by Bruce Catton
Meanwhile, there was the task of administering occupied territory. The people of Memphis continued to detest the Yankee invader, and they took no pains to hide their feeling. A newspaper correspondent said that the Memphis women were especially bitter, ostentatiously drawing their skirts aside whenever they had to pass a Union soldier on the street; employing a delicate euphemism, he wrote that the women of the town, “with a breadth of misapplied maternal attractions,” would parade haughtily in the evening “in the fleeciest and scantiest of magnificence,” each one usually accompanied by a little Negro girl carrying parasol and other minor impedimenta. But Sherman believed that he was getting things under control, and with his usual brutal frankness he wrote Grant about it in the middle of August:
I find them [the people of Memphis] much more resigned and less presumptuous than at first. Your orders about property and mine about “niggers” make them feel that they can be hurt, and they are about as sensitive about their property as Yankees. I believe in universal confiscation and colonization. Some Union people have been expelled from Raleigh. I have taken some of the richest Rebels and will compel them to buy and pay for all of the land, horses, cattle and effects, as well as damages, and let the Union owner deed the property to one or more of them. This they don’t like at all.33
Grant was supposed to be a man without nerves, but the strain of this summer was beginning to tell on him. He was moved, presently, to do something out of character: he arrested and imprisoned a newspaper reporter, and the incident tells something about the tense atmosphere which surrounded the camps of the occupying army.
The Chicago Times was notorious as a Copperhead paper, and its Memphis correspondent was one W. P. Isham, brother-in-law to Wilbur Storey, the paper’s proprietor. Isham’s reputation was bad. His room in the Gayoso Hotel at Memphis was considered a resort for local secessionists, and he was described by a hostile newspaper as “one of the still sort: has a mild blue eye, a pleasant face, his mouth always wears a secret, crafty smile.” He had been sending North stories calculated to dishearten loyal Unionists, depicting Memphis as a city full of drunkenness and disease, cursed by a bad climate and an infected water supply, inadequately garrisoned in the face of rising Rebel strength. The story which moved Grant to hostile action was one which Isham filed late in July, describing the wholly imaginary arrival at Mobile of a fleet of ten English-built ironclad gunboats—impregnable vessels mounting from 10 to 30 guns apiece and sheathed in six-inch armor, whose appearance (according to Isham) broke the blockade and gave the Confederacy a naval force “of superior strength and weight of metal” to anything the Union possessed. Grant sent a clipping of the story to Sherman, with a note remarking that the story was “both false in fact and mischievous in character,” and directing Sherman to “have the author arrested and sent to the Alton Penitentiary, under proper escort, for confinement until the close of the war, unless sooner discharged by competent authority.”
Sherman complied willingly enough—he hated newspaper correspondents of all descriptions, and unquestionably would have been happy to arrest every reporter in Tennessee, loyal or otherwise—and the Chicago Tribune mentioned the action with approval. Isham’s story, said the Tribune, was made up out of whole cloth; “There was design in it—to induce discouragement into the North at a critical time.” So Isham went to Alton, under guard, and the Times sent down a reporter of a very different stripe to take his place, a former Milwaukee newspaperman named Sylvanus Cadwallader. Cadwallader ultimately persuaded Grant to order Isham’s release; meanwhile, he established his own integrity as a reporter and in time became one of Grant’s chosen intimates, winning for himself a place at headquarters that no other correspondent could match.34
But the significance of the incident remains. The North was rapidly approaching the most chancy period of the entire war. There was reason for despondency back home, and if the imperturbable little General in Tennessee was growing jumpy there was plenty in the war situation to make him so. As the summer of 1862 drew on toward autumn the Confederacy was reaching its high tide, and everything that the Union had won down to date seemed in a fair way to be lost forever.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Victory, and a New Plan
What made Corinth important was the railroads. The great Memphis and Charleston line, the Confederacy’s vital East-West axis, ran through here on its way to Chattanooga, and at Corinth it crossed the Mobile and Ohio, which linked Kentucky with the Gulf. With these roads securely held and with Corinth itself properly fortified, the mighty Union Army could digest its conquest of West Tennessee and, at its leisure, could gather strength for an irresistible new advance into a half-paralyzed South. Everything that had been done since Shiloh had been based on the belief that this would be so. Now, in the middle of the summer of 1862, this belief was being exposed as a massive error in judgment.
