This Hallowed Ground (13 page)

This it might possibly do. But the simple lack of know-how at the top was a fearful drag on the army’s movements and a depressant for army morale as well. The green soldiers could not help seeing that Frémont and his staff seemed much more concerned with military pomp and display than with the more prosaic business of keeping the army fed and moving. Full of enthusiasm though it was, the army began to feel that it was almost helpless — poor weapons, inadequate training, and bad leadership — and an Iowa soldier remarked that they were being led straight into the heart of the enemy’s country with “an inferior quality of unserviceable foreign-made guns, a lamentable lack of military method in the plans for the campaign, a want of confidence and harmony among the commanders who were to lead the army, and in many regiments discipline little better than that of an armed mob.” Illinois soldiers grumpily declared that the best they could say about this campaign in Missouri was that it was better than being in hell, and one volunteer wrote angrily about the failure of supplies and concluded: “If there ever was an empty, spread-eagle, show-off, horn-tooting general, it was Frémont.”
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With infinite effort the loose-jointed army plowed on down toward the southwest. Substantially outnumbered, the Confederates drew back from before them, and by the end of October Frémont had his troops in and around Springfield. A couple of incidental skirmishes, dignified
in Frémont’s later reminiscences as “admirably conducted engagements” and “a glorious victory,” had been fought, but although Frémont believed he was on the verge of bringing the main Confederate force to battle the chance actually was remote. Instead of being concentrated at Wilson’s Creek, nine miles away, where Lyon had been killed — which is where Frémont innocently supposed they were — the Confederates were a good sixty miles away, easily able to retreat further if they chose in case Frémont tried to come to grips with them.

Frémont’s objectives were two: to catch and destroy the Confederate army, and then to capture Memphis as a step toward New Orleans. Remote as Washington was, it was obvious even in the White House that he was never going to do either of these things, the way he was going. So to one of his subordinate officers in St. Louis, late in October, there came from Washington a sealed packet with instructions to get it into Frémont’s hands as quickly as possible.

But Lincoln had made this delivery subject to one condition — an extremely interesting one for the light it sheds on Lincoln’s attitude, even at that stage of the war, toward an erring strategist. If, when the messenger reached Frémont, “he shall then have, in personal command, fought and won a battle, or shall then be actually in a battle, or shall then be in the immediate presence of the enemy in expectation of a battle,” the envelope was not to be delivered; instead, the messenger was to keep it and check back for further instructions.
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Lincoln had had enough, in other words, but if Frémont would actually get into a full-dress fight all would be forgiven.… Then and throughout the war, inability to get in close and fight was the one trait in a general that Lincoln could not forgive. One good battle could always cover a multitude of military sins.

The messenger took off. Because it was commonly understood in St. Louis that Frémont had made arrangements to keep any order of recall from reaching him, the messenger was disguised as a Missouri farmer and was under orders to follow a little stratagem. He presented himself at Frémont’s camp and told the sentries that he was a messenger with information for the general from within the Rebel lines. He got at last to some of Frémont’s staff officers, who told him he could not see the general but could give them any information he had. He refused to do this — what he had to tell the general was for the general’s own ears — and after a whole day of this the staff finally decided that he was harmless and took him to Frémont’s tent. There the man produced the envelope and handed it over. Frémont opened it, asked wrathfully how this person had ever got through his lines, and read the bad news: over the signature of Winfield Scott, he was ordered to turn over his command to his ranking officer — a surly regular named David
Hunter, who had long been convinced of Frémont’s total ineffectiveness — after which he was to report to Washington, by letter, to see if anybody had any further orders for him.
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For the time being, at least, the Pathfinder had come to the end of the trail.

There had been the romantic General Frémont, and there still was the romantic General McClellan. In addition there was General U. S. Grant, who was not romantic at all — a stooped, rather scrubby little man whom nobody in particular had ever heard of — and the war was giving him a chance to make a modest new start in life.

In a way, Frémont was responsible for him. Grant had gone off to war that spring as colonel of the 21st Illinois Infantry, which put in a month or two in the summer guarding railroads in eastern Missouri, and he had been promoted chiefly because the inscrutable ways of Republican party politics entitled an Illinois congressman named Elihu B. Washburne to name one brigadier general. Washburne knew Grant and liked him and sent in his name; and somewhat to his surprise — for he had had a hard time getting into the war at all, that spring — Grant became a general. And what Frémont had done for him was to lift him out of a railroad-guarding billet in Missouri and give him command of the military District of southeastern Missouri, whose headquarters were in Cairo.

Like Grant himself, Cairo was more important than it looked. It was a muddy, untidy little place snugged down behind the levees at the angle between the Ohio and the Mississippi, and it had been a troop center right from the start. The first volunteer regiment raised in Illinois was sent down there, and others came soon afterward, so that before the war had fairly got started the Federals had a modest troop concentration at this key point, facing south.

Grant’s arrival at Cairo was not impressive. When his promotion came through he gave away his colonel’s uniform and sent for a brigadier’s outfit, and the new togs had not yet arrived; he showed up in civilian clothing, looking like anything but a soldier, and he wandered into the office of Colonel Richard Oglesby, the commanding officer, and wrote out an order relieving Oglesby and assuming the command himself. Oglesby looked at the order and then looked at Grant, and for a time he was undecided whether to obey the order or put this strange civilian under arrest as an imposter.
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He finally obeyed the order, whereupon a key piece in the machinery of the Civil War
dropped quietly into place and began to function.

