The Confederate Nation: 1861 to 1865 (18 page)

Again he rode an artillery caisson to the scene of action. And again young men allowed him to fire their first shot. This time Ruffin’s shot exploded near a suspension bridge over Cub Run on the Federal line of retreat and showered fragments into a body of fleeing troops. Ruffin watched with pride the distant blue figures recoil in panic as the guns of “his” battery completed the work he had begun.

Next day Ruffin visited the bridge and the site of his most recent “first shot.” He was disappointed to find only three dead bodies. Later he learned that “about seven dead bodies” lay near where his shell exploded, and finally he convinced himself that at least fifteen Yankees had fallen, dead or wounded.
⁴¹

R
OANOKE Island, North Carolina, had been important in American history before. Some time between 1587 and 1590 a colony of Englishmen sponsored by Sir Walter Raleigh had vanished without, a trace from the island, beginning the intriguing unsolved mystery of the “lost colony.” Early in 1862, Roanoke Island again commanded the attention of Americans. This time the “lost colony” was a band of Confederate soldiers and sailors who attempted to defend the place. But this time there was no mystery; most of the defenders were killed, wounded, or captured by Union soldiers.
¹

Situated behind North Carolina’s outer banks, Roanoke Island was critical terrain. Control of the island promised influence in North Carolina’s extensive inland waterways and command of the Dismal Swamp Canal, the “back door” to Norfolk.
²

In August of 1861 the Federal navy succeeded in capturing Fort Hatteras, which guarded the entrance to Pamlico Sound from the sea. At that point Benjamin J. Huger, who commanded the Department of Norfolk, sent a regiment of troops to garrison and fortify Roanoke Island with the aid of some state militia from North Carolina. Then Huger inaugurated an extensive dialogue with the Confederate War Department over the boundaries of his department, to attempt to avoid responsibility for defending Roanoke Island. While the War Office gerrymandered military departments, work on the island’s defenses proceeded indifferently. Finally in late December 1861, Judah P. Benjamin, who had succeeded Leroy Pope Walker as Secretary of War, assigned Henry A. Wise to Roanoke Island and to Huger’s department.
³

Governor Wise, the former Virginia fire-eater, was a general by virtue of political influence and his ability to recruit a “legion” (brigade) for the Confederate army. He assumed command at Roanoke Island on January 7, 1862, while his legion was still in transit from Virginia. However limited his military experience and talent, Wise could easily perceive that Roanoke Island was all but defenseless.
⁴

On the island were about 1,500 soldiers who were, Wise later reported, “undrilled, unpaid, not sufficiently clothed and quartered, and … miserably armed with old flint muskets in bad order.” The artillery was misplaced, antiquated, and undersupplied. Wise’s naval complement consisted of a squadron of small gunboats commanded by Captain William F. Lynch. The
Sea-Bird,
Lynch’s flagship, carried two guns; the rest of the vessels in the squadron had one gun each, and two were in reality tugboats with guns aboard. Wise pronounced them “perfectly imbecile.”
⁵

Having acquainted himself with the sad state of his new command, Wise hastened to Norfolk to confront Huger with his needs and then to Richmond to expedite transit of his legion. Meanwhile, during the first week of January a Union armada of warships and troop transports, eighty ships and 15,000 men, under the command of Ambrose E. Burnside set sail for North Carolina. On January 20, Captain Lynch discovered Burnside’s expedition pouring through Hatteras Inlet and responded by steaming back to Roanoke Island and writing a letter to the Navy Department blaming Wise for the impending disaster.
⁶

Wise did not return to his command until the last day of January. The next day he established his headquarters at Nags Head on the outer banks and became violently ill with pleurisy. The General’s legion was arriving slowly, and as it did, Wise dictated orders from his sickbed dispatching the troops to Roanoke Island. Eventually the Confederates on the island numbered just over 2,500. Neither army nor navy contingents had adequate ammunition for more than a skirmish.
⁷

The Federals came steaming into Croatan Sound in strength on the morning of February 7. Lynch’s squadron gave battle intermittently, and the army’s shore batteries opened on the Union ships. Never, however, was there hope of doing more than delaying the advance of the enemy. Federal troop transports began landing operations on an all but unprotected beach in the middle of the island, and by midnight 10,000 Union troops and considerable artillery were on Roanoke Island.

