THE FALL OF ATLANTA 2 SEPTEMBER 1864 - PART THREE
THE FALL OF ATLANTA 2 SEPTEMBER 1864 – PART THREE
Meanwhile in the West the Union forces were slowly establishing control over the Mississippi river and blocking Southern railways, leading to the capture of New Orleans in April 1862. At sea the US Navy was blockading Southern ports and while blockade runners did succeed in bringing in some Enfield rifles bought from Britain, very soon the Confederacy was forced to make its own weapons, mainly in the Tredegar iron works in Richmond. The North too imported Enfield rifles as well as manufacturing its own Springfield. It was these weapons that were one of the causes of the very heavy casualties suffered by both sides. Initially most infantry units were armed with smooth bore muskets, many of them flintlocks adapted to take percussion caps. The smooth bore musket was inherently inaccurate and fired a lead ball at low velocity effective up to about 100 yards. Assuming it hit the target (only certain if fired in mass volleys) and provided it did not hit a vital organ, it would stop a man but not necessarily kill him. As long as the medical officers could extract the ball and any detritus driven in by it before gangrene could set in, or in the worst case amputate an arm or a leg, then the man would probably recover given time. The rifle, whether Enfield or Springfield, fired a minié bullet to a far greater range with much more accuracy and at a higher velocity than the musket (1400 feet per second compared to the 1000 fps). The rifle was thus a much more deadly weapon than its predecessor, and tactics developed for the smooth bore musket, that is advancing in close order and firing in volley, were completely unsuited to fighting with the rifle, and so butchers’ bills were much higher until eventually tactics were adapted to cater for the new weapon.
With the Northern navy blockading its ports the Confederacy was unable to export its major product, cotton. As most cotton went to Britain the Confederacy hoped that the cutting off of their supply of cotton would persuade the British to enter the war on their side, or at least to grant them diplomatic recognition. The British Prime Minister, Palmerston, thought that in the future the growing United States might become a rival for trade and naval supremacy, and that the success of secession might be in the British long term interest, but both he and the British public were resolutely opposed to slavery and in any case, as Palmerston said ‘Anyone who gets involved in someone else’s civil war is a fool’. Britain did however grant the South belligerent status, which meant that legally they were not pirates with ships liable to be captured or sunk by the Royal Navy, but that was as far as it went, and Britain obtained cotton from Egypt and India instead of from the American South.
What was supposed to be a short sharp police action dragged on. The Confederacy won battles through superior generalship, particularly that of Robert E Lee. Lee was born in 1807 in Virginia, the son of Henry ‘Light Horse Harry’ Lee who had served under Washington in the American revolutionary war, and passed out second of his class from West Point in 1829, being commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Corps of Engineers. In the North Scott’s replacement, George McClellan, the ‘Young Napoleon’ proved incapable of prosecuting the war and was demoted to army commander, replaced by Henry Halleck in March 1862. In June and July of that year McClellan’s Army of the Potomac was soundly defeated by Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia in a series of battles north of Richmond. In August of the same year Lee saw off the Northern Major General Pope’s Army of Virginia at the Second Battle of Manassas; in May of the following year Lee defeated the Army of the Potomac, now commanded by Major General Hooker, at the Battle of Chancellorsville, north of Richmond, in what is generally considered to be Lee’s greatest achievement, being hugely outnumbered by 134,000 Union troops to his 60,000. A Confederate victory it was, but it cost the life of ‘Stonewall’ Jackson, who was wounded by friendly fire, had an arm amputated and died of pneumonia eight days later. He was a serious loss to the Confederacy.
