Shelby foote THE CIVL WAR 02 the civil war, a narrative sh ote (v5 0)

ALL THESE WERE HONOURED IN THEIR GENERATIONS AND WERE THE GLORY OF THEIR TIMES THERE BE OF THEM THAT HAVE LEFT A NAME BEHIND THEM THAT THEIR PRAISES MIGHT BE REPORTED AND SOME THERE BE WHICH HAVE NO MEMORIAL WHO ARE PERISHED AS THOUGH THEY HAD NEVER BEEN AND ARE BECOME AS THOUGH THEY HAD NEVER BEEN BORN AND THEIR CHILDREN AFTER THEM BUT THESE WERE MERCIFUL MEN WHOSE RIGHTEOUSNESS HATH NOT BEEN FORGOTTEN WITH THEIR SEED SHALL CONTINUALLY REMAIN A GOOD INHERITANCE AND THEIR CHILDREN ARE WITHIN THE COVENANT THEIR SEED STANDETH FAST AND THEIR CHILDREN FOR THEIR SAKES THEIR SEED SHALL REMAIN FOR EVER AND THEIR GLORY SHALL NOT BE BLOTTED OUT THEIR BODIES ARE BURIED IN PEACE BUT THEIR NAME LIVETH FOR EVERMORE Ecclesiasticus xliv © Copyright, 1963, by Shelby Foote All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions Published in New York by Random House, Inc., and simultaneously in Toronto, Canada, by Random House of Canada, Limited Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 58–9882 eISBN: 978-0-307-74468-5 v3.1 CONTENTS Cover Title Page Copyright The Longest Journey Unhappy New Year Death of a Soldier The Beleaguered City Stars in their Courses Unvexed to the Sea Riot and Resurgence The Center Gives Spring Came on Forever List of Maps, Bibliographical Note I II III I The Longest Journey “AFTER AN ABSENCE OF NEARLY TWO YEARS,” Je erson Davis told the legislators assembled under the golden dome of his home-state capitol on the day after Christmas, 1862—twenty months and two weeks, to the day, since the guns of Charleston opened re on Sumter to inaugurate the civil war no one could know was not yet halfway over —“I again nd myself among those who, from the days of my childhood, have ever been the trusted objects of my a ection, those for whose good I have ever striven and whose interests I have sometimes hoped I may have contributed to subserve.… I left you to assume the duties which have devolved upon me as the representative of the new Confederacy The responsibilities of this position have occupied all my time, and have left me no opportunity for mingling with my friends in Mississippi or for sharing in the dangers which have menaced them But, wherever duty may have called me, my heart has been with you, and the success of the cause in which we are all engaged has been first in my thoughts and prayers.” In February of the year before, he had left for Montgomery, Alabama, to assume his role as President of the newly established provisional government, believing, as he said now, “that the service to which I was called could be but temporary.” A West Pointer and an authentic hero of the Mexican War, he had considered his primary talent—or, as he termed it, his “capacity”—to be military He had thought to return to the duty he found congenial, that of a line o cer in the service of his state, “to lead Mississippians in the eld, and to be with them where danger was to be braved and glory won.… But it was decided di erently I was called to another sphere of action How, in that sphere, I have discharged the duties and obligations imposed on me, it does not become me to constitute myself the judge It is for others to decide that question But, speaking to you with that frankness and that dence with which I have always spoken to you, and which partakes of the nature of thinking aloud, I can say with my hand upon my heart that whatever I have done has been done with the sincere purpose of promoting the noble cause in which we are engaged The period which has elapsed since I left you is short; for the time which may appear long in the life of a man is short in the history of a nation And in that short period remarkable changes have been wrought in all the circumstances by which we are surrounded.” Remarkable changes had indeed been wrought, and of these the most immediately striking to those present, seated row on row beneath him or standing close-packed along the outer aisles, was in the aspect of the man who stood before them, tall and slender, careworn