Early on the morning of the eighth about 1,500 Southerners arrayed themselves around a three-gun battery on a low hill and discovered that no one knew how to serve the artillery pieces. A captain sent from Wise’s headquarters was still giving lessons when the enemy’s infantry appeared. The fight was more than uneven; by noon the Southerners had exhausted their artillery ammunition and had fallen back in confusion. There was nowhere to retreat. In addition to other shortages, the Confederates had virtually no small boats in which to escape from the island, and most of the Southern troops surrendered in place.
⁸

One of those mortally wounded was Captain O. Jennings Wise, son of the Commanding General and until recently editor of the Richmond
Enquirer.
When General Wise recovered from his pleurisy and his grief, he sought vengeance for the debacle on Roanoke Island at the expense of Huger, Benjamin, and the Confederate War Office. Eventually a committee of Congress investigated; Wise had the time and the inclination to supply the committee with most of the evidence it considered, and not surprisingly the committee laid the blame for the defeat upon Huger and Benjamin.
⁹

The battle of Roanoke Island was a classic Confederate disaster. From the beginning, the new nation was unprepared to defend the isolated island. Huger demonstrated the weakness of the departmental command structure by spending considerable time and energy trying to avoid responsibility for Roanoke Island. Nor was the War Department able to make an appropriate response even with ample warning of the Union threat. Wise was an amateur general; he spent most of his time while in command of Roanoke in Norfolk and Richmond complaining instead of doing anything effective about his problems. As a result the Confederate plan to defend the island was a farce. The navy showed itself weak and small, and the army’s deficiencies in men and war materiel were all too obvious. Even before the debacle occurred, the Southerners—Lynch, Wise, Huger, and Benjamin—bent their energies exchanging blame. And eventually the unseemly sniping involved a congressional committee that took few pains to spare the feelings of the administration.

Roanoke Island was not the only disaster to befall the Confederacy during the eight months following the victory at Manassas. In fact nearly a year passed before Southerners could again celebrate a major victory, and during the period between the battle of Manassas and the opening of the 1862 campaigns, Confederate losses seemed irredeemable. In sharp contrast to the euphoria of July 1861 was the growing disillusion and gloom of the succeeding months.
¹⁰

In early August of 1861 a party of “buffalo hunters” led by John R. Baylor invaded the territory of New Mexico and claimed it for the Confederacy. But when the adventure became a campaign, the Southern troops of Brigadier General H. H. Sibley lost the battle of Glorieta Pass on March 28, 1862, and abandoned New Mexico.
¹¹

On August 10, Southern volunteers commanded by Sterling Price and ex-Texas Ranger Ben McCulloch defeated a Union army at Wilson’s Creek in Missouri,
¹²
but skirmishing between small units continued during the late summer and fall with no further Confederate advances. The Confederate Congress admitted Missouri to the Confederacy formally on November 28 in the presence of Governor Claiborne Jackson, but by then Jackson’s government was in exile and Missouri was
de facto
in the Union.
¹³
The Southerners made what turned out to be their last campaign for Missouri in March of 1862, and that campaign advanced no farther than northern Arkansas. On March 6 and 7, Confederate General Earl Van Dorn and about 20,000 soldiers attacked an equal number of Federals at Pea Ridge. The battle was essentially a draw, but the Southerners abandoned the field and their threat to southern Missouri.
¹⁴

The Confederate attempt to hold Kentucky fared no better. On September 3, 1861, General Leonidas Polk, until recently the Episcopal bishop of Louisiana, violated Kentucky neutrality and drew a strong protest from the state legislature. Popular sentiment in the state was running against the Confederacy even as the Confederate Congress admitted Kentucky to the Southern nation on December 10, 1861. Then, on January 17, 1862, Richmond’s military positions in Kentucky collapsed at the Battle of Mills Springs. Within a month the Confederacy had all but abandoned Kentucky and was fighting to hang on to some of Tennessee.
¹⁵

In the mountains of western Virginia the Confederacy suffered secession and defeat during the fall of 1861. Delegates from the western counties met in Wheeling in late August. They were in effect a secession convention which framed the constitution for a new state carved from Virginia. On October 24 a popular referendum in the Virginia west endorsed the work of the convention.
¹⁶
Military efforts to hold the area for the Confederacy were uniformly unsuccessful. The major campaign led by Robert E. Lee failed at the Battle of Cheat Mountain in mid-September. By early spring the Confederate frontier in Virginia seemed about to contract still more. Stonewall Jackson and a small force of infantry suffered defeat at Kernstown in the lower, or northern, Shenandoah Valley.
¹⁷

In November 1861, a Federal amphibious force landed at Port Royal, South Carolina, and rapidly secured a foothold on the coast between Charleston and Savannah. Lee, the Confederate departmental commander, was powerless to do more than harass his enemies, and by December planters along the Georgia-South Carolina coast were burning cotton to prevent its capture by the Union army.
¹⁸

On the Mississippi the Confederates lost a key point at each end of the river. Early in December 1861 the United States reoccupied Ship Island near the mouth of the Mississippi. That move provided the North with a base from which to launch assaults on New Orleans and/or Mobile, although the Confederacy was able to open the Mississippi briefly in October 1862, when the ironclad ram
Manassas
damaged some Union ships. To the north the Southerners held New Madrid, Missouri, through the winter but lost the river port on March 14, 1862. It was obvious that Southern use of the river would be perilous at best.
¹⁹

Then the South, having lost both possession and allegiance in Kentucky, began losing Tennessee, in the Confederate heartland, as well. Albert Sidney Johnston commanded Department Number Two, which extended from the Cumberland Gap to the Mississippi River, including most of the state. On the other side were two Union military departments and the potential, for the Union, of confused command. Johnston convinced himself that his most immediate threat was Don Carlos Buell’s army. Buell, who commanded the Department of the Ohio, had a sizable force at Munfordville, Kentucky, and seemed to Johnston about to advance on Nashville. Accordingly Johnston made his largest concentration at Bowling Green, between Buell and Nashville. Meanwhile from the adjacent Union Department of Missouri came an amphibious assault up the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers.

The Federal army commander of this expedition was Ulysses S. Grant, who at this point boasted an essentially undistinguished record in the “old army” and a command seemingly beyond his training and experience. Grant and his naval counterpart, Commodore Andrew H. Foote, were aggressive, however, and on February 2, 1862, an invasion force of 15,000 began moving up the Tennessee. Barring the invasion route were two Confederate forts, Henry and Heiman, and a small army commanded by Lloyd Tilghman.
²⁰

The Confederates were woefully unprepared to defend the forts. Most of Tilghman’s 2,500 troops were armed with muskets left over from the War of 1812. Fort Heiman, situated on high ground on the west bank of the Tennessee, was an uncompleted work designed to protect Fort Henry, which was on level ground on the east bank. Fort Henry was all but defenseless against Foote’s gunboats; winter rains had flooded many of the gun emplacements, and the parade ground was under two feet of water at the time of the Federal advance. Tilghman had repeatedly warned Johnston of his potential peril, but because Johnston was preoccupied with Buell’s threat, the warnings went unheeded. Now in the face of the Union advance, Tilghman realized his position was hopeless. He evacuated Fort Heiman, dispatching all but a token garrison to Fort Donelson (eleven miles away on the Cumberland River) and at Fort Henry awaited the inevitable. The Southerners defended Fort Henry for two hours on February 6 and surrendered.
²¹

Finally, Johnston understood the dimensions of the threat posed by Grant. He countered by falling back from Bowling Green to Nashville and reinforcing Fort Donelson. By February 12, when Grant was ready to move against the fort, former Virginia Governor John B. Floyd was at Donelson in command of 15,000 Confederates, the divisions of Simon B. Buckner and Gideon J. Pillow. Floyd, Buckner, and Pillow, however, were convinced that Foote’s gunboats represented the greatest danger to the fort, and the Confederates ignored their opportunity to attack Grant’s infantry as it approached. Instead the Southern troops manned a line of breastworks outside Fort Donelson and waited.

On February 14 the gunboats closed on the fort and dueled with the Southern shore batteries. Donelson’s guns repulsed the attack, but Floyd did not realize the extent of the damage inflicted upon the Federal fleet. That evening the Southern commander held a council of war with Pillow and Buckner, and they determined to abandon the fort and withdraw to Nashville.

Meanwhile Grant was receiving reinforcements; by morning 25,–000 Union troops enclosed the Southern lines. Both sides were suffering from the extremely cold weather, a dearth of blankets, and a shortage of rations. Near dawn on February 15, Pillow’s Confederates surged forward to open an escape route and after brisk fighting during the morning achieved their objective. Floyd, however, could not believe his success. He conferred with Pillow and Buckner, delayed the breakout, and eventually recalled his army to their works. In the afternoon the Confederates repulsed a Union counterattack, and by nightfall the two armies occupied essentially the same lines as they had the night before.