by John F. Ross
And, even better, he was in love.
Her name was Emma, the daughter of his maternal half-uncle and his wife, Joseph and Harriet Dean. In 1855, his mother had received a startling letter that the Deans had actually come to America a half dozen years earlier and were living in Detroit. Joseph and Harriet Dean had agreed to travel with Mary and Joseph from England in 1829, but never showed up at the ship. Now here they belatedly were, Joseph working as a hatmaker and doing well. Mary set off at once to see them. On one of Wes’s many collecting trips, he passed through Detroit and met his cousin Emma, a year and a half his junior. Just topping five feet, she had flashing blue eyes that lit up an oval face, her dark brown hair swept back into an elaborate braid. The quick and curious Emma delighted in her first cousin’s stories.
When Wes’s parents could see that the romance was more than a passing fancy, they grew alarmed at the closeness of kinship, even though Mary’s brother and she had different mothers. Joseph put his foot down hard, forbidding any marriage. But Wes, in a decision that declared and finally defined his independence, ignored his father’s command.
They got engaged. But before they could get married, the nation convulsed into war.
CHAPTER 3
Thinking Bayonets
On April 15, 1861, the day following the fall of Fort Sumter, Lincoln called upon the state governors to raise seventy-five thousand volunteers for a three-month commitment to put down “combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings,” which pushed Arkansas, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia to secede in short order. Just a fortnight later, the quickly mounting tensions forced Lincoln’s hand further. He called for more volunteers, this time for a wartime commitment of three years. The conflict that he had worked so hard to prevent was coming to pass.
Five days after this latest call, the thickly bewhiskered twenty-seven-year-old John Wesley Powell, along with nine others from Hennepin, took the train six miles east to Granville, where they enlisted in the 20th Illinois Volunteer Infantry Regiment. The newly minted private looked upon going to war as the ultimate patriotic act: “It was a great thing to destroy slavery,” he would write, his father’s sentiments now an organic part of his outlook, “but the integrity of the Union was of no less importance . . .” Like a family torn asunder by a deadly feud, the Union needed a firm hand to pull it back together. Powell steadfastly believed that Lincoln was strong and wise enough to do it.
The Rock Island Railroad deposited the party in Joliet around 4 p.m. They marched to the fairgrounds, where they found sheds scattered with straw for their pallets. After a slim meal of sourbread, a slice of bacon apiece, and coffee in tin cups, the new soldiers retired to the floors without overcoats or blankets, and shivered the night away. Soon they were issued blankets and .58 caliber Springfield muskets. Days of drilling followed. The men voted Powell sergeant of Company H, as much in recognition of his college training and position as principal of Hennepin as for his yet-to-be-unveiled soldierly talents. But he had no intention of merely teaching boys fresh from the plow how to march and mark time.
To Powell, so well acquainted with Midwest river systems, the outgoing Union general-in-chief Winfield Scott’s proposed Anaconda Plan would have made eminent sense: Starve Southern ports with naval blockades, then fight down the Mississippi to New Orleans, and split the rebel states in two. A sustained Union offensive would require much expertise not only at overrunning defensive works but in building them as well. The fresh-faced infantryman decided his immediate future lay in becoming an expert in the science of fortification. The method in Methodism had seen to it that he knew how to study—or more accurately, in his case—how to cram. With little in the way of formal education, he had willed himself into a naturalist, then conchologist, and, after that, into an apparently gifted teacher. Now he turned to military engineering and the science of war. He secured leave to travel sixty miles by rail to Chicago, ostensibly to buy a uniform, but with the real purpose of obtaining copies of Dennis Hart Mahan’s Treatise on Field Fortifications and another volume by Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban, the seventeenth-century master of fortress building. He also bought a slim book on tactics and army regulations and managed a quick side trip to visit Emma in Detroit.
Back in Joliet, Powell pored over these manuals, musing on the “uses of counterscarp galleries” and the “relation between the terre-plein and interior crest of the square redoubt.” For a mind untutored in engineering, the task of mastering such concepts proved daunting indeed, but he found a willing helper in his commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel C. Caroll Marsh.
On June 13, 1861, the 20th Illinois was formally mustered into service, Marsh promoting Powell to second lieutenant to fill a vacancy. The regiment traveled by train to Alton, then on to St. Louis, where the townspeople turned out to cheer their 961 saviors. St. Louis’s armory furnished Enfield rifles and handsome new blue uniforms. “We now had a very extravagant opinion of ourselves,” recalled a veteran of the outfit years later. On July 6, they chugged down the Mississippi to Cape Girardeau in southeastern Missouri aboard the steamer Illinois. The town reminded one army surgeon of a French village, consisting of basically one long, narrow, deeply rutted street leading up from the river between low houses with projecting eaves. For all its modest demeanor, however, Cape Girardeau occupied a strategic position—the first high ground commanding the Mississippi north of its confluence with the Ohio at Cairo. The ability to deploy artillery at Cape Girardeau would prevent Confederate warships from sailing north to raid St. Louis. The ten companies set up their Sibley tents just to the north in an open area near the bank.
Marsh ordered Powell to survey the ground with an eye toward fortifying the headland. Powell set to work, breaking only for a five-day expedition with Companies H, E, and G to pursue guerillas into the interior. Bushwhackers were known to lie in roadside swamps, wrote an embittered infantryman, and would “murder Jesus Christ if they thought he was a Union man.” The expedition came home unbloodied.
Within two weeks of the 20th Illinois’s arrival, the newly appointed commander of the Department of the West, Major General John C. Frémont, appeared with a large retinue of foreigners, including illegally commissioned Hungarian and Italian veterans bedecked with feathers and gold loops. When the forty-eight-year-old general asked Marsh whether he had given thought to fortifying the town, the colonel turned to Powell. For someone who had been a village schoolmaster only weeks before, the chance to meet the Pathfinder must have been electrifying. Frémont was as colorful a character as the young republic would bring forth—charismatic, outspoken, always in a web of quarrels and intrigues. The illegitimate son of a Richmond socialite, he had been court-martialed for mutiny in the Mexican War, served as a U.S. senator, and run in 1856 as the first Republican candidate for president. But perhaps most impressive to Powell was Frémont’s reputation as the greatest western explorer since Lewis and Clark, having mounted five expeditions into the still-unknown western vastness. His first, in 1842, a five-month journey at the head of twenty-five men, including Kit Carson, made him a national hero, his report excerpted in newspapers across the nation. “Frémont has touched my imagination,” wrote Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and he no doubt touched Powell’s as well. With strong government backing, Frémont ground out a plethora of reports and maps that would not only bring him his sobriquet, but guide thousands west to Oregon, direct the ’49ers to California, and inspire Brigham Young to seek out Utah.
Lincoln had tasked Frémont with the tall order of keeping the turbulent border state of Missouri from seceding while maintaining the adjacent stretch of the Mississippi as a wedge into the heart of the Confederacy. Although professing neutrality, Missouri lay deeply divided. Depredations and brutalities were visited upon civilians of both sympathies. Cape Girardeau proved to be one of the few Unionist havens in southeastern Missouri. “Quite a number of beautiful girls here,” commented one so
ldier, the consequence of many Union-sympathizing fathers sending their daughters there for protection.
Frémont, whose dark ringlets fell over a handsome brow, sized up the young lieutenant. This seasoned explorer had learned something about judging men. Powell succinctly outlined his ideas for a series of four strongpoints forming a square around the town—two on the river bluffs and two inland overlooking the major road approaches. Frémont liked what he heard. The following day, he ordered immediate construction to begin, directing Captain Henry Flad of the Engineer Regiment of the West to supervise the overall design. Colonel Marsh assigned Powell to oversee work on the critically placed Fort D, the position with the best river vantage. Powell set the loyalist Missouri militia to work. He paid escaped slaves to join in.
