Grant Moves South (5 page)

On the same day that Grant ordered the Illinois regiments to move east and south, he got reinforcements—two new regiments, as Western as regiments could be, 7th Iowa and 1st Nebraska. Colonel John Thayer of the Nebraska regiment called at headquarters and found Grant sitting at a table writing; he remembered that Grant wore a suit of Army blue, not unlike the suits worn many years later by graybeard members of the Grand Army of the Republic, with no shoulder straps or any other signs of rank. Grant
was puffing at a clay pipe, and he asked Thayer to wait a few minutes while he finished what he was writing. Thayer was willing; an amateur soldier himself, he wanted a chance to size up this West Pointer who was to be his commander.

Studying him, Thayer thought that he saw something: firmness, self-reliance, quiet determination. (So, at any rate, it seemed to him, years afterward, when he sat down to write about it, writing in the knowledge that the unassuming little Brigadier he met in Missouri was to become the most famous soldier in the world.) When Grant at last pushed his papers aside and began to talk, Thayer liked what he heard. Grant asked a few questions about Thayer's regiment, its strength and its state of training, and he expressed satisfaction that the frontier territory of Nebraska had been able to send a thousand men to the front; he went on to say that this was a nice contrast to the course taken by older, more populous states in the South, which (as Grant saw it) had brought on a fratricidal war. “When I read of officers of the army and navy,” said Grant, “educated by the government at West Point and Annapolis, and under a solemn vow to be defenders of the flag against all foes whatsoever, domestic or foreign, throwing up their commissions, going South and taking service under the banner of treason, it fills me with indignation.” Later that day Grant came around to the Nebraskans' camp, riding the clay-bank horse which was to become such a familiar sight in the Army, and Thayer felt that the men were impressed, as he had been, by “his calm, composed manner, united with a soldierly bearing but entirely free from any pride or hauteur of command.”
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More reinforcements were coming, but their arrival took Grant down a peg. Two days after the Nebraska and Iowa regiments had appeared, four more regiments came into camp, led by Brigadier General Benjamin M. Prentiss, another Illinoisan. What disconcerted Grant, who was just ready to leave Ironton and join his advanced forces, was the fact that Prentiss carried orders from Major General John C. Frémont, commanding the Western Department, putting Prentiss in command in southeastern Missouri. This relieved Grant from his command and left him without an assignment, although Frémont apparently had not quite intended it that way; he seems to have got mixed up by the intricacies of Army regulations governing seniority.

Prentiss, an amateur soldier, had been made a brigadier earlier in the year, at a time when Grant was still a civilian doing clerical work for the governor of Illinois at Springfield. When Grant became a general his commission was dated back to May 17, the same date that Prentiss's commission bore; headquarters seems to have assumed that because Prentiss had actually held the commission before Grant did he was therefore Grant's senior, and what it overlooked was the provision that when two officers whose commissions bore identical dates got together, seniority would depend on prior rank in the Army. Prentiss had fought in the Mexican War as a captain of Volunteers and then had returned to civilian life, but Grant had been a captain of Regulars; hence, by law, Grant ranked Prentiss.

What gave this mixup its cutting edge was the fact that as Army law then stood it was impossible to require an officer to serve under an officer whom he ranked. When Prentiss got off the evening train from St. Louis and displayed his orders, then, his arrival automatically put Grant out of a job. There was nothing Grant could do but report at St. Louis and see if there was another assignment for him. He turned everything over to Prentiss, explained the moves that were afoot, and then ordered a locomotive and a daycoach prepared to take him to the city.
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As Thayer remembered it, Grant took it rather hard. He made no official protests, and he said nothing to Prentiss about his disappointment, but he was “thoroughly cast down and disappointed”—even more so, it seemed to Thayer, than the facts really warranted. Either then or later, Thayer believed that this was not because he was mortified by being superseded but because the shift canceled Grant's own plan for occupying all of the southeastern part of the state and getting over to Cairo where he could prepare for a drive down the Mississippi and up the Tennessee.

On the night of August 18—it was nearly midnight, and both Grant and the night were very gloomy—Grant took off for St. Louis. He asked Thayer to go along with him, and the two men had a silent ride in a nearly empty daycoach that bumped along for hours, reaching St. Louis after daybreak. In St. Louis the two men had breakfast at the Planter's House, after which Grant went to headquarters to report. He returned to the hotel later in the morning, and it seemed to Thayer that Grant was even more dejected
than before. Frémont, Grant said, had told him nothing about the reason for the transfer; he had simply ordered him to go to Jefferson City, the capital of the state, on the Missouri River one hundred miles northwest of Ironton, and take charge of the Army Post which had been established at that strategic spot. Affairs at Jefferson City seemed to be in a mess, and the place looked like a side pocket, far removed from the theater of aggressive action. The prospect was not attractive.

“I do not want to go to Jefferson City,” said Grant. “I do not want to go any further into Missouri. But of course I must obey orders.”
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What happened next is hazy. Thayer said that Grant wanted very much to return to Galena for five days, which is indisputable; Grant had just written to Julia saying that he would like to get home briefly, if only to buy a proper general's outfit. But Thayer went on to say that Grant went back to Frémont, got five days leave, went to Galena, and there saw Congressman Washburne, to whom he explained his plan for an invasion of the south by way of Cairo. Washburne, said Thayer, took or sent the plan to President Lincoln, and it was discussed in cabinet meeting, as a result of which General Frémont was presently told to put Grant back in command in southeast Missouri; and all that happened thereafter in the Mississippi valley, Thayer believed, grew out of the plans Grant had made at Ironton, and out of his hurried trip to Galena in mid-August.
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It did not actually happen that way. Grant did apply for leave, but his application was refused. He was in St. Louis at least through the morning of August 19, and he was in Jefferson City on August 21, which leaves too little time for a visit with Washburne in Galena. In addition, the move would have been most unlike Grant. He was then a brigadier of no more than two weeks' standing, and the gap between his position and the White House was altogether too broad to be leaped by a quiet little man who had complete indoctrination about the virtue of following the proper channels of the Army hierarchy. Also, when the invasion of the South was actually under way, the following spring, and the great victory at Fort Donelson had been won, Grant wrote to Washburne saying that it was idle to give credit for the move up the Tennessee to any specific general; the strategic soundness of the plan was obvious, he said—“General
Halleck no doubt thought of this route long ago, and I am shure I did.”

Yet Emerson wrote, long after the war, that some written exposition of Grant's plan had reached Washburne that summer, and he said that Washburne himself, when he asked him about it many years later, remembered presenting the plan to Mr. Lincoln; and Emerson added that Montgomery Blair, a member of Lincoln's cabinet in 1861, recalled having discussed the project at the White House. Whether all of this reflects a dim recollection of something that actually happened—a recollection dredged up after a quarter of a century, by men who would then be entirely ready to concede that General Grant had always been a military genius—is a mildly tantalizing question. The one certainty seems to be that Grant obeyed orders without making complaint to anyone except Thayer, and two days later he had assumed his new command at Jefferson City.
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Jefferson City was no prize package. There were plenty of Union troops there, but no Regular Army man was likely to think of them as soldiers. Many ardent patriots had obtained authority—dubious authority, for the most part, which had no particular standing in law—to recruit volunteer organizations for the Union, and had set up shop all over town, some to raise full regiments, some to raise battalions, others simply to raise companies—in tents and in huts and elsewhere, with rudely lettered signs overhead inviting all corners to join up at once. Some of these recruiters were offering six-month terms of enlistment, others were offering terms of one year; and Grant learned, when he looked into things, that most of their recruits were coming from the legal, three-year regiments which had been stationed in the place. On top of this the city was filled with fugitives—Missouri farmers and their families, who had fled from the western part of the state because it seemed likely that the Confederates would rule there. These folk came in, usually, with a team of horses hauling a farm wagon loaded with household goods; they had no means of support and no place to go, and they had come to Jefferson City not because they especially wanted to be there but simply because they wanted to get away from the Confederacy's armed forces, which had even less discipline than the Union troops Grant had been looking at and which were harrying
Union sympathizers out of every neighborhood which Federal troops did not occupy. All in all, Jefferson City was a complete madhouse.
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Things in Missouri were not going well for the Union just then.

