• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 6767 0

had not seen his son—or any of his other children—for several years, though he continued to send them long, disapproving letters from East Africa. Robert was a restless, lonely boy—“dour, determined, impulsive,” was how one contemporary described him. Far from acceding to his father’s wish for him to train as a doctor, Robert wanted to join the army or navy. At one point, he absconded from school and became lost for a short time in the underworld of Limehouse in London, where sailors’ hostels operated side by side with opium dens and brothels.

THIRTY-ONE

The Crisis Comes

Not enough men—Lincoln upholds the message of Gettysburg—Lord Lyons insists—Colonel Grenfell’s new mission—Failure of the Copperheads

The South was nearly bankrupt. In mid-July, President Davis persuaded George A. Trenholm to take over from Christopher Memminger as secretary of the treasury—even though the businessman told him frankly that it was too late to improve the Confederacy’s finances. Its rampant inflation and crippling shortages were evidence of an economy that was no longer functioning. The South’s military position also looked critical, especially in the West, and on July 17, 1864, Davis removed General Joe Johnston from command of the Army of Tennessee. The cabinet unanimously backed the decision. General William T. Sherman had invaded Georgia on May 7 with a force of a hundred thousand men, and for the past three months Richmond had been expecting to hear of a great battle between the two armies. But Johnston had insisted on pursuing a strategy of attrition, arguing that he could wear Sherman down through defensive maneuvering and then attack once the numerically superior Federals were too weak to resist.

The problem for Johnston was that whenever he settled his men into a seemingly impregnable position, Sherman simply marched around him and continued toward Atlanta. Johnston succeeded in having one battle of his choosing, at Kennesaw Mountain on June 27, less than thirty miles from Atlanta, but Sherman easily absorbed the three thousand casualties and moved forward. Johnston abandoned the mountain, but before he could establish a new defensive line the Federals had crossed the last natural barrier before Atlanta—the Chattahoochee River—on July 8. Now there were no more mountains or rivers to stand in the way of Sherman’s advance. Losing Atlanta would not only be politically disastrous; Davis knew that its capture would “open the way for the Federal Army to the Gulf on the one hand, and to Charleston on the other.” The South would be split in two: “It would give them control of our network of railways and thus paralyze our efforts.”1 Davis replaced Johnston with one of his subordinate commanders, thirty-three-year-old General John Bell Hood, who had been lobbying for weeks to be allowed to wage a more aggressive campaign.

Atlanta was not the only city under threat. Mobile’s defenses were crumbling, and the survival of Charleston—where the Federal bombardment was under way—rested on Fort Sumter’s continuing to keep the enemy out of the harbor. Captain Henry Feilden was fighting his own battles with the Ordnance Department for more guns. (There was still no word of his promotion, despite General Jones’s having added his own letter of recommendation to General Beauregard’s.) He did not wish to sound defeatist, but if Mobile were to fall, Feilden told General Gorgas, “Farragut’s fleet would be set at liberty for operations to the eastern coast, and there can be little doubt that Charleston would be the first place assailed … in our present position, I feel deeply apprehensive as to the result of a grand naval attack.”2

Feilden was unable to press his point further; in August he was sent on a special mission to Florida. “Throughout this State but especially on the Coast there are large numbers of deserters and desperadoes who have fled from our armies and hid themselves in these almost inaccessible wilds,” he explained to Julia. “The General now wishes to apply the policy of reconciliation, and I shall go down amongst them as an