One trouble was that holding the railroads did not paralyze the Confederates in the least. On the contrary, it inspired them to a new activity, for it offered a wealth of targets which could be hit by small bands of guerillas (whose name was legion) or by detachments of roving cavalry. Simply to get the roads into operating condition kept thousands of Union soldiers so busy they had no time for anything else, and whatever they did could be undone, overnight, by a handful of Southerners. The army of occupation became half constabulary and half track-repair gang, and the main current of the war simply flowed out from under it.
Buell, moving east to take Chattanooga, was tied to the railroad, and two months after Corinth was occupied he still had not reached his goal, although his men had performed prodigies of road-building. (This did little good, because the road ran squarely across the Confederate front and it could be cut anywhere at a minor expenditure of Southern effort.) Grant was no better off; the line from Corinth to Memphis still was not open, the connecting lines farther to the rear were in little better shape, and the handiest way to get from Memphis to Corinth was to go up to Columbus, Kentucky, by steamboat and then to come down from Columbus by rail.
The guerillas were an expensive nuisance. Lacking cavalry, Grant had to shift whole infantry divisions about to meet them, an expedient that never worked because the swiftly moving Confederates refused to wait for the ponderous columns to arrive. Grant tried to extemporize a mounted force—his appeal for cavalry reinforcements having been turned down—by putting foot-soldiers on horses seized from Tennessee plantations, but this did little good.1 His army’s rear seemed no more secure than its front lines.
A painful illustration of this fact came on August 22, when Grant was obliged to report to Halleck that a guerilla detachment had captured one of his posts far back at Clarksville, on the Cumberland. This loss was especially irritating because of the way in which it came about. Clarksville had been garrisoned by six companies of the 71st Ohio, under Colonel Rodney Mason, and Mason had been one of the fainthearts who led his regiment off the field at Shiloh in the first shock of battle. He had come to Grant afterward, with tears in his eyes, begging for a chance to redeem himself, and Grant had put him at Clarksville. Now it developed that when a Rebel band surrounded this detachment and sent in a demand for surrender, Colonel Mason had taken counsel of his fears and his junior officers. He sent a subordinate out, under flag of truce, to count the Rebels who had surrounded him, and this man came back with the report that there were at least eight hundred of them, one company being horrendously “armed with volcanic rifles,” by which it appears that the man meant repeaters. The juniors argued that the case was hopeless, Mason agreed, and the whole place was ingloriously surrendered. Mason and twelve of his juniors were promptly cashiered, by order of the President, but this did not help very much.2
Guerilla warfare in the rear was not only unsettling; it distracted attention from the front, and by the middle of August the Confederates were obviously up to something extensive. Their target was Buell’s army rather than Grant’s, but whatever happened to Buell would have an immediate effect on Grant—
Halleck had already warned Grant that he must be prepared to give Buell some reinforcements—and by this time the Confederates had brought more soldiers east of the Mississippi and seemed inclined to strike at both armies. A Southern offensive of large dimensions was in fact getting under way, and for the moment there was nothing the Federals could do but wait for the blow to fall. Grant’s army and Buell’s were all but completely immobilized, and Braxton Bragg had worked out a plan to take advantage of this.
