Corinth was of immense importance to both sides, as it commanded the rails not only east and west, from the Tennessee to Memphis, but north and south, from the Ohio to New Orleans and Mobile. Though New Orleans was taken by Farragut on the twenty-fifth of April, the rails between Vicksburg and Port Hudson remained in Confederate hands till next year; while Mobile remained so till the year after that.

Beauregard collected all the troops he could at Corinth. Yet, even with Van Dorn's and other reinforcements, he had only sixty thousand effectives against Halleck's double numbers. Moreover, the loss of three States and many battles had so shaken the Confederate forces that they stood no chance whatever against Halleck's double numbers in the open. All the same, Halleck burrowed slowly forward like a mole, entrenching every night as if the respective strengths and victories had been reversed.

After advancing nearly a mile a day Halleck closed in on Corinth. He was so deeply entrenched that no one could tell from appearances which side was besieging the other. Towards the end of May many Federal railwaymen reported that empty trains could be heard running into Corinth and full trains running out. But, as the Confederates greeted each arriving "empty" with tremendous cheers, Halleck felt sure that Beauregard was being greatly reinforced. The Confederate bluff worked to admiration. On the twenty-sixth Beauregard issued orders for complete evacuation on the twenty-ninth. On the thirtieth Halleck drew up his whole grand army ready for a desperate defense against an enemy that had already gone a full day's march away.

In the meantime the Federal flotilla had been fighting its way down the Mississippi, under (the invalided) Foote's very capable successor, Flag-Officer Charles Henry Davis. The Confederates had very few naval men on the river, but many of their Mississippi skippers were game to the death. They rammed Federal vessels on the tenth of May at Fort Pillow, eighty miles above Memphis. Eight of their fighting craft were strongly built and heavily armored, though very deficient in speed. The Federal flotilla was very well manned by first-class naval ratings, and was reinforced early in June by seven fast new rams, commanded by their designer, Colonel Charles Ellet, a famous civil engineer.

At sunrise on the lovely sixth of June the Federal flotilla, having overcome the Confederate posts farther north and being joined by Ellet's rams, lay near Memphis. The Confederates came upstream to the attack, expecting to ram the gunboats in the stern as they had at Fort Pillow. But Ellet suddenly darted down on the eight Confederate ironclads, caught one of them on the broadside, sank her, and disabled two others. The action then became general. The overmatched Confederates kept up a losing battle for more than an hour, in full view of many thousands of ardent Southerners ashore. The scene, at its height, was appalling. The smoke, belching black from the funnels and white from the guns, made a suffocating pall overhead; while the dark, squat, hideous ironclad hulls seemed to have risen from a submarine inferno to stab each other with livid tongues of flame—so deadly close the two flotillas fought. When the awful hour was over the Confederates were not only defeated but destroyed; and a wail went up from the thousands of their anguished friends, as if the very shores were mourning.

For the next month Grant held the command at Memphis. Then, on the eleventh of July, Halleck was recalled to Washington as General-in-Chief of the whole army; while Pope was transferred to Virginia. The Federal invasion of Virginia under that "Young Napoleon," McClellan, had not been a success against Lee and Stonewall Jackson. Nor did it improve with Pope at the front and Halleck in the rear, as we shall presently see; though Halleck had declared that Pope's operations at Island Number Ten were destined to immortal fame, and Pope himself admitted his own greatness in sundry proclamations to the world.

The campaign now entered its second phase. The Virginian wing (of the whole front reaching from the Mississippi to the sea) was checked this summer; and was to remain more or less checked for many a long day. The river wing, under the general direction of Halleck, had also reached its limit for '62 about the same time, after having conquered Kentucky and western Tennessee as well as the Mississippi down to Memphis.

This river wing was now depleted of some excellent troops and again divided into quite separate commands. Buell commanded the Army of the Ohio. Grant commanded his own Army of the Tennessee and Rosecrans's Army of the Mississippi. Buell's scene of action lay between the tributary streams—Ohio, Cumberland, and Tennessee—with Chattanooga as his ultimate objective. Grant's scene of action lay along the southward rails and Mississippi, with Vicksburg as his ultimate objective.



The Confederates were of course set on recovering complete control of the line of Southern rails that made direct connections between the Mississippi Valley and the sea: crossing the western tributaries of the St. Francis and White Rivers; then running east from Memphis, through Grand Junction, Corinth, and Iuka, to Chattanooga; thence forking off northeast, through Knoxville, to Washington, Richmond, and Norfolk; and southeast to Charleston and Savannah. Confederate attention had originally been fixed on Corinth and Chattanooga. But General O. M. Mitchel's abortive raid, just after Shiloh, had also drawn it to the part between. The Federals therefore found their enemy alert at every point.

Braxton Bragg, Beauregard's successor and Buell's opponent, basing himself on Chattanooga, tried to drive his line of Confederate reconquest through the heart of Tennessee and thence through mid-Kentucky, with the Ohio as his ultimate objective. His colleagues near the Mississippi, Van Dorn and Sterling Price, meanwhile tried to effect the reconquest of the Memphis-Corinth rails that Grant and Rosecrans were holding.

All main offensives, on both sides, ultimately failed in this latter half of the river campaign of '62. So nothing but the bare fact that they were attempted needs any notice here.

In August, about the time that Lee and Jackson were maneuvering in Virginia to bring on the Second Bull Run, Price and Bragg began their respective advances against Grant and Buell. Buell was at Murfreesboro, defending Nashville. Bragg, screened by the hills of eastern Tennessee, made for the Ohio at Louisville and Cincinnati. Pivoting on his left he wheeled his whole army round and raced for Louisville. Buell enjoyed the advantage of rails over roads and of interior lines as well. But Bragg had stolen several marches on him at the start and he only won by a head.

The Union Government, now thoroughly alarmed, sent Thomas to supersede Buell. But Thomas declined to take over the command, and on the eighth of October Buell fought Bragg at Perryville. There was no tactical defeat or victory; but Bragg retired on Chattanooga. The Government now urged Buell to enter east Tennessee. He protested that lack of transport and supplies made such a move impossible. William S. Rosecrans then replaced him. Buell was never employed again. He certainly failed fully to appreciate the legitimate bearing of statesmanship on strategy; but, for all that, he was an excellent organizer and a good commander.

In the meantime Grant had been experiencing his "most anxious period of the war." During this anxious period, which lasted from July to October, Rosecrans defeated Price at Iuka. This happened on the nineteenth of September. Van Dorn then joined Price and returned to the attack but was defeated by Rosecrans at Corinth on the fourth of October. The Confederates, who had come near victory on the third, retired in safety, because Grant still lacked the means of resuming the offensive.

As soon as he had the means Grant marched his army south for Vicksburg. There were three converging forces: Grant's from Grand Junction, Sherman's from Memphis, and a smaller one from Helena in Arkansas. But the Confederate General, J. C. Pemberton, who had replaced Van Dorn, escaped the trap they tried to set for him. He was strongly entrenched on the south side of the Tallahatchie, north of Oxford, on the Mississippi Central rails. While Grant and Sherman converged on his front, the force from Helena rounded his rear and cut the rails. But the damage was quickly repaired; and Pemberton retired south toward Vicksburg before Grant and Sherman could close and make him fight.

Then Grant tried again. This time Sherman advanced on board of Mississippi steamers, with the idea of meeting the Union expedition coming up from New Orleans. But Van Dorn cut Grant's long line of land communications at Holly Springs, forcing Grant back for supplies and leaving Sherman, who had made his way up the Yazoo, completely isolated. Grant fared well enough, so far as food was concerned; for he found such abundant supplies that he at once perceived the possibility of living on the country without troubling about a northern base. He spent Christmas and New Year at Holly Springs, and then moved back to Memphis.

In the meantime Sherman's separated force had come to grief. On the twenty-ninth of December its attempt to carry the Chickasaw Bluffs, just north of Vicksburg, was completely frustrated by Pemberton; for Sherman could not deploy into line on the few causeways that stood above the flooded ground.

On the eleventh of January this first campaign along the Mississippi was ended by the capture of Arkansas Post. McClernand was the senior there. But Sherman did the work ashore as D. D. Porter did afloat.

Meanwhile Bragg had brought the campaign to a close among the eastern tributaries by a daring, though abortive, march on Nashville. Rosecrans, now commanding the army of the Cumberland, stopped and defeated him at Stone's River on New Year's Eve.

The "War in the West," that is, in those parts of the Southwest which lay beyond the navigable tributaries of the Mississippi system, was even more futile at the time and absolutely null in the end. Its scene of action, which practically consisted of inland Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, was not in itself important enough to be a great determining factor in the actual clash of arms. But Texas supplied many good men to the Southern ranks; and the Southern commissariat missed the Texan cattle after the fall of Vicksburg in '63. New Mexico might also have been a good deal more important than it actually was if it could have been made the base of a real, instead of an abortive, invasion of California, the El Dorado of Confederate finance.

