Never Call Retreat (3 page)

General Johnston was to have his own place in the Confederate legend. He was Little Joe, the Gamecock, graying, winsome, courtly but at times fiercely, absurdly, ruinously touchy; a gifted defensive strategist the value of whose services to the South was limited by two small failings. His canny appraisal of the military realities was so precise that it never quite left him room for the risk-everything sort of offensive thrust which the Confederacy's situation occasionally demanded; also, it unfortunately was in the long run impossible for him and Jefferson Davis to work together with mutual confidence and understanding. This appointment to western command exposed both of these qualities to the open air.

Johnston's assignment was to use Bragg and Pemberton to defeat Grant, and he quickly concluded that this combination was less logical than it looked. Bragg and Pemberton were separated by the Tennessee River, by Grant's army, and by the fact that the only really good route from Murfreesboro to central Mississippi was extremely roundabout, wandering by way of Chattanooga, Atlanta, Montgomery, and Mobile—800 miles and more, involving the use of half a dozen railroads. It would be much better, said General Johnston, to use Holmes and Pemberton against Grant. His own authority ought to embrace these two armies, joining Mississippi and Arkansas instead of Mississippi and Tennessee.

The protest was not heeded. Opening headquarters at Chattanooga on December 4, Johnston got word from the War Department that Pemberton was in full retreat, that Holmes had been "peremptorily ordered" to send reinforcements, and that the President, anticipating delay in Holmes' movement, wanted Johnston to order troops down from Bragg. Johnston protested that Pemberton's retreat took the man constantly farther away from Bragg, which made Bragg's army a most illogical source of support, but this did no good—partly because he could not get Richmond to see his point and partly because Richmond was oddly helpless. Holmes, it finally appeared, was not going to send any men east of the Mississippi—the Federals were too menacing, his army was too weak, and the people of Arkansas were likely to give up the cause if this army moved away. Pemberton pleaded, the War Department ordered, and Mr. Davis sent Holmes a long, patiently persuasive letter, pointing out that Arkansas and Holmes' army would both be doomed if the Confederacy lost Vicksburg; and all of this did no good at all. When Mr. Davis got to Chattanooga he told Johnston that there was no help for it; Johnston must send at least a division of General Bragg's troops down to help Pemberton.
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Holmes would not act, Richmond could not make him act—and Mr. Davis, so often accused of behaving with bureaucratic and dictatorial firmness toward his generals, was in this case unwontedly pliable. Perhaps the truth was that the vast country west of the Mississippi was so far away, and the situation there was so delicate, that the central government could not enforce its will without subjecting the Confederate fabric to an unendurable strain. Holmes believed that this was so. He argued that if his army came east of the river and the Federals as a result captured Little Rock, "the whole valley of the Arkansas will be stampeded and the political party which has constantly cried out that the country is deserted by the government will pave the way to dangerous disloyalty and disgust." The warning was cloudy, but Holmes at once made it more explicit: if his troops went east the Confederacy would probably lose Arkansas, and to lose Arkansas was to lose the entire trans-Mississippi country. And so, "under these circumstances, and with the greatest reluctance, I hesitate to obey your last order."
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Rarely did a Confederate officer tell Jefferson Davis, "I hesitate to obey," and escape destruction. Holmes was one who did; probably because Mr. Davis saw his point before he made it. Several days before he left for Tennessee the President had told General Lee that he wanted Holmes to send troops to Mississippi "if it can safely be done." The fatal difficulty in the Mississippi Valley was that what imperatively had to be done could not be done safely, and because it could not be done safely it was not done at all. Joe Johnston wrote to his friend Senator Wigfall that the failure to bring Holmes' troops east of the river "has blown away some tall castles in the air."
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Some of these dissolving air castles were central to the vision of Confederate independence.

