Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (82 page)

For defense against river-borne invasions the Confederacy relied mainly on forts. These were particularly strong on the Mississippi. At Columbus, Kentucky, only fifteen miles below Cairo, General Leonidas Polk had fortified the heights with 140 heavy guns. Well might the Confederates boast about this "Gibraltar of the West," for nothing that floated, not even Pook's turtles, seemed likely to get past those guns. Just to make sure, though, the southerners fortified several other strongpoints along the 150 miles of river down to Memphis. In strange contrast to these Gibraltars, the forts protecting the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers just south of the Kentucky border were poorly sited and unfinished at the end of 1861. Perhaps this was because the Mississippi loomed so large in southern consciousness, while the Tennessee and the Cumberland seemed less important. Yet these rivers penetrated one of the principal grain-growing, mule- and horse-breeding, and iron-producing areas of the Confederacy. The iron works at Clarksville on the Cumberland were second in the South only to Tredegar at Richmond, while Nashville on the same river was a major producer of gunpowder and the main supply depot for Confederate forces in the West.

These forces were commanded by Albert Sidney Johnston, the highest-ranking field officer in the Confederacy. A native of Kentucky who had fought for both Texas and the United States against Mexico, Johnston was commander of the Pacific Department in California when the Civil War began. Like Robert E. Lee, he declined a high commission in the Union army and made his way across the Southwest, dodging Apaches and Union patrols on his way to join the Confederacy. Tall, well-built, possessing a sense of humor and a manner of quiet authority, Johnston looked like the great soldier he was reputed to be. Jefferson Davis had admired him as a fellow student at Transylvania University and West Point in the 1820s, and had fought with him in the Black Hawk and Mexican wars. While Davis was forming a low opinion of the other Johnston—Joseph—he pronounced Albert Sidney "the greatest soldier, the ablest man, civil or military, Confederate or Federal."
¹

Johnston's Western Military Department stretched from the Appalachians to the Ozarks. By early 1862 he had about 70,000 troops on this 500-mile line facing half again as many Federals stretched along a line of similar length from eastern Kentucky to southwest Missouri. The northerners, however, were handicapped by divided authority. In November, Henry W. Halleck had replaced Frémont as commander of the Department of Missouri. Halleck's authority extended as far east as the Cumberland River. Beyond it, Don Carlos Buell headed the Department of the Ohio, with headquarters in Louisville.

The outbreak of war had found Halleck and Buell, like Johnston, in California. Their prewar careers had also produced reputations that led their countrymen to expect great things of them. Halleck had graduated near the top of his West Point class. He wrote
Elements of Military Art and Science
, essentially a paraphrase of Jomini's writings, and translated Jomini's
Life of Napoleon
. These works earned Halleck renown as a strategic theorist. Old Brains, as he was sometimes called (though not to his face), had resigned from the army in 1854 to become a businessman and lawyer in California, where he wrote two books on mining law and declined a judgeship on the state supreme court. Although balding and paunchy, with a double chin, goggle eyes, and an irritable temper, Halleck inspired confidence as a military administrator. In his early months of command he performed up to expectations, bringing order out of the chaos left by Frémont and organizing efficiently the logistical apparatus for 90,000 soldiers and the fresh-water navy in his department. Buell also proved himself an able administrator. Like McClellan, who sponsored his assignment to Louisville, Buell was a firm disciplinarian who knew how to turn raw recruits into soldiers. But unlike McClellan, he lacked charisma and was never popular with his men.

Lincoln repeatedly urged Halleck and Buell to cooperate in a joint offensive against Johnston all along the line from the Mississippi to the

1
. Foote,
Civil War
, I, 169.

Appalachians. The president believed that the North would win this war only by using its superior numbers to attack "different points, at the
same
time" to prevent the enemy from shifting troops from quiet to threatened sectors. But joint action was inhibited by the divided command between Halleck and Buell, each of whom was anxious to outshine the other and both of whom feared to risk failure. Buell professed a willingness to attack the main Confederate force at Bowling Green if supported with a diversionary attack by Halleck up the Tennessee River. But Halleck demurred. "I am not ready to cooperate" with Buell, he informed Lincoln on January 1, 1862. "Too much haste will ruin everything."
²

Lincoln was beginning to suspect that whatever merits Halleck possessed as an administrator and theorist, he was not a fighting soldier. But Halleck had a fighter under his command: Ulysses S. Grant at Cairo. While Halleck and Buell bickered by telegraph, Grant proposed to act. He urged Halleck to permit him to take his troops and Foote's new gunboats up the Tennessee to capture Fort Henry. Halleck hesitated, refused permission, then reversed himself at the end of January and ordered Grant to go ahead.

Once unleashed, Grant moved with speed and force. This was his first real opportunity to dispel doubts stemming from the drinking problems that had forced his army resignation in 1854. Since re-entering the army in June 1861, Grant had served an apprenticeship in command that had increased his self-confidence. He had discovered that his laconic, informal, commonsense manner inspired respect and obedience from his men. Unlike so many other commanders, Grant rarely clamored for reinforcements, rarely complained, rarely quarreled with associates, but went ahead and did the job with the resources at hand.

Grant's first assignment as colonel of the 21st Illinois had been to attack the camp of a rebel regiment in Missouri. Grant had proved his personal courage as a junior officer in the Mexican War. But now he was in command; he was
responsible
. As his men approached the enemy camp, Grant recalled, "my heart kept getting higher and higher until it felt to me as though it were in my throat. I would have given anything then to have been back in Illinois, but I had not the moral courage to know what to do; I kept right on." It turned out that the Missouri regiment, learning of the Yankee approach, had decamped. Grant suddenly realized that the enemy colonel "had been as much afraid of me as I

2
.
CWL
, V, 98;
O.R
., Ser. I, Vol. 7, p. 526.

had been of him. This was a view of the question I had never taken before; but it was one I never forgot. . . . The lesson was valuable." It was a lesson that McClellan and many other Union commanders, especially in the East, never learned.

A few months after this incident, Grant had taken five regiments from Cairo down the Mississippi to create a diversion in aid of another Union operation in Missouri by attacking a Confederate camp at Belmont, across the river from the southern Gibraltar at Columbus. On November 7, Grant's troops routed a rebel force of equal size but were in turn counterattacked and surrounded by reinforcements from Columbus. Some of Grant's officers panicked and advised surrender; Grant merely said that "we had cut our way in and could cut our way out just as well." So they did, and returned to their transports—not without loss, but having inflicted greater losses on the enemy. Although the battle of Belmont accomplished little in the larger scheme of war and could hardly be called a Union victory, it taught Grant more valuable lessons and demonstrated his coolness under pressure. Lincoln did not know it yet, but here was the general he had been looking for these past six months.
³

Grant and Foote proposed to attack Fort Henry because they considered it the weak point in Albert Sidney Johnston's line. They were right. Built on a low bank dominated by surrounding hills and threatened with flooding by every rise in the river, the fort did no credit to southern engineering. Preoccupied with the need to defend Columbus and Bowling Green, where he believed the main Union attacks would come, Johnston neglected to strengthen Fort Henry until too late. On February 5, transports protected by four of Foote's ironclads and three wooden gunboats landed Grant's 15,000 troops several miles below Fort Henry. The plan was for the foot-soldiers to attack the fort from the rear while the gunboats shelled it from the river. Roads turned into quagmires by the heavy rain slowed down the troops, however, while the same rain caused the river to flood the fort's lower level. When the Union flotilla hove into sight on February 6, only nine of the fort's guns bore on the enemy, while the boats could fire twice as many guns in return from their bows-on position. Recognizing the odds as hopeless, the fort's commander sent its 2,500-man garrison cross-country to Fort Donelson, twelve miles away on the Cumberland, remaining behind

3
. Quotations in these two paragraphs from
Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant
, 2 vols. (New York, 1885), I, 250, 276.

with one artillery company to fight a delaying action against the gunboats.

Under the circumstances the rebel cannoneers performed well. For two hours they slugged it out with the fleet, hitting the boats some eighty times and putting one ironclad out of commission with a shot into the boiler that scalded twenty men to death. But finally the defenders, with half their men killed or wounded and most of their guns disabled, surrendered to the gunboats before Grant's soldiers, slogging through the mud, arrived on the scene. The three wooden gunboats steamed upriver to knock out a railroad bridge on the line linking Johnston's forces at Columbus with those at Bowling Green. The gunboats continued another 150 miles all the way to Muscle Shoals in Alabama, destroying or capturing nine Confederate vessels including one powerful steamboat the rebels had been turning into an ironclad to fight the Yankees on their own terms. Instead it became a part of the invader's fleet, which made of the Tennessee a Union highway into the Deep South.

Grant and Foote wasted no time celebrating their victory. "Fort Henry is ours," Grant telegraphed Halleck on February 6. "I shall take and destroy Fort Donelson on the 8th."
⁴
But bad weather delayed the supplying and marching of his troops overland, while Foote had to repair his battered gunboats before they could steam back down the Tennessee and up the Cumberland to Donelson. The delay allowed Johnston time to ponder his next move, but this gave him small comfort. The one-two punch of capturing Fort Henry and cutting the railroad south of it had put Grant between Johnston's two main forces. The Yankees could now attack Columbus from the rear, or overwhelm the 5,000 Confederates at Fort Donelson and then steam upriver to take Nashville, or come up behind Johnston's 25,000 at Bowling Green while Buell's 50,000 attacked them from the front. Johnston's only options seemed to be the concentration of all available men (about 35,000) to defend Donelson and perhaps counterattack to regain Fort Henry, or to give up Kentucky and concentrate his whole army to defend the vital factories and depots at Nashville.

An emergency meeting of Confederate brass at Bowling Green on February 7 canvassed these disagreeable choices. Beauregard was there, having just arrived from Virginia, where Jefferson Davis had breathed a sigh of relief at his departure. Ebullient as ever, Beauregard wanted to

4
.
O.R
., Ser. I, Vol. 7, p. 125.

smash Grant and Buell in turn. Johnston demurred. Instead of being able to fight the two enemy forces separately, he feared that his entire army would be flattened between Grant's hammer and Buell's anvil. Johnston preferred retreat to the Nashville-Memphis line, leaving a token force at Donelson to delay Grant and saving the bulk of the army to fight another day under more favorable conditions. In effect, Johnston proposed to abandon the strategy of dispersed defensive in favor of concentration for a possible offensive-defensive stroke. It was a good plan. But unaccountably Johnston changed his mind and decided to make a real fight at Fort Donelson. Instead of taking his whole available force there, however, he sent 12,000 men and retreated with the rest to Nashville. To command at Donelson, Johnston assigned none other than John Floyd, who had been transferred to Kentucky after helping to lose West Virginia. Floyd's presence made Donelson an even bigger plum for Federal picking, since he was a wanted man in the North for fraud and alleged transfer of arms to southern arsenals as Buchanan's secretary of war.

But picking that plum would give Grant and Foote more trouble than they anticipated. And in the end they did not get Floyd. "Fort" Donelson was not really a fort; rather, it was a stockade enclosing fifteen acres of soldiers' huts and camp equipment. The business end of the defenses were two batteries of twelve heavy guns dug into the side of a hundred-foot bluff on the Cumberland to repel attack by water, and three semicircular miles of trenches to repel it by land. Southern soldiers were strengthening these trenches as Grant's confident 15,000 Yankees approached on February 12. Probing attacks next day were repulsed, convincing Grant that Donelson would not topple without a fight. Ten thousand Union reinforcements arrived on February 14 along with four of Foote's ironclads and two wooden gunboats. Hoping to repeat the Fort Henry experience, Grant ordered the navy to shell the fort while his troops closed the ring to prevent the garrison's escape. But this time the navy met more than its match. Foote brought his ironclads too close, causing them to overshoot their targets and giving the shorter-range Confederate guns a chance to rake them with plunging shots that riddled smokestacks, shot away tiller ropes, cracked armor, and smashed through pilot houses and decks into the bowels of the gunboats. One by one these crippled monsters drifted downstream out of the fight. Each had taken some forty or more hits; fifty-four sailors were dead or wounded while not a gun or man in the rebel batteries had been lost. The morale of the southerners, who had believed the gunboats invincible, soared.