This Great Struggle (14 page)

4

THE EMERGENCE OF GRANT

TWO PRESIDENTS AND THEIR PROBLEMS

L
incoln was painfully aware of what the war was costing the country each day not only in terms of money, of which Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase did somehow manage to raise a continuing supply, but also of the people’s will to see the cause through to victory. He wished his generals might somehow have the same perspective, realizing that they did not necessarily have the luxury of unlimited delay to prepare to meet the Rebels in battle. With one exception, none of his generals saw that angle. McClellan was the worst, and by the beginning of 1862, Lincoln was beginning to lose patience with his dashing young general in chief who not only did nothing but also refused to reveal to Lincoln any of his plans for future operations. McClellan was also insulting. In letters to his wife, McClellan referred to the president as “nothing more than a well-meaning baboon” and “the original gorilla.”

He may not have used quite that language in talking with others, but the attitude came through. To one general he called Lincoln “a rare bird.” In November Lincoln and Seward, accompanied by Lincoln’s secretary John Hay, stopped by McClellan’s house in Washington one evening to discuss strategy. Told that McClellan was out, they said they would wait and were shown into the parlor. About an hour later McClellan came home, was told that the president and secretary of state were waiting for him, and went upstairs. Half an hour later the visitors asked the porter to take the message upstairs to McClellan that they were still waiting. The servant returned a few moments later with word that McClellan had gone to bed for the night. As they walked back to the White House, Hay expressed outrage, but Lincoln said, “It was better at this time not to be making points of etiquette and personal dignity.” To another Lincoln commented, “I would hold General McClellan’s horse” if the general would only win a victory.

With Scott far off in New York in retirement, with the nation’s new top military man unwilling to cooperate with him, and with some in Washington even suggesting that there might be a sinister reason why McClellan, the Democrat, would not cooperate, Lincoln desperately turned to studying books on military science to try to educate himself in matters of strategy. Then shortly before Christmas, McClellan came down with typhoid and was out of commission for nearly three weeks.

Reports from the West were equally discouraging. Freémont was gone now, sacked by Lincoln for corruption and failure to accomplish anything useful. In his place the president appointed Henry W. Halleck (West Point, 1839), the army’s leading intellectual and author of the main textbook Lincoln was studying on the art of war. To command in Kentucky, now that that state was open as an avenue of Union advance, Lincoln had assigned Don Carlos Buell (West Point, 1841), a McClellan proteégeé with a reputation as a professional’s professional. Yet despite all of Lincoln’s urging, neither general was willing to undertake any action at all.

Lincoln was especially frustrated that Buell would not advance to relieve the Unionist population of East Tennessee, which had risen up against secessionist rule and was currently being schooled by several thousand Confederate troops in just how much the Rebels truly believed in self-determination. East Tennessee was not an easy place to reach, especially from the north and especially in winter, but Buell was ready to provide plenty of reasons why his command could not reach anyplace at all within Rebel control. Halleck was no better, and the two steadfastly declined to cooperate with each other. On one dispatch from Halleck, Lincoln sadly endorsed, “It is exceedingly discouraging. Here as everywhere else nothing can be done.”

In Virginia at least, Lincoln could try to force the pace of the action in person. To Lincoln’s lament that the bottom was out of the tub, Montgomery Meigs suggested that the president should talk to some of McClellan’s division commanders. Lincoln did, commenting to them that “if General McClellan did not want to use the army, he would like to borrow it, provided he could see how it could be made to do something.” But the generals were little help. When Lincoln met with them again on January 13, a still pale and shaky McClellan rose from his sickbed to attend the meeting, which he was convinced was a conspiracy against him.

A few days later, in a meeting with the cabinet, McClellan again refused to reveal his plan of campaign and spoke of his conviction, steadily held now for several months, that the Rebels had twice as many men in Virginia as he did. This was the purest moonshine, but for McClellan it was practically an article of faith from which he never wavered throughout his tenure in army command. In fact, at this time he outnumbered the Confederate troops in Virginia by more than two to one. In retrospect, his constant insistence that he was outnumbered seemed almost intended to justify his fear of taking action. For the moment, any at rate, Lincoln had to be content with McClellan’s assurance that at least he did have a plan.

Frustrated with his seeming inability to get action out of his generals and convinced from his study of the books on strategy that it would be a good thing to exert pressure on the enemy from multiple directions at the same time, Lincoln on January 27 issued General War Order Number One, directing that all the armies of the republic were to advance and attack the enemy on February 22, Washington’s Birthday. On January 31 Lincoln added a further order specifying that on February 22, the Army of the Potomac was to advance against the Confederate army still encamped near Centerville. McClellan responded with a twenty-two-page letter explaining in detail why the Army of the Potomac should not advance any time soon. He did include in his letter, though, an explanation of his long-awaited campaign, a scheme for landing the army near the mouth of the Rappahannock River and moving in behind the Rebels at Centerville, trapping them. Lincoln doubted that the plan would really work, but, happy to be taken into the general’s confidence at last, he deferred to the military professional and acquiesced in the army’s remaining idle a few more weeks.

Less than one hundred miles away in Richmond, Jefferson Davis had his own problems that winter. After Beauregard’s release to the press of his self-promotional report on the Battle of Bull Run, relations between the Creole general and the Confederate president had not been good. In the report, the general claimed that if only Davis had approved a plan he, Beauregard, had submitted before the battle, the Confederacy would have scored a virtually war-winning victory, but the plan had called for troops the Confederacy did not have. Beauregard aired this and other complaints to members of the Confederate congress, suggesting that if his ideas were given full play, he would shortly win the war. Hearing that Beauregard’s nonsense had been repeated on the floor of the Confederate congress repeatedly taxed Davis’s patience.

Relations between the president and Joseph E. Johnston had gone sour when that general discovered that in appointing the Confederacy’s initial five full generals in September 1861, Davis had ranked him fourth, behind Adjutant and Inspector General Samuel Cooper and generals Albert Sidney Johnston (no relation) and Robert E. Lee. The last seemed to rankle Johnston particularly since he had spent his whole army career trying to get ahead of his West Point classmate Lee. Having used political connections to win a staff appointment as brigadier general in the U.S. Army just before secession, Johnston thought he had finally beaten Lee, and he believed that a Confederate law guaranteeing the same relative ranks in the Confederate army that officers had held in the U.S. Army would keep him ahead of his old West Point rival.

What Johnston had missed in the law was that his staff rank in the old army would not count toward his line rank in the new. Davis had read the law correctly and given Johnston his proper rank. Not accepting that, Johnston in mid-September wrote Davis a fifteen-page abusive letter concluding, “I now and here declare my claim that, notwithstanding these nominations made by the President, and their confirmation by Congress, I still rightfully hold the rank of first general in the armies of the Southern Confederacy.” Davis’s reply was short and to the point: “I have received and read your letter of the 12th instant. Its language is, as you say, unusual; its arguments and statements utterly one-sided, and its insinuations are as unfounded as they are unbecoming.” Relations between Davis and Johnston would henceforth be tense at best.

In the late fall of 1861, Beauregard and Johnston requested that Davis visit their headquarters and urged him vigorously to strip troops from other parts of the Confederacy in order to reinforce their army and enable them to take the offensive and win the war before the one-year enlistments of their troops expired. It would have been an extremely risky move elsewhere, with doubtful results in Virginia, and Davis was not prepared to make that gamble. He returned disappointed to Richmond, leaving his generals sullen and resentful. By midwinter Beauregard’s troublemaking propensities had become so annoying that Davis arranged to have him transferred to the western theater of the war, where he would serve as second in command to Albert Sidney Johnston (West Point, 1826).

This other Johnston was perhaps the only man Davis admired more than he did Leonidas Polk. Sidney Johnston had been an upperclassman when Davis was a beginning student at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky. Later Johnston had been an upperclassman when Davis was a plebe at West Point, and they had served together in the Mexican War. Johnston ever after remained for Davis the ideal of all that a soldier should be. In the wake of Polk’s blundering away of Kentucky neutrality in September 1861, Johnston had arrived in Richmond from his previous post with the U.S. Army in California, and Davis had immediately assigned him to overall command of all of the Confederacy’s northward-facing defenses from the Appalachians to the Great Plains.

What Davis failed to do was support Johnston with anything like adequate men or materiel. In part this was because Davis did not have anything like adequate numbers of men or amounts of materiel available, but in part it was because Davis had already begun to focus too much on the narrow but prestigious eastern theater of the war while giving less attention to the all-important heartland west of the Appalachians. Of the scant supplies of weapons that did become available during the fall of 1861, the lion’s share went to Virginia.

FORT HENRY

February 22, 1862, arrived, and the armies of the Union had not moved—with one exception. One Union army had already advanced in the days immediately preceding Washington’s Birthday and had won what would prove to be two of the most significant victories of the war. That army belonged to Ulysses Grant. After the setback at Belmont, Grant had not given up his eagerness to get at the Rebels at Columbus, who soon numbered about ten thousand men. By early 1862, he had come up with a plan to drive southward up the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers and thus turn Columbus.

When Grant presented his plan to Halleck, the superior general rebuffed him so brusquely that Grant, still believing as everyone else did at that time that Halleck was a military genius, thought he must inadvertently have proposed something extraordinarily stupid. That was not the case. Halleck’s rude dismissal of Grant’s plan was not because it was a bad plan but because it was a good one, in fact, exactly the plan Halleck himself was contemplating. Nor did one need to be the country’s leading military mind to see it. Several officers proposed it, and a woman in Maryland, after looking over a map, sent a letter to the government suggesting it. The question was not what to do but who could make it happen. Halleck wanted to be the one who did, but he wanted much more time for preparation first, thus his curt dismissal of Grant.