Grant Moves South (13 page)

One of these men remembered that, as they stood there, a man on horseback appeared at the top of the bank and called to them sharply: “Get aboard the boat—they are coming.” They looked up, saw that the rider was Grant, and hastened to obey. They heard Grant shout to the boat's captain: “Chop your lines and back out”; then, after the lines had been cut, members of the boat's crew laid a plank from the deck to the shore, Grant's horse settled down on its haunches and slid down the bank, and then Grant calmly rode aboard on the swaying plank, the last Federal soldier to leave Belmont.
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Grant dismounted, went to the texas deck, and entered the captain's stateroom just behind the pilot house, lying down on a sofa to catch his breath. After a moment he arose, to go out on deck and see what was going on; Rebel musketry fire was getting heavy, by now, and Grant had no more than stood up when a bullet ripped through the bulkhead and struck the head of the sofa where he had been lying.

All things considered, the men were in fairly good spirits. A man in the 8th Illinois admitted that the whole retreat had been little better than a rout, but he said that most of the soldiers were laughing and joking as they came aboard the steamers; they felt that they had somehow won a victory and done a great thing even though it had been a tight squeeze at the end, and they were proud that they had at last been through a real battle. Yet the trip back to Cairo was pretty solemn, and once the excitement of getting away died down the men were rather subdued. An officer who sat at dinner in the ladies' cabin noted that all of the officers were briskly discussing the day's events except for Grant himself, who sat at the head of the table and said not a word except for an occasional order to the waiter. “We thought he was
hard-hearted, cold and indifferent,” this officer wrote, “but it was only the difference between a real soldier and amateur soldiers.”
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The battle of Belmont was over. It had been somewhat costly. Of the 2700 men he had put into action, Grant had lost 607, of whom 120 had been killed. Of nearly 400 wounded, many remained on the field for such care as Confederate surgeons could give them. Confederate losses had been about equal;
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but if the Confederates had lost their camp they had unquestionably regained it, and had had the satisfaction of seeing the Yankee invader take to his heels and retreat in vast haste. Apparently nothing whatever had been accomplished. The move had not kept Polk from sending troops to Price because no such movement had been contemplated, and Oglesby had been in no real danger; learning of the outcome of the fight at Belmont he turned about and took his command back to Bird's Point without difficulty. All that had happened was that a Federal force had gone down the river, had fought a hard, pointless battle with the Confederates, and then had returned to its base. Old C. F. Smith, coming down cross-country from the northeast, had never departed from his instructions to conduct a demonstration and nothing more; when his subordinate, General Paine, hearing the sound of firing, had enthusiastically started marching his men farther than he had been told to march them, thinking to get in on the fight, Smith sternly denounced him, reporting that the action indicated on Paine's part “a fixed purpose from the start to gain notoriety without reference to the public service or his plain duty as a soldier.” Smith was so angry about this that he demanded a court of inquiry to sift Paine's disobedience.
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Grant never felt called on to apologize for Belmont. On the contrary, to the end of his days he believed that what he did there was justified, and as soon as the steamboats got back to Cairo he issued orders congratulating his men. Later in the war, after battles whose scope made Belmont look like no more than a skirmish, Grant would be very chary about writing such orders, but on November 8 he let himself go, and the order is worth looking at if only as a sample of the kind of prose Grant was willing to offer to green troops in the early days of the war. It went as follows:

The general commanding this military district returns his thanks to the troops under his command at the battle of Belmont yesterday.

It has been his fortune to have been in all the battles fought in Mexico by Generals Scott and Taylor save Buena Vista, and he never saw one more hotly contested or where troops behaved with more gallantry.

Such courage will insure victory wherever our flag may be borne and protected by such a class of men.

