by John Keegan
The answer may lie in his European experience. When McClellan observed the conduct of the Crimean War, fought by Britain and France to deter Russia from destroying the Turkish empire, he saw that the main difficulty facing the Anglo-French war effort was the inaccessibility of the tsar’s empire. Though Russia could be invaded through eastern Europe, France and Britain had no bases or allies there. That forced them to look elsewhere, which meant by seeking points of entry around Russia’s coastline. Here the similarity with the Confederates, which perhaps struck McClellan, may be perceived. Russia’s enormous size equates to that of the South; indeed, the comparison is often made. But just as the South was protected by wide oceanic barriers backed by extensive mountain chains with areas of arid land and huge internal waterways, Russia was almost entirely cut off from the outside world by frozen seas. Climatically Russia was landlocked. The Anglo-French strategists puzzling as to how to get at their enemy fixed eventually on only three points at which it could be attacked. One was in the Baltic, itself very difficult of access. The second was on its Pacific coast, north of Japan, where Russia had naval bases in the Kamchatka Peninsula. The difficulty with both the Baltic and Pacific theatres as scenes of action was that their hinterlands were unsuitable for conventional ground operations and, in the case of the Pacific region, far from any possessions of value to the Russian government. Those considerations caused the allies eventually to choose the remaining point of entry, the Crimean Peninsula in the Black Sea. As a target area, it too had disadvantages, since the Crimean Peninsula connected badly with the Russian mainland and contained only one place of value, the port city of Sebastopol. Nevertheless, it could be attacked and so, there being little other choice, was selected by the allies for their debarkment. Having established a base on the west shore of the Black Sea, they concentrated their fleets and expeditionary forces and began the invasion. Its outcome, which resulted in the British and the French becoming drawn into an unsuccessful siege of Sebastopol, ought, had the Crimea indeed been McClellan’s inspiration and had he reflected more deeply on its implications, to have warned him against initiating the Urbana Plan.
Yet the attractions of resort to an amphibious solution of his problem look obvious, given what we know of McClellan’s exposure to the Crimean expedition. McClellan felt himself blocked on the land route to Richmond, perhaps through his own overestimation of the enemy’s strength, perhaps because of the aura of defeat that hung about the Manassas region. Positively, Chesapeake Bay, which would be the axis of the Army of the Potomac’s advance, was a body of water offering copious possibilities to an imaginative commander. On a dull coastline, which America’s Atlantic shore is, being low-lying, generally unindented, and much choked with barrier islands and swamps, the Chesapeake is a fascinating complex of subordinate bays, peninsulas, and estuaries. Its proximity to the Appalachian chain, which collects the rainfall from the Atlantic, means that a very large number of rivers and lesser waterways flow across the levels of northern Virginia and Maryland to empty into the Chesapeake at dozens of outlets. Most flow parallel to one another, infuriatingly from a military point of view, since south of Washington the overland route to Richmond is crossed every twenty miles or so by a water barrier, such as the wide Potomac itself, running down from Harpers Ferry, at the head of the Shenandoah Valley, but also the Rappahannock, the Mattapony, the Chickahominy, the Appomattox, the James, and the York, many fed by smaller streams which, when confronting an army on the march, prove formidable obstacles. In combination, the feeder streams of Chesapeake Bay make it one of the most easily defensible and therefore militarily difficult regions for offensives anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere; little wonder that McClellan, inexperienced and overpromoted, isolated in Washington as general in chief, at the beck and call of a president whom he did not understand and without friends and supporters of his own, leapt at the opening presented to him by his perception—if one may guess that this was what came to him—that the inaccessibility of the Confederacy might be cracked by disregarding the obvious overland route and, instead, seeking to appear on the South’s back doorstep by amphibious means.
