Grant Moves South

by Bruce Catton

  On June 1, Grant wrote to Washburne asking him to intercede with the Secretary of War to win promotion for a young Lieutenant Dickey, son of the colonel of the 4th Illinois cavalry and brother-in-law of the late General W. H. L. Wallace. He then remarked: “I leave here in a day or two for Covington, Ky., on a short leave of absence. I may write you again from there if I do not visit Washington in person.”22 The projected Washington visit may conceivably have been in connection with the attempt to get a transfer to some other department, but the trip to Covington—where Jesse Grant lived, and where Julia and the children spent a good deal of time during the war—does not sound like a momentous step that would have brought Grant’s military career to a close. In any case, a little more than a fortnight after writing this letter Grant sent Washburne another one, which tells how he came to abandon the trip north.

  Your letter of the 8th inst. addressed to me at Covington Ky. has just reached.—At the time the one was written to which it is an answer I had leave to go home, or to Covington [here Grant added “for a few days,” then crossed the phrase out] but Gen Halleck requested me to remain for a few days. Afterwards when I spoke of going he asked that I should remain a little longer if my business was not of pressing importance. As I really had no business, and had not asked leave on such grounds, I told him so and that if my services were required I would not go atal. This settled my leave for the present, and for the war, so long as my services are required I do not wish to leave.

  He added that he would presently be going to Memphis, where his headquarters were to be for the immediate future.23

  It is possible to read more strain into the Grant-Halleck relationship in the spring of 1862 than really existed. Grant’s feeling toward Halleck became extremely bitter after the war, but there was no bitterness in evidence during the war, and Grant apparently did not then feel that Halleck had seriously mistreated him. He undoubtedly described his emotional condition accurately when, a month after the letter just cited, he told Washburne that Halleck “is a man of gigantic intellect and well studied in the profession of arms. He and I have had several little spats but I like him and respect him nevertheless.”24 Halleck, for his part, seems to have had nothing in particular against Grant: he simply was, and for a long time remained, very lukewarm in respect to this subordinate, not so much because Grant had got into his black books as because he himself was a dismally bad judge of men. The only proof that is needed, as far as this point is concerned, is the fact that in the summer of 1862 Halleck could write: “It is the strangest thing in the world to me that this war has developed so little talent in our generals. There is not a single one in the west fit for a great command.”25 When he wrote that, Halleck was fresh from a command that included, among others, Grant, Sherman, Thomas and Sheridan!

  Halleck underrated Grant, but so did almost everyone else. There was a rather general impression, through most of 1862, that Grant was nothing more than an earnest, uninspired plodder who had blundered his way into certain victories. Halleck had planned to replace him early in the winter, had been reluctant to keep him in command in the pre-Shiloh period, and indeed was to make one more effort to put another man in his place; but it seems likely that all of this reflects nothing much more than acceptance of the common opinion regarding the unimpressive-looking soldier who could never manage to appear like a great strategist.26

  Meanwhile, the military picture took a sudden turn. Beauregard had been sparring and running a long bluff, in his effort to keep the Federals away from Corinth; he adopted various devices, including the trick of running empty trains into the town, after dark, with much whistling and chuff-chuffing, with the garrison cheering each arrival, which led Federal scouts to report the steady arrival of heavy reinforcements; but he was hopelessly overmatched, and at the end of May he got his army and most of his supplies out, headed south, and let the Federals have the strategic spot which they wanted so badly. To the last moment, the invaders were misled. At 1:20 A.M. on May 30, John Pope sent Halleck word that Beauregard was being heavily reinforced, and warned: “I have no doubt, from all appearances, that I shall be attacked in heavy force at daylight”; five hours later Pope realized that he had been cruelly deceived and he ordered his skirmishers forward, while the explosion of ammunition dumps which Beauregard had been unable to salvage sent huge clouds of smoke into the morning air. Before 9 o’clock Pope held Corinth, the United States flag was hoisted over the courthouse, and Pope informed Halleck that the Confederates “evacuated yesterday and last night. They marched down the Mobile railroad.”27 An officer in the 3rd Iowa wrote that he and his comrades had “an undescribable feeling of mortification that the enemy with all his stores and ordnance had escaped,” and Colonel John Smith from Galena wrote angrily that he hoped “all that twaddle about Grant” would stop, because “this biggest of all blunders the Commanding Genl. is responsible for.” Years later, Grant recalled that officers and men were disappointed, since “they could not see how the mere occupation of places was to close the war while large and effective Rebel armies existed.” He himself believed that a two-day campaign could have turned the trick.28

