Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (83 page)

Their elation was premature, for they were still surrounded on three sides by better-armed foot soldiers and on the fourth by floating artillery which, though bruised, yet controlled the river. The besieged defenders had three apparent choices: to surrender now; to sit tight and hope for a miracle; or to cut their way out and escape to Nashville. That night, while Union soldiers who had thrown away blankets and overcoats on a previous balmy day shivered and caught pneumonia in driving sleet and snow, Confederate generals held a council of war to decide what to do. Floyd's division commanders, the self-important Tennessee politician Gideon Pillow and the darkly handsome, saturnine West Pointer Simon Bolivar Buckner, agreed to try a breakout attack on the morrow. All night they shifted troops to Pillow's sector on the left. These movements were masked by the snow and howling winds.

As chance would have it, Grant was downstream conferring with Foote when the rebel attack exploded soon after dawn. The north wind blew the sound of battle away and kept him in ignorance of what was happening five miles to the south. Not expecting any fighting that day "unless I brought it on myself," Grant had told his division commanders merely to hold their positions until further notice.
⁵
These instructions anticipated a pattern in Grant's generalship: he always thought more about what he planned to do to the enemy than what his enemy might do to him. This offensive-mindedness eventually won the war, but it also brought near disaster to Grant's forces more than once. On this occasion his orders to sit tight inhibited the two division commanders on the left and center from doing much to help General John A. McClernand's division on the right, which bore the full fury of the Confederate assault. McClernand was an ambitious Democrat from Illinois whose thirst for glory had earned Grant's mistrust. On this frosty morning of February 15 McClernand got his chance to fight, but the odds were against him. Many of his regiments performed well, but after several hours of hard fighting five brigades on the Union right had been driven back nearly a mile. Demoralized and out of ammunition, they were in no condition to stop the rebels from escaping through the breach.

Couriers had dashed off to find Grant, who returned post-haste to the battlefield. Meanwhile his adversaries had suffered a strange lapse of will. As he rode along his lines, General Pillow was taken aback by the exhaustion and disorganization of his victorious soldiers, who had suffered heavy casualties. He concluded that they could not march cross

5
. Grant,
Memoirs
, I, 305.

country and fight off a possible flank attack by the Union reinforcements that his scouts reported were gathering. Pillow persuaded Floyd, over Buckner's agonized protest, to call off the breakout attempt and order the troops back to the relative safety of their trenches.

During this lull of Confederate indecision, Grant arrived on the scene. As at Belmont, he refused to panic. "The position on the right must be retaken," he told his officers. "Some of our men are pretty badly demoralized, but the enemy must be more so, for he has attempted to force his way out, but has fallen back: the one who attacks first now will be victorious and the enemy will have to be in a hurry if he gets ahead of me."
⁶
Grant asked Foote to have the gunboats lob a few shells at the rebels to give the infantry moral support. While this request was being carried out, Union officers reorganized their brigades, counterattacked, and regained the ground lost in the morning.

Night fell on a dismal scene. Nearly a thousand Yankees and rebels had been killed and three thousand wounded, many of the latter suffering and dying in the thickening cold. A chill also fell on southern headquarters, where mutual recriminations hung heavy in the air. A planned night-time escape of the garrison was aborted when scouts reported Union regiments camped near the only practicable road. Pillow still wanted the garrison to fight its way out, but Floyd and Buckner, convinced that such false heroics would sacrifice three-fourths of their men, considered surrender the only alternative. As political generals, however, Floyd and Pillow did not want to surrender their own persons. Remembering his prewar record, Floyd anticipated little mercy from his captors. He commandeered two steamboats docked near Donelson and escaped downriver with 1,500 of his Virginia troops in the darkness before dawn. The disputatious Pillow was no more eager than Floyd to become a prisoner of war. Having proclaimed "liberty or death" as his slogan, he chose liberty—and escaped with his staff across the Cumberland in a skiff. Before leaving, Floyd had turned the command of Fort Donelson over to Pillow who in turn passed it to West Pointer Buckner. Disgusted by this
opéra bouffe
, Buckner intended to share the fate of his men.

Before surrendering, however, Buckner permitted another disgusted commander to escape with his men—Nathan Bedford Forrest, head of a cavalry battalion that had fought with distinction that day. A self-made man who had grown rich from slave trading and planting, Forrest enlisted

6
. Lew Wallace, "The Capture of Fort Donelson,"
Battles and Leaders
, I, 422; Grant,
Memoirs
, I, 307.

as a private in June 1861 and rose to lieutenant-colonel of the battalion he raised and equipped at his own expense. Self-educated, with no previous military experience, Forrest became one of the South's most innovative and hard-driving commanders. He developed combined mounted and dismounted tactics not mentioned in military textbooks—which he had never read—but ideal for the wooded terrain of western Tennessee and northern Mississippi. A large, powerful, and fearless man, Forrest possessed a killer instinct toward Yankees and toward blacks in any capacity other than slave. Before daybreak on February 16 he led 700 troopers out of Fort Donelson across an icy stream too deep for infantry to ford, and escaped without encountering a single Union picket.

Soon after dawn on February 16, Buckner sent a proposal to Grant for discussion of surrender terms. Back came a blunt reply: "No terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted. I propose to move immediately on your works." Buckner was nettled by these "ungenerous and unchivalrous" words. After all, he had lent the down-and-out Grant money to help him get home after his resignation from the army in 1854. Nevertheless, Buckner now had no choice but to surrender his twelve or thirteen thousand men.
⁷
When this news reached the North, church bells rang and cannons fired salutes to celebrate the great victory. Lincoln promoted Grant to major general, making him second in command only to Halleck in the West. Eight months earlier Grant had been an obscure ex-captain of dubious reputation; now his name was celebrated by every newspaper in the land.

The strategic consequences of this campaign were the most important of the war so far. Nearly a third of Johnston's forces in the Tennessee-Kentucky theater were
hors de combat
. Half of the remainder were at Nashville and half at Columbus, 200 miles apart with a victorious enemy between them in control of the rivers and railroads. Buell's un-bloodied Army of the Ohio was bearing down on Nashville from the north, while a newly organized Union Army of the Mississippi commanded by John Pope threatened Columbus from across the Mississippi River. Johnston had to evacuate Nashville on February 23, making it

7
.
O.R
., Ser. I, Vol. 7, p. 161. No official record of the number of Confederates surrended at Donelson was ever made. Of the 17,000 or more men in the garrison, some 500 had been killed. At least 1,000 of the wounded had been evacuated before the surrender. Another 2,000 or more men escaped with Floyd and Forrest, or made their way through the loose Union cordon after the surrender.

the first Confederate state capital and important industrial center to fall. A few days later the garrison at Columbus also pulled out. All of Kentucky and most of Tennessee came under Union military control—save for guerrilla activity and periodic rebel cavalry raids, which thenceforth became endemic in this theater. Confederate forts still guarded the Mississippi along Tennessee's western border, but they seemed doomed as well. The
New York Tribune
, a good barometer of northern opinion, rose as high as it had fallen low after Bull Run: "The cause of the Union now marches on in every section of the country," declared the
Tribune
. "Every blow tells fearfully against the rebellion. The rebels themselves are panic-stricken, or despondent. It now requires no very far-reaching prophet to predict the end of the struggle."
⁸

Many rebels were indeed despondent. Southern newspapers and diarists lamented the "disgraceful . . . shameful . . . catalogue of disasters." Mary Boykin Chesnut suffered "nervous chills every day. Bad news is killing me."
⁹
From London, James Mason reported that "the late reverses at Fort Henry and Fort Donelson have had an unfortunate effect upon the minds of our friends here." In the midst of these gloomy tidings, Jefferson Davis was inaugurated for his six-year presidential term on February 22. Davis and his Negro footmen in the inaugural procession wore black suits. When asked why, the coachman replied dryly: "This, ma'am, is the way we always does in Richmond at funerals and sichlike." The rain that poured down during the ceremony added to the funereal atmosphere. In his inaugural address, Davis conceded that "after a series of successes and victories, we have recently met with serious disasters."
¹⁰

Like their northern counterparts after Bull Run, however, southern spokesmen urged renewed dedication to the task. Though "the tide for the moment is against us," Davis continued, "the final result in our favor is never doubtful. . . . It was, perhaps, in the ordination of Providence

8
.
New York Tribune
, February 12, 1862, quoted in Kenneth P. Williams,
Lincoln Finds a General
, 5 vols. (1949–59), III, 231.

9
. Jones, War
Clerk's Diary
(Miers), 67; E. Merton Coulter,
The Confederate States of America
(Baton Rouge, 1950), 353n; Woodward,
Chesnut's Civil War
, 286.

10
. Ephraim D. Adams,
Great Britain and the American Civil War, 2
vols. (New York, 1925), I, 272–73; Hudson Strode,
Jefferson Davis: Confederate President
(New York, 1959), 201, 199. Before February 22, 1862, Davis and his fellow officers of the Confederate government were "provisional" officials. A general election took place in November 1861. Davis and Vice President Stephens were then elected without opposition and inaugurated on Washington's birthday in 1862.

that we were taught the value of our liberties by the price we pay for them." The losses of Forts Henry and Donelson "were for our own good!" according to Richmond newspapers. "Days of adversity prove the worth of men and of nations. . . . We must go to the work with greater earnestness than we have yet shown."
¹¹

But southerners were fated to endure several more defeats before they could next celebrate a victory. Johnston's defensive line east of the Mississippi having collapsed in February, his line west of the river caved in the following month. A new general had taken command of the rebel forces in Arkansas—Earl Van Dorn, a diminutive but hard-bitten Mississippian who had been wounded five times in the Mexican War and in frontier Indian fighting. Van Dorn had dazzled Johnston with visions of an invasion through Missouri to capture St. Louis and then to descend on Grant's forces from the north. To do this, however, he first had to defeat a Union army of 11,000 men that had pushed Sterling Price's Missourians out of their home state during the winter. Van Dorn put together a motley force numbering 16,000, consisting of the divisions under Price and Ben McCulloch that had won at Wilson's Creek the previous August plus three regiments of Indians from the Five Civilized Nations in Indian Territory. The latter, mostly Cherokees, served under chiefs who had made treaties of alliance with the Confederacy in the hope of achieving greater independence within a southern nation than they enjoyed in the United States—an ironic hope, since it was mostly southerners who had driven them from their ancestral homeland a generation earlier. In any event, with Indian help the old Indian fighter Van Dorn intended to "make a reputation and serve my country. . . . I must have St. Louis—then Huzza!"
¹²