GRANT'S STRATEGY--THE RED RIVER CAMPAIGN--FORT PILLOW, ETC.
The operations of the Confederate war covered a vast area, and included
a multitude of actions severe in themselves, and often rising to
the dignity of great battles so far, at least, as the extent of the
slaughter was concerned. But many of these actions had no particular
bearing or effect upon the general conduct and outcome of the war. To
tell the story of them all would not only be tedious, but it would
make this history a confused mass of only slightly related details
rather than a consecutive narrative of what happened. It is necessary,
therefore, to summarize many things which in themselves were dramatic
in their character and of the highest importance to the men engaged in
them.
The detachment of Longstreet to operate against Burnside at Knoxville
has already been mentioned in the previous chapter. There was some
brilliant fighting there, in which the Federals succeeded in beating
off Longstreet's tremendous assault, but only after suffering one
conspicuous defeat at the hands of the great Confederate lieutenant.
In like manner the expedition of Banks in command of 40,000 Federals
into the Red River country, west of the Mississippi, had no important
bearing upon the war except in so far as it resulted in depriving
Grant for a time of the services of 40,000 veterans whose soldierly
vigor he could have used to much better purpose.
This Red River expedition was inspired by cotton speculators for their
own purposes of greed. It was intended to enable them to get possession
of the great stores of cotton that lay in Louisiana and Texas. The
expedition consisted of the army under Banks--a political general of
far better military capacity than most political generals had--and a
fleet of gunboats under that noted fighter, Commodore David D. Porter.
Banks's army was opposed by a much smaller force of Confederates under
General Richard Taylor, who nevertheless defeated it in an irregular
action and drove it into a confused retreat which must have ended in
surrender but for the protection of Porter's gunboats. Banks retreated
painfully along the margin of the tortuous stream, nowhere daring
to quit the gunboats' support even in order to save weary miles of
marching around the bends in the river.
This expedition was ordered before Grant took command of all the
armies. It was one of the many foolish blunders with the results of
which the great Federal commander had to reckon and wrestle when he
came into his own. As the spring of 1864 approached something happened
which was of more importance to the Federal cause than any battle could
be, or the success of any campaign. Congress and the administration
recognized Grant as the great leader that he was, and gave him that
authority of command which alone he needed in order to make an end of
the struggle. On the twenty-sixth of February a bill passed by Congress
revived the grade of lieutenant general in the army. Grant was promptly
nominated for that office, and confirmed in it by the Senate on the
second day of March. On the third he was ordered to Washington, and on
the ninth Mr. Lincoln delivered to him his commission as lieutenant
general, with authority to direct the operations of all the Federal
armies in whatever part of the country they might be stationed.
Oddly enough in thus bringing to the front and giving command to
the only general who had shown adequate capacity to direct the war
to a successful conclusion, the administration still retained as
its adjutant general that conspicuously incapable person, General
Halleck, who had done more than all other men and all other influences
combined to interfere with Grant's work in the war, to prevent him
from accomplishing the ends he sought in behalf of his country, and
to fritter away the fruits of his victories after he had won them.
The shade of Winfield Scott still held in mortmain its strange
influence over the Washington authorities. And General Grant's personal
memoirs--though they make no complaint of this absurdity--very clearly
show, that in the gigantic combinations which he was now called upon
to make, he was often seriously embarrassed by this continuance of an
authority to interfere in many ways with his plans.
The advent of Grant to the command of all the armies in the field
wrought a revolution instantly and conspicuously in the conduct of
the war. He had no sympathy whatever with the "pepper box policy."
From the very beginning he had clearly seen that the strength of the
Southern Confederacy lay in the fighting capacity of its armies.
He had clearly seen that the problems of this war were not mainly
geographical--that the occupation of this, that or the other position
was of small consequence, except in so far as it tended to weaken the
tremendous fighting force of that "best infantry on earth" which was
defending Richmond on the one hand, and threatening Washington on the
other.
Now that he had come into supreme command it was his first thought so
to organize and coördinate all the operations of all the armies as to
make them tend to the accomplishment of one supreme purpose--namely,
the breaking and crushing of the Confederate power of resistance.
As that power of resistance was centered chiefly in the Army of
Northern Virginia, and in the genius of Robert E. Lee, Grant's grand
combinations were all directed toward the destruction of that army, and
the baffling of that genius.
