*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 45609 ***

Note: Images of the original pages are available through
      Internet Archive. See
      https://archive.org/details/historyconfederate01egglrich


      Project Gutenberg has the other volume of this work.
      Volume II: see http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/46175





THE HISTORY OF THE CONFEDERATE WAR

ITS CAUSES AND ITS CONDUCT

A Narrative and Critical History

by

GEORGE CARY EGGLESTON

VOLUME I







New York
Sturgis & Walton Company
1910

All rights reserved

Copyright, 1910
By Sturgis & Walton Company

Set up and electrotyped. Published March, 1910




CONTENTS


    CHAPTER                                                         PAGE

         PART I.--THE CAUSES OF THE WAR

           Introduction                                                3

        I. A Public, Not a Civil War                                  13

       II. The Growth of the National Idea                            19

      III. The "Irrepressible Conflict"                               37

       IV. The Annexation of Texas                                    58

        V. The Compromise of 1850                                     71

       VI. Uncle Tom's Cabin                                         107

      VII. The Repeal of the Missouri Compromise, The
              Kansas-Nebraska Bill and Squatter Sovereignty          112

     VIII. The Kansas War--The Dred Scott Decision--John Brown's
             Exploit at Harper's Ferry                               122

       IX. The Election of 1860                                      138

        X. The Birth of War                                          147


         PART II.--THE CONDUCT OF THE WAR

       XI. The Reduction of Fort Sumter                              177

      XII. The Attitude of the Border States                         194

     XIII. "Pepper Box" Strategy                                     203

      XIV. Manassas                                                  215

       XV. The Paralysis of Victory                                  233

      XVI. The European Menace                                       249

     XVII. Border Operations                                         256

    XVIII. The Blockade--The Conquest of the Coast and the Neglect
             to Follow up the Advantage thus Gained                  261

      XIX. The Era of Incapacity                                     268

       XX. The First Appearance of Grant                             273

      XXI. The Situation Before Shiloh                               282

     XXII. Between Manassas and Shiloh--The Situation in Virginia    293

    XXIII. Shiloh                                                    302

     XXIV. New Madrid and Island Number 10                           328

      XXV. Farragut at New Orleans                                   332

     XXVI. McClellan's Peninsular Advance                            352

    XXVII. Jackson's Valley Campaign                                 363

   XXVIII. The Seven Days' Battles                                   397

     XXIX. The Second Manassas Campaign                              414

      XXX. Lee's First Invasion of Maryland                          423




PART I

THE CAUSES OF THE WAR




INTRODUCTION

THE MAGNITUDE OF THE CONFEDERATE WAR


During the years from 1861 to 1865, one of the greatest wars in all
history was fought in this country.

There were in all three million three hundred and seventy-eight
thousand men engaged in the fighting of it.

There are not that many men in all the regular standing armies of
Europe combined, even if we include the unpaid hordes of Turkey and the
military myriads of the armed camp known to geography as Russia.

The actual fighting field of this war of ours was larger than the whole
of western Europe, and all of it was trampled over and fought over by
great armies.

The men killed or mortally wounded in our war numbered on the Northern
side alone 110,000. The total number of deaths resulting from military
operations on the Northern side alone was 350,000. The figures for the
Southern side are not accessible, owing to the loss of records. But
as the fighting was equally determined on both sides, and as other
conditions were substantially equal, it is certain that the losses of
life were relatively about the same on both sides. It is well within
the facts, therefore, to say that this war of ours directly caused the
death of more than half a million men. No other war in modern history
has cost so many lives or half so many.

We hear much of our recent war with Spain. Let us take it as a basis
of comparison. The total number of men even nominally called into the
field in that war was less by nearly two to one than the deaths alone
during the Confederate war. The number of men who were actually engaged
in the Spanish war numbered only about one tenth as many as those who
were buried as victims of the Confederate war's battle fields.

Again, the total number of men killed and wounded during the Spanish
war--including every man who was touched by a bullet or scratched by
a sword or bayonet thrust or hurt by a splinter at sea--was only two
hundred sixty-eight. That is fewer than the number who were stricken in
each of many before-breakfast skirmishes of the Confederate war, some
of which were deemed too insignificant to be reported to headquarters
with precision.

Looking for higher standards of comparison, we find that 43,449 men
fell killed or wounded at Gettysburg alone. That is almost double the
loss of the allied forces at Waterloo and probably equal to the total
losses on both sides at that greatest and most decisive of European
battles.

There were more than a dozen other battles of the Confederate war
which in slaughter fairly deserved comparison with Waterloo. These
included the Seven Days' battle before Richmond, and the battles of
Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Antietam, Shiloh, Chickamauga, the
Wilderness, Spottsylvania, Cold Harbor, the Second Manassas (or Bull
Run), Stone River, Petersburg, Franklin, Lookout Mountain, Nashville
and several others.

Still another measure of the magnitude of a war is its duration. It is
duration indeed that chiefly determines the amount of human suffering
caused by a war, especially to the women and children who are war's
chief victims.

Measured by this test of duration the Confederate war exceeded all
other recent conflicts in the magnitude of the suffering it inflicted.

Its first gun was fired at Fort Sumter in April, 1861: its last armed
conflict did not occur until May, 1865. Thus for four years and a month
the war endured. The Crimean war--one of the longest of nineteenth
century conflicts--endured for less than half that length of time and
the actual fighting of it lasted less than one fourth as long. The
duration of the Confederate war was seven times as great as that of
the stupendous Franco-Prussian conflict of 1870, which overthrew the
second Napoleonic empire, consolidated Germany and made the republic an
enduring fact in France. It was twenty-four times as long as that of
the French-Austrian war, which set Italy free, or as the War of 1866
between Austria and Prussia which laid the foundations of the present
German empire.

Measured by its enduring consequences the superior magnitude of our
war in its influence upon national and human destinies is still more
conspicuous.

It made an end of human slavery in the last civilized country on earth
in which slavery was permitted.

It freed the nation from a reproach that sorely afflicted its citizens.

It ended a political conflict which had threatened the very foundations
of the Republic from the hour of its institution.

It freed the Southern States of the Union from an incubus that their
statesmen and their best citizens had for generations desired to be rid
of, an incubus that had restricted their development and retarded their
growth in wealth and population as no other evil influence had ever
done in any part of our country.

Still more important so far as human history is concerned, this war of
ours settled at once and forever, the vexed and vexatious questions of
constitutional interpretation that had beset the Republic from the hour
of its formation.

It revised the constitution upon new lines and reconstructed the
Republic in ways that promise permanence.

As an exhibition of national military capacity and a revelation of our
prodigious possibilities of armed resistance, it taught the world the
advisability and indeed the absolute necessity of letting the United
States alone, as the one unassailable and defensively irresistible
nation on earth.

Finally it gave to the American people a realizing sense of their
own limitless power, which has both strengthened and sobered the
popular mind, revealing to it the nation's limitless ability to work
iniquity, and awakening it to the Republic's nobler capacity--to work
righteousness instead.

The conflict so far exalted and emphasized the power of the Republic as
to inspire us with a new generosity of forbearance in our dealings with
all other nations. It made it easy for us to follow General Grant's
rule of right to "deal with other nations as enlightened law requires
individuals to deal with each other."

Incidentally this war exhausted and impoverished the South as no other
war ever exhausted and impoverished any fruitful land. It utterly
destroyed the labor system of those states. It put out the light of
their prosperity for a time and left their people blindly groping
for sustenance. It destroyed a social fabric of exquisite poise and
picturesqueness which had endured from the beginning of American
colonization. It set society upon its head in the South and replaced
historic order with inexpressible chaos. For a time it substituted
for a traditional government by the best, an actual and very lawless
government by the worst elements of society, exalting ignorance above
culture, vice over virtue, and setting a horde of half-savage and
suddenly emancipated slaves to direct the destinies of a region to
which the country had always reverently looked for exalted patriotism
and the wisest statesmanship--the region which had produced Washington
and Jefferson and Madison and Monroe; the region that had given to the
Republic that greatest and wisest of the jurists of the modern world,
John Marshall; the birthplace of Patrick Henry, and George Wythe and
George Mason and Henry Clay.

Anarchy and chaos and an era of unspeakable disorder succeeded the war
as its inevitable consequence and when at last a new order was wrought
out of these disturbed conditions, all that was characteristic of the
old South had completely passed away. A new era had dawned, coming as a
posthumous birth of the conflict of arms.

A revolution had been wrought in the social, industrial and economic
conditions of a fair land. It brought with it a new material prosperity
greater than any that had ever been dreamed of in that region before.
It led to the development of resources that had lain dormant for
generations. In agriculture alone, the South produces now many times
the wealth each year that had been dug out of her fields under the old
system. The very greatest cotton crop that was ever grown before the
war amounted to 4,669,770 bales; since 1877 no crop so small has been
grown in any year, while in recent years the crops have reached the
stupendous total of more than 12,000,000 bales in each year.

Thus the old staple industry has doubled and trebled its productiveness
under the influence of the new industrial conditions created by the war
and by the social and economic revolution which the war wrought.

But this is a small part of the matter. Greatly as the yield of cotton
has been multiplied under the new conditions, cotton has ceased to be
king even in the land over which it once exercised undisputed sway.
Other and humbler agricultural products--never thought of in the old
planting days as money crops--have come, in their value to rival cotton
itself as a source of enrichment to Southern agriculture.

More important still, the new conditions that were created in the
South as a result of the war have led to the development there of
resources of inestimable value which were wholly neglected under the
old system. The little, local, loitering railroad lines of the older
time have been combined and extended and upbuilt into great arteries
of travel and traffic. Prairies that were scratched over for the sake
of meager cotton crops of half a bale to the acre have been delved
under for coal and iron. Industrial cities of importance have arisen
where cabins remotely stood. Blast furnaces have replaced the breezes
that once alone disturbed the broom-straw grass. Iron foundries, steel
mills, machine shops, coke ovens, rolling mills and the like employ men
by tens of thousands where before only a few hundreds compelled the
reluctant soil to yield them a precarious living. The still unsubdued
pine lands are dotted all over with cotton mills which give work and
wages to a multitude and the magnitude of their dividends strongly
tempts capital to a like investment elsewhere in the country that was
once abundantly content to produce a raw material and to buy back the
finished products of it from factories hundreds or thousands of miles
away.

The harbors of the South, once mere ports of call or refuge for a
shipping that belonged elsewhere, have become the seats of great
shipbuilding and ship-owning enterprises the productiveness of which is
loosely reckoned by imperfectly counted millions.

Still again, under the new conditions resulting from the war, great
industries have sprung up in the South which find both their profit
and their reason for being in the utilization of things that were sheer
waste under the old system. The manufacture of cotton seed oil and its
rich by-products is the best illustrative example of this. It employs
thousands of well paid workmen and millions of well remunerated capital
in converting into very valuable products the cotton seed that was once
utilized only as a fertilizer for half-exhausted soils.

In brief, the political and social revolution wrought by the war
is matched and over-matched by the stupendous economic revolution
produced, a revolution whose rewards to industry, to capital and to
enterprise are such as the wildest visionary would have laughed at as
a futile dream when the South lay stripped and stricken and staggering
under its burden of perplexities at the end of a struggle which had
taxed its material resources to the point of exhaustion and which had
well-nigh exterminated its vigorous young manhood.

It is to tell the story of a war thus stupendous in its causes, its
events and its consequences that this book is written. There is nowhere
in history a story more dramatic, more heroic or more intimately
inspired by those emotions that control human conduct and work out the
events of human life. The endeavor in these volumes will be to relate
that story with absolute loyalty to truth.

The writer of these pages is persuaded that the time has fully come
when this may be acceptably done; that the time has passed away
when any American of well ordered mind desires the perversion or
the suppression of truth with respect to our war history. There is
certainly nothing in that history of which any part of the American
people need be ashamed.

The great actors in the drama have all passed away. The passions of the
war are completely gone. Even in politics, war prejudices no longer
play a part worth considering. The time seems fully come when one may
write truth with regard to the war with the certainty of a waiting
welcome for his words. The time has come which General Grant foresaw
in 1865, when he predicted that the superb strategy and unconquerable
endurance of Lee and the brilliant military play of Sherman, the
splendid prowess of Stonewall Jackson and the picturesque achievements
of Phil Sheridan, the extraordinary dash and enterprise of J. E.
B. Stuart on the one side and of Custer on the other, would all be
reckoned a common possession in the storehouse of American memory, a
subject of pride and satisfaction wherever there might be an American
to glory in the deeds of his countrymen.

The time has come when the prowess of the American soldier, equally
on the one side and upon the other, his measureless courage, his
exhaustless endurance, his all-defiant devotion to duty, his
extraordinary steadiness under a fire such as few soldiers on earth
have ever been called upon to face, his patience under long marchings,
starvation and every circumstance of suffering, are subjects of justly
indiscriminate admiration on both sides of a geographical line long
since obliterated.

The story of Pickett's charge at Gettysburg may now be told to Northern
ears as surely sympathetic with the heroism shown in that world-famous
action as are any ears at the South. The heroic tale of the Federal
assaults upon Marye's Heights at Fredericksburg where brave men,
knowing the futility of their endeavors, obeyed orders and went to
their deaths by thousands because it was their duty to do so may now be
told to listening Southern ears with as absolute certainty of applause
as if the story were related only to veterans of the Army of the
Potomac.

"East is East, and West is West" writes Kipling in one of his finest
ballads in celebration of generous personal courage. Paraphrasing, we
may say: "North is North and South is South," but courage, heroism,
devotion and a generous chivalry belong to no time and no country
exclusively. They are the common possessions of all worthy manhood.
Like the gold beneath the guinea's stamp they pass current wherever
coined because their value is inherent.




CHAPTER I

A PUBLIC, NOT A CIVIL, WAR


The war of 1861-65 was in fact a revolution. Had the South succeeded in
the purposes with which that war was undertaken it would have divided
the American Republic into two separate and independent confederations
of states, the Union and the Southern Confederacy. The North having
succeeded, no such division was accomplished, but none the less was a
revolution wrought as has been suggested in the introductory chapter of
this work.

Familiarly, and by way of convenience, we are accustomed to call this
"The Civil war," in contra-distinction from those other wars in which
the American power has been arrayed against that of foreign nations.
But the term "Civil war," as thus applied, is neither accurate nor
justly descriptive. In all that is essential to definition this was a
public and not a civil war and it is necessary to a just understanding
of the struggle and its outcome to bear this fact in mind. Otherwise
the entire attitude and conduct of the Federal government toward its
antagonist must be inexplicable, inconsistent and wanting in dignity.

The Southern States asserted and undertook to maintain by a resolute
appeal to arms, their right to an independent place among the nations
of the earth. In the end they failed in that endeavor. But while the
conflict lasted they so far maintained their contention as to win from
their adversary a sufficient recognition of their attitude to serve all
the purposes of public rather than civil war.

They instituted and maintained a government, with a legislature, an
executive, a judiciary, a department of state, an army, a navy, a
treasury, and all the rest of the things that independent nations set
up as the official equipment of their national housekeeping.

Not only did foreign powers recognize their right to make war, not as
rebels but as legitimate belligerents entitled to all the consideration
that the laws of civilized war guarantee to nations, but the United
States government itself made similar recognition of the South's status
as a power possessed of the right to make war.

At the outset there was quibbling of course, and a deal of playing for
position. But in view of the obvious facts all this quickly gave way
to a perfectly frank recognition on both sides of the truth that there
was legitimate public war between the North in the name of the Union
and the South organized as the Southern Confederacy; that the struggle
involved the question of the independence of the South on the one hand
and the indissolubility of the Federal Union on the other; that the
conflict was the result of an entirely legitimate appeal to arms for
the decision of questions which no other arbitrament could decide;
and that the contest must be fought out not as a struggle between
constituted authority on the one hand and insurrection on the other but
as a controversy between two powers, each of which was legitimately
entitled to assert its contentions and to maintain its attitude by
every means known to civilized war.

All this was reflected, while the war lasted, in the treatment of men
captured on either side as prisoners of war; in negotiations for the
exchange of prisoners with full recognition of military rank on either
side; in the issue, the observance and the enforcement of paroles; in
safe conducts frequently granted and always honorably respected; in
agreements for the immunity from arrest of medical officers and other
non-combatants; in the humane and civilized arrangements made between
opposing generals for the equal care of the wounded of either army by
the surgeons of both, and in a score or a hundred other ways.

And when the war was over both sides fully recognized and emphasized
its character as a legitimate public war and not in any respect as an
insurrection. When the broken fragments of the organized armies of the
South surrendered, there was an end of the controversy. The Southern
people made no effort to prolong the struggle in irregular ways, as
they easily might have done. They set their faces against all attempts
to inaugurate a guerilla warfare, a thing which would have been easy to
them. Under the advice of General Lee and their other great leaders the
soldiers of the Confederacy accepted the surrender of the Confederate
armies as a sovereign act that made an end not only of the war but of
their right to make war. By their immediate return to ways of peace
and by their sincere acceptance of the terms offered in Mr. Lincoln's
promptly issued amnesty proclamation they marked and emphasized their
view that they had been engaged, not in a disorderly insurrection, but
in a legitimate, public war, the military end of which marked the end
of their right to carry on hostilities of any kind or character.

Equally on the other side, the public character of the war was
recognized by every act of the government. There was not even one
prosecution for treason. Congress imposed upon the Southern States
definite legislative duties as a condition precedent to the readmission
of those states to the Union, thus emphatically recognizing the fact
that during the progress of the war they had actually been out of
the Union, and could be readmitted to it only upon terms prescribed
by a congress representing those states which had remained in it. In
these and a hundred other ways--and especially by means of that long
military occupation of the South which ended only under the Hayes
administration--the national government recognized the fact that there
had been a legitimate public war between the two sections and not
merely an insurrection with the military operations necessary to its
suppression.

A failure to recognize these things would have been absurd and
ridiculous in an extreme degree. It would have been to ignore the most
obvious facts in modern history and to substitute a lot of lawyers'
quibbling prevarications for the modern world's greatest wonder story
of war. It would have been to regard a dozen or twenty of the greatest
battles ever fought on earth as the conflicts of a sheriff's posse
with turbulent gangs of rioters. It would have been to treat as
merely disorderly outbreaks and operations for their suppression, the
great military campaigns which have passed into history as superbly
illustrative, on the one side and upon the other, of all that is most
brilliant in strategy and all that is most heroic in endeavor and in
endurance. It would have been to discredit the national defense by
belittling the occasion for it. It would have been to rub off the
tablets of human memory equally the achievements of Grant and Meade
and Sherman and Thomas and Farragut and the rest, and the record of
what Lee and Jackson and Beauregard and the two Johnstons and Stuart
and Early and Longstreet had done. It would have been to rob the
nation of the credit it had won in the most strenuous conflict in
which it had ever been engaged and of the glory of the genius and the
heroism manifested by Americans upon either side. It would have been a
perversion of history, a degradation of great deeds, a reckless wasting
of the Nation's accumulated store of cherished memories of heroism.

We must bear these truths in mind if we are rightly to understand
the great struggle which for convenience and quite incorrectly we
call the Civil war. We must remember that it was a struggle of
giants; that it was a conflict between two powers, each of which was
possessed of a tremendous fighting capacity; that it called forth
the most brilliant strategy of modern times; that it was inspired
on both sides by a heroism worthy of celebration in song by the
most gifted of ballad-makers; that it involved the very vitals of
republican self-government among men; that it wrought a revolution
more stupendous, more far-reaching and more lasting in its effects
than any other in recorded history; that it overthrew old institutions
and created new ones in their stead; that it reversed the history of a
hundred years; that it wrote anew the fundamental law of the greatest
nation of all time; that it created a new epoch and made a new national
power the dominant force and influence in the ordering of human affairs.

Only by such appreciation of the nature, the magnitude and the
significance of our war, shall we justly estimate its place in the
record of human affairs or properly understand the meaning it is
destined to carry with it into history.

It is with an abiding conviction that the story of this war is the most
precious memory of all the American people, the record of their highest
achievements, the supreme demonstration of their right to a foremost
place among the peoples of the earth that this telling of that story is
undertaken.




CHAPTER II

THE GROWTH OF THE NATIONAL IDEA


The causes of the war of 1861-65 were deeply imbedded in the history of
the country, in the peculiar manner of its development, in the complex
interests of men, and in those primary instincts of human nature which
account for everything but which are themselves often unaccountable.

It is difficult, indeed it is impossible to trace and unravel to the
full the influences which in 1861 brought the North and South into
armed conflict and created a war of stupendous proportions between men
who had for generations rejoiced in a common heritage of liberty; men
who had cherished alike the memory of Bunker Hill and Yorktown; men
who had worshiped the same household gods and honored the same heroes
as their national demigods; men to whom the history of the Republic
was, to all alike on both sides, the story of their fathers' and
grandfathers' heroic deeds.

Yet if the historical event of 1861 is to be at all adequately
understood or interpreted, the historian must in some degree at least
discover the conditions, near and remote, that gave occasion for the
strange catastrophe.

There is a short and easy method of dealing with the matter as there
always is a short and easy method of solving historical puzzles by
referring them to some complex cause and treating that cause as a
matter of the utmost simplicity. It is easy to say that the war of
1861-65 grew out of slavery; that slavery existed and was defended at
the South while it was antagonized at the North, and that the conflict
arose out of that. But no reader of intelligence is satisfied with such
a reference as a substitute for explanation. Every such reader knows
not only that the great and overwhelming majority of Northern people
in 1861 would have angrily rejected a proposal that the nation should
wage a war for the extermination of slavery in the states in which it
legally existed. Every reader who is in the least instructed in the
history of that time knows that Mr. Lincoln himself was at the utmost
pains to avoid even the appearance of such a purpose and that during
nearly half the period of the war's duration he resolutely refused
to commit the government to that cause by issuing a proclamation of
emancipation, even as a measure helpful to the national arms.

Instead of this short and easy catechism of causes which has satisfied
so many, especially those foreigners who have more or less ignorantly
written as historians or critics of our war, it is necessary to go back
to the early history of the country, to study there the conditions
that laid the foundations of discord, to find in the fundamental
characteristics of human nature and in the varying self-interests of
men the explanation of events that are otherwise inexplicable.

The American colonies were separately founded. Their settlers were
persons of very diverse mind and often of hostile interest but they
were all inspired by an abiding sense of the main chance. The minutely
studious historians who have written in our later time have differed
in many things but they are all agreed that the early settlers upon
these shores, whether in Virginia first or in New York a little later
or in New England still later, were not heroes of romance blown
hither by adverse winds of fate or by the buffeting of the gods, but
plain, ordinary and very commonplace men, ignorant for the most part,
narrow-mindedly selfish, and altogether intent upon the bettering
of their own fortunes as the chief end of human life. The higher
inspirations which we are accustomed to attribute to them in our
American Aeneid did not exist. Those things were born later of admiring
imagination as higher aspirations usually are in the discussion of
national beginnings.

The colonies were far more remote from each other than we can easily
conceive. From Boston to Williamsburg in the seventeenth century
was a journey more difficult, more toilsome and more dangerous than
a circling of the globe is in our time. And even in the eighteenth
century Charleston in South Carolina was farther removed from
Charlestown in Massachusetts than either is to-day from Yokahama or
Hong Kong.

This element of remoteness cannot be too much insisted upon as a cause
of estrangement between the widely separated colonies. The means of
communication between the several settlements of English-speaking
people were few and meager and painfully uncertain. There were no
railroads, no steamships, no telegraphs, and in effect no mails.
For not until Franklin near the revolutionary epoch laid the rude
foundations of our postal system, was there any tolerably trustworthy
post in this land. We find in old letters Abigail Adams in Boston
apologizing to her statesman husband in Philadelphia for having allowed
three weeks to elapse without a letter and offering as a sufficient
excuse the fact that during those weeks she had "found no opportunity"
to send a letter, no "trustworthy hand going from these parts to
yours." And she and other correspondents of that time whose letters
have been preserved as precious historical material, refer frequently
to the public post as a means of communication to which no rational
person would think of entrusting letters of any consequence.

In the same way Eliza Lucas, afterwards Eliza Pinckney and the mother
of distinguished revolutionary personages, excuses her neglect
to send letters from James island to her intimates on the Cooper
river--twenty-five miles away--on the plea that she had no trustworthy
opportunity and that the post was not to be thought of.

In still further illustration is the fact recorded by Franklin in
his autobiography, that when his rival in the business of newspaper
publishing had control of the posts, he seriously embarrassed Franklin
by refusing to deliver his newspaper to its subscribers. And it was a
source of pride to Franklin that when he, himself, became Postmaster
General he generously refused to retaliate upon his rival by denying
him in his turn the privileges of the mails.

In these conditions it is not difficult to understand that even as the
revolutionary times approached, the interchange of thought, opinion
and sentiment among the people of the several colonies was infrequent
and very meager and that during the previous, formative century it had
scarcely at all existed.

It is true that the immigrants who founded the several colonies were
mainly Englishmen. But during a century and a half of remotely separate
development, they had had ample time for estrangement of mind and for
the breeding of very radical differences of interest, aspirations and
opinions. The really astonishing thing about their history is that
after a hundred and fifty years or more of this diversely conditioned
development there was left enough community of thought and interest
among the colonists to make possible their alliance for revolutionary
purposes.

That alliance was of the loosest possible character, marked in every
detail of its terms by a jealousy almost phenomenal. The first
agreement of the colonies to act together for the common defense was as
loose as the hurrah of a mob bound together only by a temporary purpose
in common. It was not until the Revolutionary war was well advanced
that even the articles of confederation were agreed upon, and they were
about the flimsiest, most inadequate and most inefficient bond of union
that ever served to ally states for a common purpose. Those articles of
confederation set out with a formal and emphatic reservation to each
state of its absolute, individual sovereignty and independence--that
being at the time the one thing which each of the revolted states
cherished with the most sleepless jealousy. They left to each of the
states the unrestricted right to do as it pleased in all matters of
sovereign concern.

The avowed purpose of the confederation was to create a national
government but the articles of confederation distinctly denied to
the central power every right and function necessary to governmental
activity and independence. The so-called general government could not
levy any tax, enforce any impost, or in any other way provide for the
raising of money, the payment of national debts, the organization of
armies, the enforcement of treaties or even the uniform validity of
statutory enactments.

Even in the act of creating a central power for the sake of the
common safety, the several states were so jealous of their separate
independence that they resolutely refused to give to their general
government any power whatever to control the individual states or the
people thereof, even to the meager extent of enforcing the national
agreements with other powers.

The Congress--there being no executive possessed of any power--was
authorized to call upon the several states for contributions of men
and money for the common defense. But it was a case parallel with Owen
Glendower's ability to "call spirits from the vasty deep." The question
remained "will they come?" And that question each state decided for
itself.

If we would at all understand the history of our country we must bear
in mind this intense, this resolute, this utterly uncompromising
insistence of the several states at the beginning upon their separate
sovereignty.

It was in this spirit that independence was achieved and the
independence thus won was not the independence of a federated republic,
but that of thirteen individual and widely separated states, no one of
which owed any sort of allegiance to any other or to all the others
combined; no one of which was ready upon any consideration to yield one
jot or tittle of its independent sovereignty to the will of any other
or of all the others.

The states, indeed, were as jealous of trespass by each other as of
trespass by Great Britain herself.

We are accustomed to think of them as closely united commonwealths,
engaged in a long and painful struggle for the independence of the
American Federal Republic. They were nothing of the kind. They were
separate and diversely interested states each fighting for its own
emancipation from a foreign yoke. They were allied in a common cause,
but their alliance had no bond more obligatory upon themselves than
is that which unites a mass meeting whose constituent members are
possessed temporarily of a common purpose.

When the states had achieved their independence, they undertook to live
together in the loosely formed union thus provided. They quickly found
it impossible to do so. Not only was their central government powerless
to fulfil its obligations to other countries, or to pay its debts at
home, or to enforce its authority, or to levy and collect taxes, or to
provide securely and properly for the maintenance of an army, a navy,
a postal service or anything else of a national character or to do with
certainty and authority any other of the things which a nation that
expects respect may and must do, but it could not in any effective way
regulate trade either with foreign countries or between the states.
Each state had the reserved right to interfere with the transit of
goods across its borders in ways that threatened presently to render
trade among the states impossible.

It was in view of these distressing conditions that the statesmen of
Virginia appealed to those of the other states for a conference looking
to the devising of a better way, "a more perfect Union." The conference
thus called at Annapolis was attended by representatives from only
five of the states. But it led to the calling of that Philadelphia
Convention which, under Washington's presidency, and with the united
wisdom of the most sagacious statesman in all the commonwealths, framed
the Federal Constitution.

The task was one of extraordinary difficulty. The old jealousies of the
states remained in scarcely abated force. Each feared to surrender any
part of its sovereignty. Each dreaded the possible interference of the
others with its domestic concerns. Each feared and dreaded a national
power that might some day control a state's actions and coerce it into
an obedience derogatory to its sovereignty. The less populous states
feared the possible dominance of the more populous, and all of them
alike feared the possibly oppressive power of a national executive.

After months of such labor as statesmen have rarely given to the
framing of a fundamental law, all these differences were adjusted
and in a considerable degree, though not wholly, the individual
apprehensions of the several states were allayed.

The equal representation of states as such, without reference to
the numbers of their population, was provided for in the peculiar
constitution of the Senate, in the organization of the electoral
college which chooses the president and still again in the provision
of the Constitution that in case of no election to the presidency the
choice shall be left to the popular house of Congress, but with the
express condition that each state's representatives in that body,
however numerous or however few, shall have one and only one vote.

Again the Constitution reflected the jealousy of the several states
for their sovereignty by providing specifically that all powers not
delegated by the states to the general government by the terms of that
instrument should be reserved to the states or to the people thereof.

Notwithstanding all these precautionary measures and notwithstanding
all the reservations made, two of the states withheld their assent to
the Constitution for a year or two after it was accepted by the rest,
and in other states the vote by which it was ratified showed a very
narrow margin in its favor. Even in Virginia, the state which had
originally suggested the union under the Constitution, whose Washington
had presided over the convention that framed it, whose Jefferson and
Madison and other statesmen had strenuously advocated it, the influence
of the most potential statesmen of that period was barely sufficient
to secure an affirmative vote by a slender majority in favor of the
adoption of that Constitution which made the United States a nation and
gave to their government a recognized place among world powers.

In brief the people of the original thirteen states very reluctantly
surrendered a narrowly restricted part of the functions of sovereignty
to the Federal Government. They very jealously reserved to themselves
as individual states all the other functions of sovereignty and
independence. And even with such restrictions and such reservations
they gravely hesitated before making a grant of power which threatened
the possible use of the Federal Authority in control of a state's
action or in restraint of a state's sovereign independence.

This was the spirit in which the National Government was formed. It was
intended to be a government for external and communal purposes only. By
every provision which the ingenuity of statesmanship could devise the
General Government was restrained from trespassing upon the sovereign
right of each state to regulate in its own way and by its own devices
all matters not distinctly delegated to the General Government by the
express terms of the Constitution.

For half a century after the adoption of the Constitution, this view
everywhere prevailed and was everywhere recognized as authoritative.
When, during the War of 1812-15, New England found that the course
of the General Government antagonized the local interests of that
region, the states in that quarter of the country opposed the
national policy even to the extent of threatening a withdrawal from
the Union--secession in other words, and nullification. It was Daniel
Webster--afterwards the apostle of "Liberty and Union, now and forever,
one and inseparable"--who drew and championed the Rockingham Memorial
in 1812, in which his New England constituency formally protested
against the war then existing with England and by unmistakable
implication threatened secession and a separate peace with England
on the part of the maritime states in the northeastern part of the
country. And immediately afterwards Webster was elected to Congress
where, with the approval of that part of the country, he opposed all
measures designed to encourage enlistments at a time when the country
was engaged in foreign war. He even went so far as to vote against the
appropriations for the national military defense against the country's
ancient foe, at that time engaged in an effort to undo and reverse the
results of the Revolutionary war itself.

Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, writing of this incident, expresses the
opinion that it was an extreme stretch of the liberty of legislative
opposition to the administration in a time of war and public danger and
that it carried the right of opposition to the utmost limit to which it
could go without treason.

Yet at the time nothing very serious was thought of the matter for the
reason that at that time the individual state and not the National
Government was regarded as the primary and ultimate object of men's
allegiance.

The states felt themselves to be still only conditionally and
tentatively members of the Union. They were still intensely jealous of
their individual sovereignty, and they were still indisposed to make
serious sacrifice of their own interests in behalf of the common weal
of a union which they regarded doubtfully as an experiment. They still
felt themselves entitled to reject the experiment and withdraw from the
Union if at any time they should see fit to do so.

It would be easy to multiply historical illustrations of this attitude
of mind, extending, though with diminishing frequency and force, to
that time just before the outbreak of the Confederate war when N. P.
Banks's cry of "Let the Union slide" was accepted as the slogan of the
anti-slavery party. But the multiplication of such illustrations is
unnecessary. Every instructed mind is aware of the fact that at the
first the Union was regarded as a doubtful experiment into which the
states had entered with misgiving and from which each state felt itself
at liberty to withdraw whenever it should find the yoke of the Union a
galling one.

Writing of Webster's replies to Hayne, Senator Lodge frankly admits
that the historical argument was all against Webster; that there is no
room for doubt that at the first the Union was held to be an experiment
and withdrawal from it was everywhere regarded as a reserved right of
the states.

And even the right of a state while remaining in the Union to nullify a
national statute obnoxious to its prosperity or to its moral sense was
as directly asserted in the personal liberty bills with which, just
before the war, many states sought to render the National Fugitive
Slave Law inoperative, as it had been asserted by South Carolina in
that state's attempt a generation earlier to annul and resist a law
imposing tariff restrictions upon trade.

But there are some other historical facts that must be borne in mind if
we would justly understand the war catastrophe of 1861.

It must be remembered that before the beginning of that year twenty
new states had been created out of territories that at the time
of the Union's formation were wildernesses. These new states had
none of that jealousy of their sovereignty which gave pause to the
original thirteen. They had entered the Union not reluctantly, as
states hesitatingly surrendering a previously cherished independence,
but eagerly as communities upon which the dignity of statehood and
all the sovereignty that statehood implies had been conferred by
gracious gift of the Union. Those communities had been suppliants for
the favor of admission to the Union and not, as the original states
were, the creators of the Union, surrendering to it with more or less
reluctance some share of an absolute sovereignty previously enjoyed by
themselves. These new states were not benefactors of the Union but its
beneficiaries. They had surrendered no rights of self-government to it,
but on the contrary had received from it as a gracious gift all the
rights and dignities of states, where before they had had no rights and
dignities whatsoever.

These new states had grown populous and prosperous under that Union to
which they had surrendered nothing of independence and from which they
had received all they had of statehood and sovereignty. Very naturally,
then, their attitude toward the Union was quite different from that of
the older states. That Union which the older states had always regarded
as their creature, owing its very existence to their grace, the new
states looked upon as their creator to whom they owed all that they
enjoyed of liberty-giving autonomy.

In the newer states particularly, but in the older states also,
there had grown up a new conception of the dignity and permanence
of the National Union. That which had been originally regarded as a
doubtful venture had little by little come to be looked upon as a
thing established and glorious. The national idea had taken a new and
deeper hold upon men's minds and affections. Vast material and moral
interests had grown into sturdy self-consciousness under its beneficent
rule. That Union which had been entered upon with so much doubt and
hesitation and with so many precautionary stipulations had become
one of the great nations of the earth, strong at home and everywhere
respected abroad. It had a history in war and peace which was a
precious possession of all the people alike.

Proud, loving memories clustered about the story of its career. The
victories of New Orleans, and Buena Vista, and Chapultepec, the sea
conquests of Porter and Perry and the rest, had been added to the
stories of Lexington, Concord, Bunker Hill, Trenton, Camden and
Yorktown, as fireside tales with which the grandfathers made the
eyes of a younger generation of Americans glisten with patriotism.
And achievements of peace equally notable--stories of what Morse,
Henry, Fulton, Peter Cooper, Daniel Boone, Bowie, Kit Carson,
Fremont, Sam Houston, General Gaines and a multitude of others had
accomplished--were equally stimulating to the pride and patriotism of
the youth of the thirty-three states.

And there were heroic tales told of Indian wars in which Andrew Jackson
and William Henry Harrison, Sam Dale, the Mississippi Yagers, Col. Dick
Johnson, and other veritable heroes of romantic daring had figured. All
these and scores and hundreds of other tales of patriotic heroism were
then familiars of the fireside as illustrations of American pluck and
American achievement.

There was the country's expansion, too, to glory in. The Louisiana
purchase had added an empire of vast extent and of inestimable
productive possibilities to the national domain, the development of
which, even before 1861, was a romantic wonder story of history. The
Mexican war had brought with it another accession of incalculably rich
territory such as no nation in all history except our own had ever
added at a single stroke to its domain.

Where the Spanish gold-seekers had galloped for centuries in search of
the precious metal, finding it not, an American had quickly discovered
a new Golconda, an Ophir, an Eldorado so rich in its productiveness as
for a time to threaten the stability of gold as an accepted measure of
values among men. Vast regions that had remained for generations the
haunt of savages and wild beasts, with only here and there a mission
station of adobe huts to offer hope of better things in some far
distant future time, became, within a brief while populous territories
ready to take their place in the Union as important American states.
Better still, a new and matchless fruitfulness had been discovered
in vast valleys and upon far-reaching mountain sides that had been
previously typical of hopeless sterility and desolation.

All these things had mightily stimulated the American imagination
and all of them had contributed incalculably to the strengthening of
the national spirit and to the upbuilding of a new and controlling
sentiment of loyalty to the Union under which all this actual greatness
had been achieved and all this potential greatness was confidently
promised.

In still other ways the sentiment of nationality had been strengthened.
The orators of the land had for generations mightily exalted the horn
of the Nation in eloquent speeches which all the schoolboys in all
the states grew enthusiastic in declaiming. All the literary men of
the land had celebrated the country's glories in prose and verse that
filled the school books and set juvenile patriotism aflame with ardor.

All this patriotic awakening had for its object of worship the glories
of the Nation, and not at all the narrower achievements of particular
states or sections. All of it referred itself to the Union as the
commonwealth. Neither literature, nor eloquence, nor familiar household
narrative concerned itself in the least with any of those jealousies
which had prompted the original states to hesitate to enter the Union.
None of them recognized even in the remotest way, those questions of
conflicting powers and dignities, those anticipations of encroachment
on the part of the central power, or those jealous guardings of the
rights of individual states which had played so large a part in the
settlement of the original problem of a Federal Union.

In brief, the people had outgrown and forgotten the doubts and fears
of the earlier formative time. In the main they knew nothing about
such things and cared nothing for them. They knew only that they were
citizens of the greatest, freest and strongest nation on earth, and
that its history was a heritage of glory to all of them alike.

Lawyers' quibblings, logic chopping, and all arguments drawn from
history meant nothing to the great majority of a people who had been
born and bred under the Union and had imbibed with their mothers' milk
a sentiment of undying loyalty, not to any state or any doctrine or any
theory, but to the Nation in whose history they regarded themselves as
entitled to feel personal and ancestral pride and affection.

Thus while the historical argument was clearly with those who
maintained the right of the states to assert their authority as
superior to that of the Union, that argument was addressed in large
part to ears that had been rendered deaf to it by the echoes of
the national glory. While the Union had indeed been at the first
a hesitating experiment, it had become by time and by national
achievement a nationality for the maintenance of which vast populations
were ready and willing and even eager to risk their lives.

If we would understand the war and the conditions in which it came
about, we must first clearly realize the change that had occurred in
popular sentiment, and especially the growth of that national feeling
which had slowly but surely replaced the old hesitation and jealousy
of the states. Only the circumstance that slavery existed and was
defended in one part of the Union and that it was antagonized in the
other part on grounds of policy, conviction, and morality, kept alive
the old sentiment of state sovereignty and made the war possible. That
sentiment of the dominant right of the states was strongly asserted
on both sides and insisted upon both in behalf of slavery and in
antagonism to it until war resulted. The history of that controversy
must be the subject of a separate chapter, in which its irritating
character as well as the difficulties that statesmanship encountered in
dealing with it, may be set forth without undue elaboration but with
sufficient detail to render the result easily enough understood.




CHAPTER III

THE "IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT"


There is no possibility of doubt that, but for the slavery controversy,
that growth of an intense national feeling which has been mentioned
would have rendered the war of 1861-65 impossible.

That intensely patriotic feeling of nationality was all pervasive,
except in so far as the slavery controversy impaired it as it did, both
North and South. If that one cause of disagreement had not existed,
if there had been no negro slaves in the United States, the sentiment
of union and nationality which had grown with the Nation's growth and
strengthened with its strength, would unquestionably have overborne
all the quibbles and all the logical refinements of the earlier time.
The decisions of the Supreme Court, especially those of John Marshall,
which in effect rewrote the Constitution and successfully claimed
for the courts the right to annul any and all acts of Congress that
were not in accordance with the Constitution, had created a new and
effective barrier against possible aggression by the Federal power
upon the autonomy of the states and had at the same time established
the Federal authority securely. When Marshall decided in Marbury vs.
Madison, that an act of Congress assuming to do by national authority
anything reserved to the states in the constitutional grant of power
to the General Government, is no law at all but an act null and void,
which the courts will on no account enforce, there was an end of all
danger of wanton Federal encroachment upon the reserved rights of the
states. And, as we have seen, that fear died out of men's minds, except
in so far as questions relating to slavery from time to time revived
it. But for those questions it need never again have arisen to vex the
Republic and set its people by the ears.

But slavery involved questions of prejudice, questions of passion,
questions of morality, questions of labor, questions of principle,
and questions of pride, of sentiment, of conscience, of religion, of
conviction. It stirred the passions of men, excited their prejudices,
and appealed to their interests as no other question of policy has done
in our modern times. Incidentally it revived, as no other issue could
have done, all the old jealousies between the Union and the several
states which the progress of the Republic had so strongly tended to
allay. It set the history of the formation of the Union against the
history of the Union itself as implacably antagonistic historical
arguments in behalf of conflicting contentions.

Let us see how all this came about.

When the colonies achieved their independence, slavery existed, in
greater or less degree, in all of them. The negro was then nowhere
regarded as a man, so far at least as the generalizations of the
Declaration of Independence and other formal settings forth of human
rights were concerned. There was a strong desire to be rid of slavery,
a deep seated conviction of the impolity of that institution, but,
except among the Quakers and a very few others, there seems to have
been no thought anywhere that the holding of negroes in bondage was a
violation of that fundamental doctrine of human rights upon which the
Republic had been established.

Indeed the desire to be rid of slavery seems at that time, and for a
long time afterwards, to have been stronger at the South, where the
institution was general, than at the North where it existed only in
a scant and inconsequent way. As early as 1760, the South Carolina
colony had sought to limit the extension of the system by passing an
act forbidding the further importation of slaves, but the British
Government had vetoed the measure. Twelve years later Virginia sought
to protect her people against the black danger of slavery by imposing a
prohibitory tariff duty upon imported slaves. Again the home government
in London forbade the act to have any force or effect.

When Thomas Jefferson, a Virginian, wrote the first draft of the
Declaration of Independence, one of the strongest counts in his
splendid indictment of the British King was the charge that in these
and other cases he had forbidden the people of the colonies to put any
legal check upon the growth of this stupendous evil.

But when the Declaration was adopted by Congress and signed as the
young Republic's explanation of its revolutionary action, rendered
in obedience to "a decent respect for the opinions of mankind," the
great Virginian's arraignment of the King for having thus fostered
slavery in colonies that desired to be rid of it, did not appear in
that supreme document of state. We have Jefferson's own testimony that
it had been stricken out in deference to the will of those New England
merchants and capitalists whose ships and money found astonishingly
profitable employment in the slave trade between the coast of Africa
and the southern part of our country.

Thus while the holding of slaves in the more northerly colonies had
proved to be unprofitable and had to a great extent ceased at the time
of the Revolution, the traffic in slaves from Africa to the southern
parts of this country was so profitable an industry that even the
Declaration of Independence must be emasculated of one of its most
virile features in deference to the greed of gain.

And this dominance of interest over principle continued for long years
afterward. When the great convention that framed the Constitution was
in session, it was at first proposed to put an end to the slave trade
from Africa in the year 1800. An amendment was offered, extending
the license of that infamous traffic to the year 1808, and this
eight years' extension was adopted by a vote which included in the
affirmative every New England state represented in the convention,
Virginia voting steadfastly against it.

Those votes for the extension of the slave trade were given undoubtedly
in behalf of the mercantile interest of the maritime states of the
northeast, and they reflected no moral conviction whatsoever. For there
was at that time no moral conviction of the wrongfulness of slavery
anywhere in the country. The thought that the negro was a man, endowed
by his Creator with an unalienable right to "life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness," had not yet been born in America.

And even after thirty odd years, and a dozen years after the
constitutional prohibition of the African slave trade had gone into
effect, that unlawful traffic in human beings was still so gainful an
occupation to merchants and shipmasters, that Mr. Justice Joseph Story,
himself a New Englander and a judge of the Supreme Court of the United
States, was bitterly denounced by the New England press and public as
a judge who deserved to be "hurled from the bench," because he had
instructed grand juries that it was their sworn duty to indict the
men who were still engaged in the nefarious business of transporting
slaves, under conditions of unspeakable cruelty, from Africa to these
shores. The offense of that great jurist lay in the fact that he
regarded the demands of the constitution and the law as more binding
upon his character and conscience than the demands of the New England
slave traders whose very profitable business his insistence upon the
rigid enforcement of the law threatened to embarrass and destroy.

As there are now no advocates of slavery in our free land; as all of
us, North and South alike, are agreed that the institution was a curse
the maledictions of which endure to the present day in vexatious "race
problems;" it is possible and proper now to record all facts respecting
it with impartiality and without controversial intent. It is of supreme
importance to any clear understanding of this matter to bear in mind
the fact that our modern conceptions of human rights did not exist in
the earlier times; that the recognition of the negro as "a man and
a brother" is the birth of comparatively recent thought; that the
traffic in black human beings, captured in Africa and brought hither
for sale as laborers, excited no impulse of antagonism, offended no
moral sentiment, and seemed to nobody in the earlier times a violation
of those fundamental doctrines of human right upon which this Republic
is based. All that has been a glorious after-thought, and it is solely
with an expository purpose and not at all as a _tu quoque_ that these
facts of history are here set forth.

Surely the time is fully ripe in which men of the North and men of the
South may sit together in an impartial study of the causes of a quarrel
that brought them into armed conflict more than a generation ago and
may calmly consider without offense the sins of their forefathers
on either side, making due allowance for the lack of modern light
and leading as a guide to those forefathers. We must do this in this
spirit, if we would be fair. Still more imperatively must we do it if
history is ever to be written.

The period of controversy is past. The time of reckoning has come.
The time has come when the advocate holding a brief for the one or
the other party to the controversy should give place to the historian
intent only upon the task of discovering and recording fact. The
circumstance that there was grievous wrong on both sides does not rob
either of the credit due for the right that it supported.

After the revolution the great statesmen of our land manifested a
determined eagerness to free the country from slavery. John Adams and
Alexander Hamilton were not more energetic in this cause than were
Jefferson and other Southerners. When Virginia ceded to the Federal
Government all her claims to the territory northwest of the Ohio river,
it was Thomas Jefferson, the Virginian slaveholder, who insisted upon
writing into the deed of cession a provision that slavery should never
be permitted in any part of that fair land which now constitutes the
states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin.

George Wythe, under whose tuition Henry Clay studied law, was by all
odds the greatest jurist that Virginia ever produced, with the single
exception of John Marshall. George Wythe was one of those whom Mr.
Carl Schurz has in our own times characterized as "the Revolutionary
abolitionists." They were the men of the South who regarded slavery
as an imposed and hereditary curse to be got rid of by any means that
did not threaten the social fabric with destruction and the country
itself with chaos and black night. George Wythe absolutely impoverished
himself--born to vast wealth as he was--in setting free the negroes
whom he had inherited as slaves and in providing them with the means of
establishing themselves in bread-winning ways. For, as he expressed it,
"I have no right to set these people free to starve."

He gave them their liberty and with it a piece of land for each, on
which with ordinary industry and thrift they could surely make a
living for themselves and their families. Then he set to work, a man
stripped of all his ancestral possessions and impoverished by his own
act of justice, to earn a living as a Virginian lawyer. So far from
having offended his fellow Virginians by his act of emancipation, he
had won their esteem and their reverence. He became their chancellor
and the most honored judge upon their bench.

Thousands of other Virginians of lesser note than George Wythe did
substantially the same thing, though less conspicuously. Under the law
after a time they could not set their slaves free without sending them
beyond the borders of the state. Many of them found this condition a
paralyzing one. They must pay off the hereditary debts of their estates
and they must buy in the West little but sufficient farms for their
inherited negro slaves to live upon if they would set those slaves
free. These things many of them did at cost of personal impoverishment,
while many others, like-minded, found conditions beyond their control.
If the whole story of that Virginian effort to be rid of slavery by
individual and grandly self-sacrificing effort could be told here or
elsewhere, the angels of justice and mercy would rejoice to read the
page on which the wonder tale was written. But the heroes who did these
deeds of self-sacrifice for principle were mainly obscure men of whose
names there remains no record. Only here and there a great name like
that of George Wythe appears. Among these is the name of John Randolph
of Roanoke,--most insistently cantankerous of Southerners--who left
a will freeing all his slaves on grounds of human right. And though
that will was defeated of its purpose by a legal technicality, it is
immeasurably valuable as a fact in history which reflects the sentiment
of that time among those who had inherited and who held slaves and even
among those who, like Randolph, are commonly regarded as the special
champions of slavery.

And this desire of Southern men to be rid of slavery did not cease
until the very end. Very many Southerners whose consciences dominated
their lives, deliberately and painstakingly educated their negroes
for freedom in the hope and assurance that sooner or later, by one
means or by another, freedom would come to them. There were planters
not a few who used their authority as the masters of slaves to compel
their negroes to cultivate little fields of their own and to put aside
the proceeds thereof, as a fund with which to meet the surely coming
freedom face to face, with no fear of starvation as a circumstance of
embarrassment.

Henry Clay studied law under Virginia's great chancellor, George Wythe.
From his distinguished Virginian teacher he learned the lesson that
slavery--forced upon an unwilling people in the Southern part of this
country by kingly and corporate greed, and still further forced upon
those regions by the greed of merchants and shipmasters, even after
the traffic that fed it had been prohibited by the Constitution and
by the law--was an evil and a curse, a wrong to the black man and a
demoralizing influence to the white. He saw clearly that it was the
task of all good men to exterminate that evil root and branch, by such
means as might be found available, without the destruction of society
as a necessary incident or consequence. In the young state of Kentucky
Henry Clay began his political career as an advocate of rational and
gradual emancipation, and to his dying day--involved as he was in all
the strenuous controversies to which the slavery issue gave rise in
national politics--he never lost his interest in this behalf or abated
his efforts to secure its accomplishment. A plea for the extermination
of slavery was the first plea he ever presented to the people whom he
asked to support him for public office. A plea for the extirpation of
slavery was well-nigh the last that he ever urged upon the people of
his state after all that was possible of honor had been conferred upon
him by their approving will.

So enduring was this sentiment at the South that John Letcher, the
Democratic war governor of Virginia, the man who set Lee to organize
the state's forces for the Confederate war, the man who created
the Army of Northern Virginia and made possible all its splendid
achievements, was in fact elected governor because of his abolitionist
sentiments.

Mr. Letcher was strongly imbued with that conviction which had
dominated the best minds of Virginia from colonial days, that slavery
was a curse to be got rid of and not at all an institution to be
defended upon its merits. He had publicly urged the necessity of
getting rid of it. He had explained to his fellow Virginians, in public
utterances, its demoralizing influence upon the young white men of
that commonwealth. Finally, so eager was he to rid his native state of
the incubus that he deliberately proposed the one thing most offensive
to the Virginian mind, namely, the division of the "Old Dominion" into
two states in order that the western half of it at least might be free
from slavery. When he stood as a candidate for governor in the last
election before the war, all these facts were used against him to the
utmost by the advocates of slavery and they undoubtedly deprived him
of many thousands of votes east of the Alleghenies. The first returns
indicated the election of his adversary, William L. Goggin, by an
overwhelming majority. But when the figures came in from the western
part of the state, where slavery scarcely at all survived, John Letcher
was elected. Thus the anti-slavery sentiment gave to the foremost state
of the Southern Confederacy its singularly earnest and efficient war
governor.

But side by side with this anti-slavery sentiment in the South, there
grew up a pro-slavery sentiment which was buttressed by every impulse
of gain that it is possible for the human mind to conceive.

Near the end of the eighteenth century, Eli Whitney made slavery
enormously profitable by his invention of the cotton-gin. Before that
time slavery had been of more than doubtful profit to the people of the
states that permitted it. It was not at all an economical labor system.
It required the master to give to the laborer, in lieu of wages, such
food, habitation, clothing, nursing in illness and care in infancy and
old age, as no laboring population in the world has ever before or
since received in return for its labor. It involved pension as well as
payment. It imposed upon the employer obligations such as no employer
in all the world, before or since, has been willing to assume.

But Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton-gin made the payment of such
wages possible and profitable. It made it possible for a plantation
owner to grow rich while feeding, housing, clothing and caring for his
negroes as no other employer has fed, housed, clothed and cared for his
working people since the foundations of the world were laid.

Eli Whitney's invention made illimitable cotton a substitute for costly
and narrowly limited linen and in a great degree for good. It made it
possible for every man in all the world to put a shirt on his back,
a pair of sheets on his bed, a case on his pillow, and to clothe his
wife in calico and his children in cottonade where before all these
luxuries were denied to him and his by inexorable laws of economics.
But incidentally that invention made slavery enormously profitable,
where before it had been doubtfully profitable. Eliza Lucas of South
Carolina, afterwards Eliza Pinckney, had sought to find profitable
employment for her slaves by cultivating indigo. Other enterprising
experimenters had explored other avenues of earning, but not one of
them had found a way of making profitable the ownership of slaves until
Eli Whitney devised a machine by the use of which any ignorant negro
could remove the seed from three thousand pounds of cotton in a single
day, where before one negro man or woman could remove the seed from
only one pound or at the most a few pounds. From that hour forward,
negro slavery became profitable in the South, and from that hour forth
it stood as a "vested interest" with its influence as such in politics.

Let us not misunderstand. The cultivation of cotton by free labor
has exceeded in its productiveness by more than two to one, that
cultivation under the slave system. As has already been set forth in
these pages, the greatest cotton crop ever grown before the war with
which we here have to deal amounted only to 4,669,770 bales, while
under free labor the annual production rose to an average of more than
11,000,000 bales in the closing years of the century which saw the
extinction of slavery.

Yet there is no doubt or possibility of doubt that Eli Whitney's
invention of the cotton-gin near the end of the eighteenth century made
negro slavery profitable as it had never been before in this country.
It enabled the planter to grow rich upon the proceeds of the labor of
negro slaves whose industry had before produced scarcely more than
enough to support themselves. It created a new era. It inaugurated a
new epoch. It instigated a new sentiment in favor of slavery, where
before the sentiment had been tending the other way.

In considering human affairs historically it is very necessary to
bear in mind that men ordinarily have no opinions. If by "opinions"
we mean well considered judgments, founded upon an orderly reasoning
from accepted premises, then opinions are the very rarest of human
possessions. If we are told that a particular person was born and
bred in Spain, we know without further inquiry what his religious
convictions are. If we learn that he is a Turk we perfectly know his
so-called opinions upon the subject of matrimony. We take for granted
the views of the Puritans' sons and daughters concerning religion. We
know, without asking, what the "opinions" of any American are with
respect to the Declaration of Independence. We know that, with the
exception of a very few men, all the people of the South were firmly
convinced that the cause of the South in the Confederate war was a
just one; that the National Government had no conceivable right to
coerce recalcitrant states; that secession was an absolute right of
the states, and all the rest of it. On the other hand we know that
the Northern boy who had declaimed Webster's reply to Hayne was fully
imbued with the conviction that "Liberty and Union" were "now and
forever, one and inseparable."

In other words, with here and there an exception, men's opinions are
determined by geography, tradition, circumstance, self-interest and the
like.

Thus when New England's chief interest was maritime and commercial,
Daniel Webster was the most radical of free-traders. He held up to
ridicule and contumely Henry Clay's protective "American system" and
showed conclusively that nothing in the world could be more utterly
un-American. But a few years later, when New England's interests were
centered in manufactures, Daniel Webster's opinions became those of
an extreme protectionist. In the same way he opposed a national bank
so long as New England disliked that institution and favored it the
moment New England desired its continuance. In like manner John C.
Calhoun began by clamoring for the tariff protection of Southern
industries and developed into the chief apostle of nullification as a
means of escaping protective tariffs. Similarly Clay began by making so
absolutely conclusive an argument against a national bank that Andrew
Jackson afterwards quoted it as the best possible plea he could offer
in support of his warfare upon that institution after Clay had become
its chief apostle.

Men ordinarily have no opinions except so far as self-interest,
geography, and circumstance determine them and in considering matters
of history it is of the utmost importance to recognize that truth.

In the last analysis, therefore, Southern opinion was determined in
behalf of slavery by the cotton-gin. And yet the greater number of
Southern men were not slaveholders and so had no personal interest
in the institution. Their opinions were merely a reflection of
the sentiment that surrounded them. That sentiment was born of
self-interest on the part of a small but dominant class and it drew to
itself the sentiment of that much more numerous class--the white man
who owned no negroes. Of the white men in the Confederate army, who
made so unmatched a fight for Southern independence, not one in five
had ever owned a slave or expected to own one.

And there was another influence at work all this while to create a
sentiment at the South in favor of slavery as an institution right
in itself, where before it had been almost uniformly regarded as an
entail of evil. The circumstances of the national life forced this
question into politics and made of it an incalculably exasperating
issue.

The Nation having acquired the vast Louisiana territory, invitingly
fruitful as it was, the question arose "What shall we do with it?"
Men from all quarters of the country wanted to go in and "possess the
land." Those of them who came from the South very naturally desired
to take their negro servants with them into the new territories, and
at first they did so without let or hindrance. Even the Indians of
Mississippi, Georgia, Tennessee, South Carolina, and Alabama, when
removed, practically by compulsion, to the Indian Territory west
of the Mississippi years later were freely permitted to take their
negro slaves with them, nobody gainsaying their right. In like manner
Southern men emigrating to Missouri took their slaves with them without
so much as a question of their right to do so. And when Missouri,
in 1819, became sufficiently populous to justify an application for
statehood, a majority of the settlers in that region desired that
African slavery should be permitted there.

In the meantime, the Northern states, now completely emancipated from
slavery within their own borders, had more and more learned to detest
the system. There had grown up in the North an intense moral sentiment
in antagonism to the further extension of slavery. There had grown up
also an intense economic opposition to the system. It was felt that the
very existence of slavery in any region tended to degrade free labor
and to make of the laborer an inferior person not entitled to respect,
a person not quite a slave but still not quite a freeman.

It was, nevertheless, not deemed reputable to advocate the abolition
of slavery. The term "Abolitionist" was then, and for a generation
afterwards continued to be, the most opprobrious epithet that one man
could apply to another.

Nevertheless when Missouri sought admission to the Union as a slave
state, the opposition was intense, determined, angry.

Then came Henry Clay with a compromise. Earnestly desiring the
extinction of the slave system, it was that statesman's fate to do
more than any other man of his era in behalf of the perpetuation and
extension of the institution which he regarded as a curse and an
incubus. There was one other thing for which he cared far more than
he did for the extinction of slavery. In common with Webster and most
others of the statesmen of that time he was more deeply concerned for
the preservation and perpetuation of the Union than for any other
matter that appealed to his mind. His attitude was identical with that
of Mr. Lincoln while the war was on, when he declared his sole purpose
to be the restoration of the Union and proclaimed his conviction that
the question of slavery and all other questions were in his mind
subordinate to that.

Clay saw grave danger to the Union in this Missouri controversy. In
order to avert that danger, and regardless of everything else, he
brought forward his compromise and succeeded in securing its enactment
into law.

Under that compromise Missouri was admitted to the Union as a slave
state; but it was stipulated that no other slave state should be carved
out of territory north of 36° 80´ north latitude, that being the
southern boundary line of Missouri.

In practical effect this compromise excluded slavery from all future
states to be created out of the vast region embraced in the Louisiana
Purchase, except the territory of Arkansas. Louisiana was already a
state. Missouri was permitted by the compromise itself to become a
state. The Indian Territory was forever set apart for a special purpose
and, it was then held, could never become a state. There was no other
acre of the Louisiana Purchase lying south of the line fixed by the
compromise as the extreme northern limit to which the institution might
extend. Texas, New Mexico, Utah, Arizona, California, Nevada, Colorado
and the rest were still Mexican possessions which the great Republic
had not then the remotest thought of acquiring. On the other hand
there were all the vast, fruitful regions now known as Iowa, Kansas,
Nebraska, Minnesota, the Dakotas and the states lying to the west of
them into which by this agreement slavery might never go, from which
it was supposedly as effectually excluded as it had been from Ohio,
Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin by that clause which Thomas
Jefferson--in his eagerness to make an end of the system--had written
into the deed of cession by which the Northwest Territory became a
national possession.

Clay fondly believed that this Missouri Compromise of his devising
had finally laid to rest the entire controversy with regard to
slavery. Thirty odd years later he was still laboring to induce his
own state, Kentucky, to adopt a system of gradual emancipation, but in
the meanwhile history had written itself in another way and in direct
antagonism to his views.

There had grown up at the North an intolerance of slavery which freely
expressed itself in denunciation of those who supported or countenanced
the institution. There had grown up at the South a sentiment in
advocacy of slavery such as did not exist in that region in the
earlier years of the Republic. Men whose fathers and grandfathers had
diligently sought means by which to free their native land of a curse,
had little by little come to regard that curse as a blessing. Men whose
forefathers had regarded slavery as an inherited misfortune, came to
regard the institution as right in itself and to defend it as the best,
most generous, and most humane labor system in the world. In support of
this contention they could point to the factory system of old England,
and New England and argue with some truth that nowhere in the world was
labor so generously rewarded as at the South.

