The Oxford Handbook of the American Civil War 9780190903053, 9780197549988, 9780190903060, 9780190903077, 0190903058

Table of contents :
cover
The Oxford Handbook of the American Civil War
Copyright
Contents
List of Maps
List of Contributors
Introduction
1. Bleeding Kansas: A Call to Arms
2. The Union Blockade: A Slow Asphyxiation
3. Missouri 1861: War and Identity
4. First Bull Run/​Manassas: Antebellum Military Cultures
5. Eastern Kentucky and Northwestern Virginia, 1861–​1862: Terrain and Loyalty
6. Forts Henry and Donelson: The Material War
7. The Union Occupation of Coastal North Carolina: Foundations for Freedom
8. Campaign for Charleston: Military Science, Emancipation, and Social Collapse
9. The Civil War in Arkansas, 1862: Divided Loyalties and Partisan Warfare
10. New Mexico and the Central Great Plains in the Civil War: Testing U.S. Authority
11. Indian Territory: Social and Political Unraveling
12. Shiloh and Corinth
13. Mississippi Valley, 1862: Politics of Recruitment
14. The Peninsula Campaign and Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley, 1862
15. The Seven Days’ Battles and Public Opinion
16. The Kentucky Campaign of 1862 and Drought
17. Second Bull Run/Manassas: Clash of Partisan Armies
18. The Maryland Campaign: Carnage and Emancipation
19. The Battle of Fredericksburg: Military Occupation and Urban Combat
20. Grant’s North Mississippi Campaign, Chickasaw Bayou, and the Bottomlands
21. Stones River: Making Emancipation Work
22. Vicksburg and Port Hudson
23. The Chancellorsville Campaign: Strategic Contingency Point
24. The Gettysburg Campaign: War Comes to Free Soil
25. The Battle of Helena, the Little Rock Campaign, and the Capture of Fort Smith, 1863
26. The Tullahoma and Chickamauga Campaigns: Discord, Disruption, and Defeat
27. The Chattanooga and Knoxville Campaigns: War in the Switzerland of America
28. The Overland Campaign: No Turning Back
29. The Campaign for Atlanta: Displacing Civilians and Tearing Up Georgia
30. Petersburg, Virginia, June–​August 1864
31. The Red River Campaign, 1864: Profits, Politics, and Grand Strategy
32. The 1864 Invasion of Missouri
33. Sherman’s March to the Sea: Home Front Becomes Battlefront
34. Spring Hill, Franklin, and Nashville: Insurgency and Emancipation
35. Petersburg Besieged and the Shenandoah Valley
36. The Carolinas Campaign: A War Reckoning
37. The Fall of Petersburg and Appomattox
38. Texas, Mobile, and Wilson’s Raid: International Repercussions
39. Occupation, 1865–​1877
Index

Citation preview

T h e Ox f o r d H a n d b o o k o f

T H E A M E R IC A N C I V I L   WA R

The Oxford Handbook of

THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR Edited by

LORIEN FOOTE and

EARL J. HESS

1

3 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2021 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Foote, Lorien, 1969– editor. | Hess, Earl J., editor. Title: The Oxford handbook of the American Civil War / edited by Lorien Foote, and Earl J. Hess. Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2021] | Series: Oxford handbooks series | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2021002152 (print) | LCCN 2021002153 (ebook) | ISBN 9780190903053 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197549988 (epub) | ISBN 9780190903060 | ISBN 9780190903077 Subjects: LCSH: United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Campaigns. | United States—History—Civil War, 1861-1865. Classification: LCC E470 .O94 2021 (print) | LCC E470 (ebook) | DDC 973.7—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021002152 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021002153 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190903053.001.0001 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America

Contents

List of Maps List of Contributors

ix xi

Introduction Lorien Foote and Earl J. Hess

1

1. Bleeding Kansas: A Call to Arms Kristen T. Oertel

34

2. The Union Blockade: A Slow Asphyxiation Craig L. Symonds

51

3. Missouri 1861: War and Identity Ethan S. Rafuse

66

4. First Bull Run/​Manassas: Antebellum Military Cultures Barbara A. Gannon

80

5. Eastern Kentucky and Northwestern Virginia, 1861–​1862: Terrain and Loyalty Brian D. McKnight 6. Forts Henry and Donelson: The Material War Jason Phillips

93 107

7. The Union Occupation of Coastal North Carolina: Foundations for Freedom David Silkenat

124

8. Campaign for Charleston: Military Science, Emancipation, and Social Collapse Lorien Foote

137

vi   Contents

9. The Civil War in Arkansas, 1862: Divided Loyalties and Partisan Warfare Thomas W. Cutrer

153

10. New Mexico and the Central Great Plains in the Civil War: Testing U.S. Authority Stacey L. Smith

169

11. Indian Territory: Social and Political Unraveling Clarissa W. Confer

187

12. Shiloh and Corinth Stephen D. Engle

203

13. Mississippi Valley, 1862: Politics of Recruitment Michael D. Pierson

219

14. The Peninsula Campaign and Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley, 1862 Christopher S. Stowe

236

15. The Seven Days’ Battles and Public Opinion Timothy J. Orr

254

16. The Kentucky Campaign of 1862 and Drought Kenneth W. Noe

270

17. Second Bull Run/Manassas: Clash of Partisan Armies John H. Matsui

286

18. The Maryland Campaign: Carnage and Emancipation D. Scott Hartwig

300

19. The Battle of Fredericksburg: Military Occupation and Urban Combat Barton A. Myers

317

20. Grant’s North Mississippi Campaign, Chickasaw Bayou, and the Bottomlands Earl J. Hess

331

21. Stones River: Making Emancipation Work Earl J. Hess

345

Contents   vii

22. Vicksburg and Port Hudson Earl J. Hess

358

23. The Chancellorsville Campaign: Strategic Contingency Point Christian B. Keller

376

24. The Gettysburg Campaign: War Comes to Free Soil Carol Reardon

391

25. The Battle of Helena, the Little Rock Campaign, and the Capture of Fort Smith, 1863 Carl H. Moneyhon

405

26. The Tullahoma and Chickamauga Campaigns: Discord, Disruption, and Defeat Andrew S. Bledsoe

421

27. The Chattanooga and Knoxville Campaigns: War in the Switzerland of America Aaron Astor

437

28. The Overland Campaign: No Turning Back Lisa Tendrich Frank and Brooks D. Simpson 29. The Campaign for Atlanta: Displacing Civilians and Tearing Up Georgia Earl J. Hess

451

468

30. Petersburg, Virginia, June–​August 1864 A. Wilson Greene

485

31. The Red River Campaign, 1864: Profits, Politics, and Grand Strategy T. Michael Parrish

505

32. The 1864 Invasion of Missouri Joseph M. Beilein Jr.

520

33. Sherman’s March to the Sea: Home Front Becomes Battlefront Anne J. Bailey

534

34. Spring Hill, Franklin, and Nashville: Insurgency and Emancipation Benjamin Franklin Cooling

551

viii   Contents

35. Petersburg Besieged and the Shenandoah Valley James Marten

565

36. The Carolinas Campaign: A War Reckoning Christopher Phillips

585

37. The Fall of Petersburg and Appomattox Elizabeth R. Varon

602

38. Texas, Mobile, and Wilson’s Raid: International Repercussions Earl J. Hess

619

39. Occupation, 1865–​1877 Andrew F. Lang

628

Index

647

List of Maps

I.1 Refugee Movement in the East

4

I.2 Refugee Movement in the West

6

I.3 Refugee Movement in the Trans-Mississippi and Far West

8

1.1 Border War in Kansas

37

2.1 Union Naval Blockade

53

3.1 Missouri, 1861

71

4.1 First Bull Run

88

5.1 West Virginia, 1861–​1862

94

5.2 East Kentucky, 1861–​1862

100

6.1 Fort Henry and Fort Donelson

108

7.1 Union occupation of North Carolina coast

126

8.1 Charleston

138

9.1 Pea Ridge and Prairie Grove

154

10.1 Southwest

172

10.2 Central and Southern Great Plains

173

11.1 Indian Territory

188

12.1 Shiloh and Corinth

205

13.1 New Orleans to Island No. 10

222

14.1 Peninsula

239

14.2 Shenandoah Valley, 1862

245

15.1 Seven Days’ Battles

256

16.1 Kentucky, 1862

272

17.1 Second Bull Run

292

18.1 Antietam

301

19.1 Fredericksburg

319

20.1 North Mississippi and Chickasaw Bayou

333

21.1 Stones River

347

22.1 Overland march and Siege of Vicksburg

359

22.2 Port Hudson

362

23.1 Chancellorsville

380

x   List of maps 24.1 Gettysburg

393

25.1 Helena and Little Rock

407

26.1 Tullahoma and Chickamauga

424

27.1 Chattanooga

438

27.2 Knoxville

443

28.1 The Overland Campaign

454

29.1 Atlanta

470

30.1 Petersburg, June to August 1864

488

30.2 Shenandoah Valley and Maryland, May to July 1864

498

31.1 Red River and Camden

511

32.1 Price in Missouri, 1864

524

33.1 Sherman’s March to the Sea

540

34.1 Hood in Tennessee

555

35.1 Shenandoah Valley, August to October 1864

568

35.2 Petersburg, September to December 1864

572

36.1 Carolinas

589

37.1 Petersburg, January to April 1865

607

37.2 Appomattox

609

38.1 Texas and Mexico

621

38.2 Mobile and Wilson’s Raid

624

39.1 Reconstruction, 1867–​1877

637

List of Contributors

Aaron Astor earned his Ph.D. in history at Northwestern University. He is an associate professor of history at Maryville College, where he teaches courses on the Civil War, Southern history, African American history, and Appalachian history. Anne J. Bailey earned her Ph.D. in history at Texas Christian University. She retired as a full professor from the History Department at Georgia College & State University in Milledgeville, where she taught courses on the Civil War, military history, and Southern history. She is the author/​editor of eight books on the Civil War. Joseph M. Beilein Jr. is the author of Bushwhackers: Guerrilla Warfare, Manhood, and the Household in Civil War Missouri. He is an associate professor of American history at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College, where he teaches courses on the Civil War, gender, and military history. Andrew S. Bledsoe earned his Ph.D. in history at Rice University. He is an associate professor in the Department of History, Political Science, and Humanities at Lee University, where he teaches courses on the Civil War and Reconstruction, Early America, and military history. Clarissa W. Confer earned her Ph.D. in history at Pennsylvania State University and is the author of The Cherokee Nation in the Civil War. She is a professor of history at California University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches courses on the Civil War and Reconstruction and American Indian history and anthropology. Benjamin Franklin Cooling earned his Ph.D.  in history at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a professor in the Department of Strategy at the Eisenhower School, National Defense University, where he teaches courses in national security, strategic resourcing, and acquisition/​innovation. Thomas W. Cutrer received his Ph.D. in American studies from the University of Texas at Austin. He is a professor emeritus of history and American studies at Arizona State University, where he taught courses on the American South, the American West, and U.S. military history. Stephen D. Engle is a professor of history and director of the Alan B. and Charna Larkin Symposium on the American Presidency at Florida Atlantic University. Lorien Foote is the Patricia & Bookman Peters Professor in History at Texas A&M University. She teaches courses on the Civil War and Reconstruction and war and

xii   List of Contributors society and uses her digital humanities project about three thousand escaped Union prisoners to teach undergraduate historical research methods classes. Lisa Tendrich Frank is the author of The Civilian War: Confederate Women and Union Soldiers during Sherman’s March and coeditor, with LeeAnn Whites, of Household War: How Americans Lived and Fought the Civil War. She received her Ph.D. in history from the University of Florida. Barbara A. Gannon earned her Ph.D. in history at Pennsylvania State University. She is an associate professor in the Department of History at the University of Central Florida, where she teaches courses on war and society. A. Wilson Greene’s career in public history and preservation spanned forty-​four years. He is the author of six books on the Civil War and Southern history, including A Campaign of Giants:  The Battle for Petersburg, the first of three volumes on the Petersburg Campaign. D. Scott Hartwig was supervisory historian at Gettysburg National Military Park and retired from the National Park Service in 2014 after thirty-​four years. He currently lives in Gettysburg. Earl J. Hess is Emeritus Professor of History at Lincoln Memorial University, and is the author of twenty-​four books about the Civil War, including Civil War Supply and Strategy: Feeding Men and Moving Armies, Civil War Logistics: A Study of Military Transportation, and Civil War Infantry Tactics: Training, Combat, and Small-Unit Effectiveness. Christian B. Keller is a professor of history and director of the Military History Program at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. He is the author of The Great Partnership: Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and the Fate of the Confederacy and other books focusing on Confederate strategy and command, ethnicity, and the Chancellorsville Campaign. Andrew F. Lang is an associate professor of history at Mississippi State University. He is the author of A Contest of Civilizations: Exposing the Crisis of American Exceptionalism in the Civil War Era and In the Wake of War: Military Occupation, Emancipation, and Civil War America, which received the Tom Watson Brown Book Award of the Society of Civil War Historians. James Marten is a professor of history at Marquette University and a former president of the Society of Civil War Historians. He has written or edited twenty books on the Civil War era and on the history of children and youth. John H. Matsui earned his Ph.D. in history at Johns Hopkins University. He has taught at the Virginia Military Institute and Washington and Lee University, where his courses included U.S. history, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and Jacksonian America. Brian D. McKnight is a professor of history and founding director of the Center for Appalachian Studies at the University of Virginia’s College at Wise. He is a specialist in the Appalachian Civil War experience and is the author of several books on the subject.

List of Contributors   xiii Carl H. Moneyhon earned his Ph.D.  in history at the University of Chicago. He is now professor emeritus from the Department of History at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, where he taught courses on the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Old South, and the New South. Barton A. Myers is the Class of 1960 Professor of Ethics and History at Washington and Lee University. He is the author of the award-​winning Executing Daniel Bright: Race, Loyalty, and Guerrilla Violence in a Coastal Carolina Community, 1861–​ 1865 and Rebels against the Confederacy:  North Carolina’s Unionists, and coeditor with Brian D. McKnight of The Guerrilla Hunters: Irregular Conflicts during the Civil War. Kenneth W. Noe is the Draughon Professor of Southern History at Auburn University. He is the author of Perryville: This Grand Havoc of Battle, and most recently The Howling Storm: Climate, Weather, and the American Civil War. Kristen T. Oertel is the Mary F. Barnard Professor of Nineteenth-​Century American History at the University of Tulsa. She is the author of Bleeding Borders: Race, Gender, and Violence in Pre–​Civil War Kansas and Harriet Tubman: Slavery, Civil War, and Civil Rights in the 19th Century. Timothy J. Orr is an associate professor of history at Old Dominion University, where he teaches classes on U.S. military history. He earned his Ph.D. at the Richards Civil War Era Center at Penn State University, and for eight years he worked as a seasonal park ranger at Gettysburg National Military Park. T. Michael Parrish is the Linden G. Bowers Professor of American History at Baylor University. His teaching focuses on the Civil War and Reconstruction, religion and war, and Texas history. Christopher Phillips is the John and Dorothy Hermanies Professor of American History and University Distinguished Research Professor in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at the University of Cincinnati. He teaches courses on the nineteenth century, including the Civil War and Reconstruction, Abraham Lincoln, and the American South. Jason Phillips is the Eberly Family Professor of Civil War Studies at West Virginia University, where he teaches courses on nineteenth-​century America, Southern history, and gun culture. His most recent book is Looming Civil War: How Nineteenth-​Century Americans Imagined the Future. Michael D. Pierson is a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. His most recent book is Lt. Spalding in Civil War Louisiana: A Union Officer’s Humor, Privilege, and Ambition. Ethan S. Rafuse is a professor of military history at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College. In 2018–​2019, he was the Charles Boal Ewing Visiting Professor at the U.S. Military Academy.

xiv   List of Contributors Carol Reardon is the George Winfree Professor Emerita of American History at Penn State University, where she taught courses on the Civil War, U.S. military history, and the American War in Vietnam. She served as president of the Society for Military History from 2005 to 2009. David Silkenat is a senior lecturer in American history at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of three books, most recently Raising the White Flag: How Surrender Defined the American Civil War. Brooks D. Simpson is the ASU Foundation Professor of History at Arizona State University. He has written extensively on the Civil War and Reconstruction and the life of Ulysses S. Grant. Stacey L. Smith is an associate professor of history at Oregon State University. She is the author of Freedom’s Frontier:  California and the Struggle over Unfree Labor, Emancipation, and Reconstruction, which won the inaugural David Montgomery Prize in U.S. labor history from the Labor and Working-​Class History Association and the Organization of American Historians. Christopher S. Stowe earned his Ph.D. in history at the University of Toledo. He is a professor of military history at Marine Corps University’s Command and Staff College, where he served as War Studies Department head from 2015 to 2020. Craig L. Symonds is the Ernest J. King Professor of Maritime History at the U.S. Naval War College and professor emeritus at the U.S. Naval Academy. He is the author or editor of twenty-​nine books on naval and military history. Elizabeth R. Varon is the Langbourne M. Williams Professor of American History at the University of Virginia and serves on the Executive Council of UVA’s John L. Nau III Center for Civil War History. Her most recent book, Armies of Deliverance: A New History of the Civil War, was awarded the 2020 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize.

Introdu c t i on Lorien Foote and Earl J. Hess

Library and bookstore shelves are overflowing with books about the American Civil War, stacked neatly together in the “E” section of the Library of Congress classification system or in the “Civil War” section of Barnes & Noble. Although the works on the Civil War are located in the same place, there is a noticeable segregation in their content. There are books about battles and campaigns; there are also books about the sweeping political, social, cultural, and economic transformations of the period. Historians acknowledge that military events and social change were interconnected, yet books about the war generally treat them separately. Reference histories of the war mark this dichotomy in their tables of contents by listing essays on “race and slavery,” “gender,” and “the Vicksburg Campaign,” as if these three topics had nothing to do with one other. Yet the Vicksburg Campaign was an integral part of the destruction of slavery in the Mississippi Valley, the actions of local African Americans altered the course of military events, and the behavior of local women was instrumental to decisions U.S. commanders made about how to suppress supporters of the Confederacy. Scholars who write military histories of the Civil War often suffer from myopic vision, assuming that the true and only focus of an operational study is the clash of armies. Even when campaigns ranged far across the countryside and extended over many months, historians tend to focus on the confrontation between opposing military forces, paying scant attention to the population in the path of the armies, the natural and man-​made environment, and the effect of that campaign on society outside the zone of active military operations. Yet military force is at best a blunt and destructive instrument of national policy. Even if an army failed to batter its armed opponent on the battlefield, it still unleashed unintended, unwanted, and overlooked consequences on a wide range of people, material objects, and human institutions in its path. These unintended effects occurred even in campaigns where

2    Lorien Foote and Earl J. Hess the opposing armies did not grapple in serious combat. The military history of the Civil War demonstrates the ability of armies to survive heavy fighting and persist in campaign after campaign. But civilian society and the material environment were far less resistant and far more fragile when exposed to military force; the damage to them was more difficult to repair. Yet historians have given relatively little attention to the effects of military campaigns on nonmilitary resources and people. Exploring how military campaigns resonated off the battlefield is a comparatively new approach to understanding the Civil War, even though scholars have long known that armies destroyed material resources and hurt noncombatants. The Oxford Handbook of the American Civil War eschews the segregation of the traditional reference collection and broadens the vision of the typical military history. It is the first compendium to integrate the military and social histories of the conflict in its structural organization. This reflects the evolution of historical writing about war. Traditional military histories focused on a set of favorite topics: grand strategy, combat leadership, operations, narratives of individual campaigns, tactics, and debating explanations for victory and defeat.1 Practitioners of the “new military history,” which reached its zenith in the 1970s–​1990s, incorporated the experience of soldiers and civilians, the connection between armies and the societies that produced them, and the influence of race, class, and gender.2 In the early decades of the twenty-​first century, scholars refer to “war and society” as a field but without a common definition of the term. Some use it synonymously with the new military history; some use it to indicate those who study societies at war without including military institutions or operations; and some use it to describe the work of historians who apply social and cultural history methods (including the history of memory) to the study of militaries and warfare. The two words in the phrase “war and society” indicate its best application: scholarship that adopts a holistic approach to understanding war and its consequences that incorporates the topics and techniques of a variety of historical subfields.3 Each chapter of the Handbook narrates a military campaign embedded in its strategic, political, and social context. The authors explore the consequences of a military campaign for the people who lived in its path and provide analysis of how an army’s presence reverberated throughout society in its region of operation. The volume as a whole, as its title implies, is about warfare. The United States and the Confederate States projected military power to impose their political will on the other side. This volume focuses on military power and what happened to the people, animals, and environments that encountered it. The Handbook presents the military campaigns of the Civil War in chronological order so that readers can follow the unfolding national narrative, but each chapter zooms in to show how the intersection of armies and communities played out locally.

Introduction   3

Movement, Deportation, and Depopulation Such an integrated study of the Civil War yields a number of important insights about the impact of military campaigns. One is that the movement of armies created a corresponding movement of people. This may seem an obvious point, but scholars have only begun to appreciate the magnitude and directions of this movement, its resonance across the continent, and its importance as an analytical tool.4 Studies of refugees have often focused on elite white Confederate women. Now historians acknowledge that the war produced a refugee crisis when hundreds of thousands of Southerners—​white and Black, rich and poor, young and old—​fled their homes. In locations across the South, the arrival of a Union army pushed thousands of white supporters of the Confederacy into flight and drew thousands of slaves seeking freedom into Union lines (see Figure I.1).5 Military operations in coastal North Carolina during 1861–​1862 unleashed white evacuees who congregated in the state’s interior. They undermined the local economic and social order of their chosen places of refuge. They produced nothing yet consumed vast quantities of scarce supplies. They created housing and food shortages, spread contagious diseases, and exacerbated class tensions. In Indian Territory, the United States abandoned its garrisons, allowing Confederate Indians and Anglo Texans to pursue the Indians deemed hostile to the Confederate cause. The Creek leader Opothleyahola led thousands of Creek, Cherokee, and Seminole women and children and hundreds of Blacks north in a desperate trek to Kansas. The scale of depopulation in some locales returned the landscape to wilderness conditions. Confederate and Union army movements during the Pea Ridge and Prairie Grove campaigns in southwest Missouri and northwest Arkansas in 1862 emptied the regions of their male populations. Residents abandoned hundreds of small farms and dozens of small towns. Food production in the devastated area dropped precipitously, and some women and children died of starvation in the latter months of the war (see Figure I.2). In multiple places, military campaigns unleashed the forced deportation of populations. Confederate slaveholders removed thousands of slaves from the path of invading Union armies. During the Confederate invasion of Pennsylvania, the Army of Northern Virginia rounded up Black people of all ages, even those born free in the North, and forced them south. U.S. commanders, tasked with suppressing guerrillas in Missouri, removed twenty thousand people and burned farms in four western counties. Federals regularly ejected civilians from military lines and transported Southerners to midwestern communities. During the Federal campaign against Atlanta in 1864, after Union forces burned factories in Roswell and Sweetwater Creek, Maj.

4    Lorien Foote and Earl J. Hess

Map I.1  Refugee Movement in the ​East* Virginia—​Initial Federal Movements, 1861

  1. Unionist white refugees flee north Virginia to Maryland and Washington, D.C.   2. Blacks exiting slavery to Fortress Monroe.

South Carolina—​Port Royal and Charleston Campaigns, 1861–​1863

  3. White Confederate refugees from Port Royal, Sea Islands, and Charleston to Columbia, Spartanburg, and Cheraw, South Carolina, and Flat Rock, North Carolina.

Introduction   5 Gen. William T.  Sherman deported the six hundred working women to Northern cities, many of whom found work in Indiana and stayed there the rest of their lives. Military campaigns reverberated into Northern communities tasked with absorbing the burdens of deportees and refugees. The officer in charge of the U.S. military railroad system estimated that 150,000 Black and white refugees and Confederate deserters shipped north from the Military Division of the Mississippi between July 1, 1864, and June 30, 1865. U.S. military forces operating in the Southwest extended U.S. authority over Indigenous people in New Mexico. In 1864, the Union Army removed ten thousand defeated Navajo in a forced march to a camp at Bosque Redondo (see Figure I.3). The consideration of prisoners of war also yields insight into the movement of people during war. This understudied topic, relative to the numbers involved and the significance that contemporaries assigned to it, has evolved from its original focus on the breakdown of the exchange cartel, the resultant military prisons, and assigning blame for conditions in them. Recent scholarship considers how the accumulation of prisoners affected the communities that housed them and how the logistics of processing prisoners on the battlefield and moving them through multiple sites behind the lines affected military operations.6 When Brig. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant captured Fort Donelson in Tennessee in February 1862, the need to handle fifteen thousand prisoners

  4. Blacks exiting slavery from coastal areas and rivers of Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina to Unionheld Sea Islands.

North Carolina—​Burnside’s Coastal Expedition, 1862

  5. White Confederate refugees, and slave removal, from Roanoke and New Bern to Raleigh, Greensboro, Charlotte, and Salisbury.   6. White Unionists and Blacks exiting slavery from coastal areas to Union-held New Bern.

Virginia—​Peninsula Campaign, 1862

  7. White Confederate refugees from east Virginia to Richmond and to Staunton in the Shenandoah Valley.   8. Blacks exiting slavery to Army of the Potomac on the Peninsula.

Virginia—​Second Bull Run Campaign, 1862   9. Blacks exiting slavery to Army of Virginia.

Virginia—​Fredericksburg Campaign, 1862

10. Evacuation of Fredericksburg civilians to rural areas to the west.

Pennsylvania—​Gettysburg campaign, 1863

11. Civilians in Cumberland Valley flee north at Lee’s approach. 12. Forced deportation of Blacks by Lee’s army from area around Chambersburg and Gettysburg to Richmond.

Virginia—​Overland, Petersburg, and Shenandoah Valley Campaigns, 1864

13. Confederate white refugees flee Grant’s advance to Richmond and flee from Petersburg to rural areas around city. 14. Blacks exiting slavery to Union-​held City Point. 15. Confederate white refugees from countryside in Shenandoah Valley to its towns.

North Carolina—​Wilmington Campaign, 1865

16. White Confederate refugees from Wilmington to interior.

South Carolina—​Sherman’s Carolinas Campaign, 1865

17. White Confederate refugees to Columbia and Cheraw from south part of state. 18. White Unionists and Blacks exiting slavery follow Sherman’s army from Columbia, sent to Wilmington. *Thank you to Amy Murrell Taylor, who provided information concerning the location of slave refugee camps.

6    Lorien Foote and Earl J. Hess

Map I.2  Refugee Movement in the West* Kentucky—​Federal Occupation, 1861–​1863

1. White Unionists in middle and western Kentucky flee to Union-held Louisville. 2. White Unionists from eastern Tennessee to Union garrisons in eastern Kentucky. 3. Blacks leaving slavery from Tennessee and Kentucky to Camp Nelson in Kentucky and to Missouri.

Tennessee—​Fort Donelson Campaign, 1862

4. Blacks leaving slavery from Kentucky and Tennessee border area to Fort Donelson and to Nashville after Union occupation of city.

Mississippi—​Halleck’s Advance on Corinth, 1862

5. Blacks leaving slavery from rural areas between Pittsburg Landing and Corinth to Union-held Corinth, and hundreds transported to Midwest by the Federals.

Mississippi—​Grant’s North Mississippi Campaign, 1862

6. White Confederate refugees flee Union advance in north Mississippi and go south after early November 1862. 7. Blacks leaving slavery flee to Holly Springs, Oxford, and Memphis after Union occupation in early November 1862.

Introduction   7 of war delayed his forward advance and transformed the midwestern communities that received the prisoners. Confederate officials moved more than forty-​seven thousand Union prisoners on a multimonth journey from Virginia to Georgia to South Carolina in 1864, and in the process disrupted the economic infrastructure that supported armies and civilians in the latter two states. During the Union campaign for Wilmington, North Carolina, in February 1865, the movement of POWs delayed the advance of Union armies, unloaded the prisoners on communities along the state’s major rail lines, and inhibited Confederates from evacuating all of their supplies.

Refugees, Emancipation, and Insurrection Historians’ research suggests that the concept of “refugee” best describes the status of the 500,000 slaves who escaped from bondage and entered Union Army lines. This trend in the historiography reflects a broader shift in scholars’ understanding of emancipation, from an act granted to slaves by President Lincoln and the U.S. Congress, to an emphasis on slaves’ self-​emancipation, to consideration of the extended process that required a combination of slave agency, military action, and national policy.7 The presence of a Union army or Union naval force created opportunities for a mass exodus that stressed and ultimately destroyed the institution of slavery. Black refugees

  8. White Unionist refugees transported from north Mississippi to Cairo after early November 1862 by the Federals.

Mississippi—​Vicksburg Campaign, 1863

  9. Blacks leaving slavery flee to Grant’s army in Mississippi Bottomlands, upstream from Vicksburg and gather at Vicksburg after its fall.

Tennessee—​Stones River, Tullahoma, Chickamauga, and Knoxville Campaigns, 1862–​1863

10. Blacks leaving slavery to Murfreesboro after January 1863 and to Knoxville after September 1863. 11. White Unionists return to East Tennessee after September 1863. 12. White Confederate refugees from East Tennessee to Rome, Lafayette, and Cartersville, Georgia, and Texas, after September 1863.

Georgia—​Atlanta Campaign, 1864

13. Confederate white refugees flee Sherman’s advance from northern Georgia to Atlanta and other southern cities. 14. Unionist refugees from north Georgia shipped to Nashville, Louisville, and Midwest by the Federals. 15. Deportation of Roswell and Sweetwater factory women to Louisville, Kentucky, and Midwest by the Federals, July 1864. 16. Deportation of Atlanta civilians to Hood’s army south of Atlanta by the Federals, September 1865.

Georgia—​Sherman’s March to the Sea, 1864

17. Blacks exiting slavery by following Sherman to Savannah.

Alabama and Georgia—​Wilson’s Raid, 1865

18. White Confederate refugees flee before Union advance from Selma to Montgomery to Columbus to Macon.  *Thank you to Amy Murrell Taylor, who provided information concerning the location of slave refugee camps.

8    Lorien Foote and Earl J. Hess

Map I.3  Refugee Movement in the ​Trans-​Mississippi and Far West* Missouri—​Lyon’s Campaign, 1861

  1. Unionist refugees from southwest Missouri to St. Louis and Confederate refugees from southwest Missouri to southern Arkansas and Texas.

Indian Territory—​Confederate Offensive, 1861

  2. “Loyal” Creeks, Cherokees, Seminoles, free Blacks, and Blacks exiting slavery flee from northern Indian Territory to Kansas.

Arkansas—​Pea Ridge Campaign and Curtis’ March across Arkansas, 1862

  3. White Confederate refugees from northwest Arkansas and area around Batesville to Texas, Missouri, and Kansas.   4. Blacks exiting slavery from rural northern Arkansas to Helena.

Louisiana—​Bayou Teche Campaign, 1863

  5. White Confederate refugees from south Louisiana and Mississippi Valley to Shreveport.

Arkansas—​Steele’s Little Rock Campaign, 1863

  6. White Confederate refugees and slave removal from Little Rock to southern Arkansas and Texas.   7. White Unionist refugees and Blacks exiting slavery to Little Rock and Pine Bluff after Union occupation in September 1863.

Indian Territory—​Union Offensive, 1863

  8. Confederate Cherokees flee to Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations and to Texas.

Missouri—​Anti-​Guerrilla Campaign,  1863

  9. Federal deportation of 20,000 Confederate supporters from four western Missouri border counties to Arkansas.

Louisiana—​Red River Campaign, 1864

10. White Confederate refugees and their slaves from rural areas to Shreveport and Texas. 11. Blacks leaving slavery to Alexandria, then with white Unionists from Alexandria to New Orleans.

New Mexico Territory—​Asserting Federal Domination, 1864

12. Forced removal of 10,000 Navajo in “Long Walk” from Canyon de Chelly in northeast Arizona to Bosque Redondo. * Thank you to Amy Murrell Taylor, who provided information concerning the location of slave refugee camps.

Introduction   9 lived in nearly three hundred settlements located within Union military encampments across the South. The concept of military necessity governed encounters between armies and people leaving slavery. Refugee settlements were places of sickness and death; they were also places where Blacks crafted new identities, built schools and fraternal organizations, and experienced the rudiments of free labor. Emancipation was a localized process that varied from place to place depending on strategy, resources, leadership, and the environment.8 By integrating the analysis of military campaigns with the local process of emancipation across time, it is possible to track temporal and regional variations and trace how local actors and the unanticipated consequences of military campaigns transformed national policies. Federal operations along the coasts of North and South Carolina in 1861–​ 1862, into northern Arkansas and northern Mississippi in 1862, and in the bottomlands of the Mississippi River Valley in early 1863, for example, ended the policies that had excluded Blacks from military lines in the opening months of the war. Armies utilized the labor of thousands of Black refugees in the engineering, commissary, and medical departments of the army, created experiments with free labor plantations to produce cotton, and recruited and armed former slaves. Refugees to the Atlantic coast stayed in fixed locations, while refugees in the Western Theater moved multiple times with the Union armies that crossed vast geographic spaces. A local perspective also adds Hispanos and Indians in the Southwest to the emancipation narrative. Hispanos ignored the 1862 law that outlawed slavery in all Federal territories and continued their long-​ standing practice of seizing Indian captives and enslaving them. Congress did not address Hispanos’ continued defiance of the Thirteenth Amendment until the 1867 Anti-​Peonage Act, but even then Hispano grand juries refused to indict defendants charged with holding Indians as slaves or debt peons. Isolated cases of slavery persisted in New Mexico until the 1930s.9 Thinking about emancipation as a process with regional variations brings forward the experience of Black refugees who followed military operations only to find the path to freedom suddenly blocked. Lincoln exempted Tennessee from the Emancipation Proclamation, and refugees who flocked to Union lines in the aftermath of the Stones River Campaign in December 1862, unlike refugees in other locations, were unable to enlist in the Union Army. A Federal cavalry raid during the campaign for Petersburg, Virginia, in 1864 accumulated over one thousand refugees, but Confederate cavalry scooped up all but two hundred of them during the Federals’ panicked retreat from Ream’s Station and returned them to slavery. During Sherman’s march from Atlanta to Savannah, Union troopers crossing Ebenezer Creek removed the bridges they had used and abandoned several thousand refugees, trapping them between the stream and approaching Confederate cavalry. Military campaigns at times hampered Blacks in their quest for freedom; at other times and in other places they unleashed slave insurrections. The historiography of wartime slavery includes assertions that slaves undermined the rebellion in a variety of ways, from withholding their labor to enlisting in the Union Army. Some scholars argue that Southern plantations were sites of warfare, pitting slaves against

10    Lorien Foote and Earl J. Hess their masters and against state authorities. The Civil War, in this view, was also a slave rebellion.10 In South Carolina, for example, after U.S. gunboats made incursions into the interior in the fall of 1862, male slaves formed guerrilla bands that terrorized the low-​country white population and raided plantations for food and supplies. Female slaves disrupted work patterns and increasingly defied the orders of their mistresses. The arrival of the Union Army in Park Hill, Indian Territory, prompted a general uprising among the slaves in the Cherokee Nation, who took horses and weapons and joined the Federals. Once former slaves enlisted as soldiers and fought in the Union Army, Confederate supporters interpreted their participation as marking a servile insurrection. Local conditions determined the extent to which military operations transformed into servile insurrection. Along the coast of South Carolina in 1862, an abolitionist Union general had access to thousands of slaves whose owners had absconded at the sight of Union naval vessels. Maj. Gen. David Hunter drafted Blacks on the Sea Islands at gunpoint, created companies without the knowledge of the Lincoln administration, and once he received authority to do so, deployed Black troops on raids against plantations with the strategic purpose of liberating slaves and destroying slaveholders’ property. During the campaign for Vicksburg, the Union Army lived and worked from January to April 1863 in the bottomlands of the Mississippi River Valley with its tens of thousands of slaves. Federals in this region mustered men directly into several USCT (U.S. Colored Troops) regiments, who defended Grant’s base at Milliken’s Bend and repelled a Confederate attack on June 7. During the Union occupation of Nashville, Tennessee, Blacks spent two years constructing the citadel and logistical center that defended the city. When Confederate forces under Gen. John Bell Hood attacked in December 1864, USCT units composed of former stevedores, wagoners, and warehouse laborers anchored the Union line and pursued Hood’s broken army into Alabama. In Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley during 1864, in contrast, few local slaves joined the fight. Many had left the region, and those who remained were hesitant to commit to the Union forces that might soon depart.

People’s War, Households, and Guerrillas The transformation of political conflict to an armed struggle between citizens occurred before the United States launched its first campaign. As part of the literature on the complex long-​term and immediate causes of the Civil War, scholars have produced excellent studies of the violence along the Kansas-​Missouri border from 1855 to 1861.11 Settlers organized militarized communities that included armed self-​defense associations, the participation of women in stockpiling weapons, and regular drill to prepare for

Introduction   11 combat. “Free state” militia forces composed of settlers in Kansas raided pro-​slavery communities and liberated slaves in Missouri, expelled pro-​slavery settlers from Kansas, and attacked a U.S. district court to disperse its pro-​slavery judges. The military campaigns that occurred after 1861 unleashed a people’s war in hundreds of other locales across North America. Scholars relegated guerrilla conflict to a peripheral role in the American Civil War until an outbreak of studies in the first two decades of the twenty-​first century made the case for its wider significance. Wherever Union armies moved, elements of the population formed self-​constituted bands that operated independently from state forces. Drawing from traditions of frontier warfare, supporters of the Confederacy ambushed detachments of soldiers, attacked supply lines, and terrorized other citizens who were loyal to the United States. Portions of the South, including northwest Arkansas, eastern Tennessee, western North Carolina, western Virginia, and northern counties in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Texas, contained populations of Unionists who rose up against their Rebel neighbors and Confederate armies.12 Guerrilla warfare emerged from Southern households. This insight has transformed the scholarship and provided an important point of intersection for military and social history.13 Women were the supply line of food, clothing, ammunition, and information on enemy locations; men fought from the bush, spaces that extended from and surrounded a network of households that were connected through kinship ties. U.S.  authorities waged war against entire communities to suppress guerrilla activity. They arrested, banished, and terrorized women and children, burned towns located near an ambush site, and destroyed homes and property of suspected guerrillas. Confederate authorities did the same to Unionist communities and households. They failed, however, to coordinate effectively the guerrillas who supported Confederate independence with the conventional operations of Confederate armies. Confederate Maj. Gen. Sterling Price’s invasion of Missouri in 1864 was a rare campaign that included both a formal army and Southern guerrillas, and its failure offers a parable for the Confederate military experience as a whole. U.S. military campaigns and wartime conditions fostered violent resistance to Federal authority from people in the far West, who seized the opportunity to assert greater self-​governance. For the first half of the twentieth century, scholars virtually ignored the Civil War in this region and viewed Indian conflicts as separate from the battles east of the Mississippi River. Historians revised this assessment through studies that highlighted Indian participation in the war and the consequences for their diverse communities. Since 2000, Indigenous studies scholars and historians of the American West have asserted a continental framework that incorporates the people and events east and west across a long nineteenth century. The Civil War from 1861 to 1865 was but one part of a prolonged effort of the United States to extend and maintain its sovereignty across North America.14 When the War Department redeployed the U.S. Army from the West to the Southern states, Indian peoples escalated their military defense of their homelands. U.S. forces subjugated the Mescalero Apache and Navajo, but were not able

12    Lorien Foote and Earl J. Hess to subdue the Comanche. White U.S. citizens living in Colorado defied the Federal government, attacked peaceful Cheyenne and Lakota camps, and inaugurated a war with Indians in the central plains that U.S. officials did not want to fight. Because citizens sanctioned and sustained the violence of regular armies in the Civil War, U.S. military officials viewed unarmed noncombatants as enemies and subjected them to the hardships of war. Campaigns in multiple locales targeted Confederate households and brought armies to their doorsteps. In the most famous but certainly not anomalous example, when Sherman marched his army from Atlanta to Savannah (November–​ December 1864)  and from Savannah to Goldsboro, North Carolina (January–​March 1865) in order to join Grant’s army in Virginia, one goal was to break the will of Confederate people and defeat the household support system for Confederate armies. Union soldiers entered homes, rifled through women’s belongings, and destroyed women’s possessions. Several scholars argue that this was a gendered act of power communicating to elite Confederate women, and their male protectors fighting in distant armies, that they no longer had control of private spaces.15 Union and Confederate officials divided the population into categories of “loyal” and “disloyal” and subjected the “disloyal” of both sexes to military reprisal and/​or civil penalties. Military operations in a locale forced residents to make decisions based on a complex, and sometimes competing, cluster of loyalties to family, community, political party, and nation. Army commanders thought loyalty was simple—​a citizen was loyal to the nation or not and supported its armies or not—​but for many people loyalty was flexible and conditional. During the early months of the war in the borderland region of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia, the front lines continually shifted. Union and Confederate armies alternately occupied some communities multiple times. Residents thus found it problematic to show open support for either side. Divided loyalties made it difficult for army commanders who hoped to win hearts and minds; soldiers needed food, but efforts to obtain it often alienated the local population. In eastern North Carolina, patriotic loyalty did not motivate the Unionists who fled to Federal military lines; they wanted to escape Confederate conscription and sought greater economic opportunity. As the war progressed, both the U.S. and Confederate governments demanded that people prove their loyalty through oaths of allegiance, military service, and sacrifice of resources. Proven loyalty, in turn, became a way to claim protection from the government and, in the case of Southern Blacks, citizenship.16

Localized Total War and Military Conscription Regions where military campaigns and pervasive guerrilla violence combined created conditions that many scholars characterize as localized total war. After some historians writing during and in the aftermath of World War II proclaimed the American Civil War

Introduction   13 a “total war” that presaged those of the twentieth century, scholars spent subsequent decades debating the definition and applicability of the term. Many historians writing in the early twenty-​first century eschew the phrase “total war,” and with good reason. The Civil War resembles eighteenth-​century conflicts as much as it does twentieth-​ century wars. Armies targeted resources, and at times households, but the conventional forces of both sides generally followed international laws of war that minimized noncombatant casualties. There was atrocious violence in the Civil War, especially against Indians and Blacks, such as the 1st Colorado’s indiscriminate massacre of Cheyenne at Sand Creek, Colorado, or Confederate troopers’ killing of USCT soldiers after their surrender at Fort Pillow, Tennessee. There were also campaigns conducted with exceptional restraint, especially compared to other civil wars of the nineteenth century that featured mass public executions, the wholesale slaughter of enemy populations, and the complete collapse of civilian society.17 At the same time, however, studies conducted in the 2010s argue that the decentralized nature of military conflict in the American Civil War created conditions in which local conflicts became total. Especially west of the Mississippi River, such regions featured armies treating all people as combatants, taking and destroying resources necessary to sustain life, and imposing military law. Historians identify counties throughout the South where law and order collapsed and civil government ceased to function.18 Armies in the Civil War brought martial law with them. Even during temporary forays, armies overrode civilian legal codes, restricted liberties, impressed resources, and managed trade. Confederate Maj. Gen. Thomas C. Hindman, in command of forces in Arkansas during the summer of 1862, proclaimed martial law and established a “government ad interim.” He conscripted men directly into his army, used public documents from the state library for cartridge paper, commandeered crops and redistributed food among the population, suspended habeas corpus, and used military force against citizens suspected of loyalty to the United States. During Federal operations along the Mississippi River, Grant and Rear Adm. David Dixon Porter curtailed all trade south of Helena, Arkansas. Boat captains seized cotton to sell for the benefit of the government. Federal occupation extended these effects across time and space. The U.S. Army concentrated its forces in fortified posts within strategically located towns, and after 1862, when Federal policy shifted away from conciliating Southerners, army officers used martial law to subdue the populations that lived there.19 Armies operating under martial law conscripted local manpower and confiscated livestock, food, and other resources. Confederate armies impressed slaves to build fortifications, railroads, and prisons. Historians tend to examine conscription from a national perspective, examining draft laws, resistance to those laws, and public debates over constitutionality and fairness.20 But armies did not just rely on the machinery of Federal civil authorities to raise manpower and collect the resources necessary for military operations. Commanders in the field, sometimes with and sometimes without the sanction of their governments, directly impressed manpower on a scale that destabilized communities and states. Agents from the Confederate Army, tasked with defending Charleston, ranged across South Carolina, seizing food, forage for livestock, and slaves.

14    Lorien Foote and Earl J. Hess Conscription drained districts of all men between the ages of seventeen and sixty. Because of these actions, communities instituted welfare systems to distribute rations to poverty-​stricken soldiers’ wives. The state government eventually imported food to districts that could no longer produce enough to feed their populations. To increase the size of his army for the defense of Tennessee, Confederate Gen. Braxton Bragg in January 1863 created the Volunteer and Conscript Bureau. Troops scoured the countryside in Tennessee and Alabama and ignored draft exemption papers when they brought men to the army. When Gen. Joseph E.  Johnston assumed command, local military conscription extended into northern Georgia and Mississippi and provoked pitched battles between soldiers and draft resisters. The Army of Tennessee directly conscripted twenty-​five thousand men, in the process embittering locals, disrupting local economies and social networks, and provoking violent resistance.

Buildings and Food, Cities and Farms Military campaigns ranged over urban and rural spaces; they destroyed private dwellings and public infrastructures. They ruined forests, turned gardens into wastelands, diverted the flow of waterways, burned entire regions, and dumped waste, excrement, and dead bodies. Each side sought to harness human, animal, and mineral resources, and their success or failure affected military possibilities. Field commanders in the Civil War believed that civilized nations mastered and controlled the environment. Through foraging, fire, and the science of engineering, they altered the landscape to advance operational objectives. Nature did not always cooperate with an army’s agenda, however, and scholars who write about the Civil War and the environment consider the natural world to be an active agent in the historical process rather than a passive recipient of human activity. Generals and soldiers battled weather and terrain as much as they did enemy armies. Insects and disease likewise disrupted plans and influenced operational outcomes.21 War came to cities in a variety of ways; some were strategic targets, some housed Confederate armies, and some suffered collateral damage in sweeping military movements. The city of Fredericksburg, Virginia, caught between a Union army maneuvering toward Richmond and the Confederate army defending it, experienced in microcosm the Federals’ policy shift from conciliation and protection to punishment and destruction. When the Army of the Potomac neared, the mayor ordered women and children to leave. Refugees camped along the roads for miles around. Because Confederate troops used houses in the city for cover, Union artillery shelled them. Federal soldiers took the city in house-​to-​house fighting, then rampaged and looted. Charleston, South Carolina, the birthplace of secession and war, was both a major seaport and a target of symbolic importance. Union forces stalled in operations against the city in 1863–​1864, but technological innovations in artillery and engineering enabled a bombardment over many months that was the longest in military history until

Introduction   15 Stalingrad. When citizens deserted portions of the city, cows returned to graze on the grass that grew in the streets. Law and order collapsed; without the gas that normally lighted the streets, assaults, robbery, and burglary were nightly occurrences downtown. Casualties, however, as was common in urban bombardments of the Civil War, were light. The campaign for Petersburg, Virginia, lasting 292 days, was the longest sustained military operation of the war. Federals commenced shelling on June 17, 1864, and ultimately damaged or destroyed virtually every building in the eastern part of the city. Two-​thirds of the residents eventually evacuated, and those who remained suffered through disease and disorder, skyrocketing inflation, constant fires, and industry shutdowns. Campaigns had concentric consequences across space in rural areas. When battles occurred on farms, the destruction and devastation was catastrophic. William Roulette’s farm, for example, bordered the northern edge of an old sunken lane where Confederate troops took a defensive position during the Battle of Antietam in September 1862. His house was stripped of furniture so that it could be used as a field hospital (blood eventually covered the walls); he lost his crops of oats, wheat, corn, hogs, shoats, sheep, calves, apples, and potatoes; and seven hundred bodies were buried on his property. Farms further away from the main movements of armies usually escaped the total destruction of fences, crops, and livestock, but they were sites used to feed and supply the thousands of animals and humans that accompanied armies. Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, wintering in Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville in 1862–​1863, gathered food from southern Virginia and northeast North Carolina. Lee employed one-​third of his forces in forage detail away from his main position and dispersed his batteries across several counties to pasture his artillery horses. The scale of an army’s impressment of food, livestock, and forage and its destruction of fences, homes, buildings, mills, and factories varied across time and space. Several factors intersected to determine the extent of damage: national strategic goals, the political inclination and practical needs of field commanders, the logistical challenges of the natural environment, the presence of guerrilla warfare in a region, and the extent of supply problems that could transform normally law-​abiding soldiers into hungry thieves of apples and pork. Scholars suggest that the war did not transform from a “limited war” to a “hard war” in a simple linear fashion. Union armies practiced “hard war” in Missouri, Arkansas, and South Carolina at the same time that other Union armies implemented conciliatory policies (protecting the property of citizens in the path of armies) in Virginia and Tennessee. Soldiers often implemented “hard war” even when their commanders desired otherwise. Each campaign had its own dynamic of destruction.22 Campaigns also had concentric consequences across time. Citizens living in the path of an army felt its consumption of crops and cattle immediately. Other effects took weeks, months, years, or decades to manifest. The Union blockade of the Atlantic Coast shifted traffic patterns for Southern farmers and planters. Before the war, they had transported their goods on barges and small schooners in the coastal sounds from Georgia to Virginia. When the U.S. Navy blocked access to these waterways, farmers

16    Lorien Foote and Earl J. Hess used railroads instead. The additional traffic quickly wore down local rails. Campaigns shaped long-​term labor, industrial, and settlement patterns for the communities and regions that experienced them. South-​central Pennsylvania—​and Gettysburg—​never returned to the rhythms of agricultural life after General Lee’s invasion and gradually transformed into a tourist mecca. East Tennessee, with its farms stripped of livestock, seed corn, and building materials, never regained the agricultural prosperity that it had enjoyed in the 1850s. Many rural communities in the region that provided timber to armies during the war became lumber and coal camps that birthed the Appalachian labor movement. The Federal occupation of Little Rock sparked a long-​term economic boom. Maj. Gen. Frederick Steele created a central market for farm produce and used Federal greenbacks and gold to pay for it. The presence of the army attracted merchants. Within months, the city’s warehouses and stores were bursting with goods. The population soared from just over 3,000 residents in 1860 to 12,380 in 1870.

Political Synergy War exists in a synergistic relationship with politics. The interaction between the military and political spheres drove change in both and created sweeping effects on society. Historians tend to present this synergy from a broad national perspective rather than charting how specific campaigns intertwined with local and national politics. Because of an outpouring of scholarship since the 1990s, we now understand more than we did decades ago about how “the war” in a generalized sense spawned a variety of transformations in American politics and society. It fostered new expressions of nationalism, altered conceptions of citizenship, facilitated modernization and bureaucratization, forged a new relationship between women and the Federal state, and shaped new patterns of political dissent, among a host of other changes.23 It will be important for future scholarship to unthread the local knots and expose the dynamics of their weaving. The politics of recruitment in the Mississippi Valley in 1862 provides a perfect example. The Confederate military at Island No. 10 (located at a sharp bend in the Mississippi River at the intersection of Missouri, Kentucky, and Tennessee) nearly collapsed because of apathy and disloyalty among the soldiers. Immigrant urban soldiers, unhappy with the Know Nothing and anti-​Catholic political policies of the New Orleans city government, mutinied at Fort Jackson, south of New Orleans, when Union forces approached and facilitated its capture. This in turn spurred the Confederate conscription law of April 1862 that infused the army with manpower and enabled Confederate commanders to attack Baton Rouge, a target chosen because the U.S. garrison there was successfully enlisting Black troops and undermining the plantation economy. U.S. military victories at New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Memphis prompted new congressional laws to govern all the people restored to Federal control. Political reconstruction in Louisiana and Tennessee, in turn, allowed the United States

Introduction   17 to recruit, and later draft, white men from these states. Military actions spurred the enactment of new laws that motivated further military actions. A particular campaign’s interaction with politics might produce immediate and long-​ term effects on public policy, political movements, and political ideology. During the campaign for Charleston, when the Union attacked Fort Wagner on Morris Island in July 1863, Confederates captured prisoners from the 54th Massachusetts who were free Blacks born in Northern states. Just two months earlier, the Confederate Congress had resolved to treat captured free Blacks in Federal uniform as servile insurrectionists subject to state trials. Because powerful constituencies in the North supported the regiment, the Lincoln administration threatened retaliation if Confederates implemented this policy. The Jefferson Davis administration recognized the intense international publicity surrounding the soldiers of the 54th and worried about the diplomatic consequences of executing any of them. Confederates decided to treat free Blacks as prisoners of war. The battle for Fort Wagner thus shifted the Davis administration away from its intended policy of public mass executions. It also contributed to a long-​term ideological change. Confederates buried the white colonel of the 54th, Robert Gould Shaw, in a trench with his enlisted men. New England’s literary elite and Republican newspapers published poems, essays, and artistic images of this burial as part of a successful propaganda effort to win the Northern public’s support for the enlistment of Black troops. The Battle of Chancellorsville in May 1863 contributed directly to a political movement. Northerners scapegoated the German American soldiers of the Eleventh Corps for the loss. In June, German Americans held mass rallies in Washington, D.C., New York, Philadelphia, and several western cities to protest and unify against the nativist resurgence. That fall, German American leaders convened in Cleveland to develop a political platform challenging Lincoln’s reelection and laid the groundwork for what became the Frémont movement. Because of Chancellorsville and the subsequent political protest, German Americans stopped enlisting in the ethnically German regiments of the Union Army. An individual campaign might have negligible, or at least untraceable, effects on the political sphere, even in cases where historians have assumed that connections must exist. One reason for this is that politicians and the public interpreted the results of battles according to preestablished partisan beliefs. The Seven Days Battle (June 25–​July 1, 1862) in Virginia pitted Lee against Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan during a period when some congressional Republicans wanted to confiscate the property of Rebels, including slaves, and McClellan, like the Northern Democrats, wanted to conciliate Southerners by protecting their property. Newspapers in the nineteenth century were partisan and spun facts to fit a preconstructed political narrative. No accurate or shared understanding of what actually happened during the Seven Days emerged. Political debate over the battle and any suggested policy responses to it followed automatic emotional responses because the facts themselves were in such dispute. Even the Union soldiers who participated in the battle exhibited confusion about how to understand its immediate and long-​term consequences.

18    Lorien Foote and Earl J. Hess Political considerations affected military strategy and the command relationships of armies in the field.24 At crucial moments, Confederates launched major military movements timed to Northern elections to send a message to Northern voters that Republican war policies were failing. On the other side, the Lincoln administration needed battlefield victories before January 1, 1863, to release the Emancipation Proclamation from a position of strength; the Union’s campaign that led to the Battle of Stones River in December 1862 took place in that context. In the fall of 1864, Lee shuffled elements of the Army of Northern Virginia between Petersburg and the Shenandoah Valley for political as well as military reasons. He hoped to divert Union troops from the siege of Petersburg and to convince voters that the Confederacy was viable. His opponent, Grant, worried that military setbacks would hurt the Lincoln administration at the polls, ordered his subordinates in the weeks before the presidential elections not to take unnecessary risks. Partisan divisions in the respective civilian administrations of the Union and the Confederacy diffused through all ranks of the armies. When elements of two Union armies clashed with a Confederate army on the battlefield of Second Manassas in late August 1862, the ideological opposition between the Republican generals and soldiers of the Army of Virginia and the Democratic generals and soldiers of the Army of the Potomac hindered unified policy, strategy, and operations for the Federals. The U.S. Army’s mission to enforce congressional Reconstruction policies on the defeated South represents the ultimate in political collaboration. When white Southerners used violence and race-​based laws to control newly freed Black people in 1866–​1867, frustrated congressional Republicans created a Reconstruction policy intended to transform race relations and Southern society. Military occupation was the only effective means to enforce this policy. In the same way that the volunteer Federal army saved the Union during 1861–​1865, the Union soldiers still serving in the postwar months and later the U.S. Regular Army after 1867 sought to save the fruits of freedom. During its postwar occupation of the South, the army implemented the political will of Congress; it registered voters, superintended constitutional conventions, and mediated local political conflicts in order to include Black male participation in Southern state governments. Politics, in turn, undermined effective military action during Reconstruction. Because some white Americans viewed a standing army as a source of instability and a threat to democratic self-​determination, politicians insisted on a rapid demobilization that deprived the army of the manpower necessary to implement a genuine occupation and to ensure a lasting biracial democracy in the South.25 Although scholars gave far more attention to politics than religion in historical writing through most of the twentieth century, a spate of studies published since the 1980s demonstrates the central relationship between religion and the war. Conviction that God was on their side was an important component of wartime nationalism in both the Union and the Confederacy, and religious rhetoric demonized the enemy and sanctioned war measures. Ordinary Americans interpreted the events of the war through the providential view that God was in control. Black Americans’ belief that God intervened in history on behalf of oppressed people underlay the decisions they made

Introduction   19 to resist their masters and leave the plantations. The faith of individual soldiers was essential to their ability to overcome their fear of death and endure combat, and sweeping religious revivals sustained Confederate armies in 1864 and helped to prevent their collapse at that time. Christian organizations ministered to the mental, moral, and physical health of the soldiers on a massive scale and played a critical role in the ability of both combatants to maintain their armies in the field. Scholars have also reconsidered the assumption that the horror and suffering of the war undermined the Christian worldview and ushered in the modern relativism and cynicism that flowered worldwide after the Great War. Instead, several works assert that although the war prompted intense spiritual struggles, most Christians emerged with their faith intact.26

Military Campaigns in Time and Place The growth of digital humanities in the early twenty-​first century, which allows historians to create websites that visualize, map, and animate historical events, applies new technology to a classic methodology: considering spatial factors in scholarly analysis.27 These are especially important for writing the history of military campaigns, where a consideration of local factors and the way they impinged on decisions, actions, and experiences is essential to understanding outcomes. Time and place imposed limits on the conduct of campaigns. Weather and topography particularly affected military operations.28 When Confederate armies invaded Kentucky in the fall of 1862, the region was in the midst of a terrible drought. Rivers and creeks were dry and trees dead. On the line of march, soldiers encountered only foul-​smelling and scummy water, which caused rampant diarrhea and dehydration. Sunstroke debilitated soldiers and made them ineffective in battle. Union soldiers retreating in Tennessee were on half-​rations because of the drought; they plundered homes for food in defiance of their commanders’ orders. Because mountains were barriers, armies operating in the Appalachian region of eastern Kentucky, eastern Tennessee, and southwest Virginia traveled through gaps, but narrow roads, steep terrain, poor drainage, and frequent streams slowed movement to a snail’s pace. Field commanders quickly realized that large forces were counterproductive in such terrain and implemented small-​unit warfare fought mainly with infantry. During Sherman’s campaign in northern Georgia in the summer of 1864, changes in the topography alternately favored one army over the other; the high ridges between Dalton and Etowah covered the Union’s movement, but the thick pine forests further south assisted the Confederate Army’s delaying tactics. Location and topography determined how the navy participated in campaigns. Despite all the attention the American public gives to the armies of the Civil War, the navy was instrumental to the Union victory, and several chapters in the Handbook cover combined operations.29 Some campaigns featured mobility, others entrenchment, and some a combination of the two. Recent scholarship has corrected an older interpretation that there was a linear

20    Lorien Foote and Earl J. Hess evolution in the Civil War, from open, fluid warfare to trench warfare that foreshadowed the twentieth century’s Great War. Soldiers constructed field fortifications throughout the war, and fluid warfare continued to the end, depending on local factors such as whether armies remained in continuous contact for extended periods.30 Grant’s campaign against Vicksburg in 1863 involved the Union Army’s rapid maneuver in an overland march and a subsequent siege. Soldiers in the Army of the Potomac operating against Richmond in 1864–​1865 confronted two different combat environments. During the mobile movements of May–​June 1864, they experienced constant marching and fighting, which exhausted their bodies, undermined their discipline, and brought them to an emotional nadir. The static combat in the siege aspects of the Petersburg campaign actually improved morale and combat effectiveness. Soldiers learned how to protect themselves in the trenches, enjoyed consistent mail delivery that reconnected them to home, and benefited from improved logistics. Logistics is an essential element in warfare, and local successes and failures shaped the conduct of campaigns.31 The logistical failures of the Confederate invasion of Maryland in 1862 hindered its effectiveness because massive numbers of soldiers from the Army of Northern Virginia straggled across the countryside in search of food. During the Tullahoma and Chickamauga Campaign in 1863, the Confederate quartermaster sent supplies from Georgia to Lee’s army in Virginia rather than to Bragg’s Army of Tennessee, forcing Bragg’s soldiers to scavenge and live hand-​to-​mouth. Sherman impressed railroad cars and prohibited civilian travel to prepare for his campaign against Atlanta; efficient logistical support was an important element of his success. In contrast, flaws in the state’s rail infrastructure undermined the Confederate defense of North Carolina. In 1865, the North Carolina Railroad was intact, but not enough cars could run on its narrow-​gauge track. Troops, artillery, and supplies were stuck in a bottleneck on their way to the front. A local view illuminates how officers and soldiers applied engineering technology during military operations. Engineering innovation was more important than weapons innovation on the battlefields and waters of the Civil War. Although Civil War soldiers fired rifled muskets, which were more accurate at distance than smoothbore muskets, they were not trained to use them properly, and the soldiers themselves preferred to fire at short range, believing it was more effective no matter what the type of weapon. As a result, most of the fighting took place within the range of the smoothbore. Officers continued to use traditional European linear and columnar formations—​and especially skirmishing lines—​to deploy and maneuver men on the battlefields because those primary tactics were still the best. The number of highly skilled engineers in Civil War armies and navies, combined with experience over time for soldiers and sailors, enabled tactical advances.32 During the successful campaign for Island No. 10, Union engineering troops cut a canal through nine miles of flooded bottomland in nineteen days. The Confederate defense of Charleston relied on scientifically constructed fortifications and an irregular naval war against the Union blockade and gunboat patrols. Defenders planted minefields, blew a hole in the side of the most powerful ironclad in the U.S. Navy with a torpedo, and sank

Introduction   21 a blockading ship with a submarine. This activity forced alterations in the blockade. Soldiers in Grant’s army during the siege of Vicksburg creatively applied rudimentary lessons in engineering maxims, adapted traditional siege craft to their situation, and successfully dug out their opponents. Inexperienced Confederate soldiers in the Army of Tennessee defending a position at Resaca, Georgia, dug only the most basic trench and parapet. They failed to build enough traverses at right angles to protect themselves from enfilading artillery fire. Later in the campaign, they learned to construct impressive earthworks that made the campaign for Atlanta siege warfare in the open field. Soldiers served in varied zones of war and their experience depended on how a number of factors intersected. After the first social history of the common soldier appeared in 1943, historians spent the next decades seeking generalizations about soldiers and their experiences. Scholars debated whether belief in a cause motivated them to fight, whether they sustained manhood ideals of courage and honor after frontal assaults and trench warfare, whether concepts of the republican citizen-​soldier inhibited effective discipline, whether ethnic and immigrant soldiers had divergent experiences from native-​born white soldiers, and whether the mass of Union soldiers became emancipationists. The most recent scholarship cautions against making too many generalizations and instead considers the varied and individualized soldier experience. Soldiers served in different branches of service (infantry, artillery, and cavalry) and theaters of deployment (Eastern, Western, Trans-​Mississippi, frontier). Some fought the Dakota in Minnesota and others guerrillas in Kentucky. The quality of the army and commanders influenced soldiers’ experience. It mattered whether soldiers garrisoned fortifications and defenses, guarded railroad lines, performed front-​line duty, or occupied towns. Of course, their religious, political, and cultural perspectives likewise varied. Spatial methodologies help historians explore the combinations of these factors.33 The quality of medical care a wounded soldier received was highly dependent on time and place. Historians once characterized Civil War medicine as medieval, but recent scholarship asserts that Union Army surgeons were innovators who progressed toward professionalism during the conflict as they collected specimens, standardized procedures, and published their findings. Organizations such as the U.S. Sanitary Commission modernized and bureaucratized hospital procedures in order to address the magnitude of disease and wounds. The influx of female nurses during the war provided soldiers with the gendered care that was most familiar to them. Yet changes were uneven and medical care highly dependent on the quality of local military and civilian leadership, the magnitude of carnage in a given campaign, and the natural environment. Soldiers’ ability to practice self-​care made a critical difference in their health. A local perspective recovers an aspect of medical care that scholars have neglected in broader surveys of the topic. The immediate care of wounded soldiers often fell on the communities of people who lived near a battlefield. Their farms and homes became hospitals and they became nurses, sometimes for extended periods. The care that soldiers received from these civilians needs more scholarly attention.34

22    Lorien Foote and Earl J. Hess

War and Society Historical writing about warfare has evolved from its traditional focus on tactics, technology, operations, and battle leadership to a “war and society” methodology that does not neglect these topics but rather enriches the study of war through integrating its social and cultural elements. This Handbook serves as a call to historians to think in fresh ways about how to depict the deployment of military force and how to conceptualize the nature of military history. It demonstrates the possibilities for using a war and society approach that connects military action with the civilian consequences and serves as a path forward to a more holistic history of the American Civil War.

Notes 1. Examples of traditional military history include Douglas Southall Freeman, Lee’s Lieutenants: A Study in Command, 3 vols. (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1942–​1944); Bruce Catton, Mr. Lincoln’s Army (New York: Doubleday, 1951); Bruce Catton, Glory Road (New York: Doubleday, 1952); Bruce Catton, A Stillness at Appomattox (New York: Doubleday, 1953); T. Harry Williams, Lincoln and His Generals (New York: Knopf, 1952); Stephen W. Sears, Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1983); Herman Hattaway and Archer Jones, How the North Won: A Military History of the Civil War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983); Richard E. Beringer, Herman Hattaway, Archer Jones, and William N. Still Jr., Why the South Lost the Civil War (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986); Steven Woodworth, Jefferson Davis and His Generals: The Failure of Confederate High Command in the West (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1990); Albert Castel, Decision in the West: The Atlanta Campaign of 1864 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992); Earl J. Hess, The Rifle Musket in Civil War Combat: Reality and Myth (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008); Field Armies and Fortifications in the Civil War: The Eastern Campaigns (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). One of the few studies of operations is Brian Holden Reid, America’s Civil War: The Operational Battlefield, 1861–​1863 (Amherst, MA: Prometheus Books, 2008). For strategy in the Civil War, see Archer Jones, Civil War Command and Strategy: The Process of Victory and Defeat (New York: Free Press, 1992); Donald Stoker, The Grand Design: Strategy and the U.S. Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). For synthetic military histories of the war, see Russell Weigley, A Great Civil War: A Military and Political History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000); Williamson Murray and Wayne Wei-​siang Hsieh, A Savage War: A Military History of the Civil War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016). 2. Examples of the new military history are Bell Irvin Wiley, The Life of Johnny Reb:  The Common Soldier of the Confederacy (Indianapolis, IN:  Bobbs-​Merrill, 1943); Bell Irvin Wiley, The Life of Billy Yank: The Common Soldier of the Union (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-​ Merrill, 1952); Reid Mitchell, The Vacant Chair:  The Northern Soldier Leaves Home (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Joseph T. Glatthaar, Forged in Battle: The Civil War Alliance of Black Soldiers and Their White Officers (New York: Free Press, 1990); Joseph

Introduction   23 T. Glatthaar, General Lee’s Army: From Victory to Collapse (New York: Free Press, 2008); George C. Rable, Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg! (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Lorien Foote, The Gentlemen and the Roughs: Manhood, Honor, and Violence in the Union Army (New York: New York University Press, 2010); Glenn David Brasher, The Peninsula Campaign and the Necessity of Emancipation: African Americans and the Fight for Freedom (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Leslie J. Gordon, A Broken Regiment: The 16th Connecticut’s Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014); Susannah J. Ural, Hood’s Texas Brigade: The Soldiers and Families of the Confederacy’s Most Celebrated Unit (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017). 3. For a discussion of the field of “war and society” and how to define it, see Wayne E. Lee, “Mind and Matter—​Cultural Analysis in American Military History: A Look at the State of the Field,” Journal of American History 93 (March 2007): 1116–​1142; Robert M. Citino, “Military Histories Old and New: A Reintroduction,” American Historical Review 112, no. 4 (October 2007): 1070–​1090; Earl J. Hess, “Where Do We Stand? A Critical Assessment of Civil War Studies in the Sesquicentennial Era,” Civil War History 60 (December 2014): 371–​ 403; Andrew S. Bledsoe and Andrew F. Lang, “Military History and the American Civil War,” in Upon the Fields of Battle: Essays on the Military History of America’s Civil War, ed. Andrew S. Bledsoe and Andrew F. Lang (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2018),  3–​19. 4. Yael A. Sternhell, Routes of War:  The World of Movement in the Confederate South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). 5. Scholars who write about elite Confederate women or Confederate families often consider the topic of refugees within individual chapters. For a good example, see Drew Gilpin Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). For one of the first articles that considers whites of all social classes throughout the Confederacy, see Mary Elizabeth Massey, “Southern Refugee Life during the Civil War,” North Carolina Historical Review 20, no. 1 (January 1943): 1–​21. The classic social history of refugee life is Mary Elizabeth Massey, Refugee Life in the Confederacy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1964). Among notable works on the refugee crisis and its consequences, see David Silkenat, Driven from Home: North Carolina’s Civil War Refugee Crisis (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016); Chandra Manning, Troubled Refuge:  Struggling for Freedom in the Civil War (New York: Knopf, 2016); Susan-​Mary Grant, “When the Fires Burned Too Close to Home: Southern Women and the Dislocations of the Home Front in the American Civil War,” Women’s History Review 26, no. 4 (2017): 568–​583; Amy Murrell Taylor, Embattled Freedom: Journeys through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018). 6. The seminal study that launched scholarly inquiry of Civil War prisoners was William Best Hesseltine, Civil War Prisons: A Study in War Psychology (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1930). For studies of prisons and national prison policy with debates over blame, see Ovid Futch, History of Andersonville Prison (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1968); George Levy, To Die in Chicago: Confederate Prisoners at Camp Douglas, 1862–​1865 (Evanston, IL: Evanston Publishing, 1994); William Marvel, Andersonville: The Last Depot (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Benton McAdams, Rebels at Rock Island: The Story of a Civil War Prison (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2000); Charles W. Sanders, While in the Hands of the Enemy: Military Prisons of the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005); Roger Pickenpaugh, Camp Chase

24    Lorien Foote and Earl J. Hess and the Evolution of Union Prisoner Policy (Tuscaloosa:  University of Alabama Press, 2007); James M. Gillispie, Andersonvilles of the North: The Myths and Realities of Northern Treatment of Civil War Confederate Prisoners (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2008); Paul J. Springer and Glenn Robins, Transforming Civil War Prisons: Lincoln, Lieber, and the Politics of Captivity (New York: Routledge, 2014). For effects on local communities and new directions for the scholarship, see Michael Gray, The Business of Captivity: Elmira and Its Civil War Prison (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2001) and Crossing the Deadlines: Civil War Prisons Reconsidered (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2018). For movement, see Lorien Foote, Yankee Plague: Escaped Union Prisoners and the Collapse of the Confederacy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016). 7. For consideration of the role of Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation in ending slavery, see Benjamin Quarles, Lincoln and the Negro (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1962); John Hope Franklin, The Emancipation Proclamation (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1963); Allan C. Guelzo, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America (New  York: Simon & Schuster, 2004); Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (New York: Norton, 2010). To better understand the role of Congress in ending slavery, see James Oakes, Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–​1865 (New York: Norton, 2013). Treatments of slave agency and self-​liberation include Leon Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Vintage, 1979); Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrows: Black Women, Work and the Family from Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1985); Ira Berlin, Barbara J. Fields, Thavolia Glymph, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland, eds., The Destruction of Slavery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985); David Williams, I Freed Myself: African American Self-​Emancipation in the Civil War Era (New  York:  Cambridge University Press, 2014). For the intersection of congressional policy, the Union Army, and African American action, see Kate Masur, An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle over Equality in Washington, D.C. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Brasher, The Peninsula Campaign. 8. Taylor, Embattled Freedom; Manning, Troubled Refuge; Jim Downs, Sick from Freedom: African-​American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Joseph P. Reidy, Illusions of Emancipation: The Pursuit of Freedom and Equality in the Twilight of Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019). 9. Stacey L. Smith, “Emancipating Peons, Excluding Coolies: Reconstructing Coercion in the American West,” in The World the Civil War Made, ed. Gregory P. Downs and Kate Masur (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 46–​74; William S. Kiser, Borderlands of Slavery: The Struggle over Captivity and Peonage in the American Southwest (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). 10. The seminal works are W. E.  B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America (New  York:  Harcourt, Brace, 1935); Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the Civil War (Boston: Little, Brown, 1953); Dudley Taylor Cornish, The Sable Arm: Negro Troops in the Union Army, 1861–​1865 (New York: Longmans, 1956). For consideration of the plantation as a site of resistance, rebellion, or warfare, see C. Peter Ripley, Slaves and Freedmen in Civil War Louisiana (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976); Clarence L. Mohr, On the Threshold of Freedom: Masters and Slaves in Civil War Georgia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986); Stephanie M. H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina

Introduction   25 Press, 2004); Armstead L. Robinson, Bitter Fruits of Bondage: The Demise of Slavery and the Collapse of the Confederacy, 1861–​1865 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005); Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Leslie A. Schwalm, A Hard Fight for We: Women’s Transition from Slavery to Freedom in South Carolina (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997); Bruce Levine, The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South (New York: Random House, 2013). For the perspective that the Civil War was a slave rebellion, see Steven Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003) and Stephanie McCurry, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). 11. The literature on the causes of the Civil War is vast. For those interested in a good overview of the historiography, see Michael E. Woods, “What Twenty-​First-​Century Historians Have Said about the Causes of Disunion:  A Civil War Sesquicentennial Review of the Recent Literature,” Journal of American History 99, no.  2 (2012):  415–​439. Scholarship about violence in Kansas includes Nicole Etcheson, Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era (Lawrence:  University Press of Kansas, 2004); Kristen Tegtmeier Oertel, Bleeding Borders:  Race, Gender, and Violence in Pre–​Civil War Kansas (Baton Rouge:  Louisiana State University Press, 2009); Jeremy Neely, The Border between Them:  Violence and Reconciliation on the Kansas-​Missouri Line (Columbia:  University of Missouri Press, 2011); Jonathan Earle and Diane Mutti Burke, eds., Bleeding Kansas, Bleeding Missouri:  The Long Civil War on the Border (Lawrence:  University Press of Kansas, 2013); Kristen Epps, Slavery on the Periphery: The Kansas-​Missouri Border in the Antebellum and Civil War Eras (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016). 12. The seminal study of guerrillas is Michael Fellman, Inside War: The Guerrilla Conflict in Missouri during the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). He claims guerrilla violence in Missouri was anarchic and erased the line between combatant and noncombatant. He is most interested in how ordinary people could commit atrocities during wartime. Studies followed that consider guerrillas from a regional perspective, such as Noel C. Fisher, War at Every Door: Partisan Politics and Guerrilla Violence in East Tennessee, 1860–​1869 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); that place them in political and social context, such as Barton A. Myers, Executing Daniel Bright: Race, Loyalty, and Guerrilla Violence in a Coastal Carolina Community, 1861–​1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009); and that seek to categorize their tactics and the Union response, such as Robert R. Mackey, The Uncivil War:  Irregular Warfare in the Upper South, 1861–​1865 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004) and Clay Mountcastle, Punitive War:  Confederate Guerrillas and Union Reprisals (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009). The turning point in making the case for a broad significance of guerrillas on the whole war is Daniel E. Sutherland’s A Savage Conflict: The Decisive Role of Guerrillas in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). Representative of the new approach to guerrillas are Joseph M. Beilein Jr. and Matthew C. Hulbert, The Civil War Guerrilla: Unfolding the Black Flag in History, Memory, and Myth (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2015) and Brian D. McKnight and Barton A. Myers, The Guerrilla Hunters: Irregular Conflicts during the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017).

26    Lorien Foote and Earl J. Hess 13. LeeAnn Whites and Alicia P. Long, eds., Occupied Women: Gender, Military Occupation and the American Civil War (Baton Rouge:  Louisiana State University Press, 2009); LeeAnn Whites, “Forty Shirts and a Wagonload of Wheat: Women, the Domestic Supply Line, and the Civil War on the Western Border,” Journal of the Civil War Era 1 (March 2011): 56–​78; Joseph M. Beilein Jr., Bushwhackers: Guerrilla Warfare, Manhood, and the Household in Civil War Missouri (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2016). 14. There were isolated studies of Indians and the Civil War in the West at the turn of the twentieth century, notably Wiley Britton, The Civil War on the Border (New York: Putnam’s, 1899) and Annie Heloise Abel, The American Indian in the Civil War (1919; Lincoln:  University of Nebraska, 1992). Histories of the Civil War battles and campaigns in Indian Territory and the West and Indian participation in the war include Ray C. Colton, The Civil War in the Western Territories: Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1959); Craig W. Gaines, The Confederate Cherokees: John Drew’s Regiment of Mounted Rifles (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989); Alvin M. Josephy Jr., The Civil War in the American West (New York: Knopf, 1991); Laurence Hauptman, Between Two Fires: American Indians in the Civil War (New York: Free Press, 1995); Clarissa Confer, The Cherokee Nation in the Civil War (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007); Mary Jane Warde, When the Wolf Came: The Civil War and the Indian Territory (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2013). For the Civil War as part of a broader effort by the United States to extend sovereignty, see Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009); Elliott West, The Last Indian War: The Nez Perce Story (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Journal of the Civil War Era 6, no. 4 (December 2016); Megan Kate Nelson, The Three-​Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West (New York: Scribner, 2020). 15. Jacqueline Glass Campbell, When Sherman Marched North from the Sea: Resistance on the Confederate Home Front (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Megan Kate Nelson, Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012); Anne Sarah Rubin, Through the Heart of Dixie: Sherman’s March and American Memory (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); Lisa Tendrich Frank, The Civilian War: Confederate Women and Union Soldiers during Sherman’s March (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015). 16. Considering loyalty and how Civil War Americans perceived and acted on it has become an important subtopic of Civil War studies during the past two decades. See Margaret M. Storey, Loyalty and Loss: Alabama’s Unionists in the Civil War and Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004); Aaron Sheehan-​Dean, Why Confederates Fought:  Family and Nation in Civil War Virginia (Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Susanna Michelle Lee, Claiming the Union: Citizenship in the Post–​ Civil War South (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); William A. Blair, With Malice toward Some: Treason and Loyalty in the Civil War Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); Erik Mathison, The Loyal Republic: Traitors, Slaves, and the Remaking of Citizenship in Civil War America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018). 17. For important early discussions of the Civil War as a total war or with elements of modern war, see John B. Walters, “General William T. Sherman and Total War,” Journal of Southern History 14 (November 1948): 447–​480, followed by his book Merchant of Terror: General Sherman and Total War (New York: Bobbs-​Merrill, 1973); T. Harry Williams, Americans

Introduction   27 at War: The Development of the American Military System (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1960); Russell F. Weigley, The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977); James B. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Stig Förster and Jörg Negler, eds., On the Road to Total War: The American Civil War and the German Wars of Unification, 1861–​ 1871 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1997). Several articles have facilitated debate over the concept. See Roger Chickering, “Total War: The Use and Abuse of a Concept,” in Anticipating Total War: The German and American Experiences, 1871–​1914, ed. Manfred E. Boemeke, Roger Chickering, and Stig Förster (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1997); Mark E. Neely Jr., “Was the Civil War a Total War,” Civil War History 50, no. 4 (December 2004): 434–​458; Joseph G. Dawson III, “The First of the Modern Wars?,” in Themes of the American Civil War: The War between the States, ed. Susan-​Mary Grant and Brian Holden Reid (New York: Routledge, 2010); Wayne Wei-​Siang Hsieh, “Total War and the American Civil War Reconsidered: The End of an Outdated ‘Master Narrative,’” Journal of the Civil War 1 (September 2011): 394–​408. A seminal study argued for “hard war” rather than “total war”: Mark Grimsely, The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy toward Southern Civilians, 1861–​1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). For studies that use a temporal and spatial comparative perspective, see Mark E. Neely Jr., The Civil War and the Limits of Destruction (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2007), and Aaron Sheehan-​Dean, The Calculus of Violence: How Americans Fought the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018). 18. This case for “localized total war” is a prominent feature of the following works: Sutherland, A Savage Conflict; Barton A. Myers, Rebels against the Confederacy:  North Carolina’s Unionists (New  York:  Cambridge University Press, 2014); Matthew M. Stith, Extreme Civil War:  Guerrilla Warfare, Environment, and Race on the Trans-​Mississippi Frontier (Baton Rouge:  Louisiana State University Press, 2016). Regional studies that emphasize the pervasive nature of the local violence that transformed home front to battle front include Wayne K. Durrill, War of Another Kind:  A Southern Community in the Great Rebellion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Fisher, War at Every Door; Daniel E. Sutherland, ed., Guerrillas, Unionists, and Violence on the Confederate Home Front (Fayetteville:  University of Arkansas Press, 1999); Victoria E. Bynum, The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Jonathan Dean Sarris, A Separate Civil War: Communities in Conflict in the Mountain South (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006); Storey, Loyalty and Loss; Brian D. McKnight, Contested Borderland: The Civil War in Appalachian Kentucky and Virginia (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006). 19. The seminal study of wartime occupation, Stephen V Ash’s When the Yankees Came: Conflict and Chaos in the Occupied South, 1861–​1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), uses a spatial approach to describe three zones across the Southern landscape that resulted from Federal occupation. Studies that consider Federal efforts to subdue local populations during occupation include Judkin Browning, “I Am Not So Patriotic as I Was Once: The Effects of Military Occupation on the Occupying Union Soldiers during the Civil War,” Civil War History 55 (2009): 217–​243 and Joseph W. Danielson, War’s Desolating Scourge:  The Union’s Occupation of North Alabama (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2012).

28    Lorien Foote and Earl J. Hess 20. The most comprehensive study of Confederate conscription remains Albert Burton Moore, Conscription and Conflict in the Confederacy (New York: Macmillan, 1924). Literature that considers the politics of conscription, slave impressment, and/​or resistance to the draft in the Union and the Confederacy includes Paul D. Escott, After Secession: Jefferson Davis and the Failure of Confederate Nationalism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978); Mark S. Weitz, More Damning Than Slaughter: Desertion in the Confederate Army (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005); Jennifer L. Weber, Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln’s Opponents in the North (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Robert M. Sandow, Deserter Country:  Civil War Opposition in the Pennsylvania Appalachians (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009); Jaime Amanda Martinez, Confederate Slave Impressment in the Upper South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013). 21. An overview of the environmental history of the Civil War is Judkin Browning and Timothy Silver, An Environmental History of the Civil War (Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 2020). An important book that explicitly argues for nature’s agency in war is Harold A. Winters, Battling the Elements: Weather and Terrain in the Conduct of War (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). For other studies of weather and war, see Kenneth W. Noe, The Howling Storm: Weather, Climate, and the American Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020); Robert K. Krick, Civil War Weather in Virginia (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007); Amy Murell Taylor, “How a Cold Snap in Kentucky Led to Freedom for Thousands: An Environmental Story of Emancipation,” in Weirding the War: Stories from the Civil War’s Ragged Edges, ed. Stephen Berry (Athens:  University of Georgia Press, 2011), 191–​214; Kenneth W. Noe, “Fateful Lightning: The Significance of Weather and Climate in Civil War History,” in The Blue, the Gray, and the Green: Toward an Environmental History of the Civil War, ed. Brian Allen Drake (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015), 16–​33. For considerations of the environment and strategic planning, see Ted Steinberg, Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Mark Fiege, “Gettysburg and the Organic Nature of the Civil War,” in Natural Enemy, Natural Ally: Toward an Environmental History of Warfare, ed. by Edmund Russell and Richard P. Tucker (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2004), 93–​109; Lisa M. Brady, War upon the Land: Military Strategy and the Transformation of the Southern Landscapes during the American Civil War (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012). For works that connect disease, environment, and war, see Paul E. Steiner, Disease in the Civil War: Natural Biological Warfare in 1861–​1865 (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1968); Andrew McIlwaine Bell, Mosquito Soldiers: Malaria, Yellow Fever, and the Course of the American Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010); Downs, Sick from Freedom; Kathryn Shively Meier, Nature’s Civil War: Common Soldiers and the Environment in 1862 Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013). For consideration of the war’s environmental destruction, see Nelson, Ruin Nation; Joan E. Cashin, War Stuff: The Struggle for Human and Environmental Resources in the American Civil War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 22. Grimsley, The Hard Hand of War; Sheehan-​Dean, Calculus of Violence; Paul F. Paskoff, “Measures of War: A Quantitative Examination of the Civil War Destructiveness in the Confederacy,” Civil War History 54, no. 1 (March 2008): 35–​62. 23. The literature on all these topics is too vast for comprehensive discussion in a single footnote. The following books will help interested readers get started. For Confederate nationalism, see Drew Gilpin Faust, The Creation of Confederate Nationalism:  Ideology and Identity in the Civil War South (Baton Rouge:  Louisiana State University Press,

Introduction   29 1988); Gary W. Gallagher, The Confederate War (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1997); Anne S. Rubin, A Shattered Nation:  The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, 1861–​1868 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Paul Quigley, Shifting Grounds: Nationalism and the American South, 1848–​1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). For Union nationalism, see Susan-​Mary Grant, North over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity in the Antebellum Era (Lawrence:  University Press of Kansas, 2000); Melinda Lawson, Patriot Fires: Forging a New American Nationalism in the Civil War North (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002); Andre Fleche, The Revolution of 1861:  The American Civil War in the Age of Nationalist Conflict (Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 2012). For conceptions of citizenship, see Christian B. Samito, Becoming Americans under Fire: Irish Americans, African Americans, and the Politics of Citizenship during the Civil War Era (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009); Lee, Claiming the Union; Mathison, The Loyal Republic. For women’s relationship to the state, see Mary Elizabeth Massey, Bonnet Brigades (New  York:  Knopf, 1966); George C. Rable, Civil Wars:  Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989); Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber, Divided Houses:  Gender and the Civil War (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 1992); Jeanie Attie, Patriotic Toil: Northern Women and the American Civil War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998); Nina Silber, Daughters of the Union: Northern Women Fight the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); Judith Giesberg, Army at Home: Women and the Civil War on the Northern Home Front (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); McCurry, Confederate Reckoning. For modernization, bureaucratization, and economic development, see Gavin Wright, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy since the Civil War (New York: Basic Books, 1986); Phillip Paludan, A People’s Contest:  The Union and Civil War 1861–​1865 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988); Richard Franklin Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–​1877 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Matt Gallman, Mastering Wartime: A Social History of Philadelphia during the Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); John Majewski, Modernizing a Slave Economy: The Economic Vision of the Confederate Nation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); William Thomas, The Iron Way: Railroads, the Civil War, and the Making of Modern America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011). 24. Joseph Allen Frank, With Ballots and Bayonet:  The Political Socialization of Civil War Soldiers (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998); Thomas J. Goss, The War within the Union High Command: Politics and Generalship during the Civil War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003); Stephen R. Taffe, Commanding the Army of the Potomac (Lawrence:  University Press of Kansas, 2006); Jonathan W. White, Emancipation, the Union Army, and the Reelection of Abraham Lincoln (Baton Rouge:  Louisiana State University Press, 2014); John H. Matsui, The First Republican Army: The Army of Virginia and the Radicalization of the Civil War (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2016); Kristopher Teeters, Practical Liberators: Union Officers in the Western Theater during the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2018). 25. For literature that focuses on the relationship between politics, the army, occupation, and Reconstruction policies, see Willie Lee Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-​Merrill, 1964); James E. Sefton, The United States Army and Reconstruction, 1865–​1877 (Baton Rouge:  Louisiana State University Press, 1967); Joseph G. Dawson III, Army Generals and Reconstruction:  Louisiana, 1862–​1877

30    Lorien Foote and Earl J. Hess (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982); George C. Rable, But There Was No Peace:  The Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction (Athens:  University of Georgia Press, 1984); William Blair, “The Use of Military Force to Protect the Gains of Reconstruction,” Civil War History 51 (December 2005): 388–​402; James K. Hogue, Uncivil War: Five New Orleans Street Battles and the Rise and Fall of Radical Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006); Mark Grimsley, “Wars for the American South:  The First and Second Reconstructions Considered as Insurgencies,” Civil War History 58 (March 2012): 6–​36; Gregory P. Downs, After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015); Andrew F. Lang, In the Wake of War: Military Occupation, Emancipation, and Civil War America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017). 26. For a comprehensive examination of the role of religion that asserts its centrality to the conflict, see George C. Rable, God’s Almost Chosen Peoples:  A Religious History of the American Civil War (Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 2010). For the role of religion in sustaining soldiers and armies, and for soldier’s spiritual struggles, see Drew Gilpin Faust, “Christian Soldiers: The Meaning of Revivalism in the Confederate Army,” Journal of Southern History 53 (1987): 63–​90; Gardiner H. Shattuck, A Shield and a Hiding Place: The Religious Life of Civil War Armies (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1987); James McPherson, For Cause and Comrades:  Why Men Fought in the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Steven E. Woodworth, While God Is Marching On: The Religious World of Civil War Soldiers (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001); Jason Phillips, Die Hard Rebels: The Confederate Culture of Invincibility (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007); David Rolfs, No Peace for the Wicked:  Northern Protestant Soldiers and the American Civil War (Knoxville:  University of Tennessee Press, 2009). For Black religion, see Albert Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Daniel L. Fountain, Slavery, Civil War, and Salvation:  African American Slaves and Christianity, 1830–​1870 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010); Matthew Harper, The End of Days: African American Religion and Politics in the Age of Emancipation (Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 2016). For the relationship between religion and the war, and the effect of the war on faith, see Kent Dollar, Soldiers of the Cross: Confederate Soldier Christians and the Impact of the War on Their Faith (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2005); Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Harry S. Stout, Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the Civil War (New York: Viking, 2006); Sean A. Scott, A Visitation of God: Northern Civilians Interpret the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Timothy L. Wesley, The Politics of Faith during the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013). An important case that the Civil War did not disrupt the cultural worldview is Frances M. Clarke, War Stories: Suffering and Sacrifice in the Civil War North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 27. The seminal digital humanities mapping project for the Civil War is “Visualizing Emancipation,” which includes emancipation events and Union Army locations: http://​ dsl.richmond.edu/​emancipation/​. Other important Civil War scholarly mapping projects are “Of Methods and Madness: A Spatial History Approach to the Civil War’s Guerrilla Violence,” “Mapping Occupation:  Force, Freedom and the Army in Reconstruction,” and “Fugitive Federals: A Digital Humanities Investigation of Escaped Union Prisoners,” found on https://​ehistory.org/​; “Sherman’s March and America: Mapping Memory,” http://​

Introduction   31 shermansmarch.org/​. Researchers should also consult the site for the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond, which includes maps such as “Hidden Patterns of the Civil War,” “Voting America: Civil War Elections,” and “Confederate Richmond”: http://​ dsl.richmond.edu/​. 28. Winters, Battling the Elements; Krick, Civil War Weather in Virginia; Noe, “Fateful Lightning.” 29. Nineteenth-​century Americans viewed the Civil War as a contest of grand armies fighting land battles, and the historiography of the navy has lagged behind that of the army in terms of scope and methodology ever since. Scholarship on the navy has grown significantly since the 1990s. For early histories by participants, see David Dixon Porter, The Naval History of the Civil War (New York: Sherman, 1886) and John Scharf, History of the Confederate Navy (New York: Rogers and Sherwood, 1887). For evolution of the topic, see Richard S. West Jr., Mr. Lincoln’s Navy (New York: Longmans, Green, 1957); James M. Merrill, The Rebel Shore: The Story of Union Sea Power in the Civil War (Boston: Little, Brown, 1957); Raimondo Luraghi, A History of the Confederate Navy (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1992); Spencer Tucker, Blue and Gray Navies: The Civil War Afloat (Annapolis, MA: Naval Institute Press, 2006); Gary D. Joiner, Mr. Lincoln’s Brown Water Navy: The Mississippi Squadron (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007); Craig L. Symonds, Lincoln and His Admirals: Abraham Lincoln, the U.S. Navy, and the Civil War (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2008); Craig L. Symonds, ed., Union Combined Operations in the Civil War (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009); Stephen R. Taaffe, Commanding Lincoln’s Navy: Union Naval Leadership during the Civil War (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2009); Myron J. Smith, Tinclads in the Civil War: Union Light-​ Draught Gunboat Operations on Western Waters (Jefferson, NC:  McFarland, 2008); Howard J. Fuller, Clad in Iron:  The American Civil War and the Challenge of British Naval Power (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2010); James M. McPherson, War on the Waters: The Union and Confederate Navies, 1861–​1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Craig L. Symonds, The Civil War at Sea (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). A work that stresses the multiple consequences of the blockade and relates it to economics is David G. Surdam, Northern Naval Superiority and the Economics of the American Civil War (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001). For social histories of sailors, see William Marvel, The Alabama and the Kearsarge: The Sailor’s Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Dennis J. Ringle, Life in Mr. Lincoln’s Navy (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1998); Steven J. Ramold, Slaves, Sailors, and Citizens:  African Americans in the Union Navy (DeKalb:  Northern Illinois University Press, 2002); Michael J. Bennett, Union Jacks: Yankee Sailors in the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Barbara B. Tomblin, Bluejackets and Contrabands: African Americans and the Union Navy (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2009); Barbara B. Tomblin, The Civil War on the Mississippi: Union Sailors, Gunboat Captains, and the Campaign to Control the River (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2016). 30. For the older view, see Edward Hagerman, The American Civil War and the Origins of Modern Warfare:  Ideas, Organization, and Field Command (Bloomington:  Indiana University Press, 1988). For the revision of that view, see Paddy Griffith, Battle Tactics of the Civil War (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 1989); Brent Nosworthy, The Bloody Crucible of Courage:  Fighting Methods and Combat Experience in the Civil War (New  York:  Carroll & Graf, 2003); Hess, Field Armies and Fortifications in the Civil

32    Lorien Foote and Earl J. Hess War; Steven E. Sodergren, The Army of the Potomac in the Overland and Petersburg Campaigns: Union Soldiers and Trench Warfare, 1864–​1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017). 31. Although military theorists, scholars, and generals agree that logistics is essential to warfare, the number of scholarly works on the topic for the Civil War is minuscule compared to other areas of military history. See Ella Lonn, Salt as a Factor in the Confederacy (New  York:  Neale, 1933); James A. Huston, Sinews of War:  Army Logistics, 1775–​1953 (Washington, D.C.:  U.S. Army Historical Series, 1966); Richard D. Goff, Confederate Supply (Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 1969); Hagerman, American Civil War and the Origins of Modern Warfare; Emmitt M. Essin, Shavetails and Bell Sharps:  The History of the US Army Mule (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997); John E. Clark, Railroads in the Civil War:  The Impact of Management on Victory and Defeat (Baton Rouge:  Louisiana State University Press, 2001); Mark R. Wilson, The Business of Civil War:  Military Mobilization and the State, 1861–​1865 (Baltimore, MD:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); Earl J. Hess, Civil War Logistics: A Study of Military Transportation (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017). 32. For contrasting views of rifle technology and tactics, see Grady McWhiney and Perry D. Jamieson, Attack and Die:  Civil War Military Tactics and the Southern Heritage (Tuscaloosa:  University of Alabama Press, 1982) and Earl J. Hess, Civil War Infantry Tactics:  Training, Combat, and Small-​Unit Effectiveness (Baton Rouge:  Louisiana State University Press, 2015). For fortifications, see Hess, Field Armies and Fortifications; Justin S. Solonick, Engineering Victory:  The Union Siege of Vicksburg (Carbondale:  Southern Illinois University Press, 2015). For naval technology, see Milton F. Perry, Infernal Machines: The Story of Confederate Submarine and Mine Warfare (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1965); Kurt Hackemer, The U.S. Navy and the Origins of the Military-​ Industrial Complex, 1847–​1883 (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2001). For ordnance technology, see Edward B. McCaul Jr., The Mechanical Fuze and the Advance of Artillery in the Civil War (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010). For the intersection of war and technology, see Charles D. Ross, Trial by Fire: Science, Technology, and the Civil War (Shippensburg, PA: White Mane, 1999); Thomas F. Army, Engineering Victory: How Technology Won the Civil War (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016). 33. Wiley, Life of Johnny Reb (1943) was the first social history. The study of soldiers exploded in the 1980s and 1990s; see Joseph T. Glatthaar, The March to the Sea and Beyond: Sherman’s Troops in the Savannah and Carolinas Campaign (New  York:  New  York University Press, 1985); Gerald F. Linderman, Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War (New York: Free Press, 1987); Reid Mitchell, Civil War Soldiers: Their Expectations and Experiences (New York: Viking, 1988); Joseph Allen Frank and George A. Reaves, “Seeing the Elephant”: Raw Recruits at the Battle of Shiloh (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989); Larry J. Daniel, Soldiering in the Army of Tennessee: A Portrait of Life in a Confederate Army (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); Earl J. Hess, The Union Soldier in Battle: Enduring the Ordeal of Combat (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997); McPherson, For Cause and Comrades; Keith P. Wilson, Campfires of Freedom: The Camp Life of Black Soldiers during the Civil War (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2002); Susannah Ural Bruce, The Harp and the Eagle: Irish American Volunteers in the Union Army (New York: New York University Press, 2006); Sheehan-​ Dean, Why Confederates Fought; Chandra Manning, What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War (New York: Knopf, 2007); Martin Öfele, True Sons

Introduction   33 of the Republic: European Immigrants in the Union Army (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2008); Foote, Gentlemen and the Roughs; Kenneth W. Noe, Reluctant Rebels: The Confederates Who Joined the Army after 1861 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Steven J. Ramold, Baring the Iron Hand: Discipline in the Union Army (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010); Sodergren, Union Soldiers and Trench Warfare; Peter S. Carmichael, The War for the Common Soldier: How Men Thought, Fought, and Survived in Civil War Armies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018). 34. The medical Middle Ages thesis is taken for granted in McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom. For an analysis of the successes and failures of Civil War medicine and for claims that medical care was innovative, bureaucratizing, and professionalizing, see George Worthington Adams, Doctors in Blue:  The Medical History of the Union Army in the Civil War (New York: Henry Schuman, 1952); H. H. Cunningham, Doctors in Gray: The Confederate Medical Service (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1958); Frank R. Freemon, Gangrene and Glory: Medical Care during the American Civil War (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1993); Alfred Jay Bollet, Civil War Medicine: Challenges and Triumphs (Tucson, AZ: Galen Press, 2002); Ira Rutkow, Bleeding Blue and Gray: Civil War Surgery and the Evolution of American Medicine (New York: Random House, 2005); Judith Ann Giesberg, Civil War Sisterhood: The U.S. Sanitary Commission and Women’s Politics in Transition (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2006); Margaret Humphreys, Marrow of Tragedy: The Health Crisis of the American Civil War (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013); Shauna Devine, Learning from the Wounded: The Civil War and the Rise of American Medical Science (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); Kathryn Shively Meier, “U.S. Sanitary Commission Physicians and the Transformation of American Health Care,” in So Conceived and So Dedicated: Intellectual Life in the Civil War–​Era North, ed. Lorien Foote and Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 19–​40; Susan-​Mary Grant, “Civil War Cybernetics:  Medicine, Modernity, and the Intellectual Mechanics of Union,” in So Conceived and So Dedicated 41–​63. For soldier self-​care, see Meier, Nature’s Civil War.

Chapter 1

Bleeding   Ka ns as A Call to Arms Kristen T. Oertel

Historians rarely cast the Bleeding Kansas conflict of the 1850s in a military light, perhaps because it featured farmers wearing homespun rather than soldiers marching in blue or gray. And yet the settlers along the Kansas-​Missouri border viewed politics through a military lens and organized their nascent society into opposing “free-​ state” and pro-​slavery camps from the get-​go. Take, for example, twenty-​two-​year-​old Edward P. Fitch, who arrived in Kansas Territory from Massachusetts in October 1854 and was enrolled in a military company less than a year later because, he wrote, “there is a large body of armed men within a few miles that say they are going to burn this town and kill all the Yankees.” Fitch was stationed at Hunts Fort near Lawrence, where the “Headquarters of Company E” prepared to “repel an attack from the enemy.” He claimed, “We are in a state of siege. An army lays near our border. . . . We have a number of forts throwed up which we mean to defend to the death.” Missourians and pro-​slavery settlers also stood battle-​ready. A.  J. Hoole reported to his sister in South Carolina, “[G]‌uns are firing in the camps of the different companies of soldiers who are gathering to attack Lawrence. . . . I expect before you get this Lawrence will be burnt to the ground.”1 Although historians have often separated the military aspects of the war from the social and political, Bleeding Kansas provides the perfect venue in which to examine how violence between pro-​slavery and antislavery settlers animated sectional politics and forecast a larger struggle over the fate of slavery and the nation itself. The passage of the Kansas-​Nebraska Act in 1854 initiated a political firestorm that exploded into armed conflict in Kansas Territory and eventually led the country on a path toward secession and civil war. Sponsored by Senator Stephen A.  Douglas of Illinois, the act lifted the legal restrictions on slavery’s westward expansion that had been in place since the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which had prohibited slavery in territory north and west of Missouri’s southern border. The act not only exacerbated sectional strife; it also increased conflict with the Plains Indians, as it opened up a huge swath of territory (current-​day Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, and parts of Colorado)

Bleeding Kansas   35 for white settlement. Protests against and debates about the Kansas-​Nebraska Act helped form the Republican Party and launched Abraham Lincoln’s presidential bid, as settlers from Northern and Southern states rushed to the territory to vote slavery up or down using the principle of popular sovereignty. But voting fraud was rampant, violence erupted at polling places and in nascent settler communities, and stories of “Bleeding Kansas” peppered the nation’s newspapers, heating up the sectional tensions in the late 1850s until they reached a boiling point in 1861. Yet charting the history from Bleeding Kansas to Fort Sumter involves more than constructing political timelines filled with famous names like Douglas and Lincoln or chronicling the secession debates in Southern state legislatures. To understand the ways in which political disagreements fueled violence we must turn to the local stage, to the average men and women who animated the political ideals made popular by the media and the national political spotlight. These settler communities nurtured a martial spirit and prepared the country to go to war, as women like Margaret Wood fashioned bullet cartridges and smuggled supplies to free-​state forces, and men like Benjamin F. Stringfellow formed the Platte County (Missouri) Self-​Defensive Association to protect slavery at all costs. As Wood’s and Stringfellow’s actions make clear, during the mid-​ 1850s the fight for Kansas was palpable on the border but also throughout the country. The words and gunfire exchanged by the people residing on the Kansas-​Missouri border galvanized the nation and brought it to the brink of war in 1861, but settlers on the border had already been at war for years. Because the Kansas-​Nebraska Act opened up the territory to white settlement and left the slavery question to be determined by popular sovereignty, Northern and Southern states immediately began organizing emigration parties to people the plains of Kansas with like-​minded citizens. These white settlers occupied areas of eastern Kansas already possessed by emigrant Indian tribes like the Wyandot, Shawnee, and Delaware who had been forcibly removed from their homelands further east. The Kansas-​Nebraska Act followed close on the heels of a Delaware treaty, signed on May 6, 1854, that ceded lands to the United States that would become Kansas’s “first town” of Leavenworth. A group of land speculators, including U.S. Army officers stationed at Fort Leavenworth and several pro-​slavery Missourians, preempted these claims and raised the ire of the Delaware. They also disliked the politics of the white invaders, as many of the Delaware sympathized with the free-​state settlers and spoke out against slavery. Similarly, the Wyandot protested the presence of slaveholders in their midst, and one Wyandot spokesperson, Lucy Armstrong, requested in 1849 that the Federal government assign the tribe an antislavery missionary rather than the local Methodist missionaries illegally holding slaves in the region.2 While the Delaware and Wyandot peoples generally aligned with the free-​state cause, the Shawnee were mostly pro-​slavery and resided on a mission about a mile west of the Missouri border that housed one of the largest enslaved populations in Kansas Territory. The Methodist mission’s director, Rev. Thomas Johnson, owned roughly a dozen slaves, and many of the Shawnee at the mission were slaveholders as well. Some Shawnee were even known to capture runaway slaves and turn them over to authorities. The pro-​slavery

36   Kristen T. Oertel newspaper Kansas Weekly Herald reported in the spring of 1855 that a Shawnee had shot and maimed a runaway slave who was escaping from Westport, Missouri, to Lawrence. The Shawnee returned the enslaved man to his owner in Missouri, but area slaveholders still worried about abolitionists enticing slaves to escape to Kansas Territory. Enslaved people seeking their freedom were not the only Missourians who crossed the porous and contentious border. Beginning with the first territorial elections in the fall of 1854, pro-​slavery men left their farms in Missouri and voted for Kansas Territory’s representative to Congress. Voting fraud was widespread; for example, in the March 1855 elections for the territorial legislature, over 6,000 voted, even though the territorial census counted only 2,905 voters in the territory at the time, and pro-​slavery candidates garnered a total of 5,427 votes. Missourians believed they had a right to vote in territorial elections, and they viewed these border crossings as a way to defend their rights and their enslaved property from “foreign invaders” and “hirelings” who were being paid by New England abolitionists to emigrate to Kansas Territory. Many pro-​slavery settlers went even further and argued that not only did they have a right to vote in territorial elections, but they had an obligation to expel all abolitionists from the territory. The Platte Argus reported on a number of resolutions passed by pro-​slavery settlers in 1855 that justified this “defensive” stance: “self-​defence required the expulsion of every person opposed to negro slavery—​such persons being robbers and traitors, who had no right to the protection of the law.”3 The Argus story ran in newspapers as far away as South Carolina, spreading the word that Missourians would do all they could to stop the “plague” of abolition. On the other side of the border, the free-​state settlers painted an entirely different picture of the conflict, although the popular concept of branding political enemies as “foreign invaders” persisted. Charles Robinson, who would become Kansas’s first governor, gave a speech on July 4, 1855, that cast pro-​slavery Missourians as immoral and inhumane foreigners. He announced, “The people of Kansas Territory are today the subjects of a foreign State, as laws are now being imposed upon us by the citizens of Missouri, for the sole purpose of forcing upon this Territory the institution of slavery.” Charles was not the only Robinson to disparage the pro-​slavery settlers in public; his wife, Sara Tappan Robinson, kept copious notes while living in Kansas Territory and published a book, Kansas, Its Interior and Exterior Life, in the spring of 1856. She narrated the numerous armed conflicts between free-​state and pro-​slavery settlers, and she defined the pro-​slavery men as “dark hordes of invaders” who were the embodiment of evil. She castigated Missourians as enslavers not only of Africans but of Kansans as well: “At this time, when Freedom is but a name; when three millions of human beings . . . are sold as chattels in a country boasting of liberty . . . we in Kansas feel the iron heel of the oppressor, making us truly white slaves.”4 Sara’s book was published in Boston, Cincinnati, and London and went through multiple printings, indicating not only its popularity but its widespread reach, as her words publicized the border conflict throughout the world. Although the pro-​slavery press defined all free-​staters as “New England abolitionists,” in part because its spokespeople like the Robinsons hailed from Massachusetts, white settlers immigrated to Kansas from across the nation and traced their roots back to

Map 1.1  Border War in Kansas

38   Kristen T. Oertel several European countries. In fact, the February 1855 territorial census recorded that only 4.3 percent of residents hailed from New England, while almost 50 percent came from Missouri and 25 percent from midwestern and mid-​Atlantic states. Nonetheless, the most vocal antislavery settlers arrived in the territory ready to breathe life into the doctrine of popular sovereignty, even as their pro-​slavery counterparts stood ready to do the same. It wasn’t long before their opposing political ideologies would be expressed not just in speeches and contested ballots, but also with bullets. Several skirmishes erupted at polling stations in the fall of 1854 and spring of 1855, including one station that was dismantled by pro-​slavery Missourians. The election judges inside were given the choice to “resign or be killed,” and they promptly resigned. At another polling place, one man was “dragged from the polling window by men yelling, ‘Kill the damned nigger-​thief,’ and was “threatened with a knife and revolver.” In Lawrence, Charles Robinson reported that “about a thousand Missourians took possession of the polls and threatened to hang one of the judges who was formerly from Missouri but antislavery.”5 Although little overt violence occurred in the first two elections, armed threats like these motivated enough fear on both sides for the region’s young men to form military companies to defend their communities. Julia Louisa Lovejoy, an antislavery settler from New Hampshire, reported to her hometown newspaper in August 1855 that military companies were forming in earnest. Particularly by the fall of 1855, dozens of military companies and self-​defense associations held meetings, stockpiled weapons, and drilled on the open prairie. The rapid formation of these companies is not surprising given the history of volunteer militias in the American republic. From their country’s revolutionary origins, Americans had distrusted a standing, professional army and instead relied upon local militias to defend its borders. Volunteers served for a brief time and then returned to civilian life, thus embodying classical republican values of selfless service to the polity and community; serving in local militias reinforced ideals of independence, self-​ government, and manliness. Every able-​bodied male was expected to fulfill this important civic duty. Because of American settler colonialism and the country’s relentless expansion westward, the threats of both Indian attacks and slave rebellion loomed throughout American history; thus young men learned from an early age that taking up arms to defend one’s community and political ideals went hand in hand. In addition to these inherited national norms, Southerners organized local police forces to pursue runaway slaves, something Missourians had been doing on their western border for decades. Now these men also zeroed in on perceived abolitionists whose proximity was too close for comfort. An increase in runaway slaves and perceived threats from “negro stealers” in the 1850s alarmed white Missourians, and slave patrols in the region stepped up their activities in the decade before the Civil War. Edward Fitch noted that some antislavery settlers also took up arms to protect local free Blacks who were vulnerable to kidnapping from pro-​slavery patrols who were “hunting runaways.” Fitch wrote to his parents in September 1855 that “there has been a free negro here” who “the Pro Slavery men [were] trying to prove . . . was a slave and get him away. . . . A lot of us armed with Sharps rifles went out under the command of our Orderly Sargent to

Bleeding Kansas   39 protect him but the slave holders backed out and dared not try anything. If they had we should have pitched in to them with our rifles.”6 Thus men on both sides of the border went from using rifles to enforce or oppose the Fugitive Slave Law to using them to debate the extension of slavery itself. Armed free-​state “secret societies” like the Kansas Legion began drilling in the winter of 1854–​1855 and formal military companies sprang up in the summer and fall of 1855. The Kansas Legion, organized in February 1855, functioned like a free-​state army, its members sharing secret hand signals and identifying themselves with black ribbons on their shirts. Meanwhile pro-​slavery settlers organized themselves into groups like the aforementioned Self-​Defensive Association of Platte County and the Palmetto Guard, comprised mostly of settlers from South Carolina, which organized in early 1856 near the pro-​slavery town of Atchison, Kansas Territory. These organizations soon functioned as military companies given the perceived threats on both sides of the border. The U.S. Army likewise stood on high alert because of the tension over slavery in the region. Soldiers stationed at Fort Leavenworth, founded in 1827, were accustomed to monitoring disputes between white settlers and Indian peoples, as the fort was established to protect traffic and trade on the Santa Fe Trail, and these conflicts persisted even as friction between pro-​slavery and antislavery settlers grew. While Missourians poured over the border to vote in March 1855, soldiers at Fort Leavenworth were planning an expedition against the Sioux after a group of Brulé Sioux had killed a detachment of U.S. troops from Fort Laramie the previous August in the Grattan Incident. On September 3, 1855, Brig. Gen. William S. Harney’s troops attacked the Brulé leader, Little Thunder, and his people, and the fighting quickly ended after Harney’s men killed eighty-​six Sioux and captured seventy women and children, while losing only four of his own men. President Franklin Pierce believed the army had mollified the offending Sioux, and Harney’s troops returned to Fort Leavenworth after compelling a treaty at Fort Pierre in 1856. The strong-​arm methods the army used against Indian peoples could not be employed against its own citizens, however. Ironically, Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, who helped settle conflicts between Indians and white squatters in his earliest days as a soldier in Wisconsin Territory, faced similar dynamics in territorial Kansas. Commissioner of Indian Affairs George Manypenny wrote to Davis in 1855 complaining that white settlers were illegally squatting on Delaware lands and demanded that the U.S. Army use its power to evict these squatters since they were violating the terms of a Federal treaty. But Davis declined this request and later refused to use the army to mitigate conflicts between pro-​slavery and free-​state settlers, instructing Col. Edwin V. Sumner not to intervene after forces on both sides of the border threatened to open fire on each other in December 1855. The Wakarusa War of December 1855 helps explain how local settlers viewed their political differences through a military lens and, perhaps more important, how the local and national press politicized and amplified the conflict. What began as a dispute over a land claim quickly escalated into a war between pro-​slavery and free-​state settlers. An Ohio man named Charles W. Dow, who was a member of the free-​state

40   Kristen T. Oertel military company, the Wakarusa Liberty Guard, was gunned down by a pro-​slavery settler, Franklin Coleman, on November 21, 1855. Coleman swore that he shot Dow in self-​defense during a heated argument over Jacob Branson’s land claim. (Branson had invited Dow to stay on his land, which bordered Coleman’s claim.) But Coleman knew his claim of self-​defense would not fly among free-​staters, so he fled to Missouri. Five days after Dow’s murder, Branson convened a meeting of the Liberty Guard at his house in Hickory Point to determine how best to retaliate against Coleman and his allies. Branson and the Liberty Guard determined to avenge Dow’s death and promptly torched Coleman’s house; some free-​state men had already burned down two houses owned by pro-​slavery settlers and ordered pro-​slavery women to leave their property in the interim between Dow’s murder and the meeting at Branson’s. Word quickly spread of the free-​state depredations, and Douglas County sheriff Samuel J.  Jones arrived at Branson’s home with a posse of pro-​slavery men to arrest him. Meanwhile, the Wakarusa Guard, under the direction of “Major” J. B. Abbott, caught wind of the arrest and blocked the posse as they tried to leave with Branson. Free-​stater Samuel N. Wood, a lawyer, yelled at Branson to join them after Sheriff Jones refused to show him the supposed warrant authorizing Branson’s arrest. The Wakarusa Guard thwarted the county sheriff, rescued Branson, and ferried him to Charles Robinson’s house in Lawrence. The next morning, according to free-​state settler Hannah Ropes, “Lawrence was up and dressed early, and as wide awake as his ancestors of Seventy-​six.” Ropes reported that the entire town prepared for war, knowing that Branson’s presence made the city vulnerable to attack. In a letter to her mother she wrote, “How strange it will seem to you to hear that I have loaded pistols and a bowie-​knife upon my table at night, three of Sharp’s rifles, loaded, standing in the room, and two or three men in the cabin beside Edward [her son], except when it is their turn to keep guard. . . . All week every preparation has been made for our defence.”7 Ropes charted the arrival of dozens of armed defenders from across the territory, including several members of the Wyandot tribe, who rode in “at full gallop.” Two free-​state women, Margaret Wood and Lois Brown, helped supply the gathering troops by smuggling gunpowder under their petticoats and eluding pro-​slavery guards by playing the “innocent” gender card. Wood and Brown claimed that they were merely traveling to a friend’s house to socialize, and they brandished their knitting needles as proof of their benign intentions. Like their husbands and fathers, women like Wood, Brown, and Ropes quickly learned their own martial modes of living and shaped the border war in multiple ways. From supplying local militias with arms to clothing and feeding runaway slaves and reporting on disputed elections and rising violence, women promoted their respective political ideals as they supported men’s military actions. Although free-​state women like Ropes and Sara Robinson played a more visible role by writing about and sometimes publishing their letters from the “home front,” Rebel women worked behind the scenes and supported local militias as well by sewing makeshift uniforms and feeding hungry volunteers. The butternut wool shirts they sewed would become known as “guerrilla shirts” during the war, and border women were well versed in feeding entire companies on a minute’s notice. Thus women and families on the Kansas-​Missouri

Bleeding Kansas   41 border rehearsed for full-​scale war for years as sectionalism turned violent in the mid-​ 1850s and military companies drilled in preparation for battle. In December 1855 Hannah Ropes exclaimed that “every rumor . . . is more dark and fearful” and watched as Charles Robinson and James Lane and their respective military companies marched past her window, training.8 Robinson and Lane were preparing for an attack from Sheriff Jones and a pro-​slavery militia that had been called up by territorial governor Wilson Shannon at Jones’s request to help retrieve the wanted Branson and his free-​state accomplices. Pro-​slavery Missourians answered the governor’s call and gathered by the thousands, traveling to Douglas County from St. Joseph and even Boonville, over 130 miles to the east. The governor also asked Colonel Sumner of the U.S. Army for backup, claiming that the Federal troops could be controlled but questioning whether he could restrain the pro-​slavery militia. But Sumner balked at Shannon’s request, instructing him to ask for authorization from President Pierce. Sumner hoped that the mere possibility of Federal troops being deployed would quell the conflict between the warring factions, and he awaited official authorization from either the president or the secretary of war before mobilizing U.S. forces. That communication was delayed in part because of faulty telegraph lines, but Sumner was hesitant to use Federal troops without official orders because he wanted to maintain control over these troops and not allow Shannon to usurp that power.9 Meanwhile the free-​state and pro-​slavery militias kept drilling, amassing men and arms, and preparing for war. In Liberty, Missouri, northeast of Lawrence about fifty miles, an armed band of pro-​slavery men, likely members of the Clay County Volunteers, robbed a small arsenal. Sumner sent a company of cavalry to Liberty to provide added protection to the arsenal and reported to Washington, “[In] any other circumstances, I should feel it to be my duty to pursue the marauding party at once, and retake the guns, but I cannot do this . . . without taking sides in this momentous quarrel.”10 President Pierce was reluctant to give Sumner the authority to use troops to keep the peace, in part because he perceived that the conflict had not yet reached the high threshold necessary to employ Federal troops in domestic affairs. Thus Sumner maintained his impartiality and held the army at bay, which forced Governor Shannon to open negotiations between the factions or risk all-​out war. The governor met with free-​state leaders Charles Robinson and James H. Lane and members of the pro-​slavery militia, like Senator David Atchison and Albert Boone (grandson of Daniel), and they brokered a peace treaty on December 8.  Shannon instructed Sheriff Jones to disband all local militias, forcing the Missourians to pack up and go home, at least for the time being. But in a whiskey-​induced haze, Shannon also signed an agreement crafted by Robinson that authorized free-​state men to maintain a militia to protect Lawrence. Lane deemed his men real “United States dragoons” because of the document, and free-​state forces continued to organize and drill as if preparing for war. They had reason to be concerned because they buried one of their own, Thomas Barber, who had been shot and killed by a member of Sheriff Jones’s pro-​slavery posse on December 6. His death inspired the military companies to band together, as members of the Kansas Rifles, Barber Guards, and Kansas Guards marched in unison to “drums

42   Kristen T. Oertel beating a solemn funeral dirge, the citizen-​soldiery with arms reversed,” at Barber’s funeral service.11 The militias activated by the Wakarusa War did not stand down for long; as the weather heated up in the late spring of 1856, so did sectional strife at both the local and national levels. A cluster of events in late May and early June caused several newspapers to claim there was a “Civil War in Kansas.” First, pro-​slavery men attacked and burned the town of Lawrence on May 21; a day later, South Carolina representative Preston Brooks caned Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner on the Senate floor; and then free-​state men retaliated in Kansas at both Pottawatomie Creek (May 24) and Black Jack (June 2), resulting in the deaths of dozens of settlers. Although the causality is more complex than the close chronology suggests, all of these events contributed to a growing sense that political conflicts were being played out in violent ways in both Kansas Territory and in Washington, D.C. Beginning with the Sack of Lawrence, these events illustrate how citizen soldiers used violence to address political problems. The pro-​slavery territorial legislature in Kansas was enraged that free-​state settlers had set up a parallel government, called the Topeka Movement, which openly resisted territorial laws, particularly those meant to protect slavery and enslaved property. In early May a grand jury indicted for treason all free-​ state men involved in the Topeka government and cited the Free State Hotel and antislavery newspapers in Lawrence as egregious symbols of this treason. Thus Sheriff Jones and his posse rolled into town on May 21 with four cannon, bombarded the Free State Hotel with repeated shelling, and then burned the hotel, the press buildings nearby, and several other properties in downtown Lawrence. Within a week, reports of the Sack of Lawrence were broadcast in Cleveland, Milwaukee, Chicago, New York, and Boston. One paper exclaimed that the “destruction committed by the barbarian horde . . . [was] greater than was at first stated. Every house but one in the place was sacked—​trunks were broken open, wardrobes rifled . . . and even ladies dresses were added to the miscellaneous plunder.” Northerners were outraged by the attack, while Southerners defended it, proclaiming that “law and order” was restored in the region. A pro-​slavery newspaper editor in North Carolina proudly prophesied, “In a few months, in my opinion, there will not be an abolitionist left in Kansas; they will be swept with a clean broom. Then the war will be carried elsewhere, if war we are to have.”12 As reports rolled in about the Sack of Lawrence, they were joined by equally alarming depictions of the caning of Sumner. Representative Brooks had taken offense at Sumner’s incendiary speech, “The Crime against Kansas,” in which he maligned Brooks’s relative and colleague, Andrew Butler, a senator from South Carolina. Brooks defended his family’s and state’s honor with a gutta percha cane, pummeling Sumner and leaving him bloodied and permanently disabled. Antislavery journalists used “Bleeding Kansas” and “Bleeding Sumner” to cast the pro-​slavery power, in Missouri and in Congress, as a violent malevolent force that attacked innocent people, while pro-​slavery pundits used the incidents to reinforce their political position that slavery, along with Southern honor, should be defended at all costs.

Bleeding Kansas   43 As these debates raged in Congress and on the front pages of newspapers across the country, men like John Brown and H. Clay Pate actuated them on the ground in Kansas Territory. Brown had moved to Kansas Territory with five of his sons in 1855, and they joined the Pottawatomie Rifles, a free-​state military company headquartered south of Lawrence. After the Sack of Lawrence, along with the indictment of two of his sons by the pro-​slavery government, Brown and his men wanted revenge. They first sought out men who had served on the grand jury that issued arrest warrants for his sons, and they brutally murdered James Doyle, his sons William and Drury Doyle, and Allen Wilkerson with broadswords on the night of May 24. The final victim was William Sherman, whose family ran a tavern that served as headquarters for pro-​slavery forces in the area and whose brother, Henry, had threatened to lynch an associate of Brown’s. The savage murders on Pottawatomie Creek precipitated a retaliatory response from pro-​slavery men like Pate. A Virginian who moved to Missouri in 1855, Pate edited a pro-​slavery newspaper in Westport called the Border Times, where he praised a fellow Southerner who said he was “[g]‌oing to Kansas to hunt Buffalo and abolitionists.”13 Pate raised a pro-​slavery posse to hunt down Brown and his men, and they established a camp at Black Jack, near Hickory Point, to launch operations. But Brown caught wind of Pate’s location and decided to strike first, attacking Pate’s company on the morning of June 2. Although greatly outnumbered by Pate’s men, Brown’s surprise attack—​which included a quick exchange of fire followed by a blustery (and false) proclamation from Brown’s son that the pro-​slavery men were surrounded—​forced Pate to surrender after only a few hours of battle. Dozens of casualties resulted, even though Brown’s forces numbered roughly twenty-​five and Pate’s about fifty. Four of Pate’s men died and twenty-​ five were taken prisoner, only to be released later at the command of Colonel Sumner, who had been ordered by Governor Shannon to quell the conflict and disarm both sides. If the Battle of Black Jack was not technically the first battle of the Civil War, it certainly looked like it at the time. Although Colonel Sumner told both sides to disband their troops, the military companies that fought at Black Jack proudly maintained themselves, recording their service on muster rolls and identifying with particular companies up to and even through the Civil War. For example, Robert H. Pearson, who had moved to Kansas Territory from Pennsylvania, joined Capt. Samuel Shore’s company, which was part of Col. Cyrus Holliday’s regiment and was formed after the March 1855 elections; Pearson marched with Shore’s unit in the Wakarusa War later that year and again at the Battle of Black Jack in June 1856. Holliday’s regiment continued to patrol the border region, as did members of the Stubbs Rifle Company. Also formed before the Wakarusa War, the Stubbs company drilled constantly and was called upon to defend Lawrence numerous times in the late 1850s; the Stubbs reconstituted itself as the Oread Guard (Lawrence was founded near Mt. Oread) during the Civil War, fighting at the Battle of Wilson’s Creek in 1861. On the Missouri side of the border, pro-​slavery troops also continued to drill, even though Sumner stationed five companies of the U.S. Army near Westport to try to control the martial atmosphere in the summer of 1856. Colonel Holliday reported to his wife

44   Kristen T. Oertel on June 16 that the threat of full-​scale war had not dissipated after Pate’s surrender at Black Jack; in fact, he claimed, U.S. troops from both Fort Leavenworth and Fort Riley stood ready to fight a unit of pro-​slavery men led by “General” John W. Whitfield: “We are hourly expecting word if a sanguinary battle between the U.S. Troops and the Border Ruffians—​There will be about 1000 on a side—​with Cannon, Dragoons, Infantry &c. &c. upon each side and it will be a desperate battle—​Look out for the news of the result—​ Should there be a fight there is no telling when the thing will end.”14 Whitfield, a veteran of the Mexican-​American War, moved to Missouri from Tennessee in 1853 to serve as an Indian agent and was elected to Congress by the first (pro-​slavery) Kansas territorial legislature, even though he lived in Missouri. He would later serve in the 4th Texas Cavalry and fight at the Battle of Pea Ridge against some of the very men he faced on the border that summer. Whitfield not only led forces in Westport, but he also joined a party of men that attacked the town of Osawatomie in late June, setting up camp at an Indian reservation and launching operations that caused property destruction and one death. The violence in the summer of 1856 peaked in August with multiple battles near Osawatomie that resulted in at least ten deaths and dozens of wounded. From August 7 to 12, John Brown’s company attacked pro-​slavery settlers near Osawatomie and Franklin, killing six people and capturing artillery and ammunition and employing a cannon used by Missouri troops in the Mexican war to assault another pro-​slavery settlement on August 15. The next day Samuel Walker’s free-​state company seized Titus’s Fort, located just west of Lawrence, and forced the surrender of thirty-​four pro-​slavery soldiers but lost a free-​state soldier the next day who died from his battle wounds. In response to these free-​state victories and still in hot pursuit of Brown, who had been a wanted man since the Pottawatomie murders, pro-​slavery forces retaliated in late August, when over four hundred men under the leadership of John W. Reid marched on Osawatomie. They engaged and quickly overwhelmed Brown’s forces with superior fire and manpower, killing three free-​state men, including Brown’s son Frederick, and taking dozens more prisoner. But instead of pursuing Brown’s retreating forces, Reid’s men set fire to the town. The large-​scale fighting near Osawatomie would cease for the time being, but skirmishes persisted all along the border for months, and as Kansas bled, Congress experienced political chaos that erupted into violence in 1858. Back in the Capitol, Congress debated the Lecompton Constitution, which would have admitted Kansas to the Union as a slave state, even though free-​state settlers had boycotted the territorial vote on the document. Normally congressmen were able to defuse political disagreements in informal ways by arguing over cigars and whiskey at local taverns. But during the House debates on Lecompton, Representative Laurence Keitt from South Carolina (who had also been involved in the caning of Sumner) called Representative Galusha Grow from Pennsylvania a “damned black republican puppy.” Grow shot back that Keitt was a “nigger driver” who would not “crack his whip over me!” They exchanged blows, and as their respective allies joined in, the House floor descended into a brawl. The bedlam lasted several minutes, overwhelming the sergeant-​at-​arms’ orders to cease fighting, and

Bleeding Kansas   45 only stopping when two Wisconsin Republicans accidentally “scalped” Representative William Barksdale of Mississippi by ripping off his hairpiece.15 The laughter that temporarily dissolved the political tension over Lecompton on the House floor did not reverberate in Kansas Territory, however, and war-​like conditions returned in 1858, when Col. James Montgomery raised a free-​state military company and began launching raids on pro-​slavery communities on both sides of the border. Montgomery had moved to the territory from Missouri (although he was born in Ohio) and settled in Linn County, where his antislavery views put him at odds with most of his neighbors in the southeastern part of the state, roughly a dozen miles west of the state line. His cabin, dubbed “Fort Montgomery,” was constructed using only the sturdiest oak and walnut logs and included an escape tunnel and just one window, located high enough to avoid incoming fire. James H. Lane appointed Montgomery captain of the Little Sugar Creek Company to protect the ballot boxes in the 1857 election, but Montgomery interpreted this commission broadly, using it to justify expelling all pro-​slavery settlers from the region. He also warned slave catchers, “manstealers” as he called them, that they would be risking their lives if they tried to recover runaways in the territory. Montgomery’s brand of vigilante justice earned him and his men the moniker of Jayhawkers, as they raided pro-​slavery property and liberated slaves across the border. Historians have noted that before and during the war, Montgomery and his fellow Jayhawker Charles Jennison turned many border Missourians into secessionists because of their seemingly indiscriminate guerrilla tactics, employing strategies of “hard war” that would eventually be adopted by Gen. James H. Lane and others a few years later. Even free-​state settlers initially criticized the Jayhawkers and decried their use of preemptive violence. One settler complained to Territorial Governor James Denver, “When I wrote to you to come and send additional force of military . . . civil war in all its honors, was initiated. Violence had started to run riot. . . . Montgomery and his murderers, & robbers, commenced his operations almost in site of this place, in broad day light.” Similarly, abolitionist Augustus Wattles reported from Fort Scott in April 1858 that the “whole county” was “in anarchy & blood. No man obeys the laws and but few appeal to them.”16 Montgomery’s company marched into Fort Scott in December 1858 and rescued Benjamin Rice, a free-​state man imprisoned there; in the ensuing gunfight, Montgomery’s men shot and killed a pro-​slavery man, John Little, whose death riled Missourians. From 1858 to 1861 Montgomery’s company, along with Jennison’s Jayhawkers, terrorized white Missourians along the border, swooping in and destroying their property and liberating their slaves. John Brown returned to Kansas after a sojourn in the East and added to pro-​slavery fears that “negro stealers” were encouraging enslaved Blacks to flee to Kansas. Brown and a group of about fifteen men helped eleven slaves escape their Missouri masters in December 1858, taking them through Kansas Territory up to Iowa, Michigan, and eventually Ontario, Canada, by the spring of 1859. Brown remained back east to plan his raid on Harpers Ferry in Virginia, hoping to spark a

46   Kristen T. Oertel large-​scale slave rebellion, even as one of Montgomery’s associates, Daniel R. Anthony (brother of Susan B. Anthony) boasted of Kansas, “The Fugitive is as safe here as in Canada. . . . Nothing less than a Regiment of troops—​‘Proslavery Troops’ at that—​in every county can compel us to send them forward.”17 Montgomery believed that the Fugitive Slave Law, which compelled all citizens to return runaway slaves to their owners, was impotent in the face of Jayhawker “justice,” and he and his men continued to fight slaveholding settlers as secession loomed on the political horizon. The combined impact of free-​state soldiers’ and Brown’s violent abolitionism in Kansas, along with Brown’s attempt to launch a slave rebellion at Harpers Ferry in October 1859, cultivated extreme anxiety among the local and national slaveholding elite. While many slaveholders in Missouri trusted that staying in the Union was the best way to protect the institution of slavery, local fire-​eaters like Senator David Atchison and Benjamin Stringfellow joined their Deep South colleagues with repeated calls for secession. Stringfellow’s mouthpiece, the Squatter Sovereign (edited by his brother, John), complained repeatedly about the “Black Republicans” and threatened to “look to other sources than an abolition Congress for government” if Kansas was not admitted as a slave state. James Shannon, president of the State University of Missouri at Columbia, worried that “free soil traitors and abolition negro-​thieves, leagued with British tories,” would undertake “an unholy conspiracy to dissolve the Union.” Similarly, following the Harpers Ferry raid, men in Marshall, Missouri, declared their right to secede and asked that “in the event of the election of a Black Republican President in 1860, that a Convention of the Southern States be called to take such measures as will conduce to the great interests of the South.”18 These Missouri radicals joined a rising chorus of calls from the Deep South for secession, and Southerners pointed fingers at Bleeding Kansas as one of the many reasons for leaving the cherished Union. Texas specifically identified outrages in Kansas and the Federal government’s inability to protect slaveholders from mob violence as justification for secession. In their declaration of secession, the state of Texas wrote, “By the disloyalty of the Northern States and their citizens and the imbecility of the Federal Government, infamous combinations of incendiaries and outlaws have been permitted in those States and the common territory of Kansas to trample upon the federal laws, to war upon the lives and property of Southern citizens in that territory, and finally, by violence and mob law, to usurp the possession of the same as exclusively the property of the Northern States.”19 Georgia chimed in with a similar reference to the violence in Kansas and sent a delegate to the Missouri secession convention to encourage the state to leave the Union. Georgian Luther J. Glenn, a former mayor of Atlanta, told those assembled that Georgians “have witnessed their own and your own people shot down, and the soil of Kansas moistened with the blood of your own people, for no other crime than the assertion and vindication of their own constitutional rights.” Glenn urged Missourians to join the Confederacy, declaring that an “irreconcilable antagonism” existed between the pro-​slavery and antislavery sections of the country.20 While Lincoln’s election was undeniably the straw that broke the camel’s back for most Confederate states, anger about events in Bleeding Kansas certainly weighted down that camel’s burden.

Bleeding Kansas   47 In November 1860, with Lincoln’s election (a “Black Republican”) triggering South Carolina’s secession, events in Kansas continued to add fuel to the secession fires. Jayhawkers attacked Fort Scott again, forcing the pro-​slavery judges of a U.S. District Court to flee to Missouri. Because a Federal court had been threatened and rumors of a Missouri invasion abounded, the War Department instructed General Harney to send troops from Fort Leavenworth to capture Montgomery and his men. Meanwhile Missouri’s Governor Robert Stewart called up one thousand militia and ordered them to the state’s southwestern border; the militia’s commander, Brig. Gen. Daniel Frost, promised to repel any invasion and informed Harney of these intentions. Harney tried to avoid the appearance of an alliance with either the Missouri or the Kansas militia, but Kansans cried foul as U.S. troops descended upon Fort Scott in search of Montgomery and Missouri troops hovered across the border. Both the country and the Kansas-​Missouri border stood on the precipice of full-​ scale war, and alarming headlines broadcast Jayhawker exploits from Massachusetts to Mississippi. The Boston Daily Advertiser claimed that “the whole country is divided into Jayhawkers and anti-​Jayhawkers” and reported that martial law had been imposed in several counties along the border because of the intense fighting between the two groups. A headline in the Jackson Weekly Mississippian screeched, “To Arms! To Arms! The Irrepressible Conflict Commenced. Excitement in Kansas . . . Missouri and other States to be Invaded.” The paper reported that “the Abolitionists, under command of Montgomery and Dr. Pennison [sic] . . . have suddenly commenced a war of extreme ferocity on the law-​abiding citizens of southern Kansas.” The Mississippian warned that Montgomery’s “Jayhawker army” was headed for Missouri and that Missourians were fleeing to the interior of the state. “Still more startling,” the paper claimed, was news that “the foregoing is the preliminary step to an invasion of Arkansas and Texas by the myrmidons of Lincoln and Seward.”21 The U.S. Army was able to temporarily reassure nervous Southerners, Missourians in particular, that they would not be invaded in the fall of 1860 by quelling the violence in Kansas. Though the army did not arrest Montgomery, the presence of U.S. troops in southeastern Kansas Territory decreased the number of Jayhawker raids during that secession winter. Yet uncertainty reigned in the region when Kansas entered the disintegrating Union as a free state on January 29, 1861, even while Missouri was debating secession. Although Missouri did not officially secede, many of her citizens did, joining Confederate troops and fighting the Jayhawkers, some of whom would lead the 7th Kansas Cavalry and 1st Kansas Colored Infantry. As the nation prepared for war, citizens on the Kansas-​Missouri border saw little change in their daily existence because the martial atmosphere that soon overwhelmed the nation had already characterized their lives for years. The major players of the Border War entered the Civil War committed to the same political ideals and, in many cases, the same military companies that emerged during the 1850s. Similarly, the women and civilians who crafted cartridges and nursed men injured during Bleeding Kansas could connect the bullets recovered at Black Jack to the artillery launched at Antietam. Clarina Nichols, whose son Aurelius Carpenter fought with John Brown

48   Kristen T. Oertel at Black Jack, took a bullet that had been lodged in her son’s shoulder and waved it at a crowd gathered to hear her speak in the late 1850s. Almost chiding the audience she remarked, “My sons are among the sufferers and the defenders of that ill-​fated Territory; their blood has baptized the soil which they yet live to weep over, to love, and to defend. . . . Will you send out the lifeboat to save these sinking, struggling victims of foul oppression?”22 That lifeboat eventually arrived in the form of the U.S. Army, and a soldier about to crest the “Bloody Hill” at the Battle of Wilson’s Creek a few years later drew the line from 1856 to 1861 even more clearly: “How the blood leaped in our veins then . . . some thought of Kansas—​of blood of brothers spilled in ’56. During that short quick march we thought of everything but fear and defeat.”23 Little did these men and women know how long they would have to face their fears before the military conflict ceased, but the political differences that spawned both Bleeding Kansas and the Civil War live with us still.

Notes 1. Edward P. Fitch to John and Lucy Fitch, September 30 and December 8, 1855, in John M. Peterson, ed., “From Border War to Civil War: Letters of Edward and Sara Fitch, 1855–​ 1863,” in Kansas Territorial Reader, ed. Virgil W. Dean (Topeka: Kansas State Historical Society, 2005), 165–​166; Axalla John (A. J.) Hoole to Elizabeth Euphrasia Hoole, May 18, 1856, in William Stanley Hoole, ed., “A Southerner’s Viewpoint of the Kansas Situation,” in Dean, Kansas Territorial Reader, 232–​233. 2. Lucy B. Armstrong to “Sir,” January 4, 1849, Indian History, 590, Kansas Historical Society, http://​www.kansasmemory.org/​item/​219788. 3. “Latest by Telegraph: Excitement in Missouri,” Daily South Carolinian (Columbia), May 11, 1855. 4. Charles Robinson, “Extracts from Oration,” July 4, 1855, reprinted in Frank W. Blackmar, ed., Charles Robinson, the First Free-​State Governor of Kansas (Topeka, KS: Crane, 1900), 95, 101; Sara T. L. Robinson, Kansas, Its Interior and Exterior Life (Boston: Crosby, Nichols, 1856), 69. 5. Quoted in Nicole Etcheson, Bleeding Kansas:  Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), 57; Charles Robinson to Eli Thayer, April 2, 1855, Eli Thayer Collection, 519, Box 1, Kansas Historical Society (hereafter KHS). 6. Edward Fitch to “Parents,” September 8, 1855, cited in Peterson, “From Border War to Civil War,” 164–​165. 7. Hannah Ropes, Six Months in Kansas (Boston: John P. Jewett, 1856), 117. 8. Ropes, Six Months in Kansas, 118, 120–​121. 9. Wilson Shannon to Col. Edwin V.  Sumner, December 1, 1855, in Tony R. Mullis, Peacekeeping on the Plains: Army Operations in Bleeding Kansas (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004), 158–​160. 10. Col. Edwin V. Sumner to Col. Samuel Cooper, December 7, 1855, in Mullis, Peacekeeping on the Plains, 161–​162. 11. “The Burial of Mr. Barber,” Herald of Freedom (Wakarusa, Kansas Territory), December 22, 1855.

Bleeding Kansas   49 12. The [North] Carolina Times reprinted in “Story Told by the Other Side.” Lowell Daily Citizen and News [Lowell, Massachusetts] 19 June 1856: n.p. 19th Century U.S. Newspapers. Web. 19 July, 2018. 13. “We clip the following from ‘The Star of Empire,’ published by H. Clay Pate, which he copies from the Alabama Journal of the 20th ult., as a specimen of the news items floating through the Southern papers.” Kansas Herald of Freedom (Wakarusa, Kansas Territory), November 15, 1856. 14. C. K. Holliday to My Dear Wife [Mary Holliday], June 16, 1856, Cyrus Kurtz Holliday Collection, 386, Box 1, Folder 3, KHS. 15. “The Crisis on the Kansas Question,” New York Herald, February 7, 1858. 16. J. Willis to Governor James W. Denver, May 16, 1856, James W. Denver Collection, 328, Box 1, Folder 7, KHS; Augustus Wattles to Wm. Hutchinson, April 28, 1856, William Hutchinson Collection, 400, Box 1, Folder 3, KHS. 17. Daniel R.  Anthony to James Montgomery, December 3, 1860, James Montgomery Collection, Military Papers, 1859–​1905, Collection 446, KHS. 18. Squatter Sovereign (Atchison, Kansas Territory), April 8, 1856; James Shannon, An Address Delivered before the Pro-​Slavery Convention of the State of Missouri on Domestic Slavery, July 13, 1855, and Glasgow (MO) Times, January 5, 1860, both cited in Aaron Astor, Rebels on the Border: Civil War, Emancipation, and the Reconstruction of Kentucky and Missouri (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012), 53–​55. 19. “A Declaration of the Causes which Impel the State of Texas to Secede from the Federal Union,” Avalon Project, Yale Law School, https://​avalon.law.yale.edu/​19th_​century/​csa_​ texsec.asp. 20. “Speech of Luther J. Glenn to the Missouri Convention,” March 4, 1861, in Journal and Proceedings of the Missouri State Convention, Held at Jefferson City and St. Louis, March, 1861 (St. Louis, MO: George Knapp, 1861), 17–​22. 21. “By Telegraph,” Boston Daily Advertiser, January 6, 1859; “To Arms! To Arms!,” Weekly Mississippian (Jackson), November 28, 1860. 22. Clarina Nichols, “To the Women of the State of New  York,” New  York Daily Tribune, November 1, 1856. 23. H. S. Moore to Dear Br., August 20, 1861, quoted in William Garrett Piston and Richard W. Hatcher, eds., Wilson’s Creek: The Second Battle of the Civil War and the Men Who Fought It (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 244–​245.

Bibliography Abing, Kevin. “Before Bleeding Kansas:  Christian Missionaries, Slavery, and the Shawnee Indians in pre-​Territorial Kansas,” Kansas History 24 (Spring 2001): 54–​7 1. Astor, Aaron. Rebels on the Border: Civil War, Emancipation, and the Reconstruction of Kentucky and Missouri. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012. Benedict, Bryce. Jayhawkers: The Civil War Brigade of James Henry Lane. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009. Blackmar, Frank W. ed. Charles Robinson, the First Free-​State Governor of Kansas. Topeka, KS: Crane, 1900. Dean, Virgil W., ed. Kansas Territorial Reader. Topeka: Kansas State Historical Society, 2005.

50   Kristen T. Oertel Earle, Jonathan, and Diane Mutti Burke, eds. Bleeding Kansas, Bleeding Missouri: The Long Civil War on the Border. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2013. Epps, Kristen. Slavery on the Periphery: The Kansas-​Missouri Border in the Antebellum and Civil War Eras. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016. Etcheson, Nicole. Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004. Fellman, Michael. Inside War: The Guerrilla Conflict in Missouri during the American Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Journal and Proceedings of the Missouri State Convention, Held at Jefferson City and St. Louis, March, 1861. St. Louis, MO: George Knapp, 1861. Mullis, Tony R. Peacekeeping on the Plains:  Army Operations in Bleeding Kansas. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004. Neely, Jeremy. The Border between Them: Violence and Reconciliation on the Kansas-​Missouri Line. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011. Oertel, Kristen Tegtmeier. Bleeding Borders:  Race, Gender, and Violence in Pre–​Civil War Kansas. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009. Piston, William Garrett, and Richard W. Hatcher, eds. Wilson’s Creek: The Second Battle of the Civil War and the Men Who Fought It. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Ponce, Pearl. To Govern the Devil in Hell:  The Political Crisis in Territorial Kansas. Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2014. Robinson, Sara T. L. Kansas, Its Interior and Exterior Life. Boston: Crosby, Nichols, 1856. Ropes, Hannah. Six Months in Kansas. Boston: John P. Jewett, 1856. SenGupta, Gunja. “Bleeding Kansas:  A Review Essay.” Kansas History 24 (Winter 2001): 318–​341. SenGupta, Gunja. For God and Mammon: Evangelicals and Entrepreneurs, Masters and Slaves in Territorial Kansas. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996.

Chapter 2

T he Union Bl o c ka de A Slow Asphyxiation Craig L. Symonds

Measured in terms of either manpower or materiel, the Union blockade of the Confederate coast was the single largest undertaking by the U.S. Navy from its founding in the late eighteenth century until the world wars of the twentieth. Though it began modestly in the spring of 1861 with a half-​dozen ships, it grew in size and scope over the ensuing four years until it involved more than five hundred ships and 100,000 men, a total that exceeded the number of ships and sailors committed to all of America’s previous wars combined. Critics noted that despite that commitment, the blockade never succeeded in its announced goal of sealing the South off from the rest of the world. Vessels transgressed the blockade regularly right up to the last days of the war, bringing in the supplies without which the Confederate armies would have been paralyzed. On the other hand, the blockade also exposed and exacerbated intrinsic weaknesses in the Southern economy and contributed to a gradual deterioration of Southern confidence and morale. It is incontrovertible that economic difficulties plagued the Confederate war effort and that those difficulties worsened as the war lengthened. The suffering of the men in the ranks and their families at home, especially after 1864, is a central theme of Lost Cause literature, and there is plenty of anecdotal evidence to support it. This is not to say that the South lost the war because of a collapse of will; the Confederacy lost because its armies were defeated on the battlefield. Yet the decline of morale both inside the army and on the home front contributed to that denouement. It is difficult, however, to determine how much the Union blockade was responsible for that development, and this has led to robust debates among historians about how important the blockade actually was. In the nineteenth century, imposing a naval blockade was a traditional stratagem that naval powers employed regularly, even routinely, against a rival whose principal strength was its army. Great Britain had relied on it for more than two centuries in her serial wars with Holland, France, and other continental foes. In those wars, the Royal Navy sought to confine enemy warships, especially the fleets of ships-​of-​the-​line, to

52   Craig L. Symonds their ports so that British trade could move with relative impunity. Because the British had prevailed in those wars, the efficacy of a naval blockade was nearly unquestioned. The Union blockade of the Confederacy, however, was different. Pres. Abraham Lincoln’s objective was not to neutralize a hostile navy—​the Confederacy did not have any naval squadrons to confine. Rather, his goal was to cut the South off entirely from the outside world. In his own words, it was to “prevent entrance and exit of vessels” from all the ports in all of the rebellious states.1 He hoped that by demonstrating the South’s dependence on maritime commerce, cooler heads might rethink the rash decision to leave the Union. It was, in short, as much a political and economic gambit as a martial one. Because of that, the Union’s patrolling vessels had to guard not only those ports hosting hostile vessels but every harbor, river mouth, and navigable inlet where a merchant ship might offload goods. It was an enormous, even unprecedented undertaking. Lincoln’s decision to announce a blockade of the Southern states was further complicated by his insistence that those states did not constitute a sovereign entity. According to Lincoln, secession proclamations notwithstanding, the Southern states remained in the Union and were subject to its laws. By announcing a blockade, he undercut this argument since under international law declaring a blockade was an act of war and implied an acknowledgment that the Confederacy was a sovereign entity. After the war, the Radical congressman Thaddeus Stevens claimed that he had warned Lincoln that declaring a blockade could be construed as a virtual recognition of the Confederacy. According to Stevens, Lincoln admitted his error: “Well, that is a fact,” Stevens recalled him saying, “I see the point now. But I don’t know anything about the law of nations and I thought it was all right.”2 If the story is accurate—​we have only Stevens’s word for it—​Lincoln was being not only self-​deprecatory but disingenuous, for the evidence is clear that he and Secretary of State William Seward had considered the legal ramifications of announcing a blockade beforehand. Indeed, both Seward and Navy Secretary Gideon Welles suggested that instead of using the word “blockade” Lincoln could simply proclaim the closure of specific American ports. Since civil unrest made it impossible to collect import duties in those ports, he would be justified in announcing that they were temporarily closed to trade. U.S. Navy warships and revenue cutters could be stationed offshore to redirect merchant shipping to other (Northern) ports that remained open. Such an approach anticipated future American efforts to avoid legal difficulties about blockades by employing carefully selected language. Both Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s and Pres. John F. Kennedy in the 1960s avoided using the word “blockade” and christened their attempts to restrict trade with Japan and Cuba, respectively, as “quarantines.” Declaring a “quarantine,” however, would not authorize U.S. ships to patrol over the horizon or stop suspicious vessels along the coast. In the end, therefore, Lincoln decided that he had to use the term “blockade” regardless of whatever it implied about the legal status of the Confederacy. Lincoln also knew that announcing a blockade was merely the first step. The 1856 Declaration of Paris, which most European nations (though not the United States) had signed, stated that for a blockade to be legal and therefore binding on neutral powers,

The Union Blockade    53 the blockading nation must post “a competent force” outside every port that was included in the blockade. Once North Carolina and Virginia joined the Confederacy, the South claimed a coastline of some 3,500 miles with 189 navigable entrances. It was evident that the tiny U.S. Navy of forty-​two active ships was utterly incapable of placing a “competent force” off every one of those potential ports of entry. Clearly, then, the next necessary step was for the Union to acquire the naval force needed to make Lincoln’s announced blockade a reality. Within weeks of the first shot at Fort Sumter, Navy Secretary Welles dispatched the handful of warships that were immediately available southward to take up positions off the Rebel coast. The USS Niagara arrived off Charleston on May 10, 1861, and captured a vessel the very next day. It was the first of more than 1,500 blockade runners seized during the war. To augment these first few vessels, Welles issued orders for navy ships on overseas stations to return at once, and he sought to acquire as many new warships as possible. Of course, building new warships would take both time and money and required congressional authorization before construction could even begin. Welles’s dilemma was that Congress was not scheduled to assemble until July 4. Deciding that the emergency called for extraordinary measures, he let contracts for the construction of two dozen small gunboats to be delivered within ninety days (thereafter called ninety-​ day gunboats), hoping and expecting that Congress would retroactively sanction his action when it did meet. That expectation was fulfilled on July 4, when a compliant Congress approved all of Lincoln’s war preparations in a sweeping authorization.

Map 2.1  Union Naval Blockade

54   Craig L. Symonds Welles’s initiatives gave the U.S. Navy a total of over a hundred warships by the end of the summer, though that was still only a fraction of what would be needed. Most of the rest—​eventually more than four hundred ships—​came from repurposing merchant vessels. In that less technologically complicated era, it was still possible to convert existing ships into wartime use, and it was both faster and cheaper to do so than to build new warships from scratch. Navy shipyards did much of the conversion work, but commercial shipyards also played an important role. Indeed, such a dramatic transformation would have been impossible without a robust shipping and industrial infrastructure. New and existing factories produced the hundreds of parts needed, from steam engines to anchor chain, underscoring the fact that the American Civil War was as much a war of rival economies as of rival armies and governments. To acquire the merchant ships for these conversions, Welles appointed his own brother-​in-​law, John D. Morgan, as purchasing agent, a decision that critics pounced on as an example of flagrant nepotism. Morgan bought eighty-​nine ships at an average cost of $40,000 each. Dockyard workers transformed them by strengthening their decks to support the heavy naval guns, constructing magazines below the waterline, and expanding the berthing spaces for larger crews. Often in just a few weeks the newly refitted ship received a complement of officers and crew and steamed off to join the growing blockade force. By the end of 1861, the Union Navy boasted a total of 264 warships, and a blockade that had been no more than an aspiration the year before was well on the way to becoming a reality. The next step was to develop some organizational scheme for the blockade vessels. To accomplish that, Lincoln and Welles authorized what became known as the Blockade Board or Strategy Board. To head it, Welles appointed navy captain Samuel Francis Du Pont, who emerged as the first Union naval hero of the war. The board met in the red brick Smithsonian Institution on the National Mall, and Du Pont delivered the Board’s findings to Welles in a series of reports in July while the Battle of Bull Run was playing out in Virginia. The report called for the establishment of separate blockading squadrons for the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic coasts—​eventually these were subdivided into the East and West Gulf Squadrons and the North and South Atlantic Squadrons—​ with a rear admiral in command of each. Acknowledging the transformative impact of new technology, Du Pont’s board insisted that only steam ships could function efficiently on blockade duty. Sailing ships, the board declared, for all their sea-​keeping capability, lacked the ability to maneuver safely close inshore, to hold their positions in all tides and all weather, or to pursue steam-​powered blockade runners. While a few sailing vessels did serve on the blockade—​the yacht America, original winner of the America’s Cup, was a notable example—​most of the rest were steam ships. Of course steam ships had to be regularly supplied with coal, and that compelled the navy to establish a supply base for each squadron somewhere along the Confederate coast. Three of the squadrons operated out of bases that were already in Union hands. The North Atlantic Squadron relied on Hampton Roads, Virginia; the East Gulf Squadron operated from Key West, Florida; and the West Gulf Squadron from Ship

The Union Blockade    55 Island, Mississippi. There was no secure base, however, for the South Atlantic Squadron, the largest and most strategically important of the four, and the Blockade Board insisted that the capture of a base along the South Atlantic coast was an urgent priority. Initially, the board suggested either Bull’s Bay, South Carolina, or Fernandina, Florida, though in the end the choice fell on Port Royal, South Carolina, almost exactly halfway between Charleston and Savannah. To capture it, Du Pont led nine warships into Port Royal Sound on November 7, 1861. In a matter of hours, the heavy guns on the Union warships had so battered the log-​and-​ wood fort on Hilton Head Island that its Confederate commander, Brig. Gen. Thomas Drayton, ordered its evacuation. Ironically, one of the ships in Du Pont’s squadron was commanded by General Drayton’s brother, Capt. Percival Drayton. The Federal victory at Port Royal had several important long-​term consequences. Psychologically, the news was extremely welcome to the Northern public, still haunted by the specter of the defeat at Bull Run that summer. Operationally, it provided the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron with the base it needed to sustain the blockades of Charleston and Savannah. But a third consequence of Du Pont’s victory at Port Royal was the realization that heavy naval guns could dominate ersatz coastal fortifications. For centuries, any ship captain who pitted his vessel against a fort was deemed a fool. After all, forts generally had larger and more powerful guns, and they often had a height advantage and were sometimes built of stone, though those at Hilton Head had been constructed of dirt and logs. Most important, forts could not sink. Yet steam power and the impact of new and larger rifled naval guns firing explosive shells had changed the calculus. A witness to this new reality was Gen. Robert E.  Lee, whom Confederate Pres. Jefferson Davis had sent to South Carolina from Richmond to assess the Union naval assault and report on the condition of the South’s coastal defenses. Lee’s report was sobering. He pointed out that the South could never move troops up and down the coast as fast as Yankee warships could steam from place to place. “Wherever his fleet can be brought,” he wrote of the Northern enemy, “no opposition can be made to his landing.”3 Attempting to defend everywhere would effectively mean that the South could not defend itself anywhere. Lee suggested that the Confederacy should attempt to defend only those essential points where the local geography gave the defenders an advantage. This included New Orleans, Louisiana, plus Wilmington, North Carolina; Galveston, Texas; Mobile, Alabama; and three cities on the South Atlantic coast: Charleston, Savannah, and Fernandina. The most important of these was New Orleans, the largest city in the Confederacy, which was protected by two river forts. Unlike those at Port Royal, Forts Jackson and St. Philip were stone forts built by the Army Corps of Engineers in the 1820s and boasted a combined total of 177 guns. Yet here, too, the forts proved unable to deter the assault of a naval squadron. This time it was a squadron under Rear Adm. David Glasgow Farragut that took up the challenge. Once his ships ran past the river forts, the city was helpless. Its fall in April 1862 reduced the number of “open” Confederate ports to only five.

56   Craig L. Symonds The Confederacy’s virtual abandonment of its own coastline had an enormous impact on the Southern economy. For more than a century, Southern planters and farmers had relied heavily on the coastal sounds from Georgia to Virginia to transport their goods. Now, with access to the coastal waterways denied them, goods that had previously been transported on barges and small schooners were shifted onto the South’s already overburdened railroad system. Southern railroads were a patchwork of local routes, some of which relied on what was called “strap and stringer” rails: wooden rails with a thin band of iron on top. Burdened by the additional traffic, these lines quickly wore out. Though the Confederacy managed to keep its railroad system operational during the war and even built some new lines, the loss of the coastal trade marked the beginning of a long decline in the efficiency of its railroad network. The Union sailors who manned the blockading ships in all of the offshore squadrons were mostly novices. The U.S. Navy had expanded so quickly that on many ships, the captain was the only regular navy officer on board, with volunteers from the merchant service holding the other posts. Many of these volunteer officers were adequate mariners, but few of them knew much about ordnance. The sailors, too, were rookies. Since there was no formalized training such as a modern boot camp, the men who enlisted in the navy to suppress the rebellion (or to avoid conscription into the army) arrived on board with little familiarity of things naval; some had never seen the ocean. They quite literally had to learn on the job, harried by the petty officers who were themselves newly promoted into positions of responsibility. Moreover, nearly all the ships were undermanned, and that shortage of manpower was a constant concern. Exciting as it must have been for these neophyte sailors to embark on their first duty at sea, they soon found life on the blockade an endless—​and endlessly boring—​routine. At 6:00 a.m. orders to turn to and lash up sounded through the ship; the decks were swabbed and sanded; watches changed at 8:00, noon, and 4:00; dinner was piped, and then night set in as another day ended. Officers and lookouts spent interminable days focused intently on the horizon or peering into harbors hoping to catch a trace of black smoke that might indicate that a potential blockade runner was getting underway. Alas, day after day—​often week after week—​passed without a sign of either a blockade runner offshore or a vessel in port trying to come out, and soon enough time began to hang heavy on the watchers. A typical entry in one officer’s journal read, “Uninterruptedly all day doing nothing.”4 When blockade runners sought to run past the blockading vessels, they generally did so at night, particularly if it was cloudy or during a new moon. With all the ships blacked out, shipboard lookouts strained to discern a slightly darker shadow amid the blackness and report it to the officer of the deck. Wary of firing into a friend, the officer would likely order the night signal for “friend or foe.” The signal officer put up the required combination of red or white flares, and if the appropriate response was not forthcoming, the duty officer would fire a rocket skyward to alert the rest of the squadron. Some ships slipped their anchors and set out in pursuit, and bright orange muzzle flashes lit up the night, temporarily blinding the gunners. Sometimes the blockaders caught the unarmed

The Union Blockade    57 blockade runner. As often as not, however, it would prove too swift or too elusive and escaped either into port or out over the horizon, leaving the Union officers frustrated by yet another missed opportunity. Life on the blockade was, in short, a schizophrenic combination of tedious boredom and manic activity. The blockade also provided many Union sailors their first exposure to Southern slavery. U.S. Navy warships operating along the coast or steaming up navigable Southern rivers provided opportunities for enslaved persons to flag down a passing vessel and request sanctuary. Along the South Atlantic coast in particular, captains of the Union ships found that, as Du Pont put it, “the negroes . . . came down to the shore with bundles in their hands, as if expecting to be taken off.”5 Often they were. When the U.S. Navy commander John B. Marchand led a small naval expedition up the Stono River south of Charleston in May 1862, he was startled during his return seaward to see what he described as “a stampede of slaves on the cotton and corn fields to the south of the river.”6 Most were women and children, and they were running flat out, dragging or carrying smaller children as they ran. Not far behind them, and clearly in pursuit, was a body of Confederate cavalry. Some of the cavalrymen fired their pistols at or near the fleeing crowd. Horrified, Marchand ordered the ship’s gunners to send a few shells toward the cavalry. When they did, the horsemen at once broke off the pursuit and fled. That left Marchand with a crowd of terrified supplicants along the riverbank, all of them begging to be rescued. They told him that their husbands, sons, and brothers had been moved inland to prevent them from escaping, and now the authorities were back to round up their families. Marchand felt he could not abandon them, but of course he could not keep them on board his warships. These circumstances confronted the Lincoln administration with a refugee crisis. One partial solution was to amalgamate the males into the ships’ crew. Of the approximately eighteen thousand Black men who served in the Union Navy during the Civil War, three-​quarters of them had been born into slavery, and as many as half of those fled slavery directly into the naval service. The addition of these so-​called contrabands to the ships’ crews was not quite a social revolution. America’s warship crews had included Black sailors since literally the first days of its existence. Moreover, since segregating men by race in the crowded confines of a warship was virtually impossible, U.S. Navy ships were more racially integrated than almost any other aspect of antebellum American life. It was not equality, however. Black sailors were paid less than white sailors, and they were generally restricted to the most menial tasks. Some suffered from abuse, both verbal and physical, at the hands of their white shipmates, and perhaps because of that desertion rates for Black sailors were higher than for whites. Those Black refugees who could not be taken into the naval service—​the women, children, and the elderly—​were settled into camps on one or more of the offshore islands, and that policy presaged a social revolution. By the end of 1862 there were dozens of such camps on Hilton Head, Edisto Island, St. Simon’s Island, and elsewhere. Indeed, there were so many refugees in so many camps that they threatened to overwhelm the ability of Union authorities to keep them supplied and protected. From Port Royal, Lt. Charles Francis Adams Jr., an officer in the Union Army, wrote his father, the U.S. ambassador

58   Craig L. Symonds to England, “We now have some 7,000 masterless slaves within our lines and in less than two months we shall have nearer 70,000, and what are we to do with them?”7 What indeed? As Adams suggested, these circumstances marked the front edge of a social and political revolution that would eventually transform both the war and the nation. The Sea Islands off South Carolina and Georgia became not merely refugee camps but also laboratories for the transformation of enslaved persons into citizens. Volunteers came from the North to teach them to read and write. The refugees were encouraged to plant and maintain their own crops, including sea island cotton, for which there was a great demand, and allowed to keep the proceeds, thus turning former slaves into entrepreneurs. Even more revolutionary, Admiral Du Pont, appreciating that he could not defend them from Confederate raids, issued the men in the camps some old flintlock muskets so they could defend themselves. Though the Lincoln administration was still several months away from allowing the enlistment of Black regiments, the pressure of events on the blockade led to this first arming of former slaves by the government. On the Confederate side, running the blockade became a robust business, and by 1863 had developed a regular protocol. The traffic originated in some European port, often in England, with the ships’ official cargo manifests indicating that they were bound for a neutral port in Canada, the Caribbean, or elsewhere. The most popular destinations were St. George, Bermuda, Nassau in the Bahamas, and Havana, Cuba. Though virtually everyone knew that the cargoes in these ships were intended eventually for the Confederacy, the U.S. Navy could not legally interfere with maritime trade proceeding from one neutral port to another. After the ships arrived at Bermuda or the Bahamas, the goods were transferred into other, smaller ships that were specially designed to run the blockade: low, fast, side-​wheel or propeller-​driven “screw” steamers painted a light gray to blend with the sea, their masts stripped down to reduce their profile. Once these vessels set out for a Confederate port, their purpose was self-​evident and they were subject to capture. The blockade runners were not armed and relied on speed and stealth, timing their voyages to arrive off their port of destination after nightfall in order to make the final run through the blockading squadron in the dark. Thomas E. Taylor, who served as the supercargo, or the owner’s agent, on the English-​ built, steel-​hulled blockade runner Banshee, recorded how it felt to run the blockade. “Nothing I have never experienced can compare with it,” he wrote later. “Hunting, pig-​ sticking, steeple-​chasing, big-​game shooting, polo—​I have done a little of each—​all have their thrilling moments, but none can approach ‘running a blockade.’ ”8 Taylor’s first such experience occurred in May 1863, a week after the Confederate victory at Chancellorsville. The Banshee approached Wilmington, North Carolina, in the middle of the night. As always in approaching the coast, she was completely blacked out—​the captain even forbade smoking cigars for fear that the pinpoint of light might give them away. As the eastern sky began to lighten with the first glow of dawn, one of the several blockading ships spotted her and sent up a rocket. The blockading vessels slipped their anchors and set off in pursuit, and the Banshee made a run for it. Once it got inside the range of the heavy guns in Fort Fisher at the entrance to Wilmington, the U.S. Navy

The Union Blockade    59 ships sheered off. Taylor and the others on the Banshee cheered and waved their hats as they saw the Union vessels turn away. The success of yet another blockade runner gave both Jefferson Davis and Southern newspaper editors an opportunity to proclaim the ineffectiveness of the blockade. Southern newspapers had scoffed at the idea of a blockade from the moment it was declared, insisting that any attempt to cut the South off from the world would do much greater damage to the North than to the South for it would deprive the Yankees access to the South’s essential goods, such as cotton, tobacco, beef, and corn. Southern politicians embraced this reasoning as well. Insisting that the world’s demand for Southern cotton trumped the South’s need for manufactured goods from either Europe or New England, the Confederate Congress initially embargoed its own cotton exports in order to create a global shortage that they believed would compel Britain to send its fleet to America to break the blockade. In doing so, the Confederate Congress became an effective collaborator in Lincoln’s scheme, for by withholding cotton from the world market at a time when the blockade was not yet strong enough to prevent its shipment, the South deprived itself of an opportunity to obtain overseas credits for future purchases. By the time it was evident that this gambit was not going to work, the blockade had become more effective. Assessing the impact of the blockade on the Southern economy is difficult. Given Lincoln’s announced goal of eliminating all maritime traffic from half a continent, it could be argued that if any ship got to sea from a Southern port or managed to slip into one, it was evidence that the blockade was failing. This was the gauge used by Confederate newspapers. Since vessels managed to get through the blockade with embarrassing regularity, it proved to the satisfaction of one Richmond editor that “the Federal blockade was of little avail.”9 Some opposition papers in the North agreed. James Gordon Bennett, editor and publisher of the Democratic New York Herald, editorialized that because vessels repeatedly ran through the blockade the U.S. Navy was being wasted, bobbing uselessly off the Atlantic coast while Union soldiers bled themselves white on the battlefields of Virginia and Tennessee. Here was proof, Bennett wrote, that Secretary of the Navy Welles was “as obstinate as he is ignorant,” and that he should be removed at once in favor of some more competent person. Despite such attacks, Lincoln stood by his embattled secretary, proving, in Bennett’s opinion, that the president was “a great deal more kind than just.”10 Davis used the apparent inefficiency of the blockade to argue that what he called “the pretended blockade” of the Lincoln administration was little more than a sham. Effectiveness, he insisted, was the yardstick of legality; if vessels routinely made it through the blockade, that blockade was ipso facto not a blockade, and he instructed his representatives in London and Paris to insist that neither Britain nor France should feel compelled to acknowledge it. His argument fell mostly on deaf ears. Napoleon III, whose country had been the victim of blockades in the past, was sympathetic and told Confederate representatives he was ready to intervene if Britain would join him. It was a meaningless pledge, for he knew that Britain had no intention of weakening one of the most important weapons in her naval arsenal. London’s response to Davis’s argument

60   Craig L. Symonds was that even though ships managed to run through the blockade, that was not sufficient to “prevent the blockade from being an effective one by international law.”11 Historians continue to argue about the impact of the blockade on the Southern war effort. Early historians, and particularly Southern historians, tended to emphasize the porosity of the blockade. Careful analysis, however, reveals a more nuanced conclusion. In addition to the handful of sailing ships that sought to run the blockade early in the war, most of the blockade running after 1862 was conducted by about three hundred different steam-​powered vessels, much like the Banshee. The Banshee herself made four successful trips before she was finally captured, and that, as it happens, was the average number of runs made by these steam-​powered vessels. That works out to about 1,200 attempts, of which more than 1,000 were successful. Thus steam-​powered blockade runners made it successfully through the blockade over 80 percent of the time. On the other hand, Union warships eventually captured 136 of those 300 steamers, and another 85 of them were destroyed—​run into the shore by pursuing vessels, or lost at sea—​for a total of 221 vessels, or 74 percent. Thus it is possible to assert that although 80 percent of all attempts to run the blockade were successful, 75 percent of all the ships that tried it were captured or destroyed. This suggests that a strict reliance on numbers is fraught with uncertainty. Nevertheless, because numbers are hard evidence, historians have relied on them to assess both the impact and the importance of the blockade. Southern scholars in particular found the long lists of ships that successfully violated the blockade compelling evidence that the blockade not only was porous but was, in the words of one, “a naval sieve.”12 It is indisputable that despite the vigilance of the blockaders, the South managed to import sufficient material through the blockade to keep its armies supplied. Over the course of the war, blockade-​running ships brought in more than 400,000 rifles, three million pounds of lead for bullets, and more than 2,250,000 pounds of saltpeter for gunpowder. Even in the second half of 1864, when the strength of the blockade was reaching its height, this illicit traffic brought in 50,000 rifles and 500,000 pairs of shoes for Lee’s ill-​shod soldiers.13 It is hard to imagine that the Southern armies could have sustained the war for so long without this support. The most important factor in assessing the effectiveness of the blockade, however, is one that cannot be counted or measured at all, and that is the number of ships that never tried to run the blockade in the first place because of the deterrent value of the blockading squadrons. Though 80 percent of the ships that tried to run the blockade did so, hundreds of others never tried it at all, and that dramatically reduced the total amount of foreign trade. Indeed, the number of ships entering or exiting Southern ports between the last full year of peace and the first full year of war declined by more than 90 percent. All those missing ships, and their missing cargoes, starved the Southern economy of both routine and specialized commodities. That loss had a slow but steady asphyxiating impact on both Southern economics and morale. As Lincoln had anticipated, this dramatic reduction in trade demonstrated that the Southern states were not an autarky after all, that they were dependent on the outside world for their economic health. At first, Southerners insisted they did not need

The Union Blockade    61 Northern imports. If the blockade created temporary shortages of manufactured goods, the editor of the Richmond Dispatch assured his readers, this would merely prove “a stimulant to home manufactures and industry.”14 The Confederacy did demonstrate great resiliency in response to the blockade, replacing many imports with domestically produced alternatives, and soon “making do” and “doing without” became symbols of Southern patriotism. Yet by 1864, the pinch was becoming painful. Robert Garlick Hill Kean, chief of the Bureau of War in Richmond, reported that the blockade made it difficult to feed Lee’s army. If part of the reason for that was the breakdown of internal transportation, that too, as noted previously, was due partly to the effects of the blockade in stressing the Southern railroad network. Even food for the wounded soldiers in Richmond’s hospitals had to be rationed. One Richmond woman wrote her soldier husband that “the one topic of conversation everywhere and on all occasions is ‘eating’ even the ministers in the pulpit unconsciously preach of it.”15 Such circumstances were particularly ironic in an agricultural society. Another reason for the precariousness of the Southern economy was that planters could not export their crops to obtain specie or overseas credits. As the Union’s assistant navy secretary Gustavus Fox put it in a conversation with Lincoln’s secretary John Hay, the rebellion was sustained “not by what entereth into their ports but by what proceedeth out.”16 The Southern economy was almost entirely dependent on its production of cash crops for export, especially cotton, and the impact of the Union blockade on cotton exports can be measured. In the last full year of peace (1859–​1860), the cotton states exported just under three million bales of cotton. During the ensuing twelve months, even though the blockade was just beginning to take hold, the South exported just over fifty thousand bales—​less than 2 percent of the peacetime total. In part that was due to the South’s disastrous self-​imposed embargo, but even after that was lifted, exports remained minuscule. Of course the price of cotton went up as exports declined, but so did the price of the goods the South sought to acquire. A recent economic historian concludes, “The shortfall in Southern revenues from exporting raw cotton rivaled, if not exceeded, the Federal government’s [total] expenditures on its navy during the war.”17 Given that, a simple cost-​effective analysis suggests that the resources the Union committed to the blockade paid substantial dividends in the damage it did to the Southern economy. The blockade also contributed to inflation in the Confederacy. During the heady days of 1861 and 1862, inflation had been held in check by hope and battlefield success, but by 1863 it began to climb dramatically. Much of this was due to the Confederacy’s refusal to enact taxes and printing unsecured money, but shortages due to reduced imports added to the problem. Prices for all goods rose rapidly, and certain goods became unobtainable at any price. The shortages contributed to hoarding and speculation and eroded civilian morale. Civil unrest became manifest in April 1863, when hundreds of women gathered in the streets of Richmond to protest low wages and food shortages. Shouting “Bread or blood,” they began smashing windows in the business district. Mayor Joseph Mayo read them the riot act, though with little effect. Davis himself went into the streets and pleaded with the protesters to go home, even emptying his own pockets in an effort to

62   Craig L. Symonds assuage them. Only the threat that artillery would be used succeeded in finally clearing the streets. Though those at the bottom of the economic pyramid suffered the most, the wealthy also noticed. The ubiquitous Mary Chesnut recorded in her diary in January 1864 that a pair of slippers cost her fifty dollars, and “five miserable, shabby little pocket handkerchiefs” set her back thirty-​two dollars.18 Coffee and tea became luxuries so prized that one Atlanta jeweler (perhaps in mockery) set coffee beans into pins in place of diamonds. Over time, the blockade also compelled the South to confront its ideological pole star of small government and state rights. Blockade running was an entrepreneurial activity that yielded tremendous profits for the speculators and ship owners who engaged in it, but it did not always contribute directly to the South’s war-​fighting capability. That was because the character of the cargoes was determined by what yielded the greatest profit rather than by what was most needed by the forces in the field. The stories of blockade runners filled with bonnets and hoop skirts are largely mythological, yet most ship owners and captains did opt for those goods that were likely to return the largest profit. With unconscious irony, Confederate planters complained that the fabulous sums made by blockade runners were enriching a small class of moneyed men while making little, if any, contribution to the war effort. As early as 1863, pressure began to grow to assert some regulatory control over the blockade-​running effort, a notion that ran counter to the laissez-​faire values of Southern culture. Desperate for overseas credits that could be used to purchase munitions, Davis in February 1864 successfully pressed the Confederate Congress to pass a law that required outbound blockade runners to reserve half of their cargo space for government-​ owned cotton that would bolster the government’s credit in Europe. A month later, the president backed a law forbidding blockade runners from importing the kind of high-​ value, high-​profit luxury goods favored by many ship captains, and a few months after that the government sought to take over control of trade altogether. It issued cotton certificates—​essentially promissory notes to sell future cotton crops to the holders at a discounted rate—​in order to purchase ships that would be owned and controlled by the government in Richmond placing those ships under the command of Confederate Navy officers. In effect, blockade running was nationalized. For a society ostensibly committed to small government and state rights, this was a virtual revolution. It provoked angry resistance from both merchants and state governments, including at least one armed standoff between a privately owned blockade runner and a Confederate artillery battery. The new protocols did increase both exports and imports and even elevated the value of Confederate bonds; they might have made a significant difference if adopted sooner. By 1864, the cumulative impact of the loss of its coastline, the consequent effect that had on the South’s railroad system, the reduction of imports, the far more dramatic reduction of exports, and eventually the occupation of its major seaports seriously undermined both the credibility and the effectiveness of the Confederate government. As one naval historian has put it, if the blockade was “never airtight,” it “was constricting

The Union Blockade    63 enough that the South was constantly gasping for economic breath.”19 That slow asphyxiation, combined with the reduction in the size of the logistic base from which the Confederacy could draw support, so isolated Lee’s army in Virginia that in the end it had no choice but to surrender. It is entirely possible that the North could have won the Civil War without a blockade as long as the Northern electorate sustained Lincoln’s war policies, but almost as certainly the blockade made the war shorter, and in doing so it probably saved many thousands of lives.

Notes 1. Lincoln’s blockade proclamation is in Roy S. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1955), 4:339. 2. Stevens’s testimony is in the New York Herald, July 8, 1867. 3. Lee to Samuel Cooper, January 8, 1862, in Clifford Dowdey and Louis H. Manarin, eds., The Wartime Papers of Robert E. Lee (Boston: Little Brown, 1961), 101. 4. The officer was Capt. John B.  Marchand (diary entry of March 17, 1862), in John B. Marchand, Charleston Blockade: The Journals of John B. Marchand, U.S. Navy, 1861–​ 1862, ed. Craig L. Symonds (Newport, RI:  Naval War College Press, 1976; reprinted Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2012), 136. 5. Du Pont to Welles, April 23, 1962, Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office), ser. 1, vol. 12: 773 (hereafter cited as ORN); Fulton to Welles, November 13, 1861, ORN, ser. 1, vol. 12: 293. 6. Marchand, Charleston Blockade, 176–​177 (diary entry of May 21, 1862). 7. Charles Francis Adams Jr. to Charles F. Adams, March 13, 1862, in Worthington Chauncey Ford, ed., A Cycle of Adams Letters (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1920), 117. 8. Thomas E. Taylor, Running the Blockade: A Personal Narrative of Adventures, Risks, and Escapes during the American Civil War (London: John Murray, 1912), 49–​54. 9. Richmond Daily Dispatch, July 2, 5, and 6, 1861. 10. New York Herald, August 9, 1863. 11. John Slidell to R.M.T. Hunter, February 11, 1862, quoted in Douglas B. Ball, Financial Failure and Confederate Defeat (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 65. 12. William N. Still, “A Naval Sieve: The Union Blockade in the Civil War,” Naval War College Review, May–​June, 1983. 13. The numbers were calculated by Steven R. Wise, Lifeline of the Confederacy:  Blockade Running during the Civil War (Columbia:  University of South Carolina Press, 1991), 221–​226. 14. The Richmond Dispatch is quoted in Mary Elizabeth Massey, Ersatz in the Confederacy: Shortages and Substitutes on the Southern Homefront (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993), 11. 15. Mrs. William Simmons to her husband, March 23, 1864, quoted in Nelson Lankford, Richmond Burning:  Last Days of the Confederate Capital (New  York:  Viking Press, 2002), 29. 16. Mary Chesnut, Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, ed. C. Vann Woodward (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), 529.

64   Craig L. Symonds 17. Fox is quoted in the diary of John Hay (September 25, 1864) in Michael Burlingame and John R. T. Ettinger, eds., Inside Lincoln’s White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997), 219. 18. The economic historian is David Surdam in Northern Naval Superiority and the Economics of the American Civil War (New York: Viking Press, 1971), 144–​152, 158. 19. William H. Roberts, Now for the Contest: Coastal and Oceanic Naval Operations in the Civil War (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 164.

Bibliography Ball, Douglas B. Financial Failure and Confederate Defeat. Urbana:  University of Illinois Press, 1991. Basler, Roy S., ed. The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. New Brunswick, NJ:  Rutgers University Press, 1955. Browning, Robert M., Jr. Cape Charles to Cape Fear: The West Gulf Blockading Squadron during the Civil War. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993. Browning, Robert M., Jr. Lincoln’s Trident: The West Gulf Blockading Squadron during the Civil War. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2015. Browning, Robert M., Jr. Success Is All That Was Expected:  The South Atlantic Blockading Squadron during the Civil War. Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2002. Burlingame, Michael, and John R. T. Ettinger, eds. Inside Lincoln’s White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997. Chesnut, Mary. Mary Chesnut’s Civil War. Edited by C. Vann Woodward. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981. Dowdey, Clifford, and Louis H. Manarin, eds. The Wartime Papers of Robert E.  Lee. Boston: Little Brown, 1961. Lankford, Nelson. Richmond Burning: Last Days of the Confederate Capital. New York: Viking Press, 2002. Marchand, John B. Charleston Blockade: The Journals of John B. Marchand, U.S. Navy, 1861–​ 1862. Edited by Craig L. Symonds. Newport, RI: Naval War College Press, 1976; reprinted Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2012. Massey, Mary Elizabeth. Ersatz in the Confederacy: Shortages and Substitutes on the Southern Homefront. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993. McPherson, James M. War on the Waters:  The Union and Confederate Navies. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. Reidy, Joseph P. “Black Men in Blue during the Civil War.” National Archives and Records Administration. Prologue Magazine 33, no. 3 (Fall 2001). Roberts, William H. Now for the Contest: Coastal and Oceanic Naval Operations in the Civil War. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. Still, William N. “A Naval Sieve: The Union Blockade in the Civil War.” Naval War College Review, May–​June, 1983. Surdam, David. Northern Naval Superiority and the Economics of the American Civil War. New York: Viking Press, 1971. Symonds, Craig L. The Civil War at Sea. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Symonds, Craig L. Lincoln and His Admirals: Abraham Lincoln, the U.S. Navy, and the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.

The Union Blockade    65 Taylor, Thomas E. Running the Blockade: A Personal Narrative of Adventures, Risks, and Escapes during the American Civil War. London: John Murray, 1912. Thornton, Mark, and Robert B. Ekelund. Tariffs, Blockades, and Inflation: The Economics of the Civil War. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004. Tomblin, Barbara Brooks. Bluejackets and Contrabands, African Americans and the Union Navy. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2009. Weddle, Kevin. Lincoln’s Tragic Admiral:  The Life of Samuel Francis Du Pont. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005. Wise, Stephen R. Lifeline of the Confederacy:  Blockade Running during the Civil War. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988.

Chapter 3

M issou ri   1861 War and Identity Ethan S. Rafuse

In June 1861, Brig. Gen. Nathaniel Lyon decided the duly elected governor of Missouri could no longer be allowed to exercise the duties of his office. That a man who had been a mere captain in the U.S. Army only a few months earlier would deem it proper for an army officer to make such a determination was, to put it mildly, truly extraordinary. That Lyon would be in a position to act on this determination, take it upon himself to make prisoners of a portion of the state’s military forces, and then lead a military operation that would drive the governor from his capital and lay the groundwork for his replacement was likewise remarkable. It certainly was not something that was supposed to happen in the American republic. In retrospect, that Missouri would present a complicated problem for Union policymakers is hardly surprising. The state’s application to enter the Union as a slave state in 1819 sparked fierce congressional debate over the future of slavery—​and, by extension, the course of the country’s rapid westward expansion and the nature of republican government. Because of its location, Missouri was a state that defied simple characterization in 1861. It was a slave state, yet its people looked to and were just as conscious of their location on the great western frontier. Nor could they ignore the growing importance of industrial manufacturing in the state. Not surprisingly, in 1861 Missouri was home to a people divided over which direction to steer the state’s destiny. Of course, for students of the American Civil War, Missouri is known principally for playing host to an especially nasty guerrilla conflict. Irregular warfare is currently a popular subject of study, in part because it illustrates the relationship between the employment of violence for political ends and the social contexts of that violence. Missouri’s experiences during the sectional conflict, the circumstances that plunged the state into war, and various political currents that were at work merit serious attention. During the war’s first year, Missouri also offered compelling evidence to support the Prussian theorist Carl von Clausewitz’s observation that war is not just an extension of political activity but that war drives politics as well.

Missouri 1861   67 In a year that saw many remarkable events, few matched the one that played out at the Planters House hotel in St. Louis, Missouri, on June 11, 1861. Four men had come together to discuss Missouri’s relationship with the United States government. On one side of the discussion were Claiborne Fox Jackson and Maj. Gen. Sterling Price. Jackson had been inaugurated as the fifteenth governor of the state a little over six months earlier and was decidedly pro-​Southern in his sympathies. Price, a former governor, was probably the most respected man in the entire state, in part due to his service in the U.S.-​Mexican War, especially his role as military governor of New Mexico in the suppression of the Taos Revolt of 1847. After Abraham Lincoln’s election, he presided over the state convention that debated secession but ultimately decided not to follow most of the country’s other slave states out of the Union. Price also arrived in his capacity as Jackson’s choice to command the Missouri State Guard, a military force the governor had mobilized. Taking a jaundiced view of Price’s command and Jackson’s decision to mobilize the State Guard were the two other principal actors at the Planters House. Congressman Francis P. Blair Jr. was the scion of one of the country’s most prominent political families, with a brother in Lincoln’s cabinet and a father who had considerable influence in Washington. As a consequence of being at Andrew Jackson’s side during the 1830s when South Carolina challenged the authority of the Federal government, the Blairs brought to the secession crisis of 1860–​1861 a hardline perspective. The successful resolution of the Nullification Crisis of 1832–​1833, they believed, was a consequence of Jackson’s taking a tough stance toward the South Carolinians. They thought efforts to conciliate Southerners or negotiate their relationship with the Federal government were wrong-​ headed and counterproductive; the U.S. Constitution was clear enough that it was the supreme law of the land. Blair’s disinclination toward conciliation was shared by the man who accompanied him to the Planters House. A few months earlier, Nathaniel Lyon had been an officer in the U.S. Army on a career path that seemed destined to keep him obscure. Now Lyon found himself responsible for upholding the Federal system established by the Constitution—​with the prospect of wielding the sword should the Missouri state government have an incorrect perception of its constitutional duties. That Jackson and Price were laboring under such a perception was evident when they insisted Lyon and Blair more tightly leash or, better, disband the military forces they had raised to support the Federal government to soothe the frayed nerves of a populace that had shown little inclination to leave the Union. After several hours of conversation, it was evident that, in seeking what one witness described as “the basis of a new agreement for maintaining the peace of Missouri,” neither Jackson nor Price understood the matter correctly. “[R]‌ather than concede to the State of Missouri,” Lyon slowly and deliberately declared, “the right to demand that my Government shall not enlist troops within her limits, or bring troops into the State whenever it pleases, or move its troops at its own will into, out of, or through the State; rather than concede to the State of Missouri for one single instant the right to dictate to my Government in any matter however, I would”—​at which point Lyon rose from his chair and began pointing to others in the room—​“see you, and you, and you, and you,

68   Ethan S. Rafuse and you, and every man, woman, and child in the State dead and buried.” If Jackson was still unable to see his duty correctly, he had made himself an enemy of the U.S. government and there was nothing more to say. “This means war,” Lyon announced. “In an hour one of my officers will call for you and conduct you out of my lines.”1 In 1861, Missouri was in a state of flux. For decades, its identity had largely reflected the economic and political outlook of plantation owners whose views were evident in the fact that the region along the Missouri River in which their plantations were concentrated is popularly known as “Little Dixie” to this day. In the decades after entering the Union, Missouri was also a place that defined itself by its support for westward expansion, the interests of small farmers, moderation on the slavery issue, and political democracy. This sense of identity was also rooted in the fact that, while a slave state, Missouri also looked to the west, with those traveling the great overland trails to Santa Fe, Oregon, and California setting off on their journeys from Independence and Westport in Jackson County. The 1840s and 1850s, however, also saw the arrival of settlers who were far less in line with the state’s prevailing economic and political identity. Many of these were immigrants who had fled Europe after participating in the failed liberal revolutions of 1848–​1849 and brought with them little sympathy for human chattel slavery. They also arrived at a time when the expansion of railroads, acceleration of industrialization in St. Louis (which by 1860 ranked seventh among the nation’s cities in the value of its manufactured products), and the rapid growth of that city’s population (fewer than half of whom were native-​born by 1860) created the prospect of a major shift in the balance of the state’s economic and political power. It was hardly propitious that this took place at a time when slave owners in Missouri, like those throughout the country, were ratcheting up their demands for safeguards for their interests and the country was becoming more and more polarized over the issue of slavery. During the 1850s, anxiety about the future contributed to a decided radicalization of Missouri’s slaveocracy, which was most evident in its conspicuous role in the violence and perversions of political democracy that were committed in the effort to force slavery’s expansion into neighboring Kansas. In the 1860 presidential election, Missouri’s voters made clear they wanted a middle ground between the “ultras” of both sections. Over 70  percent of the voters cast their ballots for candidates of compromise and sectional conciliation, the Northern Democrat Stephen A.  Douglas and the Constitutional Unionist John Bell. Abraham Lincoln won a mere 10 percent of the vote, concentrated among the growing immigrant element in St. Louis. Southern Democrat John C. Breckinridge did a bit better, winning about 19 percent. It would be no easy task to develop a policy for such a state. Clearly, the great majority of Missourians wanted a peaceful resolution to the secession crisis and had little taste for a shooting war. Yet it is often the case that determined minorities drive historical events, and there were enough of those in Missouri to be a source of trouble. This was certainly true of those who had voted for Lincoln. They had little patience for anyone who sought to place qualifications on their loyalty to the Union. Their preferred policy was one that

Missouri 1861   69 aggressively punished Confederate sympathizers and rewarded those who stood with the Lincoln administration. This made them a potential asset to the Federal government, but also a potential problem. They were a small percentage of the state population, were concentrated in St. Louis, and a large percentage were foreign-​born. Gratifying their desire for a tough policy toward secessionists could antagonize the moderate majority in the state. On the other hand, leniency could have the effect of encouraging defiance and give the Breckinridge minority, whose ability to make trouble if they did not get their way had been evident in Kansas during the 1850s, too much room to operate. The senior military officer in Missouri in early 1861 was Brig. Gen. William S. Harney, commander of the U.S. Army’s Department of the West, headquartered just outside St. Louis. Though a cavalryman with a reputation for military aggressiveness, Harney was moderate politically. Recognizing that his views were in line with those of the great majority of Missourians, he adopted a policy of conciliation and restraint. Not surprisingly, he felt his approach was validated when the Missouri state convention broke up in March without following the secessionist path that South Carolina, Mississippi, or the other states of the Deep South took. Blair and those who joined him in creating the Missouri Unconditional Union Party in February 1861 disagreed with Harney’s approach, and the conduct of the Missouri state government offered them good reason for concern. Although he had portrayed himself as a Douglas Democrat in his campaign for governor, Jackson’s sympathies rested firmly with his slaveholding allies in Little Dixie. When the Lincoln administration called on Missouri for four regiments in the aftermath of Fort Sumter in April, Jackson refused to comply. “Your requisition, in my judgement,” he bluntly advised Washington, “is illegal, unconstitutional, and revolutionary in its object, inhuman and diabolical, and cannot be complied with. Not one man will the State of Missouri furnish to carry on any such unholy crusade.”2 Lincoln’s request was none of those things, and Lyon could not help but be concerned. Shortly after reaching St. Louis in March as a company commander in the 2nd U.S. Infantry, he had been introduced to Blair, who advised him of his efforts to rally the loyal population of St. Louis—​mainly by working with the city’s German Turnverein (Turner Societies)—​and the organization of “Minute Men” companies by the city’s pro-​Southern elements. Lyon and Blair were especially anxious to keep the large quantity of muskets, artillery, gunpowder, and machinery located in the St. Louis Arsenal out of Jackson’s hands. Not surprisingly, they were exasperated by Harney’s actions, especially his refusal to accept into Federal service the units of Union Guards Blair and Lyon organized and mandate that Lyon receive permission from headquarters before he issued arms or ammunition to anyone. Meanwhile, Brig. Gen. Daniel Frost, whom Jackson appointed commander of the state militia, prompted a number of his subordinates to resign by making clear he hoped the state would cast its lot with the Confederacy. Then, in response to expressions of concern by Frost about Blair’s and Lyon’s machinations, Jackson requested assistance from the Confederate government and authorized Frost to establish a camp at St. Louis from where he could better monitor Blair’s and Lyon’s activities. Then, on April 21, word

70   Ethan S. Rafuse reached St. Louis of secessionists seizing a Federal arsenal at the western Missouri town of Liberty. Blair responded by working his contacts in Washington, with the result that Harney received orders to turn over his command and Lyon received authorization on April 30 to “enroll in the military service of the United States the loyal citizens of Saint Louis . . . for the purpose of maintaining the authority of the United States.” Washington understood granting a captain in the army this authority was an extraordinary thing. Nonetheless, when the orders authorizing it reached commanding Lt. Gen. Winfield Scott’s desk for endorsement, he provided it. “It is revolutionary times,” Scott wrote, “and therefore I do not object to the irregularity of this.”3 Lyon and Blair soon had around 2,500 men under arms, over 80 percent of whom were German. (Although there was no choice but to turn to the Germans, given the place they occupied in Missouri at the time—​and in American memory of the War for Independence—​this was a problematic course of action politically and a propaganda gift that their opponents were quick to seize upon.) After a St. Louis resident named William T.  Sherman turned down Blair’s offer of command, Lyon accepted it and promptly worked out a plan to smuggle the arsenal’s weapons across the river to Illinois, which was skillfully executed. Meanwhile, Jackson ordered the militia to assemble on May 3 and secured a promise of four artillery pieces from Confederate President Jefferson Davis. Soon Frost had a camp of nearly nine hundred men at Lindell Grove, which he named Camp Jackson. Lyon closely monitored the situation, and it did not take long for him to decide to take action. His activities took on a greater sense of urgency when word arrived that Washington had decided to restore Harney to command. On May 10, Lyon ordered his command to converge on Camp Jackson and dispatched a letter to Frost. “Your command is regarded as evidently hostile towards the Government of the United States,” Lyon declared, “for the most part made up of those secessionists who have openly avowed their hostility to the General Government, and have been plotting at the seizure of its property and the overthrow of its authority. . . . These extraordinary preparations plainly indicate none other than the well-​known purpose of the governor of this State . . . having in direct view hostilities to the General Government and co-​operation with its enemies. . . . [I]‌t is my duty to demand, and I do hereby demand, of you an immediate surrender.” While unable to deny the truth of Lyon’s charges, Frost complained that he “never for a moment having conceived the idea that so illegal and unconstitutional a demand . . . would be made by an officer of the United States Army.” At the same time, he conceded he was “wholly unprepared to defend my command . . . and shall therefore be forced to comply with your demand.”4 Pro-​ Southern residents of St. Louis shared Frost’s indignation. As Lyon’s men marched their prisoners through the streets, pro-​Jackson elements in the city made their displeasure with the situation known. After coming under verbal and physical assault, Lyon’s men soon found themselves exchanging small arms fire with an angry mob. (As is the case with so many events of this nature, the question of who fired the first shot is a matter of dispute.) When Harney arrived to resume command on May 11, nearly thirty

Missouri 1861   71

Map 3.1  Missouri, 1861

civilians were dead and anger toward Lyon and the Germans was at a fever pitch. Harney promptly told Blair that he wanted to demobilize or redeploy the units he and Lyon had raised. Blair talked Harney out of this and instead persuaded him to commend Lyon’s actions. Harney also issued a proclamation declaring the state legislature’s military bill enabling Jackson’s creation of a Missouri State Guard “cannot be regarded in any other light than an indirect secession ordinance” whose “most material provisions are in conflict with the Constitution and laws of the United States. To this extent it is a nullity, and cannot and ought not to be upheld or regarded.”5 Hoping to defuse the situation, though, Harney agreed to meet with Price, whom Jackson had appointed commander of the Missouri State Guard on May 12. Together, Price and Harney worked out an “agreement” that if the state government exercised its responsibility for maintaining order in a loyal Missouri, Harney would neither insist on

72   Ethan S. Rafuse the disbanding of its armed forces nor do anything that might bring state and Federal forces into conflict. Moderates applauded the agreement; Blair and Lyon were appalled, believing Harney had given Jackson and Price what they most needed to consummate their secessionist machinations, namely, time to mobilize their forces free from Federal pressure. On May 30, Blair acted on authorization from the War Department to once again relieve Harney from command—​this time for good. Lyon, a brigadier general in the Federal service as of May 17, was thus able to act freely. Alarmed conservatives in St. Louis in early June reached out to Jackson and Price hoping they might be able to work out with Blair and Lyon an agreement along the lines of what Price had worked out with Harney. Both parties agreed to meet, but their discussions produced not peace but Lyon’s declaration of war against the government of Missouri. From this point forward, war would not just be a product of policy but would drive politics as well. After leaving the Planters House, Price and Jackson proceeded to the state capital of Jefferson City, where Jackson issued a proclamation on June 12 calling fifty thousand militia into state service. “Fellow citizens, all our efforts toward conciliation have failed. We can hope nothing from the justice or moderation of the agents of the Federal government,” Jackson declared. “They are energetically hastening the execution of their bloody and revolutionary schemes.” While reminding his constituents Missouri remained “one of the United States,” he also asserted, “[Y]‌our first allegiance is due to your own State, and . . . you are under no obligation whatever to obey . . . the edicts of the military despotism which has enthroned itself at Washington.”6 Barely was the ink dry on this proclamation before Jackson had to deal with a Union force heading up the Missouri River to bring him to heel. His best bet, Jackson decided, would be to gather what troops, money, and supplies he and Price could from the state’s slaveholding counties and then head south toward Arkansas. In that state, which had been admitted to the Confederacy on May 18, Confederate forces were being organized under the direction of Brig. Gen. Benjamin McCullough, who had orders to move north into Missouri if he saw fit. After sending a man to Arkansas to meet with McCullough, Jackson took direction of the effort to raise troops as Price fell ill and went to his plantation at Keytesville to recuperate. After abandoning Jefferson City, Jackson and his staff linked up with the State Guard at Boonville on June 13, hoping he could hold the town long enough to grab all of the currency and records he could and finish the task of raising troops. Lyon would not give Jackson the time he needed for the latter task. After directing three regiments to take trains to the railhead at Rolla and then march on Springfield, the main settlement in southwest Missouri, Lyon departed St. Louis with about two thousand men and headed west up the Missouri. On reaching Jefferson City on June 15, Lyon found Jackson gone and, after leaving a small garrison force, led the rest of his command west. Early on June 17, Lyon’s men disembarked from their ships about eight miles below Boonville and ran into Jackson’s men east of town. After only about twenty minutes of fighting, the State Guard, which eliminated any doubts about their perfidy by shooting at soldiers in the service of the United States, was in full retreat.

Missouri 1861   73 Northern newspapers took delight in hailing Lyon’s actions and found much humor in the poor performance of the State Guard. Lyon, however, had to halt operations in order to build up supplies and await reinforcements. This gave Jackson time to rally the State Guard and secure agreement from McCullough to come to its assistance. Making matters worse, on July 5 the commander of a small Federal force in southwest Missouri, Brig. Gen. Franz Sigel, decided to attack Jackson’s command at Carthage, was defeated, and had to retreat to Springfield. Shortly thereafter, Lyon personally arrived in Springfield and proceeded to concentrate his forces there. By that point, despite his accomplishments, Lyon’s days in charge of the war in Missouri were numbered, as the Lincoln administration decided to make Missouri part of a new Department of the West under the command of Maj. Gen. John C. Frémont, whose exploits as an army officer in the Far West had done much to support the westward expansion that was so important to Missouri’s identity, won him renown as “the Pathfinder,” and contributed to his selection as the Republican Party’s first presidential candidate in 1856. On July 25, Frémont arrived at St. Louis—​and with not only Lyon’s operations to worry about. Equally if not more important in Washington’s eyes were those taking place in the eastern part of the state, as Frémont was also tasked with preparing for operations to seize control of the Mississippi River. An operation to seize the Mississippi, for which Federal possession of St. Louis and southeastern Missouri was critical, was a component of the Anaconda Plan that General Scott had developed for restoring the Union. However, in July 1861, Lincoln—​no doubt encouraged by Lyon’s victory at Boonville, as were the Blairs, who argued against Scott’s strategy—​hoped a quick victory in Virginia might be enough to break the will of the Southern people and bring about a quicker resolution of the conflict than Scott’s strategy promised. Whether the assumptions behind this approach were valid would not be revealed, as Union forces suffered an embarrassing defeat in Virginia, one of whose effects was to revive the importance of the Mississippi River in Union strategy. When Frémont assumed command in St. Louis, Lyon found himself in a difficult situation at Springfield. Far from a railway or major river, he was overextended logistically. Worse, even though they still had not officially cast their lot with the Confederacy, appeals by Missouri state officials for assistance had led McCullough to enter the state and link up with Price. Now significantly outnumbered, Lyon appealed to Frémont for reinforcements. Frémont, though, in line with Washington’s wishes that he give greater priority elsewhere in the state, refused Lyon’s request and advised him to fall back to Rolla rather than jeopardize what he had already accomplished. Meanwhile, Price and McCullough advanced on Springfield. By August 7, they had reached the point where the Wire Road connecting Springfield with Fayetteville, Arkansas, crossed Wilson Creek and went into camp (because soldiers mistakenly referred to it as Wilson’s Creek, the battle and creek afterward became known by that name instead). Friction, however, had arisen between Price and McCullough. Price was unwilling to place himself under McCullough’s command, believing that the fact that he had outranked McCullough during the Mexican War made him the senior commander. McCullough not only took exception to Price’s pretensions but found the State

74   Ethan S. Rafuse Guard wanting in discipline and poorly armed, problems that he placed at Price’s feet. Overhanging everything was the question of what political objective the Missouri Guard was fighting for. McCullough knew he was fighting for an independent Confederacy. What exactly were Price and his men fighting for? Meanwhile, on the evening of August 8, Lyon and his subordinates decided not to fall back, but to risk battle. “To abandon the Southwest without a struggle,” Lyon declared, “would be a sad blow to our cause. . . . We will fight, and hope for the best.”7 Working with Sigel, Lyon developed a plan whereby Sigel would take about 1,200 men and maneuver to attack the enemy camp from the south, while Lyon attacked from the north with about 4,200 men. During the night of August 9–​10, Lyon’s and Sigel’s men moved to execute their plan. Initially, things went well. Sigel was able to carry out his part in the plan, surprise the enemy, and throw Price’s and McCullough’s command into panic. Meanwhile, Lyon personally led the men under his command forward on what became known as Bloody Hill. The situation to the south turned when Sigel’s men, unable to identify a force in their front and wary of firing on friends, held their fire too long and were overwhelmed by enemy fire. Price’s and McCullough’s men were eventually able to rally, though, and their superior numbers turned the tide of the battle. As Sigel’s command retreated, McCullough and Price focused their efforts on Bloody Hill. Lyon was mortally wounded, and shortly thereafter, recognizing that no more could be accomplished, the Federals began retreating toward Springfield. There Sigel assumed overall command and decided to pull back to Rolla, which was reached on August 19. Believing he had fulfilled his mandate from Richmond to aid the Missourians and having had enough of Price, McCullough ordered his forces back to Arkansas. Price, however, decided to follow up the victory at Wilson’s Creek with an advance north to the Missouri River. On August 26, Price sent a message to Col. Thomas Harris, asking him to bring the forces he had been raising in the northeastern part of the state to Lexington. The defense of Lexington rested on the shoulders of Col. James A. Mulligan, who had been dispatched there by Union authorities to protect the deposits in the branch of the state bank there and keep them out of the hands of Price’s men. The bank issue loomed large in Missouri in 1861. Four years earlier, the state government had passed a new banking law in response to the desire of St. Louis’s growing population of entrepreneurs and merchants for a loosening of the state’s restrictions on banking, but crafted it with an eye on advancing the state’s wealthy slave owners. The law established new banks in counties in central Missouri that tended to have a large percentage of slave owners, shifting funds to them from St. Louis. As the Missouri State Guard mobilized, supporters of resistance to the Federal government stepped forward with promissory notes to the banks if they would release assets to support the governor’s efforts. With Price then serving as a state bank commissioner and Jackson pledging to back them, these notes were accepted. This would bring catastrophe when supporters of Jackson were purged from the state government and the banks were taken over by Union men, who filed and won civil lawsuits against predominantly pro-​Southern slaveholders demanding repayment of the promissory notes. With the Jackson government impotent

Missouri 1861   75 to fulfill its promises to back them, these people suffered financial ruin and loss of their lands in compensation to those they had tried to defraud. The result was economic ruin that “created a revolution in land ownership that decapitated the state’s southern society” and would provide powerful fuel to the bitter guerrilla struggle in the state.8 Not surprisingly, Frémont took a keen interest in the operations of the banks and moved to seize their funds and have them sent to St. Louis. Upon reaching Lexington, Mulligan took possession of the bank’s cash and put his men to work establishing a fortified position on College Hill between the town and the Missouri River. By the time Price and his entire command reached Lexington on September 18, they found Mulligan’s outnumbered men well prepared but did not hesitate to attack. A bitter fight ensued around the Anderson House on the western side of Mulligan’s line, and the following morning Price’s men employed hemp bales as movable breastworks that enabled them to close on the beleaguered Federal force. On September 20, with his ammunition low and the men out of rations and without water, Mulligan surrendered. Meanwhile, trouble developed from another quarter. With Price so far north, Kansas troops under the command of Brig. Gen. James H. Lane saw an opportunity to conduct raiding operations in western Missouri that would gratify those desiring to repay pro-​ slavery Missourians for the suffering they had inflicted on Kansas during the 1850s. On September 23, Lane’s command unleashed their wrath on the small town of Osceola, executing nine residents and burning the town “to ashes,” which aroused further anger among the people of Missouri and did much to convince men of military age in the region that violent resistance to Union authority was called for.9 The situation in western Missouri combined with the defeats at Wilson’s Creek and Lexington to feed a growing sense that the problems in Missouri were too much for the man in charge of the Department of the West to handle. Not surprisingly, reports that Frémont had failed to provide Lyon or Mulligan with sufficient troops inflicted severe damage to Frémont’s reputation. On top of this, reports of Frémont conducting himself in an autocratic fashion, corruption in the administration of contracts, and friction between Blair and Frémont began reaching Washington. Moreover, while pro-​Southern elements in the state were not strong enough to challenge Union control of St. Louis, they were sufficient in numbers to cause trouble through acts of criminal sabotage and terror elsewhere in the state, causing many Unionists to flee to surrounding states. Unfortunately, the aggressive assertion of Federal power in June had the effect of galvanizing “Missouri’s countryside, turning thousands of conditional Unionists into southern rights advocates or outright secessionists” who “quickly sought to drive unionists, especially northern-​born, from their midst.”10 As Federal troops poured into the state to put their thumbs on the scale in favor of the unconditional Unionists, Southern rights men sought to hamper their efforts by turning to irregular warfare, targeting local communities, railroads, and other vital points in the state. Consequently, earlier than they did elsewhere, Federal troops and their commanders in Missouri found themselves compelled to adopt harsh measures against local communities and their residents. Their often limited and temporary presence—​long enough to arouse hostility but not long enough to truly intimidate—​and the radicalization of sentiment

76   Ethan S. Rafuse on both sides fed the escalation of violence within communities. Whatever desire they might have had to be neutral, households chose sides and turned to violence to protect themselves. The exact extent of this violence varied so much from community to community and time to time in 1861 that a precise reckoning cannot be made. Nonetheless, it is clear that by the end of August it had reached a level where it seemed to a number of people that the precarious degree of control Unionists had gained over the state was being undermined. In an effort to counter these efforts—​and curry favor with antislavery Republicans—​ Frémont decided to issue a proclamation on August 30 declaring martial law in the state in response to its “disorganized condition, the helplessness of the civil authority, the total insecurity of life, and of the devastation of property by bands of murderers and marauders.” These, he believed, “demand the severest measures to repress the increasing crimes and outrages.” Included among the measures Frémont announced he was adopting: “The property, real and personal, of all persons in the State of Missouri who shall take up arms against the United States, and who shall be directly proven to have taken active part with their enemies in the field, is declared to be confiscated to the public use; and their slaves, if any they have, are hereby declared free.”11 This was something Lincoln was not prepared to support. Frémont’s actions also aroused considerable angst among the loyal Missourians who had reconvened the convention that rejected secession earlier in the year. After declaring the governorship and legislature vacant on July 22, on August 1 the convention appointed Hamilton Gamble governor of a provisional state government. Staunchly loyal to the Union, Gamble was personally conservative, a slaveholder, and by no means enthusiastic about the unleashing of the elements within the state that had rallied behind Lyon—​all of which made him a good fit for the task of reassuring the people of his state and rallying them behind the Union banner. Frémont’s actions complicated his efforts and, not surprisingly, Gamble was quick to add his voice to those protesting Frémont’s edict. Frémont responded by sending his wife to Washington to make his case to the president. The haughty tone with which she did so, though, probably did the general more harm than good. In any case, Lincoln was already annoyed by Frémont’s refusal to follow the president’s wishes that he retract the proclamation on his own authority, forcing Lincoln to directly order him to do so. It did not take long before the administration decided it had had enough and dispatched officials to St. Louis with authorization to relieve Frémont of command. They arrived just after Frémont, recognizing he needed a military success to fend off calls for his removal from command, had taken the field. On October 25, advanced elements of his command charged into Springfield, driving off a small contingent of the Missouri State Guard, and claimed possession of the town. It was not enough. On November 2, Frémont’s tenure as commander of the Department of the West officially came to an end. His initial replacement was Maj. Gen. David Hunter, who would not hold the command for long, for in early November Maj. Gen. Henry W. Halleck arrived in Washington. Halleck had a reputation as one of the antebellum army’s outstanding military minds, and it did not take long for the Lincoln

Missouri 1861   77 administration to decide that, while it liked Hunter well enough, it needed a man of Halleck’s ability in St. Louis. By the time Halleck arrived in St. Louis in late November, the situation in the state was receiving a bit more clarity in one respect. Governor Jackson managed to assemble a group of like-​minded members of what had been the Missouri General Assembly at Neosho in late October. Together they drafted and passed a secession ordinance. One month later, on November 28, 1861, in a remarkable effort to deny the fact that military action had rendered Jackson’s claim to be a figure of authority in Missouri rather ludicrous, Richmond recognized Missouri and the officials Jackson and his supporters put forward as the duly elected senators and representatives of the state. Still, the Davis administration was undoubtedly gratified to know that Jackson and his supporters had finally cast their lot with the Confederacy. Nonetheless, as December 1861 opened, Davis saw Halleck’s arrival at St. Louis as a turn in the Union war effort that did not bode well for the Confederate cause in Missouri. “The Federal forces are not hereafter to be commanded by path finders and holiday soldiers, but by men of military education and experience in war,” Davis advised a correspondent. “The contest is therefore to be on a scale of very different proportions than that . . . witnessed during the past summer and fall.”12 The events of 1861 in Missouri would cast a long shadow. The North secured sufficient control of the state to subsequently achieve one of the most important accomplishments in American military history:  the wresting of the Mississippi River from the Confederacy. In addition, the consequences of the banking debacle, Jackson’s provoking Lyon and Blair into aggressive action, the victories at Wilson’s Creek and Lexington, and the depredations of Kansas Jayhawkers laid the foundation for a remarkable evolution of sentiment in the state. The events of 1861, the guerrilla resistance that emerged and eventually married the image of the western gunslinger to the cause of Southern independence in the minds of Missourians, and the response of Union authorities to irregular warfare, combined with the destruction of slavery to lead survivors of the war in Missouri to carry away an intense sense of grievance toward the North and stronger sense of Confederate identity than the 1860 election indicated was present in the state when the war began. Society and politics had both driven war in the state and been driven by it. Among the residents of Missouri in 1861 was the family of Solomon Young, whose experiences illustrate how the outbreak of war in the state that year was experienced at the local level. Young had been born in Kentucky in 1815 and made his way to western Missouri, settling in Jackson County during the 1840s. Reflecting Missouri’s status as a state both southern and western in its orientation, he established a prosperous farm a few miles from the Kansas border, with slaves to help work the land, while also leading wagon trains over the nearby western trails. All of this combined to make him a man of considerable means in western Missouri by 1861. Although a slave owner, Young was a Union man and, like most residents of the state, seems to have just wanted to get on with his life and business—​and for Young that business in 1861 was not north or south; it was west. His determination not to let the tumult

78   Ethan S. Rafuse of 1861 interfere with his leading wagon trains on the western trails, though, meant leaving his family behind at a decidedly dangerous time. However much their family patriarch may have wanted to stay out of the whole mess, at some point in 1861 (when exactly is difficult to pin down), the war came to the Young family. During a raid into Missouri, Kansas Jayhawkers came across the prosperous Young farm and proceeded to terrorize Solomon’s wife and family. They forced her to bake biscuits for them, seized whatever valuables they could find, slaughtered hundreds of hogs, and employed what would later be known as enhanced interrogation techniques on her fifteen-​year-​old son. While the experience would not be enough to prevent Solomon from ultimately taking a loyalty oath to the Union, it would be part of the distinctly pro-​Southern history and memory of the war his daughter Martha passed on to her son Harry Truman, a man who often looked to the history of the Civil War for guidance during a political career that made him one of the most important leaders of the twentieth century.

Notes 1. Thomas L. Snead, The Fight for Missouri: From the Election of Lincoln to the Death of Lyon (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1886), 199–​200. 2. Jackson to Cameron, April 17, 1862, in U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, 70 vols. in 128 parts (Washington, D.C.:  Government Printing Office, 1880–​1901), ser. 3, vol. 1:  82–​83. Hereafter cited as OR, with all references to series 1 unless otherwise noted. 3. Cameron to Lyon, April 30, 1861, with Scott and Lincoln indorsements, OR, vol. 1: 675. 4. Lyon to Frost, May 10, 1861, OR, vol. 3: 6–​7; Frost to Lyon, May 10, 1861, OR, vol. 3: 6–​7. 5. Harney to the People of the State of Missouri, May 14, 1861, OR, vol. 3: 371. 6. Jackson to the People of Missouri, June 12, 1861, OR, vol. 53: 696–​698. 7. Thomas W. Knox, Camp-​Fire and Cotton-​Field:  Southern Adventure in Time of War, Life with the Union Armies, and Residence on a Louisiana Plantation (New York: Block, 1865),  67–​68. 8. Mark W. Geiger, Financial Fraud and Guerrilla Violence in Missouri’s Civil War, 1861–​1865 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 3. 9. Christopher Phillips, The Rivers Ran Backward: The Civil War and the Remaking of the American Middle Border (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 148. 10. Phillips, The Rivers Ran Backward, 138, 140. 11. Frémont Proclamation, August 30, 1862, OR, vol. 3: 466–​467. 12. Davis to Harris, December 3, 1861, OR, vol. 8: 701.

Bibliography Boman, Dennis K. Lincoln’s Resolute Unionist:  Hamilton Gamble, Dred Scott Dissenter and Missouri’s Civil War Governor. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006. Castel, Albert. General Sterling Price and the Civil War in the West. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968. Geiger, Mark W. Financial Fraud and Guerrilla Violence in Missouri’s Civil War, 1861–​1865. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010.

