The next six and one-half years of Grant’s life was a period of mediocrity and failure. As a businessman and farmer, he did not prosper in the little Illinois town of Galena. With the outbreak of hostilities in April 1861, he became involved in local military activities, holding a number of minor military positions in recruiting troops. Weeks passed, and then Governor Dick Yates offered the West Pointer the command of the Twenty-first Illinois Infantry Regiment. This job was no sinecure. The first commander of the regiment was Colonel Simon Goode, a handsome, swashbuckling Kentuckian who had served in the Mexican War, the Lopez-Cuba expedition, and the Kansas border wars. Goode, although brave, was extremely incompetent, and he had the habit of calling his sentinels from their posts to drink whiskey with him. The troops began getting out of hand, and some of the regiment’s officers went to Governor Yates to ask for a new colonel. Someone suggested Captain Grant, and Yates promptly agreed that it should be Grant.
Grant arrived at the regiment’s camp in civilian clothes, his elbows sticking out through the holes in his worn coat sleeves, and wearing a very battered hat. Used to the more magnificent appearance of Colonel Goode, the soldiers made fun of him, and one soldier even pushed him in the back. Later Grant wrote of the incident, “I found it very hard work for a few days to bring all the men into anything like subordination, but by the application of a little regular army punishment all were reduced to as good discipline as one could ask.”21
For the next few months Grant was in eastern Missouri, unsuccessfully chasing parties of Confederate guerrillas. Almost a thousand miles away, at the home of Senator Lyman Trumbull on Eighth Street, Washington, D. C., Illinois congressmen and senators met to vote on placing in nomination for promotion a number of Illinois soldiers. The name of U. S. Grant was first on the list and when the appointments were presented to President Lincoln and Congress, the nomination of Grant as brigadier general was approved. Grant first heard of his promotion in a St. Louis newspaper, and he remarked to a chaplain standing nearby, “I had no suspicion of it. It never came from any request of mine. It must be some of Washburne’s work.”22
In September Brigadier General Grant led an invasion of Kentucky, occupying Paducah on the 4th. For the next two months he was busy raising and organizing an army around Paducah and in threatening the Confederate base at Columbus, Kentucky. On November 7, Grant drew blood for the first time in a strike at the small Confederate garrison at Belmont, Missouri. Ferried over by the navy, Grant routed the small Confederate army, but Southern reinforcements arrived and the newly appointed brigadier was forced to abandon the Confederate camp, load his army on the navy transports, and with naval gunfire covering him, retire to Paducah. Union and Confederate armies both claimed the victory at Belmont. Union losses were 607 men against 641 Confederate casualties. The first real battle in the West since Wilson’s Creek, the engagement attracted great publicity and made U. S. Grant the rising star of the Union army in that theater. It was not so much that Belmont was a great victory for the North, but rather that Grant had bothered to fight at all, while dozens of other Union generals sat around training troops, bragging to newspapers, or causing trouble for the administration in Washington.23
The man who would become one of Grant’s closest friends and most loyal supporter came from a background in many ways similar to Grant’s. William Tecumseh Sherman, although of Ohio-birth, was two years older than the man who would become his trusted superior, and who with him would make up one of the deadliest fighting teams in military history. The death of his father when the boy was nine caused young Tecumseh to be brought up by United States Senator Thomas Ewing, a friend and fellow citizen of his father. The Ewing family was influential in middle Western politics, which gave Sherman something of an edge over Grant in seeking public advancement. As a lad Sherman received a sound education in the local academy at Lancaster, but in 1836, Ewing secured an appointment for him at West Point. Always something of a rebel, the young Ohioan did not particularly excel at the Academy, disdaining the strict conformity to rules which was expected of the cadets. Even so, at the isolated post amid the highlands of the Hudson River Valley, young Sherman survived the grueling grind to eventually graduate in the same year that a young plebe from Ohio, U. S. Grant, entered. Sherman’s grades were fairly good, although his records show a respectable collection of demerits, and after graduation he was commissioned with the Fifth Infantry Regiment.24 After service in various military posts Sherman eventually was sent to California, where he left the army to go into business. Still later, he migrated to Louisiana, where he became superintendent of what later became Louisiana State University, at Alexandria, from 1860-1861.25
At the age of forty-one Sherman re-entered the United States army. The first forty-one years of his life had been a record of frustrated ambitions and minor successes. At the Battle of First Manassas he led a brigade with considerable success, but it was only with his transfer from the Army of the Potomac to the Western theater that Sherman began to exhibit any unusual or outstanding characteristics. Unfortunately those characteristics he first demonstrated were those of emotional instability, and possibly even derangement. Sherman always had a sense of the dramatic and tended to see things in an extremely pessimistic light on some occasions. The responsibilities of a major command tended to overly upset him and led to his eventual removal from command in Kentucky. After a short spell of duty in Missouri, where he helped create a panic by insisting that Confederate forces under General Price were advancing on him, he was eventually shifted away to avoid embarrassment.
A few weeks of rest and the redoubtable Tecumseh was ready for a field command again; this time it would be an infantry division under his fellow Ohioan, General U. S. Grant. Somehow these two men hit it off. Possibly it was because neither of them had ever achieved any particular success, and this helped create some sort of bond between them, not so much a recognition of mediocrity, but rather, a sense of feeling they could achieve something if only given the opportunity, or perhaps it was simply that the men liked each other. Anyway, they would work together as corps commander and army commander to help create the military victory that would preserve the American Union.26
The third member of the military group that would dominate military affairs in the West at this time was Don Carlos Buell, major general of United States Volunteers. Born on March 23, 1818, and of Welch descent, Buell, like Sherman and Grant, was an Ohioan. His father died when he was very young, and he was reared by an uncle, George P. Buell of Lawrenceburg, Indiana. After the usual education for a member of the rough and semi-frontier society, young Buell entered West Point, and upon graduating was assigned to service with the Third Infantry Regiment. After service in the Seminole War he joined Taylor in Texas, and was brevetted captain for meritorious service at the Battle of Monterrey on September 23, 1846. Much later, in the double battle of Contreras and Churubusco, Don Carlos Buell was brevetted again for gallant conduct.
His peacetime service was honorable, but not particularly distinguished, and in April 1861, Buell was a lieutenant colonel in the adjutant general’s office. Promoted to major general, he helped organize and train troops for the Army of the Potomac, where his services were apparently extremely creditable. Buell and McClellan, his superior at the time, seemed to work well together, and apparently there was a close, friendly relationship between the two men, something like that existing between Fritz John Porter and the young general-in-chief.27
In November, Buell arrived in Kentucky to take command of the Army of the Ohio (sometimes known as the Army of the Cumberland).28 Basically his job was to se cure the Un ion left flank in the West and eventually invade Eastern Tennessee. A lack of combat experience and practical experience in handling troops in the field was not particularly a handicap, as there was virtually no one in either army—Union or Confederate—with such a back ground. Buell seems to have been thought of favorably by most of his con temporaries at this time. Of medium stature, Buell wore a full beard and posses
sed an extremely stern appearance.29 The only person who seems to have registered any criticism of Buell at this time was a young officer serving under Grant, who wrote in a letter that Buell “is too cautious.” Only time would tell whether Buell would have the necessary aggressiveness and skill to command a field army.