At Knoxville there were nearly twenty thousand Confederate troops led by Major General Edmund Kirby Smith, and in the middle of August these started north, outflanking the small Union force which held Cumberland Gap and forcing it to retreat, and driving on for the heart of Kentucky. Shortly after this, Bragg with nearly thirty thousand left Chattanooga—which he had reached long ahead of Buell’s fumbling advance—and moved North, aiming to get into Buell’s rear, to recapture Nashville if possible, and perhaps to move on into Kentucky and join forces there with Kirby Smith.3 He had had strong cavalry detachments under John Morgan and Bedford Forrest raiding Buell’s supply lines, and Buell’s unhappy railroad-building activities came to a complete halt. Buell was in many ways the stuffiest of all Union generals, but he was also one of the unluckiest, and he was caught now in a pitiless vise. He had to keep step with Bragg, and for the moment Bragg was moving to a very lively tune. Not the least of the Federals’ problems was the fact that Price and Van Dorn, in Mississippi, had between them nearly thirty thousand men. Some of these had to be retained for the defense of Vicksburg, but since most of Grant’s men were tied down to fixed positions it would be quite possible for the Confederates in Mississippi to launch a mobile field army that would give Grant a great deal of trouble.
Bragg’s and Kirby Smith’s Confederates moved north with speed, and as they moved the whole Confederate war effort approached its high tide. In Virginia, Lee was pulverizing Pope and his makeshift Army of Virginia, and was going on into Maryland, meditating a slashing invasion of Pennsylvania. Bragg was hopeful that the Western contingents “may all unite in Ohio,” and Halleck was frankly warning Grant that a junction of Price and Bragg in Tennessee or Kentucky “would be most disastrous.” Buell demanded reinforcements, and Grant sent two divisions from Rosecrans, and realized that he might at any time have to send more. He was confident that he could hold Corinth, and he did not believe that the Price-Van Dorn combination could get past him into Tennessee, but he had nothing whatever to spare.4
The first result of all of this was that it completely wrecked Buell’s railroad-building activities. He had gone toward Chattanooga with painful deliberation, partly because he was deliberate by nature and partly because Halleck considered that the Memphis and Charleston railroad, having been captured, ought to be used, and everything Buell’s army had done since Corinth was taken had been keyed to the notion that the Union must at all costs keep, use and protect the long lines of track. Now, with Bragg swirling past him toward Kentucky, all of the summer’s work was abandoned. The Confederacy was providing Union strategists with abundant proof that conquests made on the map mean nothing as long as enemy armies themselves are undefeated. The fact that Chattanooga was connected by railroad with both Corinth and Nashville amounted to very little, if the Federal armies at Corinth and Nashville should be defeated.
When the campaign began Confederate strategy was somewhat formless; Bragg, Van Dorn and Price were all independent, answerable only to Richmond, and in the beginning Bragg could do no more than urge Van Dorn and Price to keep active in Mississippi in order to help his own invasion. Price obediently moved up into northeastern Mississippi and occupied the town of Iuka, capturing Federal stores there, and Grant notified Halleck that although he believed this was only a feint intended to pin his own forces down, “sending so many troops away, may it not be turned into an attack?” What Grant feared was about to come true. President Davis put Price under Van Dorn’s orders, and Van Dorn promptly began to plan a real attack.5
Grant’s problem thickened. Buell was moving all the way up to Louisville—Bragg having outmarched him—and he needed more help. Raw troops from Ohio, Indiana and Illinois were being rushed down to his aid, but he needed veterans, and Grant had to send a third division, Gordon Granger’s, from Rosecrans’s force. With it, much to Grant’s displeasure, went Phil Sheridan, who was about to be made a brigadier general. Granger was assigning Sheridan to the command of an infantry brigade, and Sheridan, eager for combat service, was delighted with the assignment; Grant met him at the railroad station where Granger’s troops were getting on the cars for the move north and tried to persuade him to remain at Corinth. Sheridan angrily refused, and bystanders saw the two generals, who later were to become so intimate, arguing hotly. Grant lost the argument and Sheridan went north.6 He had already shown himself to be a highly capable cavalry leader; in Kentucky he would win distinction leading an infantry division for Buell in the battle of Perryville.
