Never Call Retreat Read online

  Never Call Retreat

  Civil War Trilogy [3]

  Bruce Catton

  Doubleday (1982)

  Tags: Military, Non Fiction

  Militaryttt Non Fictionttt

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  SUMMARY:

  "...one of the great historical accomplishments of our time...will have an enduring place in our national records."--New York Times.

  BRUCE CATTON

  NEVER CALL RETREAT

  "No finer narrative history of the Civil War has

  ever appeared.. . . Catton's major triumph is

  in the art of history. He manages to combine the great sweep of history with its sum of individual actors, major and minor, its incidents, anecdotes, asides." —Los Angeles Times

  "A solid, thrilling book ... superb history— the best that has come from the author's prolific

  pen...." —Baltimore Sunday Sun

  "It is rather amazing to find a historian who can give a running account of the events of a war which was fought on more than one front, give the political and military history of the war at the same time without impairing the readability of the work or giving it a 'patchy' aspect. This book accomplishes this feat, too.... The three volumes of his history will become

  classics." —Nashville Banner

  Books by Bruce Catton

  The Coming Fury

  Never Call Retreat

  A Stillness at Appomattox

  Terrible Swift Sword

  This Hallowed Ground

  Published by WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS

  Most Washington Square Press Books are available at special quantity discounts for bulk purchases for sales promotions, premiums or fund raising. Special books or book excerpts can also be created to fit specific needs.

  For details write the office of the Vice President of Special Markets. Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020.

  BRUCE CATTON

  NEVER CALL RETREAT

  WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS PUBLISHED BY POCKET BOOKS NEW YORK

  A Washington Square Press Publication of

  POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, N.Y. 10020

  Copyright © 1965 by Bruce Carton

  Published by arrangement with Doubleday & Company, Inc.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Doubleday & Company, Inc., 245 Park Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10017

  ISBN: 0-671-63883-1

  First Pocket Books printing August 1967

  22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13

  WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS, WSP and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Printed in the U.S.A.

  To the one-time members of E. P. Case Post Number 372, Grand Army of the Republic, who now sleep in the village cemetery at Benzonia, Michigan, this book is affectionately dedicated.

  Foreword

  THE CENTENNIAL HISTORY OF THE CIVIL WAR by Bruce Catton is a project begun in 1955 by Doubleday & Company, Inc., in conjunction with The New York Times. As originally planned, this is a three-volume work constituting a modern history, based on the fullest as well as the most recent research.

  The three volumes, which are entitled THE COMING FURY. TERRIBLE SWIFT SWORD, and NEVER CALL RETREAT, may be read and understood separately.

  In the foreword of Volume One of the original publication of the work, Mr. Catton wrote of Mr. E. B. Long: "As Director of Research for this project he has made a more substantial contribution than it is possible to acknowledge properly." Mr. Catton also noted the "able assistance given by that indefatigable and charming person, Mrs. Barbara Long."

  Contents

  Foreword vii

  List of Maps xi

  Chapter One: IN THE RAPIDS

  1. Castles in the Air 1

  2. Battle without Logic 11

  3. The Politics of War 23

  4. In the Mists at Stone's River 34

  5. Paralysis of Command 45

  ' 6. A Question of Control 53

  Chapter Two: PARTING OF THE RED SEA WAVES

  1. The Land of Cotton 67

  2. In Motion in All Directions 77

  3. The Needs of Two Armies 88

  4. A Bridge for the Moderates 98

  5. The Way of the Liberated 106

  Chapter Three: REMORSELESS REVOLUTIONARY STRUGGLE

  1. Ironclads at Charleston 117

  2. Men Trained for Command 127

  3. The Darkness, and Jackson, and Fear 138

  4. Aftermath of Victory 149

  5. Mirage on the Skyline 160

  6. Encounter at Gettysburg 170

  Chapter Four: IN LETTERS OF BLOOD

  1. All or Nothing 185

  2. The Notion of Equality 197

  3. Servants of the Guns 208

  4. The Road to Zion 217

  5. A Mad Irregular Battle 227

  6. 37,000 Plus One 239

  Chapter Five: THE IMPOSSIBILITIES

  1. The Impassable Gulf 254

  2. Eloquence at Gettysburg 263

  3. Amnesty and Suffrage 272

  4. Solitary in a Crowd 281

  5. The General and the Statesman 292

  Chapter Six: ACT OF FAITH

  1. The Last Barrier 302

  2. Sideshows 314

  3. The Cork in the Bottle 326

  4. However Bold We Might Be 337

  5. Vested Interest in Failure 351

  6. A Grand Simplicity of Purpose 364

  Chapter Seven: HIS ALMOST CHOSEN PEOPLE

  1. Appeal Against the Thunderstorm 377

  2. What Have You Done? 387

  3. Too Late 399

  4. None Shall Be Weary 409

  5. As in the Old Days 422

  6. To the Dark Indefinite Shore 434

  Notes 447

  Bibliography 502

  Acknowledgments 523

  Index 527

  The Centennial History of the Civil War

  VOLUME THREE

  I

  NEVER CALL RETREAT

  CHAPTERONE

  In the Rapids

  1. Castles in the Air

  OFFICIALLY, Jefferson Davis was traveling incognito; and yet, as the Chattanooga newspaperman wrote, a live President was still something of a curiosity in Tennessee, and the trip got a good deal of attention. The reporter considered Mr. Davis "decidedly handsome for a middle-aged gentleman," and said that he wore a perpetual expression of good humor, combining graceful manners with an impressive senatorial dignity; and he commended him for going about without ostentation or parade, his only luggage one leather valise, his only attendant a single body servant. It was inspiring (said the reporter) to contrast this republican simplicity with the pretensions of the "miserable despot of abolitionism" in Washington, who never went abroad without a file of armed dragoons and who lived "in constant apprehension of the assassin's dagger in his own capital."1

  Mr. Davis was making this trip in the middle of December 1862, drawn from Richmond to the Mississippi Valley by grave problems of command, of strategy and of public morale. A few days earlier he had confessed to a committee of the Confederate Congress that the war had entered its most dangerous period, and on this trip he saw nothing to make him revise that opinion; yet in public he was serene, and in Knoxville, the most dissident of all Confederate cities, he told an attentive audience that "the Toryism of east Tennessee" had been greatly exaggerated. Two days later, at Murfreesboro, he assured an enthusiastic crowd that if the Southern people persevered a little longer final victory would be theirs.

  Perhaps it was easy to be hopeful at Murfreesboro. The powerfu
l Army of Tennessee was in camp there, and this army had never looked better. It had recovered from the bewildering Perryville campaign, in which a valiant thousand-mile march brought nothing but an inconclusive battle and a missed opportunity; it had had plenty of rest, for once it was properly shod and clothed, it had more than 45,000 veterans in its ranks, and morale was high. Even its generals were feeling confident. Braxton Bragg, the army commander, a dyspeptic martinet who ordinarily radiated an infectious gloom, seemed sprightly, and he assured the President that the army was ready for anything. It was nobly supported, he said, by the patriotic people of Tennessee, who, "having felt the heel of the tyrant," were furnishing men and supplies in abundance. He believed he could whip the Yankee army that held Nashville if that army could ever be induced to come out and fight.2

  Mr. Davis was ready to agree. He reviewed the army, was impressed by what he saw. and impressed those who saw him. His old friend Leonidas Polk, the Episcopal Bishop who was now a lieutenant general commanding an army corps, wrote to Mrs. Polk with innocent enthusiasm: "We have had a royal visit, from a royal visitor. The President himself has been with us." The review was "a great affair," and the Bishop said Mr. Davis told him that the soldiers who passed in review were "the best-appearing troops he had seen, well appointed and well clad."

  Bishop Polk had the President's trust and affection, he was a West Point graduate (of a lone-gone vintage, to be sure) and he was a devout patriot; and on both sides in this war men were commissioned general for less impressive reasons. He could still wear episcopal vestments over his uniform. In this month of December he officiated at a wedding, marrying General John Hunt Morgan, the famous Kentucky cavalryman, to pretty Mattie Ready of Murfreesboro, with Bragg and his staff, and other generals, looking on; and this was a storybook affair with a storybook romance back of it. A few months earlier, Mattie Ready was living in Federally occupied territory. She did not then know Morgan, but she defended him with much spirit when she heard Federal officers deride him, and one of them demanded her name— he would write it down, and see that she was listed as a confirmed rebel. She gave it to him, and added defiantly: "But by the grace of God I hope one day to call myself the wife of John Morgan." After the Federals were gone Morgan heard the story, laughed, then rode around to see her; liked what he saw, courted her, and now made her his wife. . . . So went the story. A day or so after the wedding. Morgan and his squadrons went riding hard to the northward, to go raiding far behind the Federal front and spread alarm along the wild Kentucky border. The ceremony at army headquarters went into the Confederate legend, along with bride and bridegroom and the memory of candlelight glinting off the brass buttons and sword-hilts. The good bishop assured his wife that the wedding had been a historic occasion.3

  So the legend was flourishing, and the fine review at Murfreesboro would fit into it: but meanwhile the Confederate cause itself was displaying ominous symptoms, and that was why the President had come to Tennessee. He was not really worried about what this army at Murfreesboro might do, and he did not need to see the troops march past in order to know that they would give a good account of themselves when it was time to fight. But he had come to the Mississippi Valley just when the Federal Army of the Potomac was making another "forward to Richmond" campaign, and at such a moment Jefferson Davis did not leave the Confederate capital for any small reason. What had wrenched him away from Richmond was his recognition of the fact that no matter what happened in Virginia the Confederacy was very probably doomed unless it could reverse the tide that was besinning to flow in the west. The problem in the east could be left to Robert E. Lee; that in the west demanded immediate presidential attention.

  The danger could be stated in simple terms. Thirty thousand veteran Federal soldiers led by the aggressive Major General Ulysses S. Grant were marching out of western Tennessee down the line of the Mississippi Central Railroad, heading for Vicksburg. Vicksburg, a one-time cotton-shipping port that sprawled up the slopes of a chain of hills overlooking a hairpin bend in the Mississippi, roughly halfway between Memphis and New Orleans, had been given river batteries of moderate strength and it was occupied by an inadequate garrison. It was one of the places which the Confederate nation had to possess if it were to win its independence.

  As long as they held Vicksburg the Confederates owned a 150-mile stretch of the great river, the segment running south from Vicksburg to Port Hudson in Louisiana, where there were also fortifications and a garrison; and as long as this much of the river was held the Southern Confederacy was still a valid whole, an unbroken nation stretching from Virginia tidewater to the Rio Grande, the authentic cotton kingdom as planned by the founding fathers. But if this bit of the river were lost—as it would be if Vicksburg fell, for Port Hudson could not stand alone—then the Confederacy would begin to die, its western states broken off forever, all of the Mississippi Valley held by the government at Washington. Then there would be no good way to save what was left of Tennessee, or the Gulf States either, and once these were gone the remnant of the nation could hardly hope to survive.

  Obviously, General Grant had to be stopped, and the President had come west to see about it. Yet if it was easy to say what had to be done it was extremely hard to say what it was going to be done with. To oppose General Grant there was in northern Mississippi a field army less than 24,000 strong, somewhat frayed from its experiences in the recent battle of Corinth. Elsewhere in the Department of Mississippi—the state itself, and that part of Louisiana which lay east of the river—there were no more than 10,000 men, most of them tied down in garrison duty at Vicksburg and Port Hudson. Unless help could be brought in from outside the Department the game was going to be lost. But all of the troops that might conceivably be brought in were urgently needed (according to their commanding officers) somewhere else, and could not be summoned without inviting disaster.4

  To accept this argument was in effect to admit that the Confederacy was being tried beyond its strength, an admission Mr. Davis would never make. In Arkansas and in Tennessee the Confederacy had upward of 80,000 soldiers; surely, with the nation's life at stake, some of these could be brought into Mississippi? Surely, strategic brilliance could find a way to make up for lack of brute strength? Mr. Davis showed a cheerful face in public, but his generals were giving him very little to be cheerful about. It might be that strategic resources in these parts were as limited as resources of manpower.

  Or it might be that Mr. Davis was calling for an answer that did not exist.

  During the war, and after it, Mr. Davis was accused of failing to see the gravity of the Mississippi Valley problem; of interpreting all of the war in terms of what happened in Virginia, and of ignoring the catastrophe that began to take shape when Grant marched south across the Mississippi line. This charge does injustice to a sorely harried man. Mr. Davis understood perfectly the implications of the Federal drive to open the Mississippi Valley—after all he was a westerner himself, his own plantation lying only a few miles downstream from Vicksburg—and he gave the matter full attention the moment the campaign began. The real trouble was that the crisis called on him to take a gambler's chance and he did not feel that he ought to gamble.

  Neither his vision nor his nerve was at fault. It simply seemed to Mr. Davis that it was necessary to win in front of Vicksburg without risking loss anywhere else, and although no general could show him how to do this (because in fact it could not be done) it had to be admitted that the situation in the western Confederacy now was most peculiar.

  Before he left Richmond. Mr. Davis told General Lee that he had to go west "to bring out men not heretofore in service and to arouse all classes to united and desperate resistance," and after his departure a War Department official made an entry in his diary: "Private information from many sources represents the tone and temper of the Mississippi Valley as very unsound. They are submitting." Although he had spoken so bravely at Knoxville, the President sent a somber appraisal back to the Secretary of War: "The feeling in East
Tennessee and North Alabama is far from what we desire. There is some hostility and much want of confidence in our strength."5

  East Tennessee, to be sure, had long been recognized as an area badly infected with Yankeeism, but the worst report of all came from Mr. Davis' own state, Mississippi. Senator James Phelan said frankly that "the present alarming crisis," far from arousing the people, had made them despondent, and he went on to assert: "The spirit of enlistment is thrice dead. Enthusiasm has expired to a cold pile of ashes. Defeats, retreats, sufferings, dangers, magnified by the spiritless helplessness and an unchangeable conviction that our army is in the hands of ignorant and feeble commanders, are rapidly producing a sense of settled despair, from which, if not speedily dissipated by 'some bright event or happy change,' the most disastrous consequences may be apprehended." It was essential for the President to "plant your foot upon our soil" and, thus anchored, to "unfurl your banner at the head of the army"; and in fact Mr. Davis went to Mississippi as soon as he disposed of his business in Tennessee.

  Unquestionably the command situation had caused trouble. Mr. Davis had recently taken steps from which he hoped good would come, but the generals who served the Confederacy in the west were oddly assorted and, in some cases, oddly selected as well. Collectively they presented a problem to each other, to the President, and to the country.

  Until recently the Mississippi army had been in command of Earl Van Dorn, one of the President's favorite officers— curly-haired, alert, a man of much energy, not all of it properly channeled. It was Van Dorn on whom the Yankees had inflicted costly defeat at Corinth in October, and on Van Dorn the people of Mississippi now were blaming their troubles. Senator Phelan said frankly that in the common belief Van Dorn was "the source of all our woes," and he added that the man's private life as well as his military competence had been called into question: "The atmosphere is dense with horrid narratives of his negligence, whoring and drunkenness, for the truth of which I cannot vouch; but it is so fastened in the public belief that an acquittal by a court-martial of angels would not relieve him of the charge."6 Van Dorn knew what was being said about him, and grew despondent, writing to his wife that his command had brought him nothing but "misfortune, criticism, falsehood, slander and all the vile things belonging to the human heart." He recovered his bounce presently; before 1862 was out he would strike a blow that helped to compel Grant to beat a hasty retreat, and in the spring, unacquitted by angels, he would be shot to death by a Tennessee civilian who considered himself an outraged husband.7 Meanwhile his mere existence offended the patriotic.