Grant Moves South

by Bruce Catton

As a dealer in leather goods, Jesse thought he might as well be selling harness to Grant’s army, and Grant had to warn him that he would do nothing to help him: “… it is necessary both to my efficiency for the public good and my own reputation that I should keep clear of government contracts.” He also had to refuse to provide a pass through the lines for a man recommended to him by Jesse, and he found Jesse’s loquacity about his soldier-son a problem. Late in November he wrote Jesse frankly about this, and in the course of his letter he set forth succinctly his own attitude on the slavery issue:

  I do not write you about plans, or the necessity of what has been done or what is doing because I am opposed to publicity in these matters. Then too you are very much disposed to criticize unfavorably from information received through the public press, a portion of which I am sorry to see can look at nothing favorably that does not look to a war upon slavery. My inclination is to whip the rebellion into submission, preserving all constitutional rights. If it cannot be whipped in any other way than through a war against slavery, let it come to that legitimately. If it is necessary that slavery should fall that the Republic may continue its existence, let slavery go. But that portion of the press that advocates the beginning of such a war now, are as great enemies to their country as if they were open and avowed secessionists.26

  Julia Grant remembered that Cairo was made no more cheerful by the fact that the muddy Ohio was swollen and angry. Yet she and the General were happy there. They had compared notes about the strange vision which she had seen at the moment when Grant was in greatest peril at Belmont; it had been vaguely like an earlier experience, in which something like second sight had been her lot. At the beginning of the war, when Grant was looking for a place where his military training might be of use to the government, he had gone to Ohio, to see if young General McClellan might have a place for him on his staff, and when he left Galena he told Julia to open any important-looking letters that arrived. During his absence she had three times dreamed of opening some mailed parcel and of seeing a sparkle of bright stars within, and she had supposed this might mean that her mother was sending her a certain ring which she owned. Then, one day, there came a letter addressed to Colonel U. S. Grant. Thinking nothing of the unusual title, she had opened it—to find a sheet of vellum set off by the great seal of the State of Illinois, which was spangled with shining stars. She remembered the recurring dream and looked at the document; it was the commission which made Grant Colonel of the 21st Illinois Infantry.…

  That her husband was moving on to some place high and important, Julia Grant had no doubt in the world. She took great pride in watching him review troops in the camps around Cairo; the fresh new regiments, marching past with new flags, in uniforms whose rich blue was still unweathered, made a pageant which, as she confessed years later, moved her more deeply than any other military displays she saw in all the war … even though he had here but a handful of untaught regiments and she would within a few years see him, as Commanding General of all the nation’s soldiers, take the salute of whole armies of hard veterans. She remembered, too, that Cairo was the only headquarters town in the war where Grant had a really comfortable mess.27

  Dr. Brinton saw a good deal of Grant in those days. He remembered that many letters went across Grant’s desk, written by loyal folk in Illinois who wanted to get in touch with relatives in the South. Grant was willing to let them write, but he was careful about the chance that military secrets might be disclosed and not all letters were passed. A Philadelphia doctor wrote to Brinton, asking that a letter he wanted to send inside the Confederate lines be passed without reading; on his word of honor, it contained nothing improper. Brinton asked Grant about it, and Grant said that “for form’s sake” he would ask Brinton to take a look at the letter and assume responsibility for it—if Brinton did this, Grant said, Grant would pass the letter. Brinton looked and to his horror found the letter jammed with classified military information. He told Grant about it, and tossed the letter into the fire. Grant smiled dryly and remarked, “I expected as much.”

  Brinton found himself deeply drawn to Grant. Once, during Grant’s temporary absence, McClernand countermanded some rule Brinton had drawn up governing the military hospitals. Brinton quietly told the hospital people to ignore McClernand’s order, and on Grant’s return told Grant about it.

  Grant looked at the papers and said, “Doctor, this is a very serious business.”

  Brinton replied: “General, when you entrusted to me, as your medical director, the care of the invalids of your command, you said to me, ‘Doctor, take care of my sick and wounded to the best of your ability. Don’t worry over regulations.’ Now, General, I have done this to the best of my ability. If I have done right you will support me; if I have done wrong you know what to do with me.”

  Grant looked at the papers again and then wrote an endorsement: “The object of having a medical director is that he shall be supreme in his department. The decision of Surgeon Brinton is sustained.”

  To Brinton this action seemed “very noble,” and he wrote that “my veneration for his character and my strong personal affection for him dated from that interview.” Ever afterward, he said, he was confident that Grant was the man who would finally win the war.28

  Somewhat similar was the feeling of the paymaster who used to hear the children singing hymns on Sundays. He liked Grant’s plain-as-an-old-shoe appearance, the common Army blouse he wore with no sign of rank except the starred straps tacked to the shoulders, the devotion to his family which, the paymaster felt, “won for him the respect and admiration of all with whom he came in contact.” Trying to sum everything up, the officer wrote: “The one great virtue that marked General Grant’s character as superior to others was that in proportion to his increased responsibility and care came increased ability to act, increased power to meet the emergency.”29

  Even the Leonard Swett who had had difficulties with Grant over supply contracts found the General a frank and friendly sort. Visiting Cairo (and battling vigorously for contracts which Grant would not approve), Swett got the General to talk about the big fight at Belmont, and he liked the way Grant admitted that at the crucial moment of the battle he had lost control over his troops. Swett thought this was a point in Grant’s favor; it was refreshing, he said, to meet “one of those big men who wouldn’t lie out of a scrape.”

  The soldiers seem to have noticed that Grant was a good family man, and to the big 64-pounder in the left flank battery at Fort Holt they gave the name “Lady Grant.”30

  CHAPTER SIX

  Limited Objectives

  At the end of 1861, what happened in eastern Tennessee might seem to be of no concern to U. S. Grant. East Tennessee was far removed both from his own military district and from the military department to which his district belonged. His responsibilities were limited, and they required him to look south, not east. But 1861 was the year of preparation, the year in which a singular tangle of conflicting strategic plans, personal rivalries and the slowly emerging imperatives of civil war would presently bring forth new opportunities and new actions. Indirectly but effectively, the fact that eastern Tennessee was putting its own pressure on events in the West would have much to do with the subsequent career of the Brigadier General commanding at Cairo.

  It had begun a good deal earlier. Somewhere around October 1, Lincoln wrote out a lengthy “Memorandum for a Plan of Campaign,” specifying that in the very near future—within a few weeks, if that could be managed—“I wish a movement made to seize and hold a point of the railroad connecting Virginia and Tennessee, near the Mountain pass called Cumberland Gap.” There would presently be a Federal sortie down the Atlantic coast, an amphibious operation which, by November 7, would take possession of Port Royal, South Carolina, as a base for the blockading fleet and a possible take-off point for operations into the Confederate interior. It seemed to the President that this move and the drive through Cumberland Gap ought to be simultaneous, “and that, in the meantime, pre
paration, vigilant watching and the defensive only” should be followed elsewhere.1

  With this view the General in Chief, George B. McClellan, agreed. McClellan was carefully getting ready for an offensive in Virginia, aimed at Richmond, and it seemed to him essential for the success of this program that the Tennessee railroad line be severed.2 The idea also appealed strongly to the people of East Tennessee themselves, who were strongly Unionist in sentiment and who were more than willing to get into the fight if the government at Washington would provide a little help. Living in isolation south of the long rampart of the Cumberland Mountains and feeling no sympathy for the separatist aspirations of the prosperous slaveholders in the western part of the state, these East Tennesseans constituted a potential Union asset near the heart of the Confederacy. There were like-minded folk near them, in the North Carolina mountains and in northern Georgia; the railroad line that came east from Chattanooga, through Knoxville and on into Virginia, was vital to the Confederacy’s existence; with a little help these mountain folk could cut the eastern tidewater off from the west and provide a rallying point for any Union sentiment there might be in the South. Lincoln may have overstated the case, a little later, when he said that once a Federal force was firmly established in East Tennessee the Confederacy would be doomed to perish “like an animal with a thorn in its vitals,” but in his intense anxiety to get such a campaign started he was at least recognizing a political and military opportunity of the first magnitude.

  This imperative, then, hung over Federal strategists in the west: get an army through the Cumberland Gap, destroy the Confederacy’s east-west communications, and arm and sustain the tough Southern mountaineers who were prepared to die for the Union. There were just two problems. One was imposed by geography. The road to and beyond the Gap was long and very bad, leading through barren country where a moving army would have immense difficulty supporting itself. The other problem centered in the brain of the austere, methodical, intellectual soldier who commanded Federal forces in Kentucky, Brigadier General Don Carlos Buell.

  Buell did not believe in the project. He did not consider himself ready to make a move of any sort this fall, and when he did move he did not want to move through those rugged mountains. The bulk of the Confederate power in the west lay along the line running from Bowling Green, in central Kentucky, over to Columbus, on the Mississippi, and by the books this was the only proper objective for a major offensive. (That the books had been prepared by men wholly ignorant of the special problems which would be raised by a civil war in America was unfortunately a point Buell was not willing to take into account.) To strike the main Confederate force would bring difficulties of its own, because the Cumberland River, rolling northwest from the great Confederate supply base at Nashville, came through the exact center of the Rebel line, and the Cumberland marked the western limit of Buell’s territory. Everything to the west, as far as Kentucky and Tennessee were concerned, was under Halleck’s control, and the offensive Buell was thinking about could be made only through close co-operation between Buell and Halleck.3 That co-operation, as events were to prove, would be extremely hard to establish.

  Officially, however—as far as the President and the General in Chief could make military policy official—the Number One objective was an expedition through Cumberland Gap, and the people of eastern Tennessee assumed (to their cost) that it was going to take place immediately. Some two thousand of them had already filtered across the line into southeastern Kentucky, where they had been formed into Federal regiments by Brigadier General S. P. Carter, a native of East Tennessee and a former naval officer. Behind them, in the more open country below the mountains, other Tennesseans were rising in revolt, trying to destroy the Confederacy’s all-important railroad line in the belief that Union troops would presently be on hand to protect them. Arming themselves as well as they could, they burned bridges and they tore up track, and by November they were giving Confederate patriots much cause for alarm. Early in the month the president of the East Tennessee and Virginia Railroad telegraphed Confederate Secretary of War Judah Benjamin that he had evidence that these bands were ready to “destroy or take possession of the whole line from Bristol to Chattanooga,” and he said that unless the protection of Confederate troops was quickly provided “transportation over my road of army supplies will be an utter impossibility.” Two days later the superintendent of this road notified President Davis that several bridges had been burned and that the country was “in great excitement and terror”; a Confederate officer at Knoxville reported that two thousand Unionists were under arms, five bridges were down, and there seemed to be “a general uprising in all the counties.” Governor Isham Harris of Tennessee sadly wrote Davis on November 12 that things were really bad: “The burning of railroad bridges in east Tennessee shows a deep-seated spirit of rebellion in that section. Union men are organizing. This rebellion must be crushed out instantly.” Harris would send state troops to the scene, but he begged Davis to send regulars from western Virginia. From Jonesborough, in eastern Tennessee, a correspondent told Davis that “Civil War has broken out at length,” and said that the epidemic of bridge burning was “occasioned by the hope that Federal troops would be here in a few days from Kentucky.” The railroad president supplemented his earlier report by saying that armed Unionists were massing to destroy the long bridges at Watauga and Strawberry Plains, and he warned: “If these two bridges are burned our road stops.”4

  Federal troops did not come; Confederate troops did; the rebellion was put down with a heavy hand; some of the leading bridge-burners were hanged, and others were imprisoned. But although order was restored, Confederate officers on the scene wrote that the whole section was incurably hostile to the Confederate government. One commander reported: “I think that we have effected something—have done some good; but whenever a foreign force enters this country be it soon or late three-fourths of the people will rise to join them.” Most of the male inhabitants, he said, had fled to the mountains, and when Confederate troops appeared the women who had been left behind were “throwing themselves on the ground and wailing like savages. Indeed, the population is savage.”5

  This was the background for Lincoln’s insistence that a Union Army be sent down through the Cumberland Gap. McClellan and Buell were intimate—most of their letters to each other began “Dear Friend,” even when they wrote on official business—and McClellan did his best to make Buell see that the political factor might affect the military. McClellan tried to make it clear:

  Were the population among which you are to operate wholly or generally hostile it is probable that Nashville should be your first and principal objective point. It so happens that a large majority of the inhabitants of eastern Tennessee are in favor of the Union. It therefore seems proper that you should remain on the defensive on the line from Louisville to Nashville while you throw the mass of your forces by rapid marches by Cumberland Gap or Walker’s Gap on Knoxville in order to occupy the railroad at that point and thus enable the loyal citizens of eastern Tennessee to rise while you at the same time cut off the railroad communication between eastern Virginia and the Mississippi.6

  But Buell could not be moved. In a sense, he finally had his way; that is, the Federal blow in the west was at last directed against Confederate strength rather than against Confederate weakness. But the war was beginning to move faster than Buell had anticipated. From waiting at his headquarters in Louisville, studying things carefully and making detailed and balanced long-range plans, Buell before long would find himself making a desperate attempt to catch up with an offensive that had slipped out from under him. The Tennessee campaign would follow the general lines he had laid down, but he himself would have progressively less and less to do with it. With all of his caution and his foresight, Buell was simply setting things up for Grant.

  Buell was well aware that his command was not as solid as it looked from Washington. In a report which he sent to the Adjutant General just before Christmas he poin
ted out that although he had an aggregate of 70,000 troops in his department, only 57,000 of these were to be reported as “present for duty, equipped,” and that figure included a number of totally untrained regiments; his efficient force he believed was no more than 50,000. Discipline was poor. There were 5500 officers and men absent on leave, and 1100 more absent without leave, and Buell felt that “there is not much difference between the two classes.” In a “Dear Friend” letter to McClellan he touched on his troubles with the state governors, from whom he was getting his troops. They tried to keep control over their regiments, the governor of Ohio “evidently looks upon all Ohio troops as his army,” and the governor of Indiana had raised a company of cavalry to act as bodyguard to one of Buell’s generals and had shipped it off to camp without bothering to report its existence to department headquarters. Most colonels and brigadiers seemed to have their own personal establishments, and Buell wanted some replacements: “If you have any unoccupied brigadiers—not my seniors—send six or eight, even though they should be no better than marked poles.”7

  For a time Buell tried to keep the East Tennessee move in mind. He assured McClellan just before the year 1861 ended that he definitely intended to send 12,000 men and three batteries down into East Tennessee, just as soon as proper preparations could be made, although he could not yet set a date for it. But he still felt that the big effort ought to be made in the western part of the state, and the center of this line, where the railroad which connected Columbus with Bowling Green crossed the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers, stuck him as “the most important strategic point in the whole field of operations.”8

  Buell’s appraisal of the situation was somewhat warped by the fact that, like most generals at the time, he overestimated the strength of the forces opposing him. He lacked the emotional pessimism which had driven his predecessor, Sherman, into temporary retirement, but he did not yet realize how weak Albert Sidney Johnston really was. Aside from 4000 poorly armed and equipped soldiers who were guarding Cumberland Gap, Johnston had no more than 50,000 men of all arms at his disposal, and he was constantly begging the Richmond government (with very little success) to send him more troops. To impress the Yankees, meanwhile, he put on a bold front, circulating stories about immense levies and strong reinforcements, and these stories were believed. Not for the last time in this war, Confederate soldiers who did not exist exerted an influence on Federal strategy.