Terrible Swift Sword (33 page)

In
a way,
Monitor
had won something
important; she had at least restored the status quo. As long as she remained
afloat, McClellan could bring his army down in transports and put men and
supplies ashore near Fort Monroe. The army's campaign against Richmond could go
ahead, even though
Virginia's
presence would impose
certain handicaps. But the weight of the whole campaign rested on this queer,
mastless warship with the revolving turret.
Monitor
could not be risked;
she could neutralize
Virginia,
but she could do
nothing more than that; dared do nothing more, because of all the ships in the
United States Navy this was the one that must not be lost.

Meanwhile, Mr. Mallory had a nice answer
for the impatient men in the Confederate Congress who had been demanding that
he leave the cabinet because he had not given the Confederacy a navy.

2.
The Vulture and the Wolf

Major General Braxton
Bragg found the Mississippi town of Corinth badly overcrowded and wholly
lacking in proper control. Troops were swarming into the place, disorganized
and without supplies; the weather was atrocious, with rain and cold wind, and
no one had made any arrangements for the sick, who were numerous. The one hotel
was in danger of being sacked by hungry soldiers who crowded into the dining
room in defiance of military restraint and even went into the kitchen to snatch
hot meats off of the stoves, threatening to slaughter the hotel proprietor when
he tried to stop them. Part of this disorder was probably due, as General Bragg
now and then remarked, to the fact that these were raw troops led by untrained
officers, which in turn could be blamed on "universal suffrage, the bane
of our military organization"; a deeper reason was the fact that this
little railroad junction town in northern Mississippi had suddenly become the
Confederacy's most important troop center west of Richmond—the place from which
General Albert Sidney Johnston would try to regain all that had been lost and
chase the invading Yankees back to the Ohio River.
¹

Driven out of Kentucky and middle and
western Tennessee, General Johnston had discovered that his government would
give him in disaster that which he had never been able to get in more
prosperous times: reinforcements and some attention to his problem. He
commanded more men now than he had ever had before, despite the heavy loss at
Fort Donelson; by the final weeks of March he had between 40,000 and 45,000 men
in Corinth, in addition to possibly 8500 who held New Madrid and Island Number
Ten, on the Mississippi. Beyond this he could use, if he could get them across
the river, the 20,000 Confederates now operating in Arkansas.

General
Bragg had brought 10,000 men up from Mobile and Pensacola, and 5000 more had
come from New Orleans, under Brigadier General Daniel Ruggles. (These would go
under Bragg's command, and Mrs. Bragg assured her husband, by letter, that
Louisiana troops were "obedient, good marksmen, habituated to exposure,
and free from the besetting sin of our Confederacy,
drunkenness.")
²
Leonidas Polk had brought down approximately 10,000 men who until March 2 had
been stationed at Columbus, Kentucky, and, on the long march over from
Murfreesboro, General Johnston had brought 17,000 and odd who had been at
Bowling Green. All in all, there were plenty of soldiers at Corinth. The
trouble was that they were not yet an army, but the raw materials of an army;
putting them together and giving them the indefinable combination of training
and inspiration which would make them feel and act as a unit would take time,
which the Yankees might not allow.

In
a sense, everything depended on whether or not the Federal invaders would come
on with energy. If they did, neither General Johnston nor anyone else would
have a chance to turn this convocation of soldiers into an army. Moving up the
Tennessee River were 40,000 men under General Grant, their advance guard no
more than twenty miles away. Coming overland from Nashville were 35,000 more
under General Buell; they were a good deal farther off, and it seemed unlikely
that they would move very rapidly no matter where they were. On the
Mississippi, trying with the Navy's help to destroy all Confederate
installations north of Memphis, were 25,000 men led by John Pope, a man with
much raw energy, engaged now in an effort to isolate the strong mid-river fort
at Island Number Ten. And from the far side of the Mississippi, because of
recent events in the Arkansas foothills, the Federal power could draw reinforcements
whenever it chose.

Yet the dominant factor might be General
Johnston himself. General Johnston refused to feel that he was licked. Even as
he led his dejected troops southeast from Nashville late in February, a storm
of bitter criticism swirling about his head, winter rains and gales tormenting
the soldiers, Johnston kept thinking about how he was going to beat the Yankees
rather than about how they were beating him. He had been outgeneraled and he
had been beaten, and he was woefully outnumbered, but his one thought was to
regain the initiative. He planned not merely to check the invader but to win
back everything that had been lost, and each day given him by the slow advance
of the opposing armies was a day he would use to the utmost. As he rebuilt his
army at Corinth he still had a chance, and it was a chance he did not propose
to miss.

To wait was to lose.
Grant had as many men as he had, and Grant had come up the Tennessee River
almost to the Mississippi line, his headquarters at the town of Savannah, most
of his troops thrust forward to the high ground back of Pittsburg Landing on
the west bank of the Tennessee, around a country meetinghouse known as Shiloh
Church. Once Buell joined Grant, Johnston would be compelled to use 40,000 to
beat 75,000; the task would be impossible, and Johnston knew it. His only hope
was to destroy Grant before Buell reached the scene. If he could do this he
could turn the war upside down.

The chance was thin,
of course. By any reasonable standard Johnston's army was no more ready to take
the offensive than McDowell's had been at Bull Run. General Bragg was gloomily
saying that few of the regiments had ever so much as made a full day's march
and that most of the rank and file had never done a day's work in their lives,
³
and although General Bragg was a dour pessimist who usually believed the worst
the situation was not promising. If the army did not come unraveled when it
marched up to Pittsburg Landing it might very well fall apart when it made its
attack. A cautious general, naturally, would wait until he had the army in
better shape; yet a cautious general, waiting thus, getting everything ready before
he moved, would simply condemn himself to fight a little later against
overwhelming odds. General Johnston could not afford to be cautious.

He was greatly helped by the fact that
General Halleck, who commanded all of the foes that were coming in on him, was
the very embodiment of caution. Halleck had sent Grant up the Tennessee but had
ordered him to be extremely careful; whatever happened, Grant was not to stir
up a fight until Buell joined him. This was playing it safe: it was also giving
General Johnston several priceless weeks of time which might have been denied
him. Most of Grant's troops reached Pittsburg Landing by the end of the third
week of March, and if they had moved on to Corinth at once they could have torn
Johnston's army apart before its diverse elements had fully assembled. Such an
advance, of course, would have been a bit risky, and Halleck would permit no
risks. Grant must keep his army in its camps until Buell's men arrived. Then,
no doubt, they could do something about getting on with the war.

It must be said in General Halleck's
behalf that he had had other things to think about, and that one of his armies
had in fact effectively disrupted a part of General Johnston's plan for a great
counteroffensive.

Johnston planned to advance on both sides of
the Mississippi River—to regain western Tennessee and Kentucky with his own
army while with another army he drove the Yankees out of Missouri, going up to
Cairo and beyond, perhaps even to St. Louis. West of the Mississippi there was
a fairly substantial number of Confederate soldiers, and in January the
Confederate government had sent out a new man to take command of these, to weld
them into an army, and to use them under Johnston's direction. This new man was
Major General Earl Van Dorn, a slim, elegant little soldier with curly hair,
charming manners and a strong taste for fighting. A West Pointer in his early
forties, Van Dorn had an excellent record. He had been an Indian fighter of
note, with four wounds received in action on the western plains, and he had
done well in the Mexican War, taking another wound and winning promotion for
gallantry. He had dash and energy, and he seemed just the man to carry out
Johnston's plan for action beyond the Mississippi.

Van Dorn had to begin by getting Ben
McCulloch and Sterling Price to work together. President Davis wanted no
repetition of the Wilson's Creek business, where a victory had lost most of its
value because these soldiers could not agree, and he had given Van Dorn
authority over both. Armed with this authority, Van Dorn conferred with
Johnston shortly before the evacuation of Bowling Green, and worked out a bold
plan for leading Price and McCulloch up through Missouri to St. Louis and
thence eastward into Illinois—a move which, if it worked, would unquestionably
hamstring the Federal thrust up the Tennessee River. Then he set out to cross
the Mississippi and take over his new command.

