April 12, 1862---One Year Since Fort Sumter

APRIL 12, 1862:         

 U.S. Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles announces an absolute embargo on the export of anthracite coal. Confederate blockade-runners and commerce raiders were buying exported American anthracite in Caribbean ports. The alternative, bituminous coal, burned with heavy black smoke which could be seen at great distance at sea. Anthracite coal, on the other hand, not only contained much more heat per given volume, but burned very cleanly with just a little white smoke.

In the Western Theater, General Halleck takes direct command of the Union troops at Shiloh, and begins to move on Corinth, Mississippi. Unwilling to take the risk Grant took at Shiloh, Halleck is cautious---too cautious in the vein of General McClellan---and entrenches his troops every night against a possible surprise attack. It takes him nearly a month to cover the 40 miles to Corinth.  

The Civil War entered its second year on this day. The Union appeared to be in the ascendancy, despite both sides having bled each other pale as death in grim battles like Shiloh. An irreversible contracture of the Confederate borders had begun. 

On the ground, the Confederacy had ceded effective control of the Border States of Kentucky and Missouri to the Union; excepting bloody encounters with raiders and Confederate troops marched in from elsewhere, both States were firmly in the Union orbit. Their Confederate governments were in exile. Tennessee had been returned to Union control as had western Virginia, though both areas were still battlegrounds. The other Border States had stayed in the Union. In the Far West, Confederate dreams of Manifest Destiny had proven illusory. Southern California remained with the Union, and the armed disputes in the New Mexico and    Arizona Territories were resolving in the Union’s favor. Swaths of Virginia were in Union hands. Richmond itself was threatened.

On the sea, “Scott’s Anaconda” was still slowly strangling the Confederacy. With a vast coastline that stretched from the mouth of the Potomac to the mouth of the Rio Grande, the Confederacy was struggling to maintain its maritime access. The larger ports of Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi were all in Union hands. The coastal cities of South Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas were blockaded---at least well enough to be punishing the South. 

Economically, the South was suffering. It had become almost impossible to import or export anything by sea. Land exports had to move through Mexico or illicitly through the North, driving up costs and prices. The Confederacy had a shortage of specie and couldn’t back its currency. Inflation was spiraling sharply upward. Food supplies were restricted, as were supplies to feed and clothe the army. Army pay was months in arrears. 

Despite the South’s chronic shortages, morale was generally high. Although most Southerners had been cured of the idea that “Any one Southerner could lick any ten Yankees,” the Southerners’ belief in the ultimate victory of their cause offset by a surprising percentage the Union’s advantages. For the Union had many advantages---in manpower, in manufacturing, in transportation, and even in agronomy. The South’s “King Cotton” had proven to be a less mighty monarch than had been hoped (by the South) and feared (by the North). Britain still needed U.S. grain supplies, but it had begun cultivating cotton in India and Egypt to replace the South’s constricted exports. The Union could muster more troops and outfit them increasingly well as the war progressed. It was exactly the opposite in the South.

If the Confederacy lacked a cohesive national vision of itself, it had a war vision…

…But the North was bedeviled by a lack of vision and purpose. “To Preserve The Union” was a fine rhetorical basis for the war, but among most Northern Americans appeals to the Revolutionary War ideals of their grandfathers simply did not play the heartstrings, except perhaps in New England. 

Worse yet was the bumbling incompetence of many of the Union commanders, who seemed dedicated to the proposition that men were cannon fodder and civilians were all suspect. This profoundly troubled the Union public. 

The nameless victories in the Far Western Theater were too remote and small to excite the Northern public. General Grant’s Western Theater victories, while impressive, were almost as remote, but large and bloody, and tinctured, many believed, with a whiff of spirits.

It was in the Eastern Theater, in that 100 mile wide fertile crescent that curved between Washington and Richmond, that people---North and South---looked for the ultimate victory, and none more so than Abraham Lincoln, who had hitched his star to a dray wagon pulled by that slowest of war horses, George Brinton McClellan. 

The General-in-Chief’s halting efforts to take the Confederate capital enraged some and discouraged others. Ever cautious (some would say cowardly), McClellan refused to commit wholeheartedly to battle. He wanted to intimidate the South, but the South intimidated him. 

He dithered in Winter camp until deep into Spring. He besieged Yorktown when he should have attacked Richmond. He saw great phantom armies in his mind, and blamed others for his seemingly innate inability to take action. 

And because of who he was---the General-in-Chief, presumptively the best commander the Union had---and because of where he was---on the center stage of the war---his fears and flaws colored the progress of the entire war, a contest that spanned a continent. 

And so they moved toward the second year of the war…