by Ron Chernow
Eager for a certifiable victory, Lincoln followed events at Fort Donelson with mounting apprehension. “Our success or failure at Donelson is vastly important; and I beg you to put your soul in the effort,” he urged Halleck.27 Without fanfare or prompting from Lincoln, Grant was taking the decisive measures the president wanted, while George McClellan procrastinated with his large, well-accoutred army in the East.
On the night of February 15, with things looking bleak, Confederate commanders sorted through their shrinking options. While Floyd and Pillow, the ranking officers, vowed never to surrender, the Union army now blocked any escape route to Nashville. Buckner, the third-ranking officer, thought it the height of folly to try to smash through Union lines and predicted that three-quarters of their men would perish in such a suicidal mission and that no general “had the right to make such a sacrifice of human life.”28 Because Floyd feared being captured and tried for treason, he and Pillow decided to flee that night and enacted a curious transfer of power. “I turn the command over, sir,” Floyd told Pillow. “I pass it,” Pillow told Buckner. “I assume it,” Buckner said.29 Contrary to chivalric traditions beloved by the South, Floyd and Pillow were selfishly abandoning their men, while Buckner, instilled with a deep sense of soldierly honor, refused to desert them. Floyd and Pillow fled by water to Nashville while Nathan Bedford Forrest and his cavalry slipped out by an unguarded stream. It therefore fell to Buckner to surrender and he showed exceptional courage in doing so, knowing he would be reviled throughout the South for surrendering an entire Confederate army for the first time.
In the early hours of February 16, under a flag of truce, a Confederate emissary delivered Buckner’s letter to General Smith, who took it to the farmhouse where Grant lay on a mattress on the floor. Smith handed him the letter, saying, “There’s something for you to read General.” Buckner requested a formal armistice with commissioners appointed to negotiate terms of surrender. “What answer shall I send to this, General?” Grant inquired of Smith, who answered categorically: “No terms to the damned Rebels!”30 With that, Grant sat down at the kitchen table and composed a classic statement in American military history. In lapidary prose, he wrote: “Sir; Yours of this date proposing Armistice, and appointment of commissioners, to settle terms of capitulation is just received. No terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted. I propose to move immediately upon your works.”31 When finished, Rawlins said, Grant raised his eyes to his old West Point instructor, gave him the letter, and said drily, “General, I guess this will do.” Smith agreed. “It could not be better.”32
Buckner was taken aback by Grant’s harsh terms, which struck him as ungentlemanly, and he reluctantly replied that “the overwhelming force under your command, compel me . . . to accept the ungenerous and unchivalrous terms which you propose.”33 A modern general, Grant retired outmoded forms of chivalry, showing that gentility had given way to a stark new brand of modern warfare. He did not soften his words in deference to past friendship with Buckner and delivered a powerful military message instead. In conventional warfare, Buckner would have been entitled to the preliminary armistice and negotiation of surrender he requested, but Grant believed the South had conducted an illegal rebellion and wasn’t entitled to enjoy the niceties of military etiquette.
Shortly after dawn, Grant rode across a snowy landscape, past rebel lines that sprouted white flags, to meet Buckner at the Dover Hotel. This low frame building, with an unpainted double row of porches, lay right by the Cumberland River, where it provided a stopping place for travelers. The meeting between Grant and Buckner surely had a fairy-tale quality. The last time Buckner, with his broad swarthy face and handlebar mustache, had seen Grant in 1854 the latter was sad and broke after departing in disgrace from the army. Now Grant was the victorious Union general at the zenith of his career to date. Despite their stiff exchange of messages, Grant and Buckner turned warmly companionable in person, as befit old friends.