Moreover, the antagonism to the system which had developed at the
North had its very natural reflex effect. The offensive terms in which
slave owners were habitually spoken of in Northern prints were well
calculated to impel Southern men to the angry and intemperate defense
of their system. Still more effective in breeding a "thick and thin"
pro-slavery sentiment at the South were the aggressive measures taken
at the North for the annoyance of those who held slaves.

The laws for the rendition of fugitive slaves--not at that time so
strict as they were afterwards made--were habitually set at naught.
There existed a fairly well organized system called "the underground
railroad" by which slaves were induced to run away and by means of
which their flight was facilitated. All this was dictated by a profound
conviction on the part of those who engaged in it that slavery was an
institution so utterly wrong that any means by which its hold could be
impaired were right in morals, no matter what the law might say.

All this was done in defiance of law, in violation of the statutes
and in flagrant disregard of that compact of reciprocity upon which
the Union was founded. We are not concerned in the twentieth century
to discuss the question of the right or wrong of men's conduct in
the first half of the nineteenth. But if we would understand the
irritations that bred the war between the North and the South, we must
recognize not only all the facts but equally all the refinements by
which they were judged in their time.

For a time at least the Missouri Compromise took the sting out of the
slavery issue as a cause of controversy between the North and the
South. By that compromise the South had given up all claim further to
extend its institutions into any part of the vast and immeasurably
rich territory included in the Louisiana Purchase, with the single
exception of Arkansas. All the region that now constitutes Iowa,
Kansas, Nebraska, Minnesota, the two Dakotas--and all the vast
territories west of those states,--were foreordained by that agreement
to be erected into free states. South of the dead line established by
the agreement there remained the territory of Arkansas and nothing
else. Arkansas was admitted to the Union as a slave state in 1836 and
in the next year the balance of power in the Senate and the electoral
college was restored by the admission of Michigan as a free state.
There remained within the limits of our national domain no other acre
of territory except in Florida, into which under the terms of the
Missouri Compromise the southern emigrant could take his slave property
with him, while to the northern emigrant there was opened a possession
rivaling the greatest empires of earth in area and in prospective
productiveness.

But for twenty-five years the compromise served in a great degree to
allay the asperities of the slavery controversy. The anti-slavery
sentiment at the North was for the time satisfied with the assurance
that with the exceptions of Louisiana, Missouri and Arkansas, all
the great domain embraced in the Louisiana Purchase was by that
compromise forever devoted to the system of free labor; that perhaps a
dozen prospective free states of inestimable wealth and incalculable
population were destined in the near future to be added to the Union,
while with the exceptions of Florida and Arkansas, no further slave
states could be created. The South in its turn was satisfied with the
recognition which the compromise gave to slave property as entitled to
equal protection in national law at least with other property.




CHAPTER IV

THE ANNEXATION OF TEXAS


If matters had remained as they were, there is little room for doubt
that the settlement reached in the Missouri Compromise would have
endured for another generation at the least. It is true that, once
raised, the issue between free labor and slavery was, as Mr. Seward
afterwards said, "an irrepressible conflict." It is morally certain
that sooner or later, in one way or in another, it was bound to lead
to a decisive struggle either of war or of diplomacy between the
North and the South. But we are dealing now with facts and not with
probabilities; with events and not with conjectures; and the facts and
events strongly suggest that if no new condition had intervened to
disturb the settlement made by the Missouri Compromise, that adjustment
of the vexed and vexing slavery question would have endured for at
least a generation longer than in fact it did.

The new circumstance that intervened was the annexation of Texas. Texas
was a vast territory, undefined as to its limits at that time, but
covering an area eight or ten times greater than that of the largest
state then in the Union. It included the present state of Texas, New
Mexico, and a large area besides. It had been a part of Mexico, peopled
chiefly by emigrants from the United States under whose inspiration it
had revolted and achieved its independence as a republic.

Its desire for annexation to the Union was quite natural and inevitable
and but for slavery that desire would have been reciprocated throughout
the United States. It was easily foreseen, however, that the annexation
of this vast territory, lying as it did south of the line that set the
limit to slavery, would open to that institution an opportunity of
expansion scarcely less than that opened to free labor by the Missouri
Compromise.

The policy of annexation was bitterly opposed on this ground and
additionally because of the practical certainty that annexation would
involve a war with Mexico.

Years before that time, Henry Clay had severely criticized the
administration for having failed to insist upon our right to Texas as
a part of the Louisiana Purchase, but now, in his anxiety to keep the
slavery question out of politics because of the danger it involved to
the Union, he was strongly opposed to the annexation policy.

When, in 1844, it was deemed certain that Clay and Van Buren would be
the rival candidates for president, those statesmen, being personal
friends, met at Clay's residence at Ashland, and together planned to
keep the Texan question out of the coming campaign. Their agreement was
that each should publish a letter--at about the same time--opposing the
annexation of Texas and the ratification of the treaty, which was then
pending, to accomplish that purpose.

The letters were published, but their effect was precisely the reverse
of that which was intended. The Whigs nominated Clay by acclamation,
but the Democrats of the South took offense at Van Buren's letter and
nominated in his stead James K. Polk, an uncompromising advocate of
annexation. Thus the painstaking effort that had been made by Clay and
Van Buren to eliminate this annexation question from the presidential
campaign had for its actual effect the making of that question the
paramount issue of the contest.

Thus the slavery question became again dominant in national politics
with a greater disturbing force than ever. For the agitation in
politics of a question concerning which men's consciences or
self-interests are strongly enlisted--and this question involved
both--must always and everywhere intensify feeling, arouse passion and
consolidate partisan activity.

The result in this case was to intensify the sentiment of hostility
to slavery at the North and to break down the sentiment in behalf of
emancipation which had previously been strong though decreasing at the
South. The agitation of those years continued to the end, and in its
course it slowly but surely changed the conditions of the problem. At
the North it made anti-slavery endeavor respectable, where before it
had been looked upon with frowning as an activity which threatened
that Union which was the chief object of American adoration. At the
South, by putting men on the defensive and filling them with a feeling
that they were menaced in their homes, it slowly but surely broke down
the old conviction that slavery was an evil to be cured and ultimate
emancipation a national good to be sought by every safe means that
human ingenuity could devise.

At the North it gave birth to a party willing to sacrifice the Union
itself, in behalf of the cause of anti-slavery. At the South it gave
birth to a new party ready to defend and perpetuate slavery at all
hazards and at the cost of a dissolution of the Union if that should
become necessary.

In addition to this, as the years went on this new agitation of the
slavery question revived with added intensity the old jealousy which
the states had felt toward the national power. Of that we shall speak
later. Let us first outline the course of events.

Texas was annexed. The Mexican war followed, ending in the additional
annexation of an imperial domain including all that we now know as
California, Utah, Colorado, Nevada and the neighboring states and
territories. The question at once arose, What shall we do with these
new lands? A large part of them lay south of the slavery dead line.
Should that part be open to slavery? Texas, itself a slave state, was
authorized by the terms of the contract of annexation to form itself
into four states with eight senators and at least twelve electoral
votes which a rapid immigration might increase to twenty or forty
within a brief while. Arizona and New Mexico, claimed by Texas as a
part of its domain, seemed practically certain to become independent
states. California,--even now extending from the latitude of Boston to
the latitude of Savannah and reaching inland half as far as from the
Atlantic to the Mississippi--had at least one-half its area and the
better half, lying south of the Missouri Compromise line. Moreover the
terms of the compromise did not forbid the extension of slavery even
into the whole of the California country, a region that might easily
be carved into ten or a dozen states, for the restrictions of the
compromise applied only to territory acquired by the Louisiana Purchase.

Here surely was cause enough for controversy. And a new reason had
arisen for intense obstinacy in controversy. Let us consider this a
little carefully. The anti-slavery agitation at the North was growing
more and more aggressively hostile. In common with the pro-slavery
sentiment at the South it had begun to appeal to the old and dying
sentiment of states' rights for the justification of its attitude,
thus reviving a controversy between the national sovereignty and the
independence of the states, which had been largely allayed by the
progress of time.

Northern states refused to make themselves parties to slavery even at
command of the Federal Government. They refused to lend their courts
and jails and sheriffs to the work of returning to slavery negroes who
had run away from bondage at the South. They enacted laws in assertion
of their State sovereignty which in effect nullified the laws of the
Nation and effectually obstructed their execution. We are writing now
of the period from 1845 to 1860, and not of a particular year.

Here was that revival of the old states' rights controversy with the
Federal authority, of which mention has been made before.

It was met on the other side by an equally determined assertion of
states' rights. There was nowhere any question that every state in the
Union--except as forbidden by the cession of the Northwest Territory or
by the Missouri Compromise--had full authority to sanction or forbid
the institution of slavery within its own borders at its own free will.
But there was a party at the North which contended that slavery was a
wrong so enormous that it ought to be exterminated by the high hand of
Federal force; that the disruption of the Union as an incident to such
extermination of the system would be a small price to pay for an end so
beneficent. The abolitionists denounced the Constitution itself as "a
covenant with hell," because it permitted the several states to decide
for themselves whether or not they would permit African slavery within
their borders, and because it authorized laws compelling the rendition
of fugitive slaves.

On the other hand there was growing up at the South a party that
preferred the disruption of the Union to a longer continuance of
existing conditions, a party weary of struggling for what it held to be
the rights of the states under the Constitution and disposed instead
to resort to the ultimate right of withdrawal from the Union which the
South claimed then, as New England had claimed it during the war of
1812, as a reserved privilege of the states.

The slavery question had not only entered again into national politics,
but had become well-nigh the only question of politics, state and
national.

Congress was flooded with daily petitions for the abolition of slavery
in the District of Columbia and for the prohibition of the sale of
slaves from one state to another. Southern and some Northern members
opposed the reception of these petitions and endeavored to secure rules
to lay them on the table without debate and without reference to any
committee. This policy was stoutly opposed on the ground that it was
in derogation of that "right to petition" which in all free lands is
held to be inherent in the citizen. Debate ran high on this and like
questions, and became intensely acrimonious.

When the peace settlement with Mexico was pending, a bill to authorize
the rectification of boundaries by the purchase of a large territory
from Mexico was presented in Congress. Mr. Wilmot of Pennsylvania, in
1846, moved as an amendment a proviso--known in history as "The Wilmot
Proviso"--stipulating that slavery should never be permitted in any of
the territory to be thus acquired.

This additionally intensified the controversy, and while the Wilmot
Proviso, though adopted by the House of Representatives, was rejected
by the Senate and never became law, its suggestion and the House's
adoption of it were accepted by the South as an additional evidence
of the uncompromising hostility of the anti-slavery party, and of a
determination at the North to use the Federal power for the limitation,
the restriction and the ultimate extermination of slavery.

In the meantime a sentiment against abolitionism had grown up at the
North which was implacably intolerant of opinion. Owen Lovejoy was
put to death by an Illinois mob for his offense in publishing an
aggressively abolitionist newspaper. Other men suffered persecution
upon similar account. Newspaper offices were wrecked and their
proprietors sorely dealt with by mobs in states which by their organic
law forbade slavery and the people of which had no interest in the
institution. They regarded all abolitionist movements as agitations
seriously threatening the Union and recklessly risking the public
peace. They were ready to resort to mob violence by way of repressing
activities which they regarded as destructive of public order and
seriously menacing to the Union, which had come to be an object of
adoration to the great majority of Americans.

Thus the controversy involved violence and lawlessness at the North
even more than at the South.

Again the anti-slavery propagandists at the North were men of shrewd
intelligence as well as men of profound convictions as to the absolute
righteousness of their cause. They believed without doubt or question
that anything which might help to destroy slavery was right. To
that end they were ready to violate law, to commit acts which the
law--improperly as they thought--denounced as criminal, and even to
destroy the American Republic if by that means they could extirpate the
system of human bondage. They were devotees of a cause that admitted
of no compromise or qualification. They were crusaders at war who
regarded all means as righteous that might lead to what they believed
to be a righteous end. This is not the place in which to question the
correctness of their belief or to criticize their conduct. Our concern
is merely to record the facts and trace the consequences of them.

The mails offered an easy and convenient means by which these
propagandists could address themselves to other minds than their own,
or those in known sympathy with them. Accordingly they freely used the
mails as a means of impressing their anti-slavery convictions upon
black men or white at the South.

To them the literature which they sought thus to circulate in the South
was nothing more than an appeal to reason and the sense of right. But
to the Southerner, whose family was at the mercy of a multitude of
slaves, it seemed a very different thing and one immeasurably more
menacing. To him it seemed an incitement to servile insurrection
in a region where such an insurrection could not fail to result in
unspeakable horrors and calamities.

It is a fact imperfectly understood outside of the South that the
average negro there was not at all such as the planter usually carried
about with him in the capacity of body servant to himself or maid to
his wife or daughter; not at all the "intelligent contraband" so dear
to the newsgatherers of the war time; not at all a Booker T. Washington
or a Frederick Douglass, or a Blanche K. Bruce or a Montgomery, but a
hopelessly ignorant, passion-impregnated, half-savage, held to good
behavior only by fear of the white man's superior power. On the coast
of South Carolina and in other regions the negro was in many cases even
a whole savage--recently imported, clad in breech clout and ebonized
nakedness and unable to speak or understand any language except the
Congo gibberish to which he had been born.

Of course literature made no direct appeal to creatures of such sort.
But there were many educated or at least literate negroes at the
South--some of them slaves and some of them "free men of color" as the
law phrase at that time ran. If incited thereto, these intelligent
blacks might very easily have organized the physical force of the
multitude of more ignorant negroes for an insurrection which would
have involved the wholesale slaughter of white women and children and
a servile war more horrible in its incidents and consequences than any
that the world has known since time itself began.

It was altogether natural that the anti-slavery agitators who had made
up their minds to destroy slavery at all hazards and at all costs and
who held all other considerations to be but as dust in the balance in
comparison with that one supreme desire of their souls, should seek
by means of the mails to propagate their ideas in the South and among
the slaves themselves. But it was equally natural that the white men
of the South, whose wives and children as well as themselves and their
property were menaced by such a possibility, should seek to avert it
by any means within their grasp. Their impulse was dictated by the
primal human instinct of self-preservation--an instinct that listens
to no argument and stops at no act which may be necessary to avert the
impending danger.

These people saw their hearthstones menaced by this use of the mails.
They saw in the mails a certain socialistic use of the people's power
for a common purpose. They paid taxes for the maintenance of those
mails, and they could not see why a mail system which represented
and was supported by all the people of all the states should be used
for the destruction and desecration of the homes of a part of those
people--for the instigation of a servile revolt which could not fail
to result in horrors so unspeakable that we may not even suggest them,
except vaguely, in this place.

Since that time it has become a commonplace of law to forbid the use
of the mails to those who would use them for any purpose inimical to
the public welfare; but at that time this thought had gained no place
in postal administration, and the desire of the Southerners to purge
the mails of incendiary literature which threatened to create a servile
insurrection with all its necessarily horrible accompaniments, was put
aside as an effort to "tamper with the mail." Contrary to all modern
conceptions as to the mails it was held that they were sacred alike to
good and to evil purposes and that any matter deposited in them must be
delivered to the person to whom it was addressed in utter disregard of
any question of public polity and in absolute indifference to the use
which the person addressed might be disposed to make of the printed or
written matter sent to him.

In our time, where the post office refuses even to rent a box to
any man who cannot demonstrate to the postmaster his need of it for
legitimate business purposes, and when the delivery of men's mail
is deliberately and quite unquestioningly stopped by the postal
authorities upon the mere suspicion that their business may be in
some way detrimental to the public welfare, we find it difficult
to understand why the Southern objection to the distribution of
dangerously incendiary matter through the mails--matter which
threatened those American citizens with massacre for themselves and
something immeasurably worse than massacre for their womankind--should
not have received respectful attention.

In the light of our modern postal practice it is difficult to
understand the anger and resentment with which the demand of the
Southerners was received for the exclusion from the mails of matter
the circulation of which threatened themselves, their homes and
their families with calamities too horrible to be contemplated with
complacency.

But it must be remembered that on the other hand the extirpation of
slavery was confidently believed to be an end so righteous as to
justify any means that might be employed for its accomplishment; that
the holding of men in bondage, whether willingly or unwillingly,
whether by virtue of an inheritance that carried other and controlling
obligations with it, or by the speculative purchase of men's labor,
was a crime deserving of any calamity that might fall upon those who
participated in it in the process of its extinction.

In other words there was intolerance on both sides; misunderstanding on
both; an utter failure on each side to grasp the considerations that
controlled the acts of men on the other side; a fanatical dogmatism
on the one side and upon the other that was open to no argument, no
consideration of fact or circumstance, no reasoning of any kind.

Thus came about the "irrepressible conflict." These were the influences
that created it and forced it to an issue of politics. How it resulted
in the most stupendous war of modern times must be related in other
chapters.




CHAPTER V

THE COMPROMISE OF 1850


The Mexican war and the subsequent negotiations added a vast territory
to the national domain. Much of it lay south of the Missouri Compromise
line, and into that part of it at least the advocates of slavery
confidently expected to extend their labor system.

The introduction of the Wilmot Proviso and its passage by the House did
not indeed result in the exclusion of slavery from those territories,
for the reason that the proviso, failing in the Senate, did not become
law.

But it alarmed the South. By the Southerners of the more radical
pro-slavery school it was accepted as a notice to quit; a notification
that so far as Northern anti-slavery sentiment could control the
matter, there was to be no further addition of a single acre to the
slave territory of the Union; that so far as that sentiment could
influence national politics, the power of the Federal Government was
thenceforth and forever to be exercised to prevent the extension of
slavery into any new territory acquired or to be acquired by the Union
north or south of the Missouri Compromise line, and in the end to
abolish the system altogether.

Let us clearly understand this situation. The Wilmot Proviso and all
the attempted legislation, by which it was sought to confine slavery
within the boundaries prescribed for it by existing conditions, seemed
to the opponents of slavery merely a legitimate effort to emphasize
the fact that free labor was national, while slavery was a permitted
evil within prescribed limits permitted solely because within those
limits the national power was not authorized to exert itself for the
extermination of the system. On the other hand, all these things seemed
to the Southern mind to be an utterly unjust discrimination against
a part of the people. The territories involved in the controversy
had become national possessions, they contended, largely through the
activities of Southern men and Southern statesmanship. It was felt to
be a grievous wrong that Southern men should be forbidden to emigrate
to those territories on equal terms with other citizens of the Union or
that thus emigrating they should be forbidden to take with them their
slave property, which represented in part their industrial system but
in far greater part their domestic life.

The very proposal thus to exclude them from an equal participation in
the opportunities and the privileges opened to other citizens of the
Republic by the acquisition of these new territories seemed to them
a threat, a notification that henceforth they were to be treated not
as citizens of the Union entitled to the same protection and the same
privileges that were extended to other citizens, but as inferior and
offending persons, persons graciously permitted to exist, but persons
to be excluded, because of their offenses, from an equal participation
in the conquests and land purchases of the Nation and from the
enjoyment of a share of the benefits resulting from the addition of a
great and immeasurably rich territory to the national domain.

It is true that the proposal of their exclusion had failed to become
law. But it had failed by a margin so narrow that its success might
easily be anticipated as an event of the near future. It is true that
neither the Wilmot Proviso nor any other legislation suggested at that
time sought to forbid Southerners to migrate into the new territories.
But it was proposed that they should be forbidden by law to take with
them into those territories the slaves upon whose services they relied
not only for agricultural work, but even more for that domestic service
to which they had been accustomed all their lives to look for comfort.
To tell them that they might remove their households into the new
territories, but at the same time to say to them that they must leave
behind all that had before contributed to their prosperity and to the
comfort of their domestic arrangements, seemed to them something worse
than a mockery.

Out of the agitation of these questions arose very important events.

The old sentiment at the South in favor of a gradual emancipation of
the slaves, though it survived in some degree to the end, gave place,
in large measure, to a new sentiment in behalf of slavery as a thing
right in itself, a sentiment born of the instinct of self-preservation.

The manifest disposition to exclude slavery from the newly acquired
Southern possessions prompted the men of the South to question the
Missouri Compromise itself. The spirit of that compromise had been that
slave property might be taken into territories south of 36° 30´ north
latitude, with the assurance that such territories might become slave
states, in return for the stipulation of the South that all territory
lying north of that line should be forever exempted from slavery. When
the new territory was acquired from Mexico, a large part of it lying
south of that line, it was naturally expected that in those regions
the people of the slave states were to find an outlet for emigration
as freely as those of the Northern states found a like outlet north of
that line. When a determined effort was made, with every prospect of
success, to deny even this to them, they began seriously to question
a compromise by which they had surrendered so much and seemed now
destined to gain so little. They had secured Arkansas and Missouri as
outlets for their superfluous, discontented, unfortunate or specially
enterprising population; they had surrendered all claim to an equal
opportunity in Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Minnesota, the Dakotas and
all the rest of the rich regions embraced in the Louisiana Purchase.
Obviously, it seemed to them, they had made a bad bargain, and now that
they were threatened with a denial of their share in the benefits of
it, so far as the territory acquired from Mexico was concerned, they
were disposed to repent them of it or at the very least to question the
extent to which its terms were binding on themselves.

The compromise, they reflected, was merely a matter of statutory law.
It had no constitutional obligation back of it. It had been enacted
by one congress. It could be repealed by another. In answer to the
threat to disregard its spirit in dealing with the new territories, the
Southerners made the counter-threat to repeal the compromise itself.
It was all very natural, very human, but to the Republic it was very
dangerous.

The lands that lay north of the dead line were still territories and
still for the most part unoccupied. Nothing more binding than an
easily repealable statute forbade Southerners to migrate into those
territories with their negroes and in due time, by out-voting Northern
immigrants, to make slave states of them. The essence of the compromise
they held to be, that in return for the prohibition of slavery north
of 36° 30´ north latitude, slavery should be freely permitted in all
regions lying south of that line if the people settling there should
so decide. If the contract was to be repudiated on the one hand, why,
they asked, should it not be equally repudiated on the other? If the
Missouri Compromise was to carry with it none of the benefits it
conferred on the South why should it be held binding upon the South for
the benefit of the North?

This seems to have been the thought and attitude of the South at that
time, and it soon found expression in legislation and in attempted
legislation.

The discovery of gold in California quickly resulted in such a
peopling of that region as made its admission to the Union as a state
a necessity. The settlers there were mainly from the North and they
naturally had no desire to make a slave state out of the territory.
Without waiting for an enabling act they adopted a constitution in 1849
and knocked at the doors of the Union for admission as a free state.

Instantly the South took alarm. Quite half of California lay south
of 36° 30´ north latitude. Apart from its gold, the region promised
harvests of grain and fruit of incalculably greater value even than
all the output of all its mines. There was nothing in the Missouri
Compromise or in any other legislation to forbid the whole of
California to become a slave state. There was only the decision of the
people in that part of the country that they wanted the state to be
free and that decision was not by any means unanimous. On the contrary
it was believed to be at least possible that if the territory were
divided into two substantially equal parts the southern half of it
would elect to become a slave state.

This added enormously to the acrimony of the slavery controversy. There
had from the beginning been accepted in the country a half formulated
theory of the necessity of maintaining a "balance of power" between
the opposing systems of slavery and free labor so far at least as the
Senate, representing the states as such without regard to population,
was concerned. From the beginning slave and free states had been
admitted to the Union in effect in couples. Thus Vermont, admitted in
1791, was balanced by Kentucky, admitted in 1792. Tennessee came in
in 1796 with no free state comrade till 1803, when Ohio was admitted.
Louisiana, admitted in 1812, was offset by Indiana which became a
state in 1816. Mississippi was admitted in 1817 and Illinois in the
following year. Alabama, admitted in 1819, was balanced by Maine in
1820. Missouri came in in 1821 by a compromise that more than offset
the omission to create a corresponding and compensatory free state. But
when Arkansas was admitted in 1836, Michigan was thrown into the other
scale in 1837. Florida and Texas, annexed in 1845, were balanced by
Iowa in 1846 and Wisconsin in 1848. But for California as a free state
there was no peopled region that could be carved into a compensatory
slave state and for that reason, as well as because of the rise of the
anti-slavery agitation to fever heat, the controversy about 1850 took
on an angrier tone than ever, and one more seriously threatening to the
Union.

The people of the country at that time might justly have been divided
into three classes, viz:

1. Those extreme opponents of slavery who were ready and eager to
sacrifice the Union itself and the Constitution to the accomplishment
of their emancipating purpose;

2. Those extreme pro-slavery men who were equally ready to wreck the
Union in order to perpetuate and extend the system of slave labor;

3. Those intense lovers of the Union, North and South, who were ready
to put aside and sacrifice their convictions for or against slavery
in order to save the Nation from disruption with all its horrible
consequences of civil war.

This last class was at that time a dominant majority and for long
afterwards it exercised a controlling and restraining influence over
all the rest. It included men at the South who earnestly desired the
extinction of slavery, and other men at the South who were sincerely
convinced that the slave system was absolutely necessary to the
cultivation of Southern fields and that its perpetuation was justified
by the incurable inferiority of the black race, and the hopeless
incapacity of the negro for freedom and self-government. At the North
the class of those who cared more for the perpetuity of the Union than
for either the extinction or the perpetuation of slavery included men
of every shade of belief as regarded slavery itself, except the extreme
opponents of the system. It included such men as Abraham Lincoln who,
even after the war was on, persisted in holding to his heart as his
supreme desire the perpetuity of the Union in order, as he splendidly
phrased it in his Gettysburg speech, that "Government of the people by
the people and for the people might not perish from the earth."

It was a magnificent conflict of human forces. Incidentally it brought
into play passion, prejudice, malice, groveling self-interest and
brutal disregard of others' rights and feelings. But in large part
it was dominated, on the one side and upon the other, by a love of
liberty, an instinct of justice and an exalted patriotism that did
honor to those who were so inspired.

All these sentiments and aspirations were variously directed, giving
rise sometimes to contradictory courses of action. But he who
would understand and interpret the events of that time must fully
conceive the fact that the inspiring impulses of the great majority
were essentially and fundamentally the same on both sides, however
variously they may have been interpreted into conduct. Only thus shall
we understand how it was that men on opposite sides of a geographical
line, men equally loving liberty and equally holding in reverence the
traditions of the American Union, fell a-fighting in 1861 and for four
years waged the bloodiest and most devastating war of which modern
history anywhere makes record.

The controversy with respect to California and the territories was only
a part of the disturbing influences of the middle of the nineteenth
century.

The Constitution of the United States, in Section 3 of Article IV,
distinctly imposed upon the states and upon the people thereof the duty
of returning to their masters all fugitive slaves who might escape from
one state to another. That provision of the Constitution was resented,
even to the point of violence by the antagonists of slavery; it was
insisted upon by the advocates of slavery--in the North as well as in
the South--to the border-land of crime. It was defeated of its purpose,
not only by the acts of individuals banded together with express intent
to nullify it in practice, but still more by laws enacted in many
states at the North to facilitate its nullifications. The law officers
of many states either refused to exercise their authority for the
enforcement of this law or going further, employed their authority to
prevent its enforcement.

Let us frankly recognize the fact that these men were in effect
disunionists, and the further fact that they were such upon
conscientious conviction. All this was done in full faith that it
was right and in response to the requirements of conscience. But
it was done in flagrant violation of the constitutional compact. We
may sympathize with the impulses of the sheriff or other officer who
refused to aid in the return of an escaping negro to slavery, and still
more easily we may sympathize with those unofficial persons who fed and
housed and expedited escaping slaves, in their refusal to aid a system
of human bondage of which they were conscientiously intolerant, but on
the other hand we may not justly blink the fact that all this was in
disobedience of the fundamental law of the land, in violation of that
compact on which alone the Union rested, and in derogation of property
rights which the compact of union pledged all the states to enforce and
all the people to respect.

The whole trouble lay in the fact that there was an "irrepressible
conflict" between the ideas that were dominant North and South and that
laws and constitutions, and compacts, and agreements were powerless
to enforce themselves or to get themselves enforced in opposition to
intense conviction and strongly felt sentiment.

The feeling on both sides ran high and was intensely intolerant. It was
heedless of reason or argument. It scoffed at compacts and agreements.
It made of legal obligations a mockery and of constitutional
requirements a laughing stock.

It entered also into every relation of life and mischievously disturbed
every such relation. It divided families. It disrupted churches,
producing divisions in them, some of which--most of which indeed--have
not been healed even in our present time when the war and slavery and
all things pertaining to them are matters of history.

Along the line of the Ohio river, where one brother had gone across
the narrow stream to Indiana in search of fortune while another had
remained behind in Kentucky, the specter of this implacable controversy
wrought an estrangement that was at once cruel and unnatural. Skiffs
lined the opposing shores. Intercourse was easy and the waterway
between was of trifling width; but the skiffs were not used, and the
intervening waterway was left uncrossed, because between those who
dwelt upon the one side of the stream and those who lived upon the
other there arose the black shadow of the irrepressible conflict. They
were friends and near relatives. Their homes confronted each other
with only a placid stream between. Their shores were far less than
a mile apart, and their old loves for each other were uncooled, so
far as they realized. But they gradually ceased to visit each other.
Those courtships and marriages which had been the frequent occasions
of rejoicing among them became of the very rarest occurrence and
finally ceased to occur at all. And all this in spite of the fact that
in northern Kentucky slavery was scarcely more than a name while the
people on the other side of the river had, for the major part, been
emigrants from Kentucky, accustomed in their childhood to such mild
mannered slavery as still survived beyond the stream.

Here was the line of cleavage. Here was the barrier between men's minds
and hearts and lives. On the one side slavery was permitted and, in
self-preservation chiefly, was defended. On the other side there were
softening memories of slavery as an institution that had surrounded the
childhood of those concerned with the loving care and the affectionate
coddling of negro mammies and negro uncles. But the issue between
slavery and antagonism to it had become so sharply accentuated that
even family affection and memories of childhood and the influences of
near neighborhood and the ties of close kinship could not break down
the barrier.

Still further, there had begun to grow up at the North a political
party whose sole bond of union was antipathy to slavery. It was not at
all respectable, for even yet it was not deemed respectable in many
parts of the North to be an Abolitionist, and this was distinctly
an Abolitionist party. Its sole reason for being was its purpose to
abolish slavery in the United States. It was still a feeble party, so
far as the number of votes it could command was concerned, but it was
prepared to ally itself with any others whose purposes might tend even
in the smallest degree in the direction in which it wished the Republic
to go. It was ready to join in any effort that might help toward the
extirpation of slavery, but its avowed purpose was not to assail
slavery where that institution legally existed, but to prevent its
extension to any new lands.

In that purpose many thousands sympathized who would scornfully have
resented the imputation that they were Abolitionists.

This new "Free-soil" party had no less a personage than Ex-president
Martin Van Buren as its candidate for the presidency in 1848 and while
its following and its poll of votes were small its menace seemed
to men of the South very great, a seeming that was destined to be
confirmed ere long. In 1840 the Anti-slavery candidate, Birney, had
received only 7,059 votes in the whole country, scarcely enough to be
recorded in the election returns. In 1844 the same candidate received
62,300 votes--a great increase, but still not enough to be reckoned
seriously. In 1848 Martin Van Buren, as the candidate of this Free-soil
party, received 291,263 votes, thus greatly more than quadrupling the
highest directly Anti-slavery vote previously polled. In 1856 the
Free-soil party under the name of the Republican party, was in effect
the only serious antagonist of the Democracy, the only party that
seriously disputed with it the control of the National Government. In
that election the new party polled 1,341,264 votes, against 1,838,169
for the Democratic candidate. It carried no less than 114 electoral
votes out of a total of 296, its successful antagonist carrying 174.

All this occurred after the time which we are now considering, but
the facts are presented here because their coming was anticipated in
1850 and because they serve to illustrate the rapidity with which the
"irrepressible conflict" grew in intensity and fervor.

In 1850 the country was on the verge of a revolution.

The Southerners were exasperated to the point of armed revolt by the
proposal to deny to them what they deemed their fair participation in
the fruits of the Mexican War; by the increasingly active antagonism
of the North; by the aggressive opposition there to the enforcement
of property rights in fugitive slaves; by the condemnatory tone of the
Northern press, pulpit and platform; by the insistent use of the mails
for the circulation of literature which the South deemed dangerously
incendiary; by the continual inflow of petitions to Congress for the
abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia; and by a score of
other annoyances which were ceaseless in their aggression.

The feeling grew in the South that there was no longer any place in
the Union for those states that permitted slavery; that there was no
longer any tolerance for their people; that a war upon them had begun
which would stop at nothing short of the forcible abolition of their
institutions, with all of chaos and insurrection and servile revolt
which they believed to be the necessary sequences of such abolition.

They were affronted, offended and alarmed. States' rights had been
freely invoked against them as a means of evading and defeating such
laws as then existed for the rendition of fugitive slaves. They, in
their turn, looked to states' rights as perhaps affording to them a way
of escape from their difficulties and tribulations.

"If the Union can no longer protect us," they asked themselves, "why
should we remain parties to that compact? If we are to have no share in
its benefits or even in its territorial conquests and purchases, why
should we go on bearing our share of its burdens and obligations? If it
cannot or will not fulfil those duties which it has assumed towards us,
why should we not repudiate those obligations which we have assumed in
return for its pledges of protection? If we cannot be members of the
Union upon equal terms with other members of the Union, why should we
continue to be members of the Union at all?"

There was nowhere in the South the slightest doubt of the right of
any state in the Union to withdraw from the compact and resume those
attributes of sovereignty which, in creating the Federal Government,
the several states had delegated to it. Indeed up to that time there
had been scarcely any doubt anywhere, North or South, of the existence
of this right of the states, as a right reserved in the formation of
the Federal Union.

Accordingly there grew up in the South a distinctly "disunion"
party, a party which favored the withdrawal of the slave states from
a confederacy which, they contended, had failed to render them the
protection or secure to them the equality of rights and privileges
which it had been instituted to render and secure.

This impulse of withdrawal was very strong, but like the radical
impulse of disunion at the North for the sake of abolition at all costs
or hazards, it was for a long time overborne by the dominant sentiment
of devotion to the Union and loyalty to the traditions of the Republic.
The majority at the South were unwilling to give up the memory of
Bunker Hill, Lexington, Concord, Saratoga and Trenton, as a national
heritage of glory and likewise the majority at the North were reluctant
to forget the victories of Marion and Sumter, or to relinquish the
glorious memory of Yorktown.

Thus in 1850 there was a party at the North eager to sacrifice
everything, including the Republic itself with all its traditions,
in order to secure the extinction of slavery; and there was also a
similarly radical party at the South ready and willing to destroy the
Union in order to be rid of what it regarded as the unreasonable and
intemperate hostility to the South within the Union.

Both these radical parties were in an apparently hopeless minority each
in its own section, but each manifested a tendency to growth which
boded ill for the future. Nevertheless the overwhelming majority of
men on the one side and upon the other intensely detested and bitterly
resented every suggestion to sacrifice the Union for any imaginable
cause or upon any conceivable occasion.

It was to this great majority, North and South, that Henry Clay at that
critical time appealed. The dominant passion of that statesman's soul
was his love of the Union and his desire that it might endure during
all time. To that one god of his adoration he had made sacrifices from
the beginning. In its behalf he had put aside his lifelong desire for
the gradual emancipation of the slaves. In its behalf he had sacrificed
the supreme ambition of his life--the ambition to be president. In
behalf of the Union he had made himself _anathema maranatha_--at the
North as a slaveholder and at the South as an abolitionist. He was in
fact both at once. He held slaves under a system of which he could not
rid himself without arming them, in Jefferson's phrase, "with freedom
and a dagger." He wanted them emancipated and was ready to make
sacrifice in that behalf, but on the other hand he desired beyond all
other things the preservation of that Union, to the perpetuity of which
his whole life had been devoted, and to the perpetuity of which he
looked for the enduring memory of whatever was worthy of remembrance in
American history.

In an extraordinary degree Clay rose above the passions of the hour, as
did Webster and certain other statesmen of that time,--though certain
other statesmen of the time did not.

He saw the situation clearly. The Union had been formed in candid
recognition of the fact that slavery existed in full force and effect
in certain of the states, while in certain other states, chiefly by
reason of its unprofitableness, it was slowly passing away at the
time of the Constitution's framing. He perfectly understood that the
Constitution was a compact between states that could ratify or reject
it at will, and that but for concessions made on the one side and on
the other, the Constitution could never have become the fundamental
law of the Republic. He clearly understood that the dealings of the
Constitution with this question of slavery constituted a compromise to
which the moral sentiments and the material interests of both sides
were parties.

But as has been explained, there had grown up at the North and at
the South two parties of extremists who cared little or nothing for
the Union and everything for their opposing purposes: the Northern
party for the abolition of slavery at all costs, even at cost of the
destruction of the Union itself; and the Southern party organized for
the perpetuation and extension of slavery regardless of everything
else, regardless of the Union and of all that it signified of
human liberty and of the practical realization of the doctrine of
self-government among men.

Neither party represented the people in whose behalf it professed to
speak. The abolitionists, whose petition for the dissolution of the
Union we shall hereafter present, certainly did not represent the
thought or desire of the great majority of the Northern people. In
the same way the Southern disunionists who sought the disruption of
the Union in order that slavery might "have free course to run and be
glorified," did not represent the great body of Southern citizens,
many of whom deprecated slavery and longed for its extinction by some
safe process of gradual emancipation. But in both cases the extremists
were accepted on the opposing side as representatives of the general
thought; the extravagant opinions and demands of fanatical persons on
the one side or the other were interpreted as the settled convictions
of the great body of the people on the side thus misrepresented to its
hurt.

Among the extremists on both sides the disruption of the Union was
jauntily contemplated as a ready remedy for ills complained of.

As early as 1844 the Legislature of Massachusetts had resolved "That
the project of the annexation of Texas, unless arrested on the
threshold, _may tend to drive these states into a dissolution of the
Union_." Again, in 1845, the Legislature of Massachusetts passed
and the governor of that state approved, a resolution asserting a
right of nullification and declaring that the admission of Texas as
a state in the Union "would have no binding force whatever on the
people of Massachusetts." That resolution could mean nothing less
than that Massachusetts would withdraw from the Union in the event of
the admission of Texas, for otherwise laws enacted by virtue of the
vote of Texas senators must have "binding force" upon the people of
Massachusetts as upon those of all the other states.

There were other resolutions of similar purport adopted by the
Legislature of Massachusetts that it is not necessary to set forth in
a history which is not an indictment but merely an expository setting
forth of facts by way of accounting for events.

On both sides disunion was constantly and freely threatened if either
side could not have its way. A convention of Southerners held at
Nashville, Tennessee, distinctly recommended the secession of the
South and called for a Southern congress to consider and adopt that
policy. About the same time Mr. Hale of New Hampshire introduced in the
Senate (Feb. 1, 1850) a petition deliberately calling upon the national
legislative body to adopt measures for the dissolution of the Union.

The petitioners were citizens of Pennsylvania and Delaware, but they
constituted only a small fraction of the people of those states and
unquestionably their proposal, if put to a vote in Pennsylvania and
Delaware, would have been buried under a mountainous majority of
adverse ballots. Yet the petitioners deliberately assumed to be and
to speak for "the inhabitants" of those states, and their petition
was undoubtedly accepted at the South as representing popular opinion
in the region whence it came, if not indeed in the entire North. It
was the mischief of such things that, while they were the work of
a fanatical few, they managed to pass themselves off as utterances
representative of public sentiment in the quarter from which they
emanated.

The petition was as follows:

    We, the undersigned, inhabitants of Pennsylvania and Delaware,
    believing that the Federal Constitution, in pledging the strength
    of the whole nation to support slavery, violates the Divine Law,
    makes war upon human rights, and is grossly inconsistent with
    republican principles; that its attempt to unite freedom and
    slavery in our body politic has brought upon the country great and
    manifold evils, and has fully proved that no such union can exist
    but by the sacrifice of freedom and the supremacy of slavery,
    respectfully ask you to _devise and propose, without delay, some
    plan for the immediate, peaceful dissolution of the American Union_.

Daniel Webster fitly exposed the character and significance of this
petition by moving that it be prefaced with a preamble as follows:

    Whereas, at the commencement of the session, you and each of you
    took your solemn oaths, in the presence of God and on the Holy
    Evangelists, that you would support the Constitution of the United
    States; now, therefore, we pray you to take immediate steps to
    break up the Union, and overthrow the Constitution of the United
    States as soon as you can.

So repulsive was this proposal of disunion that only three senators
voted even to receive the petition embodying it and in the House a like
refusal was made. But those three senators were Mr. Seward, of New
York, Mr. Chase of Ohio, and Mr. Hale of New Hampshire--three great
leaders of Northern thought who were destined soon to become three men
of dominant influence in the new party of Free-soil and leaders in
antagonism to the Southern claim to a share in the new territories.

There might have been a score of other votes for the petition which
would have had far less significance. The votes of these three senators
meant clearly that the Free-soil party looked upon disunion just as the
extreme pro-slavery men of the South did, as a legitimate and always
available remedy for existing ills or a prophylactic against evils
anticipated.

As early as 1847 Mr. Calhoun had set forth the Southern contention with
regard to the territories in a series of carefully worded resolutions
which read as follows:

    Resolved, that the territories of the United States belong to the
    several States composing this Union, and are held by them as their
    joint and common property.

    Resolved, that Congress, as the joint agent and representative of
    the States of this Union, has no right to make any law, or do any
    act whatever, that shall directly, or by its effects, make any
    discrimination between the States of this Union, by which any of
    them shall be deprived of its full and equal right in any territory
    of the United States, acquired or to be acquired.

    Resolved, that the enactment of any law which should, directly
    or by its effects, deprive the citizens of any of the States of
    this Union from emigrating, with their property, into any of the
    territories of the United States, would make such discrimination,
    and would, therefore, be a violation of the Constitution and the
    rights of the States from which such citizens emigrated, and in
    derogation of that perfect equality which belongs to them as
    members of this Union, and would tend directly to subvert the Union
    itself.

    Resolved, that it is a fundamental principle of our political
    creed, that a people, in forming a Constitution, have the
    unconditional right to form and adopt the government which they
    may think best calculated to secure their liberty, prosperity, and
    happiness; and that, in conformity thereto, no other condition
    is imposed by the Federal Constitution on a State, in order to
    be admitted into this Union, except that its constitution shall
    be republican; and that the imposition of any other by Congress
    would be not only in violation of the Constitution, but in direct
    conflict with the principle on which our political system rests.

Here we have from the South a threat of disunion, a trifle more
disguised, perhaps, than the threats that had come from the North, but
not less positive. The resolutions were intended especially to cover
the new territories which the country was then acquiring from Mexico
by conquest and treaty, but they covered with equal effect all of that
territory which had been added to the Union by the Louisiana Purchase,
and the greater part of which had been set apart by the Missouri
Compromise to be formed into free states. They were a challenge to the
Missouri Compromise, and the assertion of a doctrine which afterwards
greatly vexed the country and contributed in an important way to the
bringing about of war. They constituted a plea for that repeal of the
Missouri Compromise which was to come a very few years later.

This was the condition of things which Congress had to confront on its
assembling in December, 1849. Disunion was everywhere in the air and
on each side there was a party openly advocating it as the only remedy
for existing and threatened ills. Both in the North and the South this
party of disunion was in a hopeless minority, but by reason of its
ceaseless and aggressive activity it had managed to make itself seem
the authorized exponent of public opinion for each side.

The questions before the country were many, but they all related,
directly or indirectly, to slavery. Should California be admitted
to the Union as a free state? If so with what boundaries? for
California then included Utah, Nevada and adjacent territory. Or
should California, limited to the present boundaries of that state,
be divided into two commonwealths, so that the Southern half might
come in as a slave state to offset the Northern half in the Senate
and the electoral college? Texas had already been admitted as a slave
state, but its boundaries were still vague and undefined. It claimed
jurisdiction over all that we now know as New Mexico and Arizona.
Should that vast region--the sterility of which was at that time wholly
unappreciated--be added to the domain of slavery, or should it be set
apart in the hope that it might be erected presently into two or three
or possibly half a dozen free states?

There were also two complaints of arrogant aggression from the opposing
sides. At the North there was complaint that the "slave power," as
it was called, sought and threatened to make itself dominant and
supreme in the Union by its demands for the rendition of fugitive
slaves. At the South there was complaint that the homes and firesides
of the Southern people were menaced with servile insurrection by the
activities of those who sought to breed discontent among the negroes
and spread among them sentiments dangerous to public peace and order.
There was complaint at the North that the constitutional and statutory
provisions for the rendition of fugitive slaves exacted of Northern
people an obligation which many of them could not conscientiously
fulfil, making them unwilling parties to a system which their
consciences abhorred, or, if they refused obedience, condemning them
to the condition of lawbreakers and denouncing them as criminals
because of their refusal to do that against which their very souls
revolted. On the other hand the people of the South complained that
their Northern brethren, or many of them, not only assisted runaway
slaves to escape but deliberately incited them to that course and that
the constitutional compact upon that subject was not enforced by any
adequate statutory law.

On both sides discontent was rampant and threatening. On both sides
dissatisfaction had begun to look to the dissolution of the Republic as
the readiest remedy available.

There were statesmen like Senator Benton who laughed to scorn the
idea that any considerable part of the people could ever seriously
contemplate an assault upon the integrity of the Federal Union, but
that the Union was truly and very gravely in danger subsequent events
conclusively demonstrated.

It was to save the Union from disruption at the hands of Northern or
Southern fanatics--all of whom were threatening that disaster--that
Clay framed, Webster supported, Congress adopted, and the President
approved the compromise measures of 1850.

Those measures covered substantially all the points in controversy. The
bills were five in number.

The first provided for the separation of New Mexico from Texas, with
compensation to Texas, and for the admission of that territory to the
Union as a state when it should become populous enough, with or without
slavery as its own people should at such time determine.

The second set off Utah from California and provided in a precisely
similar manner for its ultimate admission to the Union as a state.

Neither of these two measures ever resulted in anything practical.
Even unto this day New Mexico has remained too sparsely populated for
statehood and Utah was not admitted to the Union until long after the
Constitution of the United States had been so amended as to prohibit
slavery in any part of the Republic.

The third of Clay's compromise bills provided for the admission of
California to the Union as a state under the Constitution which it had
adopted, which made no provision for the existence of slavery within
its borders.

The fourth of the bills was a new and more strenuous fugitive slave law
than any that had ever before existed. It was intended to carry out
the provision of the Constitution of the United States on that subject
and it was supposed to be offset to Northern sentiment by the fifth
of the compromise measures which forbade the slave trade within the
strictly national domain of the District of Columbia.

It had long been a grievance to Northern minds that this peculiarly
national territory, governed as it was exclusively by a Congress
representative of all the states in the Senate and of all their people
in the House, and wholly without any expression of the will of its
inhabitants, was made a slave mart, into which the slave-trader from
Maryland or Virginia could take his chattels for sale on the auction
block to other slave-traders who were there to buy speculatively that
they might sell again to the owners of cotton and rice fields at the
South.

In the North and South there had always been a radical distinction
in men's minds and consciences, between slavery and the slave-trade;
between the holding of men in hereditary bondage under a system
essentially patriarchal and kindly, and the deliberate traffic in human
beings for purposes of speculative profit.

There were two distinct questions with respect to slavery in the
District of Columbia. To have abolished the institution there root and
branch, as multitudes of petitioners prayed, would have been to menace
the two states, Virginia and Maryland, which had given the District
to the Union.[1] It would have been to establish within their borders
and by national authority a little Canada into which fugitive slaves
from either of those states might escape with the certainty of thereby
achieving freedom; for in the temper of that time no fugitive slave law
could by any possibility have been enforced there after once Congress
had decreed the abolition of slavery within the District.

    [1] Virginia's portion had been receded to that State in 1846.

But the abolition of the _slave-trade_ within this peculiarly national
domain was quite another matter. It left to all Southerners summoned
thither on one or other sort of governmental business, or removing
thither to reside, the right freely to bring then domestic servants
with them without fear of molestation; but it made an end of that
traffic in negroes as mere merchandise which was even more offensive to
the better people of the South than to those of the North--which was
socially as severely frowned upon in the one part of the country as in
the other and concern with which made the slave-trader as completely a
social outcast in Virginia as it might have done in Massachusetts.

Mr. Clay's five bills were framed and introduced in pursuit of his
dominant purpose to preserve the American Union at whatever sacrifice
of principle or of interest, and in like spirit they were enacted by
both houses of Congress. They had the strong support of Daniel Webster
in one of the ablest orations he ever delivered in behalf of the Union;
a speech made, as Webster's biographers contend, in full knowledge
of the fact that its delivery must cost him his very last hope of
election to the presidency; a speech which brought upon him the odious
accusation of having "sold out to the slave power."[2] They had the
support also of men on both sides of the danger line of cleavage who
strongly disapproved of some of them but who voted for all in the firm
conviction that together they constituted a compromise necessary to the
preservation of the Union.

    [2] Unhappily for his reputation Mr. Webster gave color to this
        charge by accepting a large sum of money from Mr. Corcoran as
        a scarcely disguised reward for the speech.

That object was still supreme in the minds of the great majority,
North and South alike. It was felt on both sides--in spite of personal
convictions, personal interests, and the irritating friction of
political agitation--that after all, the cause of human liberty, human
progress, and the system of self-government among men was dependent
upon the perpetuity of the union of these states. It was felt that
the enslavement of the negro, now that the Constitution, the statute
law, and the public sentiment of the country had robbed it of its most
repugnant feature--the African slave-trade--was a matter of minor
consequence in comparison with the perpetuity of the only government
on God's earth which had ever rested its right to be upon the twin
theories of unalienable rights and the consent of the governed.

To the two disunion parties, the one aggressively active at the North
in behalf of abolition and the other equally aggressive at the South in
behalf of slavery, these compromise measures were intensely offensive.
But to the great majority of the American people their passage seemed
imperatively necessary to the preservation of the Republic, and this
sentiment found expression in the action of both houses of Congress
upon them.

All of them were enacted by decisive majorities and all by the votes of
statesmen from North and South, acting together and putting aside their
sectional prejudices in behalf of the Union.

The bill for the admission of California as a free state, against which
the strongest opposition was made from the South, had thirty-four
senators in its favor against only eighteen in opposition, four of the
votes in behalf of it being cast by the four great Southern leaders,
Bell of Tennessee, Houston of Texas, Benton of Missouri, and Underwood
of Kentucky--a list to which Mr. Clay, as the author and sponsor of
the bill must be added as a king of men. In the House,--more directly
representative of popular sentiment--the vote in favor of the bill was
no less than one hundred and fifty, with only fifty-six against it.
This was the bill most offensive to the South and so the vote upon it
reflected the strength of the Southern desire for the perpetuity of the
Union.

On the other hand the Northern desire for the accomplishment of that
end was reflected in the vote upon the Fugitive Slave Law which
constituted a part of Clay's compromise scheme,--a part of it intended
to offset to the South the admission of the whole of the present state
of California as a free state.

This Fugitive Slave Act was passed by a vote of twenty-seven to twelve
in the Senate, and by a vote of one hundred nine to seventy-six in
the House. Three Northern senators voted for it and one other, Mr.
Dickinson of New York--who wished to vote for it, was paired with his
colleague Mr. Seward. In the House thirty-two members from Northern
states voted in favor of the Fugitive Slave Law.

But the discussion of these compromise measures lasted for eight
months, and it was by no means confined to the halls of Congress. There
was the fourth estate--the newspaper press--to be reckoned with, and
behind that were the people. The people themselves and the newspaper
representatives of popular opinion took a free part in the discussion,
and both were unrestrained by parliamentary etiquette or by any of
those considerations of polity and statecraft to which members of
either house of Congress made obeisance. There was a great devotion
to the Union it is true among press and people, but it did not take
statesmanlike form or consider those nice questions that statesmen were
bound to take into account.

On either side the popular desire for the preservation of the Union
was complicated with the conviction that only the iniquities and
injustices of the other side imperiled the Republic. On each side there
was a profound conviction that if the other side would behave itself
as it should, there would be no shadow of danger to the Union. Again
on either side there was an intemperate press, representing an utterly
intolerant party of extremists, and, shut their eyes as they might to
facts, the statesmen of that time were aware that these extremists on
the one side and upon the other, were daily adding to their numbers
and daily becoming more and more nearly representative of popular
sentiment.

The matter was complicated with partisanship, also, and with personal
ambitions. There was the question of supremacy in the Nation, between
the Whigs, who were then in power by virtue of Taylor's election in
1848, and the Democrats who, with one other brief interval, had been
dominant in national affairs during the entire preceding half century.
At the South the two parties, laying aside the questions of polity that
had previously separated them, vied with each other in such support
of slavery as should win the good will of the extreme pro-slavery
party. At the North they were rivals as suitors for the favor of the
new Free-soil faction--for at that time it was only a faction which
Know-Nothingism was destined presently to relegate temporarily to the
background.

But at the North the new Free-soil party drew more heavily on the Whigs
than on the Democrats for its support, although its early leaders
and presidential candidates, John P. Hale and Martin Van Buren, were
distinguished Democratic statesmen.

Accordingly there arose in the country a contest between the two
old parties for the favor of the two new ones. It became in fact a
scrambling auction, in which each party in each section and each state
and each district bid its convictions and its principles, without
scruple, for votes. Each party sought to be more intensely pro-slavery
than the other in those states and districts in which the pro-slavery
sentiment was strong, while in those states and districts in which the
anti-slavery sentiment was manifestly dominant, each party rivaled the
other in its courtship of the prevailing dogma and its representative
voters.

Quite naturally, men ambitious of political preferment trimmed
their sails to catch these varying winds, and for the first time in
the history of the country political conviction and principle very
generally gave way to questions of self-interest. If the politician of
that time was not quite "all things to all men," he was at any rate all
things to the men who could cast the larger number of votes for his
elevation to office.

The accusation of such selfish sacrifice of principle and conviction
for the sake of personal aggrandizement was openly made against the
foremost statesmen of the time, including Clay and Webster, and the
President himself. Whatever any one of these did that was displeasing
to one part of the country, was freely attributed to a desire to "curry
favor," as the phrase went, with "the slave power" in the one case, or
with "the abolitionist sentiment," in the other.

Without questioning the motives of the greater men, who offered their
dominant devotion to the Union as the only and amply sufficient
explanation of their actions and their votes, it is safe to say that
the attitude and course and eloquence of a multitude of minor men
possessed of ambition for political preferment were determined, on the
one side or the other, chiefly by a consideration of votes.

Mr. Clay, Mr. Webster and the statesmen who aided them in adopting
the Compromise of 1850, confidently believed that by their action in
that matter they had laid the slavery question to rest for at least a
generation to come. They had in fact, as the event proved, succeeded
only in opening it anew and adding virulence to its discussion. Their
very debates, preparatory to the passage of the compromise bills, had
stirred the country to a discussion of the question, angrier than
any other that had been known since the Constitution was framed. The
measures themselves, so far from allaying excitement and controversy,
intensified both. The South felt that it had been cheated in a
bargain which gave one free state certainly and two, three or four
prospectively, to the North, with absolutely no certainty and little
probability of the admission of any slave state in compensation--for
from the first the people of Texas resented and resisted the proposal
to divide their great domain into the four states provided for at the
beginning. On the other hand the Northern States felt that the new
Fugitive Slave Law was an enactment with which they could not comply
without such a sacrifice of conscience and conviction as could in no
wise be made by honest and sincere men.

From the very first many of the Northern States set their legislative
machinery at work to defeat the operation of this Fugitive Slave
Law by the most effective counter legislation that legal ingenuity
could devise. In so far as these devices succeeded in preventing the
execution of that law they in effect nullified a national statute which
the National Government was entirely competent to enact.

More important still from the point of view of history, is the
fact that the compromise which was intended to allay all sectional
feeling and work a pacification in behalf of the Union, directly and
immediately wrought an opposite result. It additionally inflamed
passion in all parts of the country. It strongly accentuated those
differences of opinion which alone threatened the Union with
dissolution and the country with devastating war.

The North set itself to nullify the Fugitive Slave Law. The South set
itself to undo the Missouri Compromise.

On the one hand it was contended that the Fugitive Slave Law made
slavery a national instead of a state institution--a thing to which
Northern sentiment and Northern conscience could in no wise consent.
On the other hand it was stoutly insisted that the equality of the
states under the Constitution was openly violated, not only by the
personal liberty laws enacted by Northern States in order to nullify
the national statute on the subject of fugitive slaves, but still
more aggressively by the practical exclusion of slaveholders from the
territories, so far at least as their slave property was concerned; and
further by the decree of the Missouri Compromise that, whatever the
will of the settlers in new regions might be, there should be no new
slave states carved out of that portion of the Louisiana Purchase which
lay north of the southern line of Missouri. This prohibition--taken in
connection with the admission of California as a free state--amounted
in effect to a provision that there should be no more slave states
created anywhere; for, as Mr. Webster had clearly pointed out, there
was no other part of the territory conquered or purchased from Mexico,
into which slavery could be practically or profitably extended.

The attempts made to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law at the North,
whether successful or baffled, served only to inflame passion on both
sides and to intensify the very controversy which it had been the
purpose of the act--as a part of a compromise--to allay. On the other
hand the Southern conviction grew that by the two compromises the South
had been cheated of its equal rights in the public domain, and out of
that contention was destined almost immediately to grow a bloody war in
Kansas and a still more acrimonious state of feeling between the North
and the South.

The story of that matter is reserved for another chapter of this
history. In the meanwhile, if the facts have been adequately set
forth, it must be clear to the reader that the Compromise of 1850 not
only failed of its purpose of pacification, but resulted immediately
in the very marked increase of hostility between the sections, the
intensifying of the irritation and the accentuation of the acrimony
that pervaded and inspired the dispute.

The fundamental trouble was that the statesmen who fondly thought to
settle the matter by a compromise, did not grasp the truth of the
situation with which they were called upon to deal. They did not
appreciate the fact that there was indeed an "irrepressible conflict,"
between the two systems, a conflict which no compromise could end, no
arrangement could mollify, no agreement could by any possibility adjust.

War was already on between abolitionism and slavery. It was idle to
seek for grounds of reconciliation between convictions so utterly
antagonistic and so necessarily irreconcilable. The compromisers
were men crying "Peace" where there was no peace and no possibility
of peace. They were visionaries seeking to reconcile sentiments that
were as opposite as the poles. In opinion and sentiment as well as in
physics, there are affinities that may not be resisted and antagonisms
that no power can overcome. There was no flux of political agreement
that could fuse Northern and Southern sentiment on the subject of
slavery into one homogeneous whole--no _vehiculum_ in which the two
antagonistic principles could mingle in harmony.

The key to the situation, as every sincere historian must recognize, if
he would interpret the events of that time aright, was the fact that
this conflict was indeed "irrepressible," and that it could end only
with the extinction of slavery on the one hand, or with the universal
and constitutional recognition of slavery as a national institution on
the other.

The Compromise of 1850 was futile and a failure because it was founded
upon the ignoring of this fundamental truth.




CHAPTER VI

UNCLE TOM'S CABIN


The failure of the Compromise of 1850 to accomplish its purpose did
not at first appear in the national election returns. In fact the new
Free-soil party polled fewer votes in 1852 than it had cast four years
before, but in the elections of the several states of the North it was
steadily gaining ground precisely as in the South the extreme disunion
pro-slavery party was likewise doing.

Little by little the more conservative men on either side were being
drawn into the radical propaganda.

In 1852 there appeared in print a novel which was destined to affect
the history of the Union as no other novel ever did before or since.
Every historian of that epoch must reckon with "Uncle Tom's Cabin" as
one of the vital forces affecting the history of the time.

The novel was written by Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, who personally
knew very little about slavery except by hearsay. Of necessity it
abounded in inconsistencies, mistakes of facts, and impossibilities
so far as its social depictions were concerned. All these things have
been pointed out by criticism and need not now be recapitulated, the
more because they have no historical importance whatever. But the novel
made a tremendous appeal to the sentiment of humanity in antagonism to
slavery. It argued no question, it offered no statistics, it presented
no thesis. It simply appealed to the sentiments of men, and women, and
children, for the abolition of slavery and its influence was immediate
and well-nigh limitless.

As there are no fixed canons of criticism by which to determine the
artistic merit or the dramatic value of any work of the imagination it
is of course open to those who choose to contend, as many have done,
that Mrs. Stowe's work was not at all great as a creation in fiction
but that its immediate and stupendous success and influence were due
solely to the adventitious circumstances of its publication. But
those adventitious circumstances did not exist in the remote European
countries into whose languages the novel was presently translated and
among whose people it continues to be a classic to this day. These
people knew nothing whatever of American slavery and cared little if
at all about it. They were in no degree influenced in their judgment
of Mrs. Stowe's romance by any of the considerations that vexed the
politics of this Republic. They read the novel because of its intrinsic
and intensely human interest and because of nothing else whatever.

The better judgment would seem to be that "Uncle Tom's Cabin" was a
work of extraordinary dramatic power and phenomenal fitness to appeal
to the sympathies of men. It had for its subject one of the most
picturesque states of society that has ever been known among men and
one so unusual among modern nations that its very rarity added to its
charm as a theme for the romance writer.

