by Bruce Catton
Military red tape was a burden. The paymasters who came down periodically to pay the troops were all bound up in it, and the slightest mistake in the way a man’s name appeared on the rolls—a minor misspelling, or the omission of a middle initial—caused them to refuse to make payment. Officers who listed the names of the servants for whom they were entitled to draw pay were apt to get into trouble if the listing was in any way defective. Grant himself ran into this, when one month the account which he submitted was accompanied by a list of servants written by an aide; when the papers reached Washington the Treasury Department refused to honor them, pointing out that they were made out in two different kinds of handwriting. When the paymaster was unable to explain how this had happened, the papers were sent back to Grant, with a demand for an accounting. They reached Grant in the spring of 1864, in the midst of the Wilderness campaign.32
John Page, officer in a Chicago militia battery, was ordered to go to Washington for assignment to a regular infantry unit, and he went to Grant’s office to get an order for transportation. Grant looked at his commission, stared at it for a moment, and became lost in reverie; he looked at the officer, repeated “John Page” two or three times, and did not sign the papers until an aide nudged him. Page was the son of the first man Grant had seen killed in action—a John Page, who was standing at Grant’s side in the battle of Palo Alto when a Mexican cannon ball smashed his head.33
As he continued to work on the details of training and housing his men—at one time Grant suggested building barracks on empty coal barges, with the idea that on subsequent expeditions down-river these floating barracks could be towed to their destination by tugboats—Grant came to see that some of his earlier ideas for the capture of Columbus had been pretty sketchy. J. N. Tyner, another special agent for the Postoffice Department, visited him that fall, and killed time after his business had been finished by chatting with Grant at headquarters while waiting for a train. He said Grant gave him a pipe and tobacco, settled back for a smoke, and with a grin suggested: “Now tell me all you know about this war—it won’t take you long.” Tyner did not have much to say, but presently Grant himself began to talk, and he went into a proposal which, he said, had been made “by politicians and outsiders” for getting the Confederates out of Columbus. As Tyner remembered it, this proposal involved sending men downstream to make a surprise attack, by night, on the Rebel forces at Columbus, while another column under General Smith moved across the western tip of Kentucky and assailed Columbus from the rear. This scheme may have been built on Frémont’s own proposals to Lincoln, or indeed it may have grown out of the idea Grant himself had outlined to Frémont in a letter written in mid-September: Tyner got the impression that the notion had originally been Grant’s own, at least in part. By now, however, Grant could see the flaws in it, and he told Tyner how risky it would be to try to co-ordinate two separate surprise attacks, at night, by forces which would be completely out of touch with each other. Grant’s own hope, Tyner gathered, was to let the upper river take care of itself and strike deep into the Confederate interior, and he said vigorously that it was about time for the Union forces to make war rather than to “play war.”34
The Grant with whom Tyner talked, it might be noted, was not quite the Grant of legend. The legend makes Grant an extremely taciturn, silent man, who weighed his words carefully and never spoke except when he had something of moment to say, but Tyner did not find him that way at all—nor did others, then or later, who found him in a relaxed mood. As a matter of fact, Grant was a chatty person who became close-mouthed only when strangers were present or when high formalities were being observed. W. S. Hillyer, who knew Grant in St. Louis before the war and served through much of the war on his staff, said Grant’s friends always considered him “more than commonly talkative”; they realized, though, that he never spoke for effect, and that to be loquacious he had to be with his intimates. A Galena man who served with Grant in his Western campaigns said that “if you could get him started he was one of the most entertaining talkers I ever listened to,” and John A. J. Creswell, who was to become Postmaster General in Grant’s cabinet, remembered hearing Grant talk for an hour or more without a break. Once you knew him, said Creswell, Grant “would talk as much as any companion should”; but if he became suspicious of the motives of anyone who happened to be with him “he would remain cold and silent and his firm jaw would shut like a trap.” A telegraph operator who handled Grant’s cipher dispatches through most of the war remembered that Grant once said an odd thing to him: “I think I would always like to remain about 35 years of age for at that age one can take activity in a conversation without being considered old fogyish.”35 Despite the legend, it was perfectly in character for Grant to sit talking late into the night while the postal agent waited for his train.
