CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE CAMPAIGN AGAINST RICHMOND
THE NEW YEAR OPENED GRIEVOUSLY FOR THE SOUTH, AND
A BITTER tide of disillusion chilled its people. In the Cabinet and
headquarters at Richmond, where facts and figures told their sombre
tale, the plight of the Confederacy already seemed grave. The Union
blockade froze the coasts. Hostile armies, double or triple the
numbers the South could muster, were assuming shape and quality,
both in the Atlantic and Mississippi theatres. The awful weight of
the North, with its wealth and munition-making power, lay now upon
the minds of President Davis, his colleagues and Generals. The
Southern states had no arsenals, little iron and steel, few and
small factories from which boots, clothing, equipment could be
supplied. The magazines were almost empty. Even flintlock muskets
were scarce. The smooth-bore cannon of the Confederate artillery
was far out-ranged by the new rifled guns of the Union. Nor was
there any effectual means by which these needs could be met. It is
upon this background that the military prodigies of the year stand
forth.
Disaster opened in the Mississippi valley. Here
Albert Sidney Johnston commanded the Confederate forces. Davis
believed him to be his finest General. He was certainly a man of
boundless devotion, whose daring was founded upon a thorough
knowledge of his art. In the autumn of 1861 he had advanced to
Bowling Green, a railway junction of high strategic value to the
south of the Green River, a tributary of the Ohio. Here he stood
brazenly, hoping to rouse Kentucky and marshal Tennessee, while to
the westward Leonidas Polk, who in peace-time was Bishop of
Louisiana, with another small army barred the Mississippi at
Columbus. The Federal forces, with their fleets of armoured river
gun-boats, descending the Mississippi from St Louis and the Ohio
from Louisville, outnumbered both these Confederate Generals by
four to one. Still, for months they had remained unmolested in
their forward positions, covering enormous territories from whose
population and resources much might be drawn. Now with the turn of
the year the Union leaders set their men in motion. Masses of
blue-clad soldiers began to appear upon the three-hundred-mile
front from the great river to the mountain ranges, and all kinds of
queer craft cased in steel and carrying cannon and mortars glided
slowly down the riverways from the north. The bluff could be played
no longer. Polk abandoned Columbus, and Johnston retreated from
Bowling Green. This carried the fighting line southwards to the
Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers, and to a Confederate fortress
called Island No. 10 on the Mississippi.
The Federal General, Henry W. Halleck, who
commanded the Western Department was a model of caution.
Fortunately among his generals there was a retired Regular officer,
Ulysses S. Grant, who since the Mexican War had lived in obscurity,
working for a time in his father’s leather store in Illinois. The
Confederates sought to block the Mississippi at Island No. 10, the
Tennessee at Fort Henry, and the Cumberland at Fort Donelson, and
their advanced forces garrisoned these armed posts. Fort Henry was
weak, and Fort Donelson was an entrenched camp which required a
considerable army for its defence. Grant proposed a winter advance
up the Tennessee River and an attack upon Fort Henry. Halleck
approved. Grant made the advance, and the advance made Grant.
Albert Sidney Johnston foresaw with perfect clarity a Federal
winter offensive while the rivers were well filled. He clamoured
for reinforcements, both to President Davis and the Governors of
the Western states. The former could not and the latter did not
supply them. In February 1862 Grant seized Fort Henry. It was but
ten miles across the tongue of land between the rivers to Fort
Donelson, on the Cumberland. Without authority, and in severe
frost, Grant struck at Fort Donelson, which was defended by
seventeen thousand Confederates under Floyd, the former United
States Secretary for War, who in the interval between Lincoln’s
election and inauguration had allowed the muskets to be transferred
to the South. After four days’ fighting and confrontation Fort
Donelson surrendered, with fourteen thousand prisoners and sixty
guns. Floyd, apprehending a charge of treason, escaped the night
before. He was probably wise.
