It naturally followed that whoever could gain control would be in a much better position both militarily and politically. The governors of Tennessee and Kentucky both tended to be pro-secessionist, but at the outbreak of war the legislators tended to either favor a policy of neutrality or were in favor of remaining within the framework of the Union. Using illegal or extra legal means, pro-Unionist forces quickly gained control of the Missouri state government, seized most of the large stocks of munitions lying within the state, and launched an offensive to clear out pro-Confederate forces from the state. After a preliminary engagement at Boonville, Missouri, Unionist forces led by Brigadier General Nathaniel Lyon began a move southward.
Brigadier General Franz Sigel was defeated in a minor action at Carthage, Missouri, but managed to link up with Lyon in time to attack the Confederate army in Missouri, which was led by Brigadier General Ben McCullough, and the Missouri State Confederate Guard, commanded by Brigadier General Sterling “Pap” Price. Lyon was killed in battle at Wilson’s Creek, Missouri, on August 10, 1861, and his numerically smaller army was forced to retreat in one of the bloodiest actions for its size in the entire war. The following month, in September, Price succeeded in capturing Lexington, Missouri, after a two weeks’ siege, but lack of equipment and numbers forced the pro-secessionist forces to withdraw southward.
In Kentucky, the situation was even more complex. Brigadier General Simon Bolivar Buckner commanded the Kentucky State Guard, a well-trained and organized military force of about twelve thousand men, largely pro-Confederate in sympathy. Buckner, the soul of honor, refused to use his position to advance the cause of the Confederacy and entered into an agreement with Major General George B. McClellan to maintain Kentucky’s neutrality. Both sides immediately began raising troops from this state. The Confederates, who were theoretically at least in the eyes of most Northerners, Rebels, unfortunately insisted on acting in the most legal and officious manner possible, while their Northern foe, who supposedly represented the forces of good order and legality, acted with almost true revolutionary zeal. Arms and munitions were brought into Kentucky from Northern arsenals, and several bodies of pro-Union Kentucky troops were soon organized, the most important at Camp Dick Robinson, in Northern Kentucky, commanded by one of the most interesting figures of the war, Brigadier General William Nelson, a naval officer turned soldier in the emergency.
The Confederates drew troops from the state, but they set up their camps across the Kentucky line in the friendly state of Tennessee, which had seceded in June. The Kentucky situation finally exploded on September 3, 1861, when Major General Leonidas Polk led Confederate force across the state line and occupied Columbus, which he immediately began fortifying into one of the strongest Confederate positions in the West. In retaliation for the act, Brigadier General U. S. Grant led a small Union force south, occupying Paducah on the following day. Polk’s act was militarily important because it did give the Confederates a good base of operations for their left flank in Kentucky, but it was politically unfortunate because it put on the South the stain of first invading a neutral state and alienated many Kentuckians, who might otherwise have been more sympathetic to the Southern position. The line of Confederate forces in Kentucky was soon stabilized, running from Bowling Green in the center, left to Polk’s newly acquired position at Columbus, and to the right roughly to the vicinity of Cumberland Gap. Confederate headquarters were at Bowling Green, on the south bank of the Barren River, where the railroad from Nashville to Louisville crosses. This position also enabled the Southerners to use the Mobile and Ohio Railroad, which crossed over into Tennessee, enabling the Confederates to use rail communications between their center and their left. Across the Mississippi River, the Confederates occupied and began fortifying New Madrid, Missouri, as well as Island No. 10, which actually was an island at a point between the Tennessee and Missouri shores.6
Even before Tennessee seceded Union authorities had already begun work on building a fleet capable of potentially dominating this heartland region. At Cairo, Mound City, and St. Louis, Union ironclad warships, as well as wooden gunboats, were quickly constructed and outfitted. Across half a dozen states Confederate and Union generals raised troops, collected munitions, and tried frantically to put their forces together in some reasonable state of preparation for the fighting that sooner or later would break out. At this early stage in the war, both sides were handicapped by the lack of practical experience, as well as sufficient quantities of supplies and weapons. The South naturally suffered most in this department, lacking funds to buy materials in Europe and resources at home with which to build war equipment, but even the Union forces were often inadequately equipped in the first days of the war. Neither side was prepared to launch any kind of major offensive operation at this time, and most Union leaders were too happy to retain control of Missouri and Kentucky.
After the fall of Fort Sumter, Major Robert Anderson, Kentucky-born but loyal to the Union, achieved the status of a national hero even though he had been forced to yield his position, after a two day bombardment, to Brigadier General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard. Because of his Kentucky connections, Lincoln and other Washington officials thought it would be politically expedient to send him to command in Kentucky once Union and Confederate forces had moved into the state. Anderson was in ill health, and he soon asked to be relieved after a little more than a month in service. On October 7, the hero of Fort Sumter was formally relieved of his command by Brigadier General William Tecumseh Sherman, who after his services at the Battle of First Manassas had been appointed to command an infantry brigade at Lexington, Kentucky. Sherman held this command for a little more than a week before he became involved in his famous discussion with Secretary of War Simon Cameron over just how many troops would be needed to suppress the rebellion and crush the Rebels in the Mississippi and Tennessee valleys. The following month Sherman was replaced by Brigadier General Don Carlos Buell as head of the Department of the Ohio. Sherman was shunted off for a short rest, and was out of the main-stream of events for some weeks while he recovered control of his nerves.7
With Buell in command in central and eastern Kentucky and the adjacent Northern states and Major General Henry W. Halleck in command of the Department of the West across the river and the district of western Kentucky, it would seem that the Union army was suffering from a serious error in divided command. Actually the division of the West in the various departments was the product of the thinking of the new General-in-Chief of the Union Army, George Brinton McClellan. On November 9, just eight days after McClellan assumed his new position as head of the Union army, he divided the extensive Western Department into the Department of Kansas and Missouri. The latter included not only Missouri but the Western states of Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, Arkansas, and the segment of Kentucky lying west of the Cumberland River. Lincoln’s home state of Illinois had been in the Western Department since the third of July, but all of Kentucky, with Tennessee, had comprised the old Department of the Cumberland, though forces from the Western Department had been stationed at Paducah and Cairo.
With a large but motley collection of half-trained armies scattered on both sides of the Mississippi River, the stage was practically set for the opening of the real war for the Mississippi and Tennessee valleys. But if the stage were set, the casting of the roles of the leading actors was not complete. Most of the characters were on hand, but no one had been picked to direct the play. Major General John Charles Fremont, the famous Pathfinder of Western exploration fame, was appointed to command in Missouri and the adjacent territory on July 9, but his tenure of office was extremely stormy. Politically protected by his wife, a member of the Thomas Hart Benton family, and by tie-ups with Frank Blair, a leading Missourian pro-Unionist politician, Fremont enjoyed great renown for his first few weeks in command, but his failure to adequately support General Lyon, and still later, his lack of action during the siege of Lexington, caused the administration to lose faith in him and worse, he
succeeded in alienating the influential Blair family by his arrogance and conceit. The Pathfinder was finally officially relieved of his command on November 2, 1861, and Brigadier General David Hunter, Virginia-born but a strong abolitionist and Union sympathizer, was picked to temporarily succeed him until a new department commander could be brought out from Washington.8
On November 19, Major General Henry Wager Halleck arrived at St. Louis to relieve Hunter of his temporary post and to assume the direction of the Department of the Missouri, which also included Kentucky.9 Hunter was shunted off to a lesser command in Kansas, while Halleck declined to take to the active field against the local Confederate forces, preferring to act as a war director. Brigadier generals Samuel Curtis and John Pope were given the task of clearing northern and southern Missouri of Confederate irregulars and driving General Sterling Price out of the state.
Across the river in eastern Kentucky the command system was even more confused, if that were possible. By placing both banks of the Mississippi below its junction with the Ohio and the lower part of the Tennessee River under a single central system, McClellan directly paved the way for the operations that would follow during the winter. This led to the elimination of the Department of the Cumberland and the formation of the Department of the Ohio, which would be General Buell’s command, consisting of Kentucky, east of the Cumberland River, all of Tennessee (occupied by the Confederate army), plus Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio. It can be seen from this arrangement that the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers changed departments as they crossed the Kentucky state line, but at the moment this made little difference, since Tennessee was controlled by Confederate forces. It was a complicated arrangement once offensive operations south began, but for the moment it was adequate.10
If Generals Buell and Halleck could work together, coordinated by McClellan as General-in-Chief and the good offices of the Secretary of War and the President, then the command system in the West could be made to work without too much friction.
South, in Confederate territory, the command system was considerably more simplified. The original Confederate commander, Polk, had been replaced with the arrival of one of the South’s greatest wartime heroes, General Albert S. Johnston. The Kentucky-born Confederate leader reached Nashville on September 14,11 and assumed command of Department No. 2 on the following day. The text of the order giving Johnston his command, issued five days earlier, assigned him to direct military operations in Tennessee, Arkansas, that part of Mississippi lying west of the New Orleans, Jackson, and Great Northern and Central Railroad, Kentucky, Missouri, and the Indian country to the west of Missouri and Arkansas. Johnston was the senior officer in the Confederate army, after the Adjutant General, Samuel Cooper, who was too in firm to engage in active field operations. The appointment of a man of Johnston’s prestige and repute to command the West demonstrated the force of President Jefferson Davis’ feelings in regard to the importance of the theater, but the wisdom of giving such a large command to one man, since everyone assumed that Johnston would also lead the main Confederate field army in battle, is possibly debatable. An old military axiom says that a general should never have to lead one army in person while directing the operations of others at the same time. Whether Johnston could act as soldier and as a master theater strategist would remain to be seen, but at least the Confederate forces in the West would have a certain unity of command that their Bluecoated foes would lack, at least for the time being.12
If General Johnston possessed a national reputation, his foes to the north of the Bowling Green-Columbus line were of a lesser known quality. None of the leaders who would fight for the Union cause had achieved any spectacular peacetime prominence. Brigadier General U. S. Grant had indeed lived in mediocrity for most of his thirty-nine years. Of distant Scottish ancestry, Grant’s family had originally come from Scotland to Massachusetts in May 1630, and later one ancestor fought in the American Revolution. Born on April 27, 1822, Grant, baptized Hiram Ulysses, lived the routine life of a small town Ohio boy, studying in the local subscription schools of Point Pleasant. Not a terribly capable scholar, Grant worked steadily and doggedly, prodded by his father, who had ambitions for his male child. In the winter of 1838-39, Jessie Grant decided his young son, Ulysses, needed a higher education, and without consulting him asked United States Senator Thomas Morris to get the boy an appointment to the Military Academy at West Point, New York. Young Ulysses’ reaction when informed by his father that he was going to the Academy was a prompt, “But I won’t go.”13 He went, however. Grant’s stay at the Academy was not particularly pleasant, for he always lacked enthusiasm for the routine life of the soldier or cadet. Still he managed to graduate twenty-first out of a class of thirty-nine.14 His classmates included William B. Franklin, who won top honors in the class of 1843, Roswell S. Ripley, John J. Peck, J. J. Reynolds, C. C. Augur, Frederick Steele, Rufas Ingalls, and a young New York-born cadet, Franklin Gardner, who would oppose Grant in battle just nineteen years later.15
Assigned to the Fourth Infantry, Grant was stationed at Jefferson Barracks, near St. Louis, Missouri. Still lacking enthusiasm for a military career, the young second lieutenant began an intensive study in mathematics, the only subject in which he had shown special aptitude at the Point, hoping to get an assistant professorship at the Academy. One of Lieutenant Grant’s former cadet friends, Fred Dent, was a native of St. Louis, and he invited the Ohio boy to his home, where he met the Dent sisters. Six year old Emmy was strongly attracted to the nattily uniformed army officer, but it was her seventeen year old sister, Julia, who won Grant’s heart. The young couple decided they were in love, but unfortunately the Mexican crisis had taken a turn for the worse and the War Department ordered the Fourth to Fort Jesup, Louisiana.16 More than four years were to pass before the two were finally married on August 22, 1848, after Lieutenant Grant’s return from the war.17
Hostile to the idea of warfare with Mexico and convinced that Southern annexationists were behind all the trouble, Grant loyally obeyed orders, accompanying General Zachary Taylor’s army to Louisiana and then to Texas. At Corpus Christi the army almost lost a new second lieutenant when Grant fell off the transport Suviah into the Gulf of Mexico. Fished out of the water without a scratch, the soggy lieutenant went through a lot of joking and remarks about his clumsiness before his fellow officers let him forget the incident.18
Surviving the bloody battles of Palo Alto, Resaca de la Palma, and Monterrey, Grant was eventually transferred to General Winfield Scott’s army, taking part in many of the battles from Vera Cruz to the capture of Mexico City. Although most of the time a regimental quartermaster, he managed to participate in many of the battles as a combat soldier.19 In the storming of the Mexican capitol, the Fourth Infantry was part of William Jenkins Worth’s division, and Lieutenant Grant helped drag up the army’s little mountain howitzers, aiding in hoisting them to the roofs of the stone houses from where they could be used to blast out the Mexican defenders. A young naval officer, Raphael Semmes, assisted Grant in moving the guns up. Only a few hundred yards away, P. G. T. Beauregard, Earl Van Dorn, and Adley Gladden, all of whom would again meet Grant in battle, but under a different flag, fell wounded from Mexican gun fire. Grant’s brigade commander reported that the young Ohioan “acquitted himself most nobly,” and General Worth sent an aide, Lieutenant John C. Pemberton, to bring Grant to divisional headquarters. Just six teen years later, on a hot, sticky day, these two men would meet again, and Grant would receive the surrender of his old war comrade at Vicksburg, Mississippi, following a grim and merciless forty-seven day siege.20
With the end of hostilities and with his marriage to Julia, Grant settled down to the routine peacetime army life, serving at Sacketts Harbor and Detroit. Then the Fourth was ordered to the Pacific Coast, and Julia returned to St. Louis to stay with her family. On the West Coast Grant lived the dreary life of a bachelor officer. Never particularly enamored with military life and bored by the deadly, dull routine of the isolated outp
osts at which he was stationed, Grant began drinking.
In 1854, possibly to avoid a court-martial, Grant, holding the permanent rank of captain, submitted his resignation to Secretary of War Jefferson Davis. The future Confederate President accepted the resignation, and Grant found himself a civilian once more. Short of funds, the ex-army captain succeeded in getting passage to New York, where he arrived penniless. Staying at a hotel in the city, U. S. Grant attempted to collect an old debt, but without success. His hotel bill began running up, and the hotel manager seized his baggage and ordered him out. At this time Captain Simon Bolivar Buckner, an old army comrade, happened to run into Grant, and upon discovering the situation went to the hotel manager and agreed to be responsible for the Ohioan’s debt. Grant was allowed to stay in the hotel upon Buckner’s promise. Buckner did not loan any money to Grant, as some stories current during the Civil War claimed, and Grant was soon able to settle his own accounts with the aid of his father.
Shiloh and the Western Campaign of 1862 Page 3
