Shiloh, 1862 (10 page)

Matters had boiled over and a fight was quickly becoming the only thing that would settle it. Grant understood this, and, being a military man, he felt honor-bound to offer his services to the Union. As he saw it, if Washington allowed the South to secede, nothing would prevent other states from doing the same, until in the end the first and only true experiment in democracy the world had ever known would dissolve itself into a disastrous and irretrievable collection of petty states squabbling among themselves.

He had also concluded that despite the Confederacy’s seizure of enormous Federal stores, munitions, and military equipment in Southern forts and armories, and the defection of so many West Point–educated officers, the war nevertheless would be a short one. The Northern population was nearly twice that of the South, and its industrial superiority would soon take the starch out of the rebellion. Once that had occurred, Grant wrote in a letter to his father, with the abolitionist Republicans in control of the government, the market for slaves would bottom out until “the nigger will never disturb this country again.” So reasoned Ulysses S. Grant.

After the attack on Fort Sumter in April 1861, Lincoln called for the various states to raise 75,000 volunteers to put down the rebellion. This resulted in an overwhelming response in most Northern states, including Illinois, where Grant helped to muster in troops. It also resulted in the secession of four more Southern states. On
May 4, 1861, Grant wrote a letter to the adjutant general of the U.S. Army offering his services. It was never answered. Puzzled, he went to Cincinnati to see his old West Point acquaintance George B. McClellan, who had just been made a major general. He waited for three days but McClellan wouldn’t see him.
⁴

Grant was about to return to Galena, 39 years old and washed up, with the war passing him by, when a message came that the Illinois governor Richard Yates wished to see him. He went to Springfield, where the governor was waiting with an offer. There was a new regiment of volunteers, the governor said, who had revealed themselves as little more than a mob of chicken thieves led by a drunkard. Would Grant take charge of these people and try to straighten them out? He would have the rank of colonel. It was a stroke of fate that would change Grant’s life forever.

In a month of hard work, patience, and liberal doses of the guardhouse, Grant had whipped these miscreants into such fine shape that Governor Yates turned over to him three other errant regiments. The number of troops under Grant now constituted a brigade, and technically the rank of brigadier general was his due. Still, Grant was stunned to read in the St. Louis newspapers that he had just been promoted, with some unexpected help from an acquaintance from Galena, Republican congressman Elihu Washburne. In two months Sam Grant had gone from a has-been former captain, failed farmer, and second-rate businessman to the command of several thousand men and induction into the most exclusive club the U.S. Army had to offer.

Not long after news of the North’s disaster at the Battle of Bull Run in Virginia had reached the western command, Grant was put in charge of the District of Southeast Missouri, with headquarters at Cairo, Illinois, at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. At that point Missouri and Kentucky were hanging in the Union by the slenderest political thread. As slave states, their loyalties were decidedly mixed and in the outlying areas Rebel detachments, abetted by Southern sympathizers, were recruiting, reconnoitering, burning bridges, and shooting at Yankee patrols. It was Grant’s job to suppress these activities, and he was given considerable latitude to accomplish it.

The first thing Grant decided to do after he reached Cairo was seize the nearby city of Paducah, Kentucky, whose citizens were merrily anticipating the arrival of the Rebel general Gideon Pillow and his band of Confederates. This, Grant said, he had learned “from a scout belonging to General [John. C.] Frémont,” who commanded the department. Control of Paducah, located about 40 miles east of Cairo at the confluence of the Ohio and the Tennessee Rivers, was critical if the Union planned to use the rivers as highways into the heart of the Confederacy.

One of the most brilliant ideas that the Union came up with during the war was the concept of the armed river gunboat as a strategic weapon. Rivers were, and had been, main arteries of travel, but until Robert Fulton’s development of the steamboat in 1807 it was nearly impossible for a military operation to go against the current of a river. Now the Union snatched up a number of large river vessels, reinforced their superstructures with heavy oak, and armed them with big guns. These became the so-called timberclads, two of which played such a large role at the Battle of Shiloh. At
the same time, the Yankees were developing an even more powerful river warship—the ironclad. These were shoal draft vessels up to 200 feet in length carrying crews of 150 or more. Their armament consisted of 2½-inch-thick iron plate over heavy oak blocking from 12 to 24 inches deep. The ship’s main batteries consisted of 32-pounder cannons, as well as big 42- and 64-pounder Dahlgren guns. By comparison, the typical army field gun was a mere 6-pounder or 12-pounder Napoleon gun. The ironclads were self-sustaining, except for coal tenders that supplied their fuel, and their firepower could flatten an average-size town within half a day. Eight of these enormous craft were produced in less than four months in 1861–62.

