Never Call Retreat (59 page)

Immediately after Early made his thrust at Washington in July the Federal troops assembled along the Potomac were under Hunter's command, but Hunter was unable to use them effectively and Grant removed him and sent Sheridan up to take charge. Sheridan had the furious driving energy Grant wanted, but for a time he seemed lost in this assignment. He shared the War Department belief that Early's army was more than twice as big as it really was, he spent a good deal of time getting his army organized, and Early's feints and excursions confused him; for six weeks after he took command, Sheridan did little more than hold his ground at the lower end of the Shenandoah Valley, and at last Grant came up from Petersburg, talked to him, and ordered him to strike.

Grant's idea about what ought to be done in the valley was the same now as it had always been. He wanted the valley used for a blow at Lee's rear, with a Federal army going all the way to Staunton, coming east to Charlottesville and breaking the Virginia Central Railroad between that place and Gordonsville so that the fertile valley could send no more supplies to Lee. Sigel tried it and failed, Hunter tried it and failed even more disastrously, and now Sheridan seemed unable to do it. To clear the lower valley was not enough; Grant was afraid that Early might retreat, just out of reach, returning when Federal forces were withdrawn, and he concluded that it would be necessary to devastate the valley so thoroughly that it could not again be used as a military highway or granary. Late in August he grimly told Sheridan: "If the war is to last another year, we want the Shenandoah Valley to remain a barren waste." But the plan to strike down the whole length of the valley in such a way as to force Lee to evacuate Petersburg and Richmond was always his goal.
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Sheridan attacked Early and roundly defeated him on September 19. As he said, the battle was long and hard. He got his troops into action clumsily, so that when the battle began half of them were struggling up the Opequon Creek ravine, their way blocked by another of those misplaced wagon trains, and in the first part of the action the Federals were in danger of being beaten by fewer than half of their numbers. But during the afternoon Sheridan got everybody into action, his own talents as an inspirational battlefield leader came into full play, and by nightfall Early was in retreat, his army badly battered. Sheridan pursued, and struck him again three days later at Fisher's Hill, twenty miles to the south, sending him flying in a retreat so headlong that Sheridan assured Grant: "I do not think there ever was an army so badly routed."
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This was an overstatement, as Sheridan learned a few weeks later, but the two triumphs were spectacular. Sheridan methodically began the work of devastation, turning a garden spot into a smoking desert, and the campaign to re-elect Abraham Lincoln took on increased momentum.

Sheridan and Sherman had provided powerful arguments, and another one came from Admiral Farragut. From the moment New Orleans fell, the old admiral had wanted to run the forts at the entrance to Mobile Bay and seal off that port permanently, and early in August he got his wish. With his fleet of wooden warships stiffened by four monitors, he steamed into the bay on August 5, pounded his way past the forts, took the formidable Confederate ironclad
Tennessee,
overwhelmed the few wooden gunboats that were its consorts, and made it possible for the army to come in and capture the forts shortly afterward. It was a hard fight, Farragut lost the monitor
Tecumseh,
his fleet suffered more than three hundred casualties, and in the general Northern depression of mid-summer the victory somehow did not seem as impressive as it did a month or two later. By the middle of the autumn it was bracketed with Atlanta and the Opequon, and Republican orators jeered that Sherman, Sheridan, and Farragut had knocked the bottom out of the Democratic platform.

The platform had already been somewhat damaged by General McClellan. As a war Democrat running on a peace platform, McClellan was not happy, and when he sat down to draft his formal acceptance of the nomination he found the going difficult. He finally produced a letter saying that although he believed in reconciliation and compromise (qualities which in his opinion the administration notably lacked) there could be no peace without full reunion: "I could not look in the face my gallant comrades . . . who have survived so many bloody battles, and tell them that their labors and the sacrifice of so many of our slain and wounded brothers had been in vain—that we had abandoned the Union for which we have so often periled our lives." McClellan, in short, believed in going on with the war until it was won, despite the platform's demand for an armistice and a peaceful settlement. This outraged Vallandigham, who announced that the Democratic party was still a peace party and that its platform was binding on one and all, including the head of the ticket; and the Democrats began to bicker among themselves as the Republicans had been doing a month earlier.
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Meanwhile, the Republicans got their own house in order. In August there had been a strong, not wholly invisible movement to call a new convention and nominate someone in Lincoln's place, and Ben Butler appears to have maneuvered quietly in the hope that he might get that nomination. He would have been a formidable opponent, a former Democrat with a large following but also a hard-war man perfectly acceptable to the radicals; the potential threat he always represented may help to explain why the administration kept him in a top army command despite his notorious incompetence as a soldier. But the change in the military climate made everything look different, and before September ended the party had closed its ranks. The movement for a new convention ended. Fremont, waited upon by a committee of party leaders, announced on September 22 that in the interest of party harmony he was withdrawing from the race— and on the next day Mr. Lincoln, who had a fairly good line on all of the things that had been happening, asked for and got the resignation of Montgomery Blair.
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The radicals came back to the fold and they went out and stumped for the party ticket—as did Blair, for that matter—and if Mr. Lincoln had any further thoughts about the gloomy memorandum he had written predicting his own defeat he said nothing about them. Down at Petersburg General Humphreys, chief of staff of the Army of the Potomac, meditated on the campaign and wrote a letter: "What an extraordinary fortune McClellan has had. Extolled to the skies by the newspapers in the first place, in the summer and fall of 1861, having a reputation affixed to him
by them
of being one of the greatest generals of any age, without having done more than a general of division may do every day without notice; —exhibiting in his campaigns no more ability or skill than scores of other officers of the old Army would have done, abused by one set of newspapers and extolled by others only because he was displaced, and now made the candidate for the Presidency of the United States! For myself, I would rather be a Major Genl. in the regular army than President of the United States, and I think McClellan would also."
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A tide was flowing now. It had its springs in many things, ranging all the way from the solemnity of the Gettysburg Address to the extreme heat which the Lincoln administration put on everyone from war contractors to private soldiers who were going to be allowed to vote, compounded like the war and like the nation of the noble and the ignoble and an odd intangible. From England, John Bright wrote to Horace Greeley that Englishmen like himself hoped for the re-election of Abraham Lincoln, "not because they believe Mr. Lincoln to be wiser or better than all other men on your continent, but because they think they have observed in his career a grand simplicity of purpose and a patriotism which knows no change and which does not falter."
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As the tide flowed, Sheridan got into it once more. By the middle of October (state elections in the North were going Republican, and it was harder and harder to believe in failure) Sheridan had the lovely Shenandoah Valley pretty well burned out. In his matter-of-fact way he reported that "I have destroyed over 2000 barns filled with wheat, hay and farming implements; over 70 mills, filled with flour and wheat; have driven in front of the army over 4000 head of stock, and have killed and issued to the troops not less than 3000 sheep. . . . The people here are getting sick of the war." He had not gone on down to strike at Lee's railroad because, all in all, he felt that it would be too difficult, and he concluded that "the best policy will be to let the burning of the crops of the valley be the end of this campaign."

That might have been all right, except that General Early did not propose to let it end there. He and his beaten army had more resilience than Sheridan suspected, and when the Federals moved northward to rest from destruction and to consider what ought to happen next Early followed them; and on the morning of October 19, while Sheridan's army lay in camp behind Cedar Creek, not far from the old Fisher's Hill battlefield, and while Sheridan was far in the rear having a top-level conference on strategy, Early attacked this army in its tents and sent half of it flying north along the valley pike, capturing camp, guns, and a varied assortment of prisoners.

