by Bruce Catton
When Thomas won his fight at Logan’s Cross Roads the era of static warfare came to an end, and if the point was still missed in Washington it was visible from end to end of Kentucky. Farther west, while Thomas was making his campaign, the Federals had confirmed their earlier suspicions that there was a soft spot in the Confederate line, where the Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers came north across the Kentucky-Tennessee border, and this soft spot demanded attack: an attack which was also demanded by the men who had discovered it and who must eventually do the fighting, General Grant and the rugged sailor who represented the salt-water navy on the rivers of the Middle West, Flag Officer Andrew Foote. Even Halleck had seen it; he had written to Washington about it, and just as McClellan was signing the excellent letter which called for concerted action Halleck was telling Grant and Foote to start up the Tennessee and do the things they had said they could do. In mid-January McClellan had warned Buell, “You have no idea of the pressure brought to bear here upon the Government for a forward movement.” Now the pressure was being wondrously intensified, and McClellan himself was the man who would feel it first.14
War Department thinking abruptly changed: evidenced by a singular trip through the Middle West made at the end of January by Assistant Secretary of War Scott.
Scott was an old crony of Cameron’s, and as vice-president of the Pennsylvania Railroad had been associated with Cameron in railroad operations. On this western trip he devoted himself to a study of the way in which a major part of the Army of the Potomac could be moved to Kentucky and used to complete the smashing of General Johnston’s line there. This project of course involved a complete reversal of all plans for an offensive in Virginia, and it was clearly worked out on Stanton’s orders and with at least the passive approval of General McClellan. On February 1, Scott sent Stanton his preliminary findings. By combining the rolling stock of four railroads, he said, it would be possible to send soldiers from Washington to Pittsburgh at the rate of 15,000 men a day. Within six days, 60,000 men and their equipment—artillery, cavalry, baggage, tents, munitions, and rations—could be placed on the Ohio River somewhere west of Pittsburgh. Next day he amplified it: in just over five days, using steamboats for the journey west of Pittsburgh, the army could be deposited at Covington, Kentucky, across the river from Cincinnati. As a railroad man, Scott had worked out the logistics with much care. He had talked to the Middle Western governors, and he had also discussed the business with General Buell, whom he considered “a very superior officer—calm, prudent and with great power to control.”
Buell told Scott that a column of “from 30 to 50,000 good soldiers from the Army of the Potomac” would enable the Federals to take and hold a good position between the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers at a point which would cut the railroad line connecting Johnston’s central position at Bowling Green with the Mississippi River stronghold at Columbus, Kentucky. Once this was done, Buell could destroy the Confederates at Bowling Green while Halleck disposed of the Rebel force at Columbus; meanwhile the Potomac column could advance up the rivers, Nashville could be occupied, and “with Nashville for a base of operations the so-called Southern Confederacy could be effectually divided, and with reasonable facilities our armies could soon be able to accomplish great work south and east of that center.”15
McClellan was interested. His friend Barlow warned him, on February 8, that Stanton definitely felt that McClellan ought to go to Kentucky, “if there is to be action there & none for the present in Va.”; it was Barlow’s belief that Stanton wanted McClellan to distinguish himself before the abolitionists pushed some other general into the limelight. Stanton told Scott that he had not really been able to impress the importance of the move on McClellan, but he hoped the man would come around before long; and McClellan was definitely warming up to the idea. Apparently early in February, McClellan wrote to Stanton: “Have you anything from Scott as to the means we can command in the way of moving troops westward by rail & water. My mind is more & more tending in that direction, tho’ not fully committed to it. But there should be no delay in ascertaining precisely what we can do should it become advisable to move in that direction. Please put the machinery in motion to ascertain exactly how many troops we can move per diem to Kentucky, how many days the transit would occupy, etc. Should we change the line I would wish to take about 70,000 infantry, 250 guns, 2500 cavalry—at least 3 bridge trains.” The words “I would wish to take” indicate clearly that McClellan was thinking of going west in person.16
The project hung in the air for a short time and then dissolved and was heard of no more. It dissolved because it suddenly became unnecessary, and for the best of reasons: someone else had already done what was being planned so elaborately. On the day when Scott talked with Buell about the great things that could be done if a Federal army moved up the rivers and cut the Columbus-Bowling Green railway line, General Grant and Flag Officer Foote captured Fort Henry, the Confederacy’s sole stronghold on the Tennessee, and Grant notified Halleck that he would move twelve miles cross country and take the Rebel fort at Dover, on the Cumberland. As an immediate result, Albert Sidney Johnston ordered his subordinates to prepare for the evacuation of both Bowling Green and Columbus. Before the month was out he would move to regroup his outnumbered forces in the state of Mississippi, just below the southern border of Tennessee.
2: Unconditional Surrender
A Belgian who traveled across Kentucky at the end of 1861 wrote that the Confederates who held Albert Sidney Johnston’s line were fantastic. They had nothing much in the way of uniforms, their weapons were antiquated, it was hard to tell officers from privates and equally hard to tell soldiers from civilians, and the visitor shuddered when he looked at these characters who brandished “their frightful knives” and who went about uncombed, unshaven, and unwashed. It seemed to the Belgian’s orderly European soul that they belonged to “a state of society but little to be desired,” and in their camps he saw more sickness and less discipline than he had seen among the Federals; yet somehow the men looked dangerous, for “their determination is truly extraordinary, and their hatred against the north terrible to look upon, there is something savage in it.” They believed that they were fighting for their homes, their families and their own precious lives, and they might be extraordinary fighters.1
The capabilities of these soldiers would be shown in many battles, and they would be just as dangerous as the Belgian imagined. But in this month of January they were in a desperately bad fix and General Johnston did not quite see how he was going to get them out of it.
General Johnston saw disaster coming. From the beginning he had had too much territory to defend and too few men to defend it with, and now the pay-off was at hand. Late in January he had predicted that the Federals would soon attack Fort Henry and Fort Donelson and then would move on Nashville, and there was not much he could do to stop them. The two forts were unfinished and undermanned, with no more than 4000 men between them; Johnston had only 23,000 men at Bowling Green, the strong point which marked the center of his line, and he felt compelled to send 8000 of these off to the vicinity of Clarksville, where the all-important railroad from Columbus crossed the Cumberland twenty-five miles upstream from Fort Donelson. He believed that Buell, who was obviously about to take the offensive, had 80,000 men; an estimate that was only a little too high, although more than a third of Buell’s men were by no means ready for action. Bowling Green was well fortified, and Johnston thought he could hold the place if Buell made a frontal assault, but there was little chance that Buell would do anything so foolish. He was much more likely to flank the Confederates out by coming up the Cumberland, and Johnston simply did not have the manpower to stop him.
The general complained, correctly, that “our people do not comprehend the magnitude of the danger that threatens,” and he begged Richmond to send him more troops. This, for a variety of reasons, most of them excellent, Richmond felt quite unable to do; it did, however, send him General Beauregard, who reache
d Bowling Green on February 4 and learned to his amazement that General Johnston had no more than half the men Beauregard supposed he had.2
As always, Beauregard was preceded by a great deal of tall talk, and when the Federals heard about his new assignment they understood that he was bringing fifteen Virginia regiments of infantry with him. This, to be sure, was not the case; but the fact that this false report came on ahead of him was one of the things that triggered the Federal offensive in Kentucky. If Beauregard, who was a host in himself, was bringing strong reinforcements, it would be well to strike before the reinforcements arrived; and this was an element in the thinking that sent Grant and Foote up the rivers into Tennessee.
At this distance that thinking is rather hard to trace. General Halleck, who commanded everything west of the Cumberland, had patiently explained to President Lincoln that too much haste would be ruinous, and he was not by nature impetuous. Still, he had sent Grant and Foote out to investigate the western end of General Johnston’s line, and Grant and Foote had seen weakness there and had been clamoring for action. Halleck did not especially want to act, he had a reserved opinion of General Grant (who had been typed as a rough-hewn man who drank too much) and he did not really have to listen to Foote, who was, although a naval officer, Halleck’s own subordinate, responsible for certain strange auxiliaries called gunboats. But Halleck had a sensitive ear and he had heard what the President and the Secretary of War were saying, and when he learned that Beauregard was bringing reinforcements he felt that something ought to be done quickly. So he told Grant and Foote to go ahead and try their luck.
Their luck was in. Grant and Foote came up to Fort Henry on February 6 and found that the place was a sham. It was inexpertly built on low ground and the Tennessee River was in flood; the high ground across the river, which the Confederates should have fortified in the first place, was largely unoccupied, its hillsides furrowed by the beginning of trenches but wholly harmless to invaders. Grant had brought 15,000 soldiers, and he put them ashore and marched up the two sides of the river to invest the fortifications and prepare for an assault, and Foote steamed up against the current and opened a preliminary bombardment. The fort collapsed almost at the first touch. Its commanding officer, Brigadier General Lloyd Tilghman, knew that the place was indefensible, and before Grant drew his lines Tilghman sent most of his men off to Fort Donelson, twelve miles to the east, staying himself with the handful retained to work the guns. He and the gunners made a good fight, putting one of Foote’s gunboats out of action, causing men to die amid flying splinters and scalding steam; but the Navy’s big guns broke his parapets, dismounted his guns and dismembered some of the gunners, and by early afternoon Tilghman could see that it was time to quit. He hauled down his flag and surrendered to the Navy while Grant’s army was still getting into position, and the Federals had gained one of the easiest and most significant victories of the entire war. The victory surprised its authors. Grant had supposed that his men would have to do a good deal of hard fighting, and Foote mildly confessed to Secretary Welles: “I made a bold dash at Fort Henry to inspire terror, & it succeeded.” A newspaper correspondent remarked acidly that “Gen. Grant evidently did not understand that Commodore Foote … believes in energetic action at close quarters,” and an infantryman said the soldiers “really felt sore at the sailors for their taking of the fort before we had a chance to help them.”3
The fall of Fort Henry left General Johnston in a desperate situation. The railway line was gone forever, the Tennessee River now was an undefended highway for the Federal invader, running all the way to northern Alabama—Foote sent Lieutenant S. L. Phelps and three unarmored gunboats ranging up the river as soon as the fort surrendered, to spread alarm all through the South—and General Johnston’s army, always inadequate, was broken squarely in half. When he consulted his lieutenants the day after the fort was taken, Johnston had no illusions about his prospects.
Johnston met with Beauregard, who was still appalled by his discovery of the essential weakness of the western army, and with his second-in-command at Bowling Green, Major General William J. Hardee, a solid officer who had written a textbook on tactics before the war: in Northern and Southern armies alike, untrained company officers were desperately trying to learn their new trade by studying Hardee. The Confederates found that they could do one of two unsatisfactory things—concentrate at Fort Donelson immediately and try to destroy Grant before he could be reinforced, or evacuate the fort at once and beat a speedy retreat to some place in southwestern Tennessee. The first looked a little too much like putting all of the eggs in one insecure basket—if this eastern half of Johnston’s severed army were lost the Confederacy itself would probably be lost shortly afterward—and yet the other choice was not inviting either. To retreat meant, unquestionably, the loss of Nashville, capital of Tennessee, a supply depot of vast importance and an industrial center of considerable consequence. Nashville had never been fortified, and even if it had been a Federal advance up the Tennessee would quickly make it untenable; if it was to be saved, the only place to save it was at Fort Donelson. Johnston had held his line, from the beginning, largely because he had convinced the Federals that he was much stronger than was actually the case. Unfortunately, the Confederacy also had come to believe the same thing. If it now lost Tennessee simply because a few gunboats had spent one morning bombarding one lonely fort, the shock to public morale would be disastrous.
He did what he thought was best, and the people who came around a bit later to complain that he was wrong never had to carry the load he was carrying on February 7, 1862; and it might be added that when the whole thing blew up in his face he did not offer excuses or blame somebody else. Johnston tried to go down the middle. He would put about half of the men he had available (starting with the 8000 at Clarksville) into Fort Donelson, in the thin hope that they could somehow beat Grant, Foote and the terrible gunboats—those gunboats, black monsters with slanting sides, slow-moving, fearfully armed, apparently irresistible—and with the rest he would retreat as fast as he could and as far as he had to. He told Beauregard to get over to Columbus and take charge of the western half of the army, to leave enough men to hold the Mississippi River forts and to take everybody else south in the hope that there could be a reunion somewhere along the southern border of Tennessee. Then he struck his tents and marched.
So the Confederates evacuated Bowling Green, while cautious Buell drew nigh to this empty stronghold with powerful misgivings. Of the fearsome fighting men whom he commanded, Johnston sent nearly half into Fort Donelson—not enough to defeat Grant, too many for his army to lose—and with the rest he went unhappily down to Nashville, looking for a haven and hoping for the best. The shadow of dark wings was over him. He was moving toward a place he had never heard of, a stumpy clearing on high ground above the Tennessee River near a bleak country meetinghouse known as Shiloh Church, where he had an appointment with a Yankee bullet: a collective appointment, so to speak, which he shared with thousands of others. When he rode out of Bowling Green he had just two months to live.
On the Federal side, General Grant waited for the infamous roads along the Tennessee to dry out a bit, and then he marched east to the tangled ridges overlooking the Cumberland River, where Fort Donelson and its inadequate trench system awaited him. The weather was warm and his men were jubilant, and as they got out of the mud and hit the good roads on high ground they went along brightly, tossing overcoats and blankets into the dead grass by the roadside, supposing that the weather would always be mild.
The whole business was just a little more than the Federal high command could digest. When General Buell learned that Halleck’s people were going to move up the rivers he wrote that the idea was strategically sound but that it was premature, poorly organized, undertaken without his consent. He sensed as well that the war might be moving out from under him. He had just explained to Washington that it was not possible to go through Cumberland Gap into East Tennessee, because the roads w
ere so bad and the country was so devoid of forage; yet even while Grant and Foote were on their way to Fort Henry he had sent a strange telegram to General Thomas, off to the east, asking impatiently: “What now is the condition of the roads? How soon could you march and how long do you suppose it would take you to reach Knoxville? Are your supplies accumulating in sufficient quantity for a start? How is the road in advance likely to be affected by the passage of successive trains? What dependence can you place in supplies along it, particularly forage? Do you hear of any organization of a force there?” (Nothing whatever came of this.) Halleck meanwhile was bombarding both Buell and McClellan with anxious messages saying that the crisis of the war was at hand, that he needed support, and that the whole western theater of operations ought to be under one man, who obviously should be General Halleck.4 And Grant moved on to Fort Donelson, while Foote took his ironclads back to the Ohio and came plugging up the Cumberland to attack the fort’s water batteries.
Grant was doing no more than follow a soldier’s instinct to get at the enemy and hit him. Originally, Fort Henry had been the objective. Once taken, it was to be fortified and held, and the blow at Fort Donelson was incidental; when he left Cairo to go up the Tennessee, Grant expected to be back at the base in a few days, and after Fort Henry surrendered Grant airily wired to Halleck: “I shall take and destroy Fort Donelson on the 8th and return to Fort Henry.” None of the Federals quite understood that the Confederate works on the Cumberland amounted to much, and the pre-battle planning, such as it was, usually mentioned the town of Dover rather than the fort itself.5 There was no way to know that Grant’s twelve-mile march from the Tennessee to the Cumberland was one of the epoch-making movements of the war.