As has been said already Grant was preëminently a man of practical
common sense, and to his mind military problems were like any others
that present themselves to the human mind--that is to say, they were
problems, to be solved by the use of the means at command in the
most effective way that could be thought of. War was to him like any
other business. He knew that the administration had at its command,
in men, money and materials, resources immeasurably superior to those
which the South could control. It was his purpose to avail himself
of that superiority in every way possible. In all that involved
considerations of humanity or courtesy he had the delicate sentiments
of a tender-hearted and generous man. But in the conduct of war he did
not permit sentiment for one moment to interfere with common sense.
The strategy with which he undertook to fight the war out to a finish
was simple. His "objective" was always the army opposed to him, and
not merely a geographical position. In all his orders to all his
lieutenants he emphasized this incessantly. In order to end the war he
must crush the Confederate armies, and to that effect he instructed
Sherman and every other commander under his orders.
Grant established his headquarters in Virginia in order that he might
give personal direction to the operations of the Army of the Potomac.
He did this with a most delicate consideration for Meade, who had
direct command of the Army of the Potomac, and whose devotion and
capacity he trusted implicitly, as he has himself testified in his
memoirs.
It was his simple plan of campaign first to prevent Lee's reinforcement
from any quarter, and secondly to hurl all the force he could
concentrate against the Army of Northern Virginia for the purpose of
destroying the resisting power of that army. In his judgment it was
more important to cripple Lee than to capture Richmond. And in his
judgment, also, to cripple Lee was to make the capture of Richmond easy
and certain.
In order that Lee might not be reinforced, Grant began by issuing
orders for vigorous operations in every other part of the Confederacy.
He ordered Banks to withdraw from his wasteful cotton-seeking
expedition up the Red river, to return to New Orleans, and to
move thence against Mobile. He ordered Sherman to press back the
Confederates in northern Georgia toward Atlanta, directing him to seize
that town, and push on to the Gulf, thus again cutting in twain what
remained of the Confederacy.
The military situation at this time could not be more clearly set forth
than it was by General Grant himself, in his memoirs written long
afterwards. In aid of a clear understanding his exact words are quoted
here:
The Mississippi river was guarded from St. Louis to its mouth; the
line of the Arkansas was held, thus giving us all of the northwest
north of that river. A few points in Louisiana, not remote from
the river, were held by the Federal troops, as was also the mouth
of the Rio Grande. East of the Mississippi we held substantially
all north of the Memphis and Charleston railroad, as far east as
Chattanooga, thence along the line of the Tennessee and Holston
rivers, taking in nearly all of the State of Tennessee. West
Virginia was in our hands; and that part of old Virginia, north of
the Rapidan and east of the Blue Ridge we also held. On the sea
coast we had Fortress Monroe and Norfolk in Virginia, Plymouth,
Washington and New Berne in North Carolina, Beaufort and Folly
and Morris Islands, Hilton Head, Port Royal and Fort Pulaski in
South Carolina and Georgia, Fernandina, St. Augustine, Key West
and Pensacola in Florida. The balance of the southern territory,
an empire in extent, was still in the hands of the enemy. Sherman,
who had succeeded me in the command of the military division of the
Mississippi, commanded all the troops in the territory west of the
Alleghanies and north of Natchez, with a large movable force about
Chattanooga.
* * * * *
In the east the opposing forces stood in substantially the same
relations towards each other as three years before or when the war
began. They were both between the Federal and Confederate capitals.
It is true footholds had been secured by us in Virginia and North
Carolina, but beyond that no substantial advantage had been gained
on either side.
* * * * *
That portion of the Army of the Potomac not engaged in guarding
lines of communication was on the northern bank of the Rapidan.
The Army of Northern Virginia, confronting it on the opposite bank
of the same river was strongly entrenched, and commanded by the
acknowledged ablest general in the Confederate army.
* * * * *
The Union armies were now divided into nineteen departments,
though four of them in the west had been concentrated into a
single military division. The Army of the Potomac was a separate
command, and had no territorial limits. There were thus seventeen
distinct commanders. Before this time these various armies had
acted separately and independently of each other, giving the
enemy an opportunity often of depleting one command, not pressed
to reinforce another more actively engaged. I determined to stop
this. To this end I regarded the Army of the Potomac as the center,
and all west to Memphis, along the line described as our position
at the time, and the north of it, the right wing; the Army of
the James, under General Butler (with headquarters at Fortress
Monroe), as the left wing, and all the troops south as a force in
rear of the enemy. Some of these latter were occupying positions
from which they could not render service proportionate to their
numerical strength. All such were depleted to the minimum necessary
to hold their positions as a guard against blockade runners; where
they could not do this their positions were abandoned altogether.
