The Man Who Saved the Union

by H. W. Brands

  Grant approached Halleck a third time. “I would respectfully suggest the propriety of subduing Fort Henry, near the Kentucky and Tennessee line, and holding the position,” he wrote Halleck on January 29. “If this is not done soon there is but little doubt but that the defenses of both the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers will be materially strengthened.” Taking Fort Henry would preempt such strengthening. “It will besides have a moral effect upon our troops to advance them towards the rebel states.” With what might have struck Halleck as smugness, Grant concluded: “The advantages of this move are as perceptible to the General Commanding Department”—Halleck—“as to myself. Therefore further comments are unnecessary.”

  Grant’s arguments finally caught on, and Halleck let himself be persuaded. “Make your preparations to take and hold Fort Henry,” he telegraphed Grant.

  Grant had already begun. “Very little preparation is necessary for this move,” he wrote Smith, who commanded the garrison at Paducah. The small need for preparation was fortunate, as secrets were impossible to maintain where Southern sympathizers abounded. “If possible, the troops and community should be kept from knowing anything of the design.”

  “I will leave here tomorrow night,” Grant telegraphed Halleck on February 1. The next day he issued marching orders to the officers and men. “No firing, except when ordered by proper authority, will be allowed.… Plundering and disturbing private property is positively prohibited.… Regimental commanders will be held strictly accountable for the acts of their regiments.”

  To John McClernand he gave particular orders: “On your arrival at Paducah you will proceed immediately up the Tennessee River, debarking all your cavalry excepting one company at the first ferry above, on the side between the two rivers.” The cavalry should march to a spot several miles below Fort Henry and the transports return to Paducah. Pending the arrival of additional troops McClernand should hold the ground below Henry. “For this purpose you will dispose your forces to the best advantage.”

  Grant himself probed the defenses of Fort Henry. “I went up on the Essex this morning with Captain Porter, two other ironclad boats accompanying, to ascertain the range of the rebel guns,” he wrote Halleck on February 4. “From a point about one mile above the place afterwards decided on for place of debarkation, several shells were thrown, some of them taking effect inside the rebel fort. This drew the enemy’s fire, all of which fell far short, except from one rifled gun which threw a ball through the cabin of the Essex and several near it.” This ball determined the point of debarkation, just out of range of the rifled guns.

  That night Grant wrote Julia from the steamer Uncle Sam. “All the troops will be up by noon tomorrow,” he said. “And Friday morning, if we are not attacked before, the fight will commence. The enemy are well fortified and have a strong force. I do not want to boast but I have a confident feeling of success.” The troops did arrive the next morning, and they were arrayed, per Grant’s order, along the river. “The sight of our campfires on either side of the river is beautiful and no doubt inspires the enemy, who is in full view of them, with the idea that we have full 40,000 men,” he wrote Julia that evening. The reckoning was but hours away. “Tomorrow will come the tug of war. One side or the other must tomorrow night rest in quiet possession of Fort Henry.”

  At eleven o’clock on the morning of February 6 the attack commenced. McClernand’s infantry and cavalry approached the fort on land; Foote’s gunboats closed by the river. The boats did the greater damage, as high water impeded McClernand’s march. The Union boats exchanged fire with the Confederate artillery, tentatively at first but escalating after noon. “The fire on both sides was now terrific,” Confederate commander Lloyd Tilghman reported afterward. One by one the guns of the fort were silenced. Meanwhile only the Essex of the Union gunboats suffered serious damage, when a shell hit the boiler and caused an explosion that killed or wounded nearly fifty of the crew.

  Gradually Tilghman’s battle plan became clear. The Confederate commander had fewer than 3,000 troops, too few to defend both Fort Henry and Fort Donelson. “Fort Donelson might possibly be held, if properly re-enforced, even though Fort Henry should fall; but the reverse of this proposition was not true,” Tilghman recounted. He knew he was outnumbered, though he overestimated his deficit—as Grant intended he would. “I had no hope of being able successfully to defend the fort against such overwhelming odds,” Tilghman declared. He sent his infantry, cavalry, and light artillery away from Fort Henry toward Fort Donelson. He kept no more than a hundred men to fire the guns and cover the others’ escape. “My object was to save the main body by delaying matters as long as possible.”

