v1.1.2 / chapter 4 of 93 / 01 oct 09 / greg goebel / public domain
* The early stages of the war were highly political, with both sides working to bring undecided states, such as Kentucky and Missouri, over to their cause. Real fighting had yet to begin; there was a popular belief that once the shooting started in earnest the war would be quickly decided, but there were those, such as Winfield Scott, who believed this an illusion and were making plans for a long war.
That the war was going to be complicated was already becoming apparent to those who could appreciated details. In one of the first significant military campaigns of the war, Union forces helped the anti-secessionist counties of western Virginia break away from their home state, leading to the creation of the state of West Virginia under legal reasoning that even a good Unionist might find at least a bit peculiar. In a bit of equally innovative legal reasoning, Ben Butler established as a principle that the Union could seize slaves from slaveowners serving the Confederate war machine, with the slaves labelled "contraband of war".
* While Maryland was being secured for the Union, the struggle for the border states of Kentucky and Missouri was just beginning to take shape. In such deeply divided states, the notion of secession was particularly, dangerously troublesome.
Governor Beriah Magoffin of Kentucky was secessionist, but the Kentucky legislature was not. Both the secessionist and Unionist factions in Kentucky were engaged in quietly building up their own militias. The secessionist militia was led by Brigadier General Simon Bolivar Buckner, while the Unionist militia was led by an energetic gorilla-sized bully of a man named William Nelson. Nelson was a Navy lieutenant who had decided to throw his weight for the Union in Kentucky, smuggling in arms and taking other measures. He was made an Army brigadier general as a reward. That was an unusual promotion path to say the least, but unusual times dictated unusual measures.
The situation in Missouri was even more chaotic. Missouri Governor Claiborne Jackson was a devoted secessionist who had tried to take Missouri out of the Union earlier in the year, but had been shouted down by the voters. Governor Jackson then began scheming to seize the state for the Confederacy by force. He sent secret messages to Jefferson Davis to send artillery pieces, and ordered secessionist state militia to prepare to seize the Federal armory in Saint Louis once the guns arrived.
Publicly, Governor Jackson proclaimed that Missouri would remain neutral. However, Francis P. Blair JR, a Republican Congressman from Missouri and the brother of Postmaster General Montgomery Blair, wasn't fooled for an instant and decided to deal with Jackson. Blair understood politics but lacked military expertise, so he obtained it in the form of US Army Captain Nathaniel Lyon. Lyon was a wild hothead with bushy red hair and beard, a diehard Unionist and abolitionist, a man with lots of energy but little gentleness or restraint. An Army doctor described Lyon as "narrow minded, mentally unbalanced", filled with "anger that was almost insane", and "honest to the core, truthful, and intelligent." Frank Blair had Lyon transferred to Saint Louis from Fort Riley, Kansas, where he had been post commander.
Blair had organized some of the Unionist citizens of Saint Louis into a militia, uniforming and equipping them with funds donated by Unionists back East. The militiamen were mostly German immigrants, nearly all of whom were antislavery diehards, and were highly motivated. Lyon provided them with military discipline and direction. They promised to make an effective force, except for one thing: no weapons. There were plenty of them in the Saint Louis armory, but Lyon reported to Brigadier General William S. Harney, an old Indian fighter who was reliable, loyal, and did things by the book. The book did not recommend that the government provide arms to a private army.
Frank Blair had Harney called away to Washington on a temporary assignment, and Lyon then conveniently received orders to arm local citizens to protect Federal property. Lyon used the opportunity to not only arm his Germans and local Unionists, but to ensure that secessionists didn't get their hands on any of the armory's weapons.
On the night of 25:26 April, a steamer docked at Saint Louis. It had been sent by Governor Richard S. Yates of Illinois, who had been in touch with Blair and Lyon, and no more liked the idea of a Confederate Missouri than they did. Before morning, the steamer had been loaded with 20,000 muskets and 110,000 cartridges from the armory. Local secessionists had got wind of the scheme and a mob had formed up to block the transfer, but Lyon had arranged an earlier shipment of boxes of old flintlocks. The flintlocks were triumphantly seized by the crowd, which then dispersed. The real shipment took place in the dark hours of the morning, with the weapons eventually finding their way to Springfield, Illinois, out of reach of the secessionists.
