Whether Halleck planned this concentration of Grant's and Buell's armies for an advance upon Corinth as his partisans contend, or whether Grant planned it and Halleck merely accepted the plan as others stoutly assert, is a matter of no historical consequence, whatever biographical interest it may have. In either case the purpose of the concentration was to move upon Corinth in irresistible force, overthrow the Confederates there and seize upon the two important lines of railroad which intersect each other at that point. It was at any rate Halleck's purpose to command in this campaign in person. But it was not intended to advance upon Corinth until Grant's and Buell's armies should form a junction, and there was no thought or expectation that the Confederates would themselves assume the offensive. General Halleck planned to leave St. Louis not earlier than April 7, and perhaps several days later, for Pittsburg Landing. In the meanwhile General Grant had posted his army loosely and had thrown up no earthworks in the field. All his procedures indicated that he did not expect to be molested where he lay or to encounter the enemy until he should go in search of him. Indeed, he telegraphed Halleck on the fifth of April, the very day before the battle, saying, "The main force of the enemy is at Corinth, with troops at different points east.... I have scarcely the faintest idea of an attack (general one) being made upon us, but will be prepared should such a thing take place."
At the very moment when that dispatch was penned the Confederates with their entire strength were actually on march to assail an enemy who had "scarcely the faintest idea of an attack" being made upon him either then or later. In his memoirs General Grant said:
"When all reinforcements should have arrived I expected to take the initiative by marching on Corinth and had no expectation of needing fortifications.... The fact is I regarded the campaign we were engaged in as an offensive one and had no idea that the enemy would leave strong intrenchments to take the initiative when he knew he would be attacked where he was, if he remained."
It had been the purpose of General Johnston to deliver his blow on the morning of the fifth of April, overthrow Grant, and be prepared to fall upon Buell when he should arrive. But matters of detail went so far wrong that the Confederates, advancing from Corinth to attack, did not reach the neighborhood of Shiloh church, where Sherman was posted without fortifications, until nightfall of that day. They bivouacked very near the Federal lines, but strangely enough their presence in force was not discovered by the enemy they purposed to fall upon at daylight. In the meanwhile the head of Buell's column had come up and the rest of it was dangerously near at hand.
The Confederates made their assault with great impetuosity at dawn of April 6. The first that Sherman, who held the advance of Grant's position, knew of the impending battle was when the Confederates forty thousand strong rushed upon his camps and after a brief but stubborn struggle carried them, Sherman being driven back so hurriedly that he left his tents standing and the breakfasts of his men not yet cooked. The first that Grant knew of a tremendous attack of which he had had "scarcely the faintest idea," was when at his headquarters at Savannah several miles down the river he heard the guns at work at Shiloh.
There has been much and angry discussion of the question whether or not Grant and Sherman were "surprised," in the military acceptation of the term, by the Confederate onslaught at Shiloh. The point has little historical importance, but in the light of all the facts since disclosed by the records it is difficult to interpret what happened there otherwise than as a complete surprise, which but for the excellent discipline of the Federal troops and their superb fighting quality might easily have ended in disaster. We have seen that Halleck in St. Louis did not intend to leave for the front, where he expected to command in person, until the next day or even later. We have seen how confident Grant was in his belief that the Confederates intended no general attack either then or later and how he planned himself to take the offensive. It is certain that Grant's forces were not disposed as they would have been if an assault by the enemy had been anticipated. The several advance corps were posted with little or no reference to coöperation between them to resist an enemy assaulting in force. No line of battle had been formed or in any way provided for. Sherman, who was first assailed, was resting quietly in camps which would very certainly have been stripped for action if an attack had been expected. Indeed, Sherman's very latest reports to Grant had expressed the utmost confidence that no attack was in contemplation, and that the Confederates would do nothing more than annoy the pickets. He reported to Grant that they "will not press our pickets far." In brief it is obvious that neither Halleck at St. Louis, nor Grant at Savannah, Tennessee, nor Sherman, holding the front at Shiloh meeting house, anticipated a battle in front of Pittsburg Landing. They expected to fight on the offensive at Corinth when they should be ready to advance, but the thought of having to defend themselves against a Confederate force assailing them at Shiloh seems never to have occurred to them until the Confederates fell upon Sherman's camp with their "yell," for a first warning of their presence.
Sherman with two brigades lay in front. The two brigades were widely separated, as they would not have been had an attack in force been regarded as even a possibility. McClernand's division lay far in rear of Sherman. Prentiss, Hurlbut, W. H. L. Wallace and the commander of C. F. Smith's force—that general being ill—with their several divisions were scattered about in the rear all the way to Pittsburg Landing, while Lew Wallace with about five thousand men was posted several miles farther down the river in complete isolation from the rest of the force.
General Van Horne, writing under the direct inspiration of General George H. Thomas and with all the orders and dispatches under his eye, says that the several divisions "were widely separated and did not sustain such relations to each other that it was possible to form quickly a connected defensive line; they had no defenses and no designated line for defense in the event of a sudden attack, and there was no general on the field to take by special authority the command of the whole force in an emergency."
The ground in front of Pittsburg Landing was especially well adapted to defense. Flanked on either side by creeks difficult to cross, it compelled the assailants to depend almost entirely upon direct assault in front with little chance of success in any effort they might make to turn either flank.
There was as yet no officer authorized to take general command, General Grant being at Savannah, far from the field, but the division commanders, each acting upon his own responsibility, quickly responded to the need, and not long after Sherman's camps had been overrun there was a very tolerable line of battle contesting the Confederate advance with great obstinacy and determination.
In the meanwhile Grant had ordered up such reinforcements as were at hand and was himself hurrying to the scene to give personal direction to the battle.
He found multitudes of stragglers and skulkers cowering under the river bank, as is always the case during a battle when a place of refuge near at hand offers a tempting security to the cowardly. But apart from these spiritless ones he found the men of his army bearing themselves right gallantly and contesting every inch of the ground over which the Confederates were slowly beating them back towards the river.
The purpose of the Confederates was to break through the left of Grant's line and reach the river, thus placing themselves on their enemy's flank, threatening his rear and imperiling his entire army. General Albert Sydney Johnston had been mortally wounded early in the afternoon, but Beauregard, upon whom the Confederate command had devolved, adopted and sought to carry out the strategy determined upon. Late in the afternoon, he hurled the whole of Bragg's force upon the left of Grant's line with an impetuosity which must have achieved success had the tremendous assault been made an hour earlier. But fortunately for the Federals General Buell had come up with a part of his army. He quickly threw such regiments as he had with him into action at the point of danger, and the danger was really extreme. It was only necessary for the Confederates to push Grant's left wing back for about two hundred yards farther than it had been pushed already in order to seize upon the landing and completely cut Grant off from his gunboats and transports acting as ferry-boats, and from all hope of further reinforcement.
In that case Grant's problem would have been to save his shattered army from complete overthrow, with surrender as the well-nigh inevitable result. There is little doubt that the left wing must have given way before Bragg's assault, as the Confederates expected it to do, but for the reinforcement which Buell sent into action at the critical moment. This reinforcement saved the left wing from the destruction intended for it.
This statement is made upon the very careful and trustworthy authority of General Van Horne, writing under direct inspiration of General Thomas. In his "Memoirs" General Grant repudiates the claim of Buell's having rendered important assistance at that time and insists that he rendered him no help of any consequence on the first day of the battle. But the memoirs were written from the memory of a very ill man many years after the event, and may therefore be erroneous. At any rate General Van Horne's account of what happened, supported as it is by copies of all the orders given, seems the more trustworthy authority on the point at issue.
Night was now near at hand. During a long day of continuous and desperate fighting Grant had been slowly beaten back to the neighborhood of the river bank. There he stood at bay with all his artillery and all his infantry massed in a commanding position, shattered and broken, and standing in desperate defense of a point from which he could retreat no farther without retreating into the river.
Across his front lay a deep ravine. This would have been difficult for his enemy to cross under the best of conditions. It was rendered the more difficult by the fact that it was in part filled with back water from the river. Still more important was the fact that it was completely commanded by a plunging fire from the Federal artillery which in spite of defeat stood resolutely to its guns.
Nevertheless the passage of that ravine was not quite impossible to a determined foe; more difficult tasks have been accomplished by generals of desperate courage commanding such an army as that under Beauregard had proved itself to be during that unflinching day of slaughter.
It was a critical moment of the war—we may almost say it was the critical moment of the war. If Beauregard could have forced that ravine he must have driven his adversary into the river or compelled the surrender of the Federal army with its complete destruction as the only alternative. On the other hand, if he failed to force the ravine that night it would be forever too late. For Buell's whole army was now within call and it was certain that on the following day, if Grant were not now destroyed, there would be a Federal force on the Confederate side of the river with which Beauregard could not reasonably hope to cope successfully.
It would perhaps be unjust to say that at this supreme crisis Beauregard faltered and failed. The peril of the attempt was so great and the certainty of slaughter so appalling that the very stoutest heart might well have shrunk from the desperate hazard.
Beauregard himself has told us in his official reports, and in Colonel Roman's inspired book, that he was unwilling to order a movement so desperate in its chances and so certain to involve a slaughter of brave men greater than any that has been anywhere recorded in the annals of modern war. He was satisfied with the day's work done and confident of complete victory on the morrow. So sure was he of this that he sent dispatches to Richmond that night announcing a victory of stupendous proportions and painting it in colors so glowing that President Davis was moved to send a congratulatory message to the Congress, and that body passed resolutions of the most enthusiastic kind.
During that night Buell's army, itself outnumbering what remained of Beauregard's, was hurrying to reinforce Grant who planned to renew the conflict at dawn with every prospect of reversing the first day's results and wresting victory from what had been so nearly a complete and disastrous defeat.
Early on the morning of the seventh of April Grant, reinforced by Buell's men and having now an overmastering superiority of numbers, took the offensive and assailed Beauregard's weakened army with a determination which under the circumstances could mean nothing less than victory.
But Beauregard was an obstinate fighter and a skilful one and his men were Americans of the same race and lineage and traditions as those they were meeting in battle. There was terrible fighting, therefore, on that second day, and it was only after a very desperate and a very bloody struggle, hours long in duration, that Grant regained the ground lost on the day before.
But Beauregard's struggle on that second day was rendered hopeless from the outset by irresistible odds of numbers, and after a heroic resistance he withdrew his army and retired in good order and unmolested to his strongly fortified position at Corinth.
Thus ended one of the great and decisive battles of the war. The Federals had lost 13,047 men—killed, wounded and prisoners. The Confederate loss was officially reported at 10,699 men. They had captured the whole of Prentiss's division, 2,200 strong.
But the respective losses did not accurately measure the importance of the contest. The battle left the Confederates baffled in their attempt to overthrow Grant, but not less determined than ever to fight the matter out to that conclusion which they religiously believed to be their due of righteousness. On the other hand, it left the Federal army in overmastering force on the Confederate side of a river which constituted the last serious natural obstacle to Grant's purposed march to the gulf.
But Grant was again immediately superseded in the chief command and forbidden to press the Confederates with that tireless and ceaseless activity which was the dominant characteristic of his military methods. He had now an army of about 120,000 men. In front of him lay the enemy upon a weakly defensive line with an army reduced by battle losses to less than 40,000 effectives. It was obviously Grant's greatest opportunity, but he was not permitted to seize it and turn it to account. For no sooner was the battle completely won than General Halleck hurried down from St. Louis and himself assumed command.
His orders were paralyzing. Instead of pushing forward with his force, that outnumbered the Confederates by about three to one, and quickly making an end of their resistance, he fortified and proceeded to busy himself with the petty and nagging criticism of battle reports while the Confederates were doing all that remained possible to them to gather recruits, to strengthen their position at Corinth and to prepare means of resistance farther South.
When we shall come to consider in a future chapter, what else had happened, we shall see clearly that by his victory on the second day of the Shiloh battle, taken in connection with other occurrences, General Grant had made easily possible the immediate and complete conquest of the entire Mississippi Valley. It only required an immediate and determined advance such as General Grant naturally and eagerly desired to make, in order to complete that work at once. He says in his "Memoirs" that two days would have been ample for the conquest of Corinth. But General Grant was not in control of operations in the western department. General Halleck was. General Grant was no longer even in command of the army with which he had driven General Beauregard back to Corinth. General Halleck was, and instead of pressing forward at once as Grant desired to do and driving Beauregard still farther south while capturing all his stores or compelling him to destroy them, Halleck forbade all this and with three men to Beauregard's one, and with thrice or four times his resources in artillery, ammunition and everything else, he fortified at Shiloh and began a slowly scientific approach to works that Grant, in command of that army, would have run over as a schoolboy tramples down a pathway through a clover field. Halleck did not even begin this "scientific" advance against Corinth until the thirtieth of April—more than three weeks after the battle at Shiloh had opened the way. It took him, by his slow methods, a full month more to reach Corinth—less than twenty miles away—and when he got there at last he found the place already evacuated, the Confederates having made good use of the seven or eight weeks' time which his dilatoriness had thus allowed them in removing their guns, ammunition and stores to newly fortified positions farther south.
But Grant's achievement at Shiloh was too great to be ignored. Again, as after the capture of Forts Henry and Donelson, the land was resounding with the praises of this Galena clerk Ulysses S. Grant, and nobody outside the war department at Washington was even thinking of his superior officer, General Halleck.
