Born to Battle

by Jack Hurst

  Turning unaccountably kind, Halleck stepped forward to seem to save Donelson’s disgraced victor. It was a sham. Halleck had manufactured the crisis himself. He let Grant believe that General in Chief George McClellan (who had been outraged at encountering an intoxicated Grant in the antebellum army) and President Abraham Lincoln had demanded his dismissal, but the actual foe had been Halleck himself. He wanted Grant gone and would use any pretense to accomplish that end. He had only wilted when Lincoln, grateful for the Donelson victory, began asking questions about what was happening to Grant. Had he left his command without proper authority? Had his reports not been timely? Had he been insubordinate? Halleck, knowing he had manufactured this controversy himself, quickly minimized it and kicked it under the rug.2

  Grant knew none of this. Relieved at having dodged a political bullet, he resumed his duties. His new task was large: to organize the huge force gathering to harvest the fruits of the Henry-Donelson victories.

  To Grant’s way of thinking, those triumphs should have been followed up by quick strikes southward. “My opinion was . . . that immediately after the fall of Fort Donelson the way was opened to the National forces all over the South-west without much resistance,” he later wrote. He thought Federal troops already in uniform could have fanned out to the rail centers of Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Corinth, Mississippi, as well as the Mississippi River cities of Memphis and Vicksburg. A quick Union advance into these areas, in his opinion, would have denied the Confederate armies “tens of thousands” of potential Southern recruits.3

  Instead, many of these Southerners were being recruited now, while the Union army took its time readying its next blow. Thousands were reportedly gathering at Corinth to try to stop the southward Federal drive along the Tennessee River. Corinth was a major hub on the Memphis & Charleston Railroad, whose tracks were bringing in more troops. A Confederate victory in front of the Mississippi town would begin recouping the South’s staggering Henry-Donelson losses.

  Grant’s return to command made him a target of Confederate desperation, but that did not worry him. Grateful for Halleck’s inexplicable reversal, Grant could look back on his Henry-Donelson campaign with relief and pride.The Donelson triumph had whipped both his anonymous Union enemies and 20,000 Confederates. Three-fourths of the latter he had captured and sent to Northern prisons.

  But the victory also obscured major errors. Flag Officer Foote’s gunboats had battered Fort Henry into submission before Grant’s army could arrive. Grant had then attacked Donelson without knowing how many Confederates were inside its fortifications—only to find that they contained more troops than he had outside. He had assumed the ironclad gunboats that had decimated Fort Henry would make similar rubble of Fort Donelson—but Donelson’s apprentice cannoneers all but blew the ironclads out of the Cumberland River. On the battle’s third and climactic day, Grant rode out four icy miles north of the left end of his lines to persuade Foote not to take the crippled but still-feared river monsters north for refitting. While he was gone, the Confederates burst from the far end of their entrenchments and rolled the south end of the Union line northward more than a mile. Grant had neglected to leave anyone in charge at headquarters; he returned from his conference with Foote to find a wrecked right wing and mounting dismay among his troops.

  Yet Grant kept his head. The Confederate attack finally faltered, and he rightly guessed that to bring such force against the lower end of the line, the enemy had to have stripped most of his strength from the upper end. Grant’s innate aggressiveness only increased under stress. He ordered the commander on his left—stalwart Brigadier General Charles Ferguson Smith, his tactics instructor at West Point—to ready a charge. Then he ordered an all-out counterattack, promising that the trenches on the left would be lightly defended. Sure enough, Smith’s charge overran that end of the defenses.

  Smith later gave Grant the words with which newspapers would transform the erstwhile pupil into an overnight hero. When a Confederate party arrived with a message requesting surrender terms, Grant looked to Smith. “No terms to the damned rebels,” growled the oldster. Even though the appeal to negotiate came from Confederate brigadier Simon Bolivar Buckner, a Grant friend and antebellum benefactor, Grant took Smith’s advice. “No terms except immediate and unconditional surrender can be accepted,” Grant replied to Buckner’s note. “I propose to move immediately upon your works.”

  With Smith occupying one end of his trenches and his Confederates in disarray, Buckner surrendered. Grant, with Smith’s indispensable assistance, had saved himself. Despite the errors they concealed, the Henry-Donelson victories stymied Halleck’s intention to fire this man whom history would come to regard as most responsible for winning the war.

  Few men looked less likely to save the Union. Born and reared in the comparative wilds of southern Ohio, Grant had rarely impressed even his own family. He had gone to West Point reluctantly, at his thrifty father’s insistence (a West Point education being free). Before that, he had spent most of his youth plying fields and roads with workhorses, thus avoiding the blood and stink of his father’s tanning business. At West Point, he studied war indifferently, preferring to read adventure novels from the academy library and draw sketches that showed some talent. He stood out from classmates in just two respects: for serving as president of the Point’s literary society and setting an academy horse-jumping record that would stand for a quarter century.

  After graduation, he spent eleven years in the army. He participated, he later recalled, in about as many battles of the Mexican War as one person could. His behavior under fire was rock steady; his feats included intrepidly riding through house-to-house fighting in the streets of Monterrey, amid hails of bullets, to request more ammunition for a unit that was running out. He did this despite being an officer and an adjutant, then gave the credit to his horse, Nelly. Such exploits won him brevet promotions to first lieutenant and captain, but he reached the latter rank permanently only years later, just prior to his abrupt departure from the army.

  Grant resigned in April 1854, apparently to escape allegations of drunkenness. He had endured a long, monotonous posting in the remote Pacific Northwest, half a continent away from his beloved wife, Julia, and their family. Soon after making captain, he reportedly showed up at a company pay table stupefied by drink, and his commander, an eastern-born martinet and nephew of President John Quincy Adams, reportedly threatened to file formal charges if Grant did not resign. A friend speculated that he chose the latter to avoid scandalizing his family. He went to farming in Missouri near the plantation of his father-in-law, working in the fields beside slaves. But bad weather and national financial panics ruined him. He had to peddle firewood in shabby clothes on the streets of St. Louis to survive. Only a job in a Galena, Illinois, leather-goods store owned by his father rescued him from want.

  War pulled him out of obscurity at age thirty-nine. Politically he was middle-of-the-road, believing the Union should remain whole. He neither supported slavery nor espoused its abolition, but he seemed to empathize with slaves as fellow humans; he freed the only one he ever owned. Because of his West Point education, city fathers in Galena asked him to organize and train a company of volunteers, and he did. He turned down an offer to be its captain, however, because men with less—or no—army experience were becoming colonels. He held out for higher rank, though his reputation as a drunkard and lack of political influence hamstrung him for a time. The Illinois governor finally named him colonel of the Twenty-first Illinois Infantry only because the initial appointee could not handle its rowdy troops.

  Then Grant’s luck, so bad for so long, turned. Congressman Elihu Washburne of Illinois, seeking as many generals for his state as possible, got Grant commissioned as a brigadier. Before long, he was commanding the burgeoning Union base at Cairo, Illinois—from whence he and Foote attacked Fort Henry. Following his triumphs there and at Fort Donelson, Grant’s grit earned him his promotion to major general; it also won him a personal
triumph as consequential as those victories. The charges of drunkenness he had endured throughout the Henry-Donelson campaign and during his brief, puzzling suspension from command, were worse than those that had driven him from the army seven years earlier. These latest ones, amplified in another version sent directly to the War Department, had alleged that his inebriation was chronic and involved such sensational sins as drunkenly losing his sword and ascending a hotel’s stairs on all fours. But this time he refused to allow the charges and the possibility of their publication, now that he had attained the stature of a general—to cow him. His determination had hardened. The smashing victory he had won at Fort Donelson sustained him. With Halleck’s abrupt decision to reinstate him, the accusations seemed to have been buried on a desk somewhere up the chain of command.4

  Grant’s first task was to rejoin his men. During his post-Donelson removal, his erstwhile army had swelled from three to five divisions: 39,000 men. Halleck had put General Smith in command and ordered them seventy-five miles farther south on the Tennessee River.

  Smith’s orders were to do nothing to bring on a full-scale battle. He debarked most of his force just north of the Mississippi state line at two steamboat landings, Pittsburg and Crump’s, and allowed his ground commander, Brigadier William Tecumseh Sherman, to arrange them willy-nilly. There was no order to entrench. West Point wisdom held that telling a soldier to dig for safety was tantamount to telling him he should fear.

  The fifty-six-year-old Smith, like many of his soldiers, was still ill from Donelson. He had slept on the snow there after giving up his tent to the wounded. Now a trifling injury challenged his weakened constitution. Jumping into a rowboat on the swirling Tennessee, he barked a shin, and the oncoming springtime temperatures helped to infect it. Soon erysipelas had Smith bedridden in Savannah, Tennessee. Halleck, under scrutiny by Washington for his removal of Grant, returned the army to the Donelson victor.

  Grant hurried south from Fort Henry and took up the reins. He had to provide for his troops’ many wants while they—and he—awaited orders for the next shove southward. The coming pounce, he predicted in a letter to Julia, would result in “the greatest battle . . . of the War.” Their target would be the railroad hub at Corinth, Mississippi. But he could not expect to command in the battle. Halleck had claimed that honor for himself. So Grant and his men sat on hold, awaiting the arrival of their chief from St. Louis and, from Nashville, more help. A second large Federal army under Major General Buell was marching overland from the Tennessee capital to join them. But Buell, who had dawdled in sending help to Grant at Fort Donelson and then in “taking” unoccupied Nashville, was again delaying. At Columbia, he insisted on rebuilding a bridge torched by the Confederates during their southward retreat rather than cross the Duck River by pontoon.

  Between Grant and Buell lay a gulf of bad blood. Buell had resented Grant’s promotion to major general following the victories Grant scored at Fort Henry and Fort Donelson while Buell was resisting Lincoln’s calls to advance. Buell soon became a major general too—but after Grant. So the prewar captain who had resigned in an 1854 whisky stink was now senior to the distinguished antebellum career officer.

  That was not all. Buell only “took” Nashville after Grant, trying to help, ordered one of Buell’s divisions to return to their commander by boat from Fort Donelson and land in the Tennessee capital. They arrived there before he did himself. This embarrassed and angered Buell, who had feared to move his own 7,000 men into the city because Lieutenant Colonel Nathan Bedford Forrest and forty of his cavalrymen still lurked there. A few days later, newly minted major general Grant came down to Nashville to meet still brigadier general Buell. There he disagreed with Buell’s insistence that Confederates might attack him in Nashville at any moment. Grant correctly maintained that the Confederates were retreating as fast as they could march.5

  Not everyone in Buell’s command was as methodical or hesitant as the commander himself. Kentucky-born Brigadier William “Bull” Nelson, an ambitious twenty-year navy veteran who had become one of Buell’s division commanders, was electrified by the danger to Grant’s army and the opportunity it offered Nelson himself. Grant’s force was on the west bank of the Tennessee, where the broad river would separate it from Buell’s aid even after the Nashville column arrived. So on March 27 Nelson persuaded Buell to let his division ford the Duck, which it did, shivering, on March 29. The rest of Buell’s army was left behind as Nelson marched hard toward Grant’s headquarters at Savannah, Tennessee, nine miles north of Pittsburg Landing, but on the river’s east bank.

  Grant fidgeted and worked. Previous to 1861 he had commanded only a company of troops, and now he had to supervise tens of thousands. “I am very glad you are having a pleasant visit,” he wrote Julia at the home of friends in Louisville, Kentucky. “I wish I could make a visit anywhere for a week or two. It would be a great relief not to have to think for a short time.”6

  His men’s needs were not the only things on Grant’s mind. He knew Confederates were gathering around Corinth, twenty-five miles south-west of Pittsburg Landing. Their numbers were reported to be anywhere from 20,000 to five times that, and Grant wanted to attack before they consolidated. He was certain they would not leave the Corinth fortifications in force. He knew, though, that a significant Confederate unit was “hovering,” as he put it, to the west of his troops at Crump’s Landing. He had a division’s supplies stockpiled at Crump’s, five miles north of Pittsburg on the same side of the Tennessee, and he worried that Confederates might raid there before he could send reinforcements.

