THE

HISTORY OF

UNITED STATES

CHAPTER XVII

A RECAPITULATION of the salient events of the year ending with the spring of 1862 will be useful. April 12, 1861, the Confederate government began the war by the bombardment of Fort Sumter. The Northern and Southern people, who had confronted one another since the election of Lincoln, now prepared for conflict. The appeal to arms to try the cause which Congress had failed to settle by compromise met with a vigorous response from the North and from the South. Both organized armies. The parties to the war were, on the one hand, the Union, composed of twenty-three States with twenty-two million people, and, on the other hand, the Southern Confederacy, made up of South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee, eleven States in all, with a population of nine million. The cause of the war was slav-、 ery: the South fought to preserve and extend it; the North fought to repress and further restrict it. The real object was avowed on neither side. The North went into battle with the preservation of the Union blazoned on its banner, the South with resistance to subjugation. There was a measIV. - 1

ure of truth in each battle-cry. The North denied the right of secession, the South resolved to exercise it; and since there was substantial unanimity in the Confederate States, the war became one of conquest to be carried on by the invasion of the South by Northern soldiers. Three months went by while the armies were being organized. July 21, 1861, 29,000 Union soldiers and 30,000 Confederates met in battle at Bull Run, Virginia: the Union army was signally defeated. With no signs of discouragement and with unabated enthusiasm, the North rose up again. In October the Confederate troops defeated the Federals at Ball's Bluff on the upper Potomac ; this victory following the battle of Bull Run aroused in the Southerners a well-sustained confidence that they would in the end win their independence. But fortune turned, and the United States gained victories. In November, 1861, Port Royal, South Carolina, was taken, and with the new year Federal successes followed swiftly. General George H. Thomas overcame the Confederates at Mill Spring, Kentucky. General Burnside and Commodore Goldsborough took Roanoke Island, North Carolina. Flag-officer Foote captured Fort Henry. Grant, after one of the truly decisive battles of the war, forced the surrender of Fort Donelson on the 16th day of February, 1862, and seven weeks later repelled at Shiloh the northward advance of the Confederates, which was designed to retrieve their loss of Forts Henry and Donelson. Curtis drove the Confederates out of Missouri. Pope captured Island No. 10, and Farragut took New Orleans. Congress prohibited slavery in the Territories, abolished it in the District of Columbia, and, on the initiative and recommendation of President Lincoln, offered the slave States pecuniary aid in case they should take measures to emancipate their slaves.

These events bring us down to April, 1862. In the last chapter the story left McClellan with an army of 100,000 men besieging Yorktown. Up to April 11 there was no time when the Union army did not outnumber the Confederate, three to one; moreover, the Union general had the

authority of his government to make an assault.1 Not to break the Confederate line of thirteen miles which stretched from the York River to the James 2 was an error; indeed it is true, as Joseph E. Johnston wrote, that "No one but McClellan could have hesitated to attack."3 April 17 Johnston took command in person at Yorktown, and at that date the Confederate army had reached the number of 53,000.4 From this time on perhaps nothing could have been better than a continuance of the scientific siege operations which McClellan had begun soon after his arrival before Yorktown. He went on erecting siege works and planting heavy Parrott guns and mortars against the Confederate fortifications, maintaining an active correspondence with the department at Washington and with his wife at home. In his letters to the President and to the Secretary of War he resented bitterly that McDowell's corps had been withdrawn from his command; he complained of the smallness of his own force, and intimated that he was outnumbered by the Confederates; he had much to say of the rainy weather and of the roads deep with mud. To his worshipping wife he told of the disadvantages he was laboring under and of his many troubles in a tone that at times degenerated into childishness; indeed some of his letters sound like the utterances of a youth ungrown rather than of the captain of a great army. Others show him to be a prey to illusions. Not only "the rebels," but the "abolitionists and other scoundrels" are aiming at

1 Official Records, vol. xi. part iii. pp. 76, 97, 425, 436; part i. pp. 14, 15. By the title of Official Records I designate the government publication : War of the Rebellion: Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies.. Series I. is to be always understood unless there is mention otherwise. In making references to these records the abbreviation O. R. will be used.

April 6 the President telegraphed McClellan: "I think you better break the enemy's line from Yorktown to Warwick River, at once." — O. R., vol. xi. part i. p. 14. McClellan wrote his wife: "The President very coolly telegraphed me yesterday that he thought I had better break the enemy's lines at once! I was much tempted to reply that he had better come and do it himself."— Own Story, p. 308.

3 April 22, to Lee, O. R., vol. xi. part iii. p. 456.

Johnston's Narrative, p. 117.

his ruin. It is the men at Washington to whom he refers when he writes, "History will present a sad record of these traitors who are willing to sacrifice the country and its army for personal spite and personal aims."1 The President, yearning for the success of McClellan and willing to do anything in his power to bring it about, sent him Franklin's division of McDowell's corps, which reached him April 22. Still McClellan did not open a general attack from his batteries. April 28 he called for some 30-pounder Parrott guns from Washington, and brought forth this answer from the President: "Your call. . . alarms me chiefly because it argues indefinite procrastination. Is anything to be done?"2

Crossing to the Confederate lines, one is impressed with the good fortune of the South in having an able commander for its principal army at the commencement of the war instead of being obliged, as was the North, to grope about through bitter trial and sickening failures. Johnston coolly watched the operations of his adversary, and made up his mind that Yorktown would be untenable when McClellan's elaborate siege operations were set in motion. Desirous of avoiding the loss of life which a bombardment would occasion, he timed nicely his evacuation of Yorktown and the adjacent works, withdrawing his army on the 3d of May, three days before the contemplated opening of a general fire from the heavier Union batteries. McClellan's procrastination had given the Confederates a precious month, in which they commenced the reorganization of their army, gave some measure of training to the Virginia militia, and brought reinforcements from the South. The evacuation of Yorktown took McClellan by surprise. Nevertheless he gave orders for immediate pursuit, while he himself remained at Yorktown to superintend the

1 Letters to his wife, McClellan's Own Story, p. 310, ante, et seq.

2 O. R., vol. xi. part iii. pp. 126, 130.

3 See vol. iii. of this work, pp. 606, 616.

4 "The action of the enemy almost always disappointed McClellan." Gen. Francis Palfrey, who was in McClellan's army in the Peninsular Campaign: Papers of the Military Historical Society of Mass., vol. i. p. 155.