The History of the Confederate War, Its Causes and Its Conduct, Volume 1 (of 2) / A Narrative and Critical History

The fighting raged furiously at this critical point and for a considerable time its result was in doubt, with the chances strongly in favor of the Federals. Three times the tide of battle ebbed and flowed across the disputed field, both sides fighting with a courage and obstinacy that were scarcely to have been expected of troops so little inured to the work of war.

When the struggle was at its fiercest, and at the moment when the promise of it seemed to be that the Federals would overwhelm and crush their sorely outnumbered adversaries, a strong detachment of Johnston's troops from the Valley, long delayed on their railroad journey, reached the field. Their orders were of the vaguest, but they plainly saw an overmastering Federal force pressing the Confederates very hard in their immediate presence. So, following the Napoleonic instruction to go to the point of heaviest firing the officers commanding the arriving Confederates went at once into the thick of the fight.

It was the work of a brief time for these fresh men to envelop the advancing Federal right wing and crush it to pulp.

In the meanwhile the sorely beset left wing of the Confederates had been enabled to hold its ground and save itself for a time from complete disaster, only by the obstinate courage of a brigade of Virginians under General Thomas Jonathan Jackson—a West Pointer who had long ago resigned from the old army to become a professor in the Virginia Military Institute, and who had now become a brigadier-general of Virginia volunteers. He had already so completely won the hearts and dominated the minds of his men that—raw volunteers as they were—they had no thought of faltering or flinching in the presence of any danger, so long as their chieftain bade them stand fast. One after another the battalions with which they had touched elbows were beaten back before a leaden hailstorm, or torn to shreds by cannon fire at murderously short range, or fairly forced to the rear by bayonet-armed phalanxes, while their own brigade line was steadily withering under the destructive fire. But they were under inspiration of a leader whom they loved and whose courage was inspired by a religious faith as unfaltering as that of any Mussulman fanatic, and so they stood steadfast in spite of all. They looked for their orders only to that great, calm, passionless leader, and from him alone they took their impulse. Scarcely at any time during a war that abounded in illustrations of heroism, was there, on either side, a more conspicuous example of the courage that endures, than that which was afforded by Jackson and his Virginians at that most critical moment of the first great battle. It excited admiration and inspired others with courage even in that hour of seemingly hopeless defeat. General Bee, who was destined a few minutes later to become a martyr to his own courage, seeing it, cried out to his wavering men: "There stands Jackson like a stone wall," and appealed to them to emulate the example of their comrades and "rally on the Virginians." From that hour to this the title "Stonewall" has clung to the fame and memory of Jackson more closely than his own proper name has done.

Under the fierce onset of Johnston's fresh men, supported by rallying brigades that had for a time faltered and yielded ground, and reinforced from the Confederate right, the Federal assailing column was quickly crushed and forced to retire, the Confederates pressing hotly upon their heels.

Then occurred that insane panic in the Federal army which has never been explained or accounted for except upon the insufficient ground that its victims were men without discipline and wholly unused to war. The explanation leaves much to be desired. The men who yielded to that panic impulse had already on that day proved themselves brave fellows, quite capable of doing soldiers' work right gallantly. They had fought with vigor, determination and high courage through long and bloody hours. They had been the assailants where assault required a greater courage than defense and they had done their soldierly work altogether well. They had been baffled of victory in the crowning hour of the battle, but they perfectly knew that their columns still outnumbered those of their adversary, and they must have known that in an orderly withdrawal from the scene of the conflict they were not in the least degree likely to be destructively assailed in their turn. Nothing was more unlikely indeed, than that the Confederates, having exhausted their freshness of vigor in the battle and having achieved their immediate purpose by repelling their enemy's assault, would in their turn advance upon that enemy, still outnumbering them, if he had withdrawn in good order and taken up a strong defensive position at Centreville, only a few miles away. Had the Federal Army done that, preserving its cohesion and presenting a determined front, it is indeed certain that the Confederates would not have cared to convert their successful defense into a more than doubtful offense; and even had that happened through Confederate over-confidence, the opportunity of the Federals to convert their own defeat into a conspicuous victory would have been as tempting as any that an army could desire.

Later in the war after the two armies had been molded into effectiveness by the stern discipline of service, some such course as this would undoubtedly have been pursued. But at Manassas the event was startlingly different. No sooner did the Federal troops that had fought so gallantly on the right of their line find their assault repelled and themselves forced back than all cohesion, all discipline, all soldierly qualities went out of them. They broke ranks and fled in a positively demented panic, which unfortunately proved to be instantly and universally contagious. The whole army fell into confusion. Even those parts of it which had successfully held their own in severe conflicts throughout the battle hours broke ranks and ran as an unorganized mob might at the advance of a force of regulars armed with bayonets.

The Confederates, flushed with unexpected victory achieved in the moment of defeat, pursued them with all the quick-moving forces available, chief among these being Stuart's small body of Virginia cavalry.

There was a report current in the Federal army that J. E. B. Stuart had under his command thirty thousand of the finest and most desperately daring horsemen that had been known in the world since the days of the Mamelukes. As a matter of fact, he had under his orders five or six hundred young Virginians. They knew how to ride their horses, they knew how to use their revolvers, and they knew in some degree at least how to handle their sabers. They had been trained to all that all their lives and perfected in it at the camp of instruction at Ashland. But beyond that they had no skill and no superiority and it was their constant wonder after the battle of Manassas, that during the chase they almost nowhere met the cavalry of the other side. They met and quickly dispersed artillery and infantry, but nowhere did they encounter men of their own arm of the service. They had met and fought horsemen in the Valley of Virginia—for Stuart had been with Johnston there—but they encountered none such now.

The simple fact is that the Union army was in an insane panic and utterly disorganized. The sole thought of every man in it was to escape with a whole skin if that should be in any way possible. The cavalry men having horses under them put spurs to their steeds and led instead of protectingly following a confused and confusing retreat upon Washington. Artillery men cut their horses out of their gun carriages and caissons, mounted them, and fled bareback at such speed as the horses could make.

