v1.1.2 / chapter 64 of 93 / 01 oct 09 / greg goebel / public domain
* By April 1864, Grant was completing preparations for his big push in Northern Virginia. Robert E. Lee knew that the something was going to happen any day, but he lacked the resources to take preemptive action. Lee had to content himself with preparing for the defense as best he could.
In the West, Bedford Forrest conducted another one of his trademark raids, raising hell in Western Tennessee, snatching up horses and supplies, and pulling in new recruits for later campaigns. However, an attack on Fort Pillow on the Mississippi went wrong, with overexcited Confederate troops killing a number of black Union soldiers trying to surrender before rebel officers could stop them. The "Fort Pillow Massacre" grew in the telling and became a source of outrage throughout the North, and led to the cessation of prisoner exchanges.
* Ulysses Grant had not been idle during the winter, and now that spring had finally come he was ready to move. On 9 April 1864, Grant handed Meade a letter marked FOR YOUR PERUSAL ONLY, with instructions for the upcoming campaign.
The strategy was simple: The Army of the Potomac was to come to grips with the Army of Northern Virginia and destroy it. "Lee's army will be your objective. Wherever Lee goes, there you will go also." There was no more dreaming of dodging around Lee and capturing Richmond. Richmond might have had magical significance to the Northern public, but as far as Grant was concerned, it was just a place, its real significance being that Lee would fight to protect it. As long as Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia survived, so did the Confederacy.
Sherman was to simultaneously drive down into Georgia towards Atlanta, but his real objective was to destroy Joe Johnston's Army of the Tennessee. Grant hoped that Banks would also be able to move on Mobile, Alabama, though Grant didn't expect it to happen.
Of course, the traditional concern for defending Washington DC from a lightning Confederate thrust remained a priority, but Grant was a firm believer in the "active defense". Franz Sigel commanded an army in the Shenandoah Valley, blocking the back door to Washington, and he was to advance south through the Valley, supported by force of cavalry and infantry moving out of West Virginia. Ben Butler, holding down Fort Monroe at the end of the James Peninsula, was to pull together forces from the various coastal holdings and move up the peninsula towards Richmond.
This was an ambitious plan, exactly the plan that President Lincoln had been advocating since early in the war. The US Army would hit the Confederacy simultaneously, East and West, and hopefully overwhelm the rebels.
In Grant, Lincoln had finally found a general who was in tune with him. They were both Westerners, with similar backgrounds. When Grant explained to the President that Union Army forces operating on the defensive should work to support those on the offensive, Lincoln replied: "As we say out west, if a man can't skin he must hold a leg while somebody else does." Grant understood this comparison perfectly, since he was the son of a tanner. McClellan would have found it another uncultured remark from the "original gorilla".
* Now all there was to do was to complete preparations and wait for the moment to set things in motion. The Union Army was that would make the big push against the rebels was not the same organization that it had been two years earlier. Then it had been staffed mostly by idealistic volunteers, who felt a high degree of comradeship and dedication to ideals.
Now the ranks were being filled by two sorts of people: conscripts and "bounty men" of various sorts. The conscripts were no great trouble. They were not particularly enthusiastic about being soldiers -- conscripts rarely are -- but they would go along with military discipline and do as they were told. The conscripts did need some additional effort in training, because they came from the poorest and most illiterate elements of society. This was because nobody who had any money would end up being a conscript in the first place; any person subject to conscription could hire a substitute to serve in his place.
Indeed, the clumsy Union conscription act of 1863 had been mostly seen as a way of pressuring men to enlist voluntarily, not of obtaining men in itself, which it did very poorly. Volunteerism was being promoted by bounties offered by Federal, state, and local governments to help fill their recruiting quotas, and in between the hiring of substitutes and the offers of bounties, the money for enlisting was pretty good, in some cases reaching a thousand dollars, a very tidy sum in those days.
There is no reason to believe that every person who was paid to enlist made a bad soldier, but the records of the time suggest that the system attracted a bad element. There were "substitute brokers" who arranged the enlistment of substitutes for those willing to pay, and these brokers were much more interested in being paid than in finding people who would make useful soldiers, turning in "recruits" who were cripples, imbeciles, suffering from debilitating diseases, immigrants who barely spoke a word of English and hardly knew what was happening to them, and outright criminals.
In fact, hardcase criminals found the financial rewards for enlisting almost irresistible. They would enlist under assumed names, take the money, then desert. Desertion could be punished by death, but the likelihood of being caught was very small, a lower risk than hardened criminals faced normally, and such "bounty jumpers" proliferated. In one camp, an officer found that many of them forgot the assumed names they had enlisted under. The bounty jumpers were hated as thieves and cutthroats. Nobody was safe when they came into camp, though they usually left as soon as they could make a break for it. They were absolutely worthless as soldiers,
The old regular army had its share of hard cases in the ranks and had methods for dealing with them: stringing them up by the thumbs; making them sit on a rail wearing a dunce cap for a day; "bucking and gagging", which involved leaving them tied up and helpless sitting in a curled-up position on the ground to be abused by their comrades; or strapping them over the end of a caisson in such a painful way that many left in such a position pleaded to be shot, and were sometimes injured for life by the experience. Discipline was now much more severe than it had been a few years earlier.
