Captains of the Civil War Part 3

Of course the South had some sea-power of her own. Nine-tenths of the United States Navy stood by the Union. But, with the remaining tenth and some foreign help, the South managed to contrive the makes.h.i.+ft parts of what might have become a navy if the North had only let it grow. The North, however, did not let it grow.

The regular navy of the United States, though very small to start with, was always strong enough to keep the command of the sea and to prevent the makes.h.i.+ft Southern parts of a navy from ever becoming a whole. Privateers took out letters of marque to prey on Northern s.h.i.+pping. But privateering soon withered off, because prizes could not be run through the blockade in sufficient numbers to make it pay; and no prize would be recognized except in a Southern port.

Raiders did better and for a much longer time. The _Shenandoah_ was burning Northern whalers in Bering Sea at the end of the war.

The _Sumter_ and the _Florida_ cut a wide swath under instructions which "left much to discretion and more to the torch." The famous _Alabama_ only succ.u.mbed to the U.S.S. _Kearsarge_ after sinking the _Hatteras_ man-of-war and raiding seventy other vessels. Yet still the South, in spite of her ironclads, raiders, and rams, in spite of her river craft, of the home s.h.i.+ps or foreigners that ran the blockade, and of all her other efforts, was a landsman's country that could make no real headway against the native sea-power of the North.

Perhaps the worst of all the disabilities under which the abortive Southern navy suffered was lubberly administration and gross civilian interference. The Administration actually refused to buy the beginnings of a ready-made sea-going fleet when it had the offer of ten British East Indiamen specially built for rapid conversion into men-of-war.

Forty thousand bales of cotton would have bought the lot. The Mississippi record was even worse. Five conflicting authorities divided the undefined and overlapping responsibilities between them: the Confederate Government, the State governments, the army, the navy, and the Mississippi skippers. A typical result may be seen in the fate of the fourteen "rams" which were absurdly mishandled by fourteen independent civilian skippers with two civilian commodores.

This "River Defense Fleet" was "backed by the whole Missouri delegation"

at Richmond, and blessed by the Confederate Secretary of War, Judah P. Benjamin, that very clever lawyer-politician and ever-smiling Jew. Six of the fourteen "rams" were lost, with sheer futility, at New Orleans in April, '62; the rest at Memphis the following June.

As a matter of fact the Confederate navy never had but one real man-of-war, the famous _Merrimac_; and she was a mere razee, cut down for a special purpose, and too feebly engined to keep the sea. Even the equally famous _Alabama_ was only a raider, never meant for action with a fleet. Over three hundred officers left the United States Navy for the South; but, as in the case of the Army, they were followed by very few men. The total personnel of the regular Confederate navy never exceeded four thousand at any one time.

The irregular forces afloat often did gallant, and sometimes even skillful, service in little isolated ways. But when ma.s.sed together they were always at sixes and sevens; and they could never do more than make the best of a very bad business indeed. The Secretary of the Confederate navy, Stephen R. Mallory, was not to blame. He was one of the very few civilians who understood and tried to follow any naval principles at all. He had done good work as chairman of the Naval Committee in the Senate before the war, and had learnt a good deal more than his Northern rival, Gideon Welles. He often saw what should have been done. But men and means were lacking.

Men and means were also lacking in the naval North at the time the war began. But the small regular navy was invincible against next to none; and it enjoyed many means of expansion denied to the South.

On the outbreak of hostilities the United States Navy had ninety s.h.i.+ps and about nine thousand men--all ranks and ratings (with marines) included. The age of steam had come. But fifty vessels had no steam at all. Of the rest one was on the Lakes, five were quite unserviceable, and thirty-four were scattered about the world without the slightest thought of how to mobilize a fleet at home.

The age of ironclads had begun already overseas. But in his report to Congress on July 4, 1861, Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy, only made some wholly non-committal observations in ponderous "officialese." In August he appointed a committee which began its report in September with the sage remark that "Opinions differ amongst naval and scientific men as to the policy of adopting the iron armament for s.h.i.+ps-of-war." In December Welles transmitted this report to Congress with the still sager remark that "The subject of iron armature for s.h.i.+ps is one of great general interest, not only to the navy and country, but is engaging the attention of the civilized world." Such was the higher administrative preparation for the ironclad battle of the following year.

