This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [173]
“The father of waters rolls unvexed to the sea.”
Chapter Ten
LAST OF THE MIGHT-HAVE-BEENS
1. Pursuit in Tennessee
IT was believed that the Middle West now was back where it had been in 1860. The Mississippi Valley was open again, and it was an article of faith that this river was the all-important highway to the markets of the world. The West was free; the terrible threat of isolation posed by secession was ended, and the farmers and traders of the continental interior no longer had to see a closed door at the mouth of the great river. They could also count themselves relieved from economic bondage to the merchants and bankers of the East.
Yet war is fought in a fog, and men are not always able to understand just what they have done. The Mississippi would never again be what it had been before — not even when the last vengeful guerrillas had been driven from the canebrakes and cured of their new habit of taking shots at passing steamboats. The road to the outer world would run east and west now, river or no river, war or no war. Not again would there be the lazy life of drifting downstream with the tide, high-pressure engines swinging paddle wheels in slow, splashing rhythm, corn and wheat and pork and mules and lumber borne away by the Father of Waters to the great ships waiting at the New Orleans levee. The dike that had obstructed the river was broken, but the old flow would never quite be resumed. The West had won the most significant campaign of the war, but it had not brought back the past. That was gone forever. Now the West must face east, not south. And the entire country must look to the future rather than to the past.
That the capture of Vicksburg would have unexpected results was no more than natural. It had been thought of as something that would soothe the rising war-weariness west of the Alleghenies and make farmers feel that they would gain by the war; it turned out to be the stroke that would decide the war itself, or at least would go far toward doing so, and Sherman was exultantly writing to his brother, the senator, that Federal armies “will be in Mobile in October and Georgia by Christmas if required.” He was talking with southern men of repute and position, and he reported: “The fall of Vicksburg has had a powerful effect. They are subjugated.”1
Sherman could have been right. From a soldier’s viewpoint, all the logic was on his side; having lost the valley, the Confederacy could not hope to win the final decision. Yet the war was turning into something that no one battle or campaign could settle. It was no longer a mere matter of armies; it was turning into the first of the great modern wars, releasing unsuspected energies even as it brought infinite destruction, and its proper target now was not so much the opposing armies in the field as the will to resist, the capacity to keep on struggling for survival, in the hearts of the people themselves. Grant had wrecked the transportation and manufacturing nexus at Jackson, Mississippi, as an essential preliminary to the taking of Vicksburg. More and more the war would follow that pattern. The morale of a Mississippi planter or an Ohio farmer would finally come to be fully as significant as the condition of Bragg’s or Grant’s soldiers.
Odd things were beginning to happen. There was, early this summer, for a sample, the matter of John Hunt Morgan’s raid into Ohio and the possibly related business of Clement Vallandigham and his effort to become governor of Ohio.
Vallandigham was a northern Democrat who believed that the sheer weight of the northern war effort was crushing domestic liberties; believed, also, that under almost any circumstances it would be better to have Democrats in power than to have Republicans. He had been campaigning in Ohio with great vigor, uttering words that seemed calculated to discourage northern recruiting efforts and to bring about a readiness to accept a negotiated peace; and Ambrose E. Burnside — who, after Fredericksburg, had been