Lyon then moved his home-grown regiments to a site that overlooked Saint Louis. Governor Jackson's militia was oddly complacent in the face of these threatening moves. They did assemble on 6 May in a grove outside of Saint Louis, naming the place Camp Jackson in honor of the governor. Four artillery pieces sent upriver from Baton Rouge by Jefferson Davis arrived on 8 May, but there was little will to make use of them: Jackson's militia were essentially Sunday soldiers who found the whole exercise pleasantly theatrical and amusing. Captain Lyon was rarely amused by anything, and certainly was not amused by a camp of armed secessionists, no matter how half-hearted they were in practice. He disguised himself as a woman in black dress and veil, and rode through Camp Jackson in a buggy driven by a black coachman. He concluded that Jackson's militia needed to be dealt with immediately.
William Tecumseh Sherman had come to Saint Louis after leaving Washington to become the superintendent of a trolley company. He had known Lyon in his Army days and when he heard of Lyon's sightseeing excursion, found it unbelievable to think that Lyon, with his wild red hair and beard, could have ever disguised himself as a woman. The next day, 9 May, Sherman saw Blair's German regiments lined up at the armory, being issued ammunition. Lyon was running furiously about, in uniform instead of a dress this time, and Sherman concluded something was about to happen. On 10 May 1861, Lyon marched his soldiers up to Camp Jackson and simply demanded that the secessionists surrender. They were outnumbered and gave up without a fight.
Lyon's men marched their captives through Saint Louis to the armory so they could be disarmed and paroled. A crowd gathered; there were secessionists among them, and before long a gun battle was in progress. Sherman was one of the spectators. Caught in the crossfire along with his small son, he threw the boy to the ground and lay on top of him as a shield. He would later guess that a hundred bullets passed over them before the fighting died down. At least 28 people were killed, with many more wounded. The next day another fight broke out, causing 6 to 12 deaths. Lyon's men suppressed the rioters harshly, and secessionists decided to flee: by 12 May over 3,000 of them had left the city.
* Missouri had been split ever since the days of Bleeding Kansas, but Lyon's actions put the two sides literally at total war. On 10 May, the news of Lyon's actions reached the state legislature in Jefferson City, in central Missouri, almost directly to the west of Saint Louis. The legislature had been neutral up to this point, but now they went completely secessionist. Of the Missouri citizens who sided with the Confederacy, the most important was Sterling Price. Price was a handsome, well-respected citizen in his early fifties: ex-Congressman, ex-governor, a Mexican War veteran and one of the state's most prominent men. Governor Jackson appointed him a general and put him in command of the state militia.
General Harney returned to Saint Louis and tried to undo the damage, but Blair arranged to have President Lincoln authorize Harney's removal. Lincoln admitted that this measure was highly irregular and of doubtful legality. It was also a bitter offense to a loyal Army officer, but the Union was at risk, niceties were not on the agenda, and Harney went off humiliated into forced retirement.
On 11 June, Governor Jackson and General Price met with Lyon in Saint Louis to discuss the confrontation. The meeting was antagonistic, with Lyon finally telling them he would see every last Missourian dead and buried before he would agree that the state government could impose any restrictions on Federal authority. He then had Jackson and Price escorted out of Federal territory.
Lyon once more moved quickly. On 14 June, he marched into Jefferson City, drove out the secessionist legislature, and two days later had a brief fight with Price's state militia in Boonville. Lyon had 1,700 men, the state militia somewhat less, the battle was noisy if relatively bloodless; the state militia gave way and retreated to the southwest, while Lyon occupied Boonville. General Lyon decided to pause there to reorganize. He had earned a rest, having dislodged the secessionist legislature and put their forces into retreat. The elected Missouri government was now a government-in-exile.
The Confederacy had been founded on grand high-mindedness. The founders of the Confederacy rarely tired of speaking of the noble principles on which their new nation was based, and of the legality and justice of their cause. Unfortunately, like the anachronism of slavery itself, their beliefs had deep contradictions. They felt they had good reason to believe their cause was right; somehow they conveniently ignored the unarguable fact that their opponents did not agree at all and were not inclined to go along.
The Confederates were upright in their faith in the sacredness of the law, with a curious blindness to the fact that the Federal authorities believed they were simply rebels and traitors. That made adherence to any other laws almost meaningless. To expect that Lincoln and his men would graciously play by polite Confederate rules was foolish. Instead, the leadership in Washington was ruthless, and so Missouri had now effectively fallen into Federal hands through a military coup against the properly elected state government.
* The Federal government was demonstrating considerable energy and focus on the political front. Getting the military front up to speed was not proving quite as easy. Back in early May, as the militia regiments poured into Washington, Lincoln had issued a new proclamation increasing the regular army by 20,000, the navy by 18,000, and asking for over 42,000 three-year volunteers. Now the question was of what to do with the added forces.
Winfield Scott could be muddled on occasion, but his military instincts were fundamentally sound. Scott had no faith in the usefulness of the 90-day militia, and the prospect of a large force of long-term volunteers meant he would have the resources to take a long view of the situation. On 3 May, he described his strategic vision in a letter to one of his generals. He would tighten the blockade around the South to cut off trade and foreign assistance to the Confederacy, and in the meantime send a force of 60,000 men, backed up by gunboats, down the Mississippi to cut the Confederacy off from Texan cattle and grain, as well as from any foreign resources that might trickle in across the Mexican border.
In time, possibly a year or two, the general thought, the rebellion would be snuffed out in a relatively bloodless fashion as hardship and boredom deprived it of its fire, and the Unionist sentiment that Scott believed, in the absence of much evidence, still remained in the South re-asserted itself. It would certainly be much easier and less brutal than trying to occupy all the Southern states and obtain their submission at the point of a bayonet. Such a "pacification campaign", as it would be called today, would be grinding and difficult.
Lincoln liked the idea, though Scott stated the big drive down the Mississippi could not begin before the middle of November. That was much too long for armchair warriors who felt the rebellion could be crushed easily with one fast blow. When Scott's plan leaked to the press, it was roundly mocked as "the Anaconda plan", with cartoonists showing a huge snake coiling itself around the South. Some even called it treasonous.
The Union militia were eager to get into action. On 23 May, the citizens of the state of Virginia ratified the ordnance of secession, and as a safety precaution Lincoln ordered troops to cross the Potomac and seize Alexandria, Virginia. In the lead of the small force was Colonel Elmer Ellsworth of the New York Fire Zouaves, a regiment of New York rowdies mostly recruited from fire departments. Ellsworth was 24 years old, from an aristocratic New York City family, and a personal friend of Lincoln's. An Alexandria hotel was flying the flag of the Confederacy, and Ellsworth went upstairs to cut it down. On coming back down the stairs, the proprietor shot and killed him with a shotgun, and was immediately shot and killed in turn by Ellsworth's aide. Lincoln was crushed by the loss of his friend. Ellsworth's body lay in state in the White House and his colleagues grieved.
Ellsworth's death was a sign of things to come. Within a few days, there was another significant death that closed a chapter of the past. On 3 June 1861, Stephen A. Douglas died in Chicago at age 48, worn out from working too hard and drinking too much, breathing his last. He gave eerily reassuring words to those who in his company who had expressed the thought he was in great pain: "He ... is ... very ... comfortable."
Death was a comfort, since his last years had given him no peace. Since the war began, he had been a powerful voice for the Union, trying to bring undecided Westerners in with the Union cause, ruining himself financially and physically. A man whose life had been governed by pragmatism and self-interest died pursuing ideals and self-sacrifice. There were those in the South who felt the loss as well. Confederate Vice-President Alec Stephens thought Douglas should have died sooner or lived longer: had he died sooner, the Democratic split in Charleston in 1860 might have been avoided, and with him dead now, there was no influential voice to restrain the Federal military threat against the Confederacy.
* Although President Lincoln's belief that Unionist sentiment remained strong in the South was generally wrong, there was a major exception. The hill people of western Virginia, eastern Kentucky and Tennessee, and northern Georgia and Alabama owned few slaves and had little sympathy with the lowlanders. The region was rugged and somewhat inaccessible, which increased the sense of isolation the hill folk felt from the power centers in the cities. The rugged terrain also made military operations difficult, but the counties of western Virginia bordered Union territory and were more accessible to Federal forces. This accessibility worked both ways, since the main rail line from Washington to the west, the Baltimore and Ohio, went through Virginia territory to get to the Ohio Valley and was vulnerable to Confederate attack. If the line fell into secessionist hands, it would be a disaster to the Federal cause.
