Terrible Swift Sword (11 page)

The
Sherman who replaced him was by no means the conquering hero of later days. He
was gloomy, utterly lacking confidence in the raw volunteers entrusted to his
command, hagridden by memory of the disaster which he had seen overtake
similar volunteers at Bull Run, unable to realize that though his own problems
were grave those of General Johnston were a good deal worse. He complained that
he had been "forced into command of this department against my will,"
and in a mood of uncontrolled pessimism he estimated that it would take 300,000
men "to fill half the calls for troops" that were being made on him.
¹⁰
In plain English, Sherman had lost his nerve; temporarily he was a setup for
the bold measures which General Johnston adopted.

Johnston had a long line to defend east of
the Mississippi and he was badly outnumbered. He was getting recruits (although
they were not so numerous as he had hoped, and the anticipated rising of
Kentuckians to the Confederate cause was not taking place) but finding weapons
for them seemed impossible and he believed that as soon as the Federals
advanced they would discover the inadequacy of his force. His left was on the
Mississippi, at Columbus, strongly held by Bishop Polk; Zollicoffer anchored
the right, in front of Cumberland Gap; and Forts Henry and Donelson were being
built just below the Kentucky line to command the Tennessee and Cumberland
Rivers. To block the line of the Louisville & Nashville Railroad, which
any Federal army invading western Tennessee would certainly want to use,
Johnston had put General Buckner, with just under 10,000 men, at Bowling Green;
and Buckner was industriously sending out raiding parties, behaving like a man
who was about to march north to the Ohio River, convincing Sherman that an army
of 20,000 Confederates would soon capture Louisville,
¹¹
and putting
loyalist civilians in the back country into a state of wild panic. One roving
Confederate detachment was commanded by a tough Irish veteran of the British
Army, Colonel Patrick Cleburne, and as this outfit entered the hill country
along the upper Cumberland the inhabitants ran and hid, anticipating massacre
and destruction. One old woman astounded Cleburne by tottering out to meet him,
an open Bible in her hand, announcing that she was prepared to die and implying
that they might as well do their worst at once; the colonel had a hard time
persuading her that no harm would come to her, and he wrote that he doubted the
valor of male Kentuckians because of "the alacrity with which they fled
from this strongly defensible country, leaving their wives, daughters and
children to the tender mercies of supposed ravishers, murderers and
barbarians."
¹²
From backwoodsmen to the commanding general,
Kentucky Unionists were alarmed. If the essence of successful strategy is the
ability to compel one's opponents to accept one's own appraisal of a situation,
Albert Sidney Johnston was being a very good general this fall.

All of this fatally handicapped the plan
to get east Tennessee back into the Union. William B. Carter left Camp Dick
Robinson for the highlands on October 18 or 19, and a few days after that
General Thomas set out for Cumberland Gap. Thomas had half a dozen fairly
well-trained regiments, along with two new regiments of Tennessee refugees, and
although he was short of equipment he believed he could carry out his assignment.

Thomas
meant business. Like Lee, he was a Virginian who had had to choose between
conflicting loyalties. He had made the choice Lee did not make, and for a
century to come his native state would regard him without warmth. He was massive,
sedate, with a deceptive air of unhurried calm; he had hurt his spine in some
pre-war accident and to ride at a gallop pained him, so people called him
"Old Slow-Trot." The nickname created a totally false picture, for
Thomas was not a slow-trot general at all. He could move fast and he could hit
with pulverizing impact, and when the Union Army got him it gained very nearly
as much as it had lost when it failed to get Lee.

Thomas
started out briskly enough. He brushed aside a Confederate outpost at
Rockcastle Hills, fifty miles south of his starting point, occupied the town of
London, and sent back word that he proposed to move on to a place called
Somerset, where he believed he could pick a favorable time and route for going
all the way to the Cumberland Gap and thence to Knoxville. The east Tennessee
Unionists, informed that he was on the move, began their uprising, burning five
railroad bridges, fighting with Confederate patrols and effervescing so freely
that the Confederate commander in Knoxville reported that "the whole
country is now in a state of rebellion"; the railroad authorities doubted
that they could move any more army supplies, and a Confederate commissary
officer wrote that the expected approach of the Federals has so inflamed the
insurrectionists that "there is no telling how much damage they may
do."
¹³

What the east Tennessee people did not
know, however, was that just when the uprising was beginning the Federal advance
was canceled and that Thomas was compelled to take his army back to its
original point of departure.

