Born to Battle

by Jack Hurst

  BRIGADIER GENERAL NATHAN BEDFORD FORREST

  Soon after Forrest’s unproductive canter to headquarters, Bragg issued him another slap. He took Forrest’s command and gave it—temporarily, he said—to Major General Joe Wheeler, a West Pointer of flawed judgment under whom Forrest had vowed never to serve again. Forrest took a rare and much-needed leave, which he had hardly begun when Bragg sent him orders to report to Wheeler. It was the last straw. Forrest rode to headquarters again, this time taking along an in-law. The relative said Forrest barged into Bragg’s tent, ignored a proffered handshake, and poked the index finger of his left hand into Bragg’s face. He began reciting a litany of the abuses that Bragg had subjected him to. Then his rising temper topped out with a threat he was manifestly able to fulfill.

  “If you ever again try to interfere with me—or cross my path,” he promised, “it will be at the peril of your life.”3

  As the steaming Confederate stalked from Bragg’s tent, Union major general Ulysses S. Grant lay in agony in Vicksburg, Mississippi.

  His horse, spooked by a train whistle after a troop review near New Orleans, had reared and fallen on him. He was almost certainly drunk. The accident knocked him unconscious, badly wrenched his right leg, and injured that whole side of his body. The leg was “swollen from the knee to the thigh,” he later wrote, adding that “swelling, almost to the point of bursting,” ballooned his torso to his armpit. The pain was agonizing. “I lay in the hotel something over a week without being able to turn myself in bed.”4

  It was bad timing. In July, in one of military history’s hardest-won campaigns, Grant had taken Vicksburg and split the Confederacy in two. But that was July. Union major general William Starke Rosecrans’s September defeat at Chickamauga, which threatened the entire Federal Army of the Cumberland with capture or annihilation, appeared to revive the South’s foundering fortunes. Outnumbered Federals at Chattanooga were besieged, starving, and about to abandon their recent conquest of East Tennessee and their invaluable capture of the Confederacy’s Virginia-to-Georgia railroad. Grant’s Washington superiors ordered him to rush 20,000 more men to Chattanooga to forestall calamity.

  He did so—and more. Putting the 20,000 on the march from Memphis, he wired the Chattanooga commander, Major General George H. Thomas, to hold on, no matter what. He himself would be there as soon as possible, he said, and he did not exaggerate. On crutches, he took a steamboat to Louisville, then a train to northern Alabama. There aides lifted him onto a horse for the trek’s final leg, a sixty-mile ordeal on rain-drowned roads. At Chattanooga, they took him from the saddle and helped him into headquarters. Without even changing his muddy pants, he demanded a detailed briefing and asked myriad questions. That the army was outnumbered and ringed by foes on higher ground did not faze him. He wanted to attack.

  For two days he plotted nonstop, then okayed an already-planned night strike. The plan sent men and pontoons floating down the Tennessee River to surprise Confederate guards. His Federals bridged the river, opened the supply line into Chattanooga, and allowed Union reinforcements from northern Alabama to flood in. Three weeks later, the troops he had ordered from Memphis began arriving. And he launched his attack.5

  MAJOR GENERAL ULYSSES S. GRANT

  The Federals took the tops of the mountains in two assaults on separate days. Grant and his officers tried to direct them from below. When the outcomes were known, only riflemen could take bows. On November 24 three divisions under Major General Joe Hooker captured Lookout Mountain in the murk of a heavy fog. The following day, in full view, the 19,000 troops of General George Thomas, the stolid “Rock of Chickamauga,” had hit the Confederate center and overwhelmed its first line of rifle pits. Their assignment had been to take and hold that position while other forces hit and turned the Confederate flanks. But once there, under murderous fire, they disobeyed Grant’s orders and swarmed on up Missionary Ridge. The mass insubordination could have been fatal; if their charge had failed, a Confederate counterattack pursuing their fallback down the mountain might have knocked out the Union center. It could have crushed the whole Federal army. But Thomas’s men made sure that could not happen. They went over the two upper trench lines on the heels of the fleeing defenders. It was a rout.6

