THE FALL OF ATLANTA 2 SEPTEMBER 1864 – PART TWO
Alarmed by the election of President Lincoln, on 20 December 1860 the state government of South Carolina announced that it was leaving the Union. Here was the major question: was the Union indivisible, or could states volunteer to leave it (as, after all, they had volunteered to join it). In January 1861 Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana followed suit with Texas leaving on 1 February. Beginning on 4 February delegates from all the secessionist states met and agreed to form the Confederate States of America, with a constitution which differed little from that of the USA, except that it entrenched slavery, and elected a President, Jefferson Davis, with the Confederate capital in Montgomery, Alabama, later moved to Richmond in Virginia. Davis was born in Kentucky[*], was a West Point graduate, a hero of the Mexican American War, had represented Mississippi as a US Senator and had been Secretary for War from 1853 to 1857. He had always preached moderation in attempting to reconcile the interests of North and South and while he disapproved of secession, he was adamant that States had a right to do so. So far there was no appetite for armed conflict in either Union or Confederate governments, but the spark for conflagration would not be long in coming.
The forts along the east coast of the USA were garrisoned by regular troops, but in most cases those bordering Southern states had been occupied by the States’ militias without violence. The exception was Fort Sumpter, halfway down the coast of South Carolina, where the garrison commander politely explained to the State Governor’s messenger that the fort belonged to the USA and would remain so. A Confederate delegation went to Washington and asked, again politely, that Fort Sumpter be handed over to the South Carolina militia. Lincoln was reluctant to do so, and informed the South Carolina government that he intended to resupply the fort by sea, and that the ships would carry neither weapons nor men, but only rations and clothing. Provided the fort was left alone it would not take any aggressive action.
In Montgomery the Confederate government knew full well that if they did interfere with the resupply, or attempt to take the fort by force, they would be blamed for starting a war, and Davis was in favour of allowing the resupply. Wise counsel failed however, and the hotheads, of whom there were plenty on both sides, won. Brigadier General Pierre Gustave Tousant-Beauregard, a West Point graduate who had fought in the Mexican American war and had been Superintendent (commandant) of West Point, and the first officer to be appointed a general in the nascent Confederate army, demanded the surrender of Fort Sumpter and when it was refused brought up artillery and on 12 April 1861 opened fire on the fort. Beauregard’s guns fired 3,341 rounds, and received 1,000 in return. Total casualties were one mule, and the fort surrendered the next day. The line was drawn, and Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina and Tennessee declared for the Confederacy. Still neither government wanted war, but both were on a treadmill of public opinion and they could not get off. Both Lincoln and Davis ordered their States’ militias to mobilise. While the senior commanders on both sides would in the main be from the pre-war regular army, the war would be fought by militias and regiments raised for the conflict, inexperienced and only partly trained, a factor that would contribute to the very high casualty rate.
In 1861 there were 753 officers in the regular army of the USA. 313 of them resigned and joined the Confederacy; of the 239 cadets at West Point, 80 of them refused to swear an oath of allegiance to the Union and they too went South. The General-in-Chief of the Union army was Acting Lieutenant General Winfield Scott[†], who had been in the army since 1814, had fought in the latter stages of the War of 1812, the Mexican American War and numerous Indian wars. A physical wreck by 1861 ‘Old Fuss and Feathers’ was seventy-five years old in 1861, grossly fat and could not mount a horse. He nevertheless had lost none of the sharpness of mind that had made him one of finest generals in American military history. He did realise, however, that he could not possibly take field command and offered command of the Union army, with promotion to major general, to an engineer officer of considerable experience and high reputation: the fifty-four years old Virginian, Colonel Robert E Lee. Lee deplored the breakup of the Union but felt that honour demanded that he go with his state, and so he declined the offer and went south. Instead, in November 1861, command went to George McClellan, a thirty-five years old engineering graduate from West Point who had fought in the Mexican American War, had left the service in 1857 to become chief engineer and chairman of the Illinois and then the Ohio Railway, re-joining the army at the outbreak of the Civil War.
Although not up to taking the field, and realising that he must hand over his appointment to an officer who was, Scott nevertheless designed the Union plan for winning the war, the so-called ‘Anaconda Strategy’, named after the snake that squeezes its prey to death before devouring it. The scheme envisaged blockading the Confederacy by sea (the navy was overwhelming for the Union) thus preventing it from importing weapons or exporting its major product, cotton, surrounding it by land and by taking control of the Mississippi river splitting its territory, thus laying siege to the Confederacy and in time strangling it. This was all very well, but public opinion in the North wanted more than just an investment that might last years. The Confederacy did not have to win the war – it had only to survive without losing it.