No attack came. Frémont lasted only three months in command, but still made the war-changing decision to elevate a binge-drinking former Illinois shopkeeper to brigadier general above John Pope, his highly competent and most senior officer of that rank. Ulysses S. Grant combined the unassuming character, dogged persistence, and iron will that the Union so desperately needed to command its raw new armies.
Grant’s first action in command of southeast Missouri and the southern tip of Illinois was to inspect Cape Girardeau on August 30, where he met Powell and heard about the ambitious plans under way. The neophyte general confidently elaborated on ideas about defending this small town, exhibiting skills he would later demonstrate again and again, to U.S. senators and presidents, to railroadmen, fur trappers, and Indians—a quiet, no-nonsense, sustained competence undiminished by grandstanding. Powell could not only pick up skills at lightning speed, but also at once put them effectively to work.
In October Grant detached the “acting engineer” from the 20th Illinois and authorized him to independently raise an artillery battery and manage Cape Girardeau’s siege guns, a rare action for a general to take toward so junior an officer, even in the feverish expansion of Union forces. A deep vote of confidence, indeed. Powell undertook to raise a company of 132 men in two days, a task that proved surprisingly easy. Many men displaced from their homesteads by partisan violence were eager to sign up for Battery F of the Second Light Artillery, 20th Illinois Volunteers. A lot were skilled, liberal-leaning German immigrants who had come to America after the failed 1848 German revolts. Mostly in their twenties and thirties, they represented a broad spectrum of common occupations, from baker, house painter, and druggist, to farmer, carpenter, and “segar maker.” At twenty-seven, Powell was only a little older than the median age of his recruits.
The still-green soldier once more showed himself a quick study. Managing an artillery battery has always been a complicated task. Powell now commanded more than a hundred men who operated six cannons, each hitched to a limber pulled by six horses. In support of each artillery piece, another six horses drew yet another limber, which itself dragged a caisson, a two-wheeled carriage bearing ammunition chests and an extra wheel. A battery also included a forge, ambulance, and battery wagon, requiring in all about 125 horses. Each time a cannon was discharged, a team of men underwent “the cannoneer’s hop,” a precise sequence of cleaning the barrel, priming, ramming the charge, aiming, and firing. In battle, the entire process often had to be performed under heavy fire and war’s irregular conditions. Training—and more training—was essential.
When Grant returned to the Cape in late November, he and Powell spent three hours inspecting the fortifications. Their horseback tour might easily have taken a quarter of the time, but the general enjoyed the younger man’s company. Grant extended an invitation for dinner aboard his steamboat, where their bond grew even stronger. Of the two leaders graven in his mind, Powell felt drawn to Grant in a way he had not been to Frémont. Unlike Frémont, Grant usually traveled with the smallest possible command staff, which left Powell free to talk to and observe his commander up close. Grant wore a private’s uniform with stars sewn on it and an unassuming slouch hat; a surgeon described him as a man with “gentle” eyes who did “nothing carelessly.” His one nod to sartorial splendor was a longish square-cut beard. “One of my superstitions,” Grant would write about his childhood, “had always been when I started to go anywhere or do anything, not to run back or to stop until the thing was accomplished.” The new commander would become a model of leadership for the newly coined engineer—humble yet fiercely willful, and never a quitter.
Grant gave Powell leave on November 28 to travel to Detroit to marry Emma. Sharp in his blue uniform—very much the “efficient officer,” as Grant described him—Powell arrived at 6 p.m. One local newspaper would recall the bride as “a very beautiful young woman.” They were immediately married in the parlor of her father’s house. Powell’s parents were several hundred miles away. By 8 p.m. that night, the couple had boarded a train back to Cape Girardeau. Like many officers’ wives, Emma would follow her husband on campaign, embracing the opportunity to escape her childhood home.
By early December, Powell’s battery had still not been formally mustered in, leaving him to reassure the men that their pay would soon come. Only after Grant himself fired off a rather irritated dispatch to headquarters, “respectfully” asking for the incorporation of Battery F, did it officially come into being, Powell as its captain.