There is another important fact which must be taken into consideration
in estimating the influence of that work of fiction. At that time
all the churches frowned upon novel-reading as a sin. A few of T. S.
Arthur's temperance tales were cautiously permitted to the elect,
but as a rule the reading of novels was rigidly forbidden to those
who constituted the congregations of the churches. Even Dickens, who
was then in the midst of his extraordinary popularity, was read only
secretly and with shamefacedness by those who submitted themselves
to the instruction of the clergy. The Methodists in particular--and
Methodism was, as it still is, a very great power in the land--frowned
upon all works of fiction as the devil's agencies for the perversion
of the human mind and the destruction of the human soul. Novel-reading
was classed by all the pulpits of the time with such sins as
Sabbath-breaking, whiskey-drinking, dancing, and other devices of
Satan. The great majority of men and women of that generation were
effectually forbidden to read even the great masterpieces of their
mother tongue, from Shakespeare onward. But here in Mrs. Stowe's work
was a novel approved of all the clergy, a novel which anybody might
virtuously read, and a generation hungry for creative literature
of a date later than the "Pilgrim's Progress" eagerly welcomed the
opportunity to read a novel, full of flesh-and-blood interest, that
appealed strongly to the kindlier and better sentiments of human
nature. The preachers read the book and recommended it to their
parishioners and as a consequence everybody read it--men, women and
children.

Very naturally this universal reading of such a romance greatly
inflamed the sentiment of antagonism to slavery and incidentally
aroused something like hatred of the slaveholder though Mrs. Stowe had
probably not intended that to be the effect of her written words.

There were a dozen or a score of more or less inane novels put forward
in answer to "Uncle Tom's Cabin" but their only effect was to intensify
the interest in that work.

Coming as it did upon the heels of the new and peculiarly offensive
Fugitive Slave Law Mrs. Stowe's romance converted pretty nearly all the
people of the North to the anti-slavery cause and hastened the growth
of the anti-slavery party into formidable proportions. It awakened
sentiment, and sentiment is always an immeasurably more potent factor
in human affairs than mere intellectual conviction is. It enlisted in
the anti-slavery cause every gentle and every rampant impulse of the
people of the North. It rubbed out of multitudes of men's minds every
consideration of constitutional restriction, every thought of states'
rights, every dogma of the law and every decree of the courts. It
quickly bred a new crusade against slavery. It everywhere stimulated
the thought that slavery was a wrong for which the whole Nation was
responsible and the extermination of which, at all costs, the Union was
bound to accomplish as its first and highest duty. In brief, this novel
bred a spirit of abolitionism such as the country had never before
known.

The time had not yet come when any political party could plant
itself, with the smallest hope of success, upon a platform of openly
avowed abolitionism. Those who were ready to advocate an aggressive
political warfare upon the system of slavery where it legally existed
and to insist upon its abolition by force of Federal enactment in
contravention of the Constitution were still in a hopeless minority.
They were opportunists in politics, however, and they saw and seized
their opportunity. If they could not gain all that they desired they
were ready to accept whatever might be accomplished in the direction
of the end they sought. The Free-soil party presented itself to their
minds as an easily available instrumentality. It is true that that
party had expressly and with extreme circumspection disclaimed all
purpose and all constitutional right to interfere with slavery in the
states in which it legally existed. But the avowed antagonism of the
party to the system of slavery rendered it a conveniently available
agency for the execution of the will of those who desired that slavery
should cease to be at all costs. All the abolitionists joined the party
at once, in spite of its voluntary and to them offensive limitation
of its activity to the purpose of preventing the extension of the
slave system into new territories. On the other hand men by scores and
hundreds of thousands throughout the North who would have bitterly
resented the still opprobrious epithet of "abolitionists" eagerly
joined the new party in the undefined but warmly cherished hope that it
might somehow find means of ridding the Republic of the curse and the
scandal of slavery.




CHAPTER VII

THE REPEAL OF THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE, THE KANSAS-NEBRASKA BILL AND
SQUATTER SOVEREIGNTY


The Missouri Compromise was in effect repealed by the compromise
measures of 1850 but there was as yet no formal repeal. The effect of
the compromise measures of 1850 was presently to stir up a greater
strife than ever on the subject of slavery and even to raise new
questions with regard to it. The ultra Southern men began to see that
the Compromise of 1850 had given them practically nothing whatever in
the way of territory out of which to create future slave states.

It had admitted California as a free state. It had opened Utah, which
lay mostly to the north of the dead line, to the possible introduction
of slavery if its future settlers should so decree upon coming into the
Union, as no sane man in any quarter of the country imagined that they
ever would. It had also separated New Mexico which lay mostly south of
the dead line, from the slave state of Texas with a like license to
its future settlers if there should ever be any such, to choose for
themselves whether or not they would permit slavery in their domain.

Neither of these territories promised, at that time, to become a state
within the life of the generation then in being, and in point of fact
neither did. Utah was not admitted to the Union until 1896, long after
the utter abolition of slavery had been accomplished by constitutional
amendment, and New Mexico, at the beginning of the twentieth century is
still a territory of vast area and very small population.

The passage of the Fugitive Slave Law was in fact the only return the
Compromise of 1850 had made to the South for what the South regarded
as a practical surrender of territory that might otherwise have been
molded into slave states. At the North this compensatory enactment
was everywhere regarded as an excessive return for such concessions
as had been made. The great body of the Northern people would not and
could not lend themselves to the execution of a law which offended
their consciences as no other law had ever done. They could not make
themselves, as that law required them to do, participants in a system
which they held to be utterly wrong and iniquitous.

Thus the South felt itself wronged and cheated in the compromise and
the North felt that its conscience had been outraged and its integrity
of mind assailed.

It was altogether inevitable that the calmer consideration and the
discussion of this matter should bring up new questions and create new
situations. The Missouri Compromise had not yet been formally repealed.
That Compromise forbade the creation of slave states out of any part of
the Louisiana territory lying north of the southern line of Missouri,
and by implication it forbade the carrying of slaves into any such
territory prior to its admission as a state. Under the Compromise
Missouri and Arkansas had been admitted to the Union as slave states
and for thirty years the Compromise had stood as a bulwark against
disunion.

But now there appeared a tendency on the part of the territories lying
north of the Missouri Compromise line to become populous. Emigration
seemed to be setting in that direction and the fertility of the region
promised presently to tempt great multitudes of men to settle there.
That part of the territory which now constitutes Kansas was especially
tempting to emigration. The eastern half of Kansas was a part of
the Louisiana Purchase. Its western half was a part of the region
acquired from Mexico. The eastern half of it, therefore, was subject
to the Missouri Compromise's prohibition of slavery while the western
half by virtue of the compromise measures of 1850 was free from that
restriction.

Out of all the conditions here briefly noted there arose at the South
a clamor for the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. Men argued that as
it was only a statute repealable at any session of Congress, and as, in
their contention, it robbed and wronged the slave-holding half of the
Union, it ought to be repealed. At the North it was felt that repeal
would in effect make of slavery a national institution, and rob the
anti-slavery sentiment of the benefit it had secured by consenting to
the admission of Missouri and Arkansas as slave states.

There was a very strong man in the Senate at that time, Stephen A.
Douglas of Illinois. He was a born leader of men, a man of great
ability and courage, and he had ambition to become president of the
United States. He was a master of statecraft and an opportunist in
politics. He had sought some years before to settle the question with
regard to the new territories once for all by enacting a law to extend
the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific, thus excluding slavery
north of that line from all the new as well as from all the older
possessions of the Republic and by implication permitting it south of
that line.

As his proposal was rejected it is not worth while now to speculate
upon what effect its acceptance might have had. In lieu of it the
compromise measures of 1850 were enacted. Their effect was almost
immediately to increase and intensify an inflammation of the popular
mind which it is difficult in our time even to conceive. Senator
Douglas voted for these measures and advocated them strongly in the
Senate. When he returned to his own state at the end of the session
he found himself an object of public hatred and condemnation. The
City Council of Chicago greeted his coming with a set of resolutions
in denunciation of him. The resolutions declared him to be a traitor
and pronounced the compromise measures a violation of the law of God.
The City Council instructed the police, and advised all citizens to
disregard the new laws. A mass meeting was called and by resolution it
declared it to be the duty of all good citizens "to defy death, the
dungeon and the grave" in resisting the Fugitive Slave Law, but so
uncertain was the popular mind, even in its fury, that Douglas promptly
challenged it and met it in a great mass meeting before which he
delivered an impassioned speech explaining his views. By this single
speech he secured an immediate and well-nigh unanimous rescinding of
the resolutions of censure and a little later he was again elected to
represent the state in the Senate.

Three years later, in 1853, on his return from Washington to Illinois
and after he had made himself sponsor for that Kansas-Nebraska Bill of
which an account will presently be given, he picturesquely said that
he had traveled all the way from Washington to Chicago "by the light
of his own burning effigies." Nevertheless when his term expired a few
years later he was again elected to the Senate after a conspicuous
canvass of the state in which his reëlection was practically the only
question at issue and in which Abraham Lincoln was his opponent on the
stump.

It must not be supposed that Northern sentiment on the questions then
dividing the country was uniform. It was on the contrary as sharply
divided as ever, with a distinct preponderance of it in favor of
letting the slavery question rest, so far as legislation was concerned,
where it had been placed by the compromise measures of 1850. But the
sentiment in antagonism to slavery was everywhere growing even among
those who deprecated the agitation of the subject.

The extreme opponents of slavery had taken more advanced ground than
ever before. They denounced the Fugitive Slave Law as a statute which
Congress had no right to enact and which no citizen should obey. They
pointed out that it was in violation of that very doctrine of state
sovereignty to which the advocates of slavery had appealed. The ultra
ones among them planted themselves upon the doctrine first enunciated
by Mr. Seward of New York, that there is a "higher law" than the
statutes or the Constitution, and that men of enlightened consciences
were bound to obey that higher law even to the extent of violating the
statutes, and setting the Constitution at naught.

The time had obviously come when there was no longer any use in
the adoption of compromises or the passage of conciliatory laws by
statesmen whose first concern was for the preservation of the Union.
Compromises were no longer binding upon men's consciences or conduct.
Political parties refused to regard them and even states in their
organized capacity legislated for their nullification, asserting their
right of sovereignty to that extent.

It is obvious that peace could not long continue in a country thus
violently divided against itself in opinion and sentiment. Sooner or
later by one means or another, but with the same certainty that governs
the rising and the setting of the sun, such a condition meant _war_.
In this case it meant that within the Union so afflicted there was
an "irrepressible conflict" of opinion, a conflict that would yield
to no argument, submit itself to no law, accommodate itself to no
circumstance and would stoutly insist upon irreconcilable contentions
on the one side and the other until the matter should be decided by
that last brutal arbitrament of man, a conflict of cannon, musketry,
and mortars.

Precisely that condition of affairs had been reached in the United
States when the compromise measures of 1850 were repudiated, defied
and nullified by both popular and legislative authority. Logically the
war between North and South should have occurred then, and undoubtedly
it would have occurred at that time but for the persistence of that
sentiment of devotion to the Union which still dominated the minds of a
majority of men both at the North and at the South.

It was in obedience to that sentiment that statesmen refused to see the
hopelessness of the situation and went on endeavoring to find some way
out of the difficulty that should bring peace where there was no peace,
and save the Union from disruption.

The trouble with all such efforts was that everything proposed by way
of placating those on one side of the controversy additionally inflamed
those on the other.

The most notable legislative outcome of this vexed situation was the
Kansas-Nebraska Bill, for which Senator Douglas made himself sponsor.
That bill provided for the erection of the two territories, Kansas and
Nebraska, leaving it to those who should settle within that domain to
permit or exclude slavery as they might please when the time should
come for them to apply for admission to the Union as states. By
direct implication at least slaves might freely be taken into those
territories during the period of their territorial existence if the
settlers there so desired.

In justice to the memory of a patriotic statesman who served his
country to the best of his ability, it is only fair that his doctrine
and his opinions shall be presented in his own words.

In the speech by which, in 1850, he placated the animosity that had
greeted him at Chicago, he set forth his thought as follows:

    These measures [the compromise measures of 1850] are predicated
    upon the great fundamental principle that every people ought to
    possess the right of framing and regulating their own internal
    concerns and domestic institutions in their own way.... These
    things are all confided by the constitution to each state to decide
    for itself, and I know of no reason why the same principle should
    not be extended to the territories.

Three years later Mr. Douglas carefully set forth his doctrine again in
the Kansas-Nebraska Bill itself. Referring to the Missouri Compromise,
with its prohibition of slavery in the states to be erected out of
Louisiana territory north of 36° 30´, the bill said:

    Which being inconsistent with the principle of non-intervention by
    Congress with slavery in the states and territories, as recognized
    by the legislation of 1850 ... is hereby declared inoperative and
    void; it being the true intent and meaning of this act not to
    legislate slavery into any territory or state, nor to exclude it
    therefrom, but to leave the people thereof perfectly free to form
    and regulate their domestic institutions in their own way, subject
    only to the Constitution of the United States.

Mr. Douglas's doctrine, popularly known as "Squatter Sovereignty," was
open to criticism on very obvious constitutional and historical grounds.

The original conception of the Union had undoubtedly been that it
was a confederacy of states, each sovereign within itself except in
so far as it had surrendered to the National Government a part of its
sovereignty by accepting the Federal Constitution and entering the
Union. It was deemed an axiom that each state was free by the will
of its own citizens to regulate its domestic affairs in its own way,
permitting or forbidding slavery at its own free will. After the great
slavery controversy arose the South contended still for this doctrine
of states' rights, and by the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, this sovereignty of
the states was extended to the territories also.

The student of history must observe however that that doctrine had been
very greatly impaired if not indeed set aside by the act of Virginia
in ceding her claims in the Northwest Territory and the acceptance
of that cession by the general government. In that cession it had
been stipulated that slavery should never be permitted in any of the
territory thus made a part of the national domain. The cession was
made with the direct intent that the region concerned should presently
be divided and admitted into the Union as a number of states. But
those states were thus forbidden in advance to permit the existence of
slavery within their borders. So far as they were concerned, therefore,
the supposed right of a state to legislate at will on that subject was
taken away from them even before their birth.

Here it would seem there was an abrogation or at least an important
modification of the doctrine of the right of each state to determine
this question for itself, and that modification had been made by
Virginia and everywhere accepted.

The Missouri Compromise in precisely the same manner had taken away
that right of determination from all the states that might be formed
out of the Louisiana territory lying north of the southern line of
Missouri. If the prohibition thus laid upon yet unborn states was
permissible as regards the cession of the Northwest Territory it would
seem to have been equally so with regard to the new domain west of the
Mississippi.

Further than this the sovereign right of a state to determine this
question for itself did not extend at any time to the territories.
Under the Constitution as uniformly interpreted by the Supreme Court of
the United States, Congress is supreme in the territories and may make
any law that it pleases for their governance. In other words the people
of the territories have absolutely no rights of self-government except
such as Congress may from time to time see fit to confer upon them.

This statement is not made speculatively or as an opinion of the
historian. It is a well settled doctrine of constitutional law,
affirmed by every court to which the question has at any time been
submitted.

Senator Douglas's Kansas-Nebraska Bill was based upon an assumption
precisely the reverse of this. It extended to the territories a
sovereignty which under the Constitution belonged only to states, and
which, as has been suggested, the states themselves had in a large
degree surrendered by the acceptance of the cession of the Northwest
Territory.




CHAPTER VIII

THE KANSAS WAR--THE DRED SCOTT DECISION--JOHN BROWN'S EXPLOIT AT
HARPER'S FERRY


With the aid of a considerable Northern vote in Congress the South
succeeded in passing the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, repealing the Missouri
Compromise, and under the doctrine of "Squatter Sovereignty" throwing
all the territories open to slavery at least as a possibility.

The North at once took alarm and the Free-soil party, newly named the
Republican party, grew in numbers and enthusiasm as no other party had
ever done before.

Events mightily aided this growth, driving into the Free-soil or
Republican party many thousands of men who had before held aloof from
a movement which they thought to be dangerous to the perpetuity of the
Union and to peace within its borders.

First of these events was the outbreak of civil war in Kansas. The
repeal of the Missouri Compromise opened that territory at once to
settlement by men from both sections and at the same time opened the
question whether it should become a free or a slave state. Incidentally
a contest of factions began which raged hotly to the end.

Whether Kansas should be a slave state or a free state depended upon
the will of the settlers alone. The land was in many respects a
tempting one to emigrants in spite of the aridity of its western part,
so that even without any incentive of politics its speedy settlement
was quite a matter of course. But politics North and South enormously
aided in that behalf. There was a rush from both sections to fill up
and occupy the land in order to control it. From the Missouri border
and from farther south slaveholders and the representatives of slavery
poured into the territory in great numbers with the purpose of voting
it into the Union as a slave state. In the slang of the period these
were called "border ruffians." On the other hand there was an "assisted
emigration" from the North, the emigration of men whose way was paid in
consideration of their votes and their rifle practice against slavery
in Kansas. These called themselves "Free State Men" but they were
called by their adversaries "Jayhawkers."

In order to promote the emigration of these men to Kansas societies
were formed in Massachusetts and other states which not only paid
their way but furnished them with rifles of an improved pattern and
ammunition in plenty, with the distinct understanding that it was their
duty to ply both the bullet and the ballot in aid of the cause they
represented.

These two groups of men quickly fell by the ears, as it was intended
that they should, and civil war in the strictest sense of that term
ensued.

John Brown--an able, adventurous, and fanatical man--took command of
the free state forces and between him and his adversaries there was
a contest for supremacy which involved every outrage to which civil
war, waged by uncivilized man, can give birth. Small battles were
fought. Men on either side were shot or hanged without mercy. Homes
were desolated. Women and children were driven forth to suffer all the
agonies of starvation, of cold, and of homelessness--all in aid of the
voting one way or the other.

In our time such a situation in a territory subject to national control
would be instantly ended by the sending of troops to the disturbed
region with instructions to preserve order, to suppress all manner
of lawlessness, and to protect all citizens equally in the enjoyment
of the peaceful possession of the land. But in the fifties the
government of the United States was still unused to such exercise of
its authority--parties were too evenly divided, political feeling was
too hot and voters were far too sensitive, to admit of such a treatment
of the situation as would in our time seem quite a matter of course.
Troops were sent to Kansas, it is true, but in quite insufficient
numbers and under inadequate instructions. So the war in Kansas went on
and otherwise peaceful citizens of the Union actively aided it upon the
one side or the other quite as if it had not been a civil war within
the Union and in a territory in which the authority of Congress was
supreme beyond even the possibility of question.

At the South companies of armed men were organized, equipped, and sent
into Kansas nominally to settle there and vote to make a slave state of
the territory, but really, if possible, to drive out every "Free State"
man or to overawe or overcome them all, so that the voting might be
all one way. At the North similar companies of men were organized and
armed and aided to emigrate for the purpose of doing very much the same
thing to the representatives of slavery and achieving a contrary result
at the ballot box.

Many of the men on both sides were not genuine settlers at all
but merely armed bandits engaged in a mission of violence. Yet on
both sides they were supported, encouraged, and defended in their
lawlessness by the pulpit, the press, and every other agency of
civilization.

Elections were held in the territory in which both sides voted
their men without question as to their age, the length of their
residence within the territory or any other qualification for voting
which the loose laws of the time provided. Every devilish device
of fraud and swindling that had up to that time been invented by
ingeniously unscrupulous politicians was employed on the one side or
the other without so much as a qualm of conscience or a scruple of
conventionality.

It was _war_ that these men were engaged in and elections were a mere
pretense. War habitually has no scruples as to the means it uses
for the overcoming of an adversary. On each side men voted who had
arrived within the territory just in time for the election, cheerfully
perjuring themselves in order to do so, an incident which nobody seemed
to regard as a serious matter. Each side voted its men as often as it
could under the loose election laws of the time and in some cases that
was very often. Ballot boxes were stuffed with fraudulent votes by one
side and were seized and destroyed by the other.

Conventions fraudulently chosen by such practices as these framed
constitutions which were one after another rejected by Congress.

The story need not be told here in further detail. The struggle
continued until the end of the decade and it was not until after the
Confederate War had begun that the territory was admitted to the Union
as a state. In the meanwhile the eyes and minds of all the people in
the country were concentrated upon that center of disturbance and the
situation there enormously increased the intensity of that acrimony
which already characterized the relations of men North and South.

Another event which tended to increase the acrimony between the two
sections of the country and ultimately to bring about war was the
rendering of the "Dred Scott" decision, which alarmed and intensely
angered the North.

Dred Scott was a negro slave in Missouri, owned by an army surgeon who,
about twenty years before, had taken him as a servant to an army post
in Illinois. Under the laws of Illinois any slave taken by his master
into that state was by that act set free.

Dred Scott remained however in the position of a slave and after a time
he was taken back to Missouri. There he was sold to a new master whom
he presently sued for assault on the ground that his former master had
in effect set him free by voluntarily taking him into a free state, and
that therefore he was not liable to sale or to a chastisement at the
hands of a master.

The negro won in the lower courts but was defeated upon appeal. Later,
circumstances enabled him to bring suit in the United States Court,
and finally the case went on appeal to the Supreme Court of the United
States. The questions directly and indirectly involved in it were of
so great national and political interest that four of the greatest
constitutional lawyers in all the land volunteered to argue it--two
of them on the one side and two upon the other. The argument was a
contest of intellectual giants with the whole country looking on and
listening. At the end of it the judgment of the court was rendered by
Chief Justice Taney in March, 1857. The decision negatived all of Dred
Scott's contentions and it affirmed principles that were even more
offensive to Northern sentiment than its negations were. It amounted in
fact to a judgment that state laws setting free such slaves as might
be brought into the states concerned by voluntary act of their masters
were null and void. It expressly declared unconstitutional that part of
the Missouri Compromise which forbade slavery in territories north of
36° 30´ north latitude.

So completely did the court decide upon the slavery side of the
question that Thomas H. Benton, the great Democratic senator from
Missouri, characterized this deliberate and very carefully considered
judgment of the Supreme Court as one which made slavery the organic law
of the land with freedom as a casual exception.

The victory of the pro-slavery radicals was here complete. The decision
gave them the definite judgment of that Supreme Court whose decisions
rise above congressional enactment and set aside statutes,--that court
from whose judgments there is nowhere any appeal to any other authority
on earth--in behalf of their most extreme contentions.

If that decision had been accepted by the people, as the decisions of
the Supreme Court usually are, it would indeed have made slavery a
national institution subject only to such limitations as the individual
states might impose upon it within their own borders and without
interference with slaveholders who might choose to take their slaves
into free states and hold them there.

But the victory of the slave advocates--complete as it was--gave
them no practical advantage. Such a doctrine as that laid down by
the court simply could not find acceptance in the minds of men at
the North. Logically it ought not to have found acceptance with the
ultra pro-slavery men of the South for the reason that it distinctly
negatived that contention for states' rights and state sovereignty upon
which they relied in their contest with their adversaries.

Unfortunately for them, in the course of his decision Chief Justice
Taney used one unhappy phrase which gave even greater offense perhaps
than the decision itself did. That phrase was in fact no part of the
decision but was what the lawyers call an _obiter dictum_--a saying
apart. It was a mere statement of what the Chief Justice believed to
be a fact of history. It was not at all a ruling of the court. As an
illustration of his meaning he made the perfectly true statement that
before the time of the American Revolution--and he might have included
a much later date--the negroes "_had been regarded_ as beings of an
inferior order and altogether unfit to associate with the white race
either in social or political relations; and so far inferior that they
had _no rights which the white man was bound to respect_; and that the
negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit."

This statement of fact as to the attitude of the public mind toward the
negro before the Revolution was entirely correct, as every educated
reader knows, and as the history of the African slave-trade--carried
on not only before the adoption of the Constitution but for a dozen
years after 1808 when the constitutional prohibition of that nefarious
traffic went into effect--perfectly and completely shows.

But Chief Justice Taney's simple statement of this historical fact was
everywhere interpreted to be a part of his legal decision. This was
natural enough under the circumstances for the reason that slavery
itself, in behalf of which the decision seemed to have been rendered,
rested solely upon the doctrine that a negro has no rights which the
white man is bound to respect.

Even if this unfortunate phrase had not been used and even if it
had not been misinterpreted as it was, the decision itself must of
necessity have wrought something like a revolution in the thought of
the Northern people. The most conservative among them had reconciled
themselves to the existence of slavery in certain of the states upon
the ground that each state had a right to legislate for itself upon
that question and therefore that each state was alone responsible
for its own legislation. They were startled now by the challenge of
a Supreme Court decision which denied to them even this relief of
conscience and even this liberty of individual state action. They were
asked to accept the doctrine that slavery was a national institution
against which state laws were futile except in a very limited way.

This extreme decision in favor of slavery, coming as it did at the
very time when civil war was on in Kansas, not only inflamed public
sentiment at the North but alarmed it. Already the political party
opposed to the extension of slavery had mightily grown in numbers and
in enthusiasm. In 1852 it had cast less than 157,000 votes. In 1856 its
vote amounted to 1,341,264, carrying with it 114 electoral votes as
against 174 secured by its chief antagonist and eight thrown away on a
third candidate.

During that four years the Anti-slavery party had drawn to itself
through force of circumstance all of the Free-soil Democracy and the
greater part of the Northern Whigs.

In 1856 for the first time in the Republic's history the election
of a president was contested by a party strictly sectional in its
composition and the fact was alarming not only at the South but almost
equally so at the North. The conviction was general that such a contest
meant mischief for the country. It was the first sure foreboding of
that war which was destined to come a little later between the sections.

The Republican party existed exclusively at the North. It made no
pretense of existing in the Southern half of the Republic. It did not
even go through the empty form of nominating electors in the Southern
states either in 1856 or four years later in 1860. It did not hope in
either of those years for a single electoral vote from any state lying
south of the Potomac or the Ohio. Its purpose was to carry the election
and to control the country by a strictly sectional and geographical
vote--a thing that had never before been attempted or thought of by
any party, and a thing the very suggestion of which caused great alarm
throughout the country. For, men anxiously asked, if one section
of the Union is thus to dominate the other how shall we be able to
maintain the Union in its present disturbed and distracted condition?
Hitherto, they reflected, majorities have been drawn from all the
states in contests that were purely national in their inspiration
and in their significance, and all men have held themselves bound to
submit to the will of such majorities, as representing the ultimate
judgment of all the states and all the people; but, they anxiously
asked themselves, how long will the states or the people of one part
of the country consent to be governed by the elected candidates of a
party which exists solely in the other part of the country; a party
which does not even ask for votes except in that other part, in support
of its candidates; a party whose platform is one of avowed hostility
to the industrial, social and domestic labor system of the southern
half of the Republic; a party which has no existence or recognition
or representation in that part of the Union, and which includes among
its most active and aggressive members those who openly declare their
purpose to overthrow the domestic institutions of the South, in
defiance of all constitutional guarantees, and by any means that may
be available, even including servile war in states where the negroes
outnumber the whites by two or three to one?

Considerations of this kind undoubtedly restrained many voters at the
North in the election of 1856, and for a time after that election there
seemed to be a promise of peace in the influence of conservatism on the
one side and on the other in spite of what was going on in Kansas.

At the same time the state of feeling throughout the country was
well-nigh indistinguishable from that which prevails during the
existence of actual civil war. Only the old devotion to the Union which
existed in both the Northern and Southern mind prevented men from
flying at each other's throats.

Then, as if to emphasize the inevitableness of war and to hasten its
coming, there occurred the raid of John Brown at Harper's Ferry,
Virginia, in the autumn of 1859--only a year before a presidential
election must occur.

John Brown had been the chief leader of the Free State men in the
warlike operations in Kansas. He was a man of extraordinary fanaticism,
limitless daring, large capacity, and relentless determination. His
hostility to slavery knew absolutely no bounds. With a courage which
had no balance wheel of discretion to regulate it, he had no hesitation
in undertaking great enterprises with ridiculously inadequate means,
and in the end he showed that he had no flinching from the personal
consequences of his acts.

In June, 1859, he went secretly to the neighborhood of Harper's
Ferry, with a band so small that even after its reinforcement it was
manifestly inadequate to be trusted by any but a madman to accomplish
the work that Brown had laid out for it to do. He was both morally and
materially supported by men of wealth and influence at the North who
blindly entrusted him with arms, ammunition, and money, not knowing or
inquiring whither he was going or what his purposes might be.

By the end of June, 1859, he had established himself near Harper's
Ferry with a band of devoted followers about him. One by one the men
who had enlisted in his service joined him until the company numbered
twenty-two. Still his purpose was wholly unsuspected by his Virginian
neighbors.

In the meanwhile the two hundred rifles contributed by George L.
Stearns of Medford, Mass., in aid of the Kansas controversy, were
delivered to John Brown who had, besides, a war chest of five hundred
dollars in gold given to him by Boston enthusiasts in aid of an
enterprise concerning which they had no definite information whatsoever.

His purpose was to establish in the mountain fastnesses near Harper's
Ferry a fugitive slave camp which a few men could easily defend while
the rest of those coming into it could be run off to Canada and
freedom with ease and certainty. In effect he contemplated a general
insurrection of the slaves, their concentration in easily defensible
mountain camps and their removal to Canada from these military posts as
rapidly as that end could be accomplished.

This program if successful could have resulted in nothing less than a
slave insurrection and a bloody servile war.

But John Brown's program failed of its accomplishment for two reasons.
There was far less of active discontent among the negroes of northern
Virginia than John Brown had supposed. Most of those negroes in fact
were entirely satisfied with their condition and treatment and so they
refused to flee to him for rescue from an oppression which they did not
feel.

It is noteworthy that Frederick Douglass, the ablest representative
of the negro race and by all odds the ablest negro representative of
abolitionism, disapproved and discouraged John Brown's enterprise.
Especially Frederick Douglass advised against John Brown's policy
of making war upon the United States. That was the second and the
controlling cause of his failure. It seems to have been his thought
that with the country in the tempestuous condition it was then in he
might hopefully assail the National Government itself and that in such
an assault he would have behind him the entire Northern people. How
badly he misunderstood the signs of the times the events clearly show.

On the 16th of October, 1859, he marched with eighteen men upon the
undefended United States arsenal at Harper's Ferry, broke down its
doors and took forcible possession of the premises.

This in itself was an easy thing to do for the reason that the
Government, seeing no occasion to apprehend violence of such sort, had
made no adequate provision for the defense of its arsenal. But John
Brown's act was a direct, open, and flagrant levying of war against the
United States and it was promptly treated as such by the Government at
Washington. A force of marines was sent to Harper's Ferry to eject the
intruder and to repossess the national arsenal.

There was a little skirmish. Many of John Brown's men were killed and
he and his surviving companions were promptly made prisoners, tried for
treason, convicted and hanged.

In the number of men engaged, in the amount of damage done, and in
its immediate consequences this raid of John Brown's was a matter
of no moment whatever. It was conspicuously a failure so far as its
ulterior purpose of inducing slaves to flee from bondage and engage in
insurrection was concerned. It was still more conspicuously a failure
in so far as it meant war upon the United States. A single company of
marines brought it to an end without the necessity of calling in any
larger force. But the raid had a very important influence nevertheless,
upon the future history of the country.

It illustrated and emphasized as no previous event had done, the
implacability of the sentiment hostile to slavery. It demonstrated,
as the fact had never been demonstrated before, the hopelessly
irrepressible character of the controversy concerning slavery. It
alarmed and angered the South as it had never been alarmed and angered
before. It indicated to the Southern people the fact that there were
agencies active at the North which would stop at nothing that might
help to the abolition of slavery; that even a servile war, with all
the brutality and bloodthirstiness that servile war must mean to the
South, was lightly contemplated by a certain and rapidly growing
Northern opinion, as a legitimate means for the accomplishment of
abolition. It indicated an implacability of sentiment against which
there seemed to be no defense except in that dissolution of the
Union which the extremists on both sides had so long and so freely
invoked as a remedy for the hopeless division of the Republic into two
antagonistic camps.

John Brown's invasion would have counted for little if it had stood
alone. But the rifles that he had in possession, with which to arm
fugitive slaves, had been contributed by a citizen of Massachusetts
under urgency of conspicuous representatives of the political party
that sought the abolition of slavery. The five hundred dollars that
Brown carried with him as a part of the equipment with which he hoped
to create a servile war, was contributed by Boston citizens and
represented a hostility as unkind as it was unlawful. The sanction
given to John Brown's insane and treasonable raid by many newspapers
and a certain part of the public at the North served to convince even
the most moderate and conservative men at the South that there was no
longer any hope or prospect of reconciliation between the two sections
upon any basis of reasonable and mutual concession.

It was in this mood that the country approached the presidential
election of 1860. On either side there was a strongly surviving love
for the Federal Union, an abiding conviction that it alone could
guarantee the perpetuity of the American idea of local self-government
and personal liberty. But on either side there was an aggressive party
of disunion which must be reckoned with in politics. On the side of the
North the disunionist party desired and insisted upon the utter and
immediate and unconditional abolition of slavery as the sole condition
of the Union's further existence. On the Southern side the extremists
demanded that slavery should be recognized and protected as a national
institution, with local and state freedom from it as a casual incident
which should in no way be permitted to interfere with the right of the
slaveholder to hold his slaves in bondage even when his convenience
led him to carry them into any free state; and still further that the
people of every territory should be free to decide for themselves
whether or not slavery should be permitted within the domain controlled
by them. Between these two opposing parties stood the overwhelming but
rapidly weakening majority of the people, insisting that the perpetuity
of the Union was of greater importance to liberty than either the
maintenance or the extinction of slavery.

How these forces fought the matter out must be the subject of another
chapter.




CHAPTER IX

THE ELECTION OF 1860


When the time came to nominate candidates for the presidential election
of 1860, something akin to despair had seized upon the minds of men--a
despair that discouraged hopeful conservatism and prompted many to
courses that could promise nothing other than disaster to the Union.

In the event, the election of that year showed that there was a
majority of nearly a million votes against the Republican party, in
a total vote of about four and a half millions. There was still an
overwhelming majority of the people, therefore, who regarded the
preservation and perpetuity of the Republic as the paramount concern.
There is every reason to believe that if circumstances had so shaped
themselves as to put that matter immediately in issue, and if the
contest could have been fairly fought out between the two opposing
sentiments the majority of nearly a million votes cast against what
was regarded as a sectional party, representing a purely geographical
sentiment, would have been swelled to two millions or more. For in all
parts of the country the Union was still an object of adoration and the
Constitution remained a text-book of patriotic study.

But the battle was not destined to be fought out on those lines. Those
whose supreme concern was for the preservation of the Republic, with
all that it signified of self-government among men, were divided in
council and were in consequence defeated. It sounds like a paradox,
but it is a simple statement of fact to say that the disruption of the
Union was brought about by the disunion of the Union forces.

The story is an interesting bit of history and a most significant one.
But in order to understand it clearly the reader should bear in mind
the excessively strained state of feeling in the country which has
already been set forth in these pages. In aid of that let us briefly
recapitulate.

The events of the recently preceding years had gone far to unseat
conservatism, to breed a hopeless discouragement, and to induce a very
general despair. The civil war in Kansas had been lawless, criminal and
murderous on both sides.

It is impossible for any honest mind to approve the doings of the men
on either side in that struggle, or to regard them otherwise than as
criminal attempts to substitute force for law and fraud for freedom of
the ballot.

Yet on each side the _tu quoque_ argument was freely and justly used;
on either side the criminal doings of the partisans of that side were
regarded as a necessary offset to the criminal doings of the partisans
of the other side. At the North the "free state men" were encouraged
and supported by a large part of the press and pulpit. Great preachers
pleaded from their sacred desks for contributions of money with which
to arm the Northern men for this conflict. Great leaders of radical
opinion employed the press and platform in the like behalf.

On the other hand, at the South, with a far less orderly organization
of the forces that control popular opinion and action, there was
an equally strong disposition manifested to support and encourage
those Southern youths who had gone into Kansas to struggle for the
establishment of slavery there. And on each side there was a manifest
willingness to shut eyes to such lawlessness and such crime as the
partisans of that side might find it necessary and convenient to commit
in behalf of the "cause" they were set to serve.

Then had followed John Brown's attempt at Harper's Ferry to bring about
that most terrible of all catastrophes, a slave insurrection. The
attempt itself was so absurd in its lack of means conceivably adequate
to the end proposed, and so clearly the work of a madman in that it
involved a direct assault upon a national arsenal, making itself thus
the insane challenge of a mere handful of men to the whole power of the
United States, that it might have been dismissed from men's minds as
men are accustomed to dismiss the vagaries of demented persons, but for
one fact. The John Brown raid was seriously and earnestly approved by
so many persons and pulpits and prints at the North, as was shown by
funeral services and otherwise, that it was regarded at the South as
a preliminary, typical, and threateningly suggestive manifestation of
what Northern sentiment intended to do to the South whenever it should
have the necessary power. How largely it was thus sanctioned was
later shown by the fact that during the succeeding war the song that
celebrated John Brown's raid made itself a national anthem declaring
that in the advance of the national armies his "soul was marching on."

To the Southern people John Brown's attempt to stir up servile
insurrection meant all of horror, all of slaughter, all of outrage to
women and children that it is possible to conceive. It meant to them
the overturning of society. It meant the dominance of a subject and
inferior race outnumbering the whites in many states, a race ignorant
and passionate in Virginia and Kentucky, and well-nigh savage in the
cotton states. It meant rapine and murder--rape, outrage and burning.

There were still many at the South who desired and earnestly advocated
the extirpation of slavery by any means that could be adopted with
tolerable safety to Southern homes, but John Brown's program of
abolition by servile war--a program which seemed to them to be accepted
by Northern public sentiment--offered them a threat of desolation
against which, if they were men, they were bound to revolt with all
the force they could command. It called into instant and aggressive
activity that fundamental impulse of humanity, the all-controlling
instinct of self-preservation.

On the other side the increasingly insistent demand of the Southern
extremists for the nationalization of slavery and their apparent
ability to force such nationalization, through fugitive slave laws
against which the consciences even of the most devoted lovers of
the Union at the North revolted, and through the decisions of the
Supreme Court, bred in that quarter a similar despair of lasting
union. Hundreds of thousands who did not sympathize with the purpose
to stir up servile war despairingly felt that the time had come when
the demands of what was called "the slave power" must be resisted at
any and all risks, and resigned themselves to the employment of any
means that might be found necessary to that end. They felt that all
compromises had failed, that all efforts to enable this Nation, as Mr.
Lincoln phrased it, "permanently to endure half slave and half free,"
had been defeated and shown to be futile.

In brief, on both sides of the line of cleavage, a spirit of despairing
readiness for any remedy, however drastic it might be, had been created
by the inexorable circumstances of the "irrepressible conflict."

There is no doubt whatever that if the situation had been clearly
understood, nine in ten of all Northern people would have shrunk with
horror from such a program of destruction as that which John Brown's
raid implied and intended--namely the overthrow of the United States
Government and the inauguration of a servile insurrection at the South.

But the conditions were not clearly understood upon either side. Upon
neither side did the people really know precisely how the facts of
the situation presented themselves to the people on the other side.
On neither side was there enough of calm, impartial deliberation to
distinguish between the excesses of sentiment and conduct and provoking
self-assertion on the part of extremists on the other side and the
settled purposes of the great majority. Still worse, on neither side
was there enough resolute calmness to relegate the small body of
extremists to their proper place as a minority, and to take matters out
of their hands.

The thought of secession rapidly gained ground at the South. The
"slangy" slogan of N. P. Banks--"Let the Union slide"--was accepted as
a policy by increasing multitudes at the North.

It was in such conditions that political parties made their
preparations for the presidential campaign of 1860.

The Democratic party represented the only opposition to Republicanism
which had any hope or possibility of success. It was in a clear and
commanding majority in the Nation. The old Whig party had dwindled to
a remnant, and the greater part of that remnant would have voted for
the Democratic candidate in an election directly presenting the issue
of Democracy and nationalism against Republicanism and a geographical
division of the people into parties.

But the Democratic party was itself hopelessly divided. The radical
pro-slavery men at the South had made up their minds to disunion as
a thing desirable and necessary. They did not want the Democratic or
any other national party to win unless they could themselves dominate
and control it. The extreme men among them wanted the Republicans to
succeed in the election in order that there might be an excuse for
secession.

The Democratic nominating convention met at Charleston, S. C., on April
23, 1860. Senator Stephen A. Douglas from the beginning was the first
choice of a majority of the delegates as the party's candidate, but
he could not command that two-thirds' vote which the party had always
insisted upon as a condition precedent to nomination. In his Illinois
campaign against Lincoln in 1858, Douglas had been logically forced to
make certain admissions as to the right of the people in a territory
to exclude slavery from it before it became a state, which deeply
offended the extremists of the South. There was also in effective play
the active desire of these extremists to disrupt the party and secure
its defeat as a pretext for secession. To have nominated Douglas at
that time would have been to elect him with absolute certainty, and to
have elected him in 1860 would have been to postpone the program of
secession for at least four years.

So from the beginning to the end the radical pro-slavery men held
out against Douglas's nomination. They in the end seceded from the
convention and after ten days of fruitless wrangling that body
adjourned without making a nomination or adopting a platform, to meet
again at Baltimore on the eighteenth of June.

This second meeting of the convention was the signal for still further
and bitterer wrangling. The Southerners again withdrew and in the end
two candidates were nominated--Douglas by that part of the convention
which claimed to be national and Breckinridge by the Southern wing.

This was a direct invitation to defeat. It not only compelled such a
division of the Democratic vote as to render the success of either
Democratic candidate impossible, but it was accompanied by the still
further division of the forces opposed to the strictly sectional and
geographical Republican party. The old Whigs and those in sympathy with
their desire to preserve the Union if possible, had met in convention
in Baltimore on the ninth of May, adopted, as their platform,
resolutions pledging devotion to "the Union, the Constitution and the
enforcement of the laws," and under the name of "the Constitutional
Union party" nominated John Bell of Tennessee for president and Edward
Everett of Massachusetts for vice-president.

Their purpose was to bring to bear for the preservation of the
Union the votes of a large body of men who would not vote for the
Republican candidate on the one hand or for either of the Democratic
candidates--presently to be nominated--on the other. Their hope was
that among four candidates there would be no election, and that in an
election by states in the House of Representatives their candidate
might be chosen as one upon whom lovers of the Union could unite
without regard to party.

When the election came they polled no less than 589,581 votes and
carried thirty-nine electoral votes against Douglas's twelve and
Breckinridge's seventy-two. But their hope of throwing the election
into the House of Representatives was doomed to disappointment.

The Republican convention met at Chicago on May 16, and after some
contest nominated Mr. Lincoln. When all the nominations were made,
presenting three candidates in opposition to him, Mr. Lincoln's
election was practically certain, with only the remote chance that the
choice might be thrown into the House of Representatives, as a possible
doubt of that result. In fact he was elected, though the majority
against him on the popular vote was nearly a million.

In the meantime the canvass had mightily tended to additional
embitterment. It had drawn the line more sharply than ever between the
sections. It had completely disrupted and scattered into three warring
groups all those forces that stood out against a party which had no
being except in one section of the Union. It had familiarized men's
minds with the idea of disunion. It had been a campaign of threats and
defiances. It had well-nigh made an end of conservatism as a sentiment
influential on either side. It had intensified distrust, accentuated
hatred, embittered the relations of men, and prepared the minds of the
people North and South for disunion and war.

The time had come which statesmen had so long foreboded when threats of
disunion--oft repeated on both sides and usually received scoffingly as
mere vaporings--took on a seriously menacing character. The time had
come when the warring sectional interests, prejudices and principles
were ready to make final appeal to the brutal arbitrament of steel
and gunpowder. The situation had been strained to the breaking point,
and the fact that it did not break at once was due to conditions and
inspirations which need another chapter for their explanation.




CHAPTER X

THE BIRTH OF WAR


The election of Mr. Lincoln filled the whole country with alarmed
apprehension. At the North no less than at the South men anxiously
asked of themselves and of their neighbors "What is going to happen?"

What had already happened was something unprecedented in the history of
the country. On its face it was merely the election of a president by
a majority of the electoral college vote, against whose election there
had been a heavy popular majority.

The like had happened several times before and the occurrence had never
before excited the least apprehension or created the least alarm or
suggested the smallest protest. It had been accepted in every case
as a natural result of our complex electoral system, which combines
representation of population with representation of the states as such
without regard to population, and which gives to each state the right
to cast the whole of its electoral vote in accordance with the will
of a majority of its people. It was a recognized fact that under this
system a president might easily be chosen by a minority vote of the
people, provided that minority vote was so distributed among the states
as to secure an electoral majority in his behalf. There was no ground
of complaint, therefore, and in fact no complaint was anywhere made,
that Mr. Lincoln was elected in the face of an adverse majority of
about 950,000 popular votes.

But there was a much more significant, and, as it seemed to many minds,
a much more alarming fact behind his election. That election was
purely and exclusively sectional. Of the one hundred eighty electoral
votes cast for him, not one had come from any state lying south of the
Potomac or the Ohio nor had his candidacy been supported in the popular
vote by even a handful in that half of the country. Both on the popular
and on the electoral vote his support had been purely geographical, and
even on geographical lines it had been little more than a majority. In
the slave states he had had no support at all, while in the free states
taken by themselves his popular majority was only 186,964, the vote of
the free states standing 1,731,182 for him and 1,544,218 against him.

In other words, Mr. Lincoln was elected in face of an adverse popular
majority of about 950,000 in the whole country, by a narrow popular
majority of less than 200,000 in one section of the country. He was the
candidate of a party which had absolutely no existence in the southern
part of the Republic, and which existed avowedly only in antagonism to
the institutions of that part of the country.

For the first time in the history of the Republic there had occurred
a purely geographical election. For the first time, as the South
interpreted the matter, one section of the country had assumed the
right to govern another. For the first time a party dominating one
section by a narrow majority and having no shadow of existence in the
other section had come into power with authority to rule both, so far
at least as executive and administrative power was concerned. For the
first time that geographical division of the country had occurred in
fear and dread of which as a possibility so many of the original states
had hesitated to ratify the Constitution itself.

Worse still, so far as the future of the Republic was concerned,
this purely geographical election had been sought and secured upon a
purely geographical and sectional question. Refine the matter as the
platform-makers might, and qualify and explain policies as the party
did, the fact was as apparent then as it is now that the sole reason
for the Republican party's existence was hostility to slavery and an
earnest desire to abolish that institution in this land by whatever
means there might be available to that end. That purpose alone held
together in political union the otherwise discordant elements of which
the party was composed. In other words a party founded exclusively
upon hostility to the domestic institutions of the Southern States had
elected a president by means of a purely sectional and geographical
vote, against the expressed will of the people as reflected in a
popular majority of nearly a million ballots.

These facts of history are here set forth not by way of condemnation
and not at all with any intent to criticise them or the authors of
them adversely, but solely in aid of understanding. They are set
forth in order that the reader who was not born early enough in the
nineteenth century to remember them may understand the conditions and
circumstances that gave birth to the war.

The election of Mr. Lincoln under these circumstances and in this way
was accepted by the extreme pro-slavery men at the South as a challenge
to them to dissolve the Union if they dared. They proceeded to accept
the challenge, but their influence was not dominant in Virginia or
in those states which looked to Virginia for guidance in this crisis
and the lack of such dominance was an embarrassment to them. South
Carolina, in which state the extremists were most influential, adopted
an ordinance of secession on the twentieth of December, 1860. The other
cotton states followed South Carolina's lead until seven of them were
counted as seceding states. But Virginia resolutely held aloof, and
North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Missouri awaited
Virginia's leadership, while Maryland and Delaware stood firmly by the
Union.

Without these states the attempt to disrupt the Union would of course
have been an absurdity from the beginning. But unless Virginia could
be drawn into the movement the other border states were resolute to
withhold themselves from it, for the double reason that Virginia's
influence as the mother of the states concerned was paramount, and that
Virginia's geographical position, the numbers of her population, her
importance in American history and her productiveness of those supplies
upon which military operations must depend, rendered that state an
absolutely indispensable member of the new Confederacy if its war of
independence was to be in the least degree hopeful of success.

The seceding states sent delegates to a convention at Montgomery,
Alabama, in early February, 1861, and there set themselves up as a new
and independent republic under the name of "The Confederate States
of America." But neither Virginia nor the other border states were
represented in that convention.

Virginia, on the fourth of February, elected a constitutional
convention to consider the question of secession. The result of that
election was altogether hostile to the purposes of the secessionists.
An overwhelming majority of the convention elected on that date
consisted of men resolutely opposed to the policy of secession.

Here a nice distinction must be made. The Virginians generally, and
their accredited representatives in the constitutional convention,
believed absolutely and without a shadow of questioning in the
constitutional right of any state to secede from the Union at will.
They agreed also in the conviction that the National Government had
no constitutional right or power to use force of any kind in order to
prevent the secession of any state or in order to compel its return to
the Union.

But while they held these doctrines to be absolutely indisputable,
the Virginians resolutely rejected secession as a policy. They saw
nothing in Mr. Lincoln's election to justify a resort to so extreme
a remedy, and they refused their assent to that method of procedure.
It is important to bear in mind the distinction between the Virginian
conception of states' rights and the Virginian conception of policy
in the conditions created by Mr. Lincoln's election, because upon
that distinction hung the issue of peace or war in the Republic. For
nothing could be more certain than that without Virginia's pith and
substance, and without the assistance of the states that waited for
Virginia's decision before rendering their own, the cotton states would
not have undertaken, seriously, a war of independence, or if they had
done so, would not have been able to maintain their struggle against
the Federal power for any considerable time.

Everything hinged upon Virginia's course and Virginia resolutely
repudiated the policy of secession, denying that Mr. Lincoln's election
afforded any just occasion or any sufficient excuse for a resort to
that extreme remedy.

Accordingly all the forces of secession were brought to bear upon
Virginia. All the hotheads in the state and many from other states,
were set to make speeches. Most of the newspapers were purchased and
placed in control of intemperate radicals who could be depended upon
to make life not worth living for any man who hesitated to precipitate
war. John M. Daniel, a gifted man of extreme views and highly
intemperate prejudices, came home from his consular mission abroad
and resumed control of his newspaper, the Richmond _Examiner_, only
to make of its columns a daily terror to every man in the convention
or out of it who ventured to hope for peace and the perpetuity of the
Union, through the efforts of John J. Crittenden's peace conference or
through any other conceivable agency of compromise or reconciliation.
Commodore, and afterwards Admiral, Farragut--himself a Southerner, and
a resident at that time of Virginia,--said that Virginia was "dragooned
out of the Union." The phrase is not quite accurately descriptive of
what happened, but at any rate it correctly describes the attempts
made to compel Virginia's secession and to secure with it the addition
of all the strength of all the border states to the newly formed
Confederacy.

The dragooning was attempted, but Virginia refused to yield. Her
convention, undoubtedly representing with accuracy the will of her
people, held out in opposition to every suggestion of the state's
withdrawal from the Union.

Virginia stood thus as a bulwark against civil war for more than two
moons, and there is little doubt that her influence and her attitude
would have been effectual in preventing the war if only a technicality
had been put aside in order that Virginia might not be forced to array
herself against that Union of which she was largely the author and to
which she still clung with loyal allegiance.

When in the middle of April, 1861, after the bombardment of Fort
Sumter, Mr. Lincoln issued a call for 75,000 men to form an army with
which to coerce the seceding states into submission, and included
Virginia in that call, the Virginians felt themselves bound to choose
between a secession for which they saw no possible occasion, on the one
hand, and the lending of Virginia's power on the other to a program of
coercion for which they recognized no constitutional warrant and no
moral right. In making such a choice they saw but one honorable course
open to them. A convention which had stood out against secession in
face of vituperation, contumely and every other force that could be
brought to bear in that behalf, voted for secession at the last as an
alternative to injustice and dishonor.

This act--which the wisely diplomatic omission of Virginia from the
call for troops would have averted--made the war not only possible but
a fact.

But this is getting well ahead of the story. Let us go back.

Mr. Lincoln was elected on the sixth of November, 1860. He could not
take his seat until the fourth of March, 1861. In the meantime the
Government must remain in the hands of the peculiarly irresolute
administration of James Buchanan, whose sole concern seemed to be to
postpone the outbreak of actual hostilities until the expiration of his
own term of office.

Commissioners were sent to him from the seceding states to arrange for
the peaceful dissolution of the Union. He had no constitutional power
to negotiate with them and he very properly refused to receive them
in their official capacity. But on the other hand he did absolutely
nothing to prevent or to check or in any way to interfere with the
organization of the seceding states as a power in open resistance to
the Union. It is a fact now apparent to all students of history that
but for Virginia's refusal to join the secession movement, carrying
with it as it did the refusal of the other border states, there would
have been an organized power ready, upon Mr. Lincoln's accession to
office, to assert and maintain the independence of the Southern states
against any force that the North could have brought to bear against
them.

The regular United States army at that time was ridiculously inadequate
in numbers to undertake any enterprise of consequence. Its feeble
forces were scattered from Maine to Texas, from Florida to Oregon.
Its hands were more than full with the task of holding the Indians in
subjection and protecting the borders against the ravages of savage
war. The Buchanan administration called no volunteers into the field,
while in every Southern state there were musterings at every county
seat and military organizations of a formidable character.

In the meantime the newly elected president and those who supported him
had no opportunity to make preparation for meeting these conditions.
They were not even privileged to advise.

The administration that still remained in power was rapidly
disintegrating. Four of the cabinet officers resigned their places,
thus still further paralyzing the hands of the President. At the
North there was a fixed conviction that secession was merely a bit of
political play which would never be pushed to the point of actual war
and consequently there was very little of military preparation, while
all the able-bodied young men of the South, and even of Virginia, which
so emphatically refused to secede, were organizing and drilling and
holding themselves in readiness for whatever might happen.

But everywhere there was apprehension. From the hour of the election
returns in November until the incoming of Mr. Lincoln's administration
on the fourth of March, conservative men at the North and at the South
anxiously busied themselves in an endeavor to find a way out of the
difficulty, to save the Union from disruption and the country from
civil war.

On the second day of December the Albany _Evening Journal_, a newspaper
edited by Thurlow Weed and the personal organ of Mr. Seward, appealed
strongly and even passionately to patriotism throughout the country
for "such moderation, and forbearance as will draw out, combine and
strengthen the Union sentiment of the whole country."

But this and like appeals made by Union-loving, patriotic men North
and South fell, not so much upon deaf ears as upon the ears of those
who had lost control of their respective parties. Had the conservative
men of the Nation been able to act together, they must undoubtedly
have prevailed for peace in virtue of their majority of a million, but
on both sides the radicals had seized upon the reins. At the South
the secessionists were rejoicing in Mr. Lincoln's election under
circumstances that gave excuse for the dissolution of the Union. At
the North the radical abolitionists saw and welcomed in that event an
opportunity to use the whole power of the Federal Government for the
final extirpation of African slavery. At the North and at the South the
extremists were in control, chiefly by virtue of their intensity and
their clamor.

On neither side did the radicals desire the preservation of the
Union; on neither side did they seek any amicable adjustment of the
controversy. On the contrary they invoked controversy, invited disunion
and courted war.

In Congress many efforts were made to find a plan and a basis of
adjustment. By a vote of 145 to 38 the House of Representatives created
a committee of one member from each state to consider the state of
the Union and to report measures of pacification. The Senate adopted
measures of like purport.

In that body Andrew Johnson of Tennessee--afterwards
president--deliberately proposed a constitutional amendment to the
effect that thereafter the president and vice-president should be
chosen the one from the North and the other from the South and that the
two sections should alternately enjoy the advantage of furnishing the
incumbent of the higher office.

Even at that excited and unreasoning time there was probably no more
insane proposal made than this. It would have put sectionalism into the
Constitution itself. It would have limited both parties in their choice
of candidates to men resident in one section or in the other; it would
have made of the so-called Mason and Dixon's line a divisional boundary
over which no political power, no popular preference, no vote, however
overwhelming, could step; it would have changed the United States from
the condition of a single, federal republic in which all the states and
all citizens were possessed of equal rights into a bifurcated alliance
between two antagonistic groups of states, the chief bond of union
between which would have been an agreement that they should alternately
govern each other.

Surely nothing more senseless, more absurd or more impracticable than
this was ever proposed in any country by anybody pretending to be a
statesman. But the fact that it was seriously proposed and earnestly
urged by a senator who at the next election was nominated and elected
vice-president and who became president by virtue of Mr. Lincoln's
assassination, is suggestive at least and illustrative of the intensity
with which the country and its statesmen were at that time longing for
a way out of the difficulty and endeavoring to find it.

In the meanwhile the radicals and extremists on both sides laughed and
jeered at all such endeavors to save a Union which they had doomed to
destruction by their common fiat, though in nothing else were they
agreed. They found means of thwarting every effort of conservatism,
and, by intemperate and incessant vituperation, they succeeded in
driving many thousands out of the ranks of patriotic conservatism
on the one side or the other, and into support of their demand for
disunion, chaos and black night.

It was frankly recognized by many leaders of public opinion at the
North, that the Southerners were somewhat justified in their attitude
by their misconception of the Republican party's purposes and views,
a misconception to which the intemperate utterances of extreme
anti-slavery men, very naturally ministered. It was in recognition of
this natural misunderstanding that Senator Benjamin F. Wade, himself an
earnest and even extreme anti-slavery man, said in the Senate, two days
before South Carolina seceded:

"I do not so much blame the people of the South, because I think they
have been led to believe that we, to-day the dominant party, who are
about to take the reins of government, are their mortal foes, and stand
ready to trample their institutions under foot."

That was precisely what the Southern people believed. They were firmly
convinced that the success of the Republican party meant a merciless,
relentless, implacable war upon their labor and social system and upon
themselves as the supporters and beneficiaries of that system.

Nevertheless they clung to the Union and labored for its preservation.
Virginia supported by the other border states made every effort to
secure a pacification.

Chief among these efforts was that made in Congress by John J.
Crittenden of Kentucky. On the nineteenth of December, the day before
South Carolina's adoption of the ordinance of secession, Mr. Crittenden
offered a series of resolutions in the Senate which were designed to
compose the troubles of the time and to furnish a basis of peaceful
settlement.

Mr. Crittenden proposed amendments to the Constitution providing:

1. That slavery should be prohibited in all territories north of the
Missouri Compromise line while they remained territories and freely
permitted in all territories south of that line, but with the provision
that every state to be formed out of such territory, whether lying
north or south of that line, should be free to decide for itself
whether or not as a state it would permit slavery.

2. That Congress should have no power to abolish slavery in any place
subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the United States--meaning,
of course, the District of Columbia, the public reservations and the
territories. It was especially provided that Congress should at no time
abolish slavery in the District of Columbia without the consent of the
state of Maryland and of the owners of slaves within the District.

3. That Congress should not in any way forbid the traffic in slaves
from one slave state to another.

4. That the United States should be liable for the value of any
fugitive slave whose recapture should be prevented by force or by
intimidation and that the county in which the force or intimidation had
been used should be liable to the United States for the mulct.

There were other details which need not here be considered in view of
the general absurdity of the proposal. Not even Andrew Johnson's plan,
already set forth, embodied more conspicuous elements of impossibility.
The Northern States would never have consented to these constitutional
provisions. The Southern States would never have been satisfied with
them, because they carried with them no effectual provision for their
own enforcement. It was folly and futility, from beginning to end, but
at any rate it was patriotic folly and country-loving futility. It
represented the dominant desire of the people to find some basis of
reconciliation upon which the crumbling foundations of the Union might
be rebuilt and securely buttressed.

The proposal--absurd and impossible as it was--was strongly supported
both in Congress and in the country. Mr. Pugh of Ohio expressed in
the Senate the opinion that it would command the support of nearly
every state in the Union, and he pointed out the fact that no other
proposal ever submitted to Congress had been supported by the petitions
of so great a multitude of citizens. The conservative newspaper press
passionately urged its adoption, declaring it to be a measure which
would completely disarm the disunion sentiment on both sides, and
suggesting to Mr. Seward that one word from him in its behalf would
make a final end of the fearful threat of war which overshadowed the
country.

But all these urgings were founded upon neglect to consider the
all-controlling fact that the conflict between slavery and anti-slavery
had become actually irrepressible, with the added element of what
Charles Sumner called a "sacred animosity."

There was an active, aggressive, anti-slavery minority at the North
whose members cared not one pin-point's worth for the Union except in
so far as they hoped to use its power for the abolition of slavery in
any way and upon any terms that might be available. They had already
declared their hostility to the Constitution, and the insertion of Mr.
Crittenden's amendments into that document would have served only to
intensify their hatred of it and to stimulate their purpose to be rid
of it. On the other hand there was an active and ceaselessly aggressive
pro-slavery party at the South whose members were resolutely bent upon
the destruction of the Union in order that a new Republic might be
founded with African slavery as its corner stone.

Between these two radical parties there could be no peace and no
neutral ground upon which to negotiate a peace. Each held the Union
in contempt--the one because the Constitution protected slavery, the
other because it did not adequately protect that institution. Each was
ready to sacrifice the Union if by such sacrifice it might achieve its
cherished purposes. The one had decried the Union and its Constitution
as "a league with death and a covenant with hell" but now clung to it
as a power that might be conveniently used for the accomplishment of
cherished purposes. The other had despaired of its hope of using the
Federal power further for its own ends. The Southern extremists wished
to destroy the Union in order that its power might not be used for
the extirpation of slavery; the Northern extremists, who had formerly
been equally willing to "let the Union slide," were now eager for its
preservation in order that its tremendous potentialities of force and
compulsion might be employed in behalf of that extirpation of slavery
for which alone they cared.

Neither of these extreme parties in the least degree sympathized
with any effort to preserve the Union for its own sake by measures
of compromise and reconciliation. The Northern radicals wanted the
South to secede in order that military force might be employed for the
compulsory abolition of slavery. The Southern radicals wanted the Union
dissolved in order that slavery might be no further interfered with.

Neither at the North nor at the South were the radicals even yet in a
majority. But in both sections they held a sort of balance of power
and in both they were in effect dominant.

Under such conditions, with a conflict so truly and hopelessly
irrepressible confronting the country, what conceivable hope was there
of a peaceful adjustment by means of Mr. Crittenden's resolutions, or
by any other means that patriotic ingenuity might devise?

The first gun had not yet been fired, but there was war on,
nevertheless, and no paper resolutions however plausibly phrased could
stop its progress to the cannon and musket stage.