Whatever the origins of the Urbana Plan, it came to be accepted perhaps even more swiftly than McClellan anticipated. During his long period of inactivity in October and November, while he procrastinated with Lincoln over the restaging of the advance on Richmond through Manassas, he added to his own difficulties by falling ill of typhoid fever. Lincoln was exasperated. On January 10, 1862, several weeks after the renewed advance on Richmond should have begun, he received a despatch from General Halleck in the western theatre, re-emphasising his inability to do the president’s will in Kentucky. Lincoln seems to have been seized by despair, an understandable but not characteristic mood. He went to see Montgomery Meigs, the quartermaster general, a powerful man in the Washington wartime scene. Lincoln poured out his troubles. Halleck and Buell were not winning the war in the West. There was financial trouble in Washington. The electorate was demanding victories. The Union’s principal soldier had taken to his sickbed. Meigs agreed that something had to be done since, if the Confederacy attacked out of its Manassas positions at the present moment, Washington itself might be threatened. Meigs suggested a council of war, always a dubious resort in time of danger. Lincoln nevertheless called the most senior and available soldiers—including McDowell, who had lost at Manassas—and politicians to advise him. At its first meeting the generals gave Lincoln mixed advice, though William B. Franklin recommended a waterborne advance on Richmond; he knew what was in McClellan’s mind. McDowell again pressed the Manassas case. Inevitably word of this meeting reached McClellan on his sickbed and inevitably he was outraged. With reason he felt that his political chief was going behind his back. Suddenly recovering, he appeared at the White House on the evening of January 13; the mood of the meeting was bad-tempered and the outcome inconclusive, though Lincoln did eventually declare himself satisfied that McClellan was about to undertake action.
The action promised was in the West, not Virginia, but Lincoln was so desperate for activity of any sort and still so committed to his “Young Napoleon,” as McClellan was known to the newspapers, from a supposed resemblance, that he did not demur. Action he shortly got, though in a curiously indirect way. Halleck, the eternal prevaricator, suddenly launched his subordinate Ulysses S. Grant in an advance up the Cumberland River in Tennessee towards a Confederate earthwork, Fort Henry, blocking the river. The pattern of waterways in this section of Tennessee is as complex as that west of Chesapeake Bay, with this difference: the rivers, which are tributaries of the Ohio and fed by the waters running off the western slopes of the Appalachians, particularly the Cumberland Mountains, are far wider than their Virginia equivalents and carry much larger volumes of water. Topography, moreover, exhibits the same curious effect of disposing waterways with widely separated sources into channels that run in close proximity and parallel to each other. So it is with the Tennessee and the Cumberland rivers. The Cumberland rises on the Virginia border, the Tennessee in Tennessee, west of Knoxville; however, just before they flow into the Ohio, they run almost parallel for a short distance. Because the Union held the Ohio at the points where the Cumberland and Tennessee discharge into it and so were well placed to use the two tributaries as avenues of entry into the important borderlands of Kentucky and Tennessee, from which there were easy avenues of advance into Missouri and Alabama also, the Confederacy had taken the sensible precaution of fortifying the Tennessee-Cumberland river system at its confluent point. The earthwork forts of Henry and Donelson supported each other and blocked upstream movement into the Tennessee interior. The forts, moreover, were strongly garrisoned, by 21,000 men under the command of Gideon Pillow and Simon Bolivar Buckner.