But in order clearly to understand what and how much all this meant, it is necessary in another chapter to recount what else had happened of a nature calculated to contribute to the recovery of the Mississippi river and the Mississippi Valley, and to the severance of the Confederacy in twain.
While the battle of Shiloh was in progress another strategically important struggle was fought out.
By way of defending the Mississippi and holding it within Confederate control the Southern generals had strongly fortified New Madrid Bend and Island Number 10.
Let us explain. The Mississippi river is exceedingly tortuous in its course. Some miles above New Madrid in Missouri, it suddenly turns northwardly and makes a great bend. At or near the northerly curve of that bend lies the village of New Madrid, Missouri. There the Confederates had fortified themselves and there General Pope with his army in Missouri was threatening them.
In the course of that vast bend lay Island Number 10, and here the Confederates had still more determinedly fortified themselves with a view of holding the great river. They had a strong force at Fort Pillow, on the Tennessee bank farther down the stream. They held Memphis on the Chickasaw bluffs 240 miles below Cairo. They had possession of Vicksburg and Port Hudson, but those positions had not yet been made strongholds by elaborate fortifications. They still held New Orleans and the defenses below that city, though they were destined soon to lose them. Thus they commanded the river and made of it a Confederate highway. It was the obvious policy of the Confederates to retain possession of that great river. It was the equally obvious policy of their adversaries to conquer control of it.
When Beauregard wisely, and indeed under strategic compulsion, withdrew the forces from Columbus, Kentucky, he sent some of the troops constituting the garrison and most of the guns that bristled from the useless fortifications of that town to New Madrid and Island Number 10, where they were needed.
Early in March General Pope moved down the Mississippi on its western side, and began operations for the reduction of New Madrid. When he had got his siege guns into position and opened a serious bombardment, the works there were quickly abandoned.
Then began the assault upon Island Number 10, the one great northern stronghold of the Confederates in the Mississippi river, designed to hold that great waterway and forbid to the Federals its use as a thoroughfare into the heart of the South.
The Federal army cut a canal across the peninsula formed by the great bend in the river. All the naval force that the Federals could command in those waters was brought to bear not only for the reduction of the forts there but still more for the beating off of the Confederate gunboats under Commodore Hollins. On the other hand Commodore Foote ran the canal with his Federal gunboats and established himself in a commanding position in reverse of the forts while Pope crossed the stream and assailed the enemy in front with all his land forces.
The situation of the Confederates was a hopeless one and after an effort to escape they surrendered nearly 7,000 men and more than 150 guns, most of them of large caliber and formidable destructive force.
This occurred on the second day of the Shiloh battle, April 7, 1862, on which day, after a heroic effort to breast Grant's overwhelming numbers, Beauregard withdrew from Shiloh to Corinth. This capture of Island Number 10 opened the Mississippi to Memphis, except for the single and, as it afterwards proved to be, the utterly ineffective position at Fort Pillow.
General Halleck was fully informed of all that had happened. He knew that Pope's way was open down the Mississippi to Memphis, and that Memphis, scarcely at all defended, was within his easy grasp. He knew of course that Memphis was the westerly end of the new defensive line of the Confederates, and that its capture must compel them still further to retire toward the south, even should he fail or neglect to drive them from the Memphis and Charleston railroad line at Corinth, as he easily might have done with his utterly overwhelming force, and as Grant would undoubtedly have done if that vigorously aggressive general had been left in control of that splendidly equipped army. But Halleck sat still and pottered over "reports" that annoyingly paid no tribute to his genius and suggested no credit to him for the victory that had been won.
Meanwhile Grant was losing time. The Confederates, foreseeing the inevitable loss of Memphis, which happened on the sixth of June, nearly two months after energy would easily have compelled it, were busily fortifying all defensible positions on the river below, especially at Vicksburg and Port Hudson, and thus making necessary one of the most strenuous and one of the bloodiest campaigns of the war, where scarcely any campaign at all would have been necessary but for the fact that a martinet officer, much too "scientific" and too "regular" for the practical purposes of war, was in authority over a man who knew not only how to plan campaigns but how to conduct them quickly to a successful conclusion.
There was still another man of splendid genius and capacity who about this time came to the front as a winner of victories for the Federal arms, and above all, as a man like Grant, who knew how to do things when officialism permitted him to act. Like Grant on the one side, and Lee on the other, Farragut was at first treated as a negligible factor in the war.
David Glasgow Farragut was a man of Southern birth who had been twice married in Virginia, and all of whose kindred and connections and instinctive sympathies were Southern. He so far sympathized with the South indeed that he openly declared his purpose to go with the Confederacy if by any means the division of the country could be peacefully arranged and accomplished. But, living as he did at the outbreak of the war in a strongly secessionist Virginia town, he frankly declared his lack of faith in the peaceful accomplishment of secession, and his fixed purpose in the event of war to cast in his lot with the cause of the nation, which, all his long life—for he was sixty years old—he had served, and from which all his honors had come. This declaration quickly made Norfolk, in which city he was living, "too hot" for him in its popular sentiment, and accordingly he removed to the North to await events.
At that time Farragut was a captain in the navy. He was by all odds the officer in that service most distinguished for brilliant, daring and competently effective performance. He had entered the navy "through a port hole," as he said, at nine years of age. He had served with such distinction under Commodore Porter, that at twelve years of age he had been intrusted by the great seaman with the command of a richly laden prize ship, navigating her for fifteen hundred miles into the harbor of Valparaiso, and there arranging for her condemnation. He had, while yet a mere boy, distinguished himself for courage in a severely-contested sea fight.
In brief, this Captain Farragut was obviously, and unquestionably, the very fittest man to undertake any difficult naval expedition that the Washington government might plan or contemplate.
But he had the taint of Southern birth and connections, and it was nearly a year after he offered himself unreservedly for any service that might be required of him when the politicians who controlled the Navy Department at Washington ventured to make use of his abilities.
And when at last these people in the Navy Department reconciled themselves to the thought of giving an important command to this brilliantly distinguished naval officer, who shared with Winfield Scott and George H. Thomas the suspicious disadvantage of Southern birth and connections, they did it in a way insultingly suggestive of their doubt as to his loyalty or courage or something else essential.
New Orleans was in every way—in population, exports, imports, and everything else—the chief city of the Southern Confederacy. Moreover its strategic position was one which commanded a vast system of inland waterways constituting the only effective link between the Confederate country west of the Mississippi and that part of the Confederacy that lay east of the great river.
The city lies about a hundred miles, to use round figures, above the multitudinous mouths of the Mississippi. It lies less than half a dozen miles west of the so-called Lake Pontchartrain, which is an inlet from the gulf, with two other bodies of water, Mississippi Sound and Lake Borgne, lying between.
