This Hallowed Ground (19 page)

Floyd had personal reasons for wishing to avoid capture. He had been Secretary of War in Buchanan’s Cabinet, and Northerners believed he had used his official position to stock southern arsenals and forts with extra supplies of weapons against the day of secession. It seemed likely that if they caught Floyd they would make things tough for him. So Floyd said he thought he had better go away with Pillow, and he passed the command on to Buckner. Being made of stouter material, Buckner did not try to duck his responsibilities. If the fort had to be given up and if he was now its commander, he would do what had to be done and would stay with his men, to take what came. So he had written a letter to Grant asking what terms the Federals would give if the garrison should surrender.

Grant read the thing and looked up at Smith, who was twisting his mustache before the fire. Perhaps Grant still felt like the young cadet in the presence of the commandant, for he asked, “What answer shall I send to his, General Smith?”

Smith cleared his throat heavily and barked: “No terms to the damned rebels.”

Grant chuckled, got a pad of paper, and began to write. A moment later he showed Smith what he had written. It was a short message, which would become famous. Curt and to the point, it announced
that Grant would offer no terms except “immediate and unconditional surrender,” and closed with the blunt statement: “I propose to move immediately upon your works.”

“Hmm!” said Smith. “It’s the same thing in smoother words!” Grant chuckled again, and Smith stalked out of the room to send the letter through the lines to Buckner.
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Buckner thought the letter harsh and unchivalrous, but there was no help for it. Pillow and Floyd had slipped away to the far side of the Cumberland and were on their way to safety. One other soldier had also escaped, a man who was to be worth more to the Confederacy than a dozen Pillows and Floyds: a hard, rough-hewn former planter and slave trader named Nathan Bedford Forrest, now commanding a detachment of Confederate cavalry, one of the authentic military geniuses of the whole war. If they could have caught him and kept him under lock and key to the end of the war, the Federals would have saved themselves much anguish. Forrest had found that the encircling lines were not quite airtight, and he led his troopers out to safety, floundering waist-deep through an icy backwater in the silent night; and Buckner and his troops — something like fifteen thousand of them, with all their guns and equipment — laid down their arms and surrendered when morning came. The North had won the first great victory of the war.
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Grant’s message was sent all across the North, and people made him a hero overnight; there was something about the hard ring of “unconditional surrender” that aroused vast enthusiasm, and it tickled people that the words fitted Grant’s initials.

But it was old Smith who had really stated the terms. As he said, all Grant had done was put them in smoother words.

Fort Donelson was a crusher, and the Confederate high command instantly recognized it as such. The loss of Fort Henry had already cracked Johnston’s line, causing him to retreat from Bowling Green to Nashville, and to send Beauregard west to see what could be done with the great river fortress at Columbus. Now with Donelson gone, there was no good place to make a stand north of the southern Tennessee border.

On news of Buckner’s surrender, Johnston evacuated Nashville and started south, while Beauregard prepared for the evacuation of Columbus. As far as any plans had been made, Johnston aimed to concentrate his forces at Corinth, Mississippi. Beauregard believed that the Mississippi
River could still be held, with strong points at Island No. Ten, New Madrid, and Fort Pillow, but except for this fringe all of western Tennessee was gone.
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What gave the defeat the potentiality of outright disaster — aside from the fact that the Confederacy was losing a modest industrial nexus of fair importance — was that it exposed to the Federal invaders the most important railroad line in the southern nation, the Memphis and Charleston, which (after dipping down into northern Mississippi and Alabama) ran east through Chattanooga and Knoxville and gave the Mississippi Valley region a direct connection with Virginia and the Atlantic seaboard. Abraham Lincoln, whose strategic ideas were not nearly as defective as a good many of his generals assumed, had had this line on his mind from the start; it was one of the reasons he was so desperately anxious to get an army down into eastern Tennessee. The value which the Richmond government placed on the line was shown by its reaction to the news of the defeat; it instantly began to strip the southern seaboard of troops in order to give Johnston reinforcements.

