Hearts Touched by Fire Read online

  A 2011 Modern Library Hardcover Original

  General introduction, editorial commentary, and chronology

  copyright © 2011 by Harold Holzer

  Compilation copyright © 2011 by Random House, Inc.

  1861 part introduction copyright © 2011 by Craig L. Symonds

  1862 part introduction copyright © 2011 by Stephen Sears

  1863 part introduction copyright © 2011 by James M. McPherson

  1864 part introduction copyright © 2011 by Joan Waugh

  1865 part introduction copyright © 2011 by James I. Robertson

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER Design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  The essays in this work, some of which appeared over the years in The Century Magazine, were originally published in the various volumes of Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, edited by Robert Underwood Johnson and Clarence Clough Buel and published between 1887 and 1888.

  eISBN: 978-0-679-60430-3

  www.modernlibrary.com

  v3.1

  IN MEMORY OF JOHN Y. SIMON,

  A LEADER WHO LED BATTLES

  AND KNEW THE WAR’S GREATEST GENERAL BEST OF ALL

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  INTRODUCTION by Harold Holzer

  1861

  INTRODUCTION by Craig L. Symonds

  1. INSIDE SUMTER IN ’61 by James Chester

  2. THE FIRST STEP IN THE WAR by Stephen D. Lee

  3. WAR PREPARATIONS IN THE NORTH by Jacob D. Cox

  4. THE CONFEDERATE GOVERNMENT AT MONTGOMERY by R. Barnwell Rhett

  5. GOING TO THE FRONT: RECOLLECTIONS OF A PRIVATE by Warren Lee Goss

  6. THE FIRST BATTLE OF BULL RUN by P.G.T. Beauregard

  7. RESPONSIBILITIES OF THE FIRST BULL RUN by Joseph E. Johnston

  8. ARKANSAS TROOPS IN THE BATTLE OF WILSON’S CREEK by N. B. Pearce

  9. THE FLANKING COLUMN AT WILSON’S CREEK by Franz Sigel

  1862

  INTRODUCTION by Stephen W. Sears

  1. THE GUN-BOATS AT BELMONT AND FORT HENRY by Henry Walke

  2. THE WESTERN FLOTILLA AT FORT DONELSON, ISLAND NUMBER TEN, FORT PILLOW AND MEMPHIS by Henry Walke

  3. THE CAPTURE OF FORT DONELSON by Lew Wallace

  4. THE BATTLE OF SHILOH by Ulysses S. Grant

  5. SURPRISE AND WITHDRAWAL AT SHILOH by S. H. Lockett

  6. THE SHILOH BATTLE-ORDER AND THE WITHDRAWAL SUNDAY EVENING by Alexander Robert Chisolm

  7. THE PLAN AND CONSTRUCTION OF THE “MERRIMAC” by John M. Brooke and John L. Porter

  8. THE BUILDING OF THE “MONITOR” by John Ericsson

  9. THE FIRST FIGHT OF IRON-CLADS by John Taylor Wood

  10. FARRAGUT’S CAPTURE OF NEW ORLEANS by William T. Meredith

  11. STONEWALL JACKSON IN THE SHENANDOAH by John D. Imboden

  12. THE PENINSULAR CAMPAIGN by George B. McClellan

  13. THE SECOND BATTLE OF BULL RUN by John Pope

  14. THE INVASION OF MARYLAND by James Longstreet

  15. THE BATTLE OF ANTIETAM by Jacob D. Cox

  16. THE BATTLE OF FREDERICKSBURG by James Longstreet

  1863

  INTRODUCTION by James M. McPherson

  1. THE CHANCELLORSVILLE CAMPAIGN by Darius N. Couch

  2. STONEWALL JACKSON’S LAST BATTLE by James Power Smith

  3. LEE’S INVASION OF PENNSYLVANIA by James Longstreet

  4. THE FIRST DAY AT GETTYSBURG by Henry J. Hunt

  5. THE SECOND DAY AT GETTYSBURG by Henry J. Hunt

  6. THE THIRD DAY AT GETTYSBURG by Henry J. Hunt

  7. THE CONFEDERATE RETREAT FROM GETTYSBURG by John D. Imboden

  8. THE VICKSBURG CAMPAIGN by Ulysses S. Grant

  9. NAVAL OPERATIONS IN THE VICKSBURG CAMPAIGN by James Russell Soley

  10. THE CAPTURE OF PORT HUDSON by Richard B. Irwin

  11. CHICKAMAUGA—THE GREAT BATTLE OF THE WEST by Daniel H. Hill