We have already seen what happened on February 15, 1861, when General Twiggs handed over to the State authorities all the army posts in Texas. On the first of the following August Captain John R. Baylor, who had been forming a little Confederate army under pretext of a big buffalo hunt, proclaimed himself Governor of New Mexico (south of 34 deg.) and established his capital at Mesilla. In the meantime the Confederate Government itself had appointed General H. H. Sibley to the command of a brigade for the conquest of all New Mexico. Not ten thousand men were engaged in this campaign, Federals and Confederates, whites and Indians, all together; but a decisive Confederate success might have been pregnant of future victories farther west. Some Indians fought on one side, some on the other; and some of the wilder tribes, delighted to see the encroaching whites at loggerheads, gave trouble to both.

On February 21, 1862, Sibley defeated Colonel E. R. S. Canby at Valverde near Fort Craig. But his further advance was hindered by the barrenness of the country, by the complete destruction of all Union stores likely to fall into his hands, and by the fact that he was between two Federal forts when the battle ended. On the twenty-eighth of March there was a desperate fight in Apache Canon. Both sides claimed the victory. But the Confederates lost more men as well as the whole of their supply and ammunition train. After this Sibley began a retreat which ended in May at San Antonio. His route was marked by bleaching skeletons for many a long day; and from this time forward the conquest of California became nothing but a dream.

The "War in the West" was a mere twig on the Trans-Mississippi branch; and when the fall of Vicksburg severed the branch from the tree the twig simply withered away.

The sword that ultimately severed branch and twig was firmly held by Union hands before the year was out; and this notwithstanding all the Union failures in the last six months. Grant and Porter from above, Banks and Farragut from below, had already massed forces strong enough to make the Mississippi a Union river from source to sea, in spite of all Confederates from Vicksburg to Port Hudson.



CHAPTER V

LINCOLN: WAR STATESMAN

Lincoln was one of those men who require some mighty crisis to call their genius forth. Though more successful than Grant in ordinary life, he was never regarded as a national figure in law or politics till he had passed his fiftieth year. He had no advantages of birth; though he came of a sturdy old English stock that emigrated from Norfolk to Massachusetts in the seventeenth century, and though his mother seems to have been, both intellectually and otherwise, above the general run of the Kentuckians among whom he was born in 1809. His educational advantages were still less. Yet he soon found his true affinities in books, as afterwards in life, not among the clever, smart, or sentimental, but among the simple and the great. He read and reread Shakespeare and the Bible, not because they were the merely proper things to read but because his spirit was akin to theirs. This meant that he never was a bookworm. Words were things of life to him; and, for that reason, his own words live.

He had no artificial graces to soften the uncouth appearance of his huge, gaunt six-foot-four of powerful bone and muscle. But he had the native dignity of straightforward manhood; and, though a champion competitor in feats of strength, his opinion was always sought as that of an impartial umpire, even in cases affecting himself. He "played the game" in his frontier home as he afterwards played the greater game of life-or-death at Washington. His rough-hewn, strong-featured face, shaped by his kindly humor to the finer ends of power, was lit by a steady gaze that saw yet looked beyond, till the immediate parts of the subject appeared in due relation to the whole. Like many another man who sees farther and feels more deeply than the rest, and who has the saving grace of humor, he knew what yearning melancholy was; yet kept the springs of action tense and strong. Firm as a rock on essentials he was extremely tolerant about all minor differences. His policy was to live and let live whenever that was possible. The preservation of the Union was his master-passion, and he was ready for any honorable compromise that left the Union safe. Himself a teetotaller, he silenced a temperance delegation whose members were accusing Grant of drunkenness by saying he should like to send some of his other generals a keg of the same whisky if it would only make them fight.

When he took arms against the sea of troubles that awaited him at Washington he had dire need of all his calm tolerance and strength. To add to his burdens, he was beset by far more than the usual horde of office-seekers. These men were doubly ravenous because their party was so new to power. They were peculiarly hard to place with due regard for all the elements within the coalition. And each appointment needed most discriminating care, lest a traitor to the Union might creep in. While the guns were thundering against Fort Sumter, and afterwards, when the Union Government was marooned in Washington itself, the vestibules, stairways, ante-rooms, and offices were clogged with eager applicants for every kind of civil service job. And then, when this vast human flood subsided, the "interviewing" stream began to flow and went on swelling to the bitter end. These war-time interviewers claimed most of Lincoln's personal attention just when he had the least to spare. But he would deny no one the chance of receiving presidential aid or comfort and he gladly suffered many fools for the chance of relieving the sad or serious others. Add to all this the ceaseless work of helping to form public opinion, of counteracting enemy propaganda, of shaping Union policy under ever-changing circumstances, of carrying it out by coalition means, and of exercising civil control over such vast armed forces as no American had hitherto imagined: add these extra burdens, and we can begin to realize what Lincoln had to do as the chief war statesman of the North.

A sound public opinion is the best embattlement of any home front. So Lincoln set out to help in forming it. War on a national scale was something entirely new to both sides, and especially unwelcome to many people in the North, though the really loyal North was up at Lincoln's call. Then came Bull Run; and Lincoln's renewed determination, so well expressed in Whitman's words: "The President, recovering himself, begins that very night—sternly, rapidly sets about the task of reorganizing his forces, and placing himself in positions for future and surer work. If there was nothing else of Abraham Lincoln for history to stamp him with, it is enough to send him with his wreath to the memory of all future time, that he endured that hour, that day, bitterer than gall—indeed a crucifixion day—that it did not conquer him that he unflinchingly stemmed it, and resolved to lift himself and the Union out of it."

Bull Run was only the beginning of troubles. There were many more rocks ahead in the stormy sea of public opinion. The peace party was always ready to lure the ship of state out of its true course by using false lights, even when certain to bring about a universal wreck in which the "pacifists" would suffer with the rest. But dissensions within the war party were worse, especially when caused by action in the field. Fremont's dismissal in November, '61, caused great dissatisfaction among three kinds of people: those who thought him a great general because he knew how to pose as one and really had some streaks of great ability, those who were fattening on the army contracts he let out with such a lavish hand, and those who hailed him as the liberator of the slaves because he went unwarrantably far beyond what was then politically wise or even possible. He was the first Unionist commander to enter the Northern Cave of Adullam, already infested with Copperhead snakes.

There he was joined by McClellan exactly a year later; and there the peace-at-current-prices party continued to nurse and cry their grievances till the war was over. McClellan's dismissal was a matter of dire necessity because victory was impossible under his command. But he was a dangerous reinforcement to the Adullamites; for many of the loyal public had been fooled by his proclamations, the press had written him up to the skies as the Young Napoleon, and the great mass of the rank and file still believed in him. He took the kindly interest in camp comforts that goes to the soldier's heart; and he really did know how to organize. Add his power of passing off tinsel promises for golden deeds, and it can be well understood how great was the danger of dismissing him before his defects had become so apparent to the mass of people as to have turned opinion decisively against him. We shall presently meet him in his relation to Lincoln during the Virginian campaign, and later on in his relation to Lee. Here we may leave him with the reminder that he was the Democratic candidate for President in '64, that he was still a mortal danger to the Union, even though he had rejected the actual wording of his party's peace plank.

The turn of the tide at the fighting front came in '63; but not at the home front, where public opinion of the most vocal kind was stirred to its dregs by the enforcement of the draft. The dime song books of the Copperhead parts of New York expressed in rude rhymes very much the same sort of apprehension that was voiced by the official opposition in the Presidential campaign of '64.

Abram Lincoln, what yer 'bout? Stop this war, for it's played out.

Another rhyme, called "The Beauties of Conscription," was a more decorous expression of such public opinion.

And this, the "People's Sovereignty," Before a despot humbled! . . . . Well have they cashed old Lincoln's drafts, Hurrah for the Conscription! . . . . Is not this war—this MURDER—for The negro, nolens volens?

So, carrying out their ideas to the same sort of logical conclusion, the New York mob of '63 not only burnt every recruiting office they found undefended but burnt the negro orphan asylum and killed all the negroes they could lay their hands on.

Public opinion did veer round a little with the rising tide of victory in the winter of '63 and '64. But, incredible as it may seem to those who think the home front must always reflect the fighting front, the nadir of public opinion in the North was reached in the summer of '64, when every expert knew that the resources of the South were nearing exhaustion and that the forces of the North could certainly wear out Lee's dwindling army even if they could not beat it. The trumpet gave no uncertain sound from Lincoln's lips. "In this purpose to save the country and its liberties no class of people seem so nearly unanimous as the soldiers in the field and the sailors afloat. Do they not have the hardest of it? Who should quail while they do not?" But the mere excellence of a vast fighting front means a certain loss of the nobler qualities in the home front, from which so many of the staunchest are withdrawn. And then war-weariness breeds doubts, doubts breed fears, and fears breed the spirit of surrender.

There seemed to be more Copperheads in the conglomerate opposition than Unionists ready to withstand them. The sinister figure of Vallandigham loomed large in Ohio, where he openly denounced the war in such disloyal terms that the military authorities arrested him. An opposition committee, backed by the snakes in the grass of the secret societies, at once wrote to Lincoln demanding release. Lincoln thereupon offered release if the committee would sign a declaration that, since rebellion existed, and since the armed forces of the United States were the constitutional means of suppressing rebellion, each member of the committee would support the war till rebellion was put down. The committee refused to sign. More people then began to see the self-contradictions of the opposition, and most of those "plain people" to whom Lincoln consciously appealed were touched to the heart by his pathetic question: "Must I shoot the simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, while I must not touch a hair of the wily agitator who induces him to desert?"

But there was still defection on the Union side, and among many "plain people" too; for Horace Greeley, the best-known Union editor, lost his nerve and ran away. And Greeley was not the only Union journalist who helped, sometimes unwittingly, to pervert public opinion. The "writing up" of McClellan for what he was not, though rather hysterical, was at least well meant. But the reporters who "wrote down" General Cox, because he would not make them members of his staff in West Virginia, disgraced their profession. The lies about Sherman's "insanity" and Grant's "intoxication" were shamelessly excused on the plea that they made "good stories." Sherman's insanity, as we have seen already, existed only in the disordered imagination of blabbing old Simon Cameron. Grant, at the time these stories were published, was strictly temperate.

Amid all the hindrances—and encouragements, for the Union press generally did noble service in the Union cause—of an uncensored press, and all the complexities of public opinion, Lincoln kept his head and heart set firmly on the one supreme objective of the Union. He foresaw from the first that if all the States came through the war United, then all the reforms for which the war was fought would follow; but that if any particular reform was itself made the supreme objective, then it, and with it all the other reforms, would fail, because only part of the Union strength would be involved, whereas the whole was needed. Moreover, he clearly foresaw the absolute nature of a great civil war. Foreign wars may well, and often do, end in some sort of compromise, especially when the home life of the opponents can go on as before. But a great civil war cannot end in compromise because it radically changes the home life of one side or the other. Davis stood for "Independence or extermination"; Lincoln simply for the Union, which, in his clear prevision, meant all that the body politic could need for a new and better life. He accepted the word "enemy" as descriptive of a passing phase. He would not accept such phraseology as Meade's, "driving the invader from our soil." "Will our generals," he complained, "never get that idea out of their heads? The whole country is our soil."

He was a life-long advocate of Emancipation, first, with compensation, now as part of the price to be paid for rebellion. Emancipation, however, depended on the Union, not the Union on it. His Proclamation was ready in the summer of '62. But to publish it in the midst of defeat would make it look like an act of despair. In September, when the Confederates had to recross the Potomac after Antietam, the Proclamation was given to the world. Its first effect was greater abroad than at home; for now no foreign government could say, and rightly say, that the war, not being fought on account of slavery, might leave that issue still unsettled. This was a most important point in Lincoln's foreign policy, a policy which had been haunted by the fear of recognition for the South or the possibility of war with either the French or British, or even both together.

Lincoln's Cabinet was composed of two factions, one headed by Seward, the Secretary of State, the other by Chase, the Secretary of the Treasury. Both the fighting services were under War Democrats: the Army under Stanton, the Navy under Welles. All these ministers began by thinking that Lincoln had the least ability among them. Seward and Welles presently learnt better. Stanton's exclamation at Lincoln's death speaks for itself "Now he belongs to the ages!" But Chase never believed that Lincoln could even be his equal. Chase and the Treasury were a thorn in the side of the Government; Chase because it was his nature, the Treasury because its notes fell to thirty-nine cents in the dollar during the summer of '64. Welles, hard-working and upright, was guided by an expert assistant. Stanton, equally upright and equally hardworking, made many mistakes. And yet, when all is said and done, Stanton was a really able patriot who worked his hardest for what seemed to him the best.

Such were the four chief men in that Cabinet with which Lincoln carried out his Union policy and over which he towered in what became transcendent statesmanship—the head, the heart, the genius of the war. He never, for one moment, changed his course, but kept it fixed upon the Union, no matter what the winds and tides, the currents and cross-currents were. Thus, while so many lesser minds were busy with flotsam and jetsam of the controversial storm, his own serener soul was already beyond the far horizon, voyaging toward the one sure haven for the Ship of State.

But Lincoln was more than the principal civilian war statesman: he was the constitutional Commander-in-Chief of all the Union forces, afloat and ashore. He was responsible not only for raising, supplying, and controlling them, but for their actual command by men who, in the eyes of the law, were simply his own lieutenants. The problem of exercising civil control without practicing civilian interference, always and everywhere hard, and especially hard in a civil war, was particularly hard in his case, in view of public opinion, the press, his own war policy, and the composition of his Cabinet. His solution was by no means perfect; but the wonder is that he reached it so well in spite of such perverting factors. He began with the mere armed mob that fought the First Bull Run beset with interference. He ended with Farragut, Grant, and Sherman, combined in one great scheme of strategy that included Mobile, Virginia, and the lower South, and that, while under full civil control, was mostly free from interference with its naval and military work—except at the fussy hands of Stanton.

The fundamental difference between civil control, which is the very breath of freedom, and civilian interference, which means the death of all efficiency, can be quite simply illustrated by supposing the proverbial Ship of State to be a fighting man-of-war. The People are the owners, with all an owner's rights; while their chosen Government is their agent, with all an agent's delegated power. The fighting Services, as the word itself so properly implies, are simply the People's servants, though they take their orders from the Government. So far, so good, within the limits of civil control, under which, and which alone, any national resources—in men, money, or material—can lawfully be turned to warlike ends. But when the ship is fitting out, still more when she is out at sea, and most of all when she is fighting, then she should be handled only by her expert captain with his expert crew. Civilian interference begins the moment any inexpert outsider takes the captain's place; and this interference is no less disastrous when the outsider remains at home than when he is on the actual spot.

Lincoln and Stanton were out of their element in the strategic fight with Lee and Stonewall Jackson, as the next chapter abundantly proves. But they will bear, and more than bear, comparison with Davis and Benjamin, their own special "opposite numbers." Benjamin, when Confederate Secretary of War in '62, nearly drove Jackson out of the service by ordering him to follow the advice of some disgruntled subordinates who objected to being moved about for strategic reasons which they could not understand. To make matters worse, Benjamin sent this precious order direct to Jackson without even informing his immediate superior, "Joe" Johnston, or even Lee himself. Thus discipline, the very soul of armies, was attacked from above and beneath by the man who should have been its chief upholder. Luckily for the South things were smoothed over, and Benjamin learnt something he should have known at first.

Davis had none of Lincoln's diffidence about his own capacity for directing the strategy of armies. He had passed through West Point and commanded a battalion in Mexico without finding out that his fitness stopped there. He interfered with Lee and Jackson, sometimes to almost a disabling extent. He forced his enmity on "Joe" Johnston and superseded him at the very worst time in the final campaign. He interfered more than ever just when Lee most required a free hand. And when he did make Lee a real Commander-in-Chief the Southern cause had been lost already. Lincoln's war statesmanship grew with the war. Davis remained as he was.

Lincoln had to meet the difficulties that always occur when professionals and amateurs are serving together. How much Lincoln, Stanton, professionals, and amateurs had to do with the system that was evolved under great stress is far too complex for discussion here. Suffice it to say this: Lincoln's clear insight and openness of mind enabled him to see the universal truth, that, other things being equal, the trained and expert professional must excel the untrained and inexpert amateur. But other things are never precisely equal; and a war in which the whole mass-manhood is concerned brings in a host of amateurs. Lincoln was as devoid of prejudice against the regular officers as he was against any other class of men; and he was ready to try and try again to find a satisfactory commander among them, in spite of many failures. The plan of campaign proposed by General Winfield Scott (and ultimately carried out in a modified form) was dubbed by wiseacre public men the "Anaconda policy"; witlings derided it, and the people were too impatient for anything except "On to Richmond!" Scott, unable to take the field at seventy-five, had no second-in-command. Halleck was a very poor substitute later on. In the meantime McDowell was chosen and generously helped by Lincoln and Stanton. But after Bull Run the very people whose impatience made victory impossible howled him down.

Then the choice fell on McClellan, whose notorious campaign fills much of our next chapter. There we shall see how refractory circumstances, Stanton's waywardness among them, forced Lincoln to go beyond the limits of civil control. Here we need only note McClellan's personal relations with the President. Instead of summoning him to the White House Lincoln often called at McClellan's for discussion. McClellan presently began to treat Lincoln's questions as intrusions, and one day sent down word that he was too tired to see the President. Lincoln had told a friend that he would hold McClellan's stirrups for the sake of victory. But he could not abdicate in favor of McClellan or any one else.

It was none of Lincoln's business to be an actual Commander-in-Chief. Yet night after weary night he sat up studying the science and art of war, groping his untutored way toward those general principles and essential human facts which his native genius enabled him to reach, but never quite understanding—how could he?—their practical application to the field of strategy. His supremely good common sense saved him from going beyond his depth whenever he could help it. His Military Orders were forced upon him by the extreme pressure of impatient public opinion. He told Grant "he did not know but they were all wrong, and he did know that some of them were."

McClellan was not the only failure in Virginia. Burnside and Hooker also failed against Lee and Jackson. All three suffered from civilian interference as well as from their own defects. At last, in the third year of the war, a victor appeared in Meade, a good, but by no means great, commander. In the fourth year Lincoln gave the chief command to Grant, whom he had carefully watched and wisely supported through all the ups and downs of the river campaigns.

Grant's account of his first conference alone with Lincoln is eloquent of Lincoln's wise war statesmanship:

He stated that he had never professed to be a military man or to know how campaigns should be conducted, and never wanted to interfere in them.... All he wanted was some one who would take the responsibility and act, and call on him for all the assistance needed, pledging himself to use all the power of the government in rendering such assistance.... He pointed out on the map two streams which empty into the Potomac, and suggested that the army might be moved on boats and landed between the mouths of these streams. We would then have the Potomac to bring our supplies and the tributaries would protect our flanks while we moved out. I listened respectfully, but did not suggest that the same streams would protect Lee's flanks while he was shutting us up. I did not communicate my plans to the President; nor did I to the Secretary of War or to General Halleck.

Trust begot trust; and some months later Grant showed war statesmanship of the same magnificent kind. McClellan had become the Democratic candidate for President, to the well-founded alarm of all who put the Union first. In June, when Grant and Lee were at grips round Richmond, Lincoln was invited to a public meeting got up in honor of Grant with only a flimsy disguise of the ominous fact that Grant, and not Lincoln, might be the Union choice. Lincoln sagaciously wrote back: "It is impossible for me to attend. I approve nevertheless of whatever may tend to strengthen and sustain General Grant and the noble armies now under his command. He and his brave soldiers are now in the midst of their great trial, and I trust that at your meeting you will so shape your good words that they may turn to men and guns, moving to his and their support." The danger to the Union of taking Grant away from the front moved Lincoln deeply all through that anxious summer of '64, though he never thought Grant would leave the front with his work half done. In August an officious editor told Lincoln that he ought to take a good long rest. Lincoln, however, was determined to stand by his own post of duty and find out from Grant, through their common friend, John Eaton, what Grant's own views of such ideas were. This is Eaton's account of how Grant took it:

We had been talking very quietly. But Grant's reply came in an instant and with a violence for which I was not prepared. He brought his clenched fists down hard on the strap arms of his camp chair. "They can't do it. They can't compel me to do it." Emphatic gesture was not a strong point with Grant. "Have you said this to the President?" "No," said Grant, "I have not thought it worth while to assure the President of my opinion. I consider it as important for the cause that he should be elected as that the army should be successful in the field."

When Eaton brought back his report Lincoln simply said, "I told you they could not get him to run till he had closed out the rebellion."

On the twenty-third of this same gloomy August, lightened only by the taking of Mobile, Lincoln asked his Cabinet if they would endorse a memorandum without reading it. They all immediately signed. After his reelection in November he read it out: "This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be reelected. Then it will be my duty to so cooeperate with the President-elect as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration, as he will have secured his election on such ground that he cannot possibly save it afterwards." He added that he would have asked McClellan to throw his whole influence into getting enough recruits to finish the war before the fourth of March. "And McClellan," was Seward's comment, "would have said 'Yes, yes,' and then done nothing."

Lincoln's reelection was helped by Farragut's victory in August, Sherman's in September, and Sheridan's raid through the Shenandoah Valley in October. But it was also helped by that strange, vivifying touch which passes, no one knows how, from the man who best embodies a supremely patriotic cause to the masses of his fellow patriots, and then, at some great crisis, when they scale heights which he has long since trod, comes back in flood and carries him to power.

Lincoln stories were abroad; the true were eclipsing the false; and all the true ones gained him increasing credit. Naval reformers, and many others too, enjoyed the homely wit with which he closed the first conference about such a startlingly novel craft as the plans for the Monitor promised: "Well, Gentlemen, all I have to say is what the girl said when she put her foot into the stocking: 'It strikes me there's something in it.'" The army enjoyed the joke against the three-month captain whom Sherman threatened to shoot if he went home without leave. The same day Lincoln, visiting the camp, was harangued by this prospective deserter in presence of many another man disheartened by Bull Run. "Mr. President: this morning I spoke to Colonel Sherman and he threatened to shoot me, Sir!" Lincoln looked the two men over, and then, in a stage whisper every listener could hear, said: "Well, if I were you, and he threatened to shoot me, I wouldn't trust him; for I'm sure he'd do it." Both Services were not only pleased with the "rise" Lincoln took out of a too inquisitive politician but were much reassured by its model discretion. This importunate politician so badgered Lincoln about the real destination of McClellan's transports that Lincoln at last promised to tell everything he could if the politician would promise not to repeat it. Then, after swearing the utmost secrecy, the politician got the news: "They are going to sea."

The whole home front as well as the Services were touched to the heart by tales of Lincoln's kindness in his many interviews with the war-bereaved; and letters like these spoke for themselves to every patriot in the land:

Executive Mansion, November 21, 1864.

Mrs. Bixby, Boston, Massachusetts.

Dear Madam: I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of the Adjutant-General of Massachusetts that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle. I feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering to you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save. I pray that our heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.

Yours very sincerely and respectfully, Abraham Lincoln.

Nor did the Lincoln touch stop there. It even began to make its quietly persuasive way among the finer spirits of the South from the very day on which the Second Inaugural closed with words which were the noblest consummation of the prophecy made in the First. This was the prophecy: "The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature." And this the consummation: "With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."



CHAPTER VI

LEE AND JACKSON: 1862-3

Most Southerners remained spellbound by the glamour of Bull Run till the hard, sharp truths of '62 began to rouse them from their flattering dream. They fondly hoped, and even half believed, that if another Northern army dared to invade Virginia it would certainly fail against their entrenchments at Bull Run. If, so ran the argument, the North failed in the open field it must fail still worse against a fortified position.

The Southern generals vainly urged their Government to put forth its utmost strength at once, before the more complex and less united North had time to recover and begin anew. They asked for sixty thousand men at Bull Run, to be used for a vigorous counterstroke at Washington. They pointed out the absurdity of misusing the Bull Run (or Manassas) position as a mere shield, fixed to one spot, instead of making it the hilt of a sword thrust straight at the heart of the North. Robert E. Lee, now a full general in the Confederate Army and adviser to the President, grasped the whole situation from the first and urged the right solution in the official way. Stonewall Jackson, still a junior general, was in full accord with Lee, as we know from the confidential interview (at the end of October, '61) between him and his divisional commander, General G. W. Smith, who made it public many years later. The gist of Jackson's argument was this: "McClellan won't come out this year with his army of recruits. We ought to invade now, not wait to be invaded later on. If Davis would concentrate every man who can be spared from all other points and let us invade before winter sets in, then McClellan's recruits couldn't stand against us in the field. Let us cross the upper Potomac, occupy Baltimore, and, holding Maryland, cut the communications of Washington, force the Federal Government out of it, beat McClellan if he attacks, destroy industrial plants liable to be turned to warlike ends, cut the big commercial lines of communication, close the coal mines, seize the neck of land between Pittsburg and Lake Erie, live on the country by requisition, and show the North what it would cost to conquer the South." On asking Smith if he agreed, Smith answered: "I will tell you a secret; for I am sure it won't be divulged. These views were rejected by the Government during the conference at Fairfax Court House at the beginning of the month." Jackson thereupon shook Smith's hand, saying, "I am sorry, very sorry," and, mounting Little Sorrel without another word, rode sadly away.

Jefferson Davis probably, and some of his Cabinet possibly, understood what Lee, "Joe" Johnston, Beauregard, Smith, and Jackson so strongly urged. But they feared the outcry that would assuredly be raised by people in districts denuded of troops for the grand concentration elsewhere. So they remained passive when they should have been active, and, trying to strengthen each separate part, fatally weakened the whole.

Meanwhile the North was collecting the different elements of warlike force and changing its Secretary of War. Cameron was superseded by Stanton on the fifteenth of January. Twelve days later Lincoln issued the first of those military orders which, as we have just seen, he afterwards told Grant that the impatience of the loyal North compelled him to issue, though he knew some were certainly, and all were possibly, wrong. This first order was one of the certainly wrong. McClellan's unready masses were to begin an unlimited mud march through the early spring roads of Virginia on the twenty-second of February, in honor of Washington's birthday. A reconnoitering staff officer reported the roads as being in their proper places; but he guessed the bottom had fallen out. So McClellan was granted some delay.

His grand total was now over two hundred thousand men. The Confederate grand total was estimated at a hundred and fifteen thousand by the civilian detectives whom the Federal Government employed to serve in place of an expert intelligence staff. The detective estimate was sixty-five thousand men out. The real Confederate strength at this time was only fifty thousand. There was little chance of getting true estimates in any other way, as the Federal Government had no adequate cavalry. Most of the few cavalry McClellan commanded were as yet a mere collection of men and horses, quite unfit for reconnoitering and testing an enemy's force.

McClellan's own plan, formed on the supposition that the Confederates held the Bull Run position with at least a hundred thousand men, involved the transfer of a hundred and fifty thousand Federals by sea from Washington to Fortress Monroe, on the historic peninsula between the York and James rivers. Then, using these rivers as lines of communication, his army would take Richmond in flank. Lincoln's objection to this plan was based on the very significant argument that while the Federal army was being transported piecemeal to Fortress Monroe the Confederates might take Washington by a sudden dash from their base at Centreville, only thirty miles off. This was a valid objection; for Washington was not only the Federal Headquarters but the very emblem of the Union cause—a sort of living Stars and Stripes—and Washington lost might well be understood to mean almost the same as if the Ship of State had struck her colors.

On the ninth of March the immediate anxiety about Washington was relieved. That day came news that the Monitor had checkmated the Merrimac in Hampton Roads and that "Joe" Johnston had withdrawn his forces from the Bull Run position and had retired behind the Rappahannock to Culpeper. On the tenth McClellan began a reconnoitering pursuit of Johnston from Washington. Having found burnt bridges and other signs of decisive retirement, he at last persuaded the reluctant Lincoln to sanction the Peninsula Campaign. On the seventeenth his army began embarking for Fortress Monroe, ten thousand men at a time, that being all the transports could carry. For a week the movement of troops went on successfully; while the Confederates could not make out what was happening along the coast. Everything also seemed quite safe, from the Federal point of view, in the Shenandoah Valley, where General Banks commanded. And both there and along the Potomac the Federals were in apparently overwhelming strength; even though the detectives doing duty as staff officers still kept on doubling the numbers of all the Confederates under arms.

Suddenly, on the twenty-third, a fight at Kernstown in the Shenandoah Valley gave a serious shock to the victorious Federals, not only there but all over the semicircle of invasion, from West Virginia round by the Potomac and down to Fortress Monroe. The fighting on both sides was magnificent. Yet Kernstown itself was a very small affair. Little more than ten thousand men had been in action: seven thousand Federals under Shields against half as many Confederates under Stonewall Jackson. The point is that Jackson's attack, though unsuccessful, was very disconcerting elsewhere. From Kernstown the area of disturbance spread like wildfire till the tactical victory of seven thousand Federals had spoilt the strategy of thirty times as many. Shields reported: "I set to work during the night to bring together all the troops within my reach. I sent an express after Williams's division, requesting the rear brigade, about twenty miles distant, to march all night and join me in the morning. I swept the posts in rear of almost all their guards, hurrying them forward by forced marches, to be with me at daylight." Banks, now on his way to Washington, halted in alarm at Harper's Ferry. McClellan, perceiving that Jackson's little force was more than a mere corps of observation, approved Banks and added: "As soon as you are strong enough push Jackson hard and drive him well beyond Strasburg," that is, west of the Massanuttons, where Fremont could close in and finish him. Lincoln had already been thinking of transferring nine thousand men from McClellan to Fremont. Kernstown decided it; so off they went to West Virginia. Still fearing an attack on Washington, Lincoln halted McDowell's army corps, thirty-seven thousand strong, on the march overland to join McClellan on the Peninsula, and kept them stuck fast round Centreville, near Bull Run. And so McClellan's Peninsular force was suddenly reduced by forty-six thousand men.

April was a month of maneuvers and suspense. By the end of it McClellan, based on Fortress Monroe, had accumulated a hundred and ten thousand men. The Confederates on the Peninsula, holding Yorktown, numbered fifty thousand. McClellan sadly missed McDowell, whose corps was to have taken the fort at Gloucester Point that prevented the Federal gunboats from turning the enemy's lines at Yorktown. McDowell moved south to Fredericksburg, leaving a small force near Manassas Junction to connect him with the garrison of Washington. The Confederates could spare only twelve thousand men to watch him. Meanwhile Banks occupied the Shenandoah Valley, having twenty thousand men at Harrisonburg and smaller forces at several points all round, from southwest to northeast, each designed to form part of the net that was soon to catch Jackson. Beyond Banks stood Fremont's force in West Virginia, also ready to close in. Jackson's complete grand total was less than that of Banks's own main body. Yet, with one eye on Richmond, he lay in wait at Swift Run Gap, crouching for a tiger-spring at Banks. Virginia was semicircled by superior forces. But everywhere inside the semicircle the Confederate parts all formed one strategic whole; while the Federal parts outside did not. Moreover, the South had already decided to call up every available man; thus forestalling the North by more than ten months on the vital issue of conscription.

In May the preliminary clash of arms began on the Peninsula. The Confederates evacuated the Yorktown lines on the third. On the fifth McClellan's advanced guard fought its way past Williamsburg. On the seventh he began changing his base from Fortress Monroe to White House on the Pamunkey. Here on the sixteenth he was within twenty miles of Richmond, while all the seaways behind him were safe in Union hands. The fate not only of Richmond but of the whole South seemed trembling in the scales. The Northern armies had cleared the Mississippi down to Memphis. The Northern navy had taken New Orleans, the greatest Southern port. And now the Northern hosts were striking at the Southern capital. McClellan with double numbers from the east, McDowell with treble numbers from the north, and the Union navy, with more than fourfold strength on all the navigable waters, were closing in. The Confederate Government had even decided to take the extreme step of evacuating Richmond, hoping to prolong the struggle elsewhere. The official records had been packed. Davis had made all arrangements for the flight of his family. And from Drewry's Bluff, eight miles south of Richmond, the masts of the foremost Federal vessels could be seen coming up the James, where, on the eleventh, the Merrimac, having grounded, had been destroyed by her own commander.

But the General Assembly of Virginia, passionately seconded by the City Council, petitioned the Government to stand its ground "till not a stone was left upon another." Every man in Richmond who could do a hand's turn and who was not already in arms marched out to complete the defenses of the James at Drewry's Bluff. Senators, bankers, bondmen and free, merchants, laborers, and ministers of all religions, dug earthworks, hauled cannon, piled ammunition, or worked, wet to the waist, at the big boom that was to stop the ships and hold them under fire. The Government had changed its mind. Richmond was to be held to the last extremity. And the Southern women were as willing as the men.

In the midst of all this turmoil Lee calmly reviewed the situation. He saw that the Federal gunboats coming up the James were acting alone, as the disconnected vanguard of what should have been a joint advance, and that no army was yet moving to support them. He knew McClellan and Banks and read them like a book. He also knew Jackson, and decided to use him again in the Shenandoah Valley as a menace to Washington. Writing to him on the sixteenth of May, the very day McClellan reached White House, only twenty miles from Richmond, he said: "Whatever movement you make against Banks, do it speedily, and, if successful, drive him back towards the Potomac, and create the impression, as far as possible, that you design threatening that line." Moreover, out of his own scanty forces, he sent Jackson two excellent brigades. Thus, while the great Federal civilians who knew nothing practical of war were all agog about Richmond, a single point at one end of the semicircle, the great Confederate strategist was forging a thunderbolt to relieve the pressure on it by striking the Federal center so as to threaten Washington. The fundamental idea was a Fabian defensive at Richmond, a vigorous offensive in the Valley, to produce Federal dispersion between these points and Washington; then rapid concentration against McClellan on the Chickahominy.

The unsupported Federal gunboats were stopped and turned back at the boom near Drewry's Bluff. McClellan, bent on besieging Richmond in due form, crawled cautiously about the intervening swamps of the oozy Chickahominy. McDowell, who could not advance alone, remained at Fredericksburg. Shields stood behind him, near Catlett's Station, to keep another eye on nervous Washington.

In the meantime Stonewall Jackson, still in the Shenandoah, had fought no battles since his tactical defeat at Kernstown on the twenty-third of March had proved such a pregnant strategic victory elsewhere. But late in April he had a letter from Lee, telling of the general situation and suggesting an attack on Banks. Banks, however, still had twenty thousand men at Harrisonburg, with twenty-five thousand more in or within call of the Valley. Jackson's complete grand total was less than eighteen thousand. The odds against him therefore exceeded five against two; and direct attack was out of the question. But he now began his maneuvers anew and on a bolder scale than ever. He had upset the Federal strategy at Kernstown, when there were less than eight thousand Confederates in the Valley. What might he not do with ten thousand more? His wonderful Valley Campaign, famous forever in the history of war, gives us the answer.

He had five advantages over Banks. First, his own expert knowledge and genius for war, backed by a dauntless character. Banks was a very able man who had worked his way up from factory hand to Speaker of the House of Representatives and Governor of Massachusetts. But he had neither the knowledge, genius, nor character required for high command; and he owed his present position more to his ardor as a politician than to his ability as a general. Jackson's second advantage was his own and his army's knowledge of the country for which they naturally fought with a loving zeal which no invaders could equal. The third advantage was in having Turner Ashby's cavalry. These were horsemen born and bred, who could make their way across country as easily as the "footy" Federals could along the road. In answer to a peremptory order a Federal cavalry commander could only explain: "I can't catch them. They leap fences and walls like deer. Neither our men nor our horses are so trained." The fourth advantage was in discipline. Jackson habitually spared his men more than his officers, and his officers more than himself, whenever indulgence was possible. But when discipline had to be sternly maintained he maintained it sternly, throughout all ranks, knowing that the flower of discipline is self-sacrifice, from the senior general down, and that the root is due subordination, from the junior private up. After the Conscription Act had come into force a few companies, who were time-expired as volunteers, threw down their arms and told their colonel they wouldn't serve another day. On hearing this officially Jackson asked: "Why does Colonel Grigsby refer to me to learn how to deal with mutineers? He should shoot them where they stand." The rest of the regiment was then paraded with loaded arms, facing the mutineers, who were given the choice of complete submission or instant death. They chose submission. That was the last mutiny under Stonewall Jackson. Both sides suffered from straggling, the Confederates as much as the Federals. But Confederate stragglers rejoined the better of the two; and in downright desertion the Federals were the worse, simply because their own peace party was by far the stronger. The final advantage brings us back to strategy, on which the whole campaign was turning. Lee and Jackson worked the Confederates together. Lincoln and Stanton worked the Federals apart.

On the last of April Jackson slipped away from Swift Run Gap while Ewell quietly took his place and Ashby blinded Banks by driving the Federal cavalry back on Harrisonburg. Jackson's men were thoroughly puzzled and disheartened when they had to leave the Valley in full possession of the enemy while they ploughed through seas of mud towards Richmond. What was the matter? Were they off to Richmond? No; for they presently wheeled round. "Old Jack's crazy, sure, this time." Even one of his staff officers thought so himself, and put it on paper, to his own confusion afterwards. The rain came down in driving sheets. The roads became mere drains for the oozing woods. Wheels stuck fast; and Jackson was seen heaving his hardest with an exhausted gun team. But still the march went on—slosh, slosh, squelch; they slogged it through. Close up, men!—close up in rear!—close up, there, close up!

On the fourth of May Jackson got word from Edward Johnson, commanding his detached brigade near Staunton, that Milroy, commanding Fremont's advanced guard, was coming on from West Virginia. Jackson at once seized the chance of smashing Milroy by railing in to Staunton before Banks or Fremont could interfere. This would have been suicidal against a great commander with a well-trained force. But Banks, grossly exaggerating Jackson's numbers, was already marching north to the railhead at New Market, where he would be nearer his friends if Jackson swooped down. Detraining at Staunton the Confederates picketed the whole neighborhood to stop news getting out before they made their dash against Milroy. On the seventh they moved off. The cadets of the Virginia Military Institute, where Jackson had been a professor for so many years, had just joined to gain some experience of the real thing, and as they stepped out in their smart uniforms, with all the exactness of parade-ground drill, they formed a marked contrast to the gaunt soldiers of the Valley, half fed, half clad, but wholly eager for the fray.



That night Milroy got together all the men he could collect at McDowell, a little village just beyond the Valley and on the road to Gauley Bridge in West Virginia. He sent posthaste for reinforcements. But Fremont's men were divided too far west, fearing nothing from the Valley, while Banks's were thinking of a concentration too far north.

In the afternoon of the eighth, Milroy attacked Jackson with great determination and much skill. But after a stern encounter, in which the outnumbered Federals fought very well indeed, the Confederates won a decisive victory. The numbers actually engaged—twenty-five hundred Federals against four thousand Confederates—were even smaller than at Kernstown. But this time the Confederates won the tactical victory on the spot as well as the strategic victory all over the Valley; and the news cheered Richmond at what, as we have seen already, was its very darkest hour. The night of the battle Jackson sent out strong working parties to destroy all bridges and culverts and to block all roads by which Fremont could reach the Valley. In some places bowlders were rolled down from the hills. In one the trees were felled athwart the path for a mile. A week later Jackson was back in the Valley at Lebanon Springs, while Fremont was blocked off from Banks, who was now distractedly groping for safety and news.

The following day, the famous sixteenth, we regain touch with Lee, who, as mentioned already, then wrote to Jackson about attacking Banks in order to threaten Washington. This dire day at Richmond, the day McClellan reached White House, was also the one appointed by the Southern Government as a day of intercession for God's blessing on the Southern arms. None kept it more fervently, even in beleaguered Richmond, than pious Jackson in the Valley. Then, like a giant refreshed, he rose for swift and silent marches and also sudden hammer-strokes at Banks.

Confident that all would now go well, Washington thought nothing of the little skirmish at McDowell, because it apparently disturbed nothing beyond the Shenandoah Valley. The news from everywhere else was good; and Federals were jubilant. So were the civilian strategists, particularly Stanton, who, though tied to his desk as Secretary of War, was busy wire-pulling Banks's men about the Valley. Stanton ordered Banks to take post at Strasburg and to hold the bridges at Front Royal with two detached battalions. This masterpiece of bungling put the Federals at Front Royal in the air, endangered their communications north to Winchester, and therefore menaced the Valley line toward Washington. But Banks said nothing; and Stanton would have snubbed him if he had.

On the twenty-third of May a thousand Federals under Colonel Kenly were sweltering in the first hot weather of the year at Stanton's indefensible position of Front Royal when suddenly a long gray line of skirmishers emerged from the woods, the Confederate bugles rang out, and Jackson's battle line appeared. Then came a crashing volley, which drove in the Federal pickets for their lives. Colonel Kenly did his best. But he was outflanked and forced back in confusion. A squadron of New York cavalry came to the rescue; but were themselves outflanked and helpless on the road against the Virginian horsemen, who could ride across country. Kenly had just made a second stand, when down came the Virginians, led by Colonel Flournoy at racing speed over fence and ditch, scattering the Federal cavalry like chaff before the wind and smashing into the Federal infantry. Two hundred and fifty really efficient cavalry took two guns (complete with limbers, men, and horses), killed and wounded a hundred and fifty-four of their opponents, and captured six hundred prisoners as well—and all with a loss to themselves of only eleven killed and fifteen wounded.

Ashby's cavalry, several hundreds strong, pushed on and out to the flanks, cutting the wires, destroying bridges, and blocking the roads against reinforcements from beyond the Valley. Three hours after the attack a dispatch-rider dashed up to Banks's headquarters at Strasburg. But Banks refused to move, saying, when pressed by his staff to make a strategic retreat on Winchester, "By God, sir, I will not retreat! We have more to fear from the opinions of our friends than from the bayonets of our enemies!" The Cabinet backed him up next day by actually proposing to reinforce him at Strasburg with troops from Washington and Baltimore. Nevertheless he was forced to fly for his life to Winchester. His stores at Strasburg had to be abandoned. His long train of wagons was checked on the way, with considerable loss. And some of his cavalry, caught on the road by horsemen who could ride across country, were smashed to pieces.

Jackson pressed on relentlessly to Winchester with every one who could march like "foot cavalry," as his Valley men came to be called. On the twenty-fifth, the third day of unremitting action, he carried the Winchester heights and drove Banks through the town. Only the Second Massachusetts, which had already distinguished itself during the retreat, preserved its formation. Ten thousand Confederate bayonets glittered in the morning sun. The long gray lines swept forward. The piercing rebel yell rose high. And the people, wild with joy, rushed out of doors to urge the victors on.

By the twenty-sixth, the first day on which Stanton's reinforcements from Baltimore and Washington could possibly have fought at Strasburg, the Confederates had reached Martinsburg, fifty miles beyond it. Banks had already crossed the Potomac, farther on still. The newsboys of the North were crying, Defeat of General Banks! Washington in danger! Thirteen Governors were calling for special State militia, for which a million men were volunteering, spare troops were hurrying to Harper's Ferry, a reserve corps was being formed at Washington, the Federal Government was assuming control of all the railroad lines, and McClellan was being warned that he must either take Richmond at once or come back to save the capital. Nor did the strategic disturbance stop even there; for the Washington authorities ordered McDowell's force at Fredericksburg to the Valley just as it was coming into touch with McClellan.

On the twenty-eighth Jackson might have taken Harper's Ferry. But the storm was gathering round him. A great strategist directing the Federal forces could have concentrated fifty thousand men, by sunset on the first of June, against Jackson's Army of the Valley, which could not possibly have mustered one-third of such a number. McDowell arrived that night at Front Royal. He had vainly protested against the false strategy imposed by the Government from Washington, and he was not a free agent now. Yet, even so, his force was at least a menace to Jackson, who had only two chances of getting away to aid in the defeat of McClellan and the saving of Richmond. One was to outmarch the converging Federals, gain interior lines along the Valley, and defeat them there in detail. The other was to march into friendly Maryland, trusting to her Southern sentiments for help and reinforcements. He decided on the Valley route and marched straight in between his enemies.

His fortnight's work, from the nineteenth of May to the first of June, inclusive, is worth summing up. In these fourteen days he had marched 170 miles, routed 12,500 men, threatened an invasion of the North, drawn McDowell off from Fredericksburg, taken or destroyed all Federal stores at Front Royal, Winchester, and Martinsburg, and brought off safely a convoy seven miles long. Moreover, he had done all this with the loss of only six hundred, though sixty thousand enemies lay on three sides of his own sixteen thousand men.

His remaining problem was harder still. It was how to mystify, tire out, check short, and then immobilize the converging Federals long enough to let him slip secretly away in time to help Johnston and Lee against McClellan. Jackson, like his enemies, moved through what has been well called the Fog of War—that inevitable uncertainty through which all commanders must find their way. But none of his enemies equaled him in knowledge, genius, or character for war.

The first week in June saw desperate marches in the Valley, with the outnumbering Federals hot-foot on the trail of Jackson, who turned to bay one moment and at the next was off again. On the sixth the Federals got home against his rear guard. It began to waver, and Ashby ordered the infantry to charge. As he gave the order his horse fell dead. In a flash he was up, waving his sword and shouting: "Charge, for God's sake, charge!" The Confederate line swept forward gallantly. But, just as it left the wood, Ashby was shot through the heart. His men avenged him. Yet none could fill his place as a born leader of irregular light horse.

Next morning the hounds were hot upon the scent again: Shields and Fremont converging on Jackson, whom they would run to earth somewhere north of Staunton. But on the eighth and ninth Jackson turned sharply and bit back, first at Fremont close to Cross Keys, then at Shields near Port Republic. Each was caught alone, just before their point of junction, and each was defeated in detail as well.

Fully to appreciate Jackson's strategy we must compare the strategical and tactical numbers concerned throughout this short but momentous Valley Campaign. The strategic numbers are those at the disposal of the commander within the theater of operations. The tactical numbers are those actually present on the field of battle, whether engaged or not. At McDowell the Federals had 30,000 in strategic strength against 17,000 Confederates; yet the Confederates got 6000 on to the field of battle against no more than 2500. At Winchester the Federal strategic strength was 60,000 against 16,000; yet the Confederate tactical strength was every man of the 16,000 against 7500—only one-eighth of Banks's grand total. At Cross Keys the strategic strengths were 23,000 Federals against 13,000 Confederates; yet 12,750 Federals were beaten by 8000 Confederates. Finally, at Port Republic, the Federals, with a strategic strength of 22,000 against the Confederate 12,700, could only bring a tactical strength of 4500 to bear on 6000 Confederates. The grand aggregate of these four remarkable actions is well worth adding up. It comes to this in strategic strength: 135,000 Federals against 58,700 Confederates. Yet in tactical strength the odds are reversed; for they come to this: 36,000 Confederates against only 27,250 Federals. Therefore Stonewall Jackson, with strategic odds of nearly seven to three against him, managed to fight with tactical odds of four to three in his favor.

While Jackson was fighting in the Valley the Confederates at Richmond were watching the nightly glow of Federal camp fires. McClellan had 30,000 men north of the Chickahominy, waiting for McDowell to come back from his enterprise against Jackson, and 75,000 south of it. What could the 65,000 Confederates do, except hold fast to their lines? TO RICHMOND 4-1/2 MILES: so read the sign-post at the Mechanicsville bridge, and there stood the nearest Federal picket. Johnston and Lee knew, however, that McClellan's alarmist detectives swore to a Confederate army three times its actual strength at this time; and there was reason to hope that the consequent moral ascendancy would help the shock of an attack suddenly made on one of McClellan's two wings while the flooded Chickahominy flowed between them and its oozy swamps bewildered his staff.

Hearing that McDowell need not be feared, Johnston attacked at daylight on the thirty-first of May. The battle of Seven Pines (known also as Fair Oaks) was not unlike Shiloh. The Federals were taken by surprise on the first day and only succeeded in holding their own by hard fighting and with a good deal of loss. A mistake was made by the Confederate division told off for the attack on the key to the Federal front (an attack which, if completely successful, would have split the Federals in two) and the main bodies were engaged before this fatal error could be rectified. So the surprised Federals gradually recovered from the first shock and began to feel and use their hitherto unrealized strength. On the second day (the first of June) Johnston, who had been severely wounded, was plainly defeated and compelled to fall back on Richmond again.

On the morrow of this defeat Lee was appointed to "the immediate command of the armies in eastern Virginia and North Carolina." Davis was not war statesman enough to make him Commander-in-Chief till '65—four years too late. Johnston did not reappear till he tried to relieve Vicksburg from the determined attacks of Grant in '63.

The twelfth of June will be remembered forever in the annals of cavalry for Stuart's first great ride round McClellan's host. With twelve hundred troopers and two horse artillery guns he stole out beyond the western flank of the Federals and reached Taylorsville that evening, twenty-two miles north of Richmond. Next day he rode right in among the Federal posts in rear, discovering that McClellan's right stretched little north of the Chickahominy, that it was not fortified, and that it did not rest on any strong natural feature, such as a swampy stream. This was exactly the information Lee required. So far, so good. The Federals met with up to this time had simply been ridden down. But now the whole country was alarmed and McClellan had forces out to cut Stuart off on his return, while General Cooke (Stuart's father-in-law) began to pursue him from Hanover Court House.

Then Stuart took the boldest step of all, deciding to go clear round the rest of the Federal army. At Tunstall's Station on the York River Railroad he routed the guard, tore up the track, destroyed the stores and wagons, cut the wires, burnt the bridge, and replenished his supplies. Thence southeast, by the Williamsburg road, his column marched under a full summer moon, the people running out of doors, wild with joy at his daring. At sunrise he reached the Chickahominy, only to find it flooded, full of timber, and spanned by nothing better than a broken bridge. But, using the materials of a warehouse to make a footway, the troopers crossed in single file, leading their chargers, which swam. Waving his hand to the Federals, who had just arrived too late, Stuart pushed on the remaining thirty-five miles to Richmond, rounding the Federal flank within range of Federal gunboats on the James.

This magnificent raid not only procured in three days information that McClellan's civilian detectives could not have procured in three years but raised Confederate morale and depressed the Federals correspondingly. Moreover, it drove the first nail into McClellan's coffin. For in October, just after another Stuart raid, the following curious incident occurred on board the Martha Washington when Lincoln was returning from an Alexandria review which had cheered him up considerably, coming, as it did, after Lee had failed in Maryland. By way of answering the very pertinent question—"Mr. President, how about McClellan?"—Lincoln simply drew a ring on the deck, quietly adding: "When I was a boy we used to play a game called 'Three times round and out.' Stuart has been round McClellan twice. The third time McClellan will be out."

Stuart rode ahead of his troopers, straight to Lee, who immediately wrote to Jackson suggesting that the Army of the Valley, while keeping the Federals alarmed to the last about an attack on the line of the Potomac, might secretly slip away and join a combined attack on McClellan. Jackson, who had of course foreseen this, was ready with every blind known to the art of war. Even his staff and generals knew nothing of their destination. The first move was so secret that the enemy never suspected anything till it was too late, while friends thought there was to be another surprise in the Valley. The second move led various people to suspect a march on Washington—no bad news to leak out; and nothing but misleading items did leak out. The Army of the Valley moved within a charmed circle of cavalry which prevented any one from going forward, ahead of the advance, and swept before it all stragglers through whom the news might leak out by the rear. On the twenty-third of June, only eight days after Stuart had reported his raid to Lee, Jackson attended Lee's conference at the same place, Richmond. The Valley Army was then on its thirty-mile march from Frederick's Hall to Ashland, where it arrived on the twenty-fifth, fifteen miles north.

McClellan had over a hundred thousand men. Lee had less than ninety thousand, even after Jackson had joined him. To attack McClellan's strongly fortified front, with its almost impregnable flanks, would have been suicide. But McClellan's farther right, commanded by that excellent officer, FitzJohn Porter, lay north of the Chickahominy, with its own right open for junction with McDowell. So Lee, knowing McClellan and the state of this Federal right, decided on the twenty-fourth to attack Porter and threaten McClellan's communications not only with McDowell to the north but with White House, the Federal base twenty miles northeast. This was an exceedingly bold move, first, because McClellan had plenty of men to take Richmond during Lee's march north, secondly, because it meant the convergence of separate forces on the field of battle (Jackson being at Ashland, fifteen miles from Richmond) and, thirdly, because the Confederates were inferior in armament and in supplies of all kinds as well as in actual numbers. Magruder, who had held the Yorktown lines so cleverly with such inferior forces, was to hold Richmond (on both sides of the James) with thirty-five thousand men against McClellan's seventy-five thousand, while Lee and Jackson converged on Porter's twenty-five thousand with over fifty thousand.

Then followed the famous Seven Days, beginning on the twenty-sixth of June near the signpost at the Mechanicsville bridge—TO RICHMOND 4-1/2 MILES—and ending at Harrison's Landing on the second of July. On the twenty-sixth the attack was made with consummate strategic skill. But it was marred by bad staff work, by the great obstructions in Jackson's path, and by A. P. Hill's premature attack with ten thousand men against Porter's admirable front at Beaver Dam Creek. Hill's men moved down their own side of the little valley in dense masses till every gun and rifle on Porter's side was suddenly unmasked. No scythe could have mowed the leading Confederates better. Two thousand went down in the first few minutes, and the rest at once retreated.

Porter fell back on Gaines's Mill, where, after being reinforced, he took up a strong position on the twenty-seventh. Again there was failure in combining the attack. Jackson found obstructions that even he could not overcome quickly enough. Hill attacked again with the utmost gallantry, wave after wave of Confederates rushing forward only to melt away before the concentrated fire of Porter's reinforced command.

But at last the Confederates—though checked and roughly handled—converged under Lee's own eye; and an inferno of shot and shell loosened and shook the steadfast Federal defense. Lee and Jackson, though far apart, gave the word for the final charge at almost the same moment. As Jackson's army suddenly burst into view and swept forward to the assault the joyful news was shouted down the ranks: "The Valley men are here!" Thereupon Lee's men took up the double-quick with "Stonewall Jackson! Jackson! Jackson!" as their battle cry. The Federals fought right valiantly till their key-point suddenly gave way, smashed in by weight of numbers; for Lee had brought into action half as many again as Porter had, even with his reinforcements. On the gallantly defended hill the long blue lines rocked, reeled, and broke to right and left all but the steadfast regulars, whose infantry fell back in perfect order, whose cavalry made a desperate though futile attempt to stay the rout by charging one against twenty, and whose four magnificent batteries, splendidly served to the very last round, retired unbroken with the loss of only two guns. Then the Confederate colors waved in triumph on the hard-won crest against the crimson of the setting sun.

The victorious Confederates spent the twenty-eighth and twenty-ninth in finding the way to McClellan's new base. His absolute control of all the waterways had enabled him to change his base from White House on the Pamunkey to Harrison's Landing on the James. When the Confederates discovered his line of retreat by the Quaker Road they pressed in to cut it. On the thirtieth there was severe fighting in White Oak Swamp and on Frayser's Farm. But the Federals passed through, and made a fine stand on Malvern Hill next day. Finally, when they turned at bay on the Evelington Heights, which covered Harrison's Landing, they convinced their pursuers that it would be fatal to attack again; for now Northern sea-power was visibly present in flotillas of gunboats, which made the flanks as hopelessly strong as the front.

McClellan therefore remained safely behind his entrenchments, with the navy in support. He had to his own credit the strategic success of having foiled Lee by a clever change of base; and to the credit of his army stood some first-rate fighting besides some tactical success, especially at Malvern Hill. Nevertheless the second invasion of Virginia was plainly a failure; though by no means a glaring disaster, like the first invasion at Bull Run.

McClellan, again reinforced, still professed his readiness to take Richmond under conditions that suited himself. But the most promising Northern force now seemed to be Pope's Army of Virginia, coming down from the line of the Potomac, forty-seven thousand strong, composed of excellent material, and heralded by proclamations which even McClellan could never excel. John Pope, Halleck's hero of Island Number Ten, came from the West to show the East how to fight. "I presume that I have been called here to lead you against the enemy, and that speedily. I hear constantly of taking strong positions and holding them—of lines of retreat and bases of supplies. Let us discard such ideas. Let us study the probable line of retreat of our opponents, and leave our own to take care of themselves." His Army of Virginia contained Fremont's (now Sigel's) corps, as well as those of Banks and McDowell—all experts in the art of "chasing Jackson."

Jackson was soon ready to be chased again. The Confederate strength had been reduced by the Seven Days and not made good by reinforcement; so Lee could spare Jackson only twenty-four thousand men with whom to meet the almost double numbers under Pope. But Jackson's men had the better morale, not only on account of their previous service but because of their rage to beat Pope, who, unlike other Northerners, was enforcing the harshest rules of war. His lieutenant, General von Steinwehr, went further, not only seizing prominent civilians as hostages (to be shot whenever he chose to draw his own distinctions between Confederate soldiers and guerillas) but giving his German subordinates a liberty that some of them knew well how to turn into license. This, of course, was most exceptional; for nearly all Northerners made war like gentlemen. Unhappily, those who did not were bad enough and numerous enough to infuriate the South.

Halleck, who had now become chief military adviser to the Union Government, was as cautious as McClellan and had so little discernment that he thought Pope a better general than Grant. Lincoln, Stanton, and Halleck put their heads together; and an order soon followed which had the effect of relieving the pressure on Richmond and giving the initiative to Lee. Halleck ordered McClellan to withdraw from Harrison's Landing, take his Army of the Potomac round by sea to Aquia Creek, and join Pope on the Rappahannock—an operation requiring the whole month of August to complete.

Lee lost no time. His first move was to get Pope's advanced troops defeated by Jackson, who brought more than double numbers against Banks at Cedar Run on the ninth of August. The Federals fought magnificently, nine against twenty thousand men. After the battle Jackson marched across the Rapidan, and Halleck wisely forbade Pope from following him, even though the first of Burnside's men (now the advanced guard of McClellan's army) had arrived at Aquia and were marching overland to Pope. Then followed some anxious days at Federal Headquarters. Jackson vanished; and Pope's cavalry, numerous as it was, wore itself out trying to find the clue. McClellan was still busy moving his men from Harrison's Landing to Fortress Monroe, whence detachments kept sailing to Aquia. What would Lee do now?

On the thirteenth he began entraining Longstreet's troops for Gordonsville. On the fifteenth he conferred with his generals. And on the seventeenth, from the lookout on Clark's Mountain, he saw Pope's unsuspecting army camped round Slaughter Mountain within fifteen miles of the united Confederates. Halleck had just given Pope the fatal order to "fight like the devil" till McClellan came up. Pope was full of confidence. And there he lay, in a bad strategic and worse tactical position, and with slightly inferior numbers, just within reach of Jackson and Lee. Pope was, however, saved from immediate disaster by an oversight on the part of Stuart. In ordering Fitzhugh Lee's cavalry brigade to rendezvous at Verdierville that night Stuart forgot to make the order urgent and the missing brigade came in late. Stuart, anxious to see the enemy's position for himself, rode out and was nearly taken prisoner. His dispatch-box fell into Pope's hands, with a memorandum of Jackson's reinforcements. Jackson was for attacking next day in any case and groaned aloud when Lee decided not to, owing to the failure of cavalry combination in front and the belated supplies in the rear. Pope retired safely on the eighteenth, and on the nineteenth a thick haze hid his rear from Lee's lookout.