Missouri 1861   79 Gerteis, Louis S. The Civil War in Missouri:  A Military History. Columbia:  University of Missouri Press, 2012. Hulbert, Matthew Christopher. The Ghosts of Guerrilla Memory: How Civil War Bushwhackers Became Gunslingers in the American West. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016. Parrish, William E. Frank Blair:  Lincoln’s Conservative. Columbia:  University of Missouri Press, 1998. Phillips, Christopher. Damned Yankee:  The Life of General Nathaniel Lyon. Columbia:  University of Missouri Press, 1990. Phillips, Christopher. Missouri’s Confederate:  Claiborne Fox Jackson and the Creation of Southern Identity in the Border West. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000. Phillips, Christopher. The Rivers Ran Backward:  The Civil War and the Remaking of the American Middle Border. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Piston, William Garrett, and Richard W. Hatcher III. Wilson’s Creek: The Second Battle of the Civil War and the Men Who Fought It. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Rafuse, Ethan S. “‘Far More than a Romantic Adventure’: The American Civil War in Harry Truman’s History and Memory.” Missouri Historical Review 104 (October 2009): 1–​20. Siddali, Silvana R., ed. Missouri’s War: The Civil War in Documents. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009. Smith, Michael Thomas. “Corruption European Style: The 1861 Fremont Scandal and Popular Fears in the Civil War North.” American Nineteenth Century History 10 (March 2009): 49–​69.

Chapter 4

F ir st Bu ll Ru n/ ​M a nas s as Antebellum Military Cultures Barbara A. Gannon

It may be apocryphal, but Pres. Abraham Lincoln purportedly told Brig. Gen. Irvin McDowell, the commander of U.S.  forces around Washington, D.C., that he should not wait to train his army. Instead, he should proceed to engage the Confederate Army: “[Y]‌ou are green, it is true, but they are green, also; you are all green alike.”1 Because of Lincoln’s pressure, McDowell moved his army into Virginia in July 1861, fought, and lost, a battle near Bull Run Creek and the town of Manassas. True or not, this assessment reflected an erroneous calculation of the military capability of each side. While the Confederate Army was composed mostly of volunteer units made up of amateurs, similar to Union forces, the nature of antebellum military culture gave the Confederate forces a decided advantage. In fact, Confederate units were often more competent than Union forces early in the war. Lost Cause supporters—​those who advocated the Confederate version of Civil War memory—​portrayed this military superiority as a function of their superior society, one with more honor, courage, and manliness than Northern society. Instead, this advantage derived from Southern society’s need to maintain more effective local military force to enforce a slave regime. Though one section managed to provide more capable forces for the first battle of the Civil War, both sections shared the same idea about military culture before the war. Northerners and Southerners disdained army regulars recruited by the Federal government and preferred state-​based militia and volunteers. Citizens of the separate states maintained local military forces based on their understanding of external and internal threats. Given their fear of slave revolts and the need to enforce the slave regime with violence, residents of slave states maintained effective military forces. In contrast, free states had no similar need. As a result, Confederate forces were decidedly less green than U.S. forces mostly composed of units from free states. In the Civil War, as in many other wars, more militarized societies had an initial edge over less militarized societies. Initial military defeats, such as First Bull Run, provided the type of shock needed to mobilize societies that maintained a limited military capability. Despite their initial disadvantage,

First Bull Run/Manassas    81 free societies often prevail because they rely on the service and sacrifice of a free people. Initial Confederate victories, based on superior state forces, failed to win the war when they had a short-​term advantage. In the long run, free men accepted the need for military discipline as state volunteers. Eventually, the Union Army harnessed the efforts of newly freed people in the fight for their own liberty, a critical turning point in the war, boosting the military advantage of the free states. Scholars have examined the First Battle of Bull Run, its more popular name, as the first battle of the Civil War. That significant first battle, the last battle of the antebellum military era, reveals the strength and weaknesses of each side’s prewar military cultures. The antebellum military organizations of the states and the Federal government did not reflect an overarching defense policy articulated by a central authority. Nor was there one singular “culture” because states made their own decisions about the type of military organizations they supported. Antebellum Americans rejected the notion that the Federal government should monopolize military force within the boundaries of the United States. This belief reflected Americans’ understanding of the relationship between the Federal and the state governments. Antebellum Americans of all sections believed that the Federal government should deal with threats on the seas in ships and from overseas in harbor fortifications. In addition to these “external” threats, Americans relied on the Federal government in disputes with Native Americans in the territories and in states challenged to suppress uprisings with local troops. Overall, Americans believed that if necessary the small regular force, reenforced by militia or volunteer units organized by the states, could deal with any internal or external threats. First Bull Run represented a test of the antebellum military system. Not surprisingly, the better-​prepared states won. Free states in the North had few threats and little need to maintain military forces and did not do so. Most of their state-​based military units were moribund. In contrast, Southern states staffed and maintained forces needed to hold four million people to forced labor. As a result, one side was much less green than the other when war came. The preparation for the battle, the course of the battle, and the victory of Confederate forces reflected each section’s strengths and weaknesses. Subsequent battles acted as an equalizer. Eventually free states made up for their “weakness” and established among themselves a well-​led, well-​trained, and professional Federal army capable of crushing what that generation termed the “Slaveholders Rebellion,” which restored the Union and ended slavery. Lincoln himself manifested the failings of a population untrained in military affairs. If Lincoln viewed soldiers on both sides as equally untested, he spoke from his own limited military experience. He often recalled his brief turn in the Black Hawk War as an elected captain with an Illinois unit. According to his humorous recollections, when he did not know the correct commands to move his unit from one side of a fence to another, he told his subordinates to break ranks and form on the other side. To a free man, who lived in a free state, the training burden in peacetime service was minimal. Lincoln viewed the respective military merits of each section through the prism of his own military incompetence.2

82   Barbara A. Gannon The future commander in chief ’s limited military career was typical for most native-​ born white men in this era. The vast majority of Americans in the antebellum era did not serve in the U.S. Army. With an extremely small regular army in peacetime, ranging in size from fewer than three thousand to about seventeen thousand soldiers, few had an opportunity to serve. No one felt bereft by the lack of slots in the army; native-​born Americans, particularly Southerners, had no desire to serve. The regular U.S. Army before the war recruited immigrants. Most military capability, such as it was, existed at the state level in militia or volunteer units. Each state and community maintained the force local officials deemed appropriate to defend against potential threats. In areas where the Native American threat had receded, there seemed little reason to maintain efficient part-​time military forces unless one held millions of people to forced labor as chattel slaves.3 Despite these limitations, a combination of part-​time and full-​time forces won the antebellum wars. The government used a combination of regular army forces and a small number of Southern militias and volunteers to fight the Second Seminole War (1835–​ 1842). Also known as the Florida War, it was as much about stopping slaves escaping into the wilderness as it was a native removal and a land grab. Slavery also mattered in the U.S.-​Mexican War (1846–​1848). Americans in both sections understood that any land the United States annexed from Mexico would be either slave or free. As a result, much of the agitation against the expansion of slavery began during this war. When President James K. Polk provoked a war on the border, the government recruited state volunteer units to augment the regular army; Jefferson C. Davis, West Point graduate, Mexican War hero, writer of reports on the militia, and later president of the Confederacy, commanded the 1st Mississippi Infantry. Eventually a combination of skilled leadership and effective light artillery defeated Mexican forces. When the war ended, regulars went back to their forts; volunteers went home to their respective states.4 Victory meant U.S. territory expanded, initiating another struggle over the expansion of slavery that ended only when the Civil War began. Only some states seemed to be ready for war based on the organization of their militias: the slave states. Most historians have described the militia as moribund during this period. Volunteer units wore fancy uniforms and performed complex drills, emphasizing military spectacle and not military training. When one historian chronicled these enthusiastic volunteers, he used a description provided by a member of the Philadelphia Lancer Guard in 1835: “The dress consists of a coat of rich maroon cloth faced with buff, pantaloons of crimson with a stripe of buff on the outside seams, and a helmet of the lancer shape, the skull of beaten brass, and the crest of crimson with a radiance of silver in front surrounding a golden eagle.” The volunteer suggested that these troops were not about military preparedness: “The species of troops is a novelty in the city, and if gotten up with spirit, will add greatly to the splendor of our parades.” This type of drill may be somewhat useful when war comes, giving some cities that welcomed these units a limited advantage in military training.5 A slave society needed more than soldiers wearing fancy uniforms and practicing parade ground drill. It needed quasi-​military bands who rode the roads at night looking

First Bull Run/Manassas    83 for escaping slaves: slave patrols. While scholars have made the connection between these organizations and the development of the modern police force, in Virginia and South Carolina officials considered them a subset of the militia. While the slave patrol secured the enslaved population, it also trained future Confederate soldiers in night operations, reconnaissance, and small-​unit cavalry tactics. In rural areas, patrols moved along the roads, stopping any African Americans they encountered, questioning them about their movements, and checking enslaved men’s and women’s paperwork to ensure they had permission to travel. If these men and women failed to provide this paperwork, they received fifteen lashes from the patrol. Some may have been escaping; others may have been visiting their spouses or children on other plantations. If the patrol believed they displayed any type of insolence, they received more than double the punishment: thirty-​nine lashes. Each patrol had a captain in charge and a handful of his subordinates, perhaps four or five men. The slave patrols of the slave states formed as early as the seventeenth century in South Carolina and Virginia. To hold millions of people to forced labor, often away from their families, required this type of surveillance and punishment. As a result, Southerners had, for a least a century and a half, operated local cavalry militia units that produced a cadre of small-​unit leaders and troopers trained to operate effectively on horseback.6 This experience may explain some of the advantages the Confederacy had over Federal forces at the beginning of the war, when Confederate cavalry literally rode circles around their Union counterparts. Ironically, Americans interpreted this superiority as an indication that Confederates were honorable “Cavaliers.” Instead, it was decades of enforcing slavery that made them more successful than free-​state citizens who had no need to be night riders. In the crucible of war, Northerners learned cavalry operations and became capable cavalry troopers. The postwar incarnation of the slave patrol, the nightriders of the Ku Klux Klan, demonstrate the relationship between superior horsemanship and white supremacy. The ongoing need for a regular slave patrol explains the vigor of the cavalry militia in the slave states. Southern states had more organized militia cavalry units than Northern states did. In 1854, Secretary of War Jefferson Davis reported the condition of the militia to Congress in this annual report; he documented the number of militia officers and enlisted men organized in companies, battalions, brigades, and divisions in each state. His report included all combat branches: infantry, cavalry, and artillery. Overall, 208 of the 313 militia cavalry companies served in slave states. The only exception, Ohio, claimed eighty-​five cavalry companies; however, it had not reported since 1845, suggesting that these outdated numbers reflected frontier Ohio. Neither New Jersey, Pennsylvania, nor New York reported any cavalry militia units at all. The difference between slave and free states appeared to be even more significant at higher levels of organization: the battalion, the regiment, and the brigade. Across all states, officials organized twenty-​one cavalry militia regiments. Ohio claimed three of these units; the slave states hosted the other eighteen available cavalry regiments. No free state identified the need for a cavalry militia brigade; the slave states reported that they organized eighteen brigades. In 1854, Americans faced no foreign enemy worthy of such a well-​organized military

84   Barbara A. Gannon structure. Southerners had identified a domestic threat that required these units: their own enslaved citizens.7 While useful, cavalry superiority was not decisive in the Civil War; it was a war won or lost by well-​trained and drilled infantry regiments. The Southern slave states, particularly in the Southeast, maintained larger and better-​organized militia infantry units. Despite the fact that Northern states had a larger population and more military-​age men, with few exceptions the Northern states’ militias appeared moribund. The free militias in western states seemed to be in better condition, but most of the long-​settled New England and Middle Atlantic states that provided the men who fought at First Bull Run let their militias languish. Davis’s militia report evinced the vigor of the slave states’ part-​time units and the lethargy of militia states in free societies. Massachusetts represented the only exception to this rule, reporting over 137,000 men in seventy companies, nine regiments, six brigades, and three divisions. Much of this may be due to the role the militia played in the commonwealth’s history—​the Minutemen of Lexington and Concord, the Massachusetts volunteers in the Seven Years War, and the militia of the Pequot wars. Even today the U.S. Army National Guard traces its heritage to Massachusetts’s first muster in 1637. Not surprisingly, Massachusetts militia arrived quickly to defend the capital in 1861. In contrast, Pennsylvania identified about 13,000 officers and militiamen in its ranks, a small force given its large population. At least Pennsylvania reported; neither New York nor New Jersey documented any available militia. Even if Northern states reported available militiamen, sometimes their units had few officers. Maine claimed over 55,000 militiamen but identified one single officer for this force. Rhode Island did better, but 47 officers is inadequate for a force of more than 15,000 men. Vermont reported 19,000 men and 885 officers; however, this information had been reported in 1843. State officials failed to update their numbers for 1853, suggesting that they paid little heed to militia issues.8 In contrast, Southern states seemed ready for any military contingency. Virginia, as always, reported the most robust force, almost 110,000 men commanded by almost 6,000 officers, organized in more than 1,000 companies. Militia officials at the division, brigade, and regimental levels oversaw these units. North and South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama had fewer soldiers available, but they maintained the same robust command structure and a robust officer corps to command their militia units. Having some kind of higher command authority during the mobilization, officers at the division, brigade, and regimental levels represented an almost incalculable advantage for slave states early in the Civil War. Northern states had no sign of any such organization and were at a tremendous disadvantage. Given the lack of an external threat to these states, only the ever-​present fear of a domestic threat—​slave insurrection—​explains these robust militia formations. Moreover, when war came the slave states had enough military leadership to ensure that they took full advantage of the months before Bull Run to mobilize and train Confederate forces.9 Some of the officers in these units formally trained for this duty at military academies. Again the Confederacy had an edge because their society had more citizens familiar with

First Bull Run/Manassas    85 military drill to train new recruits. The North had some of these institutions; the best-​ known still exits: Norwich in Vermont. However, more young Southern men attended military colleges. When war came, a subset of Southern men had attended the Virginia Military Institute (VMI), the Citadel, and other military institutions. These former cadets drilled units increasing the efficiency of the Confederate Army. Overall, the Confederate Army benefited from the graduates of ninety-​six military programs across the South. Some colleges even trained men in artillery; Thomas J. Jackson taught artillery operations at VMI and earned his nickname, “Stonewall,” at the First Battle of Bull Run. Few of these men planned a military career; instead, these institutions inculcated ideas of manhood rooted in self-​discipline in a military environment. Military training also reinforced the notion that their place in society rested on the implicit and explicit use of violence. When they returned home after graduation, they did so assured of their ability to maintain their slave society using their military training.10 When war came, the part-​time soldiers of the states mobilized. The Militia Act of 1792 limited the call-​up to ninety days; the clock started ticking in April or May for most units. When Lost Cause advocates argue that Lincoln forced loyal slave states to secede by calling out the militia, they ignore one critical fact: Lincoln had no choice. If he had not called out the militia, the Union would have had no defenders. In 1861, sixteen thousand officers and enlisted men served in the regular army; most served west of the Mississippi River in posts defending settlers against Native American threats. The closest military command, the Department of the East, counted fewer than a thousand officers and enlisted men under its command. The U.S. Army had stationed no infantry or cavalry units west of the Mississippi; eastern-​based artillery units supported fixed fortifications that defended harbors. With few options, Lincoln called on state militias and newly formed volunteer units to defend the capital and respond to South Carolina’s aggression. Inexperienced militia and volunteer units responded; the Federal government had just over three months to prepare these new soldiers for battle.11 Most Confederate forces had a head start because they seceded immediately after Lincoln’s election. South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas had already separated by early February 1861. Virginia, which seceded only after Lincoln’s call for militia to suppress the rebellion, had been at a higher readiness level since John Brown’s attack on Harpers Ferry. Right after Virginia seceded, Thomas J. Jackson, colonel in the Virginia militia, led 175 cadets to Richmond to serve as drillmasters for newly organized units; some of his former students trained his men in the Valley. Stonewall Jackson won his sobriquet when he supposedly stood like a stone wall at Manassas. While some have claimed this was apocryphal, his units most certainly stood firm in the face of enemy fire, their ability to stand against Federal forces due to their training. Few Union militia and volunteer units received the same type of instruction.12 As Confederate forces trained, the U.S. government moved regular army combat units from the West to the East, experienced men who proved of little use at First Bull Run. When they came east, officials formed these disparate companies into battalions, a formation smaller than the standard ten-​company regiment. While having an experienced

86   Barbara A. Gannon regular army unit better trained than newly recruited units might be valuable, success in mid-​nineteenth-​century warfare required that each unit in a battle line reach a certain level of proficiency; otherwise, the line would break at a weak point. When one section gives way, the rest of the line’s position becomes untenable. Surrounded by ill-​trained state units, these men could not forestall a Confederate victory. Regular army soldiers served throughout the Civil War, even after this defeat. The Federal government increased the size of the regular army and organized more units. While enlarging the number of available units, the government maintained the integrity of its regular regiments. Some regular officers received commissions to command volunteer units. Some of these men resigned from the U.S. Army and received Confederate commissions. Still others had left the army before the war, when slow promotions and meager pay made active duty miserable, and returned to wartime service in volunteer units. While experience helped, even regular officers lacked the training to perform their duties. Men who had commanded companies found themselves commanding regiments, brigades, divisions, and field armies. Ironically, professionals on both sides had as much to learn as their volunteer counterparts. The regular army had other professionals that remained underutilized throughout the war:  noncommissioned officers. Using these men to train state units may have been a better use of an experienced force. Despite any potential value added, Americans would have rejected the idea that regulars should train and discipline militia or volunteers because of long-​held notions on the relationship between Federally raised units and those organized by the separate states. Like the regulars, Confederate and U.S.  forces converged on Washington and Richmond in spring of 1861. Everyone, in particular temporary soldiers on both sides, wanted action. Each side believed the other less capable. Confederate forces seem to have some understanding that their more militarized society had an edge. They couched this superiority in terms of manliness, honor, and courage to support the notion that one of them could beat ten Yankees. Union forces may have felt the same way, but much of their faith in victory may have reflected the president’s and others’ view that secession was the action of a few, rejected by the many. One defeat would bring hidden Southern loyalists to their senses. Like their subordinates, both U.S.  and Confederate commanders hoped that they might win a victory that would end the war quickly; however, neither group had commanded this many troops in combat. The commander of the Union forces, Irvin McDowell, served in the adjutant general’s office before the war. He would, perhaps unfairly, be blamed for the defeat. His counterpart, Brig. Gen. Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, had commanded troops at Charleston, South Carolina, during the Fort Sumter crisis. Ironically, he failed to gain the long-​term career advantage from this first victory because he did not get along with Davis. Davis’s faith in his own judgment based on his previous military experience may partly explain Lincoln’s ultimate victory. Because Davis knew so much about military affairs, he seemed less able to adapt to the unprecedented challenges of the Civil War. Lincoln did better because he knew less and learned more over the four-​year struggle.

First Bull Run/Manassas    87 Despite their lack of recent combat experience, McDowell and Beauregard had fought in Mexico and were well trained in contemporary military tactics. Both men planned to outflank the other by attacking on the left. Flank attacks targeted soldiers facing away from the attacking force. These men could not quickly respond to attack on the side of their formation; this vulnerability often led to a panicked rout. Despite the advantages inherent in this tactic, it required units to perform complicated maneuvers, which inexperienced soldiers and officers on each side had problems executing. It was not merely individual experience but collective experience that mattered; a well-​trained soldier in the middle of an untrained unit does little good. Flanking maneuvers required companies, regiments, and brigades to move and attack together. The plan did not suit green troops except on a map, where all plans work. Who were the men who would execute this complex series of commands? The order of battle, the list of units involved in any action, tells you a great deal about First Bull Run. Union forces consisted of five divisions that included about thirty-​five thousand men. While small compared to later Civil War armies, it represented the largest U.S. field army in American history to that date. Each division had two to four brigades composed of subordinate regiments. The second brigade of the second division included three regular battalions, a group of companies not large enough to be a regiment. One battalion included Marine Corps units, most of whom had only recently been recruited and were little better than novice volunteers. Another battalion included cavalry troopers who performed that function for the advancing Union forces. The regular infantry battalions consisted of companies from various regiments that had made it to the East in time for the battle. These units had not fought or served together; however, that made little difference because antebellum infantry units operated from small forts or military installations with only one or two companies. Most had not even been drilled in regiment-​or brigade-​level tactics. In addition to regular cavalry and infantry units, U.S. regular artillery units augmented volunteer artillery units. Artillery proficiency might have turned defeat into victory; however, when the battle began, McDowell placed these batteries too far forward, exposing them to enemy fire. It might have been McDowell’s lack of recent experience in combat units that explains this placement. Some of his subordinates had trained at West Point but had left the army before the war. Ironically, Col. William T. Sherman served as superintendent of the Louisiana Military Academy before he returned to the army. Neither Sherman nor any of his fellow officers had ever commanded as much as a regiment in battle.13 The rest of the army was a mix of volunteers and militiamen who knew little about soldiering and nothing about fighting. One brigade was composed entirely of New Jersey troops; about half of the regiment consisted of three-​year volunteers and the other half were militia on a ninety-​day call-​up. Between their enlistment and their movement into enemy territory, recruits from the loyal states had little training and discipline. As a result, Union recruits broke ranks and stole food as they advanced toward Richmond. Because of their straggling, it took too much time for Union forces to travel less than thirty miles. McDowell began his march on July 16, and the battle started in Manassas on July 21; the delay allowed the Confederate Army to concentrate.

88   Barbara A. Gannon

Map 4.1  First Bull Run

The Confederate Army defending northern Virginia consisted of approximately thirty-​two thousand men organized in brigades as part of two armies. These units may have had many of the same problems as U.S. forces; however, they stood on the defense, and that made their task easier. Like their Northern counterparts, regulars commanded Confederate brigades. Brig. Gen. James Longstreet’s, Brig. Gen. R. S. Ewell’s, and Col. Jubal Early’s units camped near Manassas. Army commander Gen. Joseph E. Johnston and his subordinate Brig. Gen. Thomas J. Jackson, along with their brigades, guarded the Shenandoah Valley. On July 18, Johnston was advised to reinforce Beauregard to stop McDowell, giving Valley forces three days to move east. Jackson marched to Manassas and Johnston came by train, arriving in time for McDowell’s attack. Union forces had another eighteen thousand men shadowing Johnston near the Valley; however, these men did not move because Confederate cavalry screened Johnston’s movement. If they had responded to this redeployment, they likely would not have been able to advance as quickly as Johnston, who had the benefit of being closer to Manassas and near a railroad.14 Despite Confederate reinforcements, U.S.  forces did well in the battle’s first hours and pushed back the enemy. McDowell divided his men into separate columns, using one force to attack the left flank of the Confederate Army across Sudley Ford while holding potential Confederate reinforcements in place on Warrenton Pike, near a stone bridge. The Confederates had a similar plan, but McDowell struck first. Success came after a hard-​fought battle on Mathews Hill. Critical to Union success was the arrival of

First Bull Run/Manassas    89 Sherman, who commanded a mix of volunteers, militia, and regular artillery. At noon, inexperienced Union soldiers celebrated, thinking they had won the battle. Confederate forces retreated to Henry Hill, where, instead of attacking the Federal army, they set up a defensive line. For much of the afternoon, the fighting went back and forth because McDowell never attacked with all of his forces; instead, he committed his units in a piecemeal fashion. While this may have been a command failure, coordinating an infantry attack by forces of such differing experience would have challenged the most capable commander. Inexperienced men do better on the defense than the offense because they merely need to stay still and shoot; soldiers on the offense must move forward together into withering fire. By the end of the day, both sides were exhausted, but Confederate forces stood fast defending Henry Hill. Artillery and cavalry also played a role in this battle. Both sides seemed to be reenacting Mexican War campaigns by using their artillery aggressively; there was a great deal of capturing and recapturing of guns. In the Mexican War, light artillery flew around the battlefield and proved decisive against the Mexican Army; heavier artillery units in the Civil War proved less crucial. In contrast, Confederate cavalry made a difference, breaking Union lines at a critical juncture. Green Union soldiers must have seemed like slaves, easily run down by Confederate men on horseback. In later battles, cavalrymen never had the same success; well-​trained infantry knew how to form a series of lines arrayed in a box formation, a square. Most cavalry commanders did not take that risk against infantrymen armed with bayonets arrayed in this formation. Despite the success of the cavalry, infantry won or lost Civil War battles. The climactic movement came when Confederate reinforcements from the Shenandoah Valley arrived and struck the Union Army’s right flank. In the type of linear warfare fought during the Civil War, the battle line’s strength equals its weakest link. The Union Army had many weak links, and they broke. The regular infantry played a critical role, but only after inexperienced soldiers panicked; regulars covered the retreat. Despite their hard-​ fought delaying action, volunteer and militia units lost all cohesion, threw away their equipment, and ran all the way back to Washington. Confederate forces emerged victorious, but they exhausted themselves with their victory. The last battle of the antebellum era was over. Both armies, both societies, had to face a new reality and construct a military culture suitable for war. Despite everyone’s despair over casualties, it was not the bloodiest day of the war, or the second, the third, or even the tenth bloodiest. Those milestones lay ahead. Despite the need for men, militia forces played a limited role in this struggle. Most men on both sides served as state volunteers. Federal forces had the farthest to go in training; Lincoln soon realized that one side was not as green as the other. As a result, he called Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan to Washington from a small-​scale but successful campaign in the future state of West Virginia to create a new Federal army from the remnants of McDowell’s force. McClellan would succeed. The separate states organized volunteer units; however, after they mustered into service they received the same type of training, particularly drilling, that regular units experienced. Using manuals written in peacetime by the U.S. Army, state volunteers—​enlisted men and officers—​drilled in

90   Barbara A. Gannon small and large units until they became proficient soldiers. Given time, other generals built Northern armies composed of western men to invade the Confederate heartland. Eventually these eastern and western armies included Black men who fled a society that had fewer white men at home to enforce the slave regime. Slave patrollers gave the Confederacy an edge when the war began. When they left the local roads and no longer lashed slaves bloody, enslaved men and women fled to freedom. When the formerly enslaved presented themselves to Union officials in the months after Bull Run, a decision had to be made: would Union soldiers become slave patrollers and return these men and women to their masters? Ultimately the Union Army refused and became a liberating army. The Confederates who survived First Bull Run were many of the same men who won at Second Bull Run because those who enlisted for one year in April 1861 had their enlistment contracts changed. By law, they were compelled to serve until the war’s end; when this measure failed to provide enough soldiers, a conscription law passed, making every man of military age liable for Confederate service. The government exempted ministers, teachers, and those needed to force twenty slaves to labor, too few to maintain a slave regime. In contrast, the U.S. government honored enlistment contracts. A three-​ month or a three-​year enlistment ended when the soldier completed his term of service. The Northern draft was less onerous. Free states attempted to fill their quotas with enlistment bounties for volunteers. Only those who know nothing about antebellum Southern society would find it ironic that the Confederate national government forced so many to perform military duties. A society that for centuries held people to forced labor had little trouble forcing its citizens to fight.15 As time passed, the Southern edge diminished. Union soldiers through fire and trial learned how to soldier, and their commanders learned how to command—​not merely in the sense of flanking movements, though they learned that too, but understanding how to move troops and supplies across continents. Fighting alongside their formerly enslaved comrades, they learned the profession of arms and eventually triumphed. Ultimately the Union had its edge; its way of life, a nation of free men engaged in commerce and small farming, had a decided advantage in modern warfare. Only in memory do gallant cavaliers from a superior society lose to superior numbers of less capable free men. In reality, industrial warfare requires harnessing the voluntary efforts of a committed people. Ironically, the fairy tale that rests on the blood and sweat of a captive people won the battle of memory as decisively as the Confederates won First Bull Run.

Notes 1. James M. McPherson, Tried by War:  Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief (New York: Penguin Press, 2008), 39. McDowell is the source of this quote, but he does not say who said it in his congressional testimony. See U.S. Congress, Senate, Report on the Joint Committee of the Conduct of the War, vol. 2, 37th Cong., 3rd Sess. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1863), 38.

First Bull Run/Manassas    91 2. David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 44–​45. 3. Allan Reed Millett, Peter Maslowski, and William B. Feis, For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States from 1607 to 2012 (New York: Free Press, 2012), 655. 4. Richard Bruce Winders, Mr. Polk’s Army: The American Military Experience in the Mexican War (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2020); John K. Mahon, The History of the Second Seminole War (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2010). 5. Marcus Cunliffe, Soldiers and Civilians:  The Martial Spirit in America, 1775–​ 1865 (New York: Free Press, 1973), 218. 6. Sally E. Haden, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). 7. U.S. Congress, Senate, Report of the Secretary of War Communicating an Abstract of the Return of the Militia of all the States and Territories, with their Arms, Accoutrements, and Ammunition. 33rd Cong., 1st sess. (1854), Ex. Doc. No. 30 (Washington D.C.: n.p., 1854). 8. U.S. Congress, Senate, Report of the Secretary of War, Ex. Doc. No. 30. 9. U.S. Congress, Senate, Report of the Secretary of War, Ex. Doc. No. 30. 10. Rod Andrew Jr., Long Gray Lines:  The Southern Military School Tradition, 1839–​1915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 8–​28. 11. Clayton R. Newell, The Regular Army before the Civil War, 1845–​1860 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Army Center for Military History, 2014), 50–​53; U.S. War Department, Report of the Secretary of War, which Accompanied the Annual Message of the President of the United States, to Both Houses of the Second Session of the Thirty-​sixth Congress (Washington, D.C.: George W. Bowman Printers, 1860), 215–​216. 12. Byron Farwell, Stonewall: A Biography of General Thomas J. Jackson (New York: Norton, 1993), 149. 13. Ted Ballard, Staff Ride Guide: The First Battle of Bull Run (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Army Center for Military History, 2007), 46–​50; Timothy Reese, “Squared Away: The Regular Infantry Battalion at First Bull Run,” On Point 10, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 9–​14. 14. Ballard, Staff Ride Guide, 53. 15. James W. Geary, We Need Men: The Union Draft in the Civil War (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1991); Albert Burton Moore, Conscription and Conflict in the Confederacy (New York: Macmillan, 1924).

Bibliography Coffman, Edward M. The Old Army: A Portrait of the American Army in Peacetime, 1784–​1898. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Cooper, William J. Jefferson Davis and the Civil War Era. Baton Rouge:  Louisiana State University Press, 2012. Cunliffe, Marcus. Soldiers and Civilians:  The Martial Spirit in America, 1775–​ 1865. New York: Free Press, 1973. Davis, William C. The Battle at Bull Run: A History of the First Major Campaign of the Civil War. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981. Donald, David Herbert. Lincoln. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995. Foote, Lorien. The Gentlemen and the Roughs:  Violence, Honor and Manhood in the Union Army. New York: New York University Press, 2010.

92   Barbara A. Gannon Hadden, Sally E. Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Hess, Earl. Civil War Infantry Tactics: Training, Combat, and Small-​Unit Effectiveness. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015. Mahon, John K. The History of the Second Seminole War. Gainesville:  University Press of Florida, 2010. McMurry, Richard M. Two Great Rebel Armies:  An Essay in Confederate Military History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989. McPherson, James M. Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. McPherson, James M. Tried by War:  Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief. New York: Penguin Press, 2008. Millett, Allan Reed, Peter Maslowski, and William B. Feis. For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States from 1607 to 2012. New York: Free Press, 2012. Rafuse, Ethan. McClellan’s War:  The Failure of Moderation in the Struggle for the Union. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. Skelton, William B. An American Profession of Arms:  The Army Officer Corps, 1784–​1861. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992. Winders, Richard Bruce. Mr. Polk’s Army: The American Military Experience in the Mexican War. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2002.

Chapter 5

E astern Kent u c ky a nd N orthwestern V i rg i nia , 1861–​1 862 Terrain and Loyalty Brian D. M c Knight

Textbooks proclaim that the first considerable battle of the Civil War took place at Manassas, Virginia, on July 21, 1861, and skip to the early 1862 fights in Kentucky and Tennessee as if the five-​month gap between Manassas and Fort Donelson was a peaceful interlude. In reality, during that gap the geographic lines along which the Civil War would be fought were being drawn along the North-​South borderland. The first skirmishes gave way to the first small battles, and then to the first campaigns, all taking place in the Appalachian region among people more concerned about their own lives than the broader questions of politics and society. In these first days of the war, the front lines were continually changing and invisibly cast across the hills and hollows of eastern Kentucky and the area of northwestern Virginia, an area that would soon declare itself independent from its seceded parent state. It was these mountaineers who witnessed the first real carnage of the war and learned how to exist in the midst of turmoil long before their neighbors in Sharpsburg and Gettysburg had to. In this fall and winter of military adolescence, these mountains came to know future Civil War luminaries like Gen. Robert E. Lee and Brig. Gen. William S. Rosecrans, learned of battles at Wildcat Mountain and Cheat Mountain, and began to realize that the military elements of a war paled in comparison to the broader implications of martial turmoil on individual lives, community stability, civil authority, and regional society. The residents of Virginia’s northwestern counties knew they had been co-​opted by subversive elements to their south and east. Only four days after the Virginia convention’s vote for secession, loyal Unionists from Monongalia County met and adopted resolutions opposing the state’s leaving the Union. For the next month and a half, feelings of betrayal and abandonment festered within the pro-​Union populace of

94   Brian D. McKnight northwestern Virginia. On May 3, Governor John Letcher asked for volunteers to serve the state and, by extension, the Confederacy. Richmond knew this move would be unpopular in the northwestern section of the state, so news of the move was not widely circulated in that region, and the only declared encampment was located near the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad at Grafton. In the meantime, Confederate Col. George Porterfield had been ordered to the region to recruit from a reluctant populace and by June had assembled only a small army poorly trained and equipped. Although the numbers were low and supplies were sparse, supporters of the Confederate cause were eager and active recruiters. The Upshur Grays, with mostly teenagers and an eighteen-​year-​old captain, were representative of Confederate recruiting in the region. Indeed the Confederate effort was haphazard. Soldiers pulled up lead pipes to make bullets, ate meals with civilians, and, in the midst of it all, had overwhelming confidence. One captain even swore he could whip Lincoln’s seventy-​five thousand volunteers with a peach tree switch if they invaded Virginia.

Map 5.1  West Virginia, 1861–1862

Eastern Kentucky and Northwestern Virginia, 1861–1862    95 Porterfield, a graduate of the Virginia Military Institute and veteran of the Mexican War, arrived in the midst of this regional chaos just in time for the Union attack on Grafton. Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan, in command of the Department of the Ohio and eager to strike the first blow in the region, ordered Col. Benjamin Kelley to move on Grafton. What resulted was the beginning of the war’s first proper campaign, and on June 3, it all came together at Philippi—​the first organized combat action of the Civil War. Union Brig. Gen. Thomas A. Morris reported that after securing the B&O Railroad, his men occupied Grafton, which straddled the Tygart Valley River through which the railroad ran. By holding the B&O, Morris secured one of the most important rail routes for the United States and ensured that it continued to connect the middle seaboard with the heartland of the Midwest.1 In the face of this larger Union force, the Confederates abandoned Grafton and retreated fifteen miles south to Philippi, where they relaxed in the knowledge that they could easily move further south, if necessary. With stories emerging daily about Confederates having harassed civilians, Morris ordered his men to march to Philippi and “dislodge and disperse them from their new position.”2 In the meantime, several local women warned Porterfield of the Union advance, but believing that an attack was not imminent, the Confederate commander moved slowly. However, Kelley had moved quickly, and his attack resulted in the scattering of about two thousand unsuspecting Confederates who were “in great confusion driven before our troops for several miles towards Beverly.” Northern newspapers dubbed this rout the “Philippi Races.” The weather confounded the eager Federals who, despite killing and wounding numerous men and capturing the abandoned Confederate munitions, attempted to overcome their exhaustion and the muddy conditions to overtake the Southern column. Morris added, “Had the attack been supported by a few companies of cavalry, it is probable that many of the enemy would have been captured or cut to pieces” and “[Since] I have no available troops of that description in my department, I would . . . urge upon the consideration . . . the importance of a mounted force . . . to insure the success of future operations in this department.”3 In this borderland region, among a population with competing loyalties, military commanders learned quickly to judge the veracity of intelligence reports. Although the fight began on June 3, the Federals initially planned to move on the first day of the month. When Morris arrived on June 1, he postponed the attack for one day in order to allow better preparation, and then postponed it a second day. “Having satisfied myself during the evening that we were in the midst of spies, who readily obtained every information in regard to our movements,” he arranged “the expedition so as to give a false impression, and thereby secure the advantage of a surprise of the enemy.”4 Similarly, in his report Morris noted that he wished to drive the Confederates out of Grafton “[t]‌o prevent their further outrages upon the railroads or upon the property of loyal citizens” and “that the effect of this decisive engagement will be to inspire the Union people of the country with confidence in our ability to afford them protection.”5 The Civil War in Appalachia was a true borderland conflict complete with a variety of complex loyalties. Whereas citizens in secure locations behind military lines usually

96   Brian D. McKnight threw their support to the dominant regional force, borderland residents could make the same choice, choose to become part of the opposition, or sit on the fence. In Appalachia, however, choosing a side did not come with the same guarantees of relative security as it did elsewhere. The residents of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, endured the war and saw enemy soldiers for only a few days, but in the eastern mountains, soldiers from different armies streamed along the roads in waves, with some communities being alternately occupied, or at least under the influence of, different forces several times throughout the war. In this event, having made a strong statement supporting one cause or the other could suddenly turn one’s greatest advantage into a fearful disability. In Appalachia, withholding one’s open advocacy until real security could be felt was often the intelligent decision. Early in the war, Kentuckian Sidney Barnes illustrated this issue when he encouraged his superiors to allow him to establish a camp in the eastern Kentucky mountains supplied with “[b]‌lankets, tents, guns, &c,” claiming that the move “will help us and give our people confidence.” He continued, “More depends on this than men ordinarily imagine. The mountain people are peculiar, and I know them.”6 Geographically, the Appalachian region taught both armies the influence of topography. The mountains served as barriers, their gaps acting as swinging gates permitting movement back and forth. This movement, however, was slowed by the narrow roads, steep terrain, poor drainage, and frequent rivers and streams. For citizens going about their day’s business, these narrow roads and steep hills did not register as serious impositions, but for military forces numbering in the thousands, the terrain choked movement to a crawl. A steep uphill section often required artillery pieces to be stopped and additional draft animals added, and steep downhill grades forced teamsters to unhook the team, turn the gun’s muzzle downhill, and rehitch the draft animals to act as brakes against the force of gravity. At the bottom of the hill, everything had to be stopped again to rehitch the teams to pull. Overall, the momentum-​sapping accordion effect on the march that could be eliminated on flat ground and good roads was more exaggerated in the mountains. On the eastern battlefields, conventional forces and tactics could glean results, but in the hills and valleys, with their funneling effects, dedicated artillery, cavalry, and infantry forces inhibited movement. Warfare in Appalachia depended on the hybridization of military forces into companies of mounted infantry, some carrying small artillery pieces strapped behind them across their saddles. Such units could move independently and rapidly and, once at their destination, could be dismounted and organized quickly. Pursuit was enhanced, as was the opportunity to retreat through the narrow passes that had granted them access in the first place. It was for these reasons that the Appalachian region saw so much small-​unit warfare. Quickly realizing that large forces would be counterproductive in such hostile terrain, both armies turned to smaller, infantry-​based units with minimal dedicated cavalry and small artillery pieces. In addition to the topography’s constraints on movement, the size of armies limited the amount of food and forage available. Mountaineers have always been small farmers by virtue of the limited fertile bottomland lying only along low and slow creeks and rivers. During the Civil War, with soldiers suddenly appearing in the region, the traditionally limited food supply was even more stressed. Taking food and

Eastern Kentucky and Northwestern Virginia, 1861–1862    97 livestock from civilians has always been an inevitable part of warfare, but in this area, where loyalties were so tenuous, this behavior might also serve as a wedge between an army and those it hoped to protect. In sum, while Appalachia is often viewed as a backwater that saw little Civil War activity, the reality is much more complex. The uniqueness of the Appalachian Civil War experience was not isolated to military or social matters; politics also played a significant role. Feeling that they had been forced out of the Union by an unrepresentative delegation in Richmond, Virginia’s northwestern counties seceded from the state and returned to their prewar nation on June 11 in a convention at Wheeling. Although the convention had been scheduled prior to the victories at Grafton and Phillipi, the recent successes had emboldened the region’s Unionists. As large numbers of pro-​Union delegates arrived in town, there was little doubt that an opposition government would be established, and over the coming days the nuts and bolts of the region’s formal reunification with the United States were worked out. On June 19, the delegates in Wheeling voted unanimously for the “Restored Government” of Virginia and sent their new declaration to Washington. On August 6, this newly recognized legislative body met and began the process of applying for statehood. In Washington, President Lincoln could see the potential benefits of this episode of countersecession. Always skeptical of the right of a state to leave the Union, Lincoln held fast to that philosophical point by arguing that these disaffected counties had been forcibly removed from the Union and their secession from Virginia was done in order to rejoin the United States. He also did not believe that a majority of qualified voters in many Southern states, with the exception of South Carolina, favored secession.7 With these setbacks, one might expect a full Confederate retreat. In reality, the Confederacy’s commitment to controlling Virginia’s western region was as strong as ever. Just a week after Philippi, Lee sent Brig. Gen. Robert S.  Garnett to replace Porterfield. Garnett surveyed the state of his command and reported to Samuel Cooper, his successor to the position of adjutant general of the Confederate Army, that his men had occupied passes at Laurel Hill and Rich Mountain but were without the supplies and strength necessary to hold their positions against a determined enemy. To be sure, the Union Army in the vicinity was a determined enemy. Facing six thousand Union soldiers and a few pieces of artillery at Philippi and four thousand men at Grafton, Garnett felt hopeful that his much smaller force could, with the help of the terrain, hold the passes, but keeping the railroad would be much more difficult. While Garnett worried about holding the B&O, McClellan thought in more comprehensive terms. Commanding from Parkersburg, McClellan envisioned an advance on Cheat River, one hundred miles due east of his position. Moving his sizable army there would essentially draw a Union line across western Virginia, connecting it with the southern border of western Maryland and protecting the B&O along the way. From this position, the Union Army would have a clear line from which to operate south against Confederates in the region and ultimately penetrate into the eastern and southern reaches of Virginia. Unlike the reputation he would earn later in the war, McClellan did not dawdle. By July 5 he was in Buckhannon, and four days later he was at Rich Mountain ready to meet Brig. Gen. John Pegram’s Confederates, who were well

98   Brian D. McKnight placed at the foot of the mountain. With the help of a young local guide, a detachment of Union soldiers was led around the mountain and into Pegram’s rear. The plan was that once William S. Rosecrans’s men began firing into the Confederate rear, McClellan would attack from the front. But confused by the location of the early firing, McClellan stayed put and inadvertently gave Rosecrans all the glory for the victory. By the next day, Pegram’s remaining force had disintegrated around him, and he surrendered on the night of July 12 and 13. The Federals had lost fewer than fifty men. With Pegram out of the picture and the major road between Parkersburg and Staunton now in the hands of McClellan’s remaining brigade, the remaining Confederates in the region retreated east toward the Cheat River, hoping to get within reach of the Shenandoah Valley. On July 13, the two sides clashed again at Corrick’s Ford, resulting in a decisive Union victory, and although the Confederates escaped, McClellan had won the Union’s greatest victory of the early war. After the two victories, McClellan’s Union Army moved south into Huttonsville, where it forced seventeen Confederate regiments to hold their positions at Monterey and Huntersville and watch Brig. Gen. Jacob D. Cox ascend the Kanawha to take Charleston on July 25.8 The strong Union showing and the weak Confederate responses signaled changes for both armies in the region. By August, McClellan was promoted to command Lincoln’s armies and Lee had been sent to take over Confederate efforts in western Virginia. Replacing McClellan was Rosecrans, who now faced a determined Lee. Newly arrived from Richmond, Lee surveyed the line and concluded that the only way to break it was to launch an offensive, for which his army was not prepared. The roads were flooded, the men constantly ill, and the army itself green and scattered for better foraging. Emory Thomas suggests that Lee saw his role in West Virginia as a coordinator of the various Confederate forces present rather than overall commander. One must wonder, however, why Lee would approach his role so tepidly. On August 31, he officially became the third highest ranking general in the Confederate Army, so he certainly had the authority to make nearly anyone do as he wished. It is possible that Lee saw such little hope for the overall operation that he sought to distance himself from its inevitable failure. The fall campaign would be a short one, although it began with much promise for both sides. The one opportunity that Lee could see was concentrating forces for an assault on Cheat Mountain. His gentle prodding of subordinates could not make them move, however, and as a result he lost the initiative to Rosecrans. Although Lee had been sent to western Virginia to initiate a campaign, it was Rosecrans who felt the pressure to outperform his now exceedingly well-​placed predecessor. On August 26, Confederates initiated the short, but sharp, Battle of Kessler’s Cross Lanes, which resulted in a few dozen casualties. Two weeks later, on September 10, while Lee was preparing his advance on Cheat Mountain, Rosecrans ordered his men forward to Carnifex Ferry. There Confederate Brig. Gen. John Floyd had concentrated his 1,800 men in the face of Rosecrans’s 5,000 Federals. Several times that day, Floyd had requested reinforcements, but none came. Standing alone, Floyd’s men were dug in and performed well against Rosecrans’s larger force but were shaken by the superior Federal artillery. The battle continued all day, and after night fell, Floyd abandoned his camp and withdrew his army

Eastern Kentucky and Northwestern Virginia, 1861–1862    99 across the Gauley. The next day he was in retreat toward Lewisburg, leaving the western end of northwestern Virginia in Union hands. The day after Carnifex Ferry, Lee initiated the Cheat Mountain Campaign, nearly a hundred miles east of Floyd’s defeat. For the Confederacy, the morning of September 12 started perfectly. Charged with leading the way up Cheat Mountain, Col. Albert Rust initiated an early assault on exterior Federal units but permitted himself to be convinced that they were large in number, well entrenched, and fully informed that a Confederate attack was imminent. He decided that moving forward with the assault would be foolish, and since he did not attack, none of the other commanders advanced, prompting Lee to call off the general attack. Lee was mortified that his well-​laid plan had been compromised by poor intelligence and a weak commander’s case of nerves and that his initial foray into Civil War combat had suffered an embarrassing failure. Within days of the Confederacy’s missed opportunity at Cheat Mountain, zealous Southern commanders to the west began pressing into the Kentucky mountains. In order for the Confederacy to gain free access to the Kentucky heartland, it had to control the entry points. One of the most important of these avenues was along the Wilderness Road as it passed through Cumberland Gap and meandered into the Bluegrass region of central Kentucky. The Confederate commander tasked with controlling Cumberland Gap was a terribly nearsighted former journalist with no military experience named Brig. Gen. Felix K. Zollicoffer. Zollicoffer saw an opportunity at the Gap. With only a single road leading north, he reasoned that while the Gap was safe as it stood at that moment in August 1861, if he moved a significant portion of his army forward to Cumberland Ford, he could use the Gap as a destination of retreat, if necessary. On September 19, he ordered his men out of the newly established Camp Buckner at Cumberland Ford and forward toward Barbourville, where they expected to find a thousand Union soldiers. When the Confederates arrived, Zollicoffer learned that the Union troops had departed, leaving behind a handful of Home Guards. After a spirited skirmish, the Confederates brushed the civilians aside and relaxed, having won the first engagement in Kentucky. Along the borderland, which the Federals tried to ignore while the Confederates considered it a legitimate international boundary, the early days of the Civil War saw active interplay between the military and civilian populations. Often in history war has been treated as separate from society. In reality, those two elements have never been separated, and during Appalachia’s Civil War armies and civilians very often occupied the same space, exerting influence over one another. Civilians could conspire against their occupiers, or occupying forces could seek to gain local favor. On the very day of the Confederate victory at Barbourville, Zollicoffer’s men broke into the courthouse and dragged tax records out into the street and burned them. Having symbolically freed the citizens of Knox County, Kentucky, of their oppression, Confederates now felt they had a chance to win local support for their cause and maybe even enlist some recruits. On September 23, about seventy miles west of Barbourville, a band of Confederate partisans rode into Albany, Kentucky, robbing the stores and individuals on the street, including stands of arms stored in town for use by the state militia. By the time Union

100   Brian D. McKnight

Map 5.2  East Kentucky, 1861–1862

soldiers arrived later that day, the offenders were gone. With frustration still boiling, they rounded up suspected Confederate sympathizers and threw them in jail in the hopes that it would temper local enthusiasm for secession and revolt. Hearing about the arrests, Confederates in nearby Tennessee rode into Albany and drove the Union men out and released their prisoners. By the end of the month, Union soldiers had returned to Albany. Zollicoffer’s initial military foray into Kentucky had turned out well, and he was determined to maintain his momentum. He began looking deeper into Kentucky for his next opportunity and reasoned that if he could remain on the Wilderness Road, he would be making his own travel easier, restricting the movement of his enemies, and essentially enforcing civil authority along the way. By the end of September, he had moved north and threatened Laurel Bridge, which crossed the Rockcastle River, and, having used that movement as a diversion, had ordered his men to Goose Creek Salt Works near Manchester. Driving around a thousand Union soldiers back toward the river, Zollicoffer’s Confederates not only took the bridge but also captured a considerable amount of military supplies. The other wing of Zollicoffer’s force moved on Manchester and over the coming days took two hundred barrels of salt back to Cumberland Gap. Surprisingly, Zollicoffer recognized that the nature of the early war in Appalachia was winning hearts and minds. When he took the salt from the works, he left receipts payable by the Confederacy at forty cents per bushel. He wrote to Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston,

Eastern Kentucky and Northwestern Virginia, 1861–1862    101 in command of the Confederacy’s Western Department, that he was doing his best to respect “the rights of the citizens, and am making some favorable impression on their sentiments I hope.”9 The reality was not so rosy. He was soon forced to acknowledge depredations committed by his men, undermining his efforts of “conciliating masses of ignorant people here who were hostile because they were told we would have no respect for their personal or property rights.”10 Within weeks of the raid on the saltworks, Zollicoffer was moving on Laurel Bridge again. With news that 4,500 Union soldiers had moved out of Camp Dick Robinson in the direction of his force, the Confederate general essentially planned to advance up the Wilderness Road and fight the enemy where he found them. If he achieved a victory there, he would turn southwest and force eight hundred Union soldiers out of Albany, essentially clearing eastern Kentucky of the Union threat. With luck and skill, Zollicoffer would open Kentucky’s Bluegrass region to the Confederacy and secure the eastern half of the state. In the fall of 1861, few Confederate commanders could match Zollicoffer’s speed and success. On October 3, Johnston gave him permission to operate freely against Union forces in the region, and the next day Zollicoffer ordered a cavalry company out of London, Kentucky, to scout the road ahead. They found 3,300 Federals encamped at the junction of the Wilderness Road and the Richmond Road, just short of the Rockcastle River. The new bivouac was Camp Wildcat. It was at this point that the tide turned against Zollicoffer. His supplies began to fail him, and nothing he could do could make them appear in sufficient number or quickly enough to permit him to comfortably advance. After a week of delays, he had gathered enough supplies for the movement, but he had ceded the element of surprise. Union forces at Camp Wildcat knew he was nearby and could surmise his intent. The Union commander, Col. T.  T. Garrard, was panicked by news that Zollicoffer’s force was marching toward his position and messaged Brig. Gen. George Thomas for more men and artillery. Garrard surmised that Zollicoffer’s force was larger than six thousand men and was clearly intimidated by the prospects of meeting such a column. Thomas ordered Brig. Gen. Albin Schoepf, a native of Poland with an impressive résumé in the Austrian Army, to command Union forces on the Rockcastle, and Schoepf immediately departed for his new station. The Battle of Wildcat Mountain began on the morning of October 21 with Zollicoffer sending his army uphill into a funneling draw toward Schoepf ’s Federals. Advancing up the Wilderness Road, with steep and high ridges on each side, the Confederates spent the early morning clearing the path forward of downed trees. Only two hundred yards east of Zollicoffer’s advance stood Round Hill. It was the high ground, and while Schoepf did not seem to immediately recognize its potential, his subordinate commanders did and they urged him to shift a significant portion of their manpower to give them access to Zollicoffer’s now broadside column. Throughout the afternoon and evening, Zollicoffer continued to press his men forward in the hopes that he could either split or dislodge Schoepf ’s command, but nothing seemed to work. By nightfall

102   Brian D. McKnight the battle was over. The defeated Zollicoffer retreated toward Cumberland Gap. They reached Camp Buckner at Cumberland Ford on October 23, and a week later they had returned to the Gap.11 After only a few days back at Cumberland Gap, Zollicoffer resumed his self-​realized Kentucky Campaign by moving on Monticello, seventy miles west. Having just traveled the Wilderness Road back from Camp Wildcat, he knew it was in terrible shape, so he moved his army due west through Jacksboro, Tennessee, toward Jamestown, where he turned north to Monticello. Zollicoffer had heard that Monticello was not occupied by any Federal forces, so he surmised that it would be an easy target in an area in need of a protective force and a good position from which he could continue to move toward the Bluegrass. However, his once bright star had faded. With most of the questions relatively settled in northwestern Virginia and Zollicoffer moving west toward his destiny at Mill Springs, the Big Sandy Valley that separated Virginia from Kentucky became a locus of activity. The Union had been aggressive in the mountains of eastern Kentucky since summer, trying to tie into their newly established line through northwestern Virginia. They had pressed Confederates in the region to the point that Col. John S. Williams had abandoned Prestonsburg, taking his “unarmed and unorganized” troops with him because he “had not two rounds of ammunition” there. He lamented, “The enemy has pressed me so hard that I have not even had time to complete the muster rolls of the companies.” Falling back to meet his supplies at Piketon, Williams ordered Capt. Andrew Jackson May forward to check Union Brig. Gen. William “Bull” Nelson’s advance.12 May took up a strong position overlooking Ivy Creek and waited for Nelson’s arrival. He did not have to wait long, as Nelson’s men marched into view on November 9. May was a native of nearby Prestonsburg, and the property on which he made his stand that day was owned by his father-​in-​law, so he had an intimate knowledge of the region and terrain that others did not. He chose well, concealing his men while giving them a clear view of the approaching road and the crossing below. May estimated he had about 250 men with him that day, among them “some citizens, having joined me on the march,” but his company was not well enough armed to legitimately resist Nelson’s estimated 1,500 Federals. He recalled that about “[o]‌ne hundred . . . were armed with muskets,” a few dozen with Enfields, but the remainder had “squirrel rifles and shotguns.” As Nelson approached, his force would be descending opposite of and in clear view of the Confederates along a seven-​foot-​wide road essentially cut into a gorge.13 May’s small force waited patiently until the head of Nelson’s column reached a pinch point on the road before they opened fire. Pinned down in the road by an enemy they could not see, the Federals dove for cover and hoped that the powder smoke would obscure their positions. The Confederates had Nelson’s force in a bad spot until the men of the 59th Ohio scaled a nearby ridge and gained a view of the enemy. May’s men, now being fired down upon, quickly retreated toward Piketon, leaving hundreds of downed trees across the road. The brief but sharp fight resulted in the most significant force not only retreating to Piketon but being beaten the next day by men from

Eastern Kentucky and Northwestern Virginia, 1861–1862    103 the 33rd Ohio and driven even further back to Pound Gap, the area’s most accessible entry into Virginia. With winter coming on and resupply in the mountains a tenuous operation at best, Nelson withdrew his force from eastern Kentucky, essentially giving it back to the Confederates with confidence that he would not have a hard time retaking the ground, if called upon to do so. This was Brig. Gen. Humphrey Marshall’s opportunity to retake ground—​even if it had been simply abandoned—​and declare his movement some kind of success. For Marshall, it was not so much the opportunity to take territory as it was a chance for him, a Kentuckian, to recruit fellow Kentuckians, but he was hamstrung by the nature of his command. Many Appalachian Virginians had joined state guard units under the provision that they could not be forced to leave their home counties. Although Marshall’s force appeared numerically strong in comparison to other regional forces throughout the war, a significant portion of it was anchored and could not be moved as a result of this peculiar circumstance of enlistment. In early December, coinciding with Zollicoffer’s movement to Mill Springs and Marshall’s longtime nemesis George Crittenden’s taking command of Confederate forces in the region, Marshall, citing a lack of forage in southwestern Virginia, ordered his men into eastern Kentucky. Marching fast, his men arrived at what they dubbed “Camp Recovery” near Prestonsburg. Throughout the month of December, Marshall kept his men busy by ordering them to confiscate food and forage, recruit soldiers, and appear as a stabilizing force in an unstable region. Marshall’s presence in the Big Sandy Valley forced a Federal move. Maj. Gen. Don Carlos Buell created the 18th Brigade for the specific purpose of evicting Marshall and his Confederates. Commanding the 18th was Col. James A. Garfield of Ohio, who was young, energetic, and ambitious. He moved his nine hundred men up the Big Sandy River and over the muddy roads, finally locating Marshall’s force near Paintsville, Kentucky. Marshall had chosen Hagar’s Farm as his preferred defensive location, but Garfield had split his force and put Marshall between the jaws of a vise. Marshall retreated to near the mouth of Middle Creek, where he had a clear view of the road to Virginia. On January 9, 1862, the Battle of Middle Creek got underway. After suffering a humiliating defeat the day before in a heavy skirmish at Jenny’s Creek, Marshall, a member of West Point’s class of 1832, was given a letter signed by all of his company commanders declaring “that we can accomplish no good result this winter” and that they could not sacrifice their men because the men’s “friends and families look to us for their safety and preservation.” While not open mutiny, the message was clear:  Marshall’s men did not savor the fight and he would struggle to compel them. With roughly twice Garfield’s numbers, Marshall hoped that a rousing victory would erase the pessimism permeating his command. He had a good position and expected the enemy to walk right into his trap. By 8:00 a.m. the skirmishing began, and by noon Garfield still did not know the exact location of Marshall’s well-​concealed men along the ridgelines. Desperate, he sent a unit across an open field to draw a mass of enemy fire. He found the

104   Brian D. McKnight enemy, and the two armies fought for four desperate hours. The Battle of Middle Creek resulted in a clear draw, but that did not prevent both commanders from reporting to their superiors that they had won. Although both armies retreated from the field and licked their wounds, Marshall’s force was beginning to weaken; Garfield realized it and remained aggressive. Within weeks he had pushed the Confederates out of the eastern Kentucky mountains.14 Zollicoffer’s final battle got underway on January 19, 1862, at Mill Springs, on the Cumberland River. With Marshall tied up in eastern Kentucky and assaults on Forts Henry and Donelson in Tennessee expected, the Confederacy had ordered Zollicoffer to advance into Kentucky to the south bank of the Cumberland, but he took the initiative to cross the river in anticipation of an opportunity to launch an attack against an expected Federal force. The new commander, George B. Crittenden, urged Zollicoffer to recross the river to the safer south bank, but he failed to act quickly. Crittenden, forced to join Zollicoffer on the north bank, now faced an advancing Union force with the swollen river at his back. Hoping to gain an advantage, Confederates moved forward out of their precarious position into the darkness and heavy rain. This was the point at which Zollicoffer moved too far ahead and unknowingly entered enemy lines, where he gave Federal soldiers orders and was killed when they realized his mistake. After a brief Confederate rally, Union commander George Thomas brought forward more of his men and pushed Crittenden’s force back against the river by nightfall. With the disaster complete, Crittenden withdrew his men across the swollen Cumberland that night. The result of the Confederate failure at Mill Springs was that the defensive line the Confederates had drawn across southern Kentucky was now broken.15 Soon the breach would expand as Federal forces took Forts Henry and Donelson. By spring Nashville had fallen, Unionist sentiment was growing in eastern Tennessee, and the suddenly energized Union Army was plunging deep into the Confederate heartland, where it would win a decisive battle at Shiloh and take control of important rail junctions in northern Mississippi. Looking back at the Civil War more than 150 years later, it is easy to see the long shadows of Gettysburg, Antietam, and Vicksburg. At the time, however, the view was very different. During the first six months of combat, the war was one of small units fighting brief but ferocious battles in areas even then considered to be political and cultural backwaters. Backwaters they were, but they held the roads, rails, and mountain passes that enabled the coming conflict of large armies on great fields of battle. In reality, these early, small campaigns have been overlooked as defining elements of the United States’ greatest conflict.

Notes 1. Mark A. Snell, West Virginia and the Civil War (Charleston, SC: History Press, 2011), 31–​33. 2. Reports of Maj. Gen. George B.  McClellan, U.S. Army, June 10, 1861, in U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and

Eastern Kentucky and Northwestern Virginia, 1861–1862    105 Confederate Armies (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1880), ser. 1, vol. 2: 65 (hereafter cited as OR); Lesser, Rebels at the Gate,  56–​58. 3. Reports of Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan, ser. 1, vol. 2, 65; Lesser, Rebels at the Gate,  65–​73. 4. Report of Brig. Gen. T. A. Morris, Indiana Militia, June 7, 1861, in OR, ser. 1, vol. 2: 66. 5. Reports of Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan, ser. 1, vol. 2, 65. 6. Sidney M. Barnes to Gen. George H. Thomas, September 23, 1861, in OR, ser. 1, vol. 4: 269–​270. 7. Message to Congress in Special Session, July 4, 1861, in Lincoln: Speeches and Writings, 1859–​1865 (New York: Library of America, 1984), 258. 8. Snell, West Virginia and the Civil War,  35–​40. 9. F. K. Zollicoffer to Lt. Col. Mackall, September 26, 1861, in OR, ser. 1, vol. 4: 429. 10. F. K. Zollicoffer to Lt. Col. Mackall, September 30, 1861, in OR, ser. 1, vol. 4: 202. 11. Brian D. McKnight, Contested Borderland: The Civil War in Appalachian Kentucky and Virginia (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006), 42–​45. 12. A. J. May to E. O. Guerrant, August 12, 1867, in Edward O. Guerrant Papers, Southern Historical Collection, Manuscripts Department, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; New York Times, November 5, 1861; Jno. S. Williams to Brig. Gen. Humphrey Marshall, November 9, 1861, in OR, ser. 1, vol. 3: 227–​228. 13. A. J. May to E. O. Guerrant, August 12, 1867, in Guerrant Papers; Robert Perry, Jack May’s War: Colonel Andrew Jackson May and the Civil War in Eastern Kentucky, East Tennessee, and Southwest Virginia (Johnson City, TN: Overmountain Press, 1998), 8; Henry P. Scalf, Kentucky’s Last Frontier (Pikeville, KY: Pikeville College Press of the Appalachian Studies Center, 1972), 288–​291; Report of Brig. Gen. William Nelson, U.S. Army, November 10, 1861, in OR, ser. 1, vol. 3: 225–​226. 14. McKnight, Contested Borderland,  65–​67. 15. Aaron Astor, The Civil War along Tennessee’s Cumberland Plateau (Charleston, SC: History Press, 2015), 86–​88.

Bibliography Carr, Joseph D. “Garfield and Marshall in the Big Sandy Valley, 1861–​1862.” Filson Club Historical Quarterly 64 (April 1990): 247–​263. Connelly, Thomas L. Army of the Heartland: The Army of Tennessee, 1861–​1865. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967. Current, Richard Nelson. Lincoln’s Loyalists:  Union Soldiers from the Confederacy. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992. Daniel, Larry J. Days of Glory: The Army of the Cumberland, 1861–​1865. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004. Hall, Granville Davisson. Lee’s Invasion of Northwest Virginia in 1861. Chicago:  Mayer and Miller, 1911. Hess, Earl J. The Civil War in the West:  Victory and Defeat from the Appalachians to the Mississippi. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Lesser, W. Hunter. Rebels at the Gate: Lee and McClellan on the Front Line of a Nation Divided. Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2004. McKnight, Brian D. Contested Borderland: The Civil War in Appalachian Kentucky and Virginia. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006.

106   Brian D. McKnight McKnight, Brian D. “Reconsidering Felix Zollicoffer: The Influence of Weather and Terrain in the Rise and Fall of a Military Commander in Appalachia.” In Border Wars: The Civil War in Tennessee and Kentucky, edited by Kent T. Dollar, Larry H. Whiteaker, and W. Calvin Dickenson, 147–​169. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2015. Snell, Mark A. West Virginia and the Civil War. Charleston, SC: History Press, 2011. Stealey, John E., III. West Virginia’s Civil War Era Constitution: Loyal Revolution, Confederate Counter-​Revolution, and the Convention of 1872. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2013. Zinn, Jack. R. E. Lee’s Cheat Mountain Campaign. Parsons, WV: McClain, 1974.

Chapter 6

Forts H e nry and D one l s on The Material War Jason Phillips

On February 16, 1862, the Union captured Fort Donelson in the western theater. On the following day, the Confederacy launched its first ironclad warship, the CSS Virginia, in the eastern theater. Both events revealed the priorities of each side. From the war’s beginning, Union strategists like Lt. Gen. Winfield Scott and Maj. Gen. Henry Halleck focused on the Mississippi Valley to control western waters that offered a natural highway for invasion and to occupy a region rich in war materials that the enemy desperately needed. While the Union concentrated on the interior heartland, the Confederacy privileged coastal defenses to maintain essential trade routes with Europe. The new nation worked hard to boost its domestic economy, but it still needed to trade Southern cotton for European guns, uniforms, and steam engines to have a chance against the industrial might of the United States. The material disparity between the Union and the Confederacy affected strategy. Had the Confederacy prioritized defending its interior resources at the start of the war, it still lacked the industry to transform those raw materials into the arsenals of weapons it needed. In northern Tennessee, Forts Henry and Donelson defended the Confederacy’s richest iron region, but the only Southern manufacturer willing and able to sheath an ironclad vessel was the Tredegar Ironworks in Richmond, and even this establishment, the premier ironworks of the Confederacy, could not make engines and shafts big enough to power such a ship. Those parts would have to be salvaged from other vessels or bought from Europe. By contrast, Union manufacturers and shipyards from St. Louis to Boston could outfit ironclads and concentrate them at any point along the southern border from Hampton Roads to New Orleans. These facts shaped how both sides thought about and fought the war. The Union coordinated naval and army operations along the arc of the Confederate border, probing for weaknesses to exploit. Lacking a

108   Jason Phillips comparable navy, the Confederacy built forts at key water approaches and relied on its armies. The campaign for Forts Henry and Donelson exemplifies both strategies. Combining military and political history reveals how these material conditions mixed with immaterial factors to shape the battles and their aftermath. Contests for resources—​human, animal, and mineral—​affected each side’s political and military prospects. The Mississippi Valley contained thousands of border men and laborers who could be recruited to either side depending on who controlled the area and whether the fortunes of war favored them. The heartland grew hogs, cattle, wheat, and corn that fed the Deep South before the war. The Confederacy sought those supplies to sustain its armies, but it also needed the region’s iron ore. Occupying the valley and exploiting its wealth proved difficult for both sides. Throughout the campaign, environmental challenges—​weather, terrain, and river navigation—​hindered the movement and cooperation of armies and navies and affected the contest’s outcomes. These material conditions mixed with intangible factors to form a stew of contingencies that shaped the campaign. Morale, rumors, emotions, egos, prejudices, loyalties, and culture framed how people understood the material war and reacted to it. No one knew it at the time, but 1861 marked the end of the golden age of steamboats. Those marvelous vessels capitalized on free passage across a vast network of rivers that

Map 6.1  Fort Henry and Fort Donelson

Forts Henry and Donelson    109 coursed through Middle America, carrying iron, pork, cotton, tobacco, hemp, corn, wheat, and manufactured goods from Pittsburgh to New Orleans and back to Natchez, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Louisville, Nashville, and hundreds of river towns in between. Settlers who crossed the Appalachian Mountains and populated the Old Northwest and Southwest prospered from this shared economy. Pennsylvanians who traveled to central Kentucky and middle Tennessee established the first ironworks in the region. River commerce and manufacturing unified politics within the heartland while slavery and its westward expansion divided it. When the Deep South seceded after Pres. Abraham Lincoln’s election, the nascent Confederacy accumulated as much trade from steamboats as possible. During the secession winter, Southerners bought more Yankee pork than ever before. In February 1861, during the Confederate founding, the Nashville Banner reported, “The amount of flour, corn, and bacon which has passed through this city en route for the Republics of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina is unprecedented.” Before war erupted, Southern states, private citizens, and the Confederacy imported 1.2 million of the 3 million hogs packed during the secession crisis, which coincided with the packing season of 1860–​1861. That pork boom helped to elect a Southern sympathizer mayor of Cincinnati in spring 1861. But when Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri remained in the Union after Fort Sumter, the Confederacy lost one-​third of the South’s hogs. A year later the Confederate Bureau of Subsistence explained how the war’s borders deprived the new nation of pork. In a report to the Confederate Congress, the Bureau admitted that fewer than twenty thousand hogs were packed in 1860–​1861 at establishments within Confederate territory. That amounted to less than 1 percent of the nation’s pork-​ packing industry.1 The Union planned to blockade the Confederacy from these resources and invade its heartland with armored riverboats. Weeks after Fort Sumter, James Eads, a self-​taught engineer who salvaged vessels on the bottom of the Mississippi, wrote to Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles with a plan. Eads recommended Cairo, Illinois, as the Union’s western base of operations. The town had broad levees suitable for artillery that could command access to the Mississippi and Ohio. Moreover, the Central Railroad of Illinois could supply the city with all the men and materiel needed for active campaigning. To patrol the region, Eads offered Welles a snag boat that he used to recover shipwrecks near St. Louis. It was a twin-​hulled vessel with fourteen watertight compartments, four boilers, and two engines. Strong enough to carry 32-​ pound guns, the ship would be indestructible once it was armored. Eads thought “$2,000 or $3,000 worth of cotton bales arranged properly upon her” would do the trick. Welles approved and ordered naval constructor Samuel Pook to begin designing and building river gunboats inspired by Eads’s ship. Pook improved on Eads’s plan by creating seven “turtles,” as they were called, powerful, shallow-​draft vessels covered in iron instead of cotton and strong enough to carry 64-​pound guns. To complement this western flotilla, the navy bought three steamboats, the Conestoga, Lexington, and Tyler, and sheathed them in five-​inch oak planks. When this fleet of “turtles” and “timberclads” assembled in October 1861 under the command of Adm. Andrew Foote,

110   Jason Phillips it looked unlike anything that the seasoned crews and pilots of Middle America had ever seen, but it proved effective.2 Unable to build a comparable navy, the Confederacy constructed a chain of forts to guard river routes into its heartland. On the left flank, they anchored defenses at two points, New Madrid in southern Missouri and Island No. 10 in the Mississippi River. On the right, Confederates built three positions, Fort Henry, Fort Heiman, and Fort Donelson, where the Cumberland and Tennessee rivers ran parallel, about twelve miles apart, in Tennessee. Politics affected where and when these forts appeared. Tennessee governor Isham Harris supported secession but feared a Federal invasion. Before Tennessee joined the Confederacy, Harris bargained for Confederate help defending his state. As a result, Maj. Bushrod Johnson began constructing Fort Henry before Tennessee joined the Confederacy. He hastily selected a low spot on the east bank of the Tennessee River that could be commanded by higher ground on both sides. The terrain was so poor that the fort flooded during high water. Recognizing the situation, Confederates began building Fort Heiman across the river on higher ground and Fort Donelson twelve miles away on a bluff overlooking the Cumberland. Kentucky politics affected these forts as much as Governor Harris’s machinations. Stronger positions for defending Tennessee existed across state lines, but Kentucky’s proclaimed neutrality denied the Confederacy access to the region. Both armies initially respected this neutrality to lure the vital state to their side. But Rebel rumors started to spread of Union troops preparing to invade Kentucky. When a Federal expedition attempted to land at Belmont, Missouri, across the river from Kentucky, Confederate Maj. Gen. Leonidas Polk ordered Brig. Gen. Gideon Pillow to cross the border and fortify Columbus in September 1861. Polk violated Kentucky’s neutrality without confirming the enemy’s intentions, consulting his superiors, or notifying Kentucky’s government. His blunder, which one historian judged “one of the greatest mistakes of the war,” cost the Confederacy Kentucky. The state sympathized with the Union, which had been arming Kentucky for months during its neutrality, but Polk’s invasion gave Kentuckians an overt act to repudiate. When Union Brig. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant countered Polk’s maneuver by occupying Paducah the following day, Kentuckians received his troops as protectors, not aggressors. The state legislature demanded the Confederates withdraw from the state, did not ask Grant to leave, and placed the state militia under the command of Union Brig. Gen. Robert Anderson, the defender of Fort Sumter. The militia had been under the command of Confederate sympathizer Simon Buckner, who resigned in disgrace and fled the state. Confederates concentrated their force at Columbus, but because of geography and politics the three forts in Tennessee proved the key to the theater. If Union forces captured Henry, Heiman, and Donelson, they could flank Confederates out of their stronger positions in Kentucky without shedding blood on neutral soil. Moreover, by capturing points upriver, the Federals could cut the Rebels off from Southern supplies.3 The Confederate commander of the theater, Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston, failed to recognize this problem, because he and his subordinates fixated on operations in Kentucky. Johnston, Polk, and Pillow worried about Union threats to Columbus and

Forts Henry and Donelson    111 peppered Richmond with requests for more men and materiel. Instead of bolstering defenses where Southern resources were richest, the Confederate War Department funneled Tennessee’s materials elsewhere. Ordnance officers in Nashville, Memphis, and Chattanooga received orders to redirect munitions shipments from Johnston’s army to Virginia and coastal defenses. One hundred fifty barrels of powder earmarked for Johnston’s army instead went to Mobile and New Orleans. Johnston tried to stop hemorrhaging resources in the West by banning the transfer of Nashville goods to Virginia. Polk and Pillow placed an embargo on Kentucky pork so that local hogs fed their armies instead of bypassing them for distant markets. In November 1861, a frustrated Polk informed Confederate Pres. Jefferson Davis that he planned to buy thousands of rifles from a supplier he knew in Cuba if the government promised to reimburse him. Weeks later Secretary of War Judah Benjamin agreed to send 4,500 Enfield rifles received from England, but it wasn’t enough firepower. The western forts desperately needed siege guns that the Tredegar works manufactured and supplied to coastal defenses at Norfolk, Savannah, Galveston, St. Augustine, Fernandina, St. Marks, and along the North Carolina coast. When a suspicious fire consumed Nashville’s ordnance shops before Christmas 1861, the catastrophe crippled Johnston’s army; 500 sets of artillery harnesses, 8,000 to 14,000 sets of accouterments and equipment, 300 cavalry saddles, 2 million percussion caps, and 5,000 friction primers went up in smoke. The mills had produced 2,800 pounds of powder per day. While Confederate generals raised alarms about Union threats in Kentucky, leaders in Tennessee added to the cacophony by calling for stronger defenses in their state. Governor Harris wrote Johnston in November that Fort Donelson was inadequate to protect the Cumberland River and the rich iron industry that relied on it. He stressed the “indispensable necessity” of defending “the iron establishments on that river.” The forts protected local citizens too, but Harris was more concerned about guarding the ironworks, “which are at this time an absolute national necessity.” In 1858, J. P. Lesley, secretary of the American Iron Association, counted thirty-​nine furnaces, thirteen forges, and three rolling mills between Nashville and the lower Cumberland Valley. Powerful families owned these ironworks, offered their products to the Confederacy, and demanded strong defenses for their vital businesses. The Hillman family, which founded the Tennessee Rolling Mills in the region, was the richest in the state. The Vanleers, who owned the Cumberland Iron Works, were one of the wealthiest families in the South. Woods, Yeatman, and Company was owned by John Bell, the Constitutional Union Party candidate for the presidency in 1860. All of Bell’s sons fought for the Confederacy.4 Fort Henry’s commander, Brig. Gen. Lloyd Tilghman, recognized the vulnerability of his position and tried to alert his superiors in Kentucky. A construction engineer by trade, Tilghman fumed when the laborers who were promised to him never came to finish Fort Heiman. Despite weapons production in the region, Tilghman lacked guns and ammunition. When Union gunboats scouted his defenses at Fort Henry in January, Tilghman learned that only one of his seventeen cannon, a 10-​inch Columbiad, could match the range of the enemy’s guns, and it had no ammunition. His best regiment, the 10th Tennessee Infantry, carried muskets that had belonged to Andrew Jackson’s militia

112   Jason Phillips in 1812. Tilghman pleaded with Polk for ammunition, two more 10-​inch guns, and additional infantry. Paranoid about Union threats in Kentucky, Polk sent nothing. On February 4, Grant and Foote coordinated an amphibious assault of Fort Henry by transporting seventeen thousand troops from Paducah, Kentucky to Pine Bluff, Tennessee, a few miles downstream from the fort. The move required every available boat and sailor, an ironclad escort, and two trips. From the riverbanks, African Americans cheered the invaders as liberators. When Tilghman spied the transports landing below his fort, he knew his garrison was no match for the approaching enemy, evacuated his infantry to Fort Donelson, and stayed behind at Fort Henry with eighty-​ three troops to man the guns. Winter rain worsened his gloomy situation, flooding Fort Henry’s guns and surrounding its flagstaff with two feet of water. The weather slowed Union troops advancing on the fort, but not the navy. Columns led by General Grant and Brig. Gen. C. F. Smith on opposite banks of the Tennessee River ground to a halt as roads turned into mud holes that consumed men, animals, and wagons. Grant’s eagerness to advance despite winter weather would have been impossible without combining operations with the navy. As Foote’s gunboats steamed toward the fort, they navigated through driftwood and enemy torpedoes unmoored by swollen currents. During their final meeting below Fort Henry, Foote turned to Grant and predicted, “General, I shall have the fort in my possession before you get into your position.” Pook’s ironclads, the Essex, Cincinnati, Carondelet, and St. Louis, led the way, followed by the three “timberclads,” Tyler, Lexington, and Conestoga. Foote ordered his fleet of sixty-​five guns to dismantle the Confederate defenses “by the accuracy of our fire,” reminding them that their own army would arrive at the rear of the fort and that every shot fired “costs the government about eight dollars.”5 At noon, the turtles swung into view of Fort Henry and opened fire from a mile away. As the crews closed to within six hundred yards of the fort, Tilghman’s gunners returned fire. For forty-​five minutes shot and shell whistled through the air as thick, acrid smoke shrouded the scene. The iron plating worked. The Carondelet received about ten hits and suffered no casualties. The Essex was not as lucky. A shell passed through a forward port, exploded the center boiler, and scalded to death several crewmen and pilots. Foote’s flagship, the Cincinnati, attracted most of Tilghman’s attention. Shells smashed its chimneys, disabled two guns, and wounded several men, killing one. But Fort Henry’s defenders were no match for the fleet. Tilghman’s rifled gun exploded, killing the entire crew. Then the 10-​inch Columbiad jammed. A shell passed through an embrasure, destroying another cannon and its crew. An hour and a half of firing reduced the fort to two working guns. Tilghman raised a white flag. Foote’s fleet took command of the fort, and a party of Union officers and sailors surveyed the damage. The gore still haunted Capt. Henry Walke years later. “The first glance over the fort silenced all jubilant expressions of the victorious,” he remembered. Body parts, debris, and unexploded shells from the gunboats littered the cratered ground. The bombardment buried men alive. Walke found cabins burning in the rear of the fort and had sailors extinguish them. He met a Confederate surgeon, coatless and covered in blood, tending to the wounded. When Grant arrived an hour later

Forts Henry and Donelson    113 with his staff, everyone was silent and grave. Union cavalry chased after the garrison that Tilghman sent toward Donelson, capturing the tail of the column and a battery of six field guns. Grant wired Halleck, “Fort Henry is ours.” He promised to take Fort Donelson in two days.6 After slogging through mud and missing the battle for Fort Henry, Grant knew his plan was optimistic. He hoped to take Donelson before Johnston could reinforce it, but even in fair weather his army lacked the logistical support to carry an overland invasion. Grant had limited each regiment to four wagons when transporting them to Tennessee by boat. Moreover, he failed to confer with Foote, who needed to repair his ironclads before another attack. After Fort Henry, Foote sent his available gunboats to raid the Confederate interior. The Carondelet steamed up the Tennessee and destroyed the Memphis and Louisville Railroad bridge. The timberclads passed the remains of the bridge, destroyed some track, found three boats loaded with Confederate stores that the enemy abandoned and burned, and captured the steamer Eastport before Confederates could convert it into an ironclad. On February 8, the timberclads captured two more steamers, forced the enemy to burn three more vessels, and reached Florence, Alabama, where a landing party seized supplies intended for Fort Henry. The rapid advance and destructive force of Foote’s fleet contrasted with Grant’s plodding troops, but the eastern press praised Grant and the army. One New York paper even disparaged the timberclads as “western bandboxes.”7 On January 6, Lt. Seth Ledyard Phelps commanded one of those “bandboxes,” the Conestoga, when it scouted Fort Donelson for the last time before the Union assault. What he found impressed him. The Confederates were “industriously perfecting” their defenses by exploiting the environment and local resources. He could steam no closer than a mile and a half from the fort because the enemy obstructed the river by uprooting trees, chaining them together, and sinking them in the current with their branches pointed downstream. Any crew attempting to remove this watery abatis would face severe fire from batteries placed along a bluff twenty to fifty feet above the river. Phelps learned that Confederates impressed “a large force of negroes” to dig irregular earthworks for four 32-​pounders at these batteries. He did not know that the slaves placed eight more guns on the bluff: a 10-​inch smoothbore, a rifled 128-​pounder, two 32-​pound carronades, and four more 32-​pounders. These cannons could rain plunging fire down on approaching ships as they made a sharp turn, single file, through a narrow channel. Phelps admitted that much about Donelson—​the size of its garrison and its defenses against a land assault—​remained a mystery shrouded in “a thousand rumors.” Whatever awaited the Union Army beyond the bluff, Phelps reported, “It is now too late to move against the works . . . except with a well-​appointed and powerful naval force.”8 The Confederates at Donelson agreed and focused their efforts on withstanding a naval assault. The business end of the fort faced the river with two batteries of guns. The rest of Donelson resembled an entrenched camp more than a fort. Inside the base, a bombproof protected troops from enemy artillery and linked them to the batteries through a series of trenches. Facing the land approaches, irregular trenches followed the contours of the bluff, zigzagging south, east, and north along a ridge. Where the

114   Jason Phillips ridge was steepest, these trenches formed walls twenty feet tall, and defenders stood on platforms made from stakes and woven brush. In other spots along the line, the trench was nothing more than a shallow rifle pit. This meandering perimeter enclosed a sixty-​ acre camp with four hundred log cabins for barracks. After Fort Henry fell, a stunned Albert Sidney Johnston failed to design a new strategy to handle the situation and did not take to the field when his army needed him most. After conferring with his top generals in Kentucky, including Gen. P. G. T. Beauregard, who had recently arrived from Virginia, Johnston first ordered a complete evacuation of troops from Kentucky and a withdrawal up the Cumberland Valley to an indeterminate spot somewhere outside of Nashville. The Union gunboats’ success at Fort Henry and subsequent rampage through the region convinced Johnston that he could not stop the enemy’s navy. As a result, he called for the abandonment of Polk’s fortress at Columbus and told Maj. Gen. William Hardee to fall back to Nashville. Polk objected and argued that a smaller garrison of five thousand at Columbus could delay the enemy’s advance indefinitely. Beauregard and Johnston realized that Foote’s success at Fort Henry outflanked Columbus and meant that any troops committed to the position would eventually be captured. Initially, Johnston ordered the evacuation of Fort Donelson too, but then changed his mind, sent Pillow and his men to reinforce the garrison, and placed Brig. Gen. John Floyd, a political general who commanded troops at nearby Clarksville, in charge. “I cannot give you specific instructions and place under your command the entire force,” Johnston wrote to Floyd as he started to evacuate Kentucky.9 On February 13, Floyd and his men slipped into Fort Donelson as Grant’s army arrived and tested the fort’s defenses. Expecting the ironclads to pummel Donelson as easily as they handled Fort Henry, Grant ordered his army to guard avenues of escape and avoid a general engagement. The first gunboat to arrive, the Carondelet, shelled the fort for most of the day. Donelson’s gunners answered with solid shot, including a 128-​pound ball that glanced off the forward casement and plunged into the engine room, wounding a dozen men. Despite this stiff Rebel resistance, Union forces remained confident that the full ironclad fleet would bombard the garrison into submission the following day. They did not know that Floyd’s arrival reinforced the fort to twenty-​eight infantry regiments, one cavalry regiment, six light batteries, and enough troops to man seventeen heavy batteries. Balmy weather at the start of the siege also fooled the Yankees. Brig. Gen. Lew Wallace described February 12 as “a day of summer. River, land, and sky fairly shimmered with warmth.” He allowed his men to discard their overcoats along the muddy road to Donelson.10 That night, as the rest of Foote’s fleet arrived, so did a cold front that plunged the temperature to 12 degrees and dropped snow and freezing rain on Grant’s exposed army. Pvt. Daniel Ambrose of the 7th Illinois Infantry could not sleep through the “long cheerless night” and watched his colonel “pacing up and down a hill to keep from freezing.” Capt. John Adair of the 45th Illinois thought the campaign’s weather, more than its combat, taught volunteers “what an earnest cruel thing a soldier’s life was.” His men tossed their knapsacks when Lt. Col. Nathan Bedford Forrest’s cavalry skirmished with them on the march to the fort. “This foolish act cost us more lives than rebel shot on

Forts Henry and Donelson    115 the battle field,” Adair noted. As snow covered the Carondelet’s slanted deck that night, the crew, sobered from the beating they took the day before, tried to shield the ship’s unarmored upper deck from plunging shot. Sailors hauled anything heavy—​chains, lumber, coal—​to the top deck and spread the articles across the weakest sections of the turtle’s shell. Meanwhile in the wardroom, the cook ground enough coffee to keep the men alert, warm, and energized for the frozen battle ahead.11 Foote’s fleet weighed anchor and steamed for Fort Donelson midafternoon on February 14. From a mile away, the ironclads started hitting the fort while the Rebels’ return fire fell short. The psychological warfare that these armored monsters wielded even gripped Forrest, who turned to the Rev. Maj. D. C. Kelley and said, “Parson, for God’s sake pray! Nothing by God Almighty can save the fort.” Using a megaphone, Foote calmly reminded his captains to deliver slower, more deliberate fire. The four ironclads, the St. Louis, Louisville, Pittsburg, and Carondelet, pounded the fort for more than two hours while the timberclads, Tyler and Conestoga, threw shells from a thousand yards astern.12 The Union’s iron navy seemed invincible, but every force has a weakness, and Foote exposed his fleet’s vulnerability when he steamed too close to Donelson’s elevated batteries. At Fort Henry, Foote nosed right up to the lower gun crews and fired grapeshot to silence them. That approach failed against the higher bluffs at Donelson. A  Confederate private recorded the spectacular scene with colorful spelling:  “The gunboats with full Determination to take our Battrey by Storme . . . pressed up the river stidley firing on us.” Though “sudden death and distrucktion” hung in the air, “Stilt tha came on . . . within Three Hundred yards of the Batterrys and tha turned loosed their guns with grap shot to run our gunners away from thear Guns but tha finding our men to hard and brave for them, tha concluded to givit up and tha turned down the River while the Iron and Wood was flying from them upin the air tha sneaked down behind the bend badely tore to peasis.”13 No amount of coal, timber, and iron could save the fleet’s upper decks from plunging fire rained down from Donelson’s batteries. Shot and shell pierced the fleet’s pilothouses, tore off smokestacks and boats, smashed anchors, and ripped through iron plating. As their decks slickened with blood and body parts, the crews lost their composure. Quickening their fire, gunners on the Carondolet worked too fast and caused its rifled gun to explode, wounding more than a dozen sailors. The pilot of the Pittsburg, in haste to escape the enemy’s fire, crashed into the Carondelet and disabled its starboard rudder. Union casualties numbered eight dead and forty-​seven wounded, including Foote, who received a painful wound in the ankle. The Confederates did not suffer a single casualty. Icy weather beset the Union lines again that night. Foote’s defeat ruined Grant’s plan, but he proved better at improvising than his opponents. On the morning of February 15, Grant conferred with Foote onboard the St. Louis. The ironclads needed to return to Cairo for repairs, but Grant convinced Foote that even damaged gunboats could demoralize the enemy and shell the fort. Foote agreed to leave four ships at Donelson and left for Cairo with two heavily damaged vessels. While Grant rode back to his headquarters, a panicked courier intercepted him

116   Jason Phillips to report the Confederates were attacking Brig. Gen. John McClernand’s division on the right and taking control of the road to Charlotte, Tennessee. The Union ring around Donelson cracked open. When Grant learned that captured Rebels on the field had three days of cooked rations in their haversacks, he understood that Floyd was trying to bust open the siege and escape before the Union grip on Donelson tightened. It was a desperate move, and Grant knew how to combat it. He ordered General Smith’s division to attack the thinner defenses on the Confederate left and called for help from the ironclads. “If all the gunboats that can will immediately make their appearance to the enemy it may secure us a victory. Otherwise all may be defeated.” The Union counterattack regained most of the lost ground but left one road open.14 While bitter weather assailed the dead and dying, a host of factors, including miscommunication, false rumors, and indecision doomed the garrison that night. Men who survived the day’s carnage recorded surreal sights in their letters and diaries: corpses lying together as thick as men in a tent, dead horses in frozen pools of blood, trees torn to splinters. An Illinois volunteer picked up over twenty hats with bullet holes and brains in them. Meanwhile, Floyd held a council of war around a roaring fire at the Rice house in Dover. State loyalties fractured the group. The Tennesseans Pillow and Forrest wanted to fight their way out and save the garrison for the defense of Nashville. Floyd reported Union reinforcements downstream that bolstered Grant’s army to eighty regiments. (New troops and ammunition did arrive by steamboat, but the actual size of Grant’s force was half of Floyd’s figure.) Stunned by the news, Kentuckian Brig. Gen. Simon Buckner proposed surrender. According to Buckner, the only professional soldier in the room, the garrison, outnumbered, fatigued, and poorly supplied, would plod out of Donelson only to be cut to ribbons by the enemy’s superior force. Forrest and Pillow begged Floyd to fight, but the Virginian agreed with Buckner. Floyd, Pillow, and Buckner understood that they would be the first Confederate generals captured, and none of them knew whether they would be treated as prisoners or traitors. The terrible uncertainty of their situation inflamed an already tense meeting. Floyd had cause for concern. As James Buchanan’s secretary of war, he was one of the highest-​ranking officials of the U.S.  government to join the Confederacy. When secession and war loomed, Floyd exploited his authority to transfer 115,000 arms from Northern to Southern arsenals. He also gave Southern states, including his home state of Virginia, their 1861 quotas of muskets while the Confederacy formed. Many of these weapons were rifles of current patterns, and all of them supplied Rebel regiments. Floyd turned over command to Pillow, who passed it to Buckner like a hot potato. The vainglorious Pillow insisted that Grant wanted to capture him more than any other man in the Confederacy. Pillow had led the force that violated Kentucky’s neutrality. Buckner accepted command, though he worried that he faced treason charges as a West Pointer fighting against the United States. Before Buckner surrendered, Floyd escaped on the last steamboat, which stranded troops noticed was half empty. He had found room for his Virginia troops but left others on the dock. Pillow and his staff fled across the river that night in an old scow. An irate Forrest galloped down the open road with his cavalry instead of conceding defeat.

Forts Henry and Donelson    117 Buckner requested a truce and hoped for generous terms from Grant, an old friend from the Mexican War. Grant’s reply became famous and intensified the war:  “No terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted. I propose to move immediately upon your works.” On the morning of February 16, Buckner grudgingly consented to the “unconditional surrender” of Fort Donelson and its fifteen thousand defenders. Sunshine beamed for the first day of the campaign, glinting off streams of bayonets as Union troops filled the fort. When John Adair marched toward the earthworks, the white pallor of hundreds of corpses stared up at him. It seemed to him that nature was trying to warm them back to life. Buckner’s capitulation surpassed Lord Cornwallis’s defeat at Yorktown, and many Unionists, including Grant, hoped the historic event would demoralize Confederates and accelerate the war’s end. He reported, “[G]‌reat numbers of Union people have come in to see us . . . [and] they say secessionists are in great trepidation.” Federal strategists still believed that puncturing the Confederate perimeter would crush Southern resistance.15 Confederate civilians expressed a range of emotions, and not every sentiment supported Union optimism. Living twenty miles from the fort, people in Clarksville heard the battle rage for days and expected Confederate victory. Nannie Haskins sensed the battle building to a crescendo with each passing day. In her diary she recorded how the outnumbered defenders of the fort, including her brothers, “killed, slaughtered, [and] whipped them as dogs were never beaten before.” The media circulated false rumors that compounded Confederate exaggerations. On February 14, the Clarksville Chronicle reported the garrison killing Yankees at a ten to one ratio. “Even if the enemy should renew the attack, we have, we think, but little to fear from them,” the editor predicted. He claimed to have heard from “an officer of high position” that “Commodore Hollins with the ram, Manassas, and thirteen Gun-​boats passed Memphis last Wednesday, on his way to our relief.” This fictional Confederate fleet would sweep Yankees off Southern rivers. “Let every true man be calm, firm, fearless, and leave panics to cowards,” he advised.16 After anticipating revenge for the fall of Fort Henry, Clarksville citizens panicked when Donelson surrendered. On his farm outside town, Joseph Killibrew told his slaves and family to cook hams and bake bread for the garrison. On the way to Clarksville to deliver the food, Killibrew, accompanied by one of his slaves, learned that Donelson had surrendered that morning. He turned his slave back home with the goods, not wanting the “boy” to witness the hysteria in town. “Men were running their horses up and down the streets, shouting to one another and acting precisely as if their lives were forfeited.” A  local preacher, Rev. H.  F. Beaumont, was the only calm individual that Killibrew encountered. Together they went to the Female Academy, which had been transformed into a hospital for boatloads of bloody men. There Killibrew found gravely wounded men screaming about battle, heaps of amputated limbs, and a “deep, but suppressed excitement that I had never witnessed before.” White citizens gave the Yankees a chilly reception when they occupied the town days later. The 7th Illinois Volunteers found quarters in a tobacco warehouse and smoked as much as possible, while women from town serenaded them with secessionist songs.17

118   Jason Phillips After Donelson fell, the Federal government implemented economic policies to erode Confederate nationalism. On February 28, Lincoln reopened river commerce between the Union and loyal citizens beyond Confederate lines. The Union stronghold at Cairo still policed the blockade, denying Confederates commerce with Northern suppliers along the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. Union success at Donelson further deprived the Rebels of supply routes by denying them use of the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers and threatening railroads from Louisville to Nashville and Chattanooga. James Eads predicted that Union control of these commercial arteries meant Confederate “starvation is inevitable in less than six months.” Opening trade with Northern markets rewarded desperate Confederates who returned to the Union and punished those who did not. The Federals applied the same hard but humane policy when they captured Nashville, Memphis, and New Orleans over the coming months.18 Foote implemented this strategy in Tennessee. On the way to Clarksville, he stopped at the Cumberland Ironworks and interrogated Mr. Lewis, the superintendent, who claimed to be a Unionist. If he were a Unionist, Foote replied, why did his company have contracts with the Confederacy? Lewis pleaded that the blockade barred them from work in Kentucky and other Union states. Unconvinced, Foote bombarded the works. “The rebels all have a terror of the gun-​boats,” Foote reported. He hoped that opening trade and threatening diehards with his ironclads would flip political loyalties in Tennessee. When he arrived at Clarksville, Foote issued a proclamation assuring the citizens that the navy would not harm “peaceably-​disposed persons” or their property. He encouraged such citizens “to resume their business avocations with the assurance of my protection” but warned them that he would tolerate “no secession flag or manifestation of secession feeling.” According to Killibrew, the proclamation convinced many Clarksville residents “that the Federal Soldiers, or at least a majority of them, were animated by better motives than we gave them credit for.” He reported, “The opening of the channels of commerce was a great relief to the country.” Killibrew managed to hedge his bets between the Union and the Confederacy by selling his tobacco crop in Kentucky for twenty dollars per pound in Kentucky currency.19 When Nashville surrendered without a fight weeks later, the Union threatened to deprive the Confederacy of vital resources in Middle Tennessee. The iron industry that Governor Harris tried to protect declined. Confederate pork production also fell because the Union occupation of Nashville disrupted the flow of pigs through Tennessee, the Confederacy’s richest hog state. “So much for hogs,” lamented Col. L. B. Northrop, the commissary-​general of subsistence. Despite its agricultural wealth, the Confederacy, like the Old South, needed to import meat—​but through more precarious trade networks and with weaker currency. After Fort Donelson fell, Kentucky farmers refused to sell pork for Confederate money. Historians who have praised the Confederacy for harnessing its resources tend to compare its wartime production to antebellum Southern figures. That analysis is deceptive, because wartime economies, as a rule, generate and consume more materials. To assess how well the Confederacy managed its resources, scholars need to follow its weapons, food, and other goods as they assembled, grew, and either reached the army or fell into enemy hands. The mismanagement and

Forts Henry and Donelson    119 loss of resources during the campaign for Forts Henry and Donelson revealed logistical failures, industrial inadequacies, and command mistakes that cost the Confederacy men, animals, weapons, and iron that it could not afford to lose.20 While Union authorities tried to turn Confederates toward reunion after Donelson, they faced a more pressing concern:  handling fifteen thousand prisoners of war. Guarding so many prisoners challenged Grant’s army in Tennessee. Rebels who worked on burial details routinely slipped away. The North was not prepared to receive them either. The Federal government shipped the first groups of prisoners to Union training grounds converted to prison camps. Scattered across the Midwest, prisoners populated Camp Douglas, Camp Chase, and Johnsons Island. Each compound contained bureaucratic administrators, cramped barracks, poor food, and disease. Many senior officers went to Fort Warren in Boston Harbor, where they suffered solitary confinement but otherwise received better treatment and living conditions. Precise figures are lacking, but several hundred men captured at Henry and Donelson died in Northern prisons. Bored, sick, and eager for the war to end, over three hundred prisoners from Henry and Donelson took the oath of allegiance and joined the Union Army with the understanding that they would fight Native Americans out west instead of their former comrades in the Confederacy. These “galvanized Yankees” were the first of over five thousand Confederate soldiers who fought for the Union. By the summer of 1862, the Peninsula Campaign and other major battles overwhelmed prison camps on both sides and led to the Dix-​Hill Cartel, a prisoner exchange system. After about six months of confinement, most of the Henry and Donelson prisoners were paroled and sent home under oath not to raise arms against the Union again. The Confederacy violated the cartel agreement, gave its returning soldiers short furloughs, and returned them to military service. Capturing Forts Henry and Donelson presented Federal authorities early evidence that African Americans, not white Southerners, were the Union’s most numerous and trustworthy allies in the Confederacy. When Donelson fell, enslaved Blacks rushed to the riverside to praise their ironclad deliverers and worship the American flag. The region’s African American community had a history of resistance. During the winter of 1856–​1857, slave owners uncovered a nascent insurrection among Blacks at the ironworks. Rumors centered on 250 slaves owned by Woods, Lewis, and Company, the largest iron manufacturer in Stewart County. According to sensational newspaper reports, the conspirators planned to murder all the white men in Dover, kidnap the white women, and float to freedom down the river. Terrified citizens led a brutal inquisition that jailed, tortured, lynched, and mutilated untold numbers of enslaved people. The decapitated heads of their victims appeared on poles as a warning. No wonder the survivors abandoned the ironworks the first chance they had to seek work and protection with the Union Army. African American initiative at Donelson accelerated emancipation in the Confederate heartland. Before the campaign, General Halleck issued General Orders No. 3, which banned fugitive slaves from Union lines. They came anyway. When enslavers called on Grant for the return of their property, he banned them from camp and offered the

120   Jason Phillips runaways employment “in the Quarter Masters Department for the benefit of the Government.” His decision relied upon the First Confiscation Act, passed by the U.S. Congress in August 1861, which forfeited the property rights of any slaveholder whose laborers worked for the Confederacy.21 Capt. Channing Richards of the 22nd Ohio Infantry administered the law as provost marshal in Clarksville. The first slave to arrive at his office was a literate carpenter named John who had helped to construct Donelson’s gun platforms. When his enslaver appeared demanding the return of his property, Richards explained the First Confiscation Act, asked the gentleman if he wished to take the oath of allegiance, and when the Tennessean refused, certified in writing that John was “entitled to his freedom under the act of Congress” and no longer belonged to “a notorious rebel of this country, who now refuses to take the oath of allegiance.” Within days, dozens of Black men appeared at Richards’s door claiming to have worked on the fort and requesting their freedom papers. He sent them to work for the quartermasters, but slaveholders routinely followed them to camp, insisting that their men had never labored at Donelson. Without proof that the men worked for the Confederacy, the process of emancipation could easily be reversed by persistent masters with powerful friends, and some of them sought help from the new military governor of Tennessee, Andrew Johnson.22 The fate of the Donelson fugitives hung in the balance until an unlikely ally, a local white man, provided Richards with an official roll of every slave who worked at the Confederate fort. Knowing the act could cost him his life, the stranger handed Richards the time book anonymously. He simply “wanted to help the boys get their freedom.” Armed with this ironclad evidence, Richards found work for scores of fugitives who entered Union lines. Former slaves worked hard hauling pork, flour, and meal from local warehouses to Union barges bound for the Federal camp at Paducah. Most of these men traveled with the goods to Kentucky and worked for the army there.23 By following the flow of materiel down river, Donelson’s “contraband” inadvertently helped others escape slavery. Word of their freedom spread through Kentucky slave quarters like wildfire and lured slaves across the border to Donelson. This exodus created the first contraband camp in the western theater, at Fort Donelson. Masters in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, complained to Governor Thomas Bramlette, “[O]‌ur largest farmers & best citizens (loyal men) are losing all except the helpless ones.” Union victory in Tennessee was eroding bondage in neighboring Kentucky. Hundreds of African Americans worked as laborers, blacksmiths, cooks, nurses, and laundresses for the new garrison at Donelson. This process of emancipation accelerated when churches from Michigan and Wisconsin sent teachers and schoolbooks to Donelson. A  Kentucky master found a young boy who had belonged to him at the fort and offered him wages if he returned with him. “I’m going to school,” the boy replied. Former slaves of all ages cherished their new spelling books and worked hard to acquire literacy. One man who worked as a cook for the 83rd Illinois Infantry kept his schoolbook beside his pots and studied while he stirred. “All my scholars are learning very rapidly,” a teacher at Donelson reported. When former slaves learned to write, they asserted power by

Forts Henry and Donelson    121 petitioning authorities for their rights. As a result, governors like Bramlette received competing appeals from Black and white Southerners over which group represented the best and most loyal citizens.24 Encounters with enslaved Southerners during the Donelson campaign also eroded Union soldiers’ opposition to abolition and prepared them for the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation months later. One of Richards’s messmates was a lieutenant who vehemently denounced emancipation and blamed abolitionists for the war. One night, after the fall of Donelson, this lieutenant was officer of the guard near Clarksville when a young woman approached the picket line with a heavy iron chain fastened to her leg. Her master had whipped her, and when she threatened to run away, he shackled her to a log. Somehow the girl managed to separate the iron from the wood and fled to the protection of a white woman, who accompanied her to the Union line. Faced with the physical brutality of slavery, and with the fate of this girl in his hands, the lieutenant changed his political position on the spot. One of his men found an iron file and together they worked for hours to open the shackle. Knowing that the First Confiscation Act did not apply to this woman, the lieutenant disguised her as a man by giving her his spare clothing and passed her through Union lines. “Thus the war proved a great and rapid educator,” Richards remarked.25 The campaign for Forts Henry and Donelson showed how a contest over resources—​ rivers, hands, iron, and hogs—​clarified intangible elements of the war, including the morality of abolition, allegiance along borders, and the fate of the nation. Moral suasion had not affected the lieutenant’s view of slavery. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, the Republican Party’s rhetoric, and John Brown’s martyrdom did not change his mind. Heavy iron shackles cutting into that girl’s narrow anklebone did. A local furnace probably forged those chains. Destroying those ironworks weakened Confederate nationalism in the region more than appeals to Unionism and “the mystic chords of memory.” With his Cumberland works up in smoke and his slaves liberated, John Bell became a war refugee. He fled with his family to Huntsville, Alabama, and in May alerted Federal authorities that he wanted to come to Washington to negotiate peace and national reunion. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton replied that Bell would do more good if he stayed in the Deep South and worked to change Confederate minds. Grant understood that hard but humane warfare was required to win the war and establish peace. His approach at Forts Henry and Donelson—​a relentless assault on the enemy and his resources, regardless of material challenges and seasonal conditions—​foreshadowed the continuous campaigning he brought to the eastern theater two years later.

Notes 1. Benjamin Franklin Cooling, Forts Henry and Donelson:  The Key to the Confederate Heartland (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987), 3. 2. Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion (Washington D.C., Government Printing Office, 1908), ser. 1, vol. 22: 278, 283. Hereafter cited as ORN.

122   Jason Phillips 3. Thomas Lawrence Connelly, Army of the Heartland:  The Army of Tennessee, 1861–​1862 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967), 52. 4. Isham G. Harris to Johnston, November 16, 1861, U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion:  A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1880–​1901), ser. 1, vol. 4: 557–​558. 5. Barbara Brooks Tomblin, The Civil War on the Mississippi:  Union Sailors, Gunboat Captains, and the Campaign to Control the River (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2016), 41–​43, 44. 6. Henry Walke, Naval Scenes and Reminiscences of the Civil War in the United States on the Southern and Western Waters (New York: F. R. Reed, 1877), 58; ORN, ser. 1, vol. 7: 124. 7. Tomblin, The Civil War on the Mississippi, 49. 8. ORN, ser. 1, vol. 22: 485–​486. 9. Thomas Lawrence Connelly, Army of the Heartland:  The Army of Tennessee, 1861–​1862 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967), 112. 10. Lew Wallace, An Autobiography (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1906), 378. 11. Daniel L. Ambrose, History of the 7th Illinois Volunteer Infantry (Springfield:  Illinois Journal Company, 1868), 32; John M. Adair, Historical Sketch of the Forty-​Fifth Illinois Regiment (Lanark, IL: Carroll County Gazette Print, 1869), 3. 12. Edward Cunningham, Gary Joiner, and Timothy Smith, Shiloh and the Western Campaign of 1862 (New York: Savas Beatie, 2011), 61. 13. James M. McPherson, War on the Waters: The Union and Confederate Navies, 1861–​1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 77. 14. Cunningham, Joiner, and Smith, Shiloh and the Western Campaign of 1862,  64–​65. 15. William S. McFeely, Grant: A Biography (New York: Norton, 1981), 101; Adair, Historical Sketch, 3. 16. Minoa D.  Uffelman, Ellen Kanervo, and Eleanor Williams, eds., The Diary of Nannie Haskins Williams: A Southern Woman’s Story of Rebellion and Reconstruction, 1863–​1890 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2014), 2; Clarksville Chronicle (TN), February 14, 1862; Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, Library of Congress, https://​ chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/​lccn/​sn88061076/​1862-​02-​14/​ed-​1/​seq-​2/​. 17. J. B. Killibrew’s Recollections of My Life, circa 1898, 165, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. 18. ORN, ser. 1, vol. 22: 278–​279. 19. James Mason Hoppin, Life of Andrew Hull Foote (New York: Harper and Bros., 1874), 233–​ 235; ORN, ser. 1, vol. 7: 422–​424; Killibrew’s Recollections, 168. 20. ORN, ser. 4, vol. 2: 193. 21. Ulysses S. Grant, General Orders No. 14, February 26, 1862, in John Y. Simon, ed., The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, vol. 4: January 8–​March 31, 1862 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1970), 290–​291. 22. Channing Richards, “Dealing with Slavery,” in Sketches of War History, 1861–​1865: Papers Prepared for the Commandery of the State of Ohio, Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States (Cincinnati, OH: Monfort, 1908), 4:320. 23. Richards, “Dealing with Slavery,” 4:322. 24. E.  H. Hopper et  al. to Thomas E.  Bramlette, January 23, 1864, Office of the Governor, Thomas E. Bramlette, Governor’s Official Correspondence File, Military Correspondence, 1863–​ 1867, BR5-​ 106, Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives, Frankfort, Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition, htpp://​discovery.

Forts Henry and Donelson    123 civilwargovernors.org/​document/​KYR-​0001-​003-​0068; Amy Murrell Taylor, Embattled Freedom: Journeys through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 193. 25. Richards, “Dealing with Slavery,” 4:326.

Bibliography Connelly, Thomas Lawrence. Army of the Heartland: The Army of Tennessee, 1861–​1862. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967. Cooling, Benjamin Franklin. Forts Henry and Donelson: The Key to the Confederate Heartland. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987. Cunningham, Edward, Gary Joiner, and Timothy Smith. Shiloh and the Western Campaign of 1862. New York: Savas Beatie, 2011. Dew, Charles Ironmaker of the Confederacy: Joseph R. Anderson and the Tredegar Iron Works. Richmond: Library of Virginia, 1999. Dilbeck, D. H. A More Civil War: How the Union Waged a Just War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. Engle, Stephen D. Struggle for the Heartland:  The Campaigns from Fort Henry to Corinth. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001. Hawkins, Susan. “The African American Experience at Forts Henry, Heiman, and Donelson, 1832–​1867.” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 61, no. 4 (2002): 222–​241. Hess, Earl J. The Civil War in the West:  Victory and Defeat from the Appalachians to the Mississippi. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. Knowles, Anne Kelley. Mastering Iron: The Struggle to Modernize an American Industry, 1800–​ 1868. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Luraghi, Raimondo. A History of the Confederate Navy. Translated by Paolo E.  Coletta. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1996. Manning, Chandra. Troubled Refuge:  Struggling for Freedom in the Civil War. New York: Knopf, 2016. Phillips, Christopher. The Rivers Ran Backwards:  The Civil War and the Remaking of the American Middle Border. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Smith, Timothy B. Grant Invades Tennessee: The 1862 Battles for Forts Henry and Donelson. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2016. Still, William N., Jr. Iron Afloat:  The Story of the Confederate Armorclads. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1971. Tomblin, Barbara Brooks. The Civil War on the Mississippi: Union Sailors, Gunboat Captains, and the Campaign to Control the River. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2016.

Chapter 7

The U nion O c c u pat i on of C oastal Nort h C a rol i na Foundations for Freedom David Silkenat

In late 1861 and early 1862, a series of invasions along the coast of North Carolina created some of the earliest Union victories in the Civil War. These attacks demonstrated the power of the Union Navy and the relative weakness of Confederate fortifications along the Atlantic coast. Although overshadowed at the time by military developments elsewhere and largely ignored by military historians since, the Union’s capture of Hatteras, Roanoke Island, New Bern, and other sites along the North Carolina coast set the groundwork for the Union blockade of the Confederacy’s Atlantic ports. Just as significant, as one of the first sites in the South occupied by the Union Army, coastal North Carolina created an early venue for wartime Reconstruction, the introduction of free labor into the South, and de facto emancipation. Although President Abraham Lincoln had announced a blockade of Confederate ports in April, the Union Navy could not effectively enforce it. In command of the Atlantic Blockade Squadron, Cdr. Silas Stringham had only sixteen ships to patrol more than one thousand miles of coastline. While the major Rebel ports at Charleston, Savannah, Wilmington, and Norfolk had substantial fortifications in place by July 1861, a host of smaller harbors remained only thinly defended, including several in North Carolina. Occupying these vulnerable sites would serve two important functions. First, it allowed the Union Navy to focus its blockading efforts on the major ports. Second, Union-​occupied harbors could serve as fueling and resupply depots for the blockading fleets. While Confederate officials focused their efforts on fortifying Virginia, state officials in North Carolina recognized the vulnerability of their coastal underbelly. Governor John W.  Ellis undertook to fortify the state’s coastline largely without support from Confederate authorities. Under the direction of the newly consisted state Military and Naval Board, the coast defense plan called for two layers of fortification. Along the Outer

The Union Occupation of Coastal North Carolina    125 Banks, a strip of thin sandy barrier islands that stretched two hundred miles from the Virginia border to Cape Lookout, new fortifications would defend Oregon, Ocracoke, and Hatteras inlets. If Union forces breached the Outer Banks, they confronted new fortifications on Roanoke Island, which straddled Albemarle and Pamlico sounds, and reinforced Forts Johnston, Caswell, and Macon, colonial relicts that required substantial upgrading. To guard Wilmington, North Carolina’s largest city and most important harbor, state officials began construction on Fort Fisher. This massive project taxed scant resources. Brigadier Generals Walter Gwynn and Theophilus H.  Holmes (who commanded the northern and southern halves of the coastline, respectively) conscripted hundreds of enslaved and free African Americans from coastal counties. In June 1861, Gwynn urged Currituck County residents “to send laborers, slaves or free negroes. . . . Send them at once. Delay is dangerous.”1 Construction on the Outer Banks proved particularly challenging, as food, freshwater, and building materials had to be transported from the mainland, most of it from New Bern. Securing adequate and appropriate ordnance proved impossible, as did finding sufficient troops to garrison these new fortifications. By July 1861, North Carolina had only 580 men stationed in four forts on the Outer Banks. Requests for additional soldiers fell on deaf ears, as Confederate officials prioritized sending troops to defend Virginia. Despite chief engineer W. B. Thompson’s claim that Hatteras Inlet was “secure against any attempt of the enemy to enter it,” Union naval vessels patrolling just outside of artillery range saw the site’s vulnerability, as the Federal steamer Harriet Lane began patrols off Hatteras in early July.2 Confederate blockade runners used Hatteras Inlet not only to supply North Carolina but also to access the Dismal Swamp Canal, which provided a backdoor to Norfolk and Richmond. Moreover, Confederate privateers regularly used the inlet as a shelter, prompting U.S. Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles to instruct Commodore Stringham, “[T]‌here is no position off the coast which you are guarding that requires greater vigilance or where well-​directed efforts and demonstrations would be more highly appreciated by the government and country than North Carolina, which has been the resort of pirates and their abettors.”3 To this end, Welles authorized Stringham to attack the Confederate fortifications guarding Hatteras Inlet. In the conflict’s first coordinated effort between the Union Army and Navy, Stringham worked with Maj. Gen. Benjamin F. Butler to plan and carry out the assault. The controversial Massachusetts politician had already provoked the ire of Union military officials for his conduct at Big Bethel. For months Butler had urged the War Department to target Hatteras, but this suggestion, like many others Butler made, fell on deaf ears. For the assault on Hatteras, Butler received authorization to detach 860 soldiers from Fortress Monroe. The Union fleet consisted of seven warships, plus assorted troop transport and support vessels. Despite the small size of the combined Union force, Butler and Stringham knew from intelligence reports that the two sand and turf forts guarding Hatteras were poorly armed and understaffed. An eighth of a mile from the inlet, Fort Hatteras had a battery of twenty cannons, though most of limited range, while the smaller Fort Clark, located three-​quarters of a mile to the north and facing the Atlantic, had only five 32-​pound guns. Despite the site’s strategic importance, only 350 soldiers in

126   David Silkenat

Map 7.1  Union occupation of North Carolina coast

the 17th North Carolina Regiment garrisoned the two forts, supplemented by five converted riverboats, which soldiers sarcastically dubbed the “mosquito fleet.” A scant 130 other Confederate soldiers manned fortifications at Oregon and Ocracoke. Leaving Hampton Roads on August 26, 1861, the Union fleet anchored outside Hatteras Inlet the next afternoon. Butler knew that the forts’ modest garrison would prove no match for Stringham’s 143 cannons. “Our plan is to land the troops under the cover of the guns,” Butler wrote to his wife just before the assault. “We are then to

The Union Occupation of Coastal North Carolina    127 attack on the land side, and my intention is to carry them with the bayonet.”4 Catching sight of the approaching Union fleet, Confederate Col. William F.  Martin sent for reinforcements, but his request did not reach authorities in time. The battle the following day unfolded largely as Stringham and Butler had planned. At 10:00 a.m. the three largest gunboats, the Minnesota, the Wabash, and the Cumberland, opened fire on Fort Clark, the smaller of the two earthen forts. Armed with only five 32-​pound guns, Clark’s small garrison could only ineffectually return fire, their shells falling short of the Union gunboats. In high winds and rough surf, the Harriet Lane, Monticello, and Pawnee deposited Butler’s soldiers at noon two miles up the beach from the fort, although the vessels all took on substantial damage in the process. Out of ammunition and suffering from a heavy bombardment, Confederate Col. J. C. Lamb ordered his men to spike the guns and abandon Fort Clark. One of the Confederate soldiers described the dash across a narrow sand causeway to Fort Hatteras under “the heaviest shelling any man ever saw.”5 By the end of the day, Union forces had taken Fort Clark with minimal losses. A heavy storm that evening forced Commodore Stringham to take his fleet out to sea, leaving the small Union garrison at Fort Clark vulnerable. Confederates in Fort Hatteras received reinforcements overnight, but not in sufficient numbers, and when expected reinforcements from New Bern failed to arrive and the morning presented calm seas, they knew their situation was perilous. With the fleet outside the range of Confederate batteries, the Union bombardment began shortly after sunrise and continued “like a hailstorm” with shell fragments raining down “on their mission of destruction” until the Confederate garrison surrendered a few hours later.6 Despite the bombardment, the death toll proved light: no Union soldiers died taking Hatteras, while a dozen Confederates died in its defense. Having secured both forts, Butler left behind a small Federal garrison, including a detachment of 9th New York Zouaves, whose garish uniforms impressed the local civilians. Departing with nearly seven hundred Confederate prisoners, Butler and Stringham left the 9th New York’s Col. Rush C. Hawkins in command of the island. Having lost Hatteras, Confederate officials decided to abandon their other forts on the Outer Banks. The Union victory at Hatteras had several important consequences. After the defeats at Bull Run and Wilson’s Creek, the Northern public greeted the news with enthusiasm. Conversely, in Richmond and Raleigh Confederate officials tried to assign blame for their disastrous performance on the Carolina coast. The Confederate Congress launched an investigation to ascertain why the forts fells so quickly. Most significant, however, the victory heralded the beginning of an effective blockade of the Confederacy’s Atlantic coast. While it would take another year before the blockade had a significant effect on the Confederate economy and war effort, the victory at Hatteras demonstrated that a small combined operation could have significant consequences. Union Adm. David Dixon Porter later observed that the victory at Hatteras “gave us a foothold on southern soil and possession of the sounds of North Carolina. . . . It was a death-​blow to blockade running in that vicinity, and ultimately proved one of the most important events of the war.”7

128   David Silkenat For many white residents on the North Carolina coast, the Union victory on Hatteras sent them into a panic. Eighteen-​year-​old Elizabeth Collier wrote in her diary, “Hatteras taken by Yanks—​women and children fleeing. ‘Quick oh God! Save us from the enemy. Surely thou hast not forsaken us!’ ”8 Concerned citizens sent petitions to Raleigh and Richmond demanding that the rest of North Carolina’s coast receive reinforcements. One member of the Halifax County planter class wrote in her diary, “The excitement was tremendous throughout the State. . . . A thousand rumors, the last wilder than the first, were put in circulation. . . . Now this town was reported burned, now that.”9 Stationed near Fort Macon with the 26th North Carolina Regiment, Col. Zebulon Vance, a future North Carolina governor, wrote, “We are in constant doubt here, immense naval preparations have certainly been made by the Yankees for attacking the Southern Coast, but where they will strike no one can say.”10 Some white coastal residents, however, greeted the Union forces on Hatteras as liberators. On August 30, 1861, the day he took command of Fort Hatteras, Colonel Hawkins received a delegation of “loyal citizens,” asking for protection. By September more than 250 people had taken the oath of allegiance, with more arriving every day. Persecuted for their political allegiances, these North Carolina Unionists claimed that they had opposed secession, and that “secret Union meetings have been held in several of the counties bordering on the Pamlico Sound, and that they would openly avow themselves true to the United States Government if they were sure that they would be protected against the violence of the secessionists.” Hearing their stories, Hawkins wrote to Washington with three proposals: an invasion of North Carolina’s coastal counties with significant Unionist sentiment, a political convention so “that these counties would vote themselves back into the Union,” and the enlistment of local men into Unionist regiments. Were these steps taken immediately, Hawkins argued, “one-​third of the State of North Carolina would be back in the Union within two weeks.”11 Lincoln approved raising troops in North Carolina and encouraged Hawkins’s efforts to reestablish a Unionist government. In November 1861, Hawkins orchestrated a small Unionist convention on Hatteras, with representatives from forty-​five counties, which repudiated secession, the Confederacy, and the Raleigh government. The convention also elected a provisional governor and congressional representative, although Washington did not recognize either as legitimate.12 While Hawkins oversaw the small garrison and Unionist community on Hatteras, military officials in Washington prepared for a larger invasion of coastal North Carolina. Organized by Brig. Gen. Ambrose Burnside and Capt. Louis M. Goldsborough, the expedition targeted several sites on North Carolina’s jagged interior coast: Roanoke Island, which straddled the Pamlico and Albemarle Sounds; New Bern, the state’s colonial capital; Elizabeth City, which guarded the entrance to the Dismal Swamp Canal; and Fort Macon, which guarded Beaufort Harbor. On alert for a potential Union invasion since the fall of Hatteras, state officials lobbied heavily for additional defenses and soldiers, though most of these appeals fell on deaf ears in Richmond. In command of the small Confederate garrison on Roanoke Island, former Virginia governor Henry Wise repeatedly asked for reinforcements from his superior, Maj. Gen. Benjamin Huger, saying that

The Union Occupation of Coastal North Carolina    129 four thousand additional soldiers were needed to adequately defend the island, only to be told to rely on the “hard work and coolness among the troops you have, instead of more men.”13 Wise appealed to Richmond, arguing that Roanoke was “now utterly defenseless. No preparations have been made there at all adequate. . . . We have very limited means, and not half time enough to prepare to meet an enemy who is now almost in our immediate presence in very formidable force.”14 Repeatedly rebuffed in his requests for reinforcements and franticly preparing for an attack he knew he would lose, Wise’s health collapsed and he remained prostrate for the next few months, turning responsibility for Roanoke’s defense to Col. Henry M. Shaw. Expecting an attack, many prudent white civilians relocated to sites in the North Carolina Piedmont; many more prepared themselves for a rapid departure when the inevitable attack occurred. In the aftermath of Hatteras, few were under the illusion that the Confederate defenses could repel a Union attack. “We have no naval force to meet them on water,” noted one New Bern woman, “they have every advantage of us in that respect and unless God fight for us we must be defeated.”15 The Burnside Expedition formed one branch of a coordinated Union attack on vulnerable Rebel targets in early 1862. Orchestrated by Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan, the plan called for simultaneous advances on North Carolina, Tennessee, New Orleans, and Fort Pulaski in Georgia, intending to draw resources away from Richmond. In command of fifteen regiments, Burnside’s invasion was aided by Goldsborough’s fleet of narrow-​draft vessels that could navigate the shallow North Carolina coastline. Burnside’s flotilla left Annapolis in early January, but two fierce winter storms and difficulty getting the troopships over the bar at Hatteras delayed the assault on their first objective, Roanoke Island. Once in position, the Union fleet of sixty-​seven ships moved on Roanoke, defended by only two thousand Confederates and seven small gunboats. Few doubted the battle’s outcome. Starting at noon on February 7, Goldsborough ordered a heavy bombardment of Fort Barlow, which lasted until darkness set in. In the meantime, Burnside landed ten thousand men at Ashby’s Harbor, three miles south of Fort Barlow. The amphibious landing used surfboats and barges pulled by light-​draft steamers that sped toward the shore. Fifty feet away, the steamers released their charges, which used the momentum to beach themselves. The following day, Union forces proceeded cautiously, as the defending Confederates used a narrow gap in the island’s swampy terrain to bottleneck their advance. Union officers overcame this barrier by sending flanking movements into the swamp on both the right and left, prompting the Confederates into a panicked retreat. By nightfall, Confederate Col. Henry Shaw surrendered the island, its fortifications, and 2,500 men, including some reinforcements who arrived too late to participate in the battle but early enough to be included in the surrender. As had been the case with Hatteras, casualties on both sides were light: for the Union, 37 killed, 214 wounded, and 13 missing, while Confederates had 23 killed, 58 wounded, and 62 missing. After the victory at Roanoke Island, Burnside prepared to move upon the North Carolina mainland. On February 10, 1862, Union gunboats under Cdr. Stephen F. Rowan made short order of North Carolina’s coastal “mosquito fleet” near Elizabeth City. Setting the town on fire to prevent it from falling into Federal hands, Elizabeth

130   David Silkenat City’s white residents fled westward. When Union soldiers occupied the burning town, African Americans greeted them as liberators, a scene that would be repeated multiple times in the coming weeks. Word of Burnside’s victory on Roanoke reached Washington at the same time that news broke of Grant’s capture of Fort Henry and Fort Donelson. One New York newspaper rejoiced at “a week of glorious and unmixed triumph,” as Union forces struck a “mortal blow” to the Confederacy.16 The Saturday Evening Post heralded “the surrender of Roanoke Island” and “the capture of Fort Donelson” as the “rapid caving in of the rebellion.”17 For many in the North, these twin victories proved the first significant good news since the start of hostilities, and an optimistic few predicted that the war would be over by summer. Conversely, the defeats created a panic in Richmond and Raleigh. The Richmond Examiner claimed, “[T]‌he loss of an entire army at Roanoke Island is certainly the most painful event of the war . . . a repetition of Hatteras on a larger scale.”18 The Confederate Congress immediately started hearings to ascertain why Roanoke had fallen so quickly, an investigation that prompted Judah P. Benjamin’s removal as secretary of war. The defeat on Roanoke Island prompted Jefferson Davis to take immediate action. “Enough is known of the surrender at Roanoke Island to make us feel that it was deeply humiliating,” Davis told the Confederate Congress, “however imperfect may have been the preparations for defense.”19 On February 27, 1862, Davis suspended the writ of habeas corpus in Norfolk and Portsmouth, Virginia, which he suspected might be among Burnside’s next targets. To protect these “cities threatened with invasion,” Davis authorized military officials in the region to take extraordinary measures, including conscription of adult men, a mandatory curfew, and the imprisonment of “all persons against whom there is well-​grounded suspicion of disloyalty.”20 A few days later, he extended the declaration of martial law to include the capital of Richmond. Davis’s decision signaled an important shift in Confederate policy, one that prefaced increasing centralization and authoritarianism, and indicated the significance he attached to the defeat. Roanoke’s fall also prompted recriminations and panic in the rest of North Carolina. Enlistment in the Confederate ranks temporarily surged, but not in time or in sufficient numbers to adequately defend the state. Governor Henry Toole Clark attempted to prepare for further Union incursions, but scant resources and inadequate manpower made the task impossible. With only four thousand largely untrained soldiers, Confederate Brig. Gen. Lawrence O’Bryan Branch set out to fortify New Bern, the state’s colonial capital and Burnside’s likely next target. Two lines of defense protected the town: a strong outer system of breastworks known as the Croatan Line and an inner set of earthworks that ended with Fort Thompson, overlooking the Neuse River. With inadequate manpower to adequately defend both lines, Branch elected to only thinly staff the Croatan Line in favor of the shorter interior works. While Fort Thompson’s artillery prevented Union gunboats from traveling too far upriver, the interior line’s earthworks stretched westward only a mile, where it intersected with the Atlantic and North Carolina Railroad. West of the railroad, Branch only had the manpower to construct a series of

The Union Occupation of Coastal North Carolina    131 redans behind a muddy creek. He hoped that the swampy terrain would prove sufficient deterrent. Recognizing the inadequacy of Confederate defenses, some white civilians in New Bern had evacuated after the fall of Roanoke Island. Two trains packed with refugees left daily. One resident noted that since New Bern was “in an exposed position, it was thought best for as many women and children as could leave to do so.”21 Most white refugees from eastern North Carolina sought sanctuary in the Piedmont, especially in the cities of Raleigh, Greensboro, and Charlotte and in the smaller communities of Hillsborough, Chapel Hill, and Salisbury. In early September 1861, one week after the Union invasion of Hatteras Island, twelve-​year-​old Susie Mallett in Hillsborough wrote to her father, then serving with the Confederate Army, that his sister had arrived in town: “Aunt Mary arrived here from Newbern last week. The Yankee droved her from it. I suppose you heard that the Yankee had taked Fort Hatrass near Newbern. And all the people thought it wasn’t safe to stay.”22 Eastern North Carolina planters saw the imminent Union invasion as a threat not only to their personal safety but to the security of their enslaved property. Fearing that slaves would take advantage of the Union presence to run away, many slave owners removed them to the interior. Lawyer David Schenck was among the first to note the removal of slaves to the interior, writing in his diary that trainloads of white refugees were arriving daily in Raleigh from coastal North Carolina and that “negroes too are being sent off in numbers to the west for security.”23 By the summer of 1862, thousands of white and Black refugees had relocated to the Piedmont, where many of them would remain for the duration of the war. The Union attack on New Bern proceeded much as Burnside planned and Branch feared. Boarding transports on Roanoke Island, Burnside’s men crossed Pamlico Sound and entered the Neuse River. After landing on March 13 at a spot twelve miles below New Bern, they methodically advanced on Confederate lines, their progress slowed more by heavy mud than the vigorousness of the Rebel defense. By nightfall the Confederates had abandoned their extensive line and fallen back to the Fort Thompson line. The following morning, March 14, Burnside ordered his men to attack. At daybreak the Union forces advanced in three columns. They exploited a break in the Confederate center along the railroad, causing the entire line to falter. Overwhelmed, the inexperienced Confederate militiamen broke and stampeded, many of them running at a sprint for the bridge across the Trent River to New Bern. One Confederate officer noted, “[T]‌roops without their officers passed me in confusion, and throwing away their arms, rushed across the bridge.”24 Recognizing that he could not hold the line, Branch ordered a general retreat to Kinston, thirty-​five miles to the east. In the chaotic mass exodus, fleeing Confederates jostled with white civilians. One retreating Confederate soldier recalled “a perfect stampede” as “the panic stricken crowd of a heterogeneous mixture of soldiers, citizens, men, women, and children, and negroes leaving the town in the utmost confusion.”25 Hoping to prevent Burnside’s men pursuing them, Branch ordered the bridge across the Trent River burned. Some Rebel soldiers took it upon themselves to set fire to the town as well. One Union soldier noted that “only for the prompt efforts of the troops crossing into the city, and aid furnished by the colored people, New Berne would have been destroyed.”26

132   David Silkenat The largest military engagement of the Burnside Expedition, the Battle of New Bern also proved to be its bloodiest, with ninety Union and sixty-​four Confederate soldiers killed. Compared to other battles of this size, however, the death toll at New Bern proved remarkably light. When Union soldiers marched into the burning city, “one class of the population gave us a hearty welcome,” recalled chaplain Rev. Horace James, “the negroes. They stood in lines along the street as we advanced. . . . They seemed too happy for expression, and were actually wild with delight.”27 African Americans in eastern North Carolina saw the Union occupation of New Bern as a signal to abandon the plantation, as thousands of runaway slaves entered Federal lines in the coming weeks. General Burnside reported that New Bern had been “overrun with fugitives from the surrounding towns and plantations,” a situation he found “a source of very great anxiety.” Recognizing that Federal policy on runaway slaves remained inchoate, Burnside added, “[I]‌t would be utterly impossible if we were so disposed to keep them outside of our lines, as they find their way to us through the woods and swamps from every side.”28 Two weeks after the victory at New Bern, Burnside assigned oversight of this growing refugee population to Vincent Colyer, a Christian Commission volunteer who had accompanied the Union expedition. Colyer’s appointment created an uneasy partnership between military officers and civilian relief workers that would persist for years to come. An abolitionist and humanitarian, Colyer saw his primary obligation to feed and care for the thousands of Black refugees, many of whom had come into Union lines with only the clothes on their back. To this end he helped to build refugee camps near New Bern and on Roanoke Island and establish schools and hospitals. Conversely, Burnside saw Black refugees primarily as a source of manual labor. He ordered Colyer to recruit as many as five thousand Black men to build fortifications and work on the docks, paying them eight dollars per month, plus rations and clothes. Colyer also helped to organize a volunteer corps of fugitive slaves to work as spies, scouts, and guides. Prohibited from officially enlisting in the Union Army, Black refugees sojourned deep behind Confederate lines to collect information and guide white soldiers. One New Yorker claimed, “[I]‌n all our expeditions in North Carolina we have depended upon the negroes for our guides, for without them we could not have moved with any safety.”29 For Black refugees, life in North Carolina’s contraband camps proved both a blessing and a curse. The camps enabled them to reconstruct families divided by slavery, obtain an education denied to them in slavery, and establish social and religious institutions that would shape Black politics for decades to come. However, the camps were also sites of immense suffering. Overcrowded and without adequate sanitation, the camps were subject to outbreaks of epidemic disease, including smallpox, typhoid, and yellow fever. The Union invasion and occupation of eastern North Carolina exposed the divided loyalties of the white civilian population. New Bern and other occupied towns became places of refuge for white Unionists who fled to the Union banner just as runaway slaves did. White Unionists in North Carolina were a heterogeneous bunch. While some had maintained their support for the old flag during and after the secession crisis, most wore their Unionism lightly. “The North Carolinian calls himself a Unionist,” wrote Northern

The Union Occupation of Coastal North Carolina    133 journalist Sidney Andrews, “but he makes no special pretense of love for the Union.”30 Their flexible and contingent loyalties depended on practical considerations as much as political or regional allegiances. Many white refugees fled to Union-​occupied New Bern to escape Confederate conscription. In May 1862, Burnside authorized enlisting white North Carolinians, and two regiments were raised over the next eighteen months. Many of these soldiers had previously served in Confederate uniforms and were branded deserters by Rebel authorities. Other white refugees saw greater economic opportunities in Union territory. In the no-​man’s land between Union-​occupied New Bern and Confederate Kinston, white civilians had to negotiate a precarious political and military landscape. Liable to be visited by both Union and Confederate patrols, white civilians wore their loyalty lightly. For many of them, their flexible allegiance had started during the secession crisis and continued throughout the conflict. Much to the consternation of Union officials, many local civilians refused to take an oath of allegiance to the Union, preferring to swear an oath of neutrality. While most civilians tried to avoid taking sides, some organized themselves into Unionist and Confederate guerrilla bands, which by May 1862 had transformed parts of eastern North Carolina, especially those counties bordering the Great Dismal Swamp, into a lawless and violent region. Traveling by canoe from Portsmouth to New Bern, one Union surgeon witnessed “the banks of the Neuse River swarmed with guerrillas. . . . We could see their fires and hear them talking, and there would be an occasional shot.”31 Because of the threats of violence, the no-​man’s land became depopulated, as civilians sought sanctuary outside of an active war zone. In the weeks after the fall of New Bern, Burnside’s forces occupied the coastal towns of Washington and Plymouth uncontested. In the campaign’s last major action, Burnside laid siege to Fort Macon, an aged masonry fort on Bogue Banks that guarded the channel to Beaufort. (The North Carolina town of Beaufort should not be confused with its South Carolina counterpart; although both are named for the same English duke, their names are pronounced differently.) When the garrison’s commander twice refused to surrender, Burnside ordered an artillery bombardment that prompted its defenders to raise a white flag within a day. Burnside consented to generous terms that granted paroles to the captured Confederates, and on April 26, 1862, Rhode Island soldiers occupied Fort Macon. Like earlier battles on the Carolina coast, causalities were very light. Shortly after his victory at Fort Macon, General Burnside and the majority of his forces were recalled to support McClellan’s efforts on the Peninsula, effectively bringing his Expedition to a close. The Union victories in coastal North Carolina in 1861 and early 1862 created a stable Union enclave along the south Atlantic seaboard. With the exception of a disastrous Confederate attempt to retake New Bern in February 1864 and the successful capture of Plymouth two months later, these Union bastions remained relatively unmolested, as the modest Federal garrisons effectively dissuaded Confederate efforts to reclaim them. For the duration of the conflict, these bases, alongside Port Royal in South Carolina, served as the foundation of the Atlantic blockade. As a consequence of the Burnside Expedition, all the ports in North Carolina except Wilmington were closed to Confederate traffic.

134   David Silkenat Beyond its effects on the blockade, the most important consequences of the Union invasion of the North Carolina coastline were as testing grounds for emancipation, free labor, and wartime Reconstruction, objectives that stood in uneasy tension. On May 19, 1862, two months after the capture of New Bern, Lincoln appointed Edward Stanly to serve as North Carolina’s first and only military governor. Persistent in his belief in Southern Unionism, Lincoln hoped that Stanly, a former North Carolina congressman, could reinstitute civilian government in the state. Asserting that his appointment granted him the autonomy of a “dictator” and that he “could do what [he] pleased,” Stanly immediately began to reinstitute slavery in occupied North Carolina. In his “first administrative act,” he ordered Colyer to close the two Black schools in New Bern, arguing that he “had been sent to restore the old order of things.” Stanly informed Colyer that “the laws of North Carolina forbade slaves to be taught to read and write.” Furthermore, Stanly argued that the Black schools undermined the growth of white Unionism in eastern North Carolina.32 Within days of taking office, Stanly received petitions from local whites for the “restoration of their fugitive property,” and on several occasions he permitted slave owners to violently seize African Americans who had been living in de facto freedom since the Union invasion. Stanly's policy on refugee slaves created a “stampede in all directions.” One observer noted, “Frightened at this turn of affairs, a number of the slaves who have congregated in the town had scattered like a flock of frightened birds. Some have taken to the swamps, and others have concealed themselves in out-​of-​the-​way places. A perfect panic prevails among them.”33 This unsettled situation remained until Stanly resigned in early 1863 to protest Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Although Lincoln excluded Union-​occupied Virginia and Louisiana from its provisions, the executive order did apply to occupied North Carolina, and therefore refugee African Americans became “henceforward and forever free.” In New Bern, African Americans enlisted in newly formed Black regiments. Speaking to recruits in Beaufort, former slave Abraham Galloway articulated the broader significance of Black military service, claiming that they “would have not only their personal freedom, but political equality, and if this should be refused them at the ballot box they would have it at the cartridge box!”34 By the end of the war, more than five thousand African Americans from eastern North Carolina had enlisted in the Union Army.

Notes 1. Ira Berlin, Barbara J. Fields, Thavolia Glymph, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland, eds., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), ser. 1, vol. 1, 684. 2. Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion, 30 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1880–​1901), ser. 1, vol. 6: 713. Hereafter cited as ORN. 3. ORN, ser. 1, vol. 6: 110.

The Union Occupation of Coastal North Carolina    135 4. Jessie Ames Marshall, Private and Official Correspondence of General Benjamin F. Butler (Jamaica Plain, MA: n.p., 1917), 1:227–​228. 5. W. Buck Yearns and John G. Barrett, North Carolina Civil War Documentary (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 30. 6. Thomas Sparrow Diary, August 29, 1861, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (hereafter SHC). 7. David Dixon Porter, The Naval History of the Civil War (New York: Sherman, 1886), 47. 8. Yearns and Barrett, North Carolina Civil War Documentary, 32. 9. Catherine Ann Devereux Edmondston, “Journal of a Secesh Lady”: The Diary of Catherine Ann Devereux Edmondston, 1860–​1866, ed. Beth G. Crabtree and James W. Patton (Raleigh: North Carolina Division of Archives and History, 1979), 86–​87. 10. Vance to Wife Harrietta Espy Vance, October 17, 1861, in Zebulon B. Vance, The Papers of Zebulon Baird Vance, vol. 1: 1843–​1862, ed. Frontis W. Johnston (Raleigh: North Carolina Department of Archives and History, 1963), 118. 11. U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, 127 vols. (Washington: D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1880–​1901), ser. 1, vol. 4: 607–​613. Hereafter cited as OR. 12. Yearns and Barrett, North Carolina Civil War Documentary,  32–​33. 13. OR, ser. 1, vol. 9: 112–​115. 14. OR, ser. 1, vol. 9: 132–​134. 15. Clarissa Phelps Hanks Diary, January 26, 1862, Hanks Papers, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC. 16. New York Independent, February 20, 1862. 17. Saturday Evening Post, March 1, 1862. 18. Richmond Examiner, February 11, 1862. 19. Journal of the Congress of the Confederate States of America, 1861–​1865 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1904), 2:22. 20. OR, ser. 1, vol. 9: 46, 56. 21. Mary Norcott Bryan, A Grandmother’s Recollections of Dixie (New Bern, NC:  Dunn, 1912), 25. 22. Susie Mallett to Peter Mallett, September 7, 1861, Peter Mallett Papers, SHC. 23. Diary, September 1, 1861, David Schenck Papers, SHC. 24. Bela Estvan, War Pictures from the South (London: Routledge, 1863), 2:148 25. William A. Curtis, “A Journal Reminiscences of the War,” Our Living and Our Dead 2, no. 3 (May 1875): 288. 26. Joseph Waldo Denny, Wearing the Blue in the 25th Mass. Volunteer Infantry (Worcester, MA: Putnam & Davis, 1879), 104. 27. Horace James, letter, Congregationalist, March 22, 1862. 28. Burnside to Stanton, March 21, 1862, OR, ser. 2, vol. 1: 812. 29. Philadelphia Inquirer, July 17, 1862. 30. Sidney Andrews, The South since the War (Boston: Tickner & Fields, 1866), 392. 31. John M.  Spear, “Army Life in the Twenty-​Fourth Regiment, Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry,” Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston. 32. OR, ser. 1, vol. 9: 400; Vincent Colyer, Report of the Services Rendered by the Freed People to the United States Army (New York: V. Colyer, 1864), 44; New York Times, June 10, 1862. 33. New York Times, June 4 and 10, 1862.

136   David Silkenat 34. Judkin Browning, The Southern Mind under Union Rule:  The Diary of James Rumley (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009), 71.

Bibliography Barrett, John G. The Civil War in North Carolina. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1963. Browning, Judkin. Shifting Loyalties: The Union Occupation of Eastern North Carolina. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. Cecelski, David S. The Fire of Freedom: Abraham Galloway and the Slaves’ Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. Click, Patricia C. Time Full of Trial: The Roanoke Island’s Freedmen’s Colony, 1862–​1867. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Hess, Earl J. Lee’s Tar Heels: The Pettigrew-​Kirkland-​MacRae Brigade. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. McPherson, James M. War on the Waters: Union and Confederate Navies, 1861–​1865. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. Meekins, Alex Christopher. Elizabeth City, North Carolina, and the Civil War: A History of Battle and Occupation. Charleston, SC: History Press, 2007. Moore, Mark Anderson. The Old North State at War:  The North Carolina Civil War Atlas. Raleigh: North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, 2015. Myers, Barton A. Executing Daniel Bright: Race, Loyalty, and Guerrilla Violence in a Coastal Carolina Community, 1861–​1865. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009. Myers, Barton A. Rebels against the Confederacy:  North Carolina’s Unionists. New  York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Sauers, Richard A. A Succession of Honorable Victories:  The Burnside Expedition in North Carolina. Dayton, OH: Morningside, 1996. Silkenat, David. Driven from Home:  North Carolina’s Civil War Refugee Crisis. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016. Silkenat, David. Raising the White Flag: How Surrender Defined the American Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019.

Chapter 8

Cam paign for C ha rl e ston Military Science, Emancipation, and Social Collapse Lorien Foote

No Southern city exceeded Charleston in symbolic importance during the Civil War: it represented the secession movement. The Union campaign against Charleston and its environs lasted from November 1861 to February 1865. It included a naval blockade, classic siege operations on Morris Island against Confederate fortifications, and the 545-​ day bombardment of the city. Confederate defenses relied on engineering expertise and technological innovations in the form of torpedoes and submarines. Because Union forces confronted Confederate defenses for such an extended period of time along a lengthy coastline connected to South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, the campaign for Charleston had far-​reaching effects. It created a refugee crisis, caused the breakdown of law and order, disrupted farming in interior counties, unleashed slave uprisings, and changed women’s relationship to the state. Because the Union occupation of the coastal Sea Islands was stable from the opening months of the war, this campaign featured prominent experiments with military emancipation, free labor, and the recruiting and use of African American soldiers in combat that profoundly shaped the national conversation about emancipation and civil rights. Confederate forces fired the opening shots of the war from Charleston on April 12, 1861, when their artillery forced the surrender of the U.S. garrison at Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. Three weeks later, the USS Niagara inaugurated a naval blockade. The presence of this screw steamer was a symbolic gesture since the single vessel could not hope to close the three different channels that gave ships access to the port of Charleston. Military action began in earnest on November 7, when a Union fleet of seventy ships under the command of Flag Officer Samuel Du Pont attacked Port Royal, located fifty-​two miles south of Charleston and thirty-​two miles north of Savannah. It was one of the best natural harbors along the south Atlantic coast, and the Union hoped to gain a coaling and supply station for a legitimate blockade of Charleston. The Union vessels moved in an elliptical pattern as their guns took turns pounding the defending

138   Lorien Foote forts. Confederate forces evacuated, and Union troops under Brig. Gen. Thomas W. Sherman took possession of the island. Du Pont achieved the Union’s first major victory of the war. The U.S. Navy possessed a base for the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron and for army incursions along the coastline of three southern states. Success at Port Royal led Union Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles to develop subsequent strategy based on the belief that steam warships could defeat land fortifications without the aid of the army.1 The Union victory at Port Royal had drastic social consequences disproportionate to the minor number of troops involved. White families fled the surrounding islands and abandoned plantations and ten thousand slaves to the occupying federal forces. Plantation owners in the South Carolina low country as far inland as thirty miles from the coast evacuated thousands of slaves to the central and upcountry regions of the Carolinas, where these white and Black refugees contributed to housing and food shortages and inflation. Low country elites often took refuge in their summer residences located in western North Carolina. In Flat Rock, they served as a spark that exploded latent class tensions. Local whites viewed the slaves brought into the region as a danger and a threat to their economic survival. They murdered a prominent wealthy white refugee, burned homes, ran off livestock, and instituted a reign of terror. Low country refugees had fled from one war only to find another.2 The Sea Islands were transformed into experimental communities with no parallel in the history of the antebellum South. Two days after entering Port Royal, General Sherman appointed a superintendent of contrabands who organized local African

Map 8.1 Charleston

Campaign for Charleston    139 Americans into a workforce that unloaded supplies and navigated naval vessels. Through the First Confiscation Act of August 1861, Congress had authorized agents of the Federal government to seize property, including slaves, which had been used to support insurrection. The luxury cotton grown in the Sea Islands offered an opportunity for the government to make a profit, so Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase sent a treasury agent to collect the cotton crop and plan for production on the abandoned plantations in 1862. Northern philanthropists and antislavery reformers descended on the islands to establish free labor and education (more than two hundred had arrived by May 1862). The War Department took over the plantations in June 1862 and appointed Brig. Gen. Rufus Saxton as military governor. The government paid the salaries of superintendents tasked with managing the plantation labor force and provided money for equipment, clothing, and rations. Northern reform societies paid the salaries of teachers assigned to the plantations. Superintendents paid laborers low wages (thirty cents a day) to work in gangs to produce cotton. Some tried new incentives such as giving each Black family responsibility for a portion of land. When the Treasury Department organized a public auction of the abandoned plantations two years later, a few African Americans were able to purchase a limited amount of acreage.3 U.S. military personnel in the theater were more radical than the Lincoln administration and pushed forward an emancipationist policy toward the slaves who entered Union military lines. Maj. Gen. David Hunter, appointed to command the Department of the South in March 1862, with headquarters at Hilton Head Island, issued a proclamation on May 9 that declared slaves in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida to be free, but Lincoln rescinded the order on May 19, reserving such authority for himself. After his proclamation of freedom, Hunter ordered all able-​bodied Black males to Hilton Head because he wanted to recruit a Black regiment. He sent squads of Union soldiers to the plantations who rounded up terrified Black men at gunpoint and shot a handful who resisted. The regiment served for three months but was never mustered in because Lincoln did not sanction it. In the fall of 1862, one company that had remained on picket duty joined with freed slaves who had armed themselves to fight off a Confederate raiding party that landed on St. Simon’s island. After Congress passed the Militia Act in July 1862, which authorized the recruitment of African American soldiers for segregated regiments with white officers, Hunter mustered in the initial company of the 1st South Carolina Volunteers on November 7, which was the first regiment in the Union Army composed of freed slaves. Some of its corporals eventually commanded white soldiers during the performance of guard duty.4 Port Royal established the blueprint for transitioning from slavery to freedom that the War Department and later the Freedmen’s Bureau would apply throughout the South during Reconstruction. This model subordinated the needs of African Americans to the military effort, prioritized the production of cotton, assumed that former slaves were unprepared for the full responsibilities of citizenship, and minimized opportunities for freed people to acquire land of their own. One of its most important lasting achievements was education. The presence of thousands of Black children in school and their use of nearly thirty-​six thousand educational books and pamphlets during 1862

140   Lorien Foote was a drastic departure from the past and inaugurated the transition from illiteracy to literacy for the former slave population.5 African Americans on the Sea Islands faced uncertainty and constant flux as they sought freedom in a situation that still conscribed them. The army regularly disrupted daily life for Black families and undermined the progress of free labor experiments when it recruited and conscripted men from local communities. White soldiers of the Union Army on occasion raided African Americans’ gardens and stole their property and abused Black women. Even distant campaigns dislocated Sea Island Blacks from their homes. When the War Department transferred troops from the Department of the South to Virginia in the summer of 1862, Hunter and Saxton concentrated their remaining forces in Beaufort and Port Royal. In order to protect Blacks from kidnapping by nearby Confederates, they uprooted settlements on Edisto and St. Simons islands and relocated Black families away from the crops they had planted to locations nearer to Union troops. The alliance that eventually formed between refugees from slavery and the Union Army produced a long-​term transformation. African American women such as Fanny Wright, who escaped from the mainland in a boat (Confederate pickets shot one of her two children dead in her arms during the flight), worked for the army as laundresses and provided important manual labor. Fourteen-​year-​old Susie King, who had learned to read and write while a slave in Savannah, worked as laundress, nurse, and teacher for the men of the 1st South Carolina.6 As U.S. officials across the South documented the contributions that freed men, women, and children provided to the Union war effort, the Federal government assumed an obligation to protect the basic rights of those who had proven their usefulness to the national community. The national government, rather than the states, became the arbiter of citizenship, and the permanence of emancipation was ultimately secured through the Fourteenth Amendment that made Black men citizens. Union forces maintained their base on Port Royal and Hilton Head throughout the war. The War and Naval departments prodded their commanders in the theater to undertake operations against Charleston. In addition to its enormous symbolic value, it was a critical port for the blockade running that brought supplies to the Confederate Army, and its capture would seriously undermine the traffic. Federals hoped to cut the important Savannah-​to-​Charleston railroad line that served the national system of Confederate logistics. General Hunter and Du Pont made their first serious attempt to capture Charleston after Robert Smalls, an African American pilot on a Confederate steamer, brought the vessel to the Union fleet on May 13, 1862, and conveyed important intelligence. Confederate troops had abandoned a fort at the mouth of the Stono River, which offered the Union a beachhead on James Island. Confederates had amassed infantry and built significant fortifications there because the island was the key to defending both land and water approaches to the city. Fort Johnson guarded the entry to Charleston Harbor and offered a position from which artillery could pound Fort Sumter into submission. If Federals possessed Johnson and neutralized Sumter, the U.S. Navy could enter

Campaign for Charleston    141 the harbor. On May 21, Du Pont sent gunboats up the Stono that fired on Confederate cavalry helping panicked planters remove their slaves. This action opened the way for hundreds of slaves to cross into Union lines. On June 2, two divisions of Union soldiers landed on James Island with the goal of crossing the island to attack Fort Johnson from the rear. Naval gunfire supported the landing and suppressed Confederate artillery. One division, encamped at Grimball’s plantation, immediately dug an infantry trench 1,200 yards long with battery emplacements.7 Land operations during the siege of Charleston, as was typical in the eastern theater, featured the hasty construction of field fortifications whenever soldiers were in close proximity to the enemy for several days. The campaign also featured elaborate defensive fortifications that Confederate engineers had designed and prepared. The Confederate position on James Island contained five miles of earthworks and the superbly constructed Tower Battery, located near the village of Secessionville, which had four faces configured in a giant “M” shape and seven guns mounted on parapets up to sixteen feet high. Marshes surrounded the works so that the only approach for attacking troops was a stretch of land two hundred yards wide directly in the front. When Confederate troops probed the Union position at Grimball’s plantation on June 10, they were repulsed in an open-​field engagement in front of the Union works. Hunter returned to Hilton Head and ordered his subordinates on James to abort active operations but to maintain their toehold on the island. Naval gunboats maintained a tremendous rate of fire on Confederate positions. Brig. Gen. Henry Benham ignored Hunter’s orders and took the offensive. On June 16, six thousand Union soldiers attacked the Tower Battery, the strongest point in the Confederate defensive line, but its defenders, commanded by Col. Thomas G. Lamar (1st South Carolina Artillery), repulsed them. Although five hundred assailants gained the parapets, there was no steady flow of supporting reinforcements because of the constricted approach to the earthworks and the inexperience of Union regimental commanders. Hunter ordered Union troops to withdraw from the island on July 1.8 The evacuation of James Island poisoned relations between the Union Army and Navy. Hunter did not notify Du Pont of his intentions. Naval officers were disgusted at the quick abandonment of what seemed to them a promising campaign. Hunter’s incompetence reinforced the view of officials in Washington, particularly Naval Secretary Welles and Assistant Secretary Gustavas Fox, that the navy should capture Charleston without the cooperation of the army. They were convinced that Du Pont could run the gauntlet of Fort Sumter, Fort Johnson, and Fort Moultrie with his monitors, enter the harbor, and demand the city’s surrender. Du Pont was skeptical of this plan, but he never clearly communicated his opposition to his superiors. Although Admiral David G.  Farragut had captured New Orleans in a similar manner, Charleston presented greater natural and man-​made obstacles. Its cul-​de-​sac-​shaped harbor was ringed with expertly constructed batteries and was filled with torpedoes (underwater mines). Du Pont also doubted the offensive capability of the monitors, which were flat ironclads with a round turret in the center that fired two Dahlgren guns. Their rate of fire was too slow to reduce earthworks, and they broke down easily during continuous action.

142   Lorien Foote While Du Pont (recently promoted to rear admiral), Fox, and Welles talked past each other during the fall of 1862, U.S. gunboats conducted sorties up South Carolina’s rivers that disrupted local economies in the interior of the state. These raids were ongoing until the end of the war. They interrupted the harvesting and movement of cotton, burned saltworks, destroyed boats, and brought slaves and refugees to Union lines. The navy played a critical role in emancipation in the Carolinas and enlisted refugees into military service months before the army did so. African Americans were 15 percent of the crew in the blockading fleet and piloted the gunboats through the tricky tides and obstacles of South Carolina’s harbors and rivers.9 The 1st South Carolina also conducted sorties from January to June 1863. Two of its companies penetrated thirty miles from the coast and captured Confederate pickets. African American Sgt. Harry Williams and his men, operating independently of white officers, liberated all the slaves on a plantation during a raid.10 These incursions and the stable Union occupation of the Sea Islands convinced African Americans living in the South Carolina low country that it was an opportune time for insurrection. They were aware that the U.S. Congress had passed the Second Confiscation Act in July 1862, which provided freedom to slaves whose masters were in rebellion. Thousands of male slaves absconded to Union lines. They served as critical military labor—​building earthworks, unloading supplies, navigating vessels, scouting enemy positions—​and enlisted in the U.S. Colored Troops to fight for their freedom. Others formed guerrilla bands that terrorized the low country white population and raided plantations for food and supplies. Female slaves disrupted work patterns and increasingly defied the orders of their mistresses. The actions Confederate military officials took to defend Charleston during 1862 and 1863 drained South Carolina of both white men and slaves. Gen. P. G. T. Beauregard was an engineering genius who built one of the most formidable fortification networks possessed by any Southern city. Conscripted white men from the interior served as soldiers, cavalry, and artillerists. Impressed Black slaves built the miles of fortifications, earthworks, and batteries defending the city. As a result, portions of the low country were eventually emptied of all men between the ages of seventeen and fifty. Throughout the state, available food, forage for livestock, and manpower were diverted—​and by 1864 the Confederate military directly impressed these resources—​to military efforts at Charleston and Richmond. Agricultural production declined, and the state government of South Carolina eventually imported food to some districts that could no longer produce enough to feed their population. The hunger of women and children created political transformation throughout the South. Although the Confederacy’s slaveholding male leadership envisioned women as irrelevant to politics, the mass of poor, white, rural Southern women asserted themselves as a powerful constituency that influenced policy through their written petitions to government authorities for aid and a series of riots against government storage depots in March and April 1863. They developed a political identity as “soldiers’ wives” that enabled them to demand and obtain support for their families. South Carolina, along with other states, established welfare programs. In Greenville, for example, on the first

Campaign for Charleston    143 Monday of each month (locals called it Draw Day), officials distributed corn obtained through a tax-​in-​kind to the hundreds of needy persons who descended on the village. Confederate women thus prompted a new relationship between citizens and the state.11 The gradual, grinding collapse of South Carolina’s interior was not yet apparent to Union military officials facing the formidable fortifications of a defiant Charleston. Although the city was of little strategic importance in the wider Union military effort, the Lincoln administration believed its symbolic power demanded that Du Pont take action. On April 7, 1863, his squadron of ironclads approached Fort Sumter in single-​file formation. Rather than run the gauntlet to enter the harbor, as authorities in Washington expected, the squadron attacked the exterior fortifications. When an explosion rocked the lead monitor before it crossed the obstructions blocking the harbor, which Du Pont had failed to reconnoiter, it turned and engaged Fort Sumter. Because of poor design, pilots in the monitors had poor visibility and could not navigate them handily. They ran into each other. The flagship ironclad frigate, the USS New Ironsides, could not steer in the strong currents and anchored over a 2,000-​pound torpedo that failed to detonate. The New Ironsides did not fire any broadsides at Fort Sumter for fear of hitting the monitors that were within a thousand yards of the fort. The monitors fired only 151 shots at Sumter, and only 36 struck. Confederate defenders of Sumter fired 2,209 shots from seventy-​six guns and scored 520 hits on the ironclads. After two hours, Du Pont broke off the attack.12 President Lincoln and his advisors wanted to maintain a credible threat against Charleston. They still hoped to capture the symbol of secession but at minimum desired commanders in the theater to occupy Confederate defenders so that troops could not be transferred to the scene of major Union efforts in Virginia and Mississippi. The administration relieved Du Pont and Hunter and replaced them with Rear Adm. John A. Dahlgren, noted for his technological innovations to naval armament, and Maj. Gen. Quincy A.  Gillmore, noted for his engineering prowess. Gillmore proposed to land troops on Morris Island, a narrow strip of land at the outer entrance of the harbor that naval guns could enfilade, and capture the two major earthworks that defended the island. Then army engineers and artillerists could establish breaching batteries whose fire would destroy Fort Sumter and enable the navy to enter the harbor. But strategic confusion, miscommunication, and cross-​purposes between the army and the navy at the administrative and the operational levels hindered planning and implementation of the campaign. Dahlgren and Gillmore each believed that it was the other’s job to capture Charleston. The Union offensive and Confederate defense on Morris Island evolved into a classic siege operation that drew on the accumulated engineering techniques of two centuries of western warfare but employed modern technologies such as land mines and calcium lights. Union engineers built batteries that contained thirty-​two guns and fifteen mortars on Folly Island, adjacent to Morris. Because Confederate pickets were located just across an inlet, the Federals worked at night in silence, muffled their equipment, and hid construction under heavy brush during the day. On July 8, a Union division moved onto James Island to skirmish with Confederate forces as a diversion. Two days

144   Lorien Foote later, the batteries on Folly Island and four monitors unleashed a two-​hour bombardment on Confederate troops in the earthworks on the southern end of Morris Island. This enabled a Union brigade to land, capture eleven one-​gun batteries, and overrun three-​fourths of the island with the support of the monitors that advanced alongside the soldiers marching up the sandy beach. Battery Wagner, an enormous sand earthwork with ample artillery, blocked any further advance. After Confederate defenders repulsed a predawn attack on July 11 by three Union regiments, Union engineers initiated the construction of four breaching batteries. On July 18, all the Federal land and sea artillery in range opened a massive bombardment of Wagner to prepare for an infantry assault. Federals fired one projectile at the earthwork every two seconds. Exploding iron fragments created clouds of debris that disguised how effectively the sand earthwork absorbed this punishment.13 After witnessing the dazzling display of pyrotechnics, an overconfident and inexperienced Gillmore, who had failed to orient regimental commanders to the lay of the land, ordered Brig. Gen. George C. Strong’s brigade forward for a frontal assault on Wagner at twilight. The brigade included the 54th Massachusetts, an African American regiment recruited in the Northern states. Wagner presented the same problem for attacking forces that Tower Battery on James Island had the year before: a narrow approach, in this case a strip of land between the sea and wet marshes, and the resulting trouble commanders had inserting supporting units into the action. No more than five hundred men at a time could pass through the defile leading to Wagner. The lead regiment, the 54th Massachusetts, took enormous casualties on the approach but gained one of the parapets and engaged in desperate hand-​to-​hand fighting before withdrawing. The 6th Connecticut and the 48th New York climbed the sea face and discovered a gap in the Confederate lines at an angle of the work because the 31st North Carolina had refused to leave the bombproof when ordered to take its position. About a hundred men of a supporting Union brigade also gained the angle and seized two gun chambers, but they were trapped in a cul-​de-​sac inside the earthwork. They held on under heavy fire until they realized that no reinforcements were coming. Gillmore halted a third brigade before it entered the fray. The Federals suffered 30 percent casualties overall; the 54th Massachusetts, 42 percent, and the 48th New York, 50 percent. The 7th New Hampshire set a single-​battle record for Civil War regiments when it lost eighteen of its officers during the assault.14 The participation of the 54th Massachusetts in the assault on Battery Wagner contributed to a revolutionary transformation of mindset about the purpose of the war among the Northern reading public. Its colonel was Robert Gould Shaw, the son of wealthy abolitionists who had personal connections to the most important transatlantic publishers and literary figures. He was killed on Wagner’s parapet and buried in a mass grave with his men in the aftermath of the battle. Newspapers widely circulated the story that the Confederate commander of Wagner had pointedly refused to return Shaw’s body or give him an honorable officer’s burial. Shaw’s father publicly retorted that his son’s resting place among his brave men was holy ground. This response and the actions of the Black soldiers of the 54th during the battle inspired a wave of paintings, essays,

Campaign for Charleston    145 poems, and newspaper articles that swayed public opinion in favor of Black regiments and convinced skeptics of their combat abilities. Battery Wagner became the literary world’s symbol of white sacrifice for Black freedom. While the transatlantic literary world was absorbed with the deaths and burials at Wagner, the Confederate War Department faced a legal and public relations quandary because Confederate troops at Wagner had captured at least seventy-​three soldiers from the 54th Massachusetts.15 Supporters of the Confederacy considered U.S. Black troops and their white officers to be engaged in servile insurrection and refused to treat them as legitimate combatants entitled to prisoner of war status. In November 1862, President Jefferson Davis had authorized the commander at Charleston to summarily execute four African Americans wearing Federal uniforms who were captured on St. Catherine’s Island.16 Controversy between the combatants over Confederate treatment of Black soldiers escalated when the Union recruited U.S. Colored Troops in earnest after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation took effect on January 1, 1863. In the ensuing months, the U.S. War Department had placed several regiments in active combat zones, including the operations against Charleston. On May 1, the Confederate Congress proclaimed that military courts should try and execute white U.S. officers captured commanding Black troops. Confederate military authorities should deliver any Blacks captured in U.S. uniform to state authorities in the location where they were captured. Although the resolutions were not explicit, its authors intended that state authorities would execute African American soldiers or sell them into slavery.17 Confederate authorities recognized the intense international publicity attending the soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts, who were born free in Northern states and who enjoyed the patronage of financially and politically powerful Northern Republicans, and they worried about the diplomatic ramifications of executing any of them. U.S. authorities promised retaliation in order to protect the Black soldiers captured at Wagner. On July 31, Secretary of War Edwin S. Stanton issued General Orders No. 252, which demanded that Confederates treat all U.S. soldiers as prisoners of war without distinction of color. The order announced that the United States would put a Confederate prisoner of war to hard labor for every U.S. soldier sold into slavery and would execute a Confederate prisoner of war for every U.S. soldier put to death.18 Under intense scrutiny and the pressure of potential retaliation, the Confederate War Department did not implement the resolutions of the Confederate Congress in full. It never established the proposed military courts to try white officers. Secretary of War James A.  Seddon asked Governor Milledge Bonham not to try the captured Black soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts. Bonham ignored the request, but the court he convened refused jurisdiction, and the governor eventually returned the prisoners to military officials. Confederate authorities decided to distinguish between Black Federal prisoners born in slavery and those born free in Northern states. Seddon instructed state governors to consider the latter to be prisoners of war. The prisoners from the 54th Massachusetts either languished in the Charleston Jail and later the Florence Military Prison with white soldiers until exchanged near the end of the war, or died of wounds and disease while in confinement. The battle at Wagner thus swerved the Confederacy

146   Lorien Foote away from the path to public mass executions and inhibited the development of a uniform practice. It inaugurated the War Department’s covert preference, as Seddon informed one of his generals, “never to be inconvenienced with such prisoners.”19 In subsequent months, Confederate soldiers executed Black soldiers and their white officers on several battlefields when they tried to surrender. Military authorities reenslaved hundreds of Black soldiers and used them for military labor, but sent others to military prisons. The assault on Wagner proved Gillmore to be an ineffectual infantry commander, but he was an expert engineer, and he was in his element during the next phase of the campaign for Morris Island. He commenced a siege on July 19 that ultimately featured five parallels connected with a complex zigzag trench system, batteries of artillery mounting thirty-​eight guns that protected each parallel and fired on Confederate targets, the use of wire entanglements (a relatively new feature of war), and calcium lights to illuminate targets at night. Some of the batteries contained an experimental predecessor to the machine gun.20 Siege warfare was a well-​developed science that required exhausting and dangerous manual labor from soldiers. Fatigue parties, comprising mostly African American soldiers, worked eight-​hour shifts under the fire of Confederate artillery from James and sharpshooters in Wagner to consolidate trenches with sandbags and lumber. As the army constructed the siege works, the navy’s monitors were in action every day against Wagner, Sumter, and other targets of opportunity. The engineers and technologists commanding Union forces made the siege a test of artillery distance and experimental explosives. Dahlgren and Gillmore unleashed their combined firepower during a week-​long artillery bombardment of Wagner and Sumter that began August 17. On that same date, Gillmore received word that the “Swamp Angel” was ready. His engineers had constructed a battery whose platform and parapet floated on a sixteen-​foot-​deep mucky marsh located 7,900 yards from the city between Morris and James islands. The engineering marvel supported thirteen thousand sandbags and a 16,300-​pound 8-​inch Parrott rifle. At 1:30 a.m. on August 22, the Swamp Angel fired a shell into the city using a compass reading from the steeple of St. Michael’s church in downtown Charleston. A gun had never fired at a target at such a distance in the history of warfare to that point. Thirty-​four more shells would follow before the gun burst on August 23. One-​third of the shells were filled with Greek fire, an incendiary material, although the vast majority of these prematurely exploded before reaching the city.21 The firing of the Swamp Angel was the third time during the Civil War that the Union Army deliberately bombarded the residential areas of a major city. President Lincoln had a long-​standing interest in such a tactic. He encouraged Lt. Gen. Winfield Scott and Maj. Gen. George McClellan to bombard cities in April 1861 and May 1862, although they did not do so, and he personally promoted the testing and distribution of the experimental Greek fire to his commanders.22 Charleston was a legitimate military target with fortifications, arsenals, and foundries that produced ironclads and torpedoes. Gillmore believed that the customs of western warfare sanctioned his actions because Confederate defenders had the responsibility to remove noncombatants when Union

Campaign for Charleston    147 operations against the outer fortifications began. Forty days of continuous Federal attack served as sufficient warning of an imminent shelling of the city. The bombardment also reflected a special hatred for Charleston, the instigator of secession, and deep frustration over repeated military failures. Gillmore hoped that the bombardment would destroy the commercial value of the city for investors in Great Britain and the branches of Charleston-​based firms in England that ran supplies through the blockade. Union engineers and artillerists also fired into the city just to see if they could. The seven-​day bombardment of Fort Sumter pounded its walls to rubble and silenced its big guns from a range of two miles. Army artillerists threw 4,804 projectiles at Sumter, and half of them struck the target.23 Since the fort was no longer a threat to navy operations by August 23, Gillmore believed that Dahlgren and his squadron should have entered the harbor, but the admiral dreaded torpedoes and rightfully believed that the firepower of his ships was no match for the powerful Confederate batteries in the inner ring of fortifications protecting the city. Relations between the two men drastically deteriorated. Sumter was neutralized for harbor defense against a fleet and was reduced to an infantry outpost, but its garrison remained defiant. The garrison at Wagner, however, could not stop the construction of the siege works that doomed the earthwork. Its Confederate defenders—​South Carolina, North Carolina, and Georgia troops—​suffered a physical and emotional hell. On September 4, Beauregard held a meeting with his subordinates and determined to save the garrison. Two days later, Federal sappers reached Wagner’s ditch. That evening, Confederate forces evacuated the island. With Morris Island in Federal possession, the ships of the blockading fleet could take position in channels inside the bar of Charleston harbor. This effectively closed the city to blockade runners. Union artillerists were in position from Morris and a new gun was placed in the marsh battery to open a persistent bombardment of the city that lasted from November 17, 1863, until February 14, 1865. The 545-​day bombardment was the longest in military history until the German bombardment of Leningrad during World War II. Charlestonians deserted portions of the city; hundreds of cows grazed on the grass that grew in the street. Law and order collapsed. Bands of thieves risked the shells to roam downtown and pillage abandoned homes. Every night there was an assault and robbery downtown; without the gas that normally lighted the streets at night, it became too dangerous to venture out after dark. Confederate soldiers stripped homes and businesses of copper and other metals to make ordnance. It would take Charlestonians years to repair the damage to homes, churches, businesses, and streets. The bombardment inflicted casualties on an unknown number of noncombatants. As of January 8, 1864, there were five killed and eight wounded, but Confederate authorities stopped the official count after that date, and records during the height of the bombardment are too sporadic and incomplete to provide a reasonable estimate of the total. Diary and newspaper accounts suggest casualties were light but ongoing. There were daily injuries and at least two deaths from the shelling during September 1864, for example. Casualties continued after the war when unexploded shells wounded citizens digging them out of their yards and gardens.24

148   Lorien Foote After October 1863, Union and Confederate forces at Charleston settled into a stalemate. The two governments prioritized operations in other theaters: the Union stripped forces from Charleston to participate in raids in Florida and offensives in Virginia, while Confederates were sent to the defense of Richmond and Georgia. Military action around Charleston settled into a routine of artillery duels, scouting and reconnaissance expeditions to pinpoint the location of new enemy batteries and infantry outposts, and the constant repair and enhancements of earthworks and fortifications. Both armies consumed enormous amounts of timber and destroyed woodlands in Florida and Georgia to acquire materials for their extensive fortifications. Beauregard deployed innovative naval technology to wage an irregular naval war against the blockade and the Union boat patrols of the coastal islands. The Confederacy’s foremost torpedo expert, Brig. Gen. Gabriel James Rains, had arrived in Charleston during August 1863 to oversee the planting of a minefield in front of Wagner and of torpedoes in creeks, rivers, and harbors. Charleston merchants contributed funds to build the David, a low-​profile cigar-​shaped vessel armed with a spar that carried a torpedo six and a half feet below the water. On October 5, 1863, the David rammed the torpedo against the most powerful ironclad in the U.S. Navy, the New Ironsides, and blew a hole in its starboard side. Although the New Ironsides remained on duty, the attack altered the structure of the blockade. Dahlgren thenceforth required the monitors to remain together, with two serving as pickets to protect the New Ironsides, which was outfitted with a protective netting and a calcium light to illuminate surrounding waters. On February 17, 1864, Confederates altered the course of naval history when the H. L. Hunley sunk the USS Housatonic, a wooden screw sloop stationed outside the bar, in the first combat action by a submarine. The nine-​man crew of the Hunley used hand cranks to propel the vessel, which was armed with a torpedo on a bow spar. They did not survive the attack. Torpedoes and submarines ultimately did not disrupt the blockade, but they did sink several vessels and contributed to the U.S. Naval Department’s decision not to renew an attack on Charleston.25 The unique conditions of the siege of Charleston—​the length of the standoff between troops who could see and hear the enemy on a daily basis; the massive expenditure of projectiles in sustained artillery bombardments; the dread of land mines, torpedoes, and Greek fire that hung over participants; and the high percentage of African American soldiers deployed in the theater—​created tensions and frustrations that culminated in one of the war’s most notorious retaliation incidents. On June 13, 1864, the new Confederate commander of the Department of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, Maj. Gen. Samuel Jones, with the purpose of forcing the Union to suspend the bombardment of the city, put fifty Union officers who were prisoners of war in a house in a district that was under fire from Union guns. The Union War Department sent its new commander, Maj. Gen. John G. Foster, fifty Confederate prisoners of war to be put on Morris Island under the fire of Confederate guns. The vessels carrying the Confederate prisoners arrived off Morris Island on June 30, the day before Foster launched a demonstration against Charleston and its railroad line to Savannah that presented the greatest danger to Charleston during the entirety

Campaign for Charleston    149 of Union operations against the city. On July 1, two thousand Union soldiers, including the men of the 54th Massachusetts, advanced from Folly Island to the south end of James Island with the support of two monitors and several gunboats. They captured a battery, commenced entrenching, and held the position for two days. Although an attack on Fort Johnson at the opposite end of James utterly failed, a Union brigade of three U.S. Colored Troops and one white regiment successfully landed on John’s Island, located adjacent and to the west of James. Since the Union possessed Morris to the east and Folly to the south, the Federals were finally in position to enfilade the Confederate defensive lines on James. Jones recognized the peril and sent panicked telegrams for help. On July 7, the Union brigade attacked strongly fortified batteries and were repulsed. Confederate reinforcements from Georgia arrived on John’s Island during the action, and two days later Confederate infantry attacked the Federals’ defensive field fortifications and batteries, composed of outer and inner works that had been hastily constructed using timber from the woods on the island, but were driven back to their own batteries. On July 10, Foster ordered his forces to withdraw.26 During the ten days of combat, Foster and Jones exchanged letters about the prisoners of war and agreed to their exchange. But on July 29, Confederate prison officials sent another six hundred Union prisoners of war to Charleston. The U.S. War Department placed six hundred Confederate prisoners of war on Morris Island in retaliation. When Jones removed the prisoners from Charleston in October, Foster sent the Confederate prisoners off Morris. Although no prisoners were killed, the deliberate placement of prisoners of war under artillery fire in order to force a change in the enemy’s tactics, an action without parallel elsewhere during the war, exemplified the desperate nature of the contest for Charleston.27 The movements of Union Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s army doomed Charleston in the end. When it approached Savannah at the end of November after the destructive march from Atlanta, Foster landed forces south of Charleston and instigated a series of persistent but unsuccessful attacks on the Charleston and Savannah Railroad. Sherman’s troops captured Savannah, turned north into South Carolina, cut the railroad, and forced the Confederate garrison to evacuate Charleston on February 17, 1865. Although Union forces operating from the coast did not capture the city because of inept commanders, poor planning between the army and navy, and the obstacle of superior Confederate fortifications, they had reduced blockade running and had taken Charleston out of the war’s military calculations. Sherman chose other targets for his army since he believed Charleston was “a dead cock in the pit.”28 The length of the Federal operations against the coastal city contributed to the collapse of South Carolina’s political and social system in the months before Sherman’s army arrived. Districts throughout the region were in a condition of lawlessness and chaos when Union troops entered the city on February 18. Slaves in a paramilitary company in St. Matthew’s Parish were fighting their masters. In upcountry Spartanburg District, raiders and thieves numbering in the hundreds were robbing and terrorizing farmers. White and Black refugees were crowding the roads. Barter was replacing currency, and courts were no longer meeting.

150   Lorien Foote The U.S.  government held a ceremony at Fort Sumter on April 14, 1865, to raise the very flag that the Federal garrison had hauled down when it surrendered the fort four years earlier. Government officials, prominent Northern clergy, and Northern abolitionists made speeches, and the attending crowd sang “Victory at Last.” The next day Charlestonian African Americans held a jubilee in the streets. A parade featured a hearse bearing the placard “Slavery is Dead.”29 The song and the hearse encapsulated the local and national importance of the military contest over the symbol of secession.

Notes 1. Craig L. Symonds, Lincoln and His Admirals: Abraham Lincoln, the U.S. Navy, and the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 37, 69. 2. David Silkenat, Driven from Home:  North Carolina’s Civil War Refugee Crisis (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016), 206–​209. 3. National Freedmen’s Relief Association, Organized in the City of New  York, on the 22nd February, 1862 (New  York:  Wm. C.  Bryant, 1862), 3–​10; Willie Lee Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 3–​29. 4. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Army Life in a Black Regiment and Other Writings (New York: Penguin Books, 1997), 211–​214, 280–​281. 5. Annual Report of the New York National Freedman’s Relief Association, of New York, with a Sketch of Its Early History (New York: Holman, 1866), 10–​11. 6. Susie King Taylor, Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33rd U.S. Colored Troops, Late 1st South Carolina Volunteers, ed. Patricia W. Romero as A Black Woman’s Civil War Memoirs (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 1988), 29–​40; Higginson, Army Life, 192. 7. James M. McPherson, War on the Waters: The Union and Confederate Navies, 1861–​1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 138–​141. 8. Earl J. Hess, Field Armies and Fortifications in the Civil War: The Eastern Campaigns, 1861–​ 1864 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 245–​247. 9. Symonds, Lincoln and His Admirals, 165. 10. Higginson, Army Life, 179. 11. Stephanie McCurry, Confederate Reckoning:  Power and Politics in the Civil War South (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2010), 178–​203; Lorien Foote, The Yankee Plague:  Escaped Union Prisoners and the Collapse of the Confederacy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 43. 12. Robert M. Browning Jr., Success Is All That Was Expected: The South Atlantic Blockading Squadron during the Civil War (Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s, 2002), 154–​163; McPherson, War on the Waters, 146. 13. Stephen R. Wise, Gate of Hell: Campaign for Charleston Harbor, 1863 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1994), 93–​100; Hess, Field Armies and Fortifications, 252–​253. 14. Hess, Field Armies and Fortifications, 256–​258; Wise, Gate of Hell, 106–​114. 15. Luis F. Emilio, A Brave Black Regiment:  History of the Fifty-​ Fourth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, 1863–​1865, 2nd edition (Boston: Boston Book Company, 1894), 400–​402. 16. James A. Seddon to P. G. T. Beauregard, November 30, 1862, in U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate

Campaign for Charleston    151 Armies (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1880–​1901), ser. 2, vol. 4: 954. Hereafter cited as OR. 17. No. 74, Joint Resolution on the Subject of Retaliation, OR, ser. 1, vol. 28, pt. 2: 235. 18. General Orders No. 252, July 31, 1863, OR, ser. 2, vol. 6: 163. 19. Endorsement of Seddon, June 13, 1864, OR, ser. 2, vol. 7:  204; Lorien Foote, Rites of Retaliation:  Civilization, Soldiers, and Campaigns (Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 2021), has the full account of retaliation in the Department of the South. 20. Hess, Field Armies and Fortifications, 268. 21. Edward W.  Serrell to Quincy A.  Gillmore, September 10, 1863, OR, ser. 1, vol. 28, pt. 1: 230–​235. 22. Roy P. Basler, ed., Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (New Brunswick, NJ:  Rutgers University Press, 1953), 6:107, 145, 255, 270, 421. 23. Report on Artillery Operations, Department of the South, Box 2, John W. Turner Papers, U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center, Carlisle, PA. 24. Henry Bryan to A. Roman, January 6, 1864, OR, ser. 1, vol. 28, pt. 1: 181–​185, 682–​684; Eric W. Emerson and Karen Stokes, eds., Days of Destruction: Augustine Thomas Smythe and the Civil War Siege of Charleston (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2017), 16–​17,  79. 25. McPherson, War on the Waters, 178–​179. 26. John G. Foster to Henry Wager Halleck, July 7 and 12, 1864, and Samuel Jones to Samuel Cooper, July 4–​11, 1864, OR, ser. 1, vol. 35, pt. 1: 14–​17, 121–​124. 27. Foote, Rites of Retaliation, discusses this retaliation episode in depth. 28. William Tecumseh Sherman to David Dixon Porter, December 31, 1864, OR, ser. 1, vol. 44: 843. 29. Franklin McGrath, The History of the 127th New York Volunteers: “Monitors” in the War for the Preservation of the Union—​September 8, 1862–​June 30, 1865 (n.p.: n.d.) (Hathi Trust Digital Library), 152–​157.

Bibliography Browning, Robert M., Jr. Success Is All That Was Expected:  The South Atlantic Blockading Squadron during the Civil War. Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s, 2002. Foote, Lorien. Rites of Retaliation: Civilization, Soldiers, Campaigns. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Foote, Lorien. Seeking the One Great Remedy: Francis George Shaw and Nineteenth-​Century Reform. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003. Foote, Lorien. The Yankee Plague: Escaped Union Prisoners and the Collapse of the Confederacy. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. Hess, Earl J. Field Armies and Fortifications in the Civil War: The Eastern Campaigns, 1861–​1864. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Higginson, Thomas Wentworth. Army Life in a Black Regiment and Other Writings. New York: Penguin, 1997. Manning, Chandra. Troubled Refuge:  Struggling for Freedom in the Civil War. New  York: Knopf, 2016. McCurry, Stephanie. Confederate Reckoning:  Power and Politics in the Civil War South. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.

152   Lorien Foote McPherson, James M. War on the Waters: The Union and Confederate Navies, 1861–​1865. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. Quarles, Benjamin. The Negro in the Civil War. Boston: Little, Brown, 1953. Rose, Willie Lee. Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964. Schwalm, Leslie A. A Hard Fight for We: Women’s Transition from Slavery to Freedom in South Carolina. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997. Silkenat, David. Driven from Home:  North Carolina’s Civil War Refugee Crisis. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016. Symonds, Craig L. Lincoln and His Admirals: Abraham Lincoln, the U.S. Navy, and the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Wise, Stephen R. Gate of Hell: Campaign for Charleston Harbor, 1863. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1994.

Chapter 9

The Civil Wa r i n Arkansas ,   1862 Divided Loyalties and Partisan Warfare Thomas W. Cutrer

During the Civil War, Arkansas’s citizens experienced deep and bitter divisions in loyalty. The state suffered from the marked indifference of the central government in Richmond and a notable lack of effective leadership and cooperation among the various Confederate generals. The result was the loss of the state to the Southern cause and the onset of brutal partisan warfare behind the lines between secessionist and Unionist neighbors. Despite the Rebel victory at Wilson’s Creek, Brig. Gen. Ben McCulloch of the Confederate States Army and Major Gen. Sterling Price of the Missouri State Guard proved incapable of cooperation in formulating a strategy for offensive operations in Missouri. Because of the inability of the two allied but mutually antagonistic generals to agree, on January 10, 1862, the Confederate War Department assigned Maj. Gen. Earl Van Dorn to the newly created Trans-​Mississippi Department with orders to assume command of the two armies in the department and to meld them into one. Van Dorn expected to command an army of forty-​five thousand men with which he intended to capture St. Louis, transfer the war into Illinois, and draw Federal forces out of Tennessee, precluding their threatened advance up the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers. His plan was checked, however, when Brig. Gen. Samuel Ryan Curtis, commander of the District of Southwest Missouri, opened a winter campaign, forcing Price out of Springfield on February 14 and across the Arkansas line. The Federals occupied Fayetteville on February 21, farther south than they had ever been, and Curtis could boast that he was now “master of all their strongholds and larger cities of western Arkansas.”1 The Confederates fell back to a commanding position near Strickler’s Station, deep in the Boston Mountains, which Curtis, wisely, chose not to attack. Van Dorn assumed command of Price’s and McCulloch’s forces, as well as Brig. Gen. Albert Pike’s Indian

154   Thomas W. Cutrer brigade, on March 2, and resolved to defeat the Army of the Southwest in detail before Curtis could concentrate its separated divisions. At dawn on March 4, less than two days after taking command, he marched toward Bentonville, intending to “gobble up” Brig. Gen. Franz Sigel’s isolated command. Due largely to the bad roads and the ill discipline of the Confederate ranks, however, Sigel’s two divisions retreated to the safety of Curtis’s fortifications behind Little Sugar Creek. Van Dorn determined that, by making a flanking march of eight miles around the Federal right wing, he could not only avoid a head-​on assault on the formidable Union defenses, but he could also place himself squarely on Curtis’s line of retreat. Soon after dark, Price’s division was in motion, with the intention of crossing the creek far to Curtis’s right and then turning east to skirt around Pea Ridge—​a 150-​foot-​high mountain extending two and a half miles west from Elkhorn Tavern. His plan was to interdict the Telegraph Road north of Curtis’s army, placing the Federals in an inescapable trap. Six or eight vital hours were lost, however, in fording the creek and negotiating the obstructed trail. At last, at 8:00 a.m. on March 7, the leading elements of Price’s division reached the Telegraph Road about half a mile to the rear of the Army of the Southwest. At last aware that large numbers of Confederates were moving around Pea Ridge toward the Telegraph Road, Curtis responded with speed and efficiency. The Federal commander began a masterful change of front, directing his units to face the threat to his

Map 9.1  Pea Ridge and Prairie Grove

The Civil War in Arkansas, 1862    155 rear. This realignment left Col. Peter J. Osterhaus’s and Brig. Gen. Alexander S. Asboth’s divisions on the left, Col. Jefferson C. Davis’s in the center, and Col. Eugene Asa Carr’s on the extreme right. By 11:30 a.m., however, Price’s division was engaged with Carr’s division north of Elkhorn Tavern and relentlessly driving it back. Curtis, having no reinforcements to send him, could only order him to “persevere.”2 Van Dorn had sent orders to McCulloch to attack the Federal left in support of Price’s offensive at Elkhorn Tavern and was waiting for his division to engage before ordering a general advance. The division debouched onto an area of uncultivated fields and dense thickets masking whatever opposition it might face. McCulloch drew up his brigades in line of battle and plunged into the tangled mass of foliage toward Elkhorn Tavern, but near Leetown it encountered Osterhaus’s division, interjecting a wedge between the two wings of the Rebel army. McCulloch formed Col. Louis Hébert’s infantry brigade for a charge against the Federal right wing, but Davis’s division, which had just arrived on Osterhaus’s right, overlapped Hébert’s left flank and checked his advance. With the Confederate advance on the Leetown front brought to a halt, McCulloch rode forward to reconnoiter the Federal position. He was killed instantly by a volley of Federal rifle fire. McIntosh, the division’s next ranking officer, was killed leading a charge to recover McCulloch’s body, and Hébert, the next ranking officer on the field, was captured when his brigade fell victim to the flanking attack of Davis’s division. Thus the whole of McCulloch’s column, deprived of its leaders and without unity of command, was thrown into confusion and beaten back. Not until 3:00 p.m. did Pike learn that the command had devolved upon him. He gathered a handful of McCulloch’s units and marched east to rejoin Van Dorn, leaving the largest part of the division again leaderless. Only late in the day did Col. Elkhana Greer learn that he was the senior officer on the field, and at 1:30 a.m. on March 8 he began a general withdrawal toward Elkhorn Tavern. There he formed McCulloch’s regiments on Price’s left, but was left in idleness. When he learned of the disaster on his right wing, Van Dorn gave the order for Price’s brigades to advance against Carr. The Missourians overran and captured eight Federal guns, and Carr’s line was forced back nearly half a mile, past the Elkhorn Tavern, where the Confederates turned both of his flanks and threatened to engulf his battered division. But Brig. Gen. William Yarnell Slack was mortally wounded at the head of his brigade, and the Federals re-​formed to the south of Elkhorn Tavern, deploying a strong concentration of artillery on the Rebel front. Moreover, Curtis ordered all of his other divisions to Carr’s relief. These troops began to arrive at the Elkhorn front at around 2:00 on the morning of the eighth. Price’s division was by then without food or ammunition, and the supply train could not be located. Now, with the concentrated Army of the Southwest holding the line that had been maintained all the previous day by Carr alone, Curtis was certain of success. Sensing the inevitable, Van Dorn determined to withdraw, leaving Col. Henry Little’s brigade to fight a rearguard action, while putting his wagon train on a road to Van Buren. The Federals overlapped both wings of Little’s line, and the Missourians were driven back from Elkhorn Tavern to the heights of Pea Ridge and then down into the

156   Thomas W. Cutrer ravines of Cross Timber Hollow. By 10:00 a.m. the Federal wings converged, but by then Van Dorn’s main body had escaped, retiring toward Van Buren. Considerable controversy ensued regarding the use of Indian troops and their behavior on the battlefield, with Curtis protesting to Van Dorn that many of the Federal dead “had been tomahawked and scalped, and their bodies shamefully mangled, contrary to civilized warfare.” He chided the Confederate commander about the behavior of his Indian allies, reminding him that the use of Indian troops “involves a probability of savage ferocity which is not to be regarded as the exception, but the rule.” Pike admitted that he had witnessed the execution of one wounded Union prisoner and was aware of at least one scalping incident on the field at Pea Ridge. He implored his troops “in no case hereafter to follow their cruel example, since the bravest should be always the most ready to spare a fellow foe.” Van Dorn cast doubt upon Curtis’s report, however, stating that the Indians under Pike had “for many years been regarded as a civilized people.” Agreeing with the Union commander that the horrors of “this unnatural war” should be suppressed, he countered that many of his soldiers who had surrendered were reported to have been “murdered in cold blood by their captors, who were alleged to be Germans.”3 Curtis’s victory at Pea Ridge was not, as Sigel perceived, a battle of “preponderating national importance”; it did not “break the backbone of the Rebellion.” But, he insisted, the battle “virtually cleared the Southwest of the enemy,” and it terminated, until Price’s disastrous 1864 raid, the South’s effort to carry the war into Missouri. Although Southern sentiment remained strong in the slave-​owning Missouri River Valley, the state remained in Union hands for the remainder of the war. An estimated sixty thousand Missourians who were ready to enter Confederate service were pinned behind Federal lines. Missouri became the seat of a bitter and brutal internecine war.4 Earl van Dorn and the Army of the West were ordered east of the Mississippi to reinforce the Army of the Mississippi gathering at Corinth to initiate a counteroffensive against Grant’s army on the Tennessee River. The men of the Army of the West were, of course, unwilling to leave their homes in possession of the enemy, and, in any event, they arrived too late to play a role in the decisive Battle of Shiloh. With the abandonment of the state by its only defenders, the Army of the Southwest quickly swooped down into a virtually defenseless Arkansas, rendering northwest Arkansas a virtual no-​man’s land. The state’s governor, Henry Massey Rector, proclaimed that the Trans-​Mississippi states must organize to defend themselves, in effect threatening to secede from the Confederacy. As early as April 15, 1862, the slaveholding element, concentrated in the rich valley of the Arkansas River, described to Confederate Pres. Jefferson Davis the havoc into which their state was descending. The state, they said, was now “defenseless and open to the invasion of Yankees and the incursions of savages and Kansans so completely that 10,000 men could march from one end of the State to the other in the midst of plenty and wholly unopposed.”5 With the departure of Van Dorn’s army, straggling soldiers infested the country, armed and lawless, robbing the people. Governor Rector and the legislature fled Little Rock for Washington, Arkansas; courts were suspended; Confederate money became

The Civil War in Arkansas, 1862    157 virtually valueless. The citizens of the counties of northern Arkansas were, according to Price’s chief of staff, Col. Thomas Lowndes Snead, “fast submitting to the authority of the Union,” and many were enlisting in the Union Army.6 With the Army of the West no longer a deterrent, on May 3 Curtis, as military governor of Arkansas with authority to establish a loyal government, moved into northeastern Arkansas with an effective force of 12,422 men, occupying Batesville, only ninety miles from the capital at Little Rock. By then, many of the citizens of the region had fled, taking their meager possessions with them, and the sole Confederate force in Arkansas was then a few companies of badly organized and poorly armed state militia. Federal cavalry operated at will for miles around Batesville, liberating a large number of enslaved Blacks. To the Confederates, however, these raids consisted only of “burning homes, carrying off slaves, destroying farming utensils, and leading old men and boys into captivity, or murdering them.”7 Curtis was checked, however, not by Rebel militia but by his tenuous supply line. Abnormal rains created flooding that spring, and food supplies that Curtis had hoped would allow him to reach Little Rock proved inadequate when creeks became impassable, and the local farms could not supply his army’s needs. The seizure of private property, not given official sanction until the passage of the Second Confiscation Act on July 17, 1862, became increasingly common among Federal soldiers. “I believe in pitching in and taking what we want to eat,” wrote Pvt. George E. Flanders of the 5th Kansas Cavalry, and making the secessionist farmers who they plundered “wait for their pay until they become loyal.”8 The Army of the Southwest looted private property and burned public buildings and private homes. As Curtis himself wrote, “[D]‌esolation, horrid to contemplate, marks every section of the country through which the army has passed and an air of sickening desolation is everywhere visible.”9 Although the general advocated the use of terror against secessionists to quell the rebellion, he also hoped to protect the Unionists within his lines. “While we carry death and destruction into the enemy,” he wrote, loyalists within his army’s sphere should “feel the benign influence of a fostering and affectionate government.”10 Even so, Curtis’s march brought with it the destruction of the economy and wreaked havoc on local social institutions, bringing total war to northern Arkansas two years before Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman visited it upon Georgia. An additional important aspect of this campaign was that it set free thousands of slaves. Curtis’s march across Arkansas took his command through an area characterized by large numbers of enslaved Blacks, and the army’s presence among them led to the disruption of the institution and a flood of refugees. Curtis, a stanch antislavery advocate, followed the example of Maj. Gen. John Charles Frémont and Maj. Gen. David Hunter, emancipating slaves within his military jurisdiction “on the ground that they became captured captives and therefore subject to my disposal instead of a former captor or assignee.”11 Most of Curtis’s soldiers agreed, with one citing the “meanness, treachery and malignity of the rebels” as justification for liberating their property.12 Therefore, according to First Lt. Othman A. Abbott of the 9th Illinois Cavalry, “armies of strange

158   Thomas W. Cutrer looking negroes  .  .  .  streamed into our camps and attached themselves to our columns.”13 Swarms of Black men and women—​estimates of their numbers range up to four or five thousand—​took advantage of the presence of the Union forces to escape from bondage, and Pvt. Andrew J. Huntoon of the 5th Kansas Cavalry wrote that by the time the army reached Helena they were “wandering around the camp as thick as blackberries.”14 As with the army’s extralegal confiscation of crops and livestock, so Curtis’s liberation of slaves in Rebel hands took place prior to the passage of the Second Confiscation Act and before it became the Lincoln administration’s policy to do so. Technically, therefore, these men and women were not free. Not until the President issued his Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, could Black men be recruited into the army. Only after Curtis reached Helena did Confederate authorities recognize the peril that Van Dorn’s departure had created in the Trans-​Mississippi Department, and they sent Maj. Gen. Thomas Carmichael Hindman to rectify the situation. Reaching Little Rock on May 31, 1862, Hindman began to create a new army. Although he lacked authorization to raise any new regiments, with Curtis at the very gates of Arkansas’s capital and the entire Confederate Trans-​Mississippi in peril, Hindman ignored this directive and began organizing an army, as he admitted, “without authority of law.”15 He halted Texas regiments on the way to the Army of the Mississippi, obtained the return of a division of Price’s troops from the army at Corinth, and—​although several of them reported at Little Rock without arms—​brought unassigned regiments from Texas. Hindman was preoccupied for his first three months as district commander in purchasing or impressing arms, ammunition, and commissary stores. Given the virtual impossibility of supplying his district from east of the Mississippi, he purposed to make it self-​sustaining, establishing factories, mines, and a saltworks, and ordered public documents from the state library disbound for use as cartridge paper. By dint of extraordinary energy and the willingness to work outside of official regulations, by the first weeks of July Hindman had assembled about twenty thousand armed men and forty-​ six pieces of artillery. Hindman’s draft of white men for his army, combined with the self-​liberation of so many formerly enslaved men and women, exacerbated Arkansas’s shortage of farm laborers. Often, too, escaping slaves took draft animals and other livestock with them, placing a further strain on farm families already living on the edge of poverty. With the virtual collapse of civil authority in Arkansas, Hindman also instituted what he called “a government ad interim,” proclaiming martial law on June 30. He insisted that civilians adhere to the Confederate cause and maintain a discipline “unexcelled among the troops of any government.” To Hindman, this meant sustaining the Confederate currency, crushing “the spirit of extortion and speculation,” and sacrificing “all property valuable to the enemy which may possibly fall into his hands.” He commandeered all the steamboats he could gather, lest they fall into Federal hands, and, under an act of the Confederate Congress of March 17, 1862, seized or had burned all the cotton that he regarded as in danger of capture by the Federals. Planters of course objected, but the general believed that such drastic measures curtailed illicit trade with the enemy, saved the

The Civil War in Arkansas, 1862    159 army from starvation, restored the value of Confederate currency, and “exorcised the devil of extortion that was torturing soldiers into desertion by starving their wives and children.”16 To revive “the hopes of loyal men in Missouri and to get troops from that State,” Hindman authorized the raising of units to carry out irregular operations behind Union lines—​partisan rangers in the view of the South, guerrillas and bushwhackers to the North. These irregulars, Hindman reported, “soon became exceedingly active and rendered important services, destroying wagon trains and transports, tearing up railways, breaking telegraph lines, capturing towns, and thus compelling the enemy to keep there a large force that might have been employed elsewhere.” In Northern eyes, however, these “packs of unsupervised irregulars degenerated into roving criminal gangs and murdered hundreds if not thousands of soldiers and civilians.”17 Thus Arkansas, like Missouri, came to experience guerrilla warfare—​a war without rules—​characterized by ambushes and nighttime raids, often with civilians treated as combatants. Given the Davis administration’s manifest disregard of the Trans-​ Mississippi region in favor of theaters farther east, as Federals entered Arkansas in February 1862, guerrilla units—​in the absence of organized Confederate resistance—​ sprang up to meet them. On May 27, Carr reported that some of his German troops had committed acts of atrocity, “going into the private apartments of ladies and opening trunks and drawers and ransacking everything and taking away what they wanted. If these excesses are permitted, we cannot wonder at guerrilla warfare.”18 In June, Hindman sanctioned the formation of bands of ten men or more who would operate in their own home counties. Ostensibly under the direction of the provost marshal, these bands had permission to harass the enemy’s supply lines and outposts, protect the lives and property of their Rebel neighbors, and pin down large numbers of Unionists whose services might have been put to use at the front.19 These “independent companies” were to receive pay and allowances for subsistence and forage and were to be “governed in all respects by the same regulations as other troops.” Partisan warfare was, of course, tainted with the venom of revenge and personal vendetta, leading to an escalating cycle of violence, and the irregular too often crossed the line between soldier and brigand.20 Guerrillas recruited into Union service swiftly descended to the same base level as those of their antagonists, and the jayhawking of partisans of both the Union and Confederate causes too often blurred the distinctions between legal and extralegal and even between friend and foe. Terror was regarded as a legitimate tactic by both sides. Reprisals fell most often on the civilian population, including refugee families fleeing north or west to escape the violence of their home counties. Union officials at all levels considered guerrillas to be robbers and brigands rather than legitimate combatants because they did not wear uniforms and were not under the discipline of the Confederate Army. They summarily executed many of them upon capture. Because guerrillas received supplies from their households and blended into communities between attacks, Union officials targeted people they suspected of supporting guerrillas by seizing or destroying property in proximity to guerrilla activity. Thousands of civilians fled

160   Thomas W. Cutrer northwest Arkansas and sought safety in Texas, Missouri, or Kansas. Some women and children left in the region actually died of starvation. Despite the political hornets’ nest that Hindman stirred in drafting an army, requisitioning supplies, burning cotton, and declaring martial law, in protecting the capital and driving the Federals out of northern Arkansas, however briefly, he was remarkably successful. The new commander believed that Arkansas could best be defended by pursuing an offensive strategy, thus recovering all of Arkansas and the Indian Territory. Moreover, like Price and Van Dorn before him, Hindman saw Missouri as the key to Confederate success in the West, and his plan was to “push forward toward the Missouri River with the greatest vigor.”21 Due to a lack of supplies, the Rebels’ constant small-​scale series of hit-​and-​run attacks on Curtis’s outposts and communications, and the mistaken belief that the Confederates were receiving massive reinforcements from Texas, the Federals abandoned their attempt on Little Rock. On June 24, Hindman learned that Curtis had abandoned Batesville and had moved down the White River toward Helena, which he reached on July 13 and where he handed over command of the Army of the Southwest to Brig. Gen. Frederick Steele. A conservative Democrat, Steele allowed the confiscation of slave property for military purposes only and never regarded emancipation as a matter of policy. He therefore rolled back much of his predecessor’s liberal policy regarding slaves who entered Union lines, expelling them from his camps and insisting that they be “allowed to return to the plantation [from] where they came.”22 The lack of supplies confined both armies to their base, with Steele remaining in Helena and Hindman encamped at Little Rock, where his men deserted in alarming numbers. Fearing that his army was on the verge of disintegration, Hindman had a number of the deserters executed. This stern measure did not endear the commander to the army or to the people of his district, and although his draconian actions produced positive results, his declaration of martial law and his severe application of the draft triggered massive disaffection. President Davis recognized that a less heavy hand was needed, and Hindman’s administration came to an abrupt end. On September 12, Lt. Gen. Theophilus Hunter Holmes was assigned to command of the Trans-​Mississippi Department. Holmes had served with no particular distinction as a division commander under Gen. Robert E. Lee in the Seven Days, and his primary qualification for his advancement seems to have been that he was a devoted personal friend of the president. Holmes was a poor choice. Timid and vacillating, he was known derisively to his men as “Granny.” He established his headquarters at Little Rock, where he announced the division of the Trans-​Mississippi into districts, assigning to Maj. Gen. Richard Taylor the District of Louisiana, to Sterling Price the District of Missouri, to Maj. Gen. John B. Magruder the District of Texas, and to Hindman the District of Arkansas. In December 1862, Holmes informed Davis that his situation was “full of perplexities not the least dangerous of which is the growing disaffection to the war among the people.”23 Class conflict in what had been thought to be an egalitarian culture was rending Confederate Arkansas. Large numbers of soldiers deserted from the army that winter, due to food shortages; monetary inflation, which particularly hurt the poor; lack of pay;

The Civil War in Arkansas, 1862    161 and the conscription of poor farmers, while planters were exempt. Among the poor, Union Leagues began to sprout, causing Holmes to suspend habeas corpus laws in his department and to impose martial law in the early months of 1863. He then moved against deserters, bushwhackers, and other dissidents with military force, breaking up groups of armed Jayhawkers and hanging some of their leaders, either legally or extralegally. Although Holmes reported to Davis that the uprisings had been “put down everywhere and quiet is restored,” lawlessness continued. The Confederacy never regained the hearts and minds of the poor people of Arkansas, and resentment and resistance to Confederate authority continued to grow.24 Nevertheless, Hindman commanded about eighteen thousand well-​armed infantry and an additional six thousand to eight thousand men in various camps of instruction, either wholly or effectively unarmed; seven batteries; and some six thousand cavalry. Through the fall and winter of 1862, he continued to build his command at Fort Smith, mustering recruits and conscripts whom he struggled to feed, shelter, train, and equip. By summer, Hindman believed, he was strong enough to drive the Federals out of Arkansas and to reenter Missouri, and although Holmes preferred a defensive strategy, he reluctantly acceded to the aggressive Hindman’s plan to drive Brig. Gen. James G. Blunt back into Kansas and then march toward the Missouri River. At the same time, from Fort Gibson, he intended to throw five thousand Indian troops under Col. Douglas H. Cooper into Kansas to seize Fort Scott. In Missouri, however, the commander of the District of Missouri, Brig. Gen. John McAllister Schofield, was building the Army of the Frontier. On July 22, Schofield issued a general order requiring all able-​bodied Missourians to report for militia duty. Within a week, he claimed, twenty thousand Union men had been called into active service, further aggravating the already incendiary tensions between Unionists and secessionists in Arkansas and Missouri. Schofield’s command, approximately fifty thousand state militiamen, was engaged, with imperfect success, in subduing secessionist irregulars in southwest Missouri when intelligence reports revealed Hindman’s planned foray into the state. Schofield claimed to be prepared to meet the advance, but Curtis, then commander of the Department of the Missouri, ordered him to fall back into Missouri with two of his divisions, leaving only Blunt’s 1st Division of the Army of the Frontier in the immediate theater of operations. On August 16, Rebel forces routed a Federal force at Lone Jack, Missouri, but, just as this promising campaign was getting underway, Holmes recalled Hindman to assume command of the defense of Arkansas Post against a rumored Federal advance out of Helena. In his absence, the command of Hindman’s forces devolved upon the manifestly incompetent Brig. Gen. (Missouri State Guard) James S. Rains, whom he instructed “to make no aggressive movement, but if assailed, to hold the line occupied as long as practicable.”25 On October 2, Schofield moved against the Rebels at Newtonia, sending Blunt to pin the Confederates in place while he, with his cavalry, was to fall upon their rear, cutting their line of retreat. Schofield failed to arrive on the Rebel rear in time, however, and

162   Thomas W. Cutrer so the Confederates under Cooper and Col. Joseph O. Shelby escaped with little harm, falling back on Rains’s main body. The retreat across the Boston Mountains was brutal, however, with many of the men making the march without shoes. For seventy miles along the route, Capt. Ethan Allen Pinnell of the 8th Missouri Infantry wrote, the army “neither saw houses or farms, though we saw numerous huts, swarming with women and dirty half naked children.” The few cultivated acres were but “sterile rocks,” and from the “numerous skins of different species stretched on the sides of the huts” he perceived that most of the citizens were trappers or hunters rather than farmers. “The people are poor, ignorant, and I believe the majority of them, Union.”26 The Confederate incursion, however brief, left southwest Missouri “almost entirely deserted of its male population,” wrote Lt. Benjamin F. McIntyre of the 19th Iowa Infantry. The Confederate presence had “compelled the Union men to flee the place,” while the Federal advance “compelled those of rebel proclivities to skedaddle.” Indeed, the settlements scattered across the Ozarks in Missouri, Arkansas, and the Indian Territory had experienced the hard hand of war.27 Hundreds of small farms and dozens of small towns had been abandoned. Food production in the devastated area dropped precipitously, and foraging grew less productive with every passing month. Commanders on both sides discovered that maintaining a sizable army in the burned-​out frontier region was increasingly difficult, and on October 24, Schofield issued an order strictly forbidding all jayhawking. “It seems to me this proclamation seems to have come at a bad time,” McIntyre observed, “for everything worth taking has already been taken.”28 Hindman, who returned to Fort Smith on October 15, learned that his remaining troops were scattered about northwest Arkansas and that Cooper’s Indian troops had ridden for the Cherokee Nation. Gathering his dispersed command, Hindman fell back toward the Arkansas River, arriving on October 22. Thus Hindman’s plan to regain Missouri for the Confederacy was destroyed. Schofield pursued Hindman as far as his overextended line of supply would permit in the devastated Ozark district, and then, on November 13, withdrew two of his divisions to Springfield, leaving only Blunt near Maysville, where he could be supplied from Fort Scott. Schofield’s campaign in northern Arkansas had not, as he believed, ended the war in the Ozarks. Indeed, with Holmes’s reluctant blessing, Hindman was preparing to attack Blunt’s isolated division. He first sent Col. John Sappington Marmaduke’s cavalry division across the Boston Mountains to screen the Rebel advance. Blunt, expecting Hindman to join Marmaduke to make a dash into Missouri, attacked the Rebel cavalry at Cane Hill on November 28. The two divisions skirmished for nine hours before the Confederates fell back toward Van Buren. Despite the tactical setback, the Confederates were in a stronger position than before, as by moving forward to meet Marmaduke at Cane Hill, Blunt had drawn thirty-​five miles nearer to the main Confederate Army and correspondingly farther from his two supporting divisions, now more than one hundred miles distant. Blunt was convinced that his victory had driven Hindman out of northwestern Arkansas for good, so he was surprised to learn, on December 2, that the Rebels were advancing to attack. Although

The Civil War in Arkansas, 1862    163 no tactical or strategic reason compelled him to do so, Blunt determined to maintain his position at Cane Hill. Blunt summoned Maj. Gen. Francis J. Herron, then near Springfield, Missouri, with the 2nd and 3rd Divisions, to his support. Herron broke camp on the morning of the third and advanced to reinforce his endangered colleague. Marching 110 miles in three days, he reached Elkhorn Tavern on the evening of December 6. Despite this remarkable rate of march, the distance between the two parts of the army remained great, and Curtis remained fearful that the Army of the Frontier might be destroyed in detail. Hindman’s intention was, indeed, to attack the isolated Blunt before Herron could arrive to assist him. On December 3 his nine thousand infantry—​many of whom were less than willing conscripts and most of whom were going into their first battle—​two thousand cavalry, and twenty-​two pieces of artillery began the forty-​five-​mile march from Van Buren. Although the Union force was equal to his own, Hindman expected to defeat Blunt and then return immediately to Little Rock. Reaching the vicinity of Cane Hill on the morning of December 6, Marmaduke's cavalry drove in the Federal outposts, giving Hindman possession of the road to Fayetteville, leading north around the Federal left flank. That night, Herron informed Blunt that his two divisions were making forced marches to reinforce his lone division and would be at Fayetteville by daylight of the seventh. Learning of Herron’s rapidly approaching divisions, Hindman quickly changed his plan. Fearing that an attack on Blunt at Cane Hill would cause his division to retire on Herron without accepting battle, he chose instead to first fall upon and destroy the approaching column and then return to fight Blunt. Hindman left a single brigade of cavalry to hold Blunt in place while he, with his remaining ten thousand men, marched to meet Herron. Just before sunrise on December 7, Marmaduke’s cavalry collided with the horsemen of Herron’s divisions and quickly routed them, sending them riding in panic through the Federal infantry, marching down the Telegraph Road to their rear. The Confederate infantry, still far to the rear, was ordered forward at double time, cresting the Boston Mountains and, shortly after sunrise, reaching Marmaduke’s cavalry. The leading elements of Hindman’s infantry encountered Herron’s command at the crossing of the Illinois River about twelve miles south of Fayetteville. The Rebels took a strong position on the edge of a densely wooded hill overlooking Crawford’s Prairie to the north, the direction from which Herron was advancing. Also atop the hill was the Prairie Grove Presbyterian Church, where Hindman was to establish his headquarters and from which the forthcoming battle would take its name. Hindman formed his line in a horseshoe, conforming to the shape of the hill. The position was a naturally strong one, but, although Blunt was still five miles away, Herron determined to attack. His initial attempt to ford Illinois Creek failed in the face of the Rebel batteries. Herron next moved three of his batteries opposite the Confederate center and opened fire. The Confederates failed to reply due to a shortage of ammunition, and Hindman’s line was driven back. Even so, the Federal infantry was twice more repulsed with heavy losses.