Despite the tactical victories the South was no nearer winning the war. Casualties on both sides were mounting and while the North could afford the losses, the South with its far smaller population could not. Unable to import anything, the South relied on what could be obtained from its own territories, which led to shortages in certain areas, hoarding of foodstuffs and desertion by soldiers whose land might be left with no males to work it, and concern by slave owners as to the safety of their womenfolk. This latter consideration became more urgent when in January 1863 Lincoln declared that henceforth the slaves in the states that had seceded were free. This was issued as a presidential proclamation under the War Powers Act, not as an act of Congress, for if it had been put to the latter it might not have got through. Although the North was in principle opposed to slavery, there were many in the Republican party who believed that abolition, if it had to happen, should proceed slowly and with safeguards to prevent a sudden influx of freed slaves into the North. Lincoln’s motive was, of course, more of an attack on the manpower intensive Southern economy than a moral gesture, indeed he had said that if he could preserve the Union without freeing the slaves he would do so. Lincoln’s original plan was to abolish slavery slowly, taking decades to do it and with slave owners compensated with $500 from federal funds for each slave freed. To those who protested the cost of such a scheme, Lincoln averred that it was less than three months’ campaigning in the current war. Taking account of northern fears that freed slaves would come north in huge numbers in search of employment, Lincoln’s plan envisaged freed slaves being compulsorily ‘colonised’, that is transported to Haiti or Liberia (established in 1824 on land purchased from tribal chieftains) or settled in a remote part of the United States. In many parts of the North free blacks were already resented, particularly by those who had to compete with them for jobs, and in most areas if segregation was not enshrined by law it was by habit. In the event the proclamation simply stated that slaves in states and territories in rebellion against the United States (i.e. the Confederacy) would be declared free from 1 January 1864 and would be permitted to enlist in the army and navy of the United States from that date. In practice little changed in the south: slave owners there did not consider themselves bound by Northern law and most slaves, even if they heard about the proclamation, which most did not, tended to stay where they were and carry on working as they had been. Those who did hear about the proclamation and who had the ability and energy to flee to the north did so, despite efforts by the Union government to dissuade them. Enlistment of black soldiers began, in all black units commanded by white officers and with less pay than that received by white troops, and by the end of the war 180,000 black soldiers had been enlisted into the Union army. The navy had been accepting black sailors for some years – sailors spent their time at sea and being not obviously in the public gaze their presence was less divisive than soldiers would have been, and were to be.
Prior to the change in the law that allowed for the enlistment of black soldiers, it was clear to the Union government that voluntary enlistment and mobilisation of the states’ militias was not producing the numbers needed to fight the war. The Confederacy had instituted conscription in 1862, shortly after the beginning of the war, and it was generally accepted by the population there, but the North had hoped to fight a short war with volunteers. Now it was clear that the war would not be the short sharp police action anticipated. The Enrolment Act of 1863 obliged all male citizens (and blacks, free or not, could not be citizens) between the ages of twenty and forty-five to register for the draft, whereby every six months a lottery selected the number of men the army needed, and had the facilities to train. There were exceptions: married men were not drafted until all single men had been, and exemption could be purchased for $300, or a substitute found (which cost around $1000). As a soldier’s pay was around $13 a month, this meant that the rich could avoid the draft while the poor could not.
Despite the draft and the enlistment of blacks the war was not going well for the North. The battle of Gettysburg, fought between 1 and 3 July 1863, was trumpeted then – and now – as a great Northern victory, but it cost 23,000 Union casualties and failed to destroy Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, which withdrew at its own pace. Otherwise Fredericksburg in December 1862 was a Confederate victory with 12,653 Union casualties, as was Chancellorsville in May 1863 with 14,000 Union casualties, and Chickamauga in September of the same year (16,170 casualties), Spotsylvania Courthouse in May 1864 (18,000 casualties) and the battle of the Wilderness in the same month (17,666). Grant had, it is true, captured Vicksburg after a seven week siege, but this added another 4,800 Union casualties to those that Grant’s Army of The Tennessee had already suffered in its advance along the valley of the Mississippi.
Grant’s problem in attempting to take Vicksburg was that he and his army were north of Vicksburg on the west side of the Mississippi, and Vicksburg was on the east bank. A crossing might be possible at Bruinsburg, thirty miles south-west of Vicksburg, but bridging the river would take too long and could not be concealed from Confederate patrols. Transporting the troops across by boat could be done in a day, but the river boats to do that were north of Vicksburg and for miles either side of Vicksburg Confederate artillery batteries covered the river. Grant’s answer was to march his army south along the west bank to Bruinsburg and to suggest to the naval flotilla commander, the fifty-years-old Rear Admiral David Dixon Porter, that by sailing fast and by night his ships could run the gauntlet of guns and rendezvous with the army at Bruinsburg. This was taking an enormous risk, for Grant would be cutting himself off from his base and his supply lines and would be relying on the ability of the navy to run the blockade. Porter did run the blockade, at minimal cost, losing only one gunboat in the process and on 30 April 1863 Grant’s army was ferried across the river and could now lay siege to Vicksburg.