Whether Grant himself realized it or not, his position at Cairo and the strategic possibilities that went with it were exerting real pressure on the Confederate command. In a military sense, the operation was running smoothly; at about this time Grant’s fellow-townsman from Galena, A. C. Chetlain, now lieutenant-colonel of the 12th Illinois, was writing to Congressman Washburne that “General Grant is doing wonders in and about Cairo in his quiet way,”36 and Confederate plans had already been modified as a result. In December the Confederate Secretary of War, Judah P. Benjamin, wrote to Braxton Bragg that when Albert Sidney Johnston was first assigned to the Western command, in the middle of September, it had been hoped that he could concern himself chiefly with affairs west of the Mississippi, leading a campaign from Arkansas up into Missouri—“the obtaining possession of the latter state is of such supreme importance that I need not say to you a word on the subject.” It had never been possible for Johnston to do this, Benjamin went on, because before he even reached the river “the threatened invasion of Tennessee and the advance of the Federal forces into Kentucky rendered it necessary to detain him in this latter state.” Kentucky, said Benjamin, was fully as important to the Confederacy as Missouri, and was under an even greater threat, “especially when considered in connection with the menaced attack on our lines of communication by railroad through east Tennessee.”37
What Grant was hoping for would come soon enough. The time of preparation was just about over. Before long the Federals in the West would be making war in earnest.
CHAPTER FOUR
“You Looked Like Giants”
John A. Rawlins looked frail, but he bristled. Undersized and pale, he was almost visibly burning with an inner fire which seemed to be composed of a hatred of secession, a crusading detestation of strong drink, and a profound conviction that Ulysses S. Grant, as a man of destiny, needed just the sort of protection, help and gadfly conscience which no one but Rawlins could supply. An impressionable newspaper correspondent wrote that Rawlins’s heavy black hair and beard formed a dramatic setting for the “marble pallor” of his face; a pallor that “in place of making it effeminate gave it a wondrous and melancholy beauty.” The effect was heightened by “large, lustrous eyes of a deep black”; perhaps the inner fires could be glimpsed there.1 Rawlins got to Cairo on September 14, accepted a commission as Captain of Volunteers, and took up his duties as Grant’s Assistant Adjutant General—the effective head of Grant’s staff, the medium through which his contacts with the rest of the military hierarchy would be carried on.
He came none too soon. Grant had been operating almost without a staff, doing much paper work which should have been delegated; Rawlins found that Grant, who was working every day from morning until midnight, was nearly worn out. Rawlins knew nothing whatever about military matters—he had never so much as set eyes on a company of Regular infantry or a squadron of cavalry—but he had driving energy, he also had administrative ability, and he possessed Grant’s full confidence. The two men were already intimate, and they were to grow much more so, until finally Rawlins would come to seem almost a part of Grant, and men would assert that no one could tell the story of Grant without also tell
ing the story of Rawlins.
