by Bruce Catton
With Halleck Grant’s relations were correct but distant, and Grant was learning that Halleck could write acrid letters when matters of routine went wrong. One such matter developed in the middle of September, in connection with the exchange of prisoners. Southern soldiers who had been captured in St. Louis when Nathaniel Lyon broke up the Camp Jackson rendezvous the previous spring were going south, on exchange, and on December 17 Grant got a telegram from an unknown Colonel W. H. Buel, in St. Louis, warning him that the latest consignment, coming down by boat from St. Louis en route to Bishop Polk’s camp, was composed of impostors; Grant was to stop them and send them back to St. Louis. Grant did so, and got a sharp wire from Halleck:
By what authority did you send back exchanged prisoners? They are not under assumed names. All were identified here before exchange.
Grant answered, citing Buel’s message, and got another angry reply from Halleck:
No such man as W. H. Buel, colonel, known at these headquarters. It is most extraordinary that you should have obeyed a telegram sent by an unknown person and not even purporting to have been given by authority. The prisoners will be immediately returned to Cairo.
Grant replied sturdily, implying quite deftly that something was wrong with Halleck’s military housekeeping:
In justice to myself I must reply to this telegram. In the first place I never thought of doubting the authority of a telegram received from St. Louis, supposing that in military matters the telegraph was under such surveillance that no military order could be passed over the wires that was not by authority; second, the signature to the telegram was made with so many flourishes that I could not make it out at all and to send a copy to headquarters was obliged to send to the office here for a duplicate; third, before this telegram was received, Captain Livingston who came in charge of these prisoners reported to me that several who were to come had proven to be impostors and that he had reason to believe that two of those still with him were under assumed names; fourth, directions sufficient to detain prisoners (Camp Jackson exchanged prisoners) might come from the provost-marshal’s office, from General Curtis or from headquarters, and I do not know the employees of the former nor the staff of the latter. The fact is I never dreamed of so serious a telegraphic hoax emanating through a large and responsible office like that in St. Louis.
Halleck could never back down gracefully, and his wire in reply was perfectly characteristic:
The person who sent the telegram about the prisoners has been discovered and placed in confinement. He has no authority whatever. You will hereafter be more careful about obeying telegrams from private persons countermanding orders from these headquarters.16
Grant would be careful. Meanwhile, he was worried about contraband trade running from the rich Illinois corn lands to Confederate territory. Steamers coming down the Mississippi from St. Louis, he was convinced, carried freight for the Rebels. This freight would be dropped at landings on the Missouri shore between Cape Girardeau and Cairo, and taken overland by wagon to Jeff Thompson’s minions for transshipment south, and Grant wanted to break it up. The Missouri shore was Rebel territory. “There is not,” Grant assured Halleck, “a sufficiency of Union sentiment left in this portion of the state to save Sodom.” He was especially disturbed by the capture by Thompson’s men of a packet steamer named the Platte Valley, which put in at Price’s, or Pryor’s, Landing, on the Missouri shore, only to be seized by Confederate raiders, who lifted the freight and captured two Federal Army officers who happened to be on board. There is a hint that this stroke had been aimed at Grant himself, who was supposed to be making a river trip at that time; Bishop Polk had sent Thompson special instructions, and Thompson had replied that he was not certain that he could catch any particular packet but that he would get one or another, and Grant complained that the officers of many of these boats were in the employ of the Confederacy. To Halleck he emphasized “the almost certain disloyalty of the entire boating interest plying between St. Louis and this place.” He went on to assert: “I am informed that the owners of the packets complained of are generally enemies to the government and their acts prove conclusively that the crews employed are.”17
Undeniably, there was a steady movement of contraband goods from Union territory to the Confederates, and Confederate spies found it easy to slip back and forth across the lines. Some of this could be corrected at department headquarters, where Halleck’s subordinates often made passes easy to get, and Grant—who, as an Old Army man, knew his way about the military hierarchy—demanded tighter controls. General S. R. Curtis was, late in November, acting as commander of the military post at St. Louis, and to him Grant sent a letter bristling with independence:
Several have come to this post with safe-conducts through, signed by yourself. I regret this, as one of the most exposed posts in the Army at this time, and would much prefer that the number sent south should be made as limited as possible or sent by some other route. Although I shall accomodate, whenever it seems to me consistent with that interest of the public service, I shall in future exercise my own judgment about passing persons through my lines, unless the authority comes from a senior and one who exercises authority over me.