At a little stream a caisson in mad flight was presently overturned, obstructing a bridge. A great cloud of panic-stricken soldiers and citizens seeking an avenue of flight was collected there almost in an instant. Then up came Kemper of the cannon, powder-grimed and weary but flushed with the victory. Using two guns he opened fire upon the confused crowd at short range, with an effect like that produced upon a flock of partridges when a charge of shot is fired into its midst. Then a little squad of Stuart's cavalry men—ten or a dozen in number—drew sabers and charged, and a minute later the creek was full of struggling and drowning men, but no organized force remained to be charged except a body of eighty infantry men fully armed, with bayonets fixed, who stood away on the left. Upon these the insignificant squad of cavalry men made a dashing charge, calling out as they galloped: "Throw down your arms or we'll put you to the sword!" And so completely demoralizing had the panic become that these eighty who could instantly have swept the little band of cavalry men off the face of the earth, not only dashed their arms to the ground but broke ranks and ran, every individual man seeking such escape as might be possible to him.

The men who were so panic-stricken on that fateful Sunday were not cowards. Many of them fought valiantly and stalwartly later in the war. They were simply victims of an insensate and highly contagious panic. They were not yet soldiers. They had not yet learned the first lesson of the soldier, namely, the imperative necessity of preserving organization, fighting every force encountered, and waiting for orders that must be obeyed at all costs, especially before giving way to the enemy. Their imaginations had been inflamed by the stories related at their camp fires respecting Stuart's mythical Mamelukes and their terrible skill in horsemanship.

In brief all courage, all cohesion, and all soldierly quality had completely gone out of the Federal army. Men who had fought courageously an hour before had become as hares fleeing from pursuing hounds, and their flight knew no halting until they had passed the long bridge into the streets of Washington, where they paused only to gather breath for a still further flight if such should become necessary.

In all this the confusion was increased and multiplied by the presence among the fugitives of a multitude of panic-stricken picnickers—Congressmen, civilians of every sort, and lavishly dressed women—who had gone out in carriages and carryalls to see the spectacle of a Federal army walking over the Confederates, and to follow the fleeing rebels all the way to Richmond, feasting meanwhile upon the champagne, the boned turkey, the sandwiches and the truffled game with which they had so lavishly supplied themselves that the Confederates fed fat for days afterwards upon the provisions that the picnickers abandoned in their flight.

The presence of these people within the lines of a fighting army was in itself a conspicuous illustration of the utterly unmilitary and undisciplined condition of that army. Imagine, if it be possible to imagine, such a horde of sightseers attempting to follow Grant into the Wilderness, or Sherman on his march to the Sea! But the war was very young when the battle of Manassas was fought, and so these people were permitted to be there, to add to the completeness of a rout that could never have been equaled in its insanity at any later period of the conflict.

As to the total number of men engaged on either side at Manassas, the statistics are varying and untrustworthy. It is certain that there was no very great or decisive disparity of numbers. The Federal army outnumbered that of the Confederates by only three or four thousand men. General Beauregard has estimated his total force, including the necessary garrison of the works, which of course was not actually engaged, at a total of 29,188 men. According to Dr. Rossiter Johnson, an unusually accurate and conscientious historian on the Northern side whose means of information are of the very best, McDowell's total force, including those detached to guard the line of retreat upon Washington, was about 34,000 men.

Exact statistics in such a case are of no moment. Where armed mobs, undisciplined, ill-organized, and unused to the strenuous work of war, meet in battle quite other things than numbers are apt to be decisive.

The Federal commanders reported a loss of 470 killed, 1,071 wounded and 1,793 missing—a total loss of 3,334 men. The Confederate loss was officially reported at 387 killed, 1,582 wounded and 13 missing, making a total of 1,982.

If greater attention is here given to this first important battle than to others of larger magnitude to be treated in future pages of this work, it is because of the extraordinary effect the battle had, as will be set forth in the next chapter, and because of the peculiar danger to which the Confederate victory for a time subjected the Federal cause.

CHAPTER XV
The Paralysis of Victory

On the evening of the twenty-first day of July, 1861, the Confederate army at Manassas rested upon one of the completest and most spectacular victories that had ever been won by any army over any adversary. The assailing army had not only been repelled—all possibility of resistance was gone from it. Not only had it been driven pell-mell from the field with every circumstance of demoralization that could add picturesqueness to its flight, but the uttermost link of cohesion that could hold its battalions together for any purpose of resistance was completely broken up and destroyed. Divisions were dissipated, brigades were broken into bits, regiments no longer existed and even companies were scattered to the winds. Only demoralized and panic-stricken fugitives, each madly seeking safety, remained. That which had been a most gallant "army with banners" at sunrise had become before nightfall a panic-stricken mob without possibility of cohesion or stamina and utterly without a sense of soldierly duty.

Then followed the strangest event of the war. This victory, the completest, the most picturesque, the most absolute that could be imagined, had the effect of paralyzing the winners of it to an extent to which even defeat could not have done.

The story is too strange and historically of too much import to be told otherwise than in its fulness.

Let us first consider the character and composition of the two armies that fought at Manassas. The Confederate volunteers were enlisted for twelve months. The term might have been made longer without the loss of a volunteer. For these young men, whatever their contract with the Government might stipulate, fully intended to remain in the service so long as the war should last. They felt it to be their own personal war and most of them had nothing else to do than fight it out to the end, however long it might endure. Indeed it was certain that so long as it lasted no young man of the South could long remain out of the army without incurring damning disgrace at home.

As a consequence, the organization of the Confederates when the battle of Manassas occurred was far more perfect and had far more of permanency in it than was the case with that of McDowell's forces. These consisted largely of men who had volunteered for no more than a three months' service, and the terms of many regiments were expiring or about to expire when the call to battle was issued. Many of those whose terms were at an end turned back on the very eve of battle—four thousand of them quitting on the day of battle itself. They refused to participate in the conflict because their time was up.

This was a manifestation of indifference to all patriotic and manly considerations such as was nowhere witnessed on the Southern side at any time during the war.

