by H. W. Brands
In fact Frémont had replied, but to avoid tipping off Confederates or sympathizers who might be eavesdropping on the telegraph lines, his message had been translated into Hungarian before being transmitted. Until now Grant hadn’t received any such coded communications, and his aides didn’t know what to do with the strange message. Conveniently it told him to go ahead.
The boats left Cairo a bit before midnight and reached Paducah at dawn. The sudden appearance of the Union troops took the locals by surprise. “Found numerous secession flags flying over the city, and the citizens in anticipation of the approach of the rebel army, who was reliably reported thirty eight hundred strong sixteen miles distant,” Grant informed Frémont. “I landed the troops and took possession of the city without firing a gun.” The secession flags were hauled down and replaced by Union flags. Grant ordered the seizure of the town’s rail depot and he confiscated rations and leather intended for the Confederate army. He took control of the telegraph office and other key points. “I distributed the troops so as best to command the city and least annoy peaceable citizens.”
He published a proclamation explaining his purposes. “I have come among you not as an enemy but as your friend and fellow citizen,” he declared. As their friend he would be their protector. “An enemy, in rebellion against our common Government, has taken possession of and planted its guns upon the soil of Kentucky and fired upon our flag.… He is moving upon your city. I am here to defend you against this enemy and to assert and maintain the authority and sovereignty of your Government and mine.” Peaceful citizens of whatever political views would be unmolested. “I have nothing to do with opinions. I shall deal only with armed rebellion and its aiders and abettors.” And he would stay in Paducah no longer than necessary. “Whenever it is manifest that you are able to defend yourselves, to maintain the authority of your Government and protect the rights of all its loyal citizens, I shall withdraw the forces under my command.”
It was his first decisive command action, and he liked the feeling it gave him. “You have seen my move upon Paducah!” he wrote Julia. “It was of much greater importance than is probably generally known.” The rebels had been on the verge of seizing the town. “Our arrival therefore put quite a damper upon their hopes.” The citizens seemed willing to accept his presence and authority; at least they weren’t resisting. And the capture of Paducah promised to be the start of something big. “We are likely to have lively times.… An attack somewhere cannot be postponed many days.”
The attack failed to materialize. Grant’s scouts skirmished with rebel patrols, and gunboats under his Cairo command exchanged fire with Confederate batteries near Columbus. But the rebels declined to challenge him directly, and he lacked the troops to engage them in force. “All is quiet here now,” he wrote Julia disappointedly from Cairo in late September. “How long it will remain so is impossible to tell. If I had troops enough not long.” A month later he was still complaining. “I am very sorry that I have not got a force to go south with, at least to Columbus,” he told Julia. “But the fates seem to be against any such thing. My forces are scattered and occupy posts that must be held.” A defensive posture didn’t suit his personality. “What I want is to advance.”
He got what he wanted not much later. John Frémont set out from St. Louis in October in search of the main body of Missouri’s secessionist army, led by Sterling Price. He directed Grant to detain or divert any Confederates on the Mississippi or in southeastern Missouri. Grant gathered all the troops he could and headed from Cairo toward Columbus, Kentucky, intending merely a demonstration of force, in keeping with Frémont’s order. He was not planning a serious attack. “But after we started,” he recalled later, “I saw that the officers and men were elated at the prospect of at last having the opportunity of doing what they had volunteered to do: fight the enemies of their country. I did not see how I could maintain discipline or retain the confidence of my command if we should return to Cairo without an effort to do something.”
Grant was as eager as any of the men at the prospect of action, and when he heard that the Confederates at Columbus were sending troops across the river, he lost no time in striking against them. With three thousand men in steam transports he dropped down the Mississippi in the dark, pausing several miles above Belmont, a Missouri village opposite Columbus, where the Confederates had established a camp. “At daylight we proceeded down the river to a point just out of range of rebel guns and debarked on the Missouri shore,” he related in his after-action report. “From here the troops were marched by a flank for about one mile towards Belmont, and then drawn up in a line, one battalion having been left as a reserve near the transports.” Grant ordered skirmishers to locate the enemy; within a few minutes they made contact.
Jacob Lauman, a colonel heading an Iowa regiment, was in the thick of the battle that ensued. “We fought the rebels slowly but steadily, driving them before us at every volley,” he recounted later. “Our advance at this point was slow in consequence of the obstructions in our way, caused by felling timber and underbrush, but we crept under and over it, at times lying down to let the fire of the artillery and musketry pass over us, and then up and onward again until we arrived at the field to the left of the rebel camp.” Here they linked up with other Union troops. “We poured volley after volley on the retiring foe across the field in front of and on the battery, which was stationed at the head of the encampment, on our right. Our fire was so hot the guns were soon abandoned, the enemy, about 800, fleeing across the field in the greatest consternation.” Lauman’s men seized the battery, which gave them a clear view of the rest of the camp. “The rebels kept up a sharp and galling fire upon us, but a few well directed volleys induced them to abscond from their camp immediately.”
To this point in the battle, Grant was delighted with the performance of his troops. “The officers and men engaged at Belmont were then under fire for the first time,” he observed. “Veterans could not have behaved better than they did.” But they didn’t know how to follow up. “They became demoralized from their victory and failed to reap its full reward.… The moment the camp was reached our men laid down their arms and commenced rummaging the tents to pick up trophies. Some of the higher officers were little better than the privates. They galloped about from one cluster of men to another, and at every halt delivered a short eulogy upon the Union cause and the achievements of the command.”
The Federals’ distraction became the Confederates’ salvation. Upon fleeing their camp the rebels took refuge beneath the bank of the river, out of sight and shot from Grant’s men. Once they discovered that they weren’t about to be captured or killed, they crept north along the river until they reached a spot between the Federals and the Union transports. From the Federal rear they readied a counterattack.
“I saw at the same time two steamers coming from the Columbus side towards the western shore above us, black—or gray—with soldiers from boiler-deck to roof,” Grant recalled. He shouted to those of his troops who had captured the rebel battery to turn the guns against the approaching boats. But in the noise and confusion they failed to hear or heed the message. He suddenly realized that his rapid advance had led him into what had become a trap; he must withdraw as quickly as possible. Yet he hated to fall back without accomplishing something material, and so he ordered the torching of the Confederate camp—an action that increased the danger to his men, as the Confederate guns at Columbus, heretofore quiet from belief that the rebels still held the camp, opened fire.
By this time Grant’s men realized they were surrounded. Some assumed they had to surrender. “But when I announced that we had cut our way in and could cut our way out just as well, it seemed a new revelation,” Grant explained. The Federals charged the Confederates again, in the reverse direction from before, and fought their way back to their boats.
Grant was the last aboard. Galloping about the battlefield, he had his horse shot from beneath him. Taking another from a subordinate, he continu
ed to race around in front of and behind his men, urging them forward—that is, to the rear. After they reached the boats and began boarding he rode along the river’s edge to determine where the Confederate troops had landed. He entered a cornfield so thick with leaves and unharvested ears as to make reconnaissance nearly impossible. “I had not gone more than a few hundred yards when I saw a body of troops marching past me, not fifty yards away,” he wrote. “I looked at them for a moment and then turned my horse towards the river and started back, first in a walk and, when I thought myself concealed from the view of the enemy, as fast as my horse could carry me.”
At the Union boats he came under fire from Confederates contesting the Federals’ escape. The engineer of the final boat to push off saw him coming and ordered a plank thrown back to the water’s edge, at the bottom of a steep pitch below the field across which Grant was racing. “My horse put his fore feet over the bank without hesitation or urging, and with his hind feet well under him slid down the bank and trotted aboard the boat, twelve or fifteen feet away, over a single gang plank.”
The Confederates raked the transports with small-arms fire. Grant ascended to the captain’s cabin beside the pilot house and collapsed on a sofa. But after a minute to catch his breath he leaped up to check on his men. “I had scarcely left when a musket ball entered the room, struck the head of the sofa, passed through it and lodged in the floor,” he recounted.
His luck was better than that of many of his men that day. At the time and afterward Grant displayed a certain defensiveness about the battle of Belmont. His losses totaled some six hundred killed, wounded, captured or missing, against about the same number for the Confederates. He nonetheless lavished praise on the performance of his regiments. “All the troops behaved with great gallantry, much of which is to be attributed to the coolness and presence of mind of the officers, particularly the colonels,” he reported right after the battle. Yet at the end of the war he filed a second report on the battle, emphasizing the orders he had been given to make a show of force. And in his memoir, written another two decades later, he asserted, “The two objects for which the battle of Belmont was fought were fully accomplished. The enemy gave up all idea of detaching troops from Columbus.… The National troops acquired a confidence in themselves at Belmont that did not desert them through the war.”
These may indeed have been Grant’s objectives. But the first was negative and the second nebulous, and the cost of achieving them was high. Doubtless Grant was speaking of himself as much as of his men when he emphasized the importance of confidence. Belmont was his first battle command. He performed with conspicuous bravery and dash. Proving himself—to himself—was no small matter. But it didn’t come cheaply.
21
LINCOLN WAS WILLING TO OVERLOOK THE COST. AFTER BULL RUN the president had replaced Irvin McDowell with George McClellan, who captured the hearts of Washington with his manly good looks, his uniformed flair and his solicitude for the defense of the capital. “By some strange operation of magic I seem to have become the power of the land,” McClellan wrote his wife. “I almost think that were I to win some small success now I could become Dictator or anything else that might please me.”
The magic diminished as McClellan declined to challenge the Confederates across the Potomac in Virginia. Lincoln at first said nothing, but others in Washington grumbled till McClellan in late October 1861 felt obliged to probe beyond the river in the direction of Leesburg. The effort began well but ended devastatingly when the Union force was driven back over Ball’s Bluff into the river, where many drowned. A thousand Federals were killed, captured or wounded; among the Union dead was Colonel Edward D. Baker, a senator from Oregon and a close friend of Lincoln’s. McClellan conceded privately that the battle was a “serious disaster”; his critics said the same thing aloud. The most bitter alleged a secessionist conspiracy, with McClellan cast as an agent of the rebellion and Lincoln as his dupe. Congress established a joint committee on the conduct of the war to second-guess the administration.
