by Bruce Catton
In this war that was tearing the country apart, Kentucky was still clinging to an improbable and tenuous neutrality. In no single state was popular sentiment so sharply divided as in Kentucky. Wholly symptomatic was the fact that of the two sons of the aging Senator John J. Crittenden (who had worked so hard and so fruitlessly in the months just before Lincoln’s inauguration to find some formula by which the argument between North and South might be harmonized) one was to be a general in the Confederate Army and the other a general in the Union Army. Governor Beriah Magoffin was strong for the Confederacy, and he had indignantly rejected Lincoln’s call for troops that spring; but the state legislature was predominantly pro-Union, and with government thus divided the state was trying desperately to stay out of the war entirely. So far this effort had worked. Neither Washington nor Richmond had yet been willing to do anything that might disturb the delicate balance of forces in Kentucky, and for the time being Kentucky’s neutrality was respected. Neither North nor South had troops in the state, although each side was eagerly collecting recruits there, inviting them to training camps outside of the state.
The one certainty was that Kentucky’s neutrality was not likely to last very much longer. In the nature of things it could not last. If North and South were to make war in the West they would be bound to cross Kentucky sooner or later, and the only real question was who would make the first move. According to information which was reaching Frémont, the Confederacy was just about to make such a move; it was reported that General Leonidas Polk, the Episcopal bishop who had been trained at West Point and who, as an ardent Southern patriot and an intimate friend of President Jefferson Davis, had been given an important command in the Southern Army, was about to march up from western Tennessee and fortify the high bluffs at Columbus, Kentucky, the northern terminus of the Mobile and Ohio railway: a spot, which, if held, would keep Yankee gunboats and transports from descending the Mississippi River. Frémont had the notion that if this was in the cards it would be well for the Union to strike the first blow. Hence his summons to Grant.
According to Major Justus McKinstry, an Old Army Regular, who was Frémont’s chief quartermaster and provost marshal, Frémont called a staff meeting to choose a commander for southeast Missouri. McKinstry got a hurry-up call to come and join in the conference. He drove to headquarters, parked his horse and buggy at the curb, and stalked through the basement hallway on his way to Frémont’s office. In the dim light of this hall he found a man sitting on a bench, an old friend from prewar Regular Army days whom he had last known as Captain Grant. Turning to him, McKinstry asked him: “Sam, what are you doing here?”
Grant told him that he had been ordered to report to Frémont and that he had been sitting in the hall for hours, trying without success to gain access to the General. (Surrounded by an officious staff, Frémont was notoriously hard to see.) McKinstry promised to let Frémont know Grant was present, and hurried up to the meeting. When he entered Frémont’s room he was told that the officers present were trying to find the right man to take responsibility for meeting the anticipated Confederate thrust along the river. To this McKinstry replied that he knew just the man: Sam Grant, who was now waiting downstairs and whose gallantry and soldierly abilities he himself had observed during the Mexican War. This started an argument: the first of many similar arguments that were to be carried on during the Civil War, arguments growing out of the humiliation and failure which lay upon Grant’s military record on the West Coast.
Grant, several officers objected, would not do. He drank too much and was unfit for high command.…
A man can get typed, justly or unjustly, and the shadow of the past, the dark stain of officers’-mess gossip, deposited over the years, can stay with him. Few of these men had actually known Sam Grant but in one way or another they had all heard of him: he was the officer who had had to resign his commission out West, six or seven years ago, because he could not leave the bottle alone. Of the exact circumstances surrounding the resignation, of the loneliness and frustration that may have led man and bottle together, of the years of struggle that came thereafter, of the man’s present determination to live down the past and make fullest use of his talents, of the hard core under the surface that would make his name terrible in war—of all these things the trim men in unweathered headquarters blue knew nothing. They knew only of the gossip, of the ineradicable stain, and that was enough.
It would be enough for many others, then and thereafter, for the dark film left by gossip can never be entirely scrubbed away. In an army famous for the hard drinking done by men in shoulder straps, this was a handicap Grant would always have to carry. He began as a colonel and he became a lieutenant general; by maneuvering and hard fighting he captured three rival armies entire; in four years he won command of all the troops in the United States, making himself the completely trusted instrument of the canniest judge of men who ever sat in the White House, enforcing unconditional surrender on dedicated men who had sworn to die rather than to submit; but the stain deposited by the gossip is still there, and men still cock their eyes and leer knowingly when Grant’s name is mentioned: He drank. For men who do not know him, that has been enough.
