Terrible Swift Sword (39 page)

He had his ships anchor a few miles upstream
from the forts, at the old quarantine station, to bury the dead, attend to the
wounded, wash down the decks, make hasty repairs, and count losses. Altogether
he had lost thirty-seven men killed and 149 wounded, all of his ships had been
hit hard, and the forts themselves had suffered only minor damage— but he had
done exactly what he had believed he could do, the big danger had been met and
passed, and New Orleans was entirely at his mercy. All he had to do now was to
go on and take it.
¹⁴

He went on and took it. One of his
gunboats achieved the improbable by overawing and then capturing a battalion of
infantry near the quarantine station, and just below New Orleans there were men
with field pieces prepared to make
a
fight. A few blasts
from the heavy guns dispersed them; and then the fleet came up to the New
Orleans waterfront in
a
drizzling rain, saw angry crowds shaking
fists and uttering impotent curses in front of lifeless warehouses, cowed them
with the threat of the terrible guns, anchored—and New Orleans was gone, United
States flag flying, mayor stoutly refusing to surrender but confessing that if
the Yankees wanted the city they had it, General Lovell leading a handful of
third-rate troops off into the hinterland, the greatest city in Dixie caving in
while the scarred black warships anchored in the river just offshore.

Lovell was helpless. When the ships
passed the forts he had fewer than 3000 troops to defend New Orleans, and the
troops were of no use to him. He had certain militia regiments drawn up on the
"inner line" of defenses just below the city, but he gave them no
ammunition, and he explained why. They could not fight warships no matter how
they tried, and anyway "they had in some regiments manifested such an
insubordinate disposition that I felt unwilling to put ammunition in their
hands";
¹⁵
and whatever Lovell did, Farragut could and would
bombard the city unless it gave in, so Lovell took his useless handful out of
town and let the Federals have it. Farragut saw the United States flag run up
and then, still somewhat shaken, wrote a letter to his wife: "I am so
agitated that I can scarcely write & shall only tell you that it has
pleased Almighty God to preserve my life & limb, through a fire of 2 days,
that the world has scarcely known—I shall return publicly my thanks as well as
those of our Fleet for his Goodness & mercies." Along the waterfront
great stacks of baled cotton were burning, not to mention ranks of steamboats
which nobody wanted the Yankees to have, and the old man felt a sailor's grief
over it: "all the beautiful Steamers & Ships were set on fire &
consumed."
¹⁶

There
were, of course, the Confederate ironclads, and the fight had come just a
little too soon for them. Lacking the ability to move,
Louisiana
had been towed downstream and tied to the
bank near Fort St. Philip, where she had been able to do no more than add a few
guns to that fort's battery; her crew blew her up and sent her to fragments a
few days after Farragut had gone by. At a New Orleans wharf there was
Mississippi,
two of her three propellers still lying on
the dock, her iron armor not yet fastened, no guns aboard, workmen fighting for
time that had been denied them. The naval officer who had been sent down to fit
her out and fight her confessed, desperately, that when Farragut passed the
forts "I did not know, in the name of God, what to do with her"; in
the end he did the only possible thing and set the hulk on fire, and the
blazing wreck drifted harmlessly down past Farragut's grim fleet while the
city's fate was being settled.
¹⁷

Farragut's final point proved itself.
Once he had New Orleans it was the forts and not the Federal fleet that were
isolated; distracted by the long bombardment, hopeless because everything else
was gone, the garrison in Fort Jackson mutinied, and not long after Farragut
had taken New Orleans the forts surrendered and everything was finished. The
Federal power held both ends of the Mississippi, and the old flag officer had
won. After the news got to Washington, Farragut was made rear admiral, first
of that grade in the U. S. Navy.

6.
Brilliant Victory

The movement of the
Army of the Potomac to Hampton Roads was an impressive display of the
irresistible strength of the North. More than 400 transports were on the water—
ocean liners, bay and harbor steamboats, schooners, laboring tugs hauling heavy
barges—going from the Potomac wharves at Alexandria to the landing stages under
the guns at Fort Monroe. The business had been organized by men who knew
exactly what they were doing, and although at times two dozen ships anchored in
the lower bay, awaiting their turns to unload, there were no real delays. In
the final weeks or March the North moved more than 75,000 soldiers and a almost
infinite variety of equipment that embraced everything from siege guns to
observation balloons and the apparatus to generate hydrogen gas, and did it
without accident or confusion. (Without serious accident, anyway: eight mules
were lost when a barge foundered.) Never on earth had anyone seen a water-borne
military movement so prodigious. An admiring British writer remarked later that
the whole affair had been "the stride of a giant."
¹

But there was no second stride. Having
made the first, the giant paused, irresolute, muscle-bound, anxious to avoid a
fall. The war was about to take a strange turn.

As far as any Northerner could see in
the middle of April, 1862, the war was almost won. The Confederacy was losing
the Mississippi River and all of the west, its Atlantic coastline was being
sealed off, and it was obviously hard pressed. Secretary Stanton was so
confident that on April 3 he closed the Army's recruiting offices and ordered
all recruiting details back to their regiments.
²
Now the North's
largest army, carefully trained for eight months and equipped with everything
an army could use, was coming down to crush a Confederate capital whose
outnumbered defenders were still trying to reorganize their troops all the way
down to company and regimental levels. This, surely, would be the final blow.
It had to be.

And yet . . . four months later, after
this army had done its level best, the war had turned topsy-turvy and it was
the North rather than the South which seemed to be in danger of defeat. Once
the Army of the Potomac went into action the tide began to flow in the other
direction. The beginning of the long war—the all-out, all-destroying,
disastrous war that finally went beyond control—dates from this army's advance
up the Virginia peninsula.

