Grant Moves South (26 page)

The Confederate plan was simple and logical. With reduced force, Buckner would hold the right and center of the line. With perhaps ten thousand men, Pillow would march out, crush the end of McClernand's line, and drive the Union right back on its center. This would open the road and the Confederate Army could get away. The fort itself would of course be lost, but men and material might be saved. If Pillow's assault succeeded, Buckner would move out to act as flank guard while the retreat proceeded. By daylight on February 15 everything was set and the move got under way.

McClernand's right was held by Dick Oglesby's brigade—five Illinois regiments, with two batteries and a handful of cavalry, and with John McArthur's three regiments, borrowed from Smith's division, somewhere in support. The chilled soldiers were preparing to fall in for breakfast when there was a sudden spatter of firing on the picket lines; then the pickets came tumbling back into camp, calling that the woods in front were all a-swarm with armed Rebels. Part of the brigade got into line just in time to receive a heavy volley from Pillow's advance. The attack was beaten off for the moment, but the Confederates reformed and came on again, and a number of extremely tough dismounted cavalry from Bedford Forrest's command struck the Unionists in flank and rear. More and more of Pillow's troops came into line, and all of McClernand's front was under pressure. Musketry fire rose to a high pitch—Lew Wallace remembered that from a distance it sounded “as if a million men were beating empty barrels with iron hammers”—and the Federals had to give ground.

McArthur's regiments had taken position the evening before, with an imperfect understanding of the lay of the land and the position of the enemy. Now they were fighting grimly with Forrest's cavalry, and heavy battle smoke streaked the hollows and clearings; the soggy snow that covered the ground was stained with red, as more and more men were shot; ammunition was running low, and soldiers went scurrying about to collect cartridge boxes from the fallen. By ten o'clock the whole right of the Union line was giving way, Oglesby's men were falling back to the west and McArthur's bewildered troops—fighting grimly, and sustaining heavy losses—were falling back with them. The Confederate plan was working. The door to the road south was swinging open wider and wider.
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McClernand sent a desperate message to Lew Wallace, who held the Union center, asking for help. Wallace referred the message to Grant's headquarters, but Grant was not there and in his absence his staff either lacked the power or lacked the initiative to act. Desperately pressed, McClernand repeated his plea, and Wallace finally shot a brigade cross-lots to help him, but the guide who tried to lead the brigade into position lost his way and the new troops came under heavy fire from some of Oglesby's men and, in the end, were involved in the reteat. The 20th Ohio, which had seen Grant
riding to the river at dawn, came up behind the lines, noticed Colonel John A. Logan waiting with a painful shoulder wound for a surgeon's attention, and watched a demoralized colonel gallop for the rear with the cry that all of the infantry had been cut to pieces and that the Rebels were going to crush the entire army. A Chicago battery galloped furiously toward the front, upsetting one gun in a narrow woodland road, and the Ohio soldiers filed off among the trees and opened fire in what was believed to be the direction of the enemy.
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The whole of the position McClernand had been holding was gone, and now Wallace sent Colonel Thayer's brigade into action, pushing the men forward through a cloud of disorganized fugitives. Wallace and McClernand paused in a clearing to compare notes—and just then Grant came riding up, a sheaf of papers in one hand.

From the broken country in front of the Generals a dense cloud of smoke was slowly fanning off into shreds. Grant returned the salutes which his subordinates offered, heard McClernand growl: “This army wants a head.” Grant curtly replied: “It seems so,” and then waited for them to tell him what had happened.
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What they had to say was grim enough. McClernand had lost 1500 men, and the survivors of his displaced division were desperately trying to rally behind Wallace's thin line. McArthur had been driven back with 400 casualties, and his men too were striving to regroup. Smith's division was too far to the left to come to the rescue. For whatever it might be worth the Confederates had broken the constricting Union ring and the escape route to the south was wide open; wide open, too, seemed to be the road to the Union rear, the road to final defeat of the Union cause in Tennessee. The Rebel yell was rising, jeering and triumphant, over smoky woods and littered fields where blue bodies lay helpless in the snow: and here was Sam Grant, one-time Captain of Regular Infantry, Brigadier of Volunteers now by virtue of the friendship of a prairie Congressman—stubby Sam Grant, sitting on his horse with a sheaf of documents in one fist, and what he said in answer to this tale of disaster would determine what would happen to him and to the Western war itself.

