Grant Moves South

by Bruce Catton

  Grant, meanwhile, got busy. On receipt of Halleck’s telegram he replied:

  I am quietly making preparations for a move, without as yet having created a suspicion that a movement is to be made. Awaiting your instructions, which we expect in the morning, I have not made definite plans as to my movements, but expect to start Sunday evening, taking 15,000 men.

  The movement would be made by water as far as practicable, and Grant would take either McClernand or Smith “to command after my return.”36

  The last five words are significant, for they highlight the fact that this expedition—which was soon to become one of the most consequential of the entire war—was still being thought of as an affair of strictly limited objectives. This seems to have been because none of the Federal officers involved—unless it may have been C. F. Smith—had at this date a really clear idea of the Confederate defenses on the two rivers.

  Fort Henry guarded the Tennessee: all of the Unionists knew about that, and Foote and Smith had discerned that it was vulnerable. At Dover, on the Cumberland, twelve miles to the east, the Confederates had Fort Donelson, which was well laid out on high ground and which, if properly manned, was a much stronger place; and about Donelson the Union commanders appear to have known very little. It did not figure greatly in their planning. C. F. Smith wrote that is was “called Fort Gavock, or Fort McGavock, or something else.”37 Halleck’s orders to Grant did not mention it, except to provide that Grant should block the road to Dover so as to keep the people in Fort Henry from getting away: Halleck appears to have confused Dover with Clarksville, thirty miles upstream. In his messages to Buell Halleck sometimes spoke of Fort Henry and sometimes of “Fort Henry and Dover,” the clear implication being that Fort Henry was the important objective and that whatever sort of works the Confederates might have at Dover would stand or fall with the fort on the Tennessee. And now Grant was writing that he would come back to Cairo once Fort Henry was taken, leaving a subordinate to hold the place.

  But all of these limitations would vanish very quickly. The important fact was that the movement had been entrusted to the one soldier in all the West to whom limited objectives were least acceptable.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Between the Rivers

  Halleck’s order to go ahead and take Fort Henry hit Grant’s headquarters with galvanic effect. Colonel Emerson, who had the story from Rawlins, said that staff officers stopped work at their desks “as suddenly as if a one hundred pound bomb had landed in their midst.” Rawlins kicked over a couple of chairs and pounded the walls with his fists. Other officers threw their hats in the air and kicked them as they came down. Grant looked on, amused, and at last suggested that they really did not need to make so much noise that Bishop Polk would hear it, down at Columbus. Then all hands got down to work.1

  Grant’s first step was to write to Smith. He did this immediately after getting Halleck’s telegram, before the receipt of the written orders, and he told Smith that “on Monday next”—that is, on February 3—he would move with fifteen thousand men to seize the Confederate fort. Smith was to take a brigade from Paducah and all of the men who were stationed at Smithland except for the 52nd Illinois and one battalion which Smith was to designate. His men were to carry two days’ rations and forty rounds of ammunition; the boats from Cairo would issue a fresh supply at the place of debarkation. “Very little preparation is necessary for this move,” Grant wrote. “If possible the troops and community should be kept from knowing anything of the design. I am well aware, however, that this caution is entirely unnecessary to you.”2

  On February 1, having been notified by Halleck that his requisitions for horses, mules, wagons and the like could not be filled, but that the usual supply trains could be dispensed with inasmuch as the troops would not be moving far from their steamers, Grant wrote orders for McClernand; McClernand was to hold his troops ready to move on the following evening, taking all camp and garrison equipment, issuing three days’ rations and forage and limiting his transportation to four teams to a regiment. While the expedition was away General E. A. Paine—the same with whom Smith had had so much trouble at Paducah—was to be left in temporary command at Cairo, where he would have eight regiments of infantry, six companies of cavalry, two companies of artillery, and the sick of the entire command. Rawlins got off revised instructions to Smith; he was to take all the troops he had, leaving only enough to hold Paducah and Smithland in case of a sudden raid by the Confederates. Grant sent to Halleck a summary of his dispositions. Then, apparently suspecting that Beauregard (who was highly respected by the Federal commanders) might be about to replace General Polk at Columbus, Grant warned: “More troops should be here soon if a change of commander is expected at Columbus.”3

