v1.1.1 / chapter 8 of 93 / 01 sep 07 / greg goebel / public domain
* After the confused fits of action through the spring and summer of 1861, in the early fall of that year both the Union and Confederacy settled down to organize and plan their next moves. General George McClellan busily drilled his men in their camps around Washington DC, while political reshufflings took place North and South, and both sides prepared newfangled ironclad warships to make war at sea. In the meantime, there were skirmishes along the coast, in the mountains, and all through Missouri.
* Summer turned to fall along the Potomac, and General George B. McClellan
continued drilling and organizing his forces. He was turning them into
something that looked and felt like an army, not of a mob of undisciplined
militias. They marched like soldiers, looking and feeling very proud of
themselves. After one grand parade, a woman named Julia Ward Howe was so
impressed that on returning to her hotel room at Williard's, she set to the
tune of the popular camp song "John Brown's Body" a more inspiring set of
lyrics, under the title "The Battle Hymn of The Republic."
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword;
His truth is marching on.
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
His truth is marching on.
It would become a Union anthem for the rest of the war.
The weather was pleasant and soldiering not too hard, for the time being. Union and Confederate pickets, having decided there was no sense in taking idle potshots at each other, fraternized a little. Some of the regiments from the northeast had problems with local customs, however, particularly the custom of owning human beings. A runaway slave came into a Federal camp at Annapolis one day, and the soldiers did everything they could to help him, stealing a rowboat for him and getting him provisions. Unfortunately, this particular slave belonged to the governor of Maryland and formal complaints were lodged against the Army. Brigadier General Charles P. Stone, a division commander, issued orders at the end of September telling the troops "not to incite and encourage insubordination among the colored servants in the neighborhood of the camps." In other words, the soldiers were to mind their own business.
Unfortunately, the incident set in motion a chain of events that would have consequences beyond any reasonable prediction. Shortly after General Stone issued these orders, two runaway slaves sought refuge with the 20th Massachusetts Volunteers. A young officer dutifully took a squad of men and returned the slaves to their rightful owner, as per orders. Some of the regiment didn't like this much, and wrote home about it. Not long afterward, the regimental commander, an old soldier named Colonel William R. Lee, got a letter from Governor John A. Andrew of Massachusetts, reprimanding the young officer for returning the slaves and Lee for allowing them to be returned. Colonel Lee passed the letter upstairs to General Stone, who replied to the effect that the men were following orders and that interference from the governor was unwelcome. Governor Andrew didn't take kindly to being addressed in such a way and a nasty exchange followed, ultimately leading to a denunciation of General Stone in the senate by Senator Charles Sumner, with an enraged letter from General Stone in response. There matters sullenly stood for the moment, but the Radicals in Congress had marked down General Stone's name and were not going to forget about him.
* The Union soldiers marched and practiced their marksmanship. Colonel Lee found that his men had the odd habit of firing a rifle in the general direction of a target with their eyes squeezed shut, and the colonel concluded more training was in order. The men had acquired the form of soldiers, but they were still green and unblooded.
There wasn't much fighting available for the moment. On the last day of August, a New Jersey colonel took a regiment up against the most advanced Confederate outpost, a place called Munson's Hill, which was less than 10 miles (16 kilometers) from Washington and from which Confederate soldiers could see the unfinished dome of the Capitol building. The presence of rebels overlooking his regimental drilling fields annoyed the colonel and he felt he at least had to make a protest. His men went forward, got a few of themselves shot, then fell back, and that seemed to be that.
The demonstration made Joe Johnston nervous, however, since it seemed to him that the Federals could easily take Munson's Hill once they made up their minds to do so, and on 28 September 1861 the Federals woke up to find Munson's Hill quiet and by all appearances empty of rebels. The Union soldiers went up the hill cautiously, since a cannon was still in place. It seemed unlikely that the rebels would leave such a valuable piece of hardware behind, and in fact they hadn't. When the men got to the top of the hill they found it was a log painted black with old wagon wheels nailed on. The press had a fine time mocking General McClellan and his army for their fear of fake cannon, and public complaints that the Army was not taking action increased.
