by Shelby Foote
General Grant saw us out on parade two days ago and held up the entire column while he got down off his horse to look at Bango. He was always crazy about animals, even back in the old Georgetown days when I was a boy and he was driving a logging wagon for his father. He said Bango was the finest hound he'd ever seen.
You would not know old Useless Grant if you saw him now. I keep reminding myself he is the same one that came through home 20 years ago, just out of West Point that time he drilled the militia. He trembled when he gave commands & was so thin & pale, you could see he hated it. It’s even harder to connect him with the man that came back from being booted out of the Army for drinking & all the tales we heard about him in St Louis & out in Ill. The men all swear by him because he is a Fighter — & I think we ought to be proud he is from Georgetown.
It was the operation against Belmont last October in southeast Missouri across the river from Columbus, Kentucky, that first attracted public attention to Grant. He attacked the Confederates and routed them, but his men turned aside to loot the camp instead of pressing the attack, and the Rebels cowering under the riverbank had time to catch their breath. When reinforcements came from the opposite shore, they counterattacked and Grant retreated.
This was no victory. Strictly speaking, it wasn’t even a successful campaign. He just went out and came back, losing about as many as he killed. But the fact that struck everyone was that he had marched in dirty weather instead of waiting for fair, had kept his head when things went all against him, and had brought his command back to base with some real fighting experience under its belt.
By then we were pressing them all along the line. When Thomas in the east defeated Zollicoffer, wrecking his army, Grant moved against Middle Tennessee. Gunboats took Fort Henry by bombardment, and when that was done Grant marched twelve miles overland to Fort Donelson and forced its surrender in two days of hard fighting. The Rebels in the fort sent a note asking for terms. Grant wrote back: "No terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be expected. I propose to move immediately upon your works."
People back home went crazy with joy, ringing church bells and hugging each other on the street. That was when I joined up. Everybody knew the Donelson message by heart. "I propose to move immediately upon your works"—they said it in every imaginable situation until it got to be a joke. The nation had a new hero: Unconditional Surrender Grant, they called him. Best of all, however, the fall of the forts had flanked the enemy armies. The whole Confederate line caved in, from Kentucky to the Mississippi River. They fell back, and we followed. That was when General Halleck was put in command. I saw him once in St Louis; it was in February when I went down after my commission. Old Brains, they called him. He looked a little like an owl and he had a peculiar habit of hugging himself across the chest and scratching his elbows when he was worried. He had plenty to worry him now. Buell moved slowly, careful lest old foxy Johnston turn on him with something out of his bag of tricks, and Grant went off to Nashville (—God knows why, Halleck said; it was clear out of his department) and would not acknowledge any messages sent him. About this time Halleck got an anonymous letter saying Grant had slipped back to his old habits and was off on a bender. So Halleck took Grant's army away from him and gave it to General Smith.
O, my darling it is six weeks today this very Sunday I’ve have been apart. Does it not seem longer? That day that I’ve marched away for Paducah, going to the war & everyone out in their Sunday best to cheer us off, it seems so long ago. In your last you said how proud you were I looked so elegant in uniform, but I was the one should have been proud for you put all the rest of them to shame, & if I was a Captain among the men surely you were a Colonel among the ladies. Such a pretty one too!
Now you must not be jealous, dearest girl, because if you could see these country Secesh women you wouldn't be. They wear mother Hubbards & are thin as rails every one. It must be because their men work them so hard I suppose, scrubbing clothes & boiling soap & everything. They just stand on their porches & stare at us marching by. O, if looks could kill. But really I think they would like to have us on their side Vain wish!
When we got to Paducah we were brigaded with two other Ohio regiments in Sherman's division. That created excitement among us, for Sherman had been removed from command of troops in November on suspicion of insanity. He had told the Secretary of War that the government would need two hundred thousand well-trained troops to crush the Rebellion in the Mississippi Valley alone. But finally Halleck had decided that he was not crazy, just high-strung and talkative, and had given him a division under Smith. Every man assigned to that division was worried. Naturally no one wanted to go into combat with a leader who might take a notion to storm a frozen river or a burning bam. And our first sight of him wasn’t reassuring. He was red-headed, gaunt, skeleton thin, with a wild expression around his eyes; he had sunken temples, a fuzzy beard, and a hungry look that seemed to have been with him always. I never saw him but I thought of Lazarus. His shoulders twitched; his hands were never still, always fumbling with something, a button or a saber hilt or his whiskers. Our first real operation, however, changed our minds about him—though, truth to tell, it was not a successful movement.
Halleck ordered General Smith to move up the Tennessee River to Savannah—up means south on the Tennessee; that’s typical in this country. We went on transports. We were green; most of us had never left home before (officers as well as men, except the officers carried their greenness better) yet here we were, traveling south up an enemy river past slow creeks and bayous and brooding trees. I thought to myself if this was the country the Rebels wanted to take out of the Union, we ought to say thank you, good riddance. The men crowded the rails, watching the swampland slide past. None of them said much. I supposed, like myself, they were thinking of home. It was a strange thing to be in a distant land, among things you’d never seen before, all because our people in Congress had squabbled among themselves and failed to get along and there were hotheads in the South who thought more of their Negroes and their pride than they did of their country. Lining the rails of the transports, watching that dismal swampland slide past, there must have been many a man who was thinking of home and the ones he'd left behind.
