The History of the Confederate War, Its Causes and Its Conduct. Volume 2 of 2

Fortunately, he had for his coadjutor one of the most enterprising and most daring men who ever commanded a ship. David D. Porter, in his personal character, was typical of that all-unfaltering courage which the officers of the American navy have always exacted of each other and of themselves as the measure of a man. Porter was ready for anything. Cool-headed, skilled in navigation, resolute, and thoroughly familiar with the problems of the Mississippi, he responded instantly and eagerly to Grant's demand that he should run his fleet past the Vicksburg batteries at any and every hazard and place it in a position below, where the gunboats might serve as transports to the troops if Grant could manage to get the troops there.

This thing was splendidly done, and perhaps nothing more picturesque or dramatic occurred during the war. Porter chose the night, of course, for his attempt, but the Confederates on the shore had long anticipated some such enterprise and had prepared themselves to overcome the difference between night and day. They had collected great piles of lumber on the banks; they had filled many houses with combustibles, and to all these they instantly set fire when it was known that the fleet was endeavoring to pass the batteries. The river and the entire landscape were rendered lurid by the flames. The men behind the guns on shore were enabled to deliver their fire as accurately as if the sun had been shining. The fleet, in the meanwhile, replied to every shot as it steadily steamed by, and in spite of the hellish appearances the losses on either side were trifling.

In the meanwhile Grant had moved on the western side of the Mississippi, from Milliken's Bend to a point opposite Grand Gulf. There he found the Confederates strongly fortified, but by moving down the river to Bruinsburg he succeeded in getting his army across on the thirtieth of April.

If the reader will now look at a map, remembering that Vicksburg and Port Hudson were both held by the Confederates, and that the regions along the river bank on the western side of the stream were quagmires, traversed at every step by impassable streams and bayous, he will have some conception of the boldness of this movement of Grant's. The great fighter had deliberately carried his army into a position where he had no possibility of communication with any base of supplies in either direction. He had cut himself off from all help and must henceforth rely exclusively upon himself. He had put himself in a position where victory was the only alternative to destruction. During all the course of the war no other general on either side ventured upon so desperate a risk as this.

Having marched over difficult roads, and by circuitous routes, Grant had brought with him, of course, supplies of food and ammunition sufficient only for a very brief campaign. For further food than this he must depend upon a country by no means rich in supplies at any time, which had already been stripped nearly bare by the requisitions of his adversary. For ammunition, beyond the store that he had in his caissons and cartridge boxes, he had no supply-source at all. To employ the old metaphor of war history, he had completely burned his ships and his bridges behind him. But at least and at last he had succeeded in placing himself in a position from which he could operate in the rear of Vicksburg.

The Confederate general, Joseph E. Johnston – just recovered from the well-nigh mortal wound he had received at Seven Pines – had been sent to Jackson, Mississippi, less than fifty miles east of Vicksburg to take command of such forces as could be gathered there. He had in fact collected a considerable body of men whose numbers Grant could in no wise ascertain. Nevertheless, Grant determined to push his own army into a perilous position between that of Johnston at Jackson, and that of Pemberton near Vicksburg. He was aided in this by a great cavalry raid which had recently been made by Grierson from the north which swept through the Mississippi country, desolating it and occupying the attention of the Confederates in many quarters from which, but for this diversion, Johnston might easily have drawn reinforcements.

During the next two months the battling was well-nigh incessant, and the losses on both sides, though incurred in comparatively small engagements, amounted in the aggregate to those of a great contest. One considerable battle occurred on the fifteenth of May at Champion Hills. Having captured the city of Jackson and destroyed there everything that could aid the Confederates in their struggle, Grant had turned westward in a direct march toward Vicksburg. At Champion Hills he encountered Pemberton, who had taken up a strong position on high ground and who desperately resisted the Federal advance. After four hours of such fighting as only veterans could have done or stood, Pemberton retreated, leaving his dead, his wounded and thirty guns on the field. The losses on either side were between twenty-five hundred and three thousand men. Yet this battle of Champion Hills is scarcely known by name to the millions of youths who every year pass their examinations in American history. A smaller but still considerable battle was fought on the Big Black river on the seventeenth, resulting in a loss of eighteen guns and two thousand men to the Confederates.

From that point Pemberton retired to Vicksburg and Grant following, closely besieged that city. In the meanwhile his operations had been so far successful that he was now in command of a point on the Yazoo where he established a secure base of supplies.

