The History of the Confederate War, Its Causes and Its Conduct. Volume 1 of 2

When Grant offered his services and asked for the privilege of fighting the country's adversaries his application was left absolutely unanswered. His only way into the army was "by the back door." He was elected by the men to be colonel of a regiment of Illinois volunteers, but was not commissioned in the regular army until after he had conducted a campaign to the first considerable success achieved by the national arms, and not even then without every embarrassment and humiliation which it was possible for his inferiors in superior place to inflict upon him. Indeed, as will be related later, his first great victory, the first of any importance that had been anywhere won for the Federal arms, was promptly punished by his suspension from command and by the refusal of his distinctly inferior superiors to let him follow up his success with other and obviously easy operations.

On the Confederate side the one masterful military mind was that of Robert E. Lee. As a matter of fact it was Lee who selected Manassas as the first point of resistance, and it was under his wise direction that Beauregard and Johnston were able to concentrate their forces there and to win the victory of July 21, 1861. But in the meanwhile Lee was not himself appointed to command any considerable army. He was sent to West Virginia to patch up a peace between the civilian brigadiers who commanded there and who had managed among themselves to lose every action that had occurred in that quarter. While Beauregard and Johnston were weakly throwing away the opportunity so conspicuously opened to them by the Manassas victory, this officer of commanding genius was set to the task of organizing a mountain defense against expeditions that had nothing of serious purpose in them except the prevention of Confederate enlistments west of the Alleghenies.

In the same way, after the Carolina coast forts were reduced, Lee was sent to a pestilential hole called Coosawhatchie, in South Carolina, to plan a defense of the railroad line between Charleston and Savannah, while Johnston and Beauregard were fortifying their victorious army against a foe that it had beaten into temporary helplessness.

These two – Grant and Lee – were destined in the end to fight the war out to a conclusion. But in those earlier months of it neither was permitted to exercise his genius in any effective way, or to show in action what stuff he was made of. Lee indeed held high rank from the beginning and was the military adviser of the Confederate Government, but for a time his genius was dissipated on minor matters, while lesser men were wasting time.

And as it was with the great captains so was it with their great lieutenants. William T. Sherman was an unconsidered, unconsulted lieutenant of McDowell. Stonewall Jackson and Ewell and Longstreet were the subordinates of Beauregard and Johnston. Grant and Sherman on the one side and Stonewall Jackson on the other, had lost caste in the military service by resigning from the regular army at a time when the service neither offered nor promised a career worthy of them. Inferior men therefore, who had been content with a meaningless routine, outranked and commanded these really great men after that code of military ethics and etiquette which assumes that the officer – even though he be a dullard – who has been longest in continuous service is fit to command the officer – whatever his genius may be – who has served for a briefer time or who, finding the service to be a stupid and meaningless routine of camp duty in time of peace, has resigned from it in search of better opportunities for the exercise of his abilities, and has returned to it only when duty to his country has seemed to call him.

Thus the first year of the war was the period in which official incapacity ruled on both sides; the period in which technical rank overrode genius and trampled it to earth; the period in which the martinets were afflicted with victories which they were utterly incapable of turning to profitable account, and defeats which they knew not how to repair.

A better era was approaching, but it came slowly. For a time Grant was to be dominated by Halleck. For a time Stonewall Jackson was destined to have his carefully considered disposition of forces in the valley of Virginia overridden and canceled by an ignorant civilian in Richmond, who knew so little of military courtesy as to send his orders direct and not through Jackson's commander Johnston.

On the other side, Benjamin F. Butler, a criminal lawyer, who knew nothing whatever of the military art, was a major-general by virtue of political influence alone, and as such outranked and dominated officers immeasurably his superiors. Think of Lee banished to the coast of South Carolina, while Beauregard and Johnston were needlessly fortifying at Centreville against an absurdly impossible advance of McClellan's forces. Think of McClellan himself in command of the most important Union army, while Grant and Sherman and George H. Thomas remained in subordinate positions!

And in the navy a similar discrimination against demonstrated capacity and in favor of mere "rank" equally prevailed. Farragut, with all his already and abundantly proved capacity, waited for the best part of a year before he could get permission to bring his great powers into play, and when at last he got such permission from the ignorant and arrogant civilians who dominated the navy department at Washington, it came to him with an insulting suggestion of doubt as to his courage, his patriotism and his capacity. That is a sad story to be told hereafter. Our present purpose is merely to show how lamely and incompetently the war was carried on on both sides during the first year of its progress. He who considers the simple facts is well nigh forced to the conclusion that had either side conducted its contest with half the brains and energy that came later into play it must have won at once.

CHAPTER XX

The First Appearance of Grant

The "pepper box" policy of employing small bodies of troops everywhere for the accomplishment of ends of no strategic consequence prevailed at Washington during all those early months of the war. The results of that policy are the despair of the historian who would intelligently trace the progress of the conflict from its beginning to its end. In very truth there was no progress. So far as the outcome of the war was concerned those events had no part to play; so far as the history of the war is concerned, any attempt to relate their insignificant stories would serve only to confuse the reader's mind, and to distract his attention from events and operations that bore directly upon the ultimate outcome of a struggle which involved the fate of the nation. Let us leave them aside as inconsiderable incidents and trace instead those significant happenings that served to determine the ultimate results.

The outcome of all great wars is determined in the end by the personality of the men who conduct them to a conclusion. Circumstances and even accidents have their part to play, but in the main it is personality that determines the event.

So at this point it becomes necessary to consider General Grant as a factor in the war, "a stone rejected of the builders," but destined to become the chief cornerstone, nevertheless, of Federal success.

General Grant was a West Point graduate ranking low in his class at graduation. He served for a time in the regular army with such capacity as to reach the rank of captain. Then he resigned, as many other officers did – Stonewall Jackson and William T. Sherman among the number – because the police duty which seemed to constitute the only function of the regular army offered no career to him. Captain Grant became first a farmer and later a clerk in his brother's business house at Galena, Illinois, upon a meager salary of $800 a year, which was eked out by the earnings of his slaves in Missouri. When the war broke out he offered his services to his country, asking for a restoration to the regular army. His application was not deemed worthy even of a reply. But presently a regiment of Illinois volunteers, more appreciative than the Washington authorities, made him its colonel, and after a little while he was promoted to be a brigadier-general of volunteers, but still without even so much as a second lieutenant's commission in the regular army.

In this volunteer capacity he was sent first to Missouri and later to Cairo in Illinois to command a wide district. He fought the battle of Belmont and after a partial victory he lost it. A few months earlier, learning that the Confederates, who were masters of Columbus, twenty miles down the Mississippi, were planning to seize upon Paducah, fifty miles up the Ohio, Grant had undertaken without orders an expedition against that town. He promptly captured it and thus defeated the Confederate program.

After the battle of Belmont he planned and proposed a campaign which he hoped might reverse the existing situation at the West and give to the Union arms their first important and strategically significant victory.

Two great and practically navigable rivers, the Cumberland and the Tennessee, rise in the very heart of what was then the Southern Confederacy. Upon substantially parallel though vastly varying lines, they flow westward and northward till they debouch into the Ohio River within a few miles of each other.

At a point near the boundary between Kentucky and Tennessee where these two rivers flow within eleven miles of each other, the Confederates had erected two fortresses to command them – Fort Henry and Fort Donelson.

These fortresses gave to the South control of the two rivers. It was Grant's idea that by the reduction of these works he might reverse this condition of affairs, and make of the two rivers facile avenues of Federal access to the heart of the Confederacy, where now they served the Confederates as roadways of approach to positions of the utmost strategic importance to the side that should master and hold them.

But Grant was only a brigadier-general of volunteers, in no way entitled to plan campaigns or to make suggestions for campaigns. Halleck had command of the department, with headquarters at St. Louis. Halleck was a major-general in the regular army and Grant's "superior officer." Halleck disliked, distrusted and detested Grant, and so when Grant asked permission to move against and reduce the Confederate strongholds on the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers, Halleck's reply was in effect an injunction to the inferior officer to mind his own business.

Grant was so sure, however, of his ability to accomplish this vitally important task that he persisted in his entreaties and many weeks were consumed in fruitless negotiations for the privilege of doing great work in a great way. At last through the influence of Commodore Foote, commanding the naval forces in that quarter, the discredited volunteer general was graciously permitted by his martinet superior to undertake and execute the first operation of the war which crowned the Federal arms with a victory of strategic importance. This permission, though long solicited, did not come to Grant until the very end of January, 1862, and it was in February that the combined land and naval forces moved for the capture of the Confederate strongholds.

The expedition moved first up the Tennessee river. Grant had about 15,000 men, a force which was presently swelled by reinforcement to 27,000. But his advance was delayed and the fleet, with scarcely any assistance from him, captured Fort Henry on the sixth of February. Then the gunboats steamed down the river to its mouth and thence up the Cumberland to assail Fort Donelson. In the meanwhile Grant pushed across the narrow neck of land between the two fortresses and closely invested that fort. The fleet made a determined assault but was beaten off in a badly crippled condition. Grant continued to assail the enemy's works throughout three days of storm and sleet and suffering, and at the end of that time the fortress surrendered with about fourteen thousand men in addition to a Confederate loss in killed and wounded of about two thousand. The greater part of the garrison had previously escaped.

This was the first conspicuous victory achieved anywhere by the Federal arms. Its moral effect was incalculable and strategically it was of the utmost importance. It made an end for the time being of the war in Kentucky which had been going on for some time, involving actions of some individual importance, though they had no vital bearing upon the strategic history of the war. It made Federal instead of Confederate highways of the two great rivers that in their course penetrated almost to the heart of the Confederacy. It made easy prey of Nashville as a vantage point from which the Federal forces might penetrate the South and assail its strongholds of resistance. Still further, as the event showed, it opened the way for that campaign which, as many critics think, resulted at Shiloh, or Pittsburg Landing, in the strategically decisive action of the war.

However that may be, by the accomplishment of his object in this campaign General Grant had achieved one of the most conspicuous and to the country one of the most enheartening victories that were accomplished by any general on either side from the beginning to the end of the war. He had every right to expect commendation. He had every right to expect permission to go on from conquest to conquering, and to have such forces placed at his command as might be necessary for the carrying out of his enterprises. But Grant was still only an officer of volunteers badly at outs with his department commander, and those were the days of red tape, the days in which achievement counted for nothing as against "rank" and "seniority."

It is true that Halleck, who had never risen above the grade of captain in the regular army, was at best only Grant's equal in "old army rank." But he had the favor of General Scott as Grant had not, and so, ex-captain that he was, he had been made a major-general in the regular service while Grant remained a mere brigadier-general of volunteers. It is true that Grant had captured two fortresses of enormous strength while Halleck had captured nothing whatsoever anywhere on earth. It is true that Grant had received the surrender of a powerful and important fort with fourteen thousand prisoners in addition to a loss on the part of his enemy of two thousand in killed and wounded, while Halleck had never received the surrender of anybody and never did to the end of the story. But Halleck was a major-general in the regular army in spite of his resignation during his captaincy – Grant also having been a captain when he resigned – and so Halleck as department commander was authorized not only to restrain Grant from this expedition, as he had done during two months of precious opportunity, but afterwards to suspend him for many weeks from command, to place him under virtual arrest and for weary weeks to restrain him from carrying out those obviously easy supplementary enterprises with which he desired to glory-crown his achievement. Grant wanted to march on Nashville, which lay helpless before him and offered to the Federals a strategic position of incalculable value. Halleck ordered him to go to his tent and hammock instead.

What a wretched story it all is, to be sure! What a record of imbecility in control of genius, of incapacity in command of the highest ability, of small men in great places, and of great men restrained from action by the superior authority of other men immeasurably their inferiors, who by luck, or circumstance or official favor came into authority and position which they in no wise deserved, and which they were utterly incapable of using effectively in behalf of the cause they were set to serve! And what a price the country – North and South – was called upon to pay in blood and treasure and heartbreak, for all this misplacing of men!

But conditions and circumstances must be recognized, and due allowance must be made for them. The officers in the regular United States army were strictly professionals. Their first business in life was to secure all they could of rank and pay for themselves. Whether they remained in the regular army or resigned to accept Confederate service, their first concern was to secure all they could of personal preferment, rank, distinction, and recognition. Why should Beauregard or Johnston surrender aught of their advantages of regularity in behalf of the genius of Stonewall Jackson, who had long ago resigned to become a professor in a military institute? Why should McDowell, who had remained in the regular army, give place to Sherman, who had resigned to become a professor in a school? Why should Halleck, who by General Scott's favor had been raised from the rank of resigned captain to that of major-general, give place or favor to the ex-Captain Grant, now by mere popular selection a brigadier-general of volunteers, holding no place whatsoever in the regular army? Why should General Halleck permit this interloper Grant to go on winning victories? And why when the volunteer general had won them – as for example at Pittsburg Landing – should not Halleck come as he did and take command and thus assume to himself the credit due to another?

These were the ways of the early war. Moreover the administration on either side had no means of measuring men's capacities except by army rank or the favor of commanders. It was not until later that better counsels prevailed, that demonstrated capacity was recognized, and that the military martinet learned that something more than seniority was required as a claim to command.

Stonewall Jackson, it is true, had been made a major-general in the Confederate service in reward for his conduct at Manassas, but there were lieutenant-generals and full generals still outranking him and his was an exceptional case. Grant did not share in the benefits of the example. He had won a great victory which gave fresh heart and courage to the country, but in his reports he had been careless of technical details and had given no special credit for his achievements to the department commander who had done all he could to prevent him from achieving anything at all. He had made himself "persona non grata" at department headquarters, though the people everywhere were acclaiming him as a victor to the sore annoyance of "headquarters." Why should "headquarters" let the interloper complete his work by seizing upon the vitally important positions which his victory had made easy of conquest? Who was Grant, anyhow? Ex-captain, ex-Galena clerk, and only a brigadier-general of volunteers! What right had he to the credit of any victories he had been graciously permitted to win?

CHAPTER XXI

The Situation Before Shiloh

During the autumn of 1861 the troops of both sides were pushed into the "neutral" state of Kentucky at various points and in considerable numbers. Two battles of some moment resulted. At a place called Paintville, on the Big Sandy river in the eastern part of the state, Humphrey Marshall established himself with about 2,000 or 2,50 °Confederates. Colonel Garfield (afterwards General and still later President), in command of a substantially equal force of Federals, assailed Marshall there, pushed his columns back and on January 10, 1862, so far crippled him in a small but hotly contested pitched battle that Marshall was glad to retreat during the night with a loss of morale which at that period of the war was as important as the loss of guns.

In the meanwhile the Confederate General Zollicoffer, one of those amateurs in the military art who managed by political or other interest to push themselves into military command on either side, invaded eastern Kentucky, was defeated on October 21st, and fell back to Mill Springs on the upper waters of the Cumberland, where he fortified himself.

General Don Carlos Buell on the Federal side was in command of the department, and General George H. Thomas was in command of the column that immediately confronted Zollicoffer.

