Grant Moves South

by Bruce Catton

  Grant never felt called on to apologize for Belmont. On the contrary, to the end of his days he believed that what he did there was justified, and as soon as the steamboats got back to Cairo he issued orders congratulating his men. Later in the war, after battles whose scope made Belmont look like no more than a skirmish, Grant would be very chary about writing such orders, but on November 8 he let himself go, and the order is worth looking at if only as a sample of the kind of prose Grant was willing to offer to green troops in the early days of the war. It went as follows:

  The general commanding this military district returns his thanks to the troops under his command at the battle of Belmont yesterday.

  It has been his fortune to have been in all the battles fought in Mexico by Generals Scott and Taylor save Buena Vista, and he never saw one more hotly contested or where troops behaved with more gallantry.

  Such courage will insure victory wherever our flag may be borne and protected by such a class of men.

  To the many brave men who fell the sympathy of the country is due, and will be manifested in a manner unmistakable.22

  As details of the battle were published in the North, Grant was criticized for getting into an expensive, meaningless fight, and the battle has never been considered a particularly bright spot on his record. The Confederates played it up as a victory, as they were fully entitled to do by all the rules of the game. Yet Grant felt that the fight had been worth all it cost. If it did nothing else, it “blooded” his raw troops, and he now had a hard nucleus of men who had been under heavy fire and who, by the standards of that day, could be considered combat veterans. Near the end of his life, looking back on it all, he wrote that “The National troops acquired a confidence in themselves at Belmont that did not desert them throughout the war.”23

  The military student A. L. Conger, who after the first World War wrote an extensive study of Grant’s development as a general, concluded that in a sense Grant was correct. The battle had at least given Grant “the trust and allegiance of his men,” and by the hard rules of war Conger considered that this may have been worth the six hundred casualties. What the troops sensed, Conger felt, was “the released dynamic force that swept with [Grant] into battle”; in this engagement, he wrote, “there was welded … that subtle bond that made them from that hour ‘Grant’s men.’” Conger suggested, as well, that Grant’s desire to provoke a fight at Belmont may have been at least partly due to indoctrination he was getting from the naval officers at Cairo, a hard-bitten lot who were notoriously anxious to see some real fighting develop.24

  Chief among these was the new Flag Officer in charge of the gunboats, a craggy sort of character named Captain Andrew Foote, who had been assigned to the river command in the middle of September. Foote and Grant understood one another from the start, and they made a harmonious team; in a command setup practically guaranteed to produce friction between Army and Navy commanders, Foote and Grant always got along perfectly.

  Foote did not survive the war; he died in 1863, and he comes down to us, mostly, in pictures—brown solid face, looking benign and tough at the same time, with an engaging fringe of seagoing whiskers running all along the jawline from ear to ear. He was a passionate foe of slavery (he had served in the Navy’s anti-slaveship patrol off the African coast, some years earlier), he disliked strong drink as no one else but John Rawlins disliked it, and he was a devout orthodox Christian, delivering sermons to his crew on the quarterdeck every Sunday morning. A few years before the war, commanding three naval vessels on the China station, he had performed the almost unimaginable feat of inducing every officer and man on each of his ships to sign the temperance pledge, and there was no grog issue on any ship he commanded—a thing which his sailors seemed to take in their stride. Foote was always ready for a fight, although he had been in St. Louis when the Belmont expedition sailed.25

  Equally pugnacious was Commander Henry Walke, skipper of gunboat Tyler and ranking naval officer on this trip. Yet that either talked Grant into anything Grant was not already anxious to do seems improbable. From the day he took command at Cairo, Grant had been waiting to come to grips with Polk’s men.

