The dramatic Confederate victory at Bull Run shocked the nation. Southern whites felt more certain than ever of the superiority of their martial prowess, and for once northerners were almost tempted to believe they were right. “We are utterly and disgracefully routed, beaten, whipped by secessionists,” wrote New York businessman George Templeton Strong in his diary. The casualties of the battle were about 1,800 Confederates killed and wounded and about 1,600 Federals, plus another 1,300 or so Federals captured in the final disastrous rout. Each side had suffered almost twice as many killed and wounded as United States forces had sustained in the bloodiest battles of the Mexican War and the War of 1812. Far greater than the loss of life and limb, however, was the impact on the spirits of the warring sections of the country. Confederate morale had never been higher, while Unionists were almost in despair.
Recent wars in Europe had tended to be short, decided by a single great battle. Many Americans assumed that their own conflict would be much the same. Especially Confederates reveled in the thought that their independence had been won on the field of Manassas. Some northerners were inclined to agree with that. The never quite stable Horace Greeley, who had so vociferously urged an early advance against Richmond, now wrote Lincoln an anguished letter imploring him not to shrink from the difficult necessity of abandoning the war, accepting defeat, and granting Confederate independence. Fortunately for posterity, Lincoln was not yet ready to give up. Neither, as it turned out, were the people of the North. With the approval of Congress, Lincoln had already expanded the regular army and called for another forty-two thousand volunteers, not for the obviously inadequate ninety-day term but for three years. Now in the wake of Bull Run he issued a call for three hundred thousand three-year volunteers, and the country responded enthusiastically as recruits flocked to the colors once again in more than adequate numbers. Most of the ninety-day regiments promptly reenlisted for the three-year term, determined to see the rebellion suppressed and the Union saved.
The North’s determined response to the defeat and obvious willingness to make much greater efforts was a sobering development for Confederates. Within weeks of Bull Run, the luster began to wear off of their great victory as it became apparent that the battle had not come close to winning the war at a single stroke. With that, recriminations began within the Confederate public and high command as to whose fault it was that the victory had turned out to be barren. Confident that such a feat could have been easily done, newspaper editors wanted to know why Confederate forces had failed to pursue the beaten Yankees into Washington. Beauregard wrote and published, contrary to regulations, a report of the battle implying that he had had an excellent plan that, if implemented by Davis before the battle, would have won the war by now. In fact, Beauregard’s plan had been all moonshine and nonsense, completely impractical, and Davis had been right to turn it down. In the face of Beauregard’s postbattle grandstanding, the president did his best to keep his well-known temper and wrote his general a mild rebuke.
Curiously, though the war had grown out of a dispute over the future of the institution of slavery, the two sides in the conflict were not equally eager to admit the fact that they were fighting over slavery and the status of African Americans. Confederate leaders made no secret of the fact that they were fighting for slavery and white supremacy. In a March 21, 1861, speech in Savannah, Georgia, Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens proclaimed, “Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea [to that of the equality of the races]; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”1
By contrast, Union leaders during the first half of the war were not nearly so forthright about what kind of war this was and why they were fighting it. This was never more true than in the immediate aftermath of Bull Run, when a traumatized U.S. Congress feared that support for the war might collapse in the wake of the humiliating defeat. In a July 22, 1861, proclamation, authored by Kentucky Representative John J. Crittenden, Congress announced “that this war is not waged upon our part in any spirit of oppression, nor for any purpose of conquest or subjugation, nor purpose of overthrowing or interfering with the rights or established institutions of those States, but to defend and maintain the supremacy of the Constitution and to preserve the Union.”2
In a very narrowly technical sense, this was correct. Although the southern states had seceded because they did not accept the incoming administration’s position on slavery, the U.S. government was presently waging war simply to suppress the rebellion and restore obedience to the law without regard to the cause for which the rebellion had been launched and the law defied. It was not fighting directly for the cause of freeing the slaves—yet. Nevertheless, even at this early stage of the conflict, the most cursory observer of American politics could easily predict the likely results of Union victory. Lincoln had previously expressed his and his party’s goal as placing slavery “in the course of ultimate extinction.” A rebellion that tried and failed to break up the Union for the sake of slavery would only tend to bring that extinction closer than it would otherwise have been. Notwithstanding Congress’s bland denials, even in these early days it was clear to all concerned, especially to the slaves themselves, that a Union victory would shorten the days of slavery.
Northern leaders had political reasons for their desire to emphasize the cause of saving the Union and enforcing the law and to play down the issues of slavery and race. White southerners were virtually unanimous in their support for slavery and white supremacy, but a significant minority of them opposed secession, especially in places like western Virginia, East Tennessee, and other parts of the upland and Appalachian South. On the other hand, although support for the war to preserve the Union was far from unanimous in the North, it did command a fairly sizable majority of support across the region. By contrast, the cause of abolishing slavery would scarcely command a majority, even in the North, much less in border slave states like Crittenden’s own Kentucky. Emphasizing that they were waging a war solely for the restoration of the Union and not for the abolition of slavery was a way that northern leaders could unite their own section of the country and divide the South, at least to some degree.
In the immediate aftermath of Bull Run, however, Lincoln and those around him in Washington had little leisure to think about the meaning of the war, how it should be presented to the public, or even of the great mobilization about to begin across the North. The president’s immediate concern was keeping the Rebels out of Washington. Lincoln could not know, on the day after the battle, that the Confederate army was too disorganized to follow up its victory, but he could not ignore the disorganized and demoralized state of the main Union army in Virginia, with thousands of its soldiers scattered throughout the capital city, many of them in bars drinking themselves into oblivion while appalling their fellow patrons with exaggerated tales of disaster. The public had lost confidence in McDowell. More important, the army had lost confidence in McDowell and in itself. Lincoln needed a general who could restore the army’s confidence in itself and win its confidence for himself, a general who had won victories and who was not too far away from Washington since Lincoln needed him right away. The obvious choice was George McClellan, fresh from his victories in western Virginia. On July 22 a telegram from the secretary of war summoned the thirty-four-year-old major general to Washington without delay.
McClellan the conquering hero officially assumed command of the troops around Washington on July 27 and immediately went to work to restore order and discipline. Provost guards swept the stragglers out of the Washington bars and off the streets. Back in their camps, the men, including regiment after regiment of new troops arriving in the Washington area in response to the president’s latest call, learned what it was to be soldiers, observing military discipline, maintaining military bearing, and drilling for hours on end. Uniforms and equipment became somewhat more standardized, though the army would continue to contain a number of Zouave regiments.
Shortages of U.S. manufactured weapons testified to the Union’s early unreadiness for waging war and forced the federal government to procure arms from European manufacturers. This meant that different regiments carried a variety of weapons, from the standard U.S. Harpers Ferry or Springfield rifle-muskets to the highly similar British Enfield. Meanwhile, badly inferior Belgian or Austrian rifles or obsolete but still lethal U.S. Model 1820 smooth-bore muskets also found their way into the Union ranks. Although muskets and rifles of varying calibers posed a logistical nightmare, the Union made do with its odd assortment of weaponry until gradual standardization of military armaments occurred as the conflict progressed. To his credit, McClellan transformed the collection of troops around Washington, some of them demoralized and all of them green, into something that looked and felt like an army. He called it the Army of the Potomac, and its men soon came to feel an exuberant faith in themselves and their commander.
So far, McClellan had been all that Lincoln, the cabinet, or Congress could have hoped, and the youthful warlord’s reputation seemed to be expanding more rapidly than a bursting shell. Newspapers christened him “the young Napoleon.” Lincoln was deferential. Cabinet members and congressional leaders fawned on the new commander of the Army of the Potomac, suggesting that he was the only man who could save the country. Washington was safe, and the army was growing in size and proficiency. Its commander was dapper in his tailored uniform and so deep chested that he looked short at his slightly above average five feet, seven inches, cutting a splendid figure on horseback and looking the very image of the Currier & Ives war that people imagined they were about to fight. Civilians visiting the army’s camps gazed admiringly on the general, and his adoring troops cheered him to the echo.
While McClellan continued to make his preparations in the East, serious fighting broke out in the West, which during the Civil War referred to the part of the country west of the Appalachian Mountains. Because both sides were still respecting Kentucky’s bizarre claim to neutrality, the four-hundred-mile stretch from the mountains to the Mississippi was, for the present, out of bounds. That left Missouri, where Nathaniel Lyon had occupied Jefferson City on June 15 and then pursued Sterling Price and his army of secessionist Missourians toward the southwestern corner of the state, winning skirmishes at Booneville on June 17 and Carthage on July 5. By July 13 he had reached Springfield.
Meanwhile, about seventy-five miles to the southwest, in the extreme corner of Missouri, Price had been joined by Brigadier General Ben McCulloch along with a force of Confederate troops who had moved up from Arkansas. Price and McCulloch found it difficult to work together. Both were proud veterans of the Mexican War. Price maintained that as a major general of Missouri forces, he should command. McCulloch contended that his Confederate brigadier general’s commission took precedence. With Lyon closing in, they agreed to set aside their differences for the moment. Together their combined forces turned, advanced toward Lyon, and encamped August 6 near Wilson’s Creek, ten miles from the town.
Outnumbered more than two to one, the always aggressive Lyon decided to attack. On the night of August 9 he led his army of about 5,400 Kansans, Iowans, and German American Missourians, as well as a few U.S. Army regulars, out of Springfield. Lyon’s second in command was Colonel Franz Sigel. A graduate of the Karlsruhe Military Academy and sometime lieutenant in the army of the German state of Baden, Sigel had led revolutionary forces in the German uprisings of 1848. When they failed, he, like many another German, had come to America. He was a great favorite of his fellow German eémigreés. Sigel pressed on Lyon a plan to allow him, Sigel, to take an independent column of 1,200 men and try to surprise the Rebels with a flank attack.
Lyon’s column struck the Rebels first at 5:00 a.m., August 10, surprising Price’s Missourians and driving them back. Later in the morning Sigel attacked and also scored initial success, but McCulloch counterattacked and routed Sigel’s column, driving it from the battlefield. The Rebels were then free to turn their united strength against Lyon’s woefully outnumbered troops. The Federals held on doggedly along a ridge that became known as Bloody Hill. Lyon suffered two wounds but continued to encourage his men until a third bullet killed him instantly. Major Samuel D. Sturgis (West Point, 1846) took over command of the Union army and shortly thereafter ordered it to retreat. The Confederates and their Missouri allies were in no shape to pursue. Losses from the battle were about equal—1,317 Union to 1,230 among Price’s and McCulloch’s men.
In the aftermath of the Battle of Wilson’s Creek, McCulloch and Price fell out again. The former took his Confederates back to Arkansas, while the latter led his Missourians on a foray 150 miles north to the valley of the Missouri River, where on September 20 he defeated a small Federal force at the Battle of Lexington. Governor Jackson and the pro-Confederate legislature that had fled with him to Arkansas declared Missouri a Confederate state and incorporated Price’s force into the Confederate army. Nevertheless, most Missourians stood by the Union and supported a Union-loyal state government set up by the state convention that had rejected secession that spring. As more Federal troops entered the state, Price found himself compelled to fall back and join McCulloch. By the end of October, his army and Jackson’s secessionist Missouri government were back in Arkansas.
