This Hallowed Ground (64 page)

Then, at the moment when despair was deepest, a great wind swept across the sky and drove the clouds off in shreds, and it was possible to see the sunlight once more. To begin with, there was Admiral Farragut and Mobile Bay.

The venerable admiral, who would not consider himself old until he found himself unable to turn a handspring on his birthday, had assembled
a powerful fleet at the mouth of Mobile Bay, and early in August he struck with it. Mobile was important, the Confederacy’s last port for blockade-runners on the Gulf coast (except for ports in Texas, which, having been cut off, hardly counted any more). Grant had wanted to take Mobile right after Vicksburg fell, but Halleck had ruled otherwise. Now Farragut would try it. The town itself he might not get, but if he could run past the harbor forts and anchor his fleet inside the bay, the port would be closed, and one more Confederate gateway to the outer world would be sealed off — those gateways to the outer world, whose help must come in if the Confederacy was to live.

August 5, and a hot sunny morning; Farragut’s wooden sloops of war came steaming in toward the mouth of the bay, topmasts and upper yards sent down, everything cleared for action. The ships were in double file, with the monitors going on ahead; the sun came down hard on the flat iron decks of these latter, making the heat below almost unendurable. Along the channel the Confederates had planted mines — “torpedoes,” as the word was used in those days — and on the east side of the channel was powerful Fort Morgan, a masonry work of great strength which Farragut could not hope to pound into submission; his best chance was to run past it, as he had run past the New Orleans forts. Then the fort would be isolated, and the army could bring in troops and siege guns and reduce it at leisure.

Inside the bay the Confederates had a small fleet. Except for one vessel, the ironclad
Tennessee
, this was made up of light gunboats that could never stand up to Farragut’s ships at close range, but the exception might make all the difference. The
Tennessee
had been built on the Alabama River, near Selma, after the
Merrimac
pattern — low in the water, with a slant-sided citadel armored with five- and six-inch iron plating, heavily armed, with a ram bow. She was clumsy and her steering mechanism was exposed, but at that moment she may have been the most formidable warship afloat. With her consorts she waited in the lee of Fort Morgan while the Federal fleet came in through the windless morning, black plumes of smoke training off on the smooth water.

At the start there was trouble. The torpedoes were a menace, and when the fort and the Confederate ships opened fire the Union fleet fell into confusion. Monitor
Tecumseh
, at the head of the line, put her forefoot on one of the torpedoes and blew up, going to the bottom like a stone and carrying her captain and most of her crew down with her. Ships behind her sheered off, slowed down, and stopped. Farragut, in the flagship
Hartford
, was astern of them; he scampered up the rigging to a point just below the main top, peering ahead into the smoke while an anxious junior passed the bight of a line around him to keep him from falling into the water. For the fleet to stay here, huddled under the fire of
the fort’s big guns, was to invite complete destruction. Angrily Farragut demanded to know the reason for the delay.

Torpedoes ahead, he was told:
Tecumseh
is gone already, and if we go on we will lose more ships.

Farragut exploded: Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead! The line began to move again; firing mechanisms in the torpedoes proved defective —
Hartford
brushed against one, but it failed to explode — and the fleet exchanged enormous broadsides with the fort while it plowed on into the bay. The fight was hot and heavy while it lasted, and
Hartford
took a brutal pounding. An army signal officer who was stationed aboard her recalled afterward that he had read, in stories about sea fights, tales about decks running with blood and had thought it all imagination; he really saw it this morning.

The fleet passed the fort at last and got well inside the bay. The Confederate ships drew off briefly, and Farragut had his ships anchor and repair damages. Then
Tennessee
came steaming in to the attack, and the fight was renewed — a whole fleet coming to grips with one grim black ironclad. One of the wooden sloops rammed
Tennessee
, hurting the Confederate not at all but wrecking her own bow; another tried to ram, missed, and crashed into
Hartford
, almost sinking the flagship, and again Farragut sprang into the rigging for a better view of what was going on. The guns of the fleet could not penetrate
Tennessee’s
mailed sides, but they kept hammering, surrounding her and penning her in; a monitor held position just astern of the big ironclad and slammed away with fifteen-inch solid shot;
Tennessee
lost her stacks, her steering failed, she was helpless, her gun ports could not be opened — and finally, with the other Confederate ships sunk, the fort by-passed, and no hope remaining, she pulled down her flag.

