The Confederate Nation: 1861 to 1865 (19 page)

Again Floyd called a council of war. This time the three commanders decided to surrender, or at least they decided to surrender their armies; Floyd and Pillow fled in the night on February 15 with about 1,500 members of the garrison. Cavalry commander Nathan Bedford Forrest, who would have no part of the surrender talk, managed to lead his troopers through a frozen swamp and onto the road to Nashville that same night.

Buckner, because he had less rank than his fellow generals, was left to surrender Donelson, 11,500 troops, and forty guns. He asked for terms on February 16. Grant demanded unconditional surrender, and Buckner had no choice but to accept. Grant thus enhanced his reputation as an aggressive commander, earned a famousnick-name, and compounded the Southern ignominy. Four days after the surrender at Fort Donelson, Johnston abandoned Nashville. Then Grant’s army pressed its advantage into the Tennessee Valley; by the end of March the invasion column was at Pittsburg Landing, only a few miles from Mississippi.
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There were bright spots in the record of Confederate arms after Manassas, but they were pitifully few and mostly of short duration. As late as March of 1862 the Confederates still had to celebrate Manassas as their last major military victory. They had had to abandon New Mexico, Missouri, Kentucky, western Virginia, and a large portion of Tennessee. The enemy threatened at Port Royal, at both ends of the Mississippi, and in eastern North Carolina. And worst of all were the humiliating ways in which the Confederates lost—especially at Fort Donelson and Roanoke Island.

To make matters even more frightening, Union General George B. McClellan, victor in the western Virginia campaigns, was raising and training a mammoth army around Washington for an assault on Richmond. Rumors put McClellan’s numbers at more than 100,000, and the rumors were true. In the wake of so much failure the Confederacy appeared ready for the
coup de grâce
as the campaigning season of 1862 began in earnest.
²³

Amid the gathering gloom that pervaded the Confederate war, the Southern navy offered little hope. Secretary Mallory had gathered about him some first-rate thinkers, and he and his staff had thought some wise thoughts. Yet in the realm of deeds the navy had little of lasting consequence to show in the spring of 1862. Mallory was still hoping to buy a navy in Europe rather than construct one in the South. To this end Captain James D. Bulloch, Georgia-born veteran of the United States Navy, had already made a good beginning in England. He had, for example, contracted with the Laird shipbuilders at Birkenhead for the construction of two seagoing ironclad rams which promised to wreak havoc with the Union blockade. Yet Laird could not complete the rams for another eighteen months, and in the interim the Federals were tightening the blockade.
²⁴

In July of 1861 the United States, which possessed about a hundred ships, was attempting to seal the 189 openings along the 3,549 miles of Confederate coastline with fewer than thirty-three vessels. Not surprisingly, during 1861 the blockaders stopped only about one Southern ship in nine. By January 1862, though, the Federal navy had grown to three hundred ships, and during 1862 blockading squadrons were able to catch one ship in seven. The blockade was not yet ruinous to Southern trade, but Union performance was improving. And during the period when the blockade was most porous, the Confederates had been unable to ship their unfilled arms orders from Europe. Now, in 1862, the South faced a tightening blockade with little more than purchase orders in the way of a blue-water navy. The entire Confederate naval force on February 27, 1862, numbered only thirty-three ships.
²⁵

While waiting for the efforts of Bulloch and other purchasing agents to bear fruit, Mallory and his staff realized the necessity for immediate action to defend Southern rivers and coastal waters. The Secretary had for some time been intrigued with the feasibility of ironclad ships and the possibility that a few armored vessels might offset the North’s growing superiority in numbers of conventional ships. Even though the
Manassas
had had to withdraw to New Orleans for repairs after its brief success on the Mississippi, the pioneer ironclad had demonstrated potential. Nevertheless, in October 1861, the Confederate Congress committed $2 million to the construction of small wooden gunboats.

