Terrible Swift Sword

by Bruce Catton

  It might have been better if Grant had moved faster. On February 8, Donelson was weakly held, and Grant’s 15,000 could have overrun the place without much trouble. But it took much longer than Grant had supposed to get the march organized, and it was February 12 before his troops got to the scene and prepared to fight; and by this time Johnston had sent in powerful reinforcements, so that Fort Donelson was held by 16,000 men or more—a larger force, on that day, than Grant had with him, although more Federal troops were on the way to join him. Instead of pushing over an insignificant outwork Grant’s army was moving into the biggest battle yet fought in the west.

  But war goes by a strange logic, and in the end the delay helped the Federal cause mightily simply because it enormously increased the value of the prize that could be won. Instead of taking a fort which sooner or later must fall anyway, Grant now had the opportunity to destroy a significant part of Johnston’s army—a much larger part than Johnston could afford to lose. Quite unintentionally, Grant had permitted his opponent to make a huge mistake; if he could take advantage of it he could win one of the war’s greatest victories.

  Fort Donelson had originally been laid out as a work to keep Yankee steamboats from coming up the Cumberland, and its core was a set of water batteries overlooking a long stretch of the river; a dozen guns, or thereabouts, only two of them really heavy enough to fight armored gunboats, manned by enthusiastic but poorly trained gun crews. To protect these batteries against attack by land, the Confederates had dug a long, irregular line of enclosing trenches which ran for several miles along the inland ridges, and these trenches now were very strongly held. When the Federals got ready to fight, their obvious tactic was to use what they had learned at Fort Henry: surround the place with troops and then bring up the gunboats to hammer the fort into submission. With the water batteries destroyed and the fleet in control of the river, and with Union troops blocking all the exits by land, the Confederates could do nothing but surrender.

  That put it up to Flag Officer Foote. He was a hardhead who followed his own rules: Regular Navy to the core, a little fussy—it was recalled that when the Navy subdued certain Chinese forts in the fifties Foote had led a storming party across rice fields and over ditches under heavy fire, carefully holding a big umbrella over his head against the oppressive Oriental sun. He believed in total abstinence, the abolition of profane swearing, and a strict observance of the Sabbath, and he had somehow been able to make Old Navy shell-backs abide by these principles without mutiny. He had misgivings about this attack at Fort Donelson, because he knew that his irondads were not really as strong as people thought, but the army was in a hurry so he went into battle somewhat against his better judgment.6 He came up the river on the afternoon of February 14 with four ironclads, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Carondelet, and Louisville, followed by the unarmored gunboats Tyler and Conestoga, and when he was about a mile from the water batteries he opened fire. He had a megaphone and he kept popping in and out of the pilothouse on St. Louis, shouting instructions to his captains.

  At long range he had all the advantage, since the Confederate guns were too light to do much damage at any distance, and if he had stayed far away and kept on firing he probably could have put the water batteries out of action. But the Fort Henry lesson had been learned a bit too well. He had won there by coming in close and so he came in close now, steaming up to a mere 400 yards, and here the Rebel guns could hurt him. St. Louis was struck fifty-nine times and drifted downstream out of action, steering gear smashed, pilothouse wrecked, pilot killed, Foote himself wounded. Louisville also was disabled and drifted after the flagship, and then the two other ironclads collided, Pittsburgh was struck along the waterline and seemed ready to sink, and before the day ended the whole squadron had retired and the bombardment had been an expensive failure. Fort Donelson was going to be an Army fight.