By July the Vicksburg garrison, under Lieutenant General John C Pemberton, was starving and near mutiny. Pemberton was a northerner by birth and a West Point graduate, being commissioned into the artillery and serving in the Indian wars and the Mexican American War. A captain in 1861, a Virginian wife and long years of service in the south persuaded him to resign his commission and join the army of the Confederacy as a lieutenant colonel, promoted to colonel almost immediately and to major general in 1862 and his present rank in 1863 before taking command at Vicksburg. In the terms of surrender Grant agreed that Pemberton’s men would be paroled, rather than taken prisoner and sent to prisoner-of-war camps. The vast majority of the men then headed for home rather than re-joining the colours, an ominous portent for the Confederacy but one not necessarily appreciated at the time.
While the capture of Vicksburg was of enormous significance, in that not only could the Confederates no longer block river traffic along the Mississippi as far as New Orleans (captured by Porter and the Union navy in 1862) and the sea, but also it cut the Confederacy in half, as Winfield Scott’s ‘Anaconda Plan’ had recommended. Despite the victory of Vicksburg – and under any other general than Grant that victory would have been unlikely – the public perception in the North, reinforced by the Union defeat at Chickamauga two months later, was that the war was dragging on interminably, presided over by an incompetent government and bumbling generals with no end in sight. Desertion from Northern armies was increasing and opposition to the draft manifested itself in riots, some of which turned into opposition to the President’s proclamation freeing the Southern slaves. In New York, an anti-draft rioting mob invaded the black quarter and began lynching any black they could find. There was objection to the imposition of martial law in the areas behind the lines, with civilians tried by military courts, while the suspension of Habeus Corpus, which allowed the Union government to arrest and imprison anyone thought to be hindering the war effort, caused great umbrage in a nation that prided itself upon democracy and the rule of law (at least for whites).
With this background of war weariness, 1864 was a presidential election year. Lincoln was reluctant to stand, and indeed thought that if he did he would lose. No president since Andrew Jackson (in office 1829 – 1837) had run for a second term, but the Indian Wars and the war of 1812 had made Jackson a national hero who was instrumental in creating the Democrat Party. After him Van Buren (1837-41) did not seek a second term; Harrison (1841) died in office shortly after assuming it; neither Tyler (1841-45) nor Polk (1845-49) sought a second term; Zachary Taylor (1849-50) died in office; both Fillmore (1850-53) and Pierce (1853-57) would have stood but did not get their party’s nomination, and Lincoln’s predecessor Buchanan (1857-61) did not seek re-election. Lincoln’s wife was convinced that he would lose and as she had run up massive debts, unknown to her husband, which would be called in should Lincoln no longer be president, she scurried round soliciting donations from Lincoln supporters, supposedly to finance his election campaign but in reality to pay off her own debts. Nominated by the Republican party Lincoln agreed to stand, but would run his own re-election campaign under the banner of the Union Party, in an attempt to attract the votes of all those who wanted to defeat secession, regardless of party affiliation. Huge pressure was exerted by Lincoln’s supporters, including threatening government employees with losing their jobs if they failed to vote for their man.
The Democrat candidate was George McClellan, he who had failed as commander of the army of the Potomac and as General in Chief. The Democrat party manifesto promised a truce with the Confederacy and peace – effectively recognising the right of states to seceded from the Union – and while McClellan himself claimed to be opposed to his own party’s peace policy it was very attractive to those fed up with the war and its seemingly insatiable demand for more and more young men and its mounting casualties. The ‘Peace Party’ was growing and such opinion polls as there were indicated that McClellan would win comfortably.