  John Rawlins, inexpert but devoted soldier, had no doubt that the Federals had won something. In a letter written to his mother just after the battle, Rawlins jubilantly pointed out that every commanding officer in the battle save one, Colonel Jacob Lauman of the badly cut-up 7th Iowa, had been a Democrat before the war—Grant, McClernand, Dougherty, the regimental commanders, not to mention Rawlins himself. Whatever else might be true of it, this at least was no Republican war; and Belmont, Rawlins felt, had proved it to the hilt. The point seems a minor one nowadays, but at the time men like Rawlins felt that it was very important. Most Confederate officers, in the fall of 1861, mentioning Union troops or commanders in their dispatches, never referred to them as anything but “Lincolnites,” the implication being that the Northern war effort was the creation and the exclusive possession of the detested Republican Party. Belmont, Rawlins felt, proved that the whole North was fighting the war.26

  There were bits and pieces to be picked up in the wake of the battle. Under a flag of truce Grant went downstream a day or so afterward to arrange for burial of the Union dead and to work out a deal for exchange of prisoners. Union and Confederate officers chatted in friendly fashion, and Grant mentioned to one Southerner that he had been very close to a moving Confederate column just before the embarkation. The Confederate, a member of Polk’s staff, replied that they had seen him, although they had not recognized him, and he said that Polk had told the soldiers near him: “There is a Yankee; you may try your marksmanship on him if you wish.” Somehow, no soldier had felt moved to try a shot.

  Polk and Grant met face to face on at least one of these trips. Grant left no written record of the visit, and Dr. Brinton, who seems not to have been greatly impressed, wrote that Polk was tall, thin, toothless and bland, talking a great deal and seeming somewhat flippant. Polk himself wrote to his wife about Grant in these words: “He looked rather grave, I thought, like a man who was not at his ease. We talked pleasantly and I succeeded in getting a smile out of him, and then got on well enough. I discussed the principles on which I thought the war should be conducted; denounced all barbarity, vandalism, plundering and all that, and got him to say he would join in putting it down. I was favorably impressed with him; he is undoubtedly a man of much force.” (If Grant was ready to assent to an attempt to stop plundering he was probably thinking about the way his men had behaved in the captured camp at Belmont, when a passion for collecting souvenirs kept them from attending to their military duties. Nearly three weeks later he was writing to Oglesby to check on the captured property held by his troops; officers who possessed stuff seized at Belmont were to be put under arrest, and noncommissioned offenders were to be locked up.)27

  There were several of these flag-of-truce boats, in the days that followed, and tales were told concerning them. Rival officers made a point of being very affable and courteous to one another on these occasions, and toasts were often drunk. Men said that on one trip Colonel N. B. Buford of the 27th Illinois found himself acting as a host, of sorts, to General Polk and his staff. He served drinks, and—looking for a subject both sides could drink to—raised his glass and said: “To George Washington, the Father of His Country.” Polk raised his own glass, smiled, and added: “And the first Rebel.” Other men reported that once Grant sailed down on the headquarters boat, Belle of Memphis, met Confederate General Cheatham, and got very drunk with him. After the war, a veteran wrote indignantly to the St. Louis Republican to deny the story. He himself had been along on that trip, he said, and the Federal officer who clinked glasses with General Cheatham was one of Grant’s staff officers; Grant himself was not even on the boat at the time.28 All in all, it seems clear that on these trips neither Grant nor Polk ever drank more than a good general should.

  One effect Belmont did have: it gave Grant unbounded confidence in the fighting c
apacity of his Volunteers. It may even have helped get him into a frame of mind that stayed with him, at least periodically, until after Shiloh—a suspicion that the Southerner’s heart was not in this war and that Northern victory would not long be delayed. In plain fact the Federals at Belmont had outfought their enemies, and the Confederates afterward gave them credit for having two or three times their actual numbers on the field. In a jubilant wire which he sent to Jefferson Davis the day after the conflict, Polk estimated Federal numbers at 8000. To Johnston he wired that he had been assailed by 7500, and in his formal report, written three weeks later, he said that “the battle was fought against great odds.” An Illinois soldier, talking with a prisoner during a lull in the fighting, asked the man if he still believed in the old boast that one Southerner could whip five Yankees. “Oh,” said the Confederate, “we don’t mean you Westerners. We thought this morning when you were approaching that we never saw such big men in our lives before. You looked like giants.”29

