Terrible Swift Sword (61 page)

Bragg
understood that the campaign would begin with the recapture of Cumberland Gap,
which would take care of the Federal General Morgan; after this, Bragg and
Smith would join forces and fall on Buell. Beating Buell, they would clear
central Tennessee of Federals, and then move into Kentucky —which, according to
that spirited Kentucky cavalryman, John Hunt Morgan, would immediately throw
out its Unionist governor and legislature and support the Confederacy enthusiastically
with numerous recruits and abundant supplies.

Smith
either understood the plan differently or changed his mind immediately after
the conference. He marched out of Knoxville in mid-August, before Bragg was
ready to move, left a division to mask Cumberland Gap, and went boldly north into
Kentucky, getting farther away from Bragg at every step.

Thus co-operation had
failed at the outset, and Bragg had to revise his own plan. Since Smith was
entering Kentucky with hardly more than a third as many soldiers as Buell commanded,
he had to be supported; and so, on August 21, Bragg got his army under way,
crossing the Tennessee River at Chattanooga and striking northward into the
tough mountain country in order to put his army between Buell's and Smith's.
He made the move smartly, and Buell—whose grasp on the military initiative had
been somewhat loose all summer—was forced to give up his cautious advance on
Chattanooga and adjust his movements to those of his enemy. By September 5,
Bragg had crossed the mountains and the Cumberland River and had gone all the
way to the Kentucky line, entering that state at the town of Tompkinsville,
while Buell was still concentrating his own forces at Murfreesboro,
seventy-five miles to the south. Buell was being reinforced. He was gathering
in his own scattered units, and in addition two of Grant's divisions were
coming from western Tennessee to join him. Grant was warned to keep a third
available; and it seemed to Buell that his best course was to leave an
adequate force to hold Nashville and take everyone else into Kentucky in
pursuit of Bragg. Since Bragg would go all the way to the Ohio River unless
Buell overtook him, the pursuit was necessary; but to Andrew Johnson, the
militantly Unionist Tennessee Senator who had been made military governor of the
state, it looked like a ruinous retreat, and Johnson filed bitter complaints
with Washington. Washington was not happy. When Buell sent a reasoned
explanation of his proposed movements, Halleck gave him a cold reply:
"March where you please, provided you find the enemy and fight him."
⁷

Bragg and Smith were still a long way
apart, and to get their armies and their ideas for using them into close
harmony might be difficult; but their campaign undeniably was off to an
excellent start, and it spread feverish alarm in the North. By August 30 Smith
was approaching the town of Richmond in central Kentucky, roughly halfway
between Cumberland Gap and Cincinnati, and at this place he virtually
obliterated a scratch force of 6500 Federals which tried to stop him. The
soldiers were mostly untrained Indiana recruits, hastily scraped together and
sent to the front under one of Buell's trusted lieutenants, Major General
William Nelson; Smith's veterans disposed of them with moderate effort,
capturing 4000 unwounded prisoners. One immediate result of the victory was
that the Federal General Morgan evacuated Cumberland Gap and made a prodigious
two hundred mile retreat all the way to the Ohio River.

Smith marched on and occupied Lexington,
where he got a heartwarming welcome: Confederate flags all over the place,
women and girls crying a welcome from every window and garden, baskets of food
and buckets of cold water at street corners for the refreshment of tired
Confederates, everyone exulting (as an Arkansas soldier put it) that
"Kentucky was at last about to be free." The town almost exploded
with joy when John Hunt Morgan and his cavalry came through on the gallop; all
the church bells rang, and people who had no flags waved their handkerchiefs,
and laughed or wept or cheered as the spirit moved them. Smith sent a jubilant
message off to Bragg. He was going to move on to Cincinnati, he said, all that
was needed was to have the left of his army in touch with the right of Bragg's,
and "if I am supported and can be supplied with arms, 25,000 Kentucky
troops in a few days will be added to my command."
⁸

Moving against Cincinnati, Smith was
spreading himself just a bit thin. He commanded about 21,000 men, but 8000 of
them were at Cumberland Gap and 3000 more were chasing Federal General George
Morgan, and Smith had hardly more than 10,000 soldiers immediately at hand; not
enough by half for an invasion of Ohio. But the long strong flood Bragg had
talked about was moving, the Federals were obviously getting panicky, and in a
panic anything can happen; so Smith's leading division went north through
Cynthiana toward Covington, and all the Ohio country responded in a fever of
patriotism, fright and overflowing energy. David Tod, Governor of Ohio, urged
loyal men in each county to take up arms and prepare for the worst, declaring
that "the soil of Ohio must not be invaded by the enemies of our glorious
government." Major General Lew Wallace, who may have been just the man for
the assignment, assumed command of the defenses of Cincinnati, suspended
ferryboat service on the river, devised the slogan "Citizens for labor,
soldiers for battle," and announced that all business would be suspended
so that able-bodied men could go out and dig trenches, under police supervision.
From the outlying precincts homespun citizens showed up with muzzle loaders,
powder horns, and leather bullet pouches; 15,000 of them and more, by all
accounts, men who were either backwoodsmen or could pass for such with citified
reporters; and they prepared to man the trenches dug by less picturesque folk,
in case armed secession drew nigh. They were said to be squirrel hunters and
this was their great day, and they became legendary; shooting no Rebels,
because no Rebels ever came within range. The final note about them is an
anxious query sent to Wallace by a Regular Army officer a fortnight later:
"Cannot I get rid of the Squirrel Hunters? They are under no control."
In the end, Cincinnati was saved. Kirby Smith had just been making a feint.
⁹

The danger looked real enough at the time.
Bragg also was driving north, and Buell's men marched hard in a vain effort to
overtake him. Bragg came up thirty miles east of Bowling Green, which had
marked the center of Albert Sidney Johnston's line just a year earlier, and at
Munfordville, where the railroad to Louisville crossed the Green River, he
struck a Federal strong point held by 4000 men under Colonel John T. Wilder,
who until recently had been an unassuming Indiana business man and who now was
about to add a strange little footnote to the story of the Civil War.

Bragg's
advance guard attacked the fortifications twice and was repulsed with moderate
loss. Then Bragg brought up the rest of his army and sent in a demand for
surrender, pointing out that the Federals were surrounded and that their case
was hopeless. Through the Confederate lines that night came a flag of truce and
a Yankee officer—Colonel Wilder in person, seeking a conference with Major
General Buckner, who led a division in Hardee's corps. In Buckner's tent Wilder
became disarmingly frank. He was not, he said, a military man at all, but he
did want to do the right thing. He had heard that Buckner was not only a
professional soldier but an honest gentleman as well; and would Buckner now
please tell him if, under the rules of the game, it was Colonel Wilder's duty
to surrender or to fight it out?

Somewhat flabbergasted—he said later
that he "would not have deceived that man under those circumstances for
anything"—Buckner said Wilder would have to make his own decision. (He
knew what
a
weight that was. Seven months earlier he had
had to surrender Fort Donelson, his superiors having fled from responsibility,
and when he sent a flag through the Yankee lines his old friend Grant had been
merciless.) Buckner pointed out that Wilder's men were hemmed in by six times
their own numbers and that Bragg had enough artillery in line to destroy the
fort in short order; at the same time, if the sacrifice of every man would aid
the Federal cause elsewhere it was Wilder's duty to fight.
...
In the end, Buckner took him to see
Bragg, who was curt with him but let him count the cannon in the Confederate
works. Wilder counted enough to convince him that the jig was up, and at last
he surrendered: a well-meaning but bewildered citizen-soldier who had gone to
his enemy for professional advice and, all things considered, had been fairly
dealt with.
¹⁰

Perhaps this was high tide, or something
like it. It was September 17, and the advancing Confederates had canceled the
threat to eastern Tennessee, had taken more than 8000 prisoners, and had
compelled 50,000 Yankee invaders to head northward in unseemly haste for the
Ohio River. They had caused happy crowds to go cheering through the streets of
Lexington, and had forced other crowds to dig trenches at Cincinnati, while
squirrel hunters held a muster. Bragg suddenly ceased to be the dour
dyspeptic; for once in his career he actually seemed lighthearted, and he
fairly bubbled with praise for the soldiers in his command.

"My
army is in high spirits, and ready to go anywhere the 'old general' says,"
he wrote, in a letter to Mrs. Bragg. "Not a murmur escapes a man. . . . We
have made the most extraordinary campaign in military history." One of
his officers noted that two soldiers who had been sentenced to be shot for
insulting Kentucky women (nature of the insult not specified) had been
reprieved by the commanding general, and wrote: "We begin to think Bragg
isn't nearly the inhuman, blood-thirsty monster that he has been represented to
be." Colonel Wilder, having toured the camp, said that although Bragg's
soldiers were terribly ragged and dirty, "I never saw an army in a more
perfect state of discipline," and in a dispatch to the War Department
Bragg asserted: "My admiration of and love for my army cannot be
expressed." He spoke of its "patient toil and admirable
discipline" and remarked that

"the men are much jaded and
somewhat destitute, but cheerful and confident without a murmur." He
added hopefully: "We move soon on a combined expedition with General
Smith." "

High tide; but possibly not quite as high as
it looked. The men were, after all, very tired, for they had made a prodigious
march across difficult country, and although Bragg held his enlisted men in
high regard he had little use for most of his generals. (He had told Adjutant
General Cooper earlier in the summer that some of these "are only
incumbrances and would be better out of the way," and said that their
weakness robbed his army of a quarter of its efficiency.)
¹²
Smith
was still one hundred miles away, and although Buell had been badly
outmaneuvered he was too strong to be beaten unless Bragg's and Smith's armies
could be united. Near Munfordville Bragg hesitated, waited for Buell to attack
him, found that he would not, and at last moved northeast to Bardstown, where
he hoped that Smith would join him. (This move gave Buell a clear road to
Louisville, whereas before the road had been blocked.) At Bardstown, however,
Bragg found no Smith: just a letter from Smith urging him to destroy Buell as
quickly as he could because the people of Kentucky would not support the
Confederacy until Buell had been defeated.
¹³

Bragg's
pessimism began to return. He believed that the success of his whole campaign
depended finally on an uprising of loyal Kentuckians; if they were not going
to rise the campaign would be a failure no matter how brilliantly it had been
conducted. When a cheering Bardstown crowd surrounded his hotel and called him
out to the veranda for a speech, Bragg was frank. He had come north to enable
Kentucky "to express her southern preference without fear of northern
bayonets," but it was all up to the people themselves. If they would
support him he would support them, but if they should "decline the offer
of liberty" he would take his army away and leave the state to its own
devices. He notified the War Department that "we are sadly disappointed at
the want of action by our friends in Kentucky." Recruits thus far did not
even equal the number of casualties that had been incurred, although
casualties had been light; he had brought 15,000 stand of arms along but so far
had found hardly anyone to use them, and "unless a change occurs soon we
must abandon the garden spot of Kentucky to its own cupidity."
¹⁴
The
bright sky was slowly darkening; the unhappy fact being that although Bragg and
Smith had outwitted and outmarched their opponents they had passed an
invisible meridian and had moved into an area where time was on the side of
the Federals. Simply to march into Kentucky was hot enough, no matter how
brilliantly it was done. The Yankees who held Kentucky had to be beaten—not in
outpost affairs, but in a major battle—and the longer this battle was deferred
the less chance did the Confederates have to win it, because the Yankee armies
were getting stronger every day while the Confederate armies were not. Bragg
and Smith were not exactly avoiding battle, but they were not driving on relentlessly
to provoke a battle at all hazards; by this time the hazards were beginning to
look too great. Smith was torn between a desire to occupy Frankfort, the
capital of the state, and a fear that the Federals would strike him in the
rear, and his moves were tentative and ineffective. Bragg was beginning to
show the strange bleakness of spirit which sometimes came upon him in time of
crisis, making him brood over a danger instead of striking it dead with one
decisive blow. Growing uncertain, he was beginning to fumble.