The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox (145 page)

Schofield was the first to be subtracted. In early January, expecting Fort Fisher to fall under renewed pressure from Porter and units already on the way back there from the Army of the James, Grant ordered the XXIII Corps detached from Thomas and hurried north and east, by boat and rail, to a point near Washington. There Schofield would put his 14,000 men aboard transports for a trip down the coast and a share in the follow-up drive on Wilmington, which then would be converted from a haven for blockade-runners to an intermediary refuge and supply base for Sherman, in case he ran into trouble slogging north. Otherwise, reinforced to a strength of 24,000 by troops from Foster and the Army of the James, Schofield was to move up the North Carolina littoral to occupied New Bern, where he would turn inland for a meeting with Sherman at Goldsboro, and from there the two columns would go on together — better than 80,000 strong — for the rest of the march, by way of Raleigh, into Virginia. Meade by then would have been joined by Sheridan from the Shenandoah Valley, and Grant would have well over 200,000 seasoned fighting men around Petersburg and Richmond: surely enough, and more than enough, as he put it, to “wipe out Lee.” However, by way of encouraging further confusion in the region to be traversed, he also instructed Thomas to send Stoneman and 4000 troopers pounding eastward from Knoxville into North Carolina, where they would serve to distract the state’s defenders while Sherman and Schofield were moving northward through it near the coast. This done, Stoneman too would cross into Virginia, where he would not only rip up Lee’s supply lines west of Lynchburg, but would also perhaps be in position, when the time came, to get in on the kill.

That so much concerted havoc was about to be visited on the Carolinas and the Old Dominion did not mean that the Deep South was to be neglected or spared. No; Grant had plans for its disruption,
too. In addition to Schofield’s corps, shifted eastward in mid-January, he also ordered A. J. Smith’s detached, along with a division of cavalry under Brigadier General Joseph Knipe, and sent by steamer down the Mississippi to New Orleans, where Edward Canby had gathered the survivors of last year’s expedition up and down Red River. Smith’s 16,000 veterans, most of whom had also had a share in that unfortunate adventure, would lift Canby’s available strike force to a strength of 45,000 of all arms: enough, Grant thought, for him to undertake the long-deferred reduction of Mobile, which continued defiant, behind its outlying fortifications, despite the loss of its Bay and access to the Gulf. Moreover, that was only to be the first step in the campaign Grant proposed. Once the city fell (if not before; haste was to be the governing factor) Canby would move with a flying column of 20,000, mainly composed of Smith’s free-swinging gorilla-guerillas, north and east into the heart of Alabama. Specifically he would proceed against Selma, the principal center for the production of munitions in that part of the country, where he would make contact — much as Sherman was to do with Schofield, six hundred miles to the northeast — with still another detachment from Thomas’s fast-dwindling army up in Tennessee. In the weeks that followed the pursuit of Hood from Nashville, James Wilson had continued to mount, arm, and train incoming cavalry units at so rapid a rate that by the end of January he had no less than 22,000 troopers under his command. Knipe took 5000 of these to New Orleans with Smith, and Wilson presently was instructed to strike southward with 12,000 of the rest, sturdily mounted and armed to a man with repeaters that gave them more firepower than a corps of infantry. Forrest would no doubt attempt to interfere, as he had done before in such cases; Grant was willing to leave it to Wilson whether to avoid or run right over him, which he should be able to do rather easily, considering his advantage in numbers and equipment. In any case, his immediate objective would be Selma, where he would combine with Canby’s flying column, after wrecking the manufactory installations there, to continue the heartland penetration eastward: first to Montgomery, the Confederacy’s original capital, and then across the Georgia line to Columbus and Macon, all three of which had been spared till now the iron hand of war.