As always, he seemed unemotional, except that the flesh across his cheekbones grew red. Wallace remembered that Grant crumpled
the papers in his hand convulsively, but when he spoke his voice was calm.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “the position on the right must be retaken.”
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There was a lull in the fighting, just then. The Confederates, who had swept everything before them, had fallen back—to regroup, to mount a new attack, to retreat, to find some food or just to catch their breath. All about the Generals, Union soldiers were standing bewildered, talking to one another, trying to figure out what they were supposed to do next. A few were hunting around for discarded ammunition boxes, to get a fresh supply of cartridges, and they were gabbling that the dead Rebels they had seen carried full haversacks, as if they did not propose to return to their camp for food. Word of what the men were saying came to Grant, and after he had spent a moment sizing things up he turned to Colonel J. D. Webster of his staff and expressed his opinion.

“Some of our men are pretty badly demoralized,” he said, “but the enemy must be more so, for he has attempted to force his way out but has fallen back; the one who attacks first now will be victorious, and the enemy will have to be in a hurry if he gets ahead of me.”

It seemed to Grant that the Confederates had put everything they had into the assault on McClernand. If that was the case, the Confederate right must be very lightly held; let Smith, then, make an immediate attack, breaking the network of trenches and rifle pits in his front, and compelling the Confederates to turn and protect their own rear. Wallace was to put in line all the men he could lay hands on, and when the guns had been rolled forward to prepare the way he was to counterattack; meanwhile, McClernand's broken fragments must be rallied so that they could strengthen Wallace's blow. Meanwhile, too, an aide must gallop off down the muddy, winding road to the steamboat landing; crippled or not, the gunboats must lend a hand here, and even a show of force on the river might help the infantry in its work. On land and on the water, the Federals would immediately attack with everything they had.
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To everyone who saw him at this moment Grant seemed completely calm and unworried, and afterward men believed that the tide of battle turned the moment he gave the order … “the position
on the right must be retaken.” Actually, Grant was far from calm. His full awareness of his peril, concealed from everyone else, is apparent in the wording of a hasty note which he scribbled and sent off to Foote:

If all the gunboats that can will immediately make their appearance to the enemy it may secure us a victory. Otherwise all may be defeated. A terrible conflict ensued in my absence, which has demoralized a portion of my command, but I think the enemy is more so. If the gunboats do not show themselves it will reassure the enemy and still further demoralize our troops. I must order a charge to save appearances. I do not expect the gunboats to go into action, but to make an appearance and throw a few shells at long range.
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Never in his career as a soldier did Grant write a more completely revealing dispatch. In the confusion of its wording—unusual, with Grant, whose dispatches ordinarily are extremely clear and explicit—the note bears evidence of the haste with which it was written; bears evidence, too, that he himself had been jarred more than his intimates realized by the military catastrophe that had developed during his absence. The words “otherwise all may be defeated” sound a note which is rarely heard in anything Grant said or wrote. He had been prompt enough to reassert his control over the situation, and Wallace had marveled at his coolness, but down inside Grant clearly realized that he was elbow-to-elbow with final disaster. There is an urgency in this appeal for help that seldom appears in one of Grant's dispatches.

Beyond that, this note sums up not only Grant's immediate appraisal of the situation but the military philosophy on which his reaction to that situation was based.

He had done the obvious things, almost automatically: ordered an attack from his left on the apparent soft spot in the Rebel line, called for a counterattack in the place where ground had been lost, arranged for regrouping of the troops driven out of action, summoned the gunboats back into the fight. Back of these orders lay the lesson he had learned in Missouri: the idea that in every battle there may come a moment when each side is fought out and ready to quit, and the belief that in such a moment victory will go to the
side which is able to make one final effort. It seemed to him that this moment had arrived, and it was going to be Grant's army that made the final effort. The note to Foote is supplemented by the remark to Colonel Webster: “The enemy will have to be in a hurry if he gets ahead of me.”

