Today in the Civil War. (generals, Washington, Lincoln, state)
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Another attempt to capture the Weldon railroad 150 years ago today. The same two Union Corps, those of Generals Birney and Wright, would be involved. The plan was for Birney to attack and retake the ground lost in yesterday's repulse. Wright was to send a detachment on an end around to start wrecking the railroad. When that action drew a response from General Hill's men, the rest of Wright's Corps would attack.
Birney's troops surged forward with a yell only to discover no opposition. The rebels had evacuated their forward position during the night and were safely behind a new line. Birney, having fulfilled his instructions to retake the lost ground, took no initiative beyond that.
On Wright's front, a Vermont brigade reached the railroad and had managed to wreck about a half mile worth of track when they were set upon by Hill's men. Those not captured, scattered. With Birney's Corps to their right sitting out the fight, Wright concluded that an assault would be futile and he refused to send his men forward, infuriating General Meade.
Part of Wright's conclusions were well grounded. More and more the Union troops were showing reluctance for attacking trenches. Since the slaughters at Spotsylvania and Cold Harbor, the boys in blue were frequently doing only the minimum required... Advancing until coming under fire, then going to ground and refusing all pleas for further forward movement. The attacks around the Jerusalem Plank Road had reflected this lack of spirit and Wright did not believe that sending them forward once more was going to accomplish anything other than inflating the casualty lists.
This ended the phase of the fight known as the Battle of Jerusalem Plank Road. The results were that the Weldon railroad would remain in operation and continue to supply General Lee's army through the remainder of the year. To the Federal's benefit the siege lines had been extended further to the SW, a strategy General Grant would continue to employ throughout the rest of the campaign.
While Grant would launch a large scale cavalry raid behind Lee's lines, the infantry fighting at Petersburg was over save for siege operations for the next five weeks. The scene of the action was about to shift to the Valley where General Early was hoping to become the neo Stonewall.
With the Jerusalem Plank Road battle casualties added to the lists, Grant's campaign had now cost a staggering 74,000 men, more than were in Lee's army when the operations opened in the Wilderness. Lee had lost nearly 40,000 in stopping Grant. The American continent had never seen war on this scale before.
The South could not prevail in a war of attrition, and it could not indefinitely endure a siege. Despite the huge losses, Grant had imposed both of these forms of warfare upon Lee. The Army of Northern Virginia was fixed in place. Lee could not leave while Richmond was threatened, and he lacked the strength to attack and drive the besiegers away.
The war was coming down to a question of endurance. Which would last the longest? The South's ability to withstand a siege, or the North's ability to absorb the casualties? The time frame was known, it was from now until election day in November. That was when Northerners would be voting for president in what would amount to a referendum on the war.
The question would be answered, but not in the Petersburg theater. Rather the issue would be settled in the west and the Valley.
Despite the failure to cut the Weldon railroad to the south, General Grant was determined to remain active against all rebel supply lines. To that end, on the 22nd Generals James Wilson and August Kraust were dispatched around the Confederate left flank with 5000 cavalry, their mission to strike and destroy the Richmond and Danville railroad which was the major east/west supply artery for Lee's army.
Although the movement was detected right away and General Fitzhugh Lee was sent in pursuit with the rebel cavalry, the Federals managed to rip up nearly 60 miles of railway while advancing on the Roanoke Station by the Staunton River. There, 150 years ago today, the Confederates used a ruse to badly fool Wilson and Kraust, and preventing Roanoke Station from being wrecked by the Union troopers.
The rebels piled the few troops which they did have in the area (mostly the too old, the too young, those recuperating from wounds and whatever local militia could be assembled) onto a single train, but then ran that train around in a circle so that it appeared to Federal eyes that train after train was arriving with reinforcements. In addition, local plantation owners had been alerted and told to misinform the Federals with regard to the Confederate strength in the area. Wilson and Kraust became convinced that ten thousand rebel troops were converging on Roanoke Station. They delayed their attack while seeking more intelligence.
There were actually just 960 men in the makeshift defensive force, but they did have a half dozen serviceable cannons which they mounted in twin earthwork bastions on either side of the road leading to the station. At 3:45 pm, Wilson and Kraust decided that they had better attack now before the enemy became even stronger. Four cavalry charges went forward and four cavalry charges were repulsed by the ad hoc army defending the station. Around sunset, as the Federals were rallying for another charge, word reached Wilson and Kraust that Fitzhugh Lee had arrived in their rear with his cavalry division. The Union commanders agreed that they had better fold operations at Roanoke. They turned around and headed back east, having sustained 116 casualties to the rebel's 44. Their major objective, the destruction of the Staunton River bridge, was not accomplished and the railway remained open after the torn up track was repaired.
Also on this day approval was given to Colonel Henry Pleasants for an unusual project he had proposed. Pleasants was the commander of the 48 Pennsylvania infantry regiment, an outfit raised in coal mining country. Pleasants was a mining engineer and most of his men had been miners before the war. The 48th was part of General Burnside's Corps and they had been posted opposite a salient in the rebel defensive line on which stood a fort. Noting that the distance between the opposing lines was shorter here than elsewhere along the extended front, Pleasants proposed to Burnside that his men be allowed to dig a tunnel underneath no man's land, expand it into a long chamber underneath the fort, fill it with gunpowder and blow an enormous gap in the Confederate lines through which the Federals might launch an attack.
Burnside bumped the idea up to General Meade who was not enthusiastic about it, but when Grant was informed, he told Meade to go ahead and permit the operation under the theory that it was better to have the troops doing active work than simply squatting in the trenches all day.
With the project green lighted, Pleasants set to work. He had a number of difficulties to overcome, the primary one being that no tunnel of the length required had ever been dug before. The reason was the vanishing ventilation the further you went into the tunnel. Some method, non existent up until then, had to be found to pump oxygen into the tunnel so that life could be supported at the distant end.
The Atlanta campaign was producing grumblings from both sides. President Davis was upset that General Johnston kept giving up ground and allowing General Sherman's army to get closer and closer to the targeted city. Davis expected Johnston to be like General Lee, to take the offensive and drive the invaders back to Tennessee. Instead Johnston had been executing a Fabian style strategy, shifting to block Sherman each time he moved.
In the North the newspapers, along with the radical Republicans, were griping that Sherman was being too gentle, maneuvering rather than assaulting, simply jumping from one stalemated position to another while not coming to grips with the enemy. Now the invaders seemed bogged down in front of the Marietta defensive line. The only clash of any significance had been on the 22nd when responding to pressure, Johnston had permitted General Hood's Corps to attack near Kolb's farm where General Hooker held the Union line. The attack had been poorly coordinated and the rough nature of the terrain had held up Hood getting into position until late in the day. The assault went forward at 5 pm and was easily repulsed, Hood losing 1500 men to just 400 for Hooker.
150 years ago today, it was Sherman's turn to respond to the behind the lines pressure. Reasoning that his troops might grow complacent if they did not experience battle conditions, Sherman decided on an attack on the rebel center at Kennesaw Mountain. Probing attacks would be made on both flanks to try and draw defenders from the center, then General Thomas would go forward with the Army of the Cumberland to hit that hopefully weakened area in the middle.
Scheduled to be launched at sunrise, delays kept Thomas from getting underway until 9 am. The assaults lasted all of an hour and forty five minutes before Sherman, on the advice of Thomas, agreed to call them off. The well entrenched and prepared rebels had beaten back the advances on all fronts, enduring 1000 casualties while inflicting 3000 on the Federals. No gains were made.
Sherman took a lesson from this and determined that he would never again launch a frontal attack against well prepared defenses. And he didn't, Kennesaw Mountain was the last time he attempted an assault of that nature. In his memoirs however, he did not express regret or admit to a mistake. He wrote that the assault had been necessary to show Johnston that he was not afraid to attack.
In strategic terms, the battle amounted to little, both armies remained in their positions, neither had suffered any sort of crippling blow. In terms of morale, the tactical victory gave the South a shot in the arm, their first triumph of any sort over Sherman since the campaign began in May.
And in case you are wondering about the connection, yes, the first commissioner of Major League baseball, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, was indeed named for this battle, as were many rebel babies at the time. Landis' father had fought for the Confederacy and been wounded in the battle. Two years later when his son was born, the fight was honored in the form of the name, albeit with a modified spelling where the second "n" was dropped.
Sherman was not discouraged by the loss, he would spend another five days on the Marietta line before once again pulling out his army and swinging around the rebel flanks.
The Battlefield...Photographed A Few Weeks After The Fight
Almost as an afterthought, 150 years ago today the US Congress finally got around to formally addressing one of the primary areas of contention which led to the war.
Passed in 1850 as part of the Great Compromise, the Fugitive Slave Act had specified that all citizens of free states were required to cooperate in the returning of fugitive slaves to their owners. Harboring a fugitive slave or assisting in their evading of the law, also became a crime.
The Great Compromise had been intended to defuse passions and antagonisms over the issue of slavery, but the Fugitive law instead managed to wind up inflaming both sides. Abolitionists had been infuriated by its passage, and when law officers attempted to enforce it, the active resistance of northerners had severely angered southerners.
The Underground Railroad network continued to assist runaways, concealing them until they could be smuggled to Canada. Communities rallied to obstruct efforts to locate the runaways, juries refused to convict anyone charged with violating the Act.
The South had gotten their law, what they had not gotten was very many slaves returned under that law.
The last enforcement of the law took place a few months before the war got underway, and of course had not been enforced at all after the commencement of armed hostilities. No one on the north was going to enforce a law on behalf of a claimant who was in rebellion against the government which had produced that law.
Because the war had rendered it moot, there had been no need to do anything about it, but 150 years ago today Congress at last formally repealed the law. President Lincoln of course was happy to sign the bill.
Poster Which Appeared All Over Boston After The Passage Of The Fugitive Slave Act...Now Why Would The South Suspect That They Might Not Be Getting Full Cooperation?
When Lyndon Johnson was elected to his own term as president in 1964, his staffers saw this as a wonderful opportunity to finally put FBI Czar J. Edgar Hoover out to pasture. Hoover was 69, past the legal retirement age, so LBJ had plenty of justification if he was so inclined.
Johnson decided not to force Hoover's retirement, telling his aids that it was "Better to have him inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in."
Although President Lincoln would never have expressed it in such crude terms, his attitude toward his Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon P. Chase, was not very different.
Chase had been one of Lincoln's main rivals for the Republican nomination in 1860, and there was every reason to believe that Chase intended to be the main rival again in 1864. Lincoln had brought Chase into his cabinet not only for Chase's very real talents as a financier, but also to keep an eye on him and limit his abilities to act independently on political matters.
While most of Lincoln's cabinet officers had come cherish and respect a man who to their surprise had turned out to be an extremely able president, the Chase/Lincoln relationship had always been more formal, with the underlying rivalry always something of a factor. The president, who more than most men looked to find the good in people, simply did not like Salmon Chase. Privately he complained that Chase was the sort who was a miserable person, and whose main goal seemed to be trying to make those around him as miserable as he.
Lincoln had a high opinion of Chase as a treasury secretary, as did Chase himself. Three different times during the administration's life Chase had become miffed and turned in his written resignation. Each time the patient president had smoothed things over and persuaded Chase to remain in his post.
150 years ago today Chase miscalculated. The issue was the appointment of a replacement for the assistant treasurer of New York. NY senator Edwin Morgan wrote to Lincoln objecting to the choice Chase had made, and the president instructed Chase to find someone else. Chase demanded a meeting to hash it out and Lincoln refused, in language less patient than was his custom. Chase decided to take offense and once more went into his melodramatic petulant mode, submitting his written resignation.
Chase seemed to have forgotten that Lincoln had already received the nomination for a second term and thus was no longer worried about having to keep an eye on Chase. To Chase's shock, Lincoln accepted the resignation, writing:
Quote:
To Salmon P. Chase
Hon. Salmon P. Chase Executive Mansion,
My dear Sir. Washington, June 30, 1864.
Your resignation of the office of Secretary of the Treasury, sent me yesterday, is accepted. Of all I have said in commendation of your ability and fidelity, I have nothing to unsay; and yet you and I have reached a point of mutual embarrassment in our official relation which it seems can not be overcome, or longer sustained, consistently with the public service. Your Obt. Servt. A. LINCOLN
William Pitt Fessenden, Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee was chosen to replace Chase.
Chase would only be on the mortification bench for a half year. In December Lincoln would appoint him as the new Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court. In that capacity in 1869, Chase would issue the only legal ruling on the question of secession. To no one's surprise, Chase held it to be unconstitutional, although by this point it was a moot question.
In lengthy mine shafts during peacetime, the solution to providing air for the miners would be to dig a series of vertical ventilation shafts. That was not an option for Colonel Henry Pleasants and his Pennsylvania miners turned soldiers. The rebels were not going to passively spectate while Union engineers wandered out into no man's land to dig the needed shafts, and of course it would have given away the whole game if they had tried.
At best they could have one ventilation shaft, dug behind their own lines. The finished tunnels was going to be over 500 feet in length and the air from a shaft near the entrance would not sustain miners beyond the first few hundred feet.
Pleasants came up with an ingenious solution. A historical marker sits today at the sight where the ventilation shaft rose above ground, and the plaque beside it explains how the problem was solved.
Quote:
One hundred feet into the mine, Pleasants’s men dug a vertical ventilation shaft - the remains of which are in front of you. They then placed an airtight canvas door across the mine opening and ran a wooden duct the length of the mine to the forward end of the chamber. The fire that burned continuously at the ventilation shaft drew stale air out of the mine; fresh air was drawn through the duct to the men working at the head of the tunnel.
The air-tight partition (1) ensured that the fire (2) would draw air from the interior of the tunnel (3), thus drawing the stale air away from the workers.
Fresh air drawn through the wooden duct (4) replaced the stale drawn out of the mine by the fire at the ventilation shaft.
I've been to that marker. It's really amazing to see what these guys had undertaken almost literally right below the noses of the enemy. Those Pennsylvania miners had plenty of nerve.
I won't play spoiler and say how the operation turned out, but I'm looking forward to reading the account.
Having failed with his frontal assault at Kennesaw Mountain, 150 years ago today General Sherman returned to the tactics which had been successful so far. Abandoning the Marietta line, Sherman swung his cavalry and the Army of the Tennessee around General Johnston's left flank.
With the advantage of height on Kennesaw Mountain, the rebels were able to detect this latest flanking march right away. Unsurprisingly, Johnston reacted by pulling his army off the mountain and force marching it across the Chattahoochee River where he formed a new defensive position, complete with the sorts of trenches and obstructions which Sherman had now vowed to no longer attack directly.
Johnston was not aware of it at the time, but he was on a very short string with his commander in chief, President Davis. The rebel leader was rapidly exhausting his patience with Johnston, a man he personally detested anyway. The latest retrograde movement, Davis determined, would be Johnston's last. If he could not hold the Chattahoochie line, if he could not launch an attack to drive Sherman back, then Davis resolved to sack him in favor of a more aggressive general.
Who might that more aggressive general be? Throughout the campaign, General Hood had been in continuous private correspondence with Davis, offering his assessment of Johnston's decisions. It should represent no surprise that Hood severely disapproved of nearly all of Johnston's decisions, insisting that in every circumstance they should have attacked rather than retreated.
With General Lee's army fixed in place at Petersburg, General Johnston's army giving up more and more ground as it fell back on Atlanta, the blockade effectively strangling the southern economy, and the Mississippi River back in Federal control, thoughts in Washington were turning from the war to the war's aftermath.
The only governmental plan in circulation was President Lincoln's 10 % program which called for the restoration of a state to the Union when the state had agreed to the emancipation of their slaves, and 10 % of the registered voters signed loyalty pledges to the US government. Lincoln's opposition to the ten percent idea came not from his Democrat Party rivals, but rather from his own party.
The Radical Republicans were out for a great deal more than simply restoring the nation to the pre war status, they were out to remake southern society entirely. The plantation system should be destroyed, former slaves should have full rights as citizens, and the leaders of the rebellion should be executed or incarcerated. Full rights would be given only to those residents of the readmitted states who swore an oath that they had never supported the Confederacy. The formal version of their plan was sponsored in the House by Henry Winter Davis, Congressman from Maryland, and in the Senate by Benjamin Wade of Ohio.
The Senate was dominated by the Radical Republicans, there were 18 of them, four non Radical Republicans, six Democrats and four Constitutional Unionists. Their offering for reconstruction, the Wade-Davis bill, was passed by a vote of 18-14, with the 18 yeas being the 18 Radical Republicans. The bill called for a harsh program of reconstruction, one where states would have to meet a series of tough standards and endure a prolonged probationary period before readmission would be considered. It included measures for the permanent exclusion from government of a wide array of rebels, all officers of the Confederate army and all members of all rebel governments. There would be post war trials for treason for the highest ranking officials and officers.
Lincoln was appalled by this because it flew in the face of the position he had been taking all along....that secession was illegal and thus the southern states were never really out of the Union, merely being held captive by rebels. By the president's reasoning, the states did not have to regain their status as states, just renounce rebellion and meet a few conditions in order to have their rights as a state fully restored. The Wade-Davis bill, by treating readmission as a process by which states had to earn their way back into the Union, was clearly suggesting that the southern states had indeed left the group.
These were obviously incompatible approaches, one focused on welcoming back straying brothers, the other on punishing traitors to the family.
When a bill is presented to the US executive for signature, the president has ten days in which to sign it or veto it. If he does neither, it becomes law. The Wade-Davis bill had passed Congress on July 2nd, when there were fewer than ten days left in its then session. The consequence was that Lincoln was able to render the bill moot without having to veto it outright. If a president fails to sign or veto a bill before a session of Congress expires, that is called a pocket veto, as in simply putting the bill in your pocket and ignoring it.
So, the big fight between the executive and legislative branches of the US government was postponed, at least until the next session of Congress. Nothing was solved.
The North was invaded once more 150 years ago today.
In 1862 it had been General Lee sweeping up the Valley into Maryland in the campaign which ended at Antietam. In 1863 it had been Lee once more, this time driving into Pennsylvania and being stopped at Gettysburg.
In 1864, reflective of their reduced capacity to field armies, the rebel invaders were composed of General Jubal Early and his 14,000 troops. They had been dispatched to the Valley by Lee in the hopes that he could drive away General Hunter's despoiling force, and if possible, threaten Washington so as to cause General Grant to have to take troops from the Petersburg siege lines and send them north to protect the capitol. It was a repeat of Lee's strategy in 1862 when Stonewall Jackson had left President Lincoln and three Yankee armies reeling in a confused and useless state, preventing reinforcements from reaching General McClellan in the Peninsula Campaign.
The South needed another Jackson, would it be Jubal Early?
He had started well enough, clashing with Hunter's army on the 17th and 18th of June at Lynchburg. Hunter had retreated after putting up only a token fight. There were fewer than 100 total casualties but the battle did result in the Valley being opened up to Early.
150 years ago today Early took his troops across the Potomac River into Maryland. His objective was unknown to the Federals, and Washington was defended by a series of well fortified posts. There was no immediate reaction.
That would change.
General Jubal Early...Brickwall Early?
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