Never Call Retreat (8 page)

They probably would have lost it except for an unexpected echo from the one fragment of Rosecrans' original battle plan that was ever put into effect. Earlier in the day Crittenden had started his corps across Stone's River to lead the attack on the Confederate right. He had to bring it back almost at once because of Hardee's attack, but the simple fact that he had made this unproductive move had a profound effect two hours later. For at the height of the action, when it seemed clear that the Confederates would storm the Round Forest if they could get a little more weight in their attack, Bragg sent for his reserve—Breckinridge's division, far off on the right—and Breckinridge replied that he could send no help because he was about to be attacked by the Yankees. He was of course entirely wrong, but he was going by the best information he had; Crittenden's advance had been reported to him, but somehow the withdrawal had not been noticed, and so Bragg's reserve remained out of action all morning, waiting for an attack that was never made. By the time the misunderstanding was cleared up it was too late; the Federal grip on the Round Forest was too strong to break.

Once his tactical plan had been knocked out of his hands, Rosecrans could do little more than shore up his collapsing lines and show his troops that their commanding officer was still undaunted, and this much he did with unflagging spirits. He seemed to be galloping along the lines all day long, a dead cigar clenched in his teeth, black hat jammed down on his head, his overcoat all streaked with blood—a shell had taken off the head of his chief of staff, riding beside him, and the general had been spattered. If the soldiers needed a general's words to hearten them, Old Rosey was the man. He reined up once by a line of infantry to demand: "Men, do you wish to know how to be safe? Shoot low! Give them a blizzard at their shins!" Gunners in a battery that was hard pressed remembered that he galloped up and told their captain: "Be a little more deliberate and take good aim—don't fire so damned fast!" Usually he rode alone, except for one or two of those sandy fellows on his staff, and one admiring enlisted man said that with his rumpled hat, stained coat, and stubby cigar "he looked more like a third-rate wagon master than a great general, as he is."
⁸

If his day was heroic it was frustrating, a continuous process of staving off disaster. When night came and the fighting ended the Federal army was still in one piece and it was not running away, but it had unquestionably taken a beating. It had lost more than a fourth of its numbers, the Confederates had captured twenty-eight pieces of artillery, there had been a cloud of stragglers drifting back toward Nashville throughout the day, and Joe Wheeler had gone rampaging around in the army's rear, destroying wagon trains and threatening to cut the army off from its base entirely. At nightfall Bragg confidently expected the Federals to retreat, and he telegraphed to Richmond that he had won a noble victory and that "God has granted us a happy New Year."
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For the enlisted men of the two armies, New Year's Eve was not at all happy. The rain began again, the gloomy thickets dripped in the cold dark, and the fields where so many thousands of wounded men lay were deep with mud. Confederates who wandered across the ground they had won saw hideous things. Here a soldier leaned against a tree, an overturned coffee mill between his spread legs; a Minie ball had struck him while he was getting breakfast and he had bled to death. By a path leading to a spring sprawled another dead Federal, still gripping the bail of an oaken bucket. A Confederate had been cut entirely in two by a shell; another soldier had been killed by the windage of a near miss and lay contorted, his face blackened, not a wound on his body; farther on there were two men who had been killed by the same cannon ball, which had passed through their chests, removing their hearts and leaving "a hole big enough to put your arm through." One Rebel remembered seeing a blue-coated soldier whose skull had been broken open like a melon, his intact brain lying on the ground near his body. A Texas soldier wrote that "the seens on the battle field was aufle" and asserted that "the hogs got a holt of some of the Yankey dead before the night was over." A man from Louisiana saw horrors when the moon broke through the rain clouds: "The earth was burdened with the Yankee dead. They were crossed and piled over each other, nearly all of them lying on their backs, with their faces so ghastly turned up to the moon."
¹⁰