Then, suddenly, the Army of the Potomac got more action than anyone bargained for.
* In between Harper's Ferry and Washington, the Potomac switches its direction of flow from southeast to southwest, then switches back to southeast again about 10 miles (16 kilometers) on. At the lower end of the switchback sits the town of Leesburg.
The Confederates had occupied the town earlier in the summer. On 19 October 1861 McClellan, having heard Johnston was getting ready to pull his forces out of that area, decided to send a division under Brigadier General George A. McCall up the Virginia side of the river to probe rebel defenses. Johnston's evacuation of Munson's Hill suggested to McClellan that a show of force might make the rebels pull back from Leesburg as well. McClellan ordered General Stone, whose division was on the northern side of the river, to keep an eye on the Confederates and watch which way they jumped. The letter closed with the suggestion: "Perhaps a slight demonstration on your part would have the effect to move them."
McCall performed his probe as ordered and, having done so, withdrew on 21 October. On the same day Stone decided to press forward with the "demonstration" McClellan's orders had suggested, and sent a few regiments across the river to see what trouble they could stir up.
At one crossing site near the middle of the switchback, the southern bank of the Potomac was dominated by a high, steep bluff, known by the locals as Ball's Bluff. Troops of the 20th Massachusetts crossed the river in three small boats with a total capacity of 25 men on the morning of the 21st. They found some other Union soldiers who had crossed in the night already under fire from rebels in the woods beyond the top of the bluff, and joined in the skirmish.
At a little after 2:00 PM, Colonel Edward D. Baker, in command of a regiment of Pennsylvania volunteers, arrived to take charge. Baker was no ordinary military officer. He had made a name for himself in the Mexican War and the California Gold Rush, and, on moving to Oregon in 1860, had promptly been elected a senator. Baker had been a voice for the Lincoln Administration in the Far West, and was on close terms with the President. They had been friends for decades, having met while both working as lawyers in Illinois. Baker had ridden in the presidential carriage on inauguration day, and had introduced Lincoln for his inaugural address. His enthusiasm for the Union cause was such that he had personally raised a Philadelphia regiment. He had been offered a major general's stars but, since that would have meant giving up his seat in the Senate, had become a colonel instead. This arrangement allowed him to put his commitment to fighting the rebels in action, while also giving him the opportunity to make speeches on the floor of the Senate, wearing his officer's uniform with his sword laid in front of him, denouncing the faint-hearted among his colleagues.
Now he and his Pennsylvania regiment were in the thick of it. "I congratulate you on the prospect of a battle," he told a Massachusetts colonel, and called out to the soldiers: "Boys, you want a fight, don't you?!" They cheered him in response. Baker managed to get several guns across the river and into action. When a colonel named Cogswell of a New York regiment arrived on the field with his troops in the afternoon, he found Baker in high spirits, quoting heroic poetry. Baker asked Cogswell how he like the looks of things.
Colonel Cogswell was a West Pointer and found the look of things terrifying. The Federals were in an exposed position, trying to fight a well-protected enemy they could hardly see. The enemy appeared to be massing for an attack that would sweep the Union men off the bluff, down to the edge of a river that had been difficult and time-consuming enough to cross even when things were peaceful.
At about 3:00 PM the rebels stepped up their attack and the fight began in earnest. Confederate rifle fire cut down the gunners handling the Federal field pieces, and one gun kicked itself over the edge of the bluff. At 4:00 PM, the rebels charged and the battle grew even more intense, with many men falling on both sides. One of the wounded was a young Federal lieutenant, straight out of Harvard, named Oliver Wendell Holmes JR, later Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court. Things were going completely to hell for the Federals, and then, at about 4:30, while Baker was trying to rally his men, a Confederate stepped out of the woods and emptied a revolver into him. Baker fell, dead instantly, with a bullet in his brain.
