Grant marched his regiment into Missouri in search of rebels, particularly a certain Col. Thomas Harris, whose Confederate troops were plaguing local farmers and who was said to be a fiery and aggressive commander. Grant located Harris’s camp and advanced on it, writing years later that, as he led his men over the brow of a hill, “I would have given anything to be back in Illinois, but I had not the moral courage to halt.”
He soon discovered that Harris and his men had already fled, and wrote, “It occurred to me at once that Harris was much afraid of me as I had been of him. This was a view of the question that I had never taken before; but it was one I never forgot afterwards.”
Henceforth Grant would always operate on the assumption that the enemy had as much reason to be afraid of him as he might be of the enemy, and “from that event to the end of the war, I never experienced trepidation upon confronting an enemy.”
Grant’s memoirs are pellucid and reveal not only a striking literary gift but an amazing memory; still, his modesty is such that he has to be read carefully. He is not writing here about fear or physical courage—he had already demonstrated his fearlessness in Mexico to his own satisfaction—he is writing here about what amounts to “stage fright” as a commander of men in battle. He had learned a lot by observing Zachary Taylor in Mexico, but as every young officer discovers in battle, it is one thing to give an order and quite another to know it will be obeyed. Here, in the unpromising countryside of Missouri, he had braced himself to order his men into battle, led them over “the brow of the hill,” and found, to his relief and theirs, that the enemy had fled. It was his first step as a commander—the realization that he knew what he was doing and that his men would follow him—that Grant was describing here, exactly like that of Napoleon at the bridge of Arcola, when the young Napoleon, who was as personally fearless as Grant, also realized for the first time that men would follow him.
It may be too that Grant at last realized his own strengths. He was not a thinker, like the unfortunate General McClennan, who thought so long and hard about a campaign that it never got anywhere, leading Lincoln to complain that McClennan had “a case of the slows,” and exasperating the president until he finally asked if he could borrow the Army of the Potomac since McClennan wasn’t using it. Grant, on the contrary, was a man of action, and movement was what stimulated him, not thought. He would try something, and if it failed he would try something else, but his instinct was always to keep moving forward against the enemy.
Napoleon, when asked what his method was of beginning a battle, replied, “On s’engage, et puis on voit.” Much as Grant, according to his memoirs, disliked Napoleon, his view of battle was the same—he attacked the enemy, and then he waited to see what happened. One senses in the words of Grant’s about his anticlimactic attack on Harris, a dawning understanding that he had found, at last, something he could do better than other men. He was courageous, he had common sense, he could read a map, and, like the child he had been, he would never go backward and retrace his steps once he had started out. In an army full of commanders busily planning how to win a war without fighting a battle, Grant sought one out. The elements of military genius were all there, hardened and annealed by the experience of Mexico and the years of failure—now at last he had the opportunity to use them.
While Grant marched his men up and down the dusty Missouri roads in pursuit of Harris, larger events were taking place in Springfield and Washington, D.C. President Lincoln was anxious to create enough brigadier generals to command the rapidly growing volunteer army, and Representative Washburne, a fellow Illinois politician, convinced the president that at least one of these new generals should come from his own district. Lincoln, who never forgot the rule that “all politics are local,” allowed Washburne to name his pick. Since Grant was the only Galena man appointed a colonel, Washburne put his name down for promotion to the rank of brigadier general, and by the time Grant returned from the fruitless chase after Harris he read in the newspaper that he was now Brig. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant.
Only a few months ago he had been ex-captain Sam Grant, slouching behind the counter of his father’s store, wrapping packages. Now, he wore the single gold star of a brigadier general on his shoulders and, surrounded by his staff, rode into Cairo, Illinois, to set up his headquarters at the Cairo Hotel, which no less an authority than W. H. Russell, the famous war correspondent of the London Times, would describe as a hell hole of heat, vermin, and flies.
Russell’s interest in Cairo, Illinois, like Grant’s, is a point worth noting. At this early stage of the Civil War, the belief on both sides was that one big battle would bring the other side to its senses. If nothing else the first Battle of Bull Run (or First Manassas, as it is known in the South) would shortly prove that this assumption was doubtful. Fought within sight of Washington, D.C., in what are now its suburbs, Bull Run was a devastating defeat for the North. Although crowds of civilians had come out by carriage to see the battle, as if it were a parade, Brig. Gen. Irvin McDowell’s army was badly mauled by the army of Brig. Gen. P. G. T. Beauregard. McDowell lost nearly three thousand men and twenty-seven cannon, as most of his troops broke and ran. A determined pursuit might have won Beauregard Washington, but the victorious Confederates were as exhausted as their defeated opponents.
Three things emerged from the disaster that would affect the future course of the war. One was the first appearance on the battlefield of Confederate Brig. Gen. Thomas J. Jackson, one of the great generals of the war, who earned his nickname, “Stonewall,” at Bull Run, when Gen. Barnard E. Bee rallied his troops by shouting, “There is Jackson standing like a stone wall.” The second was the belief, in the North and in the South, that the war would be won—must be won—in the narrow territory that separated Washington from Richmond. And the third was the very slowly dawning realization that neither side would give way after one big battle, and that many more might have to be fought.
Grant (and W. H. Russell, who had seen war at its best and its worst in the Crimea, where he had personally witnessed the Charge of the Light Brigade from a position next to Lord Raglan himself) understood almost at once that the key to winning the war was in the West, not in the East, in front of Washington.1 He saw that the Confederacy’s weakness was its size, not its industrial inferiority to the North. The Confederacy was vast, and there was no way it could be defended with equal strength all along its frontier, yet this was exactly what Jefferson Davis proposed to do. Davis wanted a big victory—big enough to shock Lincoln to the bargaining table for a treaty of peace, and to convince the European powers that the Confederacy was there to stay—but he also didn’t want to surrender an inch of territory for fear of what that might do to Southern morale. Though something of a bookworm at West Point and afterward, Davis seemed to have forgotten that old military maxim “To attempt to be strong everywhere is to be strong nowhere.”
Seen from drab, dusty Cairo, the heart of the South lay open to a determined thrust, aimed down the great rivers that separated the Confederacy into two separate regions. A determined advance through the border states of Missouri and Kentucky would bring a Federal army within reach of Tennessee and Mississippi, and such a thrust could be supplied by river rather than overland. Victory would split the Confederacy, expose its vast, weakly defended western border to attack at any point, and allow a Union army to threaten the Southern heartland, opening up a war of movement instead of big, set-piece battles. Grant might not have spent much time on books about strategy at West Point, but he could read a map, which is more than could be said for many of his colleagues. From Cairo he could see how to win the war, as plain as a pikestaff.
Russell saw it, too, hence his interest in Cairo. And, more important, a thousand miles to the east, Abraham Lincoln saw it—felt it in his bones—for, after all, he was an Illinois man, who had traveled up and down the great rivers in his youth. He sensed, uneasily, that McDowell had been wrong, that even General Scott was wrong, and that McClellan would be wrong, too,
when his turn came, and looked to the West for a general who understood what was in the back of his mind: a whole different kind of war.
For the moment no such person seemed to exist. Grant’s immediate superior was the flamboyant Maj. Gen. John C. Frémont, “the Pathfinder,” as he was called, after his supposed explorations in the West, a political and celebrity general, an amateur, whose personal fortune, glamorous wife, and undisguised presidential ambitions did not inspire much confidence in Lincoln. Frémont was too busy talking to reporters to pay much attention to Grant, whom he scarcely knew, and thus was unable to prevent Grant from taking his forces forty miles above Cairo to seize the town of Paducah, Kentucky, before the Confederates got there. Paducah was not of itself much of a prize, but a look at the map shows that the Tennessee and the Cumberland Rivers both flow into the Ohio near Paducah. A Union army could descend* the two rivers deep into the heart of Tennessee.
The Confederates could read a map, too, and they had already built two strong forts, Fort Henry to protect the Tennessee River, and Fort Donelson to protect the Cumberland, and manned them with sizable forces. It now occurred to them that occupying Paducah would strengthen their position, but the force they sent to take it retired when they found Grant already holding it. Not a shot had been fired, but Grant had opened the way South just a crack, and calmed the good citizens of Paducah with a respectful and sensible proclamation, appealing to their better instincts. “I have come among you,” he wrote, “not as an enemy, but as your friend and fellow-citizen,” and when Lincoln saw it, he is reported to have said, “The man who can write like that is fitted to command in the West.”
Grant’s soothing proclamation was followed by a more rousing one from Frémont, threatening among other things to seize the slaves and property of Confederate sympathizers and shoot any man not in uniform found bearing a gun. These were exactly the kind of sentiments most calculated to turn inhabitants of the “border states” away from the Union cause at just the moment when Lincoln was trying to woo them, and when Frémont highhandedly refused to withdraw his proclamation at the president’s request, he was removed from his command, his presidential aspirations as good as gone.
Grant was no longer in Frémont’s shadow, and his name was beginning to be known, at least in the White House. Lincoln may not have said, when told about Grant’s drinking, “Tell me the brand of whiskey that Grant drinks—I would like to send a barrel of it to every one of my other generals,” but he did say to one of Grant’s many critics, “I cannot spare this man—he fights.”
Grant would shortly prove that he could not only fight but move fast. In the meantime, with the collapse of Frémont’s balloon, Grant found himself under the command of Maj. Gen. Henry W. Halleck, commander of the Department of Missouri. Up until then Halleck’s chief concern had not been the Confederates but the more important task of getting rid of Frémont and maintaining his superiority in numbers over his rival, Brig. Gen. Don Carlos Buell, commander of the Department of Ohio, but Grant now moved into Halleck’s field of vision as a new threat. Halleck was known to his fellow army officers as “Old Brains,” and he didn’t like or trust a single thing he had heard about Grant. Cautious, pop-eyed, bald, quick to criticize, and slow to make up his mind, a deskbound general who was something of an intriguer and a gossip (many of the stories about Grant’s drinking can be traced back to him), Halleck was to become, for a time, Grant’s bête noire, though once Grant finally succeeded he would find Halleck a useful man to look after things in Washington while Grant took to the field. Halleck’s strengths—attention to detail, administrative ability, a love of paperwork, and an intimate knowledge of the army way of doing things—in many ways complemented Grant’s.
The second person who entered Grant’s life at this point, and made an immediate difference, was John A. Rawlins, who joined Grant’s staff as an aide. Grant did not know Rawlins well—for some time he wrote his name as “Rollins”—but Rawlins was a fellow Galena man and had in fact been the attorney for Jesse Grant’s leather and harness shop.
Rawlins took charge of Grant’s chaotic paperwork, for which Grant had no gift at all. He also acted, from the beginning, as Grant’s éminence bleue—adviser, protector, sounding board. Rawlins was abrasive, exacting, even abusive, had no difficulty (unlike Grant) in saying no to people, and was above all a fervent and outspoken “teetotaler,” who abstained from all forms of spirits. Rawlins was a born follower, who had been looking all his life for a man to follow and found him in Grant. It became his role to prevent Grant from reaching for the bottle, and on those occasions when he failed, to keep Grant out of sight. Rawlins was like a faithful guard dog, ferocious, absolutely loyal to his master, and devoted to protecting him, even from himself.
With Rawlins to guard his flank, Grant took to the field immediately. Ordered by Halleck to make “a demonstration” at Belmont, a Confederate camp on the Mississippi, twenty miles below Cairo, opposite Columbus, Missouri—that is, to impress and overawe the Confederates there by his presence—Grant went beyond his orders. He took three thousand men downriver by steamer and decided to attack Belmont instead. He landed, drove the Confederates out of the fortified camp, then was sharply driven back himself when they counterattacked in superior numbers. Grant had stirred up a hornet’s nest and was very lucky to get his troops embarked again.
Grant was the last man to leave, riding his horse straight down a steep, almost “perpendicular” bank under enemy fire, then across a narrow plank onto the deck of the waiting steamer—another brilliant feat of horsemanship that would have been performed by a stuntman in a movie. No sooner was Grant in his cabin than a bullet came through the hull, hitting the pillow on which he was about to lay his head. He must have begun to sense in himself a certain destiny, but also, as he began to suspect at Belmont, and perhaps even in Mexico, a gift for command. Risks did not seem to scare him. He hardly even noticed danger. Quietly but firmly he got things done.
Halleck bristled at Grant’s transformation of a demonstration into an amphibious landing against a larger force, but Grant, with a newly acquired sense of public relations, or perhaps on Rawlins’s shrewd advice, decided to call it “a raid.” If it had been an attack, then he had been repulsed, as the Confederates claimed, whereas if it was a raid, it had been daring and successful. Halleck grumbled, was not fooled for a moment, but accepted Grant’s explanation, though it did nothing to increase his confidence in Grant.
Nevertheless, after considerable acrimonious correspondence between Halleck and Grant, and a few suggestions leaked from Halleck to Washington that Grant might have been drunk, Halleck reluctantly agreed to let his impetuous subordinate attack Fort Henry, the weaker of the two Confederate forts that guarded the Tennessee and the Cumberland Rivers, surely hoping to upstage General Buell and, perhaps wrongly, assuming that this would keep Grant occupied for some time.
Buell had 45,000 men in his command, just south of Louisville, Kentucky, and had been promising to advance on Nashville for some time. Halleck, with 91,000 men, and an eye fixed firmly on Washington, wanted very much to carry out an attack before Buell did. Buell’s forces were spread out, and he was in no hurry to move them, and Halleck must have thought there could be no harm in dispatching Grant to do a little mischief in the general direction of Nashville before Buell did.
Grant did not hesitate. He moved, like Rommel nearly eighty years later, mit blitzartiger Schnelle, the lightning speed so favored by German Panzer generals, and took the Confederates by surprise. Grant was carried south on the Tennessee River by a flotilla of transports and gunboats, under the command of Comm. Andrew H. Foote, U.S.N., which had originally been assembled to carry Buell south, and was still waiting for Buell to move.
Having preempted Buell’s flotilla, Grant now deftly stepped into the limelight before Buell. He was about to receive help from an unexpected source—his Confederate opponents. Despite his dislike of Napoleon, Grant was about to prove the emperor right again. When asked what kin
d of generals he liked best, Napoleon is said to have replied, “Lucky ones.” Luck was about to strike Grant at last.
Though the Confederacy had recognized the importance of the rivers flowing north into the Ohio before the Union generals did, its choice of positions for the forts defending them was hampered by a reluctance to advance too far north into Kentucky, and the Confederate fortress system was therefore built at unpromising points. Perhaps Jefferson Davis and Gen. A. S. Johnston had also dozed during the lectures on fortifications at West Point, or neglected to read Vauban’s classic work on the subject, but in any case Fort Henry, on the Tennessee River, was placed on low ground, so that it could be shelled by gunboats. The Confederates then made the classic mistake of attempting to strengthen it by building a supporting fort—Fort Heiman—on the opposite, west bank of the Tennessee, which was on higher ground but only lightly manned.
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