It was the same in everything. The people had taken no interest in the navy and Congress had faithfully represented them by denying the service all chance of preparing for war till after war had broken out. Then there was the usual hurry and horrible waste.

Fortunately for all concerned, Gideon Welles, after vainly groping about the administrative maze for the first five months, called Gustavus V. Fox to his a.s.sistance. Fox had been a naval officer of exceptional promise, who had left the service to go into business, who had a natural turn for administration, and who now made an almost ideal a.s.sistant Secretary of the Navy. He was, indeed, far more than this; for, in most essentials, he acted throughout the war as a regular Chief of Staff.

One of the greatest troubles was the glut of senior officers who were too old and the alarming dearth of juniors fit for immediate work afloat. It was only after the disaster at Bull Run that Congress authorized the formation of a Promotion Board to see what could be done to clear the active list and make it really a list of officers fit for active service. Up to this time there had been no system of retiring men for inefficiency or age. An officer who did not retire of his own accord simply went on rising automatically till he died. The president of this board had himself turned sixty.

But he was the thoroughly efficient David Glasgow Farragut, a man who was to do greater things afloat than even Fox could do ash.o.r.e.

How badly active officers were wanted may be inferred from the fact that before the appointment of Farragut's promotion board the total number of regular officers remaining in the navy was only 1457. Intensive training was tried at the Naval Academy. Yet 7500 volunteer officers had to be used before the war was over.

These came mostly from the merchant service and were generally brave, capable, first-rate men. But a nautical is not the same as a naval training; and the dearth of good professional naval officers was felt to the end. The number of enlisted seamen authorized by Congress rose from 7600 to 51,500. But the very greatest difficulty was found in "keeping up to strength," even with the most lavish use of bounties.

The number of vessels in the navy kept on growing all through.

Of course not nearly all of them were regular men-of-war or even fighting craft "fit to go foreign." At the end of the first year there were 264 in commission; at the end of the second, 427; at the end of the third, 588; and at the end of the fourth, 671.

Bearing this in mind, and remembering the many other Northern odds, one might easily imagine that the Southern armies fought only with the courage of despair. Yet such was not the case. This was no ordinary war, to be ended by a treaty in which compromise would play its part. There could be only two alternatives: either the South would win her independence or the North would have to beat her into complete submission. Under the circ.u.mstances the united South would win whenever the divided North thought that complete subjugation would cost more than it was worth. The great aim of the South was, therefore, not to conquer the North but simply to sicken the North of trying to conquer her. "Let us alone and we'll let you alone" was her insinuating argument; and this, as she knew very well, was echoed by many people in the North. Thus, as regards her own objective, she began with hopes that the Northern peace party never quite let die.

Then, so far as her patriotic feelings were concerned, the South was not fighting for any one point at issue--not even for slavery, because only a small minority held slaves--but for her whole way of life, which, rightly or wrongly, she wanted to live in her own Southern way; and she pa.s.sionately resented the invasion of her soil. This gave her army a very high morale, which, in its turn, inclined her soldiers the better to appreciate their real or imagined advantages over the Northern hosts. First, they and their enemies both knew that they enjoyed the three real advantages of fighting at home under magnificent leaders and with interior lines. Robert Lee and Stonewall Jackson stood head and shoulders above any Northern leaders till Grant and Sherman rose to greatness during the latter half of the war. Lee himself was never surpa.s.sed; and he, like Jackson and several more, made the best use of home surroundings and of interior lines. Anybody can appreciate the prime advantage of interior lines by imagining two armies of equal strength operating against each other under perfectly equal conditions except that one has to move round the circ.u.mference of a circle while the other moves to meet it along the shorter lines inside. The army moving round the circ.u.mference is said to be operating on exterior lines, while the army moving from point to point of the circ.u.mference by the straighter, and therefore shorter, lines inside is said to be operating on interior lines. In more homely language the straight road beats the crooked one. In plain slang, it's best to have the inside track.

Of course there is a reverse to all this. If the roads, rails, and waterways are better around the circle than inside it, then the odds may be turned the other way; and this happens most often when the forces on the exterior lines are the better provided with sea-power. Again, if the exterior forces are so much stronger than the interior forces that these latter dare not leave any strategic point open in case the enemy breaks through, then it is evident that the interior forces will suffer all the disadvantages of being surrounded, divided, worn out, and defeated.

