by Bruce Catton
Cairo was on the frontier, and a heavy trade with the enemy was moving down the Mississippi. Packet boats plying between St. Louis and Cairo, Grant believed, were dropping off considerable amounts of freight for the armies of the Confederates, at way stations along the river; to check this, all the gunboats being busy on other assignments, Grant took a river steamer, put an armed guard aboard, and told the skipper to pick out one of the suspected packets and follow it downstream, stopping wherever the packet stopped and confiscating the freight that was sent ashore. (A fine lot of contraband was seized: unfortunately, the captain of the guard got too enthusiastic and seized the packet also, and Grant had to release it.) He also sent troops on a foray to Charleston, Missouri, some miles inland, to seize goods which he believed were en route to Jeff Thompson. He had “serious doubts whether there is any law authorizing this seizure,” but he felt that his action was necessary; would the Department Commander please advise him? Grant needed eight thousand bed sacks at once; needed, as well, to make a quick trip to Cape Girardeau, where civilian property had been seized as the site for a fort, and where it was necessary to appoint a board of officers to appraise the value of the property and decide on a proper rental. At Cape Girardeau, too, a steam ferryboat had been requisitioned for Army use; the owner was demanding seventy-five dollars a day as compensation, but steamboat men said that eight dollars would be fair; the District Commander must look into things and say what would be paid. (Having looked, Grant concluded that the owner was too demanding by far, and decreed that the ferryboat would be kept in service without any rental.)17
With details like these Grant’s time was kept occupied. Yet these, after all, were just details. The armed forces of the Confederacy were very near, and as he put his District in shape, cared for his sick, got his troops equipped and trained and dealt with all the odds and ends of military housekeeping, Grant’s first responsibility was that of a commander in the field. The presence of Polk and Pillow and their men at Columbus was his biggest concern. Rumor credited them with aggressive intentions, and there must be defensive works to guard against a possible Confederate offensive; Fort Holt was built and manned, on the Kentucky side of the Ohio, and near it a second work, Fort Jefferson, came into being. On the Missouri side of the Mississippi, at Norfolk, a few miles below Bird’s Point, Grant established an outpost, and he kept soldiers and gunboats busy with ceaseless reconnaissances, keeping track of what the Rebels might be doing.
As a matter of fact, the Rebels at that time were not trying to do much more than establish a good defensive line across Kentucky. Polk’s invasion of the state had surprised the Confederacy fully as much as it had surprised anyone else, and in the days following his occupancy of Columbus this fact became quite apparent. If the invasion of Kentucky had been agreed on at Richmond as part of a calculated strategic move, and if the Confederacy had been ready to swarm into the state on a broad scale, with objectives selected in advance, the Union might have been caught at a sharp disadvantage; except for the area around Cairo and Paducah, the Federals were by no means ready for such a thrust. But the action had been Polk’s own, forced on him by developing circumstances, and after he had made the move everything had to be improvised.
During the period of its neutrality Kentucky had maintained a state guard, commanded by an old friend of Grant’s, General Simon Bolivar Buckner; the same man who, six years earlier, had met Grant in New York when Grant made his inglorious return from California, and who, finding Grant stony-broke, had loaned him money so that he could get back to Illinois. No one had been sure what Buckner would do, when and if Kentucky got into the war.
