by Shelby Foote
Two hundred thousand of anything, even rabbits, could make a considerable impression, however, if they were launched at a man who was unprepared: which was the one thing Halleck was determined not to be. Orders went out for the troops to dig harder and deeper, not only on the flanks, but across the center. They cursed and dug—the rains were over; summer was almost in—sweating in wool uniforms under the Mississippi sun. Only the Shiloh veterans, looking back, saw any sense in all that labor. Apparently all but four of the ranking generals shared their commander’s apprehension: Pope, who chafed at restraint, bristling offensively on the left: Thomas, who did not have it in his nature to be quite apprehensive about anything: Sherman, who, happy over a pending promotion, called the movement “a magnificent drill”: and Grant. Not even Shiloh had taught him caution to this extent. He suggested once to Halleck that he shift Pope’s army from the left to the right, out of the swamps and onto the ridge beyond the opposite flank, then send it bowling directly along the high ground into the heart of Corinth. Halleck gave him a fish-eye stare of unbelief. “I was silenced so quickly,” Grant said later, “that I felt that possibly I had suggested an unmilitary movement.” He drew back and kept his own counsel. This was not his kind of war.
It was Halleck’s kind, and he kept at it, burrowing as he went. An energetic inchworm could have made better time—half a mile a day now, sometimes less—but not without the danger of being swooped on by a hawk: whereas, by Halleck’s method, the risk was small, the casualties low, and the progress sure. The soldiers, digging and cursing under the summer sun, might agree with the disgruntled McClernand’s definition of the campaign as “the present unhappy drama,” but they would be there for roll call when the time came for the bloody work ahead. Besides, nothing could last forever; not even this. By the morning of May 28—a solid month from the jump-off—all three component armies were within cannon range of Beauregard’s intrenchments. After four weeks of marching and digging, Halleck had his troops where he had said they would be “tomorrow.” He had reached the second stage, the one in which he had said he would “be governed by circumstances.”
East and far northeast of Corinth, Halleck had two more divisions, both left behind by Buell when he marched for Pittsburg Landing. The latter, commanded by Brigadier General George W. Morgan, was maneuvering in front of Cumberland Gap, prepared to move in if the Confederates evacuated or weakened the already small defensive force. Morgan had further plans, intending not only to seize the gap, but to penetrate the Knoxville region—a project dear, as everyone knew, to the heart of Abraham Lincoln. However, the place was a natural fortress; Morgan reported it “washed into deep chasms or belly-deep in mud.” So long as the rebels stayed there he could do nothing but hover and maneuver. The more substantial threat would have to come from the opposite direction, beyond the gap, and that was where Buell’s other division, under Brigadier General Ormsby M. Mitchel, came in.
He was already in North Alabama, deeper into enemy country than any other Federal commander, having occupied Huntsville the day Halleck got to Pittsburg. From there he pushed on and took Bridgeport just as Halleck’s army started south. A bright prospect lay before him. Once he had taken Chattanooga, thirty miles away, he would continue his march along the railroad and threaten Knoxville from the rear. This would cause the evacuation of Cumberland Gap, and when Morgan came through, hard on the heels of the defenders, Mitchel would join forces with him and make Lincoln’s fondest hope a fact by chasing the scattered rebels clean out of East Tennessee. That was his plan at the outset, and it tied in well with another he had already put in motion, which resulted in what was known thereafter as the Great Locomotive Chase.
James J. Andrews, a Kentucky spy who had gained the trust of Confederates by running quinine through the lines, volunteered to lead a group of 21 Ohio soldiers, dressed like himself in civilian clothes, down into Georgia to burn bridges and blow up tunnels along the Western & Atlantic, the only rail connection between Atlanta and Chattanooga. Andrews and his men infiltrated south and assembled at Marietta, Georgia, where—on April 12, the day after Mitchel took Huntsville—they boarded a northbound train as passengers. During the breakfast halt at Big Shanty they made off with the locomotive and three boxcars, heading north. The conductor, W. A. Fuller, took the theft as a personal affront and started after them on foot. Commandeering first a handcar, then a switch engine, and finally a regular freight locomotive, along with whatever armed volunteers he encountered along the way, he pressed the would-be saboteurs so closely that they had no time for the destruction they had intended. Overtaken just at the Tennessee line, where they ran out of fuel and water, they took to the woods, but were captured. Eight were hanged as spies, including Andrews; eight escaped while awaiting execution, and the remaining six were exchanged. All received the Congressional Medal of Honor in recognition of their valor “above and beyond the call of duty.” Fuller and his associates received a vote of thanks from the Georgia legislature, but no medals. The Confederacy never had any, then or later.
