Monday, March 5, 2012

March 4, 1862

March 4, 1862:  As a result of the failures of the Army telegraph system, and rumors, Gen. Halleck relieves Ulysses S. Grant of command over the Army of the Tennessee, and to turn over command to Gen. Charles F. Smith.  Halleck believes that Grant has been flagrantly disobeying orders and also resorting to his “old habits” (i.e., alcoholism) again.
 

---John Worden, commander of the newly-launched USS Monitor, receives orders to sail from new York to Hampton Roads, the Union naval base in the southern area of the Virginia tidewater in Chesapeake Bay, at Ft. Monroe.
 

—Gen. Robert E. Lee is relieved as commander of the Confederate Department of South Carolina, Georgia, and East Florida, a position he has held only briefly.  He is called to Richmond to serve as chief military advisor to Pres. Jefferson Davis.


---After a months-long stalemate of inaction in the East, which the newspapers of both sides mock as a “sitting war,” McClellan begins to implement his plans to take his army by sea to Ft. Monroe so as to advance upon Richmond from the southeast.  But the Rebels already know about the plan which has been in the works for so many months.  John Beauchamp Jones, a senior clerk in the C.S. War Department, notes in his journal, after the embarrassment of having been symied by the “Quaker guns” at Manassas:  “But McClellan would not advance. He could not drag his artillery at this season of the year; and so he is embarking his army, or the greater portion of it, for the Peninsula.”  There are few secrets that are not known, the Northern papers being ever-eager to publish all of the military plans they can uncover.
      McClellan and Johnston observe one another during the period of "masterly inactivity."


---At the reading of the First Confiscation Bill in the U.S. Senate, Sen. Cowan of Pennsylvania opposes the Confiscation Bill, on grounds Constitutional and cultural—that is, the likelihood of this being a roadblock to reconciliation after the war:

If we can suppose consummated the scheme the bill proposes, we shall have the following result: This bill proposes, at a single stroke, to strip four millions of white people of all their property, real and personal, and mixed, of every kind whatsoever, and reduce them at once to absolute poverty; and that, too, at a time when we are at war with them, when they have arms in their hands, with four hundred thousand of them in the field opposing us desperately.

Now, Sir, it does seem to me that if there was anything in the world calculated to make that four millions of people and their four hundred thousand soldiers in the field now and forever hostile to us and our Government, it would be the promulgation of a law such as this. . . . The bill is in direct conflict with the Constitution of the United States, requiring us to set aside and ignore that instrument in all its most fundamental provisions; those which define the boundaries between the powers delegated to the several departments of the Government.

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