by Bruce Catton
This pleased both Grant and Rosecrans, who were finding it increasingly hard to work together. Rosecrans blamed Grant’s staff, believing that “the mousing politicians” there were working successfully to make Grant jealous of his subordinate. Not long after the battle of Corinth, Grant had chided Rosecrans for letting his own staff plant newspaper stories implying that Rosecrans’s army was independent of Grant; Rosecrans had denied this with some heat, ending with the assertion: “If you do not meet me with the frank avowal that you are satisfied, I shall consider that my ability to be useful in this department has ended.” To Halleck, Rosecrans confided: “I am sure those politicians will manage matters with the sole view of preventing Grant from being in the background of military operations. This will make him sour and reticent. I shall become uncommunicative, and that, added to a conviction that he lacks administrative ability, will complete other reasons why I should be relieved from duty here.”18
To Grenville Dodge, Grant said that Rosecrans’s promotion was a good thing. Grant believed that Rosecrans was insubordinate, Dodge recalled, saying that the man had some fundamental reluctance to respond to the orders of a superior; as an independent army commander, however, Grant thought Rosecrans ought to do very well. One of Grant’s aides told Sherman that Rosecrans’s transfer was “greatly to the relief of the general, who was very much disappointed in him,” and such generals as McPherson and Hurlbut had made bitter complaints about the handling of the pursuit of Van Dorn. Julia Grant was at the Jackson headquarters for a time, late in October, and she received a number of these complaints. Long afterward, Dodge said Mrs. Grant told him that Grant had made up his mind to relieve Rosecrans from duty, and that when the telegram announcing the new assignment was received Grant brought it to her with the remark that his greatest trouble was over. Dodge believed that one thing that set Grant against Rosecrans was Rosecrans’s public criticism of Brigadier General Thomas Davies’s division, whose line had been broken in the first day’s fighting at Corinth. The core of this unit was the division C. F. Smith had led at Fort Donelson, and it was a pet outfit of Grant’s; assigning Dodge to the command of it, shortly after Corinth, Grant told him, “I want you to understand that you are not commanding a division of cowards.”19
If Rosecrans’s assignment pleased both Rosecrans and Grant, it was not quite so pleasing to George H. Thomas. Although Thomas had refused to take Buell’s place when it was offered to him a month earlier, he did not consider that he had permanently declined it, and when the job went to Rosecrans his feelings were hurt. With great dignity, Thomas stated his case in a letter to Halleck. Early in the fall of 1861, he pointed out, he had promised to occupy East Tennessee if given twenty thousand men. The twenty thousand had not been given him, East Tennessee had not been occupied, and Thomas still believed he could have done what he had promised to do; and, in any case, during the year “I performed my duty patriotically and faithfully and with a reasonable amount of credit to myself,” and now he was “deeply mortified and aggrieved.” He made it clear that he was not demanding the army command; what wounded him was the fact that an officer junior to him in rank should be placed over him.
Halleck assuaged him with a friendly letter, in which he pointed out that Rosecrans’s new rank of major general had been dated back in such a way that he was now in fact Thomas’s senior. Thomas immediately withdrew his protest. He was no self-seeker, and once it was made clear that the government was not going out of its way to slight him he had no complaint: “I have no objection whatever to serving under General Rosecrans now that I know his commission dates prior to mine.”20
Meanwhile it was time to get on with the war. The Federals had regained the initiative which had been lost early in the summer, and each Northern army was planning to take the offensive. Grant was evolving plans of his own—at the moment, they involved nothing much more concrete than a determination to get to grips with his enemies to the southward—but he could not do much unless he could get more men. If the Corinth affair had done nothing else it had clearly shown that the Union forces in West Tennessee were badly under strength.
Halleck would be helpful if he could. In the middle of October Grant’s district was designated a full-fledged military department; it would include Cairo, Forts Henry and Donelson, western Kentucky and Tennessee, and as much of northern Mississippi as Grant could get, and Grant was named as its commander.21 Halleck in far-off Washington seemed to be a more understanding superior than Halleck in Tennessee; the day of the petty pin-prickings seemed to be over—one reason, perhaps, being that Grant himself had learned a little more about his own job. In any case, if Grant could take the offensive Washington would support him.
In the middle of September, Halleck had notified Grant that the Rebels were believed to be building ironclad gunboats somewhere on the Yazoo river, and he had suggested that Grant consult with the Navy people and with General Frederick Steele, who commanded Union forces in Arkansas, and see whether there might not be an expedition that would thwart this project. Grant worked out a scheme for an advance by his own army down the Mississippi Central Railroad, which ran south from Memphis just east of the rich Yazoo delta country. If Steele, with the Navy’s help, could get some men across the river, while Grant seized the town of Grenada, one hundred miles below Memphis, the thing might work. But before he could do anything Grant would have to be reinforced.22
All of this was being planned at the very height of the scare raised in the north by Bragg’s presence in Kentucky, when Middle Western governors were being urged to send all the recruits they could get to Louisville to help defeat the invader. Even so, Grant’s appeal was approved, and Halleck told Wright, commanding along the Ohio, to ear-mark some of the new regiments at Cairo for Grant’s department. Between the battles of Iuka and Corinth Grant made a quick trip to St. Louis to arrange for co-operation from west of the Mississippi.
