This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [228]
If they could hold their own … continued stalemate could actually mean victory for the Confederacy. It believed itself to be unconquerable, and men could argue that in this dreadful summer it was proving itself so. Hang on, keep the Yankees from making any visible gains, let war-weariness carry the election — and that will be the end of it. So ran the southern hope; so, also, ran the genuine possibility.
The great struggles of history are not always visible and dramatic. They can take place out of sight, in the hearts and the minds of millions of men who have a choice to make. It went thus in 1864. The final word about the Civil War would be spoken by the people back home, most of whom had never seen a battlefield, carried a musket, or known what it was like to watch pain and death take form in the red-gray mist of smoke and flame. Out of what they felt, the choice would come.
The wheel had swung full circle. In 1861, war had come because emotion took charge when hard decisions were to be made. Emotion would take charge again this year; emotion, springing from no one could say what involved thoughts and deep griefs and hopes, given final form perhaps by the news from the battle fronts. In one way or another the men of the North would decide whether they wanted to go on to the finish or give up and write off all that they had suffered and all that they had once hoped for. Their verdict would be final. Lincoln knew it, and the little slip of paper he had filed away in a pigeonhole shows what he feared the decision might be like: shows, too, that if the decision was unfavorable to everything he had lived for he would get around it if he possibly could. There have been few bitter-end fighters in all history quite as tenacious as Abraham Lincoln.
Then, at the moment when despair was deepest, a great wind swept across the sky and drove the clouds off in shreds, and it was possible to see the sunlight once more. To begin with, there was Admiral Farragut and Mobile Bay.
The venerable admiral, who would not consider himself old until he found himself unable to turn a handspring on his birthday, had assembled a powerful fleet at the mouth of Mobile Bay, and early in August he struck with it. Mobile was important, the Confederacy’s last port for blockade-runners on the Gulf coast (except for ports in Texas, which, having been cut off, hardly counted any more). Grant had wanted to take Mobile right after Vicksburg fell, but Halleck had ruled otherwise. Now Farragut would try it. The town itself he might not get, but if he could run past the harbor forts and anchor his fleet inside the bay, the port would be closed, and one more Confederate gateway to the outer world would be sealed off — those gateways to the outer world, whose help must come in if the Confederacy was to live.
August 5, and a hot sunny morning; Farragut’s wooden sloops of war came steaming in toward the mouth of the bay, topmasts and upper yards sent down, everything cleared for action. The ships were in double file, with the monitors going on ahead; the sun came down hard on the flat iron decks of these latter, making the heat below almost unendurable. Along the channel the Confederates had planted mines — “torpedoes,” as the word was used in those days — and on the east side of the channel was powerful Fort Morgan, a masonry work of great strength which Farragut could not hope to pound into submission; his best chance was to run past it, as he had run past the New Orleans forts. Then the fort would be isolated, and the army could bring in troops and siege guns and reduce it at leisure.
Inside the bay the Confederates had a small fleet. Except for one vessel, the ironclad Tennessee, this was made up of light gunboats that could never stand up to Farragut’s ships at close range, but the exception might make all the difference. The Tennessee had been built on the Alabama River, near Selma, after the Merrimac pattern — low in the water, with a slant-sided citadel armored with five- and six-inch iron plating, heavily armed, with a ram bow. She was clumsy and her