New Year's Day brought disillusionment to General Bragg, because the Federal army clung to its position. There had been a tense meeting of the Federal high command, late the night before, in which everybody agreed with Thomas' terse verdict: "This army
can't
retreat," and Rosecrans ordered his battered divisions to hold their ground.
¹¹
With that decision, the battle of Stone's River began to change from a Confederate victory to a Confederate defeat. Bragg held his army in position on January 1 but he did not resume the attack— could not, because his army had worn itself out. His men had fought magnificently, but there were not enough of them, and it did no good to reflect that they almost certainly would have won decisively if Stevenson's missing division had been there to help. Bragg's army had suffered the astounding loss of approximately one-third of its total effective strength, and although Federal losses had been higher numerically, and almost as high proportionately, a genuine renewal of the Confederate offensive was utterly impossible.
¹²
In sheer desperation, Bragg ordered Breckinridge to attack the Federal left on the morning of January 2, but the case was hopeless, and the massed Federal artillery quickly broke Breckinridge's brigades to fragments. On January 3 there was another odd pause on the battlefield, while the two mangled armies stared at each other from their wretched bivouacs, and by nightfall it was clear that Bragg had only one option left: retreat. Of infantry and artillery, the only arms that would be effective in a renewed engagement here, he now had no more than 20,000 men. It was reported that Rosecrans was being reinforced, and although this was not true it was obvious that he could get reinforcements long before Bragg could hope to get any. Stone's River was rising behind Hardee's men, if they did not retreat now they might not be able to later— and at last, on the night of January 3, the Confederate army tramped through Murfreesboro and headed south.
¹³

It did not have to go far because the Federals were too cut up to pursue. Rosecrans' army stumbled into Murfreesboro like an exhausted man collapsing on his cot, and it spent the better part of six months there, recuperating. This was much too long, yet there was some excuse: this army was only a third as large as the Federal army that had fought at Fredericksburg, yet it had equaled the Fredericksburg losses. These armies at Stone's River had in truth fought each other almost to death and each was out of action for a long time.

To use such a word as "victory" in connection with a shambles like Stone's River is to risk twisting the word out of its meaning. Yet in a negative but vitally important way Rosecrans' army did win something there. It kept the Confederacy from knocking the props out from under the campaign against Vicksburg. Grant's advance could be resumed, because this blow at the roots of Federal power in the west had failed precisely as the earlier blow at Shiloh had failed. (There is a strange similarity between these two mismanaged battles, Shiloh and Stone's River.) Now there was shattering proof of Johnston's gloomy forecast that the essential help for Pemberton's army could not come from Tennessee; and as the cards lay if that help could not come from Tennessee it could not come from anywhere. The retreat of Bragg's army was clear announcement that those cavalry blows at Grant's communications had been mere episodes rather than a turning of the tide.

This was perfectly clear to Abraham Lincoln, who understood the strategic score as well as anybody. Months later, when Rosecrans thought himself in disfavor at the White House, Mr. Lincoln sent measured words of reassurance:

"I can never forget, whilst I remember anything, that about the end of last year, and beginning of this, you gave us a hard-earned victory which, had there been a defeat instead, the nation could scarcely have lived over."
¹
*

5. Paralysis of Command

RETURNING FROM his visit to the Mississippi Valley after the first of the year, Jefferson Davis faced two major problems. One was the situation created by the Emancipation Proclamation, which Abraham Lincoln issued, as he had promised to do, on New Year's Day; the other was the matter of the war in the west, whose gravity was underlined by the victory General Bragg had first won and then lost at Stone's River. The first problem was largely political, and the other was purely military, but at bottom the two were ominously alike: each one required Mr. Davis to transcend the limitations that the war itself' imposed on him and find a solution which a President of the Confederacy could hardly hope to attain.