This happened at last to the South, and was one of the four advantages she lost. Another was the hope of foreign intervention, which died hard in Southern hearts, but which was already moribund halfway through the war. A third was the hope of dissension in the North, a hope which often ran high till Lincoln's reelection in November, '64, and one which only died out completely with the surrender of Lee. The fourth was the unfounded belief that Southerners were the better fighting men. They certainly had an advantage at first in having a larger proportion of men accustomed to horses and arms and inured to life in the open. But, other things being equal, there was nothing to choose between the two sides, so far as natural fighting values were concerned.

Practically all the Southern "military males" pa.s.sed into the ranks; and a military male eventually meant any one who could march to the front or do non-combatant service with an army, from boys in their teens to men in their sixties. Conscription came after one year; and with very few exemptions, such as the clergy, Quakers, many doctors, newspaper editors, and "indispensable" civil servants.

Lee used to express his regret that all the greatest strategists were tied to their editorial chairs. But sterner feelings were aroused against that recalcitrant State Governor, Joseph Brown of Georgia, who declared eight thousand of his civil servants to be totally exempt. From first to last, conscripts and volunteers, nearly a million men were enrolled: equaling one-fifth of the entire war-party white population of the seceding States.

All branches of the service suffered from a constant lack of arms and munitions. As with the s.h.i.+ps for the navy so with munitions for the army, the South did not exploit the European markets while her ports were still half open and her credit good, Jefferson Davis was spotlessly honest, an able bureaucrat, and full of undying zeal.

But, though an old West Pointer, he was neither a foresightful organizer nor fit to exercise any of the executive power which he held as the const.i.tutional commander-in-chief by land and sea. He ordered rifles by the thousand instead of by the hundred thousand; and he actually told his Cabinet that if he could only take one wing while Lee took the other they would surely beat the North.

Worse still, he and his politicians kept the commissariat under civilian orders and full of civilian interference, even at the front, which, in this respect, was always a house divided against itself.

The little regular army of '61, only sixteen thousand strong, stood by the Union almost to a man; though a quarter of the officers went over to the South. Yet the enlisted man was despised even by the common loafers who would not fight if they could help it.

"Why don't you come in?" asked a zealous lady at a distribution of patriotic gifts, "aren't you one of our heroes?" "No, ma'am,"

answered the soldier, "I'm only a regular."

The question of command was often a very vexed one; and many mistakes were made before the final answers came. The most significant of all emergent facts was this: that though the officers who had been regulars before the war did not form a hundredth part of all who held commissions during it, yet these old regulars alone supplied every successful high commander, Federal and Confederate alike, both afloat and ash.o.r.e.

The North had four times as many whites as the South; it used more blacks as soldiers; and the complete grand total of all the men who joined its forces during the war reached two millions and three-quarters. But this gives a quite misleading idea of the real odds in favor of the North, especially the odds available in battle.

A third of the Northern people belonged to the peace party and furnished no recruits at all till after conscription came in. The late introduction of conscription, the abominable subst.i.tution clause, and the prevalence of bounty-jumping combined to reduce both the quant.i.ty and quality of the recruits obtained by money or compulsion. The Northerners that did fight were generally fighting in the South, among a very hostile population, which, while it made the Southern lines of communication perfectly safe, threatened those of the North at every point and thus obliged the Northern armies to leave more and more men behind to guard the communications that each advance made longer still. Finally, the South generally published the numbers of only its actual combatants, while the Northern returns always included every man drawing pay, whether a combatant or not. On the whole, the North had more than double numbers, even if compared with a Southern total that includes noncombatants. But it should be remembered that a Northern army fighting in the heart of the South, and therefore having to guard every mile of the way back home, could not meet a Southern one with equal strength in battle unless it had left the North with fully twice as many.

Conscription came a year later (1863) in the North than in the South and was vitiated by a subst.i.tution clause. The fact that a man could buy himself out of danger made some patriots call it "a rich man's war and a poor man's fight." And the further fact that subst.i.tutes generally became regular bounty-jumpers, who joined and deserted at will, over and over again, went far to increase the disgust of those who really served. Frank Wilkeson's _Recollections of a Private Soldier in the Army of the Potomac_ is a true voice from the ranks when he explains "how the resort to volunteering, the unprincipled dodge of cowardly politicians, ground up the choicest seed-corn of the nation; how it consumed the young, the patriotic, the intelligent, the generous, and the brave; and how it wasted the best moral, social, and political elements of the Republic, leaving the cowards, s.h.i.+rkers, egotists, and moneymakers to stay at home and procreate their kind."

