by Bruce Catton
When the sun came up on the morning of February 16, the area was strangely quiet. The weather had turned warm, and rivulets of melted snow trickled through the fields and clearings where many untended wounded men were still lying. In the Federal lines, soldiers looked about, bewildered, asking one another why there was no more firing; then, from Smith’s division, there came a rising volume of excited cheering, and the word spread through the camp: The Rebels have given up. Lew Wallace put his division in line to advance and occupy the Confederate works in his front, and then with his staff spurred on ahead and went into the town of Dover, where he found Buckner and his staff at breakfast in the village tavern. Half an hour later Grant joined them.
Somewhere around nine in the morning, the scarred gunboats came up the river, followed by a long file of transports. (Grant by now had twenty-seven thousand men on the scene, and reinforcements were still coming up.) A newspaper correspondent on Grant’s headquarters steamer wrote that Federal regiments were massed along the shore and on the heights, each with its flag. He saw a United States flag hoisted on a flagpole and heard a tremendous cheer from the troops, and wrote that it was “a glorious moment—a Sabbath morning which will live in history.”24
Another correspondent was present when Grant and Buckner had a talk. He described Grant, who had suddenly become so famous: “About 45 years of age, sandy complexion, reddish beard, medium height, pleasant, twinkling eyes and weighs 170 pounds. He smokes continually.” Grant and Buckner settled some question of rations for the prisoners; then, said the reporter, “the Negro question came up.” Grant agreed that Confederate officers might take their body servants with them, but the horde of Negro laborers in the fort would not be returned to their owners. “We want laborers,” the correspondent quoted him as saying. “Let the Negroes work for us.” A planter who had come to reclaim his slaves “retired silent and sullen” when he heard this verdict.
Grant’s chat with Buckner was friendly. Long afterward, Buckner told how Grant drew him aside when the conference ended, remarking that Buckner, as a prisoner, separated from his own people, might have financial difficulties; if Buckner needed money, anything Grant had in his purse was available … and the favor which Buckner had done for Grant years earlier (which neither man mentioned) could be repaid in kind. The episode was characteristic. Up to the moment of surrender, it would not enter Grant’s head that his old-time friendship with the opposing commander should in any way affect his attitude; but once the fighting had stopped and the opposing commander had laid down his arms, the old friendship could be resumed and there would be room for the chivalry whose absence in the ultimatum of surrender had struck Buckner as brusque and stern.25
Grant’s first task was to send back word of his victory, and without delay he got off a message to Halleck at St. Louis:
We have taken Fort Donelson and from 12,000 to 15,000 prisoners, including Generals Buckner and Bushrod Johnson; also 20,000 stand of arms, 48 pieces of artillery, 17 heavy guns, from 2,000 to 4,000 horses, and large quantities of commissary stores.26
It was the first of three messages which Grant would send during the war announcing the capture of an opposing army.
CHAPTER NINE
Aftermath of Victory
Now it was a different war. The foundation of the Confederacy had suddenly cracked, and seismic vibrations ran all across the land. People began to see that something decisive had happened, and they responded quickly, with deep emotion.
At the Union Merchants Exchange in St. Louis, staid men of business forgot getting and spending in order to group themselves together and sing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and other patriotic songs, after which they went down the street to General Halleck’s headquarters, where they cheered until Halleck himself appeared at a window. Responding to public acclaim was not quite in Halleck’s line, but he adapted himself to it, this once, and cried out: “I promised when I came here that with your aid I would drive the enemies of our flag from your state. This has been done, and they are virtually out of Kentucky and soon will be out of Tennessee.” Governor Richard Yates of Illinois, with a coterie of lesser officials, took off promptly for Dover, ostensibly to make provision for wounded Illinois soldiers, probably also to identify the state administration with the great victory. From a stopping point along the way the Governor telegraphed to Chicago: “People by thousands on the road and at the stations, with shoutings and with flags. Thank God that our Union is safe now and forever.” A newspaper correspondent at Cairo wired “The backbone of the rebellion is broken,” and in Chicago there was an all-day celebration. Luckless General Floyd, scuttling off to safety, was hanged in effigy in Chicago and then burned, a newspaper editorial announced that “any person found sober after nine o’clock in the evening would be arrested as a secessionist,” and the Tribune remarked the next morning that “Chicago reeled mad with joy by that time.” The Tribune added that the celebration had been a fine thing: “It was well that we should rejoice. Such events happen but once in a lifetime, and we who passed through the scenes of yesterday lived a generation in a day.”