Lincoln’s military problems with McClellan were matched by his political problems with John Frémont. The frustrations of partisan warfare in Missouri drove Frémont to issue a proclamation establishing martial law and emancipating the slaves of rebel owners. The emancipation decree elicited applause from abolitionists and other Republicans who believed the nettle of slavery must be grasped if the war would be won; Frémont became their hero. But the decree immensely complicated Lincoln’s task of keeping the border slave states—Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland and Delaware—loyal, and it undercut all he was saying about the war’s being solely to save the Union. Lincoln told Frémont’s wife, sent by the general to explain his action, that the war was for “a great national idea, the Union.” He added—harshly, Jessie Benton Frémont judged—that “General Frémont should not have dragged the Negro into it.”
Lincoln demanded that Frémont rescind the decree. The general grudgingly did so while continuing to believe he knew better than Lincoln how the war ought to be managed. His arrogance ultimately alienated even some of his friends, allowing Lincoln in November to remove him from his command.
The news about Grant and Belmont arrived amid the president’s Frémont troubles and while the evil echoes from Ball’s Bluff still roiled the capital. Northern papers, hungry for good news, presented Belmont as a signal victory. The New York Times praised Grant and his men: “The late battle at Belmont, Mo., is considered in a high degree creditable to all our troops concerned in it, and the credit of the brilliant movement is due to General Grant.” The Chicago Journal declared, “General Grant was everywhere in the thickest of the fight, and performed wonderful deeds of bravery. The men never tire of lauding his gallantry.”
Lincoln didn’t know Grant personally, but he knew John McClernand, a Democratic congressman who had resigned his seat to command a brigade of Illinois volunteers and fought under Grant at Belmont. “All with you have done honor to yourselves and the flag and service to the country,” Lincoln congratulated McClernand. “Most gratefully I do thank you and them.” McClernand responded by urging the president to create a new military department for the lower Mississippi Valley. “An energetic, enterprising and judicious commander would early redeem this department from the thralldom of rebellion,” McClernand said. He was thinking of himself—“If a department could be established there your promotion would be almost certain,” a Washington ally assured him—but Lincoln began thinking of Grant.
The positive reaction to Belmont reinforced Grant’s view of the battle. “The victory was most complete,” he informed his father. “It has given me a confidence in the officers and men of this command that will enable me to lead them in any future engagement without fear of the result.” He laid plans to exploit his success and telegraphed Henry W. Halleck, Frémont’s successor and his own new superior, for permission to visit St. Louis and explain what he required by way of troops, arms and provisions.
Halleck brushed him off. He was old army and knew the stories of Grant’s drinking. He doubtless considered the popular reaction to Belmont overblown. He had his hands full dealing with the confusion Frémont had left behind. And he didn’t want Grant getting carried away. He told him to stay where he was. “You will send reports in writing.”
Grant was left to train his troops, integrate new arrivals into his command, reconnoiter from Cairo and ponder what he would do if given the chance. “The true line of operations for us was up the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers,” he explained afterward. “With us there, the enemy would be compelled to fall back on the east and west entirely out of the State of Kentucky.” Two Confederate forts commanded the two rivers: Fort Henry on the Tennessee and Fort Donelson on the Cumberland. The forts were twins and nearly conjoined, for the rivers were but a dozen miles apart at this location and the outer defenses of the forts came to within cannon shot of each other. Grant proposed to pin Fort Henry between advancing ground forces and ironclad gunboats on the Tennessee and
then, with Henry secure, do the same to Donelson.
He discussed his plan with some of his fellow officers, including Charles Smith, who was a decade his senior and a distinguished veteran of the Mexican War. Smith concurred with Grant on the importance of the Tennessee and Cumberland, prompting Grant to renew his request to visit St. Louis.
Halleck this time consented, to Grant’s encouragement. “I have now a larger force than General Scott ever commanded prior to our present difficulties,” he wrote his sister Mary. “I believe there is no portion of our whole army better prepared to contest a battle than there is within my district, and I am very much mistaken if I have not got the confidence of officers and men. This is all important, especially with new troops.”
Halleck still didn’t share Grant’s hopefulness, though, and he greeted the brigadier coolly. Grant blamed both Halleck and himself for the meeting’s failure. “I was received with so little cordiality that I perhaps stated the object of my visit with less clearness than I might have done,” he wrote. “I had not uttered many sentences before I was cut short as if my plan was preposterous. I returned to Cairo very much crestfallen.”
But not dissuaded. He again wrote Charles Smith, who reaffirmed the feasibility of the Tennessee campaign. “Two ironclad gunboats would make short work of Fort Henry,” Smith told John Rawlins, the Galena orator, who had become Grant’s assistant. Navy commander Andrew Foote, heading the Union squadron on the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, telegraphed Halleck: “Fort Henry on the Tennessee can be carried with four ironclad gunboats and troops to be permanent-occupied.” Foote, writing in the last week of January 1862, added, “In consultation with General Grant we have come to the conclusion that the Tennessee will soon fall as the Ohio is falling above and therefore it is desirable to make the contemplated movement the latter part of this week.”