Fourth of the major Union army officers, but certainly not least, was Henry Wager Halleck. One of the most controversial figures of the war, Halleck at one time or the other was condemned by just about every major figure is the entire Union army. William T. Sherman was one of the very few who seemed to always favor Halleck and respect him for his undoubted administrative ability.30 Halleck’s tragedy was that he was called on to perform the functions of a daring, dashing field commander, while basically at heart he was simply a book keeping bureaucratic official.31
If Halleck was a little lacking in the abilities necessary for an aggressive field commander, he was fortunate in that his subordinates had these qualities. One of his most able men was Brigadier General Charles Ferguson Smith, a man whose untimely death cut short possibly a brilliant career, perhaps even the supreme command of Union armed forces. Smith, a native of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, entered West Point in 1820, at the age of thirteen, graduating five years later. After holding various field positions, he returned to West Point in 1829 as an instructor, which post he held for thirteen years under Syvanus Thayer, then head of the school. It was the Mexican War that gave Smith his great opportunity, and he took full advantage of it. Captain Smith led the advance of General Zachary Taylor’s army across the Salt Lagoon at Arroyo, Colorado, in March 1846. Just days later he scouted the position of the Mexican army at Resaca de Guerrera. As a measure of trust in him General Taylor assigned Smith the duty of taking a force of artillery and Texas cavalry and assaulting the Mexican army’s position on the redoubt at the western end of the summit of Federation Hill at Monterrey during the bloody battle of that city. Transferred to General Winfield Scott’s command, Smith, now a lieutenant colonel, took part in the advance on Mexico City, missing out on the final bloody assault only through illness. Once the city actually fell, such was the measure of Scott’s confidence in the young officer, he was assigned the difficult and dangerous task of policing the city with a special force of five hundred military police recruited from the most reliable volunteers and regulars.32
After the Treaty of Guadeloupe Hidalgo ended hostilities, Smith returned to the routine life of peacetime soldiering, taking part in an expedition to the Red River country and later in the famous Utah expedition under Colonel, later Confederate General, Albert Sidney Johnston. On the out break of the Civil War, Smith was promoted to brigadier general and eventually was placed under the command of Brigadier General U. S. Grant, a former student at West Point.33
There was much discontent in the Union army that General Smith, who had put in thirty-seven years soldiering, should be placed under the command of a man not only his junior in years but in military experience. Fortunately for the cause of the Union, Smith completely subordinated himself to the general welfare of the Union and willingly and loyally served under his former student. Smith had not forgotten Grant from academy days, and he particularly remembered Grant as a modest young man, a fine horseman, and a very efficient student in mathematics.34
General Halleck was among those who felt that Smith had not been fairly treated, and Grant, himself, was embarrassed by the relationship. In conversation with a junior officer, Grant remarked that he did not like to think of having to give General Smith orders, “which don’t seem just right to me, for this veteran officer was a commandant at West Point when I was a cadet and all the school regarded him as one of the very ablest officers of his age in the army.”35 Smith was described as being “every inch a soldier, and a true disciplinarian.” He was tall, over six feet three inches in height, “slender, well proportioned and up right with a remarkably fine face, and a long twisted white mustache…the very beau-ideal of a soldier.”36 General Lew Wallace once called Smith “by all odds the handsomest, stateliest, most commanding figure I have ever seen,”37 and many of the regular officers felt him the best all around soldier in the United States Army.38
Geographical conditions in the Eastern or Atlantic theater of war made the army dominant, but in the West the location of the great waterways made it apparent from the beginning that the navy would play a major role in military operations. The man selected to lead the Union navy was Captain Andrew Hull Foote. Originally Foote entered West Point, but after a six month stay at the Academy he left to join the navy as a young midshipman. Just sixteen years old, Foote was fortunate to serve with some of the United States Navy’s best officers, notably Commodore David Porter. In 1827, the twenty-one year old officer, while serving on the U.S.S. Natchez, was converted to Christianity, and for the rest of his life he attempted to gain more converts. In 1849, while skipper of the brig Perry, Foote gained much renown for his services in suppressing the slave trade on the African coast. One of his most notable contributions to the American navy was his work for temperance, of which he was a violent advocate.39 As skipper of the Cumberland, he was successful in making her the first temperance ship in the navy.40
Of a crusading temperament, Foote set down certain of his ideas and experiences in a book entitled Africa and the American Flag. Possibly the most spectacular of his duties entailed the famous attack on the Canton barrier forts. In 1856, Chinese military authorities failed to give proper protection to American merchants, and even fired on a naval vessel, killing one American sailor. With the permission of Commodore Samuel Armstrong, Commander of the American East Indies Squadron, Foote, supported by the U.S.S. Portsmouth and the Levant, attacked the forts guarding the approaches to Canton. With a combination of naval gunfire, and employing a detachment of 287 marines and sailors as a landing party, he took four powerful forts mounting 168 cannon, some of them 8.5-inch caliber. Some five thousand Chinese troops were defeated, many of them killed or wounded, in exchange for a loss of only seven American sailors and marines killed and twenty-two wounded. The vigorous retaliatory action was responsible for forcing the imperial government to apologize for firing on the American flag, and it paved the way for peaceful American mercantile activities in China for many years.41
Popular with the sailors, who often sang of him, “He increased our pay ten cents a day, and stopped our rum forever,” Foote was a stern disciplinarian. With a strong sense of duty, he was always willing to do his duty to God, country, and the temperance movement.42 Commodore C. R. P. Rogers once said of him that “Foote had more of the bull dog than any man I ever knew.”43 Slow thinking but steady and completely reliable, and popular with his fellow officers, Foote was probably the perfect man for the difficult task of organizing and commanding a fleet in Western waters. Only the closest and most exacting army-navy cooperation would be adequate to give the Union victory in the heartland region.
It remained to be seen if these men from diverse backgrounds would be able to cooperate to the necessary degree for this.
Chapter 2
Lincoln Takes a Hand
NO ONE KNOWS FOR certain who first conceived of the idea of a great Union push down the lines of the Mississippi and Tennessee rivers. Perhaps many men thought of the plan in its broadest outlines at the same time. It was certainly evident to anyone who looked at a map that such an offensive utilizing the rivers as avenues of transportation and invasion would be the easiest way to conquer this region in the South, by splitting the Confederacy in two.
In April 1861, while yet an officer of the Ohio militia, young George McClellan proposed to General Winfield Scott, the fat and aging General-in-Chief of the United States Army, that one possible plan of action would be to “cross the Ohio at Cincinnati or Louisville with 80,000 men, march straight on Nashville, and act according to circumstances,” with the ultimate aim of advancing on “Pensacola, Mobile and New Orleans.”1 Just days later, Scott presented his own famous Anaconda plan. This proposed a “comple
te blockade of the Atlantic and Gulf ports … in connection with such blockades,” proposing a mighty “movement down the Mississippi to the ocean, with a cordon of posts at proper points…the object being to clear out and keep open this great line of communication in connection with the strict blockade of the seaboard, so as to envelop the insurgent states,” and crush them with the minimum amount of blood shed. Scott went on to say in a letter to McClellan that twelve to twenty steam gun boats would be needed, be sides transports to carry 60,000 men who would be inducted in the army.2 Scott’s plan did not allow for the difficulties that would be set forward in an invasion, and he underestimated the forces needed, but at least he offered a beginning for Union strategy in the West.
Nor were the Southerners unaware of the strategic possibilities inherent in the situation. Work continued on developing fortifications to protect the Mississippi, Cumberland, and Tennessee, while the Confederates were making all efforts possible to mass troops and equipment in the West. A young Southern ordnance officer, Captain W. R. Hunt, in a letter containing recommendations to Major General Polk, written on August 12, pointed out succinctly that “if the war should unfortunately be prolonged, the Valley of the Mississippi must ultimately become its great theater, for the enemy now working to subjugate the South knows the value of our great artery of commerce and of the prominent cities upon it too well for us to doubt that he will bend all his energies to control them.”3 Captain Hunt’s fears were well founded, for just a few hundred miles north, various Union officers were already beginning to mull over ideas for a drive down the river line. One of the first high ranking officers to bring up the matter was Colonel Charles Whittlesey, a graduate of West Point in 1831 and the chief of Brigadier General Ormsby M. Mitchel’s engineers. In a dispatch dated November 20, Whittlesey wrote General Halleck suggesting the propriety “of a great movement by land and water up the Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers.”4 His idea was that this would al low the army to operate along the water lines half way to Nashville with out endangering the supply line, which would be vulnerable to attack by cavalry if operating over land along the crude road system. This would also make possible, even probable, the Confederate evacuation of Columbus, since it would have the effect of threatening their railway communications. Further, it was in Colonel Whittlesey’s opinion the most passable route into Tennessee.5
Shiloh and the Western Campaign of 1862 Page 4
