American Experiment (112 page)

McClellan was given green troops and substandard equipment, but western generals complained of receiving nothing at all. The federal government focused its supervision on the army around Washington while draining the West of troops, guns, and skilled officers. Lincoln appointed John Charles Fremont to command the main Union force in Missouri because of his prominence within the Republican party; similarly, he would relieve Fremont later in the year after the general quarreled bitterly with the Blairs.

Left largely to their own devices, the Westerners muddled through. Fremont put up $75,000 of his own money and bought what rifles he could find. In St. Louis two wealthy businessmen, James Buchanan Eads and Charles Ellet, began building a gunboat fleet that would give the Union control of the western waterways. And further south at Cairo, Illinois, where the Ohio and Mississippi rivers joined, a small man, of uncommanding presence, was drilling a small body of troops. Ulysses S. Grant had left the Army in disgrace several years earlier, his Mexican War heroism overshadowed by tales of drunkenness. He returned to his wife and children in Missouri, took up the backbreaking work of farming, but went bankrupt; he tried a few business ventures, but they failed; when Sumter fell, he was working as a clerk in his father’s leather store. A local politician helped Grant to appointment as a colonel and then a brigadier in the new volunteer forces, but the job that he really wanted, on McClellan’s staff in Washington, was closed to him because of his reputation. So in the autumn of 1861 Sam Grant supervised the training of his Illinois troops and waited for a chance to redeem himself.

While the armies prepared and waited, the Navy acted. Lincoln’s head of the Navy Department, Gideon Welles, proved himself a superb
organizer, his assistant, Gustavus Fox, a keen strategist, Having begun the war with 43 seaworthy ships, Welles bought or built 400 more of every size and description, from shallow-draft tugs to experimental ironclad gunboats. This motley array of vessels clamped a lid over the coast of the Confederacy, squeezing southern commerce until only a fraction of the prewar shipping was able to get through. Fox organized the Navy’s best ships into an amphibious task force that struck sharp blows against the South. On August 29, l861, an expedition seized Hatteras Island off North Carolina, and on November 7 a naval landing party hoisted the Stars and Stripes over Port Royal farther down the coast. These victories not only shook southern confidence and closed two ports; they gave the Navy advance bases from which it could tighten the blockade and strike again.

Lincoln, indeed, might be excused for thinking the Navy to be too aggressive, for one ship commander almost triggered a war with Britain. Captain Charles Wilkes had been patrolling the eastern Caribbean in the sloop
San Jacinto
, searching for Confederate commerce raiders, when he learned that two southern diplomats, James M. Mason and John Slidell, had slipped through the blockade and were on their way to Europe aboard the British mail steamer
Trent.
On his own initiative, and against the advice of his second-in-command, Wilkes intercepted the
Trent
in the Bahama Channel on November 8, stopped her with a shot across the bow, and sent a boarding party to bring Mason and Slidell back to the
San Jacinto.
The northern press applauded when Wilkes arrived in Boston with his prisoners, but the British government professed to be outraged. Lord Palmerston and his Cabinet tacitly sympathized with the Confederacy; the combination of southern cotton and northern insolence seemed an almost irresistible inducement to war. While the London
Times
breathed fire, and British troop transports prepared to sail for Canada, the Prime Minister demanded that the American government apologize and release the captive envoys.

The northern public, happy to turn against America’s old enemy, showered Wilkes with gifts and testimonials. Lawyers, congressmen, and editors called upon Lincoln to defy the British ultimatum. Secretary of State Seward seemed taken with the idea of bringing the South back into the Union by starting a war with Europe. “We will wrap the whole world in flames!” he told
Times
correspondent William Russell. But neither popular pressure nor diplomatic cleverness swayed Lincoln. The President, wanting just “one war at a time,” dictated a conciliatory reply to Palmerston. The note, although filled by Seward with references to Britain’s violations of American neutral rights during the Napoleonic wars, disavowed Wilkes’s action and “cheerfully” promised to release Mason and Slidell. In
London, Charles Francis Adams adroitly presented the American case, and Queen Victoria worked for peace; the crisis subsided.