Mr. Crittenden's proposal of Amendments to the Constitution did not
and could not command the two-thirds majority in Congress necessary to
their submission to the several states for ratification. The cry of
the Northern extremists was "No backing down! No inch of concession
to the slave power! No surrender of the fruits of the victory we have
won!" The cry of the Southern radicals was: "There is no use in paper
guarantees! We cannot trust them! Our enemies have not kept faith in
the past and will not keep faith in the future. Let us abandon the
hopeless effort for compromises that cannot be enforced! Let us secede
and set up a new republic of our own!"

Then came Virginia into the breach, as she had so often come before.
Standing as she did for conservatism and for that Union which her
legislature had been the first to suggest and which her statesmen
had done so much to bring into beneficent being, she appealed to the
sentiment of Union and patriotism throughout the land. Her legislature
asked that all the states should appoint delegates to a great peace
conference at Washington, whose statesmanlike duty it should be to
devise and agree upon some plan of adjustment by which the danger that
overshadowed the Republic might be averted. This appeal for peace was
made on the nineteenth day of January, 1861,--more than a fortnight
before the date appointed for the election of a constitutional
convention in Virginia to consider the crisis.

It is idle to speculate upon the "might have been." What actually
happened was that many of the states appointed to that peace conference
delegates of radical views and intemperate minds, whose endeavors from
first to last were ceaselessly devoted not to the task of finding a way
out, but to the preconceived purpose of defeating the objects of the
peace conference.

In the end a committee of that body did indeed recommend a policy
practically identical with that outlined in Mr. Crittenden's proposed
amendments to the Constitution. But the extremists on both sides and
especially the politicians on both sides who sniffed preferment in the
air of radicalism, were by that time so far dominant that the proposal
came to nothing. It failed of acceptance in either house of Congress
when put to a vote within a brief time before the end of the session.

Nevertheless Virginia still resolutely held out against secession and
five other border states stood by her in that patriotic attitude for a
month and a half more.

Mr. Lincoln was inaugurated on the fourth of March, and straightway
there set in a rivalry among the Republican leaders for the control
of his administration. Even those who had most actively aided in
his election gravely misunderstood and seriously underestimated the
character of the man they had chosen to be president. They assumed
from the beginning that somebody, other than himself, must direct his
administration, and there was eager rivalry among them to usurp that
function.

They did not know Abraham Lincoln or realize his intellectual or
moral power. The extreme abolitionists beset him with plans to make
war upon the seceding states with the avowed purpose of abolishing
slavery in all the states by the high hand and without regard to that
Constitution which they had declared to be a "league with death and
a covenant with hell." To these Mr. Lincoln replied that while they
were free to advocate any policy they pleased, he at least, was bound
by his official oath to support and maintain the Constitution of the
United States. In the end, of course, and when strenuous war was on
he did indeed take a different view. As a "war measure" he in the end
proclaimed emancipation, without even a pretense of constitutional
authority to do so, and indeed in direct defiance of the Constitution.
But at least he hesitated to do this, and waited before doing it until
the exigencies of an uncertain war seemed to force that extreme measure
upon him as one of national self-defense.

At the first he decided as his fixed policy to assert the authority
of the National Government in the seceding states, to insist upon the
enforcement of the laws there, to recover such government property as
those states had seized upon and to use such force as might be required
for these ends. He clearly understood that there were men by hundreds
of thousands in the North who would stand by him in an endeavor thus
to restore and maintain the Union, but who would instantly and angrily
desert him should he proclaim a war for the extirpation of slavery
within the states in which that institution constitutionally existed.

Accordingly he addressed all his endeavors solely to the task of
asserting and maintaining the national authority in the seceding states.

Had all the Southern states seceded before he assumed office his
problem would have been an easy one. He would simply have had to call
upon the Northern states for military forces sufficient to carry out
this program of law enforcement. But Virginia had not seceded, and
five other Southern states had submitted their course to Virginia's
decision. Virginia was anxiously busying herself to find some ground of
reconciliation, some means of accomplishing that preservation of the
Union which Mr. Lincoln had declared to be his own and only object of
endeavor.

But if Mr. Lincoln was to enforce the laws in the seceding states, and
thus to maintain the Union, he must have troops. The little regular
army could not furnish them. Either the militia must be called out or
volunteers must be summoned for the purpose.

Mr. Lincoln called upon all the states that had not yet seceded for
their several quotas required to make up an army of 75,000 men, with
which in effect to coerce the seceding states into submission. He
demanded that Virginia should furnish her quota of troops for this
purpose, and Virginia, deeming the purpose to be an unlawful and
iniquitous one, decided to secede--as she had thitherto resolutely
refused to do--rather than aid in a coercion which all her Union-loving
and peace-loving people regarded as a wrong, an injustice, an
unconstitutional and unlawful aggression upon the rights of sovereign
states.

Virginia seceded unwillingly and not at all because her people regarded
Mr. Lincoln's election as affording any just ground for the withdrawal
of any state from the Union, but solely because the mother state was
forced to choose between secession on the one hand and the lending
of active assistance on the other to what all Virginians regarded as
a wicked and wanton warfare by the Federal Government upon sovereign
states for having exercised what all Virginians held--as most Americans
had previously and sometimes aggressively held--to be their reserved
rights under the Constitution.

It was on the fifteenth day of April, 1861, that Mr. Lincoln called
upon Virginia for her quota of troops with which to coerce the
seceding states into submission. It was on the sixteenth day of April
that Virginia's constitutional convention, bravely resolute in its
love for the Union and in its antagonism to the policy of secession,
was confronted with the choice of furnishing troops to aid in what
its members almost unanimously regarded as a political crime or the
alternative of joining that secession movement from which the sober and
conservative thought of Virginia had so long and so courageously held
aloof in defiance of criticism and in face of contempt and contumely.

To men of high minds, holding these views, there could be but one
choice in such a case. They decreed that Virginia should prefer a
secession which that state overwhelmingly disapproved, to a dishonor
which no Virginian could contemplate with a satisfied mind. Accordingly
Virginia's strongly pro-Union convention reluctantly adopted an
ordinance of secession, on the seventeenth day of April, 1861, not of
choice but upon a conviction of necessity. The other border states that
had waited for Virginia's decision to determine their own, became at
once members of the new Southern Confederacy and the question of war
or peace was finally decided in behalf of war--war to the limit of
possibility, war to the utmost end of endurance, war to the point of
exhaustion on the one side or the other.

A wise prophet, basing his prophecies upon the patent facts of the
situation, could not have failed to foretell the outcome of such a war
with precision and certainty. The utmost that the South could do--even
by "robbing the cradle and the grave" as was wittily and sadly said
at the time, was to put 600,000 men into the field, first and last.
The North was able to enlist an aggregate of 2,778,304, or, if we
reduce this to a basis of three years' service for each man, the Union
enlistments for three full years numbered no less than 2,326,168--or
nearly four times the total enlistments in the Confederate army from
beginning to end of the war. Yet the Confederate armies included
practically every white man in the South who was able to bear arms.
There was in effect a levy _en masse_, including the entire white male
population from early boyhood to extreme old age.

Again the Federal Government had a navy and the Confederates none.
It was certain from the beginning that the Federal authorities would
completely shut the South in by blockading and closely sealing every
southern port. Thus the Federals--as was apparent in advance--were
destined to have the whole world to draw upon for soldiers, for
supplies, for ammunition, for improved arms and for everything else
that contributes to military strength, while the South must rely
absolutely upon itself--ill armed, and unequipped with anything except
courage, devotion and heroic fortitude.

There were no facilities at the South for the manufacture of arms.
There was not an armory in all that land that could turn out a musket
of the pattern then in use, not a machine shop that could convert a
muzzle-loading rifle into a breech-loader or give to any gun so much
as a choke bore. There were foundries that could cast iron cannon of
an antique pattern, but not one that could make a modern gun. There
were machine shops--a very few--in which the Northern-made locomotives
then in use on Southern railroads could be repaired in a small way,
but there was not in all the South a shop in which a useful locomotive
could be built. Nor were there any car builders who had had experience
in the making of rolling stock fit for service.

In brief the South was an agricultural region accustomed to depend
upon the North and upon Europe for its mechanical devices and the
outbreak of war was clearly destined to be the signal for the shutting
off of both Northern and European supplies. Even in the matter of
medicines--and greatly more soldiers die of disease than of wounds--the
South had no adequate supply and no assured means of creating one
for itself. Quinine, calomel and opium were scarcely less necessary
than gunpowder and bullets to the conduct of military operations.
Yet there was nowhere in the South a "plant" that could produce any
one of those drugs. Nor was there anywhere a mercury supply from
which calomel might be made. Early in the war it became impossible to
procure so much as a Seidlitz powder in the South. There was nowhere a
factory that could make a scalpel, to say nothing of more ingeniously
contrived surgical implements. The materials for making gunpowder
were so wanting that citizens were urged a little later to dig up the
earthen floors of their smoke-houses and their tobacco barns and were
instructed in the art of extracting the niter from them. In the towns
women were officially solicited to save their chamber lye and deliver
it to the authorities in order that its chemicals might be utilized
in the creation of explosives. Farmers were by law forbidden to burn
corn cobs in their fire places and required to turn them over instead
to the authorities in order that their sodas and potashes might be
utilized in the manufacture of gunpowder. Women were urged to grow
poppies and instructed in the art of so scarring the plants as to
secure the precious gum from which opium could be made for the relief
of suffering in the hospitals. They were taught also how to harvest and
stew dog-fennel in order to secure a substitute for quinine. The negro
boys were set at work to dig up the roots of the dogwood, and women
were taught to extract from the bark of such roots a bitters which
served as a substitute for the unobtainable quinine.

In short, at every point the South was lamentably lacking in supplies,
and the blockade, established early in the war, forbade the incoming
of such things as were needed except at serious risk of capture and
confiscation.

Even food supplies were from the first to the last meager. The South
produced very little corn, pork, wheat, and the like, in comparison
with the production of the great northwestern states or in comparison
with the need that was created by the enlistment of all the able-bodied
white men of that region in the Confederate army.

Thus the South was at a fearful disadvantage from the first; the wiser
men of the South knew the fact in advance. They had courage and they
had little else. Their achievement in maintaining a strenuous war for
four years in face of such disparities of force and resources, must
always be accounted to their credit as brave and resourceful men.

It was certain from the first that the South must be beaten in its
struggle--unless by dash and daring it should win at once, or unless,
by some remote chance, assistance should come from without. The chance
of that was very small but it existed as a factor in the problem. The
chief hope the Southern people had of winning the war upon which they
entered with courage and enthusiasm was born of the delusive belief
that the god of battles awards victory, not to the strong but to the
righteous. They devoutly believed that their cause was righteous,
and, in spite of all the teachings of history, they expected God to
interpose in some fashion to give them the victory. They believed
themselves to be battling for the same right of self-government among
men that their revolutionary ancestors had fought for, and they refused
to recognize any disparity of resources between the contending forces
as a sufficient reason for their failure under the rule of a just God
in whose reign over human affairs they devoutly believed.

They were sentimentalists. They believed that ideas rather than facts
ruled the world and its affairs. They had been nurtured upon the Bible
and Scott's novels, and they believed in both.

Had any prophet arisen among them who should have measured their
resources against those of their adversary, they would have refused to
listen to his prophesyings. They would have gone on believing that they
were entirely certain of success and victory by reason of what seemed
to them the indisputable righteousness of their cause.

There were men among them who rightly recognized the enormous disparity
between the resources of the North and those that the South could
command. But such men were few and their counsel counted for nothing.

As for the extremists, they anticipated military commissions and
political preferment for themselves, and they cared for little else
than to occupy a conspicuous place in public attention for a little
while. They were in spirit gamblers, ready to stake everything upon
uncertain chance. They wanted war for the sake of what war might bring
to them of advantage, and they were ready to stake everything upon the
hazard of their own fortune.

It was in Virginia mainly that there were men of soberer minds, as had
been demonstrated in the Virginians' choice of men to represent them
in their constitutional convention. But even in Virginia there were
hotheads and fools a plenty, who believed that a war was to be won by
hurrahs, and that enthusiasm was an effective substitute for ammunition.

The secession of Virginia made the war a fact and a necessity. So long
as that had been delayed there had remained a hope of reconciliation
and adjustment by peaceful devices. When that event occurred it was
certain that the question at issue must be fought out upon bloody
battlefields.

The final stage of the controversy had been reached. The case had
been appealed to the arbitrament of steel and gunpowder. Argument was
at an end and brute force had come in as umpire. It was a melancholy
spectacle over which the gods might well have wept. But men on both
sides greeted it joyously as if it had been a holiday occasion.




BOOK II

THE CONDUCT OF THE WAR




CHAPTER XI

THE REDUCTION OF FORT SUMTER


The events that brought about the Confederate War, the conditions and
circumstances under which it occurred, and the passions and prejudices
which inspired that bloody and most lamentable conflict have been
sufficiently and quite truthfully set forth, the author believes, in
the preceding chapters of this work. He has sought to show them forth
without prejudice, and in a spirit of the utmost candor and fairness.
It is the function of the historian to record facts, not to complain of
them; to describe conditions, not to criticize them.

After nearly half a century of study it is the firm conviction of
the present historian that the Confederate war was a necessary and
unescapable result of historic conditions; that nobody in particular
was to blame for it, because there was nobody who could have prevented
or averted it. History and circumstance had combined to compel its
occurrence, and for its occurrence no person and no party was in
any accountable way responsible. It occurred because the logic of
circumstance compelled it, and it was fought out with conscience upon
both sides.

Incidentally there were wrongs done in its conduct, quite as a
matter of course. He must be a stupid reader of history who does not
understand that the doing of wrong is inevitable in every great
historical event. But he must also be a very stupid and prejudiced
reader of history who can contemplate the story of the Confederate war
without realizing that on the one side and on the other conscience was
the inspiring motive of it. He must be dull indeed who fails to see
that devotion had its part to play on both sides and that on both sides
it played it well, to the everlasting glory of the American name.

The story of the war on the one side, and on the other, is a story of
American heroism in courage and in endurance, in battle and in camp,
in action and in the patient submission to hardship, in dash and in
defeat, in assault and in retreat. The purpose of the succeeding
chapters is to tell that story without passion or prejudice, without
fear or favor, and with no flinching from the truth, whithersoever it
may lead.

So far as actual fighting was concerned, the war began with the
bombardment of Fort Sumter, in Charleston Harbor on the morning of
April 12, 1861.

When President Lincoln was inaugurated, the total military force at
command of the Government amounted to a mere handful of men, and these
were mainly occupied with the duty of garrisoning frontier posts and
maintaining the subjection of the Indians. So far as eastern positions
were concerned there were scarcely enough men in the forts to take care
of the government property there and perform a perfunctory guard duty.

The total force in Charleston Harbor consisted of seventy men under
command of Major Robert Anderson. This force occupied Fort Moultrie,
at that time an indefensible position by reason of the unfinished
character of its fortifications and the ease of approach to it from the
land side.

As a matter of military prudence and under a threat of war, Major
Anderson decided to transfer his little force to the far more
defensible and, to Charleston, the far more threatening work, Fort
Sumter. This he did in the early morning of December 26, 1860.

This military transfer of force from an indefensible to a defensible
work, was construed by the Confederates to be a distinct violation of
the agreement which had been made by the Buchanan administration, to
the general effect that, pending final negotiations, there should be no
change made in the military situation at any point in the South.

Major Anderson's transfer of his little force from Fort Moultrie, where
it might easily have been captured from the land side to the sea-girt
fortress in the middle of the harbor, was held to be a violation of
this compact. Without going into the lawyers' quibbles concerning that
question, let us recognize the situation and relate the events that
grew out of it.

The Confederates, under the skilled direction of General Beauregard,
a little later began the construction of works and the emplacement
of guns that should completely command Fort Sumter. There was in all
this a good deal of the "fuss and feathers" that plays so large a
part in the beginning of every war made by a people wholly unused to
military operations. With a field battery and one columbiad or one
Dahlgren gun, General Beauregard could easily have reduced Fort Sumter
on any one of the long days of waiting and preparation. Or, with a
single battalion of determined men he could have taken it by assault
in spite of such resistance as its feeble defending force could have
offered. But those were the days of spectacular effects. The "pomp and
circumstance of glorious war" were necessary agents in the work of so
exciting the southern mind as to overcome the reluctance of Virginia,
North Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas, Kentucky and Missouri to join the
seceding column. So pomp and circumstance were freely invoked.

General Beauregard's preparations for the reduction of a brick fort
which must quickly crumble under an efficient artillery fire, defended
as it was by less than a single company of men, were such as might have
been made for the reduction of some fortress like that at Gibraltar, or
the elaborate works in the Bermuda Islands.

But it was not the purpose of either side to bring on the inevitable
war as yet. The quibbling lawyers and phrase-mongering diplomatists
were busy at work in wordy fence, each trying to force upon the other
the technical responsibility of beginning the war by some act of
forcible aggression.

On both sides every nerve was strained to make military preparations,
precisely as if the coming of war had been recognized as certain--as
in fact it was--while on both sides there was a jealously maintained
pretense of entirely peaceful purposes. The organization of military
forces on either side was easily explainable and excusable upon the
plea of prudence and of a necessary preparation for conceivably
possible emergencies, and on both sides these preparations for war
served to arouse the fighting instincts of the populace and thus to
make war more and more obviously inevitable.

During the first forty days or so of Mr. Lincoln's administration
there was nothing done that was not in consonance with the Buchanan
program of peace and waiting. Nothing was undertaken of a more positive
character than the acts of the Buchanan rule. So far as proclamations
and professions and pledges of peaceful purpose were concerned there
was no change either for better or for worse.

In his inaugural address Mr. Lincoln outlined his policy by saying
of the administration that it aimed only at the preservation of the
Union. He said, "It will constitutionally maintain and defend itself.
In doing this there need be no bloodshed or violence, and there shall
be none unless it is forced upon the national authority. The power
confided to me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property
and places belonging to the Government, and collect the duties and
imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will
be no invasion, no using of force against or among people anywhere. In
your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the
momentous issue of civil war. The Government will not assail you. You
can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors."

All this was very specious and to the Northern mind convincing, but
it ignored the fundamental fact that the seceding states claimed a
constitutional right to secede and that having exercised that asserted
right, they denied the right of the United States Government to "hold,
occupy and possess," forts, arsenals or custom houses within their
territory, or within that territory to "collect duties and imposts."
The very vitals of the question at issue were involved in that
assumption of right on the part of the Federal Government to impose
and enforce laws and imposts, and to assert and maintain rights of
property possession within the territories of states that had, as they
resolutely contended, taken themselves out of the Union by rigidly
constitutional methods.

It is not purposed here idly and uselessly to discuss this
constitutional question. It is only intended to show how it presented
itself to the minds of men on the one side and upon the other. To the
Northern mind, which had forgotten its own pleas for disunion and its
own claims of the right of any state to secede, Mr. Lincoln's declared
purpose seemed an altogether righteous and reasonable proposal of
governmental activity and necessary national self-assertion. To the
Southern mind, in which the traditional doctrine survived of the right
of any state to secede at will, it seemed a proposal of intolerable
aggression.

If the seceding states had acted within their constitutional right
in seceding, then they were no longer within the dominion or in any
remotest way subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. Any
attempt on the part of that government to exercise jurisdiction or to
"collect duties and imposts" within their borders was a trespass upon
their independence, an affront to their dignity, an invasion of their
sovereignty, in brief an act of direct war upon them.

Mr. Lincoln's inaugural address, as the Southerners held, begged
the whole question at issue. It assumed that secession was an
unconstitutional nullity and that the seceding states were still in
the Union and still subject to its laws, its imposts and its duties.
That was the whole matter in dispute. If that assumption was correct
then it was permitted to him to use any force he might see fit to
employ with which to compel them to obedience. But if the assumption
was incorrect--if those seceding states had in fact constitutionally
withdrawn from the Union, as they contended that they had done--then he
had no more right to exercise authority, to enforce laws, to possess
"places and property" or to "collect duties and imposts" within their
boundaries than he had to do the same within the domains of Britain,
France or Germany. This was the very marrow of the question at issue.

Mr. Lincoln's words spoken in his inaugural address were meant to be
placative to Southern sentiment and to minister to that reconciliation
which from beginning to end was the sincerest desire of his soul. But
they were based upon a seemingly total misconception. They constituted
a refusal to recognize what the South held to be a fundamental fact.
Mr. Lincoln's placative words did not placate for the reason that
they completely ignored the Southern contention. They became instead,
directly offensive as an assertion of the wrongfulness of secession,
and its utter lack of constitutional authority.

His words, the men of the South thought, claimed either too much or
greatly too little.

All this was only a part and a small part of the fencing by which the
men in high place on either side sought in that troubled time to shift,
each to the others' shoulders, responsibility for the actual and brutal
beginning of a war which was clearly inevitable, and the occurrence of
which had been made steadily more and more a necessity by the events of
history during generations past.

In the meanwhile both sides were making every possible preparation for
a war that had not been declared, a war that both professed to regard
as unnecessary, a war for the outbreak of which each was determined
that the other and not itself should bear all the blame.

The Congress at Washington had adjourned at the beginning of March
without making any warlike appropriations whatsoever. Forty days of
Mr. Lincoln's administration had passed without the calling of a
regiment or a company or even a soldier into the field. Congress had
indeed passed a resolution declaring its purpose to avoid war and its
conviction that every possible concession should be made by Northern
sentiment in avoidance of that terrible catastrophe.

It had resolved:

"That the existing discontents among the Southern people, and the
growing hostility to the Federal Government among them, are greatly
to be regretted; and that whether such discontents and hostility are
without just cause or not, any reasonable proper and constitutional
remedies and additional and more specific guarantees of their peculiar
rights and interests, as recognized by the Constitution, necessary to
preserve the peace of the country and the perpetuity of the Union,
should be promptly and cheerfully granted."

But how much did this resolution signify? It was passed by more than
a two-thirds majority of a rump House of Representatives after the
Southern members of that body had withdrawn from it. It therefore
seemed to represent Northern and Republican sentiment. But the Senate
rejected it and it came to nothing. It was a resolve that concessions
should be made and that new guarantees should be given in the interest
of the Union's preservation. But, the Southerners pointed out, the
concessions were not made and the new guarantees were not given.

It was impossible, in fact, that these things should be done. It
was easy for Congress to resolve that "any reasonable, proper and
constitutional remedies and additional and more specific guarantees"
should be given, but quite another thing to secure the execution of
such a program. One house of Congress vetoed the action of the other
on every such resolution and both refused to put the guarantees
into legal form. Northern sentiment saw and resented in every such
proposition a suggestion of still further concession to that slave
power which Northern sentiment had come to abhor with all the loathing
that is possible to the human mind, and Northern sentiment would have
no part or lot in concession to a system which under compulsion of the
Constitution it might tolerate but to the perpetuation of which it
would on no account lend a hand.

On the other side the extremists of the South asked for no further
guarantees and trusted none that might be offered. They contended that
the guarantees of the Constitution itself had been nullified by the
laws of the Northern States; that every compromise had been broken;
that, as they insisted, Northern sentiment had openly and distinctly
approved of servile insurrection, with all the horror that it must
imply, as a means of abolishing slavery; and that there was no further
hope of reconciliation by virtue of paper guarantees which the Federal
Government had no adequate power to enforce.

The issue had, in fact, been made up and all attempts at compromise
were futile folly. The war to which the country's history and politics
for half a century past had been leading had at last come and the only
real question that remained to be settled was that of who should begin
the actual fighting. That detail was of no real importance.

The South bore its part in all this by-play and coquetry of endeavors
at reconciliation. It sent distinguished men as delegates to plead for
peace at Washington, either, as some of them urged, upon some basis of
compromise or, as others insisted, upon a governmental recognition of
secession as a right and a fact, the recognition of which would indeed
have furnished a peaceful remedy for ills otherwise irremediable, an
easy and peaceful way out of a controversy that otherwise threatened
a savage, brutal and peculiarly devastating war. But that remedy was
obviously and absurdly impossible of adoption in the circumstances then
existing.

Neither side was in the least degree disposed to accept or even
seriously to consider the peace proposals of the other. Neither being
willing to yield a single item of its contention, there was no ground
or chance of compromise. It was clearly understood upon both sides that
war was presently to come.

On both sides there was an active sharpening of swords and a diligent
rubbing up of guns that might prove serviceable in war.

At the South practically all the able-bodied young men were enlisted
in what were then called "volunteer companies," though it did not yet
appear in what cause they were supposed to be volunteering. They were
drilled and disciplined and made into something at least remotely
resembling soldiers. Their familiarity with firearms and their
habits of strenuous outdoor life fitted them for comparatively easy
transformation into troops.

At the North there was an equally active preparation for war. Among
other warlike initiatives a fleet was preparing for the relief of Fort
Sumter or at the least for a threatening manifestation off Charleston
harbor. It had every equipment--even to surf boats for use in enforced
landings--that such a fleet could require, and it presently sailed.
Neither mail nor telegraphic communication between the North and
the South had as yet been interfered with, and so every detail of
preparation made upon either side was instantly reported to the other.

These were the conditions in which the actual struggle approached.
When on the night after Christmas Major Anderson transferred his little
handful of men under cover of darkness from the hopelessly indefensible
works of Fort Moultrie to the seemingly much stronger position at Fort
Sumter, the Confederates clamorously contended that the change was a
violation of the Buchanan administration's promise to maintain the
military _status quo_. They seized upon the occurrence as an excuse for
that erection of batteries around the harbor which has already been
spoken of. In the meanwhile they courteously extended the hospitalities
of the city of Charleston to Major Anderson, freely permitting him to
send men ashore and to supply himself in the Charleston markets with
fresh vegetables, butter, eggs, milk and whatever else he needed for
the comfort of his command.

But when an attempt was made during the Buchanan administration to
provision Fort Sumter for a siege, the steamer _Star of the West_,
which carried the supplies, was forbidden to approach the fort and
compelled to put again to sea.

Then followed negotiations which were marked by all that suave and
gentle courtesy which characterizes the preliminary communications
between duelists who intend presently to shoot one another.

The state of South Carolina, claiming to be an independent sovereignty
and a member of a new and sovereign confederacy, courteously asked the
United States Government to withdraw its military force from Charleston
Harbor. The state represented that the military occupation of a
fortress within its domain by another sovereign power was derogatory
to the dignity and independence of the state. It courteously offered
adequate compensation to the United States for any property that might
be involved in the change but politely insisted that the United States
Government should cease to trespass upon the dignity of a sister nation.

To all this the Buchanan administration with equal courtesy replied,
declining to recognize in South Carolina the status it claimed as
an independent state, but seemingly at least promising the early
evacuation of Fort Sumter.

All this was "play for position" on both sides and it produced the
desired effect. It put South Carolina and the seceding states "right
upon the record." That is to say, it enabled them to avoid even the
appearance of recognizing the existence of Federal authority within
their borders and on the other hand it gave to the more or less
friendly administration of Mr. Buchanan the opportunity it desired to
finish its term without armed conflict and without the necessity of
assuming any positive and pronounced attitude toward secession.

But even after Mr. Lincoln came into office the clash of arms was
postponed. Neither side was as yet ready for it, and each earnestly
desired to throw upon the other the responsibility of precipitating a
conflict which was clearly inevitable and for which each must account
as best it could to that "opinion of mankind" to which the American
Declaration of Independence had been reverently addressed as an act of
"decent respect."

So for forty days or so after Mr. Lincoln assumed office there was
nothing done, except in the way of preparation for emergencies. In the
meanwhile Virginia still held aloof from the secession movement and
five other border states--the chief sources of that military strength
which resides in a food supply--were waiting for the word from the
mother state.

It began to be understood in South Carolina that something must be
done to compel Virginia to take her stand one way or the other. There
was little if any doubt that upon the abstract right of any state to
secede, Virginia stood firmly with the South. But her protest was
resolute against the contention that secession was at that time either
necessary or politic. It was necessary, therefore, to "force Virginia's
hand," as whist players say, to do something which might leave to that
state no choice but that between secession on her own part and consent,
on the other hand, to the doctrine that the National Government was
possessed of a right to coerce, and by military force to subdue, states
that had assumed to act upon what they claimed to be and what Virginia
freely recognized as the right of each state to withdraw from the Union
at its own good pleasure. It was plain that the war must be hurried
into being if the new Confederacy, composed exclusively of the cotton
states, was to ally Virginia and the other food-producing states of
the South with itself and thus secure any hope or even any chance of
success in its effort to maintain itself.

Accordingly General Beauregard, who was in command at Charleston, was
ordered to demand the surrender of Fort Sumter, and upon refusal to
reduce that work. This was a ridiculously easy task. But its execution
was a thing of momentous consequence.

Major Anderson, who commanded the fort with its mere handful of men,
was himself a man of Southern extraction, as were Farragut, George H.
Thomas, Winfield Scott and even Lincoln himself. But Anderson was a
soldier in the United States Army and while he freely declared that his
heart was not in a war against the South, he had no thought of failing
in his soldierly duty.

When on the eleventh of April, 1861, he was summoned to surrender, he
refused, as it became a brave officer to do. He knew perfectly well
that Beauregard had force enough and cannon enough and ammunition
enough to reduce a dozen such forts as that which he commanded, but in
that spirit which throughout the war animated every good soldier of
whatever rank in both armies, he refused to yield until such time as
physical force should overcome his powers of resistance and compel his
surrender. There was a relieving fleet in the offing, but, though it
drew near enough during the action for Major Anderson to salute it, it
rendered him no assistance and indeed made no attempt to do so.

Beauregard opened fire upon the fort at 4:20 A.M. on the twelfth of
April, from batteries located at every available range point. The
unfitness of the antiquated masonry work to endure a bombardment was
quickly and, to Major Anderson, disastrously demonstrated, but in
spite of all he heroically held out until on the next day his men
were literally driven from their guns by the smoke of the burning
quarters within the fortification. Unable to make further resistance
and obviously hopeless of assistance even from that fleet in the
offing which had been elaborately equipped and sent to effect his
reinforcement and rescue, he at last capitulated.

He was permitted to salute his flag before lowering it, to march his
command out of the fort with military honors, and to sail North with
his men.

Those were the mild-mannered, courteous, drawing-room days of war. The
butchery and brutality were to come later. Nobody had been killed by
the fire of either side, and nobody wounded. The courtesy which had
marked all relations between Major Anderson and the Carolinians was
maintained to the end. Major Anderson left Charleston as any honored
guest might have left a hospitable mansion in Charleston Neck after
entertainment, with the good wishes, the friendship, and the godspeed
of his hosts. Nothing could have been pleasanter or more exquisitely
courteous than this encounter and this parting. But it was the preface
to a war which sent brave men by scores of thousands to their graves,
desolated thousands of homes, North and South, made widows of loving
wives and orphans of unoffending children.

So far as the direct effect of the spectacular but bloodless
bombardment of Fort Sumter was concerned it failed of its purpose. Even
such an event did not prompt the Virginia convention, as had been hoped
and confidently anticipated, to adopt an ordinance of secession. On
the day after news of it was received in Richmond the representatives
of the mother state stood as resolutely as ever in opposition to a
secession program, which they deemed at once impolitic and unjustified
by anything in the situation of affairs.

But the bombardment accomplished its intended effect by indirection.
It gave Mr. Lincoln occasion to call for a volunteer army with which
to meet what had thus assumed the character of a war upon the United
States. As has been already related he called for seventy-five thousand
men and demanded of Virginia that she should furnish her proportional
part of that force. After many weeks of resolute resistance to what
the Virginians regarded as a policy of quixotic folly and certain
destruction, the Virginia convention on the seventeenth of April,
1861, adopted an ordinance of secession. From that hour war was on in
earnest, as both sides quite clearly understood.




CHAPTER XII

THE ATTITUDE OF THE BORDER STATES


With the secession of Virginia on the seventeenth of April, 1861, there
came a final end to all hope of finding a way out. The active border
states did not immediately declare their secession indeed, but that was
a foregone conclusion so far as Arkansas, North Carolina and Tennessee
were concerned, and military proceedings did not wait for the formal
act. That came on the sixth of May, in Arkansas, on the twentieth of
May in North Carolina, and on the eighth of June in Tennessee. Kentucky
and Missouri were so divided in sentiment that no united action for or
against the Union could be secured.

Kentucky officially assumed an attitude of neutrality to which neither
side paid the smallest attention then or later. That indeed was the
most impossible of all conceivable attitudes. It assumed to the state
all the independent right of action that secession itself implied,
without asserting a claim to the right of secession. It proclaimed
Kentucky to be so far out of the Union as to demand respect for its
neutrality and so far in the Union as to exercise its full voice in
Congress. It warned the armies of both sides to avoid trespass upon
Kentucky's territory, a warning which, if Kentucky had undertaken to
enforce, it would have involved that state in immediate war with both
the combatants at one and the same time. The thing was ridiculous
from the beginning, absurd in conception and a ludicrous failure in
execution. There was later a pretense of secession by a so-called
convention in that state, but it was not taken seriously on either
side, and in the end the state furnished volunteers to both the
contending armies in substantially equal numbers.

Tennessee did much the same thing but in a different fashion. That
state's adoption of an ordinance of secession was quite regular in
form. It had all the validity that the like ordinance adopted by any
other state had or could have. But it did not and could not command the
obedience of Tennessee's people in anything like the degree in which
secession ordinances in other states had commanded the obedience of
the people of those states. The advocates of secession had secured a
majority vote in Tennessee, but it was not a very pronounced majority.
Still more important, the division of sentiment there was mainly
geographical. In the mountainous eastern part of the state and in
the adjacent mountains of North Carolina where slavery scarcely at
all existed and where little mountain farms and hunters' log cabins
stood in the place of plantations and stately mansions, the sentiment
was overwhelmingly in favor of the Union. This was perhaps scarcely
more largely due to a feeling of loyalty to the Union, though that
was strong, than to a still more active sentiment of hostility and
antagonism to the wealth and social pretensions of the cotton and
tobacco planters whose more fruitful fields lay farther to the west.

The often illiterate but shrewdly intelligent mountaineers, to whom
education had offered few and very meager advantages and with whom
fortune had dealt rather harshly, were very naturally jealous of their
better educated, better fed, and altogether more prosperous neighbors.
It is hard for the man who trudges afoot or rides astride an underfed
mule for which his forage supply is scant, to entertain kindly feelings
toward the man who goes about in his carriage drawn by sleek and
negro-groomed horses. It is not easy for the man who houses his family
in a mud-daubed log hut and feeds his half-clad wife and children upon
corn pone and an often uncertain ration of bacon or salt pork, to avoid
sentiments of discontent when he realizes how much easier and more
luxurious is the lot of those who "wear purple and fine linen and fare
sumptuously every day."

So, in the mountain regions of Tennessee, among the stalwart
six-footers who were inured to hardship, and who knew all there was to
know about using a rifle with effect, there was a very general impulse
to join the Union armies and fight against the slave-holding class,
whom they regarded as hereditary enemies.

In the region a little farther west this class antagonism was
intensified by a closer contact and one often more exasperating.
Between these two classes there was instinctive and implacable war
already; and when the time came for the poorer Tennesseans to choose
on which side they would fight, they very generally elected to fight
against and not for an institution which they believed to be the source
and origin and ultimate cause of that social inferiority which so
galled and irritated and angered them.

Let us not misunderstand. These people had no theories on the subject
of slavery. The few of them who could in any wise come into the
ownership of a negro held to that property possession as resolutely as
they would have held to the ownership of a mule or an ox. They were
not troubled by any scruples of conscience concerning the ownership of
human beings or beset in their minds by any abstractions as to human
rights. They no more regarded the negro as the equal of the white man
than did their plantation owning neighbors. A negro was in their eyes
a "nigger," to be worked to his utmost capacity and mercilessly lashed
when guilty of any insolence. They were even less ready than their
wealthier neighbors to tolerate any assumption of equality on the part
of a negro. They were quicker even than the planters to see and resent
such assumptions because their own social status as the superiors of
black men was less marked and less secure than that of the planters.
A very small concession on that point would have obliterated the only
social distinction that these poor cabin dwellers enjoyed.[3]

    [3] The author had occasion closely to note a like attitude of mind
        on the part of the cabin dwellers of the Virginia mountains,
        with whom he was brought into close and constant contact during
        the war. No rich planter in all the land could have been more
        insistent than they were upon the social distinction between a
        white man and a negro or readier than they to resent negro
        assumption.

But these mountain dwellers--these children of poverty and
hardship--saw no reason why they should fight for a system which
they resented with every impulse of their minds; a system which
somehow--they could not reason out how--created the disparity of
fortune and social status and personal comfort which existed between
themselves and their plantation-owning neighbors.

In Missouri the situation was different. There too the population was
divided in sentiment but not upon strictly geographical lines, in any
pronounced way at least. In Missouri more than anywhere else, the war
took on the character of a true civil war. There was a pretense of
secession there also, but it represented only a part of the population
and amounted only to a declaration in favor of the South by what may or
may not have been a majority of the people. It led instantly to war,
but it did not distinctly place Missouri either in the list of seceding
states or in that of states that adhered to the Union.

Thus the issue was made up. Eleven states, namely, Virginia, North
Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana,
Texas, Arkansas, Tennessee and Florida, had formally seceded. Kentucky
had absurdly and futilely declared an impossible neutrality, Missouri
had entered upon a program of civil war within her own borders.
Maryland adhered to the Union but sent the flower of her young manhood
into the rival camps with an almost equal hand. Delaware, though
nominally a slave state, was so situated as to be out of the reckoning
of secession. The rest of the states adhered to the Union and were
prepared to support its cause with unnumbered men and unstinted means.

It is true nevertheless that in most of the Northern States there was
a strongly hostile and pro-Southern sentiment that must be reckoned
with, and in New York and some other states the reckoning was a
difficult one, but in no state did that sentiment at any time during
the war so far secure control of affairs as to produce disastrous
results to the Federal arms or cause.

Yet how dangerously and threateningly strong that sentiment was, is
easily illustrated by statistics. In the presidential election of
November, 1864, after the war had been in active and very bloody
progress for more than three years and a half, and after the power of
the Confederates to resist had been enormously reduced by battle, by
blockade and by the wearing lapse of time, there was a comparatively
narrow majority of votes cast in the Northern States in behalf of the
Union cause.

McClellan was the Democratic candidate for president. He was running
upon a platform the dominant note of which was a declaration that the
war for the restoration of the Union had proved itself a failure and
should be brought to an end. This could mean only that the United
States Government should recognize the Confederate Government as a
separate, independent and equal power, and make peace with it on such
terms as could be secured. There is no other construction possible that
would be accepted anywhere outside the pages of _Alice in Wonderland_.
It was a distinct and definite proposal that the United States
Government should give up all its contentions, withdraw its armies
from the South, raise its blockade, admit that its efforts had failed,
recognize the independent sovereignty of the Confederate States,
and make the best peace it could with that Republic as a conquering
power. Yet so strong was the anti-war sentiment at the North that,
with only the people of the Northern States voting, the Democratic
candidate received no less than 1,808,795 votes against 2,216,067 for
his adversary. In other words the proposal to abandon the struggle,
recognize Confederate independence and acknowledge the United States
beaten after three and a half years of strenuous, costly and very
bloody war, was defeated by only 407,349 votes in the Northern States,
in a total vote in those states of no less than 4,024,865.

This is a fact of the utmost historical significance which may perhaps
be better appreciated if put in another form. This was an election
in which only the Northern States participated. The Union cause was
supported by all of Mr. Lincoln's personal popularity; by all the
influence of an administration in possession and with the whole
patronage of the Government at its disposal; by all the sentiment of
the army and the fathers and brothers of the men in the army; by every
influence in short--personal, political and patriotic--that could be
brought to bear. Yet the declaration that the war for the Union was a
failure and the proposal to abandon all that had been fought for, was
defeated by a majority of scarcely more than ten per cent. of the total
vote cast in the states that remained professedly loyal to the Union
cause.

The interpretation of this fact is unescapable. It means that from
beginning to end of the war the Federal Government had not one but
two enemies to fight--the Confederacy with its splendidly robust and
enterprising armies, in the front, and the hostility of very nearly
one-half the population of the Northern States as an enemy in the rear.

In estimating the comparative resources and the relative opportunities
of the contending forces it is only fair that the student of history
should reckon this as some offset to the fact that the North enlisted
2,700,000 soldiers against the South's 600,000; that it had a navy
with which to shut the South off from the outer world while itself
drawing freely upon every land for supplies and men and money; and that
its resources in the matters of food, machinery, arms, equipments,
medicines and all sanitary supplies and equipments were immeasurably
superior to those of the South. How far the one fact really offsets the
other is a matter of which each reader must judge for himself. But it
is a fact worthy of observation that if the Southern States had been
permitted to participate in that election of 1864 there would have
been a stupendously overwhelming majority of the people in behalf of
the proposition that the war had been a failure and in favor of the
proposal to end it by the recognition of Confederate independence. Of
course the Confederates, in the attitude they had deliberately chosen
to assume, were in no remotest way entitled to cast their votes in
that election--nor did they think of claiming that privilege--but the
arithmetical calculation serves to show how easily the conservatives
of the two sections might have controlled the situation and saved the
country from a devastating war had they resolutely acted together
at the beginning against the intemperate radicals on both sides, the
self-regardful politicians and the seekers after shoulder straps
and gold-laced uniforms. It serves also to show something of the
difficulties with which those were beset who had charge of the Union
cause.

These things are perhaps tedious to the reader. But their just
consideration is absolutely necessary to any really impartial inquiry
into the history of the war, such as this work is intended to be.




CHAPTER XIII

"PEPPER BOX" STRATEGY


The moment Virginia adopted an ordinance of secession the authorities
on both sides recognized the fact that that state was destined to be
the chief battle ground of the war, and especially that the first and
perhaps the decisive actions of the struggle were likely to occur
there. Accordingly both sides began at once to hurry troops to that
borderland--the South sending them to such vantage points in Virginia
as might most seriously threaten Washington, the North sending them
to the capital city for its defense and for that march upon Richmond
which, it was hoped at the North, might be quickly decisive of the war
in favor of the Federal arms.

The Confederate General Forrest is reported to have defined "strategy"
as the art of "getting there first with the most men." This was what
each side at that time was endeavoring to do.

Richmond was not yet selected as the Confederate capital, but its
choice as such was already foreshadowed as a necessary requirement
alike of geography and politics, and within a brief while the
foreshadowing became a fact. In the meanwhile it was accepted in
advance as a certainty, and the two capitals confronted each other at a
distance of scarcely more than a hundred miles, as the crow flies.

The Southern States poured troops into Richmond as rapidly as they
could. The Northern States poured troops into Washington for the
defense of that capital with all possible energy and enterprise.
Neither upon the one side nor upon the other were the men soldiers
in any proper acceptation of the term. They were raw levies. From
the North they were mainly men who had passed their young lives in
commerce, in study or in other peaceful pursuits. From the South they
were mainly the sons of planters or the sons of overseers, accustomed
in either case from their youth up to the use of gunpowder, and to
the employment of those arms in the use of which gunpowder is a prime
factor. The Southern youths were accustomed to outdoor life, to camp
fare, to self-dependence, to self-sacrifice, if need be. The Northern
youth in the main were accustomed to nothing of the sort.

Thus at the beginning the Southern troops had an advantage. This was
peculiarly obvious when the cavalry of the two sections met each other
in battle. The Southern horsemen had been "rough riders" from infancy.
Many of the Northern men of that arm of the service had never ridden at
all except perhaps by way of conducting a gentle and docile farm horse
to a watering trough. In the matter of horses, too, the Southerners,
and especially the Virginians, had a distinct advantage. Ever since
the first settlement of Virginia it had been the custom of men in
that nearly roadless state to go everywhere upon horseback. They had
consequently given special attention to the breeding of horses fit for
strenuous work under the saddle, while in the North horse-breeding had
been conducted mainly with a view to harness use. The wiry Virginian
thoroughbreds, or half-breds, were far fitter for cavalry service, far
more enduring, far quicker of action, far more alert and responsive
than the Conestogas or Percherons or handsome and fast trotting Morgans
of Pennsylvania, from which state came the first cavalry regiments
encountered by Stuart and his born and bred cavaliers, mounted as they
were upon "Red Eye" colts or "Revenue" fillies.

The Southern troops also had the advantage of fighting defensively in
their own country to whose climate they were inured and to the diseases
of which they were in the main immune.

But apart from these small differences the two armies that confronted
each other on the Potomac were composed of substantially the same
materials. Later in the war the large enlistment of immigrants gave to
the Union army an element that did not at any time exist in the armies
of the South. But at the outset there was no important difference. Each
army was made up of American youths, full of patriotic fervor, brave,
heroic upon occasion, but utterly untrained in the profession of arms.

On the Northern side in the early contests of the war there was the
advantage of small bodies of regulars, trained to obey orders at all
hazards and to stand firm in every moment of danger. These regulars
proved themselves of inestimable value in the early actions of the war;
but their numbers were so small that their service scarcely counts in
the historical reckoning.

For the rest, both armies were made up of volunteers, men wholly
unused to military discipline and wholly untrained in that subjection
of their own minds and wills to superior authority which constitutes
the distinction between the soldier and the raw recruit--between an
army and an armed mob. They were brave fellows, all of them. They were
devoted to the causes they severally served, but they were not yet
soldiers. They retained the unsoldierly habit of thinking and judging
for themselves, where they should instead have let their officers think
and judge for them. Under the discipline of service and of fighting
they presently reduced themselves to the ranks, as it were, and became
soldiers equal and even superior to the best regulars that any army on
earth has ever brought into the field. Their deeds at Cold Harbor, at
Fredericksburg, at Chancellorsville, in the Wilderness, at Petersburg,
at Antietam, at Gettysburg, and on a score of other desperately
contested battlefields leave no possible room for doubt that the men
who composed the Federal and Confederate armies were the peers and even
the superiors of any other men who ever fought anywhere. But at the
first they were not such. They were undisciplined and subject to such
panics as that sort of individual thinking in which they indulged is
inevitably bound to produce. It is important to bear these facts in
mind if we would read the early history of the war understandingly.

The first blood shed in the war, however, was not shed in formal
military action. On the nineteenth of April, two days after Virginia's
secession, a Baltimore mob assailed a Massachusetts regiment on its
passage through the Maryland city to Washington, and several persons
were killed in the melée. It is not historically recorded that any of
the men who constituted the mob and made the assault ever afterwards
served in the Confederate army. On the contrary there is every reason
to believe that these men, so ready for mob violence, very carefully
avoided a service in which legitimate fighting was to be the daily
routine of life. That, however, is a detail--illustrative, perhaps, but
not otherwise important to history.

The secession of Virginia carried with it one event of vital and even
of supreme importance, namely, the secession of Robert E. Lee, without
whose genius the Confederate War would almost certainly have ended in
McClellan's capture of Richmond in the summer of 1862.

General Winfield Scott had called Lee "the flower of the American
Army." He had earnestly recommended Lee as his own fittest successor
in supreme command of the United States Army and such command had been
definitely offered to Lee. The secession of half a dozen Northern
or border states could not have been of greater consequence either
to the North or to the South than the decision of Robert E. Lee to
resign his commission and go with his native state Virginia into a
war of secession for which he saw no occasion or justification. His
problem, like that of Farragut and George H. Thomas and other officers
of Southern birth in the United States Army and Navy, was a very
perplexing one, involving a divided duty such as few men are ever
called upon to confront in the course of their lives. He himself set
forth the considerations that finally determined his course, in a
letter to his sister, the wife of a Union officer, which it is proper
to quote here in explanation. To this sister he wrote on the twentieth
of April, 1861: "We are now in a state of war which will yield to
nothing. The whole South is in a state of revolution, into which
Virginia after a long struggle has been drawn, and though I recognize
no necessity for this state of things, and would have foreborne and
pleaded to the end for the redress of grievances real or supposed,
yet in my own person I had to meet the question whether I should take
part against my native state. With all my devotion to the Union and
the feeling of loyalty and duty of an American citizen, I have not
been able to make up my mind to raise my hand against my relatives, my
children, my home. I have therefore resigned my commission in the army,
and, save in defense of my native state, with the sincere hope that my
poor services may never be needed, I hope I may never be called upon to
draw my sword."

Surely no more tragic, no more pathetic letter than that was ever
written. Yet it represented and reflected the struggle which at that
time was going on in the soul of every army or navy officer of Southern
birth and kindred. It was a part of the tragedy of a war which divided
families and set brother against brother in a strife that knew neither
mercy nor relenting for four, long, terrible years.

Lee went at once to Richmond and was promptly appointed to the task of
organizing first the Virginian and afterwards all the Southern armies
for effective service. For such work of organization he had a peculiar
genius which General Scott recognized, at the same time congratulating
the Union cause upon the fact that it had some weeks the start of Lee
in the task of creating an army out of untrained and undisciplined
volunteers.

Lee was not yet placed in any active military command, but at
every step he was the supreme military adviser of the Southern
authorities. When Beauregard, with all the laurels of popular praise
upon him, reached Richmond he and not Lee was the idol of the hour.
His spectacular and rather theatrical reduction of Fort Sumter had
advertised him to the popular attention as nothing had advertised Lee.
But Lee was his superior in rank as in genius and everything else, and
it was he who directed Beauregard to establish himself at Manassas and
along Bull Run as the fittest vantage ground from which to repel the
first serious advance of the Federal Army which was then assembling at
Washington.

At that period of the war there prevailed at Washington what a military
wit and critic afterwards called "the pepper box policy." That is to
say, the policy was to send forces into all quarters at once, to defend
large and small positions equally, and thus to scatter an army which if
concentrated upon a single point might have achieved decisive results.
Thus if the whole force available for eastern service had been brought
at once to Washington and pushed thence toward Richmond it seemingly
might have enveloped its adversary in superior numbers, and except for
the uncertainty due to the untrained character of its men it might have
been reckoned upon to achieve decisive results.

But under the "pepper box policy," a part of this force was sent under
McClellan to West Virginia; a part of it to the Valley of Virginia
under Patterson; a part of it to Fortress Monroe, and the main body to
Washington and its neighborhood, to protect the capital and presently
to advance for the overthrow of Beauregard at Manassas and for a
determined advance upon Richmond.

This policy invited defeat and met it. On the tenth of June the small
force at Fortress Monroe advanced and assailed the Confederates at
Big Bethel. It was defeated with some loss, having inflicted no
corresponding or compensatory injury upon the Confederates. Even had
the expedition succeeded in driving the Confederates from Big Bethel,
it could not possibly have accomplished anything of value to the
Federal arms or cause. It was supported by no force at Fortress Monroe
or elsewhere which was conceivably adequate to undertake an advance by
that route upon Richmond. In default of such support the expedition was
a foolish and futile one, and it must have been so reckoned even if it
had succeeded in capturing the wholly unimportant works at Big Bethel.

In the same way, early in July, McClellan gained some notable
advantages at Rich Mountain and elsewhere in West Virginia. He had
distinctly the best of it in the fighting; he dislodged his adversaries
from their chosen positions; and he made prisoners of a considerable
number of men. But his expedition led nowhither. His position and
the positions which he captured from the Confederates were alike
strategically unimportant from the point of view of an aggressive
campaign. His victories commanded no strategic points and opened no
road to any desirable objective.

In the Valley of Virginia the Confederates abandoned Harper's
Ferry--carrying off everything there that had military value, and
General Patterson occupied the place. This made good dispatches for the
newspapers and justified startling headlines of victory. But in very
truth it meant nothing whatever except that the wily Fabian, Joseph
E. Johnston, in command of the Confederate forces in that quarter,
was wisely determined to keep himself and his army within reinforcing
distance of Beauregard at Manassas, where the first great battle of the
war was obviously destined to occur. Harper's Ferry and Martinsburg
were clearly of no value whatsoever to General Johnston. By abandoning
them and retiring to Winchester he placed his army twenty-five or
thirty miles nearer to Manassas than it had been and drew Patterson by
so much farther from the fighting points. For in order to reach and
reinforce McDowell for the impending Manassas fight Patterson must
march north, recross the Potomac, move thence eastward to Washington
and then move southwest again to McDowell's assistance. Johnston
meanwhile secured to himself a short line of march which gave him a
very great advantage.

When the time came for the first great battle of the war to be fought,
it was hoped at Washington that Patterson with his strong force,
numbering about twenty-two thousand men, might be able to reinforce
McDowell, while real or pretended operations might detain Johnston in
the valley and prevent him from reinforcing Beauregard with his much
smaller force. But by retiring to Winchester Johnston had secured for
himself the certainty of joining Beauregard in time for the battle.
When Patterson threw forward a cloud of skirmishers as if intending to
offer battle at Winchester and secure the mountain passes into eastern
Virginia, it did not take the ceaselessly active cavalry leader J.
E. B. Stuart many hours of continuous skirmishing within his enemy's
lines to discover that the movement was a feint and that Patterson was
in fact hurrying the main body of his army toward Manassas, by way of
Harper's Ferry and Washington.

Even before Stuart definitely reported this fact, Johnston had so far
penetrated Patterson's purpose that he began his own movement toward
Manassas, sending first the heavier and more slowly moving corps
across the mountains to a point where railroad transportation was to
meet them, and thus clearing the way for the cavalry and the lighter
infantry and the well-horsed field batteries to proceed over country
roads without the assistance of railroad cars.

Thus the "pepper box" system of strategy which prevailed at Washington
met its first defeat. If Patterson had been sent at the outset to
strengthen McDowell the result of the battle of Manassas might or
might not have been different from what it was. But at any rate that
arrangement would have given to McDowell a much greater preponderance
of strength than he actually had on that battlefield. If Patterson had
not gone to the valley of course Johnston would not have gone thither
to meet him, and the bulk of Johnston's force would have been added to
Beauregard's. But Patterson's army very largely outnumbered the force
that Johnston had at Winchester within striking distance of Manassas,
so that the total result of the plan of concentration would have been
to strengthen McDowell.

More important still is the fact that while Johnston actually got
a large part of his army to Manassas in time to decide the battle,
Patterson never got there at all. So in considering the policy that
sent Patterson to the valley instead of sending him to the line of Bull
Run, we are entitled to reckon it as the cause of Patterson's complete
absence from a field on which his valley adversary was present with
timely and sorely needed strength.

In the meantime and throughout the summer there was a civil war going
on in Missouri with varying fortunes. It occupied many thousands of
men who might perhaps have been more wisely and effectively employed
in aid of the one great movement upon Richmond, which if it had been
thus made conspicuously successful, would pretty certainly have made an
end of the war before it had had time to develop its strength. Those
operations in Missouri had a dramatic interest of their own. But they
in no way bore upon the problems of grand strategy which were meanwhile
the proper and legitimate objects of supreme concern and consideration
by the two stalwart contestants.




CHAPTER XIV

MANASSAS


At midsummer, 1861, there occurred near Manassas Junction in Virginia a
battle which must always be regarded as one of the most remarkable of
conflicts whether we consider its unusual event or its extraordinary
sequences.

The battle was utterly untimely in its happening. It was a contest
of the unready with the unready. It was brought about by influences
peculiarly unmilitary and in defiance of the judgment of all the
military men who had aught to do with it. We shall see hereafter in
how strange a way it produced effects precisely the opposite of those
that were legitimately to be expected of it; how to the victors in it
it brought a paralysis of enterprise far greater than disaster itself
could have wrought.

The Confederates lay at Manassas Junction thirty miles or so southwest
of Washington, with a force numbering by official report 21,833 men
and twenty-nine guns. The Federals had in front of Washington a total
available force of 34,000 men. On both sides the men were volunteers,
unused to the ways of war and unfit to enter upon a great battle. In
this respect, as has been already said, the Confederates had somewhat
the advantage in the fact that their volunteers were accustomed to
outdoor life and to the use of firearms, while those on the Federal
side were largely drawn from the counter, the bookkeeper's desk,
the factory, the farm, and the village. But on both sides they were
untrained, undisciplined, unlearned in the arts of war, and so loosely
organized that their organization could scarcely at all be considered
as an element of strength.

To offset this small Confederate advantage the Federals had behind them
supply departments almost perfect, while the Confederates were very
nearly starved to death by official incompetency in those departments
even at that early period of the war.

At Manassas they were perilously short not only of provisions and
forage, but even of water, all by reason of an extraordinary incapacity
on the part of supply departments that began their careers by
strangling themselves and their armies with red tape.

The facts of this matter have been set forth in detail in General
Beauregard's official reports, and in other authoritative publications.
Only a synopsis of them is necessary in this history. The Confederate
army lay at Manassas in the midst of a country abounding in supplies,
but its quartermasters and commissaries were not permitted to draw upon
that source of supply even in the smallest way. For months, before and
after the battle of Manassas, an entirely unused railroad--the Manassas
Gap line--lay idle. It penetrated a country to the west of the army
whose granaries were full, whose smoke-houses were rich in food, and
whose fields were laden with ripening corn. A country similarly rich
in food lay to the north, between the Federal and Confederate lines.
Its supplies were sure to fall into Federal hands presently if not
seized upon by the Confederates while they had opportunity. But the
Confederate supply departments at Richmond absolutely forbade their
own lieutenants at Manassas to feed and forage the army from such
easily available sources. They forbade any food or forage purchases to
be made in that region except by purchasing agents of their own, and
they required that all food and forage so purchased in the immediate
neighborhood of the army should be shipped to Richmond over the already
overburdened, single track Virginia Central railroad, and shipped back
again in such meager doles as the broken-down railroad could carry.

This peculiar imbecility of management continued till very nearly
the end of the war to keep the Confederate armies half starved or
wholly starved even when their camps lay in the midst of available
plenty. The difference between the admirable management of the supply
departments at the North and the phenomenally stupid management of the
like departments at the South was, from beginning to end, the full
equivalent of an army corps' difference in the number of fighting men.

Besides Beauregard's army there was a small force at Fredericksburg
from which Beauregard was able to draw 1,355 men and six guns in time
for the battle. In the last preceding chapter it has been shown how
Johnston succeeded in transferring a large part of his army--6,000
men and twenty guns--to Manassas in time for the battle, while none
of Patterson's regiments or batteries succeeded even in placing
themselves within supporting distance of the Federal army there
engaged.

Thus, according to the official reports, the Confederates had in all
29,188 men and fifty-five guns with which, in a strong position of
their own selection, to meet the advance of McDowell's force estimated
by the best Northern authorities at about 34,000 men.

If Patterson had not been sent to the valley at all, but to Washington
instead, the Federal force would have been swelled to 55,000 or 60,000
men, while Beauregard's strength could not have been increased by more
than a few thousands at most. In that case the result of the first
great battle of the war might or might not have been different from
what it was--for with wholly untrained troops strength is not always
to be accurately measured by numbers. But in any case the probability
would have been greatly increased that the first battle of the war
should be the last and that the country by quick and complete victory
should be spared four years of desolating war that threw homes by
scores of thousands into the shadow.

The battle was brought about not in answer to any consideration of
military propriety but solely in response to ignorant but irresistible
popular clamor. The people of this country knew nothing of modern war
or of the conditions that govern success or failure in it. The latest
national recollection of war was of the unequal conflict with Mexico
nearly a decade and a half before. The American people had never seen
assembled in their name and behalf an army half so great as that with
which their patriotism had now responded to the country's call. In
front of Washington and in the near-by valley of Virginia they had
between fifty and sixty thousand men, while their adversaries could
muster there only a little more than half as many.

Knowing little of the difference between uniformed men with arms
in their hands and seasoned soldiers, the people at the North grew
violently impatient of the delay. They had furnished their Government
twice as many armed men as the enemy could count, and they could not
understand why the double force thus created should not go on at once
to make an end of what they regarded as the "nonsense down there in
Virginia."

So confident had been the conviction at the North that this was a petty
outbreak to be suppressed easily and quickly, that a large part of the
enlistments were for no more than three months. That period seemed to
them more than adequate to the task in hand, and it had been deemed
needless to take young men away from their homes and their employments
for a greater length of time.

It is plain enough that the administration at Washington at first
shared this conception of the case. Otherwise it would neither have
called for nor accepted three months volunteers.

But the three months were now nearly expired, and nothing had been
done to make an end of the "nonsense." The terms of service of many
regiments were soon to expire and there seemed to be no general
disposition on the part of the men composing them to enter into new
enlistments. It was obvious that unless the "army" at and near
Washington should go forward at once, crush Beauregard's greatly
inferior force, march on to Richmond and make an end of the difficulty,
new levies must be called for and a new strain put upon the endurance
and the patience of the people.

All this impatience found daily and often intemperate expression in
the newspapers, whose rivalry in clamor fanned the flame of discontent
among the people. Desk strategists who knew nothing of war's conditions
had an easy task in figuring out with their blue pencils an absolutely
certain victory for the Federal arms, if only the Federal generals
could be persuaded or compelled by public opinion to avail themselves
of their matchless opportunity. "Are not two more than one? And have
not we the two to our enemy's one? What dullards and laggards our
generals must be to delay for a day or an hour!" So ran the editorial
argument, and that argument seemed to the people conclusive and
convincing, for the reason that the people generally were as ignorant
as the strategists of the editorial rooms themselves concerning the
conditions that govern battle and the training necessary to convert
civilian volunteers into soldiers fit to face a fire of musketry and
cannon.

The military men knew better, of course. Except the superannuated
commander-in-chief, General Scott, not one of them had ever commanded
so much as a brigade in battle, but at least they had been taught in
a military school and many of them had seen fighting. They knew the
peril of hurling ill-organized regiments of utterly untrained and
undisciplined civilians upon the chosen positions of an armed foe,
even when that foe's forces were in a like condition of undisciplined
inefficiency. The arithmetical argument in no degree deceived them.
They knew that with such men as they had under their command strength
could not be safely reckoned by a mere numerical count, that under
certain easily imagined conditions, indeed, strength must often be in
inverse ratio to numbers. They perfectly knew that for them to advance
against the Confederates with an army in such condition as theirs was
at that time was to take a fearful risk of defeat, disastrous and
demoralizing to the army and dangerously discouraging to the country
behind the army.

But the demand on the part of press, pulpit and people for an immediate
advance was too insistent, too clamorous, and was rapidly becoming too
angry to be longer resisted. It was reinforced by an almost equally
insistent demand on the part of the civilian authorities at Washington,
whose ignorance of military conditions was scarcely less pronounced
than that of the excited editors and orators of the country.

