Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
A.D. Boileau was the owner and publisher of the Philadelphia Journal, had been a consistent critic of the war and the administration which was conducting it. As Union fortunes took a turn for the worse toward the end of 1862, Boileau had stepped up the attacks and his paper now appeared to be openly welcoming a rebel victory. This crossed the line between free journalistic expression and advocacy of treason, at least in the minds of the Lincoln administration. 150 years ago this evening, Boileau and the paper's editor were arrested by military authorities. The editor was held briefly and released. Boileau was taken to Fort Mchenry to spend some time thinking about which side he was on.
He apparently had been full of bluster because a few days later when he was brought before a grand jury convened to consider an indictment against him, he became penitent and produced a copy of a letter he had written to General Schenk of the Provost department. The letter proclaimed his unwavering fidelity to the Union, stated that the offending editorials had gone into print without his knowledge and would not have done so had be been aware of them. He closed with a rousing call for crushing the rebellion.
The charges were eventually dropped and Boileau returned to Philadelphia where his paper adopted a less severe tone in its criticisms.
The success of the CSS Virginia in nearly wrecking the Hampton Roads blockade before the arrival of the USS Monitor, was something the Confederates would spend the rest of the war trying to repeat. The ironclads meant to defend New Orleans had to be destroyed to avoid capture because they had not been completed before the invasion was launched. The CSS Arkansas had raised morale when it ran through both Federal Mississippi fleets before Vicksburg, but then was lost due to engine trouble at the Baton Rouge battle.
Now Charleston was ready to challenge the Union blockade with two new ironclads, the CSS Chicora and the CSS Palmetto State. The Chicora was constructed using the plans put together by the men who built the CSS Virginia, the Palmetto State copied the Chicora design. Both were of the Virginia style iron protected casemates mounted on wooden hulls which were below the waterline. Both had their six gun batteries filled with 9" smoothbores and 32" rifles. The Chicora was given to Commander John Randolph Tucker and the Palmetto State was captained by Lieutenant Commander John Rutledge. 150 years ago today they sortied in Charleston Harbor and set out after the ships of the Union blockade.
The plan was for the Chicora to occupy the strongest of the Federal ships while the Palmetto State picked off the weaker ones. Things went according to plan. While the Chicora engaged in a long range gunnery duel with the ocean going vessels, the Palmetto State targeted the smaller gunboats. It first attacked the USS Mercedita, disabling her with gunfire and forcing her surrender after she was rammed. Next the sidewheel steamer the USS Keystone State came under the Palmetto State's attention and her engines were knocked out by shells which penetrated her boilers, forcing her to have to be towed away to safety.
The rest of the inner harbor US gunboats then fled from their close in positions, seeking the safety of the blue water fleet. Neither of the rebel ironclads were capable of deep water action, so for the moment they controlled the harbor entrance, making the final leg of a blockade runner's trip less dangerous, but the blockade was still in place out in the ocean.
The government in Richmond of course attempted to claim that the blockade had been officially broken and that international shipping should now be allowed to come and go freely since by international law, a blockade must be effective to be legal. European merchants were notified by the US government that this claim was not recognized by the United States and that all traffic in and out of Charleston was still subject to search and seizure.
Thus despite the loss of one ship and the damage to another, nothing really changed in terms of the blockade. No one was foolish enough to attempt to sail unmolested into Charleston on the basis of the Confederate claim, the risks remained in place. However, the engagement was yet another black eye for the Federal navy, which was not having a good time of it in 1863.
The two ironclads, with no further in harbor foes to fight, were absorbed into the general defense force for Charleston.
The CSS Palmetto State
Model Replica of the CSS Chicora
The USS Mercedita Being Rammed By The Palmetto State
Some disappointing news for the Confederacy was announced 150 years ago today, something which showed that the Emancipation Proclamation truly was a war weapon.
The second half of 1862 had revived Confederate hopes for foreign recognition. Though the states in rebellion were not any closer to establishing their independence, the United States was simultaneously no closer to suppressing the rebellion and restoring the Union as it was previously constituted. The rebels had managed to halt the Federal advances in the west made in the first half of the year, and had even launched two invasions of the North, albeit ones which were turned back without lasting results. Vicksburg had withstood one assault and the Mississippi was not yet under unfettered Federal control.
