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

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.