This Hallowed Ground

by Bruce Catton

  Naturally the northern authorities were jubilant. The chief engineer of the Army of the Potomac wrote to McClellan saying that the victory “knocks all present calculations in the head” and remarking that if McClellan’s army did not move pretty soon it might find that the western troops had won the war without its aid. “We can march anywhere, I take it,” he exulted.3

  This touched McClellan where he was sore. President Lincoln, the Cabinet, and the Republican leadership generally had been getting more and more impatient with him because he was refusing to move, and Lincoln not long since had irritably remarked that if McClellan did not propose to use the army he himself would like to borrow it for a time. Now McClellan was beginning to take fire. To Buell he telegraphed that “if the force in the west can take Nashville, or even hold its own for the present, I hope to have Richmond and Norfolk in from three to four weeks.” In a wire to Halleck he was equally optimistic: “In less than two weeks I shall move the Army of the Potomac, and hope to be in Richmond soon after you are in Nashville.”4

  Halleck himself seemed to be slightly unhinged. He reported that the Rebels were reinforcing Columbus (which they were in fact preparing to evacuate) and he warned that they were apt to attack him any day in great strength. To Buell he appealed: “I am terribly hard pushed. Help me and I will help you.” He told McClellan that Beauregard was about to come upstream and attack Cairo, called for more troops, and complained: “It is the crisis of the war in the west.” He wanted reinforcements, he wanted Grant and Buell made major generals (along with Smith, who he said was the real author of victory at Fort Donelson, and John Pope, who was mounting an assault on the Confederate river defenses), and most of all he wanted advancement for himself. He appealed to McClellan to make him top commander in the West: “I ask this in return for Forts Henry and Donelson.” Only by promoting him, he asserted, could the Federals cash in on the situation: “I must have command of the armies in the west. Hesitation and delay are losing us the golden opportunity.” Assistant Secretary of War Thomas A. Scott was in Louisville at the time, and Halleck begged him to make Buell co-operate with him, adding plaintively: “I am tired of waiting for action in Washington. They will not understand the case. It is as plain as daylight to me.” Then he went over everybody’s head and sent a wire direct to Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, saying that he had “a golden opportunity” to strike a fatal blow but that “I can’t do it unless I can control Buell’s army.… Give me authority and I will be responsible for results.”5

  Washington’s reaction was lukewarm. Even at that distance McClellan could see that Beauregard was not in the least likely to launch an assault on Cairo, and he said so, adding that neither Halleck nor Buell was giving him a clear picture of what was going on. (Buell was telling him that Johnston was concentrating at Nashville, which he was actually abandoning, and was warning that a great battle would be fought there, for which he would need reinforcements.) Halleck was told that neither the President nor the Secretary of War saw any need for changing the western command arrangements at present and was warned that he and Buell were expected “to co-operate fully and zealously with each other.” For the time being the only promotion that came through was a major general’s commission for U. S. Grant. Now Grant would outrank Buell if their forces ever came together.6

  Grant, meanwhile, wanted to keep moving. He was no man for fuss and feathers; when a romantic staff officer, his mind full of the pageantry of formal warfare, asked him on the morning of Donelson’s surrender what arrangements were being made to parade the captured Rebels for regular surrender ceremonies, Grant said that there would be no ceremonies: “We have the fort, the men and the guns,” and that was enough. To make a show of it would only mortify the beaten Confederates, “who after all are our own countrymen.”

  Grant wanted to push on up the Cumberland toward Nashville. The first objective was the town of Clarksville, twenty-five miles upriver from Donelson, where the railroad line from western Tennessee crossed the Cumberland on its way to Bowling Green. Learning that the Rebels were leaving the place, Grant sent C. F. Smith up to hold it, notified Halleck that he was doing so, and offered to push on and take Nashville if anybody wanted it.7

  Taking Clarksville smoothed the path of invasion. The roads were in bad shape, but Buell could move by rail to Clarksville and could go from there to Nashville by boat, and at last he got under way. Unable to get any clear directive from Halleck, Grant went on ahead, hoping to meet Buell at Nashville and find out what the plans were; and soon after Buell’s advance brigade entered the place — led by the Ormsby Mitchel who had seen poetry and romance in a moonlit reveille in a Kentucky camp — Grant was there, too, trying to work out some scheme for co-operation.