By that time, Kentucky was no longer neutral. Lyon’s superior in Missouri was Major General John C. Freémont, commander of the Department of the West. Freémont was a prime example of what historians sometimes call a political general. Every Civil War general was in some sense political since the president who appointed him hoped that his victories would achieve the political goals of the nation and perhaps of the president’s own party as well. Many generals, including professionally trained officers, benefited from having good political connections. A political general, however, was one whom a president appointed to the rank of general directly from civilian life, not because of any victories he was expected to win, though the president certainly hoped he would win victories, but rather because simply having him in uniform, with a general’s insignia on his collar, would increase public support for the war, often in some particular segment of the population. Many Americans believed that military leadership was a natural gift, not something that could be taught at an academy or learned by experience, and they wanted their favorite political heroes to lead them into battle.
Leading small army exploring expeditions in the Far West during the 1840s, Freémont had won popularity as the Pathfinder, though the paths he found were those his guide Kit Carson showed him. He had gained political influence by marrying the daughter of powerful Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton and notoriety by helping to win California during the Mexican War and then being court-martialed for insubordination to a superior officer. Great wealth had come to him when someone had discovered gold on land Freémont owned near Mariposa, California, and the adoration of antislavery Americans when he had declared for free soil and accepted the 1856 Republican presidential nomination. His public reputation made him exactly the sort of great man who many northerners believed would be a natural military leader. As a former Republican presidential candidate, he had political stature Lincoln could not afford to ignore.
Like most political generals, Freémont proved a far better politician than general, and in the end he was not a very good politician. He failed to support Lyon adequately, remaining ensconced in his St. Louis headquarters surrounded by a lavish staff that included foreign officers seeking adventure in the American war. Missourians and midwesterners found them off-putting. Allegations of financial corruption arose, and the War Department began to investigate. Meanwhile, in the aftermath of Wilson’s Creek, Freémont continued to accomplish nothing as a general.
Aware that Lincoln could well be considering removing him, Freémont played to the gallery by issuing a proclamation announcing the imposition of martial law in Missouri and the emancipation of the state’s slaves, a move he had absolutely no authority to make. Abolitionists reacted with delight, but Lincoln realized the proclamation could have disastrous results for the allegiance of wavering Kentuckians in the still-neutral Bluegrass State and wrote Freémont suggesting that he quietly withdraw the proclamation. Instead of doing so, Freémont dispatched his formidable and politically savvy wife to Washington to make his case to Lincoln directly. Jessie Benton Freémont was nothing if not forceful, making implied threats of her husband’s future political opposition—or worse. Lincoln was unmoved, and since Freémont refused to withdraw the proclamation himself, the president issued an order of his own revoking it.
As the Freémonts had intended, abolitionists fumed with rage that their Republican president apparently cared nothing for the freeing of slaves, but they were wrong. Lincoln was eager to do what he could to bring about an end to slavery, but he knew that he would have to do so in a way that would stand up to legal scrutiny (very likely by Roger B. Taney) and that would, he hoped, be acceptable to border-state Unionists. He would bide his time. For the next few months, Lincoln sought by means of suggesting programs of gradual, compensated emancipation, along with the deportation of the freed slaves to Africa or Central America, to persuade border-state Unionists to give up slavery voluntarily, starting a process he hoped would spread to the rebellious states as well.
For the present, Lincoln had prevented Freémont from making a move that would have damaged the Union cause seriously in Kentucky and the other border states. It was a Confederate general who prevented Freémont’s next political blunder by beating him to it. The importance of the Mississippi River was obvious to practically everyone on both sides. The “Father of Waters” was both the great east–west divider of the continent and the great north–south conduit of commerce. The Confederates had on July 28 occupied the town of New Madrid, Missouri, in a bend of the river opposite the Tennessee–Kentucky line, and had begun fortifying it. Freémont noticed another key position, the only place north of Memphis where high bluffs overlooked the Mississippi, fifty miles upstream from New Madrid at Columbus, Kentucky. Freémont ordered a subordinate to occupy it.
Fortunately for the Union cause, Confederate troops under the command of Major General Leonidas Polk got there first. Polk was Freémont’s Confederate equivalent in a number of ways. He was a political general despite having graduated from West Point in 1827, where he was the idol of underclassman Jefferson Davis. He had resigned from the army immediately on graduation to pursue a career as an Episcopal priest, in which he had been a great success and risen to the rank of bishop of Louisiana. Though Polk had never actually held a command in the army and had not so much as picked up a book on military affairs for thirty-four years, Davis commissioned him to the rank of major general directly from civilian life, partially because he hoped that the well-known bishop would boost popular support for the war in the lower Mississippi Valley and partially out of a youthful hero worship toward Polk that Davis never outgrew. Aside from being completely unqualified for his position, Polk’s chief drawback as a general was that he never really saw the need of taking orders from anyone below the rank of God, with Whom he tended to confuse himself. At the beginning of September 1861, he showed his regard for Davis’s announced policy of respecting Kentucky neutrality by marching his troops into the state and occupying those alluring bluffs at Columbus.
The result was outrage among previously nonaligned Kentuckians and consternation among those Kentuckians and Tennesseans who had been working to bring the Bluegrass State into the Confederacy and now saw the ruin of all their efforts. One of them was Tennessee Governor Isham G. Harris, who now frantically telegraphed Richmond to have Polk recalled. Confederate Secretary of War Leroy Pope Walker initially issued a recall order, but Polk ignored it, and presently Davis revoked it, accepting Polk’s claim that it had been a matter of military necessity. With that, the political damage was done. Kentucky might have gone for the Union eventually anyway. Now it did so emphatically, the state legislature demanding that the Confederates withdraw and calling on Union forces to enter the state and help expel the invaders. A few Kentuckians left the state to side with the Confederacy, including Governor Beriah Magoffin and Senator (former U.S. vice president) John C. Breckinridge, but three times as many Kentuckians fought for the Union.
Meanwhile, having incurred the full political cost of being the first to invade Kentucky so as to gain the bluffs overlooking the Mississippi at Columbus, Polk failed to secure the military dividend of his move. Sixty miles east of Columbus the Tennessee River flows through Kentucky on a north– south course. Ten miles farther east, the Cumberland River does the same. Whereas the Mississippi flows from north to south, the Tennessee and Cumberland, here in their lower reaches, flow from south to north. That made no difference to steamboats, including several iron-plated gunboats the Federals were known to be building near St. Louis. Polk was soon fortifying his bluff tops at Columbus with a view to stopping those gunboats, but the vessels could just as easily come up the Tennessee or the Cumberland and open the way for ground forces that could turn (get behind) Polk’s stronghold, forcing the Confederates to retreat to avoid being trapped. Polk recognized the importance of taking control of the other two rivers by seizing the towns at their mouths, Paducah and Smithland, but he waited, and the Union commander beat him to it.
That Union commander was a subordinate of Freémont’s named Ulysses S. Grant. An 1842 West Point graduate, Grant had served creditably in the Mexican War and then been stationed to California. Lacking the independent wealth necessary to bring his wife and family out to the West Coast on a captain’s salary, Grant had grown bored and lonely and had sought solace in drink. Easily intoxicated, Grant in 1854 faced the choice of resigning or being court-martialed and chose the former. For the next seven years, he strove for success in various occupations but found none.
When the war broke out, Grant offered his services to the government and eventually received a commission as colonel in command of a regiment of unruly volunteers. He handled them well, but his advance in rank would have been much slower had his military career not become the particular project of his congressman, Elihu B. Washburne. Political backing could help good generals as well as bad ones. As a subordinate of Freémont’s, Grant commanded Union troops in southern Illinois with his headquarters in Cairo, at the confluence of the Mississippi and the Ohio, the southernmost town in the free states. He had just taken over his new assignment in Cairo when he learned of Polk’s incursion into Kentucky at Columbus. He saw both the threat and the opportunity and immediately occupied Paducah and Smithland. Applauded as a liberator by the Kentucky legislature, Grant left Polk with all the political cost of having broken Kentucky neutrality and none of the military benefits.
Years later, Grant would sum up his philosophy of war: “Get at the enemy as quick as you can; hit him as hard as you can, and keep moving on.” He lost no time putting that philosophy into practice in his new command. A small Confederate cavalry foray into southwestern Missouri gave Grant the excuse he needed to make an attempt on Columbus, presenting it to Freémont as a diversion to keep the Confederates away from Union forces in Missouri. As a first step he took his small force of about three thousand men down the Mississippi from Cairo in riverboats, supported by two of the navy’s gunboats (earlier models protected with heavy oaken planks rather than iron plates), and attacked the Confederate encampment at Belmont, Missouri, just across the river from Columbus.
After overrunning the Rebel position at Belmont, Grant’s inexperienced volunteers broke ranks to celebrate their victory. Their equally inexperienced officers, including Illinois Democratic politician John A. McClernand, encouraged them, making Fourth-of-July-style speeches. While this went on, more Rebels crossed the river from Columbus and got between Grant’s force and its steamboats. Cut off and badly outnumbered, some of Grant’s officers suggested they ought to surrender, but Grant calmly replied that as they had cut their way in, so they would cut their way out again. And so they did, amid fierce fighting, regaining the steamboats and returning to Cairo. Grant’s first attempt to take Columbus had failed, but his men had learned something— both about warfare and about their commander.
Meanwhile back in the East, McClellan continued to drill his splendid Army of the Potomac, but he did not undertake any offensive movement toward the Confederates whose flags could be seen from the U.S. capital at their forward outposts at Mason’s and Munson’s hills, just a few miles south of the Potomac. Confederate batteries on the Virginia shore downstream from Washington made navigation of the Potomac too dangerous for unarmed vessels without heavy naval escort, effectively cutting off the capital’s contact with the sea. Yet despite the beautiful fall campaigning weather with crisp temperatures and cloudless skies that kept Virginia’s dirt roads dry and firm, McClellan left his magnificent army in its camps. Admiration for the young general’s stirring martial appearance and obvious love for all the pomp and circumstance of war began to wear thin for some of the more aggressive-minded Republican politicians in Washington.
“All quiet along the Potomac,” read the general’s regular communiqueés to the War Department. In the weeks immediately following Bull Run, those missives had been reassuring, both to the administration and to the public, which had read them in the next day’s newspapers. By late summer, some people were reading that line with distinctly sardonic overtones. Ethel Lynn Beers of New York saw the phrase in a newspaper one morning in September and noticed just below it a small item about a picket (soldier on outpost duty beyond the front line) being killed. The ironic juxtaposition moved her to compose a poem titled “All Quiet along the Potomac Tonight,” lamenting the picket’s death on a night when the high command deemed that nothing significant had happened in the war. It was a poignant reminder that while the largest armies on each side sat idly regarding each other’s advanced positions through field glasses and peace and victory came no nearer, the nation was still at war, ordinary men were still dying, and families suffered the absence and possible loss of loved ones. Harper’s Weekly magazine published the poem November 30, 1861. Later it was set to music.
By the time Beers’s poem appeared in Harper’s, the situation expressed in its title had become a very bitter one to many in Washington and elsewhere, and a good deal more than the “stray picket” had become casualties. Along the Potomac, upstream from Washington, scattered outposts of troops kept watch on America’s new internal frontier: Confederates on or within a few miles of the south bank and Federals on the north. On October 19 McClellan ordered Brigadier General George McCall to take his division and reconnoiter across the Potomac to the town of Dranesville, Virginia, about twenty miles northwest of Washington. McClellan also suggested to Brigadier General Charles Stone, commanding a division farther up the Potomac, diverting attention from McCall by making “perhaps some slight demonstration,” or diversion, against the Rebel forces near Leesburg, Virginia, fifteen miles to the northwest of Dranesville.
