Lincoln and Scott, though at first apparently approving of McClellan"s plan, did not actually adopt it, or make available the resources that would have set it in train. This left the Anaconda Plan, which Scott had proposed in early May, to confine the Confederacy by blockading the seacoasts and controlling the Mississippi River. Economically, the Anaconda Plan was correctly conceived and practically feasible. The North, because it controlled most of the U.S. Navy"s ships and men, and almost all American shipbuilding yards, was in a position to close the South"s exits to the sea quite quickly; because river craft were largely Northern-owned, the Union was also well placed to take control of traffic on the great waterways. Once it did so, the South"s great exporting capacity, in which it took such understandable pride, would be rendered irrelevant. Four million bales of cotton, an enormous store of wealth, would lose all value if they could not be shifted from the warehouses. At the outset of the war, some in the South persuaded themselves that it was to the Confederacy"s advantage that the supply of cotton to the world market should be interrupted. The resulting slump in the manufacturing industry of the north of England and of France would, so they believed, oblige Unionist moderates to urge acceptance of secession on the Federal government and the South"s powerful foreign trading partners to recognise her independence. These beliefs were to be proved wrong. Cotton starvation did cause a slump in the European mills, but so strongly did the millworkers support the anti-slavery cause that economic distress did not translate into political protest. Mill owners, and the propertied generally, were more sympathetic to the South; there was still sufficient resentment at the rebellion of the thirteen colonies for the old-fashioned to take pleasure at seeing republicans in difficulty. Nevertheless, the power of the antislavery cause, which Britain had virtually made its own in the first half of the century, national pride in the success of the Royal Navy in suppressing the slave trade, and simple common sense about the conduct of foreign policy proved the decisive factors. The Foreign Office, though much lobbied by Southern representatives, held out against granting recognition of Confederate independence.
Diplomatically, therefore, the Anaconda Plan, when inst.i.tuted, did its work. The Mississippi campaign, to which it gave rise, by the successive capture of Cairo, Memphis, and, at the river"s mouth, New Orleans, bisected the South and isolated its western half from the Dixie heartland. Explaining the object of his scheme to Lincoln on May 3, Scott wrote that his intention was to "clear out and keep open this great line of communication ... so as to envelop the insurgent states and bring them to terms with less bloodshed than by any other plan."5 This observation was highly characteristic of Scott. A man who had won a war, he had no need to look for means to prove his own martial virtue. In his eyes McClellan"s plan was defective because it required great offensives to be launched into the South, which he rightly doubted would work, but which he also correctly antic.i.p.ated would kill many whom he preferred should be kept alive. Alas, Scott"s plan, for all its virtues, was defective also. It was as if Adam Smith had set out to practise strategy rather than economics. An unseen hand was to achieve the outcome desired by the commander, without the intervention of any of the unkind apparatus of war. Notable in Scott"s Anaconda Plan was the omission of any mention of battle. Key points were to be captured, waterways controlled without apparently provoking any reaction from the enemy. The territory of the South was to be bisected without Confederate protest. Scott"s estimable desire to avoid bloodshed between fellow citizens would apparently be shared by the enemy. Such was certainly not the case. The South was bursting with enthusiasm for a fight, partly to get the war over and won, partly because it longed to trounce the inept and effete Yankees. Nevertheless, the Anaconda Plan did have the merit of presenting to Lincoln an alternative to McClellan"s schemes for operations in Virginia and of alerting him to the strategic importance of the Mississippi. This observation was highly characteristic of Scott. A man who had won a war, he had no need to look for means to prove his own martial virtue. In his eyes McClellan"s plan was defective because it required great offensives to be launched into the South, which he rightly doubted would work, but which he also correctly antic.i.p.ated would kill many whom he preferred should be kept alive. Alas, Scott"s plan, for all its virtues, was defective also. It was as if Adam Smith had set out to practise strategy rather than economics. An unseen hand was to achieve the outcome desired by the commander, without the intervention of any of the unkind apparatus of war. Notable in Scott"s Anaconda Plan was the omission of any mention of battle. Key points were to be captured, waterways controlled without apparently provoking any reaction from the enemy. The territory of the South was to be bisected without Confederate protest. Scott"s estimable desire to avoid bloodshed between fellow citizens would apparently be shared by the enemy. Such was certainly not the case. The South was bursting with enthusiasm for a fight, partly to get the war over and won, partly because it longed to trounce the inept and effete Yankees. Nevertheless, the Anaconda Plan did have the merit of presenting to Lincoln an alternative to McClellan"s schemes for operations in Virginia and of alerting him to the strategic importance of the Mississippi.
The West and the Midwest troubled Lincoln. As theatres of Confederate offensive operations they posed no great danger to the Northern heartland, but the risk that their divided populations might be swung into the Southern camp, with the loss of prestige and Northern morale that would follow, certainly nagged at him. He correctly believed, moreover, that the Kentucky-Missouri-Tennessee bloc offered a base from which successful invasions of Virginia and its neighbours might be launched. The first appointee to command in the West, John Fremont, Republican candidate for president in 1856, soon had to be replaced. Though famous in the United States as "the Pathfinder" because of his pre-war exploits as an explorer of western territories, and though a regular officer, he lacked both experience of and talent for war. He was also a fervent abolitionist and as commander of the Western Department made it one of his first acts, in August 1861, to free all slaves belonging to rebels in Missouri. But immediate emanc.i.p.ation was not Union policy, since many, including Lincoln, believed that it would alienate pro-Union sympathy in the border states. After Fremont"s removal, McClellan-who had been named general in chief in succession to Scott, whom illness and McClellan"s disregard had brought low-divided the Western Department into two, appointing Don Carlos Buell to command eastern Kentucky and Tennessee, Henry Halleck to command the rest. Buell had a high reputation in the pre-war army for efficiency. Halleck had been McClellan"s chief rival for command of the Army of the Potomac. Neither was to display great practical talent, either in the coming campaign in the West or later.
