8
The War in the West

BREAKING THE CORDON

I cannot possibly be mistaken in the strategy of the campaign.
—HENRY WAGER HALLECK, FEBRUARY 21, 1862

Forts Henry and Donelson

AT THE END OF DECEMBER 1861, Brigadier General Lloyd Tilghman, the Confederate commander of Fort Donelson in Tennessee, was worried. “I feel deeply solicitous about our condition on the Tennessee and Cumberland,” he wrote Davis, “and believe that no one point in the Southern Confederacy needs more the aid of the Government than [these] points.”1 He was right to fret. Union eyes looked hungrily his way.

Albert Sidney Johnston now led the Confederate forces in the West. Johnston and Davis had attended Transylvania University and West Point together. Johnston had served in the Black Hawk War, headed the army of the Texas Republic, and served beside Davis in Mexico. He resigned his commission when the war began and made a daring ride from California to Virginia, crossing the Mojave Desert in the company of other would-be Confederates and dodging Apaches and Union troops along the way. Johnston arrived in Richmond on September 5, 1861. Five days later he received command of nearly all of the Confederate forces west of the Appalachians.²

But Johnston had problems. General Polk—another friend of Davis’s—had destroyed Kentucky’s neutrality while Johnston was returning to take up his command. Johnston believed Polk intended to take the key city of Paducah. But Polk had no such intent. Grant took the town on September 6, giving the Union control of the mouths of both the Cumberland and Tennessee rivers. Johnston did secure Bowling Green, which straddled the nexus of rail lines connecting Louisville, Nashville, and Memphis, by commissioning Kentucky native Simon Bolivar Buckner a general and hurriedly dispatching him from Nashville at the head of a small contingent of troops.³

Johnston’s strategy for defending the region included fortifying Bowling Green, which marked roughly the center of his command, he and his generals agreeing that the key rail and road junction “was the most defensible point that could be selected to cover Nashville and our southern line of operations, extending from Cumberland Gap to the Mississippi River.” While fortifying the city, Johnston hoped his army would grow large enough to mount an offensive. Columbus, Kentucky, situated on the Mississippi, anchored the western edge of the cordon. The series of fortified Confederate posts stretching across the state to the Cumberland Mountains became known as the Kentucky Line.4 Operationally, the South’s implementation of a cordon defense spread thin the South’s inferior manpower, thus creating strategic weakness.

About 50,000 Confederates soon faced 90,000 or so Federals. Both sides daily increased in strength—indeed, Johnston did all he could to gather more troops, including the ultimately unsuccessful dispatch of a personal messenger to Davis to ask for men and arms from the East—but the Union forces grew much faster. Simply put, the Confederates did not have enough men to guard an area stretching Kentucky’s length.⁵ Moreover, Bowling Green proved less pivotal than the Rebels believed. Also, however deluded, belief in the power of King Cotton underpinned Johnston’s strategic thinking. “Believing it to be of the greatest moment to protract the campaign,” he wrote, “as the dearth of cotton might bring strength from abroad and discourage the North and to gain time to strengthen myself by new troops from Tennessee and other States, I magnified my forces to the enemy, but made known my true strength to the Department and the Governors of the States. The aid given was small.”⁶

The Union had been considering how to breach the Kentucky Line (at this point in the war most of the Union generals proved superb at “considering” action) and discussing the possibility of advancing down the Cumberland and Tennessee rivers since at least as early as November 1861.⁷ Talk of such a move became almost commonplace by late in the year.⁸ Colonel Charles Whittlesey, Halleck’s chiefengineer, queried his superior about these waterways on November 20.⁹ Halleck noted in a meeting with William T. Sherman and others that the natural place to break the Confederate defenses was along the Tennessee River.¹⁰ In a January 20 letter Halleck insisted that the Cumberland and Tennessee rivers were lines of advance, though the “overly cautious” Halleck was in no more hurry than McClellan or Buell.¹¹

The situation in Missouri played a part in persuading Halleck to postpone an advance aimed at Tennessee. Confederate forces under General Sterling Price stirred in the state, and Halleck believed he first needed to subdue them.¹² He warned that taking troops from his command sufficient for an advance down the Cumberland risked the loss of Missouri. Moreover, in early January he felt that the necessary gunboats would not be ready for one or two weeks. With some luck and additional arms, Halleck thought, he might be ready for a Cumberland thrust by early February 1862.13

The thoughts of General Ulysses S. Grant ran in a similar vein. He had twice unsuccessfully sought permission from Halleck to attack Fort Henry. Undeterred, and now joined by Flag Officer Andrew H. Foote, Grant again broached the subject with his superior on January 28, 1862.¹⁴ His timing proved serendipitous. The next day, McClellan wired both Halleck and Buell that the Confederate general P. G. T. Beauregard had departed for the West with fifteen regiments.¹⁵ The report was half right. Beauregard had indeed departed, but not the troops. Halleck, digging deeply, found some initiative (or at least the will to approve someone else’s) and agreed to Grant and Foote’s request, based on an inaccurate intelligence report.¹⁶ Grant received his orders on February 1. Halleck instructed him to advance quickly enough to reduce the objective before the Confederates could significantly reinforce it. Grant and Foote sailed the next day.¹⁷

Simultaneously, Buell sent a letter to McClellan. He was still bucking Lincoln’s orders, insisting upon the impossibility of moving into eastern Tennessee with units of any substantial size. Instead, he planned “to move at once against Bowling Green, in combination with an attack up the Tennessee and Cumberland and an effective demonstration against Columbus.” Buell’s plan was to take Fort Henry, Dover, and Clarksville and destroy the bridges. “These objects accomplished and Nashville in danger, the resistance at Bowling Green will give way; otherwise the struggle at that point will be protracted and difficult.” “I am not unconscious of the magnitude of the work I propose,” he added, “but it has to be done, and the sooner we can do it the better.”¹⁸ Buell advocated prompt action, but his lack of movement in the preceding months made it obvious that it would not come from him.

Some odd lines close Buell’s letter. “While you were sick,” he told McClellan, “by direction of the President I proposed to Halleck some concert of action between us. He answered, ‘I can do nothing; name a day for a demonstration.’ Night before last I received a dispatch from him, saying, ‘I have ordered an advance on Fort Henry and Dover. It will be made immediately.’ I protest against such prompt proceedings, as though I had nothing to do but command ‘Commence firing’ when he starts off. However he telegraphs me to-night that co-operation is not essential now.”¹⁹

Buell had begun with a slap at Halleck, an unjust one because he was complaining that Halleck had said he could not move during the first week of January, but now he was saying he could at the beginning of February.²⁰ He followed this with further complaints that Halleck had enacted part of the operational

The Kentucky/Tennessee Theater, Winter-Summer 1862. Adapted from James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 399.

plan Buell just suggested to McClellan in the very same letter. Buell seemed to want it both ways, refusing to move into Tennessee but presenting a new plan (which was in many ways an old plan), then criticizing the commander for putting an element of it into motion.

Meanwhile, Grant fought the war. He planned to take Fort Henry in a joint operation with Foote’s naval forces. “The troops were to invest the garrison and the gunboats to attack the fort at close quarters,” he wrote later. This took place on February 6. The night before, units under Brigadier General C. F. Smith landed across the river and moved behind Fort Heiman. They found it empty. General Tilghman, Henry’s commander, had sent out the bulk of his force to keep them out of the range of Union gunboats, then dispatched them to Donelson before Foote’s gunboats forced the fort’s surrender.21

On February 5, Halleck asked Buell to make a diversion in support of Grant.²² “My position does not admit of diversion,” Buell snapped. “My moves must be real ones.”²³ Such a great general could not merely provide support. Even before Henry’s fall the Union high command wrangled over what to do next. “Considering” continued to plague the Union war effort.

On February 5 Buell announced his intention to begin his long-awaited march toward Bowling Green. The poor roads, he insisted, would slow him, and they were desperately bad. His troops also had to repair the broken rail line as they marched. Still, he declared, any move he made must amount to more than a “diversion.”²⁴ The next day McClellan queried both Halleck and Buell about making the Cumberland and Tennessee rivers the main Union lines of advance, especially since they faced such miserable roads.²⁵ Buell initially replied by calling the move “right in its strategical bearing” while denouncing Halleck for going off half-cocked. He, too, had been thinking about shifting his forces to this line but would have to consider it a bit before taking action.²⁶

Grant’s advance awakened Halleck’s ambitions. He promised McClellan that with 25,000 more men he could “threaten Nashville and cut off railroad communication.” Halleck would then deliver Bowling Green bloodlessly because the Rebels would have to give up the town.²⁷

On February 7, Halleck telegraphed McClellan that Fort Henry had fallen.²⁸ Grant lunged immediately for Donelson, unbidden, he insisted, by Halleck; the two never discussed it.²⁹ Halleck, having already moved to McClellan’s side of the contest regarding the river drive, maintained that if McClellan agreed to the thrusts down the Cumberland and Tennessee, the general in chief should give him “everything you can spare from General Buell’s command or elsewhere.”³⁰ But McClellan had his own ideas. “Why not have Buell take the line of Tennessee and operate on Nashville,” he wired Halleck, “while your troops turn Columbus? Those two points gained, a combined movement on Memphis will be next in order.”31 He suggested nearly the same course to Buell.³²

Halleck had already begun prodding Buell about a combined march on Nashville, something for which Halleck believed he did not have enough troops. He suggested that Buell send his forces to the Cumberland and Tennessee rivers to move them against the Tennessee capital.³³ But Buell decided to continue his muddy march to Bowling Green.³⁴ The next day, he went back to considering.³⁵

By now, Halleck had received McClellan’s suggestion to put Buell in command of the forces advancing on Nashville. He was not happy about it.³⁶However, never one to let an opportunity for personal advancement pass ungrasped, Halleck proposed the unification of all the Union forces in the West under one head, which, of course, meant his.³⁷ McClellan rebuffed him.³⁸

Then Lincoln, via Stanton, chimed in. Lincoln had read Buell’s February 1 letter outlining a plan of campaign for the West, liked it, and wanted his western generals to put their “two heads together” and do it.³⁹ Buell’s plan, as we’ve seen, encouraged all the things the Union leaders had dithered about for months: moves into eastern Tennessee, down the Cumberland, and down the Tennessee, a “demonstration” against Columbus, and the seizure of Clarksville, all in preparation for an advance on Nashville.⁴⁰ On February 12, Buell finally decided that he would send part of his force via one or the other river while he kept up his march on Bowling Green.⁴¹

But the question of what to do next remained unsettled. Halleck told his superior that he had no firm plan for action past taking Donelson and Clarksville. “Subsequent movements must depend upon the enemy,” he insisted.⁴² Nevertheless, thanks to Grant, Halleck still held the initiative. The time to push had come. Not doing so risked losing momentum and surrendering an opportunity.

The general in chief decided for him. McClellan told Buell to support Halleck’s forces by moving past Bowling Green and on to Nashville, overland or down the Cumberland.⁴³ “This is bad strategy,” Halleck railed, preferring that Buell first help him reduce Donelson and Clarksville and then push on to Florence, Alabama, to cut the Decatur railroad. Halleck foresaw this forcing the Confederates to abandon Nashville and resulting in the liberation of Tennessee.⁴⁴ McClellan told him Nashville would be the objective. He believed (correctly) that this would force the Confederates out of Donelson anyway and gave Buell the leeway to instead support Grant if Buell’s forces could not make an immediate march on Nashville. “The Decatur movement and one on Memphis are the next steps in my programme,” he told Halleck, once again reaching back to the plan he had given Lincoln.45 Buell had already decided to make Nashville his objective, and McClellan applauded the decision.⁴⁶

Buell reached Bowling Green on February 14. Finding the Confederates gone, he reversed a decision he had made to send troops down the Cumberland and decided to push his whole force toward Nashville along the rail line.⁴⁷ Over the telegraph lines, Halleck pleaded with Buell to unite his forces with Halleck’s to reduce Donelson and Clarksville first.⁴⁸

Then Lincoln interfered, writing directly to Halleck and subverting the chain of command. The president worried about the enemy concentrating forces to try to break Grant’s grip on Donelson. He wondered if Union cavalry could be sent to cut the rails from Knoxville and Union gunboats dispatched to destroy Clarksville’s railroad bridge. “Our success or failure at Fort Donelson is vastly important,” Lincoln wrote. He also revealed his distress: “I beg you to put your soul in the effort.”⁴⁹ Lincoln’s intervention was unwarranted—McClellan was on top of the situation—but the president simply no longer trusted his generals to do the smart thing.

