A Military Genius Part 10

In an extract from the London _Times_, brought to the notice of the Senate by Mr. Howe, the command of the waters of the southwest is pointed out as the essential matter, and it is stated by Mr. Grimes that "the British Government has sent over into all the British colonies of North America some thirty thousand men."

[London _Times_, September 27, 1861.]

"Whatever may be the a.s.sertions of the Northerners, they must look upon the permanent separation of the Southern States and the formation of a second republic as at least highly probable, and in the action of England and France toward Mexico Mr. Lincoln, perhaps, only sees an intervention in the affairs of a country which is soon to be divided from his own by the territory of a rival. * * It is said the three European powers have taken advantage of the dissensions of the American Union to carry out plans upon a violation of the Monroe doctrine."

[London _Shipping Gazette_, February 1, 1862.]

"A semi-official note is sent by Napoleon to the British Government respecting the blockade, to the effect that the Emperor cannot longer allow French commerce to be injured."

DIPLOMATIC CORRESPONDENCE--CLAY[22] TO SEWARD.

_Jan. 24, 1862._

"Prince Gortchakoff expresses his fears should any reverse happen to us that England would at once make common cause with the South, acknowledge her independence, and finally break down the power of the Republic. I must confess I very much fear England's influence. My first impression is not weakened, but rather strengthened. Nothing but great and decisive success will save us from foreign war. I would prepare for war with England as an essential means to prevent the independence of the South before the first of April."

[Footnote 22: Ca.s.sius M. Clay, Minister to St.

Petersburg during the Civil War, has been from first to last one of Miss Carroll's warm supporters. He says, "Be that as it may, your case stands out unique, for you towered above all our generals in military genius, and it would be a shame upon our country if you were not honored with the grat.i.tude of all and solid pecuniary reward."

(See p. 132 of batch of memorials.)]

SEWARD TO DAYTON.

_Jan. 27, 1862._

* * * "You see our army and our fleet are at Cairo. You see another army and another fleet are behind Columbus, which alone is relied upon to close the Mississippi against us on the north. Though you may not see it, another army and another fleet are actually on their way to New Orleans."

At this time of intense anxiety it was suggested to Miss Carroll by the War Department that she should go West and endeavor to form an opinion as to the probable result of the proposed descent of the Mississippi by the gunboats, upon the success of which the continuance of the Union depended. Accordingly she went to St. Louis, and remaining for a month or more at the Everett House, in that city, by means of maps and charts procured from the Mercantile Library she made careful study of the topography of the proposed line of advance. She became convinced that this intended expedition would result in disaster, and that the Tennessee river, not the Mississippi, would be the true pathway to success.

Again we will turn to Miss Carroll's able account in the Congressional Records of the military position at that time.

"It became evident, in the autumn of 1861, that if the unity of the United States could be maintained by military force, the decisive blow upon the Confederate power must be delivered within sixty or ninety days. To that period the tide of battle had been steadily against the Union, and the military operations had not met the expectations of the country. Nothing is more certain than that this rebel power was able to resist all the power of the Union upon any of the lines of operation known to the Administration; for operating on any safe base, on any of these known lines, the Union armies were not numerically strong enough to reach the vital point in the Confederate power. The enemy were in strong force on a line extending from the Potomac, westward through Bowling Green, to Columbus, on the Mississippi, and was complete master of all the territory to the Gulf. Kentucky and Missouri had been admitted formally into the Confederacy, and they had resolved to move the Capital to Nashville and extend their battle lines to the northern limits of those States, and the Secretary of War, after a tour of inspection, reported that these States had not sufficient force to hold them to the Union.

The war had then been waged seven months, and between 700,000 and 800,000 men had been mustered in the field; the public debt aggregated over $500,000,000; and the daily average expenses of maintaining the army was upward of $2,000,000, besides the hundreds of precious lives which were being daily sacrificed.

Thus, while the two armies were confronting each other in sight of Washington, events were rapidly pressing in the Southwest which, if unchecked, would change the destiny of the American people for ages to come.

Thus, in that ominous silence which preceded the shock and storm, the two sections stood, each watching and awaiting the movements of the other. Both were confident; the South greatly strengthened from her successes and impregnable position; the North strong in its large excess of numbers, wealth, and the justice of its cause.

The Army of the Potomac and the Army of the West were the two expeditions on which the Administration relied.

All others were auxiliary to these great movements. The first named, though seeming to the country of such signal moment, occupied a position of comparative insignificance when contrasted with the army of the Southwest, and had chance thrown Richmond under national control at an earlier day it could not have materially affected the destiny of the war. Capitals in an insurgent and unrecognized power can have but very little strategic value, and from the geographical position of Richmond it had none at all, and they were ready to move it any day.

They could have surrendered all the Atlantic States to Florida and yet maintained their independence; indeed, it was upon this theory that the disunion party had ever based its expectations of separate and independent nationality. Could the Confederates have held their power over the Mississippi Valley but a few more months they would have so connected themselves with France through Texas and with England through the States of the great northwest as not only to have made good their own independence but to have dwarfed the United States to the area of their old thirteen and taken the lead as the controlling political power on this continent.

With the Mississippi in their possession to the mouth of the Ohio, the presence of the English and French fleets at New Orleans would have brought about that result.

The Army of the Potomac, after having been put upon a scale of the rarest magnificence consistent with mobility, and with several changes of commanders, took three years and a half to reach Richmond, and was not then half way to a decisive point, and never would have been strong enough had the expedition to open the Mississippi been executed on the plan as originally devised.

Strategically an invasion always leads to deep lines of operations which, on account of the difficulty of maintaining communications with its base, are always dangerous in a hostile country, and every mile the national armies advanced, every victory they gained, carried them farther from their base, and required an increase of force to protect their communications; while every retreat of the enemy brought him nearer to his resources, and it is mathematically certain that he would soon have reached the point on that line where he would have been the superior power. Nothing but the results of the Tennessee campaign prevented Lee from recruiting his army and extorted from him his sword at Appomatox Court-House.

The Mississippi expedition was designed by the aid of the one from the Gulf to clear the river to the mouth, etc. Could it succeed? Could it open the Mississippi to its mouth? These momentous questions and the military delay were weakening the confidence of the people and confirming foreign powers in the belief that the Government had neither the strength nor the ability to conquer the rebellion. And even could the expedition have opened the river, was there any point on that river where a decisive blow could have been dealt the Confederacy? The Memphis and Charleston railroad, the only complete interior line of communication, would not necessarily have been touched. So long as the Confederacy could maintain its interior lines of communication complete, the United States could neither destroy its armies in the east nor open the Mississippi river. The National Government could only escape annihilation by reaching the center of the Confederate power and striking a fatal blow upon its resources.

Geographically, there was but one mode of attack by which this could be accomplished, and this was unthought of or unknown to all connected with the prosecution of the war.

Mr. Lincoln saw from the beginning the vital importance of regaining the Mississippi and controlling the resources of its great valley, and therefore reserved to himself the direction of this expedition as Commander-in-chief. He was fully alive to the perils that now environed the Government, and he and his advisers looked imploringly to the army for relief as the agency absolutely essential to the nation's life. This and this only could strike the blow that must then be struck, if ever.

No display of military genius could have extorted from Lee his sword so long as his resources were unwasted. No valor on the part of our navies and armies could have opened the Mississippi so long as the Confederates could keep open the lines of communication. The Memphis and Charleston railroad was their only complete bond of connection between their armies of the east and the armies of the Mississippi Valley. There was but one avenue by which this bond could be reached and effectually severed, and that was the Tennessee river. The people had responded grandly; their uprising in behalf of their endangered Government had astonished the world. It now remained for the army to supplement by its valor in the field what the Administration and the people had done at home.

Never was the stress and strain of a nation more severe; never when another defeat would have been so perilous and a victory so desirable as then. So long as the Confederates were undisturbed in the possession of the southwest, and men and munitions of war sent uninterruptedly to the east, the Army of the Potomac could not advance. Something had to be done to cripple or engage the rebel armies in that section.

As the weary months of October and November wore away, the darkness grew more and more intense and the anxiety more oppressive. A blow had to be inflicted quickly that would be sharp and mortal, to ward off intervention and invasion by European powers, to smother the spirit of secession in southern Illinois and Indiana, and to prevent financial bankruptcy, which of itself must destroy the nation.

And yet neither Mr. Lincoln nor his generals knew or had in mind any plan other than that of forcing a pa.s.sage down the Mississippi, bristling with batteries that frowned from its bluffs, while swamps and bayous skirted and pierced its banks, affording defenses in the rear little less formidable and forbidding.

And thus the nation stood as in the hush that precedes the storm or the crash of battle, apprehending not so much any particular movement of the Confederate armies as the threatening elements generally with which the air seemed surcharged, and knowing not how or when or where the blow would fall. Military success was of all things most desired; military delay of all things most dreaded. With the South to stand still was their strength; time was power, and every day's delay increased the thickening dangers that were closing around the Union cause. With the North not to advance was to recede; not to destroy was to be destroyed. The exigencies of the situation made it imperative that the decisive blow should be struck thus early in the war. How to make that advance and deliver that fatal blow was the great problem to be solved. Omniscience only was then able to know whether the last sun had set to rise no more on the Union of these States. The country was clamorous for military successes, but not half so troubled as was Mr.

Lincoln and his advisers, for the people did not know, as they did, how much depended thereon; how the beam trembled in the balance and what irremediable evils were involved in delay.