The next day Stone sent a small probe across the river, and when all went well, on October 21, he dispatched a three-hundred-man battalion to the south bank at a place called Ball’s Bluff, where the Virginia shore rose steeply from the Potomac. A few hundred yards beyond the top of the bluff the battalion encountered a small Confederate force with which it skirmished inconclusively. Stone dispatched Colonel Edward D. Baker to the bluff to determine whether to withdraw the reconnaissance force or to reinforce it.
The fifty-year-old Baker was a very special sort of colonel. Born in England, Baker had come to Illinois as a teenager, studied law, and entered politics. A veteran of the Black Hawk and Mexican wars, Baker also served in the Illinois legislature and U.S. House of Representatives, first as a Whig and then as a Republican, becoming a close friend of Abraham Lincoln, who named his second son Edward Baker Lincoln. Baker moved to Oregon in 1860 and immediately won election to a U.S. Senate term that began October 2 of that year. In May 1861, like many other politicians on both sides who considered themselves great natural leaders of men both in war and peace, Baker had obtained authorization from the War Department to raise a regiment of troops and become its colonel. By the fall of 1861, he commanded a brigade within Stone’s division while retaining his seat in the Senate, where he would occasionally appear and make speeches in uniform. “I want sudden, bold, forward, determined war,” he had once intoned on the Senate floor.
Finding the troops at Ball’s Bluff engaged in light skirmishing with the Confederates, Baker at once decided the time had come for “sudden, bold, forward, determined war” and ordered as many troops as possible across from the north bank to reinforce the Federals on the bluff. It was a slow business getting the men across the river since only three small boats were available for ferrying, but Baker was in his glory, quoting Thomas Babington Macaulay’s poem about Henri IV, King of France, going into battle 271 years before: “Press where ye see my white plume shine/Amidst the ranks of war.” He did not have the military acumen to realize that he was bringing his troops into a trap, with their backs to a steep bluff and a river for which they lacked adequate boats to make a quick crossing.
By 3:00 p.m. Baker had about 1,700 troops on the bluff. The Confederates, under the command of thirty-seven-year-old Colonel Nathan G. “Shanks” Evans (West Point, 1848), a prewar regular army officer and veteran of Bull Run, were present in about equal numbers and began to press hard against Baker’s ill-chosen position. The poorly led Federals fell back fighting until they were pressed against the bluff top. Baker took four bullets almost simultaneously and fell dead around 4:30, the first and, thus far, only U.S. Senator to die in battle. The fighting continued until nightfall, as the Confederates drove the routed Union soldiers pell-mell down the bluff and into the river. When it was over, more than two hundred Federals were dead, as many more were wounded, and more than five hundred had become prisoners of war. Confederate casualties totaled 155.
In the larger accounting of the war as a whole, the nearly one thousand Federal casualties would prove to be very small change indeed. Nor had the Battle of Ball’s Bluff done anything to change the course of the war in military terms. It was, however, going to change the course of politics in the Union and therefore also of the war as well. The North had suffered another humiliating defeat and a traumatic one. Baker’s body, recovered under flag of truce, lay in state in Washington, deeply mourned by members of the Senate as well as the president and his family. Eleven-year-old Willie Lincoln wrote a poem for the occasion: “There was no patriot like Baker, / So noble and so true; / He fell as a soldier on the field / His face to the sky of blue. . . .” The bodies of Baker’s men who had drowned or been shot attempting to swim the river could be seen floating past the city in the Potomac.
Someone was bound to be held responsible for such a disaster. Baker, who had been its author, was, as a martyred hero, unavailable for blame. That left Stone, and he made an uncommonly good target. In the midst of a civil war in which (from a Union point of view) several million Americans had betrayed their country, including several hundred who as army officers had previously taken oaths of loyalty to the country, it was easy to wonder who else might be disloyal. Stone, like McClellan and many other army officers, was a Democrat and had no sympathy with Republicans or abolitionists, whom most Democrats held to be only slightly less responsible for the war than the southern Fire-Eaters.
Such Democratic officers’ disdain for Republicans was returned with interest, especially by the more radical members of that party in Congress. To make matters worse, Stone had ordered his men to return to owners any fugitive slaves who entered the camps of his division. This was in keeping with the orders of his superiors and the official policy of the government at that point in the war since the Lincoln administration was pursuing a policy of attempting to conciliate rebellious southerners. When a Massachusetts regiment of his division carried out Stone’s orders, the incident earned Stone the wrath of Massachusetts Republican Governor John A. Andrew and of one of the state’s Republican senators, Charles Sumner, both powerful men in Washington. Stone replied to their criticisms with an intemperate letter.
Now in the wake of Ball’s Bluff, Radical Republicans who wondered why the Union had suffered two embarrassing defeats in Virginia within three months took action by establishing the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, the brainchild of Michigan Senator Zachariah Chandler and chaired by Ohio Senator Benjamin Wade. Among the committee’s first items for business was General Charles P. Stone, and since he was under orders from McClellan not to discuss any of McClellan’s orders or arrangements and since he was, in any case, not particularly sympathetic to the committee, the members found his testimony highly unsatisfactory. In February 1862 Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, himself closely allied with the congressional radicals, had Stone arrested and imprisoned for six months without charges. Eventually he was released but held only minor positions throughout the remainder of the war.
