Terrible Swift Sword (17 page)
As
befitted men who have just won a great deal more than they had expected to win,
the two commanders were in good spirits. Sherman considered Du Pont's handling
of the fleet "a masterpiece of activity and professional skill" and
told the War Department that the performance had been "a masterly
one" which could hardly be appreciated by anyone who had not actually seen
it. Du Pont a little later wrote that the action had been "like driving a
wedge into the flanks of the rebels" and reflected that if the nation had
kept up an adequate Navy in the first place and had relied on it instead of on
politicians and money it might have nipped the rebellion in the bud.
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Sherman
went about establishing a camp on Hilton Head Island, and after a day of
meditation he composed and issued a proclamation, in which he reminded the
South Carolinians of the grievous error of their ways and invited them to
return penitently to the Union.
He began by announcing that he himself had
spent much time in South Carolina and that he and the soldiers and the warships
"have come amongst you with no feelings of personal animosity; no desire
to harm your citizens, destroy your property or interfere with any of your
lawful rights or your social and local institutions." This was all very
well, except that the entire countryside within a fifty-mile radius was in a
turmoil, social and local institutions had been turned upside down, and animate
property was taking its ease in the sun and living off of Old Massa's riches,
precisely because the Federal soldiers and warships had appeared; and anyone
who doubted that a general overturn was coming in with the huge black ships and
the uneven ranks of blue-coated soldiers did not know what was going on.
However, the general continued in the same vein
...
"I implore you to pause and reflect upon the tenor and
the consequences of your acts. . . . We have come among you as loyal men, fully
impressed with our constitutional obligations to the citizens of your state. .
. . The obligation of suppressing armed combinations against the constitutional
authorities is paramount to all others. If in the performance of this duty
other minor but important obligations should be in any way neglected, it must
be attributed to the necessities of the case."
18
No
doubt this was excellent, but it meant nothing. The time for soft words had
gone. The hammering of the guns was all that mattered now, and General
Sherman's vision failed to detect two things. The first was that where his army
and Du Pont's ships came, the white people ran away and the black people stayed
to raise hosannas: the revolutionary upheaval which Secretary Seward saw
germinating in this war was taking place wherever the war actually touched
bottom. The second thing that went unobserved was that for the moment Sherman
and his men could go just about anywhere they wanted to go. Du Pont said it: a
wedge had been driven into the Confederate flank, and for the immediate future
there was very little the Confederates could do about it. A woman in Savannah
saw it more clearly than the Federal general could see it. The day after
Sherman issued his proclamation she wrote: "The fleet was hourly expected
& the decision with most was to burn their dwellings & let the Yankees
have smoking ruins to welcome them. . . . The panic on Saturday cannot be described,
& the cars twice a day are loaded down with women & children bound to
the interior.
...
At the present time
the enemy by the land route could walk into our city without let or
hindrance."
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4.
"We Are Not Able to Meet It"
As it was to do so many times in the
future, the Confederacy at this moment of crisis called on General Robert E.
Lee. It did not yet recognize the full stature of the man on whom it would
finally load everything, but the emergency was urgent and Lee was at least
available. He had been ordered back to Richmond after the failure in the
western Virginia mountains, and when Jefferson Davis realized that the Federals
meant real harm in South Carolina, Lee was within reach. Mr. Davis created the
Department of South Carolina, Georgia and East Florida and put Lee in command,
thus making him responsible for the defense of all of the Atlantic coast below
North Carolina, and Lee set out for the new task just as Du Pont was preparing
to open his unanswerable bombardment.
As Lee himself doubtless realized, this job
was much like the one which had meant trouble beyond the Blue Ridge: an
assignment in which things had begun to go irretrievably wrong, and where a
good man could lose much through little fault of his own. Here at Port Royal
the Federals held high cards, and if they played them expertly they were likely
to win. Still, they might make mistakes; the initial victory opened so many
opportunities that it automatically increased the number of things which might
be done wrong, and within a year or two it would be evident that Federal
generals who were opposed
to Lee usually
did
make mistakes, at substantial cost to themselves.
Lee made his
headquarters at Coosawhatchie, a little station
I
on the Charleston
& Savannah Railroad some twenty miles inland from Port Royal. It was the
nearest point on the railroad to the scene of action, but the action was over
by the time Lee arrived. Forts Walker and Beauregard had been taken, and Lee
could do no more than try to save the troops and perfect the defenses of
Charleston and Savannah. His first report to the War Department was gloomy:
"The enemy having complete possession of the water and inland navigation,
commands all the islands on this coast and threatens both Savannah and
Charleston, and can come in his boats within four miles of this place. . . . We
have no guns that can resist their batteries, and have no resource but to
prepare to meet them in the field." This would be difficult, because there
was nothing much to meet the Federals with: "I fear there are but few
state troops ready for the field. The garrisons of the forts at Charleston and
Savannah and on the coast cannot be removed from the batteries while ignorant
of the designs of the enemy. I am endeavoring to bring into the field such
light batteries as can be prepared." Inhabitants of the coastal area were
in a panic, there were few troops at hand, arms for new recruits seemed to be
almost non-existent, and many weeks later Lee had to confess: "The
strength of the enemy, as far as I am able to judge, exceeds the whole force
that we have in the state; it can be thrown with great celerity against any
point, and far outnumbers any force we can bring against it in the field."
