Grant Moves South (9 page)

Brinton found that there were many sick men. Grant selected Mound City as the best place for these; the town had been laid out a few years earlier by optimistic real estate promoters who thought it would be a thriving shipping point for river-borne freight, and it had long rows of substantial brick warehouses, empty and unused. These were turned into hospitals, but the care which the men got was rudimentary. The army at Cairo was making use of civilian doctors, holding no commissions but working under contract, and many of these were conscienceless impostors and charlatans. There seemed to be no nurses and there was a
great shortage of medical supplies; for a time there was not even a chaplain, and when men died Dr. Brinton had to read the burial service. If people back home had not regularly sent money and boxes of food, the men would have been in desperate straits.

Grant told Dr. Brinton to put things right, and Brinton found that the General would always support him. The doctor would presently write that “Grant is a plain, straightforward, peremptory and prompt man. If I ask for anything it is done at once.”

A big problem had to do with nurses. All over the country, women were volunteering to work in Union Army hospitals. Miss Dorothea Dix, a capable and stern-minded lady, had been given general charge of the new Army Nursing Corps. She had fixed ideas, and rigorously combed out all applicants who were either youthful or pretty; there would be no romantic passages between nurses and patients if Miss Dix could help it. In spite of her best efforts, a large number of pathetically unqualified women kept showing up, each one bearing some sort of endorsement or order from a faraway general or War Department official, all insisting that they were going to be of service. They had to be fed, housed and paid, and they were not ordinarily pleased with the accommodations that were available. “They defied all military law,” Dr. Brinton asserted. “There they were and there they would stay, entrenched behind their bags and parcels, until accommodations might be found for them.… This female nurse business was a great trial to all the men concerned and to me at Mound City it became intolerable.”

The good doctor's complaint was being echoed just at this time by Dr. John Cooper at St. Louis, who ungallantly declared that every preacher in the North “would recommend the most troublesome old maid in his congregation as an experienced nurse.” Many of the women chosen by Miss Dix, said Dr. Cooper, were obtained in this way; “every day the preacher would write about his own particular ewe lamb, suggesting some post as far off as possible—the most of these ewe lambs hailed from New England and the most of them had been school marms whose only experience in nursing was of the wrath of the boys whose ears had been warmed too often because their fathers had overlooked her.” Miss Dix, said Dr. Cooper, came in with many of these people in tow,
“each one with spectacles on her nose and an earnest gaze in her eyes, to see the man she was to take possession of,” The increase in the death rate following their arrival was heavy, Dr. Cooper added, “probably caused by the spectacles.”

In one way and another, the nursing situation was got under control. Dr. Brinton improved it by sending to South Bend, in Indiana, and getting a detachment of Catholic Sisters. The change, as he recalled it, was refreshing. Each volunteer nurse, formerly, had wanted special attention. “They did not wish much, simply a room, a looking glass, someone to get their meals and do little things for them, and they would nurse the sick boys of our gallant Union army.” One morning fourteen or fifteen of the Sisters arrived; apprehensively, Dr. Brinton asked what accommodation they would need, and to his pleased surprise got the answer: “One room, Doctor.”
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There was a great deal of routine for the District Commander to handle. An exceptionally sickly regiment must be sent back to St. Louis, to be replaced by one better able to stand conditions around Cairo. It was necessary to have a mustering officer sent down, since there were many troops which had never been sworn in; necessary, too, to get the Navy to do something about paying the crews of the gunboats—as things were, the men could legally be paid only at Cincinnati, which was a long way off. Vast quantities of supplies were arriving, and since all of these would presently be shipped off by boat it was expensive and unhandy to store them on shore: Grant found and took over a big wharf boat with a storage capacity of twenty-five hundred tons, to get around that problem. Cold weather was approaching, and there must be suitable winter quarters for the troops; log huts would do nicely and would cost little, but the military chest was empty—“Credit will not do at this place any longer. I understand the credit of the Government has already been used to the extent of some hundred thousand dollars and no money ever paid out.” Could department headquarters kindly send some money, along with a paymaster to pay the troops? Too many soldiers were applying for medical discharges, which the contract surgeons were recommending on trivial grounds: could Grant have the authority to
approve or, more important, to disapprove these? (Studying the regulations, Grant decided that he had that authority; technically, he was commanding an army in the field, and the power he was asking for went with the job.) It was necessary for him to visit Springfield, to see whether the Governor of Illinois could send him some artillery and small arms. (The Governor could not, having none at his disposal, but he promised to send down the first that came to him.) Also, the Austrian muskets with which many troops were equipped were defective; and the troops badly needed tents, shoes, shirts, blankets, along with cavalry equipment and a good deal of field artillery. At least six telescopes were required, and if a large map of Kentucky could be provided it would be very useful.
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Cairo was on the frontier, and a heavy trade with the enemy was moving down the Mississippi. Packet boats plying between St. Louis and Cairo, Grant believed, were dropping off considerable amounts of freight for the armies of the Confederates, at way stations along the river; to check this, all the gunboats being busy on other assignments, Grant took a river steamer, put an armed guard aboard, and told the skipper to pick out one of the suspected packets and follow it downstream, stopping wherever the packet stopped and confiscating the freight that was sent ashore. (A fine lot of contraband was seized: unfortunately, the captain of the guard got too enthusiastic and seized the packet also, and Grant had to release it.) He also sent troops on a foray to Charleston, Missouri, some miles inland, to seize goods which he believed were en route to Jeff Thompson. He had “serious doubts whether there is any law authorizing this seizure,” but he felt that his action was necessary; would the Department Commander please advise him? Grant needed eight thousand bed sacks at once; needed, as well, to make a quick trip to Cape Girardeau, where civilian property had been seized as the site for a fort, and where it was necessary to appoint a board of officers to appraise the value of the property and decide on a proper rental. At Cape Girardeau, too, a steam ferryboat had been requisitioned for Army use; the owner was demanding seventy-five dollars a day as compensation, but steamboat men said that eight dollars would be fair; the District Commander must look into things and say what would be
paid. (Having looked, Grant concluded that the owner was too demanding by far, and decreed that the ferryboat would be kept in service without any rental.)
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With details like these Grant's time was kept occupied. Yet these, after all, were just details. The armed forces of the Confederacy were very near, and as he put his District in shape, cared for his sick, got his troops equipped and trained and dealt with all the odds and ends of military housekeeping, Grant's first responsibility was that of a commander in the field. The presence of Polk and Pillow and their men at Columbus was his biggest concern. Rumor credited them with aggressive intentions, and there must be defensive works to guard against a possible Confederate offensive; Fort Holt was built and manned, on the Kentucky side of the Ohio, and near it a second work, Fort Jefferson, came into being. On the Missouri side of the Mississippi, at Norfolk, a few miles below Bird's Point, Grant established an outpost, and he kept soldiers and gunboats busy with ceaseless reconnaissances, keeping track of what the Rebels might be doing.

As a matter of fact, the Rebels at that time were not trying to do much more than establish a good defensive line across Kentucky. Polk's invasion of the state had surprised the Confederacy fully as much as it had surprised anyone else, and in the days following his occupancy of Columbus this fact became quite apparent. If the invasion of Kentucky had been agreed on at Richmond as part of a calculated strategic move, and if the Confederacy had been ready to swarm into the state on a broad scale, with objectives selected in advance, the Union might have been caught at a sharp disadvantage; except for the area around Cairo and Paducah, the Federals were by no means ready for such a thrust. But the action had been Polk's own, forced on him by developing circumstances, and after he had made the move everything had to be improvised.

During the period of its neutrality Kentucky had maintained a state guard, commanded by an old friend of Grant's, General Simon Bolivar Buckner; the same man who, six years earlier, had met Grant in New York when Grant made his inglorious return from California, and who, finding Grant stony-broke, had loaned him money so that he could get back to Illinois. No one had been sure
what Buckner would do, when and if Kentucky got into the war.

During the summer, Lincoln, believing that the man would go with the North, had made out and signed a general's commission for him, to be delivered if he should at last commit himself for the Union. But Jefferson Davis had a commission waiting, too, and after Polk made his move it was Davis's commission that Buckner accepted. By mid-September Buckner was at the strategic spot of Bowling Green, on the railroad line that angled down to Nashville from Louisville, in command of five thousand men and looking as if he meant business; his patrols had burned a bridge within thirty-three miles of Louisville, and the Federal command was most anxious. A makeshift collection of raw troops under Brigadier General William Tecumseh Sherman, who was a very nervous, uncertain man just then, advanced cautiously in Buckner's direction, establishing a camp on the high ground known as Muldraugh's Hill, thirty or forty miles from Louisville; and Sherman, reflecting on the disorganization of the Federal command and the pathetic unreadiness for combat of all the Federal troops he had seen, began to see visions of imminent disaster. Many miles to the east, at Cumberland Gap, Confederate General F. K. Zollicoffer took three unready Confederate regiments fifteen miles across the border and made ready to fortify and hold a position at Cumberland Ford.
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The Confederate line, then, ran roughly along the state's east-west axis, anchored solidly at Columbus in the west, held in the center at Bowling Green, and pinned down none too firmly in the eastern mountains by Zollicoffer's skimpy command. All things considered, this may have been the most vital single line in all the Confederacy, but it was not held in great strength and unless a military miracle took place it would not serve as jumping-off ground for any Southern offensive. No one knew this any better than the man Davis now put in command of the Western theater—General Albert Sidney Johnston, believed to be a man of great strategic ability; a man of whom much was expected. Just now, Johnston was laboring under the perennial handicap of all Confederate field commanders—he had too much ground to cover and not enough troops to do it with.

Polk's occupancy of Kentucky had raised a fuss, and Union adherents were trying to squeeze political advantage out of it. A
committee of the state senate sent Polk a formal resolution asserting that the good people of Kentucky were profoundly astonished that an act of invasion had been committed by the Confederate states. Having “hoped that one place at least in this great nation might remain uninvaded by passion,” they earnestly wished that General Polk would take his troops and go back to Tennessee. Polk replied that the Federals had already fractured the state's neutrality, offered to withdraw if the Federals would do the same, and stayed precisely where he was. The indignant legislature also resolved that Governor Magoffin should order the Confederate troops to withdraw. Magoffin vetoed the resolution, it was passed over his veto, and he dutifully issued the order, which had no effect whatever. The Union Army's first war hero, Major General Robert Anderson—the weary, unhappy, Kentucky-born Regular who had been in command at Fort Sumter, and who since early summer had been assigned to the Kentucky area on an if-and-when basis—was invited by the legislature to establish himself in Louisville; he complied, found that the strain of everything was too much for him, and in little more than a month was compelled by failing health to resign. He would be replaced by Sherman, to whom the assignment would bring nothing but misery and frustration.
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No matter how the politicians might resolve and maneuver, Confederate troops were in Kentucky and they would not leave unless armed men made them leave. This fact was clear to Grant from the start, and C. F. Smith had hardly reached Paducah before Grant was thinking about a Federal offensive. On September 10 Grant wrote to Frémont that an amphibious reconnaissance down the Mississippi had exchanged shots with Rebels around Columbus, and he felt that this had been good for Federal morale. He reported: “All the forces show great alacrity in preparing for any movement that looks as if it was to meet an enemy, and if drill and discipline were equal to their zeal, I should feel great confidence even against large odds.” It seemed to Grant that the Confederates were playing for time, either to perfect their defenses or to make ready for an attack on Paducah, and he added: “If it were discretionary with me, with a little addition to my present force I
would take Columbus.” The next day he told Colonel Oglesby, who commanded the outpost at Norfolk, to renew the armed reconnaissance, “annoying the enemy in every way possible,” and on the day after that he wrote to Frémont: “I am of opinion that if a demonstration was made from Paducah toward Union City” (a Tennessee railroad junction twenty-five miles south of Columbus) “supported by two columns on the Kentucky side from here, the gunboats, and a force moving upon Belmont, the enemy would be forced to leave Columbus, leaving behind their heavy ordnance. I submit this to your consideration, and will hold myself in readiness to execute this or any plan you may adopt.”
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