A fortnight later Grant pointed out that the steamer J. D. Perry had landed a good deal of freight on the Missouri shore between Cape Girardeau and Cairo, under authority granted by the Provost Marshal at St. Louis, and he announced: “I have ordered the captain of the J. D. Perry to disregard all orders to land on the Missouri shore between Cape Girardeau and this place unless given by the commanding officer of the department or myself.” Orders from Halleck himself Grant would execute without demur; orders from Halleck’s underlings he would obey only if in his own opinion they were sound. The Perry’s freight, he found, went directly from the landing point to the Confederates at Hickman, Kentucky, and at New Madrid, Missouri. Concerning this freight Grant allowed himself to be mildly facetious. “Eighty barrels of this freight,” he informed Halleck, “were whiskey; a character of commerce I would have no objection to being carried on with the South, but there is a possibility that some barrels marked whiskey might contain something more objectionable.”18
During the fall of 1861, the attempt to block trade with the South took much of Grant’s time and attention. Late in November he ordered the commander of an outpost at Caledonia, Illinois, to stop all movement of people and goods between Illinois and Kentucky. “All persons known to be engaged in unlawful traffic between the two states,” he ordered, “will be at once arrested and sent before the provost marshal in Cairo, with such proof as may be at hand. Whenever any property is known to be for use of the Southern Army the commanding officer may seize it, whether on the Illinois or Kentucky side of the river.”19
On December 21 he instructed Colonel Oglesby to make a sweep of the road that ran from the inland town of Charleston to Belmont, scene of the late battle; a road by which he believed a good deal of the contraband was moving to the Confederates. Oglesby sent cavalry as close to Belmont as it was safe to go and then doubled back, seizing all loaded wagons that were met on the road and bringing them back to Bird’s Point. The next day, suspecting that the hamlet of Jonesborough, Illinois—30 miles north of Cairo, and a few miles in from the Mississippi—was a source of illegal trade, Grant ordered McClernand to descend on the place, breaking up the traffic and dispersing a band of armed desperadoes which was overawing the Unionists in that area.20
Meanwhile, above everything else, there was General Polk to be watched, and Grant was vigilant. A fortnight after the battle of Belmont he reported that Polk had at Columbus 47 regiments of infantry and cavalry and more than one hundred guns, with eight thousand more troops stationed at Camp Beauregard, twenty-five or thirty miles to the southeast of Columbus. The fortifications at Columbus were being extended, and although the Confederates were reported to be fearful of a Union attack Grant believed that “they may be induced to act on the offensive if more troops are not sent here soon.” He found that
one way to keep informed about Polk’s condition was to read the Memphis newspapers. By this means, he said, he learned at the end of November that General Polk now had three gunboats—small converted river steamers, mounting only four guns apiece—and that the State of Mississippi had called for ten thousand militia for sixty days to be held in the defense of Columbus. “There seems,” he wrote to Halleck, “to be a great effort making throughout the South to make Columbus impregnable.”
With his new flotilla of gunboats Polk was making tentative stabs up the Mississippi. On December 1 Grant notified St. Louis that “Bishop Polk’s three gunboats made a Sunday excursion up to see us this evening.” Nothing came of it; a few shots were exchanged with the Union batteries at Fort Holt, without damage to either side, and when the Federal gunboats appeared the Confederate craft disappeared downstream, getting away clean because they had greater speed.21
The gunboat business worried Grant a little. In due time he would have a naval force that the Confederates could not match—the shipyards at Carondolet, near St. Louis, and at Mound City, just up the Ohio from Cairo, were busy, and seven brand-new warships, heavily gunned and at least partly armored, were due to go into service early in the winter—but at the moment the margin of safety did not look very wide. Grant heard that the Confederates were about to bring a number of gunboats up from New Orleans, and he warned St. Louis: “The arrival of this fleet without the floating means here of competing with them will serve materially to restore the confidence and feeling of security of the enemy, now, from best accounts, much shaken.” Grant was not satisfied with the progress the Mound City yards were making, and as a matter of fact the whole construction program was somewhat behind schedule. James B. Eads had contracted to deliver seven boats at Cairo by October 10, but the designated delivery date had been set by optimists. The contract had not even been signed until August 7, and difficulties had been immense; timbers for the hulls came from trees that were still in the northern forests at the time of signing, and before the armor could be made the fabricating machinery had to be built. There were twenty-one steam engines and thirty-five boilers to build, and although Eads had four thousand workmen busy on a night-and-day basis the still incomplete hull of the first of the seven vessels was not so much as launched before the delivery date was reached.22
The boats would be formidable, when they did arrive. They would be squat, ugly, powerful warships, 175 feet long with a beam of 51½ feet, drawing 6 feet of water, pierced for three bow guns, four on each broadside and two at the stern, armored with 2½ inches of iron forward, and given some armor along the sides to protect boilers and machinery. They looked like nothing any naval officer had ever seen before, and they quickly acquired a descriptive nickname: “the Turtles.” They would be slow, with inadequate power for proper upstream maneuvering, and their somewhat sketchy armor plating would not give very great protection, but they would be much stronger than anything the Confederates could bring against them, and in Flag Officer Foote Grant had a man who would use them with much energy. But as 1861 drew to a close they were not yet ready.
Finding crews for them was a problem. The Navy managed to send a draft of five hundred seamen from the East Coast, but the rest had to be taken where they could be found: river steamboat men, sailors from the Great Lakes, Midwestern farmboys who had never seen a body of water bigger than the nearest creek—one gunboat captain comforted himself with the reflection that there were “just enough men-o’-war’s men to leaven the lump with naval discipline.” The Army had to detail some men for naval service, and Army officers (including Grant himself) tended to do the obvious thing in this respect: detail the men for whom the Army had the least use. On January 6 Grant wrote to Halleck that he had a number of soldiers in the guardhouse for offenses of one kind or another, and he suggested, “in view of the difficulty of getting men for the gunboat service, that these men be transferred to that service.” He had spoken to Flag Officer Foote about this, he said, and “I believe it meets with his approval.” A soldier at Cape Girardeau wrote that the commanding officer there “picked out 50 to 60 of his most worthless men and put them on gunboats,” and while the plan apparently met with Foote’s approval—he had to get men from somewhere, and he would take what he could get—he was not enthusiastic about it.23 The most that can be said is that the business did not cool the developing friendship between Foote and Grant. Foote doubtless consoled himself with the reflection that the Navy had had much experience in the matter of making useful sailors out of seemingly hopeless material.
In the middle of December Grant got a scare. Intelligence reports from inside the Confederate lines convinced him that some movement was about to take place from Columbus, with the probable objective a night attack on Bird’s Point or Fort Holt, and he promptly sounded an alert. He told McClernand that an attack was “quite imminent” and ordered him to keep all the troops at Cairo in their camps, adding a clumsily worded but explicit instruction: “Ammunition should be issued, so as to give cartridge boxes full, and the command sleep under arms.” Four regiments were to be quartered on steamboats so that they could be moved instantly to any threatened point. The commander at Fort Holt was instructed: “Be on the qui vive tonight and tomorrow. Strengthen your pickets and tell them to keep a vigilant lookout. Let every man be at his post, and have your men sleep on their arms.” Similar orders went to Bird’s Point. Scouting parties were to cover all the approaches against a possible attack “tonight or tomorrow,” and the entire command was to be kept at its posts, with cartridge boxes filled and arms at hand. Transports were ordered to keep up steam, Foote was notified that his gunboats should be ready, word was sent to St. Louis that trouble was anticipated, and Halleck was assured that “all the troops at Bird’s Point, Fort Holt and Cairo are sleeping upon their arms.” These measures taken, Grant awaited developments.24
No developments came, for the alarm was false and General Polk made not even a gesture of hostility. The period of alert passed, nothing happened, and all hands relaxed; and one is compelled to wonder whether the effect of this on Grant may not have been unfortunate. He had been properly vigilant only to find that the Confederates were not as enterprising as his intelligence reports had said they would be. Did a memory of this fiasco remain with him and lead him, at Shiloh, to relax his guard when he had a Confederate Army in his immediate front?
For Grant personally the latter part of the autumn went pleasantly. He was able to have his family with him, and when Julia and the children were near Grant could enjoy life. They came down, shortly after the battle of Belmont, and the commanding general at Cairo became, for the time, a family man. On the lower floor of the old bank building he had his offices, shared with Rawlins, two aides and a sergeant; on the upper floors were Mrs. Grant and the children, and before long Grant moved his own office upstairs, letting the paper-shovers take over the one-time haunt of cashiers and tellers. Men who worked with him noticed his care and affection for his family. A paymaster who spent much time in the first-floor offices often had to work on Sundays, and as he worked in the quiet office he could hear the Grant children, overhead, singing Sunday School airs. Julia’s arrival caused a change in Grant’s appearance. Up to now he had worn a long, flowing beard; Julia did not care much for it, and presently Grant had it trimmed to the close stubble that is familiar in the photographs. He was not, men recalled, much of a smoker at this time, and when he smoked he usually chewed on a long-stemmed pipe. He admired a gray dressing gown trimmed with red flannel which Dr. Brinton wore, and Brinton loaned it to Julia; she sent it to Chicago and had a similar gown made for Grant—somehow, one would like to have a picture of the tough little General in this robe.25
Family ties were always important with Grant. He had wanted Julia and the children to visit him from the moment he reached Cairo, but he had had to wait until the military situation became stable. As he wrote to his sister, Mary: “Hearing artillery within a few miles it might embarrass my movements to have them about.
I am afraid they would make poor soldiers.” When the visit finally became feasible, Grant urged Mary to join the party, offering to pay the expenses of her travel; meanwhile, he sent photographs of himself and his staff for Mary to distribute among his relatives—“one for Uncle Samuel, one for Aunt Margaret, one for Aunt Rachel and one for Mrs. Bailey.”
With his father Jesse, Grant’s relationship was affectionate—and, at times, trying. Jesse was a businessman, and he was always aware that the commanding general of an important military district could steer business acquaintances into useful jobs. Grant refused to be obliging, explaining to Mary:
I do not want to be importuned for places. I have none to give and want to be placed under no obligation to anyone. My influence no doubt would secure places with those under me, but I become directly responsible for the suitableness of the appointee, and then there is no telling what moment I may have to put my hand upon the very person who conferred the favor, or the one recommended by me. I want always to be in a condition to do my duty without partiality, favor or affection.