Most of the original volunteers had signed up for three-year enlistments, and in the winter of 1863:1864 their terms were coming to an end. Without these men, experienced soldiers who could still fight, the Union Army would have great trouble carrying on the war. About half of the old volunteers left: they'd had enough. The other half stayed, however, less because of the various rewards offered for re-enlistment -- though these could be very generous -- than because they wanted to see the thing through. The Union seemed poised to finally win the war, and after so many hardships, they simply didn't want to quit before they finally came to the end of it.
* Robert E. Lee always paid careful attention to what the Federals were doing and it was obvious to him that they meant to give him trouble in the near future. He wrote Braxton Bragg, his nominal superior in Washington: "My hands are tied. If I was able to move, with the aid of Longstreet and Pickett, the enemy might be driven from the Rappahannock and be obliged to look for the safety of his own capital, instead of the assault on us." Lee couldn't move: he had no forage for his horses and mules, even though "the season has arrived when I may be attacked any day." Lee proposed that supply of his army be given the top railroad priority until the Army had the ability to move again.
At least Longstreet was rejoining him. On 7 April, Longstreet received orders in his winter camp in the mountains of Tennessee to rejoin the Army of Northern Virginia. They marched through the mountains and by 22 April were in camp in Mechanicsburg, behind the Confederate Rapidan line. Lee was glad to have them back, and they were glad to be back. The campaign in Tennessee had been a miserable failure, with Longstreet's command plagued by the sort of bickering that flourishes when things are going poorly. Robert E. Lee visited Longstreet on 29 April and then reviewed the troops. Lee rode in front of them, stopped, and took off his hat in respect. The men cheered with wild enthusiasm in response. A chaplain of Longstreet's corps asked a Colonel C.S. Venable of Lee's staff: "Does it not make the general proud to see how these men love him?"
Venable shook his head: "Not proud. It awes him."
* Nathan Bedford Forrest was never one to sit idle for any longer than he absolutely had to. Furthermore, his command, the "Cavalry Department of West Tennessee & North Mississippi", gave him a degree of jurisdiction over a chunk of territory that he regarded as almost his own by right. The fact that a goodly part of that territory was in Yankee hands deterred him not in the slightest.
After chasing Union General Sooy Smith and his troopers out of Northern Mississippi in February, Forrest reorganized his command into two divisions, one under Brigadier General Abraham Buford and the other under Brigadier General James R. Chalmers. This administrative detail taken care of, on 15 March 1864, Forrest rode with Buford and his division out of their base at Columbus, Mississippi.
Forrest intended to ride north through his "domain" along the Mississippi to resupply and obtain new fighters for his ranks, and do the Federals as much damage as possible in the meantime. He reached Jackson, roughly in the center of western Tennessee, on 20 March, and sent a message to Chalmers to move out of Columbus, instructing him to feint at Memphis to keep the Yankees off balance.
Forrest then led a regiment of Buford's command to Union City, Tennessee, in the northwest corner of the state, where by intimidation and bluff, including cannons made out of logs, he forced the surrender of the garrison there on 24 March almost without firing a shot. The rebels captured 481 men, 300 horses, and a substantial stockpile of food, weapons, and supplies.
He then caught up with Buford's main force and fell on Paducah, Kentucky, at the confluence of the Tennessee and Ohio Rivers, on the afternoon of 25 March. Forrest chased the garrison into their defenses and proceeded to play the same sort of intimidation and bluff game as he had performed at Union City, sending demands to the Federal commander to surrender that specified "no quarter" if they didn't.
The Federal commander was unimpressed. His works were stout and were supported by two gunboats, but Forrest wasn't particularly concerned if the Yankees didn't raise the white flag. Paducah was a major supply depot, and Forrest was mostly concerned with cleaning out its warehouses. A colonel in his command, a native of Paducah, ignored orders and did attack the Union works. The colonel was killed and his men were driven off with a total of about two dozen casualties.
The rebels departed about midnight, torching everything they couldn't carry off. Forrest then gave his Kentucky troopers a week's furlough to visit their families, with instructions to return to Trenton, Tennessee, with fresh clothes and mounts. Not only did all the Kentuckians return; many of them brought in new recruits who wanted to ride with Forrest.
