Chapter Three

MEN WHO SHAPED THE WAR

1. The Romantics to the Rescue

WINFIELD SCOTT was an old man, vain and ponderous, dropsical and infirm, a swollen and grotesque caricature of the brilliant soldier who had won the Mexican War and who, because he once so perfectly acted the part of the proud soldier, had been known half affectionately as “Old Fuss and Feathers.” He was mixed up now in a war that had come too late for him, a bewildering sort of war that saw his pet enemy, Jefferson Davis, and his pet soldier, Robert E. Lee, making common cause against the country that had all of his loyalty. He was greatly partial to the regular army, believed that volunteer troops needed many months in training camp before they could take the field, and doubted that cavalry would be of much account in this war; everybody knew that it took a full two years of drill to turn an ordinary recruit into a competent trooper. He blamed himself for having let political pressure make him send McDowell’s unready army out on the disastrous expedition to Bull Run, and his own physical disabilities — getting in and out of the chair behind his desk, with much puffing and wheezing, was about all he could manage — must have been a painful reminder that this war was in process of slipping out from under the commanding general of the army.

Yet the old man had a clear eye. Others might talk about the one swift blow that would end the rebellion. Bright young General McClellan, for instance, had proposed a quick stab up the Kanawha Valley, across western Virginia, and over the mountains to Richmond, and since he proposed that this be done with the ninety-day men, he had obviously been thinking of a short war. But Scott saw it differently. The Confederacy, he believed, would never be subdued by piecemeal; it would have to be enveloped and throttled. The job could hardly be begun before the enlistments of the ninety-day men had expired, and it was time to think in terms of the long pull.

Let the navy (said Scott) blockade the southern coasts. The army, then, must drive down the Mississippi, opening the river all the way to the Gulf, splitting the western states from the Confederacy and holding the valley in such strength that the blockade of the Southland would be complete. With rebellion isolated, it could then be crushed at leisure.

The proposal got to the White House and was talked about, and before long it was being discussed in the press. It called up the picture of a gigantic constrictor tightening a deadly inexorable grip about the seceding states, and it became generally known as the “Anaconda Plan,” under which title it was widely derided by impatient patriots who looked for a quick and easy war. Scott, they complained, believed that the war could be won without fighting — visible proof that he was a senile old fumbler who had lived beyond his usefulness. “On to Richmond” had more of a swing to it.

But Scott had something. He had submitted a general idea, not an actual strategic plan, and he was not suggesting that the war could be won without fighting. Instead, he was trying to show the things that would have to be done before a really effective fight could be made. And although his idea was scoffed at, it did take root in the mind of Abraham Lincoln. In the end, the Anaconda idea became the basis for the Federal war effort.¹

By midsummer it appeared that the lieutenants through whom most of the spadework for this plan must be done would be chiefly two — George Brinton McClellan and John Charles Frémont.

The army in 1861 hardly possessed two more completely different soldiers — and yet, in an odd way, they had certain traits in common. They came into their new posts as ready-made heroes, welcomed by a land that wanted heroes to worship. They had the gift for making fine phrases, and so for a time they could express perfectly the spirit with which men of the North were going to war. A great many men believed in them passionately and went on believing in them long after failure had come. They had color and dash, romance seemed to cling to them, and at bottom each man was essentially a romantic. That was their great handicap, for this was not going to be a romantic war and it would never be won by romantics.

The romantic in McClellan was buried under a layer of crisp, energetic efficiency. Called to Washington immediately after Bull Run and given command of all the troops in and around the capital, he seemed the very model of the businesslike, self-reliant administrator. He found the town overrun with men in uniform who drifted about the streets (and jammed the saloons) in aimless confusion, not knowing what they were up to or what was expected of them, conscious of the shame of panic and defeat. He detailed regular army soldiers to police the place, got the wanderers back into camp, saw that the camps were properly laid out and intelligently managed, ironed out the kinks in the commissary system so that everyone got plenty to eat, and set up a regime that involved endless hours of drill. In short, he restored order, made the men feel like soldiers, and before long he instituted a series of grand reviews in which the new soldiers could look at themselves in the mass and could begin to realize that they were part of a powerful, disciplined, smoothly functioning army.

The transformation was taking place. The Bull Run fight had taken off a little of the pressure, and McClellan was doing what McDowell had never had a chance to do; he was creating an army, and it had a name, a name that would cast long shadows and stir great memories before the end came — the Army of the Potomac. More often, though, the newspapers spoke of it simply as “McClellan’s army,” and that was the way the men themselves thought of it. They were McClellan’s men, and in spirit most of them would continue to be that as long as they lived.

For McClellan had touched their spirits. To the men who had lived through Bull Run he brought back pride and self-respect. To the newcomers, who did not carry Bull Run in their memories, he gave the feeling that it was grand to be a soldier. To all he gave a sense of belonging to something big and powerful that was going according to plan.

The men did not set eyes on him very often, to be sure. Instead of living in camp he rented a large house in downtown Washington not far from the White House, and he lived in considerable splendor, giving elegant dinner parties for important people, his doors guarded by swanky regulars, with glittering staff officers and aides following him wherever he went. The average soldier saw him only at the big reviews, and at such times McClellan always made a dramatic entrance. There would be the great level field, long ranks of men in blue standing at attention (the men secretly proud of their ability to stand and march and look like real soldiers), carriages full of senators and diplomats and starchy womenfolk waiting on the far side of the field, officers with drawn swords poised immobile in front of their commands, everybody tense with expectancy. Then the jaunty little man on his big black horse would come galloping down the line, his escort trailing out after him, and the whole field would break out in a wild shout of enthusiasm … and all at once army life would be just as exciting and romantic and wonderful as it had seemed to be when one stood with raised hand before the mustering officer, and all the drudgery and annoyance of training camp would be forgotten.²

A Massachusetts recruit summed it up.