Beyond the confusion and wreckage of the battlefield, Grant was looking to the morale of the soldiers themselves—his own soldiers, and the soldiers of the Confederacy. His men, or a substantial number of them, were indeed demoralized; that much he frankly confessed. But it was not merely native optimism that led him to add that the Confederates were no better off. The Southerners had carried full haversacks when they made their attack—certain indication that they were fighting to win a chance to get away rather than to win a battle. What was important now was what happened in men's minds. The gunboats need not bring much weight to bear, but they must “make an appearance”; Grant would order a charge “to save appearances”—and out of all of this would come tangible evidence that his army wanted to renew the engagement, that it did not own itself beaten, that the appearance of Confederate victory and Union defeat was only an appearance and nothing more. Final victory would go to the side which insisted on winning it, and the Union Army would be very insistent.

In this moment of crisis at Fort Donelson Grant met one of the supreme tests of his career as a soldier.

With McClernand, Grant galloped along the line, calling out to the beaten men that the Confederates were retreating and urging every man to refill his ammunition pouch and take his place in the line ready for an attack. Then, with the broken lines reforming, Grant rode off to the left, where the former commandant of West Point cadets, C. F. Smith, was waiting for orders.

Smith was sitting under a tree, beside one of his aides. Grant rode up to him and, without ceremony, said: “General Smith, all has failed on our right—you must take Fort Donelson.” Smith unfolded his long legs, brushed his mustache as he got to his feet, said briefly, “I will do it,” and sent the aide off to get the division into line. In no time the division was ready to advance—2nd Iowa in the lead, four more regiments massed behind it. While Grant rode back
to see to the right of his line, Smith rode across the Iowans' front, gestured toward the high ground where lay the Confederate works, and said: “Second Iowa, you must take that fort. Take the caps off your guns, fix bayonets, and I will support you.”
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The Middle Westerners who made this attack remembered it as long as they lived, for the way was tough—a tangle of fallen timber, a ravine with steep banks, invisible Rebels driving in a hot fire, with double-barreled shotguns charged with buckshot reserved for close range—but even more than the fight itself, they remembered Smith. He was erect on his horse in front of them, his saber held high in the air, and when he had given the command to advance he went on in advance of everybody—turning in the saddle, now and then, to make sure that his men were following him. For faint hearts he had scornful words; seeing some of the soldiers hesitating about getting out into the thick of things, he swung about and made wrathful oration: “Damn you, gentlemen, I see skulkers. I'll have none here. Come on, you volunteers, come on. This is your chance. You volunteered to be killed for love of your country and now you can be. You are only damned volunteers. I am only a soldier and I don't want to be killed, but you came to be killed and now you can be.” And so, with a mixture of oaths and sharp words, the old man led them up the wooded slope straight for the Confederate trenches. Men said he was the first man in the works, riding in so close to the Rebels that he could have put his hand on their heads, and one of his soldiers wrote that “by his presence and heroic conduct he led the green men to do things that no other man could have done.”
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Smith's charge was a success, and the right of the Rebel line gave way. Meanwhile, McClernand's and Wallace's men were finding it unexpectedly easy to regain the ground that had been lost during the morning; and here, indeed, Grant was greatly aided by a singular paralysis which descended on the minds of the officers commanding the Confederate Army.

Gideon Pillow had done very well indeed, so far. He had smashed the Union right; as Bedford Forrest wrote, he had opened not one but three roads by which the Confederate Army could retreat. But before Grant had got his counterattack in motion, Pillow had undergone
a strange change of mind. Buckner was pulling his own troops out of their trenches, preparing to join in what had been planned as a retirement to safety farther south, when he was ordered by Pillow to go back to the lines. John B. Floyd, who was technically in supreme command, at first countermanded the order, then—after conferring with Pillow—sustained it; Buckner's men were just getting back into position when Smith's assault hit them and made a fatal lodgment in their lines. Pillow, meanwhile, was ordering his own men back into the works; and at the very moment when Grant's right was reorganizing for a counterattack, the Confederates who had driven everything before them in the morning were going back to the fortifications, leaving the open road to the south to take care of itself.