The states of Ohio and Indiana had raised more regiments than Lincoln had called for, and so there were forces available to send into the region. When these western counties showed signs of dissatisfaction with the secessionist government in Richmond, military plans were put into motion to push things along in a helpful direction.
The Federal Department of the Ohio included Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, part of western Pennsylvania, and the western section of Virginia in question. The military commander of the Department of the Ohio was Major General George Brinton McClellan. McClellan was 35 when the war started. He had graduated second in his class from West Point in 1846, had served in Mexico, and had been a War Department observer in the Crimean War. He had then resigned with the rank of captain to go into the railroad business, where he rose to become a vice-president of a rail concern. He came back into the military when the war began and, in an environment where there were few trained officers to go around, quickly found himself in a position of considerable responsibility.
When the Confederates sent a small force to occupy the rail hub of Grafton in western Virginia in late May, Winfield Scott telegraphed McClellan and suggested he do something about it, in order to protect the railroad and "support the Union sentiment in western Virginia." McClellan sent his men in immediately to an enthusiastic welcome by the locals. The Confederates pulled out of Grafton, with the Federals entering the town in their wake on 30 May 1861. On 4 June, McClellan's men defeated the Confederates at the town of Philippi in a largely bloodless battle, sending the untrained and poorly-led rebels into panicked flight. The Federals called their easy victory "the Philippi races". McClellan made a high-flown speech to his men in their praise:
BEGIN QUOTE:
Soldiers! I have heard that there was danger here. I have come to place myself at your head and to share it with you. I fear now but one thing -- that you will not find foemen worthy of your steel. I know that I can rely upon you.
END QUOTE
McClellan continued his advance, sending the badly outnumbered Confederates fleeing again after a fight on 10 and 11 July. In another fight on 13 July, the Federals gave the rebels another beating and killed their commander, General Robert S. Garnett. He was the first general to die in the conflict; he wouldn't be the last.
General Scott sent him praise: "The general-in-chief, and what is more, the Cabinet, including the President, are charmed with your activity, valor, and consequent success ... We do not doubt that you will in due time sweep the rebels from Western Virginia, but we do not mean to precipitate you, as you are fast enough." On 16 July, McClellan sent another one of his proclamations to his regiments:
BEGIN QUOTE:
Soldiers of the Army of the West! I am more than satisfied with you. You have annihilated two armies, commanded by educated and experienced soldiers, intrenched in mountain fastnesses fortified at their leisure ... You have proved that Union men, fighting for the preservation of our Government, are more than a match for our misguided and erring brethren ...
END QUOTE
This was putting an overblown face on what amounted to beating up on a much weaker opponent, and the offensive quickly ran out of momentum in the rough terrain. The Federals had still won a great deal: they had obtained valuable coal and salt mines, threatened Virginia from the west, and taken control of vital transport routes through the mountains.
The raw Union soldiers did feel like conquerers, having driven out the secessionists and been welcomed as liberators the locals. The campaign had been easy, and to the soldiers from the flatlands of the Midwest, the mountain scenery was heroic itself. One of them wrote that there were "ravines so dark one could not guess their depth; openings, the ends of which seemed lost in a blue mist; others so steep a squirrel could hardly climb them ... mountain streams, sparkling now in the sunlight, then dashing down into apparently fathomless abysses."
In the meantime, the Unionist western Virginia counties had been conducting a series of meetings in the town of Wheeling, and by the end of June they had their own legislature in place, along with a governor, Francis Pierpont, and two senators to send to Washington. Since the Federal government regarded the secession of Virginia as illegal, the effective secession of the state's western counties from Virginia in turn was of highly doubtful legality as well; the measures were taken on the interesting theory that the secessionist state government no longer had any legal standing, and so the new government was the "true" state government.
Washington agreed. Once more, since the rules were unclear, it was useful to be able to choose among them selectively. The Federal government recognized the governor and senators designated by the new state legislature as the "legitimate" officials of the state of Virginia and admitted their senators into the US Senate. All this was unprecedented and thoroughly irregular, and for the rest of the year and through the next there was an extended session of local politics and elections to put the establishment of the new state on a recognized legal basis. There was still some Confederate sympathy in the region and that would lead to a nasty guerrilla war, with neighbors fighting neighbors in endless reprisals.
