by Bruce Catton
Buell believed that Johnston had at least 30,000 men at Bowling Green, and he told McClellan that this number could quickly be increased to 50,000 or 60,000 by transfers from Columbus. It seemed clear to him that he could strike no blow of his own unless Halleck, by threatening Columbus and the Confederate forts on the Tennessee and the Cumberland, could make such transfers impossible. The thrust at East Tennessee struck Buell as a move that could be made only as a supplement to a drive toward Bowling Green and Nashville, and that drive could be made only in co-operation with Halleck. East Tennessee, therefore, would have to wait and the wait might be a long one.9
Mr. Lincoln waited, with dwindling patience. On December 31 he sent a message to Halleck: “General McClellan is sick. Are General Buell and yourself in concert? When he moves on Bowling Green, what hinders it being reinforced from Columbus? A simultaneous movement by you on Columbus might prevent it.” A copy of this message he sent to Buell.
The Generals replied promptly, but the replies did not make Mr. Lincoln happy.
Buell wired:
There is no arrangement between General Halleck and myself. I have been informed by General McClellan that he would make suitable disposition for concerted action. There is nothing to prevent Bowling Green being reinforced from Columbus if a military force is not brought to bear on the latter place.
And from Halleck came this wire:
I have never received a word from General Buell. I am not ready to cooperate with him. Hope to do so in a few weeks. Have written fully on this subject to Major General McClellan. Too much will ruin everything.10
On the following day Halleck sent word to Buell:
I have had no instructions respecting co-operation. All my available troops are in the field except those at Cairo and Paducah, which are barely sufficient to threaten Columbus, etc. A few weeks hence I hope to be able to render you very material assistance, but now a withdrawal of my troops from this state is almost impossible. Write me fully.11
More correspondence followed. Slowly recuperating from an attack of typhoid fever, McClellan notified Halleck that “it is of the greatest importance” to keep the Rebels at Columbus from reinforcing those at Bowling Green, and he suggested an expedition up the Cumberland, supported by gunboats. He urged, also, a demonstration against Columbus, with strength enough to make a real attack on the place if any troops had been withdrawn, and proposed a simultaneous feint up the Tennessee. Federal success in Kentucky, he said, would depend largely on these measures, and “not a moment’s time should be lost in preparing these expeditions.” Buell wrote to Halleck that “the great power of the Rebellion in the west” was arrayed from Columbus to Bowling Green, estimated that Johnston had at least 80,000 men there, and remarked that Halleck would of course “at once see the importance of a combined attack on its center and flanks.” Whatever was done, he said, “should be done speedily, within a few days.”12
Lincoln’s patience continued to diminish. On January 4 he asked Buell to report on the progress and general condition of the movement toward East Tennessee, ending the telegram with the terse word: “Answer.”
Buell replied that he was planning to move a division toward the Cumberland Gap, but that he lacked transportation and that other preparations had not been completed. He added, frankly:
I will confess to your excellency that I have been bound to it more by sympathy for the people of east Tennessee and the anxiety with which you and the General-in-Chief have desired it than by my opinion of its wisdom as an unconditional measure. As earnestly as I wish to accomplish it, my judgment from the first has been decidedly against it, if it should render at all doubtful the success of a movement against the great power of the Rebellion in the west, which is mainly arrayed on the line from Columbus to Bowling Green and can speedily be concentrated at any point of that line which is attacked singly.
This drew a rebuke from McClellan, who wrote to Buell bluntly:
There are few things I have more at heart than the prompt movement of a strong column into eastern Tennessee. The political consequences of the delay of this movement will be much more serious than you seem to anticipate.… I was extremely sorry to learn from your telegram to the President that you had from the beginning attached little or no importance to a movement in east Tennessee. I had not so understood your views, and it develops a radical difference between your views and my own which I deeply regret.
My own general plans for the prosecution of the war made the speedy occupation of east Tennessee and its lines of railway matters of absolute necessity. Bowling Green and Nashville are in that connection of very secondary importance at the present moment. My own advance cannot, according to my present views, be made until your troops are soundly established in the eastern portion of Tennessee. If that is not possible, a complete and prejudicial change in my own plans at once becomes necessary.… Halleck, from his own account, will not soon be in a condition to support properly a movement up the Cumberland. Why not make the movement independently of and without waiting for that?13
And Halleck, on January 6, wrote to President Lincoln explaining that at best he could spare only 10,000 men to help Buell, and saying: “It would be madness to attempt anything serious with such a force, and I cannot at the present time withdraw any from Missouri without risking the loss of this state.” Most of the middle and northern counties of Missouri, he added, were in a state of insurrection, and the presence in them of strong Federal forces was essential. Moreover, many of Halleck’s troops and officers were unreliable, and “I am in the condition of a carpenter who is required to build a bridge with a dull axe, a broken saw, and rotten timber.” Halleck knew nothing about Buell’s intended operations, and the idea of making simultaneous movements on the Rebel stronghold struck him as folly: “To operate on exterior lines against an enemy occupying a central position will fail, as it has always failed in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred. It is condemned by every military authority I have ever read.”
