CHAPTER TEN
THE UNION IN DANGER
NOW CAME THE FATEFUL PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF
1860. IN February the Southern Senator Jefferson Davis demanded
that the Northern states should repeal their Personal Liberty Laws
and cease to interfere with the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. Chief
Justice Taney’s decision of the Supreme Court must be obeyed.
Slavery could not be prohibited by the Federal Government in the
Territories of the United States. Rather, Davis demanded, the
Federal Government should protect slavery in those areas. Against
this, Abraham Lincoln, in New York and elsewhere, unfolded in
magnificent orations, calm, massive, and magnanimous, the
anti-slavery cause. In this crisis the Democratic Party split. When
Douglas, their Presidential candidate, carried a set of compromise
proposals in the party meeting at Charleston the Alabama delegation
marched out of the hall, followed by those of seven other cotton
states. Lincoln would probably in any case have been elected, but
the division among the Democrats made his victory certain. The
cotton states put forward as their candidate John C. Breckinridge,
of Kentucky, who was at that moment Vice-President. He stood as a
Southern Rights Democrat. The scene was further complicated by the
appearance of a fourth aspirant, Senator John Bell, of Kentucky,
who called himself a Constitutional Unionist and was an
old-fashioned Whig. Secession was not the issue, though everyone
felt that the South would in fact secede if Lincoln won. Slavery
was the dominating and all-absorbing topic. Lincoln and the
Republicans wanted to reverse the Dred Scott decision, prohibit
slavery in the Territories and confine it within its existing
limits. Douglas and the official Democrats were for
non-intervention in the Territories and “popular sovereignty” by
the settlers. Breckinridge and his supporters demanded that slavery
in the Territories should be protected by law. Bell tried to ignore
the issue altogether in the blissful hope that the nation could be
made to forget everything that had happened since the Mexican War.
On November 6, 1860, Lincoln was elected. He had behind him only 40
per cent of the voters. Douglas was the runner-up on the popular
vote. Breckinridge, who was reputed to be the Secessionist
candidate in spite of his assurances of loyalty to the Union, came
third. Even in the slave states he failed to win a majority of the
votes.
In spite of this great majority against breaking
the Union, the state of South Carolina, where the doctrines of
Calhoun were cherished, passed by a unanimous vote at Charleston on
December 20 its famous Ordinance of Secession, declaring that the
Union of 1788 between South Carolina and all other states, Northern
and Southern alike, was dissolved. This precipitate and mortal act
was hailed with delirious enthusiasm. The cannons fired; the bells
rang; flags flew on every house. The streets were crowded with
cheering multitudes. The example of South Carolina was followed by
the states of Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana,
and Texas. Delegates from the first of these sovereign states, as
they regarded themselves, met in Alabama in February and organised
a new Confederacy, of which Jefferson Davis was chosen President. A
new constitution, similar in almost all respects to that of the
United States, but founded explicitly upon slavery, was proclaimed.
A Confederate flag—the Stars and Bars—was adopted. President Davis
was authorised to raise an army of a hundred thousand men, large
sums were voted, and a delegation of three was sent abroad to seek
recognition and friendship in Europe. All the leading figures
concerned in this decision harboured grave illusions. They thought
the North would not try to coerce them back into the Union. If it
made the attempt they believed the Yankees would be no match for
Southern arms. And if the North imposed a blockade the Confederates
expected that the Powers of Europe would intervene on their behalf.
They cherished the notion that “King Cotton” was so vital to
Britain and France that neither country could peaceably allow its
supplies to be cut off.
Buchanan was still President of the United States,
and Lincoln, President-Elect, could not take office till March. For
four months the dying administration gaped upon a distracted land.
Floyd, Secretary of War, an ardent Southerner, showed no particular
vigilance or foresight. He tamely allowed muskets which had been
sent North for alterations to be returned to the Southern arsenals.