But the passes into Lake Borgne and from that body of water into Lake Pontchartrain, are shallow and difficult, as the British discovered in 1814 in their attempt to approach New Orleans by the "back door," as it were.
On the other hand, the Mississippi has five principal mouths, with some others that carry less water. Thus it was, or seemed to be, impossible for any Federal fleet to blockade the entrances to that stream and cut off commerce between New Orleans and the outer world.
But above and beyond all these considerations, was the desire of the Federal authorities to conquer control of the Mississippi itself throughout its entire length. That would be not only to split the Confederacy into halves, cutting off a large part of its food resources, but also to make of the great river a convenient highway for the transportation of Federal food supplies, troops, ammunition and all else that is needful in war, to such points as might have need of them.
Thus the reduction of the defenses of New Orleans, and the conquest of that city became a matter of supreme strategic importance. To this task Farragut was assigned with a fleet that, in our time, could not possibly force its way past a single well-defended fort, or successfully meet an adversary afloat. He had in his fleet, first of all—in Navy Department estimation—twenty-one schooners, each carrying a mortar intended to throw shells high in air and drop them into the Confederate defensive works. These proved to be utterly useless, as Farragut had from the beginning believed that they would be. He had besides, six sloops of war, sixteen gunboats, and eight other ships. His flagship, the Hartford, was a wooden vessel, carrying twenty-two Dahlgren nine-inch guns besides howitzers in the tops. The others were similarly armed. All were under-powered, and could make only eight knots an hour where there was no current. In such a stream as the Mississippi four knots constituted the limit of their performance. There were transports also, carrying an army of about 15,000 men under command of General Benjamin F. Butler. This force was intended to occupy the city after Farragut should have captured it, but until he should do so it was only an incumbrance to his expedition. He got rid of it for a time by landing the troops on one of the islands that separate Mississippi Sound from the gulf, and leaving them there until such time as he should have need of them.
The civilians in control of the Navy Department had not in any adequate way consulted Farragut as to the composition or the armament of the fleet with which he was required to accomplish a task that was next to impossible. In making up the fleet they had accepted the suggestions of his subordinate, Commander David D. Porter, and in obedience to them had created the flotilla largely out of mortar schooners which Farragut regarded as practically useless, and which in the event proved to be altogether so. That is to say, after the manner of that time they had consulted with the less experienced inferior instead of asking the advice of the thoroughly experienced superior. They had been guided by an officer who was not to command the expedition, instead of asking the advice of the officer who was to lead it. But Farragut was so anxious to proceed upon the country's business and in some way to serve it that he promptly accepted the command offered to him and expressed himself as "satisfied" with the ship force provided for him to command.
Expert as he was in all that pertained to Mexican Gulf geography and hydrography, he perfectly knew that one of the principal ships assigned to him could in no wise be dragged into the Mississippi because of her excessive draught of water. Expert as he was in all that pertained to naval warfare, he foresaw that the mortar fleet assigned to him could accomplish nothing, and that its presence in his squadron could be nothing other than an embarrassment. In the same way he saw clearly that General Butler's land force, carried upon transports, could not fail to be a weak spot in his armor. Yet he uncomplainingly accepted the conditions and set about the duty assigned him.
It was with this utterly inadequate and motley crew of serviceable and unserviceable and positively detrimental ships that Farragut was ordered to reduce the defenses of New Orleans, overthrow its naval resistance and conquer the city.
Farragut was fully aware of the utter inadequacy of the means given to him. He perfectly knew that the effective vessels at his disposal were far fewer and far less formidable than the task set him required. But it was his habit to undertake desperate enterprises with inadequate means, and he had waited a long time for any opportunity, however meager, to serve his country. So, in the great generosity of his mind, he expressed to the Navy Department his willingness to undertake the desperate enterprise with the obviously insufficient, and in part the absurdly worthless, force assigned to him to command.
Then came his orders from the civilians, who, without experience or knowledge, or skill, or any other recognizable qualification for command, controlled the Navy Department. These orders were insulting in their tone and manner. It was quite a matter of course that so old, so tried, so skilful an officer as David Glasgow Farragut would do the very best that was possible with the means placed at his command. Yet the Navy Department people suggested doubt of this by the very terms of the orders they gave him.
These orders instructed him to reduce the defenses of the Mississippi and take possession of New Orleans. They took no account of difficulties. They reckoned not upon things in the way. They merely ordered a thing done as one might order a carpet cleaned or a load of wood sawed into stove lengths. Then those orders went on to say: "As you have expressed yourself perfectly satisfied with the force given to you, and as many more powerful vessels will be added before you can commence operations, the department and the country require of you success."
Could there have been anything more impertinent than this, from a purely civilian department to an officer who for half a century had been accustomed to make success the keynote of all his reports of action? Could there have been anything more insolent or more insulting than the suggestion that David Glasgow Farragut might do less than lay within his power to do toward the accomplishment of any purpose to which he might be commissioned? Could anything be more insolent than the reminder that in consenting to undertake the expedition he had declined to criticise the composition of the fleet concerning which he had not been consulted and had expressed himself as "satisfied" to undertake the expedition with the means provided to his hand?
Now let us consider the terms and conditions of Farragut's problem, the nature of the work he had to do, the tools he had to do it with, and the difficulties he must overcome in order to achieve the success "required" of him.
The Mississippi river is the greatest waterway in the world. It is the middle thread of a system embracing more than sixteen thousand miles of practically navigable rivers, bayous and creeks. In its ramifications it drains no less than twenty-eight states of the Union. In its course it flows from the Rocky Mountains on the one side, the Alleghenies on the other, and the Cumberland, the Ozark, and the Missouri ranges, into a single great stream.
New Orleans lies in a bend of that tortuous stream within about one hundred miles from its mouths.
But this greatest of rivers, dividing the eastern from the western United States, and, in its great tributaries dividing the north from the south, instead of broadening in its course toward the sea after the usual manner of rivers, narrows itself below New Orleans to a width of half a mile or less.
Here the Confederates had established their defenses, or more properly speaking, here they had made themselves masters of defenses created by the National Government before a thought of civil war had arisen in any mind.
So far as the "back door" approach was concerned—the approach by way of Lake Borgne and the Rigolets and Lake Pontchartrain—New Orleans was adequately defended by the shallowness of the water at critical points. Unless a special fleet of shallow-draught gunboats should be built at Ship Island or elsewhere there was no possibility of reaching the chief city of the Confederacy by that route. Farragut's only hope lay, therefore, in ascending the Mississippi river.