  His method succeeded. After two hours he struck the flag and surrendered the fort. Grant gave cavalry chase to the Confederates fleeing toward Fort Donelson, but their lead was too great and he called his horsemen back.

  “Fort Henry is ours,” he wired Halleck on the evening of February 6. Yet the campaign had only begun. “I shall take and destroy Fort Donelson on the 8th.”

  Halleck relayed the message to Washington with a flourish. “Fort Henry is ours,” he telegraphed George McClellan. “The flag of the Union is re-established on the soil of Tennessee. It will never be removed.”

  “Thank Grant, Foote, and their commands for me,” McClellan responded.

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  “I WAS VERY IMPATIENT TO GET TO FORT DONELSON, BECAUSE I KNEW the importance of the place to the enemy and supposed he would reinforce it rapidly,” Grant said later. “I felt that 15,000 men on the 8th would be more effective than 50,000 a month later.” And so on the day after taking Fort Henry he rode in the direction of Donelson. He expected little resistance. “I had known General Pillow”—Gideon Pillow—“in Mexico, and judged that with any force, no matter how small, I could march up to within gunshot of any entrenchments he was given to hold.” Grant was aware that John Floyd, Pillow’s superior, commanded Fort Donelson. “But he was no soldier, and I judged he would yield to Pillow’s pretensions.” Besides, Grant said, Floyd was morally unfit for his post and knew it. “His conscience must have troubled him and made him afraid. As Secretary of War”—under James Buchanan—“he had taken a solemn oath to maintain the Constitution of the United States and to uphold the same against all its enemies. He had betrayed that trust.… Well may he have been afraid to fall into the hands of National troops.”

  Grant got a good look at Donelson. The fort topped a bluff on the left, or west, bank of the Cumberland River. A creek separated the fort from the village of Dover two miles upstream. At most times the creek presented little obstacle to travel, but winter rains this February had swollen the stream and also raised the river, which backed up into the creek. A second creek, south of the fort, similarly hindered movement. The heavy guns of the fort were trained on the river, threatening any upriver traffic from the north. Trenches for riflemen protected the west-facing rear of the fort, and recently felled trees, their sharpened trunks and branches pointing outward, protected the trenches.

  Grant intended to pin Fort Donelson as he had Fort Henry. Foote’s flotilla of gunboats would attack from the river while ground troops under McClernand, Smith and Lew Wallace would close in on land.

  But the weather frustrated his plans. “At present we are perfectly locked in by high water,” Grant reported on February 8. The banks of the Cumberland rose several feet above the fields and forests behind, so when the floodwaters went over the banks they inundated much of the surrounding area. “I contemplated taking Fort Donelson today with infantry and cavalry alone, but all my troops will be kept busily engaged saving what we now have from the rapidly rising waters.”

  After spending the previous weeks in rapid motion, Grant found the delay vexing. “You have no conception of the amount of labor I have to perform,” he wrote his sister Mary. “An army of men all helpless looking to the commanding officer for every supply. Your plain brother has, however, as yet had no reason to feel himself unequal to the task and ful
ly believes that he will carry on a successful campaign against our rebel enemy. I do not speak boastfully but utter a presentiment. The scare and fright of the rebels up here is beyond conception. Twenty-three miles above here some were drowned in their haste to retreat, thinking us such vandals that neither life nor property would be respected. G. J. Pillow commands at Fort Donelson. I hope to give him a tug before you receive this.”

  Grant summoned his division commanders to a meeting aboard one of the steamers. Lew Wallace had already formed a sense of Grant; the meeting reinforced it. “From the first his silence was remarkable,” Wallace remembered. “He knew how to keep his temper. In battle, as in camp, he went about quietly, speaking in a conversational tone; yet he appeared to see everything that went on, and was always intent on business. He had a faithful assistant adjutant-general”—John Rawlins—“and appreciated him; he preferred, however, his own eyes, word, and hand. His aides were little more than messengers. In dress he was plain, even negligent; in partial amendment of that his horse was always a good one and well kept. At the council—calling it such by grace—he smoked, but never said a word.”

