And yet, in spite of it, there grew a compelling fascination. I do not think I exaggerate: for in that fascination lies War’s power. Once you have lain in her arms you can admit no other mistress. You may loathe, you may execrate, but you cannot deny her. No lover can offer you defter caresses, more exquisite tortures, such breaking delights. No wine gives fiercer intoxication, no drug more vivid exaltation. Every writer of imagination who has set down in honesty his experience has confessed it. Even those who hate her most are prisoners to her spell. They rise from her embraces, pillaged, soiled, it may be ashamed; but they are still hers.
—Guy Chapman
AMERICA’S RIVERS, as they flow across a continent, had represented to John Marshall the arteries of the nation’s life. The rivers carried the movement, the growth, and in the full eighteenth-century sense of the term, the commerce of a people. In view of that splendid conception, a claim could be made that the strangely beautiful river town of Cairo, Illinois, is better suited to be the capital of the nation than the sterile federal city lying in a boggy byway along the Potomac. For Cairo lies where great rivers join. The Mississippi River, into which the Missouri has already entered from the west, flows through the nation from north to south. It is met at Cairo by the Ohio, the west-running river that links the old Northwest Territory with midland America. And upstream, just a few miles from Cairo, the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers, which ramble westward through the mountains of the upper South, cut suddenly northward and flow into the Ohio.
By the fall of 1861, that nation had fallen in two and commerce had been disrupted. Forts blocked the points where the Tennessee and the Cumberland left the Confederacy and entered Kentucky. The Mississippi was in the hands of disunionists as far north as Memphis, and new Confederate thrusts northward threatened St. Louis. Grant, a general as unmajestic as his capital, was stationed at Cairo with orders to hold back the moves of the Confederacy northward along the rivers into the Midwest. He had probably never read any decision by the great chief justice, but he seems to have grasped the power of Marshall’s metaphor. Born far upstream on the Ohio, he had ridden its banks and traveled out into the world against its currents. An unprepossessing general in what others misguidedly thought of as a backwater command, Grant, at Cairo, not only blocked a Confederate move northward but began a southward probing of these rivers that eventually and painfully was to make the nation flow together again.
As he had a sense of the rivers and the people who lived along them, so too did the unintellectual general have a feel for the movement of events. Last year’s clerk in the leather shop in Galena had come a very long way from his reluctance to speak out on political matters. While more prominent Union commanders in Washington were focusing on what lay across the Potomac in Virginia, Grant wrote and sent a telegram to the Speaker of the House of Representatives of Kentucky, informing him that “Confederate forces in Considerable numbers” had invaded the state. The message, sent on September 5, 1861, only four days after Grant took command at Cairo, represented a rare overreach of his authority. Less news than warning, it informed the legislators that Grant might find it necessary to take military action in their state. The statement should have come not from him, but from civilians in the federal government in Washington. In any event, its content suggests Grant’s early grasp of the political dimension of the war. Unlike most of his military colleagues, he understood the importance to President Lincoln of holding Kentucky in the Union.1
The next day Grant gave force to his warning by moving a detachment of men up the Ohio and, without a battle, taking the town of Paducah, Kentucky, at the mouth of the Tennessee River. Similarly, General Charles F. Smith occupied Smithland, at the juncture of the Cumberland and the Ohio. Notice was served that the Confederates were not going to be allowed either to overrun western Kentucky or to move across the Ohio into Illinois. At Paducah, Grant felt at home much as he had when as a boy he visited cousins upriver in Maysville. Ignoring any animosities, the general addressed the citizens of the town: “I have come among you, not as an enemy, but as your friend and fellow-citizen…. An enemy, in rebellion against our common Government…is moving upon your city. I am here to defend you….” That enemy took the form of the army of Leonidas Polk, the Episcopal bishop turned Confederate general. Polk, coming up the Mississippi, sought to join the Confederate forces active in eastern Kentucky. Rebel and loyal brigades alike were maneuvering in gingerly fashion throughout the state, trying not to alienate their fellow citizens but instead to secure their allegiance. Like the Missourians, the people of Kentucky were deeply unsure of where their loyalties lay. Polk, hoping to enlist them in the Confederacy, had set up headquarters at Columbus, Kentucky, twenty miles south of Cairo on the Mississippi; his troops were a threat to Missouri, Kentucky, and even Illinois.2
With their eyes on that godly warrior, Grant and Captain Henry Walke of the United States Navy set out on November 6, 1861. By chance their action came on the same day that Flag Officer Samuel F. DuPont took Port Royal, South Carolina; the Civil War was moving by water. General Winfield Scott had called his concept of enveloping the Confederacy by exerting pressure on all its perimeters the Anaconda Plan, but the navy had venomous attacks in mind. DuPont’s blockade was only one facet of the flexible maneuvers of the navy, whose vessels not only entered ports along the Confederacy’s coast but also darted up the rivers of its interior, with small gunboats penetrating its deepest recesses. Grant and Walke’s effort was of less social significance than DuPont’s; his capture of the coastal fort, with the resulting evacuation of nearby white planters, opened the way for the experiments in farming by the freed people left behind that were to prove so important to Reconstruction. Grant’s day was simpler; his object in going out on the river was to get into battle at Belmont, Missouri.3
During this action, Grant was careful not to appear insubordinate. The habit was so ingrained that it carried over into his choice of words when he described the episode in his Memoirs twenty years later. Frémont had ordered him to make “demonstrations” without, however, “attacking the enemy.” Just what a “demonstration” might be, he did not say. Grant never revealed what he had in mind when he left Cairo. He claimed that only after he realized that his men, as they went aboard the boats, were “elated” at the prospect of a battle did he think of fighting. And he would have us believe that only at two the next morning, when he learned that General Polk had sent General Gideon J. Pillow with a relatively large force from Columbus across to the tiny garrison of Belmont, did he decide to fight there. Grant had seen Pillow’s ineptness in the Mexican War and was pleased that he would be his opponent. But clearly he had already made the decision to attack when he left Cairo. Why else would he have taken three thousand men out in those boats? The gunboats alone could have made a “demonstration” by shelling Columbus; Grant gave his intent away in an order, sent on November 6, to Colonel R. J. Oglesby, commanding an Illinois regiment nearby in Missouri. Oglesby was told to “communicate with me at Belmont.” Grant had set out to fight and to take the fort—not to demonstrate.4
Grant had wanted to seize Columbus before Polk did. It was too late for that now, but he could attack across the river at Belmont to prevent the Confederates from augmenting their forces in Missouri. At dawn on November 7 he went ashore three miles north of the fort and led his men through the riverbank thicket of trees. Meanwhile, the gunboats proceeded southward. Learning of Grant’s operation, Polk hurried reinforcements across the river, and the two armies engaged in two hours of close, bitter fighting. Grant’s men did not yield; finally, Pillow’s did, and the Union soldiers overran the Confederate camp.
Polk, assuming Grant’s attack at Belmont was designed to mask a second, larger assault on Columbus itself, did not move his whole force across the river, but he did send additional reinforcements to Pillow. These fresh soldiers, despite warnings from fleeing colleagues to go back, moved forward toward the fort, determined to recapture it. Dismayed at the prospect of a new attack, Grant ordered his men—who, in a mood of exultation, had begun looting—to burn the camp and cut their way back through the woods to the river. Grant himself, on his second horse of the day (one had been shot under him), started at a walk, to ensure that the Confederates would not suspect panic and begin a pursuit of his forces. But once he knew he was out of sight, he rode “as fast as my horse could carry me.” At one point, through a field of cornstalks, he could see Confederate soldiers not fifty yards away. The horse “seemed to take in the situation,” and as Grant stated it, “put his fore feet over the back of the bank without hesitation or urging, and with his hind feet well under him slid down the bank,” stepped onto a single plank put out as a gangway and carried Grant, the last man aboard, out of the battle at Belmont.5
Terms matter in war. If the action at Belmont was a battle, Grant lost; if a raid, he won. Leonidas Polk declared Belmont to be a battle, which he had won. On November 8 he notified “His Excellency, President Davis” of the “complete rout” of the enemy, in the accomplishment of which his own men were “immortalized by gallant killing in the face of being themselves killed.” Best of all, wired Polk, “General Grant is reported killed.” Unluckily for His Excellency, the bishop’s report was exaggerated; Grant had landed with his men on the riverbank at Belmont and gotten off again, alive.6
Grant, in his report to Washington from Cairo, spoke of an “engagement”; the term skirted both the question of insubordination and the question of how to evaluate the day’s results. He complimented his soldiers on their valor, commended General McClernand, who had three horses shot from under him while commanding his brigade, and acknowledged his debt to John A. Rawlins, Clark B. Lagow, Joseph D. Webster, and William S. Hillyer of his staff. Grant asserted that his attack on Belmont had halted the Confederates’ moves to reinforce their forces in Missouri, but this claim was possible only by luck: Polk retained Belmont and the opportunity to send troops into Missouri, but he failed to begin an offensive, thus draining meaning from his “victory.” And Grant’s “raid,” as his admirers were to call it, was not much to crow about, though it came to be regarded as his first victory. Grant said, grandly and accurately, that Belmont’s significance was in the “confidence it inspired in our troops,” but the lesson of greater importance for him and his men was that fighting and winning wars has less to do with great “victories” than with messing through days like Belmont and not letting embarrassment over ineptness stop one from setting out again on the morrow.7
For Grant himself, Belmont was a critical initiation. To be sure, he had seen men die in battle in Mexico; as a junior officer he had ordered men to cross a stream or seize a building and several of them had died as a result. Similarly, a few of his men had died in skirmishes in Missouri. But now, for the first time he had had the sole responsibility for an attack, in which eighty-five of his men were killed. On the Confederate side, families came to Columbus to take the dead home for burial, and Grant wrote later that “Belmont had caused more mourning than almost any battle up to that time.” But he insisted that the effect of the engagement on his men was different. Repeating himself, he affirmed that “the National troops acquired a confidence in themselves…that did not desert them through the war.” Grant, too, had gained confidence. Shortly after Belmont, when talking to a Confederate officer to arrange a truce to bury the dead, Grant was told exactly what kind of coat he had been wearing during the action. Startled, he asked how the rebel knew and was told by the officer that both he and General Polk had been able to see Grant as he left the battlefield and that Polk had invited a soldier to “try your marksmanship on him if you wish.” But, wrote Grant, “nobody fired at me.”8
Just days after Belmont (but not as a consequence of it) there was a reorganization of commands in the Union army above Grant’s level. Henry Wager Halleck was given the Army of the Missouri, replacing David Hunter, who was moved to Kansas. Halleck’s headquarters were at St. Louis, and operations in Missouri, western Kentucky, and western Tennessee were under his jurisdiction. At the same time Don Carlos Buell, with headquarters at Louisville, was placed in charge of the Army of the Ohio, with jurisdiction over proposed actions throughout Tennessee. Later in the month there was a change of command at a still higher level. Because of one of those frequent and silly assumptions that age necessarily incapacitates, Winfield Scott, seventy-five years old, was replaced by George B. McClellan as general in command of all Union forces. When McClellan took charge in Washington, he found that there was confusion of authority (as exemplified by Tennessee) among the new commanders in the west. Halleck and Buell were jealous and hence overly respectful of each other’s spheres of jurisdiction, and Ulysses Grant, a subordinate of Halleck’s, was the one who disturbed the decorum—crossing the western tip of Kentucky, entering Buell’s Tennessee, and invading the Confederacy.
But before Grant could conduct an invasion of the enemy’s home territory he had had to increase his own authority. At Cairo, he was still very much a local commander and veteran quartermaster, occupied more with problems of supply than with the decisions of field command. He was communicating with his superiors not through personal letters to his commander, but through reports to General Halleck’s assistant adjutant general. But at the same time he was doing a bit of standard army politicking. In October, John Rawlins received a letter from their fellow townsman Congressman Elihu Washburne “from which,” Ulysses reported to Julia, “it appears that he has been urging me for the place of Major General.” After making his usual disavowals of any desire for higher rank, Ulysses asked his wife to “lay aside the rules of society which would require Mrs. W. to pay you the first visit and call upon her and make known the many obligations I feel to her husband.”9
Grant had a more direct chance to put himself forward with Washburne later in the month. Getting the necessary goods of war had been a problem for every general, and Congress was investigating charges of incompetence and fraud among army suppliers. As luck would have it, Grant’s congressman was on the House Select Committee on Government Contracts, and Washburne arrived in Cairo on October 31, 1861, to investigate supply conditions. At the hearing, Grant explained that foreign guns presented problems because they were of a bore for which ammunition was not available in America; the bullets did not fit. Grant did not whine about ineptness in Washington, nor did he overstate the matter, but by the time he had finished, the purchase appeared to have been stupid, while he came through as intelligent. And Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, for one, was told so by Washburne.10
In November, turning to matters more exciting than materiél, Grant wrote Washburne about a plan for an offensive. The details of the proposal are lost, but not the fact that Grant succeeded in making Washburne aware that if an attack was made, he should lead it. Carefully acknowledging the worth of two other Illinois officers, Colonel W. H. L. Wallace and General McClernand (who, he knew, was also politicking in Washington), Grant began his argument for an offensive: “The battle of Belmont [as he now called it] as time passes, proves to have been a greater success than Gen. McClernand or myself at first thought. The enemies loss proves to be greater and the effect upon the southern mind more saddening.” Grant was taking special care not to insult McClernand because the former congressman had received a telegram of praise from President Lincoln after Belmont, while he himself, still the obscure man from Galena, had had not a word. But Grant was beginning to get himself out of the shadow. Washburne forwarded his skillfully written letter to the president, with instructions from one Illinois politician to another: “I want you to take a moment’s time to read this letter of Genl Grant.”11
Meanwhile, in Cairo, Grant was impatient. He displayed both his firmness and his discouragement in a letter to his father, in which he vented some of his anger at the impossible old man by delivering a sermon to him on the purpose of the war. After making his usual little-boy apology for not having written more often, after telling his father that he could not help him get a contract for harness, and taking care to avoid giving any news of his movements because he knew Jesse would leak them to the newspapers, he went on:
Then too you are disposed to criticise unfavorably from information received through the public press, a portion of which I am sorry to see can look at nothing favorably that does not look to a war upon slavery. My inclination is to whip the rebellion into submission, preserving all constitutional rights. If it cannot be whipped in any other way than through a war against slavery, let it come to that legitimately. If it is necessary that slavery should fall that the Republic may continue its existence, let slavery go. But that portion of the press that advocates the beginning of such a war now, are as great enemies to their country as if they were open and avowed secessionists.
These views were entirely consonant with Lincoln’s, and here, at the close of 1861, Grant was predicting with precision exactly the way the goals of the war would change as it evolved into a crusade to end slavery. But Grant’s lofty rhetoric did not hold to the end of the letter. He was depressed: Julia had gone to visit her father, two of his horses had died, he had forgotten his good saddle cloth—it was at home—and, finally: “I am somewhat troubled lest I lose my command here.”12
Two months later, in January of the new year, Grant was still uneasy about his command and bolstered his morale by boasting to his sister that he had under him at Cairo more men than Winfield Scott had had in Mexico. He hoped he would “retain so important a command for at least one battle.” The next day, Grant went to St. Louis to persuade his commander that such a battle should be fought. He had written earlier in the month asking for an interview, but General Halleck’s aide had dismissed the request, apparently seeing it as an attempt by Grant to find an excuse to visit St. Louis rather than assuming that he might wish to discuss important ideas about the conduct of the war. Nevertheless, Grant risked leaving Cairo, even though by doing so he put his rival, General McClernand, in temporary command. As commanding officer, McClernand seized the chance to send dispatches directly to General Halleck and President Lincoln; when Grant got back four days later, Rawlins had to inform Halleck formally that “Grant arrived home this morning, and will again resume command.”13
The St. Louis meeting had gone badly. Henry Wager Halleck, heavy-set, with bulging eyes, was difficult to get close to. Forty-six years old, he had graduated from West Point the spring before Grant entered and, winning a coveted spot in the corps of engineers, had gone to California. There, after resigning from the army, he had become successful in business. It was considered, not least by him, a great gift to the Union cause that he had returned to the army to manage the war in the west. Grant had known Halleck neither at West Point nor in Mexico; their paths had crossed only once, when they met briefly during Grant’s difficult days in California. Halleck had heard (and probably told) some of the virulent stories about Grant’s drinking in California and had heard and believed recent rumors about his consumption of alcohol at Belmont and Cairo. Indeed, Halleck would not have been surprised by the observation of James Harrison Wilson, gossiping with Samuel F. DuPont far off on the East Coast, on the flagship Wabash: “These generals in the west are not much and Grant drinks all the time.” Halleck (whom DuPont thought a “military genius”) was exceedingly wary of trusting a general commonly thought to be a drunk. He did not really listen as Grant sought to persuade him to stop rearranging his forces and start an invasion by river. Grant, for his part, had learned that all one could expect from carrying out one of Halleck’s pointless cross-country reconnaissance maneuvers was “splashing through the mud, snow and rain.” He wanted instead to move not by land but by boat, take Fort Henry, at the Tennessee border, and invade the Tennessee River valley, moving through Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama; however, according to Grant, the meeting proceeded with “so little cordiality that I perhaps stated the object of my visit with less clearness than I might have done.” Halleck said no.14
Grant was profoundly depressed by Halleck’s rebuff; he returned to Cairo “very much crestfallen.” It was a navy man, Flag Officer Andrew Hull Foote, who restored Grant’s confidence. Foote, with a background of New Haven Congregational rectitude, respected Grant and was ready to go into battle with him. Foote either disbelieved the stories of Grant’s drinking or didn’t care. Instead, he helped the general get on with a sober task. When Grant got back to Cairo, Foote immediately sent Halleck an uncomplicated proposal: “Grant and myself are of opinion that Fort Henry on the Tennessee can be carried with four Iron-clad Gun-boats and troops to be permanent occupied. Have we your authority to move for that purpose?” That same night Grant sent a parallel, succinct telegram: “With permission I will take Fort Henry on the Tennessee and hold & establish a large camp there.” With the assurance of Foote’s participation in hand, Halleck telegraphed his assent, but in the written order to Grant that followed, pointedly added, “You will furnish…Foote with a copy of this letter.” Grant was being allowed to go because Foote would be there to keep a fatherly eye on him.15
In this first invasion of the Confederacy in the west, Grant’s army was an auxiliary of the United States Navy. On February 3, 1862, Foote took seven gunboats, four armored and three unsheathed, upstream on the Tennessee River across the narrow western end of Kentucky toward Fort Henry, poorly sited on low land, where the Confederates had placed fortifications intended to block any Union invasion southward into Tennessee. The Union’s unimpressive but effective armada was followed by a fleet of transport ships carrying seventeen thousand of Brigadier General Ulysses S. Grant’s men. The river waters were high and carried away Confederate mines laid to defend the fort. On February 6 one contingent of Grant’s army, under General McClernand, disembarked and in heavy rain and cold moved toward Fort Henry on close-to-impassable roads along the east bank of the river. General Charles F. Smith led a similar force against the companion fort on the west bank. Foote’s gunboats moved to within a mile of Fort Henry and opened fire. For two hours the shelling continued; the returning shot was accurate and deadly. The wooden boats had to hold to the bank; one ironclad was so badly damaged that it drifted back downstream, but the other sheathed boats persevered, despite fierce shelling, and put the fort’s cannon out of commission. Recognizing that he could not hold Fort Henry, its Confederate colonel, Lloyd Tilghman, sent 2,500 of his men overland to Fort Donelson, eleven miles away on the Cumberland River, and with the death of but one man, surrendered the remaining seventy. In the words of one authority, James Marshall-Cornwall, “The victory had been won by the U.S. Navy.”16
In Washington, McClellan was delighted, but his request to General Halleck, “Please thank Grant and Foote and their commands for me,” was carried out only with respect to Foote. Halleck could celebrate the success of the naval officer without jealousy; he held back from congratulating his fellow army officer. Meanwhile, Grant and Foote were making people other than Halleck uncomfortable. The Federals were “away down in Dixie,” as Grant put it in a letter to his sister, and in the Confederacy, for the first time, there was fear of deep penetration by the Yankees. On February 8 Foote’s gunboats pushed all the way across Tennessee and reconnoitered threateningly as far south as Florence, Alabama.17
As soon as Fort Henry fell, Grant called his chief officers together to discuss the possibility of attacking Fort Donelson. He once said that he never held a council of war in his life; General Lew Wallace corrected him. There was one such council—in the ladies’ cabin of the Tigress, the gunboat on which Grant made his headquarters at this time. At the meeting, Wallace found his fellow councilors joined “in icy binding; probably because, like myself, they were mostly new to the business. Our uniforms and swords, worn in compliance with etiquette, may have had to do with the frigidity of the occasion.” General Charles F. Smith, a tall, dignified, fifty-five-year-old West Pointer, who had stood in judgment of Grant at the academy as his teacher and was a veteran of a command in the Mexican War, had some sense of the protocol and mores of such gatherings. He contributed a bit of small talk, but “aside from that there was not the slightest pretence of sociability, no introductions, no bowing, no hand-shaking, no conversation.”18
“After little,” Wallace recounted, “General Grant stepped to the table and said, ever so quietly: ‘The question for consideration, gentlemen, is whether we shall march against Fort Donelson or wait for reinforcements. I should like to have your views.’” The generals, still standing, spoke in order of seniority. Smith said simply that he was ready to go at once, but McClernand, hammering another nail into his coffin, “drew out a paper and read it.” He, like all the others, “was in favor of going at once.” However, as Wallace observed, it would have been “better for him…had he rested with a word to that effect; as it was he entered into details…; we should do this going and that when we were come. The proceeding smacked of a political caucus, and…both Grant and Smith grew restive….” Wallace was aware that while the various officers spoke, Rawlins watched them—taking stock of each of his general’s lieutenants. When McClernand was through, Grant immediately gave the order that all were to be ready to leave at a moment’s notice, and Wallace thought it “hardly supposable” that “the opinions submitted had any influence” on the decision. “There is evidence that he had already determined upon the movement.” Thereafter, Grant dispensed with the charade of appearing to rely on councils of war.19
Few Americans have written better about battles than Lew Wallace. February 12 was “a day of summer. River, land, and sky fairly shimmered with warmth,” and Wallace, as impatient as his men for the order to move, stupidly allowed them to discard their overcoats. That night the weather changed; two nights later, after they had made the march of thirteen miles to join Smith’s and McClernand’s forces in the line west of Fort Donelson, Wallace’s men were shivering in bleak discomfort and in danger of frostbite. The temperature was twelve degrees.20
On February 14, Flag Officer Foote’s four gunboats opened fire on Fort Donelson. The exploding shells created a spectacular blaze of fire and the destruction of the fort seemed imminent, but the Confederate defenders, although their best gun was out of commission, poured a hail of artillery and rifle fire down on the gunboats. On one after another the steering mechanism was destroyed, and the once fierce vessels were drawn into the current and swept harmlessly back to the north. This time the navy could not win Grant’s fight for him.21
The next morning, while Grant was absent for a conference with Foote, the Confederate soldiers—elated by the repulse of the gunboats—attacked the Union armies to the rear of their fort. Smith’s men were on the west, Wallace’s in the center, and McClernand’s on the east, in the path of the rebels trying to fight their way out of the fort and onto the road eastward to Nashville. Fighting well, General Gideon Pillow’s men routed McClernand’s despite reinforcements which Wallace sent, against Grant’s earlier orders. As McClernand’s forces—out of cartridges and uneager to replenish their supply from stores in the rear—broke ranks, leaving the road open, Wallace managed to move his force out of the way of the retreat so that they too would not panic and join the rush to the rear. He accomplished little else.
Grant has been criticized for leaving no single general in command while he was away from the front, but perhaps recalling the council of war on the Tigress, he had had confidence in none. As he rode back to the battlefield in the afternoon, he noticed “men standing in knots talking in the most excited manner. No officer seemed to be giving any directions.” He rode up to McClernand and Wallace, who were also standing and talking, and first proposed that the Union forces back out of range of Confederate fire, but when Wallace told him that a fallback by the right flank of the Union army would allow the entire Confederate force to escape to Clarksville, he changed his mind. Despite the rebel attack, he still thought he could trap the Confederates at Fort Donelson, and he blamed McClernand (and perhaps Wallace) for having relinquished the offensive. Wallace reported that “Grant’s face, already congested with cold, reddened perceptibly and his lower jaw set upon the other. Without a word, he looked at McClernand.” As that general once more began a long explanation, Grant, fiercely controlling his rage, interrupted him: “Gentlemen,” he said, “that road must be recovered before night.” Gripping the papers in his hand—Wallace heard them “crinkle”—he continued: “I will go to Smith now. At the sound of your fire, he will support you with an attack on his side.” Thereupon Grant turned his horse and rode off at an ordinary trot. Wallace watched him go, “wondering at the simplicity of the words in a matter involving so much.”22
The ground over which Grant rode after he took his leave was the same that Wallace covered when he rode off to follow his new orders, but the two men, both keen observers, saw different wars. They were as unlike as writers as they were as generals. Forty years later, Wallace went squirrel shooting with a gun he had had his orderly take from the body of a Confederate soldier, “its owner looking up at the sky from his sheet of crimson snow,” and using the gun reminded him of other corpses of war. He remembered that as he left Grant, his “horse objected to the dead men still lying in the road.” Wallace picked his way among them and, working his way through heavy-fire, came on “a man sitting against a stump,” in homespun and coonskin cap, who was looking mockingly at him. Wallace spoke to his orderly: “Find out what that fellow means by grinning that way. If he answers decently, help him.” The orderly dismounted, went over to the man, and reported, “Why he’s dead, sir.” “That can’t be,” Wallace replied. “See where he’s hit.” They then investigated more closely: “The cap when taken off brought away with it a mass that sickened us. A small bullet—from a revolver, probably—had gone through the inner corner of his eye leaving no visible wound, but the whole back of the head was blown off and the skull entirely emptied.”23