Every facility was given to officers of the Regular Army to join
the new forces being feverishly raised in the South. Buchanan,
longing for release, tried desperately to discharge his duties and
follow a middle course. All counter-preparations in the North were
paralysed. On the other hand, he refused to recognise the validity
of secession. Practically all the Federal posts, with their small
garrisons, in the Southern states had passed without fighting into
the possession of the Confederacy. But the forts of Charleston
harbour, under the command of Major Anderson, a determined officer,
continued to fly the Stars and Stripes. When called upon to
surrender he withdrew to Fort Sumter, which stood on an island. His
food ran low, and when a ship bearing supplies from the North
arrived to succour him Confederate batteries from the mainland
drove it back by cannon-fire. Meanwhile strenuous efforts at
compromise were being made. Many Northerners were prepared for the
sake of peace to give way to the South on the slavery issue. But
Lincoln was inflexible. He would not repudiate the platform on
which he had been elected. He could not countenance the extension
of slavery to the Territories. This was the nub on which all
turned. In this tense and tremendous situation Abraham Lincoln was
sworn President on March 4, 1861. Around him the structure of
Federal Government was falling to pieces. Officials and officers
were every day leaving for their home states in the South. Hands
were clasped between old comrades for the last time in
friendship.
The North, for all its detestation of slavery, had
by no means contemplated civil war. Between the extremists on both
sides there was an immense borderland where all interests and
relationships were interlaced by every tie of kinship and custom
and every shade of opinion found its expression. So far only the
cotton states, or Lower South, had severed themselves from the
Union. Missouri, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina,
Maryland, Delaware, and above all the noble and ancient Virginia,
the Old Dominion, the birthplace of Washington, the fountain of
American tradition and inspiration, still hung in the balance.
Lincoln appealed for patience and conciliation. He declared himself
resolved to hold the forts and property of the United States. He
disclaimed all intention of invading the South. He announced that
he would not interfere with slavery in the Southern states. He
revived the common memories of the North and South, which, like
“mystic cords, stretch from every battlefield and patriot grave to
every living heart . . . over this broad land.” “In your hands,” he
exclaimed, “my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is
this momentous issue of civil war. The Government will not assail
you. You can have no conflict without yourselves being the
aggressors. You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the
Government, while I shall have the most solemn one to preserve and
defend it.”
On April 8 Lincoln informed the Governor of South
Carolina of his intention to re-victual Major Anderson and his
eighty-three men in Fort Sumter. Thereupon President Davis ordered
General Beauregard, who commanded seven thousand men at Charleston,
to demand the immediate surrender of the fort. Anderson, admitting
that famine would reduce him in a few days, nevertheless continued
constant. Vain parleys were held; but before dawn on April 12 the
Confederate batteries opened a general bombardment, and for two
days fifty heavy cannon rained their shells upon Fort Sumter.
Anderson and his handful of men, sheltering in their bombproof
caverns, feeling that all had been done that honour and law
required, marched out begrimed and half suffocated on the
14th, and were allowed to depart to the North. No blood
had been shed, but the awful act of rebellion had occurred.
The cannonade at Fort Sumter resounded through the
world. It roused and united the people of the North. All the free
states stood together. Party divisions were effaced. Douglas,
Lincoln’s rival at the election, with a million and a half
Democratic votes at his back, hastened to the White House to grasp
Lincoln’s hand. Ex-President Buchanan declared, “The North will
sustain the administration almost to a man.” Upon this surge and
his own vehement resolve, Lincoln issued a proclamation calling for
“the militia of the Union to the number of seventy-five thousand”
to suppress “combinations” in seven states “too powerful to be
suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings.” Here,
then, was the outbreak of the American Civil War.
Upon Lincoln’s call to arms to coerce the seceding
states Virginia made without hesitation the choice which she was so
heroically to sustain. She would not fight on the issue of slavery,
but stood firm on the constitutional ground that every state in the
Union enjoyed sovereign rights. On this principle Virginians denied
the claim of the Federal Government to exercise coercion. By
eighty-eight votes to fifty-five the Virginia Convention at
Richmond refused to allow the state militia to respond to Lincoln’s
call. Virginia seceded from the Union and placed her entire
military forces at the disposal of the Confederacy. This decided
the conduct of one of the noblest Americans who ever lived, and one
of the greatest captains known to the annals of war.
