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By Root 1796 0

Grant’s medical director seized on these and converted them into a huge army hospital — one was badly needed because the hot river valley was unhealthy and there was much sickness. In the course of outfitting the place the doctor learned that it was all but impossible to get any work out of the soldiers who were detailed to help. To these Westerners, sweeping and scrubbing and setting up beds was women’s work, and they simply would not do it. He learned, too, that these boys from the farm and the small town, self-reliant to a fault at ordinary times, became totally helpless when they fell ill, requiring much more nursing than the civilian patients of his past experience.5

Mound City had a shipyard, in which four ironclad gunboats were being built; big snub-nosed craft with two and one half inches of armor on their slanting sides, pierced for thirteen guns, three of which were heavy-duty eight-inch Dahlgrens. It had been clear from the start that war could not be fought along the great rivers without warships, but Washington (to the navy’s intense disgust) had decreed that all of these inland operations should be under army control. So the War Department was having the gunboats built, the navy would man and operate them, and skippers and squadron commanders were required to take orders from the army. Thus, when he took over at Cairo, Grant found that he had a budding fleet under his control.

Part of it was already afloat and in operation: three river steamers hastily converted into gunboats, powerfully armed but very vulnerable to enemy fire because their boilers were above the waterline and they had nothing but five-inch oak bulwarks for armor. Since the Confederates had no gunboats at all in this part of the world, these fragile steamers were having no trouble, but they could not for five minutes stand up against shore fortifications, and therefore they could control the river only if the army occupied the banks.

To command its Mississippi squadron the navy had sent out Flag Officer Andrew Foote, a salty person with an engaging fringe of whiskers jutting out around a heart-of-oak face; a devout churchman who not infrequently delivered sermons to his crews and who was so well liked by the rank and file that he was even able to stop the grog ration without creating trouble. Luckily for the cause of the Union, he and Grant took to each other at once, and — in a command situation almost guaranteed to generate friction — they got along in perfect harmony.6

Grant had been at Cairo almost no time at all before he began to get action.

Across the river was Kentucky, and Kentucky was still neutral, but nobody imagined that the neutrality was going to last very much longer. Somebody was bound to violate it; if the Union and the Confederacy were going to make war on each other along the underside of the Middle West, Kentucky was bound to become involved, and the only real question was when and how it would happen. At Cairo, Grant was looking down the river, turning over plans for a thrust toward Tennessee; and in northwestern Tennessee there was a Confederate army under Major General Leonidas Polk, former bishop in the Episcopal Church, who had gone to West Point with Jefferson Davis and who now was responsible for keeping the Yankees from coming down the Mississippi.

On the Mississippi there was a little Kentucky town named Columbus, important for two reasons: it was the northern terminus of a southern railroad line, and it was perched on high bluffs which, if properly fortified, no northern gunboats could pass. Bishop Polk suspected that the Federals were about to put up works on the opposite Missouri shore, and he decided to beat them to the punch. On September 4 he acted, disregarding Kentucky neutrality and sending troops over the state line to occupy and fortify Columbus.

Grant learned of this at once, and the surgeon who had been watching him with growing interest discovered that one of his early judgments was correct — the man could act swiftly in an emergency.

Grant began by sending a telegram to the Speaker of the