Terrible Swift Sword Read online

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 62-15937

  Copyright © 1963 by Bruce Catton

  All Rights Reserved

  eISBN: 978-0-307-83306-8

  v3.1

  To Thurber Catton

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  Terrible Swift Sword is Volume Two of a projected three volume work, The Centennial History of the Civil War. The first volume, The Coming Fury, was published in 1961.

  The Centennial History of the Civil War is a project begun in 1955 by Doubleday & Company, Inc., in conjunction with the New York Times. That newspaper is carrying articles based on the work.

  Each book in the series may be read and understood separately. It is part of the original plan that the three volumes will constitute a modern history, based on the fullest as well as the most recent research. The author’s note in the Foreword of Volume One with reference to Mr. and Mrs. E. B. Long is intended to be considered as a part of this book as well.

  Mr. Long is preparing an “Almanac,” or factual reference book, based on the research for the Centennial History. The American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War, already published, with a narrative by Mr. Catton, is an illustrated volume which is a graphic companion volume to this series.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  LIST OF MAPS

  CHAPTER ONE: The Leaders and the Led

  1. Tornado Weather

  2. A Mean-Fowt Fight

  3. The Hidden Intentions

  4. End of Neutrality

  5. Mark of Desolation

  6. The Road to East Tennessee

  CHAPTER TWO: A Vast Future Also

  1. Magazine of Discord

  2. Struggle for Power

  3. The Hammering of the Guns

  4. “We Are Not Able to Meet It”

  5. Revolutionary Struggle

  6. The Want of Success

  CHAPTER THREE: The Military Paradox

  1. Decision in Kentucky

  2. Unconditional Surrender

  3. The Disease Which Brought Disaster

  4. Time for Compulsion

  5. Contending with Shadows

  6. Forward to Richmond

  CHAPTER FOUR: Stride of a Giant

  1. The Ironclads

  2. The Vulture and the Wolf

  3. Pittsburg Landing

  4. Threat to New Orleans

  5. Fire on the Waters

  6. Brilliant Victory

  CHAPTER FIVE: Turning Point

  1. The Signs of the Times

  2. Do It Quickly

  3. The Last Struggle

  4. Railroad to the Pamunkey

  5. Seven Days

  6. Letter from Harrison’s Landing

  CHAPTER SIX: Unlimited War

  1. Trading with the Enemy

  2. The Ultimate Meaning

  3. A Long and Strong Flood

  4. Triumph in Disaster

  5. The Pressures of War

  6. Scabbard Thrown Away

  CHAPTER SEVEN: Thenceforward and Forever

  1. Recipe for Confusion

  2. The Terrible Weariness

  3. To Risk Everything

  4. A Town Called Sharpsburg

  5. Taking the Initiative

  6. Nobly Save or Meanly Lose

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  LIST OF MAPS

  Mississippi River

  Kentucky and Tennessee Spring Campaigns, 1862

  Wilson’s Creek, Missouri and Fort Henry and Fort Donelson, Tennessee

  The Carolinas

  Hampton Roads

  Shiloh or Pittsburg Landing, April 6–7, 1862

  Island No. 10 and Pea Ridge or Elkhorn Tavern

  New Orleans

  The Shenandoah Valley, 1862

  The Peninsula Campaign

  The Seven Days, June 25–July 1

  Second Bull Run or Manassas Campaign

  Second Bull Run or Manassas

  Antietam or Sharpsburg Campaign

  Antietam or Sharpsburg, Maryland, Sept. 17, 1862

  On the above listed maps the black arrows or bars indicate the Confederate forces, the blue bars or arrows indicate the Federal forces. In both cases, when the arrow lines are interrupted or dotted, it means either retreat or regrouping.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Leaders and the Led

  1: Tornado Weather

  On the Monday after the Battle of Bull Run the Congress of the United States went about its duties in a dignified and abstracted calm. Human fragments of the routed army drifted up and down the streets of Washington, clotting the sidewalks and alleys, eddying sluggishly about the bars, as soiled and depressing to see as fragments of the broken republic itself, but the legislators had little to say openly about the defeated soldiers or about the disaster that had taken place. In the Senate the new tariff was up for consideration, and there was also discussion of a proposal to increase the naval medical corps; and in the House the members devoted themselves to Mr. Crittenden’s bill defining the cause and scope of the war.

