Grant Moves South

by Bruce Catton

  Clearly enough, Grant’s concentration on what he was going to do to the opposing army kept him from thinking very much about what that army might do to him. Up to this point his chief worry seems to have been the possibility that Johnston might send more troops in to relieve the Confederates at Fort Donelson, and he wanted to get some of his own men all the way over to the Cumberland above the town of Dover in order to prevent this. The lay of the land, however, was against him, with high water in the Cumberland making the low ground impassable, and to Halleck he confessed that “it was impossible, in consequence of the high water and deep sloughs, to throw a force in above Dover to cut off their reinforcements. Any force sent for such a purpose would be entirely away from support from the main body.”4 Nevertheless, he remained hopeful. With the help of Foote and the gunboats it ought to be possible to force the troops in Fort Donelson to surrender before any Confederate supports could arrive.

  Foote would do his part. That morning, on his four ironclads, men were busy shifting chains, lumber, bags of coal and other materials to the upper decks of the warships, as a defense against plunging shot. The ironclads would steam up to the works in line abreast, as at Fort Henry, with the two wooden gunboats hanging back to do what they could at long range. If the Confederate water batteries could be silenced the whole river front could be sealed off, and the place might come into Union possession as simply as Fort Henry had done. Preparations took most of the morning, and the noon hour was well past when the ungainly “turtles” began splashing laboriously against the current, driving on to action stations. Foote himself was in and out of the pilothouse on the flagship, St. Louis. He had a megaphone with him, and when one of his ships failed to keep position he would hail it with the command: “Steam up!” When the Confederate works were still about a mile away, St. Louis opened fire, followed by the others. Foote was a stickler for accuracy, and when Carondelet opened rapid fire (at the expense, thought the Flag Officer, of effective gun-laying) the megaphone came into use again, and Carondelet was told to fire more slowly.

  Trying to fit this fight to the Fort Henry pattern turned out to be a big mistake. The Confederates had plenty of guns bearing on the river, but most of them were comparatively light, outranged and outweighed by the powerful naval ordnance; at long range Foote could hit the Confederates at very little risk to himself, but when he got closer he increased the effectiveness of the Southern guns, and as the range closed from a mile to five hundred yards and then to four hundred and less, the gunboats took a fearful pounding. Closing the range increased the naval gunners’ problems, because the Fort Donelson batteries were high above the level of the river; at close range the gunboats consistently overshot their targets, and some of Foote’s shell arched clear across the Confederate camp and came down in the Union lines beyond. Foote’s guns did knock the earthen parapets to pieces, but the Confederate guns remained fully operational; nothing short of a direct hit would put a piece out of action, and once the inexperienced Southern gun crews saw that the heavy Union fire was not really hurting them they cheered and stuck to their work bravely.

  The Confederates were pounding the gunboats hard. Decks were slippery with blood, carpenters were busy plugging shot holes along the waterlines, fire-control parties were dousing flames in the woodwork, and flagship St. Louis received fifty-nine hits. One of these demolished her pilothouse, killed the pilot, wounded Foote, and put the steering gear out of action, and at almost the same moment Louisville’s tiller ropes were shot away; the two big steamers ponderously swung about, end for end, in the current, and began to drift down out of action. Carondelet and Pittsburgh closed in to cover them, collided, three of the fleet’s four pilots were down, Carondelet was struck along the waterline so many times she was almost in a sinking condition—and eventually all four vessels went back downstream out of range, with fifty-four casualties and a humiliating defeat to show for their pains. Jubilant Confederates capered and yelled at the sight, and it was painfully obvious that what had beaten Fort Henry was never going to beat Fort Donelson.5

  Grant’s headquarters were in a little farmhouse owned by a Mrs. Crisp, situated perhaps five hundred yards behind C. F. Smith’s battle line and six miles or more, by bad roads, from the downstream landing on the Cumberland. From a point near the river, Grant witnessed the repulse of the gunboats; returning to headquarters, he ordered the new troops which had disembarked from their transports just before Foote went into action formed into a division and placed under Lew Wallace’s command. This division, green soldiers under a green general they had never seen before, was put into the middle of the Union line, and McClernand moved farther to the right in an attempt to cover the half-flooded lowlands to the south of the town of Dover.

