Terrible Swift Sword (23 page)

At this distance that thinking is rather
hard to trace. General Halleck, who commanded everything west of the Cumberland,
had patiently explained to President Lincoln that too much haste would be
ruinous, and he was not by nature impetuous. Still, he had sent Grant and
Foote out to investigate the western end of General Johnston's line, and Grant
and Foote had seen weakness there and had been clamoring for action. Halleck
did not especially want to act, he had a reserved opinion of General Grant (who
had been typed as a rough-hewn man who drank too much) and he did not really
have to listen to Foote, who was, although a naval officer, Halleck's own
subordinate, responsible for certain strange auxiliaries called gunboats. But
Halleck had a sensitive ear and he had heard what the President and the
Secretary of War were saying, and when he learned that Beauregard was bringing
reinforcements he felt that something ought to be done quickly. So he told
Grant and Foote to go ahead and try their luck.

Their luck was in. Grant and Foote came
up to Fort Henry on February 6 and found that the place was a sham. It was
inexpertly built on low ground and the Tennessee River was in flood; the high
ground across the river, which the Confederates should have fortified in the
first place, was largely unoccupied, its hillsides furrowed by the beginning of
trenches but wholly harmless to invaders. Grant had brought 15,000 soldiers,
and he put them ashore and marched up the two sides of the river to invest the
fortifications and prepare for an assault, and Foote steamed up against the
current and opened a preliminary bombardment. The fort collapsed almost at the
first touch. Its commanding officer, Brigadier General Lloyd Tilghman, knew
that the place was indefensible, and before Grant drew his lines Tilghman sent
most of his men off to Fort Donelson, twelve miles to the east, staying himself
with the handful retained to work the guns. He and the gunners made a good
fight, putting one of Foote's gunboats out of action, causing men to die amid
flying splinters and scalding steam; but the Navy's big guns broke his
parapets, dismounted his guns and dismembered some of the gunners, and by early
afternoon Tilghman could see that it was time to quit. He hauled down his flag
and surrendered to the Navy while Grant's army was still getting into position,
and the Federals had gained one of the easiest and most significant victories
of the entire war. The victory surprised its authors. Grant had supposed that
his men would have to do a good deal of hard fighting, and Foote mildly
confessed to Secretary Welles: "I made a bold dash at Fort Henry to inspire
terror, & it succeeded." A newspaper correspondent remarked acidly
that "Gen. Grant evidently did not understand that Commodore Foote . . .
believes in energetic action at close quarters," and an infantryman said
the soldiers "really felt sore at the sailors for their taking of the fort
before we had a chance to help them."
³

The fall of Fort Henry left General Johnston
in a desperate situation. The railway line was gone forever, the Tennessee
River now was an undefended highway for the Federal invader, running all the
way to northern Alabama—Foote sent Lieutenant S. L. Phelps and three unarmored
gunboats ranging up the river as soon as the fort surrendered, to spread alarm
all through the South—and General Johnston's army, always inadequate, was broken
squarely in half. When he consulted his lieutenants the day after the fort was
taken, Johnston had no illusions about his prospects.

Johnston
met with Beauregard, who was still appalled by his discovery of the essential
weakness of the western army, and with his second-in-command at Bowling Green,
Major General William J. Hardee, a solid officer who had written a textbook on
tactics before the war: in Northern and Southern armies alike, untrained
company officers were desperately trying to learn their new trade by studying
Hardee. The Confederates found that they could do one of two unsatisfactory
things—concentrate at Fort Donelson immediately and try to destroy Grant before
he could be reinforced, or evacuate the fort at once and beat a speedy retreat
to some place in southwestern Tennessee. The first looked a little too much
like putting all of the eggs in one insecure basket—if this eastern half of
Johnston's severed army were lost the Confederacy itself would probably be lost
shortly afterward—and yet the other choice was not inviting either. To retreat
meant, unquestionably, the loss of Nashville, capital of Tennessee, a supply
depot of vast importance and an industrial center of considerable consequence.
Nashville had never been fortified, and even if it had been a Federal advance
up the Tennessee would quickly make it untenable; if it was to be saved, the
only place to save it was at Fort Donelson. Johnston had held his line, from
the beginning, largely because he had convinced the Federals that he was much
stronger than was actually the case. Unfortunately, the Confederacy also had
come to believe the same thing. If it now lost Tennessee simply because a few
gunboats had spent one morning bombarding one lonely fort, the shock to public
morale would be disastrous.