  Signs of mischief multiplied. On the afternoon of Friday, April 4, a handful of men from the Seventieth Ohio, posted five miles out the road toward Corinth from Pittsburg, ventured past their pickets in a nasty rainstorm and disappeared.The Seventy-second Ohio heard firing, and two of its companies went to investigate. Their probe turned into a firefight. When the two companies did not return, 150 cavalrymen of the Fifth Ohio went after them, and the troopers found the infantrymen skirmishing with a large force of Confederate cavalry.The Union horsemen charged and drove the Confederates, only to run into infantry and artillery.7

  Grant was concerned, and not just that the enemy appeared to be “in considerable force.” Halleck had ordered that no battle be opened until Buell arrived, and Buell was somewhere on the road from Columbia. Grant took a steamer to Pittsburg Landing from Savannah that evening and rode out for a look at the skirmish site. “The night,” he afterward recalled, “was one of impenetrable darkness, with rain pouring down in torrents; nothing was visible . . . except as revealed by the frequent flashes of lightning.” Two Federal officers and a few enlisted men had been captured; four others had been wounded. As far as Grant could tell, though, all was quiet.

  His expedition was nevertheless eventful. His horse fell on the watery road and pinned its rider. He returned to Savannah with an ankle so swollen that the boot had to be cut off. Still, he had learned that out in front, much closer than Corinth, were Confederate cavalrymen accompanied by at least three pieces of artillery and some infantry. “How much,” Grant wrote Halleck on Saturday, April 5, “cannot of course be estimated. I have scarcely the faintest idea of an attack (general one) being made upon us, but will be prepared should such a thing take place.”8

  He turned out to be anything but, as he learned all too well the next morning. The Confederates had beaten Halleck to his great battle. On April 6, 44,000 Southerners came yipping out of the Sabbath dawn and into Sherman’s camps around a country church called Shiloh. Their mission was unholy: to destroy Grant’s army before Buell’s could arrive.

  2

  LATE WINTER–EARLY SPRING 1862—FORREST

  Hurry

  For Confederate lieutenant colonel Nathan Bedford Forrest, the time between mid-February and mid-March 1862 had been even more appalling than it had been for Grant.

  Four hundred square miles of Forrest’s new homeland—the ambitious, year-old Confederate States of Am
erica—had dropped from Richmond’s control in less than a fortnight. Near the northeast end of this lost vastness was Nashville, the first Confederate state capital to fall. With it went many of its crammed supply depots and all its vital industrial facilities. For Forrest, as for other Confederates, the losses were personal as well as military. On the new Confederacy, he had gambled 3,400 acres of prime Mississippi cotton land, other holdings, and a lot of cash amassed in two and a half decades of antebellum labor. At Forts Henry and Donelson, he had seen this wealth’s future imperiled. At Donelson, four generals whose combined talents did not equal his own had ignored his recommendations and wasted his valor.

  Forrest had ridden away from Donelson in disgust, leading hundreds of cavalry, infantry, and artillerymen. Refusing to participate in the generals’ sorry surrender, he had vowed to cut his way out of the siege—one that they, over his repeated protests, maintained the Federals had reestablished around the fort. But Forrest and his men had had to cut nothing. He had been right: the Federal siege was incomplete. The escapees rode out without drawing a saber.

  Forrest had fought like a demon at Donelson. Fifteen bullet marks tattered his overcoat. But he had sustained every nick for naught. He could only ride to Nashville and try to save as much of the Tennessee capital’s stockpiled matériel as possible.

  Only a fool would not have tallied a personal cost. A single watchword had characterized Forrest’s postboyhood life: hurry. The family he was born into in south-central Tennessee had owned a modest acreage, but only temporarily. Before his blacksmith father’s early death, they were reduced to leasing northern Mississippi hill land. As a teenager Forrest had breakfasted by candle to enter the fields by dawn, wasting not a ray of daylight. He had spent evenings on the hearth, sewing clothes and shoes for younger siblings.