Terrible Swift Sword

by Bruce Catton

  But it was most important to get them in, because east Tennessee promised a great deal to the Union cause. Here was the asset President Lincoln had looked for in vain elsewhere in the South—a solid nucleus of Unionists who would rally around a Federal army the moment such an army appeared. The highland people were loyalists, and the central highlands ran over into North Carolina and down into northern Georgia and Alabama as well; establish a Union army in the upper Tennessee Valley, and the Confederacy might well begin to disintegrate at the core. Mr. Lincoln had believed—often rather against the evidence—that the Confederacy was not the monolithic unit its leaders said it was. Here was one place where he could prove it.

  Whatever had really driven the people of the South to secede, it was undeniable that loyalty to the old Union ran strong wherever the slave population was small. In the Southland, as a whole, there was one slave to every two white people; in east Tennessee there was one slave to twelve whites. Most people were small farmers, poor, cut off from the main currents of Southern life, feeling no kinship whatever with the wealthy slaveowning class. In his distrust of the plantation aristocracy, Andrew Johnson accurately reflected the viewpoint of his own people. Most of them, probably, were willing to submit passively to Confederate authority, but they would do nothing whatever against the Union and they would rejoice openly if Confederate authority were removed.4

  There was another matter of great practical importance. The most significant railway line in the South was the one that threaded the length of Tennessee, giving Richmond its connection with the west. If a Union army could be planted permanently across that railroad line the Confederacy would be in a dire fix; as a Richmond editor pointed out, in such case “the empire of the South is cut in twain and we become a fragmentary organization, fighting in scattered and segregated localities, for a cause which can no longer boast the important attribute of geographical unity.”5 Before Bull Run, President Lincoln had been aware of the strategic possibilities here, and late in September he wrote that he wanted an expedition “to seize and hold a point on the Railroad connecting Virginia and Tennessee, near the mountain pass called Cumberland Gap.”6

  Cumberland Gap meant the old Wilderness Road, the historic highway of pioneer America. Daniel Boone had blazed the trail long ago, and the slow caravans had followed, peopling Kentucky and opening half a continent to the young American nation. Now the flow would be reversed, with strange new caravans coming down to the gap from the north and west to restate the notion of a continental destiny. During the summertime of Kentucky’s neutrality nothing very concrete could be done, but the administration and the east Tennesseeans could make certain arrangements—a strategic plan or a dark conspiracy, depending on the point of view.

  These plans were devised in Washington at about the time General Polk was ending Kentucky’s neutrality (which of course opened the way for direct action in respect to Tennessee). One of the most active of the Tennessee Unionists, William B. Carter, went to Washington and met with President Lincoln, Secretary Seward, and General McClellan, and promised to set up what a later generation would have called a fifth column. At a given moment during the fall (it was agreed) armed bands of east Tennesseeans would go swarming out to destroy all of the bridges on that vital railroad line; simultaneously, Washington would send an army under General George H. Thomas down through the gap to protect these guerrillas (whom the Confederates otherwise would unquestionably obliterate) and to occupy Knoxville and the surrounding area. Federal money was provided to finance the uprising; it was arranged that the numerous mountain men who had fled into Kentucky to escape Confederate arrest would be organized into Federal regiments, and Carter’s brother Samuel, hitherto a lieutenant in the Navy, was made colonel and acting brigadier general to command them. William Carter was to go back to Tennessee shortly after the middle of October to get his people in motion, and General Thomas was to begin his march within a week thereafter.7

  So ran the plan. If it had worked it might have affected the course of the war most materially, but it did not work; instead it went off half-cocked, disastrously, causing some of Carter’s patriots to get hanged and bringing profound discouragement and renewed oppression to all east Tennessee loyalists.

  To begin with, General Zollicoffer moved forward through Cumberland Gap as soon as he learned about the Confederate advance in western Kentucky, and he established his troops at a ford on the Cumberland River, thirty miles inside of Kentucky, by the middle of September.8 General Zollicoffer, to be sure, could eventually be taken care of; was taken care of, quite effectively, a few months later. More important was a singular combination of factors which the planners in Washington had not been able to take into account—the ill health of General Robert Anderson, the excellence of the bluff staged by General Albert Sidney Johnston, and the nervous uncertainty which almost incapacitated that supposedly self-assured soldier, General William T. Sherman.

  It began with Anderson. The hero of Fort Sumter had been living on his nerves for months, and it had been too much for him. While Kentucky was still neutral Anderson’s doctors warned him that his brain might be affected if he remained on duty, and he spent part of the summer at Cresson, Pennsylvania, trying to restore his strength. The rest and the mountain air helped, but the doctors insisted that it would be dangerous for him to return to active duty before the end of the year. He had no sooner received this verdict, however, than a delegation of Tennessee Unionists led by Andrew Johnson and Congressman Horace Maynard came to put pressure on him. He testified later that they insisted that if he resumed active command along the border, “20,000 mountain boys would rally to my flag and follow me anywhere.” He told them what his doctors had said, and added: “If I break down as they threaten me I cannot break down in a better cause,” and he went back to his post just in time to witness the end of Kentucky’s neutrality.

  Anderson made his headquarters at Louisville and tried to cope with the situation, but it was too much for him. He went through the motions but he accomplished nothing, and friends at last induced his brother, Larz Anderson of Cincinnati, to come and tell him bluntly that the breakdown the doctors spoke about was actually taking place. He consulted the doctors afresh, and at last—on October 6, in a carefully worded telegram from Winfield Scott—he was relieved of his command and told to report for duty in Washington “as soon as you may without retarding your recovery.” Anderson turned the command over to Sherman, expressing the hope that Sherman could destroy “the marauding bands who, under the guise of relieving and benefiting Kentucky, are doing all the injury they can to those who will not join them in their accursed warfare.”9 Then he went off stage, seeking the recovery that never came. He had seen the war begin, on the ramparts of Fort Sumter, and in a sentimental finale, four years later, a wreck of a man in a ruined fort, he would hoist his flag there again; but except for that his part in the war was finished.

  The Sherman who replaced him was by no means the conquering hero of later days. He was gloomy, utterly lacking confidence in the raw volunteers entrusted to his command, hag-ridden by memory of the disaster which he had seen overtake similar volunteers at Bull Run, unable to realize that though his own problems were grave those of General Johnston were a good deal worse. He complained that he had been “forced into command of this department against my will,” and in a mood of uncontrolled pessimism he estimated that it would take 300,000 men “to fill half the calls for troops” that were being made on him.10 In plain English, Sherman had lost his nerve; temporarily he was a setup for the bold measures which General Johnston adopted.

  Johnston had a long line to defend east of the Mississippi and he was badly outnumbered. He was getting recruits (although they were not so numerous as he had hoped, and the anticipated rising of Kentuckians to the Confederate cause was not taking place) but finding weapons for them seemed impossible and he believed that as soon as the Federals advanced they would discover the inadequacy of his force. His left was on the Mississippi, at Columbus
, strongly held by Bishop Polk; Zollicoffer anchored the right, in front of Cumberland Gap; and Forts Henry and Donelson were being built just below the Kentucky line to command the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers. To block the line of the Louisville & Nashville Railroad, which any Federal Army invading western Tennessee would certainly want to use, Johnston had put General Buckner, with just under 10,000 men, at Bowling Green; and Buckner was industriously sending out raiding parties, behaving like a man who was about to march north to the Ohio River, convincing Sherman that an army of 20,000 Confederates would soon capture Louisville,11 and putting loyalist civilians in the back country into a state of wild panic. One roving Confederate detachment was commanded by a tough Irish veteran of the British Army, Colonel Patrick Cleburne, and as this outfit entered the hill country along the upper Cumberland the inhabitants ran and hid, anticipating massacre and destruction. One old woman astounded Cleburne by tottering out to meet him, an open Bible in her hand, announcing that she was prepared to die and implying that they might as well do their worst at once; the colonel had a hard time persuading her that no harm would come to her, and he wrote that he doubted the valor of male Kentuckians because of “the alacrity with which they fled from this strongly defensible country, leaving their wives, daughters and children to the tender mercies of supposed ravishers, murderers and barbarians.”12 From backwoodsmen to the commanding general, Kentucky Unionists were alarmed. If the essence of successful strategy is the ability to compel one’s opponents to accept one’s own appraisal of a situation, Albert Sidney Johnston was being a very good general this fall.

