Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction (64 page)

Just as had happened at Chancellorsville, Lee now had the Army of the Potomac on the ropes and was ready to deliver the knockout blow. This time, though, he had sustained so many losses in killed, wounded, and missing that the blow would have to be struck with the only uncommitted division he had left, one of Virginians from Longstreet’s corps under Major General George E. Pickett, supported by North Carolinians from Hill’s depleted corps—approximately 10,500 men in all—against the center of the Union line of battle. By the example of the British attack on the Alma in 1854, this should have swept the Army of the Potomac from the heights of Gettysburg. Instead, Pickett’s charge turned into a reverse of Fredericksburg. The Confederates were compelled to cross almost a mile of open ground under a murderous fire of artillery, then confront the fire of Federal infantry from the 2nd Corps of the Army of the Potomac, who were convinced that the outcome of the war was resting on their shoulders. Although a few Confederates managed to reach the Union line and punch a small hole in it, the overall attack collapsed, with the loss of more than 1,100 killed and 4,500 wounded. By the end of the day, it was at last evident to Lee
that he could not dislodge Meade from his position at Gettysburg. With his supplies and ammunition badly depleted, and almost 28,000 casualties from the three days of fighting, Lee wearily ordered the Army of Northern Virginia to retreat.
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After ten months of almost unrelieved bad news from the battlefield, the news of Gettysburg came as welcome relief to the North. In the Confederacy, it shattered the image of Lee’s invincibility and raised questions for the first time about Lee’s capabilities as a field commander. On August 8, assuming full responsibility for the defeat at Gettysburg, Lee offered Jefferson Davis his resignation. Davis refused, but at the same time, Lee would never again have complete control of Davis’s military policy, and in September Davis would detach Longstreet’s corps from the Army of Northern Virginia and send it west to reinforce Braxton Bragg. “One brief month ago,” wept Josiah Gorgas into his journal on July 28, “we were apparently at the point of success. Lee was in Pennsylvania, threatening Harrisburgh, and even Philadelphia. Vicksburg seemed to laugh all Grant’s efforts to scorn.” Now, the “picture is just as somber as it was bright then. … The Confederacy totters to its destruction.”
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At almost the same time, a Confederate officer in the Army of Northern Virginia wrote a similar lament in his diary:

Another month has passed and the results are perhaps more disastrous than even Feby. ’62. Vicksburg, Port Hudson & Gettysburg have been fought and leave a gloom on the country. Unless unceasing success attends the Confederate arms, fits of despondency at once overhang every community. Even the army grows despondent, and evidence of demoralization are visible. More desertions than usual are occurring. Rumors of renewed difficulties in the South are circulating.
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For Lincoln, however, Gettysburg offered only limited consolations. Although he was jubilant at Meade’s victory, he waited in vain to hear of Meade pursuing and destroying the defeated Lee. Instead, Meade, in a manner tiringly reminiscent of McClellan, rested his men and then cautiously set off in a perfunctory pursuit of the Army of Northern Virginia. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia crossed the Potomac River on July 14, and after that, any hope that Meade would finish him off disappeared. Lincoln would have to keep on looking for the general who would fight and win the kind of war that he had in mind.

Vicksburg fell to Grant the day after Meade’s victory at Gettysburg, and the conjunction of the two events gave the North its happiest weekend in two years of war. Still, the repulse of Lee’s invasion of Pennsylvania and the reopening of the Mississippi probably meant a good deal less in strategic terms than they seemed to. Although Gettysburg had inflicted severe wounds on the Army of Northern Virginia, Meade’s failure to pursue Lee only ensured that the same cycle of invasions, retreats, and counterinvasions would have to begin all over again in the fall of 1863 or the spring of 1864. As for the Mississippi River, the anxiety Lincoln felt about reopening the entire length of the river to the Gulf was generated by his youthful memories of how dependent Western farmers had always been on the Mississippi for transporting their surpluses to market, and by the croaking of western governors such as Oliver Perry Morton of Indiana, who was convinced that his legislature would vote to secede and join the Confederacy unless the Mississippi was reopened.
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Lincoln’s memories were a generation old in 1863, and the mature Lincoln’s association as a lawyer with the railroads provided telling evidence of a dramatic shift in market transportation away from the north-south axis of the Mississippi River Valley and toward the east-west axis of the railroads, which now brought goods more swiftly to Chicago and New York than the steamboat could bring them to New Orleans. Even as Vicksburg bitterly surrendered to Grant, resourceful Northern farmers had already begun to turn to the railroads as their preferred means of shipment to market, and Mississippi River traffic never again regained the heights it had attained before 1861.

Of course, the conquest of the Mississippi did pay the Union a few dividends. The Confederates surrendered an entire army at Vicksburg—nearly 29,000 men—and the loss of the Mississippi cut them off from Texas, Arkansas, and most of Louisiana. But Braxton Bragg’s rebel Army of Tennessee was still intact and dangerous in middle Tennessee; what was more, none of the regions cut off by the capture of the Mississippi had been a critical source of supply for the Confederacy anyway. Whatever their loss did to damage the Confederate war effort, it did not prevent the Confederacy from waging war for almost two more years. In fact, the real heart of the Confederacy’s power to carry on the war—its factories, its granaries, its rail centers—never had lain along Halleck’s or Grant’s lines of operation on the Tennessee or the Mississippi. They lay, instead, in upper Alabama and Georgia, around the critical rail centers of Chattanooga and Atlanta, where the remaining pieces of the Confederacy’s two lateral rail lines still intersected, and around the new government-run gun foundries and ironworks at Selma and the great powder works in Augusta. This meant that the real line of successful operations for the Union in 1862 and 1863
would have to be the same eastern Tennessee line that McClellan had vainly urged Buell to follow back in January 1862.

A good deal more might have been made of this had not Buell shown himself no more eager to pursue his chances in 1862 than McClellan had been. In the spring of 1862, he had pretty much taken McClellan’s view of the war by announcing, “We are in arms, not for the purpose of invading the rights of our fellow-countrymen anywhere, but to maintain the integrity of the Union and protect the Constitution.” He had defeated Braxton Bragg at Perryville in October 1862, only to let Bragg retreat unscathed while Buell composed criticisms of the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln and the War Department had seen all they wanted to see of this kind of behavior from field officers, and on October 24, 1862, Buell was unceremoniously replaced by Major General William Starke Rosecrans. It would now be up to Rosecrans to finish the long-delayed conquest of eastern Tennessee, seize Chattanooga and Atlanta, and drive a stake into the heart of Georgia and Alabama.
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Like so many other high-ranking Union officers, Rosecrans was a West Point graduate, class of 1842, who served in the prestigious Corps of Engineers until 1854 (including a stint teaching at West Point from 1843 to 1847), when he resigned and opened up his own business as an architect and engineer. Unlike many of the others, however, Rosecrans was a Democrat and a Roman Catholic (his brother was a bishop), which made him an object of suspicion in an overwhelmingly Protestant culture. James A. Garfield, one of Rosecrans’s brigadiers and a radical evangelical preacher, sat up into the wee hours of many mornings with Rosecrans, “talking constantly and incessantly for hours on religion.” To Lincoln, any Union man with those credentials was a political godsend who could be used to rally Northern Democrats and working-class immigrants, and Rosecrans suddenly found himself rewarded in 1861 with a brigadier general’s commission. He served briefly (and not entirely happily) under Grant, and conducted a successful defense of Corinth from a rebel attempt to recapture that key Mississippi railroad junction in 1862. A serious student of strategy, paternal and well loved by every brigade and division he had ever commanded, Rosecrans now took over Buell’s 46,900 men, gave them the name “Army of the Cumberland,” and on December 26 moved south out of Nashville after Bragg.
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Braxton Bragg, meanwhile, had nearly gone the same way as Buell. Bragg was gravely hampered by an assortment of physical ills, ranging from nightmarish
headaches to abdominal cramps, which made him quarrelsome with subordinates and a disciplinary fiend to his soldiers. After Perryville, rather than risk chances with a fresh invasion of Kentucky, Bragg went into winter quarters at Murfreesboro, Tennessee, approximately forty miles south of Nashville along Stone’s River. When Davis visited Bragg and the Army of Tennessee at Murfreesboro in early December 1862, Davis was delighted to see that Bragg’s men were “in good condition and fine spirits.”
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Bragg was soon given a chance to use the Army of Tennessee to redeem his reputation. The combative Rosecrans and the Army of the Cumberland moved down to within two miles of Bragg’s lines around Murfreesboro on December 30, and the next day, both armies planned to leap at each other’s throats in simultaneous attacks. In the event, however, the Confederates moved first, catching Rosecrans’s right flank still at breakfast and scattering it backward for three miles. The battle might well have been lost right there had not Rosecrans personally rode down the lines and rallied his men in the face of Confederate fire. When his chief of staff protested against exposing himself, Rosecrans merely replied, “Never mind me. Make the sign of the cross and go in.” As for Bragg, the Confederate commander kept on feeding his divisions into the fight piece by piece, feeling all along Rosecrans’s battered lines for a weakness. Somehow the Federals held on: one Federal division under a scrappy Irishman named Philip Sheridan lost all three of its brigade commanders and almost one-third of its men, but it slowed Bragg’s attack on the center of the Union line to a halt by midday. At other points, the Federals managed to repel Confederate attacks with nothing more than odds and ends of cavalry and, in one instance, members of Rosecrans’s own headquarters escort. By the time darkness fell, each army had lost close to a third of its men as casualties.
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Bragg immediately jumped to the conclusion that he had won a great victory, and he telegraphed Richmond that Rosecrans was falling back. Rosecrans himself was inclined to agree. But his three corps commanders disagreed; one of them, George Henry Thomas, snapped, “This army can’t retreat. … I know of no better place to die than right here.” When Bragg awoke the next morning, New Year’s Day, the Army of the Cumberland was still there. On January 2, Bragg launched a second series of attacks, hoping to prod Rosecrans into the withdrawal that Bragg presumed he ought to be making. Instead, by the end of the day, it was Bragg who became convinced that he had lost the fight and ought to retreat, and during the night of
January 3, 1863, Bragg began pulling out of Murfreesboro for another camp twenty miles south.
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Murfreesboro was, like Shiloh, more like a simple slugfest than a model of tactical brilliance, but it temporarily made Rosecrans a national hero all the same. Bragg, meanwhile, was assailed by a mounting tide of criticism from his own officers for uselessly throwing away a victory. Just as at Perryville, at Murfreesboro Bragg demonstrated a fatal incapacity to perform under the stress of combat, and his abrupt decision to retreat was due at least in part to a simple loss of nerve. As one of Bragg’s disgusted subordinates remarked, Bragg could easily fight his way straight up to the gates of Heaven, but once there would doubtless order a withdrawal. One division commander in the Army of Tennessee, Benjamin F. Cheatham, vowed never to serve under Bragg again. Another, the Irish-born Patrick Cleburne, politely informed Bragg that no one really trusted his military judgment anymore: “I have consulted all my Brigade commanders… and they write with me in personal regard for yourself, in a high appreciation of your patriotism and gallantry… but at the same time they see, with regret, and it has also met my observation, that you do not possess the confidence of the Army, in other respects, in that degree necessary to secure success.”
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At this point, even President Davis was ready to relieve him of command, and in March 1863 Davis tried to persuade Joseph E. Johnston to take over Bragg’s command. Johnston declined Davis’s suggestion, however, and Davis took that as a sign that Bragg had been severely misjudged by his subordinates. Accordingly, Davis decided to grant Bragg one more reprieve, and in March he even allowed Bragg to court-martial one of his critics, Major General John Porter McCown, who had loudly threatened to leave the Army of the Tennessee and go back to farming potatoes until Bragg was relieved.
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The situation for the western Confederacy might have looked even bleaker had not Bragg’s failures been partly compensated for by the spectacular achievements of one of Bragg’s cavalry brigadiers, Nathan Bedford Forrest. By the end of 1862, Forrest had emerged as the single most daring and successful light cavalry officer of the Civil War: in July 1862, leading only 1,400 cavalry troopers, Forrest raided Buell’s supply lines, “captured two brigadier-generals, staff and field officers, and 1,200 men; burnt $200,000 worth of stores; captured sufficient stores with those burned to amount to $500,000, and brigade of 60 wagons, 300 mules, 150 or 200 horses, and field battery of four pieces.” In December 1862, he led a new brigade of
2,100 cavalrymen on a destructive joyride through middle Tennessee that, in two weeks, destroyed fifty bridges along the Mobile & Ohio Railroad, killed or captured 2,500 Federal pursuers, captured ten pieces of artillery and enough Enfield rifles to reequip his own men (with 500 rifles to spare), and generally made a shambles of the Federal occupation of middle Tennessee. “Forrest’s cavalry seemed to be ubiquitous,” rejoiced one Tennessee rebel. “The Federals never knew when he would appear upon their flanks or in their rear.”
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