Once again, the Cave of the Moonbat is cluttered with the detritus of war, and your resident historiorantologist is once again shouting to be heard over the din of arms. If you have trouble finding a place to sit, ask Matthew Brady to
move a body or two - otherwise, just huddle `round the fire as close as you can; there's horrible things happening in the fields and forests outside.
Join me, if you will, as we look at how a real President behaves in the face of truly grave national crisis. Tonight, Abraham Lincoln becomes the man history remembers as the Great Emancipator, and earns himself a coveted 25% of Mount Rushmore. In the process, we might also touch on some of the reasons why George W. Bush isn't destined for a whole lot more honor than having a species of slime-mold beetle named after him...
Cross-posted at Progressive Historians
Cross-posted at Never In Our Names
Now it gets ugly. The war might have started in a haughty mix of self-righteousness, nationalism, and over-confidence, but now it is being perpetuated by other things. Too many men are already in the ground for hatchets to be buried among them, so vengeance (cloaked in the guise of honor) becomes an acceptable rationale for continued slaughter. While one side bleeds nobly for its idealized vision of itself, the other is obligated to promote the conflict to the rank of moral crusade just to keep its people fighting.
War is the most transformative experience a civilization can undergo. Like a thunderstorm in the desert, the actual event may be relatively brief and localized, but its effect on the landscape is greater than that of the combined efforts of all the other agents that work to scour it to the bedrock. Nothing like a war entered into voluntarily, or one based on ideas perceived to be foundational by one side and antithetical to the other (such is often the case in a civil or revolutionary war), causes a people to examine their own beliefs at a level far deeper than any number of candlelight vigils, benefit concerts, and information awareness campaigns during peacetime ever could.
While Tardy George Drilled and Ceremonied...
A lot was going on the spring of 1862. The previous summer had shown conclusively that this would be no 90-day war, and in capitols and tents from the Chesapeake to the Mississippi, men strategerized over how best to end this thing in a manner favorable to their side. In the North, the commanding general (first of the entire Union Army, then demoted to command of the still-really-huge Army of the Potomac, later to be re-promoted, and re-demoted...), George McClellan, exhibited considerable compassion for his troops, but the idea of making men's lives a priority was quickly coming to be viewed as quaint but most other strategic commanders.
Brigadier General Ulysses S. Grant was one such man, and his singleminded focus on victory - regardless of how many men died in the process - caught Lincoln's eye when he delivered into Union hands its first real wins at Forts Henry and Donelson, Tennessee, the latter falling on February 16, 1862. Grant got his first 15 minutes of fame when newspapers ran stories about the exchange between he and Fort Donelson's commander, Simon Bolivar Buckner (an old friend from the days of the Mexican War who had once loaned Grant money):
Grant: "No terms except unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted. I propose to move immediately upon your works."
Buckner: SIR:--The distribution of the forces under my command, incident to an unexpected change of commanders, and the overwhelming force under your command, compel me, notwithstanding the brilliant success of the Confederate arms yesterday, to accept the ungenerous and unchivalrous terms which you propose.
wikipedia
Buckner's surrender had enormous strategic significance: compared to the 12,000 Confederates that were marched north toward the prison camps, only a handful of veteran troops and leaders - including cavalryman, guerilla genius, and future founder and first Grand Wizard of the Klan, Nathan Bedford Forrest - managed to escape. So it was that while Buckner spent a few months as a POW (swapped for General George McCall in August, 1862), Forrest went on take command of the evacuation of Nashville, which itself was necessitated by another of the advantages the forts gave Grant: he now controlled the upper reaches of the Tennessee River, leaving the South's solar plexus open for a good, hard punch.
The Ensigns of Command
"Unconditional Surrender" Grant pinned on his second star the day after the surrender of Fort Donelson, then headed off (as a general of the Illinois volunteers) toward a rendezvous with even more Federal troops near the town of Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee. Along the way, he was savaged by attacks from his rear - not by the rebels, but through the good offices of his own commander, Henry Halleck, who revived old rumors about Ulysses' penchant for the bottle and the gambling table. After Grant had dinner with another Union general (and rival of Halleck's), Don Carlos Buell, Halleck relieved his future boss of command, and only Presidential intervention restored Grant in time for the fighting around Shiloh.
On the morning of April 6, Confederate forces swarmed into the Union camps, achieving almost complete surprise and putting the Federals to flight for most of the day. It was exactly the sort of dynamic, fast-moving situation (it even had lots of crappy weather thrown in) that separates leaders of men from dumbasses in pretty uniforms. Two northern commanders in particular distinguished themselves by their bravery and coolness under fire: Grant (whose accolades would be delayed by post-battle politics), who sternly held his lines at tremendous cost, and William T. Sherman, whose division bore the brunt of the Confederate attack. These two lie in contrast to brand-new-to-division-commander Lew Wallace (not to be confused with W.H.L. Wallace, who was also a new Northern division commander at Shiloh, but who was mortally wounded before he could ever write anything like Ben Hur or my personal favorite, The Fair God), who at one point found his lead elements approaching the enemy's rear, but chose to follow the least aggressive of Grant's contradictory orders and march in a circle rather than engaging.
Multiple styles of leadership clashed on the macro scale as well: After the Confederate field commander, A.S. Johnston (not the same Johnston as the one at Manassas - that was J.E.), was mortally wounded on the afternoon of the first day of the battle, the well-traveled P.G.T. Beauregard took command. In a move no doubt carefully planned to provide fuel for historical debate for decades to come, he decided not to press his advantage on the evening of the first day, and so found himself being advanced upon across a broad front the following morning, when he discovered to his great misery that Grant had been reinforced overnight by the timely arrival of his friend/rival, General Buell. Now outnumbered nearly 2:1, the Beauregard withdrew, reluctantly ceding Central Tennessee to the Union, which would occupy and use it as a base to strike toward the west and, later, the southeast.
Shadows of Shiloh
Together, Sherman and Grant put the Confederate army to flight on April 7, but it was Buell who took the credit. Though Grant technically outranked him, Buell had always insisted on running his division as pretty much an independent entity, and there was little Grant could do about it - especially since it played into the CNN-style, self-referential spin in the Northern papers, which painted a picture of a cool and collected Buell arriving just in time to salvage a victory from the mess created by (perhaps alcohol-related) unpreparedness on the first day. Though Sherman was seen to have redeemed himself through battlefield valor, Grant got swiftboated by the Hannitys, O'Reilys, and Oxified Ones of the day. Lincoln, who must have had a feeling in his gut about Grant, responded to the many calls for his head with a simple, factual statement:
"I cannot spare this man; he fights."
Western Theater commander Henry Halleck put Grant in a powerless, second-in-command position, where he languished for a few months while Lincoln got more and more fed up with McClellan's failing Peninsula Campaign. Halleck was finally recalled to the East to replace Tardy George in late July, and from his new post as chief of staff of the entire Union Army, he screwed Grant some more by transferring four divisions over to Buell, who Halleck kept under thumb by having him report directly to the War Department instead of Grant, who might be drunk. Grant would later use the 46,000 troops he had left to screw Halleck right back, by taking Vicksburg, Mississippi, in a very sober siege.
What kind of a man was Henry Halleck, you ask? Well, probably not the kind you'd want as a boss. Think Rumsfeld with a brain, or John Bolton if he had had the cajones to wear the uniform of the forces he so dearly loves to offer up to harm's way. Here's how he's described in Kendall Gott's Where the South Lost the War:
Although he had impressive credentials, Henry Halleck was not an easy man to work for. The nature of his job and his personality often provoked antagonism, hatred, and contempt. Halleck's strengths were organizing, coordinating, planning, and managing. He could also advise and suggest, and he sometimes ordered subordinates where and when to make a move, but he never was comfortable doing it himself. Halleck seldom worked openly, and as a department commander, he was always at headquarters, separated and aloof from the men. His decisions were the result of neither snap judgments nor friendly discussion, but calculated thinking. He was also prone to violent hatred and never cultivated close relationships. Overall, he generated no love, confidence, or respect.
via wikipedia
Weird Historical Sidenote: There are a couple of other interesting post-Shiloh stories regarding people we've already mentioned:
Henry Halleck showed just how classically trained he was during a rare field command in operations against Corinth, Mississippi. Engaging in the thoroughly Roman practice of throwing up elaborate defensive works at every evening's camp, he essentially played right into the hands of P.G.T. Beauregard, who commanded the town's defenses - Halleck's advance was so slow (5 miles in 3 weeks!) that the Confederates were not obligated to engage in a delaying action before Beauregard moved out of the city without a fight - and with considerable subterfuge - on the night of May 29.
William T. Sherman led a recon-in-force the day after Shiloh, and at a place called Fallen Timbers stumbled onto a Confederate field hospital being guarded by none other than Nathan Bedford Forrest. Forrest ordered a charge, only to find himself alone a few feet in front of the Federal line, when a Union soldier stuck a musket in his side and pulled the trigger. Forrest, now with a bullet lodged near his spine, nevertheless found the strength to yank a bluecoat up by the collar and use the man's body as a human shield to facilitate his escape, even as his troops covered his retreat with shotguns, revolvers, and sabers.
Nathan Bedford Forrest
Both sides were shocked at the carnage of Shiloh - though eight later battles would kill more people, this was the bloodiest one to date; casualty figures for Shiloh alone listed more American soldiers than the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and the Mexican-American War combined. While both sides lost roughly equal numbers - 13,047 (1,754 killed, 8,408 wounded, 2,885 captured/missing) for the Union; 10,694 (1,723 killed, 8,012 wounded, 959 captured/missing) for the Confederacy - it was the South that was least able to absorb the loss, which had profound effects on Grant's ideas surrounding wars of attrition.
The Shape of Things to Come
With its huge advantage in terms of industrial capacity, plus a long tradition of shipbuilding and New Englanders taking to the sea, it's probably little surprise that the Union enjoyed the Navy's near-complete loyalty. For economic reasons we'll get into later, control of overseas trade routes remained important throughout the war, and the Union blockade, though leaky at first, slowly tightened to the point that the South's only hope for lifting it lay with the increasingly-unlikely chance that a foreign power would intervene on their behalf.
That's not to say folks on both sides weren't making serious efforts to come up with better ways of sending the other guy's ships down to Davy Jones' Locker. At Norfolk Naval Yard, Virginia, Confederate sailors raised the frigate USS Merrimack from the shallow water in which she had been half-scuttled by Union sailors when the shipyards were abandoned at the outset of the war. Rebel engineers then heavily modified the vessel, adding 2-inch thick armor plating and 10 12-pound cannon, which made her ride pretty low in the water - she had a draft of 22 feet - and led to such an odd appearance that naval historioranter Matt Desjardien describes the vessel as "a floating barn roof."
Weird Historical Sidenote: Though the ship was renamed CSS Virginia, the change went over about as well as that Iraqi flag of a few years ago, and history generally remembers the ship as Merrimack, though inclusion of that last "k" is still debatable, and Virginia still sticks, as far as the purists are concerned.
The people who knew about Swedish-Yankee designer's plans to counter what some people were thinking was going to be the future of naval warfare called it "Erickson's Folly." A mind-blown rebel sailor described the USS Monitor thusly:
". . . a craft such as the eyes of a seaman never looked upon before, an immense shingle floating on the water with a giant cheese box rising from its center"
via cyberessays.com
Merrimack, along with a handful of support and warships, steamed into the Union-held harbor at Hampton Roads, Virginia, on March 8, 1862, looking for a fight. They found one: Merrimack sank rammed and sank one Union vessel, USS Cumberland, then ran USS Congress aground. The indestructible, soot-belching monster then set its sights on the USS Minnesota, but was unable to pursue the Union ship into shallow water, and so resolved to return the next day - not realizing that Monitor had been dispatched to protect the fleet at Hampton Yards, and was arriving on station even as Confederate Captain Franklin Buchanan was plotting how best to finish off Minnesota.
The battle on March 9 has its comic elements - the two ironclads fired at one another at point-blank range for four and a half hours, without really damaging one another - but it occurs against a desperate backdrop. Before she engaged with Monitor, Merrimack destroyed two Union ships and damaged a third (killing 261 and wounding more than 100 more), which pretty much signaled the end of wooden-ship navies around the world. Even though both ships were rushed into combat, and even though there were still major design flaws to be overcome, the technological leap forward they represented made obsolete virtually every other ship on earth.
Weird Historical Sidenote: Neither ship survived the year. Merrimack was scuttled on May 11, during the Confederate evacuation of Hampton Roads (raised and part out 10 years later), while Monitor foundered and sank in December, off Cape Hatteras, N.C. (located 1973; 1st shipwreck to receive National Historic Landmark status, 1987). She bequeathed her name to an entire class of ships used by the Union primarily to patrol the Mississippi, James, and other rivers for the remainder of the war.
Rethinking Strategies
The faltering campaign on the Virginia Peninsula, the bloodiness of Shiloh, and the successes of the Union Navy (Hispanic Scots-American David Glasgow Farragut captured New Orleans on April 29) convinced Lincoln to revisit some of his earlier Pollyanna-ish hopes that a couple of strong blows would be enough to deflate the Southern will to fight. In a case of most un-Rumsfeldian war administration, the staffs and leaders in Washington observed the relative strengths and weaknesses of they and their enemy, then devised a comprehensive, long-term set of strategies meant to bring the war to a successful conclusion:
Strangle the Southern economy by maintaining the blockade and keeping foreign powers dissuaded from intervening
Split the South by wresting from it control of the Mississippi River
Exploit control of the coasts and pressure areas far behind the front lines by sending troops into the Carolinas and Georgia
Capture Richmond
The "Grant Special": Engage the enemy's main strength everywhere, all the time, and win the war by simple, cynical math
Sow discord and rebellion in the South by announcing the emancipation of their slaves
The long-termness of these policies caused Lincoln to rethink positions he had stated with rock-solid certainty back in his debates with Steven A. Douglas; unlike some Presidents we know, he did not equate strength with inflexibility of philosophy. So it was that in July, he signed into law the first graduated income tax (3% on earnings over $800), and - after the carnage of Antietam was spun enough to look like a victory - floated a promise that slaves would be emancipated for real on January 1, 1863.
Southern strategy kept running up against a politico-philosophical wall around the area of local rights. At the head of a perilously weak central government, Jefferson Davis was able to raise considerable funds through bond sales at the outset of the war, but after initial fervor depleted the available funds in the pockets of the people, he found (upon a second bond issuance) that citizen largess was a well he wouldn't be able to go back to a second time. Out of necessity, the C.S.A. began printing its own notes, which, though not the compulsory cash of the realm (another states-rights-based mistake) soon accounted for about 75% of the Confederate treasury. Under 2% came from direct taxes (the C.S.A. ran into that old Revolutionary War-era problem of states being left to collect and pay federal taxes in what amounted to an honor system), with the remainder being made up of bond receipts that had been paid for in - you guessed it - Confederate notes.
By the issuance of money to fund itself, the Confederacy tried to kick the debt burden down the road a spell: the notes were to be redeemable in specie two years after the war ended. So long as confidence that the war would be won remained high, the system worked okay (though the waters were muddied by the states' issuance of their own local currencies), but shortages and runaway inflation took over as the war dragged on.
Historiorant: There's an excellent essay on all of this bonddad stuff at tax.org
Wooing Maryland
Despite setbacks in the West, the South still saw a chance to defeat the North in the East. With McClellan's retreat from the failed Peninsula Campaign, and the Army of Northern Virginia now being commanded by Robert E. Lee, the Confederates made to capitalize on the discord in the Union's upper echelons by moving aggressively against Washington. At the Second Battle of Bull Run on August 29-30, Lincoln's new best hope, the subordinate-blamin' General John Pope, was made mincemeat of by a triumvirate consisting of Lee, James Longstreet, and Stonewall Jackson.
Weird Historical Sidenote: A lot of these guys - from both sides - had odd and powerful positions in and out of government after the war. Longstreet, for example, became a good friend of Grant's, and wound up serving as U.S. Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire during U.S.'s Administration. He became the last of the Confederate high command to spring the mortal coil, the year after flight was developed.
With Maryland still somewhat-wavering on the Border State fence, Lee surmised that its people might flock to his cause if he went up there and threatened Washington with a hearts and minds tour. The PR didn't work out quite as planned: Lee's army was so rag-tag - many soldiers lacked blankets, shoes, and/or food - that joining it held little appeal to Marylanders, though it was successful in making Abe Lincoln do something he didn't want to do: Restore George McClellan to command. To the cheers of his troops, "Little Mac" headed out of the capitol in search of Lee.
This hunt was helped considerably when a couple of soldiers found Lee's Special Order No. 191 (which gave his entire army's plan of movement for the next four days) lying in the grass at a recently-occupied camp. Even the normally-cautious McClellan recognized the actionable nature (granted, it was even more clear than "Bin Laden Determined to Strike inside U.S.") of the intel, and though he dithered for a Bush-approved 18 hours, he positioned his forces accordingly.
Historiorant/WHS: The finding of this document changed the course of the war, and thus the entirety of subsequent U.S. history. Antietam could have been the South's Saratoga, a victory there prompting intervention by Britain and/or France - and probably would have been, were it not for the extremely convenient finding of Lee's war plans. Now, I know this site's policies regarding conspiracy theories, but I'm tellin' ya: if this isn't simply one of the weirdest happenstances in all of human history, then it's the clearest evidence we have to date that time travelers are manipulating our past.
Winning the Battles while Losing the War
The armies of the Potomac and Northern Virginia converged around Sharpsburg, Maryland (which lay near Antietam Creek) on September 15, 1862. McClellan had an enormous numerical advantage - his 6 corps versus Lee's 2 - but true to form, he approached the coming battle with bad intel in hand (he thought Lee had 100,000 troops) and a trademark desire to bring every man home alive in his heart. His slowness and caution in reacting to the shifting scenes on the battlefield that day robbed the Union of the chance to destroy the Army of Northern Virginia in detail, and allowed Lee to use his own trademark nimbleness, able subordinates, and quick thinking to maximum effect over three days of fighting against vastly superior numbers.
September 17, the final day of the battle, was the bloodiest in our nation's military history. When the smoke cleared in and around Sharpsburg, Lee had suffered 10,316 causalities (1,546 killed, 7,752 wounded, 1,018 captured/missing) - or 31% of his army - against McClellan's 12,401 (2,108 killed, 9,540 wounded, 753 captured/missing) - or 25% of a force in which a full third of the Union soldiers present never fired a shot. Enraging the folks back in Washington, McClellan then failed to pursue Lee with any sense of aggression, allowing the Army of Virginia to live and fight another day.
Lincoln would fire McClellan once and for all on November 5th (Historiorant: just a gentle reminder that you should remember to get the McClellans out of your life this coming 11/7! - u.m.), but in the meantime, he had a sorta-victory to spin. He knew that Britain and France would now realize that the northern nation was indeed strong enough to deny independence to its southern counterpart, and so decided to go a step further and push the southerners off the moral high ground once and for all. On September 22, he pronounced a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. Though even the finished product was more proclamation than it was emancipation - it didn't free slaves currently being held in Border States, for example - the very idea that the war was now about something bigger than mere disunion carried considerable weight, both at home and overseas.
In England, the government's ability to step in on behalf of the South became even more limited after the Emancipation Proclamation, as even the out-of-work wage slaves that coughed their outrage on the Dickensian streets were unwilling to support a war on behalf of actual slavery. Besides, the South had produced so much cotton in the years just before the war that British textile manufacturers were sitting on large enough stockpiles to keep a lot of folks working. By the time the supplies ran out and people started losing their jobs, rising prices had enticed colonial producers in India and Egypt to increase their output. Further working to dethrone King Cotton was the fact that the Union enjoyed excellent weather and corn harvests for the entirety of the war, even as England felt the sting of an exactly opposite pattern. Thus, shipments of northern corn - harvested by Cyrus McCormick's labor-saving new reaper - replaced those of southern cotton, which was still being processed by the third of the South's 9 million people that were held in bondage.
That's not to say that either the preliminary or the actual Emancipation Proclamation resulted in a true groundswell of righteousness; reaction was actually quite varied. At the very least, Wendell Phillips' comment of the previous summer - that Lincoln was a "first-rate second-rate man" - was dispensed with, but while Horace Greeley printed "God Bless Abraham Lincoln" in the New York Tribune, the really hardcore abolitionists complained that Lincoln's measures didn't go far enough, and in places like the Butternut region of Ohio, they were seen as going way too far. The issue was one of character, you see:
"Honest old Abe, when the war first began,
Denied abolition was part of his plan;
Honest old Abe had since made a decree,
The war must go on till the slaves are all free.
As both can't be honest, will some one tell how,
If honest Abe then, he is honest Abe now?"
etzo.com
Historiorant:
War is the crucible of leadership, and rarely-but-often-enough, great men and women are produced by the same fires that break and destroy lesser people. Had Darius III not behaved as a coward at Issus, Alexander might've been thrown back before ever posing a threat to Persepolis itself; 150 years earlier, Themistocles' cunning and brilliance saved his people from a fate that might have seen Plato scrubbing Persian toilets and struggling to learn Farsi instead of allegoryizing about his own little cave of moonbattery.
Those leaders who understand the reasons behind why their people will fight - the causes for which sacrifice and death are judged worthy in the minds of individual citizens - are the ones that history remembers, respects, and eventually carves into stone. These are your Churchills, your FDRs, your Lincolns. Regrettably for the generations compelled by circumstance (or Supreme Court intervention) to live with the other type - the Ethelred the Unreadys, the Vidkun Quislings, the George W. Bushs - the fires and fogs of war break far more would-be saviors than they produce genuine articles.