* The hill country of western Virginia ran contiguously south into eastern Tennessee, which was populated by Unionists, like their relatives to the north. In early June the east Tennessee loyalists held a convention to demand that they be allowed to set up their own Unionist state. The state legislature of course refused the demand, and after the state voted to ratify the ordinance of secession, the matter publicly quieted down.
Things weren't quiet enough in the hills to keep the new secessionist government happy. They began to arrest prominent Unionist leaders, the most visible being William Gannaway Brownlow, the editor of the KNOXVILLE WHIG. "Pastor" Brownlow had been a circuit-riding Methodist preacher and was vocal in his attacks on the secessionists, having written: "I'll fight the Secession leaders till Hell froze over, and then fight them on the ice." The state government decided to put him on ice in jail for a while, and also called to Richmond for reinforcements.
New regiments arrived in the area and were put under the command of General Felix Kirk Zollicoffer, a prominent Tennessee citizen, who was charged with making sure east Tennessee stayed Confederate. There wasn't much the Federals could do about it for the moment. There was no way any serious Union force could move south through the rugged mountains to help the loyalists, and for the moment other approaches to the area were deep in rebel territory.
* At the beginning of the conflict, Union leadership did everything possible to avoid dealing with the issue of slavery. Frederick Douglass called for action to undermine slavery, saying that it was the "very stomach" of the Confederate war effort, but nobody had to be a hardcore proslavery man to dismiss such ideas as the rantings of an abolitionist, and a black abolitionist at that. Principled leaders would hardly suggest such actions; and so it was not too surprising that the first step towards that end was taken by Ben Butler, who didn't worry too much about principles.
If General Scott had thought that transferring Butler to the command of Fort Monroe would keep him out of sight and out of mind, he was mistaken. One way or another, Butler was unpredictable. In early June, he found out that the rebels were setting up a battery of artillery at a river crossing about 8 miles (13 kilometers) from Butler's lines, near a church named Big Bethel, and decided to deal with it. Butler's plan involved complicated movements of seven Federal regiments against about 1,400 Confederates. The troops went into action in the darkness on 9 June 1861 and the result was mass confusion, with Union soldiers firing on each other and providing the rebels with an entertaining "rabbit shoot". By the end of the next day, the Federals had lost 76 dead and wounded, the Confederates only 8.
Although painful to the Union soldiers who took the worst of it, the fight at Big Bethel was of little consequence, except as an occasion for Confederate jubilation and Union humiliation. Butler was clearly no military genius. However, events were already demonstrating his clear skills in other areas. One day in late May, three slaves who had been laboring on Confederate defenses had come through the lines to seek refuge among the Federals. The men's owner, Charles Mallory, demanded their return under the Fugitive Slave Law.
It was astounding that Mallory could have made such a demand with a straight face, and its absurdity was not at all lost on Butler: if Virginia asserted that it was no longer part of the Union, how Virginians claim the right to invoke Federal laws? Furthermore, Mallory was a Confederate colonel, engaged in military operations against the Federal authority. It seemed to Butler that the United States government had a right to seize the property of those in active rebellion against it. Since the three men were legally property, the government was therefore entitled to seize them and use them as it saw fit. Butler did so, putting them to work on building up his own defenses.
The slaves were "contraband of war". Soon hundreds of escaped slaves, or "contrabands", were making their way into Fortress Monroe, where they were put to work as paid laborers. Butler understood that he was walking out on uncertain ground and wrote a letter dated 30 July to ask for clarification from Secretary of War Cameron. Butler asked Cameron: "Are these men, women, and children, slaves? Are they free?" If they were property, Butler went on, then shouldn't they become the property of the Union if captured? Since the Union didn't want to own slaves, shouldn't they be set free?
Butler was very deliberately asking uncomfortable questions, and to add to their confusing nature the bizarreness of the situation cut both ways: if the Federal government did not recognize the secession of the state of Virginia, then the Fugitive Slave Act was still valid. However, the legal contradictions of the matter obviously carried far less weight than the needs of war, and Butler's "contraband" policy seemed like it might be a very good way to exert pressure against the Confederacy. It is ironic that the first person to free slaves as a war measure was Ben Butler, who nobody would have accused of being a wild-eyed idealist passionately devoted to principles of justice. It is hard to believe that his motives were strongly based on much sympathy with black folk; it is much easier to believe that he took pleasure in finding a way to put the screws to slaveowners.
