Ulysses S. Grant (7 page)

Rawlins took charge of Grant’s chaotic paperwork, for which Grant had no gift at all. He also acted, from the beginning, as Grant’s
éminence bleue
—adviser, protector, sounding board. Rawlins
was abrasive, exacting, even abusive, had no difficulty (unlike Grant) in saying no to people, and was above all a fervent and outspoken “teetotaler,” who abstained from all forms of spirits. Rawlins was a born follower, who had been looking all his life for a man to follow and found him in Grant. It became his role to prevent Grant from reaching for the bottle, and on those occasions when he failed, to keep Grant out of sight. Rawlins was like a faithful guard dog, ferocious, absolutely loyal to his master, and devoted to protecting him, even from himself.

With Rawlins to guard his flank, Grant took to the field immediately. Ordered by Halleck to make “a demonstration” at Belmont, a Confederate camp on the Mississippi, twenty miles below Cairo, opposite Columbus, Missouri—that is, to impress and overawe the Confederates there by his presence—Grant went beyond his orders. He took three thousand men downriver by steamer and decided to attack Belmont instead. He landed, drove the Confederates out of the fortified camp, then was sharply driven back himself when they counterattacked in superior numbers. Grant had stirred up a hornet’s nest and was very lucky to get his troops embarked again.

Grant was the last man to leave, riding his horse straight down a steep, almost “perpendicular” bank under enemy fire, then across a narrow plank onto the deck of the waiting steamer—another brilliant feat of horsemanship that would have been performed by a stuntman in a movie. No sooner was Grant in his cabin than a bullet came through the hull, hitting the pillow on which he was about to lay his head. He must have begun to sense in himself a certain destiny, but also, as he began to suspect at Belmont, and perhaps even in Mexico, a gift for command. Risks did not seem to
scare him. He hardly even noticed danger. Quietly but firmly he got things done.

Halleck bristled at Grant’s transformation of a demonstration into an amphibious landing against a larger force, but Grant, with a newly acquired sense of public relations, or perhaps on Rawlins’s shrewd advice, decided to call it “a raid.” If it had been an
attack
, then he had been repulsed, as the Confederates claimed, whereas if it was a
raid
, it had been daring and successful. Halleck grumbled, was not fooled for a moment, but accepted Grant’s explanation, though it did nothing to increase his confidence in Grant.

Nevertheless, after considerable acrimonious correspondence between Halleck and Grant, and a few suggestions leaked from Halleck to Washington that Grant might have been drunk, Halleck reluctantly agreed to let his impetuous subordinate attack Fort Henry, the weaker of the two Confederate forts that guarded the Tennessee and the Cumberland Rivers, surely hoping to upstage General Buell and, perhaps wrongly, assuming that this would keep Grant occupied for some time.

Buell had 45,000 men in his command, just south of Louisville, Kentucky, and had been promising to advance on Nashville for some time. Halleck, with 91,000 men, and an eye fixed firmly on Washington, wanted very much to carry out an attack before Buell did. Buell’s forces were spread out, and he was in no hurry to move them, and Halleck must have thought there could be no harm in dispatching Grant to do a little mischief in the general direction of Nashville before Buell did.

Grant did not hesitate. He moved, like Rommel nearly eighty years later,
mit blitzartiger Schnelle,
the lightning speed so favored by
German Panzer generals, and took the Confederates by surprise. Grant was carried south on the Tennessee River by a flotilla of transports and gunboats, under the command of Comm. Andrew H. Foote, U.S.N., which had originally been assembled to carry Buell south, and was still waiting for Buell to move.

Having preempted Buell’s flotilla, Grant now deftly stepped into the limelight before Buell. He was about to receive help from an unexpected source—his Confederate opponents. Despite his dislike of Napoleon, Grant was about to prove the emperor right again. When asked what kind of generals he liked best, Napoleon is said to have replied, “Lucky ones.” Luck was about to strike Grant at last.

Though the Confederacy had recognized the importance of the rivers flowing north into the Ohio before the Union generals did, its choice of positions for the forts defending them was hampered by a reluctance to advance too far north into Kentucky, and the Confederate fortress system was therefore built at unpromising points. Perhaps Jefferson Davis and Gen. A. S. Johnston had also dozed during the lectures on fortifications at West Point, or neglected to read Vauban’s classic work on the subject, but in any case Fort Henry, on the Tennessee River, was placed on low ground, so that it could be shelled by gunboats. The Confederates then made the classic mistake of attempting to strengthen it by building a supporting fort—Fort Heiman—on the opposite, west bank of the Tennessee, which was on higher ground but only lightly manned.

