The transports put in to the bank about three miles below the fort, out of artillery range, and began debarking the troops under the firing cover of Foote’s four ironclads—the Essex, Carondelet, St. Louis, and the commodore’s flagship, Cincinnati—then returned to Paducah, 50 miles downstream, for more soldiers.
By the morning of February 6 all was in place. While Grant’s 15,000 soldiers floundered through the miry marshes toward Fort Henry, Foote’s big black ironclads steamed upriver in line of battle, four abreast. The firing commenced at a range of about one mile.
Inside Fort Henry there was an air of “unwonted animation,” according to Capt. Jesse Taylor of the Confederate States Navy—late of the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis—who had been tapped to train the artillerists within Fort Henry in the management of large, anti-warship cannons. Artillery for the Confederacy was a major problem at that stage of the war. The Rebels had only what they had seized from Federal arsenals located in the South, which consisted mainly of field guns and the larger caliber cannons from shore batteries along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. When war broke out there were no cannon foundries in the South, and it would be some time before the Confederates got these up and running.
Just before the Yankee onslaught General Tilghman had called together his senior commanders, including the enigmatic cavalry commander Nathan Bedford Forrest, and all agreed that their 3,500 or so men, “armed with shot-guns and hunting rifles,” would be no match for Grant’s thousands. The sensible plan, then, was to evacuate the men to Fort Donelson and combine with its 12,000 troops to make a stand on the Cumberland. In the meantime, “recognizing the difficulty of withdrawing undisciplined troops from the front of an active and superior opponent,” Tilghman turned to Captain Taylor with a question: “Can you hold out for one hour against a determined attack?” When the reply was affirmative, Tilghman began preparing his men for the 12-mile march to Fort Donelson, leaving Taylor and his 54 artillerists to their fate.
When he first arrived at the fort Taylor had felt an ill-omened shiver of fear after noticing “a high water mark that the river had left on a tree which convinced me that we had a more dangerous foe to contend with than the Federals—namely, the river itself.” When he began directing his gunners toward Foote’s attack, the river was running 14 feet higher than normal. It had risen nearly to the mouths of the cannons and was threatening the ammunition magazine itself. Many of the gunners were up to their knees in water while they waited for the range to close.
As the gunboats “slowly passed up this narrow stream” the tension aboard the Yankee warships was acute. In the wheelhouse of Carondelet, her captain, Henry Walke, recorded that “not a sound could be heard or a moving object seen in the dense woods which overhung the dark and swollen river.” The gun crews of Carondelet stood silent at their posts. “About noon,” Walke said, “the fort and the Confederate flag came suddenly into view, the barracks, the new earthworks, and the great guns well-manned.” Cincinnati, Foote’s flagship, fired the first shot, which was a signal for all to commence firing.
Watching from the ramparts of Fort Henry, where he had taken personal charge of a powerful 6-inch Whitworth rifle, Captain Taylor later wrote: “As [the ironclads] swung into the main channel they showed one broad and leaping sheet of flame. The command was given to commence firing from the fort. The action now became general, and for the next twenty or thirty minutes was, on both sides, as deliberate, rapid, and accurate as a heart could wish, and apparently inclined in favor of the fort.”
Aboard the hard-fighting but luckless Essex the steering apparatus had been shot away and she turned broadside in the river. Seventy shots had been fired from her 9-inch guns when calamity struck. A shell from the fort pierced the iron casemate—which was thinner amidships—decapitated the master’s mate, and went on to strike the middle boiler, releasing a horrible cloud of scalding steam. The captain, who had been standing nearby, was fearfully burned and leaped out a porthole. A number of officers and crew were killed outright at their posts, while many others were “writhing in their last agony.” In the pilothouse the steersman was found scalded to death, “standing erect, his left hand holding the spoke and his right hand grasping the signal-bell rope.” Everyone else in the wheelhouse was scalded to death, including an ammunition bearer who was found still on his knees, “in the act of taking a shell from the box to hand to the loader. The escaping steam had struck him square in the face, and he met death in that position.”6
Thirty-two of Essex’s officers and crew were killed, wounded, or missing in this mishap, and the vessel itself fell out of the action and began twisting helplessly downstream. A number of her scalded crew had jumped into the water and many of these presumably drowned, as they were never heard from again.