Robert E. Lee stood high in American life. His
father had been a colonel in the Revolution. By his marriage with
Miss Custis, a descendant of Mrs George Washington, he became the
master of Arlington, the house overlooking the national capital
which George Custis, Washington’s adopted son, “the child of Mount
Vernon,” as he was called, had built for himself a few miles from
Washington’s own home. A graduate of West Point, General Scott’s
Engineer Staff-Officer in the Mexican’ War, Lee had served for more
than twenty-five years in the United States Army with distinction.
His noble presence and gentle, kindly manner were sustained by
religious faith and an exalted character. As the American scene
darkened he weighed carefully, while commanding a regiment of
cavalry on the Texan border, the course which duty and honour would
require from him. He was opposed to slavery and thought that
“secession would do no good,” but he had been taught from childhood
that his first allegiance was to the state of Virginia. Summoned to
Washington during March 1861, he had thus expressed himself to an
intimate Northern friend: “If Virginia stands by the old Union, so
will I. But if she secedes (though I do not believe in secession as
a constitutional right, nor that there is sufficient cause for
revolution), then I will still follow my native state with my
sword, and if need be with my life.”
He reached the capital in the fevered days of
March, and General Scott, his old chief, wrestled earnestly with
him in a three hours’ interview. By Lincoln’s authority he was
offered the chief command of the great Union army now being raised.
He declined at once, and when a day later Virginia seceded he
resigned his commission, bade farewell for ever to his home at
Arlington, and in the deepest sorrow boarded the train for
Richmond. Here he was immediately offered the chief command of all
the military and naval forces of Virginia. He had resigned his
United States commission on the Saturday, and on the Monday
following he accepted his new task. Some of those who saw him in
these tragic weeks, when sometimes his eyes filled with tears,
emotion which he never showed after the gain or loss of great
battles, have written about his inward struggle. But there was no
struggle; he never hesitated. The choice was for the state of
Virginia. He deplored that choice; he foresaw its consequences with
bitter grief; but for himself he had no doubts at the time, nor
ever after regret or remorse.
Those who hold that the fortunes of mankind are
largely the result of the impact upon events of superior beings
will find it fitting that Lee’s famous comrade in arms, “Stonewall
Jackson,” should be mentioned at this point. Lee was fifty-four in
the crisis, Jackson but thirty-seven. Like Lee, he was a trained
professional soldier who had served gallantly in the Mexican War.
He had devoted himself to the theoretical study of the military
art. He was at this time a professor at the Virginia Military
Institute. Jackson came of Ulster stock, settled in Virginia. His
character was stern, his manner reserved and usually forbidding,
his temper Calvinistic, his mode of life strict, frugal, austere.
He might have stepped into American history from the command of one
of Cromwell’s regiments. There burned in him a hatred of Northern
domination not to be found in Lee. Black-bearded, pale-faced, with
thin, compressed lips, aquiline nose, and dark, piercing eyes, he
slouched in his weather-stained uniform a professor-warrior; yet
greatly beloved by the few who knew him best, and gifted with that
strange power of commanding measureless devotion from the thousands
whom he ruled with an iron hand.
Both these men, though they habitually spoke and no
doubt convinced themselves to the contrary, loved war as a
technical art to which their lives had been given. Their sayings
and letters abound with expressions of sorrow at the terrible
decrees of which they had now become the servants. But on a long
night march to a desprate battle at dawn Jackson muttered to his
companion “Delicious excitement!”; and Lee, surveying a field of
carnage, observed reflectively, “It is well that war is so
horrible—we would grow too fond of it.” Against Lee and his great
lieutenant, united for a year of intense action in a comradeship
which recalls that of Marlborough and Eugene, were now to be
marshalled the overwhelming forces of the Union.
