Captains of the Civil War Part 6

And great things were expected to result from Donelson itself, whence the Union forces were to press on south till they met other Union forces pressing north. The river campaign was then to end in a blaze of glory.

Donelson did have important results. Johnston, who had already abandoned Bowling Green for Nashville, had now to abandon Nashville, with most of its great and very sorely needed stores, as well as the rest of Tennessee, and take up a new position along the rails that ran from Memphis to Chattanooga, whence they forked northeast to Richmond and Was.h.i.+ngton and southeast to Charleston and Savannah.

Columbus was also abandoned, and the only points left to the Confederates anywhere near the old line were Island Number Ten in the Mississippi and the Boston Mountains in Arkansas.

But the triumphant Union advance from the north did not take place in '62. Grant was for pus.h.i.+ng south as fast as possible to attack the Confederates before they had time to defend their great railway junction at Corinth. But Halleck was too cautious; and misunderstandings, coupled with division of command, did the rest. Halleck was the senior general in the West. But the three, and afterwards four, departments into which the West was divided were never properly brought under a single command. Then telegrams went wrong at the wire-end advancing southwardly from Cairo, the end Grant had to use. A wire from McClellan on the sixteenth of February was not delivered till the third of March. Next day Grant was thunderstruck at receiving this from Halleck: "Place C. F. Smith in command of expedition and remain yourself at Fort Henry. Why do you not obey my orders to report strength and positions of your command?" And so it went on till McClellan authorized Halleck to place Grant under arrest for insubordination. Then the operator at the wire-end suddenly deserted, taking a sheaf of dispatches with him. He was a clever Confederate.

Explanations followed; and on the seventeenth of March Grant rejoined his army, which was a.s.sembling round Pittsburg Landing on the Tennessee, near the future battlefield of s.h.i.+loh, and some twenty miles northeast of Corinth.

Meanwhile Van Dorn and Sterling Price, thinking it was now or never for Missouri, decided to attack Curtis. They had fifteen against ten thousand men, and hoped to crush Curtis utterly by catching him between two fires. But on the seventh of March the Federal left beat off the flanking attack of McCulloch and McIntosh, both of whom were killed. The right, furiously a.s.sailed by the Confederate Missourians under Van Dorn and Price, fared badly and was pressed back. Yet on the eighth Curtis emerged victorious on the hard-fought field that bears the double name of Elkhorn Tavern and Pea Ridge.

This battle in the northwest corner of Arkansas settled the fate of Missouri.

A month later the final attack was made on Island Number Ten. Foote's flotilla had been at work there as early as the middle of March, when the strong Confederate batteries on the island and east sh.o.r.e bluffs were bombarded by ironclads and mortarboats. Then the Union General John Pope took post at New Madrid, eight miles below the island, on the west sh.o.r.e, which the Confederates had to evacuate when he cut their line of communications farther south. They now held only the island and the east sh.o.r.e opposite, with no line of retreat except the Mississippi, because the land line on the east sh.o.r.e was blocked by swamps and flanked by the Union armies in western Tennessee.

On the night of the fourth of April the _Carondelet_ started to cut this last line south. She was swathed in hawsers and chain cables. Her decks were packed tight with every sort of gear that would break the force of plunging shot; and a big barge, laden with coal and rammed hay, was lashed to her port side to protect her magazine. Twenty-three picked Illinoisian sharpshooters went aboard; while pistols, muskets, cutla.s.ses, boarding-pikes, and hand grenades were placed ready for instant use. The escape-pipe was led aft into the wheel-house, so as to deaden the noise; and hose was attached to the boilers ready to scald any Confederates that tried to board. Then, through the heart of a terrific thunderstorm, and amid a furious cannonade, the _Carondelet_ ran the desperate gauntlet at full speed and arrived at New Madrid by midnight.

The Confederates were now cut off both above and below; for the position of Island Number Ten was at the lower point of a V-shaped bend in the Mississippi, with Federal forces at the two upper points.

But the Federal troops could not close on the Confederates without crossing over to the east bank; and their transports could not run the gauntlet like the ironclads. So the Engineer Regiment of the West cut out a water road connecting the two upper points of the V. This admirable feat of emergency field engineering was effected by sawing through three miles of heavy timber to the nearest bayou, whence a channel was cleared down to New Madrid. Then the transports went through in perfect safety and took Pope's advanced guard aboard. The ironclad _Pittsburg_ had come down, through another thunderstorm, this same morning of the seventh; and when the island garrison saw their position completely cut off they surrendered to Foote.

