Chapter Four

TO MARCH TO TERRIBLE MUSIC

1. Sambo Was Not Sambo

THERE was a significance in the crossing of the Ohio River. North of the river was the familiar Middle West; beyond it there was nothing less than the South itself, mysterious, romantic, threatening, strange. The nearest Confederate armies might be scores of miles away, with no faintest intention of coming any closer. No matter: when a soldier crossed the river he felt that he was in the war.

Thousands of sunburned boys in ill-fitting blue uniforms were crossing the Ohio this fall, for Kentucky was the destined point of departure and the government was hastening to build up Union strength in the state. Nervous General Sherman had warned the Secretary of War that before they got through they would have to have two hundred thousand soldiers on this front. His panicky overestimate unsettled the authorities so much that they concluded Sherman was too flighty for his job, and he was replaced by the less emotional General Don Carlos Buell; and for a time Sherman hovered unhappily on the fringes of the war, a general without portfolio, alleged by unfriendly newspaper correspondents to be insane. But although his estimate of required strength had been rejected, the government nevertheless was getting troops into the state as fast as the training camps could send them. (By the war’s end it would turn out that Sherman’s wild appraisal was tolerably accurate, after all.)

The new arrivals were the greenest of recruits, and they came into Kentucky peering nervously about for enemies, tasting the wild excitement of the road to war, seeing a miraculous tonic quality in the sunrise and the crisp autumn wind. Even their officers felt it, even the West Pointers. Ormsby Mitchel, who had been graduated from the military academy in the same class with Robert E. Lee, had left the army to become an astronomer of note and now came to Kentucky as a grizzled brigadier bearing the nickname of “Old Stars” — even Mitchel felt it as he looked about his brigade camp at dawn and saw a haunting mist on the landscape: “Reveille is just sounding from forty drums and fifes and from twenty bugles, all over an area two miles square. It is just coming daylight, but the moon makes it bright as day even at this early hour. The smoke of the campfires spreads a gauzy veil over the white tents sleeping in the moonlight, illumined here and there by an early fire.…”¹

They were a heavy-handed and irrepressible lot, these Unionists. There was the 18th Illinois, which was under orders to march away from Cairo when one soldier murdered a comrade. The soldiers immediately took things into their own hands; hustled the colonel off to town on some trumped-up errand, then formed an impromptu court, appointed members of the regiment as attorneys for prosecution and defense, tried the culprit, and forthwith sentenced him to death. The lieutenant colonel led them into a wood, where the murderer was immediately hanged from a convenient tree. When someone suggested that after hanging a proper length of time the man ought to be given a grave, the officer agreed: “Damned good idea. Dig one under him as he hangs and drop him into it.” It was done, the lifeless body was buried, the colonel presently came back from town, and the regiment went off to the wars.²

The impatience was characteristic, although the results were not often so grim. Another Illinois regiment, training at Cairo, was sent across the Mississippi each day to practice the manual of arms, loading and firing with blank cartridges, and after a few days of it the colonel went to General Grant with a complaint:

“General, I can’t take my boys over there to practice any more unless you will furnish us with some real cartridges. For two days past they have attacked those — — weeds and there they stand, as saucy and defiant as ever.” Grant chuckled and issued ball cartridges. Next evening the colonel reappeared, all jubilant, to report: “General, there isn’t a —— weed left standing in front of my command. Now you can turn us loose on the southern Confederacy as quick as you please!”³

As far as the soldiers were concerned the Confederacy began on the southern border of the Ohio River. That Kentucky had maintained a painful neutrality for months meant nothing; that a majority of her citizens now favored the Union rather than the Confederacy meant nothing, either; it was a slave state, and although they had not enlisted to put down slavery, these Middle Westerners felt instinctively that slave territory was enemy territory. As they disembarked at Louisville and marched off through the town the files looked about them in nervous excitement for signs of hostility. The 51st Indiana chuckled when one private, thus marching up a city street, remarked aloud that he wished he could see one real, live Rebel. Instantly a two-hundred-pound Amazon of a woman stepped out from the pavement, came up to him with brandished fists, and cried: “Well, sir, here’s one! What do you want?”

Camp life was taking on its own routine. The big conical Sibley tents, each one large enough to house an entire squad, dotted the meadows, set off by crude charcoal signs: “Bull Pups,” “Bengal Tigers,” “Wild Cats.” At dawn the camps rang with a rhythmical, tinny clangor as the men took the unground coffee beans that made up such an important part of their rations, put them in tin pails, and ground the beans by pounding them with musket butts. Sutlers set up their tents near the company streets, selling indigestible pies, gingerbread, and candy, and it was noticed that hungry boys who patronized them lost appetite for army hardtack and bacon, came down with digestive upsets, and trailed off on sick call. Stray colored men, somehow escaped from bondage, began to filter into the camps, and many of these were pressed into service as company cooks. It was learned that surplus coffee from the army ration was as good as money, and soldiers used it to buy Dutch ovens, potatoes, vegetables, and chickens for these cooks to use.⁴

The colored people were beginning to influence men’s attitude toward war. Most of these western regiments had very little anti-slavery sentiment as such. They had enlisted to save the Union or because, being young, they had had a special receptivity to the drums and trumpets and cheering crowds, or perhaps just plain for fun, and the peculiar institution had meant nothing much to them one way or the other. Yet here they were, in what they considered to be the South, and there were colored folk all about them; and it began to seem that in the great fight to put down disunion these colored folk were allies, pathetically eager to help, very useful on occasion. Company E of the 33rd Illinois remembered a tour of duty in Missouri when a collection of rifles and a handful of Confederate recruits had been rounded up on somebody’s plantation. Unable to think of anything better, the company commander had equipped the plantation’s slaves with the rifles and had them march the captives back to camp, only to draw a stiff reprimand from army authorities, who castigated him for doing “what the President of the United States had not seen fit to do — liberate and arm the slaves.” The prisoners had been released and the slaves had been sent back to servitude, and Company E still felt that there was something about the deal that was not quite right.⁵

Runaway slaves would come into camp, and the men would try to hide them — moved, apparently, by nothing much more than sympathy for men who had found every man’s hand against them. It was official policy at that time to return all fugitives to their lawful owners, and in most detachments the policy was enforced. Little by little the soldiers began to feel that returning fugitive slaves was helping the rebellion; they objected to it, and some outfits were brought almost to mutiny by the orders, although under ordinary circumstances the men were as ready as any to draw the color line. Slowly but surely the idea began to dawn: these slaves are on our side, and in a state where people keep both Union and Confederate flags and display the one which on any given day seems most likely to be advantageous, these men with dark skins are the ones we can count on as friendly.

Not that the colored people got much out of it. The soldiers felt themselves to be immeasurably superior to all people whose skins were not white, and they had much pride of race. The 77th Illinois laughed at a group of officers who, touched by feelings of romance on a moonlight evening, went to the handsomest mansion in town, stood beneath its windows, and sang sentimental serenades very prettily (encouraged by handkerchiefs and scarves waving from opened windows) until their wind gave out; after which a colored maid came to the front door, thanked them for their effort, and said she was “sorry de white folks weren’t at home to hear it.” A Wisconsin soldier moodily confessed in a letter home: “The black folks are awful good, poor miserable things that they are. The boys talk to them fearful and treat them most any way and yet they can’t talk two minutes but tears come to their eyes and they throw their arms up and praise de Lord for de coming of de Lincoln soldiers.” This same Wisconsin boy admitted that he was greatly surprised to find that none of these slaves had ever heard any of Stephen Foster’s “colored” songs.⁶

It was the beginning of wisdom, perhaps. For this was not the land of Old Black Joe and My Old Kentucky Home, with gay darkies picturesquely melancholy over long shadows dropping on the plantation lawn, Uncle Ned hanging up the shovels and the hoe after a life of faithful service, Nelly Gray gone down the river to the tune of quavering male quartet vocalizing, Swanee River curling lazily south with the romantic sadness of a faint tug at the heartstrings. This was not minstrel-show land, after all. These midwestern soldiers had grown up knowing only the stage Negro — the big-mouthed, grinning, perpetually carefree Sambo who loved watermelons and possum, had peculiar gifts for wielding the razor (always on other Sambos, who did not much mind being slashed, having been born for it), and who liked to eat fried chicken and drink more gin than he could properly manage. Mr. Bones was out of his depth here, and there were emotional values under the surface that Stephen Foster had not quite touched; when Negro music was heard it had a wild quality and a jungle drumbeat, fit to be punctuated by the thudding of heavy guns and the cries of men desperately in earnest. This was real, there was a life force welling up here, and these illiterate men and women whose English was a queer gumbo of mispronounced words and faulty grammar nevertheless were actually trying to say something. This was not picturesque Sambo, faithful Old Black Joe, the grinning darky who was gay in the autumn sunlight; this was a manstruggling to stand upright as a man should and to be master, as far as a weak mortal may, of his own destiny, as precious to him as to any white boy from Wisconsin farm or Ohio city. It was something nobody had been prepared for, and it was inordinately disturbing.