After their greetings, Grant asked why Pillow had fled. “Well, he thought you would rather have hold of him than any other man in the Southern Confederacy.” “Oh no,” Grant smirked. “If I had got him I’d let him go again; he will do us more good commanding you fellows.”34 Grant and Buckner, both veterans who remembered Pillow from Mexico, shared a good laugh at this caustic remark. Grant liked to tell stories of how Pillow once dug a ditch on the wrong side of his breastworks or described himself as “cut down by grape shot” when a bullet grazed his foot.35 During this friendly banter, Buckner said that if he had been in command, Grant would not have approached Fort Donelson so readily. “I told him that if he had been in command I should not have tried in the way I did,” Grant recalled.36 In his personal dealings with Buckner, Grant showed the gratitude missing from their official communications. “After I became his prisoner Grant tendered me the use of his purse,” recalled Buckner. “I did not accept it, of course, but it showed his generosity and his appreciation of my aid to him years before, which was really very little.”37
Grant had captured an army of at least thirteen thousand men, a record on the North American continent. He showed mercy toward the conquered force, giving them food and letting them keep their sidearms. Avoiding any show of celebration, he refused to shame defeated soldiers and vetoed any ceremony in which they marched out of Fort Donelson and stacked their arms. “Why should we go through with vain forms and mortify and injure the spirit of brave men, who, after all, are our own countrymen,” he asked.38 In treating the sick and wounded, he made no distinction between federal and Confederate troops and prevented the indignity of having souvenir hunters scavenge trophies from the battlefield.
In the wake of Fort Donelson, Grant’s behavior toward fugitive slaves signaled a shift. Aligned with new national policy, he rebuffed attempts by masters to seek runaway slaves in his camps, although he still prohibited slaves from finding sanctuary with his army. On the other hand, he refused to return two hundred slaves captured at Fort Donelson who had worked on Confederate fortifications and enlisted them instead as “contraband” of war to cook, handle horses, and perform other jobs. “We want laborers, let the negroes work for us,” he announced to Buckner.39 This momentous first step looked forward to the recruitment of former slaves as full-fledged Union soldiers.
Grant comprehended the historic nature of his victory. With Julia, he struck a jubilant tone. “Dear Wife I am most happy to write you from this very strongly fortified place, now in my possession, after the greatest victory of the season. Some 12 or 15 thousand prisoners have fallen into our possession to say nothing of 5 to 7 thousand that escaped in the darkness of the night last night. This is the largest capture I believe ever made on the continent.”40 To Congressman Washburne, he portrayed Fort Donelson as “a battle that would figure well with many of those fought in Europe where large standing armies are maintained.”41
Without major victories elsewhere that winter, the North’s attention became fixated on the splendid triumph at Fort Donelson, curbing a defeatist psychology that had begun to take hold. Sherman said that in America’s “hour of its peril,” Grant had “marched triumphant into Fort Donelson. After that none of us felt the least doubt as to the future of our country.”42 Governor Yates described the pandemonium that broke out in Illinois as thousands gathered “on the roads and at the stations, with shouting and with flags.”43 Church bells chimed, grown men embraced, people burst into patriotic songs. The celebration in Chicago lasted a full day. As the Chicago Tribune reported, “Chicago reeled mad with joy . . . Such events happen but once in a lifetime, and we who passed through the scenes of yesterday lived a generation in a day.”44
This first major Union victory bestowed instant fame on Grant, who became the war’s first certified hero. Rocketed to stardom—The New York Times affirmed that Grant’s “prestige is second now to that of no general in our army”—he leapt to the front pages of newspapers across America.45 In homage to his message t
o Buckner, Grant was endearingly dubbed “Unconditional Surrender Grant,” a nickname that tallied nicely with his initials. With the public famished for details about him, one reporter obliged by saying that Grant’s face had three characteristic expressions: “deep thought, extreme determination, and great simplicity and calmness.”46 He was such a fresh celebrity that when the New-York Illustrated News ran a photo of him, it mistakenly showed a beef contractor from Illinois named William Grant. The U. S. Grant legend began taking shape as papers identified him as someone who personified the American heartland, a folksy character partial to homespun speech. “I was so brought up,” Grant explained, “and if I try fine phrases I shall only appear silly.”47 He was a superior version of the ordinary American and the public loved it. As a general, he epitomized the fighting soldier, bashful and self-effacing, who went about his grim business without any self-aggrandizement.