Foote’s flagship Cincinnati received 32 hits from the fort. “Her chimneys, after-cabin, and boats were completely riddled,” Walke said. “I happened to be looking at the flag-steamer when one of the enemy’s heavy shot struck her. It had the effect of a thunder-bolt, ripping her side timbers and scattering the splinters over the vessel.”
Foote did not slacken speed but instead brought the three remaining ironclads nearer to the fort, and nearer yet, until he was standing within the almost unheard of distance of 200 yards, where he defiantly exchanged shot and shell with the Rebel artillery.
Inside the fort the Rebel captain Taylor was almost at the end of his rope. He had started the fight with eight 32-pounder cannons, two 42-pounders, and one 128-pounder, known as a Columbiad.7 He also had five 18-pounder siege guns as well as the dangerous rifled Whitworth gun that could crack a level shot a mile and more with terrifying accuracy. Its conical projectile was said to make an eerie noise, which caused Captain Walke on the Carondelet to note, “The wild whistle of their rifle-shells was heard on every side of us.”
Taylor had promised to give Tilghman an hour for his men to get a head start on Grant’s army; he had been fighting now for two hours, and against all odds. The rising river was nearly upon him and the protective earthen ramparts of Fort Henry had been torn to pieces by the relentless cannon fire of Foote’s ironclads.
Taylor had been directing the fire of the rifled gun when a messenger arrived asking that he go with him to the Columbiad to confer with General Tilghman who, to everyone’s surprise, had returned to the fort to share in its fate. Lucky for Taylor, because no sooner had he departed than the rifled cannon burst, killing all those serving it and severely injuring others in the immediate vicinity. What is more, just as Taylor reached General Tilghman “a sudden exclamation” was uttered by someone serving the Columbiad, which, upon Taylor’s investigation, proved to have been evoked by the accidental spiking of the fort’s most effective weapon by an inexperienced cannoneer. With both the Whitworth rifle and the Columbiad now out of action, Commodore Foote pressed his attack, and Yankee shells and shot quickly struck two of the 32-pounders, killing or wounding all the men around them.
After a short consultation, Tilghman decided that further resistance “would only result in a useless loss of life,” and he ordered the Confederate flag hauled down. After the surrender a number of Foote’s officers visited the fort—most of them “friends, messmates,” or at least “known” to Captain Taylor from the old navy. General Tilghman and the other Rebel officers, himself included, “were treated with every courtesy,” Taylor reported. Presently, Grant arrived for a look-see. “At the time,” Taylor wrote, “he impressed me as a modest, amiable, kind-hearted but resolute man.”
After the victory at Fort Henry, Foote withdrew his ironclads from the Tennessee and went back to Cairo—flying the huge Rebel flag from the fort upside down from his halyard mast—to deal with the battle damage. Meanwhile, the three wooden gunboats, Lexington, Tyler, and Conestoga embarked on a spectacular joyride on the Tennessee, steaming all the way into northern Alabama and Mississippi, blowing up bridges, trestles, and any Southern steamboat unlucky enough to get in their way. This caused a wild panic among t
he population, which had been assured that the abominable Yankees would never come that far south.
1 Emerson’s version of the story is contained in his work Grant’s Life in the West and His Mississippi Valley Campaigns, first serialized in the Midland Monthly, 1896–98.
2 The camels performed as advertised but were abandoned during the Civil War. Sightings of them and their progeny out in the deserts persisted until the late 1920s.
3 Davis’s logic here was that in order for the Confederacy to be recognized by other nations it had to demonstrate that it was powerful enough to control its borders. Subsequently it has become a military maxim that in a major war to defend equally all of one’s territory is to defend none of it well.