General Thomas was a Virginian by birth and was passionately devoted to his native state and its historic memories. He had been at the outbreak of the war a major in that specially selected regiment of which Robert E. Lee was colonel and in which the roster of his fellow officers included besides Lee Albert Sydney Johnston, William J. Hardee, Earl Van Dorn, E. Kirby Smith, John B. Hood and Fitzhugh Lee. All of these, Thomas's fellow Southerners, resigned their commissions and accepted service in the Confederate army. Thomas, who had very remarkably distinguished himself in the service, might well have been strongly tempted, not only by the example of these his beloved comrades and by his sentimental affection for his native state, but additionally by the direct certainty of an exalted command in the Confederate army, to go with them into the Southern service. To him peculiarly came the perplexing problem of divided allegiance which presented itself to every old army officer of Southern birth, and it is said – whether truthfully or not the historian cannot determine – that for a time he seriously and painfully hesitated whether to cast in his lot with Virginia and the South, and thus join his most cherished comrades, or to retain his place in the service of the nation that had educated him as a soldier and that had so generously recognized and so richly rewarded his genius and his devotion in the past. In the end he decided to adhere to the Federal cause, and very early in the war he was offered that supreme command of the Federal armies which Robert E. Lee had refused. He too declined that honor and responsibility, remaining, however, in the Federal service and becoming one of the most brilliant commanders in the Northern armies.

At Mill Springs with seven regiments, two batteries, and a handful of cavalry, he assailed Zollicoffer – who was killed in action – overthrew him and his successor Crittenden, and in effect drove the Confederates across the river. This was the first considerable victory won by the Federal arms in any part of the country after the Manassas defeat and its moral effect was naturally very great. It antedated Grant's victories, but was of course insignificant in comparison with them.

In the meantime General Buell was busily organizing the Army of the Ohio, with headquarters at Louisville and very skilfully endeavoring to maneuver the Confederates out of Kentucky without a pitched battle, the results of which might have been for better or for worse in the then undisciplined condition of his troops. It was a period of the war in which orderly battles were imminently perilous to the Federal cause, because success in them would have accomplished little while failure in them – which might easily result from the rawness of the troops – would have made of every border state a Confederate possession and stronghold.

General Buell was afterwards bitterly censured for not having fought great battles. It seems a sounder judgment which awards him praise for having maneuvered the Confederates out of Kentucky and far into Tennessee, without risking all results upon the hazard of any single contest which, with his raw troops, he might or might not have won.

But when Grant and Foote succeeded in capturing Fort Henry and Fort Donelson, the situation was fundamentally changed. There was a large and rapidly increasing force at Louisville and near Bowling Green under General Buell. Grant had his victorious forces at the two strongholds of Fort Henry and Fort Donelson. It was obviously easy and obviously wise to move with the two armies upon Nashville and add the conquest of all the Tennessee strongholds to that already achieved of all positions that could by any possibility give to the Confederates a standing ground in Kentucky.

In brief Grant's idea was to employ all available forces in the quick reduction of important Confederate positions, the overthrow of all Confederate armed forces, and the breaking of Confederate resisting power before it could have time to strengthen itself with reinforcements or with fortifications, or still more important with the organization, disciplining and seasoning of its troops. Accordingly he notified General Halleck that he purposed to move at once upon Nashville and positions beyond, unless forbidden to do so.

He was promptly forbidden to do anything of the kind, and peremptorily called back from a career of easy and obvious victory. For who was this $800 Galena clerk? What right had he to plan campaigns and carry them to a success that reflected no credit upon his regular army military superiors? It is true that he had captured Forts Henry and Donelson, with 14,623 men, 65 cannon, and 17,000 stands of small arms, with ammunition and accouterments in proportion. It is true that he had made Federal possessions of two important rivers reaching into the heart of the Confederacy and commanding its most important line of defense. It is true that he had won the first great inspiriting success of the war for the Federal arms. It is true that he had broken that carefully constructed line of defense which the Confederates had established from the Atlantic to the Mississippi. It is true that he had placed the National forces in such a position within the heart of the Confederacy that a further and decisive advance into Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi was obvious and easy. But on the other hand he was only a volunteer, possessing no rank or place in that regular army group which, at the North and at the South alike, stoutly asserted its claim to command by virtue of regularity and seniority of commission and wholly without regard to demonstrated genius or proved capacity.