  That the war might grow and change immeasurably because of what had happened during the last twenty-four hours was neither argued nor, apparently, thought about. Mr. Crittenden’s bill was static. It asserted that the war had been forced on the country by Southern malcontents, and held that the Federal government’s only aim in pressing on toward an assured final victory was “to preserve the Union with all the dignity, equality and rights of the several states unimpaired.” This was the definition of a small war, and the shattering defeat just experienced was a disturbing sign that the war was not going to be small. It might grow very great indeed—great enough to involve at last the dignity, equality, and rights of human beings as well as of states—and if it went in that direction there was no telling what might come of it.

  But the House was in no mood to examine the future. Avoiding the hysteria which Bull Run had evoked in so many quarters, the House was still willing to see the war as something manageable, an incident rather than a cataclysm. Even Thaddeus Stevens, the Republican leader, brooding darkly on the tragedy whose ultimate dimensions he perhaps saw more clearly than anyone else, warning the legislators that the terrible laws of war were their only guide now—even Stevens was content to vote for this enactment, and in the end Mr. Crittenden’s measure was adopted with just two votes cast against it.1

  One of these dissenting votes came from Congressman Albert Gallatin Riddle, an antislavery man from Ohio’s Western Reserve who confessed that he could hardly believe his ears as he heard member after member vote for an explicit statement that the war would be fought in such a way that it would not affect the institution of slavery in the slightest degree. He went to the members’ lobby after he had voted, and there some of his colleagues urged him to go back and change his vote. Riddle flared up at them. Slavery, he said, was doomed to die, and every sensible man knew it, and when it died it would not simply be voted out of existence; it would be abolished “by convulsion, fire and blood,” and the convulsion had already begun. The convulsion was, in short, this war which (as Mr. Riddle felt) was being so badly defined, and he wanted the war recognized as the thing that would kill slavery: “I mean to make a conquest of it; to beat it to extinction under the iron hooves of our war horses.” Northerners who thought that the war could be fought without touching the slavery issue (he said) were like children who tiptoed about in the dark for fear of waking a destroying ogre. For himself, he believed that the ogre was already awake and that the thing to do now was to kill it.2

  In the middle of that summer of 1861, the thing Mr
. Riddle was talking about was actually more disturbing than the Bull Run defeat itself. The military disaster was humiliating, even infuriating, but it was not—to a people who, after all, were fairly tough-minded—really frightening. It might even help to inspire them to put down secession and to restore the shattered American past in all its beauty. But to say flatly that the war would be fought against slavery (thereby implying unmistakably that it would be fought for slavery’s opposite, freedom, which is unlimited) was to bid an eternal goodbye to the cherished past, to confess that it could never be restored on earth. It was to invoke revolution, far-ranging and uncontrollable, in order to put down mere rebellion; and at this point in their development the people were not ready for any such invocation.

  Still, there it was: if the war became great it would transcend the intentions of its authors. This might have momentous results at home, and it was beginning to be apparent that it could also have consequences overseas. It was apparent, at least, to the Secretary of State, William H. Seward, who had sought to make use of the fact in his conduct of the nation’s foreign policy.

  This policy struck Charles Francis Adams, the minister to England, as almost inconceivably bold and aggressive, so reckless that for a time he suspected that someone in the administration had gone mad. Mr. Adams reached London two months before the battle of Bull Run was fought, and soon after he got there he received a letter from Secretary Seward saying that the United States would unhesitatingly make war on any European nation or combination of nations which extended aid, comfort, or recognition to the Southern Confederacy.