Farragut’s victory was complete. His men had paid for it — one hundred and forty-five killed and one hundred and seventy-four wounded — and some of his ships were badly racked, but he had Mobile Bay. Mobile was no longer a seaport, Fort Morgan would fall whenever an effort was made, and here, suddenly, was encouraging news for war-weary people in the North.
⁵

It was followed a few weeks later by even better news. Sherman captured Atlanta.

Sherman had been extending his lines around to the east and south of the city, trying to cut its railway connections, and at the beginning of September he finally succeeded. He hoped to bag Hood’s army as well — after all, this army was really his primary objective — but the Hood who could not quite tell when to go in and slug and when to spar and play for time was canny enough to keep his army from being involved in the loss of the citadel, and when he saw that Atlanta could
not be saved he got his army out intact. In a sense he kept Sherman from getting the prize he wanted. But in the end it did not matter.

It did not matter because the news that Atlanta had fallen was a mighty intoxicant for the people back home. Mobile Bay, then Atlanta — the war was being won, after all, the stalemate was being broken, and certain victory lay not far away. Even sedate General Thomas lost his control when news of the triumph came to him; he skipped, combed his whiskers with eager fingers, and, as Sherman reported, did everything but actually caper.

Washington got the news on the night of September 2 in a wire from General Henry W. Slocum. Slocum commanded the troops Hooker had had earlier — Hooker disliked Sherman, and when command of McPherson’s army went to Howard he resigned in a huff — and Slocum messaged Stanton: “General Sherman has taken Atlanta.” A day or so later Sherman sent his own message, beginning: “So Atlanta is ours, and fairly won.” Wild rejoicing went all across the North, and Grant ordered his batteries in front of Petersburg to fire a hundred-gun salute, with all guns shotted and trained on the Rebel works.

This was not the end of it. Before the end of September Phil Sheridan won a smashing victory over Jubal Early in the Shenandoah Valley.

Sheridan had been slow getting into action. He had a strong advantage in numbers, but guerrilla warfare in the valley had been carried to such a pitch of perfection that he had to use a good many of his men to guard trains and supply lines, and he seems to have overestimated Early’s strength. In addition, he was not altogether sure of the quality of all his troops. He had the VI Corps from the Army of the Potomac — as good a combat outfit as there was in either army — but the rest of his men did not seem quite so solid, and he had taken his time about launching an offensive. But on September 19 he was ready, and he came down and crushed Early in a hard, sharp battle near Winchester.

The battle began badly. Somehow Sheridan’s marching orders got fouled up and his troops came to the field slowly. The first attack was knocked back on its heels, and around midday it looked as if the Confederates might win an unexpected victory. But Sheridan was all over the field in person, riding at a pelting gallop on his big black horse, his hat gripped in one fist and his starred battle flag in the other; he reorganized his lines, brought up his reinforcements, and at last drove home an irresistible charge, a whole division of mounted cavalry shearing in behind the Confederate flank, every man in action — and Early’s army went hurrying south through Winchester, and for the first time in the war the North had won a victory in the Shenandoah.

The victory would have consequences. Sheridan would go on, devastating the rich valley farmland with cold, methodical effectiveness, so
that it never again could serve as a base of supplies for Confederate armies. Early would counterattack a month later at Cedar Creek, catching Sheridan’s army off guard (with Sheridan himself absent) and coming close to driving it north in rout. But Sheridan made a dramatic twenty-mile ride to the scene from Winchester, rallied his stragglers, pulled the lost battle out of the fire, and closed the day by giving the Confederate army such a furious beating that it no longer had any weight as a dangerous combat force.

The war was being won, and the election would be won, too, because it was obviously absurd now to campaign on a plank stating that the war effort was a failure. And to cap it all, McClellan himself pulled the main prop out from under the Democratic platform by the simple process of refusing to accept it.

McClellan had had his troubles and he undeniably had his faults, but now and then he could measure up. He had done so after Second Bull Run, when he pulled the Army of the Potomac together and prepared it for Antietam. He did it now, when — quietly and with dignity — he gave the lie to the bitter-end Republicans who had considered him little better than a traitor, and showed that although he might not swallow the Republican version of the war program he was as determined as anyone to insist on a restored Union and an end to the Confederacy.

The Democratic committee went to McClellan to give him formal notification that he had been nominated. McClellan responded, as a candidate always does, but he did not quite make the response he had been expected to make. Blandly he remarked that as far as he was concerned the party’s platform meant that the North was not to offer peace on any terms short of a reconstructed Union. To take anything less, he added, would be to insult and affront the thousands of northern soldiers who had died in battle. The Democrats might look like a peace party, but their candidate had his own ideas.

As the upswing developed, the move to find a new candidate in place of Lincoln withered. Pathfinder Frémont had been brought out, dusted off, and put in position as a species of third-party candidate, to bid for the votes of rock-ribbed abolitionists. He quietly retired, the Republican radicals dutifully lining up behind President Lincoln. Salmon P. Chase, the dignified Treasury Secretary who had always imagined himself as the statesman destined to come in and supply the firm hand Lincoln lacked — Chase, too, was in retirement, no longer a member of the Cabinet, an aspirant for the presidency whom no one could ever take quite seriously. Lincoln had a clear road at last.

In the West and the South, Thomas and Sherman prepared their armies for the mopping-up process; and in the long lines that ran down the James River and half encircled Petersburg, the Army of the Potomac
held its ground, pinning Lee’s army there by sheer weight, taking daily casualties and looking less and less like the gallant host that had marched down to the Rapidan in May with bands playing and flags afloat, but still holding on with an unbreakable grip. Autumn was wearing away, and the Confederacy’s last winter was drawing near.

On November 8 the people of the North re-elected Abraham Lincoln and endorsed a war to the finish. One week later General Sherman and sixty thousand veterans left Atlanta on the march that was to make that finish certain — the wild, cruel, rollicking march from Atlanta to the sea.

Two months had passed since the capture of Atlanta. A part of this time had been spent in resting and refitting the army. Several weeks more had been consumed in a fruitless chase of John B. Hood, who still commanded forty thousand good men and who circled off to the northwest, molesting Sherman’s supply line and hoping to draw the invaders off in retreat. Sherman had tried to catch and destroy this Confederate army, but he had not had much luck, and he complained bitterly, if illogically, that the real trouble was Hood’s eccentricity: “I cannot guess his movements as I could those of Johnston, who was a sensible man and did only sensible things.”

In mid-October Sherman gave up the pursuit entirely and made his plans for the next campaign. Back to Tennessee went Thomas and Schofield, with something fewer than half of the men who had occupied Atlanta. They would see to it that Hood’s Confederates did nothing to upset the military balance; with the rest of his men Sherman would drive for the seacoast.

He had an extended argument over the telegraph wires with Grant on this point. Grant suspected that it would be wise to dispose of Hood before going off on a new campaign; he doubted that Thomas would have quite enough force to protect everything if Hood should march up into mid-Tennessee, and he felt that the navy ought to seize and prepare some seaport city as a base before Sherman moved east. But Sherman convinced him at last that his own plan was sound. He had written off Hood entirely — “Damn him, if he will go to the Ohio River, I will give him rations,” he growled at one point — and he was convinced that nothing would bring the war to a close so speedily as a visible demonstration that a large Union army could go anywhere it chose to go in the Confederacy.
¹

Jefferson Davis had recently visited Georgia, rousing the people with valiant speeches in which he predicted that Sherman would be overwhelmed
in the Southland as Napoleon had been overwhelmed in Russia. To Grant, Sherman wrote contemptuously: