This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [60]
3. Come On, You Volunteers!
The high command had been doing a good deal of sputtering during January. McClellan still hoped that Buell could move into east Tennessee, but Buell was insisting that he had to crack the Confederate defenses at Bowling Green first and then move on Nashville; so McClellan told Halleck that he ought to move up the Tennessee River to create a diversion and keep the Rebels from reinforcing at Bowling Green, and Halleck was replying that the Confederate force at Columbus far outnumbered the ten thousand men he had available for such a move. He argued that “it would be madness to attempt anything serious with such a force,” and he gave McClellan a little lecture on strategy; to move against two points on the Confederate line would be “to operate on exterior lines against an enemy occupying a central position,” a military solecism which “is condemned by every authority I have ever read.” Lincoln saw the correspondence, and across the bottom of Halleck’s letter he scribbled: “It is exceedingly discouraging. As everywhere else, nothing can be done.”1
The sputtering continued. Halleck reminded McClellan that the troops he had inherited from Frémont were in a disorganized, near-mutinous condition, and complained: “I am in the condition of a carpenter who is required to build a bridge with a dull axe, a broken saw and rotten timber.”2
Some of his tools did have a good edge, however, and Thomas’s victory at Logan’s Crossroads lent inspiration. Grant, Foote, and old C. F. Smith were all convinced that they were facing a bright opportunity rather than a vexing problem, and word of their optimism got abroad. Oddly enough, a false alarm from the East was a spur to action. McClellan learned that General Beauregard was being sent west, to be second-in-command to Albert Sidney Johnston: in addition, he was erroneously informed that Beauregard was taking fifteen regiments with him, and it seemed advisable to do something before these reinforcements should arrive. Halleck finally consented to let Grant make a stab at Fort Henry on the Tennessee River, just over the line from Kentucky, and he found that he could spare fifteen thousand men for the task instead of the ten thousand he had mentioned earlier. He and Buell then began exchanging messages, exploring the possibilities of co-operation, deploring the atrocious state of the roads, and doubting that anything very effective could be done. Halleck told McClellan that unless he got heavy reinforcements he did not believe he could accomplish much, Buell complained that Halleck’s move was being commenced “without appreciation — preparative or concert,” and he added that the Rebels would probably muster sixty thousand men to oppose the move.3
While the high command sputtered, Grant, Foote and Smith moved.
The Tennessee River comes up from the Deep South to meet the Ohio River at Paducah. To the east, the Cumberland River, after rising in the Kentucky mountains, dips to the north, and as it leaves Tennessee to re-enter Kentucky it flows parallel to the Tennessee for a long distance. Just below the Kentucky-Tennessee border, at a place where the two northward-flowing rivers are no more than ten miles apart, the Confederates had prepared two strong points: Fort Henry on the Tennessee, and Fort Donelson at Dover on the Cumberland. Between them, these two forts were supposed to hold the line between Columbus on the west and Bowling Green on the east, where the main Confederate body was concentrated.
On paper these forts were powerful. What Grant had learned was that Fort Henry, at least, was a hollow shell. It had been poorly situated in lowlands which were subject to flood. The Tennessee was high, as February began, and half of Fort Henry was under water; furthermore, the place was weakly garrisoned, and while the Confederates were trying to remedy matters by building another fort on the western bank of the Tennessee they had not got very far with it.
Early in February, Grant took off. He had approximately fifteen