But let us not judge too harshly. These young men were civilians, not soldiers. They had enlisted only for a period of three months. They were callow youths unaccustomed to war. They had regarded a three months' service in the volunteers as a sort of exciting picnic excursion to the South. They had done their duty during the term for which they had agreed to serve, with very tolerable faithfulness. They had had their outing. Their frolic was over. Their contract was fulfilled. They very naturally wanted to return to their homes. When under such circumstances a fierce battle confronted them, with the enemy very manifestly in no "excursion" mood but bent upon all that was possible of slaughter, is it any wonder that these young men faltered and failed?

They were scathingly assailed in patriotically inspired prose and verse, and certainly a similar turning back on the part of Southern youths on the very eve of battle would have been punished with an enduring and all-embracing social ostracism harder to bear than death. But there were differences between Northern and Southern sentiment that must be taken into the reckoning. At the North there was a party more or less openly opposing the war. At the South there was none such. At the North the military impulse did not inspire all minds as it did at the South. At the North personal courage was not held to be the one supreme test of manhood, as it was at the South. At the North a man might fail in that and have laughter for his portion, while at the South the punishment for a like fault was the eternal damnation of scorn and contempt, with universal social outlawry as an accompaniment. If any man in Beauregard's army had gone home because his enlistment had expired while the battle was pending he could never more have visited any neighbor or aspired to any woman's hand; he would have been everywhere treated with contempt and measureless scorn. His neighbors would not have sat on the same bench with him in church. He would have been instantly rejected as a juryman by both sides in every case. No other crime that he might commit could have added in the least degree to the depth of his degradation.

At the North very different standards prevailed. The poets and the newspaper writers might lavish opprobrious epithets upon these young men in a collective capacity without mentioning their individual names, but their neighbors, their sweethearts, their daily associates were not apt to take so quixotic a view of their duty or so severely to judge their conduct. It must always be borne in mind that men's standards of duty and obligation are apt to conform in a general way at least to those of their neighbors. In passing upon human conduct we must be attentive to this fact if we would justly judge.

As for the men who went into the fight on the Union side we must remember that at the end of it the companies and regiments and brigades of which they had formed a part in the morning had been dissipated into the thinnest of thin air at three o'clock in the afternoon by the lightning-like stroke of panic. There were no longer any companies left or any regiments or any brigades or any organizations of any other sort. There was no longer any such thing as cohesion among them. There was nobody authorized to give orders—nobody capable of enforcing obedience. The multitude of men who in the morning had seemed to constitute an army had been resolved before nightfall into a wild-eyed and uncontrollable mob of irresponsible fugitives, intent only upon seeking safety, without any regard whatever to any obligation or impulse, of honor or duty or shame—any impulse except the instinct of self-preservation.

There were many such panic-stricken fugitives on the Confederate side also—so many that when Jefferson Davis met a mob of them on his approach to the battlefield, he was convinced that the Southern army had been defeated and broken. But these were individuals merely, and while their aggregate was large, it embraced no command, no entire body of troops, whether company, regiment or brigade. The Confederate commands remained intact. They preserved their organizations perfectly and remained absolutely obedient to orders. At the end of the battle theirs was not only still an army; it was an army flushed with victory, illimitably confident both in itself and in its leaders, eager for further action, clamorous for advance and ready to do and dare anything and everything that might promise further glory.

That army eagerly wanted to march at once upon Washington, and there was absolutely no military reason why it should not have done so. There was no fighting force to resist it on the march. There was no force at Washington which could have seriously disputed its entry into the city. It could easily have trampled to earth the feeble resistance it must have encountered at the gateways of the capital. Stuart, almost with tears on his cheeks, besought permission to lead such an advance with his handful of cavalry men, pledging his honor and reputation as a soldier and all that he hoped for of a future career, in bail of his promise to clear away every obstacle and open an unobstructed road to the columns of Beauregard and Johnston in their victorious march across the Long Bridge and into the streets of the Federal capital.

Stuart was accustomed to boast that he never used profane language. But his impatient cavaliers heard and heartily echoed some strong words from his lips when finally the paralyzing prohibition of an immediate advance came to him in the shape of an order to encamp his men in a muddy cornfield on that rainy night, when in his judgment they should have been gaily galloping on march for Washington as the advance guard of a victory-inspired army, intent upon making the most of its success and crowning its achievements with historic consequences.

Stuart at least anticipated no difficulty in galloping into Washington and Stuart's stalwart cavaliers were ready for any enterprise to which that born leader of men might invite them.

Those Virginia horsemen had been for ten consecutive days and nights forbidden to remove a saddle. For ten consecutive days and nights they had stood at the heads of their horses at feeding time and held the temporarily removed bridle bit in one hand and the ear of corn from which the horse was feeding in the other. For ten consecutive days and nights those men had been ceaselessly in the saddle, their only sleep being snatched in brief fragments, while their horses were tethered to their wrists. Yet so eager were they to follow up this victory that every man of them "swore like a trooper" on that Sunday evening when the pursuit was senselessly called off, and every man of them ejaculated a hearty "amen" to their leader's vituperation of that superior authority which forbade him and his devoted cavalry men to ride into Washington close upon the heels of the broken, panic-stricken and utterly demoralized Federal fugitives from the battlefield.

There is now not the slightest doubt that he could have done this. There is not the smallest question that if he had been permitted to do it, with a supporting column of infantry and artillery following as closely as it could upon his horses' heels, Washington would have become a Confederate possession on that Sunday night, and—who knows what else might have happened? Perhaps four years of the bloodiest of modern wars might have been spared to the American people.

However that may be, the historian of the Confederate War is bound to regard the failure of the Confederates to follow up their victory and pursue their broken, fleeing and utterly disintegrated enemy into Washington during that night and the next morning as one of the most stupendous blunders recorded anywhere in history.

It was perfectly well known to the two Confederate commanders, that Washington was not defended on the South by any fortifications which a determined assailing column could not easily have run over. There was only one earthwork, and that an incomplete one, in the way, and it was so little in the way that a column moving upon the Federal capital could easily have passed on toward the city by thoroughfares that lay quite out of the effective range of its guns.

In brief there was absolutely no conceivable reason for the failure of the Confederate generals to follow up their phenomenal success on the battlefield by an instant and dramatic march upon their enemy's capital over a road which was obstructed by nothing more menacing or embarrassing than huge piles of abandoned food supplies.

General Beauregard and General Johnston have courageously and manfully assumed all responsibility for that failure to advance at the right and critical moment. For a time that failure was attributed to the paralyzing hand of Jefferson Davis, who came upon the field near the end of the battle. But that accusation was unjust. Mr. Davis has been exonerated from all responsibility for the failure by the deliberately recorded testimony of his lieutenants. Mr. Davis was in fact eager for an immediate advance which might crown the victory with its legitimate consequences. He even dictated and had written out a peremptory order to that effect, which Johnston and Beauregard persuaded him to withhold.

Their reasons for doing so have been fully set forth by themselves. In spite of the facts that lay before their eyes, they could not believe in the completeness of the victory they had achieved. Neither had they confidence in the army that had won that victory. They were sure that it was tired. They thought it needed rest. They doubted its trustworthiness. They had no adequate conception of its enthusiasm for the enterprise for which it was clamorously eager. It is one of the embarrassments of war that a commanding general has sometimes no means of knowing what the men under his command are thinking and feeling.

So far were the two Confederate commanders from appreciating the magnitude and the completeness of their victory, that after it was all over, and after events of every kind had demonstrated the extremity of Federal demoralization, they were by their own confession, frightened half out of their wits by the movement of certain Confederate forces which they believed to be a new and determined advance by the hopelessly demoralized enemy.

They ought to have known better, of course; but they did not, and they would not let Stuart teach them better, though he, with his preternatural activity, had followed the panic-stricken fugitives far enough to know what their moral condition was.

Let us frankly recognize facts and take account of them in the reckoning of history. Johnston and Beauregard were accomplished officers, familiar with every detail of technical military duty. But neither of them was as yet experienced in the command of armies or the conduct of campaigns. Until a few months before that battle was fought they had been mere captains of engineers. Neither had ever commanded any force greater than a company. Neither had ever seen an army of proportions half so large as those of the force that fought at Manassas. Neither had ever had even the smallest experience in grand strategy. They were mere apprentices still in the art of war. They had not yet fully learned their trade. They utterly failed to understand what their victory meant. They had no conception of the disorganizing, disintegrating effects of that victory upon their adversaries. They were utterly incapable of understanding their opportunity or of taking advantage of it. Because of their inexperience they let slip the finest opportunity that was at any time afforded to commanders on either side to achieve a quick and decisive result.

With no purpose or willingness to undervalue the ability or the devotion of two officers who afterwards achieved well-deserved distinction as the commanders of armies, it may fairly be pointed out that they were in command at Manassas not because of known and demonstrated fitness for command, but solely because of their technical rank in the old, peace-time army of the United States, where promotion was exclusively by seniority—perhaps the unsafest ground of promotion that was ever devised by the evil ingenuity of officialism and professional self-regard. Whatever capacity these two officers afterwards developed, it is very manifest that at the time of the Manassas battle they both showed themselves incapable of seizing upon the opportunity that victory offered them in any such masterful way as that in which Lee afterwards seized upon far less obvious opportunities at the end of the Seven Days' Battles and again after Chancellorsville.

Having won the completest and most conspicuous victory of modern times, they set to work to fortify themselves for defense against the enemy they had so disastrously overthrown, precisely as if they had been beaten in the fight and were called upon to defend themselves against further aggression at the hands of an enemy to be feared. Having everything of opportunity their own way, they threw it all into the adversary's hands. Having reduced their enemy's army to pulp they deliberately gave him time and opportunity to reconstruct it, to reinforce it, to reorganize and discipline it, as he presently did, into a superb fighting machine instead of pushing forward and fighting it vigorously while it possessed no fighting force at all.

Both sides in this war suffered for a time from this paralysis of officialism and routine which set inferior men to command their superiors and balked conclusions by incapacity. It will be related later in this history, how Grant—the most masterful man in the Federal army—was long denied his opportunity by the arbitrary will of the immeasurably inferior Halleck, to whom a false system and an old man's favor gave control in despite of fact and achievement.

At present we deal only with the facts of a single case. On the night of July 21, 1861, and on the following morning, there was open to the Confederate commanders at Manassas an opportunity which hopefully promised to bring the war to an immediate end. They utterly failed to embrace that opportunity and the price paid for their neglect was four years of bloody conflict, involving the loss of lives by scores of thousands and the infliction of incalculable suffering upon the American people. At several other points in the history of the struggle like opportunities presented themselves, less conspicuously indeed but none the less positively, to one side or the other. In many cases they were similarly neglected, and the war went on with all its horrors.

But if we wonder at the failure of the Confederates to follow up their victory on the evening of its achievement and on the days immediately following, how much greater must be our astonishment at their failure to take the initiative during the long months of inaction that followed it, or to make any effort to direct the further progress of a war upon the success of which their very existence depended!

The singularly complete victory at Manassas was won on the twenty-first of July, 1861. That was almost at the beginning of the season favorable to military operations in Virginia. Yet after that battle was over there was no effort made on either side to utilize the time in military movements of any kind. The Confederates advanced to Fairfax Court House and threw their pickets as far forward as Mason's and Munson's Hills, within a few miles of Washington, but they undertook no military operations of importance. They inaugurated no campaigns. They made no advance upon Washington, which was the one thing that ordinary intelligence was entitled to expect at their hands. They did not at all behave like victors. They nowhere assailed their enemy. They made no effort of any kind to strengthen themselves, either by the occupation of strategic positions or by giving battle where battle promised every chance of victory. They simply sat still, and their sitting still was one of the most inexplicable things that ever happened during the Confederate or any other war. There were several other pauses of like kind during the gigantic struggle, but there was none so completely without an explanation, as was this utter throwing away of half a year of superb campaigning weather.

On the Northern side the inaction was not only explained but justified by the utter demoralization of the army which had been so terribly beaten, and so utterly disintegrated at Manassas. But nobody has ever yet offered so much as a plausible suggestion of a reason for the more astonishing inaction of the Confederates during all that summer and autumn, when the very causes of inaction on the other side afforded the utmost inducement to tireless activity on the Southern side. At a time when all that could be desired of achievement was freely open to them, they sat still, doing nothing except to aid their adversaries in undoing what had been accomplished by hard fighting.4

McClellan succeeded McDowell in command of the Federal army during the month of August. His difficult problem was to organize that army anew; to create it out of chaotic elements and in the face of the difficulties that were thrown in his way by its experience in battle. He must give it morale. He must teach his soldiers the very primer lessons of military service; he must overcome their phenomenal demoralization and gradually mold them into a shape fit to take the field.

An alert enemy, under such circumstances, would have insisted upon interfering, morning, noon and night, with the exercises of the adversary's military kindergarten. A commander on the Confederate side, possessed of large capacity and energy, would have interrupted the work of McClellan by daily and disturbing incursions in force; or more probably still he would have crossed the Potomac, and forced McClellan to accept battle in Maryland or Pennsylvania with his utterly untrained and badly demoralized volunteers. All of this was so obvious that dulness itself must have seen it. Yet the two Confederate generals at Manassas and Centreville seem never to have opened their eyes to the opportunity, and so nothing in this way was done.

In the meanwhile, McClellan was diligently strengthening himself. He was daily adding to his forces those new levies of volunteers which came freely from the North in spite of the disaster at Manassas. He was also strengthening the fortifications at Washington in a way that made their conquest forever afterwards a hopeless enterprise. He sent out many columns to one point and another, not to bring on battle, but to practice his men in the school of the soldier, and to use them to "standing fire" without flinching.

Incidentally, these operations brought on only one action of considerable moment, that which occurred at Leesburg or Ball's Bluff on the Potomac, on the twenty-first of October. It was an action involving rather heavy losses particularly to the Federal troops, but it had no strategic significance whatever. Military critics have not been able to conjecture why the action was brought on at all.

Under orders of General C. P. Stone, Colonel Baker crossed the Potomac near Leesburg to reconnoiter at a point where no reconnoissance was needed, and where no action could by any possibility have aught of significance or consequence. Colonel Baker was disastrously defeated and killed. The Union troops were driven into the river, and large numbers of them were drowned. The effect of the action was to increase rather than diminish the demoralization that the Manassas battle had wrought in the Union army, and to increase in like proportion the self-confidence of the Confederates—all but their generals. Even after this second victory they did not push their columns across the Potomac.

To the like result all the minor actions of that time contributed. McClellan sent out forces to Drainesville, to Falls Church, to Vienna, and to other points, with the distinct purpose, as he himself afterwards explained, of accustoming his demoralized battalions and his newly enlisted men to the idea of fighting. In every instance Stuart assailed them promptly and vigorously, and in every instance except at Drainesville, where they stood their ground well, they ran to cover with a precipitancy which convinced the Confederates that there was no stability in them, no nerve, no soldierly quality whatever. How great a mistake this was, the subsequent actions of the war served to demonstrate—actions in which these same men, properly organized and disciplined, grandly and gallantly played the part of soldiers.

Apart from these insignificant contests, the war in Virginia went to sleep after the battle of Manassas, and to an expectant world was presented the spectacle of a phenomenally victorious army taking a siesta upon its arms, while its adversaries recruited and drilled and fortified, and in every other conceivable way strengthened themselves for the future. In brief the victor—the most complete and conspicuous victor in all the history of the war—having utterly crushed his adversary, and having for the time being destroyed in that adversary all capacity for resistance, meekly adopted the attitude of the vanquished. An army flushed with victory, an army that had completely destroyed the fighting force of its enemy, sat down behind earthworks and waited for more than half a year for that enemy to recuperate and choose at its leisure the next date and place of its fighting.

It is not necessary to characterize all this inactivity in harsh terms. Its stupidity needs no emphasis of rhetoric. The only excuse that history can find for the phenomenal failure to compel results either in July or later, is the fact that Beauregard and Johnston were merely two ex-captains, who had had no experience in the command of armies or in the conduct of great campaigns.

CHAPTER XVI
The European Menace

While the Southern army indulged in its siesta after its victory, and seemed to wait for the war to come to an end of its own accord, the North was stirred by that event into more strenuous activity. Fresh levies were called for, and volunteers by scores of thousands eagerly responded to the call. New energy was brought to bear upon the fortification of Washington, so that the capital city might never again be in such danger of hostile conquest as it had been on that fateful twenty-first day of July, and for a dangerously considerable time afterwards.

Multitudes of the fugitives from the Manassas battle never returned to their duty. In many cases their term of service expired about that time, so that they could not be brought back by virtue of any law, civil or military. In other cases it was not thought worth while to drag back into the service men whose demoralization was too complete to admit of the hope that they might ever again be made effective soldiers. But their places were promptly taken by eager, patriotic young men, and General McClellan, with that rare capacity for organizing which was the distinguishing characteristic of his genius, molded the raw levies with almost incredible rapidity into effective regiments and brigades, a task in which, as has already been shown, the Confederates mightily aided him.

But in the meanwhile, the victory of the Confederates very seriously threatened the Federal cause with a new and terrible danger—namely, the danger of the recognition of the Southern Confederacy as an independent power. Great European nations under the lead of France and England had already recognized the claim of the Southern armies to belligerent rights. That was a measure of humanity and civilization so obviously proper and necessary that while it temporarily angered the North, and was construed there as an unfriendly act, it was presently and of necessity accepted by the Federal Government which, in its turn, made an informal but none the less effective recognition of belligerent rights on the part of the Southern armies. Without such recognition it would have been impossible to carry on the war upon anything like civilized lines. Without it no prisoner could have been exchanged, no flag of truce could have been recognized, no cartels could have been agreed upon, no safe-conducts could have been respected—in short, without such Federal recognition of belligerent rights on the part of the Southerners the struggle must have speedily degenerated into a savage contest. All prisoners in that case would have been at the mercy of their captors to do with as they pleased. There would have been no possible opportunity for negotiation or for the interchange of any of those amenities, by means of which the horrors of war are so greatly mitigated to individuals. There could have been no paroles. On both sides the prisoners would have been in the position of captives to a savage foe, responsible in no way to civilization.

