Grant Moves South

by Bruce Catton

  His stay in Memphis would not be long. Far off in Virginia, events were taking place that would profoundly change the conditions under which the war in the West would be fought. Grant’s period of development was about over. From now on he would enter a different phase of his career.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “To Be Terrible on the Enemy”

  The Federal Armies in Virginia were having trouble, and their troubles affected the armies in Tennessee and Mississippi. All of the plans that had been made would be forgotten, and new ones would have to be made by different people. For the moment, what men did in the West would be determined by what General Lee did in front of Richmond. (The initiative, once surrendered, may be picked up in very faraway places.)

  During the spring General McClellan had moved up the Virginia Peninsula with a methodical caution fully as great as Halleck’s own. He considered himself heavily outnumbered, and shortly after he fought the hard, inconclusive action at Seven Pines and Fair Oaks he suggested to the War Department that some of General Halleck’s troops might properly be sent to him.1 Nothing had come of this, but the complete inability of the fragmented Federal forces in upper Virginia to cope with Stonewall Jackson led the War Department eventually to create a new army—the short-lived, grotesquely unlucky Army of Virginia—and to command this army Secretary Stanton reached West and selected Major General John Pope. Halleck did not like this, and said so, but it did no good, and Pope went East, to brief eminence and then inglorious exit.2 On his departure his old Army of the Mississippi went under red-faced, energetic Brigadier General W. S. Rosecrans.

  This was only part of it. Like Halleck, McClellan had planned on the unspoken assumption that there was unlimited time, and in the last week of June Lee showed him his error. Mechanicsville was followed by Gaines’s Mill, the Army of the Potomac began its risky retreat to the James River, and on June 28 Stanton sent Halleck a telegram that canceled any scheme of conquest Halleck might have had:

  The enemy have concentrated in such force at Richmond as to render it absolutely necessary, in the opinion of the President, for you immediately to detach 25,000 of your force and forward it by the nearest and quickest route by way of Baltimore and Washington to Richmond.… in detaching your force the President directs that it be done in such way as to enable you to hold your ground and not interfere with the movement against Chattanooga and East Tennessee.… The direction to send these forces immediately is rendered imperative by a serious reverse suffered by General McClellan before Richmond yesterday, the full extent of which is not yet known.3

  Halleck protested that Washington was asking the impossible: he could not hold his ground, continue the advance on Chattanooga and East Tennessee, and also send twenty-five thousand troops East, and he suggested that the Chattanooga move be canceled. Having filed his protest, he then set about getting the troops ready to move. Grant was told to report immediately on the number of men he had at Memphis and to describe the river transportation available to get them up to Cairo; he had better fortify the land side of Memphis at once, because the divisions of Sherman and Hurlbut might have to leave—“The defeat of McClellan at Richmond has created a stampede in Washington.” Buell was notified that his whole railroad-repair scheme might be halted, and McClernand was ordered to prepare to move east with his entire command. Halleck glumly told him, “The entire campaign in the west is broken up by these orders and we shall very probably lose all we have gained.”4

  As it turned out, things were not quite that bad. Now as always, President Lincoln was profoundly interested in anything that affected eastern Tennessee, and Stanton immediately notified Halleck that “the Chattanooga expedition must not on any account be given up”—instructions which Lincoln supplemented with a personal wire to Halleck:

  Would be very glad of 25,000 infantry—no artillery or cavalry; but please do not send a man if it endangers any place you deem important to hold or if it forces you to give up or weaken or delay the expedition against Chattanooga. To take and hold the railroad at or east of Cleveland, in East Tennessee, I think fully as important as the taking and holding of Richmond.5

  During the next few days Washington’s fear diminished, as it became clear that the Army of the Potomac had suffered a repulse but not a disaster, and Halleck presently was notified that he need send no troops after all. But if Halleck’s troops were not to be moved, Halleck himself might be: he was increasingly on the mind of the President, who had already suggested that he would be glad if the General could make “a flying visit for consultation,” and on July 10 there appeared at Halleck’s headquarters Governor William Sprague of Rhode Island, armed with a letter from Lincoln. Sprague, at the moment, looked like a rising star; he was young, wealthy, about to become a member of the U. S. Senate, about to become son-in-law of Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, and the Presidential letter which he carried said that although his mission was unofficial it bore full White House approval.