During the summer, Lincoln, believing that the man would go with the North, had made out and signed a general’s commission for him, to be delivered if he should at last commit himself for the Union. But Jefferson Davis had a commission waiting, too, and after Polk made his move it was Davis’s commission that Buckner accepted. By mid-September Buckner was at the strategic spot of Bowling Green, on the railroad line that angled down to Nashville from Louisville, in command of five thousand men and looking as if he meant business; his patrols had burned a bridge within thirty-three miles of Louisville, and the Federal command was most anxious. A makeshift collection of raw troops under Brigadier General William Tecumseh Sherman, who was a very nervous, uncertain man just then, advanced cautiously in Buckner’s direction, establishing a camp on the high ground known as Muldraugh’s Hill, thirty or forty miles from Louisville; and Sherman, reflecting on the disorganization of the Federal command and the pathetic unreadiness for combat of all the Federal troops he had seen, began to see visions of imminent disaster. Many miles to the east, at Cumberland Gap, Confederate General F. K. Zollicoffer took three unready Confederate regiments fifteen miles across the border and made ready to fortify and hold a position at Cumberland Ford.18
The Confederate line, then, ran roughly along the state’s east-west axis, anchored solidly at Columbus in the west, held in the center at Bowling Green, and pinned down none too firmly in the eastern mountains by Zollicoffer’s skimpy command. All things considered, this may have been the most vital single line in all the Confederacy, but it was not held in great strength and unless a military miracle took place it would not serve as jumping-off ground for any Southern offensive. No one knew this any better than the man Davis now put in command of the Western theater—General Albert Sidney Johnston, believed to be a man of great strategic ability; a man of whom much was expected. Just now, Johnston was laboring under the perennial handicap of all Confederate field commanders—he had too much ground to cover and not enough troops to do it with.
Polk’s occupancy of Kentucky had raised a fuss, and Union adherents were trying to squeeze political advantage out of it. A committee of the state senate sent Polk a formal resolution asserting that the good people of Kentucky were profoundly astonished that an act of invasion had been committed by the Confederate states. Having “hoped that one place at least in this great nation might remain uninvaded by passion,” they earnestly wished that General Polk would take his troops and go back to Tennessee. Polk replied that the Federals had already fractured the state’s neutrality, offered to withdraw if the Federals would do the same, and stayed precisely where he was. The indignant legislature also resolved that Governor Magoffin should order the Confederate troops to withdraw. Magoffin vetoed the resolution, it was passed over his veto, and he dutifully issued the order, which had no effect whatever. The Union Army’s first war hero, Major General Robert Anderson—the weary, unhappy, Kentucky-born Regular who had been in command at Fort Sumter, and who since early summer had been assigned to the Kentucky area on an if-and-when basis—was invited by the legislature to establish himself in Louisville; he complied, found that the strain of everything was too much for him, and in little more than a month was compelled by failing health to resign. He would be replaced by Sherman, to whom the assignment would bring nothing but misery and frustration.19
No matter how the politicians might resolve and maneuver, Confederate troops were in Kentucky and they would not leave unless armed men made them leave. This fact was clear to Grant from the start, and C. F. Smith had hardly reached Paducah before Grant was thinking about a Federal offensive. On September 10 Grant wrote to Frémont that an amphibious reconnaissance down the Mississippi had exchanged shots with Rebels around Columbus, and he felt that this had been good for Federal morale. He reported: “All the forces show great alacrity in preparing for any movement that looks as if it was to meet an enemy, and if drill and discipline were equal to their zeal, I should feel great confidence even against large odds.” It seemed to Grant that the Confederates were playing for time, either to perfect their defenses or to make ready for an attack on Paducah, and he added: “If it were discretionary with me, with a little addition to my present force I would take Columbus.” The next day he told Colonel Oglesby, who commanded the outpost at Norfolk, to renew the armed reconnaissance, “annoying the enemy in every way possi
ble,” and on the day after that he wrote to Frémont: “I am of opinion that if a demonstration was made from Paducah toward Union City” (a Tennessee railroad junction twenty-five miles south of Columbus) “supported by two columns on the Kentucky side from here, the gunboats, and a force moving upon Belmont, the enemy would be forced to leave Columbus, leaving behind their heavy ordnance. I submit this to your consideration, and will hold myself in readiness to execute this or any plan you may adopt.”20
