Terrible Swift Sword (56 page)

That night Farragut sought revenge. The
spot where
Arkansas
had
tied up was noted, and range lights were fixed on the opposite shore to mark
the place; and after dark, while a thunderstorm raged, Farragut's squadron went
steaming down past Vicksburg, each one firing a broadside at
Arkansas's
berth. This would probably have destroyed her
if she had been there, but she was not: the Confederates had noticed the range
lights and, guessing what was coming, had shifted
Arkansas
to a different position. The Federals made a
huge noise and expended much ammunition but did no especial harm, and Farragut
unhappily confessed his "great mortification" in a message to
Secretary Welles, admitting frankly that the Confederates had taken him
entirely by surprise. Welles testily told him he had better not leave Vicksburg
until
Arkansas
was
sunk; then, after a day or so, thought better of it, and telegraphed the
admiral that he could leave whenever he chose. Farragut chose to leave at once
and went steaming off to New Orleans, dropping General Williams and the troops
at Baton Rouge as he went. A few days later Davis pulled his own fleet up to
the mouth of the Yazoo, retiring shortly thereafter all the way to Helena,
Arkansas, and the Confederates had Vicksburg all to themselves.
⁷

Actually, they had a good deal more than
that. Jubilant over Farragut's departure, Van Dorn ordered General Breckinridge
to take five thousand men down the river and recapture Baton Rouge.
Breckinridge tried, on August 5, and was beaten off after a fight in which
General Williams lost his life, but although Breckinridge lost this fight the
Confederacy had unquestionably won the campaign. In mid-June it had owned ho
more than three miles of the Mississippi; by mid-August it held several hundred
miles of it—everything from Helena to Port Hudson, Louisiana, a few miles above
Baton Rouge, where Breckinridge built a fort. It continued to have ready access
via the Red River to all of its resources in the trans-Mississippi region, and
the Federals were farther from opening the river than they had been at the end
of the spring, when the job was all but completed.
Arkansas
presently ran hard aground because of an
engine failure and had to be blown up, but she had served her purpose.
Considering the fact that the southland contained hardly any sailors, mechanics,
shipwrights, naval architects, or iron workers, Mr. Mallory and his men were
showing an amazing aptitude for building and using armored warships.

Colonel Morgan, General Forrest, and
Lieutenant Brown were the living signs that something was wrong with the
Federal conduct of the war in the west. Three cavalry raids involving fewer
than three thousand troopers all told, and one wild cruise by a square-cornered
gunboat jerry-built by amateurs on the edge of a cornfield—these would have
been no more than incidents, except that the Federal power had let the war get
into a condition of unstable equilibrium in which mere incidents could jar it
into a new shape. If blows so light would mean so much, a really hard blow
might have prodigious effect.

A hard blow was in fact being prepared, and
would be launched by General Braxton Bragg.

Bragg was a strange
combination, a hard case with an unpredictable streak of irresolution; stern,
angular, contentious, a man who would seem to have been utterly lacking in
personal magnetism except that he remained a romantic hero to his wife, Elise
Bragg, and to the end retained the affection and trust of Jefferson Davis, who
was somewhat angular and contentious in his own right. Mrs. Bragg wrote
sensitive love letters to her husband. Like any soldier's wife, she was haunted
by the fear that he might be killed in action, and she comforted herself with
the thought that his high rank would keep him away from the firing line. Then
came Shiloh, where the army commander himself was killed, and she wrote
pathetically: "I had taught myself to believe
you
could not
be hurt, danger had
so often surrounded you, your high rank in a measure protected you. The first
awakening from this hope was the death of Johnston—his rank was higher—his poor
wife had probably thought the same with me." She wanted his physical
presence, and she could write: "Oh that you could come to your wife's arms
for a few days, until soothed and calmed she could restore you to your
country."
⁸

Bragg got command of the Confederate
Army at Tupelo, after Beauregard was removed, and he took hold with firmness,
ordering the death penalty for stragglers and looters and enforcing his orders
rigorously. A general who behaves so does not win the affection of his
soldiers, yet this harshness —applied to an army which had been almost entirely
out of hand on the short march up to Pittsburg Landing in April —seems to have
improved morale. After one private was court-martialed and executed for
shooting at a chicken, missing, and hitting a Negro, one of the man's comrades
ruefully admitted that the army's discipline was improved "because it felt
it had at its head a man who would do what he said and whose orders were to be
obeyed." Bragg drove himself as hard as he drove anyone else, ruining
first his digestion and then his temper by constant overwork; a fellow officer
who admired his zeal and felt that he was getting good results confessed that
his ways were so stern that he "could have won the affection of his troops
only by leading them to victory." Bragg found Army command a strain, but
at the moment his health was good and he told Mrs. Bragg that he hoped to
"mark the enemy before I break down." He added that the tide had
turned in favor of the Confederacy and he saw the prospect of
"a
long
and strong flood."
⁹

The turning tide would strike Buell
first. With more than 40,000 men, that methodical officer was carefully getting
ready to move on Chattanooga, but he was taking ever so much time about it and
his own position actually was most insecure; he was a long way from his base,
and if the Confederates could strike northwest from eastern Tennessee in
strength they might cut him off and give him serious trouble.