Meanwhile, trying to undermine a good plan, Halleck again urged McClellan to stop Buell from driving on Nashville before Donelson’s fall. Moreover, he thought Nashville of no importance now since the Union held Bowling Green. The idea was absurd. Nashville was the South’s second-largest industrial center and the primary crossroads of the rail and river networks between the Appalachians and the Mississippi. McClellan put him in his place, telling him that the advance on Nashville “is the most important.”⁵⁰ From his office in Washington, he saw more clearly the key nodes of the Western Theater than did one of the area’s commanders. He also urged Buell on: “Time is now everything. If Nashville is open the men could carry their small rations and bread, driving meat on the hoof[.] Leave tents and baggage. If you can occupy Nashville at once it will end the war in Tennessee.”⁵¹ McClellan exaggerated slightly, but he saw an opportunity to make great gains and did not want it to slip away.

Halleck vigorously protested Buell’s move.⁵² McClellan struck him down again: “Give facts on which your opinion is based.”⁵³ Then Donelson fell, and Halleck got greedy: “Make Buell, Grant, and Pope major-generals of volunteers, and give me command in the West. I ask this in return for Forts Henry and Donelson.”⁵⁴ Halleck wanted a lot for something that he had not accomplished, which had not even been his idea in the first place, which he had in fact resisted, and to which he and Buell had contributed almost nothing. Buell also flashed his pettiness, delivering a long soliloquy on potential Union and Confederate moves that was in actuality only a smokescreen for asking Halleck to return some of Buell’s troops.55 Halleck, for his part, still tried to get Buell to move first on Clarksville.⁵⁶ Buell insisted that he could not do so because his only route was a boggy road.⁵⁷ Halleck persisted: “Help me, I beg of you.”⁵⁸

Halleck’s ambitions rose with the tenor of his cries. The next day he reiterated to McClellan his request for the creation of a Western Division under his command. “Give it to me,” he informed McClellan, “and I will split secession in twain in one month.”⁵⁹ Simultaneously, he went around his boss and appealed to Thomas A. Scott, the assistant secretary of war, to have Buell sent to help him.⁶⁰ Lincoln parried this power grab, while McClellan remained in no hurry to give Halleck so much authority.⁶¹ Halleck nonetheless persisted. “One whole week has been lost already by hesitation and delay,” he told Stanton. “There was, and I think there still is, a golden opportunity to strike a fatal blow, but I can’t do it unless I can control Buell’s army.”⁶²

Halleck was right, though he was largely the cause of the delay. He had been trying to get Buell’s army to advance against Clarksville instead of Nashville, intending to move on the Tennessee River while Buell advanced down the Cumberland. He wanted this so badly he had even gone over McClellan’s head to try to get it.⁶³ The problem with Halleck’s plan was that Nashville was not much farther from Buell’s army than Clarksville was. Plus, threatening Nashville would mean flanking Clarksville, forcing its abandonment. Moreover, he had left Foote and Grant hanging, delaying their push for Nashville by ordering on February 18 that the all-important gunboats not go past Clarksville, which flabbergasted Foote.⁶⁴ Halleck then used Foote’s and Grant’s impatience to be off as an excuse for again trying to force Buell’s line of advance on to the Cumberland.⁶⁵

McClellan gripped the reins and gave Buell the choice of advancing on the Cumberland or overland. He would meanwhile direct Halleck’s men against Columbus and Memphis.⁶⁶ Buell chose the overland route, leaving Bowling Green on February 22.⁶⁷ His pickets reached the outskirts of Nashville the next day.⁶⁸

McClellan laid out the Union’s next moves in the West. To Buell he wrote that he had requested Halleck “to give you all the aid in his power in your operations on Nashville.” He believed “possession of railway junctions near Chattanooga would seem to be of next importance.” “After we have gained Nashville and can see our way to holding Chattanooga,” he continued, “we must get possession of Columbus and Memphis… . We must not lose sight of Eastern Tennessee.”69 McClellan elaborated in a note to Halleck: “Buell will be in front of Nashville to-morrow evening. Best co-operate with him to the full extent of your power, to secure Nashville beyond a doubt; then by a combined movement of troops and gunboats seize Decatur. Buell will be directed to occupy and hold in three the railroad junctions in vicinity of Chattanooga and to re-establish the railroads from Nashville to Decatur and Stevenson. This will very nearly isolate A. S. Johnston from Richmond.”⁷⁰

By setting his sights on Chattanooga, McClellan had delineated the most important line of advance that the Union could choose. The city, on the south bank of the Tennessee River, held the key rail connection linking the eastern and western Confederacy, and was an ideal launching place for incursions into the Deep South. Meanwhile, he had not neglected pushing in other areas as well, such as down the Mississippi and into eastern Tennessee. But the main push was to be toward Chattanooga; taking Stevenson in northern Alabama would secure the railroad for this. Securing Decatur, Alabama, would give a rail and river junction on the Tennessee River. Both meant severing the Memphis and Charleston Railroad running between Chattanooga and Corinth, the only east-west Confederate rail link at the time, as the Confederates did not complete the gap on the line stretching across central Alabama until December 1862.⁷¹ McClellan’s plan would have all but cut the South in two.

The Confederate Response

THE SOUTH’s GENERALS, unlike their Northern counterparts, did not sit on their hands while Grant moved. With Fort Henry’s fall, Johnston believed he had to defend Nashville at Fort Donelson, and on February 7, after a meeting with Beauregard and his other generals, he sent some 12,000 men to reinforce Donelson. He retained only 14,000; fatigue and sickness reduced that number to under 10,000 by the time they reached Nashville.⁷² Johnston also ordered the evacuation of Bowling Green before the battle for Donelson began, telling Brigadier General John B. Floyd to save his army if he could not hold the position. Floyd failed at both.⁷³ He lost most of the army and Fort Donelson, whose surrender made Bowling Green untenable.

The fall of Henry, Donelson, and Bowling Green shattered the Confederacy’s western perimeter and had far-ranging strategic consequences. To Johnston, the loss of Donelson “was most disastrous and almost without remedy.” Its surrender, coupled with the Union capture of Bowling Green, made Nashville vulnerable to Union forces.74 It also opened up the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers to Union passage, making possible offensives against Clarksville, home of the second-largest ironworks in the South, and the important industrial center of Nashville, as well as thrusts into northern Alabama and Mississippi. Controlling these two rivers allowed the Union to force the Confederates from Kentucky and western Tennessee, depriving them of access to a large chunk of their war industry and the South’s granary, as well as its greatest source of pork. Additionally, a third of the Confederate forces in Kentucky and Tennessee became casualties.⁷⁵

Instead of taking advantage of the situation, Halleck quarreled with Grant, his more talented subordinate, and gave command of the Union advance to C. F. Smith. However, intervention from above, and the resolution of a communications problem, led to Halleck’s reinstating the Union’s thus far most successful military commander.⁷⁶

Johnston replied to the enemy advance by beginning to assemble an army at Murfreesboro, Tennessee. He intended to strike back, but the weather turned inclement, ruining his plans. He then turned and crossed the Tennessee River to unite with Braxton Bragg at Corinth, Mississippi, and also join with Beauregard in defending the Mississippi Valley. He hoped to have 50,000 men assembled by March 20, 1862. “This,” he wrote of his army, “must be destroyed before the enemy can attain his object.”⁷⁷

Davis offered his advice to Albert Sidney on repairing the Confederate situation in the West. His ideas were aggressive and optimistic despite the fact that he knew that the South’s forces there were outnumbered and inadequately armed, the Confederates being forced to rely upon private weapons to make up the shortfall. “With a sufficient force,” Davis wrote, “the audacity which the enemy exhibits would no doubt give you the opportunity to cut some of his lines of communication, to break up his plan of campaign, and, defeating some of his columns, to drive him from the soil as well of Tennessee as of Kentucky.” He believed that the Union would aim at the Tennessee and Mississippi rivers in its next campaign and hoped Johnston could concentrate enough force to counter such a campaign. Additionally, Davis hoped a move by forces under Edmund Kirby Smith into eastern Tennessee would create a diversion. A Confederate fleet was also gathering on the Mississippi River. If the Union moved its gunboats up the Tennessee, it would give Johnston a chance to strike at Cairo, Illinois.⁷⁸ Davis correctly deduced the Union river campaigns, which were in some respects dictated by geography and logistics, but he was overly optimistic, indeed unrealistic, about the potential for a Confederate naval strike against Cairo.

