Lincoln was painfully aware of what the war was costing the country each day not only in terms of money, of which Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase did somehow manage to raise a continuing supply, but also of the people’s will to see the cause through to victory. He wished his generals might somehow have the same perspective, realizing that they did not necessarily have the luxury of unlimited delay to prepare to meet the Rebels in battle. With one exception, none of his generals saw that angle. McClellan was the worst, and by the beginning of 1862, Lincoln was beginning to lose patience with his dashing young general in chief who not only did nothing but also refused to reveal to Lincoln any of his plans for future operations. McClellan was also insulting. In letters to his wife, McClellan referred to the president as “nothing more than a well-meaning baboon” and “the original gorilla.”
He may not have used quite that language in talking with others, but the attitude came through. To one general he called Lincoln “a rare bird.” In November Lincoln and Seward, accompanied by Lincoln’s secretary John Hay, stopped by McClellan’s house in Washington one evening to discuss strategy. Told that McClellan was out, they said they would wait and were shown into the parlor. About an hour later McClellan came home, was told that the president and secretary of state were waiting for him, and went upstairs. Half an hour later the visitors asked the porter to take the message upstairs to McClellan that they were still waiting. The servant returned a few moments later with word that McClellan had gone to bed for the night. As they walked back to the White House, Hay expressed outrage, but Lincoln said, “It was better at this time not to be making points of etiquette and personal dignity.” To another Lincoln commented, “I would hold General McClellan’s horse” if the general would only win a victory.
With Scott far off in New York in retirement, with the nation’s new top military man unwilling to cooperate with him, and with some in Washington even suggesting that there might be a sinister reason why McClellan, the Democrat, would not cooperate, Lincoln desperately turned to studying books on military science to try to educate himself in matters of strategy. Then shortly before Christmas, McClellan came down with typhoid and was out of commission for nearly three weeks.
Reports from the West were equally discouraging. Freémont was gone now, sacked by Lincoln for corruption and failure to accomplish anything useful. In his place the president appointed Henry W. Halleck (West Point, 1839), the army’s leading intellectual and author of the main textbook Lincoln was studying on the art of war. To command in Kentucky, now that that state was open as an avenue of Union advance, Lincoln had assigned Don Carlos Buell (West Point, 1841), a McClellan proteégeé with a reputation as a professional’s professional. Yet despite all of Lincoln’s urging, neither general was willing to undertake any action at all.
Lincoln was especially frustrated that Buell would not advance to relieve the Unionist population of East Tennessee, which had risen up against secessionist rule and was currently being schooled by several thousand Confederate troops in just how much the Rebels truly believed in self-determination. East Tennessee was not an easy place to reach, especially from the north and especially in winter, but Buell was ready to provide plenty of reasons why his command could not reach anyplace at all within Rebel control. Halleck was no better, and the two steadfastly declined to cooperate with each other. On one dispatch from Halleck, Lincoln sadly endorsed, “It is exceedingly discouraging. Here as everywhere else nothing can be done.”
In Virginia at least, Lincoln could try to force the pace of the action in person. To Lincoln’s lament that the bottom was out of the tub, Montgomery Meigs suggested that the president should talk to some of McClellan’s division commanders. Lincoln did, commenting to them that “if General McClellan did not want to use the army, he would like to borrow it, provided he could see how it could be made to do something.” But the generals were little help. When Lincoln met with them again on January 13, a still pale and shaky McClellan rose from his sickbed to attend the meeting, which he was convinced was a conspiracy against him.
A few days later, in a meeting with the cabinet, McClellan again refused to reveal his plan of campaign and spoke of his conviction, steadily held now for several months, that the Rebels had twice as many men in Virginia as he did. This was the purest moonshine, but for McClellan it was practically an article of faith from which he never wavered throughout his tenure in army command. In fact, at this time he outnumbered the Confederate troops in Virginia by more than two to one. In retrospect, his constant insistence that he was outnumbered seemed almost intended to justify his fear of taking action. For the moment, any at rate, Lincoln had to be content with McClellan’s assurance that at least he did have a plan.
Frustrated with his seeming inability to get action out of his generals and convinced from his study of the books on strategy that it would be a good thing to exert pressure on the enemy from multiple directions at the same time, Lincoln on January 27 issued General War Order Number One, directing that all the armies of the republic were to advance and attack the enemy on February 22, Washington’s Birthday. On January 31 Lincoln added a further order specifying that on February 22, the Army of the Potomac was to advance against the Confederate army still encamped near Centerville. McClellan responded with a twenty-two-page letter explaining in detail why the Army of the Potomac should not advance any time soon. He did include in his letter, though, an explanation of his long-awaited campaign, a scheme for landing the army near the mouth of the Rappahannock River and moving in behind the Rebels at Centerville, trapping them. Lincoln doubted that the plan would really work, but, happy to be taken into the general’s confidence at last, he deferred to the military professional and acquiesced in the army’s remaining idle a few more weeks.
Less than one hundred miles away in Richmond, Jefferson Davis had his own problems that winter. After Beauregard’s release to the press of his self-promotional report on the Battle of Bull Run, relations between the Creole general and the Confederate president had not been good. In the report, the general claimed that if only Davis had approved a plan he, Beauregard, had submitted before the battle, the Confederacy would have scored a virtually war-winning victory, but the plan had called for troops the Confederacy did not have. Beauregard aired this and other complaints to members of the Confederate congress, suggesting that if his ideas were given full play, he would shortly win the war. Hearing that Beauregard’s nonsense had been repeated on the floor of the Confederate congress repeatedly taxed Davis’s patience.
Relations between the president and Joseph E. Johnston had gone sour when that general discovered that in appointing the Confederacy’s initial five full generals in September 1861, Davis had ranked him fourth, behind Adjutant and Inspector General Samuel Cooper and generals Albert Sidney Johnston (no relation) and Robert E. Lee. The last seemed to rankle Johnston particularly since he had spent his whole army career trying to get ahead of his West Point classmate Lee. Having used political connections to win a staff appointment as brigadier general in the U.S. Army just before secession, Johnston thought he had finally beaten Lee, and he believed that a Confederate law guaranteeing the same relative ranks in the Confederate army that officers had held in the U.S. Army would keep him ahead of his old West Point rival.
What Johnston had missed in the law was that his staff rank in the old army would not count toward his line rank in the new. Davis had read the law correctly and given Johnston his proper rank. Not accepting that, Johnston in mid-September wrote Davis a fifteen-page abusive letter concluding, “I now and here declare my claim that, notwithstanding these nominations made by the President, and their confirmation by Congress, I still rightfully hold the rank of first general in the armies of the Southern Confederacy.” Davis’s reply was short and to the point: “I have received and read your letter of the 12th instant. Its language is, as you say, unusual; its arguments and statements utterly one-sided, and its insinuations are as unfounded as they are unbecoming.” Relations between Davis and Johnston would henceforth be tense at best.
In the late fall of 1861, Beauregard and Johnston requested that Davis visit their headquarters and urged him vigorously to strip troops from other parts of the Confederacy in order to reinforce their army and enable them to take the offensive and win the war before the one-year enlistments of their troops expired. It would have been an extremely risky move elsewhere, with doubtful results in Virginia, and Davis was not prepared to make that gamble. He returned disappointed to Richmond, leaving his generals sullen and resentful. By midwinter Beauregard’s troublemaking propensities had become so annoying that Davis arranged to have him transferred to the western theater of the war, where he would serve as second in command to Albert Sidney Johnston (West Point, 1826).
This other Johnston was perhaps the only man Davis admired more than he did Leonidas Polk. Sidney Johnston had been an upperclassman when Davis was a beginning student at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky. Later Johnston had been an upperclassman when Davis was a plebe at West Point, and they had served together in the Mexican War. Johnston ever after remained for Davis the ideal of all that a soldier should be. In the wake of Polk’s blundering away of Kentucky neutrality in September 1861, Johnston had arrived in Richmond from his previous post with the U.S. Army in California, and Davis had immediately assigned him to overall command of all of the Confederacy’s northward-facing defenses from the Appalachians to the Great Plains.
What Davis failed to do was support Johnston with anything like adequate men or materiel. In part this was because Davis did not have anything like adequate numbers of men or amounts of materiel available, but in part it was because Davis had already begun to focus too much on the narrow but prestigious eastern theater of the war while giving less attention to the all-important heartland west of the Appalachians. Of the scant supplies of weapons that did become available during the fall of 1861, the lion’s share went to Virginia.
February 22, 1862, arrived, and the armies of the Union had not moved—with one exception. One Union army had already advanced in the days immediately preceding Washington’s Birthday and had won what would prove to be two of the most significant victories of the war. That army belonged to Ulysses Grant. After the setback at Belmont, Grant had not given up his eagerness to get at the Rebels at Columbus, who soon numbered about ten thousand men. By early 1862, he had come up with a plan to drive southward up the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers and thus turn Columbus.
When Grant presented his plan to Halleck, the superior general rebuffed him so brusquely that Grant, still believing as everyone else did at that time that Halleck was a military genius, thought he must inadvertently have proposed something extraordinarily stupid. That was not the case. Halleck’s rude dismissal of Grant’s plan was not because it was a bad plan but because it was a good one, in fact, exactly the plan Halleck himself was contemplating. Nor did one need to be the country’s leading military mind to see it. Several officers proposed it, and a woman in Maryland, after looking over a map, sent a letter to the government suggesting it. The question was not what to do but who could make it happen. Halleck wanted to be the one who did, but he wanted much more time for preparation first, thus his curt dismissal of Grant.
Throughout the war Grant would develop a pattern of being the man who accomplished things that others had only thought about doing. One reason was his persistence, usually aimed at the enemy but this time, of necessity, plied on his superior, Halleck. A couple of weeks later, he proposed his idea to Halleck again. This time the situation had changed enough to win Halleck’s approval. Lincoln’s General War Order Number One had reached Halleck’s desk, and letting Grant off the leash for a few days might be a good way to satisfy the president and relieve the pressure. Then word arrived from Washington that a recently captured Confederate soldier had reported that Beauregard was coming from Virginia to Tennessee with fifteen regiments of troops. The Creole general was indeed on his way, but the part about the regiments was wrong. Beauregard did not have fifteen staff officers with him and no troops at all. Still, the threat that Confederate reinforcements were about to arrive and make future offensive operations much more difficult was the final prod Halleck needed to turn Grant loose.
Grant loaded his army, now grown to seventeen thousand men, into steamboats and set out from his bases at Cairo and Paducah on February 3. The next day the first elements of his force began landing on the banks of the Tennessee River several miles downstream from a Confederate outpost called Fort Henry. Begun during the days of Kentucky neutrality, Fort Henry was located near the river’s northernmost point in the state of Tennessee. It was a poor location for a fort, but Kentucky was unavailable, and Tennessee planners wanted to protect as much of their state as possible. Worse, the fort had been under Polk’s jurisdiction since the preceding summer, and Polk, with his fixation on Columbus, had accumulated most of his department’s troops and both of its trained engineer officers at the Mississippi River stronghold, leaving Fort Henry undermanned and incomplete even after Johnston, who had been Polk’s West Point roommate, sent him repeated orders to see to it that the fortifications on the Tennessee were in good shape. Now the poorly sited, incomplete, undermanned fort was all the Confederates had to prevent the deep penetration of the Confederate heartland via the Tennessee River.
After scouting the fort from a distance, Grant gave orders that the assault should take place at 10:00 a.m., February 6. His troops marched out of their camps that morning in high spirits but were soon dismayed to find that recent rains had turned the dirt roads of Tennessee into seemingly bottomless quagmires. Laboriously they waded on through the mud, dragging their artillery, caissons, and ammunition wagons, but when 10:00 came they were still far from their attack positions.
Cooperating with Grant’s force on this operation was a squadron of four of the navy’s new ironclad river gunboats under the command of Flag Officer Andrew H. Foote. Another of the navy’s crusty, old seadogs, the tough, aggressive Foote was a stickler for precision. Grant had asked him to attack at 10:00 a.m., and that is exactly what Foote did, leading his boats into action with colors flying and guns blazing.
The gunboats were strange craft. Based loosely on the design of ordinary riverboats, they drew six to eight feet of water and were 175 feet long and a little more than fifty feet wide. A casemate, or box, covered nearly the entire deck space of each gunboat, enclosing its thirteen heavy guns and single, twenty-two-foot-diameter paddle wheel, driven by two steam engines mounted side by side in the vessel’s shallow hold and capable of propelling the gunboat at a respectable eight knots. The casemate’s sloping sides, along with the vessel’s overall squat proportions, led nonplussed observers to nickname them, after their designer Samuel M. Pook, Pook’s Turtles. The turtles’ shells were only selectively strong and then only within limits—two and a half inches of iron plate forward, an inch and a half on the sides and the small pilot house above the casemate, and none at all aft. No more of the heavy armor could be added to such a shallow-draft vessel.
The gunboats proved effective against Fort Henry. The fort’s commander had seen the handwriting on the wall and hastily dispatched almost his entire garrison to march the twelve miles east to Fort Donelson, the Confederacy’s outpost on the Cumberland River, something they were able to do because Grant’s troops were still stuck in the mud several miles away. Then with a small volunteer force he stayed behind to man the fort’s few cannon and delay the inevitable. One of their shots actually penetrated a gunboat, bursting its boiler and putting it out of action with heavy casualties, but the others came on. Then one of the Confederate cannon burst, mangling its crew; the gunboats closed in to point-blank range, and the fight was soon over. The Confederates raised a white flag, and since the river was in flood stage and the fort’s location was so low to the banks, a rowboat bearing a naval officer came right through the main gate to accept the surrender.
The fight had cost less than 120 casualties on both sides combined. Yet it was one of the most decisive battles of the war. The Union victory at Fort Henry tore open the center of the Confederate defenses in the West, leaving the way open for Union gunboats and Union troops to penetrate up the Tennessee River all the way into northern Mississippi and Alabama, and the Confederacy could do almost nothing to stop them. West Tennessee was lost to the Confederacy, and the next place the Rebels could hope to make any serious stand on the Mississippi River was now more than three hundred miles south of Columbus, deep in the state of Mississippi. The Battle of Fort Henry did not decide the outcome of the war in a single day—no battle could do that by itself—but the Confederacy never really recovered from it. The remainder of the war in the West represented a series of Confederate attempts to win back what had been lost—and Union attempts to exploit what had been won—in less than four hours on February 6, 1862.
Grant intended to follow up quickly and make the Confederate disaster even more complete. If Fort Henry had fallen so easily, Fort Donelson would likely do the same, and this time Grant planned to see to it that he had his troops in position in plenty of time to bag every last Rebel in the place as a prisoner of war. On the day Fort Henry fell, Grant sent a dispatch to Halleck informing him of victory and adding, “I shall take and destroy Fort Donelson on the 8th and return to Fort Henry.”
It was not quite that easy. Heavy storms of rain, sleet, and snow swept across the Upper South for the next few days, rendering the roads once again impassible. By February 12 another sudden shift in the weather had brought clear skies and a warm sun that dried the roads and convinced many of Grant’s soldiers on the march that day to throw away their overcoats as useless burdens, convinced as they were that spring had come in February here in the sunny South and that the war would be over long before autumn. By the morning of February 14 Grant had his army in place surrounding Fort Donelson, from the Cumberland River below (north of) almost to the river above the fort. All that remained was for Foote and his gunboats to go in and blast the Rebels into submission as they had at Fort Henry eight days before.
The situation inside Fort Donelson was considerably different than that inside Fort Henry had been, in part because of decisions Albert Sidney Johnston had made after the fall of Fort Henry. From his headquarters in Bowling Green, Kentucky, Johnston had realized that the ironclad gunboats opened a new chapter in warfare, making the rivers into highways of conquest for the side that owned them, and his side owned none. He assumed that Fort Donelson would not hold out much longer than Fort Henry had lasted.
From there, the logic of Johnston’s decision was inexorable. He could not afford to abandon the fort without a fight because once it was in Federal hands, the Union gunboats would range up the Cumberland all the way to Nashville, cutting off his main body at Bowling Green. He needed a few days to get his troops back across the Cumberland at Nashville and continue the retreat southward. He did not want to sacrifice the garrison of Fort Donelson. He could not afford to lose a man unnecessarily if he was going to have a chance of retrieving Confederate fortunes in the West. He could not count on Grant to be slow again in surrounding the fort. So Johnston’s only hope of both buying time and ensuring the garrison’s escape would require inserting enough infantry into the fort to enable them to push the encircling Federals aside, break out, and rejoin the army somewhere south of Nashville.
The troops Johnston sent to Donelson were those he had on hand, close enough to reach the fort in time. There was a brigade under the command of Brigadier General Gideon J. Pillow, a Tennessee politician, political ally of the eleventh president of the United States, James K. Polk, and an ardent secessionist. A veteran of the Mexican War, Pillow was now serving as a political general in his second war. His past record did not inspire confidence—he had become notorious among U.S. officers in the Mexican War for having had his men construct a set of fortifications backward—but his brigade was available. Another available brigade belonged to another political general, former Virginia governor and U.S. secretary of war during the Buchanan administration, John B. Floyd. Widely suspected in the North both of financial graft while secretary of war and of deliberately transferring heavy cannon to southern arsenals on the eve of secession so as to make them easy pickings for the Rebels, he had been less effective for the Confederacy since he had put on its uniform, having contributed his part to the ongoing Confederate debacle in western Virginia.
Thus, Johnston sent what troops he could, and those included Pillow’s and Floyd’s brigades. By the time Grant arrived outside the fort, its defenders numbered about twenty thousand men. Floyd, as senior officer present in the fort, had the command. Grant’s force outside the fort numbered about seventeen thousand.
The morning of February 14 dawned bitter cold. Another front had passed over during the night, rain turning to sleet and then to snow, several inches of it, and temperatures dropping into the low teens. Too close to the enemy to light campfires, the soldiers huddled grimly under the icy blast. At the appointed hour, Foote led the gunboats into battle, and soon troops all the way around the Union and Confederate perimeters, out of sight of the river, could hear the constant thunder of the big guns. Federals were confident, Confederates almost in despair. “The fort cannot hold out twenty minutes,” Floyd wrote in a message to Johnston sent across the Cumberland as the gunboats closed in.
Then to everyone’s astonishment, the Confederate shot and shell began to take their toll on the iron behemoths. The key difference was that Fort Donelson was located on a high bluff, giving its guns the ability to fire down at an angle onto the unprotected wooden decks of the gunboats. One boat after another went out of control, steering shot away or boilers burst, and drifted helplessly back down the river, still pounded by the Confederate guns until it mercifully passed out of range. The flagship’s pilothouse took a direct hit, severely wounding Foote. Presently the last of the gunboats fell back down the river with heavy damage, and the fight was over. As the guns fell silent, stunned Union soldiers around the perimeter heard cheers starting in the Confederate positions near the river and running around the lines.
Grant took in stride the realization that his ground troops were going to have to take the fort with minimal help from the navy. He sent for additional troops from those he had left to garrison Fort Henry and settled down to prepare for either an assault or a siege. In the dark hours after midnight of another brutally cold night came a message from the wounded Foote asking if Grant could ride to meet him where the flagship and the other battered gunboats were tied up several miles below the fort. Though his message did not say so, Foote needed to explain to Grant that the fleet was going to have to withdraw to Cairo for repairs. Grant appreciated the voluntary cooperation of Foote, whose naval command had never been under Grant’s orders. Eager to repay the flag officer’s assistance, Grant agreed to go. He left no officer in command of his army but left strict orders with each of its three division commanders to remain in their positions and do nothing until he returned. One of the three was McClernand, a political general whom Grant had learned to distrust.
Grant was a general who devoted most of his thought to what he was going to do to the enemy and relatively little to what the enemy might be planning to do to him. He understood the value of momentum in warfare better than almost any other general on either side during the war, and he made a point of seizing and keeping it: “Get at the enemy as quick as you can. Hit him as hard as you can, and keep moving on.” As long as he kept the momentum he was by far the most dangerous general of the war, but when something happened to halt his momentum, whether enemy action or the orders of a superior, he became vulnerable. The repulse of the gunboats had put Grant in such a situation.
Grant had been gone only a short time, and it was still dark when the numb and shivering troops on the right end of the encircling Union line, near the Cumberland on the opposite side of Fort Donelson from where Grant was riding away, saw darker shapes moving toward them from the direction of the fort. The Confederates were attacking. In keeping with Johnston’s orders, having bought what they believed was enough time for Johnston’s retreat from central Kentucky, Floyd, Pillow, and fellow brigadier general Simon B. Buckner (West Point, 1844) had arranged their breakout attack, reducing troops to a minimum on the northern perimeter to mass every available man for an assault southeastward, with the Cumberland River on their left.
The attack fell on McClernand’s division and gradually by weight of numbers overwhelmed its regiments one by one from east to west, curling it back on Brigadier General Lew Wallace’s center division. Wallace had previously sent only slight aid to McClernand because of Grant’s orders to remain in place and do nothing, but his division was able to halt the Confederate offensive around midday.
From the point of view of the Confederate plan, the stand of Wallace’s division was irrelevant. A yawning gap on the right of the Union line now left the way wide open for the entire Fort Donelson garrison to march out and take the road for Nashville and a reunion with Johnston’s main body. Buckner, the only professional soldier among the top three in the fort, found Floyd on the battlefield and suggested the time had come to leave. Floyd agreed, but before he could issue the order for the withdrawal, Pillow found him. Flushed with victory, Pillow persuaded Floyd to cancel or postpone the withdrawal and order the troops back into the entrenched lines of the fort to rest and eat a meal. Pillow apparently thought the Yankees so badly whipped that the victorious Confederates could retire at their leisure.
A staff officer caught up with Grant as he was coming ashore after his conference on Foote’s flagship and informed him that the army was fighting a desperate battle. Grant galloped back and arrived just as a lull was settling over the battlefield after Wallace’s noon repulse of the Confederates. Sizing up the situation Grant decided the Rebels had attempted to break out and had failed to do so. “The one who attacks first now will be victorious,” Grant told a staff officer. “The enemy will have to be in a hurry if he gets ahead of me.” Grant gave immediate orders for an attack all along the line. On the center and right, Wallace’s troops and some rallied units of McClernand’s wrecked division drove back toward the positions McClernand had lost that morning, taking key ground.
On the Union right, Grant’s old West Point professor, Brigadier General Charles F. Smith, led his division from the front, huge white mustache streaming over both shoulders. Smith forbade his men to stop and fire until they got inside the Confederate breastworks. The position was extremely strong, but the Confederate lines were thin because most of the troops there had been pulled away to take part in the breakout attack. Behind Smith’s charismatic leadership the Union line surged up to the works. The color-bearer of the Second Iowa leapt over, and then hundreds of Federals followed, swarming over the breastworks and driving the Rebels back. Darkness and Confederate reinforcements brought their drive to a halt. The Confederates were men of Buckner’s command hurrying back to their defensive positions after Floyd had ordered them to return to the fort.
That night the three Confederate brigadiers held a conference inside the fort. Buckner announced that the Yankees had possession of his lines and from their favorable position could overrun the entire fort at dawn. No option remained, he said, but surrender. Floyd said he dared not surrender; with the accusations leveled at his actions as secretary of war, the Yankees might hang him. Pillow said he would never surrender. A volunteer cavalry colonel named Nathan Bedford Forrest came in and said a way out was still open, apparently unknown to the Yankees. It followed a road immediately along the bank of the Cumberland, and it would involve wading several hundred yards, “saddle-skirt deep,” through an icy backwater. Buckner said if they did that, three-quarters of the men would die of pneumonia, and that would be immoral. It was their duty, he said, to surrender.
Floyd asked if he might turn the command over to Buckner and be permitted to escape personally. Buckner said he could if he got out before the white flag went up. “I turn the command over, sir!” said Floyd. “I pass it,” said Pillow, his next in rank, and Buckner went to look for a bugler and a white flag. A disgusted Forrest led his own cavalry regiment out, along with quite a number of infantrymen who decided to tag along, clinging to the horses’ stirrups when the water got deep. Floyd and Pillow found boats at the fort’s landing—Floyd a steamboat on which he could take some of his men, Pillow an abandoned scow in which he could take a few staff officers as oarsmen. When Grant received Buckner’s note asking for terms of surrender, he responded, on Smith’s advice, “No terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted. I propose to move immediately upon your works.” Buckner, though grumbling about Grant’s lack of chivalry, had no choice but to accept.
News of the victory thrilled the nation. With 12,392 Confederates heading north into Union captivity it surpassed Saratoga and Yorktown as the largest surrender ever on American soil. The intensity of the fighting was demonstrated by the fact that the 2,500 Union killed and wounded and the 1,500 Confederate were comparable to the numbers of killed and wounded at Bull Run (considerably more for the Union), though only about half as many troops had been engaged.
The capture of forts Henry and Donelson was enormously important and might almost be called the first turning point of the war. Up until that time, the Confederacy had had things pretty much its own way, but it never fully recovered from the loss of the forts. The twin February victories gave the Union control of the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers deep into what had been Rebel-controlled territory. Union gunboats, transports, and armies could range up the Cumberland all the way to Nashville and up the Tennessee all the way into northern Mississippi and Alabama. The Rebels could no longer hold positions along the Mississippi in the states of Tennessee or Kentucky because Union control of the Tennessee guaranteed the defenders would easily be turned and possibly trapped. Half the state of Tennessee passed to Union control, and the partial Confederate grasp on the state of Kentucky was gone. Within weeks, Union troops would be poised on the edge of the Deep South states.
Grant became a national hero, and his demand for “unconditional surrender” gave a new meaning to his first two initials. Lincoln soon promoted him to major general of volunteers. The president did not fully realize it yet, but he had found a general who would fight and fight skillfully.
Washington’s Birthday came six days after the surrender of Fort Donelson and found the armies of the Union quietly encamped, though Grant’s was resting from its earthshaking victories of that month.
In Richmond, the Confederacy had chosen this day, with its associations with the first president and father of his country, to inaugurate its first regular president, duly elected the preceding November in the glow of the Confederate victories of 1861. This of course was Jefferson Davis, the provisional president and only candidate for the regular presidency. The inaugural ceremony was anything but auspicious. A cold rain dripped sullenly out of a low, gray overcast. When the president’s wife, Varina Howell Davis, asked one of the four black footmen who walked slowly beside the barely rolling presidential coach why they wore formal black suits and walked so slowly, he replied, “This, ma’am, is the way we always does in Richmond at funerals and such-like.”1
It certainly appeared that the Confederacy’s funeral, if the southern slaveholders’ republic should receive any such honor, would not be far off, for the disasters of Fort Henry and Fort Donelson, though by far the worst, had not been the only Confederate debacles in recent weeks. On January 19, a division of nearly six thousand Confederate troops under Major General George B. Crittenden (West Point, 1832), son of Union-loyal Kentucky Congressman John J. Crittenden, had attacked a smaller Union division of about 4,400 men under the command of Union-loyal Virginian George H. Thomas (West Point, 1840) at Logan’s Crossroads in Kentucky.
It had been a sharp little fight on a foggy, rainy morning, with the Second Minnesota fighting it out with the Fifteen Mississippi with bayonets over a rail fence and the colonel of the German-speaking Ninth Ohio leading his men in a wild bayonet charge, shouting, “Close your eyes, boys, if it gets too hot for you.” Felix Zollicoffer, a popular but very nearsighted Nashville newspaper-editor-turned-Confederate-general, accidentally rode into Union lines and was shot. The Federals prevailed, and Crittenden’s force retreated in disorder. The defeat would have been significant in destroying Albert Sidney Johnston’s right flank had Buell been enterprising enough to exploit it and the season of the year propitious enough to favor such exploitation. As it was, the fall of the Tennessee and Cumber river forts, coming less than a month later, had ripped open the center of Johnston’s defenses and presented the Union with a far better opportunity than that gained by the victory at Logan’s Crossroads.
Then on February 8 Union sea power and its long amphibious arm struck again, this time on the North Carolina coast. A fleet of specially acquired shallow-draft gunboats under Flag Officer Louis M. Goldsboro entered the North Carolina Sounds, the narrow, shallow waters inside the band of barrier islands off the coast of the northeastern part of the state. The fleet chased away a few Confederate gunboats and suppressed the fire of shore batteries. Then transports landed a special ten-thousand-man army amphibious division under the command of Ambrose Burnside (West Point, 1847), and within less than twenty-four hours the 2,500-man Confederate garrison surrendered, leaving the island in Union hands. Aside from the loss of troops, the capture of Roanoke Island hurt the Confederacy by opening the way for complete Union control of the North Carolina Sounds and their shores, cutting off coastwise commercial traffic and closing a backdoor for materials coming through the blockade to reach the port of Norfolk, Virginia, via the Albemarle and Chesapeake Canal and the Dismal Swamp Canal.
Well might President Davis observe in his inaugural address that February 22, “We have recently met with serious disasters,” but, though he admitted that “the tide for the moment is against us,” he maintained nonetheless that “the final result in our favor is never doubtful.” Perhaps, he suggested, God was teaching them to value their liberty by the high cost they paid to win it.
Whatever the cause and purpose of the Confederate disasters that winter, they were not over, and spring at first brought no change of the tide of war. On March 7 a Confederate army of sixteen thousand men under the command of Major General Earl Van Dorn (West Point, 1842) attacked a Union army of about ten thousand men under Major General Samuel R. Curtis (West Point, 1831) in northwestern Arkansas. Despite the death of Lyon at Wilson’s Creek the preceding August, Union forces had steadily pressed Sterling Price’s Confederate Missourians out of that state. Curtis, with his Army of the Southwest, pursued Price into Arkansas.
Retreating into Arkansas, Price’s force again united with that of Ben McCulloch, reopening the previous year’s questions about who should command whom. From far off Richmond, Jefferson Davis decided to fix the problem by assigning his fellow Mississippian Van Dorn to command both Price and McCulloch. Van Dorn had big plans. He would crush Federal strength in Arkansas and then march into Missouri. “I must have St. Louis,” he wrote to his wife, “then huzzah!”
The first step was defeating Curtis, who had learned of Van Dorn’s approach with a more powerful army and had taken up a strong defensive position along the valley of Sugar Creek. Van Dorn planned to march around Curtis, get behind him, and split his own army into two columns, one passing east and the other west of a landform called Pea Ridge and converging in an irresistible pincer movement on the Federal rear. In practice, however, everything seemed to go wrong. Curtis discovered Van Dorn’s movement and turned his force in time to face him, stopping the two Confederate columns on either side of Pea Ridge and hindering their conjunction. McCulloch crept forward to reconnoiter the Union position in front of his column, and a Federal soldier shot him dead. Then Van Dorn discovered that the problem with being in the enemy’s rear was that then the enemy was in his own rear. As a result his army ran low on ammunition with no good way of replenishing. The battle carried over to the next day, March 8, and ended with Curtis’s Federals routing Van Dorn’s Rebels. After the Union victory at Pea Ridge, Confederate forces would never again seriously threaten to gain control of Missouri but would henceforth struggle to maintain some hold on Arkansas.
The Confederacy suffered another, albeit less significant, setback later that month and even farther west. With authorization from Richmond, Confederate Brigadier General Henry Hopkins Sibley (West Point, 1838) had raised a brigade of Texas cavalry the preceding fall and marched it west in hopes of adding the western territories with their gold mines and possibly even Pacific coast harbors to the Confederacy. They got as far as Glorieta Pass, in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of New Mexico, where on March 28, 1862, a smaller mixed force of U.S. Army regulars and Colorado and New Mexico territorial volunteers defeated them and turned back their expedition.
Battles like Pea Ridge and Glorieta Pass, fought well west of the Mississippi River, were of tangential significance to the Civil War. If the Confederacy won the war and gained its independence, such battles would help decide what western lands the new slaveholders’ republic might own, but nothing that happened out there was at all likely to decide the central momentous question of the war. That question might, by an off chance, be decided east of the Appalachians, but it was most likely to find its answer in the prewar heartland of America, the broad swath of country between the Appalachians and the Mississippi.
In the heart of that heartland during the Confederacy’s bleak late winter of 1862, Albert Sidney Johnston made his plans for a counterstrike that he hoped would regain what had been lost at Henry and Donelson. He made no attempt to evade the criticism leveled at him in the newspapers for the twin debacles. “The test of merit in my profession,” he wrote, “with the people, is success. It is a hard rule, but I think it right.” He hoped to pass that test by means of the desperate counterattack he contemplated launching against Grant.
Despite his recent victories, Grant had had problems enough of his own of late. He had been eager to follow up on the successes at Henry and Donelson but could get little help from Halleck and no cooperation out of Buell. When he made a quick trip by steamboat to Nashville to talk to Buell, Halleck got wind of the visit and reprimanded Grant sternly. Then Halleck launched a full-scale offensive against his subordinate. He relieved Grant of command of his army and wrote to McClellan that Grant was acting without authorization, failing to send proper reports, and drinking. None of these things were true, and Halleck knew it. In the case of the last charge, drunkenness, Halleck was especially well informed. He had assigned a member of his staff, engineer Lieutenant Colonel James B. McPherson, to serve on Grant’s staff, ostensibly to help Grant but really to report to Halleck on Grant’s sobriety. McPherson had indeed helped Grant but had also reported quite truthfully to Halleck that Grant was firmly on the wagon. Halleck chose to lie to McClellan in order to undermine Grant. His probable motive was jealousy.
Grant might have remained sidelined and vanished from history save that his congressman, Elihu B. Washburne, once again went to bat for him to the Lincoln administration. Lincoln was inclined to give Grant the benefit of the doubt and may well have been canny enough to detect Halleck’s jealousy in any case. He had Stanton order Halleck to explain the nature of his charges against Grant. Knowing that his allegations would never stand the light of day, Halleck backed down and reassigned Grant to command of what would come to be called the Army of the Tennessee.
By the time Grant resumed command, his army was encamped on the west bank of the Tennessee River at Pittsburg Landing, a two-house settlement at a steamboat landing about fifteen miles from the Mississippi line and twenty from the key northern Mississippi rail junction town of Corinth, where Albert Sidney Johnston was even then gathering his troops. Grant’s orders from Halleck were to keep his army encamped idly at Pittsburg Landing until he could be joined by Buell’s Army of the Ohio, marching overland from Nashville, and the Army of the Mississippi, which under the command of John Pope (West Point, 1842) had been cooperating with the navy in clearing away the Confederate defenders of the Mississippi who had already been turned by Grant’s success on the Tennessee. When all three armies were in place, Halleck would come down to Pittsburg and take personal command for the final advance to Corinth. Above all, Grant was to do nothing that might bring on a fight with the Confederates—no aggressive patrolling, no forceful reconnaissance probes. The big battle was to wait until Halleck and all the troops were on hand.
Albert Sidney Johnston would no doubt have appreciated Halleck’s orders if he could have known of them, but he did not intend to wait quite that long for the big battle. He had gathered in Corinth all the elements of his command east of the Mississippi—Crittenden’s survivors from Logan’s Crossroads, now no longer under Crittenden since that officer was facing court-martial for drunkenness on duty; Polk’s Columbus garrison, having long since abandoned the fortifications Polk had kept them working on all winter; and Johnston’s own main body, having marched all the way down from Bowling Green. Davis had hurried enough reinforcements from the rest of the Confederacy to bring Johnston’s total force up to forty-four thousand men. The task before him was simple and extremely difficult. His best chance for reversing the tide of war in the West was to destroy Grant’s Army of the Tennessee before Buell’s Army of the Ohio or Pope’s Army of the Mississippi could join it. Then, if his own army was still battleworthy, he could at least in theory turn on the two smaller Union armies and destroy them one after the other.
Johnston’s army was composed of green troops, most of whom had never been in battle, and its units had never worked together before. Johnston wanted as much time as possible to train and organize it before leading it into battle. He therefore planned to wait until Buell, who was closer, had almost reached Grant. Then he would strike. On April 2 his scouts brought word that Buell was getting very close, perhaps only another day or two of marching from joining Grant. The time had come, and Johnston gave the order for his army to march the twenty miles to Pittsburg Landing the next day and attack Grant’s army at dawn on April 4.
He assigned to his second in command, Beauregard, the task of composing the march orders. Beauregard and his chief of staff had a copy of Napoleon’s order for the march to Waterloo and used it as a pattern, adapting it as best they could to the present troops and terrain. Their march order was much too complicated, especially for the army’s woefully inexperienced troops and their equally green officers. Divisions and corps were to weave between each other on intersecting roads. The result, predictably, was chaos, with entire divisions getting lost and the army commander himself having to ride out in search of them. Eventually Johnston found all the pieces of his army, but there was considerable delay. Heavy rains occasioned further delay by turning the roads into mud. Johnston had to postpone the attack from the fourth to the fifth and then to the sixth.
By the evening of the fifth, Beauregard and most of the rest of Johnston’s ranking subordinates strongly advocated aborting the operation and returning to Corinth since the element of surprise had almost certainly been lost. Johnston was adamant. “I would fight them if they were a million,” he told a staff officer. In front of him was Grant’s army with its back to the Tennessee River. “Tomorrow,” Johnston grimly predicted, “we will water our horses in Tennessee River.”
Alert Federals in the forward camps of the Army of the Tennessee, from sergeants all the way up to brigadier generals, had indeed detected the approach of Johnston’s army and even exchanged shots with the Rebels in the days leading up to the battle, but Grant did not expect an attack. His headquarters were twelve miles downstream at the town of Savannah in order to make the earliest possible contact with Buell, whose leading elements on the morning of April 6 were still a full day’s march from Pittsburg Landing. For the situation at the actual encampment at Pittsburg Landing, Grant was depending on Brigadier General William T. Sherman (West Point, 1840), the only professionally trained officer among the commanders of the five divisions encamped there. Since the camps of Sherman’s division were among the farthest inland from the landing and Sherman said no significant Rebel force was nearer than Corinth, Grant took it at that.
In retrospect Sherman’s stubborn refusal to believe a major Confederate army was nearby despite abundant evidence to the contrary brought in by members of his and a neighboring division seems incredible. Yet it was common for an army to experience harassment from light forces of the enemy. The question was whether heavy formations of the enemy lay behind the skirmishers one encountered, and the only way to find out was to probe forward aggressively, driving back the enemy’s cavalry as well as his infantry skirmishers until encountering enough resistance to reveal that the enemy was present in force. It was just that sort of reconnaissance in force that Halleck had forbidden Grant and his officers to use, thus leaving them effectively blind to the approach of Johnston’s army. They had to guess, and Sherman guessed wrong.
Well before dawn on Sunday, April 6, Johnston’s troops filed into their positions for the assault. Johnston’s plan was based on the crude maps he possessed. The area where the Army of the Tennessee was encamped was a plateau about fifty feet above the level of the river, mostly wooded, cut near its edges with deep ravines, bounded on the north by the swampy bottomland of Owl Creek and its tributary Snake Creek and on the south by the equally swampy bottoms of Lick Creek. Johnston’s maps showed the creeks running roughly from west to east, at right angles to the river, and this led him to assume that the Union line would run north and south and face west. In fact, the creeks ran from southwest to northeast, and the line of Union encampments ran more or less east and west, facing south. Johnston planned to place a large corps under Major General Braxton Bragg (West Point, 1837) on the right, with two smaller corps on the center and left and one in reserve. With this unbalanced formation he would strike heavily against the southern end of the Union line, turn it to the north, and then roll up Grant’s army and drive it into a pocket formed by the swamps of Snake and Owl creeks.
Johnston let Beauregard handle the deployment of the troops for battle, and Beauregard arranged them differently, stretching each corps all the way across the battlefield and arranging the four of them one behind the other. It was the worst possible arrangement since it meant that as soon as successive corps moved up to help their comrades in front, their divisions and brigades would become mixed, and troops would be fighting alongside strangers and under officers they did not know. Johnston apparently discovered this after the troops were already in position. He was talking to Beauregard and other officers, who were once again trying to convince him to call off the whole thing, when firing broke out at the front. “The battle has opened, gentlemen,” Johnston announced, “it is too late for us to change our dispositions.”
What triggered the fighting was a Union patrol moving forward to investigate the suspicious sounds of movement in the woods in front of them. The fighting quickly became general and spread across the entire front as the Confederates launched their attack. On the Union left the completely green division of Brigadier General Benjamin S. Prentiss, an Illinois Democratic politician, fought for about an hour and then collapsed under the weight of Confederate numbers. Johnston, who was with the troops attacking Prentiss, interpreted this development in light of his imperfect maps and concluded that he had crushed Grant’s flank and trapped him against the swamps to the north. “That checkmates them!” he exclaimed.
Not quite, but the collapse of Prentiss’s division had certainly done the momentarily leaderless Union army no good. Johnston could have scored big gains by pursuing the fugitive fragments of Prentiss’s division, but believing he faced no more threat in the direction they were fleeing (due north), Johnston diverted several brigades toward the west, where heavy firing could be heard through the forests.
That firing came from Sherman’s division, holding the right end of the Union front line. After his poor showing in not anticipating the Confederate attack, Sherman was turning in the performance of a lifetime, rallying his troops and directing their defense of a low ridge on which stood a Methodist meetinghouse called Shiloh Church. He was slightly wounded and had several horses shot out from under him, but his men commented on his fierce but steady demeanor and calm, clearheaded instructions as key to their prolonged stand.
Grant had been about to eat breakfast at his Savannah headquarters when the sound of firing reached him from more than twelve miles away. He stopped with his coffee cup halfway to his lips, paused, set it down, and ordered his staff to join him on the steamboat that was kept tied up with a full head of steam, ready for his use. They raced up the river, pausing at Crump’s Landing, halfway to Pittsburg, to alert Lew Wallace’s division, which was encamped there. Wallace said he had heard the guns and had his men under arms. Grant instructed him to stand by for orders and then raced on up the river. Arriving at Pittsburg, Grant mounted up and rode to the top of the bluffs. The roar of battle that met him told him this was the big one. He immediately sent a messenger back downstream with orders for Wallace to march for the battlefield at once.
Back out on the fighting lines, Confederates had finally driven Sherman off Shiloh Ridge, but his division fell back in good order to the next ridge, where McClernand’s division moved up to join him. Unfortunately the political general positioned his line incorrectly, weakening the fighting power of its veteran regiments. With the troops Johnston had diverted from the other end of the line, Sherman and McClernand were now facing almost three-fourths of the Confederate army, well over twice the roughly fifteen thousand men in those two divisions. The new position collapsed quickly, and the Federals reeled back another half mile or so. They rallied, and Sherman led them forward in a counterattack. The battle seesawed back and forth, with Sherman more often forced to give ground, but his division and McClernand’s were holding the attention of the bulk of Johnston’s army.
Between Sherman and the river, the divisions of William H. L. Wallace, a Mexican War veteran, and Stephen A. Hurlbut, another Illinois politician, moved into line, halting the renewed Confederate push on the Union left. Prentiss and a few of his fugitives fell in with the fresh troops in a position that ran between thickets along a country lane and through a peach orchard, pink with blossoms. Yet Grant now had no reserves left at Pittsburg, and his line was not long enough to touch the Tennessee River on its left. There a succession of rugged ravines, a single brigade of Union troops, and the artillery support of two timber-clad gunboats in the river were all that prevented the Confederates from pouring around Grant’s left flank and cutting his army off from the landing.
With growing anxiety, Grant and his staff wondered where Lew Wallace was. In fact, he had taken the wrong road, perhaps through some failure in the communication of orders or from a misunderstanding of the situation on the battlefield. When subsequent couriers informed him of his error, Wallace proceeded at a steady but cautious pace that would have been very commendable for an ordinary march but was not at all the desperate rush the circumstances demanded. Grant never forgave Wallace.
Johnston’s army was unevenly distributed. Heavy forces still pressed Sherman on the west end of the battlefield, though Johnston had pulled several brigades back to the east side, near the river, to strengthen the push against the surprisingly stubborn Yankees there. In the center, little more than a single Confederate brigade doggedly but vainly attempted to drive a brigade of Iowans out of a patch of thickets that came to be known as the Hornets’ Nest.
Frustrated at the failure of his troops to dislodge Hurlbut’s men from the peach orchard, Johnston personally rallied a regiment and led it halfway across the intervening cotton field in another charge. Turning back, he watched from the rear as his men swept on toward the peach orchard. To a staff officer he commented jubilantly about a Union bullet that had grazed the bottom of his foot, cutting his boot sole but leaving him unscathed. “They almost tripped me up that time,” he joked. He may not have realized it yet, but another bullet had torn through the back of his calf, slicing open a major blood vessel. Had the blood not been flowing into his intact boot, those around him would have seen a steady stream of it pouring to the ground. A few minutes later an aide found him reeling in the saddle and helped him to the ground in a sheltered spot. Minutes later he was dead. In his pocket was a tourniquet that could have saved his life. The time was about 2:30 p.m.
The Confederate attacks continued. The lone Union brigade in the brakes along the river finally gave way. Next in line, Hurlbut had to fall back, giving up the peach orchard. As he retreated, his division broke up in a confused stampede. More than two thousand of William Wallace’s men, along with Prentiss and a handful of his, were cut off and captured as the Federal right collapsed. Wallace himself lay on the field, shot through the head.
Hurlbut’s men rallied on a line of artillery Grant and his staff had put together on the last ridge overlooking Pittsburg Landing, and there Sherman’s and McClernand’s divisions joined them. The sun was dipping toward the western horizon as the Confederates prepared for one more attack, this one aimed at Grant’s last possible line of defense. Lew Wallace’s division was still slogging through the Owl Creek swamps. Buell’s troops were struggling over roads almost as muddy on the east bank of the Tennessee, and even now his lead regiments were nearing the river, where steamboats would ferry them across to Pittsburg Landing. Grant’s tired soldiers would have to receive the attack without the help of reinforcements. Then word passed along the Confederate lines that Beauregard had called a halt for the night. Grant had plenty of artillery, and his troops, though tired, were determined. He would probably have stopped a final push, but history will never know.
Grant’s staff thought he would withdraw the army across the Tennessee during the night. Instead he made plans to strike back. When morning came on April 7, Grant’s army, strengthened at last by Lew Wallace’s division and three divisions of Buell’s troops, went over to the attack and by afternoon had driven Beauregard’s Confederates back through the abandoned and ransacked Union camps to about the place where the fighting had started the previous morning. With his army exhausted and near the point of collapse, Beauregard ordered a retreat back to Corinth. Grant’s army was too spent to pursue.
The Battle of Shiloh was over. It introduced the country to bloodshed on a scale out of proportion to anything it had known before. Casualties had been almost exactly even, with the exception of the extra two thousand Federals captured late in the afternoon of April 6. Just over 1,700 men had been killed on each side, with another eight thousand Federals and eight thousand Confederates wounded. The death toll from the two days of fighting along the Tennessee River quadrupled that of Bull Run and exceeded total U.S. battle deaths in the entire War of 1812 and Mexican War combined. Shortly before his death more than two decades later, Grant reflected on the events that transpired at Shiloh. “Up to the battle of Shiloh I, as well as thousands of other citizens, believed that the rebellion against the Government would collapse suddenly and soon, if a decisive victory could be gained over any of its armies.” The two days of carnage along the Tennessee began to change his mind. Shiloh was a harbinger of the length and cost of the conflict that was then only just beginning.2
In the wake of the battle, Halleck arrived at Pittsburg Landing as planned and took command. The rest of Buell’s and all of Pope’s army arrived, swelling Union numbers there to more than one hundred thousand men. Halleck shelved Grant in a meaningless assignment as second in command, and Grant, who was receiving severe criticism in the newspapers for being surprised at Shiloh, contemplated resigning but thought better of it. Halleck advanced his ponderous army toward Corinth at a snail’s pace, entrenching at the end of each day’s short advance. Beauregard could find no way to stop him but did manage to get his army out of the path of Halleck’s military glacier as it approached Corinth, leaving the Federals a hollow victory and a dusty and disease-ridden northeastern Mississippi rail junction town that they occupied May 30. By that time, the war was heating up on other fronts as well. On April 23, a U.S. Navy fleet ran the forts blocking passage up the Mississippi River from the Gulf of Mexico and the next day captured New Orleans without a fight, thus taking possession of the largest city and financial capital of the South. And in far-off Virginia, McClellan finally launched his grand campaign.