164   Thomas W. Cutrer At this crucial moment, Blunt’s division appeared from the southeast, and Herron’s battered regiments rallied. Once Blunt became aware that Hindman’s command had marched past him during the night, he had moved rapidly to form a junction with Herron, arriving at Prairie Grove before Hindman could hope to destroy the 1st and 2nd Divisions in detail. At that point, the impetus went over to the Federals. Blunt first ordered a general advance against the Rebel line, but the attack was repelled with heavy losses. Blunt and Herron then massed their artillery opposite Hindman’s front and opened a cross-​fire on the Confederate line. Then, from 4:00 p.m. until dark, the Federals launched a series of attacks against Hindman’s center and against both flanks. All were driven back with considerable loss, but a Confederate counterattack was equally bloodied when it attempted to overrun the massed Union artillery. When night fell, both sides were in the same position in which they had begun the day’s fighting. Blunt directed the Army of the Frontier to maintain its position in front of Hindman’s line and, having received reinforcements during the night, expected to renew the battle with at least four thousand effective men. Hindman’s army, however, was in no condition to continue the battle. The general ordered his men to retire to the Boston Mountains, and on the morning of December 8 the Federals rejoiced in their victory. Blunt was perfectly correct when he reported that Prairie Grove had decided the fate of Missouri. Had Hindman won, he claimed, western Arkansas, Missouri, Kansas, and the Indian country “would have been the prey of the rebel army.” Despite having retreated from Prairie Grove, Hindman and many of his troops claimed victory. On December 13 the general addressed his army from Fort Smith, assuring it that it had “engaged an abolition army largely out numbering you” and had “held every inch of ground and repulsed every attack.” The Confederates had, indeed, come close to success. Hindman’s plan to destroy Blunt before Herron could arrive, and then, being deprived of that opportunity, to drive between the two wings of the Army of the Frontier and defeat each in turn, was exceptionally bold in conception and execution. But Herron’s speed in coming to Blunt’s aid was entirely unexpected, and Blunt’s march to Prairie Grove, where Herron was struggling for survival, were both master strokes. Despite the ardent belief of many Confederates that they had defeated the enemy, Curtis was correct in his assessment that the engagement had been a “complete victory” for Union arms.29 By December 15, 1862, Hindman had crossed the Arkansas River with his remaining infantry and artillery. By the time it reached Van Buren, however, the Confederate Army had been reduced to no more than five thousand effective troops. Pay for the troops was not forthcoming, and since the poor made up the rank and file of the Confederate armies, “their wives and children, left without protection, are exposed to absolute suffering.” If only the men were promptly paid, Hindman insisted, and if only that pay were adequate to support the soldier’s family, “desertions would be unknown.”30 Clothing too was unobtainable, and the Missouri state bonds, which paid the men of the Missouri brigades, were, according to Capt. Eathan Allen Pinnell of the Confederate Eighth Missouri Infantry, “no better here than so much blank paper.”31 Moreover, Hindman’s

The Civil War in Arkansas, 1862    165 camp at Little Rock had only four days’ rations for the men and would soon be forced to fall back into southern Arkansas. Blunt, not content with his victory at Prairie Grove, prepared a dash into Van Buren. Schofield had been absent from the Army of the Frontier on account of ill health. Now recovered, he was on his way back to Arkansas to resume command. Blunt planned his raid to the Arkansas River, designed to disrupt the Confederate base at Fort Smith, to be executed before Schofield’s return. On December 26, Schofield ordered Blunt to fall back, but Blunt defied the order and continued his advance. Hindman’s army was dispersed throughout the area in search of food and forage, with only one division and a brigade remaining in the Fort Smith–​Van Buren area. Moreover, as Hindman could not, even if reinforced, ferry his troops across the Arkansas River to confront the Federals, Blunt felt entirely safe in conducting a raid against Van Buren. On December 27, Blunt, with the army’s cavalry, began his march over the Boston Mountains. The infantry and thirty pieces of artillery followed, bringing the total Federal force to eight thousand men. On the morning of the twenty-​eighth, the Federal advance guard encountered Rebel pickets and drove them back through Van Buren. Having no means of crossing the river, Hindman was powerless to repel the raiders. Hindman evacuated not only Van Buren but also Fort Smith, and as the few Rebels pulled out, the Federals moved in. Union soldiers plundered what little was left in the shops and stores. “Guards were of but little consequence and the officers seem to care not whether Jayhawking was going on or the men all quiet in their quarters,” observed Pvt. Robert T. McMahan of the 25th Ohio Artillery.32 Van Buren was the first place where at least some of the Northerners observed slavery in practice. It was “a gala day” for the enslaved population, and they “arrayed themselves in their Sunday best and stood in rows along the pavements on either side of the streets seeming mute spectators to our entrance into the city,” and McIntyre wrote admiringly that he had never before seen “as neat and nicely dressed ebony beauties” as he met that day.33 The Unionist citizens of Van Buren, McMahan claimed, were pleased to have been liberated from martial law that had commandeered all crops and distributed them more or less equitably to the civilian population. This system was “probably better for the poorest,” McMahan commented, “but subjected all others to a state of entire dependency on military permission to enjoy the fruits of their own labor.”34 Blunt’s forces occupied Van Buren until the twenty-​ninth, at which time they retired north toward the Boston Mountains. Schofield encountered the returning army twelve miles north of Van Buren and returned with it to Prairie Grove, resuming command of the Army of the Frontier on January 1. He was received coolly by the men, who “do not believe in Mudtown heroes” and who reserved credit for the successful expedition for Blunt and Herron.35 The raid had netted one hundred prisoners and destroyed three steamboats and more than fifteen thousand bushels of corn and much of Hindman’s camp equipage. In addition, it had captured fifty six-​mule teams, 250 head of cattle, and a large number of

166   Thomas W. Cutrer horses, as well as several wagonloads of sugar. As a result of the raid, the Confederate Army in Arkansas had “crumbled to pieces, and became entirely inefficient,” Herron reported. “They are demoralized and broken up,” he said, “and I think this section is rid of Hindman.”36 The region had suffered disastrously. As a single example, the village of Keitsville—​known to be “a rendezvous or hiding place for small gangs of guerillas or bushwhackers”—​and almost all of the homes nearby had been put to the torch by Federal soldiers. The residents “had claimed strong proclivities for the Union,” McIntyre wrote, but “had harbored Rebels who practiced their murderous warfare.”37 Not only was the property of Confederate sympathizers destroyed. In that same month a Union company camped in the meadow of a farmer, who, with his son, was serving in the Union Army. “We’re burning his fences,” McIntyre wrote, “killing his hogs, and using his stacks of hay, oats and wheat for ourselves and forage for horses and mules.” On January 8, 1863, Herron issued a general order forbidding further jayhawking by his command, but the order was honored more in the breach than in the observance.38 With the return of the Army of the Frontier from its Van Buren raid the campaign in Arkansas was ended, and Schofield assumed that his men would be most useful in aiding Grant in opening the Mississippi. With the exception of one small brigade to occupy northwest Arkansas and the Indian Territory, he withdrew his army into Missouri, never again to invade Arkansas. Thereafter, increasing numbers of both Union and Confederate troops were transferred east of the Mississippi River to fight the decisive battles to come in Mississippi, Tennessee, and Georgia. The severe blows dealt to the Confederacy at Prairie Grove and Van Buren, however, assured that Missouri would remain under Union control for the duration of the conflict and that no further major fighting would be seen on the Ozark Plateau.39

Notes 1. U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1880–​ 1901), ser. 1, vol. 8, pt. 1: 68. 2. Franz Sigel, “The Pea Ridge Campaign,” Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, II 329; OR, ser. 1, vol. 8, pt. 1: 307–​308. 3. Moore, ed., The Rebellion Record: A Diary of American Events (New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1864–​1868), 4:263–​264; OR, ser. 1, vol. 2, pt. 1: 398–​399, 410; New York Times, April 13, 1862. 4. Sigel, “Pea Ridge,”:331. 5. John M. Harrell, Arkansas, vol. 10/2, in Clement Anselm Evans, ed., Confederate Military History (Atlanta:Confederate Publishing Company, 1899), 108; William G. Bek, trans., “The Civil War Diary of John T. Buegel,” Missouri Historical Review (July 1946) 40:4, 323; Gary D. Joiner et al., eds., No Pardons to Ask, Nor Apologies to Make: The Journal of William Henry King, Gray’s 28th Louisiana Infantry Regiment (Knoxville:  University of Tennessee Press, 2006), 11, 23.

The Civil War in Arkansas, 1862    167 6. Thomas L.  Snead, “The Conquest of Arkansas,” Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, 3: 443, 444. 7. Snead, “The Conquest of Arkansas,” 443; OR, ser. 1, vol. 8, pt. 1: 64, 86; John M. Harrell, Arkansas, 10/​2, 92–​93, 104. 8. George E. Flanders to brother, September 18, 1862, Flanders Papers, Kansas State Historical Society, Topeka. 9. Curtis to brother, June 18, 1862, Curtis Papers, Huntington Library, San Marino, CA. 10. Curtis to wife, January 9, 1861, in Kenneth E. Colton, ed., “ ‘The Irrepressible Conflict of 1861’: The Letters of Samuel Ryan Curtis,” Annals of Iowa, 3rd series, 24 (July 1942): 18. 11. Samuel R. Curtis journal, May 21, 1862, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT, quoted in Robert G. Schultz, The March to the River: From the Battle of Pea Ridge to Helena, Spring 1862 (Iowa City, IA: Camp Pope, 2014), 329. 12. Fred Tell Ledgerber to uncle, September 2, 1862, Engelmann-​Kircher Collection, Illinois State Historical Library, Springfield. 13. Othman A. Abbott, Recollections of a Pioneer Lawyer (Lincoln: Nebraska State Historical Society, 1929), 40. 14. A.  J. Huntoon to wife, July 22, 1862, A.  J. Huntoon Collection, Kansas State Historical Society, quoted in William L. Shea, “A Semi-​Savage State: The Image of Arkansas in the Civil War,” in Civil War Arkansas:  Beyond Battles and Leaders, ed. Anne J. Bailey and Daniel E. Sutherland (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2000), 95. 15. Harrell, Arkansas, 106. 16. OR, ser. 1, vol. 8, pt. 1: 31, 34, 39. 17. OR, ser. 1, vol. 8, pt. 1: 1, 33. 18. OR, ser. 1, vol. 8, pt. 1: 64, 86. 19. OR, ser. 1, vol. 8, pt. 1: 33. 20. Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion (Washington D.C., Government Printing Office, 1908), ser. 23, 187. 21. OR, ser. 8: 875. 22. General Orders No. 48, Army of the Southwest, September 18, 1862, Records of the Office of the Inspector General, Record Group 393. 23. “Correspondence of General T. H. Holmes,” Records of the War Department, Collection of Confederate Records, National Archives, quoted in Shea, “A Semi-​Savage State,” 119. 24. Holmes to Jefferson Davis, April 7, 1863, Holmes Correspondence, National Archives. 25. OR, ser. 8:47. 26. Michael E. Banasik, ed., Serving with Honor: The Diary of Captain Eathan Allen Pinnell of the Eighth Missouri Infantry (Confederate) (Iowa City, IA: Camp Pope, 1999). 27. Nannie M. Tilley, ed., Federals on the Frontier:  The Diary of Benjamin F.  McIntyre (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1963), 28. 28. Tilley, Federals on the Frontier, 38. 29. “General Hindman’s Address,” Weekly Herald (Dallas, TX), December 31, 1862, quoted in Banasik, Serving with Honor, 404. 30. OR, ser. 1, vol. 22, pt. 1: 145. 31. Banasik, Serving with Honor, 39. 32. Michael E. Banasik, ed., Reluctant Cannoneer:  The Diary of Robert T.  McMahan of the Twenty-​Fifth Independent Ohio Light Artillery (Iowa City, IA: Camp Pope, 2000), 98. 33. Tilley, Federals on the Frontier, 85. 34. Banasik, Reluctant Cannoneer, 98.

168   Thomas W. Cutrer 35. Tilley, Federals on the Frontier, 87. 36. OR, ser. 1, vol. 22, pt. 1: 170. 37. Tilley, Federals on the Frontier, 43. 38. Tilley, Federals on the Frontier, 36, 47, 50, 93–​95. 39. Tilley, Federals on the Frontier, 50.

Bibliography Bailey, Anne J., and Daniel E. Sutherland, eds. Civil War Arkansas: Beyond Battles and Leaders. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2000. Banasik, Michael E., ed. Serving with Honor: The Diary of Captain Eathan Allen Pinnell. Iowa City, IA: Press of the Camp Pope Bookshop, 1999. Christ, Mark K., ed. Rugged and Sublime: The Civil War in Arkansas. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1994. Connelly, Donald B. John M. Schofield and the Politics of Generalship. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Cutrer, Thomas W. Theater of a Separate War:  The Civil War West of the Mississippi River. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Deblack, Thomas A. With Fire and Sword:  Arkansas, 1861–​1874. Fayetteville:  University of Arkansas Press, 2003. Dougan, Michael B. Confederate Arkansas:  The People and Policies of a Frontier State in Wartime. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1976. Fellman, Michael. Inside War:  The Guerrilla Conflict in Missouri during the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Hess, Earl J. “Confiscation and the Northern War Effort: The Army of the Southwest at Helena.” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 44, no. 1 (Spring 1985): 56–​75. Huff, Leo E. “Guerrillas, Jayhawkers, and Bushwhackers in Northern Arkansas during the Civil War.” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 24, no. 2 (Summer 1965): 127–​148. Moneyhon, Carl H. The Impact of the Civil War and Reconstruction on Arkansas: Persistence in the Midst of Ruin. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994. Neely, Jeremy. The Border between Them: Violence and Reconciliation on the Kansas-​Missouri Line. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2007. Shea, William L. Fields of Blood: The Prairie Grove Campaign. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. Shea, William L., and Earl J. Hess. Pea Ridge:  Civil War Campaign in the West. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992. Sutherland, Daniel E. Guerrillas, Unionists, and Violence on the Confederate Home Front. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1999. Sutherland, Daniel E. A Savage Conflict: The Decisive Role of Guerrillas in the American Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

Chapter 10

N ew Mexic o a nd t h e Central Great Pl a i ns i n the Civi l   Wa r Testing U.S. Authority Stacey L. Smith

The outbreak of war between the United States and the Confederate States of America in 1861 transformed the landscape of the American West dramatically. From the Louisiana Purchase (1803) to the U.S.-​Mexico War (1846–​1848), the United States bought or seized millions of acres of land west of the Mississippi River, lands inhabited by hundreds of independent Native nations and thousands of former British, French, and Mexican citizens. The United States claimed sovereignty, supreme governing authority, over these vast western hinterlands and attempted to assert this authority by extending American political influence, commercial networks, and military power westward. The Confederate rebellion in 1861 disrupted this process and created three intertwined crises of sovereignty for the United States. First, the redeployment of much of the regular U.S. Army to the eastern theater of the war left western territories vulnerable to invasion and occupation by the Confederacy. Second, the decline in the regular U.S. Army’s presence presented American Indian peoples with new opportunities to challenge U.S. claims to sovereignty over their homelands. Finally, wartime conditions and policies caused some U.S. citizens living in western territories to resist Federal authority and to assert greater self-​governance. From 1861 to 1865 the United States not only fought an eastern war aimed at reconquering the Confederacy; it also fought a western war to maintain sovereignty over its enormous North American empire. The United States relied on military force to back up American claims to sovereignty over western territories. Prior to 1861, most of the regular U.S. Army operated west of the Mississippi River. Around ten thousand men, equivalent to around three-​quarters of the peacetime regular army, manned dozens of Federal forts along the overland trails to the Pacific Coast or adjacent to Indian lands.1 This force was stretched thin across

170   Stacey L. Smith millions of acres of the North American interior, and military power was relatively weak. In many western places, such as the northern and southern Great Plains, Native nations were the most powerful polities. In these regions, the equestrian Lakota and Comanche governed their own homelands and conquered, displaced, or extracted tribute from other Native and non-​Native groups.2 American claims to sovereignty over these western territories were tenuous, at best, without the military force to back them up. The Confederate rebellion exacerbated these manpower problems. After the first shots at Fort Sumter, the Federal government pulled thousands of regular army soldiers out of the West and redeployed them in the eastern theater of the war. Approximately 313 officers—​about a third of all regular U.S. Army officers—​left western posts for the East or resigned so that they could enlist in the Confederate Army. The reduction of the regular army presence left many western forts with small garrisons. The Federal government abandoned several military installations altogether. The withdrawal of much of the regular U.S. Army from the Far West paved the way for a Confederate challenge to American sovereignty over its western territories. Pro-​ slavery Southerners had long coveted the lands that the United States seized from the war with Mexico between 1846 and 1848. Future Confederate president Jefferson Davis used his influence as a U.S.  senator and secretary of war to expand the geographic reach of slavery into former Mexican lands and to tie the region economically to the slave South. Despite California’s admittance to the Union as a free state, Davis and other like-​minded Southerners in Congress continued to promote Southern expansion into the Southwest. They contested the conventional wisdom that the West’s dry climate placed “natural limits” on slavery’s viability and declared that enslaved labor was well suited to mining and irrigated agriculture in the Far West. They advocated a southern route for a transcontinental railroad line that would link slaveholders in the Mississippi Valley to the markets of California and Asia. Pro-​slavery Southerners even engineered the Gadsden Purchase, the acquisition of an additional thirty thousand square miles of Mexican land in southern New Mexico Territory, to make their proposed southern route viable. Southerners won a major political and economic victory when the U.S. Post Office chose a southerly stagecoach route for the delivery of overland mail to the Pacific. All the while, Davis agitated for, and eventually won, his pet project: the creation of a U.S. camel corps to facilitate travel, exploration, and warfare against Native people in the southwestern desert. Southern expansionists failed to get their transcontinental railroad line or the wholesale establishment of chattel slavery in the West, but efforts at building a southwestern empire for slavery bore political fruit in the shape of pro-​slavery allies. Although only a few enslaved African Americans ever made it to New Mexico, the territory had its own regional system of unfree labor. For centuries, New Mexico’s Hispanos (Spanish and Mexican settlers) raided and traded with Indigenous tribes for captives who they enslaved or bound to labor through debt. Mexico’s official ban on slavery in 1829 did little to halt this practice. This was because Mexicans perceived bound captive Indians not as slaves but as household dependents who owed their labor to their masters in exchange for being “redeemed” from pagan life and brought into the fold of civilization

New Mexico and the Central Great Plains in the Civil War    171 and Christianity. Hispanos who wanted to maintain these old regional labor practices joined forces with Southern-​born migrants who favored Black chattel slavery. These two groups cooperated to pass an 1859 slave code that aligned the territory with the slaveholding South. The southernmost reaches of New Mexico Territory also attracted a large pro-​slavery population. These settlers agitated for independence from New Mexico so that they could create a pro-​slavery territory called Arizona. Secession and war did not dampen white Southerners’ enthusiasm for westward expansion. In fact, war with the United States presented the slaveholders of the Confederacy with new opportunities to seize key territory and resources. Expansionists saw the occupation of New Mexico Territory as the first step to invading other lands that could be colonized for slavery, including southern California and northern Mexico. The silver mines of the Southwest, as well as the gold mines of western Kansas Territory (later Colorado) and California, made tempting targets for the perpetually cash-​strapped Confederate nation. Seizing southern California might give the Confederacy access to Pacific ports and shipping that would circumvent the U.S. naval blockade along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. An invasion of the Southwest and the Pacific coast might well bolster the Confederate nation’s war effort and secure its independent nationhood at the expense of U.S. territorial sovereignty in the West.3 A Confederate rebellion emerged in the Southwest before the bombardment of Fort Sumter. Southern-​sympathizing Whites in southern New Mexico Territory declared their independence from the United States and their allegiance to the Confederacy in March 1861. In the same month, Bvt. Maj. Gen. David E. Twiggs, the Georgia-​born commander of the U.S. Army’s Department of Texas, surrendered his entire command—​ including all forts and supplies—​to Texas officials. After Texas seceded, Col. Earl Van Dorn took command of the new Confederate Department of Texas. Heartened by the secession movement in the Southwest and fearful of a U.S. invasion of Texas emanating from New Mexico forts, Van Dorn chose Lt. Col. John R. Baylor to lead a small force of men into the Texas–​New Mexico borderlands. Baylor marched northwest from Brownsville, Texas, with six companies of the 2nd Texas Mounted Rifles to the abandoned Federal installation at Fort Bliss, near El Paso. He left some of his troops there to guard the Texas border against the United States. From there, Baylor crossed into New Mexico Territory with a force of around three hundred mounted riflemen and artillerymen. After an abortive effort to take the Federal installation at Fort Fillmore under the command of Maj. Isaac Lynde, Baylor marched to the secessionist stronghold of Mesilla and occupied the town. Lynde attempted to retake Mesilla with a force of 550 men. Baylor’s troops repulsed the attack. The inept, discouraged Lynde hastily evacuated Fort Fillmore and burned it to the ground to prevent the Confederates from seizing Federal stockpiles of supplies. Baylor’s men easily captured the harried, dehydrated Federals, but decided to parole them. Baylor sent them packing north to Fort Craig up the Jornada del Muerto, the “Path of the Dead Man,” a stretch of ninety miles of waterless desert. Federal troops at Fort Stanton soon abandoned that post to Baylor as well. Baylor’s men had expelled virtually all U.S. troops in the New Mexico Territory south of the 34th parallel without losing a single man in battle. On

172   Stacey L. Smith

Map 10.1 Southwest

August 1, 1861, Baylor proclaimed the conquered region the Confederate territory of Arizona and established the capital at Mesilla.4 While Baylor seized southern New Mexico for the Confederacy, Brig. Gen. Henry H. Sibley plotted a full invasion that would drive all Federal troops out of the entire territory. Sibley was experienced in desert warfare and believed he could overcome the harsh, arid landscape of the Southwest with careful planning. His scheme was to recruit two or three regiments of mounted rifles and lead them from San Antonio to New Mexico. Once there, his force would move from fort to fort, driving out Federal soldiers and securing water and other critical supplies as they traveled. This strategy would allow for faster movement because his units would not be tethered to supply lines. Sibley’s recruits were mostly young ranchers and day laborers from southern Texas who brought their own horses, weapons, and equipment. Some had extensive experience fighting in frontier militias against American Indians. Most were eager to seize New Mexico for the Confederacy.5 The first wave of the Sibley Brigade, as the expeditionary force came to be known, finally departed for El Paso in October 1861. Despite his emphasis on minimal supply lines in New Mexico, Sibley insisted on fielding a traditional campaign for the first leg of the march from San Antonio to El Paso. He spent months gathering supplies, wagons, and four thousand head of cattle before finally setting off. Sibley did, however, attempt to adapt his troop movements to the arid landscape. He staggered his men’s departures from El Paso over the course of several days so that desert watering holes could replenish themselves after each group passed. These careful plans did not work. Men, horses, and cattle broke down as they plodded through the rugged, dry, mountainous terrain

Map 10.2  Central and Southern Great Plains

174   Stacey L. Smith between the Pecos River and El Paso. Forage, provisions, and water ran out. The exhausted men finally staggered into Fort Bliss in December 1861. There they recuperated and planned their full-​fledged invasion of New Mexico. The Texas Confederates who sought to seize all of New Mexico Territory posed just one of the threats to U.S. sovereignty in the Southwest. Rather than being a straightforward struggle between two nation-​states, the United States and the Confederacy, the war for New Mexico Territory was also a contest between nation-​states and subnational or substate polities for political and economic control over the Southwest. The reduction of U.S. troops and the chaos of the Confederate invasion created openings for the inhabitants of the Southwest to challenge constituted state authority over the region. The numerous Native nations in New Mexico Territory recognized neither the United States nor Mexico nor the Confederacy as the sovereign political authority. They used the upheaval of wartime to stake their own claims to territorial and political sovereignty over their homelands. Hispanos also made for doubtful U.S. allies in wartime, especially when emancipation policy challenged entrenched local practices of Indian enslavement and peonage. The Civil War and the Confederate rebellion absorbed and intertwined with long-​standing rivalries between Americans, Hispanos, and Natives for control over the peoples, lands, and resources of the borderlands. The United States had struggled to govern and impose military rule over the Southwest since the end of the U.S.-​Mexico War in 1848. The diversity, mobility, and military power of the region’s Native nations and the long history of borderlands violence made the region particularly difficult to govern. Puebloan peoples, descendants of the region’s ancient inhabitants, lived in dozens of adobe villages along the upper reaches of the Rio Grande. They were the first to suffer colonization with the Spanish invasion in the sixteenth century. The Puebloans lived in tension not only with their European overlords but also with their newer Athapaskan-​speaking neighbors, the Apache and Navajo (Diné). These groups migrated to the region from northwestern North America sometime between 1200 and 1500 c.e. They became formidable foes once they acquired Spanish horses and livestock. Apache bands developed an equestrian bison-​hunting culture mixed with some sedentary agriculture on the eastern and southern fringes of the Spanish settlements. The Navajo began raising thousands of sheep in the lands to the west. Both groups raided Spanish and Puebloan settlements for food, goods, and captives. The Spanish and Puebloans frequently joined forces to wage war on their mutual enemies. They took hundreds of Apache and Navajo captives, who became a class of detribalized slaves, genízaros, in Spanish households.6 The arrival of the Comanche in the first decades of the eighteenth century increased the turmoil in New Mexico. The Comanche were Uto-​Aztecan speakers originally from present-​day Wyoming. They adopted horses, migrated to the southern Great Plains, and took up bison hunting. They gained a reputation as master equestrians, skilled traders, and fearsome warriors. Soon they became the most populous, powerful, and wealthy polity in northern New Spain. Comanches terrorized and displaced Apache bands. They raided, traded with, and extracted tribute from Native and European communities across the borderlands. They incorporated thousands of Indigenous and non-​Native

New Mexico and the Central Great Plains in the Civil War    175 captives into their bands. They stole and bred thousands of horses. By the middle of the nineteenth century, they dominated a vast territory, Comanchería, which stretched from New Mexico in the west to central Texas in the east, and from the central Great Plains in the north to the Rio Grande in the south. Comanche raiding parties ventured hundreds of miles in search of revenge, captives, horses, and loot. The Comanche were so powerful, and so expansionary, that some historians have called them a Native empire in the heart of North America.7 U.S. officials hoped to rein in this complex, violent borderlands political economy. They found, however, that they lacked both the military force and the political capital to transform the region into a peaceful, governable territory subservient to the will of the United States. The regular army was small and fortifications were scattered and weak. U.S. soldiers had limited success tracking or punishing Apache, Navajo, and Comanche raiders or making peace with these nations. Moreover, Federal officials could not necessarily count on Hispanos, the largest non-​ Native group in New Mexico, to help establish American military or political dominance over the region. Mexican independence in 1821, followed by the establishment of the Santa Fe trade with Missouri, brought dozens of American traders to New Mexico long before the United States had any territorial claims there. When U.S. troops showed up in Santa Fe in 1846 at the onset of the war with Mexico, few Hispanos overtly resisted their presence. Americans bragged of a “bloodless conquest.” Hispanos’ initial acquiescence masked deep hostility toward Anglo invaders. In 1847, hundreds of Hispanos and their Puebloan allies attacked Americans and killed the territorial governor. U.S. retribution included an assault on the Taos Pueblo that left 150 Hispanos and Pueblos dead, followed by the trial and execution of more than two dozen alleged conspirators.8 Hispano resentment continued up to the Civil War as territorial status left New Mexico powerless and voiceless in national politics and American political appointees occupied most major territorial offices. Political marginalization under the territorial system may explain why some Hispanos made overtures toward pro-​slavery Southerners. The heavily Hispano territorial legislature that passed the 1859 slave code may have sought Southern congressmen’s approval for New Mexico statehood.9 Hispanos’ latent anti-​ American sentiment and possible Southern ties made them uncertain U.S. allies. The United States could not always count on former Mexican citizens to support U.S. Indian policy aimed at putting Native people under tight Federal control. By the 1860s, U.S. officials sought to stop perpetual cycles of borderlands violence, captive taking, and looting by forcibly relocating Apache and Navajo to distant reservations and turning them into sedentary farmers and ranchers. The suppression of Indian raiding was appealing to Hispanos who had suffered Apache and Navajo attacks for centuries. At the same time, the proposition of removing Native people and limiting all cross-​cultural conflict would destroy the borderlands political economy upon which Hispanos also depended. Indians killed and stole from Hispanos, but in times of peace they were also valuable trading partners, and in wartime they were a source of captives who could be profitably employed as enslaved domestic servants or debt peons. Indeed, after the U.S.  takeover Hispanos continued illicitly trading with some groups of Indians and

176   Stacey L. Smith waging unauthorized war on others to seize captives.10 These same Hispanos may well have worried about what would happen to critical borderlands institutions of Indian captivity and enslavement in light of the Civil War. The preexisting contests over U.S. authority in the southwestern borderlands overlay the struggle to eliminate Confederate threats to U.S. territorial sovereignty in the region. Few Federal officials feared Hispano defection to the Confederates, but many worried that apathy would prevent them from enlisting to fight. This indifference dissolved, however, when Confederate Texans showed up. Hispanos had a long-​standing suspicion of white Texans that stretched back to a failed invasion of New Mexico by the Republic of Texas in 1841. The return of the Texans in 1861 spurred Hispano enlistment and enthusiasm for the U.S. cause. By February 1862, U.S. officials had recruited between two thousand and three thousand Hispanos into five volunteer regiments and a number of short-​term militia units. Tensions between Hispanos and white Americans soon dampened this initial fervor. Hispanos complained that white officers treated people of Mexican ancestry as racial inferiors and refused to serve alongside them. The U.S. Army was late with their pay and refused to compensate them for horses that they brought with them when they enlisted. Many were upset with the long terms of their enlistment (three years) and likely worried about tending to their crops and defending their families from Native raiders. Mutiny and desertion cases rose. Relying on Hispanos to keep New Mexico under U.S. control seemed a difficult proposition. The full-​fledged Confederate invasion of northern New Mexico Territory tested the strained alliances between white Americans and Hispanos. A combined force of 2,500 men from Sibley’s and Baylor’s units began pushing northward from El Paso in February 1862. They avoided the heavily manned Fort Craig and instead aimed to draw out its defenders by crossing the Rio Grande, occupying the village of Valverde six miles to the north, and threatening to cut the fort’s supply lines from the territorial capital of Santa Fe. Col. Edward Canby, the commander at Fort Craig, sent troops to engage the Confederates. The Federals soon fell back to the fort. The Confederates marched onward to occupy Albuquerque and then Santa Fe. U.S. troops retreated before the invasion, torching warehouses full of supplies as they left. U.S. commanders finally consolidated their forces at Fort Union, northeast of Santa Fe. Fortunately for the Federals, Maj. Gen. David Hunter, commander of the Department of Kansas, responded quickly to a plea for reinforcements. The First Colorado Volunteer Infantry under Col. John P. Slough marched four hundred miles in just under two weeks to join the Federal forces at Fort Union.11 U.S.  war fortunes finally reversed with the arrival of the Coloradans. Slough assembled a force of 1,350 men at Fort Union and marched them down the Santa Fe Trail to drive Confederates out of the territorial capital. The Confederate commander at Santa Fe, Maj. Charles L. Pyron, got word of the imminent Federal attack but was unaware of the Colorado reinforcements. Pyron led four hundred men northeast along the Santa Fe Trail with the intent of surprising the Federals and driving them out of New Mexico altogether. Pyron’s men collided with Slough’s much larger force at Apache Canyon, at the western end of Glorieta Pass, a narrow passage through the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

New Mexico and the Central Great Plains in the Civil War    177 The Federals beat back the Confederates in a short skirmish on March 26, 1862, before falling back to the eastern end of Glorieta Pass to camp and refresh their water supplies. Pyron now realized that he was outnumbered and called for reinforcements from the 4th Texas Regiment under Lt. Col. William R. Scurry. Scurry’s regiment brought the Confederate forces to around a thousand men. The confrontation between the two armies came to a head on March 28. At dawn, Colonel Slough executed a daring strategy aimed at trapping the Confederates in the narrow confines of Glorieta Pass. He sent Maj. John M. Chivington with a party of 490 men due west on a mountain shortcut that would place them at the Confederates’ rear. Slough then led his remaining 850 men south and west through the pass to confront the Confederate forces head-​on. The plan initially looked like a disaster when Slough unexpectedly ran into the main Confederate force under General Scurry that had been pushing through the pass to engage him. The Federals managed to take out most of the Confederates’ guns with their own artillery and sharpshooters, but Scurry’s units eventually forced Slough’s exhausted men to retreat five miles to their camp at the other end of the pass. What first seemed like a Confederate victory quickly turned into a devastating defeat. Chivington’s men, who had bypassed the main body of the Confederates, found the rear of the enemy line at Apache Canyon virtually unprotected. They surprised a handful of Texans who had been left behind to guard the entire Confederate supply train. Chivington’s men drove away the guards and burned eighty wagons full of food, ammunition, tents, and equipment. Then they bayoneted five hundred Confederate mules and horses. Only thirty-​six Confederates died in the confrontation at Glorieta Pass, compared to around eighty-​three Federals, but it would now be impossible to sustain an army without adequate food, water, equipment, livestock, or mounts. The destruction of the Confederate supply train ended the invasion of New Mexico. The Confederates retreated from Glorieta Pass back to Santa Fe. Federal troops amassed near Albuquerque and threatened the remaining Confederate supply depot there in an effort to lure Sibley’s troops out of the territorial capital at Santa Fe. This tactic worked. Federals soon reoccupied Santa Fe without opposition. General Canby was determined to drive the Confederates out of the territory. He ordered his men to surround Albuquerque and bombard it with artillery. The beleaguered Confederates realized that their only chance to sustain the invasion was to flee southward and capture the large stockpile of U.S.  supplies at Fort Craig. Federals followed, harassed, and skirmished with the Confederates for several days. The Confederates gave up on taking Fort Craig and instead sought to bypass Federal forces by retreating along a little-​used wilderness trail deep into the desert. They took a few remaining horses and only seven days’ worth of provisions so that they could travel light and fast. The Texans’ morale completely dissolved along the treacherous hundred-​mile route. Sick and starving men fell by the wayside and were abandoned by their comrades. Military order collapsed completely as exhausted and defeated men blamed Sibley for their predicament. Meanwhile, Sibley learned that 2,500 fresh U.S.  troops from California (the “California Column”) under Col. James H. Carleton were headed his way. On June 7,

178   Stacey L. Smith Carleton arrived in Tucson and took over temporary governorship of the territory. He intended to restore full U.S. sovereignty over the territory by pushing toward the Confederate capital at Mesilla. By July, the entire Confederate army in New Mexico had vacated the territory and retreated into west Texas. The remnants of Sibley’s brigade—​ who suffered a thousand casualties, half due to battle and disease and the other half missing or captured—​straggled into San Antonio later that summer.12 New Mexicans nicknamed the Battle of Glorieta Pass the “Gettysburg of the West,” and historians identify it as a critical turning point in the war for the Southwest. In turning back the Confederate invasion of New Mexico, the U.S. Army managed to reinstate U.S.  sovereignty over the region and to reestablish U.S.  authority over the western borderlands of Texas. After the summer of 1862, Federal troops held firm in New Mexico and reoccupied forts in the hinterlands of western Texas. The Confederacy would not invade New Mexico again or retake far western Texas for the remainder of the war. The Confederate flight from New Mexico resolved only one crisis over U.S.  sovereignty in the Southwest. The United States also struggled to suppress two internal rebellions against Federal authority—​one by Native peoples and one by Hispanos—​ long after Confederates left. Diverse bands of Navajo, Apache, and Comanche continued to fight for control over their homelands, to raid American settlements, and to resist federal Indian policy aimed at forcing them to settle permanently on reservations. Hispanos protested the Federal emancipation policy and stymied efforts to eradicate timeworn systems of Indian slavery and debt peonage that underpinned the New Mexican economy. The focus of U.S. operations in the Southwest after 1862 became the military subjugation and territorial dispossession of Native nations, as well as the dismantlement of unfree Hispano labor systems that ran counter to Federal emancipation policy. After summer 1862, U.S.  officials in New Mexico reorganized territorial volunteer units, once mobilized for defense against Confederates, into Indian-​fighting outfits. Kit Carson, the famous guide and trader who had distinguished himself fighting the Confederate invasion, led U.S.  military forces in the field. Carson’s first task was to subdue the Mescalero Apache who had been raiding Federal forts in the southern part of the territory. Territorial commander Col. James H.  Carleton ordered Carson not to make peace with the Mescalero. Mescalero headmen would have to travel to Santa Fe and negotiate directly with Carleton. Carson was to wage total war against the Mescalero, killing or capturing them wherever he found them, until they trekked to Santa Fe. Carson’s men killed the Mescalero leaders Manuelito and Jose Largo and several members of their bands as they attempted to parley with the Federal troops. Before the Mescalero could plan their revenge, members of the California Column stationed near El Paso ambushed and scattered the bands. Several Mescalero leaders agreed to travel to Santa Fe to meet with Carleton and sue for peace. Carleton’s terms were severe: the pacified Mescalero would be interned at Bosque Redondo, a camp along the Pecos River far to the north of their homelands. They would have to become settled farmers and give up their equestrian raiding culture completely.

New Mexico and the Central Great Plains in the Civil War    179 With the Mescalero defeated, Carson turned his attention to the north and west, where he would embark on a protracted military campaign to assert U.S. authority over the Navajo. Over the winter of 1862–​1863, Carleton met with Navajo who were interested in peace. He initially told them that he would agree to peace only if they gave up raiding New Mexican settlements for sheep and horses. He later demanded that they surrender unconditionally by July 20, 1863, and move to a permanent reservation at Bosque Redondo, about three hundred miles to the east. The Navajo proved unwilling to accept these terms, and Carson set out with his men to confront them. The Navajo felt enormous pressure as old enemies from the borderland political economy, both Native and non-​Native, converged on their homelands. As Carson was pushing into Navajo country from the south and west, Ute bands—​erstwhile scouts for Carson’s expedition—​broke off on their own and sent raiding parties that hit the Navajo from the north. Meanwhile, Hispanos and Pueblo Indians, long the victims of Navajo raiding, stepped up their attacks from the east. The Navajo found themselves hemmed in on all sides. Thousands of Navajo fled rather than surrender to U.S. authority. They holed up in Canyon de Chelly, a narrow, deep complex of canyons in what is now northeastern Arizona. From there, they sent raiding expeditions into northern New Mexico to seize livestock and captives. Despite the onset of winter, Carleton ordered Carson to remain in the field and pursue the Navajo. In January 1864, Carson split his forces into three groups. They each entered Canyon de Chelly from a different direction and scoured it for Navajo. The surrounded Navajo, facing harsh winter conditions, the loss of their animals and crops, and continuing raids from Natives and Hispanos, finally surrendered to the U.S. Army. The “Long Walk,” the removal of defeated Navajo to Bosque Redondo, signaled a major triumph of U.S.  authority over a large portion of the New Mexico Territory. Across 1864, the U.S. Army force-​marched around ten thousand Navajo to the desolate camp. Hispano and Native raiders, eager for revenge and booty, stole Navajo livestock along the route and kidnapped three hundred Navajo children. Three hundred Navajo died on the march, while another two hundred managed to escape. Altogether, around eight thousand Navajo finally stumbled into the Bosque Redondo reserve, where they faced imprisonment and starvation. They eventually negotiated relocation to a massive reservation close to their homelands, but they gave up most of their prime pasture and agricultural lands to the United States.13 Despite the subjugation of the Navajo, the U.S. war for control over the southwestern borderlands was still incomplete by the time the Army of Northern Virginia surrendered at Appomattox in April 1865. The Comanche, the most powerful borderlands people prior to the 1860s, joined with the Kiowa to raid American settlements and disrupt traffic along the Santa Fe Trail. Carson took his battle-​hardened New Mexico Cavalry unit east to confront the Comanche and Kiowa in November 1864. He recruited seventy-​two Ute and Jicarilla Apache auxiliaries to fight alongside him in exchange for the right to plunder defeated enemies. Carson’s troops trudged almost a hundred miles in frigid weather before confronting a large force of Comanche and Kiowa warriors at Adobe Walls, a ruined trading post in the Texas Panhandle. The outnumbered Carson

180   Stacey L. Smith eventually retreated, but not before burning a large Kiowa village and looting its stock of winter provisions. The expedition was, however, largely a failure, and the U.S. Army would spend another decade conquering the Comanche. Compounding the American defeat, the Mescalero escaped Bosque Redondo in 1865 and refused resettlement on a reservation until 1871.14 Just as New Mexico’s Native people continued to resist U.S. authority after the Civil War, so too did Hispanos. The immediate postwar years saw a brewing controversy between Hispanos and U.S. officials over the fate of Indian slavery and peonage. The United States ultimately failed to suppress Hispano resistance to new Federal antislavery legislation. This failure highlighted the limits of U.S. sovereignty in the southwestern borderlands and the inability of the U.S. Federal government to impose its vision of postwar freedom on its colonized Hispano subjects. The battle over coerced Indian labor in New Mexico heated up in 1862, when the U.S. Congress outlawed slavery in all Federal territories. Hispanos quickly petitioned Congress for relief from the law. They estimated that at least six hundred Native captives lived in servitude in New Mexican homes. The petitioners claimed that captive Indian slaves could not survive on their own. Congress would need to provide money for the captives’ care and welfare. Hispanos also asked Congress to allot “reasonable compensation to the owners of these captives.” They wanted, in effect, gradual, compensated emancipation. Congress ignored the petition, and Hispanos, in turn, ignored the 1862 abolition decree. They continued to seize Native captives and hold them as slaves. This was likely the fate of the three hundred Navajo children torn from their parents as they were force-​marched to Bosque Redondo in 1864. Congress did little to enforce the ban on slavery in Federal territories during the Civil War, and so the task fell to postwar legislators and territorial officials. The Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery and involuntary servitude, followed by the Civil Rights Act of 1866, aimed at vesting African American freepeople with basic civil rights, provided opponents of Indian slavery with ammunition to attack the institution. After Republican Charles Sumner gave a rousing speech against enslavement and peonage in New Mexico in early 1867, Congress decided to address the situation with additional Federal legislation. The Anti-​Peonage Act of 1867 authorized the criminal prosecution of New Mexicans who forced workers to labor involuntarily or in repayment of debt. Congress appointed a U.S.  commissioner to investigate hundreds of New Mexicans suspected of holding Indians as slaves or debt peons. He later bound over around three hundred alleged slaveholders for hearings before a Federal grand jury. The fate of the accused slaveholders revealed the tenuousness of Federal legal authority over the southwestern borderlands. The predominantly Hispano grand jury declined to indict any of the defendants, claiming that they treated Indian captives well and never used force to keep them in service. Afterward, the Federal campaign against Indian slavery and peonage in New Mexico fell apart. New Mexicans continued to hold captive Indians in servitude or debt peonage in defiance of Federal law. Although Indian slavery and debt peonage waned in the late nineteenth century, isolated cases persisted into the 1930s.15

New Mexico and the Central Great Plains in the Civil War    181 The contest for New Mexico embroiled the United States in three wars to maintain sovereignty in the southwestern borderlands:  one against the Confederate States of America, one against the Native nations of the Southwest, and one against the territory’s Hispano residents. In addition to suppressing the Confederate bid for territorial expansion, Federal officials fought to squelch the domestic rebellions of the colonized peoples of New Mexico who contested American political and legal hegemony over the borderlands. The United States met these crises of sovereignty with varying degrees of success. U.S. officials were able to muster enough military force to push out Confederates and to subjugate the Mescalero Apache and Navajo. It would take another decade of fighting, however, to subdue the Comanche. Federal opponents of slavery were unable to exercise enough legal influence to break up Indian enslavement in the Southwest. U.S. authority could be weak or uneven at the edges of the nation’s continental empire. North and east of New Mexico the central Great Plains was the stage for another set of armed conflicts over the reach of U.S. authority in the 1860s. The central Great Plains encompassed a coveted strip of bison-​rich grassland between the Arkansas and Platte rivers. It stretched from the Kansas-​Missouri border to the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains in present-​day Colorado. Just to the west, in the mountains, lay the lucrative Colorado gold mines. Solid Confederate plots to seize the mineral wealth of Colorado never materialized. Federal officials contended instead with a set of internal challenges to U.S. sovereignty similar to those that had emerged in New Mexico. The Native peoples of the central plains, the Southern Cheyenne and Southern Arapaho, fought American efforts to dispossess them of their homelands, hunting grounds, and commercial influence. White American newcomers to the central plains were more eager to subdue the Cheyenne and Arapaho than even the U.S. government. This eagerness turned to conflict with the Federal government as the inhabitants of Colorado Territory clashed with U.S. officials over how aggressively to pursue Native people and force them to submit to American rule. The war for the central plains would test the United States’ power to subjugate Indigenous people and to control white citizens living in Federal territories. Like the Apache, Navajo, and Comanche farther south, the Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho peoples of the central plains were more recent migrants to their homelands. They were Algonquin-​speaking people who had once lived near the headwaters of the Mississippi River before taking up an equestrian life and moving out onto the plains to hunt bison. They migrated first to the northern plains in the eighteenth century and then to the central plains by the early nineteenth century. They developed strategic alliances with southern and northern plains peoples, as well as commercial ties with European traders. Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho became prosperous intermediaries as they brokered exchanges in bison hides and horses in the heart of the plains. They were fully enmeshed in both the American fur trade and the Santa Fe trade. The westward expansion of the United States during the 1850s and 1860s profoundly transformed Cheyenne and Arapaho homelands. Floods of American migrants took the overland trails to the Pacific that cut right through the central plains. The 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie permitted white Americans only to pass through Cheyenne and Arapaho lands, not to permanently settle there. The discovery of gold in the eastern

182   Stacey L. Smith Rocky Mountains changed all of this. The 1858 Pike’s Peak (or Colorado) Gold Rush attracted thousands of new migrants, who squatted illegally near the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains. During the Civil War, Congress’s passage of the Homestead Act of 1862, which granted 160 acres of free public land to U.S. citizens who resided on and “improved” their claims for five years, accelerated this migration. Hundreds of whites migrated to the Platte River country in the heart of the central plains seeking homestead claims and pressing for greater military protection for white civilians. The swell of invaders from the United States threatened not only Cheyenne and Arapaho commercial interests but their sheer survival. Overland migrants disrupted bison herds and depleted crucial sources of water and wood along the trails. The cities that cropped up along the base of the Rockies, including Denver, displaced Cheyenne and Arapaho from crucial wintering grounds. The gold rush economy also crowded out the older fur trade economy that had once linked Natives and non-​Natives in critical alliances.16 The gold rush created a crisis over sovereignty on the central plains by the time the war with the Confederacy erupted. Congress organized the region into the new Territory of Colorado in 1861. White settlers in Colorado Territory demanded that the Federal government extinguish all Indian title to the lands on which they squatted. Under pressure from the U.S. government, some Arapaho and Cheyenne bands signed the 1861 Treaty of Fort Wise, which ceded title to their lands in exchange for annuity payments and a small reservation in southeastern Colorado. The validity of the treaty was questionable, however, because not all band leaders approved it. The Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho refused to sign it. The Dog Soldiers, an independent band of Southern Cheyenne, dismissed compromise altogether. Moreover, many of the chiefs who did sign the treaty claimed that they had been tricked into selling their lands. Most Cheyenne and Arapaho refused to abide by it. John Evans, Colorado’s new territorial governor, was determined to enforce the treaty of Fort Wise and establish U.S. sovereignty over the central plains. He wanted to compel all the Cheyenne and Arapaho to settle on their designated reservation. Both nations refused to attend Evans’s treaty councils. Then Evans grew alarmed over a (false) rumor that all the Indians of the central plains were planning a concerted attack on the region’s whites. He believed preemptive military action was necessary. Chivington, who had recently been promoted to commander of all of Colorado Territory’s military forces after his victory at Glorieta Pass, agreed with him. Evans’s and Chivington’s aggressive stance toward the central plains bands put territorial leadership at odds with the Federal government. U.S. Superintendent of Indian Affairs William P.  Dole initially supported the Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho in their protests against the unfair Treaty of Fort Wise. Dole capitulated on the matter only when Evans warned him that the blood of innocent white settlers would be on his hands if he did not cooperate with the removal of the Indians to the new reservation. Evans, Chivington, and the white citizens of Colorado Territory also grew alarmed by the Federal government’s withdrawal of territorial volunteer units to fight Confederate guerrillas in Kansas and Missouri. They claimed that Colorado’s white population

New Mexico and the Central Great Plains in the Civil War    183 was vulnerable to an imminent Indian attack. Chivington went as far as withholding troops from the eastern theater, and Evans traveled to Washington, D.C., to beg the War Department for the return of volunteer and regular units. His request fell on deaf ears. At this point, Evans and Chivington realized that only active warfare would get the War Department’s attention. They needed a pretext for military action, and they found their opportunity in early 1864, when whites began accusing Cheyenne bands of raiding ranches and stealing livestock. Chivington ordered the 1st Colorado, now reorganized as a cavalry unit, to indiscriminately “kill Cheyennes wherever and whenever found.”17 The soldiers invaded Cheyenne camps, recovered livestock, and killed or drove off peaceful Native people, including a group of Lakota who had been visiting their Cheyenne allies. The unprovoked attacks dragged the United States into a war with the plains peoples that most U.S. officials neither sought nor wanted. Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho were outraged by the brutal assaults. They stepped up their raids, killed a few dozen whites, and destroyed ranches and wagon trains. Evans retaliated with two critical proclamations. The first commanded peaceful Indians to assemble at Fort Lyon and Point of Rocks, where the U.S.  military would protect them. The second authorized local whites to organize volunteer militias and kill all “hostile” Indians who refused to obey the first proclamation. The day after Evans made this final announcement, Federal officials finally authorized him to recruit a unit of hundred-​day volunteers, the 3rd Colorado Cavalry, to wage war on the plains peoples. In the midst of the rising violence, a group of Southern Cheyenne, represented by Black Kettle, met with Evans and Chivington to negotiate peace. The Camp Weld Conference of September 1864 ended with an ambiguous settlement. The U.S.  military promised to protect Cheyenne and Arapaho who assembled in the vicinity of Fort Lyon in southeastern Colorado. The conference did not, however, clarify the procedure for formal surrender or the penalties for individual Native men who whites believed were responsible for the previous year’s raids. Nonetheless, hundreds of Cheyenne and Arapaho migrated toward Fort Lyon. But harsh weather and depleted game soon made long-​term settlement next to the fort impossible. The fort’s new commander, Maj. Scott Anthony, sent Black Kettle’s band to slightly more promising hunting grounds on Sand Creek, a small stream about thirty-​five miles to the northeast. Many Arapaho with familial ties to the Cheyenne went with them. Anthony instructed Black Kettle to fly a U.S. flag above his camp, along with a white flag of surrender, to signal his band’s peaceful intentions. The five hundred to seven hundred Cheyenne and Arapaho who congregated at Sand Creek in the late fall of 1864 expected peace and protection. They did not know that Anthony’s policy had taken a deadly turn. Colonel Chivington arrived at Fort Lyon with seven hundred cavalrymen from the 1st and 3rd Colorado. Instead of going after bands of “hostile” Indians, Chivington and Anthony proposed using this infusion of military force to chastise all Indians in the region. The goal was to assert U.S. authority on a grand scale as a prelude to forcing the central plains peoples onto reservations. Their plan included an attack at Sand Creek. Both men envisioned a retaliatory strike to capture and kill men involved in earlier raids and who were now living in Black Kettle’s

184   Stacey L. Smith camp. Chivington and his men set off for Sand Creek camp under cover of darkness on November 28, 1864. The attack began the next day at dawn. Despite Chivington’s professed goal of capturing and killing only men who had committed crimes against whites, his howitzer crews shelled the camp and cavalrymen rode in shooting indiscriminately. Unprepared and outnumbered, the Cheyenne and Arapaho could mount little defense. Women, children, and the elderly fled upstream and took cover by digging holes in the sandy banks of the creek. Black Kettle stood in the camp waving his U.S. flag at the soldiers, but gunfire soon forced him to run for the sand pits. The assault on Black Kettle’s camp lasted until the afternoon. Accounts of the outcome varied wildly. Chivington claimed 500 Indians killed; more modest accounts put the massacred dead at 150. Chivington’s detractors gave a grisly account of the postbattle scene: scores of women and children lay dead; the volunteers from the 3rd Colorado mutilated corpses, taking scalps, fingers, and genitals as trophies. Chivington and the men of the 3rd Colorado disputed these accounts, claiming that only two women (and no children) died and that no mutilations occurred. The survivors of the horrific attack fled toward the “hostile” Cheyenne camps on the Smoky Hill River. The attack at Sand Creek was supposed to be the beginning rather than the end of a broader campaign to subdue and forcibly relocate the peoples of the central plains. That plan fell by the wayside. Chivington soon led his men back to Denver instead of heading into the Smoky Hill River country. Some, including Major Anthony, charged Chivington with seeking a quick, decisive victory to bolster his political career. They predicted, rightly, that all Cheyenne and Arapaho would seek revenge for the unprovoked attack. Virtually all the chiefs who had once sought compromise and negotiation now called for war. Cheyenne and Arapaho attacked waystations along the South Platte River, stole hundreds of cows and horses, and killed around fifty whites. 18 Sand Creek also heightened the tensions between the Federal government and the citizens of Colorado Territory. The accusations against Chivington’s men prompted four separate Federal investigations in 1865, two by Congress and two by the U.S. Army. All four investigations concluded that the Cheyenne and Arapaho were camped peacefully, that Chivington and his men had slaughtered them cruelly and indiscriminately, and that the soldiers had defiled the dead. Congress’s Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War found that Chivington had “deliberately planned and executed a foul and dastardly massacre.”19 Chivington escaped a court-​martial only because he had already resigned from the army. Whites in Colorado Territory largely defended his actions and sneered at the Federal reports. They claimed that Black Kettle’s band was hostile, that the attack was necessary, and the Federal officers behind the investigation smeared Chivington for their own political gain. For decades to come, Coloradans persisted in calling the incident the “Battle of Sand Creek” rather than conceding that it was a massacre. The war for the central plains, much like the war for New Mexico Territory, continued long after the end of the Confederate rebellion. In the years after 1865, the United States redeployed the regular army westward to continue the struggle for U.S. territorial sovereignty and political authority over Indigenous peoples. The army would spend

New Mexico and the Central Great Plains in the Civil War    185 another four years defeating the Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho, another nine years conquering the Comanche, and another twelve years subduing the Lakota. Apache bands in the southwestern borderlands resisted American and Mexican authority into the twentieth century. The last Apache raid on Arizona happened as late as 1924. Meanwhile, the U.S. government continued to clash with its own citizens, the residents of western states and territories, who clamored for more aggressive Indian policy and additional Native land cessions. Just as ex-​Confederates resisted U.S. authority in the reconstructing South, Native people and white westerners continued to challenge the Federal government’s sovereignty over a vast swath of North America long after the Confederate guns at Appomattox had fallen silent.

Notes 1. Alvin M. Josephy Jr., The Civil War in the American West (New York: Knopf, 1991), 7. 2. Pekka Hämäläinen, “Reconstructing the Great Plains: The Long Struggle for Sovereignty and Dominance in the Heart of the Continent,” Journal of the Civil War Era 6, no. 4 (2016): 481–​509. 3. Josephy, The Civil War in the American West, 11–​18, 34–​37; Kevin Waite, “Jefferson Davis and Proslavery Visions of Empire in the Far West,” Journal of the Civil War Era 6, no. 4 (2016):  536–​564; Megan Kate Nelson, “Death in the Distance:  Confederate Manifest Destiny and the Campaign for New Mexico, 1861–​ 1862,” in Civil War Wests: Testing the Limits of the United States, ed. Adam Arenson and Andrew R. Graybill (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), 33–​36. 4. Waite, “Jefferson Davis,” 555–​556; Josephy, The Civil War in the American West, 22–​30,  43–​50. 5. Nelson, “Death in the Distance,” 38–​41. 6. Lance Blyth, “Kit Carson and the War for the Southwest: Separation and Survival along the Rio Grande, 1862–​1868,” in Arenson and Graybill, Civil War Wests,  53–​57. 7. Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). 8. Laura E. Gómez, Manifest Destinies:  The Making of the Mexican American Race (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 1–​45. 9. Waite, “Jefferson Davis,” 553. 10. Blyth, “Kit Carson and the War for the Southwest,” 57, 63–​64. 11. Josephy, The Civil War in the American West, 41–​42,  61–​67. 12. Josephy, The Civil War in the American West,  77–​92. 13. Blyth, “Kit Carson and the War for the Southwest,” 57–​64. 14. Andrew E. Masich, Civil War in the Southwest Borderlands, 1861–​1867 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2017), 212–​218; Josephy, The Civil War in the American West, 289–​292. 15. Stacey L. Smith, “Emancipating Peons, Excluding Coolies: Reconstructing Coercion in the American West,” in The World the Civil War Made, ed. Gregory P. Downs and Kate Masur (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 55–​60. 16. Elliott West, The Contested Plains:  Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998). 17. Quoted in Josephy, The Civil War in the American West, 300. 18. West, The Contested Plains, 297–​308; Josephy, The Civil War in the American West, 296–​303. 19. Ari Kelman, A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 191–​195.

186   Stacey L. Smith

Bibliography Blyth, Lance. “Kit Carson and the War for the Southwest: Separation and Survival along the Rio Grande, 1862–​1868.” In Civil War Wests:  Testing the Limits of the United States, edited by Adam Arenson and Andrew R. Graybill, 53–​70. Oakland: University of California Press, 2015. Colton, Ray C. The Civil War in the Western Territories: Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1959. Gómez, Laura E. Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race. New York: New York University Press, 2007. Hämäläinen, Pekka. The Comanche Empire. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008. Hämäläinen, Pekka. “Reconstructing the Great Plains:  The Long Struggle for Sovereignty and Dominance in the Heart of the Continent.” Journal of the Civil War Era 6, no. 4 (2016): 481–​509. Josephy, Alvin M., Jr. The Civil War in the American West. New York: Knopf, 1991. Kelman, Ari. A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. Kiser, William S. Borderlands of Slavery:  The Struggle over Captivity and Peonage in the American Southwest. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. Masich, Andrew E. The Civil War in Arizona: The Story of the California Volunteers, 1861–​1865. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012. Masich, Andrew E. Civil War in the Southwest Borderlands, 1861–​1867. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2017. Nelson, Megan Kate. “Death in the Distance: Confederate Manifest Destiny and the Campaign for New Mexico, 1861–​1862.” In Civil War Wests: Testing the Limits of the United States, edited by Adam Arenson and Andrew R. Graybill, 33–​52. Oakland: University of California Press, 2015. Nelson, Megan Kate. “Indians Make the Best Guerrillas: Native Americans and the War for the Desert Southwest, 1861–​1862.” In The Civil War Guerrilla: Unfolding the Black Flag in History, Memory, and Myth, edited by Joseph M. Beilein Jr. and Matthew C. Hulbert, 99–​122. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2015. Nelson, Megan Kate. The Three-​Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West. New York: Scribner, 2020. Smith, Stacey L. “Emancipating Peons, Excluding Coolies:  Reconstructing Coercion in the American West.” In The World the Civil War Made, edited by Gregory P. Downs and Kate Masur, 46–​74. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Waite, Kevin. “Jefferson Davis and Proslavery Visions of Empire in the Far West.” Journal of the Civil War Era 6, no. 4 (2016): 536–​564. Waite, Kevin. West of Slavery:  The Southern Dream of a Transcontinental Empire. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. West, Elliott. The Contested Plains:  Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998.

Chapter 11

Indian Terri tory Social and Political Unraveling Clarissa W. Confer

American Indians residing in Indian Territory fought for both the Union and the Confederacy in the American Civil War. When war came to the region in 1861, the Five Nations—​Creek, Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole—​made choices derived from their cultural, political, and economic interests as sovereign nations. Military action ebbed and flowed through Indian Territory over four years, which displaced significant portions of the population at different times. At war’s end the Natives found themselves on opposing sides, both between and within the individual nations. The external as well as internal civil war deepened tribal divisions and caused substantial physical destruction and considerable human suffering. Far from the familiar battlefields of Virginia a less well-​known war raged on the borders of the United States and the Confederate States and engulfed the Indigenous peoples of the region. Invisible to most contemporaries and later historians, Native Americans fought primarily in the Trans-​Mississippi theater, in Indian Territory. They enlisted in both national armies and fought for their own reasons of kinship, sovereignty, and identity. The war experience took a tremendous toll on Native nations in terms of social and physical upheaval and loss and had serious political consequences. In Indian Territory the roots of the Civil War stretch back to the relocation of the Native American nations referred to by the United States as the “Five Civilized Tribes.” The Creek, Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole people arrived in the region of present-​day Oklahoma in the 1830s as a consequence of the Jackson administration’s policy of Indian removal. A little over two decades later, as they struggled to rebuild their shattered worlds, the U.S. nation split asunder and pulled them into the maelstrom. The strategic geographic location of Indian Territory guaranteed interest from the two major combatants. Although far from the national capitals and out of the main theaters of war, the territory could not be ignored. For the Confederacy it would be an important shield to the valuable states of Texas and Arkansas as well as a possible staging area for an invasion of the resource-​rich Far West. Similarly, the Union could buffer the

188   Clarissa W. Confer new state of Kansas or get closer to a penetration of Texas. Examination of a map makes this geographic significance clear; however, this did not translate into immediate action by either national government in 1861. As the governments in Washington, D.C. and Richmond focused on the eastern theater of conflict, Indian Territory garnered little attention in strategic planning. Additionally, in what was initially conceived by both sides as a “white man’s war,” Natives had no clear role. As the larger nation divided itself into warring camps in 1861, the Natives of Indian Territory faced difficult choices. Geographic location, heredity, friendships, religious affiliation, economic interests, and political beliefs might point people toward Union or Confederacy. However, national (tribal) membership and kin group added to the complicated decision for Natives. The Natives of Indian Territory did not hold U.S. citizenship, so they did not give up one political membership in exchange for another. The legacy of removal also strongly influenced these discussions. All the Five Nations, but particularly the Creek and Cherokee, had divided bitterly over the issue of removal, and those deep wounds had not healed but instead reopened within the context of the Civil War. Above all, however, Natives made their choices as Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, or Seminole, in that unique position of noncitizen residents of the United States. When it came to military service, members of the Five Nations enlisted for a variety of reasons. They shared typical motivations with other men; however, motivations of loyalty, group expectation, defense of homeland, political allegiance, and family ties all have different meanings for members of Native nations. All the men from these nations

Map 11.1  Indian Territory

Indian Territory   189 had a level of identity that superseded ideas of North or South, slave or free, Republican or Democrat. They identified with their tribal affiliation, which layered over traditional kinship structure and remained embedded in the decisions they made. They acted on loyalties to recognized community leaders rather than to any distant white government and intended to fight to defend their families and tribal nation. Some accepted the Confederate assertion that the Union had become that enemy in 1861. Therefore, Indian men expected to fight with rather than against other members of their nations in defense of their homeland. The pressure of operating as minority, semisovereign nations at a time of national crisis threatened the existence of the Five Nations. While many Native leaders understood that strength would derive from a position of unity, they failed to achieve that elusive unity either between nations or within nations. The artificially constructed “Five Civilized Nations” concept ignored the reality of disparate cultures, heritages, and even languages, so it did not offer a platform for unified decision-​making. Not only could the Five Nations not agree easily; they could not even find consensus within their nations. Three of the five nations found their citizens enlisted in both Union and Confederate forces by mid-​war, while the other two fought exclusively for the Confederacy. This internal division at the regional and tribal and even kin group level wreaked havoc on Native society and institutions. At the national level the Richmond government recognized the value of Native alliance before the United States acted. The Confederate States of America’s well-​thought-​ out plan sent known representatives like lawyer and Brig. Gen. Albert Pike to the region offering an alliance that included representation in the national Confederate government (something the U.S. government had never considered for Native peoples) as well as guarantees of suspended Federal annuity payments and military protection from invasion. With this offer on the table, and no communication from the U.S. government other than the abandonment of Federal installations in the region, all five nations ended up signing an alliance with the Confederate States of America. The Choctaw and Chickasaw committed to the Confederate cause early and steadily. A homogeneous society (unlike the Creek, for example), they made their choice based on what they described as their “natural affections, education, institutions, and interests” with the South. We can identify their engagement with slavery, the influence of Southern sympathizers among them, and fear of the loss of tribal resources as motivating factors. Although Choctaw Chief George Hudson initially supported neutrality, he quickly proposed raising a unit for the Confederate Army. Choctaw and Chickasaw together raised three regiments, making the 2nd Indian Brigade. These troops saw little fighting and spent most of the war in their own country. Both nations remained loyal throughout the war, possibly motivated by witnessing the devastating internecine strife in the Creek and Cherokee nations. In the Cherokee Nation, enlistment and military service revolved around internal issues. This tribe divided terribly during the removal crisis in the 1830s. The residual bitterness and divisiveness manifested in two rival groups, led by Stand Watie and John Ross. When the Confederate offers of alliance arrived in 1861, Cherokee viewed them according to their understanding of identity and loyalty. The rival factions instinctively

190   Clarissa W. Confer chose opposing sides and vied for any available power. Chief John Ross and rival Stand Watie understood well the implications of military service. Those who enlisted with the Confederacy gained power and prestige as well as access to guns, rations, and uniforms. An armed body sanctioned by the Confederate States could be an important asset in the continuing power struggle in the Cherokee Nation. Ross feared two outcomes from the existence of an armed unit: loss of status as a neutral, which he regarded as the Cherokee’s only hope of surviving the war, and the instigation of domestic strife and internal difficulties in the nation. While Ross pursued neutrality, Stand Watie and his followers quickly identified with the Confederate cause and corresponding opportunity for power, and so raised a mounted regiment. Now threatened with a shift in the internal power struggle of the nation, Ross also raised a regiment of supporters as soon as the nation signed a Confederate treaty. This was not to be just an internal struggle, however. Once the Cherokee units enrolled in the Confederate military structure, they could and would be ordered to support Confederate military goals. The harsh realization of their new national allegiance came in the fall of 1861, when the first military action in Indian Territory reflected the social and cultural situation in the Native nations. The southern Indian forces existed, in theory, to defend their nations. The general understanding was that the threat would come from Union forces, or perhaps from guerrillas or raiders lurking on the borders. Few expected the conflict to begin among their own people. However, soon the Cherokee troops became embroiled in fighting fellow Indians in running battles that seemed to have little to do with their reasons for enlisting. They found themselves facing an “enemy” who was quite familiar: Creek Indians. This definition of the Creek as a threat or enemy came from the Confederate States, not from Chief Ross or the official Cherokee government. In fact, Ross stayed in communication with the de facto head of this “enemy” group, regarding him as a fellow Native leader. Creek leader Opothleyahola represented those “loyal Creek” who opposed Confederate alliance. Their opposition sprang from several factors. Some intended to honor earlier alliances made with the United States; others opposed the pro-​removal Creek now gaining ascendancy under the Confederates. This group sought reassurance from the U.S. government to no avail. Seemingly abandoned by the United States and unwilling to join the Confederacy, this group faced an uncertain future. When the charismatic Opothleyahola began to move friends and family northward toward Union territory, thousands followed him. His offer of freedom for Blacks who joined him was well received, and hundreds of free Blacks and slaves joined the Creeks. As the size of this group swelled, Confederates became increasingly nervous. The presence of a respected Native leader who opposed the Southern cause annoyed Col. Douglas H. Cooper, commander of the Confederate Indian forces, so he instigated attacks on the loyal Indians. He claimed knowledge of correspondence between Creek chiefs and the Federal government, which he misrepresented as an alliance to justify his military actions against civilians. In fact, there is no evidence that Opothleyahola posed a serious military threat; he merely represented an alternative for Indian Territory residents. Entire families had flocked to his leadership and protection—​hardly an

Indian Territory   191 offensive force. Yet Cooper pledged to “either compel submission . . . or drive him and his party from the field.”1 In November 1861 Confederate forces moved toward Opothleyahola’s group, whom they labeled hostiles. Opothleyahola had anticipated this action by moving his people north, toward the perceived safety of Union lines. In a series of three engagements—​ at Round Mountain, Chusto-​talasah, and Chustenahlah—​Confederate Indian forces aided by Texans drove several thousand pro-​Union Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole into a desperate trek to Kansas. Although only short, swift skirmishes, these engagements had a profound impact on the course of the war for the Indians. In a seeming reenactment of the earlier removal exodus, about half the Creek Nation, along with hundreds of Blacks, a group of Seminole warriors, and thousands of women and children from both nations, moved north in front of the advancing Confederate force. As this large group of civilians with all their possessions moved forward, the stage was set for tragedy. When Cooper caught up with the travelers on November 19, 1861, he was leading six companies of Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole troops, but it was the 9th Texas Cavalry that charged the Indian camp.2 The scouts led the cavalry directly to an ambush by concealed Creek and Seminole warriors. The result was chaos. Opothleyahola had moved his vulnerable population on ahead to another camp so that only a determined rearguard fought the Confederate allies. Cooper formed the Choctaw and Chickasaw regiment for an attack, but the Texans were so far ahead that no one could fire safely. The officers hesitated and called out to ascertain the location of their troops. Darkness hampered the efforts of both sides, and fires on the prairie only added to the confusion. The skirmish ended after a mere fifteen minutes, and casualties were correspondingly light. The loyal Indians had disengaged to follow their fleeing families. The group headed northeast, forded the Arkansas River in the dark, and entered the Cherokee Nation. The effect of the contest was evident the next day. This brief encounter had forced the loyal Creek and Seminole to flee in haste, leaving much of their wealth behind. Cooper’s men rode into the abandoned camp and tallied their booty:  Opothleyahola’s buggy, twelve wagons, flour, sugar, coffee, salt, cattle, and ponies.3 These captured supplies—​a nice bonus for the Confederate forces on the march—​represented a serious blow to their owners. Because Opothleyahola’s people were civilians, no government supported the group and no army commissary supplied them. They subsisted on what they could carry and forage. Cooper’s forces denied them all means of subsistence by capturing supplies and keeping them on the run. The men of Opothleyahola’s band had to wage delaying actions to allow the women and children time to move again. Unlike the majority of Civil War battles, the Confederates in Indian Territory were attacking a primarily civilian group. These were Indian men protecting their kin groups in a traditional manner, not an offensive army. The pursuit of the loyal Indians continued into December 1861, with weather and attrition adding to the hardship on both sides. Cooper caught up with the travelers in the Cherokee Nation. This development proved alarming because many Cherokee were known to be lukewarm Confederates, and the presence of dissidents might spark a

192   Clarissa W. Confer defection. Reports of an impending attack by Opothleyahola magnified the sense of urgency, although it is unlikely that this band of fleeing families intended to deliver an offensive blow against mounted soldiers. Cooper believed this news, however, and added Col. John Drew’s Cherokee to the Confederate effort. Drew commanded mostly full-​ blood men who had enlisted to defend their nation and who were loyal to John Ross rather than to Confederate President Jefferson Davis. The Confederacy had done little to encourage their devotion as the unit lacked flour, coffee, sugar, salt, and adequate clothes and blankets. The 1st Cherokee did not embrace the Confederate cause with the dedication of their Southern allies and probably were considered a supporting force to the main thrust. Unfortunately for Cooper, Drew’s men made first contact with Opothleyahola’s people at Bird Creek. Ross’s Cherokee remained anxious to settle the Creek matter by diplomacy instead of conflict, and with Cooper’s approval Maj. Thomas Pegg, of Drew’s regiment, tried to meet with Opothleyahola. The situation quickly degenerated into confusion. Pegg returned empty-​handed from his diplomatic mission, and his report of Creek painted for war alarmed Cooper. It also served to complete the disintegration of Drew’s command. Men “slipped away” from camp and from Confederate military service that expected them to fight friends and relatives. Some went home, others to Fort Gibson, and many joined the loyal Indians they had been assembled to fight. The defection of Drew’s men should not have come as a surprise. When their sense of loyalty, primarily based on ideas of identity and kinship, was challenged, as by the Confederacy’s demand that they fight against Creek families, they made their own choice. The soldiers had enlisted out of loyalty to their chief and a belief in his assertion that the borders of their beloved nation must be protected. Drew’s regiment had been raised to combat enemies of the Cherokee Nation, not of the Confederacy. The Creek posed no immediate threat to the Cherokee and thus did not fall under a strict definition of enemy. Many Cherokee had personal relationships with Creek, who had been neighbors in Indian Territory for over two decades. Drew explained that his men’s behavior was due to a “misconception of the character of the conflict between the Creeks, and from an indisposition to engage in strife with their immediate neighbors.”4 In other words, Cherokee knew an intertribal fight when they saw one and wanted no part of it. Drew pledged to fight on with Cooper, but he was forever tainted by his men’s desertion. The battle of Chusto-​talasah, or Caving Banks (north of present-​day Tulsa), went on despite the defection of the 1st Cherokee Mounted Rifles. The site was well-​chosen for defense. Opothleyahola sheltered his warriors along the high banks (thirty feet in places) of Bird Creek. Cooper’s men found it difficult to attack this natural stronghold, but they kept up the effort throughout the afternoon of December 9, 1861. After four hours of fighting, the loyal Creek withdrew at dusk, and the Confederates regrouped in camp. That night they experienced the hardships of winter campaigning as three inches of snow fell. Cooper exaggerated enemy losses and claimed a victory at Chusto-​talasah, despite the fact that the dissident Creeks and Seminoles remained on the loose. After two engagements, Cooper was not confident in his ability to drive Opothleyahola from Confederate soil. The renegade band of families had proved difficult to overcome,

Indian Territory   193 and it appeared that more Cherokee were joining them. Cooper requested white troops and received the 2nd Arkansas Mounted Rifles under Col. James McIntosh. McIntosh’s pursuit of the loyal Creek resulted in the battle of Chustenahlah on December 26. After four days in the field, he cut free from his baggage train. Opothleyahola prepared to fight again, choosing a site with natural protection along Shoal Creek. The women, children, and supplies remained sheltered while warriors took up a fine defensive position half a mile to the south. Although McIntosh impetuously charged an enemy well ensconced in a defensive position, his assault was successful. The Confederates dislodged the Creek and Seminole with a rapid onslaught. Many defenders fought fiercely, but the majority were routed and fled to the north. McIntosh’s men continued the chase, cutting down pro-​Union Indians wherever they scattered. The battle of Chustenahlah doomed the unfortunate loyal Indians. Colonel McIntosh reported that the enemy was completely scattered. The military defeat of the warriors, represented by retreat from the field, was less critical than the material losses the civilians sustained. The Confederates pushed north to the Creek encampment, “shooting and cutting down the enemy” along the way, and wreaked havoc there. They captured 180 people and quantities of property, including wagons, horses, cattle, and sheep. These losses deprived the Creek and Seminole of the means to continue their journey. Both food and transportation were severely reduced, and the women and children who escaped had to flee on foot. Stand Watie’s 2nd Cherokee Mounted Rifles arrived after the battle and inflicted further misfortune by seizing nearly a thousand head of livestock and hundreds of ponies. Colonel Cooper’s men chased the dislocated Creek and Seminole toward the Kansas border until forced back due to the bitter winter weather. The first military campaign in Indian Territory had ended. When called upon to chase down men, women, and children of the neighboring Creek Nation in the fall of 1861, numerous Cherokee had abandoned the Confederate cause. While many of Drew’s men refused to take this action, other Cherokee did follow Confederate command. Loyalties were challenged and choices made constantly throughout this conflict. The unsteady relationship between the nations of Indian Territory and the Confederacy continued into 1862 and included a major military engagement. C.S.A. commander Albert Pike marched his Native troops to Arkansas to participate in the Battle of Pea Ridge, despite treaty assurances that Indian forces would not leave their nations without their consent. The Indian troops did not go willingly to battle. In the haste to concentrate men against the Union invasion, no one had officially consulted the tribes about fighting outside their territory, as required by the 1861 treaties. The orders to march to Bentonville, Arkansas, clearly did not involve a direct threat to Indian homes or families. In addition, the men refused to move without receiving the overdue military wages that their families relied on. Although they eventually moved out, Indians demonstrated little enthusiasm for this trek into Arkansas for a subsequently failed military engagement. The Choctaw and Chickasaw and Creek regiments lagged behind and missed the Battle of Pea Ridge. The Cherokee successfully took a portion of the battlefield, but then retreated in haste as they experienced their first taste of Union artillery.

194   Clarissa W. Confer The Cherokee participation at Pea Ridge left a lasting legacy as the Union accused them of “barbarity.” When Iowa cavalry found eight Union soldiers scalped and their necks pierced with long knives, blame quickly fell on the Indian troops on the field. Contemporary racism drove accusations. The New  York Tribune described an “aboriginal corps of tomahawkers and scalpers” at Pea Ridge. The politically driven Joint Committee of Congress on the Conduct of the War jumped into the fray by publicizing the behavior of the Cherokee who were accused of scalping and mutilating the Federal dead. The Confederacy showed little inclination to stand behind its allies in putting down this talk of barbarism and remained publicly silent about any Indian participation in the battle. Accusations of scalping had long been a weapon used against Indians, so Native leaders regarded this inflammatory talk as racist and detrimental to their relations with both white governments. The Confederates’ lack of support for Indian forces in the aftermath of Pea Ridge presaged a disturbing trend. By 1862, the Confederate States seemed to have lost interest in their Native allies. Maj. Gen. Earl Van Dorn essentially cut them loose from Confederate operations with a vague mandate to annoy the enemy in Indian country. Most units returned to their nations, where they had always intended to be, or roamed the interior of the territory. If the Federals invaded they would surely come from the northern or eastern borders, but Confederate commanders remained in the south-​ central region, seemingly oblivious to Cherokee and Creek interests. The Confederacy had taken the initiative in Indian Territory, first diplomatically and then militarily, and the Union always seemed to be playing catch-​up. Finally, in 1862, the dire refugee situation in Kansas prompted the U.S. military leadership to take action. The U.S. government and the Natives for once had parallel interests: the government wanted to stop supporting Native refugees in Kansas, and the miserable refugees desperately wanted to return to their homes. Using Native men in an expedition to secure the Creek and Cherokee nations for the United States and thus allow for repatriation seemed an obvious solution, but prejudice, distrust, and incompetence doomed the project. Obstacles abounded. The first hurdle would be the enlistment of Natives into the U.S. military since this was still a white man’s army in 1862 and Natives were not welcome. Finally, after ignoring District of Kansas commander Brig. Gen. Samuel D. Sturgis’s order prohibiting enrollment of Indians, the United States filled two Indian regiments under the command of Brig. Gen. James Blunt. With Blunt at headquarters, command of the Indian troops fell to Col. William Weer, a Kansas Jayhawker with a fondness for the bottle and little empathy with his non-​white troops. The expedition would be a difficult one, since the army and the Natives had quite different objectives and measures of success. On top of that difficult situation, Weer proceeded to undo the promise of the expedition by alienating both Native and white soldiers. He never tried to understand the Indian enlistees or their goals and in fact complained that they constantly questioned his intentions for the expedition. Weer did not recognize their distrust of white involvement in Indian affairs. The mistrust was well-​founded. Native men enlisted because they viewed the U.S. Army as a means to return safely to their

Indian Territory   195 homeland; however, the army had no plan to repatriate these refugees from Indian Territory. Days before the march was to begin, Weer asked his superiors what he should do with the Indians once they reached their country, and later complained about “want of instructions as to the Indians.”5 The first Indian Expedition left Kansas in June 1862 with high hopes and bountiful promises. It returned a few months later in disgrace, having achieved neither its military objective of establishing Union control over Indian Territory nor the secondary purpose of returning the Native refugees to their homes. The invasion force of 6,000 men included the 1,600 recently enlisted Indian troops. The target was the Cherokee Nation and the Confederate Cherokee force led by Col. Stand Watie, but Weer marched his troops farther and farther into hostile territory with no clear objective or tangible results. While the expedition achieved some successes, by summer the men were just sitting in camp near Fort Gibson with dwindling supplies and a drunk commander. In mid-​July Col. Frederick Salomon arrested Weer, took control of the expedition, and ordered the withdrawal of white forces from Indian country, while the Indian regiments were to remain behind to maintain a Union presence. One outcome of the Federal invasion of the Cherokee Nation was to secure the allegiance of Chief Ross and his party for the Union. The Confederate States had appeared to be the only viable ally in 1861; however, their consistent lack of support caused Ross to rethink the alliance. When Union forces finally arrived in the Cherokee Nation, Capt. Harris Greeno arrested Ross, thus providing the chief and the Cherokee Nation a way out of the territory. As the chief traveled to Washington, D.C., he left behind chaos in his nation. The internal Cherokee power struggle flourished, and while Ross attempted to convince the Lincoln administration of his nation’s loyalty, his enemies proclaimed rival Stand Watie as chief. The Cherokee Nation’s division brought chaos. As Ross explained to President Lincoln, the Cherokee people were now left “in a position fraught with distress, danger and ruin.”6 Not surprisingly, U.S. officials found little reason to believe in these unknown Natives who appeared to be switching sides, so Ross spent the remainder of the war in Washington trying to convince the government to trust his people. This change of alliance with external political entities created internal problems in the Indian nations. In the Cherokee and Creek nations the still potent removal schism essentially mirrored the United States–​Confederate States divide, so that national resources could now be applied to decades-​old grudges. When the Federal Indian forces swept into the Tahlequah capital area, the men settled old scores with the Watie faction. Hundreds of pro-​Confederate Cherokee and Creek abandoned the region in spring 1862. But by fall the loyal Creek and Cherokee were in enemy/​rival-​held territory with no Federal support. The failed Weer expedition was now costing them dearly. They had been abandoned by the U.S. government and were on their own. Of course, as the Union expedition withdrew, the tide of refugees flowed the other way, as Watie’s men surged back to the Park Hill neighborhood near the capital at Tahlequah and wreaked revenge on Ross’s supporters. The 1863 burning of Ross’s beautiful Rose Cottage symbolized the enduring hatred. In the summer of 1863 the largest engagement in Indian Territory unfolded along Elk Creek, near the small community of Honey Springs, from which it takes its name.

196   Clarissa W. Confer This largest battle of about 5,000 men occurred the same month as Gettysburg, which had more than 165,000 combatants. While the fight had great significance for Natives, it has been largely overlooked in the traditional narrative of the American Civil War, overshadowed by the much larger battle in the East. However, its outcome in 1863 essentially cemented Union control of Indian Territory for the duration of the war. In mid-​1863 the Union commander General Blunt went on the offensive to protect Fort Gibson. The three-​thousand-​strong U.S. Army force moved south, encountering the numerically superior Confederate Army under Douglas Cooper at Honey Springs in the Creek Nation. Superior rifles, three times more artillery, and drier powder strengthened the Union’s chances, and after two hours of fighting the Texans’ retreat from an untenable forward position triggered the collapse of the Confederate line. Cooper retreated, having lost several hundred dead, wounded, and captured, yet Blunt declined to pursue and instead returned to Fort Gibson. Stand Watie’s men fought without their commander, who was on detached duty at Webbers Falls. Cooper thought they would have done better had Watie been present; however, none of the units fought well. An eyewitness noted that one Confederate Creek regiment “did not fight but run,” while another “fought awhile and then run,” and the Choctaw fought a little more than the Creek. Later that summer, Blunt defeated Confederate Indian forces at Perryville and Scullyville, Choctaw Nation, before returning to the safety of Fort Gibson.7 The military action in the territory deteriorated into small raids with little strategic impact as the national powers “turned the tide” in the major military theaters and the residents of the territory faced pressing crises of survival. While the military actions in the Cherokee Nation seemed to fizzle out, the ongoing political schism continued unabated. In February 1863 the pro-​Union Cherokee, emboldened by U.S. Army support, met at Tahlequah, where they voted to nullify the original treaty of alliance with the Confederate States. The council declared allegiance to the United States, abolished slavery in the Cherokee Nation, and reveled in their power by confiscating the property of Stand Watie and his supporters. This act of revenge against their political rivals replicated the ordered assassinations of pro-​removal leaders twenty-​plus years earlier. Not to be outdone, the pro-​Confederate Cherokee also met in council at Webber’s Falls and elected Watie principal chief. The Cherokee had two competing governments pledging allegiance to two warring national powers. Although they now wore gray and blue uniforms, little had changed about the internal power struggle in the Cherokee Nation. This deep-​seated division plagued the nation for decades and ultimately weakened them in their dealings with the United States. In contrast, the Choctaw and Chickasaw remained unified throughout the war. The Chickasaw and Choctaw experience in the Civil War differed from their Cherokee neighbors. While the northern region of Indian Territory—​Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole nations—​saw most of the military action in the first years of the war, the southern nations remained relatively unscathed. Both the Choctaw and the Chickasaw nations had signed the alliance with the Confederacy and created units early in the war. Their regiment arrived in Arkansas too late to engage in the Battle of Pea Ridge and saw little military action as the Cherokee Nation became a battleground. However, these

Indian Territory   197 southernmost nations in the territory did experience the influx of refugees as the tide of battle farther north ebbed and flowed. Choctaw Chief Peter Pitchlynn struggled to protect his own nation’s resources while extending traditional hospitality to those in need. As the war dragged on, it became more and more difficult to support everyone residing in the territory. By 1863 there wasn’t anywhere easy to live in Indian Territory. The northern regions had been shattered by war, while the southern nations had been overrun by refugees. The Union Army, the Confederate Army, Jayhawkers, bushwhackers, William Clarke Quantrill’s guerrilla band, and numerous other outlaws frequented the region throughout the conflict, and civilians often bore the brunt of their actions. In Park Hill, Cherokee Nation, a resident recorded the uncertainty in her diary: “This morn. we saw the Southern army pass, on the very same road where, exactly a week before, we had watched the Federals pass. . . . What next will we see?”8 In fact, the first military engagement in 1861, Confederate pursuit of Opothleyahola’s group, was an act of warfare primarily aimed against civilians. Since residents included various groups—​traditional and progressive Indians, whites and free and slave African Americans—​there is no overall civilian experience. However, all who stayed in Indian Territory faced similar disruptive forces brought by war. Those who remained at home dealt with murder, theft, shortage of food, inadequate medical aid, and lack of transportation and communication. Civilians lived in a truly divided region that tended to split along internal fractures rather than geographic lines. The ties that formerly bound people—​kinship, religion, economic status—​frayed under the pressures of war. The tensions over removal simmered just beneath the surface, and old grudges, suspicions, and the desire for revenge gained new life when national pressures intruded. It became difficult to remain in this border region as the conflict heated up, so men sought work in other states until the war was over, or entire families moved out to escape the conflict. However, this option worked for only a minority as most families or individuals did not have the economic ability to move, and family ties and responsibilities bound them in place as well. The women and children who made up the majority of the remaining residents had been left to their own devices. They faced numerous challenges due to wartime conditions, in addition to the normal burdens of nineteenth-​century life in a rural area. Indian civilians suffered many of the same problems that white Confederates endured in occupied areas of the South. The institutions that had previously structured their lives, such as banks, schools, businesses, and local government, disintegrated. The uncertainty of travel in a war-​torn area greatly restricted the lives of civilians and forced an even greater self-​reliance on solitary farming communities. Home became the only refuge for civilians who could not travel safely. In many cases the situation there was dire. Living off the land, armies stripped the countryside as they went, bivouacking in fields, burning fences, and trampling crops. The situation in Indian Territory differed from much of the South because many soldiers from both sides lived in the region. Confederate Cherokee troops occasionally patrolled the Park Hill vicinity. This gave rise to situations where Confederate Cherokee soldiers “requisitioned” supplies from people they had known all their lives. The dispensing

198   Clarissa W. Confer of hospitality, even in strained circumstances, was ingrained in Native culture, and most Indian Territory residents did their best to cope with the situation. Sharing of resources with relatives and other tribal members remained a tradition, although strained by wartime changes. Agricultural production dropped precipitously as the war continued. With men and draft animals gone and fields and fences destroyed by passing troops, women struggled to grow food. This was especially hard for those acculturated families who had relied on male labor on the farms. This area was described as “little more than a desert,” where “farms are ruined—​corn and meat eaten up.”9 Theft may have been the most widespread and most difficult feature of army occupation. Numerous survivors recalled the frequent robberies of the period. Dozens of residents reported “losing everything” or mentioned that raiders “took anything they wanted” as they watched helplessly. Little could be done by women and children to stop the violence of an armed gang of men. In many cases the destruction was total: all furnishings, clothing, and structures were stolen or went up in smoke. Clothing became scarce when ill-​supplied troops ransacked homes for garments, and raw materials for weaving were no longer available. Much of the region experienced bitter winter winds and snow accumulation that foretold hardships for those without shoes and blankets. This lack of adequate clothing may have led to increased sickness and death from exposure. Illness presented another challenge for Indian people in the territory. In the many single-​parent households, an ailing adult could mean disaster for several children. Everyone experienced the loss of family and friends during the war. As difficult as life was for those who remained in war-​torn homes, fleeing the region presented as many hardships. Waves of refugees moved across Indian Territory throughout the war, depending upon the current military ascendancy. The general trend was that Union loyalists fled first, then returned mid-​war to push out Confederate supporters; however, small changes in the power struggle precipitated many other movements. Refugee life is by definition unstable, but the generic term does little to convey the horrors of dislocation. The panicked supporters of Opothleyahola fled with little preparation in what was “almost another trail of tears.” The conditions of their life in Kansas were nearly indescribable even to eyewitnesses. Phrases such as “it would be impossible to give an adequate description of the suffering endured” and “I doubt much if history records an instance of sufferings equal to these” characterize reports from agents in the field.10 Even when loyal Cherokee returned to Indian Territory in 1863, they remained impoverished and away from their homes. Their agent described their fall from the most powerful, wealthy, and intelligent Indians in the United States to utter destitution—​“disgraced, humbled, impoverished, and demoralized.”11 Despite this situation, the return of loyal Indians threatened pro-​Confederate Natives. Although many families had been slowly migrating southward, when the Union Army arrived in the Cherokee Nation in 1863 it sparked a panicked flight of new refugees. They moved into Confederate territory in the Choctaw and Chickasaw nations and Texas. No government agencies awaited their arrival; no provisions existed to feed, clothe, or shelter them. The Confederacy and the individual tribes did allot funds for the purchase of

Indian Territory   199 refugee rations, but the people were not contained in a few camps with regular distribution, as they were in Kansas. Most of the southern refugees sought assistance from family and friends or survived on their own. Relatively unscathed for the first two years of the war, the Choctaw and Chickasaw were now inundated by refugees. The arrival of these homeless thousands taxed the resources of the host tribes beyond their limits. Choctaw Chief Pitchlynn described an unprecedented state of destitution and suffering. Still, the Choctaw and Chickasaw citizens did their best to support their displaced brethren from northern Indian Territory. Like Indian residents, Black families in Indian Territory found themselves suddenly caught in the turmoil of warfare. Largely unable to participate in national decision-​ making, Black slaves and freed people still retained a measure of control over their future. Some understood the changes war could bring, and many were poised to take advantage of new situations to obtain freedom. Indian Territory slaves’ experience varied widely, partly because not all slaveholders sided with the Confederacy. Those who did tended to relocate, often with their human “property.” The circumstances of hasty flight allowed for the possibility of escape or separation from masters. Additionally, the lifestyle of refugees generally was not conducive to retaining control over slaves. Some Indian slaves seized the wartime opportunity to improve their situation. As in the rest of Confederate territory, Union lines (in this instance in Kansas) proved a strong lure for those daring enough to try escape. Young, healthy, single men had the best chance of surviving the sometimes harrowing trek to a Federal camp. “[T]‌he few [slaves] who have not gone over to the Federals,” remarked a slaveholder, “are either old, infirm, or sick.”12 Although individuals naturally profited from successful escapes, flight from bondage could have repercussions on those left behind. Security might be tightened or punishments meted out. Slave women could also pay a high price for the loss of male protectors. When the men in her world—​master and father—​left for the war, Victoria Thompson was stolen by a white man who forced her to live with him and branded her. Male slaves also experienced mobility by going to war as personal servants. They accompanied their Indian masters into the army just as many Virginia and South Carolina slaves did. When Doc Hayes accompanied his Cherokee master to fight with Stand Watie, the men left behind Indian and Black women to survive as best they could. But the majority of Blacks remained at home. Being left on one’s own in an area bereft of the normal strictures of society might seem like a boon to slaves; however, the reality was often harsh. As Indian Territory suffered from a lack of food and transportation and a surplus of violence, freed slaves generally had difficulty acquiring the limited resources necessary for survival. Life also changed for many of those who remained in bondage. Fear induced masters to initiate new restrictions, including less travel, more work, heightened discipline, and possibly more violence. As one eyewitness remembered, everybody was harder on their slaves then.13 The Union military forces, rather than their owners, became the most disruptive power in the lives of Indian-​owned slaves. The arrival of the Union Army in Park Hill, Cherokee Nation, prompted a general uprising among slaves who asserted their freedom by helping themselves to horses and weapons and joining a “swelling throng

200   Clarissa W. Confer on its way to join the Federal army.”14 Still, slaves recognized the Union presence as a fleeting one and feared a lack of protection in their new status as freed people. Indian-​owned slaves faced the same cruel dilemma as slaves throughout the South in 1865. When the news of freedom finally came, the emancipated Blacks found themselves without food, shelter, or clothing, and few means with which to acquire them. Children remembered their family’s predicament. “Father was stumped for he didn’t know what on earth he was going to do with that big family,” recalled one witness. “We had no home, no food and mighty few clothes.”15 Emancipation was as difficult in some ways as slavery, and it took many years for freed people to achieve a level of security. As Indian Territory civilians struggled to cope, their region receded from the national conflict. Neither North nor South had any real idea of what to do with their Indian allies, and as military action in Virginia and Georgia increased, Indian Territory fell out of military planning. By 1864 the military action in Indian Territory had devolved into relatively small-​scale raiding. After the Union effort to retake the northern part of the territory in 1863, the Confederates never regained the offensive. Confederate Indians found that the national government had lost interest in them. Their families struggled to survive at home while they struggled to stay in the field, some complaining about “destitution and the inadequacy of the Confederate protection,” and some expressing themselves more practically by deserting to the Union.16 Confederate Cherokee leader Stand Watie continued to strike at Federal forces where and when he could, primarily hitting the supply lines to Fort Gibson. One of his most storied exploits was the 1864 attack on the Union supply steamer J. R. Williams, which guaranteed his place in the folklore of the war. However, the raid actually reveals the desperate situation of Confederate Indian forces. Native soldiers immediately carried off the seized supplies for their destitute families, depriving the Confederate war effort of beneficial provisions. An attack at Cabin Creek yielded desperately needed clothing, although it meant Confederate forces were dressed in blue uniforms. This raiding earned Watie a commission as brigadier general, but ultimately it did little to regain control of his homeland. The arrival of Maj. Gen. Samuel Maxey as the Confederate leader in Indian Territory did breathe new life into their struggle, but his efforts were thwarted by the violence, corruption, and political intrigue plaguing the territory. The end came quickly after Maxey left the territory in February 1865 without having overseen any major engagements. On June 2, 1865, Gen. Edmund Kirby-​Smith surrendered the Department of the Trans-​Mississippi, including Indian Territory. On June 18 Chief Pitchlynn of the Choctaw Nation surrendered to a Federal commander, who merely sent the Choctaw troops home under the protection of the United States, which then encouraged Governor Winchester Colbert of Chickasaw Nation to do the same. On June 23 Stand Watie, a Confederate brigadier general and chief of the Cherokee Nation, surrendered Cherokee, Creek, Seminole, and Osage fighters to Lt. Col. Asa Matthews at Doaksville, Choctaw Nation. The long, bitter struggle was over on the battlefield, but divisions, violence, and suffering continued unabated.

Indian Territory   201

Notes 1. U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1880–​ 1901) (hereafter cited as OR), ser. 1, vol. 8. 2. D. H. Cooper to J. P. Benjamin, January 20, 1862, Section X, 84:19, Oklahoma Historical Society, Oklahoma City. 3. Thom Hatch, The Blue, the Gray, and the Red:  Indian Campaigns of the Civil War. (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole, 2003), 11 4. OR ser. 1, vol. 8. 5. Jay Monaghan, Civil War on the Western Border (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1955), 253; OR, ser. 1, vol. 13: 430, 487. 6. John Ross to Abraham Lincoln, September 16, 1862, Abraham Lincoln Papers:  Series 1.  General Correspondence. 1833–​ 1916:  John Ross to Abraham Lincoln, Tuesday, September 16, 1862 (Relations between the U.S.  and Cherokee Nation), Cherokee Nation), Library of Congress Digital Collections, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mss/ms000001. mss30189a.1845200. 7. D.  H. Cooper to James M.  Bell, September 24, 1863, in Edward Everett Dale and Gaston Litton, eds., Cherokee Cavaliers:  Forty Years of Cherokee History as Told in the Correspondence of the Ridge-​Watie-​Boudinot Family (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1939), 141. 8. Hannah Hicks diary, November 17, 1862, Thomas Gilcrease Institute of American History and Art, Tulsa, OK. 9. Mary Jane Warde, When the Wolf Came:  The Civil War and the Indian Territory (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2013), 133. 10. William Dole, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs 1862, [hereafter ARCIA], 26 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office); Cutler, ARCIA, 139; A. B. Campbell’s report, ARCIA, 153–​54. 11. Harlan to Coffin, August 8, 1863, in Correspondence of the Office of Indian Affairs, Letters Received, 1824–​1881, frame 287–​291, reel 835, M234, RG75, National Archives, Washington, D.C. 12. Wm. Ross to Colonel Cooper, August 18, 1862, in Cherokee Collection-​Misc Letters, John Vaughn Library, Northeastern State University, Tahlequah, OK. 13. Narrative of Jim Threat, in George P.  Rawick, ed., The American Slave:  A Composite Autobiography, supplement, series 1, 12  vols. (Westport, CT:  Greenwood Press, 1977), 12:329, 331. 14. Narrative of Lonian Moses, in Rawick, American Slave, 12:210–​211. 15. Narrative of Jim Threat, in Rawick, American Slave, 12:338. 16. OR, ser. 1, vol. 22, pt. 2: 770.

Bibliography Abel, Annie Heloise. The American Indian in the Civil War, 1862–​1865. 1919; reprinted, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992. Bearss, Edwin C. “The Civil War Comes to Indian Territory, 1861: The Flight of Opothleyahola.” Journal of the West 11 (January 1972): 9–​42.

202   Clarissa W. Confer Britton, Wiley. The Civil War on the Border. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1890. Clampitt, Bradley R. The Civil War and Reconstruction in Indian Territory. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015. Confer, Clarissa. The Cherokee Nation in the Civil War. Norman:  University of Oklahoma Press, 2009. Dale, Edward Everett, and Gaston Litton, eds. Cherokee Cavaliers:  Forty Years of Cherokee History as Told in the Correspondence of the Ridge-​ Watie-​ Boudinot Family. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1939. Debo, Angie. The Rise and Fall of Choctaw Republic. Norman:  University of Oklahoma Press, 1961. Gaines, W. Craig. The Confederate Cherokees. Baton Rouge:  Louisiana State University Press, 1989. Hatch, Thom. The Blue, the Gray, and the Red. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole, 2003. Moulton, Gary, ed. The Papers of Chief John Ross, 1840–​1866. 2 vols. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985. Nichols, David A. Lincoln and the Indians: Civil War Policy and Politics. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1978. Rampp, Lary, and Donald Rampp. The Civil War in the Indian Territory. Austin, TX: Presidial Press, 1975. Stith, Matthew M. Guerrilla Warfare, Environment, and Race on the Trans-​Mississippi Frontier. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016. Warde, Mary Jane. When the Wolf Came:  The Civil War and the Indian Territory. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2013.

Chapter 12

Sh il oh and C ori nt h Stephen D. Engle

In the Civil War’s master narrative, the Shiloh and Corinth campaigns figure among the most prominent because they represented more than just the Union’s large-​scale military foray into the Confederacy’s vital western river region (specifically the region between the Cumberland and Mississippi rivers), the occupation of slave soil, and the Confederacy’s first major counteroffensive. They also exposed the complex interplay between armies and the places they operated, demonstrated how national objectives played out in local conditions, and revealed the war’s brutal nature. The intensive two-​ day Battle of Shiloh produced the bloodiest fighting on the North American continent up to that time, precipitated the subsequent Union capture of Corinth, Mississippi, disrupted slavery in the Trans-​Mississippi, led to an enormous transfer of power in the western theater’s most prized strategic region, and induced Union policy changes regarding occupation and repatriation of the Southern citizenry. In short, these developments established the foundation for the Union’s successful prosecution of the war. The fact that Union and Confederate leaders experienced problems in strategy and operations and that many of the combatants were recent recruits added to the drama. Moreover, these campaigns brought the public and political leaders closer to the war’s realities as the fighting forced both sides to adjust to large-​scale battles. That Shiloh and Corinth continue to attract considerable scholarship confirms they represented more than just military victory and seizure of vital points. The region’s divided locality and slave population forced Washington authorities to transform their thinking about how to exploit these social factors to weaken the Confederacy. Union armies operating in western Tennessee and northern Mississippi in the spring of 1862 became magnets for runaway slaves and forced military commanders and political leaders to rethink their fugitive slave policy and, more important, the army’s conduct in occupying Southern territory. Occupation encompassed an array of policy matters that involved civil-​military procedures, strategies for Reconstruction, and regulations for handling slaves. The soldiers’ presence forced some secessionists to abandon their homes rather than suffer Union occupation. As much as Tennessee military governor Andrew Johnson wanted to make treason odious, most Southerners in occupied regions

204   Stephen D. Engle seldom relinquished their loyalties and instead initiated an irregular warfare designed to free communities from occupying troops. As the Union Army moved south, Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston’s Confederates abandoned Middle Tennessee, crowded into Columbus and Memphis, regrouped below Murfreesboro, dispatched some forces toward Chattanooga, and moved to Corinth in the Southern army’s first major concentration west of the Appalachians. State officials, including the governor, fled from Nashville to Memphis hoping for a reversal of fortune. Maj. Gen. Henry W. Halleck’s acknowledgment that Corinth was vital to Union military interests placed the army on a collision course that ultimately ended in a hollow but important victory that gave the Union the opportunity to exploit its occupation of northern Mississippi and possibly strike into the Deep South. These campaigns unfolded in a geographically and militarily significant region. “It was one of the weaknesses of the Confederacy in the West,” wrote Allan Nevins, “that the two rivers, the Tennessee and the Cumberland, reached inland from the North toward its center. . . . A mere glance at the map would seem to reveal that the Tennessee-​ Cumberland river system offered the North a heaven-​sent opportunity to thrust a harpoon into the very bowels of the Confederacy.”1 Even if the rivers were navigable only to Nashville, Tennessee, and Decatur, Alabama, they offered the promise of much more. Long before railroads, these waterways carried cargo out of the Smokey Mountains and into both Southern and Northern markets that helped shape political ties. Midwestern and Southern governors understood the economic vitality of these natural arteries in producing a commercial maze of shared goods and practices. Yet, the iron rails soon disrupted these fertile valleys and competed with water-​borne traffic. The most important of these railroads was the Memphis and Charleston, which stretched from the Mississippi River to the Atlantic coast. Although slavery appeared to be eroding in this western upper South region in the years before the Civil War, which loosened the link between border state and Deep South Southerners, the railroad’s construction in eastern Tennessee reinforced the link between the Deep South’s slave economy and the modern transportation system. The implications of seizing control of this vital region and its resources were enormous for both sides. Both Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis understood the region’s importance, but the Union had the manpower to exploit the geographic weakness made more vulnerable because of insufficient Confederate manpower to guard the nearly five-​ hundred-​mile defensive line that stretched from the Appalachians to the Mississippi. During March 1862, General Johnston and Gen. P. G. T. Beauregard debated logistical moves after Confederate armies had surrendered Forts Henry and Donelson as well as Nashville to the Federals, while Halleck mapped a river expedition to further harpoon the Confederates’ defensive line. With Nashville in Union hands, Lincoln expected that the army’s presence might enhance Union feeling in Tennessee, and he appointed loyal Tennessee senator Andrew Johnson military governor to return as the state’s highest-​ranking civilian leader. Yet the president did not delineate any specific orders for military occupation, which complicated issues and led to civil-​military clashes. In the meantime, Lincoln’s War Order No. 3 relieved Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan as

Shiloh and Corinth    205

Map 12.1  Shiloh and Corinth

general in chief and named Halleck overall commander of the new Department of the Mississippi, which brought Maj. Gen. Don Carlos Buell’s twenty-​five-​thousand-​man Army of the Ohio under his command. Consolidating the western command, however, failed to account for the fact that these commanders were conservative Democrats and limited-​war disciples, who wanted nothing to do with slavery and who would resist new approaches to fighting. In preparation for the move farther south, Maj. Gen. Ulysses S.  Grant, southeastern Missouri district commander with headquarters in Cairo, Illinois, imposed martial law on the occupied territory and vowed to lift it only when sufficient numbers of citizens returned to their allegiance to law and order. Halleck ordered his men to restrain themselves in captured territory so that Southerners could see that the Union Army intended only to crush rebellion and reestablish peace and the constitutional benefits of republican government. In the meantime, he prohibited soldiers from encouraging slaves to seek safety in army camps, concluding that the civil courts, not the military, would decide the future of relations between master and slave in the restored areas. Halleck’s assumption of the Union high command allowed him to combine Grant’s forty-​four thousand men in the Army of the Tennessee and Buell’s twenty-​five thousand in the Army of the Ohio and, if need be, Maj. Gen. John Pope’s Army of the Mississippi of twenty-​five thousand to move simultaneously toward Corinth, Mississippi. The potential concentration buoyed Halleck’s confidence that Corinth’s seizure would result in permanent occupation of the railroad junction and the surrounding region. By this time, however, a series of miscommunications soured the commander on Grant, and

206   Stephen D. Engle rumors that his army was demoralized and that he had returned to his drinking habits further frustrated Halleck. He turned to Maj. Gen. Charles F. Smith to accomplish his objectives, which prompted Grant to resign, but Halleck ignored this decision, and the sullen commander assumed his subordinate role until Lincoln urged Halleck to reinstate him weeks before Shiloh. Meanwhile, Grant quietly made his way to Pittsburg Landing, a tiny wharf on the Tennessee’s west bank. The Union presence in Tennessee paved the way for potential success if the military and political objectives could result in Southern repatriation, and the Tennessee River afforded them an avenue. Yet, Federals were cognizant that their authority prevailed no farther than their muskets or carbines, and that occupation presented civil-​military conflicts. When giving the command to Buell, McClellan made it clear early on that he was to respect the citizens’ civil liberties in occupied zones. As Grant’s and Buell’s armies moved across Tennessee and into Mississippi, they encountered problems with citizens but handled them with kid gloves, as had Halleck in St. Louis. Buell’s General Orders 13 mirrored Halleck’s General Orders No. 3, in that these mandates not only outlined the rules for soldiers in occupied zones but also barred fugitive slaves from army camps to avoid giving military officers the responsibility for making decisions about slavery. These were necessary decisions best handled by civil authorities. Grant believed this, and Halleck expanded his intentions to control the territory along the river permanently, hoping to turn the citizenry against the Confederacy. He revoked pilots’ and engineers’ licenses and forced them to apply for new ones, which allowed U.S. officials to reexamine their allegiance. Initial reports encouraged Lincoln that Halleck’s planned occupation of the region might prove successful, and in fact some residents joined the Union ranks. Yet, some officers arrested citizens suspected of disloyalty and kept them without bringing charges forward, which undermined Halleck’s repatriation efforts. In the meantime, slaves took advantage of these military disruptions in the countryside and headed for Union camps. Amid these changes, Congress passed a law in March that prohibited the return of fugitive slaves to their masters, which forced Federals to execute this legislative objective in the field. Even as Congress debated these policies, some Confederate sharpshooters were ordered to kill runaways and make visible their corpses as a deterrent to flight. The change relieved some Union soldiers, who abhorred returning slaves to be hanged and staked as visible consequences for running away. The new policy drew the ire of planters, who sought their property’s return, and Federal commanders found themselves in another war with the citizens over slavery. Hardin County residents, however, greeted the Federals warmly when they arrived at Savannah and Pittsburg Landing, especially since many of the die-​ hard Confederates had evacuated when they arrived. William H. Cherry, a slave owner, for example, opened his home to Union commanders and discussed freely events in and around the area. Named for Pitts Tucker, a local citizen who ran a tavern near the Tennessee riverbank, Pittsburg Landing became the disembarkation point of Union forces heading overland toward Corinth, roughly twenty-​two miles southwest. A short distance away was a small, one-​room log structure named by the local Methodists the Shiloh Meeting House. To counter the Union offensive and defend Corinth, Johnston stripped Confederate troops

Shiloh and Corinth    207 from middle Tennessee and the gulf coast of Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas to assemble an army of more than forty thousand men at the northern Mississippi stronghold. The commander even ordered Brig. Gen. Daniel Ruggles from Grenada, Mississippi, Maj. Gen. Braxton Bragg from Mobile, and Maj. Gen. Leonidas Polk from Columbus. The Confederate War Department recognized that these Union threats would require sacrifice in holding on to the Mississippi Valley, which left the remaining Confederate defenses located on the upper Mississippi River at New Madrid, Island No. 10, and Fort Pillow. Mississippi governor John Pettus worried that Federal domination of the region would bring the enemy into contact with the slaves, and he advised that mounted parties organize to harass Federal expeditions and suppress slave unrest. Military authorities agreed, but want of time foiled the idea. As Union armies moved south in the war’s first major offensive in the West, it was a peculiar turn of events in their mobilization efforts that Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton ordered recruiting offices closed on April 3 and that officers return to the field. Recruiting fell solely upon Union governors to replenish the armies after the long, dreary winter and recent campaigns that drained the ranks. State executives kept in close contact with soldiers and encouraged journalists to ensure that news of soldier welfare made it back home through private and public correspondence, but replenishing the ranks proved nearly insurmountable. Several executives traveled to the army in Tennessee to ensure that regiments received adequate supplies and medical attention and to remind soldiers that they had loved ones at home cheering for their success and waiting for their return. Governors frequently accompanied members of the press, who used the opportunity to converse with regiments. When Buell departed Nashville and headed south to unite with Grant’s forces along the Tennessee River, reports indicated that soldiers were displeased about the army’s slow progress. Johnson complained that Buell’s exodus from Nashville left him almost helpless in governing middle Tennessee. Union governors represented thousands of soldiers in the western armies, and they followed their operations carefully, precisely because they were close attendants to soldier welfare, especially since there were so many newly mustered recruits. Southern governors also followed their soldiers closely, attending to welfare, proper equipment, and supplies, but because the war threatened their civilians and their slaves, governing in the war zones proved problematic. Some commanders understood these exigencies and worked with political leaders to combat Union occupation. Beauregard assumed a decided role in the West’s Confederate high command and provided a stabilizing influence that soldiers sorely needed in the war’s early months. Organizing the army into three corps with such a diverse combination of soldiers, however, was challenging, and it weakened Confederate unity. Many recruits were green, undisciplined, new to army life, and unexperienced in combat. Yet, after a series of bungled attempts to move out toward Pittsburg Landing, the army managed to position itself in the tangled landscape south of the Methodist meetinghouse known by the locals as Shiloh. The chaos so alarmed Beauregard that he petitioned Johnston to call off the advance, but Johnston hoped to overcome these deficiencies by motivating his men with words of home and family. “Remember the precious stake involved,” he declared,

208   Stephen D. Engle “remember the fair, broad, abounding land, the happy homes, and ties that will be desolated by your defeat. The eyes of 8,000,000 of people rest upon you.” It would be hard to imagine a more stirring speech to send soldiers into combat. Even more difficult to believe, however, was that the slaves counted in that estimate would be prepared to defend the Confederate Army. Nonetheless, Johnston’s words were prophetic. “I would fight them if they were a million,” he boasted to Beauregard that morning. He carried that sentiment further by prophesying to Col. John S. Marmaduke, “We must this day conquer or perish.”2 Contrary to Beauregard’s concern that the army’s marching delays had lost all chance for surprise, on Sunday morning, April 6, the Confederates came racing out of the woods and within hours had routed the unsuspecting Federals positioned just up from the landing and drove them back toward the river. Even with the chaos and delays, a more effective surprise would have been hard to achieve. Throughout the day more than eighty thousand Northern and Southern soldiers fought one another in a series of brutal assaults in and around what became known years afterward as the Bloody Pond, Peach Orchard, Sunken Road, and the Hornet’s Nest. Although Brig. Gen. William T. Sherman’s Union division fell back in defense, Maj. Gen. John McClernand and Brig. Gen. Benjamin Prentiss maintained stubborn resistance throughout the day and held the Union line. When Grant arrived at the battlefield, he provided a calming influence amid the hysteria and sent for Maj. Gen. Lew Wallace to move from Crump’s Landing and reinforce Sherman. Chaos characterized the Confederate assaults as inexperienced soldiers and faulty organizational plans hampered their ability to manage any collective push against the Federals, and by midmorning their attack lost its cohesion. Consequently, the first day was little more than a series of isolated actions by individual brigades rather than an organized offensive. Rather than coordinate the men, Johnston hoped to mount a final assault by inspiring soldiers as he had done all day by riding back and forth along Confederate lines. About 2:30, he was leading a charge against a Union camp near the Peach Orchard when he was mortally wounded by a bullet that struck his right knee and clipped his artery. He died an hour later in the arms of Tennessee governor Isham Harris. The governor wrapped his body in a blanket, removed him from the battlefield, and took off to Corinth with no word about his death until the day’s end. Meanwhile, after several long hours of spirited combat in the Hornet’s Nest, Prentiss surrendered the 2,200 soldiers left in his command. Sunset, combat fatigue, and heavy rains ended the day’s fighting, and the Federals pulled back to the river, held on to the high ground, and redeployed during the night for the next day’s attack. Even with their surprise attack and fierce fighting, it was a disheartening day for the Confederates, and supreme command devolved to Beauregard, who chose not to launch one final assault to drive Grant into the river. Scholars debate this decision, but one could imagine that after assessing his army’s condition and the terrain, witnessing the magnitude of what had transpired, and evaluating his soldiers, he might have believed that the next day gave him a better chance of conquering the enemy. The slim chance of victory was not worth another assault and casualties. Some scholars concur: they believe

Shiloh and Corinth    209 Grant had the situation under control and could fend off much larger numbers than Beauregard could bring at the end of the day. Buell’s arrival late that afternoon encouraged Grant, and the commander deployed his fresh soldiers throughout the rainy night to give the Federals renewed strength and a numerical advantage of more than seventeen thousand troops the next morning. To mask Buell’s landing, Grant ordered the gunboats Tyler and Lexington to fire volleys throughout the night. To add to his strength, General Wallace’s seven-​thousand-​ man 3rd Division arrived that evening after the previous days’ heavy rains delayed his soldiers’ ability to get to the battlefield, and his men took up a position on the Union’s right flank. Sherman encapsulated the savage day by remarking “Well, Grant, we’ve had the devil’s own day, haven’t we?” Grant returned some prophetic words that spoke volumes about his leadership, combat mentality, and assessment of Confederates’ losses. “Yes,” he replied, puffing on his cigar. “Yes. Lick ’em tomorrow, though.” Even with the knowledge he had suffered severely on the first day, his tenacity as a commander would not admit defeat, and in fact inspired him to stay the course—​perhaps his leadership’s defining feature.3 The following day brought about a Confederate reversal of fortune as Beauregard planned to continue the final offensive push with twenty-​five thousand soldiers against a force twice that size. Grant’s and Buell’s soldiers, however, renewed the fight with vigor and forced Beauregard to take up an unexpected defensive posture. The Army of the Ohio bore the brunt of the fighting during the morning and early afternoon but managed to press the Confederates back by attacking persistently. In response, Beauregard launched a series of counterattacks near Shiloh Church and made temporary gains, but as the day wore on, the commander recognized that he had lost the momentum and that defeat was imminent, and he concluded to pull back and retreat to Corinth. The Federals advanced, claimed the ground, and won the day. Grant attempted a half-​hearted chase, which touched off a dispute between his officers over why there was no all-​out pursuit. The following day, he sent Sherman down the Corinth Road on a reconnaissance to ensure that the enemy had in fact retreated. The titanic two-​day fight revealed Grant’s tenacity, but also that his campaign preparedness proved invaluable—​a lesson he carried with him as his career unfolded. Shiloh also offered the Confederate high command a valuable lesson about the problematic formation of their forces. Beauregard had suggested to Johnston that the men be organized in multiple lines and that an entire corps be assigned to the first line and another to the second line. This formation meant that the supporting troops were commanded by officers of a different corps rather than those in the first line, making it difficult to coordinate the reserves, which produced confusion and made attacking on the first day chaotic. The size and scale of Shiloh was unimaginable even to those who endured the terrifying sights, sounds, and physical devastation. For months afterward, civilians endured the battle’s grisly results that blackened the landscape and ground the economy to a halt until the farmland could be cleared of debris. Ironically, the structure that gave the battle its namesake, the Shiloh Meeting House, survived only to be torn down weeks later.

210   Stephen D. Engle Because it was the first apocalypse of its kind on American soil, news from Shiloh had a sobering impact on soldiers and civilians alike. The bloodbath shocked Northerners and Southerners into the realization that neither side was willing to concede. Even in victory, Stanton resumed recruiting for the armies. In the U.S. Senate, Orville H. Browning interrupted the morning session to read New York journalist Henry Villard’s report: “The bloodiest battle of modern times just closed, slaughter on both sides immense.”4 The total count was staggering, as Confederates suffered 10,699 casualties (1,728 killed, 8,012 wounded, and 959 missing or captured) and the Federals suffered 13,047 casualties (1,754 killed, 8,408 wounded, and 2,885 missing). Reports soon made it clear that the two-​day contest resulted in the deaths of more men than all American combat up to that point. News that the Federals won the ground hardly compensated for their losses. Grant remembered it as the “severest battle fought at the West during the war, and but few in the East equaled it for hard, determined fighting.”5 At the time, however, it was not only the combat but also the ground and the people the Union Army was bent on occupying that seemed more important. Shiloh was a turning point in the war, and in the weeks to come both sides would comprehend its significance in defining the character of the war. Shiloh convinced Union authorities that Confederates were prepared to wage war in earnest to achieve their independence. Consequently, knowing the devastating effects the battle would have on the public, state governors west of the Appalachians intensified their recruiting efforts to replenish the ranks and restore morale. Republicans characterized the battle as a monumental achievement toward success, and some used it as a rallying cry to urge citizens to the ranks, to end the war in that region and even emancipate slaves. Governors on both sides expanded their efforts to send medical and sanitary supplies to assist with the overwhelmed military staff. Wisconsin governor Louis P. Harvey, for example, arrived at Pittsburg Landing on April 19 with a team of surgeons and nurses, and while stepping from a docked boat to a steamboat, lost his footing and plunged into the frigid Tennessee River. Locals retrieved his body two weeks later sixty-​five miles downstream. Democrats continued to bemoan large casualty figures and used the opportunity that slaves were flocking to the ranks as a sign that the war was turning into a revolution to end slavery and expand Federal power. Shiloh helped turn a rather complacent Northern will to win into a hardened resolve to conquer the enemy. The Union’s success gave indications that the Federals were prepared to wage war in earnest even if commanders of the Army of the Ohio and the Army of the Tennessee did not agree on what that would mean. As Grant came under scrutiny for being surprised, Buell came under attack for his strict occupation policies since his army entered Tennessee. Sherman took umbrage at Buell’s dismissal of the hard fighting that had taken place before his army’s arrival. Nonetheless, the battle imbued Union soldiers with confidence and Northern civilians with faith in their western armies and that occupying Southern soil to weaken the Confederacy meant expanding war aims at all costs. The Confederate defeat at Shiloh diminished popular hope that Southerners could recover the Mississippi Valley. Since mid-​February, the Western Department had lost a staggering thirty thousand soldiers and marked the beginning of attrition from which

Shiloh and Corinth    211 the Confederacy would not recover. Southern governors labored to replenish their ranks and incentivize recruiting, but the losses were greater than the number of volunteers that came forward. Political measures were needed. On April 16, the Confederate government enacted conscription laws to compensate for sluggish recruiting and strengthen national resolve, especially as Union naval forces approached New Orleans. The controversial measure extended the enlistment terms of twelve-​month soldiers by an additional two years and made eligible all white males between the ages of eighteen and thirty-​five to be drafted into the army for three years. Draftees could apply for an occupational-​related exception or could purchase a substitute. These exceptions, however, as well as the impact the law would have on the economy and on Confederate civil governance, made this decision unpopular. But at the time, the law produced the much-​ needed manpower; by the end of May more than six thousand troops, mostly from Mississippi and Alabama, had been mustered in and channeled into a new army forming under Maj. Gen. Earl Van Dorn in northern Mississippi. Yet, these recruits came into a demoralized and numerically inferior army, which, without Johnston, gave the Union a psychological edge in the West. Beauregard assumed overall command, but he was no Johnston, and the officers and soldiers knew it. For weeks after Shiloh the nation’s eyes were on the West as the war accelerated dangerously in that region. Because it happened on the way to Corinth, Shiloh represented just one part of the Union’s offensive and the end of the Confederate counteroffensive in the West after its losses of Mill Springs, Forts Henry and Donelson, Columbus, and Nashville. The battle’s significance to the Confederacy was felt west of the Mississippi River as well, as Van Dorn’s twenty thousand troops, attempting to get to Johnston’s aid, abandoned Arkansas and never returned. Halleck arrived four days after the battle to assume command of the combined armies in the field and made Grant his second-​in-​command. A limited-​war disciple and overly cautious, the commander took control of a battered but confident army. As he had for months, Halleck had kept Corinth in his sights. There was much to be gained, especially now that the Confederates had fallen back on the defensive. The presumed gateway to the Deep South offered the Federals a great opportunity, provided they exploited it. The war’s first winter provided evidence that Union commanders came to see it as such. The region’s resources and transportation nexus included the Memphis and Charleston Railroad, the nation’s first railroad to link the Mississippi River with the Atlantic Ocean. Moreover, a Union advance south through this region had the potential to disrupt civilian life, including plantation slavery, depress citizen morale, and continue the Union’s quest for occupation and repatriation. President Davis grew frustrated with Beauregard, but after losing Johnston he had few options for the western high command. His apparent blindness by events closer to Richmond and the fallout from conscription led him to cling to the false hope that his western armies could mount another countermove against the Federals in the West. Closer to the ground, it was obvious that Southern soldiers were in no shape to undertake a major offensive. The loss of equipment on the battlefield, the maddeningly slow rate of replenishing supplies, and the growing plundering of Southern civilians forced

212   Stephen D. Engle commanders to choose restoring discipline to the ranks over strategizing for a counteroffensive. Indeed, some of the pillaging in this region, certainly in Nashville’s evacuation, was done by Confederates desperate for survival as the Union forces remained under strict orders not to live off the countryside, a policy that commanders hoped would improve relations with Southern civilians. The Confederates pillaged depots and warehouses of government stores and carted off wagons loaded with supplies into the countryside. The high command dispatched Col. John Hunt Morgan’s and Col. Nathan Bedford Forrest’s cavalrymen to restore order and to remove all valuable supplies and ammunition before the Federals arrived, including the foodstuffs and rifling machinery. Fearing Confederates would attempt to retake Nashville, and wanting to calm Governor Johnson’s fears, Buell eventually authorized the construction of a fort (named after Brig. Gen. James S. Negley) to protect the Union’s hold on the city and its strategic access to roads, railroads, and the Cumberland River. He refused to use Union soldiers, so he eventually ordered army engineer Capt. James S. Morton to use former slaves to construct the fort and ordered that they be paid by known contributors to the Confederate cause. More than 2,700 former slaves labored under inhospitable conditions of inadequate food, shelter, and clothing for several months to complete the fort by December 1862. In an ironic twist of fate, Nashville’s defense for the remainder of the war was due as much to former slaves as it was to Union soldiers. Because Johnston assembled much of the western army at Corinth, the Union Army seized upon the weaknesses along the Gulf coast and occupied New Orleans on April 26. The Confederates went on the defensive after Shiloh, but political leaders remained hopeful that commanders could apply more aggressive measures to counter the loss and revive civilian morale. Perhaps they could move the war back into the border states in hopes of persuading populations there to join the Confederacy. Yet, these were unrealistic expectations, as Beauregard’s army was in no condition to take the offensive. As corps commander Braxton Bragg surmised, “[I]‌f we fail it is our own fault.”6 If Bragg and Beauregard had reason to fear their soldiers were in no condition to take the offensive, they were equally concerned that they had awakened a giant in the West. Halleck concluded that the Confederates stunned the Federals at Shiloh, and he was determined to take Corinth with the largest army he could assemble to avoid another surprise. Just as Johnston had pulled together nearly all the Confederate soldiers west of the Appalachians to make a stand in Tennessee, so too did Halleck pull together nearly all the western Union forces at Pittsburg Landing to move south into Mississippi. He assembled more than 100,000 soldiers, combining Buell’s, Grant’s, and John Pope’s armies as well as drawing on forces in the Trans-​Mississippi. He not only did this to prevent surprise, but he subscribed to the notion that once a critical movement on a pivotal target was commenced, a good commander should maximize strength to overwhelm the enemy. Perhaps he overconcentrated, stripping vast areas of ground troops, which would explain why he dispersed his field force after the campaign, but concentration also justified his decision to keep troops rather than allowing them to be transferred to the Virginia theater, where McClellan was campaigning. When he arrived at Shiloh, he attempted to quiet the public attacks lodged at Grant for being surprised, demoted him

Shiloh and Corinth    213 to second in command, and planned his advance to the tiny, low-​lying crossroads at Corinth, roughly twenty-​two miles to the south. Although a major railroad junction, Corinth’s obscurity made traversing the countryside difficult because spring rains soaked the narrow dirt roads, making them nearly impassable. Sloshing in the mud bogged down the advance by requiring the army to corduroy the roads in low-​lying areas. To ensure he would not be surprised, Halleck ordered units to construct fieldworks every night, so the days allotted to reach the Mississippi town turned into weeks. His communiqués with Stanton told the story of his frustrating march, as did the soldiers’ letters home and to their governors. Governors worried about another surprise and slaughter, and they remained overly attentive to their troops. President Lincoln may also have contributed to Halleck’s mindset by wiring him not to suffer a defeat that would dampen the outlook of the war; thus the commander remained attuned to “feel” his way forward.7 By mid-​May, Halleck’s maddeningly slow offensive reflected the stalled Federal war effort on all fronts. The Corinth Campaign displayed Halleck’s desire to make regional occupation permanent, and thus he hoped to bring the area under Union control as he marched. For such a vast army, there was surprisingly little plundering recorded on the citizenry. Although local residents had prominent Unionist leanings, Tishomingo County sent fifty-​eight companies to the Confederacy, and the absence of so many military-​age males placed a great burden on the area’s economy and loyalties. The county’s sparse slave presence underscored the lack of secessionist zeal, but the Confederates used local slaves as laborers and the Union used them for information. Still, the army’s arrival caused problems for Halleck’s command as it attracted hundreds of runaway slaves that flocked to his armies as it made its way south. Some refugees who fled slavery in this region were able to pursue freedom into the upper Midwest. Occasionally refugees who made it to Union lines arranged with white soldiers and officers transport to the homes of family and friends or to Northern employers. Under the auspices of military authority, freedmen’s aid societies, philanthropic civilians, and potential employers aided them in their migration north. Halleck hoped that Union navies could take Memphis, but if not, he would lay siege to that city after taking Corinth. He also recognized that the army would need to repair the railroad and its bridges as it moved deeper into the South. To set himself up for great laurels, Halleck wired Stanton in late May, “Richmond and Corinth are now the great strategical points of war, and our success at these points should be insured at all hazards.”8 The commander understood what Confederates had appreciated for some time: between the Appalachians and the Mississippi River there was no more important place strategically in the South than Corinth, Mississippi. Since the battle of Shiloh, the tiny village had swelled in size with Confederate soldiers. Halleck’s slow pace befuddled Beauregard. He hoped that the Federal commander might make a mistake he could exploit, and he even formulated plans to attack because life in the camps and trenches had become unbearable. Halleck’s massive army presented the commander with numerous problems, but as it inched toward Corinth, Confederates feared its superior numbers that dwarfed the

214   Stephen D. Engle Confederate Army, and the landscape afforded them no defensive advantage. Corps commander Maj. Gen. William J. Hardee offered Beauregard a reasonable alternative to remaining at Corinth. The best tactic was to abandon the town, move southeast into the Mississippi interior, and lure Halleck away from the river and rail bases. Even Gen. Robert E. Lee assured Beauregard that Confederate leaders had faith in him should he decide that the enemy’s superior numbers forced a retreat. Moreover, it would force Halleck’s army to live off the Deep South’s hostile countryside, where the population was less receptive to Unionism. Beauregard decided to evacuate Corinth and head south along the Mobile and Ohio Railroad toward Tupelo and then to Meridian. As Halleck’s army moved at a glacial pace, it afforded the Confederates time to affect a complete ruse to abandon the town quietly on the night of May 29–​30. Although the army executed the evacuation with great precision, it was still a disorderly retreat to Tupelo, and aside from destroying what could be useful to the Federals, such as bridges and locomotives, there was minimal plundering of the countryside compared to the behavior before Nashville’s surrender. Indeed, Confederate soldiers suffered poor morale because officers enforced strict discipline and harsh punishment on soldiers who operated outside regimental boundaries. After advancing the twenty-​two miles from Pittsburg Landing in twenty-​nine days, Halleck’s army moved into Corinth on May 30 and found it just as Beauregard had arranged: vacant. There was no evidence of the anticipated attack, no concentration, and, they discovered, not even an army. When Halleck rode into Corinth that afternoon, he noticed a blue uniform stuffed with straw hanging by the neck from a scrubby tree limb. Nailed to a tree nearby was a pine board inscribed “Halleck outwitted—​what will old Abe say?” Lew Wallace remarked, “Corinth was not captured; it was abandoned to us. At dawn of May 30th, we marched into its deserted works, getting nothing—​nothing—​not a sick prisoner, not a rusty bayonet, not a bite of bacon—​nothing but an empty town and some Quaker guns.”9 Halleck was as surprised as Grant had been at Shiloh, but he could claim he seized the city without combat. “Thousands of the enemy are throwing away their arms,” he boasted to Stanton, “the result is all I could possibly desire.”10 The Confederate deception had been so complete that it cost Halleck considerable standing in Washington and in the ranks. To avoid criticism, he emphasized for Stanton that the Confederates’ position in front of Corinth was “exceedingly strong” and that the enemy could not have occupied stronger positions. He further maintained that Beauregard’s army was discouraged and demoralized and that he had cut the Confederacy’s most important railroad. Grant, however, believed Halleck’s hollow victory served to lift Confederate morale, and some Confederates agreed. Yet, the Federal presence in northern Mississippi represented more than military victory, in that the army was positioned to strike into the Deep South and weaken the Confederacy’s hold on slaves, who labored for the war effort in the region. Sherman went west to secure the region around Memphis, and Buell headed across northern Mississippi and Alabama toward Chattanooga. The Confederates had inadvertently helped them by plundering some civilian farms as they abandoned the area. John Pope pursued the Confederates far enough to ensure they would not return. Deserters told stories of the destitute and

Shiloh and Corinth    215 demoralized soldiers. This buoyed the Federals’ confidence that their campaign was yielding promising results. By June, it appeared that Halleck’s army had significantly pierced the western Confederacy, and, in light of the military successes they had enjoyed since February, the Federals were poised to change the war’s course. In fact, Northerners hailed western achievements as evidence that Northern sacrifices in casualties were not in vain. By rolling up the Confederate defensive line from the Appalachians to the Mississippi, the Union Army had established an occupational presence in a region that now included Kentucky, much of Tennessee, and a significant portion of Mississippi, all of which had resulted in the fall of New Orleans, the capture of Nashville, and the seizure of major rivers and railroads. So much success in just a few months, however, belied the difficult road ahead. If the Union wanted to win Lincoln’s conciliatory war, they were certainly poised to do so in the region they occupied, but it was also positioned to advance deeper into Mississippi, where it could dramatically change the war. It remained to be seen, however, what they might accomplish next. Halleck’s army could head southwest to Vicksburg or due south toward the Gulf, wreaking havoc along the march. Instead, he scattered his army to maintain control over the territory and railroads won in recent weeks. In truth, logistical disadvantages plagued his army the further south it marched, as did communication and manpower needs. The Union supply line would weaken as it stretched into the Deep South, where Southern loyalties, guerrillas, and slavery presented the army with more problems than it could solve. The Confederates had lost significant territory and manpower, but not the resolve to carry on the war in earnest. Consequently, the Union success in the West decelerated in the summer. Yet the Federals occupied the region until early 1864. The Union soldiers’ presence for such an extended period provided far-​reaching implications for Lincoln’s conciliatory limited-​war goals and changed the dynamic of occupation going forward. Halleck hoped to repatriate the Southern citizenry by respecting their civil rights and by keeping slaves out of the war and out of his command. But soldiers grew fatigued with having to occupy the enemy with kid gloves, and they often wrote to their governors asking that the war be expanded to allow them to wage a harsher war on the people to break their will and end the conflict sooner. Even in the thinly populated regions along the Tennessee River, Union troop presence signaled an irreversible momentum that disintegrated slavery and irreparably ruptured the institution’s security. As the army moved south following Shiloh, more slaves sought refuge in its ranks, especially since their masters typically fled the region. Along the way, soldiers, many of whom were midwesterners, interacted with slaves, which often transformed them into opponents of the institution. This contact helped shift the balance in attitudes away from exclusionary policies and in favor of policies that intervened on the refugees’ behalf. During the Campaign to Corinth, Halleck dismissed officers who turned away refugees. By the summer, the Union Army was creating spaces for refugees in the military structure, and Halleck ended their transport to the Midwest.

216   Stephen D. Engle Refugees entered a transition state that was no longer slavery but was not yet freedom. Army commanders employed male refugees to repair and reconstruct railroads and work in the commissary and medical department. Female refugees often worked as laundresses. Refugees lived in tents near army encampments. Army officials issued rations for brief periods of time, but because they feared fostering dependency on the government, they sought to shift the burden of feeding women and children to a male provider as quickly as possible. After Lincoln signed the preliminary emancipation proclamation in September, Corinth became a haven for refugees, who offered their services as laborers, teamsters, and cooks. By November, Grant had established a contraband camp, which soon became a model operation under the supervision of Chaplain John Eaton of the 27th Ohio Volunteers and ultimately one of the largest such facilities of the war. The U.S. War Department developed a new Federal bureaucracy to oversee the residents of the army’s three hundred refugee camps located at garrisons across the South. Managing refugee affairs was a military necessity that expanded Federal power. For western commanders who wanted initially to keep slaves out of the war, this was an ironic turn of events. Freedmen at Corinth sought to make the military spaces of emancipation conform to their vision of freedom. They organized schools and churches, began farming, and built houses in their quest to achieve independence. Their activities drew the attention of several Northern benevolent groups, including the American Missionary Association, the Western Sanitary Commission, the African-​American Women’s Aid organizations, the American Freedman’s Union, the Chicago Colored Ladies’ Freedmen’s Aid Society, and the Contraband Relief Association in Boston and Washington. Women from these and other Christian groups volunteered to teach in the camp. As the war dragged on, the population reached more than three thousand, and Eaton developed a plan for large-​scale farming to establish a sense of communal self-​sufficiency. The progressive practices at Corinth established a thriving civil-​governing free African American society, which reflected the refugees’ determination and eagerness to be free, productive, and independent. The camp’s success, however, did not survive the war, as jurisdictional disputes between the War and Treasury departments over control of the freedmen’s affairs undermined its mission. Moreover, the Union’s control of the Mississippi River made the camp and its strategic location no longer vital to military interests. The great promise of freedom waned as the Union Army shuttled African Americans to Memphis, burned the buildings and anything that would be useful to the enemy, and ended the thriving community. In its broadest context, the Shiloh and Corinth campaigns represent a crucial chapter in the war that established political objectives designed to shorten the conflict. Whether or not the Federals exploited the advantage they thought could arise from penetrating the western Confederacy, the reality on the ground served political leaders on both sides with a great lesson in resilience. Prior to Shiloh, Grant accomplished the largest capture of the war thus far in the region, won the largest and most decisive battle yet, and allowed Halleck the opportunity to revise his policies toward civilians and slaves. The victory at Pittsburg Landing and the capture of Corinth added to these laurels and afforded Lincoln and Republicans hope that military achievements would translate into political victory in the fall. Conceding the region to the Union had demoralizing

Shiloh and Corinth    217 implications, especially since it came in the form of a domino-​like effect. Jefferson Davis had previously sent Col. William Preston Johnston to inspect the western army, and his report confirmed for Davis that Beauregard’s actions had done irreparable damage to the Confederacy’s position in this region. “I fear Beauregard has thrown away the campaign in the West,” Johnston wrote to his wife.11 Still, it would be hard to imagine Confederate alternatives that might have produced better results. Indeed, it might be said that the Federals gave away the advantage they had so fiercely won. After the Shiloh and Corinth campaigns in the spring of 1862, the Federals never used the advantages they had gained in winning this region. Grant’s tentative moves south from north Mississippi in November and December 1862 were mostly meant to threaten rather than penetrate the Deep South, and he gave up entirely after Van Dorn destroyed his depot at Holly Springs. The promise of the summer that resulted from so successful a spring campaign quietly but quickly faded. As the smoke cleared and the stench of hastily buried bodies dissipated, Tennesseans and Mississippians came to acknowledge war’s totality. It would be time to campaign again, but combatants never forgot April 6–​7 and May 30, 1862. Shiloh and Corinth were seared in the memories of veterans who recognized the significance of these campaigns to the war’s master narrative.

Notes 1. Allen Nevins, The War for the Union:  War Becomes Revolution (New  York:  Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1960), 14–​15. 2. Timothy B. Smith, Rethinking Shiloh:  Myth and Memory (Knoxville:  University of Tennessee Press, 2013), 27–​28. 3. Larry J. Daniel, Shiloh:  The Battle That Changed the Civil War (New  York:  Simon & Schuster, 1997), 266; Timothy B. Smith, Shiloh: Conquer or Perish (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2014), 201. 4. J. Cutler Andrews, The North Reports the War (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1955), 176–​179. 5. Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U.  S. Grant (New  York:  Charles L.  Webster, 1894), 1:210. 6. Earl J. Hess, Braxton Bragg:  The Most Hated Man in the Confederacy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 39. 7. Timothy B. Smith, Corinth 1862: Siege, Battle, Occupation (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2012), 47–​49. 8. Smith, Corinth, xi–​12,  57–​61. 9. Stephen D. Engle, Struggle for the Heartland: The Campaigns from Fort Henry to Corinth (Lincoln:  University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 183–​184; Lew Wallace, Lew Wallace:  An Autobiography (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1906), 2:581. 10. U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1880–​ 1901), ser. 1, vol. 10: 669. 11. William C. Davis, Jefferson Davis: The Man and His Hour (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991), 406.

218   Stephen D. Engle

Bibliography Ash, Stephen V. When the Yankees Came: Conflict and Chaos in the Occupied South, 1861–​1865. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Connelly, Thomas L. Army of the Heartland:  The Army of Tennessee, 1861–​1862. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967. Daniel, Larry J. Shiloh:  The Battle That Changed the Civil War. New  York:  Simon & Schuster, 1997. Engle, Stephen D. Struggle for the Heartland:  The Campaigns from Fort Henry to Corinth. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001. Frank, Joseph Allan, and George A. Reaves. “Seeing the Elephant”: Raw Recruits at the Battle of Shiloh. New York: Greenwood, 1989. Hess, Earl J. Civil War Infantry Tactics: Training, Combat, and Small-​Unit Effectiveness. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015. Hess, Earl J. The Civil War in the West:  Victory and Defeat from the Appalachians to the Mississippi. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. Manning, Chandra. Troubled Refuge:  Struggling for Freedom in the Civil War. New York: Vintage, 2016. Marszalek, John F. Commander of All Lincoln’s Armies: A Life of General Henry W. Halleck. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Roland, Charles P. Albert Sidney Johnston:  Soldier of Three Republics. Austin:  University of Texas Press, 1964. Simpson, Brooks D. Ulysses S. Grant: Triumph over Adversity, 1822–​1865. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000. Smith, Timothy B. Corinth 1862:  Siege, Battle, Occupation. Lawrence:  University Press of Kansas, 2012. Smith, Timothy B. Shiloh: Conquer or Perish. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2014. Taylor, Amy Murrell. Embattled Freedom: Journeys through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Woodworth, Steven E. Decision in the Heartland: The Civil War in the West. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011.

Chapter 13

M ississippi Va l l ey,   1862 Politics of Recruitment Michael D. Pierson

In April 1862, Union forces broke through significant Confederate defensive positions on the Mississippi River at Island No. 10 above New Madrid, Missouri, and at Forts Jackson and St. Philip below New Orleans. These were significant military victories, and the United States exploited these successes by capturing two of the five largest cities in the Confederacy, New Orleans and Memphis. In addition, long stretches of the Mississippi River fell into Union hands, bringing access to agriculturally rich areas and the people who lived and worked there. In the late summer of 1862, however, the Confederate government mustered a counterattack along all fronts. In the Mississippi River basin, their counteroffensive featured an attack against the Union garrison at Baton Rouge in early August. Their attempt to regain Louisiana’s capital city marked the moment when the Confederacy turned a corner; after an unrelenting string of military failures, it was now holding its own along the river. Within this military framework of U.S.  victory and exploitation, followed by Confederate counterattack, we can see strong connections between military events and political actions. This is especially true in terms of both governments’ recruitment policies. For the Confederacy, initial weakness spurred a sweeping conscription law in April 1862. At Island No. 10 and the forts south of New Orleans, many Confederate soldiers proved either apathetic or actively disloyal. However, conscription bolstered the flagging Confederate military, giving it a large infusion of manpower that drove the new country’s resurgence at Baton Rouge and elsewhere. Confederate conscription prolonged the war for years, and it has been neglected by scholars for too long. For the United States, the military victories opened up fertile recruiting grounds that forced the issue of African American emancipation and enlistment on the U.S. Congress. On the ground, self-​emancipating people encountered Union soldiers and changed how many of those men viewed both slavery and people of African descent. Refugees from slavery pressed to join the Union military as soldiers or paid workers. White soldiers and commanding officers often found their offers hard to resist. Starting with the

220   Michael D. Pierson employment of Black men and women in military camps and, in August, as soldiers in Louisiana, the Mississippi Valley saw large numbers of African Americans present themselves as potential allies of the U.S. government. Soon Congress acted to empower these women, men, and children by passing the Second Confiscation Act, which freed people whose owners were in rebellion against the United States. The U.S. success in mobilizing Blacks as soldiers and workers in turn spurred the Confederate attack on Baton Rouge, where the U.S. garrison was undermining the plantation economy and the racial status quo. Looking beyond the African American population, the liberation of New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Memphis prompted the United States to begin Reconstruction of the state governments of Louisiana and Tennessee. Experiments in these states had broader implications for Reconstruction policy and enabled the United States to actively recruit, and later draft, white men in these Southern states. Military victories also helped the U.S.  government feel optimistic enough to push through vital economic legislation, including the Pacific Railway, Federal funding for agricultural colleges, and the Homestead Act.

Confederate Collapse at Island No. 10 and New Orleans: March and April 1862 During March and April, Union forces attacked Confederate defensive positions at Island No. 10 from the north and Forts Jackson and St. Philip from the Gulf of Mexico. The Union attacks were well-​managed and made full use of the manpower and material advantages the U.S. government possessed. While the Confederacy delayed each Union drive for about a month, its garrisons in all three positions surrendered after inflicting only minimal losses on their attackers. In both places the Confederacy lost significant amounts of men and material while seeing its military dissolve because of poor morale and even disloyalty. The events of March and April demonstrated the extent of Confederate military collapse and the necessity of conscription if the new republic was to have a chance of surviving. Despite having enjoyed minor military triumphs in 1861, the Confederacy entered 1862 in a perilous condition, especially west of the Appalachian Mountains. U.S. advances in February exploited these weaknesses. In Tennessee, the Confederacy lost Forts Henry and Donelson, including their substantial garrisons. Nashville fell shortly thereafter. In the Mississippi Valley, the Union victories turned the flank of the major Confederate position at Columbus, Kentucky, which had guarded the northern reaches of the river. After Columbus, the next Confederate defensive position was at Island No. 10, and it was still a work in progress. The Confederacy rushed resources to the island, sending heavy artillery, gunners, infantry, the River Defense Fleet, and a new commander, Maj. Gen. John McCown, in the hope of halting the Union’s progress down

Mississippi Valley, 1862    221 the river. Unfortunately for the Confederacy, an aggressive Union commander, John Pope, had begun marching toward Island No. 10 even before Columbus was evacuated. The fight for Island No. 10 demonstrated how a confident Union commander could use superior Northern resources to overwhelm and capture a weaker, less motivated Confederate garrison. This was true even though Island No. 10 was a strong defensive position. Its garrison drew its supplies from the east side of the Mississippi River, and all land approaches to that lifeline were blocked by the impassable Reelfoot Lake. Union forces, therefore, had little choice but to march through Missouri and try to establish themselves on the western bank of the river south of Island No. 10, and then somehow cross over to the eastern bank and cut Confederate supply lines. Brig. Gen. Pope moved quickly to establish a base of operations at Commerce, Missouri, in February. By March 3, his large force was within a few miles of New Madrid, Missouri, the main Confederate position on the west bank of the river. Pope deployed a battery of siege guns against the two Confederate forts guarding New Madrid by the middle of March. After a one-​day artillery duel between the U.S. battery and the two forts and their supporting Confederate gunboats, McCown ordered a hasty and possibly premature evacuation of New Madrid. Even though he had gained New Madrid and control of the west bank downstream from Island No. 10, Pope still had to find a way to land troops on the eastern bank of the river in order to cut off supplies to Island No. 10. The Confederate River Defense Fleet and small shore batteries stood in his way, making any river crossing hazardous. It would take him about three weeks to solve this puzzle. During the next three weeks, the United States benefited from the engineering skills of its troops, its industrial strength, and Pope’s confidence that he could “bag the whole of them” if he could only get across the river.1 First, Pope’s engineering troops cut down enough trees, below water level, to enable shallow-​draft transport ships to pass through a flooded bottomland from north of Island No. 10 to the river south of it, all while bypassing the Confederate batteries. The transports would greatly facilitate Pope’s eventual crossing. As one historian concluded, the canal “represented the ingenuity, confidence, and culture of Pope’s army.”2 Having gotten his army and the transport ships south of Island No. 10, Pope wanted an ironclad gunboat—​or two, ideally—​with which to batter the Confederate artillery positions guarding the east bank before he tried to cross with his infantry. In the most famous incident of the campaign, Cdr. Henry Walke agreed to take the USS Carondelet past Island No. 10 on the night of April 4. The Carondelet emerged from its ordeal unscathed. Two nights later the USS Pittsburg made the same journey. One Pittsburg crewman wrote in his journal, “[T]‌heir was not a single shot struck us.”3 This was the first time that the Confederacy’s reliance on fixed batteries to stop Union warships on the Mississippi proved misguided. It would not be the last time. The arrival of the Carondelet and Pittsburg made Pope’s subsequent crossing of the Mississippi comparatively easy; the two ironclads silenced the small Confederate batteries on the opposite bank by noon on April 7. It is possible, however, to overestimate the importance of the ironclads’ presence. Pope’s engineers were almost finished

Map 13.1  New Orleans to Island No. 10

Mississippi Valley, 1862    223 constructing an armored floating battery at New Madrid that they planned to anchor near the small Confederate batteries. Pope wrote on April 2, “I am only waiting to finish the floating battery. . . . I think [it] will be impregnable to any batteries the enemy can establish in any reasonable time.”4 Thus, Union victory would probably have been secured by the skill of Pope’s engineers even if the ironclads had not appeared. Having gained the eastern bank on April 7, Pope rushed his troops forward. A new Confederate commander, Brig. Gen. William Mackall, pushed his men south in full retreat, trying to get to a strip of high ground between the Mississippi River and Reelfoot Lake, near the town of Tiptonville. Having failed to beat Col. James Morgan’s two Union regiments to the key escape outlet, and finding two other regiments of Col. Gilbert Cumming’s brigade following his force, Mackall surrendered without a fight in the early morning hours of April 8. Pope suffered few casualties during the campaign, and most of those had been in front of New Madrid. Pope, promoted to major general on March 22, had gained a substantial victory. While there have been varying estimates of how many men he captured when Mackall surrendered, the most convincing case is that the number probably reached 5,300. This estimate, however, includes only Mackall’s land forces. Not included are the crews of the eleven ships either scuttled or captured at Island No. 10, as well as the many sick soldiers left behind in hospitals when the Confederates withdrew six infantry regiments and other units after New Madrid fell. Pope also captured over a hundred artillery pieces, and “never again . . . did the Rebels marshal such an impressive array of heavy guns in the West.”5 How did the United States capture so much at such little cost? While Pope made effective use of superior Union manpower, ships, and engineering talent, Confederate weaknesses were also on prominent display. Most important, low morale pervaded all ranks, from Confederate soldiers to the upper echelons of command. When General Mackall took command a week before the surrender, his earliest reports sounded a defeatist tone. He complained, “[O]‌ne good regiment would be better than the force which I have. It never had any discipline. It is disheartened—​apathetic. So report my best officers. I cannot rely on sentinels or guards.”6 Nor did Mackall like the Confederate naval forces, writing that he “would not give the price of wood which the boats burn for their present service.”7 Capt. Victor Sheliha, the staff engineer, warned that “the troops of this command, with the exception of a very small portion, are lacking some of the most essential qualities of a soldier—​vigilance and self-​reliance. Discipline and system seem to be unknown among them.”8 Nor were Mackall’s two brigade commanders optimistic. Brig. Gen. L. M. Walker thought that if Pope ever got his army across the river, the Confederates “must not expect any of the command to be saved.”9 The other brigade commander, Col. E. W. Gantt of Arkansas, was so unimpressed by the Confederacy that he went over to the United States in 1863. Once in action, Confederate soldiers confirmed their officers’ doubts. Writing about the evacuation of New Madrid, Brig. Gen. Alexander Stewart complained that his “men became sullen and indifferent—​indisposed to work.” Inspectors general investigating the retreat faulted “the want of discipline among the troops,” adding that “the men [were] disinclined to obey orders.” 10 McCown blamed “a want of discipline of the troops.” The

224   Michael D. Pierson retreating Confederates abandoned artillery pieces and their regimental flags; Union troops walking into the forts the next morning reported picking up “the colors of several Arkansas regiments.”11 The Confederate force retreating from Island No. 10 toward Tiptonville three weeks later notably refused every opportunity to offer battle. Union Brig. Gen. E. A. Paine, whose division led the Union advance, reported that the Confederates formed battle lines three times during that day, and each time they “fled.” He called them “the flying rebels.” The final surrender came without a shot. As one of Paine’s brigade commanders wrote, “[H]‌ere we expected to give the enemy battle, but finding themselves hemmed in, they surrendered without striking a blow.”12 Many Union officers’ reports mention picking up dozens, or even hundreds, of deserters. At least one Confederate officer, surgeon S. H. Caldwell, had predicted this apathetic performance, writing privately beforehand, “[O]ur officers tell the men openly that we are whipped and that we will all be taken prisoners, etc. etc. and I firmly believe that if they are ever lead into battle they will run like turkeys.”13 The dismal Confederate performance at New Madrid and Tiptonville may have reflected the new country’s failure to win the loyalty of all of its citizens. Both Humes’s and Bankhead’s Tennessee Batteries, for example, drew their soldiers from working-​ class Irish neighborhoods in Memphis and Nashville, and their ranks filled only when other jobs dried up. One Union soldier who talked to his prisoners wrote that they had been coerced into enlisting and were “glad to be taken prisoners.”14 Some took the oath of allegiance after being captured. Events south of New Orleans mirrored what had happened at Island No. 10. The United States mustered a large infantry and naval force to attack Confederate forts that were bolstered by an inadequate naval force. Again, the Confederate soldiers displayed poor morale. Like the Tennessee artillerymen drawn from Memphis and Nashville, the Confederate troops in Forts Jackson and St. Philip came largely from working-​class immigrant communities in New Orleans. When offered the chance to do so, many deserted, while others actively mutinied against the Confederate government. The U.S. fleet began a bombardment of Fort Jackson on April 18, using mortar boats under Cdr. David Dixon Porter. The mortars caused little serious damage, and the Union fleet commander Flag Officer David Farragut decided to steam most of his warships past the two forts on the night of April 24. This was the dramatic event of the campaign, with hundreds of cannons firing and significant ship-​to-​ship actions, all fought by the light of blazing fire rafts. By morning, all but three of Farragut’s seventeen warships had gotten past the forts in working order. Most of the Confederate fleet had been destroyed. Confederate forts had once again failed to stop Union warships. But Farragut had not yet won the campaign. New Orleans would not surrender to the navy alone. Farragut’s ships could have destroyed the city, but he was understandably unwilling to open fire on its 170,000 people. He needed to land his infantry under Maj. Gen. Benjamin Butler in order to compel New Orleans’s government to surrender the city. Unfortunately for him, Butler’s troops were still south of Forts Jackson and St. Philip, and they seemed likely to stay there as long as the forts remained in Confederate

Mississippi Valley, 1862    225 hands, capable of sinking the crowded and unarmored troop ships. As one of Farragut’s officers wrote at the time, “[W]‌e may be in a tight fix now, if the forts do not fall, and it is not safe for any one to leave our ships and go anywhere in a boat.”15 Adding to the Union difficulties, the mortar boats, now left without the protection of Farragut’s warships, withdrew down the river. Forts Jackson and St. Philip were no longer being shelled. Butler, however, was working on a way to get Farragut out of his “tight fix.” Placing the reinforced 26th Massachusetts Infantry in small boats, he moved them across swampy water to the north of Fort St. Philip. Landing upriver from the fort early on April 27, the troops slogged across the narrow peninsula to the Quarantine Station on the river, which lay between New Orleans and Fort St. Philip. By nightfall, two hundred soldiers had crossed to the Fort Jackson side of the river, cutting off land communication between both forts and the Crescent City. Shortly before midnight on April 27, the Confederate soldiers inside Fort Jackson staged the Civil War’s most significant mutiny. A  large majority of the five hundred soldiers inside the fort took up arms against their officers, with enough premeditation to assemble on the parade ground, seize the guard, spike many of the heavy guns, and reverse the cannon on the ramparts to fire into the fort. They also closed the fort’s drawbridge, thereby locking out the pro-​Confederate St. Mary’s Cannoneers company, which was stationed outside the walls in the Water Battery. Officers were awoken to confront a mutinous command, and their speeches failed to restore order. Approximately 250 soldiers then left the garrison and surrendered to the 200 Union soldiers who had arrived on their side of the river just hours before. Shortly after dawn, Confederate Brig. Gen. Johnson Duncan decided that neither the remaining troops at Fort Jackson nor the garrison at Fort St. Philip could be relied upon to fight for the Confederacy. Duncan surrendered both forts that afternoon. The mutiny in Fort Jackson was a militarily significant act of disobedience to the Confederate government, and there is every reason to think that it was politically motivated. The Confederate municipal government in New Orleans was a continuation of the Know Nothing administration of the 1850s, and their anti-​immigrant and anti-​Catholic rhetoric and political policies had alienated working-​class immigrants who later served in Confederate ranks. For example, the captain of the loyal St. Mary’s Cannoneers wrote that his soldiers were of a “social position above the troops who compose the garrison of the fort, [and] find themselves very unhappy at being put on the same level as these Irish and Germans.”16 Written on April 12, his letter reflects the gulf between Confederate officials and the people they sought to govern and command. The city’s social and political conflicts, exacerbated by a blockade-​induced depression, prompted most of the city’s immigrant soldiers across southern Louisiana to switch sides when given the chance to do so. After forcing the surrender of their fort, the mutineers at Fort Jackson cheered the U.S. flag. As an eyewitness described it, “What do you think of two squads of them, about seventy-​five men each, volunteering three cheers for the Union, and giving them with a will? What a comment upon the boasted unanimity of the South!” Drawn overwhelmingly from immigrant communities in New

226   Michael D. Pierson Orleans, the Forts Jackson and St. Philip garrisons (excepting the St. Mary’s Cannoneers, from a sugar parish on the coast) followed up their cheers by choosing to take the oath of allegiance instead of being paroled. After the mutiny, many men from the garrison returned to civilian life in New Orleans, but others took jobs with the U.S. government repairing Fort Jackson. Others enlisted in the U.S. Army; Capt. John W. De Forest knew that some served in his 12th Connecticut and wrote that “probably half the fellows who defended the forts against us are already wearing our uniform.”17 Two days after the mutiny, Col. Halbert Paine of Wisconsin noted that the commander at the Quarantine Station had taken in “a large number of deserters from the Forts,” and that “several had enlisted in the 21st Indiana. They were mostly Irish.”18 In New Orleans, white volunteers grew numerous enough to warrant opening a recruiting station on May 12. The city sent at least 1,200 white recruits into Butler’s ranks by the end of September. The mutiny at Fort Jackson took place in the context of widespread disloyalty among Confederate troops around New Orleans, many of whom deserted or mutinied as soon as the Confederacy lost the strength to compel military service. Examples of disobedience and desertion include the armed refusal of the Cazadores Regiment to accept reassignment closer to Farragut’s bombardment, and the Chalmette Regiment’s passive surrender at the Quarantine Station on April 25. In the smaller forts on the Louisiana coast, the Union attack prompted mutinies or mass desertions at Forts Quitman, Pike, and Livingston. The 20th and 30th Louisiana regiments experienced widespread desertion. Two state militia brigades disbanded. The Confederate Guards regiment retreated to Camp Moore, where they mutinied, successfully refusing to serve outside of New Orleans. Butler’s estimate that over half of all Confederate soldiers serving around New Orleans deserted in late April was almost certainly accurate.

Union Exploitation and Confederate Reaction: May through July 1862 The United States moved quickly to exploit its April victories, pressing far into Confederate territory. New Orleans fell on May 1, with Baton Rouge (Louisiana’s capital) and Natchez (Mississippi’s largest city in 1860) welcoming Union sailors by May 12. At the Confederacy’s northern border, the fall of Island No. 10 brought U.S. forces up against Fort Pillow, 115 miles to the south. The Confederacy then evacuated Fort Pillow on June 3, after retreating from Corinth, Mississippi. Moving past Fort Pillow, the Union’s naval forces almost entirely destroyed the Confederate River Defense Fleet under the bluffs of Memphis, which surrendered on June 6. While the Confederates managed to hold Vicksburg against Farragut and Butler in June and July, the summer was one of dramatic U.S. gains. New Orleans and Memphis held important banking and industrial resources, and Baton Rouge and Natchez were governmental and

Mississippi Valley, 1862    227 economic centers. The loss of these four cities severely damaged the already jury-​ rigged Confederate war machine. The Union also gained control over long stretches of the river. This progress toward opening up the free navigation of the Mississippi to the Gulf proved especially satisfying to residents in the upper Midwest, who had always relied on reaching Atlantic markets via New Orleans. Military victories fulfilled a critical goal for northwestern farmers looking to export their crops in the summer and fall of 1862. Union control of long parts of the river also impaired Confederate transportation networks and logistics. Political action in Washington, D.C. followed hard on the heels of the military exploitation of the April victories. The United States now needed to enact new laws and policies to govern the people newly restored to its control. This was true of the relationships between the government and Southern whites, as well as with free and enslaved African Americans. Union advances in Louisiana and Tennessee prompted the Lincoln administration to begin reintegrating Southern whites into the United States. In Louisiana, Benjamin Butler, an urban Democratic politician before the war, readily understood the immigrants whom he now governed. By the end of 1862, he had won over most of the city’s voters. Using a patronage network made up of municipal employees who had taken the oath of allegiance, Butler maintained a viable political majority of whites in the city. These Unionist employees policed and cleaned the streets, cleared sewers and drainage canals, and kept yellow fever at bay. Butler also won friends by overseeing the transfer from Confederate money to U.S. notes in ways that made wealthy Rebels and banks, not working-​class people, pay the inevitable losses. His administration also provided food to poor people and the families of Union volunteers. While there remains a myth portraying all New Orleans whites as superb Rebels who hated Butler, by December 1862 the United States was able to hold special congressional elections in two Louisiana districts. In these elections, the number of voters (all of whom had taken the oath of allegiance) reached 50  percent of the prewar electorate totals. Interestingly, these white voters did not choose conservative Democrats; instead, the two congressional districts elected Republicans. These men “saw emancipation as the key to remolding the backward South in the image of the progressive North. For them and their associates, the Civil War was a genuine revolution.”19 The radical proclivities of Louisiana’s 1862 voters demonstrate the weakness of Confederate ideologies, explain the mutinies and desertions among Confederate units drawn from these neighborhoods, and add urban, immigrant workers to the list of Southern Unionist constituencies that plagued the Confederacy. That many men from these communities joined the U.S. military over the next two years highlights the seriousness of this weak point in Confederate nationalism. The United States took other political actions in the wake of the victories at Island No. 10 and New Orleans. It needed to redefine its relationship to the many free and enslaved African Americans who lived in the areas it now controlled. Union advances into regions with large populations of enslaved people, such as the Mississippi Valley, quickly revealed the shortcomings of the First Confiscation Act. This law had seized,

228   Michael D. Pierson but not legally freed, slaves employed as part of the Confederate war effort. In Louisiana and elsewhere, African Americans forced clarification of their status by escaping to Union camps. Who was included? Were they free? Were they citizens? U.S. soldiers and commanders in Louisiana offered a wide range of answers. Some officers, such as Brig. Gen. Thomas Williams, begrudged committing resources to care for the large refugee population in their camps. Other commanders (and many soldiers) saw humanitarian issues as foremost. Still others regarded the Black population as potential workers and soldiers. In response to this situation, Congress passed the Second Confiscation Act on July 17, 1862. The new law declared all slaves owned by disloyal owners to be “forever free.” It also held that former slaves could be employed by the government in unspecified ways, which left the door open to recruiting African American soldiers and sailors. While the Lincoln administration did not yet condone enlistment officially, the idea gained ground rapidly in the Mississippi Valley. North of Vicksburg, fleet commander Lt. Col. Alfred Ellet recruited Black men to replace sick crew members on his army rams as early as late July. In Louisiana, Brig. Gen. John Phelps recruited Black troops in late July. While Butler initially opposed Phelps’s actions, the new Second Confiscation Act and the Confederate resurgence at Baton Rouge in early August worked to change Butler’s mind. Within weeks he authorized the formation of the 1st Louisiana Native Guards Regiment. The 2nd and 3rd Native Guard regiments followed in October and November. The enlistment of Black troops in Louisiana was a direct result of the Union military advances in April and May that had given them access to a large Black population. While the number of recruits was relatively small in 1862, that would soon change. The Mississippi Valley (including Louisiana and stretches north of Vicksburg) held twenty-​ seven thousand African American soldiers by the end of 1863. By the end of the war, the Valley had provided seventy-​six thousand African American volunteers. By gaining control over large numbers of Blacks and whites, the Union victories at Island No. 10 and New Orleans forced the U.S. government to enact laws clarifying Reconstruction and emancipation. The same Congress that passed the Second Confiscation Act also looked ahead to a postwar world that could only be imagined because of recent Union military successes. On May 20, Congress passed the Homestead Act, granting 160 acres to any man or woman willing to move into the western territories and remain for five years. Congress added funding for a transcontinental railroad on July 1. One day later, the Morrill Land-​ Grant College Act, authorizing for the first time Federal support for higher education and agricultural science, became law. The idea that the United States would encourage western migration while simultaneously trying to recruit men into the army points to the optimism of Republican leaders as they looked at the war in the early summer of 1862. The U.S. Congress, standing on the apparent cusp of victory, acted to create a postwar world of advanced learning, technological advances, and westward growth. This vision was predicated on popularly supported Reconstruction governments in the South that would rebuild the Union and damage slavery in ways that would make its long-​term viability highly doubtful.

Mississippi Valley, 1862    229 The Confederate Congress was also in session in these months, and it reacted to the new country’s evident military weaknesses with vigor. The Confederacy’s First Conscription Act passed on April 16; only a year after Fort Sumter the new country resorted to compulsion. The Conscription Act required all white male citizens between the ages of seventeen and thirty-​five to serve in the military, a far more sweeping draft than the United States would pass later in the war. While exemptions based on slave ownership or occupation were added soon, such widespread conscription would seem to be a drastic step for a government that trumpeted individual liberty and opposition to Federal tyranny. However, the draft fit nicely into Southern culture. President George Washington, a Virginian, had supported compulsory military service during the Whiskey Rebellion in the 1790s. More important, Southern whites were routinely compelled to do armed service on slave patrols, especially in the aftermath of slave rebellions or conspiracies. Such compulsory service was so frequent that the draft seems not to have surprised many Southerners. Opposition to the draft was often based only on what level of government should oversee it, not on the idea of compulsory armed service. Many historians have focused primarily on Southern opposition to conscription, but that approach tells only part of the law’s history. Military historians need to examine the extent of the draft, its impact on specific campaigns, and how it changed particular units and their battlefield performance. Including the draft as a serious element in campaign studies will rewrite military history and change the popular impression that Confederate armies were filled almost entirely by volunteers. Research is beginning to suggest that the Conscription Act had a dramatic effect on the size of the Confederate military. The increased manpower pool fueled the counterattack launched by the Confederacy on all fronts in the late summer of 1862. Even if we count only literal conscripts, the fact that some 120,000 men were drafted into the ranks makes it clear that this was a significant piece of legislation. Many of the conscripted men came into the ranks in the spring and summer of 1862 and reinforced Confederate armies when they moved north into Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri. Recent studies of Maj. Gen. Thomas J.  “Stonewall” Jackson’s Valley Campaign and of the Antietam Campaign have shown that new arrivals bolstered Jackson’s and Gen. Robert E. Lee’s ranks in these months. Confederate resurgence rested on more than the brilliance of Confederate commanders such as Lee, Jackson, Gen. Braxton Bragg, and Maj. Gen. Sterling Price. Predicating Confederate success on conscription diminishes the romance of the resurgence, but it does so by correctly tying military events to political actions. The conscription law had a much bigger impact, however, than pulling in the acknowledged 120,000 men who were formally drafted. Two other groups of Confederate soldiers need to be thought of as volunteer-​conscript hybrids. One group enlisted in 1862. The conscription law allowed men who would soon be drafted to volunteer before that happened. Many Southern men took that route, in part to avoid the stigma attached to being a conscript, but also because the law granted volunteers concrete benefits, such as picking their branch of service and their unit. This group of “volunteers” have never been classified among the 120,000 conscripts, perhaps rightly. But to enlist knowing that

230   Michael D. Pierson one would soon be drafted is to be less than a full-​fledged volunteer. All but the youngest members of this group could have volunteered over the previous year, and yet they had notably failed to do so. Therefore, they should be thought of as volunteer-​conscript hybrids. Another group had already joined as volunteers in 1861. The Conscription Act required anyone who had enlisted for one year of service in 1861 to remain in the military; this is now called a “backdoor draft.” The earliest study of the subject identifies 148 Confederate regiments that had enlisted in 1861 for only one year, and calls their retention the law’s “immediate and primary purpose.”20 Historians have always written about these men as volunteers even after their first year of service, but not everyone stayed in the military voluntarily after 1862. Given the existence of these two very large groups of soldiers who were volunteer-​ conscript hybrids, historians need to acknowledge that Confederate soldiers often were neither purely volunteers nor entirely conscripts. We should replace that simplistic dichotomy with a spectrum that allows for varying degrees of willingness to serve in the Confederate military. A recent study of Confederate soldiers who enlisted after 1861, that is to say, while conscription was being considered or after its enactment, shows the complexities of such men’s allegiances. Late enlistees, as a rule, proved to be useful soldiers whose service records indicate no greater cowardice or desertion rates than their 1861 counterparts. The study also finds, however, that such men wrote less about politics and displayed less theoretical devotion to slavery than those who joined in 1861. “One might well surmise that the later recruit’s hesitancy to enlist after Fort Sumter can be traced at least in part to his relative lack of the kind of militant patriotism and nationalism that energized the initial waves of recruits.”21 Since most of the later recruits either were drafted or volunteered under threat of conscription, we might conclude that they generally did not care enough about politics, the secession movement, or slavery to have ever enlisted voluntarily. Nevertheless, they were pro-​ Confederate enough to fight well once they were compelled to do so. Such a soldier lies somewhere in between being a volunteer and a draftee. There were a great many such men in Confederate ranks. The backdoor draft presents similar complications for how to think about the men who had volunteered for a year’s service, only to find themselves forced in 1862 to stay longer than they had bargained for. How many would have gone home in 1862 if allowed to do so? It is impossible to know, but certainly a large percentage of men left the Union Army after their three years were up in 1864. Confederate soldiers were rarely allowed to make that choice, either in 1862 or 1864 (when three-​year terms begun in 1861 were not allowed to expire), but the actions of the men who could leave tell us something about the extent to which the new law forced them to stay in the ranks. A recent study of Bankhead’s Battery, which served at New Madrid, suggests that conscription kept many soldiers in the ranks who would have left. The law did not draft men over thirty-​five, and Bankhead’s Battery had thirty-​two men over that age. Of these men, exactly half chose to go home.22

Mississippi Valley, 1862    231 Conscripts and volunteer-​ conscript hybrids were vital to Confederate survival: “without the draft the South could scarcely have carried the war past 1862, for in addition to bringing new men into the army, it kept veterans from leaving.”23 The Confederates knew this too; Confederate Adjutant and Inspector General Samuel Cooper told conscription officers in July, “[O]‌ur capacity to improve the recent victories now favoring our arms depends mainly upon your exertions to fill the ranks of our armies.”24 After 1862, the Confederate Army was composed mostly of soldiers whose participation was to some degree the product of a coercive state. After the backdoor draft seized the three-​year enlistees in 1864 and held them to service, almost all Confederate soldiers were volunteer-​conscript hybrids or draftees.

The Baton Rouge Campaign and the Confederate Counterattack Conscription enabled the Confederacy to stabilize the situation in the Mississippi Valley, where it was able to hold Vicksburg. It was also able to strike back, attacking the Union garrison at Baton Rouge on August 5, 1862. The assault by Maj. Gen. John C. Breckinridge’s divisions was repulsed by stalwart Union defenders aided by the big guns of the Union fleet, but it took four hours of fierce combat to determine that result. The casualty rates were appallingly high on both sides. Union Col. Thomas Cahill reported four days after the battle, “I cannot conceive how it was possible for so many men to have engaged on so small a piece of ground.”25 While able to hold on for the day, Butler decided to evacuate the city two weeks later, and the Confederates fortified nearby Port Hudson soon after. The Confederate counterattack here, as elsewhere, regained some of the ground lost over the summer. The war would be prolonged in ways that had not seemed possible in May. The Battle of Baton Rouge clearly demonstrates how politics influenced military events during the summer. First, the Conscription Act gave Breckinridge and his superior, Maj. Gen. Earl Van Dorn, the manpower resources to contemplate aggressive actions. Second, the campaign against Baton Rouge was driven by the Confederate desire to stop the emancipation and arming of slaves by the Union Army there. In these ways, the Baton Rouge Campaign was planned as a military response to the politics that had resulted from the Union’s April victories. With military actions causing new laws that motivated further military campaigns, the actions of commanders and civilians became intertwined in a long rope of events. Conscription made the Confederate counterattack possible. Breckinridge’s attack force consisted of two divisions totaling seventeen infantry regiments and battalions. Evidence suggests that the draft augmented this force enough over the summer to tip the balance toward pursuing an aggressive policy instead of merely holding the Vicksburg

232   Michael D. Pierson fortifications. First, three of the seventeen regiments (17.6 percent) had been formed in the aftermath of the Conscription Act, when many men eager to avoid conscription formed new regiments. Each of these three regiments was placed in a different brigade, and each of them suffered the highest number of casualties in their respective brigade, an indication that they were instrumental in making the attack. Modern unit histories of other regiments in Breckinridge’s force show that the law also strengthened old units. The 19th Tennessee did not receive any conscripts since the First Conscription Act exempted eastern Tennessee, its home region. But the fact that the “great majority of the regiment’s deserters” left in a very brief period in 1863 just after Union troops reached Knoxville suggests that conscription held many men to Confederate service only until they could safely leave.26 A  second regiment, the 15th Mississippi, took in one hundred new men on May 19. These men probably enlisted to avoid being drafted, though their motives were no doubt complicated. These new recruits were at least 20 percent of the regiment’s strength that summer. But the most important aspect of the Conscription Act remained the provision requiring men who had volunteered for one year of service to stay in arms. As a private in the 15th Mississippi wrote in his journal, “[T]‌he passage of the ‘conscript act’ confirmed. Quite a sensation in the camp. Many of the boys talking bitterly against it. . . . We are doomed men two years longer.”27 General Van Dorn was responding to the political aftermath of the Union’s Second Confiscation Act when he planned the attack on Baton Rouge. Successful efforts by Union commanders to win over whites and to emancipate and recruit Blacks had caught the attention of Confederate officers. In mid-​July, two local officers warned Confederate Brig. Gen. Daniel Ruggles that Union troops in Baton Rouge threatened civilians in surrounding parishes. These parishes, they felt obligated to mention, were “eminently loyal to the Confederate cause.” To prove their point, they cited census figures indicating that 11,880 whites there owned 25,341 slaves. The local men nevertheless warned that even these civilians needed to be saved “from total demoralization on account of the varied efforts by tyranny, forces, and trade on the part of the enemy to seduce them from their allegiance to the Confederate cause.” Later in the month, another man sent word that “cavalry might be profitably employed capturing negroes on the lower Baton Rouge road and in preventing intercourse between our people and the enemy.” Ruggles warned Van Dorn in mid-​July that the “disaffection is so great” that more troops were “absolutely” required.28 While historians have explained the attack on Baton Rouge by pointing to the significance of the Red River for Confederate supply networks, Southern generals also weighed the importance of keeping African Americans subjugated. Ruggles served as Van Dorn’s source of intelligence about the size of the Baton Rouge garrison, and he argued strongly for an attack in the two weeks before the battle. Ruggles sent dispatches on July 22 and July 25 alerting Van Dorn of the enlistment of Black soldiers. His July 22 note was only four sentences long, but two of them warned of Black soldiers: “it is supposed that they [in Baton Rouge] are arming negroes. General Phelps is arming negroes

Mississippi Valley, 1862    233 near New Orleans.” His July 25 note, only six sentences, included two nearly identical passages, though he added that Phelps had four thousand Black men under arms. Van Dorn subsequently promised Sterling Price that he would attack Baton Rouge to “break up their nest there,” a racist phrase that equated supposed racial inferiors with vermin.29 Interestingly, neither Ruggles nor Van Dorn mentioned logistics or the Red River while planning the attack. The Second Confiscation Act and African Americans’ decision to seek their freedom had a profound effect on where and how the Confederacy deployed its newly enlarged military.

Conclusion The Confederacy’s defenses along the Mississippi River proved to be fragile in April 1862. While their fortifications looked formidable, the soldiers in them often proved to be apathetic or even disloyal. After puncturing Confederate defenses, the Union military used the Mississippi River to seize New Orleans, Natchez, Baton Rouge, and Memphis. U.S. politicians, pushed by both African Americans on the ground and abolitionists at home, made similarly rapid legislative advances. By the end of July, African Americans owned by Confederates had become legally free, and some Black men wore Union uniforms as soldiers and sailors. Politicians also capitalized on the large number of loyal Southern whites by holding Reconstruction elections and recruiting white regiments. As the United States moved forward, the Confederate government instituted compulsory national military service. The new law’s impact was widely felt. As Union officer John De Forest wrote, “[W]‌hat is it but drafting which has enabled it of late to resume the offensive? Here is Breckinridge invading Louisiana. . . . Where did Jefferson Davis get the materials for these new armies? The whole secret of their numbers, and of their energy and effectiveness too, is conscription.”30 From the rolling landscape of Sharpsburg to the streets of Baton Rouge, the Confederacy was riding the highest tide of its manpower surge in August and September. The war in the Mississippi Valley in 1862 included few dramatic battles, largely because the Confederacy mounted an ineffectual resistance. But the dramatic gains won by the U.S. military prompted both governments to take major legislative actions. These new laws revealed the fundamental differences in how the two countries thought about democracy and equality. The Confederacy sustained itself by amassing power over its people—​both Black and white—​at every level of government, including the national level. The title of “Rebel” in its modern usage does not belong to them; in the Mississippi Valley the true Rebels were the working-​class whites, the immigrants, the free Blacks, and the enslaved people who undermined that reach for authority. The United States was not the egalitarian society that many men and women of all nationalities and races hoped for, but in 1862 it was easy to see it as the more likely road to equality and democracy.

234   Michael D. Pierson

Notes 1. U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1880–​ 1901), ser. 1, vol. 8: 623. Hereafter cited as OR. 2. Thomas F. Army Jr., Engineering Victory: How Technology Won the Civil War (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), 110. 3. Quotation in Katherine Bentley Jeffrey, ed., Two Civil Wars: The Curious Shared Journal of a Baton Rouge Schoolgirl and a Union Sailor on the USS Essex (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016), 81. 4. OR, ser. 1, vol. 8: 657. 5. Larry J. Daniel and Lynn N. Bock, Island No. 10:  Struggle for the Mississippi Valley (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1996), 148. 6. OR, ser. 1, vol. 8: 809. 7. OR, ser. 1, vol. 8: 805. 8. OR, ser. 1, vol. 8: 812. 9. OR, ser. 1, vol. 8: 794. 10. OR, ser. 1, vol. 8: 164, 137, 138. 11. OR, ser. 1, vol. 8: 781, 614. 12. OR, ser. 1, vol. 8: 109, 112. 13. H. Blair Bentley, “Morale as a Factor in the Confederate Failure at Island Number 10,” West Tennessee Historical Society Papers 31 (1977): 124. 14. Daniel and Bock, Island No. 10, 139. 15. George E. Belknap, ed., Letters of Captain Geo. Hamilton Perkins, U.S.N., Edited and Arranged: Also a Sketch of His Life (Concord, NH: Rumford Printing, 1908), 69. 16. Capt. Florian O. Cornay to “my dear Adele,” April 12, 1862, Gettysburg National Military Park Library, Gettysburg, PA. 17. John William De Forest, A Volunteer’s Adventures: A Union Captain’s Record of the Civil War (1946; repr., Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996), 31. 18. Samuel C. Hyde, ed., A Wisconsin Yankee in Confederate Bayou Country: The Civil War Reminiscences of a Union General (Baton Rouge:  Louisiana State University Press, 2009), 47. 19. Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–​1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 46. 20. Albert Burton Moore, Conscription and Conflict in the Confederacy (1924; repr., Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), 130. 21. Kenneth W. Noe, Reluctant Rebels:  The Confederates Who Joined the Army after 1861 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 37. 22. Bruce R. Kindig, Courage and Devotion: A History of Bankhead’s/​Scott’s Tennessee Battery in the American Civil War (Bloomington, IN: Author House, 2014), 74–​75, 225. 23. James M. McPherson, Ordeal by Fire:  The Civil War and Reconstruction (1982; repr., New York: McGraw-​Hill, 2001), 203. 24. OR, ser. 4, vol. 2: 6. 25. OR, ser. 1, vol. 15: 56. 26. John D. Fowler, Mountaineers in Gray:  The Nineteenth Tennessee Volunteer Infantry Regiment, CSA (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2004), 109.

Mississippi Valley, 1862    235 27. Ben Wynne, A Hard Trip:  A History of the 15th Mississippi Infantry, CSA (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2010), 81. 28. OR, ser. 1, vol 15: 777, 778, 788, 778. 29. OR, ser. 1, vol 15: 785, 786. 30. De Forest, A Volunteer’s Adventures, 36.

Bibliography Army, Thomas F., Jr. Engineering Victory:  How Technology Won the Civil War. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016. Bentley, H. Blair. “Morale as a Factor in the Confederate Failure at Island Number 10.” West Tennessee Historical Society Papers 31 (1977): 117–​131. Cozzens, Peter. Shenandoah 1862: Stonewall Jackson’s Valley Campaign. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. Daniel, Larry J., and Lynn N. Bock. Island No. 10:  Struggle for the Mississippi Valley. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1996. Dufour, Charles L. The Night the War Was Lost. 1960; reprinted, Lincoln:  University of Nebraska Press, 1994. Hartwig, D. Scott. To Antietam Creek: The Maryland Campaign of September 1862. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. Hollandsworth, James G. The Louisiana Native Guards: The Black Military Experience during the Civil War. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995. Hunter, G. Howard. “The Politics of Resentment: Unionist Regiments and the New Orleans Immigrant Community, 1862–​1864.” Louisiana History 44 (Spring 2003): 185–​210. McCaul, Edward B., Jr. To Retain Command of the Mississippi: The Civil War Naval Campaign for Memphis. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2014. Moore, Albert Burton. Conscription and Conflict in the Confederacy. 1924; reprinted, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996. Noe, Kenneth W. Reluctant Rebels: The Confederates Who Joined the Army after 1861. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. Pierson, Michael D. Mutiny at Fort Jackson: The Untold Story of the Fall of New Orleans. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. Ripley, C. Peter. Slaves and Freedmen in Civil War Louisiana. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976. Tomblin, Barbara Brooks. The Civil War on the Mississippi: Union Sailors, Gunboat Captains, and the Campaign to Control the River. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2016. Towers, Frank. The Urban South and the Coming of the Civil War. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004.

Chapter 14

T he Peninsul a C a mpa i g n and Jackson i n t h e Shenand oah Va l l ey,   1862 Christopher S. Stowe

At times contemplated as separate military events, the 1862 Shenandoah Valley and Peninsula campaigns may be more broadly considered as constituent actions within a complicated strategic setting. Both combatants sought to achieve political ends using military and other means in the first campaign season in the eastern theater featuring mass, people’s armies. The twin campaigns are noteworthy in that they solidified the reputation of Maj. Gen. Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson as the Confederacy’s principal early hero, while also setting the conditions for the emergence of Gen. Robert Edward Lee as his section’s preeminent strategist. For the Federals, the Virginia operations most notably amplified differences between President Abraham Lincoln and his chief eastern commander, Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan. Indeed, the developing civil-​ military rift within the Union high command underscored tensions between policies of conciliation in the occupied South and an emergent “hard war” approach advocated by congressional radicals as well as a growing number of Federal soldiers and Northern citizenry. The campaigns’ results—​Jackson’s famed Valley maneuvers neutralized the exertions of three Union military departments charged with overpowering his command and impeded Lincoln from buttressing McClellan’s effort on the Peninsula with reinforcements—​contributed to Federal disappointment in the Old Dominion. More important, the Virginia operations helped hasten the Civil War’s fitful transformation into a revolutionary struggle. Their scale spurred statist centralization and social change, including the first conscription measure in American history, an unprecedented mobilization of troops and supplies over continental transportation networks, and the continuing discussion over the status of Blacks in the republic. Too, the war in 1862 wrought change upon those women and men impacted directly by its conduct. Throughout Virginia, white Southern resistance to Union occupation remained vigorous and encouraged retaliation from those Federal forces charged with

The Peninsula Campaign and Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley, 1862    237 maintaining stability. Its net effect was to intensify the war’s brutality, blurring the line between enemy and noncombatant. Last, the operations marked a watershed for those African Americans in the path of war. The impressment of Blacks for use in service of Confederate armies on the Peninsula forced Union authorities to consider the efficacy of their conciliatory course, while the arrival of bondspeople into Union lines—​and their labor in support of Federal forces in the field—​sharpened debate over confiscation policy and emancipation.

The Strategic Setting The Federal war effort appeared at the onset of spring 1862 to be rejuvenated after a winter of gloom. Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s victories at Forts Henry and Donelson along the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers, Atlantic coastal enclave operations that saw the seizure of Roanoke Island and New Bern in North Carolina, a welcome triumph at Pea Ridge, Arkansas, by Maj. Gen. Samuel R. Curtis, and the blunting of Confederate forays into the New Mexico Territory augured well for Lincoln, who as the year opened had deplored Federal military torpor and possible financial collapse. But events in Virginia tempered any sense of optimism within Lincoln’s administration as well as the nation at large. The Old Dominion’s location near the Federal capital at Washington, D.C., as well as its proximity to major Northern population centers, ensured that military operations conducted there would retain a hefty portion of public attention. Here the general in chief of the Union armies, George B. McClellan, had cultivated by March 1862 a turbulent relationship with the national command authority. McClellan, a conservative, professional officer who favored a strategy of moderation that aimed to separate the war’s more destructive effects from the Southern populace, had by the spring thaw aroused suspicion among radical members of Lincoln’s Republican Party and Northern newspaper editors that his approach, when coupled with his meticulous military preparations, concealed darker motives, even generating speculation on the general’s degree of loyalty to the Union cause. Indeed, inactivity from the Army of the Potomac, the Federals’ principal eastern fighting force, led Lincoln to insert himself directly into its planning process, encourage back-​channel communication between the army’s subordinate commanders and the White House, and issue a memorandum to McClellan on January 31 outlining his preferred line of operations along the Occoquan River–​Bull Run Valley in northern Virginia. All this coarsened McClellan’s narrow view, informed by a decade of service within the antebellum military establishment, that political interference (motivated, in his estimation, by partisan motives) bode ill for the orderly conduct of operations in war. The general’s favored course was to turn his enemy’s position by conducting an ambitious joint-​service effort. Utilizing the Chesapeake and its estuaries, he would land his force along the lower Rappahannock River at Urbanna and, through rapid marching, cut his foe’s communications with the Confederate capital at Richmond. Lincoln throughout

238   Christopher S. Stowe February did not categorically reject McClellan’s vision, though he doubted the army’s ability to gain success in a war of maneuver and expressed legitimate concern for the safety of Washington in the wake of the proposed expedition. The general, for his part, assured his superior that any potential enemy move upon the capital could be contained by those forces retained to its defense. Any nascent understanding between McClellan and his civilian authority over operational planning was strained by the next month’s events. Lincoln appointed Major Generals Irvin McDowell, Edwin V. Sumner, and Samuel P. Heintzelman to lead three of five newly created army corps. These men had voted against the Urbanna scheme in a poll that McClellan had taken of his officers. Though Lincoln selected them ostensibly on the basis of their seniority, the move conveyed the message that McClellan’s personal influence over the Army of the Potomac would be counterbalanced by the collective command of his immediate lieutenants. Moreover, the president on March 11, in a move designed to lighten his general’s considerable workload, relieved McClellan of his duties as general in chief of the armies of the United States, enabling the latter to concentrate upon directing the Potomac army in its anticipated fight ahead. Mollified by an intermediary that the change was not undertaken by any sense of malice in what was admittedly a contentious political atmosphere, McClellan accepted the demotion philosophically. Lincoln did not appoint a replacement. Then too, the Confederacy possessed a voice in matters. On March 8, the age of sail in American naval affairs saw its days eclipsed with the debut of the Confederate ironclad warship CSS Virginia (converted from the scuttled USS Merrimack) at Hampton Roads, Virginia. The littoral vessel made short work of two wooden Federal warships of the North Atlantic Blockading Squadron and caused a third to run aground. The action struck panic into some Federal authorities—​most notably Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton—​who feared that the Virginia might next target the capital itself. McClellan, for his part, reasonably considered the debacle at Hampton Roads to be a danger to his own planning. Fortunately for the Union, its own ironclad, the USS Monitor, arrived at Hampton Roads after nightfall and fought the Virginia to a draw the next day. The lower Chesapeake thus remained free from possible enemy interdiction efforts. More important in upsetting McClellan’s preparations was the Confederate decision finally to abandon the Occoquan line. The C.S.A. command authority had feared the effects of a Yankee concentration over space and time; since the fall of 1861, President Jefferson Davis and his military subordinates pondered various countermeasures, ranging from maintaining a defensive posture across Virginia to conducting large-​scale raids into Northern territory. By February, Gen. Joseph E. Johnston, commanding the Department of Northern Virginia, advocated withdrawing much of his force south to positions behind the Rappahannock, from where he could more effectively coordinate operations with the Confederate departments of Norfolk and the Peninsula. The movement began on March 8, much to the distress of Davis, who preferred that his general maintain his Centreville post. While Johnston’s retrograde included the abandonment of Rebel shore batteries along the Potomac River (thus enabling Federal forces to freely navigate it), the action nevertheless rendered McClellan’s Urbanna scheme unfeasible.

Map 14.1 Peninsula

240   Christopher S. Stowe The Union general now determined, this time with the support of his new corps commanders, that the Army of the Potomac must conduct its turning movement farther south, along the peninsula formed by the confluence of the York and James rivers. On March 17, Brig. Gen. Charles S. Hamilton’s division of Heintzelman’s Third Corps began boarding vessels bound for Fort Monroe, commencing the Peninsula Campaign. If the seat of war in the Old Dominion had shifted by spring to the Tidewater, other locations within the commonwealth combined with it to create a vast, statewide area of operations. One such place was the Shenandoah Valley, arguably the Confederacy’s foremost agricultural seat, where wheat, corn, rye, and livestock were key commodities sustaining Virginia society and the Southern war effort. Here General Jackson, whose military performance at First Manassas had already earned him celebrity and an enduring moniker, in November 1861 took control of the Valley District, Department of Northern Virginia. Essential communication arteries framed the Valley’s 140-​ mile southwest-​ to-​ northeast course from near Lexington, Virginia, to the upper Potomac, including the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad along its northern fringe. Federal authorities rightly aimed to control these strategic assets as they attempted to convert their section’s latent military and economic power into decisive action. Jackson, as combative a leader as any in the Civil War, had sought throughout the winter of 1861–​1862 to disrupt these routes, though the results had been mixed. Now, with Johnston falling back and the prospect of a major Yankee offensive along the Chesapeake watershed becoming real, Jackson moved to prevent further Federal concentration east of the Blue Ridge. On March 23, Stonewall encountered advance elements of Maj. Gen. Nathaniel P. Banks’s Fifth Corps, Army of the Potomac (soon to be reorganized as the Department of the Shenandoah), at the village of Kernstown, Virginia, just south of Winchester. Jackson, whose intelligence reports underestimated enemy numbers, was forced from the field after his own assaults stalled before enemy infantry and massed artillery fire. Still, the tactical setback bore operational fruit: the Lincoln administration, startled by Jackson’s aggression, recalled one division earmarked for operations on the Peninsula and another placed to protect the capital, assigning them instead to reinforce efforts in western Virginia and the Shenandoah. The shuffling of troops presented those charged with planning and executing military operations with unique challenges, for the movement of mass, citizens’ armies across nineteenth-​century transportation systems was an event new to the American military experience. Union Quartermaster General Montgomery C.  Meigs and the Potomac army’s Brig. Gen. Stewart Van Vliet oversaw the gargantuan enterprise of conveying no fewer than 120,000 Federal soldiers and twenty-​five thousand horses and mules to the lower Chesapeake from mid-​March through April 22.1 Moreover, McClellan had anticipated that his army could feed itself in part through forage obtained along the Peninsula, but the Tidewater’s cash-​crop economy, exhausted soils, and unsympathetic white population prevented its ability to effectively provide for military sustainment. Supplies needed therefore to be borne from locations across the North to the army’s advance depots. That Meigs, Van Vliet, and other officers were effective in overcoming

The Peninsula Campaign and Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley, 1862    241 many, if not all, impediments to deploy and feed McClellan’s expeditionary force was a testament not only to their own management skills but also to the Northern road, rail, and seaborne logistical networks, which had never before been tested by large-​scale mobilization and war. To be sure, in order to wage modern war, each side needed to shepherd ample strategic resources for military use by engaging other elements of national—​or, in this case, sectional—​power to defeat an enemy determined by early 1862 to achieve policy objectives at great cost. In February the North, its treasury suffering from debt to the tune of well over 100 million dollars, floated a second bond issue (totaling a half-​million dollars) and passed the Legal Tender Act, which authorized the use of a national paper currency—​styled “greenbacks”—​as a means to further finance the Union war. The Confederacy, for its part, extended the coercive power of its nascent central state by passing the first conscription measure in American history just as McClellan’s Tidewater deployment intensified in April. Then too, the sections sought diplomatic preference among the great powers. Confederate designs, including the overtures of James M. Mason and John Slidell to Britain and France, were unsuccessful throughout early 1862 in obtaining formal European recognition, while U.S. ministers Charles F. Adams and William L. Dayton worked diligently within an Old World domestic political milieu that was, in many quarters, not averse to seeing the Federal experiment miscarry. While achieving nominal success in preventing intervention, the Union ministers nonetheless failed throughout that spring to stem burgeoning European popular and political support for the South on legal, economic, and even moral grounds. Indeed, many observers, both home and abroad, thought the campaign season at hand might tip the diplomatic balance to ensure an outcome that favored the Confederacy in North America.

Operations in Virginia The Union buildup on the Peninsula could not go uncontested, yet Rebel reaction to the Federal movement was at first muddled, underscoring disagreements between Davis and Johnston that by March had come to rival those affecting the Yankee high command. Johnston, a proud officer of distinction within the antebellum U.S. Army, had in 1861 felt slighted by Davis’s decision to place him fourth in rank among the Confederacy’s senior generals; this, coupled with squabbles between the two over everything from operational planning to bureaucratic minutiae, threatened to undermine Southern unity of effort at a most inopportune time. With the spring campaign season at hand, Davis on March 13 looked elsewhere for counsel and support, turning to his third-​ranking general, Robert E. Lee, to act as his special advisor, “charged with the conduct of military operations in the Armies of the Confederacy”—​a general in chief in all but name.2 The Tidewater-​born Lee’s prewar record was certainly as stellar as Johnston’s, but more important to the Confederacy was the former’s ability to translate national objectives into a clear strategic vision. His personal relationship with Davis, moreover, was one of mutual

242   Christopher S. Stowe respect and trust. Together they would bring coherent management to the Confederate war effort in the East. The most immediate need for Davis, Lee, Johnston, and other Southern commanders was to fashion a suitable operational approach for Virginia. While Johnston encouraged the immediate consolidation of available Confederate troops near Richmond, Davis and Lee favored buying time for the protection of the Rebel capital by maintaining a forward posture for both Johnston and Maj. Gen. John B. Magruder’s Department of the Peninsula. Magruder, posted across the width of the Peninsula from Yorktown to Mulberry Island on the James in numbers fractional to McClellan’s gathering army, resorted in part to deception when countering initial Federal probes on April 5.  He instructed his troops to march back and forth in open sight of the enemy, with officers barking commands to imaginary regiments, all the while creating a din with well-​timed soldier cheers. McClellan, whose operational prudence had by now begun to exasperate his civilian masters, paused upon contact with the Rebel works, overestimated Rebel numbers in his front, called for additional support from elsewhere in the state, and settled to engage his enemy through means other than maneuver; he would instead resort to conventional siege operations. Though this perhaps boosted Confederate fortunes in the short term, Joe Johnston’s overall assessment of the situation was as credible as it was pithy. “We are engaged in a species of warfare,” he wrote Lee later in April, “which we can never win.”3 Southern armies, proportionately heavy in cavalry and infantry, had been built for mobility and the sudden strike. Federal institutional advantages in engineering assets, heavy ordnance, and logistics naturally favored McClellan’s methodical and scientific approach. If the latter were to successfully commence positional warfare, rebel capitulation along the Peninsula was a mere matter of time. As Johnston’s forces moved to reinforce Magruder’s advanced line throughout the month, the Confederate high command continued to search for a method to gain an asymmetric advantage over the Yankee host. Pessimism emanated from Washington, as well. Indeed, under mounting public pressure in what he fittingly styled “a People’s contest,” Lincoln had had enough of his general’s perceived delays. “[L]‌et me tell you it is indispensable to you that you strike a blow,” the president wired McClellan on April 9. “The country will not fail to note, is now noting, that the present hesitation to move upon an entrenched enemy is but the story of [Johnston at Centreville] repeated. I beg to assure you that I have never written you or spoken to you in greater kindness of feeling than now. . . . But you must act.”4 Yet the president’s own actions empowered his subordinate’s caution. Still deeply concerned over the capital’s security after Kernstown, Lincoln four days earlier ordered withheld from McClellan the men of McDowell’s First Corps, Army of the Potomac. This quashed Little Mac’s evolving plan to use McDowell as a turning force from positions opposite Yorktown near Gloucester Point. The general was furious over the president’s directive, characterizing it privately as “the most infamous thing that history has recorded.”5 The fight between McClellan and Lincoln over use of the First Corps would dominate Federal planning considerations for the next six weeks.

The Peninsula Campaign and Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley, 1862    243 The rest of April saw desultory skirmishing as the Army of the Potomac moved its massive siege train to occupy a growing system of emplacements. On the sixteenth, McClellan authorized a heavy reconnaissance of Confederate works then being built near Dam Number 1 along the Warwick River. The effort saw initial tactical success but failed to yield larger results in part because of McClellan’s immediate desire to avoid escalation. Persistent rainfall that quickly turned the Tidewater’s sandy roadways into mire added to the general’s troubles, as did a noticeable lack of interservice cooperation from the Federal North Atlantic Blockading Squadron, whose commander, Flag Officer Louis M. Goldsborough, refused to support his army counterpart in operations along the York. Yet, as the month drew to a close, Little Mac had meticulously assembled some 112,000 troops upon the Peninsula, while Johnston, now superseding Magruder in command of the forward Confederate defense, counted 55,000 effectives within his ranks.6 By April 30, McClellan was ready to decisively engage the Confederate enemy. His Battery Number 1 opened a sharp fire upon the Yorktown wharves and supporting Confederate works at Gloucester, making Rebel efforts at resupply from the Middle Peninsula unsafe. Johnston could now not hope to hold on longer, informing Lee the day previous that he would begin evacuating his fortifications “as soon as can be done conveniently.”7 On the night of May 3, mere days before McClellan hoped to storm his works, Johnston began retiring up the Peninsula toward Richmond. The Army of the Potomac occupied Yorktown the next day and quickly pushed forward, forcing elements of Johnston’s army to turn about and face their pursuers. On a rainy May 5, while McClellan remained back at Fort Monroe to coordinate his long-​ cherished turning movement up the York, his advance troops attacked Confederates posted in front of the colonial capital of Williamsburg. In a back-​and-​forth fight, Rebel defenders, aided by indecision among senior Federal officers on the field, were able to withstand the Yankee assaults. Despite this (and despite repulsing McClellan’s turning movement two days later at Eltham’s Landing on the Pamunkey River), Johnston continued his withdrawal up the Peninsula over the next twelve days. His retreat forced the Confederates to abandon the Gosport Navy Yard (and, with it, forced the destruction of the CSS Virginia), opening the critical James River to Union navigation. Now more amenable to conducting joint operations with land forces, the U.S. Navy dispatched a squadron of five vessels, including the Monitor, up the river to possibly bag Richmond. The Confederates on May 15 stopped the ambitious effort at Drewry’s Bluff, located some seven miles from the Rebel capital at a pronounced northward bend of the James. These setbacks notwithstanding, McClellan’s army moved confidently toward the Southern citadel, its riverine flanks and logistics relatively secure, with the promise again from Lincoln that the rest of McDowell’s forty-​one-​thousand-​ man corps would arrive from Fredericksburg, Virginia, by the close of the month. The C.S.A. command authority could not allow this to occur. Besides, with Johnston now fortifying behind the Chickahominy River along Richmond’s eastern outskirts—​ the general’s preferred line of defense since the campaign began—​the Army of Northern Virginia no longer had space to trade for time on the Peninsula. Davis and his top military advisor were crestfallen; in a cabinet meeting on May 14, Lee captured growing

244   Christopher S. Stowe Southern sentiment well when he exclaimed, tears welling in his eyes, “Richmond must not be given up. It shall not be given up!”8 He began to call troops from across the Confederate Atlantic seaboard to the defense of the Southern capital, which by early 1862 had swelled in size and transformed itself into an industrial seat for the would-​be nation. More than this, he sought Stonewall Jackson’s help. Since April, Lee had envisaged Jackson’s robust role in preventing Union reinforcement of McClellan’s army. Now, with the crisis at hand, Lee proposed that Stonewall work to carry out his concept of operations. “Whatever movement you make against Banks do it speedily,” he wrote Jackson on the sixteenth. “[I]‌f successful, drive him back toward the Potomac, and create the impression, as far as practicable, that you design threatening that line.”9 In the Valley, Jackson had long hoped to resurrect what had thus far been a disappointing spring campaign. Banks, plagued by supply problems, nonetheless controlled the length of the Shenandoah to Harrisonburg, Virginia, by the middle of April. Problems between Jackson—​a general noted as much for his toxicity in command as for his talent—​and a number of his subordinates undermined Confederate unity of effort during the lull, but Lincoln’s decision on May 1 to withdraw Banks to Strasburg, Virginia, located twenty-​one miles south of Winchester on the Valley Pike, enabled Stonewall to regain the operational initiative. Jackson’s soldiers countered Union forces inching toward the Valley from western Virginia under the command of Maj. Gen. John C. Frémont, erstwhile Republican presidential candidate and a favorite of that party’s radical wing. Meeting Frémont’s vanguard at McDowell, Virginia, on May 8, Jackson repulsed several Yankee attacks in a five-​hour firefight. Though unable to successfully pursue his retiring foe during the days following the battle, Jackson had checked Frémont from combining with Banks and potentially crushing his command. Lee’s communiqué arrived soon thereafter. Jackson responded with keenness, inaugurating a series of events renowned in the annals of western warfare. Using the mobility that was characteristic of Confederate fighting forces, Jackson’s “foot cavalry” aimed to defeat slower-​moving Federal columns before they could mass against his command, which now swelled to some seventeen thousand men. Stonewall turned his attention first to Banks. The Massachusetts-​born Banks owed his general’s stars to his political prominence; the one-​time Bay State governor and speaker of the U.S. House had, like Frémont, rallied important antislavery backing for the Union cause. Jackson moved first to turn Banks from his Strasburg positions, defeating and capturing the latter’s outposts at Front Royal, Virginia, at the foot of the Blue Ridge, on May 23. Stonewall hurriedly pressed the retreating Banks, who, as hoped, withdrew the next day toward Winchester to protect his now-​imperiled communications. The capture of thousands of pounds of Federal commissary stores led to brief disorder among several hungry Rebel units, but Jackson kept up his pursuit. He arrived to face Banks’s 6,500 men south of Winchester on May 25, drove them from their positions atop Bowers and Camp hills, and sent them dashing north through the town’s streets. Banks conducted his retrograde skillfully, however, retiring in good order across the Potomac to Williamsport, Maryland, by early the next morning.

Map 14.2  Shenandoah Valley, 1862

246   Christopher S. Stowe The battle was a turning point. Lincoln, who had earmarked McDowell’s four-​ division command to once more join McClellan near the Chickahominy on May 18, could now not risk its departure, what with Jackson threatening the B&O Railroad, the C&O Canal, and perhaps eventually Washington itself. He countermanded his order to McDowell on May 24. Yet the president’s vision in northern Virginia did not consent to a passive defense of Federal strategic points. Acting in the absence of a general in chief, Lincoln saw instead the opportunity to destroy Jackson’s little army. Under the president’s plan, three columns of Union forces—​Banks’s, Frémont’s, and two divisions from McDowell’s corps—​would converge upon the Valley from the north, west, and east, hoping to entrap Jackson, who would be obliged to retire up the Valley to secure his endangered communications. Theirs was a complex enterprise to be executed without essential unity of command, for the president failed to appoint an officer to oversee the operation. The task of synchronizing actions among three independent departments over challenging terrain (and no small distance) against a resourceful enemy was enormous. Lincoln’s scheme to ensnare the Army of the Valley was perhaps consigned to fail. Indeed, disunity of command ensured disunity of effort and an inept pursuit. Frémont entered the Valley near Strasburg, while Brig. Gen. James Shields, whose division formed the van of McDowell’s force, remained temporarily inert at Front Royal to await reinforcements. And Banks, stung from his recent defeats, failed to move his force from its Potomac sanctuary at all. Jackson, wide awake to the threat against his communications, withdrew quickly up the Valley, his last brigade reaching Strasburg on June 1 to escape the Union concentration. From there he raced south on the Valley Pike in the shadow of Massanutten Mountain, making tremendous use of its macadamized surface in steadily worsening weather conditions. Shields pursued through the rain up the east, or Luray Valley, his command strung out for miles upon its unimproved, sodden roads, while Frémont’s 11,500 soldiers, some of whom were among the most poorly provisioned Union forces of the entire war, tracked Jackson on the pike. With Federal forces thus divided, Jackson decided to make his stand near Port Republic, Virginia, along the foot of the Blue Ridge at the confluence of the South Fork of the Shenandoah and its tributaries, the North and South rivers. There he hoped to take advantage of the complex watercourse to defeat the converging Yankee columns in detail. Jackson posted Maj. Gen. Richard S.  Ewell’s Division seven miles north of Port Republic near the hamlet of Cross Keys to block any attempt by Frémont to unite with Shields. There, on June 8, Ewell carried out his mission faultlessly as Frémont’s disjointed attacks failed to push his Confederate opponents aside. Frémont drew back instinctively to recover from the setback, giving the bulk of Ewell’s Division both the time and the space to rejoin Jackson’s main body across the rivers after nightfall. Early the next morning at Port Republic, Jackson encountered 3,500 men from two brigades of Shields’s division in a sharp fight. The Confederates suffered the worst of it in the contest’s early stages, but Jackson’s local numerical advantage and innate maneuverability tipped the contest in his favor before noon. Frémont at length crept forward, drawn by the sounds of battle, but he pulled up short of the rain-​swollen South Fork, unable to cross to assist

The Peninsula Campaign and Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley, 1862    247 his defeated comrades. Shields, who with the rest of his ten-​thousand-​man division was not present for the contest, ordered his force to retreat down the Luray Valley, with Frémont doing likewise along the Pike. In a campaign during which his forces marched 350 miles, Jackson had defeated three separate Union commands, cleared the middle Shenandoah of Federals, and, most critically, prevented more than fifty thousand Union troops from potentially coming to McClellan’s aid in what was the Union’s main effort in the Old Dominion. Jackson’s work came at a grave moment for the Confederacy. Its military and national fortunes had taken a hard turn as summer neared. The combined Union armies of Grant and Maj. Gen. Don C. Buell drove Rebel forces from western Tennessee at the battle of Shiloh in early April, while at the same time on the Mississippi, Maj. Gen. John Pope and Flag Officer Andrew H. Foote had subdued Island Number 10, opening Union navigation of the great river nearly to Memphis. In arguably the biggest Yankee triumph of the war thus far, New Orleans, the South’s leading port, had fallen to Flag Officer David G. Farragut and Maj. Gen. Benjamin F. Butler by the close of the month. Successes in enclave operations along the coastal Carolinas, though fairly limited in character, also had brought distress to Confederate arms and the society it served. But more immediate to Virginia’s interest was the Army of the Potomac’s continued presence before Richmond. McClellan had done his best to refit and reorganize his host throughout May, most notably elevating favored subordinates—​and fellow political conservatives—​Major Generals William B. Franklin and Fitz John Porter to the command of newly created infantry corps. This curtailed the deleterious effects of Lincoln’s handpicked corps generals upon the army’s performance. He placed the new units, along with a third Yankee corps, north of the Chickahominy to effectively cover his White House Landing base and expedite the still-​anticipated link-​up with McDowell. Sporadic skirmishing occurred along the length of the armies’ positions, flaring up at Hanover Court House, Virginia, on May 27, where elements of Porter’s new command bested a Confederate detachment covering the Virginia Central Railroad. Johnston, receiving reports that McDowell was on the move to unite with McClellan, saw offensive opportunity in the latter’s force deployment, and at the May 31–​June 1 Battle of Seven Pines (or Fair Oaks), the Army of Northern Virginia aimed to crush the two Union corps remaining between the flooded Chickahominy bottomlands and the James. Johnston’s plan of assault miscarried owing to poorly communicated orders, continued heavy rains, attendant logistical troubles, and the inability of key subordinates to translate his vision into action. To be sure, one Federal division broke under the Confederate onslaught, but Union reinforcements arrived as McClellan, bedridden by an attack of malaria, came by the afternoon of May 31 to appreciate the battle’s magnitude. After two days of fighting unmatched in the eastern theater thus far, the Army of Northern Virginia pulled back into its entrenchments covering Richmond. Union casualties totaled five thousand (of some thirty-​four thousand engaged) while Johnston, losing his chance to disrupt McClellan’s nascent siege operations and possibly destroy a portion of the enemy army, suffered losses exceeding six thousand (of nearly forty thousand forces committed).10

248   Christopher S. Stowe Among the casualties was the Army of Northern Virginia’s commander. Rendered unconscious by wounds sustained to the chest and shoulder during the first day’s fight, Joseph Johnston relinquished his control of the army. Command passed to Maj. Gen. Gustavus W. Smith for hours on June 1, but Davis, seeking more dynamic leadership than that which could be offered by either Johnston or the inexperienced Smith, called upon Lee to assume the army’s reins. Lee had, in truth, gained a decidedly mixed reputation during the war so far. His command tenure in western Virginia in 1861 was defined by difficulty in achieving unity of effort among his subordinates, while his subsequent labors along the Carolina and Georgia coasts, if not unproductive, were entirely defensive in character. In light of this, some doubted Davis’s choice. Yet Lee perhaps more than any other Confederate general understood the stakes of the matter as the Army of the Potomac stood before Richmond. “McClellan will make this a battle of Posts,” he wrote Davis on June 5. “He will take position from position, under cover of his heavy guns, & we cannot get at him without storming his works, which with our new troops would be extremely hazardous.” Lee instead proposed to grasp the initiative from his slower-​moving foe. “I am preparing a line that I can hold with part of our forces in front [of Richmond], while with the rest I will endeavor to make a diversion to bring McClellan out [of his entrenchments].”11 Such a course, conforming to Southern military strengths as well as the wishes of his president and the Confederate public at large, became the hallmark of his strategic method:  Lee would conduct targeted offensive operations in the form of wide turning movements, forcing his sustainment-​heavy enemy, its lines of communications threatened by swift-​moving Rebel columns, to fight on his conditions. In the short term, by doing so Lee hoped to remove the immediate Federal threat to Richmond. More comprehensively, his approach aimed to clear Yankee forces from the entire Virginia frontier. Its effects might exhaust Northern will to continue the conduct of the war, which by the advent of summer had already demanded a level of sacrifice that the Union had not anticipated a year before. Lee, knowing that he needed a robust army in order to attain such lofty goals, set about to concentrate as many troops near Richmond as possible. His position as commander of all field forces in Virginia and North Carolina—​a privilege not afforded Johnston—​enabled the general to assemble a force unequaled in the Army of Northern Virginia’s entire history. From Maj. Gen. Theophilus H. Holmes’s Department of North Carolina came three brigades totaling some eleven thousand men. The Department of the Henrico would provide Lee sixteen thousand more. The exertions of Lee, Davis, Adjt. Gen. Samuel Cooper, and the already degraded Confederate railroad system ferried another division-​size force comprising regiments from South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. But the key component in Lee’s operational plans was the like-​thinking Jackson; with the Valley campaign concluded, Stonewall and his fifteen thousand effectives would now join Lee to inaugurate a campaign of maneuver along the Chickahominy. By the end of the month, the Army of Northern Virginia’s strength exceeded 112,000 present for duty.12

The Peninsula Campaign and Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley, 1862    249 McClellan—​aided by the faulty estimates of his intelligence chief Allan J. Pinkerton—​ had since Yorktown consistently (and at times vastly) overestimated the size of the enemy’s forces in his front. Lee’s buildup assured that the Army of the Potomac would indeed be outnumbered by over ten thousand soldiers near Richmond. This fortified McClellan’s preternatural caution, to be sure, yet it also supported the Army of the Potomac’s institutional strengths. McClellan, no longer expecting full reinforcement from McDowell, shifted the majority of his corps south of the Chickahominy, where they would commence regular siege approaches. Porter’s Fifth Corps would remain north of the stream in a relatively strong position protecting the army’s communication and supply artery, the Richmond and York River Railroad. Made aware of Jackson’s presence off Porter’s right flank during the fourth week of June, McClellan even began to consider shifting his base to the James, controlled now by the Federal navy nearly the length of its navigable course. From his headquarters at the Peterfield Trent House, the Yankee commander authorized a foray west on June 25 along the Williamsburg Road better to enable his siege guns to operate against Confederates digging busily to his front. With massed fire, engineering superiority, and secure logistics, George McClellan, whose systematic approach had come to rankle those in the North who clamored for a more destructive, punitive way of war, sought to control rationally the ebb and flow of the coming fight. Made aware of the general dispositions of McClellan’s force from a mid-​June reconnaissance performed by cavalry commander Brig. Gen. James E. B. Stuart, Lee sought, unlike his counterpart, to achieve decisive action through mobility. After solitarily wrestling over offensive options for much of June, the commander met trusted subordinates Major Generals James A.  Longstreet, Daniel H.  Hill, Ambrose P.  Hill, and the just-​ arrived Jackson at his Josiah Dabbs House headquarters on June 23. During the closed-​ door session, Lee revealed his intent. For the campaign ahead, Jackson would serve as the Army of Northern Virginia’s strike force, turning Porter’s corps and jeopardizing Union communications with White House Landing. Presuming that McClellan would redeploy Porter from his fixed positions to counter Jackson’s threat, Lee instructed A. P. Hill, Longstreet, and D. H. Hill to sweep the disrupted enemy in a drive en échelon down the length of the Chickahominy. The remainder of the army’s divisions would hold McClellan before Richmond in the case of a Federal strike in preemption of Lee’s bold move. With each side thus committed to its operational vision, the stage was set for the transformative Seven Days Campaign.

The Old Dominion at War, 1862 The employment of military forces of unprecedented size marked operations in Virginia during the spring of 1862. The need to raise, equip, train, deploy, and sustain armies that, when combined, totaled a quarter-​million citizen-​soldiers was itself a huge task, demanding a level of centralized management heretofore unseen in the republic. But the move toward gigantism altered more than bureaucratic responses to the war—​it

250   Christopher S. Stowe changed the character of the war itself. Mass armies went hand-​in-​hand with participation in mass politics; the level of commitment displayed by soldiers North and South to their respective causes enabled them to conduct—​and, more important, to withstand the rigors of—​continual and sequential operations fought over extended time and space. With war no longer waged within the single-​battle construct, its scale naturally intensified, affecting all who experienced its scourge. To be sure, the campaigns in the Old Dominion wrought change upon the soldiers, the women and men caught in its path, the contending home fronts, and the western world at large. The mobilization of such vast armies placed immediate challenges upon the rank and file. Many Confederate and Union soldiers in Virginia had not experienced active campaigning at any level prior to the Peninsula and Valley operations. Wholly unaccustomed to the brand of compulsory intimacy pervasive in army life, the men soon suffered in the face of dire environmental and sanitary conditions that their collective presence had spawned. Nascent military medical bureaucracies were wholly inefficient to the scale of the crisis, as tens of thousands of soldiers soon found themselves on the armies’ sick lists. Doctors, for their part, possessed little understanding of preventive medicine, an imperfect conception of palliative care, and none at all of germ theory; the men viewed hospitals grimly as places in which to die rather than recover their health. Against this background and as the spring rains hastened hot, humid conditions spawning typhus, malaria, and dysentery, the soldiers resorted to self-​care techniques to overcome their physical (and mental) anguish. Finding suitable water supplies, adopting exercise regimens, and searching for medicinal flora away from camp occupied much of a soldier’s downtime, even at the expense of maintaining “traditional” military discipline. Indeed, straggling in order to restore one’s health had become commonplace in both armies as the campaign season progressed, to the consternation of officers whose responsibility of function was to enforce military standards. Yet it can be argued that these self-​imposed furloughs, however brief, led to heightened well-​being among those troops who would be called upon to shoulder arms and risk their lives on the firing line.13 For those Federal soldiers who occupied Confederate Virginia, the state’s sociopolitical atmosphere also presented singular trials. Early hopes that a conciliatory Union stratagem, protecting Southern property—​even slave property—​while simultaneously targeting Rebel military forces, might hasten sectional goodwill proved empty as much of the white South resented the Federal invaders’ presence among them. “The more I see the Yankees, the worse I hate them,” wrote a Suffolk, Virginia, resident, Mattie Prentiss, in May, while in Winchester, Kate Sperry found Banks’s troops to be the very picture of wantonness, exclaiming that she “never saw as many faces where evil predominated.”14 Others took to active expressions of resistance in both word and deed. Secessionist women in Winchester hurled scorn and abuse upon the Federals, demoralizing the latter and inviting indiscriminate measures of retribution. Union troops, in spite of orders prohibiting such behavior, ransacked farms, homes, and even bedchambers located near their billets, often without distinction between those belonging to Southern sympathizers and known Unionists. The violation of what was considered a woman’s

The Peninsula Campaign and Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley, 1862    251 sacred sphere served only to strengthen white female support for the Confederacy and an escalation of tensions between occupiers and townspeople. The strain begot retaliatory violence: in an episode particularly galling to Yankee forces, male—​and, as asserted by some, female—​citizens of Winchester fired upon Banks’s retreating troops after their May defeat. Union troops, their morale flagging under attacks from uniformed and civilian enemies, soon echoed radical Republicans at home who had long since called for a more severe application of war. At the centerpiece, however, of the hard-​war philosophy was the status of Virginia’s African American population. Earlier attempts at military emancipation by Frémont (in Missouri) and Maj. Gen. David Hunter (in South Carolina) had been reversed by Lincoln, whose desire to uphold conciliation as a policy while cultivating regional and party-​political coalitions overrode, for the short term, any radical Republican impulse for Black freedom. But the widespread impressment of slaves and free Blacks for the Confederate war effort during the Virginia campaigns, to include such work as digging entrenchments, serving as teamsters and cooks, and even sporadic (and, to be sure, compulsory) duty in the front lines, convinced many Northern soldiers and officers that a strike upon slavery would necessarily render a significant blow to the Southern cause. Moreover, over the course of the campaign season, thousands of African American men, women, and children, themselves recognizing the evolving character of the war, sought the protection of Union forces as the latter advanced deeper into the Old Dominion. Once within Federal lines, Black refugees offered critical information concerning Rebel dispositions and fortifications and provided myriad direct support for Union operations. Black men worked—​now for wages—​as personal servants and as drivers and stevedores within the immense Federal logistical complex, while African American women assumed roles as cooks and laundresses for the Union Army. Though instances of ill-​treatment of Blacks by the Northern rank and file did occur, a sense of trust developed over time between soldiers and Black Southerners, enabling each to leverage the other in achievement of their goals and sharpening perceptions among whites and Blacks alike that the war would be a transformative event in American racial relations.15 All this could not help but draw the attention of the North’s political leadership. On Capitol Hill, conservatives such as Kentucky senator John J. Crittenden called for the continued protection of property and other rights for white Southerners, parroting the views of those military commanders, including McClellan, who feared the effects of white civilian insurgency and slave insurrection if the army adopted a severe approach. On the other side, radical senators Zachariah T. Chandler, Thaddeus Stevens, Charles Sumner, and Benjamin F.  Wade led the charge to chasten those who, by supporting armed insurrection, were in their view no longer entitled to the republic’s constitutional protections. Meanwhile, Black abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown, advocated for an increased sense of urgency in the North to provide racial justice in America for a slave population that sought self-​reliance over servitude (and who provided the only consistent Southern support for the Union). Then too, reports—​many exaggerated, others not—​of Rebel atrocities committed upon Union

252   Christopher S. Stowe troops during the Virginia operations raised Northern ire and, importantly, succeeded in edging Northern moderates into the hard-​war camp. The actions of McClellan, by now the national symbol of conciliation, and other officers would prompt heightened scrutiny as July 1862 approached. Conservatives, sustained by Union military successes across the continent, looked yearningly to Little Mac to finish the nation’s work by defeating Lee, seizing Richmond, and hastening an amicable reunion preserving slavery status quo ante. Yet the general’s determination to protect white Southern property, coupled with his scrupulous military preparations, also helped focus Republican discussion toward a more comprehensive confiscation policy, possible emancipation, and the use of African American soldiers-​in-​arms. Ironically, the radicals, in spite of their overarching desire to see the rebellion crushed, could not consent to a precipitate end to the campaign at hand, for a swift McClellan victory between the Chickahominy and the James might delay (or halt entirely) the kind of revolution in American sociopolitical affairs that they so earnestly sought. Seven summer days before Richmond would do much to determine a pathway toward hard war.