* * *
In the early winter of 1862, Grant began his southward thrust into Tennessee by overwhelming Forts Henry and Donelson and forcing the enemy to regroup at Corinth, a strategic railroad hub in northern Mississippi. The Union’s western commander, Major General Henry Halleck, ordered Grant to assemble his forces at a rural steamboat dock on the Tennessee River just 22 miles from Corinth. He ordered Grant to await reinforcement by Major General Don Carlos Buell’s 35,000-man army, which lay 120 miles away, and by Halleck’s own. Only at full strength did the cautious Halleck want Grant to attack the Confederates at Corinth. But tiny Pittsburg Landing, only envisioned as a way station, would soon etch itself into the divided nation’s consciousness, its name to be eclipsed by Shiloh, a small neighboring church.
On March 14, Battery F steamed southward from Cape Girardeau to join Grant’s forces at the Landing. Powell left Emma in Savannah, a riverside hamlet nine miles downstream from the Landing. When the battery arrived, white Sibley tents were scattered thickly over the rough plateau on the high western bluffs that overlooked a broken landscape of heavy forests, small fields, orchards, and steep ravines. Five major farm roads transected the area, notably the Corinth Road that ran southwestward. The battery found a place to camp. Light drilling duties left men time to play cards and roll dice, pitch horseshoes, or write letters. Pink blossoms hung heavily on the branches of peach trees, and Johnny-jump-ups carpeted the fields. Neither Grant nor his friend and division commander, Brigadier General William Tecumseh Sherman, saw any reason to raise defensive works, not imagining that the Confederates would ever dream of leaving their Corinth stronghold.
But General Albert Sidney Johnston, the Confederacy’s commander at Corinth and its most senior field officer, had no intention of letting the Union army swell to full strength. He ordered a surprise attack on the Union position at Pittsburg Landing. His 40,000 men marched for two days through wretched weather, coming within a mile of Union pickets on Saturday night. Scouts alerted Sherman to unusual amounts of hostile activity, only to be stood down by the general, who was convinced that nighttime and their imaginations had taken the better of them.
At 7:30 a.m., the rattle of musketry and the roar of artillery startled Powell awake in his tent. General P. G. T. Beauregard staggered four Confederate corps one right behind the other, with the design of piercing enemy defenses. The plan worked: The Confederates drove right into the Union line so fast that they overran groggy bluecoats drinking coffee around their breakfast fires. Many Union soldiers did not stop running until they hit the river.
Battery F lay encamped well back from the front line. Powell ordered its horses harnessed and artillery limbered.
The men gulped down their breakfasts and stood by their guns. And then they waited. The din of drum and bugle grew loud, the thunder of artillery louder still. Powell found himself in an awkward position. Recently arrived, his was one of five Illinois batteries not yet assigned to an infantry division. As the men eyed one another nervously, Powell awaited orders. A rabble, many shouting that all was lost, passed by. Then in stumbled the walking wounded. Still no orders.
While the Union forces fell back in disarray, many Confederates, famished from their forced march, paused to finish the hastily abandoned Union breakfasts and to loot possessions, affording the Union army a precious hour to re-form its shattered center. The battle now degenerated into what one historian has called “a disorganized, murderous fistfight.” The attack had nearly dissolved Grant’s Sixth Division under Brigadier General Benjamin Prentiss, which had begun the day with 5,400 men, but by 9:45 a.m. could muster only about 500.
By 9 a.m., Powell had made up his mind that—with or without orders—he would take his guns into action. The day before he had learned that the battery might be attached to General John McClernand’s division, which lay down the Corinth Road and to the left of Sherman’s division. Moving the battery forward over the worn thoroughfare, now choked with the wounded, proved nearly impossible for the six-horse teams to negotiate, particularly at its two bridges. The less than mile-and-a-half move to the front took ninety agonizing minutes. The broken spirit of stragglers and wounded alike declared everything they needed to know about the desperate struggle ahead.