Illinois felt especial pride. Grant came from Illinois and so did most of his soldiers, and the state felt that Donelson was somehow an Illinois achievement. But in other places where state pride was less compelling there was equal jubilation. In Cincinnati a reporter observed: “Everybody was shaking hands with everybody else, and bewhiskered men embraced each other as if they were lovers.” Business was suspended, fireworks were brought out, and “the misty atmosphere was rosy with the burning of Bengal lights and bonfires blazing at many crossings.” In Washington, officers at McClellan’s headquarters crowded around the General in Chief when a telegram from General Cullum, Halleck’s chief of staff, announced the victory; and McClellan enjoyed a half hour of glory while his staff congratulated him “on the brilliant results of his arrangement of the plan of campaign.” McClellan then set off in the rain to take the news to the War Department; in the Capitol building Senator Grimes of Iowa read Cullum’s dispatch aloud on the Senate floor, and when the Senators ignored their own rule against applause and broke into cheers, Vice-President Hannibal Hamlin, presiding, condoned the outburst: “The chair rules that the Senate is neither applauding nor cheering a Senator.” Guns boomed in salute all day long, and in the camps of the Army of the Potomac young men in unfaded blue uniforms who had never yet faced the enemy in battle tossed their caps and yelled until they were hoarse.1
The rejoicing was natural, for this was the North’s first substantial victory, and it came after months of discouragement. Yet a great deal of what had been won at Fort Donelson had really been gained at Fort Henry. Taking Fort Henry, the Federals had opened the brimming highway of the Tennessee River, and with that highway open the Confederates could do nothing but retreat. Johnston and his officers had agreed to abandon the Kentucky-Tennessee defensive line before Grant had one infantryman in front of Donelson’s pickets: orders for the retreat from Bowling Green had been issued, disillusioned Beauregard had gone west to pick up the pieces at Columbus, and with Fort Henry gone the Confederacy had been doomed to make its next stand at the northern border of Mississippi. But no one in the North had been able to see this, unless perhaps Grant himself had had a feeling for it; it had taken the long fight on the snowy ridges above the little town of Dover to make manifest the fact that the Confederate defensive line in the west had been shattered once and for all.
Grant found himself famous. Until now he had been one of the throng, an obscure brigadier doing a job in a remote sector; now, suddenly, he was the man who knew how to win battles, and his “immediate and unconditional surrender” note stirred men’s blood. Secretary Stanton referred to it, in an announcement which was at bottom an attempt to get a little immediate action out of General McClellan, and men who had never heard of Grant before told one another that his initials stood for “Unconditional Surrender.” Newspapers told how Grant had been smoking during the battle, and gifts of cigars came
in from all quarters—so many that Grant largely gave up his pipe and became a confirmed cigar smoker, if for no better reason than that he had dozens of boxes of cigars lying around headquarters and it seemed a shame to let them go to waste.