Notes 1. William J. Miller, “‘Scarcely Any Parallel in History’: Logistics, Friction, and McClellan’s Strategy for the Peninsula Campaign,” in The Peninsula Campaign of 1862: Yorktown to the Seven Days, ed. William J. Miller (Campbell, CA: Savas, 1995), 2:125–​183. 2. Samuel Cooper to Samuel Jones, Special Orders No. 14, March 13, 1862, Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, New York. 3. Joseph E. Johnston to Robert E. Lee, April 30, 1862, in U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1884), ser. 1, vol. 11, pt. 3: 477. 4. Abraham Lincoln, “Message to Congress in Special Session,” July 4, 1861, in Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 4:438; Lincoln to George B.  McClellan, April 9, 1862, in Basler, Collected Works, 5:185. 5. George B.  McClellan to Mary Ellen McClellan, April 6, 1862, in Stephen W. Sears, ed., The Civil War Papers of George B.  McClellan:  Selected Correspondence, 1860–​1865 (New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1989), 230. 6. Stephen W. Sears, To the Gates of Richmond: The Peninsula Campaign (New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1992), 48. 7. Johnston to Lee, April 29, 1862, in OR, ser. 1, vol. 11, pt. 3: 473. 8. Lee quoted in John H. Reagan, Memoirs, with Special Reference to Secession and the Civil War, ed. Walter F. McCaleb (New York: Neale, 1906), 139. 9. Lee to Thomas J. Jackson, May 16, 1862, in OR, ser. 1, vol 12, pt. 3: 892–​893. 10. Sears, To the Gates of Richmond, 146–​147. 11. Lee to Jefferson Davis, June 5, 1862, in Clifford Dowdey and Louis H. Manarin, eds., The Wartime Papers of R. E. Lee (Boston: Little, Brown, 1961), 184. 12. Joseph L. Harsh, Confederate Tide Rising:  Robert E.  Lee and the Making of Southern Strategy, 1861–​1862 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1998), 84.

The Peninsula Campaign and Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley, 1862    253 13. Kathryn Shively Meier, Nature’s Civil War: Common Soldiers and the Environment in 1862 Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 1–​15. 14. Mattie J.  Prentiss to Joseph Webb, June 1862, Riddick Family Papers, cited in Brian S. Wills, “Shades of Nation:  Confederate Loyalties in Southeastern Virginia,” in Inside the Confederate Nation: Essays in Honor of Emory M. Thomas, ed. Lesley J. Gordon and John C. Inscoe (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005), 65; Kate S. Sperry Diary, March 12, 1862, cited in Richard R. Duncan, Beleaguered Winchester: A Virginia Community at War, 1861–​1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007), 49. 15. Glenn David Brasher, The Peninsula Campaign and the Necessity of Emancipation: African-​ Americans and the Fight for Freedom (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 223–​228.

Bibliography Ash, Steven V. Rebel Richmond:  Life and Death in the Confederate Capital. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. Brasher, Glenn David. The Peninsula Campaign and the Necessity of Emancipation: African-​ Americans and the Fight for Freedom. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. Cozzens, Peter. Shenandoah 1862: Stonewall Jackson’s Valley Campaign. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. Dubbs, Carol Kettenburg. Defend This Old Town: Williamsburg during the Civil War. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002. Duncan, Richard R. Beleaguered Winchester: A Virginia Community at War, 1861–​1865. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007. Grimsley, Mark. The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy toward Southern Civilians, 1861–​ 1865. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Harsh, Joseph L. Confederate Tide Rising: Robert E. Lee and the Making of Southern Strategy, 1861–​1862. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1998. Hattaway, Herman, and Archer Jones. How the North Won: A Military History of the Civil War. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983. Meier, Kathryn Shively. Nature’s Civil War:  Common Soldiers and the Environment in 1862 Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013. Miller, William J., ed. The Peninsula Campaign of 1862: Yorktown to the Seven Days. 3 vols. Campbell, CA: Savas, 1995–​1997. Newton, Steven H. Joseph E. Johnston and the Defense of Richmond. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999. Rafuse, Ethan S. McClellan’s War:  The Failure of Moderation in the Struggle for the Union. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. Robertson, James I., Jr. Stonewall Jackson:  The Man, the Soldier, the Legend. New  York: Macmillan, 1997. Sears, Stephen W. To the Gates of Richmond: The Peninsula Campaign. New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1992. Woodworth, Steven E. Davis and Lee at War. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995.

Chapter 15

The Seven Days ’ Bat t l e s a nd Public Opi ni on Timothy J. Orr

On July 10, 1862, a religious newspaper in Pennsylvania published an article lamenting the recent defeat of the Army of the Potomac on the Yorktown Peninsula. A seven-​day-​ long sequence of battles, from June 25 to July 1, had subtracted 36,000 men from the two warring armies, piling up some 5,237 men killed or mortally wounded. The newspaper appropriately titled its article “The Nation’s Disappointment.” The contributor explained how the “signal failure” of the Army of the Potomac’s four-​month campaign to seize Richmond, combined with the “appalling lists of casualties to our best regiments and our bravest officers” had “made their mark upon our history and deeply agitated and disappointed the nation.” The facts, wrote the editor, offered a “hard lesson in national modesty.”1 U.S.  citizens desperately attempted to understand—​and come to terms with—​ the meaning of the colossal defeat. Few Northerners could deny the tragic fact that the Army of the Potomac had been forced to withdraw, leaving behind its dead and wounded and, most disappointing of all, doing so after getting into position only a few miles from Richmond’s outskirts. But beyond the centrality of this fact, partisan loyalty determined how this news was received and processed. Although the military situation in the eastern theater was by no means irretrievable for the army’s controversial commander, Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan, Northerners from both parties viewed the situation with an air of anxiety. In the aftermath, McClellan’s supporters—​ the self-​styled “conservatives”—​argued that corrupt Republican politicians had so hamstrung McClellan’s efforts that the best thing the nation could have expected was a fighting retreat, as evidenced by his successful “change of base” to the James River. Meanwhile, the radicals—​the Republicans who wished to widen the scope of the war—​argued that McClellan’s imbecility had caused the defeat. Specifically, they believed his chronic timidity—​born of his personal insecurities and his amoral aversion to combating slavery—​had caused him to back down when Richmond was within his grasp.

The Seven Days’ Battles and Public Opinion    255 Whether sincere or not, the two Northern political factions dueled over the interpretation of the Seven Days, the first major military news from Virginia since the debacles at Bull Run and Ball’s Bluff. As public opinion oscillated after the battles, the facts became increasingly less relevant to its explicators, replaced by collective outrage. Meanwhile, in the Confederacy, white Southerners experienced a similar phenomenon, albeit from a nonpartisan standpoint. There, news coverage attempted to glorify the results of the battles, pushing Confederate national optimism to its outermost limits. In fact, the Seven Days proved to be one of the first cases when Americans, North and South alike, attempted to understand the results of a complex military engagement through the lens of a prolific, unprofessional, and deeply partisan news media. In the end, the nation received no respectable education on the consequences of the battles, but only an air of confusion, resentment, frustration, and mistrust. Most Americans believed whatever truth they wanted, so long as it conformed to their political opinions, and those who displayed any skepticism soldiered on with an abiding mistrust of the media. Although the Seven Days Battles are often remembered as a series of Confederate offensives, in actuality they began with a Union attack. McClellan planned to seize Old Tavern, an important position on the road to Richmond, as the first step of his end-​game. He expected to bring up two hundred artillery pieces, aim them at the Confederate capital, and commence an epic barrage. When a Confederate deserter entered Union lines on June 24, telling his captors that Maj. Gen. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson’s Army of the Valley had arrived with fifteen brigades—​in actuality, nine—​McClellan ordered three brigades from the Third Corps to begin the assault. But the Union troops found it necessary to move against a different position, not Old Tavern but King’s School House, located south of the Richmond and York River Railroad. The building sat atop dominant high ground marked by a cluster of oak trees, which gave the resultant battlefield its name, Oak Grove. By 8:30 a.m. on June 25, as the Third Corps rolled forward, the bluecoats came in contact with three Confederate brigades. Swampy terrain staggered the Union advance, allowing the Confederates an opportunity to counterattack. The Rebels surged forward with bayonets fixed, driving the confused Union troops all the way back to their starting point. This, the first clash of the Seven Days, did little to alter the plans of the newly appointed commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, Gen. Robert E. Lee. Similar to his Union counterpart, Lee used the third week of June to sketch out a meticulous offensive. He planned an operation to strike the right flank of the Army of the Potomac and gain Richmond some breathing room. Lee hoped two divisions could hold in place a portion of McClellan’s army, that which occupied the area south of the Chickahominy River, while four other divisions—​those belonging to Major Generals A. P. Hill, D. H. Hill, James Longstreet, and Stonewall Jackson—​would strike at the bluecoats north of the river. Lee’s subsequent orders, General Orders 75, implied a vigorous pursuit. That is, once the Union flank became dislodged, the four attacking divisions needed to drive the Army of the Potomac aggressively, pushing it toward the James River. Lee’s offensive began at 3:00 p.m. on June 26, although without the number of troops he intended. Jackson’s division did not reach its rendezvous point at Mechanicsville

Map 15.1  Seven Days’ Battles

The Seven Days’ Battles and Public Opinion    257 until 5:00  p.m., two hours behind schedule. Unwilling to wait for the arrival of Jackson’s soldiers, Maj. Gen. A. P. Hill launched an assault on his own, and in so doing collided with Maj. Gen. George McCall’s Pennsylvania Reserve Division, about fifteen thousand strong. Although largely untested by battle, the Pennsylvanians occupied an impregnable position on the east side of Beaver Dam Creek, a tributary of the Chickahominy River. Overnight the Pennsylvanians had reinforced their defenses with logs. Hill’s Confederates, about eleven thousand of them, did their best, showering the Pennsylvanians with small arms fire and artillery. But Confederate firepower proved insufficient to carry the day. Hill’s troops took the worst of the punishment. They crossed a stagnant marsh and stopped forty yards from the Union line, losing more than 1,400 killed and wounded. Unable to maintain their momentum, the Confederates withdrew, leaving McCall’s men secure in their position. McClellan was pleased with McCall’s success but expressed concern when he learned that Stonewall Jackson’s division, rumored to be nearby and unbloodied, had not been involved. Fearful that Jackson’s troops were somewhere to the north, moving around the Pennsylvanians’ flank, McClellan ordered McCall’s division to abandon its position and withdraw three miles to the rear, consolidating with Maj. Gen. Fitz John Porter’s Fifth Corps near Boatswain’s Creek. The Union withdrawal from Beaver Dam Creek gave the Confederates a sense of achieving a victory, even though they had suffered horrendous losses. In a letter to Confederate President Jefferson Davis, Lee dubbed the battle a stunning success, calling it a “signal victory,” an assertion validated only by the fact that his men held the field.2 He directed his divisional commanders to renew the attack on June 27. This time they had to attack a weaker Union position at Boatswain’s Creek. Although more Union troops confronted the Rebels than at Beaver Dam, the Union troops did not reinforce their cover as strongly. The Fifth Corps troops requested entrenching tools, but this valuable equipment did not arrive in time. Using their personal cookware—​tin cups and plates—​ the bluecoats dug shallow pits and toppled trees to strengthen their defenses. It helped, but their earthworks were not nearly as reliable as those from the previous day. The Battle for Boatswain’s Creek (or Gaines’s Mill) began at 1:00 p.m. Once again the Confederates attacked by crossing a swamp and ascending a gentle slope against a withering fire. For the most part, the results were largely the same. The Confederates were cut down in great numbers as they lurched toward the Union line. Whenever the graycoats came close to breaking the Union position, Porter reinforced the threatened area with reserves. The battle raged for hours, and some Union soldiers expressed assurance they could hold on indefinitely. However, Porter’s stalwart defense did not last. At dusk, the Confederates’ persistence finally paid off. At 7:00 p.m. Brig. Gen. William H. C. Whiting’s division tore through the middle of Porter’s line, causing it to collapse. Union participants had difficulty explaining how the breakthrough occurred, but consensus suggested that Confederate numbers—​which had been superior all day—​finally tipped the scales. In all, more than

258   Timothy J. Orr fifty-​seven thousand Confederates participated in the attack at Gaines’s Mill, vastly outnumbering Porter’s thirty-​four thousand troops. Despite a heroic counterattack by the 5th U.S. Cavalry, nothing could mend the yawning gap caused by Whiting’s Rebels. By nightfall, Porter’s line had unraveled and panicked troops led the way to pontoon bridges over the Chickahominy. Although Union forces had lost 6,800 men, including more than 2,000 taken prisoner, Lee’s men suffered far more: nearly 8,000 killed and wounded, the predictable results of another direct attack against a hastily entrenched foe. Yet, as awful as the results had been for the Confederates, McClellan treated the battle as a clear-​cut defeat for his army. He believed his position on the north side of the Chickahominy was all but lost. Without much deliberation, he ordered Porter’s men to continue their retreat southward over the pontoon bridges. He gave instructions to his other corps commanders to evacuate to Harrison’s Landing on the James River, making certain that Flag Officer Louis Goldsborough’s gunboats met him there. In a fiery huff, McClellan scratched off a letter to Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, blaming him and President Lincoln for the debacle at Gaines’s Mill: “I have lost this battle because my force was too small. I again repeat that I am not responsible for this [defeat].” Believing that Whiting’s breakthrough signaled the portents of his total downfall on the Peninsula, McClellan argued that his only move was to save as much of it as he could. He chided Stanton, “If I save this Army now I tell you plainly that I owe no thanks to you or any other persons in Washington—​you have done your best to sacrifice this Army.”3 McClellan’s decision to retreat from the gates of Richmond derived from his misguided belief that Lee’s army outnumbered his by two-​to-​one, a misunderstanding that historians have routinely mentioned for the past century. At most, Lee possessed 92,000 men, but for various reasons McClellan believed he confronted over 200,000. Further, from a tactical standpoint, Lee’s attacks north of the Chickahominy had convinced him that the Army of the Potomac was in dire straits. He reasoned he could not attempt to reinforce the north bank of the river because his engineers had built too few crossings there. Likewise, he could not continue pushing westward, for that would increase the distance between his army and its supply base at Harrison’s Landing. His only choice, he concluded, was to pull back to a safer base of supply, one where his army could be evacuated by water, if the situation demanded it.4 Thus, the Army of the Potomac began its “change of base,” a phrase taken from McClellan’s after-​action report. Over June 28, 29, and 30—​the fourth, fifth, and sixth days of the week-​long engagement—​the Army of the Potomac packed its belongings and made its way south, giving up its hard-​fought position at Seven Pines. True to the spirit of General Orders 75, Lee’s forces kept up a vigorous pursuit, striking the retreating Union troops at Savage’s Station, White Oak Swamp, and Glendale Crossroads. At each of those locations, the situation looked grim for the Army of the Potomac. At Glendale Crossroads, for instance, the armies grappled in a furious battle that involved hand-​to-​ hand combat. Meanwhile, at Savage’s Station, 2,500 wounded men had to be abandoned, a decision that dismayed many bluecoats.5

The Seven Days’ Battles and Public Opinion    259 By July 1, the seventh day of the battles, the Army of the Potomac had assembled in its entirety atop Malvern Hill, a 130-​foot acclivity two miles north of the James River. Realizing he possessed only one more chance to attack the Union Army before it reached the safety of Harrison’s Landing, Lee ordered another frontal assault. In the afternoon, after a brief artillery barrage, fifteen Confederate brigades went into action. Moving across an open field with little cover, the massive assault charged into the teeth of a well-​prepared Union defense. Seven Union brigades, 171 artillery pieces, and three gunboats in the James River unloaded their ordnance into the Confederate ranks. Once again the Confederates took a brutal beating. At the end of the day, Lee’s soldiers were back at their starting point, having lost 5,650 officers and men, roughly 18 percent of those engaged. After the drubbing at Malvern Hill, Lee discontinued his offensive. He considered it fruitless to attack Harrison’s Landing. The Battle of Malvern Hill resulted in a decisive Union victory, but McClellan did nothing to alter his plan. After securing the wounded from the battlefield, his soldiers continued their march to Harrison’s Landing. They arrived there on July 2, where they found fresh supplies and the protection of the navy’s gunboats. McClellan maintained his belief that given the enemy’s numerical advantage, a fighting retreat was all he could have hoped for. Worried that the danger had not yet passed, McClellan begged for fifty thousand reinforcements, insisting this was the minimum number necessary to retrieve the situation. Lincoln pointed out that Union forces operating in the Shenandoah Valley, northern Virginia, and Washington, D.C., did not exceed sixty thousand. For practical reasons, fifty thousand soldiers could not be sent to the Army of the Potomac without surrendering the U.S. capital, nor could any amount of reinforcements be sent promptly. The Seven Days Battles disoriented the lives of civilians. Sarah B. K. Watt, a widow whose house stood in the center of the Gaines’s Mill battlefield, saw her home taken over by Confederate medical staff. Wounded men were piled in the yard, outhouses, and every room of her dwelling. The stench made her property temporarily unlivable. Moreover, Watt lost some of her most valuable possessions: during the battle, a Pennsylvania regiment liberated seven slaves, giving them uniforms and hiring them as army laborers.6 For weeks, scores of plunderers occupied the battlefields. The scenes of conflict contained hundreds of relics discarded by Union forces—​tents, clothing, boxes of food, broken ambulance wagons, broken weapons—​all valuable to cash-​starved opportunists. Further, clusters of gravesites now dotted the land. Unwanted Union burials stirred terrific emotion in the property owners. Dr.  William G.  Gaines, a member of the Confederate Congress (and owner of Gaines’s Mill), chastised Union soldiers who appropriated his plantation as a hospital. He vowed to dig up all Union soldiers buried on his property and feed them to his hogs.7 Meanwhile, Richmond was besieged with other casualties of war, the wounded and the prisoners. The Confederacy operated fifty hospitals within the city, all of them running at full capacity. Belle Isle, a small island in the James River, was full to the brim with over ten thousand prisoners, including Union captives taken from the Shenandoah

260   Timothy J. Orr Valley. The inmates had no shelter, pitiful rations, limited medical treatment, and no protection from vermin. Typhus, typhoid fever, scurvy, and dysentery prevailed there, and Confederate paranoia exacerbated the prisoners’ plight. Whenever women came by to sell food to the prisoners, they were arrested for suspicion of Union sympathy if they did not attempt to enforce an unreasonable price gouge. Everywhere in Richmond, disaffection ruled the hour. At Chimborazo—​Richmond’s massive, ninety-​ward military hospital—​the medical staff demanded slaves be pressed into service. Prices rose because of unchecked speculation and extortion. Confederate agents put restrictions on citizens’ passports. All the while, the state and Confederate governments demanded more men. Although the Confederate government eventually eased some of these burdens, they all contributed to a growing sense of injustice that many Richmonders keenly felt throughout the remainder of the war. In the aftermath of the Seven Days, the people of the North attempted to understand the situation that had befallen their army. Undoubtedly, the nation’s news readers experienced confusion because conflicting reports arrived from the various battlefields, telling two very different tales, one that described a tremendous Union victory, the other a disastrous defeat. The army’s war correspondents—​the reporters who traveled with the army—​led the way in explaining the outcome of the Seven Days’ fight. Motivated by partisanship rather than professionalism, the correspondents attempted to explain the results from a vantage point entirely sympathetic to their political worldview. For instance, the New  York Herald, a conservative newspaper that had been supporting McClellan all year, opened its July 2 issue with three different accounts from embedded correspondents, all of whom portrayed the withdrawal from Richmond as a successful move orchestrated by a military mastermind. Already the Herald’s reporters sensed a need to explain the army’s change of base as a wise, timely maneuver.8 Although utterly saccharine in tone, the pro-​McClellan reporters of the Herald made it clear that McClellan’s change of base did not involve a reactive move to the Confederate assaults, but that he had been contemplating an evacuation from White House Landing—​the old supply base—​for some time. Various conservative newspapers suggested that McClellan’s move to Harrison’s Landing constituted unimpeachable proof that the Army of Northern Virginia had been defeated because Lee’s legions, in their current position, could no longer attack. Some of the Herald’s correspondents made an equally absurd intellectual leap, arguing that the Republican Party had attempted to set up McClellan for failure. So the theory went, the Republican Party’s abolitionists convinced Lincoln to deny the fifty thousand reinforcements to prolong the war on purpose. If McClellan failed on the Peninsula, then the abolitionists would have an excuse to widen the war, making the U.S. Army and Navy the new instruments for emancipation.9 If McClellan’s supporters did not blame the abolitionists, they surely blamed Secretary Stanton for the Army of the Potomac’s troubles. Due to Stanton’s stubbornness, the change of base, they said, became the army’s only recourse. Like McClellan himself, Democratic newspaper editors concluded that Stanton’s refusal to reinforce the Army of the Potomac with additional troops made a fighting withdrawal to the banks of the

The Seven Days’ Battles and Public Opinion    261 James River the best possible result. Even the New York Times, a moderate Republican newspaper, offered this assessment.10 Unsurprisingly, war correspondents attached to more radical Republican newspapers told a nearly opposite tale, one that stressed the breakthrough at Gaines’s Mill, the chaotic retreat from the Chickahominy, and the uncoordinated abandonment of the Army of the Potomac’s wounded men at Savage’s Station. To them, Little Mac had transformed a series of tactical victories into a depressing strategic defeat. Further, some Republican war correspondents argued that McClellan and his supporters engaged in systematic lying to deceive the public. Correspondent Whitelaw Reid believed, “It is unfortunate for the Army of the Potomac that support of its General has become a partisan question, and that the venal New York press have inaugurated a policy of the most stupendous lying in his behalf.”11 Most Republican reporters picked up on a particular detail, a boastful line from one of McClellan’s dispatches which stated that, during the withdrawal from the Chickahominy, his army had lost only “one gun” and “one wagon.”12 Specifically, McClellan described heavy equipment losses from the Battle of Malvern Hill and not the more embarrassing losses that occurred over the course of the week. Republican newspapers did not see the distinction. They argued that Little Mac had deliberately disguised the truth, trying to cloak the fact that his army had lost at least two dozen light artillery pieces and more than six thousand officers and men captured. British newspapers tended to be the first to notice the discrepancy in the statistics, for they printed Union reports alongside reports from Richmond newspapers. Of course, Confederate reports also exaggerated numbers from the battlefield, but by comparing notes, British newspaper correspondents could easily prove that McClellan’s “one gun” report offered nothing but crafty embellishment. Wrote one British editor, “This is a good example of the way in which a great defeat may be cleverly toned down, and the tidings so gently broken as not to shock an impatient people.”13 Republican newspapers immediately picked up on the discovery by the British press, reprinting several anti-​McClellan articles word for word. The anti-​McClellan editorials also indulged in more dangerous talk, drawing attention to sinister conspiracies they saw developing on the home front. The Chicago Tribune, for instance, believed that the “friends of McClellan” had hatched a vast conspiracy to silence the press, censoring reports sent by Republican correspondents, all for the purpose of hiding the true nature of the retreat. “The people were treated like children,” wrote the editor Joseph Medill. “It was thought that lies were needed to make the bitter medicine sweet, and that lies must be told. So they were deluded with tales of victory, which gradually resolved themselves into apologies for a check, then excuses for a repulse, and at last confessions of a great disaster—​good—​bad—​worse—​worst.”14 No matter how the Democratic newspapers spun it, the change of base was a retreat, plain and simple. Cutting through the confusing statistics pertaining to known casualties, Republican newspaper editors routinely landed on an undeniable point: a victorious army needed to move forward, not in reverse. George Wilkes’s Spirit of the Times scornfully commented that McClellan “could not reach Richmond from his position on the James, except as a captive; and that unless some leader, abler than himself, should

262   Timothy J. Orr extricate his stranded forces and restore them to the true base of operations, nothing but the Providence of God could save him from capitulation.”15 It is, of course, impossible to judge Northern opinion statistically—​since public opinion polls did not exist—​but much of the anecdotal evidence suggests that negative feelings predominated in the immediate aftermath of the Seven Days. If anything, Northern communities experienced a strange emotional cocktail, feelings of misperception and despair mixed together. For weeks, no one knew what to believe, and if they did, they presumed the worst. A reporter for the Chicago Tribune explained, “Our city yesterday was distracted and kept in a feverish condition by the conflicting reports from the seat of war. Men swung like pendulums between elation of reported success to blank despair by the tidings of defeat to the army before Richmond.”16 Of course, as time droned on and it became obvious that Richmond would remain in Confederate hands for the foreseeable future, the anguish became permanent. A Philadelphia diarist confided, “There is more gloom & anxiety now than at any period of the war since the battle of Bull Run.”17 The mood from within the Army of the Potomac mirrored that of the Northern public at large: divided and confused. Like many people back home, soldiers exhibited confusion when attempting to understand the long-​term consequences of the battles in which they had just participated. Had they performed a masterful maneuver to go down in the annals of U.S. military history, or had they been driven from Richmond like frightened cowards? Many theories abounded. Some Union soldiers defended McClellan’s version of events. Cpl. Roland Bowen, a Massachusetts soldier, believed the Army of the Potomac had fought off Confederate attacks while badly outnumbered. Further, he argued that the army could have won a more decisive victory had the War Department sent the necessary reinforcements. Bowen accused the abolitionists, the “God Damned set of Infernal Politicians who are everlastingly trying to work the Ruin of this Country,” for convincing Lincoln to hold back those fifty thousand men.18 Naturally, Union soldiers who identified with the Republican Party found McClellan’s interpretation harder to swallow. Col. Francis Barlow, a young regimental commander, saw nothing accurate in McClellan’s congratulatory orders that declared victory. Writing to his brother, Barlow declared, “McClellan issues flaming addresses though everyone in the army knows he was outwitted & has lost confidence in him. His statements that he lost no materials of war or ammunition are simply false.” The Army of the Potomac, Barlow contended, was the superior army, but it could not win a single victory so long as McClellan commanded it or so long as conservative West Point generals commanded the various corps. Distrustful of all the newspapers in his hometown of New York City, Barlow warned his brother not to trust their sham bulletins. “We are surprised to learn from the New York papers that we gained a great victory. We thought we had made a disastrous retreat leaving all our dead & wounded & prisoners & material & munitions of war in the hands of the enemy.”19 Although soldiers like Barlow and Bowen believed they knew the cause of the defeat, they stood with the minority. In reality, most Union soldiers expressed confusion. They

The Seven Days’ Battles and Public Opinion    263 did not know what to think about the Seven Days. Opinions varied, but most believed the army had fought well. Their units, generally, had repelled attack after attack, leaving the Confederate dead piled in windrows. And yet, after each of these attacks, the army had pulled back, relinquishing hard-​fought battlefields and abandoning their wounded to the enemy. Lt. Edgar M. Newcomb, an officer attached to the 19th Massachusetts, tried to weigh the positives and negatives but came up unable to decide which way the scales tipped. Newcomb wrote to his sister, Leila, from Harrison’s Landing, explaining the conundrum: “We have been in 4 engagements, marched 25 miles, lost 176 men, and covered ourselves in glory. The Rebels have taken all our sick and wounded, and followed, perhaps driven us, to the cover of gunboats. We are at a loss to imagine whether this is strategy or defeat.”20 This air of uncertainty reached Lincoln as well. On July 4, Brig. Gen. Randolph Marcy visited the War Department, and in an off-​hand comment told Stanton that he would not be surprised if McClellan’s army “should be obliged to capitulate.” Stanton took Marcy’s warning seriously. (After all, Marcy was McClellan’s father-​in-​law; he might possess knowledge not yet privy to the War Department.) In apprehension, Stanton reported this conversation to Lincoln, who, in a greatly excited manner, summoned Marcy to the White House. When it became clear that Marcy had spoken carelessly, Lincoln reprimanded him. “Genl.,” Lincoln said sternly, “I understand you have used the word ‘Capitulate’—​that is a word not to be used in connection with our army.” Marcy bumbled an apology, but the interview bothered Lincoln so much he made arrangements to visit Harrison’s Landing and review the army’s condition with his own eyes.21 At 4:00 p.m. on July 8, the USS Ariel delivered Lincoln and his staff to McClellan’s headquarters. As Lincoln disembarked, McClellan handed him a letter—​the so-​called Harrison’s Landing Memorandum—​which outlined McClellan’s opinions on matters related to the Union’s developing civil-​military policy. Lincoln read the letter on the spot but made no comment on it. Boldly, McClellan’s memorandum cautioned Lincoln to maintain a civil-​military policy that kept the war limited, a contest between armies only. He advised against confiscating property, arresting Southern civilians, reorganizing rebellious territory, or freeing slaves—​anything that might radicalize the war. “A declaration of radical views, especially upon slavery,” McClellan’s memorandum stated, “will rapidly disintegrate our present armies.”22 McClellan’s advice was not taken. In Congress, Senator Zachariah Chandler, a Radical Republican, used the Seven Days to mount a tour de force against McClellan and the conservative approach to the war. As things stood, the Republican senators and representatives of the 37th Congress were busily putting the final touches on two pieces of legislation that represented a radical drift for their party. The Second Confiscation Act automatically validated the freedom of any runaway slaves who fled from rebellious owners, and the Militia Act authorized the recruitment of African American soldiers into the army. On July 16, one day before the passage of these acts, Senator Chandler delivered a lengthy speech, haranguing McClellan’s military leadership, pointing out the ways the Seven Days made all of these new directions wholly necessary.

264   Timothy J. Orr The radicals’ high tide shaped Lincoln’s opinion. Five days after signing the Second Confiscation Act into law, he held a secret cabinet meeting, unveiling a forthcoming executive proclamation in which, under his authority as commander in chief, he planned to declare all enslaved persons still held in rebellious territory “thenceforward, and forever . . . free.” This sudden announcement of an emancipation proclamation caught the cabinet unaware, and under advisement of Secretary of State William Seward, Lincoln tabled the proclamation until a decisive Union victory intervened.23 Lincoln waited exactly two months to make that announcement public—​after the conclusion of the Maryland Campaign—​but he could not help being coy about his decision. A few days later, while writing to a wealthy New York financier, August Belmont, Lincoln pointed out that the war had already changed forever the government’s relationship with slavery. “Broken eggs cannot be mended,” Lincoln philosophized, referencing the limited emancipation already going on in the South. Historians disagree over the extent of Lincoln’s radicalism. Throughout his career, he remained a careful, calculating moderate, so it is tempting to conclude that his departure from moderation came because the radicals in his party dragged him along. However, the shock of the Seven Days likely shaped Lincoln on a personal level, fostering a greater sense of urgency. He closed his letter to Belmont with a statement that echoed the pride of a principle he now felt comfortable in sharing: “This government cannot much longer play a game in which it stakes all, and its enemies stake nothing. Those enemies must understand that they cannot experiment for ten years trying to destroy the government, and if they fail still come back into the Union unhurt.”24 As the Union’s citizens struggled to understand the meaning of the Seven Days, so too did their Confederate adversaries. In stark contrast, Confederate citizens uniformly gushed with pride. Contrary to expectations, the Army of Northern Virginia had vanquished its foe, protected the Confederate capital, and given the fledgling nation a sense of hope. In Winchester, a town occupied by Union forces, forty-​year-​old Cornelia Peake McDonald summed up her feelings in her diary: “We have heard the result. We were victorious. McClellan driven back, driven away! The whole town is rejoicing, if we dared we would illuminate.”25 Southern newspapers generally echoed these positive sentiments and, indeed, contributed to them. Even the normally mild-​mannered tone of the Richmond Enquirer seemed to fall apart in the aftermath of the Seven Days, its editors unable to contain their glee at the results. They wrote, “The almost funeral pall which has hung over our country since the fall of Donelson, seems at last to be passing away. From out the gloom and disaster of the past, the martial spirit of the South has emerged and never soared with so proud an ascendant as at this very hour.”26 Of all Confederate citizens, soldiers attached to the Army of Northern Virginia exhibited the most intense pride. In the immediate aftermath of the battles, many were confident that history would remember the Seven Days as the decisive Confederate victory of the war. Brig. Gen. William Dorsey Pender believed the capture of McClellan’s wagons and supplies at Savage’s Station was enough to warrant calling it such. Even in

The Seven Days’ Battles and Public Opinion    265 the immediate aftermath of the bloodshed at Malvern Hill, Pender still basked in the army’s triumph. Writing to his wife, he declared, “We . . . are after them on their flank as they retreat. They have destroyed immense stores. There [sic] rout therefor has been complete.”27 Beyond defending Richmond successfully, soldiers from the Army of Northern Virginia believed the Seven Days carried the potential to entice foreign mediation. The Seven Days might, some Confederates believed, amount to a turning point in the war. Lt. William C. Nelson, a Mississippian, wrote to his mother, “[W]‌e have gained a great and important victory and demoralized McClellan’s army to such an extent that it will be long before he can bring it into any sort of fighting condition; before he can do so, it is possible that European powers may intervene, from the tone of the British press, their efforts for Mediation will not be deferred much longer, but should that hope prove vain, and McClellan again advances towards Richmond we feel confident of our ability by the aid of Providence to repel him.”28 But not all Confederate soldiers exhibited such optimism. Although nearly all of them called the Seven Days a victory, not everyone considered it decisive. So long as McClellan’s army lived comfortably at Harrison’s Landing, the scales of triumph tipped only marginally toward the Confederates. Lt. Thomas J. Goree, a staff officer attached to Maj. Gen. James Longstreet, wrote to his mother that he “very much . . . regretted that we were not able in the recent conflict to capture or [destroy] McClellan’s grand army as to have rendered it impossible to have recovered from it.”29 Others worried that the horrific casualties suffered by the army, which were still being counted, greatly diminished its tactical achievements. Like Goree, General Lee found the results less than thrilling. On July 9, he admitted to his wife, “Our success has not been as great or complete as I could have desired.” However, in his after-​action report, which he submitted months later, he buried his personal feelings in favor of more upbeat propaganda that emphasized the brighter points. The Seven Days had raised the siege of Richmond, and “the object of a [Union] campaign, which had been prosecuted after months of preparation at an enormous expenditure of men and money,” had been “completely frustrated.” Lee’s only wishful assessment came when he guessed that enemy losses in battle “exceeded our own.” 30 In reality, Lee’s army had suffered more: about 20,200 losses. McClellan’s army, by contrast, lost 15,849.31 Beyond all else, the Seven Days represented the nation’s inability to understand the results of one of the Civil War’s most costly engagements. In the North, partisanship dulled any chance for its citizens to comprehend the enormity of the Army of the Potomac’s defeat and, in response, soberly chart a new course for victory. Democrats and stubborn supporters of General McClellan refused to believe that a defeat had been suffered. Throughout the Seven Days, so claimed the North’s political conservatives, McClellan had masterfully outmaneuvered Lee through his change of base, saving his army from entrapment and halting the Confederate onslaught. If responsibility for failure needed to be placed anywhere, they argued, it must fall squarely upon the shoulders of Lincoln, Stanton, or whoever withheld the mythical fifty

266   Timothy J. Orr thousand reinforcements at the crucial moment when Lee’s army attacked. Meanwhile, Republicans viewed the Seven Days as a catastrophe, an unmitigated disaster brought on by the hubris and cowardice of an egotistical general who could not be trusted in reporting basic facts. If McClellan could not admit the loss of more than one cannon, their argument went, how could he be trusted with the reins of an army? In their opinion, the change of base yielded only a humiliating retreat. Finally, in the South, Confederate citizens rightfully applauded the Army of Northern Virginia’s victory, but once again citizens deluded themselves by refusing to view the results with moderation. Truly, Lee’s army had ended McClellan’s short-​lived siege, but few white Southerners willingly admitted that it came at a high cost or that it came without a decisive conclusion. In the aftermath, some Confederates made hopeful wishes for foreign mediation or dreamed of the imminent collapse of the Army of the Potomac. Only after the Army of Northern Virginia’s retreat from Maryland in September did Confederate citizens finally begin to grasp the strength of the Army of the Potomac’s will to fight. The Seven Days marked the Civil War’s first major “crisis of truth,” when political debate about an event followed automatic emotional responses with little concern about establishing a reasonable interpretation. Modern scholars have suggested that “posttruth politics” is a phenomenon that grew out of the final decades of the twentieth century, specifically from the Watergate scandal and the rise of the internet. Clearly, the Civil War generation faced a similar crisis—​if not a duplicate one—​in the summer of 1862. At that time, the facts of the Seven Days were in such dispute that the truth ceased to matter to those who reported it.32 The war’s arrival forced newspapers to focus on something other than politics. But rather than modernize the press with an air of professionalism, war reporting only worsened their deeply committed combativeness. Regardless of whether the Peninsula Campaign ended in victory or defeat, newspapers prepared to control the elucidation and dissemination of battlefield news. Partisan writers had only to make the facts fit the narrative they had already imagined. In a nation living under the shadow of death, the rising distrust with the news media added another layer of misery to a war already full of it. Far away in Louisiana, diarist Sarah Morgan began wondering if she should even keep writing in her journal. One month after the end of the Seven Days, she concluded that if she recorded anything, she should mention only the events she physically witnessed. Having been told, erroneously, that Richmond had fallen to Union forces and later that McClellan had been killed in battle, Morgan decided she could no longer trust the news. To her, the Seven Days proved as unreal as a fairy tale. She commented bitterly, “If I kept a diary of events, it would be one tissue of lies. Think! There was no battle on the 10th or 11th, McClellan is not dead, and Gibbes [her brother] was never wounded! After that, who believes in ‘reliable’ information? Not I!”33 Truly, in multiple ways, the Seven Days led to the nation’s disappointment.

The Seven Days’ Battles and Public Opinion    267

Notes 1. American Presbyterian, Philadelphia (PA), July 10, 1862. 2. Robert E. Lee to Jefferson Davis, June 27, 1862, in Clifford Dowdey and Louis Manarin, eds., The Wartime Papers of R. E. Lee (New York: Bramhall House, 1961), 202. 3. George McClellan to Edwin Stanton, June 28, 1862, in Stephen Sears, ed., The Civil War Papers of George McClellan:  Selected Correspondence, 1860–​1865 (New  York:  Da Capo Press, 1989), 323. 4. Brian K. Burton, The Peninsula and Seven Days: A Battlefield Guide (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 88–​89. 5. Robert K. Sneden, June 29, 1862, in Charles F. Bryan Jr. and Nelson D. Lankford, eds., Eye of the Storm (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), 72. 6. Joseph Gibbs, Three Years in the Bloody Eleventh:  The Campaigns of the Pennsylvania Reserves Regiment (State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), 112. 7. Martin N. Bertera and Kim Crawford, The 4th Michigan Infantry in the Civil War (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2010), 72. 8. New York Herald, New York (NY), July 2, 1862. 9. New York Herald, New York (NY), July 7, 1862 10. Lancaster (PA) Intelligencer, Lancaster (PA), July 15, 1862. (The Intelligencer reprinted an article from a New York Times correspondent.) 11. Pittsburgh (PA) Daily Gazette and Advertiser, Pittsburgh (PA), July 30, 1862. 12. George McClellan to Abraham Lincoln, July 2, 1862, in Sears, The Civil War Papers of George B. McClellan, 329. 13. Philadelphia Press, Philadelphia (PA), July 29, 1862. 14. Chicago Daily Tribune, Chicago (IL), July 11, 1862. 15. George Wilkes, McClellan: From Ball’s Bluff to Antietam (New York: Sinclair Tousey, 1863), 19, originally in Spirit of the Times, July 14, 1862. 16. Chicago Daily Tribune, Chicago (IL), July 4, 1862. 17. Sidney George Fisher diary, July 26, 1862, in Nicholas B. Wainwright, ed., A Philadelphia Perspective: The Diary of Sidney George Fisher Covering the Years 1834–​1871 (Philadelphia: Historical Society of Philadelphia, 1967), 431. 18. Roland Bowen to Mother, July 19, 1862, in Gregory A. Coco, ed., From Ball’s Bluff to Gettysburg  .  .  .  and Beyond:  The Civil War Letters of Private Roland E.  Bowen, 15th Massachusetts Infantry, 1861–​1864 (Gettysburg, PA: Thomas, 1994), 114–​115. 19. Francis C. Barlow to Edward Barlow, July 8, 1862, in Christian G. Samito, ed., “Fear Was Not in Him”:  The Civil War Letters of Francis C.  Barlow, U.S.A. (New  York:  Fordham University Press, 2004), 96–​97. 20. Edgar Newcomb to Leila Frances Newcomb, July 4, 1862, in A. D. Weymouth, ed., A Memorial Sketch of Lieut. Edgar M.  Newcomb, of the Nineteenth Mass. Vols. (Malden, MA: Alvin G. Brown, 1883), 75. 21. Orville Browning diary, July 14, 1862, in Theodore Calvin Pease and James G. Randall, eds., The Diary of Orville Hickman Browning, vol. 1: 1850–​1864 (Springfield: Illinois State Historical Society, 1925), 559. 22. George McClellan to Abraham Lincoln, July 7, 1862, in Sears, The Civil War Papers of George McClellan, 345.

268   Timothy J. Orr 23. Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (New York: Norton, 2010), 220–​221. 24. Abraham Lincoln to August Belmont, July 31, 1862, in Roy P. Basler et al., eds., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Pres, 1953), 5:350. 25. Cornelia Peake McDonald, July 4, 1862, in Minrose Gwin, ed., A Woman’s Civil War: A Diary with Reminiscences of the War from March 1862 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 66. 26. Richmond (VA) Enquirer, Richmond (VA), July 4, 1862. 27. William Dorsey Pender to Fanny, July 1, 1862, in William Hassler, ed., One of Lee’s Best Men: The Civil War Letters of William Dorsey Pender, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 161. 28. William Cowper Nelson to Maria C.  Nelson, July 12, 1862, in Jennifer W. Ford, ed., The Hour of Our Nation’s Agony: The Civil War Letters of Lt. William Cowper Nelson of Mississippi (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007), 92. 29. Thomas J. Goree to Sarah Williams Kittrell Goree, July 21, 1862, in Thomas W. Cutrer, ed., Longstreet’s Aide: The Civil War Letters of Major Thomas J. Goree (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), 91. 30. R. E. Lee to Samuel Cooper, March 6, 1863, and to Mary Lee, July 9, 1862, in Dowdey and Manarin, The Wartime Papers of R. E. Lee, 221–​222, 230. 31. Stephen W. Sears, To the Gates of Richmond: The Peninsula Campaign (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1992), 343–​345. 32. Mark E. Neely Jr., The Union Divided: Party Conflict in the Civil War North (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 63. 33. Sarah Morgan, August 3, 1862, in Charles East, ed., The Civil War Diary of a Southern Woman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991), 186.

Bibliography Browning, Judkin. The Seven Days’ Battles:  The War Begins Anew. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2012. Burton, Brian K. Extraordinary Circumstances: The Seven Days Battles. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. Burton, Brian K. The Peninsula and Seven Days: A Battlefield Guide. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007. Crenshaw, Doug. Richmond Shall Not Be Given Up: The Seven Days’ Battles, June 25–​July 1, 1862. El Dorado Hills, CA: Savas-​Beatie, 2017. Dougherty, Kevin, and J. Michael Moore. The Peninsula Campaign of 1862: A Military Analysis. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005. Dowdey, Clifford. The Seven Days: The Emergence of Lee. Boston: Little, Brown, 1964. Gallagher, Gary W., ed. The Richmond Campaign of 1862: The Peninsula and the Seven Days. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Harsh, Joseph L. Confederate Tide Rising: Robert E. Lee and the Making of Southern Strategy, 1861–​1862. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1998. Martin, David G. The Peninsula Campaign March–​July 1862. Conshohocken, PA: Combined Books, 1992.

The Seven Days’ Battles and Public Opinion    269 Miller, William J. The Battles for Richmond, 1862. Fort Washington, PA:  National Park Service, 1996. Miller, William J., ed. The Peninsula Campaign of 1862: Yorktown to the Seven Days. 2 vols. Campbell, CA: Savas, 1995. Sears, Stephen W. To the Gates of Richmond: The Peninsula Campaign. New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1992. Spruill, Matt, III, and Matt Spruill IV. Echoes of Thunder: A Guide to the Seven Days Battles. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2006. Webb, Alexander S. The Peninsula: McClellan’s Campaign of 1862. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1882. Wheeler, Richard. Sword over Richmond:  An Eyewitness History of McClellan’s Peninsula Campaign. New York: Harper and Row, 1986.

Chapter 16

The Kentucky C a mpa i g n of 1862 and Drou g h t Kenneth W. Noe

Gen. Braxton Bragg took command of the Confederacy’s troubled Western Department from Gen. P. G. T. Beauregard at Tupelo on June 20, 1862. He faced a daunting predicament. Hunger, sickness, and low morale had undermined his Army of the Mississippi since Shiloh. He lacked the supplies that his predecessor abandoned in flames in Corinth. He judged many of his officers as wanting. Above all, there was the operational problem of what to do about Maj. Gen. Henry Halleck’s Federals in Corinth. Bragg lacked both the manpower and the transportation to retake the city directly. But if not that, what? At almost exactly that moment, Halleck provided Bragg with an answer. Hoping to shore up his hold on Western Tennessee and protect his rail transportation from guerrillas, Halleck also was wary of pressing deeper into the malarial South until autumn brought relief. Until then, he would disperse much of his force to safeguard his supply line. There would be one offensive operation, however. Halleck ordered Maj. Gen. Don Carlos Buell to march his Army of the Ohio east, across northern Alabama, to Chattanooga. Maj. Gen. Ormsby Mitchel’s Federal force, already near Huntsville, would join him. From Chattanooga, Buell could accomplish Pres. Abraham Lincoln’s cherished project of liberating Eastern Tennessee. Buell responded skeptically, chary of moving troops through rugged Eastern Tennessee. Summer weather conditions figured prominently in his concerns. Drought devastated much of the Confederacy in the summer of 1862. By early June, northern Alabama already was foraged out thanks to Mitchel and the weather. Buell’s column would need constant resupply, but the Cumberland and Tennessee rivers already were dangerously low. He would have to rely solely on Memphis and a single railroad for food and forage. Unfortunately, as Buell well understood, Confederate horsemen could harass that single line with impunity. He thus would have to divert parts of his command to the rear in order to defend the rail line to Nashville and Louisville. For all these reasons, Buell advocated marching to Chattanooga by way of Nashville instead, but he could not persuade Halleck.

The Kentucky Campaign of 1862 and Drought    271 Buell issued orders to march on June 10. The weather grew stiflingly hot, with daytime temperatures perhaps reaching triple digits. In an effort to counter the heat, columns took to the road well before sunup and halted during the noontime sun. While that saved lives, it slowed progress considerably. So did burdened draft animals. Red clay road dust rose into thick, suffocating clouds along the line of march. Straggling grew common. Rations increasingly became scarce. Beyond Eastport, Mississippi, the drought-​ravaged Tennessee River was too shallow for supply boats. Federal quartermasters and commissary officers off-​loaded supplies there and shipped them by wagon to Iuka, to be reloaded on railcars there. At Tuscumbia, Alabama, Federals unloaded those supplies again and ferried them across the Tennessee for reshipment. All that took time. As for the railroad, the Memphis & Charleston lacked enough functioning locomotives, while the tracks and bridges required repair and protection. All of Buell’s concerns, in short, came true. At the beginning of July, Buell was in Huntsville while the van of his army dug in within thirty miles of Chattanooga, at Battle Creek and nearby Stevenson, Alabama. Four other divisions were still on the way. It was brutally hot by then. Hungry soldiers did their best to ignore their general’s strict injunctions against foraging but usually found little to take anyway, with the regional corn crop and fruit production stunted by drought. Washington was unhappy with Buell as well. Lincoln wanted prompt and positive results in the West, especially after Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan failed to take Richmond. Instead, the methodical Buell used July and the first part of August to gather and carefully array his six divisions. His final main line against Chattanooga stretched over sixty miles by early August. The men, eager to fight, instead spent most of their time repairing and protecting the vital logistical network. That was no small task given the poor condition of the rail lines as well as the continued efforts of Confederate guerrillas and regular cavalry to burn bridges and destroy track. Cavalry under Brig. Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest and Col. John Hunt Morgan especially did damage to the transportation network as well as to warehoused supplies. Federal cavalry responded ineffectively. More and more of Buell’s men found themselves in small fortified garrisons in the rear, scratch-​built along the railroads and major arteries. Wary of sudden attacks, they spent the hot days laboring on the railroad and hunting for something to eat. Increasingly they defied orders and took what they could from the locals. Their bellies often otherwise empty, the morale of Buell’s men plummeted in the heat and dust of that particularly harsh summer. Braxton Bragg’s Confederates also had to deal with the dry weather. On July 10, he reported that “a long and disastrous drought, threatening destruction to the grain crop, continues here, and renders any move impracticable for want of water.” Two days later, he amplified on his reluctance to move against Corinth. In part, he again blamed the weather: “A drought almost unprecedented has left the country, naturally dry, without water sufficient for the inhabitants. The enemy in their strongly-​fortified positions, garnished with heavy artillery, rely entirely on wells, as we do here.”1 As the Army of the Ohio slowly shuttled to the east, Buell’s exposed flank increasingly offered Bragg a better alternative to attacking Corinth’s formidable works. Other

272   Kenneth W. Noe

Map 16.1  Kentucky, 1862

factors increasingly pointed to a more daring option, as he suggested to his superiors. In Eastern Tennessee, outnumbered local Confederate commander Maj. Gen. Edmund Kirby Smith asked for help as Buell drew near. Well-​placed Kentuckians insisted to Confederate President Jefferson Davis that a Confederate army moving north not only could regain Tennessee but would be greeted as an army of liberation by increasingly restless Kentuckians. There was more than a germ of truth in their political argument, as Federal authorities increasingly had treated Kentucky like a conquered province. The garrisoned Civil War landscape as it evolved across the South invariably involved clashes with civilians over control of the countryside and its resources, the protection and maintenance of crucial supply lines, and political policies favoring local Unionists. Although it ran against antebellum political sensibilities, the military increasingly exercised powers once reserved to civil governments. Echoing fellow officers in Union-​controlled areas of the Confederacy, Kentucky’s Military Governor Brig. Gen. Jeremiah T. Boyle jettisoned early conciliatory policies in the face of ongoing Confederate sympathies and exercised strict control. While he could not supersede local authorities as elsewhere, he arrested Confederate sympathizers, levied monetary charges for guerrilla raids, and interfered in local elections, just as brother officers were doing in the seceded states. All that made Boyle unpopular. After his latest successful foray in June, the Kentucky partisan John Hunt Morgan insisted that white Kentuckians now needed only the appearance of a friendly Confederate Army to embrace the Confederacy. As it turned

The Kentucky Campaign of 1862 and Drought    273 out, Morgan’s “Kentucky dream” was a fantasy. By any measure, a majority of white Kentuckians either supported the Union or clung to a safe position squarely on the fence. Only far western Kentucky and parts of the Bluegrass were firmly pro-​secession. The eastern mountains were strongly Unionist, and Louisville essentially was a midwestern city. No one could be sure of this in the summer of 1862, however. Bragg forged ahead, not knowing that Gen. Robert E. Lee’s operations in Virginia and Maryland soon would distract Jefferson Davis and render the Kentucky Campaign a sideshow in the eastern press and public mind. On July 21, Bragg informed Richmond that he was moving his army to Chattanooga to rescue Kirby Smith and block Buell. With the most direct rail routes controlled by the enemy, Bragg’s infantry first went south to Mobile, crossed the bay on ferries, and then took northern-​bound trains to Chattanooga via Atlanta, a total distance of 776 miles. Cavalry and artillery traveled more slowly cross-​country. Six days after they left Tupelo, through heat and occasional rain, the first elements of infantry arrived in Chattanooga. Bragg met with Kirby Smith there to craft a plan. Kirby Smith would capture the Federal garrison at Cumberland Gap before the combined armies turned to fight Buell. Kentucky would follow. Kirby Smith accordingly left Knoxville on a hot August 13, accompanied by troops from Bragg’s army, including Brig. Gen. Patrick Cleburne’s skilled brigade. As his columns moved north, the road became drier, hotter, and more devoid of crops. He reached Barbourville, Kentucky, on August 18. Once there he changed his mind about seizing the gap, if he had ever intended to honor his agreement with Bragg at all. He exaggerated his difficulties in communications to Bragg, describing the area as devoid of supplies. After resting his men, Kirby Smith slipped his leash, bypassed the gap with about 6,500 men, and struck north on August 24 for Lexington. The path through the Cumberland Mountains was rugged and increasingly devoid of fresh water. August 29 was another hot day as Kirby Smith’s weary and parched little army cleared the mountains and approached the Bluegrass town of Richmond from the south. While no record of Richmond temperatures survive, it was 85 degrees in Louisville.2 The next morning, Kirby Smith attacked and demolished a hastily gathered, poorly trained Federal force of relatively equal numbers commanded by Maj. Gen. William “Bull” Nelson. The battle began south of Richmond and unfolded in stages that ended with the Federals driven into town and Nelson wounded. The day itself grew terribly hot and debilitating for a running fight; the 2:00 p.m. high reached 87 degrees in Louisville.3 Fought on the same day as the Second Battle of Manassas, the Battle of Richmond was the most lopsided Confederate victory of the entire war. Entire Federal brigades no longer existed after August 30. Kirby Smith’s men captured thousands of prisoners, including a wounded general, all of the enemy’s artillery, several thousand Enfield and Springfield rifles, uniforms, wagons, and assorted other stores. Federal survivors fell back in disarray toward Lexington. Although wounded, Nelson kept going until he reached Cincinnati. The newly appointed Federal departmental commander, Brig. Gen. Horatio Wright, met what was left of Nelson’s little army in Lexington on August 31. He concluded that they could not hold the city. Casting about for a healthy officer who would take command

274   Kenneth W. Noe and organize a retreat, Wright turned to a game captain in the regular army. Charles Champion Gilbert had fought at Pea Ridge before assuming staff duties under Nelson. Wright appointed him to the spurious rank of “acting major general” and ordered him to marshal the Richmond survivors as well as any newly arriving reinforcements. Wary of Kirby Smith’s intentions, Wright told Gilbert to fall back through Frankfort, the state capital, in order to screen the vital rail and river junction that was Louisville. After burning what his men could not carry, Gilbert led the column west out of Lexington. For the rest of their lives, the soldiers remembered the forced trek that followed as the “Hell March.” Temperatures rose from 83 degrees on September 3 to 90 on September 6. No clouds blocked the hot sun. Yellowish-​brown road dust was ankle-​deep and formed thick, suffocating clouds. Water proved scarce. Soldiers died of heatstroke or else filled ambulances. Stragglers were many; some eventually were captured.4 About the only people who welcomed the Hell March were local slaves. Despite its majority-​white Unionism, Kentucky doggedly remained a slave state in 1862, with nearly 20  percent of its total population in bondage. Only Virginia and Georgia contained more slave owners. Yet slavery was beginning to crumble there too. Encouraged by Washington’s two Confiscation Acts and a March 1862 law that prohibited soldiers from returning escaped slaves, individual slaves began fleeing toward Union lines in steady streams, even when that involved escaping south to areas in Tennessee or west into Missouri. Others hid among sympathetic garrison troops. The enslaved Kentuckians along the line of the Hell March who offered water or their backs and shoulders in exchange for a place in the column were thus part of a developing phenomenon that would not reach its peak until large contraband camps appeared in 1863 and the state authorized African American enlistment the following year. For African Americans in bondage, in short, Gilbert’s weary and defeated men in blue brought liberation. With exceptions, the midwestern rank and file usually reciprocated, even if their officers and local authorities objected. Jeremiah Boyle, for example, was a slave owner who wanted the soldiers to leave Kentucky’s slaves alone. Other Kentucky masters hung on to their human property tenaciously and entered camps looking for escapees. Grateful soldiers sometimes turned away those pursuing slave owners at gunpoint despite their officers’ wishes. In 1862 such freedom could be temporary, however, as local sheriffs strove to round up enslaved people once the soldiers moved on. Gilbert’s beaten command and its newly acquired allies finally arrived in Louisville on a hot September 5, dirty, exhausted, and blistered. Panic set in across the Old Northwest, as Kirby Smith had taken Lexington three days earlier. State governors pushed newly mustered and absolutely raw regiments into Louisville and Cincinnati as well in hopes of keeping the Confederates south of the Ohio River. Once in Louisville, the new recruits spent most of their time learning to march rather than constructing fortifications. The average high temperature in Louisville that month was 81 degrees. In the heat, many soldiers promptly collapsed, and some died of heatstroke. The worst day of all was September 16, when Brig. Gen. James Jackson of Kentucky ordered an unfortunate grand review through downtown. The temperature rose to 86 degrees.5 One Ohio soldier, Albion Tourgée, thought it was hotter and wrote that “the line of march

The Kentucky Campaign of 1862 and Drought    275 was long; the paved streets were glistening hot beneath the feet yet unhealed after the ‘hell-​march’; the unpaved ones ankle-​deep with dust. As usual, there were numerous delays, and then a killing pace to make up for them.” The inevitable result “was a dozen or two of sunstrokes and a score or two of breakdowns. The ambulances were full before the reviewing-​stand was reached and the march back to camp one of the sorriest sights an unsympathetic populace ever beheld.”6 As September lengthened, nights and mornings became cooler, but wet weather still largely eluded the city. It rained minimally on September 17, 27, and 29, for a total of about half an inch.7 Drilling continued even as bad water led to growing numbers of men hospitalized with diarrhea. As the days passed, apprehension grew in the city as the raw soldiers waited for Kirby Smith. He never came. Expecting a welcome from happy secessionists and eager recruits, he was soon disappointed. While the white women of the Bluegrass seemed to have welcomed the Confederates enthusiastically—​at least if soldier recollections can be taken at face value—​white men were more circumspect. Many were perfectly content to remain in the Union as long as it permitted slavery. Only emancipation and the enlistment of African American troops in Kentucky later in the war would make them wish—​or pretend—​that they had supported Bragg. In retrospect, most committed male secessionists were already in the army, fighting under native son Maj. Gen. John C. Breckinridge in the Orphan Brigade. Only about four thousand new men eventually enlisted that summer and fall, mostly as cavalry. If the Confederates wanted more wary Kentucky men to come forward and enlist, locals insisted, they needed to supply a guarantee that the Confederate presence in the state would be permanent, lest they suffer reprisals in a Federal reoccupation. Bragg already had come to that conclusion by the time Kirby Smith rode into Lexington. His troops began marching northward from Chattanooga on August 26, aiming generally for Lexington. He expected to link up with Kirby Smith before he fought Buell. Lacking enough supplies and transportation, Bragg intended to live off the land. To hold Mississippi and protect his western flank from Federals in Mississippi and Western Tennessee commanded by Maj. Gen. U. S. Grant and Maj. Gen. William S. Rosecrans, he looked to Maj. Gen. Earl Van Dorn and Maj. Gen. Sterling Price. Both had brought their armies from Arkansas across the river into Mississippi after Shiloh. Swinging east of well-​defended Nashville, Bragg charted a course north. The weather was “intensely hot and sultry” at the beginning of the campaign, according to William L. Trask of Austin’s Louisiana Sharpshooters. “No rain had fallen in this neighborhood for two months, and everything is parched by the sun.”8 Dusty roads were the inevitable result. The army’s first challenge was surmounting imposing Walden’s Ridge, that part of the Cumberland Plateau closest to Chattanooga. High temperatures and steep climbs led to rampant straggling. Rain was infrequent and water was scarce, stagnant, and dangerous, to the degree that guards had to be posted around pools. With stragglers and foragers trailing behind, the army marched to Sparta, Tennessee. Bragg hoped that the Union leadership would assume that he was about to mount an assault on Nashville. In Sparta he learned of Kirby Smith’s victory at Richmond. Other reports of drought-​ravaged fields and bone-​dry watercourses ahead along his planned

276   Kenneth W. Noe path so discouraged his plans to forage that he altered his course to the west. Although the new line of march would take him farther from Kirby Smith, marching toward the usually fruitful valleys of the Barren and Green rivers seemed imperative if his men and animals were to eat. On September 7, Bragg received another disturbing report. Buell was coming on hard. Bragg had encountered little opposition during the first days of his campaign simply because Buell’s army already had started retreating away from him. Alarmed by Kirby Smith’s swift strike and then Bragg’s obvious preparations for a similar operation, Buell had misinterpreted Confederate troop movements and started pulling back hastily on August 20. As the Confederates hoped, Buell initially surmised that Nashville was Bragg’s goal. He ordered his lieutenants to find a strong place to fight a defensive battle. The decisive factor shaping his next response was the quick conclusion that his army could not fight or survive long in the barren, drought-​plagued Cumberlands. In August 1862, only 2.6 inches of rain fell in Louisville and a little over 3.0 inches in Clarksville, Tennessee.9 Both food and water were lacking. Commissaries wrestled with shortages of corn and wheat as well as forage. Drought and Confederate guerrillas, in sum, had all but starved out Buell’s army before it started. Buell had no choice but to keep moving. Despite strong pleas from subordinates to stop and fight, Buell pushed his hungry, thirsty, and dust-​covered men on into Middle Tennessee. On September 5, his army concentrated nearby in Murfreesboro, waiting for an assault that never came. The weary retreat to Nashville, made on half-​rations, opened a wider breach between soldiers and their commander. Ordered to respect civilian property rights, the men instead plundered homes and farms with impunity. There was no steady, staged shift from “soft war” in 1861 to “hard war” three years later. Local conditions produced episodes of sporadic retaliation and restraint from almost the beginning, especially when ideology, insurgency, and emancipation collided. In Tennessee and later Kentucky that September, the drought added dust, hunger, and thirst to the mix. Driven to the physical brink, enraged Federal soldiers foraged and vandalized along the route of their march and justified their actions as just punishments for slaveholders that would shorten the war. Buell did not tarry long in Nashville. Convinced that even a reinforced garrison could hold the city, he decided to retreat all the way to his main base at Louisville. His supply line back to Louisville was the longest of the war thus far and was especially vulnerable due to its many bridges and three major tunnels. Buell’s goal was to get to Louisville before Bragg did, not to stop the enemy and defeat him first. Soon both armies were racing north toward the Ohio River on parallel roads, with Bragg in the lead. Men in both armies complained about 90-​degree heat, massive clouds of blinding road dust blown into faces by stiff winds, their pace, and increasingly skimpy rations. But most of all, they noted a growing lack of potable water due to the drought. The southern Kentucky Bluegrass in 1862 saw the worst drought in anyone’s memory. Waterways dried up, trees died, and even songbirds fled the scene. Only 2.76 inches of rain fell in Louisville in September, most of that (1.97 inches) during an eight-​hour period on September 11.10

The Kentucky Campaign of 1862 and Drought    277 Soldiers’ accounts confirm a similar paucity on the line of march. The water they could find was usually foul-​smelling and saturated with green scum and microbial disease. Fresh rain fell only infrequently, notably overnight on September 11–​12 as the Confederates entered Kentucky. Another hard storm stirred up mud during the afternoon and night of September 17. While morale remained generally good among the advancing Confederates, it declined still more in Buell’s pursuing army. Foraging continued unabated, especially for apples, green corn, and potatoes, but for seemingly useless spoils as well. Evidence suggests that diarrhea and dehydration were rampant. Indicative of the grousing was the widespread and sexually charged rumor that Bragg and Buell were traitorous brothers-​in-​law who met to sleep together nightly. On September 12, as he stepped foot into Kentucky, Bragg was still two days ahead of Buell. He rested his army at Glasgow while issuing a proclamation that depicted his force as a disciplined army of liberation, and one willing to march back to Tennessee if not welcome. He also sent a brigade under Brig. Gen. James Chalmers to Cave City, on the Louisville & Nashville Railroad. On his own, Chalmers attacked the Federal garrison at Munfordville that protected the long railroad bridge across the Green River. When the garrison refused to surrender, Bragg marched the rest of his army there. The garrison surrendered on September 18, but the detour cost Bragg two days and allowed Buell to draw near. Bragg considered stopping to fight, wavered, and finally marched his men north and then east to Bardstown, intending to link up there with Kirby Smith. They arrived on September 22. In Bardstown, he issued a new proclamation to the people of the Old Northwest and took an unlikely stab at ending the war. Denying any intentions to conquer their lands, he called upon Midwesterners to acknowledge the justice of the Confederate cause, lay down their arms, and abandon Lincoln’s war. If they did so, he added, the Confederacy would ensure their free navigation of the Mississippi River in a peaceful future. Unmoved, the region’s Republican governors continued pouring raw recruits into Cincinnati and Louisville. The tough conditions of the march’s latest phase had undermined morale in both armies. Daytime remained hot, but the nights grew cool enough to disturb men without blankets. Potable water grew even scarcer; there was no rain between September 17 and 27. Diarrhea from the water that was available grew common. Bragg’s army arrived in Bardstown the day Lincoln announced the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation that excluded Kentucky. Adding to Bragg’s woes, Kirby Smith refused to give up his independent command and moved even farther away from Bardstown. Few Kentuckians came forward to fight for Bragg, as Kirby Smith already had discovered. Despite Morgan’s rosy reports and postwar mythology, most Kentuckians did not embrace the Confederacy in 1862. If enlistment records offer any reliable guide, a majority of white men either were Unionists or simply wanted to be left alone. Bragg damned them as too economically comfortable to take a risk on the Confederacy, too devoted to their fine livestock, farms, and slaves. Increasingly disgusted, he pondered a full retreat. When local pro-​Confederate leaders explained that it was only the fear of Union reprisals that held back would-​be Confederates, Bragg instead decided to meet with Kirby Smith in Lexington. From there the two generals would ride on to the state capital at Frankfort,

278   Kenneth W. Noe formally install rump Kentucky Confederate governor Richard Hawes, and have Hawes begin drafting men into Confederate service. As he explained the dubious rationale to Richmond, Kentuckians apparently wanted to be conscripted in order to escape reprisals if Bragg could not hold the commonwealth. Adding to Bragg’s dilemma were events on the Mississippi flank, where Price and Van Dorn remained mired down. On September 11, prodded by Bragg, Price had finally started moving his Army of the West—​no more than a division numerically—​ north from around Tupelo. He hoped to threaten Grant’s communications in western Tennessee or else retake Corinth. His march coincided with an unexpected spell of stormy weather. Muddy roads mired the column’s baggage in the rear. Reaching Iuka, Price stopped on September 14 in another afternoon rain, expecting Van Dorn’s Army of West Tennessee to join him. He waited in vain. Van Dorn had halted a four-​days’-​march away at Holly Springs. Price’s halt and Van Dorn’s inaction shifted the initiative to Grant. He concentrated at Corinth and determined to attack Price before he could be reinforced. Iuka was roughly twenty miles away. On September 16, Rosecrans, with two divisions plus cavalry, marched south to Rienzi. There they would turn eastward to Iuka. Meanwhile Maj. Gen. Edward O. C. Ord and three divisions moved down the more direct path along the Memphis & Charleston Railroad. Grant rode with Ord. Rain poured again on September 17 and into the cool next morning, as it did farther north in Kentucky. It left the roads muddy and slow. On the following night, Ord’s column reached the outskirts of Iuka. Rosecrans was not there, however, as the longer distance, difficult terrain, and especially the unexpectedly muddy roads delayed him. During the next afternoon, Price began retreating to Rienzi and the rendezvous with Van Dorn. Late in the day, he ran smack into Rosecrans’s approaching column on the same road. The recent rain had tamped down any tell-​tale dust, making for splendid marching but little advance warning. The combatants fought two hours until just beyond nightfall, into unseasonably cold darkness. Grant found out only the next day, deceived by a combination of a north wind and terrain that created the atmospheric phenomenon known as acoustic shadow, disrupting sound waves and deadening the sound of fighting. His planned counterattack missed Price, who soon rendezvoused with Van Dorn. In the end, Bragg could count on little help from Mississippi, where Price and van Dorn were stuck. On September 25, six days after the Battle of Iuka, Buell’s dehydrated and exhausted army staggered into Louisville. The drought-​ravaged Ohio River was so low that some Hoosiers deserted by wading it on foot. Morale generally increased, however, although the men hated Buell more than ever. He began reorganizing his army, absorbing the city’s raw recruits as well as the three divisions of reinforcements from Grant. It did not go smoothly. His veterans detested the new recruits as effete cowards motivated by money. A dust-​free uniform was a badge of dishonor. Then, on September 29, Brig. Gen. Jefferson C. Davis of Indiana murdered Bull Nelson at the climax of an ugly argument ongoing since the Battle of Richmond and the subsequent search for scapegoats. In an effort to fill the spot with someone he could trust, Buell turned to Charles Gilbert. The appointment of the recent captain to corps command infuriated others, most notably Brig.

The Kentucky Campaign of 1862 and Drought    279 Gen. Philip Sheridan. Buell simultaneously fended off challenges from Washington, as Lincoln wanted to fire Buell and replace him with Maj. Gen. George Thomas. Buell kept his position only because Thomas refused it, and Halleck smoothed the waters. On October 1, the same day that Bragg arrived in Lexington to meet with Kirby Smith, Buell moved most of his 57,000-​man army toward Bragg’s 16,800 Confederates at Bardstown. Three Federal corps marched to the southeast on three roads to maximize available water and forage. Two divisions under Brig. Gen. Joshua Sill meanwhile feinted toward Frankfort, hoping to pin Kirby Smith in place while confusing Bragg. Harsh conditions on the march proved sadly familiar to Buell’s veterans but taxed the new recruits to their limits. The temperature rose to 86 degrees. Soldiers complained of hot daytime temperatures and thick, stifling dust in clouds that rose beyond the treetops. Light showers that began during the afternoon of October 2 lasted sporadically into the next morning, but 0.16 inches of rain could do little more than hold down the dust for a time. It did almost nothing to relieve thirst. Another shower on the morning of October 4 (0.19 inches) produced similar results. Once again, men were reduced to drinking from warm, stagnant ponds and dirty puddles.11 Meanwhile, all along the way, as during the Hell March, enslaved African Americans joined them. Once again they found support from an increasingly antislavery rank and file, now marching in the aftermath of the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation and soldier misunderstandings about its particulars. More than once, soldiers defied their officers up the ranks to Buell, driving away local slave owners attempting to reclaim escapees. On October 2 near Taylorsville, the men of the 21st Wisconsin and elements of the 24th Illinois violently confronted two men looking for their slaves and threatened to lynch them. In response, their division commander, Kentucky-​born Brig. Gen. Lovell Rousseau, disarmed the Wisconsin regiment, ordered them into a hollow square, and demanded that the ringleaders surrender or else he would open fire. They did, but that night their comrades burned down the slave owners’ houses, and the escaped slaves vanished with the regiment. The divide over slavery between Buell and his men was widening as the army neared battle.12 Elements of Buell’s center Second Corps drove away skirmishing defenders and took Bardstown with little fighting on October 4. To the north, Sill approached the capital on the same gray, rainy morning. Panic and confusion ensued, ruining the festivities that followed Governor Hawes’s planned address. Bragg and his staff fled, abandoning the newly installed government on its only day in power. Initially convinced by erroneous reports from Kirby Smith that Sill represented most of Buell’s army, Bragg ordered senior subordinate Maj. Gen. Leonidas Polk to march the army north from Bardstown and strike Sill. Feeling pressure from the northwest, Polk instead retreated to the southeast, toward Danville. As the two armies approached each other in Kentucky, the related campaign in Mississippi also reached its climax. Rosecrans held Corinth with his army of twenty-​ three thousand. Headstrong as ever, Van Dorn led his combined army toward Corinth on the morning of September 30, initially feinting toward Ord at Bolivar. As elsewhere, the days were hot and the road dusty, and there was little water on Van Dorn’s route.

280   Kenneth W. Noe He approached the still-​fortified city from the northwest on the morning of October 3, believing reports that the rings of entrenchments there were particularly weak. As the day lengthened, it became sunny and blistering hot. John Sanborn, colonel of the 4th Minnesota, reported, “[T]‌he heat during the engagement of my command was most intense, said to be 108° in the shade, and more men were carried off the field on litters from the effects of sun-​stroke than from wounds.”13 Other commanders cited heat exhaustion as well as sunstroke, which they attributed to the heat, dust, and dearth of water. Three earthquake tremors added to the developing drama. At about 10:00 a.m., Van Dorn attacked. The Confederates breached the outer ring of rifle pits but could do no more. As night fell, Rosecrans pulled his men back into more compact inner lines and prepared for the morning. Sweaty and exhausted combatants collapsed in their places. Van Dorn dismissed his subordinates’ notions of a night attack and instead bivouacked his men, determined to renew the battle in the morning. He wrote, “[M]y troops . . . were greatly exhausted by heat, by thirst, and by the fatigue which excess of valor created.”14 Before dawn, Van Dorn pounded Rosecrans’s lines with artillery and then launched a new assault. Union reinforcements stemmed two breakthroughs and responded with murderous artillery fire. In the words of one Federal soldier, the Confederate attack melted like thawing snow. By afternoon Van Dorn’s army was in retreat. Three days later, on October 7, the Kentucky campaign came to a head. Most of Polk’s retreating army marched through the small market town of Perryville. It boasted three critical attributes. There was water there. In addition to various springs, pools of stagnant water remained in the bed of the Chaplin River, which bisected the town. Perryville also was the junction of the three roads Buell was using. Hills west of town finally made for a strong defensive position. After a series of murky dispatches, Bragg told Polk to stop at Perryville and defeat the pursuing Federal force before continuing north. No one in gray understood that Gilbert’s entire corps of Buell’s army was just a few miles west, or that the other two corps were poised to arrive from the northwest and southwest. Accordingly, one Confederate division kept moving north as the others returned to Perryville. Most of Polk’s force camped that night along the dry bed of the Chaplin River, but a brigade of Arkansans took up a tripwire position west of town in the hills. A lone Arkansas regiment camped on the far western point of the Confederate line, a spot known as Peters Hill. Behind them, in the valley between them and farmer Sam Bottom’s house, were the springs of precious water. That night, a majority of Perryville’s population fled, most into the hills south of town. For the Federals approaching Perryville that night, the final days of the march had been the most excruciating of all. The high in nearby Danville was 90 degrees on October 7.15 The landscape grew more rolling and rocky. The turnpikes south and east of Bardstown produced a fine white limestone dust that proved to be suffocating. Straggling increased until entire regiments began to disintegrate along the road. Gilbert’s unhappy corps in particular seemed to be coming apart. Above all was the problem of water, both its scarcity and the microbes swimming in what water the men could find. Columns marched for hours with empty canteens, only to find nothing except scattered ponds covered with the too-​familiar green scum. The corps commander’s imperious

The Kentucky Campaign of 1862 and Drought    281 and profane ways—​notably his pattern of reserving precious water for officers—​led to repeated incidents of near-​mutiny. Third Corps’ dire need of water started the Battle of Perryville. The night sky was beautiful and cloudless, with a 9:00 temperature of 75 degrees in Danville.16 A full moon bathed the ground with light. Before daylight on October 8, Federal troops moved forward to seize Peters Hill and the spring at its eastern base, discovered hours earlier. The Arkansans fought hard to hold it. The morning grew increasingly hot as the fighting drew more troops into the struggle. Their movements stirred up enormous clouds of dust in the drought-​ravaged environment. Polk broke off combat late in the morning, shocked by Federal numbers, and took up a defensive position. When Bragg arrived unexpectedly late in the morning, he found only silence. His anger grew when he found that Polk’s new defensive line was critically flawed, with the right completely in the air. Still erroneously convinced that he commanded a numerically superior force, Bragg hastily shifted troops to his right in order to launch an afternoon attack against what he believed to be the Union forces’ vulnerable left flank. When the attack finally went off tardily at about 2:00  p.m.—​the temperature was about 90 degrees—​the Confederate assault drove directly into Buell’s First Corps.17 Commanded by Maj. Gen. Alexander McDowell McCook, it was just coming into line on the northern side of the field. Soon the fighting spread south across McCook’s front to the banks of Doctor’s Creek, all but dry in the drought except for scattered puddles that had attracted thirsty and now suddenly surprised Federals. The two forces battled into the evening and night along a north-​south axis. The Confederates steadily forced back McCook’s line through the bloody afternoon, but at nightfall could not maintain a brief breakthrough. To the south, an arrogant and confused Gilbert squandered an opportunity to take the town and cut off the Confederates’ line of retreat. On the Federal right, Maj. Gen. Thomas Crittenden’s Second Corps wasted the day sparring with Confederate cavalry. Buell might have brought some coordination to the battle, but he could not hear it. Injured in a fall the previous evening, he spent most of the day relaxing on his cot, hearing nothing more than what he believed to be scattered artillery fire. Like Grant at Iuka, he was the victim of acoustic shadow. McCook’s men thus did the lion’s share of the fighting until late in the day, when Buell and Gilbert reluctantly sent a few regiments into the fray after scattered and hard-​to-​believe reports trickled into headquarters and finally convinced Buell to act. The command situation across the lines was no better, as Bragg’s division and brigade commanders fought all afternoon without much coordination or vision. Perryville had quickly deteriorated into a classic soldiers’ battle. Night fell, and with it the killing ended. The full moon in a clear sky fully exposed the horrors of the day and shone in dead men’s eyes. Soldiers remained desperate for water, especially the wounded. Men searched the countryside for it. Some shoved aside the dead to drink from the now-​bloody pools in the bed of Doctor’s Creek. At his headquarters, Bragg finally realized that most of Buell’s army was at Perryville, not farther north, and he was outnumbered. The Confederates gathered up weapons and supplies and fled during the night, aided by the clear sky and bright moon. They went first to Harrodsburg

282   Kenneth W. Noe and then to Bragg’s planned supply depot fifteen miles beyond. Buell gingerly followed. The roads remained dusty, but the weather now alternated between hot daytime sun and heavy showers, until the first frost of the season appeared on the night of October 14. Perryville marked the de facto end of summer and beginning of autumn. By the time of that first frost, the Confederate Army was gone. Despite a tardy junction with Kirby Smith and his army, Bragg concluded that he had neither the supplies nor the numbers to hold Kentucky. In part due to the drought, the stores he had anticipated were so meager that he could feed his army for only four days. Still angry at Kentucky, Bragg marched straight for the Cumberland Gap and Tennessee. The Confederates slipped past Buell and trudged south into the mountains on two separate roads. Conditions grew cooler with the elevation and the passing of the season. Mornings grew frosty, while fog and mist were common. Many Confederates lacked proper clothing and shoes. All along the way they left wounded and dying men. The rest grew more hungry and angry by the day. They also were afraid, as snipers began to appear along their paths. South-​central and eastern Kentucky by the fall of 1862 had become a killing ground for various groups of secessionist and Unionist insurgents that operated there, as well as across the border in Tennessee and Virginia. Sometimes the guerrillas rode alongside regular troops, as during John Hunt Morgan’s raid the previous summer, but more often they went it alone, targeting enemy soldiers and local foes. Fed, hidden, and otherwise supported by local networks of kin and neighbors, guerrilla organizations typically reflected the complex communities that produced them. Their unwillingness to embrace the official chain of command or follow the established rules of war soon led uniformed soldiers on both sides to damn them as criminals rather than praise them as fellow soldiers. Even before Halleck asked Professor Francis Lieber to develop a military code of conduct that in part finally allowed Federal soldiers to execute guerrillas in the field, both sides were doing it without sanction in the Appalachians. Bragg’s invasion of Kentucky in September, offering hope and support to the local secessionist minority, had stirred up a new wave of insurgent violence. Secessionist guerrillas lay waste to Unionist farms and communities in September and October. The notorious guerrilla Champ Ferguson, ostensibly on a courier mission for Confederate authorities in Knoxville, went on a murder spree, killing five men in cold blood. Small bands of mountain Unionists then dogged the Confederate retreat, repeatedly taking aim at the two Confederate columns as they approached East Tennessee in mid-​October. Enraged Confederates responded with more violence. James Chalmers’s Mississippians retaliated against their alleged tormentors by lynching sixteen suspected bushwhackers from a single oak tree. The ongoing partisan threat, however, still was not enough to stem rampant straggling and desertion as the march continued. Once the Confederates passed by, Union cavalry entered the region to turn the tables on men such as Ferguson, and the local guerrilla war continued unabated into the winter. Sullen and exhausted, Bragg’s troops passed through Cumberland Gap—​already abandoned by its Federal defenders—​on October 18. They entrained in Morristown,

The Kentucky Campaign of 1862 and Drought    283 Tennessee, for Knoxville. On October 25, the weather again changed dramatically. That afternoon it began to snow. Back in Kentucky, the sudden change in the weather took an additional toll on Buell’s army. Their victory seemed to matter little in Washington. Bragg had escaped. Worse, Buell had ordered his pursuing army toward Nashville. The White House pressured Buell to turn and follow Bragg into Eastern Tennessee before winter made the roads impassable. Buell refused, maintaining that taking an army into the barren Appalachians with winter approaching would be madness. Lincoln was incredulous. Why could Bragg’s army operate there but not Buell’s? Typically, the president was not impressed with the realities of logistics or topography. On October 24, Halleck fired Buell and completely reorganized the theater, creating a new Department of the Cumberland with Rosecrans its commander. Grant received command of the new Department of the Tennessee, which stretched down the Mississippi River almost to New Orleans.18 Heat, dust, and drought shaped the Kentucky Campaign from the first to almost the last. The effect on the Battle of Perryville was, if anything, more profound, as Buell later argued. Now both the campaign and the heat were over. October 26, the day Federals woke up covered by shrouds of snow, was also the day the Army of the Ohio found out that it had a new commanding officer. Ironically, Rosecrans decided to continue Buell’s controversial plans and marched his army on toward Nashville instead of Eastern Tennessee. On separate paths, the armies that fought at Perryville began heading toward another rendezvous in quite a different season. They left a devastated region in their wake. Wounded men crowded homes, barns, churches, and open fields around Perryville and south along the line of march. Many died over the next weeks. The battle dead, roughly 1,300 of them, lay in shallow graves or still out in the open. Unburied Confederates bloated and decomposed until locals under army direction buried them in mass pits. Amputated body parts littered the yards of homes that had been hospitals. Farmers, especially Confederate sympathizers, faced an uncertain winter with their stores depleted by the Federal army. Hogs that had feasted upon the fallen died themselves. Across the state, the fears of Bragg’s supporters came true. At the beginning of December, Bragg complained to Federal authorities in Kentucky about arrests of pro-​ Confederate civilians and their imprisonment in Ohio. Retribution, local violence, and insurgency continued and remained a reality well into Reconstruction, especially in central Kentucky, where the armies had marched and fought. Bitterness regarding emancipation and Black enlistment made African Americans special targets before and after Appomattox. Self-​styled “Regulators” regularly targeted African American soldiers.19 Meanwhile, at Perryville, former slaves and soldiers established a postwar community called Sleettown on a section of the battlefield. The Sleet brothers had escaped from slavery when the Federal army left Perryville and as ineligible Kentuckians had enlisted under assumed names. Until its demise during the Great Depression, Sleettown offered a tangible reminder of what the Kentucky Campaign and the wider war ultimately meant: the survival of the Union and an uncertain freedom in Kentucky.20

284   Kenneth W. Noe

Notes 1. U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1886) (hereafter cited as OR), ser. 1, vol. 17, pt. 2: 644, 645. 2. Louisville, Kentucky, August 1862, Reel 189, Microfilm T907, RG 27.5.7, Records of the Division of Station Facilities and Meteorological Observations and Its Predecessors, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD (hereafter cited as RG 27.5.7, NARA-​CP). 3. Louisville, Kentucky, August 1862, Reel 189, RG 27.5.7, NARA-​CP. 4. Louisville, Kentucky, September 1862, Reel 189, RG 27.5.7, NARA-​CP. 5. Louisville, Kentucky, September 1862, Reel 189, RG 27.5.7, NARA-​CP. 6. Albion W. Tourgée, The Story of a Thousand: Being a History of the Service of the 105th Ohio Volunteer Infantry in the War for the Union from August 21, 1862 to June 6, 1865 (Buffalo, NY: S. McGerald & Son, 1896), 101–​102. 7. Louisville, Kentucky, September 1862, Reel 189, RG 27.5.7, NARA-​CP. 8. Kenneth Hafendorfer, ed., Civil War Journal of William L. Trask: Confederate Sailor and Soldier (Louisville, KY: KH Press, 2003), 43. 9. Louisville, Kentucky, August 1862, Reel 189, RG 27.5.7, NARA-​CP; Clarksville, Tennessee, September 1862, Reel 478, RG 27.5.7, NARA-​CP. 10. Louisville, Kentucky, September 1862, Reel 189, RG 27.5.7, NARA-​CP. 11. Louisville, Kentucky, October 1862, Reel 189, RG 27.5.7, NARA-​CP. 12. John Henry Otto Memoirs, October 3–​4, 1862, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison. 13. OR ser. 1, vol. 17, pt. 1: 222. 14. OR ser. 1, vol. 17, pt. 1: 457. 15. Louisville, Kentucky, October 1862, Reel 189, RG 27.5.7, NARA-​CP. 16. Louisville, Kentucky, October 1862, Reel 189, RG 27.5.7, NARA-​CP. 17. Louisville, Kentucky, October 1862, Reel 189, RG 27.5.7, NARA-​CP. 18. OR ser. 1, vol. 16, pt. 2: 630–​631, 634, 636–​638, 640–​642, 650, 652. 19. George C. Wright, Racial Violence in Kentucky, 1865–​1940: Lynchings, Mob Rule, and “Legal Lynchings” (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), 42–​43, 307–​311. 20. Brenda S. Edwards, “Preserving a Settlement,” Danville (KY) Advocate-​Messenger, May 28, 2006.

Bibliography Connelly, Thomas Lawrence. Army of the Heartland: The Army of Tennessee, 1861–​1862. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967. Cozzens, Peter. The Darkest Days of the War:  The Battles of Iuka and Corinth. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Daniel, Larry J. Days of Glory: The Army of the Cumberland, 1861–​1865. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004. Hess, Earl J. Banners to the Breeze:  The Kentucky Campaign, Corinth, and Stones River. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000.

The Kentucky Campaign of 1862 and Drought    285 Hess, Earl J. Braxton Bragg: The Most Hated Man of the Confederacy. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. Engle, Stephen D. Don Carlos Buell: Most Promising of All. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. Manning, Chandra. Troubled Refuge:  Struggling for Freedom in the Civil War. New York: Vintage, 2017. McKnight, Brian D. Confederate Outlaw: Champ Ferguson and the Civil War in Appalachia. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011. McKnight, Brian D., and Barton A. Myers, eds. The Guerrilla Hunters: Irregular Conflicts during the Civil War. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017. Noe, Kenneth W. Perryville:  This Grand Havoc of Battle. Lexington:  University Press of Kentucky, 2009. Prokopowicz, Gerald J. All for the Regiment:  The Army of the Ohio, 1861–​ 62. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Sheehan-​Dean, Aaron. The Calculus of Violence:  How Americans Fought the Civil War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. Taylor, Amy Murrell. Embattled Freedom: Journeys through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Wright, George C. Racial Violence in Kentucky, 1865–​1940: Lynchings, Mob Rule, and “Legal Lynchings.” Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990.

Chapter 17

Sec ond BUL L RU N/ Manas s as Clash of Partisan Armies John H. Matsui

In August 1862, the fields north of the railroad junction of Manassas witnessed the deadly clash of competing political ideologies. For the first time, an army commanded by Republican generals marched onto a major battlefield, but a battlefield that pitted not two but three armies against each other. The two Union armies opposed each other on ideological rather than belligerent grounds. Over the previous thirteen months, including on the same site the previous July, Northern and Southern Democrats and West Point graduates dominated the command of the belligerent armies in Virginia. The Army of Virginia—​reinforced by half of the Army of the Potomac—​was a Union army composed of and commanded by a majority of Republicans (voters and party leaders), many of them westerners who disliked eastern Democrats and West Point “professionals.” If the Republican army and its ideology were both defeated at Second Manassas, they returned to Virginia again decisively in the spring of 1864 with western generals, generals who represented the Republican “hard war” ideology pioneered by John Pope.

Three Partisan Armies: Combatants and Commanders Maj. Gen. John Pope was a West Point graduate with strong antebellum ties to Pres. Abraham Lincoln, the western states, and the Republican Party. Pope won fame after he captured a Confederate garrison on Island No. 10 in the Mississippi River, and Lincoln brought him east at the conclusion of the Corinth Campaign. That campaign looked dishearteningly similar to Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan’s efforts against Richmond,

SECOND BULL RUN/MANASSAS    287 namely the sluggish advance of a large host against an inferior enemy force, and only Pope among the generals involved enhanced his reputation for aggressiveness. That offensive spirit gained him the interest of congressional radicals who pressed Lincoln to bring him east to replace McClellan. He took command of the Army of Virginia on June 26, the very day that the future Democratic presidential hopeful’s grand campaign against Richmond fell apart in the face of aggressive counterattacks by Gen. Robert E. Lee. Developments in Virginia flipped the reputations of Lee and McClellan during the month prior to and concurrent with the formation of the new army. Following the wounding of Gen. Joseph E. Johnston at Seven Pines, Lee took command of the forces defending Richmond, now designated the Army of Northern Virginia. While McClellan knocked on the gates of Richmond, Maj. Gen. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson confused and defeated fifty thousand Union soldiers in the Shenandoah Valley before marching to reinforce Lee. The day the Army of Virginia was formed to deal with Jackson, Lee launched a series of offensives that shoved McClellan away from the Confederate capital. Yet Jackson—​physically and mentally exhausted by his lightning campaign in the Valley—​ performed poorly on several of these crucial days, enabling McClellan’s forces to escape destruction. Until this battle, Jackson was the most feted Confederate general in Virginia, but now Lee moved to the fore as the savior of Richmond, with Jackson a close second. From bottom to top, the Army of Virginia was representative of the Unionist population of the United States, and of the white northerners and westerners who provided Abraham Lincoln with a plurality of the popular vote in 1860. More than a quarter of the army’s ninety infantry regiments hailed from western states, all of which (excepting Missouri) turned out Republican majorities in 1860, and another tenth marched from border states such as (West) Virginia. A much larger share of the Virginia army’s generals were military amateurs or partisan Republican “political generals,” compared to McClellan’s officers. The commanders of two of Pope’s three corps were Republican politicians, one the 1856 presidential candidate and the other the party’s first speaker of the House. First Corps commander Maj. Gen. John C. Frémont resigned rather than serve under his former subordinate, but Maj. Gen. Nathaniel P. Banks, a former governor of Massachusetts, loyally stayed on. Frémont was replaced by another political general, Maj. Gen. Franz Sigel, who as a leader of the revolutions of 1848 helped Lincoln win over German-​speaking voters in the Old Northwest and Missouri in 1860. These Republican generals desired the abolition of slavery or accepted that the war would result in emancipation as collateral damage in crushing the rebellion, an outcome that Democratic generals in McClellan’s army rejected and actively opposed. Western Republicans were representative of this radicalism due to the sense—​already evident immediately after the first Republican effort to elect a president in 1856—​that westerners possessed a clear sense of purpose. German revolutionary Carl Schurz wrote from Wisconsin in 1857 that western Republicans lacked the “bargaining spirit . . . which gangrenes all political organizations in the East.” Schurz, a division commander under Pope by August 1862 and a frequent correspondent with Lincoln, was convinced that “the radical or rather the philosophical wing of the Republican party here will gradually obtain the control of its policy.”1 The Army of Virginia represented the western

288   John H. Matsui Republican ideology of uncompromising Unionism and antislavery policy envisioned by Schurz. The Army of the Potomac was twice the size of Pope’s army. Nearly all of its generals were graduates of the military academy, and the few outliers tended to be Democratic leaders like Brig. Gen. John Cochrane, Brig. Gen. Thomas F. Meagher, and Brig. Gen. Daniel E.  Sickles, all of Tammany Hall. There were two exceptions to this rule:  the Republican sympathizer Brig. Gen. David B. Birney and his division commander, Maj. Gen. Philip Kearny. Birney was the son of an abolitionist presidential candidate for the Liberty Party and an advocate for the recruiting and use of Black soldiers. He argued that positive action rather than the antebellum tendency of excessive “talking . . . [and] philosophy” should be taken to reverse “our craven submission to the great crime of slavery.”2 Kearny was an eccentric millionaire with extensive combat experience in Mexico and Europe, though no West Point training, who lost an arm charging the gates of Mexico City. He was disgusted by McClellan’s cautious generalship—​labeling McClellan “a traitor, as well as utterly incapable”—​and hoped that he would find a more aggressive policy with Pope.3 The army’s rank and file hailed largely from the eastern seaboard, and urban Democratic strongholds like New York featured heavily in the constituent regiments. Few members of the Irish Brigade had voted for Lincoln in 1860. Two brigades hailed from New Jersey, which split its seven electoral votes between Lincoln and Northern Democrat Stephen Douglas. Only 10 of its nearly 140 volunteer infantry regiments originated in western states, which uniformly provided majorities for Lincoln in 1860. The question remained how much of it returned from the Peninsula in time in to reinforce Pope before Lee struck the vulnerable Army of Virginia. The ostensible enemy of both Pope and McClellan was the Army of Northern Virginia, commanded since June by Lee. Slaveholders (or at least those who belonged to slaveholding families) were overrepresented in both the enlisted and (especially) the officer ranks compared to the overall white population of the Confederacy. If none of Lee’s chief lieutenants was an antebellum politician, several brigade commanders were influential advocates of secession. Brig. Gen. Robert Toombs of Georgia, Brig. Gen. Lawrence O. Branch of North Carolina, and Brig. Gen. James L. Kemper (temporarily commanding a division) and Brig. Gen. Roger A. Pryor of Virginia were prominent Democratic politicians. Their colleague Brig. Gen. Maxcy Gregg of South Carolina seceded from the party as insufficiently pro-​slavery. Gregg, Pryor, and Toombs were among the most vehement Fire-​Eaters, antebellum political extremists favoring the unlimited expansion of slavery. Eight of Lee’s twenty-​nine brigade commanders were antebellum politicians. If John Pope had to accept the three corps commanders in place—​or at least those willing to work with him—​at the formation of the Army of Virginia, Lee had a month to reorganize his army in the wake of the lessons learned against McClellan. He welcomed the reassignment of four of his division commanders deemed indecisive in combat or otherwise problematic. In accordance with Confederate president Jefferson Davis’s wishes, he moved regiments around so that two-​thirds of his infantry brigades

SECOND BULL RUN/MANASSAS    289 contained regiments from only one state. Not permitted by Confederate law to form corps, Lee chose Jackson and Maj. Gen. James Longstreet to lead the two wings of the Army of Northern Virginia, and promoted Maj. Gen. James E. B. Stuart to command the division of cavalry. All but one of the division commanders were graduates of West Point, the exception the speaker of the House of Virginia, James Kemper, a Mexican War veteran. One of Lee’s senior lieutenants warned his men that the Union fought to “make the negro your equal by declaring his freedom” and cared not about the consequences of servile insurrection for the White “babes  .  .  .  [and] innocent women” of the Confederacy.4 James Longstreet may be remembered for joining the Republican Party during Reconstruction, but he was a pro-​slavery ideologue during the war. He was now one of Lee’s wing commanders, responsible for half of the army’s infantry. One scion of a North Carolina planter family feared that Pope’s army sought to “seduce and arm our Slaves,” echoing Longstreet.5 Pope made it clear that his army’s policy differed markedly from the eastern Democrats heretofore running the war effort in Virginia, and these decrees were taken to be barbaric not only by Lee’s army but by the commanders of the Potomac army as well. Starting on July 10—​while still headquartered near the politicians in Washington—​ Pope issued a string of decrees. These general orders held civilians responsible for guerrilla violence and required to swear loyalty oaths to the Union on pain of exile, while opening civilian property—​including slaves—​for confiscation for use in the Union war effort. Pope’s decrees fit neatly with the contemporaneous Second Confiscation Act by the Republican-​dominated Congress. McClellan meanwhile lectured Lincoln from Harrison’s Landing that the war should be conducted on “the highest principles known to Christian civilization,” with limited aims to avoid revolution by threatening slavery.6 A month later he wrote his wife of a wish to “[s]‌trike square in the teeth of all [Pope’s] infamous orders & give directly the reverse instructions to my army—​forbid all pillaging and stealing and take the highest Christian ground for the conduct of the war.”7 The Confederate leadership was more appalled than McClellan about Pope’s war on secessionist civilians and slavery. On July 14 Jackson met with his brother-​in-​law, a cavalry captain. In this private meeting, Jackson recalled a chat they had in Lexington during the 1860 election campaign, which included discussion of the possibility of a civil war following an unsatisfactory political outcome. Jackson claimed no “special concern for slavery, but both agreed that if the sword was once drawn, the South would have no alternative but to defend her homes and firesides, slavery and all,” as a Northern triumph would lead to the “dissolution of the bonds of all society.” This led to Jackson’s view that “the black flag” should be raised “at once” to wage total war against invaders, but “the people of the South were not prepared for such a policy” in 1861. “But all this is now suddenly changed by the cruel and utterly barbarous orders of General Pope.”8 Jackson admitted to his younger relative that he had recently met with Lee to discuss the new dispensation in Union policy, and Lee was “in great perplexity how to meet it,” but that Jackson shared his plans to destroy Pope’s army and its policy.9 Lee forwarded Jackson’s plans to Davis, plans deemed “the only way to check Pope’s dastardly system

290   John H. Matsui of warfare and plunder.” Jackson also noted the confusion of the situation, for not only were Confederate civil authorities committed “to a very stilted style of waging war,” but McClellan remained “nominally in command” of Union forces in Virginia, “and his mode of warfare is in strict conformity to the usages of civilized nations.”10 Jackson desired to turn Pope’s policies against Northern cities and civilians, but more realistically suggested that while Pope’s soldiers would be paroled, “noted leaders [would be held] as hostages for ransom or for retaliation,” a view Davis translated into policy.11 Jackson credited Pope’s decrees with “fast opening [the] eyes” of white Southerners to “the scope and design of the Abolition element” being implemented by “Ben Butler, Fremont, and Pope.”12 Jackson’s distinction between the Republican Army of Virginia and the Democratic Army of the Potomac eventuated in Davis’s designating Pope’s officers outlaws to be held without parole, with the possibility of later execution in reprisal for further Union atrocities. Davis’s treatment of officers captured from Pope’s army bears comparison with how the Confederate president responded to Democratic Maj. Gen. Benjamin F. Butler’s draconian occupation policy in New Orleans. Seven months after Butler issued the infamous order that women who disrespected Union soldiers could be treated “as a woman of the town plying her avocation,” Davis declared Butler an outlaw. Pope never gave his officers—​let  alone his enlisted men—​permission to treat Virginia’s pro-​secession women like prostitutes, yet Davis took less than seven weeks to decide that Pope’s officers should be treated differently from McClellan’s. An officer captured at Cedar Mountain noted in mid-​September that more than sixty of Pope’s officers languished in Libby Prison, while a like number of McClellan’s officers were notified that they were being released on parole after only two days in prison. Held as “Felons and Convicts,” they were “deprived of fresh air, wholesome water, exercise; fed on revolting food, [and] denied books.”13 Only three weeks after Pope’s army ceased to exist did dozens of its officers finally receive their parole, following Secretary of War Edwin Stanton’s notice to Richmond that Pope’s decrees were no longer in force. Even before Pope joined his army in the field, his troops declared war on the eastern, Democratic way that McClellan conducted the military occupation in Virginia. The Piedmont region’s inhabitants suffered the bulk of Pope’s confiscatory policies, including the communities of Culpeper and Warrenton. First in Missouri, Pope held local communities liable for damage to public property inflicted by Rebel guerrillas even as his men confiscated the livestock and fence rails of Piedmont farmers to feed their bellies and cooking fires, with postwar compensation promised to loyal citizens. Confiscating property not only fed Pope’s army; doing so denied its use to aid the rebellion. Pope’s decrees alarmed white civilians, particularly those who supported the Confederacy, not least because Union soldiers now regularly entered Piedmont farms and farmhouses to look for food, firewood, and disloyal men. Women felt endangered by these armed invaders, and their male relatives felt powerless to defend them in the face of physical and sexual threats. The depredations of Pope’s army during their occupation of Culpeper convinced some white locals to leave the town entirely. One resident lamented the blighting of “the place in which my childhood was spent, where my best friends

SECOND BULL RUN/MANASSAS    291 live,” yet “these wretches, who forget the teachings of civilization and the amenities of civilized warfare . . . seem to have become as savages” and verbally threatened his wife while confiscating his property.14 The ways Pope’s volunteer soldiers put his words into action often exceeded intentions, leading Pope and his corps commanders to warn subordinates that permission to confiscate Rebel property was not a license to plunder. These clarifications had little impact. Many enlisted men did not care, deeming Virginia’s civilians the enemy. They resented the orders imposed on them by conservative generals to guard civilian property when they blamed many of those same civilians for sheltering—​or indeed being part of—​ guerrilla raiding parties. Encamped near Warrenton as they rejoined Maj. Gen. Irvin McDowell’s Third Corps following service on the Peninsula, men of the Pennsylvania Reserves disregarded warnings of punishment for misbehavior. The adjutant of the 9th Reserves noted that the soldiers disrupted his reading of the warning: “The men [are] much addicted to pillaging,” and the orders “seem to have done no good. Little pigs, chickens and corn come in as fast as ever,” for the men “seem to think they have a right to assume the responsibility of destroying every thing in Virginia.”15

Cedar Mountain Prelude Unlike the Army of the Potomac, the Army of Virginia spent half of its existence on occupation duty. Only in August, when the Army of the Potomac was ordered away from the Peninsula and Jackson’s forces advanced on Culpeper Court House, did active campaigning involving the bulk of Pope’s and Lee’s armies begin in earnest. Jackson began his campaign to destroy Pope’s ideology and army while Pope was keen to bring the war to the Confederacy, both combatants and civilians. The combat at Cedar Mountain was a fitting prelude to the battle at Bull Run. Less than half of each army was directly involved, yet this engagement was a microcosm of the ideological struggle in the summer of 1862. Pope’s Second Corps was a good representative of the Republican Party in arms. Led by a former Republican speaker of the House, the eight-​thousand-​strong Second Corps was the smallest of Pope’s units and contained mostly New England and western units in its seventeen regiments. Advancing on the rail depot at Gordonsville, Banks’s five small brigades ran into Jackson’s fourteen on August 9 near Culpeper. Banks impetuously attacked and drove back a similar number of Jackson’s defenders, but the rest of Jackson’s seventeen thousand men pushed Banks off the field. Banks’s command suffered a thousand more casualties than the 1,300 lost by Jackson. The failure of Sigel’s nearby brigades to intervene was a warning sign of the army’s inability to coordinate properly, and four of McDowell’s Third Corps brigades covered the retreat. Jackson, now facing the united might of Pope’s entire army, fell back on Gordonsville. Banks was proud of the Herculean effort of his corps; however, the Second Corps’ sacrifice also rendered it incapable of serving as much more than a wagon train guard for the rest of the campaign.

292   John H. Matsui

Map 17.1  Second Bull Run

The check at Cedar Mountain caused another recent arrival from the western theater—​Pope’s former superior and now Lincoln’s general in chief—​Maj. Gen. Henry W. Halleck, to panic. Halleck arrived in Washington on July 23, three weeks after his appointment. Living down to the reputation gained from his cautious campaign against Corinth in the spring, when he reined Pope in from making an aggressive advance, Halleck compelled Pope to give up his advance on Gordonsville just three weeks after taking up his post. Halleck and Lincoln also pressed McClellan to abandon his now nonexistent offensive against Richmond and shift his army to reinforce Pope. By mid-​ August, in other words, Lincoln and Halleck had handed the strategic initiative to Lee, who grasped it firmly for the next month. From August 13 to 25, Lee advanced on Pope, who first held a line on the Rapidan and then the Rappahannock River as he awaited McClellan’s reinforcements. Up to this point, the Army of Virginia had faced only the left wing of Lee’s army. Now the larger right wing of the Army of Northern Virginia under Longstreet was brought to bear, so that, however briefly, the Army of Northern Virginia for the first time outnumbered a Union opponent. Unlike McClellan, Pope invigorated his mounted arm—​organizing his cavalry into brigades under promising officers like Brig. Gen. John Buford—​so that this period was marked by vigorous cavalry raids and skirmishes that garnered important intelligence for both sides. The aggressive actions by the “Republicanized” Union cavalry almost captured Lee’s cavalry chief at one point, and in turn Stuart made off with Pope’s dress uniform after a raid on a Union supply depot.

SECOND BULL RUN/MANASSAS    293 Two of McClellan’s five corps joined Pope at this juncture, joining part of Maj. Gen. Ambrose E. Burnside’s Ninth Corps, recently returned from operations on the coast of North Carolina. The two Army of the Potomac units effecting a juncture with Pope were a study in contrasts. Third Corps was the least professional of McClellan’s units, Fifth Corps the most. Led by Maj. Gen. Samuel Heintzelman—​a friend of Republicans as well as fugitive slaves and therefore no friend of McClellan’s—​Third Corps’ division commanders were two of McClellan’s most aggressive generals, Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker and Philip Kearny. Fifth Corps was crafted by McClellan to provide a home for his confidant Maj. Gen. Fitz John Porter. It served as McClellan’s Praetorian Guard, containing the largest concentration of regular regiments in any army, and was trusted by McClellan above any other. Evidence that Porter and McClellan wished Pope ill could be found beyond Virginia. The commander of an Irish regiment on recruiting duty in Boston made the innocuous remark that Pope’s army would take Richmond. One of Patrick Guiney’s captains reported the remark to McClellan, and Porter contacted the governor of Massachusetts, asking him to delay Guiney’s promotion. In order to seize the closing window of opportunity, Jackson proposed a bold move: divide the army, move the left wing around Pope’s flank, and cut him off from Washington, with the aim of destroying him in detail, as intended against McClellan during the Seven Days Battle. Lee saw the hazards in this movement and remonstrated with Jackson to avoid a major battle until the rest of the army arrived. On August 26 Jackson marched around Pope, who on the following day abandoned his defensive line on the Rappahannock to “bag” Jackson even as his supply depot at Manassas Junction burned. In so doing, Pope willfully ignored the thirty thousand Confederates under Longstreet in his rear, which he continued to do for the next three fateful days. Jackson took up a defensive position in the woods along an unfinished railroad line slightly to the northwest of the battlefield where he had earned the nickname, Stonewall, in 1861.

The Battle (August 28–​30) On August 28 the twenty-​five thousand men of Jackson’s wing sat in cover awaiting the arrival of the rest of Lee’s army as the infantry divisions and cavalry brigades of Pope’s army fanned out in a net on the various roads near Manassas Junction to find the Confederates and bring them to battle. Closest to Jackson’s wing were two of the three divisions in the Third Corps (Pope’s largest corps) led by McDowell. Unlike Banks and Sigel, McDowell was a West Point graduate and considered a Democratic partisan in 1861. But now McDowell rode under the cloud of his defeat at First Manassas, distrusted by McClellan and his closest friends, such as Fifth Corps commander Porter. McDowell unsurprisingly cozied up to Pope and served as his chief lieutenant in this campaign, not least due to his prior experience in this part of Virginia. Jackson missed an opportunity to ambush the three veteran brigades of Pennsylvania Reserves under Brig. Gen. John Reynolds (and Brig. Gen. George Meade) who fought

294   John H. Matsui so stoutly on the Peninsula, but soon found another column passing on the Warrenton Turnpike. Four brigades under Brig. Gen. Rufus King marched toward Centreville. Born in New York and the son of the president of Columbia College, King was a Republican politician and a West Point graduate. He was incapacitated by an epileptic attack, leaving his brigade commanders to their own devices when attacked. Only two of the four brigades—​one the all-​western brigade under Brig. Gen. John Gibbon—​ responded by advancing into battle, and they fought four Confederate brigades to a standstill in a close-​range slugging match until darkness ended the combat. The other Union brigade that moved forward was commanded by Brig. Gen. Abner Doubleday, the only Republican officer stationed at Fort Sumter in 1861. One of Doubleday’s relatives claimed of him, “[T]‌here are not more than twenty such Republican officers in the U.S. Army,” encouraging a Radical Republican senator to support the officer’s bid for a brigadier generalship in 1861.16 The two units that hung back were commanded by conservative West Point graduates Brig. Gen. John Hatch and Brig. Gen. Marsena Patrick, both of whom were critical of Pope. Pope removed Hatch for insufficient aggressiveness in exercising command of a cavalry brigade and transferred him to one of McDowell’s infantry brigades, leaving Hatch to stew. “Pope has not the confidence of us old soldiers,” the West Point graduate noted in August. Hatch was “afraid” of Pope but expressed “perfect confidence” in the newly arrived Ambrose Burnside and hoped he would “superceed [sic] Pope [as army commander] if he is unsuccessful.”17 Burnside, like Hatch, was a friend of McClellan’s. Patrick deemed Pope’s July decree regarding the confiscation of civilian property “the orders of a Demagogue!”18 About a thousand men fell on each side at Brawner’s Farm. The pluck of the two Union brigades—​however much the men recalled Pope’s rhetoric about advancing to meet the enemy—​versus those led by the professional soldiers who yearned for McClellan’s return demonstrated the influence of the aggressive Republican leadership seen at Cedar Mountain. Jackson failed to deploy the other ten brigades in his command, missing a signal opportunity to annihilate eight thousand of Pope’s men when he had a three-​to-​one advantage. Jackson’s abortive ambush also alerted Pope to where the bulk of Jackson’s command was located, and Pope accordingly ordered a concentration of the entire army against Jackson for the next morning. Meanwhile, Longstreet’s wing shoved aside the single Union division McDowell sent to block Thoroughfare Gap and marched on in time to reinforce Jackson about noon the following day. McDowell did not help matters by getting lost that night as he sought to unite his three separated divisions. Pope ordered his army to attack Jackson as soon as each corps arrived on the field. But he failed to coordinate the assaults of the five corps under his command. Disjointed assaults by brigades or divisions followed, and Union casualties mounted. The one, temporary breakthrough in Jackson’s line occurred when five regiments under the West Point graduate and native of Maine Brig. Gen. Cuvier Grover from the Army of the Potomac’s Third Corps executed a bayonet charge. Grover’s assault on the unfinished railroad cut occupied by Maj. Gen. A. P. Hill’s Division prefigured

SECOND BULL RUN/MANASSAS    295 Col. Emory Upton’s twelve-​regiment assault at Spotsylvania Court House in May 1864 (and the Second Corps assault on the same position two days later). Reinforcements pushed Grover out. The fighting on August 29 sputtered out as Porter’s Fifth Corps failed to attack Jackson’s right flank due to the very real presence of Longstreet’s wing. Meanwhile, McClellan refused to release his other two corps (Second and Sixth) to reinforce Pope. He audaciously advised Lincoln to abandon Pope and divert all available resources to keep the capital safe. On multiple occasions on both days, competent generals such as cavalry brigadier John Buford and Pennsylvania Reserve commander John Reynolds warned Pope that they faced significant enemy forces on the army’s left, extending well beyond Jackson’s lines to their front. The army commander consistently disregarded this threat posed by the advent of Longstreet. Before dawn on August 30, the last of Longstreet’s five divisions arrived on the battlefield. Pope, convinced that Jackson’s force took heavier punishment than his seven thousand to eight thousand self-​estimated casualties on the day before and must be on the verge of retreat, ordered McDowell’s Third Corps to attack the Rebel flank, supported by Heintzelman’s Third Corps and possibly Fifth Corps once Porter finally arrived. McDowell urged caution, and a council of war followed around 8:00. About two hours later credible reports finally arrived that Jackson was not retreating but still firmly in his defensive positions. Most of Porter’s Fifth Corps arrived on the Union left in the late morning. Around noon, Pope ordered the two divisions of the Fifth Corps—​supported by two of McDowell’s divisions—​to assault Jackson’s left, while the two divisions of Heintzelman’s Third Corps and McDowell’s other division attacked Jackson’s right. Porter’s Fifth Corps took heavy casualties from the enfilading artillery fire of Longstreet’s wing, and Longstreet’s men counterattacked once Fifth Corps fell back. McDowell ordered several brigades to stem the Rebel tide on Chinn Ridge, but each was overwhelmed in turn. The stout defense of Henry House Hill by five brigades, including two Pennsylvania Reserve and two regular brigades, enabled the rest to fall back on Washington. The effectiveness of Doubleday’s and Gibbon’s brigades at Brawner’s Farm on August 28, Grover’s brigade on August 29, and two of Reynolds’s Pennsylvania Reserve brigades on August 30 lend credence to the argument that the Army of Virginia and its Potomac army reinforcements were most—​and least—​effective at the brigade level. Aggressive commanders like Doubleday, Gibbon, and Grover increased the cohesion and combat effectiveness of the regiments in their command, while cautious brigadiers like Hatch and Patrick diminished theirs. If the Union armies at Second Manassas demonstrated greatest cohesion at the brigade level, Jackson’s wing demonstrated the strength of the Army of Northern Virginia at the division level. The elite brigades of Lee’s army—​Hood’s Texas Brigade, the Stonewall Brigade, and the Louisiana Tigers—​remain the famed units of the army. Yet at Second Manassas several of Lee’s eight infantry divisions operated at a heightened

296   John H. Matsui level, demonstrating a cohesion paralleled in the Union armies only by the Pennsylvania Reserves. This cohesion was possible in part because twenty of the army’s twenty-​nine brigades were already composed of homogeneous regiments from the same state, in comparison to the polyglot composition of most Union brigades. Two of Jackson’s three divisions (his old and A. P. Hill’s “Light Division”) had earned elite status by August 1862, not least due to their leadership. The wounding of two of Jackson’s three division commanders on August 28 hampered the Army of Northern Virginia’s left wing in its attempt to annihilate King’s four brigades. Leadership at the division and brigade levels was crucial to the army’s winning streak, and neither Jackson nor Lee long tolerated generals who lacked an aggressive leadership style, as demonstrated by the departure of four division commanders in July. However, frontline leadership led to high casualties among generals. A. P. Hill, Jackson’s unscathed division commander, led the single best division in Lee’s army, notwithstanding the fact that Grover’s brigade temporarily broke through one of his units and Hill’s prickly relations with wing (and later corps) commanders. Here, Hill held the left flank of Jackson’s line and—​noting the detrimental effect his wooded position had on artillery—​deployed his force in two lines, enabling a swift counterattack when Grover breached his first line. Hill’s division notably contained the highest concentration of political generals in the army.

Aftermath Not quite driven from the field, but with most of the army in disarray, Pope’s army fell back on Centreville and reunited with the remainder of the Army of the Potomac. While the butcher’s bill for these three days was dramatically skewed in sheer numbers—​ roughly fourteen thousand Union casualties versus eight thousand Confederates struck down—​the opponents suffered proportionately similar losses of 16 to 17 percent. If Lee’s army took fewer casualties in absolute terms, it did not make much difference to bereaved Southern civilians. While families mourned, the fighting and dying kept right on. A skirmish at Chantilly on September 1 killed Heintzelman’s aggressive division commander Philip Kearny and inflicted several hundred more casualties on both armies as Lee headed north. The day after his division ended Kearny’s military career, one of Hill’s brigade commanders wrote home. Lawrence Branch claimed the Light Division “performed the most remarkable marches recorded in history,” which involved “[f]‌ighting all day and marching all night . . . for a whole week.” Remarkably, despite “the hail of bullets I have gone through,” he was untouched.19 Little did Branch know that his war would end two weeks later in Maryland. Although several cabinet members thought McClellan’s inaction amounted to treason, with Lee’s army invading Maryland Lincoln recognized that the common soldiers had lost whatever trust they had in Pope, and key gubernatorial and congressional elections

SECOND BULL RUN/MANASSAS    297 were on the horizon. The day after the clash at Chantilly McClellan was placed in command of both armies and set off in pursuit of Lee. Yet a shadow hung over McClellan and his lieutenant, Porter; Republicans demanded blood for the second debacle at Manassas, and a scapegoat might suffice. George McClellan endeavored to have the last word on this campaign, writing, “[M]‌y enemies are crushed, silent, and disarmed.”20 The “enemies” in McClellan’s mind were not the generals of the Rebel army but Pope and his Republican allies. McClellan thought he composed the epitaph of Pope’s Republican, hard-​war strategy while assimilating the Army of Virginia into the Democratic Army of the Potomac and resuming his limited-​ war strategy. If politics played a part in the Republican defeat at Second Manassas, Pope ensured that Republican politicians heard of it. The day before Lincoln issued the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, Pope wrote the Republican governor of Illinois, Richard Yates, like Lincoln and Pope a Kentucky native: “The Praetorian system is as fully developed and in active operation in Washington as it ever was in Ancient Rome.” The defeated general, now suppressing a Sioux uprising in Minnesota, claimed that the “Potomac Army clique talk openly of Lincoln[’]s weakness and the necessity of replacing him by some stronger man.”21 Pope’s inattention to detail and his blithe assumption that radical politicians like Stanton and Salmon Chase would support him to the hilt, even if it meant overruling the president, doomed his campaign and his hopes of succeeding McClellan. Volunteer soldiers of both Union armies trusted only McClellan to lead them against Lee by September 1862, and Lincoln needed a victory to limit Democratic gains in the November elections, let alone to abolish slavery. While Jackson and Lee—​and McClellan—​suppressed the Republican Party in arms at Second Manassas, it returned to Virginia two years later. Western generals more successful at imposing a Republican, hard-​war policy came east. The combination of Grant and Sheridan and Sherman spelled doom for the Confederacy. Viewing Pope in a cosmological sense as “Pestilence,” the others, representing “War,” “Famine,” and “Death,” formed the four horsemen of Virginia’s Republican apocalypse.

Notes 1. Carl Schurz to Gerrit Smith, September 14, 1857, Gerrit Smith Papers, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY. 2. Birney to George I.  Gross, April 13 and 30, 1862, David Bell Birney Papers, U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center, Carlisle, PA (hereafter USAHEC). 3. Philip Kearny to Cortlandt Parker, July 31, 1862, Philip Kearny Papers, Library of Congress (hereafter LC). 4. James Longstreet, Proclamation, June 17, 1862, quoted in U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, 127 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1894), ser. 1, vol. 11(3): 605–​606. 5. J. B. Slade to Jeremiah Slade, August 9, 1862, William Slade Papers, David M. Rubinstein Library, Duke University, Durham, NC.

298   John H. Matsui 6. George McClellan to Abraham Lincoln, July 7, 1862, quoted in The Civil War Papers of George B.  McClellan:  Selected Correspondence, 1860–​ 1865, ed. Stephen W. Sears (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1989), 344. 7. McClellan to Mary Ellen McClellan, August 8, 1862, quoted in Civil War Papers of George B. McClellan, 388. 8. Rufus Barringer to Mary Anna Jackson, n.d., quoted in Mary Anna Jackson, Life and Letters of General Thomas J. Jackson (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1892), 310. 9. Barringer to Jackson, in Jackson, Life and Letters of General Thomas J. Jackson, 311. 10. Jackson, Life and Letters of General Thomas J. Jackson, 312. 11. Jackson, Life and Letters of General Thomas J. Jackson, 314. 12. Jackson, Life and Letters of General Thomas J. Jackson, 315. 13. William D. Wilkins, “My Libby Prison Diary: Aug 12 to Sept 26th 1862,” September 11 and 21, 1862, entries, William D. Wilkins Papers, Box 26, Civil War Times Illustrated Collection, USAHEC. 14. George Williams to Gertrude Williams, July 26 and 27 and August 5, 1862, George M. Williams Family Papers, quoted in Daniel E. Sutherland, Seasons of War: The Ordeal of a Confederate Community (New York: Free Press, 1995), 125. 15. Robert Taggart Diary, August 26, 1862 entry, Robert Taggart Papers, Pennsylvania State Archives, Harrisburg. 16. William E. Doubleday to Zachariah Chandler, July 5, 1861, Zachariah Chandler Papers, LC. 17. John P. Hatch to father, August 9, 1862, Box 2, John Porter Hatch Papers, LC. 18. Marsena R. Patrick Diary, July 18, 1862 entry, Marsena Rudolph Patrick Papers, LC. 19. Lawrence O’Bryan Branch to Nancy Branch, September 2, 1862, Lawrence O’Bryan Branch Papers, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville. 20. McClellan to McClellan, September 7, 1862, McClellan Papers, LC. 21. John Pope to Richard Yates, September 21, 1862, John Pope Papers, Chicago Historical Society.

Bibliography Cozzens, Peter. General John Pope:  A Life for the Nation. Urbana:  University of Illinois Press, 2000. Engle, Stephen D. Yankee Dutchman: The Life of Franz Sigel. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1993. Glatthaar, Joseph T. Lee’s Army: From Victory to Collapse. New York: Free Press, 2008. Grimsley, Mark. The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy toward Southern Civilians, 1861–​ 1865. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Hennessy, John J. Return to Bull Run:  The Campaign and Battle of Second Manassas. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993. Hollandsworth, James G., Jr. Pretense of Glory: The Life of General Nathaniel P. Banks. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998. Jones, Terry L. Lee’s Tigers: The Louisiana Infantry in the Army of Northern Virginia. Revised edition. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017. Krick, Robert K. Stonewall Jackson at Cedar Mountain. Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 1990.

SECOND BULL RUN/MANASSAS    299 Matsui, John H. The First Republican Army: The Army of Virginia and the Radicalization of the Civil War, 1862. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016. Robertson, James I., Jr. The Stonewall Brigade. Baton Rouge:  Louisiana State University Press, 1963. Ural, Susannah J. Hood’s Texas Brigade: The Soldiers and Families of the Confederacy’s Most Celebrated Unit. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017. Work, David. Lincoln’s Political Generals. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009.

Chapter 18

T he Mary l an d C a mpa i g n Carnage and Emancipation D. Scott Hartwig

The 1862 Maryland Campaign was brief compared to other military campaigns of the war, lasting less than three weeks, from September 3 to 20, yet it resulted in three highly significant events. The first was the largest surrender of U.S. troops until World War II, when 12,500 Federal soldiers capitulated at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, on September 15. The Battle of Antietam on September 17 was the bloodiest single day of the war, resulting in at least twenty-​three thousand casualties. Finally, the retreat of the Confederate Army from Maryland enabled President Abraham Lincoln to issue his Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which transformed the conflict from a war to preserve the Union to one that also made the destruction of slavery a principal objective. The Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, under Gen. Robert E. Lee, following up on its stunning victory in the Battle of Second Manassas, entered Maryland near Leesburg, Virginia, between September 4 and 7 and advanced to Frederick, Maryland. Lee hoped to draw the Union Army of the Potomac out of the defenses of Washington, D.C., to a battlefield in Maryland or Pennsylvania. He believed military victory north of the Potomac might favorably influence the upcoming congressional elections in the North and, at the very least, would disrupt the Union war effort and place increased pressure on the Lincoln administration. When Lee learned that the Union garrisons at Harpers Ferry and Martinsburg, Virginia, had not been withdrawn, he conceived a plan to divide his army into four columns and capture or destroy both forces before the Army of the Potomac could threaten his rear. On September 10, Lee’s army began the operation. Meanwhile, the Army of the Potomac, under Maj. Gen. George B.  McClellan, advanced from Washington. Intelligence about the Confederates was abundant but often conflicting and inaccurate, which forced McClellan to move carefully to cover Baltimore and assure no Confederate army remained in northern Virginia. The Harpers Ferry operation took longer than Lee anticipated. By September 13 the Union garrison was surrounded, but it held out until the morning of September 15. On

The Maryland Campaign    301 September 13 soldiers of the Army of the Potomac discovered a copy of Special Orders No. 191, the Confederate operational plan to capture Harpers Ferry, lying in a field near Frederick. This intelligence revealed to McClellan that the Confederate Army was widely divided, and he ordered his army forward on September 14, driving toward the mountain gaps in South Mountain, about fourteen miles west of Frederick. McClellan’s advance forced Lee to defend the gaps, which resulted in the battles of South Mountain. At Crampton’s Gap the Union Army smashed through the Confederate defenders.

Map 18.1 Antietam

302   D. Scott Hartwig Lee held Turner’s and Fox’s gaps, but the Union troops there gained the key terrain, forcing the Confederates to retreat during the night. Initially, Lee intended to cancel the Harpers Ferry operation and withdraw to Virginia, but during the retreat he learned Harpers Ferry was to be surrendered and decided to attempt a concentration of his army at Sharpsburg, Maryland, behind Antietam Creek. McClellan pursued the Confederates and, after a day and half spent massing his forces and reconnoitering the Confederate position, finally attacked Lee on September 17. The battle opened at dawn with a furious assault by the Union First Corps against the Confederate left. Both sides pushed reinforcements into the fight, which swayed back and forth, much of it around and through a thirty-​acre cornfield that became known as “the Cornfield.” At 9:00 a.m. Maj. Gen. John Sedgwick’s division of the Union Second Corps arrived and launched a hasty assault to crack the Confederate line. The attack was poorly reconnoitered and coordinated by Maj. Gen. Edwin Sumner, the Second Corps commander, and resulted in a debacle. A skillfully managed Confederate counterattack flanked Sedgwick and routed his division, inflicting 2,200 casualties in thirty minutes. By 10:00 a.m. some 6,800 Confederate and 6,500 Union soldiers were casualties in the struggle over this part of the field. The battle’s focus now shifted south to the Confederate center, where Lee’s troops occupied an old sunken farm lane as a defensive position. Shortly before 10:00 a.m. Brig. Gen. William French’s division of the Second Corps attacked. One soldier described the fighting as a “perfect tempest of musketry.” French lost 1,750 men and failed to dent the Confederate line. Maj. Gen. Israel B.  Richardson’s Second Corps division reinforced French and after a ferocious combat carried the Sunken Lane at noon. The Confederate center was shattered, and Lee scrambled to patch together a defense. But Richardson was mortally wounded, and failure to reinforce his success resulted in an opportunity being lost for the Federals. A stalemate ensued here. Under orders from McClellan, Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside opened his attack to carry the lower bridge over the Antietam, known as the Rohrback Bridge, at 10:00 a.m. The bridge was difficult to attack, and it took Burnside two hours and hundreds of casualties to capture it. He then pushed the Ninth Corps across the creek as rapidly as possible to mount an assault on Lee’s right flank. Meanwhile, Fifth Corps troops had crossed the Middle Bridge over the Antietam and pressed Lee’s right center on Cemetery Hill. At 3:30 p.m. Burnside attacked. Initially the assault met with good success, but at the critical moment, when it appeared the Confederate right might utterly collapse, Maj. Gen. A. P. Hill’s Division arrived from Harpers Ferry and mounted a vigorous counterattack that swept the Ninth Corps back to near the Rohrback Bridge. This ended the fighting for the day. Lee’s army had held its position but was badly damaged. The Confederates remained on the field on September 18, but Lee found no advantage in remaining longer and during the night retreated to Virginia. McClellan pursued and, on September 20, at Shepherdstown, Virginia, pushed a force across the Potomac River. The Confederates counterattacked and drove the Federals back over the river, bringing the Maryland Campaign to an end.

The Maryland Campaign    303 The Confederate retreat from Maryland gave President Lincoln the military victory he sought, and on September 22 he issued his Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation.

The Logistical Challenge Logistical issues limited the mobility of the Army of the Potomac in the early stages of the campaign, and logistical failures caused massive straggling in the Army of Northern Virginia, significantly impacting its effectiveness. On the eve of his army’s invasion of Maryland, Lee acknowledged to Confederate president Jefferson Davis that “the army is not properly equipped for an invasion of an enemy’s territory,” that it lacked sufficient transportation and many of the troops lacked shoes and needed resupply of clothing and equipment.1 Lee intended to feed his army by purchasing supplies from Maryland’s farms, towns, and villages, but recognized that he might encounter difficulties with Marylanders accepting Confederate currency. He wrote Davis on September 7 of the importance of providing the quartermaster and commissary departments with some funding arrangement that would enable them to buy the army’s necessities without generating hostility from the civilian population. Lee wanted Maryland’s civilians to perceive his army as one of liberation, which meant he needed to avoid impressing supplies. The system utterly failed. The army required nearly 260 tons of food and forage daily to meet basic requirements. “We are able to obtain forage for our animals and some provisions, but there is more difficulty about the latter,” Lee wrote Davis on September 9. “Many of the farmers have not yet gotten out their wheat, and there is a reluctance on the part of millers and others to commit themselves in our favor.” Marylanders refused Confederate currency or receipts to recover the costs of selling supplies to Lee’s army. The result was that Lee’s soldiers, many already sick or with weakened systems from the rigors of the Second Manassas campaign, went hungry. The collapse of their logistical support caused massive straggling, as men left the ranks in search of food or because they could no longer physically keep up.2 In describing a march to Leesburg on September 4, one soldier wrote that “gangs from every company went off in the surrounding country looking for food, and did not rejoin their commands until weeks after,” and that the route of march “was marked with a sick, lame, limping lot, that straggled to the farm-​houses that lined the way.”3 Lee’s army numbered approximately seventy-​four thousand on the eve of its entry into Maryland. At Leesburg over five thousand soldiers who lacked shoes or were deemed unfit for the expedition were ordered to a depot being established at Winchester, Virginia. Thus Lee entered Maryland with between sixty-​five thousand and sixty-​nine thousand troops. From this number his strength steadily dwindled from straggling. Col. Ezra Carman, a battle veteran and one of Antietam’s most careful historians in the postwar years, estimated Lee’s army at Sharpsburg numbered 37,351.4 In the battles of

304   D. Scott Hartwig South Mountain, the Harpers Ferry operation, and other cavalry skirmishes, the army sustained 3,107 casualties. Nearly twenty-​eight thousand soldiers, almost 41 percent of the army, straggled during the campaign and were absent from the ranks on September 17, greatly diminishing its combat power. McClellan has been frequently criticized for the slowness of the Army of the Potomac’s march from Washington to Frederick between September 7 and 12. The march was slowed partly due to intelligence reports that indicated a large Confederate army remained in northern Virginia, and because the number of new regiments needed some level of seasoning and adjustment to marching. But logistics also slowed the army’s movements. The withdrawal of the Army of the Potomac from the Virginia Peninsula and the ensuing retreat of it and the Army of Virginia from the battlefield of Second Manassas left the armies’ trains a jumbled mess. Lt. Col. Rufus Ingalls, the talented chief quartermaster of the Army of the Potomac, was unable to determine how many wagons were available in the few days before the army took the field. The trains of units from the Army of Virginia were particularly disorganized, causing Ingalls to grumble, “It does not appear that the commander of the Army of Virginia ever knew how many wagons there were, nor what quartermasters were on duty.”5 Until the army reached Frederick and could open rail communications it was supplied by wagons, hauling food, forage, and ammunition from depots inside Washington’s defenses. At the limit of the advance to Frederick this meant a one-​way trip of nearly forty miles. It was an immense effort that required almost five hundred tons per day to feed the army and provide forage for its horses and mules. Ingalls managed to keep the army well fed, but forage proved a problem. The army’s cavalry division received no forage for the entire campaign due to a lack of wagons to haul it. Consequently, they had to purchase forage, often consisting of green corn stalks that weakened the horses. A more rapid advance by McClellan to Frederick would have forced him to purchase food and forage for his entire army, a system that rarely worked efficiently.

Soldiers “You asked me why Col. Oliver resigned,” wrote Col. James W.  Jackson of the 47th Alabama to his wife four days after the Battle of Antietam. “I don’t think he was fond of the smell of burned gun powder & the rattle of shell grape & ball. Battle is a terrible thing and it takes nerves of iron to stand the battles we are having in this country.” Antietam tested the physical and mental courage of every man who experienced its fury. The slaughter shocked veterans of previous battles. Out of a strength of approximately 87,000, the Army of the Potomac suffered 2,108 killed, 9,549 wounded, and 753 missing or captured. The Army of Northern Virginia fielded about 38,000 troops and reported losses for the entire campaign of 1,567 killed and 8,724 wounded. Actual losses were much higher. For example, the losses of the 6th Georgia were reported as 10 killed and 13 wounded, when the real loss was 81 killed, 115 wounded, and 30 missing

The Maryland Campaign    305 or captured. Losses in some units, like the 5th Florida, which suffered 159 casualties, were not reported at all. Carman estimated Confederate losses at Sharpsburg as 1,546 killed, 7,752 wounded, and 1,108 missing or captured. Their losses may have been even higher than Carman estimated. Maj. Gen. Richard H. Anderson’s Division reflects just how catastrophic the battle was for some Confederate units. The division commander and four of five brigade commanders were wounded, and thirteen of seventeen regimental commanders were killed or wounded. Two brigades had more than 60 percent casualties.6 “The ground over which we fought was fearful to behold,” wrote Lt. Col. Nelson Miles of the 61st New York to his brother. Miles believed the battleground around the Sunken Lane “surpassed anything I have seen before. In the road the dead covered the ground. It seemed, as I rode along, that it was the Valley of Death. I think that in the space of less than ten acres, lay the bodies of a thousand dead men, and as many more wounded. I hope you will never witness such a sight.” Maj. Rufus Dawes, who fought with the 6th Wisconsin Infantry in the Cornfield on the northern end of the battlefield, recalled that “the piles of dead on the Sharpsburg and Hagerstown Turnpike were frightful.”7 The fearsome violence of the combat caused many on both sides to find some pretense to leave the fighting. “I am not going to charge anyone with cowardice,” complained Sgt. Ben Hirst, of the 14th Connecticut, “but there were always too many wanting to go to the hospital with any one that was wounded and they never by any means came back again until yesterday.” The 4th North Carolina Infantry fought desperately defending the Sunken Lane, but when they were forced to retreat, Lt. James Shinn lamented that a number of the regiment’s officers, “I am sorry & ashamed to say left the field unhurt,” and “Many men took this as a chance (from all Regt’s) to leave the field entirely.” Some, particularly in regiments in their first battle, deserted. Pvt. Andrew N. Terhune in the 13th New Jersey boasted to his cousin, “Who would not be a soldier?” on September 9. Eight days later, after his regiment’s terrifying exposure to combat, Terhune deserted and did not return until June 1863.8 Apart from a few thousand conscripts who joined the army before the campaign, the Army of Northern Virginia was composed of veteran troops who had been in one or more battles. The Army of the Potomac, in contrast, contained eighteen regiments that had never been in combat, fifteen of which were newly raised under the July call for 300,000 troops. The need for manpower was so keen that these new units were assigned to the army with minimal training and, in some cases, virtually no training besides marching. They represented nearly 15 percent of the army’s infantry. Brig. Gen. Alpheus Williams found the men of “excellent stamp, ready and willing, but neither their officers and men knew anything,” and “to make any maneuver they fell into inextricable confusion.” Their experience in the battle was painful. A lieutenant in the 108th New York wrote that his regiment “moved into action with the steadiness of dress parade,” but under fire they quickly became “badly shattered.” Out of a strength of 750 the regiment suffered 195 casualties. Hundreds of able-​bodied men left the ranks, and when the regiment was led back into action after its initial exposure only the “utmost exertions” by some of the regiment’s officers managed to gather about a hundred men together. Other

306   D. Scott Hartwig raw regiments had similar experiences. Although they added numbers to the army, their inexperience often proved a hindrance.9 In every army there is a core group of men who conquer their fear to perform with coolness and courage in battle, and a handful who thrive on combat’s dangers. Typical of the former group was Capt. Francis E. Pierce of the rookie 108th New York, who admitted, “At first I acknowledge that I felt afraid, going through the orchard and up the hill the bullets were whistling like the devil.” But when his regiment came under fire for the first time Pierce found, “I was never more cool in my life. I don’t know how it was but I was perfectly indifferent, and had no more fear than I should have in your bath tub at home. In fact, I rather enjoyed it, although brave men were falling all around, dead and wounded, and being carried down to the barn which was being used as a hospital.” Pvt. Edward Spangler, a young, small youth serving in the 130th Pennsylvania, was initially seized with a nearly paralyzing fear but soon discovered, “The excitement of the battle made me fearless and oblivious of danger; the screeching and exploding shells, whistling bullets and the awful carnage all around me were hardly noticed.” It was Pierce and Spangler and those like them who inspired men of lesser fortitude to withstand the awful experience of combat and do their duty.10

Civilians Maryland felt the hand of war from its very beginning. It was a slave state but had nearly as many free Blacks as it did slaves, 83,942 to 87,189 in 1860. Most of the slaves were concentrated in the southern and eastern shore counties in the eastern part of the state. In Frederick and Washington counties, in the central part of the state, where the most significant military operations of the campaign took place, free Blacks made up 10.6 and 5.3 percent of the population, respectively, and slaves constituted 7 and 4.6 percent. The state legislature voted overwhelmingly not to secede from the Union in 1861, but enough sympathy existed for the Confederacy in the eastern part of the state to cause President Lincoln to establish martial law in Baltimore and suspend the writ of habeas corpus to make sure that Maryland remained in the Union and that crucial transportation routes were secure. General Lee understood that the part of Maryland his army entered was strongly Unionist in sentiment. “Notwithstanding individual expressions of kindness that have been given, and the general sympathy in the success of the Confederate States, situated as Maryland is, I do not anticipate any general rising of the people in our behalf,” he wrote President Davis on September 7. Lee exaggerated the sympathy of Marylanders with the Confederacy. Confederate soldiers quickly discovered that most Marylanders they encountered were indifferent or openly hostile. There had been some hope that Maryland might produce recruits for the army, but only around five hundred individuals from Frederick and the surrounding area investigated the possibility of enlisting in the Confederate army. “If ever suicide was contemplated by any one it must be by those

The Maryland Campaign    307 civilians who proposed to attach themselves to [Stonewall] Jackson’s corps,” a Sanitary Commission doctor observed. Fewer than two hundred enlisted.11 On September 8 Lee issued a proclamation explaining why his army had entered Maryland: “[T]‌he people of the South have long wished to aid you in throwing off this foreign yoke, to enable you again to enjoy the inalienable rights of freemen, and restore independence and sovereignty to your state.” Marylanders received the proclamation coolly. “Yes, that Maryland is foreign evidence accumulates,” complained an artillery lieutenant. Frederick, he concluded in disgust, “is as Yankee as Hartford or Cape Cod.” When the army departed the city on September 10, Pvt. John Dooley, of the 1st Virginia Infantry, remarked that there was “a good deal of noise and cheering among our particular friends” but that “it was not difficult to discern that this enthusiasm was roused only for the display, and that the large majority of the people were silent in regard to giving demonstrations of opinion.” Another soldier pronounced Frederick “a d—​—​d Yankee hole.”12 In his proclamation Lee declared that the purpose of his army’s occupation of Maryland had been to help its citizens regain “the rights of which you have been despoiled.” But the sullen reception of his army was evidence that Marylanders had no interest in deliverance by the Army of Northern Virginia. Yet Lee and his army remained, not to protect Maryland’s despoiled rights but because he and President Davis believed carrying the war beyond the Confederacy’s borders offered military and political opportunities that could lead to Southern independence. Lee would make Maryland a battleground despite the will of its people. Davis famously declared in April 1861, “All we ask is to be let alone.” This policy was now discarded, and Maryland would feel the consequences. Because Maryland was a slave state the Confederates did not send out detachments, as they did in Pennsylvania during the Gettysburg Campaign, to round up African American people in their path on the pretense that they were runaway slaves. However, the African Americans who had sought refuge or work with the Union garrison at Harpers Ferry suffered a cruel fate. During the months of Union occupation of the former armory town nearly 1,200 had made their way to within Union lines. They included both escaped slaves and free people. When the Federal garrison surrendered, the Blacks, men, women, and children, were captured by the Confederates. There is no evidence any effort was made to distinguish free people from enslaved; all were treated as slaves. Some masters from the surrounding area came in to claim escaped slaves, but others decided to have their recaptured slaves transported to Richmond for sale, “not deeming them desirable servants after having associated with the Yankees.” The first train loads of these reenslaved people arrived in Richmond only nine days after the surrender, reflecting the high priority Confederate authorities placed on the labor they represented.13 The only Blacks to avoid reenslavement by the Confederates were some servants working for Union regiments of the garrison. When he learned that all Blacks within the garrison were to be considered escaped slaves, Col. William Trimble, a Union brigade commander, immediately ordered all Black servants to be moved to the interior of each

308   D. Scott Hartwig regiment’s camp. He then sought and received authorization from Confederate Gen. A. P. Hill, whom Jackson assigned the duty of managing the details of the surrender, that all Blacks associated with Union regiments be given passes exempting them from being seized. Yet when Trimble marched his surrendered soldiers out of the garrison the next day, a Confederate officer attempted to separate the Black servants with the 60th Ohio. Trimble drew his revolver on the officer and was able to lead the servants with his regiment to freedom.14 Union soldiers in the Army of the Potomac found the civilian population welcoming and enthusiastic in their support. A  member of the 97th New  York Infantry found “in this part of Maryland almost the universal sentiment was in favor of the Union.” When McClellan rode into Frederick on September 13 he was greeted like a liberator. “It seemed as if the whole population had turned out, wild with joy,” recorded a member of his staff. McClellan wrote his wife that he “was nearly overwhelmed & pulled to pieces” by the enthusiastic crowd. The longer the army spent in Maryland, however, the less some citizens embraced their presence. Maryland’s agricultural bounty proved highly tempting to hungry soldiers. “All the hens within a mile have been bagged by our men. One man in the vicinity had forty hens, and boys took them all besides a pig,” wrote a Massachusetts lieutenant. McClellan, like Lee, attempted to curtail straggling and its byproduct of stealing food from locals, but both had little success, and many Maryland farmers suffered the consequences.15 Sharpsburg, the site of the battle of Antietam, was founded in 1763 between Antietam Creek and the Potomac River. In 1862 it had a population of around 1,300. There was a strong German element in the community. Most belonged to the Lutheran or Reformed churches, but there was also a small community of Dunkers, who built a church north of town along the Hagerstown Turnpike which became a famous landmark of the battle. French Huguenots also made up part of the area’s population. In general, it was a thrifty, prosperous, agricultural community. Washington County’s free Black population outnumbered the slave population by 1,677 to 1,435 during the 1860 census. In Sharpsburg, although the number of slaves fell in the decade before the war, the number of slave owners increased from seventeen to twenty-​four. But these twenty-​four individuals owned only eighty-​six slaves. William Roulette’s farm, which bordered the northern edge of the Sunken Lane, was fairly typical of the Sharpsburg area. It consisted of 198 acres, with eight horses, fourteen head of cattle, eleven sheep, and twenty hogs. He grew wheat, rye, corn, oats, hay, wool, and Irish potatoes, produced butter and honey, and maintained a large orchard south of his house. Roulette and his wife had five children and he employed a fifteen-​year-​old Black farmhand and a female Black house servant. Losses from the battle and the occupation of the area for several weeks afterward by the Army of the Potomac were immense. Many farms were employed by the armies as field hospitals, which wreaked havoc on the families’ lives and possessions. Samuel Mumma’s farm buildings were burned by Confederates to prevent them from being used as cover by Union troops, and David Reel’s barn was set afire by Union artillery fire, which led to the death of some of the wounded gathered there. Within the village of Sharpsburg, a Union

The Maryland Campaign    309 soldier reported that there were few houses “that had not been pierced by solid shot or shell.” The Roulette farm, which served as a field hospital, offers some idea of the catastrophic damage farmers suffered. Roulette’s extensive report of losses included 65 bushels of oats, 60 bushels of wheat, 337 bushels of corn, 14 hogs, 13 shoats, 12 sheep, 3 calves, 220 bushels of apples, 155 bushels of potatoes, 350 pounds of bacon, 200 pounds of sugar, and “Burial ground for 700 soldiers.” A chaplain who worked at the Roulette hospital recalled, “During the battle the rooms were stripped of their furnishings and the floors were covered with the blood and dirt and litter of a field hospital.”16 The deadliest peril for civilians was not bullets or shells but disease carried by men and animals with the two armies. Many people became ill, and several died from typhoid fever and dysentery in the weeks afterward.

Reporting Antietam Northern and Southern civilians received news about the battle primarily from two sources: newspaper reporters traveling with the armies, and soldiers who wrote letters home after Antietam, which family members provided to local newspapers for publication. What is remarkable about both sources of information is their overall honesty and sometimes brutal frankness about the war’s realities. Extensive casualty lists, compiled by state representatives sent to gather casualty data or by members of combat units, were also made public. For example, the October 9, 1862, edition of the Selma, Alabama, Daily Reporter contained a detailed list of every casualty in Brig. Gen. Robert Rodes’s Alabama Brigade in the battles of South Mountain and Sharpsburg provided to it by a staff officer of the brigade. Reporters traveling with the army received little support from the government on either side for their reporting could give away important military information, expose vulnerabilities, or spread falsehoods and propaganda that might damage army or public morale. Peter W.  Alexander, a superb reporter who wrote frequently for the Georgia Savannah Republican, observed of his peers, “The truth is there are correspondents who invariably magnify our successes and depreciate our losses, and who when there is a dearth of news will draw upon their imaginations for their facts. The war abounds in more romantic incidents and thrilling adventures than poet ever imagined or novelist described.” During the Second Manassas Campaign Union General in Chief Henry W.  Halleck directed Maj. Gen. John Pope, commanding the Army of Virginia, to expel all reporters with his army. This order had not been rescinded or modified by the time of the Maryland Campaign, and so reporters had to find creative ways to attach themselves to the Army of the Potomac. Most found that army officers ignored Halleck’s orders so long as the newspapermen did not prove a nuisance. The largest problem reporters found in trying to report on the campaign was the military control of the existing telegraph lines and the strict censorship they applied to news from the army. Southern reporters were well beyond telegraphic communications and had to rely on the mail to deliver their dispatches.17

310   D. Scott Hartwig The earliest reports of the Battle of Antietam were carried by Northern papers and, being based upon sources some distance from the battlefield, were highly inaccurate. The New York Herald of September 18, 1862, reported the Rebel army was surrounded and out of ammunition, that Maj. Gen. James Longstreet had been killed and Maj. Gen. D. H. Hill captured. Their correspondent in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, related on the evening of the seventeenth that Union forces had “undoubtedly won great and decisive victories both yesterday and to-​day” and that “the impression prevails at Hagerstown that the whole rebel army of Virginia is annihilated.” It took longer for the news to reach Southern newspapers, but their initial reporting claimed Confederate victory. Readers of the September 22 Richmond Dispatch were informed, “The advantage is on our side,” but also that the losses were “fearfully severe” and the battle had surpassed any previous battle yet in the war. Two days later the Dispatch still lacked reliable news yet declared the battle’s result “decidedly in our favor,” although it added that the army had crossed the Potomac River. Alert readers might have wondered why the army had withdrawn from Maryland if they had won a victory.18 More accurate reporting soon replaced the unreliable initial news from the battlefield. Correspondents had to exert tremendous effort to get their stories to print. George Smalley, of the New York Tribune, left the battlefield at 9:00 p.m. on September 17 and rode to Frederick, which had the closest telegraph office. The operator sent Smalley’s account of the battle to the War Department rather than the Tribune office. To get his full story to the Tribune, Smalley managed to get passage on a train to Baltimore and then to New York. He wrote his column about the battle en route to New York City, where he arrived at 5:00 a.m. on the nineteenth. The presses went to work immediately, and Smalley’s account of the battle appeared in the morning paper. Charles Coffin, writing for the Boston Journal, had a similar experience getting his story to press, riding to Hagerstown on the night of September 17 and then taking trains to Boston. Smalley’s and Coffin’s accounts of the battle tempered the early reports of a decisive victory. Smalley described a bitterly fought battle that resulted in what seemed to be a draw. Coffin also tempered hopes for a great victory, writing, “Present evidence is not sufficient to warrant any definite conclusion [as to] whether the battle was to us a victory or a defeat.”19 Peter Alexander and Felix G. DeFontaine provided the earliest and best Confederate reporting of the battle. Neither spared their readers the horror of the battlefield. “There is a smell of death in the air, and the laboring surgeons are literally covered from head to foot with the blood of the sufferers,” Alexander wrote in a column that appeared in the October 2 edition of Alabama’s Mobile Daily Advertiser and Register. In describing a field hospital, DeFontaine wrote, “Some were in the last throes of death, and some so mangled and disguised in the clotted blood upon their persons, that their nearest friends would fail to recognize them.” Both reporters attempted to put the best face on the campaign and battle. DeFontaine wrote of how at first the troops saw the battle as a draw, but by the morning of the eighteenth “the real facts are coming to light, and we feel that we have indeed achieved another victory.” However, he admitted that the Union Army “fought well and were handled in a masterly manner.” Alexander believed the

The Maryland Campaign    311 campaign one of the “extraordinary exploits in the history of any country, and stamps the man that ordered and executed it as one of the greatest military leaders in our time and generation.” Yet Alexander was confused by the Confederate withdrawal to Virginia on the night of September 18, writing that he was not sure whether military necessity dictated the movement or General Lee felt he accomplished the purpose of his invasion. His claim of a Confederate success seemed doubtful when he added that the severely and mortally wounded were left behind to the enemy.20 Private letters published in local newspapers sometimes included disturbing and graphic descriptions of the battle’s carnage. On October 11 the Memphis (TN) Daily Appeal printed a letter from a 5th Louisiana captain describing the death of Lt. Nick A. Canfield, who was originally from Memphis, “hoping by some chance that it may reach the afflicted parents.” The captain wrote that they were under heavy artillery fire when “a shell from the enemy plunged through my poor camp, passing first through the body of William, then cut off the leg of John Fitzsimmons, then both feet of D. Jenkins, and passed through my poor friend Nick, entering at the small of the back, coming out of his breast, tearing out and exposing his heart.” Such horrifying details brought the war home but gave little comfort to a grieving family.21 Antietam was the first battle of the war whose aftermath was thoroughly documented in photographs. Alexander Gardner and James F. Gibson, both employed at Mathew Brady’s studio in Washington, D.C., reached the battlefield around September 18. Their first views were recorded on September 19 and they continued their work through September 22. The battle’s carnage was their primary subject: bodies sprawled along the Hagerstown Turnpike or piled up in the Sunken Lane. Brady displayed Gardner’s and Gibson’s series in New York City in late October. For the first time in America the battlefield, shorn of any attempt to soften its horrors, was revealed to the home front. “We recognize the battlefield as a reality, but it stands as a remote one,” penned a reporter who viewed the exhibit. What Brady had done was “to bring home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war.” The images were so clear, he wrote, that it was possible to distinguish individual features of the dead and he thought “we would scarce choose to be in the gallery” should the mother of one of the dead recognize “a husband, a son, a brother, in the still, lifeless lines of bodies.”22

Emancipation and the Consequences of the Maryland Campaign and Antietam President Lincoln had prepared a draft Emancipation Proclamation in July 1862 immediately after Congress passed the Second Confiscation Act, but when he shared it with his cabinet they counseled that with the failure of McClellan’s Peninsula Campaign it might appear to the public and world leaders as an act of desperation by the administration,

312   D. Scott Hartwig and they urged him to wait for a military success to issue the proclamation from a position of strength. Lincoln agreed to wait. The defeat at Second Manassas in August dealt a heavy blow to Lincoln’s hopes. In the aftermath of that debacle he was forced to appoint McClellan to command the field army sent out to meet Lee’s invasion of Maryland. McClellan was an unlikely candidate to provide Lincoln the victory he needed. His record on the Peninsula raised doubts he would bring military success, and he opposed introducing emancipation as an objective in the Union war effort. In a letter to the president in July the general warned that “a declaration of radical views, especially upon slavery, will rapidly disintegrate our present armies.” Lincoln had followed a limited-​ war policy in the first year and a half of the war, which, although it had weakened slavery with the First Confiscation Act, had not made slavery’s destruction a war aim. He believed this policy had failed, and it was time to move on. He wrote to a critic of emancipation, “What would you do in my position? Would you drop the war where it is? Or, would you prosecute it in future with elder-​stalk squirts, charged with rose water? Would you deal lighter blows rather than heavier ones? Would you give up the contest, leaving any available means unapplied?” Slavery was the foundation of the Confederacy and its economy. Attacking it would strike at the underpinnings of the Confederate war effort and help end slavery in America.23 When Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia withdrew to Virginia on September 19 Lincoln wasted no time in acting. On September 22 he issued his Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, declaring that all slaves would be free in the states in rebellion if those states did not return to the Union by December 31. The general who had delivered the strategic victory that made the proclamation possible privately seethed over it. To his wife McClellan admitted it was doubtful he would remain in the service. “I cannot make up my mind to fight for such an accursed doctrine as that of a servile insurrection—​it is too infamous,” he complained. To William H.  Aspinwall, a conservative New York businessman, he wrote, “I am very anxious to know how you and men like you regard the recent Proclamations of the Presdt inaugurating servile war, emancipating slaves, & at one stroke of the pen changing our free institutions into a despotism.” McClellan often privately made threats regarding his superiors or about political issues only to eventually publicly acknowledge that it was the duty of all soldiers to follow policies established by the civilian government. This is what he did with the Proclamation.24 Much has been made of the opposition of soldiers in the Army of the Potomac to the Proclamation, and it definitely existed, but emancipation also had supporters. Republicans tended to welcome it, while Democrats generally opposed it, although some Democrats in the army were coming to the opinion that any measure that hastened the Rebels’ defeat was acceptable. Maj. Rufus Dawes of the 6th Wisconsin, in a public speech he gave in Marietta, Ohio, during a furlough, reflected on those who supported emancipation: “If there remains any one in the army, who does not like the Proclamation, he is careful to keep quiet about it. We are hailed everywhere by the negroes as their deliverers.” Dawes added that soldiers understood the obvious:  “Slavery is the chief source of wealth in the South, and the basis of their aristocracy, and my observation

The Maryland Campaign    313 is that a blow at slavery hurts more than battalion volleys. It strikes at the vitals. . . . We like the Proclamation because it hurts the Rebels. We like the Proclamation because it lets the world know what the real issue is.” Col. Charles Wainwright, an artillery officer and staunch Democrat, wrote that he did not hear much talk of the Proclamation in the army but opined that “all think it unadvised at this time; even those most anti-​slavery.” Despite angry disapproval by some, there was no huge surge in desertions, as McClellan had warned of. Most opponents adopted the attitude of Capt. Francis Donaldson in the 118th Pennsylvania, who declared, “I am a Democrat, first, last and all the time, but as long as the Rebels are in arms I will sustain the government’s efforts to put down the rebellion—​with my life if necessary.”25 Strategically, the Maryland Campaign was a Union victory. The Confederate capture of Harpers Ferry was significant, but it did not compensate for the overall failures of the campaign. Hopes that Maryland might show support for the Confederate cause were dashed. Peter Alexander believed, “The political effect upon Maryland of our retrograde movement must be highly injurious. We shall doubtless lose ground among the people, and it may be we shall have to make up our minds to lose the state itself.” Union success may have helped Republicans avoid an even worse defeat in the fall elections. They took a beating but maintained their majority in Congress. Internationally, the campaign had great consequence. Lee’s victories on the Peninsula and at Second Manassas fueled a growing movement in the British government to mediate an armistice and separation of the warring sections, which France likely would have supported. But Lee’s failure in Maryland immediately followed by Lincoln’s Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation sucked the energy from the movement. Lord Palmerston, Britain’s prime minister, concluded, “We must continue merely to be lookers-​on till the war shall have taken a more decided turn.”26 Lee’s thinking that motivated his decision to invade Maryland was sound politically and militarily, but the drain on his army from immense straggling diminished what it might have accomplished, and his decision to offer battle at Sharpsburg led to massive casualties with no military or political advantage to compensate for them. Following the repulse of his limited pursuit of Lee at Shepherdstown, McClellan spent the rest of the fall reorganizing and rebuilding his army in the Sharpsburg area and at Harpers Ferry. Lincoln tried to impress upon his commander the importance of taking advantage of the fall weather to carry the war to the Rebels, but McClellan refused to budge. He complained to his wife, “The real truth is that my army is not fit to advance—​the old regts are reduced to mere skeletons & are completely tired out—​they need rest and filling up. The new rgts are not fit for the field. The remains of Pope’s army are pretty well broken up & ought not to be made to fight for some little time yet.”27 The army needed resupply and old regiments were reduced in numbers, but McClellan exaggerated his army’s condition. The “remains of Pope’s army,” the First and Twelfth Corps, fought superbly at Antietam and were no worse off than other units of the army. McClellan also ignored the overwhelming intelligence describing the poor condition of the Army of Northern Virginia at the end of the Maryland Campaign. Instead, he allowed Lee to recover and rebuild his army unmolested.

314   D. Scott Hartwig By the time McClellan moved his army south of the Potomac the fall congressional elections were over, and Lincoln replaced him with Ambrose Burnside. On November 9 McClellan took his leave of the army, never to return. For all the horror and tragedy of Antietam, the battle strengthened rather than diminished the determination of the North and the South. Both sides grieved their terrible losses but steeled themselves for a long, grim conflict that would not be decided by any single battle.

Notes 1. U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1880–​ 1901), ser. 1, vol. 19, pt. 2: 590, 596. Hereafter cited as OR. 2. OR, ser. 1, vol. 19, pt. 2: 602. 3. Alexander Hunter, “A High Private’s Account of the Battle of Sharpsburg,” Southern Historical Society Papers 12 (1884): 507. 4. Ezra A. Carman, The Maryland Campaign of September 1862, vol. 2: Antietam, ed. Thomas G. Clemens (El Dorado Hills, CA: Savas Beatie, 2012), 599. 5. OR, ser. 3, vol. 2: 798. 6. James W. Jackson to My Dear Wife, September 21, 1862, in “Providence Has Been Kind,” Military Images, January–​February 1999, 22–​23; Carman, The Maryland Campaign, 2:611. 7. Nelson Miles to Brother, September 24, 1862, Gary Echelbarger Antietam Files, 61st New York file, Antietam National Battlefield Library; Rufus Dawes, Service with the Sixth Wisconsin Volunteers (Dayton, OH: Morningside Bookshop, 1984), 94–​95. 8. Robert L. Bee, ed., The Boys from Rockville: Civil War Narratives of Sgt. Benjamin Hirst, Company D, 14th Connecticut Volunteers (Knoxville:  University of Tennessee Press, 1998), 20; Andrew Terhune to Cousin, September 9, 1862, Book 27, No. 56, Lewis Leigh Collection, U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center, Carlisle, PA. 9. Milo M. Quaife, ed., From the Cannon’s Mouth: The Civil War Letters of General Alpheus Williams (Lincoln:  University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 126; Blake McKelvey, ed., “The Civil War Letters of Francis Edwin Pierce of the 108th New York Volunteer Infantry,” in Rochester in the Civil War (Rochester, NY: Rochester Historical Society, 1944), 154. 10. McKelvey, “The Civil War Letters of Francis Edwin Pierce,” 154; Edward W. Spangler, My Little War Experience (York, PA: York Daily Publishing, 1904), 30–​31. 11. OR, ser. 1, vol. 19, pt. 2:  596; Richard B. Harwell, ed., The Union Reader (New York: Longmans, Green, 1958), 162. 12. OR, ser. 1, vol. 19, pt. 2: 601–​602; John H. Chamberlayne, Ham Chamberlayne—​Virginian Letters and Papers of an Artillery Officer in the War for Southern Independence, 1861–​1865 (Richmond, VA: Dietz, 1932), 105; William Mordecai to Mother, September 24, 1862, Wm. Mordecai Papers, Virginia Historical Society, Richmond; Joseph T. Durkin, ed., John Dooley Confederate Soldier: His War Journal (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1945), 27; Harwell, Union Reader, 169. 13. Richmond (VA) Daily Dispatch, September 20, 24, 1862. 14. Harry Pfanz, Special History Report: Troop Movement Maps, 1862, Harpers Ferry National Historic Park (Denver, CO: National Park Service, 1976), 54.

The Maryland Campaign    315 15. Isaac Hall, History of the Ninety Seventh Regiment, New York Volunteers in the War for the Union (Utica, NY: L. C. Childs, 1890), 83; David Strother, “Personal Recollections of the War,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 36, (February 1868): 262; New York Tribune, September 16, 1862; Albert A.  Pope diary, Greg Coco Collection, United States Army Heritage and Education Center, Carlisle, PA. 16. U.  S. National Park Service, Roulette House Historic Structures Report, (GWWO Inc., Architects, 2006), 36, Appendix F, 3–​12; Ted Alexander, “Destruction, Disease and Death,” Civil War Regiments, V. 6, No. 2, 155. 17. Savannah (GA) Republican, June 16, 1862; J. Cutler Andrews, The North Reports the Civil War (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1955), 267, 271. 18. New York Herald, September 18, 1862; Richmond (VA) Dispatch, September 22, 24, 1862. 19. New York Tribune, September 19, 1862; Andrews, The North Reports the Civil War, 283. 20. “Army Correspondence,” Savannah (GA) Republican, October 1, 1862; Charleston (SC) Daily Courier, September 29, 1862; Athens (GA) Southern Banner, October 8, 1862; J. Cutler Andrews, The South Reports the Civil War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), 214. 21. Memphis (TN) Daily Appeal, October 11, 1862. 22. New York Times, October 20, 1862. 23. McClellan to Lincoln, July 7, 1862, in Stephen Sears, ed., The Civil War Papers of George B. McClellan (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1989), 344–​345; Lincoln to Cuthbert Bullitt, July 28, 1862, https://​quod.lib.umich.edu/​cgi/​t/​text/​text-​idx?c=lincoln;rgn=div1;view=tex t;idno=lincoln5;node=lincoln5%3A749, accessed July 2018. 24. Sears, The Civil War Papers of George B. McClellan, 482–​483. 25. Dawes, Service with the Sixth Wisconsin Volunteers, 126; Allan Nevins, ed., A Diary of Battle:  The Personal Journals of Colonel Charles S.  Wainwright, 1861–​1865 (Gettysburg, PA: Stan Clark Military Books, 1962), 109; Gregory C. Acken, ed., Inside the Army of the Potomac: The Civil War Experience of Captain Francis Adams Donaldson (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1998), 146. 26. James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom (New York: Ballantine Books, 1989), 556. 27. Sears, The Civil War Papers of George B. McClellan, 488.

Bibliography Alexander, Ted. “The Battle of Antietam and the Sharpsburg Civilians.” Civil War Regiments 6, no. 2 (1998): 143–​173. Clemens, Thomas G., ed. The Maryland Campaign of September 1862. Vols. 1–​3. New York: Savas Beattie, 2010–​2017. Frassanito, William A. Antietam:  The Photographic Legacy of America’s Bloodiest Day. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1978. Gallagher, Gary, ed. The Antietam Campaign. Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 1999. Harsh, Joseph L. Taken at the Flood: Robert E. Lee and Confederate Strategy in the Maryland Campaign of 1862. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1999. Hartwig, D. Scott. To Antietam Creek: The Maryland Campaign of 1862. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012.

316   D. Scott Hartwig Manning, Chandra. What This Cruel War Was Over:  Soldiers, Slavery and the Civil War. New York: Knopf, 2007. Rafuse, Ethan S. McClellan’s War:  The Failure of Moderation in the Struggle for the Union. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. Sears, Stephen W. George B. McClellan: The Young Napoleon. New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1988. Sears, Stephen W. Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam. New Haven, CT: Ticknor & Fields, 1983.

Chapter 19

The Bat tl e of Frederick sbu rg Military Occupation and Urban Combat Barton A. Myers

The American Civil War had raged for little more than a year and a half when Maj. Gen. Ambrose Everett Burnside reluctantly assumed command of the Army of the Potomac on a cold, blizzardy night in early November 1862. Burnside had become something of a favorite of President Abraham Lincoln’s after his successful command of the operation that secured the North Carolina coast for the Union in early 1862, but it was a position that he accepted more out of a sense of duty than personal desire. Burnside still believed that the better choice for managing the massive 135,000-​man army was his old Chicago housemate and President Lincoln’s once hopeful selection, Maj. Gen. George Brinton McClellan, the so-​called Young Napoleon. And Burnside’s recent command decisions were not inspiring for a war-​weary Northern public. His slow battlefield performance at the Battle of Antietam less than two months before had cost the Union Army a chance at dealing a devastating blow against Gen. Robert E. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia, numbering 78,000 soldiers. But affable old “Burn,” as his many friends called him, under pressure to commence an offensive that November, followed his orders and put forward a plan to the Lincoln administration for seizing the Confederate capital before the end of the calendar year. Burnside offered a sound but not terribly innovative strategic plan for seizing Richmond. This was a task that McClellan, Burnside’s close friend, had failed at with the highly imaginative amphibious operation that led to the Peninsula Campaign the previous summer. General Burnside suggested a rapid movement of Union forces by land and train along a North-​South axis between the U.S. and Confederate capitals before Lee’s army could change front and place his battle-​hardened veterans once again between the Union Army and its ultimate prize. Northern Virginia was bisected by flowing rivers (running generally from northwest to southeast), providing obstacles to any major maneuver of the armies, a geography lesson that Union commanders would

318   Barton A. Myers learn time and again in the years to come. Burnside would see his plan come apart over one of the most critical of those waterways, the Rappahannock River, just opposite Fredericksburg, a key town that sat almost equidistant from the two great capital cities (forty-​five miles from Washington, D.C., and fifty-​eight miles from Richmond, Virginia). Just south of Fredericksburg was the vital Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Potomac Railroad, which Burnside sought to seize as a critical supply line for his operation against the Confederate capital. The city of Fredericksburg and adjacent Spotsylvania County experienced the transformation in Union military policy toward the Southern civilian population more dramatically than perhaps any community in America during the war, a shift from what historian Mark Grimsley called a conciliatory policy of protecting white Southerners’ property, even in slaves during spring 1862, to a harsher war of economic destruction and punishing rebellious citizens in the seceding states by winter 1862. Fredericksburg civilians, white and Black, free and enslaved, became Civil War refugees because of nineteenth-​century military occupation and urban combat. That displacement by the Union Army meant freedom to many of the enslaved African Americans of Fredericksburg, but it meant a loss of home and security to white citizens of the town. In microcosm, the Union Army’s evolution in policy and treatment can be viewed from April through December 1862 in and around the city of Fredericksburg. During this same period, Lincoln’s administration debated and then issued the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in September 1862. Perhaps no other city in the United States captures the full range of social changes brought on by military occupation, battlefield combat, and urban destruction during the American Civil War than Fredericksburg on the Rappahannock. Founded in 1728, Fredericksburg was by 1860 a city of 5,023 inhabitants, roughly one-​ third free Black or enslaved persons of African descent. The surrounding plantations in Spotsylvania and Stafford counties as well as the African Americans enslaved in the city proper accounted for roughly ten thousand freed people who escaped to the Union Army lines between the spring and winter of 1862, when the Union Army was near the city or occupying it. The city had formed around the thriving tobacco trade of Virginia, and though that trade declined during the antebellum years, mill building for grinding flour had spurred revitalized economic activity in the late 1850s. The Union Army occupation of the town from April 18 until August 31, 1862, is illustrated in two opposing views of the occupation, one from John Washington, a slave working at a Fredericksburg hotel, and the other from Elizabeth “Lizzie” Alsop, a sixteen-​year-​old Confederate whose father was one of the wealthiest men in town. “A most memorable night,” Washington recalled. “The soldiers assured me that I was now a free man. . . . Before morning I had begun to feel like I had truly escaped from the hands of the slaves master and with the help of God, I never would be a slave no more. I felt for the first time in my life that I could now claim every cent that I should work for as my own. . . . Life had a new job awaiting me.”1 Alsop, one of the great Yankee-​haters among the population in town, wrote in May 1862, during the first occupation, “We Confederates are generally speaking, the most cheerful people

Map 19.1 Fredericksburg

320   Barton A. Myers imaginable, and treat the Yankees with silent contempt. . . . Ah! They little know the hatred in our hearts towards them.” In July her hatred had not abated: “I never hear or see a Federal . . . riding down the street that I don’t wish his neck may be broken before he crosses the bridge.”2 One of the most notable incidents of the first occupation came when the Union Army arrested nineteen prominent Confederate citizens of town, including Mayor Montgomery Slaughter. The captives were held in Old Capitol Prison in Washington for six weeks. In late May 1862, Lincoln redirected a large portion of Maj. Gen. Irvin McDowell’s Union occupation force at Fredericksburg to the Shenandoah Valley operations against Confederate Lt. Gen. Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson, whose successful six-​week campaign caused Lincoln to fear for the safety of the capital at Washington. This redirection of Union troops prevented McDowell’s large force of forty-​one thousand men from threatening Richmond from the north and supporting McClellan’s Peninsula Campaign against the Confederate capital later that summer. As part of McDowell’s scattered occupation of central Virginia that summer, thousands of Union soldiers remained in the area around Fredericksburg until August, when major operations shifted into northern Virginia and then later into Maryland, culminating in the Battle of Antietam that September. As McClellan’s replacement following Antietam, Burnside assumed command under considerable pressure from Lincoln to launch a successful campaign against the Confederate capital. In November 1862, as the plans for Burnside’s march south took shape, problems emerged. Logistical delays with the pontoon bridges that were necessary to move the enormous Union Army of the Potomac across that river permitted the “Gray Fox,” Robert E. Lee, to once again assess the military situation in Virginia and concentrate, first, sturdy Lt. Gen. James “Old Pete” Longstreet’s command on Marye’s Heights (named for the Marye family, who owned the mansion Brompton on the heights) behind the city of Fredericksburg, making sure that no crossing of the Rappahannock at that point would come without a fight. Then, once he was sure of a general movement by the Union Army along that line, Lee ordered the remainder of his forces under Stonewall Jackson, the eccentric Virginia Military Institute professor, to once again march from the Shenandoah Valley in the final days of November in support and eventually position his wing of the Confederate Army south of Fredericksburg, running all the way to a spot called Hamilton’s Crossing on the RF&P Railroad. An opportunity for an unobstructed crossing of the river at Fredericksburg had been lost to Burnside, even before the Christmas season was underway. Burnside waited and waited and waited for the appropriate equipment to arrive, but did not deviate from his original plan of march. Finally, the pontoons arrived on November 27. Even after Lee blocked his opportunity for an unmolested crossing, Burnside, with advice from his senior Grand Division commander, the aging Maj. Gen. Edwin Vose Sumner, still believed that a rapid movement against Lee’s forces south of Fredericksburg could provide the opportunity for victory. Burnside would build bridges both directly across from the city and at a lower crossing south of town for his forces to threaten both Longstreet’s and Jackson’s positions.

The Battle of Fredericksburg    321 The Confederate townspeople who remained would experience all the horrors of urban combat and wartime refugee experience:  property destruction, displacement, and the loss of loved ones during the December 1862 battle of Fredericksburg. On November 21, Burnside’s lead elements issued a military ultimatum to Fredericksburg’s city government that they should surrender the town or be shelled after a sixteen-​hour opportunity to evacuate. The Union forces hoped to gain the military objective of taking the city without firing a shot. Acting as an intermediary between the armies, the town’s Common Council, after consultation with Lee and his commanders, issued the response that Lee’s army had prepared: Fredericksburg would not surrender, but it would cease to provide Confederate materiel or movement of Confederate supplies. For its part the Union Army would not occupy the town immediately. Lee promised not to occupy the town at that point but would contest any attempt by the Union Army to cross the river there in the future. He also strongly recommended that the women and children evacuate in the face of a potential bombardment and U.S. Army occupation, which caused hundreds of citizens to flee the city. By the end of November, however, Lee had moved Brig. Gen. William Barksdale’s Mississippi Brigade into town to observe Union Army movements, which he was watching along a twenty-​five-​mile-​long front. Despite the advance notice to citizens, approximately nine hundred of Fredericksburg’s five thousand residents remained in town at the beginning of the battle. The Richmond Examiner reported that on Friday, December 12, “Mayor Slaughter announced that the [remaining] women should be removed, [which] is said to have been heartrending, and the next day when the hour arrived, the confusion and uproar was unparalleled.” “The population being mostly women and children, had no means of transporting their trunks to the depot, and had not a number of ambulances been sent in at a late hour from our army, the most of them must have left their homes with nothing but the clothes they were wearing,” the editor recounted. “Most of them locked up their houses, and left them with all their worldly goods to the chance of war and the mercy of the contending armies. Many of the poorest people refused to move at all, but determined to remain, at least until the threatened shelling should begin. Others moved from two to three miles in the country, and are now encamped along the roads with such of their furniture.”3 Confederate soldiers who watched the refugees fleeing town described their careworn, haggard appearance. “Nice ladies, dressed in furs, trudging through the mud, poor little children huddled in go-​carts and ox wagons, many of them with little bundles of valuables, and all of them leaving their home with full expectation that they would be up in flames in a few hours,” described Brig. Gen. Thomas Reade Rootes Cobb of Georgia.4 Artillery Capt. Greenlee Davidson of Lexington, Virginia, wrote on December 9, “Fredericksburg is deserted and is threatened by our guns as well as by those of the Yankees. The country for miles around is filled with refugees. Every house is crowded and hundreds are living in churches, in barns, and in tents.”5 Before dawn on December 11, Burnside ordered his engineers to begin the construction of the bridges opposite town. Lee, understanding that Burnside’s heavy guns on Stafford Heights commanded the city, sent only a fraction of his army to the city itself. Urban fighting would be a hallmark of this Civil War engagement, placing the few

322   Barton A. Myers remaining civilians not evacuated by Lee squarely in the middle of the two great armies. General Lee deployed the crack Mississippi brigade of fire-​eating secessionist William Barksdale, supported by Floridians from Brig. Gen. E. A. Perry’s Brigade, to defend the bank of the Rappahannock and harass the New York Engineers building the pontoon bridges for the Union Army to cross. As the fog began to lift over the city, Barksdale’s men did their deadly work. Union Chief of Artillery Brig. Gen. Henry J. Hunt’s guns, however, would work to reduce the houses along the wharf to eliminate the cover the Mississippians needed to be effective. Hunt arrayed 147 guns on Stafford Heights, many averaging fifty rounds apiece fired that day. Ordnance struck houses with devastating rapidity, destroying a grand piano in one home and a child’s playhouse in another. No American city had experienced a bombardment of this duration and severity during 1861 or 1862. Finally, Union soldiers would use the pontoon boats to ferry across the river and actually storm the streets. But it would be Lee’s orders that ultimately withdrew the tenacious Mississippi brigade from the city as the Union Army finally gained a foothold in town. The bombardment was a harrowing experience for the remaining citizens in town. Confederate Jane Howison Beale was the widow of William Beale. She ran a boarding house and school for girls at 307 Lewis Street in downtown Fredericksburg in the 1850s and was in town in December, during the opening stages of the Fredericksburg battle. Jane had ten children by her husband before his death in 1850. He owned a mill that she sold, allowing her to keep her house. Her son Charles Dornin Beale was killed in battle in May 1862 at Williamsburg. On December 11, she wrote, “Heavy Bombardment commenced again and the sound of 173 guns echoes in our ears, the shrieking of those shells, like a host of angry fiends rushing through the air, the crashing of the balls from the roof and upper stories of the house, I shall never forget to the day of my death, the agony and terror of the next four hours, is burnt in on my memory as with hot iron, I could not pray but only cry for mercy.” She and her children evacuated late that afternoon to the home of friends outside town. Most of the refugees evacuated in whatever was available, including army ambulances, carts, and civilian wagons.6 Under heavy fog on December 12, Union troops, protected once again by the guns of Stafford Heights, crossed the Rappahannock and entered the city in force. The carnival of punishment that Union soldiers displayed on that day exemplified a harsher war. The war was becoming harder in its military policy toward civilians, and the Union Army was beginning to use economic destruction as a weapon of war to bring hardship upon the whole Southern population. Fredericksburg would see this shift in microcosm as Union soldiers who protected and guarded houses during an earlier occupation of the city would return as part of an army that would loot the city on December 12, 1862. The vengeance that the Union Army’s soldiers acted out on Fredericksburg was not just harsher military policy against Confederate civilians they blamed for the war or for their own earlier battlefield defeats. This destruction was a catharsis against often elusive Confederate armies under Lee and Stonewall Jackson that had consistently embarrassed Union armies in the East for more than a year and a half.

The Battle of Fredericksburg    323 There were roughly 115,000 men in Burnside’s three grand divisions of infantry, commanded by Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker, Edwin Sumner, and Maj. Gen. William B. Franklin. Burnside’s tactical plan for December 13 was sound in theory. First, Franklin’s Left Grand Division (the main attack) would flank and overwhelm Jackson’s men south of town near Hamilton’s Crossing, with a goal of seizing the Richmond road and a new road Confederates had cut to link the two wings of their own army, and ultimately turn the flank of Lee’s entire army on that end of the battlefield. More important, Burnside’s army would then control the important road and the Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Potomac rail line between Fredericksburg and the Confederate capital, making the Confederate Army’s position untenable. Confederates would then have had no other choice but to move to defend Richmond. In Burnside’s plan, the secondary attack would come with the Right Grand Division of “Bull” Sumner driving the Confederates from their works and the heights after Franklin was successful. Both Franklin and Sumner would have support troops designated from Hooker’s Center Grand Division. Theoretically, if Franklin’s move south of town was successful, then Sumner’s men would be able to drive the entrenched Confederates under Longstreet from their now untenable positions on the heights directly behind the city. Franklin’s attacks, however, were not ultimately successful, due, in part, to the confusion of Burnside’s own vague orders not making the supreme importance of Franklin’s own movements clear in the overall battle plan. The subsequent assaults made against Marye’s Heights would be the assaults that countless Americans remember as Burnside’s futile folly. On the morning of December 13, Confederates under Longstreet and Jackson were arrayed along a seven-​mile front (with Jackson’s men stacked in lines along the final two miles). On the extreme Confederate right flank, south of Fredericksburg, along with Prospect Hill, stood Jackson’s four divisions. Franklin’s movements on the morning of December 13 were delayed more than an hour by the bold actions of the twenty-​four-​ year-​old Alabama artillerist Maj. John Pelham, who commanded just one cannon that harassed the flank of the large Union attacking force. Jackson, an old artillery instructor, said of Pelham, “I have never seen more skillful handling of guns. It is really extraordinary to find such nerve and genius in a mere boy. With a Pelham on each flank I believe I could whip the world.” Among Jackson’s subordinates Maj. Gen. A. P. Hill, whom Jackson personally disliked and had even arrested for dereliction of duty just a few months before, had permitted a two-​hundred-​yard gap in the Confederate line. This was a fateful decision designed to spare his men the difficulty of standing or sitting in a marshy lowland. Union Maj. Gen. George Gordon Meade’s division of Franklin’s force (the old Pennsylvania Reserve Corps) walked into this area around 1:00 p.m. on the early afternoon of December 13, throwing the Confederate defenders into confusion. This attack pushed back two brigades of Hill’s troops, driving into the center of Jackson’s second line. A furious counterattack by Brig. Gen. Jubal Early’s Division dislodged the Union attackers, but the heavy artillery cover Union soldiers had from Stafford Heights and its guns halted the Confederate momentum. On this end of the field, the casualties would be much more even.

324   Barton A. Myers On the Union right flank, the attack of Sumner’s Grand Division commenced just before noon, with neither Burnside nor Sumner completely aware of what was transpiring on the other side of the battlefield. That afternoon Georgians, North Carolinians, and South Carolinians defended the sunken road and an old stone retaining wall that ran along the base of the hill. The Confederate position on this end of the field was one of the best defensive positions Lee’s army would ever hold. Lt. Col. Edward Porter Alexander, commanding Longstreet’s artillery, told his commander prior to the battle, “General, we cover that ground now so well that we will comb it as with a fine-​tooth comb. A chicken could not live on that field when we open upon it.” But it wouldn’t be chickens; it would be men from Rhode Island and Ohio, Massachusetts and Maine, Pennsylvania, and New Hampshire.7 Confederates in the sunken road eventually stood five soldiers deep as they loaded, stepped to the firing line, and fired, again and again, over the stone retaining wall. This rock wall held together by gravity is arguably one of the American Civil War’s most powerful and important symbols of enduring union. The wall was a site where Union soldiers failed to meet a military objective, in a devastating way, but just a few months later, in May 1863, it was a site of Union victory during Chancellorsville. Today the wall symbolizes the endurance of the Union despite these deep sectional and political divisions of the 1860s. Artillerists from Col. James B.  Walton’s Washington Artillery of New Orleans, a prewar militia unit made up of many of the Crescent City’s noblest families, commanded along the heights, spewing forth iron death.8 Longstreet, whose troops defended the sunken road, captured the desperation of the scene. “A series of braver, more desperate charges than those hurled against the troops in the sunken road was never known,” Longstreet recalled, “and the piles and cross-​piles of dead marked a field such as I never saw before or since.”9 All afternoon and into the dusk, the Union assaulters came, marching across the rising open plain outside of town, crossing a millrace, attempting to carry the sunken road and heights beyond. The brigade commands as they came forward offer a sober, deadly cadence: Kimball, Andrews, Palmer, Zook, Meagher, Caldwell, Owen, Hall, Sully, Ferrero, Nagle, Barnes, Sweitzer, Stockton, Allabach, Tyler, and Hawkins. In all, seventeen brigades attempted to charge the stone wall. Parts of eight separate Union divisions drawn from the Second, Third, Fifth, and Ninth Corps would be part of the attacks or be deployed as covering and relief soldiers for failed charges. The Union soldiers came no closer than twenty-​five paces from the wall, according to Union Maj. Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock’s report of the battle. The assaults ceased as night fell on the field, but not before Burnside offered to lead one final assault himself; wisely his officers convinced him of the futility of that action. The bitter cold hastened the deaths of many that December evening, and their frozen corpses were used as shelter by some of the living stranded on the field. Among the ranks of Brig. Gen. Joseph B. Kershaw’s South Carolina Brigade, Lt. Richard Kirkland could not stand the cries for help, water, and solace from the enemy troops just over the wall, in the dangerous no-​man’s land. He requested permission to relieve these men with

The Battle of Fredericksburg    325 water. Despite the danger, he went, providing service to fallen enemies, an act of humanity during a battle filled with days of rage. The homeowners of Fredericksburg were rocked by the battle. Capt. Charles Minor Blackford, a member of the 2nd Virginia Cavalry whose family owned a home on Caroline Street, commented that the house was damaged by a cannonball. He described the scene in a letter: “The heaviest carnage of the enemy was upon the street which passes by [George] Rowe’s house [Hanover Street] and in the field in front of the house. On one square the Yankees left four hundred and eighty dead bodies, though they had been burying their dead during the two days they occupied the town after the battle. The town was full of dead men when evacuated. It seems very strange to see a deserted town, with nothing but corpses of dead men and horses for inhabitants.” Anger, frustration, and revenge would be doled out by both armies during this battle. For the Union Army it would take the form of pillaging on December 12, and for the Confederate Army it would come in the slaughter they inflicted on the 13th.10 Northern newspapers spent the days following the battle assessing the defeat. The Delaware State Journal and Statesman published a generous assessment on December 23: “We do not think Burnside deserves censure for his plan of this battle. It was an attempt not merely to defeat the rebel army but annihilate it. Had he succeeded in his attempt to pierce the center and seize the railroad in the rear, their retreat would have been cut off, the whole rebel army divided into two fragments and attacked in front, flank, and rear. It is worth all the men we have lost to try to gain such a victory.”11 The Chicago Daily Tribune, which strongly supported the Lincoln administration, tried to find a reason for hope. “There is no cause for discouragement to the Union men,” the editor wrote. “The darkness that glooms the present hour presages the day near at hand when these noble troops of ours will be led against a foe whose strongest bastions lie low in the destruction of the monster iniquity in whose cause they have been moved to rebellion.”12 The New York Tribune, a Republican paper, saw the battle for what it was, an utter disaster: “It is not using too strong an expression to say that in this battle we were butchered. The loss of the enemy, in comparison with our own, must be insignificant.”13 Lincoln’s public response to the battle’s outcome was printed in the New York Tribune on Christmas Eve 1862. He tried desperately to find a silver lining in the cloak of defeat: “Although you were not successful, the attempt was not an error, nor the failure other than an accident.” Lincoln stretched to find positives for the army after a gut-​ wrenching defeat. “The courage with which you, in an open field, maintained the contest against an entrenched foe, and the consummate skill and success with which you crossed and re-​crossed the river, in face of the enemy, show that you possess all the qualities of a great army, which will yet give victory to the cause of the country and of popular government. Condoling with the mourners for the dead, and sympathizing with the severely wounded, I  congratulate you that the number of both is comparatively small.”14 On the night of December 15, having secured his wounded, Burnside withdrew his troops across the Rappahannock River, ending the battle.15 Adulation from around the Confederacy poured in for Lee and his gray-​clad veterans. This was Lee’s most one-​sided battlefield victory of the war, by casualties and popular

326   Barton A. Myers perception. Something about the nature of this battle, however, caused even the carefully comported R.E. Lee to become reflective. “It’s well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it,” he reportedly said to Longstreet during the course of the battle. War held that seductive power, even for Robert E. Lee. He was dazzled by the pageantry of battle. Nevertheless, he was self-​aware enough to temper that statement alongside the costs, in men, in lives, in its inherent terrible nature.16 Lincoln’s private reaction summarized the pits of Northern despair over Fredericksburg. Upon hearing of the carnage, he simply stated, “If there is a place worse than hell, I am in it!”17 The Battle of Fredericksburg led to some additional pressure from the French government at conciliation between the North and South. But Lincoln’s Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation of September 1862 and formal Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, two critically important uses of his powers as commander in chief, made this a clear war over the existence of slavery in America on the international diplomatic scene. These domestic edicts abolishing four billion dollars in slave property subsequently made the likelihood of foreign military intervention by England or France extremely remote as the war continued into 1863, even with the Confederate victory at Fredericksburg. In the South the Fredericksburg victory elevated the spirits of many in the Confederate population and political leadership. This relatively easy victory for the Army of Northern Virginia further confirmed the widely held belief in the Confederate government and in the population that Lee’s army provided their best strategic chance for defending the geographic integrity of the Confederacy and securing independence. In Richmond, Confederate President Jefferson Davis gave a speech on January 5, 1863, celebrating the victory. “Our glorious Lee,” Davis extolled, “the valued son, emulating the virtues of the heroic Light-​horse Harry, his father, has achieved a victory at Fredericksburg, and driven the enemy back from his last and greatest effort to get ‘on to Richmond.’ ” Davis acerbically recounted, “Every crime which could characterize the course of demons has marked the course of the invader.” The Confederate president further charged, “The Northern portion of Virginia has been ruthlessly desolated—​the people not only deprived of the means of subsistence, but their household property destroyed, and every indignity which the base imagination of a merciless foe could suggest inflicted, without regard to age, sex or condition.”18 In both a tactical and a strategic sense, the Battle of Fredericksburg was a Confederate victory in the field. The Union Army remained in Stafford County following the battle, just across the river, encamped that winter, while Confederates held the town and surrounding Spotsylvania County. Gen. Ambrose Burnside’s failed attempt to flank the Confederate Army by moving around north of the city in mid-​January 1863, which infamously became known as the “Mud March,” did nothing to buoy the spirts of the Union cause. These twin failures led Lincoln to again seek a replacement for the Army of the Potomac’s principal commander. This time he found a competent reformer but a vain practitioner of generalship in Joseph Hooker, who planned for a spring 1863 campaign in the region surrounding Fredericksburg. Fredericksburg’s position roughly equidistant between Washington and Richmond continued to keep it a primary theater of

The Battle of Fredericksburg    327 operations for the Union and Confederate armies over the next year and a half as the Union Army worked to find a way to either capture Richmond or destroy Lee’s army. In the spring of 1863 the citizens of Fredericksburg, Stafford County, and Spotsylvania County again witnessed a clash over the town as Hooker executed an innovative flank march around the Army of Northern Virginia in the final days of April, only to see his army defeated during the first week of May at the Battle of Chancellorsville at the hands of Lee and Jackson. This battle marked the loss of Jackson but also Lee’s greatest victory of the war. During the course of the early May engagements, the Union Army troops under Maj. Gen. John Sedgwick overran the Fredericksburg defenses at Marye’s Heights, carrying what they had failed to carry only months before. This smaller engagement became known as the Second Battle of Fredericksburg, part of the Chancellorsville Campaign. On the heels of this victory, Lee marched north on a second raid, where he suffered a costly defeat at Gettysburg in July. The fall of 1863 and winter of 1864 saw the armies back in central Virginia as George Meade, the Army of the Potomac’s victorious Gettysburg commander, waged a campaign of maneuver along Mine Run in Orange County, which led to a smaller engagement there at the end of November and beginning of December 1863. This would be Meade’s last offensive prior to the arrival of Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant. By spring 1864, a new commander of the Union Army’s war effort arrived on the scene in the form of Grant, who again launched a campaign near Fredericksburg and in the surrounding counties as he marched into the Wilderness of Spotsylvania at the beginning of the Overland Campaign in May. By May 1864, Fredericksburg would become a city of hospitals, with more than fourteen thousand wounded (but only forty surgeons) housed in the remaining houses, churches, and other structures. As the battles of the Overland Campaign once again ravaged the armies, Union hospital agent Julia S. Wheelock recounted, “Day after day, long trains freighted with human suffering continued to arrive. . . . All the public buildings—​ the Court House, churches, hotels, warehouses, factories, the paper mill, theater, school-​ buildings, stores, stables, many private residences—​and in fact, everything that could give shelter was converted in receptacles for the wounded, until Fredericksburg was one vast hospital.”19 The deep symbolism that the Civil War generation created by reburying men from all of the major campaigns of 1862, 1863, and 1864 atop the heights that Union soldiers had failed to carry on that cold, heroic day, but that had been carried in the less well-​known action of Second Fredericksburg on May 3, 1863, during the Chancellorsville Campaign was striking. The transformative meaning of victory and defeat for a divided nation is literally sown in the ground by the men who fought over this hallowed space. It is at Fredericksburg in December 1862 that we see the sacrifice and duty of the citizen-​soldier demonstrated in perhaps its most poignant way in the face of what now seems to us murderous and impossible odds. For Confederates this moment would come later, with Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg in July 1863, but for the Union Marye’s Heights symbolized sacrifice. Union soldiers who made the long-​remembered assaults would not live to see the victory of their cause, but their military defeat was also a long-​term victory of Union memory, of the great costs and sacrifice of a war for union, of the importance of

328   Barton A. Myers selfless service in a time of political division. Few successful attacks made by any Union army during a victorious war stand out as much as the military defeat of the attacks on that sloping ground beneath the heights. Today the Fredericksburg National Cemetery includes over 15,243 Civil War interments, of whom only 2,473 soldiers are identified. Nevertheless, the burials at this cemetery are only a fraction of the more than 100,000 casualties that occurred within the bounds of the acreage encompassing the four major battlefields in Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park. At Fredericksburg, Burnside engaged over 100,000 men, predominantly citizen-​ soldiers, not regulars, volunteers who sought, primarily, the preservation of the Union. Lee’s over 70,000 volunteers and conscripts sought the birth of a new nation-​ state rooted in the institution of slavery. Both armies sought finality to a civil conflict over the future of the union in a battle waged on the fields and streets of one of our nation’s most historic cities. Yet neither army tasted the satisfaction of ultimate military victory on December 13, 1862. The Union’s proud Army of the Potomac, the grand army of the republic, saw one of its most agonizing defeats: 12,653 casualties, 60 percent of them on the rising plain in front of Marye’s Heights. And the vaunted Confederate Army of Northern Virginia saw one of its greatest victories of the war, suffering just under 5,400 casualties, as it turned back multiple charges on both ends of the battlefield. The audacious acts of those men North and South that December help us grasp the gravity of those days. But the service of the Union soldiers who fell in defeat at Fredericksburg, punctuated by the placement of a national cemetery on the heights they could not carry in mid-​December 1862, demonstrates their shocking, sobering, arresting sacrifice. That service clearly demonstrates the high cost of our continued national existence.

Notes 1. Crandall Shifflett, ed., John Washington’s Civil War:  A Slave Narrative (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 2008), 51–​52, 55, 63–​64. 2. Andrew H. Talkov, “The Journal of Elizabeth Maxwell Alsop Wynne, 1862–​1878,” MA thesis, Virginia Commonwealth University, 2013, 2–​3. 3. John J. Hennessy, “The Looting and Bombardment of Fredericksburg: ‘Vile Spirits’ or War Transformed,” in Upon the Fields of Battle: Essays on the Military History of America’s Civil War, ed. Andrew S. Bledsoe and Andy F. Lang (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2018), 134–​136; Belmont (OH) Chronicle, December 25, 1862. 4. J. William Jones, ed., Southern Historical Society Papers (Richmond, VA: William Ellis Jones Printer, 1900), 28:299. 5. Charles W. Turner, Captain Greenlee Davidson:  Letters of a Virginia Soldier (Verona, VA: McClure Press, 1975). 6. Jane Beale, The Journal of Jane Howison Beale of Fredericksburg, Virginia, 1850–​1862 (Fredericksburg, VA: Historic Fredericksburg Foundation, Inc. 1979), 74. 7. James Longstreet, “The Battle of Fredericksburg,” in Battles and Leaders of the Civil War (Edison, NJ: Castle Books, 1995) 3:79.

The Battle of Fredericksburg    329 8. Gary W. Gallagher, ed., Fighting for the Confederacy: The Personal Recollections of General Edward Porter Alexander (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 166–​187; William Miller Owen, “A Hot Day on Marye’s Heights,” in Battles and Leaders of the Civil War (Edison, NJ: Castle Books, 1995), 3:97–​98. 9. James Longstreet, From Manassas to Appomattox (New York: Mallard Press, 1991), 315. 10. Susan Leigh Blackford and Charles Minor Blackford, Letters from Lee’s Army:  or, Memoirs of life in and out of the Army in Virginia during the War between the States (New York: Charles Scribner Sons, 1947), 149. 11. Delaware State Journal and Statesman, December 23, 1862. 12. Chicago Daily Tribune, December 19, 1862. 13. Chicago Daily Tribune, December 19, 1862, reprint of New  York Tribune, December 18, 1862. 14. Roy P. Blaser, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 6:13. 15. George C. Rable, Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg! (Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 291. 16. Edward Porter Alexander, Military Memoirs of a Confederate:  A Critical Narrative (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1907), 302. A slightly different version of the quote appears in Douglas Southall Freeman, R. E. Lee: A Biography (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1934), 2:462. 17. Michael Burlingame, The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 105. 18. Lynda Lasswell Crist, ed., The Papers of Jefferson Davis (Baton Rouge:  Louisiana State University Press, 1997), 9:12. 19. Julia S. Wheelock, The Boys in White; the Experiences of a Hospital Agent in and around Washington (New York: Lange and Hillman, 1870), 205.

Bibliography Beale, Jane. The Journal of Jane Howison Beale of Fredericksburg, Virginia, 1850–​ 1862. Fredericksburg, VA: Historic Fredericksburg Foundation, 1979. Blight, David W. A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Own Narratives of Emancipation. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007. Gallagher, Gary W. The Fredericksburg Campaign:  Decision on the Rappahannock. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Harrison, Noel. Fredericksburg Civil War Sites. Vol. 2. Lynchburg, VA: H. E. Howard, 1995. Hennessy, John J. “The Looting and Bombardment of Fredericksburg:  ‘Vile Spirits’ or War Transformed.” In Upon the Fields of Battle: Essays on the Military History of America’s Civil War, ed. Andrew S. Bledsoe and Andy F. Lang, 124–​164. Baton Rouge:  Louisiana State University Press, 2018. Longstreet, James. From Manassas to Appomattox. New York: Mallard Press, 1991. Luvaas, Jay, and Harold W. Nelson, eds. Guide to the Battles of Chancellorsville and Fredericksburg. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996. Marvel, William. Burnside. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991. O’Reilly, Francis Augustin. Winter War on the Rappahannock: The Fredericksburg Campaign. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002.

330   Barton A. Myers Rable, George C. Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg! Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Shifflett, Crandall, ed. John Washington’s Civil War: A Slave Narrative. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008. Sutherland, Daniel E. Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville:  The Dare Mark Campaign. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010. Thomas, Emory. Robert E. Lee: A Biography. New York: Norton, 1995.

Chapter 20

Gr an t’s North Mi s si s si ppi Campaign, Ch i c kas aw Bayou, an d t h e B ot tom l a nd s Earl J. Hess

Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s North Mississippi Campaign, extending from November 1862 until January 1863, spanned three states, involved six major operations, and planted a powerful Federal army only a few miles from Vicksburg. The most important Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi River, Vicksburg was, as Pres. Abraham Lincoln put it, the key to control of the central valley that split the Confederacy in two. Grant failed to capture it, but he opened a large part of the valley, stretching two hundred miles south of Memphis, to Federal exploitation. From January to the end of April 1863, during the Bottomlands phase of Grant’s continuing operations, his men confiscated food and animals from the region for their own use, collected slave men as laborers and soldiers, and cared for Black women and children. Federal agents confiscated abandoned plantations and worked them with refugee Black labor. Temporarily stymied in capturing Fortress Vicksburg, the Federals took full advantage of their opportunity to reap benefits from the fertile delta land they now occupied, to break down the institution of slavery, and to make Lincoln’s new directions in war policy effective on the ground, where it counted. Ever since the secession of the Deep South early in 1861, reopening the navigation of the Mississippi River to Northern commerce had been an important goal of the Union war effort. For residents of the northwestern states, it was second only to national reunification—​for some of those residents, free navigation was even more important than reunion. “There is no division of sentiment in this section,” declared the editor of the Cincinnati Daily Gazette. “The Northwest will be a unit in maintaining its rights to a free and unobstructed use of the Mississippi river throughout its entire course.”1

332   Earl J. Hess Despite the fact that railroad development had begun to shift the flow of northwestern goods eastward rather than south down the river, most people recognized the economic significance of the Mississippi in their lives. They also knew that access to the Mississippi waterways had been a major goal of their region for nearly a hundred years. The Federals had gone a long way toward reclaiming the Mississippi by the late summer of 1862. Combined army and naval forces captured Island No. 10 and Memphis while advancing from the North. Other units moved up from the Gulf to secure New Orleans and Baton Rouge. The forces operating out of captured New Orleans made an attempt to take Vicksburg in July but were foiled by too few troops and widespread disease that sapped their numbers. The Confederates had devoted relatively few resources to defending the upper and lower Mississippi to this point in time, relying on a few fixed fortifications supported by minimal troops, and they paid a heavy price for their lax commitment to holding the river. By August 1862 Confederate forces held only the stretch between Vicksburg, Mississippi, and Port Hudson, Louisiana, 150 miles in a straight line. They shipped cattle and other agricultural produce from the Trans-​ Mississippi to the east through this portal. Ordnance and quartermaster stores for troops west of the river also found their way through this gate. Partial restoration of Mississippi River navigation was not enough. The Northwest needed full access to the natural highway, and public pressure on the government to provide it increased in the late summer of 1862. Lincoln’s cabinet discussed the issue on August 3 with a suggestion that the army organize a special force of volunteers from the new regiments being raised by the Northern states to fill Lincoln’s July 2 call for 300,000 more troops. This force would be dedicated to completing the conquest of the river. General in Chief Henry W. Halleck objected to the proposal, preferring to let his generals incorporate the new regiments into existing units to take Vicksburg. Confederate offensives interrupted plans for the next advance on Vicksburg. Gen. Braxton Bragg led the Army of the Mississippi in a daring invasion of Union-​held Kentucky. He knew this move could be seen by the northwestern states as a threat to their use of the Mississippi, so he issued a proclamation on September 20, 1862, assuring them the Confederacy would guarantee free use of the river. A concurrent offensive by Maj. Gen. Earl Van Dorn targeted Corinth, Mississippi. The Federal garrison barely held the town against attacks on October 3 and 4. Both Confederate offensives were repelled, with Bragg retreating to Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and Van Dorn falling back to a position south of Corinth. The strategic initiative once again shifted to the Federals. Dozens of new regiments were taking the field. Many of the new recruits assumed the large army assembling along the Mississippi would complete its conquest in a short time and believed they had a license to plunder private property under the Second Confiscation Act (passed July 17, 1862), which authorized the army to seize property belonging to anyone who supported the rebellion. Maj. Gen. John A.  McClernand, a division commander in Grant’s Department of the Tennessee, lobbied Washington officials for permission to command a corps of new regiments to capture Vicksburg. Lincoln and Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton

Map 20.1  North Mississippi and Chickasaw Bayou

334   Earl J. Hess supported him, but Halleck remained aloof. Lincoln’s and Stanton’s encouragement led McClernand to assume he would operate independently of Grant, but neither official issued instructions to that effect.

Grant’s North Mississippi Campaign Not knowing of McClernand’s scheme, Grant mounted a campaign to take Vicksburg. He had maintained a defensive posture by holding several towns in northern Mississippi and southwest Tennessee since June 1862. From that time until October, opposing forces had sparred with each other, creating a fluid border zone between permanently held posts. That fluid zone included towns alternately held and then evacuated by both sides. Van Dorn’s attack on Corinth represented an attempt to penetrate the Union zone of permanent occupation. To prevent that from happening again, Grant began to permanently occupy towns in the fluid zone. He secured La Grange and Grand Junction, Tennessee, without opposition in early November and then moved on Holly Springs, Mississippi, also taking that place without a battle. With newly raised regiments swelling his command, Grant now planned to penetrate the Confederate zone of permanent occupation. He advanced toward the Tallahatchie River fifteen miles south of Holly Springs with three divisions and arranged for Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman to move three more divisions southeast from Memphis to meet him. Grant also arranged for an infantry and cavalry strike by troops from Helena, Arkansas, to cross the river and threaten the Mississippi Central Railroad, Van Dorn’s supply link with Jackson, Mississippi. These combined moves forced the Confederates to evacuate their fortifications along the Tallahatchie by December 2 without a battle. Grant also moved troops fifteen miles south to occupy Oxford. By now, Lt. Gen. John C. Pemberton had assumed command of the Department of Mississippi and East Louisiana, superseding Van Dorn. Pemberton positioned thirty thousand troops at Grenada, Mississippi, sixty-​five miles south of the Tallahatchie River. Grant’s strength amounted to forty thousand men, but he faced serious logistical problems. Halleck was convinced that the Mississippi Central Railroad was inadequate to supply an advance 175 miles south of the Tallahatchie to Jackson, with another 45 miles west to Vicksburg. It would be vulnerable to cavalry and guerrilla attacks, draining troop strength by forcing the Federals to detail guards along the way. Halleck advised Grant to divert most of his troops to the Mississippi, transport them by civilian steamers escorted by naval gunboats, and hit Vicksburg from the north. The Mississippi represented the only secure line of communications for a deep penetration of the Lower South. But Grant continued to toy with the idea of advancing overland to Vicksburg with part of his force. He decided by December 8 to send Sherman with one division back to Memphis to organize the river expedition Halleck proposed. Sherman could supplement his division with new regiments that McClernand sent south and pick up more troops at Helena. Grant would continue advancing south along the railroad with five

NORTH MISSISSIPPI, CHICKASAW BAYOU, AND THE BOTTOMLANDS    335 divisions. If he could not rely on the rail line to Jackson, Grant planned to cut himself off from the track at Grenada and live off the countryside as he marched to join Sherman on the Yazoo River north of Vicksburg. Then he could reestablish his supply line by way of the Mississippi. Before he could resume his advance south, Grant had to contend with many problems raised by his invasion of Rebel territory. Thousands of slaves flocked to the Union Army seeking freedom. So many came in November that Grant instituted a new policy to deal with them. Since Lincoln had issued his Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, there was now no question of sending them back to their masters, as had sometimes previously occurred. Grant appointed Chaplain John Eaton Jr. of the 27th Ohio to take charge of the problem. Eaton received authorization to create a system of contraband camps to house and feed these Black refugees. From these camps the Federals recruited able-​bodied males as laborers and protected the women and children from their masters. Eaton used these laborers to pick cotton on abandoned plantations and hired them out to loyal or neutral citizens. “We were making a difficult experiment in the interests of humanity,” Eaton later wrote, describing how his subordinates acted as mediators between refugee laborers and local employers.2 Northern Mississippi became a testing ground for the future Freedmen’s Bureau. A white refugee problem also developed; Grant caused it but did not take full responsibility for the consequences. Most refugees fled the approach of the Federal army, taking their slaves with them, heading south. Some white refugees remained within Union lines but escaped to the Northern states, with the Federal army providing transportation for them as far as Cairo. From that point they were on their own. Confederate reports indicate that several thousand people abandoned their homes and plantations, leaving cotton and corn crops standing in the fields. Federal troops were even more encouraged to plunder and burn empty houses than those that remained occupied. Eaton used his Black refugees to harvest abandoned crops for the benefit of the Union war effort. Civilian flight before Grant’s advance acted therefore in complementary ways. Blacks fled to the Union; whites fled from the Yankees; but Black refugees filled the vacancy left by white refugees on white-​owned farms and plantations. The level of destruction to be seen in Grant’s campaign was noticeably higher than in previous operations. Soldiers tended to ransack farms and plantations rather than staff them with Black refugees. “The new troops come full of the idea of a more vigorous prosecution of the war,” Sherman told Halleck, “meaning destruction and plunder.”3 Another problem was Northern business interest in the war zone. Every time fresh Confederate territory was opened by Northern armies, traders appeared with a determination to grab cotton. Because many people associated Jews with this aggressive trade, Grant overreacted in an effort to curb the annoyance. He was guilty of using the label “Israelites” or “Jews” as a substitute for shady traders, but many other gentiles did the same in Civil War America. No one else, however, sought to eject all Jews from his department, as Grant did through general orders issued on December 17, 1862. The order created a storm of protest, starting with several Jewish traders in the department and quickly spreading to Jewish residents of the North. Their vocal protests were heard in

336   Earl J. Hess Washington, leading the administration to require Grant to rescind the order, which he did in January 1863. The incident haunted Grant the rest of his life and was heatedly discussed when he ran for president six years later. Another weight on Grant was the need to win a military victory on the eve of Lincoln’s final Emancipation Proclamation, slated to go into effect on January 1, 1863. The president knew his emancipation policy was risky. It seemed to violate constitutional restraints on the Federal government’s ability to act on slavery in the states. Moreover, a large proportion of the Union Army and the civilian population that gave it birth offered severe criticism of the policy. Lincoln felt he needed a military victory to bring this revolutionary direction to the forefront, just as he had needed one to introduce the proclamation in the wake of a battlefield victory in September. Thus far his armies were not cooperating. Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside had produced a bloody failure at Fredericksburg, Virginia, on December 13, 1862. Besides Grant’s army, the only other Union force capable of delivering a battlefield victory by January 1 was commanded by Maj. Gen. William S. Rosecrans, tasked with advancing on Bragg at Murfreesboro. Rosecrans had not even begun his campaign yet, so Grant represented the second of Lincoln’s three-​pronged hopes for introducing emancipation from a position of military strength. Grant gambled on a double approach to Vicksburg, and he chose his best subordinate to command the downriver strike. A superb logistician, Sherman created the largest river-​borne expedition of the war by assembling thirty thousand men, carried by sixty civilian steamers. He relied entirely on riverboats to supply his men as they operated in the Vicksburg area two hundred miles in a straight line (but four hundred miles by river line) south of Memphis. The U.S. Navy played a key role in Sherman’s expedition. Manned by navy personnel but under orders of army commanders, this river force had declined by the summer of 1862. Then important changes took place. The Mississippi River Squadron was transferred to the complete control of the navy, and Acting Rear Admiral David D. Porter was appointed to command it. Porter worked hard to refurbish old boats, buy and build new ones, add heavier guns to the fleet, and diversify the type of vessels. By December 1862 he commanded sixty boats and was eager to cooperate with the army. Even before Sherman was ready to leave Memphis, Porter sent a naval expedition to clear the Mississippi to a point north of Vicksburg. His boats also steamed up the Yazoo River to clear landing places on the east bank so Sherman could approach the steep bluffs upon which Vicksburg was located. Clearing the Yazoo was not easy. The Confederates planted submarine mines in the river that sank the ironclad gunboat USS Cairo on December 12, 1862. Porter was unable to fully secure the Yazoo River. Confederate snipers harassed his boats from shore, and Rebel operatives replaced the submarine mines his sailors dredged out of the river channel. Heavy guns at Haynes’s Bluff a few miles up from the mouth proved too much for his boats. But Porter could protect Sherman’s transports as they landed troops on the east bank of the Yazoo anywhere beyond the range of guns at Haynes’s Bluff.

NORTH MISSISSIPPI, CHICKASAW BAYOU, AND THE BOTTOMLANDS    337 The navy also played a role in cracking open the institution of slavery. Porter needed sailors in the fall of 1862, as naval recruiting lagged at the same time that he was expanding his squadron. He instructed all boat commanders to take on board any Black refugees who appeared along the banks of the Mississippi, using the able-​bodied men as sailors and taking care of their families as payment for their services. The navy thus began to recruit Blacks for military service months before the army joined that policy. McClernand had no inkling that others were preparing to attack Vicksburg. He continued to supervise regimental organization in Illinois under the impression that these units would be waiting for him at Memphis. But Halleck delayed ordering him to the field as long as possible. There is no doubt that Lincoln and Stanton earnestly supported McClernand, hoped to use his influence in recruiting new troops, and probably wanted him to take independent command of the Vicksburg expedition. But neither official wanted to insult Grant by issuing an order placing McClernand in that position, or changing the date of McClernand’s commission as major general so he would outrank Grant. Military protocol allowed whoever commanded the Department of the Tennessee to be in charge of all operations. Halleck assured Grant that any troops sent into his department were his to use as he saw fit. As long as Lincoln and Stanton refused to intervene, the advantage was on Grant’s side. Sherman worked fast to prepare his expedition. His main motive was to take advantage of the strategic momentum following Grant’s capture of the Tallahatchie River and Oxford. He did not want the Confederates to rebound again as they had done after their defeat at Shiloh. Soon after Sherman left Memphis on December 20, the Federals began to torch buildings. Sherman encouraged this by ordering retaliation for every guerrilla attack on the fleet, authorizing the burning of nearby towns. Communities such as Friar’s Point went up in smoke as the expedition passed by. As Sherman steamed south, Grant was hit by unexpected trouble. Bragg dispatched much of his cavalry force under Brig. Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest to raid Grant’s supply line in southwest Tennessee. Starting on December 18, Forrest gained the upper hand over his adversaries and during the following two weeks did more damage to Federal railroads than usually occurred in these cavalry strikes. He captured several small towns, burned many bridges, and tore up miles of track along two rail lines that Grant heavily depended on. Pursuing Union forces caught up with Forrest at Parker’s Cross Roads and defeated him in pitched battle on December 31. But the Confederates managed to escape with heavy losses, ending the raid. Then Van Dorn struck Grant’s logistics another blow. After Pemberton placed all his available cavalry under him, Van Dorn rode around Grant’s troops and surprised the garrison of Holly Springs on December 20. The Federal commander there was unprepared and his troops caught off guard. Van Dorn captured 1,500 Federals and spent the day destroying the depot, a train loaded with supplies, and most of the government materiel stored in town. Fires and explosions wrecked many civilian houses and most of the stores around the town square. But the citizens of Holly Springs, fervent Confederate sympathizers, rejoiced in Van Dorn’s success, which included the destruction of about a million dollars’ worth of government property. The Confederates continued north,

338   Earl J. Hess pursued by Federal cavalry and infantry, but were unable to capture any other posts, burn bridges, or tear up much track before finally escaping south. Even though Van Dorn’s strike was more spectacular, Forrest’s operations dealt a heavier blow to Grant’s supply line. Quartermasters easily replaced the depot at Holly Springs but spent weeks of hard work to repair Forrest’s destruction. When accurate reports of the damage reached Grant’s headquarters he gave up all hope of advancing to Grenada. Pulling troops back from Oxford, he continued to hold Holly Springs and other outposts farther south at the Tallahatchie River, leaving Sherman on his own.

