CHAPTER XIII

"PEPPER BOX" STRATEGY

The moment Virginia adopted an ordinance of secession the authorities on both sides recognized the fact that that state was destined to be the chief battle ground of the war, and especially that the first and perhaps the decisive actions of the struggle were likely to occur there. Accordingly both sides began at once to hurry troops to that borderland--the South sending them to such vantage points in Virginia as might most seriously threaten Washington, the North sending them to the capital city for its defense and for that march upon Richmond which, it was hoped at the North, might be quickly decisive of the war in favor of the Federal arms.

The Confederate General Forrest is reported to have defined "strategy" as the art of "getting there first with the most men." This was what each side at that time was endeavoring to do.

Richmond was not yet selected as the Confederate capital, but its choice as such was already foreshadowed as a necessary requirement alike of geography and politics, and within a brief while the foreshadowing became a fact. In the meanwhile it was accepted in advance as a certainty, and the two capitals confronted each other at a distance of scarcely more than a hundred miles, as the crow flies.

The Southern States poured troops into Richmond as rapidly as they could. The Northern States poured troops into Washington for the defense of that capital with all possible energy and enterprise. Neither upon the one side nor upon the other were the men soldiers in any proper acceptation of the term. They were raw levies. From the North they were mainly men who had passed their young lives in commerce, in study or in other peaceful pursuits. From the South they were mainly the sons of planters or the sons of overseers, accustomed in either case from their youth up to the use of gunpowder, and to the employment of those arms in the use of which gunpowder is a prime factor. The Southern youths were accustomed to outdoor life, to camp fare, to self-dependence, to self-sacrifice, if need be. The Northern youth in the main were accustomed to nothing of the sort.

Thus at the beginning the Southern troops had an advantage. This was peculiarly obvious when the cavalry of the two sections met each other in battle. The Southern horsemen had been "rough riders" from infancy. Many of the Northern men of that arm of the service had never ridden at all except perhaps by way of conducting a gentle and docile farm horse to a watering trough. In the matter of horses, too, the Southerners, and especially the Virginians, had a distinct advantage. Ever since the first settlement of Virginia it had been the custom of men in that nearly roadless state to go everywhere upon horseback. They had consequently given special attention to the breeding of horses fit for strenuous work under the saddle, while in the North horse-breeding had been conducted mainly with a view to harness use. The wiry Virginian thoroughbreds, or half-breds, were far fitter for cavalry service, far more enduring, far quicker of action, far more alert and responsive than the Conestogas or Percherons or handsome and fast trotting Morgans of Pennsylvania, from which state came the first cavalry regiments encountered by Stuart and his born and bred cavaliers, mounted as they were upon "Red Eye" colts or "Revenue" fillies.

The Southern troops also had the advantage of fighting defensively in their own country to whose climate they were inured and to the diseases of which they were in the main immune.

But apart from these small differences the two armies that confronted each other on the Potomac were composed of substantially the same materials. Later in the war the large enlistment of immigrants gave to the Union army an element that did not at any time exist in the armies of the South. But at the outset there was no important difference. Each army was made up of American youths, full of patriotic fervor, brave, heroic upon occasion, but utterly untrained in the profession of arms.

On the Northern side in the early contests of the war there was the advantage of small bodies of regulars, trained to obey orders at all hazards and to stand firm in every moment of danger. These regulars proved themselves of inestimable value in the early actions of the war; but their numbers were so small that their service scarcely counts in the historical reckoning.

For the rest, both armies were made up of volunteers, men wholly unused to military discipline and wholly untrained in that subjection of their own minds and wills to superior authority which constitutes the distinction between the soldier and the raw recruit--between an army and an armed mob. They were brave fellows, all of them. They were devoted to the causes they severally served, but they were not yet soldiers. They retained the unsoldierly habit of thinking and judging for themselves, where they should instead have let their officers think and judge for them. Under the discipline of service and of fighting they presently reduced themselves to the ranks, as it were, and became soldiers equal and even superior to the best regulars that any army on earth has ever brought into the field. Their deeds at Cold Harbor, at Fredericksburg, at Chancellorsville, in the Wilderness, at Petersburg, at Antietam, at Gettysburg, and on a score of other desperately contested battlefields leave no possible room for doubt that the men who composed the Federal and Confederate armies were the peers and even the superiors of any other men who ever fought anywhere. But at the first they were not such. They were undisciplined and subject to such panics as that sort of individual thinking in which they indulged is inevitably bound to produce. It is important to bear these facts in mind if we would read the early history of the war understandingly.