  Sprague wanted Halleck to go to Washington, presumably to advise the President on military matters. Halleck demurred, and he wrote Lincoln: “If I were to go to Washington I could advise but one thing: to place all forces in North Carolina, Virginia and Washington under one head and hold that head responsible for the result.”6 The oracular vagueness of this was about all Sprague got out of the interview, but Lincoln and Stanton had made their decision, and on July 11 Halleck was notified that he had been appointed General in Chief of the Armies of the United States, and that he was to move at once to Washington.

  Much later, when Halleck’s inability to function as General in Chief had become painfully obvious, people would wonder why Lincoln and Stanton had ever chosen him; yet, at the time, the selection was eminently logical. In the light of what men then knew, it must have seemed almost inevitable. The country had no General in Chief and it obviously needed one very badly, and as the record then stood it could be argued that Halleck was the only possible choice. He commanded the military department in which the war’s chief successes had been won. Kentucky and Missouri had been saved for the Union (neither state was held as firmly as seemed to be the case in July, 1862, but that would not be apparent until later), West Tennessee had been taken, Arkansas was in the process of being conquered, and it seemed likely that the Mississippi would soon be opened from headwaters to Gulf. Halleck had just told Admiral Farragut that he could not give him any help at Vicksburg just now, but he felt that although “this may delay the clearing of the river … its accomplishment will be certain in a few weeks.”7 On form, Halleck was the man to pick, and the government picked him.

  All of this, of course, made a vast difference in the status and prospects of U. S. Grant.

  Grant learned of the impending change on July 11, when he got an abrupt wire from Halleck ordering him to come to Corinth at once. The wire contained no hint of what was up, and Grant, slightly bewildered, asked if he was to bring his staff with him. Halleck replied that he could decide that for himself, but that Corinth was to be his headquarters hereafter. Grant took off, and did not learn what was in the wind until he arrived. Then, on July 16, Halleck signed Special Field Orders No. 161, which enlarged Grant’s old District of West Tennessee to include the Districts of Cairo and Mississippi; which meant that Grant now controlled everything between the Tennessee and Mississippi rivers all the way up to and including his old base of Cairo, and that he also commanded Pope’s old force, now Rosecrans’s, “heretofore known as the Army of the Mississippi.” There would be no over-all Department Commander. Grant and Buell would be independent of one another, each answerable only to Washington.8

  It appears that Halleck had not been certain whether to hand this job to Grant or not. In accepting his new command, Halleck asked Stanton whether he should turn his old headquarters over to the next in rank—who, he pointed out, was Grant—or whether the President wished to designate a successor. Privately, he seems to have wanted to give the place to a member of his own staff, Colonel Robert Allen, his c
hief quartermaster. Much later, Allen told Adam Badeau that Halleck came into his tent, informed him that he himself had been called to Washington, and asked: “Now, what can I do for you?” Allen replied that he was not sure Halleck could do anything for him, and Halleck replied: “Yes, I can give you command of this army.” When Allen remarked that he did not have enough rank, Halleck said that could easily be fixed; but Allen pointed out that he was up to his neck in the huge expenditures and complicated administration of a large and active supply organization which would make it inexpedient for him to leave his present position, and the subject finally was dropped.9 Grant formally assumed command of his enlarged district on July 17, Halleck left for Washington, and Grant was on his own.