Next day Pope's men cut off the greater part of the Confederates on the mainland. Thus fell the last point near Johnston's original line along the southern borders of Missouri and Kentucky.

Just before it fell Johnston made a desperate counterattack from his new line at Corinth, in northwest Mississippi, against Grant's encroaching force at s.h.i.+loh, fifteen miles northeast, on the Tennessee River.

Writing "A. S. Johnston, 3d April, 62, _en avant_" on his pocket map of Tennessee, the Confederate leader, anguished by the bitter criticism with which his unavoidable retreat had been a.s.sailed, cast the die for an immediate attack on Grant before slow Halleck reinforced or ready Buell joined him. Johnston's lieutenants, Beauregard and Bragg, had obtained ten days for reorganization; and their commands were as ready as raw forces could be made in an extreme emergency.

They hoped to be joined by Van Dorn, whose beaten army was working east from Pea Ridge. But on the second they heard that Buell was approaching Grant from Nashville; and on the third Johnston's advanced guard began to move off. Van Dorn arrived too late.

The march, which it was hoped to complete on the fourth, was not completed till the fifth. The roads were ankle-deep in clinging mud, the country densely wooded and full of bogs and marshes. The forty thousand men were not yet seasoned; and, though full of enthusiasm, they neither knew nor had time to learn march discipline.

Moreover, Johnston allowed his own proper plan of attacking in columns of corps to be changed by Beauregard into a three-line attack, each line being formed by one complete corps. This meant certain and perhaps disastrous confusion. For in an attack by columns of corps the firing line would always be reinforced by successive lines of the same corps; while attacking by lines of corps meant that the leading corps would first be mixed up with the second, and then both with the third.

In the meantime Grant was busier with his own pressing problems of organization for an advance than with any idea of resisting attack. He lacked the prevision of Winfield Scott and Lee, both of whom expected from the first that the war would last for years. His own expectation up to this had been that the South would collapse after the first smas.h.i.+ng blow, and that its western armies were now about to be dealt such a blow. He was not unmindful of all precautions; for he knew the Confederates were stirring on his front. Yet he went downstream to Savannah without making sure that his army was really safe at s.h.i.+loh.

Pittsburg Landing was at the base of the s.h.i.+loh position. But the point at which, by the original orders, Buell was to join was Savannah, nine miles north along the Tennessee. So Grant had to keep in touch with both. He had not ignored the advantage of entrenching. But the best line for entrenching was too far from good water; and he thought he chose the lesser of two evils when he devoted the time that might have been used for digging to drilling instead. His army was raw as an army; many of the men were still rawer recruits; and, as usual, the recruiting authorities had sent him several brand-new battalions, which knew nothing at all, instead of sending the same men as reinforcements to older battalions that could "learn 'em how." Grant's total effectives at first were only thirty-three thousand. This made the odds five to four in favor of Johnston's attack. But the rejoining of Lew Wallace's division, the great reinforcement by Buell's troops, and the two ironclad gunboats on the river, raised Grant's final effective grand total to sixty thousand. The combined grand totals therefore reached a hundred thousand--double the totals at Donelson and far exceeding those at Bull Run.

After a horrible week of cold and wet the sun set clear and calm on Sat.u.r.day, the eve of battle. The woods were alive with forty thousand Confederates all ready for their supreme attack on the thirty-three thousand Federals on their immediate four-mile front.

Grant's front ran, facing south, between Owl and Lick Creeks, two tributaries that joined the Tennessee on either side of Pittsburg Landing. Buell's advance division, under Nelson, was just across the Tennessee. But Grant was in no hurry to get it over. His rea.s.suring wire that night to Halleck said: "The main force of the enemy is at Corinth. I have scarcely the faintest idea of an attack (general one) being made upon us." But the skirmis.h.i.+ng farther south on Friday had warned Grant, as well as Sherman and the vigilant Prentiss, that Johnston might be trying a reconnaissance in force--the very thing that Beauregard wished the Confederates to do.

Long before the beautiful dawn of Sunday, the fateful sixth of April, Prentiss had thrown out from the center a battalion which presently met and drove in the vanguard of the first Confederate line of a.s.sault. The Confederate center soon came up, overwhelmed this advanced battalion, and burst like a storm on the whole of Prentiss's division. Then, above the swelling roar of mult.i.tudinous musketry, rose the thunder of the first big guns. "Note the hour, please, gentlemen," said Johnston; and a member of his staff wrote down: "5:14 A.M."

Johnston's admirable plan was, first, to drive Grant's left clear of Lick Creek, then drive it clear of Pittsburg Landing, where the two Federal ironclads were guarding the ferry. This, combined with a determined general a.s.sault on the rest of Grant's line, would huddle the retreating Federals into the cramped angle between Owl Creek and the Tennessee and force them to surrender. But there were three great obstacles to this: Sherman on the right, the "Hornet's Nest"

in the center, and the gunboats at the Landing. Worse still for the Confederates, Buell was now too close at hand. Three days earlier Johnston had wired from Corinth to the Government at Richmond: "Hope engagement before Buell can form junction." But the troubles of the march had lost him one whole priceless day.

The Confederate attack was splendidly gallant and at first pushed home regardless of loss. The ground was confusing to both sides: a bewilderment of ups and downs, of underbrush, woods, fields, and clumps of trees, criss-cross paths, small creeks, ravines, and swamps, without a single commanding height or any outstanding features except the two big creeks, the river, and the Pittsburg Landing.

At the first signs of a big battle Grant hurried to the field, first sending a note to Buell, whom he was to have met at Savannah, then touching at Crump's Landing on the way, to see Lew Wallace and make sure whether this, and not the Pittsburg Landing, was the point of attack. Arrived on the field of s.h.i.+loh, calm and determined as ever, he was rea.s.sured by finding how well Sherman was holding his raw troops in hand at the extremely important point of s.h.i.+loh itself, next to Owl Creek.

But elsewhere the prospect was not encouraging, though the men got under arms very fast and most of them fought very well. The eager gray lines kept pressing on like the rising tide of an angry sea, das.h.i.+ng in fury against all obstructing fronts and swirling round the disconnecting flanks. The blue lines, for the most part, resisted till the swift gray tide threatened to cut them off. Half of Prentiss's remaining men were in fact cut off that afternoon and forced to surrender with their chief, whose conduct, like their own, was worthy of all praise. Back and still back the blue lines went before the encroaching gray, each losing heavily by sheer hard fighting at the front and streams of stragglers running towards the rear.

Sherman, like others, gave ground, but still held his men together, except for the stragglers he could not control. In the center C.

F. Smith's division, with Hurlbut's in support, and all that was left of Prentiss's, defended themselves so desperately that their enemies called their position the Hornet's Nest. Here the fight swayed back and forth for hours, with ghastly losses on both sides.

C. F. Smith himself was on his deathbed at Savannah. But he heard the roar of battle. His excellent successor, W. H. L. Wallace, was killed; and battalions, brigades, and even divisions, soon became inextricably mixed together. There was now the same confusion on the Confederate side, where Johnston was wounded by a bullet from the Hornet's Nest. It was not in itself a mortal wound. But, knowing how vital this point was, he went on encouraging his men till, falling from the saddle, he was carried back to die.

Grant still felt confident; though he had seen the worst in the rear as well as the best at the front. Two of his brand-new battalions, the very men who afterwards fought like heroes, when they had learned the soldier's work, now ran like hares. "During the day," says Grant, "I rode back as far as the river and met General Buell, who had just arrived. There probably were as many as four or five thousand stragglers lying under cover of the river bluff, panic-stricken. As we left the boat Buell's attention was attracted by these men. I saw him berating them and trying to shame them into joining their regiments. He even threatened them with sh.e.l.ls from the gunboats nearby. But all to no effect. Most of these men afterward proved themselves as gallant as any of those who saved the battle from which they had deserted."

By half-past five, after twelve hours' fighting, Grant at last succeeded in forming a new and shorter line, a mile behind that morning's front, but without any dangerous gaps. There were three reorganized divisions--Sherman's, McClernand's, and Hurlbut's, one fresh division under Nelson, and a strong land battery of over twenty field guns helping the two ironclad gunboats in the defense of Pittsburg Landing. The Confederate effectives, reduced by heavy losses and by as many stragglers as the Federals, were now faced by five thousand fresh men on guard at the Landing. Beauregard, who had succeeded Johnston, then stopped the battle for the day, with the idea of retiring next morning to Corinth. But, before his orders reached it, his battle-worn right made a desperate, fruitless, and costly attack on the immensely strengthened Landing.

That night the rain came down in torrents; and the Confederates sought shelter in the tents the Federals had abandoned. They found little rest there, being hara.s.sed all through the bleak dark by the big sh.e.l.ls that the gunboats threw among them.

At dawn Grant, now reinforced by twenty-five thousand fresh men under Buell and Lew Wallace, took the offensive. Beauregard, hopelessly outnumbered and without a single fresh man, retired on Corinth, magnificently covered by Bragg's rearguard, which held the Federals back for hours near the crucial point of s.h.i.+loh Church.

s.h.i.+loh was the fiercest battle ever fought in the River War. The losses were over ten thousand a side in killed and wounded; while a thousand Confederates and three thousand Federals were captured. It was a Confederate failure; but hardly the kind of victory the Federals needed just then, before the consummate triumph of Farragut at New Orleans. It brought together Federal forces that the Confederates could not possibly withstand, even on their new line east from Memphis.

But it did not raise the Federal, or depress the Confederate, morale.

Four days after the battle Halleck arrived at Pittsburg Landing and took command of the combined armies. He was soon reinforced by Pope; whereupon he divided the whole into right and left wings, center, and reserve, each under its own commander. Grant was made second in command of the whole. But, as Halleck dealt directly with his other immediate subordinates, Grant simply became the fifth wheel of the Halleckian slow-coach, which, after twenty days of preparation, began, with most elaborate precautions, its crawl toward Corinth.

Grant's position became so nearly unbearable that he applied more than once for transfer to some other place. But this was refused.

So he strove to do his impossible duty till the middle of July, when his punishment for s.h.i.+loh was completed by his promotion to command a depleted remnant of Halleck's Grand Army. It is not by any means the least of Grant's claims to real greatness that, as a leader, he was able to survive his most searching trials: the surprise at s.h.i.+loh, the misunderstandings and arrest that followed s.h.i.+loh, the slur of being made a fifth-wheel second-in-command, the demoralizing strain of that "most anxious period of the war"

when his depleted forces were thrown back on the defensive, and the eight discouraging months of Sisyphean offensive which preceded his triumph at Vicksburg. No one who has not been in the heart of things with fighting fleets or armies can realize what it means to all ranks when there is, or even is supposed to be, "something wrong" with the living pivot on which the whole force turns. And only those who have been behind the scenes of war's all-testing drama can understand what it means for even an imagined "failure"

to "come back."

Corinth was of immense importance to both sides, as it commanded the rails not only east and west, from the Tennessee to Memphis, but north and south, from the Ohio to New Orleans and Mobile. Though New Orleans was taken by Farragut on the twenty-fifth of April, the rails between Vicksburg and Port Hudson remained in Confederate hands till next year; while Mobile remained so till the year after that.

Beauregard collected all the troops he could at Corinth. Yet, even with Van Dorn's and other reinforcements, he had only sixty thousand effectives against Halleck's double numbers. Moreover, the loss of three States and many battles had so shaken the Confederate forces that they stood no chance whatever against Halleck's double numbers in the open. All the same, Halleck burrowed slowly forward like a mole, entrenching every night as if the respective strengths and victories had been reversed.

After advancing nearly a mile a day Halleck closed in on Corinth.

He was so deeply entrenched that no one could tell from appearances which side was besieging the other. Towards the end of May many Federal railwaymen reported that empty trains could be heard running into Corinth and full trains running out. But, as the Confederates greeted each arriving "empty" with tremendous cheers, Halleck felt sure that Beauregard was being greatly reinforced. The Confederate bluff worked to admiration. On the twenty-sixth Beauregard issued orders for complete evacuation on the twenty-ninth. On the thirtieth Halleck drew up his whole grand army ready for a desperate defense against an enemy that had already gone a full day's march away.

In the meantime the Federal flotilla had been fighting its way down the Mississippi, under (the invalided) Foote's very capable successor, Flag-Officer Charles Henry Davis. The Confederates had very few naval men on the river, but many of their Mississippi skippers were game to the death. They rammed Federal vessels on the tenth of May at Fort Pillow, eighty miles above Memphis. Eight of their fighting craft were strongly built and heavily armored, though very deficient in speed. The Federal flotilla was very well manned by first-cla.s.s naval ratings, and was reinforced early in June by seven fast new rams, commanded by their designer, Colonel Charles Ellet, a famous civil engineer.

At sunrise on the lovely sixth of June the Federal flotilla, having overcome the Confederate posts farther north and being joined by Ellet's rams, lay near Memphis. The Confederates came upstream to the attack, expecting to ram the gunboats in the stern as they had at Fort Pillow. But Ellet suddenly darted down on the eight Confederate ironclads, caught one of them on the broadside, sank her, and disabled two others. The action then became general. The overmatched Confederates kept up a losing battle for more than an hour, in full view of many thousands of ardent Southerners ash.o.r.e.

The scene, at its height, was appalling. The smoke, belching black from the funnels and white from the guns, made a suffocating pall overhead; while the dark, squat, hideous ironclad hulls seemed to have risen from a submarine inferno to stab each other with livid tongues of flame--so deadly close the two flotillas fought. When the awful hour was over the Confederates were not only defeated but destroyed; and a wail went up from the thousands of their anguished friends, as if the very sh.o.r.es were mourning.

For the next month Grant held the command at Memphis. Then, on the eleventh of July, Halleck was recalled to Was.h.i.+ngton as General-in-Chief of the whole army; while Pope was transferred to Virginia. The Federal invasion of Virginia under that "Young Napoleon,"

McClellan, had not been a success against Lee and Stonewall Jackson.

Nor did it improve with Pope at the front and Halleck in the rear, as we shall presently see; though Halleck had declared that Pope's operations at Island Number Ten were destined to immortal fame, and Pope himself admitted his own greatness in sundry proclamations to the world.

The campaign now entered its second phase. The Virginian wing (of the whole front reaching from the Mississippi to the sea) was checked this summer; and was to remain more or less checked for many a long day. The river wing, under the general direction of Halleck, had also reached its limit for '62 about the same time, after having conquered Kentucky and western Tennessee as well as the Mississippi down to Memphis.

This river wing was now depleted of some excellent troops and again divided into quite separate commands. Buell commanded the Army of the Ohio. Grant commanded his own Army of the Tennessee and Rosecrans's Army of the Mississippi. Buell's scene of action lay between the tributary streams--Ohio, c.u.mberland, and Tennessee--with Chattanooga as his ultimate objective. Grant's scene of action lay along the southward rails and Mississippi, with Vicksburg as his ultimate objective.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Civil War Campaigns of 1862]

The Confederates were of course set on recovering complete control of the line of Southern rails that made direct connections between the Mississippi Valley and the sea: crossing the western tributaries of the St. Francis and White Rivers; then running east from Memphis, through Grand Junction, Corinth, and Iuka, to Chattanooga; thence forking off northeast, through Knoxville, to Was.h.i.+ngton, Richmond, and Norfolk; and southeast to Charleston and Savannah. Confederate attention had originally been fixed on Corinth and Chattanooga.

But General O. M. Mitchel's abortive raid, just after s.h.i.+loh, had also drawn it to the part between. The Federals therefore found their enemy alert at every point.

Braxton Bragg, Beauregard's successor and Buell's opponent, basing himself on Chattanooga, tried to drive his line of Confederate reconquest through the heart of Tennessee and thence through mid-Kentucky, with the Ohio as his ultimate objective. His colleagues near the Mississippi, Van Dorn and Sterling Price, meanwhile tried to effect the reconquest of the Memphis-Corinth rails that Grant and Rosecrans were holding.

All main offensives, on both sides, ultimately failed in this latter half of the river campaign of '62. So nothing but the bare fact that they were attempted needs any notice here.

In August, about the time that Lee and Jackson were maneuvering in Virginia to bring on the Second Bull Run, Price and Bragg began their respective advances against Grant and Buell. Buell was at Murfreesboro, defending Nashville. Bragg, screened by the hills of eastern Tennessee, made for the Ohio at Louisville and Cincinnati.