Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (104 page)

Military matters preoccupied Lincoln as he uttered these words. For two months, events in both the western and eastern theaters had been deteriorating to the point where by mid-September three southern armies were on the march northward in a bold bid for victory. But within the next few weeks the Confederate tide receded southward again without prevailing, thus ending the chance for European recognition and giving Lincoln the victory he needed to issue the emancipation proclamation.

40
.
CWL
, V, 388–89.

41
.
Ibid.
, 419–21.

17
Carry Me Back to Old Virginny

I

While Lee was driving McClellan away from Richmond, prospects also began to turn sour for Union forces in the West. The conquest of the Mississippi bogged down before Vicksburg. Triumphs on land came to a halt at Corinth. Why did this happen? The usual answer is to blame Halleck for dispersing his army and missing a grand opportunity to cripple the rebellion in the Mississippi Valley. The true answer is more complex.

Four tasks faced Halleck after his army of 110,000 occupied Corinth at the end of May. 1) Push on south after the retreating rebels and try to capture Vicksburg from the rear. 2) Send a force against Chattanooga to "liberate" east Tennessee. 3) Repair and defend the network of railroads that supplied Federal armies in this theater. 4) Organize occupation forces to preserve order, administer the contraband camps where black refugees had gathered, protect unionists trying to reconstruct Tennessee under military governor Andrew Johnson whom Lincoln had sent to Nashville, and oversee the revival of trade with the North in occupied areas. In the best of all possible worlds, Halleck would have done all four tasks simultaneously. But he did not have the resources to do so. Secretary of War Stanton and General Grant thought his first priority ought to be the capture of Vicksburg. Halleck's decision to defer this effort in favor of the other three has been the subject of much critical appraisal. An all-out campaign against Vicksburg, according to the critics, might have severed this Confederate artery and shortened the war.
¹

This thesis overlooks some physical, logistical, and political realities. The disease problem for unacclimated northern soldiers has already been mentioned. An unusually wet spring had turned into a disastrously dry summer. The streams and springs that supplied water for men and horses were rapidly drying up in northern Mississippi. Several cavalry and infantry brigades did pursue the Confederates twenty miles south of Corinth but could go no farther by July for lack of water.
²
Halleck's detachment of several brigades for railroad repair and guard duty was not so obtuse as it is sometimes portrayed, for as the rivers dropped below navigable stage the armies became wholly dependent on rail supply. Any overland campaign against Vicksburg would have been vulnerable to rebel raids on railroads and supply depots, as Grant learned six months later when such raids compelled him to abandon his first campaign against Vicksburg. Other brigades had to be detached from combat forces for the politically necessary tasks of policing and administering occupied territory. Finally, Lincoln's cherished aim of restoring east Tennessee made this political goal into a top military priority.
³

Halleck therefore divided the Army of the Tennessee
⁴
under Grant into several fragments for occupation and railroad-repair duties, detached a division to reinforce Union troops confronting a new threat in Arkansas, and ordered the 40,000 men in the Army of the Ohio under Buell to move against Chattanooga. Buell's campaign—the major Union effort in the West during the summer of 1862—turned out as badly as McClellan's drive against Richmond. As old army friends, Buell and McClellan had much in common. Buell's idea of strategy was similar to McClellan's: "The object is," wrote Buell, "not to fight great battles,

1
.
Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant
, 2 vols. (New York, 1886), I, 381–84; Bruce Catton,
Grant Moves South
(Boston, 1960), 278–79; Foote,
Civil War
, I, 542–45; Nevins,
War
, II, 112.

2
. Col. Edward Hatch of the 2nd Iowa Cavalry to Thomas Smith, July 10, 1862, Civil War Collection, Henry E. Huntington Library.

3
. For defenses of Halleck, see Stephen E. Ambrose,
Halleck: Lincoln's Chief of Staff
(Baton Rouge, 1962), 55–57; and Herman Hattaway and Archer Jones,
How the North Won: A Military History of the Civil War
(Urbana, Ill., 1983), 205–6.

4
. Sometimes called the Army of West Tennessee in 1862. The Army of the Tennessee was formally designated in October 1862 and known by that name for the rest of the war. When Halleck went to Washington as general in chief in July 1862, command of the two principal Union armies in the West was divided between Grant and Buell.

and storm impregnable fortifications, but by demonstrations and maneuvering to prevent the enemy from concentrating his scattered forces."
⁵

A political conservative, Buell also believed in limited war for limited goals. This slowed his drive toward Chattanooga along the railroad from Corinth through northern Alabama. Guerrillas cut his supply lines frequently. "We are attacked nightly at bridges and outposts," reported one division commander. Buell's belief in a "soft" war precluded a ruthless treatment of the civilian population that sheltered guerrillas or a levy upon this population for supplies. Buell therefore could move only as fast as repair crews could rebuild bridges and re-lay rails. Three weeks after leaving Corinth he had advanced only ninety miles and was still less than halfway to Chattanooga. On July 8, Halleck informed the harassed Buell: "The President telegraphs that your progress is not satisfactory and that you should move more rapidly."
⁶

By this time the Army of the Ohio was approaching Stevenson, Alabama, where it opened a new rail supply line from Nashville. But Buell's troubles had barely begun. Just as the first trainload of supplies started south from Nashville on July 13, Nathan Bedford Forrest's cavalry struck the Union garrison at Murfreesboro. Forrest captured the garrison, wrecked the railroad, and escaped eastward through the Cumberland Mountains before a division sent by Buell could catch him. When the repair crews finished mending the damage, Forrest struck again, destroying three bridges just south of Nashville and once more escaping the pursuing Federals. Forrest's attacks stalled Buell's creeping advance for more than two weeks. From Washington came further word of "great dissatisfaction." When Buell tried to explain, back came a threat of removal if he did not remedy his "apparent want of energy and activity."
⁷