  CHAPTER FIVE

  General Halleck Takes Over

  From Frémont Grant heard nothing at all about Belmont, because Frémont had lost his job. Washington had had enough. While Frémont was chasing Price across the southwestern part of Missouri, at the beginning of November, a messenger caught up with him, near Springfield, bearing orders from the War Department. Frémont was to turn his command over to Major General David Hunter, return to his home, and report to the War Department by letter for further orders. (As it turned out, for some time to come the War Department would have no further orders to give him.) Furious, Frémont obeyed. He had taken elaborate pains to keep any message from Washington from reaching him on this trip—he seems to have suspected that an order of recall might be on its way—and he could not understand how this messenger had broken through the cordon of staff officers he had set up for his protection.1

  Hunter kept command for only a few days—he had been put in simply to keep the chair warm, and when he found out about this Hunter was as angry as Frémont—and two days after the battle of Belmont was fought Hunter was replaced by an officer with whom Grant was to have many important dealings during the rest of the war, a man whose actions would have a marked effect on Grant’s military career: Major General Henry Wager Halleck.

  Halleck was a strange character. A West Pointer who had left the Army in California in the 1850’s to practice law and to accumulate a fortune, he had translated military texts and had written largely on strategy, and he was considered a highly intellectual soldier. In the prewar Army his nickname had been “Old Brains,” and except that he had a habit of rubbing both elbows, abstractedly, when lost in thought—Secretary of the Navy Welles, who never liked him, wrote acidly that he did this as if the elbows were the seat of his mental processes—Halleck at least looked like a very wise general. His book knowledge of strategy was unexcelled, he had a good understanding of the political pressures that must bear on all general officers in this war, and he was a solid, conscientious and very capable administrator.

  This last was a point in his favor, for in St. Louis he had much to administer. Frémont had appointed many officers without regard to legal requirements; he had surrounded himself with an almost totally incompetent administrative staff; and, in his effort to buy the weapons and supplies his unequipped troops needed, he had been responsible for an intricate network of contracts that were nothing less than appalling to the War Department officials who had to pass on them. (They arrived finally at the conclusion that there probably had been much corruption but that none of it touched Frémont personally; the man was quite unable to run a military department but he did have integrity, and if many people made money they were not entitled to make under his administration he himself got none of it.) Halleck’s immediate job was to clean up a mess, and he went to work with whole-souled industry.

  But what Halleck knew about war came out of books, and when the time came for action he would make war in a bookish manner. He was, in addition, waspish, petulant, gossipy, often rather pompous, afflicted with the habit of passing the buck: an ambitious man who could lose sight of larger issues in his anxiety to keep any undischarged responsibility, embodied in copperplate script from the War Department, from coming to rest at last on his own record. Now and then he might fail to accomplish things, but he would never leave the files with anything that would prove that the lack of accomplishment was due to himself. Between Halleck and Grant there would always be a faint cloud. Grant at last would come to dislike him, and in his memoirs, written in age, Grant would give Halleck none the best of it. On balance, however, Halleck in the long run would do Grant more good than harm.

  One qualification the man did have, and it worked to the country’s advantage. He could see, much more clearly than most soldiers then could see, the ins and outs of politics. This war was not like previous wars. It was military only in part; the rest of it was an exercise in ward and county courthouse politics, plus an attempt to make something out of the unvoiced but dominant aspirations of millions of plain citizens, aspirations which did not always express themselves in terms a soldier could understand. Halleck sensed this, and now and again he was able to protect an officer who did not sense it, so that the man’s services could be saved for the Union cause.

  He was sensing it this fall in connection with Brigadier General C. F. Smith, the white-mustachioed old Regular who commanded at Paducah. Smith was in trouble, as November moved on to December, and the trouble almost drove him out of the war; and this would have been too bad, because Smith had talents which the Union badly needed, and he was prepared to exercise them.

  Smith was Old Army. He ran his post the way the regulations said a post ought to be run—an Army inspector, visiting Paducah that fall, reported that this was the most soldierly and the best disciplined place he had seen in all the West—and as a result he trod on the toes of innumerable ardent Northerners. His own men had not caught on to him, yet, and his insistence on drill, on the use of spade and ax to build fortifications, and on the precise observance of what the book said enlisted men ought to do, seemed unfeeling and harsh. Once some of Smith’s men descended on a house whose occupants had hoisted a Rebel flag, when some Confederate officers visited Paducah under flag of truce, and prepared to take the place apart; Smith went around in person, dispersed the rioters, and next day issued orders denouncing the whole business as a grave breach of duty, mutinous in spirit. He was believed to be too lenient with Kentucky slaveowners, and out of all this came charges that he was actually disloyal to the Union cause. Not long after the Belmont fight Halleck got an indignant if somewhat incoherent letter from a citizen of Paducah drawing up a bill of particulars:

  Complain of Gen Smiths inactivity. That he permitted the rebels to murder a man—that he does not confiscate provisions bot for the rebel army—or only in part—That he protects rebels whilst union men suffer—and the soldiers almost ready to rise against his policy—with affidavit before J. P.2

  Similar complaints seem to have gone to Washington, and late in November the War Department apparently was prepared to remove Smith from his command. But Halleck kept his balance. When the frantic Paducah letter reached him Halleck simply endorsed it Respectfully referred to Brig. Gen. Smith for his remarks and sent it to Paducah, in the belief that Smith ought to be allowed to get into the record any reply he cared to make. Halleck also telegraphed McClellan (who now commanded all of the Federal Armies) insisting that Smith was loyal and that he was needed where he was. The effort to get Smith out failed, but the mere fact that it had been made, and that responsible people in Washington had paid attention to it, wounded the old soldier deeply. When he wrote to Halleck’s assistant adjutant general thanking Halleck for his support, Smith burst out:

  What am I to think of those in authority who, at the say-so of political tricksters, condemn one of my age, character, genl repu, and services without the slightest opportunity of self-defense. I ask myself who is safe.… Until this Civil War is over I shall to my
best ability, serve in any capacity, under any commander, where chance may place me, but on its conclusion I shall certainly, from a sense of self-respect, retire from the service of a government where to be suspected merely is to be damned. I write under a strong sense or injury rec’d, both in Washington last April and here.

  This was not all of it. An Indianapolis man signing himself simply “A friend of justice” wrote to Smith on December 2 saying that men in the 11th Indiana were sending home word that Smith was disloyal, and adding that these reports undoubtedly originated with one of Smith’s subordinates, the brand-new Brigadier General from Indiana, Lew Wallace, who years later would write a novel called Ben Hur. Smith knew better—he had taken Wallace under his wing when Wallace first came to camp, and Wallace was one of his greatest admirers—and now he simply passed the letter on to Wallace, who returned it with an informal note remarking that “the peculiar manner in which the writer gives me ‘fits’ satisfied me that he is what the Yankees call ‘a darnation smart chap.’” Smith knew well enough where the trouble lay, and a bit later he wrote to a friend that “a poor devil as a man or as a soldier by the name of Paine (Brig. Genl) hatched a base conspiracy to oust me from command on the ground of—everything, I don’t know what—disloyalty, etc., etc.… Thanks to the manliness and just appreciation of me by Genl. Halleck, who denounced the whole thing as a base conspiracy among my subordinates, the order” (the projected War Department order deposing Smith as commander at Paducah) “was revoked and Paine banished to Bird’s Point on the Mississippi.”3