This Hallowed Ground (14 page)

Paducah was another key spot. It is situated where the Tennessee River flows into the Ohio, not far upstream from Cairo, and the Tennessee was an obvious highway to the heart of the South. Broad and deep, it was easily navigable all the way to northern Alabama; and if Kentucky was no longer to be a no man’s land, the Tennessee River was of first importance. A Federal base at the mouth of the river would make possible a formal invasion of the Deep South a bit later on.

Grant reached Paducah, disembarked his troops, saw that the town was made secure, and hurried back to Cairo. There he found a message from Frémont, authorizing him to do what he had just done. Then he got another wire, rebuking him for communicating directly with
the Kentucky House of Representatives — that was a job for the department commander, and in doing it himself he had been insubordinate and out of line. Then he was notified that Paducah would be put under the command of General Charles F. Smith, and although Paducah was in Grant’s district Smith was being ordered to by-pass Grant and report directly to St. Louis.

Smith was an old-timer, with a record of thirty-five years’ service. He was tall, slim, and straight, with great piratical white mustachios that came down below the line of his chin, a man with ruddy pink cheeks and clear blue eyes, a strict disciplinarian and a terror to volunteers; the very incarnation of the pre-Civil War regular army officer. Among the regulars, indeed, there were many who considered him the best all-around man in the army. He had been commandant of cadets when Grant was at West Point, and although Grant outranked him — and would soon have him in his command, for Frémont’s order was before long rescinded — Grant always felt a little humble and school-boyish in his presence. He remarked once that “it does not seem quite right for me to give General Smith orders,” and some of the regulars felt the same way about it; Grant, they said, owed his rise to political pull, and Smith had spent a lifetime in uniform and ought to be top dog. It never bothered Smith, however. He was frankly proud of his former pupil and had confidence in him.
⁸

Something of Smith’s quality comes out in a story told by Lew Wallace.

Wallace as a boy had longed to go to West Point, and when that dream failed he tried earnestly to become a novelist. That failed too — the train of thought that would eventually become
Ben Hur
had not yet taken shape in his mind — and so he turned to the law and politics, and when the war began he was made colonel of the 11th Indiana. He was sent to Paducah soon after the place was occupied by Union troops, and — his political connections being first-rate — it was not long before he learned that he was being made a brigadier general. This unsettled him a bit, and he went to General Smith to ask advice.

Smith had taken over a big residence for headquarters, and Wallace found him sitting by the fire after dinner, taking his ease, his long legs stretched out, a decanter on the table. Smith was, said Wallace, “by all odds the handsomest, stateliest, most commanding figure I had ever seen.” Somewhat hesitantly Wallace showed him his notice of promotion and asked if he should accept.

Smith had worked thirty-five years to get his own commission as a brigadier, and the idea that any officer might hesitate to accept such a thing stumped him. Why on earth, he asked, should Wallace not take it?

“Because,” confessed Wallace, “I don’t know anything about the duties of a brigadier.”

Smith blinked at him.

“This,” he said at last, “is extraordinary. Here I have been spending a long life to get an appointment like this one about which you are hesitating. And yet — that isn’t it. That you should confess your ignorance — good God!”

Then Smith reached for the decanter, poured Wallace a drink, and told him to accept the promotion and stop worrying. He dug into a table drawer, got out a copy of the United States Army Regulations, and declared that a general should know these rules “as the preacher knows his Bible.” Then he went on to sum up his own soldierly philosophy in words which Wallace remembered:

“Battle is the ultimate to which the whole life’s labor of an officer should be directed. He may live to the age of retirement without seeing a battle; still, he must always be getting ready for it exactly as if he knew the hour of the day it is to break upon him. And then, whether it come late or early, he must be willing to fight — he
must
fight!”
⁹

Rebel troops were in Columbus, another column was coming up into Kentucky through the Cumberland Gap, and a growing Union force was established in Paducah. Kentucky’s neutrality by now had completely evaporated. The pro-Union legislature made it official, adopting a resolution directing Governor Magoffin to issue a proclamation ordering the secessionists out of the state. Magoffin, strong for the Confederacy, indignantly vetoed the measure, whereupon the legislature passed it over his veto, formally invited the Federal government to help expel the southern invaders, and ordered volunteers recruited to meet the state’s quota. The Richmond government countered by sending General Albert Sidney Johnston out to take top command in the West, and a Confederate force occupied Bowling Green and sent out patrols which burned a bridge within thirty-three miles of Louisville. Fort Sumter hero Robert Anderson established Union headquarters in Louisville; then his health collapsed and he had to retire from active duty, and Federal command passed to another of General Smith’s old protégés, a red-haired bristling general named William Tecumseh Sherman.

Sherman had inherited a perplexing job. Except for Smith’s forces at Paducah, which was out of his bailiwick, there were very few responsible troops in Kentucky, most of the midwestern levies having been sent either to Missouri or Virginia during the period of Kentucky’s neutrality. Sherman had a couple of thousand of the Kentuckians who had been training on the Indiana side of the Ohio River, he had
scattering groups of home guards, and there were a few regiments which the prodigious William Nelson had been assembling at Camp Dick Robinson. None of these was ready for active service, and the green regiments which Indiana’s Governor Morton was hurrying down were in no better case. The 38th Indiana, as a sample, was sent to Kentucky just three days after it had been mustered into service, and one of its members wrote acidly that “all the regiment lacked of being a good fighting machine was guns, ammunition, cartridge boxes, canteens, haversacks, knapsacks, blankets, etc., with a proper knowledge of how all these equipments could be used with effect.”
¹⁰

All the information Sherman could get indicated that large, well-equipped, adequately trained Confederate armies were about to come sweeping up from Tennessee to overrun the entire state. (The rumors were wild exaggerations, but Sherman did not know that until later.) For a short time Louisville itself seemed to be in danger; Confederate Simon Buckner was advancing on the city along the line of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad. (His force was so small that two troop trains served to carry it, but the Federals did not realize this.) Providentially, Buckner was delayed — by a patriotic citizen who removed a rail from the track, thus derailing the leading train — until Sherman could get a makeshift force out to meet him; upon which Buckner withdrew, and the panic was over. But it did seem clear that the Rebel commanders in the West had most aggressive intentions.

Sherman was in a bad mood. He was tense, nervous, given to worry; the grim singleness of purpose that marked him later in the war had not yet appeared. Like Grant, he had something to live down. He had resigned from the army in the 1850s and had tried various business ventures, all of which had failed. In St. Louis, a couple of years before the war, Sherman had referred to himself bitterly as “a dead cock in a pit”; now he may have been uneasily conscious that his general’s commission had come to him largely because his more successful brother, John Sherman, was an important Republican senator.

Sherman worried most about the enlisted men in his command. They were woefully untrained, and it seemed to him that to send them into battle — which he might have to do any day — would be plain murder. The sketchy Kentucky cavalry regiments were so busy scouting and patrolling that they had no time for drill. The 1st Kentucky, hastily recruited by a lawyer-politician named Frank Wolford, rode about the countryside without uniforms, armed with infantry muskets, so innocent of proper military usage that when Wolford wanted them to start marching he shouted: “Git up and git!” while he got them from marching column into line of battle by ordering: “Form a line of fight!”
¹¹

The farm boys who were grouped together in the volunteer regiments were suffering from the usual camp diseases such as measles. Sanitation and proper medical care seemed to be nonexistent in most camps, and regimental officers who owed their commissions to politics (as practically all of them did) knew not the first thing about taking care of them. An officer in the 53rd Ohio, reporting to Sherman about this time, was surprised to hear the general bark: “How long do you expect to remain in the service?” The officer replied that his regiment had enlisted for three years and expected to serve out its time. “Well, you’ve got sense,” said Sherman. “Most of you fellows come down here intending to go home and go to Congress in about three weeks.” When the officer asked where the regiment should camp, Sherman gestured at the surrounding landscape and said: “Go anywhere — it’s all flat as a pancake and wet as a sponge.” (This, said the regimental historian, was entirely true.)
¹²

Problems of discipline were peculiar. The 3rd Ohio went into camp minus its colonel, who preferred to linger in Louisville. In his absence the lieutenant colonel, who had ideas about discipline, reduced a number of incompetent non-coms to the ranks and stirred up so much antagonism that the enlisted men circulated a petition calling on him to resign and roused all the folks back home — lifelong friends and neighbors of the luckless officer — to write indignant letters to him. The missing colonel then let the men know that if the harsh lieutenant colonel were just dismissed he himself would take the regiment back to Ohio to rest and recruit and would see to it that it was outfitted with gaudy Zouave uniforms. In the end, Sherman got the colonel sent home and the unpopular lieutenant colonel was retained and supported, but the whole flare-up was symptomatic. The raw material of the Federal army in Kentucky had no idea whatever of what soldiering was going to be like.
¹³

It seemed to Sherman that these untaught boys were going to be sacrificed, and his feeling came out now and then in unexpected ways. An Indiana sergeant was detailed for a job at headquarters. When he finished it, Sherman said: “Sergeant, I hear you are short of rations over in your camp.” The sergeant said that this was so, and Sherman told him to wait and went bustling out to the kitchen. He came back in a minute with two slabs of buttered bread, a thick cut of ham between them, and two red apples. Giving these to the sergeant, he said: “There, that will put some fat on your ribs.”
¹⁴

If the regimental officers were incapable of training their soldiers, professionals who could do the job were beginning to appear; most notably a West Point classmate of Sherman (and thus still another at General Smith’s former charges) named George Thomas, who was
put in charge of operations at Camp Dick Robinson.

Thomas was a Virginian, forty-five years old, tall and stout and reserved in manner; he rarely laughed or raised his voice, he had a majestic full beard and a general air of kindly sternness, he moved with ponderous deliberation, and altogether he was extremely impressive in appearance. His army friends called him “Old Tom,” and his troops referred to him as “Old Slow Trot” — he had hurt his spine in a railroad accident a few months earlier, and it gave him excruciating pain when his horse moved faster than a walk. He was inclined to distrust volunteers and he was very stiff about matters of training; not for months would his men give him the affectionate title, “Pap,” by which he was to become famous.
¹⁵

He had been much admired by Jefferson Davis when Davis was Secretary of War, and in 1855 when the crack 2nd Cavalry was organized with Albert Sidney Johnston as colonel and Robert E. Lee as lieutenant colonel, Thomas became one of its majors. In January 1861 he suspected that his spinal ailment might make active duty impossible, and in casting about for possible employment he wrote to the superintendent of the Virginia Military Institute, applying for the post of commandant of cadets there. This was remembered against him in Washington after Virginia seceded, and the War Department was inclined to doubt his loyalty. Sherman himself had vouched for him; now Thomas was under him, helping get troops ready for the serious fighting which everybody knew must begin in the spring.

It would begin, actually, long before the spring, and when it began it would be very rough. And there were, here in this Kentucy sector, these generals who had imbibed old General Smith’s doctrine: “… he must always be getting ready for it … And then, whether it come late or early, he must be willing to fight — he
must
fight!”

T
HERE
was a significance in the crossing of the Ohio River. North of the river was the familiar Middle West; beyond it there was nothing less than the South itself, mysterious, romantic, threatening, strange. The nearest Confederate armies might be scores of miles away, with no faintest intention of coming any closer. No matter: when a soldier crossed the river he felt that he was in the war.

Thousands of sunburned boys in ill-fitting blue uniforms were crossing the Ohio this fall, for Kentucky was the destined point of departure and the government was hastening to build up Union strength in the state. Nervous General Sherman had warned the Secretary of War that before they got through they would have to have two hundred thousand soldiers on this front. His panicky overestimate unsettled the authorities so much that they concluded Sherman was too flighty for his job, and he was replaced by the less emotional General Don Carlos Buell; and for a time Sherman hovered unhappily on the fringes of the war, a general without portfolio, alleged by unfriendly newspaper correspondents to be insane. But although his estimate of required strength had been rejected, the government nevertheless was getting troops into the state as fast as the training camps could send them. (By the war’s end it would turn out that Sherman’s wild appraisal was tolerably accurate, after all.)