He
was met by a letter from General Price which convinced him that he had better
hurry. The Confederates were about to retreat from Missouri to northwestern
Arkansas, and Price and McCulloch were arguing more bitterly than ever. They
could not agree about who ranked whom or what ought to be done next, and
altogether it was time for someone to take charge. Van Dorn found the
antipathetic generals camped, with their respective commands, in the Boston
Mountains in northwestern Arkansas, seventy miles below the Missouri line. He
was struck by the physical contrast between the two men. Price was tall, handsome,
his ruddy face fringed by silvery hair and whiskers, his bearing courtly; Van
Dorn's chief of staff remembered that Price housed his visitors in some luxury
and gave them kidneys stewed in sherry for breakfast. McCulloch was spare,
wiry, a little stoop shouldered, with sharp eyes peering carefully out from
under shaggy brows, a man who looked and was a tough frontiersman. Texas to
the core, with a Texan's flair for gaudy costumes, he had for battle a suit of
black velvet, with high-topped patent leather boots and a broad-brimmed Texas
hat. Jefferson Davis regarded him highly, and wrote long after the war of his
"vigilance, judgment and gallantry."
⁴

Van
Dorn was what the two men needed. Simply because he had superior authority and
was present, the quarrel over rank and planning ended. Price and McCulloch grew
enthusiastic about the scheme for the counteroffensive, and Van Dorn presently
notified Johnston that he had close to 20,000 men ready for action. Among these
was a contingent unusual even for this western army, in which the extraordinary
was routine: a brigade of two regiments of Cherokees and one of Creeks from the
Indian Territory led by Brigadier General Albert Pike, an Arkansas lawyer with
a benign eye and a flowing beard, a reputation as a Masonic poet and philosopher,
and a knack for persuading red men to go along with the doctrine of states'
rights. Van Dorn believed that more troops could be raised without difficulty
and he was confident that the western half of the revived offensive would move
on schedule.
⁸

The
first step was to whip the nearest Federal Army, a hard-fighting, hard-foraging
outfit of fewer than 12,000 men, led by Brigadier General Samuel R. Curtis, who
in the last few weeks had ended the long stalemate in southwestern Missouri,
driving Price's Missourians out of Springfield and chasing them all the way
into Arkansas. Curtis would have brought more men except for the fact that he
was such a prodigious way from home—300 miles from St. Louis, 200 miles from
the nearest railhead at Rolla, Missouri—and he had to make numerous detachments
to protect this long supply line. He was in fact a good deal farther from his
base than any other Union general had yet gone, and in rough winter weather he
had made one of the longest marches of the war. His advance had a spectacular
quality that was lost to sight because bigger armies elsewhere were getting
most of the attention.

Curtis was halfway through his fifties,
a
quiet West Pointer who had left the Army a
few years after graduation to work as
a
civil
engineer. He had built railroads and levees, had been chief engineer in St.
Louis and mayor of Keokuk, and late in the 1850s he had been elected a
Republican Congressman from Iowa, resigning in the summer of 1861 to take a
brigadier's commission. Proud of the advance his army had made, he was deeply
disturbed by the horrors war inflicted on civilians. Many of these horrors, he
was aware, came from his own troops. He had Franz Sigel's German regiments,
which had earned a reputation for relentless foraging, and his native-American
regiments really were not much more orderly; when his soldiers lost touch with
their own supply trains they plundered farm and homestead with grasping hands.
Price's retreating Missourians had done
a
good
deal of looting and burning, too, and there were guerrilla bands to carry on
where the soldiers left off; all the countryside had been ravaged, and was
pock-marked with the blackened timbers of burned homes, barns and mills—
"a
sickening sight," Curtis wrote,
"which for the sake of humanity I could pray were effaced from the record
of events." Back of the pomp and glitter of war, he said, there was so
much misery that "all should forever more earnestly implore Heaven to
deliver us from 'war, pestilence and famine.' "
⁶