Colonel Cogswell tried to organize a breakout, but the Federals were boxed in. At about 6:00 PM the Confederates decided to charge again, and suddenly the Federals broke, running down the bluff, swamping the few small boats in their panic to get away, while the rebels, after a little hesitation in the face of such an appalling scene, stood on the bluff and poured rifle fire into the helpless mass of men. The water boiled "as white as in a great hail storm" from the bullets spattering into it. Men were shot or drowned. Some managed to swim to safety, but by the time night fell over 200 were casualties and over 500 had been captured, including Colonel Cogswell.
When the news of Baker's death came over the wire to Army headquarters, Lincoln was there. He sat there stunned for a few minutes, then left hurriedly with tears streaming down his face, stumbling out into the street, holding back sobs. Orderlies and newsmen jumped up to help him, but he recovered his poise, and walked on alone.
* Repercussions rippled out from the fiasco. First was the problem of the prisoners, who included Colonel Lee of the 20th Massachusetts and one of his officers, Major Paul Revere, descendant of the Revolutionary War patriot. Their capture was not just embarrassing. The US Navy had recently seized another Confederate privateer, the JEFF DAVIS, and once more there was talk of hanging the crew as pirates. Predictably, Richmond replied that for every Confederate hanged, a Federal prisoner would be hanged as well. Colonel Lee and Major Revere were selected by lot to await execution. Before Lee was taken away to a lockup, he told one of his sergeants: "Tell the men ... " He choked for a moment, and then continued: "Tell the men their colonel died like a brave man."
The story got back north. Lincoln decided against a hanging contest: the Confederate privateers were reclassified as prisoners of war. The Southern papers crowed over the fact that Abraham Lincoln and Jeff Davis had faced each other and Lincoln had flinched first, raising the interesting question of what the papers would said if Lincoln had gone ahead and hanged the men instead. The Federal prisoners were eventually exchanged. Lee would become a brigadier general. A little less than two years later, Revere would be mortally wounded at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
The business of the prisoners had been no joke, but it was the least of the matter. The defeat at Ball's Bluff was a humiliation to the Union and to Congress in particular, for they had lost one of their own. Things had to be investigated and set right. The charge was led by Senator Ben Wade of Ohio, one of the most fanatical of the Republican radicals, backed up by others like him such as Zach Chandler of Michigan and Lyman Trumbull of Illinois. These men wanted action and they wanted it now.
They called on President Lincoln and Secretary Seward to press for an offensive to clear out the rebels in front of Washington. The Confederates were not only present in force in the Manassas area and upriver near Harper's Ferry, but had the damned nerve to have set up batteries on the Potomac below Washington, cutting off the capital from access by water. The senators then had a long meeting with General McClellan on 25 October. McClellan impressed on them the need to eliminate the greatest obstacle to success: General Winfield Scott. McClellan wrote his wife after the meeting: "They will make a desperate effort to have Gen. Scott retired at once; until that is accomplished I can effect but little good. He is ever in my way, and I am sure does not desire effective action. I want to get through with the war as quickly as possible."
McClellan did realize that the tools he was using to further his own purposes might end up being as much a threat to himself. Senator Wade and his colleagues had no deep faith in McClellan, since he was a Democrat, not to mention a West Pointer, making him a member of an elitist military clique whose members had gone South in large numbers and betrayed the Union. Despite that, the cry went up for General Scott's head. On 1 November 1861, his resignation was formally accepted. He wrote: "Wherever I may spend my little remainder of life, my frequent and latest prayer will be, 'God save the Union.'"
Scott had wanted for his replacement Major General Henry Halleck, a scholarly West Pointer who had written treatises on military science. Halleck was known, sometimes flatteringly and sometimes not, by the nickname of "Old Brains", but Scott had fallen in order that McClellan rise, and the young general moved into the vacated position while retaining his current duties. Lincoln, fearing McClellan might be feeling the strain of such responsibility, dropped by to encourage him. It was hardly necessary. McClellan was in fine spirits, telling the President: "It is a great relief, sir!" The old general was out of his way at last.
His exhuberance hardly reassured the President. It hinted that McClellan didn't really understand exactly what he had gotten himself into, and so Lincoln pressed the point: "In addition to your present command, the supreme command of the Army will entail a vast labor upon you." McClellan replied, confidently: "I can do it all."