Acting upon the information provided by Frémont’s scout, Grant telegraphed Frémont for permission to depart that night on riverboats for Paducah and occupy it with two regiments and a battery. When he received no reply from the department commander, Grant again telegraphed his plans to Frémont. Again no reply was forthcoming, so Grant went ahead, and imagine the surprise on the faces of the dumbfounded Paducahans when instead of the Confederate army they had anticipated they were met by a blue-coated regimental band playing “Hail Columbia” as it marched to the town square. Once there, however, the citizens seemed relieved when Grant delivered a proclamation that began, “I have come among you as your friend and fellow citizen” and went on to pledge to respect their “rights and property,” which both parties understood to include slaves.

Grant’s bloodless occupation of Paducah was just the sort of thing Abraham Lincoln liked to see, and he certainly had not seen much of it since the war began. Only last month there had been the
awful humiliation of the Battle of Balls Bluff right outside Washington, and now the British were threatening to intercede on behalf of the South because of the notorious Trent Affair.
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With things looking down in the East, Lincoln had cast an eye to the war in the West, not least because of political concerns, including the upcoming congressional elections of 1862.

With the Mississippi River closed to Northern traffic since the war started, the midwestern states were suffering badly from lack of an outlet to sell their products to the South or ship them abroad. The result was steamboats rotting at the wharfs, crops rotting in the fields, timber and manufactured goods piling up in sheds, and no market for hogs, cattle, and dairy products. Almost since war broke out Lincoln had been pressing for a Union advance downriver but to no avail.

Part of the problem seemed to be finding a Union general willing to risk his reputation in battle against the Confederates. The only one who had tried, Nathaniel Lyon, was killed and his army defeated at the Battle of Wilson’s Creek several months earlier. But the greatest problem of all seemed to lie with famed general “Pathfinder” Frémont, mastermind of the California conquest a decade and a half past.

Once disgraced by court-martial for insubordination and sentenced to dismissal from the service, Frémont had political connections (he was married to the daughter of Thomas Hart Benton, an influential Democratic senator for 30 years) that had brought him
out of mothballs and installed him in this important job. A series of published accounts of his western exploits had made Frémont a national hero, but he was trained as a topographical engineer and had no formal military education, nor any experience in handling large bodies of troops. The results ranged from disorder to chaos.

Like a self-imposed Prisoner of Zenda, Frémont established himself in a palatial St. Louis mansion surrounded by a ridiculous coterie of pompously dressed guards, and he received almost no one in his headquarters, including his own generals. Inquiries went into the headquarters and remained there, mysteriously ignored. His logistics were hopelessly plagued by extravagant government contracts with unscrupulous dealers, while Frémont’s attention seemed focused on freeing slaves wherever and whenever he could—a policy that, for political reasons, was the last thing Lincoln wanted.

It was under these stressful circumstances that Grant set out to do battle with the Confederates who had recently established themselves near the small settlement of Belmont, Missouri, about 25 miles downriver from Cairo. After his peaceful occupation of Paducah, Grant had looked for some new task and decided that the concentration of Rebels at Belmont was not only a menace to navigation but offered an opportunity for his troops to get some real battle experience.

Even that early in the war, Grant seemed to grasp that the overarching Union strategy in the West should focus on clearing the Mississippi River—as opposed to merely capturing cities—and restoring Federal commerce from the Midwest to the Gulf of Mexico, while at the same time cleaving the Confederacy in two. Accordingly, he applied to the navy for steamship transportation and gunboat protection, and early on the morning of November 1, 1861, he shoved
off downriver with five infantry regiments, six artillery batteries, and two companies of cavalry—about 3,100 men in all—accompanied by the “timberclad” gunboats
Tyler
and
Lexington
.

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.