Grant, also writing long after the event, recalled different details of his meeting with McClernand and Wallace. It was he who remembered the confused men who stood “in knots talking in the most excited manner,” with no orders coming from any officer. Grant did not write of the fury that made him crumple the paper in his hand, and did not choose to mention McClernand or Wallace by name. Rather, he told how with a simple order he rallied the demoralized Union soldiers who had run out of ammunition and retreated in panic. “I directed Colonel Webster to ride with me and call out to the men as we passed: ‘Fill your cartridgeboxes, quick, and get into line; the enemy is trying to escape and he must not be permitted to do so.’ This acted like a charm. The men only wanted some one to give them a command.” Then the general “rode rapidly to Smith’s quarters….” Grant somehow erased from his memory the corpses on the road. Or perhaps he did not have to do so; during a battle he did not see them.24
Lew Wallace rode right; Ulysses Grant rode left to where General Smith and his men were facing a fierce Confederate attack from Fort Donelson. Grant, who knew the qualities of the three generals he opposed, ordered a counterattack that broke the enemy line, closed the road to Nashville, and forced the enemy back into the fort. The three Confederate generals were conscious that they would be the first important rebels to surrender and wondered if they would be charged with treason. They conferred desperately and angrily. General John B. Floyd was particularly apprehensive; he was one of the highest-ranking officials of the United States government to have gone over to the Confederacy. What was more, prior to secession, while President Buchanan’s secretary of war, he had been charged with corruption and had been accused of using his authority to move war materiel south. Both Floyd and Gideon Pillow, quarreling with the third general, Simon Bolivar Buckner, refused to surrender, but they also refused to stay at Fort Donelson and try to fight their way out. Instead, they yielded their commands to Buckner, and then Floyd, with four regiments of Virginians (there wasn’t room in the boats for his Mississippians) and Pillow, on a commandeered scow, made their escape on the river. These two generals were never again allowed a command by Jefferson Davis. Buckner, left behind and trapped with 11,500 men in the fort, had already decided to surrender to his old friend Ulysses Grant.25
How close friends are one to another is almost unknowable, but it can be assumed that Buckner, who had hiked in Mexico with Grant and had lent him money when it was badly needed, was expecting friendship to count for something. Reports of Grant’s camaraderie with Belmont captives encouraged Buckner’s hopes for leniency, and on February 16, 1862, he sent a formal request for a truce during which conditions of surrender could be discussed. Grant’s reply was famous: “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.” Buckner replied that the overwhelming size of the Union force made it necessary for him “to accept the ungenerous and unchivalrous terms.” Grant had given the Civil War a new, grim, and determined character.26
After the surrender, Grant rode to the town of Dover, just outside the fort, and was dismayed to find Lew Wallace cheerfully breakfasting with Buckner. (Earlier, a Union naval officer had come to the house to apprehend Buckner for the navy, but had left when he found himself outranked by General Wallace. Credit-gathering was in season.) After Grant’s uncompromising demand for surrender, Buckner was worried that as a captured West Point man he would be treated as a traitor rather than a prisoner of war. Wallace, with no sense of how Grant had changed the fundamental terms of the war, had just told Buckner that Lincoln and Grant were decent sorts and he could expect leniency. When Grant arrived, he took over the discussion with Buckner and gave permission only for his men to go out and bury their dead—nothing more. No doubt Grant realized that a few of the burial party might escape, but the rest, including Buckner, were to be sent north as prisoners of war. Then, the war-work of the day done, Grant could be civil with his old friend. Gossiping about Pillow he asked, “Where is he now?” “Gone,” replied Buckner, “…he thought you’d rather get hold of him than any other man in the Southern Confederacy.” “Oh,” Grant cut in, “if I had got him I’d let him go again. He will do us more good commanding you fellows.” When Buckner told Hamlin Garland of this conversation thirty years later, he added, “This made us both laugh, for we remembered Pillow in the Mexican War.”27
That night Ulysses sent Julia a hasty note that was not very elegant as historical writing but did, by implicitly comparing Donelson with the actions of the Revolutionary War and of the campaign in Mexico, place his battle in grand perspective: “This is the largest capture I believe ever made on the continent.” And his boast was not inappropriate; Donelson was the first important Union victory in the Civil War. In Washington, a week later, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton wrote Charles A. Dana, of the New York Tribune, “Was it not a funny sight to see a certain military hero [McClellan] in the telegraph office at Washington last Sunday organizing victory and by sublime military combinations capturing Fort Donelson six hours after Grant and Smith had taken it sword in hand and had victorious possession! It would be a picture worthy of Punch.” Grant was a victorious general, and important people like Stanton knew it.28
Grant had a strong sense of history, and he is frequently considered to have been canny in his judgment of the men who were with him in the making of it. Indeed, the question is often asked, If Grant was such a good judge of men during the war, why was he so poor at assessing associates in the White House and in business? The answer emerges from a recognition of the differences between men in war and out of it. Fundamentally, Grant was exceedingly disillusioned about people, including almost all of his generals. He studied them—some had been under his scrutiny since West Point and Mexico—and measured details of personality in terms of expected responses to orders. Except for Sherman and Sheridan—and he had reservations even about them—Grant did not regard his generals as having the capacity for independent judgment.
He expected little and in the war luckily got much. Also, he knew that in the army, in contrast to the civilian world, though orders might be badly carried out, they did have to be obeyed. As long as Grant could sense the movement of battle he could give explicit orders and get from his officers their best. In the White House and on Wall Street that gauge of motion was absent, and he lacked the assurance that his instructions would be listened to and obeyed. During the war he moved swiftly and surely to make men do more than their records might suggest they were capable of. He was, for example, clearly angry with McClernand and probably with Wallace as well when he came upon them out of control of the panicking men. Though he cut off McClernand in mid-excuse, Grant, in command, did not lose his temper and fire him on the spot. Instead, he gave simple unequivocal orders and left. McClernand pulled himself and his men together, and he and Wallace soon found themselves fighting with a sense of direction—and success.29
On a battleground like Donelson, and later in vast campaigns, Grant had a remarkable sense of the whole of the event. It was always changing; nothing was ever settled. His perception was not a single snapping of the shutter to give a brilliantly clear image of a battle stopped in full clarity. Instead what he saw always included a dimension of time, an awareness of the unfolding evolving motion of the life of the war. He did not fight crisp, swift, elegant battles. The taking of Fort Henry, executed so clearly that there was but one casualty, and the surrender of Fort Donelson, compelled by the threat of imminent invincible attack, gave the impression of great military style, and there was indeed good generalship on Grant’s part in both instances. But it should not be forgotten that in its earlier phases, the fight for Donelson was going so badly that he was close to disaster. Foote could not repeat the kind of naval bombardment that had succeeded at Fort Henry, McClernand’s men broke in panic, ammunition was not where it was needed, and the terrible weather could have been allowed to prevent the Union armies from reaching Donelson at all. The outcome might have been for Grant a repetition of peacetime disappointments—but it was not. Now he was at war. He seemed almost to flout adversity and relish snatching success from the desperate edge of failure. He could make his luck hold.