I miss you So much.
From Savannah, Tennessee, Smith sent Sherman farther south, toward the Mississippi state line, to break the Memphis & Charleston Railroad which passed through Corinth where Beauregard was busy collecting the scattered Rebel armies. This was probably the most important railway in the Confederacy, the main supply line from the Transmississippi to their armies in the East. Two gunboats escorted us up the river. It was good to have them. Everyone, Rebel and Union alike, respected gunboats.
We came off the transports at midnight in the hardest rain I ever saw, and by daybreak we were far inland. Most of the bridges across the creeks had been washed away. The rain came pouring. The cavalry, operating out front, lost men and horses drowned trying to ford the swollen creeks, and behind us the Tennessee was rising fast, threatening to cut us off by flooding the bottom we had marched across. It was agreeable to everyone in the division when Sherman ordered us back to the transports. The gunboats stayed with us going back down the river and covered our disembarkation at Pittsburg Landing, which we had passed coming up from Savannah.
It had been a nightmare operation, floundering in the bottoms. Probably we had done no earthly good. We were wet and tired and hungry and cold. Some of us had been somewhat frightened, to tell the truth. But curiously enough, when we were back aboard the transports where they passed out hot coffee and blankets, everyone felt fine about the whole business. For one thing, we had been into the enemy country— a division on its own, looking for trouble: that gave us a feeling of being veterans—and for another, we had seen our commander leading us.
Sherman was not the same man at all. He was not so nervous. His shoulders didn’t twitch the way they’d done in camp. He was calm and ready, confident, and when he saw the t
hing wasn’t possible he did not fret or fume and he didn’t hesitate to give it up. Whatever else he might be, he certainly was not crazy. We knew that now, and we were willing to follow wherever he said go.
There is a thing I hope you will do for me, Martha — Bake me one of those three decker cakes like the one you brought out to Camp that day while we were training near home. All I got that time was a single slice. Every officer in the regiment cut himself a hunk & of course Col. Appier got the biggest but they all said how good it was. They shall not get a sniff of this one though. Wrap it careful so it won’t get squashed & mark it Fragile but do not write on the box it is food because there is no sense in tempting those lazy mail clerks any more than necessary — they are already plump on the soldiers in the field. I can taste it right now it will be so good, so please do not delay.
In peacetime Pittsburg was the Tennessee River landing where steamboats unloaded their cargoes for Corinth, twenty-odd miles to the southwest. There was a high bluff at the river bank—it rose abruptly, its red clay streaked at the base with year-round flood-stage marks. Beyond the bluff, a hundred feet above the water level, there was a rough plateau cut with ravines and gullies. The creeks were swollen now. Oaks and sycamores and all the other trees common to this region were so thickly clustered here that even at midday, by skirting the open fields and small farms scattered there, you could walk from the Landing three miles inland without stepping into sunlight. If you carried an ax, that is. For the ground beneath the limbs and between the tree trunks was thickly overgrown with briers and creepers and a man leaving the old paths would have to hack through most of the way. We spent a rough week clearing our camp sites, but after that was done it was not so bad.
The Landing itself was between the mouths of two creeks that emptied into the Tennessee about five miles apart. Looking southwest, with your back to the river, Snake Creek was on your right and Lick Creek on your left. A little more than a mile from the mouth of Snake Creek, another stream (called Owl Creek) branched off obliquely toward the left, so that the farther you went from the Landing the narrower the space between the creeks became. Roughly, the plateau was a parallelogram, varying from five to three miles on a side, cross-hatched with a network of wagon trails running inland from the Landing and footpaths connecting the forty- and fifty-acre farms. It was confusing. When we first arrived, messengers went badly astray going from one camp to another. Guards would roam from their posts without knowing it. All that first week you saw men asking the way to their outfits; they’d gone to the bushes and got turned around and couldn’t find their way back. I got lost myself every time I stopped without taking proper bearings. It was embarrassing.
But after we had been there a few days we became used to it and realized what a good, strong position Sherman had chosen. He had an eye for terrain. Those creeks, swollen now past fording, gave us complete protection on the flanks in case the Rebels obliged us by coming up to fight on our own ground. Through the opening to the southwest we had a straight shot for Corinth on a fairly good road (considering) down which we could march when the time came for us to move out for the attack on Beauregard.
Hurlbut's division landed with us. Within a few days the others had arrived, Prentiss and McClelland and W.H.L. Wallace. Lew Wallace had his division at Crump's Landing, downstream on the Tennessee about five miles north of Snake Creek. Our division was out front—the position of honor; they called it that to make us feel good, probably; certainly there was small honor involved—three miles down the Corinth road, on a line stretching roughly cast and west of a small Methodist log meeting-house called Shiloh Chapel, near which Sherman had his headquarters. Hurlbut was two miles behind us, within a mile of the Landing. Prentiss took position on our left flank when he came up, and McClelland camped directly in our rear. W.H.L. Wallace was to the right and slightly to the rear of Hurlbut.
There were forty thousand of us. General Smith, who had his headquarters at Savannah, was in command of the army, but it was Sherman who chose Pittsburg Landing as the concentrating point and made the dispositions. We drilled and trained all day every day, march and countermarch until we thought we'd drop, improving the time while waiting for Buell's army to arrive from Nashville. When he joined, we would be seventy-five thousand. Then the Army of the Tennessee and the Army of the Ohio, combined under Halleck, would march against the Rebels down at Corinth. There wasn’t a soldier who did not realize the strategic possibilities of the situation, and everyone was confident of the outcome.
We felt good. When the war began a year ago, all the newspapers carried reprints of speeches by Confederate orators, calling us Northern scum and mercenaries and various other fancy names and boasting that Southern soldiers were better men than we were, ten to one. Then Bull Run came—a disgrace that bit deeper than talk. That was when we began to realize we had a war on our hands, and we buckled down to win it.
Belmont and Fishing Creek and Donelson showed what we could do. We pushed them back through Kentucky and Tennessee, taking city after city and giving them every chance to turn and fight. They never did. If they were worth ten to one of us, they certainly didn’t show it. Now we were within an easy march of Mississippi, one of the fire-eater States, first to leave the Union after South Carolina, and still they wouldn’t turn and stand and fight.
Of course there is nothing to do but drill drill drill but I’ve did not come down here on a picnic anyway. God forbid — it’s not my notion of a picnic grounds. Everyone feels that the sooner we move against them the better, because when we move we’re going to beat them and end this War. It’s come a long way since Bull Run — we have taken our time & built a big fine army, the Finest ever was. For the past half year we have beat them where ever they would stop for Battle & I believe this next will wind it up in the West.
Then General Smith skinned his leg on the sharp edge of a rowboat seat, and it became so badly infected he had to be relieved. Halleck put Grant back in command; he had found that the anonymous letter was untrue along with some other scandal about the mishandling of captured goods at Donelson. We cheered when we heard that Grant was back. He kept his headquarters where Smith's had been, at a big brick house in Savannah, nine miles down the Tennessee and on the opposite bank, overlooking the river. We saw him daily, for he came up by steamboat every morning and returned every night. The men liked being in his army. Fighting under Grant meant winning victories.
He was a young general, not yet forty, a little below average height, with lank brown hair and an unkempt beard. His shoulders sloped and this gave him a slouchy look that was emphasized by the private's blouse which he wore with the straps of a major general tacked on. I could remember when he used to haul logs for his father's tanyard back home in Georgetown. There was eight years' difference in our ages: a big span between boys, enough certainly to keep me from knowing him except by sight: but I could remember many things about him. He was called Useless Grant in those days, and people said he would never amount to anything. Mainly he was known for his love of animals. It was strange, he loved them so much he never went hunting, and he refused to work in the tanyard because he couldn’t bear the smell of dripping hides. He had a way with horses. Later, at West Point, he rode the horse that set a high-jump record.
When I watched him drill the militia at Georgetown after he finished at the Academy—he graduated far down the list and had almost every demerit possible marked against his name for deportment—I got the idea he hated the army. Seeing him stand so straight and severe, maneuvering the troops about the courthouse square, I thought how different this was from what he would prefer to be doing. Then the Mexican War broke out, and though he only had some administrative job down there, we heard that he had distinguished himself under fire, going after ammunition or something.
Next thing we knew, he had married into a slave-owning family down Missouri way—which was something of a joke because Old Man Grant had been one of the original Abolitionists in our county. However much West Point
might have changed him, his method of asking his girl to marry him was just like the Ulyss we had known back home. The way I heard it, they were crossing a flooded bridge, the buggy jouncing, and the girl moved over and took his arm and said, "I'm going to cling to you no matter what happens" (she was a Missouri girl, all right) and when they were safe on the other side Grant said to her, "How would you like to cling to me for the rest of your life?"
For five or six years after that we didn’t hear of him at all. Then one day everybody knew about him. Stationed on the West Coast, away from his family, he took to brooding and finally drank himself right out of the army. His father-in-law gave him an eighty-acre farm near St Louis. Grant cleared the land himself, then built a log house there and named it Hard-scrabble. It was about this time that a man from home went down to the city on business and came back saying he'd seen Grant on the street, wearing his old army fatigue clothes and selling kindling by the bundle, trying to make ends meet. But it was no go. He sold out and went into town, where he tried to be a real-estate salesman.
Now you’d think if ever a man had a chance to succeed at anything, it would surely be in real estate in St Louis in the '50s. But that was no go either. So Grant moved up to Galena, Illinois, where his brothers ran a leather business, and went to work selling hides for a living, the occupation he had hated so much twenty years before. Mostly, though, he just sat around the rear of the store, for he was such a poor salesman that the brothers did what they could to keep him away from their customers. He had a highborn wife and four children to support, and at thirty-eight he was a confirmed failure in every sense of the word.