It was decided therefore to advance the army and bring on the hazardous
battle against the better judgment of every trained military man at
Washington.

General Scott was still in supreme command of the army, but he was much
too old and too feeble to conduct the perilous enterprise in person.
General Irwin McDowell was chosen to plan the battle and fight it. He
had never commanded an army before or conducted a campaign, but neither
had any other officer then available, and his technical knowledge
of strategy was thorough. On this occasion his plan of battle was
admirable, one of the best, General Sherman has said, that was formed
at any time during the war. It was essentially identical with that
afterwards adopted by General Lee at the Seven Days' Battles and again
at Chancellorsville.

A reconnoissance in force was made against the Confederate lines along
Bull Run on Thursday, the eighteenth of July, which disclosed the fact
that the Confederates were fully entrenched in a strong position which
commanded the crossings of the stream and the plateau over which it
must be approached.

Having found out all this, General McDowell decided to bring on a
battle on Sunday, July the twenty-first.

It is not the purpose of the present writer to tell the story of
Manassas or that of any other battle in military detail. That has been
done too often already, to the hopeless confusion of the civilian
reader's mind. Only an intelligible outline is attempted here, with
no effort to locate this or that division or brigade or regiment or
battery upon the field or to follow out the details of any movement
made by any of them.

Beauregard held his line along the stream known as Bull Run, over a
space of several miles. This line had been established in defense
of the railroad "junction" at Manassas where the line of the Orange
and Alexandria railroad joined that of the Manassas Gap railroad.
This position was suggested by the artificial geography of railroad
construction. It was defended by the natural physical geography of Bull
Run, which furnished the Confederates a comparatively good, though by
no means a strategically satisfactory, line of defensive fighting.

McDowell's purpose was to assail the Confederates on their extreme
right, there making a feint as if to force a crossing of Bull Run
at that point which he did not at all intend; to march his stronger
battalions to his own right along roads substantially parallel with
Bull Run; here and there to divert a force to the Bull Run line and
make fighting there by way of preventing Confederate concentration at
any point and finally to hurl all his force with irresistible fury
upon the extreme left of the Confederate line, which he intended and
confidently expected to turn and overwhelm with his superior numbers.

It was McDowell's plan to deceive the Confederates as to his point of
decisive attack, to keep them busy all along the Bull Run line and,
late in the day, to envelop their left wing, crush it by superior
force, capture the railroad and perhaps compel Beauregard's surrender
for lack of a line of retreat.

The plan worked well for a time. The attacks of McDowell's divisions
upon the Confederate right and center were stoutly and successfully
resisted at every point, but they were made with determination and
they served their purpose of deceiving the Southern commander or at
least of preventing him from withdrawing heavy forces from that part of
the field for the defense of his left against the final and crushing
assault which McDowell intended to make there, and in preparation for
which he was all day moving his heaviest columns in that direction
along roads not visible from the Confederate lines.

When at last that assault was made, it found Beauregard inadequately
prepared for it; but, with the determination and energy which were the
dominant traits of his character, the Confederate general held his
ground obstinately and hurriedly moved troops from the right to the
left of his line.

The fighting raged furiously at this critical point and for a
considerable time its result was in doubt, with the chances strongly in
favor of the Federals. Three times the tide of battle ebbed and flowed
across the disputed field, both sides fighting with a courage and
obstinacy that were scarcely to have been expected of troops so little
inured to the work of war.

When the struggle was at its fiercest, and at the moment when the
promise of it seemed to be that the Federals would overwhelm and crush
their sorely outnumbered adversaries, a strong detachment of Johnston's
troops from the Valley, long delayed on their railroad journey, reached
the field. Their orders were of the vaguest, but they plainly saw an
overmastering Federal force pressing the Confederates very hard in
their immediate presence. So, following the Napoleonic instruction to
go to the point of heaviest firing the officers commanding the arriving
Confederates went at once into the thick of the fight.

It was the work of a brief time for these fresh men to envelop the
advancing Federal right wing and crush it to pulp.

In the meanwhile the sorely beset left wing of the Confederates had
been enabled to hold its ground and save itself for a time from
complete disaster, only by the obstinate courage of a brigade of
Virginians under General Thomas Jonathan Jackson--a West Pointer who
had long ago resigned from the old army to become a professor in the
Virginia Military Institute, and who had now become a brigadier-general
of Virginia volunteers. He had already so completely won the hearts and
dominated the minds of his men that--raw volunteers as they were--they
had no thought of faltering or flinching in the presence of any danger,
so long as their chieftain bade them stand fast. One after another the
battalions with which they had touched elbows were beaten back before a
leaden hailstorm, or torn to shreds by cannon fire at murderously short
range, or fairly forced to the rear by bayonet-armed phalanxes, while
their own brigade line was steadily withering under the destructive
fire. But they were under inspiration of a leader whom they loved and
whose courage was inspired by a religious faith as unfaltering as that
of any Mussulman fanatic, and so they stood steadfast in spite of all.
They looked for their orders only to that great, calm, passionless
leader, and from him alone they took their impulse. Scarcely at any
time during a war that abounded in illustrations of heroism, was there,
on either side, a more conspicuous example of the courage that endures,
than that which was afforded by Jackson and his Virginians at that most
critical moment of the first great battle. It excited admiration and
inspired others with courage even in that hour of seemingly hopeless
defeat. General Bee, who was destined a few minutes later to become
a martyr to his own courage, seeing it, cried out to his wavering
men: "There stands Jackson like a stone wall," and appealed to them to
emulate the example of their comrades and "rally on the Virginians."
From that hour to this the title "Stonewall" has clung to the fame and
memory of Jackson more closely than his own proper name has done.

Under the fierce onset of Johnston's fresh men, supported by rallying
brigades that had for a time faltered and yielded ground, and
reinforced from the Confederate right, the Federal assailing column was
quickly crushed and forced to retire, the Confederates pressing hotly
upon their heels.

Then occurred that insane panic in the Federal army which has never
been explained or accounted for except upon the insufficient ground
that its victims were men without discipline and wholly unused to
war. The explanation leaves much to be desired. The men who yielded
to that panic impulse had already on that day proved themselves brave
fellows, quite capable of doing soldiers' work right gallantly. They
had fought with vigor, determination and high courage through long and
bloody hours. They had been the assailants where assault required a
greater courage than defense and they had done their soldierly work
altogether well. They had been baffled of victory in the crowning
hour of the battle, but they perfectly knew that their columns still
outnumbered those of their adversary, and they must have known that in
an orderly withdrawal from the scene of the conflict they were not in
the least degree likely to be destructively assailed in their turn.
Nothing was more unlikely indeed, than that the Confederates, having
exhausted their freshness of vigor in the battle and having achieved
their immediate purpose by repelling their enemy's assault, would in
their turn advance upon that enemy, still outnumbering them, if he had
withdrawn in good order and taken up a strong defensive position at
Centreville, only a few miles away. Had the Federal Army done that,
preserving its cohesion and presenting a determined front, it is indeed
certain that the Confederates would not have cared to convert their
successful defense into a more than doubtful offense; and even had that
happened through Confederate over-confidence, the opportunity of the
Federals to convert their own defeat into a conspicuous victory would
have been as tempting as any that an army could desire.

Later in the war after the two armies had been molded into
effectiveness by the stern discipline of service, some such course as
this would undoubtedly have been pursued. But at Manassas the event was
startlingly different. No sooner did the Federal troops that had fought
so gallantly on the right of their line find their assault repelled and
themselves forced back than all cohesion, all discipline, all soldierly
qualities went out of them. They broke ranks and fled in a positively
demented panic, which unfortunately proved to be instantly and
universally contagious. The whole army fell into confusion. Even those
parts of it which had successfully held their own in severe conflicts
throughout the battle hours broke ranks and ran as an unorganized mob
might at the advance of a force of regulars armed with bayonets.

The Confederates, flushed with unexpected victory achieved in the
moment of defeat, pursued them with all the quick-moving forces
available, chief among these being Stuart's small body of Virginia
cavalry.

There was a report current in the Federal army that J. E. B. Stuart had
under his command thirty thousand of the finest and most desperately
daring horsemen that had been known in the world since the days of
the Mamelukes. As a matter of fact, he had under his orders five or
six hundred young Virginians. They knew how to ride their horses,
they knew how to use their revolvers, and they knew in some degree at
least how to handle their sabers. They had been trained to all that
all their lives and perfected in it at the camp of instruction at
Ashland. But beyond that they had no skill and no superiority and it
was their constant wonder after the battle of Manassas, that during
the chase they almost nowhere met the cavalry of the other side. They
met and quickly dispersed artillery and infantry, but nowhere did they
encounter men of their own arm of the service. They had met and fought
horsemen in the Valley of Virginia--for Stuart had been with Johnston
there--but they encountered none such now.

The simple fact is that the Union army was in an insane panic and
utterly disorganized. The sole thought of every man in it was to
escape with a whole skin if that should be in any way possible. The
cavalry men having horses under them put spurs to their steeds and led
instead of protectingly following a confused and confusing retreat upon
Washington. Artillery men cut their horses out of their gun carriages
and caissons, mounted them, and fled bareback at such speed as the
horses could make.

At a little stream a caisson in mad flight was presently overturned,
obstructing a bridge. A great cloud of panic-stricken soldiers and
citizens seeking an avenue of flight was collected there almost in an
instant. Then up came Kemper of the cannon, powder-grimed and weary
but flushed with the victory. Using two guns he opened fire upon the
confused crowd at short range, with an effect like that produced
upon a flock of partridges when a charge of shot is fired into its
midst. Then a little squad of Stuart's cavalry men--ten or a dozen in
number--drew sabers and charged, and a minute later the creek was full
of struggling and drowning men, but no organized force remained to be
charged except a body of eighty infantry men fully armed, with bayonets
fixed, who stood away on the left. Upon these the insignificant squad
of cavalry men made a dashing charge, calling out as they galloped:
"Throw down your arms or we'll put you to the sword!" And so completely
demoralizing had the panic become that these eighty who could instantly
have swept the little band of cavalry men off the face of the earth,
not only dashed their arms to the ground but broke ranks and ran, every
individual man seeking such escape as might be possible to him.

The men who were so panic-stricken on that fateful Sunday were not
cowards. Many of them fought valiantly and stalwartly later in the
war. They were simply victims of an insensate and highly contagious
panic. They were not yet soldiers. They had not yet learned the first
lesson of the soldier, namely, the imperative necessity of preserving
organization, fighting every force encountered, and waiting for orders
that must be obeyed at all costs, especially before giving way to the
enemy. Their imaginations had been inflamed by the stories related
at their camp fires respecting Stuart's mythical Mamelukes and their
terrible skill in horsemanship.

In brief all courage, all cohesion, and all soldierly quality
had completely gone out of the Federal army. Men who had fought
courageously an hour before had become as hares fleeing from pursuing
hounds, and their flight knew no halting until they had passed the long
bridge into the streets of Washington, where they paused only to gather
breath for a still further flight if such should become necessary.

In all this the confusion was increased and multiplied by the
presence among the fugitives of a multitude of panic-stricken
picnickers--Congressmen, civilians of every sort, and lavishly dressed
women--who had gone out in carriages and carryalls to see the spectacle
of a Federal army walking over the Confederates, and to follow the
fleeing rebels all the way to Richmond, feasting meanwhile upon the
champagne, the boned turkey, the sandwiches and the truffled game with
which they had so lavishly supplied themselves that the Confederates
fed fat for days afterwards upon the provisions that the picnickers
abandoned in their flight.

The presence of these people within the lines of a fighting army was
in itself a conspicuous illustration of the utterly unmilitary and
undisciplined condition of that army. Imagine, if it be possible to
imagine, such a horde of sightseers attempting to follow Grant into the
Wilderness, or Sherman on his march to the Sea! But the war was very
young when the battle of Manassas was fought, and so these people were
permitted to be there, to add to the completeness of a rout that could
never have been equaled in its insanity at any later period of the
conflict.

As to the total number of men engaged on either side at Manassas, the
statistics are varying and untrustworthy. It is certain that there
was no very great or decisive disparity of numbers. The Federal army
outnumbered that of the Confederates by only three or four thousand
men. General Beauregard has estimated his total force, including the
necessary garrison of the works, which of course was not actually
engaged, at a total of 29,188 men. According to Dr. Rossiter Johnson,
an unusually accurate and conscientious historian on the Northern side
whose means of information are of the very best, McDowell's total
force, including those detached to guard the line of retreat upon
Washington, was about 34,000 men.

Exact statistics in such a case are of no moment. Where armed mobs,
undisciplined, ill-organized, and unused to the strenuous work of war,
meet in battle quite other things than numbers are apt to be decisive.

The Federal commanders reported a loss of 470 killed, 1,071 wounded
and 1,793 missing--a total loss of 3,334 men. The Confederate loss was
officially reported at 387 killed, 1,582 wounded and 13 missing, making
a total of 1,982.

If greater attention is here given to this first important battle than
to others of larger magnitude to be treated in future pages of this
work, it is because of the extraordinary effect the battle had, as will
be set forth in the next chapter, and because of the peculiar danger to
which the Confederate victory for a time subjected the Federal cause.




CHAPTER XV

THE PARALYSIS OF VICTORY


On the evening of the twenty-first day of July, 1861, the Confederate
army at Manassas rested upon one of the completest and most spectacular
victories that had ever been won by any army over any adversary.
The assailing army had not only been repelled--all possibility of
resistance was gone from it. Not only had it been driven pell-mell from
the field with every circumstance of demoralization that could add
picturesqueness to its flight, but the uttermost link of cohesion that
could hold its battalions together for any purpose of resistance was
completely broken up and destroyed. Divisions were dissipated, brigades
were broken into bits, regiments no longer existed and even companies
were scattered to the winds. Only demoralized and panic-stricken
fugitives, each madly seeking safety, remained. That which had been a
most gallant "army with banners" at sunrise had become before nightfall
a panic-stricken mob without possibility of cohesion or stamina and
utterly without a sense of soldierly duty.

Then followed the strangest event of the war. This victory, the
completest, the most picturesque, the most absolute that could be
imagined, had the effect of paralyzing the winners of it to an extent
to which even defeat could not have done.

The story is too strange and historically of too much import to be told
otherwise than in its fulness.

Let us first consider the character and composition of the two armies
that fought at Manassas. The Confederate volunteers were enlisted for
twelve months. The term might have been made longer without the loss
of a volunteer. For these young men, whatever their contract with the
Government might stipulate, fully intended to remain in the service so
long as the war should last. They felt it to be their own personal war
and most of them had nothing else to do than fight it out to the end,
however long it might endure. Indeed it was certain that so long as
it lasted no young man of the South could long remain out of the army
without incurring damning disgrace at home.

As a consequence, the organization of the Confederates when the
battle of Manassas occurred was far more perfect and had far more of
permanency in it than was the case with that of McDowell's forces.
These consisted largely of men who had volunteered for no more than a
three months' service, and the terms of many regiments were expiring
or about to expire when the call to battle was issued. Many of those
whose terms were at an end turned back on the very eve of battle--_four
thousand of them quitting on the day of battle itself_. They refused to
participate in the conflict because their time was up.

This was a manifestation of indifference to all patriotic and manly
considerations such as was nowhere witnessed on the Southern side at
any time during the war.

But let us not judge too harshly. These young men were civilians,
not soldiers. They had enlisted only for a period of three months.
They were callow youths unaccustomed to war. They had regarded a
three months' service in the volunteers as a sort of exciting picnic
excursion to the South. They had done their duty during the term for
which they had agreed to serve, with very tolerable faithfulness.
They had had their outing. Their frolic was over. Their contract was
fulfilled. They very naturally wanted to return to their homes. When
under such circumstances a fierce battle confronted them, with the
enemy very manifestly in no "excursion" mood but bent upon all that was
possible of slaughter, is it any wonder that these young men faltered
and failed?

They were scathingly assailed in patriotically inspired prose and
verse, and certainly a similar turning back on the part of Southern
youths on the very eve of battle would have been punished with an
enduring and all-embracing social ostracism harder to bear than death.
But there were differences between Northern and Southern sentiment
that must be taken into the reckoning. At the North there was a party
more or less openly opposing the war. At the South there was none
such. At the North the military impulse did not inspire all minds as
it did at the South. At the North personal courage was not held to
be the one supreme test of manhood, as it was at the South. At the
North a man might fail in that and have laughter for his portion,
while at the South the punishment for a like fault was the eternal
damnation of scorn and contempt, with universal social outlawry as an
accompaniment. If any man in Beauregard's army had gone home because
his enlistment had expired while the battle was pending he could never
more have visited any neighbor or aspired to any woman's hand; he would
have been everywhere treated with contempt and measureless scorn. His
neighbors would not have sat on the same bench with him in church. He
would have been instantly rejected as a juryman by both sides in every
case. No other crime that he might commit could have added in the least
degree to the depth of his degradation.

At the North very different standards prevailed. The poets and the
newspaper writers might lavish opprobrious epithets upon these young
men in a collective capacity without mentioning their individual names,
but their neighbors, their sweethearts, their daily associates were not
apt to take so quixotic a view of their duty or so severely to judge
their conduct. It must always be borne in mind that men's standards
of duty and obligation are apt to conform in a general way at least
to those of their neighbors. In passing upon human conduct we must be
attentive to this fact if we would justly judge.

As for the men who went into the fight on the Union side we must
remember that at the end of it the companies and regiments and brigades
of which they had formed a part in the morning had been dissipated
into the thinnest of thin air at three o'clock in the afternoon by the
lightning-like stroke of panic. There were no longer any companies left
or any regiments or any brigades or any organizations of any other
sort. There was no longer any such thing as cohesion among them. There
was nobody authorized to give orders--nobody capable of enforcing
obedience. The multitude of men who in the morning had seemed to
constitute an army had been resolved before nightfall into a wild-eyed
and uncontrollable mob of irresponsible fugitives, intent only upon
seeking safety, without any regard whatever to any obligation or
impulse, of honor or duty or shame--any impulse except the instinct of
self-preservation.

There were many such panic-stricken fugitives on the Confederate side
also--so many that when Jefferson Davis met a mob of them on his
approach to the battlefield, he was convinced that the Southern army
had been defeated and broken. But these were individuals merely, and
while their aggregate was large, it embraced no command, no entire
body of troops, whether company, regiment or brigade. The Confederate
commands remained intact. They preserved their organizations perfectly
and remained absolutely obedient to orders. At the end of the battle
theirs was not only still an army; it was an army flushed with victory,
illimitably confident both in itself and in its leaders, eager for
further action, clamorous for advance and ready to do and dare anything
and everything that might promise further glory.

That army eagerly wanted to march at once upon Washington, and there
was absolutely no military reason why it should not have done so. There
was no fighting force to resist it on the march. There was no force
at Washington which could have seriously disputed its entry into the
city. It could easily have trampled to earth the feeble resistance it
must have encountered at the gateways of the capital. Stuart, almost
with tears on his cheeks, besought permission to lead such an advance
with his handful of cavalry men, pledging his honor and reputation as
a soldier and all that he hoped for of a future career, in bail of his
promise to clear away every obstacle and open an unobstructed road to
the columns of Beauregard and Johnston in their victorious march across
the Long Bridge and into the streets of the Federal capital.

Stuart was accustomed to boast that he never used profane language. But
his impatient cavaliers heard and heartily echoed some strong words
from his lips when finally the paralyzing prohibition of an immediate
advance came to him in the shape of an order to encamp his men in a
muddy cornfield on that rainy night, when in his judgment they should
have been gaily galloping on march for Washington as the advance guard
of a victory-inspired army, intent upon making the most of its success
and crowning its achievements with historic consequences.

Stuart at least anticipated no difficulty in galloping into Washington
and Stuart's stalwart cavaliers were ready for any enterprise to which
that born leader of men might invite them.

Those Virginia horsemen had been for ten consecutive days and nights
forbidden to remove a saddle. For ten consecutive days and nights
they had stood at the heads of their horses at feeding time and held
the temporarily removed bridle bit in one hand and the ear of corn
from which the horse was feeding in the other. For ten consecutive
days and nights those men had been ceaselessly in the saddle, their
only sleep being snatched in brief fragments, while their horses were
tethered to their wrists. Yet so eager were they to follow up this
victory that every man of them "swore like a trooper" on that Sunday
evening when the pursuit was senselessly called off, and every man of
them ejaculated a hearty "amen" to their leader's vituperation of that
superior authority which forbade him and his devoted cavalry men to
ride into Washington close upon the heels of the broken, panic-stricken
and utterly demoralized Federal fugitives from the battlefield.

There is now not the slightest doubt that he could have done this.
There is not the smallest question that if he had been permitted to
do it, with a supporting column of infantry and artillery following
as closely as it could upon his horses' heels, Washington would have
become a Confederate possession on that Sunday night, and--who knows
what else might have happened? Perhaps four years of the bloodiest of
modern wars might have been spared to the American people.

However that may be, the historian of the Confederate War is bound
to regard the failure of the Confederates to follow up their victory
and pursue their broken, fleeing and utterly disintegrated enemy into
Washington during that night and the next morning as one of the most
stupendous blunders recorded anywhere in history.

It was perfectly well known to the two Confederate commanders, that
Washington was not defended on the South by any fortifications which
a determined assailing column could not easily have run over. There
was only one earthwork, and that an incomplete one, in the way, and it
was so little in the way that a column moving upon the Federal capital
could easily have passed on toward the city by thoroughfares that lay
quite out of the effective range of its guns.

In brief there was absolutely no conceivable reason for the failure
of the Confederate generals to follow up their phenomenal success on
the battlefield by an instant and dramatic march upon their enemy's
capital over a road which was obstructed by nothing more menacing or
embarrassing than huge piles of abandoned food supplies.

General Beauregard and General Johnston have courageously and manfully
assumed all responsibility for that failure to advance at the right
and critical moment. For a time that failure was attributed to the
paralyzing hand of Jefferson Davis, who came upon the field near the
end of the battle. But that accusation was unjust. Mr. Davis has been
exonerated from all responsibility for the failure by the deliberately
recorded testimony of his lieutenants. Mr. Davis was in fact eager for
an immediate advance which might crown the victory with its legitimate
consequences. He even dictated and had written out a peremptory order
to that effect, which Johnston and Beauregard persuaded him to withhold.

Their reasons for doing so have been fully set forth by themselves.
In spite of the facts that lay before their eyes, they could not
believe in the completeness of the victory they had achieved. Neither
had they confidence in the army that had won that victory. They were
sure that it was tired. They thought it needed rest. They doubted its
trustworthiness. They had no adequate conception of its enthusiasm for
the enterprise for which it was clamorously eager. It is one of the
embarrassments of war that a commanding general has sometimes no means
of knowing what the men under his command are thinking and feeling.

So far were the two Confederate commanders from appreciating the
magnitude and the completeness of their victory, that after it was all
over, and after events of every kind had demonstrated the extremity of
Federal demoralization, they were by their own confession, frightened
half out of their wits by the movement of certain Confederate forces
which they believed to be a new and determined advance by the
hopelessly demoralized enemy.

They ought to have known better, of course; but they did not, and
they would not let Stuart teach them better, though he, with his
preternatural activity, had followed the panic-stricken fugitives far
enough to know what their moral condition was.

Let us frankly recognize facts and take account of them in the
reckoning of history. Johnston and Beauregard were accomplished
officers, familiar with every detail of technical military duty. But
neither of them was as yet experienced in the command of armies or
the conduct of campaigns. Until a few months before that battle was
fought they had been mere captains of engineers. Neither had ever
commanded any force greater than a company. Neither had ever seen an
army of proportions half so large as those of the force that fought at
Manassas. Neither had ever had even the smallest experience in grand
strategy. They were mere apprentices still in the art of war. They had
not yet fully learned their trade. They utterly failed to understand
what their victory meant. They had no conception of the disorganizing,
disintegrating effects of that victory upon their adversaries. They
were utterly incapable of understanding their opportunity or of taking
advantage of it. Because of their inexperience they let slip the finest
opportunity that was at any time afforded to commanders on either side
to achieve a quick and decisive result.

With no purpose or willingness to undervalue the ability or the
devotion of two officers who afterwards achieved well-deserved
distinction as the commanders of armies, it may fairly be pointed
out that they were in command at Manassas not because of known
and demonstrated fitness for command, but solely because of their
technical rank in the old, peace-time army of the United States, where
promotion was exclusively by seniority--perhaps the unsafest ground of
promotion that was ever devised by the evil ingenuity of officialism
and professional self-regard. Whatever capacity these two officers
afterwards developed, it is very manifest that at the time of the
Manassas battle they both showed themselves incapable of seizing upon
the opportunity that victory offered them in any such masterful way as
that in which Lee afterwards seized upon far less obvious opportunities
at the end of the Seven Days' Battles and again after Chancellorsville.

Having won the completest and most conspicuous victory of modern
times, they set to work to fortify themselves for defense against the
enemy they had so disastrously overthrown, precisely as if they had
been beaten in the fight and were called upon to defend themselves
against further aggression at the hands of an enemy to be feared.
Having everything of opportunity their own way, they threw it all
into the adversary's hands. Having reduced their enemy's army to pulp
they deliberately gave him time and opportunity to reconstruct it, to
reinforce it, to reorganize and discipline it, as he presently did,
into a superb fighting machine instead of pushing forward and fighting
it vigorously while it possessed no fighting force at all.

Both sides in this war suffered for a time from this paralysis of
officialism and routine which set inferior men to command their
superiors and balked conclusions by incapacity. It will be related
later in this history, how Grant--the most masterful man in the Federal
army--was long denied his opportunity by the arbitrary will of the
immeasurably inferior Halleck, to whom a false system and an old man's
favor gave control in despite of fact and achievement.

At present we deal only with the facts of a single case. On the night
of July 21, 1861, and on the following morning, there was open to the
Confederate commanders at Manassas an opportunity which hopefully
promised to bring the war to an immediate end. They utterly failed to
embrace that opportunity and the price paid for their neglect was
four years of bloody conflict, involving the loss of lives by scores
of thousands and the infliction of incalculable suffering upon the
American people. At several other points in the history of the struggle
like opportunities presented themselves, less conspicuously indeed but
none the less positively, to one side or the other. In many cases they
were similarly neglected, and the war went on with all its horrors.

But if we wonder at the failure of the Confederates to follow up their
victory on the evening of its achievement and on the days immediately
following, how much greater must be our astonishment at their failure
to take the initiative during the long months of inaction that followed
it, or to make any effort to direct the further progress of a war upon
the success of which their very existence depended!

The singularly complete victory at Manassas was won on the twenty-first
of July, 1861. That was almost at the beginning of the season favorable
to military operations in Virginia. Yet after that battle was over
there was no effort made on either side to utilize the time in military
movements of any kind. The Confederates advanced to Fairfax Court
House and threw their pickets as far forward as Mason's and Munson's
Hills, within a few miles of Washington, but they undertook no military
operations of importance. They inaugurated no campaigns. They made
no advance upon Washington, which was the one thing that ordinary
intelligence was entitled to expect at their hands. They did not at all
behave like victors. They nowhere assailed their enemy. They made no
effort of any kind to strengthen themselves, either by the occupation
of strategic positions or by giving battle where battle promised every
chance of victory. They simply sat still, and their sitting still was
one of the most inexplicable things that ever happened during the
Confederate or any other war. There were several other pauses of like
kind during the gigantic struggle, but there was none so completely
without an explanation, as was this utter throwing away of half a year
of superb campaigning weather.

On the Northern side the inaction was not only explained but justified
by the utter demoralization of the army which had been so terribly
beaten, and so utterly disintegrated at Manassas. But nobody has ever
yet offered so much as a plausible suggestion of a reason for the more
astonishing inaction of the Confederates during all that summer and
autumn, when the very causes of inaction on the other side afforded
the utmost inducement to tireless activity on the Southern side. At a
time when all that could be desired of achievement was freely open to
them, they sat still, doing nothing except to aid their adversaries in
undoing what had been accomplished by hard fighting.[4]

    [4] Gen. Beauregard insists that he did indeed submit a plan of
        aggressive campaign a little while after the battle but it
        involved so much of preparation that it was rejected at
        Richmond. As it led to no activity it has no historic
        significance.

McClellan succeeded McDowell in command of the Federal army during
the month of August. His difficult problem was to organize that
army anew; to create it out of chaotic elements and in the face of
the difficulties that were thrown in his way by its experience in
battle. He must give it morale. He must teach his soldiers the very
primer lessons of military service; he must overcome their phenomenal
demoralization and gradually mold them into a shape fit to take the
field.

An alert enemy, under such circumstances, would have insisted upon
interfering, morning, noon and night, with the exercises of the
adversary's military kindergarten. A commander on the Confederate side,
possessed of large capacity and energy, would have interrupted the
work of McClellan by daily and disturbing incursions in force; or more
probably still he would have crossed the Potomac, and forced McClellan
to accept battle in Maryland or Pennsylvania with his utterly untrained
and badly demoralized volunteers. All of this was so obvious that
dulness itself must have seen it. Yet the two Confederate generals at
Manassas and Centreville seem never to have opened their eyes to the
opportunity, and so nothing in this way was done.

In the meanwhile, McClellan was diligently strengthening himself. He
was daily adding to his forces those new levies of volunteers which
came freely from the North in spite of the disaster at Manassas. He
was also strengthening the fortifications at Washington in a way that
made their conquest forever afterwards a hopeless enterprise. He sent
out many columns to one point and another, not to bring on battle, but
to practice his men in the school of the soldier, and to use them to
"standing fire" without flinching.

Incidentally, these operations brought on only one action of
considerable moment, that which occurred at Leesburg or Ball's Bluff on
the Potomac, on the twenty-first of October. It was an action involving
rather heavy losses particularly to the Federal troops, but it had no
strategic significance whatever. Military critics have not been able to
conjecture why the action was brought on at all.

Under orders of General C. P. Stone, Colonel Baker crossed the Potomac
near Leesburg to reconnoiter at a point where no reconnoissance was
needed, and where no action could by any possibility have aught of
significance or consequence. Colonel Baker was disastrously defeated
and killed. The Union troops were driven into the river, and large
numbers of them were drowned. The effect of the action was to increase
rather than diminish the demoralization that the Manassas battle had
wrought in the Union army, and to increase in like proportion the
self-confidence of the Confederates--all but their generals. Even after
this second victory they did not push their columns across the Potomac.

To the like result all the minor actions of that time contributed.
McClellan sent out forces to Drainesville, to Falls Church, to
Vienna, and to other points, with the distinct purpose, as he himself
afterwards explained, of accustoming his demoralized battalions and his
newly enlisted men to the idea of fighting. In every instance Stuart
assailed them promptly and vigorously, and in every instance except at
Drainesville, where they stood their ground well, they ran to cover
with a precipitancy which convinced the Confederates that there was
no stability in them, no nerve, no soldierly quality whatever. How
great a mistake this was, the subsequent actions of the war served to
demonstrate--actions in which these same men, properly organized and
disciplined, grandly and gallantly played the part of soldiers.

Apart from these insignificant contests, the war in Virginia went to
sleep after the battle of Manassas, and to an expectant world was
presented the spectacle of a phenomenally victorious army taking a
siesta upon its arms, while its adversaries recruited and drilled and
fortified, and in every other conceivable way strengthened themselves
for the future. In brief the victor--the most complete and conspicuous
victor in all the history of the war--having utterly crushed his
adversary, and having for the time being destroyed in that adversary
all capacity for resistance, meekly adopted the attitude of the
vanquished. An army flushed with victory, an army that had completely
destroyed the fighting force of its enemy, sat down behind earthworks
and waited for more than half a year for that enemy to recuperate and
choose at its leisure the next date and place of its fighting.

It is not necessary to characterize all this inactivity in harsh terms.
Its stupidity needs no emphasis of rhetoric. The only excuse that
history can find for the phenomenal failure to compel results either in
July or later, is the fact that Beauregard and Johnston were merely two
ex-captains, who had had no experience in the command of armies or in
the conduct of great campaigns.




CHAPTER XVI

THE EUROPEAN MENACE


While the Southern army indulged in its siesta after its victory,
and seemed to wait for the war to come to an end of its own accord,
the North was stirred by that event into more strenuous activity.
Fresh levies were called for, and volunteers by scores of thousands
eagerly responded to the call. New energy was brought to bear upon the
fortification of Washington, so that the capital city might never again
be in such danger of hostile conquest as it had been on that fateful
twenty-first day of July, and for a dangerously considerable time
afterwards.

Multitudes of the fugitives from the Manassas battle never returned
to their duty. In many cases their term of service expired about that
time, so that they could not be brought back by virtue of any law,
civil or military. In other cases it was not thought worth while to
drag back into the service men whose demoralization was too complete
to admit of the hope that they might ever again be made effective
soldiers. But their places were promptly taken by eager, patriotic
young men, and General McClellan, with that rare capacity for
organizing which was the distinguishing characteristic of his genius,
molded the raw levies with almost incredible rapidity into effective
regiments and brigades, a task in which, as has already been shown, the
Confederates mightily aided him.

But in the meanwhile, the victory of the Confederates very seriously
threatened the Federal cause with a new and terrible danger--namely,
the danger of the recognition of the Southern Confederacy as an
independent power. Great European nations under the lead of France and
England had already recognized the claim of the Southern armies to
belligerent rights. That was a measure of humanity and civilization so
obviously proper and necessary that while it temporarily angered the
North, and was construed there as an unfriendly act, it was presently
and of necessity accepted by the Federal Government which, in its turn,
made an informal but none the less effective recognition of belligerent
rights on the part of the Southern armies. Without such recognition
it would have been impossible to carry on the war upon anything like
civilized lines. Without it no prisoner could have been exchanged, no
flag of truce could have been recognized, no cartels could have been
agreed upon, no safe-conducts could have been respected--in short,
without such Federal recognition of belligerent rights on the part of
the Southerners the struggle must have speedily degenerated into a
savage contest. All prisoners in that case would have been at the mercy
of their captors to do with as they pleased. There would have been no
possible opportunity for negotiation or for the interchange of any of
those amenities, by means of which the horrors of war are so greatly
mitigated to individuals. There could have been no paroles. On both
sides the prisoners would have been in the position of captives to a
savage foe, responsible in no way to civilization.

The recognition of Southern belligerency was so obviously a necessity
of civilization that the Federal commanders had already assumed it,
quite as a matter of course, from the beginning, and they had daily
acted upon it. But the people, uninstructed as they were in military
law, deeply resented England's act in recognizing it. They regarded
that act as scarcely less hostile than would have been the formal
recognition of the Southern Confederacy as an independent nation.

After the battle of Manassas there was very serious danger of even such
a recognition as that. The South eagerly hoped for it and the North
greatly feared its coming.

At that time England, France and Germany were looking with very
jealous suspicion upon the rising glory of the American Republic.
Their monarchs feared the influence of Democratic doctrines supported
by such an object lesson as the prosperity and phenomenal growth of
the American nation afforded. The tradesmen and manufacturers of those
countries, equally with their statesmen, dimly but apprehensively
foresaw what has since in our later time come to pass. They foresaw the
conquest of the world's markets by American industry. To break up this
American Union meant for them a release from these dangers, political,
commercial and industrial.

Moreover, the United States Government was at that time just entering
upon a new and extreme policy of protective tariff exclusion which
threatened very serious detriment to the trade of the manufacturing
countries of Europe. The South, being an agricultural country with
scarcely any manufacturing interests, stood for the utmost possible
freedom of trade. Very naturally, the manufacturing and commercial
nations of Europe looked with more or less favor upon a revolution in
this country, which promised to give them not only an equal commercial
chance but a sentimental advantage also in the Southern markets in
competition with the New England fabricators of goods, wares and
merchandise.

From the very beginning, the South had looked to such impulses and
interests as these as an offset to Northern superiority in numbers and
resources. The South hoped from the beginning for foreign intervention.
It was confidently believed that if any European nation should formally
recognize the Southern Confederacy's independence, the United States
would treat that recognition as equivalent to an open declaration of
war. In such an event the recognizing nation must of course send its
fleets to raise the blockade of Southern ports, and possibly also
its battalions to stand shoulder to shoulder with the Virginians and
Carolinians and Mississippians on hard fought battle fields.

The Confederate victory at Manassas, by reason of its completeness and
still more by reason of its spectacular accompaniments, gave peculiar
force to all these arguments in favor of that European recognition of
Southern independence which must have threatened the final disruption
of the American Union, the breaking down of the most dangerous trade
rival of those countries, the opening of the South to absolute free
trade, with a distinct preference for English, French and German over
"Yankee" goods, and the political weakening of that growing impulse to
republicanism which resided in the glory and greatness of the American
Republic. To dissolve and destroy the Union would have been once and
for all time to make an end of the most potent influence that ever
existed on earth in behalf of a "world without kings, and a people
supreme."

When the battle of Manassas was done, and McDowell's army had fled
in panic as a disorganized mob into Washington, and was manifestly
prepared to flee farther if it should be pressed with vigor, as every
foreign observer expected that it would be, there was every inducement
and every excuse for the recognition of the Southern Confederacy by
European nations, and for their demand that the still ineffective
blockade should be raised as an unjustifiable interference with
international commerce. Such action on the part of France and England
would undoubtedly have precipitated war between those countries and
the United States, and in that war, knowing as we do the relations
then existing between European nations, Austria, Italy and Prussia
would very probably have joined. What the consequences would have been
each reader must judge for himself, but at the very least it may be
said with entire safety that such a circumstance would have added very
greatly to the embarrassment of the United States Government, and to
the chances of ultimate success on the part of the South.

The pretender who sat at that time upon the fraud-buttressed throne
of France and called himself "Napoleon III" was ready and eager for
such interference. But he dared not undertake it single handed. He
sought the alliance and aid of England, and without doubt he would have
secured both but for one fact. Whatever policies an English government
may favor, there is always behind that government, as its master, the
sentiment of the British people, and that sentiment was at that time
unalterably and implacably hostile to human slavery.

It was the misfortune of the South that its contention for its own
right of self-government was inseparably linked in the minds of men
abroad with the cause of human bondage, against which British public
sentiment revolted.

Great Britain is not a republic in our sense of the word, but under all
its forms of monarchy, and with all its embarrassments of aristocratic
privilege, its people actually and absolutely rule.

Its people strongly sympathized with the Southern claim of a right
of autonomy. They still more strongly sympathized with themselves in
their desire to cripple their greatest and most threatening commercial
and industrial rival, and to get all the cotton they needed for their
mills. They wanted the war to end quickly. They wanted the Southern
ports opened to their ships, and the Southern cotton to be accessible
again for their use. They wanted the American Union broken up. They
wanted to trade with the Southern States upon equal terms or with a
positive advantage over their New England competitors. But even for
such sake they were unwilling to lend the power of Great Britain to the
perpetuation of human slavery anywhere upon earth.

There was the fatal miscalculation of the Southerners. They reckoned
with British trade interests, with British and other European
political prejudice, but they did not sufficiently reckon with that
British hostility to slavery which--whatever the political or trade
considerations might be--would not consent to any action on the part
of a British government which should even seem to make Great Britain
responsible for the perpetuation of human slavery anywhere.

Thus the British government was restrained by the all-dominating
British sentiment from interfering, and France did not venture to
interfere alone or even with the probability of Austrian or Prussian
support.

There was Russia to be reckoned with, also, and as later official
publications show, the Czar not only set his face against intervention
in behalf of the South, but at one critical time actually sent his
fleets to American waters to menace any and every power that might
assume to interpose to the detriment of the United States.

At the time, however, the Manassas victory gave great and
well-justified occasion for the fear at the North that Great Britain
and France, backed by the other western European powers, might be
persuaded to interpose in behalf of the Confederates. For a time,
therefore, the outlook for the Union was a very gloomy one, but
the youth of the country continued to enlist by tens and scores of
thousands, and in spite of the hostility of a political party strongly
opposed to the administration and to the war itself, Mr. Lincoln's
government went on with its preparations for prosecuting the war with
vigor, to its predestined end.




CHAPTER XVII

BORDER OPERATIONS


During the long period of strange inactivity in those parts of the
country where the real seat of war lay, there was a good deal of
active fighting elsewhere. Some of it was severe and gave rise to
stirring events, including some stoutly contested battles. But with
the exception of the operations upon the Southern coasts in aid of a
more effective blockade none of these conflicts had any considerable
strategic importance and the story of them may with propriety be
briefly told.

In Missouri the contest was in effect a civil war, in the strict
acceptation of that term. It is needless and it would be tedious to
recount here the proclamations, the gubernatorial manifestos, the
legislative resolutions and the so-called conventional action of that
state. None of these had any undisputed legal sanction whatever, though
each of them claimed all possible legality. The simple fact was that a
part of Missouri's people adhered to the Union and another part equally
clung to the cause of the Southern Confederacy. After much confusion
the Unionists formed an army under General Lyon and the Confederates
assembled a strong force under General Price. Let the lawyers quibble
as they please over the technicalities involved, the fact remains as
already stated, that the people of Missouri were divided in sentiment;
that they arrayed themselves against each other in hostile armies; and
that they fought each other in considerable battles--measured by the
number of men engaged and by the slaughter involved. But these battles
bore no influential relation to the contest between the Union and the
Confederacy, except in so far as their conduct served to occupy troops
on either side who might have been much more effectively employed at
those more eastern points at which the issue was in fact to be fought
out to a conclusion.

At Carthage, Missouri, where General Franz Sigel attacked the
Confederates on July fifth, 1861, the Federals were beaten and forced
to retreat. At Dug Spring, August third, Lyon defeated McCulloch, but
a week later (August the tenth), the Federals were again defeated in
a severely contested battle at Wilson's Creek, and General Lyon was
killed.

On the fifth of March, 1862, the two armies west of the Mississippi met
in a pitched battle at Pea Ridge, Arkansas. The contest was a fierce
and bloody one, involving a heavy, though unascertained loss. The
Federals had distinctly the better of it, but like the Confederates
at Manassas, they utterly failed to follow up their victory or in any
other way to give effect to it.

It is unnecessary to relate the story of these battles in detail. They
were gallant and strenuous actions, reflecting the highest credit upon
the courage of the officers and men engaged on either side. But they
contributed nothing whatever to the ultimate result. They played
no part in the solution of the war problem. Whether the actions so
gallantly fought by Federals and Confederates alike were won by the one
or by the other, made no difference in the ultimate outcome of a war
which was clearly destined to be decided by other men and upon other
fields of larger strategic significance.

The operations in Kentucky and Tennessee, though smaller in themselves,
were of much greater importance. Those states lay within the strategic
field. Kentucky had officially assumed an attitude of neutrality,
as has already been related, to which neither side paid or could be
expected to pay the smallest attention. That state lay between the
North and the South. It was absolutely necessary that each should push
armed forces into and across its domain in order to get at the forces
of the adversary. Moreover, Kentucky's assumption of neutrality was a
transparent absurdity in itself. If it could have commanded respect,
it would have interposed a neutral ground, stretching for about four
hundred miles from east to west between the contending armies, neither
of which would have been privileged on any account to cross it or
to enter it. Thus Kentucky, while retaining its place as a state in
the Union, would have stood as a protective barrier to the seceding
states, of even greater value than all the armies that could have been
assembled within Kentucky's borders. It would at one and the same time
have held the position of a state in the Union and the most potent of
all states in aid of the Confederacy.

It is necessary to explain that this Kentucky resolution of neutrality
never had the complete legal sanction of the state authorities, actual
or pretended; but its effect was so small that it is scarcely worth
while to discuss the technicalities. The simple fact was that Kentucky
furnished men to both sides and that its legislative and its executive
authorities were never at any time fully and legally agreed upon any
policy whatever.

In a history that takes account of facts rather than of theories, of
events rather than of resolutions, there seems no occasion to follow
this subject further, except to say that both Federals and Confederates
presently pushed their armies into Kentucky and tried conclusions
there, with results that must form the subject of future pages in this
history.

In Maryland the struggle ended in the adherence of the state to the
Union, while a large part of its vigorous young manhood went South and
enlisted in the Confederate army. It was this division of sentiment,
this separation of families, this arraying of brother against brother,
that constituted the tragedy of the Confederate war.

In North Carolina and in Tennessee there was a strong Union sentiment
among the mountaineers. It could not control either state, but it
resulted in the enlistment of a large number of hardy volunteers in
the Union armies, and in the organization of an efficient "underground
railroad," by means of which Northern soldiers escaping from Southern
prisons were aided in their journey to the North.

In Virginia the anti-secession sentiment found expression in an act of
secession from secession. The western half of that state had scarcely
any property interest in slavery and scarcely any sympathy with the
institution. The men of that region had accepted the teachings of
Thomas Jefferson, and George Wythe, and a score of other Virginian
statesmen, to the effect that slavery was a curse which it was their
duty to extirpate as soon as might be. The secession of their state
seemed to offer them an opportunity. If secession was to be the order
of the day, why should not they, as representatives of the western and
non-slave-holding half of their state, repudiate secession from the
Union by themselves seceding from their seceding state?

Upon this hint they acted. They proceeded to set up the state of West
Virginia under an autonomy granted by the National Government. It was
in direct violation of the Federal Constitution thus to divide a state
without its own consent, but the thing was done in war time, and when
war is on the rigid letter of the law is very apt to be disregarded in
the interest of general results. At any rate the thing was done, and
West Virginia has ever since 1863 held her place as one of the states
of the Union.

Thus were the border states arrayed in the war. Thus was the issue made
up. Thus were the lines drawn for the momentous conflict.




CHAPTER XVIII

THE BLOCKADE--THE CONQUEST OF THE COAST AND THE NEGLECT TO FOLLOW UP
THE ADVANTAGE THUS GAINED


As soon as the fact was recognized that war existed between the
Northern and the Southern states it was quite a matter of course and of
common sense that the Federal Government should endeavor to shut in the
Confederates by a blockade that should cut them off from all commerce
with the outer world.

The South was almost exclusively an agricultural country. It had scanty
means of supplying itself with any of those articles of manufacture
which enable communities to live and to carry on war. It was sadly
deficient not only in capacity to create arms, ammunition, and other
fighting equipments, but also in factories capable of turning out
clothing, shoes, medicines, and the like either for military or for
non-military use.

For all these things the Confederates depended upon importation, and
the obvious policy of the Federal Government was to prevent such
importation.

If that could have been completely done, the war must of necessity have
come to an early and merciful end. And there is no doubt that it might
have been done during the first years of the struggle if practical
common sense had been reinforced by executive ability commensurate
with the demands of the occasion. As a matter of fact this was never
completely accomplished until the war was in its last throes. To the
very end the Confederate soldiers were clad in English-made cloth, shod
with English-tanned leather, and largely fed upon Cincinnati bacon and
corned beef which had been shipped to Nassau in the Bahamas and thence
carried into Confederate ports by the daring of the English captains
and the English crews of English-built and English-owned blockade
running steamers. Very naturally the Federal Government understood and
appreciated all these conditions, and very naturally it sought to take
advantage of them by blockading Southern ports and thus preventing or
at least embarrassing those importations upon which the South must
mainly depend for its powder, its bullets, its clothing, its shoes, its
arms and its provisions.

Accordingly, one of the earliest acts of the Administration was the
proclamation of a blockade of the Southern ports. This was issued as
early as the nineteenth of April, 1861, two days after the Virginia
Convention adopted an ordinance of secession and thus made war a
certainty.

There is this peculiarity about the international law of blockade,
that the ships of no nation are under obligation to respect a blockade
until it shall be made effective. That is to say, until the nation
proclaiming the blockade can put a sufficient naval force at the mouth
of each blockaded harbor to prevent the entry of ships, no foreign
shipmasters are bound to respect the proclamation of blockade, and
their blockade-running ships are not subject to seizure in the attempt
to pass the paper barriers erected.

At the first, of course, the blockade of Southern ports was technical
rather than real. A foreign ship running in or out was not legally
subject to seizure or destruction because the blockade was manifestly
ineffective. But by impressing ferry-boats and every other craft that
could carry guns into the naval service, the Federal Government was
able presently to make its blockade so far effective that those ships
which essayed to "run" it did so at risk of capture and with the
certainty that capture must mean the confiscation of both ship and
cargo.

But so profitable was this commerce that the merchants and shipmasters
engaged in it were ready to take all the risks involved, for the sake
of its enormous pecuniary returns. It was a matter of easy reckoning
that a single cargo carried either way and successfully delivered,
would pay for the loss of the ship and cargo on the return voyage, and
leave a rich margin of profit besides.

Moreover a close blockade was simply impossible. Not one ship in a
dozen that attempted to pass out or in, was in actual fact captured
or driven ashore. The number of ships engaged in blockade running was
steadily reduced by the increasing dangers encountered, but the traffic
continued, with no effective interruption, until near the end of the
war, the chief effect of the blockade being to increase the profits
of the English shipowners and shipmasters who engaged in the perilous
commerce and enormously to enhance the market value of goods of every
kind at the South.

An ounce of quinine that cost $2.80 in Nassau was worth $1,100 or
$1,200 in Charleston, while the Confederate money received for the
quinine would buy cotton at ten cents a pound which had a value at the
very least of half a dollar a pound in gold at Nassau. On such terms
the human instinct of gain made it certain that the blockade, however
legally effective it might be made, would be broken through by daring
shipmasters so long as the war should last and precisely that is what
in fact happened.

But in aid of the blockade, and in aid of the general policy of
shutting the South in and compelling it to rely exclusively upon its
own inadequate resources, the Federal Government promptly dispatched
forces to the South, to capture the seacoast fortifications there and
to make of the coast a Federal instead of a Confederate possession and
stronghold. On the twenty-ninth of August, 1861, an expedition under
command of General B. F. Butler, captured the forts at Cape Hatteras.
On the seventh and eighth of November another expedition reduced the
works at Port Royal and Hilton Head in South Carolina, thus making of
the coast strongholds important strategic positions for the Northern
arms. Later the whole coast, except the great harbor, was conquered.

It must always be a matter of astonishment to the historian that
greater use was not made of the advantages thus gained at the beginning
of the war. It is true that the geography of the Carolinian coast
country specially lent itself to the defense of that region by small
forces arrayed against greatly superior numbers. It is true, for
example, that at Pocotatigo, on the twenty-second of October, 1862,
two batteries of artillery and a company or two of dismounted cavalry
numbering in all only 350 men, being reinforced late in the day by
about four hundred more, succeeded in repelling the all-day assault of
not less than three thousand and ended by driving the Federal force
back to its ships. This was due in part to the peculiarly defensive
nature of the ground and in part to the certainty that the Federal
forces could not remain over night at Pocotatigo without finding nearly
every man among them stricken with that dire disease, "country fever,"
before morning.

But all day long at Pocotatigo the Federals had the Charleston and
Savannah railroad on their left less than a mile away and with
absolutely no obstacle whatsoever between them and its possession.
Beyond the railroad line lay the high, healthful pine lands. In brief
there was no reason whatever, aside from mere blundering, why they
should not then and there have seized upon the Charleston and Savannah
railroad, made themselves masters of the entire coast, and proceeded
to the easy conquest or isolation of Charleston on the one hand and
Savannah on the other.

This particular matter is here mentioned only because it serves to
illustrate a larger truth. From the time when the Port Royal and the
Hilton Head forts were captured there was never an hour when a capable
and resolute general in command of 5,000 men--and 50,000 might easily
have been sent to him--could not have made himself master of the main
line of Southern communication, master of Charleston, master of
Savannah and practically master of South Carolina and its neighboring
states. An enterprising officer engaged in accomplishing this would, of
course, have been reinforced to any desirable extent, and a campaign
inland at that point and at that time would have promised results of
the utmost consequence.

Here was another of the errors that served to prolong through four
years a war that ought to have been brought to an end during its
first campaign, and the needless and senseless prolongation of which
inflicted almost incredible loss and suffering upon the South and
subjected the North to financial burdens and human sacrifices of the
most stupendous character.

The blockade was early made "effective" in that degree which
international law requires--so effective that shipmasters trying to
pass through it had no conceivable right of redress if their ships were
captured, or blown to pieces, or run ashore by the blockading squadron.
It was never, even unto the end, made so effective as to prevent
British merchantmen from trafficking at uncertain intervals between
Nassau and the Southern ports. It did not and could not put an end to
the importation of the necessaries of war into Southern ports; but it
made such importation so enormously expensive, even if measured by the
cotton exports on which the trade was based, as greatly to cripple
the Confederacy in its finances. The price of goods imported at such
hazard and with such difficulty was made great enough to cover the easy
contingency of capture upon the outward as well as upon the inward
voyage.

He who would understand the events of that period must constantly bear
in mind that during the first year or nearly that, of its duration
this war of ours was conducted mainly by incapacity on both sides, by
martinet captains and incapables in civil office who had been suddenly
thrust into positions vastly too great for their abilities.




CHAPTER XIX

THE ERA OF INCAPACITY


This was the situation during the year 1861 and the early part of
the year 1862. There were destined soon to come upon the scene two
great masters of the military art--the one upon the one side and the
other upon the other--Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee. But during
the early part of the struggle neither of these great men was in a
position of mastery or control. Grant was struggling against all the
difficulties that technicality and official jealousy could plant in
his pathway. He found it difficult to get into the service at all. He
was a West Point graduate and he had served with distinction in the
regular army, but he had long ago resigned his commission. He had thus
forfeited all claim to command those who had remained in the service
and who had been promoted by seniority. These, and not Grant, were made
generals.

When Grant offered his services and asked for the privilege of
fighting the country's adversaries his application was left absolutely
unanswered. His only way into the army was "by the back door." He was
elected by the men to be colonel of a regiment of Illinois volunteers,
but was not commissioned in the regular army until after he had
conducted a campaign to the first considerable success achieved by
the national arms, and not even then without every embarrassment and
humiliation which it was possible for his inferiors in superior place
to inflict upon him. Indeed, as will be related later, his first great
victory, the first of any importance that had been anywhere won for the
Federal arms, was promptly punished by his suspension from command and
by the refusal of his distinctly inferior superiors to let him follow
up his success with other and obviously easy operations.

On the Confederate side the one masterful military mind was that of
Robert E. Lee. As a matter of fact it was Lee who selected Manassas as
the first point of resistance, and it was under his wise direction that
Beauregard and Johnston were able to concentrate their forces there
and to win the victory of July 21, 1861. But in the meanwhile Lee was
not himself appointed to command any considerable army. He was sent
to West Virginia to patch up a peace between the civilian brigadiers
who commanded there and who had managed among themselves to lose every
action that had occurred in that quarter. While Beauregard and Johnston
were weakly throwing away the opportunity so conspicuously opened to
them by the Manassas victory, this officer of commanding genius was
set to the task of organizing a mountain defense against expeditions
that had nothing of serious purpose in them except the prevention of
Confederate enlistments west of the Alleghenies.

In the same way, after the Carolina coast forts were reduced, Lee was
sent to a pestilential hole called Coosawhatchie, in South Carolina,
to plan a defense of the railroad line between Charleston and Savannah,
while Johnston and Beauregard were fortifying their victorious army
against a foe that it had beaten into temporary helplessness.

These two--Grant and Lee--were destined in the end to fight the war
out to a conclusion. But in those earlier months of it neither was
permitted to exercise his genius in any effective way, or to show in
action what stuff he was made of. Lee indeed held high rank from the
beginning and was the military adviser of the Confederate Government,
but for a time his genius was dissipated on minor matters, while lesser
men were wasting time.

And as it was with the great captains so was it with their great
lieutenants. William T. Sherman was an unconsidered, unconsulted
lieutenant of McDowell. Stonewall Jackson and Ewell and Longstreet
were the subordinates of Beauregard and Johnston. Grant and Sherman
on the one side and Stonewall Jackson on the other, had lost caste
in the military service by resigning from the regular army at a time
when the service neither offered nor promised a career worthy of
them. Inferior men therefore, who had been content with a meaningless
routine, outranked and commanded these really great men after that code
of military ethics and etiquette which assumes that the officer--even
though he be a dullard--who has been longest in continuous service is
fit to command the officer--whatever his genius may be--who has served
for a briefer time or who, finding the service to be a stupid and
meaningless routine of camp duty in time of peace, has resigned from
it in search of better opportunities for the exercise of his abilities,
and has returned to it only when duty to his country has seemed to call
him.

Thus the first year of the war was the period in which official
incapacity ruled on both sides; the period in which technical rank
overrode genius and trampled it to earth; the period in which the
martinets were afflicted with victories which they were utterly
incapable of turning to profitable account, and defeats which they knew
not how to repair.

A better era was approaching, but it came slowly. For a time Grant was
to be dominated by Halleck. For a time Stonewall Jackson was destined
to have his carefully considered disposition of forces in the valley of
Virginia overridden and canceled by an ignorant civilian in Richmond,
who knew so little of military courtesy as to send his orders direct
and not through Jackson's commander Johnston.

On the other side, Benjamin F. Butler, a criminal lawyer, who knew
nothing whatever of the military art, was a major-general by virtue of
political influence alone, and as such outranked and dominated officers
immeasurably his superiors. Think of Lee banished to the coast of South
Carolina, while Beauregard and Johnston were needlessly fortifying
at Centreville against an absurdly impossible advance of McClellan's
forces. Think of McClellan himself in command of the most important
Union army, while Grant and Sherman and George H. Thomas remained in
subordinate positions!

And in the navy a similar discrimination against demonstrated capacity
and in favor of mere "rank" equally prevailed. Farragut, with all his
already and abundantly proved capacity, waited for the best part of
a year before he could get permission to bring his great powers into
play, and when at last he got such permission from the ignorant and
arrogant civilians who dominated the navy department at Washington,
it came to him with an insulting suggestion of doubt as to his
courage, his patriotism and his capacity. That is a sad story to be
told hereafter. Our present purpose is merely to show how lamely and
incompetently the war was carried on on both sides during the first
year of its progress. He who considers the simple facts is well nigh
forced to the conclusion that had either side conducted its contest
with half the brains and energy that came later into play it must have
won at once.




CHAPTER XX

THE FIRST APPEARANCE OF GRANT


The "pepper box" policy of employing small bodies of troops everywhere
for the accomplishment of ends of no strategic consequence prevailed
at Washington during all those early months of the war. The results of
that policy are the despair of the historian who would intelligently
trace the progress of the conflict from its beginning to its end. In
very truth there was no progress. So far as the outcome of the war
was concerned those events had no part to play; so far as the history
of the war is concerned, any attempt to relate their insignificant
stories would serve only to confuse the reader's mind, and to distract
his attention from events and operations that bore directly upon the
ultimate outcome of a struggle which involved the fate of the nation.
Let us leave them aside as inconsiderable incidents and trace instead
those significant happenings that served to determine the ultimate
results.

The outcome of all great wars is determined in the end by the
personality of the men who conduct them to a conclusion. Circumstances
and even accidents have their part to play, but in the main it is
personality that determines the event.

So at this point it becomes necessary to consider General Grant as a
factor in the war, "a stone rejected of the builders," but destined to
become the chief cornerstone, nevertheless, of Federal success.

General Grant was a West Point graduate ranking low in his class
at graduation. He served for a time in the regular army with such
capacity as to reach the rank of captain. Then he resigned, as many
other officers did--Stonewall Jackson and William T. Sherman among the
number--because the police duty which seemed to constitute the only
function of the regular army offered no career to him. Captain Grant
became first a farmer and later a clerk in his brother's business
house at Galena, Illinois, upon a meager salary of $800 a year, which
was eked out by the earnings of his slaves in Missouri. When the
war broke out he offered his services to his country, asking for a
restoration to the regular army. His application was not deemed worthy
even of a reply. But presently a regiment of Illinois volunteers, more
appreciative than the Washington authorities, made him its colonel,
and after a little while he was promoted to be a brigadier-general of
volunteers, but still without even so much as a second lieutenant's
commission in the regular army.

In this volunteer capacity he was sent first to Missouri and later to
Cairo in Illinois to command a wide district. He fought the battle of
Belmont and after a partial victory he lost it. A few months earlier,
learning that the Confederates, who were masters of Columbus, twenty
miles down the Mississippi, were planning to seize upon Paducah, fifty
miles up the Ohio, Grant had undertaken without orders an expedition
against that town. He promptly captured it and thus defeated the
Confederate program.

After the battle of Belmont he planned and proposed a campaign which he
hoped might reverse the existing situation at the West and give to the
Union arms their first important and strategically significant victory.

Two great and practically navigable rivers, the Cumberland and the
Tennessee, rise in the very heart of what was then the Southern
Confederacy. Upon substantially parallel though vastly varying lines,
they flow westward and northward till they debouch into the Ohio River
within a few miles of each other.

At a point near the boundary between Kentucky and Tennessee where these
two rivers flow within eleven miles of each other, the Confederates had
erected two fortresses to command them--Fort Henry and Fort Donelson.

These fortresses gave to the South control of the two rivers. It was
Grant's idea that by the reduction of these works he might reverse this
condition of affairs, and make of the two rivers facile avenues of
Federal access to the heart of the Confederacy, where now they served
the Confederates as roadways of approach to positions of the utmost
strategic importance to the side that should master and hold them.

But Grant was only a brigadier-general of volunteers, in no way
entitled to plan campaigns or to make suggestions for campaigns.
Halleck had command of the department, with headquarters at St. Louis.
Halleck was a major-general in the regular army and Grant's "superior
officer." Halleck disliked, distrusted and detested Grant, and so
when Grant asked permission to move against and reduce the Confederate
strongholds on the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers, Halleck's reply
was in effect an injunction to the inferior officer to mind his own
business.

Grant was so sure, however, of his ability to accomplish this vitally
important task that he persisted in his entreaties and many weeks were
consumed in fruitless negotiations for the privilege of doing great
work in a great way. At last through the influence of Commodore Foote,
commanding the naval forces in that quarter, the discredited volunteer
general was graciously permitted by his martinet superior to undertake
and execute the first operation of the war which crowned the Federal
arms with a victory of strategic importance. This permission, though
long solicited, did not come to Grant until the very end of January,
1862, and it was in February that the combined land and naval forces
moved for the capture of the Confederate strongholds.