As famous as were Grant’s words to Buckner—“I propose to move immediately upon your works”—they were uncharacteristic of his concept of war. The single, splendid, climactic effort was not the reality of war as Grant understood it. He never expected to get caught up with his work, even when a fort was surrendered to him. He knew that each day, and each battle, led to the next. The way to reach ultimate victory was to develop a stronger sense of war’s rhythm than that possessed by the enemy. The order perceived by the general was not one of neat battle lines or static confrontations in which opposing forces could be expected to move simultaneously. What he did after Donelson was more characteristic than the battle itself. He moved on, not restlessly or fitfully and not in exuberance, to Clarksville, and continuing eastward, wrote on February 28, “I shall go to Nashville immediately after the arrival of the next Mail, should there be no orders to prevent it.”30
He had no urge to rest on his laurels, which is not to say that he had no taste for the laurels themselves. He saw Donelson not as a crowning victory, but simply as the important second action in a series that would secure a political entity, the state of Tennessee, for the Union. He had his eye on the rivers as well. Grant reported to an aide of Halleck’s on Southern moves in anticipation of a Union attack on Memphis, the largest city on the Mississippi between New Orleans and St. Louis: “Orders have been given [by the enemy] for the evacuation of Columbus [the Confederate stronghold that guarded the city]…. The force at Memphis is said to be about 12,000.” He was exceedingly eager that Halleck seize the opportunity to take the city and sent two Memphis newspapers to St. Louis for Halleck to read. “I am growing anxious to know,” Grant added, “what the next move is going to be.” The war, and Ulysses Grant, were truly in motion.31
Motion mattered to Abraham Lincoln as well. To win at Donelson had been of critical importance to the president. The day Buckner surrendered to Grant, Lincoln (not yet knowing the news) wrote Halleck, “You have Fort Donelson safe, unless Grant shall be overwhelmed from outside, to prevent which latter will, I think, require all the vigilance, energy, and skill of yourself & Buell, acting in full cooperation.” The commander in chief, so anxious after ten months of war for a victory and so apprehensive that one might again elude him, could not have been more emphatic: “Our success or failure at Donelson is vastly important; and I beg you to put your soul in the effort.”32
Lincoln’s letter, with its grasp of essentials, makes it clear that he perceived Grant as a pivotal figure—as a fighter eager for a fight. Aware of this perception, Halleck wanted Grant pushed aside; once a victor, Grant became a rival. And so, in the month after Donelson, Grant had to meet and defeat his fellow Union officer Henry Wager Halleck. It was one of his greatest victories. If he had not won that battle he could have won no others, and the difficulty of the struggle was enormous. To win he had to do what no other general was ever able to do—he had to conquer Ulysses Grant.
Halleck, unlike Grant, was a successful man. He had sacrificed a handsome career to enter the war. A graduate of both Union College and West Point, he was perhaps the pre-eminent scholar of warfare in the country. His Lowell lectures were published as Elements of Military Art and Science, and he translated the Swiss expert on war Antoine Henri Jomini. Like Grant, Halleck resigned his captaincy in 1854, but he stayed in California, making money as a lawyer and a businessman, and writing two lawbooks. He reentered the army in 1861, ready to let his book learning work its wondrous way to a Union victory. Forty-seven, heavy, imperious, with puffy eyes that were fierce rather than comic, Halleck was a man of authority.
Halleck’s aim was to obtain senior command of the whole war in the west on the strength of the Fort Donelson victory. “Make Buell, Grant and Pope major-generals…and give me command in the west,” he suggested to the commanding general in Washington, George B. McClellan. Don Carlos Buell and John Pope, who had had nothing to do with the victory, were to get a free ride to higher rank, at the price of being under Halleck’s over-all western command. Thus Grant would be deprived of being singled out for promotion. Lincoln frustrated Halleck here; he sent only Grant’s promotion, which Donelson had made certain, to the Senate.33
Halleck, in St. Louis, might as well have been in Seattle, and he was an angry man. Grant, while his promotion to major general was being confirmed, continued his move eastward through Tennessee. Partly because of Confederate interception of telegrams and partly because of Grant’s swift moves to Clarksville and Nashville, Halleck lost contact with Grant—or as army protocol would have it, Grant lost contact with his commander. Unknown to Halleck, however, he was in communication with Brigadier General George W. Cullum, whom Halleck had sent to monitor him. Meanwhile Buell, still in independent command of the Army of the Ohio, was belatedly moving toward Nashville; should he take that city he might destroy Halleck’s hopes for an over-all command. But a greater threat than Buell was the new major general; Grant’s aggressive interference in Buell’s attack on Nashville seemed to indicate that he was taking command on his own. Buell, at Lincoln’s suggestion, had sent a division down the Ohio and up the Cumberland to help Grant at Donelson, and when the men arrived, Grant, not needing them, had sent them on up the river to Nashville. Buell was furious that his men, following Grant’s orders, arrived before he himself could reach the city overland. When he finally got to the north side of the river, he could merely join an invasion already launched within what he regarded as his—not Grant’s or Halleck’s—sphere of command.
Buell, whose exasperation with Grant was never to abate, said later that spring that Grant was either a fool or crazy. But Grant was neither; he wanted the men not needed at Nashville freed for other campaigns. Grant was showing considerable—perhaps insubordinate—independence; he was taking responsibility for the conduct of a major campaign in Tennessee. Indeed, in a letter to Julia he made it clear that although he still regarded Halleck “as one of the greatest men of the age,” he wanted his own command: “I do hope that I will be placed in a separate Department so as to be more independent.” Implicit was the wish that the department—the command of an army—would be his own. He told Julia not to make his letter public, but not to lose it.34
Independence was precisely what General Halleck was determined that Grant not have. By March 3, Halleck had reached the end of his limited patience with his fast-moving subordinate. To Washington he wrote:
I have had no communication with General Grant for more than a week. He left his command without my authority and went to Nashville. His army seems to be as much demoralized by the victory of Fort Donelson as was that of the Potomac by the defeat of Bull Run. 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. I am worn out and tired with this neglect and inefficiency. C. F. Smith is almost the only officer equal to the emergency.
McClellan replied:
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, and place C. F. Smith in command. You are at liberty to regard this as a positive order if it will smooth your way. I appreciate the difficulties you have to encounter, and will be glad to relieve you from trouble as far as possible.
As Bruce Catton has pointed out, Halleck had more malice to spread. On March 4 he wired McClellan, “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 do not deem it advisable to arrest him at present, but have placed General Smith in command of the expedition up the Tennessee. I think Smith will restore order and discipline.” He then sent a wire to Grant: “You will place Major General C. F. Smith in command of expedition and remain yourself at Fort Henry. Why do you not obey my orders to report strength and positions of your command?”35
Halleck represented everything that heretofore had defeated Grant. In his mocking query—“Why do you not obey…?”—with which he taunted Grant as being too stupid or stubborn to make the necessary reports, he was Jesse Grant. In his unapproachableness, evident when Grant tried to gain his attention in St. Louis, Halleck matched Hannah Grant’s silence. In his role as an intellectual, Halleck the scholar stood for the institutional aspects of West Point and the army that Grant had found unsatisfying. In his civilian career as a lawyer, he had been the successful man of affairs Grant had so long and so unsuccessfully sought to emulate. When Halleck’s criticisms and potentially crippling orders arrived, Grant was still sorting out elements of doubt and confidence. In his letter to Julia in Covington telling her that “the Administration have thought well enough of my administration of affairs to make me a Maj. General,” he made only one comment on the impressive promotion: “Is father afraid yet that I will not be able to sustain myself?” Was his confidence firm enough to sustain him against Halleck’s assault? If elegant little men like Lieutenant Colonel Robert Christie Buchanan had been strong enough to unseat Grant at Fort Humboldt, then surely Henry Wager Halleck, the impressive, powerful man who was Grant’s commander in the winter of 1862, should have been able to shatter Grant when he set out to do so.36
And Grant was not in the best condition to weather Halleck’s attack. A cold that he had had since leaving Cairo was giving him constant discomfort in his chest, and this, as he wrote Foote, was coupled “with a severe head ache, [that] nearly destroys my energy.” In addition, his father had come for a visit, hoping to get his hands on some of Grant’s handsome new major general’s salary of six thousand dollars. Indeed, Grant had to handle both Halleck and his father in one day. Toward his commanding general, he displayed astonishing sang-froid. In a dignified letter written on March 5 he denied “having disobeyed any order” and said he had obtained reports on the number of troops from all his generals save General Smith. And here Grant began scoring points on Halleck; the delinquent, Smith, was the man Halleck had named to supersede Grant, and Smith’s tardiness, Grant noted, probably was due to his having been ordered by Buell to move (unnecessarily, as one of Halleck’s aides had already been told) to reinforce Buell’s unopposed force at Nashville. Grant betrayed no trace of complaint in telling Halleck he would turn the Tennessee expedition over to Smith, but then, pointedly, he indicated that Halleck would have to be responsible for the troop withdrawals, and consequent losses of territory, involved in the transfer of authority. Was he, for example, “to abandon Clarkesville entirely or not”? As for the order that he remain in Fort Henry, Grant indicated that following it literally would be a bit difficult: “The water is about six feet deep inside the fort.” Halleck was not likely to have missed the suggestion that he was so ignorant of conditions in the area of his command that he did not even know of the flooding of the Tennessee River.37
To Julia, that same day, Grant wrote, “Father is just going back and I will take this occation to write you a few lines.” He asked her to tell him how much money she had—apparently she was not contributing enough toward expenses at Covington to satisfy Jesse—and added, “You can lend father all you have keeping about $100 for yourself to last until I can send you more. [He had recently sent her seven hundred dollars.] Take a note payable to yourself bearing interest….” Then, reflecting on these astringent familial arrangements, he observed, “I feel myself worse used by my own family than by strangers and although I do not think father, of his own accord, would do me injustice yet I believe he is influanced, and always may be, to my prejudice.” Grant did not suggest who might be doing the influencing; perhaps he could not contemplate his father’s hostility, unalloyed. He continued, “Kiss the children for me. I am in a very poor humor for writing. I was ordered to command a very important expedition up the Tennessee river and now an order comes directing one of my juniors to take the command whilst I am left behind here with a small garrison…. It may be all right but I dont now see it.” He signed, simply, “Ulys.”38
On March 5 and 6, Grant dutifully and efficiently set about turning over the command of the Tennessee River expedition to his old West Point teacher Charles F. Smith. He added gracious congratulations to Smith on his promotion to major general, a promotion Grant had strongly supported. Grant’s orders to several of his generals and his attention to the details of the transfer of authority suggest no bitterness or lack of energy, and now he did report the figures on the number of Federal troops directly to Halleck. In doing so he probably guessed that any statistics he supplied would be used by the conservative Halleck to conclude (as indeed he did in a report to McClellan) that a major expedition could not be undertaken without Buell’s support—that is, without a reorganization of the western command under Halleck. The momenturn generated by Grant’s victories at Fort Henry and Fort Donelson had been lost.39
On that same day, March 6, 1862, Grant received a second stinging rebuke from the man in St. Louis. After asking again for troop numbers and positions, Halleck added, “Your neglect of repeated orders to report the strength of your command has created great dissatisfaction, & seriously interfered with military plans. Your going to Nashville without authority & when your presence with your troops was of the utmost importance, was a matter of very serious complaint at Washington, so much so that I was advised to arrest you on your return.” Receiving this message was of course exceedingly painful for Grant, but he was in strong enough command of himself to read it closely and to strike back.40
In a masterful telegram in his own defense, ne stated that he had reported regularly to Halleck’s chief staff officer, General Cullum, daily; if Cullum had failed to pass the information along to Halleck, it was not Grant’s fault. And, succinctly, he said, “My going to Nashville was strictly intended for the good of the service, and not to gratify any desire of my own.” The wire went to Halleck—with a copy to Elihu Washburne. Grant was now putting to use lessons he had learned when he lobbied, awkwardly, for his colonelcy and, skillfully, for his generalship. If there were “enemies between you and myself” as Grant told Halleck in his wire (which closed with a request that he be “relieved from further duty in [pointedly] the Dept.”), Grant also had friends. His collaborator Flag Officer Foote had as his guest during these critical days the perceptive Charles A. Dana. Their conversations may have carried to Secretary Stanton, and someone, very likely Rawlins (surely not without Grant’s knowledge) got the whole Halleck-Grant controversy before Congressman Washburne, who obviously would not have wanted his star protégé disgraced. The telegrams are in Washburne’s papers. Lincoln, who had been anxious for the Donelson victory, was accessible to a Republican congressman from Illinois. What was more, he and Secretary of War Stanton were dissatisfied with the general inactivity of both McClellan and Halleck. Armed with documentation from Grant’s headquarters—not too much, exactly enough—Washburne made a strong case for not allowing Halleck to shelve the aggressive and battle-tried Grant.41
