The Great Surrender

The rebel military policy set out to make this a war of earthworks, for which the face of the country and their unlimited command of slave labor, aided by the slave driving propensities of most of our army officers, gave them great advantages, but even the strongest natural positions and most formidable fortifications will not answer without some fighting qualities and the rebels are diggers in the earth to no purpose, if when their long labored fortifications are invested the first and only object is to escape from them, and in case that is stopped to surrender everything that could not sneak off the night before the great attack.

It is very well for us that the rebels should expend months of labor in fortifying a position naturally of great strength and should gather their arms, munitions, provisions and a large army merely to fall into our hands as soon as it was found that it would take actual fighting to hold the position any longer, but we have to admire the military genius on the other side which  results in this.  It is a novel system of warfare which fortifies most formidably when no enemy is near, only to surrender as soon as he appears.  It was thus that the traditional raccoon came down to Capt. Scott, but the raccoon had not fortified himself six months in advance to resist Capt. Scott, and gathered there his tribe and their subsistence and hoisted the black flag, and talked loudly about giving no quarter, merely to let all fall into Capt. Scott’s hands before he should shoot.

Fort Donelson will stand out in American history as the great surrender, and Pillow, Floyd and Buckner as the treat surrenderers.  We doubt if anything can be found even in the Chinese wars equal to it.  Brave fighting was done the day before, and with this and the great advantage the rebels had in the nature of the ground, our brave troops suffered severely, but this fighting Buckner now says, was done in an attempt to break through our lines and escape.  Then so far as the Generalship was concerned the fighting was brought on more by the panic of flight than by any courageous determination for defense, our troops suffered severely and conquered.  The rebel troops were driven back to their works but when the day ended, the rebels were in full occupation of their main fortifications.  Only a point in their outer line of breastwork had been taken by our troops.

Here in a bastioned fortification constructed with great care and labor, they had forty eight field pieces and seventeen siege guns.  Our gun boats had been crippled and compelled to fall back.  Their number is not reliably ascertained for it is now known that the whole of the night previous to the surrender was occupied in ferrying troops across the river to escape.  Our force which has been greatly overestimated has been stated by authority in Congress as not over twenty eight thousand and it is probably that the rebel force was not much if any, inferior in number, and they had that advantage of entrenchments which military men estimate as making one man equal to five assailants especially of inexperienced troops.

If this fortification was intended for any military purpose, the time had just arrived to use it.  The fighting had been done entirely outside of it on the line of outer breastwork. – Great fortifications and great gatherings of munitions and troops in them are, according to the current idea of war intended for resisting an attack.  The main fortification had not been attacked.  But in the sortie to break our lines and escape the rebel generals say the quality of our troops and their hearts failed them.  An army of over twenty thousand men in formidable entrenchments, with every appliance of war, was taken with a panic and its generals thought of nothing but the flight of those who could escape by the river in the night, and the surrender of the rest, rather than meet the assault upon their works by our troops.  The earthworks were strong, but the hearts of the Generals became as water.

We have had a notable panic in the field during this war, but there was a panic of a greater army inside a fortification.  Bull Run is repeated with new scenery and with the addition of entrenchments and siege guns.  All that night Floyd and Pillow were transferring their troops over the river, and arms and munitions were thrown into the river, and the next morning Buckner hastened to surrender unconditionally over fourteen thousand men, and a fort which, with the same courage as their assailants they could have maintained against two or three times their number.  He had not even the heart to make a show of fight for terms of surrender as prisoners of war, but came down at once, giving up his troops to the criminal penalties of rebellion if our Government chooses to execute them.

The role of cowardice has been played to the top of its beat.  Fortifications are a farce with such generalship in the defenders.  A white feather would be much more appropriate for Gen. Buckner than the sword which, by the excessive generosity and bad taste of our officers he is permitted to have now dangling at his side.  Slaves are powerful aid in war but if Pillow, Floyd and Buckner are average rebel generals, the slaves had better be employed to defend the fortifications as well as to build them.  For the sake of the reputation of the country when reunited, we hope that Pillow, Floyd and Buckner are not specimens of the courage of the Southern Generals. – {Cincinnati Gazette.

– Published in The Burlington Weekly Hawk-Eye, Burlington, Iowa, Saturday, March 8, 1862, p. 3