Unfortunately for both, it was at this point in December 1861 that Lincoln and McClellan began to press them into activity. McClellan was himself under pressure to inst.i.tute a long-delayed advance into Virginia across the old Mana.s.sas battlefield, while Lincoln, who also wanted action by McClellan, was anxious that Buell and Halleck should coordinate their movements with a view to liberating eastern Tennessee and its anti-Confederate population. Lincoln hoped that both Knoxville and Nashville could be taken. He was downcast when Buell and Halleck alike confessed to lacking sufficient strength to undertake or cooperate in either operation. The western generals" incapacity did not dishearten only Lincoln. McClellan had looked to Buell to make a move in Kentucky that would ease his own advance into Virginia, the operation he had been promising to Lincoln for the past several months. McClellan"s Virginia action was so long considered and consequently so much postponed that eventually doubt grew, in the cabinet and the newspapers (since the secret, never well concealed, leaked out) whether McClellan was serious in his intentions. Uncertainty meanwhile grew also within McClellan over the likely success of his offensive. This was the first manifestation of what would be revealed as his disabling defect as a commander: readiness to take counsel of his fears. It is probable that had McClellan mobilised his resources in August or September, even as late as October, he could have brushed aside the Confederates defending the route south to Richmond and achieved a respectable advance. By November, however, he had begun to invest the enemy at Mana.s.sas with force they did not possess. He had a bad chief of intelligence, the head of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, and he compounded the errors of intelligence by those of his imagination. Soon he was estimating Confederate strength at over 100,000, and as he did so, he began to plead for reinforcements, disclaiming the possibility of taking action against such superior numbers.
Since McClellan never did mount a Mana.s.sas operation, it seems probable that he never would have. Yet the Virginia offensive did not merely fizzle out. Instead it was replaced by another, far more ambitious, which came into being in a strangely indirect way. In late November, when alone with the Army of the Potomac"s chief of engineers, General John Barnard, McClellan mentioned that he had an idea for capturing Richmond. He would embark the Army of the Potomac at Washington and take it down Chesapeake Bay to the mouth of the Rappahannock River and then march it overland to Richmond, which he calculated he could seize before the Confederates at Mana.s.sas had time to reach the capital. It was a typically McClellanesque scheme for achieving a large result without taking a large risk, such as a major battle fought at a distance from a secure Union base. The idea grew and was eventually adopted, with strange results. What was strangest, however, about the "Urbana Plan," as it was initially called, after the place at which McClellan proposed to debark, was how he had hit upon it in the first place. Neither Scott, Lincoln, nor any other Union commander had proposed any amphibious element in operations designed to defeat the South. There was no amphibious tradition in the American way of warfare. British seapower had been little used in the deployment of the king"s armies against the rebels during the War of Independence. The United States had scarcely employed its navy in the campaign against Mexico in 1846, which had been fought exclusively on land. Wherever, then, did McClellan derive his scheme for a large-scale waterborne descent onto the approaches to the Confederate capital? Given his cautious and highly conventional military outlook it was a most improbable adventure for him to advocate.
The answer may lie in his European experience. When McClellan observed the conduct of the Crimean War, fought by Britain and France to deter Russia from destroying the Turkish empire, he saw that the main difficulty facing the Anglo-French war effort was the inaccessibility of the tsar"s empire. Though Russia could be invaded through eastern Europe, France and Britain had no bases or allies there. That forced them to look elsewhere, which meant by seeking points of entry around Russia"s coastline. Here the similarity with the Confederates, which perhaps struck McClellan, may be perceived. Russia"s enormous size equates to that of the South; indeed, the comparison is often made. But just as the South was protected by wide oceanic barriers backed by extensive mountain chains with areas of arid land and huge internal waterways, Russia was almost entirely cut off from the outside world by frozen seas. Climatically Russia was landlocked. The Anglo-French strategists puzzling as to how to get at their enemy fixed eventually on only three points at which it could be attacked. One was in the Baltic, itself very difficult of access. The second was on its Pacific coast, north of j.a.pan, where Russia had naval bases in the Kamchatka Peninsula. The difficulty with both the Baltic and Pacific theatres as scenes of action was that their hinterlands were unsuitable for conventional ground operations and, in the case of the Pacific region, far from any possessions of value to the Russian government. Those considerations caused the allies eventually to choose the remaining point of entry, the Crimean Peninsula in the Black Sea. As a target area, it too had disadvantages, since the Crimean Peninsula connected badly with the Russian mainland and contained only one place of value, the port city of Sebastopol. Nevertheless, it could be attacked and so, there being little other choice, was selected by the allies for their debarkment. Having established a base on the west sh.o.r.e of the Black Sea, they concentrated their fleets and expeditionary forces and began the invasion. Its outcome, which resulted in the British and the French becoming drawn into an unsuccessful siege of Sebastopol, ought, had the Crimea indeed been McClellan"s inspiration and had he reflected more deeply on its implications, to have warned him against initiating the Urbana Plan.
Yet the attractions of resort to an amphibious solution of his problem look obvious, given what we know of McClellan"s exposure to the Crimean expedition. McClellan felt himself blocked on the land route to Richmond, perhaps through his own overestimation of the enemy"s strength, perhaps because of the aura of defeat that hung about the Mana.s.sas region. Positively, Chesapeake Bay, which would be the axis of the Army of the Potomac"s advance, was a body of water offering copious possibilities to an imaginative commander. On a dull coastline, which America"s Atlantic sh.o.r.e is, being low-lying, generally unindented, and much choked with barrier islands and swamps, the Chesapeake is a fascinating complex of subordinate bays, peninsulas, and estuaries. Its proximity to the Appalachian chain, which collects the rainfall from the Atlantic, means that a very large number of rivers and lesser waterways flow across the levels of northern Virginia and Maryland to empty into the Chesapeake at dozens of outlets. Most flow parallel to one another, infuriatingly from a military point of view, since south of Washington the overland route to Richmond is crossed every twenty miles or so by a water barrier, such as the wide Potomac itself, running down from Harpers Ferry, at the head of the Shenandoah Valley, but also the Rappahannock, the Mattapony, the Chickahominy, the Appomattox, the James, and the York, many fed by smaller streams which, when confronting an army on the march, prove formidable obstacles. In combination, the feeder streams of Chesapeake Bay make it one of the most easily defensible and therefore militarily difficult regions for offensives anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere; little wonder that McClellan, inexperienced and overpromoted, isolated in Washington as general in chief, at the beck and call of a president whom he did not understand and without friends and supporters of his own, leapt at the opening presented to him by his perception-if one may guess that this was what came to him-that the inaccessibility of the Confederacy might be cracked by disregarding the obvious overland route and, instead, seeking to appear on the South"s back doorstep by amphibious means.
Whatever the origins of the Urbana Plan, it came to be accepted perhaps even more swiftly than McClellan antic.i.p.ated. During his long period of inactivity in October and November, while he procrastinated with Lincoln over the restaging of the advance on Richmond through Mana.s.sas, he added to his own difficulties by falling ill of typhoid fever. Lincoln was exasperated. On January 10, 1862, several weeks after the renewed advance on Richmond should have begun, he received a despatch from General Halleck in the western theatre, re-emphasising his inability to do the president"s will in Kentucky. Lincoln seems to have been seized by despair, an understandable but not characteristic mood. He went to see Montgomery Meigs, the quartermaster general, a powerful man in the Washington wartime scene. Lincoln poured out his troubles. Halleck and Buell were not winning the war in the West. There was financial trouble in Washington. The electorate was demanding victories. The Union"s princ.i.p.al soldier had taken to his sickbed. Meigs agreed that something had to be done since, if the Confederacy attacked out of its Mana.s.sas positions at the present moment, Washington itself might be threatened. Meigs suggested a council of war, always a dubious resort in time of danger. Lincoln nevertheless called the most senior and available soldiers-including McDowell, who had lost at Mana.s.sas-and politicians to advise him. At its first meeting the generals gave Lincoln mixed advice, though William B. Franklin recommended a waterborne advance on Richmond; he knew what was in McClellan"s mind. McDowell again pressed the Mana.s.sas case. Inevitably word of this meeting reached McClellan on his sickbed and inevitably he was outraged. With reason he felt that his political chief was going behind his back. Suddenly recovering, he appeared at the White House on the evening of January 13; the mood of the meeting was bad-tempered and the outcome inconclusive, though Lincoln did eventually declare himself satisfied that McClellan was about to undertake action.
The action promised was in the West, not Virginia, but Lincoln was so desperate for activity of any sort and still so committed to his "Young Napoleon," as McClellan was known to the newspapers, from a supposed resemblance, that he did not demur. Action he shortly got, though in a curiously indirect way. Halleck, the eternal prevaricator, suddenly launched his subordinate Ulysses S. Grant in an advance up the c.u.mberland River in Tennessee towards a Confederate earthwork, Fort Henry, blocking the river. The pattern of waterways in this section of Tennessee is as complex as that west of Chesapeake Bay, with this difference: the rivers, which are tributaries of the Ohio and fed by the waters running off the western slopes of the Appalachians, particularly the c.u.mberland Mountains, are far wider than their Virginia equivalents and carry much larger volumes of water. Topography, moreover, exhibits the same curious effect of disposing waterways with widely separated sources into channels that run in close proximity and parallel to each other. So it is with the Tennessee and the c.u.mberland rivers. The c.u.mberland rises on the Virginia border, the Tennessee in Tennessee, west of Knoxville; however, just before they flow into the Ohio, they run almost parallel for a short distance. Because the Union held the Ohio at the points where the c.u.mberland and Tennessee discharge into it and so were well placed to use the two tributaries as avenues of entry into the important borderlands of Kentucky and Tennessee, from which there were easy avenues of advance into Missouri and Alabama also, the Confederacy had taken the sensible precaution of fortifying the Tennessee-c.u.mberland river system at its confluent point. The earthwork forts of Henry and Donelson supported each other and blocked upstream movement into the Tennessee interior. The forts, moreover, were strongly garrisoned, by 21,000 men under the command of Gideon Pillow and Simon Bolivar Buckner.
THE EMERGENCE OF ULYSSES S. GRANT Pillow and Buckner"s Union opponent, Ulysses S. Grant, had known both men previously; he had command of an equal number of men, based at Cairo, on the Mississippi just below the confluence with the Ohio. He also had the support of a gunboat fleet commanded by Andrew Foote, who was to emerge as one of the most talented officers of the U.S. Navy"s freshwater fleet. Grant, the beginning of whose meteoric career the Henry-Donelson campaign was, would become the towering military genius of the Civil War, displaying all the qualities that Lincoln hoped to find in McClellan but failed to do. The Grants were old colonial stock who when U. S. Grant was born, were settled in Point Pleasant, Ohio. Like most early settlers they had made their way by honest labour, eked out by paid public service. Ulysses" father set up a tannery business, and the son had a modestly comfortable upbringing and decent schooling. In 1839, however, to his surprise and distaste, he was nominated for a vacancy at West Point and, through family influence, found himself appointed. He went off resentfully and never changed his att.i.tude; he did not want to be a soldier, did not like the army, and hated war. In his wonderful autobiography he describes both the Civil War and the Mexican War of 1846 as "unholy." Had the West Point system worked with its full vigour, Grant would have not survived to graduate. He was ill-disciplined and he did not take his academic work seriously, strangely, for he was a serious, if wilful and headstrong, young man in an age when the U.S. Military Academy was one of the few places in the Western world to offer a training in mathematics, science, and technology. Grant boasted that he never revised, a failing that could easily have resulted in his being relegated and eventually dismissed. Grant was, however, exceptionally clever. He found no difficulty with the academy"s mathematical syllabus, the core of the course, so little indeed that on graduation he applied for and was accepted for an instructor"s post. By then, however, the army had taken him over and he was on his way to the Mexican War. Despite his disapproval of the conflict, Grant did well in the war, was rewarded for his distinguished service, and ought to have been a.s.sured of a successful if slow-moving career. It was not to be. Temperament was against it. Posted to a peacetime station in California, with little to do and without the company of his beloved wife, Julia Dent, he took to drink and discord. After falling out with his commanding officer, he resigned his commission and tried his luck in civilian life, only to find himself on a continuation of the downward slope. He tried small-scale commerce; he tried farming, at a place discouragingly known as Hardscrabble, and by 1861 was reduced to working as a clerk in his father"s tannery. At the moment when terminal obscurity might have overtaken him, his fortunes were changed by the outbreak of the Civil War. Suddenly any man with military credentials could find employment, income, and, with luck, social standing and the chance to recover self-respect. At the outbreak Grant was in Galena, Illinois, and, through a chapter of accidents, found himself engaged by the state government to a.s.sist in the organisation of the state"s first volunteer regiments. Not long after he was in command of one of them, the 21st Illinois. Soon after taking command Grant was ordered to find and engage a rebel regiment at Florida, Missouri. He undertook the advance through deserted countryside, with growing trepidation until, finding the Confederate colonel Harris"s campsite abandoned, he realised that Harris "had been as much afraid of me as I of him."
This exceedingly valuable lesson he was to retain all his military life. Boldness was in consequence to be a distinguishing mark of his generalship, sometimes too much so. As James McPherson has remarked, "Grant"s determination sometimes led him to see only that which was in his own mind, not what the enemy might be intending, with unfortunate results. Still boldness never brought Grant to disaster."6 Soon after the Harris episode, boldness led him to attack a superior enemy force at Belmont, opposite Columbus, on the Mississippi. His force was surrounded; lightheartedly he announced that having cut their way in, they would cut their way out. He possessed another characteristic which was a function of his powerful self-confidence: a refusal to retrace his steps. "I will take no backward step" was one of his best-known sayings, usually interpreted to denote his reluctance to retreat. Grant indeed disliked retreat as a measure of war, but those words meant exactly what they said. When finding his way across country, he preferred to press forward in the hope of arriving at his destination than to begin again. He had a keen topographical sense. He collected maps and guidebooks (Wellington had a similar enthusiasm) and at the outbreak of the Mexican War proved to have a better cartographic library than the army itself. Grant"s feel for ground was to stand him in good stead during the war, fought as it often was over unmapped, overgrown, or abandoned countryside, as in the dense woodlands of Shiloh in 1862 or the Wilderness in 1864, cleared land which had gone back to secondary forest. Soon after the Harris episode, boldness led him to attack a superior enemy force at Belmont, opposite Columbus, on the Mississippi. His force was surrounded; lightheartedly he announced that having cut their way in, they would cut their way out. He possessed another characteristic which was a function of his powerful self-confidence: a refusal to retrace his steps. "I will take no backward step" was one of his best-known sayings, usually interpreted to denote his reluctance to retreat. Grant indeed disliked retreat as a measure of war, but those words meant exactly what they said. When finding his way across country, he preferred to press forward in the hope of arriving at his destination than to begin again. He had a keen topographical sense. He collected maps and guidebooks (Wellington had a similar enthusiasm) and at the outbreak of the Mexican War proved to have a better cartographic library than the army itself. Grant"s feel for ground was to stand him in good stead during the war, fought as it often was over unmapped, overgrown, or abandoned countryside, as in the dense woodlands of Shiloh in 1862 or the Wilderness in 1864, cleared land which had gone back to secondary forest.
His situation on the Tennessee River in January 1862 was not topographically disfavoured. The countryside was open and only spa.r.s.ely wooded. The outline of the defences was clear to the eye. The problem was military: how to take possession of the forts in the teeth of their powerful artillery defences and substantial garrisons? In any event, the Confederates m.u.f.fed their chances. The gunners at Fort Henry, which Grant chose as his first point of attack, could not match the firepower of the Union gunboats. When Grant"s infantry, which the riverboats had landed behind the fort, appeared on February 6, the Confederate commander sent the bulk of his garrison away to Fort Donelson and surrendered. The gunboats proceeded upstream, destroying a vital railroad bridge and capturing important riverside towns. By mid-February, Grant and Foote between them had secured the line of the Tennessee as far south as Muscle Shoals, near Florence, Alabama, thus opening a direct riverine route from the North"s Ohio stronghold into the heart of the South.
Grant was left with the unsubdued and now reinforced Fort Donelson, eleven miles across the floodplain from Fort Henry, which had to be captured because it controlled the approaches to Nashville, Tennessee, state capital and one of the South"s few manufacturing centres. Grant"s declared intention to capture Donelson put the Confederates in a spot. The senior Confederate was Albert Sidney Johnston (always so known to distinguish him from Joseph E. Johnston), supreme commander in the West. His difficulty was that his force was divided between Donelson and Bowling Green, near Nashville. The Union forces were also divided, with Grant"s 21,000 near Donelson and Buell"s 50,000 near Louisville. These dispositions gave the Unionists more options than the Confederates: the options included concentric attack by Grant and Buell at Bowling Green or waterborne attacks on Columbus and Nashville. Johnston, by contrast, could not coordinate the actions of his two forces because of the loss of Fort Henry and the cutting of the Louisville-Memphis railroad. When he and his Southern generals considered the situation at Bowling Green on February 7, a newcomer, Pierre Beauregard, the victor of Mana.s.sas, self-confidently proposed attacking Grant and Buell in turn, believing both could be defeated. Johnston did not. Unfortunately, while wondering what to do, he got into a muddle; he decided to take most of his troops to Nashville but leave enough at Fort Donelson to give Grant a real fight. On February 14, however, Grant was strongly reinforced, both with troops and gunboats. He mounted an attack with the gunboats, to intimidate the garrison, while deploying his fresh troops to encircle the fort securely. The gunboats came off the worse in the artillery duel, while driving snow all night reduced many of the Northern soldiers to shivering inactivity. On February 15 the Confederates, commanded by John Floyd-a wanted man in the North, which he had served as secretary of war under the previous president and so was held to be in violation of his official oath of loyalty to the Const.i.tution, staged their breakout for Nashville. The thrust carried the Union back a mile and seemed about to bring on a collapse when Grant, who had been absent elsewhere, suddenly appeared at the gallop and began to set matters to rights.
What saved the situation, however, was not his intervention, but a sudden collapse of will in the Confederate fortress commander, General Pillow. Disheartened by the sight of the losses his men had suffered in the early-morning fighting, Pillow decided that the survivors, who were in fact the victors, could not safely be risked in a crosscountry retreat to Nashville and ordered them to return to their trenches. It was at this point that Grant made his appreciation. Reckoning that the enemy were giving up the ground they had taken, he remarked to his staff officers that they were unlikely to resist if counter-attacked, which, under covering fire from some of the gunboats, his hastily reorganised brigades did, with success.
In the night that followed, Floyd, Pillow, and another divisional commander, the darkly handsome Simon Bolivar Buckner, debated their predicament. Floyd and Pillow had reason to fear capture. Both escaped by water before daybreak, Pillow with 1,500 soldiers. Buckner stayed to negotiate terms, but gave permission to a subordinate, Nathan Bedford Forrest, to make his best way out with his cavalry brigade. Forrest found an unguarded but negotiable stream and led his men through it. Had Grant been aware of the prize that lay within his grasp, he would have reproached himself, for Forrest, a self-made, self-taught man from nowhere, turned himself into the outstanding cavalry commander of the war on either side. It may have been the combination of his headstrong character with his total ignorance of the rules and practices of warfare which made him so effective.
Buckner, who had been at West Point with Grant and served with him in the army, now opened, as he believed, negotiations for surrender, suggesting the recognition of an armistice as a preliminary step. That was perfectly proper, according to the conventions of regular warfare. Grant, however, did not regard what he was fighting as a regular war but as an illegal rebellion, and so his enemies were not ent.i.tled to treatment under the conventions of lawful warfare. To Buckner"s civil request, therefore, he returned one of the most peremptory refusals in the records of the conduct of war. It read, "Sir, Yours of this date, proposing armistice and appointment of commissioners to settle terms of capitulation, is just received. No terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted. I propose to move immediately upon your works. I am, Sir, very respectfully, your obedient servant, U. S. Grant. Brigadier."7 In reply, Buckner declared himself forced to accept "the ungenerous and unchivalrous terms" proposed. Later that day he surrendered 11,500 men, 40 cannon, and much equipment. He also effectively surrendered Confederate control of one of the most strategic avenues in the Confederacy. Possession of the Tennessee River, if it were used correctly by the North, would give access to southern Tennessee, northern Alabama, and the upper Mississippi, and lend support to operations down the Mississippi River itself. The capture of Forts Henry and Donelson effectively marked the end of the opening stage of the Civil War in the West. That war, unlike the conflict in the Washington-Richmond corridor, was always to have a local and slightly irregular character to it. Important though it was to both sides, it was always a distraction to the central struggle, which dominated public attention. Neither government in 1861 had set out to fight in the West; both hoped at best to avoid losing territory there and to avoid defeat, should it come to fighting. At the outset, however, shortage of troops made fighting difficult to organise, as did ignorance of the terrain. Since leading Northern generals were confined by the geography of northern Virginia, which lay on the capital"s doorstep, it is not surprising that the distant, spa.r.s.ely inhabited, and largely unmapped lands bordering the Mississippi and the Gulf should have failed to focus clearly or quickly in the military minds of either side. Lack of information put regular troops at a disadvantage. The most effective fighters were locals who knew the ground at first hand and could exploit their intimacy with it. Unfortunately for the Confederacy, which needed to defend the northern rim of the Mississippi-Alabama-Georgia tier of states if it were not to collapse and also had the strongest interest in supporting pro-Southern groups in the next tier up-Tennessee, Kentucky, and Missouri-there were insufficient organised irregular forces to dispute the issue with the Union, as opposed to making the lives of pro-Union residents a misery, while its positioning of regular troops, understandably oriented towards defeating the Union in northern Virginia, left the states of the West in an unsatisfactory disposition. The loss of Forts Henry and Donelson made that worryingly apparent. Grant"s victory left Albert Sidney Johnston"s forces scattered as much as 175 miles apart between Murfreesboro and Memphis. Johnston had the ear of the supreme command, which recognised the danger of Southern dispersal in his area of command. During March, forces were collected and sent from the coast to Tennessee. Braxton Bragg"s 10,000 men were moved at speed from Mobile, on Alabama"s seacoast, to Corinth, east of Memphis, but close to the upper reaches of the Tennessee River, which Grant was currently using to concentrate a large force near a riverside stopping point known as Pittsburg Landing, near a Sunday meeting place called Shiloh Church.
Why there should have been a major battle at Pittsburg Landing is difficult to explain. Grant wanted a fight, to follow up his success at Forts Henry and Donelson; so did Halleck, his immediate superior, whose longer-term objective was the railroad town of Corinth nearby. Union control of the local strategic communications, the Tennessee River itself and the railroad reaching Corinth from the north, suggest that both Grant and Halleck envisaged transforming the Memphis-Corinth area into a major base for offensive operations both eastward towards Chattanooga and southward down the Mississippi. In late March and early April, Halleck concerned himself princ.i.p.ally with reinforcing the area, chiefly by bringing Buell"s large force down from Nashville. He meanwhile urged Grant not to engage with the Confederates until he was strong enough to be certain of success. Grant, however, was spoiling for a fight. He would have been encouraged to know that the enemy was equally keen. On April 5, General A. S. Johnston gave orders for an attack on April 6, the preliminary objective to be the Union encampment which had grown up in the last few days around Pittsburg Landing.
The target was tempting. The Northern divisions, commanded by John McClernand, Lew Wallace (the future author of Ben-Hur) Ben-Hur), Stephen Hurlbut, Benjamin M. Prentiss, and William T. Sherman, had pitched camp on the low ground between the Tennessee River and its small tributary, Owl Creek. The encampment, however, was not entrenched or otherwise defended and was ripe to be taken by surprise. The environment of the battlefield, as the area was to become, favoured surprise. The ground was covered by scrubby woodland and broken forest and cut up by small streams and rivulets. This terrain readily disguised the Confederate approach when it began at about six o"clock in the morning. Many Northerners were still asleep in their tents or huts when the Confederates attacked from the surrounding thickets, and some were bayoneted in their blankets. The initial onset might have ended the battle, had Johnston not mismanaged the Confederate deployment and Grant not appeared on the scene at a critical moment. Johnston"s intention had been to attack in columns, retaining a reserve to reinforce success. Instead he attacked in lines, which soon became intermixed and disorientated. Without a reserve to reenergise the advance, the Confederate battle formation lost direction and cohesion and succ.u.mbed to confusion, imposed by the oppressive woodland. The worst confusion and heaviest fighting occurred on the edge of the encampment along a feature which became known to the Union as the Sunken Road and to the Confederates as the Hornet"s Nest. The Confederates made the mistake of attacking it repeatedly, at ever-growing cost. Eventually, late in the afternoon, the Union commander accepted defeat and surrendered his survivors, 2,500 in all, to the Confederates, who surrounded his position on three sides.
The battle so far had taken the form of a "soldier"s battle," its shape formed by the reactions of the soldiers as they stumbled across each other in the prevailing woodland, rather than by their commanders seeking to impose order and purpose on their stumbling movements. Yet commanders were involved. Johnston, who had ridden about the battlefield trying to organise a flanking movement that would drive the Union troops away from the Tennessee River towards Owl Creek, got so involved in the fighting that he suffered a bullet wound that severed an artery in his leg and caused him to bleed to death. Sherman, who had discounted the possibility of a Confederate attack, was also wounded twice, but slightly; though he lost three horses, he kept his composure, and by riding constantly about his line, giving encouragement and bringing reinforcements, he preserved its integrity.
On April 5, whilst convalescing after a fall from his horse had rendered him unable to walk without crutches, Grant had written to Halleck: "I have scarcely the faintest idea of an attack being made upon us, but will be prepared should such a thing take place." He was, however, eight miles distant when the sound of battle reached him early the next day. He immediately returned to Pittsburg Landing by riverboat, finding the sh.o.r.e crowded with early fugitives of the battle. In open country they would have fled to the rear, but in the dense Tennessee woodland rear and front were almost indistinguishable, the river providing the only point of reference. Grant began to round up the runaways. Fortunately for him Confederates were also running away in thousands from what had developed in three hours into the fiercest battle yet seen in the Civil War, indeed one of the fiercest to be fought until the coming of ma.s.s warfare on the Western Front fifty years later. The conditions were not dissimilar. Large numbers of soldiers were involved: six Confederate divisions, five Union, about 30,000 men on each side. The shape and character of the battlefield-dense woods, confined by a large water barrier and crossed by other, smaller waterways which constricted movement-had the effect of throwing men together into sudden and unexpected confrontations, from which escape seemed possible only by the use of firepower. At its most intense the battle pitted about 60,000 men against one another in a s.p.a.ce only eight miles square, conditions that imposed a terrible logic of "kill or be killed" on those present. It would be similar conditions that caused the appalling level of casualties at Antietam, still the costliest single-day battle in American history.