It was not enough for McKinstry, apparently, and he began to argue. Grant (he said) might indeed like whisky, but in a responsible command he would leave the stuff alone. The country desperately needed a fighter, Grant had a proven combat record as a fighter, the meeting had convened to find a fighter—why look further? The discussion, as McKinstry remembered it, grew heated. Some of those present urged that Grant be forgotten and that the choice light on General Franz Sigel, the German émigré who had a powerful hold on the loyalties of Missouri’s numerous German recruits but who unfortunately displayed no knack for training raw soldiers or for leading them effectively in combat. In the end Frémont decided on Grant, and at last McKinstry went downstairs, dug Grant out of the obscurity of the basement hallway, and told him to come on up and join the meeting.16
In the main, Frémont corroborated this story. Some time after the war he told a correspondent how McKinstry had brought Grant to his office. Grant was wearing civilian clothing, but Frémont was strongly impressed by the man’s soldierly qualities—“self-poise, modesty, decision, attention to details.” He admitted that before Grant appeared a number of officers had strongly opposed his appointment, “for reasons that were well known,” but he insisted that Grant’s bearing when he came in was enough to counteract the influence of what they had said. In any case, the appointment was made, and Frémont and Grant discussed the situation for two or three hours. “I told him,” Frémont said, “that the purpose was to make Cairo, and Paducah opposite, the base of important operations against Memphis and Nashville”—operations (he said) which had already been outlined in a letter Frémont had sent to the President. Frémont added that he told Grant he had better wear the proper uniform. Grant explained that he had given away his colonel’s uniform and that he had not yet been able to get a brigadier’s outfit; as soon as it arrived he would put it on.17
It may have been a little simpler than this, and indeed it is possible to suspect that the new assignment came simply because headquarters had at last realized that Grant outranked Prentiss. Grant’s formal orders from Frémont are dated August 28, which is also the date on which Frémont wrote to Prentiss, explaining that Grant was taking command in southeastern Missouri. In this letter Frémont told Prentiss: “When you were ordered to go to Ironton and take the place of General Grant, who was transferred to Jefferson City, it was under the impression that his appointment was of a later date than your own. By the official list published it appears, however, that he is your senior in rank. He will, therefore, upon effecting a conjunction with your troops, take command of the whole expedition.” It may be worth note, too, that on August 27—at which time Grant was still in Jefferson City—Frémont was writing to Davis, whom he addressed as “commanding, Jefferson City,” complaining that headquarters was not hearing from
Davis; if the date on this letter is correct, headquarters had obviously decided on the shift before Grant ever got to St. Louis.18
At any rate, Grant’s formal orders spelled out the movement that was contemplated. The idea back of the movement was good enough, but the information on which the idea had been built was defective; nothing concrete came of it, at the time, but in an indirect way it had a good deal to do with the way the war was going to go in the Mississippi valley.
Confederates in unknown but ominous strength (it was thought) were active in southeastern Missouri. Grant was to go to Cape Girardeau, on the Mississippi, and take command of a small Federal garrison there. The Rebels were believed to be in force at a town called Benton, fifteen or twenty miles south of Cape Girardeau and ten miles inland from the river, and there was also thought to be a Rebel detachment at the town of Commerce, which was on the river fifteen miles below Cape Girardeau. Prentiss was marching overland from Ironton with the troops Grant had once commanded, and Col. W. H. L. Wallace, commanding at Bird’s Point across the river from Cairo, was under orders to march sixteen miles west to Charleston; meanwhile, other forces from Cairo were making a reconnaissance down the river to Belmont, a steamboat landing on the Missouri side of the Mississippi, across from the commanding bluffs at Columbus, Kentucky. It would be Grant’s function to tie all of these movements into one, to clear southeastern Missouri of Confederate troops, and then to move into Kentucky and occupy the potential stronghold at Columbus, as quickly as he could. Meanwhile, he was to see to it that proper defensive works were completed at Cairo, at Bird’s Point, at Cape Girardeau and at Ironton.19
There were two noteworthy points about this order. The first was that the notion of a Confederate menace was a delusion. The Confederate General Hardee, who had been threatening Ironton from the south ten days previously, had withdrawn into Arkansas, and was now getting his slender forces over toward the Mississippi. General Pillow, who built ditches on the wrong side of earthworks, and who was displaying an unfailing ability to irritate his superiors with long, querulous, argumentative letters, had had plans for a movement toward Cape Girardeau and the area west of it, but these plans had been canceled and he was now grumpily digging in at New Madrid, in the southeastern corner of the state, on the big river. The only Confederate forces in the area where Union troops were concentrating were the informal Missouri state guards, who were sadly under strength but who enjoyed the leadership of the effervescent Jeff Thompson. These soldiers—perhaps three thousand in all, some of them mounted and some going about on foot—held forth on the fringe of a vast swamp, a score or more miles west of the Mississippi river. They were not doing very much harm to anyone, but Thompson, a minor genius, was able to make Union commanders think that they were very numerous and very aggressive, and the rumors that reached headquarters at St. Louis multiplied his raiding parties by ten.20
In addition, the order spelled out a radical change in Federal policy; a change which may or may not have struck Grant at the time. Kentucky was still neutral, and the decision to violate or to continue to respect the state’s neutrality was technically one for Washington to make. Actually, however, the decision would inevitably be made by some commander in the field. Frémont had already warned Washington that operations along the Mississippi would eventually involve the Kentucky shore; now he was ordering Grant to move into Kentucky and take possession of the bluffs at Columbus; and the effect which this might have on public sentiment in that all-important border state was wholly problematical.
