Terrible Swift Sword (8 page)

There was an instantaneous dust-up;
naturally enough, because the horizons of the war had been pushed out beyond
calculation. The Confederate Secretary of War,
L.
P.
Walker, ordered Polk to withdraw at once, and Governor Isham G. Harris of
Tennessee wired that both he and President Davis were pledged to respect the
neutrality of Kentucky: could not General Polk get his troops out of there
immediately? (A neutral Kentucky was a perfect shield protecting Tennessee from
invasion; with Kentucky in the war Tennessee was wide open, as Governor Harris
could not help but realize.) Secretary Walker assured Governor Harris that
Polk's movement was wholly unauthorized and that the prompt withdrawal of the
Confederate force had been ordered, but Mr. Davis quickly overruled him,
telegraphing to Polk that "the necessity justifies the action." Polk
wrote to Harris explaining that the invasion had been ordered "under the
plenary powers delegated to me by the President," adding that he knew of
no especial commitment to honor Kentucky's neutrality and closing with a
polite expression of regret that he could not concur with the governor's views.
¹⁰

The
first consequence was a brisk move by the Federals; the man Fremont had
stationed at Cairo was capable of acting quickly. Learning what had happened,
General Grant put all the infantry and artillery he could spare on steamboats
and, with gunboats for escort, moved fifty miles up the Ohio to take possession
of Paducah, Kentucky—another of those strategically important little cities,
like Cairo, whose possession could mean so much. Having occupied the place on
September 6, Grant hurried back to Cairo to round up reinforcements for the
Paducah contingent, to get Fremont's approval of what he had just done—he had
sent Fremont a telegram, earlier, proposing the seizure of Paducah, but had
gone ahead and made the move without waiting for a reply—and to send a telegram
to the Kentucky legislature announcing that the Confederates had violated the
state's neutrality.
¹¹
The legislature had just convened with a
strong Unionist majority—27 out of 38 Senators, and 74 out of 100 in the
House—and it reacted as might have been expected, requesting Governor Magoffin
to call out the militia "to expel and drive out the invaders,"
meaning Bishop Polk's Confederates, and inviting the United States government
to give Kentucky "that protection against invasion which is granted to
each one of the states by the fourth section of the fourth article of the
Constitution of the United States."
¹²

This invitation actually asked the
United States government to do nothing that it had not been planning to do
anyway, but it did put a heavy load on a soldier who had already been overtaxed—Robert
Anderson, who as a major in the Regular Army had had to take the heat at Fort
Sumter, and who now was a brigadier general charged with the Federal command in
Kentucky. Anderson was in wretched health. Fort Sumter had taken much out of
him, and the summer had been even worse. As a native Kentuckian who had strong
ties and deep sympathies with the South but who was also completely loyal to
the Union, he had been torn two ways by powerful emotions, and he lacked the
cold inner hardness to endure such a strain; apparently he was on the edge of
what would now be called a nervous breakdown. When Polk made his move Anderson
was in Cincinnati, conferring with eminent Kentuckians, just as he had been
doing for months, on the delicate business of getting control over a state
whose virginal neutrality was still intact. It was undoubtedly a relief to come
to the end of these under-the-counter deals and to be able to make war out in
the open, but in order to make war General Anderson was going to need more
troops than were anywhere in sight. Thus far, the troops raised by the Middle
Western states had mostly been sent either to Washington or to St. Louis; the
general had to occupy a large state, expelling invaders, and he did not have
very many soldiers.

He
did have two valuable subordinates whom he had persuaded the War Department to
assign to him, men who were to play large parts in the war; two West
Point-trained brigadier generals, William Tecumseh Sherman and George H.
Thomas. Anderson sent Sherman off to get help from Fremont, if possible, and to
urge the Governors of Illinois and Indiana to send along any troops they had,
and he dispatched Thomas to take command of Camp Dick Robinson. He himself
established headquarters in Louisville and set about recruiting Ken-tuckians
for the Federal service.
¹³

Meanwhile,
the citizens of Kentucky began to get grim evidence that they were in a civil
war, with strange new rules, or perhaps no rules at all, to govern them. United
States marshals were going about arresting people on broad charges of
disloyalty, and the legalities ordinarily involved in arrests and imprisonments
were wholly lacking. As a sample there was the case of former Governor Charles
S. Morehead, who was lodged in a cell in Fort Lafayette, far off in New York,
after a marshal accused him of treason. Morehead could get no formal
arraignment or hearing. His son-in-law appealed to President Lincoln, who
presently told Secretary Seward that it would be all right to release Morehead,
and others arrested with him, provided the release was approved by James Guthrie
and James Speed. Guthrie and Speed were private citizens of Kentucky—estimable
men, who had worked hard for the Union but who could not (under any statute
readily brought to mind) legally say whether or not suspected traitors must
stay in prison. Reuben T. Durrett, acting editor of the Louisville
Courier,
was arrested because some of his editorials
seemed disloyal, and Joseph Holt, who had been Secretary of War in the last
weeks of James Buchanan's administration, warned Lincoln that even if the man
took the oath of allegiance he ought not to be freed: "I say that he
would take the oath if necessary on his knees, and would stab the Government
the moment he rose to his feet." An Associated Press correspondent, Martin
W. Barr, was suspected of using his position "to advance the
insurrectionary cause"; marshals came to his house at night and took him
away, and from a cell in Fort Lafayette he gave his wife a fairly correct
appraisal of his situation when he wrote: "I am here beyond the reach of
law or liberty or juries." Bitterly, he added: "There remains but one
outrage—to cut my head off."
¹⁴
Correspondent Barr was spared
that final outrage, but he did not immediately get out of prison, either. The
war had been slow in reaching Kentucky, but once it arrived it was rigorous.
Kentucky's neutrality may have been an unrealistic venture, but from mid-April
to September it had spared the people something. . . .

No doubt General Polk had blundered; the
Confederacy lost much more than it gained when Kentucky went to war. Yet it may
be that Polk's real blunder was that his drastic action was not quite drastic
enough. Driven by military necessity, he had occupied Columbus; if at the same
time he had also occupied Paducah, instead of leaving that place for General
Grant to take, he might have put the Federals in a most uncomfortable box.

In
one way this war in the West was going to be unlike any other war in history:
it was going to be fought along the rivers, amphibious as no war had ever been
before, and the generals were going to have to learn the rules as they went
along. One of the rules was the unanticipated fact that in such warfare the
defensive can be much more difficult than the offensive. It seemed obvious
that guns on top of a high bluff could keep gunboats, transports, and supply
steamers from getting past; Columbus had very high bluffs, and that was why General
Polk had had the place occupied. But an invader blocked at Columbus could still
invade if he could float south on some other stream that would put him close
enough to the stronghold's rear to enable him to snip its lifelines. A Yankee
general stopped at Columbus was bound to realize that he could send a force up
the Tennessee River, which comes north across the state of Tennessee a little
less than one hundred miles east of the Mississippi; if he went up that river
far enough the Confederates would have to evacuate Columbus, even though
then-works there were wholly impregnable to assault. No Yankee general could
ascend the Tennessee unless he first took Paducah, which is where the
Tennessee flows into the Ohio. Holding Paducah, the Confederates could hold the
Tennessee and hence could hold Columbus and the Mississippi itself; losing Paducah,
they could hold Columbus only until the Federals saw what the Tennessee River
could do for them.

Polk had intended to take Paducah, but
he was doing the job one step at a time, and Grant got into Paducah ahead of
him. General Buckner promptly pointed out that this neutralized the possession
of Columbus, which meant that the Confederacy had gained very little by its
seizure of that place. As a result, Buckner believed that it would pay to get
out of the state altogether, leaving the Yankees as the only invaders and
trying to rally the citizens against them.
¹⁵
The idea was probably
impractical, but Buckner had seen one thing clearly enough; taken by itself,
Columbus was not worth what it cost. Polk should have gone for everything, but
his hand had been forced; he had had to make a quick decision at a time when
any choice he made was quite likely to turn out to be wrong. He confessed that
the Confederates really should have moved into Columbus months earlier,
"If we could have found a respectable pretext," for he believed that
during all the time of neutrality "Kentucky was fast melting away under
the influence of the Lincoln government."
¹⁶
In any case,
another man now had the responsibility. Albert Sidney Johnston was on the scene
at last, over-all commander for everything the Confederates had in the West.

Johnston was fifty-eight, a courtly man with
a singularly winning personality, a famous veteran of the Old Army and in the
opinion of some Southerners at that time the ablest soldier on either side. He
had been in command for the United States Army on the West Coast when the war
began; had stayed there, making no secret of his intention to side with the
South but faithfully carrying on with his duties until Washington could send
out a replacement; then he had resigned, traveling by horseback across the
rough mountains and plains of the Southwest all the way to Texas, and going on
to Richmond in the hope that President Davis could find something for him to
do. He was cheered wherever he made an appearance, and no one received him more
eagerly than Jefferson Davis, who immediately gave him a full general's
commission. ("I hoped and expected that I had others who would prove
Generals," Mr. Davis said a bit later, "but I knew I had
one
—and
that was Sidney Johnston.") Johnston reached Nashville on September 14,
to be received at the State Capitol by Governor Harris and an enthusiastic
crowd. Called on to say a few words to the multitude, he instinctively touched
the right note, addressing his civilian audience as "Fellow
Soldiers!" and explaining: "I call you
soldiers
because you all belong to the reserve
corps."

Polk
was devoutly glad to see him. Before Johnston ever got to Richmond, Polk had
written to Mr. Davis to urge Johnston's appointment to the top spot in the
West; he had known Johnston since boyhood, had roomed with him at West Point,
and had himself been persuaded to take the Western command only on the
understanding that the job would eventually go to Johnston. Now Johnston was on
hand, taking a look at the field that would occupy him for the rest of his
life.
¹⁷

What he saw was enough to dismay any
general: much to do, and not enough to do it with. He warned Mr. Davis, two
days after his arrival, that "we have not over half the
armed
forces that are now likely to be
required," and he pointed out that although there were plenty of recruits
there was no way to arm them. Whether faulty War Department planning or the
tightening of the Federal blockade was responsible, the Confederacy was already
pinched for weapons, and no one felt the pinch more than Albert Sidney
Johnston. In addition to being responsible for Confederate operations in
Missouri and Arkansas, he had to defend a line more than 300 miles long, from
the Cumberland Gap in the east to Columbus in the west, and he had fewer than
30,000 men all told. The Yankees had nearly twice that many, and although every
Federal commander was complaining bitterly about the lack of proper arms their
situation was infinitely better than Johnston's.
¹⁸
He could do
nothing but put on a bold front, acting as if he planned to move north to the
Ohio River and hoping that the Federals could be bluffed into inaction. If he
could stave off invasion during the fall and winter, Richmond might be able to
help him by spring. It seemed to General Johnston that the war was going to
last for at least seven years.

5.
Mark
of
Desolation

Kentucky's war had
grown out of Missouri's, a product of the shock waves that came surging east
from the Mississippi; and these waves met others which rolled in from the south
and the east, from Tennessee and Virginia, making a bewildering turbulence.
While the rival governments in Washington and Richmond settled down to the slow
and methodical business of training and equipping armies according to the
professional pattern, in the heart and center of the land the war got away from
them and made its own demands, creating unsuspected perils and opportunities.
The fire was running down to the grass roots. Somewhere between the too vivid
realities of slavery and abolitionism and the fine-spun abstractions of states'
rights and Unionism, the war was becoming something which men could interpret
in terms of wrongs done by their neighbors, of old grudges and local feuds, of
farm prices and the cost of living and the pestilent inequities of courthouse
politics. Flames burning so could be hard to control and hard to put out.