While meeting one challenge with soft words, Lincoln brazenly ignored another. As an emergency measure in the days after Sumter, Lincoln had authorized the Army to seize and hold suspected traitors without regard to the right of habeas corpus. This action embroiled the President and the military in a clash with the courts, as represented by the nation’s highest judicial official, still Chief Justice Taney. When soldiers from Fort McHenry arrested John Merryman, lieutenant in a secessionist militia company in Baltimore, Taney himself wrote out the writ of habeas corpus. He ordered the arresting officer to appear before him with Merryman, “certify and make known the day and cause of the capture and detention of said John Merryman,” and then “submit to and receive whatever the said Court shall determine upon” concerning the arrest.

General George Cadwalader, commandant of McHenry, declined to appear before Taney; a messenger who tried to serve the court’s writ upon the general was denied admission to the fort. The Chief Justice, having no troops of his own, could only dictate a scathing opinion. Congress, not the President, had the power to suspend habeas corpus under the Constitution; if Lincoln’s action went unchallenged, then “the people of the United States are no longer living under a government of laws.” Rather every citizen would hold “life, liberty and property at the will and pleasure of the army officer in whose military district he may happen to be found.” Taney sent his opinion to the President, calling upon that “high official,” whose oath of office the Justice himself had administered only months before, “to perform his constitutional duty to enforce the laws; in other words to enforce the process of this Court.” Lincoln, knowing that the North held the Supreme Court in contempt because of Taney’s ruling in the Dred Scott case, serenely ignored the command; the Chief Justice was as powerless as John Marshall had been thirty years earlier, when Taney’s mentor Andrew Jackson had defied the court’s ruling in the Cherokee lands case.

“Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” James Madison had written—and his strategy was working even amid civil war, as the crisis brought the Congress as well as the judiciary into conflict with the President. The foundations for a permanently large and powerful chief executive were building under the stupendous wartime pressures. In the long run, the increased scope of presidential power and the magnitude of the issues at stake in the war guaranteed that President and Congress would clash.

The first foretaste of the conflict was evident in July, when the lawmakers approved Lincoln’s emergency measures only grudgingly and in part, in
a last-minute rider tacked onto a military pay bill. Now in December, as they convened for the regular session, congressional leaders looked for ways to increase their influence on the war effort. In the House, the Committee on Government Contracts launched a series of investigations into the purchasing practices of the War Department, amassing eleven hundred pages of evidence of fraud and mismanagement. With these probes, and with its support of the civilian Sanitary Commission, which worked to improve conditions in the military hospitals and camps, Congress succeeded in saving money and lives.

Not all of the legislative initiatives were constructive. A group of radical Republicans led by Benjamin Wade and Zachariah Chandler organized a Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, their goal being to push for a quick end to both the war and slavery. As the winter dragged on and the Union armies continued to drill, the Joint Committee began to question the loyalty of Union officers. General Charles Stone was imprisoned for six months at the committee’s behest; his “crime” had been to send a patrol across the Potomac that ended in disaster and death for several hundred northern men—including Edward Dickinson Baker, a former senator and a close friend of Lincoln. Another old soldier, bedeviled by congressional witch hunters, wrote bitterly about serving a government “where to be suspected, merely, is the same as to be convicted.”

Lincoln had to deal cautiously with the members of the Joint Committee; they had powerful support in Congress and in the country. The war had intensified the hopes of abolitionists across the North, and Wade’s group championed their cause. Lincoln had to fend off antislavery agitation even in the Army itself, canceling emancipation orders issued by Generals Fremont and Hunter. To attack slavery before the Union Army was able to take the offensive against the South, the President feared, would be to lose the border states of Missouri, Kentucky, and Maryland—in his view, to lose both Union and abolition.

The radicals played into Lincoln’s hands. Cameron, already on shaky ground as the inefficiency of the War Department became exposed, made a play for the abolitionists’ support. Without White House consent he issued a call for the arming of freed slaves to help put down the rebellion. Racial war—the very thought terrified Unionist slaveholders and stiffened Confederate resolve. Cameron had overreached himself; Lincoln “reluctantly accepted his resignation,” sent him to Russia as American ambassador to the Tsar, and appointed Edwin Stanton as Secretary of War. Cameron’s interference with the war effort was ended, the radicals were temporarily discredited, and Lincoln gained some relief from congressional pressure.