That is to say, it was so arranged that the foxy-witted lived, while the lion-hearted died.

The organization of the vast numbers enrolled was excellent whenever experts were given a free hand. But this free hand was rare. One vital point only needs special notice here: the wastefulness of raising new regiments when the old ones were withering away for want of reinforcements. A new local regiment made a better "story"

in the press; and new and superfluous regiments meant new and superfluous colonels, mostly of the speechifying kind. So it often happened that the State authorities felt obliged to humor zealots set on raising those brand-new regiments which doubled their own difficulties by having to learn their lesson alone, halved the efficiency of the old regiments they should have reinforced, and hara.s.sed the commanders and staff by increasing the number of units that were of different and ever-changing efficiency and strength.

It was a system of making and breaking all through.

The end came when Northern sea-power had strangled the Southern resources and the unified Northern armies had worn out the fighting force. Of the single million soldiers raised by the South only two hundred thousand remained in arms, half starved, half clad, with the scantiest of munitions, and without reserves of any kind. Meanwhile the Northern hosts had risen to a million in the field, well fed, well clothed, well armed, abundantly provided with munitions, and at last well disciplined under the unified command of that great leader, Grant. Moreover, behind this million stood another million fit to bear arms and obtainable at will from the two millions of enrolled reserves.

The cost of the war was stupendous. But the losses of war are not to be measured in money. The real loss was the loss of a million men, on both sides put together, for these men who died were of the nation's best.

CHAPTER III

THE NAVAL WAR: 1862

Bull Run had riveted attention on the land between the opposing capitals and on the armies fighting there. Very few people were thinking of the navies and the sea. And yet it was at sea, and not on land, that the Union had a force against which the Confederates could never prevail, a force which gradually cut them off from the whole world's base of war supplies, a force which enabled the Union armies to get and keep the strangle-hold which did the South to death.

The blockade declared in April was no empty threat. The sails of Federal frigates, still more the sinister black hulls of the new steam men-of-war, meant that the South was fast becoming a land besieged, with every outwork accessible by water exposed to sudden attack and almost certain capture by any good amphibious force of soldiers and sailors combined.

Sea-power kept the North in affluence while it starved the South.

Sea-power held Maryland in its relentless grip and did more than land-power to keep her in the Union. Sea-power was the chief factor in saving Was.h.i.+ngton. Seapower enabled the North to hold such points of vantage as Fortress Monroe right on the flank of the South.

And sea-power likewise enabled the North to take or retake other points of similar importance: for instance, Hatteras Island.

In a couple of days at the end of August, 1861, the Confederate forts at Hatteras Inlet, North Carolina, were compelled to surrender to a joint naval and military expedition under Flag-Officer Stringham and Major-General B. F. Butler. The immediate result, besides the capture of seven hundred men, was the control of the best entrance to North Carolina waters, which entailed the stoppage of many oversea supplies for the Confederate army. The ulterior result was the securing of a base from which a further invasion could be made with great advantage.

The naval campaign of the following year was truly epoch-making; for the duel between the _Monitor_ and _Merrimac_ in Hampton Roads on March 9, 1862, was the first action ever fought between ironclad steam men-of-war.

Eleven months earlier the Federal Government had suddenly abandoned the Norfolk Navy Yard; though their strongest garrison was at Fortress Monroe, only twelve miles north along a waterway which was under the absolute control of their navy, and though the Confederates'

had nothing but an inadequate little untrained force on the spot.