The recognition of Southern belligerency was so obviously a necessity of civilization that the Federal commanders had already assumed it, quite as a matter of course, from the beginning, and they had daily acted upon it. But the people, uninstructed as they were in military law, deeply resented England's act in recognizing it. They regarded that act as scarcely less hostile than would have been the formal recognition of the Southern Confederacy as an independent nation.

After the battle of Manassas there was very serious danger of even such a recognition as that. The South eagerly hoped for it and the North greatly feared its coming.

At that time England, France and Germany were looking with very jealous suspicion upon the rising glory of the American Republic. Their monarchs feared the influence of Democratic doctrines supported by such an object lesson as the prosperity and phenomenal growth of the American nation afforded. The tradesmen and manufacturers of those countries, equally with their statesmen, dimly but apprehensively foresaw what has since in our later time come to pass. They foresaw the conquest of the world's markets by American industry. To break up this American Union meant for them a release from these dangers, political, commercial and industrial.

Moreover, the United States Government was at that time just entering upon a new and extreme policy of protective tariff exclusion which threatened very serious detriment to the trade of the manufacturing countries of Europe. The South, being an agricultural country with scarcely any manufacturing interests, stood for the utmost possible freedom of trade. Very naturally, the manufacturing and commercial nations of Europe looked with more or less favor upon a revolution in this country, which promised to give them not only an equal commercial chance but a sentimental advantage also in the Southern markets in competition with the New England fabricators of goods, wares and merchandise.

From the very beginning, the South had looked to such impulses and interests as these as an offset to Northern superiority in numbers and resources. The South hoped from the beginning for foreign intervention. It was confidently believed that if any European nation should formally recognize the Southern Confederacy's independence, the United States would treat that recognition as equivalent to an open declaration of war. In such an event the recognizing nation must of course send its fleets to raise the blockade of Southern ports, and possibly also its battalions to stand shoulder to shoulder with the Virginians and Carolinians and Mississippians on hard fought battle fields.

The Confederate victory at Manassas, by reason of its completeness and still more by reason of its spectacular accompaniments, gave peculiar force to all these arguments in favor of that European recognition of Southern independence which must have threatened the final disruption of the American Union, the breaking down of the most dangerous trade rival of those countries, the opening of the South to absolute free trade, with a distinct preference for English, French and German over "Yankee" goods, and the political weakening of that growing impulse to republicanism which resided in the glory and greatness of the American Republic. To dissolve and destroy the Union would have been once and for all time to make an end of the most potent influence that ever existed on earth in behalf of a "world without kings, and a people supreme."

When the battle of Manassas was done, and McDowell's army had fled in panic as a disorganized mob into Washington, and was manifestly prepared to flee farther if it should be pressed with vigor, as every foreign observer expected that it would be, there was every inducement and every excuse for the recognition of the Southern Confederacy by European nations, and for their demand that the still ineffective blockade should be raised as an unjustifiable interference with international commerce. Such action on the part of France and England would undoubtedly have precipitated war between those countries and the United States, and in that war, knowing as we do the relations then existing between European nations, Austria, Italy and Prussia would very probably have joined. What the consequences would have been each reader must judge for himself, but at the very least it may be said with entire safety that such a circumstance would have added very greatly to the embarrassment of the United States Government, and to the chances of ultimate success on the part of the South.

The pretender who sat at that time upon the fraud-buttressed throne of France and called himself "Napoleon III" was ready and eager for such interference. But he dared not undertake it single handed. He sought the alliance and aid of England, and without doubt he would have secured both but for one fact. Whatever policies an English government may favor, there is always behind that government, as its master, the sentiment of the British people, and that sentiment was at that time unalterably and implacably hostile to human slavery.

It was the misfortune of the South that its contention for its own right of self-government was inseparably linked in the minds of men abroad with the cause of human bondage, against which British public sentiment revolted.

Great Britain is not a republic in our sense of the word, but under all its forms of monarchy, and with all its embarrassments of aristocratic privilege, its people actually and absolutely rule.

Its people strongly sympathized with the Southern claim of a right of autonomy. They still more strongly sympathized with themselves in their desire to cripple their greatest and most threatening commercial and industrial rival, and to get all the cotton they needed for their mills. They wanted the war to end quickly. They wanted the Southern ports opened to their ships, and the Southern cotton to be accessible again for their use. They wanted the American Union broken up. They wanted to trade with the Southern States upon equal terms or with a positive advantage over their New England competitors. But even for such sake they were unwilling to lend the power of Great Britain to the perpetuation of human slavery anywhere upon earth.

There was the fatal miscalculation of the Southerners. They reckoned with British trade interests, with British and other European political prejudice, but they did not sufficiently reckon with that British hostility to slavery which—whatever the political or trade considerations might be—would not consent to any action on the part of a British government which should even seem to make Great Britain responsible for the perpetuation of human slavery anywhere.

Thus the British government was restrained by the all-dominating British sentiment from interfering, and France did not venture to interfere alone or even with the probability of Austrian or Prussian support.

There was Russia to be reckoned with, also, and as later official publications show, the Czar not only set his face against intervention in behalf of the South, but at one critical time actually sent his fleets to American waters to menace any and every power that might assume to interpose to the detriment of the United States.

At the time, however, the Manassas victory gave great and well-justified occasion for the fear at the North that Great Britain and France, backed by the other western European powers, might be persuaded to interpose in behalf of the Confederates. For a time, therefore, the outlook for the Union was a very gloomy one, but the youth of the country continued to enlist by tens and scores of thousands, and in spite of the hostility of a political party strongly opposed to the administration and to the war itself, Mr. Lincoln's government went on with its preparations for prosecuting the war with vigor, to its predestined end.

CHAPTER XVII
Border Operations

During the long period of strange inactivity in those parts of the country where the real seat of war lay, there was a good deal of active fighting elsewhere. Some of it was severe and gave rise to stirring events, including some stoutly contested battles. But with the exception of the operations upon the Southern coasts in aid of a more effective blockade none of these conflicts had any considerable strategic importance and the story of them may with propriety be briefly told.