  All of this fatally handicapped the plan to get east Tennessee back into the Union. William B. Carter left Camp Dick Robinson for the highlands on October 18 or 19, and a few days after that General Thomas set out for Cumberland Gap. Thomas had half a dozen fairly well-trained regiments, along with two new regiments of Tennessee refugees, and although he was short of equipment he believed he could carry out his assignment.

  Thomas meant business. Like Lee, he was a Virginian who had had to choose between conflicting loyalties. He had made the choice Lee did not make, and for a century to come his native state would regard him without warmth. He was massive, sedate, with a deceptive air of unhurried calm; he had hurt his spine in some pre-war accident and to ride at a gallop pained him, so people called him “Old Slow-Trot.” The nickname created a totally false picture, for Thomas was not a slow-trot general at all. He could move fast and he could hit with pulverizing impact, and when the Union Army got him it gained very nearly as much as it had lost when it failed to get Lee.

  Thomas started out briskly enough. He brushed aside a Confederate outpost at Rockcastle Hills, fifty miles south of his starting point, occupied the town of London, and sent back word that he proposed to move on to a place called Somerset, where he believed he could pick a favorable time and route for going all the way to the Cumberland Gap and thence to Knoxville. The east Tennessee Unionists, informed that he was on the move, began their uprising, burning five railroad bridges, fighting with Confederate patrols and effervescing so freely that the Confederate commander in Knoxville reported that “the whole country is now in a state of rebellion”; the railroad authorities doubted that they could move any more army supplies, and a Confederate commissary officer wrote that the expected approach of the Federals has so inflamed the insurrectionists that “there is no telling how much damage they may do.”13

  What the east Tennessee people did not know, however, was that just when the uprising was beginning the Federal advance was canceled and that Thomas was compelled to take his army back to its original point of departure.

  General Sherman had grown completely despondent. He believed that there was about to be a great Confederate offensive all across Kentucky, from the Mississippi to Cumberland Gap, which was exactly what General Johnston wanted him to believe, and just when the Confederates in east Tennessee were gloomily anticipating the worst Sherman was writing that “the future looks as dark as possible.” He considered the east Tennessee project a sideshow anyway, and now he abruptly called it off so that he could concentrate all of his forces in defense of Louisville and the Ohio River. He had recently assured the Secretary of War that the Union ought to have at least 200,000 men in Kentucky, and a Pennsylvania politician who visited the War Department at this time was confidentially told “Sherman’s gone in the head.” On November 15—with Carter’s fifth columnists neck-deep in hot water, and with Thomas’s east Tennessee recruits angrily laying down their arms because they could not march in to redeem their home land—Sherman was relieved of his command and ordered to a relatively quiet job in Missouri. An Ohio newspaper announced that Sherman was insane.14

  Sherman was replaced by an officer who was not so extensively fooled by the game General Johnston was playing but who was unable to make good use of his own enlightenment: Brigadier General Don Carlos Bell, whom the War Department had sent to see Anderson in Fort Sumter, while the nation was still at peace, on a confidential mission of vast delicacy. Buell was a close friend of McClellan, one of the officers whom men of the Old Army labeled “brilliant”; a conscientious, methodical soldier with a strong body, a trim beard, and deep vertical lines (of heavy thought, or of astigmatism) between his eyes. The change in command did not help the east Tennessee people, because Buell had even less use for the thrust at Cumberland Gap than Sherman had. Buell believed that he must get his troops thoroughly organized, outfitted, and drilled before he could do anything at all, and he did not think the wilderness road to Knoxville offered anything worth a second thought; if he did anything at all there it would simply be a gesture to assuage the President. Neither Mr. Lincoln nor McClellan could ever budge Buell from this position.15