  On his own, geographically, and to a limited extent: no officer who served under Halleck was very often on his own, no matter how far away Halleck’s headquarters might be. But Halleck in Washington would operate a little differently than Halleck in Corinth. In Corinth, he had displayed a penchant for reaching over the head of a district commander and issuing orders direct to the district commander’s subordinates, and Grant had had two or three vigorous passages of arms with him about this. It had come up immediately after Grant’s removal to Memphis, in June, and there had been a flare-up a week or two later, when Halleck misunderstood the wording of a telegram Grant had sent him about reported Confederate movements and commented that the message “looks very much like a mere stampede.” Grant replied stoutly that “stampeding is not my weakness,” and went on to assert: “Your orders have countermanded mine … all the dispositions of the forces of the Army of the Tennessee have been made without my orders, and in most cases without my being informed of the changes.” Halleck, in return, insisted that he would, whenever he thought proper, issue orders to any parts of Grant’s command he chose, and contributed a final stinger: “I must confess that I was very much surprised at the tone of your dispatch and the ill-feeling manifested in it, so contrary to your usual style, and especially toward one who has so often befriended you when you were attacked by others.”10 There would be no more of this, with Halleck in Washington, engrossed with problems far weightier than the proper placement of a brigade or a division along a railroad line in southwestern Tennessee. Within limits, Grant would be lord of his new domain.

  For the time being these limits would be restrictive. The great opportunity that had been visible after the occupation of Corinth was gone, now, and the Army of the Tennessee would have to go strictly on the defensive. Indeed, the whole Federal position between the Mississippi and the Alleghenies had changed. The initiative was held by the Confederates, both in the East and in the West. In the East, Lee had simply taken it out of the hands of an overcautious McClellan: in the West, Halleck had given the Confederacy just enough leeway to let it regain the offensive, and the great Union host which had looked so irresistible at the end of May was widely scattered, reduced to the inglorious task of rebuilding and guarding a network of railway lines, occupying cities and country garrisons, worrying about supply depots, and in general waiting to see what the Rebels were going to do next. Looking back in his old age, Grant was to remember the summer and fall of 1862 as his most anxious period in all the war.11

  At an undetermined distance to the south, in Mississippi and Alabama, there were substantial bodies of Rebel troops, obviously preparing for some new blow at the invaders. Braxton Bragg had Beauregard’s old army of 50,000 men or more, Kirby Smith was gathering forces in eastern Tennessee, and Earl Van Dorn and Sterling Price had 15,000 men brought from the trans-Mississippi area. Lumped together, the armies of Grant and Buell outnumbered them; but the Federal armies were spraddled out along a front running from Memphis to Bridgeport, Alabama, in no shape to engage in anything but strictly defensive operations. As far as the Federals were concerned, this had suddenly become a railroad war, and Grant had more than 360 miles of track to maintain and protect. The youthful engineer officer who had come down to join him in the Donelson period, James B. McPherson—promoted now to brigadier general—was acting as a highly efficient superintendent of railroads, and track and bridge gangs which he had selected from the ranks were doing great things, but they were not fighting Rebels. The Mobile and Ohio line was open all 143 miles from Corinth to Columbus, Kentucky; and although the Memphis and Charleston road between Corinth and Memphis had not been reopened, a roundabout connection was available by way of Grand Junction and Jackson. Yet these lines, running through hostile territory, where almost every civilian was both willing and able to contribute to the interruption of Yankee communications, were more liability than asset. Sherman had glumly noted that “along and on the road our every movement is known and reported, while we can hear nothing,” and Confederate cavalry raiders of uncommon talent, John Hunt Morgan and Nathan Bedford Forrest, were showing an exasperating ability to sift past the Federal outposts and smash up installations far behind the lines.12