  It was hard to be sure about Mr. Seward. Mr. Adams’s son Henry, looking at the man from his own special vantage point, saw a slouching figure with “a head like a wise macaw,” a gravelly voice, disorderly clothes, and a baffling way of indulging in loose talk which might or might not reflect his inner thoughts. Mr. Seward, the younger Adams reflected, had worn a politician’s mask so long that neither he nor anyone else was always sure whether the impression he made at any given moment was real or contrived. Seward had a basic integrity which impressed the older Adams (along with an uncomplicated sense of fun which appealed to President Lincoln) and Mr. Adams believed that someone else must have fathered his foreign policy. In his diary he remarked that a conflict with “a handful of slave-holding states” seemed to be giving the Lincoln administration all that it could handle, and he wondered: “What are we to do when we throw down the glove to all Europe?”3

  If he had known all of the facts Mr. Adams would have been even more painfully baffled. The policy was not merely Mr. Seward’s own, but it reached London in a form much less sharp than Mr. Seward had originally intended. As the Secretary drafted it, the letter had been downright provocative, a taunting challenge to the British government to view secession, the blockade, and all related matters precisely as Washington saw them—or to fight. Furthermore, Mr. Seward had planned that the unexpurgated text of the letter should be given to Lord John Russell, the British Secretary for Foreign Affairs, immediately upon its receipt in London. Henry Adams wrote that if his father had shown the letter to the Foreign Secretary “he would have made a war in five minutes,”4 and it may be that this was just what Mr. Seward had in mind. In March he had suggested a war overseas as a means of reuniting America, and the idea continued to fascinate him; not until after the Bull Run disaster did he abandon the notion that most Southerners would rally around the old flag if some foreign nation could be maneuvered into firing on it.

  It was Abraham Lincoln who had toned the letter down by careful editing; and it was Lincoln who had added the all-important proviso that the letter was simply a statement of policy for the minister’s guidance and was not under any circumstances to be shown to anyone else.5 The policy enunciated remained stiff enough, in all conscience; everything that Mr. Adams said and did in London must be said and done in the knowledge that his government would make war on an England openly friendly to the Confederacy. But he did not have to go around with a chip on his shoulder, or publicly tell the British government to mend its ways. Much was left to his discretion, which was unfailing. What he did not know was that this opportunity for the exercise of discretion would never have been opened to him if President Lincoln had not first exercised discretion of his own.

  Charles Francis Adams was prepared to expect nothing of the kind, for his opinion of Mr. Lincoln just then was low. Mr. Adams was the son of one President and the grandson of another; he had lived in Paris and in London as a boy, he had studied law in the office of Daniel Webster, and he had served in the Massachusetts legislature and in the United States Congress; he was Boston and Harvard at full strength, undiluted and not susceptible of dilution; and he had not been impressed by President Lincoln. Mr. Seward had taken him to the White House late in April, just after his ministerial appointment had been arranged, and in the Presidential quarters which still (in this caller’s mind) seemed almost to belong to old John Quincy Adams there was this long, ungainly, loose-jointed man, awkward, apparently ill at ease, with big coarse features, shabbily dressed, in shapeless pants and worn carpet slippers—Abe Lincoln of Illinois with the bark on. It was no sight for an Adams; nor was memory of the sight made more pleasant by the fact that instead of discussing foreign policy and the British the President talked to Mr. Seward about some petty matter of political patronage in far-away Chicago.6

  Better knowledge of the President lay in the future. Meanwhile, Mr. Adams did the best he could; as modified, the letter left him a good deal of leeway. He wrote that his function seemed to be “to prevent the mutual irritation from coming to a downright quarrel,” and Lord John Russell was a man he could talk to: elderly, reserved, thoughtful, with a cold blue eye—a man not altogether unlike Mr. Adams himself. His Lordship confessed that he had twice talked, unofficially, with the Confederate commissioners sent to London by Jefferson Davis, and when Mr. Adams remarked that a continuation of these unofficial conferences “could hardly fail to be viewed by us as hostile in spirit” the Foreign Minister said that he had no expectation of seeing the commissioners any more. By July, Mr. Adams felt that relations with Great Britain were in a fairly promising condition; “I have no idea that anybody wants war.”7

  Yet the British did not quite seem to understand the kind of war the American government was fighting. “They think this is a hasty quarrel, the mere result of passion, which will be arranged as soon as the cause of it shall pass off,” wrote Mr. Adams. “They do not comprehend the connection which slavery has with it, because we do not at once preach emancipation. Hence they go to the other extreme and argue that it is not an element of the struggle.” Bull Run, to be sure, set off a wave of pro-Confederate sentiment, but Mr. Adams believed that it was important to remember that “Great Britain always looks to her own interest as a paramount law of her action in foreign affairs.”8

  This was the point Secretary Seward was thinking about when he drafted his defiant letter. His tart sentences had been framed to warn the British ruling class that this American war was one they just could not afford to enter. If they did get into it, Seward remarked, the result would be another war between “the European and American branches of the British race,” strongly resembling the war for American independence, fought less than a century ago. “Europe atoned by forty years of suffering,” he wrote, “for the error that Great Britain committed in provoking the contest. If that nation shall now repeat the same great error, the social convulsions which will follow may not be so long but they will be more general. When they shall have ceased it will, we think, be seen, whatever may have been the fortunes of other nations that it is not the United States that will have come out of them with its precious constitution altered or its honestly obtained dominion in any degree abridged.” It would be well, the Secretary concluded, for the British to reflect that in such a war “our cause will involve the independence of nations and the rights of human nature.”9

  Secretary Seward thus was brandishing democracy and invitin
g the conservative British to contemplate it (hinting as well that the loss of privilege might be accompanied by the loss of Canada). He was saying, almost in so many words, that a revolutionary upheaval was germinating somewhere below the surface of this war between North and South, and he was suggesting that the American government could survive such an upheaval but that the governments of the established nations of Europe could not. To his wife he had written that if war did develop between America and England “it will be the strife of the younger branch of the British stock, for freedom, against the elder, for slavery”; he believed that it would be dreadful, “but the end will be sure and swift.”10

  Secretary Seward, to be sure, may have been talking through his hat. So far, revolution was only germinating. Whatever values and perils might be added if the war became an all-out struggle for human rights, that change had not yet been made and there was no sure indication that it ever would be made. Congress was all but unanimous in its declaration that the war had nothing whatever to do with slavery, and when it spoke thus Congress unquestionably spoke for a majority. The slavery issue, like a fulminate of mercury cap which could set off an immense explosion, had been carefully wrapped in protective swaddling so that it might not be jarred unduly. If the war could be fought with some restraint, limited by the sober design of its leaders and kept always under proper control, the disastrous shock could very likely be averted.

  But the people who were fighting one another were most unlikely to exercise much restraint or to submit to effective discipline. They were already beginning to take the war into their own hands, and they were so muscular, tenacious, and impatient that they might easily give it dimensions large enough to develop any and all of its potentialities. The pressure for action which had compelled a reluctant general to put an unready army into the fight at Bull Run was still rising. This was a war in which anything could happen.

  There was a young mining engineer who raised a company of mountaineers in northern Georgia and led them off to serve the Confederacy, only to be halted in Atlanta by the news that Georgia’s quota had been filled; the governor could not take any more recruits just now. The mountaineers promptly mutinied—if that term can be applied to men who were not yet members of any accredited military organization—and refused to go home. If the governor of Georgia did not want them, they said, they would find some other governor who did. They camped on the edge of Atlanta, a wild, spirited, uncontrollable company which would do anything on earth but disband, and in the fullness of time a place was found for them in an Alabama regiment; and in the end they got, for their enthusiasm, four years of desperate fighting. After the war their former captain wrote: “The literal truth is that the people were leading the leaders.”11