When the summer began the Confederates
had
a
little more than 15,000 men in eastern
Tennessee. Most of these were at Knoxville, under the command of a solid Old
Army soldier, Major General Edmund Kirby Smith, who had led
a
brigade at Bull Run,
had been wounded in action, and enjoyed the full confidence of the authorities
at Richmond. A small Union force had recently occupied Cumberland Gap, the
difficult northern gateway to eastern Tennessee, but it was not yet an
offensive threat and Kirby Smith was strong enough to contain it. He was not
strong enough, however, to do anything about Buell, and in June he notified Richmond
that Chattanooga would be lost unless strong reinforcements could be sent in.
At the same time he wrote to Bragg, explaining that he was powerless to save
Chattanooga. Bragg immediately sent three thousand men to Chattanooga as a
stopgap, and then studied the situation to see if he could not do more.
¹⁰

He
found that he could do much more, and he did it with speed, efficiency and
daring. He would leave Van Dorn with 16,000 men to hold Vicksburg, and he would
leave General Price with 16,000 more at Tupelo to watch northern Mississippi;
between them, these officers ought to be able to handle any offensive Grant was
likely to make this summer, especially in view of the abrupt lessening in
Federal naval pressure on the Mississippi. With the rest of his army,
approximately 31,000 men, Bragg boldly set out for Chattanooga, planning not
merely to protect that city but to join with Smith in an invasion of Kentucky
that would compel Buell to retreat and might even drive him to destruction.
Then the "long and strong flood" Bragg had hoped for would be a
reality.

One thing Bragg
understood clearly. This was a railroad war, the first one in history, and a
general who knew how to use the rails could move armies faster and farther than
armies had ever been moved before. To get from Tupelo to Chattanooga he had to
take the long way around—776 miles, over six railroads, going south from Tupelo
to Mobile, northeast to Montgomery and Atlanta and then northwest to Chattanooga—but
the railroads could move the army much more quickly than it could go if it took
the direct route and walked, and Bragg's headquarters understood logistics. The
army began to move on July 23, and late in July Bragg and his 31,000 were
coming into Chattanooga and Bragg and Smith were planning a campaign into
Buell's rear. The whole complexion of the war in the west had changed.
¹¹

The
Confederacy had regained the offensive; the lid was off, and infinite
possibilities were in the air. Neither Chattanooga nor even Vicksburg, which
the Federals could have had for the taking six weeks earlier, was in danger
now; instead Buell was in danger, the whole Federal grip on the Mississippi
Valley was threatened, a Confederate invasion of the North was taking form, and
the war which had seemed so near to its end was beginning all over again.

4.
Triumph in Disaster

Howell Cobb of Georgia, who was one of
the founding fathers of the Confederate States of America, was putting in the
summer as a brigadier general in the Army of Northern Virginia. As a military
man he had but a modest position in the chain of command, but as one of the
nation's most eminent political leaders he could talk to anybody on equal
terms, and early in August he saw hard times coming and sent a brief warning to
Secretary of War Randolph.

"This war must close in a few
months, perhaps weeks," he wrote, "or else will be fought with
increased energy and malignity on the part of our enemies. I look for the
latter result."
¹

His forecast was sound, and the most
obvious sign that he knew what he was talking about lay in the things which
were being said and done just then by a new Federal Army commander in Virginia,
Major General John Pope.

General Pope, who had made a first-rate
record in the west, had been brought east by the Northern government late in
June to make an army out of the luckless contingents which had suffered so much
at the hands of Stonewall Jackson: the commands of Fremont, Banks, and
McDowell. Fremont, who ranked Pope, considered the new arrangement an insult
and resigned, his departure lamented by no one save the most ardent
abolitionists. He was replaced by Franz Sigel, who had fought poorly at
Wilson's Creek and well at Pea Ridge; a solidier who, if not exactly a hero to
the abolitionists, was at least a hero to the German-American soldiers who had
strong anti-slavery leanings. Sigel, Banks, and McDowell became corps
commanders in the army which Pope put together: a force which numbered, at the
outset, about 42,000 men and which Pope concentrated along the upper Rappahannock
with aggressive intent. At the very least he could take the pressure off of
McClellan's beaten army; with luck, he and McClellan together might stage a
pincers operation that would capture Richmond and destroy Lee's army. The odds
were against it, because Lee was squarely between them and was most unlikely to
permit any such thing, but on paper at least the project was feasible.

Pope
was energetic. He also was full of windy bluster, and although he actually was
no more brutal than many other Federal generals he had a great talent for
seeming to be so, and his appearance in the Virginia theater did symbolize a
hardening of Federal policy, which presently became quite as malignant as
Howell Cobb anticipated. In the end good Southerners hated John Pope almost as
much as they hated Ben Butler.

Broadly
speaking, Pope had been brought east to fight with the gloves off: to be
aggressive, to live off the country as far as possible, and to teach the
inhabitants of occupied Virginia that secession was a rocky road to travel. He
began by issuing a singularly maladroit address to his troops, announcing that
in the west Union soldiers usually saw only the backs of their enemies and
declaring that he wanted to hear no more about defensive positions, lines of
retreat and the like—an army that advanced and won battles did not need to
worry about such things. This done, he spelled out his policy toward non-combatants
in a series of orders which clearly indicated that the whole atmosphere of the
war had changed.

Citizens of occupied territory would be
held responsible for all damage done by guerrillas; the guerrillas themselves,
if caught, would be executed and so would everyone who had aided them. If shots
were fired at Union soldiers from any house, that house would be destroyed and
the people who lived in it would be arrested. Disloyal citizens would be driven
outside the army's lines, and if they returned they would be treated as spies.
Inhabitants of occupied territory who did not leave home must take the oath of
allegiance to the United States, and any who took this oath and then violated
it would be shot. Furthermore, the United States Army would confiscate any
forage or other foodstuffs that it needed when it was operating in secessionist
territory.
²