His first obstacle was encountered in the mouth of the Mississippi itself. The great river carries with it to the sea a limitless quantity of mud which it deposits in whatever spot there may be ready to receive it. It is credited by the geologists with having created in this way all the low-lying lands from Cairo to the gulf, a distance of nearly twelve hundred miles by the river's course. At the several mouths of the stream it is still depositing mud and still pushing the land out into the gulf. Very naturally its mud deposits create bars at the several mouths. Long after the war was over, Captain Eads with his jetties undertook to compel the current to wash out channels in the principal mouths and thus to render easy the approach of ships to New Orleans. But nothing of that kind had been done in the early sixties, and the Federal fleet that was charged with the duty of reducing the forts and capturing the city must first force its way through shifting mud banks in order to get into the river. The useless mortar schooners entered easily by the Pass á l'Outre, but the vessels that were to do the effective fighting had far greater difficulty. It required three weeks of strenuous night and day exertion to force them through the Southwest Pass—the principal mouth of the river—and even then one of them, the Colorado, had to be left outside.
Having thus passed the first and purely natural defense of New Orleans, Farragut had next to encounter the artificial defenses of the river itself. These consisted of two forts at the narrowest part of the stream, together with some adjunctive defenses presently to be mentioned.
These forts were two very imperfectly armed works—Fort St. Philip on the eastern bank, and Fort Jackson on the western. They mounted about 109 effective guns, some of them of obsolete pattern, only a few of which—estimated at fourteen—were protected by casemates. Captain Mahan, in his "Life of Farragut," tells us that these forts had been largely stripped of their armament, and were very imperfectly equipped for the defensive work required of them.
In the river above the forts lay a Confederate war fleet of fifteen vessels, including an iron-clad ram and an iron-clad floating battery, both carrying heavy guns. This fleet had been stupidly weakened by the withdrawal of Hollins's gunboats for inconsequent service at Memphis.
Below the forts was a great chain barrier stretched across the river and supported by hulks anchored in the stream for that purpose. For the protection of this barrier the shores were lined with Confederate sharpshooters—riflemen accustomed to hit whatever they might shoot at.
Having got his fleet into the river after weeks of toil—leaving one very important vessel behind—it was Farragut's task to assail and overcome these defenses and force his way through a strong fleet, up the narrow river to the city he was ordered to capture.
Farragut, as has been said already and as he had bluntly told the Navy Department, had no confidence whatever in the effectiveness of the mortar fleet, which was in charge of its originator, David D. Porter. He would have preferred to leave that part of his squadron behind as an entirely useless and embarrassing incumbrance; but he was a man of generous mind and never arrogantly opinionated. So he gave Porter the fullest possible opportunity to demonstrate the effectiveness of his mortar fleet.
There were twenty-one of the mortar schooners, each carrying a mortar of thirteen inches caliber, which threw shells weighing two hundred and eighty-five pounds each. These shells were filled with such charges of gunpowder as made them, in theory at least, terrible engines of destruction when they exploded. It was Porter's firm conviction that by their fire alone he could compel the Confederates to abandon their forts and leave the way clear for the fleet to sail on up the river with only the Confederate war vessels to contest their passage. Farragut did not expect any such result, but he gave Porter every opportunity.
Securely anchored in a position of Porter's own selection, the mortar schooners opened fire on the eighteenth of April. For six consecutive days and nights they threw their fearful missiles, each in itself a mine, into the forts. They threw in all six thousand of these shells, weighing in the aggregate no less than eight hundred and fifty-five tons. They killed or wounded only fifty men—a picket guard in numbers—or, as Dr. Rossiter Johnson has curiously calculated, they killed or wounded about one man to every sixteen tons of iron hurled into the forts.
This was at the rate of only eight casualties a day, a bagatelle in war and very naturally a bombardment so slightly effective utterly failed to render the forts untenable or to drive out the brave men who were set to defend them. On the contrary the Confederate fire in response to the mortars sank one of the schooners and disabled one of the steamers.
Thus was again taught the familiar lesson of war, that the terrific is not necessarily the effective fire in battle.
So far from abandoning their forts under this fearful rain of metal and explosives the Confederates were busying themselves night and day in determined and intelligently directed efforts to destroy their adversary's fleet. They sent down the river a multitude of blazing fire-rafts, and it required not only all of Farragut's wonderful foresight and ingenuity but constant and very earnest exertions on the part of his crews to ward off this danger.
At last the mortar experiment was done. It had utterly failed to accomplish its intended purpose of reducing the forts or compelling their evacuation. Farragut was dealing with an enemy of his own determined kind, an enemy as resolute, as daring, and as patiently enduring as he himself was.
He decided at last to push his fleet past the forts at all hazards, and, leaving those works as an enemy in his rear, to try conclusions in a decisive battle with the Confederate fleet that lay in wait for him in the river above. It was a dangerous and a daring thing to do. Indeed, it was almost desperately daring. But Farragut's habit of mind was daring. Moreover his orders on this occasion offensively and insultingly "required" success at his hands. It was his fixed purpose either to achieve that success or to sink beneath the muddy waters of the Mississippi in a determined effort to achieve it.
His first care was to sever the chain barrier across the river. To that end he sent a force up the stream which gallantly boarded one of the hulks, cut the chain, and rendered that defense useless.
On the morning of April 24, at 3.30 o'clock, the fighting part of the fleet advanced in full force, engaging the enemy to the right and left, but meanwhile pushing its way up the river without waiting for results at the point of obstruction.
The forts were quickly passed and then ensued one of the most picturesque water battles ever fought. The Confederates knew their business and they did it with a skill and determination which excited Farragut's admiration, as he was afterwards accustomed to testify in glowing words of recognition.
Captain Theodorus Bailey, with eight vessels, was the first to pass the forts. He immediately became involved in a desperate encounter with the Confederate fleet. His flagship, the Cayuga, was engaged at once by three Confederate vessels, each determinedly trying to board and capture her; for this was a battle of giants in which every officer and every man on either side was ready for any conceivable deed of "derring-do," and in which personal courage of the most dauntless sort was the one military equipment which both sides possessed in absolutely limitless supply.
Bailey destroyed one of his assailants with an eleven-inch shell. Has the reader any conception of what it means to have an eleven-inch shell penetrate the side of a vessel and explode within its wooden walls? In every eleven-inch shell there is a charge of gunpowder of positively earthquake-producing proportions, and when it explodes it wrecks everything within hundreds of feet of it. Exploding within a vessel it dismounts guns, kills men, rips up bulwarks and bulkheads, and renders the ship a helpless wreck, with fire everywhere to complete the destruction.
That is what happened to one of the ships that assailed Captain Bailey. Another was driven off, and before the third could accomplish its purpose the Oneida and the Varuna came to the rescue. The Oneida rammed one of the Confederate vessels, cutting it in two. The Varuna had worse fortune. She was successfully rammed by the Confederates, and running ashore, sank helplessly.
