Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

on its own terms, but it was made slower by the activities of two of the Confederacy’s most successful raiders, John Hunt Morgan and Nathan Bedford Forrest. Bragg had given both Morgan and Forrest cavalry brigades and orders to create as much havoc as possible between himself and Buell. This Forrest and Morgan did effortlessly. Forrest, a former millionaire slave trader, was a natural military genius who possessed the killer instinct in spades, and in the middle of July Forrest’s raiders struck at Buell’s patiently rebuilt railroad line at Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and put it out of commission for two weeks. Meanwhile, Morgan swept up through Nashville in August, destroying rail lines and a railroad tunnel and further delaying Buell. Bragg, meanwhile, rolled into Kentucky and occupied Glasgow, Kentucky, on September 14. He then began recruiting volunteers for the Confederate army and commenced a leisurely move on Frankfort, the capital of Kentucky, where he scattered the Unionist legislature and inaugurated a Confederate governor on October 4, 1862.

By that time, Buell had finally managed to catch up with Bragg, and on October 8 the two armies collided near Perryville, Kentucky. The battle that resulted was a happenstance affair, like Shiloh, with neither Bragg nor Buell fully in control of the day’s events. After a day of pitiless slugging, the battle of Perryville ended with Buell in command of the field, while Bragg withdrew into Tennessee. Buell had saved the Ohio River for the Union, but he received small thanks for it. Like McClellan, he failed to pursue the fleeing Confederates. Even more like McClellan, Buell unwisely announced that he “would not lend his hand to such an act as the emancipation of the slave,” and on October 24, 1862, he was relieved of his command.38

If the distraction afforded by Bragg’s abortive offensive into Kentucky was one reason why the Federal offensive in the west came to halt, then the other reason was Halleck himself. Once Halleck occupied Corinth, he was determined not to risk the troops under his command on further offensive moves, and began parceling up his forces into small garrisons to keep the likes of Forrest and Morgan away from his supply lines. Although Halleck retained Grant as his deputy, Grant fumed and sputtered in frustration, his mind burdened with the tide of press criticism still flowing in his direction over Shiloh. One of Halleck’s subordinates complained that, after Corinth, “this great army… could have marched anywhere through the South without effective opposition… yet in less than two months,” Halleck had dissipated its strength in penny-ante garrison duties “to such an extent that the war was half over before it was again reunited.” In June, feeling that “I am in the way here” and “can endure it no longer,” Grant would have resigned his commission had not Sherman talked him out of it. Then, in July, Halleck was called to Washington to assume the post of general in chief of the Federal armies, the job Lincoln had taken away from McClellan in March. Halleck reconfigured the departmental boundaries and in October designated Grant as commander of the Department of the Tennessee (effectively this meant that Grant was responsible for policing all the newly occupied Confederate territory between the Tennessee and Mississippi Rivers).39

By that time Grant was ready to approach Halleck with a proposal for a new campaign. During the spring campaign up the Tennessee, the upper stretches of the Mississippi River had fallen into Union hands simply because the Confederates could no longer hold them once they had lost the Tennessee River. What was worse for the Confederates was that they had also lost New Orleans. The Federal navy had been planning its own operation against New Orleans as early as November 1861, and in February 1862 command of an assault flotilla was given to a hard-eyed and aggressive fleet captain named David Glasgow Farragut. With four steam-powered sloops—the Hartford, Brooklyn, Richmond, and Pensacola—and a collection of small gunboats and mortar schooners, Farragut began the ascent of the Mississippi on April 16, stopping below New Orleans on the eighteenth for six days so that his mortar schooners could pound the two forts that guarded the river.

Impatient with the results of the bombardment, at two in the morning of the twenty-fourth Farragut arranged his ships in two columns and swept up the river past the fire of the forts. Farragut anchored for the day just above the forts, and the next morning he ran his ships past the last small Confederate batteries below New Orleans. At noon on April 25, Farragut dropped anchor in the river by the city and sent ashore an officer to raise the United States flag over the New Orleans mint. The downriver forts, abandoned by most of their disheartened garrisons, surrendered on April 28.40

The fall of New Orleans was probably the severest single blow the Confederacy sustained in the war. New Orleans was the Confederacy’s great port, its doorway to the rest of the world, and its commercial and financial equivalent of New York City. In addition to losing the city itself, 15,000 bales of cotton (worth over $1.5 million) were burned by the retreating Confederates, along with more than a dozen river steamboats, a half-completed ironclad gunboat, and the entire city dock area. “The extent of the disaster is not to be disguised,” wrote Edward Pollard of the Richmond Examiner. “It annihilated us in Louisiana… led by plain and irresistible conclusion to our virtual abandonment of the great and fruitful Valley of the Mississippi,” and cost the Confederacy “a city which was the commercial capital of the South, which contained a population of one hundred and seventy thousand souls, and which was the largest exporting city in the world.”41

Serious though the loss of Tennessee was that spring, the Confederacy could have survived it so long as it held New Orleans and the lifeline New Orleans offered to the outside world. However, Albert Sidney Johnston had convinced Jefferson Davis that the real threat to New Orleans