Grant Moves South (22 page)

Meanwhile, Grant's troops were moving. As Grant's headquarters boat left the wharf, Rawlins noticed that Grant seemed tense and that he kept looking back at the wharf boat, as if he feared until the last minute that some order of recall might arrive from St. Louis. When the steamer finally went on upstream and Cairo fell out of sight behind, Grant “seemed a new man.” He clapped Rawlins on the shoulder—a surprising act, to Rawlins, for Grant had never behaved so before—and said: “Now we seem to be safe, beyond recall.… We will succeed, Rawlins; we must succeed.” Rawlins and Grant shook hands.
⁶

Grant had done his best to keep the expedition a secret—Halleck had told him to keep even his own staff officers in the dark about the destination of the force—but military security in the Civil War was usually leaky, and it proved so in this case. Even before the transports left Cairo, the
Chicago Tribune
man sent off a dispatch announcing that “the grand expedition up the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers is about to start”; he estimated the force at twenty-two thousand men, said that it would attack Forts Henry and Donelson, and added, apparently as an afterthought, that the military authorities were not permitting any dispatches regarding the expedition to be sent. Early on the morning of February 4 another correspondent at Paducah informed his paper's
readers that transports from Cairo loaded with troops “came straggling in here one at a time all of last night and immediately proceeded up the Tennessee.”
⁷
The expedition went plowing on; the water in the Tennessee was high, and along the shore the soldiers could see Negroes and farm stock huddling on bits of high ground. Now and then a thinly-clad, shivering, half-starved white refugee came down to the water's edge and begged to be taken on board. Usually some boat would send a yawl ashore to rescue the fugitive; Colonel Whittlesey remembered that most of the men thus rescued told wild tales of persecution of Unionist farmers by Confederate outriders. The Negroes who watched from the banks shouted and danced and waved when they saw the Federal troops.
⁸

By afternoon of February 3 the steamers nosed into the eastern bank of the river four miles below Fort Henry and started to send McClernand's men ashore. Foote and Grant with the four ironclad gunboats went on up the river to try a preliminary exchange of shots with the Confederate batteries.

The flood conditions were doing the Confederates no good. Inexpertly sited on low ground, Fort Henry was almost awash. Across the river there were hills overlooking the fort, and here, in recent weeks, the Confederates had begun to build a second work, Fort Heiman, for insurance, but the job was far from finished and Fort Heiman was useless. Torpedoes had been planted in the stream, but the rising waters had torn most of them loose from their moorings and now they were floating harmlessly down the stream, soiled white cylinders tossing on the brown current. Foote had his sailors fish some of them out and stow them on the fantail of his flagship, the
Cincinnati
, and he and Grant stood by while a gunner undertook to dismantle one and examine its mechanism. A sudden hissing of escaping air from within the container convinced everyone that it was about to explode, and Grant and Foote went swiftly up the ladder to find safety on the upper deck, while the rest of the crowd incontinently jumped overboard. Somehow, Grant beat Foote to the top of the ladder, and the two men looked at one another, somewhat sheepishly, as it became apparent that the torpedo was not going to blow up. Foote mildly asked Grant why he had been in such a hurry, and Grant calmly replied that the Army did not believe in letting the Navy get ahead of it. The examination of the mine was concluded, and the warships went on upstream to open fire.
⁹

The firing was brief and inconclusive and did very little damage. A few shells were planted in the Confederate works, and one Confederate shell came aboard the gunboat
Essex
, tearing out a corner of the captain's cabin. There was no other damage, except that one of the transports, steaming too close to the bank, struck an overhanging tree, lost part of its upper-deck railing, and wrecked its barbershop, “to the great consternation of the proprietor.”
¹⁰
The feeling-out process concluded, the gunboats returned to the place of disembarkation, and the transports hurried back to Paducah to get another load of soldiers.

Grant's plan reflected a little more forethought than had been evident in the head-on approach to Belmont. On the east side of the river he planted the division commanded by John McClernand. McClernand had nine regiments of infantry, two regiments of cavalry and four batteries, and except for a few of the gunners every man in the force came from Illinois. The troops Smith was bringing up from Paducah—mostly Illinoisans, with a sprinkling from Indiana and Missouri—were landed, on arrival, across the river from McClernand's division. The battle plan required McClernand to advance, cutting the road that led from Fort Henry over to Fort Donelson on the Cumberland so as to keep the garrison from escaping or from being reinforced, and standing by to assault the works if ordered. Smith, at the same time, was to move up the western bank and seize incomplete Fort Heiman, where he could plant guns to shoot into Fort Henry. The gunboats would steam straight up the river, and on signal would open a bombardment. Grant himself, instead of riding ahead in the front line as he had done at Belmont, would stay at the landing to co-ordinate the movements.
¹¹

With Smith's arrival Grant had some fifteen thousand troops. More were coming, for the desperate interchange of messages between St. Louis, Louisville and Washington had brought the promise of reinforcement. Halleck was sending every regiment he could spare to Cairo and Paducah, and Buell was preparing to transfer a brigade from his own army, with more to follow. Once begun, the expedition was drawing power to itself, and the Confederates were
deeply worried. In Memphis, a writer for the
Memphis Appeal
had written that Fort Donelson could be held against any onslaught but that “more solicitude is felt about Fort Henry”; within the fort, he said, water had risen to within a few feet of the magazines, and the heavy guns were only six feet above the river, with the water level still going up. The Confederate commander, Brigadier General Lloyd Tilghman, watched from his battlements while the Federal force took position, and that night held a council of war at which his officers agreed that the fort must fall. Tilghman ordered that only enough men be held in Fort Henry to work the heavy guns; he himself would stay with them but everyone else must go outside the works and be ready to go over to Fort Donelson, where the real stand would be made.
¹²

Below the fort something more important than anyone present could understand was taking place: an army was coming into existence. What Grant had with him was, up to this moment, simply a collection of individual regiments. Never before had all of them been brought together in one place. The habit of co-ordination had not been born; these regiments had been enlisted, organized and drilled separately, and they had seen so little of the parade ground that, as one veteran remarked afterward, they were to get their baptism of fire “before they learned that the cardinal military sin was to guide left while passing in review.” They had been inadequately drilled, what their commanders knew about handling massed troops was something that would have to be learned on the battlefield, and their weapons were mixed and imperfect—“the refuse guns of Europe, with calibers as varied as the nations they came from.” But as they came ashore from the steamboats and streamed out through the fields to select camping grounds and throw pickets forward they were turning themselves into what would finally become one of the great armies of American history—the informal, individualistic, occasionally unmanageable, but finally victorious Army of the Tennessee.
¹³

February 5 was the day of preparation; February 6 was the day for the big attack. It rained all night, and McClernand's tentless troops had an uncomfortable time of it; at 11 o'clock in the morning they took off, floundering along muddy roads to take their assigned
positions. On his flagship, Foote took note of the execrable marching conditions and warned Grant: “General, I shall have the fort in my possession before you get into your position.” On the west bank, Smith got his men moving forward, and around noon Foote's gunboats raised their anchors and went steaming up the river to open fire.

Foote had four ironclads—all he could find crews for, at the moment—and he took them on in line abreast. Only their bows were well armored; they would fight head-on, using their bow guns, shielding their weakly protected sides. Foote had done his best to whip his green hands into shape. Gun crews had been warned that their fire must be accurate rather than rapid. As a good New Englander, Foote abhorred waste, and he addressed his crews just before this advance got under way, warning them that “every charge you fire from one of these guns costs the government about eight dollars.” Finally, coming within range, the flagship opened fire—her first three shots, an irreverent junior noted, fell short, for a net loss of twenty-four dollars—and then the whole line opened. Bringing up the rear, out of harm's way but ready to lend a hand if needed, were the old wooden gunboats
Tyler, Lexington
and
Conestoga
.
¹⁴

The fight was unexpectedly brief and easy. Fort Henry was all but indefensible. Tilghman had been so impressed with its vulnerable layout that he wrote that “the history of military engineering affords no parallel to this case”; and although his men did their best there could be just one outcome. The Confederate fire was accurate enough, and the gunboats had been hit fifty-nine times. Heavy shot at times broke the iron plating, and an officer who saw one shot strike the flagship said that the
Cincinnati's
side-timbers were splintered and sent flying as if the vessel had been struck by a bolt of lightning. No serious damage was done, however, except to the
Essex
. Here a bolt cracked through the armor of the casemate, decapitated a sailor, and smashed on to blow up a boiler. Scalding steam filled the gunboat, twenty-nine men were scalded, quartermaster and pilot died at the wheel, and
Essex
drifted off downstream, out of action.

Meanwhile, Foote kept on closing the range, and the gunboats' fire became increasingly effective. One of Tilghman's most powerful
guns exploded, another was put out of action when spiked by an accident to its own priming wire, and Federal fire smashed a couple of 32-pounders, sending iron fragments all about and disabling every man in both gun-crews. Tilghman before long found himself with just four guns that could be fought; Foote's gunboats were within 300 yards of the fort, their projectiles were coming through the earthen embankments “as readily as a ball from a Navy Colt would pierce a pine board,” and the day was obviously lost. Tilghman ordered all of his infantry to take off for Dover, and Foote's prediction was proved correct; the bad roads had delayed McClernand so much that more than two thousand of the Confederate garrison got away clean and tramped overland to the Cumberland. Six fieldpieces they were taking bogged down in the insufferable mire and had to be abandoned, but the men themselves escaped. Tilghman struck his flag, the sailors on the gunboats came out on deck to give three cheers, and a cutter from flagship
Cincinnati
went over to the fort; so high was the water that the boat simply rowed inside the enclosure. A Confederate officer gloomily admitted that if the fight had been delayed forty-eight hours no firing would have been needed: the river itself would have done the job by drowning the fort.

Tilghman came aboard Foote's flagship and made formal surrender. His garrison by now consisted of fewer than one hundred men, and his casualties had been moderate.
¹⁵

Tilghman wrote a brief report next day, which was sent through the lines to his Confederate superiors with Grant's permission; in it, Tilghman took “great pleasure in acknowledging the courtesy and consideration shown by Brig. Gen. U. S. Grant and Commander Foote.” One of his officers wrote that Grant seemed to be “a modest, amiable, kindhearted but resolute man,” and said that Grant quickly rebuked an officious Federal officer who scolded a Confederate for destroying confidential papers at the time of the surrender. The Confederate officers dined with Grant and his staff on the headquarters transport, while waiting transfer to a northern prison camp, and two young Confederates got tipsy and talked too loudly and defiantly; an older Confederate remembered gratefully how Grant quietly had the men escorted to a cabin until they sobered up, explaining that he did it simply because he was
afraid that some equally tipsy Union officers might make trouble for them.
¹⁶

Foote had made his boast good. He had taken the fort before the Army had even got into position. Except for the tragedy on
Essex
, his own losses had been inconsiderable. The interior of Fort Henry looked like chaos, with wrecked guns and gun carriages strewed all about, with here and there bloody fragments of human bodies. No one took the time to realize that the river itself and the bad design and inadequate equipment with which Fort Henry had been endowed might have been largely responsible; the moral seemed to be that earthen forts simply could not stand up to a naval attack which was resolutely pushed home. Navy stock went up to dizzying heights.