Congress met; the Committee on the Conduct of the War was at once created. How great were the dangers which at that supreme moment made the continued existence of the Government a question of doubt, and the fact that the military successes in the West which followed were not achieved a day too soon is made evident by the speeches of many of the most distinguished statesmen of that period, in both houses of Congress, some of them occupying positions on the most important committees connected with the prosecution of the war and necessarily possessed of the most reliable information. The utterances in the halls of Congress sustain every fact as here described."

In this same Congressional doc.u.ment of 1878 Miss Carroll thus describes her inception of the plan of the Tennessee campaign:

"In the autumn of 1861 my attention was arrested by the confidence expressed by Southern sympathizers in the southwest, that the Mississippi could not be opened before the recognition of Southern independence. I determined to inform myself what the pilots thought of the gunboat expedition then preparing to descend the river. On inquiry I was directed to Mrs. Scott, then in the hotel, whose husband was a pilot, and learned from her that he was then with the expedition that had moved against Belmont; and the important facts she gave me increased my wish to see Mr. Scott. On his arrival in St. Louis I sent for him. He said that it was his opinion, and that of all the pilots on these waters, that the Mississippi could not be opened by the gunboats. I inquired as to the navigability of the c.u.mberland and the Tennessee. He said at favorable stages of water the gunboats could go up the former as high Nashville, and the latter, at all stages, as high as the Muscle Shoals in Alabama. The moment he said the Tennessee was navigable for gunboats the thought flashed upon me that the strongholds of the enemy might be turned at once by diverting the expedition in course of preparation to open the Mississippi up the Tennessee; and having had frequent conversations with Judge Evans on the military situation, I left the room to communicate this thought--as he had just then called at the hotel--and asked him if it would not have that effect. He concurred that it would, and that it was the move if it was a fact that the Tennessee afforded the navigation; and he accompanied me to interrogate Mr. Scott, to be satisfied as to the feasibility of the Tennessee. The interview was prolonged some time. At the close I told Mr. Scott it was my purpose to try and induce the Government to divert the Mississippi expedition up the Tennessee, and asked him to give me a memorandum of the most important facts elicited in the conversation, as I wished them for this object. I further stated my intention to pen the history of the war, and requested him to write from time to time all the valuable information he might be able, and I would remember him in my work. The same day I wrote again to a.s.sistant Secretary of War Thomas A.

Scott,[23] to whom I had promised to communicate the result of my observations while in the West, and also to Attorney General Bates; to both of whom I urged the importance of a change of campaign."

[Footnote 23: Thomas A. Scott was the great railroad magnate, was a.s.sistant Secretary of War when Stanton was Secretary, and was sent by Stanton to inaugurate the Tennessee campaign which saved the Union.]

A letter from Judge Evans, who chanced to be in St. Louis on other business, at the time gives a precisely similar account of this interview with the pilot, and the ideas then suggested by Miss Carroll uttered, as he relates, "in a very earnest and animated manner!"

Even though it involves some repet.i.tion, we will here give also an account written by Miss Carroll in the winter of 1889. It will possess an especial interest, as it may be the last literary exertion that the invalid auth.o.r.ess will ever be asked to make.

It was called forth by a wish expressed by a leading magazine to have a fresh account written directly by Miss Carroll. With fingers lamed by paralysis the following account was written, showing the clearness of Miss Carroll's memory in her seventy-fifth year.

"In the beginning of the rebellion public opinion gave the victory to the Southern cause, and no one shared in this conviction to a greater extent than President Lincoln and the War Department. The first effort made by me was in an unpretentious pamphlet, which fell into the hands of Mr. Lincoln and so pleased him (it did not appear with my name) that he suggested its adoption as a war measure, and the satisfaction it gave was so general that Governor Bates, then Attorney General, urged that I should continue to write in the interest of the Government. Fired by enthusiasm in a n.o.ble cause, I accepted the suggestion, and followed soon with what some have considered my best work, "The War Powers of the Government," and other pamphlets. About this time I had thought of visiting St. Louis, and mentioned my intention to Col. Thomas A. Scott, a.s.sistant Secretary of War. He urged me to go, asking me to write him fully of every point and fact investigated. These facts I communicated as requested, both to him and to Governor Bates.

The clouds were dark and lowering. Despair had well nigh possession of the bravest hearts. After my arrival I soon saw and felt that the sentiment of the West was decidedly against the Union, or rather in favor of the Southern cause.

I visited the various encampments en route and in St. Louis and found but little difference among leading minds as to the result antic.i.p.ated. All in a measure believed the struggle useless.

Finding the sentiment prevalent that the Union must fall and feeling in my soul that it _must not_ fall, I began revolving an escape from the threatened doom. Just then, while I was in St. Louis, the battle of Belmont was fought. When I saw the dead and dying as they lay upon that field and witnessed the sad sight of the ambulance wagons bearing the wounded to the hospitals, my heart sank within me. The future of the war with these awful scenes repeated was a picture not to be endured, and my anxiety as to the result grew still more intense.