At the foot of this letter President Lincoln scribbled a gloomy endorsement:
The within is a copy of a letter just received from General Halleck. It is exceedingly discouraging. As everywhere else, nothing can be done.14
However, all of this prodding was beginning to have some effect even though the effect was not at all what the President and the General in Chief had originally had in mind. On the same day that he wrote to President Lincoln, Halleck sent orders to Grant: Grant was to make an armed demonstration toward Mayfield, Kentucky, 30 miles south of Paducah, leading the Rebels, if he could, to suppose that he was going to attack either Camp Beauregard, below Columbus, or the new Confederate stronghold, Fort Donelson, was on the west bank of the Cumberland River just south of the Tennessee-Kentucky line. Flag Officer Foote would be asked to make menacing moves with his gunboats at the same time; Grant would be reinforced as soon as possible, and he was to spread the word that twenty or thirty thousand troops would presently join him from Missouri. At all costs he was to avoid a general engagement, and he should keep the real aim of the expedition—to keep the Rebels from reinforcing Bowling Green—secret even from his own officers.15
Grant accepted these orders with enthusiasm. Foote would send three gunboats up the Cumberland and two more would go up the Tennessee. From Paducah, Smith would move toward Mayfield, and Grant’s own force from Cairo would go down to the west to protect Smith’s flank. Conditions for the move were not ideal; it had been raining for a week and the roads were excessively bad, which would mean slow marching. However, Grant wrote, this “will operate worse upon the enemy, if he should come out to meet us, than upon us.” (Just why bad roads would be worse for Rebels than for Federals, Grant did not explain; obviously, he wanted to get moving, and he was going to take a hopeful view of everything.) At this time Grant had a total of just over twenty thousand men in his command, including Smith’s people at Paducah; most of them would be involved in this demonstration.16
More letters and telegrams went b
ack and forth between Washington, Louisville and St. Louis, including a message from Lincoln to Buell and Halleck ordering speed and remarking: “Delay is ruining us.” McClellan again tried to impress on Buell the need for an advance through the Cumberland Gap: “You had no idea of the pressure brought to bear here upon the Government for a forward movement. It is so strong that it seems absolutely necessary to make the advance on eastern Tennessee at once.” With Halleck, McClellan had a brief passage at arms. Halleck tried to shift responsibility by asking McClellan if he insisted on the withdrawal of troops from Missouri for the march into Kentucky, writing ominously: “If so, it will be done, but in my opinion it involves the defeat of the Union cause in this state.” McClellan deftly tossed the ball back to him by replying: “If you can spare no troops it is only necessary to say so, and I must look elsewhere for the means of accomplishing the object in view. There is nothing in my letter that can reasonably be construed into an order requiring you to make detachments that will involve the defeat of the Union cause in Missouri.”17
In spite of everything, the demonstration at last was made. On January 13 Grant issued orders to govern the conduct of the march. Straggling was not to be permitted, no one was to be allowed to leave camp in the evening, the firing of guns either in camp or on the march was prohibited unless there were armed Rebels to be shot at, and severe punishment was to be visited on all looters. On January 14 the expedition took off. At the last minute Grant had difficulties with his master of river transportation, Captain W. J. Kountz of the quartermaster department; a man who (as Grant reported to Halleck) “from his great unpopularity with river men and his wholesale denunciation of everybody connected with the Government here as thieves and cheats, was entirely unable to get crews for the necessary boats.” Grant found that the civilian crews were quite willing to serve if they did not have to serve under Kountz—who, he said, “seems to have desired to be placed on duty here for no other purpose than to wreak his revenge upon some river men whom he dislikes, and to get into the service of the Government a boat in which he has an interest”—and so he put Kountz under arrest, asked St. Louis to assign him to some other field of duty, and went off without him.18
On the surface, Grant’s expedition was a demonstration and no more, and neither he nor C. F. Smith felt that it accomplished much. The explicit orders to avoid an engagement at all costs irked Grant, and to a staff officer he remarked: “I wonder if General Halleck would object to another ‘skirmish’ like Belmont? I suppose, though, that it would hardly do to ‘skirmish’ hard enough to take Columbus.” When it was suggested that if the Confederate positions on the rivers were taken General Polk would have to evacuate Columbus, Grant objected. “Better attack,” he said, “and capture the entire force where they are. Why allow them to withdraw and follow and fight them in the interior of Mississippi or Alabama under greater disadvantages?” As he had shown at Belmont, Grant had no liking for simply making the enemy retreat. Nothing less than outright destruction of the enemy’s main force would satisfy him.19
Added up, the effect of the demonstration seemed to be good. Halleck wrote McClellan that the operation would probably keep the Confederates at Columbus in check “till preparations can be made for operations on the Tennessee and Cumberland,” and Grant reported that his talks with people inside the Rebel lines made him feel that “public confidence in ultimate success is fast on the wane in the South.” He added that “the expedition, if it had no other effect, served as a fine reconnaissance.” But he wanted to do more. One of his officers wrote that after the soldiers had returned to Cairo Grant said: “This sloshing about in mud, rain, sleet and snow for a week without striking the enemy, only exposing the men to great hardships and suffering in mid-winter, is not war.” If he had been permitted to fight, he said, he could at least have taken Camp Beauregard, “and this would have been ‘a demonstration’ with an object and a reward.”20
One of the deeply rooted impulses that would characterize Grant as a soldier had already become visible: the impulse to get to close quarters with his antagonist and slug it out. At Belmont he had turned a demonstration into a battle for no better reason than that he did not like to make empty gestures. As far as Grant was concerned a demonstration meant very little unless the man conducting it was free to make a real fight when the occasion offered. The January expedition left him dissatisfied because it had been designed as a feint and nothing more.