Chickasaw Bayou For reasons that are not clear, Grant failed to inform Sherman of his decision. The expedition steamed without opposition to the vicinity of Vicksburg by December 24, landing a few miles upstream at Milliken’s Bend. Sherman then moved his command up the Yazoo River and landed on the east bank, protected by Porter’s gunboats, on December 26. The operation that followed, called the Battle of Chickasaw Bayou or Chickasaw Bluffs, proved to be a dismal failure for Sherman. The Yazoo bottomland stretched three miles east before meeting Walnut Hills, with a maze of stagnant bayous, thick timber, and entangling vines covering the terrain. Brig. Gen. Stephen D. Lee, at the head of twenty-​five thousand Confederate troops, opposed Sherman. Only a couple of roads linking the plantations on the bottomland with Walnut Hills offered feasible lines of advance, and Lee covered these with men he positioned at the base of Walnut Hills. Sherman proceeded with caution, advancing a few hundred yards every day until opposite the Confederate line by December 28. Assuming Grant was on the way, Sherman attempted an assault on December 29, selecting two areas that appeared to be vulnerable. Two brigades crossed the small stream that fed into Chickasaw Bayou and struck the Confederate right wing, only to receive heavy fire when moving over a cleared area. They were stopped well short of the Confederate line with heavy losses. Opposite the Confederate center, one Union regiment crossed the same small stream but was pinned down by heavy fire for the rest of the day. In both cases Sherman committed minimal force to the attempt, but it is doubtful that larger numbers could have succeeded. A combination of difficult terrain and smart placement of Rebel troops made this line of advance to Walnut Hills almost impossible. Still motivated by a desire to meet Grant’s approach, Sherman planned a daring attack on Haynes’s Bluff for January 1. It would have involved a dawn assault by one of his four divisions, the men landing from river steamers onto the Yazoo bank under fire from heavy artillery. Risky in the extreme, its prospects for success were even dimmer than the assaults of December 29. Fortunately for the troops involved, heavy fog settled in the night before and Sherman canceled the attack. Soon after this, all signs indicated heavy rains to come, and trees on the Yazoo bottomland revealed marks of previous

NORTH MISSISSIPPI, CHICKASAW BAYOU, AND THE BOTTOMLANDS    339 floods, indicating that several feet of water could be expected over the lowland. As a result, Sherman evacuated his position on the night of January 1 and steamed back to Milliken’s Bend. Sherman’s expedition had started with high hopes but ended with severe disappointment. Losses were comparatively light, with 1,776 killed, wounded, and missing. Lee’s casualties were much lighter, at 187.4 By the time Sherman floundered at Chickasaw Bayou, McClernand had pressured Halleck for an order to leave Illinois and take the field. At Memphis he found that Sherman had already taken his troops on the Vicksburg expedition. The frustrated officer caught up with Sherman at Milliken’s Bend, assuming command on January 4 because he outranked Sherman. The two cooperated well enough to plan another strike against an easier target, mostly to find something to do with troops who were showing signs of decreased morale. They found a tempting target in Arkansas Post, a Confederate position forty miles up the Arkansas River, which drained into the Mississippi ninety miles north of Vicksburg. About five thousand Confederate troops under Brig. Gen. Thomas Churchill supported Fort Hindman at a bend in the river sixty miles downstream from Little Rock. The fort’s heavy guns were an obstacle to any Union advance toward the state capital. McClernand and Sherman probably would have ignored Arkansas Post except that Confederate troops from it captured the steamer Blue Wing carrying munitions and mail for the expedition. Considering the post a threat to their line of communications, McClernand and Sherman planned to eliminate it. They were still out of touch with Grant, who so far was unaware of what had happened at Chickasaw Bayou. The strike against Arkansas Post proved to be very successful because the Federals commanded the river and heavily outnumbered Churchill’s Confederates. With McClernand in command, the expedition sailed up the Mississippi and entered the Arkansas River. On January 10 McClernand disembarked his men a couple of miles downstream from Arkansas Post. He positioned them opposite Fort Hindman and a line of infantry trench that stretched several hundred yards from the work. The next day, January 11, Porter’s gunboats closed in on Fort Hindman and dismounted all the heavy guns, devastating the works and killing dozens of gun crews. McClernand’s infantry advanced across flat and open terrain, using rifle fire and field artillery to suppress the return fire of Churchill’s troops. By about 4:00  p.m., when the Federals were ready to charge across the parapet, white flags appeared along the Confederate line and the fighting came to an end. Arkansas Post was a fine consolation prize with thousands of prisoners. But it was no substitute for the more important goal of reopening the Mississippi River. McClernand considered moving on to Little Rock but was dissuaded by reports of falling water levels in the Arkansas River. He then dismantled Fort Hindman, burned Confederate troop quarters, and shipped his prisoners north. The expedition evacuated Arkansas Post during a heavy snowstorm and tarried a couple of days at Napoleon, a small town at the mouth of the Arkansas River. Before leaving Napoleon the troops burned nearly every building and then returned to Milliken’s Bend.

340   Earl J. Hess The fact that McClernand chose to lodge the expedition near Vicksburg rather than retreat to Memphis formed a key element in shaping the rest of Grant’s campaign. When he finally learned what the expedition had done, Grant was at first angry that it had been sidetracked to Arkansas Post. His mood was mollified by word of McClernand’s success, but for Grant, focusing on the main objective was all important. With the urging of Maj. Gen. James B. McPherson, another trusted subordinate in northern Mississippi, Grant decided to personally join the expedition to assume command. Grant, McPherson, Sherman, and Porter distrusted McClernand’s judgment, even though the politician turned soldier had not done badly since assuming command of the expedition. But before he left northern Mississippi Grant retired his troops in stages, evacuating Holly Springs on January 10. As they left town the Federals went on a rampage of destruction. The place had already been ransacked by the Confederates, and now, given how the citizens had welcomed the enemy, most Federals felt the town was fair game for further destruction. Widespread house burnings alarmed Union officers, who tried to clamp down on incendiarism, but they could not prevent their soldiers from carrying off movable property. Northern Mississippi became a case study in hardening Northern attitudes toward how to conduct the war effort. Blue-​clad troops left behind wide swaths of burned, wrecked, and pilfered property in city and countryside, justifying much of their behavior by arguing that their railroads had not yet been repaired and they had to eat. It is possible to place a monetary value on the property destroyed by the Federals during Grant’s North Mississippi Campaign and Sherman’s Chickasaw Bayou Campaign. The residents of College Hill, not far from Oxford, estimated that Sherman’s three divisions destroyed 200,000 dollars’ worth of property when they came to town in early December as part of Grant’s move against the Confederate line along the Tallahatchie River.5 If one extrapolates that to cover the rest of these Union movements, a liberal estimate of 5 million dollars’ worth of property destruction would not be far from the amount.

Bottomlands Grant repositioned some of his units on a line from Memphis to Corinth, leaving another zone of uncontrolled territory to the south, as Confederate forces moved up to occupy the region south of that zone. Then Grant arranged to go south, taking along several other units to reinforce the Vicksburg expedition. When he reached Milliken’s Bend and took command of the area on January 30, Grant had completed a long and complicated series of movements that had failed to clear the Mississippi Valley of Confederate troops. Although these operations resulted in no large battles and no conquest of Vicksburg, they represented a watershed in Federal efforts to control the Mississippi Valley. The result was the placement of a Union army of forty thousand men a few miles north of

NORTH MISSISSIPPI, CHICKASAW BAYOU, AND THE BOTTOMLANDS    341 the city. This made a dramatic statement, demonstrating the Federals’ intent to work at close range for the reduction of the stronghold. Both McClernand and Grant correctly reasoned that pulling the expedition back to Memphis would create a worse morale problem in the North than already existed. Moreover, Halleck had been right: relying on railroads for an overland approach to Vicksburg from northern Mississippi was not feasible. Only the Mississippi River provided a viable line of communications with the North, so placing all his hopes on a river approach was wise from a military standpoint as well. The long struggle for Vicksburg had entered a new phase of intensity by January 1863. Secure it was, but Grant’s long supply link with Memphis strained the available steamboats and committed his troops to living precariously along the low-​lying banks during winter months. Without those steamers and Porter’s gunboats, Grant’s position would have been impossible. But this move also opened up two hundred miles of the Mississippi Valley to exploitation by the Federals. It was a rich area, encompassing much of the Mississippi Delta, which stretched from Memphis to Vicksburg and fifty miles east of the river. The Delta was an area of fertile bottomland with numerous plantations and farms that produced grain and cattle. It also was the home of thousands of slaves. From January to April 1863, during the Bottomlands phase of the operations against Vicksburg, the Federals lived and worked on the low-​lying ground on either side of the Mississippi. During that time Grant experimented with one ploy after another to get past Vicksburg or onto Walnut Hills north of the city and operate on the dry ground east of the river. He sent expeditions to pioneer routes through the maze of bayous and oxbow lakes that characterized the topography on both sides of the Mississippi. McPherson tried to find a route west of the stream starting from Lake Providence but was not successful. Other troops tried to find a route east of the river, starting on the Mississippi side nearly opposite Helena through a channel known as the Yazoo Pass. It joined the Coldwater River, which flowed into the Tallahatchie River, which joined the Yalobusha River to form the Yazoo River near Greenwood, Mississippi. By early April this combined army-​navy expedition was stopped by a Confederate force at Fort Pemberton, only a few miles short of Greenwood and eighty miles north of Vicksburg. Another expedition snaked its way through a torturous system of waterways that included the Sunflower River, Deer Creek, Black Bayou, and Steele’s Bayou. The last named watercourse emptied into the Yazoo River only a few miles up from Haynes’s Bluff, but the Federals were stopped not only by narrow channels but a brigade of Confederate cavalry.6 Historians have undervalued the Bottomlands phase of Grant’s offensive against Vicksburg by focusing on his futile efforts to gain the high ground east of the river.7 But the Bottomlands phase was equally important as an effort to exploit rich Confederate territory for Union gain and because it offered opportunities for Grant’s army to make emancipation work. Northern traders were eager to exploit the area south of Memphis, and Grant’s initial reaction to the trouble they caused was to shut down all trading in this region. Political pressure, however, compelled him to reopen trade between Memphis and Helena. South of the latter town, the army and navy tried to curtail all trade. Porter’s

342   Earl J. Hess boats stopped civilian steamers and confiscated cotton illegally shipped north, and Grant established a system of surveillance to prevent medicines, weapons, and intelligence from being smuggled south to the Confederates. Grant allowed the shipment of cotton north only in hardship cases, when several men claiming to be loyalists or neutral in the conflict applied for permission to sell cotton to feed their families. But even this policy was abused by many, leading Grant to stop it in April. Porter went farther than his army colleagues in authorizing boat captains to seize all the cotton they could find to be sold for the benefit of the government. At the same time Federal agents took control of several plantations along the Louisiana side of the river and distributed Black laborers to begin planting a crop in the spring, protected by soldiers. Perhaps the most important advantage of lodging so close to Vicksburg was that the Federals had access to tens of thousands of slaves. It was a perfect opportunity to recruit Black soldiers for the Union Army, the most valuable outgrowth of Lincoln’s emancipation policy. Ironically, a large proportion of Grant’s men did not like the Proclamation or the idea of recruiting Black soldiers. Reaction against these new directions, coupled with depression over the failure to take Vicksburg, produced the lowest morale ever to be seen in the Army of the Tennessee, especially in the newly raised regiments. Desertion became a problem. Grant dismissed most officers of the 109th Illinois because they had been so vocal in their opposition to government policies as to demoralize the regiment’s enlisted men.8 Adjt. Gen. Lorenzo Thomas toured Grant’s department and gave speeches to the troops explaining the new policy to enlist Blacks and encouraging the men to embrace it. Grant came to embrace it too, especially after he received pressure directly from Washington. The key that turned the men around on Black soldiers was the opportunity to obtain commissions in the new regiments and the assurance that these units would operate separately from white units. By early May 1863, when the Bottomlands phase ended, Grant’s subordinates began to form several Black regiments. Little more than a month later some of these troops played a prominent role in defending Grant’s base at Milliken’s Bend, helping to repel a Confederate attack on June 7. Their performance dispelled lingering doubts about the wisdom of arming slaves. “So let them fight,” wrote a white Union soldier. “The army begins to like the idea.”9 The Federals could use Black men as soldiers and laborers, but the women and children who fled nearby plantations were a humanitarian problem. During the Bottomlands phase of the Vicksburg campaign, so many thousands arrived that Grant issued orders telling his subordinates not to encourage any more to come in, but he was willing to feed and house those already in refugee camps. Under the terms of Lincoln’s Proclamation, every slave in the area where his army operated was free, but there were limits to its ability to handle them. “They fly for their freedom to the union army and we are not able to do much for them as it is all we can do to take care of ourselves,” wrote Orderly Sgt. Cyrus F. Boyd of the 15th Iowa.10 The Bottomlands phase offered the Federals a grand opportunity to implement emancipation, arm Blacks, and confiscate Confederate property. It also allowed them to search for a line of advance to the high ground east of the river. Eventually, Grant decided

NORTH MISSISSIPPI, CHICKASAW BAYOU, AND THE BOTTOMLANDS    343 to run transports loaded with supplies, escorted by some of Porter’s gunboats, past the Vicksburg batteries on the night of April 16. That was the turning point of Grant’s operations against the Gibraltar of the Confederacy. He moved most of his army along the Louisiana side of the river, transported it to the east bank near Bruinsburg, Mississippi, many miles south of Vicksburg, and established a presence on the high ground. The next phase, an overland march to the rear of Vicksburg, would be the most brilliant move of his career.

Notes 1. Editor of Cincinnati Daily Gazette, quoted in Earl J. Hess, “The Mississippi River and Secession, 1862: The Northwestern Response,” Old Northwest 10, no. 2 (Summer 1984): 190. 2. John Eaton, Grant, Lincoln and the Freedmen:  Reminiscences of the Civil War (New York: Longmans, Green, 1907), 32. 3. Sherman to Halleck, November 17, 1862, in U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1886), ser. 1, vol. 17, pt. 2: 351. Hereafter cited as OR. 4. Earl J. Hess, The Civil War in the West: Victory and Defeat from the Appalachians to the Mississippi (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 122–​123. 5. Maud Morrow Brown, “The War Comes to College Hill,” Journal of Mississippi History 16, no. 1 (January 1954): 25–​27. 6. Hess, Civil War in the West, 136–​138. 7. Michael B. Ballard, Vicksburg:  The Campaign That Opened the Mississippi (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 156–​190. 8. General Order No. 12, Headquarters, Department of the Tennessee, February 1, 1863, OR, ser. 1, vol. 17, pt. 2: 586–​587. 9. Taylor to Jane, June 16, 1863, William Taylor Letters, Special Collections Research Center, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA. 10. Earl J. Hess, ed., A German in the Yankee Fatherland:  The Civil War Letters of Henry A.  Kircher (Kent, OH:  Kent State University Press, 1983), 93–​ 95; Mildred Throne, ed., The Civil War Diary of Cyrus F.  Boyd, Fifteenth Iowa Infantry, 1861–​1863 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998), 118.

Bibliography Ballard, Michael B. Pemberton: A Biography. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991. Ballard, Michael B. Vicksburg:  The Campaign That Opened the Mississippi. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Bearss, Edwin. Hardluck Ironclad: The Sinking and Salvage of the Cairo. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1966. Bearss, Edwin Cole. Vicksburg Is the Key:  The Campaign for Vicksburg. Vol. 1. Dayton, OH: Morningside, 1985. Carter, Arthur B. The Tarnished Cavalier:  Major General Earl Van Dorn, C.S.A. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999.

344   Earl J. Hess Hattaway, Herman. General Stephen D. Lee. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1976. Kiper, Richard L. Major General John Alexander McClernand:  Politician in Uniform. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1999. Marszalek, John F. Sherman’s Other War: The General and the Civil War Press. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1999. Milligan, John D. Gunboats down the Mississippi. Annapolis, MD:  U.S. Naval Institute Press, 1965. Sarna, Jonathan D. When General Grant Expelled the Jews. New York: Schocken, 2012. Simpson, Brooks D. Ulysses S. Grant: Triumph over Adversity, 1822–​1865. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000. Smith, Myron J., Jr. The Fight for the Yazoo, August 1862–​July 1864: Swamps, Forts and Fleets on Vicksburg’s Northern Flank. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012. Smith, Timothy B. Mississippi in the Civil War: The Home Front. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010. Walker, Peter F. Vicksburg:  A People at War, 1860–​1865. Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 1960. Woodworth, Steven E. Nothing but Victory:  The Army of the Tennessee, 1861–​ 1865. New York: Knopf, 2005.

Chapter 21

Stones Ri v e r Making Emancipation Work Earl J. Hess

The campaign that led to the Battle of Stones River and the capture of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, took place at a critical time. The Federal government needed to create battlefield victories to support the implementation of the Emancipation Proclamation, slated to go into effect on January 1, 1863. In the end, despite a grueling campaign that the Federals nearly lost, they were able to deliver enough of a victory to provide that political leverage. The battle also strengthened ties between the Federal army that fought at Stones River and its government while weakening the confidence felt by Southerners in their own army. After the battle, the Federals remained inert for six months at Murfreesboro. The impact on the community and its region was enormous, and even though Tennessee was exempt from the Emancipation Proclamation, slaves in the area acted to break down slavery much as they had done in other regions of the occupied Confederacy whenever the Federal army arrived. Maj. Gen. William S. Rosecrans, commander of the Fourteenth Corps, moved out of Nashville on December 26, 1862, and maneuvered toward the Confederate Army of Tennessee located along Stones River only thirty miles to the southeast at Murfreesboro. This was the third Federal campaign that month designed to give Lincoln’s emancipation policy a boost. The first effort had already ended in crushing defeat at Fredericksburg on December 13. The second campaign was led by Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant in northern Mississippi and was highlighted by the landing of an expeditionary force under Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman on the east bank of the Yazoo River to begin the Battle of Chickasaw Bayou. Sherman was defeated on December 29 and withdrew his force a few days later. Now it was up to Rosecrans and his army to introduce emancipation on a note of strength rather than weakness. Rosecrans was new to his position. Having won an important victory at the Battle of Corinth, October 3–​4, 1862, he was named to succeed Maj. Gen. Don Carlos Buell in command of the Department of the Ohio on October 24. Rosecrans assembled the Army of the Ohio at Nashville and spent several weeks refitting. He resisted

346   Earl J. Hess efforts by Washington authorities to push forward until he felt the men were ready. Meanwhile, Washington renamed his command the Department of the Cumberland and redesignated his field force as the Fourteenth Corps. Rosecrans divided that corps into a Right Wing, a Center, and a Left Wing. Each part essentially operated as a corps, although not designated as such. This field force would be renamed the Army of the Cumberland in January 1863, but it fought the Stones River Campaign as the Fourteenth Corps. The most powerful field army of the western Confederacy defended Murfreesboro. Gen. Braxton Bragg had been instrumental in organizing the Army of the Mississippi the previous March and had commanded it since the period immediately following the Battle of Shiloh in April. His training regimen and administrative policies turned it into Bragg’s army by the fall of 1862, when he led the men in a bold invasion of Union-​held Kentucky. That invasion failed to secure the riches of this border state, and Bragg retired to Murfreesboro to secure a portion of middle Tennessee. Rested and well supplied, it was redesignated the Army of Tennessee to match the new name of the geographical department that Bragg commanded. It consisted of two large corps. The opposing armies that struggled for control of middle Tennessee were about equal in strength, each with roughly thirty thousand men. Rosecrans planned a clever approach to Murfreesboro. He sent Maj. Gen. Alexander McCook’s Right Wing and Maj. Gen. George H. Thomas’s Center south from Nashville to deal with Lt. Gen. William J. Hardee’s Corps, while Maj. Gen. Thomas L. Crittenden’s Left Wing advanced on the direct road from Nashville toward Murfreesboro. This broad approach cleared the area south of Nashville of enemy troops and forced Bragg to concentrate his army at Murfreesboro. Both armies skirmished for several days as these maneuvers took place, until both were concentrated on the evening of December 30. Bragg’s line crossed Stones River northwest of Murfreesboro, while Rosecrans planned to attack the Confederate right wing by crossing the river at dawn the next day. Bragg, however, took advantage of the Federals by massing troops on his far left and hitting the Union right wing at dawn on December 31. Bragg achieved a decisive advantage over his opponent; his men struck about an hour before the Federal attack got underway. Bragg scored a tactical advantage over Rosecrans, and the Federals would have to scramble for their lives to counter it.1 When the Confederates began to advance at early light on December 31, conducting a right wheel of their units, McCook’s men of the Right Wing were taken completely by surprise. Many of them were still cooking their breakfasts or watering artillery horses. Because the Confederate line extended farther west than McCook’s right flank, Bragg’s men crushed the right-​most Union division, commanded by Brig. Gen. Richard W. Johnson. Hundreds of Federal soldiers fled, some of them in panic, chased by Brig. Gen. John Wharton’s brigade of Rebel cavalry. As the battle progressed, one Federal division after another was forced to retire, although usually in a more orderly fashion than Johnson’s hapless command. Although they had the tactical advantage over their opponent, it was not easy for Confederate commanders to maneuver their units across a flat landscape covered for about half its extent with a thick forest of cedar trees and underbrush. In some divisions, such as Maj. Gen. John P. McCown’s, the brigades lost contact

Stones River   347

Map 21.1  Stones River

with each other and operated independently. In other divisions, such as Maj. Gen. Patrick R. Cleburne’s, the brigades more or less maintained contact and cooperated reasonably well with each other. Lack of cohesion may have inhibited the Confederate ability to follow up their advantage, but it did not prevent them from keeping the ball rolling. Even though Union brigades and divisions were often able to stop a frontal attack on their position, they always had to retire a few minutes later, when other Confederate troops appeared to their right

348   Earl J. Hess flank or even to their rear. Under such conditions, retreat often was a hasty, panicked experience until the Federals could find a fence row, a clump of cedar trees, or limestone outcroppings behind which to shelter and make another stand. Following this pattern, December 31 became one of the most fearsome days of combat in the war. Losses were unusually heavy on both sides as McCook’s Right Wing conducted a fighting retreat for up to three miles, slowing the Rebel juggernaut. Thomas’s Center held more firmly. Brig. Gen. Philip H. Sheridan’s division slowed the Confederate offensive for several hours by taking advantage of a large area of wooded terrain studded with limestone outcroppings. But eventually Sheridan’s command was fronted on three sides and in danger of being cut off; only then did he give the order to retire. This process of continual retreat not only stressed the stamina of the Federals but led to the overrunning of several Union field hospitals. Taken by surprise and without the opportunity to evacuate the wounded, Federal surgeons could do nothing when excited Confederate soldiers, fresh from horrid scenes of combat, appeared in their midst. Hundreds of Federals, ranging from the slightly injured to the mortally wounded, fell into enemy hands on December 31. Their captors treated them with every degree of conduct, from kindness to brutal insensitivity. While some Rebel officers and men sympathized with the wounded enemy, many others stole their medicine and food and verbally abused them in the process. These wounded prisoners endured stressful conditions for several days as the campaign played itself out in increasingly bitter weather. For many there was a desperate struggle for survival behind enemy lines as food and medical supplies disappeared. By midafternoon, the Confederate offensive was wearing out. Near the left center of Rosecrans’s line, a brigade commanded by Col. William B. Hazen of Crittenden’s Left Wing took position in a wooded area called the Round Forest east of the Nashville Pike. Here Hazen repelled several Confederate attacks during the course of the day, anchoring the retreating right wing of Rosecrans’s army and stopping the peeling off of units from the line that had begun with Johnson’s division that morning. From Hazen’s left toward the Union left flank near Stones River, the Confederates failed to make any attack. This allowed Rosecrans to shift units around the battlefield to give timely aid in slowing Bragg’s offensive on the right. Rosecrans became a dynamo on the battlefield, energized by sheer desperation. Always of an excitable nature, he seemed to ride to every regiment in the army. To everyone he gave a word of encouragement to boost morale, or a word of advice (telling them to wait until the enemy was very near before firing, using the bayonet if necessary), or gathered information necessary for shifting fresh units to the most threatened points. His assistant adjutant general, Lt. Col. Julius P. Garesché, was decapitated by a Confederate artillery round while riding close to Rosecrans, his blood splattering the army commander. Rosecrans could not afford to stop and grieve over his friend and fellow Catholic, who was a mainstay on his staff of bright, young officers. On the Confederate side of the battlefield, Bragg remained behind the lines to coordinate his offensive. He tried to employ his reserve, Maj. Gen. John C. Breckinridge’s

Stones River   349 Division, the only Rebel force located east of Stones River. But because of a number of miscues brought on by Breckinridge’s false assumption that his position was threatened, Bragg was able to shift only three of Breckinridge’s four brigades west of the river that afternoon. He entrusted their employment to Lt. Gen. Leonidas Polk, commander of his other corps, but Polk unwisely threw them into action one at a time against the area near Hazen’s brigade at the Round Forest. None of those piecemeal attacks succeeded, and they merely increased Confederate casualties. By the evening of December 31, a number of factors had slowed the Rebel offensive. Skillful shifting of units from the Union left to the right, the difficulty experienced by Rebel troops while clawing their way through one cedar brake after another, and the exhaustion of continued combat for hours at a stretch—​all had their effect. Even Cleburne’s Division, the best in Bragg’s army, retreated in panic when the Federals counterattacked as the division neared the Nashville Pike. The pike was Rosecrans’s line of communication with Nashville; to lose it would plunge the Fourteenth Corps into a desperate situation. As a result, Rosecrans arrayed several units of his army along the pike and behind the bed of the Nashville and Chattanooga Railroad. Those units stood their ground and repelled every Confederate advance out of the cedar woods and across a cotton field that bordered the pike. As the battle finally sputtered to an end by dusk, the Fourteenth Corps was saved. Twelve hours of brutal fighting had shifted the course of the campaign in the Confederates’ favor. The battle of December 31 had forced two-​thirds of Rosecrans’s army to retreat as much as three miles, had taken out of action close to ten thousand Union troops killed, wounded, or captured, and had secured a rich haul of material that included twenty-​eight captured artillery pieces. Over a wide swath of Tennessee terrain, from the Franklin Pike up to the Nashville Pike, a devastated landscape lay smoking and covered with thousands of dead and injured men in blue and gray, not to mention hundreds of killed and wounded artillery and cavalry horses and wrecked wagons, caissons, and artillery carriages. The exhausted armies rested on January 1, a cold day that saw the implementation of the Emancipation Proclamation. Only small-​scale skirmishing took place as both sides began to construct breastworks of logs and rocks to protect their positions. Food became a major problem for Rosecrans’s army. Bragg had dispatched Brig. Gen. Joseph Wheeler with a mounted force to circle the Fourteenth Corps, destroying wagon trains. On December 30 Wheeler had taken one train by surprise near La Vergne and burned most of it before completing his circuit of the Federal army. When he tried another circuit a couple of days later he was less successful. But Wheeler devastated Rosecrans’s supply line, destroying three hundred wagons and twenty-​five tons of provisions. His men also killed or captured 2,100 horses and mules. By January 1 many Federals were so hungry they began cutting off steaks from the carcasses of horses lying on the battlefield and roasting them over open fires.2 Nevertheless, Rosecrans stubbornly refused to retreat. This was the key to Union victory in the campaign. Bragg had no reinforcements, while Rosecrans called loudly for help, prompting a division of occupation troops to be shifted from south-​central

350   Earl J. Hess Kentucky toward his embattled army. It would take some time for them to arrive, but it soon became obvious that they were on the way. Meanwhile, the tactical stalemate continued on January 2 until the afternoon, when Bragg found out that Rosecrans was shifting a division of Federal troops across Stones River to assume a position east of the stream. This was the line of advance he had planned to take on the morning of December 31. Bragg interpreted this Federal move as the start of an attack and ordered Breckinridge to push the Federals back across the stream. Breckinridge launched a spirited assault at 4:00 p.m. on January 2. His troops crushed the Federal position and caused the Yankees to retire hurriedly across Stones River, but there the Rebels met Union resistance. Rosecrans had seen Breckinridge’s preparation for an advance and had assembled a large infantry force at the river ford. The artillery chief of Crittenden’s Left Wing also had seen the preparations and assembled fifty-​eight Union guns on high ground near the ford. The infantry played the bigger role in blunting the Confederate advance and then counterattacking across Stones River with fire support from the guns. The result was a devastating Confederate defeat, with one-​third of Breckinridge’s men shot down or captured along with half a dozen artillery pieces. After the tactical success of December 31, followed by the dismal defeat of January 2, Bragg had few options for renewing the offensive. When word arrived from his subordinates that most brigades in the Army of Tennessee were too exhausted to fight, the men suffering from exposure in the cold weather, he concluded they could no longer be counted on to retain their position. Coupled with exaggerated reports that Rosecrans would soon have tens of thousands of fresh troops, Bragg evacuated the battlefield on the night of January 3. He was compelled to leave behind 1,200 seriously wounded Confederates and a number of surgeons and hospital attendants in Murfreesboro. Rosecrans cautiously followed up Bragg’s retreat on January 4, entering the town and sending out small forces southward to make sure the enemy had gone. But he did not move the bulk of his command farther than to occupy Murfreesboro. The Army of Tennessee settled down in dispersed locations near Shelbyville and Tullahoma, thirty to forty miles southeast of Murfreesboro. Both armies had lost about ten thousand men, one-​third of their manpower, in the campaign. Rosecrans had hoped to accomplish a great deal more than the mere occupation of Murfreesboro. Before setting out from Nashville, he had worked himself to the point of believing that Bragg might not offer any resistance at all near the town. His confidence in the quality of the army and the encouragement of Garesché bred unrealistic expectations—​he even arranged for a pontoon bridge to take him over the Tennessee River once he had driven the Confederates from middle Tennessee. Bragg’s attack on December 31 was doubly shocking given this overconfidence. In the end, the Federals merely enlarged their zone of occupation in that part of the state at the cost of 433 casualties for every mile they advanced, an unacceptably high cost in blood measured by distance, that would drain the manpower of the Department of the Cumberland before Rosecrans got to Chattanooga. In fact, at that rate it would take an additional 81,503

Stones River   351 casualties to advance from Murfreesboro to Atlanta. Instead of a war-​winning campaign, Stones River turned out to be a short but bloody march with only incremental achievements by the Federals; the most important thing they accomplished was survival in the face of an unexpectedly strong defense by the Army of Tennessee.3 Yet the Stones River Campaign had important resonance in national and regional affairs. By January 9, reports made it clear that the Confederates had retreated and the Fourteenth Corps held Murfreesboro. Washington officials were effusive in their praise of the campaign. It was “one of the most brilliant of the war,” in the words of General in Chief Henry W. Halleck. “You and your brave army won the gratitude of your country and the admiration of the world,” he wrote to Rosecrans.4 While approving Rosecrans’s request that his field army be reorganized into three corps, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton gushed, “There is nothing you can ask within my power to grant to yourself or your heroic command that will not be cheerfully given.”5 The reason for this enthusiasm stemmed from the fact that the Lincoln administration needed a battlefield victory on the eve of the issuance of the final Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln wanted to move into a new era in American history from a position of strength, to impress not only his domestic critics but his foreign opponents. There was a general fear in Washington that when the English Parliament met early in 1863 it might vote in favor of recognition of the Confederacy. In hindsight there seems to have been no real chance of that, but for Lincoln and his advisors it was a dreaded possibility, and they were especially relieved to hear of Rosecrans’s success at Murfreesboro as a way to counter this threat. A few months later, when Rosecrans felt slighted by his superiors in Washington, Lincoln consoled him by recalling the elation he felt when news of Stones River arrived at the capital: “I can never forget, whilst I remember anything, that about the end of last year and the beginning of this, you gave us a hard-​earned victory, which, had there been a defeat instead, the nation could scarcely have lived over.”6 This, then, was the resonance of the Stones River Campaign on the national scene. It was a limited, costly victory that stunned the victors in many ways. Yet even such an incremental advance in the strategic course of the war was enough to save the Union cause, in Lincoln’s mind. Rosecrans became the national man of the hour because he did not lose at Murfreesboro. Lincoln also was eager to find out what effect the campaign had on the mood of Tennessee residents. Andrew Johnson, his military governor in Nashville, assured him that it “inspired much confidence” among Unionists while it “greatly discouraged” and embittered Confederate sympathizers. But Johnson also pointed out that Rosecrans’s limited accomplishment fell short of liberating eastern Tennessee, where the overwhelming majority of Unionists in the state continued to reside, suppressed by Rebel rule. Only when that part of Tennessee was liberated could Johnson hope to resurrect a pro-​Union government in Nashville. Johnson was pleased that Lincoln agreed with his recommendation to exempt the entire state of Tennessee from the provisions of the Emancipation Proclamation. This move “disappointed and disarmed many who were complaining and denouncing [the Proclamation] as unjust and unwise.”7 Ironically

352   Earl J. Hess the state where the only military victory was won as the Proclamation went into effect would not enjoy its benefits, at least not immediately. This made little difference practically, for slaves flocked to the army at Murfreesboro and were used as laborers similarly to what had been taking place elsewhere since the start of the conflict. Many civilians in the North agreed with Lincoln that the Stones River victory provided a check “to a dangerous sentiment which was spreading in the North.” They referred to the increase in criticism of Lincoln’s war policies. The fall elections of 1862 resulted in a surprising number of seats in several state legislatures filled by these critics.8 With enormous political capital in Washington, Rosecrans flooded the dispatch box with one request after another and received what he wanted. He refurbished the newly christened Army of the Cumberland with advanced weapons, more and better artillery, and authority to mount a brigade of infantry to supplement his relatively spare cavalry contingent. He demanded large reinforcements. In contrast, the impact of the Stones River Campaign on the South was shattering. Bragg had unwittingly set this up by exulting in a telegram to Richmond about the success of his army on December 31. For the moment, that message truthfully reflected the reality at Stones River, but by January 4 the situation had changed dramatically. When Southerners tried to reconcile the exultation of December 31 with the later abandonment of the battlefield, confusion and bitterness set in. Bragg already had been under fire from Southern newspapers and many citizens for the failure of his Kentucky invasion; now the heat was turned up several more notches. Bragg made his situation worse by distributing a round-​robin letter to his chief subordinates on January 11. Stung by reports that he had retreated from Murfreesboro against the advice of his generals, he asked them to testify in writing as to whether they supported the move. The truth was that virtually all of them had supported the retreat. If Bragg had stopped there, the round-​robin letter would not have been controversial. But he inserted the comment that if he had lost the confidence of his generals he would be willing to step down as army commander. That comment led several of his subordinates to voice their opinion that Bragg was unfit to lead the Army of Tennessee. Angered by this unexpected turn of events, Bragg dug in his heels and fought to retain his command. Confederate President Jefferson Davis sent Gen. Joseph E. Johnston, who held nominal authority over the two major departments in the West, to investigate the furor. Johnston interviewed generals, reviewed troops, and studied the Stones River Campaign, only to conclude that Bragg had conducted the army skillfully, had damaged Rosecrans in an extraordinary way, and should not be relieved of his command. Partly due to Johnston’s report and partly to his own continued trust in Bragg’s competence, Davis retained him as commander of the Confederacy’s chief military force in the West. But a turning point had been reached in Bragg’s relations with his recalcitrant generals. Although many of his brigade and division leaders believed in him, as did a large portion of the rank and file, these supporters remained silent. In contrast, the critics among the generals now voiced their views loudly and without restraint. It was the beginning of an openly poisonous relationship between commander and subordinates

Stones River   353 that worsened until by the end of the year Bragg was almost incapable of drawing the respect necessary to command the army. While Stones River strengthened the ties between Rosecrans’s army and the home front, it seriously degraded public confidence in Davis, Bragg, and the Army of Tennessee in the South. Bragg ignored the controversy and recalled thousands of men previously detailed to other duty until he had almost made up the heavy casualties of Stones River. Desperate to increase the size of his army after the campaign, Bragg also acted on vague authority from Richmond to create a Volunteer and Conscript Bureau of the Army of Tennessee on January 16, 1863. He assigned Brig. Gen. Gideon J. Pillow to head it, and Pillow threw himself into the work with vigor. He aggressively scoured the countryside with troops not only looking for deserters and stragglers but also examining exemption papers held by civilians which excused them from the draft. Pillow’s troops interpreted those exemptions with far less leniency than did agents of the Confederate Bureau of Conscription. As a result hundreds of concerned citizens voiced criticism of Pillow’s actions, and Conscript Bureau officials in Richmond also complained. Pillow ignored warnings from the War Department to stop interfering with the draft system and was encouraged to do so by Bragg because his actions produced soldiers. Pillow did not back off until Secretary of War James A. Seddon issued a stern order in March 1863. But then Joseph E. Johnston, commander of Confederate forces in the West, asked for authority to create his own system of mobilizing manpower. With the fall of Vicksburg, Richmond responded by granting him authority to do so. Johnston put Pillow in charge of the effort, and the energetic officer once again scoured the countryside, this time concentrating on Mississippi and northern Georgia. Once again waves of resentment toward the army and the government erupted. There even were pitched battles between Pillow’s troops and local groups of men who resisted the draft. In late September 1863, Seddon demanded that Pillow forward all doubtful exemption cases to Richmond rather than settle them in the field. Seeing the writing on the wall, Pillow lobbied for reassignment and was relieved of his job the following December. He had supplied an estimated twenty-​five thousand men to the Confederate Army but at a huge cost in terms of soured relations between the people and the government. Moreover, all of these men were soldiers of dubious quality. The Confederates were highly aware that the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect during the middle of the Stones River Campaign. They began to refer to Rosecrans’s command as the Abolition Army and sought to use Southern hatred of the measure to spur voluntary enlistments into their own military force. Officers whipped up fear of servile insurrection and the resultant “massacre of their owners and their families,” in Pillow’s words.9 The Union victory at Stones River added a modest bit of middle Tennessee to Federal control, but the impact on the region was enormous. Rosecrans’s first thought was to rest a bit at Murfreesboro and then continue advancing south, but that did not happen. As the days lengthened into weeks, he became content to remain at the city and rebuild his army for an indefinite length of time. The result was a six-​month-​long occupation

354   Earl J. Hess of Murfreesboro by the Army of the Cumberland, which increased in size to fifty-​six thousand men by June 1863. Such a large military force, with 19,164 horses and 23,859 mules, smothered the small town of Murfreesboro, which had a prewar population of 2,861. The only real reason for the long stay was that Rosecrans had lost a good deal of his mental and moral vigor while dealing with the deadly attack of December 31. There is evidence that the bloody death of Garesché greatly shocked him; he publicly commented on it decades after the war. Rosecrans simply did not have the same confidence after December 31. In the wake of Stones River, Murfreesboro had to deal with 1,200 wounded Confederates left behind by Bragg, in addition to hundreds of Federal wounded; they were moved into public buildings and private houses since many residents of Murfreesboro had fled with the Confederate Army, leaving their homes to be used by the occupiers. The town became a vast hospital. On the battlefield itself, hundreds of dead in blue and gray littered the landscape. Many of them had been stripped of clothing by civilians. At La Vergne, a small town partway between Nashville and Murfreesboro, severe fighting had taken place as Confederate cavalry raided Union wagon trains. The conflict had dealt a blow to the town. Most of its buildings had been burned, and the rest were shot full of holes, while the streets were littered with dead horses. All around Murfreesboro Federal surgeons commandeered numerous houses large and small to serve as makeshift hospitals. After several weeks of such use, these buildings were wrecked, stained with blood, and their yards were littered with fresh graves. Interactions between the occupying army and the residents of Murfreesboro were strained. Most of the citizens in the area were strong sympathizers of the Confederate cause. They had rejoiced on December 31 to see the Yankees beaten and in retreat. Many took it upon themselves to round up Federal stragglers and deliver them to the Confederates. B. L. Ridley, who was too young to join the army, recalled years later that he and his young friends captured more than two hundred dazed Union soldiers that day. This was an unusual occurrence in the Civil War, accounted for by the tactical situation produced by Bragg’s attack on December 31. With hundreds of disorganized Federal troops streaming across the countryside, the citizens took action and captured many of them. According to some reports, a number of civilians also were hit by fire during the battle and could be seen limping about in the field hospitals. The region and its inhabitants continued to feel the stress of large-​scale military occupation for six months after the fight at Stones River. Repeated use of the macadamized Nashville Pike soon destroyed the crushed limestone pavement. The stone mile-​markers were knocked down by careless teamsters, and dead mules lined the side of the roadway, rotting for weeks. The large army camps polluted the environment in very obvious ways. Army butchers who killed and cut up hundreds of beef cattle for rations left the blood, entrails, and other effluvia on the ground, until a large area outside Murfreesboro simply reeked with the smell, drawing hundreds of vultures. An army surgeon filled his spare time placing samples of the water in Stones River under a microscope. He reported that the stream was heavily polluted by human and animal feces because of overuse by the

Stones River   355 army.10 When Rosecrans resumed his advance in late June, many of his regiments simply left behind all manner of used equipment and spare supplies that no one took the time to transfer to the quartermaster department. These abandoned camps became a target for local civilians who were eager to scavenge whatever they could from the invading army before the quartermasters became aware of the problem and sent details to secure the property. Pvt. Milton A. Romig of the 51st Ohio accurately described the area around Murfreesboro as “a fenceless, desolate, ruined blood stained hoof trodden burial ground as far as you can see.”11 African Americans were heavily involved in the Stones River Campaign. Pvt. James Fenton of the 19th Illinois saw a dead African American, apparently about fifteen years old, lying on the field after the battle. He assumed the boy had been a servant of some Confederate officer. In contrast, many other slaves slipped away from their masters to seek refuge with the Federals. On January 2 a slave deserted his master in the Army of Tennessee and became the servant of a Union soldier in the 2nd Minnesota Battery, telling his new employer everything he knew of the Rebels. When Confederate cavalry captured Union wagon trains, they shot several Black teamsters in cold blood. Many Black servants of Union soldiers cooked food during the campaign and sent it up to the line during lulls in the fighting, and the Federals used Blacks to bury the dead after the battle. Tennessee was exempted from the Emancipation Proclamation, but that hardly changed the way African Americans reacted to the presence of the Union Army at Murfreesboro. As elsewhere, they flocked to the town during the first six months of 1863, swelling the ranks of Federal laborers and filling contraband camps. But for the time being they were not allowed to enlist in the Union Army. In 1864, however, Lincoln authorized Black enlistment in Tennessee on grounds already established for the border states of Missouri and Maryland. Slaves could enlist if they had their master’s consent, and in cases of emergency they could be drafted by Federal authorities with a commitment from the government to compensate the owner for his financial loss. Within a year after Stones River, the slaves of Tennessee had full access to the provisions of the Proclamation. For months after the battle, civilians from the North traveled to Murfreesboro, disinterred their dead for transport home, and visited their relatives in the army. Ladies from Chicago and other Northern cities came south to nurse the wounded in field hospitals, and civilian doctors volunteered their services. The U.S. Sanitary Commission shipped seventy tons of clothes, dried fruit, beef, and chickens for use by more than two thousand wounded Federals housed in Murfreesboro. Several wagon loads of medical supplies were distributed to four thousand wounded housed at Nashville. Both armies enjoyed a long period of rehabilitation after the bloodletting among the cedars at Stones River. That period lengthened to such an extent as to reduce the political capital Rosecrans enjoyed in the wake of his partial victory. With the terrible Union defeat at Chancellorsville in early May and Grant’s stunning success at circling Vicksburg and laying siege to the place a couple of weeks later, the Washington authorities were frustrated that Rosecrans continued to wait at Murfreesboro. Finally,

356   Earl J. Hess on June 24, Rosecrans started the Army of the Cumberland on a successful campaign to push Bragg out of middle Tennessee, resulting in the Tullahoma Campaign. After that came the fall of Chattanooga on September 9 and then the bloody Battle of Chickamauga ten days later.

Notes 1. Earl J. Hess, Braxton Bragg:  The Most Hated Man of the Confederacy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 96–​98. 2. Earl J. Hess, Civil War Supply and Strategy:  Feeding Men and Moving Armies (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020), 50–​53. 3. Earl J. Hess, Banners to the Breeze:  The Kentucky Campaign, Corinth, and Stones River (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 229–​230. 4. Henry W. Halleck to William S. Rosecrans, January 9, 1863, in U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1887), ser. 1, vol. 20, pt. 1: 187. Hereafter cited as OR. 5. Edwin M. Stanton to William S. Rosecrans, January 7, 1863, in OR, ser. 1, vol. 20, pt. 2: 306. 6. Abraham Lincoln to William S.  Rosecrans, August 31, 1863, in Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (New Brunswick, NJ:  Rutgers University Press, 1953), 6:424. 7. Andrew Johnson to Abraham Lincoln, January 11, 1863, in OR, ser. 1, vol. 20, pt. 2: 317. 8. Abraham Lincoln to William S. Rosecrans, August 31, 1863, in Basler, Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 6:425. 9. Gideon J. Pillow to People of Tennessee and Confederate States, January 18, 1863, in OR, ser. 4, vol. 2: 362. 10. “Report on water made by Dr. Woodward to Dr. Castleman Inspt. Near Murfreesboro Tenn. May 19th 1863,” U.S. Sanitary Commission Records, Rare Books and Manuscripts, New York Public Library. 11. Milton A. Romig to John Minnich, January 17, 1863, 51st Ohio Regimental Folder, Stones River National Battlefield, Murfreesboro, TN.

Bibliography Cimprich, John. Slavery’s End in Tennessee, 1861–​1865. Tuscaloosa:  University of Alabama Press, 1985. Connelly, Thomas Lawrence. Autumn of Glory:  The Army of Tennessee, 1862–​1865. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971. Cozzens, Peter. No Better Place to Die: The Battle of Stones River. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990. Daniel, Larry J. Battle of Stones River: The Forgotten Conflict between the Confederate Army of Tennessee and the Union Army of the Cumberland. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012. Daniel, Larry J. Conquered: Why the Army of Tennessee Failed. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019.

Stones River   357 Daniel, Larry J. Days of Glory: The Army of the Cumberland, 1861–​1865. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004. Hess, Earl J. Banners to the Breeze:  The Kentucky Campaign, Corinth, and Stones River. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000. Hess, Earl J. Braxton Bragg: The Most Hated Man of the Confederacy. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016.

Chapter 22

Vicksburg a nd P ort Hu d s on Earl J. Hess

Two sieges of Confederate bastions on the Mississippi River resulted in more than the Union conquest of the Mississippi Valley in July 1863. The fall of Vicksburg and Port Hudson, especially the former, deeply wounded Confederate Mississippi, fractured white support for the Southern cause, and cracked open the delicate institution of slavery in the west-​central part of the state. Tens of thousands of Black refugees fled the plantations to be cared for by the Union Army, many of them joining newly created Black regiments that would play a large role in the continued Federal occupation of the valley. Nationally, the fall of Vicksburg completed the reopening of Northern access to the Mississippi for commercial purposes and played a pivotal role in boosting Northern war morale and depressing Southern spirits. Problems associated with quick Confederate repatriation of thirty thousand paroled Rebel soldiers contributed to the breakdown of the delicate prisoner-​exchange system that doomed tens of thousands of Northern and Southern prisoners to languish in horrid prison pens during the last year of the war. In many ways, the culmination of Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s long campaign against Vicksburg had unusually widespread and multilayered effects on Civil War America. The emotional benefit of these twin victories was worth the physical effort in reducing both strongholds, emboldening the North and dispiriting the South. During the long months that Grant floundered in the bottomlands of the Mississippi north of Vicksburg, it seemed as if the Union drive to capture the Gibraltar of the Confederacy was permanently on hold. The Army of the Tennessee at times barely existed at the end of a four-​hundred-​mile-​long supply line of river steamers bringing supplies from Memphis. At times the troops huddled along crowded levees, the only land higher than the rising river during winter and spring rains. Grant tried several times to find a way to access the tall bluffs lining the east side of the river and the Mississippi Delta, but to no avail. His effort to finish a military canal that could bypass the fortified city also failed when the river refused to cooperate by rushing into the ditch.

Vicksburg and Port Hudson    359 The mood in Vicksburg and among its Confederate defenders was bright during the first four and a half months of 1863. Despite the fact that thirty thousand Northern troops were lodged as close as eight miles upstream, its 4,500 residents lived as if there was no immediate danger. The Confederate commander, Lt. Gen. John C. Pemberton, kept his thirty thousand troops arrayed in defensive positions along the river bluffs north up to Haynes’s Bluff, fifteen miles north of Vicksburg, and down to Warrenton, twelve miles south of town. A series of heavy artillery batteries lined the river bluffs at Vicksburg, and Pemberton’s chief engineer had constructed a line of earthworks to protect the land approaches to Vicksburg from the east. Pemberton’s army was the largest the Confederacy assembled to protect any place in the Mississippi Valley. Its presence, combined with Grant’s futile efforts in the bottomlands, created a false sense of security. Pemberton’s troops were only a thin line of defense covering a large area. If that veneer could be pierced by a daring commander, the west-​central part of Mississippi would be thrown into chaos. The Confederate sense of security played into Grant’s hand. During the month of April he began to move in stages along the Louisiana side of the river, bypassing Vicksburg with Maj. Gen. John A. McClernand’s Thirteenth Corps in the lead. On April 16, he ran several steamers loaded with supplies past the Vicksburg water batteries. They were escorted by a portion of the Mississippi Squadron’s ironclad gunboats. Taking the Confederates by surprise, the fleet passed the heavy guns with light losses. Pemberton assumed the Federals were either trying to make contact with Maj. Gen. Nathaniel Banks’s Union force coming up from New Orleans or establishing outposts along the

Map 22.1  Overland march and Siege of Vicksburg

360   Earl J. Hess river below Vicksburg. Grant furthered the illusion with diversionary moves, sending a cavalry force under Col. Benjamin Grierson from La Grange, Tennessee, to Baton Rouge and sending Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman’s Fifteenth Corps to demonstrate against Haynes’s Bluff. Meanwhile, Grant sought a lodgment on the east bank of the Mississippi well south of the Vicksburg batteries. A naval assault on Confederate guns planted on a bluff at Grand Gulf, thirty miles south of Vicksburg, failed on April 29. But the fleet ran past those guns and ferried McClernand’s corps across the river at Bruinsburg, ten miles south of Grand Gulf. Grant finally had a lodgment on the east side of the river. He advanced to secure an enlarged area of territory within which to organize his army for mobile operations. In the process Grant ran into eight thousand Confederates under Brig. Gen. John Bowen near the town of Port Gibson, about twelve miles from the river. In a day-​long battle on May 1 Grant committed twenty-​four thousand troops of the Thirteenth Corps and a division of Maj. Gen. James McPherson’s Seventeenth Corps against Bowen’s command. The battle was fought on rugged terrain with deep ravines choked by vegetation. But by day’s end the Federals had forced Bowen to retreat toward Grand Gulf, seven miles to the northwest. They lost 787 men and the Confederates 875. Grant pursued only as far as the Big Black River, a stream that ran from the north between Vicksburg and Jackson, the state capital that lay forty-​five miles due east of the river city, and then curved southwest to empty into the Mississippi between Grand Gulf and Bruinsburg. Even after the fight at Port Gibson, Pemberton allowed Grant more than a week to organize his next move. Bowen evacuated Grand Gulf because it was isolated, located closer to Grant than to the garrison of Vicksburg. Pemberton continued to concentrate his attention on holding a zone between the Mississippi and the Big Black River, allowing Grant free rein to move into the zone east of the Big Black. There were only a few thousand troops holding Jackson, which was located sixty miles northeast of Port Gibson and thirty-​five miles east of the Big Black River. Pemberton ignored the fact that the door was open for Grant to run amok in central Mississippi because he never imagined that would be his opponent’s next move, so fixated was he on an assumption that the Federals would not maneuver far from the support of their river transports and gunboats.

Port Hudson In addition to this perception of the enemy, Pemberton assumed Grant would try to cooperate with Banks in operations against Port Hudson, Louisiana. Ever since the late summer of 1862, the only stretch of the Mississippi River the Confederates controlled was the 150-​mile corridor between Vicksburg and Port Hudson. Through this region flowed large amounts of food and other supplies from the Trans-​Mississippi. Richmond

Vicksburg and Port Hudson    361 authorities had allotted only 7,500 troops under Maj. Gen. Franklin Gardner to protect the small village of Port Hudson, perched on top of steep bluffs bordering the east side of a sharp river bend. When Banks replaced Maj. Gen. Benjamin Butler in the Department of the Gulf in late 1862, he brought ten thousand men in newly raised regiments from the northeastern states by coastal shipping to New Orleans. Incorporating them with the ten thousand men Butler had previously brought, Banks was delayed in attacking Port Hudson by organizing the Nineteenth Corps and dealing with civilians in the biggest Southern city under Union occupation. Meanwhile Adm. David Farragut tried to cut off Port Hudson’s supplies flowing down the Red River of Louisiana by attempting to run past the heavy artillery planted on the bluff with seven seagoing warships on the night of March 14, 1863. He managed to get only two of those vessels past the batteries, too few to accomplish the job, and returned downstream. Soon after Farragut’s failure, Banks took the field with sixteen thousand men in the Bayou Teche Campaign. Judging Port Hudson too strong for a direct assault, he tried to cut off its supplies by capturing Alexandria, Louisiana, located thirty miles on a straight line up the Red River. Banks approached his goal by moving west of New Orleans to Bayou Teche, a winding watercourse flowing from the northwest along the solid ground between Grand Lake and the coastal swamps. Confederate Maj. Gen. Richard Taylor hoped to stop him in this narrow causeway, but Banks advanced along it with two divisions, sending another division under Brig. Gen. Cuvier Grover by steamer up Grand Lake to flank Taylor’s position at Fort Bisland. That earthwork, located seventy miles west of New Orleans, became the scene of battle on April 12. Two divisions held Taylor’s attention in light skirmishing until the Confederates detected signs of Grover’s flanking movement and evacuated Fort Bisland on the night of April 13. Confederate losses totaled 450 men and the Federals lost 224. Taylor deployed a thousand troops at Irish Bend, one of the sharp turns of Bayou Teche located a dozen miles from Fort Bisland, to cover his retreat. When Grover’s division stumbled upon this force on April 14, the Confederates pushed him back, but Grover stabilized his lines and counterattacked, forcing the Confederates to give way. The Federals lost 355 men at Irish Bend; Confederate losses are unknown. Taylor completed his withdrawal by crossing Vermillion Bayou on April 17 and moving to Opelousas, fifty miles northwest of Irish Bend and sixty miles south-​ southeast of Alexandria. Banks gave up his pursuit and moved to Alexandria, which he occupied without a battle. He rested there for nearly a month, cutting off the flow of supplies down the Red River, while preparing for his next move. As Banks readied to approach Port Hudson, Grant contemplated a union with him, but hesitated. Neither Grant nor Banks was willing to give up his campaign completely. Although they exchanged several dispatches and Grant considered sending one of his corps to help Banks, both commanders acted independently to produce two important sieges of the Civil War.

362   Earl J. Hess

Map 22.2  Port Hudson

Overland March On May 8, after more than a week of preparation, Grant launched the inland or overland march toward Vicksburg. He intended to advance northward between the Big Black River on the west and Jackson on the east, hit the Southern Railroad of Mississippi that linked the state capital with Vicksburg, then turn west and head toward the Gibraltar on the Mississippi. Sherman was joining him, having marched along the Louisiana side of the river and crossing at Grand Gulf. Grant’s Army of the Tennessee moved with McPherson’s Seventeenth Corps on the right, Sherman’s Fifteenth Corps in the center, and McClernand’s Thirteenth Corps on the left. Grant would march without a formal line of supply, his moving army connected with Grand Gulf by wagon trains. The troops received some food before starting but were expected to rely on the countryside for most of their provisions.

Vicksburg and Port Hudson    363 The first engagement was wholly unplanned. Brig. Gen. John Gregg’s Confederate brigade was moving from Port Hudson toward Jackson when McPherson caught up with it near Raymond, a town forty miles northeast of Port Gibson. Gregg’s four thousand troops received McPherson’s twelve thousand in battle on May 12. McPherson handled his troops cautiously, and Gregg managed to delay the Federals all day before pulling away with a loss of 514 men compared to McPherson’s 442. The effect of this first battle of the overland march was decisive. Grant had worried about the Confederate force at Jackson, which was of uncertain size. Gregg’s movement toward the capital indicated it might be larger than expected. So Grant diverted most of his strength toward Jackson while positioning McClernand to watch the line of the Big Black River. McPherson marched first to Clinton, a few miles west of the city, and then headed for Jackson while Sherman moved northeastward toward the capital. On May 13, the day after the engagement at Raymond, Gen. Joseph E.  Johnston arrived at Jackson to take charge of the Confederate force. Placed in an oversight position for all commands in the West the previous fall, Johnston had been instructed by Confederate President Jefferson Davis to personally go to Mississippi and help Pemberton deal with Grant. He found upon arrival that it was nearly too late. Johnston sent an order for Pemberton to move twenty-​two thousand men across the Big Black River and attack Grant from the west. But before that message could have an effect, the Federals appeared outside Jackson on May 14. In a driving rainstorm they pushed the Confederate troops back to the earthworks protecting the city. Johnston could count on no more than six thousand men, while Grant brought three times that number against him. The Confederates evacuated Jackson after suffering 850 casualties compared to Grant’s 286 and retreated toward Canton to the north. Pemberton was unaware of these developments as he considered Johnston’s order to move east. He altered that plan by moving southeast and hitting Grant’s supply line instead, assuming it would be vulnerable somewhere between Grand Gulf and Raymond. Pemberton advanced across the Big Black River with three of his five divisions and marched a few miles before bivouacking on the night of May 15. The next morning, a desperate message arrived from Johnston reiterating his directive to advance directly east. This involved a countermarch northward and the deployment of Brig. Gen. Stephen D. Lee’s Brigade at Champion Hill to protect the rear of his column as well as the army’s wagon trains. A Union force reported to be in the area was headed by Brig. Gen. Alvin P. Hovey’s Thirteenth Corps division followed by Maj. Gen. John Logan’s division of the Seventeenth Corps. Hovey engaged Lee in battle on the morning of May 16 to initiate the Battle of Champion Hill fifteen miles east of the Southern Railroad’s crossing of the Big Black River and thirty miles west of Jackson. Maj. Gen. Carter L. Stevenson, Lee’s division commander, sent reinforcements as Pemberton halted his march and returned to Champion Hill with more troops. John Bowen’s and Maj. Gen. William W. Loring’s divisions took a position to Lee’s right. Grant fed more troops into the developing fight until the Federals outnumbered the Confederates thirty-​two thousand to twenty-​two thousand.

364   Earl J. Hess Hovey and Logan mounted an attack on Lee at 11:30 a.m. that shattered two Confederate brigades and captured a dozen artillery pieces and many prisoners. Col. James Slack’s brigade of Hovey’s division broke the Rebel line at the crossroads near Champion Hill. To meet this crisis Pemberton moved Bowen’s Division from the right. Bowen sent two of his brigades into a counterattack that drove Slack from the crossroads and recaptured four guns. The Rebels also pushed back another brigade of Hovey’s division, but the Union retreat was halted by fresh troops. Sixteen Federal guns enfiladed Bowen’s men, who had by now moved so far ahead of their supporting troops that they were vulnerable. Bowen’s command was driven back as the Federals once again captured the crossroads. Pemberton had also tried to move Loring’s Division from the right to the crossroads, but Loring failed to take the most direct road and did not reach it in time. Because of the previous Union attack, Pemberton ordered a retreat from Champion Hill. Loring became separated from the army. He conducted a long detour to the north, then headed east to Jackson by the time Johnston reoccupied the capital. Sherman’s Fifteenth Corps had been left behind to wreck public buildings and had evacuated Jackson on May 16 as the Battle at Champion Hill raged. The shattered landscape at Champion Hill was littered with 3,840 Confederate casualties and 2,441 Union losses. The battle shifted all the strategic advantages to the Federal side, separating the two Confederate forces in the area. Pemberton retreated west to shield Vicksburg, having lost the services of Loring’s Division and seeing much of Stevenson’s Division crushed and demoralized. The lingering doubt about whether Loring would try to rejoin his column led Pemberton to hold open the railroad crossing of the Big Black River. He positioned five thousand troops of Bowen’s Division on the bottomland along the east side behind a line of earthworks. The rest of his defeated army took position on the west side. This disposition made little sense. Grant would soon show up, and after that there would be no need to hold the bridgehead. The only hope of saving Bowen after that would be to retreat under cover of darkness. Pemberton waited long enough on May 17 for the Federals to appear and take position opposite this bridgehead, but they did not give Bowen time to withdraw. Finding a covered place on low ground to mass his brigade, Brig. Gen. Michael K. Lawler of the Thirteenth Corps mounted an attack with 1,500 men that hit the Confederates at a weak sector of their line. Bowen’s position collapsed with the loss of 1,700 men and eighteen guns. The Federals were stopped only by the river, which was too deep to ford, and by some Confederates who set the railroad bridge on fire. For a few hours at least, the Big Black River posed more of a safeguard for Vicksburg than did Pemberton’s army. The Battle of the Big Black River capped one of the most impressive campaigns of rapid maneuver in the Civil War. The overland march involved moving thirty-​two thousand men one hundred miles, winning four battlefield victories, smashing Pemberton’s army, and isolating Johnston’s small force. In only nine days, from May 8 to 17, the strategic and tactical situation in west-​central Mississippi had completely changed.1

Vicksburg and Port Hudson    365 The twin defeats at Champion Hill and the Big Black River severely depressed Confederate morale. Pemberton left behind some troops to harass Union bridging operations across the Big Black and ordered the rest to Vicksburg, alarming the residents when a mob of dejected soldiers streamed into the city on May 17. By that day, the Federals were feeling hungry after a week and a half of living off the land. Grant had moved through Claiborne County (Port Gibson and Grand Gulf), Hinds County (Clinton and Jackson), and Warren County (Vicksburg), totaling 428,339 acres of improved land. The three counties also contained 7,727 horses, 11,351 asses and mules, 13,829 milk cows, 34,916 cattle, and 31,137 sheep. None of these counties had seen the intrusion of hostile armies, and for the most part the invading Federals had free rein to take what was convenient. Foraging was officially sanctioned. Col. Norman Eddy told the men of his 48th Indiana “to Jayhawk all we could as the products of the country were about all we had to depend upon for several days.”2 Some units did well in finding food to sustain their rapid marching, but others suffered because they moved through areas already picked clean by other regiments. Brigade commander Brig. Gen. Ralph P. Buckland reported that his men suffered from hunger. Only now and then could they find enough food in the countryside to alleviate the problem. Col. John E. Tourtellotte’s 4th Minnesota received no rations from army commissaries from May 4 to 17. The men lived by taking food from civilians along the line of march and did not receive full rations until May 23, after Grant reestablished his supply line with the North. Foraging from the countryside saved Grant’s army from starvation. The men found enough fresh beef and pork for themselves and enough hay and grain for their animals to get by. The Federals also rounded up extra wagons and mule teams and used refugee Blacks picked up along the way to drive them.3 The passage of Grant’s army through Claiborne, Hinds, and Warren counties had an impact on the civilian population that went beyond the loss of food, hay, horses, and wagons. Some areas were hit hard by the hungry soldiers, and other areas were scarcely touched. Even in the hard-​hit areas, the Yankees came and went fairly quickly. But they disrupted spring planting and deprived hundreds of farms of much-​needed equipment and animals. Most important, the Union Army acted like a magnet to draw away hundreds of slaves from plantations. The three counties were particularly vulnerable to this effect because the relative proportion between Black and white populations was heavily skewed. In Claiborne, Hinds, and Warren counties, there were a combined population of 19,175 white men, women, and children. Only 117 free Blacks lived in the three counties, while 48,422 slaves resided there. In other words, more than 71 percent of the residents of these three counties were slave men, women, and children. Grant’s fast-​moving column broke the fragile stability of these counties, offering slaves an opportunity to reach the Federal army. Mrs. J. W. Russell, whose plantation was located southwest of Raymond, reported the effect of Grant’s passage through the area. She did not try to stop the Federals but

366   Earl J. Hess handed them the keys to her larder. “Some of them took nothing, others asked for what they wanted, and others, were as ravenous as wolves,” she wrote. “Two privates were gentlemen & tried to keep the others quiet.” The Federals took most of her food and livestock but did not intrude on her private quarters.4

Attack and Siege After the four battlefield victories of the campaign, Grant hoped to take advantage of his success. Crossing the Big Black River on the night of May 17, he pushed his army to Vicksburg with the hope of breaking through its defenses. In this expectation he was disappointed. Although dispirited, Pemberton prepared his army to defend Vicksburg. He had two fresh divisions holding positions in and near the city that had not been engaged in the battles at Champion Hill and the Big Black River. These troops were assigned to hold the northeast and east sectors of his line of earthworks, the sectors most likely to be approached by the Federals. He abandoned all outlying areas from Haynes’s Bluff to Warrenton. The Federals took position opposite Pemberton’s works on May 18 and launched an assault on May 19. The heaviest effort took place along Graveyard Road against Stockade Redan and its connecting line to the west. The Federal attack was bluntly repulsed with heavy losses. The results of this exploratory assault greatly encouraged the Confederates, but Grant had no way of knowing this and planned a general assault to take place at 10:00 a.m. on May 22. On Sherman’s Fifteenth Corps front, another attack along Graveyard Road came to grief once again because of strong Confederate earthworks that were well defended. Farther south, McPherson’s Seventeenth Corps attacked along Jackson Road toward the 3rd Louisiana Redan and the Great Redoubt, but heavy fire brought the Federals to a halt near those two strongpoints. Still farther south, McClernand’s Thirteenth Corps attacked along Baldwin’s Ferry Road but were unable to take the 2nd Texas Lunette. At Railroad Redoubt, a dozen Federals entered one section of that earthwork and planted flags on the parapet. McClernand sent urgent messages claiming he was about to breach the enemy line and needed help. Grant doubted the veracity of McClernand’s messages, but he authorized a renewal of assaults. Sherman threw a fresh brigade against Stockade Redan with heavy losses as McPherson shifted his only fresh division south to reinforce the Thirteenth Corps. McClernand sent this division into piecemeal attacks that failed to help his units that were stranded within yards of the Confederate line. As night fell that bloody day Grant counted 3,200 casualties for nothing gained. Pemberton had outgeneraled him by placing good troops at key locations and shifting reinforcements to places where they were needed, losing perhaps 500 men. Grant accepted the inevitable and ordered siege approaches on May 23.5

Vicksburg and Port Hudson    367 The fate of Vicksburg would now be determined by digging rather than by fighting. By this time Grant had reestablished his supply line with the Mississippi River and hundreds of steamers flowed south from Memphis, St. Louis, and Cairo with supplies of all kinds, unloading at landing places up the Yazoo River north of Vicksburg. Those vessels also brought thousands of reinforcements funneled to Grant by General in Chief Henry W. Halleck. With thirty thousand men at the start of the siege, Grant had seventy-​five thousand by its end, a pool of manpower the Confederates could never match. His secure line of supply combined with the influx of reinforcements enabled Grant to maintain control of the strategic and tactical environment around Vicksburg. Pemberton was trapped on all sides, his thirty thousand men occupying a pocket within the confines of his entrenchments that was two miles wide by four miles long with several thousand civilians. The Richmond government sent reinforcements to Johnston, but at most he could count on only twenty-​five thousand men, too few for a hope of relieving Pemberton. By late June Sherman commanded thirty thousand men along a fortified line facing east to defend against an advance by Johnston, who hesitated so long that by the time he began to move toward Vicksburg in early July the siege was about to end. Along the siege lines there was a growing feeling of doom among the Confederates and a sustained optimism among their opponents. While most of Pemberton’s troops felt they could hold out until Johnston came to the rescue, that feeling steadily eroded with the passage of time. Along with lowered morale, the Confederates suffered from lack of food. Their mainstay became a cake consisting of boiled field peas that had a hard crust and a mushy, uncooked interior which made many men sick. When beef gave out, commissaries issued mule meat, which some soldiers enjoyed and others avoided. Pemberton barely had enough troops to man the trenches, with no possibility of rotating units for rest, so food shortages combined with physical exhaustion to weaken the health as well as the mood of his men. By the end of the siege more than six thousand Confederates were hospitalized for illness and wounds, and only eighteen thousand were able to man the trenches. Fears over the supply of ammunition caused Pemberton to limit the firing of artillery and small arms. As a result the Federals dominated the siege lines. Grant had an abundance of ammunition and urged his men to use it without stint. The Confederates therefore had little chance to arrest the progress of Union siege approaches. After digging their own earthworks, the Federals started saps at thirteen locations along the line, all of them aimed at key points of the Confederate works. In contrast to their enemy, the Federals enjoyed every advantage during the siege of Vicksburg. They had an abundance of supplies and retained a hefty confidence in themselves and Grant. The opposing sides engaged in numerous informal truces and lengthy conversations between the lines, usually at night and on the picket lines, and quite a few Confederates deserted during these truces. The Unionists employed psychological warfare, throwing hard tack between the lines to taunt their opponents and writing propaganda leaflets to be dropped by balloon, according to a suggestion by Adm. David Porter. These leaflets emphasized the

368   Earl J. Hess fact that Johnston could not save Pemberton and pointed out that while Confederate privates were starving in the trenches their officers were eating high on the hog at headquarters. Citizens from the North came streaming to Vicksburg bearing medical supplies and food for their hometown regiments. Civilian surgeons and nurses came to help care for the sick and wounded. At least one photographer traveled to the army and did a thriving business making photographic portraits of Federal soldiers in a tent located literally within range of Confederate artillery. Jules and Frank Lombard, a singing duo from St. Louis, visited Grant’s army for a few days. McPherson’s men arranged for a truce along Jackson Road so the pair could go to the forward end of a sap and serenade the Confederates at the 3rd Louisiana Redan. The Rebels were so appreciative they called out requests for favorite songs. Several thousand civilians endured the siege of Vicksburg, the largest citizen population surrounded by enemy troops in the war. When Porter’s gunboats and mortar boats began to bombard the city, most citizens dug caves in the sides of hills as bomb shelters. Some of these caves were small chambers meant for temporary refuge; others were elaborately planned, with carpets and furniture to increase the comfort of their occupants. Virtually every building in town was damaged in some way, many demolished, and even hospitals were shelled on occasion. A conservative estimate of civilian casualties had three killed and twelve wounded, but the number probably was much higher. Many children found the experience of being under siege so new and exciting that they collected spent bullets and shell fragments as souvenirs. By July 3 food shortages had become so severe that Pemberton’s chief subordinates urged him to open negotiations with Grant, who initially insisted on unconditional surrender. When Pemberton refused, Grant changed his mind, agreeing to parole the Confederates rather than transport them to Northern prisons. At 10:00 a.m. on July 4, the Confederates stacked their weapons and allowed the Federals to enter Vicksburg. Soon the U.S. flag was flying from the Warren County Courthouse, which had been constructed on a prominent height by slave labor five years before. For the second time in his career, Grant compelled the surrender of an enemy field army. More than two hundred artillery pieces, thirty thousand men, and the strongest Confederate position on the Mississippi River were in his hands.6 No prior campaign in the western theater created as much national interest as had the overland march and the siege of Vicksburg. Grant’s lightning movements and decisive victories were the most sensational news yet to come from the West. Citizens and soldiers alike, North and South, now interpreted the outcome at Vicksburg as pivotal in the course of the war. Unreasonably high expectations were placed on Johnston to raise the siege, and his failure to do so tarnished his reputation. Coupled with the victory at Gettysburg, culminating on July 3, the North had every reason to rejoice over the twin turning points their armies had achieved by the nation’s eighty-​seventh Independence Day.

Vicksburg and Port Hudson    369

The Siege of Port Hudson Vicksburg so absorbed the interest of everyone North and South that it overshadowed another siege of a Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi River 150 miles south at Port Hudson. Banks left Alexandria, Louisiana, after spending nearly a month in that river city planning his next move. His Nineteenth Corps troops moved down the Red River toward the Mississippi, aiming generally at the location of Port Hudson. Meanwhile, Maj. Gen. Christopher C. Augur’s division moved north from Baton Rouge to bypass Port Hudson and secure a landing place on the east bank of the Mississippi upstream from the port for Banks. He was met at Plains Store, located four miles east of Port Hudson, by Confederate cavalrymen, and a small battle erupted on May 21. Augur drove the Confederates away with a loss of 150 men while inflicting 100 casualties on the enemy. Banks crossed the Mississippi ten miles north of Port Hudson at Bayou Sara on May 22 and moved south to besiege Franklin Gardner’s garrison of 7,500 men that evening. With 30,000 troops, Banks greatly outnumbered Gardner, but the Confederates had a line of earthworks 4.5 miles long to maximize the defensive power of their small numbers. Just as at Vicksburg, the landscape was badly eroded and covered with brush, and the weather would soon be brutally hot, all of which hampered Union operations. Five days after beginning the siege, Banks launched a general assault on May 27. His relatively inexperienced troops had difficulty coordinating their efforts, however, and Gardner was able to shift men to meet each piecemeal assault. The Federals gained nothing for the two thousand casualties they suffered that day, inflicting only five hundred losses on the besieged. One of the earliest employments of Black troops by the Federal army occurred this day as the 1st and 3rd Louisiana Native Guards regiments participated in heavy fighting. The 1st had been organized from among the free Black population of New Orleans, while the 3rd consisted of former slaves. Both regiments did well in the first assault on Port Hudson. For two and a half weeks the Federals concentrated on building earthworks and establishing battery positions for artillery. Then Banks tried a second assault. Union artillery pounded the defenses on June 13, and the next day the infantry once again advanced. Once again they were repulsed, this time losing 1,805 men. There was little else to do but start siege approaches, something that should have begun much earlier. Banks’s inept leadership and the slow process of siege approaches lengthened the struggle for Port Hudson. Even so, the siege was difficult for the Confederates. Like their comrades at Vicksburg, there was no prospect of relief in the works, and men endured day after day in hot, stuffy trenches with diminishing rations. By the time siege approaches were close enough for the Federals to undermine the enemy works, the Confederates were eating mule meat and rats. Sickness devastated both sides during the siege as hot and humid weather oppressed men clothed in woolen uniforms.

370   Earl J. Hess Banks barely supplied his army with coastal trading vessels capable of navigating the Mississippi River north from New Orleans. His men foraged liberally from East Baton Rouge and East Feliciana, two parishes on the east side of the river, plus West Baton Rouge, West Feliciana, and Pointe Coupee parishes on the west side of the stream. The three western parishes were a bit wealthier in real and personal property than the two eastern parishes, and that is where the Unionists concentrated their foraging. Federal troops west of the river not only prevented Gardner from escaping and kept at bay Confederate relief forces, but they scoured the countryside for provisions, livestock, horses, and wagons. They seized cotton bales to use in siege fortifications, taking material from loyalists, Rebels, Blacks, mulattoes, and whites alike. The vigor of Banks’s foraging probably was justified by his situation. He could draw on a local area of five counties with a total of more than 73 million dollars’ worth of real and personal property to supplement a fragile supply line with New Orleans during the siege of Port Hudson. In contrast, Grant could draw on six Mississippi and Louisiana counties with a total of more than 162 million dollars’ worth of real and personal property, plus a better supply line linking him with the North. On July 7, confirmation of Vicksburg’s fall reached Banks. He made a point of telling Gardner the news, and the Confederate commander saw no purpose in continued resistance. Two days later, on July 9, he surrendered the post. The last Confederate stronghold on the great river had fallen, achieving one of the most important war goals of the northwestern states: unfettered navigation of the Mississippi. The cost in life and suffering had been high. Banks lost 10,000 men during the siege of Port Hudson, about half of them due to disease. Gardner lost 750 men killed and wounded and another 250 who died of disease. He surrendered the remaining 6,500 troops. The twin victories at Vicksburg and Port Hudson were enormously important to the Union war effort. By reopening free navigation of the river, they dissolved unrest and dissatisfaction in the northwestern states. Splitting the Confederacy in two had important strategic benefits for the Northern war effort and created many new problems for the Confederates. No longer could the Confederates supply their armies in the East with food from the Trans-​Mississippi, nor supply their troops west of the river with ordnance, clothing, and other material from the East. The emotional benefit of these twin victories was worth the physical effort in reducing both strongholds, both in emboldening the North and dispiriting the South.

Fracturing Confederate Mississippi On the regional level, the twin victories greatly depressed Confederate fortunes. This is more evident in the case of Vicksburg than Port Hudson. Even before Grant’s siege ended, civilian society in west-​central Mississippi was fracturing. Food shortages caused whites to leave their homes and seek assistance from the Union Army. Pvt. George Washington Huff of the 80th Ohio walked to McPherson’s headquarters on June 28 to

Vicksburg and Port Hudson    371 look at the refugees. “I do declare that I’ve never seen so much ‘calico’ since I left Ohio,” he noted in his diary. “They came from beyond Black river and from inside Johns[t]‌on’s line to beg for bread.”7 Many Black refugees came to Grant’s army during the course of the siege. One slave woman who left her plantation when a Federal column marched to Mechanicsburg north of Vicksburg put it well when she said, “I don’t care which way I go, only so as I get away from this here place.”8 Admittedly, not all slaves felt that way. Near Raymond, Mrs. Russell noted that some of those who had accompanied McPherson’s column as it marched away returned, saying they were tired of the Yankees and preferred the peace and stability of the plantation. But all evidence indicates that a far greater number of those who left the plantation opted to stay with those who freed them rather than return to bondage. The numbers of Black refugees is a telling commentary on slave opinion. By the end of the siege at Vicksburg, 8,550 Blacks of both genders and all ages had gathered at Young’s Point just upriver from the city, where the Union Army sheltered and fed them. Another 2,400 were camped at various landings up the Yazoo River and 1,000 at Goodrich’s Landing farther up the Mississippi. Even the U.S. Navy maintained a small contraband camp at Grand Gulf during the summer of 1863. A plan to put Black refugees to work on abandoned plantations had already begun, and by the end of 1863 a total of twenty-​one leased plantations employing 2,553 former slaves had been created. The best known were those formerly owned by Jefferson Davis and his brother Joseph Davis at Davis Bend, fifteen miles south of Vicksburg on the east bank of the Mississippi. Grant had suggested these plantations be turned into an enclave for refugee Blacks, and by 1865 the army was leasing five thousand acres there to nearly two thousand Black men, women, and children, who also organized courts to settle disputes among themselves and controlled their own schools. Davis Bend had become a self-​governing freedmen’s colony. Benjamin Montgomery, a former slave of Joseph Davis, purchased both Davis plantations in 1866 to continue the social experiment. But the leased plantations along the Louisiana side of the river were vulnerable to guerrilla and Confederate attacks. Eventually they all failed, and the number of Black refugees at Vicksburg soared to twelve thousand by early 1865. Perhaps that is why Blacks were allowed to cultivate small plots of land along the former siege lines, literally on the battlefield, for many decades after the war. In places they continued this practice up to near the time the Vicksburg National Military Park was created in 1899. In the spring of 1864, more than 113,000 Black refugees were being cared for by the army in the Department of the Tennessee. Grant’s Vicksburg campaign was the primary tool that opened this region and smashed the barriers to self-​liberation by these slaves. But it was an uncertain, difficult, and complicated road to freedom for these refugees. By the time the siege began, the idea of arming Blacks had gained wider support among Grant’s men than when the idea had first been proposed in March and April. The Battle of Milliken’s Bend on June 7 went a long way toward convincing the Federals that

372   Earl J. Hess Black soldiers could fight. A Confederate brigade from the Trans-​Mississippi attacked the major supply base at the bend on June 7. It was defended by the 9th Louisiana Colored Infantry, which was so new it had not even practiced loading and firing muskets before the battle, and part of the 23rd Iowa. The Federals fought hard but were forced back to the river levee, where Union gunboat fire stopped the Confederate attack. When news of the battle spread, most of Grant’s white troops were impressed and more vigorously endorsed the Federal policy to make soldiers of former slaves. The other major factor in the turnaround of soldier opinion was the opportunity to obtain officer commissions in the newly raised Black regiments. Lt. William Titus Rigby of the 24th Iowa noted the energy his comrades displayed in recruiting. When not on duty, they scoured the countryside to persuade Black men to join. Most of the able-​ bodied men had already left plantations west of the Big Black River, so these recruiters ventured into Johnston’s territory east of the river, where they assumed more Blacks still resided on their home places. The Federals also heavily recruited Black soldiers from the three Louisiana parishes that lay on the other side of the Mississippi from the Vicksburg area; all of them had a very high proportion of African American residents. In Carroll Parish, 77 percent of the people were slaves; in Madison Parish it was 88 percent; and in Tensas Parish, 90 percent. Recruitment of Black soldiers accelerated after the fall of Vicksburg. By late July Grant had authorized the creation of seven regiments with five thousand troops at Vicksburg, and more were being formed. The number of Black males fifteen to thirty years of age who lived in the three Louisiana counties and the three Mississippi counties that his recruiters drew from totaled 14,600. In short, Grant’s army mobilized at least one out of three Black males of military age from the six counties. They would constitute the main force of the Union garrison of Vicksburg to war’s end. In a larger sense, the complete conquest of the Mississippi Valley greatly accelerated military use of the Black population of that region. During the second half of the war, more than one-​third of the Black troops who served the Union were raised in the Mississippi Valley, and most of them remained on duty guarding the banks of the great river. Controversy over Grant’s paroling of Pemberton’s army contributed to a problem concerning prisoners of war. While Grant hoped that paroling these men would lead to many of them deserting the Confederate cause, there is little evidence that actually took place. Instead, the Richmond government was so desperate to exchange them that it cut too many corners in the slow, delicate process of officially exchanging them according to the terms of the Dix-​Hill Cartel, which had been in operation since July 1862. Both sides had to agree on exactly who and how many prisoners were to be exchanged, and then they formally handed them over. The key to making the system work was that the prisoners were in enemy hands. But now that thirty thousand Confederate prisoners were in Confederate hands, the Richmond authorities unilaterally declared them exchanged in September 1863 (at least three months faster than the normal time

Vicksburg and Port Hudson    373 needed in the past) and told the Federals they could consider paroled Union soldiers in Northern camps as the exchange. The Federal government naturally protested this high-​handed action and refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the transaction. Anger increased when some Vicksburg parolees were captured on the battlefields around Chattanooga in November 1863. Lincoln had already effectively stopped the exchange system on July 30, 1863, to protest Confederate refusal to treat captured Black troops as prisoners of war. When Grant was asked to resume exchanges in April 1864 he refused, based on the Confederate action in bringing their Vicksburg soldiers back to duty without Federal approval. As a result of the breakdown of exchange, the number of prisoners held by both sides exploded during the last year of the Civil War, eased slightly by the limited resumption of exchanges during the latter months of the conflict.9 The fall of Vicksburg played a key role in weakening Confederate control of Mississippi in many other ways. Col. Manning F. Force, commander of the 20th Ohio in McPherson’s corps, noticed the beginning of a shift in public opinion during the summer of 1863. “People living at home say—​Let us have peace, take my property, take my negroes, but let the war end, and let us be under the old government again.”10 He saw this as a latent Unionist movement beginning in the heart of Confederate Mississippi. But Force was perhaps too optimistic. The fall of Vicksburg did not break Confederate Mississippi but certainly damaged it severely. Governor John J. Pettus and the legislature had started to address a number of serious problems growing out of the state’s war effort before Grant approached Jackson in May. But the coming of the Federals compelled Pettus and other state officers to flee the capital. They eventually moved the treasury to Mobile, the judicial records to Selma, and some other records to Columbus, Mississippi. Pettus and a few government officials returned to Jackson in June 1863 but fled again when Sherman advanced toward the city soon after the fall of Vicksburg. Even though Sherman abandoned Jackson after chasing Johnston’s army out of the city on July 16, the government never returned. Pettus traveled to Enterprise, Meridian, and finally to Macon, Georgia, before he joined the state legislature when it met at Columbus in November 1863. Pettus’s term expired at that time and he was replaced by former Brig. Gen. Charles Clark. By this stage of the war the state government faced insurmountable problems. It was 8 million dollars in debt and had no more than 400,000 dollars in the treasury, no stable home, and the fringes of its territory were under Federal control. If Pettus and Clark had any chance of dealing with war-​related social, economic, and military problems in Mississippi, Grant’s Vicksburg operations had destroyed that opportunity. The Federals took and temporarily occupied Jackson a total of four times during the last two years of the war, creating continuing cycles of social and political disruption in the central part of the state. On June 15, 1865, occupying Federals forced Clark’s government out of office and replaced it with one headed by William L. Sharkey, one of the latent Unionists whom Force had referred to in the summer of 1863.

374   Earl J. Hess

Notes 1. Michael B. Ballard, Vicksburg:  The Campaign That Opened the Mississippi (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 282–​318. 2. Sneier to Sir, June 21, 1863, Samuel E. Sneier Letter, Indiana Historical Society, Indianapolis. 3. Earl J. Hess, Civil War Supply and Strategy:  Feeding Men and Moving Armies (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020), 76–​83. 4. Allan C. Ashcraft, ed., “Mrs. Russell and the Battle of Raymond, Mississippi,” Journal of Mississippi History 25, no. 1 (January 1963): 39–​40. 5. Earl J. Hess, Storming Vicksburg:  Grant, Pemberton, and the Battles of May 19–​22, 1863 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020), 289–​295. 6. Edwin Cole Bearss, Unvexed to the Sea:  The Campaign for Vicksburg (Dayton, OH: Morningside, 1986), 3:1279–​1315. 7. George Washington Huff Diary, June 28, 1863, 80th Ohio Folder, Vicksburg National Military Park. 8. Force to Mrs. Perkins, August 6, 1863, M. F. Force Papers, Special Collections, University of Washington, Seattle. 9. Terry Whittington, “In the Shadow of Defeat: Tracking the Vicksburg Parolees,” Journal of Mississippi History 64, no. 4 (Winter 2002): 307–​330. 10. Force to Mr. Keebler, July, no date, 1863, and August 19, 1863, M. F. Force Papers.

Bibliography Ballard, Michael B. Vicksburg:  The Campaign That Opened the Mississippi. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Barnickel, Linda. Milliken’s Bend: A Civil War Battle in History and Memory. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013. Bearss, Edwin Cole. Unvexed to the Sea:  The Campaign for Vicksburg. Vol. 3. Dayton, OH: Morningside, 1986. Clampitt, Bradley R. Occupied Vicksburg. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016. Edmonds, David C. The Guns of Port Hudson. Vol. 1: The River Campaign (February–​May 1863). Lafayette, LA: Acadiana Press, 1983. Edmonds, David C. The Guns of Port Hudson. Vol. 2: The Investment, Siege and Reduction. Lafayette, LA: Acadiana Press, 1984. Grabau, Warren E. Ninety-​Eight Days:  A Geographer’s View of the Vicksburg Campaign. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2000. Hermann, Janet. The Pursuit of a Dream. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999. Hess, Earl J. Storming Vicksburg: Grant, Pemberton, and the Battles of May 19–​22, 1863. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Hewitt, Lawrence Lee. Port Hudson:  Confederate Bastion on the Mississippi. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987. Hollandsworth, James G. Louisiana Native Guards: The Black Military Experience during the Civil War. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995. Smith, Timothy B. Champion Hill: Decisive Battle for Vicksburg. El Dorado Hills, CA: Savas Beatie, 2012.

Vicksburg and Port Hudson    375 Smith, Timothy B. Mississippi in the Civil War: The Home Front. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010. Solonick, Justin S. Engineering Victory: The Union Siege of Vicksburg. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2015. Taylor, Amy Murrell. Embattled Freedom: Journeys through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018.

Chapter 23

The Chancell ors v i l l e Campa i g n Strategic Contingency Point Christian B. Keller

The campaign and battle of Chancellorsville, Virginia (April 25–​May 6, 1863), was a strategic watershed filled with contingencies that irrevocably affected the course of the American Civil War. On a fundamental level, the reorganization and reforms in the Union Army of the Potomac supervised by Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker in the winter of 1862–​1863 permanently enhanced the professionalization, morale, and battlefield performance of the North’s principal eastern field army. The Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, under Gen. Robert E. Lee, experienced during that same winter both a religious revival and the beginning of a permanent crisis in supply and personnel that would only worsen over the next two bloody years and damage its ability to parry the enemy’s heavy blows and deliver its own operational and tactical victories. The death of Lt. Gen. Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson, who was accidentally shot by his own men the night after his successful flank march and attack (May 2), was an especially tragic blow for the Confederacy, a contingency point in its own right because of the irreparable injury done to Lee’s senior command team, and therefore his army’s battlefield efficacy. The campaign, which ended in a remarkable Confederate victory despite the loss of seasoned leaders and thirteen thousand troops, also came at a time of strategic importance in the war. Vicksburg was almost under siege, most of Tennessee and the Mississippi River Valley were under Federal control, and the effects of emancipation and the Union blockade were economically impairing the South’s means to wage war. Time was running out for the Confederacy, and Lee knew it. His miraculous success west of Fredericksburg in the thick wilderness, against odds greater than two to one, caused seventeen thousand Union casualties, rocked the Northern army and public back on their heels again, and handed the theater-​strategic initiative in the East back to him. Lee now sensed an opportunity—​perhaps the last great chance—​to win Southern

The Chancellorsville Campaign    377 independence. Chancellorsville, in essence, set the conditions that allowed him to move north once more. Finally, the Federal defeat at Chancellorsville created political problems for Abraham Lincoln, some of which would last until the end of the war. Northern Copperheads saw in this latest setback proof that the war could not be won and temporarily surged in popularity in the lower Midwest and border East, awaiting one more military catastrophe to hand them political power. Home-​front morale bottomed out even among the majoritarian war supporters, threatening the president’s fragile coalition, and German Americans, representing the North’s largest ethnic group, felt betrayed and slandered by Anglo-​American scapegoating of their troops in the Eleventh Corps, which had been shattered by Stonewall Jackson’s flank assault. Overall Northern morale would rebound, but German-​born citizens never again harbored the same enthusiasm for the Union cause, endangering Federal political and military prospects until the 1864 presidential election.

Winter 1863: A Union and Confederate “Valley Forge” Christmas Day 1862 dawned bright and warm among the Rebel camps spread out along the southern banks of the Rappahannock River, to the west and south of Fredericksburg. The Virginia community was still devastated from the effects of the late battle on December 13, but the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia that had won it was none the worse for wear and basked in the afterglow of victory even as the first indications of supply shortages were felt among the brigade and divisional commissaries. The men in the ranks celebrated the holiday as best they could with their meager fare; their commanders, on the other hand, were treated to a rare feast at the headquarters of General Jackson on the grounds of the Moss Neck Plantation south of town. Gifts from around the South, some of them edible, as well as efficient foraging by his staff at local estates had created a mountain of food, obliging the embarrassed Stonewall to hold a Christmas dinner to which he invited Lee, cavalry commander Maj. Gen. James E. B. (Jeb) Stuart, artillery commander Brig. Gen. William Nelson Pendleton, and their aides. The famous Christmas repast, at first glance a mere footnote to the ensuing tragedy of the Chancellorsville Campaign, symbolized the growing strategic quandary facing the Confederacy, and particularly Lee’s army, in the winter and spring of 1863. Such celebrations were increasingly rare in a South strapped logistically by plundered and abandoned farms, failing transportation networks, escaping slaves, and the ever-​ tightening Union naval blockade of Rebel ports. The Fredericksburg area was a case in point. The wintering Confederate Army caused little wanton destruction of local property, but the great forests that previously separated the fine homes south of town were nearly all chopped down to provide wood for cabins and campfires, and the two main

378   Christian B. Keller railroads supplying the army suffered from constant maintenance issues and could barely keep the men from chronic hunger. Some of them joked that “General Starvation” outranked General Lee that winter. Their general also quickly found that he could not support the sustenance of the artillery horses and was forced to disperse his batteries across several adjoining counties to pasture the animals. Most ominous, the Rebel commander realized his army’s manpower vis-​à-​vis the burgeoning numbers of the Army of the Potomac, encamped across the river at Falmouth, was becoming a strategic liability, possibly limiting his ability to defend the Rappahannock line in the spring, let alone taking the operational offensive, which he and Jackson desperately yearned to do.1 During the winter months and into the early spring the two Confederate generals augmented their professional relationship by developing their personal bond. As faithful Christians unified by a common providential evangelicalism, and spending substantial time together in social events such as the Christmas feast, Lee and Jackson became friends and, postwar “Lost Cause” exaggerations notwithstanding, solidified a tested command team that included Stuart but excluded the absent Lt. Gen. James Longstreet, whom Lee sent with two of his divisions to Suffolk in southeastern Virginia. “Old Pete” was not purposefully exiled but chosen specifically for this independent mission, ostensibly to gather much-​needed foodstuffs from northeastern North Carolina and Southside Virginia. The fact that Lee sent away a third of his army to obtain forage testified to the acuity of the supply problem in Virginia, which soon bore operational bad fruit. Despite numerous attempts to recall Longstreet and his divisions in time, neither would arrive to take part in the coming campaign, lengthening the numerical odds against Lee and all but guaranteeing that any tactical victory would be difficult to exploit and turn into political gain.2 For his part, Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker was convinced that Rebel success in the spring was an impossibility. “May God have mercy on General Lee,” he said, “for I shall have none.” During the winter of 1862–​1863, the new, boastful leader of the Army of the Potomac galvanized a defeated Union host, transforming the low morale produced by the defeat at Fredericksburg and the failure of the infamous “Mud March” in January—​ a last-​ditch attempt by Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside to defeat Lee by outflanking him to the west—​into an élan through implementation of various reforms. One author has likened this process to that undergone by Gen. George Washington’s Continental Army at Valley Forge. Gone were Burnside’s “grand divisions,” replaced by the tried and true corps, which were each assigned specific badge emblems to distinguish them from each other. The men began to take pride in their crescents (Eleventh Corps), trefoils (Second Corps), and Maltese crosses (Fifth Corps), among others, and appreciated the increased and regular distribution of rations that Hooker oversaw. As the snows of winter gave way to the sunshine and breezes of spring, the commanding general also increasingly drilled the troops and held several reviews, observed by dignitaries from the various Northern states and even President Abraham Lincoln. Hooker likewise limited the access of newspaper reporters to the camps and his own headquarters, thereby increasing operational security and secrecy, and established a professional Bureau of Military Information under Col. George H. Sharpe, whose sole purpose was to gather

The Chancellorsville Campaign    379 intelligence on Rebel numbers, dispositions, and preparations. Fatefully, his reforms also included concentrating the army’s cavalry into one large corps under Maj. Gen. George Stoneman and decentralizing its artillery by parceling out the batteries to corps and divisions.3 If the Union Army experienced the organizational and professional renewal parallel to that of its Revolutionary War antecedent at Valley Forge, its foe across the river underwent a concomitant spiritual rejuvenation not unlike that reported in Washington’s army in 1777–​1778. Starting in the fall of 1862, following the bloody Battle of Antietam, the Army of Northern Virginia witnessed a mass Christian revival that swept through entire brigades and divisions. Stonewall Jackson, one of its leading proponents, fostered its progress not only through enthusiastic support of religious services but also through the recruitment of chaplains in his corps. Despite their personal satisfaction with the progress of the revival, both Jackson and Lee worried about the implications of their fellow Confederates at home failing to accept God’s divine will. Jackson was especially concerned, telling one chaplain, “[The] only thing which gives me any apprehension of [my] country’s cause was sin of the army and people.” Yet the two generals trusted that the Lord would protect the Southern nation and provide the means to launch a preemptive offensive against the Unionists in April—​an operation that may have premeditated a thrust into Pennsylvania. Jackson instructed his topographer, Capt. Jedediah Hotchkiss, to prepare a map from the Shenandoah Valley to Harrisburg, and he and Lee spent several days closeted in Lee’s tent prior to the commanding general’s trip to Richmond in mid-​March to confer with Davis and his cabinet. Unfortunately for the Rebels, Lee fell ill shortly thereafter with a severe attack of pericarditis and was confined to bed. By the time he had recovered a semblance of his strength, it was too late to concentrate the army for the move, and Hooker commenced crossing the Army of the Potomac over the Rappahannock. The Chancellorsville Campaign began in earnest.4

The Campaign and Battle of Chancellorsville Over 130,000 men in blue, divided into seven infantry corps and a large cavalry corps, began stirring in their camps on April 27, 1863, as Hooker inaugurated his campaign plan. It was bold and pugnacious, much like the general’s own personality, and anticipated placing Lee’s army in a giant operational envelopment that would oblige it either to “ingloriously fly” or “fight on ground of [the Federals’] choosing.” Three and later six of the infantry corps were to descend upon the upper fords of the Rappahannock well to the west of Fredericksburg, outflanking the strong Confederate entrenchments that frowned down upon the town and the fields below it. Simultaneously, other infantry corps, notably Maj. Gen. John Sedgwick’s large Sixth Corps, would first threaten and later actually cross the river south of town, fixing Lee’s attention. Meanwhile, Stoneman’s

380   Christian B. Keller cavalry, having crossed the Rappahannock and Rapidan rivers ahead of the infantry, would arc well behind the Confederate positions, disrupting the railroad lifelines and communications with Richmond, burning bridges and depots, and wreaking general havoc. The Rebels, Hooker reasoned, would truly be forced to retreat southward or engage him at such a disadvantage that Union victory was all but assured. “My plans are perfect,” he told a subordinate.5 Nobody informed the changeable Virginia weather, however. Heavy rains and accompanying mud delayed Stoneman’s departure so long that his horsemen splashed across the rivers at the same time as the last of the infantry on April 30. Hooker’s plan called for Stoneman to begin disrupting Lee’s rear much earlier to set conditions favorable to the success of the infantry envelopment. Now it would all occur together. Aware that his cavalry was hopelessly behind schedule, Hooker pushed forward anyway, and by last light on the last day of April had succeeded in planting three corps—​the Fifth, Eleventh, and Twelfth—​around a large mansion in the woods named Chancellorsville. Located just a few miles south of the Rappahannock at the crossroads of the Orange Turnpike and the Plank Road, the house and its grounds represented some of the only cleared areas in the vast tangle of second-​growth forest colloquially called the “wilderness” that dominated Spotsylvania County west of Fredericksburg. Hooker knew he had to clear this wooded morass to effectively employ his superior numbers and artillery, and so ordered a general advance to the east for the next day. He also called up Maj. Gen. Daniel Sickles’s Third Corps from Sedgwick’s wing of the army for extra clout, just in case Lee decided to stand and fight. Following the commanding general’s intent,

Map 23.1 Chancellorsville

The Chancellorsville Campaign    381 Sedgwick threw pontoons across the Rappahannock south of Fredericksburg and crossed most of Maj. Gen. John F. Reynolds First Corps, backed up by considerable artillery on Stafford Heights on the opposite bank. The vise was beginning to close on the Army of Northern Virginia.6 Informed fairly quickly of Hooker’s turning movement by Jeb Stuart’s cavalry videttes posted along the Rappahannock and Rapidan fords, Lee was not caught by complete surprise and reacted swiftly to the oncoming threat. Dismissing the Union cavalry force now passing to his rear as a minor concern, he asked Stuart to dispatch a small portion of his troopers to shadow them, retaining the bulk of his cavalry to monitor the Federal infantry advance. On the evening of the thirtieth Lee also sent Maj. Gen. Richard H. Anderson’s Division (of Longstreet’s Corps) toward the Tabernacle Church on the Orange Turnpike, east of Chancellorsville, and ordered Maj. Gen. Lafayette McLaws (also of Longstreet’s command) to have his men cook rations and be ready to march in support. In the first of several meetings, Lee conferred with Jackson, whose four divisions faced Reynolds and represented the bulk of Lee’s sixty-​one thousand available troops. The two leaders essentially had three operational options open to them: make a stand at Fredericksburg, facing the Yankee juggernaut from both directions; retreat southward, perhaps to another defensible line such as the North Anna River; or meet the Federal challenge aggressively, defeating first one wing of the enemy and then the other. For both generals retreat was out of the question, and only a fool could have remained passive as the enemy leviathan closed in. That left the third course of action, which suited Lee’s and Jackson’s preferences as offensive-​minded thinkers. Lee proposed to move three of Jackson’s divisions plus McLaws to confront Hooker while leaving Maj. Gen. Jubal Early’s Division in the fortifications above and below Fredericksburg to watch and, if necessary, repulse Sedgwick. A plan equally as audacious as Hooker’s given Southern numerical inferiority, it was the first time Lee divided his army in the campaign. It would not be the last.7 McLaws’s and Jackson’s graycoats got only a short night’s rest and were on the road well before dawn on May 1. As the sun rose, a dense fog shrouded the Orange Turnpike and concealed the Rebels’ final movements, so that by midmorning Union observers posted in Professor Thaddeus Lowe’s balloons, tethered at Banks Ford on the Rappahannock, reported only a fraction of the actual Confederate force on the road. Moreover, in the first of several communication failures in the coming days, the telegraph line between them and Hooker failed, prompting the Federal commander to stall his planned advance until he received more information. The delay bought time for the Confederates to organize themselves and prepare a suitable reception. By late morning Hooker, assured he faced only a division or two, ordered his corps commanders to press forward out of the wilderness toward the open country west of Fredericksburg. The commanding general claimed he would make his headquarters at the Zoan Church, just a few miles east of Chancellorsville but well on the way to Fredericksburg and Lee’s rear. What Hooker underestimated was the sheer aggressiveness of his Confederate adversary and the speed of his reaction. Lee gave Jackson tactical command of all five divisions now confronting Hooker, and around 11:00 a.m. “Old Jack,” surveying the

382   Christian B. Keller Federal advance and secure in his dispositions, ordered skirmishers forward. Behind them tramped thousands of Rebels in massed ranks, eager for a fight.8 McLaws slammed into Maj. Gen. George Sykes’s division of Maj. Gen. George Meade’s Fifth Corps on the Orange Turnpike, and after a bitter shooting match, outflanked him and started pushing him back. Surprised by the power of the enemy attack, the Union general dispatched couriers requesting reinforcements. But Meade and his other two divisions were too far away on the River Road, well to the north and in advance of Sykes’s division and temporarily out of communication. Maj. Gen. Henry Slocum’s Twelfth Corps, suddenly facing Anderson’s Confederates in his front along the Plank Road, was forced to deploy his divisions into line in the thick underbrush, cutting their progress to a slow crawl to avoid ambush. He could not come to Sykes’s aid, nor could the Eleventh Corps under Maj. Gen. Oliver O. Howard, which was too far to the rear to arrive in time. Hooker received all this information around 1:30, simultaneously with other bad news: delayed dispatches from his chief of staff, Maj. Gen. Daniel Butterfield, initially sent that morning, indicating heavy columns of Rebels detached from Sedgwick’s front moving west down the Turnpike. Worst of all, there was no word from Sedgwick, whom Hooker had ordered to attack in his front that morning. If all those enemy soldiers that had once faced his other wing were now facing him, a reassessment might be in order. “From character of information have suspended attack. The enemy may attack me—​I will try it. Tell Sedgwick to keep a sharp lookout, and attack if he can succeed,” Hooker wired a surprised Butterfield at 2:00 p.m. He called off his corps’ advance, and to Meade’s and Slocum’s consternation ordered them to withdraw their troops all the way back to Chancellorsville and prepare a defense. The Fifth Corps’ lead skirmishers had almost sighted the southern bank of Banks Ford, the capture of which would have transformed the character of the campaign, and the Twelfth Corps had suffered fewer than fifteen casualties. Hooker aborted his plan just as it was beginning to work, unleashing a cascade of speculation in generations of historians about what prompted the decision. The source of many false stories and quotations, such as the canard in which the commanding general supposedly claimed he had “just lost faith in Joe Hooker,” a more likely explanation lay in what he said to Butterfield. Based on the intelligence he had at the time, which was stale, faulty, and ominous, he told an early chronicler, “I was hazarding too much to continue the movement.” For the Union commander, then, it made sense to pull back, regroup, await reinforcements (Sickles’s Third Corps, Reynolds’s First Corps, and most of Maj. Gen. Darius Couch’s Second Corps were ordered to Chancellorsville), and prepare a strong defensive position from which to reignite his offensive. Such an action was unusual for Hooker’s character, but it was probably prudent.9 The problem for Hooker and the Union Army was that the decision to withdraw and hunker down relinquished both the tactical and the operational initiative to Lee and Jackson. The Confederate chieftains met twice during the evening and night of May 1 to discuss how best to utilize the gift their adversary had bequeathed them. Their first council occurred around 7:00 p.m. on a log at the corner of the Plank and Furnace roads and is often equated with the legendary “Last Meeting.” They had five alternatives to think over: stay put, preparing for a renewal of the Union advance; withdraw southward;

The Chancellorsville Campaign    383 or assault either the Union left, right, or center. Implicitly the two generals discarded the first two, and Lee proffered his opinion, based on a personal reconnaissance, that the enemy left was too well-​anchored against the river and situated in rough terrain. Listening intently in the rapidly fading light, Jackson nodded his agreement. The Federal center might offer opportunities, though, as one of his divisions had briefly probed it following Slocum’s retreating troops. But too much about it was unknown, so a pair of staff officers, one from each general’s staff, was dispatched to ascertain the situation. Not long after, Jeb Stuart arrived from a long ride to Hooker’s right and jubilantly pronounced it hanging “in the air,” unanchored and without a cavalry screen. Here was a serious opportunity to strike their adversary, and both Lee and Jackson jumped on it. Hooker’s army might be badly mauled if not cut off completely from the fords on the Rappahannock. About 10:00 p.m. their staff officer scouts returned, confirming the Union center too strong to assault. With that final piece of information, Lee made up his mind. “We must attack on the left [the Federal right] as soon as practicable,” he declared. Old Jack, “his face lighted up,” discerned Lee’s intent immediately, and after another meeting around 3:00 a.m. in which he boldly proposed to take his entire corps to deliver the blow (a proposal Lee accepted), hastened to prepare his divisions. Much depended on Hooker doing nothing while Stonewall marched, then making a timely and powerful assault, and Early holding back any attack from Sedgwick at Fredericksburg. Lee doubtless thought about all these factors but decided to take the risk, completely trusting his subordinate’s abilities.10 About 7:30 a.m. on May 2 the first Confederate infantry in Brig. Gen. Robert Rodes’s division of Jackson’s Corps marched past Lee’s headquarters, followed by Brig. Gen. Raleigh Colston’s and Maj. Gen. Ambrose Powell (A. P.) Hill’s divisions. Jackson had gotten a later start than he and Lee wished, but the soldiers sensed something great was afoot and moved quickly. All together they traversed over twelve miles through the thick wilderness over a rough-​cut logging road blazed by the owner of nearby Catharine Furnace, Charles Wellford. A brigade of Stuart’s cavalry led the way, themselves guided by Wellford’s son and another local man. The day grew sunny and warm, but thanks to the recent rains, no dust stirred to betray the movement to Union pickets posted southwest of Chancellorsville at a clearing in the forest named Hazel Grove. The only interruption in the otherwise quiet march was an attempt to interdict it by Union Third Corps commander Sickles, who could see what he perceived as “retreating” Rebel infantry through gaps in the trees between Hazel Grove and Catharine Furnace. Begging Hooker to be unleashed to attack, he finally received the go-​ahead too late in the afternoon to achieve more than the bagging of a regimental rearguard and the delay of Hill’s Division, which briefly stopped its progress to deal with Sickles’s noisy foray. Sickles’s movement south with two of his divisions did little to Jackson’s flank march but did bear ill for Union fortunes. Believing what he saw through his binoculars to be a true retrograde movement, Sickles’s constant reports to Hooker began to convince the commanding general that indeed the enemy might be falling back, to the point of persuading him to order Howard’s Eleventh Corps reserve, the brigade of Brig. Gen. William C. Barlow, to join Sickles. The departure of two-​thirds of Sickles’s corps and

384   Christian B. Keller Barlow left an almost mile-​wide gap in the Union line between Chancellorsville and the left division of the Eleventh Corps near the Wilderness Church. Not only was Howard’s corps hanging in the air on the right flank; it was now also badly disconnected from the rest of the Army of the Potomac. To his credit, Hooker hedged his bets somewhat by ordering Howard at 9:30 a.m. to prepare for an attack either from the south or the west. But Howard ignored the spirit of the order, realigning only half a battery and two regiments to face west. Nothing, he believed, except forest wildlife could possibly assail him from the west through the thick underbrush of the wilderness.11 About 5:30  p.m. rabbits, squirrels and other wildlife did, actually, plunge into Howard’s westernmost division, under the command of Brig. Gen. Charles Devens, driven forward into the Yankee camps by the tread of thousands of men in butternut and gray. It had taken nearly all day for Rodes and Colston to reach a suitable springboard site, about a mile west of Devens along the Orange Turnpike. Jackson was with them and, aware daylight was slipping away, ordered them forward. With a yell, the two large waves of Confederates crashed through the trees, startling Union pickets who had not detected their presence and driving them in panic back to their regiments. Howard’s brigades, save those of Maj. Gen. Carl Schurz’s division posted in clearings near Dowdall’s Tavern, hugged the small open spaces along the turnpike and were not prepared for the onslaught. Despite various warnings reported by scouts purposefully sent out by a suspicious Schurz, Howard refused subordinates’ pleas to realign their commands and face west in expectation of a possible flank attack. Now he and his men reaped the whirlwind, as first Devens, then Schurz, and finally Brig. Gen. Adolph von Steinwehr’s division were routed and forced to flee eastward to Chancellorsville. Despite being outnumbered over three to one, various components of the Eleventh Corps made gallant stands at various points along the way, conspicuously at the Wilderness Church and just to the east of Dowdall’s along what became known as the “Buschbeck Line,” suffering egregious casualties. These fateful stands, though failing to stop Jackson’s assault, did attrit its momentum, eat up valuable time as night began to fall, and allow Hooker to begin to react to the assault. The Union commander was shocked by the flank attack but not stunned. In the darkness he ordered Sickles’s two divisions back from Catharine Furnace and posted them on Hazel Grove and in the woods around it, supported to the south and east by Slocum’s Twelfth Corps, to the north by Reynolds’s newly arrived First Corps, and to the west by the Fifth and Second Corps. The men were told to fell trees and prepare for a continuance of the attack the next day. Jackson, for his part, wished more than anything to continue it that night, in hopes of reaching at least U.S. Ford on the Rappahannock and cutting off one of the Union escape routes. It was a vain hope, however, considering the heavily wooded terrain, lack of light, and nearby presence of numerically superior Federal corps. Moreover, Rodes’s and Colston’s divisions had all but shot their bolt defeating the Eleventh Corps and were now badly disorganized. Attempting to restore a semblance of order to the chaos by ascertaining just how close the Unionists were to his temporarily halted troops, Jackson and his staff rode forward in between the battle lines. He could hear the enemy chopping down trees close by and even discerned the officers

The Chancellorsville Campaign    385 giving orders. When Stonewall turned back, with only the bright moon to guide him on a lonely path paralleling the turnpike, a regiment of North Carolinians mistook him and his party for Yankee cavalry reportedly in the area and fired a heavy volley into them. Jackson was hit in his left arm, shattering the bone, and in his right hand. In excruciating pain, he was dropped twice from a litter on the way to the rear and an amputation; most historians agree that the accidental falls, which may have caused a rib to pierce his lung, and not the actual wounds, were the cause of the pneumonia that later took his life. Second-​in-​command A. P. Hill was also wounded, obliging staff officers (with Lee’s later concurrence) to seek out and offer command to Jeb Stuart, whose cavalry had successfully guarded the northern flank of his colleague’s assault.12 Overcome with grief at the news of Jackson’s wounds, Lee forcefully commanded Stuart to press the Unionists hard the next day to unite the two wings of his army. Stuart was happy to comply and set about preparing for a massive assault on May 3. Early the next morning, Hooker, fearful that Sickles would be enveloped on three sides at Hazel Grove, ordered him off the hill and smoothed out a salient in his defensive line. But by so doing he ceded the highest clear ground in the wilderness to the Rebels, who immediately swarmed the area with artillery and commenced bombarding the next closest clearing, Fairview, which controlled the approaches to Chancellorsville itself. “Never was there a more gratuitous gift of a battlefield,” one Southern artillerist noted, and by midmorning the Confederate long arm had tilted the fortunes of battle in favor of the South. A man fell every second in the woods around Fairview, the bullets and shells flying so thickly that they ignited the damp underbrush and set sections of the forest on fire. Some of the helpless wounded died horrible deaths in the flames, unable to crawl to safety. Absorbing heavy casualties as they attacked the Third and Twelfth Corps ensconced behind their makeshift log works, Stuart’s Rebel-​yell-​screaming infantry almost failed to dislodge their foes, but some Northern tactical mistakes combined with the powerful Southern artillery to force the abandonment first of Fairview and then of Chancellorsville. Exacerbating the Federal predicament was Hooker’s temporary incapacitation about 9:15 a.m. from an exploding Rebel shell that knocked him unconscious. Temporarily yielding but not formally relinquishing command to Couch, the Union commander ordered him to oversee a retreat to a defensive “apex line” anchored on the Rappahannock.13 Lee followed his triumphant, cheering soldiers into the Chancellorsville clearing, set against the backdrop of the burning mansion. His victory was the Chancellor family’s tragedy, however, as the flames drove them from shelter in the basement and into the horror of a raging battle. Young Sue Chancellor remembered the scene in vivid detail, capturing a child’s perspective of the destruction of war. Amazingly, she and her loved ones all escaped unscathed, but like other civilians in the area, the war left them with nothing but their lives. Within hours, their grand old home was reduced to smoking ruins. Charles Wellford’s iron furnace suffered the same fate a year later. From a military perspective Lee’s arrival at the site of the Chancellors’ desolation was a sublime moment, symbolizing the pinnacle of the Virginian’s military career and

386   Christian B. Keller the reuniting of his army against the odds. Yet all was not well. Shortly after realizing the tactical success in his front, Lee received word that Sedgwick had attacked Early at Fredericksburg and forced him back that morning. The timing of the reverse was bad for the Confederates, but could have been much worse; Hooker had ordered the assault to occur the day before, but due to another lapse in Federal communications Sedgwick failed to get the order until close to midnight on the second. Reacting quickly to the crisis, Lee split his army for the third time in the campaign, ordering first McLaws and then Anderson to reinforce Early, who had escaped with most of his division intact. On the late afternoon of May 3 McLaws, along with the itinerant brigade of Brig. Gen. Cadmus Wilcox, stopped the Unionists cold at Salem Church. The next day, due to failure of command and control among the divisional generals, a powerful combined assault on Sedgwick’s corps by Early, McLaws, and Anderson fizzled out, denying a frustrated Lee—​who publicly lost his temper—​an opportunity to deal a massive blow to the Army of the Potomac. Retreating in a heavy downpour across the river that night, Sedgwick’s withdrawal deflated a recovered Hooker’s hopes of salvaging his campaign. After oddly recusing himself from a council of war with his corps commanders, most of whom voted to stay and fight, the commanding general announced an army-​wide retreat, which was completed on the night of May 5–​6, and forestalled a planned Rebel assault against the apex line. The Chancellorsville campaign officially ended.

Political, Social, and Military Aftermath “My God, my God, what will the people say?” Abraham Lincoln asked after receiving word of the defeat. Earlier he had exhorted Hooker, “[P]‌ut in all your men,” but it soon became clear that his advice had gone astray. On May 3 the First and Fifth Corps were hardly used but positioned in such a way that they could have fallen on Stuart’s northern flank and probably crushed it. This might have been the war-​ending battle, and Lincoln knew it. He was distraught, and would have immediately dismissed Hooker, but realized that another shake-​up in the Union high command would harm morale in the ranks, which plummeted in the days following the campaign. Morale among Northern civilians also sank close to the levels experienced after the December Fredericksburg battle, providing fuel for Copperheads such as the editor of the Bergen, New Jersey, Democrat, who cried “to stop the dreadful carnage, and the inhuman, merciless butchery.” Lee, disappointed the Union Army had escaped a worse fate, nonetheless recognized that public faith in the Union cause was slipping, and wrote Confederate President Jefferson Davis that the time was ripe to drive northward again. Citing damaged civilian support for the Lincoln administration as one of several motivations, Lee began preparations for the offensive northward that he and Jackson had earlier contemplated. But Jackson, who had died on May 10, would not be at his side, a fact that tormented Lee

The Chancellorsville Campaign    387 both personally and professionally. “Who can fill his place I do not know,” he lamented to his brother on May 24; a week later he wept openly with William Nelson Pendleton in his tent. Lee’s grief was echoed all throughout the army and the Confederate nation alike, muting jubilation over the miraculous victory. “I shall not attempt to describe the unusual and deep mourning of the Army for his loss. The country will participate in it as fully as we,” one officer noted. President Davis termed his death “a great national calamity,” and newspaper editorials in every Southern state utilized similar verbiage for weeks: “irreparable,” “every household weeps,” “the catastrophe of the war.” Chancellorsville had been won at a very heavy price. Lee and his army were irrevocably affected.14 The same was only partially true across the Rappahannock. Many Federals blamed Hooker for the failure, but most also cast their glare at comrades in the Eleventh Corps. The hapless organization was more than half German American, making it an easy scapegoat in an era when nativism already fueled the fires of prejudice and resentment against the foreign-​born. During the first two years of the conflict, and especially at Antietam and Fredericksburg, the military prowess of the famous Irish Brigade had earned the grudging respect of nonethnics, both at home and in the military. This was not the case with the Germans, whose ethnic regiments were coalesced into an entire division in late 1861 and who had suffered under a series of mediocre leaders through 1862. They were blamed for plundering civilians (before such was legitimized by army policy) and fighting poorly, and now, at Chancellorsville, it was perceived they had underperformed again. A May 5, 1863, New York Times editorial echoed the resentment toward the Germans festering in the army. Its invective was then reprinted in English-​ language newspapers across the North, increasing Anglo-​American prejudice: “Threats, entreaties and orders of commanders were of no avail. Thousands of these cowards threw down their guns and soon streamed down the road toward headquarters. General Howard . . . could not stem the tide of the retreating and cowardly poltroons.”15 Both on the Northern home front and in the Army of the Potomac, loyal Unionists succored themselves by blaming the “damn Dutch” of the Eleventh Corps for the defeat. Hooker’s reputation, although damaged, quickly recovered, and Lincoln’s worst political nightmares were not realized. Such was not the case for the German Americans of the North, who internalized the vituperations emanating from all around the Union and began to unify against the resurgence of nativism. German-​language newspapers brimmed with indignance. The Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Freiheitsfreund, for instance, hissed that anti-​German leaders in the Lincoln administration had laid the groundwork for the disaster at Chancellorsville, which “the nativist perfidy of the correspondent of the New York Times” had brewed into an anti-​German mania repeated throughout the North. In June, mass German rallies were held in Washington, New York, Philadelphia, and various western cities to express condemnation of the nativistic backlash against the Eleventh Corps and begin the process of unifying against it. In October of that year delegates convened a German Organization in Cleveland comprising German leaders from around the North with the intention of creating a political platform. After those discussions in Cleveland radical Germans began preparations to challenge Lincoln’s

388   Christian B. Keller reelection in 1864, laying the groundwork for what became the Frémont movement. More significant, however, for the Union war effort, enlistment in the ethnically German regiments dried up, signifying waning German fervor for the war effort. One soldier, when asked by his brother if he would reenlist in 1864, answered, “I did not forget about what was done to us last spring after the battle of Chancellorsville and will not forget it in the future. I shant re-​enlist.”16 The Chancellorsville Campaign was a moment of great strategic contingency in the American Civil War. For a moment in time, the fate of the Confederacy trembled in the balance as Hooker weighed his options on the afternoon of May 1, Lee and Jackson responded, and Jackson fell wounded from his horse the next evening. Afterward, bereft of his chief lieutenant, Lee convinced the government in Richmond that now was the time to strike northward again, and commenced the fateful reorganization of his army that elevated two new corps commanders unused to the level of command—​and rapport with Lee—​Stonewall once enjoyed. Federal spirits, in and out of the army, received a mighty blow with the unexpected defeat, but rebounded at the expense of the Eleventh Corps and its German soldiery, creating a political and social ripple effect that lasted until the end of the war. Perhaps most important, the miraculous Rebel victory in the woods west of Fredericksburg steeled the resolve of soldiers in both armies, creating an expectation that the next great fight might end the conflict. Confederates believed victory all but assured, while Federals marched north, to Northern soil, determined to prevent that outcome.

Notes 1. Details of the Christmas feast held at Jackson’s headquarters and Lee’s assessments of the state of his army and the Confederacy are drawn from Christian B. Keller, The Great Partnership:  Robert E.  Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and the Fate of the Confederacy (New York: Pegasus Books, 2019), 90–​91, 95. 2. Keller, The Great Partnership, 96, 101, 105–​108. 3. Hooker quoted in Walter H. Hebert, Fighting Joe Hooker (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 178–​183. 4. Jackson quoted in Rev. B.  T. Lacy’s Narrative, 1863–​1864, 2, 6–​7, Dabney Collection, Southern Historical Society Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. 5. Hooker quoted in Stephen W. Sears, Chancellorsville (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1996), 120, 193–​194. 6. Details on Union corps movements and Hooker’s plans drawn from Sears, Chancellorsville, 119–​120, 181, 185–​189. 7. Details on the Lee-​Jackson deliberations and dispositions of opposing forces drawn from Keller, The Great Partnership, 132–​136. 8. Lacy Narrative, 9–​10; James I. Robertson Jr., Stonewall Jackson: The Man, the Soldier, the Legend (New York: Macmillan, 1997), 702–​704. 9. Hooker to Butterfield, May 1, 1863, 2:00 p.m., in U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion:  A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies,

The Chancellorsville Campaign    389 127 vols., index, and atlas (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1880–​1901), ser. 1, vol. 25, pt. 2: 326 (hereafter cited as OR); Hooker to Samuel P. Bates, April 2, 1877, quoted in Sears, Chancellorsville, 210, 212. Details on the May 1 fighting drawn from Keller, The Great Partnership, 139–​143. 10. Lee and Jackson quotes reprinted in T. M. R. Talcott to A. L. Long, July 19, 1886, Mss 1T1434, Virginia Historical Society, Richmond, and T. M. R. Talcott, “General Lee’s Strategy at the Battle of Chancellorsville,” Southern Historical Society Papers 34 (1906): 15–​18. 11. OR, ser. 1, vol. 25, pt. 1: 385–​386, 408, and pt. 2: 361; Christian B. Keller, Chancellorsville and the Germans: Nativism, Ethnicity, and Civil War Memory (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 53–​55. 12. Details on the May 2 fighting, times, and Union stands drawn from Keller, Chancellorsville and the Germans, 57–​58, and Carl Schurz, “Reminiscences of a Long Life: The Eleventh Corps at Chancellorsville,” McClure’s Magazine, June 1907, 175. Details on Jackson’s accidental wounding drawn from Robert K. Krick, The Smoothbore Volley That Doomed the Confederacy: The Death of Stonewall Jackson and Other Chapters on the Army of Northern Virginia (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002), 5–​11, 13–​22. 13. E.  P. Alexander quoted in E.  P. Alexander, Military Memoirs of a Confederate (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1907), 330, 345. 14. Lincoln and Bergen Democrat cited in Jennifer L. Weber, Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln’s Opponents in the North (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 100; Lee to Charles Carter Lee, May 24, 1863, transcription in Robert E. Lee Collection, Box 1, Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville; Benjamin Leigh to wife, May 12, 1863, transcribed by R. L. Dabney in Dabney Papers, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Davis cited in Varina Davis, Jefferson Davis, Ex-​President of the Confederate States of America: A Memoir (New York: Belford, 1890), 2:382–​383. 15. New York Times, May 5, 1863. 16. Freiheitsfreund und Courier (Pittsburgh, PA), May 30 1863; Martin Seel, 74th Pennsylvania Infantry, to brother, September 24, 1863, translation and transcription at Archives, Fredericksburg-​Spotsylvania National Military Park, Fredericksburg, VA.

Bibliography Bigelow, John. The Campaign of Chancellorsville:  A Strategic and Tactical Study. New  York: Konecky and Konecky, 1995. Dodge, Theodore A. The Campaign of Chancellorsville. 2nd edition. Boston:  Ticknor and Fields, 1881. Dowdey, Clifford, and Louis Manarin, eds. The Wartime Papers of Robert E. Lee. New York: Bramhall House, 1961. Furgurson, Ernest B. Chancellorsville: Souls of the Brave. New York: Knopf, 1992. Gallagher, Gary W., ed. Chancellorsville: The Battle and Its Aftermath. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Gallagher, Gary W., ed. Fighting for the Confederacy:  The Personal Recollections of General Edward Porter Alexander. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989. Hamlin, Augustus C. The Battle of Chancellorsville. Bangor, ME: privately published, 1896. Hebert, Walter H. Fighting Joe Hooker. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999.

390   Christian B. Keller Keller, Christian B. Chancellorsville and the Germans:  Nativism, Ethnicity, and Civil War Memory. New York: Fordham University Press, 2007. Keller, Christian B. The Great Partnership: Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and the Fate of the Confederacy. New York: Pegasus Books, 2019. Robertson, James I., Jr. Stonewall Jackson:  The Man, the Soldier, the Legend. New  York: Macmillan, 1997. Sears, Stephen W. Chancellorsville. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1996.

Chapter 24

The Get t ysburg C a mpa i g n War Comes to Free Soil Carol Reardon

The Gettysburg Campaign became the only major incursion of Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Confederate Army of Northern Virginia onto the free soil that thousands of Black and white Pennsylvanians called home. The three-​day clash at Gettysburg on July 1–​3, 1863, the bloodiest battle in North American history, resulted in the loss of more than fifty-​ one thousand dead, wounded, captured, and missing soldiers and left behind a shattered community. Gettysburg’s enduring place in national memory owes as much to the lasting scars left on south-​central Pennsylvanians’ exposure to war’s harsh realities as to continuing controversies about battle laurels and blame. In late spring of 1863, the Confederacy faced a deteriorating military situation. Growing Union pressure on the Mississippi River port of Vicksburg, as well as around Charleston and in resource-​rich central and eastern Tennessee, all concerned Confederate Pres. Jefferson Davis. In April, General Lee advised that an advance into Maryland and beyond would offer “the readiest method” both to relieve these threats and to offer Lee a way to “establish our supplies on a firm basis.”1 A push into Pennsylvania could eject Union troops from Virginia’s fertile Shenandoah Valley, force Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker’s Army of the Potomac to pursue Lee northward, and give Old Dominion farmers a chance to bring in a crop. Davis and his advisors considered a range of alternatives to relieve the threatened points, but, unfortunately, they left no minutes to explain or prioritize the factors that finally led to approval of Lee’s plan, and Lee himself never outlined his specific goals before his army marched into Pennsylvania. Thus, how he viewed his effort—​as a potentially war-​ending invasion or as a large-​scale raid to ease his logistical concerns—​remains uncertain and, for historians, a major point of contention. Nonetheless, Lee began his northward advance from Culpeper on June 3. On June 9, Hooker’s cavalry surprised Maj. Gen. James E. B. Stuart’s Confederate horsemen near Brandy Station, but the unexpected setback did not halt Lee’s northward progress. On June 11, the U.S. War Department assigned Maj. Gen. Darius Couch to Harrisburg to

392   Carol Reardon organize a defense of the Keystone State, and Pennsylvania governor Andrew Curtin called for volunteers for emergency militia regiments. Pennsylvania’s quick response was not unwarranted. By midafternoon on June 15, Brig. Gen. Albert G.  Jenkins’s Confederate cavalrymen entered the Keystone State’s fertile Cumberland Valley, where the Allegheny and Blue Ridge mountains created microclimates as far east as the Susquehanna River that favored fruit and grain crops. Their initial forays in Franklin County south of Chambersburg (population 5,255) caused “a thorough scouring” of farms, leaving many families utterly “bankrupted.”2 They then returned to Lee’s army, bringing not only foodstuffs and livestock but also, as a local newspaper reported at the time, “a large number of our colored population, old and young, male and female,” who “were free and had lived here all their lives.”3 Interestingly, despite plentiful contemporary press coverage, the fate of the Cumberland Valley’s Black population did not reenter the historical narrative until the 1990s. Jenkins’s actions predated Lee’s General Order 72, issued on June 22 as the infantry of Lt. Gen. Richard Ewell’s Second Corps entered Pennsylvania. Realizing that many of his soldiers desired retribution for the suffering of Virginia civilians, Lee made clear that “no private property shall be injured or destroyed by any person belonging to or connected with the army” and authorized specific procedures for obtaining necessary supplies. After Jenkins’s first raid, however, south-​central Pennsylvania bankers emptied vaults, storekeepers packed up inventories, farmers hid livestock, and African American residents throughout the region left for safer havens farther north. As a New York militiaman newly arrived in Harrisburg noted, “[T]‌he whole [Cumberland] valley was literally pouring itself out northward, and in great confusion.”4 More than a few gullible individuals, usually with Democratic leanings, purchased five-​dollar cards from traveling con men that promised safety for their property from Confederate raiders. General Ewell reached Chambersburg on June 24 and delivered a detailed requisition for supplies. When town fathers could not meet the demands, Chambersburg residents watched the Confederates freely help themselves to food, livestock, and much of no military value at all. Once again a Chambersburg preacher saw Ewell’s men begin “a regular slave-​hunt,” horrified to watch men “born and raised in this neighborhood” be taken.5 Most of the estimated thousand African American residents carried south during the Pennsylvania Campaign were sold into slavery in Virginia or put to work on military construction projects. For the next week, Ewell’s infantry fanned out from Chambersburg into four additional Pennsylvania counties. They met armed resistance on the road westward to McConnellsburg (population 556), the seat of Fulton County, where they gathered, among other items, fifty pounds of candy.6 On June 26, Ewell sent two divisions northeasterly into Cumberland County, brushing away New York militia sent to slow their progress but finding little to fill their supply requisitions at the county seat at Carlisle (population 5,664). That same day, Ewell sent another force southeasterly from Chambersburg toward Adams County. Despite General Order 72, they burned abolitionist congressman Thaddeus Stevens’s iron foundry on the road to the county seat at Gettysburg (population 2,390). Three miles west of Gettysburg, Ewell’s veterans easily

Map 24.1 Gettysburg

394   Carol Reardon scattered the newly mustered 26th Pennsylvania Emergency Regiment sent against them and entered the town later that afternoon. When Gettysburgians proved unable to fill requisitions from Ewell’s men, the Confederates moved eastward into York County. At the city of York (population 8,603), Maj. Gen. Jubal Early issued a demand for supplies and 100,000 dollars in cash, but, once again, the Confederate demands went unfilled. The troops quickly moved on to Wrightsville to take possession of a key bridge over the Susquehanna River, only to discover that Pennsylvania emergency regiments had set fire to it. If the towns in Cumberland, Adams, and York counties got off comparatively easy, a Gettysburg resident noted that Confederates continued to treat farmers “in the country” far “less gently,” claiming that they “there re-​enacted their old farce of professing to pay for what they took, by offering freely their worthless ‘Confederate’ scrip.”7 Ewell’s infantry and even Stuart’s cavalry, upon entering York County toward the end of their raid around the Union Army, stole “every farm animal that walked, and secured a great deal of corn, oats, hay, meat, etc. Their teams were going all the time, taking the stuff south into the Confederates lines.”8 Reports of his men’s actions caused Lee on June 27 to issue General Order 73 to chastise his men for unacceptable “instances of forgetfulness,” reminding them, “[W]‌e cannot take vengeance for the wrongs our people have suffered without lowering ourselves in the eyes of all whose abhorrence has been exited by the atrocities of our enemies.”9 Through it all, as Gettysburg’s Sarah Broadhead wrote in her diary, “Every one is asking. Where is our army, that they let the enemy scour the county and do as they please?”10 Hooker, in fact, still remained in Virginia, until Pres. Abraham Lincoln reminded him sternly, “Lee’s army and not Richmond, is your sure objective point.”11 Hooker finally entered Maryland on June 27, but when he demanded reinforcements and an expansion of his authority, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton relieved him of command. Early on June 28, Maj. Gen. George G. Meade took command of the Army of the Potomac and received a daunting two-​part mission; first, protect Washington and Baltimore, and, second, find and fight Lee. On June 29, when he learned Meade was on the move, Lee ordered his army to concentrate near Cashtown, eight miles northwest of Gettysburg. Ten roads converged in Gettysburg like the spokes of a wheel, and the town had developed a wide array of businesses and services to support the local agricultural economy. Its diverse population of German, Scotch-​Irish, English, and French residents worshiped at churches of many denominations, and educational opportunities abounded at the town’s Lutheran Seminary, Pennsylvania College, and academies for both boys and girls. When Brig. Gen. John Buford’s Union cavalry, the lead element of the Army of the Potomac, finally arrived on June 30, teenager Tillie Pierce recalled, her classmates started to sing patriotic songs and, nearby, Sallie Meyers watched soldiers eagerly grab the “sandwiches, pieces of pie, cold meat, bread, cakes, cups of coffee and bottles of water” offered to them.12 Buford deployed his troopers north, east, and west of town to find Lee. They detected enemy activity north of town and, more worrisome, detachments of Confederate infantry from Lt. Gen. A. P. Hill’s Third Corps on the

The Gettysburg Campaign    395 Chambersburg Road to the west. Buford correctly predicted that a battle would start there the next morning. About 7:00 a.m. on July 1, two divisions of Hill’s troops resumed their march southeast down the Chambersburg Road toward Gettysburg and first exchanged fire with Buford’s skirmishers three miles west of town. Although Lee had warned against bringing on a fight before his army had consolidated, Confederate infantry pushed Buford’s cavalry across Gettysburg’s rolling terrain for two miles to the ridge where former congressman Edward McPherson had built his farmstead. Buford knew his lightly armed troopers could not stand long on McPherson’s Ridge against Hill’s numbers and firepower, but shortly after 10:00 a.m., Maj. Gen. John F. Reynolds arrived with infantry from the Army of the Potomac. Reynolds formed a line of battle on McPherson’s Ridge astride the Chambersburg Road, but only twenty minutes into the fight he fell dead in John Herbst’s woodlot south of the McPherson farm. Command fell to Brig. Gen. Abner Doubleday, who watched his Midwestern Iron Brigade hold the Herbst woodlot, while regiments from New York and Wisconsin repulsed an attack against the right of his line in the bed of an unfinished railroad north of the road. Noon brought a brief and welcome respite. But, soon, fresh units from both armies renewed the fighting in the McPherson farm yard, the Herbst woodlot and his farm fields to the south, and in the railroad cut. To deny cover to Union sharpshooters, North Carolinians set fire to Herbst’s barn. On Emmanuel Harmon’s nearby property, his niece Amelia watched them use “a file of newspapers for kindling, piled on books, rags and furniture, applied matches to ignite the pile,” and burned down their house and barn too.13 General Ewell, returning from Carlisle with his Second Corps to rejoin Lee at Cashtown, heard the gunfire from the morning fighting and diverted southward, approaching Gettysburg from the north. His leading division emerged on Oak Hill, outflanking the right of the Union line on McPherson’s Ridge. Despite orders not to fight until the army had concentrated, Ewell sent forward three brigades to hit what he perceived to be the unprotected Union flank. Poor reconnaissance and coordination, irresponsible brigade-​level leadership, and stout Union resistance all contributed to a Confederate repulse on John Forney’s farm, providing one particularly grim sight: seventy-​nine North Carolinians fallen dead in a straight line, felled by a single volley. This temporary reverse did not eliminate the threat Ewell’s presence presented, however. Maj. Gen. Oliver O.  Howard, arriving about noon with the Union Army’s Eleventh Corps, first deployed one of his three divisions on Cemetery Hill, a prominent and treeless elevation on the southern edge of Gettysburg, as a potential rallying point, and then sent the rest of his command north of town against Ewell. The Eleventh Corps contained a significant number of Germans, and Northern newspapers had labeled them “Howard’s Cowards” and the “Flying Dutchmen” after they collapsed under Lt. Gen. Thomas J.  “Stonewall” Jackson’s flank attack at Chancellorsville in May. At about 2:00 p.m., General Lee ordered his entire force forward, before Howard’s right flank was prepared to receive the Confederate attack, and it quickly bent and then broke.

396   Carol Reardon His center and left stood fire well for a while, but, in the end, Howard’s men retreated hastily southward through the streets of Gettysburg to Cemetery Hill. Young Alburtus McCreary saw the retreating Union soldiers running toward them: “We did not notice how close the fighting was until, about half a block away, we saw hand to hand conflicts. It was a complete rout.”14 The Eleventh Corps withdrawal doomed Doubleday’s Union troops west of town. After nearly five hours of fighting, they abandoned McPherson’s Ridge and the Herbst farm for a final stand on the grounds of the town’s Lutheran Seminary. At about 3:45 p.m., Lee sent forward Hill’s last fresh division. The exhausted Union defenders held Seminary Ridge until South Carolinians finally broke through their line near the Old Dorm—​already an active hospital—​and forced them back to Cemetery Hill. Near the Evergreen Cemetery’s gatehouse atop the hill, as Doubleday and Howard argued over deployments, Maj. Gen. Winfield S. Hancock arrived with Meade’s written authorization to give orders in his name to bring order to the chaos. Observing the disorganization on the hill, about 5:00 p.m. Lee ordered Ewell to take that height “if practicable” without renewing a prolonged fight. Ewell decided against it, and most modern historians agree with his decision. The major fighting of July 1 had ended, and now Gettysburg-​area residents struggled to comprehend the day’s events. Like most residents, Sarah Broadhead had gone to her basement for safety; when she emerged, she watched Confederates loot a nearby deserted home. A North Carolina soldier admitted that his comrades took full advantage of the “wines and different kinds of liquor” that “were easily found that first night in Gettysburg.”15 Surgeons from both armies set up hospitals wherever they could; burials of dead soldiers around McPherson’s barn caused his tenant John Slentz to lament, “I wish I was back on your place and fixed as I was on the 29th of June.”16 Late on July 1, Lt. Gen. James Longstreet, Lee’s second-​in-​command, arrived at army headquarters on Seminary Ridge. Longstreet believed Lee planned an offensive campaign into Pennsylvania but preferred to fight only defensive battles on ground he chose. Now, to his dismay, he realized that Lee quite plainly intended to stay and take the fight to Meade at Gettysburg. Longstreet never forgot the night that Lee lost “his vaunted equipoise.”17 As Lee retired, General Meade reached Gettysburg about midnight. At first light on July 2, after a thorough reconnaissance, he laid out a fishhook-​shaped defensive line south of town for his ninety-​four-​thousand-​man army. The pointed barb of the hook—​ his right flank—​rested near Henry Culp’s Hill; the bend in the hook rested on the key terrain of Cemetery Hill; and the long shank extended south from Cemetery Hill along farmers’ fields on Cemetery Ridge. He planned to anchor the left flank of his four-​mile-​ long line on Little Round Top and Big Round Top at the southern end of Cemetery Ridge. Lee’s smaller army of seventy-​five thousand men ultimately filled a longer seven-​ mile line roughly paralleling Meade’s line, its left resting east of Culp’s Hill, curling westward through Gettysburg, and extending southward along Seminary Ridge. Early on July 2, Lee sent out a staff engineer to reconnoiter Meade’s position. The young officer reported the Union Army strongly posted on Cemetery Hill and Culp’s

The Gettysburg Campaign    397 Hill and its left flank extending south down the Emmitsburg Road in front of Cemetery Ridge to a position just south of Nicholas Codori’s farm about one mile south of Gettysburg. He reported no Union troops on the Round Tops. The information given Lee was neither complete nor accurate—​historians remain puzzled by the staff officer’s route that morning—​but the Confederate chieftain nonetheless based his battle plan for July 2 on it. He ordered Longstreet to maneuver south of Gettysburg and attack northward astride the Emmitsburg Road to roll up the Union left flank. Ewell was to launch a diversion against the Union right when Longstreet began the main effort. A. P. Hill, holding Lee’s center, prepared simply to support Longstreet and Ewell.18 Longstreet still opposed Lee’s desire to attack, and the reasons for his perceived slowness in moving into position still generate considerable scholarly discussion. Finally, about 3:30, as his column approached the crest of Seminary Ridge near Joseph Sherfy’s farm and large peach orchard astride the Emmitsburg Road, Longstreet immediately realized that the Union dispositions had changed dramatically since the early morning hours. Sherfy’s farm, then reported as unoccupied, now teemed with Union troops belonging to Maj. Gen. Daniel E. Sickles’s Third Corps. Meade initially had placed Sickles on the left end of his fishhook line to cover southern Cemetery Ridge and Little Round Top, but Sickles preferred the higher ground near the Sherfy farm, one-​half mile forward of his assigned position. Though Meade twice denied him permission, Sickles advanced anyway, establishing a new line along the Emmitsburg Road that bent southeasterly at Sherfy’s peach orchard toward—​but not reaching—​Little Round Top. Sickles’s action isolated his men from ready support, created an indefensible salient, and stretched his line too thin to stand a determined attack. Meade angrily ordered Sickles to return to Cemetery Ridge, but at about 4:00 p.m., Longstreet’s artillery opened. Fearing a collapse of his entire line if Longstreet attacked while the Third Corps pulled back, Meade reversed himself, telling Sickles to remain in position while he sent forward reinforcements. Partisan interpretations of Sickles’s and Meade’s actions began in 1863 and still continue to fuel one of Gettysburg’s most enduring controversies. Sickles’s actions, of course, forced Longstreet to revisit his own plans. Unable to convince Lee to alter his decision to conform to the changed conditions, Longstreet effectively abandoned the attack up the Emmitsburg Road for an unwelcome series of frontal assaults, proceeding from right to left against the new Third Corps line. Despite his genuine misgivings, Longstreet later described his men’s subsequent efforts as the three best hours of fighting he witnessed during the entire war. Longstreet’s main effort against the Army of the Potomac on July 2 made famous some of the most iconic battlefield terrain in American history. The fighting began first with an assault through the Michael Bushman and John Slyder farms against the massive boulder formation called Devil’s Den, and, in about forty-​five minutes, the Confederates broke Sickles’s left flank at a cost to both armies of approximately 1,800 casualties. The fighting then shifted eastward toward Little Round Top, the still-​ unoccupied anchor of Meade’s fishhook, its left face recently deforested by stonemason Ephraim Hanaway, who valued its rocks. Even before Longstreet launched his attack,

398   Carol Reardon Brig. Gen. Gouverneur K. Warren, Meade’s chief engineer, recognized the hill’s vulnerability but lacked authority to order troops to defend it. Col. Strong Vincent, leading a brigade of Fifth Corps reinforcements to Sickles’s support, diverted to Little Round Top. The stand of Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and the 386 men of the 20th Maine on Vincent’s left flank, holding strong against determined Confederate attacks, has become one of the most heralded episodes in American military history, literature, and even cinema. Little Round Top remained in Union hands at a cost to both armies of approximately 1,200 casualties. By 5:00 p.m., the fighting spread to George Rose’s wheatfield between Devil’s Den and Sherfy’s peach orchard. Meade supported Sickles very well, the corps badges on monuments commemorating regiments from the Second and Fifth Corps as well as those of the original Third Corps defenders. After about ninety minutes of intense fighting, Confederates held the western edge of the field while Union soldiers held the eastern border, and over six thousand men fell. By 5:30, Longstreet’s men had crushed Sickles’s salient at Sherfy’s peach orchard, and troops assigned to Longstreet from A. P. Hill’s Third Corps assaulted the Emmitsburg Road line itself. As he stood by Abraham Trostle’s barn, Sickles watched his men break under Confederate pressure until a cannonball shattered his right leg. Meade now faced a grave crisis. Sickles’s advance and the redeployment of troops to reinforce him had opened a gap in the fishhook. The Taneytown Road, one of Meade’s two major lines of supply and communication, now lay unprotected. A hastily organized line of Union batteries bought time for General Hancock of the Second Corps to organize a defense. The 82 percent loss suffered by his 1st Minnesota too often obscures the sacrifice of regiments from at least three other corps that Meade sent forward to stabilize the Union center. Sunset shortly after 7:00 p.m. finally brought relief from Longstreet’s main effort. But quiet did not fall over the entire battlefield. At 4:00 p.m., when Longstreet’s attack began, in obedience to Lee’s orders, Ewell’s batteries opened on Cemetery Hill and Culp’s Hill on the right of Meade’s fishhook. After his outmatched guns fell silent, Ewell ordered forward two twilight infantry assaults. The first targeted Henry Culp’s Hill. Now stripped of most of its defenders—​they left to help Sickles—​only Brig. Gen. George S. Greene’s 1,400 New Yorkers, posted behind breastworks, held the hill against at least 5,000 Confederates. As darkness fell, Ewell’s men captured lower Culp’s Hill, but the upper slopes remained securely in Union hands. Ewell’s second assault targeted Cemetery Hill’s northern and eastern slopes. His troops initially broke the Union defenses and even captured cannon on the crest of the hill, but darkness and the timely arrival of reinforcements charging over the graves in Evergreen Cemetery finally repulsed the Louisianans and North Carolinians. Thus ended the fighting on Gettysburg’s bloodiest day. The rival commanders followed far different courses to prepare for July 3. General Meade called his senior commanders to a midnight gathering at Lydia Leister’s small wooden cabin, the widow and her daughters unceremoniously ousted when the house was selected for army headquarters on July 1. Meade’s chief of staff posed three questions: Should the army stand or withdraw? If they stayed, should they attack or

The Gettysburg Campaign    399 remain on the defensive? If the latter, how long should they await Lee’s next move? The consensus—​stay, remain on the defensive, and reconsider options in twenty-​four hours—​fully suited Meade’s own preferences. By contrast, Lee held no such meeting. Believing that July 2 had given him partial victories on both flanks, he decided to renew attacks against those weakened points early on July 3. As he wrote in his report, “[T]‌he general plan was unchanged.”19 Union artillery opened on the Confederates occupying lower Culp’s Hill about 4:30 a.m., the fifteen-​minute bombardment prompting Ewell to launch his attack. Near Spangler’s spring at the base of Culp’s Hill, soldiers from Massachusetts and Indiana fell needlessly—​the victims of misunderstood orders—​but Union fortunes fared far better higher on the slopes, where the reinforced defenders posted behind breastworks threw back Ewell’s repeated attacks with heavy loss. About 9:00 a.m., the duration and intensity of the Culp’s Hill fighting caused Lee to reevaluate his options. When Lee suggested an attack on the Union center, Longstreet asserted that no fifteen thousand men ever arrayed for battle could breach Cemetery Ridge. Ultimately, however, Lee decided to make the frontal attack now best known as “Pickett’s Charge.” Maj. Gen. George E. Pickett’s 5,500-​man Virginia division from Longstreet’s First Corps and additional men from Hill’s Third Corps made up the approximately thirteen thousand troops assigned to the attack. Lee assigned command to Longstreet, who, after initially resisting the order, finally recognized his professional obligation to “adopt [Lee’s] views and execute his orders as faithfully as if they were my own.”20 At approximately 1:00 p.m., about 150 Confederate cannon opened fire on Cemetery Ridge. When damaged Union guns were seen leaving the area near a clump of trees on Peter Frey’s farm—​Lee had designated the copse as the infantry’s target—​Longstreet reluctantly, and with only a nod, ordered the attack. Pickett’s Virginians advanced from a deep swale around the evacuated Henry Spangler farm between Seminary Ridge and the Emmitsburg Road. Nearly one-​quarter mile farther north, the Third Corps troops under Brig. Gen. J. Johnston Pettigrew and Maj. Gen. Isaac R. Trimble left the woods on Seminary Ridge and pushed through the smoke of William Bliss’s burning farm buildings, fired by Union troops that morning to deny cover to Confederate sharpshooters. The Bliss, Spangler, and Codori farm fields between Seminary and Cemetery ridges gently rolled, providing the attackers with far more concealment during their advance than most observers appreciate. About six thousand infantry from Hancock’s Second Corps—​well supported with fresh artillery and posted behind David Ziegler’s and Peter Frey’s stout stone walls on Cemetery Ridge—​prepared to receive the attack. They held their fire until the Confederates crossed the Emmitsburg Road. Although their ranks thinned at every step, Pickett’s Virginians reached the Union line near Frey’s clump of trees and even broke it in two places. Union resistance stiffened, however, and after perhaps twenty minutes of bloody combat, with no reinforcements in sight and his right flank threatened, Pickett pulled back with a loss of 60 percent of his strength. Pettigrew’s and Trimble’s commands failed to penetrate the Union line on their front, but the conformation of the line allowed them to advance closer to the crest of Cemetery Ridge, until they gave

400   Carol Reardon way when Union troops enveloped their left flank. For generations, partisans of Pickett’s men and of Pettigrew’s and Trimble’s commands sparred over who deserved the greater battle laurels. The repulse of Pickett’s Charge on July 3 ended the battle’s major fighting. Two cavalry clashes that afternoon—​one four miles east of Gettysburg for control of a key crossroads and the other south of town that threatened Lee’s left flank—​contributed little to the outcome of the battle. On July 4, amid sporadic skirmish fire, General Meade canceled the traditional Independence Day cannon salute to the nation, lest Lee think he intended to reopen the battle. Lee, however, decided to break off the fight, and store clerk Daniel Skelly soon saw “boys in blue, marching down the street . . . the glorious Stars and Stripes fluttering at the head of the line.”21 In heavy thunderstorms, Lee started his infantry, artillery, and four thousand Union prisoners marching directly to Hagerstown and then to the Potomac River crossings at Williamsport, Maryland. He then sent his seventeen-​mile-​ long wagon train of sick and wounded by a longer route toward Chambersburg before it too turned south to Williamsport. Even during the retreat, Confederate troops continued to harvest the remaining bounty of south-​central Pennsylvania farms. Meade’s cavalry immediately and constantly harassed Lee’s retreating columns. His infantry, however, did not leave Gettysburg until July 5. Meade headed south into Maryland, hoping for a westward thrust across South Mountain to intercept Lee before he reached his pontoons at Williamsport. Heavy rain destroyed Lee’s bridges, and Meade prepared to attack on July 13 before the Confederates could escape. More bad weather intervened, however, and by the time skies cleared on July 14, Lee’s army had crossed safely into Virginia. A frustrated Abraham Lincoln complained in a letter to Meade, “[Lee] was in your easy grasp, and to have closed upon him would, in connection with our other late successes [i.e., Vicksburg’s surrender on July 4], have ended the war.”22 Interestingly, both Lee and Meade quickly claimed positive results from their efforts in south-​central Pennsylvania. Meade cited as his army’s prime achievements his battlefield victory at Gettysburg, Lee’s ejection from Union soil, and the capture of forty-​one colors, over thirteen thousand prisoners, and nearly twenty-​five thousand small arms.23 In his preliminary report in late July, Lee claimed modest success for his relief of the Shenandoah Valley, taking the war out of Virginia, and amassing enough food, forage, and supplies, in a modern historian’s assessment, “to extend the life of the Army of Northern Virginia until the harvests in the Southern seaboard states could be used.”24 But disillusionment soon set in as the victories of early July 1863 showed little likelihood of changing the long-​ term military situation. News of draft riots in New York City—​and the diversion of several regiments from the Army of the Potomac to quell them—​and the repulse at Fort Wagner midmonth quickly tempered Northern optimism. Southerners filled the public press with accusations apportioning blame for defeats at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, but a Confederate victory at Chickamauga in September gave Southerners renewed reason for hope, until Grant’s victory at Chattanooga in November once more gave them pause. Thus, Gettysburg’s military impact must be measured in other ways. The Official Records report that the Army of the Potomac lost 3,155 killed, 14,529 wounded, and 5,365 captured and missing. The losses triggered a nine-​month transformation of the Army

The Gettysburg Campaign    401 of the Potomac that began with the arrival of the first significant infusions of draftees in August and September, followed by the departure of the Eleventh and Twelfth Corps to the western theater, the disbanding of the badly damaged First and Third Corps, and the addition to its ranks of U.S. Colored Troops and heavy artillery regiments during the 1864 Overland Campaign. Lee lost 2,592 killed, 12,709 wounded, and 5,150 captured and missing. Since the ranks of the Army of Northern Virginia had included conscripts since the summer of 1862, Lee filled his gaps as best he could from his hospitals and by the transfer of fresh brigades from quieter fronts. Military manpower costs alone, however, hide the horrific losses that the Pennsylvania Campaign exacted from the civilians whose paths the armies crossed. Soldiers tried to bury fallen comrades, but when the armies left, local civilians—​men and women alike—​ covered over the remains on the farm fields and woodlots where they found them. Long rows of trench graves zigzagged over ground where the heaviest losses occurred, covering the base of Henry Culp’s Hill, filling George Rose’s yard near his wheatfield, and lining Nicholas Codori’s fields where Pickett’s Virginians charged. To cut the stench of decomposition—​human and equine—​residents dabbed camphor or peppermint oil under their noses. Governor Curtin authorized Gettysburg attorney David Wills to purchase land for a permanent burial ground for the Union dead. On seventeen acres bought from five townspeople, the Union dead were gathered up from their battlefield graves, many by teams of local African American residents, for reinterment in the new cemetery. On November 19, 1863, to an audience of perhaps fifteen thousand, Lincoln delivered his eloquent Gettysburg Address. The Confederate dead remained in graves scattered all around Adams County until Southern women’s groups paid for their disinterment and removal in the early 1870s. Gettysburg’s death roster generally does not include twenty-​ year-​ old Jennie Wade, killed by a stray bullet while baking bread on July 3. Or three-​year-​old Edward McPherson Woods, killed on July 5 by a shot from a discarded pistol in the hands of his five-​year-​old brother. Or nearly a dozen other children—​white and Black, male and female—​who died in the following months when the artillery rounds they gathered to sell for souvenirs exploded in their hands. As arrangements were made for the dead, residents of Adams County bore the burden of caring for thousands of wounded soldiers left behind by both armies. Sarah Broadhead, who visited the Seminary hospital, discovered that “no food had been served for several days,” and “the little we have will not go far with so many.” She found it “heart-​sickening” to want to help but to find the town so gutted of food and useful supplies by the Confederates that it was “out of our power to render any assistance of consequence.”25 The U.S. Sanitary Commission finally established its headquarters in town at the Fahnstock Brothers General Merchandise Store to serve as a clearinghouse for food and supplies, providing for hospitals and local residents alike. As soon as rail service could be restored, surgeon Jonathan Letterman lifted some of Gettysburg’s burdens by evacuating the movable wounded and concentrating the remaining injured at a few tent hospitals, the last of which remained active until November 1863.

402   Carol Reardon Indeed, the passage of the warring armies had exacted a high price from south-​ central Pennsylvania. The armies that fought over at least thirty-​eight farms destroyed fences and crops, killed livestock, and stripped farmhouses bare of material goods. John Forney lamented that “everything about the place was completely destroyed” and his house and barn on Oak Hill “were riddled by shot and shell.” Rev. Samuel Schmucker counted thirteen artillery shells lodged in his home on Seminary Ridge. Several times, the Pennsylvania legislature passed bills to allow residents of the five affected counties to file damage claims, but appropriation never followed. Despite a detailed claim for $2,689.36, John Herbst received nothing for the burning of his barn and its contents. George Rose unsuccessfully attempted to sell his damaged farmhouse and wheatfield soon after the battle, and African American blacksmith James Warfield completely lost his livelihood after the Confederates destroyed his forge on south Seminary Ridge. William Bliss’s family never rebuilt their burned farm and left Gettysburg for good.26 In the face of pervasive personal and property losses, not all Gettysburgians showed compassion for wounded soldiers or grieving families seeking their loved one’s remains. Visitors complained of rampant price gouging, stealing, hoarding, and worse, and veterans returning years later often remarked on some residents’ continuing lack of civility toward them. In many ways, despite their best efforts, Gettysburg and south-​central Pennsylvania never entirely returned to the rhythms of antebellum agricultural life and started, albeit uncomfortably, becoming a tourist mecca. Before 1863 ended, the new Gettysburg Battlefield Memorial Association purchased key battleground on Culp’s Hill, Cemetery Hill, and Little Round Top. Veterans’ reunions spurred on the association’s preservation efforts, and in the 1880s landowners denied compensation for damage claims—​ including Lydia Leister and Abraham Trostle—​sold their properties to expand the battlefield. The association’s John B.  Bachelder, Gettysburg’s first “official” historian, oversaw the placing of most regimental monuments still standing there today. The clash between past and future seldom has gone smoothly for those who call south-​central Pennsylvania home; over the years, electric railroads, battlefield hotels, amusement parks, observation towers, hot-​air balloons, casinos, and ghost tours have generated both local support for a stronger tax base and resistance for their perceived inappropriateness. Through the successive administration of the Gettysburg Battlefield Memorial Association, the War Department, and the National Park Service, south-​ central Pennsylvanians continue to tread a fine line between respect for the past and promotion of the entrepreneurial spirit of the present.

Notes 1. Clifford Dowdey and Louis Manarin, eds., The Wartime Papers of Robert E.  Lee (New York: Bramall House, 1961), 430, 438. 2. J. Hoke, Reminiscences of the War; or Incidents which Transpired in and about Chambersburg (Chambersburg, PA: M. A. Foltz, 1884), 39.

The Gettysburg Campaign    403 3. Valley Spirit, July 8, 1863, quoted in Robert L. Wynstra, At the Forefront of Lee’s Invasion (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2018), 81. 4. Our Campaign around Gettysburg: Being a Memorial of What Was Endured, Suffered and Accomplished by the Twenty-​Third Regiment (NYSNG) (Brooklyn, NY: A. H. Rome and Brothers, 1864), 44. 5. Quoted in James M. Paradis, African Americans and the Gettysburg Campaign (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2013), 31–​32. 6. Wynstra, At the Forefront of Lee’s Invasion, 119. 7. Michael Jacobs, Notes on the Rebel Invasion of Maryland and Pennsylvania, and the Battle of Gettysburg (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1864), 18. 8. Quoted in Jim Slade and John Alexander, Firestorm at Gettysburg: Civilian Voices (Atglen, PA: Schiffer Military/​Aviation History, 1998), 30. 9. For Special Orders 72 and 73, see U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion:  A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, 128 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1880–​1901), ser. 1, vol. 27, pt. 3: 912–​913 and 942–​943 (hereafter cited as OR). 10. Sarah Broadhead, The Diary of a Lady of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania (privately published: Gary T. Hawbaker, 2002), 8. 11. OR, ser. 1, vol. 27, pt. 1: 35. 12. Quoted in Slade and Alexander, Firestorm at Gettysburg, 40. 13. Slade and Alexander, Firestorm at Gettysburg, 61. 14. Slade and Alexander, Firestorm at Gettysburg, 63. 15. Quoted in Philip Hatfield, The Rowan Rifle Guards: A History of Company K, 4th Regiment, North Carolina State Troops, 1857–​ 1865 (Lexington:  University Press of Kentucky, 2011), 208. 16. Edward McPherson files, Adams County Historical Society, Gettysburg, PA. 17. James Longstreet, “Lee in Pennsylvania,” in The Annals of the War (Philadelphia, PA: Philadelphia Weekly, 1879), 434. 18. OR, ser. 1, vol. 27, pt. 2: 318. 19. OR, ser. 1, vol. 27, pt. 2: 320. 20. James Longstreet to A.  B. Longstreet, July 24, 1863, quoted in Longstreet, “Lee in Pennsylvania,” 414. 21. Slade and Alexander, Firestorm at Gettysburg, 132–​133. 22. Lincoln to Meade, July 14, 1863, Abraham Lincoln Papers. Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 23. OR, ser. 1, vol. 27, pt. 1: 118. 24. Kent Masterson Brown, Retreat from Gettysburg:  Lee, Logistics and the Pennsylvania Campaign (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 389. 25. Broadhead, The Diary of a Lady of Gettysburg,  16–​17. 26. Figures drawn from Carol Reardon and Tom Vossler, A Field Guide to Gettysburg, 2nd edition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 53, 65, 160, 192, 316.

Bibliography Brown, Kent Masterson. Retreat from Gettysburg:  Lee, Logistics, and the Pennsylvania Campaign. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005.

404   Carol Reardon Coddington, Edwin B. The Gettysburg Campaign: A Study in Command. New York: Scribner’s, 1968. Haskell, Frank Aretas. The Battle of Gettysburg. Madison:  Wisconsin History Commission, 1908. Hess, Earl J. Pickett’s Charge: The Last Attack at Gettysburg. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Paradis, James M. African Americans and the Gettysburg Campaign. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2013. Pfanz, Harry W. Gettysburg—​Culp’s Hill and Cemetery Hill. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993. Pfanz, Harry W. Gettysburg: The First Day. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Pfanz, Harry W. Gettysburg: The Second Day. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987. Reardon, Carol. Pickett’s Charge in History and Memory. Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Sears, Stephen W. Gettysburg. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003. Slade, Jim, and John Alexander. Firestorm at Gettysburg: Civilian Voices. Atglen, PA: Schiffer Military/​Aviation History, 1998. Wynstra, Robert L. At the Forefront of Lee’s Invasion: Retribution, Plunder and Clashing Cultures on Richard S. Ewell’s Road to Gettysburg. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2018.

Chapter 25

The Bat tle of H e l e na , t h e Lit tle Ro ck C a mpa i g n, an d the Cap ture of Fort Smith,   1863 Carl H. Moneyhon

From the beginning of the Civil War, Confederate and Union authorities considered control of Arkansas and the Arkansas River Valley strategically important. After abortive efforts by the Union Army to wrest control of Arkansas from the Confederacy in 1862 and the beginning of 1863, the July 4 Confederate attack on Helena, the subsequent Federal capture of Fort Smith on September 1, and the Federal campaign against Little Rock that ended with the city’s fall on September 10, determined the fate of the state and its river highway. The latter operations gave the Union control of the Arkansas River Valley and much of the state to the north of that river for the rest of the war. By 1863, the Union Army had experience addressing the problems of emancipation. In Arkansas, it permanently occupied the areas seized, and the overall commander of Federal forces in Little Rock, Maj. Gen. Frederick Steele, pursued a conciliatory as opposed to a punitive policy with local residents. The three campaigns in 1863 had major social, economic, and political consequences for the people of Arkansas. Confederate loyalists faced increasing privations, forced to rely totally on themselves and in many cases driven to move from their homes into southwestern Arkansas and eastern Texas. In Union-​occupied territory the presence of Union soldiers produced an immediate end to slavery, a movement of slaves throughout the state into Union lines, and the steady recruitment of freedmen into the Union Army. The Union Army also encouraged pro-​Union Arkansans, many of whom joined the Union Army, and produced a Unionist government. Arkansans in the areas actually occupied by the Union Army, especially Little Rock, also experienced an economic boom with the arrival of Federal greenbacks, merchants, and an army willing to buy local produce and labor.

406   Carl H. Moneyhon Arkansas’s strategic importance to the Confederacy stemmed in part from the rich agricultural lands along the Arkansas River, where grain and animals provided adequate food to sustain both a military force and the civilian population. In addition, the state provided a base of operations for future campaigns into Missouri. The Arkansas River also was important since it served as an avenue for the movement of men and supplies necessary to protect Confederate operations in Indian Territory. Politics demanded the continued control of the state. After disastrous battles at Pea Ridge on March 7–​8, 1862, and Prairie Grove on December 7, 1862, and the movement of thousands of Confederate troops from Arkansas to Mississippi that same year, Confederate Pres. Jefferson Davis assured the state’s governor that the “honor and welfare of the Confederacy” required protecting Arkansas and that the government would defend every portion of its territory.1 Union interest in Arkansas derived in large part from a desire to remove the state as a base of military operations against Union forces in Indian Territory, Missouri, and along the Mississippi River. In addition, control of the Arkansas River would allow Federals to better supply their own forces in Indian Territory. Finally, the old Military Road that ran through Little Rock from the northeastern corner of the state to Texas was a major avenue for settlers moving into that state. Control of Little Rock and the state offered Federals a potential route into Texas and the Southwest in the future. Interest in Arkansas led Union troops into the northern part of the state early in the war and resulted in several Confederate efforts to remove that threat. In the Battle of Pea Ridge, Confederates failed to defeat the Union’s Army of the Southwest in northwestern Arkansas. Subsequently Brig. Gen. Samuel Curtis, commander of that army, attempted to take Little Rock, only to be thwarted by his inability to resupply the column he pushed into the state and resulting in the column’s diversion to Helena along the Mississippi River. Another failed effort by Confederates to bring an end to Federal operations in northern Arkansas ended in the Battle of Prairie Grove. Union Maj. Gen. John A. McClernand considered a movement on Little Rock following his victory in the Battle of Arkansas Post, January 9–​11, 1863, but abandoned it after finding the Arkansas River unnavigable and the overland routes flooded. Arkansas had attracted considerable interest but still remained unconquered as a Confederate state in the spring of 1863. Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s campaign against Vicksburg diverted Federal attention from further consideration of Arkansas, but on May 23, 1863, Confederate Secretary of War James A. Seddon proposed to move Confederate troops from the Trans-​Mississippi to the Mississippi River in order to divert Federal troops from the campaign against Vicksburg. Lt. Gen. Theophilus H. Holmes, commander of the Confederate District of Arkansas, telegrammed to obtain permission for his planned attack on the Union garrison at Helena. He ordered the concentration of about half of the Confederate soldiers ready for duty in Arkansas at a point thirty miles west of Helena. The force brought together by Holmes consisted of about 7,500 men, including three brigades of infantry, two divisions of cavalry, and numerous batteries of artillery. Some moved by rail and steamboat from Little Rock, while others marched from Jacksonport, the two columns reaching the point of concentration on July 1. The battle readiness of

HELENA, LITTLE ROCK, AND FORT SMITH    407

Map 25.1  Helena and Little Rock

some men was questionable, as they had been forced to move across numerous creeks, sloughs, bayous, and the Cache River, all swollen by rain, and a landscape covered in mud. It took them eight days to cover sixty-​five miles. Holmes did not question whether or not the men could fight, however, and he moved them forward to the point of attack on July 3.2 On the night before the attack scouts reported to Holmes that they found the Union position much stronger than anticipated. Union Maj. Gen. Benjamin M. Prentiss, commander of the post at Helena and its four thousand men, had expected some sort of demonstration against his force for some time and had readied his position. In addition to Fort Curtis, located just to the west of the town, he had sited four fortified artillery positions along a ridge further to the west. To the north and northwest he located

408   Carl H. Moneyhon Batteries A and B on a rise known as Rightor Hill. Battery C lay to the south of Battery B and due west of the town, located on Graveyard Hill. Battery D anchored the south end of the Federals’ main defensive line on Hindman Hill. An additional battery along the levee to the south of Helena, supported by the 2nd Arkansas Infantry of African Descent, defended the Union position from any advance from that direction. Rifle pits and breastworks along the western slope of the ridge protected the main batteries. In addition, Prentiss’s men had felled trees to form an abatis all along his line and to close the roads into the town. The gunboat Tyler lay off shore with her six eight-​inch smooth-​bore cannons, a 30-​pounder Parrott rifle, and smaller guns. Holmes had not demonstrated much of a command capacity in his previous service and failed to do so once again. Although aware by this time of the strength of the Union position, he decided to attack anyway. His plan involved simultaneous assaults on the Federal line, even though his scouts had made him aware of the difficulty the abatis in the front of Union lines presented to such an attack. Nonetheless, he ordered Brig. Gen. John Marmaduke’s cavalry dismounted to move against Rightor Hill and Batteries A and B, Maj. Gen. Sterling Price’s two brigades to strike at Battery C on Graveyard Hill, and Brig. Gen. James F. Fagan’s brigade to take Battery D on Hindman Hill. Holmes assigned Brig. Gen. Lucius Marsh Walker’s cavalry brigade the job of protecting Marmaduke’s flank as that column advanced. Compounding the possibility that these three major assault columns would not hit the Union line at the same time because of the abatis, he issued a vague instruction to his commanders to attack at daylight. Fagan and Price were not certain what Holmes meant by daylight, and they consequently began their July 4 attacks at different times. The misunderstanding of Holmes’s orders meant that the Confederate attack went wrong from the beginning. Fagan believed that Holmes meant to attack at first light and ordered his men forward to be ready at that time. The obstructions in his way immediately delayed his advance and also interfered with his ability to resupply his troops once they were engaged. His men had not been equipped with axes, and consequently they had to climb through the abatis to get at the enemy, leaving behind their artillery and ammunition train. They hit the Union line at about 4:00 a.m., a little before first light. They quickly found the fortifications fully manned, and Fagan discovered that Price, who had concluded he should attack at sunup, had not begun his attack. As a result, his men faced enfilading artillery fire from Battery C and the artillery posted along the levee to the south. Fagan’s men drove the Federals from their first line of defense, but they continued to fall back into new lines. All the while Fagan’s column faced withering rifle and artillery fire, including heavy shells thrown at it by the Tyler. Still, after three hours of fighting they reached Battery D at about 7:00 a.m. They were, however, low on ammunition and too exhausted to move forward. Unsupported, Fagan’s attack stalled. Price delayed his attack until more than an hour after the fight on his right began, an unexplainable failure to act. Inadequate reconnoitering of the ground in front of the Federals’ Battery C delayed Price’s brigades further when an impassable gulch separated them and forced them to adjust their alignment. As in Fagan’s attack on Battery D, the obstructions they faced forced Price’s men to leave behind their artillery, although they

HELENA, LITTLE ROCK, AND FORT SMITH    409 believed they could use the Federal artillery when they captured the battery. The men going against Battery C faced heavy artillery and rifle fire from the positions immediately in front of them, and also encountered flanking fire from Battery B to their left and ultimately also from Battery D, where Fagan’s attack had stalled. Price’s men did get into the fortifications around Battery C but found that the Federals had spiked the guns in the battery, leaving the Confederates with no artillery to use and confronting a massive barrage from Fort Curtis, Batteries A, B, and D, and the Tyler. Holmes actually arrived at Battery C in the midst of this bombardment and, mistakenly thinking its capture gave him an advantage, ordered a disastrous attack on Fort Curtis and an effort to support Fagan. Neither movement achieved its objective. On the Confederate left, where Marmaduke was to attack Rightor Hill, events proved every bit as bad for the attackers. As they advanced on the hill Marmaduke’s men got lost. When they finally readjusted themselves and moved against their target they faced not only Union infantry in their front but enfilading fire from Federal units along the levee to their east, units that Walker was supposed to attack in support of Marmaduke but had failed to do. The failure of Walker to support Marmaduke and the piecemeal nature of the Confederate attack, resulting from a poor battle plan given the terrain and the conditions and the inept leadership of at least two of Holmes’s commanders, Price and Walker, ultimately doomed the Confederate effort. At 10:30, only six and a half hours after Fagan had begun the battle, Holmes ordered his men to retreat. The fight had been a Confederate disaster. Holmes lost some 1,636 men, roughly 21 percent of his command. His three infantry brigades suffered 32 percent losses of the 4,434 officers and men in those units. As Holmes’s army marched back to Little Rock, an unknown number of the survivors deserted.3 An Arkansas Confederate civilian later recalled, “Little Rock was lost at the Battle of Helena.”4 Holmes’s attack reminded Union commanders that a relatively potent Confederate army still existed in Arkansas. Maj. Gen. John M.  Schofield, who commanded the Department of the Missouri, asked General Grant for permission to invade Arkansas with a cavalry force under Brig. Gen. John W. Davidson from Pilot Knob, Missouri, and an infantry column from Helena under Frederick Steele. Grant consented to the plan and ensured Steele was in overall command of the expedition. The chief objective was to take Little Rock, the headquarters for the Confederate Army in the state. General Davidson moved first and took his command into the state along Crowley’s Ridge, a loess formation running southward from Missouri to Helena on the Mississippi that allowed an overland move without getting into the swamps and wetlands of eastern Arkansas. Davidson’s command reached Wittsburg on the St. Francis River, about seventy miles north of Helena, on July 28. General Steele ordered Davidson to advance toward Clarendon on the White River to rendezvous with gunboats and his infantry. Steele concluded that he could not operate on the Arkansas River and planned instead to march his infantry to Clarendon, then to the railhead of the Memphis and Little Rock Railroad at DeValls Bluff on the White River. Unlike the Arkansas, the White River was easily navigable to DeValls Bluff and provided a surer line of supply for his army. From there cavalry and infantry could move overland to Little Rock. The infantry did not leave

410   Carl H. Moneyhon Helena until August 10 but marched through a virtually depopulated countryside with many farmers and planters having abandoned the area when McClernand had attacked Arkansas Post the previous January. The movement to Clarendon and then to DeValls Bluff faced virtually no opposition from regular or irregular Confederate forces. DeValls Bluff was the railhead for the Memphis & Little Rock, but it had only a store, a wharf, one home, and a population that fled when the Union Army arrived. Here Steele hesitated. His men were exhausted from the Vicksburg Campaign and their subsequent struggles through the swamps and wetlands of Arkansas. The effective strength of his command was reduced to about six thousand infantry and seven thousand cavalry. Since DeValls Bluff was a relatively healthy place, Steele took time so that his men could recuperate. He fortified his position, built a hospital for his sick, established a supply depot, and erected wharfs for boats bringing supplies and reinforcements up White River. Davidson’s cavalry probed Confederate positions and won engagements at Brownsville, one of the stations on the Memphis & Little Rock Railroad, and at Reed’s Bridge on Bayou Meto, approximately twelve and a half miles northeast of Little Rock. As the Federal cavalry began to probe farther westward, the Union presence became more disruptive for civilians. Aware that the Union Army disrupted their labor system, slave owners fled to Little Rock, taking their slaves with them. Steele’s expedition marched through Monroe and Prairie counties, where over five thousand slaves lived in 1860. They encountered few slaves there, however, and passed by unharvested fields of cotton and corn. Planters with resources moved even further to the southwest, some settling in Texas, where they leased land and put their slaves back to work cultivating cotton for sale in Mexico. The panic produced by Steele’s presence even reached the people of Little Rock, where civilians became certain that he actually intended marching on the city. Many of them left even before the Federal columns began their final approach. The Confederate Army had requisitioned several hundred slaves to work in the military’s warehouses and factories, laboring as stevedores on the city’s wharfs, grinding corn, manufacturing salt, and engaging in similar work. Now owners demanded the return of their property, intending to move their slaves out of the reach of the Federals. The city’s merchants began to close their shops and leave the city. At least some civilians joined in this flight, helping to create a refugee problem in the surrounding countryside. Little Rock residents showed little faith that Confederate forces in the city would be able to prevent its capture. The condition of the Confederate Army in Little Rock justified this lack of faith. Holmes, who knew he could not defend the city and suffered from poor health, resigned. Sterling Price took command and discovered that death, wounds, sickness, and desertion had depleted Confederate troops. The remaining men had lost heart. He lacked essential supplies, and the medical department did not have bandages, lint, or soft rags. Price determined, however, to mount a stout defense of Little Rock. His men, and the slaves who remained in the city, threw up earthwork fortifications and rifle pits on the north side of the Arkansas River astride the Memphis & Little Rock Railroad. The lack of manpower, however, prevented extending that line to the south side of the river, a problem that proved ultimately fatal for the city’s defense. To bolster the size of his army,

HELENA, LITTLE ROCK, AND FORT SMITH    411 Price called on all male citizens in the city and surrounding area to rally to the defense of the capital, promising arms to any man willing to carry a gun to defend home and family. He managed to put together a force of eight thousand men, far short of the sixteen thousand that Steele believed he faced but enough at least to attempt a defense. While Steele remained at DeValls Bluff, in the Indian Territory another Union force, not working in tandem with Steele, carried out a campaign that had major implications for Steele’s drive on Little Rock. In mid-​July Confederate Brig. Gen. Douglas H. Cooper planned to attack a Union force of approximately three thousand men at Fort Gibson in the Territory. Cooper’s plan called for Brig. Gen. William L. Cabell to move his brigade of Arkansas troops from Fort Smith and join Cooper’s force of Native Americans and Texans at Honey Springs, a post that had been a Confederate supply base. The move potentially brought together nine thousand Confederate soldiers. Cooper, however, did not count on the aggressiveness of Union Maj. Gen. James G. Blunt, who pulled in reinforcements that gave him 4,500 men and determined to attack Cooper before Cabell could bring his troops from Fort Smith to join him. On July 17 Blunt hit Cooper’s Confederates, and in the battle that followed drove the Confederates out of Honey Springs and precipitated their ultimate retreat out of Indian Territory. Cabell’s brigade finally joined Cooper after the Battle of Honey Springs as Cooper retreated toward Texas. Rather than remain together, Cooper continued south into Texas and Cabell headed back to Fort Smith. Blunt followed Cabell and caught up with him southwest of Fort Smith on August 31, where a brief skirmish occurred. Cabell decided to move to the southeast into the Ouachita Mountains rather than move on Fort Smith. He left the road open to Fort Smith for Blunt. On September 1, Blunt sent two regiments of cavalry under Col. William F. Cloud in pursuit of Cabell. Cloud rode into an ambush but successfully counterattacked. Even though his men established a stable defensive line, Cabell decided to retreat and left Union forces in control of the area. Blunt’s infantry, led by the 1st Arkansas Infantry U.S. Volunteers, meanwhile marched unopposed into Fort Smith. The capture of Fort Smith assured Federal control of the Arkansas River from that point westward to Fort Gibson. Aware by this time of Steele’s presence below Little Rock, Blunt sent Cloud with two companies of the 2nd Kansas Cavalry down the Arkansas River as far as Dardanelle, where they engaged and defeated Confederate cavalry on September 12 and then pushed on toward Little Rock. Cloud arrived in the city on September 18 to find Steele occupying it. On September 1, the day that Blunt occupied Fort Smith, Steele finally ordered his infantry forward. His column moved with caution, though, taking seven days to move forty miles to the vicinity of Ashley’s Mill and a low-​water crossing of the Arkansas River, about fifteen miles from Little Rock. Davidson’s cavalry arrived on September 7 and drove off the 5th Arkansas Cavalry that had been placed at the ford to prevent a crossing. Steele stopped once again after the skirmish while his scouts explored the approaches to Little Rock. They verified that the water in the Arkansas River was low enough to ford. As a result, Steele decided to use his infantry to engage Confederate fortifications on the north side of the river and pin the Confederates down while sending his cavalry across

412   Carl H. Moneyhon the river to operate on the south side. On September 10 Davidson led the cavalry across the river, meeting virtually no resistance, while the infantry moved along the north bank. Price apparently had not expected such a move and quickly deployed the few men he had available on the south side in front of Davidson’s advancing cavalry. The last battle in the Little Rock Campaign occurred about midday on September 10 when the Union cavalry ran into Confederate cavalry and artillery at Bayou Fourche, approximately four miles to the east of Little Rock. Davidson had two brigades, probably two thousand men, while Marmaduke had only about five hundred men. Marmaduke had assumed command of Marsh Walker’s brigade after killing Walker in a duel on September 6. The Union force outmanned and outgunned the Confederates and even enfiladed the Confederate position with artillery fire from across the Arkansas River. Marmaduke had no option but to fall back on Little Rock. Price probably never seriously believed that he could hold Little Rock with the force at his disposal. When he took command, he had actually ordered the movement of Confederate supplies into the southwestern part of the state. By midday on September 10, he found he could only delay the advancing Federal cavalry approaching from the east. Aware of the fall of Fort Smith and the movement of Cloud’s Union cavalry downriver, he faced the real possibility of having his entire army captured. He withdrew his infantry from the north side of the river and began a retreat that did not end until it reached Camden in the far southwest part of the state. Davidson’s cavalry entered Little Rock about 5:00 p.m. The next morning, September 11, Steele’s infantry marched into the city over a pontoon bridge thrown across the Arkansas River. Davidson’s cavalry pushed Confederate forces toward the southwest in the following days, pursuing Price’s retreating army all the way to Arkadelphia, some seventy miles southwest of Little Rock. In addition, Union cavalry moved into Pine Bluff, south of Little Rock and on the Arkansas River, on September 14. The arrival of the Union Army in Little Rock, Pine Bluff, and Fort Smith had an immediate effect on these communities and the countryside around them. The most obvious change was the freedom the army brought to the enslaved peoples in the towns and in the countryside, where some masters had failed to move their slaves out of the way of the Union Army. White residents of Pine Bluff, a town in the middle of some of the state’s largest plantations, reported that hundreds of slaves came to town from farms and plantations as much as thirty miles away as soon as Union forces arrived. They likened the movement to a stampede. The precise number of slaves who fled to Union lines is unknown, but reports by officials tasked with helping them indicated the numbers were large. In 1860, only 853 slaves lived in the city of Little Rock. Reports by officials of the Freedmen’s Bureau in the spring of 1865 counted 3,050 within the areas around the city controlled by the Federal army. In Pine Bluff, 342 slaves had been counted in the 1860 census. The number had increased to 3,260 by early 1865. In Fort Smith, located in an area with only a few slaves, the freedmen only reached about 500. These numbers do not take into account the several thousand freedmen who joined the Union Army. The figures indicate a major relocation of the state’s Black population to the towns to secure their freedom.5

HELENA, LITTLE ROCK, AND FORT SMITH    413 Neighborhoods of freedmen in Little Rock known locally as “Lickskillet” and “Brownsville,” consisting for the most part of log houses, appeared almost overnight in the capital city. Similar communities developed in Pine Bluff, at the railhead in DeValls Bluff, and in Fort Smith.6 These developed with apparently little help from the army. Within these settlements, the freedmen sought rights and independence. Men and women married, something legally impossible to them as slaves. One scholar has suggested that the freedmen’s camps in the Trans-​Mississippi were mobile, unlike those in the East, and followed the Union armies as they moved. The freedmen’s neighborhoods in Arkansas, however, remained in place once established, since the invading forces remained as an army of occupation for the rest of the war, and actually survived geographically in these towns afterward. That situation provided a relatively stable environment for the transition from slavery to freedom. Freedmen’s settlements in Little Rock, established after considerable experimentation by the Union Army with refugee camps, do not appear to have experienced the same sorts of privation and other difficulties encountered in the 1862 camps in Helena. Maj. William G. Sargent, who served as superintendent of freedmen for the entire state of Arkansas, arrived within months of Steele’s occupation of Little Rock. He urged former slaves to seek employment immediately. Several hundred went to work for the army building fortifications and working as manual laborers on the Little Rock wharfs and the army’s warehouses for the Quartermaster and Commissary departments. Several hundred got jobs in local stores. The majority, over two thousand by the spring of 1865, went to work on plantations seized by the U.S. Treasury Department and leased to loyal citizens. These freedmen usually worked for wages. Sargent secured the six-​ hundred-​acre plantation of William Vaughn to the east of Little Rock as a “home farm,” a place where the freedmen who could not find work elsewhere could live and grow crops to help maintain themselves. On the Little Rock home farm, several hundred freedmen leased their own land to farm. The government provided seeds, farm implements, and draft animals. Sargent created a similar home farm in Pine Bluff. While most of the men leasing property grew cotton for market, some also grew vegetables that they sold in town. Military officials believed that these experiences would teach the freedmen how to work in a free labor market. Unfortunately, those who worked on the leased plantations often learned how readily white lessors cheated them.7 Sargent, in his role of acting superintendent of education, also encouraged the opening of schools. He acquired Northern teachers from the American Missionary Association and the Northwest Freedmen’s Aid Society. By the spring of 1864, schools had been created at Helena, Little Rock, Pine Bluff, and DeValls Bluff, with a few freedmen as well as Northerners serving as teachers. Most of the schools were in the towns, although at Little Rock and Pine Bluff authorities located schools on the home farms. The Little Rock newspaper reported over three hundred Black children enrolled in these schools by February 1864. The schools worked with adults as well; the Little Rock schools held evening classes where the freedmen working in the military’s hospitals and other departments learned to read and write. The location of the schools within Federal

414   Carl H. Moneyhon lines and in the towns and the fact that the schools required tuition, however, limited access by farm workers on the leased farms and plantations. Several thousand freedmen joined the Union Army at DeValls Bluff, Little Rock, and Pine Bluff. Recruitment of Black troops had begun in Arkansas in Helena in the spring of 1863 with the creation of the 1st and 2nd Arkansas Regiments of Volunteers of African Descent. After the campaigns of 1863, even more freedmen signed up with the army. The army recruited the 4th, 5th, and 6th Arkansas Regiments of African Descent from Little Rock and DeValls Bluff. Blacks formed the 1st Arkansas Light Artillery of African Descent in Pine Bluff. In April 1864, Little Rock, now the state’s former Confederate capital, saw a dress parade of Black soldiers through its streets, a sight indicative of the revolutionary transition that the Union occupation had brought to the community. Most of the Black units manned the garrisons at Helena, DeValls Bluff, Little Rock, and Fort Smith. The army provided schooling for these men, usually in the evening. Although most of the units never saw combat, the Helena regiments did engage in fighting there and in northern Louisiana. Freedmen in Pine Bluff, not yet organized in units, assisted Union forces in repulsing a Confederate effort to recapture that town on October 25, 1863. Few documents remain concerning Black soldiers from Arkansas, but they may have begun to establish a sense of national citizenship because of their service, as was the case elsewhere. The Civil War altered notions of citizenship for Blacks and ethnic immigrants. Previously, states defined rights except for those guaranteed by the national constitution’s Bill of Rights. After the war, many people looked to the national government to define and protect rights. The occupation of Little Rock and Fort Smith produced a further effect on the state’s civilian population when hundreds of the state’s white Unionists abandoned the countryside and came into Union lines. The numbers are imprecise, but contemporary accounts contended that at least two hundred families moved into Little Rock almost immediately. A later report from Fort Smith listed almost three thousand white refugees there. In both instances, the refugees initially found what housing they could, many of them reportedly in rags, hungry, and suffering from a variety of illnesses. In response to this influx, the pro-​Union women of Little Rock organized a Union Aid Society to offer assistance to those who needed it. They gathered clothing to distribute and collected hundreds of dollars to help the refugees. The refugee problem became acute enough that the army began to commandeer housing for them, acquired land where they could build cabins, and provided subsistence. The army helped some of these families by employing the men not eligible for military service in the various shops and warehouses that had been built in the city. Along with the arrival of the refugees came a rebirth of Unionist sentiment in the occupied towns. Some of the refugees joined the Union Army, forming four regiments of cavalry, four of infantry, and one artillery battery. In addition, in December 1863 Unionists in Fort Smith began efforts to restore a loyal government by calling for the organization of a Union government under the provisions of Pres. Abraham Lincoln’s Ten Percent Plan. General Steele initially met the latter demand with resistance, but encouraged by General Davidson and President Lincoln, the Unionists held an election

HELENA, LITTLE ROCK, AND FORT SMITH    415 and met in Little Rock on January 8, 1864, in a convention that wrote a new constitution that abolished slavery and applied for the state to be restored to its normal relationship in the Union. In a subsequent election held on March 14, 1864, over twelve thousand voters approved the constitution and elected state and congressional officers, including Isaac Murphy as governor. Lincoln recognized the government and urged the army to support it as legitimate. The Union Army facilitated a loyal government in Little Rock and contributed to considerable prosperity in the city. A study of the occupation of Confederate communities by Union forces found that the impact of military occupation varied greatly between urban areas and the countryside, an observation that proved true in Little Rock. The occupied towns had suffered from shortages while under Confederate control; the arrival of Steele’s army brought about new economic activity and apparent prosperity. Initially the occupying forces appeared ready to plunder local civilians. In both Little Rock and Pine Bluff soldiers searched houses, taking food, firearms, and livestock. Steele, however, intended to pursue a conciliatory policy toward the people of Little Rock and commanders quickly reestablished order. In the months that followed locals benefited from economic activity that surrounded the presence of the army. Steamboats on the Arkansas River and the rebuilt Memphis & Little Rock Railroad from DeValls Bluff brought in a variety of goods that provided for the army but also helped feed the civilian population. Union soldiers reported that many of the merchants who had fled the city on Steele’s approach had returned. Stores that had closed reopened. In addition, merchants from Memphis and St. Louis arrived to open stores and take advantage of the market created by Steele’s army. Little Rock’s warehouses and stores filled with goods. Locals commented on the sudden availability of food such as sardines, oysters, canned fruit, and cheese. Steele added to the influx of goods when he encouraged farmers in the surrounding countryside to bring their crops to Little Rock, where the army was a ready buyer of foodstuffs and the corn and grain needed to maintain cavalry horses and draft animals. Steele also increased the availability of food for civilians in the city by establishing a central market for farm produce. The one initial complaint voiced by the soldiers in Little Rock was that prices were abnormally high, although within months the price of a barrel of flour dropped from twenty dollars to eleven, with similar decreases in prices for other goods. Less is known about conditions in Fort Smith, although by the spring of 1863 supply trains and some steamboats began to move goods there from Little Rock. Precisely measuring Little Rock’s new prosperity is impossible, although the opportunities presented in the city may be seen in its market development as reflected in population growth. With only 3,127 residents in 1860, after the Union occupation the city’s population, with the addition of Steele’s army, came closer to 20,000. This larger population survived the war’s end to some degree. Four years after the war, even with the withdrawal of the army, the number of residents in the city was 12,380, roughly four times the antebellum population.8 A vibrant social life resumed in Little Rock, and the Federals were responsible for some of this activity. Soldiers built a theater in their camp to put on theatricals, which

416   Carl H. Moneyhon civilians also attended. The Unconditional Union, a newspaper supporting a return to the Union that began weekly publication in January 1864, catalogued the many public entertainments now available to soldiers and civilians that included traveling theater companies. Private entertainment also resumed, with officers of the army holding dances and, in turn, attending social gatherings in the homes of the city’s civilians. Except for the presence of the Union Army, society had returned to prewar conditions. This new sociability may be partly attributed to General Steele’s generosity with the locals, treatment considered too lenient by some of the men in his own command who thought him to be a Copperhead. Those who looked on him more favorably praised him for his forbearance, justice, and urbanity. While Confederate loyalists did not welcome the occupation, most of them believed themselves fortunate to have Steele in charge, for he socialized with them and kept his army from committing depredations. Before he left to take up another command, the city’s citizens expressed their appreciation of the general by hosting a dinner for him.9 In Little Rock, the arrival of the army appeared to do little to upset the traditional gender and age roles for the inhabitants, although little is known about the lives of the women who remained in the city. For the children and young men and women, however, the Union occupation meant a return to something of a normal life. Many schools reopened almost immediately after the city’s fall. Girls from well-​off families went back to classes at Saint Mary’s Academy, the convent school run by the Sisters of Mercy. Day schools operated for boys. Several private tutors arrived and took on students. For the young men and women of Little Rock social life returned as well, with gatherings, parties, and dances that included young men from the Union Army. During the Christmas season of 1863, only four months after the arrival of the Union Army, contemporaries reported numerous festivities for the young. One of the results of this social interaction, according to contemporary accounts, was a growing number of weddings between Arkansas women and Union soldiers. As in other regions occupied by the Union Army, conditions in the Arkansas countryside differed considerably from those in the towns. In rural areas, Arkansans had already been forced to adopt a subsistence lifestyle because of the disruption of trade and food production by the war. Matters became even worse in the countryside with the occupation of the towns on the Arkansas River. One of the reasons was that while merchants managed to stock their stores again with goods brought in by steamboat and rail, enough could not be brought in to feed the army’s livestock. As a result the army sent foraging parties into the countryside from each occupied community almost daily. Some of the parties took with them as many as a hundred wagons and fanned out for thirty or more miles. When they found hay and corn left in the fields they harvested it and hauled it back to their posts. They also drove off cattle and sheep from nearby plantations and farms. The soldiers did not hesitate to plunder households as well, leaving the residents with virtually nothing. Mrs. M. O. Mashburn, who lived in nearby Saline County, remembered the arrival of one foraging party at her farm sometime after Little Rock fell: “They took everything, even cutting the cloth from the looms, taking bed quilts and all clothing, except what the family was wearing at the time.”10 Afterward her

HELENA, LITTLE ROCK, AND FORT SMITH    417 family sometimes lived only on bread and water. Contemporary accounts show that Mashburn’s experience was not unique. Adding to the problems of the people in the countryside was the presence of guerrillas who preyed upon the foraging parties. The use of guerrillas by the Confederacy proved counterproductive because it led to an increasingly violent reaction by Union forces. Union troops on the march or in foraging parties generally responded to guerrillas with violence against surrounding communities when they could not get to the guerrillas themselves. When the 9th Wisconsin Infantry marched from Helena to Little Rock to reinforce Steele’s forces in late 1863, they showed a typical response when guerrillas fired on them from ambush: they immediately burned all of the civilian housing in the neighborhood through which they were passing. When the guerrillas persisted, the soldiers threatened to burn every home between Helena and Little Rock, a threat that apparently dissuaded further attacks.11 When Union troops captured guerrillas, they either shot them immediately or sent them to Little Rock, where they were hanged. It is unclear how many executions took place in Little Rock, although soldiers’ letters and memoirs recalled such executions as relatively normal events. This violent retribution often left the families in the countryside with as little as if they had been plundered by a foraging party. If society returned to an approximation of normality in the occupied towns, the opposite appears to have taken place in the countryside, where conditions forced new roles on both women and children in families that had owned slaves. While the lives of women and children of yeoman farmers and the poor may have varied little, when slaves left, the women from the slaveholding class were forced to assume managerial roles and to engage in work they previously had not done. Few primary sources document this shift in the Arkansas River Valley, but the plight of Mrs. Jared C. Martin was probably typical. A widow who lived in the eastern suburbs of Little Rock, Martin was forced to leave her home when Confederates took over her farm to build defenses along the Arkansas River. She later remembered that when her slaves left she had to toil as she “never had before, plowing, hoeing, harvesting, cooking, washing, spinning, weaving, and often after they had succeeded in raising a little crop the enemy came and took it.”12 Martin had one of the only wagons in her neighborhood, and she used it to haul her neighbors’ grains to a mill some eight miles away to have it ground. Her efforts meant that the family had the basic necessities throughout the war. Amanda Trulock, who lived on a plantation near Pine Bluff, became actively involved in its operations when her sons joined the Confederate Army, working with the few former slaves who remained on the plantation to grow a crop of cotton that she marketed to the Federals. Children suffered the same sorts of privations and were compelled to assume an early adulthood. Martin’s two young children joined her in the fields in their effort to grow enough to feed themselves and provide some goods to sell at market. At least some boys and young men also assumed an even more adult role in taking up arms against the Yankees. A Union scouting party out of Little Rock encountered one such child soldier when it captured a thirteen-​year-​old who had fired on them. The soldiers knocked him out with a blow to his head and took him prisoner. Such hostility to the occupying army

418   Carl H. Moneyhon may also explain the decision of eighteen-​year-​old David O. Dodd, a young man who had gone to school in Little Rock but left when the war began, to return to the city, where he acted as a spy. After working in several stores and meeting old friends at Christmas parties in 1863, he attempted to leave Union lines. Stopped by a Union picket, the soldiers found material on him that suggested he was taking information on the strength of the Union Army back to the Confederates. Charged with spying, the military executed Dodd on January 8, 1864. Young men more strongly supported the Confederacy because of their experiences and became, as a history of children in the war has suggested is true in other places, actual warriors. Like the women in their families, the young were forced to assume new roles. The campaigns that led to Union control of the Arkansas River Valley clearly created changes, although those changes often proved mixed. The chief goal of Union operations in Arkansas in 1863 had been to remove the Confederate Army as a threat, turn Arkansas into a buffer against Confederate incursions into Missouri, provide an avenue of supply along the Arkansas River for operations in Indian Territory, and serve as a base from which future campaigns into Texas could be mounted. The Union Army accomplished most of these goals. The campaigns in Arkansas in 1863 clearly reduced the Confederate capacity to make war in the Trans-​Mississippi. Even though unable to prevent the movement of Confederates across the Arkansas River into Missouri, the occupation forced Confederate armies into long marches with inadequate supply lines to achieve their objectives. The campaigns of 1863 also inflicted casualties on the Confederate armies that could not be replaced, deprived the Confederacy of necessary supplies, and caused a further deterioration on the morale of both Confederate soldiers and civilians. The resurgence of Unionist sentiment among Arkansans who had accepted secession and war revealed the hopelessness that the success of Federal armies created among Confederate Arkansans. On the other hand, by the time Little Rock fell, Confederate influence in Indian Territory already had waned. The failed Red River Campaign in the spring of 1864 stymied the one significant effort to confront Confederate forces that had been withdrawn into northwestern Louisiana and Texas. The Arkansas River defensive line proved incapable of protecting Missouri, with General Price leading an invasion force into Missouri the following summer. Holding on to Arkansas became so unimportant in the eyes of General Grant that, in the fall of 1864, he actually ordered the abandonment of Fort Smith and the concentration of all Federal forces in Little Rock. Only the intervention of President Lincoln prevented that from happening. The creation of a loyal government in Arkansas had not been an initial goal of the Arkansas River campaigns, but such a government was created. Like the military goals of the campaigns, however, the impact of the government’s creation was mixed. General Steele never fully trusted the state’s Unionists and thwarted many of the new government’s initiatives. When military commanders in northwestern Arkansas attempted to create protected farms for Union loyalists and Governor Murphy wanted to create a state militia to protect Unionists throughout the state, Steele refused to provide arms to the militias needed to protect the farms. He feared that the weapons might ultimately find their way into Confederate hands. The new government also

HELENA, LITTLE ROCK, AND FORT SMITH    419 failed to establish any influence in Washington when Congress, doubting the legitimacy of a government elected by voters who numbered little more than 10 percent of the number who had voted in 1860, refused to seat the congressmen chosen in the March election. Effectively, Steele and his successor, Maj. Gen. Joseph Reynolds, did nothing to take control of the interior of Arkansas, leaving much of the country beyond its posts to become lawless territory where guerrilla and bandit bands preyed on the civilian population. Nonetheless, the creation of a loyal government in Arkansas provided Lincoln with a much needed success in the midst of the war, supporting his idea that the common man in the South had remained loyal. The loyal government ended slavery in the state, adding another region to the gradual spread of emancipation throughout the nation. The campaigns in 1863 had unanticipated social and economic consequences for the people of Arkansas. The most significant of these was the end of slavery that followed the march of the Union armies. The result was not only the beginning of efforts by former slaves to integrate themselves into a free society but also a demographic shift of many Blacks from the farms and plantations of the countryside into the towns. Their subsequent contributions to the war effort made it even more difficult to reestablish slavery and probably helped push the loyal government in Arkansas to abolish slavery in its constitution. White civilians also experienced major changes, although these varied greatly. Confederate loyalists in the countryside faced increasing privations, forced to rely totally on themselves and compelled in many cases to embrace different gender and age roles. On the other hand, Union occupation fell more lightly on the townspeople of the state, where economic growth and a return to a more normal lifestyle produced less social change. The war may even have contributed to a growing importance of the towns of Fort Smith, Little Rock, and Pine Bluff relative to the state’s rural areas that would play out in the future. Although the results militarily, politically, and socially were mixed, the military operations in the state in 1863 brought major changes in the lives of the people of Arkansas.

Notes 1. U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1894–​ 1922), ser. 1, vol. 22, pt. 2: 932. Hereafter cited as OR. 2. Edwin C. Bearss, “The Battle of Helena, July 4, 163,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 20 (Autumn 1961): 261–​265. 3. OR, ser. 1, vol. 22, pt. 2: 411, 433, 437. 4. Henry Merrill quotation in Mark K. Christ, Civil War in Arkansas, 1863: The Battle for a State (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010), 144. 5. Population of the United States:  Compiled from the Original Returns of the Eighth Census (Washington, D.C.:  Government Printing Office, 1864), 19; “Tabular Report of Freedmen in the Dist. of Little Rock . . . March 31, 1865,” Retained Copies of Reports, Reports Received, and Misc. Papers, 1864–​1865, Arkansas, Field Office Records, Bureau

420   Carl H. Moneyhon of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, National Archives, Washington, D.C., Microfilm Series 1901, Roll 15. 6. Report of the General Superintendent of Freedmen, Department of Tennessee and State of Arkansas for 1864 (Memphis, TN: n.p., 1865), 68. 7. Report of the General Superintendent of Freedmen,  70–​7 1. 8. Nate Coulter, “The Impact of the Civil War upon Pulaski County, Arkansas,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 41 (Spring 1982): 70. 9. See diary entries for September 1863–​May 1865 in Ralph Leland Goodrich Papers, Arkansas State Archives, Little Rock, for an extensive discussion of contemporary social life in Little Rock. 10. Confederate Women of Arkansas, 1861–​’65:  Memorial Reminiscences (Little Rock, AR: H. G. Pugh, 1907), 160. 11. Mark K. Christ, ed., “Tis Day We Marched Again”: A Union Soldier’s Account of War in Arkansas and the Trans-​Mississippi (Little Rock, AR: Butler Center Books, 2014), 80–​81. 12. Christ, “Tis Day We Marched Again,” 133.

Bibliography Ash, Stephen V. When the Yankees Came: Conflict and Chaos in the Occupied South, 1861–​1865. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. Bearrs, Edwin C. “The Battle of Helena, July 4, 1863.” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 20 (Autumn 1961): 256–​297. Bearrs, Edwin C. “The Federals Capture Fort Smith, 1863.” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 28 (Summer 1969): 156–​190. Christ, Mark K. Civil War Arkansas, 1863:  The Battle for a State. Norman:  University of Oklahoma Press, 2010. Coulter, Nate. “The Impact of the Civil War upon Pulaski County, Arkansas.” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 41 (Spring 1982): 67–​82. Cutrer, Thomas W. Theater of a Separate War: The Civil War West of the Mississippi River 1861–​1865. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Huff, Leo E. “The Union Expedition against Little Rock.” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 22 (Fall 1963): 224–​237. Manning, Chandra. Troubled Refuge:  Struggling for Freedom in the Civil War. New  York: Knopf, 2006. Marten, James. The Children’s Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. Moneyhon, Carl H. The Impact of the Civil War and Reconstruction on Arkansas: Persistence in the Midst of Ruin. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994. Moneyhon, Carl H. “The Little Rock Freedmen’s Home Farm, 1863–​1865.” Pulaski County Historical Review 42 (Summer 1994): 26–​35. Sutherland, Daniel. A Savage Conflict: The Decisive Role of Guerrillas in the American Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. Taylor, Amy Murrell. Embattled Freedom: Journeys through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018.

