The expedition was in the nature of a raid rather than conquest and occupation. The Confederates under Gen. Sterling Price were using Belmont for an induction and training center and reinforcement channel both to and from their powerful new fortifications at Columbus, Kentucky, on the opposite shore.
Columbus had become a hot potato as the war intensified. At the beginning of the conflict Kentucky, a slave state divided almost evenly in sentiment between North and South, tried to remain neutral, which was to say that its legislature voted not to take sides in the contest and declared that neither Federal nor Rebel troops were welcome on its soil. It was a notion that would have been almost laughable had the stakes not been so high, for neither the Union nor the Confederacy was going to leave Kentucky be.
However, its fragile neutrality lasted through the spring and summer of 1861, with neither Lincoln—who was born there—nor Jefferson Davis—who also was born in the state and attended college there—wishing to disturb the equipoise. Pressure continued to build, however, and Kentucky’s internal politics seethed with volatile and rancid hatreds. At the end of the summer the Union general William “Bull” Nelson, a bombastic former Annapolis graduate and naval officer and native Kentuckian, could stand it no longer. He established a Union recruiting camp right in the middle of the state and defied the legislature to remove it. This “violation” of Kentucky’s neutrality by the Yankees prompted the Rebel general Leonidas Polk, formerly the Episcopal bishop of Louisiana, and a West Point classmate of Jefferson Davis’s, to order troops to take Columbus, which was both a tactical and strategic strongpoint on the Mississippi.
Located on a curve in the river, Columbus’s most commanding feature were the imposing bluffs that reared nearly 180 feet straight up from the banks almost like the ramparts of a medieval castle. (In one of his many decisions-never-made, Frémont had nearly ordered Grant to take the place, but the Rebel Polk beat him to it on September 2, 1861.) The Confederates set out to make Columbus impregnable by land or sea, installing 140 large guns, underwater mines, and a gigantic anchor chain with links eight inches thick that spanned a solid mile and was connected to a capstan across the river at Belmont, from where it could be lifted from the bottom and wound tight to block Northern shipping. The fortifications were manned by a small army of 17,000 troops served by a line of the Mobile and Ohio Railroad to Memphis and points south. Thus Columbus became the end of the end of the line so far as Yankee navigation of the Mississippi was concerned. Leonidas Polk made the installation so formidable-looking that Union intelligence estimated some 80,000 Rebels inhabited the place.
Initially, Grant’s intention had been to annihilate both Columbus and Belmont, but Frémont had not given him enough troops to do the job, so now the best he could hope for was to disrupt the Rebel encampment at Belmont and perhaps forestall its expansion. Union strategy in the West at this point seemed more bent on securing places than invading the Confederate South, which Grant clearly saw as the way to victory, and the sooner the better. He had a vision of amphibious operations that other officers seemed to lack. He saw the rivers as an easy way to get to the Rebel heartland, deep into Tennessee to places like Corinth, Nashville, and even Shiloh, which at that point he’d never heard of.
Military bureaucracy continued to block his way, but at Belmont Grant got off to a good enough start, landing without opposition about two miles north of the Confederates and marching in line of battle through a landscape of woods and cornfields. The Rebels had been forewarned by their lookouts across the river at Columbus, but Grant’s attack still took them more or less by surprise. Quickly the brisk fire from Grant’s Yankees had the Confederates scrambling down six-foot-tall bluffs along the riverbanks. It looked as though an easy victory had been obtained, but there then occurred an evil that dogged commanders on both sides all through the conflict.
As Grant lamented afterward, if his men had pressed the attack, the Rebels would have been either driven into the river or forced to surrender. Instead, his soldiers began looting the Confederate tents. “The moment the enemy camp was reached,” Grant bitterly complained, “our men laid down their arms and commenced rummaging the tents to pick up trophies.6 Some of the higher officers were little better than the privates. They galloped about from one cluster of men to the other, and at every halt delivered a short eulogy upon the Union cause and the achievements of the command.”
