Grant Moves South

by Bruce Catton

  February 5 was the day of preparation; February 6 was the day for the big attack. It rained all night, and McClernand’s tentless troops had an uncomfortable time of it; at 11 o’clock in the morning they took off, floundering along muddy roads to take their assigned positions. On his flagship, Foote took note of the execrable marching conditions and warned Grant: “General, I shall have the fort in my possession before you get into your position.” On the west bank, Smith got his men moving forward, and around noon Foote’s gunboats raised their anchors and went steaming up the river to open fire.

  Foote had four ironclads—all he could find crews for, at the moment—and he took them on in line abreast. Only their bows were well armored; they would fight head-on, using their bow guns, shielding their weakly protected sides. Foote had done his best to whip his green hands into shape. Gun crews had been warned that their fire must be accurate rather than rapid. As a good New Englander, Foote abhorred waste, and he addressed his crews just before this advance got under way, warning them that “every charge you fire from one of these guns costs the government about eight dollars.” Finally, coming within range, the flagship opened fire—her first three shots, an irreverent junior noted, fell short, for a net loss of twenty-four dollars—and then the whole line opened. Bringing up the rear, out of harm’s way but ready to lend a hand if needed, were the old wooden gunboats Tyler, Lexington and Conestoga.14

  The fight was unexpectedly brief and easy. Fort Henry was all but indefensible. Tilghman had been so impressed with its vulnerable layout that he wrote that “the history of military engineering affords no parallel to this case”; and although his men did their best there could be just one outcome. The Confederate fire was accurate enough, and the gunboats had been hit fifty-nine times. Heavy shot at times broke the iron plating, and an officer who saw one shot strike the flagship said that the Cincinnati’s side-timbers were splintered and sent flying as if the vessel had been struck by a bolt of lightning. No serious damage was done, however, except to the Essex. Here a bolt cracked through the armor of the casemate, decapitated a sailor, and smashed on to blow up a boiler. Scalding steam filled the gunboat, twenty-nine men were scalded, quartermaster and pilot died at the wheel, and Essex drifted off downstream, out of action.

  Meanwhile, Foote kept on closing the range, and the gunboats’ fire became increasingly effective. One of Tilghman’s most powerful guns exploded, another was put out of action when spiked by an accident to its own priming wire, and Federal fire smashed a couple of 32-pounders, sending iron fragments all about and disabling every man in both gun-crews. Tilghman before long found himself with just four guns that could be fought; Foote’s gunboats were within 300 yards of the fort, their projectiles were coming through the earthen embankments “as readily as a ball from a Navy Colt would pierce a pine board,” and the day was obviously lost. Tilghman ordered all of his infantry to take off for Dover, and Foote’s prediction was proved correct; the bad roads had delayed McClernand so much that more than two thousand of the Confederate garrison got away clean and tramped overland to the Cumberland. Six fieldpieces they were taking bogged down in the insufferable mire and had to be abandoned, but the men themselves escaped. Tilghman struck his flag, the sailors on the gunboats came out on deck to give three cheers, and a cutter from flagship Cincinnati went over to the fort; so high was the water that the boat simply rowed inside the enclosure. A Confederate officer gloomily admitted that if the fight had been delayed forty-eight hours no firing would have been needed: the river itself would have done the job by drowning the fort.

  Tilghman came aboard Foote’s flagship and made formal surrender. His garrison by now consisted of fewer than one hundred men, and his casualties had been moderate.15

  Tilghman wrote a brief report next day, which was sent through the lines to his Confederate superiors with Grant’s permission; in it, Tilghman took “great pleasure in acknowledging the courtesy and consideration shown by Brig. Gen. U. S. Grant and Commander Foote.” One of his officers wrote that Grant seemed to be “a modest, amiable, kindhearted but resolute man,” and said that Grant quickly rebuked an officious Federal officer who scolded a Confederate for destroying confidential papers at the time of the surrender. The Confederate officers dined with Grant and his staff on the headquarters transport, while waiting transfer to a northern prison camp, and two young Confederates got tipsy and talked too loudly and defiantly; an older Confederate remembered gratefully how Grant quietly had the men escorted to a cabin until they sobered up, explaining that he did it simply because he was afraid that some equally tipsy Union officers might make trouble for them.16

