This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [78]
On paper, Shiloh was a draw; actually it was one of the decisive battles of the war. It was a battle the Confederacy simply had to win. For it had been a blow struck to restore a disastrously lost balance, a desperate attempt to re-establish the Confederate frontier in the Kentucky-Ohio country, a crucial effort to save the Mississippi Valley. It had failed, and the fact that it had come close to being a dazzling victory did not offset the failure. Robert E. Lee, serving (with sadly inadequate authority) as Jefferson Davis’s general supervisor of military operations, recognized the crisis immediately. While Richmond was still celebrating what it believed to be a great triumph, and while Beauregard was reassembling his exhausted army in Corinth, Lee was wiring Atlantic coast commanders to send reinforcements west at any cost, warning: “If Mississippi Valley is lost, Atlantic States would be ruined.”2
That was just another way of saying that the outcome of the war would depend on what happened along the Mississippi, and in this spring of 1862 the Mississippi was visibly being won by the North. Federal John Pope, all bluster and heedless energy, had been doing his job. He had taken New Madrid and Island No. Ten, Federal rams and gunboats had smashed a makeshift Confederate fleet that protected Memphis, and before long Memphis itself would be evacuated; the river was open, or as good as open, all the way to Vicksburg.
Worse yet, as far as the Confederacy was concerned, the Mississippi was being lost at both ends. Since early winter the Federals had had troops on Ship Island, that Gulf-coast sandspit within reaching distance of the mouths of the Mississippi. Unaccountably, the Confederate high command had ignored this threat, even though it obviously meant that the Federals were meditating an attack on New Orleans. One reason, perhaps, was the fact that the Federal troops there were under command of Ben Butler, the one-time Democrat who had laid such a heavy hand on the Secessionists in eastern Maryland in the spring of 1861. At the end of February, Confederate General Mansfield Lovell, commanding at New Orleans, was writing contemptuously that Butler’s Ship Island expedition was harmless: “A black Republican dynasty will never give an old Breckinridge Democrat like Butler command of any expedition which they had any idea would result in such a glorious success as the capture of New Orleans.”3
There was much about Ben Butler that Lovell did not then understand, to be sure; but a more solid reason for optimism lay in the two forts that guarded the entrance to the Mississippi, Forts Jackson and St. Philip, downstream forty miles from New Orleans. These were solid masonry works, plunked down in almost impassable swamps. It was an unshaken military axiom just then that unarmored ships could not fight forts; these forts could be approached only by water; let the Federals assemble all the warships they chose, therefore, the southern approach to New Orleans was safe. A somewhat makeshift assemblage of river gunboats had been brought down to help the forts. There were fire rafts and river obstructions, and the New Orleans shipyards were building two prodigious ironclads, Louisiana and Mississippi; once these monsters were afloat and in commission, no imaginable power could come in through this gate.
Nevertheless, as the winter progressed things looked more serious. A brash young Federal naval officer named David D. Porter had sold the idea that these forts would be much less formidable if they were properly shelled; and he had got together twenty schooners, each one bearing a ponderous mortar capable of tossing thirteen-inch shells. Neither mortars nor shells existed when he brought his idea forward, but the North had a great military asset which had been overlooked — the great forges and foundries of Pittsburgh, operating on the iron ore that was coming down in ever-greater quantities through the Soo canal from the Lake Superior ranges. These turned to promptly, and by the time Porter had his schooners stripped for