Frémont said afterward that he appointed Grant because he saw in him “the soldierly qualities of self-poise, modesty, decision, attention to details”; qualities which he was not seeing much of in the flamboyant crowd around headquarters in St. Louis. Other officers had warned Frémont not to do it, “for reasons,” said the Pathfinder primly, “that were well known.” Grant was a West Pointer and he had served in the war with Mexico, and the officer corps of the little regular army was a clubby group in which everybody knew and gossiped about everybody else. In all of this gossip Grant had been typed — a drunkard and a failure, a man who had been forced to resign as infantry captain on the west coast in 1854 because he could not keep his hands off the bottle, and who had come back to an excessively undistinguished civilian career as Missouri farmer, St. Louis real estate agent, and most recently as manager of his father’s harness shop in Galena, Illinois. But Frémont was not impressed by this gossip. He was no West Pointer himself, and the regulars had never admitted him to the club, and, said Frémont, something about Grant’s manner was “sufficient to counteract the influence of what they said.” Anyway, he made the appointment, and as September began Grant was installed at Cairo.
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He was not yet the Grant of the familiar photographs. An army surgeon who came on from the east coast about this time found him short, spare, and somewhat unkempt, with a long flowing beard and puffing constantly on a big meerschaum with a curved ten-inch stem; a man who did not seem to have much to say and who would sit quietly at his desk, methodically going through his paper work as if he were turning all sorts of things over in his mind. He was unprepossessing at first glance but there was something about him that made a man take a second look, and the surgeon wrote: “As I sat and watched him then, and many an hour afterward, I found that his face grew upon me. His eyes were gentle, with a kind expression, and thoughtful.”
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Grant was at Cairo, which was becoming one of the great gateways to the war. Immense quantities of army stores were beginning to cram its warehouses, and the place was alive with blue-coated soldiers; one of these said it was like the mouth of a vast beehive, with a never-ending coming and going of recruits.… “They came on incoming trains and up-river steamboats. They went away on outgoing trains and down-river steamboats, and meantime they crossed and criss-crossed the town in every direction. They crowded its stations, hotels, boarding houses and waiting rooms, and, if it must be said, its saloons as well.”
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Eight miles up the Ohio was the town of Mound City; a tiny place which had come into being as part of a real estate boom that it had
never been able to live up to and which had been equipped by hopeful speculators with a range of brick warehouses to accommodate a river trade that had not developed. Grant’s medical director seized on these and converted them into a huge army hospital — one was badly needed because the hot river valley was unhealthy and there was much sickness. In the course of outfitting the place the doctor learned that it was all but impossible to get any work out of the soldiers who were detailed to help. To these Westerners, sweeping and scrubbing and setting up beds was women’s work, and they simply would not do it. He learned, too, that these boys from the farm and the small town, self-reliant to a fault at ordinary times, became totally helpless when they fell ill, requiring much more nursing than the civilian patients of his past experience.
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Mound City had a shipyard, in which four ironclad gunboats were being built; big snub-nosed craft with two and one half inches of armor on their slanting sides, pierced for thirteen guns, three of which were heavy-duty eight-inch Dahlgrens. It had been clear from the start that war could not be fought along the great rivers without warships, but Washington (to the navy’s intense disgust) had decreed that all of these inland operations should be under army control. So the War Department was having the gunboats built, the navy would man and operate them, and skippers and squadron commanders were required to take orders from the army. Thus, when he took over at Cairo, Grant found that he had a budding fleet under his control.

Part of it was already afloat and in operation: three river steamers hastily converted into gunboats, powerfully armed but very vulnerable to enemy fire because their boilers were above the waterline and they had nothing but five-inch oak bulwarks for armor. Since the Confederates had no gunboats at all in this part of the world, these fragile steamers were having no trouble, but they could not for five minutes stand up against shore fortifications, and therefore they could control the river only if the army occupied the banks.

To command its Mississippi squadron the navy had sent out Flag Officer Andrew Foote, a salty person with an engaging fringe of whiskers jutting out around a heart-of-oak face; a devout churchman who not infrequently delivered sermons to his crews and who was so well liked by the rank and file that he was even able to stop the grog ration without creating trouble. Luckily for the cause of the Union, he and Grant took to each other at once, and — in a command situation almost guaranteed to generate friction — they got along in perfect harmony.
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Grant had been at Cairo almost no time at all before he began to get action.

Across the river was Kentucky, and Kentucky was still neutral, but nobody imagined that the neutrality was going to last very much longer. Somebody was bound to violate it; if the Union and the Confederacy were going to make war on each other along the underside of the Middle West, Kentucky was bound to become involved, and the only real question was when and how it would happen. At Cairo, Grant was looking down the river, turning over plans for a thrust toward Tennessee; and in northwestern Tennessee there was a Confederate army under Major General Leonidas Polk, former bishop in the Episcopal Church, who had gone to West Point with Jefferson Davis and who now was responsible for keeping the Yankees from coming down the Mississippi.

On the Mississippi there was a little Kentucky town named Columbus, important for two reasons: it was the northern terminus of a southern railroad line, and it was perched on high bluffs which, if properly fortified, no northern gunboats could pass. Bishop Polk suspected that the Federals were about to put up works on the opposite Missouri shore, and he decided to beat them to the punch. On September 4 he acted, disregarding Kentucky neutrality and sending troops over the state line to occupy and fortify Columbus.

Grant learned of this at once, and the surgeon who had been watching him with growing interest discovered that one of his early judgments was correct — the man could act swiftly in an emergency.

Grant began by sending a telegram to the Speaker of the Kentucky House of Representatives at Frankfort, telling him that the lawless Confederates had wantonly violated the state’s neutrality. Then he got off another wire to Frémont in St. Louis, announcing that unless he was quickly ordered not to he would that night move up the Ohio and occupy the Kentucky city of Paducah. When he got no reply — he did not wait very long for it — he loaded two regiments on river steamers, got Foote to bring up two of the converted wooden gunboats, and at midnight his flotilla set off.
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