The History of the Confederate War, Its Causes and Its Conduct, Volume 2 (of 2) / A Narrative and Critical History

by George Cary Eggleston

The military situation at this time could not be more clearly set forth than it was by General Grant himself, in his memoirs written long afterwards. In aid of a clear understanding his exact words are quoted here:

The Mississippi river was guarded from St. Louis to its mouth; the line of the Arkansas was held, thus giving us all of the northwest north of that river. A few points in Louisiana, not remote from the river, were held by the Federal troops, as was also the mouth of the Rio Grande. East of the Mississippi we held substantially all north of the Memphis and Charleston railroad, as far east as Chattanooga, thence along the line of the Tennessee and Holston rivers, taking in nearly all of the State of Tennessee. West Virginia was in our hands; and that part of old Virginia, north of the Rapidan and east of the Blue Ridge we also held. On the sea coast we had Fortress Monroe and Norfolk in Virginia, Plymouth, Washington and New Berne in North Carolina, Beaufort and Folly and Morris Islands, Hilton Head, Port Royal and Fort Pulaski in South Carolina and Georgia, Fernandina, St. Augustine, Key West and Pensacola in Florida. The balance of the southern territory, an empire in extent, was still in the hands of the enemy. Sherman, who had succeeded me in the command of the military division of the Mississippi, commanded all the troops in the territory west of the Alleghanies and north of Natchez, with a large movable force about Chattanooga.

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In the east the opposing forces stood in substantially the same relations towards each other as three years before or when the war began. They were both between the Federal and Confederate capitals. It is true footholds had been secured by us in Virginia and North Carolina, but beyond that no substantial advantage had been gained on either side.

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That portion of the Army of the Potomac not engaged in guarding lines of communication was on the northern bank of the Rapidan. The Army of Northern Virginia, confronting it on the opposite bank of the same river was strongly entrenched, and commanded by the acknowledged ablest general in the Confederate army.

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The Union armies were now divided into nineteen departments, though four of them in the west had been concentrated into a single military division. The Army of the Potomac was a separate command, and had no territorial limits. There were thus seventeen distinct commanders. Before this time these various armies had acted separately and independently of each other, giving the enemy an opportunity often of depleting one command, not pressed to reinforce another more actively engaged. I determined to stop this. To this end I regarded the Army of the Potomac as the center, and all west to Memphis, along the line described as our position at the time, and the north of it, the right wing; the Army of the James, under General Butler (with headquarters at Fortress Monroe), as the left wing, and all the troops south as a force in rear of the enemy. Some of these latter were occupying positions from which they could not render service proportionate to their numerical strength. All such were depleted to the minimum necessary to hold their positions as a guard against blockade runners; where they could not do this their positions were abandoned altogether. In this way 10,000 men were added to the Army of the James from South Carolina alone, with General Gillmore in command. Officers and soldiers on furlough, of whom there were many thousands, were ordered to their proper commands; concentration was the order of the day.

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As a reinforcement to the Army of the Potomac, or to act in support of it, the Ninth army corps, over 20,000 strong, under General Burnside, had been rendezvoused at Annapolis, Maryland. This was an admirable position for such a reinforcement. The corps could be brought at the last moment as a reinforcement to the Army of the Potomac, or it could be thrown on the sea coast south of Norfolk, in Virginia or North Carolina, to operate against Richmond from that direction.

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My general plan now was to concentrate all the force possible against the Confederate armies in the field. There were but two such, as we have seen, east of the Mississippi river, and facing north. The Army of Northern Virginia, General Robert E. Lee commanding, was on the south bank of the Rapidan, confronting the Army of the Potomac. The second, under Joseph E. Johnston, was at Dalton, Ga., opposed to Sherman, who was still at Chattanooga. Beside these main armies the Confederates had to guard the Shenandoah valley, a great storehouse to feed their armies from, and their line of communications from Richmond to Tennessee. Forrest, a brave and intrepid cavalry general, was in the West with a large force, making a larger command necessary to hold what we had gained in middle and west Tennessee. We could not abandon any territory north of the line held by the enemy, because it would lay the Northern states open to invasion. But as the Army of the Potomac was the principal garrison for the protection of Washington, even while it was moving on Lee, so all the forces to the west and the Army of the James guarded their special trusts when advancing from them, as well as when remaining at them.

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Accordingly I arranged for a simultaneous movement all along the line. Sherman was to move from Chattanooga, Johnston and Atlanta being his objective points. Crooke, commanding in West Virginia, was to move from the mouth of the Gauley river, with a cavalry force and some artillery, the Virginia and Tennessee railroad to be his objective. Sigel was in command in the Valley of Virginia. He was to advance up the Valley, covering the North from an invasion through that channel, as well by advancing as by remaining near Harper's Ferry. Every mile he advanced also, gave us possession of stores on which Lee relied. Butler was to advance by the James River, having Richmond and Petersburg as his objective.

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Banks, in the department of the Gulf, was ordered to assemble all the troops he had at New Orleans in time to join in the general move, Mobile to be his objective.

Now for the first time in the entire history of the war a single masterful mind was in control of all the operations of all the vast armies of the United States, and was trying to direct all those operations with singleness of purpose to a foreordained end. The coming of Grant into command thus marks an epoch in the history of the war.

Some of his lieutenants did their work incompetently, thus in a degree baffling his purpose, but in the main those whom he had wisely selected for command did that which he required of them in masterly fashion. Sigel, who was to advance up the Valley of Virginia, and break the communications between Tennessee and the Confederate capital, failed utterly. In profound disgust, General Grant received from Halleck a dispatch saying, "Sigel is in full retreat on Strasbourg. He will do nothing but run; never did anything else."

Banks also failed to place his army of 40,000 men at New Orleans in time to help in the grand strategy which Grant had inaugurated.

Butler got himself "bottled up," as General Grant phrased it, on the south side of the James river, so that while he held a strong defensive position there, he was unable to employ his troops aggressively with effect. But the rest of Grant's subordinates—and especially Sherman—carried out their orders with brilliant capacity and tremendous effect.

While Grant was thus preparing for his grand campaign, the Confederates were not idle. With forces greatly inferior in number and equipment, and with an exhausted country behind him, Lee stood upon the defensive, waiting to see what his adversary might undertake, and what opportunities might open themselves to him for offensive defense.

In the meanwhile that most active and tireless of campaigners, General N. B. Forrest, went upon a raid in West Tennessee and Kentucky which, for a time, seriously threatened an invasion of the North and a disturbance of General Grant's plans. Sweeping northward like a hurricane, Forrest captured the Federal garrison of 500 men at Union City in Tennessee, wrecked railroads in every direction, and pushed his column daringly to Paducah, Kentucky, on the banks of the Ohio, fifty miles above Cairo. Sherman sent all his cavalry and other available troops to check this movement, and if possible to make an end of Forrest by capturing him and his force. But Forrest was too quick for him. Rapidly falling back, he assailed the Federal fort on the Mississippi river, known as Fort Pillow. That fortress was held by negro troops, and the Southerners had never yet consented to regard the employment of such troops as legitimate in this war.

Here it is necessary to explain. The enlistment of negroes in military service was no new thing in American war. During the Revolution, and even before it, the statutes of South Carolina and of some of the other colonies specifically provided for such enlistments, and in South Carolina, at least, the law made it an offense for the master of any slave to refuse his service to the country as a soldier. Again during the war of 1812–1815, Andrew Jackson made free use of vigorous young negroes, enlisting them as soldiers wherever he could find them, and appealing to their patriotism to support with manly determination the independence of the only country they could call their own.

But in the Confederate war a different condition of affairs existed. From the beginning of the struggle the Confederates employed negroes to work upon fortifications, and although they did not enlist them as soldiers, this employment of them amounted to much the same thing in so far as it released an equal number of enlisted men for active work in the field. So general was the prejudice against any and every recognition of negro equality at the North as well as at the South, that many newspaper writers at the North—ignorant of the history of their own country with respect to the military employment of negroes—bitterly denounced all this, insisting that the Confederates were employing savages in arms against a civilized enemy. That plea was apt to be an effective one in this country, for the reason that from the beginning of the colonial struggles until the end of the war of 1812–1815 it had been one of America's grievances against Great Britain that agents of the mother country had mercilessly employed Red Indian savages in murderous warfare upon the white men.