by Ron Chernow
Taking Fort Henry was a spectacular breakthrough. “Fort Henry is ours,” Halleck telegraphed to McClellan. “The flag of the Union is re-established on the soil of Tennessee. It will never be removed.”96 The North reacted ecstatically, the news feeding unreasonable hopes that the war might be wrapped up in short order. “A few more events such as the capture of Fort Henry,” the New York Tribune predicted, “and the war will be substantially at an end.”97 Fort Henry served as a tonic to Lincoln’s flagging spirits. As naval officer Henry Wise reported to Foote from Washington, “We all went wild over your success . . . Uncle Abe was joyful, and said everything of the navy boys and spoke of you—in his plain, sensible appreciation of merit and skill.”98 Spirits sagged correspondingly in Confederate circles. Albert Sidney Johnston was dismayed by the severe damage done to his defensive line, informing his Richmond superiors that Fort Donelson was “not long tenable.”99 After debating whether to withdraw altogether, Johnston made a fatal, halfhearted decision, sending only twelve thousand men to Fort Donelson to withstand Grant’s advance.
Once Grant made short work of Fort Henry, he was ready to do the same for nearby Fort Donelson. On February 10, he gathered officers aboard his steamer for a rare council of war. In general, Grant avoided such meetings, believing the fewer people privy to a secret, the better its safety, but this time he made an exception. “The question for consideration, gentlemen, is whether we shall march against Fort Donelson or wait for reinforcements,” Grant announced. “I should like to have your views.”100 As each officer spoke, Grant puffed meditatively on a meerschaum pipe while Rawlins stared hard, sizing up each speaker. For anybody who knew Grant’s nature, it was certain that he would opt for immediate action instead of tarrying to await reinforcements. If he allowed his fellow officers to air their views, in the end he consulted his own intuitions. True to form, Grant concluded by telling his officers to be ready to move at a moment’s notice, a position they unanimously endorsed.
In the flush of victory, Halleck still meditated what the Confederates might do to Grant, rather than what Grant might do to them. He chose to regard Grant as a rival and a threat rather than as a valued extension of his own power and secretly connived to replace Grant with another general. “Hold on to Fort Henry at all hazards,” he notified Grant. “Impress slaves of secessionists in vicinity to work on fortifications.”101 It was a perfect example of the timid, static thinking favored by a desk-bound general beset by fears. With perhaps a touch of sarcasm, Grant told Halleck that “there are no Negroes in this part of the Count[ry] to work on Fortifications.”102 Never one to look back, his self-confidence growing daily, Grant had little time for Halleck’s instinctive caution. His style as a commander—scrappy, mobile, opportunistic—was maturing. With his sights set on Fort Donelson, he wanted to maintain the winning tempo of his campaign, to “keep the ball moving as lively as possible,” as he phrased it.103 He had developed a bracing self-reliance as a commander and had learned, if necessary, to operate on his own. “General Halleck did not approve or disapprove of my going to Fort Donelson,” Grant later wrote. “He said nothing whatever to me on the subject.”104
CHAPTER NINE
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Dynamo
DESPITE HIS IMPLACABLE WILL, Grant stood under no illusions that Fort Donelson on the Cumberland River would succumb as easily as its sister fort on the Tennessee. The Cumberland commanded river traffic to nearby Nashville, a regional entrepôt for many agricultural and manufacturing goods, boosting dramatically the fort’s strategic value. “Fort Donelson is a very strong point naturally and an immense deal of labor has been added to strengthen it,” Grant told his brother Orvil.1 Unlike Fort Henry, Donelson stood on high, dry ground, towering more than a hundred feet above the river in spots. While the term “fort” conjures up a fortress, Fort Donelson consisted more of an extensive series of earthworks. It bristled with heavy guns staggered at different elevations and deeply planted in niches scooped from the bluff, enjoying unobstructed views of gunboats rounding a distant bend. It had miles of ramifying trenches and its seventeen thousand men were well equipped with arms and provisions. Finally, its rolling topography was punctuated by streams, gullies, and ravines that seemed to make it impregnable.
For days after Fort Henry’s fall, Grant was detained by a downpour that churned roads into mud, slowing the passage of wagons and artillery. He also awaited the arrival of the all-important gunboats, which had to travel a circuitous 150-mile water route while his infantry only needed to traverse 12 overland miles. Once again, Grant demanded firsthand knowledge of the terrain, scouting it himself. On February 7, he organized a cavalry reconnaissance group that approached within a mile of Fort Donelson’s defensive perimeter. He profited from prewar knowledge of Confederate commander Gideon J. Pillow and “judged that with any force, no matter how small, I could march up to within gunshot of any intrenchments he was given to hold . . . I knew that [John B.] Floyd was in command, but he was no soldier, and I judged that he would yield to Pillow’s pretensions.”2 On his personal survey, Grant discovered two roads by which his troops could approach the fort safely.
Amid his preparations, Grant wrote a revealing letter to his sister Mary that attests to his burgeoning confidence and dreamlike rise in the world: “You have no conception of the amount of labor I have to perform. An army of men all helpless looking to the commanding officer for every supply. Your plain brother however has, as yet, had no reason to feel himself unequal to the task and fully believes that he will carry on a successful campaign against our rebel enemy.”3
Once again Grant hatched battle plans of immaculate simplicity. His infantry would pin down the Confederates while Foote’s trusty gunboats strafed their cannon at close range. On February 11, Foote sent Grant the message he longed to hear: “I shall be ready to start tomorrow evening with two Boats.”4 The next day, boasting an army fifteen thousand strong, Grant set out for Fort Donelson in balmy, nearly summery, weather. “River, land, and sky fairly shimmered with warmth,” one Union general said.5 As skies cleared and ridge roads turned dry, Grant’s men marched east with unfettered good spirits, singing lustily. When the horse of surgeon John Brinton darted impetuously ahead of him, Grant joked aloud, “Doctor, I believe I command this army, and I think I’ll go first.”6 In unseasonably warm weather, some men stripped off their overcoats and chucked them by the wayside along with blankets.
To Halleck’s dismay, instead of strengthening Fort Henry as a base to which he could scramble back in safety, the audacious Grant had broken loose and wagered everything on conquering Fort Donelson. He again showed a glandular optimism that his boss could scarcely fathom. Reflecting his gathering confidence, he wired Halleck: “I hope to send you a despatch from Fort Donelson tomorrow.”7 The next day, as he besieged the fort and awaited gunboats, Grant sounded less jaunty than when he pounced on Fort Henry. A small shadow of doubt suddenly tempered his words. Writing to Julia on February 13, he reported that at least a dozen of his soldiers had been killed and 120 wounded that day in skirmishes. “We have a large force to contend against but I expect to accomplish their subjugation. Do not look for it for three days yet however.”8 Until more gunboats and troop transports came along, he was outnumbered by rebel soldiers inside the fort. That night, to his relief, Foote steamed into the Cumberland with four ironclads and two wooden gunboats while transports brought needed reinforcements. To bolster his forces, Grant summoned 2,500 men left behind at Fort Henry.
Those improvident soldiers who had cavalierly dumped coats and blankets by the roadside regretted their decisions on the night of February 13, 1862. The mercury plummeted to twelve degrees as the area was pelted by snow. Grant, nursing a cold, slept in a feather bed in a modest log farmhouse, but his soldiers, within range of enemy muskets and lacking sufficient tents, lay down in the cold with weapons tightly clutched at their sides. To worsen matters, Grant had to forbid campfires that might draw enemy fire. “At midnight I notic
ed some of the men who had blankets lying on the ground completely covered with snow and you would think they were dead if it was not for their breath like little puffs of steam,” said an Illinois officer.9 The men of the Twelfth Iowa, to avoid frostbite, ran around in endless circles.