  Grant’s orders for the expedition sought to guard against the Volunteer vices of straggling and looting which had helped spoil the battle plan at Belmont. No firing of guns was to be permitted, except on order. There was to be no plundering of civilian or captured military property. Company officers were to keep their men in camp, there must be roll calls every evening and morning, and all absentees were to be reported to regimental commanders. Company commanders were to take especial pains to see that rations were not wasted. Regimental commanders would be held strictly accountable for the actions of their regiments, and commanders would be made responsible for the behavior of the individual companies.

  To Buell, at Louisville, the whole business began to be disturbing. Halleck told him that “it is only proposed to take and occupy Fort Henry and Dover, and if possible cut the railroad from Columbus to Bowling Green.” Then Halleck went on to make sage suggestions:

  Keep me informed of your forces and plans, and I will endeavor to assist you as much as possible. If we take Fort Henry and concentrate all available forces there, troops must be withdrawn either from Bowling Green or Columbus to protect the railroads. If the former, you can advance; if the latter, we can take New Madrid [a Missouri town on the Mississippi some miles below Columbus; the Confederates had troops there and were building fortifications, with powerful batteries on Island Number Ten in a bend of the Mississippi a little way upstream] and cut off the river communications with Columbus. But it will take some time to get troops ready to advance far south of Fort Henry.

  All of this jarred Buell into belated thought for the East Tennessee expedition, which he had so long been resisting. To George Thomas, at Somerset, a hundred miles east of Louisville, Buell on February 2 sent a slightly frantic message:

  What now is the condition of roads? How soon could you march, and how long do you suppose it would take you to reach Knoxville? Are your supplies accumulating in sufficient quantity for a start? How is the road in advance likely to be affected by the passage of successive trains? What dependence can you place in supplies along it, particularly forage? Do you hear of any organization of a force there? Where is Crittenden? Are the fugitives getting together again? What progress has been made in improving the road to Somerset? Please answer at once.

  It was too late now. Inexorably, the weight of effort in the West was going to move up the Tennessee and the Cumberland rivers, and, although this was what Buell had been urging, he himself was being edged toward the sidelines. Buell was a good man and he had missed the boat, and by now there was very little he could do about it. He did his best; on February 3 he wrote earnestly to Halleck, setting forth his ideas:

  The destruction of bridges on the Tennessee and Cumberland by gunboats I believe to be feasible. The gunboats can at this stage of the water run past the batteries at night without great risk. This accomplished, the taking and holding Fort Henry and Dover would be comparatively easy. Without that I fear the force you name could not hold both points. It will not do to be driven away.

  He warned Halleck that Confederate reinforcements to the extent of ten thousand men from Bowling Green (not to mention such troops as Beauregard might be bringing from Virginia) would probably be appearing at Fort Henry.

  From
Grant, on the same day, Halleck got a message: “Will be off up the Tennessee at 6 o’clock. Command, 23 regiments in all.”4

  … The thing had been talked about for months. President Lincoln and General McClellan had urged a drive into East Tennessee, Buell and Halleck had been discussing the possibilities of a smash at the Confederate center, a great many days had been lost—and, at last, a job had been given to a man who was ready to move. Grant’s troops were going aboard the transports at Cairo and at Paducah, Foote’s gunboats were paddling heavily against the current, and the dismemberment of the Southern Confederacy was about to begin; while Halleck and Buell were sending messages to one another about co-operation, about demonstrations, about the chances that this general or that might gain especial advantages out of a victory. What nobody could quite grasp was the fact that the important decisions were going to be made in the field. The war was beginning to move and the man who could not move with it might be left behind.

  Messages continued to go back and forth. On February 5 Halleck wrote to tell Buell that his column was moving up the Tennessee, and he asked plaintively: “Can’t you make a diversion in our favor by threatening Bowling Green?” This jarred Buell, who had been assured a few days earlier that his co-operation was not needed, and he replied sharply:

  My position does not admit of diversion. My moves must be real ones, and I shall move at once unless I am restrained by orders concerning other plans. Progress will be slow for me. Must repair the railroad as we advance. It will probably be twelve days before we can be in front of Bowling Green.

  To make Buell more unhappy, McClellan urged him to make demonstrations and told him to help Halleck if he possibly could. Buell told him what he had told Halleck—that he could not make demonstrations (“My moves must be in earnest”) and he explained that Bowling Green was tough: it lay behind a river and it was strongly fortified, and the Rebels had obstructed the forty miles of roads Buell’s troops would have to cover. He added piously that he hoped “General Halleck has weighed his work well,” and Halleck notified McClellan that Fort Henry was being heavily reinforced and said: “Unless I get more forces I may fail to take it, but the attack must help General Buell to move forces forward.” McClellan asked Buell if, in view of everything, it might not be well to make the advance up the rivers “the main line of operations,” and Buell replied that the idea was sound but that the whole venture was hazardous; Halleck, he complained, had begun the move “without appreciation—preparative or concert.” Halleck confessed that this was true, but pleaded that he had been under great pressure. “I had no idea of commencing the movement before the 15th or 20th instant till I received General McClellan’s telegram about the reinforcement sent to Tennessee or Kentucky with Beauregard.” McClellan toyed with the idea of having Buell go down in person to take charge of the move.5

  Meanwhile, Grant’s troops were moving. As Grant’s headquarters boat left the wharf, Rawlins noticed that Grant seemed tense and that he kept looking back at the wharf boat, as if he feared until the last minute that some order of recall might arrive from St. Louis. When the steamer finally went on upstream and Cairo fell out of sight behind, Grant “seemed a new man.” He clapped Rawlins on the shoulder—a surprising act, to Rawlins, for Grant had never behaved so before—and said: “Now we seem to be safe, beyond recall.… We will succeed, Rawlins; we must succeed.” Rawlins and Grant shook hands.6

  Grant had done his best to keep the expedition a secret—Halleck had told him to keep even his own staff officers in the dark about the destination of the force—but military security in the Civil War was usually leaky, and it proved so in this case. Even before the transports left Cairo, the Chicago Tribune man sent off a dispatch announcing that “the grand expedition up the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers is about to start”; he estimated the force at twenty-two thousand men, said that it would attack Forts Henry and Donelson, and added, apparently as an afterthought, that the military authorities were not permitting any dispatches regarding the expedition to be sent. Early on the morning of February 4 another correspondent at Paducah informed his paper’s readers that transports from Cairo loaded with troops “came straggling in here one at a time all of last night and immediately proceeded up the Tennessee.”7 The expedition went plowing on; the water in the Tennessee was high, and along the shore the soldiers could see Negroes and farm stock huddling on bits of high ground. Now and then a thinly-clad, shivering, half-starved white refugee came down to the water’s edge and begged to be taken on board. Usually some boat would send a yawl ashore to rescue the fugitive; Colonel Whittlesey remembered that most of the men thus rescued told wild tales of persecution of Unionist farmers by Confederate outriders. The Negroes who watched from the banks shouted and danced and waved when they saw the Federal troops.8

  By afternoon of February 3 the steamers nosed into the eastern bank of the river four miles below Fort Henry and started to send McClernand’s men ashore. Foote and Grant with the four ironclad gunboats went on up the river to try a preliminary exchange of shots with the Confederate batteries.

  The flood conditions were doing the Confederates no good. Inexpertly sited on low ground, Fort Henry was almost awash. Across the river there were hills overlooking the fort, and here, in recent weeks, the Confederates had begun to build a second work, Fort Heiman, for insurance, but the job was far from finished and Fort Heiman was useless. Torpedoes had been planted in the stream, but the rising waters had torn most of them loose from their moorings and now they were floating harmlessly down the stream, soiled white cylinders tossing on the brown current. Foote had his sailors fish some of them out and stow them on the fantail of his flagship, the Cincinnati, and he and Grant stood by while a gunner undertook to dismantle one and examine its mechanism. A sudden hissing of escaping air from within the container convinced everyone that it was about to explode, and Grant and Foote went swiftly up the ladder to find safety on the upper deck, while the rest of the crowd incontinently jumped overboard. Somehow, Grant beat Foote to the top of the ladder, and the two men looked at one another, somewhat sheepishly, as it became apparent that the torpedo was not going to blow up. Foote mildly asked Grant why he had been in such a hurry, and Grant calmly replied that the Army did not believe in letting the Navy get ahead of it. The examination of the mine was concluded, and the warships went on upstream to open fire.9

  The firing was brief and inconclusive and did very little damage. A few shells were planted in the Confederate works, and one Confederate shell came aboard the gunboat Essex, tearing out a corner of the captain’s cabin. There was no other damage, except that one of the transports, steaming too close to the bank, struck an overhanging tree, lost part of its upper-deck railing, and wrecked its barbershop, “to the great consternation of the proprietor.”10 The feeling-out process concluded, the gunboats returned to the place of disembarkation, and the transports hurried back to Paducah to get another load of soldiers.

  Grant’s plan reflected a little more forethought than had been evident in the head-on approach to Belmont. On the east side of the river he planted the division commanded by John McClernand. McClernand had nine regiments of infantry, two regiments of cavalry and four batteries, and except for a few of the gunners every man in the force came from Illinois. The troops Smith was bringing up from Paducah—mostly Illinoisans, with a sprinkling from Indiana and Missouri—were landed, on arrival, across the river from McClernand’s division. The battle plan required McClernand to advance, cutting the road that led from Fort Henry over to Fort Donelson on the Cumberland so as to keep the garrison from escaping or from being reinforced, and standing by to assault the works if ordered. Smith, at the same time, was to move up the western bank and seize incomplete Fort Heiman, where he could plant guns to shoot into Fort Henry. The gunboats would steam straight up the river, and on signal would open a bombardment. Grant himself, instead of riding ahead in the front line as he had done at Belmont, would stay at the landing to co-ordinate the movements.11

/>   With Smith’s arrival Grant had some fifteen thousand troops. More were coming, for the desperate interchange of messages between St. Louis, Louisville and Washington had brought the promise of reinforcement. Halleck was sending every regiment he could spare to Cairo and Paducah, and Buell was preparing to transfer a brigade from his own army, with more to follow. Once begun, the expedition was drawing power to itself, and the Confederates were deeply worried. In Memphis, a writer for the Memphis Appeal had written that Fort Donelson could be held against any onslaught but that “more solicitude is felt about Fort Henry”; within the fort, he said, water had risen to within a few feet of the magazines, and the heavy guns were only six feet above the river, with the water level still going up. The Confederate commander, Brigadier General Lloyd Tilghman, watched from his battlements while the Federal force took position, and that night held a council of war at which his officers agreed that the fort must fall. Tilghman ordered that only enough men be held in Fort Henry to work the heavy guns; he himself would stay with them but everyone else must go outside the works and be ready to go over to Fort Donelson, where the real stand would be made.12

  Below the fort something more important than anyone present could understand was taking place: an army was coming into existence. What Grant had with him was, up to this moment, simply a collection of individual regiments. Never before had all of them been brought together in one place. The habit of co-ordination had not been born; these regiments had been enlisted, organized and drilled separately, and they had seen so little of the parade ground that, as one veteran remarked afterward, they were to get their baptism of fire “before they learned that the cardinal military sin was to guide left while passing in review.” They had been inadequately drilled, what their commanders knew about handling massed troops was something that would have to be learned on the battlefield, and their weapons were mixed and imperfect—“the refuse guns of Europe, with calibers as varied as the nations they came from.” But as they came ashore from the steamboats and streamed out through the fields to select camping grounds and throw pickets forward they were turning themselves into what would finally become one of the great armies of American history—the informal, individualistic, occasionally unmanageable, but finally victorious Army of the Tennessee.13