  Grant had three divisions in line—reinforcements came up the Cumberland in transports, just behind Andrew Foote’s gunboats—and he had them strung out in a long semicircle facing the Confederate trenches. On his right was Brigadier General John A. McClernand, a good war Democrat from Illinois, inexpert but valiant, thirsting for military distinction; in the center was Brigadier General Lew Wallace, also ardent for fame, destined to be remembered because years later he would write a novel, Ben Hur; and on the left there was a stiff-backed old regular with long white mustachios, Brigadier General Charles F. Smith, who had been commandant of cadets at West Point when Grant was an indifferent student there. According to the newspaper correspondents the private soldiers whom these officers commanded were eager for battle; actually, they seem to have been numb and very much subdued, for the weather had suddenly become abominable. After several days of unseasonable warmth which led heedless boys to abandon overcoats and blankets it had blown up a storm, with a wind bringing rain that turned to sleet followed by snow, the thermometer dropping to 10 degrees above zero. There had been skirmish-line fighting, and some of the wounded men froze to death; at places the underbrush took fire, so that others died in flames; and on each side boys who were first drenched and then chilled caught colds that would bring pneumonia and death no matter how the battle went.7 Both sides had active sharpshooters, and the men in the front lines were not allowed to have campfires for warmth at night.

  In the Confederate lines there had been depression when the gunboats came up, because it was widely supposed that these ugly vessels were unbeatable, but after the boats were driven off and it was seen that they had really done very little harm the soldiers’ spirits rose. Their generals, however, were pessimistic. They could not be sure that the gunboats would not soon return to the fight, they knew that Grant had been strongly reinforced, and they began to see Fort Donelson for what it was, a trap in which the army could easily die; and although they had got the bulk of their troops into the fort less than forty-eight hours ago they concluded, on the night of February 14, that at daybreak they must make an all-out fight to break Grant’s lines so that they could lead a general retreat to Nashville.

  All things considered, the decision was sensible enough. But it did underline two things: the folly of occupying Fort Donelson in strength in the first place, and the even greater folly which had governed the selection of the fort’s commanding officers.

  The man in charge was John B. Floyd, one-time Secretary of War for President Buchanan, a wholly untrained soldier who had come from the East bearing a brigadier general’s commission and a record of utter failure in the western Virginia campaign; a famous man and a devout patriot, but a leader without personal force or any idea of the responsibilities that go with leadership. Second to him was Brigadier General Gideon J. Pillow, opinionated and cantankerous, who had fought in the Mexican War and so knew something about military matters. Bishop Polk had found him a difficult subordinate, and he was the one Confederate in all the war for whom U. S. Grant would voice outspoken contempt; and his concept of a commander’s responsibilities was no better developed than Floyd’s.

  The number three man was more of a soldier and more of a man: Brigadier General Simon Bolivar Buckner, who had commanded secessionist home guards in Kentucky during the period of that state’s neutrality, and to whom Lincoln had once offered a generalship in the Union Army. (He was a friend of Grant’s, and had given Grant a life-saving loan when Grant showed up in New York, broke, after resigning from the Army on the west coast in 1854.) Unfortunately for the Confederacy, both Floyd and Pillow ranked him.

  The battle plan was simple. At daybreak Pillow would lead most of the garrison in an attack on the right of the Federal line. Buckner would leave a small contingent to hold the entrenchments and would follow Pillow with the rest. Once the Federal line was opened, everybody would march southeast. Arrangements were hastily completed, and at dawn the fight began.

  It had snowed again during the night, but the day came in clear with a wintry sunlight lying on the white hills. Pillow’s men struck with fury, crumpling McClernand’s line, driving his b
rigades back in disorder, capturing six guns and putting some 2000 Federals out of action. There was bitter fighting in the woods and ravines, but the Confederate attack had taken the Federals by surprise; by a little after noon the escape route was wide open, and Buckner (who had distrusted the whole Fort Donelson business from the beginning) supposed that it was time to start the retreat.

  Grant had ridden downstream before the fighting began, to confer with the wounded Foote, and he did not return to the battlefield until after midday, when he found the right half of his army in full retreat. He ordered Lew Wallace, who on his own initiative had marched to McClernand’s support, to advance, and with McClernand hastened to reorganize the beaten brigades for a counterattack; he sent an almost frantic message to the Navy to ask for a renewal of the bombardment by the shattered gunboats, and he ordered Smith to attack the Confederate right. As quickly as he could, he restored order and prepared to recapture the ground that had been lost, but his work almost certainly would have gone for nothing if he had not been immeasurably aided by a singular action on the part of General Pillow. For that officer, having done exactly what he had set out to do, now ordered all of the Confederates back into their trenches, and the door that had swung open so wide was about to be slammed shut again.

  Apparently Pillow felt that the fort could be held. Apparently, also, he believed that the attacking column had been so disorganized by the hours of hard fighting that an orderly retreat was impossible; and he may have been moved by the thought that the soldiers were hungry, all but exhausted and in no physical condition to begin a hard march over bad roads. (It is also possible that his reasoning simply went beyond rational analysis.) In any case, he gave the orders. Buckner protested vigorously, Floyd hesitated and at last upheld Pillow, and the advantage that had been won was thrown away. By night all of the Confederates were back in their trenches, bewildered by the way victory had turned to defeat. To increase their gloom, C. F. Smith had seized a part of their lines and held a position from which he could make a shattering attack the next morning.

  Floyd, Pillow, and Buckner went into conference. The first two had sent jubilant telegrams to Johnston, who by now was in Nashville, announcing that they had won a great victory, and Johnston naturally passed the word on to Richmond; but after darkness came these two generals could think of little except saving their own skins. Grant apparently had reoccupied his lines, and (as Buckner pointed out) the fort and all it contained would have to be surrendered. Neither Floyd nor Pillow wanted to be the first Confederate general captured: after all the Federal talk about treasonous rebellion, it seemed possible that captured generals would be hanged. So Floyd incredibly abdicated, passing the command to Pillow, who unhesitatingly abdicated in his turn and passed it to Buckner. A couple of steamboats still lay at the river front, and Floyd got himself aboard, with a few regiments of his troops, and incontinently sailed upstream to safety. Pillow fled in a small boat and eventually joined Floyd. Buckner, who had the soldierly belief that a general who surrendered his troops ought to stay with them and share their fate, wrote and sent through the lines a note to General Grant asking the Federal what terms he could give.8

  Commander of cavalry in this Confederate Army was Colonel Nathan Bedford Forrest, the one-time planter and slave-trader who was much more of a soldier than men like Floyd and Pillow knew how to use. Like Buckner, he had felt trapped in Fort Donelson, and during the gunboat bombardment he met a chaplain and told him: “Parson, for God’s sake pray! Nothing but God Almighty can save this fort!” Forrest had no intention of letting his men share in the doom of the fort, and when he learned what was going to happen he called his officers and said: “Boys, these people are talking about surrendering, and I am going out of this place before they do or bust hell wide open.” He got his troops together, found that Grant’s lines were less tight than his superiors thought, and led his men off through the night, cavalrymen floundering through ice-cold water in the swamps but getting out alive.9

  In his cabin behind the Union lines, General Grant was aroused and given the dispatch his old friend Buckner had written. His reply was simple and direct: “No terms except unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted. I propose to move immediately upon your works.”

  And an unconditional surrender was made, first thing next morning.

  3: The Disease Which Brought Disaster

  The news from Fort Donelson struck Nashville into a blind panic which was all the worse because everybody had been so confident. General Johnston had brought Hardee’s 17,000 men in a few days earlier, but although his evacuation of Bowling Green had been dismaying he seemed to feel that Nashville could be held and no one had been in a mood to doubt. The public optimism had even interfered with his military plans. He wanted to block the Cumberland River by mooring an immense raft in the steamboat channel, but there had been much passive resistance; the steamboat men opposed a move that would stop the flow of ordinary commercial traffic, nobody supposed that the Yankee gunboats would ever really get this far, and when Floyd and Pillow sent word that they had won a great victory the project died. On Sunday morning, February 16, the churchgoing crowds were in high spirits.

  Johnston knew the worst before anybody went to church. An aide aroused him at daybreak with a dispatch from Buckner saying that the fort and everybody in it were being surrendered. Johnston sat up in his camp cot, asked the aide to reread the dispatch, muttered grimly, “I must save this army,” and summoned his staff to prepare the troops for an immediate departure. He would get his army out of Nashville, marching southeast to the vicinity of Murfreesboro, sending a contingent to hold Chattanooga and then awaiting developments and a hoped-for junction with Beauregard and Bishop Polk’s troops from the Mississippi Valley; and the citizens who had been ready to celebrate saw the long columns tramping across the river and plodding south in undisguised retreat. Nashville was doomed, and by evening everybody knew it.1

  No large Confederate city had yet been occupied by a Northern army. Wartime propaganda had portrayed Federal soldiers as brutes inclined to rapine and murder, shamefully undisciplined; no one knew what horrors the Yankee invader would inflict but everyone seemed to expect the worst, and one soldier wrote years later that in all the war he never saw such frantic, unreasoning fear as he saw now in Nashville. There was a great rush to get out of town. Southbound trains were jammed, with extras running. People who owned horses and carriages set off by road in a cold rain, often with no clear destination in mind, and others started out on foot, lugging valises and carpetbags. Many people who were not trying to go anywhere wandered up and down the streets in a daze, adding to the general confusion. Swarming mobs began to sack government warehouses and steamboats, carrying off immense quantities of bacon, salt pork, flour, blankets, and clothing, roughly commandeering horses and wagons to help remove the plunder; a newspaper correspondent, properly shocked, noted that these mobs included “Negroes, Irish laborers and even genteel-looking persons.” One crowd filled the street in front of Johnston’s headquarters—he had moved into Nashville from nearby Edgefield when the retreat began—demanding angrily to be told whether the army planned to defend the city or to abandon it; dispersing only after soothing oratory by assorted generals. Johnston had his hands full, trying to get river-side batteries planted so that the gunboats might at least be delayed, supervising the details of the retreat, advising the Governor of Tennessee to get the state archives off to safety.2

  Johnston kept his personal equanimity, and when those egregious fugitives, Generals Floyd and Pillow, showed up on Monday he greeted them courteously and named Floyd temporary commandant of the city, with responsibility for keeping order and removing military stores. This responsibility, like the ones which had preceded it, Floyd found beyond his powers. Not until Tuesday, when Bedford Forrest and his cavalry reached Nashville, was anything effective done. Forrest was put in charge of the military depots, and he charged the plundering mobs with his tough troopers, sabers swinging and m
uch profane shouting going on, and the looting came to a stop. Forrest organized army wagon trains to remove such stores as remained; he reported bitterly that millions of dollars’ worth of supplies had been lost, adding that “with proper diligence” all could have been saved, and he finally got the city back on an even keel. By February 23, one week after Donelson had surrendered, Johnston had his troops in camp near Murfreesboro, and Forrest and the rear guard escorted the wagon trains out of town to join him. Groggy and half empty, Nashville awaited the arrival of the Federal Army.3

  As it happened, the Federal power was in no great hurry. There were in the Kentucky-Tennessee area two men who believed in crowding a beaten foe—General Grant and Flag Officer Foote—and they did their best. Wounded in one leg and one arm, Foote found that he could still get around, and on February 19 he took two gunboats upstream from Donelson and captured the town of Clarksville, where there was a railroad bridge; after which he and Grant agreed that the thing to do was to get troops and gunboats up to Nashville as fast as possible, and by daybreak on February 21 they had an expeditionary force afloat at Fort Donelson, ready to go, capable of reaching Nashville the same day. At this point the high command intervened. General Halleck telegraphed Grant not to let the gunboats go beyond Clarksville; after which he telegraphed to Secretary Stanton saying that there existed “a golden opportunity to strike a fatal blow” but that the blow could not be struck unless he, Halleck, could control Buell’s army. Buell, meanwhile, had got his army into Bowling Green, and, while Forrest was pulling the rear guard out of Nashville, Buell began an overland advance toward that point, begging Halleck to send some gunboats up the Cumberland for protection. Crippled and badly off balance, the Confederates had just time to get away to safety. Buell’s advance guard reached Edgefield, on the opposite side of the river from Nashville, on the evening of February 24, barely twenty-four hours after Forrest got the last Confederate soldiers out of there.4