In apprehension of an attack from Johnston in the rear, Grant made a tremendous effort on the twenty-second to carry the Vicksburg works by storm, but was beaten off with losses so heavy that he determined to settle down into regular siege operations.

During the period of this siege the situation in Vicksburg was appalling in an extreme degree. The Federal guns were near enough to pour a continuous stream of shells into the town, and they did so without pause, night or day. The inhabitants, including women and children, were ceaselessly under a fire that might well have staggered the courage even of veteran soldiers. No house in the town was for one moment a safe dwelling place, and for refuge the people dug caves in the cliffs and harbored there unwholesomely. In the meanwhile they were suffering under progressive starvation. The food supplies were daily dwindling, yet with splendid courage those who were beleaguered in the city maintained their cheerfulness to the end, as is testified by files of that daily journal printed upon the back of wall paper which appeared at its appointed time every day and in spite of all, until the end.

The end came on the fourth of July, one day after the failure of Lee's final assault at Gettysburg.

Pemberton surrendered unconditionally, and Grant generously directed that the surrendered men should first be fed and then paroled and permitted to return to their homes.

One event which belongs rather to biography than to history may perhaps be mentioned here in illustration of General Grant's delicacy of sentiment, – a trait in his character often overlooked. When it was arranged that the surrendered Confederates should march out, General Grant issued an order to forbid all demonstrations that might wound a conquered enemy's pride or sensitiveness. "Instruct the commands," the order read, "to be orderly and quiet as these prisoners pass, and to make no offensive remark."

Thus at Vicksburg, as at Appomattox many months later, that soldier who has been accounted the least sensitive of all to considerations of sentiment, manifested a generous delicacy to which all honest minds must make reverent obeisance. During his correspondence with Pemberton concerning the surrender, Grant had declined to consider any terms that limited or imposed conditions upon the capitulation. But he had also generously written to his adversary as follows: "Men who have shown so much endurance and courage as those now in Vicksburg will always challenge the respect of an adversary, and I can assure you that you will be treated with all the respect due to prisoners of war."

Grant's supplies, in his difficult position, were meager in the extreme, and it is one of the most touching incidents of the war that his men voluntarily furnished from their own haversacks the food their famished enemies needed, thus cutting off their own dinners in order that these starving foes might not longer suffer the pangs of hunger. Such incidents go far to redeem war from its curse of brutal barbarity.

Five days after the fall of Vicksburg, Port Hudson was surrendered, and in Mr. Lincoln's own phrase, thenceforth the Mississippi "flowed unvexed from its source to the sea." The Confederacy was cut in twain. The end seemed to be foreordained beyond peradventure, but the determined courage and endurance of the Confederates was destined to postpone that end for nearly two years longer.

The result of this campaign taken in connection with the baffling of Lee's invasion of the North at exactly the same time, in effect determined the issue of the war. From that hour forward, as we now see, it was certain that the Federal cause must ultimately triumph; but how and at what cost remained in the womb of fate.

Grant's conquest of Vicksburg and of the Mississippi river was a result inestimably valuable to the Federal cause if viewed only in its strategic, geographical and other external aspects. But it bore one other fruit of immeasurably greater importance even than these things. It discovered to the government at Washington the existence and the capacity of a commander capable of measuring swords with Robert E. Lee. It taught the authorities at Washington at last the lesson which ought to have been learned by them many moons earlier, namely that in Grant the nation had at its service a man great enough to understand the war problem and to solve it – a man capable of clearly seeing and perfectly understanding that the Confederate strength lay in the fighting force of the Southern armies, rather than in the possession of strategic positions – a man fit to use the enormously superior resources of the North in men, money and material, in such fashion as to break the resisting power of the Army of Northern Virginia.

Grant was eminently a man of common sense rather than of imagination. The picturesque and the romantic appealed to him scarcely at all. War was to him a problem in physics. It was his habit of mind when any undertaking was set for him to do, carefully to weigh the means at his command and the means at the command of his enemy, and judiciously to employ whatever superiority of means he possessed for the accomplishment of the purposed end. There had been much strategy of another sort than this employed in the conduct of the war on the Federal side. There had been much of sentiment brought to bear ineffectually, and often with disastrous results. With the coming of Grant the turn of common sense had come, and Grant preëminently represented common sense, backed by daring, determination and tireless energy.

After Vicksburg the days of the dominance of Halleck and his kind were numbered. The time was approaching when capacity was to take command in lieu of regularity; when sense was to replace shoulder straps; when the man under the uniform was to count for more than the uniform. The Galena clerk, Ulysses S. Grant, was a few months hence to succeed to the command of all the armies of the United States, replacing the pet of an antiquated system.

Two thirds of a year were yet to elapse before this change in the administration of Federal military affairs should completely take place, but its coming was sure and with it the beginning of an end to a struggle which had already cost the country much of its best blood and untold millions of its treasure.

To the nation the best result of the Vicksburg campaign was its discovery of Grant.

CHAPTER XL

The State of Things After Gettysburg

The summer of 1863 presented the most interesting epoch of the war. The baffling of Lee's second attempt to invade the North left the struggle in Virginia about as it had been before, except that Lee's veteran army continued to grow steadily stronger in morale and weaker in numbers. The operations at the West, however, had been very disastrous to the Confederates. Their chief city had been taken and was firmly held. Their armies had been driven out of Missouri, Kentucky and the greater part of Tennessee. The Mississippi river had been completely wrested from their possession and the Confederacy had been cut in two.

Some critics, writing at a later time, have held that these conditions demanded the abandonment of the Confederate cause, and called for a suit for peace on the part of the Southerners, upon whatever terms the Federal Government might be willing to grant. Those who take this view do so, it would seem, upon inadequate conceptions of the conditions and the facts. Had the South been a European country, with all its problems of military geography wrought out, with its strategic positions marked upon myriads of maps, with all lines of communication definitely settled and fixed, the situation at midsummer in 1863 might well have justified an opinion of this kind. But none of these conditions existed. The South was still possessed of a vast area unplatted for military purposes, abounding in obstacles that might be made effective against any adversary's advance. Still more important, there remained the spirit of the army and an unconquerable determination on the part of the people to exhaust every conceivable resource before surrendering a cause which they believed to be absolutely and eternally right.

They had been fed in childhood and youth upon the memories and traditions of American history; they had learned well the lesson that the battle is not always to the strong; they did not forget those dark hours of the American Revolution when Washington, with a small, ragged and mutinous army, lay at Valley Forge while the British occupied New York and Philadelphia and were threatening to overrun Virginia, Georgia and the Carolinas. It was their fixed belief that their own cause in this Confederate war was identical with that of their Revolutionary forefathers, and they would have held themselves in contempt had they shown a readier spirit of surrender than that of the earlier Americans. They remembered how even after the British had conquered Charleston and Savannah, and with superior forces had overrun Georgia and the Carolinas, some mere handfuls of determined men under Marion, Sumter, Pickens, Horry and their kind, had kept war alive in those regions until such time as Greene should come and by masterful strategy make his own defeats more effective than victories, and ultimately reconquer their country from its conquerors, thus making American independence possible. The Confederate people, in their manhood, believed in and acted upon that American history which they had learned in their youth. Reverses only stimulated them to new endeavors, and a more heroic endurance.

Finally, there remained the Army of Northern Virginia, under command of Robert E. Lee. For them to have abandoned their cause while such an army under such a commander was still in the field would have been a confession of weakness and cowardice wholly beyond conception by such men. The war was not yet over. The men who were fighting it on the side of the South were still so potent in arms that in that very month of July, 1863, the Government of the United States found it necessary to resort to an enforced draft in order to raise the 300,000 men called for three months before, to reinforce armies that already outnumbered those of the South by two to one and more.

So far was the Confederacy at that time from defeat and the necessity of surrender that for a space it was exceedingly uncertain whether or not the North would furnish the quotas now called for. So small was the confidence of the North in the administration, and in the success of its methods, that in some parts of the country volunteering had practically come to an end.

As has been pointed out in a former chapter, there was a party at the North, only slightly inferior in strength to that of the administration, which determinedly opposed the further prosecution of the war. This opposition was in part political and in part economic. On its economic side it enlisted all those men who had business interests or business hopes connected with the Southern trade. On its political side it included all men at the North who were opposed to the policies and the principles of the Republican party. It included also a vast multitude of men who had from their youth up hated Abolitionism, and detested the thought of negro equality in this land.

Still another force, and not a small one, had its influence. There were men of earnest minds, throughout the North, who seriously apprehended the undermining of the Constitution and the destruction of liberty in our country by the exercise of what are called war powers. These men were genuinely and patriotically alarmed when they saw the power of the National Government used to suspend the habeas corpus – that traditional bulwark of personal liberty the existence of which has been for many centuries regarded by all English-speaking men as their most priceless possession. When these men saw in addition a declaration of martial law, and the establishment of a system of passports as rigid as that of any military despotism, and when at last they saw the administration openly assuming and exercising the power of overturning the institutions of states by mere executive proclamation, they grew gravely alarmed for liberty itself. To them it seemed – rightly or wrongly – that in the struggle to free the negro slaves of the South there was very serious danger of incurring the loss of liberty to all men in this Republic. Being unwilling to exchange all that is fundamental in the Republic for the freeing of some negro slaves these earnest thinkers, – whether mistakenly or not, – opposed with all their might the further progress of the war and sought in every legal and constitutional way to make an end of it.

This then was the situation. The North had armies in the field vastly outnumbering those of its adversary and immeasurably better equipped and supplied. But public sentiment at the South was a unit, while the North in its political views was a house divided against itself. For the South to have abandoned its cause at such a time and under such circumstances merely by reason of military reverses, when it still had in the field some hundreds of thousands of veteran troops, would have been an act of cowardice inconceivable to American men.

In New York City there was a complete failure to make adequate response to Mr. Lincoln's demand for further troops. Either the government must go without the important quota from the principal city in the nation, or else a draft must be ordered to make good the deficiencies in the volunteering. This Republic of ours had always thitherto depended upon the patriotism of its people for such strength as it might need in a fighting way. It had several times happened that during wars against foreign powers some parts of the country had manifested an unpatriotic lack of enthusiasm, and had failed to furnish their quotas of volunteers for the common defense. But there had been then no thought of dragging men unwillingly into the military service, although there had been great public indignation throughout the rest of the country over the unpatriotic attitude of a part of the Union. The quotas that some of the states refused to furnish were made good by a larger volunteering in other parts of the country.

But in 1863 the conditions were radically different. The war for which the new levies were wanted was a war against Americans, and not for the defense of the nation against foreign powers. In the view of very many men it was, rightly or wrongly, regarded as a war instigated by a sectional, political party in the name of the nation for the destruction of all that was fundamental in the nation. The time has long gone by when it was worth while to argue the soundness or unsoundness of these opinions. It is necessary now only to record the fact of their existence in aid of an understanding of what happened.

The draft was begun in New York on the eleventh of July, 1863. That date fell upon a Saturday. The draft had been opposed in some of the newspapers and in public speeches as unconstitutional, and as an invasion of those private rights which free government is instituted among men to secure. There was murmuring and muttering throughout the Saturday's operations and by the time that Monday came there was throughout the city an aroused spirit of protest which threatened violence. That violence came with a vengeance when the draft was resumed on Monday. Angry crowds surrounded the offices in which the drawings were to be made. The street cars were stopped and their horses unhitched. Then the draft offices were invaded and sacked, and in some cases the buildings were set on fire. At one point an entire block was burned by the mob; at another point there were battles fought between the populace and the police which rivaled in violence and in slaughter skirmishes on the lines in Virginia. Mobs filled the streets in every direction, and for a time had their own way. The office of the New York "Tribune" was assailed and it was defended only by running out chutes from which hand grenades could be dropped into the throngs below, and by arming the printers and other employees with muskets and abundant cartridges. The office of the "Evening Post" was defended against the mob by steam jets shot from hose attached to the boilers that worked the machinery and the presses.

In the meanwhile every negro who made his appearance in the street was assaulted and eleven of them fell victims to the anger of the populace. A negro orphan asylum in Fifth avenue at 44th street was sacked and burned by the infuriated rioters and its helpless little wards narrowly escaped by the way of back doors.

In Second avenue the police and soldiers were attacked from the windows and the roofs of houses. They quickly wreaked a terrible vengeance. They pushed their way into every house and every room of every house, assailed everybody they could find there, whether guilty or innocent of offense, thrust many of them through with bayonets without inquiring as to their degree of culpability, brained many others in like unquestioned manner with locust clubs, threw some of them over balusters upon the stones below, hurled some out of fourth and fifth story windows to be crushed upon the pavement, followed the fleeing ones to the roofs, and shot them there as the most northern of northern historians has recorded – we quote his exact language – "refusing all mercy, and threw the quivering corpses into the street as a warning to the mob."