In Missouri the contest was in effect a civil war, in the strict acceptation of that term. It is needless and it would be tedious to recount here the proclamations, the gubernatorial manifestos, the legislative resolutions and the so-called conventional action of that state. None of these had any undisputed legal sanction whatever, though each of them claimed all possible legality. The simple fact was that a part of Missouri's people adhered to the Union and another part equally clung to the cause of the Southern Confederacy. After much confusion the Unionists formed an army under General Lyon and the Confederates assembled a strong force under General Price. Let the lawyers quibble as they please over the technicalities involved, the fact remains as already stated, that the people of Missouri were divided in sentiment; that they arrayed themselves against each other in hostile armies; and that they fought each other in considerable battles—measured by the number of men engaged and by the slaughter involved. But these battles bore no influential relation to the contest between the Union and the Confederacy, except in so far as their conduct served to occupy troops on either side who might have been much more effectively employed at those more eastern points at which the issue was in fact to be fought out to a conclusion.

At Carthage, Missouri, where General Franz Sigel attacked the Confederates on July fifth, 1861, the Federals were beaten and forced to retreat. At Dug Spring, August third, Lyon defeated McCulloch, but a week later (August the tenth), the Federals were again defeated in a severely contested battle at Wilson's Creek, and General Lyon was killed.

On the fifth of March, 1862, the two armies west of the Mississippi met in a pitched battle at Pea Ridge, Arkansas. The contest was a fierce and bloody one, involving a heavy, though unascertained loss. The Federals had distinctly the better of it, but like the Confederates at Manassas, they utterly failed to follow up their victory or in any other way to give effect to it.

It is unnecessary to relate the story of these battles in detail. They were gallant and strenuous actions, reflecting the highest credit upon the courage of the officers and men engaged on either side. But they contributed nothing whatever to the ultimate result. They played no part in the solution of the war problem. Whether the actions so gallantly fought by Federals and Confederates alike were won by the one or by the other, made no difference in the ultimate outcome of a war which was clearly destined to be decided by other men and upon other fields of larger strategic significance.

The operations in Kentucky and Tennessee, though smaller in themselves, were of much greater importance. Those states lay within the strategic field. Kentucky had officially assumed an attitude of neutrality, as has already been related, to which neither side paid or could be expected to pay the smallest attention. That state lay between the North and the South. It was absolutely necessary that each should push armed forces into and across its domain in order to get at the forces of the adversary. Moreover, Kentucky's assumption of neutrality was a transparent absurdity in itself. If it could have commanded respect, it would have interposed a neutral ground, stretching for about four hundred miles from east to west between the contending armies, neither of which would have been privileged on any account to cross it or to enter it. Thus Kentucky, while retaining its place as a state in the Union, would have stood as a protective barrier to the seceding states, of even greater value than all the armies that could have been assembled within Kentucky's borders. It would at one and the same time have held the position of a state in the Union and the most potent of all states in aid of the Confederacy.

It is necessary to explain that this Kentucky resolution of neutrality never had the complete legal sanction of the state authorities, actual or pretended; but its effect was so small that it is scarcely worth while to discuss the technicalities. The simple fact was that Kentucky furnished men to both sides and that its legislative and its executive authorities were never at any time fully and legally agreed upon any policy whatever.

In a history that takes account of facts rather than of theories, of events rather than of resolutions, there seems no occasion to follow this subject further, except to say that both Federals and Confederates presently pushed their armies into Kentucky and tried conclusions there, with results that must form the subject of future pages in this history.

In Maryland the struggle ended in the adherence of the state to the Union, while a large part of its vigorous young manhood went South and enlisted in the Confederate army. It was this division of sentiment, this separation of families, this arraying of brother against brother, that constituted the tragedy of the Confederate war.

In North Carolina and in Tennessee there was a strong Union sentiment among the mountaineers. It could not control either state, but it resulted in the enlistment of a large number of hardy volunteers in the Union armies, and in the organization of an efficient "underground railroad," by means of which Northern soldiers escaping from Southern prisons were aided in their journey to the North.

In Virginia the anti-secession sentiment found expression in an act of secession from secession. The western half of that state had scarcely any property interest in slavery and scarcely any sympathy with the institution. The men of that region had accepted the teachings of Thomas Jefferson, and George Wythe, and a score of other Virginian statesmen, to the effect that slavery was a curse which it was their duty to extirpate as soon as might be. The secession of their state seemed to offer them an opportunity. If secession was to be the order of the day, why should not they, as representatives of the western and non-slave-holding half of their state, repudiate secession from the Union by themselves seceding from their seceding state?

Upon this hint they acted. They proceeded to set up the state of West Virginia under an autonomy granted by the National Government. It was in direct violation of the Federal Constitution thus to divide a state without its own consent, but the thing was done in war time, and when war is on the rigid letter of the law is very apt to be disregarded in the interest of general results. At any rate the thing was done, and West Virginia has ever since 1863 held her place as one of the states of the Union.

Thus were the border states arrayed in the war. Thus was the issue made up. Thus were the lines drawn for the momentous conflict.

CHAPTER XVIII
The Blockade—The Conquest of the Coast and the Neglect to Follow up the Advantage thus Gained

As soon as the fact was recognized that war existed between the Northern and the Southern states it was quite a matter of course and of common sense that the Federal Government should endeavor to shut in the Confederates by a blockade that should cut them off from all commerce with the outer world.

The South was almost exclusively an agricultural country. It had scanty means of supplying itself with any of those articles of manufacture which enable communities to live and to carry on war. It was sadly deficient not only in capacity to create arms, ammunition, and other fighting equipments, but also in factories capable of turning out clothing, shoes, medicines, and the like either for military or for non-military use.

For all these things the Confederates depended upon importation, and the obvious policy of the Federal Government was to prevent such importation.

