by Bruce Catton
The want of order and discipline and the numerous irregularities in your command since the capture of Fort Donelson are matters of general notoriety, and have attracted the serious attention of the authorities at Washington. Unless these things are immediately corrected I am directed to relieve you of the command.
The anonymous letter rambled slightly. It asserted that a good deal of captured food had been taken over by a regimental quartermaster and by him delivered to sutlers, who repackaged the goods and sent them to Illinois for private sale. A Colonel John Cook—an Illinois officer, acting as brigadier in C. F. Smith’s division—was alleged to be assisting in all of this, in conjunction with one G. W. Graham, a civilian who frequented Grant’s headquarters. Rather confusingly, the writer added that he did not think that either Cook or Graham was profiting by the deals; Cook, he believed, was just accommodating his friends. He went on to say that a good many captured dirks, pistols, muskets and the like had been carried off by individuals; if all could be taken care of and sold by the government, the Treasury would receive several thousands of dollars.
Grant’s reply displays about as much unvarnished anger as anything he ever wrote. He sent back this telegram:
Yours of the 6th instant, inclosing an anonymous letter to the Hon. David Davis, speaking of frauds committed against the government, is just received. I refer you to my orders to suppress marauding as the only reply necessary. There is such a disposition to find fault with me that I again ask to be relieved from further duty until I can be placed right in the estimation of those higher in authority.
In plain English, Grant would demand a court of inquiry, which would involve an official ventilation of the entire situation. Halleck did not want this to happen. He replied, in a vein much more soothing than anything in his earlier messages:
You cannot be relieved from your command. There is no good reason for it. I am certain that all which the authorities at Washington ask is that you enforce discipline and punish the disorderly. The power is in your hands; use it, and you will be sustained by all above you. Instead of relieving you I wish you as soon as your new army is in the field to assume the immediate command and lead it on to new victories.9
What Grant did not know when he got this reply was that the entire situation had suddenly changed. Washington at last had lost patience with McClellan, had removed him from the over-all command of the Union Army, and had limited him to the command of the Army of the Potomac. On top of that, Halleck had finally been given what he had been demanding so long—full control in the West. The eastern limit of his department was extended to a north-and-south line drawn through Nashville, which brought Buell and his field army under Halleck’s control. If earlier refusals had put him badly out of humor, this was calculated to make him feel much better.
In addition, President Lincoln had quietly intervened in Grant’s favor. Some of the details of Halleck’s complaints had reached the White House, and the White House was in no mood to see the victor at Fort Donelson dropped without a fair hearing. To Halleck, on March 10, had come a formal wire from Lorenzo Thomas, Adjutant General of the Army:
It has been reported that soon after the battle of Fort Donelson Brigadier General Grant left his command without leave. By direction of the President the Secretary of War desires you to ascertain and report whether General Grant left his command at any time without proper authority, and, if so, for how long; whether he has made to you proper reports and returns of his force; whether he has committed any acts which were unauthorized or not in accordance with military subordination or propriety, and, if so, what.
The significance of this was clear enough. In effect, the White House was telling Halleck: either file formal charges against Grant and make them stick, or drop the whole subject.
Halleck was quite ready to drop it. He had exculpated himself and passed a reprimand on to the lower echelon, McClellan was no longer his superior, and in any case it would be quite impossible to make out a case against Grant. Halleck sent word to Washington that Grant had, after all, behaved properly; that any irregularities in his command had taken place in his absence, in violation of his orders, and (all things considered) unavoidably; that Grant had explained everything satisfactorily, that “he acted from a praiseworthy although mistaken zeal for the public service” when he made that trip to Nashville … and that the whole unpleasantness had been a regrettable misunderstanding which might as well be forgotten.10
Before he found out about this, Grant had written to Halleck that although the handling of the anonymous letter led him to want a court of inquiry, Halleck’s succeeding telegram made him feel much better; “I will again assume command, and give every effort to the success of our cause.” Grant seems to have felt that this made him sound like a touchy character who would not play when his feelings were hurt, for he added the sentence: “Under the worst circumstances I would do the same.” Then Halleck sent him copies of the messages he had just exchanged with Lorenzo Thomas, and Grant felt quite grateful. He wrote a word of thanks: “I must fully appreciate your justness, General, in the part you have taken, and you may rely upon me to the utmost of my capacity for carrying out all your orders.” When he came to write his Memoirs, Grant noted bitterly that Halleck “did not inform me that it was his own reports that had created all the trouble,” and said that at the time “I supposed it was his interposition that had set me right with the government.”11
Grant’s intimates appear to have felt that the trouble was chiefly due to Buell. Dr. Brinton remembered that he understood Buell’s complaints were responsible. Captain Rowley, the fellow townsman who had just been confirmed in his appointment to Grant’s staff, wrote to Congressman Washburne: “We are now lying at Fort Henry, owing I think to the petty jealousies of some interested parties,” and another Galena resident, Colonel Chetlain of the 12th Illinois, made a glancing reference to it by writing the Congressman: “I know but few of the facts connected with the difficulty between him” (Grant) “and Gen. Buell.” Grant’s friends felt strongly that someone was maneuvering, offstage, to destroy Grant, and most of them blamed Buell.12
Even though the difficulty was at last ironed out, it unquestionably left a scar on Grant, injuring him emotionally more than anything else that happened in all the war. When he got Halleck’s first telegram, ordering him to give the upriver command to Smith, he showed it to a friend, and (as the friend remembered it) “with tears in his eyes,” asked miserably: “I don’t know what they mean to do with me.… What command have I now?”13 He always spoke of Halleck’s order as one which virtually put him under arrest—although actually it did nothing of the kind—and after he had left the White House and was making a round-the-world tour he told his friend John Russell Young that “after Donelson I was in disgrace and under arrest, and practically without a command.” The loneliness and failure of the pre-war years were still too close to Grant, in the spring of 1862, to let him rest quietly under a public rebuke from his superior, and he was almost pathetically grateful when Halleck at last dropped the whole business, restored him to his old command, and soothed him with friendly words.14 If any Civil War soldier had a tough inner core, Grant was the man; but with it, in the early days, there was a sensitivity, a remembrance of past difficulties, that made him vulnerable.
A few days after the matter had been settled, Grant wrote about it to Congressman Washburne:
After getting into Donelson Gen. Halleck did not hear from me for near two weeks. It was about the same time before I heard from him. I was writing every day and sometimes as often as three times a day. Reported every move and change, the condition of my troops, &c. Not getting these Gen. Halleck very justly became dissatisfied and was, as I have since learned, sending me daily reprimands. Not receiving them they lost their sting. When one did reach me not seeing the justice of it I retorted and asked to be relieved. Three telegrams passed in this way each time ending by my requesting to be relieved. All is now understood however and I feel assured that Ge
n. Halleck is fully satisfied. In fact he wrote me a letter saying that I could not be relieved and otherwise quite complimentary. I will not tire you with a longer letter but assure you again that you shall not be disappointed in me if it is in my power to prevent it.15
Just before Halleck put an end to Grant’s period of disgrace, there was a significant little ceremony in the ladies’ cabin of the steamboat Tigress, which, anchored in the stream abreast of Fort Henry, was serving as Grant’s headquarters boat. Surrounded by brigadiers and staff officers, Grant was called on to receive a presentation sword. The speech of presentation was made by Colonel C. C. Marsh, of the 20th Illinois, who remarked that the sword had been ordered a long time ago but that fortunately its delivery had been delayed: “Fortunately, we say, because at this moment when the jealousy caused by your brilliant success has raised up hidden enemies who are endeavoring to strike you in the dark it affords us an opportunity to express our renewed confidence in your ability as a commander.”
The sword was handsome—ivory-handled and mounted in gold, as a newspaper correspondent saw it—and when he accepted it Grant choked up and was unable to stammer out a speech of thanks. He hurried out on deck, and Dr. Brinton found him there with tears in his eyes. After a while Grant took the doctor by the arm and led him back to the cabin, where the sword in its open case lay on a table. Pushing the case toward him, Grant said: “Doctor, send it to my wife. I will never wear a sword again.”
The presentation ceremony is worth dwelling on a moment. The sword was inscribed: Presented to Gen. U. S. Grant by G. W. Graham, C. R. Lagow, C. C. Marsh and Jno. Cook, and the date under these names was 1861: the Cairo period, when Grant was just setting up his military household, grappling to himself some, like Rawlins, who would do much good for him, and others who would do him harm. Captain Rowley, in the fall of 1862, would write to Washburne angrily denouncing four officers on Grant’s staff, saying “I doubt if either of them have gone to bed sober for a week,” and remarking that with such men around him it was small wonder if Grant occasionally kicked over the traces; and Lagow was one of the four Rowley named. Jno. Cook was the colonel whom the anonymous correspondent had blamed for the disappearance of captured foodstuffs at Fort Donelson, and G. W. Graham was the civilian whom this correspondent had named. A former Cairo business man who had tied his fortunes to Grant’s, Graham acted as headquarters sutler, kept a supply of cigars and liquor on hand and became, as an Illinois observer believed, “the power behind the throne” and a trusted member of the headquarters mess. Men like these were remembered by General Sherman, and long after the war he would write that Grant “did not have about him, near his person, officers of refinement and culture.”16 Rumors about free-and-easy ways at district headquarters had reached St. Louis—Colonel McPherson, who came down from Halleck’s office just after Fort Donelson was taken, told Dr. Brinton that many of these were in circulation—and there were, close to Grant, men whose habits would create such rumors and make others believe the rumors true.…
In spite of wrangling, place hunting and staff talk about the corrosive jealousy of rivals, a substantial Federal Army was slowly inching its way up the river in this spring of 1862. The town of Savannah had been occupied on March 5 by part of the 40th Illinois, with the 46th Ohio coming in the next day; then more than eighty transports, with escorting gunboats, began moving upstream, a long cloud of smoke billowing up from the river valley, and by March 11 the steamers were tying up on both sides of the river at Savannah. There were five divisions in Grant’s army, with more to come. McClernand led the men he had commanded at Fort Donelson, and Lew Wallace had his own Donelson division. C. F. Smith had his, too, but when he assumed command of the expedition as a whole he assigned divisional command to a new brigadier, W. H. L. Wallace. There was a new division led by Brigadier General S. A. Hurlbut, and a fifth under Sherman; and Smith gave Sherman the advance and sent him on ahead to cut the railroad near Eastport, Mississippi. Nothing went right; unending rains flooded all the little creeks and turned the roads into mud, and after some ineffective floundering about Sherman brought his men back to the high ground around Pittsburg Landing. Hurlbut’s division was there, too, sent forward by Smith, and while his own men went ashore Sherman hurried back to Savannah to report. Smith told him to assume command of all hands at Pittsburg Landing and to post the men well back from the river; the rest of Grant’s army would be sent there in due course; Smith himself would come on up, and then they would see about Halleck’s orders for a seizure of the railroad.17
Buell, meanwhile, was bringing his army overland from Nashville, aiming for Savannah, his movements slow because the Rebels in retreat had destroyed bridges, and because the rain made bad roads worse. Grant would get reinforcements from Missouri, as well; General Curtis had beaten Confederates under Earl Van Dorn in a sharp two-day battle at Pea Ridge, Arkansas, and troops which had been ear-marked for his support could now be used on the Tennessee. Grant passed on to Smith the news that these troops were coming, and said that when they arrived he himself was expected to take immediate charge of the upriver activities. He added: “I think it exceedingly doubtful whether I shall accept; certainly not until the object of the expedition is accomplished.”18 Smith had begun the expedition and was entitled to any glory that might be won. Grant would not get in his way; his former commandant was entitled to his fame.
From Halleck, through all of this, came repeated orders that there must not be a substantial fight just yet. Grant was still planning to send troops over to Paris, to break up the Confederate conscription, and Halleck warned him: “Don’t bring on any general engagement at Paris. If enemy appears in force, our troops must fall back. It is not the proper point to attack.” And as far as the Rebels at or near Corinth were concerned, the same rule applied: “My instructions not to advance so as to bring on an engagement must be strictly obeyed.” Reinforcements of 10,000 or 15,000 would be forwarded soon, but “we must strike no blow until we are strong enough to admit no doubt of the results.”19
Once it looked as if orders from department headquarters offered an opening which an energetic general could exploit. Grant had moved up from Fort Henry to Savannah, and here, on March 18, he got a wire from Halleck which read: “It is reported that the enemy has moved from Corinth to cut off our transports below Savannah. If so, General Smith should immediately destroy railroad connection at Corinth.”
The Confederates were not trying to do this and Grant knew that they were not, but the injunction to destroy the rail connection at Corinth sounded like a signal for battle and Grant pounced on it. He ordered Smith and Lew Wallace to keep their commands ready to march at a moment’s notice, with three days’ rations in haversacks and seven more in wagons; he told McClernand, whose division was at Savannah, to prepare to send at least two brigades up to Pittsburg Landing, and he telegraphed Halleck with enthusiasm: “Immediate preparations will be made to execute your perfectly feasible order. I will go in person, leaving General McClernand in command here.”20
This puzzled Halleck slightly, and he sent back the warning: “Don’t let the enemy draw you into an engagement now. Wait until you are properly fortified and receive orders.” This clearly narrowed the scope of the projected movement, and Grant, obediently promising that he would take no risks, suggested that he might at least strike some part of the railroad where the Rebels were not prepared to fight and so “at least seem to fill the object of the expedition without a battle and thus save the demoralizing effect of a retreat upon the troops.” Although he could not stir up a fight in flat disobedience to his orders Grant could at least behave aggressively and hope that the orders might be liberalized. On March 21, he warned Halleck frankly that Corinth could not be taken without a fight; the Confederates, he believed, had fully thirty thousand men there, with more coming, and if Grant’s army moved over there a general engagement would be inevitable; “Therefore, I will wait a few days for further instructions.”
Grant went on to provide a
n estimate which, he no doubt hoped, might affect the formulation of orders:
The temper of the Rebel troops is such that there is little doubt but that Corinth will fall much more easily than Donelson did when we do move. All accounts agree in saying that the great mass of the rank and file are heartily tired.
This would eventually be exposed as a major misconception, but at the moment Grant honestly believed it. It had no effect at St. Louis, however, and Grant began to get increasingly restless. To General Smith he confided: “I am clearly of the opinion that the enemy are gathering strength at Corinth quite as rapidly as we are here, and the sooner we attack the easier will be the task of taking the place.”21
Grant was unable to do as he had planned and let Smith have sole charge of the advance, because Smith, as March drew toward its end, went out of action, the victim of what looked like a wholly unimportant little accident. A few days after Grant had established his own headquarters at Savannah, Smith had to go on the sicklist, and in a letter to a friend the old man described his trouble: “In jumping into a yawl I raked the whole of right leg—the shin and calf—with the seat. The doctor fears injury to the bone. Although it is greatly better I still limp about the cabin of the steamer and cannot put on a boot. Super-added and immediately after I was prostrated by sickness, against which I had been fighting ever since Ft. Donelson. But I had no time to be sick. At length I had to go to bed. Now I am well tho’ weak.”
Laid up by this infection, Smith complained about the Army’s delay:
Our force here is very large and daily increasing. We are chafing like hounds in the leash to move at the enemy just in front but are forbidden by Halleck until the force is about doubled.… The troops are encamped between Lick and Snake creeks, the different divisions in nearly parallel lines. The advance division is about four miles off. I occasionally send out a few thousand men to look at the enemy in the direction of Corinth and wake them up.22