Confederate Secretary of War Judah Benjamin wrote to Robert E. Lee, who was then busy perfecting coastal defenses in South Carolina and Georgia, to send troops to Tennessee at once, because the railroad line “must be defended at all hazards.” Braxton Bragg, commanding at Mobile, Alabama, was ordered to leave a garrison in the harbor forts and to take the rest of his troops up to Johnston. Benjamin’s predecessor in the War Department, L. P. Walker, now a brigadier in Alabama, wrote that it would be better to lose all the seacoast than this railroad, calling it “the vertebrae of the Confederacy.” The Confederate government was aware by now that the Federals would soon be mounting an assault on New Orleans via the Mississippi passes, but when Donelson fell the best troops in the Louisiana sector were rushed north, along with much military equipment.
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Naturally the northern authorities were jubilant. The chief engineer of the Army of the Potomac wrote to McClellan saying that the victory “knocks all present calculations in the head” and remarking that if McClellan’s army did not move pretty soon it might find that the western troops had won the war without its aid. “We can march anywhere, I take it,” he exulted.
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This touched McClellan where he was sore. President Lincoln, the Cabinet, and the Republican leadership generally had been getting more and more impatient with him because he was refusing to move, and Lincoln not long since had irritably remarked that if McClellan did not propose to use the army he himself would like to borrow it for a time. Now McClellan was beginning to take fire. To Buell he
telegraphed that “if the force in the west can take Nashville, or even hold its own for the present, I hope to have Richmond and Norfolk in from three to four weeks.” In a wire to Halleck he was equally optimistic: “In less than two weeks I shall move the Army of the Potomac, and hope to be in Richmond soon after you are in Nashville.”
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Halleck himself seemed to be slightly unhinged. He reported that the Rebels were reinforcing Columbus (which they were in fact preparing to evacuate) and he warned that they were apt to attack him any day in great strength. To Buell he appealed: “I am terribly hard pushed. Help me and I will help you.” He told McClellan that Beauregard was about to come upstream and attack Cairo, called for more troops, and complained: “It is the crisis of the war in the west.” He wanted reinforcements, he wanted Grant and Buell made major generals (along with Smith, who he said was the real author of victory at Fort Donelson, and John Pope, who was mounting an assault on the Confederate river defenses), and most of all he wanted advancement for himself. He appealed to McClellan to make him top commander in the West: “I ask this in return for Forts Henry and Donelson.” Only by promoting him, he asserted, could the Federals cash in on the situation: “I must have command of the armies in the west. Hesitation and delay are losing us the golden opportunity.” Assistant Secretary of War Thomas A. Scott was in Louisville at the time, and Halleck begged him to make Buell co-operate with him, adding plaintively: “I am tired of waiting for action in Washington. They will not understand the case. It is as plain as daylight to me.” Then he went over everybody’s head and sent a wire direct to Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, saying that he had “a golden opportunity” to strike a fatal blow but that “I can’t do it unless I can control Buell’s army.… Give me authority and I will be responsible for results.”
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Washington’s reaction was lukewarm. Even at that distance McClellan could see that Beauregard was not in the least likely to launch an assault on Cairo, and he said so, adding that neither Halleck nor Buell was giving him a clear picture of what was going on. (Buell was telling him that Johnston was concentrating at Nashville, which he was actually abandoning, and was warning that a great battle would be fought there, for which he would need reinforcements.) Halleck was told that neither the President nor the Secretary of War saw any need for changing the western command arrangements at present and was warned that he and Buell were expected “to co-operate fully and zealously with each other.” For the time being the only promotion that came through was a major general’s commission for U. S. Grant. Now Grant would outrank Buell if their forces ever came together.
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Grant, meanwhile, wanted to keep moving. He was no man for fuss and feathers; when a romantic staff officer, his mind full of the pageantry of formal warfare, asked him on the morning of Donelson’s surrender what arrangements were being made to parade the captured Rebels for regular surrender ceremonies, Grant said that there would be no ceremonies: “We have the fort, the men and the guns,” and that was enough. To make a show of it would only mortify the beaten Confederates, “who after all are our own countrymen.”

Grant wanted to push on up the Cumberland toward Nashville. The first objective was the town of Clarksville, twenty-five miles upriver from Donelson, where the railroad line from western Tennessee crossed the Cumberland on its way to Bowling Green. Learning that the Rebels were leaving the place, Grant sent C. F. Smith up to hold it, notified Halleck that he was doing so, and offered to push on and take Nashville if anybody wanted it.
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Taking Clarksville smoothed the path of invasion. The roads were in bad shape, but Buell could move by rail to Clarksville and could go from there to Nashville by boat, and at last he got under way. Unable to get any clear directive from Halleck, Grant went on ahead, hoping to meet Buell at Nashville and find out what the plans were; and soon after Buell’s advance brigade entered the place — led by the Ormsby Mitchel who had seen poetry and romance in a moonlit reveille in a Kentucky camp — Grant was there, too, trying to work out some scheme for co-operation.

Nashville was a prize. Johnston had left in a hurry, abandoning huge quantities of supplies — half a million pounds of bacon, much bread and flour, and bales of new tents, the latter greatly welcomed by the Federals, who had left their own tents far behind them. The Federals were having their first experience in occupying a Confederate capital, and they found numerous timid citizens who were ready to turn their coats and cuddle up to the invaders: dignified gentlemen who called on generals to explain that they personally had always been Union men, to identify leading Rebels in the community, to tell where Confederate supplies had been hidden, and in general to make themselves useful. Mitchel felt that the town looked desolate and deserted, said the Rebels were disheartened and confused, and complained bitterly that Buell had no idea what to do next.
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By February 25 Nashville was under control, and Buell’s advance guard began cautiously to push southward to see where the Confederates might Lave gone. Smith was at Clarksville, and Grant’s army — a solid outfit of four full divisions now, thirty thousand men, twice as big as the one he had led east from Fort Henry — was concentrated in the Clarksville-Donelson area waiting for orders. And Grant was
beginning to discover that he was in serious trouble.

The tip-off came first from a staff officer friendly to Grant, Lieutenant Colonel James B. McPherson of the engineers, who came up to Donelson and remarked that all sorts of wild rumors were floating around in St. Louis: Grant was alleged to be drinking hard, and his troops were said to be wholly out of control. Halleck was reacting to these rumors like a regular gossip, passing them on to McClellan in a way designed to make Grant look like an alcoholic incompetent. He was complaining that he could get no word of any kind from Grant, that Grant had left his command without authority to go off on a fruitless trip to Nashville, and that his army “seems to be as much demoralized by the victory of Fort Donelson as was that of the Potomac by the defeat at Bull Run.” With overtaxed virtue Halleck concluded: “I am worn out and tired with this neglect and inefficiency.” He added that Smith was about the only officer who was equal to the emergency.

Halleck followed that, next day, with an even more damaging thrust. He told McClellan that he was informed that “General Grant had resumed his former bad habits,” which presumably would account for “his neglect of my oft-repeated orders.” McClellan of course knew perfectly well what “his former bad habits” meant, and he naturally told Halleck that if he felt it necessary he should not hesitate to put Grant under arrest and give the command to Smith: “Generals must observe discipline as well as private soldiers.” Next day Halleck sent Grant a stiff wire: “You will place Gen. 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?”
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So Grant was in heavy trouble, hardly a fortnight after he had taken Fort Donelson. Part of the trouble, apparently, came because Halleck all along had distrusted him; it appears that even before the Henry-Donelson expedition Halleck had planned to find a new commander, and had not acted simply because he had not found the right man. It is also possible to suspect that Grant was getting a little too much fame and glory for Halleck’s taste, and Halleck’s own attempt to wangle top command in the West had failed. In any case, it was trouble and Halleck was doing about as much as he conveniently could to get Grant clear out of the war.