  Nashville was a prize. Johnston had left in a hurry, abandoning huge quantities of supplies — half a million pounds of bacon, much bread and flour, and bales of new tents, the latter greatly welcomed by the Federals, who had left their own tents far behind them. The Federals were having their first experience in occupying a Confederate capital, and they found numerous timid citizens who were ready to turn their coats and cuddle up to the invaders: dignified gentlemen who called on generals to explain that they personally had always been Union men, to identify leading Rebels in the community, to tell where Confederate supplies had been hidden, and in general to make themselves useful. Mitchel felt that the town looked desolate and deserted, said the Rebels were disheartened and confused, and complained bitterly that Buell had no idea what to do next.8

  By February 25 Nashville was under control, and Buell’s advance guard began cautiously to push southward to see where the Confederates might Lave gone. Smith was at Clarksville, and Grant’s army — a solid outfit of four full divisions now, thirty thousand men, twice as big as the one he had led east from Fort Henry — was concentrated in the Clarksville-Donelson area waiting for orders. And Grant was beginning to discover that he was in serious trouble.

  The tip-off came first from a staff officer friendly to Grant, Lieutenant Colonel James B. McPherson of the engineers, who came up to Donelson and remarked that all sorts of wild rumors were floating around in St. Louis: Grant was alleged to be drinking hard, and his troops were said to be wholly out of control. Halleck was reacting to these rumors like a regular gossip, passing them on to McClellan in a way designed to make Grant look like an alcoholic incompetent. He was complaining that he could get no word of any kind from Grant, that Grant had left his command without authority to go off on a fruitless trip to Nashville, and that his army “seems to be as much demoralized by the victory of Fort Donelson as was that of the Potomac by the defeat at Bull Run.” With overtaxed virtue Halleck concluded: “I am worn out and tired with this neglect and inefficiency.” He added that Smith was about the only officer who was equal to the emergency.

  Halleck followed that, next day, with an even more damaging thrust. He told McClellan that he was informed that “General Grant had resumed his former bad habits,” which presumably would account for “his neglect of my oft-repeated orders.” McClellan of course knew perfectly well what “his former bad habits” meant, and he naturally told Halleck that if he felt it necessary he should not hesitate to put Grant under arrest and give the command to Smith: “Generals must observe discipline as well as private soldiers.” Next day Halleck sent Grant a stiff wire: “You will place Gen. C. F. Smith in command of expedition and remain yourself at Fort Henry. Why do you not obey my orders to report strength and positions of your command?”9

  So Grant was in heavy trouble, hardly a fortnight after he had taken Fort Donelson. Part of the trouble, apparently, came because Halleck all along had distrusted him; it appears that even before the Henry-Donelson expedition Halleck had planned to find a new commander, and had not acted simply because he had not found the right man. It is also possible to suspect that Grant was getting a little too much fame and glory for Halleck’s taste, and Halleck’s own attempt to wangle top command in the West had failed. In any case,
it was trouble and Halleck was doing about as much as he conveniently could to get Grant clear out of the war.

  But the trouble looked worse than it was. Lincoln would always react in favor of a fighting general. The “unconditional surrender” motif was something none of his other generals had yet shown him, and he was not disposed to let Grant be crushed without formal charges and a regular hearing. So on March 10 Halleck got an admonitory note from Lorenzo Thomas, the prim paper-shuffling adjutant general of the army.