Chapter 26

The Tull ahoma a nd Chickamauga C a mpa i g ns Discord, Disruption, and Defeat Andrew S. Bledsoe

In early 1863, Union efforts to isolate and capture the critical Confederate transportation hub at Chattanooga, Tennessee, culminated in the critical Tullahoma and Chickamauga campaigns. Maj. Gen. William S. Rosecrans and his Army of the Cumberland laid their plans from winter quarters in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, on the heels of a hard-​won victory at Stones River. With four infantry and a cavalry corps, Rosecrans developed a bold operational and tactical plan for a war of maneuver. A testy civil-​military relationship with the U.S. War Department, which repeatedly urged him to launch his campaign before he believed it was prudent, tempered the general’s confidence. While Rosecrans’s initial reticence caused much consternation between himself and the Union leadership in Washington, his subsequent efforts during the summer months of 1863 would deliver the Lincoln administration the near-​complete recovery of middle Tennessee from enemy control, though without destroying the enemy forces there. Opposing the Army of the Cumberland was Confederate Gen. Braxton Bragg’s Army of Tennessee, consisting of four infantry corps and a reserve corps, along with two cavalry corps. Bragg’s army was an organization also riddled with dissension, though from within rather than without. Bragg suffered from a dysfunctional command relationship among his chief subordinates, a predicament for which he was not solely to blame but one he could not resolve. Bragg also saw the size of his forces and the scope of his military authority and administrative responsibilities greatly expanded, and a bloc of anti-​Bragg generals within the Army of Tennessee actively worked to undermine him. In few other major Civil War campaigns would the politics of command play such a consequential role. The Tullahoma and Chickamauga campaigns also created widespread disruption in middle Tennessee and the Tennessee River Valley. Both the Union and Confederate forces in the campaign relied on tenuous logistical networks, resulting in widespread

422   Andrew S. Bledsoe foraging, food shortages, and a growing number of refugees and displaced persons simply seeking to avoid the path of the armies. Both sides would also experience significant defeats in these campaigns—​the Confederates losing most of Tennessee during the Tullahoma Campaign, and the Union in a stunning setback at Chickamauga. These campaigns also played out against the backdrops of emancipation and the political consequences bearing on the coming 1864 U.S. presidential election. The Tullahoma and Chickamauga campaigns originated in the winter and spring of 1863. Rosecrans’s main objective was to repair and reorganize his damaged army, which had received a mauling in its victory at Stones River, and construct the logistical infrastructure necessary for a new campaign. Rosecrans understood that his cavalry needed to play a critical role in screening his army, gathering information, and providing him with a mobile force to protect his lines of supply and communication against Confederate raids. To that end, the general wanted better mounts, better equipment, and better weaponry, including modern breechloaders and repeaters, for his cavalry, and peppered Washington with request after request for more supplies and support. Finally, when the U.S. War Department was not forthcoming enough, Rosecrans approved the unusual request of Col. John Wilder to mount his infantry brigade and equip them with Spencer seven-​shot repeaters, paying for the upgrades with a unique reimbursable subscription system. Under this innovative arrangement, Wilder took out a personal loan for the expensive weapons, and the cost of the repeaters was voluntarily deducted from the men’s monthly pay, a testament to their confidence in these highly effective firearms.1 As he went about these preparations, Rosecrans also displayed an alarming petulance in his many telegraphic communications with the president, with Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, and with General in Chief Maj. Gen. Henry W. Halleck, who urged him to expedite his plans. Making matters more urgent was the uncertain situation in Mississippi. There, Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant was pressuring the Confederate stronghold at Vicksburg, and the president hoped that Rosecrans’s planned offensive might draw enemy attention away from the effort to clear the Mississippi River. Rosecrans, however, understood the monumental task before him and refused to budge before he felt completely ready. When the Quartermaster General, Brig. Gen. Montgomery C. Meigs, suggested the use of wagons to more speedily transport Rosecrans’s troops, Rosecrans retorted that the solution “would do well on Pennsylvania Avenue” but would not serve in a real campaign.2 With tensions rising with his superiors in Washington, Rosecrans also had several additional national political developments to consider. First, the 1862 midterm elections had demonstrated the strength of the Copperhead peace movement in midwestern states like Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana. The Army of the Cumberland’s officers and men were widely dismayed at this development and, lacking an absentee voting arrangement, had been unable to express their commitment to the war and the Union in the recent elections. When the Lincoln administration decided to expel the Copperhead leader Clement Vallandigham to Murfreesboro, Rosecrans had the Ohio politician jailed and then transferred through enemy lines into Confederate custody.3

The Tullahoma and Chickamauga Campaigns    423 Looming over all of this was the January 1, 1863, Emancipation Proclamation. In Rosecrans’s army, Union soldiers and officers tended to look at the policy as a war measure first, and seemed to have generally approved of the principles behind it, namely, depriving the Confederacy of a reliable source of labor. The Army of the Cumberland was not, however, primarily an abolitionist force. Many midwesterners in its ranks expressed deep misgivings about the policy of emancipation, and the idea of making the war about abolition or even racial equality was something that made many white soldiers uneasy, or even downright angry. Rosecrans’s army viewed the Emancipation Proclamation as an instrument designed to deny the labor of slaves to the Confederacy, a pragmatic goal they generally supported and which became even more important to their identities and memory of the war.4 In planning Union strategy for 1863, Rosecrans also faced a challenging topographical environment. The campaigns for Chattanooga would unfold along a roughly northwest-​ to-​ southeast axis, originating in the Nashville-​ Murfreesboro area and extending across one of the most rugged and lightly populated regions of Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia. Three primary roads extended from Rosecrans’s winter quarters at Murfreesboro, running east and south to the small towns of Shelbyville, Bradyville, and Manchester. Beyond this, a rough plateau called the Highland Rim towered over the Cumberland and Tennessee River valleys, and only a handful of gaps permitted entry to and exit from the region and the massive Cumberland Plateau mountain range beyond. The series of flat-​topped ridges atop the plateau were notoriously parsimonious, consisting of sandy soil that tended to turn to boggy mud in heavy rains, and scrubby woods and fields more suited for pasture than farmland. The Elk and Duck rivers flowed through the area, representing additional obstacles to cross. Locals called a forty-​mile stretch of this poor land “the Barrens,” and a handful of tiny railroad hamlets like Bell Buckle, Decherd, Wartrace, and Tullahoma promised armies little in the way of forage or subsistence. The tenuous rail line through the Barrens also passed through a massive two-​thousand-​foot tunnel at Cowan. Shielded by a complex of jagged ridges and narrow mountain gaps beyond this, lay Chattanooga.5 The Union Army’s Tullahoma Campaign plans in the spring and summer of 1863 revolved around two primary objectives: the defeat of Bragg’s army and the recovery of middle Tennessee for the Union. The Chickamauga Campaign that would follow aimed to isolate and secure Chattanooga, an important staging point for future efforts to penetrate the Confederate heartland of Alabama, Georgia, and beyond. Rosecrans’s strategy for the Tullahoma Campaign was audacious; it depended upon both deception and maneuver and required the dispersed elements of his army to move with speed and flexibility in a fluid operational environment amid difficult terrain and with tenuous supply. Fortunately, the Army of the Cumberland was up to the task, and at 2:10 a.m. on June 24 Rosecrans telegraphed Halleck with the long-​awaited news that the campaign to liberate middle Tennessee and capture Chattanooga had finally begun. Braxton Bragg’s Confederates had, since the end of the Stones River Campaign, faced logistical, strategic, and operational challenges of their own. Making his winter quarters at Tullahoma in early 1863, Bragg struggled to keep his army supplied in the Barrens,

424   Andrew S. Bledsoe

Map 26.1  Tullahoma and Chickamauga

and when food ran short in January, the Confederate commander appealed to his department commander, Gen. Joseph E. Johnston, to turn loose the stockpiled supplies in Georgia. Bragg, like Rosecrans, keenly understood the unprecedented difficulty of moving large armies through Appalachia and keeping them in supply. Johnston and the Confederate high command refused his requests, however, having designated those

The Tullahoma and Chickamauga Campaigns    425 goods for Gen. Robert E. Lee’s higher-​priority Army of Northern Virginia. A frustrated Bragg was therefore forced to scavenge middle Tennessee for food and forage, and by April his Army of Tennessee was, according to one observer, “living hand to mouth, and drawing largely on the reserves.”6 Bragg also had to compete with other theaters and operations for manpower resources. Johnston, whose Department of the West oversaw not only the defense of middle Tennessee but also the impending crisis at Vicksburg, struggled to comply with Confederate President Jefferson Davis’s desire that he shift troops from Bragg’s army to that of Lt. Gen. John C. Pemberton in Mississippi. Six hundred miles of rickety railroad separated Bragg’s force from the Vicksburg defenders, and any swift transfer of troops from one operation to another would prove impossible. To remedy this issue, Johnston detached Maj. Gen. Earl Van Dorn’s cavalry corps to harass Union forces in both Mississippi and Tennessee, and thus, it was hoped, take pressure off both Pemberton and Bragg. Van Dorn met with only moderate success, in part because of bad winter weather and the poor condition of his mounts. Bragg also had to contend with a storm of discord within his senior officer corps. All of his corps commanders and many of his division commanders were highly dissatisfied with his leadership. Led by the poisonous Lt. Gen. Leonidas Polk, the Army of Tennessee’s senior corps commander, the cabal of anti-​Bragg generals traced their grievances back to the Kentucky Campaign of 1862. Among Bragg’s harshest critics were such Kentuckians as Major Generals Simon B. Buckner and John C. Breckinridge, along with a hostile press that routinely excoriated him in their newspapers. Bragg’s command was saved by the presence of General Johnston at his headquarters. Johnston told Confederate President Davis the army would fight for Bragg, provided Davis had confidence in the embattled commander. Davis left Bragg in charge of the Army of Tennessee, but in a precarious position. When Rosecrans ordered his initial movement on Tullahoma, Bragg’s forty-​three thousand men was scattered among the gaps in the Highland Rim. Bragg hoped that Rosecrans would assault him in his fortifications at Shelbyville, and because of this was slow to realize his danger. By June 25, both Hoover’s Gap and Liberty Gap were in the hands of the Fourteenth Corps, and Rosecrans’s plan to turn Bragg’s right flank looked to be succeeding. Rosecrans’s cavalry managed a thorough defeat of Maj. Gen. Joseph Wheeler’s horsemen at Shelbyville on June 27, capturing Manchester that same day. Bragg withdrew to Tullahoma and awaited reinforcements under Buckner from Knoxville. Meanwhile, both armies suffered under a steady rain that turned roads to mud and flooded their camps. Bragg’s army relied on a single main supply line with Chattanooga, a vulnerable road and rail bridge across the Elk River at Estill Springs, about seven miles from Tullahoma. If the Federals were to cut that line, the Confederates would quickly run out of food, forage, and ammunition and would be completely isolated in the Barrens. Wilder’s Lightning Brigade of repeater-​armed mounted infantry made several efforts to tear up track, destroy telegraph lines, and otherwise sever the Confederate lifeline as Rosecrans’s

426   Andrew S. Bledsoe army prepared to press on. After a heated debate within Bragg’s high command, including repeated urging by Polk to retreat, Bragg pulled out of Tullahoma, crossed the Elk River, and abandoned middle Tennessee. On July 2, he fell back on Chattanooga. By July 4, after eleven days of maneuvering and fighting, the Federals had gained middle Tennessee at the cost of only 570 casualties. The Confederates lost perhaps ten times that number, many of them prisoners captured at Shelbyville.7 The Tullahoma Campaign was a stunning success for Federal arms, though Rosecrans felt his feat was unfairly overshadowed by the near-​simultaneous victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg. Even though Bragg had surrendered a major portion of Tennessee, all was not lost for the Confederates. His army remained intact, and in the rough terrain of southeast Tennessee and north Georgia, new opportunities to turn the tide might present themselves. For the Federals, pressing on toward Chattanooga involved the challenge of maintaining viable supply lines along the axis of their advance. Shortages and logistical problems led troops to forage from local citizens, resulting in widespread shortages and tensions along the way. On July 5, Union officer Capt. Everett Abbott explained, “We have been almost out of provisions several days. . . . Foragers have taken everything eatable from the country. Many people left destitute—​some say they are almost starving. Such are calamities of war.”8 Reduced to a daily ration of one piece of hardtack, soldiers begged, bartered, or stole food from locals, scrounged for berries, or simply suffered. Fortunately, by the middle part of July Rosecrans had established a new base of supply at Winchester. Here, on the outskirts of the increasingly Unionist east Tennessee region, the Army of the Cumberland encountered a new kind of Southern civilian: the Union loyalist. Before the Tullahoma and Chickamauga campaigns, Bragg placed Brig. Gen. Gideon J. Pillow of the Army of Tennessee in charge of a department Volunteer and Conscription Bureau, with license to enforce conscription in northern Alabama, where pockets of anti-​Confederate sentiment lay. This attempt to bypass the Confederate government’s Conscription Bureau through military conscription had devastating consequences for communities in Alabama and north Georgia, embittering the locals, disrupting economies and social networks, and driving many to hide or engage in acts of overt, sometimes violent resistance against conscription and impressments agents. Civilians experienced dislocation and deprivation as armies intruded into their lives and livelihoods, disrupting the rhythms of work and home, threatening their safety, and loosening the ties between neighbor and community, slave and master, and even within families with divided allegiances.9 Further, by 1863 Union abandonment of conciliation toward pro-​ Confederate civilians in the region began to undermine the morale of civilians previously sympathetic toward secession. Rosecrans’s Federals were pleased to see the warm reception many of these modest subsistence farmers and mountaineers gave them, as loyal Tennesseans, and later Alabamans and Georgians, forced to hide in forests and caves from roving Confederate conscription agents for months on end, were at last able to reemerge and reunite with friends and family under the protection of the Federal presence in the area. These Southern Unionists and anti-​Confederates were often generous

The Tullahoma and Chickamauga Campaigns    427 toward the Federals despite their lack of means and the hardships of war, showering Yankee soldiers with effusive praise, home cooking, and intoxicating apple-​jack brandy, as well as valuable information. One such loyalist, a shadowy figure known only as “Mrs. Schwartz,” provided dubious intelligence to the Federals and passed through army lines with official sanction. Spies like Mrs. Schwartz prowled the area of operations throughout the campaigns, but it is unclear how useful these informants actually were to the armies.10 Relations between the occupying Army of the Cumberland and local civilians were not always friendly, however. On July 6, Maj. Gen. George H. Thomas issued a circular to the Fourteenth Corps noting “depredations committed by the different divisions of this command,” threatening that the “amount for the property so taken be paid out of the company savings, by withholding the commutation of rations until the amount is fully paid” and promising to arrest wrongdoers.11 Three days later, Rosecrans ordered Maj. Gen. Philip Sheridan to “maintain discipline and protect private property from willful and needless depredations.” The Army of the Cumberland had a duty to ensure “sufficient subsistence is left in all cases to supply the present necessities of families.”12 In August Rosecrans created a special commission of officers to assess damages to local farmers from the Union Army’s foraging efforts and reimburse their losses. The Union Army’s presence served both as a constant reminder of the Confederacy’s inability to protect its civilian population from its enemies and as a source of disruption to the rhythms of everyday life and the existing order in the area. Rosecrans also feared the hazardous consequences that heavy-​handed foraging and abuse of civilians might create for his own men. Lawless soldiers turned citizens into bushwhackers. He ordered cavalry commander Maj. Gen. David S. Stanley “to gather and send in to the provost-​ marshal-​general all the able-​bodied male negroes (slaves of rebel masters) you can find,” to deprive disloyal partisans and pro-​Confederate civilians of their labor.13 In August, several Union soldiers were bushwhacked by civilians, and a number of guerrilla bands operated in the Tullahoma region as late as May 1865. In addition to these complex issues, Rosecrans’s old difficulties with Washington soon reappeared to sour his disposition. Halleck and Stanton, ever impatient with Rosecrans’s deliberation, urged the general to resume the offensive on Chattanooga as soon as possible. Lincoln joined the chorus pressing Rosecrans to get moving; the president was convinced by the Gettysburg and Vicksburg victories that the Confederacy might be on its last legs. Lincoln was also understandably anxious to start the process of liberating east Tennessee from Confederate control. Halleck infuriated Rosecrans by demanding daily progress reports, to which Rosecrans, with his generals’ support, responded by threatening to resign if forced to advance earlier than mid-​August. Lincoln eventually intervened with reassurances of his full support for an offensive on the general’s preferred timetable. As the Army of the Cumberland prepared to move on Chattanooga, Bragg and the Confederates made their own plans. For some time, Confederate leaders had advocated shifting reinforcements from various places, including the Army of Northern Virginia, to bolster Bragg’s army. Robert E.  Lee’s senior corps commander, Lt. Gen. James

428   Andrew S. Bledsoe Longstreet, joined the chorus, seeing a transfer and possible independent command assignment as a stepping stone to higher things. Longstreet would eventually get his wish, but not until September, and nearly too late for the fight at Chickamauga. The 17,800 men of the Department of East Tennessee under Buckner, a Kentuckian who disliked Bragg, were also merged into the Army of Tennessee. Meanwhile, Bragg had to monitor a 150-​mile front along the Cumberland Plateau, guarding the gaps and passes there against the anticipated Federal movement on Chattanooga. To accomplish this, Bragg headquartered in Chattanooga, then spread his cavalry along a line on the Tennessee River stretching as far southwest as Alabama and northeast almost to Knoxville. The Confederate commander feared a strong Federal force under Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside in Kentucky. Rosecrans might join up somewhere to his flank and rear and fall upon him without warning. Bragg therefore focused much of his attention on the country northeast of Chattanooga and deployed his army, particularly his overextended cavalry, to guard the fords and crossings along the Tennessee River above the city. Bragg’s attention remained fixed north of Chattanooga when Rosecrans began his offensive on August 16. With the Confederates pinned to Chattanooga and its environs, Rosecrans knew he could strike Bragg at the time and place of his own choosing. He split his army into three large columns of corps for the tricky march through the mountain gaps shielding Chattanooga. The northernmost column, composed of Maj. Gen. Thomas L.  Crittenden’s Twenty-​First Corps, marched across the Cumberland Plateau on the Federal left, down into the Sequatchie Valley, and then south toward Chattanooga. Crittenden’s movement was a diversion, intended to keep Bragg’s focus northward, and the deception worked brilliantly as the Confederates were persuaded that Rosecrans intended to cross the Tennessee River and attack Chattanooga from above. The second and third Federal columns, consisting of Thomas’s Fourteenth Corps and Maj. Gen. Alexander McDowell McCook’s Twentieth Corps, swung south into Alabama and Georgia, respectively, and then pushed east and north to sever Bragg’s line of communications with Atlanta. Rosecrans also sent Wilder’s Lightning Brigade on a diversionary raid against Chattanooga to keep Bragg distracted. If Rosecrans’s grand plan succeeded, it would force the Army of Tennessee either to evacuate Chattanooga and fall back on its communications with Atlanta or to remain in the city, isolated and out of supplies. On September 6–​7, Bragg realized his cavalry pickets and outposts had failed him as word came of the Federal presence in Alabama and Georgia. He ordered the Army of Tennessee to pull out of Chattanooga and move south into Georgia, concentrating near Rome or LaFayette. The consequences of the Federal advance were felt throughout the region. Chattanooga itself began to resemble a ghost town, as civilians with the means to escape did so. Those too poor to flee simply camped in the woods beyond town. As far south as Cartersville, Georgia, nearly ninety miles from Chattanooga, passenger trains packed with fleeing civilians crowded the rails. A  scornful Confederate officer there observed, “Whole families, often consisting of the father at a desk, the mother on a sofa and a collection of children with furniture fill a box (or freight) car, and so with a little variety, for the whole train . . . [f]‌leeing like craven cowards.”14

The Tullahoma and Chickamauga Campaigns    429 Bragg’s decision to evacuate Chattanooga was wise, and though his thinking about the Federal intentions and any potential response had been muddled to this point, the Army of Tennessee’s beleaguered commander soon found new energy and inspiration. Bragg recognized that Rosecrans’s plan was rooted in overconfidence. Because of the difficulty of navigating the mountainous terrain around Chattanooga, Bragg knew Rosecrans had to disperse his army into vulnerable columns to pass them through the narrow gaps leading to the city. Therefore, by withdrawing from Chattanooga and enticing Rosecrans to pursue him, Bragg hoped to locate and counterattack one of the isolated columns and destroy it, and therefore disrupt the Federals’ campaign entirely. Bragg’s strategy was a textbook example of the Napoleonic technique of defeat in detail and was a sound option. By September 8, Rosecrans was convinced that Bragg was thoroughly outfoxed and, as Bragg hoped, modified his plan from a broad turning movement into a full pursuit. On September 9, Crittenden’s Twenty-​First Corps occupied the now-​abandoned city of Chattanooga, while Thomas’s Fourteenth Corps moved out of Bridgeport, Alabama, crossed the Lookout Mountain range, and headed for LaFayette. McCook’s Twentieth Corps continued its southeastern arc, entering Georgia at Alpine on September 10, and remaining there until the thirteenth, after which he began moving north to concentrate with the rest of the Army of the Cumberland. Rosecrans’s audacity would prove ill-​advised, but his success to that point attests to the Confederates’ operational confusion and intelligence-​gathering failures. Unfortunately for Bragg, one of the great command debacles of the Civil War soon unfolded in the mountains of north Georgia. In a three-​day comedy of errors, the sequence of events known as the Battle of Davis’s Cross Roads, the Battle of Dug Gap, or the Affair at McLemore’s Cove revealed the true severity of dysfunction within the Confederate Army of Tennessee’s command structure. By September 9 Bragg had set up Rosecrans’s advance columns in a perfect trap. Two Federal divisions blundered into a box canyon called McLemore’s Cove just west of LaFayette, unaware that the Confederates were poised to crush them. From his new headquarters at Lee and Gordon’s Mill, just south of Chattanooga, Bragg tasked a newcomer to the army, Maj. Gen. Thomas C. Hindman, to deliver the killing blow. Unfortunately, poisonous army politics and confusion plagued the entire operation. By September 11, the two Federal divisions had figured out their danger and backtracked out of the trap, while Hindman, Lieut. Gen. Daniel Harvey Hill, Buckner, and Bragg bickered and delayed. Though Bragg eventually shifted his headquarters to LaFayette, and then finally rode down to personally take charge of the attack, the grand opportunity was irretrievably lost.15 On September 17, Rosecrans issued urgent orders to both Thomas’s Fourteenth Corps and Crittenden’s Twenty-​First Corps to concentrate and recalled McCook’s Twentieth Corps from Chattanooga by way of Lee and Gordon’s Mill. Rosecrans realized that his pursuit of Bragg had left him dangerously overextended and, with the Confederates also concentrating and threatening to cut him off from his supply base in Chattanooga, had to act quickly. Bragg also knew that a great battle was imminent, and moreover, help from Longstreet’s Corps of the Army of Northern Virginia was on the way. While Longstreet’s assistance would no doubt be temporary, once he arrived the Army of

430   Andrew S. Bledsoe Tennessee would have about sixty-​five thousand men on hand and could at last achieve parity, even superiority over the enemy. Now was the time for Bragg to strike. Bragg’s difficulty lay in his confusion about the Federals’ true dispositions. Rosecrans’s left flank consisted of Crittenden at Lee and Gordon’s Mill. From there, two main roads led back to Chattanooga: the LaFayette Road, running north and west over Missionary Ridge and into the city, and the Dry Valley Road, paralleling the former and merging at Rossville. At Rosecrans’s rear lay Missionary Ridge, passable only via a few gaps, and beyond that, Chattanooga. In his front was the winding Chickamauga Creek, shallow but impassable except via a handful of small bridges and fords. Thomas’s Fourteenth Corps and McCook’s Twentieth Corps would, over the next twenty-​four hours, stream north along these roads and begin sliding into position alongside Crittenden. All told, Rosecrans would have about sixty thousand troops at his disposal. As the Federals gathered their forces across the west bank of the Chickamauga, Bragg too consolidated his army and outlined his attack plan to his generals. Thinking that the Army of the Cumberland’s left flank lay dangerously exposed, or “in the air,” at Lee and Gordon’s Mill, Bragg decided to strike Rosecrans a heavy blow there. Bragg’s complex plan would unfold in several stages. This movement, he hoped, would cut Rosecrans off from Chattanooga and position the remaining elements of the Confederate assault to strike the Federal flank at Lee and Gordon’s Mill, then drive them into the impenetrable barrier of Lookout Mountain. Bragg expected this elaborate plan to begin promptly at 6:00 a.m. on September 18 and impressed upon his generals the importance of rapidly crossing of the Chickamauga and pressing the enemy closely. All of this would be screened by Brig. Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest’s widely dispersed cavalry.16 Rosecrans remained unclear about Confederate plans and positions, and in order to provide an early warning system for his gathering army, deployed Brig. Gen. Robert H.  G. Minty’s cavalry brigade to monitor Reed’s Bridge, while Wilder’s brigade of mounted infantry guarded the Chickamauga between Alexander’s Bridge and Lee and Gordon’s Mill. These three thousand horsemen had deployed directly in the path of the main Confederate assault. Fortunately for them, the Confederate plan for an early start and swift crossing of the creek went awry immediately. Brig. Gen. Bushrod R. Johnson, whose column was supposed to set Bragg’s elaborate scheme in motion, took a wrong turn on his way to Reed’s Bridge and did not encounter Minty’s troopers until 11:00 a.m., five hours behind schedule. Forrest’s horsemen were too dispersed to provide either protection or intelligence for Johnson, and so the Confederates groped blindly ahead, completely uncertain of which enemy lay before them. Once Johnson reached Reed’s Bridge his column quickly stacked up, and he could not manage to force his way over the Chickamauga until the afternoon. Meanwhile, downstream from Minty, Wilder’s Lightning Brigade delayed the Confederate crossing there by hours. By evening on the eighteenth, the Confederates were still struggling to get across the Chickamauga and Rosecrans’s cavalry had thoroughly disrupted Bragg’s careful timetable. During the night of September 18–​19, Bragg continued to labor under the mistaken belief that Rosecrans’s left flank rested at Lee and Gordon’s Mill. In fact, Crittenden’s Twenty-​First Corps was now closer to the center of the Federal position, and the Federal

The Tullahoma and Chickamauga Campaigns    431 left extended as far as the McDonald Farm. By the morning of September 19, Rosecrans’s line stretched from the McDonald Farm to Lee and Gordon’s Mill, facing east along the LaFayette Road. Fighting began by accident, as rumors of an isolated Confederate brigade on the west bank of the Chickamauga prompted Thomas to order an attack. There was no isolated brigade; in fact, Thomas’s troops encountered Forrest’s cavalry near Jay’s Mill, and skirmishing soon escalated into a running fight that drifted from north to south. As fresh units from both sides arrived on the field, commanders fed them into the battle in piecemeal fashion, with neither side gaining much advantage. Eventually, however, the Confederates managed to push the Federals back across the LaFayette Road and create a dangerous gap in their lines. In savage fighting near the Brotherton and Viniard farms, the Confederate advance was checked by concentrated artillery, stubborn Federal resistance, and the firepower of Wilder’s repeaters. Other than an ineffective night attack by Confederate Maj. Gen. Patrick R. Cleburne’s troops, sunset brought fighting to a close and both sides looked to their wounded. During the night of September 19–​20, Bragg consulted with Longstreet, just arrived at the battle from the train station at Dalton. Bragg decided to reorganize his army on the fly, granting Longstreet and Polk “wing” command of two halves of the Army of Tennessee. Bragg had at last realized his error about the true nature of Rosecrans’s position and planned a new assault for the next morning. At first light, or “day-​dawn,” of the twentieth, Bragg wanted Polk, in charge of the newly constituted Right Wing, to launch a frontal attack on the Federals’ left flank with Hill’s fresh men. Once Polk’s assault was underway, each successive division along the line would likewise attack. Bragg hoped Polk would outflank or break Thomas’s Fourteenth Corps and then roll up the Federal line from north to south. Once Thomas was defeated, Polk was to turn south and join Longstreet and the Left Wing in finishing off the remainder of the Army of the Cumberland. Perhaps because of the toxic command environment in his army, Bragg elected not to hold a council of war with all of his corps commanders. Instead, he summoned Polk to his army headquarters and outlined his plans. Polk, upon returning to his own headquarters after this conference, actually passed Longstreet, who was on his way to see Bragg. When Polk got back to his camp, he waited for Hill to report to him. Hill, who had managed to get lost in the dark woods, never came, and Polk inexplicably decided to entrust the critical instructions for the next morning’s assault to a written dispatch before retiring to his tent for the night. Polk assumed these orders would reach Hill, but they never did, as the enlisted courier got lost and gave up the effort.17 Meanwhile, during the same night, Rosecrans and his top commanders consulted at the Army of the Cumberland’s headquarters in the Widow Glenn house. Rosecrans and his generals agreed that the Federal left was dangerously exposed and that as many units as possible ought to be shifted north along the LaFayette Road line. Thomas had identified what he considered to be a strong fallback position atop a series of hills at the Federal left rear. The locals called these hills Horseshoe Ridge, and Thomas had stationed several artillery batteries there in case of emergency. His men were busy using borrowed axes, shovels, and even bayonets to chop down trees, dig pits, and build low breastworks all along their line. Consisting of logs, fence rails, rocks, brush, and any other possible

432   Andrew S. Bledsoe cover, these works would provide important protection against the coming assaults. The Confederate delays gave Thomas’s men precious time to make their preparations; a dawn attack would have precluded many of these measures. When Polk’s attack predictably failed to commence as planned the next morning, a frustrated Bragg sent one of his staff officers to investigate. The staffer eventually found Polk, and when the officer returned to Bragg, he falsely reported that Polk was behind the lines leisurely reading a newspaper over breakfast. This was untrue, but what is certain is that Polk and Hill had not launched the expected assault, and in fact, Hill’s troops were having their own breakfasts, which they were permitted to finish. By the time the Left Wing’s attack finally got underway at about 9:45 a.m. on September 20, Bragg was in an understandable fury. Fierce Federal resistance from their strong defensive positions resulted in the bloody repulse of Breckinridge’s and Cleburne’s divisions; Rosecrans’s left held, and Polk’s attack had sputtered to a halt by noon. Still, the intensity of the Confederate assaults alarmed Thomas, in charge of that sector of the battlefield. He sent Rosecrans numerous requests for reinforcement and support throughout the morning. Rosecrans, exhausted from too much adrenaline and not enough sleep, misinterpreted these repeated requests and assumed that a gap had somehow been opened in Thomas’s line near Maj. Gen. Joseph J. Reynolds’s division. In reality, no such gap existed. Nevertheless, a frayed and frantic Rosecrans ordered Brig. Gen. Thomas J. Wood’s division out of its position near the Brotherton Farm near the Federal center in order to plug the imaginary hole. Rosecrans’s instructions were paradoxical and confusing, telling Wood, “The general commanding directs that you close up on Reynolds as fast as possible, and support him.”18 Confused, because another division blocked his way, Wood sought clarification from McCook, the nearest senior commander. McCook assured Wood that Rosecrans’s orders were nondiscretionary and that he, McCook, would fill Wood’s place with additional units from his Twentieth Corps. Wood received Rosecrans’s order at around 10:40 a.m. and began his withdrawal at about 11:00. McCook, as it happened, would have no time to fulfill his promise. By coincidence, the assault of Longstreet’s corps, now under Maj. Gen. John Bell Hood’s command, composed of eight brigades in five lines of ten thousand men, including the troops Longstreet and Hood had brought with them from Virginia, stepped off at 11:10 a.m. Crossing the LaFayette Road and the Brotherton field, Longstreet’s assault struck the gap in the Federal line at the precise time and place that it was most vulnerable. The line shattered under the force of the attack, and a good portion of the Army of the Cumberland was eventually routed from the field. By early afternoon, more than half of those men were fleeing up the roads to Chattanooga. Rosecrans himself decided to withdraw to Chattanooga to reorganize his broken army and prepare the city’s defenses, a decision rooted in a certain logic but certainly not what his panicked army wanted or needed at the moment of crisis. Crittenden and McCook joined him. En route to the city, Rosecrans decided to send his chief of staff Brig. Gen. James A. Garfield back to Thomas, the last corps commander holding out, with orders to take over management

The Tullahoma and Chickamauga Campaigns    433 of the battle, to lead the survivors still fighting at Chickamauga, and then to withdraw to Rossville when possible. George H.  Thomas was one of the few bright spots for Federal fortunes at Chickamauga. When Longstreet broke the Federal line near the Brotherton farm, Thomas remained calm and, true to form, organized a fighting withdrawal of the remainder of the Fourteenth Corps to Horseshoe Ridge, gathering broken units and fleeing batteries along the way. After making his headquarters on Snodgrass Hill, Thomas methodically placed his troops in a strong defensive position along the ridge and extending down to the Kelly field. Thomas then threw back repeated Confederate assaults all afternoon, even as his men’s ammunition began to dwindle. Holding out until sunset, the “Rock of Chickamauga” pulled the remainder of the Army of the Cumberland off the hills in an orderly retreat first to Rossville and then, on September 21, to Chattanooga, saving what was left of the Federal army. Bragg’s battered army attempted a pursuit but failed to catch the Federals before they could retreat into Chattanooga’s fortifications. Thomas’s steady performance at Chickamauga won him great acclaim and eventual elevation to lead the Army of the Cumberland, which he would do with distinction until the end of the war. The Battle of Chickamauga was immensely costly for both sides. The Army of the Cumberland lost over 1,600 killed, 10,000 wounded, and some 4,700 captured or missing. Chickamauga resulted in a large number of Federal prisoners in Confederate custody and was the first major battle after the general prisoner-​exchange policies between the two sides had completely broken down. Confederate prison camps in Richmond were so overburdened by the influx of captured Federals from Chickamauga that the government had to create the new, and notorious, prison at Andersonville, Georgia, in order to accommodate them. The Confederates suffered even greater losses than the Federals, with more than 2,300 killed, almost 15,000 wounded, and about 1,500 captured or missing.19 Chickamauga was the bloodiest battle in the western theater, and the second-​deadliest of the entire war, behind only Gettysburg in killed, wounded, and missing.20 The human toll of Chickamauga resonated beyond the ranks of the armies. George and Mary Brotherton’s small farmstead felt the brunt of some of the worst fighting on September 20. After the battle, the mostly destroyed farmstead resembled a slaughterhouse. The Brothertons buried nine Union soldiers in their yard alone. Tabler and Anna Viniard, along with their six children, were recent arrivals in the area, and their cornfields were covered with the dead and wounded. Rosecrans turned the home of Eliza Glenn, the young widow of a Confederate soldier, into his headquarters during the battle. Though she evacuated with her child and her slave, the Widow Glenn’s house burned to the ground from artillery fire and she never returned to it. George and Elizabeth Snodgrass and seven of their children refused to abandon their farm on the hill that bore their family name. They hid, along with several other refugee families, in a forested gully behind their farm as the sounds of battle swept over the fields. When they returned to their house, which had been employed as a field hospital, they were horrified

434   Andrew S. Bledsoe at the carnage. After a few years as refugees, the Snodgrass family rebuilt their farm, but it never fully recovered from the disruption of the battle.21 For all of Rosecrans’s acumen in planning and executing the Tullahoma operation, his tactical and operational abilities failed him during the Battle of Chickamauga. Mental exhaustion, complexity, and crippling command-​and-​control problems helped contribute to the disheartening Federal defeat and started a chain of events that led to Rosecrans’s fall from grace (and, on October 19, the loss of his command) during the siege of Chattanooga to follow. Still, the Tullahoma Campaign in particular accomplished a great deal for the Union cause, breaking Confederate control over much of the state of Tennessee, though at the cost of deprivation and disruption for the civilian population in the region. Bragg, on the other hand, redeemed himself somewhat from the operational and command failures prefacing the campaign and managed to recover a tactical victory, albeit an incomplete one, at Chickamauga, with the help of rail-​borne reinforcements from the Army of Northern Virginia and several days’ hard fighting by the Army of Tennessee. Still, taken as a whole the Tullahoma and Chickamauga campaigns were a defeat for the Confederacy, with important strategic and political consequences for the Civil War. By the fall of 1863 the Army of Tennessee had surrendered the middle region of Tennessee to Federal control, squandered several opportunities to severely damage or destroy the Army of the Cumberland, and ultimately failed to secure the critical city of Chattanooga. Also, with Burnside’s joint move into the heart of east Tennessee toward Knoxville, and the fall of that city at roughly the same time as the fall of Chattanooga, Lincoln managed to achieve one of his primary strategic objectives in relieving Tennessee’s Unionists, along with Union sympathizers in northern Alabama and Georgia. Though Bragg’s victory at Chickamauga threatened to jeopardize these goals, things could have been much worse for the Federals. Summer victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg may have created a premature sense of optimism among the Federal high command, only to be deflated by the stinging defeat in north Georgia. Still, Rosecrans’s humiliation would lead to Grant’s elevation, with long-​reaching consequences for the continuing effort to secure Chattanooga and carry the war deep into the Confederate heartland in 1864.

Notes 1. David A. Powell, The Chickamauga Campaign: A Mad Irregular Battle: From the Crossing of the Tennessee River through the Second Day, August 22–​September 19, 1863 (El Dorado Hills, CA: Savas Beatie, 2013), 24–​27. 2. William M. Lamers, The Edge of Glory: A Biography of General William S. Rosecrans, U.S.A. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999), 252–​263. 3. Christopher Kolakowski, The Stones River and Tullahoma Campaigns: This Army Does Not Retreat (Charleston, SC: History Press, 2011), 99–​100, 105–​106. 4. Robert E. Hunt, The Good Men Who Won the War: Army of the Cumberland Veterans and Emancipation Memory (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010), 96, 98.

The Tullahoma and Chickamauga Campaigns    435 5. Michael Bradley, Tullahoma:  The 1863 Campaign for the Control of Middle Tennessee (Shippensburg, PA: Burd Street Press, 2000), 32–​37. 6. U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1880–​ 1901), ser. 1, vol. 23, pt. 2: 623–​626, 759 (hereafter cited as OR); Kolakowski, The Stones River and Tullahoma Campaigns, 131. 7. Kolakowski, The Stones River and Tullahoma Campaigns, 136–​138. 8. Capt. Everett F.  Abbott to his mother, July 5–​7, 1863, Chamberlain Papers, Indiana Historical Society, Indianapolis. 9. Jonathan Dean Sarris, A Separate Civil War:  Communities in Conflict in the Mountain South (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006), 72. 10. William Glenn Robertson, River of Death—​The Chickamauga Campaign, vol. 1: The Fall of Chattanooga (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 114–​116. 11. OR, ser. 1, vol. 23, pt. 2: 517. 12. OR, ser. 1, vol. 23, pt. 2: 525–​526. 13. OR, ser. 1, vol. 23, pt. 2: 527. 14. George A.  Gordon to “Dear Krilla,” September 6, 1863, Gordon Letters, University of Texas, Austin. 15. Earl J.  Hess, Braxton Bragg:  The Most Hated Man of the Confederacy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 153–​158. 16. OR, ser. 1, vol. 30, pt. 2: 31. 17. David Powell and David Friedrichs, The Maps of Chickamauga (El Dorado Hills, CA: Savas Beatie, 2009), 138–​139. 18. OR, ser. 1, vol. 30, pt. 1: 635. 19. Larry Daniel, Conquered: Why the Army of Tennessee Failed (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 192. 20. David A. Powell, The Chickamauga Campaign: Barren Victory (El Dorado Hills, CA: Savas Beatie, 2016), 207–​216, 270–​280. 21. William Lee White, Bushwhacking on a Grand Scale: The Battle of Chickamauga, September 18–​20, 1863 (El Dorado Hills, CA, Savas Beatie, 2013), 153–​157.

Bibliography Astor, Aaron. The Civil War along Tennessee’s Cumberland Plateau. Charleston, SC: History Press, 2015. Connelly, Thomas Lawrence. Autumn of Glory:  The Army of Tennessee, 1862–​1865. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971. Daniel, Larry. Conquered: Why the Army of Tennessee Failed. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. Daniel, Larry. Days of Glory: The Army of the Cumberland, 1861–​1865. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006. Danielson, Joseph W. War’s Desolating Scourge:  The Union’s Occupation of North Alabama. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2012. Hess, Earl J. Braxton Bragg: The Most Hated Man of the Confederacy. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016.

436   Andrew S. Bledsoe Hess, Earl J. The Civil War in the West:  Victory and Defeat from the Appalachians to the Mississippi. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. Hunt, Robert E. The Good Men Who Won the War: Army of the Cumberland Veterans and Emancipation Memory. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010. Powell, David A. The Chickamauga Campaign: A Mad Irregular Battle: From the Crossing of the Tennessee River through the Second Day, August 22–​September 19, 1863. El Dorado Hills, CA: Savas Beatie, 2013. Powell, David A. The Chickamauga Campaign: Barren Victory: The Retreat into Chattanooga, the Confederate Pursuit, and the Aftermath of the Battle, September 21 to October 20, 1863. El Dorado Hills, CA: Savas Beatie, 2015. Powell, David A. The Chickamauga Campaign: Glory or the Grave: The Breakthrough, the Union Collapse, and the Defense of Horseshoe Ridge, September 20, 1863. El Dorado Hills, CA: Savas Beatie, 2014. Powell, David A., and Eric J. Wittenberg. Tullahoma: The Forgotten Campaign that Changed the Course of the Civil War, June 23–​July 1, 1863. El Dorado Hills, CA: Savas Beatie, 2020. Robertson, William Glenn. River of Death—​The Chickamauga Campaign. Vol. 1: The Fall of Chattanooga. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Sarris, Jonathan Dean. A Separate Civil War: Communities in Conflict in the Mountain South. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2006. Teters, Kristopher A. Practical Liberators: Union Officers in the Western Theater during the Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Woodworth, Steven E. Six Armies in Tennessee: The Chickamauga and Chattanooga Campaigns. New York: Bison Books, 1999.

Chapter 27

The Chat tan o o g a a nd Kn oxville Ca mpa i g ns War in the Switzerland of America Aaron Astor

The Union Army’s successful Chattanooga and Knoxville military campaigns of 1863 and 1864 opened Georgia and the Deep South to Union invasion, confirmed Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s suitability for leadership over all Union forces, and recalibrated the politics of loyalty in a bitterly divided section of the South. From the war’s earliest days, Unionist politicians like Senator Andrew Johnson, Horace Maynard, and William “Parson” Brownlow implored President Abraham Lincoln to rescue Confederate-​ occupied east Tennessee, dubbed by many the “Switzerland of America” for its verdant valleys and independent-​minded citizenry. But military matters overrode political sentiment, and the Union Army’s invasion path into Tennessee would go by way of the rivers to the west. The east Tennessee question reemerged in full force in the summer of 1863 with Union Maj. Gen. William S. Rosecrans’s successful Tullahoma Campaign carrying the war closer to Chattanooga and Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside’s Army of the Ohio preparing in Cincinnati for a drive toward Knoxville. On September 4, 1863, Confederate Gen. Braxton Bragg reported to authorities in Richmond the “advance of Burnside with a heavy force from Kentucky upon East Tennessee at the same time that Rosecrans moved upon Bridgeport.”1 The implication of this combined Union threat was clear:  Confederate positions in Knoxville, Chattanooga, and all of east Tennessee were in great danger. Bragg rightly feared encirclement in Chattanooga and the isolation and destruction of Maj. Gen. Simon Bolivar Buckner’s forces at Knoxville. Losing Chattanooga could prove fatal for the Confederate cause in the western theater. But without combining all available forces against Union armies coming from Kentucky and middle Tennessee, holding Chattanooga would be impossible. Buckner abandoned Knoxville in late August. Bragg evacuated Chattanooga in early September, joining Buckner in North Georgia, while awaiting reinforcements from Lt. Gen. James Longstreet. The Confederate retreat from east Tennessee was meant

438   Aaron Astor to be a temporary action, before strengthened and combined forces could retake the ground they had ceded without a fight. Instead it marked the beginning of a seven-​ month campaign of maneuver, siege, attack, deception, and destruction that would open the door to Atlanta and the final defeat of the Confederacy in the West. The complex topography of east Tennessee factored heavily in the military decision-​ making on both sides. The Tennessee River follows a strange U-​shape course, beginning in northeastern Tennessee and carving out a great valley from Knoxville to Chattanooga before cutting a spectacular gorge in the Cumberland Plateau. The river continues southwest and west across Alabama and then turns back north again through Tennessee and into Kentucky. The Upper Tennessee River Valley contained much of east Tennessee’s population, the most fertile soil in the region, and several small but commercially profitable towns. Knoxville, with roughly 5,000 people in 1860 and Chattanooga, with about 2,500, were the largest of these, though new communities grew with the arrival of the railroad. On the east side of the river and its main tributary, the Holston, is the Blue Ridge. To the west is the Cumberland Plateau, a tableland with perilous escarpments and little arable soil. Two railroads completed in the 1850s joined at Knoxville, one heading northeast to Virginia and the other southwest to Chattanooga, with junctions to railroads into Georgia and Alabama. Mastery of this terrain would require careful protection of long supply lines. Civilians of mixed loyalty wreaked havoc on invading armies by sabotaging railroad or supply infrastructure. Loyalties in the region depended heavily on prewar

Map 27.1 Chattanooga

The Chattanooga and Knoxville Campaigns    439 railroad trade. Those living close to the railroad and interacting with business interests in Virginia or Georgia tended to support the Confederacy. But the vast majority of the population in east Tennessee did not live along the railroad and maintained loyalty to the Union throughout the war. In November 1861, several residents conspired with the Lincoln administration in a plot to burn nine railroad bridges. When Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman refused to offer military support for this effort, many of the saboteurs were arrested and executed, often in barbaric fashion. Confederate Secretary of State Judah Benjamin called for the bridge burners to be “tried summarily by drum-​ head court-​martial” and executed immediately if found guilty. “It would be well to leave their bodies hanging in the vicinity of the burned bridges.”2 Although only a small fraction of the pro-​Union population participated in the conspiracy, many Confederate-​ supporting civilians encouraged a wider crackdown against the “traitors” and “Tories” in their midst. Imposition of martial law and a major crackdown against Unionist civilians in the ensuing months forced an exodus of thousands of men, leaving women and children behind to fend off Confederate conscription agents and guerrillas. Confederate Col. Danville Leadbetter reported the Unionists “scattering in the mountain paths,” where their “arms are hidden when not in use.”3 Unionists like Carter County’s Daniel Ellis, the “Red Fox,” and Cumberland County’s Richard and Ezylphia Flynn sheltered beleaguered Unionists from across east Tennessee and guided them over the mountains to Kentucky.4 There they formed Union regiments and eagerly awaited their chance to return home. Enforcement of Confederate conscription in late 1862 only exacerbated the crisis facing Unionist civilians desperate to avoid service in the Confederate Army. Burnside’s invasion and occupation of Knoxville brought many of these exiles back home again. Returning to east Tennessee in September 1863, Unionists who suffered under Confederate rule testified to their mistreatment by both Confederate conscription agents and Confederate-​supporting civilians in the first two years of war. Brownlow, the fiery Unionist, renamed his newspaper the Knoxville Whig and Rebel Ventilator and began publication in November 1863. Its first issue listed the “most atrocious murders ever known to this hell-​born and hell-​bound Rebellion.”5 Brownlow cited wanton murders of peaceable citizens—​including fellow ministers—​whose only crime was being “Lincolnites.”6 An intensifying guerrilla war added to the sense of desperation among east Tennessee civilians. In the Great Smoky Mountains, Unionist civilians in Cades Cove hid from raids by Confederate John J. Kirkland’s bushwhackers and the heavily Cherokee Thomas Legion. On the Cumberland Plateau, Champ Ferguson initiated a reign of terror on Union civilians, many of whom joined bands like Tinker Dave Beaty’s Independent Scouts for protection and revenge. Mixed-​loyalty populations sought safety in neighboring counties. The guerrilla struggle drew upon existing social networks of kin, commerce, politics, and church and followed its own logic of retaliation. But it was intimately connected to the shifting fortunes and placements of larger Union and Confederate armies fighting for control of Chattanooga and Knoxville.

440   Aaron Astor Burnside’s occupation of Knoxville meant a reversal of fortune for the city’s Confederate supporters. Legions of Confederate sympathizers abandoned Knoxville with Buckner’s army. Some would return after the war ended; others left for good, settling in Georgia, middle Tennessee, or Texas. The pattern held for east Tennessee beyond Knoxville as well. Unionist reprisals against Confederate civilians received open approval from Brownlow, as when the wealthy Campbell County slaveholder John Kincaid, described as a “bitter, thorough and unrelenting rebel,” was murdered by area Unionists when he tried to collect old debts.7 Official Union policies added to the woes of Confederate supporters. Burnside appointed Brig. Gen. Samuel Carter as provost marshal general to administer loyalty oaths and arrest dissenters. A  new Tennessee National Guard, with local Home Guards funded and armed by the Union Army, helped to protect Unionist communities like Cades Cove and also to conduct offensive operations against Confederate supporters. The guerrilla war would continue until 1865, and in some places beyond. Just weeks after vacating Knoxville and Chattanooga in September 1863, Confederate forces won a stunning victory at the Battle of Chickamauga, a few miles south of Chattanooga. The Union Army of the Cumberland escaped complete destruction because of the heroic stand of Maj. Gen. George Thomas on Snodgrass Hill, which allowed the army to file intact into Chattanooga. Confederate victory at Chickamauga revived the hopes of Confederate-​supporting civilians in both cities that they would soon be able to return home and resume their positions within society. The shocking loss at Chickamauga left Rosecrans dazed and emotionally paralyzed, even if the Army of the Cumberland remained in good spirits. But the army needed help, as rations would not last a few weeks of an effective siege. Within days, President Lincoln ordered Maj. Generals Joseph Hooker and Oliver Howard and the Eleventh and Twelfth Corps of the Army of the Potomac to begin the long journey from Virginia to Tennessee, by way of Ohio and a network of railroads.8 General Grant also ordered Sherman to send divisions from Mississippi to Chattanooga. Burnside, in Knoxville, refused to add to the relief effort, concerned as he was with protecting the vital railroad. The first Eleventh Corps troops arrived by rail at Bridgeport, Alabama, on October 3. Sherman had a much tougher task because of low water and railroads that needed repair. By the middle of October, the wheels of the Union military command were in motion. Though victorious at Chickamauga, Bragg faced a more pressing leadership crisis than did Rosecrans. Long-​running disputes with top subordinates exploded into outright mutiny, especially when it became apparent that the Army of the Cumberland had survived the retreat from Chickamauga intact. Bragg purged Lt. Gen. Leonidas Polk and Maj. Gen. Thomas Hindman, while General Longstreet wired Richmond to complain about Bragg’s leadership. Other than occupying Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge, the only offensive action taken at the time was to dispatch Maj. Gen. Joseph Wheeler and his cavalry to raid the lush Sequatchie Valley. This action was indeed costly for the besieged Federals. But Wheeler failed to maintain discipline among his men or coordinate with other generals to close off Union supply lines before Federal troops chased him into Alabama.

The Chattanooga and Knoxville Campaigns    441 Both armies faced their leadership moment of truth in the middle of October. Confederate Pres. Jefferson Davis arrived at Chattanooga to assess the mutiny among the generals. He affirmed his support for Bragg, much to the dismay of the other generals. Bragg continued his purge, removing and demoting Buckner, Brig. Gen. William Preston, and Lt. Gen. Daniel H. Hill. After receiving a vicious verbal assault from Brig. Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, Bragg sent the cavalryman west to Mississippi. Longstreet remained by Bragg’s side for the moment, as did Maj. Gen. Patrick Cleburne and Lt. Gen. William J. Hardee. These personnel decisions pleased neither the Confederate officer corps nor the soldiers in the ranks. Union leadership approached matters differently. A week after Davis backed Bragg, President Lincoln made a serious change in Union leadership structure in the West, placing Grant in charge of the newly created Military Division of the Mississippi, which included scattered commands in the western theater. On October 19, Grant removed Rosecrans from command of the Army of the Cumberland and recommended the War Department appoint George Thomas to lead it. Thomas, under Grant’s instructions, vowed to hold Chattanooga “until we starve.”9 As Grant himself reached Chattanooga on October 23, he placed Sherman in charge of the Army of the Tennessee and ordered him to move immediately to Chattanooga. The most pressing task for Grant and Thomas was reopening a precarious supply route into town. The Union Army still held the Nashville and Chattanooga Railroad bridge crossing at Bridgeport, Alabama. But getting from that point to Chattanooga was nearly impossible as long as Confederates on Raccoon and Lookout mountains guarded the railroad into town. Vulnerable Union supply wagons had to travel over sixty miles on poor roads while braving Wheeler’s raiders and sharpshooter attacks. Union soldiers described the “starvation camp” in Chattanooga, with rations getting smaller each week.10 Rosecrans and many officers in the Army of the Cumberland considered evacuating the city. Brig. Gen. William F.  “Baldy” Smith, chief of engineers in the Army of the Cumberland, proposed a solution: link up with Hooker via Brown’s Ferry. This would require sophisticated coordination and bold action under the nose of Confederate artillerists and sharpshooters. When Grant arrived in Chattanooga, he and Thomas approved of Baldy Smith’s plan, to take effect early in the morning of October 27. Thomas authorized Brig. Gen. John Basil Turchin’s brigade to cross Moccasin Bend and secure the east side of the Brown’s Ferry crossing. Another brigade, led by Brig. Gen. William Hazen, sailed downriver in the fog, below the unsuspecting Confederate guns on Lookout Mountain, and established a bridgehead on the west side of Brown’s Ferry. Just two Confederate regiments guarded the area west of the crossing. Meanwhile, two corps had moved from Bridgeport to Kelly’s Ferry and then across Lookout Valley to Brown’s Ferry. They met Turchin and Hazen on October 28. The so-​called Cracker Line was now open, and Union supplies could be brought into Chattanooga. Bragg was furious when he learned of this development. He was even more angry that Longstreet had done nothing to prevent it. Bragg ordered Longstreet to recapture the Union supply route, if not at Brown’s Ferry itself then at another place along the route.

442   Aaron Astor Longstreet chose a nighttime attack at Wauhatchie Station in the Lookout Valley. The battle turned into a confusing melee. Brig. Gen. John W. Geary’s Union soldiers were bivouacking and unprepared for the direct attack. Longstreet failed to bring enough troops along in the event of Federal reinforcements, which arrived soon after the battle began. Confederate troops eventually retreated back to Lookout Mountain, and the Cracker Line remained secure. The entire Chattanooga Campaign changed after the Union supply line opened through Brown’s Ferry. Instead of starving out the Army of the Cumberland, Bragg’s army risked being cut off from its own supply lines and from contact with Richmond. The only offensive operation possible at this point was to move around to the right and try to retake the railroad running to Virginia via Knoxville. Bragg had already considered such a move, sending Maj. Gen. Carter L.  Stevenson as far northeast as Loudon. Bragg hoped to link up Stevenson with Maj. Gen. Sam Jones in Upper East Tennessee near the Virginia border, dislodge Burnside, and reopen the railroad. But after the Wauhatchie disaster, Bragg decided to send Longstreet himself up to Knoxville and to retrieve Stevenson back to Chattanooga. On November 3, 1863, Bragg dispatched Longstreet for Knoxville. Despite facing a strong, well-​supplied, and growing enemy planning to break out of Chattanooga, Bragg divided his own forces, sending a third of his fighting men to Knoxville. But his motives were political as much as military. He was happy to rid himself of Longstreet and perhaps set up Lee’s old warhorse to take the blame if and when the Union Army pushed out of Chattanooga. Longstreet, for his part, was happy to be free of Bragg. Longstreet commanded ten thousand battle-​hardened infantry and artillery, as well as five thousand cavalry. From the beginning, he struggled with poor supply and reconnaissance for his east Tennessee Campaign. Railroad cars moved inefficiently; Longstreet repeatedly insisted that he could move his men and materiel by foot faster than by the clogged East Tennessee and Georgia Railroad. After stopping at Cleveland on November 8, he continued his march to the Tennessee River crossing at Loudon. From this point, Longstreet’s approach to Knoxville would depend on the erratic Burnside’s actions. While Longstreet made his push toward Knoxville, Burnside made two important decisions to defend the city and to help Grant in Chattanooga. First, he deployed thousands of men to build fortifications to defend the city from imminent attack. Orlando Poe headed the operation, finishing forts already begun by the Confederates and constructing new forts as needed. Poe was a skilled engineer and devised a system of fortifications that straddled the Holston River. Civilians and recently freed slaves worked tirelessly building the forts for him. Burnside’s second decision was to move west out of Knoxville along the Kingston Road and then southwest toward the likely river crossing at Huff ’s Ferry near Loudon, while Poe continued work on the fortifications.11 Burnside hoped to slow Longstreet down as he crossed the Tennessee River, and he also wanted to lure Longstreet away from Chattanooga so that he would be unable to turn around and help Bragg if called back. This required cavalry activity at Huff ’s Ferry and then a larger infantry demonstration at

The Chattanooga and Knoxville Campaigns    443

Map 27.2 Knoxville

Lenoir’s Station. Burnside sensed he was outnumbered at Lenoir’s Station and retreated back toward Knoxville to Campbell’s Station. Before Longstreet crossed the river at Huff ’s Ferry on November 12, he deployed Wheeler’s cavalry to approach Knoxville from the south. This was partly to decoy the larger movement and also to test the Union defenses south of the river. Wheeler’s men crossed the Little Tennessee River and scattered Union cavalry at Maryville and Rockford before reaching Fort Dickerson on November 15. Considerable fire from the fort convinced Wheeler that a direct assault was impossible, so he returned to join the rest of Longstreet’s army at Campbell Station west of Knoxville. Burnside’s feint down the Kingston Road nearly backfired as he found himself trapped between two columns of Confederates marching parallel to his men and aiming for Campbell’s Station. Longstreet hoped to trap Burnside in a double envelopment and prevent him from returning to his fortifications in Knoxville. After a forced march on November 16 Burnside skillfully fought off both Maj. Gen. Lafayette McLaws’s Division on the Union right and Brig. Gen. Micah Jenkins’s Division on the Union left. Reaching Campbell Station safely, Burnside retreated to Knoxville. With an open-​field battle opportunity now lost, Longstreet decided to do as Bragg had done at Chattanooga: lay siege to the Union Army. By November 20, then, Union forces were besieged in the cities of Chattanooga and Knoxville, respectively. The next ten days would determine the outcome of the whole campaign and, to a large extent, the course of the war in the western theater. Chattanooga would witness the first action when General Sherman finally arrived. But

444   Aaron Astor first, Sherman’s Army of the Tennessee needed to navigate the flooded roads and damaged pontoon bridge at Brown’s Ferry. Sherman planned to cross at Brown’s Ferry, use the hills on Moccasin Point to shield his movements and travel along the north side of the Tennessee River, and then recross the Tennessee River near the mouth of South Chickamauga Creek, just upriver from Chattanooga. Sherman’s movements spooked Bragg, who feared that Sherman was actually heading all the way up toward Knoxville. So Bragg sent Gen. Patrick Cleburne and eleven thousand men to Chickamauga Station to board rail cars for Knoxville, where they could support Longstreet. Meanwhile, Thomas’s Army of the Cumberland was tasked with keeping the center of the Confederate line honest so it would not move to support troops on the north end of Missionary Ridge. Between Thomas’s troops and the base of Missionary Ridge was Orchard Knob, a thinly guarded protrusion that could be used as an artillery post if the Union Army could take it. For now, however, Thomas’s orders were to stay put and wait for Sherman to begin the battle. But Thomas’s men began skirmishing with Confederate troops on Orchard Knob on November 23. In the first of several heroic acts by the ordinary soldiers and officers of the Army of the Cumberland, Union forces charged up Orchard Knob and captured it after only a brief firefight. The result was electrifying, the first major battle activity for the Army of the Cumberland after two months of interminable waiting in the Chattanooga siege. Once atop Orchard Knob, Thomas’s Army of the Cumberland could now train their fire on the Confederate rifle pits at the base of Missionary Ridge or launch artillery support if needed. The next day the action shifted to the southern end of the battlefield, where Hooker’s three divisions made a demonstration on Lookout Mountain. The instructions were to advance only as far as the Cravens House, on a plateau below the brow of Lookout Mountain. Crossing Lookout Creek and taking position on the western slope, with their right near the crest and their left near the foot of the mountain, Geary’s men quickly overran Confederate troops at the Cravens House. The fog had hidden the Union infantry on their way up, allowing Hooker’s forces to catch the Confederates by surprise. A brief counterattack from Confederates coming down the Summertown Road threatened to drive the Federals back off the mountain, but reinforcements arrived to hold the plateau and force the Confederates back up to safety. Bragg had already notified Carter Stevenson that holding Lookout Mountain was not a priority and that he should move his men to Missionary Ridge as soon as he could. Union forces did not know of this, of course, and expected to face a deadly attack from the top if they continued onward. With orders to stay put, the men nevertheless continued fighting their way up along the side of the mountain until they were within sight of the summit. Once there, the Union soldiers discovered that the Confederate Army had abandoned the point atop Lookout Mountain with hardly a fight. It was another major boost of morale, especially when Union troops down in the city of Chattanooga witnessed the stars and stripes flying atop Lookout Mountain. With Orchard Knob and Lookout Mountain in Federal control, the great task of Missionary Ridge now lay ahead for the Union Army. After crossing the Tennessee River

The Chattanooga and Knoxville Campaigns    445 on November 23, Sherman’s men eagerly sought the north end of Missionary Ridge. On the twenty-​fourth, they prepared for a vigorous attack on what they assumed to be the north end of Missionary Ridge. Unfortunately, Sherman operated with a bad map that failed to account for a knoll separated from the main ridge. Known as Billy Goat Hill, the knob was lightly defended, leading Sherman to believe that his men had already achieved a stunning victory when they climbed atop it by the afternoon of November 24. As Sherman’s men threatened the real north end of Missionary Ridge from Billy Goat Hill, Bragg quickly called for General Cleburne to return from Chickamauga Station and scale the north end of Missionary Ridge above the railroad tunnel. Cleburne’s men were in position for an eventual assault from Sherman once the Union commander discovered that he had yet to reach his destination. On the morning of November 25, Sherman sprang into action and discovered, much to his chagrin, the error of his reconnaissance. He sent several charges against Cleburne’s forces atop Tunnel Hill on the north end of Missionary Ridge. All of them were driven back. Repeated attacks on the north and west side of Tunnel Hill were repulsed. For the first time since the Battle of Chickamauga, the Union Army faced a serious military setback, and Sherman was the one to have failed. Meanwhile, Hooker attempted to assault the south end of Missionary Ridge and ran into his own trouble reaching his destination. So Grant turned to Thomas and his Army of the Cumberland to scatter the Confederate rifle pits at the base of the ridge and offer artillery support for Sherman’s assault on the Confederate right. Grant’s specific orders to Thomas and Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger were to take the rifle pits and “halt there.”12 Confederate troops at the bottom of the ridge were unprepared for the open-​field attack and panicked at the site of the attacking Army of the Cumberland. They had allowed no escape route except to flee directly up Missionary Ridge itself. This portended a complete disaster for Bragg’s army because his men atop the ridge would have to wait for their own forces to reach safety at the top before they could fire down at any pursuing Union attackers. Also troubling for the Confederate Army was the placement of artillery on the topographic crest of Missionary Ridge and not the military crest. The topographic crest was too high to point artillery downward against a direct charge up the ridge, thus rendering the artillery useless against an attack from below. Union troops who reached the rifle pits ignored orders to halt, seeing an opportunity to chase the Confederates up the hill and perhaps capture them. As Brig. Gen. August Willich’s brigade pressed against Confederates rushing up the hill, they came within sight of the top. With no Confederate artillery in immediate support, Willich’s brigade and then other brigades reached the top of Missionary Ridge and surprised Confederate forces not expecting the Federal arrival. Panic ensued atop the ridge as Army of the Cumberland troops carried the center of Missionary Ridge and destroyed the Confederate line. It was one of the most astonishing victories of the campaign and arguably the entire war. The Army of the Cumberland had redeemed itself after the collapse at Chickamauga. It had outshone Sherman’s Army of the Tennessee as well. For the Confederates, the collapse on Missionary Ridge was a catastrophe that could have resulted in the complete destruction of the Army of Tennessee. Confederate

446   Aaron Astor troops ran from the ridge to the east, crossed Chickamauga Creek, and made their way for Ringgold, Georgia. Grant cut the telegraph lines at Chickamauga Station so that Bragg could not communicate with Longstreet. After a brief pursuit, Grant’s troops halted. On November 27, Hooker’s men tried to break through Ringgold Gap and rout the Confederates, but Cleburne guarded the gap with artillery and fought off the Union pursuit. The Confederate Army of Tennessee survived, but it had been expelled from Tennessee. A few days later, Bragg was relieved of command, replaced by Joseph Johnston. Though operationally intact, the Confederate Army had suffered a grievous blow in the western theater, and the Union Army was poised to march into the Confederate heartland of Georgia. On the twenty-​ninth, Grant ordered Sherman to embark for Knoxville to relieve Burnside from Longstreet’s ten-​day siege. When Sherman arrived outside Knoxville on December 5, he learned that Burnside had already won a spectacular victory of his own, which began with his escape at Campbell’s Station on November 16. After failing to trap Burnside, Longstreet began preparations for an attack on Knoxville along the Kingston Road. He established his headquarters at the Bleak House, which contained a tower that could serve as a sharpshooter’s nest. Hoping to delay Longstreet’s approach, Brig. Gen. William Sanders led dismounted cavalry outside of the Union fortifications and along the Kingston Road. On November 18, Lt. Samuel Benjamin fired an artillery round from 2,500 yards away that hit the Bleak House tower and scattered the sharpshooters. But Longstreet intensified efforts to drive back the forward Union line later in the afternoon.13 As the Union line faltered, he advanced down the Kingston Road closer to Knoxville and sent Wheeler’s cavalry to probe the defenses to the north and east of the city. By November 19, Union troops had returned inside the fortifications and Longstreet dug in for a siege, having determined that Union fortifications were too strong for an immediate assault. Longstreet continued to probe other defenses of Knoxville, including forts on the south side of Holston River. He launched a steady barrage of artillery fire on the residents of Knoxville. But Orlando Poe’s fortification system had made Knoxville one of the most heavily fortified cities in the entire war. Supply lines to the southeast remained intact too, as Unionist farmers in outer Knox and Sevier counties funneled food across Bowman’s Ferry to the besieged troops. Longstreet maintained an incorrect map of the rivers in the area that showed the French Broad and Holston rivers joining west of the city rather than east. He failed to send sufficient cavalry to close off this key food supply. As in Chattanooga, the besieged would be better fed than those laying siege. Only a direct assault would drive Burnside out. Longstreet’s artilleryman Lt. Col. E. Porter Alexander had determined that the northwest bastion of the recently renamed Fort Sanders was the most vulnerable point in the Union line. Unfortunately, Longstreet and Alexander made a key miscalculation. Through their field glasses they observed Union soldiers walking casually along the outside of the fort, where it appeared that the ditch outside the walls was no more than waist deep. Siege ladders would not even be necessary, so they thought, because the attackers could simply charge up the sloping earthen walls and overwhelm the Union batteries

The Chattanooga and Knoxville Campaigns    447 and infantry at the top. The reality, however, was that the men seen along the outskirts of the fort were walking across planks that crossed a ditch up to six feet deep and twelve feet wide. Added to the fort walls themselves, the total climb from the bottom of the ditch to the top would be eighteen feet in total. The ditch would be a death trap for Longstreet’s attackers. Early on the morning of November 29, Longstreet’s troops approached the northwest bastion of Fort Sanders. Cutting through abatis and facing increasing Federal artillery fire, the men reached the edge of the ditch. The cold night had frozen the dew in the ditch, turning the walls into a sheet of ice. The Confederates paused only briefly at the ditch and then jumped in. In the next twenty minutes Longstreet’s men would make two efforts to charge up the icy walls. Each time the Federal troops at the top fired rifles, pistols, and artillery at the troops below, even as they kept pushing forward. A few managed to reach the top, climbing atop their comrades’ shoulders, only to be shot down at the parapet. The attack continued for several minutes this way until Lieutenant Benjamin—​the man who punctured the Bleak House sharpshooter tower—​thought to cut the fuses of his 20-​pounder Parrott artillery shells and toss them into the ditch.14 These makeshift grenades proved to be devastating for Longstreet’s troops, creating panic among the trapped men. Twenty minutes after the attack began, Longstreet’s men retreated, leaving many trapped in the ditch and waiting to be captured. The Battle of Fort Sanders ended with a lopsided casualty count: 813 killed, wounded, and captured on the Confederate side and just 13 killed and wounded on the Union side. A few hours after the defeat at Fort Sanders, Longstreet received disturbing news from Bragg. Not only had the Army of Tennessee been driven from Chattanooga and into Georgia, but the Union Army had also cut off telegraph and rail lines at Cleveland, thus cutting Longstreet off from Bragg for good. Longstreet knew then that retreat to Georgia was impossible. But he hoped to hold on and maintain the siege and perhaps try another assault at a different point. On December 2 he learned of more bad news: General Sherman had been dispatched to relieve the besieged Federals on November 29 and would arrive imminently. In fact, Sherman had sent two messengers to deliver the news of the relief mission. One went to Burnside via a network of civilian couriers, and the other allowed himself to be captured so that Longstreet would get the news too. At the same time, Longstreet’s northern defenses faced a threat from Maj. Gen. John G. Foster and Brig. Gen. Orlando Willcox, coming south from Cumberland Gap. Longstreet’s siege was untenable. In the days that followed, he began his retreat from Knoxville, but this time to the north and east of the city. The long denouement of the Chattanooga and Knoxville campaign began. Sherman’s arrival in Knoxville on December 5 effectively ended the siege and helped the city begin to recover. But Sherman would be needed in Georgia for the coming push on Atlanta, so he left behind just two divisions of Gordon Granger’s Fourth Corps to defend Knoxville. Two Union cavalry elements reinforced with new arrivals coming down from Cumberland Gap tried to drive Longstreet further away from the city, but the result was a new stalemate. Over the course of the next four months, Longstreet would remain east of Knoxville. He poked and prodded at the outskirts of the Federal defenses.

448   Aaron Astor Attempts to isolate and destroy pockets of Union cavalry at Bean’s Station on December 14 resulted in a brief Confederate victory that amounted to little in the end. Beginning in late December at Mossy Creek, Dandridge, and Fair Garden, Longstreet engaged in a series of brief tactical fights only to find himself in the same position, cut off from Knoxville, but with a rail line to Virginia intact. He went into winter headquarters at Russellville at the end of January 1864. Though Longstreet dreamed of a possible northward invasion of Kentucky from his position in east Tennessee, he would receive no help for such a move. On April 7 he received official instructions to begin moving out of east Tennessee and back to Virginia to support Lee against the coming Overland Campaign. After the siege of Knoxville had been lifted on December 4, the city’s civilian life began to change dramatically. Most important was the recruitment of African Americans from across east Tennessee for the 1st U.S. Colored Heavy Artillery, which would be stationed at Knoxville for the next two years. With Tennessee exempted from the Emancipation Proclamation, military service would prove to be the only avenue for enslaved men to attain freedom for themselves and their families. Abandoning the farms of the region, enslaved men followed recruiters to Knoxville, where they enlisted in the army. Women and children were also welcomed into the city, though their movement was restricted to an army-​controlled farm on the south side of the river or to contraband camps near the fortifications. Recruitment for the 1st U.S. Colored Heavy Artillery would accelerate the destruction of slavery in east Tennessee and, eventually, western North Carolina and southwest Virginia. The Chattanooga and Knoxville campaigns proved to be decisive in the Civil War. Dramatic maneuvering of Union and Confederate commanders between September and November 1863 resulted in a siege in two cities that culminated in disasters for the Confederate Army. Burnside redeemed his reputation at Knoxville by fending off the same General Longstreet who had defeated him soundly at Fredericksburg a year before. And at Chattanooga the Army of the Cumberland redeemed its reputation after Chickamauga by boldly charging up Missionary Ridge without direct instructions. The Army of the Cumberland outshone the Army of the Tennessee led by Grant’s favored subordinate, William T. Sherman, who had failed to take the north end of the ridge. Still, Grant would be sent east after the campaign to take control of all Federal forces, while Sherman assumed command of the Military Division of the Mississippi, which would include George Thomas’s Army of the Cumberland. When Longstreet finally abandoned east Tennessee in April 1864, the gateway to the Deep South was now open for the coming campaign for Atlanta. The Chattanooga and Knoxville campaigns were devastating for many civilians. Farms stripped of livestock, seed corn, and building materials would never regain the prosperity of the 1850s. Though some divided families reconciled, many did not. Soil erosion reduced the productive capacity of small farms, while partible inheritance practices left subsequent generations with parcels of land too small to live on. Both whites and African Americans in rural east Tennessee moved in large numbers to Chattanooga and Knoxville.

The Chattanooga and Knoxville Campaigns    449 At the same time, marble quarries, zinc, iron, and coal mines, lumber camps, and rail yards appeared throughout east Tennessee in the decades following the Civil War. Many Union officers, like Col. John Wilder, saw postwar investment opportunities in the iron, timber, and coal resources of east Tennessee, developing new towns like Rockwood, Dayton, and Johnson City and helping turn Chattanooga and Knoxville into New South manufacturing and warehouse cities.15 While these enterprises produced enormous wealth for investors from the area and beyond, they also provoked intense labor conflict, especially over the use of convict leasing. In response, a nascent Appalachian labor movement challenged the new barons of industry. Chattanooga and Knoxville would witness many more battles to come over the meaning of freedom, Union, equality, community, and economic progress.

Notes 1. U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1880–​ 1901), ser. 1, vol. 30, pt. 2: 20. Hereafter cited as OR. 2. OR, ser. 2, vol. 1: 848. 3. OR, ser. 2, vol. 1: 849. 4. Daniel Ellis, The Thrilling Adventures of Daniel Ellis, the Great Union Guide of East Tennessee for a Period of Nearly Four Years during the Great Southern Rebellion (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1867). 5. Knoxville (TN) Whig and Rebel Ventilator, November 11, 1863. 6. Knoxville (TN) Whig and Rebel Ventilator, November 11, 1863. 7. Knoxville (TN) Whig and Rebel Ventilator, February 22, 1865. 8. Carl Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln:  The War Years (New  York:  Harcourt, Brace, 1939), 2:426–​427. 9. OR, ser. 1, vol. 30, pt. 4: 479. 10. Isaac C. Doan, Reminiscences of the Chattanooga Campaign (Richmond, IN: J. M. Coe, 1894), 8. 11. OR, ser. 1, vol. 31, pt. 3: 33–​34. 12. Thomas J. Wood, “The Battle of Missionary Ridge,” in Sketches of War History 1861–​1865 (Cincinnati: Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States—​Ohio Commandery, 1896), 4:34. 13. Orlando Poe, Personal Recollections of the Occupation of East Tennessee and the Defense of Knoxville (Detroit, MI: Ostler, 1889), 27. 14. OR, ser. 1, vol. 31, pt. 1: 342–​344. 15. Samuel C. Williams, General John T.  Wilder:  Commander of the Lightning Brigade (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1936), 40–​42.

Bibliography Astor, Aaron. The Civil War along Tennessee’s Cumberland Plateau. Charleston, SC: History Press, 2015.

450   Aaron Astor Cozzens, Peter. The Shipwreck of Their Hopes:  The Battles for Chattanooga. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1996. Fisher, Noel C. War at Every Door: Partisan Politics and Guerrilla Violence in East Tennessee, 1860–​1869. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Groce, W. Todd. Mountain Rebels: East Tennessee Confederates 1860–​1870. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2000. Hess, Earl J. The Knoxville Campaign:  Burnside and Longstreet in East Tennessee. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2013. Jones, Evan C., and Wiley Sword, eds. Gateway to the Confederacy: New Perspectives on the Chickamauga and Chattanooga Campaigns, 1862–​ 1863. Baton Rouge:  Louisiana State University Press, 2014. McKenzie, Robert Tracy, Lincolnites and Rebels:  A Divided Town in Civil War America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Sword, Wiley. Mountains Touched with Fire: Chattanooga Besieged, 1863. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1993. Woodworth, Steven E. Six Armies in Tennessee: The Chickamauga and Chattanooga Campaigns. Lincoln, NE: Bison Books, 1999.

Chapter 28

The Overl and C a mpa i g n No Turning Back Lisa Tendrich Frank and Brooks D. Simpson

With eagerness and anxiety, Americans approached the resumption of military operations in Virginia and the eastern theater in spring 1864. Union and Confederate alike knew that the stakes were high as President Abraham Lincoln sought his second term in office. Lincoln’s appointment of Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant as general in chief of the U.S. armies and Grant’s decision to oversee personally the operations in Virginia, where he would confront the Confederacy’s most revered and successful commander, Gen. Robert E. Lee, meant all eyes would be on the Old Dominion. The looming campaign would again bring the war to Confederate citizens in the region. During this campaign U.S. soldiers invaded homesteads, destroyed the landscapes of towns and farms, looted and foraged what they needed and often destroyed any surplus, and otherwise terrorized civilians by their presence. Enslaved African Americans often saw U.S. troops as an emancipatory force, encouraged in part by the large presence of African American Union soldiers who served in Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside’s Ninth Corps. The Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia spent the winter of 1863–​1864 in central Virginia, in familiar places near the Rapidan and Rappahannock rivers. The residents of Warrenton and Culpepper had already seen their share of action and anticipated that future military operations in Fredericksburg would once again blur the lines that separated homefront from battlefront. Grant’s plan of campaign would revisit the Wilderness and come close to Gaines Mill, where Lee had earlier defeated Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan, now the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate, in the summer of 1862. Such fluid boundaries would continue to define the war during the Overland Campaign. Grant wanted to break the strategic stalemate in the eastern theater that had left the contending armies encamped in winter quarters not far from where they had been the previous winter. While Union armies had enjoyed dramatic successes north of the Potomac River in 1862 and 1863, it seemed as if the Confederates owned their

452    Lisa Tendrich Frank and Brooks D. Simpson counterparts on the south of the river. The question remained whether U.S. troops could change that situation with Grant as their new commander. Lee looked forward to the spring and contemplated taking the offensive in order to seize the initiative. If he caught Grant off balance and dealt him a serious blow, he believed Northern war-​weariness would increase and prevent Lincoln’s reelection. Grant had something different in mind as he framed a multipronged coordinated offensive: he would strike southward through the Shenandoah Valley, through southwest Virginia, and along the James River against Richmond and also engage Lee below the Rapidan-​ Rappahannock river line. He hoped threatening the Confederate capital and supply sources would force Lee to choose where to make his stand. Aware that supervising these movements as well as the operations of the remaining U.S. armies would prove taxing, Grant left Maj. Gen. George G. Meade in command of the Army of the Potomac, in part because Meade was far more familiar with the capabilities of that army’s officers and men than was Grant. As the lieutenant general mapped out the details, the Northern press enthused in anticipation of the impending clash of the war’s two foremost generals. They wondered if Grant would succeed where his predecessors had failed, or if Lee would prove a far more challenging foe than Grant’s previous conquests. They were also curious to find out how the hero of Vicksburg would fare under the scrutiny of authorities in Washington and with the eastern media looking over his shoulder. The veterans of the Army of the Potomac took the measure of the new man in charge. Nearly half of the men who had signed up for three years of service in 1861 had reenlisted, but that meant that just over half of the army would return home when their enlistments expired. Nobody knew how reliable those men would be with discharge and safety so close. At the same time, questions loomed about how the new conscripts would perform under fire. Even more unknown was how Brig. Gen. Edward Ferraro’s division of African American recruits would do in the heat of battle. Although African American U.S. soldiers proved their mettle in the Mississippi Valley and along the Atlantic coast, they had yet to see combat against Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. The war had changed the terrain between the river line formed by the Rappahannock and Rapidan rivers and the James River during the preceding two years. Lee repelled a series of U.S. offensives starting in the summer of 1862, beating back three Union efforts to break the Rapidan-​Rappahannock river line at Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Mine Run between December 1862 and December 1863. Such operations had left their mark on the area: Union artillery had shelled Fredericksburg, and the Chancellor tavern was in ashes. When the war returned to the area in spring, the coming campaign would leave similar scars. As Confederate civilians anxiously awaited the campaign, many maintained hope about the ensuing experience and their belief in Lee’s victory. From Richmond, wartime refugee Judith McGuire observed, “[T]‌he city seems quiet and trusting.” Like many other Confederates, civilian and soldier, McGuire found comfort in her faith. “We feel that the Lord will keep the city [safe].” She had confidence in Confederate success even though she believed the rumors that inflated the strength of Grant’s army to up to 180,000 men.1

The Overland Campaign    453 As did most Civil War campaigns, the Overland Campaign brought soldiers into civilian space. Both Confederate and U.S. forces made their way through populated areas, often relying on the families there to supply their needs. At a plantation not far from Richmond, Emma Mordecai and her family could see the soldiers’ encampment and movements. After dinner one night, they went for a walk and “saw camp fires up in the woods near the turnpike” and “waggons . . . moving up the turnpike to the new camp.” The soldiers did not remain at a distance. Confederate “soldiers soon came swarming to the well to fill their canteens.” When the Mordecais later “heard a great shouting from the new camp,” the men of the family guessed that they were moving. “In a short time the last shout died away, & the noise of their waggons ceased.” The proximity of the troops combined with the knowledge of a looming battle left the women of the family nervous.2 Throughout the campaign they could hear the battles and often had soldiers marching nearby or camping on their property. By the end of April, Grant had gathered nearly 120,000 men at Culpepper and Warrenton. He prepared to advance across the Rapidan-​Rappahannock river line, get through the Wilderness, then turn to face Lee, who would be compelled to move if he wanted to stay between Grant and Richmond. On May 4 he commenced his advance. Lee, with about 65,000 men on call, decided not to contest Grant’s crossing of the rivers, choosing instead to intercept Union columns as they made their way through the Wilderness. The thick growth nullified U.S. artillery and minimized the Yankees’ numerical advantage, but likely also hindered Lee’s ability to launch tactical offenses. Grant accepted Lee’s challenge, and the Battle of the Wilderness began on the morning of May 5. For two days the armies exchanged blows, each glimpsing decisive victory before it disappeared in the woods, fire, and smoke. While both sides fought to a draw across Saunders Field and the Orange Turnpike to the north, to the south the Yankees checked a Confederate advance that targeted a critical crossroads on May 5. The next morning Maj. Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock’s Second Corps launched a massive offensive, smashing the Confederate left and leaving Lee to rally his own forces. An equally devastating counterattack by Lt. Gen. James Longstreet drove Hancock back in confusion before the Rebel strike struggled after Longstreet fell wounded from friendly fire. At dusk a second Confederate attack against the Union right scored early success but eventually dissipated, leaving both armies badly bruised as soldiers battled fires that sometimes consumed wounded and dead comrades. Grant lost nearly 18,000 men killed, wounded, and missing, and Lee’s losses exceeded 11,400 men. All in the area heard the sounds of battle and wondered how it would end. Although the Rebels had checked the Yankee advance at the Wilderness, they had not thwarted it. Each side struck telling blows that caught the foe off balance, but neither side completely broke. Instead, both armies showed their resilience: soldiers rallied, dug in, and awaited another attack. Undeterred by his failure to defeat Lee outright, on the night of May 7 Grant directed his army to head southeast toward Spotsylvania Court House. Lee barely beat him there, and for almost two weeks (May 8–​19) the armies engaged in near-​continuous combat, neither side able to deliver a decisive blow. On May

Map 28.1  The Overland Campaign

The Overland Campaign    455 10, a Union infantry assault planned by Col. Emory Upton came close to breaking the Confederate line but failed due to lack of support. Two days later, waves of U.S. soldiers crashed into a salient along the Confederate center known as the Mule Shoe. Lee fought to help prevent a Confederate rout as both sides settled down to relentless combat at the Bloody Angle at the western base of the salient. However, once more the failure to provide proper support doomed the effort, as did the continuing struggle to ensure coordination between Meade’s three infantry corps and Burnside’s Ninth Corps, still an independent command under Grant because Burnside outranked Meade. As the fighting at Spotsylvania got underway, U.S.  cavalry commander Maj. Gen. Philip H. Sheridan, frustrated by his horsemen’s failure to secure a route of advance, received Grant’s permission to break away from the main army and swing south. He sought a confrontation with Confederate cavalry chief Maj. Gen. James E.B. Stuart while doing all the damage he could behind Confederate lines north of Richmond. On May 11 cavalry from both sides collided at Yellow Tavern, just north of the Confederate capital, where Stuart fell mortally wounded. Sheridan’s success came at a price: Grant could no longer draw upon cavalry to reconnoiter enemy positions. However, given the fixed position of the two field armies, this loss might not have been a serious problem. More challenging was that Grant’s continued pounding of Lee’s lines with reinforcements of inexperienced soldiers wore out both armies without securing a decisive battlefield triumph. Lee continued to hold on, but checking various attacks did little to deter Grant from persisting in his larger plan. The way Grant and Lee fought during the Overland Campaign challenged previous patterns of campaigning, which featured generals maneuvering armies in search of battle, followed by the occasional pursuit and a return to rest and refitting in camp. The notion of near-​continuous combat was new, as was the more frequent use of field fortifications by both sides. Losses mounted at an appalling rate:  soldiers began to collapse from exhaustion and were not always at their best. Nevertheless, unlike his predecessors, Grant was making progress and not relinquishing his gains. As he had assured Lincoln, there would be “no turning back.”3 Both commanders lost senior subordinates to bullets, and other key generals underperformed or suffered from ill health. Weeks of relentless fighting wore out men; many soldiers took advantage of slight wounds to retreat to field hospitals hoping they might leave the front altogether. Local civilians, not knowing whether they were in the enemy’s path or if a battle would occur near their homes, could “hear heavy firing” and feared for their safety. The Mordecai family hid their meat and other valuables as soon as they heard “that at any moment the Philistines might be upon us.”4 Enemy troops never arrived at the Mordecai house, but the fighting was not far off. Family nearby were only three miles from the action and were “ready to hide the horse & mule in the woods west of the farm” and to flee to the Mordecai house if U.S. troops arrived. Such information led the Mordecais to have their meat “hidden under the hen house” and for Rose to make “the best disposition she could of her money and other valuables, some in her pockets & some in [Emma’s].” Although they were spared from meeting enemy troops, their walk home after a visit to a nearby plantation was marked by the signs of war—​they walked along

456    Lisa Tendrich Frank and Brooks D. Simpson “the breastworks, the creek & the Mill.” Their evening was again filled with the sounds of battle; they heard the “loud firing of both cannon & musketry” until dark, and the morning began with “heavy cannonading & rounds of musketry.”5 In addition to the constant noise of the “booming of the cannon & the crack of the musketry,” the close proximity of enemy soldiers kept tensions high. The Mordecais’ neighbors, their cousins, had “a number of Yankees . . . over there all night” and reported that “the turnpike is full of them.” The family “did not undress nor get any sleep at all” and spent the day “in dreadful apprehension of being driven from home & overrun by Yankees.” Another neighbor had been “ordered to leave her house” because the battle was dangerously close to her home. The action was so close that after the day’s fighting, the Mordecais let Confederate cavalry spend the night in their barn. The women of the family brought wheat coffee and hoecakes to the soldiers so they could have a “good supper.”6 Grant had not planned upon a campaign featuring relentless combat. He had hoped that Maj. Gen. Franz Sigel’s troops in the Shenandoah Valley and Maj. Gen. Benjamin F. Butler’s newly created Army of the James would squeeze Lee’s logistics while threatening the Confederate capital. However, Confederate forces quickly checked Sigel’s thrust at New Market, frustrating Grant’s plans to control the Shenandoah Valley, while Butler, after moving his army along the James and establishing a foothold along the Bermuda Hundred peninsula between Richmond and Petersburg, failed to sever the Confederate capital’s rail connections southward. Both generals had failed to divide Confederate attention by posing multiple threats, allowing Lee to gather reinforcements and concentrate on stopping Grant. That both Sigel and Butler owed their stars to their political influence and not their military ability was not lost on Grant. Their failures damaged Lincoln’s chances at reelection:  Grant, who at Spotsylvania had pledged to “fight it out on this line if it takes all summer,” started advancing again a week later. He would have to threaten Richmond on his own.7 Even in a conflict where manpower was critical, many generals, officers, and soldiers still looked askance at putting African American soldiers on the front lines. They questioned whether newly recruited Black soldiers in Ferraro’s division, part of Burnside’s corps, would stand their ground in the heat of battle. On May 15 Ferraro’s infantry, along with a cavalry unit, clashed with Confederates seeking to seize the Orange Plank Road near Chancellorsville; four days later Black infantry repulsed another Rebel strike at Salem Church, west of Fredericksburg. Word of these engagements filtered back to the main army, along with the conclusion that Ferraro’s men could hold their own.8 Even so, Grant refrained from placing them in the front lines. As the armies moved away from Spotsylvania, the town’s civilians took stock of the destruction done to their property by shot, shell, and shovel. Soldiers who fought in backyards necessarily turned homesteads into graveyards for their fallen comrades. Irby Goodwin Scott, a member of a Georgia regiment, let his family know that after his brother “died fighting gallantly for his Country and his rights,” he was “buried in a garden at the house of Mr. McCool [McCoull] about two miles north of Spotsylvania Court House. His name was marked upon a board at the head of his grave.” Although

The Overland Campaign    457 there was “no coffin,” Scott had his brother “wraped in a new tent and a blanket.” In addition, so they could find Bud’s grave later, “[a]‌t his head upon a board is N.E.S., Co G, 12th GA Regt.”9 Similar scenes played out across the Virginia countryside as the campaign continued. The landscape bore the marks of war. After trying to take milk and biscuits to “some wounded reported to be left at some of the houses” after the previous day’s fighting at Spotsylvania, Emma and Rose Mordecai “found many difficulties to our progress, trees felled across the roads, dead horses.” They abandoned their attempt to get a closer look at the battlefield when they saw “a body of Cavalry . . . whom we feared might be Yankees.” Even on this shortened outing they “saw some large trees topped by cannon balls, & others badly cut by them, & a good many people in the woods looking for plunder . . . and the dead horses & the badly cut up roads.” After discovering that the wounded were taken to Richmond, they drove to town to deliver supplies to the Officers Hospital. On their journey they saw cavalry and infantry units, and “everything looked indeed like War.” The city, too, bore the marks of war; they saw “weary soldiers lying within the batteries wrapped in their blankets, all over the wet ground.”10 The advancing Yankees also wreaked havoc on Confederate civilians’ property. At Spotsylvania, Federal commanders “lost control of their men” once they overcame the Confederate troops. As was common during the war, U.S. soldiers “stopped to collect booty” from enemy civilians so they could send home keepsakes.11 Soldiers further looted Confederate homes and storehouses for food, often feasting on the bounty of Virginia households. In the process, they left destruction in their wake. One woman reported that they had “such a night!” with Federals at their plantation “from 1 o’clock in the day until five the next morning,” including “eight of their pickets guarding our house to prevent our escape.”12 Not all invading soldiers celebrated their impact on the Confederate homefront. U.S. staff officer Lt. Col. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. noted, “The straggling & marauding have become a great evil—​Families are robbed and houses burned constantly.”13 Of special note was the destruction wrought by Sheridan’s troopers as they rode south to battle Stuart’s horsemen. One civilian complained of “the terrible destruction of private property” that Sheridan’s men visited upon the citizens.14 U.S. soldiers concurred. At Beaver Dam Station, the bluecoat cavalrymen feasted on what they found, as did a group of Union prisoners they liberated. One such liberated prisoner gobbled down ham and a seemingly unlimited supply of eggs. They made sure they did not leave anything behind to support disloyal civilians or Confederate soldiers. To make their point, some Michigan soldiers set fire to “a pile of bacon twenty rods long and six or seven feet high.”15 Such destruction, which often resulted from soldiers’ desire to punish civilians, sometimes came at the expense of the soldiers’ own need for resources. Brig. Gen. Wesley Merritt, in command of one of Sheridan’s divisions, complained that George Armstrong Custer’s men sometimes were reckless with matches, incinerating rations that could have been put to better use. However, “As it cost nothing in lives or trouble,” Merritt observed, “no one felt like taking serious notice of the gaucherie.”16

458    Lisa Tendrich Frank and Brooks D. Simpson Sheridan expressed more enthusiasm about the efforts to dismantle the civilian world. At Beaver Dam he destroyed the train depot, “3 large trains of cars, and 100 cars, 2 fine locomotives, 200,000 pounds of bacon and other stores, amounting in all to 1,500,000 of rebel rations; and also the telegraph wire and railroad track for a distance of about 10 miles.” After capturing Ashland Station, Sheridan’s troops destroyed a locomotive, several train cars, an engine house, and several buildings “containing large amounts of stores.”17 Meanwhile, U.S. officers often burdened enemy civilians with the care of injured soldiers. “My command is in fine spirits with its success,” Sheridan exulted. “I . . . bring along with me all of the wounded, excepting about 30 cases of mortal wounds. These were, however, well cared for, and made as comfortable as possible in the farm-​houses in the country.”18 He celebrated his success: “there has been great excitement among the inhabitants and with the army. The citizens report that Lee is beaten.”19 Confederate civilians decried the tactics of Union soldiers. Lucy Breckenridge worked to keep her personal effects safe from the enemy’s prying eyes: “Poor, old journal—​it doesn’t like Yankee raids. It came so very near being consigned to the flames last Friday (the 13th of May) when we thought the Yanks were coming, but Ma hid it away in the folds of an old dress—​and so ’twas left to tell its tale to generations yet unborn.” It was not just personal details they wanted concealed. They also “hid silver and everything of value that could be put away in our room, thinking that the wretches would hold our dormitory sacred.”20 Sheridan’s men ravaged the landscape, taking food and valuables from civilians. As his raid drew to a close, he boasted, “The country passed through by my command is entirely destitute; there is nothing for men or animals. All of the country north of the James River is in this condition from very best information.”21 Such destruction brought additional anxiety to white Virginians. When news came of a battle looming near Hanover Junction, Judith McGuire worried about further damage to her family’s property and personal safety: “Our army is in line of battle on the Cedar Hill plantation. The ladies of the family have come to Richmond to avoid the awful collision about to take place. That house, I sadly fear, is to be another sacrifice.”22 In the Confederate capital, civilians similarly worried for their safety. As the battles raged nearby, confidence in Richmond’s well-​being wavered and the fear that U.S.  soldiers would capture the city became common. Georgian Sarah Alexander Lawton, who with her four children had left home to join her husband in Richmond, prepared to send her little ones to yet another place of presumed safety. Her husband’s announcement that he had “ ‘made arrangements for all of you to leave, day-​after-​ tomorrow’ . . . came like a thunder-​clap upon me. Our arms had seemed so successful that we were beginning to breathe freely and to think the enemy were foiled.” Once her children had fled to safety, she found herself “sad and desolate enough—​but have not time to indulge it.” Instead she had to be prepared for the possible arrival of enemy troops. “I must pack my trunks . . . to be ready for anything.” Although she felt some relief “that the children had safely reached the end of their railroad journey,” Lawton’s worries were not over. “On Tuesday there was a great alarm in the city. Many ladies sat up all night, dressed in all their best clothes with their jewelry on.” As a result of the

The Overland Campaign    459 uncertainty, “several families left on [the train], en route for the South.”23 Their anxiety about the unknown was shared across the Confederacy. From North Carolina, Catherine Edmondston noted, “The state of suspense in which we live is fearful. . . . We know not what to believe, but are at sea in a midst of wild sensational rumours, each more alarming that the last.”24 A similar observation about the uncertainty of the times was made by New Yorker George Templeton Strong. Reporting on a rather optimistic report of U.S.  success at Spotsylvania, he observed, “[W]‌e are so schooled in adversity that we presume all news apocryphal.” A  few days later he wrote, “[T]he feeling downtown today is despondent and bad. There is no news from the front to justify it, but people have taken up with an exaggerated view of Grant’s hard-​won success in opening the campaign, and now, finding that the ‘backbone of the Rebellion’ is not ‘broken at last’ into a handful of incoherent vertebrae . . . they are disappointed, disgusted, and ready to believe any rumor of disaster and mischief that the wicked ingenuity of speculators can devise and inculcate.”25 Although uncertainty governed the lives of Southern and Northern civilians, Grant had confidence in the second phase of the Overland Campaign. His army moved southward toward Richmond, repeatedly shifting by Lee’s right flank as the Confederate general blocked his access to the capital. At one point the U.S. commander gave his counterpart an ideal opportunity to deal a damaging blow, when a flawed crossing of the North Anna River (May 23–​26) left the Union right and left separated from each other and the center by the river, but Lee was too ill to take advantage of the opportunity and his subordinates fumbled mounting an assault. Recovering from near-​ disaster, Grant addressed a growing rift among his own commanders by reaffirming Meade’s control of operations and placing Burnside’s Ninth Corps under Meade’s direct command, ending an awkward autonomous status that had complicated the ability to coordinate attacks. By the end of May, the two armies had made their way to the outskirts of Richmond, reaching a small hamlet, Cold Harbor, where they collided on June 1. Once again the sounds of battle echoed across the area: “this month commenced here with the sound of heavy firing, heard constantly from early morning.”26 Grant, believing the Confederate Army was on the verge of collapse after Lee’s failure to attack at the North Anna, tried to launch an assault on June 2, only to discover that confusion among his generals robbed him of his opportunity. Postponing the attack to June 3, Grant and Meade directed commanders to reconnoiter the enemy lines in front of their commands in preparation for the dawn assault, but subordinates failed to comply. The Confederates made good use of the intervening time, preparing a defensive line featuring elaborate field fortifications and fields of fire that proved lethal. As a result, the June 3 Union assault collapsed within hours, and Grant called off the operation by midday. Although later reports of over seven thousand casualties in as little as twenty minutes proved wildly exaggerated, those rumors hint at the impact that Cold Harbor would leave on historical memory. That 3,500 men fell in the first hours of the assault was damning enough, given that no advantage was gained.

460    Lisa Tendrich Frank and Brooks D. Simpson The opposing armies paused to assess their situations. Grant and Lee engaged in an unseemly squabble over truce protocol to secure burial of the dead and recovery of the wounded between the lines. Despite the setback at Cold Harbor, Republicans met in Baltimore on June 8 and nominated Lincoln for a second term, with Tennessee’s Andrew Johnson as his running mate. Grant’s inability to secure a much-​anticipated decisive victory, however, led to the rising price of gold in greenbacks—​a measure of eroding investor confidence in the progress of U.S. armies. As the war moved closer to Richmond, foraging armies ravaged the Virginia countryside and left many civilians hungry. “In the field Near Mechanicsville Va,” a Massachusetts soldier described the “rich country we are now going through.” John Chase was delighted: “There is plenty of chickens meal and flour and the article of salt of which the papers have so much chat about seems to be very plenty for we find any amount of it in the houses as we pass along. There is plenty of corn.” The soldiers had no qualms about appropriating the food for themselves and were pleased with the results. “I have enjoyed my chicken soup most every day for the last week.” Chase’s only complaint was the lack of sleep the campaign forced upon him. “If Grant would only allow me a regular ration sleep I would be all right but he keeps us hopping right and when we aint fighting we are marching.”27 Throughout the campaign U.S.  soldiers continued to destroy Confederates’ food supply and property for their own satisfaction and sustenance. The Army of the Potomac’s provost marshal, Brig. Gen. Marsena R.  Patrick, observed “the 6’ Corps ravaging the whole Country & killing Cattle Sheep, etc. with perfect abandon” to both feed themselves and wreak havoc on the countryside. To add to their destruction of foodstuffs, these soldiers torched Confederate homes. Patrick noted that “the houses are burning with the 5’ Corps Head Quarters in hailing distance.”28 Houses that were not burned were ransacked. “You can’t imagine how the folks leave their things in the houses when they skedaddle down here. . . . I got a very nice mahogany table for office use and also to eat off of.” Other soldiers confirmed these reports. Samuel H. Edwards wrote, “We don’t spare any garden we come to. . . . We go right in and help ourselves.” They cut down trees to get the fruit and they appropriated livestock and poultry.29 Civilians observed with horror the soldiers’ taking of wartime spoils. From a place of relative safety in Richmond, Judith McGuire reported the news of her family’s plantations, Westwood and Summer Hill, along the route of the Overland Campaign. When her nephew, “a scout for General W. H. F. Lee,” stopped for a short visit and rest, he said “he would scarcely have known the barren wilderness.”30 McGuire was dismayed to hear of “[b]‌oth places in ruins, except the dwelling-​houses,” as a result of occupation of the area for eight days. The main houses were somewhat spared because one “was used as a hospital for the wounded brought from the battle-​fields” and the other as Union headquarters. Still, she was appalled. “The parlour [at Summer Hill] was used for an amputating room, and Yankee blood streamed through that beautiful apartment and the adjoining passage.”31 McGuire was astonished by the destruction in the area. “On these highly cultivated plantations not a fence is left, except mutilated garden enclosures,” she confided to her diary. “The fields were as free from vegetation after a few days as the

The Overland Campaign    461 Arabian desert; the very roots seemed eradicated from the earth.” The plantations’ role as both an army camp and a battlefield unsurprisingly led to destruction. “A fortification stretched across W[estwood], in which were embedded the fence rails of that and the adjoining farms. Ten thousand cavalry were drawn up in line of battle for two days on the two plantations, expecting the approach of Confederates; bands of music were constantly playing martial airs in all parts of the premises; and whiskey flowed freely.”32 Enslaved African Americans saw the occupation of their masters’ homes by U.S.  soldiers differently than did their white enslavers. Although McGuire fumed that the presence of “Abolition preachers” had corrupted her “poor servants,” African Americans took the opportunity to gain their freedom. When the soldiers departed, “[s]‌carcely a representative of the sons and daughters of Africa remained in that whole section of the country.”33 The presence of enemy soldiers caused more than physical destruction. McGuire reported news of the difficulties her family and neighbors faced once U.S. soldiers occupied the area. One of her relatives, Dr. John White Brockenbrough, was caring for Confederate wounded from the Battle of Haw’s Shop (May 28) in his home. While he was out, Union soldiers arrived and “they so quickly threw out pickets, spread their tents over the surrounding fields and hills, that he could not return to his house, where his wife and only child were alone, until he had obtained a pass from a Yankee officer.” The entire landscape had changed. “As he approached the house, thousands and tens of thousands of horses and cattle were roaming over the fine wheat fields on his and the adjoining estate, (that of his niece, Mrs. N[ewton],) which were now ripe for the sickle. The clover fields and fields of young corn were sharing the same fate.” His house, too, was occupied by enemy soldiers. “He found his front porch filled with officers.” It took some persuasion, but “[a]‌fter some difficulty he was allowed to keep his wounded Confederates, and in one or two instances the Federal surgeons assisted him in dressing their wounds.”34 Other civilians reported small kindnesses from the invading soldiers. “The Northern officers seemed disposed to be courteous to the ladies, in the little intercourse which they had with them. General Ferrara, who commanded the negro troops, was humane, in having a coffin made for a young Confederate officer who died in . . . B[rockenbrough]’s house, and was kind in other respects. The surgeons, too, assisted in attending to the Confederate wounded.” McGuire continued, “An officer one morning sent for Mrs. N[ewton] to ask her where he should place a box of French china for safety; he said that some soldiers had discovered it buried in her garden, dug it up and opened it, but he . . . had placed a guard over it, and desired to know where she wished it put. A place of safety of course was not on the premises, but she had it taken to her chamber . . . thanking him for his kindness.” Acknowledging the unusual situation caused by war, “[h]‌e seemed moved, and said, ‘Mrs. N[ewton], I will do what I can for you, for I cannot be too thankful that my wife is not in an invaded country.’ ”35 Not all U.S.  soldiers acted benevolently toward enemy civilians. In addition to commandeering Confederate property, some taunted their civilian enemy. McGuire lamented, “Poor M[ary Newton] had her stricken heart sorely lacerated in every way,

462    Lisa Tendrich Frank and Brooks D. Simpson particularly when her little son came running in and nestled up to her in alarm. A soldier had asked him, ‘Are you the son of Captain Newton, who was killed in Culpeper?’ ‘Yes,’ replied the child. ‘Well, I belong to the Eighth Illinois, and was one of the soldiers that fired at him when he fell,’ was the barbarous reply.”36 In these and other exchanges, the taunts of U.S. soldiers enraged civilians who also suffered from the uncertainty that accompanied having loved ones in military service. Throughout the Overland Campaign soldiers wreaked damage that local civilians had to manage. Women in Richmond as well as those in the surrounding areas spent much of their time nursing the “wounded [who] continue to arrive by every train.” During wartime white women necessarily stretched prewar gender norms governing medical service and took on tasks once reserved for men. They went to the hospitals whenever possible, bringing food and drink for the wounded soldiers “in spite of the great scarcity & enormous prices.” They spent their days working in the hospitals in whatever way necessary, even if they “nearly fainted while assisting a surgeon to dress a wound.”37 As the numbers of wounded increased, women who had the means often moved outside of the safety of their homes to try to ease the pain and otherwise address the needs of their nation’s soldiers. Others had to instead focus on protecting their own families. Faced with shortages and fear of invading soldiers, families moved around looking for safety. When heading to volunteer at the Richmond hospitals, Emma Mordecai “saw several families moving with their servants, cattle, horses, sheep, &c to take refuge within, the lines of fortification.” At the end of the day “some were preparing to camp out in a common, near the road. Ladies & children seated round a camp fire, while their carts, wagons and a carriage were drawn up round them, with counterpanes arranged to make a sort of tent.” Others merely sent their belongings to the city in the hopes of keeping them out of the enemy’s hands.38 Confederate civilians in Richmond watched with increasing anxiety as both armies seemed to approach the capital. “Lee seems to expect that the enemy will attack him tomorrow,” observed Sarah Lawton as May drew to a close. “We are all discussing the probability that Grant will not attack, but will cross the Chickahominy, thus forcing Gen. Lee to the city. A siege is far more to be dreaded by us than a battle.”39 At Cold Harbor the contending armies battled over ground that had already witnessed combat during the Seven Days Battles (June 1862), especially at Gaines Mill, just east of Cold Harbor. The carnage on June 3 paled in comparison to far greater losses sustained in previous frontal assaults, including Burnside’s attacks on Marye’s Heights at Fredericksburg, Lee’s July 3 disaster at Gettysburg, and the May 12 assault at Spotsylvania’s Mule Shoe. In years to come the June 3 battle assumed an importance in popular imagination that shaped perceptions about the entire campaign as one of endless attrition and bloodshed under the direction of an unimaginative, even mindless, drunken dullard of a butcher. In truth, Cold Harbor marked the end of Grant’s efforts to defeat Lee north of the James River, a concept framed as part of a very different campaign plan that failed to materialize. Instead Grant embraced his initial plan to cross the James and threaten Richmond from the south by targeting Petersburg, where the railroads that served as Richmond’s lifeline ran. Grant knew that he risked much by

The Overland Campaign    463 abandoning his lines opposite Lee and shifting his command eastward and southward to cross a broad river via transports and long pontoon bridges. If Lee did not catch him, he might achieve the decisive victory that had eluded him. Grant almost succeeded. Beginning on June 12, U.S. forces extricated themselves from their position opposite Lee without trouble, and before long blue-​clad columns streamed southward over roads, across pontoons, and in transports. By June 15 all seemed in order for an assault. A thin line of Confederates under Gen. P. G. T. Beauregard’s command was all that remained between the Yankees and Petersburg. However, the fumbling of corps commanders Maj. Gen. William F. “Baldy” Smith and Winfield Scott Hancock, combined with the hesitation of exhausted Union soldiers, allowed Lee time to rush reinforcements to protect Petersburg. As one of Meade’s staff officers said, “You cannot strike a full blow with a wounded hand.” Between supervising the river crossing and planning the assault, Grant spread himself too thin; he had also asked too much of his officers and men after six weeks of continuous fighting. With the failure of a final bid to take Petersburg on June 18, he chose to consolidate his gains and dig in. A few days later Lincoln arrived at Grant’s new headquarters at City Point. The commanding general reassured the president that all was going well. “I am just as sure of going into Richmond as I am of any future event,” he flatly stated. “It may take a long summer, but I will go in.” Lincoln agreed, but added, “I do sincerely hope that all may be accomplished with as little bloodshed as possible.”40 Ascertaining the outcome of the Overland Campaign reveals how problematic it can be to determine victory, defeat, and impact when assessing Civil War campaigns. Neither commander achieved his initial objectives. Grant’s overall campaign plan collapsed when operations in the Shenandoah Valley and along the James River proved abortive, leaving him to confront an Army of Northern Virginia that did not have to worry about other operations. What began as a campaign grounded in logistics and maneuvers became a series of battles where neither side secured a decisive advantage. Northern spirits sank as it appeared that the bloody strategic stalemate of the previous two years would continue indefinitely, and Lincoln had to ponder the impact of such discouragement on his chances for reelection. Even so, Grant had achieved something, and Lee knew it. He had inflicted terrific damage upon the Army of Northern Virginia at great cost to his own forces. Grant’s losses over the forty days of fighting amounted to approximately 55,000 casualties, some 46 percent of his original strength of 120,000. Lee lost some 33,600 men out of his original strength of 65,000 men, over 50 percent.41 Grant had forced the Confederates back to the outskirts of Richmond and Petersburg, the first time a U.S. commander managed to retain the initiative over Lee in his native Virginia. Lee felt trapped and for months tried to relieve the pressure on the Confederate capital by striking north through the Shenandoah Valley and threatening Washington and points north, but these efforts did not convince Grant to abandon his viselike grip on Richmond. Lee never regained the initiative essential to his desire to assume the offensive and counterattack. In observing the situation in June, Lee told Lt. Gen. Jubal Early, “We must destroy this Army of Grant’s before he gets to the James River. If he gets there it will become a siege

464    Lisa Tendrich Frank and Brooks D. Simpson and then it will be a mere question of time.”42 However, he also knew that time was not necessarily on Grant’s side in an election year. Grant failed in spring 1864 to secure the results needed to assure Lincoln’s reelection, but he laid the foundation for an eventual electoral triumph, one Lee proved unable to prevent. Grant did so despite the fact that at the outset of the campaign half of his veteran force was counting down their weeks until returning home when their enlistment terms expired. He did so despite the fact that generals chosen by his political superiors failed to execute their roles in his plan, and despite the fact that he was new to the Army of the Potomac, its men and its commanders, and thus struggled to learn their strengths, weaknesses, and style. To some extent Grant was the victim of the expectations born of his previous successes. Lee’s generalship during the campaign was also at times remarkable. His most trusted subordinates were killed (Stuart), seriously wounded (Longstreet), or struggling due to a number of ailments (Lt. Gen. Richard S. Ewell and Lt. Gen. A.P. Hill). Twice he exposed himself to enemy fire in desperate but ultimately successful efforts to rally his forces as they faced imminent disaster. Illness deprived him of an opportunity to strike a blow at the North Anna; only when Grant eluded him to cross the James did Lee seriously stumble. In Grant, Lee had met his match. Years before he had confided to Longstreet that he was afraid that eventually the Yankees would find a general he was unable to fathom. Meade had proven that against a capable commander Lee could no longer perform miracles; against Grant, the Confederate general discovered that he no longer had a margin for error. As Capt. Charles F. Adams Jr., son of the U.S. minister to the Court of St. James, observed, “Grant will take Richmond, if only he is left alone, of that I feel more and more sure. His tenacity and strength, combined with his skill, must, on every general principle, prove too much for them in the end.”43 For civilians North and South it was unclear who had the upper hand. Expectations of a quick and decisive victory evaporated in the news of continuous fighting. By June the casualty lists seemed endless. As Emma Holmes noted from Charleston, South Carolina, “Each day brings sad tidings from Va. of the death, wounding, capture or missing of some acquaintance or friend. . . . [N]‌othing seems gained on either side, while the most precious blood is poured out like water.”44 For the civilians who lived on the fields where men fought and died, the campaign disrupted life once more, although major operations henceforth ceased to be conducted from the Rapidan-​ Rappahannock river line to the Chickahominy. The institution of slavery in central Virginia had been undermined by war and policy, never to return, while the sight of African American soldiers in blue uniforms reminded everyone of just how revolutionary the war had become. As spring turned to summer in 1864, the war’s outcome was still not clear. What was obvious was that things would never be the same and that Grant’s arrival had transformed the importance of Virginia in the Union war effort. If expectations that Grant would bring decisive victory gave way to disappointment in the North, in the South people waited in vain to hear that Lee had driven the invaders away. Decisive blows would be struck elsewhere, at Mobile Bay, Atlanta, and the Shenandoah Valley, but Lee proved unable to reverse the course of Union fortunes.

The Overland Campaign    465

Notes 1. Judith W. McGuire, Diary of a Southern Refugee during the War, by a Lady of Virginia (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), May 6, 1864, 262. 2. Emma Mordecai, Diary, May 5, 1864, Mordecai Family Papers #847, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. 3. Henry E. Wing, When Lincoln Kissed Me: A Story of the Wilderness Campaign (New York: Abingdon Press, 1914), 31–​39. 4. Mordecai Diary, May 10, 1864. 5. Mordecai Diary, May 11, 1864, and May 12, 1864. 6. Mordecai Diary, May 12, 1864. 7. Ulysses S. Grant to E. M. Stanton, May 11, 1864, in The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, ed. John Y. Simon et. al. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967–​2012), 10:422. 8. Noah Andre Trudeau, Like Men of War: Black Troops in the Civil War 1862–​1865 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1998), 211. 9. Irby Goodwin Scott, Lee and Jackson’s Bloody Twelfth: The Letters of Irby Goodwin Scott, First Lieutenant, Company G, Putnam Light Infantry, Twelfth Georgia Infantry, ed. Johnnie Perry Pearson (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2010), May 16 and 25, 1864, 161–​162. 10. Mordecai Diary, May 13, 1864. 11. William D. Matter, “The Federal High Command at Spotsylvania,” in The Spotsylvania Campaign, ed. Gary W. Gallagher (Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 50. 12. Marion Stuart to Augusta Mordecai, letter copied into Mordecai Diary, May 14, 1864. 13. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Touched with Fire: Civil War Letters and Diary of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., ed. Mark De Wolfe Howe (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), May 23, 1864, 130. 14. Mordecai Diary, May 17, 1864. 15. Quoted in Robert E. L. Krick, “Stuart’s Last Ride: A Confederate View of Sheridan’s Raid,” in Gallagher, The Spotsylvania Campaign, 132. 16. Quoted in Krick, “Stuart’s Last Ride,” 132–​133. 17. Philip H.  Sheridan to George G.  Meade, May 13, 1864, in U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1880–​1901), ser. 1, 36, pt. 1: (1): 777. Hereafter cited as OR. 18. Sheridan to Meade, May 13, 1864, OR, ser. 1, vol. 36, pt. 1: 777–​778. 19. Sheridan to Meade, May 10, 1864, OR, ser. 1, vol. 36, pt. 1: 776. 20. Lucy Breckinridge, Lucy Breckinridge of Grove Hill: The Journal of a Virginia Girl, 1862–​ 1864, ed. Mary D. Robertson (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1994), May 21, 1864, 187. 21. Sheridan to Meade, May 22, 1864, OR, ser. 1, vol. 36, pt. 1: 778. 22. McGuire, Diary of a Southern Refugee, May 6, 1864, 275. 23. Sarah Alexander Lawton, in Heroines of Dixie:  Confederate Women Tell Their Story of the War, ed. Katharine M. Jones (New York: Bobbs-​Merrill, 1955), May 9, 11, 12, 15, 1864, 299–​300. 24. Catherine Ann Devereux Edmondston, “Journal of a Secesh Lady”: The Diary of Catherine Ann Devereux Edmondston, 1860–​1866, ed. Beth Gilbert Crabtree and James W. Patton (Raleigh, NC: Division of Archives and History, 1979), May 18, 1864, 561.

466    Lisa Tendrich Frank and Brooks D. Simpson 25. George Templeton Strong, Diary of the Civil War, 1860–​1865: George Templeton Strong, ed. Allen Nevins (New York: Macmillan, 1962), May 13, 1864, and May 17, 1864, 444, 447. 26. Mordecai Diary, June 1, 1864. 27. John W. Chase to Brother, May 31, 1864, in Yours for the Union: The Civil War Letters of John W. Chase, First Massachusetts Light Artillery, ed. John S. Collier and Bonnie B. Collier (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 338. 28. Quoted in A. Wilson Greene, A Campaign of Giants: The Battle for Petersburg, vol. 1: From the Crossing of the James to the Crater (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 73. 29. Samuel H. Edwards to “My Dear Puss,” June 15, 1864, Edwards Letters, New York Public Library, quoted in Greene, A Campaign of Giants, 73. 30. McGuire, Diary of a Southern Refugee, June 11, 1864, 279–​280. 31. McGuire, Diary of a Southern Refugee, June 11, 1864, 276–​278. 32. McGuire, Diary of a Southern Refugee, June 11, 1864, 278. 33. McGuire, Diary of a Southern Refugee, June 11, 1864, 278. 34. McGuire, Diary of a Southern Refugee, June 11, 1864, 276–​278. 35. McGuire, Diary of a Southern Refugee, June 11, 1864, 279–​280. 36. McGuire, Diary of a Southern Refugee, June 11, 1864, 276–​278. 37. Mordecai Diary, May 18, 19, 23, 1864. 38. Mordecai Diary, May 29, 1864. 39. Lawton, in Heroines of Dixie, May 30, 1864, 301. 40. Brooks D. Simpson, Ulysses S.  Grant:  Triumph over Adversity, 1822–​1865 (New  York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 339, 342. 41. Both sides had received reinforcements during the campaign, while some of Grant’s men left due to expiration of term of service. 42. Quoted in Douglas Southall Freeman, R. E. Lee: A Biography (New York: Scribner’s and Sons, 1934–​1935), 3:398. 43. Simpson, Triumph over Adversity, 341. 44. Emma Holmes, The Diary of Miss Emma Holmes, 1861–​1866, ed. John F. Marszalek (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), June 8, 1864, 354.

Bibliography Frank, Lisa Tendrich. The Civilian War: Southern Women and Union Soldiers during Sherman’s March. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015. Frank, Lisa Tendrich. “War Comes Home:  Confederate Women and Union Soldiers.” In Virginia’s Civil War, edited by Peter Wallenstein and Bertram Wyatt-​Brown, 123–​136. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005. Gallagher, Gary W., ed. The Spotsylvania Campaign. Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina, 1998. Gallagher, Gary W., ed. The Wilderness Campaign. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Gallagher, Gary W., and Caroline E. Janney, eds. Cold Harbor to the Crater: The End of the Overland Campaign. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Greene, A. Wilson. A Campaign of Giants: The Battle for Petersburg. Vol. 1: From the Crossing of the James to the Crater. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018.

The Overland Campaign    467 Grimsley, Mark. And Keep Moving On:  The Virginia Campaign, May–​ June 1864. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. Petty, Adam H. The Battle of the Wilderness in Myth and Memory: Reconsidering Virginia’s Most Notorious Civil War Battlefield. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2019. Rhea, Gordon C. The Battle of the Wilderness, May 5–​6, 1864. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994. Rhea, Gordon C. The Battles for Spotsylvania Court House and the Road to Yellow Tavern, May 7–​12, 1864. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997. Rhea, Gordon C. Cold Harbor: Grant and Lee, May 26–​June 3, 1864. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002. Rhea, Gordon C. On to Petersburg: Grant and Lee, June 4–​15, 1864. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017. Rhea, Gordon C. To the North Anna River:  Grant and Lee, May 13–​ 25, 1864. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000. Sheehan-​Dean, Aaron. Why Confederates Fought: Family and Nation in Civil War Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Simpson, Brooks D. Ulysses S. Grant: Triumph over Adversity, 1822–​1865. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.

Chapter 29

The Cam pa i g n for Atl a nta Displacing Civilians and Tearing Up Georgia Earl J. Hess

The Atlanta Campaign was one of the largest, longest, and more important of the Civil War. It thrust a huge Federal army group deep into Georgia and led to the fall of an important logistical and industrial city. The campaign for Atlanta produced more refugees than any other campaign of the Civil War, both inadvertently and on purpose. The Federals deliberately removed hundreds of women factory workers from industrial plants along the north side of the Chattahoochee River, exiling them north. Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman’s artillery bombarded Atlanta for several weeks, and he deliberately removed 3,500 residents after capturing the place to turn the city into a garrison town. His army group severely reduced the field effectiveness of the major Confederate Army in the western theater, producing many strategic weaknesses and problems for the Rebel defense of that key region. Historians believe the fall of Atlanta had a direct impact on helping Pres. Abraham Lincoln win reelection in the fall of 1864. Even if the Atlanta Campaign was not the turning point of the latter part of the Civil War, as some historians assert, it was a major episode of the conflict that resonated on the national as well as regional level. Sherman’s campaign for Atlanta was the companion of Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s Overland Campaign in Virginia. The two efforts started at exactly the same time and with about 100,000 men in blue engaged in each campaign. Grant wanted simultaneous movements by these two concentrations of Federal manpower, one to drive against the Confederate capital of Richmond sixty miles from its starting point on the Rapidan River, and the other aiming at the transportation and industrial center of Atlanta, about a hundred miles south of Chattanooga. The ultimate objective of both drives was to break up the Confederacy’s two most important field armies. Grant and Sherman adopted a mutually supportive mode of operating. Each was keen to prevent his opponent from reinforcing Confederate troops operating against the other.

The Campaign for Atlanta    469 Sherman relied on an army group consisting of three different field armies drawn from their departments in the western theater. Maj. Gen. George H. Thomas’s Army of the Cumberland, with sixty thousand men, provided the bulk of Sherman’s manpower. The Army of the Tennessee under Maj. Gen. James B. McPherson provided thirty thousand troops (after the Seventeenth Corps joined McPherson about June 7). Finally, Maj. Gen. John M. Schofield’s Army of the Ohio brought about ten thousand men from Tennessee. Sherman’s biggest problem related to supply. He relied on 350 miles of railroads to link him with his supply base at Louisville, Kentucky. This rail line was exposed nearly the entire way to guerrilla and Confederate cavalry attacks. As soon as he received Grant’s order to prepare for a drive toward Atlanta, Sherman devoted most of his time and energy to ramping up his rail system. He pressed into service hundreds of locomotives and cars from Northern railroad companies. He also worked out effective timetables to deliver goods from Louisville and stockpile them in depots at Nashville and Chattanooga. And he prohibited civilian travel on the railroads controlled by the army from Louisville to Chattanooga. Sherman set a goal of 150 cars rolling into Chattanooga per day in order to meet his logistical requirements. As it turned out, his quartermasters managed to get only 121 cars per day before the first of May, but they came close enough to give his army group a good chance of making the campaign work. Throughout the drive toward Atlanta, Sherman’s command existed on the edge of logistical viability, detaching thousands of troops to guard bridges, culverts, and depots stretching across three states. His commandeering of cars from Northern companies also affected rail travel and commerce in the Northern states.1 Grant set simple goals for the Atlanta Campaign and gave Sherman almost unlimited latitude in finding ways to achieve them. “You I propose to move against [Gen. Joseph E.] Johnston’s Army,” he wrote on April 4, “to break it up and to get into the interior of the enemy’s country as far as you can, inflicting all the damage you can against their War resources.”2 The other major goal of the campaign was to keep the Confederate Army of Tennessee under Johnston so busy it could not detach troops to Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. The Army of Tennessee had recovered from its humiliating defeat at Missionary Ridge the previous November. With the addition of fresh troops and returning wounded and detailed men and a new commander, it was at peak strength and efficiency. With the addition of more than ten thousand troops from Lt. Gen. Leonidas Polk’s Department of Mississippi and Louisiana, who arrived about mid-​May, Johnston could count on sixty thousand men to oppose Sherman. The army was linked by the Western and Atlantic Railroad with its primary supply base of Atlanta, about eighty miles south of its winter camps at Dalton, Georgia. Johnston’s objective also was simple: to stop, if possible, the expected Union invasion of the state. When Sherman started to concentrate his troops south of Chattanooga during the first week of May, he initiated a campaign that lasted longer than anyone anticipated. It devolved into three phases, demarked by geography and the growing intensity of fighting as the opposing armies neared Atlanta. From Dalton down to the Etowah

Map 29.1 Atlanta

The Campaign for Atlanta    471 River, Sherman operated in an Appalachian environment characterized by long, high ridges with numerous gaps in them, offering good terrain for flanking movements. This country was sparsely populated, and thus army movements affected civilians only in limited ways. The operations north of the Etowah River, taking place during the first three weeks of May, were conducted at a relatively slow pace with only one major battle, at Resaca.

From Dalton to the Etowah Sherman’s plan for dealing with Johnston’s strong position at Dalton was simple. When he started his campaign in the first week of May, the Confederates dug in on top of Rocky Face Ridge. The Federals launched several small attacks to fix Johnston’s attention as McPherson’s army moved through Snake Creek Gap to cut the Western and Atlantic Railroad at Resaca, the next town south of Dalton. McPherson was successful at stealing a march on Johnston but lost his nerve at the last minute and called off the advance before reaching the railroad. This gave Johnston an opportunity to evacuate Dalton on the night of May 12, rush his army to Resaca, and construct earthworks to protect the city and the railroad crossing of the Oostanaula River. Sherman concentrated his army group in front of the Rebel line at Resaca, which extended north from the river along a ridge and then made a right angle as it veered to the east across irregular ground. The Army of Tennessee dug only the most basic trench and parapet, failing to build enough traverses at the right angle to protect the men from enfilading artillery fire. The Confederates paid dearly for their lack of foresight. When the Battle of Resaca opened on May 14 Federal artillery devastated the Confederate regiments stationed at the angle of Johnston’s line. Sherman also launched several assaults that day in an effort to push them off the ridge, but none of these attacks succeeded. That night, Rebel officers urged their men to dig in deeper near the angle. The men then had better protection, but there still were not enough traverses to protect them from the pounding that continued on May 15.3 It was clear that Johnston’s position at Resaca was weak. When he learned that a Federal force had secured a foothold on the south side of the Oostanaula River downstream from the town, Johnston ordered a retreat. The Army of Tennessee crossed the river on the night of May 15 and marched south. Resaca would become a Federal supply depot, but Sherman had lost four thousand men in its capture, while Johnston lost three thousand. South of the Oostanaula River Johnston found no good defensive position until reaching Cassville, about thirty miles south of Dalton. There he planned a trap for Sherman on May 19. The railroad ran due south from Resaca to Kingston and then due east to Cassville. By sending one corps along the railroad and moving two corps directly

472   Earl J. Hess across country to Cassville, he hoped to force Sherman to divide his command and fall on one part of it before the other could come to its assistance. The plan fell apart when corps commander Lt. Gen. John Bell Hood found unexpected Union forces on his flank as he advanced to attack the Federal column heading directly for Cassville. Based on his information, Johnston called off the assault and fell back to a commanding ridge just southeast of Cassville. That evening Hood and Polk prodded Johnston into abandoning the position, arguing that Federal artillery so enfiladed their lines as to make them untenable. Once again the army failed to construct traverses, which could have at least partially protected the men. The Confederates conducted a night withdrawal across the Etowah River. After barely three weeks of campaigning, one major battle, and several limited engagements, Johnston had retreated forty miles from Dalton. From Dalton to the Etowah River, the armies had comparatively little effect on the sparse civilian population. Many citizens had fled their homes, leaving behind empty houses and untended farms. The Federals had difficulty finding guides to help them navigate the back roads of the region. At Cassville, however, the entire village lay between the lines. “Consternation of citizens,” noted Lt. Thomas B. Mackall, an aide to Johnston’s chief of staff, “many flee, leaving all; some take away few effects, some remain between hostile fires.”4 When Union skirmishers entered the town it became a battleground and was wrecked in the process.

From the Etowah to the Chattahoochee Sherman entered a different environment when his troops crossed the Etowah River on May 23. The region between that river and the Chattahoochee was an intermediate zone that mixed some high ridges and mountains with undulating terrain. More important, most of this country lay in a state of nature with thick pine forests or large patches of underbrush and only a few dirt roads snaking through the countryside. This terrain greatly favored Johnston’s delaying tactics. It was difficult for Sherman to maneuver his large army group along road systems the Federals only dimly understood and easy enough for the Confederates to block those roads. Johnston conducted his operations with greater tenacity, delaying the Federals more than he had done north of the Etowah. Sherman’s first confrontation after crossing the Etowah occurred on May 25 when Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker’s Twentieth Corps ran against Hood’s Corps at New Hope Church. In a quickly launched attack, Hooker was repulsed, with 665 casualties compared to 400 Confederate losses. Sherman now began to concentrate his forces to the right and left of Hooker’s position to form a new line. He sent a division of Maj. Gen. Oliver Otis Howard’s Fourth Corps to the east, but instead of turning the flank, Howard launched an assault on May 27 near Pickett’s Mill. It was repulsed with 1,600 Union

The Campaign for Atlanta    473 losses and only 460 Confederate casualties. The next day, May 28, the Confederates attacked McPherson’s army near Dallas and lost up to 1,500 men to Union losses of 400. By May 29 the two armies squared off in battle lines that stretched for ten miles. Both sides dug in securely, with the Army of Tennessee constructing impressive field fortifications that were deep and thoroughly traversed. The Federals did the same. After more than three weeks, the Atlanta Campaign began to assume the characteristic of siege warfare in the open field, where maneuver became a problem. Men were locked into deep earthworks within a few hundred yards of each other. Skirmishing, sniping, and artillery fire accounted for more casualties than did the small battles along the New Hope Church, Pickett’s Mill, and Dallas Line. Moreover, Sherman had to cut away from the Western and Atlantic Railroad to move across the Etowah, feeding his army with wagon trains hauling material from Kingston. He could not afford to be cut off from his line of communications indefinitely. For several days he carefully shifted his line east until regaining contact with the railroad near Acworth by about June 7. Johnston evacuated his trenches and retired a short distance farther south. His army took up a position covering Marietta, the next major city along the rail line, anchored on the left by Lost Mountain and on the right by Brush Mountain. Pine Mountain represented a salient to the right of center of this most extensive position yet held by the Army of Tennessee, called the Mountain Line. After resting his men for a few days, on June 10 Sherman began the tedious process of advancing in short spurts. With increasingly heavy downpours of rain, the dirt roads in the region turned into ribbons of mud, slowing the Federal advance even more. Well aware of the heavy casualties Grant was suffering in Virginia, Sherman was determined not to waste lives in frontal attacks. His tactics more closely resembled an advance by siege approaches: short movements to find advantageous terrain opposite the enemy works, erecting artillery, achieving fire dominance on exposed angles of the Rebel line, and intense skirmishing to weaken the opponent. Sherman always combined these tactics with efforts to seek and turn Johnston’s flanks. The campaign evolved into intense efforts to bite and claw through a jungle terrain. The Federal approach proved effective, though time consuming. Sherman pressured the Confederates from one fortified line to another until Johnston retired to his ninth fortified position, which was based on the twin peaks of Kennesaw Mountain, only two miles from Marietta. Here he held Sherman at bay for two weeks. The Federal drive toward Atlanta was stalemated as Sherman stretched his line to the right in an effort to find and turn Johnston’s left flank. This process resulted in a sharp battle near Kolb’s Farm on June 22, when Hood rashly ordered a blind assault by his corps along the Powder Springs–​Marietta Road that ran into heavy Union artillery fire and firm resistance by Hooker’s Twentieth Corps. As a result, Hood lost about a thousand men and gained nothing for it. On June 27, unable to stretch any farther without breaking his line, Sherman launched a major assault on the Confederate works. He worried that the stalemate might allow Johnston to send troops to reinforce Lee and wanted to apply pressure on his opponent. At 8:00 a.m., fifteen thousand Federals attacked three places along the Confederate

474   Earl J. Hess line. All of those assaults failed, producing three thousand losses while inflicting only seven hundred Confederate casualties. Unlike the assaults at Resaca, these were thrown against very strong earthworks covered by artillery fire and musketry.5 Sherman had no intention of repeating the bloody assaults of June 27. Once again, he planned to cut away from the Western and Atlantic Railroad and conduct a flanking movement to turn the Confederate left. Soon after he started the move on July 2, Johnston learned of his actions and evacuated the line that night. The Army of Tennessee retired a short distance to another line that had been staked out near Smyrna Camp Ground, and the men dug in that night and the next day. The Federals skirmished there on July 4 and began once again to flank Johnston’s left, which compelled the Rebel commander to abandon the Smyrna Line and fall back to the north side of the Chattahoochee River on the night of July 4. This final Confederate position north of the river, usually called the Chattahoochee River Line, protected the crossing of the last natural barrier protecting Atlanta. The city lay only six miles to the south. Moving cautiously, the Federals established bridgeheads upstream and downstream from the line, and Johnston evacuated the position on the night of July 9. Sherman took this as an opportunity to rest his troops, bring up clothing, stockpile food and ammunition, and get ready for the dangerous push across the river. Johnston’s crossing of the Chattahoochee triggered a crisis as far as Confederate Pres. Jefferson Davis was concerned. He had hoped Johnston would engage Sherman in a general battle somewhere in the mountains of northwest Georgia. Not only did that not happen, but Johnston had failed to keep in touch with Davis about his strategic plans. In the dark and desperate for action, Davis relieved Johnston on July 18 and replaced him with Hood. The latter had ingratiated himself with Davis by talking big about the need for offensive action while hiding the fact that he was personally responsible for some of the decisions Johnston made to evacuate his lines. Hood assumed command of the army with an implied mandate to attack. Except for some wasteful assaults that achieved nothing, Sherman had conducted the campaign with a good deal of caution thus far. He relied mostly on maneuver rather than battle to pry the enemy from eleven positions between Dalton and the Chattahoochee River at a loss of about eighteen thousand men while inflicting nine thousand casualties on the Confederates.

Impact The country between the Etowah and Chattahoochee produced another region characterized by sparse settlement, small farms, and tiny villages. Many Confederates considered the citizenry there to be loyal to the Federal government, and there is evidence that this was so. But that did not prevent the people from fleeing from the two armies. The Federals noted that most of the houses seemed to be empty, and there was comparatively little livestock or other sources of food to be found. Some likened the

The Campaign for Atlanta    475 region to a desert, while others pitied the plight of the civilians caught in the path of the campaign. The absence of civilians in the area once again hampered Union operations. Schofield complained that he could not find intelligent citizens to provide information about the confusing road system between the Etowah and the Chattahoochee, forcing him to gather information by time-​consuming reconnaissance patrols. In many cases the few citizens who remained became a burden on Sherman’s strained logistics. Brigade commander Brig. Gen. Manning F. Force noted that two women came to his camp one day and begged for food and free transportation north on the railroad. They had decided to stay and take their chances but had run out of provisions and were now ready to refugee north rather than south. Sherman adopted a tough attitude toward civilians who offered to interfere with his rail line. “Show no mercy to guerrillas or persons threatening our road or telegraph,” he instructed the commanding officer at Allatoona. “Remove to the rear all suspicious persons and families.”6 The near approach of Sherman’s men produced alarm among the citizens of Atlanta. With a prewar population of 9,500 enlarged by the influx of refugees from northwest Georgia, the Gate City panicked when Sherman crossed the Etowah River on May 23. The next day government officials began moving public property out of the city, and hundreds of residents packed their belongings to follow. It was “a wild day of excitement,” wrote Cyrena Stone.7 While many families elected to stay in Atlanta, others sent away the women and children, leaving one male to stay behind to protect the family’s property. Stone worried most about the poor families; they fled the city without an idea of where to go and with little money to take care of themselves when they got there. Johnston’s retreat across the Chattahoochee on the night of July 9 provoked the biggest panic in Atlanta thus far in the campaign. Johnston ordered more government supplies shipped from Atlanta to Macon for safekeeping, which increased the sense of panic even more. Army of Tennessee wagon trains were parked temporarily in the streets, soldiers seemed to be everywhere, and refugees flocked south to escape the expected fighting. Doubts about Johnston’s strategy increased among both soldiers and civilians. When the Federals reached the town of Roswell, Sherman continued his policy of moving undesirable civilians out of the way. Roswell was located on the north side of the Chattahoochee River fifteen miles upstream from the crossing of the Western and Atlantic Railroad. Brig. Gen. Kenner Garrard’s cavalry division occupied the town after driving away Confederate cavalry on July 5. Garrard found two cotton mills and a woolen factory producing goods for the Confederate government; the latter was owned by a French national who naively thought that flying the flag of his native land would prevent the Yankees from destroying the plant. With Sherman’s approval, Garrard’s men burned all three factories. As for the four hundred women working at Roswell, Sherman decided to deport them all to the North in order “to get rid of them here,” as he put it.8 He hoped they could “live in peace and security” in the North, obtaining jobs in Northern factories.9 The first trainload of Roswell women reached Louisville on July 20, with more on the way. Eventually all four hundred and their dependents were sent to Northern

476   Earl J. Hess states to fend for themselves. Many of them did find work in Indiana and stayed there for the rest of their lives, while others returned to Georgia after the war ended. Another group of women came into Union control at Sweetwater Factory, located along Sweetwater Creek, which drained into the Chattahoochee River ten miles downstream from the railroad bridge. Federal cavalrymen arrived there on July 2, burned the cotton mill, and deported up to two hundred women workers, who, like the Roswell women, had been turning out cloth for the Confederate government. What happened to the Roswell and Sweetwater women had precedents in the Civil War, but the details of this deliberate displacement of civilians were unique. Sherman had deported a handful of families with Confederate sympathies from Memphis in the fall of 1862 in retribution for guerrilla attacks on Mississippi River steamers. His brother-​in-​law, Brig. Gen. Thomas Ewing Jr., depopulated four counties in western Missouri beginning in August 1863 in an effort to combat rampant guerrilla warfare in that region. Sherman ordered the Roswell and Sweetwater women sent north in part out of anger that they had been employed to make material for the Confederacy. But his men destroyed the factories so they could not continue to do so if they had been allowed to remain in Georgia. Perhaps Sherman wanted to ship skilled factory workers to Northern industries, where they would be likely to make material for the Union Army. If so, it was a deliberate effort to shift skilled laborers from one side of the war to the other.

South of the Chattahoochee River Sherman began his final push toward Atlanta on the morning of July 17 as the bulk of his army group crossed the Chattahoochee River at two locations north of the railroad bridge. He had no intention of attacking the strong ring of fortifications around the city. Instead, he planned to cut the three railroads that fed the Army of Tennessee and force the Confederates out. The Georgia Railroad leading east from Atlanta to Augusta was his first target. McPherson’s Army of the Tennessee marched toward the vicinity of Decatur, six miles east of Atlanta, to cut the rail line. Thomas’s Army of the Cumberland anchored Sherman’s right by moving directly south against the Atlanta defenses, while Schofield’s Army of the Ohio tried to fill the gap between the two forces. With an implied mandate for action hanging over him, Hood planned an attack on Thomas’s army immediately after it crossed Peach Tree Creek, which ran generally east to west in a deep valley across the Federal line of approach. When the Confederates struck Thomas on the afternoon of July 20 they took his men by surprise. But the Federals recovered quickly, and the Battle of Peach Tree Creek became a hard-​fought engagement that resulted in the blunting of Hood’s first offensive to save Atlanta. By nightfall all Rebel divisions had fallen back to the Peach Tree Creek Line. The Confederates under Lt. Gen. William J. Hardee and Lt. Gen. Alexander P. Stewart lost 2,500 men that

The Campaign for Atlanta    477 day; Federal casualties amounted to 1,900. Hood’s old corps, temporarily led by Maj. Gen. Benjamin F. Cheatham, lay idle during the engagement. Lack of coordination in movements, some degree of refusal to fight among Confederate units, and the onset of darkness prevented the Rebels from achieving their goals on July 20.10 Hood nearly crushed Sherman’s left flank when he launched a heavy assault against McPherson’s Army of the Tennessee east of Atlanta on the afternoon of July 22. Hardee’s Corps had marched fifteen miles the previous night to flank McPherson. The result was the biggest, costliest engagement of the Atlanta Campaign, usually referred to as the Battle of Atlanta or the Battle of July 22. Hardee launched uncoordinated assaults that nevertheless chewed up Brig. Gen. Giles A. Smith’s division of the Seventeenth Corps and captured several hundred yards of Federal trenches and hundreds of prisoners. Many units in the corps jumped from one side of their slender earthworks to the other in order to repel the enemy as needed. Three brigades of the Sixteenth Corps happened to be placed a few hundred yards behind the Seventeenth Corps and blunted the assault of two Confederate divisions, saving the Army of the Tennessee. Early in this swirling battle McPherson was killed when he inadvertently rode into a Confederate skirmish line. Maj. Gen. John A. Logan gave up his Fifteenth Corps command to replace him. Later that afternoon, Maj. Gen. Benjamin F. Cheatham’s Corps assaulted the Federal front, breaking a weakly held sector and capturing several artillery pieces. Logan and other Union commanders responded to this crisis by rushing reinforcements to the area, counterattacking, and throwing the Confederates back. By dusk, when the fighting sputtered to an end, Hood had lost 5,500 men in his second effort to save Atlanta while inflicting 3,722 casualties on the Federals. Sherman decided not to name Logan as permanent commander of the Army of the Tennessee, picking Fourth Corps commander Oliver Otis Howard instead. Howard replaced Logan on July 27 as the Army of the Tennessee began to shift from Sherman’s far left to his far right in an effort to reach the last two rail lines feeding Atlanta. The Atlanta and West Point Railroad from Alabama joined the Macon and Western Railroad from Macon at East Point, located about six miles south of Atlanta. If the Federals could cut these lines, Hood would be forced to abandon the city. Howard carefully deployed his troops west of Atlanta to extend the Union line on July 28, just before the Confederates attacked him near Ezra Church. All afternoon they were shot down, until losing 3,000 men while inflicting only 632 casualties on Howard.11 In a little more than one week, Hood’s army had fought three major battles, lost at least eleven thousand men, and at best had only delayed Sherman’s operations against the railroads. Even Jefferson Davis now cautioned the new commander not to waste his manpower. Hood resorted to the same tactics that had gotten Johnston fired: digging in to block enemy movements. After a flurry of fighting, the campaign once again settled into a semi-​siege condition. Sherman continued for the next several weeks to seek ways to extend his right wing to the south in order to reach the railroad. He shifted the Army of the Ohio from his left to his right by August 2 and assigned Schofield the responsibility of reaching out

478   Earl J. Hess for the tracks. Schofield found it a fruitless assignment. The Confederates continually strengthened their earthworks with layers of obstacles in front that made them unassailable, thereby thinning the infantry line in the works to the minimum and allowing more men to extend their fortifications southward. Sherman knew he needed to cut away from the railroad and move freely across the countryside in a wide flanking movement to bypass the lengthening Confederate line. But he wanted to exhaust every other possibility before risking that move. He launched a large cavalry raid against the railroad south of Atlanta on July 27, but it was badly defeated by Hood’s cavalry. As he explored every possibility and worked to prepare his massive flanking movement, Sherman also decided to bombard Atlanta. His objective was to harass Hood’s logistical support, make life unbearable for civilian and soldier alike, and destroy what he considered to be a military target. Federal artillery had fired randomly into the city beginning on July 20, but Sherman now wanted a more concentrated effort. He shipped heavy artillery from Chattanooga and ordered all field batteries within range to fire regularly into town. Enterprising artillery officers even constructed an oven to heat solid shot in an effort to deliberately set fires among the wooden buildings. At times intense and destructive, the bombardment of Atlanta continued until Sherman began his flanking movement on August 26. Thirty-​seven days of shelling prompted many citizens to leave the city; some of them crossed the lines and asked to be sent north, while the rest chose to move farther south. It is estimated that about 100,000 rounds were fired into the city during that time, most severely damaging the northwest quadrant of town and the railroad facilities at the center. Probably about twenty civilians died as a result, and another half-​dozen perished when coming into contact with unexploded shells for a few weeks after August 26. Many citizens dug holes in their back yards to shelter themselves during the bombardment. Although Southern partisans even today decry Sherman as a cruel war maker, his bombardment of Atlanta fit well within current constructs of international law, which permitted the bombardment of a defended city. The commander of attacking forces was enjoined to warn the city authorities before bombarding, and it is true that Sherman did not do that in an official way. But the initial shelling on July 20 was very limited and served as an effective warning of what was to come. Sherman was ready to launch his large flanking movement to the south by late August after careful preparation. Leaving one corps to protect the railroad crossing of the Chattahoochee River, he led the other six out of their trenches on the night of August 26. Hood soon discovered the Federal position at the river but for a couple of days had no certain information about where the rest of Sherman’s army group had gone. By August 28, Howard’s Army of the Tennessee had landed on the Atlanta and West Point Railroad at Fairburn and Shadna Church, while elements of Thomas’s army hit the same road at Red Oak. All of these locations were about sixteen miles southwest of Atlanta. They began to systematically destroy the track for several miles so it could not be rebuilt for many months. Then Howard headed for the Macon and Western

The Campaign for Atlanta    479 Railroad at Jonesboro, about fifteen miles south of Atlanta. By this time Hood became aware of Sherman’s objective and shifted two corps to Jonesboro. The Confederates attacked Howard on the afternoon of August 31 a short distance west of town. Plagued by troop exhaustion and a marked decline of offensive spirit among the rank and file, this last Confederate attack of the Atlanta Campaign utterly failed. Because Schofield and elements of Thomas’s army lodged on the Macon and Western Railroad between Jonesboro and East Point that day, Hood recalled one corps from Jonesboro to protect East Point. He then assigned Hardee the nearly impossible task of holding the town with only one corps. On September 1, the second day of the Battle of Jonesboro, Sherman conducted small-​ scale assaults on Hardee’s line, achieving only limited success in breaking it. But the Confederates were badly outnumbered and evacuated the town that night. Hood was compelled to give up Atlanta on September 2. The Battle of Jonesboro opened the gates of Atlanta, but the Federals missed an opportunity to damage the Army of Tennessee far more than merely taking out of action 1,400 Confederates at the cost of 1,272 casualties. Hood managed to bypass Federal units and reassemble his army at Lovejoy’s Station, located on the Macon and Western Railroad more than twenty miles south of Atlanta. Sherman brought most of his army group there to confront the Rebel line from September 2 to 4. He could not find a good chance to deal with it so broke contact and retired to Atlanta to rest his men.12 After four months of nearly continuous contact, the Atlanta Campaign finally was over, but what had been accomplished during this grueling experience? Union lines had advanced a hundred miles into Georgia, but the heart of the state had not yet been reached. The logistical and industrial assets centered at Atlanta now were under Federal control. But the campaign had cost both sides a good deal in terms of manpower, resources, and time. The Federals suffered far less in all these ways than did the Confederates. In fact, from a military standpoint, the most important result of the campaign was a drastic reduction in the field effectiveness of the Army of Tennessee. Not only was its manpower down by at least one-​third, possibly as much as one-​half, but its morale was severely eroded. Whether that was due to Johnston’s constant retreats without fighting a general battle, as Hood contended, or because of Hood’s bloody battles that resulted in little gain, as the rank and file generally believed, is an arguable point. In fact, the Army of Tennessee had been so reduced in numbers and fighting power that Sherman could seriously think about breaking up his huge concentration of manpower, assigning part of it to deal with Hood and using the rest to achieve other strategic goals. He was fully aware that his long rail line would be inadequate to supply his host south of Atlanta; any further moves in that direction would have to be conducted by raiding. That meant losing contact with his line of communications and living off the countryside as he marched his troops through the Deep South to the coast, where he could regain contact with the outside world. But any such plans would have to wait while Sherman rested his men at Atlanta for a few weeks.

480   Earl J. Hess

Effect of the Campaign The Atlanta Campaign resonated on the national level for both sides in the war. Newspapers in both East and West paid close attention to Sherman’s moves and highlighted his slow but consistent progress, in contrast to Grant’s bloody march during the Overland Campaign, which became a comparative stalemate in operations once Grant reached Petersburg. The Union military system in the western theater was working so well that Lincoln could afford to pay little attention to it. Sherman was in touch with the president only twice during the campaign. Receiving pressure from civilians to rescind Sherman’s order prohibiting their travel on military railroads, the president requested the general to relent on that issue. But Sherman refused to do so, arguing that feeding his troops was more important than allowing thousands of citizens to use the cars for their own purposes, even if they intended to visit and support their hometown regiments in the field. Events during the Atlanta Campaign severely worsened relations between generals in the field and the political leadership of the Confederacy. Davis had always harbored doubts about Johnston. His fears worsened with every retreat, until Johnston’s crossing of the Chattahoochee became the last straw. The Southern president had hesitated too long; when the change of commanders finally took place, the Army of Tennessee had its back against the wall at Atlanta. Hood took over under the worst circumstances, and it showed in the poor preparations of the army during the three battles that quickly ensued. For several reasons, neither Johnston nor Hood could stop Sherman. By this stage of the war, the resource base that the Confederacy could draw on for supplies and manpower had shrunk. Also, the Federals had so consistently won battles and campaigns in the West that they had an unbreakable confidence in their commanders and in themselves. Perhaps most important, Union logistical support for deep penetrations of Rebel territory had been honed to a fine point of efficiency. The strategic context accounted more for Sherman’s victory in the Atlanta Campaign than did poor Confederate generalship or shortage of troops. The eighteen heavily fortified lines built by the Army of Tennessee during the campaign did little more than slow the Federal advance; as long as there was a chance of flanking them, Sherman could keep on moving. The Federals captured territory and a significant city, but did this campaign have a greater impact on the course of the Civil War? Many historians have argued that it was a key factor in boosting Northern morale and reinforcing faith in Lincoln’s war leadership, helping greatly to increase his chances of success in the upcoming presidential election. It is true that by August even Lincoln began to feel he may lose the political contest due to the rise of protests against the bloody spring and summer campaigns and the apparent lack of military success. Coming soon after the nomination of Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan by the Democratic Party, Shermans’ capture of Atlanta was seen by many contemporaries as a refutation of the Democrat’s claim that the war was hopelessly stalemated. But whether the fall of Atlanta actually was the turning point in Republican presidential fortunes in 1864 is a question in need of further study.

The Campaign for Atlanta    481 There is no doubt that the campaign had a devastating impact on northwest Georgia, and especially the city of Atlanta. Many Southerners admitted that their own army was as bad as the enemy in devastating the countryside and the towns. Hood issued orders for his troops to conduct a scorched-​earth policy, removing cattle and hogs from the reach of Sherman’s men. When news of the defeat at Jonesboro arrived at Atlanta, many residents panicked and fled with the Army of Tennessee, while others scooped up provisions from government warehouses that were suddenly left without guards. Food had been scarce in the city for some time. Civilians also ransacked stores and stole a lot of merchandise before the Federals restored some degree of law and order. The movement of the armies produced thousands of refugees. It is impossible to get an accurate count of them because no one was assigned to keep track of the problem. Col. Daniel C.  McCallum, who was in charge of the U.S. Military Railroad system, estimated that 150,000 refugees, contrabands, and Confederate deserters were shipped north on Sherman’s railroads in the entire Military Division of the Mississippi during fiscal year June 30, 1864, to June 30, 1865. We know that many of the white refugees fleeing from the Atlanta Campaign elected to travel north rather than south, indicating they were either Federal loyalists or neutral in the sectional strife. Sherman allowed them to travel free of charge on empty cars that ran north to Chattanooga, Nashville, and Louisville. From there they were on their own. The Roswell factory women drew the most attention, but they were outnumbered by hundreds of unidentified men, women, and children who streamed northward beginning in June and extending to the end of the campaign. Charitable organizations and private citizens alike bore the burden of helping these refugees find homes and jobs in Northern communities, constituting a long-​range impact of the Atlanta Campaign even in the free states. The problems associated with population dispersal did not end with the fall of Atlanta. Sherman wanted to convert the captured city into an armed camp with few civilians to bother the Union garrison. Therefore he issued orders for the forced removal of selected city residents in September 1864. This of course raised a howl of protest from Confederate authorities, and a spirited exchange of dispatches erupted between Hood and Sherman. Nevertheless the Confederates made arrangements to accept these refugees at a neutral point outside the city. Federal authorities moved 1,682 people, slightly more than half of them children, south of Atlanta and delivered them to Hood’s army. They represented members of 446 Atlanta families. In addition, about 1,700 residents chose to travel north, for a total of nearly 3,500 citizens who were evacuated with at least some of their movable property. Sherman granted permission to about fifty families loyal to the Union to remain in Atlanta. Refugee families were forced to fend for themselves, dependent on their resources or the charity of others to help them through a difficult transition. The plight of families caught up in the forced deportations that occurred during the Atlanta Campaign has remained obscure, but we know the stories of at least three of them. The William Bell family experienced little in the way of suffering. His two sons had worked in the Confederate government bakery in Atlanta for the past two years, which was reason enough for the Federals to include the entire family in the September removal. William

482   Earl J. Hess merely moved his family to Macon, where the sons quickly found work in another government agency of that city. Like so many other deportees, the Bell family moved back to Atlanta as soon as Sherman left the city in mid-​November to begin the March to the Sea. In contrast to the Bells, Samuel Richards, an English-​born bookseller in Atlanta, sold his house and store and headed north when Sherman ordered the deportation. He and his family moved to Louisville for a few weeks and then by early November 1864 went on to New York to live for a period of time until returning to Atlanta in the summer of 1865. Emily E. Molineaux probably was more typical than Bell or Richards concerning how refugees of the Atlanta Campaign fared. Molineaux, a single mother with an eight-​year-​ old son, also headed north during Sherman’s forced migration. She found a Refugee Home in Cincinnati but left it after only one night because it was not a suitable place for either her or her son to live. She was greatly helped by a Copperhead family in the city, by an office that distributed free goods to needy families of Union soldiers, and by the U.S. Christian Commission. She managed to get by until the war ended, and then returned to Georgia. Thousands of civilian lives were disrupted by the Atlanta Campaign, with an undetermined number of refugees never returning to their homes. The social history of the Civil War can never be complete without a look at this aspect of the conflict and how communities across the North and the South were affected by displaced people who wound up begging for help at their doors. Historians have not yet studied these issues in depth. The agriculture of the region also was deeply affected by the campaign. The spreading of farm families from the area severely curtailed planting and harvesting of crops. Moreover, the Atlanta Campaign was soon followed by Hood’s sweep northward along the Western and Atlantic Railroad from near Kennesaw Mountain up to Dalton in October. Sherman pursued Hood with six of his seven corps, leaving one behind to hold Atlanta. During that time the Federals who garrisoned Atlanta conducted massive foraging expeditions through the area southeast of the city to harvest the ripe corn crop. Then Sherman partially destroyed Atlanta before setting out on the March to the Sea. The combined effect of all these events devastated the region for a long time to come. It produced one of the most serious famines to occur as a result of the Civil War, with reports of literal starvation to death of several civilians in and around Atlanta during the spring of 1865. In fact, the Federal army rebuilt the Western and Atlantic Railroad in order to ship corn to the city in a desperate bid to relieve the suffering. After that horrible experience, both the region and the city of Atlanta began slowly to repair the wreck of war.

Notes 1. Earl J. Hess, Civil War Supply and Strategy:  Feeding Men and Moving Armies (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020), 139–​175. 2. Ulysses S. Grant to William T. Sherman, April 4, 1864, in The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, ed. John Y. Simon (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982), 10:252.

The Campaign for Atlanta    483 3. Earl J. Hess, Fighting for Atlanta: Tactics, Terrain, and Trenches in the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 36–​47. 4. “Journal of Operations of the Army of Tennessee May 14–​June 4,” in U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1887), ser. 1, vol. 38, pt. 3: 984 (hereafter cited as OR). 5. Earl J. Hess, Kennesaw Mountain:  Sherman, Johnston, and the Atlanta Campaign (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 215–​226. 6. William T. Sherman to commanding officer, Allatoona, July 14, 1864, OR, ser. 1, vol. 38, pt. 5: 141. 7. Cyrena Stone quoted in Thomas G. Dyer, Secret Yankees: The Union Circle in Confederate Atlanta (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 309. 8. William T. Sherman to Henry W. Halleck, July 9, 1864, OR, ser. 1, vol. 38, pt. 5: 92. 9. William T. Sherman to Kenner Garrard, July 7, 1864, OR, ser. 1, vol. 38, pt. 5: 77. 10. Earl J. Hess, The Battle of Peach Tree Creek: Hood’s First Effort to Save Atlanta (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 233–​245. 11. Earl J. Hess, The Battle of Ezra Church and the Struggle for Atlanta (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 194–​207. 12. Earl J. Hess, Civil War Logistics: A Study of Military Transportation (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017), 240–​248.

Bibliography Castel, Albert. Decision in the West: The Atlanta Campaign of 1864. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992. Connelly, Thomas Lawrence. Autumn of Glory:  The Army of Tennessee, 1862–​1865. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971. Cox, Jacob Dolson. Atlanta. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1882. Davis, Robert S., Jr. “The General Sherman Census of Atlanta, September 1864.” Georgia Genealogical Magazine 31 (1991): 132–​141. Davis, Stephen. What the Yankees Did to Us: Sherman’s Bombardment and Wrecking of Atlanta. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2012. Dyer, Thomas G. Secret Yankees: The Union Circle in Confederate Atlanta. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Hess, Earl J. The Battle of Ezra Church and the Struggle for Atlanta. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Hess, Earl J. The Battle of Peach Tree Creek:  Hood’s First Effort to Save Atlanta. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Hess, Earl J. Fighting for Atlanta:  Tactics, Terrain, and Trenches in the Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Hess, Earl J. Kennesaw Mountain:  Sherman, Johnston, and the Atlanta Campaign. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013. McMurry, Richard M. Atlanta, 1864: Last Chance for the Confederacy. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000.

484   Earl J. Hess Petite, Mary Deborah. “The Women Will Howl”:  The Union Army Capture of Roswell and New Manchester, Georgia, and the Forced Relocation of Mill Workers. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008. Sheehan-​Dean, Aaron. The Calculus of Violence:  How Americans Fought the Civil War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. Venet, Wendy Hamand. A Changing Wind: Commerce and Conflict in Civil War Atlanta. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014. Waugh, John. Reelecting Lincoln: The Battle for the 1864 Presidency. New York: Crown, 1997.

Chapter 30

Petersburg, V i rg i nia , J une–​A u gust  1864 A. Wilson Greene

The Petersburg Campaign was the longest sustained military operation of the American Civil War, lasting for 292 days from June 15, 1864, through April 3, 1865. Militarily indecisive during its first three months, the campaign imposed significant disruptions on civilian life in and around Petersburg and marked a profound chapter in the history of African American participation in the war. Four separate Union offensives and a Confederate initiative that reached the doorstep of Washington unfolded as a backdrop to the presidential canvass of 1864. The community on the fall line of Virginia’s Appomattox River had been in existence for more than two centuries when the Civil War erupted in 1861. The city of Petersburg traces its origins to 1645, when a trading post called Fort Henry emerged at the river’s head of navigation. By 1861 the town had grown to become Virginia’s second-​and the Confederacy’s seventh-​largest metropolis. An industrial powerhouse manufacturing cotton, flour, iron, and, most important, tobacco, Petersburg owed its strategic significance to its transportation assets. Five railroads and two major plank roads served the Cockade City and connected it to all points of the compass.1 Like many commercial towns in the South, Petersburg rejected immediate secession during the early stages of the sectional crisis. But when Virginia voted to leave the Union on April 17, 1861, the vast majority of Petersburg’s citizens enthusiastically supported the Confederate cause. Within three months the city contributed ten companies of infantry, two companies of cavalry, and three artillery batteries to Southern armies, enlisting some 53 percent of the white military-​age men in town. Petersburg’s industrial economy helped sustain a large free Black population. Nearly 26 percent of free persons in the city were African American, the highest such proportion in any Southern city. After the state seceded, a large number of free Black men expressed a desire to serve the Confederacy in a military capacity. “We are willing to aid Virginia’s cause to the utmost extent of our ability,” promised Charles Tinsley, a twenty-​ nine-​year-​old bricklayer and spokesman for the Black volunteers. The Old Dominion

486   A. Wilson Greene had rejected arming African Americans at the war’s inception, but it did accept these volunteers as laborers, employing them to build fortifications, a role Black men from Petersburg would play throughout the conflict.2 By the spring of 1864 such earthworks ringed the Cockade City. A system of fifty-​five artillery redans connected by infantry curtains stretched for nearly ten miles around Petersburg, anchored on the Appomattox River above and below the city. These defenses would not be tested until June 9, when a combined infantry and cavalry operation orchestrated by elements of Maj. Gen. Benjamin Butler’s Army of the James attacked the city hoping to destroy its connections to Richmond. Thwarted by a contingent of the town’s old men and young boys, Butler’s forces failed to capture the city, an outcome that would require almost ten additional months. The contest for Petersburg encompassed 576 square miles, extending from the eastern outskirts of Richmond, across the James River, onto the Bermuda Hundred peninsula, and around the eastern, southern, and western sides of Petersburg. But the influence of military events around Petersburg reached armies in the Shenandoah Valley, north Georgia, and even near the national capital at Washington. When Lt. Gen. Ulysses S.  Grant became general in chief of all Union armies in March 1864, he developed an integrated strategy involving five distinct but simultaneous offensives. Three of those operations would be in Virginia. Butler’s task would be to approach the Confederate capital via the James River, using Bermuda Hundred—​ between Petersburg and Richmond—​as his base. Another campaign would move up the Shenandoah Valley, sweeping it clean of Confederate opposition and denying Southern armies its agricultural fecundity. Grant’s primary maneuver would pit Maj. Gen. George Meade’s Army of the Potomac, which Grant would personally accompany, against Gen. Robert E.  Lee’s vaunted Army of Northern Virginia. Grant intended to engage and deplete Lee’s military strength and combine the three elements of his Virginia forces around Richmond to compel the reduction of the Confederacy’s premier political and economic city. Simultaneous offensives targeting gray-​clad armies protecting Atlanta and Mobile would complement the Virginia initiatives and prevent Southern strategists from shifting their outnumbered forces to meet distant threats. All of Grant’s elements would advance in concert in early May. A month later Grant’s plans had come to grief. His protégé, Maj. Gen. William T.  Sherman, made only halting progress against the nimble Confederate army in Georgia. The attempt to capture Mobile had not yet commenced, and in Virginia his efforts in the Shenandoah Valley and south of Richmond met defeat. Meade had engaged Lee in a series of bloody encounters, styled the Overland Campaign, ending on June 3 with a disastrous setback ten miles northeast of Richmond near a crossroads called Cold Harbor. To be sure, the Army of Northern Virginia had suffered horrendous losses, but it maintained sufficient strength to protect its capital and remain a defiant defensive force. Union casualties had been even worse, if proportionately about the same as their opponents’. Most important in an operational sense, Grant’s preference for moving around Lee’s right flank while maintaining a secure supply line via Virginia’s navigable rivers hit

Petersburg, Virginia, June–August 1864    487 a brick wall. Meade’s army had run out of maneuver room and faced the prospect of military stalemate, a politically perilous situation given Abraham Lincoln’s pending reelection campaign that depended upon the perception of inevitable Confederate defeat. The Union commander decided to continue to outflank Lee’s forces, but to do so would require crossing the mighty James River, a logistical challenge of enormous proportions. If successful, however, the prize would be Petersburg, whose rail network controlled Confederate supply lines to the west and south, including connections to the only functioning Atlantic coast port, at Wilmington, North Carolina. Grant’s strategy for conquering the James evolved over a week, beginning on June 5. Not only would he have to move more than eighty thousand men and hundreds of wheeled vehicles to the banks of the James, including crossing the swampy obstacle of the Chickahominy River, but he had to do so without alerting Lee. An army is never more vulnerable than when straddling a tidal river, and should Lee discover the Union plan, defeat and possible calamity would be the consequence. As engineers identified a crossing point on the James thirty-​four miles downstream from Richmond and logisticians accumulated bridging material and transport craft, blue-​clad soldiers began to disengage quietly from their Cold Harbor trenches on the evening of June 12. The next morning Confederate pickets discovered the Federals’ departure, but General Lee could not be sure of their destination. While he suspected that Grant would attempt to cross the James and threaten Petersburg, he could not afford to weaken his defenses east of Richmond, should Grant attempt to approach the city via the same routes used by enemy forces two years earlier. Lee relied on the local commander in Petersburg, Gen. P. G. T. Beauregard, to apprise him of any threat to the Cockade City, while shifting the Army of Northern Virginia to blocking positions on the river’s left bank. By June 14 the lead elements of the Army of the Potomac had reached the James, prepared to utilize a massive pontoon bridge and a fleet of transports to gain the southern shore. Butler’s Eighteenth Corps, which had reinforced Meade’s army in time to suffer heavy casualties at Cold Harbor, returned to Bermuda Hundred by water. Grant assigned it to attack Petersburg at dawn on the fifteenth, supported by Meade’s Second Corps, which began crossing the James late on the fourteenth. Beauregard’s outnumbered forces awaited them, occupying a thin line behind Petersburg’s eastern defenses. Grant’s outstanding leadership in transporting his army to and across the James stands in stark contrast to his flawed communications regarding the June 15 attacks. The general in chief failed to articulate his full intentions to the four subordinates responsible for making the assault: Butler, Meade, and corps commanders Maj. Gen. William Smith and Maj. Gen. Winfield Hancock. As a result, instead of launching a dawn attack against Beauregard’s 4,300 defenders with his corps of 14,000 men, as Grant intended, Smith could not reach his objective until midday, having no knowledge of Grant’s orders until the previous evening. Even worse, General Hancock remained unaware that his large corps was to support Smith. Confusion over supplying his men with rations they did not need, faulty maps, and enervating heat conspired to delay Hancock’s arrival until after Smith had finally made his move at 7:00 p.m.

Map 30.1  Petersburg, June to August 1864

Petersburg, Virginia, June–August 1864    489 Eighteenth Corps soldiers easily outflanked and overran Beauregard’s key position, Battery Five, and eventually extended their control from Battery Three to Battery Eleven, a stretch of more than two miles of the Confederate works. The Black division in Smith’s corps, in its inaugural combat role of any consequence, not only vanquished a Rebel outpost that morning at Baylor’s Farm but executed successful attacks that resulted in the capture of Batteries Seven through Ten. William H. Hunter, the African American chaplain of the 4th U.S. Colored Troops (USCT), considered June 15 “the day when prejudice died in the entire Army of the U.S. of America. It is the day when it was admitted that colored men were equal to the severest ordeal.” Events would demonstrate the exaggeration of this analysis, although some white Union soldiers admitted that their Black comrades acquitted themselves well. Sgt. George Breck, a gunner with Battery L, 1st New York Light Artillery, was willing to give “due credit to the black soldier for his fighting qualities” but blanched at what he considered excessive praise for their accomplishment. “This rendering to Caesar the things that don’t honestly belong to Caesar, and extolling Pompey above the white soldier, for courage and dash, valor, bravery, and endurance, may delight some of the devoted worshippers of the ebony idol, but we fail to ‘see it’ ourself.”3 Darkness ended the fighting as Hancock finally arrived on the battlefield with two of his powerful divisions. He consulted with Smith, whom he outranked, and agreed that it would be too risky to continue the advance. Night attacks rarely succeeded during the Civil War, and Smith worried that Beauregard was being heavily reinforced. Most important, with Union artillery poised to occupy the captured Confederate batteries, Petersburg would be in range of Federal cannons and thus probably indefensible. Only in hindsight did it become clear that Petersburg was ripe for the taking that night and that Smith and Hancock erred in not exploiting the advantage gained earlier in the evening. Smith was right on one count:  Beauregard had been reinforced that night. The Confederate commander summoned his troops from Bermuda Hundred to bolster the defeated remnants of his vanquished brigades of regulars and militia at Petersburg, risking a Federal incursion between Petersburg and the Confederate capital. Led by Brig. Gen. Johnson Hagood, the fresh arrivals created a new defensive line west of the captured works. Here they made a brave stand for two days, June 16–​17, as more of Meade’s army arrived at Petersburg. A series of determined if uncoordinated attacks dented Beauregard’s new perimeter but failed to break it. However, by the night of June 17, the Creole general ordered his exhausted men to withdraw to a third line of defense even closer to the city, warning Lee that if the Army of Northern Virginia failed to come immediately to his relief, “God Almighty alone would save Petersburg and Richmond.” Beauregard had been in communication with Lee during the entirety of the Union offensive, but his messages alternated between optimism and panic. Furthermore, he failed to identify the troops opposing him until the night of the seventeenth, justifying Lee’s reasonable decision to shift his men only incrementally toward the south side of the James until he could be certain that the Army of the Potomac no longer threatened Richmond. Now armed with indisputable intelligence regarding the whereabouts of Grant’s legions, Lee ordered his divisions to proceed as rapidly as possible to the Cockade City.4

490   A. Wilson Greene General Meade beseeched his corps commanders, all of whom were now present with a force that numbered ninety thousand men, to advance on the morning of June 18, only to find that the Confederates had fallen back to their new line of defense. Meade struggled all day to compel his subordinates to make a simultaneous attack before Lee’s expected reinforcements arrived. In this he failed. Once again the Union army made sporadic assaults, all of which met defeat, including an attack by the 1st Maine Heavy Artillery that resulted in the largest loss experienced by any single regiment during the entire war. Lee’s men relieved Beauregard’s exhausted defenders and extended their line to the west. The last Union attack petered out at dark and Grant’s First Petersburg Offensive sputtered to its conclusion. Casualties from June 15 to 18 numbered about 13,000 Federals and at least 2,500 Confederates. Added to the 55,000 losses sustained by Grant and the 33,000 soldiers killed, wounded, or missing in the Army of Northern Virginia during the Overland Campaign, the six weeks between May 5 and June 18, 1864, were the bloodiest in American history. The South had all but exhausted its white manpower resources, while the Federals attempted to make good their losses by implementing a draft, buttressed by generous bounties for new volunteers. These expedients generated thousands of recruits, but the quality of the new soldiers left much to be desired. The North’s Brig. Gen. Lysander Cutler wrote President Lincoln of his skepticism regarding the efficacy of this method of replenishing the ranks. “We shall . . . receive a batch of aged paralytics, scorbutics, imbeciles, &c, to be sent to hospitals or discharged—​an element of weakness instead of strength,” he advised. “I am most firmly convinced that not two-​thirds of the conscripts and substitutes ever reached this army, and . . . not half of those who did were ever available as soldiers for the field.”5 Prisoners of war remained an untapped source of manpower for both sides at this time. Earlier in the conflict, the contending governments agreed to an elaborate system of prisoner exchange. That arrangement foundered in 1863 on the status of African American soldiers held by the Confederates. President Jefferson Davis approved a policy by which captured Black soldiers would either be returned to slavery or executed, prompting the Union War Department to suspend the exchange cartel, in effect holding Confederate POWs hostage against the exercise of Davis’s threat. The bloodbath of the Overland and Petersburg campaigns engendered pressure for a renewal of the exchange cartel, but Lincoln refused to do so until USCTs received equal treatment at the hands of their Southern captors. General Grant offered another rationale. “It is hard on our men held in Southern prisons not to exchange them,” he explained to General Butler, “but it is humanity to those left in the ranks to fight our battles. Every man released . . . becomes an active soldier against us. . . . If we commence a system of exchanges . . . we will have to fight on until the whole South is exterminated. If we hold those caught they amount to no more than dead men.” The armies at Petersburg would have to persevere with their depleted forces.6 The impact of that diminution received full display during Grant’s Second Petersburg Offensive. General Meade had expressed “great regret” at his failure to capture Petersburg, but Grant responded that he was “perfectly satisfied that all has been done

Petersburg, Virginia, June–August 1864    491 that could be done,” and he called on Meade to “rest the men.” That respite would be brief. On June 20 Grant and Meade conceived a new plan to conquer Petersburg, this time by targeting the city’s transportation network. Meade’s Sixth and Second Corps would move west, seize the Petersburg (& Weldon) Railroad, and interdict the South Side Railroad, extending Union lines to the Appomattox River half a dozen miles upstream from Petersburg. At the same time, two blue-​clad cavalry divisions, led by Brigadier Generals James H.  Wilson and August V.  Kautz, would range south and west, cutting those two lines at a greater distance from the city by dismantling rails and burning bridges. They would also disable the Richmond & Danville Railroad that bypassed Petersburg en route to the Confederate capital. In the meantime, Butler would establish a bridgehead across the James at a landing called Deep Bottom, while his artillery pummeled the bridges spanning the Appomattox River at Petersburg. These multiple expedients aimed to isolate Lee’s army from its lines of communication, while menacing Richmond from a position on the left bank of the James.7 The development of this plan coincided with the first of two visits to Petersburg by President Lincoln. The chief executive, whose appearance reminded a member of Grant’s staff of “a boss undertaker,” accompanied Grant on an inspection of the battlefront, never inquiring about his general’s plans and professing no desire to know them. Grant cultivated this relationship of trust with the commander in chief by disavowing any political ambition and evincing a determination to defeat the Confederates even if, as he famously underestimated, “it takes all summer.” Lincoln’s absolute confidence in Grant insulated the general in chief from the accusations of critics who, citing Grant’s casualties, considered him an operationally clumsy butcher. General Lee enjoyed a similar rapport with his president, carefully playing to Davis’s ego and always seeking his approval of military decisions, albeit sometimes disingenuously. This ability to “manage” their civilian superiors is an important key to understanding the military success of Grant and Lee.8 Lincoln’s indulgence would come in handy, because the Second Petersburg Offensive brought barren results. Meade’s two infantry corps, diminished in size and experienced leadership due to casualties and the expiration of terms of enlistment, crossed Jerusalem Plank Road but only touched on the Petersburg Railroad, never remotely approaching the South Side Railroad. A Confederate attack led by Brig. Gen. William Mahone with only four brigades wreaked havoc upon Meade’s weakened Second Corps on June 22. The Federals lost a battery of artillery, eight battle flags, and some two thousand casualties, the majority prisoners. The next day the Sixth Corps suffered heavily, particularly the highly regarded Vermont Brigade, at the cost of only 150 men for Mahone. Butler did manage to establish his bridgehead at Deep Bottom but failed to destroy Petersburg’s bridges. Grant’s first effort to isolate Petersburg proved a dismal failure. The cavalry component of Grant’s operation met with only fleeting success. The Union troopers inflicted significant mayhem on the rails of all three targeted roads, but on June 25 they fumbled their effort to destroy the key bridge over the Staunton (Roanoke) River on the Richmond & Danville line. A ragtag collection of militia, ambulatory wounded regulars, and civilian volunteers under the command of Capt. Benjamin

492   A. Wilson Greene L. Farinholt—​himself recuperating from wounds and imprisonment—​turned back the Federals’ attempt to destroy the span. General Wilson, in overall command, now headed back to Union lines, a grueling ride in oven-​like heat. Harassed by Confederate cavalry in his rear and on his left flank, Wilson ran into serious opposition at Sappony Church on June 28 and saw his forces routed at Reams’ Station, a whistle stop on the Petersburg Railroad, the following day by troops dispatched from Lee’s army, including the ubiquitous Billy Mahone. The raiders limped back into Union lines between June 30 and July 2, leaving behind as many as 1,500 casualties, all their artillery, and vast amounts of plunder seized from local civilians along their route. In addition to wagons, horses, foodstuffs, and various domestic treasures, the Union troopers had accumulated between 1,020 and 1,420 runaway slaves during their ride through Southside Virginia. Confederate newspapers preferred to report that the slaves had been lured away or forced to flee the homes of kindly masters, but the evidence suggests that the overwhelming majority simply saw the raid as their chance to escape—​ and they took it. Such devotion to the quest for freedom ended tragically for all but about two hundred of the runaways. The Confederates hotly pursued Wilson’s panicked retreat from Reams’ Station, “exposing to view about 1,500 negroes scampering across the fields (of all sizes & sexes) with great bundles of plunder stolen from their master’s houses upon their backs,” remembered a Virginia trooper. “Such screaming & yelling as they sent up Pandemonium itself could scarcely beat.”9 Some desperate mothers, facing the difficult choice between escaping slavery or being seized with their offspring, left their children behind. “Little nigger babies could be found lying in the woods nearly dead that were thrown away by the Yankees in their flight,” wrote a Virginian, choosing to blame Northern soldiers under the standard premise that few of the slaves left their homes voluntarily. “The Rebels seemed to be inflamed with rage against the Negroes for running away,” testified an officer in the 1st Vermont Cavalry, “and leaving the ‘Yankees’ would sabre the ‘Niggers’ without mercy.” Those who survived marched into Petersburg, the children on the shoulders of Union prisoners. “It was an amusing sight to see all the little darkies with a leg on either side of a Yankee’s neck marching to Petersburg,” snarled Lt. Charles E. Denoon of the 41st Virginia.10 The Confederates established the identities of the captives as best they could and published their names for the benefit of aggrieved masters. Some were kept in Petersburg pending collection, but the majority were put on the road to return to their former homes. “Poor creatures, I felt sorry for them,” wrote a Southern trooper. “The country is now full of them making their way homeward.” The Union prisoners left Petersburg bound for Confederate prison pens.11 This influx of military captives and runaway slaves marked just one episode in a plethora of circumstances that transformed life in Petersburg. The city’s residents had been struggling with rampant monetary inflation and the shortage of consumer items, food, and fuel since the war’s second year. These pressures only increased as refugees from nearby Chesterfield and Prince George counties, now occupied by Federal

Petersburg, Virginia, June–August 1864    493 forces, flocked into the city for shelter and sustenance. Wounded and sick Confederate soldiers filled Petersburg’s seven military hospitals, adding to the strain. “The scarcity of provisions great & increasing,” recorded schoolmaster Charles Campbell. “Scarcely any to be got for love or money.”12 Rising prices placed shrinking volumes of available commodities out of reach for most residents. Watermelons fetched ten to fifteen dollars each at the Petersburg market; eggs cost ten dollars a dozen; and flour demanded 275 dollars per barrel. Many blamed speculators for manipulating the market as the municipal government took steps to provide assistance to the city’s neediest. The Common Council, for example, formed a committee in early July to “purchase wood and sell the same to the people of this city at cost.” An organization called the Poor Association distributed food, some of which came from army supplies.13 The insidious suffering of accelerating deprivation could not compare with the sudden terror of bombardment. Union artillery targeted Petersburg beginning on June 17. Most residents considered this random shelling of a civilian population barbaric. Even when military necessity required the reduction of a town, the courtesies of war demanded that the attackers notify noncombatants of their intent and provide a reasonable time for them to remove themselves and their personal property from harm’s way. The Federals neglected to do so. Maj. Giles Buckner Cooke of Beauregard’s staff visited Mayor W. W. Townes on June 20 to encourage the city government to relocate citizens living in the most shell-​prone neighborhoods. The Petersburg Common Council consulted with Beauregard and met in emergency session to debate his recommendation. Ultimately they opted not to institute mandatory removals because the city lacked the necessary transportation. Within days, however, residents of the eastern half of the city fled to safety with relatives in the country or, lacking such havens, to makeshift campsites. “It is distressing to see women and children leaving their homes,” wrote a Confederate artillerist. “It is hard on all—​but to see a poor woman, with a child on one arm and the little bundles on the other is enough to move the heart of any man—​save a Yankee.”14 Union gunners ostensibly focused on military targets, such as the Appomattox River bridges, but one Federal artillerist confessed that church spires and the steeple on Petersburg’s courthouse drew his attention. Union shells claimed few lives, in part because Petersburg citizens who remained in their homes learned how to avoid becoming victims, a skill the Daily Register sarcastically termed “conchology—​the study of artillery shells. . . . As the student seldom moves in a right line but practices eccentric curves around corners, forms obtuse angles, and always prefers the hypotenuse to the base or the perpendicular, we must rank ‘dodging’ as a branch of the higher mathematics.”15 The physical toll on Petersburg’s splendid architecture was no laughing matter. “No doubt the enemy can & probably will, very effectually, destroy the principal part of the town, by the explosion of shells, if not by conflagration,” recorded the arch-​secessionist and Petersburg resident Edmund Ruffin. Fires did erupt as a result of the shelling. As civilian authorities responded to the blazes, Union gunners lobbed more iron in their direction, intimidating Petersburg’s overmatched fire brigade. The city government

494   A. Wilson Greene increased the size of its fire department and welcomed the help of General Beauregard, who assigned fifty soldiers “to be used in the suppression of fires occasioned by the shells of the enemy.” Nearly seven hundred buildings in Petersburg would suffer shell damage during the campaign.16 Most of Petersburg’s refugees—​ overwhelmingly white women, children, and elderly—​soon discovered that life in the hinterlands provided few comforts. “The woods and all the country is filled with women, from old gray-​haired mothers down to the infant, driven from their homes without a change of dressing, thousands of them in the wood without any shelter or protection,” wrote a sympathetic Georgia soldier. By early August most of the displaced began drifting back to their imperiled homes, willing to trade the threat of instant death for the prospect of starvation in the countryside. Petersburg’s enslaved population, however, irreversibly diminished as a result of economic conditions as well as dangers posed from shelling. The proximity of the Union army offered unprecedented opportunities for escape, and many bondsmen took advantage. Idled agricultural slaves and surplus urban chattels, unemployed as Petersburg’s tobacco industry withered and died, were subject to conscription by the Confederate government, usually for some sort of hard labor—​employment that weakened the worker and thus devalued him in the marketplace. These factors prompted Petersburg’s slave owners to either remove their human property to places of safety or dispose of them at whatever price the market would bear. “Just before the shollin’ of Petersburg, dey were sellin’ niggers for little nothin’ hardly,” recalled the slave Fannie Berry. Most of the substantial free Black population of Petersburg lacked the means to evacuate, and so they hunkered down in their modest homes or in some instances occupied more elegant abandoned dwellings.17 Residents made the best of their situation by indulging in a variety of diversions. Church attendance flourished, albeit often in bombproof basements or in sanctuaries beyond the range of Union ordnance. Social events continued, hosted by Petersburg’s wealthier citizens, providing opportunities for the city’s unmarried women to flirt with handsome young Confederate officers. The city’s once-​vibrant theater scene went dark during the summer, but military bands provided frequent concerts. “The strains of music near and distant have rendered the city very lively for some nights,” reported the Petersburg Express, “and the bands are rendering a service in performing as they do. The fair sex duly appreciate their efforts to please.”18 Still, life in Petersburg had never been harsher or more perilous for all its residents, white and Black. Yet throughout the summer, civilian morale remained defiant. Dr. John H. Claiborne, director of the city’s military hospitals, understood that the enemy’s bombardment would likely turn Petersburg into a “city of desolation,” but Claiborne, like most of the townspeople, remained undaunted. “I for one am ready to see the last brick thrown down rather than the city surrendered,” he proclaimed. Grant’s next military offensive would test that resolve.19 It would take more than a month, however, for that effort to begin. For the first time since the opening of the spring campaign, the armies enjoyed relief from constant combat and maneuver. That is not to say that death took a holiday. Although soldiers

Petersburg, Virginia, June–August 1864    495 on both sides perfected their entrenchments—​digging elaborate forts and deepening their front-​line trenches—​an incessant fire of mortars, artillery, and snipers claimed a grim toll. “We have had a good many men killed by shells and Sharpshooting,” wrote Cpl. William B. Green of the 22nd South Carolina. “They are continually carrying their mangled boddies off.”20 For those who survived such random death, life on the front lines presented new challenges. Southside Virginia experienced a severe drought, and soaring temperatures tormented men confined to their fetid fortifications. “The heat and dust will in some manner get to us,” wrote Capt. Will Biggs of the 17th North Carolina. “We are almost burnt up.” Soldiers rigged makeshift shelters to block the sun and dug niches into the sides of their works as sleeping compartments. Reinforced subterranean structures, called bombproofs, provided protection from high-​arching mortar shells. Calls of nature often required troops on the front lines to stand in their own filth until safe passages to the rear could be created. Obtaining adequate food and water at the front remained a constant dilemma, particularly for the Confederates. Although officers frowned on the practice, opposing pickets regularly crossed the lines to engage in trade, coffee for tobacco being the primary bargain. High morale and optimism in both armies held sway, but some men lost faith, and deserters began to flow in both directions.21 As the rank and file sweated and suffered, Grant strategized. He focused on his toehold north of the James River at Deep Bottom. By sending Maj. Gen. Philip Sheridan’s cavalry along with Hancock’s Second Corps across the James, Grant hoped to cut the rail lines north and west of Richmond and possibly seize the Confederate capital itself. The Federals crossed the James on two pontoon bridges near Deep Bottom on July 26–​ 27, but immediately encountered problems. The infantry delayed Sheridan’s progress, and the Union cavalry would never execute its mission against the railroads. Hancock succeeded in capturing the initial Confederate defense line and then halted. Rebel reinforcements sent from Petersburg strengthened a new line of works that intimidated the usually bold commander of the Second Corps. The Confederates, bolstered by still more of Lee’s Petersburg forces, counterattacked on July 28. Although this assault failed, Grant decided to abandon his offensive. The affair, known as the First Deep Bottom operation, inflicted more than 1,100 total casualties and was bereft of significant results save one: it had drawn all but three of Lee’s infantry divisions away from Petersburg. While most troops sweltered in their trenches or engaged in indecisive combat north of the James, one Ninth Corps regiment completed a spectacular engineering feat. The 48th Pennsylvania contained a number of anthracite coal miners in its ranks, including its brigade commander, Lt. Col. Henry Pleasants. Responding to an offhand suggestion by one of his men, Pleasants conceived and executed the construction of a mine shaft 510 feet long that ended under a prominent Confederate fort called Pegram’s or Elliott’s Salient. Pleasants packed two lateral galleries with eight thousand pounds of black powder and awaited orders to detonate his mine. Although Grant and Meade had given Pleasants’s corps commander, Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside, their assent for the mine project, not until affairs at First Deep Bottom failed did they decide to use the mine as the centerpiece of a major attack. The

496   A. Wilson Greene reduction of Lee’s forces around Petersburg suggested that blasting a hole in the Rebel defenses and pouring troops through the resulting gap might achieve significant results. The Union high command, however, undermined Burnside’s attack plan when it vetoed his intention to use the Ninth Corps’ Black division to lead the assault, deeming these eager men too inexperienced for such an important assignment. Moreover, should the attack fail, thought Grant and Meade, the public would accuse the Lincoln administration of caring nothing for the African Americans, whose quest for freedom had now become a prominent war aim. Now, instead of selecting one of the two competent commanders of his white divisions for the lead role, Burnside left the decision to chance, and as luck would have it, the worst division commander in the Union Army picked the short straw. Brig. Gen. James H. Ledlie, a cowardly officer described by one observer as “a wretched, incapable drunkard, not fit to command a company,” received his new assignment some twelve hours prior to the planned explosion. He immediately issued orders to his subordinates that ran entirely counter to Burnside’s intentions and would reap confusion once the attack commenced.22 Ledlie’s brigades and the rest of the Ninth Corps would lead the impending attack, but thousands of supporting troops and 164 cannons and mortars were poised to exploit any advantage Burnside’s men might achieve. All awaited the explosion with breathless anxiety on the morning of July 30. The Confederates caught wind of a possible mining operation several weeks earlier and sank countermines at Pegram’s Salient, none of which intercepted Pleasants’s shaft. Capt. Richard Pegram’s Virginia cannoneers and two of Brig. Gen. Stephen Elliott’s South Carolina regiments thus slept peacefully in the predawn hours, unaware of the utter devastation that awaited them. After a delay caused by the failure of the detonating fuses, at 4:44 a.m. “a huge roar, as if from the bowels of the earth, belched forth, and the occupants of that fated fort . . . started heavenward,” recalled a Union observer. Ledlie’s men drove forward, stunned by the spectacle and leaderless, as their general sought shelter behind the lines with the comfort of a bottle. More of Burnside’s men rushed ahead, but none advanced beyond the ruined Confederate line, as gray-​clad gunners lobbed mortar fire into the Federals, and unfazed soldiers on the margins of the crater sealed the flanks of the Union penetration.23 Burnside’s Black troops were the last Ninth Corps men to charge. Shouting “No quarter” and “Remember Fort Pillow”—​a reference to a notorious incident earlier in the year, where African American soldiers were allegedly killed after they had surrendered—​these determined troops and their white officers advanced farther than most of their comrades. By then, however, General Lee’s trusted counterpuncher, William Mahone, had arrived with two of his brigades. Mahone’s morning assaults regained some of the lost ground, although blue-​clad soldiers clung to a reduced slice of real estate in and around the sizable crater created by the explosion.24 A lull of several hours ensued as the beleaguered Federal survivors suffered from thirst and an unrelenting sun that boosted thermometers to near 100 degrees. Casualties from the morning fight littered the landscape. “Blood was everywhere,” remembered one participant, “trickling down the sides of the crater in streamlets, and in many places

Petersburg, Virginia, June–August 1864    497 ponds of it as large as an ordinary wash basin.” Mahone used this interlude to summon reinforcements, his Alabama Brigade led by twenty-​four-​year-​old Brig. Gen. John C. C. Sanders. Told that if their attack failed, General Lee, who observed the engagement from a nearby dwelling, would personally emerge to lead them on a second attempt, Sanders’s 632 men, supplemented by several hundred soldiers from various regiments, surged forward early in the afternoon determined to do or die.25 What ensued matched the most hideous close-​quarters combat ever to stain the North American continent. The Confederates crashed into the exhausted and demoralized remnants of Burnside’s attackers, killing or capturing all those who could not run the gauntlet back to the main Union line. The Black troops suffered disproportionately. Infuriated by the cultural offense of encountering armed slaves (although most of the African American troops came from Northern states), Mahone’s troops indulged in a massacre of unprecedented proportion, refusing to accept the surrender of their Black opponents. “Our men killed them with the bayonets and the butts of their guns and every other way until they were lying eight or ten deep on top of one enuther and the blood was almost s[h]‌oe quarter deep,” boasted a Georgian. “The crater filled with a seething mass of men,” reported Capt. William Fagan of the 8th Alabama, “hundreds and thousands of them—​some firing back upon us, some struggling wildly to escape. Shattering volleys were fired into the seething abyss, till it became a perfect hell of blood.”26 Some of the few Black troops taken prisoner were murdered en route to the rear. The Unionists reported 3,798 casualties, doubtless an undercount. The Confederates suffered more than 1,600 losses but regained all the ground lost during the explosion. Grant considered the Battle of the Crater “the saddest affair I  have witnessed in the war,” no doubt referencing the bungled execution of a plan that might have ended the campaign.27 General Mahone ordered the slaughter of the African Americans to cease, an action endorsed by few Confederates. For most white Southerners, an armed Black person was simply a slave in rebellion, an act justifying swift and certain capital punishment. “I think it is right to kill every negro, formerly a slave, found in arms against us,” wrote a surgeon in the 9th Alabama. A Richmond editor took Mahone to task for ending the murders, recommending that “every salient we are called upon to defend be a Fort Pillow, and butcher every negro that Grant hurls against our brave troops.” Northern reaction to the fiasco focused on assigning blame for the failure, paying scant attention to the grim fate of the Black troops, many analysts unfairly ascribing the defeat to the African Americans. Ultimately the Crater disaster cost both Burnside and Ledlie their military careers.28 Lee had thus far thwarted each of Grant’s three attempts to capture or isolate Petersburg, but he had been compelled to react rather than initiate. Defensive warfare did not suit the gray commander, whose application of the offensive resided not at Petersburg but a hundred miles north and west, in the Shenandoah Valley. Lee had detached his Second Corps, under Lt. Gen. Jubal Early, shortly before Grant’s shift across the James. Early’s first job was to block a Federal army moving east from the Valley and

498   A. Wilson Greene

Map 30.2  Shenandoah Valley and Maryland, May to July 1864

“then to move down the valley, cross the Potomac . . . and threaten Washington City.” Early discharged his mission splendidly. After driving the threatening enemy force, under the incendiary Maj. Gen. David Hunter, into West Virginia, Early moved quickly north, entered Maryland, and turned southeast toward the national capital. Slowed by

Petersburg, Virginia, June–August 1864    499 a makeshift defense at the Monocacy River on July 9, including troops from the Army of the Potomac hurriedly dispatched by Grant, Early continued his campaign to the outskirts of Washington. By then, however, additional Federal troops from Petersburg manned the capital’s imposing fortifications and Early wisely opted not to test them. The Confederates easily withdrew back to Virginia with their accumulated plunder.29 Attempts to suppress Early failed in July, compelling Grant to assign his trusted cavalry chieftain, Philip Sheridan, to lead the effort to destroy the Confederates. Grant lent his entire Sixth Corps to Sheridan, reducing Meade’s army at Petersburg by one-​fourth. Events in the Shenandoah Valley from July through October should thus be understood as an integral part of the Petersburg Campaign, as Lee frequently shuttled elements of his army between Petersburg and the Valley. Doing this had two purposes: to relieve Grant’s pressure at Petersburg and to demonstrate to voters in the North that the Confederacy remained undeniably viable. That strategy seemed to be working. Sherman’s failure to reduce Atlanta, Grant’s frustrations at Petersburg, and Early’s appearance at the very gates of Washington provided evidence to many in the North that the war was unwinnable. Such sentiments might send George McClellan, the Democratic nominee and Lincoln’s former general in chief, to the White House in the 1864 election. The president certainly thought so. On August 23, Lincoln wrote his cabinet that “it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-​elected.”30 Many Confederates pinned their hopes for independence upon Lincoln’s defeat in November. “The presidential election in the United States in 1864 . . . is the event which must determine the issue of peace or war, and with it, the destinies of both countries,” wrote a Confederate senator. “I say we can control that election.” The link between battlefield success and the outcome of the presidential canvass had long been recognized. “Every bullet we can send . . . is the best ballot that can be deposited against [Lincoln’s] election,” editorialized a Georgia newspaper in January. “The battlefields of 1864 will hold the polls of this momentous decision.”31 Although scholars have questioned the extent of soldiers’ support for Lincoln’s reelection, letters and diaries from Federal troops around Petersburg suggest overwhelming preference for the president. “Old Abe will get it. There is not possible doubt of it,” wrote Charles Lewis Rundlett, a musician in the 11th New Hampshire. Rundlett’s prediction would prove accurate, but Grant’s final summer offensive at Petersburg would have little impact on his prognostication.32 The fiasco at the Crater persuaded Grant to focus once again on Petersburg’s railroads. His initial target would be the line that connected the critical port at Wilmington with Petersburg and Richmond. As he had done in July, Grant sent a force north of the James to dissuade Lee from reinforcing Early in the Valley as well as to draw troops away from Petersburg, thus enhancing his chance for success along the railroad. If this operation entered Richmond, so much the better. In the meantime, a portion of Meade’s army moved west and established a toehold on the Petersburg Railroad. The advance north of the James, called the Second Deep Bottom operation, enjoyed little more success than its July predecessor. The bulk of two Union corps and a cavalry division

500   A. Wilson Greene crossed the James on August 13 and engaged in combat centered along a local establishment called Fussell’s Mill, the heaviest fighting occurring on August 16. By August 20 the operation had ended, leaving four thousand casualties in its wake. Another tactical setback for the Federals, Second Deep Bottom did prevent Lee from detaching more troops to the Valley and, as Grant intended, drew much of Lee’s strength away from Petersburg. Meade’s Fifth Corps, commanded by Maj. Gen. Gouverneur K. Warren, reached the Petersburg Railroad on the eighteenth near a hostelry called Globe Tavern, about five miles south of Petersburg. Limited Confederate counterattacks halted Warren’s northward progress but failed to shove the Federals off the tracks. A more determined effort on August 19, led by the ever-​present William Mahone, succeeded in capturing 2,480 prisoners in addition to killing or wounding more than 500 bluecoats. But fresh Union troops from the Ninth Corps curtailed Mahone’s progress, maintaining the Northern grip on the all-​important tracks. Because Lee was absent, overseeing the action north of the James, General Beauregard orchestrated the counterattacks that had bent but not broken the Union lines. Beauregard spent most of the day on August 20 assembling the largest strike force yet for one concerted effort to redeem the railroad. The Louisianan would commit nine full brigades and part of a tenth to the attack, with Mahone again leading the most prominent assault. The gray-​clad veterans began marching into position well before dawn on August 21 in a pouring rain. Lee hastened back to Petersburg too late to influence the fighting that morning, combat that proved to be an unmitigated disaster for the Rebels. Miscalculating the location of the Union left flank, Mahone’s men plunged straight into the waiting Federals. “The enemy charged in good style,” admitted a Michigan soldier. “They were allowed to come up pretty close, when a general rattle of musketry and artillery cut them to pieces.” A South Carolina brigade suffered the most. Their commander, General Hagood, failed to recognize that his men had marched into a deathtrap, a portion of the strong Federal line that could pour flanking as well as frontal fire into his ranks. Of the 59 officers and 681 men who made the attack with Hagood, fewer than 300 emerged unscathed. Lee wisely declined to renew the assaults, conceding the Petersburg Railroad to the enemy—​ at least for the time being.33 Rather than move north up the tracks into the teeth of the Confederate fortifications, Meade and Grant opted to push south, destroying the Petersburg Railroad as they went, rendering it unusable even if a future Confederate assault managed to unseat them. This assignment went to the Second Corps, now returned from its misadventure at Second Deep Bottom, reduced in strength and morale. Hancock’s men began dismantling the tracks on August 22, centering their work around the depot at Reams’ Station, a few miles south of Globe Tavern. The Federals accomplished their task with workmanlike efficiency, tearing loose the iron rails, collecting the ties, and burning them in large piles. By placing the rails across the blazes, heating the middles into malleability, seizing the ends, and wrapping them around trees, the tracks became irredeemable. Confederate cavalry watched with alarm. Although the Petersburg Railroad was now a lost cause, a Federal force moving south could open the road leading from

Petersburg, Virginia, June–August 1864    501 Reams’ Station to Dinwiddie Court House, well beyond the Confederates’ right flank. Doing this would compel Lee to “extend his already thin attenuated lines and possibly abandon his lines in front of Petersburg.” The gray commander decided to forestall such misfortune.34 On August 24 Lee ordered his Third Corps commander, Lt. Gen. A. P. Hill, to take two brigades from each of four divisions and attack Hancock at Reams’ Station. Hill unleashed his assaults on August 25. The first Southern attacks failed, but late in the day the Rebels exploited a weak point west of the tracks, where the railroad bed coursed through a deep ravine. The Second Corps, once Meade’s most reliable, collapsed, despite its commander’s imprecations to rally. Hancock suffered 2,566 casualties to only 720 for Hill. Satisfied with his victory, Hill returned to the Petersburg lines the following day. Meade and Grant fortified their hold across the Petersburg Railroad north of Globe Tavern as Lee opened a new line of communications from North Carolina via the railroad to Stony Creek Station, then cross country to Dinwiddie Court House, and up the Boydton Plank Road to Petersburg. The contest for Petersburg would grind on with no end in sight. Without a doubt, Union arms had forged progress during the twelve weeks since arriving on the doorstep of the Cockade City, but Lee’s tattered battalions remained defiant and the Confederate capital secure. The impasse at Petersburg imperiled Lincoln’s chances for reelection, prospects soon to be boosted by Union victories at Atlanta and in the Shenandoah Valley. For Petersburg’s beleaguered citizens, the physical damage sustained by buildings, the omnipresence of sometimes unruly soldiers and convalescents, and the disruption of every daily routine left them feeling as if they were living in terra incognita at the edge of eternity. “Everything is sadly changed here,” lamented Dr. Claiborne, “nothing looks natural and nobody seems at home.” Rampant inflation ruined or devalued property, including the enslaved, many of whom were relocated to counties far removed from the contending armies. The city’s free Blacks labored for the Confederate army or worked in wartime industries, enduring the disappearance of most of their prewar social and legal privileges.35 Petersburg’s nightmare would continue for another seven months, killing and maiming thousands more men in blue and gray. The impact on civilians in Petersburg, white and Black, would be measured in currency beyond body counts. A local farmer celebrating his fifty-​third birthday recorded the following entry in his diary: “God shall I see 54 and feel as I now do feel . . . and shall I see another 12 months of War. Oh! how cruel.”36

Notes 1. Petersburg received its moniker of the Cockade City from a remark made by President James Madison in reference to War of 1812 volunteers from Petersburg who wore cockades in their hats. 2. Luther P. Jackson, “Free Negroes of Petersburg, Virginia,” Journal of Negro History 12 (July 1927): 387.

502   A. Wilson Greene 3. Edwin S. Redkey, ed., A Grand Army of Black Men: Letters from African-​American Soldiers in the Union Army, 1861–​1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 101–​102; George Breck, June 22, 1864, letter, Rochester (NY) Union and Advertiser, June 30, 1864. 4. Alfred Roman, The Military Operations of General Beauregard, 2 vols. (New York: Da Capo Press, 1994), 2:576–​577. 5. U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1880–​ 1901), ser. 1, vol. 40, pt. 3 394–​395 (hereafter cited as OR). 6. John Y. Simon, ed., The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, 31 vols. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967–​2009), 12:27. 7. OR, ser. 1, vol. 40, pt. 3 157. 8. Horace Porter to his wife, June 24, 1864, Horace Porter Papers, Library of Congress; Simon, The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, 10: 422. 9. Journal of Robert Thruston Hubard Jr., 104–​ 115, Petersburg National Battlefield, Petersburg, VA. 10. Richard T. Couture, ed., Charlie’s Letters: Correspondence of Charlie Denoon (Goochland, VA: Bolling Island Plantation, 1982), 226; Charles E. Denoon 41st Virginia, to “Dear Father and Mother,” July 7, 1864, Denoon Family Papers, Library of Virginia, Richmond; Horace K. Ide, History of the 1st Vermont Cavalry (Baltimore, MD: Butternut and Blue, 2000), 190–​191. 11. Daniel C. Snyder to “My Dear Wife,” June 28 [30], 1864, bound vol. 385, Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania National Military Park, Fredericksburg, VA. 12. Charles Campbell diary, June 21, 1864, Charles Campbell Papers, College of William & Mary, Williamsburg, VA. 13. Common Council Minutes, July 1, 1864, Office of the Clerk of City Council, City of Petersburg, VA. 14. James W. Albright Diary, June 20, 1864, James W. Albright Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. 15. Petersburg (VA) Daily Register, June 28 and 29, 1864. 16. William Kauffman Scarborough, The Diary of Edmund Ruffin, 3  vols. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972–​1989), 3:526–​527; Thomas Jordan to Henry Wise, July 13, 1864, P. G. T. Beauregard Papers, Library of Congress; Common Council Minutes, July 13, 1864. 17. Ronald H. Mosely, ed., The Stillwell Letters:  A Georgian in Longstreet’s Corps, Army of Northern Virginia (Macon, GA:  Mercer University Press, 2002), 272–​273; “Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers Project, 1936–​1938,” interview of Mrs. Fannie Berry, Virginia Narratives, 17:6, Library of Congress. 18. Petersburg (VA) Express, June 29, 1864. 19. John H. Claiborne to “My Dear Wife,” July 14, 1864, Claiborne Family Papers, Virginia Museum of History and Culture, Richmond. 20. William B. Green to “Dear Wife,” July 2, 1864, William B. Green Letters, University of South Carolina, Columbia. 21. Will Biggs to Pat, June 27, 1864, Asa Biggs Papers, Duke University, Durham, NC. 22. David W. Lowe, ed., Meade’s Army:  The Private Notebooks of Lt. Col. Theodore Lyman (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2007), 241. 23. Horace H. Burbank, “The Battle of the Crater,” in War Papers Read before the Commandery of the State of Maine, Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States (Portland, ME: Thurston, 1898) 1:286.

Petersburg, Virginia, June–August 1864    503 24. William A. Day, A True History of Co I, 49th Regiment North Carolina Troops (Newton, NC: Enterprise Job Office, 1893), 83. 25. Howard Aston, History and Roster of the Fourth and Fifth Independent Battalions and Thirteenth Regiment, Ohio Cavalry Volunteers (Columbus, OH:  Fred J.  Heer, 1902), 104. 26. Laban Odom to “Dear Wife,” August 2, 1864, Laban Odom Papers, Georgia State Archives, Morrow; W[illiam] L. Fagan, “The Petersburg Crater,” Philadelphia Weekly Times, January 6, 1883. 27. OR, vol. 40 (1): 17. 28. Henry Augustine Minor to “My dear Sister,” August 1, 1864, Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville; Richmond (VA) Enquirer, August 1–​2, 1864. 29. Jubal A. Early, A Memoir of the Last Year of the War for Independence, in the Confederate States of America (Toronto: Lovell & Gibson, 1866), 42. 30. Roy B. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 8  vols. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 7:514. 31. Benjamin H. Hill, speech at LaGrange, GA, March 1, 1864, reported in the Augusta (GA) Chronicle & Sentinel, March 18, 1864; Augusta (GA) Constitutionalist, January 22, 1864. 32. Charles Lewis Rundlett to “Dear Father & Mother,” September 19, 1864, Charles Lewis Rundlett Letters, Library of Virginia, Richmond. 33. Orson Blair Curtis, History of the Twenty-​Fourth Michigan, of the Iron Brigade, Known as the Detroit and Wayne County Regiment (Detroit, MI: Winn & Hammond, 1891), 273. 34. Ulysses R. Brooks, Butler and His Cavalry in the War of Secession (Columbia, SC: The State Company, 1909), 305. 35. John H. Claiborne to “My dear Wife,” August 7, 1864, John H. Claiborne Papers, Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville. 36. Quoted in Daniel W. Crofts, ed., Cobb’s Ordeal: The Diaries of a Virginia Farmer, 1842–​1872 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), 268.

Bibliography Bearss, Edwin C. The Petersburg Campaign. Vol. 1: The Eastern Front Battles June–​August 1864. Eldorado Hills, CA: Savas Beattie, 2012. Greene, A. Wilson. A Campaign of Giants: The Battle for Petersburg. Vol. 1: From the Crossing of the James to the Crater. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Greene, A. Wilson. Civil War Petersburg: Confederate City in the Crucible of War. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006. Hess, Earl J. In the Trenches at Petersburg: Field Fortifications and Confederate Defeat. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. Hess, Earl J. Into the Crater: The Mine Attack at Petersburg. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2010. Howe, Thomas J. Wasted Valor: The Petersburg Campaign, June 15–​18, 1864. Lynchburg, VA: H. E. Howard, 1988. Levin, Kevin M. Remembering the Battle of the Crater: War as Murder. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2012. Power, J. Tracy Lee’s Miserables: Life in the Army of Northern Virginia from the Wilderness to Appomattox. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

504   A. Wilson Greene Scott, James G., and Edward A. Wyatt IV. Petersburg’s Story: A History. Petersburg, VA: Titmus Optical, 1960. Simon, John Y., ed. The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant. 31 vols. Vols. 10–​12. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967–​2009. Sodergren, Steven E. The Army of the Potomac in the Overland and Petersburg Campaigns: Union Soldiers and Trench Warfare, 1864–​1865. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017. Trudeau, Noah Andre. The Last Citadel: Petersburg, Virginia, June 1864–​April 1865. Boston: Little, Brown, 1991. The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. 130 vols. Vols. 40 and 42. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1880–​1901. Waugh, John C. Reelecting Lincoln: The Battle for the 1864 Presidency. New York: Crown, 1997. White, Jonathan W. Emancipation: The Union Army and the Reelection of Abraham Lincoln. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014.

Chapter 31

The Red Ri v e r Cam paign ,   1864 Profits, Politics, and Grand Strategy T. Michael Parrish

Striking at the heart of Louisiana from March to May 1864, the Red River Campaign was one of the most ambitious, perilous, and disastrous Union military efforts of the Civil War. Involving major contingents of both the army and the navy, it was the largest such operation of the war. (Although usually described as a combined operation, the campaign was a joint operation, since there was no overall commander, a major flaw.) The campaign necessarily shifted the Union high command’s focus away from the western theater, requiring significant manpower and military resources to be invested in Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas. It reflected a multitude of lofty and apparently worthy goals. But by forcing Union authorities to weaken and jeopardize operations east of the Mississippi River, it finally inflicted a cascade of profound damage to the overall Union war effort. Regardless, President Abraham Lincoln, Chief of Staff Maj. Gen. Henry W. Halleck, and General in Chief Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, as well as Maj. Gen. William T.  Sherman, agreed that the campaign was worth all the soldiers, sailors, firepower, munitions, valuable time, public morale, and every other asset risked and finally lost in the effort. The Red River Campaign’s success would have reaped immense dividends. Its failure resonated strongly during the war and long afterward. The campaign also shocked and disrupted families, white and Black alike, living in Louisiana’s Red River Valley. The Union Army’s abrupt invasion included political efforts to cultivate loyal citizens and hold elections, causing pro-​Confederate guerrillas to target and persecute Unionists. Many slaves viewed the campaign as an opportunity to escape to freedom, but slaveholding planter families, who tended to support the Confederacy strongly, were traumatized. For decades they had enjoyed enormous profits from the prolific production and sale of premium cotton in one of the South’s richest agricultural regions. Now planters fully expected the Union Army and Navy to confiscate their cotton, free their slaves, and devastate their properties, a hellish specter

506   T. Michael Parrish that compelled many planter families to flee to the countryside with their families and slaves. Some went up the Red River to Shreveport, but the city was already teeming with refugees who had escaped the Union occupation of southern Louisiana and the Mississippi River Valley. As a result, many refugee families pushed reluctantly all the way to Texas, where the wartime population grew by several tens of thousands, the great majority of them slaves from the Red River. The hordes of unwelcome refugees put increasing pressure on Texans, who struggled to deal with the desperate families and their idle slaves. Refugee planters usually sought to hire out their slaves, and the productive Texas economy usually accommodated them. Texas slaves, however, together with the many refugee slaves, became increasingly restive during the war, looking for ways to defy their masters and often running away, thereby intensifying a climate of increasing insecurity among Texas whites. Because the Red River Campaign foundered so ingloriously, and because it happened in the allegedly marginal Trans-​Mississippi theater, many historians have discounted or ignored it. And because its commander, Maj. Gen. Nathaniel P. Banks (commander of the Department of the Gulf), evoked distrust from subordinate officers and struggled to manage the campaign’s complexities, nearly all historians conclude that it was bound to fail. Yet as catastrophic as it was for the Union, it was a major victory for the Confederacy and army commander Maj. Gen. Richard Taylor, adding to a resurgence of public optimism that grew during the spring of 1864 and continued into the summer as Confederates anticipated Lincoln’s defeat in the November presidential election.1 The Red River Campaign reflected major Union economic, political, and strategic goals that emerged early in the war and persisted to the end and beyond. The campaign targeted Louisiana and, more important, the crown jewel of the Trans-​Mississippi theater: Texas. By invading and occupying the whole of northern Louisiana and Texas—​a region with a population of more than a million—​Lincoln intended to transform the war. In all of this, he was encouraged and supported by most of his cabinet members. They recognized that the campaign’s goals were closely intertwined, reinforced and inflated by one another. First, the Yankees would capture vast quantities of cotton (in 1860 Louisiana produced about 800,000 bales and Texas produced about 430,000), large cattle herds (between three and six million cattle in Texas alone), and other agricultural bounty in both states, while putting a halt to the rich interior cotton trade (including Confederate-​ owned and privately owned cotton) that supplied stealthy blockade runners routinely departing from and arriving along the Texas coast and at ports in Mexico. The Union naval blockade stifled much of the blockade running from and to Texas, but the Yankees could do nothing legally to stop the many swift vessels disguised by foreign flags that routinely departed from Mexican ports, bound for European markets and returning with guns, ammunition, medicine, and other supplies for the Confederacy. Not only would the Union war effort benefit by seizing Texas’s great economic largesse and stopping Confederate blockade running, but the cotton especially would also put scores of idle New England cotton mills and their laborers back to work and reaping profits. As early as mid-​1862, when mill production plummeted to 25 percent of normal

The Red River Campaign, 1864    507 output, mill owners demanded the conquest of Louisiana and Texas. By 1864, Union military confiscations of cotton elsewhere in the South and the expedient of commercial trading with the enemy had enabled mill production to increase, but New England’s cotton mills were still running at limited capacity. By supplying them all the cotton they needed, Lincoln expected his popularity to rise and bolster his reelection bid in November. Second, Lincoln sought to energize wartime Reconstruction in the occupied South. He expected General Banks to empower Louisiana’s Unionist state government by securing the state’s parishes throughout the Red River Valley, creating a strong cadre of loyal citizens, and holding elections as soon as possible. Lincoln was even more determined to secure Texas. Long before the war, he had believed that Unionists were abundant in many parts of the South, including Texas. He was convinced that tens of thousands of antislavery free labor Germans and other European immigrant groups, along with white non-​slaveholding farmers and ranchers and native Tejanos, all loved the Union and longed for liberation from increasingly harsh Confederate oppression. Those loyalist legions might arise wholesale, support a Yankee invasion, and then work to create a strong Unionist state government. Propaganda in the North by zealous Texas Unionist ex-​patriots, led by the charismatic Andrew Jackson Hamilton (whom Lincoln recognized as Texas’s governor in exile and appointed a brigadier general), only intensified Lincoln’s determination to make Texas a bastion of Unionism. Such a political triumph would, he expected, make Texas a model for wartime Reconstruction in the South and, more immediately, give him throngs of voters to help assure his reelection. Third, the Red River Campaign manifested vital strategic purposes. For more than a year Gen. Henry Halleck had wanted to capture Shreveport. Situated on the Red River in northwest Louisiana, Shreveport was the capital of Confederate Louisiana and the command center for military operations in the Trans-​Mississippi theater. The city was also a growing industrial complex supporting a naval facility and a commercial network that enabled the Confederate military to gain supplies and munitions from small factories and military warehouses in Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas. By having Banks seize Shreveport and defeat Confederate forces in the region, the Yankees would not only cripple Confederate military power west of the Mississippi River, but they would also greatly weaken the enemy’s ability to affect the war on both sides of the river, throughout the Lower Mississippi River Valley and points east. In the realm of the widest grand strategy, the Red River Campaign aimed at conquering Texas in order to thwart the French occupation of Mexico as a strategic menace. In late 1861, Napoleon III had sent troops to Mexico, ostensibly to help stabilize that nation’s finances and its regime of conservative monarchists and its civil war against Benito Juarez and his pro-​democracy insurgents. Lincoln worried that France, and perhaps even Britain, would formally recognize the Confederate nation and provide substantial support to the Confederate military effort while also expanding French imperial designs in the Western Hemisphere, blatantly violating the Monroe Doctrine. Lincoln’s fears grew in October 1863, when the Mexicans appointed Maximilian I, an Austrian archduke connected by marriage to the French monarchy, as emperor of

508   T. Michael Parrish Mexico. Lincoln wanted more than ever to occupy Texas and send a strong signal to the French that the United States, by winning its own civil war, would be fully prepared to send troops into Mexico, support Juarez’s insurgency, and forcibly oust France from North America once and for all. Until then, with the Confederacy already working to create alliances with France, Great Britain, and other European powers, the French military presence in Mexico posed the most immediate and dangerous international strategic threat to the Union. The Red River Campaign signified only the latest in a long line of attempts by Lincoln to conquer Louisiana and Texas in order to achieve the Union’s major economic, political, and strategic goals. Throughout 1862, Union army and naval forces had made forays and limited occupations along the Texas coast and along the lower Rio Grande. In early July, Nathaniel P. Banks captured Port Hudson, a victory that, along with Grant’s conquest of Vicksburg, strengthened Union control of the Mississippi River. His attention always on Texas, Lincoln continually pressured Banks to invade and occupy the Lone Star State. Three attempts in 1863–​1864, a combined operation at the mouth of the Sabine River, an overland march across southern Louisiana, and a cavalry raid up the Rio Grande River, all failed.2 In the long wake of such mixed results, Lincoln demanded complete success, and Banks wanted to redeem himself. Newly appointed General in Chief Ulysses S. Grant wanted to use Banks’s Army of the Gulf in a campaign against Mobile, Alabama, followed by cooperation with Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman’s upcoming campaign to defeat Confederate forces in northern Georgia. Yet Halleck, backed firmly by Lincoln, postponed the Mobile operation and ordered Banks to lead a major campaign up the Red River to Shreveport. Lincoln tasked Banks with strengthening Louisiana’s wartime Unionist government. To guarantee the campaign’s success, Halleck convinced Sherman to loan ten thousand seasoned veterans of the Sixteenth Corps and Seventeenth Corps, all of whom were supposed to return to Sherman by mid-​April to join in the Georgia Campaign. Like Lincoln, Banks expected to enhance his political popularity—​he harbored presidential aspirations himself, if not to replace his friend Lincoln in 1864 more likely gaining future election—​by enabling many thousands of tons of cotton shipped home to New England’s cotton mills. Cotton prices in 1864 were soaring to all-​time highs. Lincoln and Banks alike were willing to tolerate the open corruption that was common, with greedy soldiers and sailors seizing cotton and selling it to speculators, who had the option of selling it to U.S. Treasury Department agents, who in turn enriched Federal coffers by marketing the “white gold” to the voracious cotton mills in the Northeast. Banks also looked forward to gaining control over the entire Red River Valley and convincing more civilians to support the Union cause, a process he had begun at Alexandria a year earlier before his move against Port Hudson. And like Lincoln, with an eye firmly fixed on the great prize of Texas, Banks now viewed the Red River as the best invasion route. Emboldened by the addition of Sherman’s ten thousand men (raising Banks’s force to about thirty thousand), Banks also looked forward to receiving additional help from Arkansas, where a reluctant Maj. Gen. Frederick Steele had been ordered by Halleck to

The Red River Campaign, 1864    509 march south with about twelve thousand soldiers as part of a strategic pincer movement on Shreveport (bringing Union Army manpower devoted to the Red River Campaign to more than 42,500). Even more impressive, Banks’s men were accompanied by a large fleet of the best U.S. Navy contingent operating in the Mississippi River Valley: more than a hundred vessels, including seventeen powerful ironclad gunboats, the whole armed with a total of 210 heavy guns. The largest naval force operating on inland waters during the Civil War, the massive fleet was commanded by Rear Adm. David Dixon Porter, a distinguished career officer and veteran of the western theater. He despised Banks. Porter pointed out that water levels on the Red River were dangerously low from chronic droughts in the region. Finally relenting, he knew that his officers and sailors looked forward to lining their pockets with profits from capturing and selling cotton to Treasury Department agents. But Porter insisted on maintaining his independence, viewing his cooperation with Banks as optional. In fact, a total lack of unified command under Banks’s authority plagued the Red River Campaign from start to finish. That flaw epitomized a tradition of mistrust and jealousy between commanders and between branches of service, and it certainly typified most operations like the Red River Campaign during the Civil War. The campaign began in early March 1864 with Sherman’s ten thousand loaned troops departing from the Mississippi River and steaming up the Red River on troop transports, accompanied by Porter’s fleet. Sherman’s men, hardened combat veterans from the Midwest, were commanded by Brig. Gen. Andrew Jackson Smith, an extremely tough career army officer who had served with distinction during the Vicksburg Campaign. A. J. Smith and his midwesterners loathed the Massachusetts politician Banks and the northeastern troops under his command. Banks and his men, in turn, called Smith’s men “gorillas,” viewing them as undisciplined and profane. Although Halleck expected Banks to take the lead, Halleck had refused to name an overall commander because he wanted to deflect dishonor if the campaign failed. As if to verify the fractured command structure, Sherman made it clear that he had loaned Smith’s ten thousand men to Porter, not to Banks, and that their ultimate responsibility was the protection of Porter’s fleet. After overwhelming a small Confederate garrison at Louisiana’s Fort DeRussy in mid-​March, A. J. Smith and Porter moved easily upriver and soon occupied Alexandria, where they waited for Banks to arrive. Meanwhile, their men intruded brazenly upon surrounding plantations, destroying and pillaging property, freeing the slaves who remained in the area, and, most eagerly, confiscating thousands of cotton bales, loading them onto stolen wagons and wedging them onboard their naval vessels. During the two months (mid-​March to mid-​May) that Union troops occupied Alexandria, up to eight thousand cotton bales were sent to New Orleans and then shipped on to New England’s mills. But that was only a tiny fraction of the cotton the Yankees meant to confiscate throughout the campaign, especially since many cotton planters, their families, and slaves had abandoned the region and fled to Texas. Smith and Porter soon learned that Banks would be late in arriving at Alexandria. He had decided to take extra time in New Orleans to witness the inauguration of Unionist

510   T. Michael Parrish governor Michael Hahn. When he finally appeared on March 26, Banks was outraged to see that Porter’s and Smith’s men had been confiscating cotton. Banks had brought private cotton speculators with him from New Orleans, who now had to scramble for at least a share of the spoils. Even ecstatic runaway slaves were arriving in town on wagons piled high with cotton bales. Finally, Banks ordered his army quartermaster to take control of all cotton and convey it to Treasury Department agents. Regardless, Banks’s twenty thousand troops of the Thirteenth and Nineteenth Corps—​including about five thousand cavalry, ninety artillery pieces, and an astounding one thousand wagons loaded with supplies—​settled down in and around Alexandria. Although Banks received a message from Grant reiterating the need to send Smith’s men back to Sherman by mid-​April, he felt scant need to move immediately to Shreveport. Instead, he spent time doing political canvassing and recruiting about three hundred Unionists to participate in elections. Likewise, many more civilian men swore loyalty oaths to the Union throughout occupied areas. Banks organized elections for April 1 in four parishes at polling places in Alexandria, Opelousas, Marksville, and Harrisonburg, in order to choose delegates to the upcoming Unionist state constitutional convention in New Orleans. Banks also knew that Lincoln was intent on seeing a larger and more robust Unionist congressional delegation from Louisiana. By now, Smith was fuming at the delay, knowing that the mid-​April deadline to take his soldiers back to Sherman would be very difficult to meet. Meanwhile, on March 23, General Steele (nearly three hundred miles away) marched his troops slowly from Little Rock, Arkansas, toward Shreveport, expecting to combine forces there with Banks and Porter. Banks, Smith, and Porter finally departed Alexandria near the end of March and moved slowly up the Red River about sixty miles, stopping on April 3 at Grand Ecore, about halfway between Alexandria and Shreveport. After doing more political canvassing and holding another Unionist election at Grand Ecore, Banks finally seemed eager to move. In his haste, however, he made a fatally bad decision. Refusing to send out scouts to locate and verify the riverside road meandering up to Shreveport, Banks took advice from local citizens and decided to march his troops along a more traveled stagecoach road running northwest, away from the Red River and away from the support of Porter’s gunboats. He expected to reunite with Porter farther upriver, just below Shreveport. Once they captured Shreveport, Banks believed he would no longer need Smith and Porter to invade and conquer Texas. Banks’s soldiers reflected his overconfidence as they marched. Singing and joking as if on parade, they decorated many of their wagons, some of them bearing names of Texas cities: Austin, Galveston, San Antonio, Houston, etc. By now, even Grant and Sherman were enthusiastic, with Grant trying to find additional troops to reinforce Steele in Arkansas, and Sherman exclaiming, “Shreveport is the grand doorway to Texas, and the key to the entire Southwest.”3 Contrary to Banks’s visions of an easy triumph, Confederate leaders had been preparing for such an invasion for many months. Trans-​Mississippi Department commander Lt. Gen. Edmund Kirby Smith had overseen the transformation of Shreveport into the department’s nerve center of military and commercial industry and trade. To add protection, he ordered the construction of an array of small forts, channel

Map 31.1  Red River and Camden

512   T. Michael Parrish diversions, and obstacles on the Red River below Shreveport. Smith’s immediate subordinate in charge of the District of West Louisiana was Richard Taylor. The son of President Zachary Taylor and blessed with a brilliant intellect, Taylor made up for his lack of formal training with an encyclopedic knowledge of military history. A graduate of Yale University, Taylor had been a prominent Louisiana sugar planter and politician before the war. Early in the war he was a colonel in command of a brigade of Louisianans and served effectively in Virginia with Maj. Gen. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson during the victorious Shenandoah Valley Campaign in 1862. Promoted to major general, Taylor readily agreed to be transferred to Louisiana and charged with protecting his home state. A political general even more than his nemesis Banks, Taylor was a brother-​in-​law and close friend of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. Yet Taylor had built a reputation as a commander who was popular with subordinate officers, troops, and civilians—​all of which explains why Davis transferred him to Louisiana. From the beginning, however, Taylor clashed with his superior, Edmund Kirby Smith. Taylor disdained Smith’s deliberate caution and defensive mindset, epitomized by the small forts and barriers he had constructed on the Red River. Moreover, Taylor and Smith differed drastically on their ultimate goals. Smith aimed to retake Arkansas and Missouri. But Taylor saw vastly greater benefits in retaking southern Louisiana and the Lower Mississippi so that he could liberate occupied New Orleans, the South’s most important commercial port. Regardless, Taylor worried that Smith’s thinly disguised ambition, a desire to achieve the martial glory that had eluded him so far, would lead to bad decisions and disaster. Able to muster only a few thousand men in the spring of 1864, Taylor was forced to withdraw up the Red River Valley—​ultimately more than 150 miles—​in the face of Banks’s invasion. In mid-​March, Smith ordered Taylor and other Confederate authorities to comply with official policy by destroying as many as 150,000 cotton bales to keep them from falling into enemy hands. Already appalled at the extensive destruction and plundering by the Yankees, Taylor considered Smith’s order a catastrophe for the many civilians who watched helplessly, weeping and cursing as their own troops burned large stores of cotton. All the while, Taylor begged Smith for reinforcements so that he could attack Banks. Finally, in early April, additional Texas cavalry and several infantry units arrived. Taylor decided to make a stand south of Shreveport, a few miles below Mansfield, at Sabine Crossroads. By now, Banks’s invasion column, slowed miserably by the long line of supply wagons, had become strung out for about twenty miles along a narrow road shrouded by a dense pine forest, plagued by muddy ditches and ravines, and affording little forage and water. Aware that Taylor’s army was nearby and occasionally clashing with his cavalry, Banks’s troopers at the head of the column asked him to send more infantrymen forward to provide protection, but Banks hesitated. Finally, on April 8, he ordered more soldiers to come up from the rear.4 Edmund Kirby Smith had come from Shreveport on April 6 to meet with Taylor, who could not persuade his commander that the head of Banks’s exposed column was now supremely vulnerable. Smith worried more about Steele’s advance in Arkansas. Therefore, Smith preferred to wait, and if necessary he would order Taylor’s forces to

The Red River Campaign, 1864    513 hide behind Shreveport’s defenses or perhaps simply abandon Shreveport and withdraw to Texas. Taylor viewed Smith’s strategy as stupid beyond measure, and by April 8 his patience was gone. That morning his troops marched through Mansfield, inspired by women and children who threw flowers in the streets and begged them to save Louisiana’s families, homes, and lives. After waiting until shortly after 4:00 p.m., Taylor seized the initiative and launched the Battle of Mansfield. As his men moved forward, Taylor received a courier’s message from Edmund Kirby Smith, ordering him to wait for Smith to arrive on the field before attacking. Convinced that the ambitious Smith only meant to appear in time to claim victory for himself, Taylor told the courier sardonically, “Too late, sir, the battle is won.”5 About nine thousand Confederates, including Maj. Gen. John G.  Walker’s Texas Division (the largest single unit of Texans), together with Louisiana infantry regiments and veteran cavalry of Texans and Louisianans, struck Banks’s right flank and then his left, moving against a Union line defended by only about five thousand available cavalry, infantry, and artillery. Shocked by Taylor’s sudden offensive, Banks showed impressive courage in trying to rally his men, but they finally panicked, broke, and then ran headlong in a chaotic retreat as the Confederates captured twenty Union artillery pieces and fired them at the terrified Yankees. The fighting finally ended after Taylor’s pursuit encountered a line of Union reinforcements, while many of his men stopped to pilfer supplies from more than two hundred captured wagons full of liquor, canned food, and other luxuries. That night Banks moved about fifteen miles southeast to the village of Pleasant Hill. The next day, April 9, Taylor attacked again, confident that he was fighting only Banks’s demoralized troops and reinforced with recently arrived Arkansas and Missouri troops sent by Edmund Kirby Smith at the last minute. But at Pleasant Hill the Yankees were prepared, and they prevailed after four hours of brutal combat, thanks to 7,500 of A. J. Smith’s troops, who came up from the rear and saved Banks. But they could do nothing to save his reputation. When Banks told Smith that he intended to capitalize on Pleasant Hill by resuming the march to Shreveport, Smith and other officers rejected the notion as foolhardy. But Banks also worried that water levels on the Red River had dropped so much that Porter’s fleet would be trapped. Smith suggested to the other senior officers that Banks should be placed under arrest, but they rejected such an act as sheer mutiny. Banks saw no choice but to abandon his wounded and withdraw to Alexandria, thereby turning a tactical victory into a strategic defeat. Yet he still nursed hopes of quickly regrouping and renewing the campaign to Shreveport. Total casualties on both sides at Mansfield and Pleasant Hill were substantial. With about twelve thousand Union troops available at both battles, the numbers of killed, wounded, captured, and missing totaled about four thousand. Similarly, Taylor’s nine thousand Confederates at Mansfield and twelve thousand at Pleasant Hill suffered about three thousand killed, wounded, captured, and missing, including many of his best officers. Local civilians who remained at Mansfield and Pleasant Hill and the surrounding area had no choice but to respond to the immense calamity of two major battles.