The Pensacola sustained a loss of thirty-seven men in passing the forts, a fact that eloquently testified to the vigor that abode in those works after Porter's six days' hail of great shells into their precincts.
The Mississippi, of Farragut's fleet, was rammed and disabled by the Confederate iron-clad Manassas. But, by way of revenge, the Mississippi's guns riddled the ram and destroyed it.
In the meanwhile the Confederates were sending down fire-rafts in great numbers, and in an attempt to avoid contact with two of these Farragut's flagship, the Hartford, ran aground upon a mud bank and for a time lay helpless in an exceedingly perilous position.
If the reader would fully understand the terror of this "river fight" he should remember that at the point where it occurred the Mississippi is only about half a mile wide. Everything done at all in such a stream must be done at close quarters, and it was at the very closest of quarters that the Northern and Southern Americans who contested that fight met each other on that terrible morning of April 24, 1862. The men who fought there in the river on the one side or upon the other, are mostly dead now; only a few of them survive in soldiers' homes or sailors' snug harbors. Surely we can do no better in this new century than pay all possible honor to the valor with which, on the one side and upon the other, they fought for their respective causes on that soft spring morning in the early sixties. They were heroes all, and right heroically did they acquit themselves in the brutal and bloody work they were set to do.
The net result of the contest was the destruction of the Confederate fleet. With that out of the way Farragut pushed on to New Orleans and with guns out for action, demanded the city's surrender.
Only one issue was possible, of course. The city was at Farragut's mercy. He could easily destroy it should it resist. It only remained for him to hoist the National flag over it and to send for General Butler's land force to occupy and possess the chief city of the South, which he did on the first of May.
Butler's rule in the city, where the white population at that time consisted chiefly of women and children, was harsh and even brutal—so harsh and so brutal in its attitude toward women as to offend sentiment both North and South, and in Europe.
He issued one order which could not have come from the headquarters of any man of soldierly instincts or gentle associations. By way of resenting the attitude and conduct of women toward a conquering soldiery, he put forth a decree in these words:
General Orders No. 28
Headquarters, Dept. of the Gulf,
New Orleans, May 15, 1862.As the officers and soldiers of the United States have been subject to repeated insults from the women (calling themselves ladies) of New Orleans in return for the most scrupulous non-interference and courtesy on our part, it is ordered that hereafter when any female shall by word, gesture or movement, insult or show contempt for any officer or soldier of the United States, she shall be regarded and held liable to be treated as a woman of the town plying her avocation.
By order of Major-General Butler.
George C. Strong,
Assistant Adjutant General and
Chief of Staff.
It needs no argument and no exposition to show that in issuing this order Benjamin F. Butler deliberately gave license and authority to the most brutal impulses of the most degraded men under his command,—authorizing them to judge for themselves when they should choose to think themselves insulted "by word, gesture, or movement," and upon every such occasion, without further inquiry, and upon their own initiative, to treat every woman who had occasion to venture into the streets as "a woman of the town plying her avocation."
With the cynicism that had equipped him for practice in the criminal courts of Boston, Butler afterwards explained his order by saying that the only right way to treat "a woman of the town plying her avocation," is to pass her by unnoticed. But he perfectly knew that that was not what his order meant to his soldiery or what he meant it to mean.
The rigor of Butler's rule in New Orleans was in some other respects salutary. He wantonly imprisoned many citizens—men and women indifferently—without warrant or just cause, but apart from that he ruled the city to its advantage. In mortal dread of yellow fever, he cleaned New Orleans as it had never been cleaned before, and throughout a hot summer he kept the city healthier than it had ever been in all its history.
Having thus completely achieved that "success" which the civilians of the Navy Department had "required" of him, Farragut was ambitious to accomplish more. He proposed further operations of like character against other Confederate ports from which commerce was being carried on in spite of the blockade. It was quite obvious that no blockade could stop this commerce on which the South so largely depended for its supplies. The only way in which the shutting in of the Confederacy could be made effective was to capture the defensive works of every Confederate port.
To that task Farragut earnestly desired to address himself. It was his purpose to make himself master of every Confederate seaport, relieve the blockading squadrons of their expensive, perilous, difficult, and ineffective work, and completely to seal the South against all outward or inward commerce with the world. His plan was to substitute the absolute possession of Confederate ports for their manifestly inefficient blockade. He asked permission, therefore, to proceed at once upon this mission, beginning with Mobile.
The civilians in control of the Navy Department promptly said him nay. They had other plans of a more spectacular character. So they ordered Farragut to proceed up the Mississippi river and waste precious time and still more precious lives, in a theatric but futile "running of the batteries" at Vicksburg and Port Hudson.
Farragut obeyed of course. It was the habit of his long life to obey. But he felt keenly the loss of opportunity which this order of a badly water-logged cabinet bureau imposed upon him. While he was thus, under compulsion of the incapables, wasting his time in the Mississippi, the Confederates were sending out precious cargoes of cotton and bringing in still more precious ship-loads of cloth, shoes, artillery harness, quinine, arms, ammunition and everything else that ministered to the maintenance of their armies in the field.
Here was another of those blunders of administration which helped to prolong the war to twice its necessary length and subjected the country, North and South, to needless and intolerable burdens. But how should a civilian Secretary of the Navy understand, as Farragut did, the ways in which the navy could be made most effectively to contribute to the ending of the war? A system that puts a Gideon Welles in control of a Farragut must take the consequences of incapacity on the part of its official head.
Welles forbade Farragut to proceed to the conquest and closing of the Confederate ports. He ordered him instead to waste time and energy and human life in futile and fruitless operations in front of Vicksburg, where even the most ordinary intelligence should have seen clearly that the effective work must be done by the land forces, and where Grant and Sherman were ready to do it well.
This judgment does not rest upon the opinion of the author of this history. It is supported in every detail by the skilled criticism of no less a naval authority than Captain Mahan. In his "Farragut," page 116 et seq., that highest authority in naval criticism has written:
"The principal result of an effort undertaken without due consideration was to paralyze a large fraction of a navy too small in numbers to afford the detachment which was paraded gallantly, but uselessly, above New Orleans. Nor was this the worst. The time thus consumed in marching up the hill in order at once to march down again threw away the opportunity for reducing Mobile before its defenses were strengthened. Had the navy been large enough, both tasks might have been attempted; but it will appear in the sequel that its scanty numbers were the reason which postponed the attack on Mobile from month to month until it became the most formidable danger Farragut ever had to encounter."
In other words, the policy of setting a Gideon Welles to direct the naval operations of a Farragut, resulted in making a difficult task out of a very easy one. The fall of New Orleans served to warn the Confederates of the danger in which Mobile lay, and while Welles was keeping Farragut uselessly and against his will in the Mississippi, skilled Confederate engineers were strengthening the Mobile defenses and planting the harbor of that port with destructive mines and torpedoes, so that Farragut's task of closing that port, when months later he was reluctantly permitted to undertake it, was difficult and perilous in the extreme, where it had been simple, easy, and scarcely at all dangerous to ships or seamen at the time when he had asked permission to proceed to its accomplishment.
But the Pinafore practice of setting an untrained, inexperienced and ignorant politician to direct the scientific and strictly professional work of highly trained naval officers, is too firmly imbedded in our system of administration to be disturbed by considerations of mere common-sense. When war is on, the country pays the penalty of this folly.
We have already seen from his own reports what McClellan thought of the force he was called upon to command at and near Washington after the disastrous defeat of McDowell at Manassas. There was, he said, "no army to command—a mere collection of regiments, cowering on the banks of the Potomac, some perfectly raw, others dispirited by recent defeat, others going home.... Washington was crowded with straggling officers and men absent from their stations without authority."
Slowly, patiently, painfully, McClellan brought order out of this chaos of demoralization. Out of the broken and utterly dispirited fragments of McDowell's army and out of the new, raw levies sent to him he created that Army of the Potomac which fought the great campaigns of the war.
In the meantime an ignorant and impatient popular clamor and an unintelligent press "opinion"—for there is a certain type of newspaper editor who is apt to regard his own hasty and ill-informed judgment of things that he knows little or nothing about, as an "opinion"—hounded and persecuted the man who was expected to retrieve the Manassas defeat. Even Mr. Lincoln, with all his patience, became impatient of McClellan's inaction—which was excessive perhaps—and almost angrily urged him to action. He called the general's attention to the fact that he had under his command a force greatly superior in numbers to any that the Confederates could muster and that the country was impatient for an advance.
McClellan seems to have had no thought of making his way to Richmond by the route of Centreville and Manassas, where Johnston lay behind impregnable fortifications. He knew the easier road of approach up the James river from Fortress Monroe as a base of operations. But, at all hazards, the Government, the press and the people insisted, Washington city must be covered and protected, and so McClellan's first care was to feel of the works at Centreville and Manassas before transferring his army down the Potomac and the Chesapeake to Fortress Monroe. Accordingly, on the tenth of March, 1862, he pushed a column forward toward Centreville and Manassas only to find those strongly fortified positions already abandoned. General Johnston had interpreted McClellan's plans aright, and was transferring his army to the Peninsula east of Richmond in order to meet his adversary's confidently-expected advance in that quarter.
There was nothing now, neither defended works nor an opposing army, to forbid McClellan's march upon Richmond by the Manassas route, while it was certain that Johnston was fortifying Williamsburg and other defensible points upon the other route and concentrating his forces there to meet McClellan's advance when it should come.
But McClellan was above all things a man of orderly and methodic mind, a man not to be turned from a pre-arranged plan of action by the offering of any opportunity, however advantageous it might be. So instead of pushing on towards Richmond by the route which his enemy had thus left undefended, he turned about, sent his army by water to Fortress Monroe, and confronted his adversary where that adversary was best prepared at all points to meet him.
In the meanwhile General Burnside had completed the occupation of the southern coast by the seizure of Beaufort, Roanoke, Newberne and Fort Macon, and another Federal force a little later, on the eleventh of April, captured Fort Pulaski, near the mouth of the Savannah river.
After great urgency on the part of Mr. Lincoln, who, in his homely phrase, feared that McClellan's army might "take root" around Washington, that officer at last transferred one hundred and twenty-one thousand men to the neighborhood of Fortress Monroe, with every adjunctive aid that an army could require or make useful. His force outnumbered the Confederates nearly two to one, but it was McClellan's habit of mind to exaggerate the strength of his enemy. It was also his bad habit, as it was Halleck's, to proceed with an exaggerated respect for military "regularity." So instead of pushing forward up the peninsula that lay between the James and the York rivers, and simply running over the vastly inferior forces of his enemy, as a general of enterprising mind would have done, he advanced "scientifically" and with scientific slowness.
The first point of contact was at Yorktown, where General Magruder lay with 13,000 Confederates, McClellan's army of assault—i.e., his advance force—numbered no less than 58,000 men and 100 guns. According to his custom McClellan enormously overestimated the strength of his adversary, and instead of hurling his superior force upon the Confederate works, or using his fleet to pass them by, as General Johnston expected him to do, he sat down before Yorktown and instituted a regular siege approach by parallels.
Reinforcements came to him daily and even hourly, until he had nearly 120,000 men and more than a hundred guns with which to assail Magruder's scant 13,000 men and less than thirty guns.
But he did not make the assault. Instead he remained inactive for nearly a month before Yorktown with about nine men under his command to his adversary's one, doing nothing energetic or determined. When at last he advanced upon the works which he might have run over on the day of his arrival before them, he found no force defending them and only "dummy" guns in the shape of painted logs occupying their embrasures. Comic opera itself has few situations more ridiculous than was this of McClellan at the end of his month's "siege" of Yorktown, defended through a large part of the siege by less than one man to his nine, and at the last defended only by "quaker" guns, with no men at all behind them.
Finding that the position against which he had so elaborately provided siege appliances was vacated by his enemy, McClellan advanced to Williamsburg, where he encountered actual resistance on the fourth of May and the days following.
Here was one of those situations, of which the war presented so many, which it is difficult to reconcile with our accepted estimates of the military capacity of the generals on either side.
McClellan was moving up the Peninsula, threatening Richmond with about 120,000 men—official reports say 119,965. He had left 70,000 men at or near Washington to protect the capital, and the authorities there had detained 10,000 or 15,000 more for safety. McDowell, with 40,000 men of this force had been pushed forward to Fredericksburg on the Potomac, with the intent that he should make a junction with McClellan before Richmond, swelling that general's force to about 160,000 men. Jackson having been driven back in the valley of Virginia the danger to Washington seemed for the moment past, and Franklin's division had been sent to strengthen McClellan's main column.
In brief, McClellan had almost exactly 120,000 men immediately with him, while 40,000 more under McDowell were moving unopposed from Fredericksburg to join him and swell his army to about 160,000. As McDowell was presently called back for the defense of Washington, in view of the renewal of "Stonewall" Jackson's threatening operations in the Shenandoah Valley, it is only fair to reckon McClellan's force at the 120,000, which his morning reports showed that he had with him below Richmond. Johnston in command at Richmond had rather less than 50,000 men with which to oppose this force.
Deeply feeling his responsibility and the enormous disadvantage at which he was placed, the Confederate general asked for reinforcements. He proposed that all the troops in the Carolinas, where they were in no wise needed, and all in the valley of Virginia, and all at Norfolk and other points from which they could be spared, should be concentrated under his command in front of Richmond, in order that with an adequate force he might assail McClellan, who was in a vulnerable position, and, overcoming him, turn about and crush McDowell.
A council of war, of which General Robert E. Lee was the dominant member, overruled this apparently wise proposal, for reasons that have never been made clear. Thus Johnston, with 50,000 men, was left to defend Richmond against the double advance of McClellan's 120,000 from the east and McDowell's 40,000 from the north.
To do that successfully he must, of course, fall back to the neighborhood of the city and concentrate his force behind the strongest earthworks he could construct. The aggressive measures which he desired to take were wholly out of the question for the time at least.
Nevertheless Magruder made a stubborn stand at Williamsburg, giving Johnston time to fortify. It was only after two days of very severe fighting, and with a loss of 2,200 men against a Confederate loss of 1,800 that McClellan at last forced the Confederate detachment—for it was only a detachment and not a very strong one at that—to fall back from Williamsburg to the main line of defense and join itself to Johnston's army, of which it was a part.
The battle of Williamsburg was strategically of no consequence except as a part of a campaign of delay. It would be an idle waste of space, a needless taxing of the reader's attention, to recount its strategy in detail. It is sufficient to say that after delaying McClellan's advance for two days and inflicting a heavy loss upon him, the Confederates withdrew in good order to the main defenses of Richmond.
McClellan now sent Franklin's division on transports to the White House at the head of the York river, to establish there a secure base of supplies. The whole army followed and by the sixteenth of May it was concentrated there.
This was then the situation. McClellan lay at the White House within twenty-four miles of Richmond. He had more nearly three than two men to his adversary's one under his immediate command and he had an army nearly equal to his enemy's, within two or three days' march ready to reinforce him, or better still, to assail his adversary in flank.
A general of such enterprise as General Sheridan, or General Sherman, or General Grant, or General Thomas, placed in such circumstances, would unquestionably have pressed forward to the assault.
But McClellan's timid imagination swelled Johnston's force of 50,000 or less to 120,000 or more and he hesitated. Instead of pushing forward by the shortest roads to Richmond he scientifically "developed" his force along the Chickahominy river to the north of Richmond, and, after fortifying, made a requisition for reinforcements.
In the meanwhile "Stonewall" Jackson had achieved some brilliant successes in the Shenandoah Valley which so far seemed to threaten Washington with assault, that McDowell's force of 40,000 men was recalled from its march to reinforce McClellan and sent to ward off the danger of an advance upon the Federal capital by that peculiarly energetic and enterprising commander.
But even without McDowell's expected reinforcement, McClellan had greatly more than twice his adversary's force. It is impossible to doubt that if he had been moved by anything like Grant's habitual and determined impulse to "press things" he would promptly have hurled his overwhelming force against his adversary's defensive lines.
McClellan, however, was not Grant nor such as he. He had a superior skill in the theoretical science of war but an immeasurably inferior capacity for war's practical work.
North of Richmond and from five to seven miles distant the Chickahominy river runs in a course almost due east from its source. McClellan placed his main force north of that erratic and uncertain stream and there awaited the reinforcements for which he was clamorously calling. But he threw his left wing across the river to the Richmond side of it. Unless he were prepared to advance at once with all his force and assail the Confederate works this was an exceedingly dangerous thing to do, for the Chickahominy is a phenomenally uncertain and erratic river. In dry weather it is scarcely more than a brook, but in periods of rain—and spring in Virginia is a rainy season—it swells suddenly and quickly to almost impassable proportions, while the swamps that form its banks become morasses in which it is difficult to find even a foothold, and impossible to discover a fit camping place for troops. When McClellan established his left wing south of the river the stream presented no obstacle to its prompt reinforcement from the other side in case of need. But presently the windows of heaven were opened and the fountains of the great deep were broken up. The floods came, and this isolated left wing was cut off and left mainly to its own devices for self-maintenance.
The Confederate General Johnston was quick to see and seize this opportunity. On the morning of the thirty-first of May, he assailed the detached left wing and there resulted the two-days' battle called Fair Oaks at the North, and Seven Pines at the South.
Johnston's force scarcely, if at all, outnumbered the detached left wing of McClellan's army, but his hope was, by determined fighting to cut off that part of McClellan's army from the main body that lay north of the river, and to crush and destroy it before it could be reinforced.
In his first assaults he was conspicuously successful, and had his expectation been realized that McClellan would be unable to reinforce his detached left wing from the other side of the river it is probable that Johnston's operation would have made prisoners of that wing of McClellan's army which lay south of the turbulent river. But two events stood in the way. One of the many frail bridges across the Chickahominy remained, in spite of the floods, as an available means of crossing. Some of its supports had given way under pressure of the waters and it was manifestly tottering to its fall. But General Sumner, ordered to support the imperiled force south of the river, heroically disregarded the danger and pushed his force across the frail and tottering structure, ordering his men to "break step" in the passage in order that the swing of the cadenced step might not cause the bridge to sway and fall. Thus perilously, he crossed, just in time to meet and defeat a Confederate effort to gain control of the bridge and destroy it, thus completely cutting off communication between the two wings of the Union Army.
The second event of importance in this battle was the very serious wounding of General Johnston. He received in his body a bullet, which incapacitated him for months to come for any active service. This was only one of thirteen wounds that Johnston had received during his military career. General Scott had described him as "a most capable officer, who has the bad habit of getting himself wounded," and here again he had indulged in that bad habit to the serious detriment of the cause he served. For when he was wounded the command passed into the hands of General Gustavus W. Smith, ex-Street Commissioner of New York City, whose fitness for so high a command was, to say the very least, problematical. Under his direction the movement by which Johnston had hoped to achieve so much came to naught.
Two days later Robert E. Lee assumed direct command of the Confederate Army at Richmond, and from that hour forth the war took on a new character. One of the two great master minds—Lee and Grant—was at last in control of the means with which the struggle was to be fought out to a finish. The other of those two great master minds was still under the control of distinctly inferior "superiors."
With the advent of Lee to direct command, the terms of the war problem were set anew. He made of the Virginia army such a fighting machine as has rarely been known in the history of the world. It was not until nearly two years later that Grant was permitted to act upon his conviction, repeatedly formulated, that the strength of the Confederacy and the danger to the Union lay, not in the possession of strategic positions, but in the fighting force of that Army of Northern Virginia which responded to every demand of Lee for heroic self-sacrifice, as the needle responds to the attraction of the pole. In the meanwhile Lee and his army were a ceaseless menace to the Federal capital and the Federal cause. From the moment of his accession to command until the hour in which he met Grant at the Wilderness, Lee dictated the course and conduct of the war, and in an extraordinary degree dominated its events.