  Foote had made his boast good. He had taken the fort before the Army had even got into position. Except for the tragedy on Essex, his own losses had been inconsiderable. The interior of Fort Henry looked like chaos, with wrecked guns and gun carriages strewed all about, with here and there bloody fragments of human bodies. No one took the time to realize that the river itself and the bad design and inadequate equipment with which Fort Henry had been endowed might have been largely responsible; the moral seemed to be that earthen forts simply could not stand up to a naval attack which was resolutely pushed home. Navy stock went up to dizzying heights.

  Grant and Foote understood and liked one another, and a situation which might have led to a great deal of inter-service jealousy and rivalry passed off quietly. Grant came up the river promptly, once the fort surrendered, established garrisons in flooded Fort Henry and incomplete Fort Heiman, and ordered the bulk of his troops reassembled on the east side of the river. Then he got off a wire to Halleck:

  “Fort Henry is ours. The gunboats silenced the batteries before the investment was completed. I think the garrison must have commenced the retreat last night. Our cavalry followed, finding two guns abandoned in the retreat.”

  Then—whether with or without reflecting deeply on the matter—he added a final sentence that turned out to be one of the most momentous promises in all the war:

  “I shall take and destroy Fort Donelson on the 8th and return to Fort Henry.”17

  It is generally assumed that in making this statement Grant went far beyond his orders and converted what had been planned as a strictly limited blow into an offensive of unlimited potentialities and consequences. That the decision to move at once on Fort Donelson did have that effect is undeniable. Halleck and Buell and McClellan might continue to send messages back and forth to one another as long as they pleased; from this moment the major Federal effort in this theater of war was going to be an all-out offensive up the Tennessee and the Cumberland and no one could change it. Yet Grant, all things considered, was not greatly exceeding his instructions. He had been told, to be sure, simply to take Fort Henry, and this had been done; but up until now all of the Federal commanders had assumed that Fort Henry was stronger and more important than Fort Donelson, the mission had been described at various times either as a thrust at Fort Henry or as a thrust at Fort Henry “and Dover,” and Donelson obviously was considered as little more than an outwork or dependency of the installation on the Tennessee. Halleck himself, who was never in the least reluctant to chide a subordinate for departing from the letter of his orders, took the news in his stride, notifying McClellan that Fort Henry had been taken and adding, more or less casually, that Grant would now go on to attack Fort Donelson “at Dover, on the Cumberland.” (The fort was so little known that it had to be identified.) And Grant appears to have looked on the move as routine.

  When he wrote to Halleck on February 6, not long after sending his brief wire, Grant went into some details about the fight and its results, and then spoke of Fort Donelson in the manner of one who mentions a relatively unimportant detail.

  I shall take and destroy Fort Donelson on the 8th [he wrote] and return to Fort Henry with the force employed, unless it looks feasible to occupy that place with a small force that could retreat easily to the main body. I shall regard it more in the light of an advance guard than as a permanen
t post.

  It seems clear that both he and Halleck looked upon this step as just part of the mopping-up process.18

  Take and destroy Fort Donelson on February 8 Grant could not, as things worked out, so much as begin to do. It might be part of the mopping-up process, but there were a great many things to do before this job could be undertaken, and Grant—who was commanding a much larger army than any he had ever seen before: he had proudly written to Mary that his army was larger than the one Scott led in Mexico—was to learn that getting such an army in motion could be a laborious business. The casual way in which Grant originally regarded the venture comes out in a remark he made to a newspaper correspondent who, the day after Fort Henry surrendered, came in to headquarters to say good-by; as far as the reporter could see the mission had been accomplished and he himself was going to go back to Cairo.

  “You had better wait a day or so,” Grant warned him. When the newspaperman asked why, Grant said: “I am going over to attack Fort Donelson tomorrow.” The newspaperman asked him if he knew how strong it was, and Grant replied: “Not exactly, but I think we can take it; at all events, we can try.”19

  It was easier to say it than to do it. To begin with, the gunboats were gone, all but ironclad Carondelet, which had been left as a guard ship. Foote had taken the other three ironclads back to Cairo for repairs, the three wooden vessels had gone on up the Tennessee in obedience to Halleck’s original orders, and without the Navy the move against Fort Donelson would be crippled. The very fact that the victory at Fort Henry had come so easily dominated men’s thinking. The gunboats had beaten the fort into helplessness without any assistance from the Army, and it seemed likely that they could do the same thing at Fort Donelson. The Army of course must be there to invest the place and round up the garrison, but the Navy could probably compel the Confederates to give up. Confederate Albert Sidney Johnston, as a matter of fact, felt much the same way about it. In his message to the War Department announcing the loss of Fort Henry, he wrote: “The slight resistance at Fort Henry indicates that the best open earthworks are not reliable to meet successfully a vigorous attack of iron-clad gunboats, and, although now supported by a considerable force, I think the gunboats of the enemy will probably take Fort Donelson without the necessity of employing their land force in cooperation.”20

  There were chores to perform at Fort Henry. There was much captured property (described by an enthusiastic newspaperman as “a vast deal of plunder”) to be possessed and itemized, and the imperfectly disciplined troops were tampering with it. Grant felt compelled to issue an order remarking that “the pilfering and marauding disposition shown by some of the men of this command has determined the general commanding to make an example of some one,” and harsh punishments were ordered; if individual thieves could not be identified, company or regimental commanders would themselves be punished. It was also necessary to crack down on the numerous regimental officers who preferred the comforts of the transports to the hardships of camp life, and colonels were ordered to let no officer go aboard any steamboat except on specific duty. On top of everything else the rain continued to fall, Fort Henry was all but surrounded by water, and the nearby roads were, as everybody had been saying, nearly impassable. The day after the fort surrendered Grant took his staff and part of a cavalry regiment and rode forward to within a mile or so of the outworks at Fort Donelson, just to get acquainted with the terrain. This, he said afterward, was not as risky as it might sound. He knew that General Pillow was in command at Fort Donelson, and Grant “judged that with any force, no matter how small, I could march up to within gunshot of any intrenchments he was given to hold.” (Actually, as Grant discovered, General John B. Floyd, former Secretary of War, was in top command at Donelson, with Pillow ranking second; but Floyd was not a trained soldier, Pillow was the more forceful character, and Grant considered that Pillow was the one who would be in effective control.)21

  The three wooden gunboats that went up the Tennessee were making a spectacular raid, underlining the importance of the victory that had been won. Immediately after the fort was surrendered the warships started up the Tennessee, under Lieutenant Commander S. L. Phelps; the sailors seized the railroad bridge above the fort, finding it an imposing structure twelve hundred feet long, with several hundred feet of trestle work at either end and with a swinging draw in the middle. A number of rails were taken up, a considerable amount of military property was seized, three steamboats were burned, and another boat loaded with ammunition was destroyed by shellfire. It blew up with a prodigious crash, breaking windows and fastenings on the gunboats at a distance of half a mile and destroying a house on the bank—a house, unfortunately, occupied by a good Union man. Phelps kept on going, took possession of a half-finished Confederate gunboat, went all the way across Tennessee and got at last to Florence, Alabama, at the foot of Muscle Shoals. The people of Florence were alarmed, and a deputation came aboard Phelps’s boat to beg that the wives and daughters of honest townfolk not be molested. Phelps wrote that “I told them that we were neither ruffians nor savages,” seized three steamboats, burned six more (all, he noted, loaded with supplies for the Rebel Army), and then leisurely came back down the river, dispersed an encampment of Confederate recruits, got the incomplete Confederate gunboat in shape to move, and triumphantly brought it back to Fort Henry, along with 250,000 feet of “the best quality of ship and building timber” and a good deal of iron plating. He reported that there seemed to be many loyal people in West Tennessee, and in northern Mississippi and Alabama; large crowds gathered at landings to cheer the United States flag, and these repeated demonstrations, he said, gave the Navy men “a higher sense of the sacred character of our present duties.” There were, he admitted, many towns of a different temper, in which men, women and children unanimously took to the woods when the Union gunboats appeared, but on balance he believed that the loyalists were in the majority.22