  The upshot of the meeting was that the army would move. “We start this morning for Fort Donelson in heavy force,” Grant wrote Halleck on February 12. As Grant expected, Pillow put up no resistance, and the Union troops reached sight of the Donelson defenses by midday. The next twenty-four hours were occupied investing the position, cutting it off as far as possible from resupply or escape. But the high water complicated the task, and the weather tested the troops’ endurance. “Last night was very severe upon the troops,” Grant wrote Halleck. “At dusk it commenced raining and in a short time turned cold and changed to snow and sleet. This morning the thermometer indicated 20 degrees below freezing.”

  The attack commenced nonetheless. On the afternoon of February 14 Foote’s gunboats chugged up the river toward the fort. Four ironclads and two wooden gunboats began blasting away. The lead vessel got within a quarter mile of the fort’s batteries, and for over an hour the flotilla delivered and received heavy fire. Foote believed he had the better of the exchange. “The enemy was running from his batteries,” he reported afterward. The capture of the fort seemed imminent; Confederate commander Floyd, writing from behind the batteries, dashed off a warning to his superior, General Albert Sidney Johnston: “The fort cannot hold out twenty minutes.” But then the rebel guns took disabling effect. The wheel of one Union craft and the tiller of another were torn away, rendering the boats helpless before the current, which carried them downstream. The other Federal vessels were similarly compelled to retire.

  Grant watched the artillery duel from the bank of the Cumberland. “The enemy had been much demoralized by the assault,” he remembered. “But they were jubilant when they saw the disabled vessels dropping down the river entirely out of the control of the men on board.” The afternoon ended on this high note for the Confederates. “The gunboats have been driven back,” Floyd informed Johnston. “I think the fight is over today.”

  The next twelve hours were extremely trying for the Federals. The weather got colder; the men were without campfires, which would have made targets for the Donelson guns, and many lacked blankets and heavy coats, which they had dropped on the rapid march from Fort Henry. Grant grew worried. “If all the gunboats that can, will immediately make their appearance before the enemy, it may secure us a victory,” he wrote Foote the next morning. “Otherwise all may be defeated.” When Foote informed him that the gunboats would need ten days for repair, he felt the victory had slipped through his grasp. Putting the best face on things, he informed Halleck, “Appearances now indicate that we will have a protracted siege here.”

  But then Floyd, or perhaps Pillow, blundered. The Confederate command impatiently determined that Pillow should try to break through the Union cordon and effect an escape. At dawn on February 15 the rebels threw themselves against the Union right, where McClernand’s division held the broken ground. “Here and there the musicians were beginning to make the woods ring with reveille,” Lew Wallace remembered, “and the numbed soldiers of the line were rising from their icy beds and shaking the snow from their frozen garments.… Suddenly the pickets fired, and with the alarm on their lips rushed back upon their comrades. The woods on the instant came alive.”

  The hottest fighting of the western war to date ensued. The Union brigade of W. H. L. Wallace absorbed some of the heaviest blows. “The first charge against him was repulsed,” Lew Wallace recounted, “whereupon he advanced to the top of the rising ground behind which he had sheltered his troops in the night. A fresh assault followed, but, aided by a battery across the valley to his left, he repulsed the enemy a second time. His men were steadfast, and clung to the brow of the hill as if it were theirs by holy right. An hour passed, and yet another hour, without cessation of the fire. Meantime the woods rang with a monstrous clangor of musketry, as if a million men were beating empty barrels with iron hammers.… Men fell by the score, reddening the snow with their blood. The smoke, in pallid white clouds, clung to the underbrush and treetops as if to screen the combatants from each other. Close to the ground the flame of musketry and cannon tinted everything a lurid red.”

  The Federals held their positions until their ammunition ran low. At this point, facing troops who seemed to have unlimited bullets and shells, they retreated, then broke and ran. The Union right, commanded by McClernand, appeared in danger of collapse.

  “Just then General Grant rode up to where General McClernand and I were in conversation,” Lew Wallace remembered. “He was almost unattended. In his hand there were some papers, which looked like telegrams. Wholly unexcited, he saluted and received the salutations of his subordinates.” Wallace summoned later experience to reflect on Grant at that moment. “In every great man’s career there is a crisis exactly similar to that which now overtook General Grant, and it cannot be better described than as a crucial test of his nature. A mediocre person would have accepted the news as an argument for persistence in his resolution to enter upon a siege. Had General Grant done so, it is very probable his history would have been then and there concluded. His admirers and detractors alike are invited to study him at this precise juncture. It cannot be doubted that he saw with painful distinctness the effect of the disaster to his right wing. His face flushed slightly. With a sudden grip he crushed the papers in his hand. But in an instant these signs of disappointment or hesitation—as the reader pleases—cleared away. In his ordinary quiet voice he said, addressing himself to both officers, ‘Gentlemen, the position on the right must be retaken.’ With that he turned and galloped off.”

  Grant’s calm resolve and the orders he issued to give it effect rescued the day. He got ammunition to McClernand, who rallied his men and regained the initiative on the right. He ordered Charles Smith, on the left, to counterattack, which Smith did with such vigor as to breach the Confederate lines. That night Smith’s troops slept where the rebels had rested the night before.

  To Grant’s eye victory was inevitable. “There was now no doubt but that the Confederates must surrender or be captured the next day,” he wrote afterward. Floyd and Pillow thought so too. Both men decided to depart, leaving the third in command, Simon Bolivar Buckner, to treat with Grant. On the morning of February 16 Buckner requested an armistice to negotiate terms.

  Grant replied in words that made him famous. “No terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted,” he said. Failing that, “I propose to move immediately upon your works.”

  Buckner complained that Grant’s ultimatum was “ungenerous and unchivalrous,” but he had no alternative and gave in. He and Grant spoke a short while later. They recalled their cadet days and how Buckner had loaned Grant money on his return from California. They reflected on the battle just concluded. “He said to me that if he had been in command I would not have got up to Donelson as easily as I did,” Grant recounted in his memoirs. “I told him that if he had been in comman
d I should not have tried in the way I did.”

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  “HONOR TO THE BRAVE!” THE NEW YORK TRIBUNE TRUMPETED OF Grant. Other papers echoed the plaudits and declared that the capture of Fort Donelson laid open the heart of the Confederacy.

  Lincoln was thrilled but nervous. “You have Fort Donelson safe,” Lincoln wrote Halleck, “unless Grant shall be overwhelmed from outside, to prevent which latter will, I think, require all the vigilance, energy and skill of yourself and Buell”—Don Carlos Buell, commander of the Army of the Ohio—“acting in full cooperation.” To this point Lincoln had let his generals run the war largely unbothered by presidential advice, but after ten months of disappointment he felt obliged to weigh in. “Our success or failure at Donelson is vastly important,” he said. “I beg you to put your soul in the effort.”

  Halleck was willing, but at the expense of Grant. “Give me command in the West,” Halleck implored George McClellan. “I ask this in return for Forts Henry and Donelson.” Halleck, as a theorist of war, had long advocated concentration of force; a single command west of the Alleghenies, he now said, would allow him to crush the rebellion. “Give it to me, and I will split secession in twain in one month.” When McClellan was slow to answer, Halleck entreated him again. “I must have command of the armies in the West. Hesitation and delay are losing us the golden opportunity. Lay this before the President and Secretary of War. May I assume the command? Answer quickly.”

  Grant learned of Halleck’s assertiveness only secondhand. Halleck had taken little advance interest in the Donelson campaign. “General Halleck did not approve or disapprove of my going to Fort Donelson,” Grant observed afterward. “He said nothing whatever to me on the subject.” Grant was surprised not to get a letter of congratulation after the victory. Halleck’s headquarters at St. Louis posted a formal notice thanking Grant and Foote and their forces for the victories at Forts Henry and Donelson. But that was all. “I received no other recognition whatever from General Halleck.”