The Confederate Nation: 1861 to 1865 (42 page)

T
HE
Alabama
was all but worn out. Its bottom was fouled, its powder indifferent, and its engines prematurely old. Raphael Semmes had taken his famous raider into port at Cherbourg for badly needed refitting in June of 1864. Before the major work could begin, however, the U.S.S.
Kearsarge
appeared at the mouth of the harbor. Semmes pondered his alternatives and decided to leave the sanctuary of his neutral port and give battle immediately. Perhaps he realized that he stood a better chance fighting one Federal ship than he would against the squadron sure to follow the
Kearsarge.
Perhaps he had a kind of romantic death wish and chose quite literally to go down in flames rather than rot at anchor in port. He wrote later that at the time he believed the two ships to be evenly matched, and thus he fought because he thought he had a good chance to win. In any event, at 9:00
A.M.
on June 19 the
Alabama
steamed into the channel to challenge its enemy.

As the battle revealed, the ships were anything but evenly matched; th
e Alabama
was much inferior. Moreover Captain John A. Winslow, in command of the
Kearsarge,
had installed a heavy cablechain matting on either side of his ship to protect her vitals amidships. Semmes attempted to stay at long range, but Winslow closed on him. Southern shot bounced off the
Kearsarge’
s cable-chain armament as though the Union ship were ironclad. A shell from one of the
Alabama’s
big guns did land on the
Kearsarge’s
deck but failed to explode. All the while the enemy’s fire had telling effect. In an hour it was all over. The
Alabama
began to sink. Semmes struck his colors and ordered his crew over the side. He drew his sword, hurled it defiantly into the channel, and then dove into the water himself.
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Early in August 1864, on Mobile Bay, Franklin Buchanan emulated Semmes’ gallantry with similar results. Buchanan commanded the defenses of Mobile Bay against an invading fleet led by David Farragut. The Confederates at Mobile depended upon a series of land fortifications, a field of torpedo mines, and the ironclad ram
Tennessee
to defend themselves and the bay. On August 5, Farragut’s Federals ran this gauntlet and by noon seventeen Union warships were at anchor inside Mobile Bay. Buchanan, aboard the
Tennessee,
watched the parade of enemy vessels steam through the channel amid a hail of Southern shot and shell. He reflected briefly and then ordered the
Tennessee
to charge the Union fleet. The lone Southern ship made a noble fight, but after Buchanan suffered a wound in the leg, the
Tennessee’s
smokestack lay on its deck and its steam pressure was falling rapidly. When a Union shell severed the
Tennessee’s
rudder chain and it no longer responded to the helm, the ship’s captain, J. D. Johnston, raised the white flag of surrender. Buchanan, too, had gone down in flames rather than forestall inevitable defeat.
²

Buchanan refused to meet the victorious Farragut and nursed his wound and pride aboard the
Tennessee
until the Federals moved him to a military hospital at Pensacola. Semmes was more fortunate. He was pulled from the channel by the crew from a British yacht and so escaped capture. Eventually he made his way back to Richmond in early 1865 to become an admiral with virtually no fleet. By then the South’s blue-water navy consisted of one cruiser, the
Shenandoah,
which put to sea on October 8, 1864. The last significant Confederate ironclad, the
Albemarle,
went down on the night of October 27, 1864, at Plymouth, North Carolina, victim of sneak attack by a Union torpedo launch. When Semmes assumed command of the entire Confederate Navy on February, 18, 1865, it numbered eight ships.
³

The Confederacy, too, was sinking but still defiant. Nor was the nation’s defiance limited to noble gestures. Like Semmes and Buchanan, the South as a whole seemed determined to fight its war to a conclusion—even though rational Southerners could find little reason, after the summer of 1864, to doubt that that conclusion would be defeat.