What the Westerners were beginning to run up against, indeed, was the inexorable fact that the Negro was going to have a controlling effect on this war for union … simply because he was there. His presence, ultimately, had been the cause of the war; the war could not be fought and won without taking him into account; when the settlement finally took place, he would have to be in it.

On the day after Bull Run, Congress had solemnly decreed that the war was not being fought to disturb “the established institutions of the states,” and the radical Republicans had not ventured to object; yet the solemn resolve was becoming a dead letter, for the established institution which the resolution had been designed to protect was being disturbed more and more every day and there was no way to avoid disturbing it. Freedom and union were bound up together, whether man wished it so or not; and freedom was not a word that could ever be used in a limited sense. It was an idea, not a word, and there was no way to keep the people who wanted freedom the most from absorbing the idea.

If it did nothing else, slavery gave Union soldiers the notion that when they were in slave territory they were in land that somehow was foreign. This was as true in the Army of the Potomac as in Kentucky and Missouri. Private Chase of the 1st Massachusetts Artillery — a man who worshiped McClellan and who did not believe that abolition had any rightful part in this war — was writing home at this time that Virginia was a fine country in which, if there was no war, he would like to live. Yet he felt compelled to add: “I think if they could have a lot of New England farmers settle here they could show them how to raise a heap of stuff.” The war, he admitted, was ravaging the Virginia countryside fearfully, but perhaps that was all for the best: “I hope when it is done it will be a permanent thing and the Question settled that there is such a thing as Union.”⁷

McClellan himself — McClellan, who went by the book of Napoleon and saw all the rebellion as something formalized, to be settled by professionals who went by the old chivalric tradition — was beginning to learn this fall that this war could not be fought without some reference to the slavery issue. He was learning it just now in a very hard way, by means of a lost battle in which men were killed, by which bright reputations could be tarnished.

McClellan had troops occupying the Maryland country along the upper Potomac, northwest of Washington, with Confederates in unknown strength across the river. Late in October he got word that Confederate troops in Leesburg, Virginia, were making ominous moves, and he ordered a Union force to scout across the river, feel them out, and see what was developing. His orders went down to a division commander, Brigadier General Charles P. Stone, and Stone had a few regiments go over the river at Harrison’s Island, scale the muddy heights at Ball’s Bluff, and on October 21, 1861, perform the maneuver known to military men as a reconnaissance in force.

General Stone’s detachment went over under command of Colonel Edward D. Baker, the same who had orated gloriously in springtime New York, calling for bold and determined war and scoffing at battle deaths as matters of small account. On the fringe of a wood atop the bluff Baker inexpertly led his men into a more powerful Confederate force, which promptly cut the command to pieces, shooting down scores, capturing hundreds, and driving a disorganized remnant back across the river in headlong flight. Altogether the action cost the Union army nine hundred casualties, among them Baker himself, shot through the heart at the height of the battle.

In an official Washington which still had painful memories of Bull Run, this was exactly the sort of disaster for which somebody was going to be made to sweat; especially so since Baker himself had been a man of considerable political consequence — a close friend of Abraham Lincoln (who had named his second son for him), a leading west-coast Republican, and a member of the United States Senate. House and Senate joined to name a committee to look into the business, and this committee — which before long would become a fearsome Jacobin creation, the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War — selected as the chief culprit General Stone, who had not been present at the battle but who seemed to be mostly responsible for the move.

General Stone himself had a certain standing. During the previous winter James Buchanan had commissioned him colonel and had given him responsibility for maintaining order at the inauguration of President Lincoln; an important assignment, as men saw it then, for the capital had been full of rumors about a secessionist attempt to keep the ceremony from taking place. Lincoln knew Stone and trusted him, and Stone enjoyed McClellan’s full confidence, but none of this helped him now. The Joint Committee scented something very fishy about the whole Ball’s Bluff operation; suspected, in fact, that Baker and his command might have been purposely sacrificed by a Federal officer secretly in sympathy with the Confederacy — an officer who, under the circumstances, could not be anyone but General Stone, who had ordered the crossing in the first place. The committee collected a quantity of ominously vague testimony about mysterious flags of truce and the passage of messages back and forth between Union and Confederate commanders along the upper Potomac. It reflected also that during the last couple of months Stone had won a certain unhappy prominence by ordering his men to return to their owners all fugitive slaves who came within his lines; a course of action that had involved him in violent argument with Governor John Andrew of Massachusetts and with that afflicted lion of the anti-slavery cause, Senator Charles Sumner himself. As more and more testimony came in, it seemed clear to the members of the committee that Stone was probably disloyal.

Stone was never actually accused of anything. He was simply wrapped in suspicion; the War Department took note of it, and in time Stone was quietly removed from command and locked up in prison, where he had to stay for quite a number of months. He was released eventually — not exactly cleared, because there had never been any charges that could be either replied to or canceled, but at least released — but his career was ruined.

General Stone had run into very bad luck and had suffered atrocious injustice. Yet what had really wrecked him was not so much the vengeful suspicion of ruthless politicians as the sunken reef of the slavery issue. He had been taught, suddenly and with great brutality, what other soldiers were being permitted to surmise for themselves — that that issue was not going to stay submerged, that it was going to become central, that sooner or later the war was going to adjust itself to it.⁸

Like the lamented Colonel Baker, the principal men in the Republican party believed in bold and determined war, and it did not seem to them that they had been getting it lately. It had been hard enough for them to keep quiet while McClellan leisurely perfected his army’s organization and training; they found it altogether unendurable when the first aggressive move made by any piece of that army proved to be the halfhearted thrust at Ball’s Bluff, productive of shameful disaster. When the man responsible for that fiasco turned out to be one who had steadfastly refused to let his part of the army take an anti-slavery stand, the inference seemed irresistible.

For the Republican leaders in Congress — men like Ohio’s Senator Ben Wade, Michigan’s Senator Zachariah Chandler, Pennsylvania’s Congressman Thaddeus Stevens — believed not only in hard war but also in the abolition of slavery. Hard war meant smiting the Confederacy quickly and with vigor; also, as they saw it, it meant destroying what the Confederacy stood on, the institution of slavery. The two must go together, and a general who had no interest in striking down slavery probably had no real interest in striking down the Confederacy either. That the President of the United States had flatly refused to let abolition be made official policy made no difference. Notice had been served that softness on the slavery issue would ultimately be equated with softness in regard to victory itself.

 … In which, perhaps, there was less political scheming and plain human cussedness than may appear. The innocent enlisted man who went to Kentucky fancying that colored folk were burnt-cork clowns who expressed their deepest feelings with the music of Stephen Foster or Dan Emmett was beginning to learn that the reality was a little grimmer than that. He was discovering, in fact, that the contraband who tried to hide in a Union camp was a fugitive from slavery and not just from a minstrel show; and he was also beginning to sense that it was going to be very difficult to wage war against the society from which those men were trying to escape, without in one way or another taking a stand on the problem of the men themselves. Ben Wade and Thad Stevens and men like them had lost their innocence far back in the unrecorded past, but the same force that was pressing on the midwestern recruit was also pressing on them. Sambo was not Sambo any longer, and the land was going to march to more terrible music than any minstrel had yet sung. Slavery had been a factor in the events that had brought on the war, and now there was no way on earth to keep it from being a factor in the war itself. Both senators and private soldiers were beginning to respond to that fact.

2. War along the Border

Among those who would feel the pressure was General George B. McClellan.

It would come a bit later, of course. The prestige he had brought to Washington — a prestige which was at least partly due to the fact that everybody hopefully expected so much of him — was not yet dimmed. There were a few private mutterings, to be sure. McClellan had had a good deal of time to get his Army of the Potomac into shape — a good deal by pre-Bull Run standards, anyway — and he was steadfastly refusing to do anything with it. Rebel armies were still camped in the Bull Run region, defiant Rebel batteries closed the Potomac River to commercial traffic, and “On to Richmond” (which hardly anyone was saying out loud these days) had a rather hollow sound.

But actually the war was making progress, even though the country’s principal army was not moving.

Shortly after Fort Sumter, Lincoln had proclaimed a blockade of the southern seacoast. There had been at the time no way to make even a respectable pretense of enforcing the blockade, and the whole business had looked a little ridiculous — the more so when, before half the spring was gone, the Confederates seized the naval base at Norfolk, Virginia, capturing enough big naval guns to equip forts all over the South and possessing themselves of the disabled hulk of one of the nation’s first-line warships, U.S.S.Merrimac;a hulk that could be raised, remodeled, and put back into service under the Confederate flag. There had been times during the last few months when the only blockade worth talking about seemed to be the one which the Southerners themselves were maintaining on the water route to the Federal capital.

The administration, however, had no intention of letting things remain in this unhappy condition, and early in August it began to take steps. These steps were not very well co-ordinated at first, and there was a certain amount of pulling and hauling in opposite directions, but eventually the army and navy found themselves carrying out a logical, co-ordinated plan for sealing off the Confederacy. Old General Scott’s “anaconda” idea had taken root.

As was the case with a number of things in this war, the operation seemed to begin with Ben Butler, After his crackdown on Baltimore and eastern Maryland, Butler had been sent to take command at Fortress Monroe, at the entrance to Chesapeake Bay. In a purely military way he had very little to do there, but his fertile lawyer’s mind had made one great contribution to the handling of the fugitive-slave problem. Runaway slaves who came within his lines, he held, were, as far as he was concerned, simply a species of property owned by men in rebellion; property which could have a direct military usefulness and whose owners, by the act of rebellion, had forfeited title; contraband of war, in other words. As contraband, fugitive slaves could be collected and used by a Union army just as any other property could be collected and used, and nobody was in any way committed on any side of the slavery issue itself. This interpretation proved enormously handy to harassed Federal commanders everywhere, and the word itself caught on at once. For the rest of the war runaway slaves and displaced colored folk in general were contrabands.

Late in August an amphibious expedition with troops under Butler and warships under a lean, irritable flag officer named Silas Stringham sailed from Hampton Roads, dropped down the Carolina coast, and without great difficulty captured two forts which the Confederates had built at Hatteras Inlet, where there was a good entrance to the vast enclosed area of the North Carolina sounds. Leaving a garrison for the forts and a tiny fleet of light-draft vessels, general and flag officer returned to Hampton Roads. The foothold they had gained could be exploited whenever the government chose.¹

Government would choose just as soon as it could get everything ready, for the advantages of amphibious warfare were beginning to become evident. While Butler and Stringham were cracking Hatteras Inlet, the navy was thinking about seizing a good harbor farther down the coast to serve as a fuel and supply base for blockading squadrons. It set aside its best warships and gave them to Flag Officer Samuel du Pont, a sailor whose social and financial standing was quite impeccable. Dupont decided to make a descent on Port Royal, South Carolina, and asked the War Department to stand by to provide troops. McClellan objected bitterly; this was a side show, the troops ought to be sent to his own Army of the Potomac, for the issue would finally be settled in Virginia and there should be no diversions. He was overruled, however. Lincoln wrote to the Secretary of War that the expedition must get moving in October, and twelve thousand soldiers were earmarked for the job, under General Thomas W. Sherman. (Not William Tecumseh; it was Thomas W.’s misfortune, by the end of the war, to be known simply as the other General Sherman.)

Inspired by this or by cogitations of his own, General Ambrose E. Burnside next went to McClellan with a proposition.

Burnside was an easy-going West Pointer from Rhode Island; a big, handsome, likable chap whose visible assets included an intimate friendship with McClellan, a set of the best intentions in all the world, and a fantastic growth of well-sited whiskers; and he asked permission to recruit along the New England seaboard a division of troops familiar with the coasting trade and the handling of small boats. With such men, he said, and with proper help from the navy, he could go in through Hatteras Inlet, dismantle every Confederate installation on the sounds, and forever end the danger of any blockade-running in that area. Furthermore, the army would be established on the mainland not too many miles south of Richmond if the expedition was a success.²

McClellan had just got through objecting to the Port Royal expedition, but he went for this one with enthusiasm and Burnside was told to go ahead. Hardly had this been done when the navy picked up a couple of Ben Butler’s regiments and a battery of artillery and whisked them down into the Gulf of Mexico, to occupy desolate Ship Island, a sprawling sand dune dotted with marsh grass and scrub oaks and pines, which lay a few miles offshore some little distance west of the entrance to Mobile Bay. The original idea seems to have been to hold the place as a coaling depot for light-draft gunboats, with which the navy hoped to break the Confederate traffic between New Orleans and Mobile. But the men and guns deposited on Ship Island were hardly seventy-five miles in an air line from New Orleans itself, largest city in the Confederacy, and they were an equal distance from the entrance to the all-important Mississippi River; a fact that was bound to call itself to strategic attention before long.

Thus by the middle of the fall the government was beginning to get on with the war even though most of the progress was as yet invisible. If McClellan’s army was doing nothing in particular in Virginia, the Confederate army in that state was keeping equally quiet; and although the idea would never have dawned on McClellan, it is just possible that by keeping quiet in Virginia his army was fulfilling its most important function. The strategy by which the Confederacy would eventually be destroyed was taking shape that fall — seal off the coast, strike down the Mississippi, destroy secession state by state, working east from the West — and the unhappy Army of the Potomac, which was to do the worst of the fighting and suffer the heaviest casualties, was not, in the end, actually required to do anything more than hold the line in front of Washington.

What was to happen would bear a striking resemblance to Scott’s original Anaconda Plan, but Scott himself would not be around to see it — except dimly, as an outsider, from afar. The old man had obviously grown too old and infirm to command the country’s armies. Also, McClellan, who was still on his way up, looked on him as an encumbrance and by-passed him whenever possible. Finally, early in November, Scott grew tired of being continually snubbed by his subordinate and went off into retirement, and McClellan was put in his place. Now McClellan had it all; immediate command of the Army of the Potomac, top command of all the country’s armies. He said stoutly, “I can do it all,” when Lincoln suggested that the burden might be too heavy; yet he did know a moment of humility when, with his staff, he went to the railway station to see Scott off, was touched by the sight of a once-great soldier shuffling sadly away into the discard, and reflected that unless things broke right he himself might someday be in Scott’s position, riding dejectedly away to make place for another man.³

But that would be a long way off. For the time being all the war was in McClellan’s hands, and the moments of self-doubt that plagued the brilliant young general were kept hidden from the multitude. Aside from the coastal operations, he had three principal theaters for action — Virginia, Kentucky, and the Missouri-Mississippi valley area — and he was resolved not to let political pressure force him, as it had forced McDowell, to move before everything was ready.

In Virginia he had unwittingly shouldered a great handicap; he had given himself Allan Pinkerton, the famous detective, as chief of military intelligence. Pinkerton was expert at catching bank robbers, railway bandits, and absconding fiduciaries, but he was almost completely incompetent at giving the general-in-chief the data he needed about the opposing army. He was telling McClellan now that Joe Johnston, Confederate commander in northern Virginia, had a large and aggressive army, and since what he told McClellan fitted perfectly with McClellan’s own native caution, McClellan soon came to believe that he was actually outnumbered. In actual fact, McClellan had just about twice as many men as Johnston had, they were fully as well trained as Johnston’s men, and in matters of supply and equipment they were ever so much better off; but it seemed to McClellan that he must be very careful what he did, and although President and Cabinet kept pressing him to make some sort of aggressive move before winter came, McClellan would not be hurried. He would always need two or three more weeks before he could start his campaign; would need them, partly because the ability to take quick, decisive action had been left out of his make-up, and partly because military intelligence kept telling him that the enemy was stronger than he was and would crush him if he made the slightest mistake.⁴

In the West, unfortunately, McClellan’s two chief subordinates turned out to be men as cautious as himself.

Romantic Frémont was gone, of course, and the petulant David Hunter who had taken his place was himself superseded shortly afterward by a flabby, moon-faced general who was to become one of the minor enigmas of the Civil War — Henry Wager Halleck, known to the regulars as “Old Brains,” a solemn, rumbling-portentous pedant in uniform who had the habit of folding his arms and rubbing his elbows whenever he was the least bit perplexed, and who took into high command a much better reputation than he was finally able to take out of it.

Halleck had written military textbooks and had translated other texts from the French, he had retired from the army in gold-rush California to make money as a lawyer, and he was a born gossip and scold; nature had designed him to fill the part of a paper-pushingbureaucrat, and his mind was as orderly and tidy as its range was limited. What McClellan might be able to do about sending an offensive column down the Mississippi would in the end be largely up to Halleck. For the moment, however, Halleck’s primary function was to pick up the litter left by Frémont and to make certain that military housekeeping was restored to an orderly basis. This much he could do, and he could also put Federal troops on the march across those parts of Missouri where rebel sympathies seemed to be strong. He was stopping waste and graft and he seemed to be restoring order; his capacity for waging aggressive war and directing troops in the field remained to be seen.

Halleck was supposed to work in harness with the other principal commander in the West, Don Carlos Buell, who had replaced Sherman in Kentucky. It was unlikely that real co-operation between these two men would come spontaneously, for each man was convinced that the other ought to be subordinate to him, but for the moment they were co-equals, with distant McClellan bearing responsibility for co-ordination of their efforts.

Buell was much like McClellan, except that the spark of personal magnetism was missing. He was one more of those diligent officers whom the old army labeled “brilliant,” and he should have been a first-rate general. He was methodical, careful of details, an able disciplinarian and organizer, the very model of a sound professional soldier. But he tended to be somewhat prissy. He had spent thirteen years in the adjutant general’s office, was fascinated by military routine, considered military problems wholly divorced from politics and other civilian realities, and — hating untidiness and military slackness above all else — he had little use for volunteer soldiers and their officers; which was unfortunate, since these made up all but a tiny fraction of his army. He knew moments of sheer horror occasionally when confronted with the civilian in arms in all his native rudeness. Once in Kentucky he saw by the road a mounted man in slouch hat, hickory shirt, and homespun breeches, spurs on naked heels, two revolvers in his belt, a rifle in his hands; and when a staff officer remarked that the man was doubtless a Federal cavalryman on duty, Buell indignantly bet fifty dollars that he was nothing but an unenrolled mountaineer. Buell lost; the man was a regular member of the 1st Kentucky Cavalry, on duty; and the loss of the money apparently hurt Buell much less than the realization that this unmilitary character was actually a trooper under his own command.⁵

The enlisted men sensed Buell’s disapproval of volunteers, and they considered him very reserved and aloof and refused to warm up to him. They might have admired one odd trick which Buell used to indulge in to display his physical strength. In his home, with guests present, he liked to take his wife by the elbows, lift her off the floor, and place her on the mantelpiece — something of a feat, one guest observed, since the lady weighed at least 140 pounds and the mantel was nearly as high as Buell’s head.⁶

The war, to Buell, was a business of maps, of military maxims carefully studied and observed, of conscious application of basic principles. It would be possible, he argued, to win an important campaign without fighting a single general engagement; battles should be fought only when success was reasonably certain, and “war has a higher object than that of mere bloodshed.”⁷ This was true enough, and Buell could cite eminent authority for his belief. Yet this war might possibly turn out to be unlike the ones in the textbooks. It might have rules of its own, or no rules at all, as Nathaniel Lyon had discovered in the free-for-all at St. Louis; in which case a man who went by the book could have much trouble.

Buell was beginning to have a little trouble this fall, in point of fact. As much as he wanted anything short of final victory, Abraham Lincoln wanted east Tennessee occupied by Union troops, for reasons both military and political; the occupation would break the all-important railroad line that connected Virginia with the Mississippi Valley, and east Tennessee was full of sturdy Union sympathizers and ought to be liberated. McClellan accepted this and passed the orders along to Buell, and Pap Thomas was eager to make the move just as soon as he got his wagon train in order. But Buell thought the move was all wrong. In a letter to Lincoln he confessed that he was led to prepare for the thrust “more by my sympathy for the people of east Tennessee and the anxiety with which you and the general-in-chief have desired it than by my opinion of its wisdom.” East Tennessee, he felt, would have to wait; the important thing was to break the main Rebel line in the West.⁸

The western end of this line was anchored by the powerful riverbank fortress at Columbus on the Mississippi, to possess which Bishop Polk had been willing to fracture Kentucky’s neutrality at the beginning of September. The center was based on Bowling Green, where Albert Sidney Johnston seemed to have his principal troop concentration. Eastward, the line tapered off in the mountainous area north and west of Cumberland Gap.

Thus the western end of the line was in Halleck’s territory and the rest in Buell’s, and before any of it could be attacked properly Buell and Halleck would have to work out a joint plan and make complete arrangements for co-operation. It was taking them a long time to do this. Some of the delay possibly arose because each general knew perfectly well that the man who drove the Rebels out of Kentucky was going to win fame and promotion, so that each one greatly preferred to see the main push take place in his own bailiwick. While they planned, argued, and cajoled one another by mail and by telegraph — for some reason they were never quite able to spend a couple of days face to face and iron out all difficulties — McClellan at long distance called for action and meditated at leisure on the best way to make use of the Army of the Potomac.… And the autumn months passed, and Republican leaders muttered that the generals were reluctant to fight, and General Stone was made an object lesson for the hesitant.

In spite of the delays, there was beginning to be action. If Halleck and Buell preferred to wait until everything was ready, each had a subordinate who was ready to fight.

General Grant in Cairo touched it off first. Across the Mississippi from Columbus, some fifteen miles downstream from Cairo, there was an insignificant Missouri hamlet named Belmont, and to this place on November 7 Grant came by steamer, with three thousand soldiers and the gunboats Tyler and Lexington for escort, on a vaguely defined mission whose final object seems to have been nothing much more complicated than to stir up a good fight.

He got his fight, since there were several Confederate regiments in residence at Belmont. Grant took his men ashore just far enough upstream to be out of range of the heavy guns at Columbus, marched down the Missouri shore, smashed a hastily formed Confederate battle line, and seized the Confederate camp. His troops felt that they had won a great victory and they celebrated by breaking ranks and looting the camp for souvenirs, thus giving the Confederates time to rally and to get reinforcements across the river. In the end Grant’s force was driven back upstream, and at the close of day the men hurriedly re-embarked and steamed back to Cairo, abandoning most of their loot and a number of their wounded men. The fight had been brisk enough — each side lost four hundred men or more — and nothing very definite had been accomplished either way. But Grant’s men considered that they had behaved very well under fire (as in fact they had) and their morale went up, and the Confederates had been put on notice that they were facing an aggressive enemy.⁹

Belmont had settled nothing, in other words, but it did bring to an end the period of inaction along the Kentucky-Tennessee front. A few weeks later Buell’s General Thomas got into a fight that had more important consequences.

Thomas had been edging forward toward the Tennessee border from the left end of Buell’s line, getting ready for the anticipated march into east Tennessee. Buell thought he was too far forward, and anyway Buell was thinking in terms of a drive through the Confederate center toward Nashville, so by the end of November Thomas was ordered to pull his men back and await developments near the town of Lebanon in central Kentucky. This apparently encouraged the Confederates, and they thrust a force up through Cumberland Gap and posted it on the north side of the Cumberland River, not far from the Kentucky town of Somerset; and around the first of the year, hampered by bad weather and atrocious roads (it took eight days to advance forty miles), Thomas went lunging forward to drive this force away.

Federals and Confederates finally collided on January 17, 1862, at Mill Springs, otherwise known as Logan’s Crossroads. The battle was fought in woodlots and meadows along the edge of a little stream, and untried soldiers on each side formed a line and blazed away manfully. Hardly anyone on either side had ever fought before; when a Confederate firing line sensibly took cover behind the lip of a ravine, a furious Union colonel climbed on a rail fence, denounced the Rebels loudly as dastards, and dared them to stand on their feet and fight like men. The Confederate General Felix Zollicoffer, in the confusion of the action, rode into the Union line and was shot; Thomas got his reserves forward at just the right moment, and the Confederates were finally driven off in rout, abandoning camp and commissary stores, eleven pieces of artillery, and more than a thousand horses and mules. Happy Federal soldiers laid in vast stocks of Confederate rations and amused themselves by cooking flapjacks, made mostly of flour and sugar, living on these so extensively that whole regiments came down with bowel trouble.¹⁰

This battle had been on a small scale — neither side had more than four thousand men on the field — but it had important results. In effect, the right end of the Confederate line had come loose. The way into east Tennessee was wide open now, if anybody wanted to use it, and Mr. Lincoln hopefully urged Congress to provide for building a railroad from Kentucky down to Knoxville. But Buell continued to think that it would be much better to move on Nashville; and as the winter deepened, General Grant and Commodore Foote unexpectedly helped his argument along by focusing attention on the Confederate center in the most dramatic way imaginable. They moved boldly up the Tennessee River and captured Fort Henry.

3. Come On, You Volunteers!

The high command had been doing a good deal of sputtering during January. McClellan still hoped that Buell could move into east Tennessee, but Buell was insisting that he had to crack the Confederate defenses at Bowling Green first and then move on Nashville; so McClellan told Halleck that he ought to move up the Tennessee River to create a diversion and keep the Rebels from reinforcing at Bowling Green, and Halleck was replying that the Confederate force at Columbus far outnumbered the ten thousand men he had available for such a move. He argued that “it would be madness to attempt anything serious with such a force,” and he gave McClellan a little lecture on strategy; to move against two points on the Confederate line would be “to operate on exterior lines against an enemy occupying a central position,” a military solecism which “is condemned by every authority I have ever read.” Lincoln saw the correspondence, and across the bottom of Halleck’s letter he scribbled: “It is exceedingly discouraging. As everywhere else, nothing can be done.”¹

The sputtering continued. Halleck reminded McClellan that the troops he had inherited from Frémont were in a disorganized, near-mutinous condition, and complained: “I am in the condition of a carpenter who is required to build a bridge with a dull axe, a broken saw and rotten timber.”²

Some of his tools did have a good edge, however, and Thomas’s victory at Logan’s Crossroads lent inspiration. Grant, Foote, and old C. F. Smith were all convinced that they were facing a bright opportunity rather than a vexing problem, and word of their optimism got abroad. Oddly enough, a false alarm from the East was a spur to action. McClellan learned that General Beauregard was being sent west, to be second-in-command to Albert Sidney Johnston: in addition, he was erroneously informed that Beauregard was taking fifteen regiments with him, and it seemed advisable to do something before these reinforcements should arrive. Halleck finally consented to let Grant make a stab at Fort Henry on the Tennessee River, just over the line from Kentucky, and he found that he could spare fifteen thousand men for the task instead of the ten thousand he had mentioned earlier. He and Buell then began exchanging messages, exploring the possibilities of co-operation, deploring the atrocious state of the roads, and doubting that anything very effective could be done. Halleck told McClellan that unless he got heavy reinforcements he did not believe he could accomplish much, Buell complained that Halleck’s move was being commenced “without appreciation — preparative or concert,” and he added that the Rebels would probably muster sixty thousand men to oppose the move.³

While the high command sputtered, Grant, Foote and Smith moved.

The Tennessee River comes up from the Deep South to meet the Ohio River at Paducah. To the east, the Cumberland River, after rising in the Kentucky mountains, dips to the north, and as it leaves Tennessee to re-enter Kentucky it flows parallel to the Tennessee for a long distance. Just below the Kentucky-Tennessee border, at a place where the two northward-flowing rivers are no more than ten miles apart, the Confederates had prepared two strong points: Fort Henry on the Tennessee, and Fort Donelson at Dover on the Cumberland. Between them, these two forts were supposed to hold the line between Columbus on the west and Bowling Green on the east, where the main Confederate body was concentrated.

On paper these forts were powerful. What Grant had learned was that Fort Henry, at least, was a hollow shell. It had been poorly situated in lowlands which were subject to flood. The Tennessee was high, as February began, and half of Fort Henry was under water; furthermore, the place was weakly garrisoned, and while the Confederates were trying to remedy matters by building another fort on the western bank of the Tennessee they had not got very far with it.

Early in February, Grant took off. He had approximately fifteen thousand men — a strong division from Paducah under C. F. Smith, another division under an ambitious politician-general from Illinois named John A. McClernand, and a smaller group of reserves under the General Lew Wallace who had hesitantly asked Smith if he should actually accept the responsibility the government was giving him. Also, he had Foote and his gunboats; and since the roads were all but impassable, the entire force was moving up the Tennessee by water.

They anchored a few miles downstream from Fort Henry on the afternoon of February 5, and Foote invited the generals aboard the gunboat Cincinnati and steamed up a little way to inspect the Confederate defenses. The river was full of floating mines — torpedoes, they were, in the nomenclature of that day — and the flood waters had torn most of these loose from their moorings and many of them were floating by. Sailors got one of them and brought it aboard the flagship, and Foote and the generals gathered around it on the low fantail deck at the stern while the ship’s armorer was called to dismantle the thing and see how it worked.

The mine was an iron cylinder, five feet long by some eighteen inches thick; with three long iron rods protruding from one end to actuate the firing mechanism. While the officers bent over to watch, the armorer removed these rods, took off the detachable end of the tube, and went to work with a wrench on a heavy nut that held the interior works together.

Apparently the torpedo had leaked. Water had entered, and the cylinder was full of air under pressure. As the armorer loosened the nut, this air suddenly began to emerge with an ominous hissing sound, and all hands immediately got the idea that the machine was about to explode. The armorer vanished, Smith and McClernand dropped flat on the deck, and Grant and Foote made for a ladder and went floating swiftly to the upper deck — getting there, breathless, just as the hissing stopped and it became obvious that the torpedo was not going to explode after all. General and flag officer looked at each other sheepishly. Then Foote blandly inquired:

“General, why this haste?”

Said Grant:

“That the navy may not get ahead of us.”⁴

Then they returned to the lower deck and the examination of the torpedo was completed.

They would attack the fort next day, and that evening old Foote made the rounds of the vessels in his squadron, addressing the crews, exhorting them to be brave men — most of them had never been under fire before — and urging them to put their trust in divine Providence. As a good Yankee, he had a final word of caution for them. When they fired the big guns they must make every shot count: “Every charge you fire from one of these guns costs the government about eight dollars.”

While Foote was addressing his crews, Grant got his troops ashore: Smith’s men on the western side of the river, to march up and seize the new works the Confederates were building there, and McClernand’s on the eastern bank, to march directly on Fort Henry itself. Morning came, the troops began to move, and Foote wheeled his gunboats upstream to convenient range and opened fire. An officer on the Essex noticed that the first three shots from the flagship fell short, and remarked that Foote’s own gun crews had just wasted twenty-four dollars.⁵

The fight was surprisingly short. The Rebel commander in Fort Henry, rightly judging that the place could not be defended very long, had sent most of his men cross-country to Fort Donelson, retaining only enough to work the guns that bore on the river. The gunboats’ fire was accurate (after the initial twenty-four dollar lapse) and the fort surrendered before Grant had got his soldiers into position.

Somewhat to the army’s embarrassment, the Confederate commander came out in a rowboat under a flag of truce, boarded the flagship, and made his surrender to Foote, who sent a detail ashore to hold the place until the soldiers could get there. The fort was so badly flooded that the cutter carrying this detail rowed straight in through the sally port. A Confederate officer said that if the fight had been delayed forty-eight hours the rising Tennessee would have drowned the fort’s magazine and the Yankees could have had the place for nothing.

Short as it was, the fight had not been bloodless. Foote’s flagship had been struck thirty-two times and two of her guns had been disabled, and the Essex had been put completely out of action with a shell through her steam chest and thirty-two casualties. The Confederate gunners had stood up to their work until fire from the fleet had dismounted their effective pieces; but Foote had brought his boats in to close range where his raw gun crews could hardly miss, and he had heavier guns than anything the fort possessed. The whole experience apparently gave sailors and soldiers alike an exaggerated idea of the effectiveness of gunboats against fortifications, which was to have important consequences a bit later.⁶

Grant’s men came floundering up presently — the bottom land was all under water and there was a veritable millrace a quarter of a mile wide just outside the parapets — and since he and Foote got on well the navy refrained from crowing too much over its triumph. Smith and his men were brought over from the western side of the river, and Grant sent a wire to Halleck announcing the victory. He added that he would move over and capture Fort Donelson in a couple of days.⁷

Grant’s telegram immediately stepped up the exchange of messages in the McClellan-Buell-Halleck triangle. Halleck told McClellan that he could hold Fort Henry “at all hazards,” predicted that the Rebels would feel obliged to abandon Bowling Green, and urged that every available man be sent up the Tennessee or the Cumberland. McClellan suggested that perhaps Buell should go to Fort Henry in person — in which case, since he outranked Grant, he would be in command there; Halleck thought that Buell should simply send reinforcements instead. McClellan proposed that Buell take his men up the Cumberland to Nashville while Halleck continued to ascend the Tennessee, with a combined smash at Memphis as the objective. This was a sound idea but impracticable for the moment, since the navy did not yet have enough gunboats to escort transports on two rivers at once. Buell complained that he could not get a clear idea of Halleck’s plans.⁸

Meanwhile Grant was taking his men overland to Fort Donelson.

Fort Henry had been comparatively easy, but Donelson would be very tough. Grant was no great distance from Paducah, where Sherman — brought out of his temporary retirement by Halleck and given the post Smith had held — was working hard to funnel more troops to him; but Buell’s men in Kentucky were a long way off, and Confederate Johnston had fifty thousand men strung out on the line from Columbus to Bowling Green. Beauregard had joined him — without those reinforcements which rumor had said he was bringing — and he was urging that Johnston concentrate everything he had and smash Grant’s force before it was too late. Johnston refused to go along with this and ordered the forces at Bowling Green to fall back on Nashville instead; but he did send twelve thousand men to Fort Donelson, bringing the total force there to seventeen thousand or more. Built on the west bank of the Cumberland, Donelson occupied high ground, with powerful guns to command the river and with extensive entrenchments strung along wooded ridges and hilltops to command the approaches by land. As the head of Grant’s column approached the place, the Confederates had more men on the scene than he had.

It had taken much longer than Grant anticipated to get everything ready, and it was not until February 13 that his army was in position. His plan was simple. Foote had gone back to Cairo, leaving his disabled boat there and picking up three others, two of which were the unarmored Tyler and Conestoga. He was steaming up the Cumberland now with six gunboats, four of them armored, and he was convoying transports bringing Grant reinforcements. Grant proposed to hem the Confederates in by land and have the gunboats close the river front; a sharp bombardment by Foote, then, might make a successful infantry assault possible, and the Confederate garrison could be captured entire.

February 14 came in cold after a sharp night. It had been unseasonably warm during the cross-country march from Fort Henry, and many of the green troops had blithely thrown away their overcoats; some units had even left blankets behind in camp on the Tennessee. The men put in a miserable night. They were so close to the Confederate lines that fires were not allowed. But as the sun came up the air moderated a bit, and in midafternoon the soldiers’ spirits rose; out of their sight, beyond the hills and the trees, there came a heavy, measured thud-thud of the big naval guns. Foote was bringing his four armored gunboats up to give Fort Donelson what he had given Fort Henry.

It might have worked if he had kept his distance. His guns outranged anything the Confederates could fire at him, and when he opened the shooting at a distance of two miles his gunners were hitting regularly and doing substantial damage. But at Fort Henry he had finished things off fast by closing to point-blank range, and he tried the same thing here. The result was sheer disaster. At close range his gunners consistently overshot, and the Confederate gunners found their targets and pounded them hard. In a short time the squadron had to withdraw, two boats disabled, the others damaged, many men killed, Foote himself badly wounded. If Fort Donelson was going to be taken, the army would have to do it. Glumly Grant admitted that he might have to settle down for a siege.⁹

Fortunately the Confederate command was very nervous. Top Confederate in the place was Brigadier General Gideon Pillow, a gray-whiskered veteran of the Mexican War who was to bear one distinction, and only one, out of the Civil War — he was the only Confederate general to whom Grant consistently referred in terms of contempt. Even though the naval attack had been beaten off, Pillow figured the place could not be held, and next morning he marshaled a striking column to break the right of Grant’s line and open a way for the garrison to escape.

To an extent, the plan worked. McClernand’s division held the right; the Confederate assault doubled it back on the Union center, driving Federal brigades in flight and swinging the door of escape wide open. But Grant sent Lew Wallace and his men in to help close the gap, and on his left he ordered Smith to assault the Rebel breastworks in order to ease the pressure on his right. Old Smith, who had said the officer must live for the great day of battle, put his regiments into line, stuck his cap on the point of his sword, and rode ahead of them into a tangle of brush and felled trees, with Confederates on a ridge beyond driving in a hot fire.

Smith’s men had never been in action before, and when they entered the underbrush with bullets whining and crackling all around them, they wavered. Smith stormed at them:

“Damn you, gentlemen, I see skulkers. I’ll have none here. Come on, you volunteers, come on! This is your chance. You volunteered to be killed for love of country, and now you can be. You damned volunteers — I’m only a soldier and I don’t want to be killed, but you came to be killed and now you can be!”

Then, without looking back, sitting his horse as if he were on parade, sword held high, he rode on ahead of them. One of his rookies wrote afterward that “I was nearly scared to death, but I saw the old man’s mustache over his right shoulder, and went on.” Through the underbrush and fallen timber and up the slope they went, the Rebels blistering the hillside with musket fire. Once more the line wavered briefly. Smith beckoned to his division surgeon, who was riding with the staff, and told him: “Hewitt, my God, my friend, if you love me, go back and bring up another regiment of these damned volunteers. You’ll find them behind the bushes.”

The other regiment came up, the wavering ceased, and a staff officer recorded: “And so the old cock led them with a mixture of oaths and entreaties over the breastwork.” On Smith’s whole front the Confederates had to withdraw to an inner line. Wallace’s men, meanwhile, had regained most of the ground McClernand had lost, and by evening the open door was slammed shut again. Clearly enough, Grant’s army — heavily reinforced by this time and strongly outnumbering the Confederates — could drive home a smashing assault in the morning.¹⁰

It was another cold night, and the Federals huddled in their lines with nothing but the anticipation of victory to warm them. Sometime past midnight Grant was in the little cabin that served as headquarters, his surgeon dozing in a chair, a good fire burning in the fireplace; and General Smith came in, ice on his boots, his great mustachios looking frostier than ever. He handed Grant a letter, remarking, “There’s something for you to read, General.” Then he asked the surgeon for a drink, took a good old-army pull from the flask that was offered, wiped his lips, and stood before the fire, warming his long legs. Grant read the letter.

It had just come through the picket lines under a flag of truce, and it bore the signature of Brigadier General Simon Bolivar Buckner, an old-time army friend of Grant, now commanding the Confederates in Fort Donelson. Because his two seniors were frightened, Buckner was the residuary legatee of defeat. At a council of war earlier that evening the Confederate commanders had agreed that the fort would have to be surrendered. However, no Confederate general had yet been captured by the Federals, and no one was quite certain that a vengeful Lincoln government might not try captured generals for treason; and so General Pillow, the top man in the fort, announced that he personally was going to make his escape, and he passed the command to the next man in line, Brigadier General John B. Floyd.

Floyd had personal reasons for wishing to avoid capture. He had been Secretary of War in Buchanan’s Cabinet, and Northerners believed he had used his official position to stock southern arsenals and forts with extra supplies of weapons against the day of secession. It seemed likely that if they caught Floyd they would make things tough for him. So Floyd said he thought he had better go away with Pillow, and he passed the command on to Buckner. Being made of stouter material, Buckner did not try to duck his responsibilities. If the fort had to be given up and if he was now its commander, he would do what had to be done and would stay with his men, to take what came. So he had written a letter to Grant asking what terms the Federals would give if the garrison should surrender.

Grant read the thing and looked up at Smith, who was twisting his mustache before the fire. Perhaps Grant still felt like the young cadet in the presence of the commandant, for he asked, “What answer shall I send to his, General Smith?”

Smith cleared his throat heavily and barked: “No terms to the damned rebels.”

Grant chuckled, got a pad of paper, and began to write. A moment later he showed Smith what he had written. It was a short message, which would become famous. Curt and to the point, it announced that Grant would offer no terms except “immediate and unconditional surrender,” and closed with the blunt statement: “I propose to move immediately upon your works.”

“Hmm!” said Smith. “It’s the same thing in smoother words!” Grant chuckled again, and Smith stalked out of the room to send the letter through the lines to Buckner.¹¹

Buckner thought the letter harsh and unchivalrous, but there was no help for it. Pillow and Floyd had slipped away to the far side of the Cumberland and were on their way to safety. One other soldier had also escaped, a man who was to be worth more to the Confederacy than a dozen Pillows and Floyds: a hard, rough-hewn former planter and slave trader named Nathan Bedford Forrest, now commanding a detachment of Confederate cavalry, one of the authentic military geniuses of the whole war. If they could have caught him and kept him under lock and key to the end of the war, the Federals would have saved themselves much anguish. Forrest had found that the encircling lines were not quite airtight, and he led his troopers out to safety, floundering waist-deep through an icy backwater in the silent night; and Buckner and his troops — something like fifteen thousand of them, with all their guns and equipment — laid down their arms and surrendered when morning came. The North had won the first great victory of the war.¹²

Grant’s message was sent all across the North, and people made him a hero overnight; there was something about the hard ring of “unconditional surrender” that aroused vast enthusiasm, and it tickled people that the words fitted Grant’s initials.

But it was old Smith who had really stated the terms. As he said, all Grant had done was put them in smoother words.

4. To the Deep South

Fort Donelson was a crusher, and the Confederate high command instantly recognized it as such. The loss of Fort Henry had already cracked Johnston’s line, causing him to retreat from Bowling Green to Nashville, and to send Beauregard west to see what could be done with the great river fortress at Columbus. Now with Donelson gone, there was no good place to make a stand north of the southern Tennessee border.

On news of Buckner’s surrender, Johnston evacuated Nashville and started south, while Beauregard prepared for the evacuation of Columbus. As far as any plans had been made, Johnston aimed to concentrate his forces at Corinth, Mississippi. Beauregard believed that the Mississippi River could still be held, with strong points at Island No. Ten, New Madrid, and Fort Pillow, but except for this fringe all of western Tennessee was gone.¹

What gave the defeat the potentiality of outright disaster — aside from the fact that the Confederacy was losing a modest industrial nexus of fair importance — was that it exposed to the Federal invaders the most important railroad line in the southern nation, the Memphis and Charleston, which (after dipping down into northern Mississippi and Alabama) ran east through Chattanooga and Knoxville and gave the Mississippi Valley region a direct connection with Virginia and the Atlantic seaboard. Abraham Lincoln, whose strategic ideas were not nearly as defective as a good many of his generals assumed, had had this line on his mind from the start; it was one of the reasons he was so desperately anxious to get an army down into eastern Tennessee. The value which the Richmond government placed on the line was shown by its reaction to the news of the defeat; it instantly began to strip the southern seaboard of troops in order to give Johnston reinforcements.

Confederate Secretary of War Judah Benjamin wrote to Robert E. Lee, who was then busy perfecting coastal defenses in South Carolina and Georgia, to send troops to Tennessee at once, because the railroad line “must be defended at all hazards.” Braxton Bragg, commanding at Mobile, Alabama, was ordered to leave a garrison in the harbor forts and to take the rest of his troops up to Johnston. Benjamin’s predecessor in the War Department, L. P. Walker, now a brigadier in Alabama, wrote that it would be better to lose all the seacoast than this railroad, calling it “the vertebrae of the Confederacy.” The Confederate government was aware by now that the Federals would soon be mounting an assault on New Orleans via the Mississippi passes, but when Donelson fell the best troops in the Louisiana sector were rushed north, along with much military equipment.²

Naturally the northern authorities were jubilant. The chief engineer of the Army of the Potomac wrote to McClellan saying that the victory “knocks all present calculations in the head” and remarking that if McClellan’s army did not move pretty soon it might find that the western troops had won the war without its aid. “We can march anywhere, I take it,” he exulted.³

This touched McClellan where he was sore. President Lincoln, the Cabinet, and the Republican leadership generally had been getting more and more impatient with him because he was refusing to move, and Lincoln not long since had irritably remarked that if McClellan did not propose to use the army he himself would like to borrow it for a time. Now McClellan was beginning to take fire. To Buell he telegraphed that “if the force in the west can take Nashville, or even hold its own for the present, I hope to have Richmond and Norfolk in from three to four weeks.” In a wire to Halleck he was equally optimistic: “In less than two weeks I shall move the Army of the Potomac, and hope to be in Richmond soon after you are in Nashville.”⁴

Halleck himself seemed to be slightly unhinged. He reported that the Rebels were reinforcing Columbus (which they were in fact preparing to evacuate) and he warned that they were apt to attack him any day in great strength. To Buell he appealed: “I am terribly hard pushed. Help me and I will help you.” He told McClellan that Beauregard was about to come upstream and attack Cairo, called for more troops, and complained: “It is the crisis of the war in the west.” He wanted reinforcements, he wanted Grant and Buell made major generals (along with Smith, who he said was the real author of victory at Fort Donelson, and John Pope, who was mounting an assault on the Confederate river defenses), and most of all he wanted advancement for himself. He appealed to McClellan to make him top commander in the West: “I ask this in return for Forts Henry and Donelson.” Only by promoting him, he asserted, could the Federals cash in on the situation: “I must have command of the armies in the west. Hesitation and delay are losing us the golden opportunity.” Assistant Secretary of War Thomas A. Scott was in Louisville at the time, and Halleck begged him to make Buell co-operate with him, adding plaintively: “I am tired of waiting for action in Washington. They will not understand the case. It is as plain as daylight to me.” Then he went over everybody’s head and sent a wire direct to Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, saying that he had “a golden opportunity” to strike a fatal blow but that “I can’t do it unless I can control Buell’s army.… Give me authority and I will be responsible for results.”⁵

Washington’s reaction was lukewarm. Even at that distance McClellan could see that Beauregard was not in the least likely to launch an assault on Cairo, and he said so, adding that neither Halleck nor Buell was giving him a clear picture of what was going on. (Buell was telling him that Johnston was concentrating at Nashville, which he was actually abandoning, and was warning that a great battle would be fought there, for which he would need reinforcements.) Halleck was told that neither the President nor the Secretary of War saw any need for changing the western command arrangements at present and was warned that he and Buell were expected “to co-operate fully and zealously with each other.” For the time being the only promotion that came through was a major general’s commission for U. S. Grant. Now Grant would outrank Buell if their forces ever came together.⁶

Grant, meanwhile, wanted to keep moving. He was no man for fuss and feathers; when a romantic staff officer, his mind full of the pageantry of formal warfare, asked him on the morning of Donelson’s surrender what arrangements were being made to parade the captured Rebels for regular surrender ceremonies, Grant said that there would be no ceremonies: “We have the fort, the men and the guns,” and that was enough. To make a show of it would only mortify the beaten Confederates, “who after all are our own countrymen.”

Grant wanted to push on up the Cumberland toward Nashville. The first objective was the town of Clarksville, twenty-five miles upriver from Donelson, where the railroad line from western Tennessee crossed the Cumberland on its way to Bowling Green. Learning that the Rebels were leaving the place, Grant sent C. F. Smith up to hold it, notified Halleck that he was doing so, and offered to push on and take Nashville if anybody wanted it.⁷

Taking Clarksville smoothed the path of invasion. The roads were in bad shape, but Buell could move by rail to Clarksville and could go from there to Nashville by boat, and at last he got under way. Unable to get any clear directive from Halleck, Grant went on ahead, hoping to meet Buell at Nashville and find out what the plans were; and soon after Buell’s advance brigade entered the place — led by the Ormsby Mitchel who had seen poetry and romance in a moonlit reveille in a Kentucky camp — Grant was there, too, trying to work out some scheme for co-operation.

Nashville was a prize. Johnston had left in a hurry, abandoning huge quantities of supplies — half a million pounds of bacon, much bread and flour, and bales of new tents, the latter greatly welcomed by the Federals, who had left their own tents far behind them. The Federals were having their first experience in occupying a Confederate capital, and they found numerous timid citizens who were ready to turn their coats and cuddle up to the invaders: dignified gentlemen who called on generals to explain that they personally had always been Union men, to identify leading Rebels in the community, to tell where Confederate supplies had been hidden, and in general to make themselves useful. Mitchel felt that the town looked desolate and deserted, said the Rebels were disheartened and confused, and complained bitterly that Buell had no idea what to do next.⁸

By February 25 Nashville was under control, and Buell’s advance guard began cautiously to push southward to see where the Confederates might Lave gone. Smith was at Clarksville, and Grant’s army — a solid outfit of four full divisions now, thirty thousand men, twice as big as the one he had led east from Fort Henry — was concentrated in the Clarksville-Donelson area waiting for orders. And Grant was beginning to discover that he was in serious trouble.

The tip-off came first from a staff officer friendly to Grant, Lieutenant Colonel James B. McPherson of the engineers, who came up to Donelson and remarked that all sorts of wild rumors were floating around in St. Louis: Grant was alleged to be drinking hard, and his troops were said to be wholly out of control. Halleck was reacting to these rumors like a regular gossip, passing them on to McClellan in a way designed to make Grant look like an alcoholic incompetent. He was complaining that he could get no word of any kind from Grant, that Grant had left his command without authority to go off on a fruitless trip to Nashville, and that his army “seems to be as much demoralized by the victory of Fort Donelson as was that of the Potomac by the defeat at Bull Run.” With overtaxed virtue Halleck concluded: “I am worn out and tired with this neglect and inefficiency.” He added that Smith was about the only officer who was equal to the emergency.

Halleck followed that, next day, with an even more damaging thrust. He told McClellan that he was informed that “General Grant had resumed his former bad habits,” which presumably would account for “his neglect of my oft-repeated orders.” McClellan of course knew perfectly well what “his former bad habits” meant, and he naturally told Halleck that if he felt it necessary he should not hesitate to put Grant under arrest and give the command to Smith: “Generals must observe discipline as well as private soldiers.” Next day Halleck sent Grant a stiff wire: “You will place Gen. C. F. Smith in command of expedition and remain yourself at Fort Henry. Why do you not obey my orders to report strength and positions of your command?”⁹

So Grant was in heavy trouble, hardly a fortnight after he had taken Fort Donelson. Part of the trouble, apparently, came because Halleck all along had distrusted him; it appears that even before the Henry-Donelson expedition Halleck had planned to find a new commander, and had not acted simply because he had not found the right man. It is also possible to suspect that Grant was getting a little too much fame and glory for Halleck’s taste, and Halleck’s own attempt to wangle top command in the West had failed. In any case, it was trouble and Halleck was doing about as much as he conveniently could to get Grant clear out of the war.

But the trouble looked worse than it was. Lincoln would always react in favor of a fighting general. The “unconditional surrender” motif was something none of his other generals had yet shown him, and he was not disposed to let Grant be crushed without formal charges and a regular hearing. So on March 10 Halleck got an admonitory note from Lorenzo Thomas, the prim paper-shuffling adjutant general of the army.

By direction of the President, said Thomas, the Secretary of War ordered that Halleck make all of these vague accusations good. There would have to be some specifications: Did Grant leave his command without authority; if so when and why? Had he definitely failed to make proper reports? If he had done anything “not in accordance with military subordination or propriety,” exactly what was it, with dates and details?¹⁰

In other words, Halleck was being told from the very top to put up or shut up. If he had something on Grant, now was the time to spell it out; if it could not be spelled out, forget it and get on with the war.

Simultaneously Grant sent Halleck a formal letter asking to be relieved of his command.

Then it all blew over. Halleck could not formulate charges against Grant because there was nothing to formulate. He got out of it, finally, by sending Thomas a letter explaining that if Grant had gone to Nashville he had really done it from the best of intentions and for the good of the service; that any irregularities in his command had taken place in Grant’s absence and in violation of his orders and were doubtless, under the circumstances, regrettable but unavoidable; that Grant had explained everything satisfactorily; that the interruption of telegraphic connections between Grant and St. Louis accounted for the failure to make reports, and that all in all the whole thing had best be forgotten. (Nothing more was said about the resumption of bad habits; a rumor which, incidentally, was completely untrue.) To Grant, Halleck sent a message saying that he could not be relieved from his command, that all anybody asked of him was that he “enforce discipline and punish the disorderly” and that everything now was fine: “Instead of relieving you, I wish you as soon as your new army is in the field to assume the immediate command and lead it on to new victories.”¹¹

If Smith felt any soreness over the role he had been called on to play, he never showed it. He continued to do his job as a soldier, cursing the volunteers in a way they did not mind and teaching them how soldiers should behave, and his junior officers stood in the utmost awe of him. Two of them, one evening, found in somebody’s back yard a flourishing bed of mint, which they plucked and took to their quarters, combining the mint with commissary whiskey and what not to make mint juleps; having done which, it occurred to them that Old Smith would probably appreciate a drink. Filling a tall glass, they set out for the general’s tent.

It was dark, and the tent flaps were drawn. Through them came a gleam of light; Old Smith was in his cot, propped up on pillows, reading by the light of a bedside candle. The two officers stood in front of the tent, trying to muster nerve to intrude on the august presence. Finally one grew bold enough to rap on the tent pole. From within came a hoarse profane question: Who was it, and why was he bothering?

The officer who was holding the glass quaked, not daring to go inside. He managed at last to part the tent flaps a few inches and thrust his arm inside, the frosted julep glass in his fist. There was a dead silence, while the old soldier stared at this apparition. Finally the beautiful truth dawned on him, and the two officers heard a gruff harrumphing and an amazed “By God, this is kind!” The general’s hand came out and the glass was taken, and there was a sniffing and a tasting and a muttered “Kind indeed!” Then the general drained it, the empty glass came back, and the two officers crept away. To the end of his days Smith never knew where the drink came from.¹²

Neither Old Smith nor anybody else stayed put very long at Clarksville. They were going on up the river, into the beginning of the Deep South; and it seemed for a time that spring as if the whole war had come loose from its hinges and perhaps a quick ending to it lay not far ahead.

The victory at Fort Donelson stirred people. So far the people of the North had had Bull Run defeats, and losing battles at Wilson’s Creek, and reasonless Ball’s Bluff tragedies, and cautious McClellan had gone on with drilling and preparation as if a long war lay ahead. Here, suddenly, was a reversal. Fifteen thousand armed Confederates had been swallowed at a gulp, the war had been pushed from mid-Kentucky all the way back below Tennessee, and in Grant’s curt “unconditional surrender” note there had been a sure, confident note that Northerners had not yet heard. Off in Missouri the 15th Illinois, which had detested Grant ever since he ordered its colonel about the summer before, began to admit that perhaps this Grant was not so bad after all. It was ordered down to join his army now, and when it got to Fort Henry and found itself boarding vessels in a fleet of fifty transports and sailing up the Tennessee with colors flying and bands playing, it agreed that the war was fine, exciting, and grand. All through the western theater, regiments that had been doing the drudgery of training-camp or border-patrol duty found themselves hoping to be sent to Grant’s army. Victory lay up the river somewhere and everybody wanted to be in on it.¹³

Up the river, or down another river; for the Mississippi moved south not too far west from the valley of the Tennessee, and Union strength was being felt there too. Blustering John Pope, for whom Halleck had vainly sought promotion, who despised volunteer troops and seemed to long for the old-army days of obedient regulars, was taking the Confederate post at New Madrid, Missouri, and with the aid of Foote’s ironclads was putting in motion the offensive that would soon take Island No. Ten and open the river all the way to Memphis. In the southwest a cautious sobersides of a professional soldier named Samuel Curtis was taking an army down to the farthest corner of Missouri, crossing into Arkansas, and routing a Confederate force at Pea Ridge, following Pathfinder Frémont’s old trail and giving the Confederates such a setback that Halleck exultantly (and prematurely, as it turned out) was notifying Washington that the rebellion in Missouri had finally been crushed — “no more insurrections and bridge-burnings and hoisting of Rebel flags.”¹⁴

From the Atlantic seaboard the news was equally good. Army and navy together were exploiting the break-through into the North Carolina sounds, hammering Confederate forts into submission, seizing New Bern and Roanoke Island and opening the way for sea-borne invasion. Farther south the navy had broken its way into Port Royal, South Carolina, getting possession of a deep-water base for its whole southern blockading fleet and raising an obvious threat to Charleston. Another amphibious expedition was hitting the Georgia coast and would soon control the sea approaches to Savannah; and in the Gulf, a fleet under a sprightly old salt named David Glasgow Farragut was inside the passes at the mouth of the Mississippi, heading for New Orleans.

There was a feeling of triumph in the air, and no one felt it more than stolid, unemotional Grant himself. Back in command with the blots off his record, Grant was going up the Tennessee, his own headquarters at the town of Savannah, Tennessee, a strong advance-guard posted at Pittsburg Landing, ten miles upstream. He was being reinforced, he would shortly have from forty to forty-five thousand men in his command, and Buell was under orders to march overland to the Tennessee and join him with perhaps thirty thousand more. The objective seemed to be a railroad-junction town, Corinth, Mississippi, twenty miles below Pittsburg Landing, a place where the north-and-south Mobile and Ohio Railroad crossed the all-important Memphis and Charleston. Johnston and Beauregard were pulling their forces together there, and it was clear that the next thing to do was to go down to Corinth and smash them.

Grant believed it would be simple. He was getting, as a matter of fact, a slight case of overconfidence. Donelson had been a hard fight, but it should have been harder, and Grant was beginning to suspect that perhaps the southern heart was not in this war — a gross misconception, as he would find out before he was much older. To Halleck, on March 21, Grant wrote: “The temper of the Rebel troops is such that there is but little doubt but that Corinth will fall much more that the great mass of the rank and file are heartily tired.”¹⁵

Writing to his wife, Grant was even more optimistic. He asserted that “ ‘Sesesch’ is now about on its last legs in Tennessee,” and said that he wanted to push on as rapidly as possible to save hard fighting. There would, he felt, be some more fighting, but not too much more: “A big fight may be looked for someplace before a great while which it appears to me will be the last in the west.” He added: “This is all the time supposing that we will be successful which I never doubt for a single moment.”¹⁶

He could not move just yet, however. Halleck was being cautious. He saw Corinth as the objective, but he would not attack it until Grant and Buell’s forces had joined, at which time he himself would come down and take active command. Grant was ordered not on any account to bring on a general engagement until all of this took place.

Halleck had finally won what he wanted most — top command in the West. Washington was reshuffling its command setup this spring. McClellan’s reluctance to move against Richmond (despite his statement to Buell that he expected to be there soon after the Federals were in Nashville) had worn the administration’s patience too thin; he was no longer top commander of all the country’s armies but was leader of the Army of the Potomac alone; and as it demoted him the administration gave Halleck control over Buell’s department as well as Halleck’s own. On paper it seemed a logical move, for Halleck’s forces were winning victories as winter ended.

Grant was getting one welcome addition to his command this March, although he did not yet know how welcome it would finally be. William Tecumseh Sherman, who had been funneling troops to him from Paducah, brought an untrained new division up the river and took his post at Pittsburg Landing — took post there just in time to exercise command, for Old Smith had skinned his leg jumping from a steamer to a rowboat, the insignificant hurt had become infected, and he was now hospitalized in Savannah in the fine old mansion that Grant had taken over for headquarters.

The Sherman who took over at Pittsburg Landing was a different sort of man from the nervous, jittery Sherman who had lost his poise and his command in Kentucky. Halleck had not known how to handle Grant — had done his best to drive him clear out of the army — but he had found the right touch with Sherman, and that effervescent soldier’s self-confidence had returned. In Kentucky he had fretted and worried over reports of Confederate activity, fearing that each thrust by a half-organized cavalry patrol betokened an immediate attack in force. Now, holding the advance and peering south from his tent pitched near gaunt Shiloh meeting house a few miles from the landing, Sherman was less than a score of miles away from the main Confederate army, but he was taking no alarm. Confederate skirmishers were infesting his front, but he was calmly reporting that they were simply trying to find out how many Yankees there were around Pittsburg Landing. He was scorning to entrench his command, and Grant was not telling him to entrench, either; there was no need for it — before long Buell’s army would arrive, and then Halleck would come, and they would sweep grandly down and whip the Rebels at Corinth.

Spring was coming on, southern winter was balmy, and a soldier in the newly arrived 11th Iowa doubtless spoke for all of his fellows when he wrote in his diary: “It is warm and dry — it is delightful. There is nothing of importance going on.”¹⁷