100 Mistakes That Changed History (26 page)

Millard Fillmore took office because Zachary Taylor made some stupid choices. On the Fourth of July 1850, President Taylor spent hours in the hot sun at the dedication of the Washington Memorial. He then went back to the White House and helped himself to a lot of cold water, a large bowl of cherries, and finally some iced milk. The problem with this was that Washington, D.C., was in the midst of a particularly virulent cholera epidemic. Cholera is transmitted through tainted water. Everyone had been warned not to drink the water, eat fruit washed in the city’s water, or have anything containing ice made from the city’s water. Taylor did all three and was dead four days later. This made his vice president head of the nation in one of its most troubling times. Fillmore was not as strong a leader or as decisive as his predecessor. Where Taylor had stopped the Clay Compromise, Fillmore saw it as a needed solution. This admitted California as a free state and tightened the laws in the north regarding the return of fugitive slaves. Since the Fugitive Slave Act was unenforceable in the abolitionist north, the south felt betrayed. The Clay Compromise ended up doing more harm than good. That was it. Fillmore did nothing else and was dropped by his party in 1852. More than two years were lost through inaction.

Franklin Pierce was a last-minute candidate who first appeared on the thirty-fifth nomination vote at the Democratic Convention. That party was split between proslavery southern representatives and those who were just as vehemently abolitionists. Pierce was a doughface, a northerner who favored slavery. Pierce won the nomination and the presidency. But once in office, he proved totally ineffective in dealing with the slavery problem on any level.

Actually Pierce did more damage to what had been already worked out when he did try to act. When the issue of expansion of the United States into its western territories blew up over which would be free and which slave states, he helped Frederick Douglass destroy the Missouri Compromise. The citizens of Kansas and Nebraska were allowed to vote, slave or free. The resulting violence gave rise to the term “Bleeding Kansas,” and the split between north and south became greater. President Pierce was never again able to deal with the issue of slavery or much else. Mostly he went drinking and argued with his critics. By the end of his term, Pierce had proved himself abysmal at diplomacy and had a habit of substituting bluster for action. He alienated even his own party. In 1856 the motto of the Democratic Convention was “Anybody but Pierce.” When James Buchanan took office everyone forgot to get President Pierce to ride in the inaugural parade. He never did get to it. Because of Pierce, four more crucial years were lost, and the nation became more divided.

James Buchanan had been a really good trial lawyer and made a fortune at it. This was good as it gave him something to live on after being one of the worst U.S. presidents ever. He could not have come along at a worse time. When the problem of slavery had begun to overwhelm all other issues and split the nation, he proved to be a weak hand on the rudder of the ship of state. The former lawyer really got elected more for where he was during the election of 1856 than for who he was or what he stood for. While everyone else had gotten soiled over the violence resulting from the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Buchanan was ambassador to England. This made him just about the only generally popular and untarnished candidate the Democrats could field. The new Republican Party did well, but the Democratic machine managed to win just one more time. The problem then was that Buchanan had no idea what was going on. Once president, he was indecisive, and he fluctuated between proslavery and antislavery positions until he had alienated both sides. One is hard put to find any substantial accomplishments in any area by Buchanan, even at a time when the United States was tearing itself apart.

In a list of the worst presidents in history, all three from the 1850s make the top ten. Some argue James Buchanan was the worst while other historians hold out for Franklin Pierce. All three were totally ineffective at dealing with the most pressing problem of their day. By the time Abraham Lincoln replaced Buchanan as president, the nation was divided and was soon at war with itself. Three men who led the nation did nothing, and by doing nothing, they doomed the United States to a civil war and hundreds of thousands of deaths.

51

STUBBORN

The Man Who Prolonged
the Civil War
1861

M
ore than 600,000 men on both sides died in the American Civil War. The war lasted nearly five years and devastated much of the southern United States. Had the Union won the first battle of the war, there is a good chance that the war might have ended within weeks when compromises were still possible. In the first battles of the Civil War, both sides struggled to understand command and maneuver. But one side was better armed than the other, and that helped make a difference.

Because of the Union’s greater industrial capabilities, most people today are under the impression that the Union Army was always better equipped. This was certainly the case by 1862, but due to a mistake made by James Wolfe Ripley, as the chief of ordnance, this was not true at the start of the war.

In July 1861, Ripley took over the office that purchased all of the weapons and equipment used by the Union Army and Navy. He was sixty-seven years old at the time he was appointed chief. He had fought in the War of 1812, against the Creek and Seminole tribes under Andrew Jackson, and more recently in the Mexican War. He also had been working with ordnance and supply for more than thirty years before he became the top decision maker in that office. He was brought in because his predecessor was inefficient and unable to change with the times. Unfortunately for the Union armies, Ripley proved worse.

Just as the war started and before the Battle of Bull Run (Manassas Creek), the British had completed changing over most of their army to using a new Enfield rifle. This left them with warehouses full of almost 100,000 perfectly usable rifled muskets. The British immediately contacted Ripley, as it was apparent that the U.S. government was going to need a lot of weapons quickly, and offered them to him. The mistake was that Ripley immediately and adamantly turned down the offer.

There were probably a number of reasons that the chief of ordnance did not take the British muskets. It cannot be forgotten that he had actually fought against the British in the War of 1812. Also, there was national pride. The stated reason that he turned down the weapons was “Buy American.” There is also the suspicion that Ripley stood to personally gain by limiting all purchases to American-made weapons. He held some ownership in a U.S.based weapons company. But the real reason, his later actions showed, was that the man who determined for two years what the Union Army fought with was simply hidebound and opposed to any change.