Both sides set to work to form armies. Trained
officers and men were few, weapons and munitions scanty. The
American people had enjoyed a long peace, and their warfare had
been to reclaim the wilderness and draw wealth from the soil. On
neither side was there any realisation of the ordeal that lay
before them. The warlike spirit ran high in the South, and their
gentry and frontier farmers, like the Cavaliers, were more
accustomed to riding and shooting than their compeers in the
commercial North. The Confederate states were defending hearth and
home against invasion and overlord-ship. Proud and ardent, their
manhood rallied to the newly forming regiments, confident that they
would conquer, sure at least that they were unconquerable.
The North was at first astonished at the challenge.
They could hardly realise that the wordy strife of party politics,
the exciting turmoil of electioneering, must now give place to
organised slaughter. When they surveyed the vast resources of the
North they felt their power incomparable. All were resolved to
maintain the Union whatever the cost; and beneath this august
constitutional issue there glowed the moral fires of wrath against
slavery.
At first sight, to foreign observers, the disparity
between the combatants was evident. Twenty-three states, with a
population of twenty-two millions, were arrayed against eleven
states, whose population of nine millions included nearly four
million slaves. But as the Southern states only claimed the right
to go their own way their policy would be defensive; the North,
which denied this right and was determined to keep them in the
Union by force, had to take the offensive. A formidable task
confronted the aggressors.
Nothing short of the subjugation of the entire
South would suffice. The issue was not to be settled by two or
three battles; the whole country would have to be conquered
piecemeal. The Confederacy embraced an area which extended eight
hundred miles from north to south and seventeen hundred from east
to west. The railways were few and badly conditioned; the roads no
better. The region was sparsely inhabited, and the invader would
have for the most part to bring his own supplies. He would have
enormously long lines of communication to guard in his march
through a hostile country. Most of the slaves, who might have been
expected to prove an embarrassment to the South, on the contrary
proved a solid help, tending the plantations in the absence of
their masters, raising the crops which fed the armies, working on
the roads and building fortifications, thus releasing a large
number of whites for service in the field.
In the North it might be suggested that a large
proportion of the Democrats would oppose a policy of force. In the
struggle of endurance, which seemed the shape which the war would
ultimately take, the South might prove more staunch. In a war of
attrition the North had the advantage of being a manufacturing
community, and her best weapon against Southern agricultural
strength, if it could blockade three thousand five hundred miles of
Southern coast, might prove to be the Navy. But a resultant cotton
famine in Europe might force Great Britain and France into
intervention on the side of the South.
The seven states of the Lower South had seceded
after Lincoln’s election, and set up a Government of their own at
Montgomery, Alabama, in February 1861. Lincoln’s call for troops
after Sumter was followed by the secession of four states of the
Upper South, and the Confederate capital was moved to Richmond.
There remained the attitude of the border slave states, Kentucky,
Missouri, Maryland, and Delaware. Of these Kentucky was the most
important on account of its geographical position, and because
Missouri was likely to follow its example. Indeed, the issue of the
war seemed perhaps to turn upon Kentucky. Lincoln, a Kentuckian by
birth, like Jefferson Davis, is reported to have said, “I should
like to have God on my side, but I must have Kentucky.” But
Kentucky, loyal to the memory of Henry Clay, “the Great
Compromiser,” tried to remain neutral. Neither combatant could
tolerate this attitude for long; yet both feared lest any violent
act of aggression might throw the state into the other’s arms.
Lincoln proved the more astute diplomatist, and by keeping the
control of policy in his own hands secured Kentucky for the Union
in September. This was the first real victory for the North.
In Missouri, as in the sister state, there was a
majority in favour of neutrality; but the extremists on both sides
took control and civil war resulted. The Governor was a rabid
Secessionist, and, supported by the legislature, endeavoured to
take the state out of the Union. The Union leader was one of the
powerful Blair family, and his brother a member of the Cabinet. He
invoked the aid of General Lyon, commander of the Federal troops in
St Louis, and with his help the Governor’s separatist designs were
defeated, and he himself chased out of Jefferson City, the state
capital, into the southwest corner of the state. But the intrusion
of Federal troops into a domestic quarrel caused many citizens who
had hitherto been neutral to join the ranks of Secession. Although
a state Convention deposed the Governor and set up a Provisional
Government at St Louis months were to elapse before Missouri was
fully brought under Federal control.
