Captains of the Civil War: A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray. William Wood
of all the men who joined its forces during the war reached two millions and three-quarters. But this gives a quite misleading idea of the real odds in favor of the North, especially the odds available in battle. A third of the Northern people belonged to the peace party and furnished no recruits at all till after conscription came in. The late introduction of conscription, the abominable substitution clause, and the prevalence of bounty-jumping combined to reduce both the quantity and quality of the recruits obtained by money or compulsion. The Northerners that did fight were generally fighting in the South, among a very hostile population, which, while it made the Southern lines of communication perfectly safe, threatened those of the North at every point and thus obliged the Northern armies to leave more and more men behind to guard the communications that each advance made longer still. Finally, the South generally published the numbers of only its actual combatants, while the Northern returns always included every man drawing pay, whether a combatant or not. On the whole, the North had more than double numbers, even if compared with a Southern total that includes noncombatants. But it should be remembered that a Northern army fighting in the heart of the South, and therefore having to guard every mile of the way back home, could not meet a Southern one with equal strength in battle unless it had left the North with fully twice as many.
Conscription came a year later (1863) in the North than in the South and was vitiated by a substitution clause. The fact that a man could buy himself out of danger made some patriots call it "a rich man's war and a poor man's fight." And the further fact that substitutes generally became regular bounty-jumpers, who joined and deserted at will, over and over again, went far to increase the disgust of those who really served. Frank Wilkeson's Recollections of a Private Soldier in the Army of the Potomac is a true voice from the ranks when he explains "how the resort to volunteering, the unprincipled dodge of cowardly politicians, ground up the choicest seed-corn of the nation; how it consumed the young, the patriotic, the intelligent, the generous, and the brave; and how it wasted the best moral, social, and political elements of the Republic, leaving the cowards, shirkers, egotists, and moneymakers to stay at home and procreate their kind."
That is to say, it was so arranged that the foxy-witted lived, while the lion-hearted died.
The organization of the vast numbers enrolled was excellent whenever experts were given a free hand. But this free hand was rare. One vital point only needs special notice here: the wastefulness of raising new regiments when the old ones were withering away for want of reinforcements. A new local regiment made a better "story" in the press; and new and superfluous regiments meant new and superfluous colonels, mostly of the speechifying kind. So it often happened that the State authorities felt obliged to humor zealots set on raising those brand-new regiments which doubled their own difficulties by having to learn their lesson alone, halved the efficiency of the old regiments they should have reinforced, and harassed the commanders and staff by increasing the number of units that were of different and ever-changing efficiency and strength. It was a system of making and breaking all through.
The end came when Northern sea-power had strangled the Southern resources and the unified Northern armies had worn out the fighting force. Of the single million soldiers raised by the South only two hundred thousand remained in arms, half starved, half clad, with the scantiest of munitions, and without reserves of any kind. Meanwhile the Northern hosts had risen to a million in the field, well fed, well clothed, well armed, abundantly provided with munitions, and at last well disciplined under the unified command of that great leader, Grant. Moreover, behind this million stood another million fit to bear arms and obtainable at will from the two millions of enrolled reserves.
The cost of the war was stupendous. But the losses of war are not to be measured in money. The real loss was the loss of a million men, on both sides put together, for these men who died were of the nation's best.
CHAPTER III
THE NAVAL WAR: 1862
Bull Run had riveted attention on the land between the opposing capitals and on the armies fighting there. Very few people were thinking of the navies and the sea. And yet it was at sea, and not on land, that the Union had a force against which the Confederates could never prevail, a force which gradually cut them off from the whole world's base of war supplies, a force which enabled the Union armies to get and keep the strangle-hold which did the South to death.
The blockade declared in April was no empty threat. The sails of Federal frigates, still more the sinister black hulls of the new steam men-of-war, meant that the South was fast becoming a land besieged, with every outwork accessible by water exposed to sudden attack and almost certain capture by any good amphibious force of soldiers and sailors combined.
Sea-power kept the North in affluence while it starved the South. Sea-power held Maryland in its relentless grip and did more than land-power to keep her in the Union. Sea-power was the chief factor in saving Washington. Seapower enabled the North to hold such points of vantage as Fortress Monroe right on the flank of the South. And sea-power likewise enabled the North to take or retake other points of similar importance: for instance, Hatteras Island.
In a couple of days at the end of August, 1861, the Confederate forts at Hatteras Inlet, North Carolina, were compelled to surrender to a joint naval and military expedition under Flag-Officer Stringham and Major-General B. F. Butler. The immediate result, besides the capture of seven hundred men, was the control of the best entrance to North Carolina waters, which entailed the stoppage of many oversea supplies for the Confederate army. The ulterior result was the securing of a base from which a further invasion could be made with great advantage.
The naval campaign of the following year was truly epoch-making; for the duel between the Monitor and Merrimac in Hampton Roads on March 9, 1862, was the first action ever fought between ironclad steam men-of-war.
Eleven months earlier the Federal Government had suddenly abandoned the Norfolk Navy Yard; though their strongest garrison was at Fortress Monroe, only twelve miles north along a waterway which was under the absolute control of their navy, and though the Confederates' had nothing but an inadequate little untrained force on the spot. Among the spoils of war falling into Confederate hands were twelve hundred guns and the Merrimac, a forty-gun steam frigate. The Merrimac, though fired and scuttled by the Federals, was hove up, cut down, plated over, and renamed the Virginia. (History, however, knows her only as the Merrimac.) John L. Porter, Naval Constructor to the Confederate States, had made a model of an ironclad at Pittsburgh fifteen years before; and he now applied this model to the rebuilding of the Merrimac. He first cut down everything above the water line, except the gun deck, which he converted into a regular citadel with flat top, sides sloping at thirty-five degrees, and ends stopping short of the ship's own ends by seventy feet fore and aft. The effect, therefore, was that of an ironclad citadel built on the midships of a submerged frigate's hull. The four-inch iron plating of the citadel knuckled over the wooden sides two feet under water. The engines, which the South had no means of replacing, were the old ones which had been condemned before being sunk. A four-foot castiron ram was clamped on to the bow. Ten guns were mounted: six nine-inch smooth-bores, with two six-inch and two seven-inch rifles. Commodore Franklin Buchanan took command and had magnificent professional officers under him. But the crew, three hundred strong, were mostly landsmen; for, as in the case of the Army, the men of the Navy nearly all took sides with the North, and the South had very few seamen of any other kind.
To oppose the Merrimac the dilatory North contracted with John Ericsson the Swede, who had to build the Monitor much smaller than the Merrimac owing to pressure of time. He enjoyed, however, enormous advantages in every other respect, owing to the vastly superior resources of the North in marine engineering, armor-plating, and all other points of naval construction. The Monitor was launched at New York on January 30, 1862, the hundredth day after the laying of her keel-plate. Her length over all was 172 feet, her beam was 41, and her draught only 10—less than half the draught of the Merrimac. Her whole crew numbered only 58; but every single one was a trained professional naval seaman who had volunteered for dangerous service under