514   T. Michael Parrish Thousands of killed and wounded littered the landscape. Older men and boys worked with Confederate soldiers, forming burial details and interring the dead in quickly dug shallow graves, some of which later heaved up and cracked opened when rains eroded the top soil and revealed the bodies. Converting their homes, churches, and public buildings into hospitals, women and girls kept busy working with chaplains and doctors—​Confederate and Union surgeons alike—​for weeks after the battles, nursing wounded soldiers, regardless of their uniforms. At Pleasant Hill, Arkansas Sleet, wife of a Confederate soldier and mother of two young children, wrote, “[A]‌ll the ladies in our little town nursed the wounded, Yankees and Confederates alike, and did all that could be done with so little to do with.” Likewise, Henry Childers, a boy at the time, later recalled, “It was both beautiful and sad to see the soldiers and nurses of the two contending armies in pleasant conversation together, exchanging ministrations and offering up prayers together.”6 The wounded who survived were very grateful for the care they received. Some Union soldiers were so appreciative that they maintained affectionate contact with the families for many years after the war. Despite suffering a major repulse and heavy casualties at Pleasant Hill, Taylor was convinced that he could eliminate Banks’s reeling forces, capture Porter’s fleet, and repatriate the lightly defended New Orleans. He immediately requested more reinforcements from Edmund Kirby Smith, but Smith astonished Taylor by ordering him to send his Arkansas and Missouri troops, as well as Walker’s Texas Division, to Arkansas so that Smith could defeat Steele and open the door to Missouri, particularly St. Louis. Taylor was left with only his cavalry and some battered infantry (about five thousand men total) to harass Banks. Taylor repeatedly implored Smith to return Walker’s Texas Division. Smith rejected Taylor’s request. Meanwhile, in Arkansas, Steele’s force stalled at Camden, hamstrung by serious logistical and supply problems. Steele conducted a fighting retreat back to Little Rock, pursued by Smith’s force, and he barely made it back to safety in early May.7 Admiral Porter faced a titanic challenge. After learning about Banks’s defeat at Mansfield, Porter steamed his fleet back down the Red River, severely vexed all the way by artillery shells and rifle fire from Taylor’s pursing men. Relieved to rejoin Banks at Grand Ecore on April 15, Porter listened to Banks argue for renewing the campaign to Shreveport. But Porter rejected the idea as suicidal and wisely opted to withdraw to Alexandria. Along the way, his fleet faced a storm of Confederate artillery and rifle fire that killed or wounded scores of sailors. Porter lost several vessels, including his flagship Eastport, to barriers of rocks, logs, and Confederate torpedoes (mines), and a transport’s boiler exploded, killing many of its crew and about a hundred runaway slaves. Banks’s and A. J. Smith’s soldiers failed to protect Porter’s fleet, and worse, they took out their frustrations on civilians, burning and pillaging all the plantations and other property they could. In late April, Porter and Banks reached Alexandria. Clearly, the Red River Campaign had failed. But defeat might have become a cataclysm because the river’s notorious falls (a series of shallow, rocky rapids) at Alexandria threatened to trap Porter’s fleet and force him to scuttle it to keep Taylor from capturing it. Fortunately, Lt. Col. Joseph Bailey,

The Red River Campaign, 1864    515 a talented military engineer, designed a 750-​foot-​wide wing dam constructed of large timbers and rocks that would raise the water level and funnel Porter’s precious vessels, one by one, over the falls. Hundreds of soldiers from New York and Maine who were experienced loggers volunteered to cut logs. But the most dangerous work fell to about 2,500 U.S. Colored Troops, African American soldiers who provided heavy labor and other duties for Banks’s forces. They were put to work, day and night, hauling heavy rocks and wooden timbers and bravely wading into the rapids to construct and shore up the dam. During the two-​week process, many of the USCT soldiers sustained injuries, and several were killed. Meanwhile, Banks had ordered his disgruntled troops to construct heavy defenses around Alexandria in order to fend off Taylor, whose weary men made a valiant but fruitless ongoing attempt to besiege the town. Still, despite having reinforcements from Union southern Louisiana and the Texas coast, Banks worried that Taylor’s force outnumbered his.8 Banks and Porter abandoned Alexandria on May 13 and continued withdrawing down the Red River. Before departing, A. J. Smith’s “gorillas” deliberately laid torches to the town and watched it succumb to almost complete destruction. “Burning buildings could be seen as far as the eye could reach,” Union soldier Pvt. James Ewer recalled. “It was an awful picture.”9 A. J. Smith rode through the town exclaiming, “Hurrah, boys, this looks like war!”10 Banks tried to stop the needless conflagration, but he was too late. Alexandria’s civilians, Confederates and Unionists alike, watched in horror. But by now such devastation had become commonplace. Especially after the battles of Mansfield and Pleasant Hill, the Yankees inflicted havoc and ruination, particularly targeting wealthy planters’ properties. “One of the distinguishing features of the Red River Campaign was the tremendous wreckage of life and property involved,” James Ewer admitted. “This began at Sabine Cross Roads [Mansfield] and ceased not until the army had reached the banks of the Mississippi.”11 Thousands of Unionists and runaway slaves joined Banks’s soldiers in the rapid escape, leaving behind angry pro-​Confederate civilians, many of whom had expediently signed loyalty oaths but now reaffirmed their allegiance to the Confederacy. During the next week Taylor harassed Banks’s rear guard in small engagements at Mansura (May 16) and Yellow Bayou (May 18), but when the fleeing soldiers crossed the Atchafalaya River on a long pontoon bridge created by Porter’s transport vessels at Simsport (May 20), the Red River Campaign finally concluded. The Union Army and Navy had paid for the disaster with about eight thousand casualties (killed, wounded, missing, and captured), nearly sixty artillery pieces, more than 3,500 horses, and nine naval vessels. Rather than pacifying the Red River Valley, Banks’s invasion had inflicted tremendous material damage and human upheaval. Many Confederate and Unionist civilians, already at odds with one another, veered into bitter conflict as pro-​Union vigilantes (Jayhawkers) and pro-​Confederate guerrillas clashed continually to the end of the war and into the Reconstruction era. Taylor blamed Kirby Smith for all the suffering and chaos. Assailing Smith with several insulting messages, Taylor called the whole campaign “a hideous failure,” the result

516   T. Michael Parrish of Smith’s “grave errors.”12 After Taylor expressed his wish to resign his command of the District of West Louisiana, Smith removed him and turned the matter over to President Davis, who then chastised Smith for refusing to reinforce Taylor and thereby preventing Banks’s and Smith’s troops from escaping Alexandria and eventually supporting operations east of the Mississippi River. Moreover, Davis promoted Taylor to lieutenant general and put him in command of the Department of Alabama, Mississippi, and East Louisiana. Taylor lamented the destruction of Louisiana. “The fairest and richest portion of the Confederacy is now a waste,” he wrote in early April. “Her children are exiles; her labor system is destroyed.”13 Even before the Red River Campaign, Taylor had experienced harsh personal losses. He lost his lavish plantation and more than two hundred slaves to Union soldiers; his two young sons died of scarlet fever as refugees; and his wife suffered so much that she lapsed into a long physical decline that resulted in her premature death in 1875. Such widespread terror and destruction typified Union invasions and campaigns throughout the war, especially in 1864 and 1865, causing many historians to label the Civil War a total war. But despite the material losses, trauma, harm, and deaths suffered by civilians, Union soldiers rarely targeted civilians as combatants—​the defining characteristic of total war—​except in retaliation against pro-​Confederate guerrillas. Regardless of the limitations on soldiers’ conduct, civilians could not see how the Red River Campaign could have been worse. Its impact was enormous and sustained. Louisiana Confederate soldiers and their families became so severely embittered toward the Union that their animosity carried over into the postwar era, fueling their hatred of Reconstruction and their goal to defeat the Republican Party and, most of all, stiffening their determination to deny their former slaves’ quest for social and political equality. Economic recovery from the Red River Campaign proved difficult and limited, casting a pall over the region, as cotton prices stagnated and slowly declined. Violence by whites against African Americans was common and often savage, lasting for many decades, far into the twentieth century. In Texas, the politics of Reconstruction proved no less violent, as racial conflict increased in part because of the enormous influx of refugee slaves from the Mississippi Valley during most of the war. In 1860 the Texas slave population had been about 180,000 (30 percent of the total population), and by 1870 the Black population grew to about 250,000. The white population also increased dramatically as emigrants from the South, especially the Deep South, flooded into Texas. Between 1870 and 1880 the state’s total population nearly doubled, from more than 800,000 to about 1.6 million and continued to rise. Texas’s population explosion in the late nineteenth century was a direct result of favorable economic conditions that contrasted dramatically with those in Louisiana and the rest of the Deep South. Saved by Taylor’s army from Union invasion, confiscations, and occupation, the Lone Star State thrived economically. The prosperous wartime cotton and cattle trades had transformed Houston, San Antonio, and other Texas cities into virtual boom towns, and that prosperity continued. Businessmen, including William Marsh Rice (Houston), John Twohig (San Antonio), William L. Moody (Galveston),

The Red River Campaign, 1864    517 S.  M. Swenson (Austin), and Richard King (the King Ranch), created fortunes that flourished in commerce, banking, real estate, insurance, and other investments, wealth that increased exponentially after the epic discovery and production of oil beginning in the early twentieth century. The postwar era aside, the Red River Campaign’s importance and impact during the war itself has seldom been fully appreciated. Taylor repeatedly lambasted Edmund Kirby Smith for refusing to send Walker’s Texas Division back to Louisiana so that he could overwhelm the Yankees at Alexandria. If Taylor had captured Banks’s and A. J. Smith’s troops, or at least kept them trapped in Alexandria, they could not have joined Union operations east of the Mississippi. Taylor might have taken control of at least part of Porter’s huge fleet, creating a Confederate naval presence on the Mississippi River that might have enhanced the Confederacy’s ability to liberate New Orleans and other vital points on the river. The Union cause would have suffered immeasurable damage as a result. As it was, the Red River Campaign was the last decisive Confederate victory of the war, and it dangerously hampered the overall Union war effort. Only about ten thousand bales of cotton fell into the Federals’ hands. Far worse, tens of thousands of soldiers, abundant munitions, and precious time that could have been devoted exclusively to coordinated campaigns against Mobile, in Georgia, in Virginia, and elsewhere were instead lavished on the Red River Campaign. Moreover, Confederates were able to shift about fifteen thousand men from Mobile to help resist Sherman and defend Atlanta, while Mobile itself remained in Confederate hands until almost the end of the war in April 1865. Despite his extreme disappointments, Taylor claimed afterward that his successes in Louisiana delayed the war significantly, bolstering hopes for Confederate independence during the spring and summer of 1864, when Union forces in Virginia and Georgia stalled, suffered staggering casualties, crippled public morale, and appeared to ruin Lincoln’s chances for reelection. Sherman agreed, stating plainly that the defeat on the Red River probably lengthened the war by six months. Two eminent Civil War scholars have concluded bluntly, “For a long time the trans-​Mississippi constituted Lincoln’s and Halleck’s strategic tar baby.”14 But the apparent ramifications of a great victory had been too alluring for the Union high command to resist. In the end, Banks’s military career and prospects for the presidency evaporated. Lincoln also had to do without the advantages of massive stolen cotton and thousands of Unionists to help him gain reelection. Fortunately, Sherman captured Atlanta in early September, barely two months before the election, saving Lincoln’s presidency and thereby assuring Union victory.

Notes 1. Ludwell H. Johnson, Red River Campaign:  Politics and Cotton in the Civil War (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1993); Gary D. Joiner, Through the Howling Wilderness: The 1864 Red River Campaign and Union Failure in the West (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2006); Michael J. Forsyth, The Red River Campaign of 1864 and Loss by the Confederacy of the Civil War (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002).

518   T. Michael Parrish 2. James G. Hollandsworth Jr., Pretense of Glory:  The Life of General Nathaniel P.  Banks (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998); Stephen A. Townsend, The Yankee Invasion of Texas (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2006). 3. Quoted in John Y. Simon and John F. Marszalek, eds., The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, 32 vols. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982), 10:266–​267; Stephen A Dupree, Planting the Union Flag in Texas: The Campaigns of Major General Nathaniel P. Banks in the West (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2008). 4. On the contentious relationship between Richard Taylor and Edmund Kirby Smith, see Jeffrey S. Prushankin, A Crisis in Confederate Command: Edmund Kirby Smith, Richard Taylor, and the Army of the Trans-​Mississippi (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005). 5. Quoted in T. Michael Parrish, Richard Taylor:  Soldier Prince of Dixie (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 347. 6. Quoted in Vicki Betts, “Civilian Reaction to the Red River Campaign, 1864, Natchitoches to Mansfield, Louisiana,” Military History of the West 34 (2004): 47, 49. 7. On Edmund Kirby Smith’s disastrous use of Walker’s Texas Division in Arkansas, see Richard Lowe, Walker’s Texas Division, C.S.A.: Greyhounds of the Trans-​Mississippi (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004). 8. On Porter’s fleet and its narrow escape, see Gary D. Joiner, One Damn Blunder from Beginning to End:  The Red River Campaign of 1864 (Wilmington, DE:  Scholarly Resources, 2003). 9. James K. Ewer, The Third Massachusetts in the War for the Union ([Maplewood, MA:] Historical Committee of the Regimental Association, 1903), 169. 10. Quoted in Parrish, Richard Taylor, 389–​390. 11. Ewer, Third Massachusetts, 169. 12. Quoted in Parrish, Richard Taylor, 396. 13. Quoted in Parrish, Richard Taylor, 334. 14. Herman Hattaway and Archer Jones, How the North Won: A Military History of the Civil War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 690.

Bibliography Dupree, Stephen A. Planting the Union Flag in Texas:  The Campaigns of Major General Nathaniel P. Banks in the West. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2008. Forsyth, Michael J. The Red River Campaign of 1864 and the Loss by the Confederacy of the Civil War. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002. Hollandsworth, James G., Jr. Pretense of Glory: The Life of General Nathaniel P. Banks. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998. Johnson, Ludwell H. Red River Campaign: Politics and Cotton in the Civil War. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1993. Joiner, Gary D., ed. Little to Eat and Thin Mud to Drink: Letters, Diaries, and Memoirs from the Red River Campaigns, 1863–​1865. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007. Joiner, Gary D. One Damn Blunder from Beginning to End: The Red River Campaign of 1864. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2003. Joiner, Gary D. The Red River Campaign: The Union’s Final Attempt to Invade Texas. Buffalo Gap, TX: State House Press, 2013.

The Red River Campaign, 1864    519 Joiner, Gary D. Through the Howling Wilderness:  The 1864 Red River Campaign and Union Failure in the West. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2006. Lowe, Richard. Walker’s Texas Division, C.S.A.:  Greyhounds of the Trans-​Mississippi. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004. Parrish, T. Michael. Richard Taylor: Soldier Prince of Dixie. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992. Prushankin, Jeffery S. A Crisis in Confederate Command: Edmund Kirby Smith, Richard Taylor, and the Army of the Trans-​Mississippi. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005. Townsend, Stephen A. The Yankee Invasion of Texas. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2006. Winters, John D. The Civil War in Louisiana. Baton Rouge:  Louisiana State University Press, 1963.

Chapter 32

The 1864 I nvasi on of M iss ou ri Joseph M. Beilein Jr.

September 27, 1864, was the most critical day of Confederate Maj. Gen. Sterling Price’s invasion of Missouri. That afternoon, Price ordered a frontal assault on Fort Davidson, a small, hexagonal fortification located on the floor of Arcadia Valley in the southeastern part of the state. The fort was defended by nine hundred Union soldiers and sixteen pieces of artillery under the command of Brig. Gen. Thomas Ewing Jr. Thousands of Confederate soldiers marched out onto the open fields to the south of the fort and into withering fire from riflemen and cannoneers. Their ranks were blasted and bodies obliterated by rifle balls, grapeshot, cannister, and solid shot. Somehow a few Southerners were able to reach the nine-​foot-​deep dry moat that surrounded the fortress. Any hope of a reprieve from hot lead was dashed by hand grenades hurled over the breastworks by Union defenders, and explosive shells, their fuses lit, rolled down into the trench that was quickly becoming a mass grave. After the third failed attack, 1,500 men lay dead or wounded on the ground—​more than a tenth of the 12,000 men who made up the Army of Missouri. The fight to take the fort was disastrous for the soldiers, the army, the campaign, and any hope for Confederate redemption in the Trans-​Mississippi theater of the war.1 A very different battle unfolded on the same day in north-​central Missouri. There, in a concerted effort with Price’s invasion force, hundreds of guerrillas were working to create havoc and draw Union soldiers away from the Army of Missouri. A couple of miles outside the town of Centralia, in northern Boone County, a group of 135 Union troops led by Major A. V. E. Johnston pursued a band of ten guerrillas into a field, where they dismounted and formed up. As Johnston began shouting to his men to make ready their arms, at least 250 and perhaps more than 400 guerrillas burst out of the woods in their front and on either flank. In a matter of moments, the battle was over. The guerrillas, mounted on excellent horses and armed with Colt revolvers, made quick work of the Union soldiers, gunning down nearly every one of them in perhaps the most one-​sided victory for the Southern war effort.2

The 1864 Invasion of Missouri    521 Juxtaposed, these two battles suggested the historical significance of Price’s Raid. It was the rare campaign in which Confederates deliberately sought to include both a formal army and Southern guerrillas. The campaign was a failure for the South—​Price’s army was driven from the state and several of the most influential guerrilla captains were killed—​but its outcome was only part of the story. More informative was the way the raid was conducted; it illustrated the limitations of “conventional” warfare as it was waged by the Army of Missouri in contrast to the opportunities offered by guerrilla warfare for an upstart nation-​state. Mostly, however, Price’s 1864 invasion demonstrated his failure to fully grasp either form of fighting, let alone an ability to apply them together. Often set aside as an anomalous event, Price’s Raid shared many of the themes of other Confederate campaigns, west or east, and can even be seen as a historical parable for understanding the Confederate military experience writ large. The guerrilla war, its fighters, and the women who supported it for years served as a beacon signaling to their Confederate brethren that Missouri was filled with Southerners who were willing to fight. Initially, the state did not vote to secede during its secession convention. However, in the fall of 1861, after the Camp Jackson affair, in which pro-​Union militia attacked and imprisoned pro-​slavery militiamen in St. Louis and later fired into a crowd of unarmed Southerners, many Missourians changed their minds. At the behest of Governor Claiborne Jackson, who was attempting to govern the state from Arkansas, the Southern-​sympathizing majority of Missouri’s legislature who fled the state with him voted to join the Confederate States. Regardless of the legitimacy or illegitimacy of this proceeding, it revealed that a great portion of the state, outside of the decidedly pro-​Union St. Louis, comprised white Southerners. Price’s decision to enter the state was a response to the persistent efforts of guerrillas, the most visible representatives of the pro-​slavery populace, who kept up the fight in the absence of formal Confederate forces. When Price finally moved his men into the state, word of his invasion vibrated through the countryside. Hearing these reverberations, many of the Southern white men who were not already in the bush fighting with the guerrillas left home and joined Price, while white women worked to assist the small, poorly outfitted army as best they could. By the time it arrived, 1864 was viewed by many diehard Confederates as the critical year in their fight. The previous year saw devastating losses at Gettysburg and Vicksburg. Respectively, these defeats drained the Army of Northern Virginia of any momentum it built in the East and cut the Confederate states in the Trans-​Mississippi off from the rest. Together, they put immense pressure on Confederate military leaders to recover ground lost. But 1864 was a presidential election year in the North, which pitted the Democrat Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan, who ran on a peace platform, against Republican Pres. Abraham Lincoln. The upper echelons of the Confederate leadership believed there was an opportunity to turn the tide of war with a decisive campaign. Defeats right before the election might resound through the Northern electorate, demoralizing voters and leading them to believe that McClellan and peace were their best option for ending the costly and bloody war.

522    Joseph M. Beilein Jr. Price ranked among the most diehard of Confederates. A wealthy slaveholder and planter from Missouri, one-​time U.S. congressman and governor of the state, and a general in the Mexican-​American War in command of volunteers from Missouri, he was deeply invested in the Show-​Me State. He thought that the fate of Missouri was directly tied to the eventual outcome of the war. As long as it remained in Union hands, there was little hope that the South could free itself and become a sovereign, slaveholding nation. In addition to the political opportunity that the presidential election of 1864 presented, there were important strategic and logistical factors that explained Price’s prioritization of Missouri. During the Civil War, St. Louis was one of the largest cities in the country and the hub of Union war efforts in the far West, the Trans-​Mississippi theater, and the western theater, with a massive arsenal, huge Union garrisons, shipyards, and stockpiles of supplies. If it could be taken, the head would be cut off the Union snake. Moreover, taking Missouri back would serve to challenge Union control of the Mississippi River and reconnect Missouri, Arkansas, Texas, and Louisiana with the other slaveholding states. Unfortunately, there was little support—​ material or political—​ for Price or his Missourians. There were many causes for the lack of men, animals, and war materiel in the Trans-​Mississippi. The South began the war with less of these things than their enemy. Infighting and incompetence among Southern military leaders in the Trans-​ Mississippi (including Price) limited any early gains the Confederacy might have made. Proactive Union commanders Brig. Gen. Nathaniel Lyon, Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, Maj. Gen. Henry W. Halleck, Maj. Gen. Samuel R. Curtis, Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman, and Rear Admiral David Farragut won many decisive battles from St. Louis to New Orleans in the first three years of the war. But perhaps the greatest reason for the Confederate shortages west of the Mississippi River was strategic neglect on the part of Confederate leadership at Richmond, Virginia. Whereas the Union looked at the map and understood that the war could be won from west to east, Confederate Pres. Jefferson Davis and Gen. Robert E. Lee overemphasized the relatively tiny stretch of land from the James River to the Potomac and the Shenandoah Valley to the Chesapeake. To protect what amounted to a military district, they hoarded the bulk of the upstart nation’s men and supplies, ceded vast swaths of land to their enemies without a fight, left millions of white Southerners defenseless, and criticized and outlawed the guerrillas who, in the absence of any formal defense, rose up to fight invading Union forces in communities across the South. Although they imagined a pitched battle or the capture of Washington were the keys to victory, their only real hope was that Lincoln, Lt. Gen. Winfield Scott, and later Halleck and Grant were as short-​sighted as they were. Indeed, hope was the only commodity with which Price was well supplied. After receiving word that he could proceed with his campaign, he set about building his force, outlining a strategy, and developing a logistical approach. At 12,000 men, the “army” Price cobbled together was understrength. (For comparison, the army Lee led into Pennsylvania the previous year numbered over 70,000 men, and the army Grant currently led in Virginia was 100,000 men strong.) More problematic than its size was that the Army of Missouri was woefully short of supplies: only eight thousand of the men who initially stepped off with Price were armed; some of the cavalrymen rode mules;

The 1864 Invasion of Missouri    523 the army towed a mere fourteen artillery pieces; dress was far from uniform, shoes were hardly universal, and food was scant. To be sure, the Army of Missouri was comical, some regiments looking more like a medieval farce on parade, complete with men bearing lances and riding mules who might as well have been tilting at windmills. Perhaps one of its greatest limitations was Price himself. The army was led by an obese, washed-​up, provincial, political general, who was looking and acting more and more like a caricature of a planter-​class buffoon with each passing day. Even his nickname, “Old Pap,” conjures up the image of an aged patriarch in a rocking chair, straw hat atop his head and mint julep in his hand. Although Price fought courageously at times during the war, especially in the early days, he thought too much of himself and too little of other Confederate leaders. His disputes crippled armies and promoted a Missouri-​first culture that was detrimental to a concerted war effort in the Trans-​Mississippi.3 The Union force that ended up confronting Price’s army demonstrated great strategic and tactical flexibility. Myriad Union soldiers—​militiamen, volunteers, and a few regulars—​were under the command of Maj. Gen. William S. Rosecrans, the head of the Department of the Missouri. The bulk of Rosecrans’s force was divided between the Kansas-​Missouri border and Jefferson Barracks in St. Louis. The remainder were strewn across the state occupying garrisoned towns. Since early 1862, the primary focus of the department was counterinsurgency, with most of the soldiers’ efforts directed at hunting guerrillas and containing their supporters. When the Army of Missouri threatened the state with invasion, Rosecrans quickly consolidated his troops, augmented them with a corps that was intended to join Sherman’s army in Georgia, and formed a new army. The new force, named the Army of the Border, was placed in the hands of Trans-​Mississippi stalwart Samuel R. Curtis. An excellent battlefield commander, Curtis won the Battle of Pea Ridge in March 1862. He was joined by other good leaders, including Maj. Gen. Alfred Pleasonton, one of the architects of the Union cavalry’s emergence in the eastern theater. In planning his raid, Price organized his army into three columns to invade Missouri. He ordered Maj. Gen. James F. Fagan to march his column to Fredericktown, traveling through Martinsburg, Reeves’ Station, and Greenville along the way. Price sent Maj. Gen. John S. Marmaduke to Fredericktown, but keeping a distance of ten to thirty miles to the right of Fagan’s column. Finally, Brig. Gen. Joseph O. Shelby, the famed commander of Price’s cavalry, was ordered to lead his column to Fredericktown, taking a path ten to thirty miles to the left of Fagan. Price and his staff marched with General Fagan’s center column. At Fredericktown the columns would all come together and proceed from there.4 Critical here and throughout Price’s marching orders was the importance of forage. Given the nature of the campaign and the lack of supplies with which the Army of Missouri began their expedition, it was necessary to live off the land. Thus, each column of Price’s force was given a meeting point, Fredericktown at this early stage of the campaign, and a rough direction of march. Beyond those instructions, Fagan, Marmaduke, and Shelby were granted wide latitude to move twenty miles off their line of march to find food. Price wanted to keep his columns from overlapping one another, but forage

Map 32.1  Price in Missouri, 1864

The 1864 Invasion of Missouri    525 was essential to determining the direction of his army; his army went where there was food to feed man and animal alike. Once in Missouri, Price planned to tap into a couple of favorable local factors. He knew there were quite a few Southern sympathizers who did not like living under Union occupation but felt powerless to do anything about it, and he hoped that the young men from this group of disaffected Southerners would flock to his banner. Missouri was the birthplace of the Union Army’s hard-​war approach. Since 1861, the border state had served as an incubator for the most draconian policies instituted by the North, from Halleck’s no-​quarter order in March 1862, which justified the executions of guerrillas and men suspected of guerrilla activity, to the arrest and imprisonment of women in 1862 and 1863. The nadir of the hard war in Missouri was Thomas Ewing’s Order No. 11 of August 1863, which depopulated four counties on the western border of the state in response to the guerrilla raid on Lawrence, Kansas. Union troopers executing Order 11 set the homes and fields of Southerners ablaze, leading to a destruction so pervasive that this stretch of the border was known thereafter as the Burnt District. Women and their families were the primary targets and victims of this war against Southern households. To be sure, Missourians living on the western border felt the hard hand of war more than any other group of white Southerners until Sherman’s march through Georgia and were poised to respond to Price’s invasion. In particular, the guerrillas of the western and central parts of the state were primed to help with the invasion. After the raid on Lawrence and the fallout of General Order 11, the guerrillas of Missouri went to Texas to spend the winter within the safety of Confederate lines. When they returned to the state in the spring of 1864, they moved their theater of operations to central Missouri, mostly north of the Missouri River, where there were still thousands of guerrilla supporters and additional guerrilla bands to bolster their strength. In the summer of 1864, emissaries for Price brought word of an impending invasion—​one the guerrillas had long anticipated. “Bloody Bill” Anderson and George Todd were eager to unleash their men on the Union communities that dotted the central Missouri landscape. Although most of the countryside was populated with slaveholders and Southern sympathizers, Germans and other Unionists huddled together in garrisoned towns along the railroads, major roads, and waterways. Throughout the summer and into the months of September and October, Anderson and Todd, along with captains in charge of local bands like Clifton Holtzclaw and Jim Jackson, raided villages and towns where Unionists were known to live, attacked vulnerable Union patrols and supply trains, cut telegraph wires, fired into riverboats and trains, and burned, destroyed, and killed anything or anyone associated with the Union. Although the percentage of the Union population affected by this violence and the amount of violence directed at the Unionist population (as opposed to armed Union troopers) by the guerrillas cannot be easily surmised, the brutality was nearly unchecked. Unionists, whether they were armed soldiers or unarmed citizens, were killed without mercy, their bodies mutilated and left to rot or be eaten by ranging hogs.5

526    Joseph M. Beilein Jr. From the perspective of the Union military, the guerrilla offensive of 1864 was dizzying. After the guerrillas performed one of their bloody deeds, Union troopers were called out to chase them. Union communications from this part of the war revealed a nearly hour-​by-​hour sequence of telegraphs, notes, and orders in which guerrillas were sighted here or there and troops were requested. Troops were often not available, but if they were, they were sent out and returned empty-​handed, and an after-​action report was filed. Altogether, the reports paint a picture of chaos for the Union officers trying to get a handle on the conflict: days and weeks of running fights, ambushes, and a generally frantic state of warfare across a handful of counties north of the Missouri River. The success of the guerrilla offensive can be traced back to their supply base. While the Confederacy struggled to supply its troops with arms and animals and to keep food in their stomachs, the guerrillas of western and central Missouri were rarely so starved. They operated in and around their own households and the households of Southerners who supported them. They often ate at the tables of their parents, aunts and uncles, grandparents, and cousins. When that was too risky for the supporters and the guerrillas, food was taken out to one of their camps deep in the brush. Women were especially supportive. In addition to food, they produced clothing for their men, operated extensive communication and intelligence networks, cared for them when they were wounded or ill, and mourned and buried the dead. Even ammunition and powder were produced and stored by women in Southern households. The guerrillas were waging a household war with a static supply line that was operated by their women. This allowed for a dynamic in which guerrillas were free to attack in one county, ride to another neighborhood to eat and resupply, attack at another point, and then seemingly disappear to another Southern community to refit and procure food for themselves, exchange horses, and launch another attack. However, guerrilla warfare could not sustain the intensity of this onslaught. Despite the apparent successes of Anderson’s band and Todd’s band in September and October 1864, their attempt to meet the demands of conventional warfare proved to be their downfall. Perhaps resulting from the pressure to create as much chaos as they could for the Union Army in the state, on September 24 Anderson and Todd decided to take Fayette. William Clarke Quantrill, who was no longer a significant officer, suggested that the town was too difficult to take, but if they tried, they could do so only by deceiving the local garrison. If the garrison was alarmed, they would take shelter in log buildings in town. Anderson and Todd did not listen to Quantrill, but instead preferred to give a yell and rush the village. When they did, the Union soldiers retreated to the log structures and used aimed rifle fire from the loopholes in the walls to bloody the guerrillas. To make matters worse, the guerrillas attempted several frontal assaults. At Fayette, the guerrillas lost thirteen men killed and around thirty wounded—​their worst loss in a single engagement over the course of the war. The essential element of guerrilla warfare was running, hiding, and avoiding conflict. Essentially, guerrilla warfare was about survival. To be sure, it was a decidedly lower intensity brand of fighting than the conventional warfare of the era, especially when guerrillas were operating independently from the formal armies. Quantrill, the first

The 1864 Invasion of Missouri    527 leader of Missouri’s guerrillas, discouraged picking fights in which victory was in question. It was often necessary to fight a losing battle, but it was not one that he or his men chose. Furthermore, when they were not victorious, it was best to lose by leaving rather than be defeated by dying. Quantrill and other successful guerrilla leaders across the state and even the South understood that their most important resource was manpower and that it was also the most finite. His ability to grasp this concept was one way in which his philosophy differed from Price’s and other Confederate leaders’, and even from his one-​time lieutenants Anderson and Todd, who lost their way in 1864. It may have been appropriate for guerrillas to run away to fight again another day, but Price believed in fighting pitched battles like the one at Pilot Knob. For an invading army with St. Louis as its target, the Army of Missouri moved slowly in approaching that city, mostly because of their persistent attempts to engage the enemy in their path. Price entered Missouri on September 19 and the next day engaged a regiment of Union cavalry. While it was a small fight—​a handful killed and wounded on either side—​the Union commander in the area now knew the Confederates were attempting an invasion and where they were. On September 22, General Shelby’s column attacked Peterson, a small garrison town. General Marmaduke also fought several skirmishes before meeting up with the core of the army. By the time the Army of Missouri started to reunite in Fredericktown on September 25, they had already wasted several days battling small garrisons, scouts, and skirmishers, and each day gave the Union more time to prepare their defenses in the southeastern part of the state, where Gen. Thomas Ewing was in command. On September 25, Price ordered an attack that revealed the limits of his vision. Rather than push forward toward St. Louis, he slowed his progress so that his army might entrap a small force of around 1,500 men near Ironton. Price instructed Shelby “to proceed at once with his division by the way of Farmington to a point on the Saint Louis and Iron Mountain Railroad, where there were three fine bridges in close proximity to each other, and to destroy the railroad there and the bridges; after effecting that object to fall back in the direction of Ironton and Pilot Knob, which would effectually prevent General A. J. Smith from re-​enforcing the garrison at those places, while [Price] would attack and take them with the divisions of Major-​Generals Fagan and Marmaduke.” This maneuvering was a well-​constructed, thoughtful tactic to trap his enemy, and Shelby was successful in executing his part of the program. However, Price exposed then and there that he was never serious about taking St. Louis, and if he was, then he was the wrong commander to lead the force.6 Two days after initiating the action against Ironton, Price was sucked into the devastating assault on Fort Davidson. His logic for making the attack was clear enough. Price’s troops drove the Federals before them through the Arcadia Valley and off the high ground surrounding the fortress. Feeling the momentum, he ordered an assault that, if successful, could have registered a sweeping and much-​needed victory for the Confederate cause. The Union troops inside the fort proved stubborn and held off the brave Butternuts who hurled themselves against the defenses. All was not lost, however. In the wake of the attack, Price began to place his artillery atop the heights.

528    Joseph M. Beilein Jr. By the next day, his cannons would be positioned to blast the fort to dust and victory would be certain. In the wake of the failed assault, during the early morning hours of September 28, the northernmost offshoot of the Arcadia Valley glowed in an eerie half-​light, revealing a scene of war. Bodies were strewn about the valley floor, the walls of a small fort were pocked where cannonballs slammed and exploded, and a small village burned, including a massive pile of coal that made night seem like day. In the relative quiet, some men from Price’s army used the illumination to make ladders for the next round of attacks they were seemingly doomed to make as soon as the sun arose. Other Confederate soldiers labored to move artillery pieces up the steeply sloped sides of Pilot’s Knob and Shepherd’s Mountain. From those promontories, Price’s cannons would fire over the walls into the vulnerable courtyard, garrison, and magazine of Fort Davidson. However, while the Confederates prepared for the next day’s action, without warning the peace was shattered by an explosion from inside the fort that turned the heads of the Confederate soldiers and caused them to cease working. A few hours later Price rode slowly across the open field toward the fortress. His horse Bucephalus gracefully placed its hooves on the damp earth between bodies and debris while the general took the measure of the nearing ramparts. As Price entered the small fortress, he saw a crater where the magazine must have been, and structures charred and things scattered and smoking. As he wandered around the abandoned stronghold, breathing the acrid and smoky air, he counted sixteen pieces of artillery, all functional, and “a large number of small-​arms, a large amount of army stores, consisting of bales of blankets, hundreds of barrels of flour, many tierces of bacon, a great quantity of coffee,” and other things. “After destroying the artillery, which I could not take with me,” Price wrote in his report, he distributed “such of the stores as were needed among the troops.”7 Immediately after the fight in the Arcadia Valley, Price decided that St. Louis was now out of his reach. In his official report, he recalled, “While at Ironton, receiving information that the Federal force in Saint Louis far exceeded my own two to one, and knowing the city to be strongly fortified, I determined to move as fast as possible on Jefferson City, destroying the railroad as I went, with a hope to be able to capture that city with its troops and munitions of war.” Price arrived near the state capital on October 7, his army marching roughly 140 miles in nine days, a strong pace of fifteen miles a day. Nevertheless, it was too late to make a major move to take the city. After his troops were rebuffed several miles outside of Jefferson City, he determined to skirt the city and direct his army toward Kansas.8 Marching westward, the Army of Missouri took Boonville—​a consolation prize of sorts after missing out on St. Louis and Jefferson City. On October 9, 11, and 12 there were skirmishes in and around the town, with the Confederates coming away victorious. When Price rode into Boonville on October 10, he found that his men had taken prisoner around three hundred Union soldiers. The next day, after learning that Union Brig. Gen. John McNeil was preparing to counterattack, Price ordered both Marmaduke’s and Fagan’s divisions to defend Boonville. The Union attack was driven back, with some

The 1864 Invasion of Missouri    529 of Fagan’s troops pursuing the fleeing Union soldiers nearly twenty-​five miles. After Boonville, they continued to move westward.9 Before Price left Boonville, however, he rendezvoused with his guerrilla allies. Anderson reported with around a hundred men. Although Price mentioned their arrival, he failed to mention that the guerrillas were cloaked in the full sartorial glory of the Missouri bushwhacker: spurred cavalry boots, pants of varied hues and textures, revolvers fastened here and there around their waists, colorful shirts, beards and long curly hair, slouch hats accented with bright, flowing ribbons, and gory prizes taken from their defeated foes at Centralia and half a dozen other battlegrounds. Of these trophies, scalps were the most prominent indication of the guerrillas’ culture of mutilation. Although he was silent on this aspect of his allies’ appearance in his report, one recollection asserted that he told Anderson and his lieutenants to remove or cover up those bloody indications of their warrior prowess. Like the guerrillas, Price’s formal Confederate force participated in violence against unarmed men during their campaign. For instance, Union Maj. James Wilson, who led a brilliant delaying action that frustrated the Confederate advance up the Arcadia Valley and bought time so that General Ewing could organize the defense of Fort Davidson on September 26 and 27, was captured by Price’s men and later executed along with six of his men. The first rumor that Wilson was killed after surrendering made its way into Union lines on October 6. According to a witness, Wilson and the other men were handed over from Price to one of his guerrilla allies, Capt. Tim Reeves, for execution. In addition to his maddening defense of the Arcadia Valley, Wilson was well-​known as a guerrilla hunter and as a man who made hard war on the Southern populace. There was little doubt among Union commanders that the Confederate general knew the fate of these men as soon as he handed them over. Like so many other dead men in the Civil War in Missouri, a couple of weeks after being shot full of holes their moldering bodies were found, half-​devoured by hogs and turkey buzzards, to be identified only by the documents in their pockets. Not long after he let Reeves do his dirty work, Price issued orders to Anderson at their meeting in Boonville to cut the North Missouri Railroad. Price apparently ordered Quantrill to do the same with the Hannibal and Saint Joseph Railroad. If properly executed, he hoped that such measures might make it difficult for Union troops garrisoned at St. Louis to unite with the Northern soldiers stationed in the western part of the state. A number of guerrillas under Todd decided to join up with Price and operate as skirmishers, scouts, and cavalry. Although he was pleased to have these knights of the bush join his army, Old Pap was disappointed in the guerrillas he sent to destroy the railroad. He said, “These officers I was informed afterward did effect some damage to the roads, but none of any material advantage, and totally failed in the main object proposed, which was to destroy the large railroad bridge that was in the end of Saint Charles County.”10 A few weeks after the Boonville meeting with Price, Todd and Anderson were killed within five days of each other. Todd was operating out in front of Sterling Price’s army during the Second Battle of Independence, and Anderson was killed charging headlong

530    Joseph M. Beilein Jr. into a Union force. Each man died fighting more like a conventional cavalryman and less like a guerrilla. Leaving Boonville, the Army of Missouri continued westward toward a cluster of cities—​Kansas City, Westport, and Independence—​near the western border of the state and along the Missouri River. There were stores of arms, food, clothes, and animals in those Jackson County communities. As the army trudged onward, it picked up recruits as well as firearms, coats, and other supplies. For all the men they gained, some were lost to desertion as a few went home to their farms and others joined the local guerrillas. Even with the fluidity of men entering and exiting its ranks, the Army of Missouri fought several small but victorious fights against local Union militia. The militiamen did not resist too much, and a few hundred surrendered and were immediately paroled. The Army of Missouri made it to the area around Independence by October 21 with fewer than eight thousand men, according to Price’s report, and there were not enough guns for even that small number. The next day witnessed a series of actions and reactions that culminated in the defeat of Price at the Battle of Westport. On October 22, Shelby’s division led the army toward Westport and Kansas City. They fought their way across the Big Blue River, drove the enemy back, and then provided cover for the baggage train, cattle, and the rest of the army to cross. Meanwhile, Fagan’s and Marmaduke’s divisions were beginning to feel pressure from another Union force pushing the Army of Missouri from the east. Despite the early indications that his army might be in a vise, Price was confident he had the men and momentum to fight his way out. That night he ordered his men to camp in line of battle, fully aware of what the next morning was to bring.11 Even if he was prepared to fight it out, Price gave other orders that suggest he had already given up on taking Kansas City. “The train had been sent forward on the Fort Scott road,” he reported, meaning that, when Price saw Union Gen. Samuel Curtis formed up for battle to the south of Westport, he ordered the wagons toward Arkansas. He ordered Marmaduke to resist the enemy at the army’s rear. Marmaduke did so even as Gen. Alfred Pleasanton bore down on him. Meanwhile, Shelby and Fagan attacked Curtis and his troops and rolled over them, pushing them back into Westport. However, before they could truly capitalize on the success, Price learned that his supply train was threatened. He ordered Fagan and Shelby to move immediately to protect the train. While he awaited their arrival, Price did what he could to protect the wagons and cattle.12 Very quickly the engagement outside of Westport morphed into a battle for survival for the Army of Missouri. Price, with only his escort, spearheaded the defense of the train. Joining him in the fray were several thousand of his men who were still without arms. The battle was so desperate that unarmed men were being thrown into the fray. While these courageous soldiers stood facing the enemy without so much as a pike, other parts of Price’s army showed up on the field of battle and engaged the enemy, sparing the unarmed column from complete destruction. Even so, the Army of Missouri was on its last legs. In what became a running fight, the army fought off attacks to either flank and the rear while trying to extricate themselves from the grasp of Union forces.13

The 1864 Invasion of Missouri    531 The Army of Missouri was now in full retreat to Arkansas. They fought several more skirmishes and small battles against the Union Army, which was in constant pursuit. Eventually, on December 2, 1864, the remnants of Price’s force staggered into Laynesport. Ever the diehard Rebel, Price painted a pretty picture in his report, highlighted by his claim that his army fought forty-​three battles, captured over three thousand Union soldiers, and destroyed ten million dollars’ worth of Unionist property. Despite the rosy outlook Price presented in his letter to Gen. E. Kirby Smith’s headquarters, the several thousand men who completed the campaign with him were the physical embodiment of a failed endeavor.14 Price seemed incapable of seeing the true nature of his defeat. While any military scholar then and now could point to the lack of political will, manpower, animals, rifles, artillery, ammunition, clothing, food, and a generally flawed logistical system, not to mention a misallocation of guerrilla force, flawed strategic approach, and a misapplication of conventional military tactics as the reasons for failure, he seemed to ignore them all. Instead, Price claimed that success was the source of his defeat: “[M]‌y march was an ovation. The people thronged around us and welcomed us with open hearts and hands. Recruits flocked to our flag in such numbers as to threaten to become a burden instead of a benefit, as they were mostly unarmed. In some counties the question was not who should go to the army, but who should stay at home. I am satisfied that could I have remained in Missouri this winter the army would have been increased 50,000 men.” In his confused final rendering, Price conjured up a justification for his decision to retreat from the state that anticipated the rhetoric of the Lost Cause: the people did rise up to join his army, but they did not arrive fully armed, in uniform, and loaded down with supplies, so he had to turn them away for they were a drag. It is not necessary to parse out the contradictions in his report to see the obvious: Price was a better politician than he was a general.15 The resonance of Price’s failed campaign was evident by the time he filed his report. In the region, Price’s Raid served to drain Missouri’s Southern sympathizers of much of their energy to continue to resist. In addition to the many prominent guerrillas killed during the campaign, many more fled the state or stayed out of sight. A few guerrillas went up into the Nebraska Territory during the winter and spring of 1865. Most of the hardened and experienced guerrillas of western Missouri followed Quantrill to Kentucky, where a guerrilla could still fight as a guerrilla with plenty of support from the Southern populace. In the Bluegrass State, they went on fighting into May 1865, when Quantrill was mortally wounded and the other men came in and surrendered. Although the guerrilla unrest in Missouri did not really fizzle out for years after the war, Price’s ill-​conceived campaign eliminated any hope the bushwhackers had of throwing off the Union occupation force. On the national level, the political resonance of the defeat of Price’s Army of Missouri was made clear when Americans overwhelmingly voted to reelect Lincoln on November 8. In addition to Sherman’s taking of Atlanta, Sheridan’s destruction of the Shenandoah Valley, and Grant’s besieging of Petersburg, Curtis’s ability to drive the Army of Missouri from the state helped maintain public confidence in the Republican administration east

532    Joseph M. Beilein Jr. and west of the Mississippi. Not unlike many of the Confederates’ last-​ditch efforts to turn the tide of 1864, the raid into the Show-​Me State was too little, too late.

Notes 1. U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1901), ser. 1, vol. 41, pt. 1: 450–​451, 629. Hereafter cited as OR. 2. OR, ser. 1, vol. 41, pt. 1: 440–​441, 443. 3. OR, ser. 1, vol. 41, pt. 1: 627–​628; pt. 2: 1059. 4. OR, ser. 1, vol. 41, pt. 1: 627. 5. OR, ser. 1, vol. 41, pt. 1: 432, 744–​745; pt. 3: 332. 6. OR, ser. 1, vol. 41, pt. 1: 629, 625–​640. 7. OR, ser. 1, vol. 41, pt. 1: 629, 625–​640. 8. OR, ser. 1, vol. 41, pt. 1: 629, 625–​640. 9. OR, ser. 1, vol. 41, pt. 1: 625–​640. 10. OR, ser. 1, vol. 41, pt. 1: 625–​640. 11. OR, ser. 1, vol. 41, pt. 1: 625–​640. 12. OR, ser. 1, vol. 41, pt. 1: 625–​640. 13. OR, ser. 1, vol. 41, pt. 1: 625–​640. 14. OR, ser. 1, vol. 41, pt. 1: 625–​640. 15. OR, ser. 1, vol. 41, pt. 1: 625–​640.

Bibliography Beilein, Joseph M., Jr. Bushwhackers: Guerrilla Warfare, Manhood, and the Household in Civil War Missouri. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2016. Boritt, Gabor S., ed. Why the Confederacy Lost. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Brownlee, Richard S. Gray Ghosts of the Confederacy: Guerrilla Warfare in the West, 1861–​1865. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1958. Castel, Albert. General Sterling Price and the Civil War in the West. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968. Davis, Dale E. “Guerrilla Operations in the Civil War: Assessing Compound Warfare during Price’s Raid.” Master’s thesis, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, 2004. Geiger, Mark W. Financial Fraud and Guerrilla Violence in Missouri’s Civil War, 1861–​1865. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010. Gerteis, Louis S. The Civil War in Missouri:  A Military History. Columbia:  University of Missouri Press, 2012. Lause, Mark A. The Collapse of Price’s Raid: The Beginning of the End in Civil War Missouri. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2016. Lause, Mark A. Price’s Lost Campaign: The 1864 Invasion of Missouri. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011. McMurry, Richard M. The Fourth Battle of Winchester: Toward a New Civil War Paradigm. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2002.

The 1864 Invasion of Missouri    533 Peterson, Cyrus A., and Joseph Mills Hanson. Pilot Knob:  The Thermopylae of the West. New York: Neale, 1914. Shalhope, Robert E. Sterling Price: Portrait of a Southerner. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1971. Sinisi, Kyle S. The Last Hurrah: Sterling Price’s Missouri Expedition of 1864. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. Stith, Matthew M. Extreme Civil War: Guerrilla Warfare, Environment, and Race on the Trans-​ Mississippi Frontier. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016. Sutherland, Daniel E. A Savage Conflict: The Decisive Role of Guerrillas in the American Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

Chapter 33

Sherm an’s Ma rc h to the Se a Home Front Becomes Battlefront Anne J. Bailey

In one of the most unusual events of the American Civil War, two opposing generals, Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman and Gen. John Bell Hood, took armies that had been fighting for months and headed them in completely opposite directions in late 1864. Following the surrender of Atlanta to Union forces in early September, the two armies enjoyed an uneasy truce until Hood decided to disrupt the Western & Atlantic Railroad, Sherman’s supply line into the city. After a brief but unproductive raid into the mountainous region of northwest Georgia, Hood turned west into Alabama and ultimately middle Tennessee. Sherman chose not to follow the Confederates out of the state and headed instead into the heart of Georgia. Both men had their own agendas. Sherman intended to march to the Atlantic Ocean, while Hood eventually headed for Nashville. Hood’s raid on the railroad line in October is almost lost to history, while Sherman’s march to Savannah is one of the best-​known episodes of the entire Civil War. The March to the Sea ranks as one of the most significant Union campaigns despite the fact there were no major battles or heavy casualties. Sherman abandoned his supply line in Atlanta on November 15, 1864, and with more than 60,000 infantry and 5,500 cavalry headed for the Atlantic coast. While his objective was to join Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant in Virginia, his personal goal was to bring the war to the previously untouched plantation region of Georgia and to the men, women, and children who lived there. This was a departure from the fighting he had waged throughout the spring and summer; this was psychological warfare, not battles with tactics and strategy. This was a campaign to break the will of the Confederate people by targeting the civilian population. To Southerners he became a villain, a ruthless commander who made war on helpless women, children, and old men, for civilians in this previously untouched region of the South did not expect the enemy at their door. White women had to watch the invasion of their private spaces, while Black women often suffered the humiliation of being

Sherman’s March to the Sea    535 treated with callous disrespect. Still, Sherman’s invasion of southeast Georgia was the first taste that a new social order was coming, and his arrival in Savannah on December 21 was a rude awakening for complacent Georgians. He left behind families whose lives were changed forever and a landscape that would take years to recover. Sherman had achieved his private objective of proving to Richmond and to the husbands and fathers serving in the Confederate armies that the government could no longer protect their families at home. After a brief stay in the river port, Sherman continued his campaign into the Carolinas, but it is the thirty-​seven days from Atlanta to Savannah that assured his name would be remembered in history. After Sherman captured Atlanta he immediately began making plans for his next campaign. He wanted to keep his options open, thus throwing the Confederates off balance. He felt that having a single geographic objective, as he did with Atlanta, had not been to his advantage. On September 20, he wired Grant that he favored heading for the Atlantic coast; he wanted to march through the heart of Georgia to show the vulnerability of the South. “Where a million of people live my army won’t starve,” he pointed out. Moreover, he knew the populated regions of Georgia had yet to feel the real effect of war, and a move through this territory would prove no one was safe anymore. “This may not be war,” he told Grant in November, “but rather statesmanship.”1 While Sherman made preparations for his march he turned Atlanta into a military camp and ordered nonessential residents to leave. He had become increasingly hardhearted toward unyielding Southerners; his brother-​in-​law, Brig. Gen. Thomas Ewing Jr., had used a similar measure when he removed residents from their homes in western Missouri the previous year. When Hood and Mayor James Calhoun protested, Sherman responded to Calhoun, “War is cruelty and you cannot refine it, and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out.” Sherman refused to be swayed by pleas for mercy from the scores of civilians turned out of their homes and had Union troops escort the refugees who went south to the little town of Rough and Ready, where Hood had to take responsibility for them. Of the more than 1,600 listed as expelled, the great majority were unaccompanied women with children. This action, coupled with later events, solidified Sherman’s reputation among Southerners as a ruthless commander who cared nothing for women and children.2 Another awkward situation arose after Sherman and Hood agreed to an exchange of around two thousand prisoners in mid-​September. Sherman wanted only men who had been recently captured and were healthy enough for active campaigning; he rejected some of the Union prisoners sent to Atlanta from Andersonville. Robert Knox Sneden, a New Yorker incarcerated at Andersonville, complained the general “selected only his own command for exchange, and sent all the rest back to captivity!” To many observers, returning anyone to the notorious prison camp was unusually harsh. Sneden noted, “[T]‌his act of Sherman’s will kill hundreds, as all hope of ever getting out of this [prison] is gone.”3 Officially designated Camp Sumter, but better known as Andersonville because of a nearby railway station, the prisoner-​of-​war camp was located southwest of Macon, Georgia. The first prisoners had arrived in February 1864, and by July the stockade held

536   Anne J. Bailey more than twenty-​six thousand men in an area designed for ten thousand. The next month the population rose to thirty-​three thousand, a number that could have made it one of the largest cities in the Confederacy. Conditions were appalling; during the hot summer months at least a hundred men died each day. Latrines built near the only creek inside the compound’s walls quickly filled with human waste, and disease was widespread. Of the forty-​five thousand men sent there during its time of operation nearly thirteen thousand died. After Atlanta fell, Confederate authorities feared Sherman might head for Mobile and liberate the prison, so Hood asked that the camp be emptied. Hood did not want to worry about protecting it as he prepared for his next campaign. Many prisoners ended up in a newly established compound in southeast Georgia near Millen, while others were moved to camps in South Carolina. Herded onto railroad cars for the long trip to their new destinations, weak and debilitated prisoners suffered intensely from the move. In spite of emptying the camp, Andersonville was not closed permanently, and by late December, after Sherman had reached Savannah, the number of inmates was back up to five thousand, where it remained until the war’s end. Unbeknownst to the Confederates, Sherman had no intention of heading in the direction of Andersonville. He was busy reorganizing his army for a move to the southeast. He divided his army into two wings, each with two corps. The two men selected as wing commanders were both veterans with respected reputations. Maj. Gen. Oliver O. Howard commanded the right wing (Army of the Tennessee), which was composed of the Fifteenth and Seventeenth Corps. Maj. Gen. Peter J. Osterhaus commanded the Fifteenth Corps, and Maj. Gen. Frank P. Blair Jr. commanded the Seventeenth Corps. The left wing (Army of Georgia) was commanded by Maj. Gen. Henry W. Slocum and was composed of the Fourteenth and Twentieth Corps. Bvt. Maj. Gen. Jefferson C. Davis commanded the Fourteenth Corps, and Brig. Gen. Alpheus S. Williams commanded the Twentieth Corps. The cavalry would be under Brig. Gen. Judson Kilpatrick. These were veteran soldiers, healthy men who were eager to start on a new campaign and willing to follow “Uncle Billy” anywhere. Many of the men in the Seventeenth Corps had been with Sherman when he had marched across Mississippi from Vicksburg to Meridian in February 1864. Sherman had abandoned his supply line and made the 350-​ mile round trip in thirty days. He had left Vicksburg in the dead of winter with the intention of crippling the western Confederacy by destroying the rail lines in Mississippi. He planned to do the same in Georgia, only on a larger scale. Sherman had thought about heading for the coast long before he left Atlanta. He had written Grant, “I would not hesitate to cross the State of Georgia with 60,000 men, hauling some stores and depending on the country for the balance.” Even though it meant traversing the state in the late autumn because of the need to delay until after the presidential election, Sherman believed the campaign “could be made in winter.” One historian has argued that Sherman specifically chose his route because he wanted to bring the war home to elite white women, and crossing southeast Georgia would “target the families and households of the lower South’s wealthiest slaveholders and political leaders.” She labeled this a “domestic war” against privileged slaveholding women whom he considered the enemy.4

Sherman’s March to the Sea    537 Sherman waged a “domestic war” only insofar as it affected the will of the Confederate soldier in the field. He understood that a citizen-​soldier’s loyalty was divided between his family and his country, and he knew that hitting a soldier’s family might weaken his resolve to fight. He said in early October, “Until we can repopulate Georgia, it is useless to occupy it, but the utter destruction of its roads, houses, and people will cripple their military resources. . . . I can make the march, and make Georgia howl.” Sherman told Maj. Gen. Henry Halleck, “We are not only fighting hostile armies, but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war.” Targeting women was a means to an end. More than forty regiments of Georgia infantry served in the Army of Northern Virginia, and Sherman knew he could demoralize those soldiers by striking at their families. While he blamed the wealthy for starting the hostilities, he knew tyrannizing families of all social classes would cause immense anxiety for the Georgia menfolk fighting with Robert E. Lee.5 Sherman also hoped he could take advantage of the political situation in Georgia. Governor Joseph E. Brown had never fully committed to the idea of a Confederate nation and had instead put his own state of Georgia first from the beginning of the war. Brown had objected to filling quotas that drained his state of able-​bodied men and weapons, and fought with Richmond over conscription. As a way to keep soldiers in Georgia, he had created various state units, the best known of which was the state militia, or “Joe Brown’s Pets.” When the Confederate government adapted the draft law to meet changing needs, Brown adjusted his own requirements for state service accordingly. As Sherman’s columns progressed south from Chattanooga, Brown finally permitted the militia to fight with the Army of Tennessee. Between ten thousand and eleven thousand Georgians joined the fighting outside Atlanta, but their commander, Maj. Gen. Gustavus W. Smith, estimated the largest number in the trenches at any one time was only about five thousand. In spite of Brown’s continued battles with Richmond, he was still a committed Confederate, and Sherman would find no friend in the state capital of Milledgeville. Sherman also briefly considered Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens, a Georgian who had a troubled relationship with his president, as someone who might help bring the state back into the Union. Sherman told Pres. Abraham Lincoln that Stephens was “a Union man at heart” and might be willing to talk. While it was true Stephens had tried to prevent Georgia from seceding, he had signed the state’s ordinance of secession and was later elected vice president of the Confederacy. Eventually falling out with Confederate Pres. Jefferson Davis, Stephens had returned to Georgia and was in the state when Sherman occupied Atlanta. Regardless of his desire to see an end to the fighting, Stephens did not have the power to negotiate with Sherman without the consent of Richmond. Since this would never be granted, any chance for a dialogue fell through. While those prominent Georgians unhappy with the war continued to complain, they still remained unwilling to consider any settlement separate from the other Confederate states. Still, when Sherman told Lincoln that Davis had arrived in Georgia to confer with Hood, Lincoln responded, “I judge that Brown and Stephens are the objects of his visit.”6

538   Anne J. Bailey Brown and Stephens were not Lincoln’s only concerns, however. While the president was certainly pleased that recent events had gone well for the Union—​Sherman had captured Atlanta; Rear Adm. David Farragut had closed Mobile Bay; and Maj. Gen. Philip Sheridan had razed the Shenandoah Valley—​the projected march across Georgia, facing an unknown foe, caused Lincoln some anxiety. The president told the secretary of war he felt “much solicitude” over the proposal and hoped it would “be maturely considered,” as “a misstep by General Sherman might be fatal to his army,” implying a blunder by Sherman could prove disastrous to Lincoln’s chances for reelection.7 Knowing he would have to delay his departure until Northerners went to the polls in November, Sherman spent his time on practical matters. He studied the maps of southeast Georgia carefully, calculating how far he could travel without worrying about food for the men and fodder for the animals. He had traversed the state in the 1840s and had explored much of the area he planned to cross. He knew he would pass through the rich plantation region of middle Georgia and with the fall harvest just completed would find enough to sustain men and animals in the storehouses and barns. The problems would emerge as he left the fertile counties behind and entered the coastal plain, where pine trees grew in abundance but little could be found for men and animals to eat besides rice. This would be a massive logistical undertaking. Besides the tens of thousands of soldiers, Sherman also had civilian workers, draft animals, and cattle to keep alive. To streamline his army, he ordered surplus supplies and the large artillery returned to Tennessee and told the men to cut their personal belongings down to the bare necessities. He estimated each individual soldier could carry forty to sixty pounds, which included his weapon and other necessary items. The hundreds of wagons would carry essentials only. Once he left Atlanta, the general could no longer rely on the Western & Atlantic Railroad to provide supplies. Besides his worry over logistics, Sherman had other things to consider. Lincoln’s victory on Tuesday, November 8, proved the first item he could check off his list. The second came when the hoped-​for autumn rain began to fall in early November, as the general wanted clear skies for the march. In the weeks leading up to his departure Sherman also had to decide how much latitude he would allow his soldiers in their dealings with the locals. He issued Special Field Order No. 120 on November 9, restricting what his soldiers could do and giving specific instructions about foraging. He added that even foragers should try to leave families with enough food to survive. But while the instructions Sherman gave his men were clear, they were frequently ignored, and the general made little effort to punish the guilty. He later admitted to Halleck that the men were “[a]‌little loose in foraging, they ‘did some things they ought not to have done,’ yet, on the whole, they have supplied the wants of the army with as little violence as could be expected, and as little loss as I calculated.” When critics later laid their grievances at his door, Sherman could point out that he had issued orders restricting damage. He did make an exception, however, when he wrote that his men should distinguish “between the rich, who are usually hostile, and the poor and industrious, usually neutral or friendly.” Unfortunately, this did not always prove the case.8

Sherman’s March to the Sea    539 By the time Sherman had everything in order for his departure, the Confederate Army of Tennessee had already abandoned the state. As October approached, Hood left on a raid with the intention of disrupting the Western & Atlantic Railroad, which ran north from Atlanta. He hoped Sherman would take the bait and follow him. But Sherman made only a half-​hearted effort to track Hood. Leaving one corps to guard Atlanta and the Chattahoochee railroad bridge, Sherman took the remaining men after the Confederates. Hood destroyed several miles of railroad track between Big Shanty and Acworth before one of his divisions reached the town of Allatoona. After a brief but unsuccessful battle to capture the supply depot, he continued north with the intention of tearing up the rails between Kingston and Resaca, then headed for Dalton, where the Confederate Army had wintered early in the year. At Dalton, Hood found about three-​quarters of the garrison’s nearly eight hundred defenders belonged to the 44th U.S. Colored Troops, an infantry unit organized at Chattanooga the previous April. While Sherman was unwilling to integrate Black soldiers into his white army, he was willing to use them for garrison duty. After the commander at Dalton elected to surrender, no one was surprised when the Black soldiers faced a different future from the white prisoners. Many were turned over to men claiming to be their owners; others were sent into Alabama and Mississippi, where they were apparently put to work rebuilding the railroad tracks and constructing fortifications. Sherman felt confident that Hood would not turn and engage him in an open fight, and he was right. After Hood captured Dalton, he made the fateful decision to head west, leaving behind only a small cavalry force under Maj. Gen. Joseph Wheeler to defend Georgia. As he moved away from both Sherman and the rail line, Hood effectively abandoned the state to the mercy of the Union horde. He headed into north Alabama, where he rested his army before invading middle Tennessee. For his part, Sherman balked at following Hood, believing that to do so would “simply amount to being decoyed away from Georgia, with little prospect of overtaking and overwhelming him.” From this point on Sherman would move southeast while Hood would head west, each hoping to strike a blow to end the war. Sherman was confident he had made the right decision. He told Grant that he had more than eight thousand head of cattle and sufficient bread, and he could forage for what was lacking. He intended to demonstrate the vulnerability of Southern civilians and prove that “war and individual ruin” were “synonymous terms.”9 So, one week after the presidential election, Sherman’s wagons rolled out of Atlanta. A few days prior to leaving the city he ordered the demolition of any buildings deemed useful to the Confederates and the burning of all military supplies. When the fires spread to the residential districts, Sherman’s soldiers did little to halt the flames. One Michigan man wrote his father, “Chambersburg is dearly paid for,” referring to the Confederate burning of the Pennsylvania town in late July. Riding out of the city amid the charred ruins, Sherman knew if the campaign succeeded it would be considered just a “matter of course,” but if it failed it would be “adjudged the wild adventure of a crazy fool.”10 The two wings took different routes, the distance between them varying as they moved through the state; this was the same method Sherman had used marching

540   Anne J. Bailey

Map 33.1  Sherman’s March to the Sea

across Mississippi in February. The left wing headed southeast toward Augusta, passing through Decatur, Oxford, Covington, Social Circle, and Madison before making a southerly turn toward Eatonton and ultimately the state capital at Milledgeville. The right wing moved in the direction of Macon, passing through Jonesboro, Lovejoy, McDonough, and Jackson before swinging further east and heading for Clinton and Gordon. The soldiers could only speculate where Sherman planned to go. Many thought Macon and Augusta were the obvious targets because both were industrial centers. The Augusta Powder Works provided munitions to Lee’s army in Virginia, and Macon hosted several factories, including an arsenal that manufactured cannon, shot, shell, and other needed ordnance. But it eventually became clear that Sherman intended to bypass both of these locations. The Union columns met with no resistance as they left behind the charred ruins of Atlanta, making the first obstacle not Confederate cavalry but the unpredictable weather. Sherman’s hope for good conditions faded when a cold rain started to fall within forty-​eight hours of their departure, turning the red clay roads into soup. By the afternoon of November 21 the rain changed to tiny snowflakes. Moving wagons, artillery, and large cattle herds became an ordeal. It was impossible to find dry wood for the fires needed to cook and keep warm, making the trek miserable for man and beast as the temperature dropped. On the night of November 22, with a raw, cold wind blowing, a slave woman directed Sherman to a dry place to sleep. It was the house of an overseer on a plantation near the state capital. The general soon learned his bed for the night

Sherman’s March to the Sea    541 was at Hurricane Plantation and its owner was Howell Cobb, a prewar governor and U.S. congressman, who had also served as U.S. secretary of the treasury. When Georgia seceded, Cobb had become president of the Provisional Confederate Congress and later a major general in Virginia. But Cobb had returned home in 1863 to take command of the Georgia State Guard and currently led the state’s Confederate Reserves. Cobb represented everything Sherman detested about Southerners, and he labeled the rich slave owner “one of the leading rebels of the South.” The same evening Sherman lay down to rest, Cobb was in nearby Macon conferring with other generals about the best way to meet the Union advance. Before Sherman left the plantation the next morning he made good on his intention of distinguishing between the rich and poor. Putting Cobb firmly in the first category, he ordered Jefferson C. Davis to “spare nothing” on the plantation except the slave cabins. Sherman had no problem dispensing justice to those he believed responsible for the war, and while he personally preferred to punish the rich, his soldiers often made no such class distinctions.11 When Sherman arrived in Milledgeville the next day he proclaimed the “first stage of the journey” had proved “absolutely successful.” While the left wing united in and around the state capital, the right wing was gathering less than twenty miles away, near Gordon to the southwest. On the same day Sherman’s soldiers rode into the capital, some of the men in the right wing encountered Confederate resistance at Griswoldville, a small factory town west of Gordon between Milledgeville and Macon.12 Griswoldville was the only noteworthy battle on Sherman’s “first stage of the journey.” The community was located on the Central of Georgia Railroad where the town’s founder, Samuel Griswold, had built a factory village around his successful production of cotton gins. When the war began, he had heeded Governor Brown’s plea to switch to weaponry, producing first pikes and later firearms styled after the Colt navy revolver. Griswoldville had escaped damage in July during a Union cavalry raid on the railroad line, but the small town and factory were both burned by enemy cavalry on November 20. Two days later a Confederate force, including Georgia militia and nonseasoned soldiers ranging from teenagers to men over sixty, approached the remains of the village. They had been ordered to proceed east from Macon to join other soldiers in Augusta, which Confederate authorities assumed was Sherman’s target. When they encountered resistance they thought they had only come across a small cavalry force. Instead they had met seasoned infantrymen, regiments from the Fifteenth Corps under Brig. Gen. Charles C. Walcutt. Confederate commander Brig. Gen. Pleasant J. Phillips continued to believe he faced only cavalry, and, convinced he outnumbered the enemy horsemen, he unwisely ordered a frontal assault on an entrenched line of Federals. This proved a disaster for the inexperienced Georgians, who were easily mowed down. While the loss on the Union side was relatively light, the loss on the Confederate side was substantial. Because Griswoldville was primarily a factory town and Samuel Griswold chose not to rebuild, the village disappeared from the map after his death in 1867, adding to the lore that Sherman destroyed everything from Atlanta to Savannah.

542   Anne J. Bailey A better fate awaited the state capital of Milledgeville, which was situated on the west bank of the Oconee River around a hundred miles southeast of Atlanta and roughly 160 miles from Sherman’s goal of Savannah. Some thirty thousand soldiers plodded through the downtown, passing by the governor’s mansion and near the statehouse. Fortunately for the residents they did not remain in the town, but crossed the bridge to camp on the Oconee’s eastern bank. Governor Brown had already fled to Macon along with any other legislators still in residence, and Sherman made his headquarters in the impressive mansion recently vacated. There was little damage to local homes or businesses or unwarranted threats made to residents, but Sherman turned a blind eye when rowdy soldiers entered the statehouse and conducted a mock session of the secession convention, revoking Georgia’s ordinance of secession while throwing valuable government papers and books into the mud outside. Soldiers also destroyed the arsenal and railroad depot and poured molasses into the pipes of the Episcopal Church’s organ. It was reported that overseer Patrick Kane was killed when trying to defend his employer’s plantation nearby. Maj. Henry Hitchcock, on the general’s staff, later wrote, “[The] people of the town say [the] Yankees treated them much better than expected. Better than some of them deserved, say I.”13 While Milledgeville did not suffer the fate of Griswoldville, the continued cold weather meant there was not an outbuilding left standing: Union soldiers burned any wood dry enough to provide warmth in the bitter conditions. Once Sherman moved on and residents could access the damage, they realized their isolation. The bridge over the Oconee River had been destroyed; the Central of Georgia Railroad depot was gone and the tracks torn up; and communication with the outside world was difficult. Wagons, carriages, and animals to pull them proved scarce. Milledgeville had always suffered from its isolated location, and it had a hard time recovering from Sherman’s visit. In 1868, state legislators decided to relocate the capital to Atlanta, citing better rail accessibility and the city’s postwar population boom. But to Milledgeville residents, Sherman had a hand in the town losing its status as the state capital. The aftereffects of the army’s passage could be seen everywhere. When Brown returned to the governor’s mansion he found all his furnishings had disappeared. This was not the work of Union soldiers but the plundering of local residents who took advantage of the situation. Eliza Andrews, who crossed the region east of the Oconee River after the army had moved on, wrote that about three miles from Sparta nothing remained but isolated houses: “The fields were trampled down and the road was lined with carcasses of horses, hogs, and cattle. . . . The stench in some places was unbearable.” It was estimated Sherman’s men killed or abandoned more than 3,000 horses and over 1,600 mules during the march, but they confiscated nearly 3,500 horses and almost 5,000 mules to replaces those losses. With dead animals littering the countryside as a grim reminder of Sherman’s visit, residents all along the route recorded their anger in letters and diaries. A woman in Newton County wrote that the departure of Sherman’s army had left her “poorer by thirty thousand dollars . . . [a]‌nd a much stronger rebel.” Entering private homes and destroying or taking people’s possessions was a way to remind Southerners that they no longer had control of their

Sherman’s March to the Sea    543 private spaces, one of the personal goals that Sherman had made for his march across Georgia.14 Women, rich and poor, white and Black, felt the effect of having so many soldiers pass by their homes. While Sherman claimed in his memoirs that he “never heard of any cases of murder or rape,” there were times where his soldiers crossed the line. In an incident near Midway, a small community outside the capital, reports circulated that Kate Latimer Nichols had been brutally assaulted, apparently a euphemism for having been raped. Certainly rapes occurred, but often unsubstantiated rumors of atrocities against women increased as the blue columns progressed southeast, meaning that Confederate cavalry responded with even more violence against captured Federal soldiers.15 It is clear that Black women fared worse because of the widespread belief they did not follow the same moral code as whites. Civilians claimed that soldiers raped female servants and did not hesitate to take provisions from free Blacks. Mary Ross Bellamy, a free woman of color who lived near Milledgeville, complained that although she was pro-​Union, soldiers emptied her barns and fields and took her horse and hogs. The men also appropriated her blankets and quilts and cooking utensils. One scholar notes, “Both slaveholding Southerners and Union soldiers believed African American women occupied a separate place in society from their white counterparts, . . . [and] the rape and attempted rape of slave women frequently occurred during Sherman’s March.”16 From Milledgeville, Sherman’s path moved into southeast Georgia. There was a noticeable change in the terrain as his men left behind the fertile fields of central Georgia and entered the coastal plain. The land turned sandier as the red Georgia clay mixed with an ancient seabed. Cypress swamps, their waters covered with algae, appeared along the roadways, and soldiers even spotted an occasional alligator and numerous snakes. Although the two wings passed through many small towns between the state capital and Savannah, there was relatively little destruction and few casualties. At Sandersville soldiers burned the courthouse and jail. At Tennille they destroyed the railroad depot and wrecked the water tanks. As they passed through Louisville, Georgia’s previous state capital, soldiers set fire to the jail and courthouse. No town escaped some kind of minor destruction, generally to public buildings, but that was enough for civilians to fear that they might lose their homes to the invaders. The march clearly affected Southerners psychologically as well as geographically.17 The Confederate cavalry’s response was sporadic and ineffective. Joe Wheeler claimed he never had more than 3,500 horsemen and seldom more than 2,000 under his immediate command at any one time. While there were numerous skirmishes with Union troopers, only a few engagements merited much notice. Violence against white Union soldiers everywhere escalated after mid-​1864, and this was certainly seen in Georgia, where Confederate cavalry retaliated with enraged brutality for the widespread foraging and pillaging of Sherman’s bummers. According to one historian, Shannon’s Scouts, a detachment from the 8th Texas Cavalry, “operated as an officially sanctioned execution squad.” Whether or not they were actually “official” is unclear, but it is true that the Scouts killed many more men than their own number of forty-​five. Some authorities estimate the number executed at 150 or more captives. But what little protection the

544   Anne J. Bailey Rebel cavalry provided ended when Wheeler moved his horsemen into South Carolina, leaving civilians in southeast Georgia to face the onslaught of the Union infantry as best they could.18 Confederate cavalry typically fought enemy horsemen but could do little to stop the Union infantry from steadily progressing southeast. With little resistance facing the foot soldiers, save for an occasional skirmish with militia or locals, the left wing set its site on Millen, a small town on the railroad between Augusta and Savannah. It was near Millen in Jenkins County that in September Confederate authorities had hastily constructed a prison camp to help alleviate the overcrowding at Andersonville. Named for Confederate Quartermaster General, Brig. Gen. Alexander R. Lawton, who made his home in Savannah, the prison was situated on forty-​two acres a few miles outside the town. Camp Lawton had a spring-​fed stream running through a compound designed to hold forty thousand inmates. When Hood asked for Andersonville to be emptied, around ten thousand prisoners eventually ended up at Camp Lawton. Freezing temperatures, cold rain, and snow resulted in the death of many incarcerated in this lonely location. On November 11, an inmate had written, “ice formed on the edges of the brook and many of the prisoners had to walk about camp all night to keep from freezing.” Six days later he added, “Cold weather and snow. Three of our men were frozen to death last night in the stockade!” The unusually frigid weather was compounded by insufficient rations, inadequate housing, and poor medical treatment.19 Confederate authorities ordered the camp emptied when it became clear Sherman was headed toward the Atlantic coast, and the guards loaded prisoners onto railroad flatcars for transfer to other locations. Weak and debilitated inmates suffered intensely on the removal to Savannah. Sent to temporary locations such as Blackshear and Thomasville in southern Georgia or into South Carolina, many of the prisoners ended up back at Andersonville after Sherman left the state. Just days after Confederate authorities emptied the camp, Sherman’s soldiers arrived, reaching Millen early in December. Vacant buildings greeted the liberators, who soon found the graves of hundreds of men. More than seven hundred inmates had died there; for a prison in operation for barely six weeks, this is a telling indictment. One Federal soldier described what he saw as a “hideous prison-​pen.” Even photographer George Barnard, who did not record the gruesome images, decided the punishment meted out to Southerners was no more than they deserved. Henry Hitchcock recorded in his diary, “If B[arnard] feels so from seeing the prison pen, how do those feel who have suffered in it!” Sherman’s angry soldiers set fire to Millen’s train depot and watched gleefully as the flames spread to other buildings.20 While Northerners generally applauded the destruction across Georgia, the same could not be said of an incident at Ebenezer Creek involving the slaves trailing in the wake of the army. Although Sherman left Atlanta with fewer than two hundred escaped slaves, the number had steadily increased to an estimated ten thousand by the time he reached southeast Georgia. Many Northern soldiers sympathized with the plight of the refugees, but they also found the men, women, and children proved an added burden and were a drain on the resources needed to sustain the army. The commander of the

Sherman’s March to the Sea    545 Fourteenth Corps, Jefferson C. Davis, was outspoken in his objections to the additional mouths to feed. The problem of camp followers reached a critical point near the Georgia–​South Carolina border at Ebenezer Creek in Effingham County. The creek, a tributary of the Savannah River some twenty miles north of the city, was in a dense swamp and travel was difficult. Near Springfield, just a few miles away, more than a hundred wagons bogged down on a swampy road. Frustrated soldiers tried to keep moving through the unfriendly landscape. On December 9, after Davis’s soldiers finally crossed Ebenezer Creek on a hastily constructed bridge, the structure was quickly disassembled. As the hundreds of contraband saw their protectors leave them behind, many plunged into the deep creek in an attempt to reach the disappearing columns, a number of them drowning in the murky water. Davis, who was not popular with some of his own officers, was widely criticized, and the story eventually broke in the Northern press. When Edwin Stanton later met with Sherman in Savannah, the secretary of war asked for a clarification of this episode. Sherman wrote in his memoirs that he had Davis personally explain his decision to Stanton, which apparently satisfied the secretary, and the matter was dropped. While Davis crossed Ebenezer Creek, Sherman neared the Georgia coast south of Savannah with the right wing. Rice fields began to appear among the trees, and foragers found less and less for the soldiers to eat; they did not consider rice worth the effort of harvesting. As food and forage dwindled daily Sherman realized he needed to locate the Union Navy and the supplies shipped from the North. Only Fort McAllister, located twelve miles below Savannah and only a few miles from the sea, stood in his path. McAllister, on the Ogeechee River, was a heavily armed earthen fortification that had survived several naval attacks with little damage. Unfortunately for the Confederates, the heavy guns faced the water, not inland, and would be useless in an assault by Sherman’s infantry. Still, Maj. George W. Anderson, who commanded around two hundred defenders, hoped to hold off the invaders. Sherman had to take the fort to reach the navy. He selected Brig. Gen. William B.  Hazen’s division for the task. As they prepared for the attack on December 13, Sherman watched from the roof of a shed at a nearby rice mill. The actual fighting lasted less than twenty minutes before the fort surrendered, and Sherman later told his wife that watching his old division capture McAllister was the “handsomest thing” he had seen in the war. Many of the men taken prisoner were put to work removing land mines the Confederates had carefully hidden in the sand. Sherman had already criticized Rebel commanders for planting shells in the ground with “friction matches,” causing them to explode on contact. “This was not war, but murder,” he complained, “and it made me very angry.” Still, he could write Secretary Stanton following the successful attack, “[The] army is in splendid order, and equal to anything. . . . I regard Savannah as already gained.”21 The Confederates in Georgia had not been idle while Sherman crossed the state. Davis had assigned the well-​respected veteran Lt. Gen. William J. Hardee, a Georgian, to command the Department of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. He also placed

546   Anne J. Bailey Gen. P. G. T. Beauregard in command of the Military Division of the West, a huge geographical expanse that included all the major armies in the western theater. To protect Georgia’s two largest cities, Hardee headed for Savannah while Gen. Braxton Bragg was sent to Augusta. When Hardee arrived at the river port he succeeded in gathering around nine thousand men. These he placed under Maj. Gen. Ambrose R. Wright, Maj. Gen. Gustavus W. Smith, and Maj. Gen. Lafayette McLaws. Hardee, who thought Sherman would head for Augusta, finally had to admit Savannah was Sherman’s objective, and, as Union soldiers neared the city, he recognized the magnitude of the threat. As a delaying tactic, he ordered the rice fields outside Savannah flooded with three to six feet of water and ordered the destruction of the Savannah & Charleston Railroad bridge. With the railroad trestle gone, Beauregard instructed Hardee to assemble a pontoon bridge in the downtown area in case it proved necessary to evacuate the army. The hastily constructed bridge was made up of rice flats connecting the wharf to the islands in the river and on to the South Carolina shore. Beauregard told Hardee if he had to make a choice between saving his army or defending the city, he should sacrifice the latter. When it was impossible to stop the inevitable, Hardee realized he had no option but to abandon Savannah. The makeshift bridge was covered with straw to muffle the sound of carriages and wagons carrying refugees and the multitude of soldiers crossing into South Carolina, and by December 21 the city was empty of Confederate soldiers. Mayor Richard Arnold quickly surrendered Savannah to Brig. Gen. John W. Geary in the hope his city would be spared. When Sherman heard the news he promptly telegraphed Lincoln, offering Savannah and its twenty-​five thousand bales of cotton to the president as a Christmas present.22 Even before Sherman reached the coast he was aware of the spreading discontent among Georgians of all social classes. From the very beginning of the war there had been Georgians who did not support the Confederacy, from the Unionists in the north Georgia mountains to ambivalent planters in the south who ignored the government’s export policy and smuggled cotton out of the state. It was a situation made to order for speculators and profiteers. Clearly the war hit the plain folk the hardest, and food riots erupted in Savannah, Augusta, Macon, Columbus, Atlanta, and even small towns. Internal dissent, part of it based on class, was tearing the state apart. A newspaper in the state capital had reported in late 1863, “We are fighting each other harder than we ever fought the enemy.” Historian David Williams has challenged the myth of wartime Southern unity and estimated that by 1864 as many as 60 percent of Georgia soldiers had deserted. Poor families suffered the most, while wealthy Georgians enjoyed a lifestyle hardly touched by the war. Sherman’s easy trek across the state proved to many people that the Confederacy had failed to protect its citizens, rich or poor.23 Sherman’s capture of Savannah, along with Hood’s defeat in Tennessee, proved a double blow to Southern morale, and Sherman was not shy in claiming his role in the victories. After the successful Tennessee and Georgia campaigns he wrote his wife that the decision to divide the army, “with one part to take Savannah and the other to meet Hood in Tennessee are all clearly mine, and will survive us both in History.” As with much of Sherman’s boasting, Maj. Gen. George Thomas’s victory at Nashville was not as

Sherman’s March to the Sea    547 easy as Sherman suggested. Both Lincoln and Grant had fretted over Thomas’s delay in dealing with Hood, and it was partially the arrival of reinforcements that pushed the bar in favor of the Union.24 Once in Savannah, Sherman had to demonstrate he was sympathetic to the newly freed slaves. It was widely known he objected to including Black soldiers in his army, and the episode at Ebenezer Creek had seemed callous and unnecessarily cruel. Before he headed into South Carolina he would have a personal visit from Secretary Stanton, whose official reason for the trip was to reestablish Union control of the port and investigate the cotton trade. But Stanton also wanted to discuss other matters, including ideas for the redistribution of land along the coast. He talked with leading Black ministers, who assured the secretary that Sherman had been honorable in his dealings with the former slaves. To show his commitment to the free men and women filling Savannah, Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15 on January 15, 1865, giving land along the Georgia coast to freed slaves. Special Field Order No. 15 was a sweeping document. The Union confiscated a strip of coastline thirty miles deep from the St. John’s River in Florida to Charleston, South Carolina. The intention was to distribute the roughly four thousand acres to freedmen in forty-​acre segments. In practice, around forty thousand Blacks were settled on the Sea Islands, those isles along the Georgia coastline. This solution was short-​lived, however, for following Lincoln’s assassination President Andrew Johnson issued an amnesty proclamation to ordinary Southerners who swore an oath of loyalty to the United States. Along with the promise of political immunity came the restoration of confiscated lands, negating much of what Sherman had done for the freedmen in Georgia. South Carolina was to be Sherman’s second leg of his campaign to bring the war home to civilians. After spending several weeks in Savannah, he marched his army north in February. For the next several weeks Sherman brought the war to the men, women, and children of the state he felt responsible for starting the conflict. This campaign of destruction, much worse than what occurred in Georgia, ended when he arrived at the North Carolina border, for he believed the Tar Heel State did not harbor the radicals of its sister state to the south. The March to the Sea continues to be one of the most controversial events in Civil War history. For many Southerners Sherman remains the personification of evil, while to many Northerners he was an avenging angel. Sherman’s own words encouraged the Southern version of history. Letters and telegrams filled with language expressing his desire to punish Southerners are plentiful. What Sherman did was not much different from the destruction seen elsewhere in the South, but no other general wrote so harshly about his intentions or about civilians. He wanted to bring the war home to real people, and he fought bureaucracy to march across the South to join Grant in Virginia. Historian Earl Hess has concluded that by marching through Georgia and the Carolinas rather than transporting his troops by railroad to Petersburg it is possible Sherman delayed the end of the war by weeks. The Union Army’s trail from Atlanta to Savannah has always overshadowed Sherman’s path through the Carolinas, although the devastation in South Carolina

548   Anne J. Bailey was much worse and the burning of Columbia remains one of the most controversial events of the war. Fascination with Sherman in Georgia started in the North in 1865 with the popular song “Marching through Georgia” and gripped the nation when Margaret Mitchell’s widely read novel Gone with the Wind appeared in 1936. The movie that followed solidified the campaign as an event known worldwide and assured its place in Civil War memory. One scholar suggests the march is the “most symbolically powerful aspect of the American Civil War, one that has a cultural dominance perhaps disproportionate to its actual strategic importance.” Moreover, the folklore surrounding Sherman in Georgia has continued well into the twenty-​first century. While Northerners and Southerners do not agree on the actual events, they do agree on one point: Sherman’s March to the Sea proved the home front could not be separated from the battlefront.25

Notes 1. U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, 128 vols (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1880–​1901), vol. 39, pt. 2: 412; vol. 39, pt. 3: 660 (hereafter cited as OR). All references are to series 1. 2. OR, vol. 39, pt. 2: 418. 3. Robert Knox Sneden, Eye of the Storm: A Civil War Odyssey, ed. Charles F. Bryan Jr. and Nelson D. Lankford (New York: Free Press, 2000), 255. 4. OR, vol. 39, pt. 2: 412; Lisa Tendrich Frank, The Civilian War: Confederate Women and Union Soldiers during Sherman’s March (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015), 4, 49. 5. OR, vol. 39, pt. 3: 162; vol. 44: 799. 6. OR, vol. 39, pt. 2: 396, 488. 7. OR, vol. 39, pt. 3: 222. 8. OR, vol. 44: 14; William T. Sherman, Memoirs of William T. Sherman (reprint, New York: DeCapo Press, 1984), pt. 2, 175. 9. OR, vol. 39, pt. 1: 583; vol. 39, pt. 3: 378. 10. Joseph T. Glatthaar, The March to the Sea and Beyond: Sherman’s Troops in the Savannah and Carolinas Campaigns (New York: New York University Press, 1985), 139; Sherman, Memoirs, pt. 2, 179. 11. Sherman, Memoirs, pt. 2, 185. 12. Sherman, Memoirs, pt. 2, 187. 13. Henry Hitchcock, Marching with Sherman, ed. M. A. DeWolfe Howe (reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 94. 14. Eliza Frances Andrews, The War-​Time Journal of a Georgia Girl, 1864–​1865 (reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 32; Christine Jacobson Carter, ed., The Diary of Dolly Lunt Burge, 1848–​1879 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), 163; Megan Kate Nelson, Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012), 75. 15. Sherman, Memoirs, pt. 2, 183.

Sherman’s March to the Sea    549 16. Adele Logan Alexander, Ambiguous Lives: Free Women of Color in Rural Georgia, 1789–​ 1879 (Fayetteville:  University of Arkansas Press, 1991), 137; Frank, The Civilian War, 110–​111. 17. Jacqueline Glass Campbell, When Sherman Marched North from the Sea: Resistance on the Confederate Home Front (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 4. 18. George S. Burkhardt, Confederate Rage, Yankee Wrath:  No Quarter in the Civil War (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2007), 222, 225. 19. Sneden, Eye of the Storm, 264, 271. 20. George Ward Nichols, The Story of the Great March (reprint, Williamstown, MA: Corner House, 1972), 84; Hitchcock, Marching with Sherman, 150. The remains of the soldiers were later reburied in the Beaufort National Cemetery in South Carolina. 21. Brooks D. Simpson and Jean V. Berlin, eds., Sherman’s Civil War: Selected Correspondence of William T. Sherman, 1860–​1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 767; Sherman, Memoirs, pt. 2, 194; OR, vol. 44: 701–​702. 22. OR, vol. 44: 783. 23. Confederate Union (Milledgeville, GA), November 24, 1863, quoted in David Williams, Teresa Crisp Williams, and David Carlson, Plain Folk in a Rich Man’s War:  Class and Dissent in Confederate Georgia (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002), 5. 24. Simpson and Berlin, Sherman’s Civil War, 792. 25. Anne Sarah Rubin, Through the Heart of Dixie: Sherman’s March and American Memory (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 1.

Bibliography Bailey, Anne J. The Chessboard of War: Sherman and Hood in the Autumn Campaigns of 1864. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000. Bailey, Anne J. War and Ruin: William T. Sherman and the Savannah Campaign. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2003. Burkhardt, George S. Confederate Rage, Yankee Wrath:  No Quarter in the Civil War. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2007. Caudill, Edward, and Paul Ashdown. Sherman’s March in Myth and Memory. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008. Davis, Burke. Sherman’s March. New York: Random House, 1980. Frank, Lisa Tendrich. The Civilian War:  Confederate Women and Union Soldiers during Sherman’s March. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015. Glatthaar, Joseph T. The March to the Sea and Beyond: Sherman’s Troops in the Savannah and Carolinas Campaigns. New York: New York University Press, 1985. Jones, Jacqueline. Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War. New York: Knopf, 2008. Kennett, Lee B. Marching through Georgia: The Story of Soldiers and Civilians during Sherman’s Campaign. New York: HarperCollins, 1995. Marszalek, John F. Sherman’s March to the Sea. Abilene, TX:  McWhiney Foundation Press, 2005. Marvel, William. Andersonville:  The Last Depot. Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 1994. Nelson, Megan Kate. Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012.

550   Anne J. Bailey Rubin, Anne Sarah. Through the Heart of Dixie:  Sherman’s March and American Memory. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. Trudeau, Noah Andre. Southern Storm: Sherman’s March to the Sea. New York: HarperCollins, 2008. Williams, David, Teresa Crisp Williams, and David Carlson. Plain Folk in a Rich Man’s War: Class and Dissent in Confederate Georgia. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002.

Chapter 34

Spring Hill, Fra nk l i n, and Nash v i l l e Insurgency and Emancipation Benjamin Franklin Cooling

The American author and satirist Ambrose Bierce wrote simply about the climactic events after the battles of Spring Hill and Franklin, Tennessee, in the decisive 1864 campaign for the Upper Heartland. A  participant on the Union side, he recorded that the enemy followed Union forces to Nashville and “fortified himself within rifle-​ reach,” where he stayed “for two weeks without firing a gun and was then destroyed.”1 President Abraham Lincoln’s conclusion that destruction of the Army of Tennessee, the Confederacy’s second principal field army, meant “its usefulness is over,” likewise understated a more portentous result.2 We can draw a line between this 1864 Confederate military disaster and subsequent Heartland stabilization, liberation, and emancipation as well as restoration and memory. Confederate failure snuffed out hope among rebellious citizenry and those in the ranks; satisfied their Union counterparts that the bloody job was about done; reinspired slaves, free Blacks, and Unionists in Tennessee and Kentucky; and completed the conquest begun two years before at Forts Henry and Donelson. Union battlefield success enabled further Union subjugation across the Deep South but also introduced postconflict chaos, occupation, and Reconstruction. It also extended the destruction, privation, social revolution, and guerrilla-​bandit depredation that already wracked the Upper South. Whether considered the “Confederacy’s Last Hurrah” or the Union’s most complete battlefield masterpiece, the sequence of events at Spring Hill, Franklin, and Nashville taken together sealed victory for the Union by the sword, not the olive branch. The campaign unfolded between September 18 and December 1864 and centered on a dramatic conflict between Confederate Gen. John B. Hood and his opponent, one-​ time West Point instructor Maj. Gen. George H.  Thomas. The campaigns featured subordinates like the ambitious Maj. Gen. John M. Schofield and youthful rising cavalry star Brig. Gen. James H. Wilson on the Union side; colorful hard-​drinking and

552   Benjamin Franklin Cooling -​fighting Maj. Gen. Benjamin Franklin Cheatham, dutiful ill-​starred Maj. Gen. Patrick Cleburne, and rough-​hewn regional hero Maj. Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest on the other. Truly, the campaign has always been identified with Hood and labeled such. It was his Iliad, his Odyssey to win or lose. Still, both sides had intended implementing grand designs at the beginning of 1864. But whether restoration of the Union, establishment of a new slave republic, unanticipated blood-​letting (climactic battle), or unintended result (emancipation/​liberation, lawless disruption, occupation and suppression), the final Tennessee Campaign flowed from modifications to those grand designs. In fact, it dated to the very beginning of the war and linked with Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s initial campaign that opened the Heartland via western rivers. The Confederacy always chased redemption for early losses, the subsequent death at Shiloh of their reputedly best general, Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston, and the lure of the western frontier on the Ohio River. As the Southern dream successively receded, losing Kentucky, then Tennessee, most of Mississippi, and so on, some redeeming counteroffensive still rattled around in Richmond and at army headquarters even as three years of conflict coursed in the opposite direction. Just as assuredly, that same period produced the Union’s methodical if fretful suppression of insurrection and restoration of the nation by conquest and subjugation accompanied by humanitarian liberation of de facto military emancipation. Then Atlanta’s capture on September 2, 1864, altered the grand design. Until that point, nothing conclusive had been achieved. The Confederacy still survived, and the population of the Upper South (occupied or not) confronted economic and social deprivation and neighborhood strife, continuous cavalry raids, and the unrequited desire to reverse war’s fortunes. By autumn, a bloodied and dismayed Union faced an election year with only promises of lengthening casualty lists, an increasingly unpopular president, and wartime measures such as conscription and suppression of civil liberties—​seemingly a choice only between relentless and unremitting war or a negotiated peace. Fortunes depended on military result. Victory or defeat still hung in the balance even after Atlanta’s fall on September 2. Politicians such as Tennessee’s military governor Andrew Johnson (now preoccupied as Lincoln’s running mate for a second-​term presidency) and loyal yet oppositionist Kentucky elected executive Thomas H. Bramlette, plus the legion of Union rear echelon uniformed defenders stretching through the two states, seemed powerless to ensure stability and tranquility. Any dislocation from rumored invasion by Hood or raiders like Forrest, Maj. Gen. Joseph Wheeler, Brig. Gen. John Hunt Morgan, or any other Rebel redeemer (even homegrown partisan vigilantes) to the region disrupted Union control. Hood’s campaign of 1864 played against this backdrop. Fighting for time drove men and events that election autumn and beyond. Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman’s army captured Atlanta, but with the enemy army intact, what to do next? The same question obtained for Hood, but in reverse. War aims changed because of Atlanta. The choice of whether to move north to the Ohio or south to the Gulf or Atlantic coast temporarily concerned the two generals and their superiors. Then a prism of light broke through Confederate gloom. Sherman’s railroad supply line offered an inviting target. Freed from defending Atlanta, Hood could perhaps force

Spring Hill, Franklin, and Nashville    553 Sherman to give up the city and retreat back to Chattanooga or at least give battle in the open. In the background lay the scheme of grand advance back to the Volunteer State, on to Kentucky, while recruiting and re-​victualing along the way. A new twist emerged. With the Confederacy’s eastern army under Gen. Robert E. Lee now besieged before Richmond-​Petersburg, and its logistics base in the Shenandoah Valley threatened by Grant, as an army group commander Hood could not linger reestablishing Confederate control in the Bluegrass. He should move on to relieve Lee east of the Appalachians as quickly as possible. Forlorn hope or distinct possibility, unrestrained Rebel forces might still affect the November reelection of Lincoln. A rollback of three years of conflict rode with Southern arms as gum leaves turned red in the river bottoms. Hood moved his perhaps thirty-​nine-​thousand-​man army northwest from Lovejoy’s Station to Palmetto Station, twenty-​five miles southwest of Atlanta. A  visiting, fact-​ finding President Jefferson Davis hinted that Hood’s command of the Army of Tennessee could be in danger due to heavy losses surrounding Atlanta’s loss, but that the general should proceed with destroying Sherman’s supply line and, depending upon Union response, advance the scheme of going north. Hood left Palmetto Station in late September and moved northeast to circumvent Atlanta. Sherman dutifully played Hood’s game, to a point. Union railroad garrisons held at Altoona (October 5) and Resaca a week later despite an ignominious surrender of the 44th U.S. Colored Troops (USCT) at Dalton. Sherman refused to withdraw from Atlanta to confront Hood but sent Thomas and Schofield back to Tennessee to act as observers while building a new army from rear-​echelon and reinforcements from other sectors. Sherman promised that, if Hood went to the Ohio River, “I will give him rations; my business is down South.”3 Utilizing his sixty-​thousand-​man army as a raiding force to strike terror and economic warfare against hearts, minds, and infrastructure from Atlanta to the sea held more gain than risk. Gaining the coast, Sherman’s men could be supplied by naval power much as they had used the advantage of the western rivers earlier. To Sherman, the Upper South was now a sideshow. War had taken on new tones. The Union now relied where possible on joint army-​ navy superiority for operations and logistics. Moreover, inland raiding by large troop concentrations (whether whole armies or significant mounted forces) afforded relief from dependence on a formal supply line (rail or road) while living off the country and its hitherto immune populace, destroying war-​making facilities, and dismantling an unrepentant slaveholding society. Countering this Union “way of war” tested the shrinking Confederacy’s resourcefulness. Some alternative, if not army raiding, then at least counteroffensive, in return might draw the opponent back to a stand-​up killing ground or effect some political standoff. Ultimately, both generals turned in opposite directions, accepting risk, intending to accomplish something ostensibly untrammeled by any significant opposition. This approach depended on swiftness of execution, defiance of distance, logistical hurdles, and enemy response. The lateness of the campaigning season loomed for the Confederates, at least. Of course, neither Sherman nor Hood was a fool. As theater commander, Sherman could direct trusted subordinates like Thomas to tap Nashville garrison contingents

554   Benjamin Franklin Cooling of supply troops and African American trainees (plus scattered occupation and guard troops around his department) with Maj. Gen. David Stanley’s Fourth Corps, John Schofield’s Twenty-​third Corps, and James Wilson’s cavalry. Maj. Gen. Andrew J. Smith, who commanded the right wing of the Sixteenth Corps and was coming from Missouri, could also add heft. Thomas might count on upward of sixty thousand defenders—​if he could concentrate them in time. And there was always the river gunboat navy normally involved with patrolling, policing illicit trade (commodities, medicines, munitions, cotton prohibited by Federal regulations), and interdicting Confederate partisan and raider activities to add more capability. Yet, at first, Federal land and naval opposition did not stymie Hood’s moves. On the line of the Tennessee River in north Alabama, Hood encountered rainy weather and high water, stubborn Union defenders, supply delays, and a confusing organizational arrangement. Thanks to President Davis’s inspection, Richmond introduced a new theater commander, Gen. P. G. T. Beauregard, at this point, to coordinate Hood and adjacent department chief Lt. Gen. Richard Taylor. Beauregard’s presence rankled Hood and added to the already wobbly effort to concentrate resources from the marginally helpful Taylor, a depleted farming region, disrupted communications, and ill-​suited railroad connections for easily shifting men and material conducive to Hood’s changing search for a suitable river crossing. The Union elections had come and gone, Lincoln reelected on a platform that promised unrelenting war by the time either Sherman or Hood started on their treks. Sherman left Atlanta on November 15; Hood departed north Alabama nearly two weeks later. It took until October 21 to even sort out arrangements for Beauregard to accede to Hood’s departure. He was less than sanguine about the logistical challenges of the planned counteroffensive. Then too, Hood’s lack of cavalry for screening, reconnaissance, and combined arms (infantry, cavalry, artillery) operations added difficulty. The addition of famed Nathan Bedford Forrest’s field force from Taylor’s Alabama-​Mississippi department went to a west Tennessee raid that garnered spectacular but largely irrelevant destruction of Johnsonville, Tennessee’s Union supply base. Sherman was beyond relying on the Upper Heartland depots for logistics. Forrest may have been a superb independent operator who inspired his ranks and Tennessee citizenry with his defiance of Union occupation, but he chafed under attachment to other people’s command. Together with more heavy rainfall delays, Forrest could not report to Hood until mid-​ November. Thus, for one reason or another, Hood lost three weeks to a month of good campaign season. Thomas ably used the time for his own buildup in middle Tennessee. November introduced Thomas’s opportunity to win or lose the war in the west. With Hood advancing by three parallel routes from Florence, Alabama, to Columbia, Tennessee, Thomas moved Schofield’s corps of observation beyond Columbia to Pulaski, shielding the Tennessee-​Alabama railroad link and presumed axis for Confederate advance northward. Wilson’s reorganized but outnumbered cavalry backpedaled before Forrest’s advance guard while screening Schofield’s flank to avoid being cut off at Columbia. The foot race between Hood and Schofield had begun; it would not end until Hood and Thomas locked horns at Nashville in December. Hood drove his

Spring Hill, Franklin, and Nashville    555 army relentlessly through sleet, snow, and rain over abysmal roads and decreed that his men would not stop to forage the countryside for provisions from a destitute populace. Flashpoints with Schofield no doubt inspired Tennesseans in Hood’s ranks and long-​suffering civilians anticipating liberation of their homes and families from hated Yankee occupation. Their Union counterparts had already joined friendlier sanctuary in Nashville and other garrisoned towns. The drama escalated north of Columbia at the end of November. Hood reunited his marching columns at Mount Pleasant and then confronted Schofield’s entrenched Federals on the Duck River at Columbia on November 29. Skirmishing heavily, Hood detached Forrest and two of the infantry corps to cross east of town to pry Schofield from his defenses. Meanwhile, Thomas directed Schofield to rapidly march north to Franklin, the next major defensive location on the Harpeth River. Thomas anticipated the imminent arrival of Smith’s reinforcements from Missouri, so the race tightened. But Schofield’s escape was crucial. He sent his six-​hundred-​ wagon supply train under heavy guard via the Columbia-​Franklin turnpike and prepared a night withdrawal, unaware that at that very moment, Hood and the corps led by Cheatham and Lt. Gen. A. P. Stewart plus an additional division were poised to deliver what should have been the most climactic action of the war. Instead, the fields and streamlets around tiny Spring Hill on the Columbia turnpike north to Franklin became the controversial scene of Confederate mismanagement and Yankee good fortune. The night of November 29–​30 proved pivotal. It became a matter of miscommunication of

Map 34.1  Hood in Tennessee

556   Benjamin Franklin Cooling commander’s intent, phlegmatic execution, perhaps fatigue and inattention on Hood’s part, possibly confusion as to locale, and plain neglect. Schofield’s Federals ran the gauntlet of a bivouacked foe scant yards from conclusive ambush. Forrest had shoved Wilson northeastward and out of the immediate action. But the appearance of Stanley’s Union infantry with the wagons prevented the raiders’ lodgment at Spring Hill. He then failed to move further north to another interdiction point at Thompson’s Station. Cheatham’s appearance between Columbia and the crossroads only prompted battle in the lowering shadows of an autumn sunset. Reports of Schofield’s main marching column eluded all levels of command. The Confederate Army paid dearly the next afternoon when it found Schofield and his consolidated and fortified army standing resolutely in a semicircle awaiting them on the south bank of a flood-​driven Harpeth River at Franklin. Perhaps the principal victim was a mortified Hood, outsmarted by his opponent and taken to blaming others. For whatever reason, Hood determined on a direct frontal assault on Schofield, rivaling Maj. Gen. George Edward Pickett’s infamous charge at Gettysburg with just as dire result. Spring Hill and Franklin would link history and memory as the Army of Tennessee swept forward, banners waving in glorious array, unsupported by artillery but ever confident of success that would not be. Hood still sought to crush Schofield short of Nashville’s protective lines. Time was short as he viewed Schofield once more escaping. Again, it was classic Napoleonic battle initiated in the late afternoon due to mustering and organizing approximately twenty thousand attackers. Initially the crush drove straight up the Columbia turnpike, breaching an unsupported brigade in front of the main defense line and then the line itself. Bitter hand-​to-​hand fighting enveloped the famous house and cotton gin of John Carter as thrust and counterthrust enveloped the two armies. Heavy losses attended both sides. Repeated Confederate attacks (sometimes desultory or uncoordinated) failed to dislodge the Federals, and at 7:00 p.m., Hood called a halt. Forrest attempted another flank movement across the river to the east, only to be buffeted by Wilson as darkness once more descended on the dead, the dying, and the cheerless living. Hood intended another assault in the morning as his artillery and infantry reinforcements arrived from Columbia. But Schofield once more extricated his army and its supply trains unscathed, reaching Nashville’s breastworks by noon the next day. At Franklin, dawn’s early light disclosed a disheartening scene of carnage that would forever be etched on Southern hearts. Over seven thousand Confederate casualties (added to perhaps five hundred from the Spring Hill engagement) lay strewn over the field. Possibly twenty thousand lesser hurt would eventually make their way back to the ranks. Not so the flower of the Army of Tennessee—​fourteen generals (six killed or mortally wounded, including the redoubtable Cleburne) and fifty-​five regimental commanders—​the cream of experienced leadership for consummating the Grand Design. Southern invincibility had been sorely tested. “Diehard” soldiery still trusted in God’s favor and their band of brothers. But melancholy joined optimism as participant Samuel King Vann observed, “We had another big battle in which we whipped the enemy, tho with a grate slaughter on our side.”4

Spring Hill, Franklin, and Nashville    557 Would Hood advance or retreat? Schofield escaped with perhaps 2,600 casualties from the one-​sided fight. Hood dutifully followed him to Nashville. In truth, could he have done otherwise? By military tradition and honor, the Southern host retained the battlefield—​hence victory. To retreat invited wholesale desertion from his army. Relinquishing the initiative admitted defeat and had a negative impact on morale and those remaining secessionists awaiting redemption. Of course, did Hood even think he had lost the campaign? In his mind, despite Schofield’s escape, Thomas remained understrength and disorganized at Nashville. While Union losses had been less than half those of Hood, Schofield’s hasty evacuation left Union dead and wounded among their Confederate brothers-​in-​arms clogging ersatz hospitals staffed by Confederate surgeons and good Samaritans from the battle-​scarred town. Major battle, unlike occupation skirmishing and counterguerrilla operations, left a more serious residue of shattered cotton fields and orchards, polluted wells, body parts, carcasses, and the military’s flotsam and debris of broken baggage wagons as well as unexploded munitions. Franklin now joined other communities across the Upper South feeling the powerful touch of war. A war-​torn countryside stretched south to north Alabama and Mississippi wherever armies had passed and clashed. Yet news of Franklin’s losses staggered even the most optimistic Confederate patriot. “Can any victory pay for so much death?” asked a South Carolina lawyer.5 Hood’s invasion forced evacuation, destruction, and disruption of the freed people in southern middle Tennessee. Some scattered into the countryside but “some 1,500 fell in with [Schofield’s] army on its retreat to Nashville; hundreds ‘joined the band’ as they marched along until there must have been 2000 on reaching this place,” reported Lt. James B. Nesbitt, an accompanying camp superintendent.6 Many sick and children were part of this exodus, moving on excess animals and supply wagons provided by Union quartermasters. Nashville officers soon dragooned able males as laborers for the city’s fortifications. Hood’s army needed refurbishment, especially shoes and food. Hood set up headquarters at local denizen John Overton’s comfortable Traveler’s Rest plantation south of Nashville upon his arrival on December 2. However, his men suffered to dig out sleeping holes in the freezing ground and bitter wind of early December. Meanwhile, their army commander scarcely admitted setback to superiors and sought reinforcement from all corners of the beleaguered Confederacy. None came, either from Beauregard or Taylor, or from Lee. Time, distance, plus dearth of such resources surfaced with a vengeance. Hood sent Forrest and Maj. Gen. William Bate’s infantry division from the main army to capture a Union garrison and supply stronghold at nearby Murfreesboro. Perhaps he thought the mighty fortified Federal supply cache at Fortress Rosecrans outside town offered supplies. Hood also sought to destroy the Nashville and Chattanooga Railroad from that point back to the capital, thus denying reinforcement and resupply to Thomas’s garrison. Forrest and Bate ultimately failed to accomplish much in this ill-​advised attempt to starve Nashville Federals. Bate soon returned to the main army, while Forrest remained absent from the subsequent fighting before Nashville in mid-​December. The questions remains: Why did Hood not simply move his whole army to Murfreesboro

558   Benjamin Franklin Cooling and hunker down for the winter? The war situation would have been where it had been the winter before. Hood somewhat meekly formed a defensive position on hills just south of the stronger Union lines built to defend southern approaches to Nashville. His depleted army faced a strongly entrenched, ever-​growing opponent, soundly anchored on a series of fortified hills. Fort Negley, the city’s crowning glory as a sophisticated field work—​possibly the strongest constructed anywhere during the war—​occupied the center. Inadequate numbers plagued Hood, especially anchoring Confederate flanks on the Cumberland River. His position simply invited attack as momentum passed to Thomas. In addition to the Murfreesboro diversion, one of Forrest’s subordinates went to interdict Thomas’s river supply route, possibly trying to replicate his mentor’s success at Johnsonville. That was not to be either, although Col. David C. Kelley successfully closed down the river at Bell’s Bend, nine miles west of Nashville, from December 2 to 15. He again bested Union gunboats in Hood’s only moment of glory. Ironically, Kelley’s blockade failed to prevent A. J. Smith’s reinforcement of Thomas. Hood actually intended a third separate strike at Thomas’s logistics. He directed Brig. Gen. Hylan B.  Lyon, commanding a district in western Kentucky (never completely occupied and subdued by Federal authorities, hence the Confederate opportunity), to interdict the lower Cumberland as well as the Louisville and Nashville Railroad. But Lyon enthusiastically spent more time burning seven county court houses (containing Union records incriminating local citizenry in partisan/​guerrilla activities), trying to conscript Kentucky youth (ostensibly subject to the 1862 Confederate draft law), and liberating horses than truly helping Hood’s suffering main army before Nashville. Lyon, like Forrest, inspired local secessionists, like a teenage Nannie Haskins in occupied Clarksville. She jotted in her diary that the physical closeness of Lyon and Forrest made residents feel “almost free again.”7 But Thomas eventually sent a strong cavalry expedition to hasten Lyon’s raiders out of the state at the conclusion of the campaign. Meanwhile, Hood awaited supplies, reinforcements, and his fate while labor battalions and Confederate-​impressed slave workers tried to repair railroads and infrastructure, restore Union-​destroyed grist mills, and otherwise get provender to embattled comrades languishing before Nashville. There a patient and deliberate Thomas prepared his sledgehammer counterblow. As the Washington high command fretted about his slowness, an unhappy, even conniving Schofield maneuvered for Thomas’s command. Army superiors could ill afford Hood’s continued existence. Grant even sent a replacement commander (perhaps recalling his own discomfort the previous July, when a raiding army under Jubal Early had almost captured Washington itself due to his inattention), and eventually moved to undertake the task himself. Nobody but Thomas and his soldiers on the ground appreciated how rain, sleet, and slippery footing made movement impossible, adding to the high-​stakes drama. Thomas finally struck Hood on December 15 and 16. Many historians claim that Nashville was the “decisive battle” of the Civil War. In a classic double envelopment of Hood’s flanks, Thomas’s army dislodged Hood from his initial defense line the first day, then slashing flanking assaults on the second day completed the task. Outnumbered,

Spring Hill, Franklin, and Nashville    559 out-​generaled, and out-​fought, the proud Army of Tennessee simply disintegrated. Brig. Gen. James Steedman’s two brigades of inexperienced USCT suffered grievously at one point, while Thomas’s veterans eventually replicated the Missionary Ridge success of a year before. Hood sustained 4,442 casualties; Thomas lost 3,057. But the Confederate loss of fifty-​three cannon was the greatest of any army in the war. Relentless Union cavalry pursuit hounded Hood’s survivors southward to the Tennessee line, despite Forrest’s eleventh-​hour return to prevent the complete annihilation at the hand of Wilson’s well-​ clothed and -​equipped pursuers. As it was, Hood’s intact pontoon bridge and a hesitant Union naval response by Rear Adm. Samuel Philips Lee permitted Hood’s escape across the Tennessee River by New Year’s Day. Rallying at Tupelo, Mississippi, the distressed crippled general resigned and his army was broken up to fight elsewhere. Fragments went to the Trans-​Mississippi and to North Carolina to assist Gen. Joseph Johnston, tasked with opposing a triumphant Sherman. Many Tennesseans deserted and went home. Over thirty thousand Confederates had marched with Hood to “play hell” in Tennessee; perhaps a third less returned a month later. Franklin’s slaughter, followed by the starving and freezing conditions at Nashville, then the debilitating retreat, had taken their toll. No wonder Maury County farmer Nimrod Porter sounded despondent as he recounted passage of “the worst broke down set I ever saw,” “trying to take everything” as “we are badly treated by them.”8 But was the rebellious Confederate heartland necessarily subdued? Haskins epitomized the bitter gall of Hood’s failure when she wrote in her diary on Christmas Day how “a fearful sacrifice of life” of friends and relatives “tis horrible, horrible.” Her disappointment overcame her: “I believe I feel this late disaster more deeply than the fall of Fort Donelson—​this dreading, dreading—​the awful stroke comes at last.” Fort Donelson had delivered a large army to the enemy, “then we dreaded their tyranny, but now we’ve felt their barbarism.” Then the “bitter, bitter disappointment” as Hood and his deliverers “waited ’til too large an army was collected then he left us, again, only to raise our heads with a firm bitter smile to breathe ‘Wait and Hope.’ ” “My God,” she ended, “how long will we have to wait.”9 The end of the war eventually led to the end of the hated occupation for Haskins and her family. But Union victory in this campaign conclusively convulsed her elite society, and her comfortable life changed forever. The campaign nailed shut the coffin of slavery in Tennessee, at least. What had begun with refuged or escaping Blacks to Union base camps several years earlier and thence to places of sanctuary from Camp Nelson in Kentucky to Tunnel Hill, Pulaski, and Nashville in Tennessee, as well as Union military garrison towns, assumed new meaning. Such camps supplied the ranks for the USCT—​uniformed soldiers to guard railroads and supply dumps but ultimately pressed into service as fighting men during Hood’s invasion. For two years, contraband refugees had contributed to the construction of the citadel and logistical center of Nashville and helped to do menial labor in hospitals. Then suddenly the fight had come to them, with Steedman’s USCT of former stevedores, wagoners, and warehouse workers providing the anchor upon which the Union scythe of white veterans wheeled westward around Hood’s left flank. They joined pursuit of the Rebel fugitives to the Alabama line while other former slaves contributed to the signal

560   Benjamin Franklin Cooling Union victory as sailors aboard gunboats and workers in Nashville’s medical wards. No longer merely grave and trench diggers, Black refugees from slavery truly fought and died for their freedom at Nashville. Service to the nation was a critical part of the progression from self-​liberation to the Union’s policy of confiscation and emancipation, to citizenship. The genesis of free labor in the Upper South came together at Nashville on December 15 and 16, 1864. Perhaps it was prophetic that Nashville would be the epicenter of the Confederacy’s destruction. Occupied by Federal forces in February 1862, it became a beacon of Military Governor Andrew Johnson’s avowed “treason must be made odious” policies. They must be punished and impoverished, he said, their great plantations seized and divided into small farms and sold “to honest, industrious men.”10 Then the success of the 1864 Tennessee Campaign emboldened regional unionism. Johnson, together with loyal Tennessee politicians and citizenry (persecuted by secessionist elements), used Spring Hill, Franklin, and Nashville to validate their fight for a restoration of civil law, ratification of constitutional prohibition of slavery, and a social revolution bringing new elements to power. However, unvarnished Union battlefield victory could not immediately restore peace and tranquility, economic stabilization, and comity in the countryside. Federal troops still had to root out irregular conflict and brigandage. The impact of Hood’s defeat for Confederate partisan groups in the rural Heartland remains elusive. News of the disaster may have disheartened them, but relentless hounding by authorities freed from worrying about Hood, Forrest, or other regular Confederate warriors had greater effect. The death and maiming of such guerrilla chieftains as Tom Woodward and Adam Rankin Johnson had the most dampening effect. Continuing depredations of the infamous Champ Ferguson in Appalachia showed no appreciable impact from Franklin and Nashville. Theirs was an independent, neighborhood conflict only distantly related to a dying Confederacy and its army no longer in existence. Such a “people’s war,” away from the main armies, simply had to burn itself out in the Heartland. If it took weeks to clear the visible debris from battlefields and bury the dead, nobody could escape the elation of victory in the North and gloom across the South at Hood’s defeat. Few would see Thomas’s words of praise for his army, although they said it all: “Too much praise cannot be accorded to an army which, hastily made up from fragments of three separate commands, can contend against a force numerically greater than itself and of more thoroughly solid organization, inflicting on it a most crushing defeat—​almost an annihilation.” Then, in April 1865, just as Thomas and his soldiers stood poised to celebrate a victory parade, telegrams arrived with news of Lincoln’s assassination. With that singular event, Andrew Johnson, oppressive and unpopular as Tennessee’s military governor and with barely a month in office as the vice president, vaulted to chief executive of the land. He was a bitter pill administered to defeated Southerners, still smarting under the pall of Hood’s defeat as well as Robert E. Lee’s more recent surrender at Appomattox. Indeed, unstable Kentucky proved even more verdant soil for continued disruption when the infamous Missouri guerrilla William Quantrill and a shrunken band of followers breathed their last gasp of pure banditry

Spring Hill, Franklin, and Nashville    561 there in 1865. It was significant that a senior Kentucky historian would quip later that Kentucky “waited until after the war was over to secede from the Union.” Hood’s defeat in Tennessee was irrelevant to that.11 Few recruits had flocked to Forrest’s call after Hood’s defeat when Union cavalryman James Wilson completed the task of vanquishing the shrunken remnants of Hood’s old mounted arm at Selma, Alabama, and other places in the spring of 1865. Posterity took its cue perhaps from an ecstatic Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton’s declaration on December 17, 1864, that the monumental clash between Thomas and Hood “resulted in a great and decisive victory for the Union arms.”12 Historians suggest that the Nashville battle was “probably the most complete battlefield victory of the war,” with Thomas coming nearer than any other Civil War general “to the complete destruction of an opposing army.”13 Some historians confirm what Northern writer and travel commentator John T. Trowbridge noted about the “devastated south” in 1865 and 1866 during his Nashville anniversary visit: that the late battle was “the only immediately decisive battle of the war” since it was “the only one in which an army was destroyed.” Hood’s army “was annihilated, and a period put to Rebel power in the states which Sherman had left behind him on his great march.”14 By the end of the century, John Fiske, the redoubtable chronicler of the war in the Mississippi Valley bluntly contended, “Nashville was the most decisive victory gained by either side in the Civil War, and one of the most brilliant.” Thomas’s most recent biographer has repeated that “it would be judged one of the two most perfect battles ever fought,” the other being Napoleon’s brilliant victory at Austerlitz.15 Other commentators have been more restrained in their more mottled portrayal of Hood’s defeat in the broader context of the war in the west.16 Even after Franklin and Nashville, a shrinking group of “diehard rebels” had determined to fight on. This phrase encapsulated a Confederate subculture of invincibility despite disastrous setbacks such as Hood’s Tennessee Campaign. Rumors of glorious Confederate victories elsewhere always formed part of soldier talk, providing encouragement and eventual memorialization in postwar “Lost Cause mythology” throughout the South. Nashville newsman Stanley F. Horn alone still billed it “The Decisive Battle of Nashville” in 1956!17 Initially optimistic over the Heartland’s future, the general who had presided over the Confederacy’s demise in the west had changed his view by 1868. Retained as Reconstruction commander, Thomas toured the Upper South and reported his findings to his Washington superiors. Still castigated by Grant, Sherman, and Schofield for his “slow” performance before Nashville, a less optimistic Thomas told the Congressional Committee on Reconstruction, “[T]‌he state of society as regards the non-​observance of law, and the want of protection for life and property has not at all improved, and in some sense is decidedly worse.” He had hoped good crops and financial reward therefrom would lead the people to appreciate peace and abstain from lawlessness, but the abject opposite had occurred. He warned of the swelling Southern underground Ku Klux Klan—​“a species of political cant” whereby the crime of treason might be covered with a “counterfeit varnish of patriotism.” Popular acquiescence to unquestionable results provided by Spring Hill, Franklin, and Nashville seemed ephemeral to Thomas.18

562   Benjamin Franklin Cooling Like Ambrose Bierce, Nannie Haskins, Nimrod Porter, and others, yet another unsung commoner delivered a simple epitaph for the events concluding the 1864 campaign in the Heartland. George Richard Browder was a Kentucky farmer, Methodist preacher, Confederate sympathizer, and slave owner. Writing in his diary on December 4, 1864, he decided his congregation was more interested in wild rumors raging and heavy cannonading toward Nashville “than in the sermon.” Great excitement, apprehension, and suspense attended the next few days in his part of the southern Bluegrass. Images of “the horrors” of the battle for the Tennessee capital competed with rumors to “excite the people,” as he recorded Hood besieging the capital “and a change in power” expected in Kentucky with Lyon’s raiders and their pursuers passing through his neighborhood, robbing and conscripting civilians and creating general mayhem. Suddenly, it had ended. Three days before Christmas, Browder wrote more solemnly in his diary, “Hood is badly defeated and traveling southward.” Echoing Haskins in nearby Clarksville, he reported, “[T]‌here is a general sadness and misgiving among Southern people.” For them, the war of independence was over. If Browder’s diary thereafter is any indicator, times of trouble, with more banditry, social upheaval, racial strife, and instability, lay ahead in Reconstruction.19

Notes 1. T. Joshi and David E. Schulz, eds., Ambrose Bierce: A Sole Survivor, Bits of Autobiography (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1998), 59, 63. 2. Brian Craig Miller, John Bell Hood and the Fight for Civil War Memory (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2010), 167. 3. On Sherman’s attitude, see Commercial (Cincinnati, OH), November 12, 1864, reprinted in Richmond (VA) Dispatch, November 28, 1864. 4. Stephen King Vann to Nancy Elizabeth Neel, December 6, 1864, quoted in Jason Phillips, Diehard Rebels:  The Confederate Culture of Invincibility (Athens:  University of Georgia Press, 2007), 113. 5. C. Vann Woodward, ed., Mary Chestnut’s Civil War (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 1981), 660, 691–​692. 6. Ira Berlin, Steven F. Miller, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland, eds., Freedom; A Documentary History of Emancipation 1862–​1867, ser. 1, vol. 2: The Wartime Genesis of Free Labor: The Upper South (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 385, 476. 7. Minoa D. Uffelman, Ellen Kannervo, Phillus Smith, and Eleanor Williams, eds., The Diary of Nannie Haskins Williams: A Southern Woman’s Story of Rebellion and Reconstruction, 1863–​1890 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2014), 103. 8. Nimrod Porter diary, December 18–​20, 1864, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. 9. Uffelman et al., Nannie Haskins Diary, 103. 10. Ira Berlin, Barbara J. Fields, Steven F. Miller, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland, eds., Free at Last; A Documentary History of Slavery, Freedom, and the Civil War (New York: Free Press, 1991), 497–​505; Johnson’s words are at Adena, http://​www.adena.com/​adena/​usa/​ cw/​cw263.htm.

Spring Hill, Franklin, and Nashville    563 11. E. Merton Coulter, Civil War and Readjustment in Kentucky (Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 1926), 439. For Thomas’s comment, see U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1880–​1901), ser. 1, vol. 45, pt. 1: 46 (hereafter cited as OR). For Johnson’s words, see http://​www.adena.com/​usa/​cw/​cw263.htm. 12. OR, ser. 1, vol. 45, pt. 2: 227. 13. Stanley F. Horn, The Decisive Battle of Nashville (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1956), preface; Russell F. Weigley, A Great Civil War: A Military and Political History, 1861–​1865 (Bloomington, IN:  Indiana University Press, 2000), 416; Peter J. Parish, The American Civil War (New  York:  Holmes & Meier, 1983), 483; Phillips, Diehard Rebels, 112–​115, 125–​126; Francis F. McKinney, Education in Violence: The Life of George H. Thomas and the History of the Army of the Cumberland (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1961), 423. 14. John T. Trowbridge, The Desolate South: A Picture of the Battlefields and of the Devastated Confederacy, ed. Gordon Carroll (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1956), c­ hapters 16, 19, 20, 23, especially 150 and 115, 125–​126. 15. John Fiske, The Mississippi Valley in the Civil War (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1900), 359; Benson Bobrick, Master of War: The Life of General George H. Thomas (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009), 303. 16. Earl J. Hess, The Civil War in the West: Victory and Defeat from the Appalachians to the Mississippi (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 255–​268, 264; Larry J. Daniel, Days of Glory: The Army of the Cumberland, 1861–​1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014), 433; Larry J. Daniel, Conquered: Why the Army of Tennessee Failed (Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 324; Thomas Lawrence Connelly, Autumn of Glory: The Army of Tennessee, 1862–​1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971), 514. 17. Stanley F. Horn, The Decisive Battle of Nashville (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1956), preface, especially. 18. Thomas’s testimony quoted in Richard O’Connor, Thomas:  Rock of Chickamauga (New York: Prentice-​Hall, 1948), 345–​346. 19. Richard L. Troutman, ed., The Heavens Are Weeping:  The Diaries of George Richard Browder 1852–​1886 (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1987), 190–​191.

Bibliography Ash, Stephen V. Middle Tennessee Society Transformed 1860–​1870: War and Peace in the Upper South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988. Bailey, Anne J. The Chessboard of War: Sherman and Hood in the Autumn Campaigns of 1864. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000. Bobrick, Benson. Master of War: The Life of General George H. Thomas. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009. Clampitt, Bradley R. The Confederate Heartland: Military and Civilian Morale in the Western Confederacy. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011. Cooling, Benjamin Franklin. To the Battles of Franklin and Nashville and Beyond: Stabilization and Reconstruction in Tennessee and Kentucky, 1864–​ 1866. Knoxville:  University of Tennessee Press, 2011.

564   Benjamin Franklin Cooling Daniel, Larry J. Conquered: Why the Army of Tennessee Failed. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. Dollar, Kent T., Larry H. Whiteaker, and W. Calvin Dickinson, eds., Border Wars: The Civil War in Tennessee and Kentucky. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2015. Dollar, Kent T., Larry H. Whiteaker, and W. Calvin Dickinson, eds. Sister States, Enemy States:  The Civil War in Kentucky and Tennessee. Lexington:  University Press of Kentucky, 2009. Durham, Walter T. Reluctant Partners: Nashville and the Union, July 1, 1863 to June 30, 1865. Nashville: Tennessee Historical Society, 1987. Reprinted, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2008. Hess, Earl J. The Civil War in the West:  Victory and Defeat from the Appalachians to the Mississippi. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. Horn, Stanley F. The Decisive Battle of Nashville. Baton Rouge:  Louisiana State University Press, 1956. McDonough, James Lee, and Thomas L. Connelly. Five Tragic Hours; The Battle of Franklin. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983. Miller, Brian Craig. John Bell Hood and the Fight for Civil War Memory. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2010. Sword, Wiley. Embrace an Angry Wind: The Confederacy’s Last Hurrah. Spring Hill, Franklin and Nashville. New York: HarperCollins, 1992.

Chapter 35

Pet ersbu rg Be si e g e d a nd t he Shenand oa h   Va l l ey James Marten

The Civil War in the East changed on July 30, 1864, when two of the more infamous episodes of the war occurred a little over two hundred miles apart. On that day, Confederate Brig. Gen. John McCausland, detached from Lt. Gen. Jubal Early’s Army of the Valley, burned much of the town of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, in retaliation for Maj. Gen. David Hunter’s destruction of private property in the Shenandoah Valley a few weeks earlier. No civilian lives were lost, but the town was all but destroyed. A few hundred miles south, not long after Confederate cavalrymen had trotted into Chambersburg, a giant explosion blew up a section of Confederate entrenchments east of Petersburg. The temporarily stunned Confederates recovered and ruthlessly threw back the ill-​led Yankees who stumbled into the eponymous “Crater.” Thousands of men on both sides were killed, wounded, or captured, and Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s hopes of finally defeating the Army of Northern Virginia in one bold stroke—​after an unprecedentedly bloody summer of constant fighting—​collapsed. These two events marked the end of the Union’s desultory strategy in the Shenandoah Valley and Union efforts to end the war by destroying the Army of Northern Virginia in open battle. Commanding general Grant sent Maj. Gen. Philip Sheridan into the lower Shenandoah Valley to consolidate all Union forces into the Army of the Shenandoah, with orders to push Early out of the Shenandoah Valley and to wreck Confederate railroads in the vicinity of Charlottesville. At the same time, Grant changed tactics before Petersburg, forsaking efforts to land a knockout blow through frontal attacks in favor of a war of attrition, extending his lines slowly south and to the west of Petersburg in hopes of cutting Gen. Robert E. Lee’s communication and supply lines. The change in Union strategy made Lee’s mission to hold Petersburg and protect Richmond even harder. For both Grant and Lee, military operations in the fall of 1864 in the Valley and around Petersburg, although very different, were thoroughly linked. Indeed, Early’s raid up the Valley during the summer had been intended to draw Union troops away from Petersburg, and even as Sheridan and Early battled it out in the Valley in September and

566   James Marten October, Lee shuttled troops back and forth and Grant sought ways to use Sheridan’s success to his advantage at Petersburg. The Valley Campaign in fall 1864 and the Fifth and Sixth Offensives of the Petersburg Campaign dominated the lives of many Virginians and most of the headlines in the United States and the Confederate States in the summer and fall of 1864. Along with the events transpiring in Tennessee and Georgia during the last third of 1864, these related but very different campaigns—​one of movement and drama, one of incremental change and frustration—​marked the beginning of the end of the Confederacy’s capacity to wage war. Their outcomes, particularly Sheridan’s successes against Early, also affected the crucial U.S.  election of 1864. Despite the improvement in the Union military outlook between May and September 1864, the political calculus of the looming presidential election meant that incremental, if significant, gains by the Union, especially when accompanied by heavy casualties, could not guarantee general support for Pres. Abraham Lincoln’s promise to carry the war to its bloody ending. The Northern public could take comfort from the fact that the bloodbaths of the Wilderness and Cold Harbor were followed by Grant’s quick move south of the James River to the gates of Petersburg. But for many, the Army of the Potomac’s inability to end the war quickly no doubt recalled the exciting but ultimately disastrous Peninsula Campaign from two years earlier. Moreover, Early’s daring dash to the outskirts of Washington, and his manhandling of virtually every force sent against him, threatened to turn public opinion against the war—​and the administration waging it—​in the same way that the Tet Offensive a century later would put the lie to the notion that the Vietnam War was nearly won. As a result, both sides waged war in the fall of 1864 with one eye on the congressional and presidential elections in the North.

The Fall Campaign, Phase One After the grinding summer campaign, the first action after the fiasco at the Crater was a throwback to a more romantic version of the war. With the Army of Northern Virginia running out of food, Lee ordered Maj. Gen. Wade Hampton and four thousand cavalrymen to make a lightning raid into the Union rear and rustle thousands of lightly defended cattle being held just five miles from Grant’s headquarters on the James River. Departing on September 14, Hampton’s men overwhelmed the handful of Union guards at dawn on September 16, rounded up over 2,500 cattle, eleven supply wagons, and three hundred prisoners, and had them back in Confederate lines within twenty-​four hours. Hampton lost only sixty-​one men in killed, wounded, and missing. As Hampton and his men were completing their frolic, Sheridan finally took the initiative in the Valley. His campaign had begun, in effect, on August 6, when he arrived in Harpers Ferry to organize the command that would become the Army of the Shenandoah. Grant sent the Sixth Corps and two cavalry divisions from the Army of

Petersburg Besieged and the Shenandoah Valley    567 the Potomac, while four more divisions came from the Nineteenth Corps and the Eighth Corps. Although it seems obvious in hindsight, at the time it was not clear that the Confederate campaign had actually ended. Early had pulled back from Washington, but he had since then beaten Union forces twice in a little over a week at Cool Spring and at Kernstown. As Lee pivoted to defend Richmond, however, he recalled an entire division and two artillery brigades from Early’s force to the Army of Northern Virginia, leaving the former with about fifteen thousand men to face Sheridan’s forty thousand, which at about the same time had started their march south. It would be over a month before the armies met on a battlefield. Early divided his tiny army, keeping Maj. Gen. Stephen Ramseur’s Division at Winchester and sending his other three divisions north toward Martinsburg, on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Alerted by his cavalry to Early’s disposition, Sheridan planned a joint cavalry-​infantry movement for September 19, hoping to destroy Ramseur’s Division before it could be reinforced. Two things went wrong:  Early began pulling his troops back to Winchester on September 18, and Sheridan’s Sixth Corps got bogged down in Berryville Canyon, where Ramseur’s men inflicted a number of casualties, and the rest of Sheridan’s men were delayed. Around noon they attacked Confederate divisions commanded by Major Generals Robert Rodes and John Gordon. The Confederates gained a temporary advantage when a gap opened between the attacking Union corps and a counterattack nearly turned the tide—​until Rodes was killed and Early halted the attack. The fighting on this front turned into a slugfest, until the rest of Sheridan’s force finally made it to the battlefield and went in against Early’s left. After fierce fighting Early’s line had been pushed back into an L, with the bulk of Early’s army stretching north across the B&O tracks on the eastern edge of Winchester. The Confederates had performed admirably throughout the day, but they could not hold against Sheridan’s last move: sending six cavalry brigades under Brig. Gen. Albert Torbert against the Confederate left. Moving along the Valley Pike toward Winchester, they swept away the Confederate cavalry and broke squares formed by the vastly outnumbered Confederate infantry. With their flank turned, the Confederates withdrew, mounting a determined rear-​guard action that prevented Union forces from pursuing much past Winchester. The Third Battle of Winchester, as it was called, was the bloodiest battle fought in the Valley during the war. While the numbers of killed, wounded, and missing paled in comparison to the bloodbath that was Grant’s Overland Campaign—​Early lost about 3,600 men (although he claimed many of the 1,800 missing were actually stragglers), while Sheridan’s casualties were just over 5,000—​they amounted to 12.5 percent of the Union forces engaged and nearly 25 percent of the Confederate Army. The performance of the commanders at Winchester would set a pattern for their armies’ operations over the coming weeks. Jeffry Wert suggests that, although Sheridan displayed remarkable adaptability and leadership in rallying his troops during the battle, his tactics were straightforward and unimaginative. He made mistakes—​as did Early—​but his vast superiority in men allowed him to recover from those mistakes, to

Map 35.1  Shenandoah Valley, August to October 1864

Petersburg Besieged and the Shenandoah Valley    569 weather the determined resistance and counterattacking of the Confederates, and to win the day.1 Although Winchester would seem to have been a turning point—​and, indeed, it was one—​the combative Early would not give up. He withdrew his battered army about thirty miles to the south to Fisher’s Hill, a previously fortified position near Front Royal that took advantage of strong natural features. Casualties and the redeployment of some of his units had left Early with about ten thousand men. Although obviously outnumbered, as Early reported to Lee, if Sheridan was to be kept out of the upper Valley, then a stand had to be made here, the only defensible position for many miles. Elements of Sheridan’s army appeared at Fisher’s Hill within a day after the Battle of Winchester. Sheridan put an elaborate battle plan into motion that sent Brig. Gen. George Crook’s Eighth Corps on a twelve-​mile, nighttime (actually, parts of two nights) flanking march over difficult terrain. By the early afternoon of September 22, Crook’s men were poised to climb Little North Mountain, from which they would attack Early’s undermanned left flank. Sheridan ordered demonstrations along the Confederate front to distract the Confederates—​the demonstrations worried Early enough that, he said later, he had decided to withdraw that night—​but one of Early’s generals noticed the Yankees gathering on the Confederate left. Ramseur and Early reacted too slowly, however, and late in the afternoon Crook’s command roared down the mountain, brushing away the dismounted cavalry holding the Confederate far left and crashing into the main line. The Union Sixth and Nineteenth Corps joined the attack, and the Confederate line crumbled from west to east. Although the initial retreat was precipitous, Early and his officers managed to organize a measured withdrawal up the Valley. They were pursued as far as Woodstock, about ten miles south on the Valley Turnpike. Although far less costly than Winchester—​fewer than a hundred Yankees and Rebels were killed, while Early’s army suffered two hundred wounded and Sheridan’s four hundred—​the thousand Confederates captured further sapped Early’s dwindling army. Moreover, many of his regimental commanders had been killed or wounded. Early withdrew his survivors south to Brown’s Gap, and Sheridan set up a little farther north near Cedar Creek, where he turned his focus to the second element of his mission: compromising the ability of the Shenandoah Valley to contribute materially to the Confederate war effort.

Digging in Dynamically at Petersburg As Sheridan and Early battled in the Valley, Grant focused on isolating Petersburg—​ and, by extension, Richmond—​by cutting Confederate supply lines south of Petersburg, which by September were the Boydton Plank Road and the South Side Railroad. During September and October, Grant attempted to put pressure on Lee’s left, north of the James River, and his right, south of the James River, and extending south and west around

570   James Marten Petersburg in coordinated attacks by Maj. Gen. Benjamin Butler’s Army of the James and Maj. Gen. George Meade’s Army of the Potomac, respectively. Both sides were handicapped by shortages of men. Plagued by an epidemic of desertions in the late summer and early fall, Lee had about fifty thousand men to defend Richmond and Petersburg. Grant’s massive losses during the Overland Campaign, along with the redeployment of some units, had also left him with about fifty thousand effectives at the end of the summer. The period of relative quiet for most of September was due partly to the fact that, although he eventually would be able to rebuild the Army of the Potomac, he did not have the massive superiority in numbers with which he began the summer and would have again later in the year. Yet he continued to plan aggressive operations. Throughout the fall campaign, Grant and his generals fretted about the readiness of new recruits, frequently reorganized units, and, on occasion, delayed operations until a time when more battle-​ready men were available. In early October, Maj. Gen. G. K. Warren urged Meade against extending the Army of the Potomac’s line too far to the left. “We need time to get our new levies in order,” he warned, “and no matter how great the pressure, we cannot succeed with them till they have at least acquired the knowledge of the rudiments of their drill and discipline.”2 The troops present were sometimes suspect; Brig. Gen. Nelson Miles complained that some of his regiments “are mainly composed of substitutes who have recently joined, and the frequency of desertions among this class of men renders it necessary that they be placed in positions where they can easily be watched and guarded.”3 Maj. Gen. Winfield Hancock worried that his men were being asked to work too hard on entrenchments, particularly replacements: “[T]‌here are a good many recruits in the command whom we are trying to drill, and I have not allowed them to be worked within the last few days on that account.”4 As Hancock suggested, in addition to planning and executing military operations, commanders had to train thousands of replacement troops and direct their men in building the complex series of fortifications required to hold their current positions. Confederate troops faced the same challenge, and both armies were constantly adjusting their lines, improving old earthworks, and destroying or modifying captured enemy works. Moreover, as the fall went on, wood and dirt fortifications, hard-​used by the men, subject to heat and rain, and fouled by decomposing bodies (some actually buried in the works themselves) and human waste, deteriorated, forcing the men to rebuild many of them. Thousands more of Butler’s men—​mainly African American troops, who often worked under fire—​were dedicated to digging the ill-​fated Dutch Gap Canal, while others dug mines and countermines under enemies’ lines and still others created primitive minefields by planting “torpedoes.” These major construction projects occurred during nearly constant skirmishing, scouting, and artillery duels. As a result, although one soldier suggested that fortifications had “sprung into existence as if by magic,” their building was extraordinarily difficult, dangerous, and exhausting. By early fall, insects, rats, lice, and dirt (and, when it rained, bottomless mud) further plagued the men digging, fighting, and dying in both the Confederate and the Union trenches.5

Petersburg Besieged and the Shenandoah Valley    571 By October 1864 Lee had fortified a front of twenty miles, while contemporary estimates placed the length of the Union front at thirty-​five miles. The total length of all fortifications has been established by modern researchers as over 125 miles, which included a series of two or three separate lines to deepen defensive positions, protect communication and supply lines, and allow for the movement of large bodies of men from one part of the battlefield to another. These ever-​growing and complicated fortifications were part of a dynamic strategy that contrasts with the popular notion that Grant had laid siege to Petersburg. In fact, although it might have seemed like a siege to the men stuck in the trenches, and especially to the civilians remaining in Petersburg, the massive fortifications were simply a means to an end. Despite his overwhelming resources, Grant did not have enough men to conduct a traditional siege. Rather, as Earl J. Hess argues, the several offensives mounted by Federal troops were part of a “traditional field campaign with some limited aspects of siege warfare” that “eventually succeeded in extending the fortified line” until Lee had to abandon Petersburg. However, that moment was several months away, in fall 1864.6 The effective coordination of Union and Confederate forces north and south of the James required constant communication and intelligence gathering. Generals in both armies gathered and issued almost daily intelligence reports, which often focused on information gleaned from deserters, who could help reveal where certain regiments and brigades were at any given time, and the more talkative could provide detailed descriptions of Rebel movements (although interrogators did worry about the reliability of the information gained). Communications included reports from officers commanding picket lines, signal stations, and myriad other sources observing the movement of men, horses, wagons, and artillery, from full brigades to companies. Captured Richmond newspapers could provide key intelligence to Union commanders, although, knowing how inaccurate Northern news reports often were, they sometimes dismissed them. Historians have identified three separate “offensives” at Petersburg between late September and late October—​ the Union “Fifth” and “Sixth” Offensives and the “Second” Confederate offensive—​and the Union “raid” on the Weldon and Petersburgh Railroad in December. The Fifth Offensive occurred in late September, with attacks on the Confederate left at Chaffin’s Farm and a movement toward the South Side Railroad. Butler’s Army of the James attacked the Richmond positions on September 29, driving the Confederates from New Market Heights and from Fort Harrison, one of the several forts in the complex. But later attacks against Forts Gilmer, Gregg, and Johnson failed. Lee hurried additional troops north from Petersburg, but their counterattacks on September 30 also failed. A notable feature of the battles around Chaffin’s Farm was the valiant and effective fighting of the U.S. Colored Troops (USCT). The division assigned to capture the Confederate fortifications at New Market Heights staged a bayonet attack across a stream, up a hill, and through two sets of obstructions. Black units took heavy casualties, with the 3rd Division of the Eighteenth Corps suffering over 1,300 in killed, wounded, and missing; the 5th USCT lost well over 200 men. The attack on Fort Gilmer was

Map 35.2  Petersburg, September to December 1864

Petersburg Besieged and the Shenandoah Valley    573 less successful. African American troops of the Tenth Corps endured enfilading fire and then became trapped in a ditch, where they took heavy losses from grenades and small arms fire. They failed to carry the Confederate works, but their valiant efforts—​ combined with their comrades’ success elsewhere—​cemented their reputations as competent fighters. In the eastern theater, at least in the Army of the James, they came to share more equally with white troops the more dangerous but also more honorable burden of fighting. Butler heaped self-​aggrandizing praise on his Black troops—​“Better men were never better led, better officers never led better men”—​and publicly commended several Black soldiers who took over for disabled color bearers, despite being wounded themselves. He also praised an African American sergeant who had to take command of his company when his white captain was killed; he was the first man into the enemy’s works. Indeed, at least four of the companies in the 6th USCT were led by Black sergeants after their officers were killed or wounded, and several companies in other regiments also went into battle behind Black sergeants. Butler ordered a “special medal” created in their honor. The steadiness of these Black sergeants confounded the widespread belief that African American troops could not function without white officers, although it did not lead to a change in the policy that refused to commission Black officers in combat units.7 Although Butler’s thrust was only partly successful, it did force Lee to thin his lines south of Petersburg, as Grant had hoped. This contributed to the partial success of the other half of the late September offensive: the push toward the Boydton Plank Road. Led by Warren’s Fifth Corps, the Union force included a cavalry division and portions of the Second and Ninth Corps. Warren marched westward on September 30 and, like Butler, enjoyed early success against the Confederates at Peebles Farm. He was eventually stopped short of his ultimate goal, but he also turned back a determined Confederate counterattack. Although the Fifth Offensive did not significantly affect Confederate supply lines, it provided another incremental victory for the Union, allowing the Army of the Potomac to extend and fortify its lines farther west toward the Boydton Plank Road and to continue to hold Lee’s left flank east of Richmond, where Butler dug in, strengthening Fort Harrison and other captured entrenchments and building his own fortifications to oppose the four-​layer maze of trenches, forts, redoubts, and other fortifications defending the eastern approaches to Richmond.

The Burning As Grant and Lee slugged it out during the last few days of September, Sheridan turned to his second objective: attacking the vast economic resources of the Valley. Nationally known for its productivity, the Valley had been a leading wheat-​producing region since the American Revolution, although its farmers also grew corn, raised livestock, and managed orchards. Although its contribution to the Confederate war effort had been

574   James Marten exaggerated, the war in Virginia could not have been sustained without the resources provided by Valley farms. Moreover, although much of Lee’s sustenance came from the lower South, not Virginia, the successful eradication of provisions in the Valley would make it much more difficult for Confederates to use it as a highway into Pennsylvania and Maryland. It was not as though the Valley had remained untouched during the first three years of the war, especially in the lower Valley, around Winchester and points north. Union and Confederate armies had competed for control of the area since the beginning of the war, sapping resources and morale, and causing shortages of food and manpower that led to skyrocketing prices and desperate straits for some civilians. Farther up the Valley, although less vulnerable to Yankee depredations, the insatiable need of the Confederate Army for food and horses meant that impressment agents had already stretched the capacity of civilians to provide for the military. Indeed, those same horses and mules coveted by the army were also desperately needed by farmers trying to feed the army (and their families). Nevertheless, even after three long years of war, the region still provided much-​ needed wheat and livestock to the Confederate war effort. After Fisher’s Hill, Grant had hoped to have Sheridan force his way up the Valley to Charlottesville and beyond, which he believed would put so much pressure on Lee that the war would be ended. Concerned with his own supply lines, Sheridan convinced Grant to let him undertake a concerted effort to ruin the Valley’s maturing crops. Mark Grimsley has argued that Sheridan’s campaign of destruction represented the shift in Union policy from one of conciliating civilians to practicing “hard war.” Resources necessary to the Confederate war effort—​the produce of farms and plantations, livestock, factories and mills, railroads and transportation hubs—​became legitimate military targets. And although Union commanders virtually always issued orders protecting “private” property and possessions, there were so many gray areas, and so little supervision, that civilian personal property and homes often were caught up in the maelstrom. Grant’s famous orders to Sheridan were clear: after defeating Early, Sheridan should direct his men to “eat out Virginia clear and clean as far as they go, so that crows flying over it for the balance of the season will have to carry their provender with them.” The Valley should be made useless to the enemy: “Take all provisions, forage and stock wanted for the use of your command. Such as cannot be consumed, destroy.”8 Sheridan’s campaign to destroy the abundant resources of the Valley was called, simply, “the Burning.” Between mid-​September and mid-​October—​with the most intense destruction occurring during a two-​week period—​and focusing on the counties of Augusta, Rockingham, Shenandoah, and Page, a strike force of five thousand cavalrymen and an infantry brigade did most of the work. The destruction was well planned and specific: Sheridan’s orders were to burn the barns storing grain and forage for livestock and the mills that processed that grain. In addition, livestock would be killed or driven off. Unlike the better-​known “March to the Sea” launched from Atlanta two months later, there was no real pretense that the Union Army was “living off the land.” Its aim was to destroy the material necessary for the survival of the Confederacy

Petersburg Besieged and the Shenandoah Valley    575 and especially to prevent the Valley from being used as a self-​sustaining highway from southern Virginia into Pennsylvania and Maryland. Sheridan, like many commanders during the last year of the conflict, when the hard-​ war policy held sway, expressly forbade the destruction of private homes and villages, and some officers tried to leave enough food to sustain families. A Yankee staff officer reported that Sheridan’s orders “were carried out literally but not riotously.”9 Some of the destruction of private property was in retaliation for attacks on Union soldiers. When Lt. John Rodgers Meigs, son of the quartermaster general of the U.S. Army, Brig. Gen. Montgomery Meigs, was killed in a skirmish mistakenly believed by Union authorities to be an ambush by partisans, the town of Dayton was burned to the ground. Other homes were destroyed by accident, as in Mt. Jackson, when embers from a burning barn were spread by wind to destroy eighteen houses. About the time burning operations ceased after the first week in October, Sheridan declared that the area “has been made untenable for a rebel army.”10 In his November 24 report on his operations between August 10 and November, Sheridan included a summary of the “property captured and destroyed.” It included ninety-​four pieces of artillery and twenty-​three thousand rounds of ammunition; 275 wagons and ambulances; nearly twenty thousand small arms and over a million rounds of small arms ammunition; and forty battle flags. His men destroyed seventy-​one flour mills, eight saw mills, seven furnaces, four tanneries, three saltpeter works, and one each of a number of facilities: woolen mill, powder mill, railroad depot, and locomotive. Over half a million bushels of grain (mostly wheat) was destroyed, along with 20,397 tons of hay and another thousand tons of fodder and straw. Six tons of bacon and ham were confiscated, five tons of tobacco were destroyed, and thirty-​eight thousand beef cattle, swine, and sheep were killed or taken. His list of Union losses was much shorter, of course; the most prominent—​the loss of two dozen pieces of artillery—​was corrected when all of the pieces were recaptured.11 So thorough was the destruction, and so devastated were the civilians living in the Valley, that agricultural production there a full five years after the war still lagged far behind prewar levels, and thirty-​four thousand fewer acres were under cultivation. Historians have debated whether or not the Civil War was a “total war”—​one in which the lines between military and civilian personnel and resources are blurred—​but to the participants in the Burning, the question was not academic. Most Yankee troopers (and certainly the horse soldier who commanded their army) no doubt believed their actions were justified; they followed the rules of war and, as scholars have suggested, probably wreaked less destruction on homes and personal property than commonly believed. Much of the decline in agricultural production in the Shenandoah was no doubt due more to the pressures of a long war than to a fortnight of determined destruction in just four counties. But for the farmers and mill owners whose property was rightfully seen as having military value, the war could not have been more “total.” Indeed, the Southern memory of the Burning that helped shape the narrative of Yankee atrocity drew less on statistics than on the feeling of violation and defeat incurred by civilians in the Valley and in other parts of the Confederacy where civilians were similarly affected. The

576   James Marten campaign itself may have demonstrated restraint from a military point of view, but for the individual farmers and their families who lost livestock, grain, and the 1864 harvest, the destruction was as bad as anything faced by the Georgians in the path of Sherman’s army later in the year. The destruction wrought by Sheridan’s men in the four Valley counties hit the men serving under Early particularly hard. Although Confederates frequently referred to defending their homes and families as an urgent motivation for fighting, such rhetoric was often rather abstract. But for at least some of the men in Early’s tiny army, especially among the cavalry, the barns and haystacks they could see burning from mountain vantage points, and the livestock they saw being driven away or killed, belonged to them or to family members. Their frustration at failing to live up to their vow to protect home and hearth had them itching for a fight by mid-​September. And their commander obliged. Although Early was able to make up some of his losses with the return of Maj. Gen. Joseph Kershaw’s Division (which had been transferred to Petersburg before the Battle of Winchester), his decision to once again take the war to Sheridan proved his undoing. Sheridan had pulled his forces back to Cedar Creek, a little north and west of Fisher’s Hill. Early followed with his fifteen thousand to twenty thousand men in early October, confident that Sheridan’s dispersed forces could be defeated in detail. A foreshadowing of what was to come occurred on October 9. Finally fed up with the Confederate cavalry harassment of Union units carrying out their campaign of destruction in the Valley—​on a single day, about a dozen men had been killed or captured—​ Sheridan had sent two-​thirds of his nine-​thousand-​man cavalry force to eliminate the threat. Outnumbered by at least two to one, the poorly mounted, poorly armed, and poorly led Confederates were overwhelmed on October 9 at Tom’s Brook. Despite this setback, Early pressed forward. After a skirmish at Hupp’s Hill, Sheridan began bringing some of his divisions back to Cedar Creek, but on October 16 he left the army for meetings in Washington. Worried that his long supply line would soon force him to retrace his march south, Early developed a daring plan, splitting his army into three columns that would converge on the Union left along Cedar Creek. After a night march, the Confederates reached their jumping-​off point on the morning of October 19. Their fierce attack, conducted at first in a thick fog, was initially incredibly successful, as Union forces fell back in panic. As the Confederate attack lost steam, Early halted his divisions, fearing an attack on his right flank by the dismounted Federal cavalrymen who had slowed the Confederate advance. A number of Confederate officers, including Early, blamed the slowing of the attack on the fact that his hungry and ragged men had paused to ransack abandoned Union camps. By noon Sheridan was on the battlefield, having completed his celebrated “ride” from Winchester, and was in the process of restoring order and planning a counterattack. That came at 4:00 p.m.; once again, his cavalry played a major role when it broke Early’s left flank and in textbook fashion rolled up the entire line and threw the Confederates into a rout. Early’s losses were heavy: nearly three thousand in killed, wounded, and missing, not to mention many of his supplies and guns. His tattered army withdrew up the Valley

Petersburg Besieged and the Shenandoah Valley    577 and would over the next several months be dismantled piecemeal as Lee shifted units elsewhere.

Autumn Stalemate at Petersburg Although combat around Petersburg had been nearly continuous during the stirring events in the Valley, the only major fight during the first half of October occurred on October 7, when a Confederate attack on the Federal right along the Darbytown and New Market roads southeast of Richmond failed. Two weeks later, hoping to take advantage of Sheridan’s victories in the Valley and to strike before Early’s retreating force had a chance to reinforce Lee, Grant initiated his Sixth Offensive on October 27 and 28. Hancock renewed the attack on the Boydton Plank Road with a force of thirty thousand men drawn from three Union corps. The aggressive response by Confederate Lt. Gen. A. P. Hill, Maj. Gen. Henry Heth, and Maj. Gen. Wade Hampton, along with a lack of coordination between Federal units, brought the Union forces to a halt. The failed attack was closely observed by Grant, who personally reconnoitered the strong Confederate positions and ordered a halt. Butler did even worse north of the James in fighting that became known as the Battle of Fair Oaks and Darbytown Road. Butler hoped to disguise an attack on Lee’s left flank by Brig. Gen. Godfrey Weitzel’s Eighteenth Corps, which included the Black 3rd Division, with a diversionary attack by Brig. Gen. Alfred Terry’s Tenth Corps. Unfortunately, Terry bungled his portion of the attack and Weitzel ran into reinforcements pushed to the Confederate left by Lt. Gen. James Longstreet, just back from several months’ absence due to wounds received at the Wilderness. Both attacks failed, with 1,600 Federal casualties to the Confederates’ 100. The Confederates gained no advantage from their victory, but Butler failed to improve his position or to draw off Confederate troops from Lee’s right. Although both armies continued to improve their fortifications, and although no one necessarily knew it at the time, this “Sixth” offensive was the end of the major fighting near Petersburg in 1864. The “Applejack Raid” on December 2 by Warren’s Fifth Corps tore up perhaps twenty miles of the track of the Weldon and Petersburg Railroad and much-​needed forage as the army went into winter quarters.

Effects of the Campaigns on Civilians The lower Valley had been deeply affected by the war long before the fall campaign in 1864. Schools, churches, and other community organizations withered under the pressure of passing or occupying armies, the instability of the white and Black workforces, and other factors that contributed to the disintegration of life as residents in the northern

578   James Marten sector of the Shenandoah Valley had known it. In the summer of 1863, observers noted that two years of war had changed Winchester. The presence of troops in and around town had ruined the streets and roads and brought increased levels of diseases like typhoid fever. During the summer of 1864, Union forces had begun destroying important economic targets such as railroads, salt works, and lead mines, and Gen. David Hunter’s June campaign had resulted in the destruction of railroad facilities and a number of mills and factories in Staunton, as well as the Virginia Military Institute and the house of former Virginia governor John Letcher in Lexington. The Burning extended the destruction much farther up the Valley, causing hardship and eroding confidence in the Confederate government, as well as support for the war. Sheridan suggested in early October, “[T]‌he people here are getting sick of the war; heretofore they have had no reason to complain, because they have been living in great abundance.”12 William Blair has argued that the Confederate war effort began to “unravel” because of the actions of the Union Army: “Wherever the men in blue went they left devastation and a new sense of vulnerability.”13 Sheridan’s campaign worsened long-​standing unrest about government restrictions and regulations—​price fixing and impressment, for example—​and further undermined the Confederate war effort. Relief programs for poor families and the families of Confederate soldiers came under increasing pressure; inflation and dwindling supplies forced women to beg the Confederate government or occupying Union forces for aid. Some Valley towns bulged with refugees, making access to the most basic provisions even more difficult. The effect of the Valley Campaign on slavery is less clear. Hundreds of slaves in the lower Valley, encouraged to leave their masters by Union commanders like Maj. Gen. Nathaniel Banks in 1862 and Maj. Gen. Robert Milroy in 1863, had already departed or stayed within Union lines. Some of them were reenslaved during the Confederate resurgence in 1863, but as the tide turned against the Confederacy in 1864, they increasingly chose to leave their white masters. Yet few Valley slaves chose to fight. Fewer than 6,000 of Virginia’s 100,000 free and enslaved African Americans of military age actually served in the Union Army. Most were recruited from Union-​occupied areas in the northern and southeastern sections of the state. By the time Union forces controlled the lower Valley, many slaves had already left, and even after the campaign in the upper Valley in fall 1864, slaves were hesitant to commit to the Union forces who defeated the Confederates and moved on rather than establish a constant presence. The 19th USCT recruited only two African Americans during a recruiting drive in 1864. During his campaign, Sheridan impressed free and enslaved African Americans to help destroy Confederate railroads. Although unhappy to be put to work involuntarily by their supposed liberators, many stayed with the Yankees when they moved on. As in many wars, children bore the brunt of the changes and hardships wrought by war. One child living forty miles south of Winchester, writing as an adult, recalled growing “tired of the war” for the simple reason that “Santa Claus forgot to come to the Shenandoah Valley” by the third year of the fighting. He recalled—​in words that many Virginians, children and adult alike, must have felt—​that he “grew progressively tired of the continual night alarms,” of “surly and threatening strangers” interrupting their lives,

Petersburg Besieged and the Shenandoah Valley    579 and of “the ever shorter rations of food that I could hardly eat.” Whenever he wanted to do something, he “was told that on account of the war [he] could not get it”: “[T]‌he war was continually rising in front of me to bar me from something I wanted.” He thought of himself as a loyal Confederate, but he also wanted an end to the “war and . . . all these alarms and this killing and wounding and this long series of privations ever getting worse.”14 At least one Valley mother worried that the war had come to dominate her young children’s lives. “Almost their entire set of plays have reference to a state of war,” she wrote. Her five-​year-​old son staged marches and battles with paper soldiers, built hospitals with blocks and corncobs, and administered pills to rag dolls. “He gets sticks and hobbles about, saying that he lost a leg at the Second battle of Manassas; tells wonderful stories of how he cut off Yankees’ heads, bayoneted them, &c.” Even the youngest children picked up military jargon.15 Civilians in the upper Valley rather suddenly found their lives turned upside down, with predictable effects on morale. The experiences of one teenager, Thomas Ashby, who wrote of his wartime life in a popular memoir published in 1914, reflect that suddenness. Living in a farm about ten miles from Cedar Creek, Thomas turned twelve during the war’s first year, and although he seemed to enjoy the additional responsibilities thrust on him during the war, he remained a boy in many ways. As a fourteen-​year-​ old at Christmas in 1863, he was able to enjoy the sham battle staged by Confederate soldiers home on leave, and, although candy and presents were sparser than in the past, his stocking was still filled. A  year later, as Union cavalry penetrated his previously protected portion of the Valley, he not only became a temporary refugee with his father (because he was big for his age, his family worried that he would be taken prisoner by the Yankees) but witnessed a small skirmish and was part of a crew sent to dig up and reinter two Confederates killed and buried without coffins by Union troopers. After the Battle of Cedar Creek, Union cavalrymen visited the Ashby farm and took whatever grain and food they found (although the family had successfully harvested and hidden valuable bushels of corn). By the winter of 1864–​1865, Ashby recalled, “the contest had almost worn out the patience of our most loyal citizens, who seemed to feel that the spring campaign would bring further disasters.”16 Petersburg civilians experienced the disease and disorder brought by the presence of large numbers of soldiers, as well as the skyrocketing prices of basic necessities and a rising crime rate. They also endured the day-​to-​day dangers and hardships of living near an active battle front and, by early fall 1864, what probably seemed to them to be a regular siege. During the months following the arrival of Union forces outside the city, more than six hundred buildings had been hit by artillery fire, with virtually every building in the eastern part of the city damaged or destroyed. Confederate engineers too did plenty of damage, aided by the two hundred free African Americans conscripted as workers. Confederate fortifications plowed right through yards and houses, slave cabins—​often on the edges of farm properties—​were burned to clear fields of fire, and soldiers clear-​ cut orchards to make abatis (pointed logs jutting out of the ground to provide obstacles in front of earthworks). Many of the city’s industries had all but shut down, replaced by the ever-​growing hospitals.

580   James Marten Although the damage was largely to buildings, several residents were killed by Federal artillery fire, mostly during the summer. Random firing into the city continued throughout the campaign. By fall it was estimated that two-​thirds of the city’s residents had evacuated. Those who remained, like their military counterparts, sought to strengthen their defenses by building timber-​and-​earth bomb shelters, piling sandbags around houses, or setting up housekeeping in basements. Some set up tents on the western edge of the city, farther from the fighting, to wait out the campaign. The city government did what it could, distributing cheap firewood to needy widows, orphans, and soldiers’ families—​as in the Valley, the ravenous armies had consumed most of the wood in the region—​which made up more than 10 percent of the city’s population. The memoir of a Petersburg woman detailed her family’s life during the last year of the war, when her father was killed and a teenage brother died of disease while serving with the local home guard unit. Her family fled their home, which was exposed to Union artillery fire, and lived for many months in a two-​room basement in a relatively safe neighborhood. She recalled the evenings, when civilians would “go out . . . to watch the mortar shells. They were like arches of fire, and very beautiful.” Even the youngest residents could identify the different kinds of shells dropping into the city.17

The Valley, Petersburg, and the Election of 1864 The political situation in the North in the late summer of 1864 worried President Lincoln and all of his generals. Northern Democrats continued to attack emancipation as a war strategy a full eighteen months after the Emancipation Proclamation and bitterly denounced the turn toward the hard war against civilians, which they believed would render reconciliation and ultimate peace difficult if not impossible. In nominating Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan for the presidency in August, they believed they had found the perfect formula: a former war hero who had refused to make war on civilians and had been unfairly fired by Lincoln. The Democratic peace platform no doubt encouraged Confederate strategists to find ways of extending the war into November. That McClellan distanced himself from a negotiated peace was somewhat confusing, but the real possibility of a Democratic victory—​at least as the campaign season got underway in early fall—​shaped Confederate and Union military decisions. Ironically, until a few weeks before the election, Lincoln agreed with the Confederates; he was doubtful about the possibility of success and had shared a memorandum with his cabinet predicting his defeat and pledging himself and his cabinet to fight to save the Union. Thus, the fall fighting was characterized on both sides by political calculations, with Lee continuing the aggressive offensive-​defensive strategy he had followed since taking command of the Army of Northern Virginia two years earlier. Now he hoped it would extend the war and force peace negotiations. With Lincoln and Grant considering the

Petersburg Besieged and the Shenandoah Valley    581 risks and rewards of every offensive operations, September and October especially would test the Union’s ability to mesh political and military strategies. Events far to the south made this easier, when Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman, after fighting his way through northwest Georgia, finally captured Atlanta in early September, a victory with very real material and emotional results. Grant and Sheridan hoped to show that they could make similar inroads against Confederates in the Shenandoah Valley and around Richmond and Petersburg. With an eye on the political situation, in September Grant ordered Sheridan not to take untoward risks. Sheridan later explained his decision to wait until he learned of the withdrawal of a division from Early’s force. “Believing the condition of affairs throughout the country required great prudence on my part, that a defeat of the forces of my command could be ill afforded, and knowing that no interests in the valley . . . were suffering by the delay,” he waited patiently until he knew he had a strong advantage.18 In the meantime, Democrats continued to attack the government’s emancipation policy, and when Sheridan commenced the Burning in late September, they leaped at the chance to declare that it was a cruel and unnecessary treatment of civilians that would inevitably lead to greater resistance among Southerners, as the bitter response of Valley residents and increased partisan attacked proved. Indeed, the biggest difference between Lincoln and McClellan was the latter’s vow that, if elected, he would not wage war on civilians. But the Republicans believed battlefield victories would help their cause. Cedar Creek gave Lincoln a little more confidence heading into November, although he still predicted that he would win by a razor-​thin margin. In the end, however, whatever hesitation American voters had about the ruthless tactics applied to the Valley and despite Grant’s defeat on the Boydton Plank Road in late October, the clear-​cut victories by Sheridan over Early—​especially following the scare the Confederates had thrown into Washington in the summer—​helped propel Lincoln to a landslide victory a few weeks later, when he lost the popular vote in only three states and earned 212 electoral votes to McClellan’s 21. Recent scholarship has challenged the notion that the Union soldiers who overwhelmingly supported Lincoln—​over three-​fourths of the soldiers who cast ballots—​had converted to Republican policies, especially emancipation.19 Yet their decisive victories in the Valley no doubt gave them confidence in the administration, while the continued sacrifices endured around Petersburg provided even more inspiration to finish the war that had already cost the lives of so many comrades.

December 1864 The year ended for Confederate civilians in occupied Winchester with a Christmas party at the hospital for Confederate soldiers, among them forty badly wounded men. The party went well, even though, as resident Laura Lee wrote, the “delicacies and luxuries” available in the stores were too expensive for civilians. Worse, the Christmas service at

582   James Marten Lee’s church offered a bitter reminder of their defeat and occupation: “Gen. Sheridan and Custer were there displaying themselves. There were many splendid entertainments and great feasting” among the Yankees, while her “Christmas dinner was a small piece of beef and a dish of tomatoes.”20 At Petersburg, Confederate officers whistled past the graveyard by staging an old-​ English-​style tournament a few days before Christmas. Other officers and men grabbed a little merriment wherever they could, and drink and dancing helped some forget for a few hours the brutal fall campaign. Most troops, however, had to settle for a dismal dinner of turkey scraps and a little apple butter. Within six months the war would be over. Sheridan’s Valley Campaign and the fighting around Petersburg in the autumn of 1864 had redefined the Civil War in the East. There would, of course, be few pitched battles on the open field after 1864, but Grant would emerge from the campaign with a better sense of how to end the fighting. Moreover, civilians would continue to experience the hard hand of war. Any reasonable hopes Confederates had in August were dashed by December. Sheridan would later brag that when his campaign opened, “we found our enemy boastful and confident,” but by the time it was over “this impression had been removed from his mind, and gave place to good sense and a strong desire to quit fighting.” Although an exaggeration, this bit of self-​satisfied hindsight effectively describes the change that occurred during these memorable months.21

Notes 1. Jeffry E. Wert, From Winchester to Cedar Creek: The Shenandoah Valley Campaign of 1864 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2010), 105. 2. Warren to Meade, October 1, 1864, in U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1880–​1901), ser. 1, vol. 42, pt. 3: 20. Hereafter cited as OR. 3. Miles to Maj. H. H. Bingham, Acting Assistant Adjutant General, Second Corps, October 11, 1864, OR, ser. 1, vol. 42, pt. 3: 160. 4. Hancock to Meade, October 15, 1864, OR, ser. 1, vol. 42, pt. 3: 238. 5. Quoted in Earl J. Hess, In the Trenches at Petersburg: Field Fortifications and Confederate Defeat (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 50. 6. Hess, In the Trenches at Petersburg, xv. 7. Gen. Benjamin Butler, “Soldiers of the Army of the James,” October 11, 1864, OR, ser. 1, vol. 42, pt. 3: 161, 163, 167–​170. 8. Quoted in Mark Grimsley, The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy toward Southern Civilians, 1861–​1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 167. 9. Quoted in Richard R. Duncan, Beleaguered Winchester: A Virginia Community at War, 1861–​1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007), 209. 10. Sheridan to Grant, October 7, 1864, OR, ser. 1, vol. 43, pt. 1: 30–​31. 11. Sheridan to Halleck, November 24, 1864, OR, ser. 1, vol. 43, pt. 1: 37–​38. 12. Sheridan to Grant, October 7, 1864, OR, ser. 1, vol. 43, pt. 1: 30–​31.

Petersburg Besieged and the Shenandoah Valley    583 13. William Blair, Virginia’s Private War: Feeding Body and Soul in the Confederacy, 1861–​1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 108–​109. 14. Robert Hugh Martin, A Boy of Old Shenandoah, ed. Carolyn Martin Rutherford (Parsons, WV: McClain, 1977), 47, 45–​46. 15. Elizabeth Preston Allan, ed., The Life and Letters of Margaret Junkin Preston (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903), 158–​159, 179. 16. Thomas A. Ashby, The Valley Campaigns: Being the Reminiscences of a Non-​Combatant While between the Lines in the Shenandoah Valley during the War of the States (New York: Neal, 1914), 301. 17. Ann Bannister, “Incidents in the Life of a Civil War Child,” Harrison Henry Cocke Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. 18. Sheridan to Bvt. Maj. Gen. John A. Rawlins, February 3, 1866, OR, ser. 1, vol. 43, pt. 1: 46. 19. See especially Jonathan W. White, Emancipation, the Union Army, and the Reelection of Abraham Lincoln (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014). 20. Michael G. Mahon, ed., Winchester Divided: The Civil War Diaries of Julia Chase and Laura Lee (Mechanicsville, PA: Stackpole Books, 2002), December 26, 1864, 177. 21. Sheridan to Bvt. Major Gen. John A. Rawlins, February 3, 1866, OR, ser. 1, vol. 43, pt. 1: 54.

Bibliography Blair, William. Virginia’s Private War: Feeding Body and Soul in the Confederacy, 1861–​1865. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Brady, Lisa M. War upon the Land:  Military Strategy and the Transformation of Southern Landscapes during the American Civil War. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012. Duncan, Richard R. Beleaguered Winchester: A Virginia Community at War, 1861–​1865. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007. Gallagher, Gary W., ed. The Shenandoah Valley Campaign of 1864. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Glatthaar, Joseph J. Forged in Battle: The Civil War Alliance of Black Soldiers and White Officers. New York: Free Press, 1990. Greene, A. Wilson. Civil War Petersburg: Confederate City in the Crucible of War. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006. Grimsley, Mark. The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy toward Southern Civilians, 1861–​1865. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Henderson, William D. Petersburg in the Civil War:  War at the Door. Lynchburg, VA:  H. E. Howard, 1998. Hess, Earl J. In the Trenches at Petersburg: Field Fortifications and Confederate Defeat. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. Jordan, Ervin L., Jr. Black Confederates and Afro-​Yankees in Civil War Virginia. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995. Lewis, Thomas A. The Guns of Cedar Creek. New York: Harper & Row, 1988. Neely, Mark E., Jr. The Civil War and the Limits of Destruction. Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2010. Newsome, Hampton. Richmond Must Fall: The Richmond-​Petersburg Campaign, October 1864. Kent, OH: Kent University Press, 2013.

584   James Marten Noyalas, Jonathan A., ed. Home Front to Front Line: The Civil War Era in the Shenandoah Valley. New Market, VA: Shenandoah Valley Battlefields Foundation, 2009. Robinson, William Glenn. “From the Crater to New Market Heights: A Tale of Two Divisions.” In Black Soldiers in Blue: African American Troops in the Civil War Era, ed. John David Smith, 169–​199. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Wert, Jeffry D. From Winchester to Cedar Creek:  The Shenandoah Campaign of 1864. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2010.

Chapter 36

T he Carolinas C a mpa i g n A War Reckoning Christopher Phillips

On March 4, 1865, Pres. Abraham Lincoln stood on the temporary podium on the U.S. Capitol’s east portico, suddenly sun-​drenched after a rain-​soaked morning, to offer his second inaugural address. He spoke not only to the ten thousand or so listeners there but to a fractured, suffering nation. The scene, along with the message and tone, were strikingly different from exactly four years earlier, when the president-​elect addressed an anxious nation from the same spot. Now the reelected president stood beneath a completed Capitol dome, a physical reminder of his and his administration’s steadfast resolve through nearly four years of bitter and bloody civil war. Confidence now replaced the Northern public’s former disquietude, and with good reason. The Federal government was firmly in the hands of Republicans, the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution ending slavery had been passed by Congress, and eighteen of the requisite twenty-​seven states had already ratified it. Though no one knew precisely how much longer the beleaguered remnants of Confederate armies in the field could hold on, the war was obviously marching rapidly toward an end. The wind now at his back, Lincoln’s pugnacity in his lengthy first inaugural address largely gave way to a more somber, and far briefer, oration. Yet, for those Americans who expected to hear (or read) a soaring paean to the victorious Union armies, or a righteous explanation of the war’s meaning and staggering cost in human life and national treasure (perhaps as many as a half-​million Federal war dead and some six billion dollars spent), or some insight into the “course to be pursued” toward the defeated South and its more than four million freed people once the war ended, or a full reconciliation balm that might help avoid the onset of an even more divisive peace, they would find disappointment in Lincoln’s remarkably short and detached second address. Rather, the president offered something of a sermon: a complex, biblical meditation on the mystical, interconnected, and often harsh contingencies of slavery, the war, and divine purpose. It explained little, predicted less, and satisfied few, especially Unionist hard-​liners who rejected the president’s soothing conclusion: “With

586   Christopher Phillips malice toward none; with charity for all . . . let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds.” Rather than accept Lincoln’s explanation that payment was now due for the national sin of slavery, hard-​liners favored vengeance on the traitorous South, a reckoning for “this mighty scourge of war” that had inflicted incalculable suffering and sacrifice on the nation. These would not, as Lincoln warned, end with the war. Radical Republicans might have believed the president’s use of Psalms 19:9—​“the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether”—​validated their belief that the wages of the national sin of slavery measured more than the deaths of some 750,000 Americans. Some, such as Boston attorney Richard Henry Dana Jr., would offer a metaphor for his faction of the national party’s newfound political and moral authority over defeated Confederates and Democrats alike, and its intent to exact retributive justice for the North’s enormous sacrifices and loss. Just weeks following the president’s assassination, to grim listeners at Faneuil Hall on June 21, 1865, Dana, once a Republican moderate, now a Radical who had successfully argued for the Federal government in the Prizes Case that the Union blockade of Southern ports was justified within the Constitution and the laws of war, offered a different, vengeful judgment: the war powers were intact after the war’s end, with the victorious North holding the vanquished South in an unyielding “grasp of war.”1 Though Radicals like Dana fumed at Lincoln’s apparent leniency toward the defeated South, the president’s frustrating opacity in his brief address belied the precision with which he had grasped the war’s military situation even as its imminent, unreconciled conclusion was yet unfolding. In fact, Lincoln was intimately involved in planning strategic operations for the Federal armies in the field in Virginia and the Carolinas to defeat the largest remaining field armies in order to seal the fate of the Confederacy’s government after four long years of conflict. Momentum was in the Union’s favor, especially since December. Lincoln and his secretary of war, Edwin M. Stanton, were keenly aware of the coalescence of various strains of hard-​war tactics that had overspread the Federal military conduct in the eastern theater, especially since the previous summer’s campaigning. In Virginia, Maj. Gen. Philip H.  Sheridan, commanding some fifteen thousand cavalrymen, was under orders from Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant to “follow [Lt. Gen. Jubal A. Early] to the death” and clear the Shenandoah Valley of some fifteen thousand Confederate troops as well as its insurgent partisans and guerrillas. When Grant’s instructions shifted from pursuit to destruction in September 1864, Sheridan led a devastating two-​week campaign of systematic destruction of fields, farms, mills, and livestock known already as “the Burning.”2 On February 28, 1865, two brigades of Sheridan’s army under Brig. Gen. George A. Custer overwhelmed the last remnant of Early’s starved and dwindled force at Waynesboro, capturing 1,200 Confederates along with all eleven artillery pieces, seventeen battle flags, and 150 wagons. Sheridan then pushed eastward to relieve the stalemate around the Confederate capital at Richmond, where Gen. Robert E. Lee’s entrenched Army of Northern Virginia was wavering under nine months of relentless pressure from Grant’s 120,000-​man Army of the Potomac. Frustrated by his inability to drive Lee’s men from their trenches, in early February Grant commenced his final left flanking movement south of Petersburg to bypass the

The Carolinas Campaign    587 trenches and sever the remaining railroads that supplied Lee’s stubborn army of some sixty thousand men. These moves were intended for far more than starving or driving Lee’s soldiers stubbornly from their works. Grant intended to prevent any juncture with Gen. Joseph E. Johnston’s force in North Carolina. Named to command and reinforced by remnants of the Army of Tennessee after Gen. John Bell Hood’s disastrous defeat at Nashville, Johnston had been attempting to slow the advance of Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman’s army that had driven north through the Carolinas during the rainy winter months of 1864–​1865. Among the several goals of the Carolinas campaign was Sherman’s desire to reinforce Grant at Petersburg, and he traveled to City Point, Virginia, to discuss closing military strategies with the commanding general and the president aboard the steamer River Queen. Sherman consistently advocated for waging the hardest forms of warfare, to strike a mortal psychological blow to the Confederate home front and to suppress the growing insurgency of irregular forces that had plagued other war fronts for several years. The Federal armies’ turn to hard war in Virginia in 1864—​epitomized by the Ohioan Sheridan’s Burning—​found its origin in a different, western theater, brought with its officers and soldiers to the eastern theater of war. Nearly from the war’s onset, western officers trucked little in the idea of conciliation. Such a concept would favor a moderate or “rosewater” policy toward slave-​state civilians that would allow time for majority-​ Unionist populations to reassert authority, disavow the Confederacy, and bring their states back into the Union. Like Sheridan and Grant, Sherman was an Ohioan and was among the earliest advocates of aggressive war-​making against Confederates and disloyal civilians. In the autumn of 1861, he had offered an impassioned call for hard-​lining the war to the then secretary of war, Simon Cameron, that included a dialectical view of loyalty. “Most unfortunately, the war in which we are now engaged has been complicated with the belief on the one hand that all on the other are not enemies,” he wrote the secretary of the treasury, another fellow Ohioan, Salmon P. Chase. “When one nation is at war with another, all the people of the one are enemies of the other.” In the late summer of 1862 in western Tennessee, Sherman, by then one of Grant’s most trusted subordinates, made good on his belief, ordering retaliatory burnings of several towns for guerrilla depredations. Responding to a Memphis newspaper editor who complained, he held firm: “This [waste] . . . is an expense not chargeable to us, but to those who made the war; and generally war is destruction and nothing else.”3 With the stakes raised by the 1864 presidential election, which saw former Federal commander Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan running as a Democrat against the president, the hard way of war-​making returned to the eastern theater. Western men who largely ridiculed eastern officers and troops for their lack of success (referring to them mockingly as “McClellan men”) had found consistent victories by this style of warfare. They served under a president and Federal high command who intended, as one Federal commander in Kentucky noted, to drive home the point “that it costs something to be disloyal.” After a Christmas strategy meeting in Cincinnati, Grant and Sherman took distinctive approaches to hard war to their respective commands in Virginia and

588   Christopher Phillips Georgia. Summoned by Lincoln to overall command after his resounding victory at Chattanooga in November 1863, Grant initiated an aggressive, attritive campaigning strategy in the Overland Campaign that led to bloody repulses but successfully drove Lee into entrenchments around Richmond, while Sherman maneuvered through mountains gaps and valleys in northern Georgia to advance his army to the outskirts of Atlanta. After encircling and capturing it, and driving uncaptured Confederate forces westward into Alabama, Sherman made good on his boast to “make Georgia howl” with his March to the Sea, foraging from or laying waste to the homes, barns, fields, and smokehouses of disloyal Georgia civilians along his army’s path to Savannah.4 The destruction that characterized the March, as its veterans referred to it simply, was only a prelude to the hard campaign strategy Sherman intended to conduct in the Carolinas. Nor was he alone in his earnestness to inflict damage on property as a form of exacting retribution for South Carolina’s role in the coming of the war. Commanders and soldiers alike were eager to do so. “The truth is the whole army is burning with an insatiable desire to wreak vengeance upon South Carolina,” wrote Sherman. Unlike the March in Georgia, where property destruction was targeted and even restrained, Sherman intended no such restraint for South Carolinians: “We are not only fighting hostile armies, but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war. . . . I doubt if we shall spare the public buildings [in Columbia and Charleston], as we did in Milledgeville.” Sherman was forced to convince Grant to allow the campaign at all. The rainy winter weather would swell the swamps and wide rivers in the low country, making troop movement unlikely. Grant’s initial plan was to transport Sherman’s armies by sea to Virginia to coordinate with the Federal armies there to defeat Lee. Such a move would take months, and Grant relented. Sherman was free to beat down all resistance and make South Carolina howl.5 To ensure Sherman’s success, Grant detached a ten-​thousand-​man division from the Nineteenth Corps and sent it by sea to garrison Savannah so that Sherman could take all of his seventy thousand veteran western troops into the Carolinas. He then detached twenty thousand men under Maj. Gen. John M. Schofield, fresh off the smashing victory at Nashville, from the Army of the Cumberland, heading them east to assist with the advance on Wilmington, North Carolina, the Confederacy’s last major port, defended by six thousand men under Gen. Braxton Bragg. A separate land-​sea expedition under Maj. Gen. Alfred H. Terry with support from Rear Admiral David D. Porter and the sixty ships of the North Atlantic Blockading Squadron would assault Fort Fisher and its garrison, stubbornly guarding the mouth of the Cape Fear River. After driving Bragg from Wilmington and occupying the city, Schofield’s force was to move inland toward Goldsboro, an important rail station between Savannah and Richmond, and establish a Federal supply base. From there, he would join Sherman for the final push through North Carolina and into Virginia. The Federal commanders finalized their complicated plan for the Carolinas Campaign knowing that Confederate forces there were in disarray. The roughly twenty thousand available troops were scattered from Augusta, Georgia, to Charleston, and

The Carolinas Campaign    589

Map 36.1 Carolinas

undermanned, including about 3,500 state militia with service limitations. Gen. P. G. T. Beauregard, commanding the Military Division of the West, ordered eleven thousand of Hood’s remaining troops from Tupelo, Mississippi, to train, boat, and march some five hundred miles to Augusta, and Lee sent a division of cavalry under Lt. Gen. Wade Hampton to his native state. All were expected to coordinate, but a conference of the various commanders—​Beauregard, Lt. Gen. William J. Hardee, Lt. Gen. Daniel H. Hill, and Maj. Gen. Gustavus W. Smith—​decided that any concentration of their disparate forces would be folly. They agreed only to a possible belated concentration near Columbia, the state capital, to slow or stop Sherman’s likely advance on the city. Mostly, they grimly hoped that the winter floods would deter the Federal advance. “[T]‌he paralysis of approaching death seemed to be upon the direction of our affairs,” wrote a subordinate.6

590   Christopher Phillips Sherman’s delay in Savannah allowed him to implement a vital component of the broader strategy for ending slavery, anticipating the reunited nation’s transition from war to peace. With more than 150,000 Black men serving in the ranks of the U.S. armies, Radical Republicans in the U.S. Congress had long pushed for land redistribution in order to break the back of slaveholders’ power. Feeling pressure from within his own party, as the U.S. House debated a constitutional amendment passed by the Senate that would end slavery, Lincoln sent Stanton to Savannah in order to facilitate a conversation with Sherman over what to do with planters’ abandoned lands. On January 12, 1865, they met with leaders from the city’s African American churches about emancipation. Four days later, already with the president’s approval, Sherman issued Special Field Orders No. 15, which explicitly called for the settlement of Black families on confiscated land from Charleston southward to Florida’s St. Johns River for settlement by freed families in forty-​acre tracts, as well as encouraging the enlistment of freedmen in the Union Army and designating a general officer to act as inspector of freedmen’s settlements. Sherman’s order immediately became consequential, providing for the settlement of roughly forty thousand African Americans and making redistribution of abandoned land to freed people a plank of Reconstruction policy. But the Ohioan was no Radical, and he made his directive mostly for military expediency, lifting his army’s burden for supporting refugee freed people, local as well as those carried south through Georgia, as it drove north into South Carolina. On March 3, 1865, Congress established the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands. Once the Federals swung into their four-​column advance in early February, the soggy, cold weather—​the wettest in decades—​deterred the columns only slightly longer than any Confederate defense might have. It did nothing to deter battle-​scarred veterans’ retributive purpose for South Carolina, intent on making the state where secession began suffer. The left wing under Maj. Gen. Henry Slocum feinted toward Augusta, while the right wing, under Maj. Gen. Oliver O. Howard, did the same toward Charleston. A corps under Maj. Gen. Frank P.  Blair moved by ship up the coast and occupied Beaufort, followed by another under Maj. Gen. John A.  Logan, establishing a supply head. Sherman aimed for its main objective: Columbia, a vital rail hub and manufacturing center some 125 miles north of Savannah. Much of their muddy march was accomplished by corduroy roads through widened swamps and hastily built bridges thrown over swollen rivers and creeks. Hardeeville, Robertsville, Barnwell (or “Burnwell,” as the Federal soldiers quipped), and Orangeburg were among the first to experience destructive war, all burned to the ground. Dozens more towns followed, with public and private buildings alike put to the torch, while, despite strict orders against foraging, rogue soldiers ransacked hundreds of rural homes, farms, and plantations. Confederate cavalry soon targeted these “bummers,” often summarily hanging them and leaving their bodies dangling in the trees. Confederate cavalry under Maj. Gen. Joseph Wheeler had been doing much the same for months, leaving many of these homes vacant or bereft. When Sherman’s army approached the state capital on February 17, it was overcrowded with refugees, white and Black. The population had more than tripled to nearly twenty thousand since the war began, until an exodus left the city fearing that the approaching

The Carolinas Campaign    591 Federals would soon burn it as they had the other towns. Only the day before, Wheeler’s horsemen had plundered much of the city of its available foodstuffs before leaving. The mayor, Thomas J. Goodwyn, met immediately with Sherman on that morning and received a pledge that citizens and their property were safe from harm. Hoping to prevent further ransacking of their stores and homes by the Federals, remaining citizens proffered liquor to the arriving Federal troops. Gale-​force winds, stacked cotton bales and loose, blowing fibers, abandoned buildings and homes, and vengeful, drunken soldiers soon conspired as innumerable fires engulfed large sections of the city’s thirty-​ six-​square-​block central business district, including the railroad depot, the state capitol, college, and armory, the jail, the government printing house (where much of the Confederacy’s currency was printed), and the Ursuline convent and academy. Despite the efforts of local fire companies and some Federals, the spreading inferno soon destroyed much of the northern part of the city. The origin of the fires—​whether accidental or deliberately set—​and the rampant social violence associated with Sherman’s foragers immediately became a subject of debate between Sherman and Hampton. (Sherman later claimed, “Though I never ordered it and never wished it, I have never shed any tears over the event, because I believe that it hastened what we all fought for, the end of the war.”) By morning the wind had subsided, revealing more than 450 buildings reduced to charred skeletons of brick and wood. By the mayor’s estimate, two-​thirds of Columbia was in ruins. Undebated was the fact that many Federal soldiers welcomed and participated in the burning as long-​awaited justice for traitorous Southern civilians, including women and children. “The women of the South kept the war alive,” snarled one, “and it is only by making them suffer that we can subdue the men.”7 Pro-​Confederate civilians’ resolve did not melt away at the Federals’ destructive tactics, whether among poor or elite white women. Although many Carolinians protested the burdens of war, they were not necessarily all disloyal. Many sought to negotiate the war by minimizing its hardships, whether physical or psychological, keeping their true loyalties hidden. The destruction caused by Sherman’s forces served as a catalyst to redirect their resentments toward whatever enemy most disrupted their personal safety and economic pursuits. Slaves and white women alike were forced to confront the dilemma of Union soldiers who were nearly as bad or even worse than secessionist civilians, Confederates, and irregulars, requiring them to fight all for their own protection. Just as Union soldiers perceived “secesh” women as “she-​devils,” white Southern women viewed these soldiers as “demons.” Far from being victims of war, elite white women in the Carolinas showed courage in the face of physical suffering and emotional abuse, which pushed some toward a stronger ideological loyalty to the Confederate nation rather than cause it to flag. In areas of the Carolinas that had yet seen little of the war, white women’s resolve often buoyed civilian support for the Confederacy that was collapsing in many other of its war-​torn parts. Within days of Columbia’s fall, Sherman continued his ruinous advance knowing that Hardee had evacuated Charleston and few Confederate forces lay between his army and the North Carolina border. After Fort Fisher fell and its garrison surrendered on January

592   Christopher Phillips 15, closing the mouth of the Cape Fear River, Schofield’s Twenty-​third Corps landed and reinforced Terry. Schofield took command of the combined force and prepared to move against the Confederate division defending Wilmington. Bragg had poorly prepared the city’s defenses despite its obvious importance, and once the Federal assault commenced he failed to supply the fort, ignoring desperate pleas for aid from its commanding officer. Starting on February 11 and continuing for ten days, with six hundred guns on Porter’s ships providing vital artillery support, Schofield pushed back Bragg’s defenders in three actions on both sides of the river. Fearing encirclement, Bragg ordered the city abandoned and burned what stores his men could not carry, along with foundries, shipyards, and ships. On February 22, his force evacuated Wilmington and retreated north toward Goldsboro. The “Gibraltar of the South” was closed, choking the main supply head for Lee’s army and at last completing the Federal blockade. The following day, Joseph Johnston reluctantly accepted command of the Army of Tennessee and all remaining troops in the region, especially those in North and South Carolina who might oppose Sherman. Prior to Sherman’s arrival, Johnston had evacuated his home in Columbia, South Carolina, having lived there since his controversial removal from command the previous July by longtime antagonist Jefferson Davis because of his inability to prevent Sherman from advancing to the outskirts of Atlanta. Now in Lincolnton, North Carolina, he was prevailed on by Lee and key members of the Confederate Congress (as well as the vice president, Alexander H. Stephens) to take command from Beauregard, restore “confidence [to] the army and the people,” and protect Lee’s unprotected rear. Johnston took the command less out of confidence that he could stop Sherman’s advance—​less likely now than in north Georgia—​than out of loyalty and duty to Lee, the Confederate general in chief. Lee’s private confidence in Johnston swayed the general to accept reinstatement, ordered by the new secretary of war, Maj. Gen. John C. Breckinridge, rather than Davis. (Johnston was convinced Davis wanted him in command to humiliate him by surrender.) He joined his command on February 25 and began to pull together his disparate forces currently at Charlotte, Cheraw, and Goldsboro. “The remnant of the Army of Tennessee is much divided,” he wrote to Lee. “So are the other troops.” With only twenty-​five thousand men, Johnston privately anticipated being able only to prolong the war in order to secure “fair terms of peace.”8 Desertions now plagued the Confederate forces that Johnston attempted to organize to slow, if not stop, Sherman’s newest “March.” War-​weariness and, in the case of some, the sudden introduction of garrison troops to field service in a part of the Confederacy that had only now been made a war front certainly played a role. (The growing attrition among Lee’s troops in Virginia, estimated by then at hundreds per day, is a much-​used example.) But the hard style of warfare that Sherman had brought to Georgia and the Carolinas was perhaps a fulcrum for much of this desertion. Among the several goals of both campaigns was to destroy the Carolinas physically, but also to wreck civilians’ morale by making hardest war on them. In the latter, Sherman was at least partially successful. Many soldiers certainly sensed, perhaps witnessed, the intrusive warfare made by Sherman’s host from their undermanned positions at the front. Many more knew well

The Carolinas Campaign    593 their harsh treatment of Georgia’s and South Carolina’s civilians, property, and cities, and desperate news from home and pleas for protection only punctuated the urgency to desert. One Confederate officer wrote that “under cover of darkness” many slipped away, driven by “the great suffering of their wives and children at home, caused by the devastations of Sherman’s army.”9 Sherman left Columbia on February 19, heading eastward toward Winnsboro and ultimately Fayetteville. Delayed a week by the flooded Catawba River, his troops were soon encumbered by trailing refugees, white and Black. Despite his efforts to deter them, thousands of African Americans from all across the low country, from Charleston to Columbia, streamed toward Sherman’s columns seeking freedom, accompanying them along their lines of march. The presence of nine regiments of U.S. Colored Troops, more than half of them raised in coastal North Carolina, confirmed their belief that the Federal forces would offer them refuge. Henry Slocum, commanding Sherman’s left wing, marveled that “at time[s]‌they were almost equal in numbers to the army they were following.” An irritated Sherman, not anticipating a flood of refugee freed people after having issued his Special Orders No. 15, complained that the freed people now “clung to our skirts, impeded our movements and consumed our food.”10 Sherman’s complaints about refugees consistently failed to consider freed people who followed the armies as more than opportunistic freedom-​seekers. Many in fact sought protection from the spiraling chaos of irregular war that imperiled their lives. In April 1862, the Confederacy had authorized mounted partisan rangers in order to take control over the guerrilla war burgeoning in occupied parts of the slave states and to help defend those areas with little protection from its armies. Rather than bring irregular warfare under state control, the Partisan Ranger Act encouraged local vigilante activity on the periphery of the Confederacy. Especially after Lincoln’s fall announcement of emancipation of the slaves, a brutal, inner conflict had raged in much of the Carolinas that belied their having seen little war until its last few months. Federal beachheads in swampy, coastal South and North Carolina encouraged the mobilization of Unionist irregulars, known locally as “Buffaloes” and comprising loyalists, Confederate deserters, fugitive slaves, and draft dodgers. They preyed on state militia, Confederate troops (often recruitment squads), and pro-​Confederate guerrilla bands that roamed much of the state terrorizing Unionist families, as well as Federal garrisons, slaves, free Blacks, and deserters. In late 1863, a raid conducted by exclusively African American troops on the northeastern counties intensified ongoing guerrilla warfare there, triggering widespread retaliatory violence and a peace movement among disaffected white citizens that one historian has called a “Quiet Rebellion.” Communities soon tried to withdraw from the war by declaring neutrality, and Confederates controlled only half of North Carolina. The resultant destabilization of the home front in 1864 caused North Carolina’s governor, Zebulon Vance, to create a home guard system for local defense against these deserter and outlaw gangs, only fueling the escalating social violence.11 Sherman’s destructive warfare in Georgia and the Carolinas caused an explosion of guerrilla and partisan violence all around his advance, causing Federal troops

594   Christopher Phillips commonly to hang those accused of assisting guerrillas and Confederates. Guerrillas and Confederates alike responded in kind by executing deserters, prisoners, and Unionists, notably at Kinston, where twenty-​two Federal North Carolinians were hanged for having formerly served in the Confederate ranks or as partisan rangers and turned coat, after being captured at New Bern. Slave escapes and organized uprisings crescendoed, and independent home guard companies, filling the void following the cessation of the partisan ranger system, were empowered to round up deserters and keep order on plantations. They soon targeted African Americans, slave and free, to prevent escapes and a general insurrection, often carrying them off following raids. From this chaos, thousands of white and Black refugees in Georgia and the Carolinas believed their future was best protected by the advancing Federal armies, despite the hard treatment they often received from unsympathetic western soldiers and officers. Consolidating the Confederate defense proved slightly less difficult because of the Federal delay, but confusing command structures and personal politics among the commanders (including their loyalties or animus to Jefferson Davis) now diminished their ability to work effectively in concert. Johnston anticipated that Sherman’s goal was to unite with Schofield’s force, which would advance from Wilmington, in order ultimately to reach Grant in Virginia, and he recognized that either Raleigh, the state capital, or Goldsboro, a vital rail junction, was Sherman’s primary target in North Carolina. Bragg, who had recommended Johnston’s removal from command to Davis as the Confederate president’s then military advisor, now was understandably dismayed that Johnston was in overall command. As he hastily moved north from Wilmington, Bragg requested of his longtime adversary, now commanding officer, that he send the remnants of the Army of Tennessee to join with his division at Smithfield, about thirty miles northwest of Goldsboro. (Only about four thousand of an expected eleven thousand of the Army of Tennessee arrived in North Carolina to join the Confederate armies’ defensive force.) Bragg argued that this consolidated force could strike a rapid blow against Sherman and perhaps stop him. Johnston reluctantly agreed to the plan. Another commander who had little intention of joining Bragg was Hardee. He commanded the troops that evacuated Charleston and retreated to Cheraw, South Carolina, in time to contest Sherman’s force as it approached. He had lost a quarter of his troops despite the fact that much of the evacuation was done by train. Despite plaudits for his performances as a corps commander at Shiloh, Perryville, and Stones River, he also had experienced deep conflicts with Bragg that resulted in Hardee’s being transferred to a less significant assignment: reorganizing paroled and exchanged men from Vicksburg in garrison at Demopolis, Alabama. He returned to the army a year later, at Chattanooga, and formed a defense that extricated Bragg’s army from Sherman’s driving force. After repeated Confederate defeats outside Atlanta that summer—​ for which Hood blamed Hardee—​Hardee secured a transfer and commanded the Confederate forces that unsuccessfully defended Savannah. Referred to by his men as “Old Reliable,” Hardee was offered command of the Army of Tennessee when Bragg was removed but declined in favor of Johnston. He now retreated on March 3 before Slocum’s wing rather than consolidate with Bragg. Finally, Daniel H. Hill was en route

The Carolinas Campaign    595 to Johnston with about two thousand men from the Army of Tennessee and received orders to join Bragg at Smithfield. Like Hardee, Hill had requested reassignment from Bragg after Chickamauga, and the enmity between the two men was palpable enough for Johnston to send a note to him asking him to “forget the past for this emergency.”12 A wary Sherman had by then learned that Johnston had taken command of the Confederate defense, and he knew that his old adversary would not easily be fooled by feints and misdirections. (By a stroke of luck, in this case the capture of one of Hardee’s brigade commanders, Sherman learned that the Confederates would contest him ahead of Goldsboro.) His forces were now converging in three columns on Goldsboro and were separated enough to be vulnerable to attack, much as Bragg intended. Having secured the railroad junction between New Bern and Goldsboro (and doing the work of repairing it to serve as Sherman’s supply line), Maj. Gen. Jacob D. Cox, in temporary command of the bulk of Schofield’s fourteen-​thousand-​man Thirty-​third Corps moving northwest from Wilmington, encountered Bragg’s six-​thousand-​man force at Southwest Creek, a deep tributary of the Neuse River about three miles west of Kinston. Bragg had reported Federal troops moving in force as early as March 6 and recognized that this point controlled the creek and several roads, as well as the nearby Atlantic and North Carolina Railroad. More, as Cox reported, it “was the only dry land in the vicinity.” Sensing it was the key to local movement and defense of the railroad as it ran northward, Bragg destroyed the bridges over the creek and entrenched his forces on the west bank, which lay in Cox’s intended path. Early on the morning of March 8, two thousand troops of the Army of Tennessee under Daniel H. Hill arrived and reinforced Bragg.13 Cox was determined to drive the fords over the creek and push Bragg’s troops away from the railroad. As two regiments under Col. Charles Upham searched for an appropriate place to ford or build a footbridge, Bragg was determined not to make the mistakes that Johnston had made by remaining solely on defense, and he followed Lee’s suggestion to attack one of Sherman’s wings. He sent Maj. Gen. Robert Hoke’s veteran division over the creek to attack what he thought was Cox’s left. (In fact, most of Cox’s troops were entrenching, guarding the railroad and roads near Wise’s Forks, some four miles east of Kinston.) Hoke’s force found the 27th Massachusetts and quickly surrounded it and captured nearly the entire regiment, while Hill crossed the creek to engage the 15th Connecticut, a green unit that quickly broke. Some 850 Federal soldiers surrendered. After a day of heavy skirmishing, on March 10 the Confederates advanced on Cox’s position, but Cox’s well-​entrenched troops easily repulsed them. Learning that Cox would soon be reinforced, Bragg withdrew his troops to Kinston, some thirty miles from Goldsboro. Johnston’s efforts to organize a full defense of Goldsboro now saw clear logistical advantages negated by infrastructural and political impediments that had plagued the Confederacy increasingly throughout the war. Despite the considerable advantage provided by an interior arc of defense and the availability of an intact North Carolina Railroad (NCRR), running some 220 miles from Charlotte to Goldsboro, the narrow-​ gauge track created a bottleneck of rolling stock at Salisbury. Nearly two hundred cars filled with troops, artillery, and supplies were stuck there and at Chester, South Carolina,

596   Christopher Phillips unable to reach Johnston because most of the cars had not returned after having been sent to Bragg. More, Johnston learned that the subsistence stores collected in depots on the NCRR’s line, including enough rations to feed sixty thousand men for four months, were reserved for Lee’s army. Lee informed Johnston that he must subsist on the country, despite lacking wagons and draft animals. (Governor Vance began impressing wagons and teams to help secure food for Johnston’s hungry troops.) The Confederate War Department denied requests to release muskets, ammunition, and equipage belonging to the now nonexistent navy, stored in Charlotte, for Johnston’s use despite the fact that some 1,200 men lacked arms. And the Confederate Treasury had no funds to pay its soldiers, contributing to the continued desertions in Virginia and the Carolinas. Having not headed to Bragg’s aid near Kinston, Hardee now was to delay the Federal advance while Johnston firmed up his defenses near Goldsboro. Hardee found his troops facing Sherman’s left wing on the road to Smithfield near Averasboro, some thirty miles west of Goldsboro. There, on March 16, his entrenched corps of about 7,500 men advanced from his fortified position during a steady rain. After heavy fighting, he turned Brig. Gen. Hugh J. Kilpatrick’s right flank, only to be confronted with newly arrived portions of the Twentieth Corps sent forward by Sherman. Outnumbered, Hardee’s line soon fell back in disorder before re-​forming, only to face a flank assault on his right and retreat again. The Confederates withstood repeated Federal attacks by Slocum’s command, suffering 865 casualties, before Sherman called off further engagement at nightfall. Hardee’s force quietly retreated to Smithfield, some twenty miles east of Goldsboro, where Johnston now concentrated his forces against Sherman’s three columns, each numbering more than twenty thousand and a day or more march from one another. Three days earlier, as Hardee prepared his defensive works at Averasboro and Johnston arrived at Smithfield, the Confederate Congress voted to approve a long-​debated bill authorizing the induction of “able-​bodied negro men” into its field armies. A desperate effort to stave off final defeat by arming slaves, the bill was a clear recognition that, despite initial political disorder and an expanding guerrilla war that did not cease with Lincoln’s reelection, the Federal government’s enlistment of African Americans as a military necessity had proved a major turning point in the Federal prosecution of the war. In January, Lee himself had asked for the bill, arguing, “We must decide whether slavery shall be extinguished by our enemies and the slaves be used against us, or use them ourselves.” Lee also asked that the slaves be freed as a condition of fighting, echoing the suggestion of Maj. Gen. Patrick Cleburne, a general in the Army of Tennessee, and recommended a plan of “gradual and general emancipation” that would eventually free all the Confederacy’s slaves. Despite such appeals, many congressmen could not bring themselves to support such a radical plan. The bill that passed the Confederate Congress on March 13 did not stipulate freedom for those who served and limited enlistments to 25 percent of “male slaves between the ages of eighteen and forty-​five, in any State.” The weakening of its former “Cornerstone” was a groaning signal that the house of the Confederacy was listing and would soon topple.14 Such desperation now found its way into Confederate tactics in the Carolinas. Having learned only days before that Lee and not Davis had recommended him to command,

The Carolinas Campaign    597 and with Federal columns converging on Goldsboro, Johnston heeded his superior’s recommendation to attack Sherman’s separated forces, defeating one before the others could join together. When Sherman shifted his advance to the east to join with Schofield, assuming that Johnston would consolidate a defensive position at Goldsboro, he chose to attack the closest column, Slocum’s left wing strung out halfway between Smithfield and Goldsboro, near Bentonville. After Hampton’s cavalry skirmished most of the previous day, on the morning of March 19 Johnston ordered his men forward. Slocum initially believed he was again confronting only Hampton’s cavalry, but by the afternoon he realized that he was facing Confederate infantry in force and was outnumbered. He sent word to Sherman asking for support. The Confederates, under Bragg, Hardee, and Lt. Gen. Alexander P. Stewart, continued to launch attacks and counterattacks the rest of the day, but Federal reinforcements arrived late in the afternoon to beat back five successive Confederate advances and stabilize and lengthen their battle line. By sundown, neither side had gained or given ground. Sherman drove his troops all night toward Bentonville to relieve Slocum, uncertain of how many Confederates he faced but certain his opponent would retreat. In the morning, Johnston fended off a series of probes and heavy reconnaissance by some of the newly arrived Federals, but soon realized he was outnumbered. Rather than withdraw, he held his position for the remainder of the day and all the next. Surprisingly, Sherman did not press his advantage to launch a full-​scale assault, being unwilling to fight an unnecessary battle, and the next day only desultory fighting occurred (in which Hardee’s son was killed). On March 22, the Federals awakened to find the Confederates gone. Johnston knew that his small force, numbering just twenty-​five thousand, could do little to stop Sherman. On March 25, Sherman’s force joined with Schofield’s at Goldsboro, where it received supplies for the first time since leaving Savannah by means of the newly rebuilt railroad to New Bern. While his army rested and refitted at Goldsboro, Sherman left immediately by rail for New Bern, to meet with Grant in Virginia. Unsure of his next step but hopeful of convincing Grant of it, he took a steamer and arrived two days later at City Point, near Petersburg. There the two friends warmly greeted one another, and Sherman soon learned that Lincoln too was at City Point. That afternoon, the principal field commanders of the Union war effort met with their commander in chief for the first time. Aboard the steamer River Queen (the same vessel on which Lincoln had discussed surrender terms with Confederate emissaries at Hampton Roads only a couple of weeks earlier), they discussed strategy and peace terms. The following day they met again, and included David Porter, the chief Federal naval commander in the area. Concern over the retributive turn in the war, which had formed some of Lincoln’s remarks in his second inaugural address and was on full display in the Carolinas, and the effects it would have on his plan for reconstruction, was clearly on his mind. Now Lincoln sought a speedy end to the war and an equally speedy peace for the reunited nation. As Porter recalled, Lincoln “wanted peace on almost any terms.” “Let them go, officers and all,” he recalled Lincoln instructing them, perhaps including Jefferson Davis. “I want submission and no more bloodshed. . . . I want no one punished, treat them liberally all around.” Sherman

598   Christopher Phillips understood Lincoln to have authorized him to instruct to Governor Vance that “to avoid anarchy the State Government, with their civil functionaries, would be recognized by him.” Hastily, he hurried back to his command intent on fulfilling what he understood to be the president’s wishes to bring the war to a rapid close by offering generous military and political terms to his Confederate foes in North Carolina.15 Sherman’s return to his army saw little changed, as Johnston remained near Smithfield awaiting his adversary’s next move, anticipated toward Virginia. On April 1, Johnston and Lee exchanged missives about meeting to discuss strategy, but only a day later, before they could arrange it, Grant forced Lee to abandon Richmond and Petersburg. When news arrived that Lee was retreating toward Danville, Johnston expected Sherman to drive immediately toward Virginia to cut the South Side Railroad, Lee’s last open rail line. In fact, Grant had ordered him to press Johnston. “Rebel armies are now the only strategic points to strike at,” he wrote. Reminiscent of Grant’s instructions to Sheridan, Sherman now pledged to “push Joe Johnston to the death.” On April 10, Sherman’s four columns commenced toward Smithfield, which Johnston quickly abandoned for Raleigh. Nearly as his men arrived, Johnston learned the next day that Lee had surrendered to Grant, followed by a testy meeting with Davis in which he and Beauregard strongly disagreed with Davis’s plan to recruit troops to continue the war. Johnston forced the Confederate president to allow him to negotiate a cease-​fire with Sherman, after which Davis absconded south.16 On April 17, the two commanders met at James Bennett’s small farmhouse near Durham’s Station. Prior to the meeting, Sherman had informed Grant that he would offer lenient terms to Johnston. News that John C. Breckinridge, the Confederate secretary of war, was present with Johnston’s army convinced Sherman to create a proposal for a larger kind of surrender agreement that he sent impulsively to Washington, knowingly overstepping his authority but naively thinking the administration and Congress would understand he sought to ease the thorny challenges of reconciliation and Reconstruction that would soon plague the nation. Sherman recalled Johnston’s response when handed a telegram informing him of Lincoln’s assassination in Washington less than three days before: “He did not attempt to conceal his distress. He denounced the act as a disgrace to the age, and hoped I did not charge it to the Confederate government.”17 Sherman requested the surrender of Johnston’s troops and offered him Appomattox-​ like terms, promising Johnston that he had issued an order “suspend[ing] any devastation or destruction contemplated” by his field commanders in order to spare civilians “the damage they would sustain by the march of this army through the central or western parts of the State.” Johnston gratefully offered Sherman the surrender of all forces still in the field, numbering some 117,000 troops, and promised the assent of the Confederate administration. Unaware that at City Point Lincoln had advised Grant only to secure surrender terms for Lee’s army, Sherman then offered recognition and readmission of the former Confederate states to the Union, and their civilians full citizenship rights and no prosecutions “as well as their rights of person and property.”18 His order soon set off a firestorm among an administration in Washington already assailed by “grasp of war” Radicals, for whom leniency was furthest from their minds. Sherman’s terms

The Carolinas Campaign    599 smacked of conciliation, to the extent that it even sustained slavery, and the Republican-​ held cabinet unanimously rejected Sherman’s terms. Stanton in particular vilified him for proposing them. Accordingly, the War Department sent Grant to North Carolina to inform Sherman that his surrender terms had been rejected and that new terms, patterned on Lee’s surrender, must be secured or hostilities would recommence. Davis ordered Johnston to disperse and reassemble farther south. Johnston refused, condemned Davis for callous self-​interest, and met Sherman again on April 25. He surrendered all eighty-​nine thousand troops serving in the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida, who were quickly disbanded, paroled, and started home. The campaign in the Carolinas culminated as one of judgment and reckoning, summoning the hardest forms of warfare to bring the Civil War to an end. The wars after the war—​waged for the terms and trials of peace and alternative narratives of the conflict and its meanings—​were only beginning.

