Grant Moves South (47 page)

At Knoxville there were nearly twenty thousand Confederate troops led by Major General Edmund Kirby Smith, and in the middle of August these started north, outflanking the small Union force which held Cumberland Gap and forcing it to retreat, and driving on for the heart of Kentucky. Shortly after this, Bragg with nearly thirty thousand left Chattanooga—which he had reached long ahead of Buell's fumbling advance—and moved North, aiming to get into Buell's rear, to recapture Nashville if possible, and perhaps to move on into Kentucky and join forces there with Kirby Smith.
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He had had strong cavalry detachments under John Morgan and Bedford Forrest raiding Buell's supply lines, and Buell's unhappy railroad-building activities came to a complete halt. Buell was in many ways the stuffiest of all Union generals, but he was also one of the unluckiest, and he was caught now in a pitiless vise. He had to keep step with Bragg, and for the moment Bragg was moving to a very lively tune. Not the least of the Federals' problems was the fact that Price and Van Dorn, in Mississippi, had between them nearly thirty thousand men. Some of these had to be retained for the defense of Vicksburg, but since most of Grant's men were tied down to fixed positions it would be quite possible for the Confederates in Mississippi to launch a mobile field army that would give Grant a great deal of trouble.

Bragg's and Kirby Smith's Confederates moved north with speed, and as they moved the whole Confederate war effort approached its high tide. In Virginia, Lee was pulverizing Pope and his makeshift Army of Virginia, and was going on into Maryland, meditating a slashing invasion of Pennsylvania. Bragg was hopeful that the Western contingents “may all unite in Ohio,” and Halleck
was frankly warning Grant that a junction of Price and Bragg in Tennessee or Kentucky “would be most disastrous.” Buell demanded reinforcements, and Grant sent two divisions from Rosecrans, and realized that he might at any time have to send more. He was confident that he could hold Corinth, and he did not believe that the Price-Van Dorn combination could get past him into Tennessee, but he had nothing whatever to spare.
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The first result of all of this was that it completely wrecked Buell's railroad-building activities. He had gone toward Chattanooga with painful deliberation, partly because he was deliberate by nature and partly because Halleck considered that the Memphis and Charleston railroad, having been captured, ought to be used, and everything Buell's army had done since Corinth was taken had been keyed to the notion that the Union must at all costs keep, use and protect the long lines of track. Now, with Bragg swirling past him toward Kentucky, all of the summer's work was abandoned. The Confederacy was providing Union strategists with abundant proof that conquests made on the map mean nothing as long as enemy armies themselves are undefeated. The fact that Chattanooga was connected by railroad with both Corinth and Nashville amounted to very little, if the Federal armies at Corinth and Nashville should be defeated.

When the campaign began Confederate strategy was somewhat formless; Bragg, Van Dorn and Price were all independent, answerable only to Richmond, and in the beginning Bragg could do no more than urge Van Dorn and Price to keep active in Mississippi in order to help his own invasion. Price obediently moved up into northeastern Mississippi and occupied the town of Iuka, capturing Federal stores there, and Grant notified Halleck that although he believed this was only a feint intended to pin his own forces down, “sending so many troops away, may it not be turned into an attack?” What Grant feared was about to come true. President Davis put Price under Van Dorn's orders, and Van Dorn promptly began to plan a real attack.
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Grant's problem thickened. Buell was moving all the way up to Louisville—Bragg having outmarched him—and he needed more help. Raw troops from Ohio, Indiana and Illinois were being rushed down to his aid, but he needed veterans, and Grant had to send a
third division, Gordon Granger's, from Rosecrans's force. With it, much to Grant's displeasure, went Phil Sheridan, who was about to be made a brigadier general. Granger was assigning Sheridan to the command of an infantry brigade, and Sheridan, eager for combat service, was delighted with the assignment; Grant met him at the railroad station where Granger's troops were getting on the cars for the move north and tried to persuade him to remain at Corinth. Sheridan angrily refused, and bystanders saw the two generals, who later were to become so intimate, arguing hotly. Grant lost the argument and Sheridan went north.
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He had already shown himself to be a highly capable cavalry leader; in Kentucky he would win distinction leading an infantry division for Buell in the battle of Perryville.

By now Buell was living on borrowed time. Washington was profoundly displeased at his inability to keep Bragg out of Kentucky, and Halleck told Major General Horatio Wright, who was in command along the Ohio River, that “unless he [Buell] does something very soon I think he will be relieved.” He added a comment describing the new pressures which would hereafter rest on all Federal commanders: “The Government seems determined to apply the guillotine to all unsuccessful generals. It seems rather hard to do this where the general is not in fault, but perhaps with us now, as in the French revolution, some harsh measures are required.” The true harshness of these measures became visible to Buell late in September, when a War Department messenger gave him orders removing him from command and ordering him to turn his army over to Thomas. These orders were suspended, at Thomas's request: Thomas pointed out that Buell had laid plans to bring the invaders to battle, that he himself had not become familiar with those plans, and that a change in commanders right now might be ruinous. For the time being the orders were suspended and Buell retained his position, but it was clear that one more mistake would end his career.
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Grant, meanwhile, had lost three divisions from his army, and Price and Van Dorn were beginning to crowd him. When he sent Granger's troops to Kentucky he won Halleck's permission to abandon the railroad east of Corinth—the whole railroad from Corinth to Chattanooga, object of an entire summer's work, was
thus given up—and Grant had to regroup his remaining troops to protect his own communications and the few places which it seemed essential to hold. In effect, he divided his troops into three principal detachments. At Memphis there was Sherman, holding that important river port and the immediately adjacent territory; in the center, guarding the north-south railroad line, there was Ord, a solid soldier who was rising in Grant's estimation; and in the Corinth area there was Rosecrans, with three infantry divisions, two brigades of a fourth, and a quota of cavalry and artillery. Grant established his own headquarters at Jackson, on the Mobile and Ohio fifty-five miles north of Corinth. At this time he had, all told, something like forty-five thousand men in his command. Slightly more than half of these were available in the forward areas to meet Van Dorn and Price.
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By the middle of September the Federal cause looked shaky. In Maryland, Lee had captured the Harpers Ferry garrison from the Union and was about to fight the great battle of Antietam. Of the other Confederate generals, Bragg was in mid-Kentucky, Kirby Smith seemed to be menacing Cincinnati, and Price, at Iuka, might be on the verge of slipping past Grant's flank and moving on toward the Ohio River; Van Dorn, meanwhile, was fifty miles west of Corinth, meditating an attack on either that town or Memphis. Even more than during the week of Gettysburg ten months later, the agonizing crisis of the war was at hand.

While Lee and McClellan were fighting along Antietam Creek, Grant made plans to defeat Price. Rosecrans, with 9000 men, was to swing out and come in on Iuka from the south; Ord, meanwhile, with about 8000, was to attack Iuka from the west, and Grant confidently wrote Halleck “I think it will be impossible for Price to get into Tennessee.” Actually, Grant was hopeful that this two-pronged attack might destroy Price's entire command. He himself moved with Ord. At the same time he ordered Hurlbut to make a demonstration south and east from the Memphis area and to create the impression that a strong Federal column was going to march down into the Yazoo Delta country. It was hoped that this would impress Van Dorn and keep him from coming to Price's rescue.

Grant's plan to bag Price's little army at Iuka was good, on paper, but it was a little too ambitious. It involved bringing two separated bodies of troops together on the field of battle, which is always a risky operation, and the maneuver was to be done in a rough, broken country whose inadequate roads made communication between the columns almost impossible. Ord's troops had a hard march, groping along a narrow road in a swamp, where heavy bushes and a tangle of decayed logs constricted all movement. They remembered, once, how Grant tried to ride past the marching column, found that his horse was spattering the soldiers with mud, and left the road to pick his way through the underbrush, not returning to the road until he had reached the head of the column. An Ohio private recalled that the men were ready to cheer him for this considerate act, and wrote that the little incident “shows the kind of man on whose shoulders the greatest responsibilities were to be placed.”
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Grant and Ord finally got their men in position a short distance west of town, and Price marshaled his own troops to give battle.

The plan was for Ord to attack on the morning of September 19, with Rosecrans coming up from the south and west and taking Price's troops in the flank, and if it had gone according to schedule Price might well have been annihilated. As usually happens with plans of this kind, however, things did not go according to schedule. Grant got word that Rosecrans had been delayed, and told Ord to wait; they would attack when they heard the sound of Rosecrans's guns, and not before. Rosecrans, meanwhile, gained position a mile or two southwest of Iuka during the afternoon and began to form line of battle; and Price, realizing the trap that was about to be sprung, pulled away from Ord's front and moved down just before evening to break his way through Rosecrans's line.

An uncommonly sharp little battle developed, and some freak of atmospheric conditions perverted the acoustics. Not a sound reached Grant and Ord; and while Rosecrans's troops were fighting desperately, the column that was to have co-operated with them rested on its arms a few miles away, with Grant and Ord wondering why Rosecrans was not getting into position and opening the battle. Rosecrans had sent a courier with word that he was on the
edge of Iuka, but the message did not reach Grant until after nightfall.

Rosecrans had not actually reached his chosen battle position when Price struck him, and the bulk of the Confederate attack was borne by the Union advance, a brigade of Brigadier General C. S. Hamilton's division. General Hamilton wrote afterward that he never saw “a hotter or more destructive engagement,” and said that Price's unaccountable hesitancy in opening the action was all that saved the Federals from defeat, since the delay gave just time enough to get the Federal regiments out of marching column and into line. Men in the 11th Ohio battery, drawn up to repel the anticipated Confederate charge, found the waiting hard to bear. They could see their enemy massed for the attack, and the gunners muttered: “Why in hell can't we let them have it?” A sergeant complained: “My God, they're coming right here in the bush and are going to gobble the whole damned caboodle and shooting match of us, and damned quick if we don't mind, before we strike a damned lick.” Then the shooting started, Hamilton sent frantic messengers back to Rosecrans for reinforcements, and the 11th Ohio battery lost forty-eight men, ending the day with no more than one cannoneer to a gun. Colonel Joe Mower, a giant of a man who was beginning to develop into one of the army's most gifted combat soldiers, led a brigade forward in a bayonet attack, and when darkness came the line was just held. Rosecrans called a midnight council of his brigade and division commanders, feeling that a fresh Rebel attack at dawn might overwhelm him; he cried bitterly “Where in the name of God is Grant?” and concluded that his only salvation was to make a bayonet charge at the moment of dawn. David Stanley, commanding the first division, remarked glumly: “I feel that I shall be killed tomorrow, but your order shall be obeyed,” and then retired to his blanket for a brief sleep.
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But with dawn the menace was gone. In his advance on Iuka, Rosecrans had left uncovered one road to the south, and during the night Price used it, getting his army away and then moving west in a forced march to rejoin Van Dorn. The Federals had Iuka, the battle went into the books as a victory, it was no longer possible
for Price to get around Grant's flank and go north toward Kentucky—but his army had not been destroyed, and Grant's elaborate enveloping movement had failed. It was clear that Price and Van Dorn together would make a new assault, sooner or later, and during the following ten days it became equally obvious that when this attack came it would strike Corinth.

A fight for Corinth would be Rosecrans's fight, mostly, and the Army figured that the fight would be in good hands. Rosecrans was big, burly, a devout Roman Catholic who nevertheless had a good command of profane idiom in the heat of battle, a tireless excitable officer who, in the jargon of the time, “looked after his men.” It was recalled fondly that at a regimental inspection held not long after he took command, “Old Rosy” came upon one private soldier whose shoes were badly worn. He demanded why the soldier let himself wear such trashy equipment, and the soldier replied that he had asked for new shoes but had not received them. Raising his voice for all to hear, Rosecrans announced that the man should demand shoes of his first sergeant, go on from there to his company commander and thence, if need be, to regimental, brigade and divisional command; and if he still did not get shoes he was to come to Rosecrans himself. There were plenty of shoes in the warehouse, Rosecrans declaimed, and all hands ought to raise a fuss until the shoes were properly issued. It was told, too, how the new shelter tents, popularly called “pup tents,” had been issued early that fall, and how the men did not like them; in one brigade the men put up derisive signs over their cramped new homes—P
UPS FOR
S
ALE
… R
AT
T
ERRIERS
… D
OG
H
OLE
N
O.
1 … S
ONS OF
B
ITCHES
W
ITHIN
and so on. Rosecrans and his staff came riding through the camp and saw all of this, and the general threw back his head and roared with red-faced laughter. It was known, too, that Rosecrans was certain to appear on the front lines when there was fighting. General Hamilton had complained that the commanding general was hard to find when the battle opened at Iuka, but the men insisted that he always got up where there was shooting and said that the sight of him there, fearless amid flying bullets, steadied them and helped them behave as good soldiers should. An Illinois soldier said that Grant was well-liked
and “could get more votes than any other man for commander of the army—always excepting Rosey.”
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