Rise to Greatness (24 page)

When Mercier returned to Washington on April 24, Lincoln and Seward welcomed him. The ranking admiral of the French navy, who happened to be in New York, visited Washington for the occasion, and along with the captain of the
Gassendi
he received Lincoln on board “with all the honors paid to a sovereign.” There is no record of the president’s conversation with Mercier, but Lincoln undoubtedly hoped that the envoy had seen the fatal weakness of the Confederate position and that France would at last accept the grand bargain he was offering. The opposite was the case. Disembarking from the ship, Mercier promptly paid a visit to Lord Lyons, his British counterpart, and argued that the time had come to recognize Confederate independence. The government in Richmond had persuaded him that the Rebels were about to strike back, hard.

That night, Seward hosted Mercier and the French admiral at his mansion across the street from the White House. As the guests consumed an abundant dinner, Mercier was fairly bursting with his knowledge of the Confederacy’s secret plans to regain the upper hand. Turning to Dahlgren, he slyly mentioned that he had met Dahlgren’s old friend Catesby Jones, the new commander of the dreaded ironclad
Virginia,
during his stay in Richmond. “He sends his respects,” Mercier purred, then added, “and said ‘not to be
caught napping
at Washington.’” Dahlgren mulled over this cryptic remark, and concluded that Mercier was hinting at something important. He decided to warn the president.

The following day, Lincoln heard not only Dahlgren’s warning but also a fresh bit of intelligence picked up by Stanton’s assistant Peter Watson. According to Watson’s source, the Confederates were preparing a sneak attack on McDowell’s scattered army—an attack that, if successful, would open the road to Washington. A few days earlier, Lincoln had been confident enough about the security of the capital to consider sending McDowell on the offensive. Now he was reminded of the enormous risks involved.

When Orville Browning visited the White House that evening, he found the president complaining of a headache. The two old friends began talking, and as he often did when he wanted a distraction, Lincoln steered the conversation around to poetry. He and Browning both had lines by Thomas Hood committed to memory, and after quoting these back and forth, Lincoln asked whether Browning recalled Hood’s poem “The Haunted House.”

When Browning admitted that he had never read the poem, the president rang for a servant who soon returned with a copy of Hood’s works from Lincoln’s library. The president proceeded to read aloud the eerie verses—a compendium of broken windows, creaking hinges, scuttling insects, unlit stairs, swarms of bats, a ticking clock, a bloody hand. Lincoln was swept away. When he reached a particularly vivid line or verse, he would pause to talk about why it worked so well. He enjoyed his own performance so much that he rang the bell again and sent for another volume, then performed Hood’s low comic poem “The Lost Heir.” Lincoln scarcely paused before launching into a third poem, and by the time he finished that one, an hour and half had sped by and both men were in better spirits. But as he said goodbye, Lincoln accurately predicted that when Browning left, there would be “a crowd … buzzing about the door like bees, ready to pounce upon him” and return him to “the annoyances and harassments of his position.”

*   *   *

From the beginning of the war, New Orleans was the prize Lincoln coveted most. It was the first great city he ever saw as a young man, his destination during the flatboat journey that marked his personal declaration of independence from his father. No other place reflected quite so well the geographical and commercial ties binding North and South, for in happier times the bounty of the continent collected there for shipment around the world. Lincoln had closely monitored months of arduous preparation, first in Washington and then in the Gulf of Mexico, for a Union campaign to take the city. Now, on April 25, the day of Browning’s visit to the White House, a fleet of battered warships under David Farragut finally steamed toward the docks of the Crescent City, dodging unmanned barges carrying blazing loads of cotton. The citizens of New Orleans, the largest city and most important port in the Confederacy, had only this futile gesture to make in response to the arrival of Lincoln’s conquering armada.

Not long past midnight of the previous day—after sand had been stowed in buckets, ready to be spread across decks that would soon be slick with blood—Farragut had ordered seventeen ships in single file past the two Confederate forts guarding the river below the city. Union mortars had been bombarding the forts for nearly a week, but the passage remained formidable. Farragut’s ships first had to steer through a line of sunken hulks. Behind these obstacles the Rebels had prepared bonfires on unmanned rafts, ready to float among the wooden vessels of the Federal fleet. Behind the fire rafts waited the meager Confederate navy, a bold but underweight armada of riverboats mounting a mix of surplus guns. Among them was the half-finished ironclad
Manassas,
a hulking former sidewheel steamboat covered in old railroad tracks so as to be pressed into service as a ram. The Confederate secretary of the navy, Stephen Mallory, had assured Jefferson Davis that the Union’s fleet could never get through.