He did what he
thought was best, and the people who came around a bit later to complain that
he was wrong never had to carry the load he was carrying on February 7, 1862;
and it might be added that when the whole thing blew up in his face he did not
offer excuses or blame somebody else. Johnston tried to go down the middle. He
would put about half of the men he had available (starting with the 8000 at
Clarksville) into Fort Donelson, in the thin hope that they could somehow beat
Grant, Foote and the terrible gunboats —those gunboats, black monsters with
slanting sides, slow-moving, fearfully armed, apparently irresistible—and with
the rest he would retreat as fast as he could and as far as he had to. He told
Beauregard to get over to Columbus and take charge of the western half of the
army, to leave enough men to hold the Mississippi River forts and to take everybody
else south in the hope that there could be a reunion somewhere along the
southern border of Tennessee. Then he struck his tents and marched.

So
the Confederates evacuated Bowling Green, while cautious Buell drew nigh to
this empty stronghold with powerful misgivings. Of the fearsome fighting men
whom he commanded, Johnston sent nearly half into Fort Donelson—not enough to
defeat Grant, too many for his army to lose— and with the rest he went
unhappily down to Nashville, looking for a haven and hoping for the best. The
shadow of dark wings was over him. He was moving toward a place he had never
heard of, a stumpy clearing on high ground above the Tennessee River near a
bleak country meetinghouse known as Shiloh Church, where he had an appointment
with a Yankee bullet: a collective appointment, so to speak, which he shared
with thousands of others. When he rode out of Bowling Green he had just two
months to live.

On the Federal side, General Grant
waited for the infamous roads along the Tennessee to dry out a bit, and then
he marched east to the tangled ridges overlooking the Cumberland River, where
Fort Donelson and its inadequate trench system awaited him. The weather was
warm and his men were jubilant, and as they got out of the mud and hit the good
roads on high ground they went along brightly, tossing overcoats and blankets
into the dead grass by the roadside, supposing that the weather would always be
mild.

The whole business was just a little
more than the Federal high command could digest. When General Buell learned
that Halleck's people were going to move up the rivers he wrote that the idea
was strategically sound but that it was premature, poorly organized,
undertaken without his consent. He sensed as well that the war might be moving
out from under him. He had just explained to Washington that it was not possible
to go through Cumberland Gap into East Tennessee, because the roads were so
bad and the country was so devoid of forage; yet even while Grant and Foote
were on their way to Fort Henry he had sent a strange telegram to General
Thomas, off to the east, asking impatiently: "What now is the condition of
the roads? How soon could you march and how long do you suppose it would take
you to reach Knox-ville? Are your supplies accumulating in sufficient quantity
for a start? How is the road in advance likely to be affected by the passage of
successive trains? What dependence can you place in supplies along it,
particularly forage? Do you hear of any organization of a force there?"
(Nothing whatever came of this.) Halleck meanwhile was bombarding both Buell
and McClellan with anxious messages saying that the crisis of the war was at
hand, that he needed support, and that the whole western theater of operations
ought to be under one man, who obviously should be General Halleck.
⁴
And Grant moved on to Fort Donelson, while Foote took his ironclads back to the
Ohio and came plugging up the Cumberland to attack the fort's water batteries.

