This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [58]
The enlisted men sensed Buell’s disapproval of volunteers, and they considered him very reserved and aloof and refused to warm up to him. They might have admired one odd trick which Buell used to indulge in to display his physical strength. In his home, with guests present, he liked to take his wife by the elbows, lift her off the floor, and place her on the mantelpiece — something of a feat, one guest observed, since the lady weighed at least 140 pounds and the mantel was nearly as high as Buell’s head.6
The war, to Buell, was a business of maps, of military maxims carefully studied and observed, of conscious application of basic principles. It would be possible, he argued, to win an important campaign without fighting a single general engagement; battles should be fought only when success was reasonably certain, and “war has a higher object than that of mere bloodshed.”7 This was true enough, and Buell could cite eminent authority for his belief. Yet this war might possibly turn out to be unlike the ones in the textbooks. It might have rules of its own, or no rules at all, as Nathaniel Lyon had discovered in the free-for-all at St. Louis; in which case a man who went by the book could have much trouble.
Buell was beginning to have a little trouble this fall, in point of fact. As much as he wanted anything short of final victory, Abraham Lincoln wanted east Tennessee occupied by Union troops, for reasons both military and political; the occupation would break the all-important railroad line that connected Virginia with the Mississippi Valley, and east Tennessee was full of sturdy Union sympathizers and ought to be liberated. McClellan accepted this and passed the orders along to Buell, and Pap Thomas was eager to make the move just as soon as he got his wagon train in order. But Buell thought the move was all wrong. In a letter to Lincoln he confessed that he was led to prepare for the thrust “more by my sympathy for the people of east Tennessee and the anxiety with which you and the general-in-chief have desired it than by my opinion of its wisdom.” East Tennessee, he felt, would have to wait; the important thing was to break the main Rebel line in the West.8
The western end of this line was anchored by the powerful riverbank fortress at Columbus on the Mississippi, to possess which Bishop Polk had been willing to fracture Kentucky’s neutrality at the beginning of September. The center was based on Bowling Green, where Albert Sidney Johnston seemed to have his principal troop concentration. Eastward, the line tapered off in the mountainous area north and west of Cumberland Gap.
Thus the western end of the line was in Halleck’s territory and the rest in Buell’s, and before any of it could be attacked properly Buell and Halleck would have to work out a joint plan and make complete arrangements for co-operation. It was taking them a long time to do this. Some of the delay possibly arose because each general knew perfectly well that the man who drove the Rebels out of Kentucky was going to win fame and promotion, so that each one greatly preferred to see the main push take place in his own bailiwick. While they planned, argued, and cajoled one another by mail and by telegraph — for some reason they were never quite able to spend a couple of days face to face and iron out all difficulties — McClellan at long distance called for action and meditated at leisure on the best way to make use of the Army of the Potomac.… And the autumn months passed, and Republican leaders muttered that the generals were reluctant to fight, and General Stone was made an object lesson for the hesitant.
In spite of the delays, there was beginning to be action. If Halleck and Buell preferred to wait until everything was ready, each had a subordinate who was ready to fight.
General Grant in Cairo touched it off first. Across the Mississippi from Columbus, some fifteen miles downstream from Cairo, there was an insignificant Missouri hamlet named Belmont, and to this place on November 7 Grant