To the many brave men who fell the sympathy of the country is due, and will be manifested in a manner unmistakable.
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As details of the battle were published in the North, Grant was criticized for getting into an expensive, meaningless fight, and the battle has never been considered a particularly bright spot on his record. The Confederates played it up as a victory, as they were fully entitled to do by all the rules of the game. Yet Grant felt that the fight had been worth all it cost. If it did nothing else, it “blooded” his raw troops, and he now had a hard nucleus of men who had been under heavy fire and who, by the standards of that day, could be considered combat veterans. Near the end of his life, looking back on it all, he wrote that “The National troops acquired a confidence in themselves at Belmont that did not desert them throughout the war.”
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The military student A. L. Conger, who after the first World War wrote an extensive study of Grant's development as a general, concluded that in a sense Grant was correct. The battle had at least given Grant “the trust and allegiance of his men,” and by the hard rules of war Conger considered that this may have been worth the six hundred casualties. What the troops sensed, Conger felt, was “the released dynamic force that swept with [Grant] into battle”; in this engagement, he wrote, “there was welded … that subtle bond that made them from that hour ‘Grant's men.'” Conger suggested, as well, that Grant's desire to provoke a fight at Belmont may have been at least partly due to indoctrination he was getting from the naval officers at Cairo, a hard-bitten lot who were notoriously anxious to see some real fighting develop.
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Chief among these was the new Flag Officer in charge of the gunboats, a craggy sort of character named Captain Andrew Foote, who had been assigned to the river command in the middle of September. Foote and Grant understood one another from the start, and they made a harmonious team; in a command setup practically guaranteed to produce friction between Army and Navy commanders, Foote and Grant always got along perfectly.

Foote did not survive the war; he died in 1863, and he comes down to us, mostly, in pictures—brown solid face, looking benign and tough at the same time, with an engaging fringe of seagoing whiskers running all along the jawline from ear to ear. He was a passionate foe of slavery (he had served in the Navy's anti-slaveship patrol off the African coast, some years earlier), he disliked strong drink as no one else but John Rawlins disliked it, and he was a devout orthodox Christian, delivering sermons to his crew on the quarterdeck every Sunday morning. A few years before the war, commanding three naval vessels on the China station, he had performed the almost unimaginable feat of inducing every officer and man on each of his ships to sign the temperance pledge, and there was no grog issue on any ship he commanded—a thing which his sailors seemed to take in their stride. Foote was always ready for a fight, although he had been in St. Louis when the Belmont expedition sailed.
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Equally pugnacious was Commander Henry Walke, skipper of gunboat
Tyler
and ranking naval officer on this trip. Yet that either talked Grant into anything Grant was not already anxious to do seems improbable. From the day he took command at Cairo, Grant had been waiting to come to grips with Polk's men.

John Rawlins, inexpert but devoted soldier, had no doubt that the Federals had won something. In a letter written to his mother just after the battle, Rawlins jubilantly pointed out that every commanding officer in the battle save one, Colonel Jacob Lauman of the badly cut-up 7th Iowa, had been a Democrat before the war—Grant, McClernand, Dougherty, the regimental commanders, not to mention Rawlins himself. Whatever else might be true of it, this at least was no Republican war; and Belmont, Rawlins felt, had proved it to the hilt. The point seems a minor one nowadays, but at the time men like Rawlins felt that it was very important
. Most Confederate officers, in the fall of 1861, mentioning Union troops or commanders in their dispatches, never referred to them as anything but “Lincolnites,” the implication being that the Northern war effort was the creation and the exclusive possession of the detested Republican Party. Belmont, Rawlins felt, proved that the whole North was fighting the war.
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There were bits and pieces to be picked up in the wake of the battle. Under a flag of truce Grant went downstream a day or so afterward to arrange for burial of the Union dead and to work out a deal for exchange of prisoners. Union and Confederate officers chatted in friendly fashion, and Grant mentioned to one Southerner that he had been very close to a moving Confederate column just before the embarkation. The Confederate, a member of Polk's staff, replied that they had seen him, although they had not recognized him, and he said that Polk had told the soldiers near him: “There is a Yankee; you may try your marksmanship on him if you wish.” Somehow, no soldier had felt moved to try a shot.

Polk and Grant met face to face on at least one of these trips. Grant left no written record of the visit, and Dr. Brinton, who seems not to have been greatly impressed, wrote that Polk was tall, thin, toothless and bland, talking a great deal and seeming somewhat flippant. Polk himself wrote to his wife about Grant in these words: “He looked rather grave, I thought, like a man who was not at his ease. We talked pleasantly and I succeeded in getting a smile out of him, and then got on well enough. I discussed the principles on which I thought the war should be conducted; denounced all barbarity, vandalism, plundering and all that, and got him to say he would join in putting it down. I was favorably impressed with him; he is undoubtedly a man of much force.” (If Grant was ready to assent to an attempt to stop plundering he was probably thinking about the way his men had behaved in the captured camp at Belmont, when a passion for collecting souvenirs kept them from attending to their military duties. Nearly three weeks later he was writing to Oglesby to check on the captured property held by his troops; officers who possessed stuff seized at Belmont were to be put under arrest, and noncommissioned offenders were to be locked up.)
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There were several of these flag-of-truce boats, in the days that followed, and tales were told concerning them. Rival officers made a point of being very affable and courteous to one another on these occasions, and toasts were often drunk. Men said that on one trip Colonel N. B. Buford of the 27th Illinois found himself acting as a host, of sorts, to General Polk and his staff. He served drinks, and—looking for a subject both sides could drink to—raised his glass and said: “To George Washington, the Father of His Country.” Polk raised his own glass, smiled, and added: “And the first Rebel.” Other men reported that once Grant sailed down on the headquarters boat,
Belle of Memphis
, met Confederate General Cheatham, and got very drunk with him. After the war, a veteran wrote indignantly to the
St. Louis Republican
to deny the story. He himself had been along on that trip, he said, and the Federal officer who clinked glasses with General Cheatham was one of Grant's staff officers; Grant himself was not even on the boat at the time.
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All in all, it seems clear that on these trips neither Grant nor Polk ever drank more than a good general should.

One effect Belmont did have: it gave Grant unbounded confidence in the fighting capacity of his Volunteers. It may even have helped get him into a frame of mind that stayed with him, at least periodically, until after Shiloh—a suspicion that the Southerner's heart was not in this war and that Northern victory would not long be delayed. In plain fact the Federals at Belmont had outfought their enemies, and the Confederates afterward gave them credit for having two or three times their actual numbers on the field. In a jubilant wire which he sent to Jefferson Davis the day after the conflict, Polk estimated Federal numbers at 8000. To Johnston he wired that he had been assailed by 7500, and in his formal report, written three weeks later, he said that “the battle was fought against great odds.” An Illinois soldier, talking with a prisoner during a lull in the fighting, asked the man if he still believed in the old boast that one Southerner could whip five Yankees. “Oh,” said the Confederate, “we don't mean you Westerners. We thought this morning when you were approaching that we never saw such big men in our lives before. You looked like giants.”
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CHAPTER FIVE

General Halleck Takes Over

From Frémont Grant heard nothing at all about Belmont, because Frémont had lost his job. Washington had had enough. While Frémont was chasing Price across the southwestern part of Missouri, at the beginning of November, a messenger caught up with him, near Springfield, bearing orders from the War Department. Frémont was to turn his command over to Major General David Hunter, return to his home, and report to the War Department by letter for further orders. (As it turned out, for some time to come the War Department would have no further orders to give him.) Furious, Frémont obeyed. He had taken elaborate pains to keep any message from Washington from reaching him on this trip—he seems to have suspected that an order of recall might be on its way—and he could not understand how this messenger had broken through the cordon of staff officers he had set up for his protection.
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Hunter kept command for only a few days—he had been put in simply to keep the chair warm, and when he found out about this Hunter was as angry as Frémont—and two days after the battle of Belmont was fought Hunter was replaced by an officer with whom Grant was to have many important dealings during the rest of the war, a man whose actions would have a marked effect on Grant's military career: Major General Henry Wager Halleck.