By now Buell was living on borrowed time. Washington was profoundly displeased at his inability to keep Bragg out of Kentucky, and Halleck told Major General Horatio Wright, who was in command along the Ohio River, that “unless he [Buell] does something very soon I think he will be relieved.” He added a comment describing the new pressures which would hereafter rest on all Federal commanders: “The Government seems determined to apply the guillotine to all unsuccessful generals. It seems rather hard to do this where the general is not in fault, but perhaps with us now, as in the French revolution, some harsh measures are required.” The true harshness of these measures became visible to Buell late in September, when a War Department messenger gave him orders removing him from command and ordering him to turn his army over to Thomas. These orders were suspended, at Thomas’s request: Thomas pointed out that Buell had laid plans to bring the invaders to battle, that he himself had not become familiar with those plans, and that a change in commanders right now might be ruinous. For the time being the orders were suspended and Buell retained his position, but it was clear that one more mistake would end his career.7
Grant, meanwhile, had lost three divisions from his army, and Price and Van Dorn were beginning to crowd him. When he sent Granger’s troops to Kentucky he won Halleck’s permission to abandon the railroad east of Corinth—the whole railroad from Corinth to Chattanooga, object of an entire summer’s work, was thus given up—and Grant had to regroup his remaining troops to protect his own communications and the few places which it seemed essential to hold. In effect, he divided his troops into three principal detachments. At Memphis there was Sherman, holding that important river port and the immediately adjacent territory; in the center, guarding the north-south railroad line, there was Ord, a solid soldier who was rising in Grant’s estimation; and in the Corinth area there was Rosecrans, with three infantry divisions, two brigades of a fourth, and a quota of cavalry and artillery. Grant established his own headquarters at Jackson, on the Mobile and Ohio fifty-five miles north of Corinth. At this time he had, all told, something like forty-five thousand men in his command. Slightly more than half of these were available in the forward areas to meet Van Dorn and Price.8
By the middle of September the Federal cause looked shaky. In Maryland, Lee had captured the Harpers Ferry garrison from the Union and was about to fight the great battle of Antietam. Of the other Confederate generals, Bragg was in mid-Kentucky, Kirby Smith seemed to be menacing Cincinnati, and Price, at Iuka, might be on the verge of slipping past Grant’s flank and moving on toward the Ohio River; Van Dorn, meanwhile, was fifty miles west of Corinth, meditating an attack on either that town or Memphis. Even more than during the week of Gettysburg ten months later, the agonizing crisis of the war was at hand.
While Lee and McClellan were fighting along Antietam Creek, Grant made plans to defeat Price. Rosecrans, with 9000 men, was to swing out and come in on Iuka from the south; Ord, meanwhile, with about 8000, was to attack Iuka from the west, and Grant confidently wrote Halleck “I think it will be imp
ossible for Price to get into Tennessee.” Actually, Grant was hopeful that this two-pronged attack might destroy Price’s entire command. He himself moved with Ord. At the same time he ordered Hurlbut to make a demonstration south and east from the Memphis area and to create the impression that a strong Federal column was going to march down into the Yazoo Delta country. It was hoped that this would impress Van Dorn and keep him from coming to Price’s rescue.
Grant’s plan to bag Price’s little army at Iuka was good, on paper, but it was a little too ambitious. It involved bringing two separated bodies of troops together on the field of battle, which is always a risky operation, and the maneuver was to be done in a rough, broken country whose inadequate roads made communication between the columns almost impossible. Ord’s troops had a hard march, groping along a narrow road in a swamp, where heavy bushes and a tangle of decayed logs constricted all movement. They remembered, once, how Grant tried to ride past the marching column, found that his horse was spattering the soldiers with mud, and left the road to pick his way through the underbrush, not returning to the road until he had reached the head of the column. An Ohio private recalled that the men were ready to cheer him for this considerate act, and wrote that the little incident “shows the kind of man on whose shoulders the greatest responsibilities were to be placed.”9 Grant and Ord finally got their men in position a short distance west of town, and Price marshaled his own troops to give battle.