Missouri

IN A NUMBER OF LETTERS to his superiors, Halleck expressed great concern about the situation in Missouri. He had cause to worry. In mid-December 1861 Confederate general Sterling Price, writing from his camp near Osceola, Missouri, asked Davis to ensure the cooperation of the Confederate forces in northwestern Arkansas. Price believed that this would allow him to collect 50,000 men and “to take and hold three-quarters of the state.” He maintained that he could not gather more men to him because those who might join would likely choose to remain home to protect their property and families against marauders. He also believed that the Union’s extended lines and occupation of all avenues of approach to the Confederate forces kept sympathizers from filling his ranks. Price would resort to tying down as many Union troops as he could.79

Price and Polk agreed to coordinate their actions and further agreed that Brigadier General Ben McCulloch deserved the blame for previous Confederate failures in Missouri. Largely because of McCulloch’s refusal to cooperate, Price insisted, Price’s forces had to fall back to southern Missouri, the result being that many who rallied to the Confederacy felt betrayed and abandoned and simply went home.⁸⁰ Price soon hoped to have 20,000 men under his command and to move against St. Louis in conjunction with Polk. Even if they failed, Price believed, the effort would show the people of Missouri that the Confederate government cared. It would also force the Union to move troops to St. Louis from other parts of the state, allowing Confederate recruiting in areas then currently held by the Union.⁸¹

By January 1862 Polk, for his part, wanted Price to take action. He urged him to keep the enemy guessing, believing that keeping Halleck’s troops occupied would bar Halleck from uniting with Buell against Johnston, as well as against Polk’s flank.⁸²

Halleck responded, but slowly. Brigadier General John Pope pushed for action against Price on December 11, 1861. Until late January, however, Halleck stressed preparation, though he did scatter troops all over the state to encourage the formation of pro-Union militias. At the end of January, he ordered an advance from Rolla, Missouri, toward Springfield, by troops under Brigadier General Samuel R. Curtis.⁸³

The Confederates also prepared. In February 1862, Secretary of War Benjamin told Price that he was trying to raise troops from North Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas to support him. He hoped to see Price’s campaign under way by the middle of March.84 Moreover, in mid-January, in an effort to sort out their situation in the Trans-Mississippi Theater, Davis appointed fellow Mississippian Earl Van Dorn, commander of a department that included Missouri, Arkansas, the Indian Territory, and parts of Louisiana. An aggressive, enthusiastic leader, Van Dorn began concentrating the region’s dispersed forces and hoped to gather enough men to move by February 20.⁸⁵ The date came and went, and Van Dorn failed to accrue the numbers he hoped for. He eventually gathered 17,000 troops, including those under Sterling Price, Albert J. Pike, McCulloch, and others. He planned to have Pike’s forces watch Kansas while he went on the offensive. “I design attempting Saint Louis… . This seems to me the movement best calculated to win us Missouri and relieve General Johnston, who is heavily threatened in Kentucky.” His target date: April 1, 1862.⁸⁶

Van Dorn never got the chance to put his plan into action. Halleck already had Curtis’s men marching from Rolla, Missouri. On February 12 they pushed Price’s forces from Springfield and drove them into Arkansas. Van Dorn, having finally achieved his desired concentration at Van Buren, Arkansas, moved to meet Curtis. The two forces clashed at Pea Ridge, or Elkhorn Tavern, on March 7 and 8. Van Dorn attempted a daring surprise double envelopment, a two-pronged attack, against the Union forces. Marching at night, Van Dorn sent half his force around to the north of the Union position, planning to strike the enemy in the rear at dawn in a tactical maneuver reminiscent of the Napoleonic era. He intended this move to draw in the defenders to his fore, and he would then strike the rear with the rest of his force. It failed, Curtis’s 10,500 troops fighting Van Dorn’s 17,000 to a standstill. Defeated (though he refused to admit it), Van Dorn withdrew. By March 23 he had his army again on the march, pushing for St. Louis. Orders from Richmond redirected him: he was to bring his force to Mississippi. Curtis, and the Confederate high command, had cleared Halleck’s flank. The Confederates never again threatened to bring Missouri under their flag.⁸⁷