Notes 1. Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865, in Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 11  vols. (Springfield, IL:  Abraham Lincoln Association, 1953), 8:332–​333; Richard Henry Dana Jr., “The ‘Grasp of War’ Speech:  June 21, 1865; Basis for Reconstruction,” in Speeches in Stirring Times and Letters to a Son, ed. Richard Henry Dana Jr. (Boston:  Houghton Mifflin, 1910), 243–​259. On the Federal war powers in Reconstruction, see Gregory P. Downs, After Appomattox:  Military Occupation and the Ends of War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). 2. Ulysses S. Grant to Henry W. Halleck, August 1, 1864, in Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant (1885; reprinted, New York: Da Capo Press, 1982), 469. 3. William T. Sherman, Memoirs of General William T. Sherman, 2 vols. (New York: Appleton, 1875), 1:210–​214, 229, 266–​267, 277–​278, 296–​298; W. James Morgan to Henry W. Halleck, December 24, 1861, and General Orders No. 13a, February 26, 1862, both in U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1881–​1901), ser. 2, vol. 1: 238. 4. T. J. Stiles, Custer’s Trials: Life on the Frontier of a New America (New York: Knopf, 2015), 85; John W. Foster to J[eremiah] T. Boyle, January 6, 1863, Records of the U.S. Army Continental Commands, 1821–​1920, Record Group 393: pt. 1, ser. 3514: Letters Received, Department of the Ohio, box 3, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.; William T. Sherman to Ulysses S. Grant, October 9, 1864, in John F. Marszalek, Sherman: A Soldier’s Passion for Order (New York: Free Press, 1992), 295. 5. William T. Sherman to Henry Halleck, December 24, 1864, in Jean V. Berlin and Brooks D. Simpson, eds., Sherman’s Civil War: Selected Correspondence of William T. Sherman, 1860–​ 1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 775–​777. 6. Charles Royster, The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans (New York: Knopf, 1991), 331. 7. John G. Barrett, Sherman’s March through the Carolinas (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1956), 91.

600   Christopher Phillips 8. Mark L. Bradley, This Astounding Close: The Road to Bennett Place (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 2, 5–​11. 9. Arthur P. Ford and Marion Johnstone Ford, Life in the Confederate Army: Being Personal Experiences of a Private Soldier in the Confederate Army; and Some Experiences and Sketches of Southern Life (New York: Neale, 1905), 44. 10. William T. Sherman to Alfred Terry, March 12, 1865, in Sherman, Memoirs, 2:298. 11. Barton A. Myers, Executing Daniel Bright:  Race, Loyalty, and Guerrilla Violence in a Coastal Carolina Community 1861–​1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009), 76–​122 and passim. 12. Bradley, This Astounding Close,  12–​13. 13. Bradley, This Astounding Close, 13. 14. Bruce Levine, Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves during the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 129–​147. 15. David Dixon Porter, Incidents and Anecdotes of the Civil War (New York: Appleton, 1885), 292–​318. 16. Bradley, This Astounding Close, 72. 17. Sherman, Memoirs, 2:349. 18. Sherman, Memoirs, 2:346–​349.

Bibliography Ayers, Edward L. The Thin Light of Freedom:  Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America. New York: Norton, 2017. Barrett, John. The Civil War in North Carolina. Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 1963. Barrett, John. Sherman’s March through the Carolinas. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1956. Bradley, Mark L. Last Stand in the Carolinas: The Battle of Bentonville. Campbell, CA: Savas, 1995. Bradley, Mark L. This Astounding Close: The Road to Bennett Place. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Campbell, Jacqueline Glass. When Sherman Marched North from the Sea: Resistance on the Confederate Home Front. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Current, Richard N. Lincoln’s Loyalists: Union Soldiers from the Confederacy. 1992. Reprinted, New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Durrill, Wayne K. War of Another Kind:  A Southern Community in the Great Rebellion. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution. New York: Harper and Row, 1988. Foote, Lorien. The Yankee Plague: Escaped Union Prisoners and the Collapse of the Confederacy. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Frank, Lisa Tendrich. The Civilian War:  Confederate Women and Union Soldiers during Sherman’s March. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015. Grimsley, Mark. The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy toward Southern Civilians, 1861–​ 1865. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Hughes, Nathaniel Cheairs. General William J. Hardee: Old Reliable. 1965. Reprinted, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992.

The Carolinas Campaign    601 Levine, Bruce. Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves during the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Marszalek, John F. Sherman: A Soldier’s Passion for Order. New York: Free Press, 1992. Royster, Charles. The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans. New York: Knopf, 1991. Sutherland, Daniel E. “Abraham Lincoln, John Pope, and the Origins of Total War.” Journal of Military History 56 (October 1992): 577–​579. Sutherland, Daniel E. A Savage Conflict: The Decisive Role of Guerrillas in the American Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

Chapter 37

The Fall of Pet e rsbu rg and App omat tox Elizabeth R. Varon

It is tempting to imagine that Union victory was all but assured by Pres. Abraham Lincoln’s reelection in the fall of 1864 and that Confederate surrender was, thereafter, a “when,” not an “if,” proposition. But Americans experienced the last four months of the war as uncertain, a period full of dramatic events that together finally spelled the Confederacy’s doom. The Union capitalized on its advantages in manpower and materiel, on the command harmony and tactical aggressiveness of Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and his team, and on the political momentum of Lincoln’s emancipation policy to seize the prizes of Richmond and Petersburg and send the Confederate government and Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia into flight. Confederates, confronting desperate shortages of manpower and materiel, debated how to prolong the fight and clung to the hope that Lee’s army would, by once again defying the odds on the battlefield, breathe new life into the Confederate project. President Lincoln, for his part, framed this last season of war as a moral reckoning with slavery and a moment to begin in earnest the work of reunion, in a spirit of forgiveness and repentance. The greatest impact of the final campaigns in Virginia in the social sphere was on the institution of slavery itself, as Lee’s surrender was a watershed in the long process of emancipation and brought many slaves their first true experience of freedom. The first days of 1865 found Lee in a tactical bind, struggling to move his remaining chess pieces in ways that would reserve to him some defensive and offensive options. “It will be impossible for me to send sufficient troops from this army to oppose [Maj. Gen. William T.] Sherman’s and at the same time resist Grant,” Lee wrote Confederate Congressman William Porcher Miles on January 19, 1865, in response to requests that Lee’s men rally to the defense of South Carolina. A month later, Charleston was evacuated when Sherman cut the rail lines leading into the city. As it had so often before, the Confederate press spun this defeat, in an effort to prop up public morale. In a February 22 article entitled “Spirit of Our Soldiers,” the Richmond Dispatch depicted Lee’s army as unbroken and indeed defiant in spirit. The article reprinted resolutions

The Fall of Petersburg and Appomattox    603 passed in the Petersburg trenches by the 32nd Virginia Infantry. They read, “Whereas, the enemy is still invading our soil with the original purpose of our subjugation or annihilation; therefore . . . [we] accept the issue, and are determined to resist until our independence shall have been acknowledge[d]‌or extermination reached.”1 Lee’s decision not to send men to reinforce Charleston’s defenses reflected his view that his undermanned and poorly provisioned army could not long keep Grant’s force at bay along the Richmond-​Petersburg front. As the Union and Confederate armies went into winter quarters in late 1864, Lee feared his men would be starved into submission. He put the situation tersely to Secretary of War James Seddon in January: “There is nothing within reach of this army to be impressed. The country is swept clear. Our only reliance is upon the railroads.”2 Grant, by contrast, had reason for confidence. He was intent on extending his own lines westward beyond Petersburg, cutting Confederate supply arteries and forcing Lee, who could barely man the existing defensive line, to abandon his trenches. To that end, Grant reorganized his command structure in early 1865, promoting officers who shared his offensive mindset. For example, Maj. Gen. Edward O. C. Ord replaced the inept Maj. Gen. Benjamin Butler as commander of the Army of the James, and Maj. Gen. John Gibbon was named commander of that army’s new Twenty-​fourth Corps; these men’s leadership improved both the morale and fitness of their troops and boded well for the spring campaign. Grant’s key move was to deploy Maj. Gen. Philip H. Sheridan against Lee’s army. After his string of victories in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, Sheridan came east in March 1865, determined to continue his success at using his cavalry, in conjunction with the infantry, as a strike force. Meanwhile, the Union was also flexing its logistical muscles: since June 1864, City Point, Virginia, Grant’s headquarters and primary supply base for military operations against Petersburg (which lay eight miles away, to the southwest), had been transformed from a modest hamlet into one of the world’s busiest ports. The once sleepy Southern village was quickly studded with wharves and warehouses, hospitals and barracks, railroad lines, engine houses and locomotives, water tanks, and repair shops. City Point had 110 hospital buildings; the sprawling Depot Field Hospital, covering some two hundred acres, treated as many as ten thousand wounded soldiers a day. Scores of African American refugees acted as laborers, cooks, laundresses, nurses, and scouts for the Federal forces. City Point was also a magnet for Northern civilians working with the U.S. Sanitary Commission to supply the troops and lift their morale; these included teachers who offered instruction to the freed people and to the U.S. Colored Troops (USCT) in the camp. City Point was a transit point for a great throng of Confederates as well as Unionists. Hundreds of prisoners of war were brought there in flags of truce boats for exchange; scores of civilian refugees arrived from Richmond and Petersburg; and hundreds of deserters slipped free of the Rebel army, “fast leaving the sinking ship,” as a New York Times article put it in March 1865. Deserters were often driven by hunger: they could not but contrast the dire conditions in besieged Petersburg with the abundant supplies of the Federal forces. The price for provisions was loyalty:  only those deserters who

604   Elizabeth R. Varon took an oath of allegiance to the Union were issued rations and granted passage on government steamers to points North. In Northern rhetoric, deserters were windows into Southern morale. Thomas Morris Chester’s dispatches from the Virginia siege lines to the Philadelphia Press emphasized the “demoralization of the enemy on account of his scarcity of provisions” and the growing “peace feeling” manifested by the starving civilians of Richmond. By March 1865 Chester had come to believe, based on the “large number who daily come into our lines,” that the Southern rank and file was “disgusted with the rebel authorities for continuing a struggle in which no one has the slightest prospect of success.”3 In addition to its logistical advantages, the Union capitalized in the war’s last year on its superior military intelligence operations. During Grant’s siege, the Union spy Elizabeth Van Lew, the intrepid head of a Richmond espionage network, kept up regular communications with City Point via five stations positioned along the thirty-​five-​ mile stretch from the Rebel capital to the Union headquarters. Her agents practiced a resourceful if primitive spy tradecraft:  posing as ordinary civilians selling farm produce, they hid letters, maps, and plans, written in invisible ink and a crude cipher, in the hollowed-​out soles of their shoes and in dummy eggshells hidden among real eggs. Intelligence reports provided by this network had immediate tactical applications. As Grant struck blows at Lee’s trench line, the Richmond underground furnished Grant with key insights about the movement of men and material in the vicinity of Richmond, and about the political atmosphere in the besieged capital. Taken together, Unionists’ reports from the last year of the war provide a picture of increasing desolation—​of business suspended, of rampant inflation, of old men and boys being herded into the army, of public bitterness at the fall of Atlanta to Sherman and at Lincoln’s reelection. This kind of information confirmed for Grant that his strategy was draining Confederate resources and sapping Rebel morale. Van Lew’s spy work exemplified how women transgressed gender boundaries during the war, moving beyond provisioning and encouraging the troops and into dangerous battlefront roles as hospital workers, scouts, spies, and even, in a few hundred documented cases, as soldiers who disguised their gender identity. As Grant’s campaign took its toll, a controversial proposal for solving the Confederacy’s manpower problem took center stage in Confederate politics: the idea of enlisting slaves in the Southern army and offering them freedom as a reward. The idea was first pushed forcefully in the winter of 1863–​1864 by Maj. Gen. Patrick Cleburne after the reverses at Chattanooga. Confederates faced a stark dilemma and must make a bold choice, he explained: “between the loss of independence and the loss of slavery, we assume that every patriot will freely give up the latter—​give up the negro slave rather than be a slave himself.” It was not until the fall of 1864 that the idea got traction; reeling from Sherman’s and Sheridan’s victories, Confederate Pres. Jefferson Davis, who had scorned the idea of Black enlistment, now “abruptly reversed course” and endorsed bringing slaves into the army. By this point Confederates had only a quarter as many soldiers available to them as the Union had: how else could the South close this gap?4 A heated and prolonged public debate ensued, with opponents of Black enlistment arguing that it would alienate the Confederate rank and file, undermine agricultural

The Fall of Petersburg and Appomattox    605 production, encroach on property rights, raise the specter of race war if armed Blacks turned against their former masters, and, most important, undermine slavery, the very institution Confederates fought to defend. Defenders of Black enlistment, Robert E.  Lee prominent among them, argued that emancipating and arming only a small proportion of slaves would preserve what was left of plantation slavery. Crucially, advocates of such measures noted that the freedom granted to recruits would be something less than full freedom: only white men would have political rights, and Blacks would be relegated to a perpetual serfdom, as a subordinate laboring class, akin to slaves. In the end, those favoring Black enlistment won a hollow victory, in the form of a congressional bill, passed in March 1865, that invited slave owners to volunteer their slaves for service (while retaining legal title to them) and slaves to volunteer on the shaky promise of a conditional, limited freedom. Not surprisingly, masters and slaves alike were uninterested in heeding this call, and the measure produced negligible results. It succeeded only in signaling that the Confederate government was spiraling into desperation. Meanwhile the Republican Party’s proposed Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, abolishing slavery, entered its final phase of debate in the wake of Lincoln’s reelection, and finally passed in Congress on January 31, 1865, by a vote of 119 to 56. The Republican Party included support for the amendment as a platform plank in the 1864 election, but the amendment garnered little attention in Lincoln’s campaign, which focused on the themes of vindicating the war effort and saving the Union. And yet Republicans chose, in the wake of the election, to treat Lincoln’s victory as a referendum on the constitutional amendment—​and Lincoln took the same tack, asking the lame duck Thirty-​eighth Congress, which had already rejected the measure, to now defer to the electoral verdict and pass it, before the incoming Thirty-​ninth Congress (which boasted a strong antislavery majority) had the chance to steal their thunder. In Lincoln’s view, if he could win over key votes among border state and Democratic representatives, he could consolidate support for the Union party that had carried the election and chart for it a bright future.5 While Lincoln, Secretary of State William H. Seward, and a group of lobbyists worked to bring border-​state Unionists and Democrats in Congress on board, the House of Representatives plunged into debates over the bill. Democrats opposed to the amendment marshaled familiar anti-​abolition arguments:  that the measure was an unconstitutional infringement on states’ rights and an emblem of the Republicans’ desire to subjugate the South; that the Republicans’ insistence on abolition was the root cause of the war and the only real obstacle to peaceable reunion; that slavery was a suitable and even benign condition for Blacks. But the amendment’s supporters brought to bear an arsenal of powerful counterarguments. Radical Republican James M. Ashley of Ohio led the way, stressing the sovereignty of the national government, the “great advantage of free over slave labor,” and the “wishes and judgment” of soldiers in the field, who had voted overwhelmingly for Lincoln and his agenda. In the end, Democratic and border-​ state votes proved crucial to the amendment’s success, with eleven representatives who had opposed it in June now flipping their votes. Upon the announcement of the final

606   Elizabeth R. Varon tally in the House, the New York Tribune reported, “the tumult of joy that broke out was vast, thundering, and uncontrollable.”6 Given his twin victories at the ballot box and in Congress, Lincoln could have chosen to strike a triumphal pose during his second inauguration in March 1865. But he refrained from doing so. Instead he invoked Providence, in stronger terms than he had ever done so before, in order to place the war effort on a moral plane that transcended electoral politics. Lincoln cast disunion, in his Second Inaugural, as the chastisement not just of the South but of the whole sin-​soaked and guilt-​ridden nation. In this formulation, historian Allen Guelzo reminds us, Providence was mysterious and something human beings could only scarcely comprehend. Seeking a way to explain that the war “might have a purpose beyond the restoration of a perpetual Union,” Lincoln intoned, “The Almighty has His own purposes.” It has been observed that this rhetoric is so much like that of the pioneering abolitionists of the antebellum era—​David Walker, Henry Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, and even John Brown—​that the Second Inaugural marks the moment when the “private” Lincoln (with his deep loathing of slavery) converges with the “public” one (the pragmatic politician), and Lincoln’s inner abolitionist comes out. But the speech can also be read as evidence of continuity: of Lincoln’s persistent determination to refute the charge that Republicans desired war as the instrument of their own political triumph. In rejecting triumphalism to emphasize the inscrutability of Providence, Lincoln offered, as Guelzo explains, “an appeal against the Radicals, and anyone else so full of themselves as to think both the questions and answers obvious.”7 Setting the terms of postwar restoration of the Union took on new urgency as the pace of battlefield developments quickened. In early February 1865, Grant directed Army of the Potomac commander Maj. Gen. George G. Meade to initiate the seventh Union offensive of the Petersburg Campaign. The offensive began as a raid to disrupt the Confederate supply line along the Weldon and Petersburg Railroad—​through which Petersburg was provisioned from the south—​and thus exacerbate the food shortages and desertion problem in the Confederate ranks. After Maj. Gen. Andrew A. Humphreys’s Second Corps established a promising position north of Hatcher’s Run, Grant and Meade adapted their plan, engaging the enemy near Armstrong’s Mill and Dabney’s Mill, in order to consolidate the Union Army’s control of key stream crossings. The Confederates achieved some tactical success with counterattacks, suffering 1,000 casualties and inflicting 1,539 on the Yankees—​but Grant’s maneuvers succeeded in extending the Federal Field fortifications for another four miles to the left. On March 25, 1865, Lee made one last attempt to break Grant’s line, with a predawn attack on Fort Stedman near Petersburg. The dramatic assault, led by Maj. Gen. John B. Gordon’s Second Corps, was a bloody and heartbreaking failure for the Confederates. With death and desertion eating away at the tattered remnants of Lee’s army, public anxiety in Richmond crested and measures were taken to prepare for the evacuation of its inhabitants. The hammer soon fell: in the wake of the Fort Stedman fiasco, Grant launched an eighth Union offensive, aimed at turning Lee’s right flank. Grant intended this action to cut the South Side Railroad, the last functioning supply

The Fall of Petersburg and Appomattox    607

Map 37.1  Petersburg, January to April 1865

and communications line out of Petersburg, and to prevent Lee’s army from escaping to the west. At the Battles of White Oak Road and Dinwiddie Court House on March 31, with Lee hoping to exploit the opening between the Federal infantry and cavalry, Confederates lashed out in vain at Philip Sheridan’s mounted troops and Maj. Gen. Gouverneur K. Warren’s Fifth Corps, in what turned out to be Lee’s last counteroffensive maneuvers of the Petersburg Campaign. As Grant intended, the Union’s manpower advantage was decisive, as Federal reinforcements pushed the spent Confederates back to the White Oak Road; later that day Sheridan received timely reinforcements from Brig. Gen. George Armstrong Custer, which prevented Confederates under Maj. Gen. George E. Pickett from seizing Dinwiddie Court House.8 The Union success at fending off Lee’s blows set the stage for the dramatic developments of the following day. On April 1, Sheridan and Warren smashed the Confederate-​entrenched position at Five Forks, which Lee had ordered Pickett to hold at all hazards. Despite spirited Confederate resistance, the line gave way, and by nightfall Five Forks was in Union hands. Pickett infamously arrived late at the battle, as he was attending a fish fry well behind the lines and insulated from the sound of the fighting by a freakish atmospheric condition called an “acoustic shadow” (an area in which sound waves fail to spread). The Confederate debacle at Five Forks was not all Pickett’s fault: through poor communication, Lee had misused his army’s right flank—​and Lee had also underrated the tenacity and fighting spirit of Sheridan.9

608   Elizabeth R. Varon Grant, for his part, did not underestimate Lee. Concerned that Lee would mount a counterattack on Sheridan and escape the closing Federal trap, Grant ordered the ninth Union offensive, unleashing a punishing artillery bombardment on the night of April 1–​2, which hammered Lee’s position from the Appomattox River to Five Forks with the heaviest barrage of the entire war, shaking the very ground beneath the Rebel capital. The morning of Sunday, April 2, brought a massive Federal attack on the Petersburg defenses, intended to flush the Rebels out of their forbidding layers of entrenchments, rifle pits, and abatis. The ensuing combat was short and sharp hand-​to-​hand fighting.10 The decisive breakthrough of Maj. Gen. Horatio G. Wright’s Sixth Corps forced Lee to recommend to the Confederate War Department that both Petersburg and Richmond be abandoned. Federal forces entered Petersburg in the predawn hours of April 3, raising an American flag above the courthouse there and preparing the way for Lincoln’s triumphant visit to the newly occupied city later that day. Jefferson Davis was attending services at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Richmond on Sunday, April 2, when he received the grim news of the collapse of Lee’s army. The Confederate president left his fellow parishioners to their praying and promptly assembled his cabinet for its last session. He directed government officials to prepare to depart Richmond for Danville, to the southwest, via the last working rail line; Davis himself would leave the beleaguered capital on the 7:00 p.m. train. With Confederate statesmen on the run, control over the city devolved upon the municipal authorities. The fall of Richmond, the subject of so many stirring eyewitness reports, is one of the most dramatic scenes in all of American history. For Confederates, it was nothing less than an apocalypse, shot through with searing irony, as it was the conduct of Confederate officials rather than of the occupying Union Army that brought about the destruction of the city. Following through on a plan that had been in place since the fall of Savannah that winter, the Confederate Army set fire to a wide range of resources to prevent their capture by the Federals; tobacco warehouses and flour mills, arsenals and ironclads, bridges and depots, all came under the torch, giving rise, as the winds kicked up at night, to an uncontrolled and rapidly spreading conflagration. To make matters worse, the Richmond City Council put into effect its own ill-​considered decision to destroy all the liquor in the city, hoping to prevent the intoxication of either the armies or civilians. The plan utterly backfired; alcohol released from storehouses ran through the gutters of the burning city, becoming a conduit for the streaming flames, to the dismay of desperate soldiers and civilians who sought to lap up the liquor and save it for their own use. By the morning of April 3, the Richmond Whig reported, the city “presented a spectacle that we hope never to witness again. . . . The air was lurid with the smoke and flame of hundreds of houses sweltering in a sea of fire.”11 After abandoning the trenches of the fallen cities of Richmond and Petersburg Lee’s army began its flight west. Even at this juncture, Lee’s men did not see their defeat as inevitable: “numbering some 56,000 effectives in February, Confederate forces faced more than twice their number in the opposite trenches. Once the lines were broken, however, U.S. forces were steadily reduced by garrison and railroad rebuilding duty—​about 80,000 men left the trenches to chase after Lee—​and the Union armies were waging a

The Fall of Petersburg and Appomattox    609

Map 37.2 Appomattox

pursuit deep in enemy territory and ranging ever farther from their base.”12 Grant’s goal was not merely to pursue Lee’s army but to intercept it: to cut Lee off and prevent him from veering South and joining the Confederate army of Gen. Joseph E. Johnston in North Carolina. Sheridan, in the vanguard, was determined to shape the course of the retreat by using his fast-​moving cavalry to repeatedly strike Lee’s columns, particularly his wagon trains. Lee planned for his columns to concentrate at Amelia Court House, where they would meet awaiting supply trains and pick up the tracks of the Richmond & Danville Railroad, heading south. But the provisions never arrived, and the Confederates wasted a day in fruitless foraging. Desertion now literally wore away Lee’s army, with thousands of Confederates drifting away from the retreat, driven by deprivation, despair, and thoughts of home. Lee’s men endured a harrowing night march westward on April 5, but the Federals caught up with them in the muddy bottom lands of Big and Little Sailor’s Creek, a tributary of the Appomattox swollen from recent heavy rains. There the three interlocking Battles of Sailor’s Creek would be fought on April 6 under gray skies and spring showers, with Sheridan leading the Union to a resounding victory. Lee divided his army after the Sailor’s Creek debacle; he and Lt. Gen. James Longstreet moved south of the river to Farmville, and John Brown Gordon and Maj. Gen. William Mahone crossed the High Bridge to get north of the river. High Bridge turned out to be the scene of another setback: Confederate cavalry fought off a Union raiding party there on April 6, opening the way for the infantry corps to cross the bridge; the plan was for Confederates

610   Elizabeth R. Varon to then set the structure to the torch to frustrate the Union pursuit. But Humphreys’s Second Corps arrived on the scene in time to douse the flames on the lower wagon bridge, and they used it to cross the river and continue their harassment of the retreating Confederates. Meanwhile, on the morning of April 7 in Farmville, Longstreet’s famished men were falling upon the rations issued them—​their first in four and a half days. But soon they were ordered to move out, hungry still, as one of Sheridan’s cavalry divisions and Ord’s Army of the James swarmed in. Lee chose to direct his retreating columns back north across the Appomattox, using the railroad and wagon bridges and, after burning those bridges, to use the river as a protective cordon as the Army of Northern Virginia moved toward Appomattox Station, where rations were sent from Lynchburg. Unfortunately for Lee, Humphreys’s troops had successfully crossed the High Bridge, so he too was north of the river. He attacked Lee’s flank at Cumberland Church, five miles away from the High Bridge crossing. Confederate forces under Mahone and Longstreet beat back a series of Federal attacks, but this was another hollow victory. Meade and Grant recognized the need to reinforce Humphreys north of the river, and by day’s end, help was on the way, in the form of Wright’s Sixth Corps, which improvised a foot bridge and commandeered a pontoon bridge to cross the Appomattox River at Farmville. Grant arrived in Farmville on April 7 and set up headquarters at Randolph House, where he conferred with Ord. Late that afternoon, Grant penned a two-​sentence note to Lee: “The result of the last week must convince you of the hopelessness of further resistance on the part of the Army of Northern Virginia in this struggle. I feel that it is so, and regard it as my duty to shift from myself the responsibility of any further effusion of blood by asking of you the surrender of that portion of the C.S. army known as the Army of Northern Virginia.”13 This note inaugurated a correspondence with Lee leading to the April 9 meeting at Appomattox. As those letters passed back and forth between the two men, Grant was carefully laying a trap, with Federal armies converging on Appomattox north and south of the river, while Lee was maneuvering to somehow slip that trap. On April 8, the final battles of the campaign were joined, with the Federal cavalry seizing the Confederate supply trains at Appomattox Station, occupying the high ground west of Appomattox Court House, and blocking the Lynchburg Stage Road. This set the stage for Lee’s last breakout attempt on the morning of the ninth—​the failure of which forced Lee to agree at last to Grant’s proposal that he capitulate. Grant’s instructions from Lincoln were to offer Lee lenient terms of surrender—​ on the condition that the Rebels accept emancipation and the reestablishment of national authority. This policy was spelled out in Lincoln’s February 3, 1865, meeting with Confederate peace commissioners, led by the Confederacy’s vice president, Alexander Stephens, aboard the River Queen at Union-​occupied Hampton Roads, Virginia. Lincoln brusquely disabused the Confederates of the idea that peace could come without reunion and emancipation. On March 28, Lincoln clarified his position again, in a meeting on the River Queen with his righthand men, Grant, Gen. William T. Sherman, and Adm. David D. Porter. There could be no mistaking Grant’s brief: his terms were to encompass the surrender of a hostile army and not seek to resolve the political questions of the defeated Confederates’ civil rights and criminal liabilities, or of their pardon and amnesty;

The Fall of Petersburg and Appomattox    611 those questions would be taken up by the civil authorities, within the liberal framework Lincoln had constructed. Lee and Davis, by contrast, were not on the same page. Davis, who had fled from Richmond to Danville, Virginia, the putative new seat of the Confederate government, resoundingly rejected the conditions for peace that Lincoln invoked at Hampton Roads as degrading and humiliating and rejected, too, the idea of an honorable capitulation; Davis would have the Confederates fight to the last ditch. Lee held out hopes for a negotiated peace, one in which the Confederacy, even if forced to capitulate, could still impose conditions on or extract concessions from the Yankees, to secure “a restored Union, an independent Confederacy, or perhaps something in between.”14 Even in the wake of the Sailor’s Creek debacle Lee believed power to influence would-​be negotiations could still be gained by further resistance. Only when his depleted army failed to break the Federal trap at Appomattox Court House did Lee finally concede the cause was lost. In their storied meeting at the McLean House at Appomattox Court House on April 9, Grant offered to Lee surrender by parole. In exchange for their pledge that they would never again take up arms against the United States, Confederates would effectively be set free. “[E]‌ach officer and man will be allowed to return to their homes, not to be disturbed by United States authority so long as they observe their paroles and the laws in force where they may reside,” the terms stipulated. Grant allowed Confederate officers to keep their side-​arms and horses and baggage, and then acceded to Lee’s request that every Confederate who owned a horse or mule be permitted to take the animal home. Grant, again at Lee’s request, provided food for the starving Confederate troops; twenty-​ five thousand Union rations would be directed from Sheridan’s commissary to Lee’s. Soldiers in both armies also helped themselves to the goods of the civilians in Appomattox Court House, a sleepy rural village that was, as historian William Marvel notes, “suddenly surrounded by ten times the population of the entire county.” While local whites willingly opened their larders to feed starving Confederates, they resented the Yankee army’s appropriation of food and livestock, as the last spoils of war.15 When news of the surrender reached the Union lines, the jubilant soldiers commenced firing a salute of a hundred guns in honor of their victory. But Grant “sent word . . . to have it stopped.” “The Confederates were now our prisoners,” he explained, and there was no need to “exult over their downfall.”16 In Grant’s eyes, the surrender was a long-​awaited vindication. The North’s triumph vindicated the capacity of citizen-​ soldiers, representing democracy, to out-​fight the conscripts and dupes of an autocratic society, and it unburdened the South and the nation of slavery, “an institution abhorrent to all civilized people not brought up under it,” as Grant put it. On the home front, the news of Lee’s capitulation on April 9—​Palm Sunday—​brought forth an outpouring of providential rhetoric from Northerners. The New York Times highlighted Northern piety in an April 11 editorial entitled “The New Epoch—​the Advent of Peace”: “We had a hidden strength which the world did not understand. It was Faith. . . . [T]‌he moral elements of the national cause made it irresistible.”17

612   Elizabeth R. Varon The idea that the Federal army’s defeat of Lee brought moral vindication had particularly keen resonance for Virginia’s Blacks, who experienced and would commemorate the surrender as a freedom day. Over the course of the war, freedom had followed the Union Army; the mass exodus of slaves to Union lines had been the catalyst for Lincoln’s emancipation policy and for Black enlistment. USCT regiments played a prominent part in the final Virginia campaigns, entering Petersburg and Richmond as liberators and then bringing the tidings of freedom to the Virginia countryside as the army moved west. Fanny Berry remembered that slaves in Pamplin, Virginia, burst into spontaneous song when they learned that Lee, his escape blocked by the USCT, had raised the white flag—​for they at that moment “knew dat dey were free.” None other than Booker T. Washington in his classic autobiography, Up from Slavery, recounted how “when the war closed, the day of freedom came” to southwestern Virginia; the sight of Confederate soldiers who had deserted Lee’s army or been paroled by Grant’s dramatized for the slaves—​as much as a U.S. officer’s belated reading of the Emancipation Proclamation did—​that the April surrender brought the long-​awaited moment of deliverance.18 And yet, however powerful this sense of triumph, it could not forestall debates over precisely what shape the peace should take. While there was widespread enthusiasm in the North for Grant’s lenient terms at Appomattox, Northerners differed over precisely what political ends magnanimity should serve. On one end of the Northern political spectrum, abolitionists and Radical Republicans claimed that Northern leniency would secure the South’s assent to emancipation and pave the way for Black citizenship. No one made this case more fulsomely than Rev. Henry Ward Beecher. On April 14, 1865, he delivered the keynote address at a symbolic raising of the Union flag at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, on the four-​year anniversary of the opening scene of the war; Beecher had been deputized by Lincoln himself to play the starring role in this ceremony. Beecher had a reputation as an uncompromising foe of slavery. But in his April 14 address, he sought to harmonize amnesty and forgiveness with racial equality and justice. Standing at the epicenter of secessionism, Beecher intoned, “I charge the whole guilt of this war upon the ambitious, educated, plotting political leaders of the South.” For such men, Beecher had no mercy—​they should be punished for their crimes (he did not specify exactly how) and would face divine judgment. “But for the people misled, for the multitudes drafted and driven into this civil war,” he continued, “let not a trace of animosity remain.” The Northern free Black press linked magnanimity to Black citizenship, with an emphasis on the Black military heroism and particularly the crucial role the USCT regiments played in blocking Lee’s escape route at Appomattox. “We the colored soldiers have fairly won our rights by loyalty and bravery,” wrote Sgt. William McCoslin of the 29th Regiment USCT to the Christian Recorder, summing up the case that the surrender was a vindication of the cause of racial equality.19 In the middle of the Northern political spectrum, moderate Republicans and war Democrats claimed Grant’s terms for the supremacy of the Union and for a cautious approach to reconstruction. Henry J.  Raymond, editor of the moderate Republican New  York Times, rejected the equation of Appomattox with the prospect of Black

The Fall of Petersburg and Appomattox    613 citizenship and instead defended Grant’s magnanimity as the means to promote “order and fraternity.” But on the other end of the spectrum, “Copperhead” Democrats claimed Grant’s Appomattox terms as a rebuke to abolitionist reformers and Radical Republican politicians. Eager to deny Lincoln’s Republican Party a victory or a mandate, the Copperhead press focused on the costs of the war, lamenting that it had steeped the country in misery and in the Republican Party’s abolitionist creed. Copperheads charged that antislavery extremists sought vengeance and would undermine Grant’s generous settlement.20 Copperheads essentially parroted the dominant Confederate interpretation of Lee’s surrender: the view that the North’s victory was one of might over right, attributable to overwhelming resources and brutal force, not to skill and righteousness. Lee himself staked out that case on April 10, in his “Farewell Address” (drafted under Lee’s guidance by his aide Charles Marshall). It began, “After four years of arduous service, marked by unsurpassed courage and fortitude, the Army of Northern Virginia has been compelled to yield to overwhelming numbers and resources.” Confederate troops had “remained steadfast to the last,” Lee continued, and could draw satisfaction, even in this bitter hour, “from the consciousness of duty faithfully performed.” In the context of Confederate ideology, the reference to overwhelming numbers was a kind of code, conjuring up images of the heartless efficiency of Northern society. In the wake of the surrender, Lee’s officers developed this theme, churning out speeches, articles, and memoirs designed to disseminate the idea that Lee had faced insurmountable odds of five to one or worse in the final campaign. Lee’s “eight thousand starving men” at Appomattox, Col. Walter H. Taylor put it, had surrendered to an unworthy foe that “had long despaired to conquer it by skill or daring, and who had worn it away by weight of numbers and brutal exchange of many lives for one.” This doctrine referred not only to the size but also the social composition of the Union Army. Lee’s lieutenants lamented that they had been compelled to surrender to a mercenary army of their social and racial inferiors, “German, Irish, negro, and Yankee wretches,” as Brig. Gen. William N. Pendleton put it bitterly in a June 1865 letter to his daughter. Scholars have since established that Lee faced odds of two to one at Appomattox, no worse than odds he had beaten before. But in its day, the numbers game had a distinct political purpose. By denying the legitimacy of the North’s military victory, former Confederates hoped to deny the North the right to impose its political will on the South.21 At Appomattox, Lee moved on a second front, to cast the surrender terms in the best possible light. Hoping their paroles could confer on his men a measure of immunity from reprisals at the hands of the victorious Federals, he requested of Grant at their April 10, 1865, meeting on horseback that each individual Confederate be issued a printed certificate, signed by a Union officer, as proof that the soldier came under the settlement of April 9. Grant readily assented to Lee’s request. In keeping with the language of the surrender terms, a parole certificate vouched that if a soldier observed the laws in force where he resided, he was to “remain undisturbed.” This seemingly simple phrase would prove to be deeply problematic. In Confederate eyes, the paroles represented the promise that honorable men would not be treated dishonorably.22

614   Elizabeth R. Varon Loyal Americans saw Appomattox as the effective end of the war: with Lee’s army neutralized, Confederate independence was a dead letter. It seemed to be only a matter of time until Johnston’s army in North Carolina would yield to the relentless Sherman. Davis and his government were in flight but could not long elude the grasp of the Federals; the same was true of the remaining Confederate forces, scattered in Alabama, Mississippi, and the Trans-​Mississippi theater. But tragedy disrupted Northern reveries of peace when John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln on the evening of April 14, 1865. Booth was enraged that Lincoln, in his last speech, on April 11, had endorsed limited Black suffrage. Lincoln delivered that address in the euphoria of victory, before the concourse of serenaders who thronged the White House grounds, in a city aglow with bonfires and illuminations. Reading from his carefully crafted text, Lincoln grappled with the challenges of Reconstruction. He defended his policy of extending amnesty to repentant Confederates (those who took an oath of present and future allegiance to the Union) and the good it had done in Louisiana in particular: the new constitution of the state duly upheld emancipation, which was the groundwork for future progress. Signaling that he had moved toward the Radical Republican position on the issue of Black citizenship, Lincoln, for the first time, publicly endorsed Black suffrage, saying he would prefer that the vote were conferred “on the very intelligent, and on those who serve our cause as soldiers.” He closed by promising to make “some new announcement to the people of the South” about how the work of Reconstruction would proceed. Booth, who was in the audience when Lincoln gave this speech, vowed at that very moment, “Now, by God, I’ll put him through. That is the last speech he will ever make.” Booth’s ardent secessionism and commitment to white supremacy had mixed, in a lethal blend, with his delusions of grandeur and his persecution complex. He took aim on April 14 at the prospect of Black suffrage.23 Among Northern civilians, the assassination brought forth a tidal wave of grief. Countless Northerners gathered to hear sermons preached to their martyred president; an estimated seven million (one in every four Americans) watched his funeral train over the course of its thirteen-​day trip to Springfield, Illinois, and more than one million paid respect to his remains as he lay in state in the cities the train passed through. Communities across the North held meetings to mourn and honor Lincoln. For example, on April 16, the “colored citizens” of Bloomington, Indiana, met in the AME Church and passed a resolution: “[We] do hereby express our grief, and mingle our tears with the great loyal and liberty-​loving masses of the American people.”24 In their pain and anger, some Northerners cried out for stern retribution against the South. “The government has been too lenient—​these arch traitors, and fiends, must be put out of the way, or there will be a scene [of] murder and midnight assassination, unparall[ele]d in the history of the world,” Ann Eliza Smith observed to her husband, Governor J. Gregory Smith of Vermont. Leading Copperheads worried that calls for vengeance would drown out the rhetoric of magnanimity. “This is the beginning of evils,” an Ohio Copperhead journal predicted. “The hearts and hopes of all men—​even of those who had opposed his policy earliest and strongest—​had begun to turn toward

The Fall of Petersburg and Appomattox    615 Abraham Lincoln for deliverance at last . . . for his course for the last three months has been most liberal and conciliatory.” His death was the “worst public calamity” imaginable, for Radicals would now substitute vindictiveness for conciliation.25 In fact, Northerners’ deep investment in Lincoln’s vision of reunion structured their responses to his assassination, serving to check the impulse toward retaliation. Massachusetts Radical Republican George S. Boutwell, a champion of Black citizenship and suffrage, delivered an April 19 eulogy to Lincoln in Lowell, Massachusetts, in which he drew a distinction—​as many eulogists did—​between retribution and justice. He cautioned, “[L]‌et not the thirst for vengeance take possession of our souls,” even as he called for stern punishment of the leading Rebel conspirators. Boutwell was hopeful that the Southern masses could be made to see themselves as “recipients of the boon of freedom,” insisting that Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was designed not only to release Blacks from bondage but also to save the nation. In the immediate aftermath of the assassination, no one did more to distinguish, rhetorically, between the guilty Southern elite and deluded masses than the new president, Andrew Johnson. In a series of addresses to visiting dignitaries and delegations Johnson repeatedly promised clemency to “the unconscious, deceived, conscripted—​in short, to the great mass of the misled” and stern penalties to the “conscious, intelligent, leading traitors.” Northerners trusted that Johnson would devise policies “as severe and inflexible as it is necessary to be, and as lenient and merciful as he can be,” as a Kansas newspaper put it in early May.26 The challenges of striking such a balance were dramatized by Joseph Johnston’s surrender to William T. Sherman at Durham Station, North Carolina, on April 26, 1865. Sherman and Johnston had negotiated an agreement on April 18 that seemed to recognize the Southern state governments, extend amnesty to all Confederates, and even restore the property and political rights of the Rebels. This accord was promptly rejected by President Johnson, Secretary of War Stanton and the other cabinet members, and Ulysses S.  Grant himself as contravening Lincoln’s explicit orders that military commanders not negotiate political settlements, and as contrary to the letter and spirit of both Lincoln’s December 1863 amnesty measure and Grant’s terms to Lee. Grant was dispatched to North Carolina to carry word of the administration’s displeasure directly to Sherman and to enjoin the wayward general to secure a new peace in line with Grant’s April 9 terms. When Jefferson Davis learned that the Union cabinet had nullified the Johnston-​ Sherman pact, he ordered Johnston to resume fighting. Johnston, knowing full well he was cornered, wisely refused. On April 26, Sherman and Johnston signed a new surrender accord, in keeping with the Appomattox model, and Davis and his cabinet continued their flight to the southwest. The Johnson administration’s prompt and emphatic efforts to bring Sherman in line confirmed some in their belief that the new president would hold the Rebels to account. With the surrender of Gen. Richard Taylor’s army to Union Maj. Gen. E. R. S. Canby in Citronelle, Alabama, on May 4, the capture of Davis by Union forces in Irwin County, Georgia, on May 10, and Gen. Edmund Kirby Smith’s capitulation to Canby at Galveston Harbor, Texas, on May 26, the Confederate military

616   Elizabeth R. Varon effort collapsed. On June 19, 1865, Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger, newly appointed commander of the Department of Texas, promulgated General Orders No. 3, informing Texas slaves of the passage of the Emancipation Proclamation, and thus belatedly granting freedom to Texas’s quarter of a million slaves. In a May 29, 1865, article entitled “Peace Completed,” the venerable North American and United States Gazette of Philadelphia declared, “[A]‌t length the great problem is finally solved. The last remnant of civil war disappears with the surrender of the Rebel forces in the trans-​Mississippi department.” Edmund Kirby Smith had failed to rally Confederates to defend their last frontier, the Gazette editorialized, because the populations under his command (in Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Missouri) had lost their taste for war and “yearned for the return of prosperous repose” under Lincoln’s amnesty policy. Such visions of Southern repentance, which had been sources of hope in the dark days of war, would serve the Unionist coalition poorly in its struggle to forge a lasting peace, as former Confederates defiantly refused to accept reunion on the North’s terms.27

Notes 1. Lee to William P. Miles, January 19, 1865, in Clifford Dowdey, ed., Wartime Papers of Robert E. Lee (Boston: Little, Brown, 1961), 885–​886; Richmond (VA) Daily Dispatch, February 22, 1865. 2. Lee to Seddon, January 11, 1865 in Dowdey, Wartime Papers of Robert E. Lee, 881. 3. “From City Point,” New York Times, March 27, 1865; R. J. M. Blackett, ed., Thomas Morris Chester, Black Civil War Correspondent:  His Dispatches from the Virginia Front (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 123–​124, 229–​231, 246, 253, 274–​275, 279–​280. 4. Bruce Levine, Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves during the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 27–​30. 5. Michael Vorenberg, Final Freedom:  The Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 174–​177. 6. Ashley speech, January 6, 1865, Congressional Globe, 38th Cong., 2nd Session, 138–​141; “Freedom Triumphant,” New York Daily Tribune, February 1, 1865. 7. Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, http://​avalon.law.yale.edu/​19th_​century/​lincoln2 .asp; Allen C. Guelzo, Abraham Lincoln:  Redeemer President (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999), 417–​420, quote on 419–​420. 8. William Marvel, A Place Called Appomattox (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008), 200. 9. Peter S. Carmichael, “A Whole Lot of Blame to Go Around: The Confederate Collapse at Five Forks,” in Petersburg to Appomattox: The End of the Civil War in Virginia, ed. Caroline E. Janney (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 92–​93, 99. 10. A. Wilson Greene, The Final Battles of the Petersburg Campaign: Breaking the Backbone of the Rebellion (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2008), 241. 11. “The Evacuation of Richmond,” Richmond (VA) Whig, April 4, 1865. 12. William W. Bergen, “Grant Finally Takes Command: How the Race to Appomattox Was Won,” in Janney, Petersburg to Appomattox, 33.

The Fall of Petersburg and Appomattox    617 13. Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant (1885; reprinted, New York: Penguin, 1999), 595. 14. Steven E. Woodworth, “The Last Function of Government:  Confederate Collapse and Negotiated Peace,” in The Collapse of the Confederacy, ed. Mark Grimsley and Brooks D. Simpson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 13–​39. 15. Marvel, A Place Called Appomattox, 257. 16. Grant, Personal Memoirs, 596–​608. 17. Grant, Personal Memoirs, 101, 114–​119, 601; Grant interview, New York Herald, July 24, 1878; New York Times, April 11, 1865. 18. Charles L. Perdue Jr., Thomas E. Barden, and Robert K. Phillips, Weevils in the Wheat: Interviews with Virginia Ex-​Slaves (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1976), 39; Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery (1901; reprinted, New York: Penguin, 2000), 13. 19. Henry Ward Beecher, Patriotic Addresses in America and England, 1850–​1885, on Slavery, the Civil War, and the Development of Civil Liberty in the United States (New York: Fords, Howard & Hulbert, 1888), 676–​700; McCoslin quoted in Noah Andre Trudeau, Like Men of War (New York: Little, Brown, 1998), 423. 20. New York Times, April 12, 14, 1865; Andrew S. Coopersmith, Fighting Words: An Illustrated History of Newspaper Accounts of the Civil War (New York: New Press, 2004), 253–​254. 21. Robert E. Lee, “Farewell Address,” in U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1880–​1901), ser. 1, vol. 46, pt. 1: 1267; Walter H. Taylor, Four Years with General Lee (New York: Appleton, 1877), 191; Susan P. Lee, Memoirs of William Nelson Pendleton (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1893), 414. 22. Elizabeth R. Varon, Appomattox: Victory, Defeat and Freedom at the End of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 112. 23. Abraham Lincoln, “Last Public Address,” in Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 8:399–​405; Michael W. Kauffman, American Brutus:  John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln Conspiracies (New York: Random House, 2004), 209–​211. 24. “Letter from Bloomington,” Christian Recorder (Philadelphia), April 29, 1865. 25. Jeffrey D. Marshall, A War of the People:  Vermont Civil War Letters (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999), 301, 307; Dayton Empire, quoted in Nashville (TN) Daily Union, April 21, 1865. 26. George S. Boutwell, Speeches and Papers Relating to the Rebellion and the Overthrow of Slavery (Boston: Little, Brown, 1867), 368–​370; Paul H. Bergeron, ed., The Papers of Andrew Johnson (Knoxville:  University of Tennessee Press, 1989), 8:22; Freedom’s Champion (Atchison, KS), May 4, 1865. 27. North American and United States Gazette (Philadelphia), May 29, 1865.

Bibliography Davis, William C. An Honorable Defeat:  The Last Days of the Confederate Government. New York: Harcourt, 2001. Downs, Greg. After Appomattox:  Military Occupation and the Ends of War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015.

618   Elizabeth R. Varon Greene, A. Wilson. The Final Battles of the Petersburg Campaign: Breaking the Backbone of the Rebellion. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2008. Grimsley, Mark, and Brooks D. Simpson, eds. The Collapse of the Confederacy. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001. Guelzo, Allen C. Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999. Hess, Earl J. In the Trenches at Petersburg: Field Fortifications and Confederate Defeat. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. Hodes, Martha. Mourning Lincoln. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015. Janney, Caroline E., ed. Petersburg to Appomattox: The End of the Civil War in Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Lankford, Nelson. Richmond Burning:  The Last Days of the Confederate Capital. New York: Viking, 2002. Levine, Bruce. Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves during the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Marvel, William. A Place Called Appomattox. Carbondale:  Southern Illinois University Press, 2008. Power, J. Tracy. Lee’s Miserables: Life in the Army of Northern Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. Silber, Nina. Gender and the Sectional Conflict. Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 2009. Sodergren, Steven E. The Army of the Potomac in the Overland and Petersburg Campaigns: Union Soldiers and Trench Warfare, 1864–​1865. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017. Varon, Elizabeth R. Appomattox:  Victory, Defeat and Freedom at the End of the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Vorenberg, Michael. Final Freedom: The Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Chapter 38

Texas, Mobi l e , a nd Wilson’s   Ra i d International Repercussions Earl J. Hess

Civil wars in both the United States and Mexico during the 1850s and 1860s fostered the most serious challenge to the Monroe Doctrine in American history. Taking advantage of Mexico’s internal troubles, Emperor Napoleon III of France installed a Hapsburg prince as the new emperor of Mexico. Although he was invited to intervene in the nation’s civil war by Mexican conservatives, no one liked the prince who remained on the throne only at the point of thirty thousand French Army bayonets. In 1863, the U.S. government tried to intimidate Napoleon to withdraw his troops by placing a small force of men in the lower Rio Grande Valley, but it failed to have an effect. Two campaigns closed the war in the West by capturing Mobile, Alabama, and destroying Confederate war industries in Alabama and Georgia before the Federals could shift large numbers of troops to Texas and finally bring an end to the French intervention in Mexico. The Federal government began to target Texas immediately after the fall of Vicksburg on July 4, 1863. It had several objectives, many of them related to the state’s proximity to Mexico, a nation undergoing the turmoil of internal strife and foreign intervention. Benito Juárez led a reform movement that had ousted the dictator Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna in 1854, but the conservatives in Mexico reacted four years later with a revolt that started the War of the Reform, resulting in the capture of Mexico City. Forces loyal to Juárez reoccupied the national capital in December 1860, just as the secession movement began in the United States. To break the stalemate in their civil war, Mexican conservatives prevailed on Emperor Napoleon III of France to intervene. Using Juárez’s stopping of payment on international debts as a pretext, French troops landed at Vera Cruz in December 1861. Eventually Napoleon committed thirty thousand men to Mexico. These troops marched inland in April 1862 and drove Juárez’s army out of Mexico City by June 1863.

620   Earl J. Hess The next month, Union forces captured Vicksburg, a significant turning point in their war effort. The Lincoln administration supported the Juárez faction as the legal government of Mexico and was concerned about Napoleon’s violation of the 1823 Monroe Doctrine. In fact, as long as the American Civil War raged, Napoleon was emboldened to challenge that doctrine. Moreover, Union authorities knew that there was a thriving trade of goods flowing from Mexican citizens across the Rio Grande River into the Confederacy.1 Northerners disliked Napoleon’s intervention. “We are all thinking a good deal now about the French in Mexico,” wrote Pvt. William Christie of the 1st Minnesota Battery soon after the fall of Vicksburg. He wanted the government to do something about it. “If we do not prevent France from subjugating Mexico, who will?”2 The only way the Federals could threaten the French and curtail the flow of goods to the Confederacy was to occupy the Rio Grande Valley. They landed 4,500 troops of the Thirteenth Corps on Brazos Santiago Island beginning on November 2, 1863. The Confederates evacuated Brownsville, thirty miles up the Rio Grande River, and the Federals occupied it without the loss of a man. Further moves placed more Federal troops at locations along the Gulf coast as far as Corpus Christi by February 1864. At all locations, the Unionists hugged the coast as Confederate forces and many civilians fled the area, destroying railroads and other resources to create a burned-​out zone between the opposing forces. The Federals also advanced a few miles up the Rio Grande Valley to Roma, 120 miles from the mouth of the river. Unfortunately for Pres. Abraham Lincoln, the Federal presence had no appreciable effect on the French in Mexico City, 425 miles to the south of Brownsville. Union soldiers in the lower Rio Grande Valley took care of hundreds of refugees fleeing Mexico and sent detachments across the river to protect the U.S. consulate in Matamoros. They also restored order in that city. The Federals managed to recruit a handful of infantry companies for the Union Army among loyalists in the valley. However, their efforts to recruit Hispanic residents for the 2nd Texas Cavalry (U.S.) did not work well. The men tended to be drawn to the civil war in Mexico and were not happy with late payments, delayed bounties, and promised uniforms that never arrived. The Federals could not cut the flow of goods from Mexico to Confederate authorities because it simply moved upriver to Laredo, a hundred miles from Roma. Federal officials devoted too few troops to the Rio Grande Valley to achieve their goals, and by early 1864 more important strategic needs developed. Lt. Gen. Ulysses S.  Grant ordered the evacuation of all enclaves along the Texas coast except 3,500 troops in the lower Rio Grande Valley. Confederate forces pushed down until they were only ten miles from Brownsville, reopening the Mexican trade as far as they went. The Federals pulled all troops from the lower Rio Grande Valley by July 17, 1864. Ironically, the new emperor of Mexico had arrived to claim his throne only two months before that date. Napoleon had prevailed on Ferdinand Maximilian Joseph, a Hapsburg prince, to assume the throne. Progressive minded but politically naive, Maximilian believed the Mexican people wanted his guidance. He was sadly mistaken. Few Mexicans, either conservatives or Juáristas, were happy with a foreigner in Mexico

Map 38.1  Texas and Mexico

622   Earl J. Hess City. Ironically, Maximilian’s progressive views were more in line with the Juárez government in exile (which his army fought) than with the conservatives who had been instrumental in putting him on the throne. Only as long as the French Army supported him could Maximilian hope to survive, and as long as the U.S. Civil War continued, Napoleon was willing to keep his troops in Mexico.3 Two campaigns that played out after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox brought the American Civil War crashing to an end in 1865. The first centered on the capture of Mobile, which had a cosmopolitan population of nearly thirty thousand. One-​fourth of the residents were foreign born and another one-​fourth were slaves. Before the war, Mobile was the second busiest Southern port city next to New Orleans. The people of Mobile tried to ride out the war as easily as possible. The city was less rabidly Southern than most other communities; town officials did not persecute those who were less enthusiastic about the cause. They also focused a good deal on keeping the city clean to prevent disease. As the Confederate government established seven hospitals for its soldiers in Mobile and the war dragged on, consumer prices soared with shortages of goods. A bread riot involving frustrated women broke out on September 4, 1863. Mobile was not easy to defend. It was located on the northwest quadrant of a large inlet called Mobile Bay that stretched forty miles inland and ranged from ten to thirty miles wide. The only way into the bay from the Gulf of Mexico was through a narrow opening of water several hundred yards wide, which was fortified by two prewar masonry works called Fort Morgan and Fort Gaines. Confederate engineers constructed a heavy ring of earthworks to protect the city itself, plus fortifications at Spanish Fort and a small town called Blakeley on the east shore of the bay. They also deployed hundreds of submarine mines near the entrance to the bay and constructed a small fleet of warships. The Confederates devoted two brigades of troops, three hundred artillery pieces, and one-​third of the entire budget of the Confederate Engineer Bureau to protect the city in 1863. Six hundred slaves contributed by planters from six counties helped to fortify the area. The Confederate Army sent hundreds of Black Union soldiers captured at Fort Pillow and in raids on Union railroads in Alabama to labor on the defenses. Mobile’s importance as a blockade-​running port justified the immense resources devoted to its defense. A little more than 80 percent of more than two hundred attempts to run the blockade at Mobile succeeded during the war. The Federals closed Mobile to blockade runners with a spectacular naval battle on August 5, 1864. Adm. David G. Farragut ran a fleet of eighteen seagoing warships, four of them ironclad monitors, through the entrance of Mobile Bay. The monitor Tecumseh hit a mine and sank with ninety-​two of its crew members, but, urged on by Farragut’s famous signal, “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!,” the wooden vessels ran through the narrow entrance and engaged the Confederate fleet in battle. The Unionists captured most of the Confederate vessels.4 The Union Army followed up Farragut’s naval victory by assembling 45,200 troops, including nine regiments of Black soldiers, under Maj. Gen. Edward R. S. Canby at New Orleans. Canby transported this army by coastal shipping and landed most of it at the

Texas, Mobile, and Wilson’s Raid    623 entrance to Mobile Bay so as to move north along the east shore and strike at Spanish Fort. A smaller column of 12,000 men under Maj. Gen. Frederick Steele landed forty miles east near Pensacola, Florida, and marched northwest to strike at Blakeley. Maj. Gen. Dabney H. Maury commanded 12,000 Confederates in the region, half of whom were divided between the two positions on the east shore. On March 27, Federal troops besieged Spanish Fort after encountering numerous subterra mines along the road. They dug parallels and approaches and transported heavy artillery and mortars to pound the Confederate position. Union gunboats could not get close enough to offer much help because of obstructions and submarine mines planted near the works. By the evening of April 1, Steele’s column from Pensacola had reached Blakeley and also begun to construct parallels and siege approaches. With the Federals closing in, the outnumbered Confederates evacuated Spanish Fort on the night of April 8, pulling out their three-​thousand-​man garrison which had held off more than thirty thousand Federals for thirteen days. They abandoned fifty pieces of artillery. Canby shifted troops and artillery to Blakeley, where the Federals mounted an attack on the afternoon of April 9 that broke the Confederate defenses. Braving land mines and worming through wooden obstructions, Black and white troops captured Blakeley only hours after Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox.5 Maury evacuated the city of Mobile on the morning of April 12, as Canby laid plans to move inland to support a large force of Union cavalrymen under Brig. Gen. James H. Wilson that was rampaging through central Alabama by the time Mobile fell. This cavalry raid, the largest of the war, aimed at destroying what was left of Confederate war industries in the West. Wilson left north Alabama with 13,480 horsemen on March 22, 1865. Not until he crossed the Cahaba River on March 30 did the column enter a rich agricultural district and could forage off the countryside. Here he also began to encounter small Confederate cavalry forces. The Federals hit every industrial plant within reach, destroying rolling mills, iron works, and a naval furnace. Wilson soundly defeated Lt. Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest at Ebenezer Church on April 1 and then moved on toward Selma, twenty miles away. Selma was the repository of the most important Confederate war industries by this stage of the war, employing ten thousand workers. A  huge government arsenal was located in the city, and the Selma Naval Foundry supplied heavy guns for Confederate warships. Selma factories provided half of all artillery pieces and two-​thirds of all fixed ammunition for the Confederacy during the second half of the war. The city was protected by a ring of earthworks, but on April 2, when Wilson neared the place, it had a garrison of only four thousand men to oppose Wilson’s nine thousand. The Federals attacked near dusk, broke through at a sector held by militia, and the defenses collapsed, with the capture of 2,700 Rebels.6 Wilson spent the next week destroying the city’s war-​making capacity before leaving on April 10. Montgomery, the state capital, was now his target. Many Blacks from the Selma area tried to follow his fast-​moving column east. The small Confederate force evacuated the state capital on April 11, and Wilson’s troopers took possession the next

624   Earl J. Hess

Map 38.2  Mobile and Wilson’s Raid

day. Canby also sent a large infantry force from Mobile to Montgomery, which arrived a few days later. Wilson did not stay to destroy the war-​making capacity of Montgomery but continued to ride east on April 14. He struck the industrial and naval center of Columbus, Georgia, two days later. Once again his troops broke through a fortified but weakly held defensive

Texas, Mobile, and Wilson’s Raid    625 line. The city, with its factories and naval base, fell into Union hands on the night of April 16. Thousands of refugees from northwest Georgia, who had fled Sherman’s army group, were now swamped by a wave of refugees fleeing the advance of Wilson’s cavalry to create turmoil in Columbus. Those refugees, added to the twelve thousand residents of the city, were thrown into a state of panic. The city was in chaos on the night of April 16 as the Federals destroyed railroad stock, factories, and bridges, burning a good deal of cotton, while many civilians, Black and white, plundered stores. Wilson left Columbus late on April 17 for Macon, crossing the Flint River two days later. On April 19 he learned of Gen. Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. A small Confederate force at Macon under Maj. Gen. Howell Cobb offered no resistance because Cobb had been informed of a truce arising from negotiations between Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman and Gen. Joseph E. Johnston in North Carolina. But Wilson had no orders to honor any truce, so his cavalrymen rode unopposed into Macon on the evening of April 20. The next day Sherman telegraphed Wilson to confirm the truce and instructed him to start paying for food he took from civilians in the area. The war was over. Wilson’s main job now was to round up Confederate officials, most of whom were moving south from Richmond through the Carolinas and into Georgia. The prize capture was Confederate Pres. Jefferson Davis, caught near Irwinville on May 10 by troops from another department, but Wilson’s men managed to round up many government officials and Confederate generals.7 Wilson’s Raid devastated the most important industrial region of the Confederacy. Riding over five hundred miles, his troops captured nearly seven thousand prisoners, 288 pieces of artillery, and 100,000 small arms, and destroyed seven iron works, seven foundries, seven machine shops, two rolling mills, five collieries, thirteen factories, four niter works, three arsenals, one navy yard, thirty-​five locomotives, and 565 railroad cars. In fact, every iron manufacturing plant in Alabama, except one, had been torched by the Yankees. Was all this destruction necessary? As far as Wilson could foresee in March and April 1865, it certainly was. He had no idea the war would end so soon. His raid also put thousands of Federal troops into position to intercept fleeing Rebel officials who, Wilson was convinced, meant to seek safety elsewhere to continue their struggle.8 Wilson’s Raid also stunned the population of a region that had felt immune to Union military action, creating at least a temporary feeling of submission to Federal authority. The exhaustive destruction of industrial plants paved the way for a modern reconstruction of industrial facilities in central Alabama during the next several decades and contributed to the region’s leading role in rapid industrialization. In Mobile, the residents adjusted easily to the occupiers, and most were willing to honor Federal authority. Hundreds of Confederate land mines, planted near the earthworks at Spanish Fort and Blakeley, along roads, and near watering holes, remained intact. Residents of the area dealt with these deadly weapons for decades to come, and relic hunters found them as late as the 1960s. By late May 1865, however, Sgt. Charles Musser of the 29th Iowa thought Mobile was fast recovering from the war.9 At the same time, Musser also noticed that many of his comrades were talking about going to Mexico after their discharge from the army. They wanted to help Benito Juárez drive the French out of his country. By May 1865 Federal authorities began shifting

626   Earl J. Hess Fourth and Thirteenth Corps troops and the all-​Black Twenty-​fifth Corps to the Rio Grande Valley. Maj. Gen. Philip Sheridan took command of this fifty-​thousand-​man force. He offered surplus clothes and weapons to the Juárista army and the U.S. Navy blockaded the Mexican coast to keep French reinforcements away. In order to ease tensions with the United States, Napoleon evacuated his troops from Mexico in January 1866. Juárez’s army toppled Maximilian’s government and captured the emperor of Mexico on May 15, 1867. He was executed by firing squad on June 19, ending the French intervention in Mexico. Only three years later, Napoleon III himself was overthrown in France’s humiliating defeat at the hands of Prussia.10 The civil wars in the United States and Mexico ended with the triumph of both national governments. To a significant degree, decisions made in Washington played a decisive role in the Mexican outcome. But the U.S. government had to defeat its own internal enemy before committing enough military power to play a role in effecting an outcome that it desired south of the border.

Notes 1. Don Harrison Doyle, The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 125–​130. 2. Hampton Smith, ed., Brother of Mine: The Civil War Letters of Thomas and William Christie (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2011), 161. 3. Thomas W. Cutrer, Theater of a Separate War: The Civil War West of the Mississippi River, 1861–​1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 276, 304–​312. 4. Arthur W. Bergeron Jr., Confederate Mobile (Jackson:  University Press of Mississippi, 1991), 76–​84, 87–​125. 5. Chester G. Hearn, Mobile Bay and the Mobile Campaign: The Last Great Battles of the Civil War (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1993), 149–​200. 6. Wilson to Whipple, June 29, 1865, in U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1897), ser. 1, vol. 49, pt. 1: 356–​362. Hereafter cited as OR. 7. James Pickett Jones, Yankee Blitzkrieg:  Wilson’s Raid through Alabama and Georgia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1976), 28–​186. 8. Wilson to Whipple, June 29, 1865, OR, ser. 1, vol. 49, pt. 1: 369–​370. 9. Barry Popchock, ed., Soldier Boy: The Civil War Letters of Charles O. Musser, 29th Iowa (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1995), 208. 10. Popchock, Soldier Boy, 206; Doyle, Cause of All Nations, 305–​306.

Bibliography Bergeron, Arthur W., Jr. Confederate Mobile. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991. Cutrer, Thomas W. Theater of a Separate War: The Civil War West of the Mississippi River, 1861–​ 1865. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Doyle, Don Harrison. American Civil Wars: The United States, Latin America, Europe, and the Crisis of the 1860s. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017.

Texas, Mobile, and Wilson’s Raid    627 Doyle, Don Harrison. The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War. New York: Basic Books, 2015. Hearn, Chester G. Mobile Bay and the Mobile Campaign: The Last Great Battles of the Civil War. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1993. Jones, Howard. Blue and Gray Diplomacy:  A History of Union and Confederate Foreign Relations. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. Jones, James Pickett. Yankee Blitzkrieg:  Wilson’s Raid through Alabama and Georgia. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1976.

Chapter 39

O c cu pation, 1865 –​18 7 7 Andrew F. Lang

Reconstruction was a unique military affair. The U.S. Army was the only institution capable of managing the aftermath of Confederate defeat and restoring stability to the Federal Union. The military occupation of the former Confederacy long after Appomattox succeeded in preserving the nation’s democratic-​republican foundations against radical secessionists. And yet, occupation during Reconstruction posed a problem because of the symbolism of standing armies functioning at the forefront of domestic social and political change. Ultimately, the success of Reconstruction depended on the army embedding itself in unprecedented ways in political affairs, race relations, and economic markets to forge a new South stable enough never again to threaten the Union’s survival, but not too centralized to appear coercive. Indeed, the very institution that reintegrated the formerly rebellious states into their proper national orbit was also one seen by many white Northerners and Southerners as a source of dangerous instability and a threat to democratic self-​determination. Limited by a swift demobilization, the army could not wield the tools necessary to prevent former Confederates from regaining political power and “redeeming” the South into an eerie image of its antebellum self.1 Military occupation during Reconstruction followed three distinct yet intimately connected phases. Between 1865 and 1867, the defeat of Rebel armies created a power vacuum across the postwar landscape that demanded the U.S. Army remain on the ground to manage the transition from war to peace. Acting as the critical civil authority, supervising the evolution from slavery to freedom, regulating the behavior of restive white civilians, and preventing any further secessionist movements, the Union Army played just as decisive a role during the dawn of peace as it had during the climax of war. The rapid demobilization of volunteer soldiers, who populated nearly all Union armies in 1865, transpired alongside the army’s initial occupying duties. Demobilization represented the principal end of war, the moment at which citizen-​soldiers’ military contracts concluded. The fast but purposeful dissolution of manpower portended an ominous fate for a military institution charged with such steep responsibilities, especially as white Southerners reconstructed their region according to the vision of President Andrew Johnson, a Democrat sympathetic to the South’s racial and social hierarchies.2

Occupation, 1865–1877   629 Once the Republican Congress wrested control of Reconstruction policy away from the intransigent Johnson, the army assumed a central role in the process of so-​called radical Reconstruction. The advent of Military Reconstruction (1867–​1871) demanded that the former Rebel states, in order to be readmitted formally into the Union, had to write new state constitutions outlawing slavery, sanctioning biracial suffrage, and ratifying the Fourteenth Amendment, which outlined biracial citizenship and codified equality and due process of law. The states were temporarily stripped of their sovereignty, governed instead as part of a military district and commanded by an army general and Federal troops. Once the states complied with the Republican Congress’s vision they were readmitted to the Union as equal civil partners, and the army retreated to the fringes of civil life. The revolutionary social and political changes produced by Republican Reconstruction—​particularly the enfranchisement of and equal citizenship bestowed to African American men—​inspired devastating waves of white Southern insurgent violence. Former Confederates who populated paramilitary units disrupted local and state elections, intimidated and murdered freed people, and aimed to overflow legitimate Southern governments. The insurgency posed difficult questions to the army, particularly once civil governance had been restored across the South after 1871. Could Federal military forces intervene in local and state affairs to stem the rising tide of white terrorism that intended to topple genuinely reconstructed, biracial, Republican governments? Although the Congress had authorized the president to call the army into action in these instances, ultimately the army’s power was neutered, its influence checked by a powerful and long-​standing national aversion to standing armies interfering in domestic life. There was inherent tension in military occupation, suggesting that occupation was not a natural derivative of victory. And yet, occupation was a critical but also unprecedented leap into an uncertain future in which the army at any moment might claim unchecked power and strip the Union of its democratic-​republican foundations. If that were to happen, contemporaries asked, what was the Union’s preservation worth? Nonetheless, although it was the only institution capable of ensuring national stability, the army was deprived of the tools necessary to effect a genuine occupation and a lasting biracial democracy in the South. Thus, Reconstruction was hardly the coercive “bayonet rule” of Lost Cause myth.

From Confederate Collapse to Self-​R econstruction, 1865–​1867 Nineteenth-​century Americans understood civilized war as a legalistic public contest between consenting nation-​states. The American Civil War thus concluded with the surrender of Confederate armies, the dissolution of the Confederate republic, and the

630   Andrew F. Lang extermination of slavery. Because Federal armies had secured the national will, the loyal citizenry expected the mass of white Southerners to rejoin the Union and accept the war’s twin verdicts: the illegitimacy of secession and the death of human bondage. By the spring of 1865, the absence of formal war and the salvation of the republic translated into a momentous demobilization of Union military forces. Enemies to the republic no longer claimed national legitimacy nor populated official military institutions, triggering a fundamental change in the disposition of U.S. armies. For four years, private citizens had volunteered their services to avenge and battle for the Union. Their contracts as soldiers expired as soon as Confederate armies surrendered, ending any further obligation to the state. A vast majority of the approximately one million U.S.  volunteers now demanded to return home as private civilians. “We offered our services to our country to help put down the rebellion,” announced Iowa volunteer Sgt. Charles O. Musser. “That object has been accomplished, and our time is out, and we are no longer needed.” As citizens of a republic, free men did not expect to serve the state indefinitely. Such compulsion was an affront to the very liberty that millions of Northern men had volunteered to uphold. With the preservation of their Union—​the source of constitutional liberty and the fountainhead of democracy—​the government possessed no further claim on their service.3 The Union’s citizen-​soldiers poured out of the army at extraordinary rates. By November 1865, a little more than 800,000 soldiers—​approximately 80 percent of the volunteers who ended the war—​had shed their uniforms. A year after Appomattox, only eleven thousand volunteers continued to serve in the army; by early 1867 citizen-​soldiers no longer populated the U.S. Army. Demobilization testified to the enduring symbol of Union for which hundreds of thousands of volunteers had given their full measure of devotion. To preserve the Union meant securing the foundations of republicanism, a distinctive governing philosophy that looked askance at centralized power, privileged the liberty of all citizens, and restrained overt militarism. Maintaining a large standing army in the wake of their victory over secessionists would undermine the very purpose for which Unionists battled between 1861 and 1865. Harper’s Weekly, a dependable gauge of mainstream Northern opinion, heralded the army “with which Washington secured our national existence, and that with which Grant maintained it, dissolved in the moment of victory” because “the standing army . . . is the enemy of Liberty.” The “most important lessons taught by the late American war,” Union Brig. Gen. John Schofield advised a Parisian audience in December 1865, was that Union armies, “when their work was done, quietly disbanded, and . . . returned to the avocations of peace.” Indeed, the United States would not transform into a large military leviathan, posing intolerable threats to civil and economic liberty. The nation’s armies, once the tools of devastating war, would now be employed to forge a just and lasting national accord.4 The post–​Civil War army thus possessed a completely different purpose and boasted a character distinct from the volunteer army that had waged a war for self-​preservation. The necessities of Reconstruction mandated a highly professional and bureaucratic military force to transition the nation from war to peace. In particular, the army had to maintain order in the chaotic aftermath of Confederate collapse; secure the western

Occupation, 1865–1877   631 frontier and bolster the nation’s coasts; neutralize the monarchical threat from French-​ occupied Mexico; and manage the Freedmen’s Bureau, a Federal relief agency that assisted formerly enslaved people to adjust to freedom. In recognition of these unprecedented constabulary duties, Congress increased the size of the regular army, dwarfing in size and scope its antebellum ancestor. By 1867, at the height of its occupation of the former Confederacy, the regular army numbered slightly more than fifty-​seven thousand soldiers—​compared to the small, sixteen-​thousand-​ man U.S. Army of 1860—​approximately one-​third of whom garrisoned strategic locales across the war-​torn South. The army played a comparatively stronger and perhaps far more devastating role in the post–​Civil War West in which the government exerted Federal force across the continent. At the same moment at which the Union stabilized the former Confederate states, the bulk of the army unfolded a thirty-​year “bayonet rule” against western Native American nations. Both Reconstruction and the Plains Wars thus sought the same ends using profoundly distinct military means: employing Federal power to secure the supremacy of U.S. sovereignty. If Reconstruction aimed to enforce peaceful Federal authority on white Southerners, the bloody wars to detribalize Indian lands in the long wake of Appomattox sought to erase the “barbaric” internationalization of a rapidly expanding white republic.5 Postwar military occupation was at once robust and restrained during the weeks after Appomattox. Civil and military authorities faced a simple yet impossible dilemma:  could U.S.  armies lawfully “occupy” states that, according to Pres. Abraham Lincoln, had never truly seceded from the Union but instead acted in temporary rebellion against Federal authority? The “grasp of war” theory justified the army’s occupation of the former Confederacy. Articulated by prominent Massachusetts attorney Richard Henry Dana, and underwritten by international law and just-​war philosophy, the grasp of war granted the Union the right to hold Southern belligerents in a state of war to facilitate the conditions of peace. “When one nation has conquered another in war, the victorious nation does not retreat from the country and give up possession of it,” Dana advised. “It holds the conquered enemy in the grasp of war until it has secured whatever it has a right to require.” The U.S. Army thus continued to wield its constitutional war powers to impose martial law, to subdue lawlessness, and to act as the Federal government’s arm throughout the South. Yet the army’s war powers were both temporary and expedient. The grasp of war disavowed permanent military rule, emphasizing instead a swift restoration of local civil governance and the full reintegration of the states into their proper Federal setting. “If we should undertake to exercise sovereign civil jurisdiction over those States,” Dana warned against indefinite military occupation, “it would be as great a peril to our system as it would be a hardship upon them.”6 The grasp of war reflected and enabled the initiatives of Reconstruction proposed by Presidents Lincoln and Johnson. Only the U.S. Army, as the lone stable Federal institution in the South, could ensure the peaceful transition away from Confederate governing authority. Yet the army did not wage a continuation of the Civil War but instead paved a civil peace. Its principal purpose functioned outside of the traditional nineteenth-​ century American conceptions of war, privileging the allure of democracy as the goal

632   Andrew F. Lang of its constabulary campaigns. The army acted as a bulwark of stability as the Southern states produced new constitutions that disavowed secession and abolished slavery, elected state and Federal representatives, and prepared to reenter the Union as loyal entities. Administering loyalty oaths, ensuring the rehabilitation of civil governments, and repairing the South’s devastated infrastructure, Federal military forces did not actively change the South but rather enforced the verdicts of the war and ensured the mandates of presidential Reconstruction. The army played a critical role in enforcing emancipation in the wake of slavery’s destruction. The collective efforts of African Americans who fled their plantations, the wartime army’s recognition of Black freedom, and congressional and executive dictates reshaped the United States into an antislavery republic. Confederate collapse, however, created profound uncertainties about the meaning of freedom and the scope of emancipation. How would Federal power enforce African American liberty? How was labor defined in the absence of human bondage? What was the new relationship between freed people and former enslavers? Only the U.S. Army could sustain an enduring emancipation, pledging the military to the unprecedented tasks of social change and cultural regulation.7 While he waited to be mustered out of service, Rhode Island volunteer Lt. Col. Elisha Hunt Rhodes, who had overseen Gen. Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, disclosed the army’s predicament. In May 1865, a local planter approached Rhodes in central Virginia, claiming “trouble with his ex-​slaves and appealed to me to settle the matter, which I  did.” Rhodes’s experience was typical throughout Union armies. “I spend my time listening to disputes between whites and blacks and trying to settle their affairs. I am Judge, Jury, and almost Executioner.” Union occupiers had to settle racial quarrels, act as intermediaries between the formerly enslaved and former masters, negotiate labor contracts, and administer legal justice. “With some [white Southerners],” Rhodes acknowledged, “it is evidently hard work, and the old spirit of rebellion shows itself quite often.”8 Few Federal institutions played a more essential role in shaping the postemancipation order than the Freedmen’s Bureau. Established in early 1865, the Bureau provided formal education to the formerly enslaved, instructed in the art of free labor, encouraged independence, and guarded African Americans from white Southern obstinacy. As the Bureau was a constituent of the War Department, army officers directed it and oversaw its managerial functions. This extraordinary task gave the army, an institution once relegated to the fringes of social and civil life, dynamic power to reshape the postwar Union. The experience of John William DeForest, a former volunteer officer who joined the Bureau immediately after the war, revealed the army’s central place on the postemancipation landscape. Disgusted that former Confederates in his district near Greenville, South Carolina, employed violence to coerce African American labor, DeForest considered it his duty to elevate “the blacks and restor[e]‌the whites of my district to a confidence in civil law, thus fitting both as rapidly as possible to assume the duties of citizenship.” Indeed, Brig. Gen. Oliver Otis Howard, a former general in the Army of the Potomac and the Bureau’s first administrator, declared the institution’s

Occupation, 1865–1877   633 principal function “to render the people self-​supporting,” promoting the reality of emancipation and the prerogatives of biracial liberty. Yet DeForest, a stalwart champion of emancipation and racial egalitarianism, sensed a quandary in this equation, one that would shape—​and hamper—​the military occupation of the former Confederacy. “If the military power were to rule them forever,” regulating white conduct and nurturing Black freedom, “if it were to settle all their difficulties without demanding of them any exercise of judgment and self-​control, how could they ever be, in any profound and lasting sense, ‘reconstructed’?”9 The architects of Union military occupation empathized with DeForest’s question. Occupation was never intended to be boundless, large scale, or coercive. A small, mobile, and supervisory army was to ensure the lasting preservation of the Union, which required the swift restoration of democratic civil government and an emancipation secure enough to be managed equitably between white and Black Southerners. Reflecting long-​established fears of standing armies, powerful institutions that squashed republican liberty, the initial occupations of the former Confederacy restrained the army’s latitude, ensuring that it could never impose militaristic order independent of civilian oversight. As DeForest acknowledged, an indefinite occupation would refashion the very democratic republic that the Union waged war to preserve. “As a rule,” Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, General in Chief of the Army, likewise acknowledged in the autumn of 1865, “I am opposed to the military taking the law into their own hands.” An occupation that reeked of the “bayonet rule” of postwar mythmaking would threaten the republic’s virtue and undermine the cause of national reunion.10 Grant bolstered his outlook in a December 1865 report on the conditions of the postwar South. He inspected the transition from war to peace and gauged whether occupation forces “could be reduced and expenses curtailed.” Grant advised President Johnson that the mass of white Southerners throughout the Atlantic seaboard had “accept[ed] the present situation of affairs in good faith.” Though understandably scarred by defeat, former Confederates acceded to the death of slavery and the illegitimacy of secession, which “they regard as having been settled forever, by the highest tribunal, arms, that man can resort to.” That a just war conducted between civilized belligerents occasioned its signal purpose, Grant encouraged holding only a diminutive military force across the South, not as a sign of pitiless conquest but as a reasonable cradle “sufficient to maintain order.” The general in chief even claimed that a mass of white Southerners conceded to the necessity of these garrisons “until such time as labor returns to its proper channel and civil authority is fully established.”11 Anxious that the army’s presence stoked instability and fear among the populace, Grant also encouraged the demobilization of the U.S. Colored Troops, African American units that composed a preponderance of the Union occupation forces in some areas of the South. Although a passionate sponsor of the USCT, Grant sensed that “the presence of Black troops, lately slaves, demoralizes labor both by their advice and furnishing in the camps a resort for the Freedmen for long distances.” Few images of defeat antagonized former Confederates more than the presence of their former bondsmen donning blue uniforms, shouldering muskets, and occupying the former lands of

634   Andrew F. Lang slavery. For Grant, removing African American soldiers would alleviate needless white apprehension and facilitate “the conclusion that the citizens of the Southern states are anxious to return to self government.” Grant recognized that former Confederates wanted nothing more than any other American: the restoration of democratic rule, the constitutional protections of citizenship, and the stability of civil institutions. These essential ingredients of republicanism clashed with military occupation, a temporary expedient to national reunion.12 Grant’s report captured the success and shortcomings of military occupation within the presidential program of Reconstruction. White Southerners were indeed eager to return to the Union, using the process of democracy to rebuild their shattered region into an image of its antebellum self. The army assisted civilian efforts to rehabilitate local governments, supervise the election of representatives to local and Federal offices, and direct the renaissance of agricultural labor. Yet the loyal citizenry’s abiding faith in democracy ensured the resurrection of a white ruling class that resembled the secessionists of 1861. The newly refurbished Southern state governments thereby passed punitive laws, known as the Black Codes, which coerced Black freedom and regulated freed people’s labor, while white voters propelled newly elected public officials—​some wearing their old Confederate uniforms—​to statehouses and even to Congress. A white ruling class, a renewed plantation system of pseudo-​enslaved labor, and the persistent threat of violence to police the conduct of freed people suddenly defined the reconstructed South. The swift reconstruction of white Southern authority troubled Unionists. Carl Schurz, a German refugee of the 1848 democratic uprisings, a fierce antislavery stalwart, and a devoted Republican, acknowledged that the death of slaveholding “commenced a great social revolution in the South, but has, as yet, not completed it.” Free labor had failed to displace coerced labor; the essence of disunion still gripped the Southern imagination; and the remnants of the Confederacy, embodied in the “reconstructed” South’s new representatives, undermined the cause of reunion. “The power which originated the revolution is expected to turn over its whole future development to another power,” Schurz stated in late 1865, “which from the beginning was hostile to it and has never yet entered into its spirit,” permitting the gross restoration of all that Union soldiers had died to dismantle. Schurz thus indicted the limits of military occupation. The army’s rapid demobilization created vast and unregulated spaces throughout the South in which planters reasserted their dominance. Federal decrees—​the expectations of loyalty and free labor—​meant only so much if they could not be enforced. Large swaths of the former Confederacy were immune from the army’s reach, permitting local whites—​rather than Federal dictate—​to set the terms of union and emancipation.13 Constrained by its narrow reach, the army was deprived of its authority to ensure a successful occupation. To complicate matters, President Johnson routinely encouraged the restoration of white Southern power and scoffed at African American freedom. His latent endorsement of the White South’s self-​reconstruction legitimized regional hostility to Federal authority and emancipation. The consolidation of White supremacy, joined by the demobilized army’s restricted grasp, yielded devastating massacres of

Occupation, 1865–1877   635 freed people in 1866 at Memphis and New Orleans. That same year, the president vetoed Congress’s reauthorization of the Freedmen’s Bureau and the Civil Rights Act, measures intended to benefit and protect African American freedom. Finally, in August 1866, Johnson declared the formal end of the Civil War, recognizing that the former Confederate states had complied with presidential Reconstruction. The army’s role now seemed at an abrupt end. “Standing armies, military occupation, martial law, military tribunals, and suspension of the writ of habeas corpus are in time of peace dangerous to public liberty,” decreed Johnson, “contrary to the genius and spirit of our free institutions.” For Johnson and former Confederates, peace had arrived. By 1866, democratic self-​reconstruction had resurrected the very white Southern ruling class that sundered the Union in 1861. A preponderance of the Union’s loyal citizenry, however, opposed Johnson’s program and white Southern restoration when they voted overwhelmingly for Republicans in the midterm elections of 1866. Their ballots underwrote a mandate for Congress to furnish the U.S. Army with new powers, rehabilitating its military occupation of the South.14

Military Reconstruction, 1867–​1871 Congress placed the U.S. Army at the center of its legislative program when Republicans wrested control of Reconstruction away from President Johnson. The fundamental problem with military occupation during the presidential phase of Reconstruction was the army’s inability to enforce Federal authority on the ground. The army comprised fewer than twenty thousand troops spread across 750,000 square miles, neutering its ability to respond to local emergencies. White Southern intransigence, combined with an overreliance on democracy and a demobilized army spread too thin, allowed former Confederates to dictate the course of peace, thereby spoiling the verdicts of Union victory. In early 1867, Congress forged a new Reconstruction agenda that balanced military occupation with democracy. A series of laws known as the Reconstruction Acts returned the former Confederate states to a condition of rebellion, stripping away each directive of presidential Reconstruction. Though Johnson rejected the laws, Congress easily overrode his vetoes. The new laws declared, “[N]‌o legal State governments or adequate protection for life or property now exists in the rebel States.” Military Reconstruction intended to rehabilitate each state to ensure “that peace and good order should be enforced in said States until loyal and republican State governments can be legally established.”15 The Reconstruction Acts stripped the former Confederate states (with the exception of Tennessee, which in 1866 ratified the Fourteenth Amendment) of civilian oversight and placed the states in five military districts supervised by a brigadier general of the U.S. Army. Congress also increased the size of the occupying force to more than twenty thousand soldiers. Through the imposition of martial law, the army supervised coalitions of biracial Southern Republicans who would assume central roles in reconstructing the region. The Acts conferred voting rights to African American men and disenfranchised

636   Andrew F. Lang former senior Confederate military officers and politicians. Congress judged the individual states “reconstructed” only once biracial constituencies assembled constitutional conventions, erased bigoted state laws, and elected new state and national representatives loyal to the Republican Party. Perhaps most critical, the states had to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment, Congress’s signal initiative that sanctioned biracial citizenship, guaranteed the equal protection and due process of law, and barred states from discriminating against residents of particular races or creeds. Bolstered with unparalleled civic authority, the district military commanders registered voters, organized and directed constitutional conventions, replaced civil courts with military tribunals, arrested disobedient citizens, and arbitrated disputes between freed people and former slaveholders. Individual commanders even possessed the ability to remove from office any official suspected of disloyalty, hostile to the Republican program of Reconstruction, or intent on reestablishing old racial orders and coerced labor regimes.16 Under the Reconstruction Acts, the army played a critical role in administering a grassroots democratic revolution that swept across the American South. The laws stimulated loyal Southerners to act within Congress’s vision, incentivized to reconstruct their states according to the twin verdicts of the Civil War: Union and emancipation. Freed people who had been enslaved not a decade earlier embraced the political opportunities to establish a new egalitarian region divorced entirely from the clutches of oligarchic secessionists. As soon as the Reconstruction Acts went into effect, 90 percent of Southern African American men affixed their names to voter rolls. This was the purpose of Military Reconstruction: employ a dynamic but temporary military occupation to restore the republic through democracy. Freed people assumed central functions in the drafting of new state constitutions and went to the polls in overwhelming numbers. And, for the first time in American history, 1,500 African American men held local, state, and Federal offices. In 1868, African Americans joined white loyal citizens in securing the presidency for Ulysses S. Grant, the nation’s foremost military hero and stalwart Republican committed to the nation’s lasting preservation. The rapid collapse of the old slaveholding order depended at once on Congress’s militaristic response to white Southern obstinacy, the democratic acumen of freed people, and the army’s stalwart presence.17 The U.S. Army’s vigorous role during Military Reconstruction nonetheless placed officers and soldiers in contexts alien to the American military tradition. Few episodes in the nation’s martial past had prepared professional troops for the realms of constitutional reform, civic regulation, and political participation. As good republicans skeptical of the awesome power of standing armies, most West Point–​trained soldiers maintained a healthy skepticism of U.S. military forces crusading on behalf of a partisan political agenda. Yet the implications of civil war and the unparalleled strains of Reconstruction necessitated that the army shed its traditional political aversions and operate on behalf of congressional Republicans. It is nearly impossible for modern sensibilities to grasp the radical magnitude of this moment. The success of Reconstruction depended on the army’s ability and willingness to perform political, legislative, and social functions outside of its customary roles in making war and defending national boundaries. It now

Occupation, 1865–1877   637

Map 39.1  Reconstruction, 1867–1877

executed the partisan will of a national political party, which in turn relied on the army to achieve its legislative goals. An officer who served in Texas spoke for myriad regular soldiers when he indicted his assignment as “going entirely outside the duty of my profession.” Maj. Gen. George Gordon Meade, the commander of the Third Military District, which encompassed Alabama, Florida, and Georgia, likewise disclosed to a fellow officer in 1867, “[We] have not only to be a soldier, but must play the politician, a part which I am sure both to you and me would be not only difficult but disagreeable.”18 Commanders of the five military districts harbored diverse political opinions. Some, like John Schofield, who governed the First District (Virginia), contested the Fourteenth Amendment and even questioned the capacity of African Americans for citizenship. Others, such as Brig. Gen. John Pope, Meade’s predecessor in the Third District, and Maj. Gen. Philip Sheridan, who commanded the Fifth Military District in Texas and Louisiana, detested former Confederates and used their authority to remove recalcitrant Southerners from office. As a rule, however, commanders respected the restraints on their dominion. While generals indeed employed their congressionally sanctioned authority, they also distrusted the powers with which they were endowed. Prior to his election to the presidency, Grant articulated the professional soldier’s view of Military Reconstruction. Although supportive of Congress’s efforts, even to the point of counseling Republicans in drafting the Reconstruction Acts, as general in chief of the army Grant advised his generals in 1868 “that District Commanders are responsible for the faithful execution of the reconstruction Act of Congress, and that, in Civil matters, I cannot give them an order.”19

638   Andrew F. Lang Grant cautioned that the army could act only insofar as Congress directed. Contrary to baseless charges from Democrats, the army did not itself draft state constitutions nor even coerce citizens into pledging their loyalty to the military. Nor did the army ever threaten to stage a coup against civilian authority. Military occupiers instead operated within constitutional boundaries regulated by congressional legislation. Generals normally sprang into action upon the request of local civil authorities, on whom commanders relied to conduct state functions. The army thus acted as a source of stability rather than an independent institution unmoored from civilian oversight. Grant offered important intuition into the delicate terrain on which the army functioned. Few Americans, he believed, desired an indefinite military occupation, which posed dangerous political and financial liabilities. “I am exceedingly anxious to see reconstruction effected and Military rule put an end to,” he admitted to the commander of the Fourth Military District of Mississippi and Arkansas. “The best way,” the general in chief explained, “to secure a speedy termination of Military rule is to execute all the laws of Congress in the spirit in which they were conceived, firmly but without passion.” Grant encouraged his commanders to demonstrate proper restraint, acting to expand the base of democracy from which Black and white Southerners could thereafter manage their local affairs.20 As Grant implied, the imposition of enduring bayonet rule would undermine the basic purpose of Reconstruction. Both the army and Southerners possessed incentives to act according to Congress’s wishes. The more quickly the Southern states complied with Republican directives, the more quickly military occupation would end. And the process worked. By 1871, each of the former Confederate states had complied with the terms set by congressional Republicans, each readmitted as full and equal partners in the Federal Union. The political and social landscape of the American South had been completely transformed. Slavery was but a distant memory, shattered by freed people’s democratic energies and bolstered by a thriving Republican Party. The torturous decade of secession and civil war and the failures of Southern self-​restoration now appeared finally at an end. The Union, it seemed, had answered Grant’s simple prayer as he sought the presidency in 1868: “Let Us Have Peace.”

The Price of Union, 1871–​1877 Military Reconstruction had transformed the American South into a region of biracial political democracy. But for many white Southerners, Republicans had unleashed a profane revolution. In 1868, Mississippi Democrats gave voice to white regional grievances when they indicted the Fourteenth Amendment as “the nefarious design of the republican party in Congress to place the white men of the Southern States under the governmental control of their late slaves, and degrading the Caucasian race as the inferior of the African negro.” Former Confederates had to combat such “crime[s]‌against the civilization of the age” to stem the excesses of a seemingly radical Republican Party. Military

Occupation, 1865–1877   639 Reconstruction sparked an extensive white Southern insurgency that aimed to terminate the regional Republican Party and, through armed intimidation, prevent African Americans from voting and participating in democratic life. Only an internal rebellion against Republican rule could cure the ills wrought by civil war, emancipation, and racial equality.21 The Reconstruction insurgency was distinct from the Confederate rebellion of 1861–​ 1865. White Southern insurgents who rose up in the wake of Military Reconstruction did not propose to regenerate an independent slaveholding republic, which secessionists had failed to establish through disunion and war. Unlike Confederates who waged war for national sovereignty, the post–​Civil War insurgency possessed “no single directing brain but rather a functional relationship among several groups with common attitudes, enemies, and objectives.” White Southern terrorists instead aimed to create within the postwar Union a stable racial hierarchy built on white supremacy and Black subordination. Former Confederates employed biracial violence and political assassinations to topple African American and Republican rule and upset the new free-​labor economic order.22 The insurgency took many forms, comprised diverse elements, and evolved across space and time. The Ku Klux Klan emerged in the late 1860s as a loosely organized social club whose disguised members conducted local night raids against individual Republicans and freed people. The Klan possessed a plain but devious goal: convince the South’s biracial ruling class that it lived in dangerous uncertainty of clandestine but constant violence. Though it inspired great terror, the Klan was largely ineffective at stemming Republican electoral success. By the early 1870s, with the triumph of Republican Reconstruction across the South, Confederate veterans had established paramilitary units to direct organized, public attacks against Republican political clubs and elections. The names of the various paramilitaries reflected their overt design on reestablishing white supremacy and Democratic political hegemony:  the Knights of the White Camelia, the White League, and the White Line. Rightly seen as terrorist organizations, paramilitary units altered their purpose by the middle of the 1870s. They instigated full-​ fledged counterrevolutions against Republican governments in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina. Using violence to intimidate voters and civilians, installing rival Democratic claimants to state houses and governorships, and refusing to recognize the legitimacy of Republican officials, the paramilitary counterrevolution posed devastating implications for a peaceful national reunion. Campaigns of terror and murder played critical roles in “redeeming” the South from African American and Republican rule.23 The U.S. Army assumed active responsibility in combating white Southern insurgents. Civil authorities typically called upon local district commanders to assist in law enforcement operations, to eliminate areas of paramilitary infestation, and to protect voters on election days. Though by late 1871 only eight thousand soldiers served across the American South, the army during that same year abolished Klan actions in South Carolina; negotiated violently contested elections in Louisiana in 1871, 1872, and 1874; and upheld President Grant’s selection of a Republican governor in the wake of a

640   Andrew F. Lang disputed 1874 electoral contest in Arkansas. Although spread thin across a vast region the size of western Europe, the army used the swift mobility of cavalry raids to curtail insurgent violence and uphold Federal authority in particularly hostile locales.24 The Federal response to Klan activity in South Carolina particularly illustrates how the army conducted counterinsurgency operations. The Ku Klux Klan emerged in South Carolina in late 1868 to contest a new state constitution that emboldened a new biracial ruling class. Violence blanketed the state for three years, as the Klan murdered scores of white and Black Republicans and blunted peaceful self-​determination. In 1871, Congress issued the Enforcement and Ku Klux Klan Acts, outlawing terrorism and the state-​level curtailment of civil liberties. The laws also sanctioned the president to hold states in a condition of rebellion, to impose martial law, and to employ the army to suppress anarchical violence. President Grant suspended the writ of habeas corpus in nine South Carolina counties, aligning the army with civil authorities to arrest hundreds of Klan members whom the authorities prosecuted for Federal crimes. Klan activity subsequently faded in South Carolina by 1872.25 The Force Acts, however, revealed a troubling curiosity about the limitations of occupation in the aftermath of Military Reconstruction. While the government targeted the Carolina Klan to demonstrate the power of Federal force against local insurgents, counterinsurgent efforts revealed the skeptical caution with which Republicans were willing to use military force in the domestic arena. The laws granted striking peacetime executive and military power, yet President Grant unfolded enforcement operations with notable restraint. He opted against placing all of South Carolina in a formal condition of rebellion subject to martial law, which would indict Klan members as true Rebels sentenced to death upon capture. The president even rejected activating Francis Lieber’s code of conduct—​General Orders No. 100—​that furnished Union armies during the Civil War with broad military power to conquer the Confederacy. The congressional statutes instead limited the military scope of law enforcement. Only civil authorities could summon the army to assist in administering the law and in arresting violent offenders. Moreover, Federal courts, rather than military tribunals, tried suspected Klan members, inevitably burdening counterinsurgent operations within sluggish bureaucratic procedures. “The machinery for the execution of these [laws] . . . is wholly inadequate to the task,” grumbled Maj. Lewis Merrill, who led the 7th U.S. Cavalry on successful expeditions against the Carolina Klan. “The United States courts are choked with a quantity of business which amounts practically to a denial of a hearing of four-​ fifths of the cases.” Though Merrill’s command apprehended some six hundred alleged Klan members, Federal courts convicted only fifty-​four dissidents. Active military operations nevertheless scattered the Klan from much of the state.26 Merrill’s frustration framed the unprecedented challenge of employing the U.S. Army during peacetime to combat civil disorders. Military Reconstruction ended in 1871, limiting the army’s role in civil and political affairs once the Southern states returned to their lawful place in the Federal system. While only the army could combat the violence that disrupted the South’s freshly inaugurated biracial ruling class, republican ideology undermined any sustained military occupation. Americans were confronted

Occupation, 1865–1877   641 with a simple yet impossible question: Could the army intervene in states to regulate social affairs and curtail civil violence? Typically the answer was no, although the U.S. Constitution permitted military actions during cases of domestic rebellion. But this was the same dilemma that John William DeForest, the volunteer officer who commanded a Freedmen’s Bureau outpost in South Carolina, cited in 1866. Could the South ever be truly reconstructed if the army remained on a perpetual war footing, regulating elections, enforcing the laws, and aligning with state and civil officials? Was this the democracy that Union armies bled to preserve between 1861 and 1865?27 An essay published in the Nation outlined the problem of peacetime military occupation. Responding in March 1871 to Klan violence in South Carolina, the author condemned “the outrages committed by what are called the Ku-​klux on the negroes and Unionists at the South.” The article praised the revolution in which “the negroes and Unionists [were] guaranteed a voice in the Government” and “were secured in the exclusive control of it.” The Klan had “taken the field against the new regime,” threatening to dismantle the changes wrought by Union victory and emancipation. But the writer then linked the problem of enforcement to the militarism of centralized government. Indeed, “if dealing with the South, [European governments] would occupy it with at least 100,000 men, they would patrol the roads with clouds of cavalry, and fill the streets with swarms of police.” The Klan posed a clear danger to biracial democracy. But the greater threat to the constitutional order, at least according to the Nation, stemmed from militaristic coercion. “If we once get into the habit of treating the Constitution as a mere expression of opinion, to be set aside whenever its observance seems inconvenient, we shall have substituted a Gallic Republic for an American one.” Charting such a course “we [will] have sown the seeds of anarchy” and have declared “the whole American system a mistake.” Therefore, “we cannot interfere effectively, and had better not interfere at all.”28 The Nation spoke to enduring white nineteenth-​century American values that favored an antimilitaristic republicanism over biracial democracy. African American political participation, which sustained a Republican-​controlled South, was essential both to national security and to upholding the verdict of the Civil War. Yet so too was retaining a central government that did not appear to coerce the citizenry and impede the natural course of popular sovereignty. The evolution of Reconstruction placed these values in impossible competition. The fate of Black equality depended entirely on the Federal government’s willingness and ability to enforce its mandates. But a demobilized army, one restricted by law and hampered by cultural suspicions of military coercion, could not govern the entire South nor combat every threat of white terrorism. The army succeeded in the places in which it operated, but its presence declined throughout the 1870s concomitant to the rise of paramilitary violence. One Republican explained the irresolvable impasse. The Enforcement and Klan Acts worked “in protecting the rights of some.” Yet the laws also “[broke] down the bulwarks of the citizen against arbitrary authority, and by transgressing all Constitutional limitations on power.”29 Loyal citizens desired a Reconstruction that cleansed the Union of the dangers of secession and the arbitrary impositions of democracy. The will of a free people had to

642   Andrew F. Lang live in a republic unfettered by any form of coercion. But democracy itself could not be compelled by the bayonet’s point, even if white Southern enemies to biracial government stood in the way. Grant unraveled these dueling tensions. When his friend and Republican ally Adelbert Ames, the Republican governor of Mississippi, petitioned Grant in 1875 for military support against the white insurgency plaguing his state, the president had to disclose the popular hostility against enduring military occupations. “The whole public are tired out with these annual autumnal outbreaks at the South,” explained Grant, “and the great majority are ready to condemn any interference on the part of the Government.” Moderate loyal citizens had come to imagine the white Southern insurgency as an inevitable but violent rejoinder against allegedly feckless and detested biracial state governments. As Harper’s Weekly concluded, any state government “which can be upheld only by the national army is not in the American sense a government of the people.”30 In the wake of Mississippi falling to white insurgents and Democratic political operatives, a disgusted Governor Ames acknowledged, “[Y]‌es, a revolution has taken place—​by force of arms—​and a race are disfranchised.” Ames condemned the nation for failing to act “but,” referring sardonically to Grant’s perspective, “it was ‘tired of the annual autumnal outbreaks in the South.’ ” Ames correctly diagnosed the source of Reconstruction’s demise and acknowledged its troubling implications by the late 1870s. Grant agreed, but in ways that devastated Ames and the millions of freed people desperate for protection against the forces of white supremacy. “Looking back over the whole policy of reconstruction,” the former president reflected after leaving the white House, “it seems to me that the wisest thing would have been to have continued for some time the military rule.” Such a course “would have been just to all, to the negro who wanted freedom, the white man who wanted protection, the Northern man who wanted Union.” But “military rule,” Grant understood, defied the idea of union. “The trouble about military rule in the South was that our people did not like it. It was not in accordance with our institutions.”31 A preponderance of white loyal citizens would have agreed. A sustained military occupation by as many as 100,000 Federal troops might have secured the racial promise of Reconstruction. But it would have planted a standing army across the South, regulating labor, regulating democracy, regulating a citizenry’s free will. And, the theory went, the army’s perpetual presence in domestic affairs would have continued to spark white insurgent resistance. With the ascendency of Republican Rutherford B. Hayes to the presidency in 1877, Republicans thus negotiated with Democrats an end to the military occupation of the South. In exchange for the remaining troops transported from the region, white Southerners would cease their campaigns of violence and retain a “peaceful” home rule. The tragedy, of course, was that such compromises solidified the conditions for Jim Crow segregation to grip the South for nearly the next century. But the army would return in the 1950s to assist a new class of African Americans to take hold of their dreams and pave the foundation for an enduring liberty.

Occupation, 1865–1877   643

Notes 1. William Blair, “The Use of Military Force to Protect the Gains of Reconstruction,” Civil War History 51 (December 2005): 388–​402; Gregory P. Downs, After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015); Andrew F. Lang, In the Wake of War: Military Occupation, Emancipation and Civil War America (Baton Rouge:  Louisiana State University Press, 2017). Interpretations, arguments, and vignettes in this essay draw entirely from the sources listed in the bibliography. 2. Downs, After Appomattox, 89–​111; Lang, In the Wake of War, 182–​209. 3. Charles O. Musser to Father, July 15, 1865, in Barry Popchuck, ed., Soldier Boy: The Civil War Letters of Charles O. Musser, 29th Iowa (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1995), 215; Downs, After Appomattox, 89–​111; Lang, In the Wake of War, 182–​209. 4. “General Grant and His Advisors,” Harper’s Weekly, November 2, 1867, 690; Schofield quoted in Frances Clarke, “ ‘Let All Nations See’: Civil War Nationalism and the Memorialization of Wartime Nationalism,” Civil War History 52 (March 2006): 92; James E. Sefton, The United States Army and Reconstruction, 1865–​1877 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967), 261–​262; Clayton R. Newell and Charles R. Shrader, “The U.S. Army’s Transition to Peace, 1865–​66,” Journal of Military History 77 (July 2013): 867–​894; Lang, In the Wake of War, 186. All references to rank in this chapter reflect the officer’s post-​Civil War commission in the U.S. Army rather than his rank in the volunteer forces during the conflict. 5. Downs, After Appomattox, 89–​91, 100–​3, 144–​145, 232–​233. 6. “Speech of Richard Henry Dana,” New  York Times, June 24, 1865; Downs, After Appomattox,  61–​87. 7. Downs, After Appomattox, 39–​60; Lang, In the Wake of War, 195–​209. 8. Diary entry, May 5, 1865, in Robert Hunt Rhodes, ed., All for the Union: The Civil War Diary and Letters of Elisha Hunt Rhodes (New York: Vintage, 1992), 228. 9. John William DeForest, A Union Officer in the Reconstruction, ed. James H. Croushore and David Morris Potter (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1948), 4–​5; Downs, After Appomattox,  39–​47. 10. Grant quoted in Brooks D. Simpson, Let Us Have Peace: Ulysses S. Grant and the Politics of War and Reconstruction, 1861–​1868 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 112; Mark Wahlgren Summers, The Ordeal of the Reunion: A New History of Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 1–​5, 36–​46. 11. Ulysses S. Grant to Andrew Johnson, December 18, 1865, in John Y. Simon, ed., The Papers of Ulysses S.  Grant, 32 vols. (Carbondale:  Southern Illinois University Press, 1967–​), 15:434–​437. 12. Ulysses S. Grant to Andrew Johnson, December 18, 1865, in Simon, The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, 15:436, 435; Lang, In the Wake of War, 182–​185, 198–​209. 13. Carl Schurz, “Report on the Condition of the South,” in Speeches, Correspondence and Political Papers of Carl Schurz, 6 vols., ed. Frederic Bancroft (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1913), 1:355. 14. Andrew Johnson, “Proclamation re End of Insurrection,” August 20, 1866, in The Papers of Andrew Johnson, vol. 11:  August 1866–​January 1867, ed. Paul H. Bergeron (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994), 102; Downs, After Appomattox, 61–​111, 149–​152.

644   Andrew F. Lang 15. “An Act to Provide for the More Efficient Government of the Rebel States,” March 2, 1867, https://​www.tsl.texas.gov/​ref/​abouttx/​secession/​reconstruction.html, accessed Sep­ tember 2, 2018. 16. Downs, After Appomattox, 161–​210; Summers, Ordeal of the Reunion, 102–​126, 129–1​39, 159–​161, 213–​225. 17. Numbers are derived from Steven Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet:  Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 163–​165, 180, 198, 199–​207, 217–​220, 237–​241. 18. George G. Meade to Regis de Trobriand, August 28, 1867, in Marie Caroline Post, The Life and Memoirs of Comte Regis de Trobriand (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1910), 347; Summers, Ordeal of the Reunion, 109–​116. 19. Ulysses S. Grant to John Pope, April 21, 1867, in Simon, The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, 17:117; Summers, Ordeal of the Reunion, 109–​116; Joseph G. Dawson, III, “The US Army in the South: Reconstruction as Nation Building,” Armed Diplomacy: Two Centuries of American Campaigning (Fort Leavenworth, KS: Combat Studies Institute Press, 2003), 45–​52. 20. Ulysses S. Grant to John Pope, April 21, 1867, in Simon, The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, 17:117; Summers, Ordeal of the Reunion, 109–​116. 21. Democratic Party of Mississippi platform, January 15, 1868, quoted in Mississippi in 1875: Report of the Select Committee to Inquire into the Mississippi Election of 1875, with the Testimony and Documentary Evidence, 2 vols. (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1876), 1:518. 22. Mark Grimsley, “Wars for the American South: The First and Second Reconstructions Considered as Insurgencies,” Civil War History 58 (March 2012): 9 (quotation). 23. James K.  Hogue, Uncivil War:  Five New Orleans Street Battles and the Rise and Fall of Radical Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 1–​13, 116–​ 143; Blair, “Use of Military Force to Protect the Gains of Reconstruction,” 396–​397. 24. Blair, “Use of Military Force to Protect the Gains of Reconstruction,” 396–​397. 25. Mark L. Bradley, The Army and Reconstruction, 1865–​1877 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 2015), 58–​64. 26. Merrill quoted in Bradley, Army and Reconstruction, 1865–​1877, 63; Summers, Ordeal of the Reunion, 267–​272. 27. Michael Les Benedict, “Preserving the Constitution: The Conservative Basis of Radical Reconstruction,” Journal of American History 61 (June 1974): 65–​90; Lang, In the Wake of War, 210–​235. 28. “The Problem at the South,” Nation, March 23, 1871, 192–​193. 29. Carl Schurz, “Why Anti-​Grant and Pro-​Greeley,” July 22, 1872, in Bancroft, Speeches, Correspondence, and Political Papers of Carl Schurz, 2:398; Lang, In the Wake of War, 232–​ 35; Blair, “Use of Military Force to Protect the Gains of Reconstruction,” 398–​402. 30. Grant quoted in George C. Rable, But There Was No Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984), 156; “The Army and the States,” Harper’s Weekly, April 7, 1877, 262. These themes are explored more fully in Summers, Ordeal of the Reunion, and Allen C. Guelzo, Reconstruction: A Concise History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). 31. Ames quoted in Stephen Budiansky, The Bloody Shirt:  Terror after the Civil War (New York: Penguin, 2008), 208; Grant quoted in John Russell Young, Around the World with General Grant, 3 vols. (New York: American News Company, 1879), 2:362–​363; Brooks D.  Simpson, “Mission Impossible:  Reconstruction Policy Reconsidered,” Journal of the Civil War Era 6 (March 2016): 85–​102.

Occupation, 1865–1877   645

Bibliography Benedict, Michael Les. “Preserving the Constitution:  The Conservative Basis of Radical Reconstruction.” Journal of American History 61 (June 1974): 65–​90. Blair, William. “The Use of Military Force to Protect the Gains of Reconstruction.” Civil War History 51 (December 2005): 388–​402. Dawson, Joseph G., III. Army Generals and Reconstruction:  Louisiana, 1862–​1877. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982. Dawson, Joseph G., III. “The US Army in the South: Reconstruction as Nation Building.” In Armed Diplomacy:  Two Centuries of American Campaigning, 39–​63. Fort Leavenworth, KS: Combat Studies Institute Press, 2003. Downs, Gregory P. After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. Grimsley, Mark. “Wars for the American South:  The First and Second Reconstructions Considered as Insurgencies.” Civil War History 58 (March 2012): 6–​36. Hogue, James K. Uncivil War: Five New Orleans Street Battles and the Rise and Fall of Radical Reconstruction. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006. Hsieh, Wayne Wei-​Siang. “Total War and the American Civil War Reconsidered: The End of an Outdated ‘Master Narrative.’” Journal of the Civil War Era 1 (September 2011): 394–​408. Lang, Andrew F. In the Wake of War:  Military Occupation, Emancipation, and Civil War America. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017. Newell, Clayton R., and Charles R. Shrader. “The U.S. Army’s Transition to Peace, 1865–​66.” Journal of Military History 77 (July 2013): 867–​894. Rable, George C. But There Was No Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984. Sefton, James E. The United States Army and Reconstruction, 1865–​1877. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967. Simpson, Brooks D. “Mission Impossible: Reconstruction Policy Reconsidered.” Journal of the Civil War Era 6 (March 2016): 85–​102. Summers, Mark Wahlgren. The Ordeal of the Reunion: A New History of Reconstruction. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. Zuczek, Richard. State of Rebellion: Reconstruction in South Carolina. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996.

Index

Figures are indicated by f following the page number Abbott, J.B., 40 Abbott, Othman A., 157–​58 abolitionists/​abolitionism Arkansas campaigns, 164 Army of the Cumberland, 423 Black abolitionists, 251–​52 Charleston campaign, 144–​45, 150 compensated emancipation and, 180 Donelson campaign, 121 Gettysburg campaign, 392–​94 Kansas-​Missouri border war, 38–​39, 42, 43, 45, 46, 47 Mississippi Valley campaign, 233 New England abolitionists, 36–​38 North Carolina Union occupation, 132 Overland campaign, 461 Petersburg and Appomattox campaigns, 605–​6, 612–​13 recruitment of slaves as soldiers, 10, 35–​36 Second Bull Run/​Second Manassas campaign, 287, 288, 289–​90 Seven Days Battles, 260–​61, 262 Stones River campaign, 353 Adair, John, 114–​15, 117 Adams, Charles F., 241 Adams, Charles F., Jr., 57–​58, 464 African-​American Women’s Aid organizations, 216 African Americans. See also Black refugees; slaves/​slavery; U.S. Colored Troops Black Codes, 634 Carolinas campaign and, 588–​89 citizenship, 140, 635–​36 education, 7–​9, 58, 132, 139–​40, 216, 413–​14 free Blacks, 17, 485–​86, 494, 579 Gettysburg campaign, 392

Hell March and, 279 impact on military events, 1, 219–​20 insurrection, 9, 142 Jim Crow segregation, 642 labor, 7–​9, 58, 132, 138–​39, 216, 371, 413 military emancipation attempts, 251 Reconstruction and, 632 reenslavement of, 307–​8 Thirteenth Amendment, 9, 180, 585 voting rights to, 635–​36 Alexander, Edward Porter, 324, 446–​47 Alexander, Peter W., 309, 310–​11, 313 Alsop, Elizabeth “Lizzie,” 318–​20 American Freedman’s Union, 216 American Indians, 39, 169, 172, 187. See also Five Civilized Tribes; Indian Territory; Native Americans; specific tribes/​ Nations American military tradition, 80–​86, 636–​37, 639 American Missionary Association, 216, 413–​14 Ames, Adelbert, 641–​42 ammunition shortages, 111–​12, 163 Anderson, “Bloody Bill,” 525, 526, 529–​30 Anderson, George W., 545 Anderson, Richard H., 304–​5, 381, 385–​86 Anderson, Robert, 110 Andrews, Eliza, 542–​43 antebellum Americans, 57, 81 Anthony, Daniel R., 45–​46 anti-​Catholic political policy, 16–​17 Anti-​Peonage Act, 9, 180 Antietam, Battle of, 300, 308, 309–​11 antislavery settlers. See slaves/​slavery Apache, 174, 175–​76, 178, 179–​80, 181, 184–​85 Appalachian Civil War experience, 95–​97, 99, 100–​1

648   Index Applejack Raid, 577 Appomattox campaign, 602–​16, 609f emancipation and, 612 politics of surrender, 612–​14 Arapaho, 181–​82, 183–​84 Argus, 36 USS Ariel, 263 Arizona, 170–​72, 179, 184–​85 Arkansas campaigns, 3, 153–​66, 154f, 405–​19, 407f Black soldiers, 414 depopulation, 162 divided loyalty, 162 emancipation, 157–​58, 412–​14 guerrilla warfare, 159–​60, 166, 417 lawlessness, 156–​57 refugees, 414 treatment of civilians, 157, 166, 410–​17 Arkansas Light Artillery of African Descent, 414 Arkansas Post, Battle of, 339 Armstrong, Lucy, 35 Army of Georgia, 536 Army of Missouri, 520–​21, 522–​25, 527, 528–​29, 530–​32 Army of Northern Virginia Appomattox campaign, 607–​11 Battle of Fredericksburg, 317, 326, 327, 328 Battle of Gettysburg, 394–​401 Chancellorsville campaign, 377, 379, 380–​81 consequences of campaigns on, 15 Gettysburg campaign, 391–​402, 393f invasion of Pennsylvania, 3–​5, 391–​401 Maryland campaign, 300, 303, 304–​6, 307, 312, 313 military strategy, 18 Overland campaign, 451–​64, 454f Peninsula and Shenandoah Valley campaigns, 243–​44, 247–​49 Petersburg campaign, 489–​90, 499–​501, 566–​67, 570–​73, 577, 602, 609–​10, 613 Second Bull Run/​Second Manassas campaign, 287, 288–​89, 292, 295–​96 Seven Days Battles, 255, 260, 264–​65, 266 Shenandoah Valley campaign, 565–​67, 580–​81, 586–​87 Army of the Border, 523

Army of the Frontier, 161, 163, 164–​65, 166 Army of the Gulf, 508 Army of the James, 456, 486, 569–​70, 571–​73, 603, 609–​10 Army of the Mississippi/​Army of Tennessee Atlanta campaign, 469, 471, 473, 474, 475, 476, 479–​81 Carolinas campaign and, 594–​95 Chattanooga, battle of, 437–​50 conscriptions by, 13–​14 Corinth campaign, 213–​15 destruction of, 551 Kentucky campaign of 1862, 270–​85 Perryville, battle of, 280–​82 Shiloh, battle of, 206–​11 Stones River campaign, 345–​57 Tullahoma and Chickamauga campaign, 20 Upper Heartland campaigns, 558–​59 Army of the Ohio/​Army of the Cumberland Atlanta campaign, 317, 468 Carolinas campaign, 585–​601 Chattanooga, battle of, 437–​50 Chickamauga, battle of, 427–​36 Corinth campaign, 212–​17 Franklin, battle of, 551–​58 Kentucky campaign of 1862, 270–​85 Nashville, battle of, 558–​64 Perryville, battle of, 280–​82 Sherman’s march to the sea, 534–​50 Shiloh, battle of, 206–​11 Stones River campaign, 345–​57 Tullahoma campaign, 421–​27 Army of the Potomac Appomattox campaign, 607–​11 Cedar Mountain campaign and, 291–​93 Chancellorsville campaign, 376, 377–​79, 383–​84, 385–​86, 387–​88 Fredericksburg campaign, 14–​15 Gettysburg campaign, 391, 394–​95, 397–​98, 400–​1 Maryland campaign, 300, 303, 304–​6, 308–​9, 312–​13 military strategy, 18 Overland campaign, 452, 460, 463–​64 Peninsula and Shenandoah Valley campaigns, 237, 238–​40, 242–​43, 247, 248, 249

Index  649 Petersburg campaign, 486, 487–​92, 499–​501, 569–​70 Richmond campaign, 19–​20 Second Bull Run/​Second Manassas campaign, 286, 288, 290, 291, 293, 294–​95, 296, 297 Seven Days Battles, 254, 255, 258–​59, 260–​ 61, 262, 265–​66 Army of the Shenandoah, 565–​67 Army of the Southwest, 153–​54, 155, 156, 157, 160, 406 Army of the Tennessee Arkansas Post, Battle of, 339–​40 Atlanta campaign, 468–​84 Carolinas campaign, 585–​601 Chattanooga, battle of, 437–​50 Chickasaw Bayou, battle of, 338–​39 Corinth campaign, 213–​15 Forts Henry and Donelson, 93 North Mississippi campaign, 331–​38 Sherman’s march to the sea, 534–​50 Shiloh, battle of, 206–​11 Vicksburg siege, 358–​75 Army of the Valley, 246, 255, 565 Army of the West, 156, 278 Army of Virginia Cedar Mountain campaign, 291–​93 Maryland campaign, 304, 309–​10 military strategy, 18 Second Bull Run/​Second Manassas campaign, 286–​89, 290, 291, 292, 295, 297 Army of West Tennessee, 278 Arnold, Richard, 546 Asboth, Alexander S., 154–​55 Ashley, James M., 605–​6 Aspinwall, William H., 312 Atchison, David, 41–​42 Atlanta campaign bombardment of Atlanta, 478 Dalton to Etowah River, 471–​72 deportation of civilians, 475–​76, 481 effect of, 480–​82 election of 1864, 480 Etowah River to Chattahoochee River, 472–​74 impact on civilians, 472, 474–​7 5, 478, 481, 482

introduction to, 468–​7 1, 470f logistics, 469 refugees, 481–​82 siege warfare, 20–​21 south of Chattahoochee River, 476–​79 terrain, impact of, 469–​7 1, 472 Atlantic and North Carolina Railroad, 130–​31, 595 Atlantic Blockade Squadron, 124 Augur, Christopher C., 369 Augusta Powder Works, 539–​40 Averasboro, battle of, 596   Bachelder, John B., 402 backdoor draft, 230 Bailey, Joseph, 514–​15 Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, 93–​94, 95, 240, 246, 567 Banks, Nathaniel P. Peninsula and Shenandoah Valley campaigns, 240, 243–​47, 250–​51 Red River campaign, 506, 507–​16, 517 Second Bull Run/​Second Manassas campaign, 287, 291, 293 Vicksburg and Port Hudson campaigns, 359–​61, 369–​70 Banshee (blockade runner), 58–​59, 60 Barber, Thomas, 41–​42 Barber Guards, 41–​42 Barksdale, William, 44–​45, 321 Barlow, Francis, 262–​63 Barlow, William C., 383–​84 Barnes, Sidney, 95–​96 Bate, William, 557–​58 Baton Rouge campaign, 231–​33 Battery Wagner assault, 143–​46 Battle at Boatswain’s Creek, 257 Battle at Champion Hill, 363–​64, 365 Battle of Antietam, 300, 308, 309–​11 Battle of Arkansas Post, 339 Battle of Averasboro, 596 Battle of Black Jack, 43 Battle of Boonville, 72, 73, 528–​29 Battle of Chancellorsville. See Chancellorsville campaign Battle of Chickasaw Bayou, 338–​40 Battle of Cold Harbor, 459

650   Index Battle of Corinth, 279–​80 Battle of Franklin, 551, 555–​56 Battle of Fredericksburg, 317–​28, 319f Battle of Gettysburg, 395–​400 Battle of Glorieta Pass, 176–​77 Battle of Griswoldville, 541 Battle of Hatteras Inlet, 125–​27 Battle of Helena, 405–​19, 407f Battle of Honey Springs, 195–​96, 411 Battle of Iuka, 278–​79 Battle of Jonesboro, 479 Battle of Kessler’s Cross Lanes, 98–​99 Battle of Lexington (Mo.), 74–​75, 77 Battle of Malvern Hill, 259, 261, 264–​65 Battle of Middle Creek, 103–​4 Battle of Mill Springs, 104 Battle of Munfordville, 277 Battle of Nashville, 551, 557–​59 Battle of New Bern, 131–​32 Battle of Osawatomie, 43–​45 Battle of Pea Ridge, 43–​44, 194, 406 Battle of Perryville, 283 Battle of Prairie Grove, 163–​64, 165, 166 Battle of Resaca, 471–​72 Battle of Rich Mountain, 97–​98 Battle of Richmond, Ky., 273 Battle of Shiloh. See Shiloh campaign Battle of Spotsylvania, 462–​63 Battle of Spring Hill, 551, 555–​56 Battle of Stones River, 18, 345–​56, 347f Battle of the Big Black River, 364–​65 Battle of the Crater, 496–​97, 499 Battle of the Wilderness, 453–​55 Battle of Valverde, 176 Battle of Westport, 530–​32 Battle of Wildcat Mountain, 101–​2 Battle of Wilmington, 5–​7, 588, 591–​92 Battle of Wilson’s Creek, 43 Battle of Winchester, 567–​69 Battles of Manassas. See First Battle of Bull Run/​Manassas; Second Bull Run/​Second Manassas campaign Battles of Sailor’s Creek, 609–​10 Baylor, John R., 171–​72 Beale, Charles Dornin, 322 Beale, Jane Howison, 322 Beale, William, 322

Beaumont, H.F., 117 Beauregard, Pierre Gustave Toutant Carolinas campaign, 588–​89 Charleston campaign, 142, 147, 148 fall of Fort Henry, 114 First Battle of Bull Run/​Manassas, 86–​87, 88 Kentucky campaign, 270 Overland campaign, 463 Petersburg campaign, 487–​90, 493–​94, 500 Sherman’s march to the sea, 545–​46 Shiloh and Corinth campaigns, 204–​5, 207–​9, 211–​13, 214, 216–​17 Upper Heartland campaigns, 554 Beecher, Henry Ward, 612 Bell, John, 68, 121 Bell, William, 481–​82 Bellamy, Mary Ross, 543 Belmont, August, 264 Benham, Henry, 141 Benjamin, Judah P., 110–​11, 130 Bennett, James Gordon, 59, 598 Bennett Place, surrender at, 598, 615 Berry, Fannie, 494 Bierce, Ambrose, 551 Big Black River, Battle of, 364–​65 Biggs, Will, 495 Birney, David B., 288 Black abolitionists, 251–​52 Black Codes, 634 Black Hawk War, 81 Black Jack, Battle of, 43 Black refugees education, 7–​9, 58, 132, 139–​40, 216, 413–​14 housing and food shortages, 138 impact on campaigns, 149, 251, 559–​60 Indian territory, 199 labor, 7–​9, 58, 132, 138–​39, 216, 371, 413 placement in camps, 57–​58, 131, 132, 216, 335, 355, 559–​60 relocation to towns, 412–​13, 448 Sherman’s march to the sea, 544–​45 utilization in U.S. Army, 7–​9, 358, 371, 593–​94 utilization in U.S. Navy, 57, 337 Black troops. See U.S. Colored Troops Blackford, Charles Minor, 325 Blair, Francis P., Jr., 67, 69, 75, 536

Index  651 Blair, William, 578 Bleeding Kansas conflict Battle of Black Jack, 43 Battle of Osawatomie, 43–​45 Jayhawkers, 45, 46, 47 overview of, 34–​48, 37f Pottawatomie Creek massacre, 43, 44 Sack of Lawrence, 41–​43 Wakarusa War, 39–​40, 42, 43 women’s roles, 40–​41 Bliss, William, 399, 402 Blockade Board or Strategy Board, 54–​55 Blockade of the Confederacy by U.S. Navy Confederate response, 62, 124–​25, 148 East Gulf Squadron, 54–​55 impact on Confederate economy, 56, 59–​62 legality, 52–​53 New Orleans, 55 North Atlantic Blockading Squadron, 54–​55, 238, 243, 588 Port Royal, SC, 55, 137–​38 South Atlantic Blockading Squadron, 54–​55, 137–​38 West Gulf Squadron, 54–​55 blockade runners, 56–​57, 58–​59, 61–​63, 506, 622 Blunt, James G., 161, 162–​66, 194–​95, 411 Boatswain’s Creek, Battle at, 257 Bolivar, Simon, 437–​38 Bonham, Milledge, 145–​46 boom towns in Texas, 516–​17 Boone, Albert, 41–​42 Boonville, Battle of, 72, 73, 528–​29 Booth, John Wilkes, 614 Border Ruffians, 43–​44 Border Times, 43 Boston Journal, 310 Bottomlands campaign, 341–​43 Boutwell, George S., 615 Bowen, John, 360, 363–​64 Bowen, Roland, 262–​63 Boyle, Jeremiah T., 271–​72, 274 Brady, Mathew, 311 Bragg, Braxton Battle of Stones River, 346–​47, 348–​51, 352–​53, 354, 355–​56 Carolinas campaign, 588, 591–​92, 594–​95, 596

food shortages and, 20 Kentucky campaign of 1862, 270–​83 Knoxville and Chattanooga campaigns, 437–​38, 440–​45, 447 Mississippi campaign, 229 North Mississippi campaign, 332 Shiloh campaign, 206–​7, 212 Tullahoma and Chickamauga campaigns, 421, 423–​26, 427–​32, 433, 434 Volunteer and Conscript Bureau, 13–​14 Bramlette, Thomas, 120–​21 Branch, Lawrence O., 288, 296 Branson, Jacob, 39–​40 Breck, George, 489 Breckenridge, Lucy, 458 Breckinridge, John C., 231–​32, 275, 348–​49, 350, 592, 598 Broadhead, Sarah, 394, 396 Brockenbrough, John White, 461 Brooks, Preston, 42 Browder, George Richard, 562 Brown, John, 43, 44, 45–​46, 47–​48, 85, 121, 606 Brown, Lois, 40–​41 Brown, William Wells, 251–​52 Browning, Orville H., 210 Brulé Sioux, 39 Buckland, Ralph P., 365 Buckner, Simon, 116, 117 Buell, Don Carlos Kentucky campaign, 270–​73, 276–​77, 278–​80, 283 Shiloh and Corinth campaigns, 204–​6, 209, 210, 212–​13 western Tennessee, 247 Buford, John, 292, 394–​95 Burnside, Ambrose Everett Battle of Fredericksburg, 317–​18, 320–​23, 324–​25, 326–​27, 328 Burnside Expedition, 128–​30 Fort Macon siege, 133 Knoxville and Chattanooga campaigns, 437, 440, 446 Maryland campaign, 302 North Mississippi campaign, 336 Petersburg campaign, 495–​97 Second Bull Run/​Second Manassas campaign, 294

652   Index Bushman, Michael, 397–​98 Butler, Benjamin F. Mississippi Valley, 224–​25, 227 North Carolina occupation, 125–​27 Overland campaign, 456 Peninsula and Shenandoah Valley campaigns, 247 Petersburg campaign, 486, 487, 490–​91, 569–​70, 571, 573 replacement of, 603 Second Bull Run/​Second Manassas campaign, 290 Vicksburg and Port Hudson campaigns, 361   Cabell, William L., 411 USS Cairo, 336 Caldwell, S.H., 224 Calhoun, James, 535 Camden Campaign, 514 Campbell, Charles, 492–​93 Canby, Edward R. S., 176, 177, 615–​16, 622–​23 Canfield, Nick A., 311 Carleton, James H., 177–​78 Carman, Ezra, 303–​4 Carnifex Ferry Campaign, 98–​99 Carolinas campaign, 585–​99, 589f emancipation, 590, 593 guerrilla warfare, 593–​94 political context, 585–​88, 597–​99 refugees, 590–​91, 593–94 treatment of civilians, 590–​91 USS Carondelet, 221–​23 Carpenter, Aurelius, 47–​48 Carr, Eugene Asa, 154–​55 Carson, Kit, 178–​79 Cazadores Regiment, 226 Cedar Mountain campaign, 291–​93, 292f Central Great Plains campaigns, 169–​85, 173f Centralia (Mo.), 520, 529 Chalmers, James, 277, 282 Chalmette Regiment, 226 Chamberlain, Joshua Lawrence, 397–​98 Chambersburg, 392, 400, 539, 565 Champion Hill, Battle at, 363–​64, 365 Chancellor, Sue, 385 Chancellorsville campaign aftermath of, 327, 386–​88

Christian revival and, 377–​79 German ethnic regiments, 387–​88 introduction to, 376–​77 overview of, 379–​86 Chandler, Zachariah T., 251–​52, 263 Charleston campaign, 137–​50, 138f Black soldiers, 139, 142, 144–​46, 148–​49 bombardment of city, 146–​47 emancipation, 138–​40 engineering, 137, 141, 142–​46 naval actions, 137–​38, 141–​42, 143, 148 slave insurrection, 142 women and the state, 142–​43 Chase, Salmon P., 138–​39, 587 Chattanooga campaign, 437–​49, 438f guerrilla warfare, 439 loyalty, 438–​39 topography, impact of, 438 Unionists, 438–​39 Cheat Mountain Campaign, 99 Cheatham, Benjamin F., 476–​77, 551–​52 Cherokee, 9–​10, 162, 187, 189–​90, 191–​95, 196–​200 Cherry, William H., 206 Chestnut, Mary, 61–​62 Cheyenne, 11–​13, 181–​85 Chicago Colored Ladies’ Freedmen’s Aid Society, 216 Chicago Daily Tribune, 325 Chicago Tribune, 261–​62 Chickamauga campaign, 20, 421–​34, 424f Battle of Chickamauga, 430–​33 impact on civilians, 433–​34 politics of command, 429 Chickasaw, 187–​88, 189, 191, 193, 196–​97, 198–​99, 200 Chickasaw Bayou, Battle of, 338–​40 children, 417–​18, 578–​79 Chivington, John M., 177, 182–​84 Choctaw, 187, 189, 191, 193, 196–​97, 198–​99, 200 Christian Commission, 132, 482 Christian grounds for war, 289 Christie, William, 620 Chustenahlah, battle of, 192–​93 Chusto-​talasah, battle of, 192 citizen-​soldiers, 21, 41–​42, 249–​50, 264–​65, 327–​28, 537, 628, 630

Index  653 citizenship, 12, 16, 139–​40, 188, 414, 559–​60, 598–​99, 612–​14, 629, 633–​34, 635–​36, 637 civil penalties, 12 Civil Rights Act, 634–​35 civil unrest, 52 civilian property rights, 276, 289, 291, 294 civilians care for wounded after battle, 21, 354, 458, 462, 513–​14 deportation, 3–​5, 475–​76, 481, 535 hunger and starvation, 3, 142, 159–​60, 179, 482 interaction with armies, 96–​97, 99, 197–​98, 289, 290–​91, 321–​22, 354, 415, 426–​27, 451, 460, 461, 512, 516, 534–​35, 574, 577–​78 loyalty, 12, 68–​69, 95–​96, 132–​33, 189–​90, 206, 438–​39, 510, 537, 591, 603–​4, 634 property destruction, 193, 211–​12, 291, 308–​ 9, 322, 427, 448, 456–​57, 458, 514, 578, 591 in sieges, 368, 492–​93, 579 treated as combatants, 159, 190–​91, 516 Claiborne, John H., 494 Clark, Henry Toole, 130–​31 Clarksville Chronicle, 117 class conflicts, 138, 160–​61, 224, 225–​26, 544 Clausewitz, Carl von, 66 Clay County Volunteers, 41 Cleburne, Patrick R., 273, 346–​47, 441, 443–​44, 445, 551–​52, 596 Cloud, William F., 411 Cobb, Howell, 540–​41, 625 Cobb, Thomas Reade Rootes, 321 Cochrane, John, 288 coerced Indian labor, 180 Coffin, Charles, 310 Cold Harbor, battle of, 459 Coleman, Franklin, 39–​40 Collier, Elizabeth, 128 colonization of Puebloan peoples, 174 Colorado, 181–​84 Colston, Raleigh, 380–​81, 383 Columbia, burning of, 547–​48, 590–​91 Colyer, Vincent, 132 Comanche, 11–​12, 174–​75, 178, 179–​80, 181 Confederate Bureau of Conscription, 353 Confederate Bureau of Subsistence, 109 Confederate collapse, 629–​35

Confederate Congress, 17, 59, 62, 109, 127, 130, 145–​46, 158–​59, 229, 259, 540–​41, 592, 596, 602–​3 Confederate Guards regiment, 226 Confederate River Defense Fleet, 226–​27 conscription Confederate Conscription Act, 90, 210–​11, 229–​30, 231–​32 by Confederate military, 13–​14, 353, 426–​27 impact of campaigns on, 16–​17, 130, 219, 220, 236–​37, 241 impact on campaigns, 229–​32, 233 refugees and, 132–​33 resistance to Confederacy and, 160–​61, 439 Contraband Relief Association, 216 Cooke, Giles Buckner, 493 Cooper, Douglas H., 161, 190–​93, 196, 411 “Copperhead” Democrats, 612–​13 Corinth, battle of, 279–​80 Corinth campaign, 203–​17 emancipation and, 215–​16 cotton, 9, 13, 58, 59, 62, 107, 108–​9, 138–​40, 142, 158–​59, 160, 335–​36, 341–​42, 370, 410, 413, 475–​76, 485, 506–​7, 508, 509–​10, 512, 517, 535, 546 Couch, Darius, 382, 391–​92 Cox, Jacob D., 97–​98, 595 Crater, Battle of the, 496–​97 Creek (American-​Indians), 187, 188, 189–​93, 194, 195–​96, 200 Crittenden, George, 103, 104 Crittenden, John J., 251–​52 Crittenden, Thomas L., 281, 346, 350 Crook, George, 569 CSS Virginia, 238 Cumberland Gap, 99, 100, 101–​2, 249, 273, 282–​83, 447–​48 Curtis, Samuel R., 153–​55, 156, 157–​58, 237, 522, 523, 530, 531–​32 Custer, George Armstrong, 457 Cutler, Lysander, 490   Dahlgren, John A., 143, 146 Daily Advertiser, 47 Daily Gazette, 331 Daily Register, 493 Daily Reporter, 309

654   Index Dana, Richard Henry, 586, 631 Davidson, Greenlee, 321 Davidson, John W., 409–​10, 411–​12 Davis, Jefferson Appomattox campaign, 604, 608, 611, 614, 615–​16 Arkansas campaigns, 154–​55, 156, 159, 160, 406 arms purchases, 110–​11 Atlanta campaign, 474, 477, 480 Battle of Stones River, 352–​53 capture of, 625 Chancellorsville campaign, 386–​87 conflicts between Indians and White squatters, 39 execution of Black soldiers, 17, 145 expansion of slavery by, 170 First Battle of Bull Run/​Manassas, 82, 83–​84, 86 Gettysburg campaign, 391 Kansas-​Missouri border war, 39 Kentucky campaign of 1862, 272–​73 Knoxville and Chattanooga campaigns, 441 Maryland campaign, 303, 306–​7 Missouri, 70, 77 Peninsula and Shenandoah Valley campaigns, 241–​42, 243–​44, 248 Petersburg campaign, 490, 491 Red River campaign, 512 Second Bull Run/​Second Manassas campaign, 289–​90 as Secretary of War, 83–​84 Seven Days Battles, 257 Sherman’s march to the sea, 536, 537, 544–​46 Shiloh and Corinth campaigns, 204–​5, 211–​12 Union blockade, 55, 59–​60, 61–​62 in U.S.-​Mexican War, 82 Vicksburg and Port Hudson campaigns, 363 Davis, Jefferson C. (Union general), 278–​79 Davis, Joseph, 371 Dawes, Rufus, 305, 312–​13 Dayton, William L., 241 De Forest, John W., 226, 233, 632–633, 640–641 Declaration of Paris, 52 DeFontaine, Felix G., 310–​11

dehydration, 19, 277 Delaware (American Indians), 35–​36 Delaware State Journal and Statesman, 325 Delaware treaty, 35 Democratic Party, 290 democratic self-​determination, 18 Denoon, Charles E., 492 detribalized slaves, 174 Devens, Charles, 384 disease Charleston campaign, 145–​46 Forts Henry and Donelson, 119 impact on military campaigns, 14, 19, 21 Kentucky campaign of 1862, 277 Maryland campaign, 309 Mobile campaign, 577–​78, 579, 580 New Mexico Territory, 177–​78 North Carolina Union occupation, 3, 132 Port Hudson siege, 370 Shenandoah Valley campaign, 577–​78, 579, 580 Sherman’s march to the sea, 535–​36 Vicksburg campaign, 332 disloyalty among soldiers, 12, 16–​17. See also mutinies Dix-​Hill Cartel, 119 Dodd, David O., 417–​18 Dog Soldiers, 182 Dole, William P., 182–​83 Dooley, John, 307 Doubleday, Abner, 294, 395 Douglas, Stephen A., 68, 288 Douglas Democrat, 69 Douglass, Frederick, 251–​52, 606 Dow, Charles W., 39–​40 Doyle, Drury, 43 Doyle, James, 43 Doyle, William, 43 Drayton, Percival, 55 Drayton, Thomas, 55 Drew, John, 191–​92 drought, 19, 276 Du Pont, Samuel, 54–​55, 57, 137–​38, 140–​41, 143 Duncan, Johnson, 225   Early, Jubal Chancellorsville campaign, 381

Index  655 First Battle of Bull Run/​Manassas, 88 Fredericksburg campaign, 323 Overland campaign, 463–​64 Petersburg campaign, 497–​99 Shenandoah Valley campaign, 565–​70, 574, 576–​77, 586–​87 East Gulf Squadron, 54–​55 Eastern theater, 121, 141, 169, 170, 182–​83, 187–​88, 236, 247, 254, 451–​52, 523, 571–​73, 586–​88 Eaton, John, Jr., 216, 335 Ebenezer Creek, 9, 544–​45, 547 Eddy, Norman, 365 Edmondston, Catherine, 458–​59 Edwards, Samuel H., 460 elite white Confederate women, 3, 12, 138, 417, 453, 455–​56, 462, 536, 559, 591 Ellet, Alfred, 228 Elliott, Stephen, 496 Ellis, Daniel, 439 Ellis, John W., 124–​25 emancipation/​Emancipation Proclamation battlefield victories and, 18, 311–​12, 336, 345, 351 Black refugee experiences and, 9, 119–​21, 134, 139–​40, 158, 216, 219–​20, 335, 371, 412–​13, 590, 612 compensated emancipation requests, 180 Confederate proposals, 596, 604–​5 debt-​peonage in Southwest, 9, 174, 178, 180 Democratic attack of, 580 impact of military campaigns on, 3, 7–​10, 119–​20, 134, 139, 157, 219–​20, 228, 236–​37, 251, 279, 300, 311–​12, 318, 341–​42, 412, 419, 505–​6, 559–​60, 602, 632 impact on South, 615 implementation of, 349 Indian Territory, 200 Petersburg and Appomattox campaign, 612 protest against, 134 scope of, 632 Tennessee and Kentucky exemption from, 277–​78, 351–​52, 355, 448 Texas, 615–​16 Union soldiers, 21, 121, 312–​13, 423, 581 U.S. Colored Troops and, 121, 145, 157–​58 engineers/​engineering campaign for Charleston, 137, 141, 142–​46

Fredericksburg, 321–​22 Island No. 10, 221–​23 Mobile, 622 Peninsula campaign, 242, 249 Seven Days Battles, 258 significance of, 14–​15, 20–​21 tactical advances, 20–​21 Vicksburg, 20–​21 environment effect of campaigns on, 1–​2, 14, 354–​55 effect on soldiers, 250 impact on military campaigns, 14, 108, 281, 423, 469–​7 1, 472 ruination of forests, 14, 148, 377–​78 terrain, impact on military operations, 14, 19, 96–​97, 102, 108, 110, 129, 130–​31, 172–​74, 208–​9, 246, 255, 278, 338, 339, 348, 360, 382–​83, 384–​85, 409, 423, 426, 429, 438, 452, 469–​7 1, 472–​73, 543, 569 topography, impact on military operations, 19, 96–​97, 283, 341, 438 weather, impact on military operations, 14, 19, 54, 95, 108, 112, 113, 114–​15, 179–​80, 183, 191–​92, 193, 246, 270, 271, 275, 278, 282–​83, 313, 348, 350, 369, 380–​81, 400, 425, 540–​41, 542, 554, 588, 590 European linear and columnar formations, 20 Evans, John, 182–​83 Ewell, Richard S., 88, 392–​94, 395–​96, 398–​99, 464 Ewing, Thomas, Jr., 476, 520, 525, 527, 529, 535   Fagan, James F., 408–​9 Fagan, William, 497 Farinholt, Benjamin L., 491–​92 farm destruction by military campaigns, 15, 162, 198, 209, 276, 282, 308–​9, 377–​78, 402, 409–​10, 427, 433–​34, 448, 451, 482, 575–​76, 586–​87 Farragut, David G., 224–​25, 247, 361, 522 Fenton, James, 355 Ferdinand Joseph Maximillian, 507–​8, 620–​22 Ferguson, Champ, 282, 439, 560 Ferraro, Edward, 452, 456 field fortifications, 19–​20, 141, 148–​49, 451–​67, 468–​84, 485–​504, 565–​84, 602–​18 54th Massachusetts Infantry, 17, 144–​46

656   Index First Battle of Bull Run/​Manassas antebellum military culture, 80–​81 free state militias, 81, 84 regular army, 85–​86 slave state militias and patrols, 82–​85 First Colorado Volunteer Infantry, 176 First Confiscation Act, 120, 138–​39, 227–​28, 274, 311–​12 First South Carolina (Union), 139, 140, 142 Fiske, John, 561 Fitch, Edward P., 34, 38–​39 Fitzsimmons, John, 311 Five Civilized Tribes, 187–​88. See also Cherokee; Chickasaw; Choctaw; Creek; Seminole Flanders, George E., 157 Floyd, John, 98–​99, 114, 116 Flynn, Ezylphia, 439 Folly Island assault, 143–​45 food shortages, 61–​62, 368, 370–​7 1, 377–​78, 401 Foote, Andrew, 109–​10, 112, 113, 114–​16, 118 Force, Manning F., 373, 475 Force Acts, 640 Forney, John, 395 Forrest, Nathan Bedford Fort Henry and Fort Donelson campaigns, 114–​15, 116 Kentucky campaign, 271 Mobile, Alabama capture, 623 North Mississippi campaign, 337, 338 Shiloh campaign, 211–​12 Upper Heartland campaigns, 551–​52, 554–​59, 560, 561 Fort Donelson, 107, 108f, 110–​11, 112–​21 Fort Fisher, 58–​59 Fort Henry, 108f, 110, 111–​14, 115, 117, 118–​19, 121 Fort Henry and Donelson campaign emancipation, 119–​21 material resources, 107–​8, 110–​11, 118–​19, 121 prisoners of war, 119 riverboats, 109–​10, 112–​13, 115 Fort Jackson, 16–​17, 55, 219, 220, 224, 225–​26 Fort Laramie, 39 Fort Leavenworth, 35, 39, 43–​44, 47 Fort Pillow, 226–​27 Fort Riley, 43–​44 Fort Scott, 45, 47 Fort Smith, capture of, 405–​19, 407f

Fort St. Philip, 55, 219, 220, 225–​26 Fort Sumter, 35, 53, 143, 147 Foster, John G., 148–​49, 447 Fourteenth Amendment, 140, 637 Fox, Gustavus, 61, 141–​42 Franklin, Tennessee campaign, 551–​62, 555f Franklin, William B., 247, 323 Fredericksburg, Battle of, 317–​28, 319f refugees, 321 treatment of civilians, 318, 321, 322 urban combat, 318, 321–​22 Fredericksburg National Cemetery, 327–​28 free Blacks, 17, 485–​86, 494, 579 free labor plantations, 9, 138–​39, 371 free-​state cause, 35–​36 Free State Hotel, 42 “Free state” militia forces, 10–​11 free-​state women, 40–​41 Freedmen’s Bureau, 139–​40, 335, 630–​31, 634–​35, 640–​41 freedmen’s settlements, 413–​14. See also Black refugees Frémont, John C. Arkansas campaign, 157 military emancipation attempts, 251 in Missouri, 73, 75–​77 Peninsula and Shenandoah Valley campaigns, 244–​46 resignation of, 287 Frémont movement, 17 Frey, Peter, 399 Frost, Daniel, 47, 69–​70 Fugitive Slave Law, 39, 46   Gadsden Purchase, 170 Gaines, William G., 259 Gantt, E.W., 223 Gardner, Alexander, 311, 370 Garesché, Julius P., 348 Garfield, James A., 103–​4 Garnett, Robert S., 97–​98 Garrard, Kenner, 475–​76 Garrard, T.T., 101 Garrison, Henry Lloyd, 606 Geary, John W., 441–​42, 546 German Americans, 17, 69, 70–​7 1, 156, 159, 225, 287, 308, 377, 387–​88, 394–​96, 507, 525, 613

Index  657 Gettysburg Battlefield Memorial Association, 402 Gettysburg campaign, 391–​402, 393f African Americans, 392 long-​term impact, 402 treatment of civilians, 377–​79, 401–​2 Gibbon, John, 294, 603 Gibson, James F., 311 Gilbert, Charles Champion, 273–​75, 278–​79, 280 Gillmore, Quincy A., 143, 146 Glenn, Luther J., 46 Glorieta Pass, 176–​78, 182 Goldsborough, Louis M., 128–​29, 243, 258 Gone with the Wind (Mitchell), 547–​48 Goodwyn, Thomas J., 590–​91 Gordon, John B., 567, 606–​7, 609–​10 Goree, Thomas J., 265 Granger, Gordon, 445, 615–​16 Grant, Ulysses S. Appomattox campaign, 602–​4, 606–​13, 615 Battle of Fredericksburg, 327 Battle of Stones River, 345 deportations by, 5–​7 fall of Petersburg and Appomattox, 602–​4, 606–​13, 615 Fort Donelson assault, 113, 114, 115–​17, 237 Fort Henry assault, 112–​13, 237 Kentucky campaign of 1862, 275 Mexican civil war, 620–​22 Military Reconstruction, 638 Missouri invasion, 522–​23, 531–​32 North Mississippi campaign, 334–​38 occupation of Paducah, 110 Overland campaign, 451–​56, 459–​60, 462–​64, 468, 567 Petersburg campaign, 486–​87, 489–​92, 494, 495–​96, 497–​501 political shuffling by, 18 postwar South and, 633–​34, 639–​40, 641–​42 Red River campaign, 505, 507–​8, 510 Shenandoah Valley campaign, 565–​74, 577, 580–​82, 586–​87 Sherman’s march to the sea, 534–​35, 536, 537, 539, 546–​47 Upper Heartland campaigns, 551–​53, 558, 561

Vicksburg and Port Hudson campaigns, 358–​68, 370–​73, 406 Great Britain, 51–​52, 146–​47, 507–​8 Great Plains, 181–​85 Green, William B., 494–​95 Greene, George S., 398 Greer, Elkanah, 155 Gregg, John, 363 Gregg, Maxcy, 288 Grierson, Benjamin, 359–​60 Grimsley, Mark, 318, 574 Griswoldville, Battle of, 541 Grover, Cuvier, 294–​95, 361 Grow, Galusha, 44–​45 Guelzo, Allen, 606 “guerrilla shirts,” 40–​41 guerrilla warfare, 10–​12, 159–​60, 276, 282 Arkansas, 159–​60, 417, 418–​19 Atlanta campaign, 469, 475, 476 Carolinas campaign, 586–​87, 593–​94, 596 Central Great Plains campaigns, 182–​83 counterguerrilla operations, 557 in Indian territory, 190, 197 Indian Territory, 197 Kansas-​Missouri border war, 45 Kentucky, 282, 560–​61 Kentucky campaign, 270, 271–​72, 276, 282 Knoxville and Chattanooga campaigns, 439 localized total war, 12–​13 as localized total war, 12–​13 Louisiana, 371, 505–​6, 515 male slaves and, 9–​10 martial law and, 439 Missouri, 45, 66, 74–​75, 77, 290–​91, 520, 521, 526–​27 North Carolina, 134, 593–​94 North Carolina Union occupation, 133 North Mississippi campaign, 334, 337 overview of, 10–​12, 15, 21 Red River campaign, 505–​6, 515, 516 Second Bull Run/​Second Manassas campaign, 289, 290–​91 Shiloh and Corinth campaigns, 215 by slaves, 9–​10, 142 Tennessee, 271, 282, 427, 439–​40, 551, 560 in Tennessee, 439–​40 in Tullahoma region, 427

658   Index guerrilla warfare (cont.) Upper Heartland campaign, 551, 558, 560–​61 U.S. Army response to, 3–​5, 11, 159–​60, 271–​ 72, 282, 289, 290–​91, 337, 417, 476, 516, 525, 526, 587 U.S. Colored Troops and, 142 Vicksburg campaign, 371 Virginia, 586–​87 western gunslinger and, 77 by women, 1, 40–​41, 526 Guiney, Patrick, 293 gunboats, 9–​10, 221–​23, 407–​8, 623 Gwynn, Walter, 125   Hagood, Johnson, 489, 500 Halleck, Henry W. Battle of Stones River, 351 Fort Henry and Fort Donelson, 107, 112–​13, 119–​20 Kentucky campaign of 1862, 270 in Missouri, 76–​77, 107 Missouri invasion, 522, 525 North Mississippi campaign, 334–​35, 337 Red River campaign, 505, 507, 508–​9, 517 Second Bull Run/​Second Manassas campaign, 292, 309 Shiloh and Corinth campaigns, 203–​6, 211, 212–​15 Vicksburg and Port Hudson campaigns, 367 Hamilton, Andrew Jackson, 507 Hamilton, Charles S., 238–​40 Hampton, Wade, 566, 577 Hancock, Winfield Scott, 396, 453, 463, 487, 489, 495, 500, 501, 570 hard war, 15, 276, 286, 574 Hardee, William J. Atlanta campaign, 476–​77, 478–​79 Carolinas campaign and, 591–​92, 594–​95, 596 Chattanooga campaign, 441 Fort Henry and Fort Donelson, 114 Sherman’s march to the sea, 545–​46 Shiloh and Corinth campaigns, 213–​14 Harmon, Emmanuel, 395 Harney, William S., 39, 69, 70–​72 Harpers Ferry raid, 45–​46 Harper’s Weekly, 630, 641–​42

Harris, Isham, 110, 111, 118–​19 Harris, Thomas, 74 Harvey, Louis P., 210 Haskins, Nannie, 562 Hatch, John, 294 Hatteras Inlet, battle of, 125–​27 Hawes, Richard, 277–​78, 279 Hawkins, Rush C., 127, 128–​29 Hayes, Rutherford B., 642 Hazen, William B., 348, 441, 545 Hébert, Louis, 155 Heintzelman, Samuel P., 238–​40, 293, 295 Helena, Battle of, 405–​19, 407f Hell March, 273–​75, 279 Herbst, John, 402 Herron, Francis J., 163–​64 Hess, Earl, 547, 571 Heth, Henry, 577 Hill, Ambrose P. Battle of Fredericksburg and, 323 Chancellorsville campaign, 383 Gettysburg campaign, 394–​95 Maryland campaign, 302, 307–​8 Overland campaign, 464 Peninsula and Shenandoah Valley campaigns, 237 Petersburg campaign, 577 Second Bull Run/​Second Manassas campaign, 294–​95 Seven Days Battles, 249, 255–​57 Hill, Daniel H., 249, 255–​57, 310, 441, 594–​95 Hindman, Thomas Carmichael, 13, 158–​60, 161–​66 Hirst, Ben, 305 Hispano refugees, 9 Hispanos, 175–​76, 180 Hitchcock, Henry, 542, 544 Hoke, Robert, 595 Holliday, Cyrus, 43–​44 Holmes, Emma, 464 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Jr., 457 Holmes, Theophilus H., 125, 160–​61, 248, 406–​7, 408–​9 Home Guards, 99 Homestead Act, 228 Honey Springs, Battle of, 195–​96, 411 Hood, John Bell

Index  659 Atlanta campaign, 472, 481 Carolinas campaign, 587 Sherman’s march to the sea, 534, 535–​36, 537, 539, 544, 546–​47 Upper Heartland campaigns, 551–​62, 555f U.S. Colored Troops and, 10 Hooker, Joseph, 293, 323, 376, 378–​88, 472–​73, 482 Hoole, A.J., 34 Horn, Stanley F., 561 hospital procedures, 21 USS Housatonic, 148 house-​to-​house fighting, 14–​15 household war, 11, 526 Hovey, Alvin P., 363–​64 Howard, Oliver O., 382, 395–​96, 472–​73, 477, 478–​79, 590, 632–​33 Hudson, George, 189 Huff, George Washington, 370–​7 1 Huger, Benjamin, 128–​29 Humphreys, Andrew A., 606 Hunt, Henry J., 321–​22 Hunter, David, 10, 139, 140–​41, 143–​57, 176, 251, 497–​99, 577–​78 Hunter, William H., 489 Huntoon, Andrew J., 157–​58   immigrant urban soldiers, 16–​17 Indian Territory Central Great Plains, 169–​85, 173f Confederate retreat from, 411 impact of US campaigns in, 3, 187–​200, 188f slaves’ experience, 199–​200 Union Army arrival in, 9–​10 inflation, 14–​15, 61–​62, 138, 160–​61, 492–​93, 501, 578, 604 Ingalls, Rufus, 304 insect impact on military campaigns, 14 insurgency, 251–​52, 276, 283, 507–​8, 523, 587, 629, 638–​39, 640, 641–​42 insurrections, 7–​10, 84, 119, 138–​39, 142, 145, 251–​52, 289, 312, 353, 551–​52, 593–​94 international repercussions, 17, 52, 145, 313, 326, 507–​8, 619–​26 Irish Americans, 224, 225, 226, 288, 293, 394–​95, 613 Irish Brigade, 288

Island No. 10 campaign, 219–​26, 222f Iuka, Battle of, 278–​79   Jackson, Claiborne Fox, 67–​68, 70–​73, 521 Jackson, James, 274–​75, 304–​5 Jackson, Thomas J. “Stonewall” Battle of Fredericksburg and, 320 Chancellorsville campaign, 376, 377–​78, 379, 381–​85, 386–​87, 388 death of, 376 First Battle of Bull Run/​Manassas, 84–​85, 88 Gettysburg campaign, 395–​96 impact of Conscription Act, 229 Peninsula and Shenandoah Valley campaigns, 236–​37, 240, 244, 249, 287 Second Bull Run/​Second Manassas campaign, 290, 294, 296 Seven Days Battles, 255–​57 James, Horace, 132 James Island, 140–​41, 143–​44, 148–​49 Jayhawkers, 45, 46, 47, 160–​61, 194–​95 Jenkin, Micah, 443 Jenkins, Albert G., 392 Jenkins, D., 311 Jennison, Charles, 45 Jewish business interests, 335–​36 Jim Crow segregation, 642 Johnson, Adam Rankin, 560 Johnson, Andrew Battle of Stones River, 351–​52 Reconstruction and, 628–​29 Shiloh and Corinth campaigns, 203–​5 Upper Heartland campaigns, 560 White Southern power and, 634–​35 Johnson, Bushrod, 110 Johnson, Richard W., 346–​47 Johnson, Thomas, 35–​36 Johnston, Albert Sidney, 100–​1, 110–​11, 114, 203–​5, 212, 216–​17, 551–​52 Johnston, A.V.E., 520 Johnston, Joseph E. Atlanta campaign, 469, 471–​74, 475, 479, 480 Battle of Stones River, 352, 353 Carolinas campaign, 587, 592–​93, 594–​99 conscriptions, 13–​14 First Battle of Bull Run/​Manassas, 88

660   Index Johnston, Joseph E. (cont.) Peninsula and Shenandoah Valley campaigns, 241–​42, 243, 248 Second Bull Run/​Second Manassas campaign, 287 Upper Heartland campaigns, 551, 558–​59 Vicksburg and Port Hudson campaigns, 367 Wilson’s Raid, 625 Jones, Samuel J., 40, 41, 148 Jonesboro, Battle of, 479 Juárez, Benito, 619, 625–​26   Kansas, Its Interior and Exterior Life (Robinson), 36 Kansas Guards, 41–​42 Kansas Jayhawkers, 77 Kansas Legion, 39 Kansas-​Missouri border war, 34–​48, 37f Kansas-​Nebraska Act, 34–​35 Kansas Rifles, 41–​42 Kansas Weekly Herald, 35–​36 Kean, Robert Garlick Hill, 60–​61 Kearny, Philip, 288, 293, 296 Keitt, Laurence, 44–​45 Kelley, Benjamin, 95 Kelley, David C., 115, 557–​58 Kemper, James L., 288–​89 Kennedy, John F., 52 Kentucky campaign of 1862, 270–​83, 272f emancipation, 274, 279, 283 guerrilla warfare, 276, 282 weather, impact of, 270, 271, 275, 278, 282–​83 Kentucky (eastern) campaigns, 93, 95–​96, 99–​104, 100f loyalty and, 95–​96, 99–​101 politics and, 97 terrain, impact of, 96–​97 Kershaw, Joseph B., 324–​25, 576 Kessler’s Cross Lanes, Battle of, 98–​99 Killibrew, Joseph, 117, 118 Kilpatrick, Hugh J., 596 King, Richard, 516–​17 King, Susie, 140 Kiowa, 179–​80 Kirkland, John J., 439 Kirkland, Richard, 324–​25

Knights of the White Camelia, 639 Know Nothing political policy, 16–​17 Knoxville campaign, 437–​49, 443f African Americans, 448 guerrilla warfare, 439 impact on civilians, 448–​49 topography, impact of, 438 Unionists, 438–​39 Knoxville Whig and Rebel Ventilator, 439 Ku Klux Klan, 83, 639–​41 Ku Klux Klan Acts, 640   Lakota, 11–​12, 183 Lamar, Thomas G., 141 Lamb, J.C., 127 Lane, James H., 41–​42, 45, 75 Lawler, Michael K., 364 Lawrence (Ks.), sack of, 41–​43 Lawton, Sarah Alexander, 458–​59, 462 Lecompton Constitution, 44–​45 Ledlie, James H., 496 Lee, Robert E. Appomattox campaign, 602–​5, 606–​14, 615 Battle of Fredericksburg, 317–​18, 320–​24, 325–​27, 328 Chancellorsville campaign, 376–​83, 385–​87, 388 farm destruction by, 15 Gettysburg campaign, 391–​92, 394–​401 Kentucky campaign, 93, 272–​73 Maryland campaign, 300–​4, 306–​7, 310–​13 Overland campaign, 451–​52, 453–​56, 459–​60, 462–​64 Peninsula and Shenandoah Valley campaigns, 236–​37, 243–​44, 248–​49 Petersburg campaign, 486–​90, 491, 496–​99, 500, 501, 565–​67, 569, 571, 573, 576–​77, 580–​81, 602–​3, 604–​5, 606–​8 Second Bull Run/​Second Manassas campaign, 289–​90, 295–​96 Seven Days Battles, 17, 160, 255–​57, 258, 265 Shenandoah Valley campaign, 565–​67, 569–​74, 576–​77, 580–​81, 586–​87 surrender of, 625, 632 Union blockade of the Confederate coast, 55 Virginia campaigns, 98–​99, 287 Lee, Samuel Philips, 558–​59

Index  661 Lee, Stephen D., 363 Lee, W. H. F., 460–​61 Legal Tender Act, 241 Leister, Lydia, 402 Letcher, John, 93–​94 Letterman, Jonathan, 401 Lexington (Mo.), Battle of, 74–​75, 77 Liberty Guard, 40 Library of Congress, 1 Lieber, Francis, 282 Lincoln, Abraham assassination of, 614 Atlanta campaign, 468 Battle of Stones River, 351–​52 election of, 47 emancipation by, 7–​9 Emancipation Proclamation, 9, 18, 121, 134, 145, 157–​58, 336, 349 Gettysburg campaign, 400 Kansas-​Nebraska Act, 34–​35 limitations in army readiness, 80, 81–​82 Mexican civil war, 619–​22 North Carolina Union occupation, 124, 128 North Mississippi campaign, 331, 332 Petersburg campaign, 491 Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, 277–​78, 279, 300, 303, 311–​14, 335 Reconstruction and, 18, 283, 289, 614 Red River campaign, 505, 506, 507–​8, 517 reelection address, 585–​87 reelection of, 602 reintegration of Southern Whites, 227 river commerce, 118 second inaugural address, 585 Shiloh and Corinth campaigns, 204–​5 Thirteenth Amendment, 9, 180, 585, 605 Union blockade of the Confederate coast, 52–​53, 54, 57, 58, 59–​60 Little, Henry, 155–​56 Little, John, 45 Little Rock campaign, 405–​19, 407f Little Sugar Creek Company, 45 Little Thunder (Brulé Sioux leader), 39 localized total war, 12–​14 Logan, John A., 363–​64, 477, 590 logistics, 20 Arkansas campaigns, 157, 406, 410, 418

Atlanta campaign, 469, 475, 480 destruction of Confederate system, 140, 227 invasion of Missouri 1864, 522 Kentucky campaign of 1862, 270, 271, 272–​73, 276, 283 Maryland campaign, 303–​4 New Mexico, 172–​74, 177 North Mississippi campaign, 337–​38 Overland campaign, 456, 463 Peninsula campaign, 240–​41, 243, 249 Petersburg campaign, 486–​87, 565–​66, 571, 573, 606 Port Hudson campaign, 360–​61, 370 Prisoners of war, 5–​7 Red River campaign, 507 Sherman’s march to the sea, 538 Tennessee campaigns, 108, 211–​12, 215, 438, 442, 446, 553, 554, 558 Tullahoma and Chickamauga campaigns, 422, 423–​26 Vicksburg campaign, 358, 367 “Long Walk,” 179 Longstreet, James Appomattox campaign, 609–​10 First Battle of Bull Run/​Manassas, 88 Fredericksburg campaign, 320, 323–​24, 325–​26 Gettysburg campaign, 396–​98 Knoxville and Chattanooga campaigns, 437–​38, 440–​44, 446–​48 Overland campaign, 453, 464 Peninsula and Shenandoah Valley campaigns, 249 Petersburg campaign, 577, 578 Second Bull Run/​Second Manassas campaign, 288–​89, 292–​93, 294–​95 Seven Days Battles, 255–​57, 265 Loring, William W., 363 Lost Cause supporters, 80, 85 Louisiana Colored Infantry, 371–​72 Louisiana Purchase, 169 Louisiana Sharpshooters, 275 Louisville and Nashville Railroad, 277, 558 Lovejoy, Julia Louisa, 38 loyalty, 12, 26n.16, 68–​69, 95–​96, 132–​33, 189–​90, 206, 438–​39, 510, 537, 591, 603–​4, 634 Lynde, Isaac, 171–​72

662   Index Lyon, Hylan B., 558 Lyon, Nathaniel, 66, 67–​68, 69–​74, 522   Mackall, Thomas B., 472 Mackall, William, 223 Magruder, John B., 160, 242 Mahone, William, 491, 496, 497, 609–​10 majority-​white Unionism, 274 Mallett, Susie, 131 Malvern Hill, Battle of, 259, 261, 264–​65 Manassas, Battles of. See First Battle of Bull Run/​Manassas; Second Bull Run/​Second Manassas campaign Manypenny, George, 39 march to the sea, Sherman, 9, 12, 534–​50, 540f African Americans, 543, 544–​45, 547 deportation of civilians, 535 logistics, 538 Sherman’s strategy, 534–​35, 536–​37 treatment of civilians, 542–​43, 546 Marchand, John B., 57 Marcy, Randolph, 263 Marine Corps units, 87 Marmaduke, John Sappington, 162–​63, 207–​8, 409, 412, 523, 527, 528–​29, 530 Marshall, Humphrey, 103–​4 martial law, 13–​14, 47, 76, 130, 158–​59, 160–​61, 165, 204–​5, 306, 439, 631, 634–​36, 640 Martin, Jared C., 417 Martin, William F., 126–​27 Marvel, William, 611 Maryland campaign Battle of Antietam reports, 300, 308, 309–​11 civilians and, 306–​9 introduction to, 300–​3, 301f logistical challenge in, 303–​4 Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation and, 300, 303, 311–​14 slavery and, 306–​7, 311–​14 soldiers in, 304–​6 Mashburn, M.O., 416–​17 Mason, James M., 241 Massachusetts volunteers in the Seven Years War, 84 Matthews, Asa, 200 Maury, Dabney H., 622–​23 May, Andrew Jackson, 102–​3

Mayo, Joseph, 61–​62 McCallum, Daniel C., 481 McCausland, John, 565 McClellan, George B. Battle of Fredericksburg, 317–​18, 320 Burnside Expedition, 129 Carolinas campaign, 587–​88 as Democratic Party nominee, 480 First Battle of Bull Run/​Manassas, 89–​90 Kentucky campaign, 95, 271 Maryland campaign, 300–​2, 304, 308, 311–​14 Missouri invasion, 521 officers as POWs, 290–​91 Overland campaign, 451 Peninsula and Shenandoah Valley campaigns, 97–​98, 236, 237–​52, 239f Petersburg campaign, 499 Second Bull Run/​Second Manassas campaign, 292–​93, 294, 296–​97 Seven Days Battles, 17, 254–​66 Shenandoah Valley campaign, 580–​81 Shiloh and Corinth campaigns, 204–​5, 212–​13 Virginia campaigns, 97–​98 McClernand, John Arkansas campaigns, 406 Fort Donelson, 115–​16 North Mississippi campaign, 332–​35, 337, 339–​40 Vicksburg and Port Hudson campaigns, 359–​60, 362–​63, 366 McCook, Alexander, 281, 346–​47 McCown, John P., 220–​21, 223–​24, 346–​47 McCullough, Benjamin, 72, 73–​74, 153, 155 McDonald, Cornelia Peake, 264 McDowell, Irvin Battle of Fredericksburg and, 320 First Battle of Bull Run/​Manassas, 80, 86–​87, 88–​89 Peninsula and Shenandoah Valley campaigns, 238, 242, 246, 249 Second Bull Run/​Second Manassas campaign, 295 McGuire, Judith, 452, 458, 460–​62 McIntyre, Benjamin F., 162, 166 McLaws, Lafayette, 381–​82, 385–​86 McMahan, Robert T., 165 McNeil, John, 528–​29

Index  663 McPherson, Edward, 395 McPherson, James Atlanta campaign, 469, 471, 472–​73, 476–​77 Vicksburg and Port Hudson campaigns, 360, 362, 366, 368, 370–​7 1 Meade, George Appomattox campaign, 606, 609–​10, 611–​12 Battle of Fredericksburg, 323, 327 Gettysburg campaign, 396–​97, 398–​99, 400 Military Reconstruction, 636–​37 Overland campaign, 452, 453–​55, 459, 463, 464 Petersburg campaign, 486–​87, 489–​91, 495–​96, 499, 500–​1 Meagher, Thomas F., 288 medical care, 21, 197, 207, 210, 250, 259–​60, 348, 355, 368, 410–​11, 462, 575 Meigs, Montgomery C., 240–​41 Memphis the Bottomlands and, 341 Chickasaw Bayou and, 337–​42 Confederate military actions, 203–​4 deportation of civilians, 476 Federal operations against, 213, 214–​15, 219, 226–​27 material resources for war effort, 110–​11, 270, 358, 367 North Mississippi campaign and, 334–​35 political reconstruction and, 16–​17, 220, 224, 233 refugees, 216 trade with northern markets, 118, 341–​42, 415 Memphis and Charleston Railroad, 204, 211, 271, 278 Memphis and Little Rock Railroad, 409–​11, 415 Memphis (TN) Daily Appeal, 311 Merrill, Lewis, 640–​41 USS Merrimack, 238 Merritt, Wesley, 457 Mescalero Apache, 11–​12, 178–​79 Methodist missionaries, 35 Mexican civil war, 619–​22, 621f, 625–​26 Meyers, Sally, 394–​95 Middle Creek, Battle of, 103–​4 Miles, Nelson, 305, 570 Miles, William Porcher, 602–​3 military campaigns of American Civil War. See also specific campaigns

armed struggle between citizens, 10–​12 destruction of private dwellings and public infrastructures, 14–​16 impact on Indian Territory, 3, 187–​200, 188f introduction to, 1–​2 localized total war, 12–​14 movement, deportation, depopulation, 3–​7 political synergy, 16–​19 refugees, emancipation, insurrection, 7–​10 in time and place, 19–​21 Military Division of the Mississippi, 3–​5 military history, 1–​2 Military Reconstruction, 635–​38, 637f military reprisals, 12 Militia Act, 85, 263 militia cavalry, 83–​84 Mill Springs, Battle of, 104 Milroy, Robert, 578 Minutemen of Lexington and Concord, 84 Mississippi Valley Baton Rouge campaign, 231–​33 Black refugees, 371 Black soldiers, 342, 371–​72 Bottomlands, 340–​43 Confederate conscription, 16–​17, 221–​23, 226, 229–​31 emancipation, 219–​20, 227–​28, 342, 358 fragility of Confederate defense, 206–​7, 220–​21, 233 Island No. 10 and New Orleans campaigns, 219–​26, 222f New Orleans, 210–​13 politics of recruitment, 16–​17 recruitment of USCTs, 228, 342, 372 refugee slaves to Texas, 516 slavery in, 1, 365–​66 Union exploitation of victories, 226–​31 Union strategy, 107, 108, 331–​32 Missouri campaign, 66–​78, 71f bank issue, 74–​75 guerrilla warfare, 66, 75–​76 politics and, 68–​69 state identity and, 68–​69, 77–​78 Missouri invasion of 1864, 520–​32, 524f Confederate strategy, 521–​22 guerrilla warfare, 520–​21, 522, 525–​27, 529–​30 women in guerrilla warfare, 526

664   Index Missouri Unconditional Union Party, 69 Mitchel, Ormsby, 270 Mitchell, Margaret, 547–​48 Mobile, Alabama capture, 622–​23 Mobile Daily Advertiser and Register, 310–​11 Molineaux, Emily E., 482 USS Monitor, 238 Monroe Doctrine, 507–​8, 620 Montgomery, Benjamin, 371 Montgomery, James, 45, 46 Moody, William L., 516–​17 Mordecai, Emma, 453, 455–​56, 457, 462 Mordecai, Rose, 455–​56, 457 Morgan, James, 223 Morgan, John D., 54 Morgan, John Hunt, 211–​12, 271, 272–​73, 277–​78, 552 Morrill Land-​Grant College Act, 228 Morris, Thomas A., 95 Morris Island, 137, 143–​44, 146, 147, 149 Morton, James S., 212 Mud March, 326–​27 Mulligan, James A., 74 Munfordville, battle of, 277 Murfreesboro, 203–​4, 276, 332, 336, 345–​46, 350–​52, 353–​56, 421, 423, 426 Musser, Charles, 625, 629–​30 mutinies, 16–​17, 55, 219, 220, 224, 225–​26   Napoleon III, Emperor, 59–​60, 507–​8, 619–​22 Nashville, Tennessee campaign, 551–​62, 555f Nashville and Chattanooga Railroad, 349, 441, 557–​58 Nashville Banner, 109 Nation, 641 National Park Service, 402 Native Americans, 81, 85, 119, 187, 411. See also American Indians; Five Civilized Tribes; Indian Territory; specific tribes/​Nations nativism, 387–​88 Navajo, 11–​12, 174, 175–​76, 178–​80, 181 “negro stealers,” 38–​39, 45–​46 Nelson, William “Bull,” 102–​3, 273, 278–​79 Nelson, William C., 265 Nevins, Allan, 204 New Bern, 124, 125, 127, 128–​29, 130–​33, 134, 237, 593–​94, 595

New England abolitionists, 36–​38 USS New Ironsides, 143 New Mexico Territory, 169–​85, 172f Confederate goals, 170–​7 1 Confederate invasion, 171–​74, 176–​77 Hispanos, 175–​76, 180 Native nations, 174–​76, 178–​80 U.S. claims to sovereignty and, 169–​70 New military history, 1–​2 New Orleans campaign, 55, 141, 212, 215, 219–​27 New York Herald, 59, 260, 310 New York Times, 261, 387, 611, 612–​13 New York Tribune, 194, 310, 325, 605–​6 Newcomb, Edgar M., 262–​63 USS Niagara, 53, 137–​38 Nichols, Clarina, 47–​48 Nichols, Kate Latimer, 543 North American and United States Gazette, 616 North Atlantic Blockading Squadron, 54–​55, 238, 243, 588 North Carolina Railroad, 20, 595–96 North Carolina Union occupation, 5–​7, 124–​34, 126f divided loyalty, 132–​33 emancipation, 132, 134 refugees, 128, 131–​294 North Mississippi campaign Battle of Chickasaw Bayou, 338–​40 Black soldiers, 342 bottomlands and, 340–​43 emancipation, 335, 342 eviction of Jewish traders, 335–​36 introduction to, 331–​34, 333f overview of, 334–​38 refugees, 335 Northrop, L. B., 118–​19 Northwest Freedmen’s Aid Society, 413–​14 Nullification Crisis, 67   O’Bryan, Lawrence, 130–​31 Occoquan River-​Bull Run Valley, 237 occupation, 10, 13, 15–​16, 18 of Arkansas, 413–​17, 419 of coastal North Carolina, 132–​33 of Fredericksburg, 318–​20, 321, 322

Index  665 of Kentucky, 215, 275 of Knoxville, 439, 440 of Little Rock, 413–​17 of Louisiana, 290, 361, 505–​6 of Mexico, 507–​8 of Mississippi Valley, 358 of Murfreesboro, 353–​55 of Nashville, 118–​19, 361 of New Orleans, 290 of northern Mississippi, 203–​4, 213, 334 Reconstruction and, 628–​42 of Sea Islands, 137, 142 of Tennessee, 204–​5, 206, 210, 215, 346–​47, 350–​51, 354–​55, 439, 551, 553–​54 of Texas, 508 of Virginia, 236–​37, 290–​91, 307, 318–​20 Official Records report, 400 Old Dominion campaigns, 249–​52 open, fluid warfare, 19–​20 Opothleyahola (Creek leader), 3, 190–​93 Ord, Edward O. C., 278, 279–​80, 603, 609–​10 Oread Guard, 43 Orphan Brigade, 275 Osawatomie, Battle of, 43–​45 Osterhaus, Peter J., 154–​55, 536 Overland campaign, 451–​64, 454f Black soldiers, 456 impact on civilians, 455–​57, 458–​59, 460, 461–​62 treatment of civilians, 453, 457–​58, 460–​62 Overton, John, 557–​58   paganism, 170–​7 1 Paine, E.A., 224 Paine, Halbert, 226 Palmetto Guard, 39 Partisan Ranger Act, 593 partisan warfare, 99–​100, 153, 159, 282, 552, 553–​54, 558, 560, 575, 581, 586–​87, 593–​94 Pate, H. Clay, 43–​44 Patrick, Marsena R., 294, 460 Pea Ridge, Battle of, 43–​44, 194, 406 Pearson, Robert H., 43 Pegg, Thomas, 191–​92 Pegram, John, 97–​98 Pegram, Richard, 496 Pelham, John, 323

Pemberton, John C., 359, 360–​61, 363, 364, 367, 368, 372–​73 Pender, William Dorsey, 264–​65 Pendleton, William Nelson, 377, 613 Peninsula and Shenandoah Valley campaigns emancipation, 251 introduction to, 236–​37 operations of, 241–​49, 245f strategic setting of, 237–​41, 239f treatment of civilians, 250–​51 Pequot wars militia, 84 Perry, E.A., 321–​22 Perryville, Battle of, 283 Petersburg campaign African Americans, 485–​86, 492 Black soldiers, 489, 495–​97, 570, 571–​73, 577 election of 1864, 580–​81 emancipation, 605–​6 impact on civilians, 492–​93, 494, 501, 579–​80, 603–​4 January-​April 1865, 602–​18 June-​August 1864, 485–​504 refugees, 494 September-​December 1864, 565–​84 Shenandoah Valley campaign and, 569–​73, 572f, 577 women and military intelligence, 604 Petersburg Common Council, 493 Petersburg Express, 494 Petersburg & Weldon Railroad, 490–​91, 499, 500–​1, 571, 577, 606 Pettigrew, J. Johnston, 399 Pettus, John J., 206–​7, 373 Phelps, John, 228, 232–​33 Phelps, Seth Ledyard, 113 Philadelphia Lancer Guard, 82 Phillips, Pleasant J., 541 Pickett, George E., 399, 556, 607 Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg, 327–​28, 399–​400 Pierce, Francis E., 306 Pierce, Franklin, 39 Pierce, Tilly, 394–​95 Pike, Albert, 153–​54, 156, 193 Pike’s Peak Gold Rush, 181–​82 Pillow, Gideon J., 110, 353 Pilot Knob, 527

666   Index Pinkerton, Allan J., 249 Pinnell, Ethan Allen, 161–​62, 164–​65 Pitchlynn, Peter, 196–​97, 198–​99, 200 USS Pittsburg, 221–​23 Platte County (Missouri) Self-​Defensive Association, 35, 39 Pleasanton, Alfred, 530 Pleasants, Henry, 495–​96 Poe, Orlando, 442 politics anti-​Catholic political policy, 16–​17 Appalachian warfare and, 97 of army command, 286–​91, 421, 429 as driver of war, 66 of Ulysses S. Grant, 18 Know Nothing political policy, 16–​17 of marginalization, 175 posttruth politics phenomenon, 266 presidential election of 1864, 18, 377, 421–​22, 480, 499, 506, 521, 522, 536, 566, 587–​88 Second Bull Run/​Second Manassas campaign, 18, 286 Shenandoah Valley campaign, 580–​81 synergy in military campaigns, 15–​19, 110, 231, 249–​50, 507 women’s impact on, 16, 35, 142–​43 Polk, James K., 67–​68 Polk, Leonidas, 110, 206–​7, 279, 280, 349, 469, 472 polling place violence, 34–​35 Pook, Samuel, 109–​10, 112 Poor Association, 493 Pope, John hard war, 286 Military Reconstruction, 637 Mississippi Valley campaign, 220–​23 Second Bull Run/​Second Manassas campaign, 286–​97 Shiloh and Corinth campaigns, 205–​6, 212–​13 Port Hudson campaign. See Vicksburg and Port Hudson campaigns Porter, David Dixon, 13, 127, 224, 367–​68, 508–​9, 588, 597–​98, 610–​11 Porter, Fitz John, 247, 249, 257–​58, 293, 341–​42 Porter, Nimrod, 558–​59, 562 Porterfield, George, 94–​95 posttruth politics phenomenon, 266

Pottawatomie Creek massacre, 43, 44 Pottawatomie Rifles, 43 Prairie Grove battle of, 3, 163–​64, 165, 166 Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, 277–​78, 279, 300, 303, 311–​14, 335 Prentiss, Benjamin M., 208, 407–​8 Prentiss, Mattie, 250–​51 presidential election of 1864, 18, 377, 421–​22, 480, 499, 506, 521, 522, 536, 566, 587–​88 Price, Sterling Arkansas campaigns, 155, 408–​9, 412 Confederate resurgence and, 229 invasion of Missouri, 11, 67–​68, 71–​72 Kentucky campaign of 1862, 275, 278 Missouri campaign, 153 Missouri invasion, 520–​32 prisoners of war (POW) Andersonville, 433, 535–​36, 544 Camp Lawton, 544 challenges with, 119–​21 City Point, 603–​4 exchange system, 119, 358, 372–​73, 433, 490, 535 execution of, 593–​94 mass captures of, 119, 127, 273, 339, 372–​73, 400, 425–​26, 433, 477, 491, 500, 625 military prisons in northern states, 119 movement of, 5–​7 officers as POWs, 290–​91 retaliation against, 148–​49 Richmond, 259–​60, 433 U.S. Colored Troops as, 17, 145–​46, 373, 490, 539 Wilmington, North Carolina campaign, 5–​7 pro-​secession women, 290–​91 pro-​slavery Southerners, 170–​7 1 Provisional Confederate Congress, 540–​41 Pryor, Roger A., 288 Puebloan peoples, 174 Pyron, Charles L., 176–​77   Quantrill, William Clarke, 197, 526–​27, 531 quarantines, as trade restrictions, 52   race-​based laws, 18 Radical Republicans, 612

Index  667 railroads Atlanta and West Point Railroad, 477, 478–​79 Atlantic and North Carolina Railroad, 130–​31, 595 Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, 95, 130–​31, 240, 246, 567, 585–​86 Central of Georgia Railroad, 541, 542 Central Railroad of Illinois, 109–​10 conscripted slaves and, 13–​14, 558 East Tennessee and Georgia Railroad, 442 Georgia Railroad, 476 impact of Union blockade on, 15–​16, 56, 60–​61, 62–​63 Iron Mountain Railroad, 527 Louisville and Nashville Railroad, 277, 558 Macon and Western Railroad, 477, 478–​79 Memphis and Charleston Railroad, 204, 211, 271, 278 Memphis and Little Rock Railroad, 409–​11, 415 Memphis and Louisville Railroad, 113 military operations and, 88, 97, 109–​10, 118, 131–​32, 140, 148–​49, 172–​74, 204, 205–​6, 212, 213, 214–​15, 254, 271, 286, 317–​18, 327, 337, 340–​4 1, 364, 377–​7 8, 409–​11, 425, 438, 440, 442, 462, 469, 471, 476, 477, 480, 485, 495, 499, 525, 534, 552–​53, 565–​66, 574, 576, 586–​87, 603, 620 Mississippi Central Railroad, 334 Mobile and Ohio Railroad, 213–​14 Nashville and Chattanooga Railroad, 349, 441, 557–​58 North Carolina Railroad, 20, 595–​96 North Missouri Railroad, 529 Petersburg & Weldon Railroad, 490–​91, 499, 500–​1, 571, 577, 606 refugee labor and, 216, 490–​91, 499, 500–​1, 571, 578 Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Potomac Railroad, 317–​18, 320 Richmond and Danville Railroad, 336, 490–​92, 609–​10 Richmond and York River Railroad, 249, 255

Savannah and Charleston Railroad, 140, 149, 546 South Side Railroad, 490–​91, 569–​70, 571, 598, 606–​7 Southern Railroad of Mississippi, 362, 363 target of guerrillas, 75–​76, 95, 438–​39 U.S. Military Railroad system, 3–​5, 481 USCTs and, 539, 553, 559–​60, 622 Virginia Central Railroad, 247 Western and Atlantic Railroad, 469, 471, 473, 474, 475–​76, 482, 534, 538, 539 Rains, Gabriel James, 148, 161 Ramseur, Stephen, 567 Raymond, Henry J., 612–​13 Reconstruction Black soldiers, 633–​34 citizen soldiers, 630, 636–​37 emancipation, 632–​33 introduction to, 18 military occupation during, 628–​42 Military Reconstruction, 635–​38, 637f republicanism and, 630, 633–​34, 641, 642 self-​reconstruction, 629–​35 U.S. Army, 629–​35, 636–​37, 639–​40 White Southern insurgency, 638–​42 Reconstruction Acts, 635–​36 Rector, Henry Massey, 156–​57 Red River campaign, 505–​17, 511f combined army/​navy operations, 508–​9, 514–​15 cotton, 506–​7, 508, 509–​10, 512, 517 emancipation, 505–​6 impact on Texas, 516–​17 political reconstruction of Louisiana, 507, 510 refugees, 505–​6, 516 strategic importance of, 507–​8 treatment of civilians, 509, 516 Reeves, Tim, 529 refugees/​refugee movement. See also Black refugees Arkansas, 157, 159–​60, 414–​15 Atlanta campaign, 468, 475, 481, 482, 535 Battle of Fredericksburg and, 318, 321, 322 defined, 7–​9 in East, 4f Georgia, 624–​25

668   Index refugees/​refugee movement (cont.) impact of military campaigns on, 7–​10 Indian Territory, 194, 195, 196–​97, 198–​99 Missouri, 75 North Carolina, 131, 132–​33, 138, 593–​94 North Mississippi campaign, 335, 337 Petersburg campaign, 492–​93, 494 Red River campaign, 505–​6 scope, 3 Shenandoah Valley, 578 Shiloh and Corinth campaigns, 216 South Carolina, 138, 149, 590–​91, 593–​94 Texas, 505–​6, 516, 620 in Trans-​Mississippi and Far West, 8f Tullahoma and Chickamauga campaign, 421–​22, 428, 433–​34 from Union blockade of the Confederate coast, 57–​58 Vicksburg and Port Hudson campaigns, 370–​73 in West, 6f white refugees, 14–​15, 131, 132–​33, 138, 159–​60, 318, 335, 414, 468, 481, 492–​93, 494, 505–​6, 593 Reid, John W., 44 relief programs, 578 religion, 18, 197 retaliation, 17, 145, 148-49, 236, 276, 289, 337, 444, 516, 565, 575 Resaca, Battle of, 471–​72 religion, 18–​19, 197 retaliation, 17, 145, 148–​49, 236–​37, 276, 289–​90, 337, 444, 516, 565, 575 Reynolds, Joseph, 418–​19 Rhodes, Elisha Hunt, 632 Rice, Benjamin, 45 Rice, Marsh, 516–​17 Rich Mountain, Battle of, 97–​98 Richards, Channing, 120 Richards, Samuel, 482 Richardson, Israel B., 302 Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Potomac Railroad, 317–​18, 320 Richmond and Danville Railroad, 336, 490–​92, 609–​10 Richmond and York River Railroad, 249, 255 Richmond Dispatch, 60–​61, 310 Richmond Enquirer, 264 Richmond Examiner, 130, 321

Richmond (Ky.), Battle of, 273 Richmond (Va.) bread riots in, 61–​62 condition of civilians in, 130, 259–​60, 452, 458–​59, 462, 603–​4 Confederate defense of, 85, 86, 242, 248, 265, 326, 379–​80, 452, 603, 606–​7 fall of, 608 Federal operations against, 19–​20, 213, 237–​38, 247, 248, 254, 287, 317–​18, 452, 463, 486, 565–​66 hospitals and prisons in, 60–​61, 259–​60, 433, 457, 462 material resources, 107–​8, 129 Virginia state politics and, 97 Richmond Whig, 608 Ridley, B.L., 354 rifle musket, 20 Rio Grande Valley, 620–​22 River Defense Fleet, 220–​21 River Queen (steamer), 587, 597–​98, 610–​11 riverboat use in campaigns, 109–​10, 125–​26, 336, 525 Roanoke, 124–​25, 128–​30, 132, 237 Robinson, Charles, 36–​38, 41–​42 Robinson, Sara Tappan, 36–​38, 40–​41 Rodes, Robert, 309, 380–​81, 383, 567 Romig, Milton A., 354–​55 Ropes, Hannah, 40–​41 Rose, George, 402 Rosecrans, William S. Battle of Stones River, 345–​46, 348–​56 Kentucky campaign, 93, 97–​99, 275, 278, 279–​80 Missouri invasion, 523 North Mississippi campaign, 336 Tullahoma and Chickamauga campaigns, 421, 422–​34, 437 Ross, John, 189–​90, 191–​92, 195 Roswell factory women, 468, 475–​76, 481 Roulette, William, 308–​9 Rousseau, Lovell, 279 Rowan, Stephen F., 129–​30 Royal Navy, 51–​52 Ruffin, Edmund, 493 Ruggles, Daniel, 232–​33 runaway slaves, 35–​36, 38–​39, 132–​33, 203–​4, 206, 213, 263, 307, 492–​93, 509–​10, 514, 515

Index  669 Rundlett, Charles Lewis, 499 rural white Confederate women, 142–​43, 275 Rust, Albert, 99   Sailor’s Creek, Battles of, 609–​10 Sand Creek, atrocity at, 183–​84 Sanders, John C.C., 496–​97 Santa Fe Trail, 176–​77 Sargent, William G., 413 Saturday Evening Post, 130 Savannah blockade of, 55 capture of, 149, 534–​35, 545–​47, 588 fortifications of, 110–​11, 124 Savannah Republican, 309 Savannah and Charleston Railroad, 140, 149, 546 Saxton, Rufus, 138–​39, 140 Schenck, David, 131 Schmucker, Samuel, 402 Schoepf, Albin, 101–​2 Schofield, John McAllister Arkansas campaign, 161–​62 Carolinas campaign, 588, 591–​92 Little Rock campaign, 409 Military Reconstruction, 637 Reconstruction and, 630 Upper Heartland campaigns, 551–​52, 553–​58, 561 Schurz, Carl, 287–​88, 384, 634 Scott, Irby Goodwin, 456–​57 Scott, Winfield, 70, 107, 522 Scurry, William R., 176–​77 secession debates, 35 Secessionist women, 250–​51 Second Battle of Bull Run/​Manassas political beliefs of commanders and soldiers, 286–​88, 297 treatment of civilians, 289–​91 Second Battle of Fredericksburg, 327–​28 Second Bull Run/​Second Manassas campaign aftermath of, 296–​97 August 28-​30 battle, 293–​96 combat at Cedar Mountain, 291–​93, 292f combatants and commanders, 286–​91 political shuffling and, 18, 286 Second Confiscation Act, 142, 157–​58, 219–​20, 228, 232–​33, 263, 274 Second Seminole War, 82 sectionalism, 40–​41

Seddon, James A., 145–​46, 353, 406, 603 Sedgwick, John, 302, 379–​81, 382 self-​defense associations, 10–​11 self-​emancipating people, 7–​9, 219–​20 self-​reconstruction, 629–​35 Seminole, 187, 191, 192–​93, 196–​97, 200 Seven Days Battles, 17, 249, 254–​66 emancipation, 264 impact on civilians, 259–​60 media coverage, 255, 260, 264 “posttruth politics,” 266 soldier assessment of, 262–​63, 264–​65 Seward, William, 52, 264, 605–​6 Shannon, John, 46 Shannon, Wilson, 41 Sharkey, William L., 373 Sharpe, George H., 378–​79 Sharpsburg, 300–​2, 303–​4, 308–​9 Shaw, Henry M., 128–​29 Shaw, Robert Gould, 17, 144–​45 Shawnee, 35–​36 Shelby, Joseph O., 161–​62, 523–​25, 527, 530 Sheliha, Victor, 223 Shenandoah Valley campaign. See also Peninsula and Shenandoah Valley campaigns Christmas celebration after, 581–​82 effect on slavery, 578 election of 1864, 580–​81 fall campaign, 566–​69, 568f impact on civilians, 574–​76, 577–​600 introduction to, 565–​66 Petersburg campaign, 569–​73, 572f, 577 political impact of, 580–​81 Sheridan’s Burning, 573–​77 Sheridan, Philip H. Appomattox campaign, 603, 604, 606–​10, 611 Kentucky campaign of 1862, 278–​79 Mexican civil war, 625–​26 Military Reconstruction, 637 Overland campaign, 455, 457–​58 Petersburg campaign, 495 Shenandoah Valley campaign, 586–​87 Sheridan’s Burning, 573–​77 Stones River campaign, 348 Sherman, Henry, 43 Sherman, Thomas W., 137–​39

670   Index Sherman, William T. See also march to the sea, Sherman Arkansas campaign, 157 Atlanta campaign, 468–​82 Battle of Chickasaw Bayou, 338–​40 Battle of Stones River, 345–​46 Carolinas campaign, 587–​99 Charleston campaign, 149 deportations by, 3–​5, 475–​76, 481 First Battle of Bull Run/​Manassas, 88–​89 Knoxville and Chattanooga campaigns, 437, 440, 441, 443–​46, 447–​48 lack of command experience, 87 Missouri invasion, 522, 523, 525, 531–​32 North Mississippi campaign, 336–​37, 338–​40 Petersburg and Appomattox campaigns, 602–​3, 604, 610–​11, 614, 615–​16 Red River campaign, 505, 508–​9, 510, 517 Shiloh and Corinth campaigns, 208–​10, 214–​15 Upper Heartland campaigns, 552–​54, 558–​59, 561 U.S. Navy support of, 336 Vicksburg and Port Hudson campaigns, 359–​60, 362, 364, 367 Wilson’s Raid, 625 Shields, James, 246 Shiloh, Battle of. See Shiloh campaign Shiloh campaign, 203–​17 emancipation, 206 political impact, 210–​11 state governors and, 207–​8, 210 strategic importance, 204–​5 Shinn, James, 305 Shore, Samuel, 43 Sibley, Henry H., 172–​74 Sickles, Daniel E., 288, 380–​81, 383–​98 siege warfare, 19–​21, 114, 115–​16, 133, 143–​44, 146–​47, 242, 249, 366–​70, 443–​44, 446, 473, 571, 623 Sigel, Franz, 153–​54, 287, 291 Sill, Joshua, 279 Slack, James, 364 Slack, William Yarnell, 155 Slaughter, Montgomery, 318–​20, 321 slaveholders in enlisted ranks, 288 “Slaveholders Rebellion,” 81 slaves/​slavery Arkansas, 405, 410–​11, 412

Battle of Fredericksburg and, 318–​20 Carolinas campaign and, 591, 593–​94 coerced Indian labor, 9, 170–​7 1, 174, 180 Congressional ban on, 180 detribalized slaves, 174 emancipation impact, 7–​10, 219–​20 expansion by Davis, 170 female slaves, 9–​10 Forts Henry and Donelson, 113, 119–​21 Fugitive Slave Law, 39 impact of military campaigns, 3–​5, 10, 150, 157, 199–​200, 215, 371, 412, 602 impressment by Confederate army, 13–​14, 113, 125, 142, 251, 259–​60, 410 Indian Territory, 190, 199, 200 insurrection, 9, 142, 149, 199–​200, 593 Kansas, 35–​36 Kentucky campaign of 1862, 274, 279 liberation by military forces, 142, 157, 259, 279, 509 Maryland campaign and, 306–​7, 311–​14 in Missouri, 45–​46, 68 Mobile, 622 occupation of their masters’ homes by U.S. soldiers, 461 Peninsula campaign, 251 Petersburg campaign, 492–​93, 494 pro-​slavery Southerners, 170–​7 1 pro-​ vs. antislavery, 34–​48, 37f rebellion threats, 38 Red River campaign, 505–​6, 509–​10, 514, 515 removal by owners, 3–​5, 131, 138, 335, 410, 505–​6, 516 runaway slaves, 35–​36, 38–​39, 132–​33, 158, 199, 203–​4, 206, 213, 263, 274, 307, 355, 492–​93, 509–​10, 514, 515 Sea Islands, 138–​40 Shenandoah Valley, 578 Sherman’s march to the sea, 544–​45, 547 Shiloh and Corinth campaigns, 206, 212, 213, 215 slave patrols, 82–​84, 89–​90 Stones River, 345, 351–​52, 355 Union blockade of the Confederate coast and, 57 Vicksburg campaign, 1 Slidell, John, 241

Index  671 Slocum, Henry W., 382, 536, 590, 593, 596–​97 Slough, John P., 176, 177 Slyder, John, 397–​98 small-​unit warfare, 19, 96–​97 Smalley, George, 310 Smith, Andrew Jackson, 509–​10, 514, 515, 517, 527, 553–​54 Smith, Anna Eliza, 614–​15 Smith, Charles F., 112, 205–​6 Smith, Edmund Kirby Kentucky campaign, 271–​72, 273–​76, 277–​78, 279 Kentucky campaign of 1862, 271–​72, 273–​76, 277–​78, 279 Red River campaign, 512–​13, 514, 515–​16, 517 surrender of territory by, 200 Smith, Giles A., 477 Smith, Gustavus W., 248 Smith, J. Gregory, 614–​15 Smith, William F. “Baldy,” 441, 463, 487–​89 Smithsonian Institution, 54 smoothbore muskets, 20 smuggling/​smugglers, 35 Snead, Thomas Lowndes, 156–​57 Sneden, Robert Knox, 535 social change, 1, 236–​37, 318, 419, 632 social history, 1–​2, 21 soft war, 276 South Atlantic Blockading Squadron, 54–​55, 137–​38 South Side Railroad, 490–​91, 569–​70, 571, 598, 606–​7 Southern Cheyenne, 181–​85 Southern plantations as sites of warfare, 9–​10 Southern women’s groups, 401 Spangler, Henry, 399 Spirit of the Times (Wilkes), 261–​62 Spotsylvania, Battle of, 462–​63 Spring Hill campaign, 551–​62, 555f Squatter Sovereign, 46 St. Louis, 67, 68–​7 1, 72, 73, 74–​75, 107–​9, 153, 206, 367, 415, 507–​8, 521, 522, 523, 527, 528, 529 Stanly, Edward, 134 Stanton, Edwin M. Battle of Stones River, 351 Charleston campaign, 145

Fort Henry and For Donelson campaigns, 121 Gettysburg campaign, 394 hard-​war military tactics, 586–​87 North Mississippi campaign, 332–​34 Seven Days Battles, 258, 260–​61 Shiloh and Corinth campaigns, 207 Upper Heartland campaigns, 561 steamboats, 108–​10 Steele, Frederick Arkansas campaigns, 405, 409–​10, 411–​12, 416 Little Rock campaign, 15–​16, 409–​10, 411–​12 Red River campaign, 508–​9, 510, 512–​13, 514 Steinwehr, Adolph von, 384 Stephens, Alexander, 610–​11 Stevens, Thaddeus, 52, 251–​52, 392–​94 Stevenson, Carter L., 363 Stewart, Alexander P., 223–​24, 476–​77, 555–​56 Stewart, Robert, 47 Stoneman, George, 378–​79 Stones River, Battle of, 18, 345–​56, 347f Stones River campaign, 9 African Americans, 355 Bragg controversy, 352–​53 Confederate military conscription, 353 Emancipation Proclamation and, 345, 349, 351 treatment of civilians, 354–​55 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 121 strategy, 2, 7–​9 Confederate, 114, 153, 160, 161, 172, 203, 248, 326, 376–​77, 429, 475, 499, 512–​13, 522–​23, 565–​66, 580–​81 material resources and, 107–​8, 241, 406 Native Americans, 181, 187–​88 politics and, 18, 236–​37, 565–​66, 575 Union, 10, 13, 54–​55, 73, 118, 137–​38, 143, 177, 203, 237, 297, 317–​18, 376–​77, 423, 486, 487, 507–​8, 534–​35, 565–​66, 571, 575, 587–​88, 597–​98, 604, 620 Stringfellow, Benjamin F., 35, 46 Stringham, Silas, 124, 125–​27 Strong, George C., 144 Strong, George Templeton, 459 Stuart, James E. B. (Jeb), 288–​89, 377, 381, 383, 385, 391–​92, 455, 457, 464 Stubbs Rifle Company, 43

672   Index Sturgis, Samuel D., 194–​95 submarine use, 20–​21, 148 Sumner, Charles, 42, 43, 180, 251–​52 Sumner, Edwin Vose, 39, 238, 320, 323, 324 Swamp Angel artillery piece, 146–​47 Swenson, S.M., 516–​17 Sykes, George, 382   tactical advances, 20–​21 Taos Revolt, 67 Taylor, Richard, 361, 506, 510–​17, 554 Taylor, Thomas E., 58–​59 Taylor, Walter H., 613 temporary soldiers, 86 Tennessee campaign (Hood 1864), 551–​64 Black soldiers, 558–​60 emancipation, 559–​60 guerrillas, 560–​61 refugees, 557 strategic context, 551–​53 Terhune, Andrew N., 305 terrain, impact on military operations, 14, 19 Arkansas, 409 Atlanta campaign, 472–​73 Chancellorsville, 382–​83, 384–​85 Chattanooga and Knoxville, 438 coastal North Carolina, 129, 130–​31 eastern Kentucky, 96–​97, 102 Forts Henry and Donelson, 108, 110 Kentucky campaign of 1862, 278 New Mexico territory, 172–​74 North Mississippi campaign, 338, 339 Overland campaign, 452 Peninsula campaign, 246 Seven Days’ battles, 255 Shenandoah Valley, 569 Sherman’s march to the sea, 543 Shiloh and Corinth campaigns, 208–​9 Stones River, 348 Tullahoma and Chickamauga, 423, 426, 429 Vicksburg and Port Hudson, 360 Terry, Alfred, 577, 588 Texas Confederate campaign for New Mexico and, 171–​72, 174–​75, 176, 177–​78, 179–​80 Confederate defense of, 55, 522 Federal access to, 406, 418 Federal operations in, 620

Indian Territory and, 187–​88, 198–​99, 418 Red River campaign and, 505–​8, 509, 510, 515, 516–​17 refugee flight to, 159–​60, 198–​99, 405, 410, 440, 505–​6, 509, 516, 525 secession, 46, 85, 171 slavery, 505–​6, 516, 615–​16 stripping Confederate troops from, 206–​7 surrender of Confederate armies in, 615–​16 Unionists, 11, 507 U.S. Army in Reconstruction, 636–​37 Thirteenth Amendment, 9, 180, 585, 605 Thomas, Emory, 97–​98 Thomas, George Atlanta campaign, 469, 476–​77, 478–​79 Battle of Mills Spring, 104 Battle of Wildcat Mountain, 101 Knoxville and Chattanooga campaigns, 440, 441, 444, 445, 448 Sherman’s march to the sea, 546–​47 Upper Heartland campaigns, 551–​52, 553–​56, 557–​59, 560–​61 Thomas, Lorenzo, 342 Thompson, W.B., 125 Tilghman, Lloyd, 111–​12 Tinsley, Charles, 485–​86 Todd, George, 525, 526, 529–​30 Toombs, Robert, 288 Topeka Movement, 42 topography, impact on military operations, 19, 96–​97, 283, 341, 438 Torbert, Alfred, 567 torpedoes, 20–​21, 112, 137, 141, 143, 146–​47, 148, 514, 570, 622 Tourgée, Albion, 274–​75 Tourtellotte, John E., 365 Trans-​Mississippi Confederate department of, 153, 158, 160, 200, 418, 510–​12 influence on other theaters, 332, 360–​61, 370, 521 movement of troops from, 406 refugee camps, 413 theater of conflict, 156, 158, 159, 187, 203, 205–​6, 506, 507, 517, 520, 521, 522–​23, 602 Trask, William L., 275 Treaty of Fort Wise, 182–​83 Trimble, Isaac R., 399

Index  673 Trimble, William, 307–​8 Trostle, Abraham, 402 Trowbridge. John T., 561 Tucker, Pitts, 206–​7 Tullahoma campaign, 20, 421–​34, 424f, 437 civil-​military relations, 421, 422, 427 politics of command, 421, 425 topography, impact of, 423 treatment of civilians, 426–​27 Turchin, John Basil, 441 Turnverein (Turner Societies), 69 Twiggs, David E., 171 Twohig, John, 516–​17 Tyler (gunboat), 407–​8   Unconditional Union, 416 Union Aid Society, 414 Union blockade of the Confederate coast, 51–​63, 53f Unionists, 250–​51 Arkansas, 157, 159, 161, 414–​15, 418–​19 coastal North Carolina, 128, 132–​33, 593–​94 complex loyalties and, 12, 132–​33 Georgia, 546–​47 guerrilla warfare and, 11, 282 Kentucky, 271–​72, 277–​78, 282, 551 Louisiana, 505–​6, 507, 510, 515 Missouri, 75–​76, 525 northern Mississippi, 373 northwestern Virginia, 93–​94, 97 Tennessee, 351–​52, 426–​27, 434, 439, 440, 551 Virginia, 250–​51, 603–​4 Up from Slavery (Washington), 612 Upham, Charles, 595 Upper Heartland campaigns, 551–​62, 555f Upton, Emory, 294–​95, 453–​55 urban bombardments, 14–​15, 146–​47, 321–​22, 478, 493 U.S. Army after Reconstruction, 629–​35 Black slaves in, 342–​43 congressional Reconstruction policies, 18 against Indian peoples, 39 Indian peoples defense, 11–​12 Kansas-​Missouri border struggles, 39 operations with navy, 107–​8, 112–​16, 125–​26, 140–​42, 224–​25, 332, 336, 360, 361, 455, 508–​9, 514–​15

slavery tension and, 39, 43–​44 White Southern insurgency, 639–​40 U.S. Army National Guard, 84 U.S. Colored Troops (USCTs), 142, 145 Arkansas, 414 Baton Rouge, 16–​17, 232–​33 Battle of the Crater, 496–​97, 499 Carolinas campaign and, 593 Confederate troopers’ killing of, 12–​13, 497 Confederate view of, 145–​46, 490, 497 emancipation through, 451 enlistment of, 142, 228, 232–​33, 274, 355 Georgia, 539, 553 impressment of, 236–​37 Louisiana Colored Infantry, 371–​72 Mississippi Valley, 228, 342, 371–​72 Mobile, 622–​23 Overland campaign, 456 Petersburg campaign, 489, 496–​97, 570, 571–​73, 578, 612 plantation raids by, 10, 142 Port Hudson, 369 POW treatment, 145–​46, 373, 490, 539 recruitment of, 10, 16–​17, 157–​58, 228, 342, 372, 400–​1, 414, 448, 573 Red River campaign, 514–​15 Shenandoah Valley, 573 South Carolina, 139, 142, 144–​46 Tennessee, 355, 448, 558–​60 U.S. Military Railroad system, 481 U.S. Navy. See also Blockade of the Confederacy by U.S. Navy Black refugees in, 337 blockades, 15–​16, 171 campaign for Charleston, 137–​38, 140–​41, 143–​44, 147, 148 coastal North Carolina, 124, 125–​27 Forts Henry and Donelson, 107–​8, 112–​16 Mississippi Valley, 224–​25, 332, 336, 360, 361 operations with army, 107–​8, 112–​16, 125–​26, 140–​42, 224–​25, 332, 336, 360, 361, 455, 508–​9, 514–​15 Red River campaign, 508–​9, 514–​15 support of Sherman, 336 torpedo attacks on, 20–​21 Union blockade of the Confederate coast, 51–​63, 53f

674   Index U.S. Navy (cont.) western gunboats, 109–​10, 112–​16, 221–​23, 336, 508–​9, 514 U.S. Sanitary Commission, 21, 401 U.S. Treasury Department, 413 U.S.-​Mexico War, 67, 82, 89, 169   Valverde, battle of, 176 Van Dorn, Earl Arkansas campaign, 153–​54, 155–​57, 158 Battle of Baton Rouge, 231, 232–​33 Kentucky campaign, 278, 279–​80 Native allies and, 194 North Mississippi campaign, 332, 337–​38 Shiloh and Corinth campaigns, 210–​11 Van Lew, Elizabeth, 604 Van Vliet, Stewart, 240–​41 Vance, Zebulon, 593 Vicksburg and Port Hudson campaigns attack and siege, 366–​70 Black soldiers, 369, 371–​72 emancipation, 365, 371 exchange of prisoners, 372–​73 fall of Vicksburg, 619 impact on Confederate fortunes, 370–​73 impact on slavery, 1 introduction to, 358–​60, 359f overland march, 362–​66 Port Hudson and, 360–​61, 369–​70 refugees, 371 treatment of civilians, 365, 366, 368 Vincent, Strong, 397–​98 Virginia Military Institute (VMI), 84–​85, 577–​78 Virginia (northwestern) campaigns, 93–​95, 94f, 97–​99, 102–​3 Volunteer and Conscript Bureau, 13–​14, 352–​53 volunteer army, 630–​31 volunteer conscripts, 229–​30, 231 voting fraud, 34–​35, 36   Wade, Benjamin F., 251–​52 Wade, Jennie, 401 Wakarusa Liberty Guard, 39–​40 Wakarusa War, 39–​40, 42, 43 Walke, Henry, 112–​13, 221 Walker, David, 606 Walker, John G., 513 Walker, Lucius Marsh, 408, 409, 412

Walker, Samuel, 44 Wallace, Lew, 114, 208, 209 Walton, James B., 324 war and society, 2, 22 War Department, Confederate, 110–​11, 145–​46, 153, 206–​7, 353, 595–​96, 608 War Department, U.S., 11–​12, 47, 72, 125–​26, 138–​40, 145, 149, 182–​83, 216, 262, 263, 391–​92, 402, 421, 422, 490, 599, 632–​33 War of the Reform, 619 Warfield, James, 402 Warren, Gouverneur K., 397–​98, 500, 570, 606–​7 Wartime Reconstruction, 124, 134–​36, 203–​4, 220, 227, 233, 414–​15, 507 Washington, Booker T., 612 Washington, George, 229 Washington, John, 318–​20 water scarcity, 277–​78, 280–​81 Watie, Stand, 189–​90, 193, 195–​96 Watt, Sarah B. K., 259 Wattles, Augustus, 45 weather, impact on campaigns, 14, 19, 54, 95, 108, 112, 113, 114–​15, 179–​80, 183, 191–​92, 193, 246, 270, 271, 275, 278, 282–​83, 313, 348, 350, 369, 380–​81, 400, 425, 540–​41, 542, 554, 588, 590 Weekly Mississippian, 47 Weer, William, 194–​95 Weitzel, Godfrey, 577 Welles, Gideon, 52, 53–​54, 109–​10, 125, 142 Wellford, Charles, 383, 385 Wert, Jeffry, 567–​69 West Gulf Squadron, 54–​55 Western and Atlantic Railroad, 469, 471, 473, 474, 475–​76, 482, 534, 538, 539 Western Sanitary Commission, 216 Western theater, 9, 120–​21, 203, 368, 433, 437–​38, 441, 443–​44, 445–​46, 468, 469, 480, 505, 522, 545–​46, 587 Westport, Battle of, 530–​32 Wheeler, Joseph, 543–​44, 552, 590 Wheelock, Julia S., 327 Whiskey Rebellion, 229 White League, 639 White Line, 639 White refugees, 14–​15, 131, 132–​33, 138, 149, 159–​60, 318, 335, 414, 468, 481, 492–​93, 494, 505–​6, 593–​94

Index  675 White settlement, 35 White supremacy, 83, 614, 634–​35, 639, 642 White terrorism, 629, 641 Whitfield, John W., 43–​44 Wildcat Mountain, Battle of, 101–​2 Wilder, John, 449 Wilderness, Battle of the, 453–​55 Wilkerson, Allen, 43 Wilkes, George, 261–​62 Willcox, Orlando, 447 Williams, Alpheus, 305–​6 Williams, David, 546 Williams, Harry, 142 Williams, Thomas, 227–​28 Wills, David, 401 Wilmington, N.C., 5–​7, 55, 58–​59, 124–​25, 133, 486–​87, 499, 588, 591–​92, 594 Wilson, James H., 529, 551–​52, 623–​25 Wilson’s Creek, Battle of, 43 Wilson’s Raid, 623–​25, 624f Winchester, Third Battle, 567–​69 Wise, Henry, 128–​29 women/​women’s roles abuse of Black women, 140, 534–​35 African-​American Women’s Aid organizations, 216 Black women, 57–​58, 140, 158, 199, 220, 251, 307, 331, 335, 342, 371, 413, 448, 534–​35, 543 bread riots, 61–​62, 142–​43, 622 burying dead soldiers, 401 deportation of, 3–​5, 468, 475–​76, 481, 535 elite slaveholding women, 3, 12, 128, 131, 138, 417, 453, 455–​56, 462, 536, 559, 591 enslaved women, 57–​58, 82–​83, 89–​90, 157–​58, 307, 331, 365 female slaves, 9–​10 free-​state women, 40–​41, 547 in freedmen neighborhoods, 413 guerrilla warfare, 10–​11, 40–​41, 521, 525, 526 impact of campaigns on, 3–​5, 12, 14–​15, 159–​ 60, 161–​62, 184, 236–​37, 249–​51, 259–​60, 321, 401, 416, 417, 448, 453, 456, 461–​62, 513, 534–​35, 578, 591 impact on military campaigns, 1, 10–​11, 47–​48, 61–​62, 95, 117, 513–​14, 526

impact on politics, 16, 35, 137, 142–​43 imprisonment of, 525 Indian women, 39, 184, 191, 192–​93, 197–​99 Kansas border war, 193, 197, 198 labor for armies, 140, 216, 219–​20, 251 martial law impact on, 439 nursing wounded soldiers, 21, 354, 458, 462, 513–​14 pro-​secession women, 290–​91 pro-​slavery women, 40 providing military intelligence, 95, 604 rebel women, 40–​41 refugee camps, 57–​58, 216, 219–​20, 335, 413 refugees, 3, 14–​15, 128, 131, 157–​58, 191, 216, 321, 335, 342, 371, 414, 448, 475, 493, 494, 535, 544–45 relationship to state, 16, 137, 140, 142–​43, 578 Roswell factory women, 468, 475–​76, 481 rural white Confederate women, 142–​43, 275 Secessionist women, 250–​51 Second Confiscation Act and, 219–​20 sexual assault, 142–​43, 543 Sherman’s domestic war against, 536–​37, 543, 547 Southern women’s groups, 401 as spies, 604 stockpiling weapons by, 10–​11 treatment by Union army, 12, 140, 184, 250–​51, 275, 290–​91, 416, 525, 534–​35, 536–​37, 543, 591 Union Aid Society and, 414 unmarried women, 494 Wood, Margaret, 35, 40–​41 Woods, Edward McPherson, 401 Wright, Horatio G., 273–​74, 608 Wyandot, 35–​36   Yorktown, 242, 243 Young, Solomon, 77–​78   Zollicoffer, Felix K., 99, 100–​2, 103, 104 zone of active military operations, 1–​2