  It had been optimistically supposed, early in the spring, that the people of western Tennessee were good Unionists at heart, waiting only for “liberation” by Federal troops. When Memphis was first occupied a correspondent for the Chicago Times had sent back a glowing dispatch about deep-seated loyalty to the Union, asserting that the good people of Memphis had firmly resisted “the encroachments of Jeff Davis’ government,” and declaring that “joy at deliverance is overwhelming,”13 but this picture was obviously false. Before he moved from Memphis Grant had reported to Halleck that the city was full of “many families of officers in the Rebel army … who are very violent,” and had obtained permission to send them all south of the Federal lines. It was his first experience in the occupation of a hostile city, and he was left in no doubt about the way the inhabitants felt. Much of his time, he remembered after the war, was spent listening to protests and complaints from citizens who seemed to feel that even a Yankee general would admit the justice of the Confederate cause if he could just be induced to take a reasoned view of the situation.14 It was becoming more and more apparent that Grant’s army was precariously established in a land where the civilian was as devout an enemy as the soldier in gray.

  The enmity was active as well as devout. Guerilla warfare was developing, and it was giving the war a new cast. A war in which the only foes were organized bodies of regular troops was one thing, but a war in which every farmer might be a night-raider who would shoot a courier, or band with other farmers to capture a wagon train or tear up railroad track, was something very different, and it would provoke a grim harshness. On July 3 Grant issued an order:

  The system of guerilla warfare now being prosecuted by some troops organized under the authority of the so-called Southern Confederacy, and others without such authority, being so pernicious to the welfare of the community where it is carried on, and it being within the power of communities to suppress this system, it is ordered that wherever loss is sustained by the Government collections shall be made by seizure of a sufficient amount of personal property from persons in the immediate neighborhood sympathizing with the rebellion to remunerate the Government for all loss and expense of collection. Persons acting as guerillas without organization and without uniform to distinguish them from private citizens are not entitled to the treatment of prisoners of war when caught and will not receive such treatment.15

  Writing thus, Grant was simply going by the book of traditional warfare, which said that armies of occupation must respect the persons and property of civilians in occupied territory but that the civilians themselves must abide by the rules: that is, that armies which did not make war on civilians must not themselves be warred on by civilians. Any community (said the tradition) was responsible for the actions of its members; if its members behaved like peaceful farmers by day and resistance fighters by night the community was supposed to restrain them, and it was proper for the occupying army to inflict punishment on the community to stimulate it in this respect. When Halleck told Secretary Stanton that he was going to stamp out guerilla warfare in occupied
territory and that “I shall probably be obliged to use hemp pretty freely for that purpose,”16 he was saying no more than the ordinary rules of warfare entitled him to say. So far, the Federal commanders had at least tried to keep the invasion from crushing the rights of enemy civilians.

  But it was a losing effort even at best, and as the soldiers began to get the idea that every man’s hand was against them, here in the Confederacy, it would become utterly hopeless. Federal troops were forbidden to rob barns or hen-roosts, to enter inhabited houses or to remove fence rails in order to make campfires, and armed guards were often stationed at plantations to enforce these orders. But there was no way to keep the poorly disciplined individualists in blue from acting on their own initiative; they had the drill and training which enabled them to parade and maneuver and fight, but the ingrained habit of obedience which would compel them to respect the property of their enemies they did not have and they would never get it. In certain important respects they were almost wholly undisciplined. Their indiscipline grew out of the society which produced them. This society had given them a great lack of respect for constituted authority, and then it had created an army organized in such a way that this lack of respect could not be corrected. In the end, this army would decide how the war was to go.

  Whatever might happen later in the war in other states, Federal armies in Tennessee at this time were not marauding, pilfering and devastating under orders. The mischief invariably was done by soldiers who had wandered away from their regiments and were acting on their own. It was not possible for the high command to stop this, because the high command was utterly unable to prevent straggling. One of Buell’s officers stated the case very simply when he testified that “it has been impossible to get the subaltern officers to either report or punish the straggling of soldiers,” adding that this was a practice which “would ruin any army in the world.” The captains and lieutenants, he said, were brave enough and intelligent enough; they just would not try to enforce the kind of discipline which would protect civilian property in enemy territory.17 And an army of this kind, faced with guerilla warfare which would provoke even a tightly-held force on the European model into harsh reprisals, was likely to behave in a very heavy-handed manner.