Among the spoils of war falling into Confederate hands were twelve hundred guns and the _Merrimac_, a forty-gun steam frigate. The _Merrimac_, though fired and scuttled by the Federals, was hove up, cut down, plated over, and renamed the _Virginia_. (History, however, knows her only as the _Merrimac_.) John L. Porter, Naval Constructor to the Confederate States, had made a model of an ironclad at Pittsburgh fifteen years before; and he now applied this model to the rebuilding of the _Merrimac_. He first cut down everything above the water line, except the gun deck, which he converted into a regular citadel with flat top, sides sloping at thirty-five degrees, and ends stopping short of the s.h.i.+p's own ends by seventy feet fore and aft. The effect, therefore, was that of an ironclad citadel built on the mids.h.i.+ps of a submerged frigate's hull. The four-inch iron plating of the citadel knuckled over the wooden sides two feet under water. The engines, which the South had no means of replacing, were the old ones which had been condemned before being sunk. A four-foot castiron ram was clamped on to the bow. Ten guns were mounted: six nine-inch smooth-bores, with two six-inch and two seven-inch rifles. Commodore Franklin Buchanan took command and had magnificent professional officers under him. But the crew, three hundred strong, were mostly landsmen; for, as in the case of the Army, the men of the Navy nearly all took sides with the North, and the South had very few seamen of any other kind.

To oppose the _Merrimac_ the dilatory North contracted with John Ericsson the Swede, who had to build the _Monitor_ much smaller than the Merrimac owing to pressure of time. He enjoyed, however, enormous advantages in every other respect, owing to the vastly superior resources of the North in marine engineering, armor-plating, and all other points of naval construction. The _Monitor_ was launched at New York on January 30, 1862, the hundredth day after the laying of her keel-plate. Her length over all was 172 feet, her beam was 41, and her draught only 10--less than half the draught of the _Merrimac_. Her whole crew numbered only 58; but every single one was a trained professional naval seaman who had volunteered for dangerous service under Captain John L. Worden. She was not a good sea boat; and she nearly foundered on her way down from New York to Fortress Monroe. Her underwater hull was s.h.i.+pshape enough; but her superstructure--a round iron tower resting on a very low deck--was not. Contemptuous eyewitnesses described her very well as looking like a tin can on a s.h.i.+ngle or a cheesebox on a raft. She carried only two guns, eleven-inchers, both mounted inside her turret, which revolved by machinery; but their 180-pound shot were far more powerful than any aboard the _Merrimac_. In maneuvering the _Monitor_ enjoyed an immense advantage, with her light draft, strong engines, and well-protected screws and rudder.

On the eighth of March, a lovely spring day, the _Merrimac_ made her trial trip by going into action with her wheezy old engines, lubberly crew, and the guns she had never yet fired. She shoveled along at only five knots; but the Confederate garrisons cheered her to the echo. Seven miles north she came upon the astonished fifty-gun _Congress_ and thirty-gun _c.u.mberland_ swinging drowsily at anchor off Newport News, with their boats alongside and the men's wash drying in the rigging. Yet the surprised frigates opened fire at twelve hundred yards and were joined by the sh.o.r.e batteries, all converging on the _Merrimac_, from whose iron sides the shot glanced up without doing more than hammer her hard and start a few rivets. Closing in at top speed--barely six knots--the _Merrimac_ gave the _Congress_ a broadside before ramming the _c.u.mberland_ and opening a hole "wide enough to drive in a horse and cart."

Backing clear and turning the after-pivot gun, the _Merrimac_ then got in three raking sh.e.l.ls against the _Congress_, which grounded when trying to escape. Meanwhile the _c.u.mberland_ was listing over and rapidly filling, though she kept up the fight to the very last gasp. When she sank with a roar her topmasts still showed above water and her colors waved defiance. An hour later the terribly mauled _Congress_ surrendered; whereupon her crew was rescued and she was set on fire. By this time various smaller craft on both sides had joined the fray. But the big _Minnesota_ still remained, though aground and apparently at the mercy of the _Merrimac_. The great draught of the _Merrimac_ and the setting in of the ebb tide, however, made the Confederates draw off for the night.

Next morning they saw the "tin can on the s.h.i.+ngle" between them and their prey. The _Monitor_ and _Merrimac_ then began their epoch-making fight. The patchwork engines of the deep-draught _Merrimac_ made her as unhandy as if she had been water-logged, while the light-draught _Monitor_ could not only play round her when close-to but maneuver all over the surrounding shallows as well. The _Merrimac_ put her last ounce of steam into an attempt to ram her agile opponent.

But a touch of the _Monitor's_ helm swung her round just in time to make the blow perfectly harmless. The _Merrimac_ simply barged into her, grated harshly against her iron side, and sheered off beaten. The firing was furious and mostly at pointblank range.

Once the _Monitor_ fired while the sides were actually touching.