Did this happen because the Army of the
Potomac advanced, or in spite of it?

Cause and effect are curiously mixed, and the
area of sheer coincidence has vague boundaries. It was coincidence, for
example, which determined that when the campaign approached its climax the army
would have to fight a military genius immeasurably more skillful than its own
leadership. But other troubles were home-grown. The army had stayed too long in
Washington. It had the touch of the parade ground; it had known too many grand
reviews and too little reality. It would presently be remarked that although
this was the best-drilled of all the Union armies, its regiments straggled most
atrociously on a route march, so that sometimes the drifters by the roadside
visibly outnumbered the plodders in the ranks.
⁸
During the months in
Washington the army had almost come to seem less a military instrument than a
tool of politics, the means by which one faction or another would control the
destiny of the nation. Its strategy might be less significant than its
political philosophy. Its commanding general was beset by uncertainties and
misunderstandings, some of them his own, some of them not his own.

The army's very name was significant. It
was the
Army of the Potomac,
the
river of the national capital. It might campaign to the gates of Richmond, but
all that it did would be controlled by what it had left behind. Of all the
country's armies, this was the one—as everyone knew, all too clearly— that
could most quickly and certainly lose the war: and so at times it was hard to
see that this was the army, also, which could most quickly and certainly win
it. A general who took the offensive with this army needed to be bold,
determined, and uncommonly clear-minded.

A hint of the way things were going to
work came on March 23, in the battle of Kernstown.

Ever since the unhappy canal boat
expedition McClellan had kept an army corps in the lower Shenandoah Valley, and
the commander of this corps, General Nathaniel P. Banks, had been having a
pleasantly uneventful war. He had 25,000 men and the Confederates in his front
numbered hardly 4500; decisive odds, surely, except that the Confederates were
led by Stonewall Jackson, about whose singular capacities neither General Banks
nor the rest of the world knew as much just then as they would know a little
later. Jackson's little force had been pushed out of Winchester and had gone,
apparently, far to the south, and could be nothing more than a minor nuisance;
so when McClellan began his move to Fort Monroe and needed a garrison for the
area around Manassas he naturally thought about General Banks. Banks was
ordered to leave a division at Winchester and prepare to bring everybody else
east of the Blue Ridge, and he promptly obeyed. At Winchester, with its
principal advanced line at Kernstown, a few miles south, he posted the division
of Brigadier General James Shields; 11,000 men, approximately, whose chief
function was to keep the lower valley clear of Rebels so that the rebuilt line
of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad could operate without interruption.

Shields
came from County Tyrone by way of Illinois and the west coast; a lean,
combative man who had the odd idea that Stonewall Jackson was afraid of him,
and who had once challenged Abraham Lincoln to fight a duel, but who otherwise
was competent and well-balanced.
⁴
He had led troops with distinction
in the Mexican War, and when Banks went east of the mountains Shields stayed on
the alert and kep: his troops alert also, maintaining as good a lookout as any
general could considering the fact that at this time, in Virginia, the
Federals were using some of the world's worst cavalry against some of the
world's best.

Jackson
had heard about Banks's withdrawal, and he seems to have believed that the man
was leaving fewer troops around Winchester than was actually the case. Joseph
E. Johnston had just warned him to keep close to the Yankees—the sort of order
no one ever needed to give Jackson twice—and anyway Jackson considered Winchester
his own private bail -wick and wanted to drive the invaders out for personal
reasons. On the morning of March 23 he sent Johnston a characteristic message:
"With the blessing of an ever-kind Providence I hope to be in the
vicinity of Winchester this evening."
⁵
Then he made his word
good by moving in to make a savage attack on the Federal lines at Kernstown.

Probably the least important thing about the
battle of Kernstown is that Jackson tried to do the impossible, and failed.
Shields had more than twice Jackson's numbers, and these Federals were good
soldiers—Westerners, mostly, plus a few Pennsylvanians, with some regiments
which would eventually be listed with the best combat units in the Union Army.
Jackson's line was halted and at last it had to give ground, and by dark its
dour commander, furious over the reverse, was leading it up the valley in full
retreat. He had lost some 700 men, and Shields (who himself was wounded) had
had smaller losses and was entitled to claim a victory.
⁸
For the
rest of the war, Shields's men bragged that they were the only ones who had
ever beaten Stonewall Jackson.

But the victory meant
nothing at all, whereas the mere fact that the battle had been fought meant a
great deal.

The lower Shenandoah Valley was an extremely
sensitive area. When a hostile army touched it the Federal government would
react vigorously, almost automatically. Kernstown revealed this fact, and both
Jackson and Robert E. Lee made note of it for use later on. What followed
Kernstown was most instructive to both of these soldiers.

It seemed clear to the Federals that Jackson
was much stronger than anyone had supposed—otherwise he would hardly have dared
to attack Shields—and there was a hasty reshuffling of troops. Banks was sent
back to Winchester, horse, foot, and guns, to drive Jackson away and keep him
away. It seemed necessary also to reinforce Pathfinder Fremont, who was just
assuming command in West Virginia and who must protect the western segment of
the Baltimore & Ohio. (If the Rebels were strong enough to attack Shields
they no doubt contemplated aggression a little farther west, as well.) So the
division of Brigadier General Louis Blenker was detached from McClellan and
sent to Fremont, with orders to tarry a while in the lower valley until Banks
had finally disposed of Jackson.