and oracular, in a mote-shot nimbus of hazy noonday sunlight pouring down from the high windows of the hall When they had seen him last on this same rostrum, just short of twenty-three months ago this week, he had not appeared to be within a decade of his fty-two years of age Now, though, he was fty-four, and he looked it The “troubles and thorns innumerable” which he foretold on his arrival in Montgomery to take the oath of o ce, back in the rst glad springtime of the nation, had not only come to pass; they had also left their marks—as if the thorns, being more than gurative, had scored his brow and made of him what he had never seemed before, a man of sorrows The gray eyes, one lustrous, the other sightless, its stone gray pupil covered by a lm, were deeply sunken above the jut of the high cheekbones, and the thin upper lip, indicative of an iron will and rigid self-control, was held so tightly against the teeth, even in repose, that you saw their shape behind it The accustomed geniality was there, the inveterate grace and charm of manner, along with the rich music of the voice, but the symptoms of strain and overwork were all too obvious These proceeded, it was said, not only from having had to await (as he was awaiting even now) the outcome of battles in which he could have no active part, whatever his inclination, but also, it was added, from a congenital inability to relegate authority, including the minor paperwork which took up such a disproportionate share of his existence Other changes there were, too, less physical and therefore less immediately obvious, but on closer inspection no less profound In this case, moreover, the contrast between now and then was emphasized by mutuality, involving others besides Davis It was twosided; reciprocal, so to speak Arriving in Jackson to accept his appointment as commander of Mississippi troops after his farewell to the Senate in January of what had presently turned out to be the rst year of the ict some men had still believed could be avoided, he had been met at the station by Governor J J Pettus, whom he advised to push the procurement of arms “We shall need all and many more than we can get,” he said, expressing the conviction that blood would soon be shed “General, you overrate the risk,” the governor protested, and Davis replied: “I only wish I did.” So thoroughly had this prediction been ful lled in the past twenty months—Kentucky and Missouri irretrievably gone, along with most of Tennessee and the northwest quarter of Virginia, New Orleans fallen, Nashville and Memphis occupied, and North Mississippi itself aswarm with bluecoats—that now it was Governor Pettus who was calling for reassurance, and calling for it urgently, from the man to whom he previously had offered it so blandly “You have often visited the army of Virginia,” he wired Richmond in early December “At this critical juncture could you not visit the army of the West? Something must be done to inspire confidence.” By way of reinforcement for this plea there came a letter from Senator James Phelan, whose home lay in the path of the invaders “The present alarming crisis in this state, so far from arousing the people, seems to have sunk them in listless despondency,” he wrote “The spirit of enlistment is thrice dead Enthusiasm has expired to a cold pile of damp ashes Defeats, retreats, su erings, dangers, magni ed by spiritless helplessness and an unchangeable conviction that our army is in the hands of ignorant and feeble commanders, are rapidly producing a sense of settled despair.… I imagine but one event that could awaken from its waning spark the enthusiastic hopes and energy of Mississippians Plant your own foot upon our soil, unfurl your banner at the head of the army, tell your own people that you have come to share with them the perils of this dark hour.