If that could have been completely done, the war must of necessity have come to an early and merciful end. And there is no doubt that it might have been done during the first years of the struggle if practical common sense had been reinforced by executive ability commensurate with the demands of the occasion. As a matter of fact this was never completely accomplished until the war was in its last throes. To the very end the Confederate soldiers were clad in English-made cloth, shod with English-tanned leather, and largely fed upon Cincinnati bacon and corned beef which had been shipped to Nassau in the Bahamas and thence carried into Confederate ports by the daring of the English captains and the English crews of English-built and English-owned blockade running steamers. Very naturally the Federal Government understood and appreciated all these conditions, and very naturally it sought to take advantage of them by blockading Southern ports and thus preventing or at least embarrassing those importations upon which the South must mainly depend for its powder, its bullets, its clothing, its shoes, its arms and its provisions.

Accordingly, one of the earliest acts of the Administration was the proclamation of a blockade of the Southern ports. This was issued as early as the nineteenth of April, 1861, two days after the Virginia Convention adopted an ordinance of secession and thus made war a certainty.

There is this peculiarity about the international law of blockade, that the ships of no nation are under obligation to respect a blockade until it shall be made effective. That is to say, until the nation proclaiming the blockade can put a sufficient naval force at the mouth of each blockaded harbor to prevent the entry of ships, no foreign shipmasters are bound to respect the proclamation of blockade, and their blockade-running ships are not subject to seizure in the attempt to pass the paper barriers erected.

At the first, of course, the blockade of Southern ports was technical rather than real. A foreign ship running in or out was not legally subject to seizure or destruction because the blockade was manifestly ineffective. But by impressing ferry-boats and every other craft that could carry guns into the naval service, the Federal Government was able presently to make its blockade so far effective that those ships which essayed to "run" it did so at risk of capture and with the certainty that capture must mean the confiscation of both ship and cargo.

But so profitable was this commerce that the merchants and shipmasters engaged in it were ready to take all the risks involved, for the sake of its enormous pecuniary returns. It was a matter of easy reckoning that a single cargo carried either way and successfully delivered, would pay for the loss of the ship and cargo on the return voyage, and leave a rich margin of profit besides.

Moreover a close blockade was simply impossible. Not one ship in a dozen that attempted to pass out or in, was in actual fact captured or driven ashore. The number of ships engaged in blockade running was steadily reduced by the increasing dangers encountered, but the traffic continued, with no effective interruption, until near the end of the war, the chief effect of the blockade being to increase the profits of the English shipowners and shipmasters who engaged in the perilous commerce and enormously to enhance the market value of goods of every kind at the South.

An ounce of quinine that cost $2.80 in Nassau was worth $1,100 or $1,200 in Charleston, while the Confederate money received for the quinine would buy cotton at ten cents a pound which had a value at the very least of half a dollar a pound in gold at Nassau. On such terms the human instinct of gain made it certain that the blockade, however legally effective it might be made, would be broken through by daring shipmasters so long as the war should last and precisely that is what in fact happened.

But in aid of the blockade, and in aid of the general policy of shutting the South in and compelling it to rely exclusively upon its own inadequate resources, the Federal Government promptly dispatched forces to the South, to capture the seacoast fortifications there and to make of the coast a Federal instead of a Confederate possession and stronghold. On the twenty-ninth of August, 1861, an expedition under command of General B. F. Butler, captured the forts at Cape Hatteras. On the seventh and eighth of November another expedition reduced the works at Port Royal and Hilton Head in South Carolina, thus making of the coast strongholds important strategic positions for the Northern arms. Later the whole coast, except the great harbor, was conquered.

It must always be a matter of astonishment to the historian that greater use was not made of the advantages thus gained at the beginning of the war. It is true that the geography of the Carolinian coast country specially lent itself to the defense of that region by small forces arrayed against greatly superior numbers. It is true, for example, that at Pocotatigo, on the twenty-second of October, 1862, two batteries of artillery and a company or two of dismounted cavalry numbering in all only 350 men, being reinforced late in the day by about four hundred more, succeeded in repelling the all-day assault of not less than three thousand and ended by driving the Federal force back to its ships. This was due in part to the peculiarly defensive nature of the ground and in part to the certainty that the Federal forces could not remain over night at Pocotatigo without finding nearly every man among them stricken with that dire disease, "country fever," before morning.

But all day long at Pocotatigo the Federals had the Charleston and Savannah railroad on their left less than a mile away and with absolutely no obstacle whatsoever between them and its possession. Beyond the railroad line lay the high, healthful pine lands. In brief there was no reason whatever, aside from mere blundering, why they should not then and there have seized upon the Charleston and Savannah railroad, made themselves masters of the entire coast, and proceeded to the easy conquest or isolation of Charleston on the one hand and Savannah on the other.

This particular matter is here mentioned only because it serves to illustrate a larger truth. From the time when the Port Royal and the Hilton Head forts were captured there was never an hour when a capable and resolute general in command of 5,000 men—and 50,000 might easily have been sent to him—could not have made himself master of the main line of Southern communication, master of Charleston, master of Savannah and practically master of South Carolina and its neighboring states. An enterprising officer engaged in accomplishing this would, of course, have been reinforced to any desirable extent, and a campaign inland at that point and at that time would have promised results of the utmost consequence.

Here was another of the errors that served to prolong through four years a war that ought to have been brought to an end during its first campaign, and the needless and senseless prolongation of which inflicted almost incredible loss and suffering upon the South and subjected the North to financial burdens and human sacrifices of the most stupendous character.

The blockade was early made "effective" in that degree which international law requires—so effective that shipmasters trying to pass through it had no conceivable right of redress if their ships were captured, or blown to pieces, or run ashore by the blockading squadron. It was never, even unto the end, made so effective as to prevent British merchantmen from trafficking at uncertain intervals between Nassau and the Southern ports. It did not and could not put an end to the importation of the necessaries of war into Southern ports; but it made such importation so enormously expensive, even if measured by the cotton exports on which the trade was based, as greatly to cripple the Confederacy in its finances. The price of goods imported at such hazard and with such difficulty was made great enough to cover the easy contingency of capture upon the outward as well as upon the inward voyage.

He who would understand the events of that period must constantly bear in mind that during the first year or nearly that, of its duration this war of ours was conducted mainly by incapacity on both sides, by martinet captains and incapables in civil office who had been suddenly thrust into positions vastly too great for their abilities.