  While Grant was organizing the attack on Fort Donelson, things behind the lines were moving. Back in St. Louis, Halleck was continuing to funnel troops down to Paducah, and some of these were coming up to Fort Henry. By February 11, the day after Phelps and his gunboats returned from their foray up the river, four fresh regiments and a battalion of sharpshooters reached camp to be formed into a new brigade for Smith’s division, and more troops were known to be on the way. Halleck sent his Chief of Staff, Brigadier General George W. Cullum, to Cairo, to superintend the forwarding of recruits and supplies; he also pulled General Sherman out of the St. Louis training camp assignment which Sherman had been filling and sent him on up to Paducah, to take command there. What would finally become the enormously effective partnership of Grant and Sherman dates from this time.23

  Halleck had also given Grant another man who was to play a large part in the activities of the Army of the Tennessee—Lieutenant Colonel James B. McPherson, an engineer officer who was assigned to accompany the Fort Henry movement. Cullum had written to Smith that McPherson was to be “engineer of the expedition,” and praised him as “a very clever young officer”; McPherson seems to have been under instructions to look things over carefully and give Halleck a confidential appraisal of Grant.24 He and Grant fitted together harmoniously. He would become one of Grant’s most trusted subordinates, a man whom Sherman finally considered the most promising soldier in the Army, commander at last of the Army of the Tennessee; he would die in battle in front of Atlanta in 1864, and hard-boiled Sherman would weep unashamedly at the news.

  Foote’s three ironclads reached Cairo on February 7, and people on the waterfront saw the leading gunboat come steaming in with a Confederate flag flying upside down just below the national flag. There was cheering and rejoicing, and the Chicago Tribune correspondent wrote that the expedition had accomplished “one of the most complete and signal victories in the annals of the world’s warfare.”25 Foote prodded the shipyard to get his damaged squadron into shape. Essex needed extensive repairs, Cincinnati had been somewhat splintered, and Foote
was not sure that the Navy was ready to play a major part in the attack on Fort Donelson.

  But events were applying their own pressure, and what had been begun had to go on and on until it was finished.

  Far off at St. Louis, in department headquarters, Halleck suddenly became very impatient. He really knew very little about the situation on the two rivers, but a glance at the map was enough to tell him that the conquest of Fort Henry could not stand by itself. With Fort Henry taken, Fort Donelson had to be attacked; it had hardly figured in the original calculations, but now it was of immediate importance—because, thirty miles up the Cumberland from Fort Donelson, there was a town named Clarksville, and at Clarksville the famous railroad line which connected the two wings of the Confederate Army crossed the Cumberland and went northeast to Bowling Green. If the Clarksville bridge that carried that railroad could be destroyed, communication between the two wings of Johnston’s army would be broken, and on February 8 Halleck sent Grant word to go on to Clarksville and destroy that bridge if possible. On February 10 Halleck sent a more insistent dispatch: “If possible destroy the bridge at Clarksville. Run any risk to accomplish this.”

  Halleck did not often advise a subordinate to “run any risk” in order to do something, and the unwonted urgency of this message shows the importance which the railroad bridge held in his thinking. But because he had no real information about the Rebel installations and intentions at Fort Donelson, Halleck conceived of this thrust at Clarksville as a hit-and-run raid; he told Grant to entrench thoroughly at Fort Henry, shifting guns about so that he could resist any Confederate counterattack; picks and shovels were being sent up the Tennessee, and reinforcements would follow quickly. On February 11 Halleck wrote that “some of the gunboats should be sent up the Cumberland with the least possible delay,” adding that “it is of vital importance that Fort Donelson be reduced immediately.” He told Cullum to “push forward the Cumberland expedition with all possible dispatch.… Time now is everything for us. Don’t delay one instant.” Then Halleck sent a message to Foote: