There is not a sufficiency of Union sentiment left in this portion of the state to save Sodom.
GRANT to Halleck
November 22, 1861
GRANT STUMBLED AT BELMONT, but recovered quickly. He had carried the battle to the enemy, confirmed his view that the rebels could be whipped, and was soon ready to try again. Downriver, the effect of the battle was just the opposite. Initially the Confederates celebrated Belmont and believed they had won a decisive victory. Polk jubilantly telegraphed Jefferson Davis that the Union force numbered 8,000 and had been completely routed. Grant, he said, was reported killed.1 In his official report three days later Polk said “the battle was fought against great odds,” and while he could not state the enemy loss precisely, “I am satisfied it cannot fall short of 1500.”2 Poems and songs, including “The Belmont Quick Step,” were written to lionize the rebel soldiers,3 and in Richmond the Confederate congress voted a resolution to commemorate “a triumphant victory” against an enemy force “greatly superior in numbers and appointments.”4 When boatloads of Confederate dead and wounded arrived in Memphis, however, the grim reality of war dawned in the cotton South.I And when it was learned Grant’s force numbered 3,000, not 8,000, celebrations turned glum. Rather than being outnumbered, the Confederates had enjoyed a two-to-one advantage at Belmont. Polk called in his outlying detachments, hastened work on the fortifications surrounding Columbus, and hunkered down to await a renewed Union onslaught. In retrospect, the fruits of Belmont seem clear. Grant gathered momentum, while the Confederates settled into a defensive posture.
The battle of Belmont coincided with the appointment of Henry W. Halleck to command the Western theater of operations.5 After six months of war, the Union command structure had sorted itself out. In the east, thirty-four-year-old George B. McClellan had been given command of the Army of the Potomac, and on November 1 he succeeded the loyal but aged Winfield Scott as general in chief, holding both posts simultaneously. The central theater was entrusted to another of Grant’s prewar acquaintances, Don Carlos Buell, who commanded the Army of the Ohio with headquarters at Louisville.6 Reporting to Buell was Brigadier General George H. Thomas, who commanded Union troops in the mountainous regions of eastern Kentucky and Tennessee. These troops formed the nucleus of what later became the Army of the Cumberland. Halleck’s principal subordinates in the West were Grant at Cairo, C. F. Smith at Paducah, John Pope on the Missouri, and Samuel Curtis, who fell heir to the troops Frémont had assembled in western Missouri.
The Confederate chain of command was simpler, but the task more difficult. Earlier in the fall Albert Sidney Johnston, fresh from California, assumed command of all rebel forces west of the Appalachians. Headquartered in Nashville, Johnston’s line stretched from the barrens of eastern Kentucky, through the bluegrass region, on across the Mississippi to the Ozarks and Indian Territory beyond. Johnston had no difficulty asserting his authority (Jefferson Davis called him “the greatest soldier, the ablest man, civil or military, Confederate or Federal, then living”7); his problem was that his line extended in a crazy-quilt pattern for over 500 miles. To defend it with the 75,000 men the Confederacy provided was impossible unless he could mass his forces at the point of Union attack.
Johnston met the challenge as best he could. He dispatched Earl Van Dorn, his most energetic subordinate, to take command of the 20,000 troops beyond the Mississippi, and left him to devise his own strategy. Johnston anchored the east end of his line in the vicinity of the Cumberland Gap, one of the few terrain features that worked to his advantage. Believing his flanks protected, Johnston concentrated on the critical 150-mile sector between Nashville and Columbus, which became the pivot of his defense. The Confederates were outnumbered, but the Memphis & Ohio Railroad ran laterally within the southern perimeter, affording a means of shifting troops rapidly from one point to another. At Columbus, Polk had 18,000 men facing Grant and Smith, whose combined force totaled more than 20,000. Polk’s fortified position—the “Gibraltar of the West”—was virtually impregnable; the disadvantage was that he lacked freedom to maneuver. The center of the Confederate line formed up in the vicinity of Bowling Green, Kentucky, an important railroad junction sixty-one miles north of Nashville where Major General William Hardee’s 30,000-man Army of Central Kentucky faced 50,000 men under Buell. On his right flank, Johnston deployed 5,000 men under former Tennessee congressman Felix Zollicoffer against an equivalent Federal force under George Thomas. Another 4,000 Confederates were constructing fortifications on the Cumberland and the Tennessee rivers, while a cavalry force under hard-fighting Nathan Bedford Forrest was somewhere out in front of rebel lines, preying on Yankee communications. Altogether, Johnston could field slightly more than 55,000 combat effectives east of the Mississippi versus 75,000 Union troops.
Johnston’s position was further complicated by the two great rivers, the Tennessee and the Cumberland, which pierced the center of his line: “a double-barreled shotgun leveled at his heart,” in the words of one historian.8 C. F. Smith’s forces sat astride the mouths of both rivers, and despite their northerly flow, they offered easy access for steam-powered Union gunboats into the vital center of the Confederacy and the supply base of Johnston’s army. Even worse, the railroads Johnston depended upon to shuttle his forces spanned both rivers only a few miles from Union lines. Gunboats could destroy the railroad bridges and the trestles leading to them in a matter of hours. To counter that threat, Johnston’s predecessors had begun construction of two forts, Fort Henry on the right bank of the Tennessee, and Fort Donelson on the left bank of the Cumberland. The forts were located twelve miles apart: close enough to reinforce each other, but not so close as to provide mutual support. Johnston ordered both forts completed as quickly as possible.
The one advantage Johnston possessed—almost the only one—was unity of command. The Confederate army had a single head. Whether the Union’s Halleck and Buell could coordinate their efforts was not clear. Both reported directly to McClellan, and they were darkly suspicious of each other.9 Their commands divided at the Cumberland River, which may have looked like a tidy demarcation line to the War Department, but in reality was the focal point of rebel resistance. Johnston sagely placed his center of gravity in the seam between the two Union armies and initially enjoyed substantial success. Overstating the size of his force by a factor of two, sometimes three, his threats to move on Lexington, Louisville, and Cincinnati were trumpeted widely by the press in both North and South. As a result, both Buell and Halleck misjudged Confederate strength and were reluctant to attack. Indeed, when Buell suggested a joint advance against Nashville, Halleck dismissed it as “madness.”10