Grant Moves South (30 page)

The meeting appears to have been icy. Grant noted that the only Federals in Nashville were men of Nelson's division, sent there by himself, and that the others in Buell's command were still on the other side of the Cumberland. He mentioned that the Confederates, from all he could learn, were retreating as fast as they could, and Buell retorted that fighting was going on no more than ten or twelve miles away. This, said Grant, might be true, but it could be no more than a rear-guard action; Nashville had been full of munitions, foodstuffs and Army equipment, and the Confederates were undoubtedly trying to carry off all they could. (They had entrusted the job to Bedford Forrest, as good a man for such a job as could have been found anywhere.) Buell insisted that Nashville was
in danger of a Confederate attack, Grant said that he did not believe it, and Buell insisted that he knew he was correct. Grant let it go at that, replying merely that Smith's troops were at that moment disembarking in Nashville. Writing about it long afterward, Grant commented that on that evening “the enemy were trying to get away from Nashville and not to return to it.”
²²

It took Halleck a long time to find out what was going on, an unexpected complication having arisen to disturb the operation of high strategy. The communications system by which Halleck and Grant were supposed to be keeping in touch had lapsed, and for the moment neither man knew it. Originally, messages between headquarters at St. Louis and the advanced force in the Fort Henry-Fort Donelson area had been relayed by steamer to Paducah or Cairo. The telegraph line had been extended to Fort Henry, but it was not working well. Years later, Grant learned that the operator at the Fort Henry end of the line was a Rebel sympathizer, indulging in sabotage by failing to deliver telegrams; but the basic trouble was a queer organizational setup which had been devised by Secretary Stanton, who had a strange mania for keeping administrative controls in his own hands. The military telegraph system was run by civilian operators who were entirely out from under the jurisdiction of Army and departmental commanders; they were answerable only to the Superintendent of Military Telegraphs, Colonel Anson Stager, who had his office in Washington and was himself answerable only to the Secretary of War. If the Fort Henry man had been under either Grant or Halleck, his failure presumably would have been noted and corrected, but he was independent of both officers; messages simply vanished and no one realized that they were vanishing, and as a result Halleck and Grant were out of touch without knowing that they were out of touch.
²³

This was to have consequences. Halleck had concluded (his attempt to get Buell under his command having failed) that he should leave the Cumberland to Buell and make his own advance up the Tennessee, and he had ordered that Grant bring Smith back from Clarksville, establish stand-by garrisons at Fort Donelson and Fort Henry, and concentrate the bulk of his forces near Danville, on the Tennessee thirty-five miles upstream from Fort Henry, ready for a movement well to the west of Nashville. Of all of this, Grant at the
moment knew nothing, and of Grant's recent moves Halleck knew nothing. The measure of the mutual misunderstanding is in a telegram Halleck sent to McClellan at the moment Buell and Grant were meeting in Nashville—a telegram which said that Buell, by now, was probably in Nashville, that Nelson's division had relieved Smith at Clarksville, that reports about Confederate dispositions were obscure and that it seemed unwise to order any further movements until the situation became a bit clearer.
²⁴

By the end of the month, indirect news began to reach Halleck. On March 1 he got off an angry wire to Cullum, demanding to know: “Who sent Smith's division to Nashville? I ordered them across to the Tennessee, where they are wanted immediately. Order them back. What is the reason that no one down there can obey my orders? Send all spare transports to Grant up the Tennessee.” On the same day he wrote a message to Grant, addressing it to Fort Henry, where Grant had not been for a number of days. Grant, he said, was to take a column up the Tennessee River, to destroy Rebel railroad bridges near Eastport, Mississippi, and railroad connections at Corinth, Mississippi, and at Jackson and Humboldt, in Tennessee. This, he pointed out, was to be a raid, pure and simple; at all costs Grant must avoid an engagement with superior forces, and it would be better to retreat than to risk a general battle. Having broken the railroads, Grant was to re-concentrate at Danville and was to move off toward the town of Paris, Tennessee, which lay west of the river on the line of the railroad running up from Memphis to the Tennessee River crossing.
²⁵

While Halleck was writing this, Grant was sending a report of his own to St. Louis. In it, he innocently remarked that he had made daily reports ever since he left Cairo—a point that would presently be in dispute—and said that his troops were suffering badly from camp dysentery, that transportation was lacking, and that if he should have to move he would move with less strength than Halleck probably anticipated, sickness and battle losses having weakened him. He was mentioning this, he said, “not to make suggestions but that my true condition may be known.” On this same day Buell wired Halleck that he now felt safe in Nashville and that he was sending Smith and Smith's troops back to Clarksville.
²⁶

Upon General Halleck, as a result, it abruptly dawned that
nothing on the upper rivers had been going on as he had planned, and his waspish temper got entirely out of control. His irritability is at least understandable, because he was an extremely busy man and at the beginning of March, 1862, most of the hot spots in the war seemed to be in his own territory. In the far southwestern corner of Missouri, he had troops under Brigadier General Samuel Curtis chasing Price and his Confederates into Arkansas. Along the Mississippi, the General Pope whom he had recommended for promotion was assembling an army that was to occupy Columbus, break the Confederates loose from their river strongholds at New Madrid, Island Number Ten and Fort Pillow, and bring about the capture of Memphis. On the Tennessee, Grant was supposed to be cutting Confederate railroad connections, which would isolate the Confederate forces that were facing Pope, and on the Cumberland Buell was sending daily messages offering and demanding co-operation and proposing a top-level conference to work out grand strategy.