Had they paid more attention at West Point to reading Vauban, Louis XIV’s builder of fortifications, they would have realized the folly of trying to reinforce a poor position with a weak one, but
Grant saw the opportunity at once. He landed Brig. Gen. Charles F. Smith—a crusty, competent, “scientific” soldier, who by coincidence had been Grant’s chief instructor at West Point—on the west bank of the Tennessee about two miles north of Fort Heiman, and the Confederate commander immediately abandoned it. That left Fort Henry exposed to fire from Foote’s gunboats and to an overland enveloping attack carried out swiftly by Grant, so Fort Henry too was abandoned, its 2,500-man garrison marching on two dirt tracks over muddy, rugged country to join the Confederate forces at Fort Donelson, on the west bank of the Cumberland.

Grant took the opportunity of sending Smith, who seemed to relish having escaped from his teaching position at West Point into real warfare, to destroy the Memphis & Ohio railroad bridge over the Tennessee, in effect stranding the Confederates; then moved his forces through cold, wet weather and thick mud in two columns to invest Fort Donelson.

He had taken Fort Heiman on February 4, he took Fort Henry on the sixth, and he had surrounded nearly twenty thousand Confederate troops in Fort Donelson by the fourteenth. By the night of February 15–16, Grant’s left wing, under Smith, pierced the elaborate Confederate defenses, and Confederate generals John Floyd and Gideon Pillow fled, abandoning command to the hapless Buckner, who surrendered to Grant on the sixteenth, after their famous exchange of correspondence.
²

Thus in twelve days Grant had opened up the way into Tennessee, captured the largest number of Confederate prisoners and guns since the war began—it was in fact the largest surrender in the history of North America to date—and achieved the first major
Union victory of the war. Grant’s troops were now only seventy miles from Nashville, and within a few days, as the news traveled north by telegraph, he would be proclaimed a national hero by the press and promoted to major general of volunteers.

Because he smoked cigars (when he could afford them), admiring citizens sent him cigars by the box—a tidal wave of tobacco that would continue to the end of his life. He became, like Freud and Winston Churchill in a later age, a chain smoker of cigars, seldom photographed without one; in the end, like Freud, he would die of his addiction, from cancer of the jaw and throat.

But in 1862 that was far in the future. Grant did not have long to enjoy his success. No sooner had he put up his second star than he was in trouble again. Buell, taking advantage of Grant’s victories, at last moved to take Nashville, and was followed there by Grant, who had been named “Commander of the Military Department of Western Tennessee”—a title that was vague but implied that he was Buell’s superior officer. This provoked Halleck, who must have felt that he had created a monster, to complain to the new general in chief in Washington, George B. McClellan, who had replaced the ailing Scott (and in whose waiting room Grant had twice sat fruitlessly waiting for an interview), that Grant had quit his command to go to Nashville, failed to keep him (Halleck) informed, and was probably drinking again. McClellan wired back that Halleck should “not hesitate to arrest him at once,” but Halleck contented himself with giving Gen. C. F. Smith command of the advance into Tennessee, while ordering a shaken Grant to remain at Fort Henry to await further investigation.

Grant finally managed to smooth Halleck’s ruffled feathers; the
rumors of his drinking were disposed of by Rawlins—although there remains a strong possibility that they were true—and by March 1862 Grant was once again headed south, in command of forty thousand troops. Smith seems to have taken all this intrigue calmly and was happy enough to give up a command he had never sought—Grant had not been one of his more successful pupils at West Point, but he seems to have recognized in him superior qualities of leadership. Grant’s commanders now included at least two unusual characters, Brig. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, temporarily in disgrace and assumed by many to be insane, but who would soon rise to become one of the most successful Union generals, and Lew Wallace, the future author of
Ben Hur
and governor of the Territory of New Mexico, who would play a leading role in ending the career of Billy the Kid.

