Terrible Swift Sword (25 page)

As it happened, the Federal power was in
no great hurry. There were in the Kentucky-Tennessee area two men who believed
in crowding a beaten foe—General Grant and Flag Officer Foote—and they did
their best. Wounded in one leg and one arm, Foote found that he could still get
around, and on February 19 he took two gunboats upstream from Donelson and
captured the town of Clarksville, where there was a railroad bridge; after
which he and Grant agreed that the thing to do was to get troops and gunboats
up to Nashville as fast as possible, and by daybreak on February 21 they had an
expeditionary force afloat at Fort Donelson, ready to go, capable of reaching
Nashville the same day. At this point the high command intervened. General
Halleck telegraphed Grant not to let the gunboats go beyond Clarksville; after
which he telegraphed to Secretary Stanton saying that there existed 'a golden
opportunity to strike a fatal blow' but that the blow could not be struck
unless he, Halleck, could control Buell's army. Buell, meanwhile, had got his
army into Bowling Green, and, while Forrest was pulling the rear guard out of
Nashville, Buell began an overland advance toward that point, begging Halleck
to send some gunboats up the Cumberland for protection. Crippled and badly off
balance, the Confederates had just time to get away to safety. Buell's advance
guard reached Edgefield, on the opposite side of the river from Nashville, on
the evening of February 24, barely twenty-four hours after Forrest got the
last Confederate soldiers out of there.
⁴

As
a matter of fact everybody was off balance, victors and defeated alike. The
capture of the two forts stunned everyone. Both Federals and Confederates had
to adjust not merely their plans but their ways of thinking about their plans:
the Federals because they had won, with a single stroke, something which they
had thought
needed
the
most elaborate organization and preparation; the Confederates because they
suddenly found themselves losing the whole western half of the war. The war
which had been moving so slowly had abruptly passed the first of its great
turning points. Now it was going at full
speed,
pulling
men
along with it, setting a pace which would be
ruinous to all who could not themselves move with equal speed. Its entire
climate had changed.

In the North there was much rejoicing.
Here at last was a victory to make men forget about Bull Run, and with the victory
there was a new hero whose appearance was all the more refreshing because up to
now no one had paid much attention to him. Grant's laconic "unconditional
surrender" note touched precisely the right key—men played with his
initials and began to call him "Unconditional Surrender Grant" —and
Secretary Stanton asserted that the aggressive spirit that would win the war
seemed to him to be expressed perfectly in Grant's threat, "I propose to
move immediately on your works."
⁵
President Lincoln made Grant
a major general of volunteers, and the Senate quickly voted confirmation; now
Grant outranked everybody in the west except Halleck himself.

There
were off-stage mutterings that the man had simply been lucky, and although
Halleck had recommended his promotion he had reservations about him. Halleck
assured Stanton that C. F. Smith was the real hero of Fort Donelson, and he
urged that the elderly Brigadier General Ethan Allen Hitchcock be promoted and
sent west, because "an experienced officer of high rank is wanted
immediately on the Tennessee line"—the line, that is, where Grant was
commanding. Hardly a fortnight after Fort Donelson surrendered, Halleck
complained angrily that Grant was ignoring his orders and failing to make
proper reports: "Satisfied with his victory, he sits down and enjoys it
without any regard to the future." (This was an odd complaint, in view of
the fact that Grant would have had Federal troops and gunboats at Nashville
while Forrest was still trying to remove commissary and quartermaster stores,
if Halleck had not immobilized him.) Then Halleck told McClellan that rumors
said Grant "has resumed his former bad habits," and for a
time—although the general public knew nothing about it— Grant was under a
cloud.
⁶

Grant unquestionably had been lucky.
After all, it was Foote who had made Fort Henry surrender and Grant who got
most of the credit for it. Grant's delay in getting from Fort Henry to Fort
Donelson had actually worked out in Grant's favor, and, at Fort Donelson,
Grant's opponents had committed the most fantastic blunders. Nevertheless, the
fact remained that Grant had displayed a trait which, as the coming years
would show, he shared with Robert E. Lee—the ability to take immediate and
devastating advantage of his foe's mistakes; and in any case no one in
Washington was prepared to find very much fault with a soldier who had just
captured the largest bag of prisoners in American military history.
⁷
The War Department presently quieted Halleck by curtly telling him that if he
had anything against Grant he must file formal charges and make them stick, and
Halleck dropped the matter. (Apparently the man did not really want to get rid
of his subordinate; he was just being petulant, and once he had blown off steam
he was ready to forget about it.) In Thomas, the western armies had produced a
soldier who could fight and win; now, in Grant, they had come up with another.
And there was also Flag Officer Foote.

The Confederates found much reason for gloom.
There had been a disastrous failure in generalship, and no amount of
explanation could gloss over the strange performance at Fort Donelson;
President Davis removed Floyd and Pillow, Floyd was never again employed in a
field command, and Pillow was used only sparingly. Johnston came in for severe
criticism, which he took in soldierly silence. He could have argued that even
if he had been mistaken in putting so many men into a fort that could not be
held, things would have gone well enough if his subordinates had been equal to
their opportunities, but he felt that this was no time to make excuses and he
stoutly told President Davis: "I observed silence, as it seemed to me the
best way to serve the cause and the country."
⁸
He had been
beaten, but he would offer no alibis.

Yet
defective generalship was not the real trouble. The dreadful truth which the
Fort Donelson affair revealed was that the Confederates in Kentucky were simply
overextended. Johnston had been compelled to try to do too much with too
little, and even if the abysmal mistakes had been avoided his line was due to
break whenever the Federals really hit it hard. Halleck, Buell, and the United
States Navy had the power to repossess Kentucky and conquer Tennessee whenever
they nerved themselves to use it, and the fact that Grant and Foote had forced
the hands of their reluctant superiors was incidental; the break was bound to
come sooner or later.

Upheld
by Mr. Davis, Johnston undertook to serve cause and country as best he could.
He prepared to reassemble his army and make ready for a new fight farther
south, and his task was extraordinarily difficult. He had 17,000 men near

Murfreesboro, and Beauregard, then at
Jackson, Tennessee, was finding that there were some 21,000 along the
Mississippi. Even when these forces got together the army would be much weaker
than the force which the Federals could be expected to bring south, and getting
them together would be hard. They were 300 miles apart, and before February
ended Halleck was preparing to get Grant and the gunboats over to the Tennessee
and drive upstream; if this move was made with vigor, Johnston and Beauregard
might not be able to get together at all. Beauregard was in poor health, and
from Jackson he wrote: "I am taking the helm when the ship is already on
the breakers . . . How it is to be extricated from its present precarious
position, Providence above can determine." He brightened up when he
reached the Mississippi Valley, and February 23 worked out an ambitious scheme
to regain the offensive. If the governors of Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana,
and Arkansas could raise from 20,000 to 40,000 new troops, and if
reinforcements could be brought over from west of the Mississippi, Beauregard
believed he could march north, take Paducah and Cairo and threaten St. Louis .
. . This plan, however, was wholly impractical, and it died in its cradle.
Beauregard had written that the loss of Fort Donelson would bring
"consequences too lamentable to be now alluded to," and these
consequences were upon him. He could do nothing but leave garrisons to hold a
few forts on the Mississippi north of Memphis and take his field force down to
Corinth, Mississippi, while the War Department ordered 15,000 men sent up from
Mobile, Pensacola, and New Orleans.
⁹
Johnston might be able to
reconstitute an adequate army provided the Federals gave him plenty of time.

This, it developed, the Federals would
do. To organize, equip, and move a proper army of invasion took time. There
were a thousand details to arrange; tangled lines of command must be set
straight; what was done here must be co-ordinated with what was done elsewhere;
and above everything else it was necessary to be prudent, lest all that had
been gained be lost through front-line rashness. Altogether, displaying an
admirable capacity for taking infinite pains, the careful men at headquarters
took a good deal of time—and, quite unintentionally, presented it to General
Johnston.

The commanders at the front could see
that this was the moment to push ahead, ready or not, the moment to drive the
enemy into a corner before he could regain his footing or recover his wind. But
there is an unformulated military law by which understanding of urgency and
front-line reality diminishes with each mile of distance to the rear echelon;
so that it was actually possible for a department commander to tell Washington
that he had a golden opportunity to strike a blow, and in the same breath to
restrain the subordinates who were on the verge of striking it. It was at this
time that Secretary Stanton began to reflect that in choosing top commanders he
would probably pick men who went personally where their troops went: "I am
very much inclined to prefer field work rather than office work for successful
military operations."
¹⁰

Yet
the respite which Johnston was about to get was of no immediate comfort to
worried folk in the South. Things were bad no matter where they looked. In
southwestern Missouri, Union Brigadier General Samuel R. Curtis had reoccupied
the town of Springfield and had driven Price all the way into Arkansas; he
apparently had completed Federal reconquest of Missouri and he seemed to be
about to attempt an invasion of Arkansas as well, and he had already crossed
the border of that state with something over 10,000 men, his numbers rising to
30,000 or 40,000 in the panicky rumors that went rippling eastward. On the Gulf
Coast, northeast of the separated mouths of the Mississippi there was a barren
sand patch known as Ship Island, once held by Confederate troops, abandoned in
September as untenable; the scene just now of a steady, ominous build-up of
Federal troops and an in-gathering of many supply vessels, while black-hulled
warships cruised off the entrances to the big river and sent light craft up to
Pilot Town and the Head of the Passes. Flag officer Farragut himself arrived on
February 20, and Major General Benjamin Butler would presently be there as Army
commander, and the two officers obviously meant to attack New Orleans—which
unhappy metropolis, by no means ready for an attack, was at precisely this moment
compelled to send troops north to strengthen General Johnston.

These
were the threats. There was also another actual defeat. Just when Forts Henry
and Donelson were being lost, the Federals struck hard inside the North
Carolina sounds, moving at last to exploit the Hatteras Inlet breakthrough,
threatening to overrun the entire coast from Chesapeake Bay to the vicinity of
Wilmington. This thrust was costly in itself and even worse in its
implications, for it pointed again to the grim moral underlined in Tennessee:
the South's defensive line was too long and too thin, and it could be broken
whenever the Federals came down hard. (Mr. Lincoln's strategic concept was
getting a certain verification this winter.) Roanoke Island illustrated the
matter perfectly.

Roanoke Island was
haunted: the place where England's first American colony, planted at the
gateway to the unknown darkness, had vanished forever, leaving the dim memory
of little Virginia Dare and the ominous word "Croatan" for an eerie,
tragic legend. The island was flat, swampy, ten miles long, lying at the
meeting place of North Carolina's inland seas, Pamlico Sound and Albemarle
Sound; if the Federals could occupy it they could control both sounds, the
cities that lay on their shores, the rivers that came into them, and a feasible
back-door approach to Norfolk. Roanoke Island, in other words, was a place the
Confederacy had to hold, but it was just one of a great many places that had to
be held and when the blow fell Roanoke Island was not prepared.

The place was commanded by Brigadier
General Henry A. Wise, who was given the post in December 1861, when it seemed
advisable to get him out of western Virginia. Wise had had no military training
whatever but he had been learning things about warfare, and he had abundant
energy; he did his best to set matters right, but he was fatally handicapped
not only by the basic lack of resources but by his inability to make the high
command see that this case was important. His immediate superior was the
department commander, Major General Benjamin Huger, a first-family career
soldier from Charleston, grown rigid and unimaginative in long years of Army
routine, an aristocrat described by an irreverent kinsman of Wise as "one
of those old West Point incompetents with whom the Confederacy was
burdened." Wise notified Huger that he desperately needed reinforcements,
only to be told: "I think you want supplies, hard work and coolness among
the troops you have, instead of more men." As a former governor of
Virginia, Wise knew how to pull political strings, so he hurried to Richmond to
appeal to Secretary of War Judah Benjamin, but Benjamin also was unresponsive;
he simply told Wise to get back to Roanoke and do the best he could with what
he had. Haggard and in poor health, Wise obeyed, anticipating disaster; then,
early in February, he came down with pneumonia and had to take to his bed in a
shoreside hotel, leaving the island and its 2500 defenders in command of
Colonel H. M. Shaw.
¹¹