2. Battle without Logic

JUST BEFORE President Davis and General Johnston left Tennessee for Mississippi an urgent telegram arrived from Richmond: the powerful Federal Army of the Potomac, 120,000 strong and backed by abundant reserves, had crossed the Rappahannock River in Virginia and was attacking General Lee's army at Fredericksburg. Lee had rather more than half as many men as the Federals had, with no reserves worth mentioning, and Fredericksburg was hardly fifty miles north of Richmond. A Federal victory here (not unlikely, when the odds were figured) could mean the end of everything, and Mr. Davis immediately telegraphed for more news. A twenty-four-hour wait brought no answer, and as he resumed his journey the President wrote to Mrs. Davis to say that he was most anxious.

General Johnston did not share his anxiety. He could see much trouble ahead in Mississippi, but in Virginia everything was different. He remembered that the high ground back of Fredericksburg offered almost perfect defensive positions, he felt that General Lee was being presented with victory by some incomprehensible act of Yankee generosity, and he wrote his own characteristic comment, half jocular, half rueful: "What luck some people have. Nobody will ever come to attack me in such a place."
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General Johnston's professional appraisal was sound. Fredericksburg turned out to be a top-heavy Confederate victory, and Lee's only regret arose from the fact that the beaten Federals were able to get back to their own side of the Rappahannock after the fighting ended. He doubtless would have agreed that he was lucky to be attacked here; he was able to repulse the invader without using more than half of his outnumbered army, and it was this battle that drew from him the exultant, desolating cry:
It is well that war is so terrible—we should grow too fond of it.
After its retreat the Federal army that looked so dangerous in its advance was glad to lie in camp, painfully recuperating, meditating on its casualty list (which contained more than 12,000 names) and on the varieties of human folly that had created the list. The President who needed to worry about Fredericksburg was not Jefferson Davis but Abraham Lincoln.

In a sense what happened there happened to Mr. Lincoln personally. In the Emancipation Proclamation he had given the nation a new imperative, and as an inescapable sequel he had given the Army of the Potomac a new leader. When he did this he took a prodigious risk. To remove Major General George B. McClellan was to wrench out of this army its central personality; the President had rested the entire Union cause on the belief that these soldiers could win even though they lost the leader who had molded them in his own image, but now their new leader failed them abysmally. Strategically, Fredericksburg cost the North nothing that could not be restored; spiritually, it was fearfully expensive. The nation could endure agony better than ignominy.

Fredericksburg was a strange and terrible battle, fought on a frozen plain between bleak hills and a ruined town—a battle that began in wintry sunlight and ended with mist floating up from the river to cloak many hundreds of bodies that lay in fields and leafless thickets—and its meaning was veiled. All of the material strength the mighty republic could bring to the battlefield had been displayed here. The soldiers had fought as well as ever. What made the battle so tragic, to Northern eyes, was that heroism and endurance had been so prodigally displayed and so miserably wasted. That strange and inexplicable quality which Mr. Lincoln later called the last full measure of devotion was still there, but Fredericksburg proved that by itself this was not enough. Mr. Lincoln now had to think of how it was to be used.

The soldier who replaced McClellan was Major General Ambrose E. Burnside. He was handsome, likable, imbued with a humility not previously known in the army's headquarters tents,
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and he did his conscientious best only to become the architect of unrelieved catastrophe. If it is true that he was much too limited a mortal to command the nation's largest army, it is also true that he could have been served ever so much better than he was served, both by his subordinates and by the War Department. It is true, further, that he had not angled for the job and that when the time came he gave it up with a good grace. Finally, the campaign which he devised and tried to carry out was well planned; up to a point it was fairly well executed. It came a little closer to success than is usually realized. Actually, it could have worked.