Halleck had finally managed to achieve overall command of the area and conceived a plan in which Buell and Grant (once he was restored to command) would move south, meet at Pittsburg landing on the Tennessee, and concentrate their forces, then push on to Memphis. This plan was jeopardized almost at once by Buell’s slowness—it is possible that Buell had not forgiven Grant for preempting his flotilla and his limelight to undertake the attack on Fort Henry—so that Grant arrived at Pittsburg Landing before Buell, to face a larger Confederate force under the command of generals A. S. Johnston and P. G. T. Beauregard.

Whether Grant was drinking or not remains open to question, but he was certainly not at his best. It may be that the quarrel with Halleck and the temporary loss of his command had shaken his confidence, or that Julia Grant was still on her way south to be with
him, or that he wasn’t confident that Buell would arrive in time to be of any use. Or it may simply be that Rawlins’s concentration was focused elsewhere and that Grant had access to whiskey again (the one item that was never in short supply in both armies). For whatever reason, Grant spread his forces out loosely on the south side of the Tennessee River, and placed his own headquarters at Savannah, nine miles west (and downstream) of Pittsburg Landing, and on the opposite side of the river, which meant that he had to commute back and forth by river steamer every day. He later claimed that he was waiting anxiously for the arrival of Buell, who had agreed to meet him at Savannah, but that seems unlikely—word could have been left there for Buell to ride down to Pittsburg Landing as soon as he arrived, and it is just faintly possible that Grant didn’t want to risk anybody in his army seeing him drunk. In any event he seems to have had no idea that the Confederate forces were concentrating at Corinth and moving directly toward Pittsburg Landing to drive his army into the river.

The first warning the army received came in the late afternoon of Saturday, April 5, in the shape of thousands of terrified rabbits and deer, clearly being driven through the woods by something, which began to run through the Union encampments. Behind the fleeing wildlife were more than 41,000 Confederate soldiers, who had marched out of Corinth and were now within two miles of the Union lines. Several sharp firefights took place that night between outlying Union troops and Confederate skirmishers, but nobody seems to have bothered to inform Grant, who was nine miles away and had unwisely telegraphed Halleck before going to bed: “I have scarcely the faintest idea of an attack being made upon us.” Only a
few miles away Johnston dismissed Beauregard’s more cautious appraisal of the Confederate situation by saying, “I would fight them if they were a million!”

Good as his word, at dawn Johnston attacked, flinging his full forces against the Federals—most of whom were only just waking up or boiling their coffee—in one long, extended savage blow that took Grant’s whole army by surprise, as well as Grant himself, who heard the firing as he breakfasted. Still ignorant of where Buell was with his twenty thousand men, Grant limped on board a steamer—he had taken a severe fall from his horse a few days earlier—and set off toward Pittsburg Landing. He stopped at Crump’s Landing, where he had inadvisably placed Lew Wallace, to order Wallace to advance toward Pittsburg Landing—Wallace, as ill informed as Grant, took the wrong road, however, and thus left Grant short of five thousand men—then proceeded toward the ever-increasing noise of heavy fire, concern and some confusion evident on his face to those who accompanied him.

The closer Grant got, the more obvious it was to him how badly he had miscalculated. It was late in the morning when he finally arrived at Pittsburg Landing, and from the river, and even from the shore once he had landed, he could see nothing. In the age before smokeless gunpowder, the battlefield was obscured by clouds of dense, gritty smoke, and in any case Grant was looking up at a seemingly impenetrable thicket of scrub and second growth, from which thousands of panicked Union troops were emerging, with or without their weapons, to huddle beside the river.

Now that Grant realized he had allowed himself to be outwitted by Johnston, he was calm again. He would have agreed with
Wellington’s appraisal of his situation before Waterloo, “By God, Bonaparte has humbugged me!” and, also like Wellington, who had to hold out all day until Blücher arrived with his Prussians, Grant would have to hang on by the skin of his teeth until Buell arrived to join
him
. Since his cavalry was useless in the rough, heavily wooded country, bisected by creeks and streams, Grant ordered them to round up the Union stragglers and drive them back to plug the gaps in the battle lines. Having done this, he sent messengers off to look for Buell, and went forward to have a closer look. Nothing he saw was encouraging—he would later remark that in places the dead lay so thick and close to each other it would have been possible to walk across a field without putting a foot on the ground—and from all accounts his left was being pushed back to the river, without any sign that the Confederate advance was slowing.