  12. CHATTANOOGA by Ulysses S. Grant

  1864

  INTRODUCTION by Joan Waugh

  1. FROM THE WILDERNESS TO COLD HARBOR by E. M. Law

  2. HAND-TO-HAND FIGHTING AT SPOTSYLVANIA by G. Norton Galloway

  3. SHERIDAN’S RICHMOND RAID by Theo. F. Rodenbough

  4. GENERAL LEE IN THE WILDERNESS CAMPAIGN by Charles S. Venable

  5. THE BATTLE OF THE PETERSBURG CRATER by William H. Powell

  6. THE DUEL BETWEEN THE “ALABAMA” AND THE “KEARSARGE” by John M. Browne

  7. THE COLORED TROOPS AT PETERSBURG by Henry Goddard Thomas

  8. PREPARING FOR THE CAMPAIGNS OF ’64 by Ulysses S. Grant

  9. THE STRUGGLE FOR ATLANTA by Oliver O. Howard

  10. FARRAGUT AT MOBILE BAY by John Coddington Kinney

  11. THE INVASION OF TENNESSEE by J. B. Hood

  12. SHERIDAN IN THE SHENANDOAH VALLEY by Wesley Merritt

  13. REPELLING HOOD’S INVASION OF TENNESSEE by Henry Stone

  14. EARLY’S MARCH TO WASHINGTON IN 1864 by Jubal A. Early

  15. SHERMAN’S ADVANCE FROM ATLANTA by Oliver O. Howard

  16. MARCHING THROUGH GEORGIA AND THE CAROLINAS by Daniel Oakey

  1865

  INTRODUCTION by James I. Robertson, Jr.

  1. SHERMAN’S MARCH FROM SAVANNAH TO BENTONVILLE by Henry W. Slocum

  2. THE NAVY AT FORT FISHER by Thomas O. Selfridge, Jr.

  3. THE RECAPTURE OF FORT STEDMAN by John F. Hartranft

  4. FIVE FORKS AND THE PURSUIT OF LEE by Horace Porter

  5. THE FALL OF RICHMOND

  I. THE EVACUATION by Clement Sulivane

  II. THE OCCUPATION by Thomas Thatcher Graves

  6. THE SURRENDER AT APPOMATTOX COURT HOUSE by Horace Porter

  7. GENERAL LEE’S FAREWELL ADDRESS TO HIS ARMY by Charles Marshall

  8. FINAL OPERATIONS OF SHERMAN’S ARMY by H. W. Slocum

  9. LAST DAYS OF THE CONFEDERACY by Basil W. Duke, with Notes on the Union and Confederate Armies

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  About the Contributors

  About the Editor

  INTRODUCTION

  Harold Holzer

  The most popular, influential, and enduring collection of first-person Civil War memoirs ever published could trace its origins to a good-natured interoffice debate between two young magazine editors.

  In July 1883, just a few days after the twentieth anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, Clarence Clough Buel of The Century Magazine initiated a lively discussion about the war with the colleague who sat at the next desk, fellow assistant editor Robert Underwood Johnson. Both men were barely thirty. Buel was a scrappy New Yorker and alumnus of the New York Tribune staff; Johnson was a young Century veteran who could trace his roots to both a Confederate general, Bushrod Johnson, and a Union politician, Indiana governor Oliver P. Morton.

  The question they argued that fateful day was: Which Civil War engagement deserved to be ranked as the bloodiest battle of them all? Buel contended that “the grewsome [sic] distinction belonged to Chickamauga,”1 where one-third of all troops were killed or wounded in action in September 1863. Johnson insisted it was the June 1864 Union assault on Confederate breastworks at Cold Harbor, where casualty tolls reached 8,500. The two men could not agree on an answer that day (Chickamauga was in fact the costlier), but their lively discussion inspired Buel to a brainstorm: Why not let the magazine’s 125,000 readers in on the conversation by offering “a series of papers on some of the great battles of the w
ar to be written by officers in command on both sides”?2 Johnson seconded the notion. A few days later, Buel pitched the idea to his boss, editor in chief Richard Watson Gilder.

  The widely read magazine, which had begun its life as Scribner’s Monthly, had just published two articles recalling a major prewar event—John Brown’s 1859 Harpers Ferry raid—from pro-Brown and anti-Brown points of view. One piece had been authored by a proslavery “Virginian Who Witnessed the Fight,” but in a great show of evenhandedness it was accompanied by a commentary provided by a self-described “Radical Abolitionist” who sympathized with it.3 Reader response had been positive, and Buel now posited that subscribers to the 35-cent monthly would certainly embrace the idea of a modest new series—no more than eight to ten articles, he envisioned at first—on “the decisive battles” of the war itself. The articles would be written by generals, Union and Confederate alike, who had commanded the engagements two score years earlier—“or, if he were not living,” Johnson proposed, by “the person most entitled to speak for him or in his place.”4 The pieces would present both sides of each major battle, guaranteeing the same scrupulous fairness that had characterized the Harpers Ferry presentations.

  The editors suggested an additional rule they calculated would boost circulation nationwide, even if it obliterated a crucial aspect of war history. Politics would be eschewed. The still divisive root causes of the war would be ignored and cool-headed military history encouraged. The series, as Johnson put it, would be presented in “an unsectional way”—meaning it would focus principally on battlefield action that could be recounted and dissected, rather than on underlying issues that might more readily open old wounds. Johnson proposed “rigid enforcement of our main principle, the exclusion of political questions.”5 To guarantee widespread appeal, sectional discord would be repressed in favor of straightforward accounts focusing on strategy and tactics—exhibiting what Buel later called “strict fairness to the testimony of both sides.” The articles would be marked by “good temper” and “unpartisan character,” with “each side” confining “controversy to its own ranks.” Union and Confederate writers alike would be urged to emphasize only “the benefit as well as the glory” of the specific events they were describing.6 These rules enhanced the prospects of wide popular acceptance, but at the expense of burying crucial aspects of Civil War memory.

  Not everyone shared Buel’s enthusiasm for rehashing the late war, however free of rancor. The Century publishing company’s president and business manager, Roswell Smith, initially “expressed doubt whether the project would increase the circulation of the magazine” at all.7 Others, like Abraham Lincoln’s former assistant private secretary, John Hay, firmly believed that the war had “gone by,”8 predicting that readers would resist any efforts to churn up ancient animosities that reminded them of the painful events that had left dozens of cities ravaged and 600,000 young men dead. (Of course, Hay was at the time busy collaborating with his onetime White House colleague John G. Nicolay on a massive biography of the late president, which he intended for magazine serialization as well. He perhaps feared that the proposed new project might preempt their own.)

  Buel, however, would not be dissuaded. He insisted that a Civil War series would not only interest “veterans in their own memories,” but also contribute to “instructing the generation which has grown up since the War for the Union.” His boss, Richard Gilder, editor since 1881, was widely known to the public at the time as both the magazine’s unbilled “voice” and also as a prominent poet (Buel and Johnson dabbled in verse as well).9 But it was likely as a Union veteran, too—he had served briefly as an emergency volunteer to repel the 1863 Confederate invasion of Pennsylvania—that Gilder “at once cordially adopted the suggestion,” according to an official introduction prepared three years later. Although the Philadelphia Times had published a similar series in 1879, also from both Union and Confederate vantage points, Gilder insisted that “this war-series is a flank movement on all our rivals. It is a great scheme.”10 He eventually won the support of publisher Smith by stressing the project’s commercial, not educational, possibilities. Ultimately, Smith too came to see the wisdom (and profitability) in expanding the reader base among the war’s survivors. Enlightening the proud children of the war’s veterans would provide a bonus, since they not unimportantly represented a new generation of potential subscribers. In other words, the series struck editors and publisher alike not only as a genuine public service but, more important, as a lucrative marketing bonanza.

  Encouraged to proceed, Gilder assigned Johnson to lead the effort, with Buel assisting. Buel prepared an outline during his summer vacation. Johnson began contacting potential contributors. By then few inside the company doubted that the series would prove appealing. Yet it is probably fair to say that no one who signed off on the project in 1883 could have imagined the scope, size, importance, or enduring reputation that it eventually achieved.

  Nor did they anticipate the setbacks that nearly derailed it before it could see the light of day. “Little did I think as a boy during the Civil War as I read the news from the front every night to my father,” Johnson later remembered, “that I should some day come into close personal relations with many of the commanders on both sides whose names were then household words to us.” Indeed, many of these living legends eventually became contributors. But some initially proved so reluctant to participate in the “War Series” that the enterprise nearly collapsed before it could begin.

  A writer who later remembered working for Gilder recalled of his skill for tapping talent, “No other was so bent upon finding, not only new writers, but new paths for established ones.”11 But for a time, the recruitment of star contributors—an effort Gilder jokingly called “General Catching”—proved far more difficult than anyone at The Century had reckoned. Not surprisingly, the editors first approached the former president and undisputed hero of the Union cause, Ulysses S. Grant. But as Johnson admitted, initially “we made no progress in this flank attack upon the General’s position.” Still physically drained by his recent two-year-long world tour, and with recent books (by others) just beginning to rehabilitate his reputation after his disastrous second term in the White House, Grant was reluctant to contribute to new endeavors that might upset the improving equilibrium. “I do not feel now as though I could undertake the articles asked for by the Century,” he insisted. Besides, as he argued, his onetime military staff aide Adam Badeau had recently published an exhaustive account containing just about everything that anyone might have wanted to know about Grant’s military career.12

  Onetime Confederate general P.G.T. Beauregard was equally dismissive, telling Century editors he was far too busy with other projects to participate either. Union legend Philip Sheridan was planning a memoir of his own, and did not want to scoop his own recollections for the benefit of The Century. General William T. Sherman was certain such a project could never succeed and was “rather inclined to pooh-pooh our undertaking,” Johnson lamented.13 And the general who had surrendered to Sherman in North Carolina—Joseph E. Johnston—suspected that the project was some kind of New York plot to trample on Lost Cause glory. Editor Johnson personally wooed Johnston on visits to his Washington, D.C., home and again at his New York hotel. But he found the old general not only “suspicious of being entrapped,” but also “irascible … difficult … as dry as ‘the remainder biscuit after a voyage, and technical to the dotting of an i.’ ” For a time, Johnston remained “depressingly unresponsive” to the Century’s overtures.14

  Response from lesser-known commanders was not much more enthusiastic. Facing a vexing predicament he labeled his “Scylla and Charybdis,” Johnson encountered “reluctance” both among officers wary of speaking “of persons who are no longer living” and from those unwilling to criticize “certain persons still living.” Facing all this seemingly intractable resistance, the editor grandiloquently complained that “it was at first hard steering for the Muse of History.”15 Afte
r Confederate general James Longstreet, too, declined, editor Gilder reluctantly told Johnson: “Without such names as his, Sherman’s, Beauregard’s … Sheridan & Grant absolutely assured we must face the issue of postponing another year.”16

  Then, just a few months later, the Century’s prospects dramatically rose—because Grant’s suddenly plummeted. After news broke that a business partner had swindled the general out of his entire fortune, the magazine promptly renewed its invitation that he contribute, expressing “regret and sympathy” over the general’s widely publicized ruin. The public, Johnson craftily told Adam Badeau, “would be glad to have its attention diverted from Grant’s present troubles, and no doubt such diversion of his own mind would be welcome to him.” More important, Gilder offered Grant $500 per article, and that broke the logjam. The general, who desperately needed money, abruptly folded his tent: he not only signed on, but set to work without delay, submitting a draft article on the Battle of Shiloh by June 30. “The series ‘smiles’ now as it never has before,” Gilder exulted, certain he could now “bag” such “big flounders” as Sherman and Sheridan, too.17

  The smiles proved short-lived. The editors read Grant’s initial submission with “dismay.” To Johnson, it was little more than “a copy of his dry official report of that engagement, as printed in the ‘Rebellion Records,’ with which we had already made ourselves familiar.” So, with a proof copy in hand, Johnson went to see the general. “Without at first letting him know of its unsuitableness to the series,” Johnson drew him into a lively conversation about the battle, taking copious notes as Grant fluently reminisced. Then the editor subtly ventured that such personal recollections were “typical of what was essential” for the magazine series. Johnson suggested that the Shiloh article should be just like “a talk as he would make to friends after dinner, some of whom should know all about the battle and some nothing at all.” Grant “seemed astonished at this,” Johnson admitted, but vowing he would try again, the general took back the article and revised it.18

  Grant recruited biographer Badeau to approve (and edit) this and each of his subsequent contributions. Badeau likely proved helpful. Although he and Grant occasionally squabbled, the small, bespectacled former diplomat had genuine literary flair—he had once served as a theater critic—although the two later fell out, predictably, over money.19 By July 15, the general was working on his Battle of the Wilderness reminiscence while on vacation at Long Branch, New Jersey, gamely asking Gilder if he wanted him to cover just the battle or the entire James River campaign. Perhaps half seriously, the financially strapped Grant added, “If the latter I fear I will have to strike; not for higher wages; but because I do not want to do so much work now.”20