Rawlins came from Galena. The son of a ne’er-do-well charcoal burner who had never quite been able either to control a taste for frontier whisky or to support his family adequately, John Rawlins had broken away from his backwoods background and had become a lawyer. A stanch Democrat, he had taken up the cause of the Union with passionate devotion once Fort Sumter was fired on, and at a mass meeting in Galena immediately after that event he had delivered a fiery save-the-Union speech which made a profound impression on Grant. (“Only one course is left for us. We will stand by the flag of our country and appeal to the God of battles!”) The speech brought the two men together, and, from the moment he became a general, Grant determined that Rawlins was the one man he most wanted to have at his side. Indeed, on the day he left Galena, Grant said good-by to Rawlins with the words: “If I see anything that will suit you I will send you word”; and from Ironton he had written to him saying: “I am entitled to a captain and acting adj-gen; I guess you had better come on and take it.”2
There had been a delay. Rawlins made a prompt reply: “Fully appreciating your kindness and friendship for me, and believing from your long experience in and knowledge of military service and its duties, you would not have offered me the position were you not satisfied it was one I could fill, gladly and with pleasure I accept it.” But Rawlins’s wife was dying, and it was not until after her death that Rawlins was able to join his new chief. Congressman Washburne seems to have worried about the matter, and to have feared that Grant might withdraw the offer, but Grant had no sooner reached Cairo than he was writing to Washburne that “I never had any idea of withdrawing it so long as he felt disposed to accept, no matter how long his absence.” He was only sorry that Rawlins could not have been with him earlier; the experience at Ironton and Jefferson City “would have been a good shool of instruction for him in his new duties,” and what lay ahead “bids fair to try the backbone of our volunteers.”3
Rawlins took charge of staff operations at once. The situation was not entirely satisfactory, and censorious young James H. Wilson, who was later to join Grant’s staff himself and who would eventually become commander of a hard-hitting corps of cavalry, wrote after the war that the staff at Cairo “contained several officers who were not only ignorant but unworthy of respect and confidence.” Many of these, Wilson asserted, “were roistering, good-hearted, good-natured, hard-drinking fellows” who were not above putting temptation “in the way of those they thought would meet them halfway.” Wilson, who admired Grant but who was always ready to write critically about him, believed that Grant “was more or less subject to flattery and to the kind attentions such ‘jolly dogs’ knew how to bestow acceptably,” and he said it took Rawlins a long time to weed out those whom he considered unworthy.4 Rawlins had no lighter side, he was the sworn enemy of all who brought liquor to headquarters, and in his stern dedication to Grant he took on the responsibility for making certain that there would never be any basis for a revival of the old rumors about Grant’s weakness for whisky. He was a confidant of Congressman Washburne, and kept him posted on this matter, and on others. Washburne visited Cairo in October and either what he saw of Grant or what Rawlins told him, or both put together, satisfied him; Lieutenant Colonel Chetlain said that after the visit the Congressman’s friends agreed that Washburne “has Grant on the brain.” At one stage Rawlins wrote to Washburne saying that much as he loved Grant he loved his country more and if for any reason he ever felt that Grant was unfit for his position he would let the Congressman know. He showed Grant the letter before he mailed it and Grant told him: “Right; exactly right. Send it by all means.” Rawlins himself said after the war that at Cairo, “beyond my friendship for Grant I felt that I was going to be attached to a man equal to the enlarging situation. And so I have remained with him ever since.”5
The situation was beginning to enlarge itself, in that fall of 1861. Red-bearded Sherman, commanding in Kentucky, east of Paducah, could see the unreadiness of his own troops much more clearly than he could see the equal unreadiness of his Confederate opponents. He fumed, became nervous and irritable—a state of voluble irritability was never far below the surface with Sherman—and when Secretary of War Simon Cameron visited him that fall and asked him how many men the Union needed in the Kentucky sector Sherman blurted out that the total was at least two hundred thousand. The horrified Cameron retreated to Washington, newspapermen who had heard the remark proclaimed that Sherman was losing his mind, and before long Sherman was removed, to be replaced by cautious, methodical General Don Carlos Buell.
Frémont, meanwhile, was having even worse troubles. Lincoln had toned down the proclamation in which Frémont had undertaken to free the slaves of all citizens who were actively supporting secession in his bailiwick, and Frémont was under strong pressure to get an army into western Missouri and crush General Price, who had what appeared to be an army of 25,000 men and who was fresh from his victory at Lexington. Frémont had put together a force of approximately 35,000 men, and late in October he was heading west; affairs at headquarters in St. Louis were handled partly by his adjutant, Chauncey McKeever, and partly by his wife, Jessie, who had a way of acting as an extra-legal but exceedingly active vice-general when the Pathfinder was out campaigning. The orders that district commanders got under these circumstances were apt to be sketchy and impromptu.