The blockade had been broken at Galveston, Texas, and had been weakened at Charleston by the attack of the twin ironclads. Because the Union had been compelled to withdraw troops from the forces which had established Federal occupation zones in the Carolinas and northern Georgia, no further progress inland had been made by those troops.
In sum, a reasonable, if partisan fueled, argument could be advanced that the rebels were on their way to winning their independence. That ability to win, a demonstration that the Confederacy was going to be a lasting institution, had been cited by both England and France as a prerequisite for their extending recognition to the South.
Those dreams came crashing down when word arrived of an address Queen Victoria had made to Parliament on this day. The monarch announced that after due consideration, Great Britain would not be offering any services to America as a mediator between the two sides. The reason given was that "such matters could not be entered into with a probability of success."
The primary real reason was the Emancipation Proclamation. Britain was the world's leader in anti slavery activity in the first half of the 19th Century, condemning it as a moral wrong and backing up their words with actions by the Royal Navy to suppress the slave trade. The proclamation had converted the American war from one over the scope and permanence of Federal power, to a war to end slavery. Britain could not take steps to assist the Confederacy in any way without being seen as massively hypocritical. France had made it known that it would adopt no policy toward the Confederacy that did not follow Britain's position.
Another factor was economics. While Britain's mills and factories had been hurt by the reduced trade for Southern cotton, intervening in the war in order to try and redeem those revenues would also mean losing the lucrative trade it was still conducting with the North, trade which had greater total value than what could be restored by an end to the blockade. A war to cure an economic ill which generated even graver economic damage, made no sense.
The refusal to mediate was important because simply the offer could have been interpreted as a recognition of a war taking place between two equal nations rather than the conflict being an internal American one.
The South would not give up trying, some in Great Britain would continue to provide covert aid to the Confederacy, and General Lee would list gaining recognition as one of the reasons for his next invasion of the North, but the Proclamation and economic self interest would trump all else for Britain.
150 years ago this month the American Civil War was in a phase where no major events were taking place. That is not to say that no events were taking place, small scale fights and skirmishes across the Confederacy took place on a daily basis. On the 7th there was a cavalry battle at Williamsburg, Virginia producing 11 Yankee casualties. On the 10th there were minor scrapes at Chantilly, Virginia and Beverly, West Virginia. On this same day raids against the Union occupation zone in southern Louisiana took place with no lasting consequences.
The blockade, and blockade running continued 24/7, three ships making it past the Charleston fleet on the 7th. On the 12th the Union gunboat Queen of the West spotted a Confederate wagon train on a Yazoo river road, opened fire upon it and destroyed a large portion with the bombardment.
None of these events were of great consequence in relation to winning or losing the war, but for those who perished or were wounded in these actions, the consequences were the same as if it had been a major action.
The next event worthy of a report at length will be on the 16th, when the US Congress authorizes the first draft in US history. (The Confederates had already done this.)
So...for the following week here, I would like to solicit comments about what has come before. If anyone has a complaint about the balance in my coverage, is aware of errors I have made, believes I have overlooked anything important, has suggestions for future reporting..anything along those lines....please indulge yourself.
February 1863:
None of these events were of great consequence in relation to winning or losing the war, but for those who perished or were wounded in these actions, the consequences were the same as if it had been a major action.
Your line is reminiscent of one of the themes of Erich Remarque's great book WWI book:
Quote:
He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front.
Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, Chapter 12
In late 1862 the US Provost Marshal General, Simeon Draper, submitted a report which estimated that the Union armies had suffered nearly 100,000 desertions. Coupled with the heavy losses at Fredericksburg and the declining enthusiasm for volunteering, President Lincoln was facing a manpower shortage. To address this he encouraged Congress to establish a draft. It had passed the House in January and 150 years ago today it was passed by the Senate. It would be signed into law by the president on March 3rd.
It was the first national conscription law of any sort, but not the first time conscription had been practiced in the US. Previously states had been authorized to conscript men of a specified age if their volunteer militias had come up short in the required rolls. And of course the Confederates had already beaten them to the punch by passing their draft law the previous March.
