This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [63]
February 14 came in cold after a sharp night. It had been unseasonably warm during the cross-country march from Fort Henry, and many of the green troops had blithely thrown away their overcoats; some units had even left blankets behind in camp on the Tennessee. The men put in a miserable night. They were so close to the Confederate lines that fires were not allowed. But as the sun came up the air moderated a bit, and in midafternoon the soldiers’ spirits rose; out of their sight, beyond the hills and the trees, there came a heavy, measured thud-thud of the big naval guns. Foote was bringing his four armored gunboats up to give Fort Donelson what he had given Fort Henry.
It might have worked if he had kept his distance. His guns outranged anything the Confederates could fire at him, and when he opened the shooting at a distance of two miles his gunners were hitting regularly and doing substantial damage. But at Fort Henry he had finished things off fast by closing to point-blank range, and he tried the same thing here. The result was sheer disaster. At close range his gunners consistently overshot, and the Confederate gunners found their targets and pounded them hard. In a short time the squadron had to withdraw, two boats disabled, the others damaged, many men killed, Foote himself badly wounded. If Fort Donelson was going to be taken, the army would have to do it. Glumly Grant admitted that he might have to settle down for a siege.9
Fortunately the Confederate command was very nervous. Top Confederate in the place was Brigadier General Gideon Pillow, a gray-whiskered veteran of the Mexican War who was to bear one distinction, and only one, out of the Civil War — he was the only Confederate general to whom Grant consistently referred in terms of contempt. Even though the naval attack had been beaten off, Pillow figured the place could not be held, and next morning he marshaled a striking column to break the right of Grant’s line and open a way for the garrison to escape.
To an extent, the plan worked. McClernand’s division held the right; the Confederate assault doubled it back on the Union center, driving Federal brigades in flight and swinging the door of escape wide open. But Grant sent Lew Wallace and his men in to help close the gap, and on his left he ordered Smith to assault the Rebel breastworks in order to ease the pressure on his right. Old Smith, who had said the officer must live for the great day of battle, put his regiments into line, stuck his cap on the point of his sword, and rode ahead of them into a tangle of brush and felled trees, with Confederates on a ridge beyond driving in a hot fire.
Smith’s men had never been in action before, and when they entered the underbrush with bullets whining and crackling all around them, they wavered. Smith stormed at them:
“Damn you, gentlemen, I see skulkers. I’ll have none here. Come on, you volunteers, come on! This is your chance. You volunteered to be killed for love of country, and now you can be. You damned volunteers — I’m only a soldier and I don’t want to be killed, but you came to be killed and now you can be!”
Then, without looking back, sitting his horse as if he were on parade, sword held high, he rode on ahead of them. One of his rookies wrote afterward that “I was nearly scared to death, but I saw the old man’s mustache over his right shoulder, and went on.” Through the underbrush and fallen timber and up the slope they went, the Rebels blistering the hillside with musket fire. Once more the line wavered briefly. Smith beckoned to his division surgeon, who was riding with the staff, and told him: “Hewitt, my God, my friend, if you love me, go back and bring up another regiment of these damned volunteers. You’ll find them behind the bushes.”
The other regiment came up, the wavering ceased, and a staff officer recorded: “And so the old cock led them with a mixture of oaths and entreaties over the breastwork.” On Smith