In Maryland the issue was more quickly settled. The
Secessionists were strong in Baltimore, and gained temporary
control of the city. They destroyed the railway bridges on the two
northern lines, and for a few days Washington found itself
dangerously isolated. Reinforcements from Massachusetts were
assaulted in their march through the streets, and a bloody
collision occurred. But without help from Virginia the Maryland
Secessionists were not capable of making head against the national
capital, and the Loyalist Governor gained time, until on May 13
General Butler, with a small Federal force, made a sudden dash,
and, taking the Secessionists by surprise, occupied Baltimore. This
ended the secession in Maryland. A fourth slave state, Delaware,
also stayed in the Union. Its Legislature had Southern leanings,
but geography ruled otherwise.
Lincoln not only secured four slavery states as
allies, but also detached an important section from the seceding
state of Virginia. West Virginia, separated by the Alleghenies from
the rest of the state, and geographically and economically a part
of the Ohio valley, had long chafed under the oppression of the
state Government at Richmond, which ignored its interests and
exploited it for the benefit of the “Tidewater” section. It now
seized the opportunity to secede from Secession. When in May the
popular vote ratified the Ordinance of Secession it broke away, and
with the help of its powerful neighbour, Ohio, established its
independence under the title of the state of Kanawha, which two
years later was formally admitted to the Union as the state of West
Virginia.
In the task of preparing for war the Southern
President had advantages over his rival. A West-Pointer, he had
served in the Regular Army for several years and had fought in the
Mexican War; he had afterwards been Secretary of War in President
Pierce’s administration, and then chairman of the Senate Military
Affairs Committee. He had an inside knowledge of the officer corps,
and could make the best use of the material at his disposal. Not
only did he select with a few exceptions the right men, but he
supported them in adversity. The principal Confederate Generals who
were in command at the beginning of the war, if not killed, were
still in command at its end.
Lincoln, on the other hand, was without military
experience; his profession of the law had not brought him in
contact with Army officers. His appointments were too often made on
purely political grounds. He was too ready, especially at first, to
yield to the popular clamour which demanded the recall of an
unsuccessful general. Few, having failed once, were given a second
chance. After each defeat a change was made in the command of the
Army of the Potomac. None of the Generals in command of Federal
armies at the end of the war had held high commands at the
beginning. The survivors were very good, but the Federal cause was
the poorer for the loss of those who had fallen by the way. Others,
fearing the President in the rear more than the foe in front, had
been too nervous to fight their best. Nor did the War Department
make the best use of the junior officers of the Regular Army. Too
many were left with their detachments in the Far West instead of
being utilised to train and lead the volunteers. But while the
North attempted at first to organise its military strength as if it
had been a confederacy of states, the Federal Government, gaining
power steadily at the expense of the states, rapidly won
unquestioned control over all the forces of the Union. The Southern
“Sovereign States,” on the other hand, were unable even under the
stress of war to abandon the principle of decentralisation for
which they had been contending. Some State Governors, though loyal
to the Confederate cause, were slow to respond to central
direction, and when conscription was decided upon by the
Confederate Congress in 1862 there was much opposition and evasion
by the state authorities.
By what paths should the North invade the South to
reconquer it for the Union? The Allegheny Mountains divided the
Mississippi valley from the broad slopes which stretched eastward
to the Atlantic. The Mississippi and its great tributary, the Ohio,
with the Cumberland and the Tennessee Rivers, offered sure means of
carrying the war into the heart of the Confederacy and rending it
asunder. The mechanical and material resources of the North ensured
the control of these waterways. The South could not organise any
river forces capable of coping with the Federal flotillas. The one
lateral line of communication within Confederate territory, the
Charleston-Memphis railroad, which passed through the key position
of Chattanooga on the Tennessee, at the junction of four railway
lines, would be speedily threatened. Waterways could not be cut by
cavalry raids; the current of the rivers was with the North, and
there was no limit except shipping to the troops and the supplies
which could be carried. Old Winfield Scott, the Federal
General-in-Chief, saw in this Western theatre the true line of
strategic advance. But the initial neutrality of Kentucky confused
the Northern view, and when at the end of September Kentucky was
gained the main Union forces were differently engaged.
