This Hallowed Ground (17 page)

Halleck had written military textbooks and had translated other texts from the French, he had retired from the army in gold-rush California to make money as a lawyer, and he was a born gossip and scold; nature had designed him to fill the part of a paper-pushing
bureaucrat, and his mind was as orderly and tidy as its range was limited. What McClellan might be able to do about sending an offensive column down the Mississippi would in the end be largely up to Halleck. For the moment, however, Halleck’s primary function was to pick up the litter left by Frémont and to make certain that military housekeeping was restored to an orderly basis. This much he could do, and he could also put Federal troops on the march across those parts of Missouri where rebel sympathies seemed to be strong. He was stopping waste and graft and he seemed to be restoring order; his capacity for waging aggressive war and directing troops in the field remained to be seen.

Halleck was supposed to work in harness with the other principal commander in the West, Don Carlos Buell, who had replaced Sherman in Kentucky. It was unlikely that real co-operation between these two men would come spontaneously, for each man was convinced that the other ought to be subordinate to him, but for the moment they were co-equals, with distant McClellan bearing responsibility for co-ordination of their efforts.

Buell was much like McClellan, except that the spark of personal magnetism was missing. He was one more of those diligent officers whom the old army labeled “brilliant,” and he should have been a first-rate general. He was methodical, careful of details, an able disciplinarian and organizer, the very model of a sound professional soldier. But he tended to be somewhat prissy. He had spent thirteen years in the adjutant general’s office, was fascinated by military routine, considered military problems wholly divorced from politics and other civilian realities, and — hating untidiness and military slackness above all else — he had little use for volunteer soldiers and their officers; which was unfortunate, since these made up all but a tiny fraction of his army. He knew moments of sheer horror occasionally when confronted with the civilian in arms in all his native rudeness. Once in Kentucky he saw by the road a mounted man in slouch hat, hickory shirt, and homespun breeches, spurs on naked heels, two revolvers in his belt, a rifle in his hands; and when a staff officer remarked that the man was doubtless a Federal cavalryman on duty, Buell indignantly bet fifty dollars that he was nothing but an unenrolled mountaineer. Buell lost; the man was a regular member of the 1st Kentucky Cavalry, on duty; and the loss of the money apparently hurt Buell much less than the realization that this unmilitary character was actually a trooper under his own command.
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The enlisted men sensed Buell’s disapproval of volunteers, and they considered him very reserved and aloof and refused to warm up to him. They might have admired one odd trick which Buell used to
indulge in to display his physical strength. In his home, with guests present, he liked to take his wife by the elbows, lift her off the floor, and place her on the mantelpiece — something of a feat, one guest observed, since the lady weighed at least 140 pounds and the mantel was nearly as high as Buell’s head.
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The war, to Buell, was a business of maps, of military maxims carefully studied and observed, of conscious application of basic principles. It would be possible, he argued, to win an important campaign without fighting a single general engagement; battles should be fought only when success was reasonably certain, and “war has a higher object than that of mere bloodshed.”
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This was true enough, and Buell could cite eminent authority for his belief. Yet this war might possibly turn out to be unlike the ones in the textbooks. It might have rules of its own, or no rules at all, as Nathaniel Lyon had discovered in the free-for-all at St. Louis; in which case a man who went by the book could have much trouble.

Buell was beginning to have a little trouble this fall, in point of fact. As much as he wanted anything short of final victory, Abraham Lincoln wanted east Tennessee occupied by Union troops, for reasons both military and political; the occupation would break the all-important railroad line that connected Virginia with the Mississippi Valley, and east Tennessee was full of sturdy Union sympathizers and ought to be liberated. McClellan accepted this and passed the orders along to Buell, and Pap Thomas was eager to make the move just as soon as he got his wagon train in order. But Buell thought the move was all wrong. In a letter to Lincoln he confessed that he was led to prepare for the thrust “more by my sympathy for the people of east Tennessee and the anxiety with which you and the general-in-chief have desired it than by my opinion of its wisdom.” East Tennessee, he felt, would have to wait; the important thing was to break the main Rebel line in the West.
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The western end of this line was anchored by the powerful riverbank fortress at Columbus on the Mississippi, to possess which Bishop Polk had been willing to fracture Kentucky’s neutrality at the beginning of September. The center was based on Bowling Green, where Albert Sidney Johnston seemed to have his principal troop concentration. Eastward, the line tapered off in the mountainous area north and west of Cumberland Gap.

Thus the western end of the line was in Halleck’s territory and the rest in Buell’s, and before any of it could be attacked properly Buell and Halleck would have to work out a joint plan and make complete arrangements for co-operation. It was taking them a long time to do this. Some of the delay possibly arose because each general knew
perfectly well that the man who drove the Rebels out of Kentucky was going to win fame and promotion, so that each one greatly preferred to see the main push take place in his own bailiwick. While they planned, argued, and cajoled one another by mail and by telegraph — for some reason they were never quite able to spend a couple of days face to face and iron out all difficulties — McClellan at long distance called for action and meditated at leisure on the best way to make use of the Army of the Potomac.… And the autumn months passed, and Republican leaders muttered that the generals were reluctant to fight, and General Stone was made an object lesson for the hesitant.

In spite of the delays, there was beginning to be action. If Halleck and Buell preferred to wait until everything was ready, each had a subordinate who was ready to fight.

General Grant in Cairo touched it off first. Across the Mississippi from Columbus, some fifteen miles downstream from Cairo, there was an insignificant Missouri hamlet named Belmont, and to this place on November 7 Grant came by steamer, with three thousand soldiers and the gunboats
Tyler
and
Lexington
for escort, on a vaguely defined mission whose final object seems to have been nothing much more complicated than to stir up a good fight.

He got his fight, since there were several Confederate regiments in residence at Belmont. Grant took his men ashore just far enough upstream to be out of range of the heavy guns at Columbus, marched down the Missouri shore, smashed a hastily formed Confederate battle line, and seized the Confederate camp. His troops felt that they had won a great victory and they celebrated by breaking ranks and looting the camp for souvenirs, thus giving the Confederates time to rally and to get reinforcements across the river. In the end Grant’s force was driven back upstream, and at the close of day the men hurriedly re-embarked and steamed back to Cairo, abandoning most of their loot and a number of their wounded men. The fight had been brisk enough — each side lost four hundred men or more — and nothing very definite had been accomplished either way. But Grant’s men considered that they had behaved very well under fire (as in fact they had) and their morale went up, and the Confederates had been put on notice that they were facing an aggressive enemy.
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Belmont had settled nothing, in other words, but it did bring to an end the period of inaction along the Kentucky-Tennessee front. A few weeks later Buell’s General Thomas got into a fight that had more important consequences.

Thomas had been edging forward toward the Tennessee border from the left end of Buell’s line, getting ready for the anticipated march into east Tennessee. Buell thought he was too far forward, and
anyway Buell was thinking in terms of a drive through the Confederate center toward Nashville, so by the end of November Thomas was ordered to pull his men back and await developments near the town of Lebanon in central Kentucky. This apparently encouraged the Confederates, and they thrust a force up through Cumberland Gap and posted it on the north side of the Cumberland River, not far from the Kentucky town of Somerset; and around the first of the year, hampered by bad weather and atrocious roads (it took eight days to advance forty miles), Thomas went lunging forward to drive this force away.

Federals and Confederates finally collided on January 17, 1862, at Mill Springs, otherwise known as Logan’s Crossroads. The battle was fought in woodlots and meadows along the edge of a little stream, and untried soldiers on each side formed a line and blazed away manfully. Hardly anyone on either side had ever fought before; when a Confederate firing line sensibly took cover behind the lip of a ravine, a furious Union colonel climbed on a rail fence, denounced the Rebels loudly as dastards, and dared them to stand on their feet and fight like men. The Confederate General Felix Zollicoffer, in the confusion of the action, rode into the Union line and was shot; Thomas got his reserves forward at just the right moment, and the Confederates were finally driven off in rout, abandoning camp and commissary stores, eleven pieces of artillery, and more than a thousand horses and mules. Happy Federal soldiers laid in vast stocks of Confederate rations and amused themselves by cooking flapjacks, made mostly of flour and sugar, living on these so extensively that whole regiments came down with bowel trouble.
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This battle had been on a small scale — neither side had more than four thousand men on the field — but it had important results. In effect, the right end of the Confederate line had come loose. The way into east Tennessee was wide open now, if anybody wanted to use it, and Mr. Lincoln hopefully urged Congress to provide for building a railroad from Kentucky down to Knoxville. But Buell continued to think that it would be much better to move on Nashville; and as the winter deepened, General Grant and Commodore Foote unexpectedly helped his argument along by focusing attention on the Confederate center in the most dramatic way imaginable. They moved boldly up the Tennessee River and captured Fort Henry.

The high command had been doing a good deal of sputtering during
January. McClellan still hoped that Buell could move into east Tennessee, but Buell was insisting that he had to crack the Confederate defenses at Bowling Green first and then move on Nashville; so McClellan told Halleck that he ought to move up the Tennessee River to create a diversion and keep the Rebels from reinforcing at Bowling Green, and Halleck was replying that the Confederate force at Columbus far outnumbered the ten thousand men he had available for such a move. He argued that “it would be madness to attempt anything serious with such a force,” and he gave McClellan a little lecture on strategy; to move against two points on the Confederate line would be “to operate on exterior lines against an enemy occupying a central position,” a military solecism which “is condemned by every authority I have ever read.” Lincoln saw the correspondence, and across the bottom of Halleck’s letter he scribbled: “It is exceedingly discouraging. As everywhere else, nothing can be done.”
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The sputtering continued. Halleck reminded McClellan that the troops he had inherited from Frémont were in a disorganized, near-mutinous condition, and complained: “I am in the condition of a carpenter who is required to build a bridge with a dull axe, a broken saw and rotten timber.”
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Some of his tools did have a good edge, however, and Thomas’s victory at Logan’s Crossroads lent inspiration. Grant, Foote, and old C. F. Smith were all convinced that they were facing a bright opportunity rather than a vexing problem, and word of their optimism got abroad. Oddly enough, a false alarm from the East was a spur to action. McClellan learned that General Beauregard was being sent west, to be second-in-command to Albert Sidney Johnston: in addition, he was erroneously informed that Beauregard was taking fifteen regiments with him, and it seemed advisable to do something before these reinforcements should arrive. Halleck finally consented to let Grant make a stab at Fort Henry on the Tennessee River, just over the line from Kentucky, and he found that he could spare fifteen thousand men for the task instead of the ten thousand he had mentioned earlier. He and Buell then began exchanging messages, exploring the possibilities of co-operation, deploring the atrocious state of the roads, and doubting that anything very effective could be done. Halleck told McClellan that unless he got heavy reinforcements he did not believe he could accomplish much, Buell complained that Halleck’s move was being commenced “without appreciation — preparative or concert,” and he added that the Rebels would probably muster sixty thousand men to oppose the move.
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While the high command sputtered, Grant, Foote and Smith moved.

The Tennessee River comes up from the Deep South to meet the
Ohio River at Paducah. To the east, the Cumberland River, after rising in the Kentucky mountains, dips to the north, and as it leaves Tennessee to re-enter Kentucky it flows parallel to the Tennessee for a long distance. Just below the Kentucky-Tennessee border, at a place where the two northward-flowing rivers are no more than ten miles apart, the Confederates had prepared two strong points: Fort Henry on the Tennessee, and Fort Donelson at Dover on the Cumberland. Between them, these two forts were supposed to hold the line between Columbus on the west and Bowling Green on the east, where the main Confederate body was concentrated.