The first blood shed in the war, however, was not shed in formal military action. On the nineteenth of April, two days after Virginia's secession, a Baltimore mob assailed a Massachusetts regiment on its passage through the Maryland city to Washington, and several persons were killed in the melée. It is not historically recorded that any of the men who constituted the mob and made the assault ever afterwards served in the Confederate army. On the contrary there is every reason to believe that these men, so ready for mob violence, very carefully avoided a service in which legitimate fighting was to be the daily routine of life. That, however, is a detail--illustrative, perhaps, but not otherwise important to history.

The secession of Virginia carried with it one event of vital and even of supreme importance, namely, the secession of Robert E. Lee, without whose genius the Confederate War would almost certainly have ended in McClellan's capture of Richmond in the summer of 1862.

General Winfield Scott had called Lee "the flower of the American Army." He had earnestly recommended Lee as his own fittest successor in supreme command of the United States Army and such command had been definitely offered to Lee. The secession of half a dozen Northern or border states could not have been of greater consequence either to the North or to the South than the decision of Robert E. Lee to resign his commission and go with his native state Virginia into a war of secession for which he saw no occasion or justification. His problem, like that of Farragut and George H. Thomas and other officers of Southern birth in the United States Army and Navy, was a very perplexing one, involving a divided duty such as few men are ever called upon to confront in the course of their lives. He himself set forth the considerations that finally determined his course, in a letter to his sister, the wife of a Union officer, which it is proper to quote here in explanation. To this sister he wrote on the twentieth of April, 1861: "We are now in a state of war which will yield to nothing. The whole South is in a state of revolution, into which Virginia after a long struggle has been drawn, and though I recognize no necessity for this state of things, and would have foreborne and pleaded to the end for the redress of grievances real or supposed, yet in my own person I had to meet the question whether I should take part against my native state. With all my devotion to the Union and the feeling of loyalty and duty of an American citizen, I have not been able to make up my mind to raise my hand against my relatives, my children, my home. I have therefore resigned my commission in the army, and, save in defense of my native state, with the sincere hope that my poor services may never be needed, I hope I may never be called upon to draw my sword."

Surely no more tragic, no more pathetic letter than that was ever written. Yet it represented and reflected the struggle which at that time was going on in the soul of every army or navy officer of Southern birth and kindred. It was a part of the tragedy of a war which divided families and set brother against brother in a strife that knew neither mercy nor relenting for four, long, terrible years.

Lee went at once to Richmond and was promptly appointed to the task of organizing first the Virginian and afterwards all the Southern armies for effective service. For such work of organization he had a peculiar genius which General Scott recognized, at the same time congratulating the Union cause upon the fact that it had some weeks the start of Lee in the task of creating an army out of untrained and undisciplined volunteers.

Lee was not yet placed in any active military command, but at every step he was the supreme military adviser of the Southern authorities. When Beauregard, with all the laurels of popular praise upon him, reached Richmond he and not Lee was the idol of the hour. His spectacular and rather theatrical reduction of Fort Sumter had advertised him to the popular attention as nothing had advertised Lee. But Lee was his superior in rank as in genius and everything else, and it was he who directed Beauregard to establish himself at Manassas and along Bull Run as the fittest vantage ground from which to repel the first serious advance of the Federal Army which was then assembling at Washington.

At that period of the war there prevailed at Washington what a military wit and critic afterwards called "the pepper box policy." That is to say, the policy was to send forces into all quarters at once, to defend large and small positions equally, and thus to scatter an army which if concentrated upon a single point might have achieved decisive results. Thus if the whole force available for eastern service had been brought at once to Washington and pushed thence toward Richmond it seemingly might have enveloped its adversary in superior numbers, and except for the uncertainty due to the untrained character of its men it might have been reckoned upon to achieve decisive results.

But under the "pepper box policy," a part of this force was sent under McClellan to West Virginia; a part of it to the Valley of Virginia under Patterson; a part of it to Fortress Monroe, and the main body to Washington and its neighborhood, to protect the capital and presently to advance for the overthrow of Beauregard at Manassas and for a determined advance upon Richmond.

This policy invited defeat and met it. On the tenth of June the small force at Fortress Monroe advanced and assailed the Confederates at Big Bethel. It was defeated with some loss, having inflicted no corresponding or compensatory injury upon the Confederates. Even had the expedition succeeded in driving the Confederates from Big Bethel, it could not possibly have accomplished anything of value to the Federal arms or cause. It was supported by no force at Fortress Monroe or elsewhere which was conceivably adequate to undertake an advance by that route upon Richmond. In default of such support the expedition was a foolish and futile one, and it must have been so reckoned even if it had succeeded in capturing the wholly unimportant works at Big Bethel.

In the same way, early in July, McClellan gained some notable advantages at Rich Mountain and elsewhere in West Virginia. He had distinctly the best of it in the fighting; he dislodged his adversaries from their chosen positions; and he made prisoners of a considerable number of men. But his expedition led nowhither. His position and the positions which he captured from the Confederates were alike strategically unimportant from the point of view of an aggressive campaign. His victories commanded no strategic points and opened no road to any desirable objective.

In the Valley of Virginia the Confederates abandoned Harper's Ferry--carrying off everything there that had military value, and General Patterson occupied the place. This made good dispatches for the newspapers and justified startling headlines of victory. But in very truth it meant nothing whatever except that the wily Fabian, Joseph E. Johnston, in command of the Confederate forces in that quarter, was wisely determined to keep himself and his army within reinforcing distance of Beauregard at Manassas, where the first great battle of the war was obviously destined to occur. Harper's Ferry and Martinsburg were clearly of no value whatsoever to General Johnston. By abandoning them and retiring to Winchester he placed his army twenty-five or thirty miles nearer to Manassas than it had been and drew Patterson by so much farther from the fighting points. For in order to reach and reinforce McDowell for the impending Manassas fight Patterson must march north, recross the Potomac, move thence eastward to Washington and then move southwest again to McDowell's assistance. Johnston meanwhile secured to himself a short line of march which gave him a very great advantage.

When the time came for the first great battle of the war to be fought, it was hoped at Washington that Patterson with his strong force, numbering about twenty-two thousand men, might be able to reinforce McDowell, while real or pretended operations might detain Johnston in the valley and prevent him from reinforcing Beauregard with his much smaller force. But by retiring to Winchester Johnston had secured for himself the certainty of joining Beauregard in time for the battle. When Patterson threw forward a cloud of skirmishers as if intending to offer battle at Winchester and secure the mountain passes into eastern Virginia, it did not take the ceaselessly active cavalry leader J. E. B. Stuart many hours of continuous skirmishing within his enemy's lines to discover that the movement was a feint and that Patterson was in fact hurrying the main body of his army toward Manassas, by way of Harper's Ferry and Washington.

Even before Stuart definitely reported this fact, Johnston had so far penetrated Patterson's purpose that he began his own movement toward Manassas, sending first the heavier and more slowly moving corps across the mountains to a point where railroad transportation was to meet them, and thus clearing the way for the cavalry and the lighter infantry and the well-horsed field batteries to proceed over country roads without the assistance of railroad cars.

Thus the "pepper box" system of strategy which prevailed at Washington met its first defeat. If Patterson had been sent at the outset to strengthen McDowell the result of the battle of Manassas might or might not have been different from what it was. But at any rate that arrangement would have given to McDowell a much greater preponderance of strength than he actually had on that battlefield. If Patterson had not gone to the valley of course Johnston would not have gone thither to meet him, and the bulk of Johnston's force would have been added to Beauregard's. But Patterson's army very largely outnumbered the force that Johnston had at Winchester within striking distance of Manassas, so that the total result of the plan of concentration would have been to strengthen McDowell.

More important still is the fact that while Johnston actually got a large part of his army to Manassas in time to decide the battle, Patterson never got there at all. So in considering the policy that sent Patterson to the valley instead of sending him to the line of Bull Run, we are entitled to reckon it as the cause of Patterson's complete absence from a field on which his valley adversary was present with timely and sorely needed strength.

In the meantime and throughout the summer there was a civil war going on in Missouri with varying fortunes. It occupied many thousands of men who might perhaps have been more wisely and effectively employed in aid of the one great movement upon Richmond, which if it had been thus made conspicuously successful, would pretty certainly have made an end of the war before it had had time to develop its strength. Those operations in Missouri had a dramatic interest of their own. But they in no way bore upon the problems of grand strategy which were meanwhile the proper and legitimate objects of supreme concern and consideration by the two stalwart contestants.