by Bruce Catton
If all the gunboats that can will immediately make their appearance to the enemy it may secure us a victory. Otherwise all may be defeated. A terrible conflict ensued in my absence, which has demoralized a portion of my command, but I think the enemy is more so. If the gunboats do not show themselves it will reassure the enemy and still further demoralize our troops. I must order a charge to save appearances. I do not expect the gunboats to go into action, but to make an appearance and throw a few shells at long range.15
Never in his career as a soldier did Grant write a more completely revealing dispatch. In the confusion of its wording—unusual, with Grant, whose dispatches ordinarily are extremely clear and explicit—the note bears evidence of the haste with which it was written; bears evidence, too, that he himself had been jarred more than his intimates realized by the military catastrophe that had developed during his absence. The words “otherwise all may be defeated” sound a note which is rarely heard in anything Grant said or wrote. He had been prompt enough to reassert his control over the situation, and Wallace had marveled at his coolness, but down inside Grant clearly realized that he was elbow-to-elbow with final disaster. There is an urgency in this appeal for help that seldom appears in one of Grant’s dispatches.
Beyond that, this note sums up not only Grant’s immediate appraisal of the situation but the military philosophy on which his reaction to that situation was based.
He had done the obvious things, almost automatically: ordered an attack from his left on the apparent soft spot in the Rebel line, called for a counterattack in the place where ground had been lost, arranged for regrouping of the troops driven out of action, summoned the gunboats back into the fight. Back of these orders lay the lesson he had learned in Missouri: the idea that in every battle there may come a moment when each side is fought out and ready to quit, and the belief that in such a moment victory will go to the side which is able to make one final effort. It seemed to him that this moment had arrived, and it was going to be Grant’s army that made the final effort. The note to Foote is supplemented by the remark to Colonel Webster: “The enemy will have to be in a hurry if he gets ahead of me.”
Beyond the confusion and wreckage of the battlefield, Grant was looking to the morale of the soldiers themselves—his own soldiers, and the soldiers of the Confederacy. His men, or a substantial number of them, were indeed demoralized; that much he frankly confessed. But it was not merely native optimism that led him to add that the Confederates were no better off. The Southerners had carried full haversacks when they made their attack—certain indication that they were fighting to win a chance to get away rather than to win a battle. What was important now was what happened in men’s minds. The gunboats need not bring much weight to bear, but they must “make an appearance”; Grant would order a charge “to save appearances”—and out of all of this would come tangible evidence that his army wanted to renew the engagement, that it did not own itself beaten, that the appearance of Confederate victory and Union defeat was only an appearance and nothing more. Final victory would go to the side which insisted on winning it, and the Union Army would be very insistent.
In this moment of crisis at Fort Donelson Grant met one of the supreme tests of his career as a soldier.
With McClernand, Grant galloped along the line, calling out to the beaten men that the Confederates were retreating and urging every man to refill his ammunition pouch and take his place in the line ready for an attack. Then, with the broken lines reforming, Grant rode off to the left, where the former commandant of West Point cadets, C. F. Smith, was waiting for orders.