For the moment, nothing came of this Yazoo expedition, but it helped to set a pattern. The idea of a two-pronged advance down the Mississippi took root; also, both Sherman and Grant began to wonder whether holding all of the Tennessee railroads might not be costing a good deal more than it was worth. While the battle of Corinth was in progress, Sherman wrote to Grant about it:
… I am daily more and more convinced that we should hold the river absolutely and leave the interior alone. Detachments inland can always be overcome or are at great hazard, and they do not convert the people. They cannot be made to love us, but may be made to fear us, and dread the passage of troops through their country. With the Mississippi safe we could land troops at any point and by a quick march break the railroad, where we could make ourselves so busy that our descent would be dreaded the whole length of the river, and by the loss of Negroes and other property they would in time discover that war is not the remedy for the political evils of which they complained.… We cannot change the hearts of those people of the South, but we can make war so terrible that they will realize the fact that however brave and gallant and devoted to their country, still they are mortal and should exhaust all peaceful remedies before they fly to war.23
Grant was never addicted to reading lectures on changing Southerners’ hearts, making war terrible and teaching an enduring lesson, but his ideas about the way to penetrate the deep South were changing. It seems likely that the war did not look quite as simple to him now as it had looked earlier. He had believed, originally, that the Confederacy would collapse after one or two defeats, and that most Southerners were not really committed to the fight. Then he had thought that a quick, slashing follow-up after the victory at Fort Donelson would settle things. By the books, this should have been so, but this war was being fought by no book anyone had ever seen before, and Grant was not quite ready to desert military orthodoxy entirely. He was beginning to see, however, that to occupy western Tennessee and to try to make use of all of its railroads was to devote most of his muscle to purely defensive duties, and this he wanted to stop; and on October 26 he tried
to put his thoughts on paper in a dispatch to Halleck.
No plan of operations, he pointed out, had yet been suggested from Washington, and Grant had no way of knowing what the other Federal armies were going to do. At the moment he could do little more than defend his position, and he did not feel at liberty to abandon any occupied place without Halleck’s consent. Still, he would suggest:
Destruction of the railroads to all points of the compass from Corinth … and the opening of the road from Humboldt to Memphis. The Corinth forces I would move to Grand Junction, and add to them the Bolivar forces except a small garrison there. With small re-enforcements at Memphis I think I would be able to move down the Mississippi Central road and cause the evacuation of Vicksburg and to be able to capture or destroy all the boats in the Yazoo river.
This, clearly, was a proposal to reverse all of the strategic planning that had gone on since the Federals first occupied Corinth. To hold the railroad network was to immobilize most of the Army: give it up, then, occupy the railroad junction of Humboldt so as to give Memphis a railway connection with Columbus and the interior, base the main army just north of the Mississippi border halfway between Memphis and Corinth, and then drive south along one railway line, using it for supplies. Vicksburg and the Yazoo Delta area could be cut off and could be occupied at leisure. This, three weeks after Van Dorn’s defeat, was Grant’s suggestion.24
Grant got no answer to this proposal, but his concept of the job before him was taking form. In the weeks ahead he would amplify it, and then he would try to act on it. The one complication which was still to be revealed centered around a seemingly insignificant little fact: Major General John McClernand, the doughty Illinois politician, had taken leave of absence in the middle of August and had gone to Washington to consult with Mr. Lincoln. What Grant finally would do in the Mississippi Valley would have to be adjusted to fit that fact.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Forrest, Van Dorn and McClernand
John A. McClernand, formerly a Democratic Congressman from Illinois and currently Major General of Volunteers with a good combat record, was ambitious, cantankerous and energetic, and he thoroughly understood Middle Western politics. He realized that a serious political crisis was building up in the great farm belt north of the Ohio River, and although this crisis demanded a military solution he doubted that the professional soldiers would ever provide it. In a year and a half of war the professionals had not managed to break the Confederate grip on the lower Mississippi River, and McClernand believed that this grip was inexorably strangling the life out of the Middle West’s willingness to go on with the war for Union. Getting leave of absence in the late summer of 1862, McClernand went to Washington to present his views to President Lincoln and Secretary Stanton. As a result, the war in the West was about to undergo a far-reaching change.