Stone seems to have been loyal, an officer guilty only of tactlessness and bad luck. His fate, however, was an indication that the Radical Republicans in Congress were determined to have “sudden, bold, forward, determined war,” to wage it without regard for niceties, and to strike against slavery as the root of the southern rebellion and the source of much of its strength. Every Union general, especially in the eastern theater of the war, henceforth would have to wage war under the baleful gaze of these grim and uncompromising veterans of the long political war against slavery. Nor was Lincoln immune to their criticism when they thought he was being too lenient or too slow in moving against slavery or removing generals whose hearts did not appear to be in the war. Sometimes the committee made Lincoln’s job easier, more often harder, but it would be a fact of political life in Washington for the remainder of the war.
McClellan would eventually come in for some of the committee’s closest scrutiny, but for the moment he continued riding high. When Winfield Scott retired, old and fatigued both by the war and by McClellan’s uncooperativeness, Lincoln added the duties of general in chief to the position McClellan already held as commander of the Army of the Potomac. When Lincoln questioned whether McClellan would be up to filling both positions, the general assured him, “I can do it all.”
Back in April, shortly after calling out the seventy-five thousand militia in the wake of the attack on Fort Sumter—indeed, on the same day that the Baltimore mob attacked the Sixth Massachusetts—Lincoln had issued a proclamation declaring a blockade of the southern states. Under international maritime law, a nation blockading another nation could stop and seize any ships attempting to enter or leave the blockaded nation’s ports, including those of neutral nations. In order to do so, the blockading nation was required to maintain at all times a naval presence off those ports sufficient to pose a credible threat to ships entering and leaving. Apart from a properly maintained blockade, the seizing of neutral ships would, with certain exceptions, be an act of war against the countries whose flags those ships flew, in this case, most significantly, France and, especially, Great Britain.
Britain was the greatest naval power in the world at that time and had been for the better part of three centuries. The British had used blockades in nearly every one of their wars during that time and were accustomed to pushing the practice of blockading to and sometimes beyond the uttermost boundary of what international law contemplated. Indeed, British abuses of blockading had helped provoke the Americans to war in 1812. Now the shoe was on the other foot. The United States, with its massive naval preponderance over the Confederacy, was eager to interpret blockade law in the broadest possible terms, often at the expense of British merchants who would have liked very much to have traded with the Confederacy. The British government, though by no means well disposed toward the United States, nevertheless accepted the new broad American interpretations of what it meant to blockade, filing them away to be trotted out when next Britannia had occasion to demonstrate that it really did rule the wave by blockading a future enemy.
One British response to the blockade, however, infuriated many Americans. No sooner had Lincoln announced the blockade than the British government formally declared its neutrality. As innocuous as this might sound, it alarmed northerners because it implied that the Civil War was a conflict between two independent, sovereign nations. That of course was exactly what the Confederates claimed, and it seemed perilously close to implying that British recognition of the Confederacy would follow in short order. Confederates had been counting on that, and they confidently expected that it would be followed by British military intervention to secure their independence. Lincoln was annoyed but had to admit, when American experts on international law pointed it out to him, that Britain had been technically legally correct in its reaction to the blockade, which, as a clear act of war against the Confederacy, did at least recognize the slaveholders’ republic as a warring party and thus justified a declaration of neutrality.
Years later, after the war was over, some merchants even went to court claiming that since the United States maintained that the Confederacy had never been legally independent, the blockade had never been legal and that their seized ships and cargoes should be returned. The Supreme Court held, with surprising common sense, that a civil war was, after all, still a war and that the methods of war were appropriate in waging it.
In fact, though Britain had been precisely legally correct in its declaration of neutrality, its government was not particularly favorable to the United States. It is an oversimplification but still generally true in very broad terms that the middle and lower classes in Britain favored the Union cause because they opposed slavery on religious or philosophical grounds and correctly identified the Union as fighting against the spread and perpetuation of that institution. The upper class, on the other hand, tended to sympathize with the Confederacy, perhaps because the gentry did not mind slavery as much as their social inferiors, but chiefly because they resented and envied America’s growing wealth and power. Britain was still what twenty-first-century people would call the world’s superpower, but perceptive Britons could already see that the United States would someday surpass its mother country—unless something somehow happened to weaken or destroy it. The Civil War seemed just the thing for that purpose. Since the upper classes tended to have a disproportionate influence in government, their outlook was largely reflected in the British government’s approach to the Civil War.
Confederates promised themselves much from this. A large proportion of the factories of Britain and France were textile mills that fed on the raw material of American-grown cotton. In theory, if the flow of that cotton were cut off, Britain and France would suffer economic upheaval, as hundreds of thousands of workers became unemployed. Unwilling to suffer such a fate, the governments of those countries would use military and naval force if necessary to see to it that nothing—for example, a Union invasion or blockade— interfered with the steady growing and shipping of large amounts of the white fiber. At least, that was what Confederates theorized, and it was the idea of the commercial supremacy of the South’s chief staple crop, even before secession, that led South Carolina Senator James Henry Hammond to proclaim in an 1858 speech to the Senate, “You dare not make war on cotton. No power on earth dares to make war upon it. Cotton is king.”3
That remained to be seen, but one thing was certain. However much the British government might enjoy seeing Americans killing each other and the United States being weakened, it did not wish to secure that result at the expense of British blood or the even greater commercial dislocation that would result from plunging into the American war. Nor could the British government afford to have its constituents see it as committing the country to a war to preserve slavery. For the time being, at least, her majesty’s government would smile unofficially on the Confederacy but endeavor to stay out of the war. As the government and its supporters, particularly in the press, had in past condemned the United States as the great slaveholding power, so now they sneered at the Union cause as not being that of freedom but rather only of preserving the United States with slavery intact.
