Grant

CHAPTER NINE

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Dynamo

DESPITE HIS IMPLACABLE WILL, Grant stood under no illusions that Fort Donelson on the Cumberland River would succumb as easily as its sister fort on the Tennessee. The Cumberland commanded river traffic to nearby Nashville, a regional entrepôt for many agricultural and manufacturing goods, boosting dramatically the fort’s strategic value. “Fort Donelson is a very strong point naturally and an immense deal of labor has been added to strengthen it,” Grant told his brother Orvil.¹ Unlike Fort Henry, Donelson stood on high, dry ground, towering more than a hundred feet above the river in spots. While the term “fort” conjures up a fortress, Fort Donelson consisted more of an extensive series of earthworks. It bristled with heavy guns staggered at different elevations and deeply planted in niches scooped from the bluff, enjoying unobstructed views of gunboats rounding a distant bend. It had miles of ramifying trenches and its seventeen thousand men were well equipped with arms and provisions. Finally, its rolling topography was punctuated by streams, gullies, and ravines that seemed to make it impregnable.

For days after Fort Henry’s fall, Grant was detained by a downpour that churned roads into mud, slowing the passage of wagons and artillery. He also awaited the arrival of the all-important gunboats, which had to travel a circuitous 150-mile water route while his infantry only needed to traverse 12 overland miles. Once again, Grant demanded firsthand knowledge of the terrain, scouting it himself. On February 7, he organized a cavalry reconnaissance group that approached within a mile of Fort Donelson’s defensive perimeter. He profited from prewar knowledge of Confederate commander Gideon J. Pillow and “judged that with any force, no matter how small, I could march up to within gunshot of any intrenchments he was given to hold . . . I knew that [John B.] Floyd was in command, but he was no soldier, and I judged that he would yield to Pillow’s pretensions.”^{² On his personal survey, Grant discovered two roads by which his troops could approach the fort safely.}

Amid his preparations, Grant wrote a revealing letter to his sister Mary that attests to his burgeoning confidence and dreamlike rise in the world: “You have no conception of the amount of labor I have to perform. An army of men all helpless looking to the commanding officer for every supply. Your plain brother however has, as yet, had no reason to feel himself unequal to the task and fully believes that he will carry on a successful campaign against our rebel enemy.”^³

Once again Grant hatched battle plans of immaculate simplicity. His infantry would pin down the Confederates while Foote’s trusty gunboats strafed their cannon at close range. On February 11, Foote sent Grant the message he longed to hear: “I shall be ready to start tomorrow evening with two Boats.”^{⁴ The next day, boasting an army fifteen thousand strong, Grant set out for Fort Donelson in balmy, nearly summery, weather. “River, land, and sky fairly shimmered with warmth,” one Union general said.⁵ As skies cleared and ridge roads turned dry, Grant’s men marched east with unfettered good spirits, singing lustily. When the horse of surgeon John Brinton darted impetuously ahead of him, Grant joked aloud, “Doctor, I believe I command this army, and I think I’ll go first.”^{⁶ In unseasonably warm weather, some men stripped off their overcoats and chucked them by the wayside along with blankets.}}

To Halleck’s dismay, instead of strengthening Fort Henry as a base to which he could scramble back in safety, the audacious Grant had broken loose and wagered everything on conquering Fort Donelson. He again showed a glandular optimism that his boss could scarcely fathom. Reflecting his gathering confidence, he wired Halleck: “I hope to send you a despatch from Fort Donelson tomorrow.”^{⁷ The next day, as he besieged the fort and awaited gunboats, Grant sounded less jaunty than when he pounced on Fort Henry. A small shadow of doubt suddenly tempered his words. Writing to Julia on February 13, he reported that at least a dozen of his soldiers had been killed and 120 wounded that day in skirmishes. “We have a large force to contend against but I expect to accomplish their subjugation. Do not look for it for three days yet however.”^{⁸ Until more gunboats and troop transports came along, he was outnumbered by rebel soldiers inside the fort. That night, to his relief, Foote steamed into the Cumberland with four ironclads and two wooden gunboats while transports brought needed reinforcements. To bolster his forces, Grant summoned 2,500 men left behind at Fort Henry.}}

Those improvident soldiers who had cavalierly dumped coats and blankets by the roadside regretted their decisions on the night of February 13, 1862. The mercury plummeted to twelve degrees as the area was pelted by snow. Grant, nursing a cold, slept in a feather bed in a modest log farmhouse, but his soldiers, within range of enemy muskets and lacking sufficient tents, lay down in the cold with weapons tightly clutched at their sides. To worsen matters, Grant had to forbid campfires that might draw enemy fire. “At midnight I noticed some of the men who had blankets lying on the ground completely covered with snow and you would think they were dead if it was not for their breath like little puffs of steam,” said an Illinois officer.⁹ The men of the Twelfth Iowa, to avoid frostbite, ran around in endless circles.