* McClellan's fear of the rebels was matched, with much more reason, by the rebels' fear of him. Not only were they were greatly outnumbered, but William T. Sherman's curse on the Confederacy was coming true: "hardly a yard of cloth" could they make, he had said, and there were too few weapons, uniforms, and other supplies to go around.
On 1 October 1861, Jefferson Davis met with Generals Joe Johnston and P.G.T. Beauregard at Johnston's Fairfax Courthouse headquarters to discuss the options open to the Confederates in northern Virginia. The generals proposed that Richmond scrape up every possible resource to create an army of 60,000 men that would take the offensive north, across the Potomac, into the enemy's own homelands. They pointed out that as time passed, the Federals would simply continue to get stronger, making the odds against the Confederacy ever poorer. Davis understood this perfectly, but he didn't have the resources to undertake such an offensive. Johnston's army would have to sit and wait, watching the Yankess build up overwhelming strength and praying the Confederacy could deal with the crisis when the time came.
Such circumstances were likely to create discontent. At the end of August, the Confederate Congress had confirmed the appointments of full generals Jefferson Davis had nominated. The appointments were all to the same rank, but there was an implied precedence to them that left Joe Johnston feeling slighted. Johnston, noted for his graciousness and civility to his subordinates, also had a touchy streak that led to quarrels with his superiors. The result was an exchange of letters with Jefferson Davis in which General Johnston expressed his outrage over how unfairly he had been treated, to which Davis gave a short, scathing reply. A more tactful person than Davis would have tried to defuse the situation, but by his nature Jefferson Davis found it very hard to budge an inch, even if antagonizing Johnston hurt the war effort. Beauregard wasn't happy either. Despite his old-world manners, he still believed himself another Napoleon, and was inclined to look down on politicians and other lesser mortals. Frictions between General Beauregard and Davis steadily degenerated into highly public exchanges of venom in the press.
Jefferson Davis was prone to crippling headaches, this could not have done him much good, and the military wasn't the only source of unrest he had to deal with. There was dissatisfaction among his cabinet secretaries as well, which had first become publicly visible when Robert Toombs had resigned as Confederate Secretary of State, back in July. It was probably inevitable that Toombs, one of the original fire-eaters, would find the constrained existence of a cabinet secretary frustrating. His frustration that was greatly multiplied by the fact that he was secretary of state for a country that nobody recognized, leaving him with little to do. In any case he left the government, to become a brigadier general in command of a Georgia brigade in Joe Johnston's army. He was replaced as Secretary of State by Robert M.T. Hunter, a prominent Virginian who had been a US senator.
The next to leave was Secretary of War Leroy Pope Walker. Trying to conduct a war against a powerful enemy with thin resources would have strained the most competent administrator, and Walker was overwhelmed, not merely by the difficulty of the task but because he had become a magnet for criticism, much of it unfair. He resigned in mid-September and left, carrying a gracious letter from Jefferson Davis, to become a brigadier general in defense of the Gulf Coast.
Davis had considered his old friend Leonidas K. Polk or Robert E. Lee to become Secretary of War, but then settled on 17 September for moving Judah P. Benjamin from the post of Attorney General to fill the vacancy. Thomas Bragg became Attorney General in his place. Benjamin was, however, in some ways the wrong man for the job of Secretary of War. While nobody slighted his intelligence, competence, or diligence, he was at heart a smooth political operator who tended to conceal bad news. Given enough bad news to make it obvious to everyone that things weren't going well, such a lack of directness could lead to credibility problems.
* While Jefferson Davis shuffled his cabinet, the Federal blockade grew tighter. In response, the rebels continued their work on one of the weapons the Confederacy could use to break that blockade, the resurrected frigate MERRIMAC.
The effort went slowly. There was a scarcity both of skilled workmen and the raw materials, particularly iron, needed to complete the refit, and the ship's engines, whose poor condition had brought the MERRIMAC into Gosport Navy Yard in the first place, hadn't been improved by 40 days of immersion in salt water. Frightening rumors still had been floating North about both the capability and state of completeness of the South's new weapon, and Navy Secretary Gideon Welles put the wheels in motion to obtain ironclads for the Union. In August, advertisements were placed in newspapers requesting proposals for ironclad designs.