When Ripley turned down the British weapons, they were quickly snatched up by the Confederacy. This meant that for the first months of the war, while Union units struggled with getting the right ammunition for a range of mismatched muskets, the Confederate troops were almost all armed with fairly modern muskets of the same caliber. They were, for those first months, better armed and more easily supplied than the Union soldiers they fought.

James Wolfe Ripley continued in his stubborn resistance to new ideas and weapons until removed from the top position in September 1863. In those two years, he resisted breech-loading weapons, refused to buy the Spencer or other repeating rifles, and kept the army from purchasing any substantial number of Gatling guns. Ripley did not cost the North a victory, but he made it harder to achieve by denying his side the most modern weapons and equipment. And it seemed he did this for no reason other than his own aversion to anything new or different. In a war that marked the beginning of modern technological warfare, Chief of Ordnance Ripley’s decisions slowed a Union victory more than the mistakes of any one general.

52

TECH FAILURE AND PANIC

Fear of the Unknown
1863

I
f it had not been for a lightning strike, the American Civil War might have ended in 1863 with Joseph Hooker considered one of the great generals in history. The problem that helped doom Hooker, and partially cost the Union a victory at Chancellorsville, is one that is also a cautionary tale of depending on new and untested technology in battle.

The Army of the Potomac went through a lot of generals in the first years of the American Civil War. Among those generals was “Fighting” Joseph Hooker. He was in command at the Battle of Chancellorsville, which took place in late April 1863. There were a lot of reasons for the Union defeat, including the brilliant flank march in which Stonewall Jackson died. But preeminent among the reasons for the Union Army being defeated, historians agree, was a loss of nerve by General Hooker.

Hooker’s battle plan was excellent and had a good chance of defeating Robert E. Lee. It made use of the Union’s superior numbers to pin the bulk of the Army of Virginia while flanking it with the rest of the larger army. Hooker had been given a number of the new Beardslee Patent Magneto-Electric Field Telegraph Machines to send commands. These early telegraph units used a hand crank and no battery. One of the problems with these almost untested devices was that they used a visual display on a moving dial to send letters and not Morse Code. Because of this, the telegraphs were easily thrown out of adjustment, making all future messages gibberish. They also had a range of only seven miles between machines. The short range meant that messages had to be relayed between stations established along the line of march. Every seven miles there had to be an operator who read a message and then passed it on to the next machine. For a twenty-one-mile message, they needed four trained operators. Setting up a string of sensitive Beardslees during a battle was no easy task, considering the machine itself weighed a hundred pounds, and it used a heavy copper cable that was easily grounded and decayed over a matter of just weeks. During the Chancellorsville battle, in their haste to get a line set up, old cable had been reused. This further garbled signals, and then one of the awkward machines was found to have been hit by lightning and could not be repaired anywhere closer than New York City. Hooker had been led to believe his communications with his generals would be almost instantaneous; instead, they proved to be almost nonexistent.

Things started well with three corps of Hooker’s army crossing both the Rappahannock River and Rapidan River undetected. Within a day, the Army of the Potomac began to concentrate at Chancellorsville. That placed it in a position to attack Fredericksburg. Lee met this threat by leaving a small force, under Jubal Early, in Fredericksburg and moving to meet Hooker with most of his army. Hearing that Lee was approaching, Hooker halted and prepared to meet him. The plan was to wait until attacked and then move unengaged units to stop or flank the Army of Virginia. This was ceding the initiative to the Southern commander.

This might have worked for Hooker if his primary means of communications had not broken down almost from the start. He had begun the battle with machines that were supposed to allow him instant communications with his commanders. But his Beardslee telegraphs very quickly either ceased to work at all or sent unintelligible messages. This left the Union Army with only signal flags and couriers for getting information to and from its spread-out commanders. But most of those commanders had correctly realized that the Southern soldiers were reading their signals, so they refused to use the flag semaphores. With Lee approaching and Hooker’s communications collapsed, it is not surprising that Hooker was worried. He had been given the expectation of leading a carefully controlled defense; instead he found himself shadowboxing in an information blackout.

Just at the point where Jackson was turning his flank, Hooker could get information only by courier. By the time he was notified of the flank attack, entire regiments were retreating. When Jackson’s troops smashed the Union XI Corps, Hooker wrongly concluded that Lee had somehow outnumbered him by two to one. It is easy to see bogeymen everywhere when you are being kept in the dark. Simply put, for a variety of reasons, General Fighting Joe Hooker was losing his nerve. The next day, the Confederate forces attacked both of Hooker’s flanks. He withdrew to a defensive position and by the next day he was back across the rivers to where the Army of the Potomac had started, leaving thousands of dead and captured behind.

Fighting Joe Hooker’s army lost the Battle of Chancellorsville because their commander lost his nerve. The flank attack and holding action make this one of Robert E. Lee’s most brilliant battles. But Hooker’s failure was certainly helped by what was one of the Union Army’s first, but hardly the last, technological failures in battle. Incidentally, the Union never again trusted or used in battle the Beardslee telegraph.

53

GETTING CARRIED AWAY COSTS THE WAR

A Ride Too Far
1863

T
he Confederacy needed a dramatic victory. There had been some serious losses in the west, but the larger Union Army had been kept at bay in Virginia. What was needed in June 1863 was a victory that showed that the South could not only defend itself but could take the war into the North. They needed to show that they had some chance of actually winning the war, not just holding on longer. This would provide the impetus for England and France to recognize them as a nation. Then the European navies would break the Union blockade, and it would be a whole new war. Robert E. Lee’s decision to take the Army of Virginia north into Pennsylvania was a political, not a military, one. But this one mistake started a series of events that had the opposite effect. It ultimately doomed the Confederate cause because of very uncharacteristic mistakes he made near a small town named Gettysburg.