On the afternoon of February 14, Flag Officer Foote, barking orders into a megaphone, came up the Cumberland with his entire gunboat fleet: four black ironclads surged ahead, trailed by two wooden ships. Grant took up position along the shore with a clear view of the naval attack as the Confederates girded for withering fire from the river. “Parson, for God sake pray!” Confederate cavalry commander Nathan Bedford Forrest beseeched a staff officer who was a minister in civilian life. “Nothing but God Almighty can save that fort.”^¹⁰

Foote was far more sober about his prospects, knowing that the downward angle of fire from the high batteries at Fort Donelson could inflict massive damage on his ironclads. He compounded the problem by sailing too close to the fort, making the plunging fire still more destructive. With ear-piercing sounds, the garrison’s big guns crashed through the gunboat armor—“as lightning tears the bark from a tree,” said one captain—and raked smokestacks with deadly fire, demolishing pilothouses.¹¹ In the meantime, Foote’s gunners widely overshot their marks. So many shells sprayed down on the Union fleet that every ironclad took at least forty hits, producing fifty-four Union casualties. Even Foote, inside the pilothouse of his flagship St. Louis, received solid shot in the ankle and thought he had never withstood such a punishing bombardment. As Grant watched, the badly battered fleet began to drift back down the river after ninety minutes of tempestuous conflict. Confederate soldiers sent up huge cheers while their leaders hastened to telegraph news of victory to Richmond.

At Fort Henry, gunboats had wrapped things up before the hapless soldiers even arrived. At Fort Donelson, the situation was reversed with the army now bearing the burden. As a rule, Grant did not like soldiers to build fortifications, which he thought sapped their fighting spirit, but he now contemplated a prolonged siege. “I retired this night not knowing but that I would have to intrench my position, and bring up tents for the men or build huts under the cover of the hills.”^{¹² That night soldiers again suffered cruelly from a snowstorm that blanketed their camps, producing a bizarre incident: when rough winds flung icicles from tree branches, the Confederates mistook this for an attack and started firing madly.}

That night, the three main Confederate generals huddled inside Fort Donelson. Grant had strong opinions about all three. John B. Floyd of Virginia was the war secretary under James Buchanan who had transferred arms from the North to southern arsenals to prepare the South for war—a notorious action Grant deemed treasonous. He thought Gideon J. Pillow proud and conceited. He still felt warmly toward his old West Point classmate Simon Bolivar Buckner, who had rescued him financially in Manhattan in 1854. Buckner was now third in command at the fort, though he was “much the most capable soldier.”^{¹³ Later explaining why he dared to confront a larger Confederate force at the fort, Grant said: “Of course there was a risk in attacking Donelson as I did, but I knew the men who commanded it. I knew some of them in Mexico. Knowledge of that kind goes far toward determining a movement like this.”^{¹⁴ The comment again speaks to Grant’s command of the psychology of battle.}}

Despite the wreckage of Union gunboats that afternoon, the three generals recognized their desperate plight. Foote still dominated the river, Grant hemmed in the fort on the land side, and they would be squeezed to death in a vise as the siege was perfected. Things would deteriorate as more Union troops descended, tightening the stranglehold. In a high-stakes decision, Pillow and Buckner agreed to hazard a surprise attack on the Union right the next morning, slashing a hole through it, then trying to make a run for safety in Nashville.

At about 2 a.m. on February 15, Foote, still incapacitated by his ankle injury, urgently requested a meeting with Grant aboard the savaged St. Louis. At dawn Grant rode to the river through a bleak landscape of frozen turf and advised his three commanders—McClernand, Smith, and Lew Wallace—to refrain from aggressive action in his absence. During his conference with Grant, Foote said he wanted to take all his wounded ships back to Cairo for repairs, but Grant prevailed upon him to take only two and keep the rest at Fort Donelson for a few more days. Around noon, Grant returned to shore and was immediately met by his aide William Hillyer, who looked “white with fear,” recalled Grant.¹⁵ Following their plan, the Confederates had furiously broken from the fort, pounded the Union right under McClernand, inflicted heavy losses, and provoked a full-blown Union retreat. Because the wind had blown in the wrong direction, Grant had missed the extraordinary racket of the conflict, which sounded “as if a million men were beating empty barrels with iron hammers,” in Lew Wallace’s image.¹⁶ Always better at plotting his own moves than at anticipating enemy reactions—he could sense weakness better than strength—Grant had been caught by surprise, but now assumed personal charge of the situation.

Biting on the stub of a cigar Foote had given him, Grant spurred his horse for seven miles over icy terrain and found McClernand and Wallace in a clearing. When Grant arrived, Wallace recollected, his face “already congested with cold, reddened perceptibly and his lower jaw set upon the other. Without a word, he looked at McClernand.”^{¹⁷ Grant found dazed, demoralized men milling about aimlessly. McClernand’s men had fought gallantly until their ammunition ran out, but had suffered from an absence of effective leadership. Taking a dig at Grant, McClernand snarled, “This army wants a head,” to which Grant shot back, “It seems so.”^{¹⁸ Grant worked off his upset by crumpling paper balls in his palm. Then he delivered a calm but forceful line that reflected his determination. “Gentlemen, the position on the right must be retaken.”^{¹⁹ Wallace admired how Grant conducted himself. “In battle, as in camp, he went about quietly, speaking in a conversational tone; yet he appeared to see everything that went on, and was always intent on business.”^²⁰}}}