Such then was Grant’s close-out plan. As he saw it, the Confederacy was already whipped and clinging groggily to the ring ropes; all that remained was for him to land what boxers called a one-two punch, delivered in rapid sequence to belly and jaw, except that this was to be thrown with both hands simultaneously. In broad outline, the design resembled the one he had worked out nearly a year ago, on taking command of all the armies of the Union, but this time he was not obliged to include any unwanted elements, such as the Red River venture, or
any unwanted subordinates, such as Banks. For example, aside from maintaining garrisons within it to preserve the status quo, and gunboats on patrol along its watery flank to keep it cut off from all contact eastward, the Transmississippi had no share in his calculations; either it would wither on its own, from sheer neglect or folly such as Price’s recent raid, or else he would attend to it in a similar undistracted fashion when the time came. Not only would this affordable neglect represent a considerable savings in troops who could be used where they were wanted, but the fact was he now had more of them than he had had when he began his forward movement, back in May. Despite heavy losses incurred in the past nine months — 100,000 in eastern Virginia alone, and about that number elsewhere — his total combat force, East and West, had grown to better than 600,000 effectives, exclusive of reserves amounting to half as many more; whereas the enemy’s had dwindled to barely 160,000 of all arms. That too was part of his calculations, and part of his hope for an early end to the conflict which by now had cost the country — the two countries, Confederates insisted — close to a million casualties, on and off the field of battle, North and South.

Nowhere in all this was there any mention of an assignment for Ben Butler, and the reason was quite simple. He was no longer around. Grant had fired him; or at any rate — now that the election was safely over — had persuaded Lincoln to fire him. The one-time Democratic senator was out of the war for good.

Fort Fisher had been the final straw. Though Grant said nothing of the ineffectual powder-boat explosion or even of the precipitate withdrawal, when he had determined the facts in the case he wrote to Stanton requesting the Massachusetts general’s removal. “I do this with reluctance,” he declared, “but the good of the service requires it. In my absence General Butler necessarily commands, and there is a lack of confidence felt in his military ability, making him an unsafe commander for a large army. His administration of the affairs in his department is also objectionable.” This was put aboard a fast packet at City Point on January 5, and when Grant found out next morning that Stanton was on his way to Savannah to visit Sherman, he followed it up with a telegram directly to the Commander in Chief. “I wrote a letter to the Secretary of War, which was mailed yesterday, asking to have General Butler removed from command. Learning that the Secretary left Washington yesterday, I telegraph asking you that prompt action may be taken in the matter.”

Lincoln’s response was prompt indeed. General Order Number 1, issued “by direction of the President of the United States,” arrived by wire the following day. “Maj. Gen. B. F. Butler is relieved from
command of the Department of North Carolina and Virginia.… [He] will repair to Lowell, Mass., and report by letter to the Adjutant General of the Army.”

Grant passed the word to Butler next morning, January 8, and named Ord the new commander of the Army of the James, some 8000 of whose members had embarked — or reëmbarked for the most part, having only just returned from the fiasco down the coast — at Bermuda Hundred four days ago, under Brigadier General Alfred Terry, for another go at Fort Fisher. Butler, however, did not “repair to Lowell” as ordered; at least not yet. He went instead to Washington, where political connections assured him a sympathetic hearing before the Joint Congressional Committee on the Conduct of the War, which assembled just under ten days later to hear his complaint of unjust treatment by the Administration and its three-starred creature down at City Point. Grant had left the charges vague, presumably on grounds that they would be harder to refute that way, but Butler at once got down to specifics. He had been relieved, he said, for his failure to take Fort Fisher, and he brought along charts and duplicates of reports by subordinates to prove that he had been right to call off the attack in mid-career, not only because Porter had failed to give him adequate support, but also because a close-up study of the thick-walled fort and its outlying torpedo fields had shown it to be impregnable in the first place, both to naval bombardment and to infantry assault. While he spoke, referring assiduously to the documents at hand, a hubbub rose outside the room — cheers in the street, the muffled crump of shotless guns discharging a salute, and newsboys crying, “Extra! Extra! Read all about it!” Fort Fisher, it seemed, had fallen. “Impossible!” Butler protested, clutching his papers. “It’s a mistake, Sir.” But it turned out to be more than possible; it was a fact, confirmed by dispatches on hand from Porter. Laughter rippled, then roared through the room. After a moment of shock adjustment, the cock-eyed general joined in as heartily as anyone. Adjournment followed, and as the members and spectators began filing out, still laughing, Butler raised his hand and called pontifically for silence. “Thank God for victory,” he intoned.

In time, the committee not only voted unanimously to exonerate the former Bay State senator — referred to affectionately by a colleague as “the smartest damned rascal that ever lived” — from all blame in connection with the failure of the earlier expedition; its members also commended him for having had the nerve, the presence of mind under pressure, to call off the assault at the last minute, thereby saving many lives. Such action, they ruled, “was clearly justified by the facts then known,” including Porter’s ragged gunnery, which had done little damage to the fort, and his inadequate support of the troops ashore. Not that their judgment affected either officer’s future war career; Butler had none, and the admiral even now was receiving congratulations for his
share in one of the best-conducted operations of the war, by land or sea or both.

Terry and his 8000 — Butler’s force, plus two brigades of Negro troops for added heft — reached Beaufort on schedule, January 8, for the rendezvous with Porter and his sixty warships. Delayed there by another three-day blow, they planned carefully for this second amphibious strike at Fort Fisher, then set out down the coast and dropped anchor before nightfall, January 12, within sight of the objective. Porter was altogether pleased with his new partner, whom he pronounced “my beau ideal of a soldier and a general,” adding: “Our coöperation has been most cordial.” Partly this was the result of Grant’s instructions, which were for Terry to get along harmoniously with his sea-going associate, and partly it was because of Terry’s natural tact and training, in and out of the army, where, as the phrase went, he had “found a home.” A thirty-seven-year-old former clerk of the New Haven County superior court, admitted to the Connecticut bar while still at Yale, he had fought as a militia colonel at First Bull Run and then stayed on to pick up much experience in coastal operations, including the expedition against Port Royal, the reduction of Fort Pulaski, and the siege of Battery Wagner, after which he was made a brigadier and put in charge of a division in the Army of the James. Now that he had command of a provisional corps, with a promotion to major general in the works, he was determined to justify the added star by disproving Butler’s contention that Fort Fisher could not be taken by assault. Once ashore, he told Porter, he intended to stay there until Confederate Point was Federal Point again, by right of exclusive occupation, and blockade runners would no longer find a haven up Cape Fear River for the discharge of their cargoes.

Just how important those cargoes were to continued resistance by the rebels was shown by the fact that R. E. Lee himself had sent word to the fort commander, William Lamb, that he could not subsist his army without the supplies brought in there. More specifically, a government report of goods run into Wilmington and Charleston during the last nine weeks of the year — practically all into the North Carolina port, for Charleston was tightly blockaded — amounted to “8,632,000 pounds of meat, 1,507,000 pounds of lead, 1,933,000 pounds of saltpeter, 546,000 pairs of shoes, 316,000 pairs of blankets, 520,000 pounds of coffee, 69,000 rifles, 97 packages of revolvers, 2639 packages of medicine, 43 cannon,” and much else. Lamb was back down to a garrison of 800 men, the Junior Reservists having departed, and though he had appealed to both the district and department commanders, W. H. C. Whiting and Braxton Bragg, no reinforcements had arrived by the time the outsized Union armada returned and dropped anchor, just out of range of his biggest guns, on the evening of January 12.

Two hours before dawn, Porter opened the action by committing all five ironclads at short range, his object being to provoke the defenders
into disclosing the location of their guns by muzzle flashes. It worked, and he followed this up after sunrise by bringing the rest of his 627 pieces to bear on targets the lookouts had spotted. The result, according to one Confederate crouched beneath this deluge of better than a hundred shells a minute, was “beyond description. No language can describe that terrific bombardment.” Moreover, the fire was not only heavy; it was highly accurate. Butler’s complaint that the navy’s gunnery had been ragged throughout the previous attempt was in large part true, and Porter, amid his denials, had taken pains to correct it. For one thing, his marksmen then had fired at the rebel flag, high on its staff above the fort, so that many of their shots plunged harmlessly into the river beyond the narrow sand peninsula. This time, he cautioned in his preliminary directive, “the object is to lodge the shell in the parapets, and tear away the traverses under which the bombproofs are located. A shell now and then exploding over a gun en barbette may have good effect, but there is nothing like lodging the shell before it explodes.… Commanders are directed to strictly enjoin their officers and men never to fire at the flag or pole, but to pick out the guns; the stray shots will knock the flagstaff down.” And so it was. He saw through the smoke and flying debris that his instructions were being followed to the letter. One by one, sometimes two by two, rebel pieces winked out and fell silent in the boil of dust and flame. “Traverses began to disappear,” he would report, “and the southern angle of Fort Fisher commenced to look very dilapidated.”