  In Richmond, Jefferson Davis was indignant because Beauregard had not put up a fight, and he called him sharply to account for it, replacing him in command shortly afterward with Braxton Bragg; but Beauregard’s position had been hopeless from the start, and he had done all anyone could have expected of him in getting his army away uncaptured. At his peak strength he had had no more than 52,000 effectives, of all arms; when Corinth was occupied Halleck commanded 128,315 in the Corinth area, not to mention 22,000 more at Nashville, Cumberland Gap and in northern Alabama,29 and the whole Confederate position in the West was rapidly crumbling. Far to the south the Navy had opened the mouth of the Mississippi, smashing its way past Forts Jackson and St. Philip and occupying New Orleans, which was now held by Federal troops under Major General Ben Butler. The Navy had had similar success in the upper river, destroying a Confederate fleet in a pitched battle near Memphis and occupying both that city and Fort Pillow. Federal troops under General J. M. Schofield held all of Missouri, and another Federal army led by General Samuel R. Curtis, which had beaten the Confederates in the battle of Pea Ridge early in the spring, was moving eastward across Arkansas toward the city of Helena, eighty miles below Memphis. The Confederates still occupied Vicksburg, and controlled the river from there down to Baton Rouge, but Rear Admiral David Farragut was bringing his salt-water fleet up the river and he seemed likely to repeat at Vicksburg the triumph he had won below New Orleans.

  When Halleck reported the occupation of Corinth, Secretary Stanton telegraphed: “I suppose you contemplate the occupation of Vicksburg and clearing out the Mississippi to New Orleans,” and Halleck replied that if the Navy did not take Vicksburg unaided “I shall send an expedition for that purpose as soon as I can re-enforce General Curtis.” This message Halleck sent on June 12; two weeks later he still hoped that the Navy could take Vicksburg, but “if not it will probably be necessary to fit out an expedition from the army.” Apparently Halleck really did have some such expedition in mind—for a time, at least—and Grant hoped that he himself would be ordered to lead it, but the expedition never materialized.30

  The expedition never materialized because Federal strategy in the West began to sag just when the opportunity was greatest. It sagged because the old desire to occupy territory of strategic importance kept the high command from realizing that if enemy armies were pulverized the strategic importance of cities, railroad lines and the like would take care of itself.

  Pope was ordered to pursue the retreating Confederates, and he reported that the woods were full of Rebel stragglers and that the enemy force seemed to be disintegrating, but he was not allowed to keep up the pressure. Halleck said frankly that if the Confederates would just go as far as Okolona—a town on the Mobile and Ohio railroad, sixty miles south of Corinth—he would be satisfied, because “the repair of the railroads is now the great objec
t to be attended to.”31 Halleck had a number of weighty problems on his mind, and the books from which he had gained his strategic wisdom had somehow failed to teach him that the destruction of the last sizable Confederate army in the West would solve all of those problems for him.

  He did have an extensive railroad network to maintain. There was the Mobile and Ohio, coming down to Corinth and the deep south from Columbus, Kentucky; and there was the Memphis and Ohio, running northeast from Memphis to Kentucky, crossing the Mobile and Ohio at Humboldt, Tennessee. There was also the all-important Memphis and Charleston, which came east from Memphis to Corinth and ran thence to Chattanooga, where it connected the western Confederacy with a line running on to Virginia. There was, finally, the Mississippi Central, which left the Mobile and Ohio at Jackson, Tennessee, came south to cross the Memphis and Charleston at Grand Junction, halfway between Corinth and Memphis, and then struck south through Mississippi all the way to New Orleans. If the Federals proposed to occupy Tennessee and northern Mississippi and Alabama it was vital to get and keep these lines in shape, especially so since the approach of summer meant that the Tennessee River would be at low-water stage, with reduction of steamboat traffic.

  But the railroads were only part of it. Corinth had to be fortified and garrisoned. As Halleck said, there must be reinforcements for Curtis, in Arkansas. Troops were needed to occupy Memphis—Sherman and his division were sent there as soon as Corinth was taken, and they took possession of the city by June 1432—and, weighing more than all else, there was East Tennessee: East Tennessee, where Union adherents had been begging for Federal troops for six months and more, and to which President Lincoln now was firmly directing General Halleck’s attention. A small force under General G. W. Morgan was about to occupy Cumberland Gap, but it could go no farther unaided; what was called for now was a march on Chattanooga itself, and this march Halleck ordered Buell to make. As it happened, a division from Buell’s army had gone into northern Alabama while the Shiloh-Corinth campaign was in progress, and this division, commanded by a former astronomer named Ormsby Mitchel, held a segment of the Memphis and Charleston between Tuscumbia, fifty miles east of Corinth, and Stevenson, forty miles west of Chattanooga. It seemed to Halleck and Buell that Buell’s army might well follow this line in its move. Bridges had been burned, and these must be repaired; the line was exposed to Rebel guerillas, and regulars operating from Alabama and Mississippi, and troops would be needed to guard the repair parties and to give continuing protection to the things repaired; and, all in all, the movement to Chattanooga—to which Washington had assigned a priority second only to that held by McClellan’s march on Richmond itself—looked like an extended and intricate operation.33 Clearly, more than enough was going on to engage all of a department commander’s attention.

  But the fact did remain that the only really sizable Confederate Army in all the West was the one which, passing from Beauregard to Bragg, was now being permitted to reorganize and refit at Tupelo, Mississippi, a place not far from the Okolona which Halleck had specified as the point to which he hoped it would be willing to retire.34 Everything the Confederacy had west of the Alleghenies depended on that army, because if it ceased to exist Halleck’s troops could go anywhere they chose to go—to East Tennessee, to Vicksburg, to the Gulf, or around-about all the way to Richmond if necessary. A whole map full of strategic lines and places could not be as important as this.

  The old pattern was being repeated. After Fort Donelson there had been delay and a regrouping, after Shiloh there had been more of it, and it was the same story now; to consolidate its “conquest” of empty land, the high command ignored the final victory that might be won by relentlessly hounding a beaten army into the last ditch. Holding an enormous advantage in man power and equipment, the Federal commanders both in the East and in the West—for McClellan was moving on Richmond with time-killing deliberation—persisted in acting as if the Federal government and its opponent were evenly matched. Its greatest single military asset, the power to set and follow its own course, compelling the enemy to one desperate expedient after another to avoid outright annihilation, was forgotten.

  All of this, at bottom, was probably little more than a simple and understandable reflection of the Army’s peacetime experience. Ever since there had been a United States Army, it had been operated on a constabulary basis, with many isolated posts and forts grouped together into departments under localized control. When campaign time arrived, the Army would be assembled from these posts and made into a mobile force; when the campaign ended, it would be redistributed all over the country, not to be reassembled until there was to be another campaign. This was the system that was being followed now. As a result, each victory was followed by a long breathing spell. There was no real continuity to any program; a campaign would break up into isolated segments, and no advantage was ever followed up properly.35 In a real sense the story of Grant’s development as a soldier is the story of his attempt to break out of this crippling tradition and apply the country’s strength in a remorseless, continuing pressure.

  Halleck’s first act, once pursuit of the retreating Confederates had been given up, was to revoke the order which had divided his army into right wing, left wing, center and reserve.36 Grant, Buell and Pope resumed their original commands; Thomas returned to his infantry division; and Grant asked and got permission to establish his district headquarters in Memphis. (A rather odd request, this, since it would put him on the western edge of what would clearly be an active district. It is just possible that Grant preferred to operate at a little distance from Halleck, whose headquarters would remain in Corinth.) He set out for Memphis on July 20, riding with a small cavalry escort through a country that was by no means safe for small parties of Federals; narrowly escaped capture by armed Confederates, reached Memphis after three days, and told Halleck no more than that the weather had been warm and the roads excellent. Memphis he found wholly unreconstructed, and he reported: “Affairs in this city seem to be in rather bad order, secessionists governing much in their own way.” However, he had set up a post-command system and provost marshals, and—just as he had written in the early days in Missouri—he confidently asserted that “in a few days I expect to have everything in good order.”

  Local clergymen insisted on offering prayers for the President of the Confederate States, and refused to pray for the President of the United States, and some of Grant’s subordinates felt that their prayers needed editing, but Grant was not prepared to go very far in this direction. On the day after his arrival, his headquarters sent a warning note to General Hurlbut, who apparently was eager to take steps: “I am directed by Major General Grant to say that you can compel all clergymen within your lines to omit from their church services any portion you may deem treasonable, but you will not compel the insertion or substitution of anything.” More important was the business of preparing to get reinforcements over to General Curtis, in Arkansas. These would have to go by steamboat, up the White River, through country full of Confederate guerillas, and after consultation with the Navy’s Captain Phelps Grant felt this could be done by preparing light-draft river steamers, with some protection for the boilers, howitzers for armament, and an infantry escort to rout sharpshooters out of hiding places.37

  During his time of comparative idleness in the Corinth campaign Grant had been doing a good deal of thinking about the way the war was developing and the principles that should govern a Federal commander, and he was beginning to arrive at certain conclusions. Earlier, he had believed that the Confederacy would collapse once it had lost a few battles; now he was coming to see that nothing but complete conquest would do, and although he still felt that many Southerners were compelled to support the Confederacy by their own fears of what would happen to them if they did not, he was beginning to believe in hard war pursued to the limit. Just before leaving for Memphis he had given Washburne a glimpse of his appraisal of the situation in his own territory:

  Fast Western Tennesse
e is being reduced to working order and I think with the introduction of the Mails, trade, and the assurance that we can hold it, it will become loyal, or at least law abiding. It will not do however for our arms to meet with any great reverse and still expect this result. The masses this day are more disloyal in the south, from fear of what might befall them, in case of defeat to the Union cause than from any dislike to the Government. One week to them (after giving in their adhesion to our laws) would be worse under the so-called Confederate Government than a year of Martial Law administered by this army.

  He went on, then, to spell out the duty of a soldier as he saw it:

  It is hard to say what would be the most wise policy to pursue toward this people, but for a soldier his duty is plain. He is to obey the orders of all those placed over him and whip the enemy wherever he meets him. “If he can” should only be thought of after an unavoidable defeat.38

  When he wrote his Memoirs, twenty years later, he elaborated on the change that came over his thinking at this time. Until Shiloh, he said, he had supposed that one decisive victory would defeat the Confederacy. Afterward, however, “I gave up the idea of saving the Union except by complete conquest.” This affected not only his attitude toward enemy armies in the field but also his conduct in respect to the civilian population and the Southland’s material resources:

  I regarded it as humane to both sides to protect the persons of those found at their homes, but to consume everything that could be used to support or supply armies. Protection was still continued over such supplies as were within lines held by us and which we expected to continue to hold; but such supplies within the reach of Confederate armies I regarded as much contraband as arms or ordnance stores. Their destruction was accomplished without bloodshed and tended to the same result as the destruction of armies. I continued this policy to the close of the war.… This policy I believe exercised a material influence in hastening the end.39