He had little leisure to enjoy his fame. Conditions in Fort Donelson—where something like 14,000 men had surrendered after a trying battle, and where the victorious army contained 27,000 men, all of them eager to see the sights—were chaotic. Bodies of dead men and animals were scattered here and there, deeply mired wagons with lifeless horses still in harness were to be found in muddy streets and fields, unattached horses were munching grain from abandoned sacks of corn, and stray dogs howled dismally for their masters. There was a profusion of military supplies and equipment, much of it in bad shape. On the waterfront under the bluffs were huge piles of pork, imperfectly salted and smelling to the skies. There were also hundreds of hogsheads of sugar, piles of sacks of corn and flour, and immense stacks of sides of bacon—some of which had been tossed into the roads in an ineffectual attempt to cope with the bottomless mud. Droves of civilians were beginning to appear, and each one seemed determined to carry off some bit of captured property as a souvenir.2
One of Grant’s first acts on the morning of the surrender was to issue an order insisting that “the utmost vigilance should be observed to guard all points captured.” Lew Wallace was told to return to Fort Henry with two brigades of infantry, two batteries of artillery, and a detachment of cavalry, to hold that important staging point on the Tennessee River. McClernand and Smith were told to make up a detail of two hundred extra-duty men to preserve the stores and munitions taken in Fort Donelson. Arrangements had to be made to get the prisoners sorted out, organized, disarmed and put on transports for the trip to northern prison camps. The prisoners stacked their arms willingly enough, but insisted that they should be allowed to keep their knives, which, they said, were part of their personal property. The knives drew the attention of the Federal officers; nearly everybody seemed to have one, and most of them had been made by country blacksmiths from files and saw blades—vicious-looking weapons, some of them, with keen blades two inches wide and eighteen inches long. Baskets were placed at the gangways of the transports, and the prisoners reluctantly dropped their knives into these as they marched aboard. Federal soldiers noted that the Confederates were rather ragged, dressed mostly in gray or in butternut; for blankets, they carried square pieces of carpet, old comforters, coverlets from beds back home. Some even lugged bedraggled featherbeds. Before noon the clear sky grew dark, and a dismal rain began to fall. There were many wounded men to be put in makeshift hospitals.3
Dr. Brinton, taking in all of this with wide eyes, bethought himself of the formal surrender ceremonies which he had read about in accounts of past wars, and once that morning he asked Grant when the parade-ground formalities of surrender would take place, with Buckner handing over his sword, bands playing, and prisoners taking part in a solemn act of capitulation. Grant replied that there would be no ceremonies, explaining: “The surrender is a fact. We have the fort, the men and the guns. Why should we go through with vain forms and mortify and injure the spirit of brave men who, after all, are our countrymen and brothers?”
As he reflected on this surprising common sense attitude, Brinton recalled stray battle scenes that had impressed themselves on his memory. Grant had a body servant, a broken-English immigrant from France, known as French John; during the fighting on February 15, French John insisted on going to the front to see the battle at close range, saying: “I have curiosity, much curiosity, and I must go see the enemies fight.” A little later a very much subdued French John was back at the safety of headquarters, murmuring: “I have no more curiosity, it is satisfied, it is all gone; the enemy did allow me to come near them, then all at once they did begin to shoot at me, but I escaped them—and behold me.”
There was an Illinois chaplain, Brinton remembered, who repeatedly took his horse up to the front to carry wounded men back to safety, propping a stricken man in the saddle and stalking alongside to hold him in position. He saved a number of lives, and Brinton felt that the Confederates who saw him refrained from shooting at him. There was also a regimental surgeon in the 18th Illinois whom Brinton had found on the firing line, using a musket tike the infantrymen all around him. When Brinton protested that this was unprofessional behavior, the surgeon said: “I’m all right, Doctor. I have done all the surgery of this regiment and I have fired 45 rounds, by God.”4
On the day after the surrender, Grant issued formal orders of congratulations to his troops:
The general commanding takes great pleasure in congratulating the troops of this command for the triumph over rebellion gained by their valor on the 13th, 14th and 15th instant.
For four successive nights, without shelter, during the most inclement weather known in this latitude, they faced an enemy in large force in a position chosen by himself. Though strongly fortified by nature, all the safeguards suggested by science were added. Without a murmur this was borne, prepared at all times to receive an attack, and with continuous skirmishing by day, resulting ultimately in forcing the enemy to surrender without conditions.
The victory achieved is not only great in breaking down rebellion, but has secured the greatest number of prisoners of war ever taken in one battle on this continent.
Fort Donelson will hereafter be marked in capitals on the maps of our united country and the men who fought the battle will live in the memory of a grateful people.5
On this same day Grant issued another order, acknowledging a change that had taken place in his own situation. Halleck had created a new military district, the District of West Tennessee, with undefined limits, and Grant was in charge of it; his old post at Cairo was given to Sherman, who had worked so hard sending troops and supplies forward from Paducah. The significance of the shift remained to be seen. Much might depend on the way in which the limits of the new district were set. Sherman was definitely being advanced. Halleck wired him that “a still more important movement” than the Donelson campaign was impending, and promised him: “You will not be forgotten in this.”6
If Grant permitted himself any savoring of his triumph, aside from the reference in his general order to the fact that Donelson had seen the largest bag of prisoners of war in American history, there is no record of it. He wanted to get on with the war; he realized that the sadly diminished Confederate Army under Johnston could do nothing but retreat; and he reflected that in his original orders he had been told to break the railroad bridge at Clarksville, thirty miles up the river from Dover. On February 18 Grant was ready to move. Up the river went Flag Officer Foote, carrying on in spite of his wound, with gunboats Conestoga and Cairo, accompanied by Colonel Webster of Grant’s staff. The expedition found the Confederate fort at Clarksville deserted, and the mayor of the town came aboard to report that all Confederate troops had left, along with two thirds of the town’s civilian population, which feared looting and pillage by the Federals. Foote assured the mayor that the Federals would take nothing but military stores, issued a proclamation to quiet the townspeople’s fears, and sent back a report saying that as soon as he could bring up some more gunboats he would like to go on upstream and, in conjunction with Grant, attack Nashville itself. He added that “the Rebels have great terror of the gunboats.”7
Grant sent Smith and his division up the river to occupy Clarksville, and on February 21 reported to Cullum that this had been done, adding that he would not do more than that without orders from Halleck, but hinting broadly: “It is my impression that by following up our success Nashville would be an easy conquest.” On the same day Foote sent Cullum a message saying bluntly that “General Grant and myself consider this a good time to move on Nashville.” Both of them, said Foote, felt that the city could be taken easily.8
This brought no action. Grant was warned not to send gunboats any farther upstream than Clarksville, but the rest was silence; a strange sort of sile
nce, actually, reflecting an even stranger situation of which, at that time, Grant himself was almost completely unaware.
McClellan, Halleck and Buell had been interchanging letters and telegrams at a great rate for three solid weeks—ever since Grant’s expedition left Cairo for Fort Henry—and in this interchange Grant himself had almost been forgotten. Reading the bulky file of these messages, one gets the impression that Grant had moved too fast. The Generals had been upset; they were above all other things deliberate, and although universal opinion in the Old Army held each of the three to be brilliant, it appeared that brilliance needed plenty of time—time to consult and confer, time to perfect the largest and the smallest details of supply, transportation and co-ordination, time as well to jockey and maneuver for personal advantage. Now the pressure for immediate action had become stronger than all other pressures, and the strain was great. As the author of this pressure—or, at the very least, the person through whom the pressure had developed—Grant was beginning to look like a man who had brought embarrassment rather than opportunity.
Halleck may have felt this embarrassment the most acutely, inasmuch as the new hero of the hour was a man whom he himself—with a complete absence of personal feeling and with no thought for anything but the good of the service—had for some time been planning to demote. Grant himself did not know this; during the fall he had sensed that the department contained a number of generals who were senior to him and that one or another of these might well replace him, but he believed that this danger had subsided. Nevertheless, on February 8—just after the capture of Fort Henry, the day when Grant announced that he would move overland and take Fort Donelson—Halleck was asking Secretary of War Stanton to make a major general out of Brigadier General Ethan Allen Hitchcock and assign him to the West, since “an experienced officer of high rank is wanted immediately on the Tennessee line.” (The “Tennessee line,” of course, was the line on which Grant at that moment was carrying on a campaign.)9
