This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [61]
They anchored a few miles downstream from Fort Henry on the afternoon of February 5, and Foote invited the generals aboard the gunboat Cincinnati and steamed up a little way to inspect the Confederate defenses. The river was full of floating mines — torpedoes, they were, in the nomenclature of that day — and the flood waters had torn most of these loose from their moorings and many of them were floating by. Sailors got one of them and brought it aboard the flagship, and Foote and the generals gathered around it on the low fantail deck at the stern while the ship’s armorer was called to dismantle the thing and see how it worked.
The mine was an iron cylinder, five feet long by some eighteen inches thick; with three long iron rods protruding from one end to actuate the firing mechanism. While the officers bent over to watch, the armorer removed these rods, took off the detachable end of the tube, and went to work with a wrench on a heavy nut that held the interior works together.
Apparently the torpedo had leaked. Water had entered, and the cylinder was full of air under pressure. As the armorer loosened the nut, this air suddenly began to emerge with an ominous hissing sound, and all hands immediately got the idea that the machine was about to explode. The armorer vanished, Smith and McClernand dropped flat on the deck, and Grant and Foote made for a ladder and went floating swiftly to the upper deck — getting there, breathless, just as the hissing stopped and it became obvious that the torpedo was not going to explode after all. General and flag officer looked at each other sheepishly. Then Foote blandly inquired:
“General, why this haste?”
Said Grant:
“That the navy may not get ahead of us.”4
Then they returned to the lower deck and the examination of the torpedo was completed.
They would attack the fort next day, and that evening old Foote made the rounds of the vessels in his squadron, addressing the crews, exhorting them to be brave men — most of them had never been under fire before — and urging them to put their trust in divine Providence. As a good Yankee, he had a final word of caution for them. When they fired the big guns they must make every shot count: “Every charge you fire from one of these guns costs the government about eight dollars.”
While Foote was addressing his crews, Grant got his troops ashore: Smith’s men on the western side of the river, to march up and seize the new works the Confederates were building there, and McClernand’s on the eastern bank, to march directly on Fort Henry itself. Morning came, the troops began to move, and Foote wheeled his gunboats upstream to convenient range and opened fire. An officer on the Essex noticed that the first three shots from the flagship fell short, and remarked that Foote’s own gun crews had just wasted twenty-four dollars.5
The fight was surprisingly short. The Rebel commander in Fort Henry, rightly judging that the place could not be defended very long, had sent most of his men cross-country to Fort Donelson, retaining only enough to work the guns that bore on the river. The gunboats’ fire was accurate (after the initial twenty-four dollar lapse) and the fort surrendered before Grant had got his soldiers into position.
Somewhat to the army’s embarrassment, the Confederate commander came out in a rowboat under a flag of truce, boarded the flagship, and made his surrender to Foote, who sent a detail ashore to hold the place until the soldiers could get there. The fort was so badly flooded that the cutter carrying this detail rowed straight in through the sally port. A Confederate officer