* Forrest rode to Jackson, Tennessee, where he planned another set of movements that would reinforce the impression that he was everywhere at once. On reading a newspaper account that his raid on Paducah had overlooked 140 horses, with the article conveniently detailing where the horses were kept, he ordered Buford to take a brigade north into Kentucky, threaten Columbus to keep the Federals off balance, and then ride to Paducah and seize the horses. This movement would also distract attention from Forrest's main objective, the seizure of Fort Pillow, about 40 miles (64 kilometers) upstream on the Mississippi from Memphis. The fort had been abandoned by the rebels in June 1862, and was now in the hands of about 550 Federals, half of them Tennessee Loyalists and the other half ex-slaves in Union blue.
Forrest believed the place had supplies and horses he could use. He and Chalmers would lead the bulk of his force against the place. Everyone was on the road by 10 April, with Chalmers investing Fort Pillow just after dawn on 12 April. Forrest took over at midmorning and inspected the Federal defenses for weaknesses.
The defenders had pulled back into a central earthworks that appeared very strong, and they were also supported by a gunboat that kept the rebels under persistent fire. If worst came to worst, the earthworks had its back to the river, allowing evacuation by water. However, the walls were so thick that if the Confederates could get close enough the Yankees would not be able to fire on them without being exposed to Forrest's sharpshooters, who had been posted to nearby high ground to force the Union soldiers to keep their heads down.
When Forrest's ammunition train arrived in mid-afternoon, he sent a message to the Federal commander, demanding his surrender and adding the usual intimidating bluster: "Should my demand be refused, I cannot be responsible for the fate of your command." The Federal commander tried to stall for time, but Forrest saw that steamers were coming with reinforcements to relieve the trapped garrison and ordered the Yankee to surrender within twenty minutes. The Union commander flatly refused, and Forrest ordered an immediate assault.
The attack went like clockwork, rebel sharpshooters forcing the Yankees to keep their heads down and the gunboat to keep its gun ports shut, while Forrest's men swept forward to the ditch in front of the Federal earthworks. The first rank of soldiers leaned over to allow the second to bound across the ditch to a narrow ledge between the ditch and earthworks, and then the second rank hoisted the first up to the ledge. At a signal, the sharpshooters ceased fire and the attackers bounded up over the earthworks.
The Federals caved in quickly and tried to reach the riverbank to escape, but the gunboat was still penned up tight by Forrest's sharpshooters, and it could not fire effectively anyway since the two forces were mixed together. Some of the Union soldiers tried to swim away and were picked off, others tried to surrender -- some succeeding and some being shot anyway, particularly the black troops. A Confederate sergeant later wrote that "the poor, deluded negroes would run up to our men, fall upon their knees and with uplifted hands scream for mercy, but were ordered to their feet and were then shot down."
Forrest and his officers ran among the men, loudly ordering them to cease fire, and the killing finally stopped. The fight was over, the Federals having had 350 of their 557 shot, with 221 killed outright. The black troops suffered most of those killed and wounded, with only 58 of the 262 blacks troops there being taken prisoner. Forrest had suffered 100 casualties, with only 14 killed. Forrest gathered up his loot and prisoners that night and pulled out, sending back one of his officers along with a captured Union captain to flag down a gunboat and have badly wounded Federals picked up for evacuation to Memphis.
* Chalmers had been busy in the meantime, detaching a few companies to make the Federals nervous at Columbus, then sweeping into Paducah at noon on 14 April to snatch the horses missed on the earlier raid. He was back in Tennessee the next day to link up with the main force.
Forrest had returned to Jackson, Tennessee on the 14th, where he received a message from General Polk, ordering him to return to Okolona, Mississippi, to help deal with a Federal cavalry raid that Polk's intelligence indicated was now being prepared in middle Tennessee. Forrest replied that he would obey the order, though his own observations suggested that no such operation was being planned by the Federals.
Indeed, the observations Forrest made while on the raid were entirely astute. He had already written Joe Johnston on 6 April: "I am of the opinion that everything is being concentrated against General Lee and yourself." Johnston was astute himself and this no doubt confirmed his worst fears, but Forrest added that if Johnston could combine his own cavalry resources with Forrest's, the rebels could raid through central Tennessee and cut the logistical foundation out from underneath Federal operations in the region.
Forrest repeated this assertion in a letter to Jefferson Davis written on 15 April, stating that "a move could be made into Middle Tennessee and Kentucky which would create a diversion of the enemy's resources and enable us to break up his plans." To reassure Davis that this wasn't another half-baked scheme like the one that landed Morgan in an Ohio prison, Forrest added that "such an expedition, managed with prudence and executed with rapidity, can be safely made."
* Having made his recommendations to the authorities, Forrest then tied up loose ends before his return to northern Mississippi, putting his loot in order and finishing up his recruiting drive in West Tennessee. Not all of the recruits were voluntary. Forrest didn't acknowledge that Tennessee was really in Yankee hands and enforced Confederate conscription laws, and every able-bodied male between the age of 17 and 45 that his patrols found was immediately drafted into the Confederate States Army, without even being given the opportunity to go home and pack. Such an approach was somehow unsurprising coming from a man who had traded in slaves. Whatever the methods, Forrest returned from his raid stronger than when he had left.
He also left behind an uproar like none other that had followed his raids. He always stirred up a hornet's nest, but the action at Fort Pillow, bad enough in itself, was being escalated by the rumor mill and the Union newspapers into an organized and preplanned massacre of men, women, and children, with some of the victims burned or buried alive. Indeed, the "Fort Pillow Massacre" became the atrocity tale of the war.
A subcommittee of the Radical Republicans' iron-fisted Joint Committee on the
Conduct of the War left Washington DC on 20 April, arriving in west Tennessee
on the 23rd. They interviewed survivors and "eyewitnesses" who told ghastly
stories, which were dutifully distilled into a lurid report that inflamed
public opinion even more. The report was denounced by Southern newspapers,
for once more or less accurately, as "a tissue of lies from beginning to
end." Lincoln had already told Secretary of War Stanton on 17 April to
investigate what he referred to with a lawyer's caution as "the alleged
butchery of our troops", and Stanton passed the issue on to Grant. Grant
immediately wired Sherman to investigate, saying:
IF OUR MEN HAVE BEEN MURDERED AFTER CAPTURE,
RETALIATION MUST BE RESORTED TO PROMPTLY.
Sherman investigated, and in his findings he made no such recommendation,
concluding essentially that to the extent excesses had taken place at Fort
Pillow, such things happen in war. Since Sherman's attitude toward Forrest
could hardly be described as sympathetic -- it was more along the line of
wishing the God-damned Wizard of the Saddle could be sent straight to Hell as
soon as possible -- his judgement on the matter was seen as credible.
* That didn't mean that the incident had no effects, since on 17 April Grant halted prisoner exchanges. Informal prisoner exchanges had taken place early in the war, but the Lincoln Administration was reluctant to do anything that implied political recognition of the Confederacy, and so it wasn't until July 1862 that formal "cartel" for prisoner exchanges was established. However, the agreement began to falter in the fall of 1863 and now it had been shut down indefinitely. Partly this was in response to the fact that rebel soldiers had shown a strong inclination to shoot black men in Union blue who tried to surrender, as demonstrated at Fort Pillow. The Lincoln Administration considered executing Confederate prisoners in return, but that was too ruthless a measure, and would have led to executions of Yankee prisoners.
More officially, Confederate authorities had made it clear that if black Union soldiers who had been slaves were taken prisoner, they would be returned to slavery and would not be subject to prisoner exchanges. Black soldiers who had been freedmen would be exchanged, but a Confederate exchange commissioner explained that the Confederacy "had a right to send slaves back to slavery as stolen property recaptured." The Emancipation Proclamation had formally established the principle of taking away Southern slaves as a direct blow to the rebel effort; it was too much to swallow to exchange "property" that had been stolen from Southerners in the first place, and worse put in uniform with arms to fight the South.
Secretary of War Stanton and Ben Butler had been wrangling with the Confederates over this issue for months, but the Confederates were unyielding in their refusal to treat black union soldiers as legitimate prisoners of war. Grant was also angered to capture Confederate troops at Chattanooga who had been paroled at Vicksburg and Port Hudson, to then be sent back into combat without the exchange of Union prisoners. He declared in direct terms that the South would have to agree to exchange Union prisoners without regard to skin color, and also agree to live up to their side of the bargain on paroles.
No agreement was forthcoming, and so Grant could do nothing but suspend the prisoner exchanges. Grant was perfectly aware that suspending the exchanges served the North's strategic interests. Since the South had a substantially smaller population than the North, a head-for-head prisoner exchange was effectively giving the Confederacy an advantage. There was also a general belief in the North that Southern prisoners in Northern prison camps were well-treated and likely to be able to return to battle after being exchanged, while Northern prisoners returned from Southern camps would be too starved and ill to go back to duty -- though the reality was that Northern prison camps were almost as bad as Southern prison camps.
The breakdown in prisoner exchanges made matters more miserable for both sides, but the Confederates got the worse part of the deal. Some have claimed that Grant was being cynically callous when he stopped the exchanges, but he made it clear that prisoner exchanges would be resumed if the Confederacy agreed to treat Union prisoners even-handedly regardless of skin color. If Southerners insisted on working against their own best interests, Grant could only shrug.
Still, although the argument still goes on over which side was being more pigheaded while prisoners suffered and died, the fact of the matter is that agreements between bitter adversaries are likely to be troublesome, and the odds of such arrangements breaking down are very high. Prisoner exchanges are unusual in modern days; they are a concept of polite warfare, a notion that had been popular at the outset of the fighting, but by the spring of 1864 neither side had much faith in polite warfare any longer.