  Across these lowlands ran a road which led from Dover to Clarksville and ultimately to Nashville—a possible escape route for the Confederates in the Fort Donelson lines, if the Confederate command chose to use it. If Foote had been able to knock out the water batteries and get his gunboats upstream that road would have been blocked by his guns; but since he had been beaten, the road would be open unless McClernand could seal it off with his troops. McClernand’s shift to the right was designed to accomplish this, but he had much ground to cover and his lines were stretched thin, especially on his extreme right, where the Clarksville road ran. Whether Grant realized, on the night of February 14, that his weakness in this area invited a Confederate counterattack, or whether this was something he planned to attend to the next day, is not quite clear. One thing that may have influenced his thinking was the fact that the Confederate position was potentially very strong; given a few days, Floyd and Pillow might (as Grant saw it) make the place almost impregnable. Grant began to fear that he would have to bring up tents and put on a regular siege, but—as he himself confessed later—he “had no idea that there would be any engagement on land unless I brought it on myself.”6

  The night of February 14 was gloomy enough, in the Union camp. The weather remained bad, and when the newly arrived 20th Ohio reached the downstream landing, at twilight, and its Colonel Charles Whittlesey rode off to report to the Commanding General, he found the Crisp farmhouse looking almost deserted. Whittlesey hitched his horse to a peach tree in the yard and went inside, to a shadowy room where a handful of officers huddled about a fire in the hearth. A man whom Whittlesey described as “the smallest and least noticeable” of the lot was sitting at a table, dictating to an aide who wrote by the light of a tallow dip. It developed that this small officer was General Grant. Whittlesey went over and presented himself. He had recently seen Grant’s father and sisters and he had messages from them, which he delivered verbally. Grant listened without comment; then, learning that Whittlesey was about to return to his regiment at the steamboat landing, he asked Whittlesey to tell Foote that a good many of his heavy-duty shells were coming over the Confederate works and exploding inside the Union lines.7

  Whittlesey rode back to his troops. Early in the morning of February 15 a message from Foote reached headquarters. Foote’s wound made it impossible for him to ride a horse or to move about with any comfort, and since it was clearly necessary for Commanding General and Flag Officer to have a conference, Foote asked that Grant come to the flagship at the downstream landing. This Grant was quite willing to do, and shortly after dawn on February 15, while the shivering troops were dragging themselves out of their uncomfortable bivouacs—and with an ominous amount of marching and grouping of troops going on inside the Confederate lines—Grant started to ride to the steamboat landing. Division commanders—McClernand, Wallace and Smith—were instructed not to bring on an engagement in his absence. The 20th Ohio was plodding up to the Union camp this morning, and its soldiers remembered meeting Grant, accompanied by a single orderly, as he rode down to consult with Foote.

  From across the woods and ravines came the sound of musketry, with the heavier crash of fieldpieces now and then distinguishable. If this made any especial impression on Grant’s consciousness
there is no record of it. There had been a good deal of intermittent skirmishing and artillery dueling throughout each day ever since the armies came into contact; no one at a distance from the field seems to have suspected that what was going on this morning was any different from the ordinary routine.8

  On the flagship Grant got bad news. Foote believed he should take his entire fleet back to Cairo or Mound City for repairs, and he urged Grant to entrench and prepare to hold his position until the fleet could return, which would be in ten or fifteen days. This was not at all to Grant’s liking, and he asked Foote if he could not remain on the scene, damaged ships or no, while the army finished the job. In the end, something of a compromise was worked out. Foote would take the two worst-damaged boats downstream for repairs, leaving the others to give what support they could. Grant, on his part, would entrench at least a part of his position, and would wait for reinforcements before trying to fight for a decision. Orders were given to have entrenching tools unloaded from a transport at the landing and forwarded to the troops. Somewhere around noon the conference ended, and Grant got into a rowboat to get over to the landing and return to the field. As he got out of the boat Captain William S. Hillyer, one of his staff officers, came riding to the landing, white-faced; during Grant’s absence the Confederates had struck a powerful surprise blow on McClernand’s position, and the Union Army was close to outright disaster.9

  The strategic motives that led the Confederates to mass troops at Fort Donelson in the first place have never been entirely clear, but by the evening of February 14—which is to say at the conclusion of Foote’s unfortunate assault with the gunboats—the Confederate commanders in the fort knew perfectly well what had to be done next. They had to save their army, which meant an immediate retreat. That they had just beaten off the gunboats made no difference; they saw the situation just as Grant saw it—Fort Donelson was a trap, and the Confederate Army would be lost if it stayed there. Somehow, the encircling Union line must be cracked; the road south must be opened at all costs so that the Confederates could get out and rejoin Albert Sidney Johnston, who had evacuated Bowling Green and was believed to be on the road to Nashville. During the evening Confederates Floyd, Pillow and Buckner laid their plans, and at dawn their troops were massed for an attack.

  The Confederate plan was simple and logical. With reduced force, Buckner would hold the right and center of the line. With perhaps ten thousand men, Pillow would march out, crush the end of McClernand’s line, and drive the Union right back on its center. This would open the road and the Confederate Army could get away. The fort itself would of course be lost, but men and material might be saved. If Pillow’s assault succeeded, Buckner would move out to act as flank guard while the retreat proceeded. By daylight on February 15 everything was set and the move got under way.

  McClernand’s right was held by Dick Oglesby’s brigade—five Illinois regiments, with two batteries and a handful of cavalry, and with John McArthur’s three regiments, borrowed from Smith’s division, somewhere in support. The chilled soldiers were preparing to fall in for breakfast when there was a sudden spatter of firing on the picket lines; then the pickets came tumbling back into camp, calling that the woods in front were all a-swarm with armed Rebels. Part of the brigade got into line just in time to receive a heavy volley from Pillow’s advance. The attack was beaten off for the moment, but the Confederates reformed and came on again, and a number of extremely tough dismounted cavalry from Bedford Forrest’s command struck the Unionists in flank and rear. More and more of Pillow’s troops came into line, and all of McClernand’s front was under pressure. Musketry fire rose to a high pitch—Lew Wallace remembered that from a distance it sounded “as if a million men were beating empty barrels with iron hammers”—and the Federals had to give ground.

  McArthur’s regiments had taken position the evening before, with an imperfect understanding of the lay of the land and the position of the enemy. Now they were fighting grimly with Forrest’s cavalry, and heavy battle smoke streaked the hollows and clearings; the soggy snow that covered the ground was stained with red, as more and more men were shot; ammunition was running low, and soldiers went scurrying about to collect cartridge boxes from the fallen. By ten o’clock the whole right of the Union line was giving way, Oglesby’s men were falling back to the west and McArthur’s bewildered troops—fighting grimly, and sustaining heavy losses—were falling back with them. The Confederate plan was working. The door to the road south was swinging open wider and wider.10

  McClernand sent a desperate message to Lew Wallace, who held the Union center, asking for help. Wallace referred the message to Grant’s headquarters, but Grant was not there and in his absence his staff either lacked the power or lacked the initiative to act. Desperately pressed, McClernand repeated his plea, and Wallace finally shot a brigade cross-lots to help him, but the guide who tried to lead the brigade into position lost his way and the new troops came under heavy fire from some of Oglesby’s men and, in the end, were involved in the reteat. The 20th Ohio, which had seen Grant riding to the river at dawn, came up behind the lines, noticed Colonel John A. Logan waiting with a painful shoulder wound for a surgeon’s attention, and watched a demoralized colonel gallop for the rear with the cry that all of the infantry had been cut to pieces and that the Rebels were going to crush the entire army. A Chicago battery galloped furiously toward the front, upsetting one gun in a narrow woodland road, and the Ohio soldiers filed off among the trees and opened fire in what was believed to be the direction of the enemy.11 The whole of the position McClernand had been holding was gone, and now Wallace sent Colonel Thayer’s brigade into action, pushing the men forward through a cloud of disorganized fugitives. Wallace and McClernand paused in a clearing to compare notes—and just then Grant came riding up, a sheaf of papers in one hand.

