The History of the Confederate War, Its Causes and Its Conduct. Volume 1 of 2

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

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.