Frémont’s intentions were aggressive enough. He told Grant to scout the roads toward Columbus, and if the enemy should cross the Mississippi to Belmont “be present with a force on the Missouri as well as the Kentucky shores.” He promised to send more troops, and warned: “Keep me informed minutely.” To President Lincoln Frémont had sent an elaborate plan for a forward movement in Kentucky and astride the Mississippi, looking toward the capture of Columbus, the occupation of Nashville, and ultimately the capture of Memphis.21 But Frémont was beginning to have pressing problems elsewhere, and he was increasingly unable to give much attention to Kentucky. Shortly after Grant left Jefferson City his successor there, saturnine Jefferson Davis (raised now to Brigadier’s rank), had sent a force under Colonel James A. Mulligan one hundred and twenty-five miles up the Missouri to occupy and hold the town of Lexington. Mulligan, gathering to himself stray detachments of cavalry as he moved, entered Lexington with between 2800 and 3500 men—the total depends on whether certain home guard units deserve to be counted as combat troops—and quickly found himself in trouble. Missouri’s General Price came up from the South with a force of 10,000 or more, and Mulligan was put under siege. Federal attempts to reinforce him came to nothing, and on September 20—overpowered, out of rations and nearly out of ammunition—Mulligan had to surrender. From Washington Frémont got a curt message saying that the President expected him “to repair the disaster at Lexington without loss of time,” and he now was devoting all of his attention to the task of assembling an army that would clear western Missouri of enemy forces once and for all. Meanwhile, Washington had called on him to send troops east, and instead of reinforcing Grant Frémont had had to take two regiments away from him. The Cairo-Paducah-Columbus triangle was to get little help from the Pathfinder.22
Whether Grant could actually have accomplished anything if he had been told to move on Columbus is an open question. In his memoirs Grant said that Columbus could have been taken if the attempt had been made immediately after the occupation of Paducah, but he said that before November the place was so strongly held that nothing but a powerful army and a long siege would have won it. At the time, his opinion seems to have fluctuated. On October 7 he was informed that Rebel strength at Columbus had been built up to 45,000 men (a wild overestimate); yet he believed that, although there was much talk of a Confederate campaign against Paducah, General Polk’s intentions were strictly defensive. Three weeks later he was more optimistic, and he told St. Louis that the Confederates had taken so many men away from Columbus for operations in other parts of Kentucky that the fortress was weak: “If Gen. Smith’s and my command were prepared it might now be taken.” He realized, however, as he may not have realized earlier, that his own force was not actually ready for a major offensive: “My cavalry are not armed nor my artillery equipped; the infantry is not well armed, and transportation is entirely inadequate to any forward movement.”23
Reinforcements were delayed. In the middle of September Grant had some sixteen thousand five hundred men in the Cairo area,24 but just after this total was recorded he lost the two regiments which Frémont had to send to Washington, and replacements were hard to get. Frémont promised to do the best he could, and he hoped that Grant and Smith between them could keep the Confederates on both sides of the Mississippi under control, but he warned Grant to be cautious: “At present I am not in favor of incurring any hazard of defeat.” Grant had already confessed to Smith that his force was “scarcely more than a weak garrison,” and after getting Frémont’s pessimistic note he wrote to Colonel Oglesby that, “despairing of being reinforced, I deem it the better part of valor to be prudent”—as a result of which Oglesby was to retire from the exposed post at Norfolk to Bird’s Point.25
What all of this came to was that through September and October, despite all the reconnaissances and the projected offensives, the Cairo command was marking time. Grant expressed it accurately in his Memoirs when he wrote: “From the occupation of Paducah up to the early part of November, nothing important occurred with the troops under my command.”26 Yet something important was occurring with Grant himself. He was learning his trade. His experience as regimental quartermaster in the Mexican War had taught him a great deal about the way supplies are kept moving to an army in the field; here in Cairo he was getting a postgraduate course in this, discovering that all of the quartermasters’ arrangements will break down unless the man at the top makes it his business to keep the cumbersome machinery moving. He was learning, too, the ways of the Volunteers he had in his command, discovering the means by which they could be given high morale and brought along as soldiers.
The men were not like the old Regulars. Dr. Brinton remembered that they had odd quirks. Most of them had been extremely self-sufficient and individualistic as farmboy civilians, but in the Army they seemed utterly unable to take care of themselves. Camp hygiene was likely to be atrocious unless the Commanding General kept it up to standard, for most company and regimental officers knew nothing at all about the way to care for their men, and the men themselves—the most self-reliant of individuals, in civilian life—appeared to be helpless. This, to the surgeon, was “one of the strangest peculiarities of the volunteers at the beginning of the war … they ceased to think for themselves and became incapable of self-protection.” One veteran wrote, after the war, that much camp sickness was the fault of the men themselves: “A contented, temperate, cheerful, cleanly man will live forever in the army, but a despondent, intemperate, gluttonous, dirty soldier, let him be never so strong when he enters the service, is sure to get on the sick list, and finally into the hospital.” Diseases like measles ran through the camps almost unchecked, and the level of medical knowledge at the time is reflected in a soldier’s comment that “the ravages of this disease, so frequent among recruits, were largely attributed to the use of straw for beds, as the decaying straw generated the bacteria.” There seemed to be no way to get either convalescents or detailed men to do any useful work in the hospitals. Scrubbing, sweeping, making beds and so on was “women’s work,” and these Westerners were proud in their young masculinity and would perform such chores only if someone in authority stood over them and made them do so.27
It was an axiom that the worst period in a Volunteer’s life came about three months after he had enlisted—the stage which thousands of the soldiers around Cairo were reaching that fall. In the early days (as one veteran explained, later) patriotic excitement and the interesting strangeness of military life were a stimulus, but after a time everything seemed boring and the soldier “hated his food, his duties and his officers” with an undiscriminating passion. Men would get tired of Army fare, gorge on gingerbread and pie bought at the sutler’s, suffer from digestive upsets and land in the hospital.28
The extent to which sickness was taken for granted at that stage of the war is shown by an innocent boast printed in a camp newspaper published by the 37th Illinois. Writing late in October, the regimental scribe asserted that this regiment was in an uncommonly healthy condition: “There will not average more than ten sick to the company throughout the regiment. In this respect they have been highly favored.”29 This, actually, meant that 10 per cent of the entire command was on the sicklist—a rate so high that a year later it would have called for an investigation by the Commanding General. In this fall of 1861 the record seemed worth crowing over.
One cure for discontent was mail from home, and Grant took pains to make sure that his armies would get good postal service. A. H. Markland, a special agent of t
he Postoffice Department, visited Cairo, and worked out for Grant a system whereby letters between camp and home were handled promptly and efficiently. Even when troops were on the march, mail wagons trailed after them; Grant declared that “the officers and men were in constant communication with kindred and friends at home and with as much regularity as the most favored in the large cities of the Union.” After the war, Grant remarked with pride that “the same promptness was always observed in the armies under my command up to the period of the disbandment.”30
Another cure for discontent was work; work, together with some evidence that the work which was being done made sense. One Illinois regiment was sent across the Mississippi daily to drill in the manual of arms, firing blank cartridges, and the Colonel finally went to Grant and said that the men would not put up with this drill much longer unless they were allowed to practice with live ammunition. They had been shooting blanks at the weeds for two days, the Colonel said, and the weeds were still standing “as saucy and defiant as ever.” Grant chuckled, and ordered ball cartridges issued, and the Colonel reported next day that the regiment was in the highest of spirits—“Now you can turn us loose on the southern Confederacy as quick as you please.” Men in a cavalry regiment enjoyed target practice, with a life-sized human figure printed on the target; they dubbed the figure “Jeff Davis” and shot at it enthusiastically if unskillfully. Disgusted by this failure to hit the mark, some spent spare time shooting at snags in the river, then rejoiced when they shot Jeff Davis full of holes.31