Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (88 page)

An embittered McClellan later charged that the administration did not want him, a Democrat, to succeed. This accusation contained little if any truth; indeed, Republicans fumed at the general's apparent lack of will to succeed. During the first week of April about 55,000 of McClellan's troops approached the Confederate defenses near the old Revolutionary War battlefield at Yorktown. Dug in behind the Warwick River were fewer than 13,000 rebels commanded by John B. Magruder. McClellan hesitated to attack, believing that the strength of the southern works would make the cost in casualties too high. "Prince John" Magruder did his best to encourage this conviction. A lover of the theater, Magruder staged a pageant for McClellan. He marched his infantry in endless circles and moved his artillery noisily from place to place, to give the impression of having more men than he actually had. McClellan reacted as Magruder hoped. He concluded that he could take Yorktown only by a siege. This news distressed Lincoln. "I think you had better break the enemies' line . . . at once," the president wired McClellan. "By delay the enemy will relatively gain upon you." Lincoln tried to warn McClellan about growing Republican doubts of his loyalty. "It is indispensable to
you
that you strike a blow. . . . The country will not fail to note—is now noting—that the present hesitation to move upon an entrenched enemy, is but the story of Manassas repeated. . . . I have never written you . . . in greater kindness of feeling than now, nor with a fuller purpose to sustain you. . . .
But you must act
."
⁴⁴

McClellan did not act; instead he wrote to his wife that if Lincoln wanted to break the rebel lines, "he had better come & do it himself." While the general complained of his difficult position with "the rebels on one side, & the abolitionists & other scoundrels on the other," he brought up his sappers and siege guns. Week after week went by as Union artillery prepared to blast the rebels from their trenches with mortars and 200-pound shells. Lincoln felt driven to distraction by this "indefinite procrastination." As he had warned, the Confederates used the delay to shift Johnston's whole army to the Peninsula.
⁴⁵

An inspection of the Yorktown defenses convinced Johnston that they were hopelessly weak: "No one but McClellan could have hesitated to attack."
⁴⁶
Johnston recommended withdrawal all the way to prepared defenses just outside Richmond itself. But Jefferson Davis and Robert

44
. Lincoln to McClellan, April 6, 9, 1862,
CWL
, V, 182, 185.

45
. McClellan to Ellen Marcy McClellan, April 8, 30, 1862, McClellan Papers, Library of Congress; Lincoln to McClellan, May 1, 1862,
CWL
, V, 203.

46
. Johnston to Robert E. Lee, April 22, 1862,
O.R
., Ser. I, Vol. 11, pt. 3, p. 456.

E. Lee vetoed this proposal and ordered Johnston to defend the York-town line as long as possible. Lee's role in this matter was a measure of Davis's loss of confidence in Johnston. The president had recalled Lee from Savannah in March and installed him in Richmond as a sort of assistant commander in chief. Johnston hung on at Yorktown until the beginning of May, when he knew that McClellan was about to pulverize the defenses with his siege guns. Rather than wait for this, Johnston evacuated the trenches on the night of May 3–4 and retreated up the Peninsula. Davis was as dismayed by this further loss as Lincoln was by the consumption of a month's time in accomplishing it. On May 5 a strong Confederate rear guard commanded by James Longstreet fought a delayed action near the old colonial capital of Williamsburg. At the cost of 1,700 casualties the rebels inflicted 2,200 and delayed the Union pursuit long enough to enable the rest of the army to get away with its artillery and wagons.

Frequent rains had impeded operations during April; even heavier rains bogged down the armies during May. The only significant action took place on the water. With Johnston's retreat, Norfolk and its navy yard were no longer tenable. The Confederates blew up everything there of military value—including the
Virginia
—and pulled out. The
Monitor
led a flotilla of five gunboats up the James River. Their captains dreamed of emulating Farragut by running the river batteries and steaming on to level their guns at Richmond. Confederate officials began packing the archives and preparing to leave the city. But they soon unpacked. On May 15 the batteries at Drewry's Bluff seven miles below Richmond stopped the gunboats. The
Monitor
proved ineffective because her guns could not be elevated enough to hit the batteries on the ninety-foot bluff. Rebel cannons punished the other boats with a plunging fire while sharpshooters along the banks picked off Yankee sailors. The fleet gave up; Richmond breathed a collective sigh of relief.

Despite the gleam of cheer afforded by the battle of Drewry's Bluff, a sense of impending doom pervaded the South. McClellan's army approached to within six miles of Richmond, while reports of defeats and retreats arrived almost daily from the West. In the crisis atmosphere created by these setbacks during the spring of 1862, the southern Congress enacted conscription and martial law. Internal disaffection increased; the Confederate dollar plummeted. During these same months a confident Union government released political prisoners, suspended recruiting, and placed northern war finances on a sound footing. In contrapuntal fashion, developments on the homefront responded to the rhythm of events on the battlefield.