The only way fully to satisfy Congress and the people, however, was to push the war to a victorious conclusion. In February of 1862 the northern forces finally began their offensive, advancing all across the broad front. The Navy led off, landing an amphibious force at Roanoke Island. In the West, a flotilla of gunboats and transports commanded by a saltwater sailor, Commodore Andrew Foote, carried Grant’s division down the Cumberland River into Tennessee. Fort Henry on the Cumberland surrendered to the gunboats, and Grant’s men trapped a small enemy army in Fort Donelson on the Tennessee River. The forty-year-old general became a national hero in mid-February when he accepted the “unconditional surrender” of 14,000 rebel soldiers at Donelson. A second northern force under Don Carlos Buell captured Nashville, and by the end of March most of Tennessee was in Union hands.

Confederate forces under Albert Sidney Johnston regrouped and counterattacked Grant’s column, which had grown to an army of 50,000 men by the beginning of April. Both sides were mauled in the two-day battle at Shiloh Church—Johnston and 40,000 men in blue and gray were gunned down—but the Confederates were forced to retreat. The northern onslaught resumed. New Orleans fell on April 25 to units of David Farragut’s fleet, which had run the batteries of the forts defending the city. Charles Ellet was killed when Confederate gunboats sortied to defend Memphis, but the ships that he had built for the Union cleared the way into that city. Farther west, a small Union army marched into Arkansas, destroying a mixed force of Confederates and Indians at Pea Ridge. On July 1 Farragut was able to sail upriver and join forces with the gunboat fleet at Vicksburg, the last Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi.

In the East, General Ambrose Burnside’s amphibious force crossed from Roanoke Island to the North Carolina mainland, seized the port of New Bern, and threatened the interior of the state. But the focus of attention was the Potomac, where McClellan began to move his army. The main Union force descended the river in transports and landed at the tip of the York peninsula, where Cornwallis’ surrender had ended the American Revolution years before. As McClellan pushed cautiously up the peninsula with 100,000 men, a second army occupied Manassas, while a third advanced into the Shenandoah Valley. By mid-May, the Union controlled most of northern Virginia, and the Army of the Potomac stood on the outskirts of Richmond.

Southerners responded to the Union invasion with éclat. They proved that the North had no monopoly on “Yankee ingenuity”; a single Confederate gunboat, its sides protected by several inches of iron plating, challenged the combined Union fleet at Vicksburg, crippled several ships, and
escaped unscathed. A second ironclad, the rebuilt old frigate
Merrimac
, threatened to cut off McClellan’s army on the peninsula, until the Union ironclad
Monitor
checked it in a duel off Hampton Roads. Nathan Bedford Forrest and other Confederate cavalry commanders were able to tie down and halt the Union forces in the West by raiding behind their lines, burning supplies, and sending false messages on the occupying army’s telegraphs. The leadership of two men, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, saved the Confederate capital and finally reversed the spring tide of Union victory. Lee had fewer than 80,000 men to withstand the three advancing northern armies, yet he sent Jackson into the Shenandoah Valley with 18,000 men to divert what Union forces he could. Jackson and his soldiers performed brilliantly. Dancing around a cumbrous army twice their strength, they fought five battles in as many weeks, forced Lincoln to stop the Union force at Manassas from marching to join McClellan, and then rushed back to Richmond. At Jackson’s return, Lee launched another desperate gamble. Again dividing his forces, he attacked the isolated northern wing of the Army of the Potomac, drove it back, and bluffed McClellan into withdrawing his entire force. After seven days of continuous fighting, McClellan’s men found themselves back on the James River, camped on the plantation where President Harrison had been born; the bells of Richmond were no longer in earshot.

Presidents can plan, and generals can command, but the outcome of wars turns largely on the individual decisions of thousands of individual soldiers to advance or wait or retreat, to lead or follow or run. The men in blue and gray were, more often than not, still boys; the majority of them had not been old enough to vote in the election that precipitated the war. Charles Fair saw in the Civil War soldiers “a curious kind of naïveté,” as though each was “too unguardedly himself, the villains obviously and totally villainous, the virtuous cleareyed and straight as strings, the country boys so rustic and simple one cannot believe them.” That innocence would not survive four grinding years of war. In shaping the destiny of the Union, the soldiers—and through them the American people—would themselves be reshaped.