All the while, however, work was progressing at the Gosport Navy Yard near Portsmouth on the partially burned hull of the old Union frigate
Merrimack.
²⁶
Back in June, Mallory’s Chief of Ordnance and Hydrography John M. Brooke had drawn a design for transforming the
Merrimack’s
hull into the iron-plated C.S.S.
Virginia.
Mallory authorized the work and anticipated completion by November. The conversion proceeded glacially, however, and although the
Virginia’s
executive officer, Lieutenant Catesby ap R.Jones, pressed the workmen to labor overtime, seven days a week, the ironclad was not in the water until mid-February 1862. It was a strange sight. The rebuilt hull, covered by a flat deck and fitted with a cast-iron ram, floated just below the waterline. An oval superstructure housing ten guns was centered on the submerged deck that protruded fore and aft. The
Virginia
was 263 feet long (the superstructure was 170 feet) and drew twenty-two feet of water. It looked somewhat like a floating roof.
²⁷

Finally, at 11:00
A.M.
on March 8, the great ironclad steamed out of Portsmouth and down the Elizabeth River toward Hampton Roads. Despite his strenuous efforts to get the ship into action, Jones was not its captain. Franklin Buchanan, recently made commander of the James River defenses, was the senior officer on board, and Jones remained the executive officer; the
Virginia
had no real captain. In keeping with his aggressive instincts the veteran Buchanan took the ironclad immediately into action without a trial run. From several Union ships on Hampton Roads, the sizable body of water which links the James River with the Chesapeake Bay, Buchanan selected the
Congress
and the
Cumberland
as his foes. The two wooden ships lay at anchor off Newport News, and Buchanan headed for them at full speed. On the
Virginia,
full speed was little better than four knots, so the Federals had more than an hour to prepare for the encounter.
²⁸

Just after 2:00
P.M.
the
Virginia
drew within 1,500 yards of the
Congress,
and the two ships exchanged broadsides with little effect. Buchanan then continued his course to engage the more heavily armed
Cumberland.
He intended to ram the Union ship, and as he closed, both ships blazed away at each other. Shells poured into the
Cumberland,
but answering shots merely bounced off the
Virginia.
Then the Southern craft rammed its adversary and tore a gaping hole in the starboard side. The
Cumberland
began to sink immediately and might have dragged the
Virginia
down too had the ironclad’s ram not broken off. The
Cumberland’s
crew continued to serve their guns even as their ship sank lower in the water. At about 3:30 the
Cumberland
went down—colors still flying.

When Buchanan then turned to engage the
Congress,
the Federal commander made sail and ran his ship aground to prevent the heavy-draught ironclad from ramming him. No matter—Buchanan maneuvered the
Virginia
to within a hundred yards of the
Congress
and pounded it into submission. Near the end of the battle Buchanan sustained a leg wound, and Jones at last assumed command of the
Virginia.
²⁹

The crew of the
Virginia
watched the
Congress
burn that night while news of their triumph spread abroad. Meanwhile Jones directed repair work and prepared to resume the destruction the following morning. He knew that by the next day the
Virginia
would no longer have a monopoly on iron armor. In the light cast by the burning
Congress,
a southern pilot had seen the Union ironclad
Monitor
approaching.
³⁰

The Federal ironclad was in Hampton Roads that morning by sheer coincidence; like the
Virginia,
it had been built as something of an experiment and towed south to support Union efforts in Virginia waters. The Federal “cheese box on a raft” was smaller (172 feet) than the
Virginia
but faster. Moreover, because its squat cylindrical turret revolved and it drew only 10.5 feet of water, it was more maneuverable and capable of delivering a more sustained rate of fire from its two eleven-inch guns.
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Early on March 9, Jones got the
Virginia
under way and headed for the Union frigate
Minnesota,
which had run aground the previous evening. As the
Virginia
closed on its prey, the
Monitor
intervened. For most of that morning the two ironclads battered each other at ranges seldom exceeding a hundred yards. Neither was able to inflict significant damage. Finally a shot from the
Virginia
exploded near one of the
Monitor’s
observation holes and the powder fragments temporarily blinded the Federal commander. His executive officer broke off the engagement, and Jones did not attempt to follow. The duel of ironclads was over, and naval warfare would never be the same again.
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During the two months that followed, both sides expected a renewal of the combat between ironclads. But none occurred. Neither navy was willing to chance combat under any but the most favorable conditions. The heavy-draught
Virginia
could not leave Hampton Roads without risking the danger of running aground, and the Federals feared that the
Monitor
might be rammed and sunk if it offered battle on wide waters.

Early in May the Confederate army evacuated Norfolk in the face of McClellan’s threat, and the
Virginia
became a ship without a port. After frantic but futile efforts to lighten the vessel enough for it to steam up the James, the
Virginia’s
crew, on May 10, scuttled and burned it.
³³

The
Virginia’s
brief cruise convinced the Confederates that their salvation lay in ironclads, and Mallory recommitted the energies of his department to the construction of armored ships. During the spring of 1862, however, the South lost the ports of New Orleans, Memphis, and Norfolk, and with them all but five of the nascent fleet of ironclads. Moreover, the Confederates themselves had the unhappy task of destroying the ships to prevent capture. On one occasion, as Secretary Mallory was concluding a women’s tour of an armored vessel, one of the women asked to see a final feature of the ship: “the place where they blow it up.” Clearly, the Navy Department would have to begin again, at a time when the end seemed imminent. To his credit, Mallory persevered. But the hard fact was that the Confederate navy was much less a match for its foe in 1862 than it had been the year before. A year of stop-gap operations and attempted foreign purchases had produced few tangible results.
³⁴

The military failure of the Confederacy during the months after Manassas was both cause and effect of other flaws in the fabric of Southern nationhood. A “chicken-and-egg” relationship existed between the fortunes of Confederate arms and the state of Southern manpower, materiel, money, politics, and national morale. In each of these areas Southerners had tried to act like a nation and had failed.

When the first session of the first permanent Congress convened in Richmond on February 18, 1862, its members were concerned about the capacity of the Confederate military establishment to defend the nation. As the sad details of the Roanoke Island and Fort Donelson debacles became known, senators and representatives became genuinely alarmed. On March 3, in open session, the House requested the President to “communicate what additional means in money, men, arms, or other munitions of war, are, in his judgement, necessary.” Presented with an opportunity to make specific requests to an ostensibly responsive Congress, Davis lost no time asking his secretaries of war and navy for estimates of their needs.
³⁵

Davis’ response to the Congress, based upon the reports of his cabinet secretaries, was curious. He began by filling in the figures of the “blank check” to prosecute the war properly during 1862. The Confederacy required 300,000 more men, 750,–000 more small arms, 5,000 more artillery pieces, 5,000 additional tons of powder, fifty more ironclads, and an additional fleet of at least ten “of the most formidable war vessels” for service on the high seas. Then, having asked for these items, the President informed his Congress that no amount of money or legislation would suffice to procure them.
³⁶
The requisite tools of war were not to be had at any price either within the South or abroad. The Confederacy had raised an army of 340,000 men, at least on paper, but in the multifront war in which the Confederacy found itself, it appeared that at least twice that number would be required. And before the South enlisted more men in the ranks, it had to solve the problem of properly arming those already in the field. Thus when Congress asked the President what he needed, Davis responded by outlining his needs and then admitted that no one knew how to meet them.

In the beginning, the War Department had hoped to purchase large quantities of arms and ammunition abroad, and Caleb Huse, the Confederacy’s chief purchasing agent, enjoyed considerable success. Using the South’s limited amount of specie as long as possible, then offering cotton in exchange for his purchases, he contracted for military supplies of all kinds. Contracts, however, would not kill enemy soldiers; by February 1862 only 15,000 small arms had actually arrived from Europe. The Union blockade hampered Huse’s efforts, as did the Confederacy’s somewhat bizarre system of international barter.
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