The batteries in the two forts thundered to life at 3:30
A.M.
on April 24. “I do not believe there was ever a grander spectacle witnessed before the world than that displayed during the great artillery duel which then followed,” a Confederate gunnery captain later recalled. In the hours before dawn, a deafening, firelit struggle played out on the wide, muddy river. The forts were supposed to be invincible; instead, Farragut proved that ships fast enough, sailed by men brave enough, could pass through the terrible barrage. One shell-shot ship at a time, the Union fleet managed to reach safety upstream, beyond the Rebel guns.

While running the terrible gantlet, Farragut’s flagship, the
Hartford
—flying a huge Stars and Stripes through the red glare—caught fire when a Confederate tugboat pushed a floating bonfire into her port side. Quickly, the crew pulled out fire hoses and manned the pumps. The admiral’s gunners held to their work despite the blistering heat, as Farragut screamed over the roar of the flames, “Don’t flinch from that fire, boys! There’s hotter fire than that for those who don’t do their duty.” The burning barge stuck to the
Hartford,
feeding the inferno, until a fast-thinking officer uncapped several shells and shoved them over the side and into the fire. Seconds later, in a huge explosion, the raft of fire disintegrated and sizzled away.

Now, steaming in his wounded craft toward the great prize of New Orleans, Farragut saw black smoke rising from bales of white cotton piled on the wharves, torched by merchants determined not to let the precious crop fall into Yankee hands. Union spies had been correct: the city had no soldiers to speak of. All its guns had been sent north or mounted on the now defeated Rebel riverboats. The last hopes of New Orleans had been pinned on the forts downriver, and on two unfinished ironclads: the
Manassas,
lost in the battle, and the
Mississippi,
scuttled and burning near the shipyard.

Dropping anchor, Farragut allowed the mayor to choose: he could either raise the Union flag or watch his city be turned to rubble by the fleet’s guns. When the mayor offered a surly no, the admiral sent marines ashore to raise the red, white, and blue. At last the Crescent City and the mouth of the great river—the strategic endpoint of Winfield Scott’s original plan for breaking the Confederacy—once again belonged to the Union.

The capture of New Orleans was a devastating blow to the Confederacy: “the great catastrophe,” as Jefferson Davis called it, “the fall of our chief commercial city, and the destruction of the naval vessels on which our hopes most rested for the protection of the lower Mississippi and the harbors of the Gulf.” The Rebel diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut wrote: “New Orleans gone—and with it the Confederacy. Are we not cut in two?”

The news astounded European leaders; Charles Frances Adams reported “general incredulity.” The French government, which of all institutions should have appreciated the strategic importance of the mouth of North America’s greatest river, tried to minimize the significance of Farragut’s coup. When Ambassador Dayton mentioned the capture to Foreign Minister Thouvenel, the Frenchman angrily jabbed at a map of the United States, pointing to the empty interior of the Deep South. The Confederates could not be beaten, he scoffed, because “they would retire there”—where he was pointing—and “it was a
vast country.
”

But if the French didn’t understand that the South’s navigable rivers made it vulnerable to attack, Lincoln and others in Washington did. New Orleans was viewed as the beginning of the end.

6

MAY

George McClellan’s works before Yorktown were just about perfect. As May began, the muddy roads leading to the front were neatly corduroyed with logs for traction, and every rain-swollen creek along the way had been bridged. Behind stout earthen walls reinforced with lumber, the general had installed fixed lines of 13-inch seacoast mortars, fat iron cauldrons that could lob enormous iron balls into the Confederate fortifications. He had 10-inch mortars and 8-inch mortars and 8-inch howitzers, too. He had ordnance guns, Napoleon guns, and Parrott guns of nearly every size—rows and rows of rifled cannon, some capable of firing 200-pound shells at the Rebel batteries. He had many tons of ammunition stockpiled, and an endless train of mule-drawn wagons ready to bring more from his base near Fort Monroe. And he had tens of thousands of infantrymen poised to swarm the Rebel positions once those were softened by the blasting and bombarding.