The expedition moved first up the Tennessee river. Grant had about
15,000 men, a force which was presently swelled by reinforcement to
27,000. But his advance was delayed and the fleet, with scarcely any
assistance from him, captured Fort Henry on the sixth of February.
Then the gunboats steamed down the river to its mouth and thence up
the Cumberland to assail Fort Donelson. In the meanwhile Grant pushed
across the narrow neck of land between the two fortresses and closely
invested that fort. The fleet made a determined assault but was beaten
off in a badly crippled condition. Grant continued to assail the
enemy's works throughout three days of storm and sleet and suffering,
and at the end of that time the fortress surrendered with about
fourteen thousand men in addition to a Confederate loss in killed and
wounded of about two thousand. The greater part of the garrison had
previously escaped.

This was the first conspicuous victory achieved anywhere by the Federal
arms. Its moral effect was incalculable and strategically it was of
the utmost importance. It made an end for the time being of the war in
Kentucky which had been going on for some time, involving actions of
some individual importance, though they had no vital bearing upon the
strategic history of the war. It made Federal instead of Confederate
highways of the two great rivers that in their course penetrated almost
to the heart of the Confederacy. It made easy prey of Nashville as a
vantage point from which the Federal forces might penetrate the South
and assail its strongholds of resistance. Still further, as the event
showed, it opened the way for that campaign which, as many critics
think, resulted at Shiloh, or Pittsburg Landing, in the strategically
decisive action of the war.

However that may be, by the accomplishment of his object in this
campaign General Grant had achieved one of the most conspicuous and
to the country one of the most enheartening victories that were
accomplished by any general on either side from the beginning to the
end of the war. He had every right to expect commendation. He had every
right to expect permission to go on from conquest to conquering, and
to have such forces placed at his command as might be necessary for the
carrying out of his enterprises. But Grant was still only an officer of
volunteers badly at outs with his department commander, and those were
the days of red tape, the days in which achievement counted for nothing
as against "rank" and "seniority."

It is true that Halleck, who had never risen above the grade of captain
in the regular army, was at best only Grant's equal in "old army
rank." But he had the favor of General Scott as Grant had not, and so,
ex-captain that he was, he had been made a major-general in the regular
service while Grant remained a mere brigadier-general of volunteers.
It is true that Grant had captured two fortresses of enormous strength
while Halleck had captured nothing whatsoever anywhere on earth. It is
true that Grant had received the surrender of a powerful and important
fort with fourteen thousand prisoners in addition to a loss on the part
of his enemy of two thousand in killed and wounded, while Halleck had
never received the surrender of anybody and never did to the end of the
story. But Halleck was a major-general in the regular army in spite of
his resignation during his captaincy--Grant also having been a captain
when he resigned--and so Halleck as department commander was authorized
not only to restrain Grant from this expedition, as he had done during
two months of precious opportunity, but afterwards to suspend him for
many weeks from command, to place him under virtual arrest and for
weary weeks to restrain him from carrying out those obviously easy
supplementary enterprises with which he desired to glory-crown his
achievement. Grant wanted to march on Nashville, which lay helpless
before him and offered to the Federals a strategic position of
incalculable value. Halleck ordered him to go to his tent and hammock
instead.

What a wretched story it all is, to be sure! What a record of
imbecility in control of genius, of incapacity in command of the
highest ability, of small men in great places, and of great men
restrained from action by the superior authority of other men
immeasurably their inferiors, who by luck, or circumstance or official
favor came into authority and position which they in no wise deserved,
and which they were utterly incapable of using effectively in behalf of
the cause they were set to serve! And what a price the country--North
and South--was called upon to pay in blood and treasure and heartbreak,
for all this misplacing of men!

But conditions and circumstances must be recognized, and due allowance
must be made for them. The officers in the regular United States army
were strictly professionals. Their first business in life was to secure
all they could of rank and pay for themselves. Whether they remained
in the regular army or resigned to accept Confederate service, their
first concern was to secure all they could of personal preferment,
rank, distinction, and recognition. Why should Beauregard or Johnston
surrender aught of their advantages of regularity in behalf of the
genius of Stonewall Jackson, who had long ago resigned to become a
professor in a military institute? Why should McDowell, who had
remained in the regular army, give place to Sherman, who had resigned
to become a professor in a school? Why should Halleck, who by General
Scott's favor had been raised from the rank of resigned captain to that
of major-general, give place or favor to the ex-Captain Grant, now
by mere popular selection a brigadier-general of volunteers, holding
no place whatsoever in the regular army? Why should General Halleck
permit this interloper Grant to go on winning victories? And why
when the volunteer general had won them--as for example at Pittsburg
Landing--should not Halleck come as he did and take command and thus
assume to himself the credit due to another?

These were the ways of the early war. Moreover the administration on
either side had no means of measuring men's capacities except by army
rank or the favor of commanders. It was not until later that better
counsels prevailed, that demonstrated capacity was recognized, and that
the military martinet learned that something more than seniority was
required as a claim to command.

Stonewall Jackson, it is true, had been made a major-general in the
Confederate service in reward for his conduct at Manassas, but there
were lieutenant-generals and full generals still outranking him and his
was an exceptional case. Grant did not share in the benefits of the
example. He had won a great victory which gave fresh heart and courage
to the country, but in his reports he had been careless of technical
details and had given no special credit for his achievements to the
department commander who had done all he could to prevent him from
achieving anything at all. He had made himself "_persona non grata_" at
department headquarters, though the people everywhere were acclaiming
him as a victor to the sore annoyance of "headquarters." Why should
"headquarters" let the interloper complete his work by seizing upon
the vitally important positions which his victory had made easy of
conquest? Who was Grant, anyhow? Ex-captain, ex-Galena clerk, and only
a brigadier-general of volunteers! What right had he to the credit of
any victories he had been graciously permitted to win?




CHAPTER XXI

THE SITUATION BEFORE SHILOH


During the autumn of 1861 the troops of both sides were pushed into
the "neutral" state of Kentucky at various points and in considerable
numbers. Two battles of some moment resulted. At a place called
Paintville, on the Big Sandy river in the eastern part of the state,
Humphrey Marshall established himself with about 2,000 or 2,500
Confederates. Colonel Garfield (afterwards General and still later
President), in command of a substantially equal force of Federals,
assailed Marshall there, pushed his columns back and on January 10,
1862, so far crippled him in a small but hotly contested pitched battle
that Marshall was glad to retreat during the night with a loss of
morale which at that period of the war was as important as the loss of
guns.

In the meanwhile the Confederate General Zollicoffer, one of those
amateurs in the military art who managed by political or other interest
to push themselves into military command on either side, invaded
eastern Kentucky, was defeated on October 21st, and fell back to Mill
Springs on the upper waters of the Cumberland, where he fortified
himself.

General Don Carlos Buell on the Federal side was in command of the
department, and General George H. Thomas was in command of the column
that immediately confronted Zollicoffer.

General Thomas was a Virginian by birth and was passionately devoted to
his native state and its historic memories. He had been at the outbreak
of the war a major in that specially selected regiment of which Robert
E. Lee was colonel and in which the roster of his fellow officers
included besides Lee Albert Sydney Johnston, William J. Hardee, Earl
Van Dorn, E. Kirby Smith, John B. Hood and Fitzhugh Lee. All of these,
Thomas's fellow Southerners, resigned their commissions and accepted
service in the Confederate army. Thomas, who had very remarkably
distinguished himself in the service, might well have been strongly
tempted, not only by the example of these his beloved comrades and by
his sentimental affection for his native state, but additionally by
the direct certainty of an exalted command in the Confederate army,
to go with them into the Southern service. To him peculiarly came
the perplexing problem of divided allegiance which presented itself
to every old army officer of Southern birth, and it is said--whether
truthfully or not the historian cannot determine--that for a time he
seriously and painfully hesitated whether to cast in his lot with
Virginia and the South, and thus join his most cherished comrades, or
to retain his place in the service of the nation that had educated
him as a soldier and that had so generously recognized and so richly
rewarded his genius and his devotion in the past. In the end he decided
to adhere to the Federal cause, and very early in the war he was
offered that supreme command of the Federal armies which Robert E. Lee
had refused. He too declined that honor and responsibility, remaining,
however, in the Federal service and becoming one of the most brilliant
commanders in the Northern armies.

At Mill Springs with seven regiments, two batteries, and a handful of
cavalry, he assailed Zollicoffer--who was killed in action--overthrew
him and his successor Crittenden, and in effect drove the Confederates
across the river. This was the first considerable victory won by the
Federal arms in any part of the country after the Manassas defeat
and its moral effect was naturally very great. It antedated Grant's
victories, but was of course insignificant in comparison with them.

In the meantime General Buell was busily organizing the Army of the
Ohio, with headquarters at Louisville and very skilfully endeavoring to
maneuver the Confederates out of Kentucky without a pitched battle, the
results of which might have been for better or for worse in the then
undisciplined condition of his troops. It was a period of the war in
which orderly battles were imminently perilous to the Federal cause,
because success in them would have accomplished little while failure in
them--which might easily result from the rawness of the troops--would
have made of every border state a Confederate possession and stronghold.

General Buell was afterwards bitterly censured for not having fought
great battles. It seems a sounder judgment which awards him praise
for having maneuvered the Confederates out of Kentucky and far into
Tennessee, without risking all results upon the hazard of any single
contest which, with his raw troops, he might or might not have won.

But when Grant and Foote succeeded in capturing Fort Henry and Fort
Donelson, the situation was fundamentally changed. There was a large
and rapidly increasing force at Louisville and near Bowling Green under
General Buell. Grant had his victorious forces at the two strongholds
of Fort Henry and Fort Donelson. It was obviously easy and obviously
wise to move with the two armies upon Nashville and add the conquest of
all the Tennessee strongholds to that already achieved of all positions
that could by any possibility give to the Confederates a standing
ground in Kentucky.

In brief Grant's idea was to employ all available forces in the
quick reduction of important Confederate positions, the overthrow
of all Confederate armed forces, and the breaking of Confederate
resisting power before it could have time to strengthen itself with
reinforcements or with fortifications, or still more important with the
organization, disciplining and seasoning of its troops. Accordingly
he notified General Halleck that he purposed to move at once upon
Nashville and positions beyond, unless forbidden to do so.

He was promptly forbidden to do anything of the kind, and peremptorily
called back from a career of easy and obvious victory. For who was
this $800 Galena clerk? What right had he to plan campaigns and carry
them to a success that reflected no credit upon his regular army
military superiors? It is true that he had captured Forts Henry and
Donelson, with 14,623 men, 65 cannon, and 17,000 stands of small arms,
with ammunition and accouterments in proportion. It is true that he
had made Federal possessions of two important rivers reaching into
the heart of the Confederacy and commanding its most important line
of defense. It is true that he had won the first great inspiriting
success of the war for the Federal arms. It is true that he had broken
that carefully constructed line of defense which the Confederates had
established from the Atlantic to the Mississippi. It is true that he
had placed the National forces in such a position within the heart
of the Confederacy that a further and decisive advance into Alabama,
Georgia and Mississippi was obvious and easy. But on the other hand he
was only a volunteer, possessing no rank or place in that regular army
group which, at the North and at the South alike, stoutly asserted its
claim to command by virtue of regularity and seniority of commission
and wholly without regard to demonstrated genius or proved capacity.

Grant's achievements in the capture of Forts Henry and Donelson were so
far recognized at Washington that he was presently raised from the rank
of brigadier to that of major-general of _volunteers_. But he was still
denied even a junior second lieutenant's place in the regular army,
and in the meantime an officer in the regular army was authorized and
entitled not only to order him to do things--a small matter to a man
disposed and accustomed to do things but to forbid him to do things--a
matter of much greater consequence to such a man.

General Halleck's official position was immeasurably superior to that
of Grant--at best a mere major-general of volunteers--while his
military capacity was in an equal degree inferior to Grant's. Grant
habitually won battles. Halleck never did. Grant conducted campaigns to
success. Did Halleck? It has already been shown for how long Halleck
restrained Grant from undertaking his expedition against Fort Henry
and Fort Donelson. When that campaign resulted in such a success as
had not before been anywhere achieved by the Federal arms, Grant very
naturally wanted to follow it up in ways calculated speedily to break
the Confederate resistance, to occupy the commanding positions in the
Confederacy and to push Federal columns southward through the seceding
states, cutting them in twain and making an end of their unity. It
seemed to him when Forts Henry and Donelson were in his possession
quite a matter of course that he should move with his 27,000 men upon
Nashville and other strategic points further south, and that all
available forces, including Buell's strong and steadily increasing
army, should be ordered to join him and assist him in the execution
of this enterprise before the Confederates could organize effective
resistance. In brief it seemed to Grant, simple soldier that he was,
that the purpose of the organization of the Federal forces was to win
the war as quickly as possible and with the smallest possible sacrifice
of life and treasure. The shortest road to that end was to follow up
his victory by the capture of other Confederate positions, the conquest
of which was then easy and the possession of which seemed to promise
that result.

But Grant had already offended his superior officer, not only by
proposing operations which should have been suggested--as they were
not--from "regular" headquarters, but still more by carrying such
amateurish operations to a successful conclusion and by winning,
without any sort of credit to headquarters, the first conspicuous and
country-inspiriting victory that the Federal arms could claim. The land
was resounding with Grant's praises even while Halleck was putting
him under virtual arrest, and not a word was said in extolment of the
genius of Halleck who had so reluctantly consented to this volunteer
officer's enterprise. Manifestly this ex-Galena clerk who had a genius
for doing things must be restrained. Otherwise he would presently run
away with all the glory that belonged by prescriptive right to his
superiors in the regular army, and particularly to General Halleck, in
his cushioned quarters at St. Louis.

Accordingly General Grant was censured for his unauthorized advance
upon Nashville, and instead of proceeding against Confederate
strongholds further South which were easily within his vigorous and
resolute grasp, was peremptorily ordered to return to the forts which
he had captured with such splendor of success and there to sit still
till released from what amounted to arrest.

It was the story of Manassas over again, except that it was reversed
in its application. As after Manassas Washington lay an easy prey to
the Confederates, which by reason of incapacity they did not grasp, so,
and in like measure, the central strongholds of the Confederacy lay,
after the capture of Forts Henry and Donelson, within the easy grasp
of Grant's army. The only difference was that in the one case it was
the inexperience of the general in the field that forbade, while in
the other it was the paralyzing prohibition of the general in a secure
headquarters that stood in the way of achievement.

In the one case it was the predestined men of action who faltered
and failed of their opportunity. In the other the man of action was
restrained by "orders" which he dared not disobey.

Thus by the paralysis of Halleck's official hand, Grant was restrained
from pushing the war to results--possibly even to a conclusion--prompt,
certain and immediate.

General Halleck, who never in all his life commanded an army in battle,
was by the pure unreason of military law and etiquette officially
authorized to restrain the military impulse of Grant toward manifestly
right ends.

Grant had neglected, or was accused of having neglected, some technical
formality as to details in making his report of the actions which had
made him master of the forts. To ordinary common-sense it would seem
that the only important facts which he was called upon to report on
that occasion were that he had certain forces under his command; that
after three days of hard fighting in rain and sleet and indescribable
mud his enemy had surrendered the forts with 14,623 men, 65 pieces of
artillery and 17,000 stands of small arms; that he had made himself
master of the two strongholds and now completely commanded both rivers,
having thus opened a double river route into the heart of the Southern
Confederacy, which he proposed to make still further available by
an immediate advance upon Nashville and other strategic points the
possession of which would give him an open pathway to the Gulf itself.

This was all that common-sense required Grant to report for the
information of his superiors, and he reported precisely that. But those
office-housed superiors held him guilty of neglect in that he had not
given in detail the position of every regiment and brigade and battery
that had helped to win the victory. In punishment of this neglect of
infinitely petty detail--and also in emphasis of the fact that Grant
was after all only a general of volunteers who had presumed to win
unauthorized victories in no way assigned to him to win--Grant was
called back from his advance for the conquest of those strategic points
that lay so easily within his grasp and ordered instead to remain where
he was and to let slip from his hands the ripe fruits of his victory.

Was there ever anything so absurd as this, outside of comic opera--this
and the extraordinary reign of incapacity in the Confederate army and
Government? That was of like kind and quality.

The simple fact, of which the historian is obliged to take account,
is that if ordinary common-sense and the commonest forms of military
sagacity had been in control on either side at the beginning of the
war--if the men able to do things had been permitted to do them--the
struggle must almost certainly have ended within a few months after its
beginning; tens, yes, scores and hundreds of thousands of lives must
have been spared and multitudes of millions in expenditure and in the
destruction of property would have been saved to the American people.

That however was not to be. It was written in the Book of Fate that for
a time incapacity, self-seeking, narrow-minded, jealousy of rank, and
other like forces of the coarse and the commonplace were to rule about
equally on the one side and on the other, and that thus the war was to
be prolonged at terrible cost of sorrow and suffering and slaughter.

This was the situation in the West at the time when McClellan was
drilling his men around Washington, while Beauregard and Johnston
were futilely fortifying at Centreville to meet an assault that only
the writer of nonsense rhymes could at that time have regarded as
possible, and the victorious Federal forces on the Carolina coasts
were succumbing to the lassitude which that climate invites, making no
vigorous efforts to conquer the exposed and indefensible Confederate
lines of communication in that quarter.

Grant had a force of commanding numbers in the neighborhood of Forts
Henry and Donelson. His army had been swelled to 27,000 men. Buell had
as many more men--some of them battle-seasoned--at Louisville and south
of that city. There were other forces in eastern Kentucky under capable
commanders, which could easily have been brought to bear, forming an
army of more than 100,000 men in support of any southward movement that
might be undertaken. The movement which naturally suggested itself to
an aggressive military mind was one against Nashville, with an eye to
the penetration of the South from that point as a base of supplies.
The "march to the sea" was as easy a possibility then as when Sherman
made it years later.

This was Grant's idea, and it had behind it the eminent common-sense
which usually inspired and informed that very practical general's
plans. His purpose was to march with an overwhelming force, from
Nashville to the Gulf. He could have done this easily and certainly,
had he been permitted to undertake it with the forces then available.
But, as we have seen, his purpose was brought to naught by the veto of
General Halleck, whose notion of strategy seems to have been to let his
enemy determine where and when the fighting should occur.

Nevertheless the Southerners, seeing the strategic situation far more
clearly than Halleck did, abandoned Nashville and Federal troops of
Buell's army promptly occupied that city. Thus Grant's success was
saved to the country in some small and insignificant measure, though
Grant was himself suspended from command and compelled to wait in
inglorious ease until the Confederates by ceaseless and heroic efforts
got together a great army in northern Mississippi, to meet which
General Halleck found it necessary to call upon his most capable
lieutenant, Ulysses S. Grant.




CHAPTER XXII

BETWEEN MANASSAS AND SHILOH--THE SITUATION IN VIRGINIA


It is necessary now to record what had meanwhile been going on in
Virginia and elsewhere. At the beginning of November General George
B. McClellan was placed in supreme command subject only to the
President--of all the armies of the United States. He was called
"the young Napoleon," though upon what grounds of achievement that
characterization was based it is difficult to conjecture. He was
thirty-five years of age, and therefore young. He was a West Point
graduate and an accomplished officer of engineers. He had been sent
during the Crimean war to observe and report upon the organization
and conduct of European armies. He had made a report admirable in its
literary quality and expert in its observations. Later he had won
distinction by his very capable conduct of that campaign in western
Virginia which resulted in the division of the "pivotal" border state,
and the arraying of its western half upon the Federal side. But neither
in his deeds nor in the temper of his mind was there aught that could
with propriety be called Napoleonic. He was given from first to last,
as will appear hereafter, to the temperamental fault of exaggerating
his enemy's strength and to a shrinking from conflict with a foe whose
forces he thus overestimated.

Nevertheless, when McClellan was appointed to the supreme command
of the Union armies after his months of organizing at Washington it
was expected of him that he should at once advance upon Richmond and
dictate terms of surrender in the Confederate capital itself.

He had found around Washington in the summer a state of affairs which
must have hopelessly discouraged any commanding officer not altogether
given over to optimism. It sadly discouraged McClellan. In words of
his own he found at Washington "no army to command--a mere collection
of regiments cowering on the banks of the Potomac, some perfectly raw,
others dispirited by recent defeat, some going home. There were," he
added, "no defensive works on the southern approaches to the capital.
Washington," he officially reported, "was crowded with straggling
officers and men absent from their stations without authority." Is
there any wonder that McClellan found it necessary to devote many
months to the task of creating an effective army out of such stuff as
this? Is there any escape from wonder that with the national capital
thus hopelessly undefended, Beauregard and Johnston failed to advance
upon and capture it?

This matter has been discussed in sufficient detail already in these
pages. But it is worthy of note that the Confederate commanders who so
strangely neglected their opportunities after the battle of Manassas,
were not restrained by higher authority from the activity that was so
obviously called for by the circumstances of the case, as Grant was
after Donelson. They were free to act upon their own initiative, and
had they been at that time, as they afterwards became, generals of fair
military capacity they would have acted with vigor and promptitude and
the future history of the war would very certainly have been quite
other than it was.

The chief hope of the Confederates lay in the recognition of their
independence by foreign governments and in a presumably probable
alliance between themselves and the powerful nations of Europe. To
promote that result they sent out two duly accredited ministers, the
one to Great Britain and the other to France. The men selected for this
service were James M. Mason of Virginia and John Slidell of Louisiana.

These envoys escaped through the blockade to Havana. There they
embarked on the British mail steamer _Trent_. Captain Charles Wilkes,
commanding the United States steam frigate _San Jacinto_, overhauled
the _Trent_ at sea, on November eight, and made prisoners of Mason and
Slidell and their secretaries.

There is no doubt now that the act of Captain Wilkes was utterly
lawless. But there is equally no doubt that it was dictated by a
patriotic purpose. It was instantly and enthusiastically applauded
throughout the North, and the Federal Congress, inattentive to
international law or consequences, voted thanks to Wilkes for his
conduct in the matter. However, there was the offended British
government still to be reckoned with, and that government was at that
time not very reluctant to pick a quarrel with the United States or to
find a substantial excuse for recognizing Southern independence, and
perhaps lending aid to the Southern arms.

The act of Captain Wilkes was denounced by the British Government, as
an outrage upon British neutrality and a wanton trespass upon British
sovereignty as represented by the Union Jack afloat over a British mail
steamer. A demand was promptly made for the surrender of Mason and
Slidell, and for an apology. There is no possible room for doubt that
that demand was justified under the laws of nations and peculiarly so
by the precedents of American contention, for it was in protest against
precisely such sea seizures that this country had made war in 1812.
But the people of the North were tremendously excited over an incident
in which they greatly rejoiced, and it was in an extreme degree
dangerous for the administration to contravene popular sentiment and to
undo Captain Wilkes's work, by yielding to Britain's demands for the
surrender of Mason and Slidell.

From beginning to end of the war there was perhaps no problem so
perplexing as that which this controversy presented to Mr. Lincoln's
administration to solve. To refuse Britain's demands was to invite
instant war with the greatest naval power in the world, with the
certainty that France, already eager, would join forces with Great
Britain in recognizing the Southern Confederacy and supporting it in
its assertion of independence. In that case all that the United States
had done toward the establishment of a blockade of Southern ports
would have been quickly undone by the appearance of overmastering
British and French fleets on the Southern coasts, and very probably
by the landing of British and French forces to aid the Confederates
in their war against the Union. For when war is on nations do not
stop at technical interference. They are apt to furnish men and guns
in aid of the cause they have espoused. In any case a declaration of
war between Great Britain and the United States--a declaration of war
which the capture of Mason and Slidell very narrowly threatened--would
have resulted in the raising of the blockade of every Southern port
and the opening of the South to that free traffic in arms, ammunition
and supplies which chiefly the South needed in order to accomplish its
purposes.

Should the Government, on the other hand, yield to the British demand,
it must encounter that highly inflamed popular sentiment which had
compelled a congressional resolution of thanks to Captain Wilkes, and
which--sanely or insanely--was disposed to twiddle its fingers at
British or any other intervention in American affairs.

Mr. Seward, as Secretary of State, solved the matter by one of the
most adroit diplomatic quibbles ever invented by an ingenious mind.
He must surrender Mason and Slidell of course, otherwise war was on
with England and France, the blockade was broken, the Confederacy
was recognized and the establishment of a Southern Republic was an
accomplished fact. On the other hand Mr. Seward must not without good
and sufficient excuse yield one jot or tittle to English demands--even
though those demands were supported by American precedents--lest he
offend the "whip all creation" sentiment of the country.

Probably in all history no diplomat ever managed so delicate or so
difficult a matter so skilfully as Mr. Seward did this. He carefully
set forth the war rights of his country. He contended that Captain
Wilkes had a right to capture the _Trent_ as a vessel knowingly
carrying contraband of war. But he explained that, as Captain Wilkes
had released the vessel instead of bringing her into port as a prize,
he had lost his rights and forfeited his claims. In summing up Mr.
Seward said: "If I declare this case in favor of my own Government I
must disavow its most cherished principles and reverse and forever
abandon its most essential policy. We are asked to do to the British
nation just what we have insisted all nations ought to do to us."

Mr. Seward's plea was a specious one, but it answered its purpose.
It enabled him to avoid war with Great Britain and France without
alienating from the administration the support of that sentiment of
confident self-reliance in the country upon which enlistments and the
success of the war depended. He surrendered Mason and Slidell, but he
adroitly managed to represent his action rather as a new assertion
of the old 1812 doctrine of American rights than as in any sense a
surrender to a foreign nation's demand. Thus peace abroad was secured
and popular sentiment at home was appeased; and after all the temporary
detention of the two Confederate ministers had fully accomplished
its purpose. By the time that they reached Europe official and
public opinion in that quarter had so far changed that neither France
nor England was any longer disposed to recognize the independent
nationality of the Confederacy which had so conspicuously neglected its
easy opportunity to compel recognition by an advance upon Washington
after Manassas.

One other event of importance remains to be recorded in this chapter.
When the Confederates seized upon the Navy Yard at Portsmouth, opposite
Norfolk, Virginia, the Federal forces there destroyed all they could
of valuable materials and adjuncts of war. But there was left a ship,
the _Merrimac_, burned in part and sunk. The Confederates raised this
ship, cut her down and armored her with railroad iron. She was the
first iron-clad ship that ever assailed other ships, the pioneer of all
modern naval armaments. At the same time Captain John Ericsson at the
North was experimenting upon somewhat similar lines and producing the
_Monitor_, the first iron-clad, turreted ship ever built.

On the eighth of March the Confederate iron-clad ram the _Merrimac_--or
the _Virginia_ as the Confederates had newly named her--steamed out
into Hampton Roads and promptly destroyed two United States ships of
war, the _Congress_ and the _Cumberland_. Her performance created the
greatest consternation. It was obvious that no wooden ship could live
in conflict with such a craft as this. With such guns as were then in
use her sides were impenetrable by shot or shell. With her steel nose
it was easily possible for her to ram and sink any ship of any type
then in use without danger to herself.

It was the plan of the Confederates to have this ironclad destroy the
wooden fleet in Hampton Roads, as it was obviously and easily possible
for it to do, proceed at once to New York and work havoc there, and
then steam south to raise the blockade by sinking, one after another,
the wooden ships of the blockading fleet.

But just after the _Virginia's_ first success was achieved, there
steamed into Hampton Roads Captain Ericsson's iron-clad, turreted ship,
the _Monitor_. The next day these two armored vessels tried conclusions
with each other. At the end of the fight the _Virginia_ retired to
Portsmouth damaged and discredited. The _Monitor_ had proved to be more
than her match, and while it had not succeeded in destroying her it had
demonstrated its own superiority as a marine fighting machine.

More important still was the fact that while the South had no shipyards
in which new and improved _Virginias_ could be built, the North was
abundantly able to reproduce the _Monitor_ in other ships of like kind
without number or limit and to better her type and construction in the
light of experience.

This conflict is historically interesting as the birth scene of modern
naval armaments. It was the first direct conflict of armored ships.
It was the first instance in history in which ironclad met ironclad.
It marked the dawn of a new era in naval construction, the natal day
of all modern navies. It was the beginning from which have sprung the
battleship, the armored cruiser, the protected cruiser, the gunboat and
the torpedo-boat destroyer, as we know them now.

The fight between the Southern ironclad and the ships it destroyed, and
the contest next day between it and the _Monitor_, have been widely
celebrated in song and story. But the real significance of those
contests lies rather in that to which they gave birth than in that
which in themselves they were.




CHAPTER XXIII

SHILOH


McClellan's advance upon Richmond, in its beginnings at least,
antedated the great conflict at Shiloh. But its crisis did not come
until much later, nor did it in its early progress involve aught that
was of significance in its bearing upon the conduct and outcome of the
war.

It seems proper therefore to discuss Shiloh and other operations in the
Mississippi Valley first, leaving the campaign in Virginia for later
consideration.

The Confederates, before the fall of Fort Donelson and Fort Henry, were
maintaining a line of offensive defense in Kentucky. This line extended
from the Big Sandy in the eastern part of the state to Columbus on the
Mississippi river in the extreme west.

The line was in many respects defective. The Confederate center of
operations was at Bowling Green, while the two ends of the defensive
line lay much farther north than that. The line thus constituted what
in military parlance is known as a reëntering angle. The enemy pushing
into such an angle with forces greater than those that defended it or
even with an inferior force, had easy choice to attack on either side
as he pleased, concentrating at will, while compelling the Confederates
to scatter their forces along the whole of an extensive line by way of
defending all parts of it equally.

It was the original purpose of those who devised this defensive system
to correct the fault by pushing their center forward from Bowling Green
to Paducah on the Ohio river, nearly fifty miles above the mouth of
that stream. Had this been accomplished, it would have made the angle
of defense a salient instead of a reëntering one.

Let us explain the advantage of this for the benefit of the
non-military reader. If the Confederates could have established
themselves at Paducah with their lines trending off to the southeast on
the one side and to the southwest on the other, they, instead of their
enemies, would have had choice of positions in which to concentrate.
Assailed at any point it would have been easy for them to throw all
possible force quickly to the defense of the threatened position.

Grant interfered with all this planning when he moved up the Ohio, and
seized upon Paducah, which was quickly fortified so strongly as to
render the execution of the scheme thereafter impracticable. From that
time forward it was clear that the Confederates must either maintain
their line of defense by means of a vast and dangerously unmanageable
reëntering angle, or they must withdraw from their two advanced wing
points. To do this latter thing would have been to abandon Kentucky
completely, and it was no part of the Confederate program to do that.

A second defect in this scheme of defense was that the line thus
formed was traversed by two rivers, the Tennessee and the Cumberland,
both practically navigable by steamboats. It was obvious to ordinary
common-sense that should both or either of these rivers at any time
fall under control of the enemy, with his multitudinous gunboats and
other river craft which could easily be made to carry guns, the western
half of the Confederate force must be completely and at once cut off
from all but a very roundabout and slow communication with its allies
on the east.

Here was a danger which must have presented itself obtrusively to the
minds of those who formed and ordered this military arrangement. It
is difficult for a military critic in this later day to understand or
to conceive upon what principle of scientific warfare such a line was
accepted as even tolerably judicious. Its adoption seems in fact to
have been determined more by political than by military considerations.

In order to meet the difficulty the Confederates created the two great
fortresses--Henry and Donelson--to defend the rivers. These forts were
curiously misplaced. They were located one upon the one river, and
the other upon the other, at a point near the dividing line between
Kentucky and Tennessee. At that point the two rivers run within eleven
miles of each other. But a little farther down the streams--that is
to say a little farther north--their course brings them within three
miles of each other. Here obviously on all accounts was the point at
which the defensive works should have been constructed. In that case
the two forts would have been within easy supporting distance of each
other and neither could have been assailed from the rear. Moreover,
we have the authority of no less eminent an engineer than General
Beauregard for saying that the ground at this point is well fitted by
its natural conformation for purposes of defense, while at the point
actually selected for the two fortresses it is peculiarly lacking in
that advantage. But the more defensible position was in Kentucky and
purely political considerations had weight in determining the choice of
the less advantageous point of defense in Tennessee.

The defective character of this line of defense and the mistake
underlying its acceptance were strongly emphasized after the overthrow
of Zollicoffer at Mill Springs and the pushing forward of General
Thomas's forces to more southerly points. This movement placed a
threatening force on the right flank of the Confederate line of
defense. Nevertheless, the Confederate War Department clung to its
mistaken policy. It lived at that time in a fool's paradise in which
facts counted for little in comparison with theories, and in which
optimism was expected to serve the purpose of guns and brigades and
defensive works.

When at the end of January, 1862, the War Department asked General
Beauregard to go to that region as second in command under General
Albert Sydney Johnston, it confidently assured him that the troops
under General Johnston's command exceeded seventy thousand in number.
On his arrival there General Beauregard found that in fact these widely
and dangerously scattered forces numbered less than forty-five thousand
and that the several parts could not possibly be made to support each
other. He found also that the strength in fortification, in guns and
in men, which should have been concentrated mainly in Forts Henry and
Donelson, had been largely wasted at Columbus, a position naturally
indefensible or defensible by a small as easily as by a large force. He
found that vast quantities of precious stores had been warehoused there
in face of the fact that Columbus was the most northerly and the most
exposed point on the entire defensive line.

When General Beauregard joined General Johnston and made his study
of conditions, he pointed out all these defects in the line and all
the dangers they involved. General Beauregard had, since the battle
of Manassas, developed an aggressive tendency which he had strangely
lacked in the earlier months of his career as a general. He had grown
into a real general. He therefore proposed to General Johnston an
instant offensive movement.

Here it is important for the reader clearly to understand the situation.

General Polk, commanding the Confederates at Columbus, was threatened
by a superior force under General Pope in Missouri, on the other
side of the river. General Johnston's position at Bowling Green was
threatened by a distinctly superior army under General Buell which lay
scarcely more than a two days' march to the north and east. Moreover
the position of Bowling Green was already in effect turned by Thomas's
advance from eastern Kentucky towards eastern Tennessee. In the
meanwhile General Grant, supported by the gunboats, was in possession
of Paducah and threatening to advance with 15,000 men for the reduction
of Fort Henry and Fort Donelson.

The Confederate forces were scattered beyond all possibility of
effective coöperation except by a concentration in advance involving a
radical change in the scheme and line of defense. There were at that
time about 14,000 Confederate effectives at Bowling Green; about 5,500
at Forts Henry and Donelson; about 8,000 near Clarksville; and about
15,000 at and near Columbus. Other detached forces at various points
swelled the total of the Confederate forces in Kentucky and Tennessee
to about 45,000 fighting men.

Grant was threatening the river forts with 15,000 men. Pope had 30,000
men or more in southeast Missouri, threatening Columbus. Buell had a
large and rapidly increasing army, numbering from 40,000 to 60,000 men
(overestimated by Beauregard at 75,000 or 80,000) at Bacon's Creek,
within striking distance, forty miles, of Bowling Green.

It was obviously easy for Pope to occupy Polk at Columbus and for Buell
to engage Johnston at Bowling Green with an overwhelming force, while
Grant should advance to the assault of Forts Henry and Donelson.

Buell, with his army of 40,000 or 50,000 men, might easily have
overwhelmed Johnston's 14,000 at Bowling Green. Pope could have so far
engaged Polk at Columbus as to prevent the detachment even of a squad
from that quarter for Johnston's reinforcement. Grant in the meanwhile
could make his advance with 15,000 men--to be reinforced presently to
27,000--and the gunboats, against Forts Henry and Donelson, defended as
those works were by no more than 5,500 men.

It was Beauregard's urgent advice to withdraw all but garrison forces
from Columbus, Bowling Green and Clarksville, and to concentrate an
overmastering force for resistance to Grant in front of Fort Donelson.

This plan was in some degree acted upon. That is to say enough men were
concentrated at the forts to swell the record of Grant's subsequent
capture to about 15,000 men, but not enough to defend the position.
The plan might have failed had an attempt been made to execute it in
its full scope. Attempted by half measures as it was its failure was
clearly foreordained. Grant captured the forts and their defending
garrisons and made himself master of the two rivers which, next to the
Mississippi, were of most vital importance to both sides. After the
forts had fallen the occupation of Nashville was quite a matter of
course, and equally so was the necessity of the Confederate evacuation
of Kentucky and of practically all of Tennessee.

Presently after being "kept in" by Halleck Grant was restored to
command--though still as a mere volunteer officer under censure and
still subject to General Halleck's often paralyzing domination. Grant
instantly began, after his habit, to plan a further campaign of damage
to the enemies of the Union. One opportunity had been denied to him. He
sought another.

In the meanwhile his capture of Forts Henry and Donelson had split the
Confederate line of defense in two and rendered its further maintenance
an utter impossibility. With the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers in
Federal possession it was manifestly absurd to think of maintaining a
line of defense which those rivers traversed. The success of Grant had
completely ended all possibility of coöperation between the eastern and
western wings of that defensive line. The forces west of the Tennessee
and those east of that river must henceforth act independently and
rather hopelessly, or else they must retire to a new line farther south
upon which coöperation might be possible.

It was decided to retire. Bowling Green was evacuated and the Federal
General Buell instantly occupied it. A little later Nashville was
evacuated by the Confederates in behalf of a less exposed position.
It was at the same time determined to withdraw from Columbus all the
forces assembled there except a garrison sufficient to work the guns,
and to defend the point for a time with the aid of Commodore Hollins's
gunboats in the Mississippi.

The new line of defense adopted by the Confederates was the Memphis and
Charleston railroad, running through southern Tennessee and northern
Mississippi, Alabama, etc. This line presented no natural advantages
of defense, but it covered the most vitally important railroad
communications of the Confederacy. Furthermore it will be observed
that this line of defense lies almost exactly midway between the Ohio
River and the Gulf of Mexico. In other words, under Grant's energetic
aggressiveness, the Federal control had been pushed from the Ohio river
nearly half way to the gulf. The process of "splitting the Confederacy
in two," was already well advanced at the beginning of the spring of
1862.

It was always the keynote of Grant's policy to "press things," and
after his period of suspension from command he began again to carry out
that obviously wise policy.

As the dominant thought in General Grant's strategy from beginning to
end of the war, he was strongly impressed with the fact that the North
was vastly superior to the South in all military resources, and as a
man of practical common sense it was his idea that this superiority in
men, arms, ammunition, food supplies, and all else that tends to help
military endeavor should be insistently and persistently utilized in
the breaking of Confederate resistance within the briefest possible
time. The ancient thought of divine arbitrament in arms had no place in
his mind. The notion was incredible to him that two armies should stand
still and do nothing while a David on the one side and a Goliath on the
other should make a personal trial of conclusions. He was not lacking
in chivalry or sentiment, as abundantly appeared on several conspicuous
occasions, but he had besides an all-dominating common sense, and he
used it. He fully agreed with the Confederate General Forrest in his
definition of strategy as the art of "getting there first with the most
men." He did not understand modern warfare to be in any wise akin to
a medieval tournament in which equality of opportunity must be sought
at all costs. Quite on the contrary he regarded war as a perfectly
practical matter of business, to be carried on as such. He clearly saw
it to be what it is and always must be, a cruel survival from barbaric
times, a measuring of brute strength in that last appeal of humanity,
to the arbitrament of arms.

His common sense taught him that whatever of science there might be
involved in the conduct of war, its results depended after all upon
brute force. It was therefore his plan always to bring to bear all that
he possessed of brute force for the solution of the problems at issue,
and, wherever he could, to press his adversary with heavier battalions
than that adversary could muster.

Having been set free again with permission to resume active warfare,
Grant intuitively desired to push forward, pressing his adversary at
every point, seizing upon every assailable position and making himself
master of every place from which further war could be waged with hope
of success.

As we have seen, he had been called back from this program of common
sense after his capture of Forts Henry and Donelson, and until March
13 he was not again allowed to do anything whatever or to use his
abilities in any manner in the public service.

By making himself master of the two rivers he had completely destroyed
the Confederate line and scheme of defense. He had completely cut
off that part of the Confederate force which had its headquarters at
Bowling Green from that part of it whose chief seat was at Columbus.
So complete was this severance, as a glance at a map will show, that
General Albert Sydney Johnston sent General Beauregard at once to
command the western force as a separate army with specific instructions
to act upon his own judgment, bearing in mind that coöperation between
the two forces was no longer possible.

It was surely a great strategic victory for Grant thus to break an
elaborate line of defense and thus completely to divide an army
already inferior to the armies opposing it in numbers, resources
and equipments. But this was not all of it. By this division of the
Confederate forces Grant was left free to attack either half of the
Southern army at will, with overwhelming numbers--for in addition to
his own 38,000 men--for his force had been swelled to that strength--he
had Buell's much larger force within easy call, to say nothing of
Thomas's command, now foot-loose for aggressive campaigning. It is safe
to say that had Grant been permitted, he could and would have fallen
upon and crushed the Confederates under Johnston, with an absolutely
overwhelming army. He could and would have conquered every remaining
Confederate stronghold in Tennessee and northern Georgia and Alabama
and he could and probably would have made within the first year of the
war that "march to the sea," either at Mobile or at Savannah, which was
left for Sherman to make years later.

On the other hand, with a strong detachment he could easily have
destroyed the long and exceedingly vulnerable line of communication
that connected Columbus, Kentucky, with the South.

At Jackson, Tennessee, the Mississippi Central railroad coming up from
New Orleans and the Mobile and Ohio line running north from Mobile
formed a junction. From that point north to Columbus, there was but
one fragile line of single track, earth-ballasted railroad, serving
as a connecting link between the South and its excessively advanced
western position at Columbus. It is difficult to imagine a line of
military communication more vulnerable than this little thread. The
country between the Tennessee river and this railroad line was quite
open and there was neither fortress nor force, except here and there
an easily conquerable picket post to defend the communication. If
Grant had been left with a free hand there is no doubt whatever that
he would instantly have sent westward a force too small in itself for
its detachment to weaken him, but large enough to make itself instantly
and completely master of this railroad line. He would thus have cut off
all communication between Columbus and the South. He would have made
himself quickly master of all the forces and all the supplies and all
the ordnance that had been foolishly concentrated at Columbus. He would
without a battle have compelled the surrender of that stronghold, with
all its preposterously numerous garrison, with all its great guns, and
with all of the rich store of supplies and ammunition and other war
material collected there.

It was another absurdity of the early war that Grant was forbidden to
do any of these things, when the time for their doing was ripe. By
orders of his "superior officer" Halleck, Grant was held idle at the
forts that he had conquered while this opportunity slipped away. From
the sixteenth of February to the thirteenth of March this only general
who knew how to do things and how to get things done was condemned to
idleness and inaction by the absurd order of a distinctly unfriendly
martinet.

In the meantime the Confederates, not being fools, utilized the
opportunity given them by this delay, to rescue themselves from their
peculiarly perilous position. Johnston withdrew the eastern half of the
Confederate army from Bowling Green to the line of the railroad that
led from Memphis eastward. Beauregard, in command of the western half
of the army which Grant had so completely sundered, clearly saw the
situation and promptly retired his forces from Columbus to Corinth,
Mississippi, on the line of the Memphis and Charleston railroad at
its intersection of the Mobile and Ohio line. He had in the meantime
transferred to New Madrid on the Mississippi, and to Island Number 10
in that stream, the best of the ordnance in Columbus, thus providing as
effectually as he could for the defense of the great river and for its
blockading against Federal gunboats and still more important Federal
transports bearing troops and supplies to points below.

Corinth is a little village in the extreme north of Mississippi. It
has no pronounced defensive advantages whatsoever. It lies in a region
of nearly flat lands with no line of bold hills to protect it and no
difficult stream to serve as a base of defense. But it lies upon that
line of railroad which the Confederates must defend if they were to
preserve their communications between the east and the west at the
crossing of the north and south line.

At Corinth the Confederates concentrated all their forces. Against
Corinth Grant instantly directed his operations as soon as he was
restored to command and permitted by his superior officer to carry on
the war for his country upon lines marked out by common-sense.

He moved at once to Pittsburg Landing on the Tennessee river. Pittsburg
Landing lies about twenty miles north by east of Corinth and between
the two there is no considerable stream, no important range of hills,
nothing in the shape of physical conformation of the ground that could
aid Confederate defense or facilitate Confederate aggression. On the
contrary the streams near Pittsburg ministered exclusively to Federal
purposes.

When Grant arrived at Pittsburg Landing he found the army encamped
about equally upon the eastern and western sides of the river. He
instantly and boldly ordered the whole of it to the western or
Confederate bank of the stream.

This was a very daring thing to do. For with the Tennessee river behind
him and with no means of easily crossing it in retreat, Grant must face
the certain surrender of his army in case of an unsuccessful battle in
that position. In such an event there could be no alternative. But it
was not Grant's habit of mind to look for alternatives. He boldly took
the risk as it was his custom to do. He threw his whole army across
the river and there waited for the arrival of Buell's stronger force,
which had been ordered by Halleck to join him and was marching in
very leisurely fashion to do so. The army under Grant's own immediate
command numbered now about 38,000 men, increased almost immediately
to 45,000. That under Buell which was strolling westward to reinforce
him numbered more than 40,000. He thus had prospect of an overwhelming
force with which to assail the Confederates at Corinth, where under
Beauregard's tireless activity they had succeeded in concentrating
about 45,000 or 50,000 men, a large part of this force consisting of
raw recruits unorganized, undrilled, undisciplined and extremely ill
armed.

Whether Halleck planned this concentration of Grant's and Buell's
armies for an advance upon Corinth as his partisans contend, or whether
Grant planned it and Halleck merely accepted the plan as others stoutly
assert, is a matter of no historical consequence, whatever biographical
interest it may have. In either case the purpose of the concentration
was to move upon Corinth in irresistible force, overthrow the
Confederates there and seize upon the two important lines of railroad
which intersect each other at that point. It was at any rate Halleck's
purpose to command in this campaign in person. But it was not intended
to advance upon Corinth until Grant's and Buell's armies should form a
junction, and there was no thought or expectation that the Confederates
would themselves assume the offensive. General Halleck planned to leave
St. Louis not earlier than April 7, and perhaps several days later,
for Pittsburg Landing. In the meanwhile General Grant had posted his
army loosely and had thrown up no earthworks in the field. All his
procedures indicated that he did not expect to be molested where he lay
or to encounter the enemy until he should go in search of him. Indeed,
he telegraphed Halleck on the fifth of April, the very day before the
battle, saying, "The main force of the enemy is at Corinth, with troops
at different points east.... I have scarcely the faintest idea of an
attack (general one) being made upon us, but will be prepared should
such a thing take place."

At the very moment when that dispatch was penned the Confederates with
their entire strength were actually on march to assail an enemy who had
"scarcely the faintest idea of an attack" being made upon him either
then or later. In his memoirs General Grant said:

"When all reinforcements should have arrived I expected to take the
initiative by marching on Corinth and had no expectation of needing
fortifications.... The fact is I regarded the campaign we were engaged
in as an offensive one and had no idea that the enemy would leave
strong intrenchments to take the initiative when he knew he would be
attacked where he was, if he remained."

It had been the purpose of General Johnston to deliver his blow on the
morning of the fifth of April, overthrow Grant, and be prepared to
fall upon Buell when he should arrive. But matters of detail went so
far wrong that the Confederates, advancing from Corinth to attack, did
not reach the neighborhood of Shiloh church, where Sherman was posted
without fortifications, until nightfall of that day. They bivouacked
very near the Federal lines, but strangely enough their presence in
force was not discovered by the enemy they purposed to fall upon at
daylight. In the meanwhile the head of Buell's column had come up and
the rest of it was dangerously near at hand.

The Confederates made their assault with great impetuosity at dawn
of April 6. The first that Sherman, who held the advance of Grant's
position, knew of the impending battle was when the Confederates forty
thousand strong rushed upon his camps and after a brief but stubborn
struggle carried them, Sherman being driven back so hurriedly that he
left his tents standing and the breakfasts of his men not yet cooked.
The first that Grant knew of a tremendous attack of which he had had
"scarcely the faintest idea," was when at his headquarters at Savannah
several miles down the river he heard the guns at work at Shiloh.

There has been much and angry discussion of the question whether or
not Grant and Sherman were "surprised," in the military acceptation
of the term, by the Confederate onslaught at Shiloh. The point has
little historical importance, but in the light of all the facts since
disclosed by the records it is difficult to interpret what happened
there otherwise than as a complete surprise, which but for the
excellent discipline of the Federal troops and their superb fighting
quality might easily have ended in disaster. We have seen that Halleck
in St. Louis did not intend to leave for the front, where he expected
to command in person, until the next day or even later. We have seen
how confident Grant was in his belief that the Confederates intended no
general attack either then or later and how he planned himself to take
the offensive. It is certain that Grant's forces were not disposed as
they would have been if an assault by the enemy had been anticipated.
The several advance corps were posted with little or no reference to
coöperation between them to resist an enemy assaulting in force. No
line of battle had been formed or in any way provided for. Sherman,
who was first assailed, was resting quietly in camps which would very
certainly have been stripped for action if an attack had been expected.
Indeed, Sherman's very latest reports to Grant had expressed the
utmost confidence that no attack was in contemplation, and that the
Confederates would do nothing more than annoy the pickets. He reported
to Grant that they "will not press our pickets far." In brief it is
obvious that neither Halleck at St. Louis, nor Grant at Savannah,
Tennessee, nor Sherman, holding the front at Shiloh meeting house,
anticipated a battle in front of Pittsburg Landing. They expected to
fight on the offensive at Corinth when they should be ready to advance,
but the thought of having to defend themselves against a Confederate
force assailing them at Shiloh seems never to have occurred to them
until the Confederates fell upon Sherman's camp with their "yell," for
a first warning of their presence.

Sherman with two brigades lay in front. The two brigades were widely
separated, as they would not have been had an attack in force been
regarded as even a possibility. McClernand's division lay far in rear
of Sherman. Prentiss, Hurlbut, W. H. L. Wallace and the commander of C.
F. Smith's force--that general being ill--with their several divisions
were scattered about in the rear all the way to Pittsburg Landing,
while Lew Wallace with about five thousand men was posted several miles
farther down the river in complete isolation from the rest of the force.

General Van Horne, writing under the direct inspiration of General
George H. Thomas and with all the orders and dispatches under his
eye, says that the several divisions "were widely separated and did
not sustain such relations to each other that it was possible to
form quickly a connected defensive line; they had no defenses and no
designated line for defense in the event of a sudden attack, and there
was no general on the field to take by special authority the command of
the whole force in an emergency."

The ground in front of Pittsburg Landing was especially well adapted
to defense. Flanked on either side by creeks difficult to cross, it
compelled the assailants to depend almost entirely upon direct assault
in front with little chance of success in any effort they might make to
turn either flank.

There was as yet no officer authorized to take general command,
General Grant being at Savannah, far from the field, but the division
commanders, each acting upon his own responsibility, quickly responded
to the need, and not long after Sherman's camps had been overrun there
was a very tolerable line of battle contesting the Confederate advance
with great obstinacy and determination.

In the meanwhile Grant had ordered up such reinforcements as were at
hand and was himself hurrying to the scene to give personal direction
to the battle.

He found multitudes of stragglers and skulkers cowering under the river
bank, as is always the case during a battle when a place of refuge near
at hand offers a tempting security to the cowardly. But apart from
these spiritless ones he found the men of his army bearing themselves
right gallantly and contesting every inch of the ground over which the
Confederates were slowly beating them back towards the river.

The purpose of the Confederates was to break through the left of
Grant's line and reach the river, thus placing themselves on their
enemy's flank, threatening his rear and imperiling his entire army.
General Albert Sydney Johnston had been mortally wounded early in
the afternoon, but Beauregard, upon whom the Confederate command had
devolved, adopted and sought to carry out the strategy determined
upon. Late in the afternoon, he hurled the whole of Bragg's force upon
the left of Grant's line with an impetuosity which must have achieved
success had the tremendous assault been made an hour earlier. But
fortunately for the Federals General Buell had come up with a part
of his army. He quickly threw such regiments as he had with him into
action at the point of danger, and the danger was really extreme. It
was only necessary for the Confederates to push Grant's left wing back
for about two hundred yards farther than it had been pushed already in
order to seize upon the landing and completely cut Grant off from his
gunboats and transports acting as ferry-boats, and from all hope of
further reinforcement.

In that case Grant's problem would have been to save his shattered army
from complete overthrow, with surrender as the well-nigh inevitable
result. There is little doubt that the left wing must have given way
before Bragg's assault, as the Confederates expected it to do, but for
the reinforcement which Buell sent into action at the critical moment.
This reinforcement saved the left wing from the destruction intended
for it.

This statement is made upon the very careful and trustworthy authority
of General Van Horne, writing under direct inspiration of General
Thomas. In his "Memoirs" General Grant repudiates the claim of Buell's
having rendered important assistance at that time and insists that he
rendered him no help of any consequence on the first day of the battle.
But the memoirs were written from the memory of a very ill man many
years after the event, and may therefore be erroneous. At any rate
General Van Horne's account of what happened, supported as it is by
copies of all the orders given, seems the more trustworthy authority on
the point at issue.

Night was now near at hand. During a long day of continuous and
desperate fighting Grant had been slowly beaten back to the
neighborhood of the river bank. There he stood at bay with all his
artillery and all his infantry massed in a commanding position,
shattered and broken, and standing in desperate defense of a point from
which he could retreat no farther without retreating into the river.

Across his front lay a deep ravine. This would have been difficult
for his enemy to cross under the best of conditions. It was rendered
the more difficult by the fact that it was in part filled with back
water from the river. Still more important was the fact that it was
completely commanded by a plunging fire from the Federal artillery
which in spite of defeat stood resolutely to its guns.

Nevertheless the passage of that ravine was not quite impossible to a
determined foe; more difficult tasks have been accomplished by generals
of desperate courage commanding such an army as that under Beauregard
had proved itself to be during that unflinching day of slaughter.

It was a critical moment of the war--we may almost say it was _the_
critical moment of the war. If Beauregard could have forced that
ravine he must have driven his adversary into the river or compelled
the surrender of the Federal army with its complete destruction as the
only alternative. On the other hand, if he failed to force the ravine
that night it would be forever too late. For Buell's whole army was now
within call and it was certain that on the following day, if Grant were
not now destroyed, there would be a Federal force on the Confederate
side of the river with which Beauregard could not reasonably hope to
cope successfully.

It would perhaps be unjust to say that at this supreme crisis
Beauregard faltered and failed. The peril of the attempt was so great
and the certainty of slaughter so appalling that the very stoutest
heart might well have shrunk from the desperate hazard.

Beauregard himself has told us in his official reports, and in Colonel
Roman's inspired book, that he was unwilling to order a movement so
desperate in its chances and so certain to involve a slaughter of brave
men greater than any that has been anywhere recorded in the annals of
modern war. He was satisfied with the day's work done and confident of
complete victory on the morrow. So sure was he of this that he sent
dispatches to Richmond that night announcing a victory of stupendous
proportions and painting it in colors so glowing that President Davis
was moved to send a congratulatory message to the Congress, and that
body passed resolutions of the most enthusiastic kind.

During that night Buell's army, itself outnumbering what remained of
Beauregard's, was hurrying to reinforce Grant who planned to renew
the conflict at dawn with every prospect of reversing the first day's
results and wresting victory from what had been so nearly a complete
and disastrous defeat.

Early on the morning of the seventh of April Grant, reinforced by
Buell's men and having now an overmastering superiority of numbers,
took the offensive and assailed Beauregard's weakened army with a
determination which under the circumstances could mean nothing less
than victory.

But Beauregard was an obstinate fighter and a skilful one and his men
were Americans of the same race and lineage and traditions as those
they were meeting in battle. There was terrible fighting, therefore,
on that second day, and it was only after a very desperate and a very
bloody struggle, hours long in duration, that Grant regained the
ground lost on the day before.

But Beauregard's struggle on that second day was rendered hopeless
from the outset by irresistible odds of numbers, and after a heroic
resistance he withdrew his army and retired in good order and
unmolested to his strongly fortified position at Corinth.

Thus ended one of the great and decisive battles of the war. The
Federals had lost 13,047 men--killed, wounded and prisoners. The
Confederate loss was officially reported at 10,699 men. They had
captured the whole of Prentiss's division, 2,200 strong.

But the respective losses did not accurately measure the importance
of the contest. The battle left the Confederates baffled in their
attempt to overthrow Grant, but not less determined than ever to fight
the matter out to that conclusion which they religiously believed to
be their due of righteousness. On the other hand, it left the Federal
army in overmastering force on the Confederate side of a river which
constituted the last serious natural obstacle to Grant's purposed march
to the gulf.

But Grant was again immediately superseded in the chief command and
forbidden to press the Confederates with that tireless and ceaseless
activity which was the dominant characteristic of his military methods.
He had now an army of about 120,000 men. In front of him lay the enemy
upon a weakly defensive line with an army reduced by battle losses
to less than 40,000 effectives. It was obviously Grant's greatest
opportunity, but he was not permitted to seize it and turn it to
account. For no sooner was the battle completely won than General
Halleck hurried down from St. Louis and himself assumed command.

His orders were paralyzing. Instead of pushing forward with his force,
that outnumbered the Confederates by about three to one, and quickly
making an end of their resistance, he fortified and proceeded to busy
himself with the petty and nagging criticism of battle reports while
the Confederates were doing all that remained possible to them to
gather recruits, to strengthen their position at Corinth and to prepare
means of resistance farther South.

When we shall come to consider in a future chapter, what else had
happened, we shall see clearly that by his victory on the second day of
the Shiloh battle, taken in connection with other occurrences, General
Grant had made easily possible the immediate and complete conquest
of the entire Mississippi Valley. It only required an immediate
and determined advance such as General Grant naturally and eagerly
desired to make, in order to complete that work at once. He says in
his "Memoirs" that two days would have been ample for the conquest of
Corinth. But General Grant was not in control of operations in the
western department. General Halleck was. General Grant was no longer
even in command of the army with which he had driven General Beauregard
back to Corinth. General Halleck was, and instead of pressing forward
at once as Grant desired to do and driving Beauregard still farther
south while capturing all his stores or compelling him to destroy them,
Halleck forbade all this and with three men to Beauregard's one, and
with thrice or four times his resources in artillery, ammunition and
everything else, he fortified at Shiloh and began a slowly scientific
approach to works that Grant, in command of that army, would have run
over as a schoolboy tramples down a pathway through a clover field.
Halleck did not even begin this "scientific" advance against Corinth
until the thirtieth of April--more than three weeks after the battle
at Shiloh had opened the way. It took him, by his slow methods, a
full month more to reach Corinth--less than twenty miles away--and
when he got there at last he found the place already evacuated, the
Confederates having made good use of the seven or eight weeks' time
which his dilatoriness had thus allowed them in removing their guns,
ammunition and stores to newly fortified positions farther south.

But Grant's achievement at Shiloh was too great to be ignored. Again,
as after the capture of Forts Henry and Donelson, the land was
resounding with the praises of this Galena clerk Ulysses S. Grant, and
nobody outside the war department at Washington was even thinking of
his superior officer, General Halleck.

But in order clearly to understand what and how much all this meant, it
is necessary in another chapter to recount what else had happened of
a nature calculated to contribute to the recovery of the Mississippi
river and the Mississippi Valley, and to the severance of the
Confederacy in twain.




CHAPTER XXIV

NEW MADRID AND ISLAND NUMBER 10


While the battle of Shiloh was in progress another strategically
important struggle was fought out.

By way of defending the Mississippi and holding it within Confederate
control the Southern generals had strongly fortified New Madrid Bend
and Island Number 10.

Let us explain. The Mississippi river is exceedingly tortuous in its
course. Some miles above New Madrid in Missouri, it suddenly turns
northwardly and makes a great bend. At or near the northerly curve
of that bend lies the village of New Madrid, Missouri. There the
Confederates had fortified themselves and there General Pope with his
army in Missouri was threatening them.

In the course of that vast bend lay Island Number 10, and here the
Confederates had still more determinedly fortified themselves with
a view of holding the great river. They had a strong force at Fort
Pillow, on the Tennessee bank farther down the stream. They held
Memphis on the Chickasaw bluffs 240 miles below Cairo. They had
possession of Vicksburg and Port Hudson, but those positions had not
yet been made strongholds by elaborate fortifications. They still held
New Orleans and the defenses below that city, though they were destined
soon to lose them. Thus they commanded the river and made of it a
Confederate highway. It was the obvious policy of the Confederates
to retain possession of that great river. It was the equally obvious
policy of their adversaries to conquer control of it.

When Beauregard wisely, and indeed under strategic compulsion, withdrew
the forces from Columbus, Kentucky, he sent some of the troops
constituting the garrison and most of the guns that bristled from the
useless fortifications of that town to New Madrid and Island Number 10,
where they were needed.

Early in March General Pope moved down the Mississippi on its western
side, and began operations for the reduction of New Madrid. When he had
got his siege guns into position and opened a serious bombardment, the
works there were quickly abandoned.

Then began the assault upon Island Number 10, the one great northern
stronghold of the Confederates in the Mississippi river, designed
to hold that great waterway and forbid to the Federals its use as a
thoroughfare into the heart of the South.

The Federal army cut a canal across the peninsula formed by the great
bend in the river. All the naval force that the Federals could command
in those waters was brought to bear not only for the reduction of the
forts there but still more for the beating off of the Confederate
gunboats under Commodore Hollins. On the other hand Commodore Foote
ran the canal with his Federal gunboats and established himself in a
commanding position in reverse of the forts while Pope crossed the
stream and assailed the enemy in front with all his land forces.

The situation of the Confederates was a hopeless one and after an
effort to escape they surrendered nearly 7,000 men and more than 150
guns, most of them of large caliber and formidable destructive force.

This occurred on the second day of the Shiloh battle, April 7, 1862,
on which day, after a heroic effort to breast Grant's overwhelming
numbers, Beauregard withdrew from Shiloh to Corinth. This capture of
Island Number 10 opened the Mississippi to Memphis, except for the
single and, as it afterwards proved to be, the utterly ineffective
position at Fort Pillow.