All this occurred more than forty-five years ago. The war which gave birth to such fury is a matter of history now, not of controversy. It is not worth while nearly half a century later to inquire too curiously into the rights and wrongs, or into the responsibilities involved in such things. But it is perhaps of human advantage, or at the least of curious historic interest, to note that all these things were done in professed service to that personal liberty which free government among men is instituted to secure.

From the point of view of the angels and other superior intelligences there could be nothing more gruesomely ludicrous than the attitude and condition of the American people on both sides of the war-drawn lines at that period. On both sides men professed and honestly believed that their supreme concern was for the maintenance – in Mr. Lincoln's phrase – of a "government of the people, by the people and for the people." Yet on each side there existed, and men consented to it, a military despotism as arbitrary, as unreasoning, and as tyrannical as that of Russia itself. On either side no man could travel without permission of some provost authority which there was nowhere any power to question or any court to curb. On either side that military power which our Constitution requires to be always subordinate to the civil arm, had laid its iron hand without even the disguise of a velvet glove upon the fate and fortune and life of every citizen of a land supposed to be the freest on earth. In New York men could be butchered in their homes and thrown out of high windows without so much as the order of a sheriff in justification. In Richmond Winder's men made practical prisoners of all soldiers and citizens who undertook to traverse the streets upon however laudable an occasion.

It is always thus in war. No sooner is the military power invoked in aid of civil authority than it demands and enforces the abdication of all civil authority in so far as that authority may interfere in the slightest degree with its arbitrary execution of its own irresponsible will. So during this Confederate war of ours we see a great people, free by inheritance, free by tradition, and clamorously free by every conceivable act of self assertion throughout generations of history, suddenly and willingly surrendering to military despotism all that they had ever dreamed of, or clamored for, or fought for of personal right and immunity, and doing all this in the name and in behalf of liberty.

The despotism thus established at the South was more perfect and more arbitrary than that which fell upon the North because at the South there was practically no party in existence that antagonized the powers that were, while at the North there was such a party that must in some ways be reckoned with. Moreover, at the North the citizen who felt that he could not endure the despotism had at any rate the option to flee from it, and take up his residence in some foreign country in which he might enjoy an actually greater personal liberty; while the Southerner who felt himself equally oppressed and wronged was completely shut in and compelled to submit.

In the contemplation of history these facts and conditions are curious and curiously interesting.

These were the conditions of the war at midsummer, 1863, after Lee's retirement from Gettysburg, and after the loss of Vicksburg, Port Hudson and the Mississippi river by the Confederates. They were certainly not conditions suggesting an abandonment of the struggle by either of the contestants, or at all clearly foreshadowing its end in victory for either. Anything in the way of results still remained possible. To hopeful minds on either side everything of good seemed likely to happen.

So the war went on.

CHAPTER XLI

The Struggle for Charleston

The Confederate war necessarily involved military operations at very widely separated points at one and the same time. The telling of its story, therefore, of necessity involves a good deal of harking back, as the huntsmen say.

While Lee's tremendous campaigns in Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania had been going on, and while Grant was engaged in conquering Vicksburg and reopening the Mississippi river, there was important fighting done at other points and particularly at Charleston in South Carolina.

The earliest efforts of the Federal Government to shut the Confederates in had been directed toward the closing of the port of Charleston. There first a blockading fleet had been established, and when it proved ineffective an effort had been made very early in the war to close the port by sinking hulks, loaded with stone in the main channels, leading into that harbor. Fortunately for all concerned, this effort permanently to close a commercial port failed completely and conspicuously. So far from obstructing the entrance to the harbor, the sinking of the hulks there had the effect of extensive dredging. The tide flows in and out of the port with a tremendous current which brooks no resistance. When the stone laden hulks were sunk this current quickly swept away the sand and mud from beneath them, so that presently the harbor entrance was found to have been actually deepened by the effort to close it.

From that time forward two objects engaged Federal attention so far as Charleston was concerned; one of these was to maintain in front of the harbor a blockading squadron strong enough to prevent the entrance and exit of ships. The other was to force the harbor itself, capture its defenses and recover the city to Federal possession. In both of these efforts the Federal operations failed, but in their progress they involved some of the severest and most picturesque battling of the war.