On the afternoon of February 14, Flag Officer Foote, barking orders into a megaphone, came up the Cumberland with his entire gunboat fleet: four black ironclads surged ahead, trailed by two wooden ships. Grant took up position along the shore with a clear view of the naval attack as the Confederates girded for withering fire from the river. “Parson, for God sake pray!” Confederate cavalry commander Nathan Bedford Forrest beseeched a staff officer who was a minister in civilian life. “Nothing but God Almighty can save that fort.”10
Foote was far more sober about his prospects, knowing that the downward angle of fire from the high batteries at Fort Donelson could inflict massive damage on his ironclads. He compounded the problem by sailing too close to the fort, making the plunging fire still more destructive. With ear-piercing sounds, the garrison’s big guns crashed through the gunboat armor—“as lightning tears the bark from a tree,” said one captain—and raked smokestacks with deadly fire, demolishing pilothouses.11 In the meantime, Foote’s gunners widely overshot their marks. So many shells sprayed down on the Union fleet that every ironclad took at least forty hits, producing fifty-four Union casualties. Even Foote, inside the pilothouse of his flagship St. Louis, received solid shot in the ankle and thought he had never withstood such a punishing bombardment. As Grant watched, the badly battered fleet began to drift back down the river after ninety minutes of tempestuous conflict. Confederate soldiers sent up huge cheers while their leaders hastened to telegraph news of victory to Richmond.
At Fort Henry, gunboats had wrapped things up before the hapless soldiers even arrived. At Fort Donelson, the situation was reversed with the army now bearing the burden. As a rule, Grant did not like soldiers to build fortifications, which he thought sapped their fighting spirit, but he now contemplated a prolonged siege. “I retired this night not knowing but that I would have to intrench my position, and bring up tents for the men or build huts under the cover of the hills.”12 That night soldiers again suffered cruelly from a snowstorm that blanketed their camps, producing a bizarre incident: when rough winds flung icicles from tree branches, the Confederates mistook this for an attack and started firing madly.
That night, the three main Confederate generals huddled inside Fort Donelson. Grant had strong opinions about all three. John B. Floyd of Virginia was the war secretary under James Buchanan who had transferred arms from the North to southern arsenals to prepare the South for war—a notorious action Grant deemed treasonous. He thought Gideon J. Pillow proud and conceited. He still felt warmly toward his old West Point classmate Simon Bolivar Buckner, who had rescued him financially in Manhattan in 1854. Buckner was now third in command at the fort, though he was “much the most capable soldier.”13 Later explaining why he dared to confront a larger Confederate force at the fort, Grant said: “Of course there was a risk in attacking Donelson as I did, but I knew the men who commanded it. I knew some of them in Mexico. Knowledge of that kind goes far toward determining a movement like this.”14 The comment again speaks to Grant’s command of the psychology of battle.
Despite the wreckage of Union gunboats that afternoon, the three generals recognized their desperate plight. Foote still dominated the river, Grant hemmed in the fort on the land side, and they would be squeezed to death in a vise as the siege was perfected. Things would deteriorate as more Union troops descended, tightening the stranglehold. In a high-stakes decision, Pillow and Buckner agreed to hazard a surprise attack on the Union right the next morning, slashing a hole through it, then trying to make a run for safety in Nashville.
At about 2 a.m. on February 15, Foote, still incapacitated by his ankle injury, urgently requested a meeting with Grant aboard the savaged St. Louis. At dawn Grant rode to the river through a bleak landscape of frozen turf and advised his three commanders—McClernand, Smith, and Lew Wallace—to refrain from aggressive action in his absence. During his conference with Grant, Foote said he wanted to take all his wounded ships back to Cairo for repairs, but Grant prevailed upon him to take only two and keep the rest at Fort Donelson for a few more days. Around noon, Grant returned to shore and was immediately met by his aide William Hillyer, who looked “white with fear,” recalled Grant.15 Following their plan, the Confederates had furiously broken from the fort, pounded the Union right under McClernand, inflicted heavy losses, and provoked a full-blown Union retreat. Because the wind had blown in the wrong direction, Grant had missed the extraordinary racket of the conflict, which sounded “as if a million men were beating empty barrels with iron hammers,” in Lew Wallace’s image.16 Always better at plotting his own moves than at anticipating enemy reactions—he could sense weakness better than strength—Grant had been caught by surprise, but now assumed personal charge of the situation.
Biting on the stub of a cigar Foote had given him, Grant spurred his horse for seven miles over icy terrain and found McClernand and Wallace in a clearing. When Grant arrived, Wallace recollected, his face “already congested with cold, reddened perceptibly and his lower jaw set upon the other. Without a word, he looked at McClernand.”17 Grant found dazed, demoralized men milling about aimlessly. McClernand’s men had fought gallantly until their ammunition ran out, but had suffered from an absence of effective leadership. Taking a dig at Grant, McClernand snarled, “This army wants a head,” to which Grant shot back, “It seems so.”18 Grant worked off his upset by crumpling paper balls in his palm. Then he delivered a calm but forceful line that reflected his determination. “Gentlemen, the position on the right must be retaken.”19 Wallace admired how Grant conducted himself. “In battle, as in camp, he went about quietly, speaking in a conversational tone; yet he appeared to see everything that went on, and was always intent on business.”20
Grant devised an ingenious way to gauge enemy intentions. Since rebel soldiers had barreled out of Fort Donelson carrying haversacks, he inspected the gear of captured soldiers and saw that they carried three days’ cooked rations. Some officers interpreted this as proof that the Confederates meant to stand and fight. Grant begged to differ, deducing correctly that “they mean to cut their way out,” but “they have no idea of staying here to fight us.”21 Typically for Grant, he focused on enemy defects, not on his own. Unlike other Union generals who magnified rebel power to imaginary proportions, Grant’s knowledge of his foes demystified them. Perhaps from his own background of failure, he was always attuned to the mentality of defeat. “Some of our men are pretty badly demoralized,” he told a staff officer, “but the enemy must be more so, for he has attempted to force his way out but has fallen back; the one who attacks first now will be victorious, and the enemy will have to be in a hurry if he gets ahead of me.”22 Once again Grant showed a predilection for taking the offensive. Coordinating all facets of battle, he ordered his stricken gunboats to throw shells at the fort at long range, giving at least moral support to his men on the ground. He also rallied McClernand’s men. “Fill your cartridge-boxes, quick, and get into line; the enemy is trying to escape and he must not be permitted to do so.” In Grant’s memory, “This acted like a charm.”23
Grant read the enemy perfectly. He saw that Pillow had not only intended to break out and escape but failed to capitalize on the momentary confusion of McClernand’s division. This convinced Grant the other side was disoriented and vulnerable. After seeing the casualties his exhausted men suffered, Pillow concluded that a breakout to Nashville was too risky. Over Buckner’s anguished protest, he ordered his men to retreat to the fort’s defenses, throwing away the morning’s dearly won victory. Realizing this, Grant redoubled his efforts to counterattack. Assuming that Confederate strength on the Union right meant corresponding weakness on the Union left—an insight he exploited repeatedly in later battles—he o
rdered General Smith to attack the Confederates on that side, predicting he would encounter only “a very thin line to contend with.”24 During the afternoon, galloping across the battlefield, Grant recouped the positions yielded to Confederates that morning. Smith performed with special brilliance, overrunning a ridge that formed part of the enemy stockade.
For Grant it had been a day of bloody triumph. As usual, he didn’t whoop with delight over enemy losses. At dusk, riding back to headquarters through fields littered with frozen corpses, he came upon a wounded Union lieutenant sprawled next to a Confederate private. Grant dismounted, got a flask of brandy, and impartially gave a swig to each man. He immediately had Rawlins summon stretcher bearers, but was dismayed when they removed the Union officer and overlooked the Confederate private. “Take this Confederate, too,” he said. “Take them both together; the war is over between them.”25 Grant seemed sickened by the carnage. “Let’s get away from this dreadful place,” he told an officer. “I suppose this work is part of the devil that is left in us all.” As Grant watched a parade of bandaged warriors trudging by, one aide heard him softly recite verse from Robert Burns: “Man’s inhumanity to man / makes countless thousands mourn.”26 It was uncommon for Grant to quote poetry, especially upon the battlefield.