Grant devised an ingenious way to gauge enemy intentions. Since rebel soldiers had barreled out of Fort Donelson carrying haversacks, he inspected the gear of captured soldiers and saw that they carried three days’ cooked rations. Some officers interpreted this as proof that the Confederates meant to stand and fight. Grant begged to differ, deducing correctly that “they mean to cut their way out,” but “they have no idea of staying here to fight us.”^{²¹ Typically for Grant, he focused on enemy defects, not on his own. Unlike other Union generals who magnified rebel power to imaginary proportions, Grant’s knowledge of his foes demystified them. Perhaps from his own background of failure, he was always attuned to the mentality of defeat. “Some of our men are pretty badly demoralized,” he told a staff officer, “but the enemy must be more so, for he has attempted to force his way out but has fallen back; the one who attacks first now will be victorious, and the enemy will have to be in a hurry if he gets ahead of me.”^{²² Once again Grant showed a predilection for taking the offensive. Coordinating all facets of battle, he ordered his stricken gunboats to throw shells at the fort at long range, giving at least moral support to his men on the ground. He also rallied McClernand’s men. “Fill your cartridge-boxes, quick, and get into line; the enemy is trying to escape and he must not be permitted to do so.” In Grant’s memory, “This acted like a charm.”^²³}}

Grant read the enemy perfectly. He saw that Pillow had not only intended to break out and escape but failed to capitalize on the momentary confusion of McClernand’s division. This convinced Grant the other side was disoriented and vulnerable. After seeing the casualties his exhausted men suffered, Pillow concluded that a breakout to Nashville was too risky. Over Buckner’s anguished protest, he ordered his men to retreat to the fort’s defenses, throwing away the morning’s dearly won victory. Realizing this, Grant redoubled his efforts to counterattack. Assuming that Confederate strength on the Union right meant corresponding weakness on the Union left—an insight he exploited repeatedly in later battles—he ordered General Smith to attack the Confederates on that side, predicting he would encounter only “a very thin line to contend with.”^{²⁴ During the afternoon, galloping across the battlefield, Grant recouped the positions yielded to Confederates that morning. Smith performed with special brilliance, overrunning a ridge that formed part of the enemy stockade.}

For Grant it had been a day of bloody triumph. As usual, he didn’t whoop with delight over enemy losses. At dusk, riding back to headquarters through fields littered with frozen corpses, he came upon a wounded Union lieutenant sprawled next to a Confederate private. Grant dismounted, got a flask of brandy, and impartially gave a swig to each man. He immediately had Rawlins summon stretcher bearers, but was dismayed when they removed the Union officer and overlooked the Confederate private. “Take this Confederate, too,” he said. “Take them both together; the war is over between them.”^{²⁵ Grant seemed sickened by the carnage. “Let’s get away from this dreadful place,” he told an officer. “I suppose this work is part of the devil that is left in us all.” As Grant watched a parade of bandaged warriors trudging by, one aide heard him softly recite verse from Robert Burns: “Man’s inhumanity to man / makes countless thousands mourn.”^{²⁶ It was uncommon for Grant to quote poetry, especially upon the battlefield.}}

Eager for a certifiable victory, Lincoln followed events at Fort Donelson with mounting apprehension. “Our success or failure at Donelson is vastly important; and I beg you to put your soul in the effort,” he urged Halleck.^{²⁷ Without fanfare or prompting from Lincoln, Grant was taking the decisive measures the president wanted, while George McClellan procrastinated with his large, well-accoutred army in the East.}

On the night of February 15, with things looking bleak, Confederate commanders sorted through their shrinking options. While Floyd and Pillow, the ranking officers, vowed never to surrender, the Union army now blocked any escape route to Nashville. Buckner, the third-ranking officer, thought it the height of folly to try to smash through Union lines and predicted that three-quarters of their men would perish in such a suicidal mission and that no general “had the right to make such a sacrifice of human life.”^{²⁸ Because Floyd feared being captured and tried for treason, he and Pillow decided to flee that night and enacted a curious transfer of power. “I turn the command over, sir,” Floyd told Pillow. “I pass it,” Pillow told Buckner. “I assume it,” Buckner said.²⁹ Contrary to chivalric traditions beloved by the South, Floyd and Pillow were selfishly abandoning their men, while Buckner, instilled with a deep sense of soldierly honor, refused to desert them. Floyd and Pillow fled by water to Nashville while Nathan Bedford Forrest and his cavalry slipped out by an unguarded stream. It therefore fell to Buckner to surrender and he showed exceptional courage in doing so, knowing he would be reviled throughout the South for surrendering an entire Confederate army for the first time.}

In the early hours of February 16, under a flag of truce, a Confederate emissary delivered Buckner’s letter to General Smith, who took it to the farmhouse where Grant lay on a mattress on the floor. Smith handed him the letter, saying, “There’s something for you to read General.” Buckner requested a formal armistice with commissioners appointed to negotiate terms of surrender. “What answer shall I send to this, General?” Grant inquired of Smith, who answered categorically: “No terms to the damned Rebels!”^{³⁰ With that, Grant sat down at the kitchen table and composed a classic statement in American military history. In lapidary prose, he wrote: “Sir; Yours of this date proposing Armistice, and appointment of commissioners, to settle terms of capitulation is just received. No terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted. I propose to move immediately upon your works.”^{³¹ When finished, Rawlins said, Grant raised his eyes to his old West Point instructor, gave him the letter, and said drily, “General, I guess this will do.” Smith agreed. “It could not be better.”^³²}}

