Grant Moves South

by Bruce Catton

  You have gained great distinction by your capture of Fort Henry. Everybody recognizes your services. Make your name famous in history by the capture of Fort Donelson and Clarksville. The taking of these places is a military necessity. Delay adds strength to them more than to us. Act quickly, even though only half ready.26

  Grant had seen the importance of the Clarksville bridge as quickly as Halleck did, and since he was on the spot he realized, before the point was clear to anyone in St. Louis, that Fort Donelson would have to be reduced first. Before he got Halleck’s wire he was urging Foote to get some gunboats up the Cumberland for the attack on the Fort, and when Halleck’s message came he replied: “Every effort will be put forth to have Clarksville in a few days.”

  Foote made his arrangements quickly. He left Cairo with gunboats St. Louis, Louisville and Pittsburgh, planning to pick up Carondelet and the wooden gunboats just below Fort Donelson, in the Cumberland; steaming up the Ohio, he stopped at Smith-land to pick up a covey of transports full of reinforcements—six new regiments from Ohio, Illinois and Nebraska, led by the 1st Nebraska’s Colonel John Thayer, who had seen Grant’s chagrin the previous August when Grant lost his command at Ironton. Thayer had moved all the way up to Fort Henry only to be told to go back and come up the Cumberland with Foote’s squadron for escort.27

  On February 12 Grant was ready. He had kept his cavalry moving about the narrow country between the rivers, and McPherson, scouting there, found that there were two roads the army could use—very good roads, he reported, considering the excessive rains that had been falling, once the troops got past the two miles of boggy lowland immediately east of Fort Henry. The artillery and most of the infantry were sent past this intervening swamp to dry ground, bridges were built over the flooded backwaters near the fort, the cavalry kept scouring the country to keep the Rebels at Fort Donelson from sending parties out to obstruct the roads—and early on February 12 Grant notified Halleck: “We start this morning for Fort Donelson in heavy force. Four regiments from Buell’s command and two from St. Louis arrived last night and were sent around by water. I hope to send you a dispatch from Fort Donelson tomorrow.”28 Then his army took off.

  Smith’s division took one road and McClernand’s took the other. Lew Wallace was left to hold Fort Henry with some new regiments; he was to be ready to move on Fort Donelson on short notice, leaving a small garrison behind. Other reinforcements would presumably be up before long; Grant was a little worried about the safety of Fort Henry, fearing a Confederate counter-offensive from Columbus, and he suggested to Halleck that fresh troops be sent up the Tennessee. They could easily march overland to aid in the attack on Fort Donelson if they were needed; meanwhile, said Grant, “there is now appearance that that point” (Fort Henry) “is in danger.”29

  So the Army of the Tennessee (which had not yet acquired that proud title) began the first of its many marches. The roads led over hilly, broken country, thinly populated and covered with timber. There were no large plantations. Halleck had suggested that in perfecting the defenses at Fort Henry Grant might impress slaves from the surrounding countryside, and Grant had to reply that in his immediate neighborhood there seemed to be no slaves at all. The weather had turned warm and the sun was out, the troops were feeling good—they had just achieved a rather startling victory, at practically no cost to themselves—and as they marched the men airily discarded blankets and overcoats as too burdensome to carry. (Why bother with such stuff in the mild winter weather of the South?) Grant and his staff rode at the head of the column. Grant was traveling light; on this day his personal baggage consisted of a toothbrush which he had in his pocket and a fresh collar carried by one of his staff. Surgeon Brinton, who had come up from Cairo a few days earlier, rode beside him, and the surgeon’s horse was a powerful black which insisted on moving ahead. Grant was a little touchy about this—one of his quirks was a strong distaste for letting anyone ride in front of him—and he turned at last to Brinton and said: “Doctor, I believe I command this army, and I think I’ll go first.”30

  By evening of February 12 Smith’s and McClernand’s divisions came together, a little more than two miles short of Fort Donelson. The officers went to work in the dim twilight in the second-growth timber, spreading the two divisions out into line of battle, and toward nightfall the uneven lines went forward, chasing away a handful of Rebel skirmishers and making bivouac not far away from the Confederate lines. Colonel Thayer and his new brigade had not yet arrived, so word was sent back to Lew Wallace to bring his troops forward at once. Grant looked things over and concluded that as soon as the gunboats appeared the attack could begin.

  The plan of attack was relatively simple, modeled on what had been done at Fort Henry. Grant’s troops would form a huge semicircle, enclosing the Confederate camp, preventing all escape and taking positions on which guns could be mounted to bombard the Confederate works. The navy would pound the fort’s water batteries to pieces and take control of the river, and surrender ought to follow very shortly. Grant wanted to get it finished quickly, because he believed that strong Confederate reinforcements were meant to come to Fort Donelson and he wanted to possess the works before these could arrive.

  The battle plan was good enough, but it was based on a couple of misconceptions. In the first place, Fort Donelson had already been heavily reinforced; and in the second place, the fort was much stronger than Fort Henry had been. What had worked so easily in the earlier fight was not going to work at all here, which was something Grant would discover by hard experience.

  News of the loss of Fort Henry had forced the Confederates to recast all of their plans. The news reached Bowling Green on February 7, and Johnston immediately went into conference with Beauregard—who was learning, to his horror, that this Western Army in which he now was second in command was very much weaker than people in Richmond had supposed—and with Hardee, who was in immediate command of the troops at Bowling Green. It was clear to all three generals that the Bowling Green-Columbus line had been fractured, once and for all, and that the only thing to do was to pull out. Johnston would stay with Hardee, and with the troops at Bowling Green they would retire south—to Nashville, perhaps all the way to northern Alabama—and Beauregard was to go to Columbus, to hold on there if he could and if not to fall back on Memphis. Eventually, the two bodies would reunite somewhere along the southern boundary of Tennessee, where they would see what could be done. Meanwhile, it seemed vitally important to make a real stand at Fort Donelson, because if Donelson fell it did not seem that there would be any chance to save Nashville. Reinforcements, therefore, would be sent to Fort Donelson, even though that would mean dividing the undersized army that was now at Bowling Green.

  It is possible that Johnston made a bad decision here, although in plain fact no really good choice was open to him. Long after the war Beauregard argued that if Johnston planned to make a stand at Fort Donelson he should have taken his entire army there, to destroy Grant before Buell’s army could reach the scene. This done, he said, Buell would not have dared to advance, and the line might have been held. By dividing his forces Johnston was risking more of his army than he could afford to lose and was leaving himself with too few men to hold off Buell. But whether Johnston then had enough time to get all of the Bowling Green people over to Dover ahead of Grant is open to some question—and, in any case, Johnston was badly outnumbered and dreadfully pressed, and anything that he did was likely to turn out badly. He was the man appointed to make the decision, and his decision was to send some but not all of his troops to fight Grant on the west bank of the Cumberland. And by the morning of February 13, when Grant’s men were getting up after their first night on the lines, Fort Donelson and its outlying trenches contained rather more than eighteen thousand Confederates, with an oddly matched triumvirate composed of Generals Floyd, Pillow and Buckner in command. Hardee and Johnston, this morning, were evacuating Bowling Green and moving south.31

  The Cumberland River comes up to Dover
from the east, and just south of the town it makes a right-angled turn to flow north toward the Ohio. Fort Donelson was an irregularly-shaped work on top of a high hill on the left bank, at the bend, looking north. On the steep bank of the hill, facing the river, there were two water batteries, well dug in, thirty feet or more above the level of the water; together they mounted only a dozen guns, but at least two of these were powerful, a massive 128-pounder and a rifled 64-pounder. Just north of these batteries there was a backwater, swampy, flooded and impassable, going inland from the Cumberland for a mile or more and preventing any attack on land from the north. The fort itself was not large, but it had been surrounded by an entrenched camp, whose lines, following the hills and ridges, formed a long arc that ran south from the northern backwater and then curved east to meet the flooded lowlands along the Tennessee just south of the town of Dover. These entrenchments were not especially well built, but they were on good ground and timber had been felled in front of them to make an effective abatis. They were strongly held, on February 13, and on that morning there were more Confederates than Unionists present.

  Grant was not ready to make his attack, for Foote had not yet arrived. The gunboat Carondelet, under Commander Henry Walke, did show up while Grant was extending his lines so as to complete the investment of the fort, and Grant sent a message saying that if Walke could open a bombardment “we will be ready to take advantage of every diversion in our favor.”

  Walke was willing, and a little after nine o’clock the ponderous gunboat went splashing forward to extreme long range and began to throw 70-pound and 64-pound shell at the fort. The fort’s heavier guns replied, and the duel went on all the rest of the morning; Carondelet took a massive solid shot through her side, which drove enough splinters around to put twelve seamen out of action; the fort suffered little if at all; and after Walke had withdrawn long enough to send his wounded to a hospital ship he steamed back to the firing line and the bombardment went on most of the afternoon. If it undermined Confederate ability to hold the fort and entrenched camp there was no visible evidence of the fact.32

  On shore, part of the infantry got into action which was no more decisive than the bombardment had been. McClernand, occupying the right of the Union line, had been harassed by Confederate artillery and sharpshooter fire, and he finally sent a brigade forward to dislodge the Rebel gunners from a particularly annoying redoubt on a wooded hill. In this attack there occurred one of the odd mix-ups inevitable in a hastily-organized army. McClernand’s third brigade, consisting of the 17th and 49th Illinois under command of the latter regiment’s colonel, William R. Morrison, was ordered to make the assault, and the 48th Illinois, led by Colonel I. N. Haynie, was sent up in support. As the troops got ready to charge, Colonel Haynie conceived that he ranked Colonel Morrison and felt that the movement was actually under his command. Morrison—feeling that “this was no time to dispute about a question of rank”—offered to conduct the column to the take-off point and then turn command over to Haynie. As the regiments started, he turned to Haynie and said, “Colonel, let’s take it together”; and the troops struggled up a steep rise through a tangle of felled timber. A bullet struck Morrison in the hip and knocked him out of his saddle, settling the command problem definitely; the attack came to a halt when the soldiers found the timber entanglements almost impassable; and after a time the men went streaming back to where they had started from, having suffered substantial losses. On Smith’s front, a brigade seized a bit of high ground, found itself unable to stay, and fell back again. When evening came, progress had been nil, except that the process of enveloping the Confederate camp had been extended. Lew Wallace brought up several regiments from Fort Henry, and these men were assigned to Smith’s division, taking position on Smith’s right, while McClernand edged his command farther over toward the Cumberland. From the town of Dover a road led south toward Nashville, and McClernand sought to cover it so as to cut off the garrison’s last chance to escape by land.33

  As evening came on the weather abruptly turned savage. It had been mild and pleasant; now a north wind drove dark clouds across the sky and a cold rain began to fall, turning presently to sleet and snow. All along McClernand’s front the men who had so incontinently thrown away blankets and overcoats found themselves making the most cheerless of bivouacs in a driving blizzard, with three inches of snow all around and sharp gusts of wind chilling them. They were within close range of the Confederate works, and fires were forbidden; the only food was hardtack and coffee, and because there could be no fires the coffee could not be prepared; tents were back on the transports somewhere, and in many commands the men stood to arms all night long simply because it was impossible to lie down. Sporadic picket firing continued in the windy darkness. Colonel Oglesby wrote that the men were subjected to “one of the most persecuting snow storms ever known in this country,” and said that by morning most of them were “nearly torpid from the intense cold.”34

