by Bruce Catton
He had had an odd career, thus far in the war. He had been a general for less than a month, and this was his third assignment in that capacity. At Ironton he had had less than ten days to fortify an outpost, to train raw troops, to straighten out the system of supply and to organize a forward movement; at Jefferson City he had had just a week to attempt the same thing under even greater handicaps. Now he was taking hold of what could be made—what could hardly help being made—the key command in the West; and he seems to have understood the full extent of the challenge.
Before he left Cape Girardeau he had found a moment to write to his father, and to him Grant had said that his only fear now was “that too much may be expected of me.” He added that he was “probably done shifting commands so much.” He had also found time to get off a letter to Congressman Washburne:
Allow me to thank you for the part you have taken in giving me my present position. I think I see your hand in it.… My whole heart is in the cause which we are fighting for and I pledge myself that if equal to the task before me you shall never have cause to regret the part you have taken.3
It would be pleasant to be able to record that someone recognized a historic moment when Grant entered Cairo, but nobody did; the man most immediately concerned, the man whom Grant relieved from command, did not even recognize Grant himself. Grant was still wearing civilian clothes, and when he strolled into the converted bank building which housed Army headquarters nobody noticed him. (Right to the end, Grant never had the knack of catching anyone’s eye.) In temporary command here was Colonel Richard Oglesby, another Illinoisan, a lusty politician who would eventually become Governor of the State. Oglesby’s office was full of people. Grant introduced himself, but somehow Oglesby did not quite catch the name and he paid no attention. Grant waited a bit, then took a piece of paper from the table where Oglesby was working and wrote out an order announcing his assumption of command.
Oglesby blinked at the paper in surprise, looked as if he might be ready to arrest Grant as an impostor, concluded finally that the man was real, and turned over the establishment to him without demur. U. S. Grant was at last in command of troops on the Mississippi, looking south.4
He was also in command of warships, for the Cairo job was amphibious. At this early stage of the war Washington was playing by ear—naturally enough, since there was no blueprint for anything it was doing—and one of the things that came out of this informal approach was the assignment to the Army of top responsibility for naval affairs in the Mississippi valley. This had come about more or less of necessity. Some sort of fleet was obviously needed on these Western waters, and in the spring and summer of 1861 the Navy had been obliged to direct all of its time and energy to matters on salt water. So the War Department had moved in. At Cincinnati it had bought three river steamboats, and these had been converted into gunboats—odd-looking creations, clumsy and fearfully vulnerable to enemy fire, but still fighting craft: Lexington, Tyler and Conestoga, armed with smooth-bore 64- and 32-pounders, given protection of a sort by extemporized bulwarks of oak five inches thick, with boilers lowered into the hold but with steampipes exposed to destruction by any shot. They were officered and manned by the Navy—top man just now was Commander John Rodgers, although a replacement was on the way—and they were under Army orders, and they would be at Grant’s disposal. In an offhand way they ranked as a division of the Army. James B. Eads of St. Louis was hurriedly building seven gunboats which would carry a bit of armor and would be better fitted for combat, but these would come later. For the moment Lexington, Tyler and Conestoga were all the fleet there was.5
Grant moved into the bank building, establishing his office behind a counter, looking very much like a small-town banker, puffing at a long-shanked meerschaum pipe while he shuffled his papers;6 and within twenty-four hours of his arrival things began to happen. There came to him, on September 5, one of Frémont’s scouts, just back from a trip down the river, and this man bore news that General Polk had sent Pillow and a force of unknown but apparently respectable strength up north into Kentucky, occupying the downstream town of Hickman and moving on to the ominous bluffs at Columbus. Kentucky’s neutrality was over, and Kentucky lay just across the river from Grant’s office. It was time for action.
Grant sent the scout on to St. Louis, and dispatched a message to Frémont saying that unless he quickly got orders telling him not to do it he was going to occupy the Kentucky city of Paducah. He waited a few hours, got no orders, and then took off, sustained no doubt by the fact that Frémont’s original orders to him had made mention of the need to seize this place.7
Paducah, like Cairo, was geographically important. It lay forty-five miles up the Ohio, on the Kentucky shore at the point where the mighty Tennessee River came in, and just ten miles below the place where the Cumberland joined the Ohio. Under the tree at Ironton Grant had thought about these rivers, tracing their courses on his map, examining the possibilities, making marks with red pencils. The Cumberland was a clear highway to Nashville, capital of one of the most important states in the Confederacy, and the Tennessee was a highway leading all the way to Mississippi and Alabama. Any soldier could see that it was important for the Union to hold the mouths of these rivers.
Along the waterfront at Cairo, gunboats and transports got steam up. Grant put the 9th and 12th Illinois regiments on the transports, along with a four-gun battery of field artillery, went aboard himself, and with the gunboats for escort went up the Ohio that evening. At Mound City—an embryonic naval base a short distance above Cairo—there was a delay, when one of the steamers fouled another. This did no particular harm, as Grant did not want to get to his goal before daylight, and the flotilla anchored for a while. Then it steamed on at leisure, and shortly after dawn it reached the waterfront at Paducah.
Grant believed that it did not get there very much too soon, for Confederate troops were supposed to be on their way to take possession of this place; they would have reached there, according to common report, by noon, the townsfolk (Southern sympathizers, by a large majority) were expecting them, and Confederate flags had been hoisted for welcome. When Grant’s troops came ashore the flags were quickly hauled down, and the people stood about on the sidewalks looking stunned. Grant believed they were badly frightened, and he wrote that he “never saw such consternation depicted on the faces of the people.” The arrival of Federal troops was clearly unwelcome, and the women set up defiant cries of “Hurrah for Jeff Davis!” but the soldiers grinned and admired the women for their spunk. One man wrote that they “fell in love with Paducah on sight,” and after the war was over he still remembered: “I never saw so many pretty women in my life.… All fat, smooth-skinned, small-boned, high-bred looking women.” Grant got his troops in position to guard the roads, took possession of telegraph office, marine hospital and railroad station, seized a quantity of rations and two tons of leather that were awaiting shipment to the Confederates, and turned the command over to Brigadier General E. A. Paine, instructing him to be sure no harm was done to inoffensive citizens, to keep the soldiers from entering private dwellings, and to “exercise the strictest discipline against any soldier who shall insult citizens or engage in plundering private property.” Then he hurried back to Cairo, reaching the place less than twenty-four hours after the expedition had taken off. He found there a message from Frémont authorizing him to do what he had just done.8
Taking thought for the political angles of the situation, and reflecting that although the people of Paducah might favor the Confederacy the state legislature was strong for the Union, Grant got off a telegram to the speaker of the Kentucky House of Representatives:
I regret to inform you that Confederate forces in considerable number have invaded the territory of Kentucky and are occupying and fortifying strong positions at Hickman and Chalk Bluffs.9
Then he sent word to Cape Girardeau to ship the 8th Missouri on to Cairo at once; getting reinforcements to Paducah was very much on his mind. Lastly, he sent a
telegram to Frémont making a complete report on everything that had been done. Frémont upheld the occupation of Paducah, but otherwise he was not pleased. Grant drew a reprimand for his action in communicating with the speaker of the Kentucky house; dealings between the military and state officials would be carried on by the department commander, and Grant was warned not to get out of line again. He was also notified that “to enable you to continue personally in command of our forces at Cairo, Bird’s Point, Cape Girardeau and Ironton,” headquarters was sending Brigadier General Charles F. Smith to command at Paducah.10
In a way this was another snub, for this move removed Paducah from Grant’s control. (It was eventually restored, but that came some weeks later.) But if Grant was wounded, he kept the fact to himself, and it is probable that he welcomed the news, for there were few officers in the Army whom Grant admired as deeply as he admired Smith.
Smith was an old-timer, a Regular of Regulars, tall and lean and straight, with drooping white mustachios and a parade-ground stiffness to his manner. He had been commandant of cadets at West Point when Grant was there, and Grant confessed that he never felt quite right issuing orders to Smith; he still felt like a schoolboy when Smith was around, and to the end of his days he seems to have considered Smith the perfect soldier. William Tecumseh Sherman, who had also taken his training under Smith, admitted that he felt the same way, and there were Regular officers in the early part of the war who felt that it was rather outrageous for Grant to be over Smith: Smith, they felt, had come up through the ranks, and Grant had become a general through the help of Congressman Washburne. Many men, writing about Smith, said that he was the finest-looking soldier they ever saw.11
When the war began Smith was Lieutenant Colonel of the 10th infantry, holding a colonel’s commission by brevet. He was strictly business, and he never bothered to utter fine phrases about the sanctity of the Federal Union. Politicians at Washington, troubled by the number of Regular officers who did not seem to be bothered greatly about the tremendous issues at stake in this war, seem to have marked him down as a person of doubtful loyalty. He had been quietly pigeonholed, assigned to duty as recruiting officer at New York, and when George B. McClellan, given command of the Army of the Potomac following the catastrophe at Bull Run, asked for Smith he could not get him. Late in August Frémont managed to break the log jam and Smith was nominated Brigadier General (the Senate had not yet confirmed this nomination) and was sent west. He reached St. Louis just in time to take over at Paducah. This was not at all to the liking of General Paine, whom Grant had left in charge there, and Paine would presently make trouble about it, but for the moment everything was fine. When Grant sent reinforcements to Paducah—which he did, as rapidly as he could—he took pains to send the fullest, best-equipped and best-trained regiments, keeping “the raw, unarmed and ragged” at Cairo.12
At Cairo, everything was to be done. At the start the soldiers hardly noticed that they had a new commanding officer. Men in the 10th Illinois had never heard of Grant before; they became aware that there was a new general around the place only when the regimental Adjutant, reading Grant’s first order to them on the parade ground, tripped over the unfamiliar signature and read off “U. S. Grant” as “United States Grant,” and then hastily corrected himself. Chuckling at the mistake, the men looked around and saw Grant himself, sitting undemonstratively on his horse, listening. Later, an officer in this regiment said that as they saw more of Grant they found him “a firm, quiet and determined sort of man, and one wonderfully modest and retired in his manners.” He never made any sort of speech to the men—orating to the troops was a common failing among officers in the early part of the war—and at reviews and parades he sat his horse quietly, saying nothing at all except that he always thanked the Colonel when the review was over. In the course of time, Grant did get a proper uniform, and one man remembered that Grant appeared before his regiment in regulation dress uniform, complete with cocked hat and ostrich feather. Across the river at Bird’s Point, men of the nth and 20th Illinois raided a farmyard and stole a quantity of honey; Grant’s guards caught them, and Grant imposed fines to pay the owner, while the guards (as the soldiers believed) ate the honey. For a time thereafter, whenever an officer was within hearing the soldiers would set up a chant: “Who stole the honey? The 11th and the 20th. Who paid for the honey? The 11th and the 20th. Who ate the honey? General Grant’s bodyguard.”13
One of Grant’s first concerns had to be the health of his command. He worked through an army surgeon, Dr. Joseph H. Brinton, who reached Cairo a few days after Grant’s own arrival. Dr. Brinton met him behind the counter in the bank, and wrote thus about it, long afterward:
… A very short, small, rather spare man with full beard and mustache. His beard was a little long, very much longer than he afterward wore it, unkempt and irregular, and of a sandy, tawny shade. His hair matched his beard, and at first glance he seemed to be a very ordinary sort of man, indeed one below the average in most respects. But as I sat and watched him then and many an hour afterward I found that his face grew upon me. His eyes were gentle, with a kind expression, and thoughtful. He did not as a rule speak a great deal … did nothing carelessly, but worked slowly, every now and then stopping and taking his pipe out of his mouth.14
Brinton found that there were many sick men. Grant selected Mound City as the best place for these; the town had been laid out a few years earlier by optimistic real estate promoters who thought it would be a thriving shipping point for river-borne freight, and it had long rows of substantial brick warehouses, empty and unused. These were turned into hospitals, but the care which the men got was rudimentary. The army at Cairo was making use of civilian doctors, holding no commissions but working under contract, and many of these were conscienceless impostors and charlatans. There seemed to be no nurses and there was a great shortage of medical supplies; for a time there was not even a chaplain, and when men died Dr. Brinton had to read the burial service. If people back home had not regularly sent money and boxes of food, the men would have been in desperate straits.