In this way 10,000 men were added to the Army of the James from
South Carolina alone, with General Gillmore in command. Officers
and soldiers on furlough, of whom there were many thousands, were
ordered to their proper commands; concentration was the order of
the day.
* * * * *
As a reinforcement to the Army of the Potomac, or to act in support
of it, the Ninth army corps, over 20,000 strong, under General
Burnside, had been rendezvoused at Annapolis, Maryland. This was
an admirable position for such a reinforcement. The corps could be
brought at the last moment as a reinforcement to the Army of the
Potomac, or it could be thrown on the sea coast south of Norfolk,
in Virginia or North Carolina, to operate against Richmond from
that direction.
* * * * *
My general plan now was to concentrate all the force possible
against the Confederate armies in the field. There were but two
such, as we have seen, east of the Mississippi river, and facing
north. The Army of Northern Virginia, General Robert E. Lee
commanding, was on the south bank of the Rapidan, confronting the
Army of the Potomac. The second, under Joseph E. Johnston, was at
Dalton, Ga., opposed to Sherman, who was still at Chattanooga.
Beside these main armies the Confederates had to guard the
Shenandoah valley, a great storehouse to feed their armies from,
and their line of communications from Richmond to Tennessee.
Forrest, a brave and intrepid cavalry general, was in the West
with a large force, making a larger command necessary to hold what
we had gained in middle and west Tennessee. We could not abandon
any territory north of the line held by the enemy, because it
would lay the Northern states open to invasion. But as the Army
of the Potomac was the principal garrison for the protection of
Washington, even while it was moving on Lee, so all the forces to
the west and the Army of the James guarded their special trusts
when advancing from them, as well as when remaining at them.
* * * * *
Accordingly I arranged for a simultaneous movement all along the
line. Sherman was to move from Chattanooga, Johnston and Atlanta
being his objective points. Crooke, commanding in West Virginia,
was to move from the mouth of the Gauley river, with a cavalry
force and some artillery, the Virginia and Tennessee railroad to be
his objective. Sigel was in command in the Valley of Virginia. He
was to advance up the Valley, covering the North from an invasion
through that channel, as well by advancing as by remaining near
Harper's Ferry. Every mile he advanced also, gave us possession
of stores on which Lee relied. Butler was to advance by the James
River, having Richmond and Petersburg as his objective.
* * * * *
Banks, in the department of the Gulf, was ordered to assemble all
the troops he had at New Orleans in time to join in the general
move, Mobile to be his objective.
Now for the first time in the entire history of the war a single
masterful mind was in control of all the operations of all the vast
armies of the United States, and was trying to direct all those
operations with singleness of purpose to a foreordained end. The coming
of Grant into command thus marks an epoch in the history of the war.
Some of his lieutenants did their work incompetently, thus in a degree
baffling his purpose, but in the main those whom he had wisely selected
for command did that which he required of them in masterly fashion.
Sigel, who was to advance up the Valley of Virginia, and break the
communications between Tennessee and the Confederate capital, failed
utterly. In profound disgust, General Grant received from Halleck a
dispatch saying, "Sigel is in full retreat on Strasbourg. He will do
nothing but run; never did anything else."
Banks also failed to place his army of 40,000 men at New Orleans in
time to help in the grand strategy which Grant had inaugurated.
Butler got himself "bottled up," as General Grant phrased it, on the
south side of the James river, so that while he held a strong defensive
position there, he was unable to employ his troops aggressively
with effect. But the rest of Grant's subordinates--and especially
Sherman--carried out their orders with brilliant capacity and
tremendous effect.
While Grant was thus preparing for his grand campaign, the Confederates
were not idle. With forces greatly inferior in number and equipment,
and with an exhausted country behind him, Lee stood upon the
defensive, waiting to see what his adversary might undertake, and what
opportunities might open themselves to him for offensive defense.
In the meanwhile that most active and tireless of campaigners, General
N. B. Forrest, went upon a raid in West Tennessee and Kentucky
which, for a time, seriously threatened an invasion of the North and
a disturbance of General Grant's plans. Sweeping northward like a
hurricane, Forrest captured the Federal garrison of 500 men at Union
City in Tennessee, wrecked railroads in every direction, and pushed his
column daringly to Paducah, Kentucky, on the banks of the Ohio, fifty
miles above Cairo. Sherman sent all his cavalry and other available
troops to check this movement, and if possible to make an end of
Forrest by capturing him and his force. But Forrest was too quick
for him. Rapidly falling back, he assailed the Federal fort on the
Mississippi river, known as Fort Pillow. That fortress was held by
negro troops, and the Southerners had never yet consented to regard the
employment of such troops as legitimate in this war.