  So the east Tennessee uprising went unsupported, and it collapsed, and men died because it was so. Confederate authority was restored with a hard hand. Troops were moved in, and there were raids, innumerable arrests, quick military trials with the head of a drum for the presiding officer’s desk and a running noose for the unlucky; some men were hanged, and a great many were sent South to prison. Property of those who had risen in revolt was confiscated, sometimes by due process, sometimes by citizen-soldiers who had personal hatred for the property’s owners. A secessionist observer confessed that “old political animosities and private grudges have been revived” and said that “bad men among our friends” were hunting down the insurrectionists “with all the ferocity of bloodhounds.”16 President Davis did his best to keep the repressive measures within bounds, but civil war in the backwoods is hard to restrain; like the immense national conflict of which it was a part (and to which it was giving certain characteristics) it was more easily started than controlled, and it could be extremely destructive. The Richmond editor’s notion that “the enemy must be made to feel the war” stated a rule which the border people considered most sensible.

  Sherman and Buell may have been right. The road to east Tennessee was long and hard, and the Union armies needed more equipment, more training, more of everything, before they campaigned in such difficult country. The whole scheme was probably just as erratic and impractical as those two officers thought it was. And yet …

  Lyon and Price had shown that even the most grotesquely unready armies could do a great deal if the men in command insisted on it. This war had not yet become regularized, and it offered amazing possibilities to the determined irregular. (Tucked away in Johnston’s army there was a Tennessee cavalry colonel who would demonstrate this point repeatedly in the years just ahead: an untutored planter and slave trader named Nathan Bedford Forrest.) As U. S. Grant later pointed out, when both sides were equally untrained and ill-equipped, the general who waited until he had everything in textbook trim simply permitted his opponent to do the same. Quick action might very well leave the fields and highways littered with the fragments of armies made to campaign before they were ready for it, but it might also win great victories.

  East Tennessee must be reache
d through Kentucky, and if the Federals did not use the direct road they must go roundabout. This they at last did, taking two years and fighting terrible battles, moving by way of such places as Shiloh and Vicksburg, Stone’s River and Chickamauga, losing more men in the process than the entire force they had in Kentucky when this protective caution was being exercised.17 The man who finally got them there, General Grant, was as it happened one who believed thoroughly in the possibility of accomplishing things with untrained volunteers. Grant had hardly taken command at Cairo, at the beginning of September, before he was planning to attack General Polk at Columbus. Overruled, he kept looking for a way to take the offensive even while he was still trying to organize, arm, and provision his raw troops, and early in November he believed that he had found an opening. Actually, the opening was a bad one and Grant was unable to exploit it, but the trouble was the unreadiness of Grant himself rather than the unreadiness of his men.

  General Frémont was marching into southwestern Missouri to drive out Price. He had heard that Polk was sending troops to Price, and so he ordered Grant to make a hostile demonstration at Belmont, the steamboat landing just across the river from Columbus. This should lead Polk to keep his troops at home, and it might also help to curb an annoyingly active commander of guerrillas, Jeff Thompson, who had been running wild in the country back of New Madrid, Missouri. The assignment was somewhat muddled and it was based on faulty information: Polk had no intention of sending men to Price, Thompson had temporarily withdrawn from the warpath, and there really was not much for Grant to do. But Grant saw a chance for action, and on the night of November 6 he put 3100 men on steamboats, with two wooden gunboats for escort, dropped down the Mississippi, and on the morning of November 7 took his men ashore a few miles upstream from Belmont and went looking for trouble.