Grant Moves South (43 page)

He did have an extensive railroad network to maintain. There was the Mobile and Ohio, coming down to Corinth and the deep south from Columbus, Kentucky; and there was the Memphis and Ohio, running northeast from Memphis to Kentucky, crossing the Mobile and Ohio at Humboldt, Tennessee. There was also the
all-important Memphis and Charleston, which came east from Memphis to Corinth and ran thence to Chattanooga, where it connected the western Confederacy with a line running on to Virginia. There was, finally, the Mississippi Central, which left the Mobile and Ohio at Jackson, Tennessee, came south to cross the Memphis and Charleston at Grand Junction, halfway between Corinth and Memphis, and then struck south through Mississippi all the way to New Orleans. If the Federals proposed to occupy Tennessee and northern Mississippi and Alabama it was vital to get and keep these lines in shape, especially so since the approach of summer meant that the Tennessee River would be at low-water stage, with reduction of steamboat traffic.

But the railroads were only part of it. Corinth had to be fortified and garrisoned. As Halleck said, there must be reinforcements for Curtis, in Arkansas. Troops were needed to occupy Memphis—Sherman and his division were sent there as soon as Corinth was taken, and they took possession of the city by June 14
³²
—and, weighing more than all else, there was East Tennessee: East Tennessee, where Union adherents had been begging for Federal troops for six months and more, and to which President Lincoln now was firmly directing General Halleck's attention. A small force under General G. W. Morgan was about to occupy Cumberland Gap, but it could go no farther unaided; what was called for now was a march on Chattanooga itself, and this march Halleck ordered Buell to make. As it happened, a division from Buell's army had gone into northern Alabama while the Shiloh-Corinth campaign was in progress, and this division, commanded by a former astronomer named Ormsby Mitchel, held a segment of the Memphis and Charleston between Tuscumbia, fifty miles east of Corinth, and Stevenson, forty miles west of Chattanooga. It seemed to Halleck and Buell that Buell's army might well follow this line in its move. Bridges had been burned, and these must be repaired; the line was exposed to Rebel guerillas, and regulars operating from Alabama and Mississippi, and troops would be needed to guard the repair parties and to give continuing protection to the things repaired; and, all in all, the movement to Chattanooga—to which Washington had assigned a priority second only to that held by
McClellan's march on Richmond itself—looked like an extended and intricate operation.
³³
Clearly, more than enough was going on to engage all of a department commander's attention.

But the fact did remain that the only really sizable Confederate Army in all the West was the one which, passing from Beauregard to Bragg, was now being permitted to reorganize and refit at Tupelo, Mississippi, a place not far from the Okolona which Halleck had specified as the point to which he hoped it would be willing to retire.
³⁴
Everything the Confederacy had west of the Alleghenies depended on that army, because if it ceased to exist Halleck's troops could go anywhere they chose to go—to East Tennessee, to Vicksburg, to the Gulf, or around-about all the way to Richmond if necessary. A whole map full of strategic lines and places could not be as important as this.

The old pattern was being repeated. After Fort Donelson there had been delay and a regrouping, after Shiloh there had been more of it, and it was the same story now; to consolidate its “conquest” of empty land, the high command ignored the final victory that might be won by relentlessly hounding a beaten army into the last ditch. Holding an enormous advantage in man power and equipment, the Federal commanders both in the East and in the West—for McClellan was moving on Richmond with time-killing deliberation—persisted in acting as if the Federal government and its opponent were evenly matched. Its greatest single military asset, the power to set and follow its own course, compelling the enemy to one desperate expedient after another to avoid outright annihilation, was forgotten.

All of this, at bottom, was probably little more than a simple and understandable reflection of the Army's peacetime experience. Ever since there had been a United States Army, it had been operated on a constabulary basis, with many isolated posts and forts grouped together into departments under localized control. When campaign time arrived, the Army would be assembled from these posts and made into a mobile force; when the campaign ended, it would be redistributed all over the country, not to be reassembled until there was to be another campaign. This was the system that was being followed now. As a result, each victory
was followed by a long breathing spell. There was no real continuity to any program; a campaign would break up into isolated segments, and no advantage was ever followed up properly.
³⁵
In a real sense the story of Grant's development as a soldier is the story of his attempt to break out of this crippling tradition and apply the country's strength in a remorseless, continuing pressure.

Halleck's first act, once pursuit of the retreating Confederates had been given up, was to revoke the order which had divided his army into right wing, left wing, center and reserve.
³⁶
Grant, Buell and Pope resumed their original commands; Thomas returned to his infantry division; and Grant asked and got permission to establish his district headquarters in Memphis. (A rather odd request, this, since it would put him on the western edge of what would clearly be an active district. It is just possible that Grant preferred to operate at a little distance from Halleck, whose headquarters would remain in Corinth.) He set out for Memphis on July 20, riding with a small cavalry escort through a country that was by no means safe for small parties of Federals; narrowly escaped capture by armed Confederates, reached Memphis after three days, and told Halleck no more than that the weather had been warm and the roads excellent. Memphis he found wholly unreconstructed, and he reported: “Affairs in this city seem to be in rather bad order, secessionists governing much in their own way.” However, he had set up a post-command system and provost marshals, and—just as he had written in the early days in Missouri—he confidently asserted that “in a few days I expect to have everything in good order.”

Local clergymen insisted on offering prayers for the President of the Confederate States, and refused to pray for the President of the United States, and some of Grant's subordinates felt that their prayers needed editing, but Grant was not prepared to go very far in this direction. On the day after his arrival, his headquarters sent a warning note to General Hurlbut, who apparently was eager to take steps: “I am directed by Major General Grant to say that you can compel all clergymen within your lines to omit from their church services any portion you may deem treasonable, but you will not compel the insertion or substitution of anything.”
More important was the business of preparing to get reinforcements over to General Curtis, in Arkansas. These would have to go by steamboat, up the White River, through country full of Confederate guerillas, and after consultation with the Navy's Captain Phelps Grant felt this could be done by preparing light-draft river steamers, with some protection for the boilers, howitzers for armament, and an infantry escort to rout sharpshooters out of hiding places.
³⁷

During his time of comparative idleness in the Corinth campaign Grant had been doing a good deal of thinking about the way the war was developing and the principles that should govern a Federal commander, and he was beginning to arrive at certain conclusions. Earlier, he had believed that the Confederacy would collapse once it had lost a few battles; now he was coming to see that nothing but complete conquest would do, and although he still felt that many Southerners were compelled to support the Confederacy by their own fears of what would happen to them if they did not, he was beginning to believe in hard war pursued to the limit. Just before leaving for Memphis he had given Washburne a glimpse of his appraisal of the situation in his own territory:

Fast Western Tennessee is being reduced to working order and I think with the introduction of the Mails, trade, and the assurance that we can hold it, it will become loyal, or at least law abiding. It will not do however for our arms to meet with any great reverse and still expect this result. The masses this day are more disloyal in the south, from fear of what might befall them, in case of defeat to the Union cause than from any dislike to the Government. One week to them (after giving in their adhesion to our laws) would be worse under the so-called Confederate Government than a year of Martial Law administered by this army.

He went on, then, to spell out the duty of a soldier as he saw it:

It is hard to say what would be the most wise policy to pursue toward this people, but for a soldier his duty is plain. He is to obey the orders of all those placed over him and whip the enemy wherever he meets him. “If he can” should only be thought of after an unavoidable defeat.
³⁸

When he wrote his Memoirs, twenty years later, he elaborated on the change that came over his thinking at this time. Until Shiloh, he said, he had supposed that one decisive victory would defeat the Confederacy. Afterward, however, “I gave up the idea of saving the Union except by complete conquest.” This affected not only his attitude toward enemy armies in the field but also his conduct in respect to the civilian population and the Southland's material resources:

I regarded it as humane to both sides to protect the persons of those found at their homes, but to consume everything that could be used to support or supply armies. Protection was still continued over such supplies as were within lines held by us and which we expected to continue to hold; but such supplies within the reach of Confederate armies I regarded as much contraband as arms or ordnance stores. Their destruction was accomplished without bloodshed and tended to the same result as the destruction of armies. I continued this policy to the close of the war.… This policy I believe exercised a material influence in hastening the end.
³⁹

His stay in Memphis would not be long. Far off in Virginia, events were taking place that would profoundly change the conditions under which the war in the West would be fought. Grant's period of development was about over. From now on he would enter a different phase of his career.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

“To Be Terrible on the Enemy”

The Federal Armies in Virginia were having trouble, and their troubles affected the armies in Tennessee and Mississippi. All of the plans that had been made would be forgotten, and new ones would have to be made by different people. For the moment, what men did in the West would be determined by what General Lee did in front of Richmond. (The initiative, once surrendered, may be picked up in very faraway places.)

During the spring General McClellan had moved up the Virginia Peninsula with a methodical caution fully as great as Halleck's own. He considered himself heavily outnumbered, and shortly after he fought the hard, inconclusive action at Seven Pines and Fair Oaks he suggested to the War Department that some of General Halleck's troops might properly be sent to him.
¹
Nothing had come of this, but the complete inability of the fragmented Federal forces in upper Virginia to cope with Stonewall Jackson led the War Department eventually to create a new army—the short-lived, grotesquely unlucky Army of Virginia—and to command this army Secretary Stanton reached West and selected Major General John Pope. Halleck did not like this, and said so, but it did no good, and Pope went East, to brief eminence and then inglorious exit.
²
On his departure his old Army of the Mississippi went under red-faced, energetic Brigadier General W. S. Rosecrans.

This was only part of it. Like Halleck, McClellan had planned on the unspoken assumption that there was unlimited time, and in the last week of June Lee showed him his error. Mechanicsville was followed by Gaines's Mill, the Army of the Potomac began its risky retreat to the James River, and on June 28 Stanton sent Halleck a telegram that canceled any scheme of conquest Halleck might have had:

The enemy have concentrated in such force at Richmond as to render it absolutely necessary, in the opinion of the President, for you immediately to detach 25,000 of your force and forward it by the nearest and quickest route by way of Baltimore and Washington to Richmond.… in detaching your force the President directs that it be done in such way as to enable you to hold your ground and not interfere with the movement against Chattanooga and East Tennessee.… The direction to send these forces immediately is rendered imperative by a serious reverse suffered by General McClellan before Richmond yesterday, the full extent of which is not yet known.
³

Halleck protested that Washington was asking the impossible: he could not hold his ground, continue the advance on Chattanooga and East Tennessee, and also send twenty-five thousand troops East, and he suggested that the Chattanooga move be canceled. Having filed his protest, he then set about getting the troops ready to move. Grant was told to report immediately on the number of men he had at Memphis and to describe the river transportation available to get them up to Cairo; he had better fortify the land side of Memphis at once, because the divisions of Sherman and Hurlbut might have to leave—“The defeat of McClellan at Richmond has created a stampede in Washington.” Buell was notified that his whole railroad-repair scheme might be halted, and McClernand was ordered to prepare to move east with his entire command. Halleck glumly told him, “The entire campaign in the west is broken up by these orders and we shall very probably lose all we have gained.”
⁴

As it turned out, things were not quite that bad. Now as always, President Lincoln was profoundly interested in anything that affected eastern Tennessee, and Stanton immediately notified Halleck that “the Chattanooga expedition must not on any account be given up”—instructions which Lincoln supplemented with a personal wire to Halleck: