This Great Struggle (11 page)

THE WAR COMES TO KENTUCKY

By that time, Kentucky was no longer neutral. Lyon’s superior in Missouri was Major General John C. Freémont, commander of the Department of the West. Freémont was a prime example of what historians sometimes call a political general. Every Civil War general was in some sense political since the president who appointed him hoped that his victories would achieve the political goals of the nation and perhaps of the president’s own party as well. Many generals, including professionally trained officers, benefited from having good political connections. A political general, however, was one whom a president appointed to the rank of general directly from civilian life, not because of any victories he was expected to win, though the president certainly hoped he would win victories, but rather because simply having him in uniform, with a general’s insignia on his collar, would increase public support for the war, often in some particular segment of the population. Many Americans believed that military leadership was a natural gift, not something that could be taught at an academy or learned by experience, and they wanted their favorite political heroes to lead them into battle.

Leading small army exploring expeditions in the Far West during the 1840s, Freémont had won popularity as the Pathfinder, though the paths he found were those his guide Kit Carson showed him. He had gained political influence by marrying the daughter of powerful Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton and notoriety by helping to win California during the Mexican War and then being court-martialed for insubordination to a superior officer. Great wealth had come to him when someone had discovered gold on land Freémont owned near Mariposa, California, and the adoration of antislavery Americans when he had declared for free soil and accepted the 1856 Republican presidential nomination. His public reputation made him exactly the sort of great man who many northerners believed would be a natural military leader. As a former Republican presidential candidate, he had political stature Lincoln could not afford to ignore.

Like most political generals, Freémont proved a far better politician than general, and in the end he was not a very good politician. He failed to support Lyon adequately, remaining ensconced in his St. Louis headquarters surrounded by a lavish staff that included foreign officers seeking adventure in the American war. Missourians and midwesterners found them off-putting. Allegations of financial corruption arose, and the War Department began to investigate. Meanwhile, in the aftermath of Wilson’s Creek, Freémont continued to accomplish nothing as a general.

Aware that Lincoln could well be considering removing him, Freémont played to the gallery by issuing a proclamation announcing the imposition of martial law in Missouri and the emancipation of the state’s slaves, a move he had absolutely no authority to make. Abolitionists reacted with delight, but Lincoln realized the proclamation could have disastrous results for the allegiance of wavering Kentuckians in the still-neutral Bluegrass State and wrote Freémont suggesting that he quietly withdraw the proclamation. Instead of doing so, Freémont dispatched his formidable and politically savvy wife to Washington to make his case to Lincoln directly. Jessie Benton Freémont was nothing if not forceful, making implied threats of her husband’s future political opposition—or worse. Lincoln was unmoved, and since Freémont refused to withdraw the proclamation himself, the president issued an order of his own revoking it.

As the Freémonts had intended, abolitionists fumed with rage that their Republican president apparently cared nothing for the freeing of slaves, but they were wrong. Lincoln was eager to do what he could to bring about an end to slavery, but he knew that he would have to do so in a way that would stand up to legal scrutiny (very likely by Roger B. Taney) and that would, he hoped, be acceptable to border-state Unionists. He would bide his time. For the next few months, Lincoln sought by means of suggesting programs of gradual, compensated emancipation, along with the deportation of the freed slaves to Africa or Central America, to persuade border-state Unionists to give up slavery voluntarily, starting a process he hoped would spread to the rebellious states as well.

For the present, Lincoln had prevented Freémont from making a move that would have damaged the Union cause seriously in Kentucky and the other border states. It was a Confederate general who prevented Freémont’s next political blunder by beating him to it. The importance of the Mississippi River was obvious to practically everyone on both sides. The “Father of Waters” was both the great east–west divider of the continent and the great north–south conduit of commerce. The Confederates had on July 28 occupied the town of New Madrid, Missouri, in a bend of the river opposite the Tennessee–Kentucky line, and had begun fortifying it. Freémont noticed another key position, the only place north of Memphis where high bluffs overlooked the Mississippi, fifty miles upstream from New Madrid at Columbus, Kentucky. Freémont ordered a subordinate to occupy it.

Fortunately for the Union cause, Confederate troops under the command of Major General Leonidas Polk got there first. Polk was Freémont’s Confederate equivalent in a number of ways. He was a political general despite having graduated from West Point in 1827, where he was the idol of underclassman Jefferson Davis. He had resigned from the army immediately on graduation to pursue a career as an Episcopal priest, in which he had been a great success and risen to the rank of bishop of Louisiana. Though Polk had never actually held a command in the army and had not so much as picked up a book on military affairs for thirty-four years, Davis commissioned him to the rank of major general directly from civilian life, partially because he hoped that the well-known bishop would boost popular support for the war in the lower Mississippi Valley and partially out of a youthful hero worship toward Polk that Davis never outgrew. Aside from being completely unqualified for his position, Polk’s chief drawback as a general was that he never really saw the need of taking orders from anyone below the rank of God, with Whom he tended to confuse himself. At the beginning of September 1861, he showed his regard for Davis’s announced policy of respecting Kentucky neutrality by marching his troops into the state and occupying those alluring bluffs at Columbus.

The result was outrage among previously nonaligned Kentuckians and consternation among those Kentuckians and Tennesseans who had been working to bring the Bluegrass State into the Confederacy and now saw the ruin of all their efforts. One of them was Tennessee Governor Isham G. Harris, who now frantically telegraphed Richmond to have Polk recalled. Confederate Secretary of War Leroy Pope Walker initially issued a recall order, but Polk ignored it, and presently Davis revoked it, accepting Polk’s claim that it had been a matter of military necessity. With that, the political damage was done. Kentucky might have gone for the Union eventually anyway. Now it did so emphatically, the state legislature demanding that the Confederates withdraw and calling on Union forces to enter the state and help expel the invaders. A few Kentuckians left the state to side with the Confederacy, including Governor Beriah Magoffin and Senator (former U.S. vice president) John C. Breckinridge, but three times as many Kentuckians fought for the Union.

Meanwhile, having incurred the full political cost of being the first to invade Kentucky so as to gain the bluffs overlooking the Mississippi at Columbus, Polk failed to secure the military dividend of his move. Sixty miles east of Columbus the Tennessee River flows through Kentucky on a north– south course. Ten miles farther east, the Cumberland River does the same. Whereas the Mississippi flows from north to south, the Tennessee and Cumberland, here in their lower reaches, flow from south to north. That made no difference to steamboats, including several iron-plated gunboats the Federals were known to be building near St. Louis. Polk was soon fortifying his bluff tops at Columbus with a view to stopping those gunboats, but the vessels could just as easily come up the Tennessee or the Cumberland and open the way for ground forces that could turn (get behind) Polk’s stronghold, forcing the Confederates to retreat to avoid being trapped. Polk recognized the importance of taking control of the other two rivers by seizing the towns at their mouths, Paducah and Smithland, but he waited, and the Union commander beat him to it.

That Union commander was a subordinate of Freémont’s named Ulysses S. Grant. An 1842 West Point graduate, Grant had served creditably in the Mexican War and then been stationed to California. Lacking the independent wealth necessary to bring his wife and family out to the West Coast on a captain’s salary, Grant had grown bored and lonely and had sought solace in drink. Easily intoxicated, Grant in 1854 faced the choice of resigning or being court-martialed and chose the former. For the next seven years, he strove for success in various occupations but found none.

When the war broke out, Grant offered his services to the government and eventually received a commission as colonel in command of a regiment of unruly volunteers. He handled them well, but his advance in rank would have been much slower had his military career not become the particular project of his congressman, Elihu B. Washburne. Political backing could help good generals as well as bad ones. As a subordinate of Freémont’s, Grant commanded Union troops in southern Illinois with his headquarters in Cairo, at the confluence of the Mississippi and the Ohio, the southernmost town in the free states. He had just taken over his new assignment in Cairo when he learned of Polk’s incursion into Kentucky at Columbus. He saw both the threat and the opportunity and immediately occupied Paducah and Smithland. Applauded as a liberator by the Kentucky legislature, Grant left Polk with all the political cost of having broken Kentucky neutrality and none of the military benefits.

Years later, Grant would sum up his philosophy of war: “Get at the enemy as quick as you can; hit him as hard as you can, and keep moving on.” He lost no time putting that philosophy into practice in his new command. A small Confederate cavalry foray into southwestern Missouri gave Grant the excuse he needed to make an attempt on Columbus, presenting it to Freémont as a diversion to keep the Confederates away from Union forces in Missouri. As a first step he took his small force of about three thousand men down the Mississippi from Cairo in riverboats, supported by two of the navy’s gunboats (earlier models protected with heavy oaken planks rather than iron plates), and attacked the Confederate encampment at Belmont, Missouri, just across the river from Columbus.

After overrunning the Rebel position at Belmont, Grant’s inexperienced volunteers broke ranks to celebrate their victory. Their equally inexperienced officers, including Illinois Democratic politician John A. McClernand, encouraged them, making Fourth-of-July-style speeches. While this went on, more Rebels crossed the river from Columbus and got between Grant’s force and its steamboats. Cut off and badly outnumbered, some of Grant’s officers suggested they ought to surrender, but Grant calmly replied that as they had cut their way in, so they would cut their way out again. And so they did, amid fierce fighting, regaining the steamboats and returning to Cairo. Grant’s first attempt to take Columbus had failed, but his men had learned something— both about warfare and about their commander.

BALL’S BLUFF AND THE JOINT COMMITTEE ON THE CONDUCT OF THE WAR

Meanwhile back in the East, McClellan continued to drill his splendid Army of the Potomac, but he did not undertake any offensive movement toward the Confederates whose flags could be seen from the U.S. capital at their forward outposts at Mason’s and Munson’s hills, just a few miles south of the Potomac. Confederate batteries on the Virginia shore downstream from Washington made navigation of the Potomac too dangerous for unarmed vessels without heavy naval escort, effectively cutting off the capital’s contact with the sea. Yet despite the beautiful fall campaigning weather with crisp temperatures and cloudless skies that kept Virginia’s dirt roads dry and firm, McClellan left his magnificent army in its camps. Admiration for the young general’s stirring martial appearance and obvious love for all the pomp and circumstance of war began to wear thin for some of the more aggressive-minded Republican politicians in Washington.

“All quiet along the Potomac,” read the general’s regular communiqueés to the War Department. In the weeks immediately following Bull Run, those missives had been reassuring, both to the administration and to the public, which had read them in the next day’s newspapers. By late summer, some people were reading that line with distinctly sardonic overtones. Ethel Lynn Beers of New York saw the phrase in a newspaper one morning in September and noticed just below it a small item about a picket (soldier on outpost duty beyond the front line) being killed. The ironic juxtaposition moved her to compose a poem titled “All Quiet along the Potomac Tonight,” lamenting the picket’s death on a night when the high command deemed that nothing significant had happened in the war. It was a poignant reminder that while the largest armies on each side sat idly regarding each other’s advanced positions through field glasses and peace and victory came no nearer, the nation was still at war, ordinary men were still dying, and families suffered the absence and possible loss of loved ones.
Harper’s Weekly
magazine published the poem November 30, 1861. Later it was set to music.

By the time Beers’s poem appeared in
Harper’s
, the situation expressed in its title had become a very bitter one to many in Washington and elsewhere, and a good deal more than the “stray picket” had become casualties. Along the Potomac, upstream from Washington, scattered outposts of troops kept watch on America’s new internal frontier: Confederates on or within a few miles of the south bank and Federals on the north. On October 19 McClellan ordered Brigadier General George McCall to take his division and reconnoiter across the Potomac to the town of Dranesville, Virginia, about twenty miles northwest of Washington. McClellan also suggested to Brigadier General Charles Stone, commanding a division farther up the Potomac, diverting attention from McCall by making “perhaps some slight demonstration,” or diversion, against the Rebel forces near Leesburg, Virginia, fifteen miles to the northwest of Dranesville.