General Sherman had grown completely
despondent. He believed that there was about to be a great Confederate offensive
all across Kentucky, from the Mississippi to Cumberland Gap, which was exactly
what General Johnston wanted him to believe, and just when the Confederates in
east Tennessee were gloomily anticipating the worst Sherman was writing that
"the future looks as dark as possible." He considered the east Tennessee
project a sideshow anyway, and now he abruptly called it off so that he could
concentrate all of his forces in defense of Louisville and the Ohio River. He
had recently assured the Secretary of War that the Union ought to have at least
200,000 men in Kentucky, and a Pennsylvania politician who visited the War
Department at this time was confidentially told "Sherman's gone in the
head." On November 15—with Carter's fifth columnists neck-deep in hot
water, and with Thomas's east Tennessee recruits angrily laying down their arms
because they could not march in to redeem their home land—Sherman was relieved
of his command and ordered to a relatively quiet job in Missouri. An Ohio
newspaper announced that Sherman was insane.
¹⁴

Sherman
was replaced by an officer who was not so extensively fooled by the game
General Johnston was playing but who was unable to make good use of his own
enlightenment: Brigadier General Don Carlos Buell, whom the War Department had
sent to see Anderson in Fort Sumter, while the nation was still at peace, on a
confidential mission of vast delicacy. Buell was a close friend of McClellan,
one of the officers whom men of the Old Army labeled "brilliant"; a
conscientious, methodical soldier with a strong body, a trim beard, and deep
vertical lines (of heavy thought, or of astigmatism) between his eyes. The
change in command did not help the east Tennessee people, because Buell had
even less use for the thrust at Cumberland Gap than Sherman had. Buell believed
that he must get his troops thoroughly organized, outfitted, and drilled before
he could do anything at all, and he did not think the wilderness road to
Knoxville offered anything worth a second thought; if he did anything at all
there it would simply be a gesture to assuage the President. Neither Mr.
Lincoln nor McClellan could ever budge Buell from this position.
¹⁵

So the east Tennessee uprising went
unsupported, and it collapsed, and men died because it was so. Confederate
authority was restored with a hard hand. Troops were moved in, and there were
raids, innumerable arrests, quick military trials with the head of a drum for
the presiding officer's desk and a running noose for the unlucky; some men were
hanged, and a great many were sent South to prison. Property of those who had
risen in revolt was confiscated, sometimes by due process, sometimes by
citizen-soldiers who had personal hatred for the property's owners. A
secessionist observer confessed that "old political animosities and private
grudges have been revived" and said that "bad men among our
friends" were hunting down the insurrectionists "with all the
ferocity of bloodhounds."
¹⁶
President Davis did his best to
keep the repressive measures within bounds, but civil war in the backwoods is
hard to restrain; like the immense national conflict of which it was a part
(and to which it was giving certain characteristics) it was more easily started
than controlled, and it could be extremely destructive. The Richmond editor's
notion that "the enemy must be made to feel the war" stated a rule
which the border people considered most sensible.

Sherman
and Buell may have been right. The road to east Tennessee was long and hard,
and the Union armies needed more equipment, more training, more of everything,
before they campaigned in such difficult country. The whole scheme was probably
just as erratic and impractical as those two officers thought it was. And yet
. . .

Lyon and Price had shown that even the
most grotesquely unready armies could do a great deal if the men in command
insisted on it. This war had not yet become regularized, and it offered amazing
possibilities to the determined irregular. (Tucked away in Johnston's army
there was a Tennessee cavalry colonel who would demonstrate this point repeatedly
in the years just ahead: an untutored planter and slave trader named Nathan
Bedford Forrest.) As U. S. Grant later pointed out, when both sides were
equally untrained and ill-equipped, the general who waited until he had
everything in textbook trim simply permitted his opponent to do the same. Quick
action might very well leave the fields and highways littered with the
fragments of armies made to campaign before they were ready for it, but it
might also win great victories.

East Tennessee must be reached through
Kentucky, and if the Federals did not use the direct road they must go roundabout.
This they at last did, taking two years and fighting terrible battles, moving
by way of such places as Shiloh and Vicksburg, Stone's River and Chickamauga,
losing more men in the process than the entire force they had in Kentucky when
this protective caution was being exercised.
¹⁷
The man who finally
got them there, General Grant, was as it happened one who believed thoroughly
in the possibility of accomplishing things with untrained volunteers. Grant had
hardly taken command at Cairo, at the beginning of September, before he was
planning to attack General Polk at Columbus. Overruled, he kept looking for a
way to take the offensive even while he was still trying to organize, arm, and
provision his raw troops, and early in November he believed that he had found
an opening. Actually, the opening was a bad one and Grant was unable to exploit
it, but the trouble was the unreadiness of Grant himself rather than the
unreadiness of his men.

General Fremont was marching into
southwestern Missouri to drive out Price. He had heard that Polk was sending
troops to Price, and so he ordered Grant to make a hostile demonstration at
Belmont, the steamboat landing just across the river from Columbus. This should
lead Polk to keep his troops at home, and it might also help to curb an
annoyingly active commander of guerrillas, Jeff Thompson, who had been running
wild in the country back of New Madrid, Missouri. The assignment was somewhat
muddled and it was based on faulty information: Polk had no intention of
sending men to Price, Thompson had temporarily withdrawn from the warpath, and
there really was not much for Grant to do. But Grant saw a chance for action,
and on the night of November
6
he
put 3100 men on steamboats, with two wooden gunboats for escort, dropped down
the Mississippi, and on the morning of November
7
took his men ashore a few miles upstream from
Belmont and went looking for trouble.

He
found it without delay. Polk had been warned that some kind of move was coming,
and when his scouts told him about the approach of Grant's flotilla he sent
Gideon Pillow with some 2500 men across the river to support the small Confederate
garrison in Belmont. By midmorning Grant's men were fully engaged with these
troops and a small but red-hot battle was on.

Grant
had things all his own way, during the morning. The Confederates were driven
out of their position, detached fragments huddling in the lee of the river
bank while the Federals went roistering through the captured camp, seizing
military equipment, picking up souvenirs, listening to speeches by their
officers, and in general celebrating a glorious victory before the battle was
half over. Polk had supposed that another column was going to attack Columbus
itself, but nothing of the kind happened, and before long he sent
reinforcements across to rally the beaten men and to cut off Grant's line of
retreat; meanwhile, his heavy guns opened a sharp fire on the captured camp,
and Grant's gunboats, totally unarmored, were unable to move in and make a
stand-up fight of it. In the end, the Federals had to fight their way out,
leaving all of the loot and many of their own wounded behind; they reached
their transports late in the afternoon and got away for Cairo, but the
Confederates could and did boast that Grant's men had been routed. Pillow
reported that in the pursuit his troops found quantities of "knapsacks,
arms, ammunition, blankets, overcoats, mess-chests, horses, wagons and dead
and wounded men," and a Louisiana soldier said that most of his regiment
was outfitted after the battle with captured blankets, coats, and rifled
muskets. Grant had lost more than 600 men and he had accomplished nothing whatever,
aside from inflicting equal losses on his foe and giving his men some combat
experience. His case was curiously like that of Robert E. Lee: the first
engagement under his command was not a success. Confederates who read their
Bibles noted that the Union troops came down from southern Illinois, which was
known locally as Egypt, and were beaten by Confederates, many of whom came from
Memphis, and they cited a Scriptural prophecy: "Egypt shall gather them,
and Memphis shall bury them."
¹⁸
Belmont, in short, might as
well not have been fought at all. It meant nothing and it depressed the spirits
of many Northern patriots, one officer writing bitterly that "it is called
a victory, but if such be victory God save us from defeat." It greatly encouraged
the Southerners, who felt that they had won a significant triumph; General Polk
believed that he had beaten off a serious attempt to take Columbus, and he got
formal congratulations from President Davis and General Johnston, along with a
resolution of thanks from the Confederate Congress.
¹⁸
But nothing
had been changed. General Johnston's bluff had not yet been called. Until it
was called, at Cumberland Gap, along the river, or somewhere else, by a soldier
whose will to fight outweighed his instincts of caution, Tennessee would remain
in Confederate hands.