Two Weeks That Changed the War

Wherein operations along the Potomac begin McClellan's downfall

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At the beginning of this week we looked at the first of two weeks that changed the American Civil War. The fall of Ft. Donelson on the Cumberland River to the obscure Brig. General Ulysses S. Grant had become a challenge to the general-in-chief of the Northern armies, Maj. General George B. McClellan. As Brig. General George Meade, commanding a brigade in McCall's Division (the Pennsylvania Reserves) put it on February 23 in a letter to his wife: "I fear the victories in the Southwest are going to be injurious to McClellan, by enabling his enemies to say, 'Why cannot you do in Virginia what has been done in Tennessee?'"

In the week that followed he had no choice but to begin an offensive motion with his Army of the Potomac, despite his long-laid plans to move it to the Rappahannock River and march on Richmond. The results of that decision changed the war.

February 24, Monday

Don Carlos Buell

The soldiers of Brig. General Don Carlos Buell reached the northern banks of the Cumberland River and looked across into an abandoned Nashville. McClellan's protege would occupy the city, despite the efforts of his (nominal) immediate superior Maj. General Henry Halleck to get Grant there first. Telegraphing his headquarters in St. Louis from Washington, McClellan told Halleck to "cooperate with [Buell] to the full extent of your power, to secure Nashville beyond a doubt." He said he would order Buell to next seize the nearby railroad junction and then "the next move should be either a direct march in force upon the rear of Memphis or else first upon the communications and rear of Columbus."

He may have gotten Columbia's name wrong, but McClellan's orders set in motion the movement of armies that led to Shiloh, what would be the bloodiest single day in American history until McClellan himself surpassed it at Antietam, and the bloodiest multi-day battle in American history until Gettysburg. The ferociousness of the battle would play a significant role in undermining McClellan's plans for what would become the Peninsula Campaign.

The Other Feud

Wherein we follow the little remembered Southern command crisis

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Joe Johnston wrote with a barely contained rage:

Sir: A colonel of a Mississippi regiment has just informed me that you had referred him to me for information in relation to the recent act of Congress granting bounties and furloughs to non-commissioned officers and privates of the Provisional Army. I have received no order from the War Department directly on this subject.

If the first winter of the war for the North was headlined by the struggle between McClellan and the Lincoln Administration, it was equally true that the winter for the South revolved around a similar power battle between Johnston and the Davis Administration. But the latter fight is remembered only as a side-note by even the more diligent historians while the former is the centerpiece of even the most casual histories of the war.

There are many reasons this may be. For one, Johnston was a far less colorful character, who bequeathed history no inflammatory personal letters. But the story also lacks a hero. Johnston was not a great general in his campaigning and won no great victories that he could claim sole credit for (forever having to share Manassas with Beauregard), while the gross mismanagement of the Davis Administration hardly provides a sympathetic character to the reader. And the later success of Lee commanding the same army helps write a simple narrative for the war: South is dominant up until Gettysburg, when either the little guy North wins through pluck and determination or the resource-rich North crushes the valiant South tragically, but inevitably (depending on your persuasion). Johnston, and his feud with Davis and his surrogates, sullies that narrative by forcing us to recognize two equally inept factions, struggling to create a physical embodiment of their ideological passions and impose it on the continent.

When General Joseph E. Johnston started writing Secretary of War Judah P. Benjamin on January 18, the specific issue was bounties and furloughs, an ill advised solution to a manpower problem. In the early days of 1861, when it was still a secession crisis and not yet a war, the Provisional Confederate Congress had to solve the problem of how to protect their would-be nation from the U.S. Army. After all, it had been Maj. General Winfield Scott that had mobilized U.S. soldiers in South Carolina to help put an end to the Nullification Crisis a quarter of a century earlier, and it was Winfield Scott who was advising Lincoln on how to deal with the Secession Crisis in 1861.