In addition, Halleck's relations with Washington were not happy. The additional powers he had been demanding so eagerly had been flatly refused him. McClellan, himself a badly harassed man this spring, was complaining that Halleck was not sending adequate reports, and was acidly suggesting that he himself could hardly make proper decisions touching on matters in Tennessee when he did not even know how many troops Halleck had and what he was doing with them. And now, on top of everything else, Halleck was discovering that Grant was not at all where Halleck had supposed him to be, and that movements on the Cumberland had been determined, not at St. Louis or at Washington but in the headquarters tent at Fort Donelson—at which place, Army gossip said, the Federal troops were getting badly out of hand, looting captured supplies, oppressing Tennessee civilians and in general behaving with a great lack of discipline.
²⁷

Halleck digested this, and on March 3 he sent a furious report to McClellan:

I have had no communication with General Grant for more than a week. He left his command without my authority and went to Nashville. His army seems to be as much demoralized
by the victory of Fort Donelson as was that of the Potomac by the defeat of Bull Run. It is hard to censure a successful general immediately after a victory, but I think he richly deserves it. I can get no returns, no reports, no information of any kind from him. Satisfied with his victory, he sits down and enjoys it without any regard to the future. I am worn out and tired with this neglect and inefficiency. C. F. Smith is almost the only officer equal to the emergency.
²⁸

To a man carrying the load Halleck then was carrying, much can be forgiven; but this dispatch, even after all allowances are made, is fundamentally unforgivable, and when Grant found out about it (as he did, long afterward) he was stonily unforgiving to the end of his days. Of all the commanders in western Tennessee, he had been the one who tried to keep driving on at the moment when the foe was reeling from a decisive defeat, and to say that he was sitting down complacently to bask in his victory without regard for the future was to make a woeful misstatement of fact—a misstatement, furthermore, for which no information in Halleck's position provided the slightest justification. Grant had done what an energetic district commander might be expected to do, in the way of clearing his visit to Nashville with headquarters; also, the limits of his command not having been spelled out, it simply was not correct to say that he had “left his command” when he went to Nashville to see Buell.

McClellan responded to this message as a very busy general in chief might be expected to respond to a subordinate complaining about his troubles; that is, he offered Halleck full support in any disciplinary program which Halleck might consider necessary. He wired in prompt reply:

The future success of our cause demands that proceedings such as Grant's should at once be checked. Generals must observe discipline as well as private soldiers. Do not hesitate to arrest him at once if the good of the service requires it, and place C. F. Smith in command. You are at liberty to regard this as a positive order if it will smooth your way. I appreciate the difficulties you have to encounter, and will be glad to relieve you from trouble as far as possible.

To show that Halleck had backing at the very top for anything he might do in this matter, the telegram was countersigned as approved by Stanton himself.

Halleck was not yet finished. On March 4 he sent McClellan a message which read:

A rumor has just reached me that since the taking of Fort Donelson General Grant has resumed his former bad habits. If so, it will account for his neglect of my often-repeated orders. I do not deem it advisable to arrest him at present, but have placed General Smith in command of the expedition up the Tennessee. I think Smith will restore order and discipline.

Then, on the same day, he gave Grant the first news that Grant was in trouble. To him he sent this telegram:

You will place Major General C. F. Smith in command of expedition and remain yourself at Fort Henry. Why do you not obey my orders to report strength and positions of your command?
²⁹

This telegram arrived just sixteen days after the unconditional surrender of Fort Donelson.

CHAPTER TEN

“What Command Have I Now?”

General Halleck probably meant nothing in particular by his sudden attack on Grant. He himself had been chided by McClellan for failure to keep Washington informed about troop numbers and dispositions, and a major general who is reprimanded is quite likely to do two things almost automatically—to pass the reprimand along to an underling, and to show that whatever fault existed was not his own. Grant was ideally situated to take both reprimand and blame, and Halleck gave them to him—his attitude sharpened, possibly, by his recent disappointments. He certainly had no intention of driving Grant out of the Army, even though he almost succeeded in doing it.

Nor was Grant himself actually harmed very greatly. He went under a cloud, but only briefly; and if, much later, he came to see that Halleck had played a double game with him, and grew to dislike the man intensely, his discovery did not come until the war had ended, by which time the relations between Grant and Halleck were no longer matters of especial public concern. It may even be that the experience was a useful step in Grant's military education.

In the beginning, at least, the trouble did not seem especially serious. Grant replied to Halleck's wire promptly, saying that he had put Smith in charge of the upriver expedition, as directed, and asking whether he was to abandon Clarksville altogether; there were Army stores and heavy ordnance items there that would have to be disposed of before the post was given up. Then Grant went on, temperately enough, to state his defense:

I am not aware of ever having disobeyed any order from headquarters—certainly never intended such a thing. I have reported almost daily the condition of my command and reported every position occupied. I have not, however, been able to get returns from all the troops, from which to consolidate a
return for departmental headquarters. All have come in except from General Smith's command at Clarksville—five small regiments of infantry and two companies of artillery. The general has probably been unable to get his in consequence of being ordered to Nashville by General Buell. General Smith has been relieved by General Buell and was ordered immediately to the Tennessee by me.

As soon as I was notified that General Smith had been ordered to Nashville I reported the fact and sent a copy of Buell's order. My reports have nearly all been made to General Cullum, chief of staff, and it may be that many of them were not thought of sufficient importance to forward more than a telegraphic synopsis of.

Grant gave Halleck an outline report of his own forces. He had in his command forty-six infantry regiments with an average strength of five hundred men, three cavalry regiments and eight independent companies, and ten batteries of light artillery. He proposed to leave four small regiments at Fort Donelson and, until further notice, two at Clarksville. Fort Henry itself was badly flooded, with six feet of water inside the walls, and the Tennessee River was so high that there were few places where troops could be embarked; continuous rains had made it almost impossible to go across-country from Fort Donelson to Fort Henry. And, finally:

In conclusion I will say that you may rely on my carrying out your instructions in every particular to the very best of my ability.
¹