Shiloh, 1862 (16 page)

What went on in Pillow’s mind seems beyond rational explanation, unless he felt it was necessary somehow to reorganize his men before beginning the retreat. Yet that alone does not make much sense, since the whole bloody enterprise was to get the troops
out
of Fort Donelson and on the road—any road—to Nashville, and urgently. The failure appears to have been a masterpiece of shilly-shallying by the commanding general, John Floyd, and his second in command, Gideon Pillow, for whom Grant now held an even more deserved contempt.

That night a final counsel of war was held within Fort Donelson, which may even have superseded the fantastic dithering of
the day. With a mile-wide line of escape between the river and the pushed-back Union front still open to them, both Floyd and Pillow decided, over Bedford Forrest’s continued objections, that the day was now lost and surrender was the only option.

Floyd, however, allowed that he did not wish to be captured personally, on account of the pending indictment against him in federal court in Washington and other accusations that might lead to the hangman’s rope. Instead, he proposed to take the last remaining steamship out of Fort Donelson and make his way to Nashville where he might be of further use to the cause.

This suddenly put the onus on Pillow, who likewise took a pass. It seems that Pillow had made so boisterous a habit of publicly proclaiming “Give me liberty or give me death” that he feared becoming a laughingstock if he now gave up to the Yankees, and wanted to go away with Floyd. Thus the burden of surrendering the first Confederate army during the Civil War fell upon the good soldier Simon Bolivar Buckner, while his superiors cravenly made their escapes to safety across the river.

For his part, Bedford Forrest announced, “I did not come here for the purpose of surrendering my command,” and he sought permission to take his cavalry out of harm’s way. Buckner acquiesced, and by sunup, after wading through icy swamp water sometimes rump-high on their horses, Forrest and his cavalrymen made good their getaway, taking along with them a number of like-minded infantrymen.

At last the time arrived for Buckner to perform his repugnant duty. He wrote a letter to Grant alluding to his “present state of affairs” and asked for the appointment of commissioners to “agree upon the terms of capitulation,” signing it, “Respectfully, your obedient servant, etc.”

In the early hours of the morning a Confederate party came out of the fort and delivered Buckner’s envelope to the nearest available Yankee command, which happened to be that of General Smith, whose evening rest had already been disturbed once that night when he accidentally gave himself a hotfoot by sleeping too close to his fire.

Smith delivered the letter to Grant himself, trudging through the snow after his famous day to the small farmhouse where Grant was sleeping on a mattress on the kitchen floor. He entered the room “half frozen,” according to Dr. Brinton, and wanted a drink. Brinton produced a flask as General Smith warmed himself by the fire and had his drink and Grant read over Buckner’s letter. “No terms to the damn rebels,” said Smith to his former pupil, causing Grant to chuckle as he wrote out his reply: “No terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted. I propose to move immediately upon your works.” Smith, still standing by the fire, wiped his mustache and nodded in approval, and then, claimed Doc Brinton, the old soldier thrust out his foot revealing that the sole of his boot was nearly burned off and remarked sheepishly, “I slept too near the fire; I have scorched my boots!” Finally everyone could have a good laugh.

General Buckner’s personal reaction to Grant’s reply is nowhere recorded, but if he expected his old friend to let his men march out of Fort Donelson as the Confederates had when Fort Sumter surrendered the previous spring—under arms and with the Union flag flying—he was seriously misguided. He sent Grant a grumbling response that protested “the ungenerous and unchivalrous terms which you propose,” then hauled down his flag and made himself a Union prisoner.

Grant immediately became a hero in the North. The press touted his line to Buckner about “unconditional surrender” and dubbed him U. S. “Unconditional Surrender” Grant. The papers reported that Grant had smoked a cigar during the heat of the battle and people began sending him cigars by the box, precipitating a habit that eventually would kill him.
²

Fort Donelson did not come without cost: Combined casualties were more than 5,000; 507 Union soldiers were killed, 1,976 were wounded, and 208 were either captured or missing versus for the Confederates 327 killed, 1,197 wounded, and a small army, 12,392, were made prisoners.

The 25-year-old colonel William Camm, of the 14th Illinois, an Englishman by birth and a teacher by trade, went over the field where the Rebels had lost most of their men shortly after the surrender. The sight was frightful. “The dead are badly distorted,” Camm wrote in his diary. “One poor fellow had fallen across a fire and was burned in two. Citizens, some of them women, were searching for relatives among the dead,” he wrote. “I came across the body of what looked like a pretty girl quietly sleeping. The pale face was turned up, the rain had combed the auburn hair back from a high, smooth forehead, and washed all the blood from the hole where the bullet had gone through the temple.”

As Camm gazed upon the dead soldier, who was in fact a young man, not a girl at all, he noticed an envelope in the breast pocket of his half-opened coat. The letter, Camm said, “was in a beautiful hand, from a mother to her son, urging him to be a good soldier,
to do his duty without fear, not to drink or swear, and if those he fought against fell into his hands, to be kind to them.”

Camm replaced the letter and mulled its contents. He decided that the boy had come from a “quality” upbringing and concluded that it would have been better if the mother “had taught her handsome son to revere human freedom and justice … for the negroes,” even at the expense of slavery.

Camm was among a small handful of military diarists or letter writers of the period who expressed abolitionist sentiments as opposed to salvation of the Union as the prime reason for their service. It is not to say that Camm himself was an active abolitionist. But when a young lieutenant off one of the gunboats remarked to him, “Colonel, you put your mark on these fellows, and put it on them good,” Camm understood the irony and replied, “Yes, but we call ourselves Christians, and pretend to be civilized, yet we glory in such work as this.” He added silently, and to himself, “Somewhere in human policy, there is a great wrong. I hope that we have found it, and that I am helping to blot it out—Slavery!”

Now that the road to Nashville was open Grant wanted to take it, but Halleck inexplicably held him up. Nevertheless, Grant’s accomplishment was impressive. Not only had he taken the fort with all its artillery and stores, he had captured an entire Rebel army of more than 12,000 and inflicted some 2,000 casualties, while taking nearly 3,000 casualties of his own. Here was the first great victory for the Union, and Grant was the hero of the hour.

From the Confederates’ standpoint the loss of Fort Donelson was an unmitigated disaster. Why Sidney Johnston chose Floyd and
Pillow to defend it rather than more experienced generals such as Hardee or even Buckner remains a puzzle. Maybe it had to do with seniority, but that doesn’t wash since a commanding general could certainly overrule it. Johnston might have gone forward with his whole army to face Grant, but then he would have left the path clear for Buell, who had been inching his way toward Bowling Green for weeks. In any case the failure was a severe blow. Kentucky was now lost, and from the Cumberland Gap to the Mississippi the whole Confederate line had collapsed. Nashville was now exposed, and Johnston ordered it evacuated by the military.

This caused a near panic as civilian mobs threatened to break into warehouses and military stores, but the timely arrival of Bedford Forrest and his cavalry troopers put an end to that, and order was quickly restored. Forrest organized the removal of hundreds of wagons containing food, ammunition, and uniforms, sending them south toward Atlanta and other Southern cities. He had his men dismantle arms factories and sent their precious machinery away on railcars. Forrest was a man with no military schooling—in fact little schooling of any sort—who had worked himself up from private to general by dint of courage, ingenuity, and raw military horse sense. There is much to be said for the suggestion that if he had held higher command sooner the war in the West may have had another outcome.

As the Yankees moved into town the Nashvillians shuttered themselves inside their homes and hoped for the best. Union commanders, however, had issued stern orders against looting or vandalism, and soon citizens began to reappear on the streets. Among the Union force was Capt. G. P. Thruston, adjutant of the First Ohio, who, while attending Miami University of Ohio, had become close
friends with Joel Allen Battle, Jr., of Nashville, now Captain Battle of the 20th Tennessee, Confederate States Army. There had been a little clique of roommates and messmates at the college and Battle was among the most popular. “A handsome young Southern student, and refined,” was the way Thruston described him, “with an intellectual face, graceful and cordial in manner. He seemed an ideal type of young American manhood and was greatly beloved by all his associates.”

Most of his associates, however, were now officers in the Federal army, in particular Buell’s army, which was soon to be on its way to Pittsburg Landing to join forces with Ulysses Grant. One day a local physician came into Thruston’s camp south of the city seeking a pass through Union lines. When Thruston asked him, casually, if he knew Allen Battle, the doctor’s face lit up and he replied that not only did he know him, they were closely related. Moreover the doctor, whose name was W. C. Blackman, insisted that Thruston come to his home for dinner and meet Battle’s wife and sisters. This created a somewhat awkward situation for all concerned, since a southerner inviting a Yankee soldier into his home was at the least apt to raise suspicion, and likewise a Union officer venturing beyond his lines into what amounted to an enemy camp was taking his life in his hands.

Nevertheless, Thruston consented on grounds that Blackman was “a gentleman of high character and I felt safe in his promised protection,” and Blackman presumably had enough standing in the community to ward off any misgivings. At the dinner party the Blackman family, and including Battle’s wife and sisters, showered Thruston “with every kind, cordial, consideration,” he said, and as he left he jokingly promised that “when we got down there and
captured Captain Battle I would see that he received the kindest treatment,” to which one of Battle’s sisters assured him with a smile that her brother “would have no occasion to accept his kindness,” adding that “it will probably be more than you can do to hang on to your own scalp.”

On that happy note Thruston departed next day for Shiloh with the odd feeling that soon enough he might be in the business of killing his close friend—or vice versa.

Meantime, Sidney Johnston now had to draw himself a new anti-Yankee barrier—across the bottommost parts of Tennessee instead of the top—beginning at Chattanooga and stretching 300 miles to Memphis on the Mississippi. And he had to defend it with one-quarter fewer troops, thanks to the fiasco at Fort Donelson.

This new Confederate line also ran through an unkempt backwater in the far southwest corner of Tennessee, a place of no intrinsic military value. In fact, it had almost negative military value, with its dark, serrated flora and mazy terrain. There was a small wooden church there called Shiloh chapel, which meant nothing to anyone but the locals, that had taken its name from a Hebrew expression meaning “Place of Peace.”

U
LYSSES
G
RANT HAD PRODUCED THE FIRST GREAT
victory of the war, cleared two major arteries into the heart of the rebellion, and captured an entire Rebel army; in the process he managed to get most of his superiors angry at him. Halleck in particular was spiteful enough to go behind Grant’s back to McClellan, accusing Grant of “neglect and inefficiency.”