During the early months of the war, the Union blockade was notably porous. The navy lacked adequate numbers of ships, and many of those it did have were laid up “in ordinary,” moored in harbors in various states of disrepair and in need of much work to be made ready for deployment. Many of those that were ready for sea were deep-draft vessels unsuitable for use in the shallow waters close inshore near the entrances to southern ports. Secretary of the Navy Gideon G. Welles and his staff wrought mightily to acquire the needed vessels to make the blockade effective, purchasing ferry boats and other shallow-draft civilian steamers, fitting them out with a few guns, and manning them with crews of bluejackets from the navy’s rapidly expanding manpower pool. Purpose-built gunboats rapidly began to take shape in shipyards along the northern coast, especially a class of small warship specially designed for blockade duty and nicknamed “Ninety-day Gunboats” from the speed at which they could be constructed.
The blockade eventually became severely damaging to the Confederacy, choking the supply of foreign-made arms and ammunition and other vital war supplies and contributing to the eventual Union victory. Nevertheless, throughout the course of the war, a steady trickle of cargo vessels successfully ran the blockade, especially the sleek, fast steamers designed for blockade-running (at the expense of much reduced carrying capacity) and built in Britain. During the early days of the war, no such purpose-built blockade-runners were available, and none were needed, as ordinary merchant vessels came and went from southern harbors with only a moderate risk of apprehension by the thin cordon of blockaders. Thus, southern planters could have exported virtually the entire cotton crop of 1860—and probably much of that of 1861 as well—with only moderate losses that would have been more than compensated by rising cotton prices in Europe.
They could have—but they did not. Thinking that an abrupt and complete stoppage in the flow of cotton to European textile mills would be the most effective way of shocking the British and French into recognition of the Confederacy and then military intervention on its behalf, vast numbers of southern planters and cotton factors (merchants) held on to their cotton, declining to send it to market and creating what amounted to a Confederacy-wide cotton embargo. Although it was never official Confederate government policy and it was never absolutely effective in preventing all cotton exportation, it did drastically diminish the amount of cotton that left American shores during 1861, and in that it was far more effective than the as-yet-feeble efforts of the U.S. Navy to impose a blockade. In triggering European intervention, however, the Confederacy’s spontaneous citizen-imposed cotton embargo was an utter failure. European warehouses bulged with the accumulated cotton surpluses of the previous few years, including the year in which Senator Hammond had announced that cotton was king. European textile mills were yet to feel the pinch of cotton deprivation, and their governments were content to watch the Americans destroy their own country without European help or expense.
One of the problems that made blockading difficult for the U.S. Navy on the southern coast was the need of warships to take on coal at frequent intervals. Only a steam-driven warship could be an effective blockader against steam-driven blockade-runners, and to have any chance of catching them, the warship would have to keep its boiler fires going at all times. That entailed frequent trips back to a Union naval base to refill its bunkers with coal, leaving minimal time to cruise or station off a southern port. The problem could be minimized if the Union possessed naval bases near the ports it was blockading. A U.S. Navy commission studied the southern coastline and decided that Port Royal, South Carolina, should be the first target since it could support blockading squadrons off both Charleston, South Carolina, and Savannah, Georgia.
The navy put together a large expedition under Flag Officer Samuel Du Pont, consisting of warships as well as transports carrying thirteen thousand army troops, and dispatched it to the southern coast in late October. After suffering delay and some damage from an autumnal gale off the South Carolina coast, the ships of the fleet arrived off Port Royal one by one during the first few days of November, and on November 7, the same day Grant made his foray against Belmont, Missouri, half a continent away, Du Pont led them into the sound to attack the two Confederate forts defending the harbor. It was an all-navy operation, as the transport carrying the army’s ammunition had been blown far off course and still had not arrived. After several hours of bombardment, the Confederates fled, leaving the harbor and its environs to the Federals. Within a few days the army troops had landed and secured a coastal enclave that included the town of Beaufort, South Carolina, and eventually extended up the coast more than fifty miles almost to Charleston. The victory at Port Royal Sound greatly facilitated blockading southern ports on the Atlantic coast and showed the way for other similar operations around the whole coastline of the Confederacy, a threat the Confederate high command would never really be able to meet effectively.
The acquisition of the Port Royal enclave also brought Union forces suddenly and rather unexpectedly into possession of an enormous slave population. The coastal reaches of South Carolina had some of the highest slave concentrations in the nation, and the question now was what the Union forces would do with them. Following a pattern set by the always cunning lawyer Benjamin Butler during the early days of the war, they classified the African Americans as contraband of war, technically enemy property that has been used in the enemy’s war effort. As such, the slaves were now the property of the U.S. government, which more or less granted them freedom. During the course of the rest of the war, some of the first halting steps toward black freedom would be made at Port Royal, including the enlistment of blacks into the Union army and experiments with settling the former slaves to farm for their own profit on the lands they once had worked as slaves.
Du Pont and his U.S. Navy fleet had won one of the first major Union victories of the war at Port Royal and brought Union victory appreciably closer. The very next day, however, another commander with another unit of the navy brought on what may well have been the Union’s most dangerous crisis of the war. Captain Charles Wilkes commanded the U.S. steam frigate San Jacinto, which had been since 1859 cruising off the coast of Africa to help suppress the illegal international slave trade. It was on its way back to the United States to join in the Port Royal expedition, but Wilkes had delayed along the way to search for a reported Confederate commerce-raiding vessel. When San Jacinto put in at the port of Cienfuegos, Cuba, for coal, Wilkes learned that Confederate emissaries James M. Mason and John Slidell, bound for Britain and France, respectively, had successfully run the blockade at Charleston in a speedy, coastal vessel on October 12 and were at that very moment in Havana waiting to take passage in the British mail packet Trent, bound for St. Thomas in the Bahamas, where they planned to take a British liner for the final leg of their trip to Europe.
