- 07 Sep 2021 13:59
#15189153
September 8, Tuesday
No state or territory in the trans-Mississippi West—and few places in all the divided nation—suffers more during the war than Louisiana. First came the fighting for New Orleans. Then the rich sugar- and cotton-growing parishes opposite Baton Rouge, Port Hudson, and Vicksburg were laid prostrate during the long, bitter struggle for control of the Mississippi. Nor did the devastation cease in July when the Federals under Ulysses S. Grant finally took Vicksburg and Port Hudson was surrendered, clearing the Mississippi. Soon other Union armies will be marching and countermarching through Louisiana, inflicting damage both near the Mississippi and in the state’s western uplands.
The main cause of this renewed fighting is an obsession in faraway Washington, D.C., with the Confederate-controlled flatlands of east Texas. Still a wild and mostly empty area, east Texas nevertheless possesses economic and strategic importance. The region looms large in the eyes of President Lincoln and his advisers for several reasons, some of them barely pertinent to the war effort. One is intense political pressure from the mill owners of New England, whose looms have been idle for lack of Southern cotton almost since the conflict began. Their clamor for military action to wrest coastal Texas cotton fields from the Confederates will reach a crescendo as the election year of 1864 approaches. A second irritant is the Confederate arms traffic across the Rio Grande from Mexico into East Texas. Foreign ships tying up at Bagdad, a Mexican port immune to the US Navy’s blockade, are busily trading Enfield rifles and other war supplies for bales of Texas cotton, needed by the spinning mills of Europe. This traffic can be choked off only by gaining control of the Rio Grande crossing points. But most important in Lincoln’s view is what appears to be a dangerous threat from a foreign power. The invasion of Mexico by Emperor Napoleon III of France is a growing concern. Putting a Federal army in Texas will help discourage any French move to aid the Confederacy—or to annex Louisiana and portions of the southwest.
For these and others, President Lincoln and his chief military advisor in Washington, Major General Henry Halleck, have begun bombarding the Federal commander in New Orleans with orders to concentrate the troops in his Department of the Gulf and move against Texas. The officer entrusted with this task is Nathaniel P. Banks. A political general who received his rank solely because before the war he had been Speaker of the US House of Representatives and a three-term Republican governor of Massachusetts, he looks the model of a major general in tailored uniforms set off by gleaming boots. He is an honest, energetic officer, but he hasn’t always fared well on the battlefield. During the Shenandoah Valley fighting last year he was soundly drubbed by Stonewall Jackson, losing so many supply wagons that Jackson’s hungry troops, feasting on the captured Federal stores, nicknamed their unwilling benefactor “Commissary Banks.” Shifted to New Orleans, Banks commanded the Federal attack on Port Hudson, and although his campaign was marred by mistakes, the eventual capture of the Confederate stronghold has restored some luster to his reputation.
Banks views General Halleck’s orders to invade Texas with distates. He agrees with General Grant, currently still the Federal commander of the Mississippi region, that a move in the other direction, toward Mobile, Alabama, will do more damage to the Confederacy. And he shudders at Halleck’s suggestion that the invasion proceed up the Red River from the already ruined parishes north of Port Hudson to Shreveport, in Louisiana’s northwest corner. Plainly a difficult undertaking, it might prove a failure and ruin forever Banks’s hopes of someday being elected President. So he casts about for other, less risky ways to move a Federal force into Texas. His first solution is to attack Sabine Pass at the mouth of the Sabine River, which forms the Louisiana-Texas border. From there, he thinks, his troops can move down the Texas coast and capture Galveston, then take Houston and Beaumont as well.
Loading 5,000 men on 22 transports, Banks sends them off under the command of Major General William B. Franklin. A veteran of the Army of the Potomac, Franklin has been in disfavor since his poor performance at Fredericksburg and has only recently been assigned to Banks. Escorting the transports are four gunboats under a young Navy lieutenant named Frederick Crocker. It seems like a mismatch when the Federal flotilla arrives off the bar at Sabine Pass. There is only a single company of 47 Texas artillerymen, under Lieutenant Dick Dowling, manning a small, partly finished Confederate fort, ashore at the pass. A few other troops and two ineffective cotton-clad gunboats, all that General John Bankhead Magruder can afford, comprise the rest of the extremely weak defense force. The Union gunboats open up on the fort and Dowling replies. Both lead Union gunboats are struck, grounded, and forced to surrender, with considerable loss. The other two withdraw, along with the troop transports, only after difficulty, and sail ignominiously back to New Orleans. It is a humiliating Federal failure and tremendous morale booster to western Confederates. Magruder is sure there will be more attempts; Banks is mortified at the failure of Franklin and his combined force. However, the legend that will grow up about the conflict outweighs its military significance.
At Charleston, with Fort Wagner and Battery Gregg in Union hands, Admiral Dahlgren now lays plans to capture the ruined Fort Sumter. Occupying it once and for all would prevent the Confederates from remounting guns there. And running up the Stars and Stripes at this bastion of Southern resistance would provide a tremendous morale boost for the North—soldier and civilian alike. General Gillmore is planning a separate assault using Army troops. Coordination between the services has, for the time being, collapsed. The Navy’s operation gets underway first. Dahlgren has been cheered by reports indicating that Fort Sumter’s garrison is insignificant and that only token resistance can be expected. Such is his confidence that when Commander Thomas Stevens, chosen to lead the assault, protests that it is too rsky, the admiral replies, “You have only to go in and take possession. You will find nothing but a corporal’s guard.”
The Confederate artillerymen at Fort Sumter have been withdrawn and replaced by about 320 infantrymen, under Major Stephen Elliot Jr. To Beauregard, the bastion is still vital to Charleston’s defenses. In his orders to Elliot, he writes, “You are to be sent to a fort deprived of all offensive capacity, and having but one gun—a 32-pounder—with which to salute the flag. But that fort is Fort Sumter, the key to the entrance of this harbor. It must be held to the bitter end, not with artillery, but with infantry alone; and there can be no hope of reinforcements.” As a prelude to the landing, Dahlgren calls for the fort’s immediate surrender, an ultimatum peremptorily refused by Beauregard. He replies, “Inform Admiral Dahlgren that he may have Fort Sumter when he can take it and hold it.”
This night, a volunteer force of 500 sailors and Marines embark from Federal warships in small boats for Fort Sumter. The party is still well offshore when Confederate sentinels at the ruins spot the boats and spread the alarm. Shore batteries on James Island and Sullivan’s Island open up on the invaders, as does the Confederate ram Chicora, while infantry hidden in the rubble maintain a steady musket fire on the approaching boats. Those men who manage to land are swiftly cut down or captured. Stevens orders a withdrawal, but five of his boats are seized. All told, the Navy loses 124 men to this “corporal’s guard.” Gillmore, whose own operation has been delayed, hastily cancels the entire operation when he learns of the Navy’s fiasco.
For Dahlgren, a quandry remains. He can try to push his ironclads past Fort Sumter and the still-dangerous Confederate batteries on Sullivan’s and James Islands to put the city under his guns. But to do so involves risks that the admiral is quite unwilling to take. Suppose a shot from an island battery were to disable one of his ironclads, leading to its capture? Once repaired by the Confederates, the ship would certainly be employed in their behalf to play havoc with the wooden vessels on blockade duty. Although the admiral offers to go in and try again if Secretary Welles will send him three more monitors, the government decides the hazards are no longer worth the prize. In the aftermath of Federal victories elsewhere, at Vicksburg and Gettysburg, Washington realizes that Charleston’s capture is no longer of the first importance. Dahlgren must be relieved. After weeks of fighting, he is physically and mentally exhausted. Confinement aboard an iron ship in the sweltering Carolina heat has taken its toll. Seasickness, frustration, and a sense of failure gnaw at him. “The worst of this place is that one only stops getting weaker. One does not get stronger,” he notes in his journal. “My debility increases, so that today it is an exertion to sit in a chair. I do not see well. How strange—no pain, but so feeble. It seems like gliding away to death. How easy it seems! Why not, to one whose race is run?”
Other fighting occurs at Winston’s Gap, Alabama, and Alpine, Georgia, in what will become the Chickamauga Campaign, and in east Tennessee at Limestone Station and Telford’s Station. Skirmishing breaks out at Brandy Station, Virginia, once more; at Beech Fork in Calhoun County and at Sutton, West Virginia; on the Atchafalaya, Louisiana; and in the Chiricahua Mountains, Arizona Territory.
President Davis tells Lee of the increasing threats to Bragg and that he has considered sending Lee west, but fears the effect of Lee’s absence from Virginia.
Confederate Attorney General Thomas H. Watts resigns, having been elected governor of Alabama in August. He is succeeded as interim General by Wade Keyes.
Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.
—Edmund Burke