Eventually 17 designs were submitted, and two were accepted, the NEW IRONSIDES and the GALENA, both of which were more or less conventional steam-and-sail screw warships, rendered in iron. The designer of the elegant GALENA, a Connecticut shipbuilder named Cornelius Bushnell, had some doubts that his vessel would float, so he went to New York City to consult with John Ericsson, a Swedish immigrant who was one of America's most highly-regarded engineers. Ericsson assured Bushnell that his ship would float, but then Ericsson surprised him by asking if he would like to see an unbeatable ironclad that could be built in only 90 days.
Ericsson fetched a cardboard model of a strange little vessel, resembling a tin can on a long, flat raft. Ericsson explained that he had offered the design to Napolean III eight years before, only to be turned down. Bushnell found Ericsson's concept superior to his own and excitedly took it to Secretary Welles, who presented it in turn to a naval committee for consideration. Not surprisingly, the radical concept provoked argument. Welles organized a meeting of the committee with President Lincoln in attendance on September 10; the President heard out the arguments, and then, when asked what his own opinion was on the matter, replied with a homely joke and concluded: "It strikes me there's something in it."
Lincoln then left to attend to other business. Despite the president's endorsement, the committee remained split on the matter. Bushnell finally realized that Ericsson would have to come to Washington to answer the questions the naval officers were raising. This was a problem, since Ericsson and the government weren't on good terms, a fact that was one of the obstacles to acceptance of his design to begin with. In 1841, he had come to America to design the Navy's first screw-propelled warship, the PRINCETON. On the trial run of the ship, a naval gun that was a copy of a design by Ericsson exploded during a test firing, killing six people, including two cabinet secretaries. The Navy blamed Ericcson for the accident and refused to pay him for the ship. Ericcson then went to Congress to appeal, with the only result being that he was marked as a troublemaker by the Navy. The bad blood hadn't faded away on either side.
Bushnell managed to persuade Ericsson to make the trip to Washington. Despite, or maybe because of, the fact that ironclad board had told him he wasn't welcome, Ericsson presented his case for the new ironclad so persuasively that he was awarded a contract for the ship on the spot, the board being impressed by his claim that he could build the ship in a hundred days. The rebuilt MERRIMAC was expected to make its appearance at any moment and there was no time to waste. Work began in Brooklyn on the ironclad that October. Ericsson named the vessel the MONITOR, since the vessel was to be a "monitor", or signal, to the Confederacy and European powers of the Union's strength.
* The reconstruction of the MERRIMAC represented one of the Confederacy's most ambitious efforts to challenge the blockade; elsewhere, the rebels made up in boldness for what they lacked in resources. New Orleans was the most important port on the Gulf Coast, and one of the main objectives of the Federal blockaders was to seal off the city. The city itself was a hundred miles (160 kilometers) upstream of the exits of its sprawling river delta, and protected by two star-shaped forts, Fort Jackson and Fort Saint Philip, which flanked the river about 25 miles (40 kilometers) from the exits.
Local rivermen had claimed that deep-draft Federal warships would not be able to get far enough upstream to pose a threat to the city, but in early October three Navy heavy warships proved them wrong by moving to a central junction of the Mississippi Delta called Head of the Passes, where they effectively cut off all merchant traffic. The city's defenders were stirred to action, and improvised a fleet consisting of four towboats mounting two guns each; a seven-gun revenue cutter; and a seagoing tug that had been covered over with iron plates and fitted with an iron ram, as well as a single gun firing dead ahead. This last vessel resembled a floating egg, and was called the MANASSAS.
On the night of 11 October 1861, the little fleet moved downriver, accompanied by three "fire rafts" -- flatboats filled with pine knots and rosin -- that would be ignited and sent against the Federal warships. The Confederate vessels mounted only a total of 16 guns, all of moderate or small bore, against the Union's 51, over half of which were 8 inch (20 centimeters) or larger. What the rebels lacked in firepower they hoped to make up for in surprise.
They won their gamble. The first thing the Federals knew about the presence of the Confederates was when a Union midshipman spotted the MANASSAS approaching his vessel, ironically named the RICHMOND, in the small hours of the morning. He ran into the quarters of Captain John Pope, the senior Union officer on the scene (not the same man as the contemporary Army officer of that name), and cried: "Captain, there's a steamer alongside us!"
Pope went topside in a hurry to see the MANASSAS crash into the his vessel. Panic followed, with the three Union warships firing blindly while the MANASSAS fumbled about. She had actually rammed a barge that was lashed alongside the RICHMOND, with the impact knocking the rebel vessel's engines off their mountings and sweeping off her smokestack. Even though she was full of choking coal smoke, the MANASSAS launched a rocket to give the signal that the fire rafts should be ignited and set downstream. The glowing rafts floating ominously downstream increased the panic among the Yankees, and the three Federal warships attempted to head for open sea, but in the confusion only one made it over the bar; the RICHMOND and the other vessel, the VINCENNES, went aground.
The other Confederate gunboats, which had to this point held back from the fight, now started firing on the grounded warships with their long-range small-caliber rifled guns. Captain Pope was still trying to cope with this bewildering situation when the skipper of the VINCENNES appeared before him, wrapped in a large American flag. The man had abandoned his ship after laying and lighting a slow fuze to the powder magazines, intending to destroy the ship instead of letting the rebels capture her. Since the RICHMOND was close to the VINCENNES, the explosion would send guns weighing over a ton raining down on the RICHMOND, with their fall little affected by such insubstantial things as decks or hulls. However, after a long tense wait, nothing happened. Captain Pope sent the skipper of the VINCENNES back to defend the ship and get her afloat again, which he did by heaving most of the guns and ammunition overboard.
It later turned out that the VINCENNES had failed to blow because the seaman assigned to light the fuze had better judgement than his superior officer, and had cut the fuze. In any case, by the time daylight rolled around, the Confederates had departed back upriver with well-earned satisfaction. They had taken a bold move and completely humiliated the bumbling Yankees, though the actual injury done was minor. Captain Pope gathered his wits, checked for damage, and found none to speak of. No one had been hurt, and the only visible damage was a small hole in the RICHMOND due to the ramming attack by the MANASSAS. There was no evidence of any hits by cannonballs until Pope found a 6 inch (15 centimeter) cannonball lodged in his bureau some time later. Pope asked to be relieved of duty "on account of ill health". The request was immediately granted.
* Far upriver on the Mississippi, Confederate General Polk had blundered in occupying Hickman and Columbus, Kentucky. Not only had Kentucky been lost to the Confederacy, but Grant's prompt occupation of Paducah left Polk's advance force hanging out on a limb: the rebels had seized the front door, only to find their enemy in control of the back. The Federal threat to Tennessee and points south had become more tangible, and so Jefferson Davis appointed General Albert Sidney Johnston to organize the defense of the region.
Thinking that appointing a general could even the odds against the Yankees was a bit far-fetched, since the Confederates had all of 50,000 men to defend Missouri, Arkansas, and Tennessee against Federal forces almost twice as big. Since there was not much else that could be done, it would have to do, and General Johnston seemed up to the job. Johnston was a career army officer, 58 years old and highly regarded by almost all. There was something in his upright, intelligent, and decent nature that commanded respect, even though his capacity for actual combat command was as untested as almost every other senior officer's in both armies. He had been two years ahead of Jefferson Davis at West Point, and Davis had a serious case of hero worship of the man. Even William T. Sherman called Johnston "a real general".
Johnston had been the US Army officer in charge of the West Coast when war broke out, but had made no secret of his intention of going South. When his replacement had arrived in California, Johnston resigned, traveled by horseback to Texas, and from there went on to Richmond. Jefferson Davis had made him a general on the spot and sent him to Nashville, where he took command on 14 September 1861.
* Johnston had plenty to keep him busy. One of the first problems was the matter of eastern Tennessee. Lincoln had among his highest hopes the wish to help the Unionists in east Tennessee, who were sullenly enduring a Confederate military occupation. Not only would liberating the area be considerate of the patriots there, but a Union seizure of the mountain regions would greatly disrupt the Confederacy. It would break the rail connection between Virginia and Tennessee through the pass known as the Cumberland Gap, and provide a jumping-off point for incursions into other regions of the South.
In late September 1861, President Lincoln wrote that he wanted an expedition organized to evict the Confederacy from east Tennessee. The operation would take place in two steps: a Federal army under the command of George Thomas would move in to the Cumberland Gap and occupy Knoxville, the central city of the mountain region. In the meantime, local Unionists, trained and financed with Federal assistance, would rise up against the Confederate authorities.
That was the plan, but the Confederates didn't cooperate. In early September, when Polk occupied Columbus and Hickman, the Confederate military commander in East Tennessee, General Felix Zollicoffer, had moved forces into southwestern Kentucky, blocking Federal movements to the Cumberland Gap. Although Zollicoffer's forces were relatively weak, the Union Army didn't have the leadership in the area with the will to deal with them. Robert Anderson had been suffering poor health since the war began, and after the Federal occupation of Kentucky it had become obvious to all, himself included, that he was no longer fit for command.
On 6 October he was relieved of duty by a respectfully-worded telegram from General Scott and went into effective retirement, to be replaced by his subordinate, William T. Sherman. Anderson would spend the rest of the war in New York City, admired on the streets as the hero of Fort Sumter, while he followed newspaper reports on the war. He took a particular interest in the exploits of Sherman, who had served under him as a lieutenant, years before the war. "One of my boys," Anderson called him.
In the face of this management shuffle, Johnston was demonstrating considerable energy in preparing for the Federals along his front. Zollicoffer held the Cumberland Gap in the east; Polk was holding the Mississippi firmly in the west; and Forts Henry and Donelson were being built in Tennessee, just south of the Kentucky border, to block Union movements down the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers respectively. To pin the center of his line, Johnston placed Kentucky General Simon Bolivar Buckner with about 10,000 men at Bowling Green, in south-central Kentucky, to hold the Louisville-Nashville Railroad. Buckner was aggressively sending out raiding parties to disrupt the Federals, under enterprising commanders such as Colonel Patrick Cleburne, a tough and professional Irishman who had served in the British Army and become a lawyer in Arkansas. Kentucky loyalists were frantic and Sherman was convinced that the rebels would soon move on Louisville.
Sherman started his new job in a state of complete confusion and was in no mental condition to direct an offensive against the Confederates. The offensive went ahead anyway. In late October a few regiments of Union-trained Tennessee loyalists and a larger force under George Thomas began their move from northwest and central Kentucky toward east Tennessee. Thomas moved to the outskirts of the mountain region, and east Tennessee Unionists rose up enthusiastically, burning five railroad bridges, fighting with rebel patrols, and in general terrifying Confederate authorities.
The Unionists were betrayed. Sherman did not think the project was worth his time and so, fearing an imminent rebel attack all across Kentucky, recalled Thomas, leaving the uprising in the mountains twisting in the wind, to be quickly crushed. Five captured ringleaders were hanged immediately. Confederate Secretary of War Judah Benjamin, in transmitting the instructions to Knoxville, added: "It would be well to leave their bodies hanging in the vicinity of the burned bridges." Their followers were sent to prison. A secessionist observer commented that "bad men among our friends" were hunting down the insurrectionists "with all the ferocity of bloodhounds". Secessionists had made much of the heavy-handedness of the Federals in Maryland; now the Confederates saw the necessity of some heavy-handedness of their own.
William G. Brownlow, who had earlier said he would fight the rebels on ice in hell, was among those arrested, since everyone knew he was a leader of the resistance. However, there was no actual evidence to convict him of burning any of the bridges and he was becoming a martyr for the Unionist cause while he stayed behind bars. Jefferson Davis ordered him escorted across Union lines. Brownlow remarked as he left his captors: "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward all men, except a few hell-born and hell-bound rebels in Knoxville."
