Terrible Swift Sword (24 page)

Grant
had three divisions in line—reinforcements came up the Cumberland in
transports, just behind Andrew Foote's gunboats—and he had them strung out in a
long semicircle facing the Confederate trenches. On his right was Brigadier
General John A. McClernand, a good war Democrat from Illinois, inexpert but
valiant, thirsting for military distinction; in the center was Brigadier
General Lew Wallace, also ardent for fame, destined to be remembered because
years later he would write a novel,
Ben Hur;
and
on the left there was a stiff-backed old regular with long white mustachios,
Brigadier General Charles F. Smith, who had been commandant of cadets at West
Point when Grant was an indifferent student there. According to the newspaper
correspondents the private soldiers whom these officers commanded were eager
for battle; actually, they seem to have been numb and very much subdued, for
the weather had suddenly become abominable. After several days of unseasonable
warmth which led heedless boys to abandon overcoats and blankets it had blown
up a storm, with a wind bringing rain that turned to sleet followed by snow,
the thermometer dropping to 10 degrees above zero. There had been skirmish-line
fighting, and some of the wounded men froze to death; at places the underbrush
took fire, so that others died in flames; and on each side boys who were first
drenched and then chilled caught colds that would bring pneumonia and death no
matter how the battle went.
⁷
Both sides had active sharpshooters,
and the men in the front lines were not allowed to have campfires for warmth at
night.

In
the Confederate lines there had been depression when the gunboats came up,
because it was widely supposed that these ugly vessels were unbeatable, but
after the boats were driven off and it was seen that they had really done very
little harm the soldiers' spirits rose. Their generals, however, were
pessimistic. They could not be sure that the gunboats would not soon return to
the fight, they knew that Grant had been strongly reinforced, and they began to
see Fort Donelson for what it was, a trap in which the army could easily die;
and although they had got the bulk of their troops into the fort less than
forty-eight hours ago they concluded, on the night of February 14, that at daybreak
they must make an all-out fight to break Grant's lines so that they could lead
a general retreat to Nashville.

All things considered, the decision was
sensible enough. But it did underline two things: the folly of occupying Fort
Donelson in strength in the first place, and the even greater folly which had
governed the selection of the fort's commanding officers.

The
man in charge was John B. Floyd, one-time Secretary of War for President
Buchanan, a wholly untrained soldier who had come from the East bearing a
brigadier general's commission and a record of utter failure in the western Virginia
campaign; a famous man and a devout patriot, but a leader without personal
force or any idea of the responsibilities that go with leadership. Second to
him was Brigadier General Gideon J. Pillow, opinionated and cantankerous, who
had fought in the Mexican War and so knew something about military matters.
Bishop Polk had found him a difficult subordinate, and he was the one
Confederate in all the war for whom U. S. Grant would voice outspoken contempt;
and his concept of a commander's responsibilities was no better developed than
Floyd's.

The number three man was more of a
soldier and more of a man: Brigadier General Simon Bolivar Buckner, who had
commanded secessionist home guards in Kentucky during the period of that
state's neutrality, and to whom Lincoln had once offered a generalship in the
Union Army. (He was a friend of Grant's, and had given Grant a life-saving loan
when Grant showed up in New York, broke, after resigning from the Army on the
west coast in 1854.) Unfortunately for the Confederacy, both Floyd and Pillow
ranked him.

The battle plan was simple. At daybreak
Pillow would lead most of the garrison in an attack on the right of the Federal
line. Buckner would leave a small contingent to hold the entrenchments and
would follow Pillow with the rest. Once the Federal line was opened, everybody
would march southeast. Arrangements were hastily completed, and at dawn the
fight began.

It had snowed again
during the night, but the day came in clear with a wintry sunlight lying on the
white hills. Pillow's men struck with fury, crumpling McClernand's line,
driving his brigades back in disorder, capturing six guns and putting some 2000
Federals out of action. There was bitter fighting in the woods and ravines, but
the Confederate attack had taken the Federals by surprise; by a little after
noon the escape route was wide open, and Buckner (who had distrusted the whole
Fort Donelson business from the beginning) supposed that it was time to start
the retreat.

Grant
had ridden downstream before the fighting began, to confer with the wounded
Foote, and he did not return to the battlefield until after midday, when he
found the right half of his army in full retreat. He ordered Lew Wallace, who
on his own initiative had marched to McClernand's support, to advance, and with
McClernand hastened to reorganize the beaten brigades for a counterattack; he
sent an almost frantic message to the Navy to ask for a renewal of the
bombardment by the shattered gunboats, and he ordered Smith to attack the
Confederate right. As quickly as he could, he restored order and prepared to
recapture the ground that had been lost, but his work almost certainly would
have gone for nothing if he had not been immeasurably aided by a singular
action on the part of General Pillow. For that officer, having done exactly
what he had set out to do, now ordered all of the Confederates back into their
trenches, and the door that had swung open so wide was about to be slammed shut
again.

Apparently
Pillow felt that the fort could be held. Apparently, also, he believed that
the attacking column had been so disorganized by the hours of hard fighting
that an orderly retreat was impossible; and he may have been moved by the
thought that the soldiers were hungry, all but exhausted and in no physical
condition to begin a hard march over bad roads. (It is also possible that his
reasoning simply went beyond rational analysis.) In any case, he gave the
orders. Buckner protested vigorously, Floyd hesitated and at last upheld
Pillow, and the advantage that had been won was thrown away. By night all of
the Confederates were back in their trenches, bewildered by the way victory had
turned to defeat. To increase their gloom, C. F. Smith had seized a part of
their lines and held a position from which he could make a shattering attack
the next morning.

Floyd, Pillow, and Buckner went into
conference. The first two had sent jubilant telegrams to Johnston, who by now
was in Nashville, announcing that they had won a great victory, and Johnston
naturally passed the word on to Richmond; but after darkness came these two
generals could think of little except saving their own skins. Grant apparently
had reoccupied his lines, and (as Buckner pointed out) the fort and all it
contained would have to be surrendered. Neither Floyd nor Pillow wanted to be
the first Confederate general captured: after all the Federal talk about
treasonous rebellion, it seemed possible that captured generals would be
hanged. So Floyd incredibly abdicated, passing the command to Pillow, who unhesitatingly
abdicated in his turn and passed it to Buckner. A couple of steamboats still
lay at the river front, and Floyd got himself aboard, with a few regiments of
his troops, and incontinently sailed upstream to safety. Pillow fled in a
small boat and eventually joined Floyd. Buckner, who had the soldierly belief
that a general who surrendered his troops ought to stay with them and share
their fate, wrote and sent through the lines a note to General Grant asking the
Federal what terms he could give.
⁸

Commander of cavalry in this Confederate Army
was Colonel Nathan Bedford Forrest, the one-time planter and slave-trader who
was much more of a soldier than men like Floyd and Pillow knew how to use. Like
Buckner, he had felt trapped in Fort Donelson, and during the gunboat
bombardment he met a chaplain and told him: "Parson, for God's sake pray!
Nothing but God Almighty can save this fort!" Forrest had no intention of
letting his men share in the doom of the fort, and when he learned what was
going to happen he called his officers and said: "Boys, these people are
talking about surrendering, and I am going out of this place before they do or
bust hell wide open." He got his troops together, found that Grant's lines
were less tight than his superiors thought, and led his men off through the
night, cavalrymen floundering through ice-cold water in the swamps but getting
out alive.
⁸

In
his cabin behind the Union lines, General Grant was aroused and given the
dispatch his old friend Buckner had written. His reply was simple and direct:
"No terms except unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted. I
propose to move immediately upon your works."

And an unconditional surrender was made,
first thing next morning.

7.
 
The
Disease Which Brought Disaster

The news from Fort
Donelson struck Nashville into a blind panic which was all the worse because
everybody had been so confident. General Johnston had brought Hardee's 17,000 men
in a few days earlier, but although his evacuation of Bowling Green had been
dismaying he seemed to feel that
Nashville could be held and no one had been in a mood to doubt. The public
optimism had even interfered with his military plans. He wanted to block the
Cumberland River by mooring an immense raft in the steamboat channel, but there
had been much passive resistance; the steamboat men op-
posed a move that would stop the flow of ordinary commercial traffic, nobody supposed
that the Yankee gunboats would ever really get this far, and when Floyd and
Pillow sent word that they had won a great victory the project died.
On Sunday morning, February 16, the churchgoing crowds were in high spirits.      

Johnston
knew the worst before anybody went to church. An aide aroused him at daybreak
with a dispatch from Buckner saying that the fort and everybody in it were
being surrendered. Johnston sat up in his camp cot, asked the aide to reread
the dispatch, muttered grimly, "I must save
this
army," and summoned his staff to prepare
the troops for an immediate departure. He would get his army out of Nashville,
marching southeast to the vicinity of Murfreesboro, sending a contingent to
hold Chattanooga and then awaiting developments and a hoped-for junction with
Beauregard and Bishop Polk's troops from the Mississippi Valley; and the citizens
who had been ready to celebrate saw the long columns tramping across the river
and plodding south in undisguised retreat. Nashville was doomed, and by evening
everybody knew it.
¹

No large Confederate city had yet been
occupied by a Northern army. Wartime propaganda had portrayed Federal soldiers
as brutes inclined to rapine and murder, shamefully undisciplined; no one knew
what horrors the Yankee invader would inflict but everyone seemed to expect the
worst, and one soldier wrote years later that in all the war he never saw such
frantic, unreasoning fear as he saw now in Nashville. There was a great rush
to get out of town. Southbound trains were jammed, with extras running. People
who owned horses and carriages set off by road in a cold rain, often with no
clear destination in mind, and others started out on foot, lugging valises and
carpetbags. Many people who were not trying to go anywhere wandered up and down
the streets in a daze, adding to the general confusion. Swarming mobs began to
sack government warehouses and steamboats, carrying off immense quantities of
bacon, salt pork, flour, blankets, and clothing, roughly commandeering horses
and wagons to help remove the plunder; a newspaper correspondent, properly
shocked, noted that these mobs included "Negroes, Irish laborers and even
genteel-looking persons." One crowd filled the street in front of
Johnston's headquarters—he had moved into Nashville from nearby Edgefield when
the retreat began— demanding angrily to be told whether the army planned to
defend the city or to abandon it; dispersing only after soothing oratory by
assorted generals. Johnston had his hands full, trying to get river-side batteries
planted so that the gunboats might at least be delayed, supervising the details
of the retreat, advising the Governor of Tennessee to get the state archives
off to safety.
²

Johnston kept his
personal equanimity, and when those egregious fugitives, Generals Floyd and
Pillow, showed up on Monday he greeted them courteously and named Floyd
temporary commandant of the city, with responsibility for keeping order and
removing military stores. This responsibility, like the ones which had
preceded it, Floyd found beyond his powers. Not until Tuesday, when Bedford
Forrest and his cavalry reached Nashville, was anything effective done. Forrest
was put in charge of the military depots, and he charged the plundering mobs
with his tough troopers, sabers swinging and much profane shouting going on,
and the looting came to a stop. Forrest organized army wagon trains to remove
such stores as remained; he reported bitterly that millions of dollars' worth
of supplies had been lost, adding that "with proper diligence" all
could have been saved, and he finally got the city back on an even keel. By
February 23, one week after Donelson had surrendered, Johnston had his troops
in camp near Murfreesboro, and Forrest and the rear guard escorted the wagon
trains out of town to join him. Groggy and half empty, Nashville awaited the
arrival of the Federal Army.
³