By the end of the day Beauregard, now in command on the Confederate side, was urged by his subordinates to mount a final attack which, they believed, would finish Union resistance. Beauregard demurred; he sensed that his men were near the end of their energy. Grant, on the other side, had come to the same conclusion. Some of his subordinates urged retreat, given the level of losses the Union had suffered. Grant refused. Reinforcements were arriving, including Lew Wallace"s division, which had taken a wrong turning on its march to the battle and lost its way, and the vanguard of Buell"s 50,000 from Nashville. Asked to agree that April 6 had been a defeat, Grant made a noncommittal reply, then articulated, "Whip "em tomorrow."
April 7 would indeed go better for the Northerners-if such terms can be applied to any battle as horrible as Shiloh. Early that morning Buell"s Army of the Ohio, as his command was officially designated, together with Grant"s Army of the Tennessee, resumed the fight. For several hours the Northerners had things their own way and recovered ground lost the day before. Then the Confederates rediscovered their spirit and began to resist. For both sides, however, the battle had lost momentum. The Southerners could not regain ground lost, while both sides were sickened by the spectacle of suffering that lay all around them, as the trench warriors of 1916 would be. Rain was falling in torrents; the casualties of the previous day, uncollected and unprotected during a bitter night, lay on sodden ground, calling out for help, which the army could not supply. Many of those left to lie were already dead, their wounds a warning to soldiers of both sides of what persistence in this dreadful combat would entail. By early afternoon the front line of battle had returned to that which marked the Union position before the Confederate attack had opened. It was suggested to Beauregard that he should consider quitting the field. He agreed and ordered a retreat. The Union troops were too exhausted to pursue the Southerners towards Corinth. Beauregard"s men left behind a ghastly spectacle and an objective tragedy. Out of 100,000 men engaged, more than 24,000 had been killed or wounded. Many of the wounded had died during the bitter night of April 6-7, of shock and exposure to chilling rain. So fiercely had the battle raged that little attempt had been made to bring them help. Their pitiful condition was an awful reminder of what was worst about the big Napoleonic battles (there had been 40,000 wounded left on the field of Waterloo) and an antic.i.p.ation of the medical disasters of the First World War (casualties on the first day of the Somme were so numerous that, even if they could be brought to help, the British medical service was forced to sort the less hopeful cases from the more, and simply leave them to die in some sort of comfort). Shiloh was in many respects an unexpected battle-in time and place but particularly in character. It was a terrible demonstration of what a determined man with a rifled firearm could do to his enemy. Veterans of 1846, accustomed to the low velocities of the musket"s spherical ball, were quite unprepared for those of the conical minie bullet. In the absence of facilities for blood transfusion or trauma surgery, it was a lucky victim of a minie strike who was not killed outright or left with a permanently disabling wound. Shiloh was the first battle of the war that exhibited these effects on a large scale. As a result, it profoundly influenced the outlook of those who took part and survived. Grant, a military realist of markedly delicate moral sensitivity, concluded in the aftermath that all hope of a swift termination of hostilities by a single victory was chimerical. No exchange of fire could be so unequal as to leave one side the unchallengeable victor, the other cowed and quiescent. Shiloh showed to Grant, and to other soldiers as intelligent as he, that they were engaged in a war of attrition, in which casualties would be equally distributed and the decision would be won by the army best able to bear the agony.
It was in a way appropriate that this important lesson was taught in a landscape so characteristically American as that presented at Shiloh. Forest and water were far more representative of the war"s mid-century environment than the cleared and settled land of northern Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. There would be more Shiloh than Mana.s.sas in the encounters that lay ahead, and Grant"s exposure to forest fighting was an essential introduction to his years of high command, now opening before him. The end of the battle reopened old complaints against Grant-that he was a drunk at worst and at best inefficient.
Lincoln paid no attention. In the aftermath, he uttered one of his most memorable apothegms of the war, in answer to a critic of Grant, with the words "I can"t spare this man, he fights."
Grant had done more than fight. Though still relatively junior and not involved in Washington"s plans for the conduct of the war, he had inadvertently helped to shape its future course. No one on either side seems to have appreciated that the water lines in the Mississippi Valley formed an avenue of military advance into the Deep South, culminating eventually at New Orleans, exactly contrary to the way that those of northern Tennessee, counting the upper Mississippi and the Ohio rivers as a single military obstacle centred on St. Louis and Louisville together, contributed an almost impenetrable barrier to invasion of Indiana and Illinois from the South. It did not take Grant long to twig. The South had made the mistake in February of evacuating the river town of Columbus, where ill health prevailed. It had already equally foolishly abandoned the strategic Island No. 10, below Columbus. Watermen and boatbuilders came forward to a.s.sist the South"s river defences, and on June 6 they steamed out to confront a similar fleet of Union rams and gunboats, which had arrived to challenge them for control. This encounter quickly developed into the most bitter inland waterway battle yet fought in the war. Ramming proved to be a particularly effective technique in the confined riverine waters and several Confederate vessels were sunk or disabled by collision. Six Confederate warships were put out of action; only one survived. By the time the encounter was over, Memphis, the fifth largest city in the Confederacy, had given up resistance and the Union river fleet was ready to press southward towards Vicksburg, the last Confederate bastion on the Mississippi. It was the last because, in April 1862, the senior Union sailor, Flag Officer (equivalent to Admiral) David Farragut, had completed his triumphant reduction of the defences of New Orleans, at the mouth of the Mississippi River.
New Orleans was important for a number of reasons. It was the South"s largest city. It had also in the days of peace been one of its princ.i.p.al gateways to the outside world and the highways of world trade. Its loss would prove a severe blow to Southern prestige, besides opening a direct route from the Gulf of Mexico into the Mississippi Valley.
THE OPENING OF NAVAL WARFARE
On April 19, 1861, President Lincoln had issued the Proclamation of Blockade Against Southern Ports: Whereas an insurrection against the Government of the United States has broken out in the States of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, and the laws of the United States for the collection of the revenue cannot be effectually executed therein conformably to that provision of the Const.i.tution which requires duties to be uniform throughout the United States: And whereas a combination of persons engaged in such insurrection, have threatened to grant pretended letters of marque to authorize the bearers thereof to commit a.s.saults on the lives, vessels, and property of good citizens of the country lawfully engaged in commerce on the high seas, and in waters of the United States: And whereas an Executive Proclamation has been already issued, requiring the persons engaged in these disorderly proceedings to desist therefrom, calling out a militia force for the purpose of repressing the same, and convening Congress in extraordinary session, to deliberate and determine thereon: Now, therefore, I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, with a view to the same purposes before mentioned, and to the protection of the public peace, and the lives and property of quiet and orderly citizens pursuing their lawful occupations, until Congress shall have a.s.sembled and deliberated on the said unlawful proceedings, or until the same shall have ceased, have further deemed it advisable to set on foot a blockade of the ports within the States aforesaid, in pursuance of the laws of the United States, and of the law of Nations, in such case provided. For this purpose a competent force will be posted so as to prevent entrance and exit of vessels from the ports aforesaid. If, therefore, with a view to violate such blockade, a vessel shall approach, or shall attempt to leave either of the said ports, she will be duly warned by the Commander of one of the blockading vessels, who will endorse on her register the fact and date of such warning, and if the same vessel shall again attempt to enter or leave the blockaded port, she will be captured and sent to the nearest convenient port, for such proceedings against her and her cargo as prize, as may be deemed advisable. And I hereby proclaim and declare that if any person, under the pretended authority of the said States, or under any other pretense, shall molest a vessel of the United States, or the persons or cargo on board of her, such person will be held amenable to the laws of the United States for the prevention and punishment of piracy. In witness whereof, I have hereunto set my hand, and caused the seal of the United States seal of the United States to be affixed. Done at the City of Washington, this nineteenth day of April, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-one, and of the to be affixed. Done at the City of Washington, this nineteenth day of April, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-one, and of the Independence of the United States Independence of the United States the the eighty-fifth. eighty-fifth.8 The triumph in the Mississippi Valley was the indirect outcome of a distant and much larger campaign down the Confederacy"s Atlantic coast and the first of what was perhaps Lincoln"s earliest and most important effort to make grand strategy. In his memorandum for a plan of campaign of October 1, 1861, he had recommended that the navy should seize Port Royal, off the coast of South Carolina. It was to be one element in his scheme for a general blockade, a programme which he raised more and more often in the first year of the war. It was obvious enough as a plan. The South"s was an exporting economy and the South an importing society. It lacked the means to manufacture many of its necessities, particularly the necessities of war, and without the freedom to export it lacked the means to pay for what it bought. The South, moreover, was particularly susceptible to blockade. Though its coastline was nearly 5,000 miles long, it had few major ports or easily penetrable river estuaries. Moreover, on the Atlantic side its sh.o.r.eline was cut off from the ocean by long chains of low-lying banks and islands which, if taken into Union hands, would become barriers of the blockade, besides providing sheltered anchorages for a blockading fleet. Lincoln was more interested in the value to be derived from blockade than were his generals, who thought exclusively in Napoleonic terms of defeating the South by winning great land battles. The U.S. Navy was, of course, interested in blockade, but unlike the Royal Navy, it was not the senior service and had comparatively little influence over the making of strategy. Nevertheless, it had influence enough to persuade Lincoln and the secretary of war to allow it to finance and organise an expeditionary force in November 1861 to seize the most important of the anchorages behind the protective banks at Port Royal.
The Southern defenders, shortly to be put under the command of Robert E. Lee, thought Port Royal safe because its entrance was strongly fortified. The Union naval commander, Flag Officer Samuel du Pont, was not deterred. He may have been aware of the British success in overcoming fortifications in the Baltic during the Crimean War; the overwhelming of the great fortress of Bomarsund was a case in point. At any rate his bombarding ships quickly suppressed the fire of the Port Royal forts, causing the flight of the defenders and of the Confederate population of the nearby Sea Islands, the richest centre of production of high-quality cotton in the South. The Port Royal anchorage quickly established itself as an anti-blockade centre, from which several successful expeditions were soon launched against the North Carolina ports in the Albemarle and Pamlico sounds. During 1862 the Northern naval offensive moved south along the Atlantic coast, taking one place after another: Roanoke Island, Cape Hatteras, New Bern, Elizabeth City, Fort Macon, and then, below Port Royal, Fort Pulaski-one of the ma.s.sive forts of the Third System, protecting Savannah, Brunswick, Fernandina, and Jacksonville-and, on March 11, 1862, St. Augustine, the oldest inhabited place in North America. The offensive also reached round the corner into the Gulf, to take, before mid-summer 1862, Apalachicola, Pensacola, Biloxi, and the strongpoints on the approach to New Orleans: Fort St. Philip, Fort Jackson, Head of Pa.s.ses, and Pa.s.s Christian. General Burnside was much involved in the maritime offensive in North Carolina; the seaward defences of New Orleans were the target of David Farragut during his 1862 offensive.
Of all these seizures of coastal strongholds, Fort Pulaski, at the mouth of the Savannah River, was the most remarkable. The fortress, built from 1829 onwards, was one of the monsters of the Third System, specially reinforced in the rear with giant timber baulks to help absorb the shock of shot striking the outer face of its immensely thick walls. This enormously expensive method of construction proved no use at all against the North"s newly developed rifled artillery. In two days, ten batteries set up on an adjoining island-they were named for such leading Union generals as Grant, Sherman, Burnside, Halleck, and McClellan-and firing at ranges of up to 3,000 yards, broke the carapace open, while sh.e.l.ls from heavy mortars devastated the interior. Local Confederate forces lacked both the artillery to counter-bombard and landing craft to launch troops against the Union gunners. The operation was a perfect demonstration of the North"s amphibious freedom of action which, by this offensive, completed its acquisition of a chain of coastal footholds and protected anchorages running from Fortress Monroe, at the mouth of Chesapeake Bay, to Mobile, in the estuary of the Alabama River. At the outset of the amphibious campaign, the United States Navy had retained only two Southern bases from which to conduct a blockade, Fortress Monroe and the offsh.o.r.e island of Key West. By its end, it was the South which was left with only two Atlantic ports, Wilmington, North Carolina, and Charleston, South Carolina, the pivots of Cornwallis"s campaign before Yorktown eighty years earlier. The situation was a terrible setback for the Southern cause, all the more so because it had come about almost inadvertently. Keen though Lincoln was on the concept of blockade, he had had no idea that it could be realized as completely and cheaply as it was. For its part, the South had given away its coastal security, making almost no effort to protect its most valuable harbours and points of seaward entry from its enemy.
The South"s one serious attempt to achieve maritime superiority failed through bad luck. Both navies, Union and Confederate, were aware in 1861 that the ships they possessed belonged to the past and that if either could build or acquire examples of the new ships that were taking to the seas in Europe, it would triumph. The French and the British had each built such a ship, La Gloire La Gloire and HMS and HMS Warrior Warrior, which were steam-propelled ironclads. Disraeli said of Warrior Warrior, seeing her in the naval anchorage at Portsmouth in 1861 among the old wooden walls of the Channel Fleet, that she looked like a "snake among the rabbits." The only ships the U.S. Navy possessed in 1861 were rabbits. The Confederate Navy had no ships at all, except those trapped in Southern ports when war broke out; they were rabbits also. Both sides knew that they would have to acquire some snakes rapidly if they were to keep the sea. The South just won the race. Their hope of achieving naval supremacy was invested in a U.S. Navy steam frigate, Merrimack Merrimack, which had been scuttled on secession but raised and repaired. To transform her, the Confederate Navy Department commandeered the output of the Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond so as to cover her in iron plate, enough to protect her 172 feet, but that, of course, robbed her of freeboard. She lay so low in the water that she resembled a raft. On her first outing, March 8, 1862, the raft, whose pre-war engines generated too little power to move her at any speed, came out of the Norfolk Navy Yard, which the Union had lost to the South, to attack the Union"s fleet of wooden warships in Hampton Roads just across the water. Union shot bounced off the Merrimack Merrimack"s carapace, damaging its fixtures and fittings. The Merrimack"s Merrimack"s rifled guns did terrible damage in return. Two large wooden warships were sunk outright, either by gunfire or ramming, and the survivors fled into shallow water for safety, where the rifled guns did terrible damage in return. Two large wooden warships were sunk outright, either by gunfire or ramming, and the survivors fled into shallow water for safety, where the Merrimack Merrimack could not follow. The enormous weight of could not follow. The enormous weight of Merrimack"s Merrimack"s plating caused her to draw twice her pre-conversion draught. plating caused her to draw twice her pre-conversion draught.
Next day should have spelt the end for the survivors of March 8. By the strangest of coincidences, however, the Brooklyn Navy Yard, which had been racing to design and build an ironclad, had got one launched and on its way south the day before. The Monitor Monitor really was a raft, with a revolving turret mounting 11-inch guns perched on top. Highly unseaworthy, it just survived the Atlantic seas between Sandy Hook and Norfolk to arrive on March 9 and take station next to one of the survivors of the previous day"s ma.s.sacre. The really was a raft, with a revolving turret mounting 11-inch guns perched on top. Highly unseaworthy, it just survived the Atlantic seas between Sandy Hook and Norfolk to arrive on March 9 and take station next to one of the survivors of the previous day"s ma.s.sacre. The Merrimack Merrimack"s crew mistook the Monitor Monitor for a dockyard repair vessel. Only when it opened fire did battle commence, and then very haphazardly, since neither vessel, try as it might with ram and cannon, could land a disabling blow. After two hours of ineffectual circling and lunging, the crews called it a day and withdrew. for a dockyard repair vessel. Only when it opened fire did battle commence, and then very haphazardly, since neither vessel, try as it might with ram and cannon, could land a disabling blow. After two hours of ineffectual circling and lunging, the crews called it a day and withdrew.
Naval experts all over the world recognised, however, the significance of March 9, 1862. The building of wooden warships stopped almost immediately, to be replaced by ironclads, though of better design than the ungainly Monitor Monitor and and Merrimack Merrimack. Neither long survived their revolutionary encounter. Monitor Monitor foundered in the open sea while being taken south to strengthen the blockade; foundered in the open sea while being taken south to strengthen the blockade; Merrimack Merrimack had to be abandoned when Norfolk fell to McClellan"s troops later in 1862. had to be abandoned when Norfolk fell to McClellan"s troops later in 1862. Merrimack"s Merrimack"s failure was a decisive event. It deflated for good the South"s hopes of defeating blockade by technical means. Its few subsequent essays in ironclad building were inland craft. It never again attempted to challenge the Union navy for command of the sea, and by failing to do so, it conceded the power of Northern blockade. The South built and bought abroad numbers of swift blockade-runners; they were better adapted, however, to making fortunes for their owners than to denting the barrier the North erected around the South"s coasts. Blockade reduced the South"s export trade by two-thirds. It was not only that the North"s active blockade was as effective as it was, but also that by 1863 one blockade-runner in three was taken by the Union cordon. Even if a blockade-runner slipped through, it had, after 1863, few ports into which it could make its way. In 1864 the only port cities which had not been taken by the Union were Wilmington, North Carolina; Savannah, Georgia; and Charleston, South Carolina. As a result the blockade-running trade was transferred to offsh.o.r.e, foreign ports, Na.s.sau in the Bahamas, Bermuda, and Havana, from which goods had to be transshipped, which did not ease the problem of delivery. Goods got through, with as many as nine out of ten ships successfully running the blockade in 1861, and still one out of two in 1865. Nevertheless, blockade crippled the South"s ability to earn foreign exchange and so slowed its consumption of foreign goods, not luxuries alone but also necessities, including munitions and firearms. Shortage, of course, stimulated a subst.i.tution economy in the South, but of a limited sort since it lacked essential natural resources and the industrial means to process them, while its neighbour, Mexico, was too underdeveloped and too poor to organise a market. Blockade was a killer to Confederate ambitions. It was only because the South was a backward region, whose population was accustomed to life at the margin, that it was able to survive privation as long as it did. failure was a decisive event. It deflated for good the South"s hopes of defeating blockade by technical means. Its few subsequent essays in ironclad building were inland craft. It never again attempted to challenge the Union navy for command of the sea, and by failing to do so, it conceded the power of Northern blockade. The South built and bought abroad numbers of swift blockade-runners; they were better adapted, however, to making fortunes for their owners than to denting the barrier the North erected around the South"s coasts. Blockade reduced the South"s export trade by two-thirds. It was not only that the North"s active blockade was as effective as it was, but also that by 1863 one blockade-runner in three was taken by the Union cordon. Even if a blockade-runner slipped through, it had, after 1863, few ports into which it could make its way. In 1864 the only port cities which had not been taken by the Union were Wilmington, North Carolina; Savannah, Georgia; and Charleston, South Carolina. As a result the blockade-running trade was transferred to offsh.o.r.e, foreign ports, Na.s.sau in the Bahamas, Bermuda, and Havana, from which goods had to be transshipped, which did not ease the problem of delivery. Goods got through, with as many as nine out of ten ships successfully running the blockade in 1861, and still one out of two in 1865. Nevertheless, blockade crippled the South"s ability to earn foreign exchange and so slowed its consumption of foreign goods, not luxuries alone but also necessities, including munitions and firearms. Shortage, of course, stimulated a subst.i.tution economy in the South, but of a limited sort since it lacked essential natural resources and the industrial means to process them, while its neighbour, Mexico, was too underdeveloped