Here it is necessary to explain. The enlistment of negroes in military
service was no new thing in American war. During the Revolution, and
even before it, the statutes of South Carolina and of some of the other
colonies specifically provided for such enlistments, and in South
Carolina, at least, the law made it an offense for the master of any
slave to refuse his service to the country as a soldier. Again during
the war of 1812-1815, Andrew Jackson made free use of vigorous young
negroes, enlisting them as soldiers wherever he could find them, and
appealing to their patriotism to support with manly determination the
independence of the only country they could call their own.
But in the Confederate war a different condition of affairs existed.
From the beginning of the struggle the Confederates employed negroes
to work upon fortifications, and although they did not enlist them
as soldiers, this employment of them amounted to much the same thing
in so far as it released an equal number of enlisted men for active
work in the field. So general was the prejudice against any and every
recognition of negro equality at the North as well as at the South,
that many newspaper writers at the North--ignorant of the history
of their own country with respect to the military employment of
negroes--bitterly denounced all this, insisting that the Confederates
were employing savages in arms against a civilized enemy. That plea
was apt to be an effective one in this country, for the reason that
from the beginning of the colonial struggles until the end of the war
of 1812-1815 it had been one of America's grievances against Great
Britain that agents of the mother country had mercilessly employed Red
Indian savages in murderous warfare upon the white men.
When, later in the war, it was decided at the North to arm and use as
soldiers such able-bodied negroes as might be induced to volunteer,
the recruits were naturally drawn in the main from the large companies
of runaway slaves who had escaped into the Federal lines. This fact
gave to the military employment of negroes against the South the
aspect of an attempt to create a servile insurrection and war--the one
thing which had been always most dreaded in those states in which the
negroes outnumbered the whites. Servile insurrection was understood to
mean rapine, the burning of homes, the butchery of women and little
children, and all else of horror that savage warfare may signify. The
Southerners therefore held the enlistment of negroes in the Northern
armies to be an act of unforgivable vandalism and savagery. They
peremptorily refused to recognize the negro anywhere as a soldier, or
in case of his capture to treat him as a prisoner of war.
In execution of that purpose of absolute and unflinching historical
truthfulness which the author of this work has tried to make his only
inspiration, it must be said that in many cases, and particularly on
occasions of raids into undefended country, certain of the negro
troops did many things to justify the Southern view of the iniquity
of their employment against white men. In regions undefended they
frequently committed outrages of a kind which the instincts of humanity
never forgive.
It is proper here to emphasize again the fact to which the present
historian directed earnest attention in a work published in
1874--namely, that throughout the war, when all the Southern white men
were in the field, and when all the plantations with the women and
children inhabiting their homes were unprotected, the negro slaves who
remained upon the plantations were affectionately loyal and obedient,
nowhere instituting insurrection or in any other wise betraying the
trust reposed in their fidelity and affection, and this in spite of
the fact that they perfectly knew that the failure of the South in
the War must result in their own emancipation. Emphasis is here given
to this fact in order that nothing recorded concerning the atrocities
committed by certain negro troops shall impair or reflect upon the
negro character generally.
But from beginning to end the Confederates refused to recognize the
right of their enemy to enlist their runaway slaves in the war against
them. From first to last they refused to regard negroes as soldiers,
entitled to be treated as such. So returning to our theme, it must
be said that when Forrest found Fort Pillow garrisoned chiefly by
negro troops, even had he desired it to be otherwise, he could not
have prevented the slaughter that ensued. His men simply would not
make prisoners of war out of negroes in arms, and the result of the
struggle was a Federal loss of about 500 killed together with nearly
all their officers, while the Confederates according to Forrest's
report lost only about twenty men. In his dispatches, written at
that time of excitement, Forrest said, "It is hoped that these facts
will demonstrate to the Northern people that negro soldiers cannot
cope with Southerners." His words have since been construed to mean
a blood-thirsty antagonism to the negroes. That construction may be
correct, but General Forrest himself contended to the end of his
life that he meant only to point out the ease with which Southern
soldiers conquered and destroyed this negro force as illustrating the
inefficiency of black men in fighting white men. That meaning would
seem to be the only one which it is necessary to give to the language
of his dispatch.
Other minor operations during the period of preparation for the
tremendous struggle of 1864 were carried on in different parts of the
South with results that had no important bearing upon the general
course of the contest or upon its outcome. These operations need not be
more particularly mentioned here.