Grant Moves South (46 page)

In moments of relaxation, Grant liked to leave off his uniform and dress like a civilian. Mrs. William H. Cherry of Savannah, Tennessee, whose house Grant had used as headquarters before the battle of Shiloh, remembered that Grant once asked her to present him to her mother; knowing that the mother had firm
Southern loyalties, he wore civilian clothing, and when he was introduced he touched himself on the shoulder—where his insignia of rank would have appeared, if he had been in uniform—and remarked, “I thought you would like this best.” A reporter noticed that Grant was in mufti at an Independence Day celebration in Memphis, and felt that he gave “a fair representation, to all outward appearance, of a well-to-do Southern planter.”
²⁷
Men remembered that headquarters was always cheerful when the Grant family was together. Grant spent much time with the children, who “used to play about and over and around the general by the hour,” with neither General nor children saying a word.
²⁸

This was too good to last, and after little more than a fortnight Julia and the children left for St. Louis, to visit Mrs. Grant's father, old Colonel Dent. It was necessary to go to some place where the children could attend school during the fall and winter months; also, there were ominous signs of renewed Confederate activity in Mississippi, and Grant felt that it was time his family returned to a place of safety. He was feeling the strain, he frankly confessed, and he wished that he could go North too and get some rest, but it was not possible. Meanwhile, he had to admit that the responsibility of command had perhaps been good for him; since he left Cairo, at the end of January, he had gained fifteen pounds!
²⁹

By the end of July it was clear that Braxton Bragg was up to something. Colonel Phil Sheridan, now commanding a two-regiment brigade of cavalry, went roving south of Corinth, and he came back with disturbing news. Bragg's army had been based at Tupelo; now, Sheridan learned, he was moving up through northern Georgia in the direction of Chattanooga—moving roundabout, by way of Mobile, to take advantage of railroad transportation and avoid a long hike cross-country—and fresh troops under Price were active in northern Mississippi, spread out over the territory from Tupelo to Holly Springs. Sheridan raided a Confederate camp and seized a quantity of soldiers' letters, which expressed a new confidence: the Yankees were about to be attacked on the right and on the left, and would soon have to “skedaddle.” Sheridan's activities impressed Rosecrans so much that he and
some of his subordinates got off a telegram to Halleck urging that Sheridan be made a brigadier general: “He is worth his weight in gold.”
³⁰

Observing the Federals' inaction, Bragg had formed a bold resolve. He would put the bulk of his forces around Chattanooga and would drive straight north for Kentucky and the Ohio river, gambling that the luckless Buell, wholly engrossed in railroad building operations, could be outmaneuvered. Price and Van Dorn would keep Grant busy, and with luck might be able to knock his scattered forces out of the way and go north to help Bragg. In any case, the Confederacy would be on the offensive, and if all went well everything that had been lost at Donelson, Shiloh and Corinth might presently be regained.

Grant's strength was not adequate for a decisive countermove. All told, he commanded 63,000 effectives, but most of the men were tied down on garrison duty. Two divisions, Sherman's and Hurlbut's, were at Memphis. General E. O. C. Ord was at Corinth with another division and McClernand was at Jackson, Tennessee, fifty-five miles to the north on the Mobile and Ohio Railroad. Several thousand men were posted in small detachments at various places in Tennessee and northern Mississippi. Brigadier General Isaac F. Quinby had nearly five thousand at Columbus, and Rosecrans with twenty-five thousand men occupied the line of the Memphis and Charleston in the general neighborhood of Iuka, east of Corinth. That was the lot, and there was very little flexibility. Buell had already called George Thomas's division away, and it seemed likely that he would need reinforcements in the near future. When Grant wired Halleck for permission to move forward and attack the Confederates in the area below Corinth, Halleck replied he could maneuver his forces as he saw fit, but that he must not scatter them because he might at any time be called on to send troops to Buell.
³¹

For the moment, nothing could be done but mark time and maintain a vigilant watch. At one point Grant felt that the thing Washington had been dreading might actually be happening—the Confederates might be detaching troops from Mississippi for use in front of Richmond—and on August 7 he warned Halleck about
it, remarking that the Price-Van Dorn contingents might be trying to do no more than “hold the Western army in check,” but this delusion did not last long. Halleck himself believed that it would be possible for the Federals to open a new western campaign in the fall, but the fall was still some time away; “All we can hope to do for the next month is to hold our positions and prepare for an onward movement.”
³²
He added that the administration was very unhappy about Buell's “want of energy,” and said frankly that Buell would soon be removed unless he accomplished something.

Meanwhile, there was the task of administering occupied territory. The people of Memphis continued to detest the Yankee invader, and they took no pains to hide their feeling. A newspaper correspondent said that the Memphis women were especially bitter, ostentatiously drawing their skirts aside whenever they had to pass a Union soldier on the street; employing a delicate euphemism, he wrote that the women of the town, “with a breadth of misapplied maternal attractions,” would parade haughtily in the evening “in the fleeciest and scantiest of magnificence,” each one usually accompanied by a little Negro girl carrying parasol and other minor impedimenta. But Sherman believed that he was getting things under control, and with his usual brutal frankness he wrote Grant about it in the middle of August:

I find them [the people of Memphis] much more resigned and less presumptuous than at first. Your orders about property and mine about “niggers” make them feel that they can be hurt, and they are about as sensitive about their property as Yankees. I believe in universal confiscation and colonization. Some Union people have been expelled from Raleigh. I have taken some of the richest Rebels and will compel them to buy and pay for all of the land, horses, cattle and effects, as well as damages, and let the Union owner deed the property to one or more of them. This they don't like at all.
³³

Grant was supposed to be a man without nerves, but the strain of this summer was beginning to tell on him. He was moved, presently, to do something out of character: he arrested and imprisoned a newspaper reporter, and the incident tells something
about the tense atmosphere which surrounded the camps of the occupying army.

The
Chicago Times
was notorious as a Copperhead paper, and its Memphis correspondent was one W. P. Isham, brother-in-law to Wilbur Storey, the paper's proprietor. Isham's reputation was bad. His room in the Gayoso Hotel at Memphis was considered a resort for local secessionists, and he was described by a hostile newspaper as “one of the still sort: has a mild blue eye, a pleasant face, his mouth always wears a secret, crafty smile.” He had been sending North stories calculated to dishearten loyal Unionists, depicting Memphis as a city full of drunkenness and disease, cursed by a bad climate and an infected water supply, inadequately garrisoned in the face of rising Rebel strength. The story which moved Grant to hostile action was one which Isham filed late in July, describing the wholly imaginary arrival at Mobile of a fleet of ten English-built ironclad gunboats—impregnable vessels mounting from 10 to 30 guns apiece and sheathed in six-inch armor, whose appearance (according to Isham) broke the blockade and gave the Confederacy a naval force “of superior strength and weight of metal” to anything the Union possessed. Grant sent a clipping of the story to Sherman, with a note remarking that the story was “both false in fact and mischievous in character,” and directing Sherman to “have the author arrested and sent to the Alton Penitentiary, under proper escort, for confinement until the close of the war, unless sooner discharged by competent authority.”

Sherman complied willingly enough—he hated newspaper correspondents of all descriptions, and unquestionably would have been happy to arrest every reporter in Tennessee, loyal or otherwise—and the
Chicago Tribune
mentioned the action with approval. Isham's story, said the
Tribune
, was made up out of whole cloth; “There was design in it—to induce discouragement into the North at a critical time.” So Isham went to Alton, under guard, and the
Times
sent down a reporter of a very different stripe to take his place, a former Milwaukee newspaperman named Sylvanus Cadwallader. Cadwallader ultimately persuaded Grant to order Isham's release; meanwhile, he established his own integrity as a reporter and in time became one of Grant's
chosen intimates, winning for himself a place at headquarters that no other correspondent could match.
³⁴

But the significance of the incident remains. The North was rapidly approaching the most chancy period of the entire war. There was reason for despondency back home, and if the imperturbable little General in Tennessee was growing jumpy there was plenty in the war situation to make him so. As the summer of 1862 drew on toward autumn the Confederacy was reaching its high tide, and everything that the Union had won down to date seemed in a fair way to be lost forever.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Victory, and a New Plan

What made Corinth important was the railroads. The great Memphis and Charleston line, the Confederacy's vital East-West axis, ran through here on its way to Chattanooga, and at Corinth it crossed the Mobile and Ohio, which linked Kentucky with the Gulf. With these roads securely held and with Corinth itself properly fortified, the mighty Union Army could digest its conquest of West Tennessee and, at its leisure, could gather strength for an irresistible new advance into a half-paralyzed South. Everything that had been done since Shiloh had been based on the belief that this would be so. Now, in the middle of the summer of 1862, this belief was being exposed as a massive error in judgment.

One trouble was that holding the railroads did not paralyze the Confederates in the least. On the contrary, it inspired them to a new activity, for it offered a wealth of targets which could be hit by small bands of guerillas (whose name was legion) or by detachments of roving cavalry. Simply to get the roads into operating condition kept thousands of Union soldiers so busy they had no time for anything else, and whatever they did could be undone, overnight, by a handful of Southerners. The army of occupation became half constabulary and half track-repair gang, and the main current of the war simply flowed out from under it.

Buell, moving east to take Chattanooga, was tied to the railroad, and two months after Corinth was occupied he still had not reached his goal, although his men had performed prodigies of road-building. (This did little good, because the road ran squarely across the Confederate front and it could be cut anywhere at a minor expenditure of Southern effort.) Grant was no better off; the line from Corinth to Memphis still was not open, the connecting lines farther to the rear were in little better shape, and the
handiest way to get from Memphis to Corinth was to go up to Columbus, Kentucky, by steamboat and then to come down from Columbus by rail.

The guerillas were an expensive nuisance. Lacking cavalry, Grant had to shift whole infantry divisions about to meet them, an expedient that never worked because the swiftly moving Confederates refused to wait for the ponderous columns to arrive. Grant tried to extemporize a mounted force—his appeal for cavalry reinforcements having been turned down—by putting foot-soldiers on horses seized from Tennessee plantations, but this did little good.
¹
His army's rear seemed no more secure than its front lines.

A painful illustration of this fact came on August 22, when Grant was obliged to report to Halleck that a guerilla detachment had captured one of his posts far back at Clarksville, on the Cumberland. This loss was especially irritating because of the way in which it came about. Clarksville had been garrisoned by six companies of the 71st Ohio, under Colonel Rodney Mason, and Mason had been one of the fainthearts who led his regiment off the field at Shiloh in the first shock of battle. He had come to Grant afterward, with tears in his eyes, begging for a chance to redeem himself, and Grant had put him at Clarksville. Now it developed that when a Rebel band surrounded this detachment and sent in a demand for surrender, Colonel Mason had taken counsel of his fears and his junior officers. He sent a subordinate out, under flag of truce, to count the Rebels who had surrounded him, and this man came back with the report that there were at least eight hundred of them, one company being horrendously “armed with volcanic rifles,” by which it appears that the man meant repeaters. The juniors argued that the case was hopeless, Mason agreed, and the whole place was ingloriously surrendered. Mason and twelve of his juniors were promptly cashiered, by order of the President, but this did not help very much.
²

Guerilla warfare in the rear was not only unsettling; it distracted attention from the front, and by the middle of August the Confederates were obviously up to something extensive. Their target was Buell's army rather than Grant's, but whatever happened
to Buell would have an immediate effect on Grant—Halleck had already warned Grant that he must be prepared to give Buell some reinforcements—and by this time the Confederates had brought more soldiers east of the Mississippi and seemed inclined to strike at both armies. A Southern offensive of large dimensions was in fact getting under way, and for the moment there was nothing the Federals could do but wait for the blow to fall. Grant's army and Buell's were all but completely immobilized, and Braxton Bragg had worked out a plan to take advantage of this.