Buckner was taken aback by Grant’s harsh terms, which struck him as ungentlemanly, and he reluctantly replied that “the overwhelming force under your command, compel me . . . to accept the ungenerous and unchivalrous terms which you propose.”^{³³ A modern general, Grant retired outmoded forms of chivalry, showing that gentility had given way to a stark new brand of modern warfare. He did not soften his words in deference to past friendship with Buckner and delivered a powerful military message instead. In conventional warfare, Buckner would have been entitled to the preliminary armistice and negotiation of surrender he requested, but Grant believed the South had conducted an illegal rebellion and wasn’t entitled to enjoy the niceties of military etiquette.}

Shortly after dawn, Grant rode across a snowy landscape, past rebel lines that sprouted white flags, to meet Buckner at the Dover Hotel. This low frame building, with an unpainted double row of porches, lay right by the Cumberland River, where it provided a stopping place for travelers. The meeting between Grant and Buckner surely had a fairy-tale quality. The last time Buckner, with his broad swarthy face and handlebar mustache, had seen Grant in 1854 the latter was sad and broke after departing in disgrace from the army. Now Grant was the victorious Union general at the zenith of his career to date. Despite their stiff exchange of messages, Grant and Buckner turned warmly companionable in person, as befit old friends.

After their greetings, Grant asked why Pillow had fled. “Well, he thought you would rather have hold of him than any other man in the Southern Confederacy.” “Oh no,” Grant smirked. “If I had got him I’d let him go again; he will do us more good commanding you fellows.”^{³⁴ Grant and Buckner, both veterans who remembered Pillow from Mexico, shared a good laugh at this caustic remark. Grant liked to tell stories of how Pillow once dug a ditch on the wrong side of his breastworks or described himself as “cut down by grape shot” when a bullet grazed his foot.³⁵ During this friendly banter, Buckner said that if he had been in command, Grant would not have approached Fort Donelson so readily. “I told him that if he had been in command I should not have tried in the way I did,” Grant recalled.³⁶ In his personal dealings with Buckner, Grant showed the gratitude missing from their official communications. “After I became his prisoner Grant tendered me the use of his purse,” recalled Buckner. “I did not accept it, of course, but it showed his generosity and his appreciation of my aid to him years before, which was really very little.”^³⁷}

Grant had captured an army of at least thirteen thousand men, a record on the North American continent. He showed mercy toward the conquered force, giving them food and letting them keep their sidearms. Avoiding any show of celebration, he refused to shame defeated soldiers and vetoed any ceremony in which they marched out of Fort Donelson and stacked their arms. “Why should we go through with vain forms and mortify and injure the spirit of brave men, who, after all, are our own countrymen,” he asked.³⁸ In treating the sick and wounded, he made no distinction between federal and Confederate troops and prevented the indignity of having souvenir hunters scavenge trophies from the battlefield.

In the wake of Fort Donelson, Grant’s behavior toward fugitive slaves signaled a shift. Aligned with new national policy, he rebuffed attempts by masters to seek runaway slaves in his camps, although he still prohibited slaves from finding sanctuary with his army. On the other hand, he refused to return two hundred slaves captured at Fort Donelson who had worked on Confederate fortifications and enlisted them instead as “contraband” of war to cook, handle horses, and perform other jobs. “We want laborers, let the negroes work for us,” he announced to Buckner.³⁹ This momentous first step looked forward to the recruitment of former slaves as full-fledged Union soldiers.

Grant comprehended the historic nature of his victory. With Julia, he struck a jubilant tone. “Dear Wife I am most happy to write you from this very strongly fortified place, now in my possession, after the greatest victory of the season. Some 12 or 15 thousand prisoners have fallen into our possession to say nothing of 5 to 7 thousand that escaped in the darkness of the night last night. This is the largest capture I believe ever made on the continent.”^{⁴⁰ To Congressman Washburne, he portrayed Fort Donelson as “a battle that would figure well with many of those fought in Europe where large standing armies are maintained.”^⁴¹}

Without major victories elsewhere that winter, the North’s attention became fixated on the splendid triumph at Fort Donelson, curbing a defeatist psychology that had begun to take hold. Sherman said that in America’s “hour of its peril,” Grant had “marched triumphant into Fort Donelson. After that none of us felt the least doubt as to the future of our country.”^{⁴² Governor Yates described the pandemonium that broke out in Illinois as thousands gathered “on the roads and at the stations, with shouting and with flags.”^{⁴³ Church bells chimed, grown men embraced, people burst into patriotic songs. The celebration in Chicago lasted a full day. As the Chicago Tribune reported, “Chicago reeled mad with joy . . . Such events happen but once in a lifetime, and we who passed through the scenes of yesterday lived a generation in a day.”^⁴⁴}}

This first major Union victory bestowed instant fame on Grant, who became the war’s first certified hero. Rocketed to stardom—The New York Times affirmed that Grant’s “prestige is second now to that of no general in our army”—he leapt to the front pages of newspapers across America.⁴⁵ In homage to his message to Buckner, Grant was endearingly dubbed “Unconditional Surrender Grant,” a nickname that tallied nicely with his initials. With the public famished for details about him, one reporter obliged by saying that Grant’s face had three characteristic expressions: “deep thought, extreme determination, and great simplicity and calmness.”^{⁴⁶ He was such a fresh celebrity that when the New-York Illustrated News ran a photo of him, it mistakenly showed a beef contractor from Illinois named William Grant. The U. S. Grant legend began taking shape as papers identified him as someone who personified the American heartland, a folksy character partial to homespun speech. “I was so brought up,” Grant explained, “and if I try fine phrases I shall only appear silly.”^{⁴⁷ He was a superior version of the ordinary American and the public loved it. As a general, he epitomized the fighting soldier, bashful and self-effacing, who went about his grim business without any self-aggrandizement.}}

Amid this Grant mania, many newspaper readers noted that in reports of the final day’s fighting at Fort Donelson, Grant was holding a cigar—the one he received from Foote. Until that point, Grant had been primarily a pipe smoker. Now admirers flooded him with “boxes of the choicest brands” of cigars “from everywhere in the North. As many as ten thousand were soon received.”^{⁴⁸ Before long, Grant smoked eighteen to twenty cigars a day and they became an inescapable part of his persona. While many people characterized him as even-tempered, the compulsive smoking bespoke a deeper tension bottled up inside him. “Smoking seemed to be a necessity to General Grant’s organism,” said Ely Parker, who “noticed that he smoked the hardest when in deep thought, or engaged in writing an important document.”^{⁴⁹ The gift of so many cigars bred an ultimately fatal addiction.}}

One person unimpressed by Grant’s victory was his father-in-law. Not long after the Confederate capitulation, Dr. William Taussig was out driving with Grant’s friend John Fenton Long when they ran into Colonel Dent at a crossroads. Long made the mistake of alluding to the famous victory at Fort Donelson, and Colonel Dent erupted in anger. “Don’t talk to me about this Federal son-in-law of mine. There shall always be a plate on my table for Julia, but none for him.”^⁵⁰

Within a week of Fort Donelson’s downfall, Grant heard from his young favorite, Colonel James B. McPherson, who was in St. Louis and described Halleck’s joyous reaction to the news. “Genl. Halleck is exceedingly gratified and says you could not have done better—Immediately on the receipt of the news he telegraphed to the President to nominate you for a Major General.” Then referring to drinking allegations against Grant, McPherson added, “You will not be troubled any more by Kountz.”^{⁵¹ In the wake of Fort Donelson, rumors about Grant’s drinking subsided, and his friend J. Russell Jones wrote sarcastically to Washburne, “Grant made a pretty fair fight for a Drunken man.”^{⁵² Sherman saw Fort Donelson as proof that Grant had mended his ways from prewar army days, telling his brother that “Grant’s victory was most extraordinary and brilliant—he was a plain unostentatious man, and a few years ago was of bad habits, but he certainly has done a brilliant act.”^⁵³}}

Stanton rushed over to Lincoln bearing Grant’s nomination as Major General of Volunteers, catapulting him ahead of every western general except Halleck. The president signed the order at once and commended the western spirit of Grant’s army, pointing out that “if the Southerners think that man for man they are better than our Illinois men, or western men generally, they will discover themselves in a grievous mistake.”^{⁵⁴ The comment previewed the special affinity between Grant and Lincoln as the war progressed. Those in the know in Washington were amused by efforts by McClellan partisans to present him as the mastermind of Fort Donelson. Stanton observed tartly that the image of a heroic McClellan, ensconced at the telegraph office in the capital, “organizing victory, and by sublime military combinations capturing Fort Donelson six hours after Grant and Smith had taken it,” made for “a picture worthy of Punch.”^⁵⁵}

After being promoted to major general, Grant thought back on all the doubts about his military ability conveyed to him by his busybody father and clearly felt vindicated by his performance. “Is father afraid yet that I will not be able to sustain myself?” he asked Julia sardonically, saying Jesse had “expressed apprehensions on that point when I was made a Brigadier.”^{⁵⁶ Grant had now proved himself beyond a shadow of a doubt and would never again have to truckle to his father or father-in-law.}

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BY SEVERING THE EXTENDED DEFENSIVE LINE that Albert Sidney Johnston had constructed from Bowling Green to the Mississippi River, Grant’s conquests at Forts Henry and Donelson carved open huge chunks of Confederate territory, enabling the North to command Kentucky, western and central Tennessee, and portions of the Mississippi Valley, while driving a wedge into Alabama and the Deep South. “‘Secesh’ is now about on its last legs in Tennessee,” Grant informed Julia.⁵⁷ In an analysis published in Vienna, Karl Marx predicted accurately that the loss of so much territory in Kentucky and Tennessee would threaten the Confederacy’s integrity.⁵⁸ The South now had to abandon its key fortress on the Mississippi at Columbus. As a result of his defeats at the twin forts, Johnston was knocked off his high pedestal in the South and subjected to scathing denunciations. Nonetheless, Jefferson Davis remained loyal to him in the teeth of a clamor to cashier him.

Grant’s military philosophy called for following up on victories before the enemy had time to recuperate. He blamed Halleck’s inertia and internal squabbling in the Union army for squandering a major opportunity to exploit the Fort Donelson victory. Had he been able to join his forty-five thousand men with thirty-five thousand under Don Carlos Buell, the united force could have damaged the Confederate army. As Grant later wrote, “If one general who would have taken the responsibility had been in command of all the troops west of the Alleghenies, he could have marched to Chattanooga, Corinth, Memphis and Vicksburg with the troops we then had . . . Providence ruled differently. Time was given the enemy to collect armies and fortify his new positions.”^⁵⁹

Commanding the new District of West Tennessee and still basking in Fort Donelson’s afterglow, Grant headed east along the Cumberland River to take the town of Clarksville, the first time the Union army had regained seceded territory in the larger Department of the Missouri. Union soldiers were cheered by the black populace, while whites largely deserted the town. As Grant’s ascendant star brought new personal scrutiny, the drinking issue inevitably resurfaced. In the Virginia theater of war, Stephen M. Weld heard from his commander, General Fitz-John Porter, that Grant was “a man of great energy and a laborious worker, but the general says that he cannot be depended upon. He is just as likely to be drunk in the gutter as to be sober.”^{⁶⁰ Such scurrilous rumors circulated freely in western Tennessee as well. As Grant’s army approached Clarksville, rumors cropped up that a drunken Grant could not contain his rowdy troops, and a local committee of safety, anticipating his arrival, poured large quantities of whiskey on the ground.⁶¹}

With his army controlling the Cumberland, Grant thought taking the next stop, Nashville, “would be an easy conquest,” and Halleck backed his plan enthusiastically.⁶² Even in Clarksville, Grant heard reports that the statehouse in Nashville had been abandoned, its legislators hurrying off to Memphis. After Fort Donelson’s downfall, Nashville residents were affected by southern propaganda that portrayed the Yankee soldiers as vulgar brutes; now these same vandals were marching straight to their defenseless town. Even as General Buell approached Nashville from the north, Grant sent William “Bull” Nelson—a brash six-foot-five general weighing three hundred pounds—to beat him there, and Buell was bitter at being denied the glory of conquering the first Confederate capital. Federal authorities recognized Andrew Johnson as the new military governor of Tennessee.

On February 27, Grant entered Nashville and held an uneasy meeting with the aggrieved Buell. Like Grant, Buell was a West Point graduate and highly decorated Mexican War veteran whose taste for combat had been tempered by years in the adjutant general’s department. Buell feared the Confederates would soon try to recapture Nashville. Grant thought they were fleeing the area as fast as they could, and he wanted to resume the offensive. He was soon proved right: Confederate troops beat a hasty retreat south to the important railroad center at Corinth in northern Mississippi. Once again, Grant rightly anticipated enemy intentions, reading fear and flight where the bullheaded Buell descried aggression. Nonetheless, in Buell Grant had made a powerful enemy who stood in the good graces of George McClellan.

While Grant suffered from a severe cold and headache that sapped his energy, the balding, jowly Halleck was working steadily to undermine him in brazen disregard of Grant’s new heroic stature. Fancying himself Fort Donelson’s hero, Halleck tried to capitalize on Grant’s victory by seeking power from Washington to command all western armies. He gave credit to Foote and Smith and attempted to deny it to Grant. He resented that, in the recent crop of new major generals, Grant would outrank both Buell and John Pope and be second in authority to him in the western theater. Halleck also faulted Grant for being a slipshod general who did not heed proper bureaucratic forms. Halleck had been reprimanded by McClellan for sending insufficient information about his forces and he passed on the blame to Grant. He ordered him to provide daily reports on the number and disposition of his forces and was outraged by a sudden, mysterious halt to these updates. Instead of waiting for Grant to explain this hiatus, Halleck devised a malevolent interpretation: willful neglect. Even as Grant hungered to advance against Confederate forces, Halleck summoned up an absurd fantasy of him complacently leaning back and coasting on his laurels. As he told McClellan:

I have had no communication with General Grant for more than a week. He left his command without my authority and went to Nashville . . . It is hard to censure a successful general immediately after a victory, but I think he richly deserves it. I can get no returns, no reports, no information of any kind from him. Satisfied with his victory, he sits down and enjoys it without any regard to the future.^⁶³

Privy to prewar gossip about Grant’s alcohol abuse, he wrote again to McClellan and, with thinly veiled innuendo, depicted Grant as a drunkard. “A rumor has just reached me that since the taking of Fort Donelson General Grant has resumed his former bad habits. If so, it will account for his neglect of my often-repeated orders. I . . . have placed General Smith in command of the expedition up the Tennessee. I think Smith will restore order and discipline.”^⁶⁴

McClellan’s draconian response to his first telegram must have shocked even Halleck:

Your dispatch of last evening received. The future success of our cause demands that proceedings such as Grant’s should at once be checked. Generals must observe discipline as well as private soldiers. Do not hesitate to arrest him at once if the good of [the] service requires it, & place CF Smith in command.⁶⁵

Both Halleck and McClellan, having been upstaged by Grant, were determined to knock him down. Their grossly unfair and shocking treatment of him bespeaks settled malice instead of sound military judgment. Neither man bothered to give Grant the benefit of the doubt or await his explanation.

There was no truth about Grant drinking during the preceding weeks. On March 20, Colonel Joseph D. Webster of Grant’s staff wrote home of this charge: “It is a vile slander, out of whole cloth. During all my acquaintance with him I have never seen him drinking anything intoxicating but once, & then he put a little brandy into some medication to disguise the taste.”^{⁶⁶ Halleck may have been deflecting attention from his own persistent problems with alcohol. Later on, Assistant Secretary of War Charles A. Dana told Rawlins, “The testimony of those best informed says that Halleck’s mind has been seriously impaired by the excessive use of liquor and that as [a] general thing it is regularly muddled after dinner every day.”^{⁶⁷ The surgeon John Brinton remembered Halleck as “fond of good living, and of good wine . . . After dining, he was often sleepy.”^{⁶⁸ The diarist George Templeton Strong walked away with this impression of Halleck: “His silly talk was conclusive as to his incapacity, unless he was a little flustered with wine.”^{⁶⁹ Halleck was to die of chronic heart and liver disease.}}}}

Grant had been innocent of insubordination and had faithfully filed daily reports of his troop strength. Hence, he reacted with “utter amazement” when he received the following dispatch from Halleck on March 4: “You will place Maj. Genl C.F. Smith in command of expedition, & remain yourself at Fort Henry. Why do you not obey my orders to report strength & positions of your command?”^{⁷⁰ Grant reassured Halleck about his daily reports, to no avail, and, in despair, asked to be relieved from command. “I have done my very best to obey orders . . . If my course is not satisfactory remove me at once.”^{⁷¹ Halleck made plain that in dealing with McClellan, he had been embarrassed by a shortage of information; Grant would pay the price. With tears in his eyes, a perplexed and deflated Grant showed Halleck’s dispatch to a fellow officer. “I don’t know what they intend to do with me . . . What command have I now?”^⁷²}}

After Fort Donelson Grant started to appreciate what he meant to the Union war effort. “I began to see how important was the work that Providence devolved upon me.”^{⁷³ It was a rare allusion to a religious meaning of his work. Yet at this moment, implausibly, he was “virtually in arrest and without a command.”^{⁷⁴ The staggering reversal of fortune was profoundly hurtful to a man who had recently escaped such misery in his life. It later turned out the telegraph operator at Cairo, who forwarded telegrams to Halleck in St. Louis, was a rebel spy and had not transmitted Grant’s dispatches. Not until March 3 did Grant receive Halleck’s dispatch of February 16, asking for daily reports of his combat readiness.}}

Isolated at Fort Henry with a small garrison, Grant was crushed by the abrupt loss of faith in him. He could never seem to savor good fortune without fresh troubles appearing. Lacking in guile, he was stunned to encounter it in those who specialized in it. Halleck treated him in the patronizing manner he had known in the 1850s when he did not yet possess the supreme confidence, born of repeated success, to resist it. The dispiriting sequel to Fort Donelson must have made him feel he would never shake off the ill luck that had bedeviled him in antebellum years. It was as if the dark, powerful undertow of the past always tugged him backward, forcing him to relive ancient misery.

During this impasse, Grant was heartened by a rousing message of support from John A. McClernand and his staff that put his strange purgatory in perspective: “You have slain more of the enemy, taken more prisoners and trophies, lost more men in battle and regained more territory to the Union than any other leader.”^{⁷⁵ Grant spent his confinement aboard the flagship Tigress, which lay anchored in the Tennessee River off Fort Henry. One friend who visited him saw how despondent the outcast commander was. “No one was on board but a watchman and Grant; not a damned soul beside. He was the most disconsolate looking man you ever saw and he was mad too. Grant said, ‘This is no time for red tape; this is a time for war. Halleck has arrested me for a breach of red tape.’”^⁷⁶}

Another man who would repeatedly rescue Grant from the doldrums was William Tecumseh Sherman. During the Fort Donelson siege, Sherman had been assigned to forward supplies to Grant from Smithland, at the mouth of the Cumberland River. Grant had been favorably impressed by the way Sherman, his senior in rank, rushed him whatever he needed.

The bond between the two men was to become the war’s most consequential military friendship. About six feet tall, weighing less than 150 pounds, the lanky Sherman had close-cropped reddish hair, a stubble beard, and a leathery, pocked face that perfectly expressed his hard-bitten nature. He was a restless, jittery character, who carried more nervous energy than his lean body could contain, his sharp eyes flashing with emotion. With surplus verve, he paced, smoked, stroked his beard, and fiddled with his coat buttons. Like Grant, he was a compulsive smoker plagued by stress-induced headaches. He had an overly active mind that always simmered with strong opinions, and sarcastic asides poured forth in rapid utterance. He dabbled in watercolors, attended the theater, and quoted liberally from Shakespeare and Dickens. Passionate in his hatreds, he directed withering scorn at the world’s follies. In his stern morality, he saw a purity in soldiers that civilians could never match. Whether people liked or detested him, they found Sherman a fascinating figure, a human dynamo who never rested.

For all his rough-hewn character, Sherman came from a refined background, born into a well-to-do family in Lancaster, Ohio. His father, who named him after the Shawnee chief Tecumseh, was a state Supreme Court justice. He died when William was nine, and the boy was taken into the home of Thomas Ewing, a U.S. senator who saw to it that he entered West Point. Sherman ended up marrying Ewing’s daughter Ellen, by which point Thomas Ewing was interior secretary. The wedding sparkled with political luminaries: Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, Thomas Hart Benton, and President Zachary Taylor attended.

After graduating from West Point and serving in the army, Sherman resigned in 1853 to become a banker in the freewheeling San Francisco that so mesmerized Grant. His exposure there to crooked politicians and corrupt journalists left him with a lasting distaste for both professions. Sherman steered his bank ably through the 1857 panic, but suffered heavy personal losses. Beleaguered by asthma and insomnia, he wound up his bank. In 1859 he became head of a new military college in Louisiana, the Louisiana State Seminary of Learning and Military Academy, which opened soon after Lincoln’s election. Although Sherman loved southern culture, he deplored secession as a treasonous act and threatened to resign if Louisiana seceded. One professor remembered that when Sherman read of Louisiana’s secession proclamation in a local newspaper, “he cried like a child, exclaiming, ‘My God, you Southern people don’t know what you are doing! . . . There can be no peaceable secession. Secession means war.’”^{⁷⁷ Sherman foresaw that northern determination and technical superiority would annihilate the South and he felt duty-bound to resign a position he adored.}

Becoming president of a horse-drawn trolley line in St. Louis, he enjoyed a ringside seat for the virulent conflict there between Confederate and Union sympathizers. In May 1861, he was appointed an infantry colonel and by July led a brigade at Bull Run. No less than Grant, Sherman was prone to depression and viewed northern missteps with consternation. In October 1861, he believed that while Frémont and McClellan were lavishly funded and supplied with men, Kentucky remained a low priority and was starved by Washington. When he confidentially told war secretary Cameron that two hundred thousand troops would be needed to suppress the rebellion in Kentucky, it leaked to the press and Sherman was branded “insane.” Relieved from duty on November 13, 1861, he tumbled into a deep depression, even flirting with suicidal thoughts. He was still being stigmatized as thoroughly unhinged when he was assigned to serve under Halleck, who gave him a second chance. This providential move brought Sherman into direct contact with Grant.

Both Grant and Sherman were damaged souls who would redeem tarnished reputations in the brutal crucible of war. They were both haunted men, tough and manly on the outside, but hypersensitive to criticism, and they sustained each other at troubled moments. Even though Sherman was more prolix and irascible than Grant, their letters display generosity, trust, and mutual admiration. As one of Grant’s officers wrote, “In all the annals of history no correspondence between men in high station furnishes a nobler example of genuine, disinterested personal friendship and exalted loyalty to a great cause.”^⁷⁸

Sherman spent decades pondering the mystery of Grant’s personality. “He is a strange character,” he wrote. “Nothing like it is portrayed by Plutarch or the many who have striven to portray the great men of ancient or modern times.”^{⁷⁹ While never as talkative as Sherman, Grant opened up to him and even confided in him about his drinking problem. “We all knew at the time that Genl. Grant would occasionally drink too much,” said Sherman. “He always encouraged me to talk to him frankly of this and other things and I always noticed that he could with an hour’s sleep wake up perfectly sober and bright, and when anything was pending he was invariably abstinent of drink.”^{⁸⁰ With facetious overstatement, Sherman once remarked, “He stood by me when I was crazy and I stood by him when he was drunk, and now, sir, we stand by each other always.”^⁸¹}}

Perhaps the strongest link between the two men resulted from a shared outlook about how to wage war. They both exhibited a bold fighting spirit, preferred to take unexpected actions that flustered the enemy, and hated to be on the defensive. Each complemented the other’s work. Not surprisingly, the literate Sherman was better read in military texts. “I am a damned sight smarter man than Grant; I know a great deal more about war, military history, strategy, and grand tactics than he does.”^{⁸² But whereas Sherman dwelled on what the enemy might do, Grant was often more fearless and flexible in carrying out his own plans. As Sherman admitted, Grant “knows, he divines, when the supreme hour has come in a campaign of battle, and always boldly seizes it.”^{⁸³ In an unsurpassed tribute, Sherman said, “Grant is the greatest soldier of our time if not all time.”^{⁸⁴ Grant was no less enamored of Sherman’s dauntless skill. “Sherman is not only a great soldier, but a great man,” he later affirmed. “He is one of the very great men in our country’s history.”^{⁸⁵ But such accolades lay far in the future.}}}}

By mid-March, Grant had emerged from the limbo to which Halleck had consigned him. Either Grant or Rawlins, or the two together, had sent Washburne copies of the correspondence between Grant and Halleck, and Washburne promptly brought them to the attention of the White House. Fuming over chronic stalling by George McClellan, Lincoln could not afford to sacrifice a general who took the initiative and had won an unbroken string of major victories in the West. The president was astute in reading Halleck and sized up the situation. In consequence, Stanton had Lorenzo Thomas, adjutant general of the army, dispatch a sharply worded order to Halleck, asking him to back up his charges against Grant. He indicated that he wrote at the direction of Lincoln and Stanton, showing that Grant now had friends in high places and could not be browbeaten.

Two other developments changed Halleck’s mind about Grant. On March 11, Lincoln removed McClellan as general in chief, reducing his authority to just the Army of the Potomac. This meant Halleck no longer had the cover of a superior general patently hostile to Grant. At the same time, Lincoln brought together the armies in Tennessee and the Mississippi Valley under Halleck’s command, making him head of a new Department of the Mississippi with the authority over western armies he craved. For the moment, Halleck’s envious instincts were appeased by success. As a result, he replied to Lorenzo Thomas in a sweetly reasonable tone, stating that Grant had never been insubordinate and that all “irregularities have now been remedied.”^{⁸⁶ Without admitting to having instigated the trouble, Halleck informed Grant: “Instead of relieving you, I wish you, as soon as your new army is in the field, to assume immediate command, & lead it onto new victories.”^{⁸⁷ Unlike his suspicious staff, Grant had been blind to Halleck’s machinations. He was still a newcomer to bureaucratic games, never having occupied a significant organizational position before the war. He naively assumed that Halleck had been his champion and did not learn the truth about his duplicitous drinking insinuations to McClellan until after the war. For the moment, still unaware of the true situation, Grant told Julia that he regarded Halleck as “one of the greatest men of the age and there are not two men in the United States who I would prefer serving under to McClellan & Halleck. They would be my own choice for the positions they fill if left to me to make.”^⁸⁸}}