THE EMERGENCE OF ULYSSES S. GRANT
Pillow and Buckner’s Union opponent, Ulysses S. Grant, had known both men previously; he had command of an equal number of men, based at Cairo, on the Mississippi just below the confluence with the Ohio. H
e also had the support of a gunboat fleet commanded by Andrew Foote, who was to emerge as one of the most talented officers of the U.S. Navy’s freshwater fleet. Grant, the beginning of whose meteoric career the Henry-Donelson campaign was, would become the towering military genius of the Civil War, displaying all the qualities that Lincoln hoped to find in McClellan but failed to do. The Grants were old colonial stock who when U. S. Grant was born, were settled in Point Pleasant, Ohio. Like most early settlers they had made their way by honest labour, eked out by paid public service. Ulysses’ father set up a tannery business, and the son had a modestly comfortable upbringing and decent schooling. In 1839, however, to his surprise and distaste, he was nominated for a vacancy at West Point and, through family influence, found himself appointed. He went off resentfully and never changed his attitude; he did not want to be a soldier, did not like the army, and hated war. In his wonderful autobiography he describes both the Civil War and the Mexican War of 1846 as “unholy.” Had the West Point system worked with its full vigour, Grant would have not survived to graduate. He was ill-disciplined and he did not take his academic work seriously, strangely, for he was a serious, if wilful and headstrong, young man in an age when the U.S. Military Academy was one of the few places in the Western world to offer a training in mathematics, science, and technology. Grant boasted that he never revised, a failing that could easily have resulted in his being relegated and eventually dismissed. Grant was, however, exceptionally clever. He found no difficulty with the academy’s mathematical syllabus, the core of the course, so little indeed that on graduation he applied for and was accepted for an instructor’s post. By then, however, the army had taken him over and he was on his way to the Mexican War. Despite his disapproval of the conflict, Grant did well in the war, was rewarded for his distinguished service, and ought to have been assured of a successful if slow-moving career. It was not to be. Temperament was against it. Posted to a peacetime station in California, with little to do and without the company of his beloved wife, Julia Dent, he took to drink and discord. After falling out with his commanding officer, he resigned his commission and tried his luck in civilian life, only to find himself on a continuation of the downward slope. He tried small-scale commerce; he tried farming, at a place discouragingly known as Hardscrabble, and by 1861 was reduced to working as a clerk in his father’s tannery. At the moment when terminal obscurity might have overtaken him, his fortunes were changed by the outbreak of the Civil War. Suddenly any man with military credentials could find employment, income, and, with luck, social standing and the chance to recover self-respect. At the outbreak Grant was in Galena, Illinois, and, through a chapter of accidents, found himself engaged by the state government to assist in the organisation of the state’s first volunteer regiments. Not long after he was in command of one of them, the 21st Illinois. Soon after taking command Grant was ordered to find and engage a rebel regiment at Florida, Missouri. He undertook the advance through deserted countryside, with growing trepidation until, finding the Confederate colonel Harris’s campsite abandoned, he realised that Harris “had been as much afraid of me as I of him.”
This exceedingly valuable lesson he was to retain all his military life. Boldness was in consequence to be a distinguishing mark of his generalship, sometimes too much so. As James McPherson has remarked, “Grant’s determination sometimes led him to see only that which was in his own mind, not what the enemy might be intending, with unfortunate results. Still boldness never brought Grant to disaster.”6 Soon after the Harris episode, boldness led him to attack a superior enemy force at Belmont, opposite Columbus, on the Mississippi. His force was surrounded; lightheartedly he announced that having cut their way in, they would cut their way out. He possessed another characteristic which was a function of his powerful self-confidence: a refusal to retrace his steps. “I will take no backward step” was one of his best-known sayings, usually interpreted to denote his reluctance to retreat. Grant indeed disliked retreat as a measure of war, but those words meant exactly what they said. When finding his way across country, he preferred to press forward in the hope of arriving at his destination than to begin again. He had a keen topographical sense. He collected maps and guidebooks (Wellington had a similar enthusiasm) and at the outbreak of the Mexican War proved to have a better cartographic library than the army itself. Grant’s feel for ground was to stand him in good stead during the war, fought as it often was over unmapped, overgrown, or abandoned countryside, as in the dense woodlands of Shiloh in 1862 or the Wilderness in 1864, cleared land which had gone back to secondary forest.
