Grant Moves South (10 page)

Frémont's intentions were aggressive enough. He told Grant to scout the roads toward Columbus, and if the enemy should cross the Mississippi to Belmont “be present with a force on the Missouri as well as the Kentucky shores.” He promised to send more troops, and warned: “Keep me informed minutely.” To President Lincoln Frémont had sent an elaborate plan for a forward movement in Kentucky and astride the Mississippi, looking toward the capture of Columbus, the occupation of Nashville, and ultimately the capture of Memphis.
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But Frémont was beginning to have pressing problems elsewhere, and he was increasingly unable to give much attention to Kentucky. Shortly after Grant left Jefferson City his successor there, saturnine Jefferson Davis (raised now to Brigadier's rank), had sent a force under Colonel James A. Mulligan one hundred and twenty-five miles up the Missouri to occupy and hold the town of Lexington. Mulligan, gathering to himself stray detachments of cavalry as he moved, entered Lexington with between 2800 and 3500 men—the total depends on whether certain home guard units deserve to be counted as combat troops—and quickly found himself in trouble. Missouri's General Price came up from the South with a force of 10,000 or more, and Mulligan was put under siege. Federal attempts to reinforce him came to nothing, and on September 20—overpowered, out of rations and nearly out of ammunition—Mulligan had to surrender. From Washington Frémont got a curt message saying that the President expected him “to repair the disaster at Lexington without loss of time,” and he now was devoting all of his attention to the task of assembling an army that would clear western Missouri of
enemy forces once and for all. Meanwhile, Washington had called on him to send troops east, and instead of reinforcing Grant Frémont had had to take two regiments away from him. The Cairo-Paducah-Columbus triangle was to get little help from the Pathfinder.
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Whether Grant could actually have accomplished anything if he had been told to move on Columbus is an open question. In his memoirs Grant said that Columbus could have been taken if the attempt had been made immediately after the occupation of Paducah, but he said that before November the place was so strongly held that nothing but a powerful army and a long siege would have won it. At the time, his opinion seems to have fluctuated. On October 7 he was informed that Rebel strength at Columbus had been built up to 45,000 men (a wild overestimate); yet he believed that, although there was much talk of a Confederate campaign against Paducah, General Polk's intentions were strictly defensive. Three weeks later he was more optimistic, and he told St. Louis that the Confederates had taken so many men away from Columbus for operations in other parts of Kentucky that the fortress was weak: “If Gen. Smith's and my command were prepared it might now be taken.” He realized, however, as he may not have realized earlier, that his own force was not actually ready for a major offensive: “My cavalry are not armed nor my artillery equipped; the infantry is not well armed, and transportation is entirely inadequate to any forward movement.”
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Reinforcements were delayed. In the middle of September Grant had some sixteen thousand five hundred men in the Cairo area,
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but just after this total was recorded he lost the two regiments which Frémont had to send to Washington, and replacements were hard to get. Frémont promised to do the best he could, and he hoped that Grant and Smith between them could keep the Confederates on both sides of the Mississippi under control, but he warned Grant to be cautious: “At present I am not in favor of incurring any hazard of defeat.” Grant had already confessed to Smith that his force was “scarcely more than a weak garrison,” and after getting Frémont's pessimistic note he wrote to Colonel Oglesby that, “despairing of being reinforced, I deem it the better
part of valor to be prudent”—as a result of which Oglesby was to retire from the exposed post at Norfolk to Bird's Point.
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What all of this came to was that through September and October, despite all the reconnaissances and the projected offensives, the Cairo command was marking time. Grant expressed it accurately in his Memoirs when he wrote: “From the occupation of Paducah up to the early part of November, nothing important occurred with the troops under my command.”
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Yet something important was occurring with Grant himself. He was learning his trade. His experience as regimental quartermaster in the Mexican War had taught him a great deal about the way supplies are kept moving to an army in the field; here in Cairo he was getting a postgraduate course in this, discovering that all of the quartermasters' arrangements will break down unless the man at the top makes it his business to keep the cumbersome machinery moving. He was learning, too, the ways of the Volunteers he had in his command, discovering the means by which they could be given high morale and brought along as soldiers.

The men were not like the old Regulars. Dr. Brinton remembered that they had odd quirks. Most of them had been extremely self-sufficient and individualistic as farmboy civilians, but in the Army they seemed utterly unable to take care of themselves. Camp hygiene was likely to be atrocious unless the Commanding General kept it up to standard, for most company and regimental officers knew nothing at all about the way to care for their men, and the men themselves—the most self-reliant of individuals, in civilian life—appeared to be helpless. This, to the surgeon, was “one of the strangest peculiarities of the volunteers at the beginning of the war … they ceased to think for themselves and became incapable of self-protection.” One veteran wrote, after the war, that much camp sickness was the fault of the men themselves: “A contented, temperate, cheerful, cleanly man will live forever in the army, but a despondent, intemperate, gluttonous, dirty soldier, let him be never so strong when he enters the service, is sure to get on the sick list, and finally into the hospital.” Diseases like measles ran through the camps almost unchecked, and the level of medical knowledge at the time is reflected in a soldier's comment
that “the ravages of this disease, so frequent among recruits, were largely attributed to the use of straw for beds, as the decaying straw generated the bacteria.” There seemed to be no way to get either convalescents or detailed men to do any useful work in the hospitals. Scrubbing, sweeping, making beds and so on was “women's work,” and these Westerners were proud in their young masculinity and would perform such chores only if someone in authority stood over them and made them do so.
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It was an axiom that the worst period in a Volunteer's life came about three months after he had enlisted—the stage which thousands of the soldiers around Cairo were reaching that fall. In the early days (as one veteran explained, later) patriotic excitement and the interesting strangeness of military life were a stimulus, but after a time everything seemed boring and the soldier “hated his food, his duties and his officers” with an undiscriminating passion. Men would get tired of Army fare, gorge on gingerbread and pie bought at the sutler's, suffer from digestive upsets and land in the hospital.
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The extent to which sickness was taken for granted at that stage of the war is shown by an innocent boast printed in a camp newspaper published by the 37th Illinois. Writing late in October, the regimental scribe asserted that this regiment was in an uncommonly healthy condition: “There will not average more than ten sick to the company throughout the regiment. In this respect they have been highly favored.”
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This, actually, meant that 10 per cent of the entire command was on the sicklist—a rate so high that a year later it would have called for an investigation by the Commanding General. In this fall of 1861 the record seemed worth crowing over.

One cure for discontent was mail from home, and Grant took pains to make sure that his armies would get good postal service. A. H. Markland, a special agent of the Postoffice Department, visited Cairo, and worked out for Grant a system whereby letters between camp and home were handled promptly and efficiently. Even when troops were on the march, mail wagons trailed after them; Grant declared that “the officers and men were in constant communication with kindred and friends at home and with as much regularity as the most favored in the large cities of the
Union.” After the war, Grant remarked with pride that “the same promptness was always observed in the armies under my command up to the period of the disbandment.”
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Another cure for discontent was work; work, together with some evidence that the work which was being done made sense. One Illinois regiment was sent across the Mississippi daily to drill in the manual of arms, firing blank cartridges, and the Colonel finally went to Grant and said that the men would not put up with this drill much longer unless they were allowed to practice with live ammunition. They had been shooting blanks at the weeds for two days, the Colonel said, and the weeds were still standing “as saucy and defiant as ever.” Grant chuckled, and ordered ball cartridges issued, and the Colonel reported next day that the regiment was in the highest of spirits—“Now you can turn us loose on the southern Confederacy as quick as you please.” Men in a cavalry regiment enjoyed target practice, with a life-sized human figure printed on the target; they dubbed the figure “Jeff Davis” and shot at it enthusiastically if unskillfully. Disgusted by this failure to hit the mark, some spent spare time shooting at snags in the river, then rejoiced when they shot Jeff Davis full of holes.