… If ever your presence was needed as a last refuge from an ‘Iliad of woes,’ this is the hour It is not a point to be argued [Only] you can save us or help us save ourselves from the dread evils now so imminently pending.” Flattering as this was, in part—especially the exhortation to “unfurl your banner,” which touched the former hero of Buena Vista where his inclination was strongest and his vanity was most susceptible—the senator’s depiction of regional gloom and fears, tossed thus into the balance, added weight to the governor’s urgent plea that the Commander in Chief undertake the suggested journey to his homeland and thereby refute in the esh the growing complaint that the authorities in Richmond were concerned only for the welfare of the soldiers and civilians in Virginia, where if anywhere the war was being won, rather than for those in the western theater, where if anywhere the war was being lost Not that the danger nearest the national capital was slight Major General Ambrose Burnside, a month in command of the Army of the Potomac as successor to Major General George McClellan, who had been relieved for a lack of aggressiveness, was menacing the line of the Rappahannock with a mobile force of 150,000 men, backed by another 50,000 in the Washington defenses To oppose this host General Robert E Lee had something under 80,000 in the Army of Northern Virginia moving toward a concentration near Fredericksburg, where the threat of a crossing seemed gravest, midway of the direct north-south hundred-mile line connecting the two capitals That the battle, now obviously at hand, would be fought even closer to the Confederate seat of government appeared likely, for Davis wrote Lee on December 8: “You will know best when it will be proper to make a masked movement to the rear, should circumstances require you to move nearer to Richmond.” Something else he said in this same letter Hard as it was for him to leave the capital at a time when every day might bring the battle that would perhaps decide his country’s fate, he had made up his mind to heed the call that reached him from the West “I propose to go out there immediately,” he told Lee, “with the hope that something may be done to bring out men not heretofore in service, and to arouse all classes to united and desperate resistance.” After expressing the hope that “God may bless us, as in other cases seemingly as desperate, with success over our impious foe,” he added, by way of apology for not having reviewed the Virginian’s army since it marched northward on the eve of Second Manassas: “I have been very anxious to visit you, but feeble health and constant labor have caused me to delay until necessity hurries me in the opposite direction.” He sent the letter by special courier that same December 8; then, two days later, he himself was off He left incognito, aboard a special car and accompanied by a single military aide, lest his going stir up rumors that the capital was about to be abandoned in the face of the threat to the line of the Rappahannock His planned itinerary was necessarily Lee, McC: The Concentration The Seven Days; Hezekiah III CHAPTER THE SUN SHINES SOUTH Lincoln Reappraisal; Emancipation? Grant, Farragut, Buell Bragg, K Smith, Breckinridge Lee vs Pope: Second Manassas CHAPTER TWO ADVANCES; TWO RETREATS Invasion West: Richmond, Munfordville Lee, McClellan: Sharpsburg The Emancipation Proclamation Corinth-Perryville: Bragg Retreats CHAPTER LAST BEST HOPE OF EARTH Lincoln’s Late-Fall Disappointments Davis: Lookback and Outlook Lincoln: December Message Volume Two I CHAPTER THE LONGEST JOURNEY Davis, Westward and Return Goldsboro; Fredericksburg Prairie Grove; Galveston Holly Springs; Walnut Hills Murfreesboro: Bragg Retreats CHAPTER U NHAPPY NEW YEAR Lincoln, Mud March; Hooker Arkansas Post; Transmiss; Grant Erlanger; Richmond Bread Riot Rosecrans; Johnston; Streit Vicksburg—Seven Failures CHAPTER DEATH OF A SOLDIER Naval Repulse at Charleston Lee, Hooker; Mosby; Kelly’s Ford Suffolk: Longstreet Southside Hooker, Stoneman: The Crossing Chancellorsville; Jackson Dies II CHAPTER THE BELEAGUERED CITY Grant’s Plan; the Run; Grierson Eastward, Port Gibson to Jackson Westward, Jackson to Vicksburg Port Hudson; Banks vs Gardner Vicksburg Siege, Through June CHAPTER STARS IN THEIR COURSES Lee, Davis; Invasion; Stuart Gettysburg Opens; Meade Arrives Gettysburg, July 2: Longstreet Gettysburg, Third Day: Pickett Cavalry; Lee Plans Withdrawal CHAPTER U NVEXED TO THE SEA Lee’s Retreat; Falling Waters Milliken’s Bend; Helena Repulse Vicksburg Falls; Jackson Reburnt Lincoln Exults; N.Y Draft Riot Davis Declines Lee’s Resignation III CHAPTER RIOT AND RESURGENCE Rosecrans; Tullahoma Campaign Morgan Raid; Chattanooga Taken Charleston Seige; Transmississippi Chickamauga—First Day Bragg’s Victory Unexploited CHAPTER THE CENTER GIVES Sabine Pass; Shelby; Grant Hurt Bristoe Station; Buckland Races Grant Opens the Cracker Line Davis, Bragg; Gettysburg Address Missionary Ridge; Bragg Relieved CHAPTER SPRING CAME ON FOREVER Mine Run; Meade Withdraws Olustee; Kilpatrick Raid Sherman, Meridian; Forrest Lincoln-Davis, a Final Contrast Grant Summoned to Washington Volume Three I CHAPTER ANOTHER GRAND DESIGN Grant in Washington—His Plan Red River, Camden: Reevaluation Paducah, Fort Pillow; Plymouth Grant Poised; Joe Davis; Lee CHAPTER THE FORTY DAYS Grant Crosses; the Wilderness Spotsylvania—“All Summer” New Market; Bermuda Hundred North Anna; Cold Harbor; Early CHAPTER RED CLAY MINUET Dalton to Pine Mountain Brice’s; Lincoln; “Alabama” Kennesaw to Chattahoochee Hood Replaces Johnston II CHAPTER WAR Is CRUELTY … Petersburg; Early I; Peace? Hood vs Sherman; Mobile Bay; Memphis Raid; Atlanta Falls Crater; McClellan; Early II Price Raid; “Florida”; Cushing; Forrest Raids Mid-Tenn Hood-Davis; Lincoln Reelected CHAPTER YOU CANNOT REFINE IT Petersburg Trenches; Weldon RR March to Sea; Hood, Spring Hill Franklin; Hood Invests Nashville Thomas Attacks; Hood Retreats Savannah Falls; Lincoln Exultant III CHAPTER A TIGHTENING NOOSE Grant; Ft Fisher; 13th Amendment Confed Shifts; Lee Genl-in-Chief? Blair Received; Hampton Roads Hatcher’s Run; Columbia Burned CHAPTER VICTORY, AND DEFEAT Sheridan, Early; Second Inaugural Goldsboro; Sheridan; City Point Five Forks—Richmond Evacuated Lee, Grant Race for Appomattox CHAPTER LUCIFER IN STARLIGHT Davis-Johnston; Sumter; Booth Durham; Citronelle; Davis Taken K Smith; Naval; Fort Monroe Postlude: Reconstruction, Davis ALSO AVAILABLE FROM VINTAGE BOOKS The Civil War: A Narrative Volume I, Fort Sumter to Perryville “A stunning book full of color, life, character and a new atmosphere of the Civil War, and at the same time a narrative of un agging power Eloquent proof that an historian should be a writer above all else.”—BURKE DAVIS “This is historical writing at its best.… It can hardly be surpassed.” —Library Journal “Anyone who wants to relive the Civil War, as thousands of Americans apparently do, will go through this volume with pleasure.… Years from now, Foote’s monumental narrative most likely will continue to be read and remembered as a classic of its kind.” —New York Herald Tribune Book Review “There is, of course, a majesty inherent in the subject Some sense of that ineluctable fact, however reluctant its expression, is evident in every honest consideration of our history But the credit for recovering such majesty to the attention of our skeptical and unheroic age will hereafter belong peculiarly to Mr Foote.”—M E BRADFORD, The National Review The Civil War: A Narrative Volume III, Red River to Appomattox “Foote is a novelist who temporarily abandoned ction to apply the novelist’s shaping hand to history: his model is not Thucydides but The Iliad and his story, innocent of notes and formal bibliography, has a literary design Not by accident … but for cathartic e ect is so much space given to the war’s unwinding, its nal shudders and convulsions … To read this chronicle is an awesome and moving experience History and literature are rarely so thoroughly combined as here; one nishes this volume convinced that no one need undertake this particular enterprise again.” —Newsweek “I have never read a better, more vivid, more understandable account of the savage battling between Grant’s and Lee’s armies.