  By direction of the President, said Thomas, the Secretary of War ordered that Halleck make all of these vague accusations good. There would have to be some specifications: Did Grant leave his command without authority; if so when and why? Had he definitely failed to make proper reports? If he had done anything “not in accordance with military subordination or propriety,” exactly what was it, with dates and details?10

  In other words, Halleck was being told from the very top to put up or shut up. If he had something on Grant, now was the time to spell it out; if it could not be spelled out, forget it and get on with the war.

  Simultaneously Grant sent Halleck a formal letter asking to be relieved of his command.

  Then it all blew over. Halleck could not formulate charges against Grant because there was nothing to formulate. He got out of it, finally, by sending Thomas a letter explaining that if Grant had gone to Nashville he had really done it from the best of intentions and for the good of the service; that any irregularities in his command had taken place in Grant’s absence and in violation of his orders and were doubtless, under the circumstances, regrettable but unavoidable; that Grant had explained everything satisfactorily; that the interruption of telegraphic connections between Grant and St. Louis accounted for the failure to make reports, and that all in all the whole thing had best be forgotten. (Nothing more was said about the resumption of bad habits; a rumor which, incidentally, was completely untrue.) To Grant, Halleck sent a message saying that he could not be relieved from his command, that all anybody asked of him was that he “enforce discipline and punish the disorderly” and that everything now was fine: “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.”11

  If Smith felt any soreness over the role he had been called on to play, he never showed it. He continued to do his job as a soldier, cursing the volunteers in a way they did not mind and teaching them how soldiers should behave, and his junior officers stood in the utmost awe of him. Two of them, one evening, found in somebody’s back yard a flourishing bed of mint, which they plucked and took to their quarters, combining the mint with commissary whiskey and what not to make mint juleps; having done which, it occurred to them that Old Smith would probably appreciate a drink. Filling a tall glass, they set out for the general’s tent.

  It was dark, and the tent flaps were drawn. Through them came a gleam of light; Old Smith was in his cot, propped up on pillows, reading by the light of a bedside candle. The two officers stood in front of the tent, trying to muster nerve to intrude on the august presence. Finally one grew bold enough to rap on the tent pole. From within came a hoarse profane question: Who was it, and why was he bothering?

  The officer who was holding the glass quaked, not daring to go inside. He managed at last to part the tent flaps a few inches and thrust his arm inside, the frosted julep glass in his fist. There was a dead silence, while the old soldier stared at this apparition. Finally the beautiful truth dawned on him, and the two officers heard a gruff harrumphing and an amazed “By God, this is kind!” The general’s hand came out and the glass was taken, and there was a sniffing and a tasting and a muttered “Kind indeed!” Then the general drained it, the empty glass came back, and the two officers crept away. To the end of his days Smith never knew where the drink came from.12

  Neither Old Smith nor anybody else stayed put very long at Clarksville. They were going on up the river, into the beginning of the Deep South; and it seemed for a time that spring as if the whole war had come loose from its hinges and perhaps a quick ending to it lay not far ahead.

  The victory at Fort Donelson stirred people. So far the people of the North had had Bull Run defeats, and losing battles at Wilson’s Creek, and reasonless Ball’s Bluff tragedies, and cautious McClellan had gone on with drilling and preparation as if a long war lay ahead. Here, suddenly, was a reversal. Fifteen thousand armed Confederates had been swallowed at a gulp, the war had been pushed from mid-Kentucky all the way back below Tennessee, and in Grant’s curt “unconditional surrender” note there had been a sure, confident note that Northerners had not yet heard. Off in Missouri the 15th Illinois, which had detested Grant ever since he ordered its colonel about the summer before, began to admit that perhaps this Grant was not so bad after all. It was ordered down to join his army now, and when it got to Fort Henry and found itself boarding vessels in a fleet of fifty transports and sailing up the Tennessee with colors flying and bands playing, it agreed that the war was fine, exciting, and grand. All through the western theater, regiments that had been doing the drudgery of training-camp or border-patrol duty found themselves hoping to be sent to Grant’s army. Victory lay up the river somewhere and everybody wanted to be in on it.13

  Up the river, or down another river; for the Mississippi moved south not too far west from the valley of the Tennessee, and Union strength was being felt there too. Blustering John Pope, for whom Halleck had vainly sought promotion, who despised volunteer troops and seemed to long for the old-army days of obedient regulars, was taking the Confederate post at New Madrid, Missouri, and with the aid of Foote’s ironclads was putting in motion the offensive that would soon take Island No. Ten and open the river all the way to Memphis. In the southwest a cautious sobersides of a professional soldier named Samuel Curtis was taking an army down to the farthest corner of Missouri, crossing into Arkansas, and routing a Confederate force at Pea Ridge, following Pathfinder Frémont’s old trail and giving the Confederates such a setback that Halleck exultantly (and prematurely, as it turned out) was notifying Washington that the rebellion in Missouri had finally been crushed — “no more insurrections and bridge-burnings and hoisting of Rebel flags.”14

  From the Atlantic seaboard the news was equally good. Army and navy together were exploiting the break-through into the North Carolina sounds, hammering Confederate forts into submission, seizing New Bern and Roanoke Island and opening the way for sea-borne invasion. Farther south the navy had broken its way into Port Royal, South Carolina, getting possession of a deep-water base for its whole southern blockading fleet and raising an obvious threat to Charleston. Another amphibious expedition was hitting the Georgia coast and would soon control the sea approaches to Savannah; and in the Gulf, a fleet under a sprightly old salt named David Glasgow Farragut was inside the passes at the mouth of the Mississippi, heading for New Orleans.

  There was a feeling of triumph in the air, and no one felt it more than stolid, unemotional Grant himself. Back in command with the blots off his record, Grant was going up the Tennessee, his own headquarters at the town of Savannah, Tennessee, a strong advance-guard posted at Pittsburg Landing, ten miles upstream. He was being reinforced, he would shortly have from forty to forty-five thousand men in his command, and Buell was under orders to march overland to the Tennessee and join him with perhaps thirty thousand more. The objective seemed to be a railroad-junction town, Corinth, Mississippi, twenty miles below Pittsburg Landing, a place where the north-and-south Mobile and Ohio Railroad crossed the all-important Memphis and Charleston. Johnston and Beauregard were pulling their forces together there, and it was clear that the next thing to do was to go down to Corinth and smash them.

  Grant believed it would be simple. He was getting, as a matter of fact, a slight case of overconfidence. Donelson had been a hard fight, but it should have been harder, and Grant was beginning to suspect that perhaps the southern heart was not in this war — a gross misconception, as he would find o
ut before he was much older. To Halleck, on March 21, Grant wrote: “The temper of the Rebel troops is such that there is but little doubt but that Corinth will fall much more that the great mass of the rank and file are heartily tired.”15

  Writing to his wife, Grant was even more optimistic. He asserted that “ ‘Sesesch’ is now about on its last legs in Tennessee,” and said that he wanted to push on as rapidly as possible to save hard fighting. There would, he felt, be some more fighting, but not too much more: “A big fight may be looked for someplace before a great while which it appears to me will be the last in the west.” He added: “This is all the time supposing that we will be successful which I never doubt for a single moment.”16

  He could not move just yet, however. Halleck was being cautious. He saw Corinth as the objective, but he would not attack it until Grant and Buell’s forces had joined, at which time he himself would come down and take active command. Grant was ordered not on any account to bring on a general engagement until all of this took place.

  Halleck had finally won what he wanted most — top command in the West. Washington was reshuffling its command setup this spring. McClellan’s reluctance to move against Richmond (despite his statement to Buell that he expected to be there soon after the Federals were in Nashville) had worn the administration’s patience too thin; he was no longer top commander of all the country’s armies but was leader of the Army of the Potomac alone; and as it demoted him the administration gave Halleck control over Buell’s department as well as Halleck’s own. On paper it seemed a logical move, for Halleck’s forces were winning victories as winter ended.