There were Southerners who argued that he might have done even more. Sometime before the middle of the day the impetus went out of the Confederate attack. Early said that his men left their ranks to loot the Federal camps, one of his officers declared that the general simply sat down and waited for the half-routed Federal army to become entirely routed and go away without further pushing, and the truth may be that his men had done all they could do against a stronger foe and that a complete victory was beyond them. Anyway, Sheridan came riding back from Winchester, a red-faced man on a horse all flecked with foam, and as he charged into the backwash of defeated stragglers the men cheered with sudden rebirth of valor and he cursed them with a mighty anger: "God
damn
you, don't cheer me! If you love your country, come up to the front! God
damn
you, don't cheer me! There's lots of fight in you men yet! Come up, God damn you! Come up!"
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They swung up into line beside the men who had not run away, Sheridan suddenly cooled off and saw to it that everything was in order, and then he drove them forward in an irresistible, storybook charge. Early's army was defeated, routed, broken—all of the overworked words were at last made good—and the Republican orators had one more item to put in their speeches.

From a properly grateful government Sheridan got official congratulations and a commission as a major general in the Regular Army. From General Grant he got a telegram: IF IT IS POSSIBLE TO FOLLOW UP YOUR GREAT VICTORY UNTIL YOU CAN REACH THE CENTRAL ROAD (that is, the Virginia Central between Charlottesville and Gordonsville: Lee's lifeline, Grant's goal all the way) DO IT, EVEN IF YOU HAVE TO LIVE ON HALF-RATIONS. IF THE ARMY AT RICHMOND COULD BE CUT OFF FROM SOUTHWEST VIRGINIA IT WOULD BE OF GREAT IMPORTANCE TO US.
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Sheridan found this impractical and he did not do it, but it no longer made much difference. The war had got to that point now: if Sherman settled for less than the destruction of Hood's army, or if Sheridan beat Early but failed to carry out Grant's design, it did not actually matter very much. To do these things would have made the end come more quickly, but the end was coming now in any case and the people of the North could see it. And so on November 8 they went to the polls, and Mr. Lincoln got 212 electoral votes against 21 for General McClellan. The popular vote, as usual, was much closer, but it was still emphatic; the President had a margin of nearly half a million votes out of slightly more than 4,000,000 cast. For the first time he had a vote of confidence, and it came to him with a decisive margin.

For McClellan, who three years earlier had entered Washington as the destined savior of his country, hearing men say that he could be a dictator then or President later at his choice, there was nothing now but the unhappy consolation that comes to a valiant loser. Sam Barlow wrote to him, saying that by being defeated he had escaped terrible trials: the next administration would face an almost impossible task, and to take office in March "with an empty treasury, a wasted army and a defiant and apparently united people in rebellion is enough to appall anyone." . . . One of the things that re-elected Mr. Lincoln was the fact that his political opponents were unable to see what was going on in the world. They made a political asset out of military failure, and when the asset proved inadequate they had to go on believing in the failure. In November of 1864, when the last long night of the Confederacy was so obviously beginning, they could still see Federal prospects as all but hopeless.

McClellan agreed that he was well out of it. He deplored the result of the election for his country's sake, but he himself had been prepared for defeat and he was not disheartened. He had one sobering thought: "God grant that our poor country may not be mired in the course of finding that we were right."
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CHAPTERSEVEN

His Almost Chosen People

1. Appeal Against the Thunderstorm

FOR THE THIRD TIME in three years Jefferson Davis left Richmond to place his own rigid figure, with its gray face and the cold fire in its veins, between the Confederacy and disaster. In the fall of 1862 he had visited Tennessee and Mississippi to inspire a firmer grip on the great valley. Tennessee and Mississippi had been lost, and the great valley along with them, and at the bleak end of 1863 he had gone to northern Georgia in a vain effort to repair the damage. Now Georgia itself was being broken, and with Sherman in Atlanta further damage was imminent, so Mr. Davis left the capital again to make one last attempt to give other men a share of his own limitless tenacity of purpose.

Beyond tenacity he had little to offer, other resources having run thin. On his earlier trips he had talked to generals, trying to meet a problem of command. Now he had to talk to the people themselves, because this military crisis arose out of a failure of the spirit: the rolls of the Confederate armies by the fall of 1864 showed that between 100,000 and 200,000 soldiers were no longer present for duty.
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The Confederacy was being overwhelmed by superior numbers but it was not getting nearly all of its own manpower into action. Unless these absentees returned to the ranks the cause was going to be lost.