  To Grant, making his headquarters in a log farmhouse near the center of the lines, there finally did come welcome news. Around midnight Foote came up the river with ironclads St. Louis, Louisville and Pittsburgh, followed by two of the wooden gunboats, and these anchored with Carondelet a few miles below the fort. The naval bombardment that had been a key part of the battle plan could take place next day.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Unconditional Surrender

  The high wind put little whitecaps on the flood waters of the Cumberland on the morning of February 14, and kicked snow flurries along the surrounding hilltops, where half-frozen men beat the frost out of folds in their clothing and tried to limber their stiffened arms and legs. Three miles below the fort, on the river, Andrew Foote’s gunboats lay at anchor, black and squat and menacing, working details swarming over the decks to prepare for action. Somewhere astern were numerous Union transports, puffing vast clouds of steam and smoke as they nosed into the west bank of the river to disembark reinforcements and supplies. The great military machine that reached so far—to St. Louis, to the Lakes, to Pittsburgh, to all the towns and farms of the West and beyond the mountains to the Eastern Seaboard as well—it was in full movement at last, and the weight of it was coming down on the improvised landing places along the riverbank, where muddy roads went roundabout toward the Federal camp facing Fort Donelson.

  The night had been tough, and none of the men who lived through it ever forgot it; to the end of the war they remembered it as one of the worst trials they had had to endure as soldiers. As they huddled around smudgy little campfires to boil coffee—when light came, the night-time rule against campfires was discarded—they compared notes on what they had been through. Some of the men confessed that the only thing that kept them alive was the thought that the Rebels were just as cold as they were: just as cold, and, because they were used to a warmer climate, probably suffering more. Men of the 12th Iowa recalled that they spent most of the night trotting around in circles just to keep from freezing, with regimental officers improvising strange new tactical commands: “By companies, in a circle, double-quick, march!” Skirmishers and pickets renewed the exchange of fire that had never really ceased during the night. Little harm was done by this firing, and yet the uproar swept the ridges and the hollows with the clamor of battle to stir the pulses of men who had never before been in action.1

  Grant was recalled as having been in an optimistic and slightly humorous mood. Two Illinois soldiers who had been wounded in McClernand’s abortive assault the day before said that as they came limping out of the fight they trudged past Grant, who noticed how battered they appeared and said: “You look disfigured—been hunting bear?” They replied that they had the animal treed and would bring him down next day, and Grant chuckled and ordered a staff officer to get the men to the nearest surgeon. One of the wounded men, who nursed a shattered left arm, lingered to tell the general how he had kept on fighting even though unable to reload his musket; his comrade had loaded for two, and he himself had been able to fire so eff
ectively that a Confederate fieldpiece which was his chosen target fell silent. Grant heard him out, then asked sharply: “You didn’t hurt anyone, did you?” The soldier gaped at him, then saw a twinkle in his eye and replied: “Why, General, I dunno—I reckon I just scared ’em and they fainted.”2

  Surgeon Brinton said that Grant had been highly confident that Fort Donelson would presently be taken. He had not ordered his encircling troops to throw up breastworks, and he seemed positive that the Confederates, having been nearly surrounded, would stay meekly in their works. Late in the evening, Grant seems to have considered the notion of a sudden night attack. Brinton said Grant told him: “Doctor, if I was a little more assured of my men I would storm with every man at 12 tonight, but I am not sure of them in a night melee.” Grant unquestionably was confident, although it is doubtful whether he gave any serious consideration to a night attack.

  To Halleck, he set forth the situation as it looked to him on the morning of February 14: “Our troops now invest the works at Fort Donelson. The enemy have been driven into their works at every point. A heavy abatis all around prevents carrying the works by storm at present. I feel every confidence of success and the best feeling prevails among the men.” To General Cullum, at Cairo, Grant wrote that it looked very much as if there would be a regular siege, and he called for more artillery ammunition. “The ground is very broken,” he wrote, and “the fallen timber extending far out from the breastworks, I fear the result of an attempt to carry the place by storm with raw troops. I feel great confidence, however, of ultimately reducing the place.”3