This Hallowed Ground (49 page)

Sherman could have been right. From a soldier’s viewpoint, all the logic was on his side; having lost the valley, the Confederacy could not hope to win the final decision. Yet the war was turning into something that no one battle or campaign could settle. It was no longer a mere matter of armies; it was turning into the first of the great modern wars, releasing unsuspected energies even as it brought infinite destruction, and its proper target now was not so much the opposing armies in the field as the will to resist, the capacity to keep on struggling for survival, in the hearts of the people themselves. Grant had wrecked the transportation and manufacturing nexus at Jackson, Mississippi, as an essential preliminary to the taking of Vicksburg. More and more the war would follow that pattern. The morale of a Mississippi planter or an Ohio farmer would finally come to be fully as significant as the condition of Bragg’s or Grant’s soldiers.

Odd things were beginning to happen. There was, early this summer, for a sample, the matter of John Hunt Morgan’s raid into Ohio and the possibly related business of Clement Vallandigham and his effort to become governor of Ohio.

Vallandigham was a northern Democrat who believed that the sheer weight of the northern war effort was crushing domestic liberties; believed, also, that under almost any circumstances it would be better to have Democrats in power than to have Republicans. He had been campaigning in Ohio with great vigor, uttering words that seemed calculated to discourage northern recruiting efforts and to bring about a readiness to accept a negotiated peace; and Ambrose E. Burnside — who, after Fredericksburg, had been gently removed from combat leadership and given the quiet post of command in the peaceful Ohio country — concluded that Vallandigham was an outright traitor, and he sent a file of soldiers to arrest the man and throw him into prison. The Lincoln administration, perceiving that this was making a martyr out of a sensationally effective Democratic vote-getter, canceled the imprisonment and sent Vallandigham into exile; sent him, in the month of May, through Rosecrans’s lines below Murfreesboro and straight into the southern Confederacy. Vallandigham went to Richmond and talked with important people there, and it seems that an unreal vision began to dawn.

Vallandigham represented many things, all of which could be summed up under one general heading: trouble for the Lincoln government.
He was appealing to Northerners who were tired of the war. Many of them were basically sympathetic to the South. They had a shadowy, semi-military, semi-secret organization, cross between political chowder club and village lodge, known as the Knights of the Golden Circle, and some of them at least talked as if they favored a new secession movement in the Northwest, with further fragmentation of the Federal Union. Somehow, the Davis administration reasoned, it ought to be possible to make use of them.

So while Vallandigham flitted off stage — he went by sea to Canada, and in Ontario waited the right moment to return to the United States — John Hunt Morgan took off on a strange, abortive, extra-military sort of expedition north of the Ohio River.
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Morgan was a Kentuckian: one of the legendary southern horsemen, all dash and gallantry and unrestrained individualism, who looked more important at the time than they do in retrospect. He commanded cavalry under General Joe Wheeler, who in turn was answerable to Bragg, and while Grant was tightening his net around Vicksburg and Rosecrans at last was showing signs of activity Bragg had Wheeler send Morgan and some twenty-five hundred troopers up into Kentucky on a raid designed to break up the Louisville and Nashville Railroad and destroy Yankee supply depots. Morgan set out, calmly ignored his instructions, got his command across the Ohio River west of Louisville, circled up through southern Indiana, and then went zooming off across Ohio, commandeering horses and supplies as he went, while Burnside spattered the Middle West with telegrams to get militia and Federal troops up to head him off.

