Terrible Swift Sword (60 page)

It was necessary to
do so many things that had not been counted on when the war began. Everything
was changing, the changes welcomed by some and deplored by others but
inevitable in any case. The editor of
DeBow's
Review,
listing the new
manufacturing plants that were springing up in the deep South, believed that
the South would become truly independent, able to make for itself many things
previously bought from Yankees, and he rejoiced: "This alone, if our
people would look at it aright, would make the war a paying one to us."

Not all saw it that way. Another editor noted
that if there was a new factory on every stream and in every valley the South
would become a different sort of place. It would be overrun with factory workers,
who were "sons and daughters of Belial," and he did not like the
prospect. "No wonder," he mused, "that those who cling with
love, which is often the highest form of reason, to the old framework of our
society, shudder at the thought of a Lowell on the Appomattox or a Manchester
in the Piedmont region."
¹⁶

6.
Scabbard Thrown Away

The New York correspondent of the London
Times
wrote
late in July that the people of the North were getting tired of the war.
Enlistments in the Army were lagging; wages were high and jobs were plentiful,
"the first bloom of war excitement is over," and all of "the
rum-shops and lager beer saloons" were buzzing with stories about the
horrors of battle and the miseries of campaigning in Southern swamps. Disabled
veterans back from the front were to be seen everywhere, mute evidence that
soldiering was not always a lark—in sober fact, the war was a little more than
anyone had bargained for. The English reporter felt that Northerners were
having second thoughts: "They were ready for a short, sharp and decisive
conflict. They were not ready for an obstinate struggle, to last for
years."
¹

The
falling off in enlistments was coming just when the Federal government was
making an extra effort to increase the size of the Army. It had recently called
for 300,000 volunteers but it was not getting them, and the news from the
fighting fronts was so bad that no one was quite sure that 300,000 additional
soldiers would be enough even if they did come forward. The one certainty
seemed to be that the war would be lost if they did not come.

So
popular enthusiasm was at a low ebb, and the war had grown so big and so heavy
that simple enthusiasm was not going to be enough anyway. This discovery, made
in Richmond at the beginning of the spring, was now being made in Washington,
and Mr. Lincoln's government came to the same conclusion Mr. Davis's
government had reached: if men would not go into the Army of their own free
will they must be made to go. This meant death for one of the proudest traditions
in the land. Americans had always believed that the volunteer spirit, the
heartbreaking patriotism of youth responding to oratory and music and flags,
would carry them through any dangers, and once this belief was struck down it
would never revive; but there was no help for it. Gingerly, and with much less
boldness and resolution than had been displayed in Richmond when the same
problem arose, Washington reached out to embrace conscription.

The embrace was not quite complete,
because there were legal ins and outs, not to mention political quaverings. As
the law stood the President could not compel citizens to go into the United
States Army. He could, however, draft the state militia for nine months, and by
Constitutional theory the militia included all of the adult males in each
state. This authority, cut and stretched to fit the emergency, was now put to
use. On August 4 the President called on the states to enroll 300,000 militia,
adding the proviso that if by August 15 any state failed to meet its quota
under the previous call for volunteers, men would be drafted from the militia
to make up the deficiency.

This was a fairly roundabout approach.
The volunteer regiments would be raised and organized by the states in the old
familiar way, and if the Federal government drafted anybody it would do it at
secondhand, using state machinery. A most intricate accounting system was
devised, under which one three-year volunteer equalled four nine-months
militiamen, and if a state met its full quota of volunteers none of its people
would have to be drafted. This was rather an approach to conscription than
conscription itself but it was an extremely powerful stimulus to volunteering,
because no elected officials in state, city, town, or country cared to be part
of a machine which dragged good voters by neck and heels into the Army. So
official persons all over the land gave vigorous support to the recruiting
program and saw to it that alluring bounties were offered regardless of
expense. Cumbersome as it was, it worked—for a time, anyway—and, by December,
Secretary Stanton was able to announce that he had 420,000 new soldiers, of
whom 399,000 had volunteered. Implicit in all of this, of course, was the idea
that if the war went on the government would use compulsion to the limit to
keep its Army up to strength.
²

This meant just what
the more drastic Confederate conscription act meant, as devout states' rights
theorists had noted with shock. It was a clear assertion of the power of the
central government to reach clear inside a state and lay its hands on the
individual citizens, and a government which could do this was no longer a
government of limited powers. The change was inevitable, because this was no
longer a limited war. Somewhere between Shiloh and Malvern Hill— or possibly at
some point along a diagonal rarining between Mr. Davis's resort to the draft
and Mr. Lincoln's decision to emancipate—it had become unlimited, and it had to
be fought accordingly.

It was bewildering, and good men were
disturbed. The very godfather of secession, William L. Yancey himself, was reported
to have said in the Confederate Senate that he would prefer conquest by the
Yankees to the despotism of President Davis: which may have been the sort of
thing the President was thinking of when he wrote to his friend General Bragg
that "revolutions develop the high qualities of the good and the great,
but they cannot change the nature of the vicious and the selfish." General
William T. Sherman looked about him in western Tennessee and confessed that he
was "appalled by the magnitude of the danger that envelops us as a
people," because rebellion in the South was accompanied in the North by a
dismaying rise of democracy and anarchy* (it was always a bit hard for Sherman
to tell the two apart). And in cotton plantations along the Mississippi there
was so much raiding and counterraiding, so much burning of cotton and so much
turmoil among the chattels, that good planters hardly knew which side they were
on.

Planters were
supposed to burn their cotton to keep the Yankees from getting it. Since his
baled cotton repesented his whole year's income the average planter hated to do
this. He hated it even more if he lived where Yankee traders might come along
and offer cash money for his crop. (It was unfortunately very hard to bargain
with these traders, because if the price they offered was rejected a squad of
Yankee soldiers was likely to show up and confiscate everything in sight,
paying nothing at all.) The local Southern authorities therefore organized
armed patrols and sent them up and down the river to burn all the cotton they
could find. Here and there the planters offered resistance, and at a place
called Carolina Landing, seventy miles above Vicksburg, a patrol was routed and
forced to retreat; regular troops had to be sent up from Vicksburg, and the
patrol at last burned the cotton behind a cordon of bayonets. A Chicago
newspaper correspondent rejoiced that "this business of destroying the
private property of citizens has done more to strengthen the national cause
than all the victories our armies have achieved," and orte resident wrote
despairingly to the governor of Mississippi that many planters had simply
abandoned their homes and moved away. Overseers were running off, the slaves
were out of control, and unless something was done soon the Yankees would get
20,000
bales of
cotton out of one county.
⁴

Unlimited
war meant that sort of thing, along with much else, and men tried in vain to
restore the old limits. The New York banker, August Belmont, who was a
conservative but stoutly Unionist Democrat, got a letter in August from a
friend in New Orleans who begged him to work for a speedy compromise peace.

If the war went on much longer, said
this friend, the South would be ruined. It was almost ruined now, but it was
not going to stop fighting; the more it suffered the angrier and more
determined it became, and it would sacrifice its last life to prevent Northern
conquest. Could not sober conservatives in the North lead in a great movement to
end the war on a simple basis of forgive, forget, and behave? Let both sides
confess error, renew the old friendship and restore the prewar world in all its
lost splendor. As the weaker side, the South could make no overtures, but the
stronger North could do so, and if the government at Washington refused to go
along a political party could perhaps bring it about—the Democratic party,
which had always tried to "maintain the constitution as it was framed and
interpreted for more than two-thirds of a century." If a chance for
compromise existed it was utter madness to go on with the war.
⁵

There was nobility in the idea that
there ought to be
a
peace without victory; yet in August of 1862
America's tragedy was that it was caught between the madness of going on with
the war and the human impossibility of stopping it. Secession had been a
direct result of the outcome of the election of 1860. To restore the status
quo would be to assume that either the North or the South had had a great
change of heart—that the North would not again go Republican, or that the South
would quietly acquiesce if it did. Neither Mr. Lincoln nor Mr. Davis was going
to assume anything of the kind. Each man was fighting for a dreadful
simplicity. Neither one could describe a solution acceptable to him without
describing something wholly unacceptable to the other; neither man could
accept anything less than complete victory without admitting complete defeat.
Both sides had heard the trumpet that would never call retreat. The peace-makers
could not be heard until the terrible swift sword had been sheathed; but the
scabbard had been thrown away, and now the Confederacy was carrying the war
into the enemy's country.

It
was making, in fact, its one great co-ordinated counter-offensive of the war.
The odds against this counteroffensive were forbidding but the thing just might
work, and if it did the Confederacy could win everything it had ever wanted.

It would begin in the west. Braxton
Bragg had stolen a long march on the Federals by getting into Chattanooga while
Buell was still methodically perfecting his arrangements in central Tennessee.
If Bragg and Kirby Smith together could get behind Buell, force him to battle
and destroy him, both Tennessee and Kentucky could be regained, the Federals
along the Mississippi would have to retreat, and the war would look very
different. It would look like a final Confederate triumph if, while the
westerners were doing this, Lee could go north of the Potomac and win a
smashing victory on Yankee soil.

There were of course a great many
"if's" in this, but it could happen; Mr. Davis told Bragg and Smith
what was expected of them just as Lee was preparing to move away from Mc-

Clellan and go after Pope; and in August
the armies began to march.
⁶

Bragg and Smith were optimistic. They
respected each other, they were well aware that their enemies were temporarily
off balance, and they believed that once they got into Kentucky they would be
fighting a war of liberation, with enthusiastic popular support canceling the
perennial Federal advantage in numbers. Unfortunately, Mr. Davis had given them
a good idea rather than the blueprint of an actual campaign. Nobody had real
over-all authority over what was about to be done except the President, who was
much too far away to do more than block out the general objectives. Bragg
could.give no binding orders to Smith, and Smith could give none to Bragg. They
were committed to cordial co-operation, but there was no boss. Bragg and Smith
commanded separate armies, facing different foes under different conditions,
and if at a crucial moment one man wanted to go one way while the other man
wanted to go another way co-operation was likely to disappear.

Bragg
and Smith met at Chattanooga early in August and apparently agreed on a plan.
They had two Federal armies to consider. Buell's, which then numbered a little
more than 30,000 and could quickly be made bigger, was spread out along the
railroad that came southeast from Nashville to Stevenson, Alabama; if left
alone, it would some day march on Chattanooga. A force of 9000 under Brigadier
General George W. Morgan occupied Cumberland Gap, and presumably meant to come
down eventually on Knoxville. The first step for the Confederates, obviously,
was to dispose of those Federal armies.