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

Assembles contributions from thirty-nine leading historians of the American Civil War into a coherent attempt to assess

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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