This Great Struggle (12 page)

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.”

THE BLOCKADE AND DIPLOMACY

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.