Some inkling of what Frémont had in mind seems to have reached the Confederate commander in the West, the former Bishop Polk. As well as anyone, Polk knew that the party which first put up fortifications at Columbus would be winning an important trick, and on September 1 he was writing to Governor Beriah Magoffin of Kentucky asking to be informed about the plans of “the Southern party in Kentucky” and saying frankly that he believed he “should be ahead of the enemy in occupying Columbus and Paducah.” Polk believed that the Yankees were about to move, and when the Federal reconnaissance party from Cairo went down to Belmont and began planting cannon there, Polk concluded that it was time for him to do something. The egregious Pillow had been begging for orders to go to Columbus anyway, and the Federal move seems to have pulled the trigger.21
For the moment it did no more than that. Grant went to Cape Girardeau. Prentiss showed up on September 1, and Grant ordered him to move south, inland, to a town called Sikeston, which was roughly due west of Belmont; he himself would go to Bird’s Point and lead a column inland from there; the detachment at Belmont would dig in and stay where it was; southeastern Missouri would be cleared of Jeff Thompson’s raiders, and then the way would be open for the occupation of Columbus. But Prentiss threw a wrench into the scheme by refusing to admit that Grant ranked him. (Apparently the man had not yet received Frémont’s explanatory order.) Prentiss hemmed and hawed and finally refused to obey Grant’s order, and, when Grant insisted, Prentiss asked for a leave of absence (which was refused), tendered his resignation (which was also refused), and then put himself under arrest and took off for St. Louis, leaving Grant to put the senior Colonel in command of his column. All of this caused an abrupt halt in the projected operation. Prentiss’s column remained in camp, pending the appointment of a new commander; and simultaneously the Federal naval commander on the Mississippi sent in discouraging reports about Rebel naval strength on the river, which led Grant to recall the troops who had been occupying Belmont. So the big drive to push the Rebels out of southeastern Missouri came to a halt—and General Polk, believing correctly that Frémont planned to seize Columbus, ordered General Pillow to move into the place ahead of the Federals. Pillow marched in on September 4, Kentucky’s neutrality was violated once and for all, President Jefferson Davis noted sorrowfully that he regretted the necessity for the move but approved the move itself, the necessity apparently existing; and Jeff Thompson got a copy of Frémont’s proclamation, which along with its attempt to free the slaves of Confederate supporters proclaimed martial law in Missouri and threatened the death penalty to all guerillas found north of a line drawn across central Missouri.22
To this, General Thompson made quick reply. In a proclamation aimed at To all whom it may concern, Thompson (who had a perky sense of humor, as well as a stout sentiment of Southern patriotism) announced:
Therefore know ye that I, M. Jeff Thompson, brigadier general of the First Military District of Missouri, having not only the military authority of a brigadier general but certain police powers granted by Acting Governor Thomas C. Reynolds, and confirmed afterwards by Governor Jackson, do most solemly promise that for every member of the Missouri State Guard, or soldier of our allies the armies of the Confederate States, who shall be put to death in pursuance of this said order of General Frémont, I will “hang, draw and quarter” a minion of said Abraham Lincoln.… I intend to exceed General Frémont in his excesses.23
CHAPTER THREE
Time of Preparation
Nobody cared very much for Cairo. General Frémont had called it “the most unhealthy post within my command,” and he said that fever and dysentery were everywhere. There were mosquitoes—“awful mosquitoes,” one recruit remembered—and there was a plague of rats. A sergeant of the guard used to amuse himself at night by seeing how many rats he could kill with his saber as he walked from one sentry post to another, and a doctor recalled that when a railroad train came clanking in along the tracks on top of the levee, vast numbers of rats would be crushed by the wheels. There was a great deal of malaria and an almost complete lack of hospital facilities; the Army’s supply depots were deficient, and the soldiers felt that the town’s inhabitants were unsympathetic and untrustworthy. A newspaper correspondent remarked that “if the Angel Gabriel should alight there the natives would steal his trumpet before he could blow it.”1
There was also mud. A Wisconsin soldier wrote that the quarters at Cairo were worse than pigpens on the farms back home, and
said that a pedestrian got completely stuck in the mud only two yards from headquarters and had to call for help. Along the water front the water was foul with the carcasses of dead mules and horses floating downstream, and an unpleasant stench filled the air. Back of the levee a good deal of the landscape seemed to be under water, and steam pumps were at work to keep this water from rising over the town’s sidewalks.2
Yet the place was very much alive. Wet, muddy and fever-smitten it might be, but the boundless vitality of the Northwest was in it. Past its levees went the great river, and this river, because of the war, had taken on an added dimension and a fearful new significance. Blocked as an artery for commerce, it was now in the process of becoming a new trail for one of the nation’s historic migrations a migration that would go south rather than west, but that would finally go irresistibly, a folk movement in which armed men followed by white-topped wagons would follow river valleys toward the sea. (A movement, too, in which the nation would curl back upon itself, so that it would suffer long from wounds of its own infliction.) Cairo was the outfitting point for this new migration; no matter what the trail might lead to it would begin here, in the low land compressed between two converging rivers.
When Grant reached Cairo on September 4, to establish the command post for the District of Southeast Missouri, he was stepping into the precise place he had wanted—the precise place, as it would develop, that he was best qualified to occupy.