General Halleck was fully informed of all that had happened. He knew
that Pope's way was open down the Mississippi to Memphis, and that
Memphis, scarcely at all defended, was within his easy grasp. He knew
of course that Memphis was the westerly end of the new defensive line
of the Confederates, and that its capture must compel them still
further to retire toward the south, even should he fail or neglect to
drive them from the Memphis and Charleston railroad line at Corinth, as
he easily might have done with his utterly overwhelming force, and as
Grant would undoubtedly have done if that vigorously aggressive general
had been left in control of that splendidly equipped army. But Halleck
sat still and pottered over "reports" that annoyingly paid no tribute
to his genius and suggested no credit to him for the victory that had
been won.

Meanwhile Grant was losing time. The Confederates, foreseeing the
inevitable loss of Memphis, which happened on the sixth of June,
nearly two months after energy would easily have compelled it, were
busily fortifying all defensible positions on the river below,
especially at Vicksburg and Port Hudson, and thus making necessary
one of the most strenuous and one of the bloodiest campaigns of the
war, where scarcely any campaign at all would have been necessary but
for the fact that a martinet officer, much too "scientific" and too
"regular" for the practical purposes of war, was in authority over a
man who knew not only how to plan campaigns but how to conduct them
quickly to a successful conclusion.




CHAPTER XXV

FARRAGUT AT NEW ORLEANS


There was still another man of splendid genius and capacity who about
this time came to the front as a winner of victories for the Federal
arms, and above all, as a man like Grant, who knew how to do things
when officialism permitted him to act. Like Grant on the one side, and
Lee on the other, Farragut was at first treated as a negligible factor
in the war.

David Glasgow Farragut was a man of Southern birth who had been twice
married in Virginia, and all of whose kindred and connections and
instinctive sympathies were Southern. He so far sympathized with
the South indeed that he openly declared his purpose to go with the
Confederacy if by any means the division of the country could be
peacefully arranged and accomplished. But, living as he did at the
outbreak of the war in a strongly secessionist Virginia town, he
frankly declared his lack of faith in the peaceful accomplishment of
secession, and his fixed purpose in the event of war to cast in his
lot with the cause of the nation, which, all his long life--for he was
sixty years old--he had served, and from which all his honors had come.
This declaration quickly made Norfolk, in which city he was living,
"too hot" for him in its popular sentiment, and accordingly he removed
to the North to await events.

At that time Farragut was a captain in the navy. He was by all odds the
officer in that service most distinguished for brilliant, daring and
competently effective performance. He had entered the navy "through a
port hole," as he said, at nine years of age. He had served with such
distinction under Commodore Porter, that at twelve years of age he had
been intrusted by the great seaman with the command of a richly laden
prize ship, navigating her for fifteen hundred miles into the harbor of
Valparaiso, and there arranging for her condemnation. He had, while yet
a mere boy, distinguished himself for courage in a severely-contested
sea fight.

In brief, this Captain Farragut was obviously, and unquestionably, the
very fittest man to undertake any difficult naval expedition that the
Washington government might plan or contemplate.

But he had the taint of Southern birth and connections, and it was
nearly a year after he offered himself unreservedly for any service
that might be required of him when the politicians who controlled the
Navy Department at Washington ventured to make use of his abilities.

And when at last these people in the Navy Department reconciled
themselves to the thought of giving an important command to this
brilliantly distinguished naval officer, who shared with Winfield Scott
and George H. Thomas the suspicious disadvantage of Southern birth and
connections, they did it in a way insultingly suggestive of their doubt
as to his loyalty or courage or something else essential.

New Orleans was in every way--in population, exports, imports, and
everything else--the chief city of the Southern Confederacy. Moreover
its strategic position was one which commanded a vast system of inland
waterways constituting the only effective link between the Confederate
country west of the Mississippi and that part of the Confederacy that
lay east of the great river.

The city lies about a hundred miles, to use round figures, above the
multitudinous mouths of the Mississippi. It lies less than half a dozen
miles west of the so-called Lake Pontchartrain, which is an inlet from
the gulf, with two other bodies of water, Mississippi Sound and Lake
Borgne, lying between.

But the passes into Lake Borgne and from that body of water into Lake
Pontchartrain, are shallow and difficult, as the British discovered in
1814 in their attempt to approach New Orleans by the "back door," as it
were.

On the other hand, the Mississippi has five principal mouths, with some
others that carry less water. Thus it was, or seemed to be, impossible
for any Federal fleet to blockade the entrances to that stream and cut
off commerce between New Orleans and the outer world.

But above and beyond all these considerations, was the desire of the
Federal authorities to conquer control of the Mississippi itself
throughout its entire length. That would be not only to split the
Confederacy into halves, cutting off a large part of its food
resources, but also to make of the great river a convenient highway for
the transportation of Federal food supplies, troops, ammunition and all
else that is needful in war, to such points as might have need of them.

Thus the reduction of the defenses of New Orleans, and the conquest
of that city became a matter of supreme strategic importance. To this
task Farragut was assigned with a fleet that, in our time, could
not possibly force its way past a single well-defended fort, or
successfully meet an adversary afloat. He had in his fleet, first of
all--in Navy Department estimation--twenty-one schooners, each carrying
a mortar intended to throw shells high in air and drop them into the
Confederate defensive works. These proved to be utterly useless, as
Farragut had from the beginning believed that they would be. He had
besides, six sloops of war, sixteen gunboats, and eight other ships.
His flagship, the _Hartford_, was a wooden vessel, carrying twenty-two
Dahlgren nine-inch guns besides howitzers in the tops. The others were
similarly armed. All were under-powered, and could make only eight
knots an hour where there was no current. In such a stream as the
Mississippi four knots constituted the limit of their performance.
There were transports also, carrying an army of about 15,000 men
under command of General Benjamin F. Butler. This force was intended
to occupy the city after Farragut should have captured it, but until
he should do so it was only an incumbrance to his expedition. He got
rid of it for a time by landing the troops on one of the islands that
separate Mississippi Sound from the gulf, and leaving them there until
such time as he should have need of them.

The civilians in control of the Navy Department had not in any
adequate way consulted Farragut as to the composition or the armament
of the fleet with which he was required to accomplish a task that
was next to impossible. In making up the fleet they had accepted
the suggestions of his subordinate, Commander David D. Porter, and
in obedience to them had created the flotilla largely out of mortar
schooners which Farragut regarded as practically useless, and which
in the event proved to be altogether so. That is to say, after the
manner of that time they had consulted with the less experienced
inferior instead of asking the advice of the thoroughly experienced
superior. They had been guided by an officer who was not to command the
expedition, instead of asking the advice of the officer who was to lead
it. But Farragut was so anxious to proceed upon the country's business
and in some way to serve it that he promptly accepted the command
offered to him and expressed himself as "satisfied" with the ship force
provided for him to command.

Expert as he was in all that pertained to Mexican Gulf geography and
hydrography, he perfectly knew that one of the principal ships assigned
to him could in no wise be dragged into the Mississippi because of her
excessive draught of water. Expert as he was in all that pertained to
naval warfare, he foresaw that the mortar fleet assigned to him could
accomplish nothing, and that its presence in his squadron could be
nothing other than an embarrassment. In the same way he saw clearly
that General Butler's land force, carried upon transports, could not
fail to be a weak spot in his armor. Yet he uncomplainingly accepted
the conditions and set about the duty assigned him.

It was with this utterly inadequate and motley crew of serviceable
and unserviceable and positively detrimental ships that Farragut was
ordered to reduce the defenses of New Orleans, overthrow its naval
resistance and conquer the city.

Farragut was fully aware of the utter inadequacy of the means given to
him. He perfectly knew that the effective vessels at his disposal were
far fewer and far less formidable than the task set him required. But
it was his habit to undertake desperate enterprises with inadequate
means, and he had waited a long time for any opportunity, however
meager, to serve his country. So, in the great generosity of his mind,
he expressed to the Navy Department his willingness to undertake the
desperate enterprise with the obviously insufficient, and in part the
absurdly worthless, force assigned to him to command.

Then came his orders from the civilians, who, without experience or
knowledge, or skill, or any other recognizable qualification for
command, controlled the Navy Department. These orders were insulting
in their tone and manner. It was quite a matter of course that so old,
so tried, so skilful an officer as David Glasgow Farragut would do the
very best that was possible with the means placed at his command. Yet
the Navy Department people suggested doubt of this by the very terms of
the orders they gave him.

These orders instructed him to reduce the defenses of the Mississippi
and take possession of New Orleans. They took no account of
difficulties. They reckoned not upon things in the way. They merely
ordered a thing done as one might order a carpet cleaned or a load of
wood sawed into stove lengths. Then those orders went on to say: "As
you have expressed yourself perfectly satisfied with the force given
to you, and as many more powerful vessels will be added before you can
commence operations, _the department and the country require of you
success_."

Could there have been anything more impertinent than this, from a
purely civilian department to an officer who for half a century had
been accustomed to make success the keynote of all his reports of
action? Could there have been anything more insolent or more insulting
than the suggestion that David Glasgow Farragut might do less than lay
within his power to do toward the accomplishment of any purpose to
which he might be commissioned? Could anything be more insolent than
the reminder that in consenting to undertake the expedition he had
declined to criticise the composition of the fleet concerning which
he had not been consulted and had expressed himself as "satisfied" to
undertake the expedition with the means provided to his hand?

Now let us consider the terms and conditions of Farragut's problem,
the nature of the work he had to do, the tools he had to do it with,
and the difficulties he must overcome in order to achieve the success
"required" of him.

The Mississippi river is the greatest waterway in the world. It is the
middle thread of a system embracing more than sixteen thousand miles of
practically navigable rivers, bayous and creeks. In its ramifications
it drains no less than twenty-eight states of the Union. In its course
it flows from the Rocky Mountains on the one side, the Alleghenies on
the other, and the Cumberland, the Ozark, and the Missouri ranges, into
a single great stream.

New Orleans lies in a bend of that tortuous stream within about one
hundred miles from its mouths.

But this greatest of rivers, dividing the eastern from the western
United States, and, in its great tributaries dividing the north from
the south, instead of broadening in its course toward the sea after the
usual manner of rivers, narrows itself below New Orleans to a width of
half a mile or less.

Here the Confederates had established their defenses, or more properly
speaking, here they had made themselves masters of defenses created by
the National Government before a thought of civil war had arisen in any
mind.

So far as the "back door" approach was concerned--the approach by way
of Lake Borgne and the Rigolets and Lake Pontchartrain--New Orleans was
adequately defended by the shallowness of the water at critical points.
Unless a special fleet of shallow-draught gunboats should be built
at Ship Island or elsewhere there was no possibility of reaching the
chief city of the Confederacy by that route. Farragut's only hope lay,
therefore, in ascending the Mississippi river.

His first obstacle was encountered in the mouth of the Mississippi
itself. The great river carries with it to the sea a limitless quantity
of mud which it deposits in whatever spot there may be ready to
receive it. It is credited by the geologists with having created in
this way all the low-lying lands from Cairo to the gulf, a distance
of nearly twelve hundred miles by the river's course. At the several
mouths of the stream it is still depositing mud and still pushing the
land out into the gulf. Very naturally its mud deposits create bars at
the several mouths. Long after the war was over, Captain Eads with his
jetties undertook to compel the current to wash out channels in the
principal mouths and thus to render easy the approach of ships to New
Orleans. But nothing of that kind had been done in the early sixties,
and the Federal fleet that was charged with the duty of reducing the
forts and capturing the city must first force its way through shifting
mud banks in order to get into the river. The useless mortar schooners
entered easily by the Pass á l'Outre, but the vessels that were to do
the effective fighting had far greater difficulty. It required three
weeks of strenuous night and day exertion to force them through the
Southwest Pass--the principal mouth of the river--and even then one of
them, the _Colorado_, had to be left outside.

Having thus passed the first and purely natural defense of New
Orleans, Farragut had next to encounter the artificial defenses of
the river itself. These consisted of two forts at the narrowest part
of the stream, together with some adjunctive defenses presently to be
mentioned.

These forts were two very imperfectly armed works--Fort St. Philip on
the eastern bank, and Fort Jackson on the western. They mounted about
109 effective guns, some of them of obsolete pattern, only a few of
which--estimated at fourteen--were protected by casemates. Captain
Mahan, in his "Life of Farragut," tells us that these forts had been
largely stripped of their armament, and were very imperfectly equipped
for the defensive work required of them.

In the river above the forts lay a Confederate war fleet of fifteen
vessels, including an iron-clad ram and an iron-clad floating battery,
both carrying heavy guns. This fleet had been stupidly weakened by the
withdrawal of Hollins's gunboats for inconsequent service at Memphis.

Below the forts was a great chain barrier stretched across the river
and supported by hulks anchored in the stream for that purpose. For
the protection of this barrier the shores were lined with Confederate
sharpshooters--riflemen accustomed to hit whatever they might shoot at.

Having got his fleet into the river after weeks of toil--leaving one
very important vessel behind--it was Farragut's task to assail and
overcome these defenses and force his way through a strong fleet, up
the narrow river to the city he was ordered to capture.

Farragut, as has been said already and as he had bluntly told the Navy
Department, had no confidence whatever in the effectiveness of the
mortar fleet, which was in charge of its originator, David D. Porter.
He would have preferred to leave that part of his squadron behind as
an entirely useless and embarrassing incumbrance; but he was a man of
generous mind and never arrogantly opinionated. So he gave Porter the
fullest possible opportunity to demonstrate the effectiveness of his
mortar fleet.

There were twenty-one of the mortar schooners, each carrying a mortar
of thirteen inches caliber, which threw shells weighing two hundred and
eighty-five pounds each. These shells were filled with such charges
of gunpowder as made them, in theory at least, terrible engines of
destruction when they exploded. It was Porter's firm conviction that
by their fire alone he could compel the Confederates to abandon their
forts and leave the way clear for the fleet to sail on up the river
with only the Confederate war vessels to contest their passage.
Farragut did not expect any such result, but he gave Porter every
opportunity.

Securely anchored in a position of Porter's own selection, the mortar
schooners opened fire on the eighteenth of April. For six consecutive
days and nights they threw their fearful missiles, each in itself a
mine, into the forts. They threw in all six thousand of these shells,
weighing in the aggregate no less than eight hundred and fifty-five
tons. They killed or wounded only fifty men--a picket guard in
numbers--or, as Dr. Rossiter Johnson has curiously calculated, they
killed or wounded about one man to every sixteen tons of iron hurled
into the forts.

This was at the rate of only eight casualties a day, a bagatelle in war
and very naturally a bombardment so slightly effective utterly failed
to render the forts untenable or to drive out the brave men who were
set to defend them. On the contrary the Confederate fire in response
to the mortars sank one of the schooners and disabled one of the
steamers.

Thus was again taught the familiar lesson of war, that the terrific is
not necessarily the effective fire in battle.

So far from abandoning their forts under this fearful rain of metal
and explosives the Confederates were busying themselves night and day
in determined and intelligently directed efforts to destroy their
adversary's fleet. They sent down the river a multitude of blazing
fire-rafts, and it required not only all of Farragut's wonderful
foresight and ingenuity but constant and very earnest exertions on the
part of his crews to ward off this danger.

At last the mortar experiment was done. It had utterly failed to
accomplish its intended purpose of reducing the forts or compelling
their evacuation. Farragut was dealing with an enemy of his own
determined kind, an enemy as resolute, as daring, and as patiently
enduring as he himself was.

He decided at last to push his fleet past the forts at all hazards,
and, leaving those works as an enemy in his rear, to try conclusions
in a decisive battle with the Confederate fleet that lay in wait for
him in the river above. It was a dangerous and a daring thing to do.
Indeed, it was almost desperately daring. But Farragut's habit of
mind was daring. Moreover his orders on this occasion offensively and
insultingly "required" success at his hands. It was his fixed purpose
either to achieve that success or to sink beneath the muddy waters of
the Mississippi in a determined effort to achieve it.

His first care was to sever the chain barrier across the river. To that
end he sent a force up the stream which gallantly boarded one of the
hulks, cut the chain, and rendered that defense useless.

On the morning of April 24, at 3.30 o'clock, the fighting part of the
fleet advanced in full force, engaging the enemy to the right and left,
but meanwhile pushing its way up the river without waiting for results
at the point of obstruction.

The forts were quickly passed and then ensued one of the most
picturesque water battles ever fought. The Confederates knew their
business and they did it with a skill and determination which excited
Farragut's admiration, as he was afterwards accustomed to testify in
glowing words of recognition.

Captain Theodorus Bailey, with eight vessels, was the first to pass the
forts. He immediately became involved in a desperate encounter with
the Confederate fleet. His flagship, the _Cayuga_, was engaged at once
by three Confederate vessels, each determinedly trying to board and
capture her; for this was a battle of giants in which every officer
and every man on either side was ready for any conceivable deed of
"derring-do," and in which personal courage of the most dauntless sort
was the one military equipment which both sides possessed in absolutely
limitless supply.

Bailey destroyed one of his assailants with an eleven-inch shell. Has
the reader any conception of what it means to have an eleven-inch shell
penetrate the side of a vessel and explode within its wooden walls? In
every eleven-inch shell there is a charge of gunpowder of positively
earthquake-producing proportions, and when it explodes it wrecks
everything within hundreds of feet of it. Exploding within a vessel
it dismounts guns, kills men, rips up bulwarks and bulkheads, and
renders the ship a helpless wreck, with fire everywhere to complete the
destruction.

That is what happened to one of the ships that assailed Captain Bailey.
Another was driven off, and before the third could accomplish its
purpose the _Oneida_ and the _Varuna_ came to the rescue. The _Oneida_
rammed one of the Confederate vessels, cutting it in two. The _Varuna_
had worse fortune. She was successfully rammed by the Confederates, and
running ashore, sank helplessly.

The _Pensacola_ sustained a loss of thirty-seven men in passing the
forts, a fact that eloquently testified to the vigor that abode in
those works after Porter's six days' hail of great shells into their
precincts.

The _Mississippi_, of Farragut's fleet, was rammed and disabled by
the Confederate iron-clad _Manassas_. But, by way of revenge, the
_Mississippi's_ guns riddled the ram and destroyed it.

In the meanwhile the Confederates were sending down fire-rafts in
great numbers, and in an attempt to avoid contact with two of these
Farragut's flagship, the _Hartford_, ran aground upon a mud bank and
for a time lay helpless in an exceedingly perilous position.

If the reader would fully understand the terror of this "river fight"
he should remember that at the point where it occurred the Mississippi
is only about half a mile wide. Everything done at all in such a stream
must be done at close quarters, and it was at the very closest of
quarters that the Northern and Southern Americans who contested that
fight met each other on that terrible morning of April 24, 1862. The
men who fought there in the river on the one side or upon the other,
are mostly dead now; only a few of them survive in soldiers' homes or
sailors' snug harbors. Surely we can do no better in this new century
than pay all possible honor to the valor with which, on the one side
and upon the other, they fought for their respective causes on that
soft spring morning in the early sixties. They were heroes all, and
right heroically did they acquit themselves in the brutal and bloody
work they were set to do.

The net result of the contest was the destruction of the Confederate
fleet. With that out of the way Farragut pushed on to New Orleans and
with guns out for action, demanded the city's surrender.

Only one issue was possible, of course. The city was at Farragut's
mercy. He could easily destroy it should it resist. It only remained
for him to hoist the National flag over it and to send for General
Butler's land force to occupy and possess the chief city of the South,
which he did on the first of May.

Butler's rule in the city, where the white population at that time
consisted chiefly of women and children, was harsh and even brutal--so
harsh and so brutal in its attitude toward women as to offend sentiment
both North and South, and in Europe.

He issued one order which could not have come from the headquarters
of any man of soldierly instincts or gentle associations. By way of
resenting the attitude and conduct of women toward a conquering
soldiery, he put forth a decree in these words:

  General Orders No. 28

                    Headquarters, Dept. of the Gulf,
                          New Orleans, May 15, 1862.

    As the officers and soldiers of the United States have been subject
    to repeated insults from the women (calling themselves ladies) of
    New Orleans in return for the most scrupulous non-interference and
    courtesy on our part, it is ordered that hereafter when any female
    shall by word, gesture or movement, insult or show contempt for
    any officer or soldier of the United States, she shall be regarded
    and held liable to be treated as a woman of the town plying her
    avocation.

    By order of Major-General Butler.

                GEORGE C. STRONG,
                    Assistant Adjutant General and
                        Chief of Staff.

It needs no argument and no exposition to show that in issuing this
order Benjamin F. Butler deliberately gave license and authority
to the most brutal impulses of the most degraded men under his
command,--authorizing them to judge for themselves when they should
choose to think themselves insulted "by word, gesture, or movement,"
and upon every such occasion, without further inquiry, and upon their
own initiative, to treat every woman who had occasion to venture into
the streets as "a woman of the town plying her avocation."

With the cynicism that had equipped him for practice in the criminal
courts of Boston, Butler afterwards explained his order by saying that
the only right way to treat "a woman of the town plying her avocation,"
is to pass her by unnoticed. But he perfectly knew that that was not
what his order meant to his soldiery or what he meant it to mean.

The rigor of Butler's rule in New Orleans was in some other respects
salutary. He wantonly imprisoned many citizens--men and women
indifferently--without warrant or just cause, but apart from that he
ruled the city to its advantage. In mortal dread of yellow fever, he
cleaned New Orleans as it had never been cleaned before, and throughout
a hot summer he kept the city healthier than it had ever been in all
its history.

Having thus completely achieved that "success" which the civilians
of the Navy Department had "required" of him, Farragut was ambitious
to accomplish more. He proposed further operations of like character
against other Confederate ports from which commerce was being carried
on in spite of the blockade. It was quite obvious that no blockade
could stop this commerce on which the South so largely depended for
its supplies. The only way in which the shutting in of the Confederacy
could be made effective was to capture the defensive works of every
Confederate port.

To that task Farragut earnestly desired to address himself. It was his
purpose to make himself master of every Confederate seaport, relieve
the blockading squadrons of their expensive, perilous, difficult,
and ineffective work, and completely to seal the South against all
outward or inward commerce with the world. His plan was to substitute
the absolute possession of Confederate ports for their manifestly
inefficient blockade. He asked permission, therefore, to proceed at
once upon this mission, beginning with Mobile.

The civilians in control of the Navy Department promptly said him nay.
They had other plans of a more spectacular character. So they ordered
Farragut to proceed up the Mississippi river and waste precious time
and still more precious lives, in a theatric but futile "running of the
batteries" at Vicksburg and Port Hudson.

Farragut obeyed of course. It was the habit of his long life to obey.
But he felt keenly the loss of opportunity which this order of a badly
water-logged cabinet bureau imposed upon him. While he was thus, under
compulsion of the incapables, wasting his time in the Mississippi, the
Confederates were sending out precious cargoes of cotton and bringing
in still more precious ship-loads of cloth, shoes, artillery harness,
quinine, arms, ammunition and everything else that ministered to the
maintenance of their armies in the field.

Here was another of those blunders of administration which helped
to prolong the war to twice its necessary length and subjected the
country, North and South, to needless and intolerable burdens. But how
should a civilian Secretary of the Navy understand, as Farragut did,
the ways in which the navy could be made most effectively to contribute
to the ending of the war? A system that puts a Gideon Welles in control
of a Farragut must take the consequences of incapacity on the part of
its official head.

Welles forbade Farragut to proceed to the conquest and closing of the
Confederate ports. He ordered him instead to waste time and energy and
human life in futile and fruitless operations in front of Vicksburg,
where even the most ordinary intelligence should have seen clearly that
the effective work must be done by the land forces, and where Grant and
Sherman were ready to do it well.

This judgment does not rest upon the opinion of the author of this
history. It is supported in every detail by the skilled criticism of no
less a naval authority than Captain Mahan. In his "Farragut," page 116
_et seq._, that highest authority in naval criticism has written:

"The principal result of an effort undertaken without due consideration
was to paralyze a large fraction of a navy too small in numbers to
afford the detachment which was paraded gallantly, but uselessly, above
New Orleans. Nor was this the worst. The time thus consumed in marching
up the hill in order at once to march down again threw away the
opportunity for reducing Mobile before its defenses were strengthened.
Had the navy been large enough, both tasks might have been attempted;
but it will appear in the sequel that its scanty numbers were the
reason which postponed the attack on Mobile from month to month until
it became the most formidable danger Farragut ever had to encounter."

In other words, the policy of setting a Gideon Welles to direct the
naval operations of a Farragut, resulted in making a difficult task
out of a very easy one. The fall of New Orleans served to warn the
Confederates of the danger in which Mobile lay, and while Welles was
keeping Farragut uselessly and against his will in the Mississippi,
skilled Confederate engineers were strengthening the Mobile defenses
and planting the harbor of that port with destructive mines and
torpedoes, so that Farragut's task of closing that port, when months
later he was reluctantly permitted to undertake it, was difficult and
perilous in the extreme, where it had been simple, easy, and scarcely
at all dangerous to ships or seamen at the time when he had asked
permission to proceed to its accomplishment.

But the Pinafore practice of setting an untrained, inexperienced and
ignorant politician to direct the scientific and strictly professional
work of highly trained naval officers, is too firmly imbedded in our
system of administration to be disturbed by considerations of mere
common-sense. When war is on, the country pays the penalty of this
folly.




CHAPTER XXVI

MCCLELLAN'S PENINSULAR ADVANCE


We have already seen from his own reports what McClellan thought of the
force he was called upon to command at and near Washington after the
disastrous defeat of McDowell at Manassas. There was, he said, "no army
to command--a mere collection of regiments, cowering on the banks of
the Potomac, some perfectly raw, others dispirited by recent defeat,
others going home.... Washington was crowded with straggling officers
and men absent from their stations without authority."

Slowly, patiently, painfully, McClellan brought order out of this chaos
of demoralization. Out of the broken and utterly dispirited fragments
of McDowell's army and out of the new, raw levies sent to him he
created that Army of the Potomac which fought the great campaigns of
the war.

In the meantime an ignorant and impatient popular clamor and an
unintelligent press "opinion"--for there is a certain type of newspaper
editor who is apt to regard his own hasty and ill-informed judgment of
things that he knows little or nothing about, as an "opinion"--hounded
and persecuted the man who was expected to retrieve the Manassas
defeat. Even Mr. Lincoln, with all his patience, became impatient of
McClellan's inaction--which was excessive perhaps--and almost angrily
urged him to action. He called the general's attention to the fact that
he had under his command a force greatly superior in numbers to any
that the Confederates could muster and that the country was impatient
for an advance.

McClellan seems to have had no thought of making his way to Richmond
by the route of Centreville and Manassas, where Johnston lay behind
impregnable fortifications. He knew the easier road of approach up
the James river from Fortress Monroe as a base of operations. But,
at all hazards, the Government, the press and the people insisted,
Washington city must be covered and protected, and so McClellan's
first care was to feel of the works at Centreville and Manassas
before transferring his army down the Potomac and the Chesapeake to
Fortress Monroe. Accordingly, on the tenth of March, 1862, he pushed
a column forward toward Centreville and Manassas only to find those
strongly fortified positions already abandoned. General Johnston had
interpreted McClellan's plans aright, and was transferring his army
to the Peninsula east of Richmond in order to meet his adversary's
confidently-expected advance in that quarter.

There was nothing now, neither defended works nor an opposing army, to
forbid McClellan's march upon Richmond by the Manassas route, while
it was certain that Johnston was fortifying Williamsburg and other
defensible points upon the other route and concentrating his forces
there to meet McClellan's advance when it should come.

But McClellan was above all things a man of orderly and methodic
mind, a man not to be turned from a pre-arranged plan of action by
the offering of any opportunity, however advantageous it might be. So
instead of pushing on towards Richmond by the route which his enemy
had thus left undefended, he turned about, sent his army by water to
Fortress Monroe, and confronted his adversary where that adversary was
best prepared at all points to meet him.

In the meanwhile General Burnside had completed the occupation of the
southern coast by the seizure of Beaufort, Roanoke, Newberne and Fort
Macon, and another Federal force a little later, on the eleventh of
April, captured Fort Pulaski, near the mouth of the Savannah river.

After great urgency on the part of Mr. Lincoln, who, in his homely
phrase, feared that McClellan's army might "take root" around
Washington, that officer at last transferred one hundred and twenty-one
thousand men to the neighborhood of Fortress Monroe, with every
adjunctive aid that an army could require or make useful. His force
outnumbered the Confederates nearly two to one, but it was McClellan's
habit of mind to exaggerate the strength of his enemy. It was also
his bad habit, as it was Halleck's, to proceed with an exaggerated
respect for military "regularity." So instead of pushing forward up the
peninsula that lay between the James and the York rivers, and simply
running over the vastly inferior forces of his enemy, as a general of
enterprising mind would have done, he advanced "scientifically" and
with scientific slowness.

The first point of contact was at Yorktown, where General Magruder
lay with 13,000 Confederates, McClellan's army of assault--i.e., his
advance force--numbered no less than 58,000 men and 100 guns. According
to his custom McClellan enormously overestimated the strength of
his adversary, and instead of hurling his superior force upon the
Confederate works, or using his fleet to pass them by, as General
Johnston expected him to do, he sat down before Yorktown and instituted
a regular siege approach by parallels.

Reinforcements came to him daily and even hourly, until he had
nearly 120,000 men and more than a hundred guns with which to assail
Magruder's scant 13,000 men and less than thirty guns.

But he did not make the assault. Instead he remained inactive for
nearly a month before Yorktown with about nine men under his command
to his adversary's one, doing nothing energetic or determined. When at
last he advanced upon the works which he might have run over on the day
of his arrival before them, he found no force defending them and only
"dummy" guns in the shape of painted logs occupying their embrasures.
Comic opera itself has few situations more ridiculous than was this
of McClellan at the end of his month's "siege" of Yorktown, defended
through a large part of the siege by less than one man to his nine, and
at the last defended only by "quaker" guns, with no men at all behind
them.

Finding that the position against which he had so elaborately provided
siege appliances was vacated by his enemy, McClellan advanced to
Williamsburg, where he encountered actual resistance on the fourth of
May and the days following.

Here was one of those situations, of which the war presented so many,
which it is difficult to reconcile with our accepted estimates of the
military capacity of the generals on either side.

McClellan was moving up the Peninsula, threatening Richmond with about
120,000 men--official reports say 119,965. He had left 70,000 men at
or near Washington to protect the capital, and the authorities there
had detained 10,000 or 15,000 more for safety. McDowell, with 40,000
men of this force had been pushed forward to Fredericksburg on the
Potomac, with the intent that he should make a junction with McClellan
before Richmond, swelling that general's force to about 160,000 men.
Jackson having been driven back in the valley of Virginia the danger to
Washington seemed for the moment past, and Franklin's division had been
sent to strengthen McClellan's main column.

In brief, McClellan had almost exactly 120,000 men immediately with
him, while 40,000 more under McDowell were moving unopposed from
Fredericksburg to join him and swell his army to about 160,000. As
McDowell was presently called back for the defense of Washington, in
view of the renewal of "Stonewall" Jackson's threatening operations
in the Shenandoah Valley, it is only fair to reckon McClellan's force
at the 120,000, which his morning reports showed that he had with him
below Richmond. Johnston in command at Richmond had rather less than
50,000 men with which to oppose this force.

Deeply feeling his responsibility and the enormous disadvantage at
which he was placed, the Confederate general asked for reinforcements.
He proposed that all the troops in the Carolinas, where they were in no
wise needed, and all in the valley of Virginia, and all at Norfolk and
other points from which they could be spared, should be concentrated
under his command in front of Richmond, in order that with an adequate
force he might assail McClellan, who was in a vulnerable position, and,
overcoming him, turn about and crush McDowell.

A council of war, of which General Robert E. Lee was the dominant
member, overruled this apparently wise proposal, for reasons that have
never been made clear. Thus Johnston, with 50,000 men, was left to
defend Richmond against the double advance of McClellan's 120,000 from
the east and McDowell's 40,000 from the north.

To do that successfully he must, of course, fall back to the
neighborhood of the city and concentrate his force behind the strongest
earthworks he could construct. The aggressive measures which he desired
to take were wholly out of the question for the time at least.

Nevertheless Magruder made a stubborn stand at Williamsburg, giving
Johnston time to fortify. It was only after two days of very severe
fighting, and with a loss of 2,200 men against a Confederate loss of
1,800 that McClellan at last forced the Confederate detachment--for
it was only a detachment and not a very strong one at that--to fall
back from Williamsburg to the main line of defense and join itself to
Johnston's army, of which it was a part.

The battle of Williamsburg was strategically of no consequence except
as a part of a campaign of delay. It would be an idle waste of space, a
needless taxing of the reader's attention, to recount its strategy in
detail. It is sufficient to say that after delaying McClellan's advance
for two days and inflicting a heavy loss upon him, the Confederates
withdrew in good order to the main defenses of Richmond.

McClellan now sent Franklin's division on transports to the White House
at the head of the York river, to establish there a secure base of
supplies. The whole army followed and by the sixteenth of May it was
concentrated there.

This was then the situation. McClellan lay at the White House within
twenty-four miles of Richmond. He had more nearly three than two men
to his adversary's one under his immediate command and he had an army
nearly equal to his enemy's, within two or three days' march ready to
reinforce him, or better still, to assail his adversary in flank.

A general of such enterprise as General Sheridan, or General Sherman,
or General Grant, or General Thomas, placed in such circumstances,
would unquestionably have pressed forward to the assault.

But McClellan's timid imagination swelled Johnston's force of 50,000 or
less to 120,000 or more and he hesitated. Instead of pushing forward
by the shortest roads to Richmond he scientifically "developed" his
force along the Chickahominy river to the north of Richmond, and, after
fortifying, made a requisition for reinforcements.

In the meanwhile "Stonewall" Jackson had achieved some brilliant
successes in the Shenandoah Valley which so far seemed to threaten
Washington with assault, that McDowell's force of 40,000 men was
recalled from its march to reinforce McClellan and sent to ward off
the danger of an advance upon the Federal capital by that peculiarly
energetic and enterprising commander.

But even without McDowell's expected reinforcement, McClellan had
greatly more than twice his adversary's force. It is impossible to
doubt that if he had been moved by anything like Grant's habitual and
determined impulse to "press things" he would promptly have hurled his
overwhelming force against his adversary's defensive lines.

McClellan, however, was not Grant nor such as he. He had a superior
skill in the theoretical science of war but an immeasurably inferior
capacity for war's practical work.

North of Richmond and from five to seven miles distant the Chickahominy
river runs in a course almost due east from its source. McClellan
placed his main force north of that erratic and uncertain stream and
there awaited the reinforcements for which he was clamorously calling.
But he threw his left wing across the river to the Richmond side of
it. Unless he were prepared to advance at once with all his force and
assail the Confederate works this was an exceedingly dangerous thing
to do, for the Chickahominy is a phenomenally uncertain and erratic
river. In dry weather it is scarcely more than a brook, but in periods
of rain--and spring in Virginia is a rainy season--it swells suddenly
and quickly to almost impassable proportions, while the swamps that
form its banks become morasses in which it is difficult to find even
a foothold, and impossible to discover a fit camping place for troops.
When McClellan established his left wing south of the river the stream
presented no obstacle to its prompt reinforcement from the other side
in case of need. But presently the windows of heaven were opened and
the fountains of the great deep were broken up. The floods came, and
this isolated left wing was cut off and left mainly to its own devices
for self-maintenance.

The Confederate General Johnston was quick to see and seize this
opportunity. On the morning of the thirty-first of May, he assailed the
detached left wing and there resulted the two-days' battle called Fair
Oaks at the North, and Seven Pines at the South.

Johnston's force scarcely, if at all, outnumbered the detached left
wing of McClellan's army, but his hope was, by determined fighting to
cut off that part of McClellan's army from the main body that lay north
of the river, and to crush and destroy it before it could be reinforced.

In his first assaults he was conspicuously successful, and had his
expectation been realized that McClellan would be unable to reinforce
his detached left wing from the other side of the river it is probable
that Johnston's operation would have made prisoners of that wing of
McClellan's army which lay south of the turbulent river. But two events
stood in the way. One of the many frail bridges across the Chickahominy
remained, in spite of the floods, as an available means of crossing.
Some of its supports had given way under pressure of the waters and it
was manifestly tottering to its fall. But General Sumner, ordered to
support the imperiled force south of the river, heroically disregarded
the danger and pushed his force across the frail and tottering
structure, ordering his men to "break step" in the passage in order
that the swing of the cadenced step might not cause the bridge to sway
and fall. Thus perilously, he crossed, just in time to meet and defeat
a Confederate effort to gain control of the bridge and destroy it, thus
completely cutting off communication between the two wings of the Union
Army.

The second event of importance in this battle was the very serious
wounding of General Johnston. He received in his body a bullet, which
incapacitated him for months to come for any active service. This was
only one of thirteen wounds that Johnston had received during his
military career. General Scott had described him as "a most capable
officer, who has the bad habit of getting himself wounded," and here
again he had indulged in that bad habit to the serious detriment of the
cause he served. For when he was wounded the command passed into the
hands of General Gustavus W. Smith, ex-Street Commissioner of New York
City, whose fitness for so high a command was, to say the very least,
problematical. Under his direction the movement by which Johnston had
hoped to achieve so much came to naught.

Two days later Robert E. Lee assumed direct command of the Confederate
Army at Richmond, and from that hour forth the war took on a new
character. One of the two great master minds--Lee and Grant--was at
last in control of the means with which the struggle was to be fought
out to a finish. The other of those two great master minds was still
under the control of distinctly inferior "superiors."

With the advent of Lee to direct command, the terms of the war problem
were set anew. He made of the Virginia army such a fighting machine
as has rarely been known in the history of the world. It was not
until nearly two years later that Grant was permitted to act upon his
conviction, repeatedly formulated, that the strength of the Confederacy
and the danger to the Union lay, not in the possession of strategic
positions, but in the fighting force of that Army of Northern Virginia
which responded to every demand of Lee for heroic self-sacrifice, as
the needle responds to the attraction of the pole. In the meanwhile Lee
and his army were a ceaseless menace to the Federal capital and the
Federal cause. From the moment of his accession to command until the
hour in which he met Grant at the Wilderness, Lee dictated the course
and conduct of the war, and in an extraordinary degree dominated its
events.




CHAPTER XXVII

JACKSON'S VALLEY CAMPAIGN


No sooner had Lee come into command than he set out to change and
reverse the existing conditions of the war. He was determined to
drive McClellan away from Richmond, to put an end to siege operations
that, if persisted in, must ultimately result in the capture of
that city, and to transfer to some more distant point the scene of
active hostilities. In other words, it was Lee's purpose to change a
dispiriting defense into an all-inspiring offense, to raise McClellan's
siege of Richmond and to institute in its stead operations that should
put Washington upon the defensive.

To that end he began by strengthening his army. He deemed the time
now ripe to adopt the plan which he had negatived as premature when
Johnston had suggested it. He called to Richmond all the available
forces that could be spared from the Southern coasts and elsewhere,
swelling his army to 70,000 or 80,000 men.

This reinforcement did not indeed give him an army equal to McClellan's
in numbers or in equipment, but it materially reduced the disparity
between the two opposing forces and opened the way to a hopeful trial
of conclusions in the field.

But there was, as already stated, a strong Federal force marching by
way of Fredericksburg to join McClellan. It numbered more than 40,000
men and was under the very capable command of General McDowell. If that
force should form a junction with McClellan the odds against Lee, in
spite of reinforcement, would be decisive, and any attempt he might
make to save the Confederate capital by offensive defense must fail.

Lee's first necessity, therefore, was to prevent McDowell's army of
40,000 men from joining McClellan before Richmond; his second purpose
was to bring all his own forces to bear at that crucial point for a
supreme effort to overthrow his adversary there.

He knew the excessive apprehension felt at the North for the safety
of Washington city, and he played upon it with masterly skill. Ever
since November, 1861, Stonewall Jackson had been in the Valley of
the Shenandoah trying with a totally inadequate force to hold that
region and upon occasion to inflict what damage he could upon the
foe, especially by destroying a section of the Baltimore and Ohio
railroad and of the Chesapeake and Ohio canal, upon which the Federal
communications between the forces in West Virginia and the headquarters
at Washington depended. Jackson had done some brilliant things in that
quarter and had succeeded in detaining there a Federal force much
greater than his own, which if set free to join McClellan would have
made the Federal army before Richmond irresistible in its strength.

But inferiority of force was by no means the sorest difficulty that
Jackson had contended with during all those months of winter marchings
and fightings amid snowstorms. On the Southern as on the Northern
side every really capable general was embarrassed by the ignorant
and intrusive dictation of men in place above him. As Grant was
paralyzingly dominated by Halleck's interference at every critical
moment in his western campaigns, and as Farragut was restrained
from obviously easy and supremely desirable achievement by the hand
of ignorant authority in the Navy Department at Washington, so
Jackson, in the Valley, found his military plans brought to naught
by the interference of a civilian Secretary of War who, having
authority, chose to use it in giving orders to Jackson's troops in
the field without so much as consulting Jackson as to his reasons
for posting them as he had done. Beauregard and Johnston at Manassas
had encountered a like difficulty and had several times been upon
the point of resigning their commissions in despair of achieving any
worthy results under such conditions of ignorant and arbitrary control.
Jackson was driven further and on the thirty-first of January, 1862,
he wrote in despair to Governor Letcher of Virginia, asking that he
be ordered back to his professor's chair in the Virginia Military
Institute, and tendering his resignation as a major-general if such an
order could not be given.

The circumstances were these. With great difficulty, at serious risk
of defeat and by exacting a positively heroic endurance on the part
of his men in marches through snow and sleet and mud, Jackson had
conquered the strategic control of the region under his command from
an enemy greatly outnumbering him. The strategic key to the position
thus conquered was Romney and there Jackson had stationed Loring with
a force strong enough to hold the place while keeping in touch with
Jackson himself. This disposition rendered the valley, with all its
strategic advantages, a secure Confederate possession and a military
base from which it was easy to threaten or with reinforcements to
assail Washington and the country north of the Potomac.

No sooner had Jackson by genius and heroic endeavor secured this
advantage for the Confederate arms than the lawyer at the head of the
War Department at Richmond assumed to undo his work by an order which
Jackson obeyed as a soldier, but bitterly resented as a strategist
baffled by the ignorance and arrogant assumption of his civilian
superior officer. His letter to Governor Letcher which follows
sufficiently explains the matter:

                    Winchester, January 31, 1862

    Governor:--This morning I received an order from the Secretary
    of War to order General Loring and his command to fall back from
    Romney to this place immediately. The order was promptly complied
    with; but as the order was given without consulting me and is
    abandoning to the enemy what has cost much preparation, expense
    and exposure to secure, and is in direct conflict with my military
    plans, and implies a want of confidence in my capacity to judge
    when General Loring's troops should fall back, and _is an attempt
    to control military operations in detail from the Secretary's
    desk at a distance_,[5] I have, for the reasons set forth in the
    accompanying paper, requested to be ordered back to the Institute
    and if this is denied me, then to have my resignation accepted. I
    ask as a special favor that you will have me ordered back to the
    Institute.

    As a single order like that of the Secretary may destroy the entire
    fruits of a campaign I cannot reasonably expect if my operations
    are thus to be interfered with to be of much service in the
    field.... If I have ever acquired by the blessing of Providence any
    influence over troops this undoing of my work by the Secretary may
    greatly diminish that influence.

       *       *       *       *       *

    I desire to say nothing against the Secretary of War. I take it for
    granted that he has done what he believed to be best, but I regard
    such a policy as ruinous.

                    Very truly your friend,
                        T. J. JACKSON

    [5] The italics are inserted by the author of this history. They
        are intended to direct attention to the marrow of the matter.

Let the reader imagine if he can, a lawyer utterly unskilled in
military affairs and completely unacquainted with even the topography
of the valley, sitting in Richmond, and undertaking not only to direct
the movements of troops in that region but to cancel and reverse the
orders of Stonewall Jackson without so much as asking his opinion of
a situation which that Napoleonic commander had painfully wrought
out with inadequate means and in face of difficulties that might
well have appalled even his resolute spirit. Such imagining will
help to a comprehension of the peculiar difficulties at that time
needlessly thrown in the way of the men to whom was assigned the task
of conducting the war to a successful conclusion. The like thing was
a familiar story on both sides at that period of the war, and it cost
both sides many thousands of human lives and many millions of treasure.

These are not pleasant facts for the historian to record, but they must
be set down if the story of the war is to be told with truth and in a
fashion to be understood.

Not only did Judah P. Benjamin, the unmilitary lawyer who held the post
of Secretary of War, assume to interfere with Jackson's dispositions
of his troops without consulting Jackson; his arrogance had an even
more astounding manifestation. Jackson was acting in the valley under
the command of his superior officer, General Joseph E. Johnston, who
had sent him thither, who trusted him implicitly, and who very wisely
and properly left to his trained skill and well-approved judgment
every detail of a campaign, the general purport of which was all
that even Johnston, as commanding general, responsible for results,
assumed the right to dictate to such a man as Jackson. Benjamin, the
lawyer Secretary of War, was so far ignorant or negligent of those
forms and courtesies of military life upon which military success
very largely depends that he sent his order directly to Jackson,
instead of sending it, as common courtesy and all military usage
properly required, through Jackson's commander, General Johnston. This
seriously endangered results and it was an affront to Johnston which
that officer would have been fully justified in resenting with his
own resignation. It was something far worse than an affront. It was
an impertinent interference with Johnston's military plans as well as
with Jackson's--an interference of ignorance with the activities of
knowledge which might easily have defeated operations of the utmost
consequence.

It seems incredible, but it is a fact, that General Johnston, the
officer at that time charged with the supreme command in Virginia,
never knew or heard of the order of the Secretary of War to Stonewall
Jackson, utterly disorganizing his plans and directing him to surrender
all that he had painfully achieved of strategic advantage, until
Jackson's letter to Governor Letcher, tendering his resignation
in righteous resentment of the interference and in despair of
accomplishing worthy results under such conditions, came to General
Johnston in the regular course. For Jackson was far too well educated
a soldier to send his letter, even though it was personal and was
addressed to the Governor of Virginia, otherwise than through his
regular military superiors.

Upon reading that letter and its inclosed communication to the
Secretary of War and learning for the first time of Benjamin's
interference with Jackson's operations, General Johnston sought to save
to the Confederacy the inestimable services of his great lieutenant. He
wrote to Jackson as follows:

    My Dear Friend:--I have just read with profound regret your letter
    to the Secretary of War asking to be relieved from your present
    command, either by an order to the Virginia Military Institute or
    the acceptance of your resignation. Let me beg you to reconsider
    this matter. Under ordinary circumstances a due sense of one's own
    dignity, as well as care for professional character and official
    rights, would demand such a course as yours. But the character of
    the war, the great energy exhibited by the government of the United
    States, the danger in which our very existence as an independent
    people lies, require sacrifices from us all who have been educated
    as soldiers. _I receive my information of the order of which you
    have such cause to complain from your letter. Is not that as
    great an official wrong to me as the order itself to you?_ Let us
    dispassionately reason with the government on this subject of
    command, and if we fail to influence its practice, then ask to be
    relieved from positions _the authority of which is exercised by the
    War Department while the responsibilities are left to us_.[6]

    I have taken the liberty to detain your letter, to make this appeal
    to your patriotism, not merely from warm feelings of personal
    regard but from the official opinion which makes me regard you as
    necessary to the service of your country in your present position.

    [6] The italics are inserted by the author of this work to
        emphasize the peculiar stupidity that on both sides in the war
        permitted ignorance to overrule knowledge and self-assumption to
        dominate skill. This particular interference came near depriving
        Lee of the superb genius of Stonewall Jackson as Halleck's
        interference well nigh lost Grant to the Federal army.

General Johnston's appeal to Jackson to continue in the service
in spite of the ignorant, embarrassing, and grossly ill-mannered
interference with his operations by the Secretary of War, was supported
by a multitude of letters and appeals from statesmen, citizens,
generals and common soldiers--many of the latter being men of high
social and political distinction who had enlisted in the ranks in a
war that all regarded as their own, but whose enlistment had in no
wise invalidated their right to speak with authority as representative
citizens.

Governor Letcher went at once to the War Department to plead with
Secretary Benjamin for the saving of Stonewall Jackson's genius and
devotion to the Confederate cause. Benjamin so far yielded as to hold
open the question of Jackson's resignation. He had not intended to
provoke that. It is doubtful that he would have dared it. He had not
intended anything, indeed, except to impress his own authority upon
the army. When he understood how great a loss Jackson would be to the
cause, and how narrowly his own grossly irregular interference with
Jackson had missed compelling the resignations of Beauregard, Johnston,
and a host of others in high and low position, Mr. Benjamin became
placative in an extreme degree.

In the meanwhile he had sacrificed all that Jackson's energy and genius
had accomplished in the Valley and had discouraged the army in a degree
and to an extent for which no later efficiency could by any possibility
atone. Until Benjamin interfered with him Jackson was master of the
Valley, and of all that its possession signified, by virtue of his
painful endeavors to achieve that highly desirable result by means of
arduous campaigns in snow and sleet and slush and mud. If he had been
let alone Jackson would have been in undisputed command of the upper
Potomac country; he would have had Maryland and southern Pennsylvania
thenceforth always at his mercy; and with reinforcements that might
at any moment have been sent to him he would have been in position to
threaten Washington in a way possibly to compel the instant withdrawal
of McClellan's army from Richmond and the recall of McDowell's from
Fredericksburg.

As it was, it was left to Lee to achieve those purposes in much more
arduous ways and at cost of great and otherwise needless battles,
involving the loss of human lives by tens of thousands, where but for
ignorant interference no considerable loss at all would have been
necessary.

Let us make this matter clear. If Jackson had been let alone in the
Valley, of which he had made himself complete master, his way would
have been easily open to the region in rear of Washington. With the
opening of the spring of 1862 practically the whole of Johnston's army,
then still at Manassas and Centreville, together with the troops at
Richmond reinforced from the seaboard and the South, could have been
pushed by the valley route into Maryland, threatening Washington,
Baltimore, Philadelphia and the North. If that had been done McClellan
would not have been permitted by his government to advance up the
Peninsula. His entire force would have been held at Washington or sent
northward and westward to meet the Confederate advance. It would have
been Washington, the Federal capital, and not Richmond, the seat of
Confederate government, that was besieged.

But the interference of a civilian war department spoiled the program
and made a mess of the campaign. It resulted in a siege of Richmond
which sorely discouraged not only the Confederates but also their
friends in Europe who were struggling to secure the South's recognition
as an independent power. It rendered necessary the Seven Days' battles
presently to be considered, and the campaign against Pope, as damaging
and depleting preliminaries to a campaign of aggression which, but for
the War Department's interference, would have been undertaken with the
full force of the Confederate army, unimpaired by the losses of nearly
a dozen battle conflicts.

Jackson's services were fortunately saved to the Confederates. His
position in the valley was impaired by the order of the Secretary of
War, which he obeyed in spite of its destructiveness, and the results
of his arduous campaign there were largely sacrificed to the fetish of
official authority. But at any rate Jackson's energy and genius were
not lost to the cause to which he was so ardently devoted. Johnston's
appeal and a multitude of others that poured in upon him overcame the
great general's reluctance to continue longer in a service in which
crass ignorance was permitted to interfere with and destroy the results
of military skill and heroic endeavor.

A week after his resignation was written Jackson, overwhelmed by
appeals to remain in the service, wrote to Governor Letcher as follows:

                    February 6, 1862

    Governor:--Your letter of the 4th inst. was received this morning.
    If my retiring from the army would produce the effect upon our
    country that you have named in your letter, I, of course, could not
    desire to leave the service, and if, upon receipt of this note,
    your opinion remains unchanged, you are authorized to withdraw my
    resignation unless the Secretary of War desires that it should be
    accepted. My reasons for resigning were set forth in my letter of
    the 31st ult. and my views remain unchanged; and _if the Secretary
    persists in the ruinous policy complained of I feel that no officer
    can serve his country better than by making his strongest possible
    protest against it, which, in my opinion, is done by tendering his
    resignation, rather than be a willing instrument in prosecuting the
    war upon a ruinous principle_.

This then was the situation. Stonewall Jackson, with a miserably
inferior force, was holding the Valley throughout a long winter, and
detaining there a Federal army, which, if it had been added to the
main Federal force, would have made that force irresistible in numbers
of men and guns. Toilsomely, and at cost of desperately hard marching
and fighting, he had made himself master of the strategic position.
He could now hold the Valley secure even with his inadequate force,
and in the event of reinforcement he could threaten Washington in ways
that must compel the diversion of decisive Federal forces from the
march upon Richmond. His strategy had been masterly, his enterprise
matchless, and his achievements astonishing in their completeness.

Just as these results were achieved a lawyer who happened to be
Secretary of War, without any adequate knowledge of the military
situation, without any skill in the art of war, without consultation
with Jackson and even without sending his orders through Jackson's
commanding officer, Johnston, assumed to order Jackson to undo all his
work and withdraw his forces from points of commanding importance which
had been won with difficulty and at cost of positively heroic sacrifice.

Is it any wonder that a war so blunderingly conducted by ignorant
civilians on both sides was prolonged to four times the length it
ought properly to have endured? Is it any wonder that under such
ignorant direction the war cost scores of thousands of lives needlessly
sacrificed by mismanagement, and hundreds of millions of needlessly
expended treasure?

These details, which seem at first glance, to belong rather to
biography than to history, are set forth here, precisely as those
touching Grant's restraint from activity by Halleck and Farragut's
embarrassment by a civilian Navy Department, are set forth in other
chapters of this history, because they serve to show how the war was
conducted on both sides in those early years. As influences that caused
the prolongation of the struggle and added enormously to its cost
both in precious treasure and in more precious human life, they have
a historical meaning wholly out of proportion to their biographical
significance.

Jackson remained in command in the Valley. He had a meager
force,--usually less than one fourth that of his adversary,--and in
spite of his activity in battle at Kernstown, Romney and the rest--his
original plans having been brought to naught by the interference of the
Secretary of War--he was slowly beaten back into positions that seemed
to make of the Valley a Federal possession.

Then he turned about and by one of the most brilliant campaigns of all
the war, reversed conditions, and made himself again master where he
had seemed to be almost hopelessly on the defensive.

In preparation for that campaign he earnestly begged Lee for
reinforcements--Lee being then in general command of the Confederate
forces--and all that Lee could do was to assign to his command the
little force under Edward Johnson west of Staunton, with the privilege
of calling to his aid such troops as General Ewell had with him on the
line of the Rappahannock, east of the Blue Ridge. His own immediate
command, together with Ewell's and Edward Johnson's, amounted in all
to a little less than 17,000 men, divided into three widely separated
columns with the Blue Ridge and a whole day's march between his own
position and that of his chief lieutenant. Opposed to him were Banks at
Harrisonburg with 19,000 men,--or more than Jackson's total possible
strength--Milroy and Schenck lying to the west of Staunton with 6,000
men and Fremont advancing from West Virginia with 9,000 more.

In brief, by concentrating all his widely scattered forces, Jackson
could bring to bear upon his problem no more than 17,000 men at the
very most, while he stood beleaguered by no less than 34,000, under
generals who already held the greater part of the valley and seemed
easily able to occupy the rest of it, including Staunton and the chief
railroad lines, at will.

When Jackson definitely learned that he could have no other help than
that of Ewell and Edward Johnson, he boldly planned to concentrate his
17,000 men and with them make war upon his 34,000 adversaries. His hope
lay in secrecy and celerity of operation. His plan was to bring the
three widely separated parts of his army together without the enemy's
knowledge, and to hurl the whole like a thunderbolt against one after
another of his enemy's divisions.

The largest of those divisions,--that under Banks's personal command at
Harrisonburg--outnumbered Jackson's total force by all of 2,000 men,
while the other two divisions were nearly enough equal to his own to
make an assault upon either of them perilous. Moreover the geographical
problem was such that Jackson could at no point bring all his inferior
force to bear at once. He must always keep a considerable part of it
detached and out of action, lest his adversary seize upon a position
of commanding importance.

Nevertheless, this truly Napoleonic commander planned a campaign in
which, with his 17,000 men, he should defend Staunton and destroy in
detail his adversary's double numbers.

Thus began that campaign whose strategy has been called by a historian
"massive thimble-rigging," because its success depended upon Jackson's
ability to conceal his movements and make sudden appearances in quite
unexpected places.

The season was highly unfavorable for rapid marchings. The roads were
quagmires and the fields on either side of the highways were morasses.
Sometimes it was impossible, even by the most heroic endeavors, to move
the guns more than five miles in a day. Rain and mud offered obstacles
immeasurably more obstinate than hostile battalions, but in spite of
all, Jackson persisted.

His first purpose was to unite the force under his own immediate
command at Swift Run Gap, with the troops under Edward Johnson at
West View, west of Staunton and forty miles or more away. He began by
ordering Ewell, with his 8,000 men, to cross the Blue Ridge from the
east, and occupy Swift Run Gap. While Ewell was executing this movement
Jackson, with his 6,000 men and with the purpose of deceiving his
enemy, moved northward down the valley, turned eastward, crossed the
mountains to their eastern side, and then by a circuitous route made
his way back again westward across the mountains to join Edward Johnson
west of Staunton. His purpose in all this was to convince his enemy
that he was abandoning and evacuating the Valley and marching to join
the Confederate forces defending Richmond.

He accomplished that deception perfectly, and so secretly was his
return to the Valley conducted that the pushing of his column into
Staunton astonished the Confederates there quite as much as it would
have astonished the Federals if they had known of it, as they did not.

Ewell, had in the meanwhile, crossed the Blue Ridge and occupied the
position left by Jackson in the Elk Run valley. Unfortunately for
Jackson, that position must be held at all hazards, and so it was
impossible for him, for the present at least, to add Ewell's 8,000 men
to the meager forces with which he intended to assail the Federals
farther west.

Thus Jackson's campaign was begun with only Edward Johnson's force,
numbering a scant 3,000 men, and his own battalions, amounting to
6,000, or somewhat less. He had in all a force of about 8,500 men or
perhaps a trifle more, with which to deal with Milroy and Schenck, who
had 6,000 men at McDowell, the much larger forces of Fremont advancing
from the west, and such reinforcements as Banks might choose to send to
them from his army of 19,000 men at Harrisonburg.

A glance at a map of the Valley will show the reader clearly that in
assailing Milroy and Schenck, Jackson in fact invited battle with all
of Fremont's and Banks's forces--in other words, that with 9,000 men
he risked and boldly challenged a conflict with no less than 34,000.
But so careful and so masterly had his dispositions been that the
chance of such a concentration against him amounted to scarcely more
than zero. For Ewell with his 8,000 men was at Elk Run, and Ewell was
an enterprising officer, greatly given to fighting upon the smallest
provocation. Had Banks detached any considerable part of his force from
the Harrisonburg position to aid Milroy and Schenck, Ewell would very
certainly have moved to the conquest of Harrisonburg, and the success
of such a movement would have meant of necessity the quick reconquering
of the whole valley by the Confederates.

Reckoning upon this Jackson joined Johnson and together they fell upon
the Federals at McDowell, where a small but severe battle ensued on
the eighth of May, in which after four hours of determined fighting
the Federals were driven from the field and compelled, during the
succeeding night, to withdraw from their position at McDowell, and fall
back, the Confederates closely pursuing them. The retreat lasted for
several days and was marked by some picturesque incidents.

Schenck, though beaten in battle and driven into retreat, was still
formidable and the fighting quality of his men had not been impaired.
Jackson feared that the force retreating before him might be reinforced
from Banks's strong army at Harrisonburg. In that case it would turn
again and rend him. But the reinforcements, if sent at all, must
be sent through certain narrow and heavily-wooded defiles, and to
check their advance Jackson sent out detachments to obstruct those
passageways by felling timber across them. He also asked the aid of
the farmers in such work and right willingly they responded.

In the meanwhile Schenck protected his retreat from too close a pursuit
by setting fire to the dense woods and literally stifling his enemy
with smoke. Jackson's men found it sometimes impossible to go forward
without actual suffocation and so Schenck gained time in which to
effect his retreat.

The destruction of superb timber, the growth of fifty or a hundred
years, which the operations of both the contestants involved, was only
a small part of that waste which makes war the most costly of all human
arbitraments.

Human lives are of course more precious in many ways than forest
growths, but human life is easily and quickly reproduced, while a
forest destroyed upon steep mountain sides is so much of God's good
gift to man forever taken away.

Jackson had now completely accomplished his purpose of driving Schenck
back upon Fremont. He had no desire to press on and bring about a
battle with the united forces of the two in the difficult mountain
country. He had effectually prevented a junction of Fremont or Schenck
with Banks's army at Harrisonburg. He had prevented the capture of
Staunton by the Federals, thus protecting the railroad connections of
the Confederates, and he had kept between thirty and forty thousand
Federal troops busy in the Valley, who might otherwise have been sent
to reinforce McClellan.

Still more important, his operations had compelled the Federal
Government to stop the advance of McDowell's army by way of
Fredericksburg and thus to deprive McClellan, assailing Richmond,
of a reinforcement which might have rendered his assault absolutely
irresistible.

Jackson's next necessity was to unite his meager force with the
column of Ewell which was posted at Elk Run for the double purpose
of threatening Banks at Harrisonburg and standing ready to march at
a moment's warning to the assistance of the beleaguered garrison at
Richmond. It was the grandest of grand strategy that Jackson was
engaged in, and it was directed by the masterful genius of Robert E.
Lee, acting through and by the genius of Stonewall Jackson.

Milroy and Schenck had been dislodged from the positions that
threatened Staunton. They had been driven westward. They had also been
effectually cut off for the time at least from a possible junction with
Banks. So Jackson decided to effect the speediest possible junction
between his own force in the field and Ewell's command of 8,000 men at
Elk Run valley, and with the force thus concentrated to assail Banks at
Harrisonburg. He hoped by a precipitate movement to defeat Banks before
Fremont, whose plans of campaign he had so greatly interfered with,
could come to that general's assistance.