The fall of Fort Donelson on February 16 was the
first great military disaster of the Confederacy; but others
followed quickly in the West. Albert Sidney Johnston, now at last
furnished with the beginnings of an army, gathered the remnants of
his former front at Corinth, behind the Tennessee, and Polk fell
back down the Mississippi to Memphis.
At Washington McClellan, General-in-Chief,
laboured to prepare his army, and resisted by every means the
intense political pressures which demanded an advance “on to
Richmond.” He exaggerated the strength of the enemy, and furnished
Lincoln with endless reports from Pinkerton’s Private Detective
Agency, which he used as his secret service, showing very heavy
forces at Richmond and behind Joseph E. Johnston’s entrenchments
thirty miles away at Centerville, He strove to gain time to drill
his men by repeated promises to advance. As month succeeded month
and the swarming Army of the Potomac made no movement the
enthusiasm which had greeted McClellan in July 1861 waned. The
Radical Republicans began to attack this Democrat General who had
been preferred to their own candidate, John C. Frémont. McClellan
was known to be opposed to the Radical policy of proclaiming the
emancipation of all slaves. Early in December he informed the
President that he did not favour a frontal attack on Joseph E.
Johnston and a march along the straight road through Fredericksburg
to Richmond. He had long been devising a plan for an amphibious
movement down Chesapeake Bay to some point on the coast of Virginia
close to the rebel capital. He imparted these ideas to Lincoln in
general terms early in December. Then in the middle of the month he
contracted typhoid fever and was absent for several weeks. The
Republican Party leaders had already procured the appointment of a
Joint Committee on the conduct of the war, consisting of three
Senators and four Congressmen. It was dominated by the Radical
enemies of the General-in-Chief. Lincoln and the cabinet, during
McClellan’s absence from duty, called into council several Generals
of the Army, and invited constructive suggestions. But their
conferences were abruptly disturbed by the reappearance of
McClellan himself. A few days later he explained his plan to the
President in detail. Availing himself of sea-power, he proposed to
transport an army of a hundred and fifty thousand men down
Chesapeake Bay and disembark it at Urbana, on the Lower
Rappahannock, where it would be only one day’s march from West
Point and two more marches from Richmond. He expected to cut off
General J. B. Magruder and the Confederate troops defending the
Yorktown peninsula, and he hoped to reach Richmond before Johnston
could retreat thither.
No one can asperse the principle of this
conception. It utilised all the forces of the Union Government; it
turned the flank of all the Confederate positions between
Washington and Richmond; it struck at the forehead of the
Confederacy. Its details were substantially modified on
examination. Fortress Monroe, at the tip of the peninsula, between
the York and James Rivers, was held by the Union, and was finally
chosen as a safe landing-place. President Lincoln had one
overpowering objection to the whole idea of a maritime expedition.
It would uncover Washington; and Joseph E. Johnston, for the
strength of whose army he probably accepted McClellan’s own
figures, to say nothing of “Stonewall” Jackson, would at once swoop
down on the defenceless capital. Hard bargaining ensued upon the
number of troops to be left to guard the capital and the mouth of
the Shenandoah valley, where at Harpers Ferry the river flows into
the Potomac. This was agreed at forty thousand. Eventually on
February 27 Lincoln gave a reluctant assent, and everything was set
in train for the tremendous enterprise. At the same time Lincoln
resolved to keep supreme control, relieved McClellan of the general
direction of the United States armies, and restricted him to the
command of the Army of the Potomac. For this there were also sound
military reasons. Feeling that he required a military adviser, he
decided to summon General Halleck from the West. McClellan learnt
of his removal from the higher command through the medium of the
newspapers before Lincoln’s emissary reached him. Thus the
President appeared guilty of a grave discourtesy, so unusual in him
that the suspicion naturally arose that the “hidden hand” of the
Joint Committee was here at work.