As always, Mr. Davis presented a cheerful face to the public. On the night of January 5 there was a serenade in front of his house in Richmond, with Captain J. B. Smith's Silver Band on hand to make music. The crowd was small, because the affair had not been announced in advance, but Mr. Davis made a short speech with much spirit. He assured his listeners that their fight for independence was even nobler than the struggle of 1776, because that one was at least waged against a manly foe while the patriots of the 1860s "fight against the offscourings of the earth." He drew laughter by remarking that some of the Yankees whose latest "on to Richmond" drive had been broken up at Fredericksburg did actually get to Richmond—many hundreds of them, as closely guarded prisoners of war—and he treated Stone's River as a victory that might well cause the states of the northwest to break away from the old Union. War, to be sure, was "an evil in every form in which it can be presented," but it was a crucible in which Southern unity was being created: "With such noble women at home, and such heroic soldiers in the field, we are invincible!"
¹

Even an invincible people, however, could feel outrage. For the Confederate Congress a week later Mr. Davis had a prepared speech which was deeply charged with emotion. He spoke of the Emancipation Proclamation as "a measure by which several millions of human beings of an inferior race, peaceful and contented laborers in their sphere, are doomed to extermination," and he continued: "Our own detestation of those who have attempted the most execrable measure recorded in the history of guilty man is tempered by profound contempt for the impotent rage which it discloses." He proposed to turn over to state authorities any Federal officers captured in areas covered by the proclamation, "that they may be dealt with in accordance with the laws of those States providing for the punishment of criminals engaged in exciting servile insurrection," and he went on to explain what the evil effects of the proclamation must be. The proclamation, he said, created a situation which could have only three possible consequences—"the extermination of the slaves, the exile of the whole white population from the Confederacy, or absolute and total separation of these States from the United States"—and the mere fact that it had been issued amounted to a confession by the Federal government that it could no longer hope to subjugate the South by force of arms.
²

To Edward A. Pollard, the Richmond editor who was becoming Mr. Davis' most bitter and captious critic, this was simply an attempt "to drown public indignation in a volume of furious words," and after the war Mr. Pollard denounced Mr. Davis for "the mean patience with which he submitted to an act of the enemy which despoiled a whole people of their property, and consigned them to a loss and ruin unequaled in all the penalties of modern war."
³
Mr. Pollard, demanding some inconceivable retaliation that could neither have been attempted nor made effective, spoke for nothing more than personal bitterness, and his remark endures only as a historical oddity. But Mr. Davis was speaking for many people, not all of them living in the South, or in the 1860s either, and he was expressing a deep and tragic conviction that the kind of society that was supposed to lie somewhere beyond Mr. Lincoln's proclamation of freedom was simply beyond human attainment.

Yet emancipation had been proclaimed, and after the beginning of 1863 the war would be different because of it. The leaders of the Southern nation were bound to give the matter thought. It was no longer possible to hope that the war's current might yet be reversed; they were in the rapids now, they and all of the American people with them, and although the future might seem unthinkable they were heading toward it at an accelerating pace. Wispy Alexander Stephens, the Vice-President of the Confederacy, reflected on the matter and was moved to deep pessimism.

Stephens did not think the war could last longer than one more year: it would break down, somewhere, "we may not have peace but we shall have a smash-up." The Emancipation Proclamation was irrevocable, President Lincoln could not possibly put back into slavery men whom he had now declared free, and as a result there was no chance at all for "a restored Union with slavery as it was." Ahead there lay only war, and although hardly anybody wanted the war to continue there was no way to stop it. "A large majority on both sides are tired of the war: want peace," wrote Stephens. "I have no doubt about that. But as we do not want peace without independence, so they" (the people of the North) "do not want peace without union. There is the difficulty. I think the war will break down in less than a twelvemonth; but I really do not see in that any prospect for peace, permanent peace. Peace founded upon a treaty recognizing our separate independence is not yet in sight."
⁴

It was Stephens' hard fate to see problems so clearly that he became immobilized. He had stated the case with flawless accuracy: wherever this war was taking the people of America, it must take them first through destruction. Stephens could say no more than that. If the facts as he saw them demanded either a broadening of war aims or a change in the way the war was being fought, someone else must chart the course.