Not only that, but while the looting progressed the Confederates managed to reorganize themselves and began working upriver, out of sight beneath the bank, so as to get between Grant and his troop transports. Even worse, Union soldiers suddenly saw coming full steam across the river from the fort at Columbus Rebel troopships crammed “from boiler deck to roof” with enemy reinforcements.
It was all Grant could do to escape. He began organizing his men to retreat back to the ships and detailed others to burn the Rebel camp, but then the Confederate artillery on the opposite shore—until now unsure of who was where—opened up on them. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the Rebels along the riverbank began to emerge and form into a battle line, and some of Grant’s men began to shout, “We are surrounded!”
As Grant told it later, “When I announced that we had cut our way in, and could cut our way out just as well, it seemed a new revelation.” Somehow Grant’s people managed to get on the boats and away before a catastrophe befell them, but it was a narrowly run operation. It was said that the general himself had to leap his horse from the bank and scramble onto the deck of a departing steamer. According to Grant, the battle proved two things: His troops would fight and the Confederates now knew they could not operate in Missouri with impunity.
The press did not see it that way, however, characterizing the Battle of Belmont as a retreat that was “wholly unnecessary and barren of results, nor the possibility of them from the beginning.” Four hundred eighty-five Union soldiers were killed, wounded, or captured; Rebel losses were put at about the same. Never mind that the newspapers lampooned him, Grant had taken his first major steps down what would be a long, bloody road.
The question now became: What next? His inclination remained to attack the big Rebel installations at Columbus, Kentucky, which had supplied those last-minute reinforcements at the Belmont fight. But Frémont still would not give him the troops. Then a stroke of luck: Grant was hardly returned from the Belmont raid when Lincoln fired Frémont for issuing his own, premature “emancipation proclamation” and replaced him with the nervous-natured, bug-eyed Maj. Gen. Henry Halleck, who had written several military textbooks but never fought a battle.
Known as “Old Brains,” the 47-year-old Halleck had been ranked number three in his West Point class of ’39, and he was married to the granddaughter of Alexander Hamilton. During the Mexican War he was assigned to the West Coast, where he soon resigned his commission and became a wealthy lawyer and land speculator, but he returned to the army when war broke out. Not as cautious as Frémont, perhaps, Halleck nevertheless was hesitant to fight battles unless he had complete military superiority, which was difficult enough, given that Union intelligence estimates routinely doubled, or even tripled, the numbers of the Confederate enemy.
To Grant the departure of the ineffectual and aloof Frémont must have seemed a godsend, but Halleck was a different character entirely. An ambitious martinet who tended to connive and micromanage, Halleck was particularly overbearing where his generals were concerned, and Grant was singled out for special oversight because of rumors Halleck had picked up about his drinking. In a subterfuge drenched in irony, Halleck sent to Grant the young, energetic colonel James McPherson, who had finished first in his class at the Academy in 1853. Ostensibly, McPherson—who had once been on Halleck’s staff—was to be Grant’s chief engineering officer, but in fact he was meant also to serve as Halleck’s spy. McPherson, however, turned out to be utterly loyal to Grant and soon became one of his most trusted officers.
Then, in an almost classic example of “what the right hand giveth, th
e left hand taketh away,” Halleck also sent to Grant Col. John A. McClernand, a lawyer with no previous military experience who was soon to join the class of “political generals” that so vexed the Federal Army of the West. A Democrat and something of a gasbag, McClernand was responsible for at least some of the rumors of Grant’s drunkenness, but he had also formed a political friendship with Lincoln that the President found indispensable. Though personally brave, McClernand proved to be an opportunist who sought to glorify himself at every turn and, unlike the steadfast McPherson, caused Grant much trouble as the war wore on.
It was McPherson who came up with the idea to attack Fort Henry, the maneuver that launched Grant’s meteoric rise. Knowing they lacked the manpower to overcome Columbus, McPherson studied the maps and the scouting reports—with Grant “looking over his shoulder and puffing relentlessly on his pipe”—and contemplated the scheme to bypass Columbus entirely and end the Union logjam in the West.
Fifty miles east of Columbus, near the Kentucky-Tennessee border, the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers come within ten miles of each other (each flowing north) before they empty into the Ohio, which in turn flows into the Mississippi. The Confederates had installed fortresses on each of these rivers, blocking the Federal armies from their heartland by waterway. Near the confluence of the Tennessee and the Ohio stood the Rebel Fort Henry; if it fell, the South would be open to invasion all the way into northern Alabama—an inviting prospect for the Union. But Grant took it even further. If Fort Henry fell, then Fort Donelson, on the Cumberland less than a dozen miles away, would also become vulnerable. And the Cumberland was the key to the grand prize of the mid-South: Nashville.
Grant and McPherson carefully formulated an amphibious attack integrating the navy and its powerful new ironclads, with which they felt they could cleave the Confederacy in two east of the Mississippi River all the way down to the Alabama-Mississippi border. On January 6, 1862, Grant carried this proposal to his new boss, Major General Halleck, in St. Louis, where both he and it were received with “such little cordiality” that, Grant said later, “I was cut short as if my plan was preposterous.”
1 Brevet was a temporary rank given for bravery or meritorious service. It is not permanent for purposes of pay or promotion.
2 Much later, in his memoirs, Grant wrote somewhat peculiarly that if he had in fact voted in 1860 it would have been for the Democrat, Stephen A. Douglas, adding, however, that he would have preferred to vote for Lincoln.
3 The document of manumission states that Grant had bought Jones, but others, including historian Brooks Simpson, suggest that Jones might have come as a gift.
4 It has been surmised that Grant’s drunken episode in McClellan’s presence at the officers’ mess at Fort Vancouver may have had something to do with this obvious snub.
5 A Union warship captain intercepted the British steamship Trent in the Atlantic and removed and arrested two Confederate emissaries en route to London. The incident nearly brought England into the war.
6 Pillaging has been the bane of armies since time immemorial; it was certainly a factor at Shiloh.
CHAPTER 4
NOTHING CAN BE DONE
HALLECK’S ODD AND DISCOURTEOUS BEHAVIOR is a perfect illustration of the kind of paralysis that gripped the Union in the early years of the war. Although the account in Grant’s memoirs was much abbreviated, an expanded version of the encounter from one of Grant’s staff members, Col. John Wesley Emerson, is even more surprising.
According to Emerson, who said he had spoken with an officer who was present at the meeting, Halleck “shook hands with Grant rather stiffly, then sat at his desk shuffling papers, and told Grant to ‘state briefly the nature of the business connected with your command which brought you to headquarters.’ Grant took out a map, unfolded it, and began to explain the situation at Fort Henry and Fort Donelson, saying that with an army of twenty-five thousand men, aided by the gunboats, he could take both forts in ten days.
“Halleck stopped him by asking coldly, ‘Is there anything connected with the good of your command that you would wish to discuss?’
“Grant tried to trace the projected movement on his map, but Halleck stood up, waved the map aside, and said, ‘All of this, General Grant, relates to the business of the general commanding the department. When he wishes to consult you on the subject, he will notify you.’
“Having said this, Halleck stalked out, leaving Grant to pocket his map and go back to Cairo.”1
The historian Bruce Catton sums up Halleck this way—and no one could say it better—“What Halleck knew about war came out of books, and when the time came for action he would make war in a bookish manner. He was, in addition, waspish, petulant, gossipy, often rather pompous, and afflicted with the habit of passing the buck.”
What Ulysses Grant made of Halleck’s treatment is anybody’s guess; in Emerson’s version, the snub was so blatant that it would have been hard not to find it highly offensive, but all Grant would say in his memoirs was that he returned to Cairo “very much crestfallen.” Yet in his letters to Julia around this time Grant somehow seemed to believe that Halleck was a great man and, more than that, a good friend. It was only much later, after the war was over and all the papers were revealed, that Grant discovered what a chameleon Henry Halleck could be.
Indeed, Halleck had been considering strategy along the same lines that Grant had been trying to propose, which makes his refusal to share that information with Grant all the more odd, and his abrupt behavior toward him almost inexplicable. The only logical explanation could have been if Halleck believed that such a move was so delicate as to be kept top secret even from Grant. Yet that calls into question why any department commander would keep in his employ a senior general who could not be trusted—especially when it was his men who were going to do the fighting.
Recently Halleck had telegraphed McClellan—who had become the new commander in chief of the army after old Winfield Scott was forced into retirement—that Grant’s plan, an attack up the rivers, was exactly the right strategy in his department. Responding to McClellan’s suggestion that Halleck move straight down the Mississippi and take Columbus, “Old Brains” countered that “a much more feasible plan is to move up the Cumberland and the Tennessee, making Nashville the first objective point. Columbus,” he continued, “cannot be taken without a terrible loss of life. However, it can be turned, and forced to surrender, but the plan should not be attempted without a large force, not less than 60,000 men.”
The only difference between Grant’s plan and Halleck’s was that Grant proposed to do it with 25,000 troops (of which he already had 20,000 on hand). But Halleck required more than twice that many men, which he didn’t have, and the only source for them would be to borrow from General Buell’s force at Louisville, which was beyond his authority.
Buell, in turn, was being pressured by McClellan to launch an all-out assault into eastern Tennessee and break up the Confederate rail lines there. That was because McClellan was planning his own movement to capture Richmond and end the war—or so he said. Instead of marching his army straight south to the Rebel capital—an approach that had ended so disastrously the previous summer at the Battle of Bull Run—“Little Mac” intended to move his 100,000-man host by steamship to the tip of the Virginia peninsula and attack Richmond from the east. In order to do so, he insisted that Buell clear and hold eastern Tennessee and its rail lines so that the Confederates could not reinforce their Virginia army before he captured Richmond. This was truly “long range” strategy.
Buell complained that he could not move into eastern Tennessee because the Confederates would reinforce the army there with men from their base in Columbus, and possibly defeat him (he also believed in the inflated 60,000-man figure). And when, in turn, McClellan prodded Halleck about attacking and destroying Columbus he got nowhere. Even Halleck’s counterproposal to attack up the Cumberland and the Tennessee would require him to borrow twenty or thirty thousand soldiers from B
uell, who claimed he was already short of men for the Tennessee operation. The result was military deadlock both east and west—precisely the kind of self-inflicted stalemate that Lincoln abhorred and yet seemed helpless to prevent.
In early January the President sent a telegram to each of his senior commanders expressing his desire that Federal armies begin moving south to crush the rebellion. He even set a timetable for the kickoff: no later than February 22, 1862, which happened to be George Washington’s birthday. When Lincoln approached Halleck about attacking Columbus to break the logjam, “Old Brains” brought to bear all of his considerable military scholarship and appended this final appraisal for the President’s edification: “To operate on exterior lines against an enemy occupying a central position will fail, as it has always failed in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred. It is condemned by every military authority I have ever read.”
To this Lincoln dejectedly appended a note of his own on the envelope, apparently for posterity’s sake: “Within is a copy of a letter just received from General Halleck. It is exceedingly discouraging. As everywhere else, nothing can be done.”
Thus Halleck fiddled while the Confederates fortified and built their schemes to retake Kentucky and bring the war back to the banks of the Ohio. There was another issue, too, which shed considerable light on the military differences between Halleck and Grant. When the subject of Columbus had come up, Halleck pulled out his maps and books and concluded, rightly so, that if his Federal army captured the river forts and took Nashville, Columbus would be turned and the Confederates would likely abandon it, because their southern lines of communication and supply would have been severed. Thus Columbus would fall into Union hands.
Here is how Grant approached the same situation. During a discussion with some of his senior officers about capturing Fort Henry and Fort Donelson, someone brought up the question of whether that would cause the Confederates to abandon Columbus—to which Grant countered that it was “better [to] attack and capture their entire force where they are. Why allow them to withdraw and [have to] follow and fight them in the interior of Mississippi or Alabama under greater disadvantages?” Grant was having none of Halleck’s Jomini–like “grand turning movements.” He wanted to get at the enemy and wipe him out, wherever and whenever he was found.