Ice on the Potomac

Wherein either Hooker exaggerates or global warming is real

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The cold weather of December had brought a warming, rather than a cooling of tensions on the Lower Potomac. From the headquarters of the Department of Northern Virginia in Centreville, General Joseph E. Johnston was preparing his Southern army for a battle that he expected, even this far into the winter. While winter campaigning was something that no army enjoyed, it certainly wasn't unusual. Writing to his subordinate commanders about the situation, Johnston would have been well aware that Union forces were on the offensive in the Western Virginia mountains and that Brig. Gen. Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson was playing a cat and mouse game with two Union forces in what is today the West Virginia panhandle.

On December 5, Johnston had written to Brig. Gen. William H.C. Whiting, commanding his right flank at Dumfries about the eventuality of an attack by the Union army and his plans for a Confederate response.

My Dear General... I want to know precisely what roads are open and which closed. Please inform me The enemy's movements might be such as to tempt me to go in your direction first. It is necessary to be prepared to do so at all events... Should we go against your enemy it ought to be in two columns on those two routes. 

And, referring to the way he had tricked Union Maj. Gen. Robert Patterson before Manassas into thinking his army was at Winchester when it was in fact on the way to turn the battle's tide, he added a line that would have brought a shout of triumph to Professor Thaddeus Lowe: "The infernal balloon may interfere with such success as we had with Patterson."

Meanwhile, Johnston was also in a letter battle with Richmond over orders issued by Secretary of War Judah P. Benjamin that he immediately create two brigades of only Mississippi troops, which Johnston scornfully refused to do in several hundred words, especially because two of his Mississippi regiments were with Whiting.

The forces as now arranged are perfectly familiar with their respective positions, officers and men have become accustomed to each other, are acquainted with the nature of the ground they occupy, &c. The execution of Orders No 252 would work a complete revolution in the organization of the army, and necessitate a change of position of all the regiments from Leesburg to Dumfries, and from this position to Dumfries and Leesburg. Should the enemy attack us whilst these changes of station are in process, an event by no means improbable, it would be almost impossible to avert disaster to our arms.

Benjamin, naturally, wrote back expressing President Jefferson Davis' "desire" that Johnston should simply send the 13th, 17th, and 18th Mississippi regiments from Leesburg (where they had been crucial at Ball's Bluff) to Whiting as reinforcements, "to whose brigade they belong". Johnston could then move any other brigade to take their place at Leesburg, never mind that the last major troop movement at Leesburg had prompted a battle.

Division Of This Army

Wherein Dumfries is of strategic importance

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With winter coming, General Joe Johnston, commanding the Department of Northern Virginia from his headquarters at Centreville, had two priorities: first, was to provide clothing, food, and dwellings for his men so they could survive the coming winter; second, was to make sure their defensive position was strong enough to defend against an attack by the Northern forces venturing further and further out from their defenses. Neither priority was close to being accomplished, but today we'll focus on defense.

By fiat from Richmond, Johnston's unified command had become three parts. His left-most flank was the Valley District, commanded by Maj. General Thomas Jackson, who people had taken to calling "Stonewall." Jackson, who Johnston had come to rely upon in their pre-Manassas days in the Shenandoah Valley and who he had high hopes for as a division commander, left the Army of the Potomac the first week of July to take over the rowdy militia of the Valley. Not surprisingly, a few days later his old brigade followed him, depriving Johnston of one of his best units. Richmond had also sent Jackson two brigades from across the Alleghenies along with their division commander William Loring, underscoring the importance of the Valley.

On his right-most flank was the second carve-out from Johnston's command, the Aquia District under Maj. General Theophilus Holmes. Stretching from Powell's Creek [Lake Montclair] to the Potomac to the Rappahannock, the district had resulted from the desire to keep Holmes in an important position. But it meant that Johnston's right-wing was effectively an independent force from his main body, the Army of the Potomac. Richmond intended that army to be the District of the Potomac, commanded by General G.T. Beauregard, but Johnston intended to command that army himself in battle, and had long-ago agreed to Beauregard's preference that he command the army's First Corps, with the Second led by Maj. General G.W. Smith.

All this mattered especially in the beginning of the third week of November because the Confederates had become well-aware that the Union Army of the Potomac had moved a division of soldiers opposite the Aquia District's batteries at Evansport [Quantico]. Though Holmes had known about the movement for several days already, it was a subordinate of G.W. Smith's who touched off the powder keg on November 16.