This elaborate and seemingly fruitless movement into Kentucky did, in the end, have results. It led to genuine action a short time afterward; which is to say that it disclosed—to the Army and Navy men on the spot, and apparently to Halleck himself—that a blow in this area, delivered with full weight, might be most effective. It is noteworthy, too, that when the blow was finally delivered Grant went beyond both his instructions and his own original concept of the move to make it one of the decisive strategic moves of the entire war.
In the course of this expedition old Smith had gone up the Tennessee River with the gunboats to exchange a few shots with Fort Henry. This was a fort which the Confederates had built just below the Kentucky state line, back in the days of Kentucky’s neutrality, and it was not strong. Some time before the expedition took place, Grant and Smith had sat in Smith’s quarters at Paducah studying such maps of the place as they could get, and they had concluded that it was vulnerable. Built on low ground, Fort Henry was partly flooded now because the water in the Tennessee was high, and both Smith and Foote believed that it could easily be taken. At the very least, gunboats might run past it, in which case they could steam up the Tennessee all the way to northern Alabama, destroying Confederate railroad bridges and generally disrupting things, and it seemed that the effort ought to be made. Foote urged Grant, “for the good of the service,” to go to St. Louis in person and propose the scheme. The worst Halleck could do, said Foote, was refuse, and even if he did “his wrath will hardly be so hot as to dry up the Mississippi before you can get back to Cairo.”21
Meanwhile, hundreds of miles to the east, another development helped make the war in Kentucky more fluid. Johnston’s troops in front of Cumberland Gap had been under the command of General Felix K. Zollicoffer, who led the skimpy little Confederate Army over the Cumberland River near Mill Springs and seemed to menace Buell’s eastern outpost, a division commanded by Virginia-born General George H. Thomas. Over the inexperienced Zollicoffer the Confederate authorities then placed George B. Crittenden, son of the distinguished Kentuckian, John J. Crittenden, who had endeavored a year ago to work out a national compromise that would avert war. Crittenden recognized the exposure of his army, but was unable to rectify Zollicoffer’s error. Thomas, a whole-hearted believer in the projected campaign into eastern Tennessee, gathered his troops together, and after a difficult march over muddy roads he prepared to attack Crittenden’s men. But on January 19 Crittenden himself attacked, only to be beaten in what became a decisive Union victory. Zollicoffer was killed, the Confederates were driven off in disorganized retreat, Crittenden’s handling of his force was so inept that men accused him of being drunk, and the eastern end of Johnston’s line had come adrift. The way now was open for the advance into eastern Tennessee.
The way would not be easy. Thomas’s ardor cooled perceptibly when he saw how bad the roads were in midwinter and how desolate was the country through which his army would have to march. “I have every reason,” he notified Buell, “to believe that the roads leading into Tennessee are in the same condition as the one over which my division has just passed, and the enemy having passed over these roads our chances for subsistence and forage would be but poor. I would therefore again respectfully suggest that I may be permitted to move down the river” (that is, down the Cumberland, which in that part of Kentucky flows from east to west before looping down into Tennessee) “with my troops, taking our subsistence and forage in flatboats, and co-operate with the main army against Bowling Green.” He added, however, that the Rebel Army in his front seemed to be
entirely dispersed, “and should we go into East Tennessee now there would be no enemy to encounter.”22
With that report, the chance for a real push into East Tennessee evaporated. General Carter would be told to move forward with his brigade and hold Cumberland Gap, but no invasion would be ordered. Inevitably, the whole weight of Federal operations would now be concentrated where Buell had always wanted it concentrated, in the general direction of Nashville; and the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers, flowing north side by side, and only a few miles apart where they descended from Tennessee into Kentucky, would loom larger and larger in the Union’s strategic planning. But the hard fact remained: an offensive in western Tennessee could take place only if Halleck co-operated, and if Halleck co-operated the instrument he must use could only be the force commanded by Grant. In the most unpredictable way, the uprising of the East Tennessee loyalists and President Lincoln’s insistence that the Western Armies act energetically in response was about to start Grant up the rivers that led to the Deep South.
In the latter part of January, Grant got permission to go to St. Louis and present his argument to Halleck. The experience seems not to have been a happy one. In his memoirs—written long afterward, at a time when his feelings toward Halleck were definitely hostile—Grant said that Halleck cut him short “as if my plan were preposterous.” He was received, he said, with so little cordiality that “I perhaps stated the object of my business with less clearness than I might have done,” and Halleck refused to hear him through. Grant returned to Cairo, he said, “very much crestfallen.”