14
The Sinews of War

I

So long as the South seemed to be winning the war, Jefferson Davis was an esteemed leader. But adversity clouded his reputation. The "patent and appalling evidences of inefficiency" demonstrated by the surrender of Forts Henry and Donelson had lost Davis "the confidence of the country," according to the
Richmond Whig
. Congressman William Boyce of South Carolina lamented "the incredible incompetency of our Executive" that "has brought us to the brink of ruin." George W. Bagby, editor of the
Southern Literary Messenger
and a Richmond correspondent for several newspapers, wrote during the spring of 1862: "We have reached a very dark hour. . . . Cold, haughty, peevish, narrow-minded, pig-headed,
malignant
, he [Davis] is the cause. While he lives, there is no hope."
¹

Davis resented what he considered "contemptible" attacks by men "who engage in strife for personal and party aggrandisement."
²
But he

1
.
Richmond Whig
, Feb. 15, March 18, 1862, quoted in Harrison A. Trexler, "The Davis Administration and the Richmond Press, 1861–1865,"
JSH
, 16 (1950), 187 and n.; Boyce to James Hammond, April 4, 12, 1862, in Rosser R. Taylor, "Boyce-Hammond Correspondence,"
JSH
, 3 (1937), 351–52; Emory M. Thomas,
The Confederate Nation
1861–1865 (New York, 1979), 142.

2
. Rowland,
Davis
, V, 209, 246.

was not free himself from the sins of excessive pride and willfulness. Austere and humorless, Davis did not suffer fools gladly. He lacked Lincoln's ability to work with partisans of a different persuasion for the common cause. Lincoln would rather win the war than an argument; Davis seemed to prefer winning the argument. Although he rarely defended himself in public, he sometimes privately lashed back at critics in a manner that only increased their hostility. Even Davis's devoted wife Varina admitted that "if anyone disagrees with Mr. Davis he resents it and ascribes the difference to the perversity of his opponent." Suffering from dyspepsia and a neuralgia that grew worse under wartime pressures and left him blind in one eye, Davis was wracked by constant pain that exacerbated his waspish temper. He recognized and regretted his thin-skinned defensiveness: "I wish I could learn just to let people alone who snap at me," Davis said to his wife in May 1862, "in forbearance and charity to turn away as well from the cats as the snakes."
³

The cats wanted the administration to wage war with more vigor and boldness. It must become a total war, wrote a Confederate general, "in which the whole population and the whole production . . . are to be put on a war footing, where every institution is to be made auxiliary to war."
⁴
In the spring of 1862 the Confederate government enacted two radical measures to carry out such recommendations—conscription and martial law. But these acts provoked even more venomous attacks from the snakes.

By the winter of 1861–62 the bloom had faded from southern enthusiasm for the war. "The romance of the thing is entirely worn off," wrote a soldier with Stonewall Jackson's brigade in the Shenandoah Valley, "not only with myself but with the whole army."
⁵
The South still had more soldiers than it had weapons to arm them, but that state of affairs promised to come to an abrupt and disastrous end in the spring—not because of a windfall of weapons, but because the one-year enlistments of nearly half the troops would expire.
⁶
Few of them seemed ready to re-enlist. "If I live this twelve months out, I intend to try mighty hard to keep out of [the army]," wrote another Virginia soldier

3
. Foote,
Civil War
, I, 65; Davis to Varina Davis, May 16, 1862, in Rowland,
Davis
, V, 246.

4
.
O.R
., Ser. III, Vol. 4, p. 883.

5
. J. H. Langhorne to his mother, Jan. 12, 1862, in Robert G. Tanner,
Stonewall in the Valley: Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson's Shenandoah Valley Campaign Spring 1862
(Garden City, N.Y., 1976), 91.

6
. The other half were three-year volunteers.

in January 1862. "I don't think I could stand it another year."
⁷
It looked like the army might melt away just as the Yankees began their spring offensives.

The Confederate Congress initially addressed this problem within the traditional framework of voluntarism. In December 1861 it enacted legislation granting a fifty-dollar bounty and a sixty-day furlough to one-year men who re-enlisted, with the additional proviso that they could join new regiments and elect new officers if they wished. As one analyst commented, "a worse law could hardly have been imposed on the South by the enemy."
⁸
The furloughs were likely to weaken the army as much at a critical time as refusals to re-enlist would have done; the election of new officers might oust efficient disciplinarians in favor of good ol' boys; the process of organizing new regiments was a sure-fire recipe for chaos, especially since many infantrymen decided to re-enlist in the more glamorous (and safer) cavalry or artillery.

A dismayed Robert E. Lee pronounced this law "highly disastrous" and urged instead a law "drafting them 'for the war.'" Although he had gone to war to prevent coercion of a state by the national government, Lee now believed the war would be lost unless the government in Richmond obtained the power to coerce men into the army. Davis agreed. On March 28, 1862, he sent to Congress a special message recommending conscription. State's righters and libertarians protested that such a measure contradicted what the South was fighting for. But the blunt, hot-tempered Senator Louis Wigfall of Texas took the floor and warned his colleagues to "cease this child's play. . . . The enemy are in some portions of almost every State in the Confederacy. . . . Virginia is enveloped by them. We need a large army. How are you going to get it? . . . No man has any individual rights, which come into conflict with the welfare of the country."
⁹

More than two-thirds of the congressmen and senators concurred. On April 16 they enacted the first conscription law in American history. It declared all able-bodied white male citizens between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five liable to service for three years. One-year volunteers must remain in the army two more years. This universal obligation

7
. G. K. Harlow to his family, Jan. 23, 1862, in Tanner,
Stonewall in the Valley
, 91.

8
. Douglas Southall Freeman,
R. E. Lee
:
A Biography
, 4 vols. (New York, 1934–35), II, 26.

9
.
O. R
., Ser. I, Vol. 6, p. 350; Wigfall quoted in Frank E. Vandiver,
Their Tattered Flags: The Epic of the Confederacy
(New York, 1970), 131.