It was a far worse mistake not to appoint a new
General-in-Chief. All the generals in command of armies were
ordered to take their instructions from the Secretary of War. For
the last two months this office had been held by Edwin M. Stanton,
who had replaced the incompetent and perhaps corrupt Cameron.
Stanton, like McClellan, was a Democrat, and during the last days
of the Buchanan administration had held the post of
Attorney-General. Possibly Lincoln thought that he would be
acceptable to McClellan. It was no doubt his intention to reappoint
McClellan as General-in-Chief, if he succeeded in his Richmond
campaign, and at the time he could think of no one to fill the
vacancy, which he hoped would be only temporary. At the outset
Stanton had professed unbounded devotion to McClellan, but the
General soon began to doubt the sincerity of his professions and
thought that he detected a deliberate design to debar him from free
access to the President. It was not very long before Stanton
appeared to be in collusion with the Joint Committee. The
Attorney-General had given the opinion that “the order of the
Secretary of War is the President’s order.” There now began to
issue from the Secretary’s office a series of orders seriously
crippling McClellan’s operations. McClellan’s scope was reduced by
the creation of the Military Departments of the Rappahannock under
McDowell, who had commanded at Bull Run, and of the Shenandoah
under Nathaniel P. Banks. A whole corps was thus taken from him. He
claimed that he was leaving behind him no less than seventy-three
thousand men, of whom but thirty-five thousand belonged to Banks’s
command in the Shenandoah valley. McClellan was justified in
regarding this force as available for the protection of the
capital. However, he did not clearly explain his arrangements to
Lincoln, and his failure to take the President into his confidence
had an unfortunate result. For Lincoln in misunderstanding ordered
the First Corps, under McDowell, to remain in front of Washington,
thus reducing the force on which McClellan had counted by forty
thousand men, at the moment of launching his tremendous
operation.
The Confederates lost their best chance of victory
when they failed to use the autumn and winter of 1861. Their
success at Bull Run proved as injurious as a reverse. Believing
with their President that foreign intervention was near at hand,
and arrogantly confident that they could beat the North in the
field if need arose, they relaxed their efforts. The volunteers who
came forward after the first battle could not be armed. Recruiting
fell off; the soldiers in the field began to go home. Efforts to
fill the ranks by grants of bounties and furloughs were
ineffectual. By the beginning of 1862 the position was desperate.
Nearly two-thirds of the Confederate Army consisted of one-year
volunteers. In May the terms of enlistment of the hundred and
forty-eight regiments which they formed would expire. These
regiments were the backbone of the Army. Invasion was imminent.
Conscription was contrary to the theory of state independence and
sovereignty. But the Confederate Congress rose manfully to the
occasion, and on April 16 by a vote of more than two to one passed
an Act declaring every able-bodied white man between the ages of
eighteen and thirty-five subject to military service. The armies
were nevertheless filled by volunteers seeking to escape the stigma
of serving under compulsion rather than by the Act itself. Indeed,
the Act proved unpopular in the States and was difficult to
enforce. Full use was made of its exemption clauses by the
disaffected in order to escape service.
Throughout this period President Jefferson Davis
rigorously adhered to the passive-defensive. He made no attempt to
exploit the victories of Bull Run and Wilson’s Creek. Determined to
keep the control of military operations in his own hands, he
devoted his attention to the East, and largely ignored the West,
where chaos reigned until Albert Sidney Johnston’s appointment to
the supreme command in September. He obstinately refused to draw
upon the “seasoned soldiers” who formed the garrisons on the
Atlantic coastline. Hatteras Inlet, which afforded the best
approach to the North Carolina Sounds, and Port Royal and Beaufort
in South Carolina, which threatened both Charleston and Savannah,
had been captured by small Federal forces and sea-power. Lee after
his return from Western Virignia was sent to organise the coast
defences. When a large expedition under the Union General Ambrose
E. Burnside entered the inland waters of North Carolina the
Confederates were ill-prepared, and lost Roanoke Island and New
Bern. President Davis was more than ever determined to maintain at
their full strength the garrisons in the threatened states. He
recalled General Lee from his coastal defence work in the
Carolinas, and employed him in a somewhat ill-defined capacity as
his chief military adviser at headquarters.
In the middle of March Halleck, who had been
appointed to the sole command in the Western theatre, directed Don
Carlos Buell, who had occupied Nashville, to march with the greater
part of his army to Savannah, on the Tennessee, thirty miles from
Corinth, to combine with Grant, who had William T. Sherman with
him, on the western bank near Shiloh, and attack Albert Sidney
Johnston. But before Buell’s men were across the river Johnston
struck. In the early morning of April 6 he surprised the advanced
Federal troops in their tents near Shiloh, and the largest and most
bloody battle yet seen in the war was fought. Johnston at first
carried all before him; and Grant, who was late in reaching the
field, was by nightfall in grave danger. But Johnston, exposing
himself with reckless gallantry at the head of an infantry charge,
was wounded and bled to death from a main artery in a few minutes.
Whatever results his great personality and wonderful energy could
have gained on the morrow were lost. Beauregard, who succeeded him,
drew off the Confederate troops, much to the disgust of his
subordinate, Braxton Bragg. Each side lost in this furious action
ten thousand men; but the proportion of loss was far heavier in the
thinner Confederate ranks. The arrival of the cautious Halleck,
although he brought Federal reinforcements, stopped any thought of
pursuit. Island No. 10 was reduced by General John Pope on April 8,
and seven thousand Confederates became prisoners of war. It now
seems that a combined naval and military expedition could easily at
this time have lunged far to the south and secured the fortress of
Vicksburg in Mississippi. But Halleck accommodated himself readily
to the President’s wish for action in East Tennessee. He moved
slowly against Corinth, and spent a month in trying to surround
Beauregard, who escaped by a swift and long retreat. By the summer
the Union line in the West had moved southwards by two hundred
miles on a three-hundred-mile front.
The stage was now set for the military drama of
the Richmond-Yorktown peninsula. At the beginning of April
McClellan’s army began to land in large numbers at the Federal
Fortress Monroe, which served as a bridgehead. As soon as this
movement, about which there could be no secrecy, became evident
Joseph E. Johnston, to the surprise and relief of the Federal
Government, withdrew from Centreville, abandoned Manassas Junction,
crossed the Upper Rappahannock, and stood in the rugged wilderness
country behind its tributary the Rapidan. It may seem confusing
that there should be two Confederate Generals named Johnston; but
after the gallant death of Albert Sidney at Shiloh only one
remained. He was Joseph E. Now behind the Rapidan he was in close
touch with Richmond, so that McClellan’s strategy, vindicated in
principle, was baulked in practice. In the middle of April
Johnston, leaving his main army eighty miles to the westward,
arrived at Yorktown, and assumed the additional command of the
troops in the peninsula. He thus enjoyed interior lines and could
concentrate all his forces for the defence of Richmond. The Union
Navy, after a heavy combat, found itself unable to face the
plunging fire of the batteries on the bluffs of the York River on
McClellan’s right flank. The Confederate entrenchments, manned by
Magruder’s troops, stretched before him across the peninsula. He
conceived himself outnumbered by the enemy, and if Davis had
consented to give Johnston the garrisons of the Atlantic towns he
would have been.
In these depressing circumstances McClellan acted
with more than his habitual deliberation. He spent a month in a
formal siege of Yorktown, incessantly appealing to Lincoln for
McDowell’s corps. Lincoln, on the other hand, urged him to vigorous
action. “I always insisted,” he wrote drily, on April 9, “that
going down the bay in
search of a field instead of fighting at or near Manassas was only
shifting and not surmounting a difficulty; that we would find the
same enemy, and the same or equal entrenchments, at either place.”
And a month later: “By delay the enemy will relatively gain upon
you—that is, he will gain faster by fortifications and
reinforcements than you can gain by reinforcements alone.”
Eventually, after the surrender of Yorktown, which opened the York
River to his ships, McClellan advanced upon the Confederate lines.
Magruder, who had only eleven thousand men, made no resistance, and
though mauled in a rearguard action at Williamsburg on May 5
extricated himself successfully. By the middle of May McClellan had
advanced sixty miles up the York, and arrived at White House, on
the Richmond—West Point railway, twenty-five miles from the rebel
capital. He formed a new base at West Point and became independent
of Fortress Monroe. Could he at this moment have brought McDowell
from Fredericksburg into his combination the fate of Richmond might
well have been sealed.
However, President Davis had in April been
persuaded by Lee to reinforce “Stonewall” Jackson for an offensive
diversion in the Shenandoah valley. With only sixteen thousand men
against four Federal Generals, Banks, Shields, Frémont and Milroy,
who disposed of over forty thousand, Jackson fought the brief,
brilliant campaign which reinforced his first renown. Striking
right and left at the superior forces on either side of him,
running daily risks of capture, making enormous marches, sometimes
dividing his small force, he gained a series of sharp actions,
which greatly perturbed President Lincoln and his advisers. Lincoln
had at last promised McClellan McDowell’s corps; but six days
later, when the Union Army was half across the swampy river
Chickahominy, a telegram brought the General the news that
McDowell’s movement was “suspended.” McClellan paused in his
advance; violent rains flooded the Chickahominy, and the Union Army
found itself divided, with two corps only on the southern side.
This was clearly Johnston’s opportunity. With his whole force he
attacked the two isolated Union corps. President Davis, with Lee at
his side, rode out to watch the resulting battle of Seven Pines, or
Fair Oaks as it is sometimes called. They had not been consulted by
the Commander-in-Chief, who had given all his orders verbally to
his Generals. The Confederate attack miscarried. The battle was
severe but indecisive, costing each side about six thousand men.
McClellan was checked, and heavy rains made him all the more ready
to remain inactive. He stood fast with his outposts five miles from
Richmond. Lincoln, having learned that Jackson was now in retreat
up the valley, again promised McDowell’s corps. But when Jackson
turned on his pursuers and defeated them on two successive days,
June 8 and 9, at Cross Keys and Port Republic, he changed his mind
again and would not let McDowell go. It was certainly desirable to
guard against any risk of the Federal capital’s falling even
temporarily into rebel hands, for the effect would have been
shattering, though hardly disastrous. But Lincoln’s vacillations
are a classic instance of the dangers of civilian interference with
generals in the field.
Far more important than the fighting was the fact
that General Joseph E. Johnston was severely wounded on the first
day at Seven Pines, and President Davis on June 1 appointed Lee to
command what was henceforward to bear the deathless title of the
Army of Northern Virginia.
Lee now made the first of his offensive
combinations, and immediately his hand was felt in the whole
conduct of the war. He procured from Davis the gathering of the
Atlantic garrisons which Johnston had been denied. He played upon
the fears of Washington by sending seven thousand men to strengthen
Jackson in the valley. This ensured the further paralysis of
McDowell. Jackson rode in from his army to concert the plans. He
was ordered to leave his “enfeebled troops” in the valley, and come
secretly with his main force to Ashland, fifteen miles north of
Richmond and on the Richmond-Fredericksburg railway. He could
thence by advancing turn the flank and the rear of the Union armies
and cut their communications with West Point. He was to be ready to
act by dawn on June 26. In the interval J. E. B. Stuart, the young
Confederate cavalry leader, with twelve hundred horse, made a
remarkable reconnaissance of McClellan’s right. He actually
traversed his communications, and, being unable to return, rode
right round the Union Army, arriving south of Richmond with several
hundred captives. This was more than Lee had wished, and Stuart’s
exploit might well have warned the enemy. But McClellan made no
change in his array, which still lay in sight of Richmond astride
the Chickahominy. Lee’s army, counting Jackson, was now over
seventy-five thousand strong. McClellan mustered eighty-seven
thousand; but of these only the corps of General Fitz-John Porter,
twenty-five thousand strong, was now north of the Chickahominy. Lee
resolved to move the bulk of his force across that river, and,
joined by Jackson, to concentrate fifty-six thousand men against
Porter’s corps, turn its right flank, destroy it, sever McClellan’s
communications with West Point, and thereafter cross the
Chickahominy in his rear and bring him to ruin. There would be left
in the entrenchments defending Richmond only sixteen thousand men
under Magruder. It would be open to McClellan, when he saw what was
afoot, to march with sixty thousand men straight upon the Richmond
lines and assault them with a superiority of nearly four to one.
Lee, who knew McClellan well, and judged him rightly, was sure he
would not do this. “Anyhow,” he said to Davis, “I shall be hard on
his heels”—meaning that he would be attacking the Union Army from
the rear while it was fighting its way into Richmond. This remark
illustrates the agile, flexible grasp which Lee had of war, and how
great commanders seem to move their armies from place to place as
if they were doing no more than riding their own horses.
During the night of June 25 two Confederate corps
crossed the Chickahominy, formed to their right, and fell upon
Porter at Mechanicsville. Porter, surprised, made a stubborn
resistance. His batteries of rifled cannon wrought havoc in the
Confederate ranks. Jackson did not appear upon the scene. The
difficulties of the route had delayed him by a day. Porter, having
inflicted a loss of over two thousand men upon his assailants, was
able to fall back upon his reserves at Gaines’s Mill, four miles
farther downstream, where the onslaught was renewed with the
greatest fury on June 27. Gaines’ Mill was the first battle in
which Lee commanded personally. It was bitterly contested. Again
the power of the Union artillery was manifest. The Confederates
were several times repulsed at all points, and the country on
Porter’s right was so obstructed with forest and swamp that when
Jackson came into action in the late afternoon he could not turn
the flank. Lee however did not despair. He appealed to his troops.
He launched J. B. Hood’s gallant Texans at the centre, and as the
shadows lengthened ordered the whole army to attack. The Texans
broke the centre of Porter’s hard-tried corps. The Union troops
were driven from the field. Twenty guns and several thousand
prisoners were already taken when night fell. Where would Porter
go? McClellan had remained immobile opposite Magruder during the
two days’ fighting. What would he do? His communications were cut.
His right wing was crushed. Lee’s long, swinging left arm, of which
Jackson was at last the fist, must curve completely round the right
and rear of the Federal Army. Surely the stroke was mortal?
But McClellan was a skilful soldier. When his
generals met him at headquarters on the night of Gaines’ Mill he
informed them that he had let go his communications with West Point
and the York River; that, using sea-power, he was shifting his base
from the York to the James; that the whole army would march
southwards to Harrison’s Landing on that river, where all supplies
would await them. He had, we now know, made some preparations for
such a change beforehand. But he ran a grave risk in leaving the
decision till the last moment. What was called, from its shape, a
“grape-vine bridge” had been built across the swamps and stream of
the Chickahominy, and by this tortuous, rickety structure Porter
made good his escape, while the whole Federal Army prepared to make
a difficult and dangerous flank march across the White Oak Swamp to
the southern side of the peninsula. It was now Magruder’s turn to
advance and strike at this vulnerable army. He broke in upon them
on the 28th at Savage Station, capturing their field
hospitals and large supplies. But Lee could not yet be sure that
McClellan was really making for the James. He might as well be
retreating by the Williamsburg road on Fortress Monroe. Lee
therefore delayed one day before crossing the Chickahominy in
pursuit. It was not till the 30th that he brought
McClellan to battle at Glendale, or Frayser’s Farm. This was the
main crisis.
It is almost incredible that McClellan spent the
day conferring with the Navy and arranging the new base on the
James. He left the battle to fight itself. On the Confederate side
many things went wrong. The maps were faulty; the timing failed;
the attacks were delivered piecemeal; Jackson, from whom so much
had been hoped, appeared in physical eclipse. Out of seventy-five
thousand men with whom Lee had proposed to deal the final blow
barely twenty thousand were really launched. These, after frightful
losses, broke the Union centre; but night enabled the army to
continue its retreat. At Malvern Hill, in a position of great
strength, with the James River behind them to forbid further
retreat, and the fire of the Navy and its gunboats to cover their
flanks, McClellan stood at bay. Once again at the end of this week
of furious fighting Lee ordered the attack, and his soldiers
charged with their marvellous impetuosity. Loud roared the Union
cannonade; high rose the rebel yell, that deadly sound
“Aah-ih!” so often to be heard in these bloody years. But
all was in vain. McClellan was saved. Frustrated, beaten, driven
into retreat, his whole campaign wrecked, with a loss of enormous
masses of stores and munitions, sixty cannon and thirty-six
thousand rifles, with Richmond invincible, McClellan and his brave
army nevertheless finished the Battle of the Seven Days by hurling
back their pursuers with the loss of five thousand men.
Victory in the Seven Days’ Battle rested with Lee.
The world saw the total failure of the immense Federal plan. This
also was the impression at Washington. McClellan, who was
undaunted, proposed to move across the James to Petersburg and
attack Richmond “by the back door,” as Grant was to do in 1865. His
proposals were not accepted. But to Lee the adventure was hardly
less disappointing. He had failed by a succession of narrow
chances, arising largely from the newness of his staffs, to
annihilate his foe. He had lost over twenty thousand of the flower
of his army, against seventeen thousand on the Union side with its
overflowing man-power.
Lincoln and his advisers now sought to return to
their original plan of massing overwhelming forces on the overland
route between Washington and Richmond and breaking through by
weight of numbers. But their armies were divided, and Lee at
Richmond stood directly between them. The President ordered
McClellan to withdraw from the peninsula and bring his troops up
the Potomac to the neighbourhood of Washington. Halleck, who was
then credited with the successes gained against his orders in the
Western theatre, was appointed General-in-Chief. He brought General
Pope, who had done well in the Mississippi valley, to command what
was to be called “the Army of Virginia.” Pope was a harsh,
vainglorious man, puffed up with good fortune in the Western
theatre, and speaking in derogatorty terms of the armies of the
East and their achievements. He would show them how war should be
waged. McClellan was ordered to hand over his troops, who parted
from him in outspoken grief, and was relegated to the defence of
the Washington lines. Pope now would be the champion of the Union.
He signalised his appointment by severities upon the civil
population of Western Virginia not yet used in the war. All male
inhabitants in the zone of his army must either swear allegiance to
the Union or be driven from their homes on pain of death if they
returned. Jackson only with difficulty preserved his habitual calm
on hearing this news about his beloved native state.
The strategic situation offered advantages to Lee
and his lieutenant. Before McClellan’s army could be brought round
from the Yorktown peninsula they would deal with Pope. How they
treated him must be recounted.
An historic naval episode had meanwhile occurred.
When in the spring of 1861 the Federal Government had lightly
abandoned the Navy yard at Norfolk to the seceding state of
Virginia some stores and several vessels of the United States Navy
had been burned. One of these, the frigate Merrimac, was
repaired and refashioned in a curious way. It was given
steam-engines to propel it, and above its deck a low penthouse of
teak was erected. This was covered with two layers of railway iron
hammered into two-inch plates. These layers were riveted
transversely upon each other, making an ironclad shelter four
inches thick. A heavy metal ram was fastened to the prow, and a
battery of ten 7-inch rifled guns, firing through portholes, was
mounted in the penthouse. Many had thought of this sort of thing
before; now it came upon the scene.
This strange vessel was only finished on March 7,
1862. She had never fired a gun, nor had her engines been revolved,
when on March 8 she went into action against the all-powerful Navy
of the United States, which from Fortress Monroe was blockading the
estuaries of the York and James Rivers. The engines, described as
the worst possible, were found to make only five knots an hour, and
the vessel swam and steered like a waterlogged ship. Out she came,
and with no hesitation engaged the two nearest ships of the
blockading fleet, the Cumberland and the Congress.
These delivered broadsides which would have sunk an ordinary
frigate. Besides this, all other United States ships in range and
the shore batteries at Sewell’s Point concentrated their fire upon
her. Without paying the slightest attention to this bombardment,
the Merrimac, rechristened the Virginia, steered
straight for the Cumberland, and struck her almost at right
angles. On board the Merrimac the collision was hardly
perceptible. The ram broke off; the Cumberland heeled over,
and, firing her cannon to the last, soon foundered, with most of
her crew. The Merrimac then turned upon the Congress,
and at two hundred yards range smashed her to pieces and set her on
fire. After an hour the Congress hoisted the white flag, and
every effort was made by various small Confederate ships to rescue
her crew. The Minnesota, which was aground, would have
shared her fate if the ebb tide had not prevented the
Merrimac, which drew twenty-two feet of water, from
approaching her. Although the Merrimac was for a long time
under the fire of at least a hundred heavy guns her armour was
hardly damaged. Nothing outside the armour escaped. The funnel and
two of the muzzles of the guns were shot off. Inside only
twenty-one men were killed or wounded by splinters through the
portholes. Her triumphant crew lay down by the side of their guns,
expecting to destroy the rest of the United States fleet the next
morning.
But when daylight came and steam was raised a
strange-looking vessel was seen to be protecting the
Minnesota. “She appeared,” wrote one of the
Merrimac’s crew, “but a pigmy compared with the lofty
frigate which she guarded.” This was Ericsson’s Monitor, of
which there had been much talk, now at last ready. The
Merrimac had made the naval revolution, but the
Monitor, one day later, was a whole lap ahead of her. She
carried only two guns; but they were eleven-inch, and mounted in a
revolving iron turret nine inches thick. She had a turtle deck,
heavily protected, almost flush with the water-line. As she drew
only twelve feet of water she had an advantage in manœuvre.
Both these ironclad monsters approached each other,
while the stately ships of the United States fleet watched
spellbound. They came to the closest quarters, and the
Merrimac, now ramless, struck the Monitor. None of
the Merrimac’s shells pierced the Monitor’ s armour;
but when the two eleven-inch guns hit the Merrimac amidships
the whole side was driven in several inches, and all the guns’
crews bled at the nose from concussion. For six hours these two
ironclads battered each other with hardly any injury or loss on
either side, and both withdrew at close of day, never to meet
again. As the Merrimac had no armour below the water-line
her crew considered her lucky. She returned to the dock-yard to
have this defect and many others repaired. The Monitor,
which was so unseaworthy that she had nearly foundered on the way
to the fight, also required attention. As soon as the news reached
Europe it was realised that all the war-fleets of the world were
obsolete. The British Admiralty, by an intense effort, in the
course of a few years reconstructed the Royal Navy so as to meet
the altered conditions. But even now there are fools who build
large ships to fight at sea with hardly any armour.1 The
combat of the Merrimac and the Monitor made the
greatest change in sea-fighting since cannon fired by gunpowder had
been mounted on ships about four hundred years before.
When Norfolk was evacuated by the Confederates
efforts were made to take the Merrimac up the James River
for the defence of Richmond; but although she was so lightened as
to become defenceless her draught prevented her escape. By the
orders of her captain she was therefore burned and sunk. The joy
which her exploit had evoked throughout the Confederacy now turned
to grief and anger. But the Confederate court-martial upon the
captain declared that “The only alternative, in the opinion of the
court, was to abandon and burn the ship then and there; which in
the judgment of the court was deliberately and wisely done by order
of the accused.”