McClernand’s argument was simple. The great outlet for the huge surplus of grain and meat raised in the Middle West had always been the Mississippi. This outlet was closed, and the West now had to rely on the East-West railroad lines, supplemented by steamboats and schooners on the Great Lakes. The railroad men, monopolists devoid of conscience, had raised freight rates to an extortionate degree, which was fine for Eastern financiers and industrialists but ruinous to the Middle West. Resenting this, Westerners were beginning to elect anti-war men to Congress; before long they might even produce a new political party, which would consent to Southern independence if the Southerners would agree to reopen the river, and which might eventually work for secession of the Western states themselves. Therefore, said McClernand, unless the government wanted to lose the war it had better do something drastic to clear the river.1
McClernand was not the only man who was thinking along these lines. The cabinet had discussed the matter as early as August 3, and Acting Secretary of the Interior John P. Usher, of Indiana, had suggested the advisability of raising a special force to open the Mississippi. Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, another Westerner, had warmly supported the proposal, and the cabinet had asked General Halleck about it. Halleck thought the river ought to be opened but did not like the notion of trying to do it with brand-new troops, and for the time being the project was dropped; but when McClernand got to Washington it was revived, and both President Lincoln and Secretary Stanton developed a strong enthusiasm for it.
A key feature of McClernand’s proposal, of course, was the suggestion that the expedition be entrusted to McClernand himself. He was an all-out-war man and he was also a Western Democrat, and it seemed probable that in an area where there were many Democrats he could bring many new recruits into the Army; also, the President and the Secretary of War were in a mood just then to welcome any suggestion which involved direct action. It had begun to seem that the West Pointers were excessively deliberate men who did not like to fight, and the very word “strategy” had come to sound like an excuse for avoiding combat. Discouraged by the apparent lack of fighting spirit, Lincoln that fall wrote that “the army, like the nation, had become demoralized by the idea that the war is to be ended, the nation united and peace restored, by strategy, and not by hard desperate fighting.” McClernand wanted to fight, he knew where to fight, and since he could also help to provide a new army the administration was ready to give his proposal substantial backing.2
There were reservations, to be sure. Secretary Chase consulted both Lincoln and Halleck about McClernand’s fitness for the job, and Lincoln admitted that although the man was brave and capable he was very anxious to be independent of everybody else. Halleck agreed; McClernand had courage and ability, he said, but he was no disciplinarian, his chief trouble being that all of his officers and men were his political constituents. Colonel John E. Smith of the 45th Illinois wrote that McClernand was a politician rather than a soldier: “He has gerrymandered his division so as to give commands to his particular friends against not only the expressed wishes of officers but of all military precedent.” Halleck himself bluntly told McClernand that he would not support the new scheme.
Grant did not want McClernand in his command, he told Halleck shortly after this time because he was “unmanageable and incompetent,” and when he wrote his Memoirs Grant stiffly said that he did not think McClernand had “either the experience or the qualifications” to fit him for an important job. But the administration was desperate. There were times when it seemed impossible to get the professional soldiers to do anything at all; Buell’s record of inaction in the West seemed remarkably similar to the exasperating inactivity of McClellan in the East, and even Halleck was discouraged. To Governor Gamble of Missouri he was confessing that “I am sick, tired and disgusted with the condition of military affairs here in the East.… There is an immobility here that exceeds all that any man can conceive of. It requires the lever of Archimedes to move this inert mass.”3 McClernand at least proposed to do something, and he proposed to do it quickly, and the administration was prepared to go along with him.
Nevertheless, both Lincoln and Stanton hedged just a little. On October 20 Stanton gave McClernand a top-secret order, on which Lincoln wrote his own endorsement saying that he approved of McClernand’s expedition and wanted it “pushed forward with all possible despatch”; but the order was curiously worded. It specified that McClernand was to visit Indiana, Illinois and Iowa, “to organize the troops remaining in those states and to be raised by volunteering or draft, and forward them with all dispatch to Memphis, Cairo or such other points as may hereafter be designated by the general-in-chief, to the end that, when a sufficient force not required by the operations of General Grant’s command shall be raised, an expedition may be organized under General McClernand’s command against Vicksburg, and to clear the Mississippi river and open navigation to New Orleans.” A final paragraph stipulated that “the forces so organized will remain subject to the designation of the general-in-chief, and be employed according to such exigencies as the service in his judgment may require.”4
There was a big loophole in all
of this. McClernand was to have an independent command—if Grant did not need his men, and if Halleck finally approved. This compound qualification escaped McClernand’s notice at the time, but it did not escape Halleck’s; nor is there any reason to think that it was supposed to, since both Lincoln and Stanton were competent lawyers who knew how to write airtight documents when they chose to do so. The administration was definitely giving the Mississippi campaign top priority, but it was not really committed to McClernand.
The ultimate effect of this order would be to throw Halleck and Grant much closer together. Halleck had had reservations about Grant for a long time, but these would disappear altogether under the weight of the heavier reservations which he had in respect to McClernand. The idea of the campaign itself Halleck liked. Shortly after McClernand got his orders, Halleck wrote to Major General Nathaniel P. Banks saying that “our prospect for an early movement down the Mississippi is improving,” and adding: “at the west, everything begins to look well again.”5
For the moment, however, a situation had been created which would make Grant’s task extremely confusing. McClernand’s orders were secret, and Halleck was unable to give Grant any explanation of what was happening. Grant knew that something very odd was going on behind his back, but he had no way of finding out just what it was. Grant began what would become one of the most important campaigns of his life under conditions guaranteed to bewilder him.