… Foote stays with the human strife and su ering, and unlike most Southern commentators, he does not take sides In objectivity, in range, in mastery of detail, in beauty of language and feeling for the people involved, this work surpasses anything else on the subject Written in the tradition of the great historian-artists—Gibbon, Prescott, Napier, Freeman—it stands alongside the work of the best of them.” —New Republic “The most written-about war in history has, with this completion of Shelby Foote’s trilogy, been given the epic treatment it deserves.”—Providence Journal ABOUT THE AUTHOR Although he now makes his home in Memphis, Tennessee, SHELBY FOOTE comes from a long line of Mississippians He was born in Greenville, Mississippi, and attended school there until he entered the University of North Carolina During World War II he served in the European theater as a captain of eld artillery In the period since the war, he has written ve novels: Tournament, Follow Me Down, Love in a Dry Season, Shiloh and Jordan County He has been awarded three Guggenheim fellowships ALSO AVAILABLE FROM THE VINTAGE CIVIL WAR LIBRARY All For the Union by Elisha Hunt Rhodes Trade/978-0-679-73828-2 eBook/978-0-307-77270-1 The American Civil War by John Keegan Trade/978-0-307-27493-9 eBook/978-0-307-27314-7 Ashes of Glory by Ernest B Furgurson Trade/978-0-679-74660-7 Buffalo Bill’s America by Louis S Warren Trade/978-0-375-72658-3 eBook/978-0-307-42510-2 The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War by Leonard L Richards Trade/978-0-307-27757-2 eBook/978-0-307-26737-5 Chancellorsville 1863 by Ernest B Furgurson Trade/978-0-679-72831-3 The Civil War Dictionary by Mark Boatner Trade/978-0-679-73392-8 The Civil War in the American West by Alvin M Josephy, Jr Trade/978-0-679-74003-2 Civil War Wives by Carol Berkin Trade/978-1-4000-9578-0 eBook/978-0-307-27293-5 The Civil War by Geoffrey C Ward Trade/978-0-679-75543-2 eBook/978-0-307-55515-1 Confederates in the Attic by Tony Horwitz Trade/978-0-679-75833-4 eBook/978-0-307-76301-3 Days of Defiance by Maury Klein Trade/978-0-679-76882-1 The Destructive War by Charles Royster Trade/978-0-679-73878-7 Did Lincoln Own Slaves? by Gerald J Prokopowicz Trade/978-0-307-27929-3 eBook/978-0-307-37714-2 The Era of Reconstruction 1864–1877by Kenneth M Stampp Trade/978-0-394-70388-6 Forever Free by Eric Foner Trade/978-0-375-70274-7 Freedom Rising by Ernest B Furgurson Trade/978-0-375-70409-3 eBook/978-0-307-42595-9 Honor’s Voice by Douglas L Wilson Trade/978-0-375-70396-6 Jefferson Davis, American by William J Cooper Trade/978-0-375-72542-5 eBook/978-0-307-77264-0 Lincoln by Richard Carwardine Trade/978-1-4000-9602-2 eBook/978-0-307-26467-1 Lincoln Reconsidered by David Herbert Donald Trade/978-0-375-72532-6 Lincoln’s Sword by Douglas L Wilson Trade/978-1-4000-3263-1 Lincoln’s Virtues by William Lee Miller Trade/978-0-375-70173-3 Nathan Bedford Forrest by Jack Hurst Trade/978-0-679-74830-4 eBook/978-0-307-78914-3 The Negro’s Civil War by James M McPherson Trade/978-1-4000-3390-4 eBook/978-0-307-48860-2 Not War But Murder by Ernest B Furgurson Trade/978-0-679-78139-4 eBook/978-0-307-42704-5 Nothing But Victory by Steven E Woodworth Trade/978-0-375-72660-6 eBook/978-0-307-42706-9 President Lincoln by William Lee Miller Trade/978-1-4000-3416-1 eBook/978-0-307-26871-6 The Reel Civil War by Bruce Chadwick Trade/978-0-375-70832-9 eBook/978-0-307-49008-7 Roll, Jordan, Roll by Eugene D Genovese Trade/978-0-394-71652-7 eBook/978-0-307-77272-5 Sherman’s March by Burke Davis Trade/978-0-394-75763-6 The State of Jones by Sally Jenkins Trade/978-0-7679-2946-2 eBook/978-0-385-53032-3 They Fought Like Demons by De Anne Blanton Trade/978-1-4000-3315-7 This Republic of Suffering by Drew Gilpin Faust Trade/978-0-375-70383-6 eBook/978-0-307-26858-7 Twilight at Little Round Top by Glenn W LaFantasie Trade/978-0-307-38663-2 What Lincoln Believed by Michael Lind Trade/978-1-4000-3073-6 eBook/978-0-307-43016-8 What They Fought For 1861–1865 by James M McPherson Trade/978-0-385-47634-8 What This Cruel War Was Over by Chandra Manning Trade/978-0-307-27732-9 eBook/978-0-307-26743-6 Wolf of the Deep by Stephen Fox Trade/978-1-4000-9542-1 eBook/978-0-307-49882-3 VINTAGE CIVIL WAR LIBRARY Available at your local bookstore, or visit www.randomhouse.com ALSO AVAILABLE BY SHELBY FOOTE FOLLOW ME DOWN In Jordan County, Mississippi, a murder trial is drawing to a close The victim is a young woman who has been found strangled and weighed down with concrete blocks at the bottom of a lake The defendant is a God-haunted farmer old enough to be her father The trial is a formality, because Luther Eustis has already confessed But as Shelby Foote re-creates the murder of Beulah Ross—and the annihilating passion that drew her to her murderer—he generates a suspense full of tension and foreboding Drawing on themes as old as the Bible and investing them with the chilling dignity of a mountain folk song, Follow Me Down immerses us in lives obsessed with sin and redemption, desire and vengeful retribution It transports us to a territory of the imagination that is touching, sometimes terrible, but always deeply recognizable: a place that only the best fiction ever penetrates Fiction/978-0-307-77928-1 JORDAN COUNTY The seven stories in Jordan County move backward in time, from 1950 to 1797, and through the lives of characters as diverse as a black horn player doomed by tuberculosis and convulsive jealousy, a tormented and ine ectual n-de-siècle aristocrat, and a halfwild frontiersman who builds a plantation in Choctaw territory only to watch it burn at the close of the Civil War In prose of almost Biblical gravity, and with a deep knowledge of the ways in which history shapes human lives—and sometimes warps them beyond repair— Foote gives us an ambitious, troubling work of ction that builds on the traditions of William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor but that is resolutely unique Fiction/Literature/978-0-307-77927-4 LOVE IN A DRY SEASON Love in a Dry Season describes an erotic and economic triangle, in which two wealthy and fantastically unhappy Mississippi families— the Barcrofts and the Carrutherses—are joined by an open-faced fortune hunter from the North, a man whose ruthlessness is matched only by his inability to understand the people he tries to exploit and his fatal incomprehension of the passions he so casually ignites Combining a awless sense of place with a Faulknerian command fo the grotesque, Foote’s novel turns a small cotton town into a sexual battleground as fatal as Vicksburg or Shiloh—and one where strategy is no match for instinct and tradition Fiction/Literature/978-0-307-77925-0 SHILOH Shelby Foote’s monumental three-part chronicle of the Civil War was hailed by Walker Percy as “an American Iliad, a unique work uniting the scholarship of the historian and the high-readability of the rst-class novelist.” Shiloh warrants similar praise, for while it is a powerful novel—a spare, unrelenting account of two days of battle in April 1862— it is also a stunning work of imaginative history, conveying not only the bloody choreography of Union and Confederate troops through the woods near Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee, but the inner movements of the combatants’ hearts and minds Through the eyes of o cers and illiterate foot soldiers, heroes and cowards, Shiloh creates a dramatic mosaic of a critical moment in the making of America, complete to the haze of gunsmoke and the stunned expression in the eyes of dying men Fiction/978-0-307-77926-7 VINTAGE CIVIL WAR LIBRARY Available at your local bookstore, or visit www.randomhouse.com ... general’s apparent lack of aggressiveness after the Battle of Antietam, he had shifted the Army of the Potomac eastward to this point where the Rappahannock, attaining its head of navigation,... soldiers and civilians in Virginia, where if anywhere the war was being won, rather than for those in the western theater, where if anywhere the war was being lost Not that the danger nearest the national... lieutenant on his way to the Mexican War he had lost his stake to a gambler on a Mississippi steamboat, and again in the mid-50’s he had failed to get a government contract for the manufacture of a