第37章 THE RIVER WAR: 1862(11)
The Union Government, now thoroughly alarmed, sent Thomas to supersede Buell. But Thomas declined to take over the command, and on the eighth of October Buell fought Bragg at Perryville.
There was no tactical defeat or victory; but Bragg retired on Chattanooga. The Government now urged Buell to enter east Tennessee. He protested that lack of transport and supplies made such a move impossible. William S. Rosecrans then replaced him.
Buell was never employed again. He certainly failed fully to appreciate the legitimate bearing of statesmanship on strategy;but, for all that, he was an excellent organizer and a good commander.
In the meantime Grant had been experiencing his "most anxious period of the war." During this anxious period, which lasted from July to October, Rosecrans defeated Price at Iuka. This happened on the nineteenth of September. Van Dorn then joined Price and returned to the attack but was defeated by Rosecrans at Corinth on the fourth of October. The Confederates, who had come near victory on the third, retired in safety, because Grant still lacked the means of resuming the offensive.
As soon as he had the means Grant marched his army south for Vicksburg. There were three converging forces: Grant's from Grand Junction, Sherman's from Memphis, and a smaller one from Helena in Arkansas. But the Confederate General, J.C. Pemberton, who had replaced Van Dorn, escaped the trap they tried to set for him. He was strongly entrenched on the south side of the Tallahatchie, north of Oxford, on the Mississippi Central rails. While Grant and Sherman converged on his front, the force from Helena rounded his rear and cut the rails. But the damage was quickly repaired;and Pemberton retired south toward Vicksburg before Grant and Sherman could close and make him fight.
Then Grant tried again. This time Sherman advanced on board of Mississippi steamers, with the idea of meeting the Union expedition coming up from New Orleans. But Van Dorn cut Grant's long line of land communications at Holly Springs, forcing Grant back for supplies and leaving Sherman, who had made his way up the Yazoo, completely isolated. Grant fared well enough, so far as food was concerned; for he found such abundant supplies that he at once perceived the possibility of living on the country without troubling about a northern base. He spent Christmas and New Year at Holly Springs, and then moved back to Memphis.
In the meantime Sherman's separated force had come to grief. On the twenty-ninth of December its attempt to carry the Chickasaw Bluffs, just north of Vicksburg, was completely frustrated by Pemberton; for Sherman could not deploy into line on the few causeways that stood above the flooded ground.
On the eleventh of January this first campaign along the Mississippi was ended by the capture of Arkansas Post. McClernand was the senior there. But Sherman did the work ashore as D. D.
Porter did afloat.
Meanwhile Bragg had brought the campaign to a close among the eastern tributaries by a daring, though abortive, march on Nashville. Rosecrans, now commanding the army of the Cumberland, stopped and defeated him at Stone's River on New Year's Eve.
The "War in the West," that is, in those parts of the Southwest which lay beyond the navigable tributaries of the Mississippi system, was even more futile at the time and absolutely null in the end. Its scene of action, which practically consisted of inland Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, was not in itself important enough to be a great determining factor in the actual clash of arms. But Texas supplied many good men to the Southern ranks; and the Southern commissariat missed the Texan cattle after the fall of Vicksburg in '63. New Mexico might also have been a good deal more important than it actually was if it could have been made the base of a real, instead of an abortive, invasion of California, the El Dorado of Confederate finance.
We have already seen what happened on February 15, 1861, when General Twiggs handed over to the State authorities all the army posts in Texas. On the first of the following August Captain John R. Baylor, who had been forming a little Confederate army under pretext of a big buffalo hunt, proclaimed himself Governor of New Mexico (south of 34 degrees) and established his capital at Mesilla. In the meantime the Confederate Government itself had appointed General H.H. Sibley to the command of a brigade for the conquest of all New Mexico. Not ten thousand men were engaged in this campaign, Federals and Confederates, whites and Indians, all together; but a decisive Confederate success might have been pregnant of future victories farther west. Some Indians fought on one side, some on the other; and some of the wilder tribes, delighted to see the encroaching whites at loggerheads, gave trouble to both.
On February 21, 1862, Sibley defeated Colonel E.R.S. Canby at Valverde near Fort Craig. But his further advance was hindered by the barrenness of the country, by the complete destruction of all Union stores likely to fall into his hands, and by the fact that he was between two Federal forts when the battle ended. On the twentyeighth of March there was a desperate fight in Apache Canon. Both sides claimed the victory. But the Confederates lost more men as well as the whole of their supply and ammunition train. After this Sibley began a retreat which ended in May at San Antonio. His route was marked by bleaching skeletons for many a long day; and from this time forward the conquest of California became nothing but a dream.
The "War in the West" was a mere twig on the Trans-Mississippi branch; and when the fall of Vicksburg severed the branch from the tree the twig simply withered away.
The sword that ultimately severed branch and twig was firmly held by Union hands before the year was out; and this notwithstanding all the Union failures in the last six months. Grant and Porter from above, Banks and Farragut from below, had already massed forces strong enough to make the Mississippi a Union river from source to sea, in spite of all Confederates from Vicksburg to Port Hudson.