Grant told Dr. Brinton to put things right, and Brinton found that the General would always support him. The doctor would presently write that “Grant is a plain, straightforward, peremptory and prompt man. If I ask for anything it is done at once.”
A big problem had to do with nurses. All over the country, women were volunteering to work in Union Army hospitals. Miss Dorothea Dix, a capable and stern-minded lady, had been given general charge of the new Army Nursing Corps. She had fixed ideas, and rigorously combed out all applicants who were either youthful or pretty; there would be no romantic passages between nurses and patients if Miss Dix could help it. In spite of her best efforts, a large number of pathetically unqualified women kept showing up, each one bearing some sort of endorsement or order from a faraway general or War Department official, all insisting that they were going to be of service. They had to be fed, housed and paid, and they were not ordinarily pleased with the accommodations that were available. “They defied all military law,” Dr. Brinton asserted. “There they were and there they would stay, entrenched behind their bags and parcels, until accommodations might be found for them.… This female nurse business was a great trial to all the men concerned and to me at Mound City it became intolerable.”
The good doctor’s complaint was being echoed just at this time by Dr. John Cooper at St. Louis, who ungallantly declared that every preacher in the North “would recommend the most troublesome old maid in his congregation as an experienced nurse.” Many of the women chosen by Miss Dix, said Dr. Cooper, were obtained in this way; “every day the preacher would write about his own particular ewe lamb, suggesting some post as far off as possible—the most of these ewe lambs hailed from New England and the most of them had been school marms whose only experience in nursing was of the wrath of the boys whose ears had been warmed too often because their fathers had overlooked her.” Miss Dix, said Dr. Cooper, came in with many of these p
eople in tow, “each one with spectacles on her nose and an earnest gaze in her eyes, to see the man she was to take possession of,” The increase in the death rate following their arrival was heavy, Dr. Cooper added, “probably caused by the spectacles.”
In one way and another, the nursing situation was got under control. Dr. Brinton improved it by sending to South Bend, in Indiana, and getting a detachment of Catholic Sisters. The change, as he recalled it, was refreshing. Each volunteer nurse, formerly, had wanted special attention. “They did not wish much, simply a room, a looking glass, someone to get their meals and do little things for them, and they would nurse the sick boys of our gallant Union army.” One morning fourteen or fifteen of the Sisters arrived; apprehensively, Dr. Brinton asked what accommodation they would need, and to his pleased surprise got the answer: “One room, Doctor.”15
There was a great deal of routine for the District Commander to handle. An exceptionally sickly regiment must be sent back to St. Louis, to be replaced by one better able to stand conditions around Cairo. It was necessary to have a mustering officer sent down, since there were many troops which had never been sworn in; necessary, too, to get the Navy to do something about paying the crews of the gunboats—as things were, the men could legally be paid only at Cincinnati, which was a long way off. Vast quantities of supplies were arriving, and since all of these would presently be shipped off by boat it was expensive and unhandy to store them on shore: Grant found and took over a big wharf boat with a storage capacity of twenty-five hundred tons, to get around that problem. Cold weather was approaching, and there must be suitable winter quarters for the troops; log huts would do nicely and would cost little, but the military chest was empty—“Credit will not do at this place any longer. I understand the credit of the Government has already been used to the extent of some hundred thousand dollars and no money ever paid out.” Could department headquarters kindly send some money, along with a paymaster to pay the troops? Too many soldiers were applying for medical discharges, which the contract surgeons were recommending on trivial grounds: could Grant have the authority to approve or, more important, to disapprove these? (Studying the regulations, Grant decided that he had that authority; technically, he was commanding an army in the field, and the power he was asking for went with the job.) It was necessary for him to visit Springfield, to see whether the Governor of Illinois could send him some artillery and small arms. (The Governor could not, having none at his disposal, but he promised to send down the first that came to him.) Also, the Austrian muskets with which many troops were equipped were defective; and the troops badly needed tents, shoes, shirts, blankets, along with cavalry equipment and a good deal of field artillery. At least six telescopes were required, and if a large map of Kentucky could be provided it would be very useful.16