Amid this Grant mania, many newspaper readers noted that in reports of the final day’s fighting at Fort Donelson, Grant was holding a cigar—the one he received from Foote. Until that point, Grant had been primarily a pipe smoker. Now admirers flooded him with “boxes of the choicest brands” of cigars “from everywhere in the North. As many as ten thousand were soon received.”48 Before long, Grant smoked eighteen to twenty cigars a day and they became an inescapable part of his persona. While many people characterized him as even-tempered, the compulsive smoking bespoke a deeper tension bottled up inside him. “Smoking seemed to be a necessity to General Grant’s organism,” said Ely Parker, who “noticed that he smoked the hardest when in deep thought, or engaged in writing an important document.”49 The gift of so many cigars bred an ultimately fatal addiction.
One person unimpressed by Grant’s victory was his father-in-law. Not long after the Confederate capitulation, Dr. William Taussig was out driving with Grant’s friend John Fenton Long when they ran into Colonel Dent at a crossroads. Long made the mistake of alluding to the famous victory at Fort Donelson, and Colonel Dent erupted in anger. “Don’t talk to me about this Federal son-in-law of mine. There shall always be a plate on my table for Julia, but none for him.”50
Within a week of Fort Donelson’s downfall, Grant heard from his young favorite, Colonel James B. McPherson, who was in St. Louis and described Halleck’s joyous reaction to the news. “Genl. Halleck is exceedingly gratified and says you could not have done better—Immediately on the receipt of the news he telegraphed to the President to nominate you for a Major General.” Then referring to drinking allegations against Grant, McPherson added, “You will not be troubled any more by Kountz.”51 In the wake of Fort Donelson, rumors about Grant’s drinking subsided, and his friend J. Russell Jones wrote sarcastically to Washburne, “Grant made a pretty fair fight for a Drunken man.”52 Sherman saw Fort Donelson as proof that Grant had mended his ways from prewar army days, telling his brother that “Grant’s victory was most extraordinary and brilliant—he was a plain unostentatious man, and a few years ago was of bad habits, but he certainly has done a brilliant act.”53
Stanton rushed over to Lincoln bearing Grant’s nomination as Major General of Volunteers, catapulting him ahead of every western general except Halleck. The president signed the order at once and commended the western spirit of Grant’s army, pointing out that “if the Southerners think that man for man they are better than our Illinois men, or western men generally, they will discover themselves in a grievous mistake.”54 The comment previewed the special affinity between Grant and Lincoln as the war progressed. Those in the know in Washington were amused by efforts by McClellan partisans to present him as the mastermind of Fort Donelson. Stanton observed tartly that the image of a heroic McClellan, ensconced at the telegraph office in the capital, “organizing victory, and by sublime military combinations capturing Fort Donelson six hours after Grant and Smith had taken it,” made for “a picture worthy of Punch.”55
After being promoted to major general, Grant thought back on all the doubts about his military ability conveyed to him by his busybody father and clearly felt vindicated by his performance. “Is father afraid yet that I will not be able to sustain myself?” he asked Julia sardonically, saying Jesse had “expressed apprehensions on that point when I was made a Brigadier.”56 Grant had now proved himself beyond a shadow of a doubt and would never again have to truckle to his father or father-in-law.
—
BY SEVERING THE EXTENDED DEFENSIVE LINE that Albert Sidney Johnston had constructed from Bowling Green to the Mississippi River, Grant’s conquests at Forts Henry and Donelson carved open huge chunks of Confederate territory, enabling the North to command Kentucky, western and central Tennessee, and portions of the Mississippi Valley, while driving a wedge into Alabama and the Deep South. “‘Secesh’ is now about on its last legs in Tennessee,” Grant informed Julia.57 In an analysis published in Vienna, Karl Marx predicted accurately that the loss of so much territory in Kentucky and Tennessee would threaten the Confederacy’s integrity.58 The South now had to abandon its key fortress on the Mississippi at Columbus. As a result of his defeats at the twin forts, Johnston was knocked off his high pedestal in the South and subjected to scathing denunciations. Nonetheless, Jefferson Davis remained loyal to him in the teeth of a clamor to cashier him.
Grant’s military philosophy called for following up on victories before the enemy had time to recuperate. He blamed Halleck’s inertia and internal squabbling in the Union army for squandering a major opportunity to exploit the Fort Donelson victory. Had he been able to join his forty-five thousand men with thirty-five thousand under Don Carlos Buell, the united force could have damaged the Confederate army. As Grant later wrote, “If one general who would have taken the responsibility had been in command of all the troops west of the Alleghenies, he could have marched to Chattanooga, Corinth, Memphis and Vicksburg with the troops we then had . . . Providence ruled differently. Time was given the enemy to collect armies and fortify his new positions.”59
Commanding the new District of West Tennessee and still basking in Fort Donelson’s afterglow, Grant headed east along the Cumberland River to take the town of Clarksville, the first time the Union army had regained seceded territory in the larger Department of the Missouri. Union soldiers were cheered by the black populace, while whites largely deserted the town. As Grant’s ascendant star brought new personal scrutiny, the drinking issue inevitably resurfaced. In the Virginia theater of war, Stephen M. Weld heard from his commander, General Fitz-John Porter, that Grant was “a man of great energy and a laborious worker, but the general says that he cannot be depended upon. He is just as likely to be drunk in the gutter as to be sober.”60 Such scurrilous rumors circulated freely in western Tennessee as well. As Grant’s army approached Clarksville, rumors cropped up that a drunken Grant could not contain his rowdy troops, and a local committee of safety, anticipating his arrival, poured large quantities of whiskey on the ground.61
With his army controlling the Cumberland, Grant thought taking the next stop, Nashville, “would be an easy conquest,” and Halleck backed his plan enthusiastically.62 Even in Clarksville, Grant heard reports that the statehouse in Nashville had been abandoned, its legislators hurrying off to Memphis. After Fort Donelson’s downfall, Nashville residents were affected by southern propaganda that portrayed the Yankee soldiers as vulgar brutes; now these same vandals were marching straight to their defenseless town. Even as General Buell approached Nashville from the north, Grant sent William “Bull” Nelson—a brash six-foot-five general weighing three hundred pounds—to beat him there, and Buell was bitter at being denied the glory of conquering the first Confederate capital. Federal authorities recognized Andrew Johnson as the new military governor of Tennessee.
On February 27, Grant entered Nashville and held an uneasy meeting with the aggrieved Buell. Like Grant, Buell was a West Point graduate and highly decorated Mexican War veteran whose taste for combat had been tempered by years in the adjutant general’s departme
nt. Buell feared the Confederates would soon try to recapture Nashville. Grant thought they were fleeing the area as fast as they could, and he wanted to resume the offensive. He was soon proved right: Confederate troops beat a hasty retreat south to the important railroad center at Corinth in northern Mississippi. Once again, Grant rightly anticipated enemy intentions, reading fear and flight where the bullheaded Buell descried aggression. Nonetheless, in Buell Grant had made a powerful enemy who stood in the good graces of George McClellan.
While Grant suffered from a severe cold and headache that sapped his energy, the balding, jowly Halleck was working steadily to undermine him in brazen disregard of Grant’s new heroic stature. Fancying himself Fort Donelson’s hero, Halleck tried to capitalize on Grant’s victory by seeking power from Washington to command all western armies. He gave credit to Foote and Smith and attempted to deny it to Grant. He resented that, in the recent crop of new major generals, Grant would outrank both Buell and John Pope and be second in authority to him in the western theater. Halleck also faulted Grant for being a slipshod general who did not heed proper bureaucratic forms. Halleck had been reprimanded by McClellan for sending insufficient information about his forces and he passed on the blame to Grant. He ordered him to provide daily reports on the number and disposition of his forces and was outraged by a sudden, mysterious halt to these updates. Instead of waiting for Grant to explain this hiatus, Halleck devised a malevolent interpretation: willful neglect. Even as Grant hungered to advance against Confederate forces, Halleck summoned up an absurd fantasy of him complacently leaning back and coasting on his laurels. As he told McClellan:
