Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction Allen Guelzo (novels to read .txt) 📖

Tennessee, McClellan acceded to Halleck’s proposal to push up the two rivers into western Tennessee, with Nashville as the ultimate objective.

Halleck’s plan succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, and that was chiefly because he enjoyed two advantages that, it is safe to say, no one else in the world possessed. The first was a fleet of ironclad gunboats ideally designed for river warfare. Prior to the nineteenth century, and for almost as long as ships had been used as weapons of war, navies had been content to build their warships—and all their other ships—of wood, and relied on lofts of sail to move them. Even if the navies of Europe had seriously desired to plate their wooden ships with protective iron, the technology of iron making was too primitive and too expensive before the nineteenth century to provide iron that would not shatter upon impact, while the inability of sail to move ships weighted down with iron armor would leave an ironclad warship almost dead in the water. In 1814, at about the same time that steam-powered riverboats first appeared on the Mississippi River system, the British navy began experimenting with steam propulsion in its warships, first in the form of paddlewheel steamers, and then in conjunction with new screw-type propellers. Then, in the 1820s, the French navy began developing explosive shells for use by its warships, so even the best-built wooden warship could be turned into a roaring holocaust with only one hit by a naval gun. With steam propulsion at last able to move heavier and heavier ships, and pressed with the urgent necessity of protecting their wooden warships from the fiery impact of explosive shell, both the French and the British navies began tinkering with the use of protective iron armor. The Crimean War of 1854–56, in which France and England were allied against Russia, gave the two navies the chance to try out their ideas under fire. They constructed five “floating batteries,” awkward and unseaworthy monstrosities that were little more than large wooden packing cases with sloping sides sheathed in wrought iron four and a half inches thick. Although these gunboats could only crawl along at the antediluvian speed of 4 knots, their iron sides proved invulnerable to anything the Russian artillery could do to them, and they were a tremendous success. “Their massive wrought-iron sides, huge round bows and stern, and, above all, their close rows of solid 68- and 84-pounder guns, show them at once to be antagonists under the attacks of which the heaviest granite bastions in the world would crumble down like contract brickwork.” When in 1859 the British launched the first full-size, seagoing armored warship, Warrior, the age of the ironclad had at last arrived.15

The lessons taught by the “floating batteries” were not lost on American designers, and in August 1861 the War Department contracted with John B. Eads to build seven ironclad gunboats for use on the western rivers. Eads and his chief designer, Samuel Pook, built what amounted to a series of 512-ton floating batteries like those used in the Crimea, with flat bottoms, slanting armored sides of two and a half inches of iron plate, and an assortment of cannon. Known as “Pook’s Turtles,” the gunboats handled awkwardly, were badly overweight, and (since no one seems to have thought of who was going to operate them) had no crews. However, the naval officer detached to bring them into service, a stern anti-slavery Connecticut salt named Andrew Foote, managed to get the boats finished and launched, rounded up crews (with Halleck’s authorization), and otherwise provided Halleck with an armored naval flotilla. “Pook’s Turtles” were far from being great warships, but they were more than anything the Confederates had on the Tennessee or the Cumberland.

Still, nothing that Foote or the gunboats achieved along the rivers would have amounted to much if Halleck had not also possessed another, less obvious advantage, and that was an officer who could take command of the Union land forces, work in tandem with Foote, and win Halleck’s campaign for him. The name of that officer was Ulysses Simpson Grant.

No one in American history has ever looked less like a great general than Ulysses Grant. He was the sort of person one would have to stare at very intently just to be able to describe him, and there had been nothing in his life up to this point that in any way suggested that he was going to be a great general. He was born in Ohio in 1822 as Hiram Ulysses Grant, and his father managed to wangle him an appointment to West Point in 1839. (The congressman who made out the appointment papers somehow confused Grant’s name with the names of some of Grant’s relatives, and this turned him into Ulysses Simpson Grant.) No brilliant student, Grant graduated in 1843, twenty-first in a class of thirty-nine cadets, and although he was a talented horseman with a penchant for mathematics, he was shunted off as a lieutenant to the 4th U.S. Infantry. The Mexican War brought him his first action and first promotion to captain. But after the war, peacetime boredom and separation from his family drove him to alcohol, and in July 1854 he resigned from the army.

For the next seven years, Grant failed at nearly everything he tried, until his father finally gave him a job as a clerk in the family leather goods store in Galena, Illinois. Having been in the army most of his life, and with simple economic survival occupying all of his attention since leaving the army, Grant “had thought but little about politics,” he later recalled. Although he was (like Lincoln) “a Whig by education and a great admirer of Mr. Clay,” the disintegration of the Whigs left him with no one to vote for in 1856, and for a while he indulged a brief fling with the Know-Nothings. He soon enough grew weary of the Know-Nothings’ ethnic hate-mongering, but his fear that a Republican presidential victory in 1856