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

The question now for Grant was whether his immediate superior in St. Louis, Henry Wager Halleck, would let him keep on moving, for in this spring of 1862, Grant was as optimistic as nearly everyone else in the North that with a little energy the war could be wrapped up right then, and especially on the rivers. “‘Secesh’ is about on its last legs in Tennessee,” Grant calmly predicted, and he clearly remembered twenty-five years later the confidence he had had then that “after the fall of Fort Donelson the way was opened to the National forces all over the South-west without much resistance.”26

The Confederate forces in the West were thrown into a panic by the speed of Grant’s movement and the embarrassing loss of Forts Henry and Donelson. The Confederates had pinned their hopes on using the Ohio River as their northern line of defense, and their eagerness to stake out the Ohio line as a Confederate moat was what had led them to take the risk of violating Kentucky’s neutrality in 1861. Once having invaded Kentucky, the Confederates tried to make sure they could hold it. All Confederate forces between the Mississippi and the Appalachians were consolidated into one department, and overall command of that department was given in September 1861 to Albert Sidney Johnston, one of the most highly regarded officers of the old regular army and one of the dearest military friends of Jefferson Davis. “If he is not a general,” said Davis, “we have no general.” With 43,000 men at his disposal, with the two forts (Henry and Donelson) on the Tennessee and Cumberland, with another fort on Island No. 10 in the Mississippi, with Confederate forces already holding the Ohio River line at Columbus, and with convenient railroad links along the Memphis & Ohio to assure him of the advantage of interior lines—with all this, Johnston certainly began the war in the west holding what appeared like the all the best strategic cards.27

The problem was that Johnston’s cards were actually of less value than they seemed. Johnston’s forts were either incomplete or poorly constructed, his men and his officers were badly undertrained and underequipped, and Johnston himself turned out to be something less of a general than his reputation had suggested. He failed utterly to anticipate Grant’s vicious strike at Henry and Donelson, and by the time Johnston realized what had happened, Federal gunboats were controlling the Tennessee and Cumberland, the Memphis & Ohio had been cut, and Johnston had lost all ability to concentrate his troops anywhere in Kentucky or Tennessee. Recalling the garrisons at Columbus and Bowling Green, and hastily gathering what forces he could lay his hands on, Johnston abandoned all of Kentucky and what remained to him of Tennessee, and selected as a concentration point the town of Corinth, a railroad junction just below the Tennessee-Mississippi border on the last remaining east-west Confederate rail line, the Memphis & Charleston.

The other Confederate outposts left in Tennessee, including Island No. 10 in the Mississippi River, simply dropped into the hands of Halleck’s other forces. “Secession is well-nigh played out—the dog is dead,” trumpeted “Parson” William G. Brownlow, who defied Confederate authorities in Tennessee to stop publication of his pro-Union newspaper, the Knoxville Whig. “Their demoralized army are on their way back to the Cotton States,” Brownlow advised Halleck, “where they can look back at you, as you approach their scattered lines. … You will overtake them at the Tennessee River,—sooner if they come with new supplies of mean whiskey.”28

The jubilation Halleck felt at these military successes was matched only by the pleasure of the political rewards he reaped. The afternoon after Fort Donelson surrendered, Halleck wired McClellan: “Give me command in the West. I ask this for Forts Henry and Donelson.”29 The War Department did even better: it promoted Halleck to the top Federal command in the west and demoted McClellan to field command in the East. Don Carlos Buell, who was supposed to be carrying the real war in the west into eastern Tennessee, suddenly became Halleck’s subordinate, and Halleck was now set free to prosecute the western war as he wished—not by invading the mountains of eastern Tennessee and rallying some vague body of Tennessee Unionists, but by pursuing the Confederacy’s western army down to Corinth and smashing it up for good. With that tantalizing object in mind, Halleck ordered Grant to push south along the Tennessee River toward Corinth with the force he had used to capture Henry and Donelson. At the same time, and with ill-concealed satisfaction, Halleck ordered Buell to bring his men down to the Tennessee River for a rendezvous with Grant. By the time the two forces had rendezvoused on the Tennessee, Halleck would have come up the river by steamboat to take personal command and push on overland to Corinth.

The Federal army began moving up the Tennessee River on March 5, unloading first at Savannah, Tennessee, on the east bank of the river. On March 17 Grant began moving them again and steamed nine miles further upstream to a scrawny little steamboat tie-up called Pittsburg Landing on the west bank of the Tennessee, which Halleck had designated as the rendezvous point with Buell and the forward depot for the big push on Corinth. There Grant sat, waiting for Halleck to come up from departmental headquarters in St. Louis, and waiting for Buell (who spent twelve days building a bridge across the Duck River) to make it to the ferry point at Savannah. In the meantime, Grant’s 33,000 men were allowed to sprawl out from the river landing, in no particular order, for almost three miles (all the way to a little log meetinghouse innocently known as Shiloh Church), just as though there were no Confederates worthy of notice within a thousand miles.30

Grant was wrong. In fact, he had committed the worst error in strategic judgment he would ever make during the war, for