Burnside took command on November 7, when the army was loosely grouped around Warrenton, Virginia. Lee's army was divided, half of it twenty miles away at Culpeper and the other half up beyond the Blue Ridge in the Shenandoah Valley. McClellan had been shifting to the southwest, hoping to destroy the segment at Culpeper. Burnside distrusted this plan, and with some reason. There were approximately 35,000 Confederates in the valley, potentially in his rear, and they were led by Stonewall Jackson: altogether this was not unlike the layout that made so much trouble for the unfortunate John Pope.
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Burnside proposed, instead, an immediate move to the southeast. A march of rather more than thirty miles would put him in Falmouth, across the Rappahannock from Fredericksburg and on the railroad that went down from Aquia Creek on the Potomac, ten miles northeast of Falmouth, through Fredericksburg to Richmond. His base at Aquia Creek would be safe, and if Burnside got into Fredericksburg quickly he would actually be nearer to Richmond than Lee was at Culpeper. Advancing along the railroad, he could compel Lee to fight, near the Confederate capital, with the odds all in favor of the Federals. Burnside put his plan on paper and when the major general commanding all the armies, Henry W. Halleck, came to Warrenton for consultation Burnside showed him the paper and asked for its approval.

Halleck had more authority than he liked to use. His guiding star was the conviction that nothing of any importance could be done without prior clearance at the White House. This now and then made it impossible for him to act at all, but during the last six months he had been in a position to see what happened to generals who ignored the President's wishes, and understandably he was most cautious. Now he took Burnside's program back to Washington, and on November 14 he sent word that the President thought the plan would work if Burnside moved rapidly.

This Burnside could do. He got two army corps on the road the next morning, and on November 17 they were in Falmouth, looking across the river to Fredericksburg which was occupied by the merest handful of Confederates. On this day Lee, still at Culpeper, notified President Davis that the Yankees seemed to be getting out of Warrenton but that it was not yet clear where they were going; he had anticipated that they might go to Fredericksburg, but so far there was nothing to show that they were actually doing it. To the War Department Lee wrote that the Yankee move might well be the first step in a program to transfer the Army of the Potomac to the James River.
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Undeniably, Burnside was off to an excellent start. He had in fact done what few Federal generals were ever able to do: he had stolen a couple of days on Robert E. Lee. If he now used that time properly he might win a dazzling success.

Burnside was not, unfortunately, able to use the time at all, and the campaign that began so briskly slowed down until it became a blind drifting to disaster.

All Burnside needed to do, once his advance guard was at

Falmouth, was to cross the river into Fredericksburg and begin his move toward Richmond. To do this of course he had to have bridges, and the War Department had promised that the pontoons, timbers, and engineer troops to build bridges would be waiting for him at Falmouth. They were not there—were in fact nowhere in sight, nor did anyone from General Halleck on down know where they were or how their arrival might be expedited. Lacking bridges, the army sat down and waited; and as it waited time went by, and many thousands of armed Confederates got into Fredericksburg, prepared to dispute the crossing.

Burnside's military secretary explained the situation in a plaintive and revealing letter from Falmouth:

"It was promised us before we left Warrenton that by the time we arrived here our pontoon trains should be here in readiness for us to cross at once—had this been the case we should have occupied the city the first night and been ready to move on the rebels the next day, but we had to wait here
four days and a half
before a single pontoon train came in & meanwhile all we could do was to see the rebels gather their forces & fortify the heights till now they have a
very large
force & in a very strong position to operate against us with."
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The non-arrival of the pontoons was of course no fault of Burnside's, but it did bring into glaring relief the quality that may have been his greatest single defect as a soldier— his utter inability to adjust himself to an unexpected development requiring a quick change in plan. He could not improvise. He had to follow his original plan, even though the delay had ruined it; Lee had ample time to assemble his entire army on the high ground which Joe Johnston recalled so wistfully. The pontoon bridges were laid at last, under fire and at some cost in human life, on December 11, and the army formed columns of assault on the Confederate side of the river and marched off to fight on December 13— almost exactly one month after the President said that Burnside had a good plan if he carried it out fast, and more than three weeks after Burnside had massed his army in and around Falmouth.
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What followed was not so much a battle as a military tragedy. Half of Burnside's tactical program was hopeless from the start and the other half was made hopeless in the performance; his poor plans were faithfully executed and his good plans were atrociously bungled. Neither for the first time nor for the last, it was proven that there was amazing, heart-breaking valor in the ranks of the Army of the Potomac—and, in its chain of command, an equally amazing lack of the ability to put that valor to effective use.