But Banks did not wait for Jackson. In face of the fact that his 19,000
men at Harrisonburg outnumbered the whole of Jackson's widely scattered
forces, Banks retreated northward down the Valley as soon as Jackson
began his campaign. On the first of May he evacuated Harrisonburg and
slowly retired to Newmarket. There he lost more than half his force
by the detachment of Shields with 11,000 men, who moved on May 12, by
way of Luray and Front Royal to join the force at Fredericksburg, thus
emphasizing that threat to Richmond which it was Jackson's function to
divert.

So far Jackson's strategy was unsuccessful. He had defeated Schenck
and Milroy. He had prevented a junction of their forces with those of
Banks; but he had not prevented Banks from sending 11,000 men and a
proportionate number of guns to strengthen the column at Fredericksburg
which was intended to join McClellan before Richmond and to render him
irresistible.

From Newmarket Banks continued his retreat down the
valley--northward--until he rested at Strasburg and Front Royal.

In the meanwhile the administration at Washington, nervously and even
absurdly apprehensive as it was, plucked up courage enough to order
McDowell, with the army at Fredericksburg, reinforced by Shields with
11,000 men, to march on the twenty-sixth across country by way of the
Richmond and Fredericksburg railroad, and join McClellan's right wing
before Richmond.

Timidity itself could not have hesitated to consent to this movement.
It placed an army of more than 40,000 men in front of Washington and
between that capital and the Confederate forces of 60,000 men or less,
that McClellan was already beleaguering at Richmond with 120,000 men,
while it left Banks in the Valley with 8,000 and the easy support of
Fremont's 15,000 men to check any movement that Jackson might make
upon Washington with his force of not more than 15,000 or 16,000.

Yet so great was the apprehension felt at Washington for the safety of
that city that when the time came, Lee played upon it with success and
by his play upon it deprived McClellan of reinforcements from McDowell,
Banks and Fremont, aggregating nearly 65,000 men.

Turning about, after his pursuit of Schenck, Jackson quickly formed
a junction of his own force with Ewell's, and with 16,000 or 17,000
men turned upon Banks, who was now retreating down the Valley toward
Strasburg. He struck first at a detachment at Front Royal which he
surprised and almost completely destroyed on the twenty-third of May.

On the twenty-fourth Banks decided to abandon Strasburg and retreat to
Winchester, destroying his stores and such wagons of his train as he
could not save from capture. Jackson's cavalry destroyed a multitude
more of them on march, throwing the Federal trains into the utmost
confusion. Jackson now had a much stronger force than Banks--about
three men indeed to Banks's one.

With his vastly superior force Jackson set out to obey his orders,
which were to "clear the valley and threaten Washington," so as to
compel the diversion of McDowell's army from McClellan's reinforcement
before Richmond.

The task was an inviting one and Jackson accomplished it promptly.
Marching tirelessly, by night as well as by day, he quickly drove
Banks from Strasburg to Middletown and from Middletown to Winchester.
At Winchester he broke Banks's force into bits in a hotly contested
battle, and having cut off the Federal general's retreat to Harper's
Ferry, sent him flying in confusion by way of Martinsburg to
Williamsport on the upper Potomac. Banks fought stubbornly against such
odds as no commander could hope to overcome, but finding himself beaten
and his columns disintegrated he skilfully retreated over the space
of thirty-four miles in a single day, and successfully placed himself
behind the Potomac where his force could threaten Jackson's flank, if
the great Confederate should move upon Washington by way of Harper's
Ferry.

Apart from its brilliant incidents which cannot be here related in
detail Jackson's Valley campaign had thus far completely accomplished
its strategic purpose. It had detained Fremont and Schenck with 15,000
men in the mountains when McClellan needed them before Richmond. It
had kept Banks busy and finally had driven him out of the Valley and
into a position from which he could render no assistance to the Federal
armies anywhere. Finally it had so greatly alarmed the authorities at
Washington that they completely diverted McDowell's 40,000 men from
McClellan's reinforcement, sending the major part of that force upon
the fruitless errand of destroying Jackson and employing the rest of it
in the direct defense of Washington.

All this was precisely what Robert E. Lee had planned and intended,
and it was perfectly accomplished. If larger space is here given to
an account of this campaign than the size and direct importance of
its battles would seem to justify, it is because of the tremendous
strategic consequences of the operations involved. Jackson's activity
made possible not only Lee's superb campaign of dislodgment against
McClellan, but all the stupendous campaigning that followed, including
the overthrow of Pope at Manassas, the invasion of Maryland, the battle
of Antietam, the Fredericksburg battle and the later Chancellorsville
and Gettysburg.

The story of all that will follow in later chapters. In the meanwhile,
it is pleasant to record here one step forward in civilization which
was made during this campaign and the author of which, Dr. Hunter
McGuire, deserves remembrance for his humanity. Until that time, and
indeed for long afterwards, surgeons in charge of hospitals full of
wounded men, upon falling into the enemy's hands, were treated as
prisoners of war. After every battle, therefore, the surgeons of a
retiring army, in charge of wounded men from both sides, must make a
hard choice. They must either abandon their patients--many of whom were
in desperate need of immediate surgical attention, or they must submit
themselves to the rigors and sufferings of a military imprisonment,
precisely as if they had been taken in battle. As a result of this
peculiar barbarism of war the wounded--by the flight of their
surgeons--were often left unattended at the critical moment that meant
to them the difference between life and death. Many precious lives were
needlessly sacrificed to this barbaric military practice.

At the battle of Winchester Jackson captured all the Federal surgeons
in charge of the field hospitals there, but instead of sending them
to Belle Isle or Andersonville or Libby Prison, he acted upon the
suggestion of his medical director, Dr. Hunter McGuire, and released
the doctors unconditionally upon the rational and humane ground that
surgeons do not make war, and ought not to be subjected to war's pains
and penalties, and upon the still more rational and humane ground that
it is needful for the care of the wounded on both sides that surgeons
shall be permitted to remain at their posts until surgeons on the other
side can replace them, regardless of army movements and without fear of
being sent to a loathsome prison as a punishment for their faithfulness
to their merciful duty.

This step forward in the amelioration of war's horrors was not
generally followed up until two years later when, during the tremendous
struggle of 1864, General Lee and General Grant, acting upon their own
humane impulses and with no authority except the confidence of each
that his acts would be approved, agreed that surgeons in charge of
wounded men should not be made prisoners of war, but should be subject
only to such temporary detention as might be necessary to prevent them
from carrying tidings of strategic importance across the lines.

It was Dr. Hunter McGuire who first offered this suggestion in
behalf of humanity, and it was Stonewall Jackson who first took the
responsibility of acting upon it. To their memory history should accord
honor for it.

Jackson's Valley campaign had completely accomplished its chief
purpose. It had thrown the War Department at Washington into a panic
which is reflected in the dispatches of President Lincoln and Secretary
Stanton sent about that time. Neither McClellan nor McDowell regarded
the situation in any such serious light as that in which it was viewed
by Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Stanton. McClellan and McDowell were trained
and educated soldiers, Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Stanton were civilians.
The two soldiers perfectly understood that while Jackson had driven
Fremont back into the West Virginia mountains and had chased Banks to
and across the Potomac, he could not with his meager force--now reduced
to less than 15,000 men--sanely cross into Maryland or without madness
undertake a serious campaign against Washington. They knew Jackson to
be a perfectly sane man, and hence they did not expect him to undertake
either of those crazy operations. They were agreed in thinking that
the proper course was for McDowell to push on to Richmond and join
McClellan there before Jackson could add his force to Lee's.

If they had been permitted to do this, McClellan's force before the
Confederate capital would have been sufficient, within three or four
days, to overpower all conceivable opposition and to capture Richmond.

But Lee knew how almost insanely the administration at Washington
dreaded every threat against that city or the country north of it, and
he had successfully counted upon that absurd nervousness to enable
Jackson, with 16,000 or 17,000 men, to neutralize McDowell's army of
40,000 in the great game then being played for the possession of
Richmond. He had made a zero of Fremont and Schenck in the problem. He
had converted Banks's army into a Potomac river-picket guard, and he
had compelled McDowell's 40,000 men to remain inactive as a garrison
defending Washington.

Never in all the war was so small a force as Jackson's made to
neutralize so large a force. By the simple virtue of Lee's masterful
strategy and Jackson's extraordinary capacity in execution, 17,000 men
occupied 65,000 and kept them completely out of the decisive struggle.
And as if to add emphasis to the situation, the 17,000 who had thus
paralyzed three or four times their number, were themselves brought
upon the field before Richmond in time to play their full part in the
critical and decisive actions from which their previous activity had
excluded so great a number of their opponents.

But the story of the Valley campaign is not yet fully told. Having
driven Fremont back into West Virginia and Banks beyond the Potomac
at Williamsport, Jackson was ordered by Lee to make a demonstration
threatening an invasion of Maryland and seeming to threaten an assault
upon Washington, by way of still further disarranging the Federal plans
and diverting Federal forces from the assault upon Richmond.

Jackson moved at once upon Harper's Ferry and for a time seemed not
only determined but quite easily able to cross the Potomac there
and push forward into Maryland and Pennsylvania or to sweep with
enthusiastic fury upon Washington itself.

The result was what Lee had planned that it should be. Fremont, whose
force ought to have been moved to McClellan's reinforcement, was
ordered to advance from the fastnesses of the West Virginia mountains
into the Valley, there to assail Jackson. Banks, driven to cover at
Williamsport on the Potomac above Harper's Ferry, was ordered to hold
the crossings there against a possible advance of Jackson by that route
and presently to return to the Valley and assail Jackson. Saxton, with
7,000 or 8,000 men, withdrawn from McDowell's army, was sent to hold
the heights about Harper's Ferry and at the proper time to advance.
McDowell's carefully planned march upon Richmond was suspended and the
greater part of his force was ordered to the Valley. The purpose was
by concurrent action on the part of Fremont moving from West Virginia,
Banks moving back up the Valley from Williamsport, Saxton's advancing
from the neighborhood of Harper's Ferry, and McDowell's strong column
crossing the Blue Ridge from Fredericksburg, completely to surround,
overwhelm and destroy Jackson, whose total force was now reduced to a
scant 15,000, while the forces thus set to the task of making an end of
him, aggregated not less than 55,000 or 60,000 men. It was his task,
with 15,000 men not only to meet and destroy these forces in detail,
so far as that might be done, but in any case to escape from the trap
set for him and unite his army with that of Lee before Richmond in time
to lend his enthusiasm and his strength to that assault upon McClellan
which was planned for the immediate future.

If the reader will look at a map he will see almost at a glance how
perilous a problem Jackson had to solve. With less than 15,000 men he
was threatening Harper's Ferry and the strongholds round about, held
by Saxton with 7,000 men and eighteen pieces of artillery. Banks with
about 9,000 men was now advancing from Williamsport to assail him in
flank and rear, and cut off his retreat. Fremont with 10,000 or 15,000
men was advancing from West Virginia and had by telegraph promised
Mr. Lincoln that he would be in Strasburg--seventeen miles south of
Winchester and commanding Jackson's route of retreat--on Saturday, May
31. In the meanwhile Shields, commanding 20,000 men from McDowell's
army and followed by McDowell himself with the rest of it, was hurrying
from Fredericksburg into the Valley and was due at Strasburg by noon of
the thirty-first.

In other words four armies, numbering in the aggregate more than 50,000
men, were threatening to envelop and overwhelm Jackson. Of these forces
no less than 35,000 men were rapidly concentrating in Jackson's rear
upon the lines over which he must march in order to escape from the
trap set for him and add his force to Lee's in time for the impending
battle before Richmond.

It was Jackson's problem not only to escape from these forces, rapidly
concentrating to destroy him, but so far to defeat them in detail with
his little army as to keep them where they were, while moving his own
army to Lee's assistance.

This required grand strategy on a grand scale, and Jackson responded to
the demand with a brilliancy wholly unmatched in any other operation
of the war. Putting aside details that would only serve to confuse
the reader's mind, let us tell in outline the story of what the great
commander of the "foot cavalry" did in this complex emergency.

First of all, he withdrew his troops hurriedly from the neighborhood
of Harper's Ferry to Winchester. When he got there he found that
McDowell's force was in possession of Front Royal, only twelve miles
from Strasburg, and Fremont was at Wardensville, only twenty miles
away, while the head of his own column was eighteen miles distant
from the crucial point, and its rear forty-three miles away. A large
part of his force was footsore and exhausted after a hurried march
of twenty-five miles in a single day, with frequent skirmishings to
punctuate their progress.

Nevertheless Jackson determined to reach and occupy Strasburg before
his enemies could get there. He had eighteen miles to go while one of
the enemy's columns had twenty and the other only twelve to travel.
Their combined forces outnumbered his own about three to one, to say
nothing of the 15,000 men of Banks and Saxton who had been pressing
his rear all day. But he believed it possible for him, reckoning upon
the extraordinary marching qualities of his men, to reach Strasburg
before the enemy's columns could concentrate there. If he could do that
he counted upon the superb fighting spirit of his men to overcome the
enemy's three detachments by striking them separately in spite of the
fact that one of those detachments outnumbered him by thirty-three per
cent while each of the others nearly or quite equaled him in numbers.

He acted instantly. His march was incumbered by 2,300 Federal prisoners
and an embarrassingly large train consisting in its major part of
wagons loaded with precious stores which he had captured from the
enemy. But in spite of all he marched all the way to Strasburg on the
31st of May, while his rear guard succeeded in passing well beyond
Winchester, some parts of it having covered thirty-five miles since the
morning. The Federals pursuing under Saxton had stopped at Charlestown,
their commander afterwards reporting that their exhaustion was such as
to forbid a further advance.

Having thus eluded his pursuers, Banks and Saxton, Jackson pushed his
foot cavalry into Strasburg in advance of both Fremont and Shields,
though each of them had had a much shorter line of march than his own
in order to reach that place. He had shaken off Banks and Saxton for a
time at least, but he had pushed his small force in between Fremont's
equal army on the one hand and Shields's superior one, which was now
supported by additional troops under McDowell's own command, on the
other. His problem was to prevent the junction of these two armies
sent to crush him, to escape them and--if possible--to defeat them
separately. One of these armies outnumbered his own in the proportion
of four men to three while the other equaled his force. But if he could
keep them separated and attack them in positions of his own choosing,
where they could not both fight him at once, he did not despair of
beating them.

McDowell, reckoning upon the easy superiority of his force, sent
detachments hither and yon, to "head off" Jackson, and prevent his
escape, that seeming now to be the only thing to be done with a fleeing
general whose army was beset on every side, outnumbered, and hopelessly
entangled.

In execution of these orders a whole day was wasted by Shields, through
mistakes as to routes, and Jackson slipped out of Strasburg on his
way to Harrisonburg, Cross Keys and Port Republic, points at which he
planned to turn upon his enemy and fight him in detail.

By the burning of bridges and the adroit disposition of troops in a
region broken by mountain ranges and laced by streams at that time of
year unfordable, Jackson managed to keep the divisions of his adversary
separated as they severally pursued his retreat, intent upon capturing
or destroying him.

So greatly overwhelming were the Federal numbers that General Shields
urgently protested to General McDowell against the sending of any more
men to his assistance. Says General McDowell in an official utterance:

    He [Shields] had been in that country before and his command had
    suffered somewhat. He wrote me a letter stating his apprehensions,
    saying that if troops instead of supplies kept coming over, the
    troops would starve, and asking why I should bring so many there;
    that he had enough men to clear the Valley out and for God's sake
    not to send him any more men.

McDowell reassured Shields as to the abundance of supplies and that
commander, with his superabundance of men, cheerfully undertook the
task of "clearing out the Valley" which seemed to him easy. He had not
adequately reckoned upon the genius of Stonewall Jackson--that was all.

The "foot cavalry" had now retreated with splendid success, as far as
Jackson intended that they should. He was pursued by the two armies,
but he had succeeded in keeping them separated by an unfordable river,
while divesting himself of his embarrassing supply train and his still
more embarrassing company of Federal prisoners. These, together with
his own sick and wounded, he had sent under escort to Staunton.

Thus, stripped for action, he turned upon his pursuers to rend them.
Fremont's force and that under Shields were separated by a river.
Jackson had destroyed every bridge that crossed that stream except the
one at Port Republic, which he securely held for his own use in the
contemplated operations. He had about 13,000 men of all arms available
for battle uses. Fremont, who was hotly pursuing him, had about 11,500,
while Shields's force--weakened by detachments--marching down the other
side of the river, was much smaller, not over three or four thousand
effectives. Exact figures are unattainable.

Jackson had effectually prevented the union of these two armies. He
decided to fight them now, one at a time.

On the eighth of June, at Cross Keys, a few miles north of Port
Republic, he turned upon Fremont. He was forced to reduce his firing
line heavily by detaching a part of his little army to hold Shields in
check on the other side of the river, and another part to hold Port
Republic and the bridge which constituted his communication. He posted
the remainder of his troops in a position of his own choosing and there
awaited Fremont's attack.

That attack was made on the eighth of June and was repulsed with so
much ease and so much completeness, that Jackson at once decided to
assail his other adversary, Shields, in the hope of defeating him in
his turn. Leaving a sufficient force on Fremont's side of the river
to hold that general in check, or, if need be to destroy the bridge
and prevent his crossing, he withdrew his battalions and precipitately
assailed Shields, falling upon him in Napoleonic fashion with the
head of his own column and trusting to expeditious marching for the
coming up of reinforcements in time to prevent a possible failure from
maturing into a disaster.

Shields resisted so valiantly and so stubbornly that Jackson's advance
corps was very nearly overthrown, but in the end the Confederate
commander brought a superior force to bear and completely crushed
Shields's defense.

Immediately Fremont and Shields gave up the contest and retreated
northward down the Valley, while Jackson rested his army preparatory
to a hurried march to join Lee before Richmond while the fear of him
should continue to hold Fremont's and McDowell's and Banks's, and what
had been Saxton's, forces in the Valley.

For that march and junction Lee had fully prepared. He secretly
sent instructions to Jackson to march at once to Ashland, a dozen
miles from Richmond, and thence sweep down between the Pamunkey and
Chickahominy rivers, in aid of Lee's own movement against McClellan.
Then he ordered two divisions ostentatiously detached from the army
before Richmond, to go to Jackson's reinforcement in the Valley, and
directed Jackson to do all he could to impress the enemy with the
belief that he was planning, with a strongly reinforced army, to
sweep down the Valley again and press on into Maryland, threatening
Washington and Baltimore. Pains were taken to impress the fact of
Jackson's strong reinforcement upon Federal officers who, as prisoners,
were about to be paroled and sent north and they carried the news,
as it was meant that they should do. The deception was so complete
that even while Jackson was actively assailing McClellan's rear on
the Chickahominy a few days later, General Banks was sending from the
Valley dispatches warning the Washington authorities that Stonewall
Jackson was preparing immediately to sweep down the Valley at the head
of a reinforced and now quite irresistible army.

The result was that Jackson and the divisions sent ostensibly to
reinforce him, joined Lee in front of Richmond in time to aid in the
Seven Days' battles for McClellan's dislodgment.




CHAPTER XXVIII

THE SEVEN DAYS' BATTLES


It was explained in the last chapter that Lee's first object when
he took personal charge of the army defending Richmond was to raise
McClellan's siege of the Confederate capital, drive him away, and
transfer the scene of active operations to some more distant field.

To that end, first of all, he had strengthened the army at Richmond
by calling to it every man that could be spared from coast defense
and from the regions farther south. Next he had set Jackson at work
in the Valley, to occupy the forces there and in West Virginia, and
by threatening Washington to divert from McClellan's reinforcement an
additional army of 40,000 men which had been intended to strengthen him
into irresistibility.

When Jackson, beset by four armies, had escaped from two of them and
had defeated the other two, Lee sent strong reinforcements to him in
a conspicuous way, so that he might seem about to advance down the
Valley, cross the Potomac and in strong force occupy the region north
of the Potomac and threaten the capture of Washington itself.

By this strategy Lee had managed to detain 65,000 Federals in the
Valley, and 20,000 or 30,000 more in and around Washington, whose
fighting force must otherwise have been added to McClellan's already
superior army before Richmond. Then he had managed to have Jackson
suddenly and secretly quit the Valley, with the force that had there
achieved such spectacular results, together with the troops that had
been ostensibly sent to reinforce him for an aggressive campaign and
by a rapid movement to join the army at Richmond and assist it in a
supreme endeavor to dislodge McClellan.

The situation then was this: Relying upon a reinforcement of 40,000 men
under McDowell, McClellan had dangerously divided his army, keeping
about half of it north and about half of it south of the Chickahominy
river. His desire was to press forward his siege operations on the
east of the Confederate capital and at the same time to maintain a
threatening force north of the city. It was his purpose so soon as
McDowell should add his 40,000 men to this army on the north, to sweep
forward with the combined forces and irresistibly to push a conquering
column into Richmond.

But Lee had baffled all these plans by his masterful strategy. He
had compelled the diversion of McDowell to the Valley, and while the
authorities at Washington were nervously expecting Jackson to swoop
down upon that city, Jackson with his whole force, which had slipped
out of the Valley, suddenly appeared at Ashland, about a dozen miles
northwest of Richmond and immediately upon McClellan's right flank.

In the meanwhile Lee had sent Stuart--perhaps the most daring and
enterprising of the Southern cavalry leaders--with a body of 1,200 or
1,500 horsemen and two guns, to the rear of McClellan's position,
there to find out the disposition of troops, the condition of the
roads and bridges, and whatever else might open the way to that
gigantic operation of offensive defense which Lee intended presently to
undertake.

Stuart moved promptly into McClellan's rear and swept around it like
a whirlwind. Finding that a tardy resistance was taking the form of
an organized effort to cut off his retreat by the route over which he
had come, the gaily enterprising cavalier of the South, instead of
turning back and trying to retrace his steps as his enemy expected him
to do, decided to ride on all the way around McClellan's army and thus
spectacularly to emphasize the imperfection of McClellan's precaution
for the protection of that rear which Lee was planning presently to
assail tempestuously. He rode completely around McClellan, crossing his
line of communications, rebuilding a bridge which had been destroyed
for the purpose of cutting him off and entrapping him, and returning to
Richmond with a loss so small as to be scarcely worthy of mention in an
official report.

This raid was made on the twelfth and thirteenth of June, and equipped
with the detailed information secured by it Lee planned to assail
McClellan on the twenty-sixth of June with a force sufficient to
dislodge him from his besieging positions, to break his line of
communication and supply by way of the White House on the York river,
and to compel his retreat from the front of the Confederate capital
to some point on the James river, where his gunboats could afford him
needed protection.

For the purposes of this operation Lee had a force somewhat inferior
in men and guns to McClellan's, but not greatly inferior. On the
other hand McClellan's army was badly placed, with half of it on the
north and half of it on the south of the Chickahominy, neither half
being within easy supporting distance of the other, while the line
of communication and supply by way of the White House was peculiarly
vulnerable in case of an attack from the rear.

Reckoning upon these advantages, it was Lee's plan to have Jackson move
down from Ashland, assail McClellan's right wing in flank and rear,
drive back his forces and thus open the crossings of the river to the
other Confederate corps, which were to cross one after the other and
assail the enemy in front while Jackson should attack him in rear and
flank.

The plan miscarried in part. For once Jackson was not on time, and,
after waiting for him until the afternoon of the twenty-seventh of June
A. P. Hill grew impatient of the delay, and pushed his corps across the
river at Meadow Bridge and, after a strenuous fight, drove the Federals
out of Mechanicsville, without any help from Jackson. Longstreet and
D. H. Hill at the lower crossings also grew impatient of delay, and
without waiting for orders crossed and engaged the enemy. On the next
morning Jackson was with them and he led the advance.

The plan of battle was that Jackson, with D. H. Hill for support, and
keeping well in rear of McClellan's fortified positions, should push
rapidly forward towards the York-river railroad, which constituted
McClellan's sole line of communication and supply, while A. P. Hill
and Longstreet, advancing upon Jackson's right, should attack McClellan
in flank, front and rear whenever he might seriously oppose Jackson's
movement.

There was some further miscarriage of plans, and in consequence of a
delay in Jackson's advance Longstreet and Hill fell upon the right wing
of McClellan's army posted in a strong strategic position at Gaines's
Mills before the advance under Jackson was ready to strike its blow.

The Confederates here encountered a very obstinate resistance and they
were not able to force the position until Jackson came up and joined
in the assault. It was a critical moment of the war. Had McClellan
been able to hold this position the Confederate campaign of offense
must have completely collapsed, and with a superior force, the Federal
general would have been free to conquer Richmond at that leisure which
his engineering soul so greatly loved.

But with Jackson's force added to the commands of Longstreet and Hill,
the Confederates, after a very determined and bloody contest, drove the
Federals from their position and made themselves prospective masters of
McClellan's sole line of communication with his only depot of supplies
at the White House.

There was nothing now for McClellan to do but retreat as best he
could to the James river at Harrison's Landing and make that, instead
of the White House, a base of supplies. To do that was exceedingly
difficult, as McClellan had open to him only one road and that a very
bad one, while the Confederates on his flank had many roads by which to
intercept and annoy his retreat.

During the course of that retreat, which was attended at every step by
bloody contests, McClellan wrote in great bitterness of spirit to the
Secretary of War in Washington (Mr. Stanton) on the twenty-eighth of
June: "If I save this army now, I tell you plainly that I owe no thanks
to you or to any other persons in Washington [obviously meaning Mr.
Lincoln]. You have done your best to sacrifice this army."

McClellan, with an overwhelmingly superior force, had invested Richmond
on the east and north. There he had strongly fortified himself. He had
pushed his advance to within four miles of the Confederate capital.
He had brought up tremendous siege guns and had apparently made
himself complete master of the situation. Then Jackson, the two Hills,
Longstreet and Ewell, under direction of Robert E. Lee, had fallen upon
his flank and rear and had driven him out of one position after another
with fearful slaughter, until his White House communication was cut
off, and nothing remained to him but retreat to a new base on James
river. The Confederates confidently calculated upon cutting off that
retreat also and compelling the surrender of an army superior to their
own in numbers, arms, resources and everything else except fighting
ability.

This they would very probably have accomplished if McClellan had not
developed in answer to a pressing need a fighting quality which he
had not before shown, and his army a resolute determination to endure
punishment such as none but the best of veterans are expected to show.

McClellan's one hope, one purpose, was to march his army out of the
swamps and escape from the ceaseless Confederate assaults to a point on
James river where the resistless fire of the gunboats might protect his
men from further attack and give them a chance to rest. To that end,
he retreated night and day, standing at bay now and then as the hunted
stag does, and fighting desperately for the poor privilege of running
away.

And the splendid fighting of his men was a tribute to the skill and
genius with which he had created an effective army out of what he
had described as "regiments cowering upon the banks of the Potomac,
some perfectly raw, others dispirited by recent defeat, others going
home." Out of a demoralized and disorganized mass reinforced by
utterly untrained civilians, McClellan had within a few months created
an army capable of stubbornly contesting every inch of ground even
while effecting a retreat the very thought of which might well have
disorganized an army. For soldiers in retreat do not usually fight as
soldiers do when advancing upon an enemy. They are apt to be filled
with the sentiment of hopelessness which retreat suggests and to
hesitate to risk their lives in contests that seem to offer no adequate
return for sacrifice.

If McClellan conspicuously failed as an energetic commander, in this
his first important campaign, he succeeded at any rate in demonstrating
the perfection of that work of organization by means of which he had
created the splendid Army of the Potomac out of raw recruits and
panic-stricken fugitives from battle.

At Gaines's Mill they gallantly endured a loss of no less than 9,000
men, and while they were driven from their position at last, they
lost nothing of their morale, but were ready two days later to fight
an equally determined battle, though it was the battle of a beaten
and broken army which had been driven by force out of a supremely
advantageous position and was now seeking safety in a flight that
knew no ceasing night or day, except now and then a pause to offer a
sullen resistance to an ever-present and pressing foe, and to ward off
complete destruction by the offer of battle wherever the ground gave
opportunity for resistance.

Here was McClellan's reward; here was his glory. This army of his a few
months earlier under such a succession of defeats would have broken
into panic-stricken rout. Thanks solely to his discipline and his
dominant influence, it now endured compulsory and disastrous retreat
with fortitude and stubbornly contested every inch of the blood-soaked
ground.

It outnumbered Lee's force and its equipment was immeasurably superior
to his. Under a commander of high gift for field work it might perhaps
have beaten Lee and forced its triumphant way into Richmond. Under
the commander it had it did itself great honor by retreating in good
order and stubbornly resisting the Confederate advance wherever it was
permitted to do so.

McClellan being now in full retreat and considering only those problems
which related to escape, abandoned the position at Fair Oaks and posted
Sumner and Heintzelman at Savage's Station. Their sole function was
to guard the flank of the hurriedly retreating Federal army. To that
end they were ordered to defend the position at Savage's Station until
nightfall, or, in other words, until McClellan's retreating army should
have passed that point in its hurried flight.

Here the Confederates under Magruder attacked with fury and the Federal
general Heintzelman was driven into retreat. But Sumner heroically held
his ground until nightfall, thus accomplishing McClellan's purpose,
though at cost of a fearful loss in killed and wounded. He was so
hard pressed indeed that when he retired at nightfall, he was forced
to leave all his wounded in the enemy's hands and make a precipitate
retreat to avoid the capture of his entire force.

Fortunately his enemy was a civilized one, so that his wounded
men, left in their hands, were as tenderly cared for as if Federal
surgeons had had them in charge. The only difference was that Federal
surgeons had all possible medicaments and surgical appliances,
while the Confederates, by reason of the blockade, lacked many
life-saving agents, particularly the quinine which men wounded after
long campaigning in the Chickahominy and White Oak swamps needed as
imperatively as a shipwrecked crew needs life-lines and breeches-buoys.
The war was so far civilized that the surgeons on either side eagerly
did their best for such of the enemy's wounded as might fall into
their hands. But it was still so far savage,--and it remained so to
the end--that the side which possessed a navy shut out from the other
as contraband of war the medicines necessary to the saving of human
life and the rescue of the wounded from a needless death, as resolutely
as it shut out gunpowder itself. In other words, the blockade was to
this extent a part of that savagery which makes war upon the sick
and wounded and other non-combatants as determinedly as it does upon
stalwart men with guns in their hands and cartridge boxes strapped
around their waists. There is cruelly no room for doubt that during
the Seven Days' battles thousands of gallant fellows on both sides
were buried in the fetid mud of those swamps, who might have been
saved, had the world then been civilized enough for the Federals to
let the Confederates have the quinine, the calomel and the opium they
needed for the salvation of the lives of those who could fight no more,
whether Federal or Confederate in their allegiance.

No nation is even yet civilized enough for this. "War is all Hell,"
said General Sherman, and its hellishness is nowhere so aggressively
manifest as when it denies to a hard-pressed adversary the medicines
necessary to the salvation of human life, the rescue from death of
those who are already incapacitated, either by wounds or by disease,
from further fighting. It is quite legitimate and logical to forbid the
sending of food supplies to your enemy, because food is the foundation
of every army's resisting power. But when a starving army surrenders,
as Lee's did at Appomattox, the first care of its conqueror is to issue
rations to the men who have ceased to fight, as Grant issued them on
that historic occasion, even before the terms of capitulation could be
written out. But it is a very different and a very much more barbarous
thing to deny to surgeons in the field the means of saving human life
whether the subjects of such life-saving happen to belong to the one
army or to the other. The people of the United States are to-day paying
princely sums as pensions to the families of those who died under
Confederate surgeons' hands simply because the laws and usages of war
forbade to those surgeons the medicines necessary to their life-saving
work, and treated life-saving appliances as they treated gunpowder and
arms, as contraband of war. Why should this hideous wrong have existed
after the middle of the nineteenth century? Why should it continue to
exist at the dawn of the twentieth? Are we, after all, only savages
under a thin veneer of pretended civilization?

On the thirtieth of June the Confederates again assailed McClellan's
retreating columns at Frazier's farm. A fearful contest ensued, for so
superbly had McClellan organized and disciplined his army that even
after days of disaster and depressing retreat it stood ready still to
resist and to fight for every inch of ground.

Here the Confederates confidently expected to overwhelm and capture
McClellan's army, compelling its surrender. And there is small
doubt that such must have been the outcome of the action had Lee's
lieutenants accomplished that which he had set them to do. But
Magruder and Huger failed Lee at the crisis. It was his plan that they
should assail the Federals in flank with all possible vigor, while
Jackson, Longstreet and A. P. Hill should press them upon the rear
of their retreat which now became their front for purposes of battle.
The destruction of McClellan's army seemed a certainty. But neither
Magruder nor Huger arrived in time to make Lee's plan of assault
successful. There was a bloody battle, but by reason of the delay
of these two lieutenants it was an abortive one, failing utterly to
accomplish that final and decisive overthrow and capture of McClellan's
army upon which Lee had reckoned as the crowning achievement of this
Seven Days' campaign.

The failure of these two generals to fulfil their obligations--a
failure which resulted in the baffling of Lee's supreme purpose at the
very moment when their presence must have given him quite all that he
desired of victory--might well have been made the subject of an inquest
by court martial or by a court of inquiry. But as Lee in the exceeding
gentleness of his nature omitted to order any such inquest, the matter
presents no authoritative basis of fact on which the historian may rest
an award of blame. This much, however, seems to be certain--that if
Huger and Magruder had done what Lee had ordered them to do, and what
they might easily have done, McClellan's army must have been destroyed
or captured on that thirtieth day of June, 1862.

As it was, McClellan fought all day and at night resumed his retreat,
still doggedly intent upon that one difficult problem of "saving
this army," concerning which he had written so doubtfully and so
despairingly and so bitterly in his heart-wrung protest to Secretary
Stanton.

After a fearfully bloody struggle the Federal army was able during the
night to retire toward Malvern Hill, a position which the Confederates
could not assail without exposing themselves to the destructive cross
fire of the Federal fleet in the James river.

McClellan had now been completely dislodged from his position on the
east and north of Richmond. He had been defeated in battle day after
day, and driven out of his fortifications into a helpless retreat to
the cover of his gunboats in the James river. His base of supplies at
White House had been utterly broken up. He had lost in this series
of battles no less than 15,249 men. The Confederates, being the
assailants, had suffered even greater losses.

The Confederates at this point made one disastrous mistake. They
had believed that McClellan would retreat by the route by which he
had come, and in that belief they had remained where they were for
twenty-four hours. During that precious time McClellan had moved his
enormous wagon train and his great herd of 2,500 cattle towards his new
base.

At White House General Casey loaded all the supplies he could upon
transports and sent them to the new base. But he was obliged to burn
millions of pounds of food and destroy hundreds of tons of ammunition
which he could not remove. Trains of freight cars were loaded with food
and ammunition and deliberately switched off the railroad tracks and
into the river to prevent them from falling into the possession of the
Confederates.

In brief McClellan's defeat was disastrous in the extreme; but by
reason of the failure of Lee's lieutenants to do their proper part at
the critical time the Federal commander was spared the humiliation of
a surrender. He escaped instead to Malvern Hill after a succession of
bloody defeats and after sacrificing the greater part of his reserve
stores of food and ammunition at what he had established as a secure
base of supplies.

It is not easy to imagine a completer or more disastrous defeat than
this of the Seven Days, or an enforced retreat more humiliating. Yet at
the last moment McClellan was enabled, by the mistake or the misconduct
of Lee's lieutenants, to escape to Malvern Hill, under cover of his
gunboats, and there Lee mistakenly assailed him, thus giving him, at
the end of a series of conspicuous defeats, the appearance at least of
a compensating victory.

Malvern Hill is rather a high plateau than a hill in the proper sense
of the term. It lies about sixty feet above the surrounding country.
It is a mile wide and a mile and a half long. At its base is a
network of streams and impassable swamp lands, constituting a natural
fortification practically impassable to any army in the field except
at one point where a narrow road leads up the hill. The plateau lies
so close to the James river that gunboats anchored in that stream can
command its one approach with deadly certainty.

Here McClellan stood at bay. Here a wise direction should have made
an end of the Confederate pursuit of him. To assail him there was to
invite needless slaughter with no hope of any result commensurate with
the inevitable sacrifice of human life.

But the Confederates were flushed with a week of continuous victories,
and they hurled themselves recklessly upon Malvern Hill, hoping there
to retrieve their lost opportunity of destroying or capturing the army
that a week earlier had besieged and threatened Richmond.

The assault upon such a position ought not to have been made at all.
Still worse, it was blunderingly made. The Confederates were not
ready to bring their whole force into action when the first advance
occurred, or in any wise to support the assailing force. Seven thousand
men, with six guns, charged up the slope. There were thirty guns in
position to sweep them away as with a broom, and many times seven
thousand men to resist their advance. There was also the terrific fire
of the gunboats to tear their columns into shreds and to throw their
men into confusion. Still more important perhaps was the fact that
the Confederate artillery had not yet been organized as a separate
arm of the service. Each brigade had its battery, but there was
nowhere any authority to bring these scattered batteries together
and make them effective by massing them. Six guns in the presence of
thirty were quickly put out of action, and throughout the day there
was a like disproportion, due to the mistaken system which assigned
batteries to brigades instead of organizing the whole artillery force
into a single arm of the service and placing each corps of it under a
commander of its own who could mass it at will and make it effective by
concentration.

McClellan had massed his artillery; Lee had not massed his. The result
was that McClellan's artillery fire quickly dismounted Lee's guns and
rendered them useless.

After this first fruitless assault was repelled, there was nothing
but artillery dueling for some hours. It was not until late in the
afternoon of July 1 that Lee was ready to assail his enemy with his
entire force. Then there was a strange lack of concert. One division
after another attacked without support and was beaten back for want of
it. At no time did the Confederates hurl their whole force upon their
enemies. They fought gallantly, but in detail, and therefore without
effect.

The fighting was continued till nine o'clock in the evening. Its net
result was that the Confederates had failed to dislodge McClellan from
his strong position. But they had so nearly accomplished that object
that McClellan dared not risk another day's trial of the issue, even
in his supremely advantageous position. He withdrew during the night
to Harrison's Landing under cover of his gunboats, and the Seven Days'
battles were done.

No military operation was ever more dramatic than this. At the
beginning of that fateful week McClellan, with about 120,000 men,
was closely besieging the Confederate capital. His heavy guns were
almost within shelling distance of the city, and an army of 40,000
men or more, was marching to his reinforcement. At the end of that
week's fighting the broken remnant of his army was thankfully cowering
under cover of a resistless gunboat fire, with siege abandoned, works
deserted, millions of dollars worth of stores destroyed, and such a
record of daily defeats as falls to the lot of few armies in the field.

But one thing had been demonstrated, McClellan had made an army out of
the exceedingly raw material furnished to his hand. He had converted "a
mere collection of regiments cowering on the banks of the Potomac, some
perfectly raw, others dispirited by recent defeat, some going home,"
into an army capable of meeting and fighting Lee at Mechanicsville,
Frazier's Farm, Gaines's Mills, Savage's Station and Malvern Hill.

Henceforth the war was to be fought out by armies of seasoned soldiers
and not by raw recruits and panic-stricken volunteers.

This great series of battles had cost the Confederates about 19,000
men and the Federals 15,249. It had made an end of the second attempt
to conquer Richmond and in that way to finish the war. It had left
the Confederates as conspicuously victorious in the east as they were
conspicuously defeated in the west.




CHAPTER XXIX

THE SECOND MANASSAS CAMPAIGN


Lee had now accomplished the first of his two purposes. He had raised
McClellan's siege of Richmond. He had not succeeded in capturing
or destroying McClellan's army as he had hoped to do, but he had
completely baffled its endeavor. He had driven it out of its strongly
fortified positions. He had kept it in an enforced and continuous
retreat for a whole week. He had compelled it to fight losing battles
by day, and to spend the nights in painful and exhausting efforts to
escape, which McClellan himself, as his grieved and angry official
reports clearly showed, regarded as efforts of extremely doubtful
outcome.

McClellan's campaign against Richmond had disastrously failed. He had
saved his army indeed without a repetition of the Manassas panic,
but he had been baffled in all his purposes and driven for seven
days and nights like a hunted stag seeking safety in flight. All his
combinations had come to naught, all his elaborately constructed
earthworks had failed him even as means of holding his position as an
assailant. All his siege guns had proved of no avail.

But he had organized a great army so well disciplined that it could
fight with determination, lose with a calm mind, and retreat before a
pursuing enemy without losing cohesion or falling into panic. That
service of his was emphasized during all the brilliant future history
of the Army of the Potomac. It made itself manifest at Antietam, at
Fredericksburg, at Chancellorsville, at Gettysburg, and later at the
Wilderness, Spottsylvania, Cold Harbor and Petersburg. But with all his
splendid ability as an engineer, and his still more conspicuous gifts
as an organizer of raw material into an effective force, McClellan was
manifestly unfit to command an expedition in which he must try his wits
against the genius of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. A historian
most friendly to him, Dr. Rossiter Johnson, has written: "He was an
accomplished engineer and a gigantic adjutant, but hardly the general
to be sent against an army that could move and a commander that could
think."

Lee had driven a splendid army, nearly double his own in numbers, to
a position where it lay cowering on the river-bank, under protection
of the gunboats and no longer depending upon its own prowess even for
self-defense.

But Lee had not destroyed McClellan's army, or captured it, or even
weakened it in any conspicuous degree. That army, splendidly organized,
superbly equipped, and strengthened rather than weakened in morale,
lay securely at rest on the James river, within easy striking distance
of Richmond. There was no knowing at what moment McClellan might hurl
it again upon Richmond or upon that commanding key to Richmond--the
Petersburg position. In the hands of a capable commander McClellan's
army would at this time have been a more serious menace than ever to
the Confederate capital, for it now had an absolutely secure and
unassailable base of operations, while its fighting quality had been
improved rather than impaired by its seven days of battling.

Thus the second part of Lee's military problem remained still to be
solved, and it was very greatly the more difficult part--the part
that most imperatively called for the exercise of strategic genius of
a high order. He must prevent a junction between Pope's army, which
was now advancing by way of Manassas Junction, and McClellan's force
on the James river. He must overthrow Pope on the one hand and compel
McClellan to retire on the other.

For the accomplishment of this Lee relied confidently upon the
positively morbid dread of the loss of Washington which at that time
filled the Northern mind and inspired every order given at the Federal
capital. His problem was to put Washington in peril without losing
Richmond, and thus to compel the withdrawal of McClellan's army for the
defense of the Federal capital and to meet a threatened invasion of the
North.

To that end Lee boldly risked a division of his force as he afterwards
did on several occasions in presence of an enemy who already
outnumbered him.

On the thirteenth of July he detached Jackson, with his own and Ewell's
commands, to operate against Pope in northern Virginia, himself holding
Richmond with the rather scant remainder of his army.

Jackson moved at once to Orange Court House, confronting Pope. This
movement threatened Washington only in a rather remote way and not very
seriously, but it had the desired effect. A part of McClellan's force
was at once withdrawn from the position at Harrison's Landing and sent
by water to the national capital as a reserve and reinforcement for
Pope in case that general should be beaten in the field.

Promptly--near the end of July--Lee sent A. P. Hill's corps to Jackson,
and, thus strengthened, Jackson pushed his column across the Rapidan
river and encountered a part of Pope's forces at Cedar Mountain on the
ninth of August. The action was not a decisive one, but it served Lee's
purpose of compelling the early and complete withdrawal of McClellan
from his threatening position below Richmond.

Two days after the battle at Cedar Mountain Jackson retired to the
south bank of the river to await the reinforcements which Lee was
sending to him as rapidly as McClellan's withdrawal rendered it
measurably prudent for him to deplete the army defending Richmond.

By August 14, Lee had transferred practically all of his army from
Richmond to the line of the Rapidan, leaving only a meager garrison at
the Confederate capital. On that day he joined the army and assumed
direct personal command.

Pope was a good and active officer, unfortunately given to vainglorious
boasting. He dated his orders "Headquarters in the saddle, Army in the
field," and set forth in them the assertion that he had so far seen
only the backs of the rebels. He announced his policy in the phrase,
"bayonets to the front, spades to the rear." In brief, he jauntily
and with ridiculous boastings, undertook to meet one of the finest
fighting forces that had ever been organized in the world, commanded
by the most brilliant and the ablest general of the South. He thus
prepared for himself a peculiar humiliation in the event of defeat,
stripping himself in advance of all excuses and all pleas in abatement
of failure, and in advance minimizing the glory of victory should he
succeed in overcoming Lee.

There was no more ridiculous spectacle seen from beginning to end of
the war than this. It invited all the wits of the newspapers to facile
jestings, and when Pope's failure was complete, one of them said, in
reference to his "headquarters in the saddle" phrase, that he had
"placed his headquarters where his hind-quarters ought to have been."

Nevertheless, General John Pope was a very able and a very enterprising
officer, as he had demonstrated at the West. He knew how to handle an
army effectively, and he had an army of great effectiveness under his
command, with seasoned and battle-trained reinforcements coming to
him every hour from McClellan's splendidly behaving force. He boldly
challenged Lee's advance and baffled it for a time. He had all that
could be imagined of equipment and of limitless supplies. Had he been
even in a measurable degree the commanding military genius that he
confidently believed himself to be, he must have hammered Lee's forces
into confusion at the first encounter and driven the great Confederate
back to his half-hopeless task of defending Richmond behind a barrier
of earthworks. The result of the encounter was quite other than this,
as we shall see.

Having at last brought up a force slightly superior to Pope's, Lee's
plan was to attack as quickly as possible and before Pope should be
strengthened by the heavy columns of reinforcements that were hurrying
to his support from McClellan's army and from every other quarter
whence reinforcements could be drawn. But before Lee's dispositions for
attack could be completed, Pope penetrated his design and fell back to
the stronger line of the Rappahannock.

The two armies confronted each other with that river between. Lee moved
by his left flank up the river while Pope kept pace with him, alertly
meeting him at every available point of crossing, with his army in
discouragingly strong positions, and prepared to resist to the utmost
any attempt the Confederate general might make to force a crossing.

To Lee this was a lamentable waste of time, while to Pope it was a
matter of hourly gain in strength. For while Lee already had with him
all the forces that he could hope to concentrate in that quarter,
regiments and brigades and divisions were constantly pouring forward
from Washington to strengthen Pope's command.

Finally Lee succeeded in outwitting his adversary. At a place
near Warrenton Springs he came to a halt and made ostentatious
demonstrations of an intention to force a crossing of the river at that
point. Pope stood ready to meet him, with all his army strongly posted,
and with hourly strengthening field works to make the assault of the
Confederates the more difficult and the more perilous.

But Lee in fact had no intention of joining battle on such unequal
conditions and risking the fate of his campaign upon his ability to
carry such a position, so strongly defended. While occupying Pope's
attention there with a simulated purpose of forcing the fords he
resorted to that tactical device which served him so often and so well
later in the war. He detached Jackson, sending him with a strong force
to march around Bull Run Mountain, cross through Thoroughfare Gap, and
threaten Pope's depots at Manassas and his lines of communication north
and south of that now historic point.

Jackson's movement was completely concealed and altogether successful.
On the twenty-sixth of August he fell like a thunderbolt upon Pope's
depots at Manassas and captured them. Meanwhile, under Lee's orders,
Longstreet was following Jackson, and on the twenty-ninth he formed a
junction with him at or near the point where the first important battle
of the war had been fought.

But Pope had not been idle or inattentive during these pregnant days.
As soon as Jackson's descent upon his supply depots was made known to
him, he abandoned his position on the Rappahannock and fell back to try
conclusions on the historic field of Manassas. Having received still
further reinforcement from McClellan, his army now slightly exceeded
Lee's in numbers and considerably exceeded it in other elements of
strength. Accordingly, being a commander of great enterprise and vigor,
he at once assailed Lee at Manassas in full force. For two days he
hurled his heavy battalions upon the Confederates, severely taxing
and testing their resisting power. For these were armies of veteran,
battle-seasoned soldiers that were fighting each other now, and not
the raw levies of a year before. They fought with order and system and
their minds were open to no such panic impulses as those that had put
McDowell to rout and reduced what had been placed under his command as
an army to the condition of an insanely frightened mob.

But on the other hand the Southerners were commanded now not by a pair
of inexperienced ex-captains of the Engineer Corps, but by Robert E.
Lee himself, with Stonewall Jackson and James Longstreet and R. S.
Ewell and the two Hills for his lieutenants.

The attack was determined; the defense obstinate; the fighting heroic;
the result bloody in an extreme degree.

The field was contested for two days with a heroic stubbornness on
either side which showed clearly how great a change had been wrought in
the conditions of the war by the disciplining of the troops, by their
experience in the brutally bloody work of war, and by the training such
experience had given to their officers.

The end of it was that Lee drove Pope across Bull Run and back to
Centreville. Immediately he followed up his victory as Johnston and
Beauregard had not done a year before on the same field. He turned the
position at Centreville and compelled Pope to retreat hurriedly, but in
tolerably good order, upon Washington.

It was in this conflict that a gallant and hard-fighting Federal
general, Fitz-John Porter, had the ill luck to encounter criticism
which resulted in his trial by court martial and his dismissal from
the army in disgrace. It was not until many years afterwards that the
actual facts of the fighting were clearly and convincingly made known
with the result of relieving General Porter of the stigma he had so
long unjustly borne, and rehabilitating his high reputation in the
minds of his countrymen.

The story of it all is one of pitiable and long-continued suffering
under misapprehension and falsehood. It is fully told in other
publications than this, and it has no proper place except that of
casual mention, in a simple chronicle of events such as the present
work is.




CHAPTER XXX

LEE'S FIRST INVASION OF MARYLAND


Lee seemed now to be master of the situation so far at least as
determining when and where the fighting should be done. Within the
brief space of two months he had raised the siege of Richmond,
maneuvered McClellan completely out of Virginia, and overthrown Pope
in a two-days' battle compelling that commander to retire behind the
defenses of Washington.

There remained no Federal army in Virginia. There was no further
defensive campaigning to be done there. Lee decided at once upon an
aggressive operation of the utmost boldness. He determined to transfer
the seat of war to the regions north of the Potomac, to threaten and if
possible to capture the Federal capital, either by direct approach or
by the conquest of Baltimore, which would isolate Washington and compel
its abandonment.

In order to understand the importance of the issues of such a campaign
as Lee now planned, the reader must bear in mind that Mr. Lincoln's
government was at that time subject to a "fire from the rear;" that
a very large part of the Northern people sympathized with the South;
that a still larger part disapproved of the war on other grounds than
sympathy--grounds of commercial interest, political prejudice and
the like. The cost of carrying on the struggle had already become
appalling to those who must meet it by the payment of taxes. The desire
to end it, and the conviction that it was hopeless of the results
proposed, were widespread.

Under such conditions it is easily obvious that if Lee could at that
time have made himself master of Washington or Baltimore or both, all
that had gone before either of victory or of defeat would have been
as dust in the balance. It would have been next to impossible, under
such circumstances for Mr. Lincoln's administration to prosecute the
struggle further. The national credit, already seriously impaired,
would have been destroyed. Neither men nor the material necessaries of
war would have been at all adequately forthcoming. A great cry must in
that case have arisen for the ending of the struggle by the recognition
of Southern independence. With the Confederates in possession of
Washington and Baltimore every foreign power would have joined its
voice to that of the doubters and malcontents at home in a clamorous
demand for an immediate "peace at any price" with a triumphant foe.

To make an end of the war in this way was the stupendous task that Lee
set himself to accomplish. His means were scanty and his grounds of
hope for success were small. But "war is a hazard of possibilities,
probabilities, luck and ill luck," and Lee was a commander given to the
taking of stupendous risks.

He had but 45,000 men with whom to undertake a task for which a quarter
of a million would not have been an excessive or even a certainly
sufficient force. But those 45,000 men were soldiers of the very best
quality imaginable. They had been seasoned by severe campaigning. They
had accustomed themselves to win in battle against heavy odds. They
believed in their leader and in themselves and were ready to undertake
any task that Lee might assign them. They were stubborn men and
stalwart, and experience on march and in battle had made them as nearly
perfect soldiers as the world has anywhere or at any time known.

On such an expedition as that which Lee planned, they were certain
to be opposed by armies greatly exceeding themselves in numbers and
immeasurably superior in equipment and supplies. But they were soldiers
of that sort that can march on a diet of hard tack and fight on no diet
at all.

So with this slender force Lee crossed the Potomac, on the fifth of
September, abandoning his base of supplies and his communications and
depending for the support of his army upon such foodstuffs as he could
secure in his enemy's country. As for reinforcements, he perfectly knew
that there were none who could come to him.

It was a desperate hazard, conspicuously Napoleonic in its daring.

Crossing the Potomac on the fifth of September, Lee established himself
on the eighth near Frederick, Maryland, a point at which his presence
threatened Washington and Baltimore about equally. And both those
cities must be guarded against his advance, the direction of which was
of course uncertain. The capture of either city would mean the speedy
surrender of the other.

To meet this danger the Federal Administration hurriedly called to
Washington every regiment and brigade it could in any wise command. It
united the armies of McClellan and Pope and reinforced them with every
regiment that could be drawn from other quarters. It restored McClellan
to command--for he had been temporarily removed in consequence of his
disastrous defeat at Richmond--and set him the task of defending the
National capital by meeting and crushing Lee in the field. If Lee had
commanded an army of half a million men instead of the meager 45,000
actually under his orders, the alarm could scarcely have been greater
or the preparations to meet him more elaborate.

President Lincoln visited McClellan in person and asked him to resume
command of the combined armies. McClellan accepted the commission.

Accomplished soldier that he was, he saw clearly that the "objective"
of his campaign must be the crushing of Lee and the enforced retreat
of the Confederates to the southern side of the Potomac. To that end
McClellan desired to employ the utmost force within call. He had about
70,000 men against Lee's 45,000, but he urgently asked for the 11,000
additional men who were guarding Harper's Ferry and Martinsburg. He
asked that those untenable positions should be abandoned and their
defenders added to the already superior force with which he was to try
conclusions again with the masterful adversary who had so conspicuously
defeated him before Richmond.

But General Halleck was now in chief command and he refused this
request.

His refusal to order the evacuation of the two untenable positions
and to add their important garrisons to McClellan's force, seriously
embarrassed Lee and contributed, in an indirect but effective way, to
the defeat of those purposes with which the Confederate chieftain had
undertaken his hazardous campaign.

Lee had assumed, quite as a matter of course, that upon his passage of
the Potomac, Martinsburg and Harper's Ferry would be evacuated, being
obviously untenable. But in fact they were not abandoned. So Lee was
compelled to pause and to send Jackson back to the south side of the
river to secure control of positions that commanded his own only secure
line of retreat in case of disaster.

This caused a very serious delay in Lee's operations, and in such a
campaign of aggression, promptitude and swiftness are all important to
the accomplishment of desired results.

Jackson went back across the river to assail Harper's Ferry from the
South. In the meanwhile McLaws, Walker and D. H. Hill seized and held
respectively Maryland Heights, Loudon Heights and Boonesboro Pass,
while Lee with the remainder of his now dangerously divided army
advanced to Hagerstown in search of food supplies.

Jackson did his part of the work perfectly, as it was his custom to do.
He drove his enemy out of Martinsburg and captured Harper's Ferry with
11,500 prisoners, seventy-three serviceable guns and important stores.

But in the meanwhile Lee's army had been scattered in a very perilous
way, and in his anxiety for its reconcentration, he wrote out an order,
giving in detail his instructions to his several subordinates.

A copy of this order somehow fell into McClellan's hands. It clearly
revealed to him Lee's divided and scattered condition, and for once
in his life McClellan hurried. If he, with 70,000 men, could manage
to attack in detail the several widely separated fragments of Lee's
army which had now been reduced by casualties to less than a total of
40,000, surely he must win.

Accordingly he hurriedly pushed forward, hoping to carry Turner's and
Crampton's Gaps in the South Mountain before Lee could concentrate for
their defense.

He was a trifle too late, however, and a stubborn defense was made
there on the fourteenth, giving Lee time to bring up the remainder
of his forces for the decisive battle at Sharpsburg or Antietam,
as the action is variously called at the South and at the North.
McClellan finally carried the gaps at cost of a loss of 2,000 men--the
Confederates losing a like number.

But in the meanwhile McClellan had lost all the strategic advantage
that he was striving for. It had been his hope to push his columns
through the gaps--as he might have done twenty-four hours earlier
without serious resistance--and to occupy commanding positions between
Lee's widely scattered forces, from which, with his vastly superior
numbers he might conquer them in detail, probably compelling Lee's
surrender as a part of the price exacted.

But McClellan was twenty-four hours late. He therefore had to fight all
day in order to force his way through passes that a day earlier had
been practically open to him.

These actions were fought on the fourteenth of September, 1862. They
were quite separate in their strategy and action, but they are classed
together in history as the Battle of South Mountain. The struggle at
both points was a fierce one and the casualties were heavy on either
side. At the end of it all McClellan held the passes and was free to
push his army through them. To that extent he had won a victory. But by
his stout defense Lee had gained the time he so badly needed in which
to bring his scattered forces together for the decisive struggle, and
as that was his sole object at the time, he justly felt that he had
accomplished the purpose with which he had undertaken the battle.

Lee promptly prepared himself for the decisive struggle. Retiring
behind Antietam Creek, he took up a strong position and awaited
McClellan's assault. He had by this time an army of less than 38,000
men with which to meet McClellan's 70,000 or 75,000--for reinforcements
were hourly coming to the Federal commander, and none to the
Confederate.

This defensive battle was not at all what the Confederate general had
hoped for or intended. He had been baffled of his purposes by adverse
circumstances. Had his enemy promptly evacuated Harper's Ferry as
he had expected and as McClellan had urged, Lee would have pushed
on towards Washington or Baltimore, giving battle as the assailant
wherever his march might have been opposed. The necessity of pausing
to reduce Harper's Ferry had delayed him during precious days, during
which McClellan's advance had completely changed the aspect of the
campaign. Instead of advancing to conquer Washington or Baltimore,
Lee fell back into a defensive position, there to meet an army nearly
or quite twice as large as his own. In the meanwhile the necessity of
living upon the country had completely demoralized those "lewd fellows
of the baser sort," who constitute a pestilently important contingent
in every fighting force. Men were away raiding chicken coops when
they should have been in line with guns in their hands. Straggling
was general beyond precedent, so that Lee declared that his army was
"ruined" by it, while D. H. Hill said in his report of operations
that "Had all our stragglers been up McClellan's army would have been
completely crushed or annihilated. Thousands of thievish poltroons had
kept away from sheer cowardice."

But the fact stares us in the face that McClellan had under his command
quite all of 70,000 men and probably more, while Lee had at most
considerably less than 40,000,--and as both armies were composed of
seasoned soldiers who had fought before, it is by no means safe to say
that if this or if that had been changed the result would have been
other than it was. With an "if," it is easy to demonstrate anything.

The simple facts are that on the seventeenth of September, 1862, the
two armies met on Antietam Creek in front of Sharpsburg, that they
fought all day with high courage and desperate determination on both
sides; that the Federals lost, by official report, 12,469 men, while
the Confederate loss, never accurately reported, was estimated at
between 9,000 and 10,000 men; that at the end of the struggle each army
held the position it had occupied at the beginning, neither having
yielded position to the other.

So far were both reluctant to renew the struggle that they lay still,
facing each other during the whole of the next day, neither side firing
a gun, and neither undertaking a maneuver of any kind.

That was what is technically called a drawn battle, a battle in which
neither army can claim advantage over the other. And in fact that was
the exact situation. Lee's men prided themselves upon the fact that
they had held their own against nearly or quite twice their numbers,
McClellan's men were proud to think that they had not been beaten as
other armies had been by this phenomenal fighting machine of Robert E.
Lee's; that they had not been flanked or caught in the rear, or in any
other way outmaneuvered or outfought, but had been able to hold their
own throughout the day and to maintain their ground when the day was
done.

Considered by itself this was in fact a drawn battle. But considered
more broadly in its relation to the general course of the war, it was
very clearly a defeat for Lee, and a victory for his adversary. It made
a final end of the Confederate general's scheme of invasion. It baffled
all of his cherished purposes. It rendered utterly futile the plans
in pursuit of which he had crossed the Potomac. It ended his hope of
winning the war by the conquest of Washington or Baltimore, or both. It
referred military operations again to Virginia, relieving all states
north of the Potomac of their share in the sufferings incident to
battles and campaigning.

Lee, being too badly crippled to continue his campaign, retired after
a day's rest, to Virginia. McClellan, being too badly hurt to risk
another contest, declined to follow him or in any way to interfere with
his purposes.

The net results of Lee's campaign were that he had captured 11,500
prisoners at Harper's Ferry together with seventy-three guns and a
vast store of food and munitions. He had inflicted upon his enemy
in battle a loss of 12,469 men. On the other hand he had suffered a
loss of 9,000 or 10,000 men; his army was reduced to 30,000 or less,
and the strategic purpose of the campaign had utterly failed. He had
encountered no disaster, but the expedition undertaken with high hopes
and positively Napoleonic purposes had come to naught.

Then occurred one of those prolonged and unexplainable pauses in the
war to which wondering reference has been made in an earlier chapter
of this work. With all the superb autumn weather before them--the very
best campaigning weather known to Virginia--neither side did anything
or tried to do anything. Lee remained in the neighborhood of Winchester
for a month, at once inactive and unmolested. Then he slowly retired to
Fredericksburg, where he fortified himself to meet the advance which
Burnside, who had succeeded McClellan, seemed to threaten by taking up
a position at Acquia Creek, seven miles or so in Fredericksburg's front.

But the battle at Sharpsburg or Antietam, had occurred on the
seventeenth of September and it was not until near the middle of
December that either of these two armies again challenged the other to
a contest of arms.


END OF VOL. I.




      *      *      *      *      *      *




Transcribers' note:

Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
predominant preference was found in this book; otherwise they were not
changed.

Simple typographical errors, including occasional unpaired quotation
marks, were corrected.

Ambiguous hyphens at the ends of lines were retained.

Page 340: "Pass á l'Outre" was printed with that accent mark.

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 45609 ***