The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox by Shelby Foote
Semmes followed Kell and his sword into the Channel, and the two men struck out as best they could, the former clutching a life preserver, the latter a wooden grating, to avoid the suction that might pull them under when the Alabama sank. She was filling fast now, air gurgling, hissing, chuckling under her punctured decks while the sea poured in through rents in her hull. Her stern awash, her prow was lifting, and suddenly it rose higher as her guns, still hot from battle, tore loose from their lashings and slid aft. The breeze freshening, she recovered a little headway with her sails, and as she moved she left behind her a broad ribbon of flotsam, broken spars and bodies, bits of tackle and other gear. Fifty yards off, Semmes turned to watch her die. Backward she went, beginning her long downward slide, anchors swinging wildly in the air below her bow; the main-topmast, split by a solid in the fight, went by the board when she paused, nearly vertical; then she was gone, the Channel boiling greenly for a time to mark the place where she had been.
It was 12.24, just under ninety minutes since she fired her first shot at the Kearsarge. For all his grief, Semmes was glad in at least one sense that she was on the forty-fathom bottom with his sword. “A noble Roman once stabbed his daughter, rather than she should be polluted by the foul embrace of a tyrant,” he later wrote. “It was with a similar feeling that Kell and I saw the Alabama go down. We had buried her as we had christened her, and she was safe from the polluting touch of the hated Yankee!”
By now the trim British yacht Deerhound — whose captain-owner John Lancaster, a wealthy industrialist on vacation with his family, had had her built up the Clyde by the Lairds two years ago, at the same time they were at work on the sloop that became the Alabama — was within reach of the crewmen bobbing amid the whitecaps. She lowered her boats and began fishing them out, including Semmes and Kell and Marine Lieutenant Beckett Howell (Varina Davis’s younger brother) but not Dr Llewellyn; a nonswimmer, he had drowned. Forty-two men were saved in all by the Deerhound in response to Winslow’s plea; another dozen by the captains of two French pilot boats, who needed no urging; while seventy more were taken and made captive aboard the Kearsarge. Semmes himself might have been among these last except for Kell’s quick thinking. Exhausted, the Confederate skipper was laid “as if dead” on the sternsheets of one of Deerhound’s boats when the Kearsarge cutter came alongside. “Have you seen Captain Semmes?” a blue-clad officer asked sharply. Kell, who had put on a Deerhound crewman’s cap and taken an oar to complete the disguise, had a ready answer. “Captain Semmes is drowned,” he said, to the Federal’s apparent satisfaction. Aboard the yacht, after the shipwrecked men had been given hot coffee and shots of rum to counter the chill and exhaustion, Lancaster put the question: “Where shall I land you?” This time it was Semmes who had the answer that meant salvation. “I am now under English colors,” he said, “and the sooner you put me, with my officers and men, on English soil the better.”
Well before nightfall the Deerhound put in at Southampton, where, news of the battle having preceded them, Semmes and his men were given a welcome as hearty as if they had won; “A set of first-rate fellows,” the London Times pronounced them. As soon as he had rested from his ordeal, the Maryland-born Alabamian used the gold left at Cherbourg to pay off the survivors and send allotments to the nearest kin of the nine men killed in action and twelve drowned. He was banqueted by admirers, including officers of the Royal Navy, who united to present him with an elegant, gold-mounted sword, engraved along the blade to signify that it was a replacement for the one he had flung into the Channel after his “engagement off Cherbourg with a chain-plated ship of superior power, armament, and crew.” However, when Confederate officials tendered him a new command with which to continue the record begun aboard the Sumter, he declined, needing time to absorb the shock of his “impossible” defeat. Though he was promoted to rear admiral and eventually made his way, via Cuba and Mexico, back to the Confederacy (none of whose ports the Alabama ever touched) he had done all he would do afloat. Other raiders would continue to strike at Yankee shipping around the globe, but not Raphael Semmes. “I considered my career upon the high seas closed by the loss of my ship,” he later explained.
As for Winslow, he too was being lionized by now as the man who had abolished in single combat the myth that the Alabama was invincible. After clearing his decks and assembling the crew for thanksgiving prayers — which helped to ease his dudgeon at having seen the British yachtsman make off with his prize of prizes, Semmes — he steamed into Cherbourg, flags aflutter from every mast of the Kearsarge, and was promptly surrounded by boatloads of people out to greet the ship whose victorious crew had somehow been transformed into the home team.
Her casualties were limited to the three men hit early in the duel, one of whom died a few days later; Alabama’s came to 43, just under half of them drowned or killed in action. Once he had paroled his prisoners and patched up superficial damage, Winslow went to Paris to consult a specialist about his failing eye, only to learn that he had waited too long for treatment to be of any use. A victory banquet, tendered by patriotic fellow countrymen in the French capital, helped to dispel the medical gloom of the occasion, and a letter from Gideon Welles was even more effective in that regard. “I congratulate you,” the Secretary wrote, “on your good fortune in meeting the Alabama, which had so long avoided the fastest ships and some of the most vigilant and intelligent officers of the service, and for the ability displayed in the contest you have the thanks of the Department.… The battle was so brief, the victory so decisive, and the comparative results so striking that the country will be reminded of the brilliant actions of our infant Navy, which have been repeated and illustrated in the engagement.”
Presently this was followed, upon the President’s recommendation, by a vote of thanks from Congress and a promotion to date from June 19. Commodore Winslow returned to the United States by the end of the year, and while the Kearsarge was being refitted in the Boston Navy Yard carpenters removed a section of her sternpost, still with the 100-pound dud embedded in the oak, and boxed it for shipment to Washington, the Commander in Chief having expressed a desire to see for himself what a close call the ship and all aboard had had on that famous Sunday, six miles out in the English Channel, when she sank the Alabama.
Lincoln was indeed glad to learn that the most famed of rebel raiders had been struck from the list of woes to be endured until the war had run its course. Lately, though, he had begun to perceive that while striving to keep up national morale he would also have to deal with national impatience, which mounted with every indication, true or false, that the end might not be far off. Earlier that week, on June 14 — the day Bishop Polk was cannon-sniped on Pine Top and Grant began crossing the James — he had confessed to a friendly newsman that the country’s tendency to “expect too much at once” was, for him, a matter of considerable private anxiety: “I wish, when you write or speak to people, you would do all you can to correct the impression that the war in Virginia will end right off and victoriously.… As God is my judge, I shall be satisfied if we are over with the fight in Virginia within a year. I hope we shall be happily disappointed,’ as the saying is; but I am afraid not. I am afraid not.”
This was something new, this concern lest the public, in its ebullience, demand an end to the war before it was won, and Lincoln bore down to counteract it two days later, nine days after his renomination, when he went to attend and address a sanitary fair in Philadelphia. “It is a pertinent question often asked in the mind privately, and from one to the other: When is the war to end? Surely I feel as deep an interest in this question as anyone can, but I do not wish to name a day, or month, or a year when it is to end. I do not wish to run any risk of seeing the time come, without our being ready for the end, and for fear of disappointment because the time had come and not the end. We accepted this war for an object, a worthy object, and the war will end when that object is attained. Under God, I hope it never will until that time.”
Cheers w
“Yes! Yes!” the crowd roared, catching fire.
“Then I say, stand ready,” Lincoln told the upturned faces about the rostrum, as well as those that would be downturned over tomorrow’s newspapers all across the land, “for I am watching for the chance.”
3
Now that Johnston had relinquished Pine Top, retiring down its rearward slope with the corpse of Bishop Polk, Sherman followed close on his heels, determined to keep up the pressure which, so far, had gained him eighty of the critical hundred air-line miles between Chattanooga and Atlanta, his base and his objective. He did so with caution, however, being confronted on the left and right by the loom of Brush and Lost mountains, both occupied by butternut marksmen who asked nothing more, in the way of compensation for their pains, than one quick glimpse down their rifle barrels at blue-clad soldiers moving toward them, within range and without cover. “We cannot risk the heavy loss of an assault at this distance from our base,” the red-haired Ohioan had wired Halleck on the day before Polk’s mangling. But on June 16, two days after that event, he changed his mind and began to consider trying what he had said he could not risk. “I am now inclined to feign on both flanks and assault the center,” he told Old Brains. “It may cost us dear, but in results would surpass any attempt to pass around.”
Presently, though, he changed his mind again — or, more strictly speaking, had it changed for him by Johnston, who gave him the slip the following night with another of his “clean retreats.” This one was not so much an outright withdrawal, however, as it was a rectification, an adjustment whereby the foxy Confederate not only shortened his rather extended line but also shored up the sagging center Sherman had planned to assault. Turning loose of the high ground on his flanks, he fell back to Kennesaw Mountain, two miles in rear of the abandoned Pine Top salient. Polk’s corps — temporarily under Major General W. W. Loring, the senior division commander — was posted there, dug in along its northern face, with Hood on the right, astride the Western & Atlantic, and Hardee on the left, denying the Federals access to Marietta by blocking the roads coming in from Dallas and Burnt Hickory. Johnston’s line, which had been concave after he gave up Pine Top, was now convex, and its center, which had been its weakest element when Sherman contemplated launching a headlong strike, was now its stoutest part. In point of fact, the graybacks had occupied no stronger position in the course of their six-week retreat.
“Kennesaw Mountain is, I should think, about 700 feet high,” an Illinois major wrote home in reaction to his first sight of this forbidding piece of geography reared up in the army’s path, “and consists of two points or peaks, separated by a narrow gorge running across the top. The mountain itself is entirely separated from all mountain ranges, and swells up like a great bulb from the plain.” Sherman too was impressed and given pause by what he called “the bold and striking twin mountain.” Rebel signalmen were at work on its two bulbous peaks, both of which were “crowned with batteries,” while “the spurs were alive with men busy felling trees, digging pits, and preparing for the grand struggle impending.” As he stood and looked, awe gave way to determination. “The scene was enchanting; too beautiful to be disturbed by the harsh clamor of war,” he was to say, years later; “but the Chattahoochee lay beyond, and I had to reach it.”
He had to reach it; but how? In an attempt to find some easier means than a headlong assault, which seemed foredoomed, he brought up his guns and began to pound away at the fortified slopes of the mountain, hoping to fix the enemy in position there while he probed both flanks of the rebel line in search of a way around it, one that would enable him to menace the railroad in Johnston’s rear and thus provoke him into abandoning his present all-but-impregnable position, as he had done so many others in the course of his long retreat, rather than risk a fight whose loss would mean the severance of his supply line. The result was a series of skirmishes, some of which attained the dignity of engagements, first at Gilgal Church, where the graybacks fought a holding action to cover their withdrawal, and then along Mud and Nose (or Noyes) creeks, both of which had to be crossed if Sherman was to turn the rebel left for a strike at Marietta, Johnston’s base, two miles back of Kennesaw, or at Smyrna Station, another four miles down the railroad. While Schofield, reinforced by Hooker, was doing all he could in that direction, McPherson, strengthened by Blair’s return the week before, was feeling out the Confederate right, but with little success, being under the guns and surveillance of the enemy on the taller of Kennesaw’s two peaks. Thomas meantime kept up the pressure dead ahead, firing so many rounds from his massed batteries — he had 130 guns in all: half a dozen more than McPherson and Schofield combined — that his soldiers, watching the bombardment from dug-in positions on the flat, began to tell each other that Uncle Billy was determined to take the double-crested mountain in their front, or else “fill it full of old iron.”
For three days this continued, neither Thomas nor McPherson achieving much with their pounding and probing, and then on June 22, having proceeded well to the south around Kennesaw’s western flank, Schofield too was brought to a sudden halt.
It happened at a place called Culp’s (or Kolb’s) Farm, four miles southwest of Marietta on the road from Powder Springs, and it came about because Johnston, in reaction to Sherman’s continuing effort to reach around his left, had issued instructions the night before for Hood, whose intrenchments on the right would be occupied temporarily by Wheeler’s dismounted troopers, to march at daylight across the rear of Kennesaw and go into position beyond Hardee on the far left, south of the mountain’s western flank, in order to block the Federal turning movement. Hood did this, and more. Within a mile of his objective by midday, he encountered troops from Schofield’s corps advancing up the Powder Springs Road, and with soldierly instinct, but without taking time for reconnaissance, attacked at once.
Assuming he had the flankers outflanked, he figured that a prompt assault would “roll them up,” drive them back with heavy casualties, and abolish this threat to Johnston’s lifeline. The result was heavy casualties, all right, though not for Schofield, who had taken the precaution of having his and Hooker’s men dig in while awaiting reports from patrols sent out to find the best route up the valley of Olley’s Creek for a strike at the Western & Atlantic above Smyrna, three miles across the way. Hood drove these forward elements rapidly back, giving chase with the two divisions on hand, but at Culp’s Farm the pursuers came unexpectedly upon the enemy main body, stoutly intrenched, and were bloodily repulsed. A second assault, launched near sundown, only added to the carnage; Stevenson’s division alone lost more than 800 men, and Hindman’s brought the total to better than 1000. Schofield and Hooker, whose soldiers did their fighting behind earthworks for a change, suffered less than a third that many casualties in breaking the two attacks. Then at nightfall, while the graybacks dug in too along the line where the fighting stopped, Schofield and Hood sent word to their superiors at Big Shanty and Marietta of what had happened.
Johnston’s anger at this loss of a thousand badly needed veterans, once more as a result of Hood’s impetuosity, was exceeded by Sherman’s when he received an out-of-channels dispatch that evening from Hooker, proudly reporting that he had “repulsed two heavy attacks” and calling urgently for reinforcements before he was overrun. “Three entire corps are in front of us,” he added by way of lending weight to his proud cry for help. “Hooker must be mistaken; Johnston’s army has only three corps,” Sherman noted in passing the message along to Thomas, who, knowing only too well that Hardee and Loring were still in position to his and McPherson’s front, replied rather mildly: “I look upon this as something of a stampede.” Sherman agreed and next morning, st
This would have its consequences for all concerned; but the fact was, Sherman’s anger had its source in something far more irksome than Hooker’s inability to avoid exaggeration. Daylight showed the graybacks intrenched across Schofield’s front. This meant that the army had gone as far as it could go in that direction without turning loose of its supply line, already under threat from rebel horsemen, and the drowned condition of the roads precluded any movement on them so long as the rain continued.
Confronted thus with the probability of a stalemate — which was not only undesirable on its own account, here in Georgia, but might also give Richmond the chance to reinforce Lee’s hard-pressed Virginia army from Johnston’s, biding its time north of the Chattahoochee — Sherman reverted to his notion, expressed a week ago, “to feign on both flanks and assault the center.” The trouble was that the center now was Kennesaw Mountain, and Kennesaw seemed unassailable. But there, perhaps, was just the factor that might augur best; an attacker would greatly increase his chance for success by striking where the blow was least expected. Besides, continued probes by McPherson today showed that Loring’s corps had been extended eastward to include a portion of the works abandoned yesterday by Hood when he set out-westward to counter Schofield’s flanking threat. That march, with its extension of the Confederate left while Loring spread out to cover the right, stretched Johnston’s line to a width of about eight miles, exclusive of the cavalry on his flanks. It must be quite thin somewhere, and that somewhere was likely to be dead ahead on Kennesaw, whose frown alone was enough to discourage assault. So Sherman reasoned, at any rate, in his search for some way to avoid a stalemate. Moreover, he explained afterwards, he conferred with his three army commanders, “and we all agreed that we could not with prudence stretch out any more, and therefore there was no alternative but to attack ‘fortified lines,’ a thing carefully avoided up to that time.”