The crusty, sixty-three-year-old seadog Wilkes, considered his options. After consulting several books on the law of the sea, he decided that Mason and Slidell were a form of living diplomatic dispatches. Diplomatic dispatches were contraband, articles whose warlike purpose allowed the vessel of a warring power to seize the neutral vessel carrying them. This would not be an exercise of the blockade since the ships involved would be far from any American harbor. It would depend for its justification solely on the claim that the Trent was carrying contraband. Wilkes was a fiery, impetuous officer, and he immediately got under way and placed the San Jacinto in the Old Bahama Channel, through which the Trent was bound to pass on its voyage to St. Thomas.
On November 8, the day after the capture of Port Royal Sound, the royal mail packet appeared, right on time. It took two shots across the bow to convince Trent’s captain to heave to. When he did, a cutter from the San Jacinto brought on board U.S. Navy Lieutenant Donald M. Fairfax, leading a boarding party. The British captain haughtily refused to produce his ship’s registration and passenger list or to allow a search of the vessel for contraband, as a cruising warship was entitled to require of a neutral vessel, and Fairfax seemed hesitant to press the point. He did nonetheless find Mason, Slidell, and their secretaries and, in compliance with his orders from Wilkes, conveyed the four men and their baggage to the San Jacinto. Perhaps somewhat taken aback by the British captain’s display of outraged arrogance, Fairfax did not carry out the portion of Wilkes’s orders that required him to seize the Trent as a prize of war, as San Jacinto was entitled to do with any ship carrying Confederate contraband.
When San Jacinto arrived in the United States with the captured Confederate emissaries, the North erupted in jubilation, celebrating the frustration both of the Rebels’ plans and of Britain’s underhanded efforts to aid them. The British reaction was national outrage. Wilkes’s action was, at worst, a milder version of exactly the sort of thing British captains had been doing to foreign ships for decades, including to U.S. vessels in the run-up to the War of 1812, but this was different as far as the British government and populace were concerned. Those incidents had been done by Britain to others, including Americans. By contrast, this had been done by Americans to a British ship. It was not to be tolerated. Prime Minister Palmerston, always hostile to the United States, told his cabinet with an oath that he would not stand for such a provocation from the Americans. To Queen Victoria he wrote that the time was right to teach “a lesson to the United States which will not soon be forgotten.”4 It certainly would not have been, but fortunately for both countries, the crisis did not go that far. Nevertheless, British troops stationed in Canada were put on alert, and further reinforcements were dispatched from the Isles. The Trent Affair was the closest the United States and Great Britain came to armed conflict during the Civil War.
Lincoln and his cabinet were at a loss to know what to do with the diplomatic “white elephants,” as Lincoln called them, that Wilkes had brought them. The Confederate emissaries, now cooling their heels at Fort Warren in Boston Harbor, were doing more to bring about armed foreign intervention in the American Civil War than they could conceivably have done had they been running loose in the courts of Europe. Lincoln commented that the nation would do best to limit itself to “one war at a time.” Yet northern public opinion made it hard to release Mason and Slidell since this would appear to be (and indeed really would be) backing down to British bullying. The problem would have become insoluble and another Anglo-American war almost inevitable had the British cabinet sent to the United States the harshly worded ultimatum it initially composed, an insulting demand for groveling with which no American president could ever have complied. Queen Victoria, invited by the cabinet to send her comments on the message, referred the matter to her husband, Prince Albert, even then dying of typhoid. The prince suggested modifying the language of the message so as to give the Americans the option of claiming, as was indeed the case, that Wilkes had acted without instructions from his government.
Backing down was still a difficult dose for Lincoln and his cabinet to swallow, but Seward wrote the British a lengthy letter explaining that Wilkes had indeed acted without authorization and that although his halting and search of the Trent had been legal, he had erred in not bringing the entire ship to an American port to be adjudicated in a prize court and possibly condemned for carrying contraband. Since Wilkes (actually Fairfax) had erred by simply removing the emissaries and letting the ship go, Seward was happy to apologize and to recognize with satisfaction that the British had now come around to the American position about the rights of the sea and admitted that they had done wrong for the past sixty years. With that, the United States released Mason and Slidell to go on their ways, and the Rebel diplomats reached their respective destinations in January 1862. Palmerston grumbled that there was much in Seward’s message with which he did not agree, including the assertion that Mason and Slidell had constituted “diplomatic dispatches.” In fact, as Mason’s daughter later revealed, the Confederates had had with them on the Trent a pouch of actual diplomatic dispatches that remained undiscovered because Fairfax did not search the ship. A British officer carried the pouch to waiting Confederate agents in England in flagrant violation of neutrality law.
As 1861 came to an end the Confederacy seemed to be riding high. It had won the great battle of the war, Bull Run, and most of the smaller ones— Big Bethel, Wilson’s Creek, and Ball’s Bluff. Its chief losses were in western Virginia and along the southern coast at Port Royal. More significantly though less visibly, it had suffered a major blow to its security in the evaporation of Kentucky neutrality. For now, though, the Confederacy’s situation seemed secure. Britain had not yet intervened, though it had come perilously close, and southerners continued to expect that event—all the more so now since Mason was in London to explain to British officials why it was their duty to recognize the Confederacy.
The outlook appeared correspondingly gloomy for the Union—military defeats, near war with Britain, and a finance crisis within the government all combined to create a dismal picture. When in late December McClellan contracted a severe case of typhoid, Lincoln thought matters could hardly get worse. “The people are impatient,” he lamented to Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs. “Chase [Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase] has no money and he tells me he can raise no more; the General of the Army has typhoid fever. The bottom is out of the tub. What shall I do?”5