As far as Grant was concerned these orders would have to do with General Polk and the Confederate force at Columbus; with these, and with the irrepressible Jeff Thompson, whose mobile force was a standing threat to Federal installations in the southeastern part of Missouri and who was generally credited with more strength than he really had. In the middle of October a Federal detachment had gone down from Ironton and had inflicted a defeat, of sorts, on some of Thompson’s men, at Fredericktown, which led Grant to issue a rather florid, highly un-Grantlike order of congratulations,6 but this had settled nothing and Thompson was a standing source of worry. Between Polk and Thompson, Grant’s attention presently would be drawn to Belmont, Missouri, across the Mississippi from Columbus.
Belmont was a name rather than a place. Earlier that fall a Federal naval officer who had gone prospecting downstream in a gunboat (this was before the Confederates had moved into Kentucky) had reported wrathfully that he had not been able to find a town or so much as a house in Belmont;7 it was simply a weedy, tree-grown tract of rather low farmland—it did have two or three houses which the Navy man had missed—and it was given importance only by the fact that it was just opposite the great Confederate stronghold and that roads led from the landing to the town of Charleston, a dozen miles inland, and to New Madrid, thirty miles or more down the Mississippi. If General Polk proposed to put more troops into Missouri, or to draw troops out of that state, it seemed likely that he would do it through Belmont.
Belmont had been in possession of Union troops earlier, and when Grant had been given command in southeastern Missouri at the start of September, it was taken for granted that the Federals would hold the place. But the collapse of the offensive that had then been projected—caused in part by General Prentiss’s inability to agree that Grant ranked him—had led to a withdrawal, and Belmont was Confederate territory now. But the name touched a sensitive nerve at Federal headquarters, and any hint that Polk’s troops were crossing the river was apt to lead to action.
Such rumors came in as October ended. On November 1 Grant received orders from St. Louis indicating that something was up: “You are hereby directed to hold your whole command ready to march at an hour’s notice, until further orders, and you will take particular care to be amply supplied with transportation and ammunition. You are also directed to make demonstrations with your troops along both sides of the river towards Charleston, Norfolk, and Blandville” (this latter a hamlet on the Kentucky side, five miles or more from Fort Holt) “and to keep your columns constantly moving back and forward against these places without, however, attacking the enemy.” Grant was also inf
ormed that somewhat similar instructions had been sent to General Smith at Paducah.
These orders were, to be sure, a bit confused, and might have been hard to follow, but clarification seemed to arrive the next day. Jeff Thompson, Grant was told, was posted at Greenville, forty miles south of Ironton, with three thousand men and with evil intentions; a force was being sent down from Ironton to assail him, and Grant was ordered to send troops from Bird’s Point and Cape Girardeau to assist “in driving Thompson into Arkansas.” Two days later the scope of the operation broadened. Polk, St. Louis said, was sending reinforcements from Columbus to help General Price in western Missouri, and Grant and Smith were immediately to make a demonstration against Columbus.8
This could be somewhat intricate. A real campaign against Thompson was being called for, and it had to go hand in hand with a demonstration against Columbus, and the two were hardly compatible; a “demonstration,” in military language, being an ostentatious movement which would look very threatening but which would not lead to anything solid in the way of fighting. But Grant was aggressive-minded, he believed that the morale of his troops would rise if they were at last taken off the drill ground and put into combat, and he prepared to execute his orders with vigor. Rawlins said afterward that Grant had become convinced that where two partially trained volunteer armies faced each other, the one which had to take the offensive gained nothing by waiting to get more discipline and drill; the other side would use the delay for the same purpose, and the relative strengths of the opposing forces would remain the same. Grant, said Rawlins, “was always ready whenever he had what he thought a sufficient number of men, without regard to the number of days they had had arms in their hands, to give battle.”9 He would give battle now.
