Grant Moves South (27 page)

Precisely what was on Pillow's mind in all of this is beyond rational explanation. It is possible that the troops which had done so well that morning were simply fought out, disorganized by their victory, worn to a frazzle by the wintry nights they had spent in the trenches; Floyd wrote afterward that some of the men were so completely exhausted that they could not keep their eyes open even when they were standing up under enemy fire, and if it was believed that the entire command needed to be pulled together and given a rest before beginning a retreat this can hardly be wondered at. Pillow himself seems to have felt that the fight to open a road for retreat was an operation entirely separate from the retreat itself; with the road opened, the army would reassemble and, after dark, the retreat would be made—the theory apparently being that the Federals would obligingly leave the escape hatch open. In any case, the Confederates left the ground they had won, and although Floyd and Pillow telegraphed Johnston that they had won a dazzling victory, they now let the victory evaporate. Meanwhile, they knew that Grant had been reinforced, and although Wallace and McClernand did not by any means reoccupy all of the ground which the Federals had held at daybreak, the Confederate commanders believed that they did. In vain did Bedford Forrest report that “there were none of the enemy in sight when dark came on.” Abandoned campfires, stirred into flame by the wind, twinkled all along the line from which the Illinois soldiers had been driven, and to Pillow and Floyd it seemed clear that the encircling ring of Union troops—
stronger now than it had ever been before—had been made whole again. Forrest might write that the Confederate soldiers were “flushed with victory, and confident that they could drive the enemy back to the Tennessee river the next morning”; Pillow and Floyd thought otherwise, and what they thought was what finally mattered. Never was Grant's belief in the importance of the factor of morale so strikingly justified. The generals who faced him had accepted his own appraisal of the situation.
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As night came down on February 15 it was by no means clear, inside the Union lines, that the battle actually was over. The rain had stopped and a full moon floated high in a clear, wintry sky. Wagon trains came plodding up through the mud, bearing rations and tents, but only the food was distributed; for one more night, at least, the soldiers would have to get along without shelter. There were many wounded men, and every farmhouse had been turned into a hospital. Dead men were laid out in long rows by each of these, and one officer remembered how white and waxen their faces looked in the moonlight. Men of the 20th Ohio found their camp overrun with disorganized men from two Illinois regiments, worn-out men in muddy, tattered clothing who seemed not to have eaten for days and who sauntered about looking for someone to tell them what they ought to do next.

Soldiers who had not fought before were dazed by the fury of the fight they had experienced. A man in the 45th Illinois wrote a breathless letter to his parents, describing the terrible violence of cannon fire: “I have seen trees a foot and a half through cut off entirely by the cannon balls and I have had balls strike the trees at full force not more than a foot from my head and I have had shells burst within a rod of me and throw the dirt all over me but it appears that the Lord still has more work for me to do.” (The Lord did: this soldier was to die in action at Shiloh, less than two months from this night.) Men who had had glimpses of Grant said that the General seemed to understand the feelings of Volunteers. One luckless German artillerist who had had to abandon his guns to the Confederates was being berated for failing to disable the weapons before leaving them. He expostulated: “What! I spike those good
guns! My God, no!” Grant heard him, chuckled at this thrifty but unmilitary viewpoint, and let him off.
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Riding back to headquarters in the twilight, Grant passed many dead and wounded men from both armies. One scene particularly struck him: a Federal lieutenant and a Confederate private, both desperately wounded, lay side by side, and the lieutenant was trying without much success to give the Confederate a drink from his canteen. Grant reined in and looked at the two, then asked his staff officers if anyone had a flask. One officer finally produced one; Grant took it, dismounted, and walked to the two wounded men, giving each man a swallow of brandy. The Confederate murmured, “Thank you, General,” and the Federal, too weak to speak, managed to flutter one hand in an attempt at a salute. Grant called to Rawlins: “Send for stretchers; send for stretchers at once for these men.” As the stretcher party came up Grant got on his horse; then he noticed that the stretcher bearers, picking up the Union officer, seemed inclined to ignore the Confederate.

“Take this Confederate, too,” he ordered. “Take them both together; the war is over between them.”

The men were borne away, and Grant and his party rode off. There were so many dead and wounded men that the horses were constantly shying nervously, and Grant at last turned to Colonel Webster with the remark: “Let's get away from this dreadful place. I suppose this work is part of the devil that is left in us all.” They got out to more open ground, and as the general watched the wounded men limping, hobbling and crawling toward the rear he was obviously depressed. One officer remembered hearing Grant—who rarely recited poetry—intoning the verse:

Man's inhumanity to man

Makes countless thousands mourn.
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Late that night Grant tasted the first food he had had since his early breakfast.

There was much movement and a general bustle and stir in the Union camp all night long. Troops were being reassembled, batteries
were being moved to new positions, loaded wagons were creaking up from the landing, and stretcher parties were constantly bringing new loads of wounded men to the field hospitals. Far off in the darkness, men could hear the splashing and puffing of steamboats along the waterfront by the fort.

Somewhere around two in the morning, stray Confederate deserters came into the lines, reporting that the Confederate pickets had been mysteriously withdrawn. Colonel Whittlesey, worried because the way was still open for a Confederate retreat, noted that there was fully a mile of open ground between the Federal right and the banks of the Cumberland, space unoccupied except for dead and wounded men.
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At about three in the morning, a Confederate flag of truce came through Smith's lines, with a message for the Commanding General.

Smith and his staff had made a bivouac in the trodden snow, and an officer from the 2nd Iowa came to this bivouac to report that the Rebel officer who came in with the flag was asking if there was a Federal officer present who could negotiate terms for a Confederate surrender. Smith mounted and rode forward, and Major Thomas J. Newsham, of his staff, reported that Smith bluntly told the Confederate: “I make no terms with Rebels with arms in their hands—my terms are unconditional and immediate surrender!” Then, bearing a letter which the Confederate gave him, Smith set off the Grant's headquarters.

Grant was in the kitchen of the little farmhouse, stretched out on a mattress on the floor. Smith stalked in, stood by the open fire to get the chill out of his long legs, and as Grant drew on some clothing the onetime commandant of cadets handed the letter to him, saying: “There's something for you to read, General.” While Grant was reading it, Smith inquired if anyone had a drink. Dr. Brinton owned a flask, and he handed it to Smith, who took a long pull at it, returned the flask, and then raised one foot and gazed at it ruefully.

“See how the soles of my boots burned,” he said. “I slept last night with my head in the saddle and with my feet too near the fire; I've scorched my boots.”

Grant finished reading the letter. It was signed by his friend from
the Old Army, General Simon Bolivar Buckner, who, by an odd turn of events, was now the commanding officer in Fort Donelson, and—as the flag-of-truce officer had told Smith—it asked for an armistice and the appointment of commissioners to settle terms of surrender. Grant gave the letter to Smith, asking: “What answer shall I send to this, General?”

“No terms to the damned Rebels!” barked Smith. Grant chuckled, then sat at the kitchen table, drew up a tablet, and began to write. Presently he read aloud, to Smith and the other officers, what he had written. It would become one of the most famous dispatches in American military history. Addressed to General Buckner, it went as follows:

Sir: Yours of this date proposing Armistice and appointment of Commissioners to settle terms of Capitulation is just received. No terms except unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted. I propose to move immediately upon your works. I am sir, very respectfully

Your obt. svt.

U. S. G
RANT

Brig. Gen
.

Smith gave a brief grunt, and remarked, “It's the same thing in smoother words.” Then, taking the letter, he stalked out of the room to deliver it to the waiting Confederate. Grant's threat to “move immediately upon your works,” incidentally, was a fully loaded gun. Before the flag of truce arrived he had sent Rawlins riding off to McClernand and Wallace with orders that they attack as soon as they heard Smith's guns open, and Smith had been alerted to renew the fighting as soon as daybreak brought enough light for fighting. Buckner's message reached Smith and Grant only a short time before the all-out offensive was to have begun.
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General Buckner was not pleased. He had befriended Grant some years earlier, when Grant needed a friend very much, and he seems to have felt that Grant ought to remember this now. He wrote stiffly in reply:

“The distribution of the forces under my command incident to an unexpected change of commanders and the overwhelming force under your command compel me, notwithstanding the brilliant success
of the Confederate arms yesterday, to accept the ungenerous and unchivalrous terms which you propose.”

If this note was both grumpy and inexact—Grant was not “proposing terms” of any sort, and he was under no obligation to be chivalrous—Buckner can be forgiven. He had just been through one of the oddest farce-comedy sequences in Civil War history, and it left him with an uneven temper. During the night his two superiors, Generals Floyd and Pillow, had had a fantastic conference. Floyd, believing surrender inevitable, had no wish to be captured; he had been Secretary of War in President Buchanan's cabinet, patriotic Northerners were accusing him of having anticipated the act of secession by transferring government arms to Southern states, and it seemed likely that the Lincoln government would put him on trial if it laid hands on him. So, quite blandly, he had turned over the command to the next man in line, Pillow. Pillow entertained two conflicting opinions: that surrender was not exactly necessary, but that Floyd's decision to surrender would be binding on the new commander anyway. Also, he was as reluctant as Floyd to become the first Confederate general captured by the Unionists. So Pillow, without hesitation, had turned the command over to Buckner—who, being of stouter fiber than his two superiors, believed that an officer who surrendered his post ought to stay with his troops and take the consequences. Floyd thereupon put himself and several Virginia regiments on the transports and steamed off to Nashville; Pillow found space for himself and his staff on another transport and followed Floyd, and doughty Bedford Forrest, disgusted by the whole operation, boldly marched his cavalry off to freedom through the flooded lowlands south of the fort. That left Buckner as the residuary legatee of disaster, and he did what he had to do manfully but unhappily.
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When the sun came up on the morning of February 16, the area was strangely quiet. The weather had turned warm, and rivulets of melted snow trickled through the fields and clearings where many untended wounded men were still lying. In the Federal lines, soldiers looked about, bewildered, asking one another why there was no more firing; then, from Smith's division, there came a rising volume of excited cheering, and the word spread through the camp:
The Rebels have given up. Lew Wallace put his division in line to advance and occupy the Confederate works in his front, and then with his staff spurred on ahead and went into the town of Dover, where he found Buckner and his staff at breakfast in the village tavern. Half an hour later Grant joined them.

Somewhere around nine in the morning, the scarred gunboats came up the river, followed by a long file of transports. (Grant by now had twenty-seven thousand men on the scene, and reinforcements were still coming up.) A newspaper correspondent on Grant's headquarters steamer wrote that Federal regiments were massed along the shore and on the heights, each with its flag. He saw a United States flag hoisted on a flagpole and heard a tremendous cheer from the troops, and wrote that it was “a glorious moment—a Sabbath morning which will live in history.”
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Another correspondent was present when Grant and Buckner had a talk. He described Grant, who had suddenly become so famous: “About 45 years of age, sandy complexion, reddish beard, medium height, pleasant, twinkling eyes and weighs 170 pounds. He smokes continually.” Grant and Buckner settled some question of rations for the prisoners; then, said the reporter, “the Negro question came up.” Grant agreed that Confederate officers might take their body servants with them, but the horde of Negro laborers in the fort would not be returned to their owners. “We want laborers,” the correspondent quoted him as saying. “Let the Negroes work for us.” A planter who had come to reclaim his slaves “retired silent and sullen” when he heard this verdict.

Grant's chat with Buckner was friendly. Long afterward, Buckner told how Grant drew him aside when the conference ended, remarking that Buckner, as a prisoner, separated from his own people, might have financial difficulties; if Buckner needed money, anything Grant had in his purse was available … and the favor which Buckner had done for Grant years earlier (which neither man mentioned) could be repaid in kind. The episode was characteristic. Up to the moment of surrender, it would not enter Grant's head that his old-time friendship with the opposing commander should in any way affect his attitude; but once the fighting had stopped and the opposing commander had laid down his arms, the old friendship
could be resumed and there would be room for the chivalry whose absence in the ultimatum of surrender had struck Buckner as brusque and stern.
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