His situation on the Tennessee River in January 1862 was not topographically disfavoured. The countryside was open and only sparsely wooded. The outline of the defences was clear to the eye. The problem was military: how to take possession of the forts in the teeth of their powerful artillery defences and substantial garrisons? In any event, the Confederates muffed their chances. The gunners at Fort Henry, which Grant chose as his first point of attack, could not match the firepower of the Union gunboats. When Grant’s infantry, which the riverboats had landed behind the fort, appeared on February 6, the Confederate commander sent the bulk of his garrison away to Fort Donelson and surrendered. The gunboats proceeded upstream, destroying a vital railroad bridge and capturing important riverside towns. By mid-February, Grant and Foote between them had secured the line of the Tennessee as far south as Muscle Shoals, near Florence, Alabama, thus opening a direct riverine route from the North’s Ohio stronghold into the heart of the South.
Grant was left with the unsubdued and now reinforced Fort Donelson, eleven miles across the floodplain from Fort Henry, which had to be captured because it controlled the approaches to Nashville, Tennessee, state capital and one of the South’s few manufacturing centres. Grant’s declared intention to capture Donelson put the Confederates in a spot. The senior Confederate was Albert Sidney Johnston (always so known to distinguish him from Joseph E. Johnston), supreme commander in the West. His difficulty was that his force was divided between Donelson and Bowling Green, near Nashville. The Union forces were also divided, with Grant’s 21,000 near Donelson and Buell’s 50,000 near Louisville. These dispositions gave the Unionists more options than the Confederates: the options included concentric attack by Grant and Buell at Bowling Green or waterborne attacks on Columbus and Nashville. Johnston, by contrast, could not coordinate the actions of his two forces because of the loss of Fort Henry and the cutting of the Louisville-Memphis railroad. When he and his Southern generals considered the situation at Bowling Green on February 7, a newcomer, Pierre Beauregard, the victor of Manassas, self-confidently proposed attacking Grant and Buell in turn, believing both could be defeated. Johnston did not. Unfortunately, while wondering what to do, he got into a muddle; he decided to take most of his troops to Nashville but leave enough at Fort Donelson to give Grant a real fight. On February 14, however, Grant was strongly reinforced, both with troops and gunboats. He mounted an attack with the gunboats, to intimidate the garrison, while deploying his fresh troops to encircle the fort securely. The gunboats came off the worse in the artillery duel, while driving snow all night reduced many of the Northern soldiers to shivering inactivity. On February 15 the Confederates, commanded by John Floyd—a wanted man in the North, which he had served as secretary of war under the previous president and so was held to be in violation of his official oath of loyalty to the Constitution, staged their breakout for Nashville. The thrust carried the Union back a mile and seemed about to bring on a collapse when Grant, who had been absent elsewhere, suddenly appeared at the gallop and began to set matters to rights.
What saved the situation, however, was not his intervention, but a sudden collapse of will in the Confederate fortress commander, General Pillow. Disheartened by the sight of the losses his men had suffered in the early-morning fighting, Pillow decided that the survivors, who were in fact the victors, could not safely be risked in a crosscountry retreat to Nashville and ordered them to return to
their trenches. It was at this point that Grant made his appreciation. Reckoning that the enemy were giving up the ground they had taken, he remarked to his staff officers that they were unlikely to resist if counter-attacked, which, under covering fire from some of the gunboats, his hastily reorganised brigades did, with success.
In the night that followed, Floyd, Pillow, and another divisional commander, the darkly handsome Simon Bolivar Buckner, debated their predicament. Floyd and Pillow had reason to fear capture. Both escaped by water before daybreak, Pillow with 1,500 soldiers. Buckner stayed to negotiate terms, but gave permission to a subordinate, Nathan Bedford Forrest, to make his best way out with his cavalry brigade. Forrest found an unguarded but negotiable stream and led his men through it. Had Grant been aware of the prize that lay within his grasp, he would have reproached himself, for Forrest, a self-made, self-taught man from nowhere, turned himself into the outstanding cavalry commander of the war on either side. It may have been the combination of his headstrong character with his total ignorance of the rules and practices of warfare which made him so effective.