Sherman did not escape the fiasco unscathed. He had gone completely unstrung, believing he needed 200,000 men to hold Kentucky. McClellan told a politician that "Sherman's gone in the head." Sherman was relieved of command on 15 November and sent to the rear in Missouri. A few weeks later, he was given indefinite leave. Sherman's wife came to take him home to Ohio to recollect his wits. The word went around that he had gone mad. He was replaced, as part of a reorganization of the Western theatre of war by McClellan, by Brigadier General Don Carlos Buell, who as a major had been sent to Fort Sumter to investigate before all the fighting broke out.
The good news was that Buell was not anywhere near as buffaloed by the activities of Albert Sidney Johnston as Sherman had been. The bad news was that Buell was still in no hurry to exploit Confederate weaknesses. Buell wanted to get his soldiers organized and trained before took action. What happened to the Unionists in east Tennessee was of very little interest to him, then or later, no matter how hard Washington pressed him on the matter.
The Federals had lost an opportunity. There had been little to prevent them from seizing east Tennessee except the timidity of their own military commanders. Had they done so, they would have caused the Confederacy serious harm at little cost.
Some of the caution on the part of Sherman and Buell had a basis in fact, as the fiasco at Manassas in July had demonstrated: fighting battles with poorly trained and ill-equipped troops could lead to disaster. But Lyon and Price had demonstrated that ragtag forces could do substantial things, if they had the right leadership, and as U.S. Grant observed later, a general who took the time to ensure his preparations were complete gave his adversaries the same amount of time to refine their preparations as well, with no necessary advantage to either side when the time came to fight. Lincoln had seen something clearly when he had told McDowell, months before, that while his forces were green, the enemy's were "green also", and a general who saw it as well might make things happen.
* While a tragedy was unfolding in east Tennessee, General Fremont was stabilizing the situation in Missouri. The secessionists who holed up in Neosho passed an ordinance of secession on 31 October, but they might have passed a hundred for all the good it did them. The Federals had already re-occupied Lexington without a fight on 16 October, and Fremont had moved back towards Springfield with 40,000 men to pursue Price and destroy him once and for all. Fremont, however, was at the end of his rope and no battle was fought. The reports filtering back to Washington of Fremont's incompetence and obvious lack of judgement were too much for Lincoln. On 28 October, he sent an order relieving Fremont and assigning General David Hunter in his place. The order had a loophole: Fremont was not to be relieved if he had won a battle or was about to fight one.
The press got wind of the order and Fremont heard the news. He tried to shield himself from the order with his pickets and bodyguards, but a captain disguised himself as a farmer with intelligence about the rebels managed to bluff his way into camp on 1 November, and presented Fremont with the order. Fremont, in another demonstration of his staggering lack of judgement, had the man arrested to keep the dismissal quiet, and roused his men to fight the battle that would save him. Unfortunately, there were no rebels conveniently nearby to fight. The captain escaped. The next morning, Fremont gave his men a farewell address and went back to Saint Louis.
Fremont left his command with the Union in control over Missouri, but that didn't mean that order had been restored. Guerrillas were active over much of the state, and warfare there had a nasty tendency to degenerate into simple looting and murder. It was worst along the Kansas border. Embers that had been left glowing during the days of Bleeding Kansas flared up again. Federal troops from Kansas, made up from the antislavery Jayhawkers of prewar days, were under the command of Brigadier General James H. Lane, an ex-senator from the state not noted for his scruples or moral character, and the lot of them were all for hard war. The Jayhawkers scoured the border area for anyone who looked like, sounded like, or smelled like a rebel, and dealt with such people harshly, taking all their possessions that could be carried off and burning what was left. Price's ragtag rebels returned the favor when they could.
No one was spared in the fighting. A Missouri woman wrote: "Our property is all taken from us and I am left without a home with four little children to take care of ... what will become of us God only knows ... Times are very hard; robbing, murdering, burning, and every other kind of meanness on every side."