Nathaniel Lyon, the red-haired, fiery little Regular Army Captain who had been made Brigadier General that spring and who had beaten down Confederate sympathizers in St. Louis by displaying a driving eagerness to strike the first blow, had moved beyond the Missouri River early that summer with an army that had neither adequate training nor proper equipment—an army, indeed, which had nothing but passionate leadership—and Lyon had planned to make Missouri secure for the Union by destroying a Confederate army which was operating in the southwestern part of the state. This army was in even worse condition, as far as training and equipment went, than the one Lyon commanded. Its armament was composed mostly of shotguns and flintlock muskets, it had a chief of ordnance who confessed that he had never set eyes on a cartridge and knew not the difference between a howitzer and a siege gun, it had no tents and no uniforms and certain of its units were officered by lawyers who knew nothing about military matters and who had their sergeants assemble their companies, when the morning's routine was about to start, by standing on the parade ground and bellowing: “Oh yes! Oh yes! All you who belong to Captain Brown's company fall in here.” Commander of this motley array was a native son, General Sterling Price, a devoted man in whom Missourians had large confidence. Price's Missouri state troops were joined with Gen. Ben McCulloch's Confederates from Arkansas and some Arkansas state troops, and in one way or another Price got his outfit up to a site known as Wilson's Creek, twenty miles or so from Springfield, in the southwest corner of the state, and there on August 10 the Confederates, under the over-all command of McCulloch, had collided with Lyon's Unionists and had given them a beating. Lyon himself was killed, the remnants of his little army went streaming north and east, Price moved on to lay siege to the important Missouri River town of Lexington (which, some time later, he captured, along with its Federal garrison) and it looked as if the resurgent Confederacy might overrun the entire state.
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Federal affairs in Missouri were in the control—nominally, at
least—of a very famous man, an ardent patriot and a dedicated believer in freedom who was, unfortunately, neither a good executive nor a competent soldier: Major General John C. Frémont, famous as the Pathfinder who had helped to open the West, a man with immense political influence. He had been the first Republican candidate for President, in 1856, and he might easily be the party's next candidate also, and he desperately wanted to rid the state of armed Confederates but had only a foggy notion of the way to go about it.

Frémont lived in state, in St. Louis, surrounded by a colorful set of bodyguards, glittering aides-de-camp (many of whom, as it turned out, had been extra-legally commissioned and very few of whom knew anything at all about the way Western troops should be officered and led) and a pervasive odor of inefficiency and corruption. Frémont had been sent to Missouri with orders which, in effect, told him to raise and equip an army, get the Rebels out of the state, and win the Mississippi Valley for the Union; orders which he was most anxious to execute, for he was a highminded man, of unquestioned loyalty to the Union, but for whose execution he was not getting much help from Washington. Missouri was a long way from the Potomac, the administration's attention was largely centered on matters in Virginia, and Frémont had to play it by ear under circumstances which would have taxed even the ablest of administrators. Professional soldiers and revolutionists-in-exile from Europe had flocked to his standard, for he was one of the few Americans famous in Europe when the war broke out, and Frémont had taken many of these into the service, at fairly exalted rank, without regard for their own capacity or for his own administrative powers. Under his authority there had been placed orders for vast quantities of tents, mules, uniforms, rifles, wagons and all the other things an army needs. The pressure of time lay on the man, purchases had to be made in an immense hurry and on credit, and many of these orders had been placed without regard for the Army's legal forms; numerous canny traders, scenting a wide-open opportunity, had sold poor goods at inflated prices. Things at St. Louis, in short, were in a mess, and there would presently be a scandal about it; and through all of it Frémont was doing his best to get more troops, hold such strategic spots as Cairo and arrange things so that he could ultimately take the offensive
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