The land war went no better than the war at sea during the fall and winter. When Hood led the Army of Tennessee west into Alabama, then north into Tennessee in late September, Sherman’s host followed for a time. Then on October 28 the Union commander decided to quit the chase. Ordering Thomas, whose army was at Nashville, to deal with Hood, Sherman returned with his own army of 60,000 to Atlanta, and from there on November 16 set out for the sea. He divided his force into three columns, cut his lines of communication and supply, and took the war to the people of Georgia. His troops lived off the country and destroyed just about everything of value which happened in their path—the 1864 harvest and the South’s economic resources between Atlanta and Savannah. Local militia and home guards proved less than annoyances to Sherman’s runaway army. Not only did Southern civilians suffer. Letters from soldiers’ families who had been in Sherman’s path had a profoundly demoralizing effect upon the troops of Hood’s and Lee’s armies. Desertions increased as men headed home to protect and feed their families.
⁴

Sherman reached Savannah on December 10; the city’s less than 18,000 defenders under William J. Hardee had little prospect of holding the place. Hardee did compel Sherman to fight for his supplies; the Confederates flooded the rice fields between Sherman and the sea, blocking the Federals’ access to their supply ships offshore. However, on December 13 the enemy captured Fort McAllister and opened a channel for resupply through the Ogeechee River south of Savannah. When Sherman next threatened to close off Hardee’s escape route from the city, the Confederate army abandoned Savannah and headed north. Hardee and the War Office in Richmond hoped to concentrate as many Southern troops as possible and make a stand against Sherman in the Carolinas. The hope was illusory.
⁵

Meanwhile in Tennessee, Hood’s troubles mounted. After Sherman returned to Georgia, the Army of Tennessee, numbering about 39,000, enjoyed initial success maneuvering in its home state against smaller contingents of Thomas’ army. Hood hoped to attack and destroy elements of Thomas’ force before they could concentrate at Nashville. The Confederates, however, lost a splendid opportunity to cut off and destroy Schofield’s oversized corps of 34,000 at the Battle of Spring Hill on November 29, 1864. Then Hood followed Schofield to Franklin, Tennessee, and decided that, since maneuver had failed to trap his enemies, he would launch a frontal assault and attempt to overrun them. The Union force was slightly smaller than Hood’s, but it was entrenched and ready. On November 30, Hood’s Southern infantry charged the Union trenches across a mile of open ground with no artillery preparation. The Battle of Franklin was slaughter; the Confederates suffered more than 6,000 casualties, including twelve general officers. In the aftermath of battle the bodies of five Southern generals, including Patrick Cleburne, lay on a single front porch, and Hood’s troops had lost almost all confidence in their commander.

Nevertheless Hood, with about 31,000 survivors of Franklin, advanced on Nashville, where Thomas waited with nearly 50,000 Federals. The Confederate general hoped this time to stand on the defense, lure his enemies out of Nashville, and destroy them. Hood’s hopes continued unfullfilled. Thomas took his time in preparation and then on December 15 and 16 he enveloped Hood’s left flank and all but annihilated the Army of Tennessee.
⁶

In mid-January 1865, Davis acceded to Hood’s request to be relieved of his command. After the Battle of Nashville, however, the Army of Tennessee offered little in the way of resistance to further Federal conquest. About 5,000 veterans did make their way across the mountains to join the Confederates attempting to block Sherman’s drive. As this remnant army marched, some of their number summarized their mood in song; to the tune of “Yellow Rose of Texas,” they sang:

“Uncle Joe” Johnston returned to command, at the behest of Lee, whom Congress made commanding general of all Confederate armies on February 6, 1865. The appointment was testimony to faith in Lee’s ability and also was tantamount to a vote of no confidence in the President’s capacity to fill the role of commander-in-chief. Davis had tried to unify military command in himself, and although he had done so to a greater degree than his enemies, the Southern President had failed as war leader, if only because he was losing the war. Congress, therefore, tried to buoy Southern morale and unify command at the same time by making Lee a supreme commander. Too late—“Uncle Joe” was not in Georgia now; Johnston’s command numbered only 17,000, and it confronted Sherman’s 60,000 in the Carolinas. On February 22, 1865, the same day Johnston received orders, the Confederacy’s last major port, Wilmington, North Carolina, fell. By this time Charleston was gone and Columbia was a smoldering ruin; both had fallen on the seventeenth. Johnston resumed command against Sherman on February 25 and promised little. He suggested that Lee send half his army in an attempt to strike a decisive blow against Sherman, but Lee pointed out that the remaining half of the Army of Northern Virginia would then be defenseless against Grant. Both Lee and Johnston hoped for a concentration against Sherman later on; but considerations of grand strategy seemed more and more to be merely dictated responses to the Federal initiative. Consequently Johnston continued only to harass Sherman as best he could while the Confederacy shrank before the Union advance.
⁸

Still, Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia maintained its precarious perimeter around Richmond and Petersburg. Life in the trenches was hard enough in summer when the sun baked the inhabitants; in winter rain, cold, and hunger made the ordeal much harder. Battle action compounded the difficulty while sharpshooters and artillery barrages reduced death to an impersonal affair of fate. Lieutenant Fred Fleet wrote his sister in late December from his “bombproof,” in which water stood “an inch or two deep on the floor.” He wrote of a comrade who, like himself, “had just written a letter to his sister.” He “sealed it up, when, as he was standing in his tent a ball came through and entered his head just behind his left ear and came out at his right eye, killing him instantly…. Ah! we soon become hardened to such scenes. Scarcely a day passes that some one in this Brigade is not killed or wounded.”
⁹

Throughout the weary months from the summer of 1864 to the spring of 1865 the two armies probed and patroled. All-out assaults upon isolated sectors of the trench lines sometimes advanced the attackers a few hundred yards if successful and often inspired counterattacks which restored the original positions. Eventually the trench networks extended for fifty miles around Petersburg and continued north of the James as a series of earthen forts east of Richmond. For the most part Lee’s army endured. Yet misery, hunger, death, and plaintive letters from home drove many to abandon the cause and desert. During one five-week period almost 8 percent (2,934) of the army’s effective total disappeared. And all the while Grant’s relentless pressure stretched the thin line of Southern earth and men ever thinner.
¹⁰

In the Shenandoah Valley, Jubal Early had more than his share of troubles upon his return from the raid on Washington. Union General Phillip Sheridan’s reinforced cavalry first chased Early’s small army, then at Cedar Creek on October 19 fought and all but annihilated the Confederates. Sheridan, in the fall of 1864, conducted in the Valley the same kind of inverse “scorched-earth” campaign that Sherman employed in Georgia. The Federals burned the recent harvest and hanged local bushwhackers who dared oppose their activities. Sheridan’s tactics, like Sherman’s, produced bitterness and hatred among the Southern victims. The tactics of “total war” also produced despair and weakened the Southern will to continue the struggle to be a nation.
¹¹

Clearly the Confederacy was losing its war. And behind the battle lines the Southern nation underwent a disintegration parallel to that taking place on its battlefields.

With good reason the Southern people despaired: their sacrifices of blood and treasure seemed to have yielded only disaster. In ever growing numbers in 1864 the Confederates reconciled themselves to defeat and reunion with their Northern enemies. Nor was this a mental and emotional process only; during the fall and winter of 1864 many Confederate Southerners expressed their defeatism in deeds. Soldiers in increasing numbers deserted the colors and returned home. The Conscript Bureau was unable to find replacements for them and in early 1865 Congress abolished the bureau altogether. The peoples’ loss of faith in the nation was also reflected in their declining faith in the national currency. Between January 1864 and January 1865 the price of gold more than doubled, and by March 1865 a gold dollar was worth up to seventy dollars in Confederate script. In Richmond the collapse of civilian morale found tangible expression in a mood of “eat, drink, and be merry.” Citizens of the capital prepared for the coming deluge with a frenzy of merrymaking. To the dismay of the city’s more sober-sided residents, the number of parties and marriages seemed to increase in direct proportion to the decline in the nation’s military fortunes. Outside of the capital Southerners expressed their despair by resisting taxes, hiding their livestock and produce from Im-pressment officers and tax-in-kind collectors, and damning the government which had led them into such folly.
¹²

The activities of the Confederate government, too, became both cause and effect of the South’s impending national doom. President Davis responded to the growing crisis by making optimistic public statements and by adopting a studied business-as-usual approach to governmental affairs. Davis also convinced himself and tried to convince others that the Confederacy needed no stable land base and that even should Federal troops overrun all his armies, the Southern nation would prevail in the continued resistance of its people.
¹³