4 The property had originally been named Mount Ayre, but Underwood thought that pretentious.
5 In August 1864 Nathan Bedford Forrest staged a midnight cavalry raid into Memphis during which he rode his horse up the steps, through the lobby, and into the offices of the Gayosa Hotel in search of the Yankee general Hurlbut, who had fled from his room in his underclothes.
6 The account is by James Laning, second master of Essex, in a letter to Captain Walke of the Carondelet, later printed in Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, serialized by the Century Publishing Company, New York, 1884–87.
7 The Columbiad was a 15,000-pound bottle-shaped cannon on recoil tracks that fired ten-inch shot weighing 128 pounds and an effective range of more than a mile.
CHAPTER 5
“UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER” GRANT
NOW FORT DONELSON’S HOUR HAD COME, BUT it would prove a far tougher nut to crack than Fort Henry, which had been reduced by naval gunfire alone. Nevertheless, Fort Donelson’s capture represented one of the great strategic errors made by the Confederates during the Civil War.
On February 6, the same day that Fort Henry fell, Grant sent a telegram to Halleck apprising him of the victory and informing him that “I shall take and destroy Fort Donelson on the 8th.” As always there were delays, owing to the late arrival of additional troops and material—and most especially because Commodore Foote’s gunboats were not yet repaired—but by February 12 Grant felt ready enough to tell Halleck that his army was getting on the move. With reinforcements pouring down the river Grant’s force would soon total 27,000. The temperature had turned balmy, and the mood of the men matched the weather. However, Southern winters can be deceiving, as anyone familiar with them knows—the weather is, in fact, subject to sudden, violent changes—but as the day wore warmly on Grant’s men began to shed their heavy overcoats and even their blankets along the roadside. The officers, who should have known better, did not stop them from abandoning valuable clothing.
On Wednesday, February 12, Grant and his staff rode ahead of the army to get a close-up look at the ground. Little was known about Fort Donelson, and the engineers and cartographers had only the vaguest rumors and notions of what was there; however, it was generally thought to be inferior to Fort Henry, which proved to be a miscalculation. Word had come down that the Rebel general Gideon Pillow was in command at Fort Donelson. Grant knew this controversial officer from his Mexican War days and had little regard for him. A verbose, pinch-faced, 56-year-old Tennessee lawyer with an Eastern-looking goatee, Pillow in 1846 had received a high military appointment from his friend the President James K. Polk, and although he showed bravery in battle during the Mexican War—being wounded twice—he became embroiled in a disgraceful public quarrel with the commanding general, Winfield Scott, which did his reputation little credit.
As it turned out, however, Pillow was not in charge at Fort Donelson, as rumor had it. He was there as second in command, having been superseded by Maj. Gen. John B. Floyd, another cantankerous lawyer who had once been governor of Virginia and the U.S. secretary of war before secession. A portly, hook-nosed man with scant military experience, Floyd had been relieved of command in the Shenandoah Valley at the insistence of Robert E. Lee and was currently under indictment in Washington for shady manipulations with Indian Trust Bonds. He was also widely suspected in the North as having used his position as secretary of war to arrange the transfer of large numbers of weapons and munitions to Southern arsenals on the eve of war. How he came to command at Fort Donelson has been something of a mystery from that day to this.
Third in command was Brig. Gen. Simon Bolivar Buckner, a 39-year-old Kentuckian who was, ironically, the West Point classmate of Grant’s who lent him the money to get back to St. Louis after he resigned from the army in California. Buckner had been cited for bravery in the Mexican War, and with his military education was probably better suited to the command of Fort Donelson than either of the other two generals.
The loss of Fort Henry had disordered General Johnston’s entire defensive strategy for the West. After conferring with Beauregard and Hardee at Bowling Green, it was concluded that the Confederate army’s position at Columbus was no longer tenable, and those troops would have to be evacuated by train to Memphis, along with the smaller artillery pieces. The larger ones would probably be lost. Bowling Green as well was no longer defensible, since the Union army at Fort Henry was squarely between Columbus and themselves. Making the best of a bad situation, Johnston ordered the troops to fall back to southern Tennessee, then try to reunite with the units from Columbus to form an army to defeat Grant. In the meanwhile, however, Johnston felt duty-bound to send a force to defend Fort Donelson, since if that position fell the important hub and manufacturing center of Nashville would be left exposed and unprotected.
Perhaps Johnston chose Floyd to defend Donelson because he had arrived from across the mountains bringing with him a number of Virginia regiments; it certainly could not have had anything to do with Floyd’s military acumen. Whatever the reason, Johnston ordered Floyd’s force to join Pillow’s and Buckner’s men who were currently occupying Fort Donelson, which—when added to the 3,300 that Tilghman had sent out of Fort Henry—would compose an army of 17,200 Rebel soldiers. As an additional safeguard, Johnston included in the Fort Donelson contingent the thousand-man cavalry command of 40-year-old Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Tennessee cotton planter, former slave trader, and one of the richest men in the South. Known for his “great energy and brute courage,” Forrest was already living up to his well-known reputation as the “wizard of the saddle.”
General Pillow, who had been sent by General Johnston, had barely arrived at Fort Donelson when information from scouts and spies reported that Grant’s army had grown significantly in size since the Fort Henry operation, and now appeared to outnumber him at least two to one. That was not quite so—nor did Grant have anywhere near the number of three to one, which military science of the day considered the desired ratio when attacking fortified positions. Nevertheless, the news seemed to have rattled Pillow, and as Grant’s people filed into position in a semicircle around the fort, rather than roaring out and attacking the Yankee force before it deployed and threw up defenses he instead drew in, turtle-like, until Grant’s investment was complete.
As positions went, Pillow’s wasn’t a bad one, and certainly much more favorable than at Fort Henry, which was underwater. Fort Donelson was sited on a 130-foot bluff and was not a fort in the popular image, which is often thought of as a castle-like structure with high parapets, moat, etc. Like Fort Henry, it was of earthen construction, with soil having been thrown up to protect the large gun batteries on the river, and defensive strongpoints on the landward side, a roughly three-mile arc anchored on the Cumberland to the south and Hickman’s Creek to the north. This defensive line consisted of rifle pits, or trenches, with the spoil of yellow-colored clay heaped in front, and forward of that the Rebels had laid obstructions of chevaux-de-frise1 and abatis. Artillery batteries at the strongpoints were protected by bastions that gave many of the guns interlocking fire.
Grant set up headquarters in a farmhouse at the outer edge of his investment lines; he had no firm plans except to wait for the arrival of Foote’s ironclads and the steady stream of
reinforcements that Halleck was pushing down from Paducah. But the following morning, Thursday, February 13, Grant had scarcely finished his cup of coffee when heavy firing broke out to the south where McClernand’s division was posted. This did not bode well. Grant had given orders that under no circumstances was any commander to take action that might bring on a general engagement—and now this.
McClernand, a politician, not a military man, apparently had gotten into an argument with a pesky Rebel battery to his front and ordered one of his brigades to silence it. The brigade massed for the attack and marched forward, only to be brutally cut down in a crossfire of rifle and cannon fire. Instead of leaving it be, McClernand obstinately ordered a second bloody assault, and then a third, which nearly decimated the outfit before it dawned upon him that the Rebel position was well nigh impregnable. Grant knew he would bear watching in the future.
There was shelling from the lone gunboat on the scene, Carondelet, which fired 139 78- and 64-pound shot at the fort before taking a hit by a huge 128-pounder ball through her port iron casement. According to Captain Walke, this did a terrific amount of damage and bounded around inside “like a wild beast stalking its prey.” But the rest of Foote’s ironclads weren’t due till the next day, and Grant used the time to strengthen his investment and usher the steady stream of reinforcements into the lines. Around sunset the wind shifted to the north and east and a cold rain began; by evening it had turned to sleet and ice, and later to snow, and the temperature dropped to 12 degrees. This made for the “severest deprivations and sufferings” among the men, who had no tents, had been ordered to build no fires, and had foolishly discarded their warm clothes on the march from Fort Henry the day before.