The new law had two famous loopholes, a drafted man could pay a fee of $300 and be exempted from having to serve, or he could hire and deliver a substitute. Needless to say these two provisions were welcomed by the wealthy and scorned by the poor, immediately giving rise to a song parody "We are coming Father Abraham, Three Hundred Dollars more." In five months the animosity toward the draft would evolve from satire to open rioting.
For a measure which was so controversial and wound up causing so much trouble, damage and murder, the draft's impact on the war was negligible. Of the 210,000,000 men enrolled in the Union armed forces over the course of the war, only 2% were draftees and another 6% were hired substitutes.
I had mentioned previously that there was seldom a day during the Civil War when blood wasn't being shed somewhere, someone was losing a barn, a house, a herd of animals, some town was losing its bridges or its rail connections, some merchant was being attacked by raiders on the seas.... some sort of misery was being spread. More often than not it was difficult to connect these destructive acts to the winning or losing of the war.
An illustration of the seeming pointlessness of many such actions took place 150 years ago today. The USS Hercules was tugboat patrolling the Mississippi River not far from the Federal occupied Memphis. It ran into an ambush set up by Confederate guerrillas who captured and burned the small utility craft.
In retaliation, Major General Stephen Hurlburt ordered a detachment to march on the town of Hopefield, Arkansas. This had been a sleepy settlement along the Mississippi until the railroad came through in the 1850's. This brought commerce which led to Hopefield becoming a town which specialized in railroad services, repair shops, depots, supplies, these things had boosted the community to about 2500 residents at the time of the war.
These residents were given an hour to evacuate the town with whatever possessions they could carry with them, and then the town was burned....every building, nothing was left.
There were no casualties aboard the Hercules nor were any Hopefield residents harmed, but gone was one tugboat and one entire community. The loss of that tugboat in no manner hampered the Union war effort and the loss of Hopefield in no manner deterred future guerrilla operations. All that happened was the spreading of misery.
As General Sherman was to note later..."War is cruelty, you cannot refine it."
Post script....Hopefield was completely rebuild after the war, and completely destroyed by a flood in 1912. There is no more Hopefield, Arkansas,
150 years ago today a flotilla of vessels floated into Moon Lake.
That sounds like something which you would find in a travel book or a romantic novel, it was actually a military expedition and the arrival in Moon Lake had been the product of prodigious engineering and labor.
While General Hooker was reorganizing the Army of the Potomac on the Rappahannock River, and General Rosecrans was in winter quarters in Tennessee, General Grant remained restless and active. His overland campaign against Vicksburg had come to grief when Earl Van Dorn had wrecked his supply base at Holly Springs. It was not in Grant's nature to sit around licking his wounds and just weeks after his army had returned to Memphis, Grant set them in motion once more.
This time it would be another indirect attempt, a movement to bypass the batteries which controlled the Mississippi River below the Vicksburg bluffs. Digging a canal across the base of the bend in the river below the fortress city had failed, so now Grant and his engineers decided to try and find a method of bypassing Vicksburg on the eastern side. The goal had always been the same, finding some way to get the Army of the Tennessee on dry land on the same side of the river as Vicksburg.
This time the plan was to alter nature and create a water passage from the Mississippi north of Vicksburg, to the Yazoo River on the NE. The engineering problem was how to get this:
Through this:
The proposed solution was to blast away the levees on the Mississippi, creating a flood northeast of Vicksburg, one which hopefully would connect the assorted bodies of water, the largest of which was Moon Lake, and lowlands so that the US gunboats and transports could pass through and reach the Yazoo. From the Mississippi, to Moon Lake, through the Yazoo Pass to the Coldwater River, into the Tallahatchie, which combines with the Yalobusha to form the Yazoo River. The gunboats were needed because it was on the Yazoo River that the Confederates were constructing ironclads to serve as their naval defense.
Work began in early February with the destruction of the levees. Five of the most lightweight gunboats (tinclads...protected the crew from rifle fire, but not artillery) and some tugboats then began churning their way through toward Moon Lake. This was not the sort of project that could be conducted unnoticed, and the rebels sent forces to harass the progress at numerous points with daily skirmishes and encounters resulting. The consequence was slow going since the army had to accompany the engineers at every step to protect them.
Finally, 150 years ago today, a group of 400 engineers blasted away another levee and the first goal was reached... Moon Lake penetrated.
