Kitabı oku: «The History of the Confederate War, Its Causes and Its Conduct. Volume 1 of 2», sayfa 20

Having thus completely achieved that "success" which the civilians of the Navy Department had "required" of him, Farragut was ambitious to accomplish more. He proposed further operations of like character against other Confederate ports from which commerce was being carried on in spite of the blockade. It was quite obvious that no blockade could stop this commerce on which the South so largely depended for its supplies. The only way in which the shutting in of the Confederacy could be made effective was to capture the defensive works of every Confederate port.

To that task Farragut earnestly desired to address himself. It was his purpose to make himself master of every Confederate seaport, relieve the blockading squadrons of their expensive, perilous, difficult, and ineffective work, and completely to seal the South against all outward or inward commerce with the world. His plan was to substitute the absolute possession of Confederate ports for their manifestly inefficient blockade. He asked permission, therefore, to proceed at once upon this mission, beginning with Mobile.

The civilians in control of the Navy Department promptly said him nay. They had other plans of a more spectacular character. So they ordered Farragut to proceed up the Mississippi river and waste precious time and still more precious lives, in a theatric but futile "running of the batteries" at Vicksburg and Port Hudson.

Farragut obeyed of course. It was the habit of his long life to obey. But he felt keenly the loss of opportunity which this order of a badly water-logged cabinet bureau imposed upon him. While he was thus, under compulsion of the incapables, wasting his time in the Mississippi, the Confederates were sending out precious cargoes of cotton and bringing in still more precious ship-loads of cloth, shoes, artillery harness, quinine, arms, ammunition and everything else that ministered to the maintenance of their armies in the field.

Here was another of those blunders of administration which helped to prolong the war to twice its necessary length and subjected the country, North and South, to needless and intolerable burdens. But how should a civilian Secretary of the Navy understand, as Farragut did, the ways in which the navy could be made most effectively to contribute to the ending of the war? A system that puts a Gideon Welles in control of a Farragut must take the consequences of incapacity on the part of its official head.

Welles forbade Farragut to proceed to the conquest and closing of the Confederate ports. He ordered him instead to waste time and energy and human life in futile and fruitless operations in front of Vicksburg, where even the most ordinary intelligence should have seen clearly that the effective work must be done by the land forces, and where Grant and Sherman were ready to do it well.

This judgment does not rest upon the opinion of the author of this history. It is supported in every detail by the skilled criticism of no less a naval authority than Captain Mahan. In his "Farragut," page 116 et seq., that highest authority in naval criticism has written:

"The principal result of an effort undertaken without due consideration was to paralyze a large fraction of a navy too small in numbers to afford the detachment which was paraded gallantly, but uselessly, above New Orleans. Nor was this the worst. The time thus consumed in marching up the hill in order at once to march down again threw away the opportunity for reducing Mobile before its defenses were strengthened. Had the navy been large enough, both tasks might have been attempted; but it will appear in the sequel that its scanty numbers were the reason which postponed the attack on Mobile from month to month until it became the most formidable danger Farragut ever had to encounter."

In other words, the policy of setting a Gideon Welles to direct the naval operations of a Farragut, resulted in making a difficult task out of a very easy one. The fall of New Orleans served to warn the Confederates of the danger in which Mobile lay, and while Welles was keeping Farragut uselessly and against his will in the Mississippi, skilled Confederate engineers were strengthening the Mobile defenses and planting the harbor of that port with destructive mines and torpedoes, so that Farragut's task of closing that port, when months later he was reluctantly permitted to undertake it, was difficult and perilous in the extreme, where it had been simple, easy, and scarcely at all dangerous to ships or seamen at the time when he had asked permission to proceed to its accomplishment.

But the Pinafore practice of setting an untrained, inexperienced and ignorant politician to direct the scientific and strictly professional work of highly trained naval officers, is too firmly imbedded in our system of administration to be disturbed by considerations of mere common-sense. When war is on, the country pays the penalty of this folly.

CHAPTER XXVI
McClellan's Peninsular Advance

We have already seen from his own reports what McClellan thought of the force he was called upon to command at and near Washington after the disastrous defeat of McDowell at Manassas. There was, he said, "no army to command – a mere collection of regiments, cowering on the banks of the Potomac, some perfectly raw, others dispirited by recent defeat, others going home… Washington was crowded with straggling officers and men absent from their stations without authority."

Slowly, patiently, painfully, McClellan brought order out of this chaos of demoralization. Out of the broken and utterly dispirited fragments of McDowell's army and out of the new, raw levies sent to him he created that Army of the Potomac which fought the great campaigns of the war.

In the meantime an ignorant and impatient popular clamor and an unintelligent press "opinion" – for there is a certain type of newspaper editor who is apt to regard his own hasty and ill-informed judgment of things that he knows little or nothing about, as an "opinion" – hounded and persecuted the man who was expected to retrieve the Manassas defeat. Even Mr. Lincoln, with all his patience, became impatient of McClellan's inaction – which was excessive perhaps – and almost angrily urged him to action. He called the general's attention to the fact that he had under his command a force greatly superior in numbers to any that the Confederates could muster and that the country was impatient for an advance.

McClellan seems to have had no thought of making his way to Richmond by the route of Centreville and Manassas, where Johnston lay behind impregnable fortifications. He knew the easier road of approach up the James river from Fortress Monroe as a base of operations. But, at all hazards, the Government, the press and the people insisted, Washington city must be covered and protected, and so McClellan's first care was to feel of the works at Centreville and Manassas before transferring his army down the Potomac and the Chesapeake to Fortress Monroe. Accordingly, on the tenth of March, 1862, he pushed a column forward toward Centreville and Manassas only to find those strongly fortified positions already abandoned. General Johnston had interpreted McClellan's plans aright, and was transferring his army to the Peninsula east of Richmond in order to meet his adversary's confidently-expected advance in that quarter.

There was nothing now, neither defended works nor an opposing army, to forbid McClellan's march upon Richmond by the Manassas route, while it was certain that Johnston was fortifying Williamsburg and other defensible points upon the other route and concentrating his forces there to meet McClellan's advance when it should come.

But McClellan was above all things a man of orderly and methodic mind, a man not to be turned from a pre-arranged plan of action by the offering of any opportunity, however advantageous it might be. So instead of pushing on towards Richmond by the route which his enemy had thus left undefended, he turned about, sent his army by water to Fortress Monroe, and confronted his adversary where that adversary was best prepared at all points to meet him.

In the meanwhile General Burnside had completed the occupation of the southern coast by the seizure of Beaufort, Roanoke, Newberne and Fort Macon, and another Federal force a little later, on the eleventh of April, captured Fort Pulaski, near the mouth of the Savannah river.

After great urgency on the part of Mr. Lincoln, who, in his homely phrase, feared that McClellan's army might "take root" around Washington, that officer at last transferred one hundred and twenty-one thousand men to the neighborhood of Fortress Monroe, with every adjunctive aid that an army could require or make useful. His force outnumbered the Confederates nearly two to one, but it was McClellan's habit of mind to exaggerate the strength of his enemy. It was also his bad habit, as it was Halleck's, to proceed with an exaggerated respect for military "regularity." So instead of pushing forward up the peninsula that lay between the James and the York rivers, and simply running over the vastly inferior forces of his enemy, as a general of enterprising mind would have done, he advanced "scientifically" and with scientific slowness.

The first point of contact was at Yorktown, where General Magruder lay with 13,00 °Confederates, McClellan's army of assault – i.e., his advance force – numbered no less than 58,000 men and 100 guns. According to his custom McClellan enormously overestimated the strength of his adversary, and instead of hurling his superior force upon the Confederate works, or using his fleet to pass them by, as General Johnston expected him to do, he sat down before Yorktown and instituted a regular siege approach by parallels.

Reinforcements came to him daily and even hourly, until he had nearly 120,000 men and more than a hundred guns with which to assail Magruder's scant 13,000 men and less than thirty guns.

But he did not make the assault. Instead he remained inactive for nearly a month before Yorktown with about nine men under his command to his adversary's one, doing nothing energetic or determined. When at last he advanced upon the works which he might have run over on the day of his arrival before them, he found no force defending them and only "dummy" guns in the shape of painted logs occupying their embrasures. Comic opera itself has few situations more ridiculous than was this of McClellan at the end of his month's "siege" of Yorktown, defended through a large part of the siege by less than one man to his nine, and at the last defended only by "quaker" guns, with no men at all behind them.

Finding that the position against which he had so elaborately provided siege appliances was vacated by his enemy, McClellan advanced to Williamsburg, where he encountered actual resistance on the fourth of May and the days following.

Here was one of those situations, of which the war presented so many, which it is difficult to reconcile with our accepted estimates of the military capacity of the generals on either side.

McClellan was moving up the Peninsula, threatening Richmond with about 120,000 men – official reports say 119,965. He had left 70,000 men at or near Washington to protect the capital, and the authorities there had detained 10,000 or 15,000 more for safety. McDowell, with 40,000 men of this force had been pushed forward to Fredericksburg on the Potomac, with the intent that he should make a junction with McClellan before Richmond, swelling that general's force to about 160,000 men. Jackson having been driven back in the valley of Virginia the danger to Washington seemed for the moment past, and Franklin's division had been sent to strengthen McClellan's main column.

In brief, McClellan had almost exactly 120,000 men immediately with him, while 40,000 more under McDowell were moving unopposed from Fredericksburg to join him and swell his army to about 160,000. As McDowell was presently called back for the defense of Washington, in view of the renewal of "Stonewall" Jackson's threatening operations in the Shenandoah Valley, it is only fair to reckon McClellan's force at the 120,000, which his morning reports showed that he had with him below Richmond. Johnston in command at Richmond had rather less than 50,000 men with which to oppose this force.

Deeply feeling his responsibility and the enormous disadvantage at which he was placed, the Confederate general asked for reinforcements. He proposed that all the troops in the Carolinas, where they were in no wise needed, and all in the valley of Virginia, and all at Norfolk and other points from which they could be spared, should be concentrated under his command in front of Richmond, in order that with an adequate force he might assail McClellan, who was in a vulnerable position, and, overcoming him, turn about and crush McDowell.

A council of war, of which General Robert E. Lee was the dominant member, overruled this apparently wise proposal, for reasons that have never been made clear. Thus Johnston, with 50,000 men, was left to defend Richmond against the double advance of McClellan's 120,000 from the east and McDowell's 40,000 from the north.

To do that successfully he must, of course, fall back to the neighborhood of the city and concentrate his force behind the strongest earthworks he could construct. The aggressive measures which he desired to take were wholly out of the question for the time at least.

Nevertheless Magruder made a stubborn stand at Williamsburg, giving Johnston time to fortify. It was only after two days of very severe fighting, and with a loss of 2,200 men against a Confederate loss of 1,800 that McClellan at last forced the Confederate detachment – for it was only a detachment and not a very strong one at that – to fall back from Williamsburg to the main line of defense and join itself to Johnston's army, of which it was a part.

The battle of Williamsburg was strategically of no consequence except as a part of a campaign of delay. It would be an idle waste of space, a needless taxing of the reader's attention, to recount its strategy in detail. It is sufficient to say that after delaying McClellan's advance for two days and inflicting a heavy loss upon him, the Confederates withdrew in good order to the main defenses of Richmond.

McClellan now sent Franklin's division on transports to the White House at the head of the York river, to establish there a secure base of supplies. The whole army followed and by the sixteenth of May it was concentrated there.

This was then the situation. McClellan lay at the White House within twenty-four miles of Richmond. He had more nearly three than two men to his adversary's one under his immediate command and he had an army nearly equal to his enemy's, within two or three days' march ready to reinforce him, or better still, to assail his adversary in flank.

A general of such enterprise as General Sheridan, or General Sherman, or General Grant, or General Thomas, placed in such circumstances, would unquestionably have pressed forward to the assault.

But McClellan's timid imagination swelled Johnston's force of 50,000 or less to 120,000 or more and he hesitated. Instead of pushing forward by the shortest roads to Richmond he scientifically "developed" his force along the Chickahominy river to the north of Richmond, and, after fortifying, made a requisition for reinforcements.

In the meanwhile "Stonewall" Jackson had achieved some brilliant successes in the Shenandoah Valley which so far seemed to threaten Washington with assault, that McDowell's force of 40,000 men was recalled from its march to reinforce McClellan and sent to ward off the danger of an advance upon the Federal capital by that peculiarly energetic and enterprising commander.

But even without McDowell's expected reinforcement, McClellan had greatly more than twice his adversary's force. It is impossible to doubt that if he had been moved by anything like Grant's habitual and determined impulse to "press things" he would promptly have hurled his overwhelming force against his adversary's defensive lines.

McClellan, however, was not Grant nor such as he. He had a superior skill in the theoretical science of war but an immeasurably inferior capacity for war's practical work.

North of Richmond and from five to seven miles distant the Chickahominy river runs in a course almost due east from its source. McClellan placed his main force north of that erratic and uncertain stream and there awaited the reinforcements for which he was clamorously calling. But he threw his left wing across the river to the Richmond side of it. Unless he were prepared to advance at once with all his force and assail the Confederate works this was an exceedingly dangerous thing to do, for the Chickahominy is a phenomenally uncertain and erratic river. In dry weather it is scarcely more than a brook, but in periods of rain – and spring in Virginia is a rainy season – it swells suddenly and quickly to almost impassable proportions, while the swamps that form its banks become morasses in which it is difficult to find even a foothold, and impossible to discover a fit camping place for troops. When McClellan established his left wing south of the river the stream presented no obstacle to its prompt reinforcement from the other side in case of need. But presently the windows of heaven were opened and the fountains of the great deep were broken up. The floods came, and this isolated left wing was cut off and left mainly to its own devices for self-maintenance.

The Confederate General Johnston was quick to see and seize this opportunity. On the morning of the thirty-first of May, he assailed the detached left wing and there resulted the two-days' battle called Fair Oaks at the North, and Seven Pines at the South.

Johnston's force scarcely, if at all, outnumbered the detached left wing of McClellan's army, but his hope was, by determined fighting to cut off that part of McClellan's army from the main body that lay north of the river, and to crush and destroy it before it could be reinforced.

In his first assaults he was conspicuously successful, and had his expectation been realized that McClellan would be unable to reinforce his detached left wing from the other side of the river it is probable that Johnston's operation would have made prisoners of that wing of McClellan's army which lay south of the turbulent river. But two events stood in the way. One of the many frail bridges across the Chickahominy remained, in spite of the floods, as an available means of crossing. Some of its supports had given way under pressure of the waters and it was manifestly tottering to its fall. But General Sumner, ordered to support the imperiled force south of the river, heroically disregarded the danger and pushed his force across the frail and tottering structure, ordering his men to "break step" in the passage in order that the swing of the cadenced step might not cause the bridge to sway and fall. Thus perilously, he crossed, just in time to meet and defeat a Confederate effort to gain control of the bridge and destroy it, thus completely cutting off communication between the two wings of the Union Army.

The second event of importance in this battle was the very serious wounding of General Johnston. He received in his body a bullet, which incapacitated him for months to come for any active service. This was only one of thirteen wounds that Johnston had received during his military career. General Scott had described him as "a most capable officer, who has the bad habit of getting himself wounded," and here again he had indulged in that bad habit to the serious detriment of the cause he served. For when he was wounded the command passed into the hands of General Gustavus W. Smith, ex-Street Commissioner of New York City, whose fitness for so high a command was, to say the very least, problematical. Under his direction the movement by which Johnston had hoped to achieve so much came to naught.

Two days later Robert E. Lee assumed direct command of the Confederate Army at Richmond, and from that hour forth the war took on a new character. One of the two great master minds – Lee and Grant – was at last in control of the means with which the struggle was to be fought out to a finish. The other of those two great master minds was still under the control of distinctly inferior "superiors."

With the advent of Lee to direct command, the terms of the war problem were set anew. He made of the Virginia army such a fighting machine as has rarely been known in the history of the world. It was not until nearly two years later that Grant was permitted to act upon his conviction, repeatedly formulated, that the strength of the Confederacy and the danger to the Union lay, not in the possession of strategic positions, but in the fighting force of that Army of Northern Virginia which responded to every demand of Lee for heroic self-sacrifice, as the needle responds to the attraction of the pole. In the meanwhile Lee and his army were a ceaseless menace to the Federal capital and the Federal cause. From the moment of his accession to command until the hour in which he met Grant at the Wilderness, Lee dictated the course and conduct of the war, and in an extraordinary degree dominated its events.