  Abraham Lincoln was grateful. He sent a message thanking and praising Grant and his army for “the courage and perseverance with which you, and they,” had plunged the Federal sword into Dixie’s bowels. Soon afterward, Lincoln would promote Grant to lieutenant general, the nation’s first permanent holder of that rank since George Washington. And he would order him east to face Robert E. Lee.7

  The twin events—Grant’s defeat of the Confederates at Chattanooga and Forrest’s post-Chickamauga tongue-lashing of his commander—were pivotal. Grant’s triumph, following his isolation of trans-Mississippi Dixie with the victory at Vicksburg, set the stage for General William T. Sherman’s fiery slicing of the eastern South into two more halves. And Forrest’s berating of Bragg marked the final alienation of the South’s most feared western warrior from its aristocratic councils—and any chance of Forrest’s contributing his mental powers to its strategic plans. Such a chance, in truth, had never existed.

  Contrasting Grant and Forrest, two opposing giants of the western theater, brings a rich new perspective to the study of the Civil War. The two events at Chattanooga in late 1863—one public, the other private—portended the fates of secession and slavery, and the two men’s separate progressions toward this dual climax shed new light on how and why the war was won and lost. Yet the tandem significance of the two events has gone unnoted—possibly because it is best understood by those who find it the least comfortable: admirers of the Old South. Forrest’s treatment by his superiors suggests that a chief cause of the Confederacy’s death was insistence on blue-blood leadership. Other nonaristocratic notables who might have played more major roles include John Brown Gordon, who finally rose to command a wing of Lee’s Appomattox remnant, and Patrick R. Cleburne, a native Irishman who was likely the best unit commander of infantry west of the Appalachians. We can never know the number of others buried in obscurity, but Forrest’s potential for higher command appears the most gravely wasted.

  Grant and Forrest, opposites on the surface, were alike underneath. They also were night-and-day different from their commanders and peers. Each hailed from closer to his society’s bottom than its top. Their lives had been steeped in the kind of daily desperation that is war’s essence. Both had fought weather and fate in the fickle fields of agriculture. Each had struggled with his hands against long odds to feed and protect his family. Hard lives had forced them to capitalize to the fullest on scant resources and watch out for the main chance. Their resultant common credential for military generalship was humble, widely disdained, yet pivotal in the end. Call it calluses.

  Besides Forrest, just twenty-four other Confederates would become full general or lieutenant general in this conflict. Only two would be, like Forrest, non–West Pointers, and these two were as unlike Forrest as possible. One, Richard Taylor, was the son of a president, Zachary Taylor. The other, Wade Hampton (to be precise, Wade Hampton III), was similarly a son of privilege, reputedly the largest landowner in the South. The third was Forrest, the onetime tiller of a leased hill farm.

  At the top of the Federal army, Grant was in the company of men of the same pride, power, and wealth. His superior, Henry Halleck, was a lion of the West Point intelligentsia as well as a rich corporate attorney, and his peers included a grandson of a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a relative of Mary Todd Lincoln. His immediate subordinates included a longtime associate of President Lincoln, former congressmen, and the son of a governor. Grant’s father had been a tanner.

  Grant had a West Point education, but this only differentiated him from Forrest superficially. Both came from the same social level and were looked down on for it. Grant’s drinking, for which he was widely scorned by other Union officers, was the subject of derision larg
ely because of his background and resultant lack of polish. By contrast, “Fighting Joe” Hooker was known widely to drink—and apparently on battlefields, which Grant never did—yet alcohol was rarely, if ever, mentioned as one of his flaws. Like Grant, Hooker left the army in the mid-1850s and was late being invited back into it, but when he did return, it was as a brigadier general. Grant barely made it back in as a replacement colonel. And both men reentered an army in which whisky—especially among officers, who could best afford it—was a staple.

  Vitally, though, Grant had the benefit of joining an army less class-conscious than Forrest’s. The Union high command was led by a president born in a log cabin. Grant’s was an army filling with new Americans who had emigrated north instead of south because Dixie’s slavery-monopolized job market offered far less chance of earning a livelihood. The North’s officer corps allowed—though hardly encouraged—working-class input; the South’s did not. Dixie barred such elements from her councils of decision.8

  The difference was crucial. Northern inclusiveness permitted the rise of Grant, the man universally regarded as most responsible for winning the war, while Southern insularity predestined the Confederacy to squander the brilliance of Forrest, whose fertile brain and vicious valor might have helped fashion an opposite outcome. But he got no chance. He served under a Southern ruling oligarchy comprised of civilian and military representatives of the 10,000 planter families that owned at least fifty slaves each. A tiny fraction of the region’s 8 million white residents, this crème de la crème held title to one-quarter of the Confederacy’s 4 million slaves. Its high-toned members rarely invited an uncultivated ex-farm-renter into their drawing rooms, let alone their war rooms.9

  Members of this Southern aristocracy proclaimed brotherhood with their poorer white neighbors based on mutual superiority to enslaved blacks, but their contempt for anybody below their social level was blatant. As a US congressman, future Confederate president Jefferson Davis had made a bitter foe of a common-born colleague, former tailor Andrew Johnson, with a thoughtless remark that Johnson took as slighting people who worked with their hands. An 1858 speech by South Carolina senator James Hammond, intending to target the Northern working class, breathed disdain for every nonslaveholding laborer. “In all social systems,” he intoned, “there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life. . . . It constitutes the very mudsill of society.” Three-quarters of the South’s white population performed that sort of drudgery.10

  Hammond and his peers also made sure the mudsill stayed in its place. Formal education—and social mobility in general—was far less available in the South than the North. Another South Carolinian, William Harper, wrote that God “did not intend” that every human be “highly cultivated”; rather, “it is better that a part should be fully and highly educated and the rest utterly ignorant.” The latter were suitable only for the work of making the upper class comfortable. In the North, where education was more available, Grant could get enough of it to qualify for a West Point appointment. Even had Forrest been able to get the education, he would hardly have gotten the appointment. In the South, such plums rarely went to former lessee farmers.11

  Grant and Forrest, unlike most of their peers, knew life at the bottom. Grant had peddled firewood on St. Louis street corners to keep his family’s bodies and souls together; he sold his pocket watch for $20 one year to give them a Christmas. Forrest, like Abraham Lincoln, wielded an axe with the skill of experience; he once split rails for fifty cents per hundred to earn boat passage back to Mississippi from Texas. But where the bookish Lincoln ended in the White House, the less literate Forrest rose only to the Memphis city council. He was elected for his fearless forthrightness in an incident rife with overtones of the Old South’s least savory elements. Himself a trader in human chattel, he gave crucial testimony in the trial of one slave merchant who had murdered another. The killer claimed the dead man, a friend of Forrest who died in Forrest’s house, had willfully sold him a free African American, who afterward recovered his liberty in court. Forrest testified unhesitatingly against his city’s richest slave trader—and supplanted him soon afterward.12

  Such hands-on familiarity with life at the bottom, seamy or otherwise, proved invaluable to both men as Civil War generals. Forrest and Grant exemplified the yeomanry that did most of the war’s bleeding and dying and, unlike their superiors, identified more with their men than their peers. Because this identification was so obvious, each had intra-army struggles with famed West Pointers who viewed them with scorn. But their working-class roots proved an incalculable asset. Each knew firsthand what was possible, and impossible, for his men to accomplish. Both also used networks of spies to gather information, because each understood the need to know all he could beforehand about a planned task; their previous lives had depended on such things. Having lived where opportunity seldom knocked, each knew the necessity of capitalizing on it when it did. Unlike their superiors, who had rarely had to devote life-and-death attention to anything, they obsessed about initiative, aggressiveness, persistence, and speed. And their stressful lives had long since accustomed them to war’s continual anxiety.

  Both Grant and Forrest showed unique mental agility in campaigning. In his daring gambles to reach and besiege Vicksburg, Grant rejected West Point wisdom in favor of his own ingenuity. Like Forrest, he used military theory against West Point–trained opponents, doing the opposite of what they expected him to. Vanquishing the treachery and contempt of peers and higher-ups, he triumphed in the epic campaigns of Fort Donelson, Shiloh, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga. No one knew it yet, but he had already beaten Lee when he came east to fight the vaunted Virginian in 1864. His western leadership had slashed the arteries of Lee’s star-crossed nation.

  Mainstream scholars rightly question the abilities of the Confederate high command. Yet, perhaps influenced by its cultivation and learning, they have largely accepted the Richmond coterie’s contemporary minimizations of Forrest. Jefferson Davis and his minions saw the Tennessean as merely coarse and offensive to their genteel sensibility, as a cartoonish half-literate who would not follow orders and could never have become more than the peerless raider he unquestionably was.

  But the Confederate high command was manifestly fallible. Scholars accepting its judgments of Forrest seem not to have noticed that he did not start out the way he ended—defiant, sullen, and imperious. At Fort Donelson, Shiloh, and many other battles, he followed every order, only to see aristocratic commanders squander all chance for victory. At least as much as his abrasiveness, their sneers and ineptitude drove him to rebellion and self-exile—and their Confederacy to its grave.

  I

  GLANCING BACK

  1

  LATE WINTER-EARLY SPRING 1862—GRANT

  Laurels Tarnished

  In mid-March 1862, Major General Ulysses S. Grant reaccepted command of his army. The month preceding his reappointment had been bewildering.

  Thirty-some days earlier at Fort Donelson in northern Tennessee, fighting myriad enemies in gray and blue, he had captured the largest force taken in any American war up to that time. His feat smashed the center of a Confederate line that had stretched westward from the Appalachian foothills to the Mississippi River. Grant’s twin victories at Fort Henry and Fort Donelson threw the Confederates out of southern Kentucky all the way across Tennessee into Alabama and Mississippi. These triumphs transformed the war, exploding the stalemate that had followed the Federal defeat at Bull Run in Virginia in July 1861. His initiative had given the Union a juggernaut western momentum. Dubbed “Unconditional Surrender Grant” by victory-hungry Northern newspapers, he rose immediately from brigadier to major general.

  Until Donelson, however, Grant had been a dead man walking. Charges of scandalous drunkenness had been filed against him just days before the battle. He had arrested his chief of river transportation, a meddlesome and politically connected civilian named William J. Kountz, for obstructing troop movements, and Kou
ntz had retaliated by launching the charges in the chain of command. They alleged that a “beastly,” drunken Grant had been incapable of conducting business on a flag-of-truce boat, had drunk with “rebels,” had been repeatedly drunk since, and had indulged in “Conduct unbecoming an Officer and a Gentleman.” Recipients of the document could not have known that its filer was a temperance fanatic who may not have even been in the vicinity when the reported excesses occurred.1

  So Grant, on the eve of his Henry-Donelson coup, had been in a most vulnerable position. His superior (and the initial recipient of the Kountz document), Major General Henry W. Halleck, was working to promote—and replace him with—a prominent West Pointer, sixty-three-year-old Brigadier General Ethan Allen Hitchcock. Federal command of the trans-Appalachian front was split between Halleck in St. Louis and Brigadier General Don Carlos Buell in Kentucky, and Halleck worried that Grant’s seedy, rumpled aggressiveness would embarrass him and hamper his chance to best Buell in army politics.

  Grant had needed to achieve something big before Kountz’s charges destroyed his career. He had pestered Halleck into letting him and naval flag officer Andrew Foote go after Forts Henry and Donelson on the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers. Reluctantly, Halleck had finally assented, hoping to achieve a victory before Buell did. It worked. The Henry-Donelson captures made Halleck preeminent in the West.

  Yet, no sooner had he distinguished himself at Henry and Donelson than Grant staggered, stabbed in the back. Mysterious foes in his own ranks, armed with his reputation as a drunkard, toppled him. On March 5, Halleck relieved him of his duties, and Grant appeared headed back to the oblivion from which he had sprung. Then suddenly, on March 13, Halleck changed his mind.