There was still a long way to go and an immense amount of work ahead. Worse, the rebels with plenty of advance warning, understood the purpose of the expedition and began the construction of a series of forts which were to ring a loop in the Tallahatchie River. Now the opposition was morphing from harassing sharpshooters to well prepared and protected artillery positions.
Map of Grant's Various Attempts At Engineering His Way Past Vicksburg. Yazoo Pass Expedition is at top of map.
You might recall that at the outbreak of the war, through the diplomatic efforts of General Albert Pike, the portion of the Cherokee Nation which recognized John Ross as their chief, had declared themselves first out of the Union, and then in a state of war against the United States.
This had been followed by a mini Civil War where the Cherokees who opposed Ross pledged their loyalty to the North. The Cherokees turned out to be a lousy ally for the South, things had not gone well.
The mounted rifle company which had been formed among the Confederate supporting Cherokees had suffered from internal discord from the start. In July of 1862, 1500 members of the unit deserted and declared for the Union. The commander appointed by Richmond to lead the Indians in battle, Colonel J. J. Clarkson, was captured about the same time. The Battle of Pea Ridge a few months earlier had resulted in Arkansas being thrown open to Federal invasion and the Cherokees found themselves being squeezed out of the state entirely as the Confederate government made no effort to throw in troops to protect them.
Finally it was made official. In a convention which gathered on February 20th and ended 150 years ago today, the John Ross Cherokees repudiated their alliance with the South. The treaty with the Confederacy was revoked, all Confederate supporting Cherokees were removed from office and replaced by loyalists, slavery was outlawed and their ordinance of secession was repealed.
There remained an element still supporting the Confederacy, led by General Stand Watie. However, their numbers were small, they were not well supported by the rebel government, and at best they could engage in harassment or guerrilla tactics, but were incapable of making any sort of significant impact on the war. Stand Watie's major claim to fame would turn out to be the honor of making the last surrender of rebel troops in the field, that coming in June of 1865.
The tribes of The Nations wound up playing only a tiny, peripheral role in the war and their internal disunity was responsible. Their reasons for going to war were related to tribal disputes which dated back to the time of the great eviction from the east. That one faction among these antagonist was allied to the Confederacy, was sufficient reason for the members of the other faction to side with the Union. They never had any sort of vested interest in the North/South political outcome.
Stand Watie was one of two Indian participants in the Civil War to rise to the rank of general. The other was Ely S. Parker, a Seneca who was General Grant's trusted adjudant and later appointed by President Grant to be Commissioner of Indian Affairs. Parker was the man who actually wrote out the terms of the surrender at Appomattox, the document signed by Grant and General Lee.
General Stand Watie
Grant and his staff. General Ely S. Parker is seated second from the right.
President Lincoln would enjoy a respite from the pressure as 150 years ago today the 37th Congress adjourned its third session. It had been a groundbreaking meeting.
Congress had passed the enabling legislation to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation, thus putting a legislative stamp of approval upon Lincoln's executive action. Congress had passed the Enrollment Act, establishing the nation's first military draft.
If those two measures were not controversial enough, there was also the Habeas Corpus Suspension Act, which as you have guessed from the name, was the legislation backing the president's right to take extralegal actions in the emergency of war time.
In addition the Congress had gone about non war business, organizing the Idaho and Arizona Territories, reestablishing the National Banking system, setting up a combined Federal/State structure which has, with minor modifications, survived to this day, and passing what has turned out to be a revenue winner for the government, The False Claims Act, aka The Lincoln Law, aka the Whistleblower Law.
That last piece of legislation was in response to the massive fraud which had marked government/private contractor dynamics since the start of the war. Designed to hit the dishonest contractors and civil servants where it would hurt the most, right in the wallet, it imposed heavy monetary penalties on top of recovering illegally received government revenues. The act also permitted individuals not under government employment, to file lawsuits against fraudulent venders on behalf of the government. If successful, the plaintiff got to keep 15-25 % of the award.
That was a powerful motivation to rat out your dishonest boss and lawsuits aplenty were launched. It had a very large and positive impact on stopping the fraud, as well as streaming revenues back to the government. (The Act is still on the books, modified in 1943 and again in 1986, and it accounts for about a billion dollars in government revenue each year.)
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