Grant was doing no more than follow a
soldier's instinct to get at the enemy and hit him. Originally, Fort Henry had
been the objective. Once taken, it was to be fortified and held, and the blow
at Fort Donelson was incidental; when he left Cairo to go up the Tennessee,
Grant expected to be back at the base in a few days, and after Fort Henry
surrendered Grant airily wired to Halleck: "I shall take and destroy Fort
Donelson on the 8th and return to Fort Henry." None of the Federals quite
understood that the Confederate works on the Cumberland amounted to much, and
the pre-battle planning, such as it was, usually mentioned the town of Dover
rather than the fort itself.
⁵
There was no way to know that Grant's
twelve-mile march from the Tennessee to the Cumberland was one of the
epoch-making movements of the war.

It might have been better if Grant had
moved faster. On February 8, Donelson was weakly held, and Grant's 15,000 could
have overrun the place without much trouble. But it took much longer than Grant
had supposed to get the march organized, and it was February 12 before his
troops got to the scene and prepared to fight; and by this time Johnston had
sent in powerful reinforcements, so that Fort Donelson was held by 16,000 men
or more—a larger force, on that day, than Grant had with him, although more
Federal troops were on the way to join him. Instead of pushing over an
insignificant outwork Grant's army was moving into the biggest battle yet
fought in the west.

But war goes by a strange logic, and in
the end the delay helped the Federal cause mightily simply because it enormously
increased the value of the prize that could be won. Instead of taking a fort
which sooner or later must fall anyway, Grant now had the opportunity to
destroy a significant part of Johnston's army—a much larger part than Johnston
could afford to lose. Quite unintentionally, Grant had permitted his opponent
to make a huge mistake; if he could take advantage of it he could win one of
the war's greatest victories.

Fort
Donelson had originally been laid out as a work to keep Yankee steamboats from
coming up the Cumberland, and its core was a set of water batteries overlooking
a long stretch of the river; a dozen guns, or thereabouts, only two of them
really heavy enough to fight armored gunboats, manned by enthusiastic but
poorly trained gun crews. To protect these batteries against attack by land,
the Confederates had dug a long, irregular line of enclosing trenches which ran
for several miles along the inland ridges, and these trenches now were very
strongly held. When the Federals got ready to fight, their obvious tactic was
to use what they had learned at Fort Henry: surround the place with troops and
then bring up the gunboats to hammer the fort into submission. With the water
batteries destroyed and the fleet in control of the river, and with Union
troops blocking all the exits by land, the Confederates could do nothing but
surrender.

That
put it up to Flag Officer Foote. He was a hardhead who followed his own rules:
Regular Navy to the core, a little fussy—it was recalled that when the Navy
subdued certain Chinese forts in the fifties Foote had led a storming party
across rice fields and over ditches under heavy fire, carefully holding a big
umbrella over his head against the oppressive oriental sun. He believed in
total abstinence, the abolition of profane swearing, and a strict observance of
the Sabbath, and he had somehow been able to make Old Navy shellbacks abide by
these principles without mutiny. He had misgivings about this attack at Fort
Donelson, because he knew that his ironclads were not really as strong as
people thought, but the army was in a hurry so he went into battle somewhat
against his better judgment.
⁶
He came up the river on the afternoon
of February 14 with four ironclads,
Pittsburgh,
St. Louis, Carondelet,
and
Louisville,
followed by the unarmored gunboats
Tyler
and
Conestoga,
and when he was about a mile from the water
batteries he opened fire. He had a megaphone and he kept popping in and out of
the pilothouse on
St. Louis,
shouting
instructions to his captains.

At
long range he had all the advantage, since the Confederate guns were too light
to do much damage at any distance, and if he had stayed far away and kept on
firing he probably could have put the water batteries out of action. But the
Fort Henry lesson had been learned a bit too well. He had won there by coming
in close and so he came in close now, steaming up to a mere 400 yards, and here
the Rebel guns could hurt him.
St. Louis
was
struck fifty-nine times and drifted downstream out of action, steering gear
smashed, pilothouse wrecked, pilot killed, Foote himself wounded.
Louisville
also was disabled and drifted after the
flagship, and then the two other ironclads collided,
Pittsburgh
was struck along the waterline and seemed
ready to sink, and before the day ended the whole squadron had retired and the
bombardment had been an expensive failure. Fort Donelson was going to be an Army
fight.