To his daughter Lee wrote that this assignment was "another forlorn hope
expedition—worse than West Virginia."
1
From
their new base the Federals could attack Charleston or Savannah or they could
cut the vital railroad line anywhere between the two cities. The country was
ideally adapted for amphibious operations, and the Federals had an overwhelming
fleet and substantially more land forces than could be brought against them.
Clearly, Lee could not hope to hold any point on the interconnected sounds and
rivers which could be reached by the Yankee gunboats. His only course was to
strengthen the defenses of the two important cities and to draw an interior
line, out of the Navy's range, which might save the railroad.
2
As he had written, it was hard to make a
good plan without knowing what the enemy meant to do. Fortunately for the
Confederacy, the enemy at this moment did not really mean to do much of
anything. Having won a much bigger victory than they had expected to win, the
Federals were slightly baffled. They had hoped to seize a good harbor as a
base for the South Atlantic blockading squadron; they had won a full half-dozen
harbors, a protected inland waterway controlling half of the South Carolina
coastline, and a spot from which the heart of the South was open to invasion.
Port Royal was not so much a conquest as a point of departure, but Sherman expressed
the full truth about the situation when he frankly confessed that "we had
no idea, in preparing the expedition, of such immense success."
3
He had the opportunity and the means, but he had no instructions, beyond a
rather generalized order that he and the Navy ought to move farther south if
they could do so conveniently and occupy the harbor at Fernandina, Florida.
He was quite aware
that something more ought to be done, and he seems to have suspected that it
ought to be done rather quickly, but there were a great many details to be
attended to. The army of occupation had to lay out and fortify its camp, the
islets and coastal settlements must be overrun, provision had to be made for
the masterless slaves who seemed to be sole occupants of most of the
countryside—and, all in all, Sherman was very busy. Young James Harrison
Wilson, a restless lieutenant of topographical engineers on Sherman's staff,
fumed that "the army did practically nothing but sit down and hold the sea
islands which the navy had captured for it":
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a complaint
which, besides being tinged with the perfectionism of youth, was written much
later in the clear light of after knowledge. Sherman began to come in for bitter
criticism in the North, although the men in Washington who wanted direct action
so much never touched him with their spurs. In the end he devoted himself to
planning a movement which would be executed during the spring, although by that
time another general would be in charge: the bombardment and capture of Fort
Pulaski, at the mouth of the Savannah River.
Sherman can be blamed too much. It was
only the Confederates who realized (as they could hardly help doing) that if
the Yankees followed up their advantage with energy it would be extremely hard
to stop them. Two months after Du Pont's ships had overwhelmed the forts, Lee
wrote that all along he had been expecting Sherman to send one column inland
to cut the railroad while he used the fleet and the rest of his troops to
isolate and capture either Charleston or Savannah: in Lee's opinion "this
would be a difficult combination for us successfully to resist." As a
matter of fact the entire Confederate coastline was vulnerable, both on the
Atlantic and in the Gulf, and General Braxton Bragg, who commanded coastal
defenses beyond the Florida peninsula, saw the danger. If the Federals struck
hard at Mobile, he said, he did not see how the place could be defended, and he
added significantly: "Our strength consists in the enemy's weakness."
5
Weakness of intent, that is; the Federals had all the power they
needed if they used it vigorously.
In the Confederate capital the hypercritical
Richmond
Examiner
believed
that the Federals would fritter away their big chance. The editor did not think
much of professional soldiers anyway, and he wrote petulantly: "There
cannot be much bloody work where a LEE is opposed by a SHERMAN; and a SHERMAN
confronted by a LEE. These generals are true scions of West Point, and both
will take time before they go into action. When West Point meets West Point,
spade meets spade, then comes
not
the
tug of war. . . . West Point
Sherman
does
not mean to fight until he gets perfectly ready." Because of this, the
Examiner
believed the blow at Port Royal might be a
blessing in disguise: "It is much to be desired that something should
occur in this latitude to rouse the people to energy and tear the speculating
mandrakes bleeding from their spoils. . . . The effect of these grand demonstrations
of the Yankees at various points will be admirable upon the Southern people,
government, army and generals. All had grown over-confident and had
consequently relapsed into list-lessness and inactivity. The enemy are curing
all of this for us."
6
No eloquence matches that of an editor
who finds that his readers, despite his best efforts, have grown hopeful; at
which time bad news becomes a welcome stimulant, and editorial vision grows
keen enough to find a silver lining in almost any disaster. And now, suddenly,
the silver lining became real enough for any Southern eye to see, and there
were a few weeks of wild surmise in which it was possible once more to credit
the hoariest of the myths that had preceded secession— the theory that the
outside world just would not let the Yankees win the war.
This came because
U.S.S.
San Jacinto,
one
of the Federal Navy's serviceable steam sloops of war, slipped in past the
Virginia Capes on November 15 and anchored in Hampton Roads, bearing an
exultant skipper, two important prisoners and an incalculable load of trouble.