McClellan looked over all that had been created during the past month and decided that it was … not quite enough. He wanted the 30-pound Parrott siege guns that he’d left behind in the forts around Washington. Lincoln, who had been expecting the attack on Yorktown for weeks, was irate.

“Your call for Parrott guns from Washington alarms me—chiefly because it argues indefinite procrastination,” the president fumed in a coded telegram. The general responded as he always did, saying in essence that so little was happening because he was doing so much. “All is being done that human labor can accomplish,” McClellan declared. No matter how hard Lincoln pushed his general, Little Mac refused to alter his pace; he was like a stubborn child who walks slower when asked to hurry up.

Having watched McClellan for eight months over the quiet ramparts of Manassas and Yorktown, Confederate general Johnston formed a crisp conclusion about his opponent: “McClellan seems not to value time especially.” Nevertheless, Johnston believed—as he had in March at Manassas—that the Federals were finally preparing to attack, and on May 5 he ordered another preemptive retreat. Over the past month, the Confederacy had collected some 55,000 troops at Yorktown; flushed from their fortifications, they had to move fast to get safely inside their next line of trenches. In their haste they left behind more than eighty artillery pieces, plus large stores of ammunition, tents, and rations—scarce resources the Rebels could not afford to lose.

The Federals set off after them, catching Johnston’s rearguard at the picturesque colonial capital of Williamsburg. There, the Rebel army turned and fought like a hounded stag, tossing the Yankees backward. Hearing this news, McClellan rushed to the battlefield, where he found chaos in the Union ranks. Major General Edwin “Bull Head” Sumner, of the II Corps, was nominally in command. Sumner, who had earned his nickname during a long-ago scrap when a musket ball struck him in the head and supposedly bounced off, had more than forty years’ military experience; he was the oldest general to serve in Civil War combat on either side. But he had never led a force remotely as large as the one he commanded at Williamsburg, and he was clearly out of his depth. Quickly surveying the tangled lines of soldiers struggling in the thick Virginia underbrush, McClellan issued a few sharp orders and got the Federals moving forward again to capture Williamsburg’s Fort Magruder. “In five minutes after I reached the ground a possible defeat was changed into certain victory,” he boasted.

McClellan had never gotten over his annoyance at Lincoln’s choice of corps commanders for the Army of the Potomac. He still believed in his own idea of letting the best men rise through the heat of battle, and he insisted that the near disaster at Williamsburg proved his point. In a letter to his wife, he grumbled that the battle was bungled by the “utter stupidity & worthlessness of the Corps Com[manders],” with Sumner the worst offender. Old Bull Head “proved that he was even a greater fool than I had supposed & had come within an ace of having us defeated.”

On balance, though, McClellan was delighted with the events of early May. Once again, his careful maneuvering had forced the enemy to give up a fortified position without a fight. “I feel very proud of Yorktown; it and Manassas will be my brightest chaplets in history; for I know that I accomplished everything in both places by pure military skill,” he declared. In Washington, the reviews were mixed; by this point everything McClellan did was controversial. John Dahlgren agreed that Yorktown was a masterpiece of military science. “McClellan’s strategy seems to be conclusive,” he wrote. “He forced the Confederates to leave Manassas without a blow, and now to abandon Yorktown.” And yet, Dahlgren reported, “the extreme Republicans are … persistent in their attacks on McClellan, as if nothing but a battle would content them.”

McClellan’s maneuvers on the peninsula had crystallized two irreconcilable views of the proper way to fight the rebellion. One approach emphasized the steady capture of strategic points by the least violent methods available, in hopes that the Confederates would see that their cause was doomed before too much bloodshed made a relatively peaceful resolution impossible. This was McClellan’s theory of the war, and it explained why in the midst of a military campaign he insisted that his soldiers protect the property of local Confederate sympathizers. While his letters were full of references to an epic battle ahead, a decisive clash of Blue and Gray, on a deeper level McClellan did not envision a truly decisive moment. Instead, he imagined that his victories would somehow return the United States to its earlier condition, unchanged—except that now levelheaded men like himself would engineer peaceful solutions to the differences between North and South. The war, in his view, was not the bitter fruit of an irrepressible conflict between slavery and freedom. It was an avoidable tragedy wrought by agitators driven by extreme passions and bad motives.