As a military move, Morgan’s raid was totally ineffective. Ohio was presently aswarm with troops, and Morgan and nearly all of his men were at last rounded up and captured after a wild dash that accomplished little more than to dampen the sympathies that a number of Ohio farmers had previously felt for the Confederacy. (Morgan’s troopers treated Ohio farms the way Grant’s men had been treating the farms in Mississippi, and the Ohioans did not like it.) Morgan and his principal officers were lodged in the Ohio penitentiary (from which place, some months later, they mysteriously contrived to escape) and a Federal general who had helped to capture them wrote that the whole affair had been a great lesson on the weakness of Copperheadism in Indiana and Ohio: “He who witnessed the great exhibition of patriotism and love of country in these mighty states on the passage of the Union army and then could doubt the ability and purpose of the people to maintain the government has certainly been ‘given over to hardness of heart, that he may believe a lie and be damned’.”
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Which was probably quite true. Yet the Morgan raid was an odd
business altogether. Whether or not it grew out of the vision created by Vallandigham’s visit to Richmond, it was at least a significant symptom: the Confederacy would fight behind the lines in the North if it saw a chance, and it would strike at home-front morale and home-front economics as well as at Federal armies in the field. It had, in other words, no faintest intention of quitting; it would go on fighting with any weapon that was handy as long as it had the capacity. Still clinging to legalism, Jefferson Davis was finally beginning to realize that he was fighting a revolution.

General Grant, meanwhile, wanted to get on with the war. Counting prisoners of war and casualties in the preliminary fighting, the Confederates had lost more than forty thousand men in the Mississippi Valley campaign — the equivalent of the army that fought at Shiloh. Although many of the Vicksburg parolees would presently show up in Confed erate armies again without benefit of formal exchange, this represented a loss which the Confederacy could not possibly make good. Grant had seventy-five thousand men with nobody much to fight. It seemed to him that he ought to go marching across the South, knocking all of the underpinnings out from under Bragg’s army in Tennessee; he could take Mobile, cross Georgia, and in general pull the Confederacy apart without serious opposition. He wanted to move.

Pemberton had no more than signed the surrender papers when Grant was striking at Joe Johnston. Sherman took off on July 5, marching for Jackson again, with elements of three army corps in his command. The weather was blistering hot, and the men had been standing in trenches for weeks and were not used to long hikes; water was scarce, shoes and uniforms were in bad shape, and some of the soldiers were sore because they had never so much as set foot inside the fortress they had just captured. No matter; they marched east, Johnston faded back before them, and Sherman was a driver — regiment; would slog the dusty roads all day and make camp after dark, with stragglers hobbling in until midnight. An Ohio battery went lumbering over the field of Champion’s Hill, where it had been furiously engaged in mid-May; to their astonishment the men found that the very field they had occupied, all torn and trampled the last time they saw it by the clash of opposing armies, had been plowed and planted with corn, and the corn now stood four feet high, as lush and peaceful-looking as if there had never been a battle within fifty miles of the place.
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The road was lit with pillars of fire and of smoke by night and by day; cotton gins, farmhouses, anything that would burn went up in fire, and the colonel of one regiment, eying a pillared plantation manor house, burst out angrily: “People who have been as conspicuous as these in bringing this thing about
ought
to have things burned. I
would like to see those chimneys standing there without any house.” A few days later, when the army marched back from Jackson — which by now was getting to be pretty shopworn — the plantation displayed nothing but blackened chimneys.
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Even the fences had been burned.

But although Grant had no trouble in driving Joe Johnston away, he got nowhere with his plan to keep the war moving. General Halleck had other ideas.

In some ways General Halleck was ideally fitted to be general-in-chief in the Civil War. He was a born gossip and politician, and for this if for no other reason he could understand that the administration’s chief problems were political rather than military. If a Buell had to be fired and a Ben Butler had to be retained because of political reasons, Halleck could understand it and he could adjust himself to it, and he could soothe other generals with chatty, half-indiscreet letters of explanation. But war itself he looked on as something out of books. The books said that when you invaded an enemy’s country the big idea was to occupy territory, and this now was Halleck’s obsession.

Grant’s army was split up. He must hold the ground he had conquered, with detachments here, there, and elsewhere to symbolize Federal occupancy. Also, he must send help to others; so part of Grant’s army went to Arkansas to quell Rebel armies which, having been amputated from Richmond by the victory at Vicksburg, could no longer be of real concern. Another part had to go down to Banks, who was nursing some plan for seizing Texas — another amputated area outside the main stream of the war. Still more had to go to Missouri, and there were forts and outposts in Mississippi and along the river to be manned. As a result, a Confederacy which was off balance and helpless in mid-July was given the rest of the summer to recover. That the rest of the summer was not time enough was more or less incidental; the breathing spell was granted, and instead of invading Alabama and sweeping up the Gulf Coast, Grant found himself visiting New Orleans to help Banks stage an elaborate review of troops — an event that bored Grant so excessively that he may have taken to the bottle again; best horseman who ever attended West Point, he suffered the indignity of falling out of his saddle at the review, injuring his leg so badly that he was crippled for weeks.
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Wherever this war might be won, it was not going to be won in the Deep South in the summer of 1863.

It was the post-Shiloh period all over again. The one-two punch was lacking. The administration was not cashing in on its victories. It was trying this summer to break its way into Charleston, South Carolina, in a combined army-navy operation. Charleston was not especially important, but it was a symbol; it was where secession began. To take the place and make it feel the final rigor of war looked like a worthy
goal, and so an immense effort was under way. It had been supposed that the new monitors were shotproof, and so a flotilla of these dumpy ironclads led the way in the first bombardment of Fort Sumter; they proved to be a good deal less than shotproof and were so badly hammered that the naval commander, Admiral du Pont, halted operations and announced that the navy alone could never in the world open Charleston Harbor. The ironclads went to drydock and Admiral du Pont went into retirement; but although Admiral Dahlgren, who replaced him, was a sturdier sort, he had no better luck than du Pont had had, and as the summer grew old a dreary amphibious operation was under way, with the navy firing thousands of shells while it risked valuable ships, and with the army landing on sandy beaches and painfully trying to storm Confederate forts that turned out to be all but literally impregnable. Men and energy were consumed freely, but nothing in particular was accomplished.

One bit of legend was created in this attempt to take Charleston. On a sandy spit of land by the harbor entrance there was a Confederate stronghold called Battery Wagner, which the Federals had to take if they were to mount siege guns to reduce Fort Sumter; and the job of taking this place was given to the 54th Massachusetts, a regiment of colored troops — one of the two which had refused to accept pay unless the pay scale recognized them as full-fledged human beings who earned the same pay as white soldiers earned. Colonel of the 54th was young Robert Gould Shaw, a blue-blooded Bostonian who saw the war as a holy cause. He had led the 54th in a grand review on Boston Common before coming south, and his mother had looked on with intense pride to see her only son riding at the head of soldiers who had come up from slavery to manhood, and she had cried: “What have I done, that God has been so good to me!” Now the 54th charged across the sand to attack Battery Wagner, and there had been insufficient preparation. Shaw got his first line on top of the parapet, there was a flurry of bitter hand-to-hand fighting, and then Shaw was killed and a great many of his men were killed. The attack failed, and white colonel and colored privates were buried together in a common grave just outside the fort. Much later Battery Wagner was taken, and siege guns pounded Fort Sumter to rubble, but Charleston was not taken. Yet the memory remained, and the surviving soldiers of the 54th raised money to build a memorial to their colonel on Boston Common, and many Northerners remembered Mrs. Shaw’s cry … “that God has been so good to me!”
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In Virginia nothing much was happening. It was as if the two great armies there were still exhausted by Gettysburg; they moved back and forth, from the Rapidan almost to the Potomac, sparring constantly,
occasionally stirring up a minor fight, but accomplishing nothing of importance. It seemed certain that there would be no major offensive in Virginia until the next year.

But in Tennessee, toward the end of June, the armies at last began to move.

Rosecrans’s Army of the Cumberland had been enjoying a rather pleasant war these last six months. It had been inactive ever since Stone’s River, and the camps around Murfreesboro began to look permanent. The men had made themselves comfortable, company streets had been precisely laid out by military engineers, and with logs and shelter-tent halves the men had made pleasant little homes; arbors of evergreen were arranged at tent entrances to provide shade, there were strict rules about keeping streets and tents clean and properly policed, and every evening the regimental bands played while the soldiers lounged about, smoked, played cards, and told tall tales. Even the men on picket duty felt that they had it easy; in Tennessee, they said, the mockingbirds sang all night long, and their songs made a man feel that he had company.
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