In Tennessee, Grant had been in the midst of the preparations for an offensive campaign, but he yielded command so that it could go forward. On March 9, he wrote General McClernand, “I did not mean to give any directions about the order of moving. Gen. Smith being in command of the expedition”; he seemed to have capitulated, but he was deeply moved when he found several of his chief officers ready to stand by him. Never before in Grant’s life had other men rallied round him as a group. Nothing could have given him more confidence. Nine of his senior officers, including the highly able young officer Colonel W. H. L. Wallace and General John A. McClernand (to his great credit, considering the rebuffs Grant had dealt him), signed a strong letter to Grant deploring his removal from command and placing “this spontaneous tribute at your disposal for such use as you may think proper to make of it.” This was not only moral support, but powerful political support as well. At this critical point still another emblem of esteem arrived—by lucky chance at the perfect moment. His officers had ordered a ceremonial sword for him, to commemorate Donelson. Fortunately, it had been a bit slow in coming, for its arrival now was, if ironic, nevertheless of critical importance. His friends were giving him a weapon—not the sword, but their affection—with which to confront discouragement. On board the Tigress, his comrades told him they were glad that it had arrived “at this moment when the jealousy caused by your brilliant success has raised up hidden enemies who are endeavoring to strike you in the dark.”42
When Halleck, writing for the second time on March 6, had accused Grant of “want of order & discipline, and the numerous irregularities in your command”—a thinly veiled hint that he regarded Grant as having been drinking—he had spoken of relieving Grant “unless these things are immediately corrected….” This, of course, made the earlier communication placing General Smith in command more ambiguous than ever—was the point only to give Smith command for a single expedition, or was it something more? Was Grant being examined for psychological sturdiness by Halleck, who believed the stories about his drinking? Whatever Halleck’s game was, Grant did not capitulate. He did not show the repentance Halleck seemed to require. Nor was he silent. In earlier personal crises he had been driven to speechlessness. Now he found words. Grant had won an exhilarating battle and had led his men on energetic thrusts into Tennessee. He had felt the lust of war; could assert himself. He did not throw himself on the mercy of Washburne, but saw to it that the congressman had the documentation that would enable him to bring his political force into play to protect a badly exposed flank. He did not retreat into a room, alone. He stepped out and spoke up.43
Grant’s restrained, dignified words in response to Halleck—not defensive, but suggesting firmly that all he had done since Donelson had been in order—were heeded in Washington. His new reputation had superseded the old. Halleck had gotten support from McClellan for firing Grant, but the War Department and White House were not ready for that, and Halleck received an astringent order: “By direction of the President, the Secretary of War desires you to ascertain and report whether General Grant left his command at any time without proper authority, and, if so, for how long; whether he has made to you proper reports and returns of his force; whether he has committed any acts which are unauthorized or not in accordance with military subordination or propriety, and, if so, what.” In short, innuendoes about drinking would not do, and if Grant’s actions could be accounted for—and they could—Halleck could only attempt to get rid of him by engaging in a “him or me” argument, which he might lose. The wire came at the “direction of the President”; Lincoln himself had called a halt to the attempt to smear Grant.44
Ironically, Grant was also the beneficiary of Halleck’s good fortune. The commander in St. Louis had, at last, been given the over-all command of forces in the west. He now had that authority without which any executive feels insecure. He no longer felt threatened by the pulling and tugging of rival generals. In addition, conditions were stable in Missouri and propitious for action in Tennessee. Halleck could now tolerate Grant and, grudgingly, agreed to do so. On March 13, in Tennessee, Grant asked “to be relieved from further duty until I can be placed right in the estimation of those higher in authority.” And that same day evidence was received that Lincoln and Stanton had indeed set things right; Halleck telegraphed Grant: “You cannot be relieved from your command. There is no good reason for it. I am certain that all which the authorities at Washington ask, is, that you enforce discipline & punish the disorderly. The power is in your hands; use it, & you will be sustained by all above you. Instead of relieving you, I wish you, as soon as your new army is in the field, to assume the immediate command & lead it on to new victories.” Grant had won the fight.45
It would be splendid for the Grant story if, after having established personal invincibility, he had moved on immediately to get the war over with. In his Memoirs, Grant made a strong case for the possibility that this might have been accomplished if only he had been allowed to press on relentlessly after Donelson. The determination to keep going was the theme of a letter he wrote to Julia after that battle, in which he said he had “no doubt but you have read of Fort Donelson until you have grown tired of the name so I shall write you no more on the subject. Hope to make a new subject soon.” He did; two days later he told her about being visited in Clarksville by citizens of Nashville who were fearful that he would attack their city. These frightened people convinced him that the “‘Secesh’ is now about on its last legs in Tennessee. I want to push on as rapidly as possible to save hard fighting. These terrible battles are very good things to read about for persons who loose no friends but I am decidedly in favor of having as little of it as possible. The way to avoid it is to push forward as vigorously as possible.”46
Hindsight argues that Grant was right. We know the quality of the hideous fighting that lay ahead. It is difficult to imagine that anything worse than the terrible indecisive battles of Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Spotsylvania could have resulted had Grant taken the offensive swiftly and massively in Tennessee early in 1862. His sense of urgency reflected a judgment that if the Confederacy was not subdued in the first months of 1862, it would be far more difficult to defeat later. He knew that battles would have to be fought, and friends killed. Other generals could not face such facts; their hesitation about subjecting themselves, their friends, and the men under their command to the hazards of battle is deplored—by experts—as vacillation. Cold-eyed men who can accept the proposition that postponed battles may kill more men than immediate ones consider a hesitating general’s sense of humanity in the midst of a war to be misplaced. They think little of reluctant generals, perhaps learned in tactics but unprepared for carnage, who balk at the realities of war. They admire, instead, Ulysses S. Grant’s simple logic, which he worked with such messy terror at Shiloh.