The
skipper was Captain Charles Wilkes, one of the best-known men in the Navy and
one of the most self-willed. Opinionated and contentious, Wilkes was a lean
man in his early sixties who had won fame for explorations along the Antarctic
coast twenty years earlier, mapping 1600 miles of bleak shoreline and leaving
Wilkes Land as an enduring name on the charts. (Characteristically, the feat
that made him famous brought him also a court-martial and a public reprimand
for inflicting illegal punishments on the enlisted men who served under him.)
Wilkes was to have commanded U.S.S.
Merrimack
this summer, but that ship had been scuttled
when the Navy Yard at Norfolk was lost, and he had been given
San
Jacinto
instead and had gone
down to cruise off Cuba.
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Returning now from this cruise, he was in
high spirits. He had given the tail of the British lion a vigorous twist (he
did not like the British, although their Royal Geographical Society had once
given him a medal) and he had also, as he believed, done much harm to the
Southern Confederacy.
His
prisoners were much more famous than their captor; were, indeed, two of the
most prominent leaders of the South, men who, like himself, had reached their
sixties trailing records of achievement—James Mason of Virginia and John
Slidell of Louisiana. These elderly veterans of Democratic politics had slipped
out of the country in October to go abroad as Jefferson Davis's commissioners
to the governments of England and France, traveling with a dignity derived
both from their own eminent positions and from the letters of instruction given
them by Secretary of State R. M. T. Hunter. They were to make clear, said
Hunter, that the Confederate states "are not to be viewed as revolted
provinces or rebellious subjects seeking to overthrow the lawful authority of
a common sovereign." The South was making no revolution; on the contrary
it was simply trying to get away from a revolution which aggressive Northern
sectionalists had tried to make "in the spirit and ends of the organic law
of their first union." Withdrawing from that first union, the South had
set up a government "competent to discharge all of its civil functions
and entirely responsible both in war and peace for its action."
8
In
simple justice, full recognition ought to follow.
Reaching Havana on a blockade-runner,
Mason and Slidell on November 7 had taken passage on the British mail steamer
Trent,
a regular liner plying between the West
Indies and the United Kingdom. Wilkes, whose ship was in Havana at the time,
heard about it, sailed on ahead to lie in wait at a suitable spot in the Bahama
Channel, and on November 8 boldly extracted the two men from the
Trent,
compelling that vessel to heave to by firing
a shot across its bows, and compounding the indignity thus offered to the
British flag by sending armed men aboard to make the arrests. For the first
time the Federal power had laid its hands on two leading secessionists, and
Wilkes felt that this was a substantial achievement. What he did not see was
that it might also cause Great Britain to declare war.
Wilkes came into Hampton Roads to get
coal, to tell his government what he had done, and to learn what he should do
with his prisoners. He was ordered to go on to Boston and turn the men over to
Army authorities at Fort Warren, which he promptly did, reaching Boston on
November 24 to find that he was a national hero. Secretary Welles wrote a
letter of commendation, pointing out that Mason and Slidell had been most
"conspicuous in the conspiracy to dissolve the Union" and assuring
Wilkes that his action "has the emphatic approval of this
department." The city of Boston gave him a great banquet, bombarding him
with oratory. The House of Representatives a little later passed a vote of
thanks, editorial writers exulted, and all in all the people of the North
showed much more enthusiasm for Wilkes's capture of two men than it had shown
for Du Pont's capture of two forts.
9
In
the South the news brought expectant optimism. At first nothing was clear
except that this Yankee skipper had committed an outrage which the British
were likely to resent, and Mary Boykin Chesnut, the South Carolina diarist,
felt that "something good is obliged to come from such a stupid blunder,"
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but as the weeks passed it appeared that this "something
good" might be fabulous indeed—might even take the form of a British fleet
scouring the Southern coast clear of blockaders and invaders and presenting the
Confederacy with immediate and permanent independence. The disaster at Port
Royal began to look insignificant. Southern valor and British sea power could
make an unbeatable combination.
For the British reaction to what Captain
Wilkes had done was quick and spirited—inevitable, in a nation conditioned to
believe that no outlanders could ever molest a merchantman flying the British
flag.
Trent
reached
Southampton on November 27, and when its news reached London a wave of
indignation ran from the cabinet through Parliament and the newspapers to the
man in the street. Earl Russell considered the seizure "an act of
violence
...
an affront to the
British flag and a violation of international law," and Lord Palmerston
informed Queen Victoria that her government "should be advised to demand
reparation and redress." The British admiral on the North American station
was warned to get ready for trouble, and 8000 soldiers were ordered off to
Canada. (It was reported that as one transport left the Mersey a regimental
band played "Dixie.") There was uproar in the dignified Reform Club
when the news came in; members became "violent, demonstrative and
outrageous," and an ordinarily peaceful member of Parliament declared
that if the insult were not atoned for "he would recommend the British
colors to be torn to shreds and sent to Washington for the use of the
Presidential water closets." One Englishman wrote to Seward that if the
country were polled "I fear that 999 men out of 1,000 would declare for
immediate war."
11