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Military red tape was a burden. The paymasters who came down periodically to pay the troops were all bound up in it, and the slightest mistake in the way a man's name appeared on the rolls—a minor misspelling, or the omission of a middle initial—caused them to refuse to make payment. Officers who listed the names of the servants for whom they were entitled to draw pay were apt to get into trouble if the listing was in any way defective. Grant himself ran into this, when one month the account which he submitted was accompanied by a list of servants written by an aide; when the papers reached Washington the Treasury Department refused to honor them, pointing out that they were made out in two different kinds of handwriting. When the paymaster was unable to explain how this had happened, the papers were sent back to Grant, with a demand for an accounting. They reached Grant in the spring of 1864, in the midst of the Wilderness campaign.
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John Page, officer in a Chicago militia battery, was ordered to go to Washington for assignment to a regular infantry unit, and he
went to Grant's office to get an order for transportation. Grant looked at his commission, stared at it for a moment, and became lost in reverie; he looked at the officer, repeated “John Page” two or three times, and did not sign the papers until an aide nudged him. Page was the son of the first man Grant had seen killed in action—a John Page, who was standing at Grant's side in the battle of Palo Alto when a Mexican cannon ball smashed his head.
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As he continued to work on the details of training and housing his men—at one time Grant suggested building barracks on empty coal barges, with the idea that on subsequent expeditions down-river these floating barracks could be towed to their destination by tugboats—Grant came to see that some of his earlier ideas for the capture of Columbus had been pretty sketchy. J. N. Tyner, another special agent for the Postoffice Department, visited him that fall, and killed time after his business had been finished by chatting with Grant at headquarters while waiting for a train. He said Grant gave him a pipe and tobacco, settled back for a smoke, and with a grin suggested: “Now tell me all you know about this war—it won't take you long.” Tyner did not have much to say, but presently Grant himself began to talk, and he went into a proposal which, he said, had been made “by politicians and outsiders” for getting the Confederates out of Columbus. As Tyner remembered it, this proposal involved sending men downstream to make a surprise attack, by night, on the Rebel forces at Columbus, while another column under General Smith moved across the western tip of Kentucky and assailed Columbus from the rear. This scheme may have been built on Frémont's own proposals to Lincoln, or indeed it may have grown out of the idea Grant himself had outlined to Frémont in a letter written in mid-September: Tyner got the impression that the notion had originally been Grant's own, at least in part. By now, however, Grant could see the flaws in it, and he told Tyner how risky it would be to try to co-ordinate two separate surprise attacks, at night, by forces which would be completely out of touch with each other. Grant's own hope, Tyner gathered, was to let the upper river take care of itself and strike deep into the Confederate interior, and he said vigorously that it was about time for the Union forces to make war rather than to “play war.”
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The Grant with whom Tyner talked, it might be noted, was not quite the Grant of legend. The legend makes Grant an extremely taciturn, silent man, who weighed his words carefully and never spoke except when he had something of moment to say, but Tyner did not find him that way at all—nor did others, then or later, who found him in a relaxed mood. As a matter of fact, Grant was a chatty person who became close-mouthed only when strangers were present or when high formalities were being observed. W. S. Hillyer, who knew Grant in St. Louis before the war and served through much of the war on his staff, said Grant's friends always considered him “more than commonly talkative”; they realized, though, that he never spoke for effect, and that to be loquacious he had to be with his intimates. A Galena man who served with Grant in his Western campaigns said that “if you could get him started he was one of the most entertaining talkers I ever listened to,” and John A. J. Creswell, who was to become Postmaster General in Grant's cabinet, remembered hearing Grant talk for an hour or more without a break. Once you knew him, said Creswell, Grant “would talk as much as any companion should”; but if he became suspicious of the motives of anyone who happened to be with him “he would remain cold and silent and his firm jaw would shut like a trap.” A telegraph operator who handled Grant's cipher dispatches through most of the war remembered that Grant once said an odd thing to him: “I think I would always like to remain about 35 years of age for at that age one can take activity in a conversation without being considered old fogyish.”
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Despite the legend, it was perfectly in character for Grant to sit talking late into the night while the postal agent waited for his train.