Upon Virginia joining the Confederacy Jefferson
Davis made Richmond the Southern capital. It was within a hundred
miles of Washington. It controlled, or might control, the estuaries
of the James and York Rivers, with their tributaries. It covered
the powerful naval base at Norfolk. Between Richmond and the enemy
flowed in successive barriers the broad outlets of the Potomac and
the Rappahannock, with its tributary the Rapidan. Here, then, upon
this advanced battleground, rather than in the interior, must the
Confederacy maintain itself or fall. Thus the two capitals stood
like queens at chess upon adjoining squares, and, sustained by
their combinations of covering pieces, they endured four years of
grim play within a single move of capture.
The Confederates hoped at first to defend the line
of the Potomac, which marked the northern frontier of Virginia.
They had seized the Federal arsenal and army depot at Harpers
Ferry, where the Shenandoah joins the Potomac, and for several
months, while the Union forces were gathering, Colonel Jackson, and
later General Joseph E. Johnston, with a few thousand men,
maintained themselves there. In front of the railway junction of
Manassas, by the Bull Run stream, only thirty miles from
Washington, stood General Beauregard, of Sumter repute, with the
main Confederate army. Thus the summer of 1861 came. “How long,”
cried the politicians in Washington, and the turbulent public
opinion behind them in the North, “should the United States
tolerate this insolent challenge?” The three-months volunteers whom
Lincoln had summoned at the end of April must be made to strike a
blow before their time expired. General Scott wished to wait till
trained armies were formed. But do not all regulars despise militia
and volunteers? Pressed beyond resistance, Scott yielded to the
entreaties of Lincoln and his Cabinet. Harpers Ferry had already
been recovered, and Joseph E. Johnston, with eleven thousand men,
had withdrawn up the Shenandoah, Scott therefore sent fifteen
thousand men to hold off Johnston in the valley, while Irvin
McDowell, a competent soldier, with thirty-five thousand, moved to
attack Beauregard, who mustered twenty-two thousand. The essence of
this plan was that Johnston’s army, held by superior force, should
not join Beauregard before McDowell attacked him. Some have
suggested that if Scott, who was still robust of mind, if not in
body, could have been conveyed to the field of battle in a litter
or ambulance, as Marshal Saxe had been at Fontenoy, the Federal
army might have been spared the disaster which overtook it.
Knowledge and experience in command outweigh mere physical
disability.
The Federal advance had originally been fixed for
July 9, but it was not till a week later that it actually began.
The two Confederate Generals were both expecting to be attacked by
the superior forces on their respective fronts, and each was asking
for reinforcements from the other. But the Union General in the
valley, Patterson, allowed Johnston to slip away unobserved, and he
joined Beauregard with two brigades on the day before the battle.
Both McDowell and Beauregard had planned the same manœuvre, to turn
the enemy’s left flank. McDowell got his blow in first; on the
Confederate right orders miscarried and the offensive faltered.
With such troops the side standing on the defensive might be
expected to hold its ground. But McDowell virtually achieved a
surprise, and his much superior force threatened to overwhelm the
weak Confederate left before reinforcements could arrive. In this
crisis Jackson’s brigade, standing “like a stone wall” on the Henry
Hill, stopped the Federal advance, until the arrival by rail of
another of Johnston’s brigades turned the tide of battle.
The combat, though fierce, was confused, and on
both sides disjointed. The day was hot, the troops raw, the staffs
inexperienced. The Northerners retreated; the Confederates were too
disorganised to pursue; but the retreat became a rout. Members of
the Cabinet, Senators, Congressmen, even ladies, had come out from
Washington to see the sport. They were involved in a panic when
thousands of men, casting away their arms and even their coats,
fled and never stopped till they reached the entrenchments which
surrounded Washington. Not more than five thousand men were killed
or wounded on both sides in the action, but the name Bull Run rang
far and wide. Europe was astonished; the South was overjoyed; and a
wave of fury swept the Union, before which the passions which had
followed the attack on Fort Sumter seemed but a ripple.
It is still argued that the Confederates should
have struck hot-foot at Washington. But Johnston at the time
thought the Confederate army more disorganised by victory than the
Federals by defeat. He had not seen the rout. Jackson and other
Confederate Generals were eager to advance on Washington. Who shall
say?
The day after this ignominious affair a new
commander replaced McDowell. One of Lee’s comrades on Scott’s staff
in Mexico, General George B. McClellan, a Regular officer with many
remarkable qualities, was summoned from West Virginia, where he had
been active and forward, to take command. Congress had voted the
enlistment of five hundred thousand volunteers and a grant of two
hundred and fifty million dollars for the prosecution of the war. A
week after his assumption of command McClellan laid before the
President the grandiose scheme of forming an army of two hundred
and seventy-three thousand men, which, in combination with a strong
naval force and a fleet of transports, should march through the
Atlantic states, reducing the seaports from Richmond to New
Orleans, and then move into the interior and stamp out the remnants
of the rebellion. In war matters are not settled so easily. Public
opinion, vocal through a thousand channels, demanded quick results.
The scythe of Time cut both ways. The Confederacy was becoming
consolidated. Every month increased the peril of foreign
recognition of the South, or even of actual intervention. However,
when at the end of October General Scott retired McClellan became
General-in-Chief of all the armies of the Republic, and bent
himself with zeal and capacity to forming brigades, divisions, army
corps, with artillery, engineers, and supply trains, according to
the best European models.
The year 1861 ended with the Confederacy intact and
almost unmolested. Along the immense front, with its deep
borderlands and debatable regions, more than a hundred and fifty
skirmishes and petty actions had been fought without serious
bloodshed. Although the Confederate commanders realised that the
time would soon come when McClellan would take the field against
them with an army vastly superior in numbers, well disciplined and
well equipped, they did not dare, with only forty thousand men,
however elated, to invade Maryland and march on Baltimore. They did
not even attempt to recover West Virginia. Lee, who was sent to
co-ordinate defence on this front, could not prevail over the
discord of the local commanders. Although he still retained his
commission from the state of Virginia, he ranked below both Joseph
E. Johnston and Albert Sidney Johnston in the Confederate
hierarchy. Beauregard, though junior to him, had gained the
laurels. Lee returned from Western Virginia with diminished
reputation, and President Davis had to explain his qualities to the
State Governors when appointing him to organise the coast defences
of the Carolinas.
So far the American Civil War had appeared to
Europe as a desultory brawl of mobs and partisans which might at
any time be closed by politics and parley. Napoleon III sympathised
with the Confederates, and would have aided them if the British
Government had been agreeable. Queen Victoria desired a strict
neutrality, and opinion in England was curiously divided. The upper
classes, Conservative and Liberal alike, generally looked with
favour upon the South, and in this view Gladstone concurred.
Disraeli, the Conservative leader, was neutral. The Radicals and
the unenfranchised mass of the working classes were solid against
slavery, and Cobden and Bright spoke their mind. But the Northern
blockade struck hard at the commercial classes, and Lancashire,
though always constant against slavery, began to feel the cotton
famine. The arrest on a British ship, the Trent, of the
Confederate agents, Mason and Slidell, by a United States cruiser
roused a storm. The Foreign Secretary, Lord John Russell, penned a
hard dispatch which the Prince Consort persuaded the Prime
Minister, Lord Palmerston, to modify. A clause was inserted which
enabled the Federal Government without loss of honour to declare
their cruiser’s action unauthorised. President Lincoln took some
persuading, but in the end he sagely remarked “One war at a time,”
liberated the captives, and all remained in sullen suspense.
Blockade-running, both in cotton outwards and arms inwards,
developed upon a large scale; but not a single European Government
received the envoys of the Confederate states. No one in Europe
imagined the drama of terrific war which the year 1862 would
unfold. None appraised truly the implacable rage of the
antagonists. None understood the strength of Abraham Lincoln or the
resources of the United States. Few outside the Confederacy had
ever heard of Lee or Jackson.