Puttering in High Places

201 The Confederate high command never did anything with its full strength. There was a continual puttering. Consider Lee's invasion of Pennsylvania in 1863. He took 75,000 men with him, a force that was wholly inadequate. There was at that time a Southern army in Tennessee, another one facing Grant at Vicksburg, another one in Mississippi under Johnston, besides a large number of men in forts and garrisons, yet the Confederate war department declared that Lee carried with him all the men who could be spared.

Lee, with his 75,000 men, encountered Meade at Gettysburg. Meade's army was stronger than Lee's in numbers, and it had the advantage of position. Lee was defeated, with heavy loss. If his army had been a little larger, if he had been reinforced by 50,000 of the men then in Southern garrisons, there is hardly a doubt that he would have smashed Meade hands down.

The reader may consider me presumptuous for criticizing the plans of able men who were on the ground and actually facing the conditions that existed at the time. But this attitude of dissection and criticism is precisely the correct one for a historian to take. The vision of even the most capable men who are contemporary to events is always and necessarily limited. They have not yet had time to organize the immediate past, and the future is unknown to them.

On the other hand, the historian, in looking back over the past, is in a position to observe the ultimate results of actions. History, therefore, to be worth the paper it consumes, must be a work of analysis and comment; and many a biographer who does not possess the qualities of leadership himself can nevertheless point out clearly the errors of those who were the leaders of a previous generation.

At first the Union army and navy merely nibbled at the Confederacy, taking a bite here and there, but these nibblings

were without a centralized purpose; they had no unity of pattern.

The navy did a good deal of nibbling. It captured Port Royal, a deep-water harbor on the South Carolina coast, and fortified the place; and it managed to secure Hatteras Island, off the coast of North Carolina. These were important ventures, because the occupation of such strategic points on the Southern coast kept the Confederate authorities in doubt and suspense. At any time a large Union army might have been landed at Port Royal, for the Union had full command of the sea, and this would have given an entirely different aspect to the military situation.

Lincoln and his cabinet were obsessed by the idea of capturing Richmond. One may truthfully call it an obsession, for the capture of Richmond as a place was not worth the effort. It was not in any sense an established national capital. The departments of the Confederate government camped in temporary headquarters, in buildings hastily adapted to their use. The Tredegar Iron Works, which were to the South what the Krupp works were to Germany, were located there, but after all the Tredegar concern supplied only a small portion of the arms used in the Confederate army.

As it finally did happen, the war was actually brought to a close when Richmond was taken, but one event was not the result of the other. It was merely a coincidence. The war came to an end because Sherman had broken the Confederacy in two in his march through Georgia and the Carolinas; and because Grant in 1863 had fought his way down the Mississippi, and had opened it under Union control from its source to its mouth. \

The great and winning strategy of the war was created by Grant, yet it was hardly a conscious act of creation. It was a product of circumstances, and came to him instinctively. Grant's immense military ability arose from the fact that

Grant's Common Sense

203 he had the vision to see the war in its larger and simpler aspects. In his mind the successful conduct of the war implied only two modes of action. One was to defeat the Confederate armies, and the other was to cut the Confederacy into separate and isolated pieces. He knew that as long as the Southern armies existed there was no use in occupying towns or places, unless such occupation would interrupt the enemy's communications or deprive his armies of sustenance. To him the war was not a war of positions, but a war of movement. We shall see him moving continually, and always toward the armies of the enemy.

As early as May, 1861, he sent to President Lincoln, through Governor Yates, a suggestion that the main attack on the Confederacy should be along the line of the Mississippi. \

This piece of ordinary common sense did not find much encouragement at that time among the strategists at Washington. Yet any one may readily see that the Union possession of the great river throughout its entire length would not only isolate Texas, Arkansas and part of Louisiana from the rest of the Confederate States, but it would also provide a base for an army of invasion that might start from the Mississippi at any point and proceed eastward across the states of Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia.

Grant's success in the Mississippi basin gradually caused the Lincoln administration to realize that the Eastern campaigns had been not much more than dramatic spectaclesenacted at an enormous cost of men and money-and that the Confederacy was being broken up by the Union victories on the Mississippi. The total effect of the Union campaigns in Virginia-until Grant took command there in 1864-was merely to hold a considerable portion of the Confederate army in front of Richmond. To that extent the prolonged Union effort in Virginia had a military value. It kept the best Confederate generals and the best troops away from the Mississippi.

This situation was highly favorable to Grant's personal career. In the West he was confronted by the lesser Confederate generals, and by inferior, poorly disciplined troops. There was no Southern general in the Western region who could reach to the height of Lee's elbow; and, of course, none of the stature of Stonewall Jackson.

CHAPTER XV

THE DOMINEERING RAWLINS APPEARS

§1

RANT was lucky in having over him a superior officer

G

as inefficient as Frémont, and he was even more for

tunate in having on his staff, and continually at his elbow, a young man named John A. Rawlins. As soon as Grant received his commission as brigadier-general he made Rawlins the adjutant of his brigade. Rawlins, who was then under thirty, was without military training of any kind, even in the militia.

He was a swarthy, black-eyed person, with hair as dark and wiry as an Indian's. Grant had known him only a few months. They had met for the first time in Galena, where Rawlins was the attorney for the Grants' leather store.

He was emotional in temperament, and had made a local reputation for himself as an expert jury lawyer. In turning over the musty reminiscences of the time one reads a lot about Rawlins' "flashing black eyes" and his "quivering muscles." He was in deadly earnest in everything he undertook. In his hours of relaxation he used to recite Burns' poem A Man's a Man for a' That. Those who heard him said that his rendition of the poem, and the thrill of his fine, sonorous voice, "lingered long in the memory." How he would have loved to intone: "My head is bloody but unbowed. . . it matters not how strait the gate, how charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul." It is a pity that Rawlins had passed away to another world before Henley wrote these lines.