Smith was sitting under a tree, beside one of his aides. Grant rode up to him and, without ceremony, said: “General Smith, all has failed on our right—you must take Fort Donelson.” Smith unfolded his long legs, brushed his mustache as he got to his feet, said briefly, “I will do it,” and sent the aide off to get the division into line. In no time the division was ready to advance—2nd Iowa in the lead, four more regiments massed behind it. While Grant rode back to see to the right of his line, Smith rode across the Iowans’ front, gestured toward the high ground where lay the Confederate works, and said: “Second Iowa, you must take that fort. Take the caps off your guns, fix bayonets, and I will support you.”16
The Middle Westerners who made this attack remembered it as long as they lived, for the way was tough—a tangle of fallen timber, a ravine with steep banks, invisible Rebels driving in a hot fire, with double-barreled shotguns charged with buckshot reserved for close range—but even more than the fight itself, they remembered Smith. He was erect on his horse in front of them, his saber held high in the air, and when he had given the command to advance he went on in advance of everybody—turning in the saddle, now and then, to make sure that his men were following him. For faint hearts he had scornful words; seeing some of the soldiers hesitating about getting out into the thick of things, he swung about and made wrathful oration: “Damn you, gentlemen, I see skulkers. I’ll have none here. Come on, you volunteers, come on. This is your chance. You volunteered to be killed for love of your country and now you can be. You are only damned volunteers. I am only a soldier and I don’t want to be killed, but you came to be killed and now you can be.” And so, with a mixture of oaths and sharp words, the old man led them up the wooded slope straight for the Confederate trenches. Men said he was the first man in the works, riding in so close to the Rebels that he could have put his hand on their heads, and one of his soldiers wrote that “by his presence and heroic conduct he led the green men to do things that no other man could have done.”17
Smith’s charge was a success, and the right of the Rebel line gave way. Meanwhile, McClernand’s and Wallace’s men were finding it unexpectedly easy to regain the ground that had been lost during the morning; and here, indeed, Grant was greatly aided by a singular paralysis which descended on the minds of the officers commanding the Confederate Army.
Gideon Pillow had done very well indeed, so far. He had smashed the Union right; as Bedford Forrest wrote, he had opened not one but three roads by which the Confederate Army could retreat. But before Grant had got his counterattack in motion, Pillow had undergone a strange change of mind. Buckner was pulling his own troops out of their trenches, preparing to join in what had been planned as a retirement to safety farther south, when he was ordered by Pillow to go back to the lines. John B. Floyd, who was technically in supreme command, at first countermanded the order, then—after conferring with Pillow—sustained it; Buckner’s men were just getting back into position when Smith’s assault hit them and made a fatal lodgment in their lines. Pillow, meanwhile, was ordering his own men back into the works; and at the very moment when Grant’s right was reorganizing for a counterattack, the Confederates who had driven everything before them in the morning were going back to the fortifications, leaving the open road to the south to take care of itself.
Precisely what was on Pillow’s mind in all of this is beyond rational explanation. It is possible that the troops which had done so well that morning were simply fought out, disorganized by their victory, worn to a frazzle by the wintry nights they had spent in the trenches; Floyd wrote afterward that some of the men were so completely exhausted that they could not keep their eyes open even when they were standing up under enemy fire, and if it was believed that the entire command needed to be pulled together and given a rest before beginning a retreat this can hardly be wondered at. Pillow himself seems to have felt that the fight to open a road for retreat was an operation entirely separate from the retreat itself; with the road opened, the army would reassemble and, after dark, the retreat would be made—the theory apparently being that the Federals would obligingly leave the escape hatch open. In any case, the Confederates left the ground they had won, and although Floyd and Pillow telegraphed Johnston that they had won a dazzling victory, they now let the victory evaporate. Meanwhile, they knew that Grant had been reinforced, and although Wallace and McClernand did not by any means reoccupy all
of the ground which the Federals had held at daybreak, the Confederate commanders believed that they did. In vain did Bedford Forrest report that “there were none of the enemy in sight when dark came on.” Abandoned campfires, stirred into flame by the wind, twinkled all along the line from which the Illinois soldiers had been driven, and to Pillow and Floyd it seemed clear that the encircling ring of Union troops—stronger now than it had ever been before—had been made whole again. Forrest might write that the Confederate soldiers were “flushed with victory, and confident that they could drive the enemy back to the Tennessee river the next morning”; Pillow and Floyd thought otherwise, and what they thought was what finally mattered. Never was Grant’s belief in the importance of the factor of morale so strikingly justified. The generals who faced him had accepted his own appraisal of the situation.18
As night came down on February 15 it was by no means clear, inside the Union lines, that the battle actually was over. The rain had stopped and a full moon floated high in a clear, wintry sky. Wagon trains came plodding up through the mud, bearing rations and tents, but only the food was distributed; for one more night, at least, the soldiers would have to get along without shelter. There were many wounded men, and every farmhouse had been turned into a hospital. Dead men were laid out in long rows by each of these, and one officer remembered how white and waxen their faces looked in the moonlight. Men of the 20th Ohio found their camp overrun with disorganized men from two Illinois regiments, worn-out men in muddy, tattered clothing who seemed not to have eaten for days and who sauntered about looking for someone to tell them what they ought to do next.