Withal, both governments still hoped to avoid a war, but public opinion dictated otherwise. In the North the cry of ‘On to Richmond’, only three days march from the Union capitol Washington, was taken up by the popular press and with a population of twenty million opposing five and a half million, with the bulk of the industry in the North and with 31,000 miles of railway compared to 9,000 in the South, it was generally expected that a war would be a short one in which the North would be triumphant. That said, there was no experience in the North of the command of formations larger than a small brigade; there was no staff college turning out military campaign managers to support the commanders; there were no maps outside the areas immediately around the cities and although the Confederate capitol, Richmond, was only 100 miles from Washington, it was well defended by natural rivers and hills, and most other Southern cities were well inside Confederate territory. From the northern border of the Confederacy to New Orleans was a thousand miles and Davis, who was his own commander-in-chief, considered that the best strategy would be to let the North drive deeper and deeper into Confederate territory, with their supply lines getting longer and longer, and then to cut them off and then either defeat them in battle or starve them into surrender. This would have been a sound plan, but public opinion wanted dramatic action and demanded attacking the North. Thus both governments were drawn into making war – which they did not want – in a way that they did not want.
The first major battle of the war took place on 21 July 1861. Called the Battle of Manassas (after the town to the south of the battlefield) by the Confederates and Bull Run (after the river that ran though it) by the Union, it was an attempt by the Union Army of North-Eastern Virginia of 35,000 men under the command of Brigadier General Irwin McDowell to force an entry into Northern Virginia and threaten Richmond. McDowell was a 43 years old artillery officer who had been promoted to brigadier at the outbreak of war. Although he had served in the Mexican American War it had been as an ADC and he had very little command experience. Added to the commander’s inexperience was that only two infantry battalions (one army, the other of the US Marine Corps) and two artillery batteries had regular officers, all other units being led by militiamen or wartime volunteers.
McDowell’s opponent would be Brigadier General Beauregard, he of Fort Sumpter fame, commanding the Army of the Potomac, of 22,000 men, and as a high proportion of regular officers had thrown their lot in with the Confederacy, there was more experience at regimental and battalion level than there was in McDowell’s force. Leaving Washington on 16 July 1861, logistic problems, lack of maps and sheer inexperience in the movement of large numbers of men, horses, guns and waggons saw McDowell taking five days to cover the twenty-five miles to Centreville, north of Manassas. By then Beauregard was well aware of what was up and had positioned his troops in a good defensive position along an eight mile stretch of high ground between Sudley Ford and Mitchell’s Ford. McDowell’s plan was to turn Beauregard’s flank and roll up his line, but he was far too slow and Beauregard was able to block the flanking movement while calling upon Brigadier General Joseph Johnston, commanding the 12,000 strong Army of Shenandoah, which was on its way from Winchester, to get to the battlefield as quickly as he could. Johnston’s army was divided into four brigades, each with an artillery battery, plus a weak cavalry regiment (around 800 troopers) under Colonel JEB Stuart. As his brigades arrived they were fed into the battle and it was here that Brigadier Thomas Jackson, commanding the First (Virginia) Brigade, received his nickname. Brigadier General Barnard Bee Jr[‡], commanding the Third Brigade, arrived on the field and is reported as saying to his men ‘Look at General Jackson, standing like a stone wall. Take post behind the Virginians’. As Bee was killed at the battle we do not know whether he meant the sobriquet as a criticism or as praise, but in any event ‘Stonewall Jackson’ stuck.
When the Confederates, now reinforced by Johnston, broke through the Union line the result was a retreat by McDowell, which soon turned into a disorganised rout, with roads blocked by overturned waggons and the carriages of fleeing civilians who had come out from Washington to watch what they expected would be a great victory. Jefferson Davis arrived by train and urged a pursuit of the beaten Northerners, and Jackson said: ‘give me 5,000 fresh men and I’ll be in Washington tomorrow’, but there were no fresh men nor the ability to organise a pursuit quickly enough for it to be effective. The South trumpeted Manassas as a great victory, whereas in truth they had avoided defeat. Although the opposing forces were about equal in overall numbers, Beauregard and Johnston had been able to engage more men actually in the battle than had McDowell. Casualties were about the same – 400 or so killed and 1,200 wounded on each side, although the Confederates took around 1,200 Union prisoners of war. Both sides drew lessons from the battle: in the north it stiffened resolve to intensify the war, while in the South the public at least, if not the generals or the president, were now convinced that despite the disparity in population, they could beat the North.
[*] The state government of Kentucky prevaricated, declaring itself neutral, but was eventually to join the Union.
[†] The US Army did not promote above the substantive rank of Major General, so Scott’s acting rank gave him seniority above the other major generals but would not improve his pension, which would be paid at the rate for his substantive rank – major general.
[‡] In the USA a son who has the same Christian name as his father tacks ‘junior’ – ‘Jr’ onto his name. When papa dies the Jr is dropped.
Many of the forts in the pre- and early war period were in fact practically unmanned and if I remember correctly Fort Sumter was only one of several forts around Charleston Harbor. What Anderson did was to gather up all of the available manpower and concentrate in Fort Sumter as being the most defensible - a movement possible in the confusions that surrounded this quiet tense moment before actual war erupted.
Nice, succinct description of the early days of the War Between the States. One quibble: did you reverse the names of the armies? Wasn’t the Army of the Potomac the name of McDowell’s force? It certainly was the name for the Union Army later in the War? Union armies were always named after rivers.