As Buell finally prepared to cross the Tennessee River twenty miles from Chattanooga, disaster struck again in the form of yet another rebel cavalry raid. This time the enemy commander was John Hunt Morgan, a thirty-six-year-old Kentuckian whose style combined elements of Stuart's dash and Forrest's ferocity. Soft-spoken, a fastidious dresser, Morgan had raised a brigade of lean and hard Kentucky horsemen who first achieved fame in July 1862 with a thousand-mile raid through Kentucky

5
. Buell to "My Dear Friend," Dec. 18, 1861, Civil War Collection, Henry E. Huntingon Library.

6
.
O.R
., Ser. I, Vol. 10, pt. 2, p. 180, Vol. 16, pt. 2, p. 104.

7
.
Ibid.
, Vol. 16, pt. 2, p. 360.

and middle Tennessee that captured 1,200 prisoners and tons of supplies at the cost of fewer than ninety Confederate casualties. In mid-August, Morgan's merry men suddenly reappeared in middle Tennessee and blocked the railroad north of Nashville by pushing flaming boxcars into an 800-foot tunnel, causing the timbers to burn and the tunnel to cave in. This exploit cut Buell off from his main supply base at Louisville.

These cavalry raids illustrated the South's advantage in fighting on the defensive in their own territory. With 2,500 men Forrest and Morgan had immobilized an invading army of forty thousand. Living off the friendly countryside and fading into the hills like guerrillas, rebel horsemen could strike at times and places of their own choosing. To defend all the bridges, tunnels, and depots along hundreds of miles of railroad was virtually impossible, for guerrillas and cavalry could carry out hit-and-run raids against isolated garrisons or undefended stretches almost with impunity. The only effective counterforce would be Union cavalry equally well mounted and led, with troopers who knew the country and could ride and shoot as well as the southerners. Such a force could track and intercept rebel cavalry, could fight on equal terms, and could carry out its own raids deep into the Confederate rear. Union commanders learned these things the hard way in 1862. The Yankees did not catch up with the rebels in this respect until 1863, when they finally began to give as good as they got in the war of cavalry raids.

Buell's campaign also illustrated the strengths and weaknesses of railroad logistics. The iron horse could transport more men and supplies farther and faster than the four-legged variety. As an invading force operating on exterior lines over greater distances, Union armies depended more on rail transport than did the Confederates. In January 1862 the northern Congress authorized the president to take over any railroad "when in his judgment the public safety may require it." The government rarely exercised this power in northern states, though Stanton used it as a prod to induce railroads to give priority and fair rates to military traffic. But in the occupied South the government went into the railroad business on a large scale. In February 1862 Stanton established the U.S. Military Rail Roads and appointed Daniel McCallum superintendent. A former Erie Railroad executive and an efficient administrator, McCallum eventually presided over more than 2,000 miles of lines acquired, built, and maintained by the U.S.M.R.R. in conquered portions of the South.

The War Department in Richmond did not achieve similar control over southern railroads until May 1863, and thereafter rarely exercised this power. There was no southern counterpart of the U.S.M.R.R. The Confederate government was never able to coax the fragmented, rundown, multi-gauged network of southern railroads into the same degree of efficiency exhibited by northern roads. This contrast illustrated another dimension of Union logistical superiority that helped the North eventually to prevail.
⁸

But in 1862 the dependence of Union armies on railroads proved as much curse as blessing. "Railroads are the weakest things in war," declared Sherman; "a single man with a match can destroy and cut off communications." Although "our armies pass across and through the land, the war closes in behind and leaves the same enemy behind," Sherman continued. It was the fate of any "railroad running through a country where every house is a nest of secret, bitter enemies" to suffer "bridges and water-tanks burned, trains fired into, track torn up" and "engines run off and badly damaged."
⁹
These experiences would ultimately teach Union generals the same lesson that Napoleon had put into practice a half-century earlier. The huge armies of the French emperor could not have been supplied by the wagon transport of that era, so they simply lived off the country they swarmed through like locusts.

Buell was unwilling to fight this kind of war, and that led to his downfall. Braxton Bragg, the new commander of the Confederate Army of Mississippi (soon to be known as the Army of Tennessee), saw the opening created by Morgan's and Forrest's raids against Buell's supply lines. "Our cavalry is paving the way for me in Middle Tennessee and Kentucky," he wrote in late July.
¹⁰
Bragg decided to leave 32,000 men in Mississippi under Van Dorn and Price to defend Vicksburg and central Mississippi. He planned to take the remaining 34,000 to Chattanooga, from where he would launch an invasion of Kentucky. Bragg hoped to repeat the Morgan and Forrest strategy on a larger scale. Buell would be forced to follow him and might present Bragg an opportunity to hit the Federals in the flank. If Grant moved to Buell's aid, Van Dorn and Price could strike northward to recover western Tennessee.

8
. Robert C. Black,
The Railroads of the Confederacy
(Chapel Hill, 1952); Thomas Weber,
The Northern Railroads in the Civil War
, 1861–1865 (New York, 1952); George E. Turner,
Victory Rode the Rails
(Indianapolis, 1953). At the beginning of the war there were 113 railroad companies in the Confederacy operating 9,000 miles of track of three different gauges.