  From the broken country in front of the Generals a dense cloud of smoke was slowly fanning off into shreds. Grant returned the salutes which his subordinates offered, heard McClernand growl: “This army wants a head.” Grant curtly replied: “It seems so,” and then waited for them to tell him what had happened.12

  What they had to say was grim enough. McClernand had lost 1500 men, and the survivors of his displaced division were desperately trying to rally behind Wallace’s thin line. McArthur had been driven back with 400 casualties, and his men too were striving to regroup. Smith’s division was too far to the left to come to the rescue. For whatever it might be worth the Confederates had broken the constricting Union ring and the escape route to the south was wide open; wide open, too, seemed to be the road to the Union rear, the road to final defeat of the Union cause in Tennessee. The Rebel yell was rising, jeering and triumphant, over smoky woods and littered fields where blue bodies lay helpless in the snow: and here was Sam Grant, one-time Captain of Regular Infantry, Brigadier of Volunteers now by virtue of the friendship of a prairie Congressman—stubby Sam Grant, sitting on his horse with a sheaf of documents in one fist, and what he said in answer to this tale of disaster would determine what would happen to him and to the Western war itself.

  As always, he seemed unemotional, except that the flesh across his cheekbones grew red. Wallace remembered that Grant crumpled the papers in his hand convulsively, but when he spoke his voice was calm.

  “Gentlemen,” he said, “the position on the right must be retaken.”13

  There was a lull in the fighting, just then. The Confederates, who had swept everything before them, had fallen back—to regroup, to mount a new attack, to retreat, to find some food or just to catch their breath. All about the Generals, Union soldiers were standing bewildered, talking to one another, trying to figure out what they were supposed to do next. A few were hunting around for discarded ammunition boxes, to get a fresh supply of cartridges, and they were gabbling that the dead Rebels they had seen carried full haversacks, as if they did not propose to return to their camp for food. Word of what the men were saying came to Grant, and after he had spent a moment sizing t
hings up he turned to Colonel J. D. Webster of his staff and expressed his opinion.

  “Some of our men are pretty badly demoralized,” he said, “but the enemy must be more so, for he has attempted to force his way out but has fallen back; the one who attacks first now will be victorious, and the enemy will have to be in a hurry if he gets ahead of me.”

  It seemed to Grant that the Confederates had put everything they had into the assault on McClernand. If that was the case, the Confederate right must be very lightly held; let Smith, then, make an immediate attack, breaking the network of trenches and rifle pits in his front, and compelling the Confederates to turn and protect their own rear. Wallace was to put in line all the men he could lay hands on, and when the guns had been rolled forward to prepare the way he was to counterattack; meanwhile, McClernand’s broken fragments must be rallied so that they could strengthen Wallace’s blow. Meanwhile, too, an aide must gallop off down the muddy, winding road to the steamboat landing; crippled or not, the gunboats must lend a hand here, and even a show of force on the river might help the infantry in its work. On land and on the water, the Federals would immediately attack with everything they had.14

  To everyone who saw him at this moment Grant seemed completely calm and unworried, and afterward men believed that the tide of battle turned the moment he gave the order … “the position on the right must be retaken.” Actually, Grant was far from calm. His full awareness of his peril, concealed from everyone else, is apparent in the wording of a hasty note which he scribbled and sent off to Foote: