Shiloh, 1862 (12 page)

In early January the President sent a telegram to each of his senior commanders expressing his desire that Federal armies begin moving south to crush the rebellion. He even set a timetable for the kickoff: no later than February 22, 1862, which happened to be George Washington’s birthday. When Lincoln approached Halleck about attacking Columbus to break the logjam, “Old Brains” brought to bear all of his considerable military scholarship and appended this final appraisal for the President’s edification: “To operate on
exterior lines against an enemy occupying a central position will fail, as it has always failed in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred. It is condemned by every military authority I have ever read.”

To this Lincoln dejectedly appended a note of his own on the envelope, apparently for posterity’s sake: “Within is a copy of a letter just received from General Halleck. It is exceedingly discouraging. As everywhere else, nothing can be done.”

Thus Halleck fiddled while the Confederates fortified and built their schemes to retake Kentucky and bring the war back to the banks of the Ohio. There was another issue, too, which shed considerable light on the military differences between Halleck and Grant. When the subject of Columbus had come up, Halleck pulled out his maps and books and concluded, rightly so, that if his Federal army captured the river forts and took Nashville, Columbus would be turned and the Confederates would likely abandon it, because their southern lines of communication and supply would have been severed. Thus Columbus would fall into Union hands.

Here is how Grant approached the same situation. During a discussion with some of his senior officers about capturing Fort Henry and Fort Donelson, someone brought up the question of whether that would cause the Confederates to abandon Columbus—to which Grant countered that it was “better [to] attack and capture their entire force where they are. Why allow them to withdraw and [have to] follow and fight them in the interior of Mississippi or Alabama under greater disadvantages?” Grant was having none of Halleck’s Jomini–like “grand turning movements.” He wanted to get at the enemy and wipe him out, wherever and whenever he was found.

Lincoln’s sorrowful conclusion that “nothing can be done” was about to change, however. For some reason it suddenly dawned on Henry Halleck that, no matter how gloomily he saw his military situation, the commander who first made a move to placate the President at this tense stage of affairs could possibly find himself in high standing upon the slippery ladder to military power, while those who continued to procrastinate (such as Buell) would likely slide down out of sight, rung by greasy rung.

Also playing a part in his decision was a report—more like a warning—from McClellan that the infamous but highly regarded Rebel general P.G.T. Beauregard was on his way to Kentucky, along with 15,000 reinforcements. Even though the last part was false, to the Union high command—Halleck included—the notion of Beauregard himself coming west was enough to sound the fire bell in the night.

Thus on January 30, 1862, Grant received from Halleck these terse instructions: “You will immediately prepare to send forward to Fort Henry, on the Tennessee River, all your available forces.”

This was music to Grant’s ears. Halleck’s directive could not have come at a better time, for Grant had been currying an exemplary military friendship with the commanding officer of the new Federal ironclad fleet, Commodore Andrew H. Foote, and the two had cooked up detailed plans for a joint amphibious operation to take Fort Henry
and
Fort Donelson. It would become one of the first such operations in U.S. military history.

Foote was truly a sailor of the seven seas. He had fought from China to the South Atlantic, had apprehended slavers, and at one point purchased and transported a regiment of camels—including their drivers—from the khedive of Egypt, pursuant to an order from
Jefferson Davis, then U.S. secretary of war, who wanted them for army topographical engineers to use as they surveyed routes for a continental railroad across the deserts of the American Southwest.
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Foote was a puritanical antislavery New Englander who held Sunday school classes for his sailors, abolished the rum ration aboard his vessels, and was an ardent believer in amphibious warfare—or at least joint army-navy operations, once telling his brother that the two services “were like blades of shears: united they were powerful—separated they were almost useless.” In this he held something very much in common with Grant; in fact, it may have been the only thing he held in common with him, given that Grant’s attitudes on drinking, slavery, and religion were ambiguous, at best.

Both men realized that merely taking the two Confederate forts would not be of much consequence in the long run, but opening the streams into the Southern heartland would be an immense blow to the rebellion. First off, when the water was high—as it was now—Foote’s powerful gunboats could maraud all the way down to Mississippi and northern Alabama, blasting Confederate railway bridges into toothpicks and otherwise disrupting the economy and communications in the enemy’s rear. Then transports of soldiers would follow on a hundred river steamers and assemble to fight and win a major battle that would decide the fate of the West. And with it, likely, the fate of the war itself, for if the rebellion was put down in the West the war in Virginia and the East Coast could not be sustained, or so the theory went.

These were thrilling concepts, almost too large to grasp for the crusty old sailor and the ill-dressed Union general sitting in the captain’s cabin on the ironclad
Cincinnati
. Then word came that a part of Buell’s army under Gen. George “Pap” Thomas, had whipped a small Rebel army at Mill Springs, in the southern part of Kentucky 150 miles to the east, and was now moving to confront the large Confederate force at Bowling Green. Grant’s attack on Fort Henry would thus constitute a general Union movement southward all across the Confederate front from the Cumberland Gap to the Tennessee—nearly 250 miles. No one dreaded this more than the Rebel general Albert Sidney Johnston, who commanded the Confederacy’s Department of the West.

Things had been more or less going the Confederates’ way until the reverse at Mill Springs, a dreary, agonizing affair characterized by misfortune (the Rebel commander Gen. Felix Zollicoffer, who was nearsighted, was shot and killed after he inadvertently rode into the Yankee lines) and insobriety (Zollicoffer’s superior Gen. George Crittenden, of the famed Kentucky family, was rumored to have been drunk during the battle).

General Johnston, after surveying his assignment and the state of his army, despaired over the status of Fort Henry on the Tennessee River. Hastily erected by the state right after war broke out, it was in wretched shape to begin with, unfinished, and now half flooded by high water in the river. (The fort was located improperly in the first place, and without consideration for the possibility that the Yankees would come with huge ironclad vessels of war capable of carrying large-caliber, long-range cannons.) Johnston received many messages
conveying the sorry state of affairs at Fort Henry. Gen. Lloyd Tilghman, a West Pointer, wrote that it was placed in a location “without one redeeming feature,” and, he concluded in abject disgust, “The history of military engineering records no parallel in this case.”

All through the autumn of 1861 Johnston served up orders to various officers concerning the river forts. On October 17, for instance, the bishop general Polk was warned to “Keep a vigilant eye on the Tennessee River … Fortify opposite to Fort Henry. No time should be lost.” Again on October 31 he warned that the rivers “require incessant watching … The Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers afford lines of transportation by which an [enemy] army may turn your right with ease and rapidity.” To Tilghman, who had been assigned command of Fort Henry on November 17, Johnston wrote, “The utmost vigilance is enjoined, as there has been gross negligence in this respect … You will push forward the completion of the works and armament with the utmost activity.” And on January 18: “Occupy and
intrench
the heights opposite Fort Henry. Do not lose a moment. Work all night.” But in the end it came to no avail.

However much he realized it, Johnston had taken on a stupendous assignment. Certainly he must have begun to appreciate the gravity of it when he reached his headquarters and compared the scope of what he was supposed to accomplish with the personnel and materials on hand. His army was outnumbered by the Federal forces more than two to one, and many of his troops carried only their personal shotguns or hunting rifles—or else they had been armed with old flintlock weapons left over from the War of 1812. Uniforms, in many units, were a matter of personal taste, but as a general rule soldiers in the ranks wore an outfit of homespun cloth in a brown shade known as butternut.

Worse, the strategy that Jefferson Davis had decreed for the defense of the West was fatally flawed. He had drawn an imaginary line—below which no Yankee was to set foot—from the Cumberland Gap in the Appalachians all the way through Tennessee and across the Mississippi River into Arkansas and Oklahoma until, after more than a thousand miles, it “trickled out somewhere in the desert sands of Arizona.” In other words, Davis intended to fight for every inch of Southern soil, a notion that was attributed to his forlorn hope for European intervention.
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It might have worked in a small area, such as Virginia, but strategically, in the vastness of the West, it became a practical impossibility.

Furthermore, the Confederacy was monstrously unprepared at this stage of the war. Soon after he had arrived in Kentucky, Johnston sent a subordinate to Richmond to protest that he desperately needed arms and men. “My God!” Davis told the startled emissary. “Why did General Johnston send you to me for arms and reinforcements, when he must know that I have neither?”

When this unpleasant news reached Johnston’s ears he was ensconced with his army of about 27,000 at Bowling Green, Kentucky, keeping a sharp eye on the Yankee general Buell at Louisville, who was beginning to inch toward him with an army of his own. And that was not to mention Ulysses Grant, who had his eye on Bowling Green as well.

It’s worth lingering a few moments to focus on the terrible and conflicting civilian drama spawned by the war. Nowhere, perhaps, is it exposed so nakedly as in the diary of Josie Underwood, a 20-year-old daughter of a wealthy family of Kentucky slaveholders who were also staunch Unionists. Until the threat of secession sheared their lives, the Underwoods had led a nearly idyllic life in Bowling Green. Then came the storm of war, and General Johnston marched his army into town.

Bowling Green was a tranquil southern Kentucky city of about 2,500 souls, whose population likely shared a greater cultural and political affinity with the Tennesseans right across the border than, say, the citizens of Louisville in the north, who were just downriver from Yankee Cincinnati, Ohio. Josie Underwood’s family was among the most prominent in town. Her father was a successful planter and lawyer and had been a state representative as well as a U.S. congressman until 1859, and he was the principal leader of the community until the question of secession broke out. Like most Unionists in that part of the state, he reviled Lincoln and his policies and had supported the conciliatory ticket of John Bell, yet he abhorred the notion of secession. The family lived at Mount Air, a thousand-acre cotton plantation on the outskirts of town, in a palatial two-story brick manor house surrounded by orchards and with a ballroom upstairs.
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The 1860 census valued their land and personal property (including the 28 slaves who worked the place) at $105,000—some $2.8 million in today’s money.