Soldiers who had not fought before were dazed by the fury of the fight they had experienced. A man in the 45th Illinois wrote a breathless letter to his parents, describing the terrible violence of cannon fire: “I have seen trees a foot and a half through cut off entirely by the cannon balls and I have had balls strike the trees at full force not more than a foot from my head and I have had shells burst within a rod of me and throw the dirt all over me but it appears that the Lord still has more work for me to do.” (The Lord did: this soldier was to die in action at Shiloh, less than two months from this night.) Men who had had glimpses of Grant said that the General seemed to understand the feelings of Volunteers. One luckless German artillerist who had had to abandon his guns to the Confederates was being berated for failing to disable the weapons before leaving them. He expostulated: “What! I spike those good guns! My God, no!” Grant heard him, chuckled at this thrifty but unmilitary viewpoint, and let him off.19
Riding back to headquarters in the twilight, Grant passed many dead and wounded men from both armies. One scene particularly struck him: a Federal lieutenant and a Confederate private, both desperately wounded, lay side by side, and the lieutenant was trying without much success to give the Confederate a drink from his canteen. Grant reined in and looked at the two, then asked his staff officers if anyone had a flask. One officer finally produced one; Grant took it, dismounted, and walked to the two wounded men, giving each man a swallow of brandy. The Confederate murmured, “Thank you, General,” and the Federal, too weak to speak, managed to flutter one hand in an attempt at a salute. Grant called to Rawlins: “Send for stretchers; send for stretchers at once for these men.” As the stretcher party came up Grant got on his horse; then he noticed that the stretcher bearers, picking up the Union officer, seemed inclined to ignore the Confederate.
“Take this Confederate, too,” he ordered. “Take them both together; the war is over between them.”
The men were borne away, and Grant and his party rode off. There were so many dead and wounded men that the horses were constantly shying nervously, and Grant at last turned to Colonel Webster with the remark: “Let’s get away from this dreadful place. I suppose this work is part of the devil that is left in us all.” They got out to more open ground, and as the general watched the wounded men limping, hobbling and crawling toward the rear he was obviously depressed. One officer remembered hearing Grant—who rarely recited poetry—intoning the verse:
Man’s inhumanity to man
Makes countless thousands mourn.20
Late that night Grant tasted the first food he had had since his early breakfast.
There was much movement and a general bustle and stir in the Union camp all night long. Troops were being reassembled, batteries were being moved to new positions, loaded wagons were creaking up from the landing, and stretcher parties were constantly bringing new loads of wounded men to the field hospitals. Far off in the darkness, men could hear the splashing and puffing of steamboats along the waterfront by the fort.
Somewhere around two in the morning, stray Confederate deserters came into the lines, reporting that the Confederate pickets had been mysteriously withdrawn. Colonel Whittlesey, worried because the way was still open for a Confederate retreat, noted that there was fully a mile of open ground between the Federal right and the banks of the Cumberland, space unoccupied except for dead and wounded men.21
At about three in the morning, a Confederate flag of truce came through Smith’s lines, with a message for the Commanding General.
Smith and his staff had made a bivouac in the trodden snow, and an officer from the 2nd Iowa came to this bivouac to report that the Rebel officer who came in with the flag was asking if there was a Federal officer present who could negotiate terms for a Confederate surrender. Smith mounted and rode forward, and Major Thomas J. Newsham, of his staff, reported that Smith bluntly told the Confederate: “I make no terms with Rebels with arms in their hands—my terms are unconditional and immediate surrender!” Then, bearing a letter which the Confederate gave him, Smith set off the Grant’s headquarters.
Grant was in the kitchen of the little farmhouse, stretched out on a mattress on the floor. Smith stalked in, stood by the open fire to get the chill out of his long legs, and as Grant drew on some clothing the onetime commandant of cadets handed the letter to him, saying: “There’s something for you to read, General.” While Grant was reading it, Smith inquired if anyone had a drink. Dr. Brinton owned a flask, and he handed it to Smith, who took a long pull at it, returned the flask, and then raised one foot and gazed at it ruefully.
“See how the soles of my boots burned,” he said. “I slept last night with my head in the saddle and with my feet too near the fire; I’ve scorched my boots.”
Grant finished reading the letter. It was signed by his friend from the Old Army, General Simon Bolivar Buckner, who, by an odd turn of events, was now the commanding officer in Fort Donelson, and—as the flag-of-truce officer had told Smith—it asked for an armistice and the appointment of commissioners to settle terms of surrender. Grant gave the letter to Smith, asking: “What answer shall I send to this, General?”
“No terms to the damned Rebels!” barked Smith. Grant chuckled, then sat at the kitchen table, drew up a tablet, and began to write. Presently he read aloud, to Smith and the other officers, what he had written. It would become one of the most famous dispatches in American military history. Addressed to General Buckner, it went as follows:
Sir: Yours of this date proposing Armistice and appointment of Commissioners to settle terms of Capitulation is just received. No terms except unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted. I propose to move immediately upon your works. I am sir, very respectfully
Your obt. svt.
U. S. GRANT
Brig. Gen.
Smith gave a brief grunt, and remarked, “It’s the same thing in smoother words.” Then, taking the letter, he stalked out of the room to deliver it to the waiting Confederate. Grant’s threat to “move immediately upon your works,” incidentally, was a fully loaded gun. Before the flag of truce arrived he had sent Rawlins riding off to McClernand and Wallace with orders that they attack as soon as they heard Smith’s guns open, and Smith had been alerted to renew the fighting as soon as daybreak brought enough light for fighting. Buckner’s message reached Smith and Grant only a short time before the all-o
ut offensive was to have begun.22
General Buckner was not pleased. He had befriended Grant some years earlier, when Grant needed a friend very much, and he seems to have felt that Grant ought to remember this now. He wrote stiffly in reply:
“The distribution of the forces under my command incident to an unexpected change of commanders and the overwhelming force under your command compel me, notwithstanding the brilliant success of the Confederate arms yesterday, to accept the ungenerous and unchivalrous terms which you propose.”
If this note was both grumpy and inexact—Grant was not “proposing terms” of any sort, and he was under no obligation to be chivalrous—Buckner can be forgiven. He had just been through one of the oddest farce-comedy sequences in Civil War history, and it left him with an uneven temper. During the night his two superiors, Generals Floyd and Pillow, had had a fantastic conference. Floyd, believing surrender inevitable, had no wish to be captured; he had been Secretary of War in President Buchanan’s cabinet, patriotic Northerners were accusing him of having anticipated the act of secession by transferring government arms to Southern states, and it seemed likely that the Lincoln government would put him on trial if it laid hands on him. So, quite blandly, he had turned over the command to the next man in line, Pillow. Pillow entertained two conflicting opinions: that surrender was not exactly necessary, but that Floyd’s decision to surrender would be binding on the new commander anyway. Also, he was as reluctant as Floyd to become the first Confederate general captured by the Unionists. So Pillow, without hesitation, had turned the command over to Buckner—who, being of stouter fiber than his two superiors, believed that an officer who surrendered his post ought to stay with his troops and take the consequences. Floyd thereupon put himself and several Virginia regiments on the transports and steamed off to Nashville; Pillow found space for himself and his staff on another transport and followed Floyd, and doughty Bedford Forrest, disgusted by the whole operation, boldly marched his cavalry off to freedom through the flooded lowlands south of the fort. That left Buckner as the residuary legatee of disaster, and he did what he had to do manfully but unhappily.23