“The boys are happy as clams at high water,” he wrote to his family. They were being drilled hard, but somehow it seemed good: “I never done anything yet that I like so well as I do soldiering.” There was a bond between private soldier and commanding general, a bond that became almost tangible as the general rode down the lines: “He has got an eye like a hawk. I looked him right in the eye and he done the same by me. I was bound to see what he looked like and I think I would know him if I should see him again.” The general was “Our George” or “Little Mac,” and he would not put his boys into action until he was sure that everything would be all right with them: “He looked like a man that was not afraid of the cry On to Richmond.… The rank and file think he is just the man to lead us on to victory when he gets ready and not when Horace Greeley says to go. For my part I think he is just the man, and” — using a colloquialism that apparently expressed the ultimate — “the kind of a man that can keep a hotel.”³

Everybody was getting ready. Infantrymen were discovering the ins and outs of brigade and division drill, were learning that doing guard duty was not quite as much fun as they had expected it to be, and were beginning to realize that a great many volunteer officers were not up to their jobs; a regiment that had any regular officers would consider itself lucky, since the regulars knew how to make camp routine go more smoothly. Budding artillerists fired their guns in target practice and blinked in awe at the discovery that a gunner, if he looked closely, could see his missile from the moment it left the muzzle until it ended its flight. (A few were slightly sobered by the reflection that if you could do this you probably could see the enemy’s shells approaching as well, which would be pretty nerve-racking.) Green recruits trying to become cavalrymen complained that government-issue saddles, high before and high behind, gave a soldier a perch like a two-pronged fork astride a round stick; he couldn’t easily fall off, but he couldn’t exactly be said to be sitting on anything, either. The new troopers found that their horses caught onto the drill as fast as the men did. When the bugles sounded “March!” or “Halt!” or “Wheel!” most of the horses would respond without waiting for their riders to guide them.⁴

Even the drummer boys were practicing, working at mysteries known as the double and single drag, learning all of the irregular syncopated beats that carried orders to marching men; a crack regiment, it seemed, was one that could maneuver all over a parade ground without spoken orders, the commands being transmitted entirely by the drums. Precocious infants not yet old enough to shave, the drummers took great pride in their work. Long afterward one of them remembered it: “When a dozen or more of the lads, with their caps set saucily on the sides of their heads, led a regiment in a review with their get-out-of-the-way-Old-Dan-Tuckerish style of music, it made the men in the ranks step off as though they were bound for a Donnybrook Fair.”⁵

And if all of this made for the men a living, shifting panorama of bright color and taut anticipation, it is clear that it did the same for McClellan himself. The man had basic traits of the true romantic: the ability to see, each moment, the fine figure he must be cutting in other men’s eyes, and the imperative need to play his part in such a way that he himself can look on it with admiration. In his letters to his young wife (he had been married only a little more than a year) McClellan was forever reciting with a kind of bemused wonder the details of his own sudden rise to fame; inviting her to look, he could stand by her shoulder and look also.

“I find myself in a new and strange position here; President, cabinet, Gen. Scott and all deferring to me,” he would tell her. “I seem to have become the power of the land.… It seems to strike everybody that I am very young.… Who would have thought, when we were married, that I should so soon be called on to save my country?”⁶

To save it singlehanded? Possibly. Washington was full of strange talk in that summer of 1861, and McClellan had been there less than a fortnight when he was hearing some unusual suggestions. He told his wife about them:

“I receive letter after letter, have conversation after conversation, calling on me to save the nation, alluding to the presidency, dictatorship, etc. As I hope one day to be united with you forever in heaven, I have no such aspiration. I would cheerfully take the dictatorship and agree to lay down my life when the country is saved. I am not spoiled by my unexpected new position. I feel sure that God will give me the strength and wisdom to preserve this great nation; but I tell you, who share all my thoughts, that I have no selfish feeling in this matter.”⁷

Clearly enough, it was a magnificent and enchanting vision that was dancing before the young general’s eyes, and he was luxuriating in it as a tired man luxuriates in a warm scented bath. Yet if this romantic indulgence might in time narrow his field of vision and place limits on the things he might do, it was not at the moment keeping him from buckling down to a solid job of work. He was surrounding Washington with forts, he was training an army of high morale, and if he was at bottom a romantic he was at least a romantic of high administrative capacity.

This, unhappily, was a good deal more than could be said for the other principal in Scott’s team of lieutenants, Major General John Charles Frémont.

Frémont was a skyrocket; a man who rose fast, seeming to light all the sky, and then went plunging down into darkness. Right now he was on the way up, and giving off sparks, with the great darkness still ahead of him; but he had had his ups and downs before. As a dashing young lieutenant of topographical engineers in the 1840s, the son-in-law of powerful Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, he had led spectacular exploring sorties across the Far West and had become known all over America as “the Pathfinder.” The precise value of his explorations may have been open to some question, but his talents as a publicist were not; and if he did not actually find very many new paths through the West, he at least centered national attention on paths other people had found, and he and the Far West became famous together.

It appears that fame went to his head. In the Mexican War he got into California in time to have a hand in detaching that territory from Mexico, and he enjoyed brief glory as an empire-builder; then, when the army sent a full-fledged general out to California to take charge, Frémont refused to obey his orders, and the army cracked down hard. Frémont was recalled to Washington, court-martialed, and dismissed from the service. To rebuild his reputation he led an expedition that was to find a route for a railroad from St. Louis to San Francisco. He elected to march into the worst of the Colorado Rockies in the bitterest winter the West had known in years, lost more than a fourth of his men through cold and starvation, saw the expedition evaporate completely, and went on to California by himself over the well-traveled southern route — and on his arrival found that the new gold rush had made him a multimillionaire, pay dirt having been struck in quantity on a ranch he had bought a year or two earlier.

Then he became a senator, and in 1856 the new Republican party made him its first candidate for President, and the North throbbed to the drumbeat chant: Free soil, free men, Frémont! Clearly, he was a man the Republican administration had to reckon with, and he was one of the very first men to be commissioned as major general after Fort Sumter fell. (The date of the commission was extremely important, as far as rank was concerned, since a major general automatically outranked all other major generals whose commissions bore later dates than his.) When old General Harney was finally pulled out of St. Louis, Frémont seemed the obvious person to put in his place.

His job was fully as big as McClellan’s. He had command of what was called the Western Department — everything between the Mississippi and the Rockies, plus the state of Illinois, with the promise that Kentucky would be added as soon as Kentucky’s gossamer-thin neutrality was torn apart. He had the support of the powerful Blair family, and in a personal conference Lincoln had given him a broad charter of authority — “Use your own judgment and do the best you can” — and in general terms Frémont was responsible for saving the West and winning the Mississippi Valley for the Union.⁸

He received his assignment on July 3. It took him three weeks to get from Washington to St. Louis, since he went by way of New York and tarried there to attend to various business matters, and when he reached St. Louis late in July he found himself stepping into an uncommonly tough spot. The Confederates were putting on a big push to retake the state. In the south and southwest they had perhaps as many as fifty thousand men under arms, with five thousand more ominously waiting at New Madrid, on the river, and an undetermined number consiscrated somewhere in western Tennessee. It was believed that a Confederate army of ten thousand was about to attack Cairo, Illinois, where the Ohio joins the Mississippi. (At that moment there was probably no spot in the United States, outside of Washington itself, whose retention was more vital to the Union than Cairo.) The northeastern counties of Missouri were boiling with guerrilla bands whose night ridings and bridge burnings seemed likely to spill all the way over into Iowa if they were not checked, and St. Louis itself was full of Rebel sympathizers who would seize the city if they had half a chance.

To deal with all of this Frémont had in his command just twenty-three thousand men, more than a third of whom were ninety-day soldiers who were about to go home. He had no arms or equipment for any new troops, the military war chest was about empty, and it developed that the government’s credit in St. Louis was exhausted.⁹

Altogether, it was a situation in which the Federal commander needed a rich variety of talents, including the ability to make bricks without straw. These talents Frémont did not have. He could strike an attitude and he could send fine words glinting down the wind, and while these qualities had taken him far they might not be adequate to carry him through a civil war in Missouri.

2. Trail of the Pathfinder

Frémont tried to meet the immediate threats first, and here he did perhaps as well as anyone could have done under the difficult circumstances.

The big thing, of course, was to hold the river. Frémont began by going up to take a look at all-important Cairo. He learned to his horror that although the Federal garrison there consisted of eight regiments, six of them were ninety-day detachments that were due to go home. Of the balance, nearly everyone was sick, nobody had ever drawn any pay, morale had almost entirely vanished, and all in all there were but six hundred men on duty under arms.

In one way or another he scraped together thirty-eight hundred troops and got them up to Cairo. He saw to it that enough men were sent to the northeastern counties of Missouri to suppress secessionist outbreaks there, and with the help of the German irregulars (with whom his name had powerful magic) he held onto St. Louis. All of this was good, but it did mean that no reinforcements could be sent to Nathaniel Lyon in Springfield, so the blazing little man with the red whiskers took the path that led him down to the smoky bottom lands along Wilson’s Creek. Flushed with their triumph, the Rebels who had killed him went surging up the western part of the state, pinching off and capturing a Union force of thirty-five hundred men at Lexington. But at least St. Louis and the river were secure.¹

Now it was up to Frémont to collect his forces and squelch all of this secessionist activity; but first he had to get organized, and the assignment might easily have dismayed a much abler man. Frémont had been calling frantically for reinforcements, and midwestern governors were sending regiments to St. Louis as fast as they could be mustered in — men without tents or blankets, many of them without uniforms or weapons, nearly all of them completely untrained. With these necessitous thousands arriving week after week the army’s purchase and supply arrangements in St. Louis were swamped. The War Department was too busy outfitting McClellan’s army to be very helpful, and anyway, Washington was a long way off. Frémont needed everything from tugboats and mules to hardtack and artillery, and he had been told to look out for himself.

If it was a prosaic job, he at least gave it the romantic touch. The commanding general’s headquarters were soon famous as a place of unrestrained pomp and spectacle. It seemed to Frémont that he needed officers, and he began to hand out commissions generously, overlooking the rule that officers’ commissions could legally come only from the President. Foreign adventurers of high and low degree began to blossom out in blue uniforms with gold braid and sashes, and the problems of Missouri were analyzed and argued in all the tongues of middle Europe. An émigré Hungarian officer named Zagonyi showed up as organizer of a crack cavalry guard, explaining in high pidgin English: “Was the intention now to form a body of picked men, each to be an officer. As was raised regiments, could be taken from this corps well-trained officers.” Another émigré Hungarian, General Asboth, scoffed at the call for tents: “Is no need of tents. In Hungary we make a winter campaign and we sleep without tents, our feet to the fire — and sometimes our ears did freeze.” Needing a bandmaster, Frémont took a musician from a local theater, commissioned him as captain of engineers, and put him in charge of headquarters music. There were guards and sentries everywhere, and a surgeon sent from the East to join Frémont’s staff learned that he could not get near the commanding general. He found Frémont making a speech to admiring Germans from the balcony of the building, and when the speech ended saw Frémont “surrounded by a queer crowd of foreigners, Germans, Hungarians and mixed nationalities.… There was much jabbering and gesticulation, and the scene was most un-American.”²

To a general who was trying to improvise command arrangements in a hurry — a general known in Europe as a fighter for freedom, his name a magnet to displaced revolutionaries, titled idealists, and plain adventure-seekers — much could be forgiven. Yet the broken-English bustle and gold-laced glitter, the sheer ostentatious foreignness around headquarters, made a queer contrast with unvarnished Missouri reality, and what Frémont had surrounded himself with was sharply out of key with the men he commanded. Frémont’s army was not an army at all, as a European would understand the word. It was just the Middle West, unexpectedly in uniform and under arms, getting ready in its own way to take charge of a little history.

It was, for instance, the 43rd Ohio, whose members in their camp by the Mississippi found life dull and felt homesick for something that would remind them of familiar things back in Ohio and so built birdhouses out of cracker boxes and nailed them to trees and posts all around, attracting a huge population of martins; and the regiment for the rest of the war was known as the Martin Box Regiment, all through the western armies.³

It was the 8th Wisconsin Infantry, parading before a general under an officer not long off the farm. Passing the general, the column was supposed to swing to the right, but its commander found himself suddenly unable to think of the proper command and so in desperation at last bawled out: “Gee! God damn it, gee!” Farmers to a man, the regiment understood and made the right turn snappily enough; but the general did ask the officer afterward if he customarily steered his command about as if it were a team of oxen.⁴

It was the 15th Illinois, restless in a Missouri outpost, complaining angrily about the colonel who commanded the post because, outranking the 15th’s own colonel, he ordered a detail from the regiment to clean his own regiment’s camp. They had not, said the 15th, enlisted to do menial labor like so many slaves, and they would not on any account do it. They protested so stoutly that the colonel at last shrugged and canceled his order, but for some months thereafter the 15th had no use for him. His name, as it happened, was Ulysses S. Grant.⁵

It was the 51st Indiana, which liked to yell just because it was young and yelling was fun, and set the pattern for the whole army. A veteran recalled that the 51st yelled at everything it saw or heard, and added: “When another regiment passed, they yelled at them; they scared the darkies almost to death, with their yelling; as they tumbled out to roll-call in the morning, they yelled; as they marched out of camp their voices went up in a muscular whoop; when they returned, after a hard day’s scouting, they were never too tired to yell. If a mule broke loose and ran away his speed was accelerated by a volley of yells all along the line; and if a dog happened to come their way they made it livelier for him than could the most resonant tin can that ever adorned his tail. Indeed, our whole army was blessed with this remarkable faculty. Sometimes a yell would start in at one end of the division, and regiment after regiment and brigade after brigade would take it up and carry it along; then send it back to the other end; few knowing what it was about, or caring.”⁶

 … Into St. Louis toward the end of August came a plump balding young regular army officer, Major John M. Schofield, who had been Lyon’s chief of staff; a serious-minded officer deeply interested in physics, whose spare-time pursuit it was to try to “work out the mathematical interpretation of all the phenomena of physical science, including electricity and magnetism,” and who was approaching now to tell the commanding general about what had happened at Wilson’s Creek. Schofield came to headquarters with Frank Blair (who owned a colonel’s commission by now), and after some delay the two were admitted to Frémont’s presence. To their surprise, Frémont asked not a question about the recent battle or about Lyon. Instead he led them to a big map spread out on a table and for a solid hour he talked enthusiastically about the great campaign he was going to have just as soon as he got everything ready — a march down through southwestern Missouri and Arkansas to the valley of the Arkansas River, a swing thence to the Mississippi, and eventually the capture of Memphis. This would turn all of the Rebel defenses on the lower river, the Confederate armies would be scattered, and the watchword for Frémont’s command this fall and winter would be: “New Orleans, and home again by summer!”

Somewhat dazed, Schofield and Blair got out at last and went off down the street. Blair finally asked the inevitable question: “Well, what do you think of him?” Schofield took a deep breath and replied in words which, he confessed later, were too strong to print. Blair nodded and said that he felt the same way himself.⁷

It was an evil omen for Frémont. Missouri was a Blair fief, as far as the administration in Washington was concerned. Blair had struck the first blow there; he had raised Lyon from infantry captain to brigadier general and he had had distinguished General Harney deposed. The commander in St. Louis, whatever else he might do, had better show that he could get along with the Blair family. Frémont had come to St. Louis with Blair support, but he had already lost some of it. During the next few weeks he was to show a positive genius for losing all the rest of it.

For one thing, there were contracts to be signed. Of necessity, Frémont was buying enormous quantities of goods — doing it in a most irregular manner, the old-line quartermasters complained, with improperly commissioned officers signing orders that no right-minded quartermaster or disbursing officer could honor, and with rumors of graft and waste and favoritism spreading all across the Middle West. This was bad, although in view of the general disorganization and the imperative need for haste, it is probable that no officer in Frémont’s position could have avoided trouble. What was worse, as far as Frémont’s personal fortunes were concerned, was the fact that the innumerable contractors who bore Frank Blair’s endorsement could not seem to get aboard the gravy train at any price. Blair’s rising distaste for Frémont began to harden into active opposition.⁸

Then, too, there was Jessie.

Jessie was Mrs. Frémont — Jessie Benton Frémont, daughter of the famous Senator Thomas Hart Benton, a strong-minded and imperious woman who was completely devoted to her husband’s advancement and who was used to having her own way. She was often in view at headquarters; she liked to be there, she found it “a stirring, eager, hopeful time,” and she liked to see the halls and offices “humming with life and the clank and ring of sabre and spur.” She worked with her husband, a cross between confidential secretary and executive assistant. When he was away Jessie actually seemed to be in charge of the army, and she wrote fondly of her husband’s habit of “referring all manner of work and duties to me as acting principal in his absence.” She would issue orders in his name, and he would send messages to her: “Thank you for the sabres and guns; send any such things forward as best you can.” She shared his belief that a great victory was in the making. To her he confided: “My plan is New Orleans straight … I think it can be done gloriously.”⁹

It could be done gloriously. The adverb was to be emphasized; war was still a matter of romance and great words, it went to “the clank and ring of sabre and spur,” officers with golden sashes and foreign titles swung naturally in the orbit of the daring Pathfinder, and if the Pathfinder and his wife felt impelled to take the general direction of things out of the hands of the President in Washington, the times were, as General Scott had admitted, revolutionary. Also, the general had once been a candidate for Lincoln’s own office, he was still the great hero of the anti-slavery men, and anyway, it was time to give tone and definition to the nation’s war aims. General Frémont must issue a proclamation.

General Frémont did so, on August 30; a turgid document, issued on a to-whom-it-may-concern basis, composed the night before by an inspired general by the midnight oil, cups of strong tea at hand. It announced that rebellion in Missouri would be put down with a heavy hand. Martial law was proclaimed, enemies of the Union found with arms in their hands inside the Union lines would be shot, and the slaves of all Missourians who favored secession were declared to be free men. Immediate emancipation, in short, was to be the price of rebellion.¹⁰

Admittedly the situation was confused. Mrs. Frémont had written that “St. Louis was the rebel city of a rebel state,” and it was easy for a Federal commander there — reflecting that the devoutly anti-slavery Germans were the hard core of loyalist support — to feel that the war needed to be put on an anti-slavery basis. Yet Missouri was not in fact a Rebel state. It had flatly refused to become one. Lyon could never have got away with his high-handed program if it had not, somewhere and somehow, touched majority opinion. Nor was St. Louis necessarily a Rebel city. The 8th Wisconsin Infantry, equipped by its native state with uniforms of gray instead of blue, was showered with bricks, eggs, dead cats, and other things when it disembarked there that fall and marched through the streets to its barracks; the citizens mistook it for a Confederate regiment and would have none of it, and the mob scene ended only when the soldiers remembered that they were carrying overcoats of proper Union blue and put them on in spite of the heat.¹¹

Indeed, the whole point of everything that had happened in the border states thus far was the demonstration that a deep, mystic feeling for an undivided country did exist and that even in slave territory it could rise above all other feelings. Men who would have no part of an attempt to fight against slavery would take up arms to fight for the Union. By his proclamation Frémont was in effect telling them that they were wrong, was saying that the whole of Lincoln’s winning gamble along the border was a mistake that had to be canceled.

From Washington to St. Louis came a hurry-up message for Frémont over Abraham Lincoln’s signature. The business of shooting civilians would lead to reprisals of indefinite extent and was altogether too risky: therefore, the general would execute no one without referring the case to Washington and getting specific authority. Also, the emancipation proclamation would probably cancel out the substantial patches of Union sentiment in the South and along the border and “perhaps ruin our rather fair prospect for Kentucky.” Would not the general, therefore, voluntarily withdraw it?¹²

Frémont would not. He had thought this up by himself, he had done it because he believed it to be right, he still felt that way about it, and if he took it back now it would look as though he were admitting an error. He would withdraw the offending proclamation only if the President publicly ordered him to do so. Having put all of this down on paper, Frémont sealed the letter, gave it to Jessie, and told her to set out for Washington at once and deliver it personally to President Lincoln.

Thus far into unreality could posturing and a sense of drama carry a man. Jessie made the trip and had what appears to have been an extremely unpleasant interview; for the man she met in the White House was not the kindly sentimentalist of legend but a coldly furious executive who was not going to let any general, not even one whose fame exceeded his own, tell him how to shape the top policy of the war. He greeted her with a cold “Well?” and did not invite her to sit down. She gave him the letter, argued her husband’s case, and hinted broadly that if the people had to choose between Lincoln and Frémont they would choose Frémont. Then she left, and off to St. Louis went the orders Frémont had specified: orders from the President, revoking the premature proclamation of emancipation.¹³

It was beginning to be pretty clear by now that in a military sense nothing much was apt to be accomplished in Missouri under Frémont. The Confederates themselves were the first to catch on; a bit later their Secretary of War was to write contemptuously of Frémont, “whose incompetency, well known to us, was a guarantee against immediate peril.”¹⁴ From the War Department in Washington came a top-level mission to look into the charges of graft and corruption that were piling up around the St. Louis headquarters. (The mission found much real waste and mismanagement, much probable graft, but no dishonesty involving Frémont personally; the man was a romantic made dizzy by his own altitude and dazzled by his own reputation, but he was never a grafter.) Meanwhile the break between Frémont and the Blair family became complete. Ever since Frank Blair and Schofield had paid their visit Blair had considered Frémont a dithering incompetent. In return, Frémont looked on Blair as an unscrupulous alcoholic, and he presently put him under arrest for insubordination. Rookie soldiers of the 16th Ohio Artillery, marking time disconsolately because Frémont was unable to provide them with any cannon, were assigned to stand guard over Blair’s tent. They found him a pleasant sort of prisoner; one rainy night he even invited the soldier who was guarding him to come into the tent and have a drink, and he appears to have been mildly shocked when the soldier virtuously refused.¹⁵

Only one thing could keep Frémont in command: a speedy and decisive victory over a Confederate army in the field. This Frémont set out to achieve. He had plenty of troops by mid-September, and if all sorts of equipment were still lacking there was enough to get moving. (After all, in Hungary the revolutionists had campaigned without tents; and, as Jessie recorded, it was considered that the army could seize cattle and corn along the way and so could move without an extensive supply train.) So by the early part of October an army of forty thousand men set off for southwest Missouri, where the Rebel forces were somewhat loosely concentrated under Sterling Price. Frémont was still thinking in terms of the capture of New Orleans, and he wrote to Jessie (who was in effective charge of army headquarters at St. Louis) that this “would precipitate the war forward and end it soon and victoriously.”¹⁶

This it might possibly do. But the simple lack of know-how at the top was a fearful drag on the army’s movements and a depressant for army morale as well. The green soldiers could not help seeing that Frémont and his staff seemed much more concerned with military pomp and display than with the more prosaic business of keeping the army fed and moving. Full of enthusiasm though it was, the army began to feel that it was almost helpless — poor weapons, inadequate training, and bad leadership — and an Iowa soldier remarked that they were being led straight into the heart of the enemy’s country with “an inferior quality of unserviceable foreign-made guns, a lamentable lack of military method in the plans for the campaign, a want of confidence and harmony among the commanders who were to lead the army, and in many regiments discipline little better than that of an armed mob.” Illinois soldiers grumpily declared that the best they could say about this campaign in Missouri was that it was better than being in hell, and one volunteer wrote angrily about the failure of supplies and concluded: “If there ever was an empty, spread-eagle, show-off, horn-tooting general, it was Frémont.”¹⁷

With infinite effort the loose-jointed army plowed on down toward the southwest. Substantially outnumbered, the Confederates drew back from before them, and by the end of October Frémont had his troops in and around Springfield. A couple of incidental skirmishes, dignified in Frémont’s later reminiscences as “admirably conducted engagements” and “a glorious victory,” had been fought, but although Frémont believed he was on the verge of bringing the main Confederate force to battle the chance actually was remote. Instead of being concentrated at Wilson’s Creek, nine miles away, where Lyon had been killed — which is where Frémont innocently supposed they were — the Confederates were a good sixty miles away, easily able to retreat further if they chose in case Frémont tried to come to grips with them.

Frémont’s objectives were two: to catch and destroy the Confederate army, and then to capture Memphis as a step toward New Orleans. Remote as Washington was, it was obvious even in the White House that he was never going to do either of these things, the way he was going. So to one of his subordinate officers in St. Louis, late in October, there came from Washington a sealed packet with instructions to get it into Frémont’s hands as quickly as possible.

But Lincoln had made this delivery subject to one condition — an extremely interesting one for the light it sheds on Lincoln’s attitude, even at that stage of the war, toward an erring strategist. If, when the messenger reached Frémont, “he shall then have, in personal command, fought and won a battle, or shall then be actually in a battle, or shall then be in the immediate presence of the enemy in expectation of a battle,” the envelope was not to be delivered; instead, the messenger was to keep it and check back for further instructions.¹⁸ Lincoln had had enough, in other words, but if Frémont would actually get into a full-dress fight all would be forgiven.… Then and throughout the war, inability to get in close and fight was the one trait in a general that Lincoln could not forgive. One good battle could always cover a multitude of military sins.

The messenger took off. Because it was commonly understood in St. Louis that Frémont had made arrangements to keep any order of recall from reaching him, the messenger was disguised as a Missouri farmer and was under orders to follow a little stratagem. He presented himself at Frémont’s camp and told the sentries that he was a messenger with information for the general from within the Rebel lines. He got at last to some of Frémont’s staff officers, who told him he could not see the general but could give them any information he had. He refused to do this — what he had to tell the general was for the general’s own ears — and after a whole day of this the staff finally decided that he was harmless and took him to Frémont’s tent. There the man produced the envelope and handed it over. Frémont opened it, asked wrathfully how this person had ever got through his lines, and read the bad news: over the signature of Winfield Scott, he was ordered to turn over his command to his ranking officer — a surly regular named David Hunter, who had long been convinced of Frémont’s total ineffectiveness — after which he was to report to Washington, by letter, to see if anybody had any further orders for him.¹⁹

For the time being, at least, the Pathfinder had come to the end of the trail.

3. He Must Be Willing to Fight

There had been the romantic General Frémont, and there still was the romantic General McClellan. In addition there was General U. S. Grant, who was not romantic at all — a stooped, rather scrubby little man whom nobody in particular had ever heard of — and the war was giving him a chance to make a modest new start in life.

In a way, Frémont was responsible for him. Grant had gone off to war that spring as colonel of the 21st Illinois Infantry, which put in a month or two in the summer guarding railroads in eastern Missouri, and he had been promoted chiefly because the inscrutable ways of Republican party politics entitled an Illinois congressman named Elihu B. Washburne to name one brigadier general. Washburne knew Grant and liked him and sent in his name; and somewhat to his surprise — for he had had a hard time getting into the war at all, that spring — Grant became a general. And what Frémont had done for him was to lift him out of a railroad-guarding billet in Missouri and give him command of the military District of southeastern Missouri, whose headquarters were in Cairo.

Like Grant himself, Cairo was more important than it looked. It was a muddy, untidy little place snugged down behind the levees at the angle between the Ohio and the Mississippi, and it had been a troop center right from the start. The first volunteer regiment raised in Illinois was sent down there, and others came soon afterward, so that before the war had fairly got started the Federals had a modest troop concentration at this key point, facing south.

Grant’s arrival at Cairo was not impressive. When his promotion came through he gave away his colonel’s uniform and sent for a brigadier’s outfit, and the new togs had not yet arrived; he showed up in civilian clothing, looking like anything but a soldier, and he wandered into the office of Colonel Richard Oglesby, the commanding officer, and wrote out an order relieving Oglesby and assuming the command himself. Oglesby looked at the order and then looked at Grant, and for a time he was undecided whether to obey the order or put this strange civilian under arrest as an imposter.¹ He finally obeyed the order, whereupon a key piece in the machinery of the Civil War dropped quietly into place and began to function.

Frémont said afterward that he appointed Grant because he saw in him “the soldierly qualities of self-poise, modesty, decision, attention to details”; qualities which he was not seeing much of in the flamboyant crowd around headquarters in St. Louis. Other officers had warned Frémont not to do it, “for reasons,” said the Pathfinder primly, “that were well known.” Grant was a West Pointer and he had served in the war with Mexico, and the officer corps of the little regular army was a clubby group in which everybody knew and gossiped about everybody else. In all of this gossip Grant had been typed — a drunkard and a failure, a man who had been forced to resign as infantry captain on the west coast in 1854 because he could not keep his hands off the bottle, and who had come back to an excessively undistinguished civilian career as Missouri farmer, St. Louis real estate agent, and most recently as manager of his father’s harness shop in Galena, Illinois. But Frémont was not impressed by this gossip. He was no West Pointer himself, and the regulars had never admitted him to the club, and, said Frémont, something about Grant’s manner was “sufficient to counteract the influence of what they said.” Anyway, he made the appointment, and as September began Grant was installed at Cairo.²

He was not yet the Grant of the familiar photographs. An army surgeon who came on from the east coast about this time found him short, spare, and somewhat unkempt, with a long flowing beard and puffing constantly on a big meerschaum with a curved ten-inch stem; a man who did not seem to have much to say and who would sit quietly at his desk, methodically going through his paper work as if he were turning all sorts of things over in his mind. He was unprepossessing at first glance but there was something about him that made a man take a second look, and the surgeon wrote: “As I sat and watched him then, and many an hour afterward, I found that his face grew upon me. His eyes were gentle, with a kind expression, and thoughtful.”³

Grant was at Cairo, which was becoming one of the great gateways to the war. Immense quantities of army stores were beginning to cram its warehouses, and the place was alive with blue-coated soldiers; one of these said it was like the mouth of a vast beehive, with a never-ending coming and going of recruits.… “They came on incoming trains and up-river steamboats. They went away on outgoing trains and down-river steamboats, and meantime they crossed and criss-crossed the town in every direction. They crowded its stations, hotels, boarding houses and waiting rooms, and, if it must be said, its saloons as well.”⁴

Eight miles up the Ohio was the town of Mound City; a tiny place which had come into being as part of a real estate boom that it had never been able to live up to and which had been equipped by hopeful speculators with a range of brick warehouses to accommodate a river trade that had not developed. Grant’s medical director seized on these and converted them into a huge army hospital — one was badly needed because the hot river valley was unhealthy and there was much sickness. In the course of outfitting the place the doctor learned that it was all but impossible to get any work out of the soldiers who were detailed to help. To these Westerners, sweeping and scrubbing and setting up beds was women’s work, and they simply would not do it. He learned, too, that these boys from the farm and the small town, self-reliant to a fault at ordinary times, became totally helpless when they fell ill, requiring much more nursing than the civilian patients of his past experience.⁵

Mound City had a shipyard, in which four ironclad gunboats were being built; big snub-nosed craft with two and one half inches of armor on their slanting sides, pierced for thirteen guns, three of which were heavy-duty eight-inch Dahlgrens. It had been clear from the start that war could not be fought along the great rivers without warships, but Washington (to the navy’s intense disgust) had decreed that all of these inland operations should be under army control. So the War Department was having the gunboats built, the navy would man and operate them, and skippers and squadron commanders were required to take orders from the army. Thus, when he took over at Cairo, Grant found that he had a budding fleet under his control.

Part of it was already afloat and in operation: three river steamers hastily converted into gunboats, powerfully armed but very vulnerable to enemy fire because their boilers were above the waterline and they had nothing but five-inch oak bulwarks for armor. Since the Confederates had no gunboats at all in this part of the world, these fragile steamers were having no trouble, but they could not for five minutes stand up against shore fortifications, and therefore they could control the river only if the army occupied the banks.

To command its Mississippi squadron the navy had sent out Flag Officer Andrew Foote, a salty person with an engaging fringe of whiskers jutting out around a heart-of-oak face; a devout churchman who not infrequently delivered sermons to his crews and who was so well liked by the rank and file that he was even able to stop the grog ration without creating trouble. Luckily for the cause of the Union, he and Grant took to each other at once, and — in a command situation almost guaranteed to generate friction — they got along in perfect harmony.⁶

Grant had been at Cairo almost no time at all before he began to get action.

Across the river was Kentucky, and Kentucky was still neutral, but nobody imagined that the neutrality was going to last very much longer. Somebody was bound to violate it; if the Union and the Confederacy were going to make war on each other along the underside of the Middle West, Kentucky was bound to become involved, and the only real question was when and how it would happen. At Cairo, Grant was looking down the river, turning over plans for a thrust toward Tennessee; and in northwestern Tennessee there was a Confederate army under Major General Leonidas Polk, former bishop in the Episcopal Church, who had gone to West Point with Jefferson Davis and who now was responsible for keeping the Yankees from coming down the Mississippi.

On the Mississippi there was a little Kentucky town named Columbus, important for two reasons: it was the northern terminus of a southern railroad line, and it was perched on high bluffs which, if properly fortified, no northern gunboats could pass. Bishop Polk suspected that the Federals were about to put up works on the opposite Missouri shore, and he decided to beat them to the punch. On September 4 he acted, disregarding Kentucky neutrality and sending troops over the state line to occupy and fortify Columbus.

Grant learned of this at once, and the surgeon who had been watching him with growing interest discovered that one of his early judgments was correct — the man could act swiftly in an emergency.

Grant began by sending a telegram to the Speaker of the Kentucky House of Representatives at Frankfort, telling him that the lawless Confederates had wantonly violated the state’s neutrality. Then he got off another wire to Frémont in St. Louis, announcing that unless he was quickly ordered not to he would that night move up the Ohio and occupy the Kentucky city of Paducah. When he got no reply — he did not wait very long for it — he loaded two regiments on river steamers, got Foote to bring up two of the converted wooden gunboats, and at midnight his flotilla set off.⁷

Paducah was another key spot. It is situated where the Tennessee River flows into the Ohio, not far upstream from Cairo, and the Tennessee was an obvious highway to the heart of the South. Broad and deep, it was easily navigable all the way to northern Alabama; and if Kentucky was no longer to be a no man’s land, the Tennessee River was of first importance. A Federal base at the mouth of the river would make possible a formal invasion of the Deep South a bit later on.

Grant reached Paducah, disembarked his troops, saw that the town was made secure, and hurried back to Cairo. There he found a message from Frémont, authorizing him to do what he had just done. Then he got another wire, rebuking him for communicating directly with the Kentucky House of Representatives — that was a job for the department commander, and in doing it himself he had been insubordinate and out of line. Then he was notified that Paducah would be put under the command of General Charles F. Smith, and although Paducah was in Grant’s district Smith was being ordered to by-pass Grant and report directly to St. Louis.

Smith was an old-timer, with a record of thirty-five years’ service. He was tall, slim, and straight, with great piratical white mustachios that came down below the line of his chin, a man with ruddy pink cheeks and clear blue eyes, a strict disciplinarian and a terror to volunteers; the very incarnation of the pre-Civil War regular army officer. Among the regulars, indeed, there were many who considered him the best all-around man in the army. He had been commandant of cadets when Grant was at West Point, and although Grant outranked him — and would soon have him in his command, for Frémont’s order was before long rescinded — Grant always felt a little humble and school-boyish in his presence. He remarked once that “it does not seem quite right for me to give General Smith orders,” and some of the regulars felt the same way about it; Grant, they said, owed his rise to political pull, and Smith had spent a lifetime in uniform and ought to be top dog. It never bothered Smith, however. He was frankly proud of his former pupil and had confidence in him.⁸

Something of Smith’s quality comes out in a story told by Lew Wallace.

Wallace as a boy had longed to go to West Point, and when that dream failed he tried earnestly to become a novelist. That failed too — the train of thought that would eventually become Ben Hur had not yet taken shape in his mind — and so he turned to the law and politics, and when the war began he was made colonel of the 11th Indiana. He was sent to Paducah soon after the place was occupied by Union troops, and — his political connections being first-rate — it was not long before he learned that he was being made a brigadier general. This unsettled him a bit, and he went to General Smith to ask advice.

Smith had taken over a big residence for headquarters, and Wallace found him sitting by the fire after dinner, taking his ease, his long legs stretched out, a decanter on the table. Smith was, said Wallace, “by all odds the handsomest, stateliest, most commanding figure I had ever seen.” Somewhat hesitantly Wallace showed him his notice of promotion and asked if he should accept.

Smith had worked thirty-five years to get his own commission as a brigadier, and the idea that any officer might hesitate to accept such a thing stumped him. Why on earth, he asked, should Wallace not take it?

“Because,” confessed Wallace, “I don’t know anything about the duties of a brigadier.”

Smith blinked at him.

“This,” he said at last, “is extraordinary. Here I have been spending a long life to get an appointment like this one about which you are hesitating. And yet — that isn’t it. That you should confess your ignorance — good God!”

Then Smith reached for the decanter, poured Wallace a drink, and told him to accept the promotion and stop worrying. He dug into a table drawer, got out a copy of the United States Army Regulations, and declared that a general should know these rules “as the preacher knows his Bible.” Then he went on to sum up his own soldierly philosophy in words which Wallace remembered:

“Battle is the ultimate to which the whole life’s labor of an officer should be directed. He may live to the age of retirement without seeing a battle; still, he must always be getting ready for it exactly as if he knew the hour of the day it is to break upon him. And then, whether it come late or early, he must be willing to fight — he must fight!”⁹

Rebel troops were in Columbus, another column was coming up into Kentucky through the Cumberland Gap, and a growing Union force was established in Paducah. Kentucky’s neutrality by now had completely evaporated. The pro-Union legislature made it official, adopting a resolution directing Governor Magoffin to issue a proclamation ordering the secessionists out of the state. Magoffin, strong for the Confederacy, indignantly vetoed the measure, whereupon the legislature passed it over his veto, formally invited the Federal government to help expel the southern invaders, and ordered volunteers recruited to meet the state’s quota. The Richmond government countered by sending General Albert Sidney Johnston out to take top command in the West, and a Confederate force occupied Bowling Green and sent out patrols which burned a bridge within thirty-three miles of Louisville. Fort Sumter hero Robert Anderson established Union headquarters in Louisville; then his health collapsed and he had to retire from active duty, and Federal command passed to another of General Smith’s old protégés, a red-haired bristling general named William Tecumseh Sherman.

Sherman had inherited a perplexing job. Except for Smith’s forces at Paducah, which was out of his bailiwick, there were very few responsible troops in Kentucky, most of the midwestern levies having been sent either to Missouri or Virginia during the period of Kentucky’s neutrality. Sherman had a couple of thousand of the Kentuckians who had been training on the Indiana side of the Ohio River, he had scattering groups of home guards, and there were a few regiments which the prodigious William Nelson had been assembling at Camp Dick Robinson. None of these was ready for active service, and the green regiments which Indiana’s Governor Morton was hurrying down were in no better case. The 38th Indiana, as a sample, was sent to Kentucky just three days after it had been mustered into service, and one of its members wrote acidly that “all the regiment lacked of being a good fighting machine was guns, ammunition, cartridge boxes, canteens, haversacks, knapsacks, blankets, etc., with a proper knowledge of how all these equipments could be used with effect.”¹⁰

All the information Sherman could get indicated that large, well-equipped, adequately trained Confederate armies were about to come sweeping up from Tennessee to overrun the entire state. (The rumors were wild exaggerations, but Sherman did not know that until later.) For a short time Louisville itself seemed to be in danger; Confederate Simon Buckner was advancing on the city along the line of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad. (His force was so small that two troop trains served to carry it, but the Federals did not realize this.) Providentially, Buckner was delayed — by a patriotic citizen who removed a rail from the track, thus derailing the leading train — until Sherman could get a makeshift force out to meet him; upon which Buckner withdrew, and the panic was over. But it did seem clear that the Rebel commanders in the West had most aggressive intentions.

Sherman was in a bad mood. He was tense, nervous, given to worry; the grim singleness of purpose that marked him later in the war had not yet appeared. Like Grant, he had something to live down. He had resigned from the army in the 1850s and had tried various business ventures, all of which had failed. In St. Louis, a couple of years before the war, Sherman had referred to himself bitterly as “a dead cock in a pit”; now he may have been uneasily conscious that his general’s commission had come to him largely because his more successful brother, John Sherman, was an important Republican senator.

Sherman worried most about the enlisted men in his command. They were woefully untrained, and it seemed to him that to send them into battle — which he might have to do any day — would be plain murder. The sketchy Kentucky cavalry regiments were so busy scouting and patrolling that they had no time for drill. The 1st Kentucky, hastily recruited by a lawyer-politician named Frank Wolford, rode about the countryside without uniforms, armed with infantry muskets, so innocent of proper military usage that when Wolford wanted them to start marching he shouted: “Git up and git!” while he got them from marching column into line of battle by ordering: “Form a line of fight!”¹¹

The farm boys who were grouped together in the volunteer regiments were suffering from the usual camp diseases such as measles. Sanitation and proper medical care seemed to be nonexistent in most camps, and regimental officers who owed their commissions to politics (as practically all of them did) knew not the first thing about taking care of them. An officer in the 53rd Ohio, reporting to Sherman about this time, was surprised to hear the general bark: “How long do you expect to remain in the service?” The officer replied that his regiment had enlisted for three years and expected to serve out its time. “Well, you’ve got sense,” said Sherman. “Most of you fellows come down here intending to go home and go to Congress in about three weeks.” When the officer asked where the regiment should camp, Sherman gestured at the surrounding landscape and said: “Go anywhere — it’s all flat as a pancake and wet as a sponge.” (This, said the regimental historian, was entirely true.)¹²

Problems of discipline were peculiar. The 3rd Ohio went into camp minus its colonel, who preferred to linger in Louisville. In his absence the lieutenant colonel, who had ideas about discipline, reduced a number of incompetent non-coms to the ranks and stirred up so much antagonism that the enlisted men circulated a petition calling on him to resign and roused all the folks back home — lifelong friends and neighbors of the luckless officer — to write indignant letters to him. The missing colonel then let the men know that if the harsh lieutenant colonel were just dismissed he himself would take the regiment back to Ohio to rest and recruit and would see to it that it was outfitted with gaudy Zouave uniforms. In the end, Sherman got the colonel sent home and the unpopular lieutenant colonel was retained and supported, but the whole flare-up was symptomatic. The raw material of the Federal army in Kentucky had no idea whatever of what soldiering was going to be like.¹³

It seemed to Sherman that these untaught boys were going to be sacrificed, and his feeling came out now and then in unexpected ways. An Indiana sergeant was detailed for a job at headquarters. When he finished it, Sherman said: “Sergeant, I hear you are short of rations over in your camp.” The sergeant said that this was so, and Sherman told him to wait and went bustling out to the kitchen. He came back in a minute with two slabs of buttered bread, a thick cut of ham between them, and two red apples. Giving these to the sergeant, he said: “There, that will put some fat on your ribs.”¹⁴

If the regimental officers were incapable of training their soldiers, professionals who could do the job were beginning to appear; most notably a West Point classmate of Sherman (and thus still another at General Smith’s former charges) named George Thomas, who was put in charge of operations at Camp Dick Robinson.

Thomas was a Virginian, forty-five years old, tall and stout and reserved in manner; he rarely laughed or raised his voice, he had a majestic full beard and a general air of kindly sternness, he moved with ponderous deliberation, and altogether he was extremely impressive in appearance. His army friends called him “Old Tom,” and his troops referred to him as “Old Slow Trot” — he had hurt his spine in a railroad accident a few months earlier, and it gave him excruciating pain when his horse moved faster than a walk. He was inclined to distrust volunteers and he was very stiff about matters of training; not for months would his men give him the affectionate title, “Pap,” by which he was to become famous.¹⁵

He had been much admired by Jefferson Davis when Davis was Secretary of War, and in 1855 when the crack 2nd Cavalry was organized with Albert Sidney Johnston as colonel and Robert E. Lee as lieutenant colonel, Thomas became one of its majors. In January 1861 he suspected that his spinal ailment might make active duty impossible, and in casting about for possible employment he wrote to the superintendent of the Virginia Military Institute, applying for the post of commandant of cadets there. This was remembered against him in Washington after Virginia seceded, and the War Department was inclined to doubt his loyalty. Sherman himself had vouched for him; now Thomas was under him, helping get troops ready for the serious fighting which everybody knew must begin in the spring.

It would begin, actually, long before the spring, and when it began it would be very rough. And there were, here in this Kentucy sector, these generals who had imbibed old General Smith’s doctrine: “… he must always be getting ready for it … And then, whether it come late or early, he must be willing to fight — he must fight!”