Andrews’ failure meant that the rebels could reinforce Chattanooga rapidly by rail. Advancing toward it, Mitchel found other drawbacks to his plan, chief among them being a shortage of supplies. Except for the fact that he could bring food and other necessities along the railroad, he told Washington, “it would be madness to attempt to hold my position a single day.” Presently gray raiders were loose in his rear, capturing men and disrupting communications. “As there is no [hope] of an immediate advance upon Chattanooga,” he wired Stanton, “I will now contract my line.” He remained in North Alabama, doing what he could—mainly destroying railroad bridges which later Union commanders would have to replace—but on the day that Halleck halted within range of the Corinth intrenchments, Mitchel requested a transfer to another theater. “My advance beyond the Tennessee River seems impossible,” he said.
Chattanooga was untaken, and though Morgan still hovered north of Cumberland Gap, Knoxville was spared pressure from either direction. Halleck could expect no important strategic diversion on his left as he entered the final stage of his campaign against Corinth.
It turned out, simultaneously, that he could expect none on his right flank either. Farragut turned back from frowning Vicksburg, abandoning for the present his planned ascent of the Mississippi, and the descending fleet of ironclads, steaming south after the fall of Island Ten, received a jolt which gave the Confederates not only a sense of security on the river, but also a heady feeling of elation, long unfamiliar, and a renewal of their confidence in the valor of southern arms.
Midway between New Madrid and Memphis, Fort Pillow was next on the navy’s list of downriver objectives, and Foote did not delay. With a burst of his old-time energy, he had the place under mortar bombardment within a week of the fall of Island Ten. The plan was for him to apply pressure from the river, while Pope moved in from the land side, a repetition of his tactics in Missouri. However, when Halleck took the field in person he summoned Pope to Pittsburg Landing, leaving only two regiments to coöperate with the navy. Foote felt let down and depressed. Fort Pillow was a mean-looking place, with the balance of the guns from Columbus dug into its bluff, and he did not think the navy could do the job alone. Downstream there was a Confederate flotilla of unknown strength, perhaps made stronger than his own by the addition of giant ironclads reportedly under construction in the Memphis yards. The commodore was feverish—“much enfeebled,” one of his captains wrote—still on crutches from his Donelson wound, which would not heal in this climate, and distressed, as only a brave man could be, by his loss of nerve. In this frame of mind he applied to Welles for shore duty in the North; which was granted with regret.
May 9 he said farewell on the deck of the flagship, crowded with sailors come for a last look at him. He took off his cap and addressed them, saying that he regretted not being able to stay till the war was over; he would remember all they had shared, he said, “with mingled feelings of sorrow and of pride.” Supported by t
wo officers, he went down the gangway and onto a transport, where he was placed in a chair on the guards. When the crew of the flagship cheered him he covered his face with a palm-leaf fan to hide the tears which ran down into his beard. As the transport pulled away, they cheered again and tossed their caps in salute. Greatly agitated, Foote rose from the chair and cried in a broken voice across the widening gap of muddy water: “God bless you all, my brave companions!… I can never forget you. Never, never. You are as gallant and noble men as ever fought in a glorious cause, and I shall remember your merits to my dying day.” It was one year off, that dying day, and when the doctors told him it had come he took the news without regret. “Well,” he said quietly, “I am glad to be done with guns and war.”
His successor, Commodore Charles Henry Davis, a fifty-five-year-old Bostonian with a flowing brown mustache and gray rim whiskers, had been a salt-water sailor up to now, a member of the planning board and chief of staff to Du Pont at Port Royal, but before he had spent a full day in his new command he got a taste of what could happen on the river. His first impression had been one of dullness. Agreeing with Foote that the fleet alone could never take Fort Pillow—though in time, if ordered to do so, he would be willing to try running past it—he kept all but one of the gunboats anchored at Plum Run Bend, five miles above the fort. That one was stationed three miles below the others, protecting the single mortar-boat assigned to keep up a harassing fire by dropping its 13-inch shells at regular intervals into the rebel fortifications. “Every half-hour during the day,” a seaman later wrote, “one of these little pills would climb a mile or two into the air, look around a bit at the scenery, and finally descend and disintegrate around the fort, to the great interest and excitement of the occupants.” There was little interest and still less excitement at the near end of the trajectory. This had been going on for some weeks now, and as duty it was dull. The seven ironclads took the guard-mount times about, one day a week for each.
While Foote was telling his crew goodbye, J. E. Montgomery, the river captain who had brought the eight River Defense Fleet gunboats up from New Orleans, was holding a council of war at Memphis. The bitter details of what Farragut’s blue-water ships had done to the Confederate flotilla above Forts Jackson and St Philip had reached Memphis by now, along with the warning that Farragut himself might not be far behind; he was on his way, and in fact had captured Baton Rouge the day before. Montgomery’s captains believed they could do better when the time came, but in any case there was no point in waiting to fight both Federal fleets at once. They voted to go upriver that night and try a surprise attack on the ironclads next morning, May 10.
It was Saturday. The ironclad Cincinnati had the duty below, standing guard while Mortar 10 threw its 200-pound projectiles, one every half-hour as usual, across the wooded neck of land hugged by the final bend above Fort Pillow. The gunboat was not taking the assignment very seriously, however. Steam down, she lay tied to some trees alongside bank, and her crew was busy holystoning the decks for weekly inspection. About 7 o’clock one of the workers gave a startled yell. The others looked and saw eight rebel steamboats rounding the bend, just over a mile away—eight minutes, one of the sailors translated—bearing down, full steam ahead, on the tethered Cincinnati. Things moved fast then. While the deck crew slipped her cables, the engineers were throwing oil and anything else inflammable into her furnaces for quick steam. They were too late. The lead vessel, the General Bragg, came on, twenty feet tall, her great walking-beam engine driving so hard she had built up a ten-foot billow in front of her bow. The Cincinnati delivered a broadside at fifty yards, then managed to swing her bow around and avoid right-angle contact. The blow, though glancing, tore a piece out of her midships six feet deep and twelve feet long, letting a flood into her magazine.
Three miles upstream, around Plum Run Bend, the rest of the fleet knew nothing of the sudden attack until they heard the guns. They too were lazing alongside bank, steam down. By the time they got up pressure enough to maneuver—which they did as soon as possible, the Mound City leading the way—they were too late to be of any help to their sister ship below. When the General Bragg sheered off, the second ram-gunboat, Sumter, struck the Cincinnati in the fantail, wrecking her steering gear and punching another hole that let the river in. Next came the Colonel Lovell, whose iron prow crashed into the port quarter. Taking water from three directions, the proud Cincinnati, the fleet’s first flagship and leader of the crushing assault on Henry, rolled first to one side, now the other, then gave a convulsive shudder and went down in water shallow enough to leave her pilot-house above the surface for survivors to cling to, including her captain, who had taken a sharpshooter’s bullet through the mouth. It appeared that one of the ironclad monsters could be sunk after all. And having proved it, the attacking flotilla proceeded to re-prove it.
The Mound City arrived too late for the Cincinnati’s good, and too early for her own. A fourth ram-gunboat, the General Van Dorn, met her almost head-on, and punched such a hole in her forward starboard quarter that the Mound City barely managed to limp toward bank in time to sink with her nose out of water. Two down and five to go: but when the rest of the ironclads came on the scene, their 9-inch Dahlgrens booming, the river captains decided enough had been done for one day. They drew off downstream, unpursued, to the protection of Fort Pillow’s batteries. Montgomery brought up the rear in his jaunty flagship Little Rebel.
After a full year of war, afloat and ashore, a contradictory pattern was emerging. In naval actions—with the exception of Fort Donelson—whoever attacked was the winner; while in land actions of any size—again with the same notable exception—it was the other way around. Montgomery was satisfied, however, with the simpler fact that an ironclad could be sent to the bottom. He knew because he had done it twice in a single morning. Returning to a cheering reception at Memphis he informed Beauregard that if the Federal fleet remained at its present strength, “they will never penetrate farther down the Mississippi.”
The Creole had need of all the assurance and encouragement he could get. With Halleck knocking at its gate, Corinth was one vast groaning camp of sick and injured. Hotels and private residences, stables and churches, stores and even the railroad station were jammed, not only with the wounded back from Shiloh—eight out of ten amputees died, victims of erysipelas, tetanus, and shock—but also with a far greater number incapacitated by a variety of ailments. For lack of sanitary precautions, unknown or at any rate unpracticed, the inadequate water supply was soon contaminated. While dysentery claimed its toll, measles and typhoid fever both reached epidemic proportions. By mid-May, with the arrival of Van Dorn, Beauregard had 18,000 soldiers on the sick list, which left him 51,690 present for duty: well under half the number Halleck was bringing so cautiously against him.
He had done what he could to increase that caution at every opportunity. Many of the “deserters,” for example, who had given the Union commander such alarming information as to the strength and intentions of the invaders, had been sent out by Beauregard himself, after intensive coaching on what to say when questioned. Valid prisoners were almost as misleading, for Beauregard had a report spread through the ranks that immediate advances were intended, and interrogated captives passed it on. Nor did the inventive general neglect to organize diversions which he hoped would cause detachments from the army in his front. Two regiments of cavalry were ordered to assemble at Trenton, Tennessee, then dash across western Kentucky for an attack on lightly held Paducah, meanwhile spreading the rumor that they were riding point for Van Dorn’s army, which was on its way to seize the mouth of the Tennessee River and thus cut off Halleck’s retreat when Beauregard struck him in front with superior numbers. A second, less ambitious cavalry project was intrusted to Captain John H. Morgan, who had shown promise on outpost duty the year before. He was promoted to colonel, given a war bag of $15,000, and sent to Kentucky to raise a regiment for disrupting the Federal rear. Though the former scheme was a failure—Beaureg
ard blamed “the notorious incapacity of the officer in command”—the latter was carried out brilliantly from the outset. These were the gray raiders who caused Ormsby Mitchel to “contract” his line in North Alabama. However, it worked less well on the Corinth front. When Andrew Johnson protested that troops were needed to restrain Tennessee “disloyalists,” the War Department referred the matter to Halleck, who refused to be disconcerted. “We are now at the enemy’s throat,” he replied, “and cannot release our great grasp to pare his toenails.”
If Old Brains was to be stopped it would have to be done right here in front of Corinth, and Beauregard did what he could with what he had. His army took position along a ridge in rear of a protective creek, three to six miles out of town, thus occupying a quadrant which extended from the Mobile & Ohio on the north to the Memphis & Charleston Railroad on the east. Polk had the left, Bragg the center, and Hardee the right; Breckinridge and Van Dorn supported the flanks, being posted just in rear of the intersections of the railroads and the ridge. All through what was left of April and most of May, the defenders intrenched as furiously as the attackers, but with the advantage that while their opponents were honeycombing the landscape practically all the way from Monterey, their own digging was done in the same place from day to day. Even before Halleck started forward, the natural strength of the lines along the Corinth ridge had been greatly increased, and as he drew nearer they became quite formidable—especially in appearance. This was what Beauregard wanted: not only to give his men the added protection of solid-packed red earth, but also to free a portion of them for operations beyond the fortified perimeter, in case some segment of the advancing host grew careless and exposed itself, unsupported, to a sudden crippling slash by the gray veterans who had practiced such tactics at Elkhorn Tavern and Shiloh.