This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [65]
Grant’s message was sent all across the North, and people made him a hero overnight; there was something about the hard ring of “unconditional surrender” that aroused vast enthusiasm, and it tickled people that the words fitted Grant’s initials.
But it was old Smith who had really stated the terms. As he said, all Grant had done was put them in smoother words.
4. To the Deep South
Fort Donelson was a crusher, and the Confederate high command instantly recognized it as such. The loss of Fort Henry had already cracked Johnston’s line, causing him to retreat from Bowling Green to Nashville, and to send Beauregard west to see what could be done with the great river fortress at Columbus. Now with Donelson gone, there was no good place to make a stand north of the southern Tennessee border.
On news of Buckner’s surrender, Johnston evacuated Nashville and started south, while Beauregard prepared for the evacuation of Columbus. As far as any plans had been made, Johnston aimed to concentrate his forces at Corinth, Mississippi. Beauregard believed that the Mississippi River could still be held, with strong points at Island No. Ten, New Madrid, and Fort Pillow, but except for this fringe all of western Tennessee was gone.1
What gave the defeat the potentiality of outright disaster — aside from the fact that the Confederacy was losing a modest industrial nexus of fair importance — was that it exposed to the Federal invaders the most important railroad line in the southern nation, the Memphis and Charleston, which (after dipping down into northern Mississippi and Alabama) ran east through Chattanooga and Knoxville and gave the Mississippi Valley region a direct connection with Virginia and the Atlantic seaboard. Abraham Lincoln, whose strategic ideas were not nearly as defective as a good many of his generals assumed, had had this line on his mind from the start; it was one of the reasons he was so desperately anxious to get an army down into eastern Tennessee. The value which the Richmond government placed on the line was shown by its reaction to the news of the defeat; it instantly began to strip the southern seaboard of troops in order to give Johnston reinforcements.
Confederate Secretary of War Judah Benjamin wrote to Robert E. Lee, who was then busy perfecting coastal defenses in South Carolina and Georgia, to send troops to Tennessee at once, because the railroad line “must be defended at all hazards.” Braxton Bragg, commanding at Mobile, Alabama, was ordered to leave a garrison in the harbor forts and to take the rest of his troops up to Johnston. Benjamin’s predecessor in the War Department, L. P. Walker, now a brigadier in Alabama, wrote that it would be better to lose all the seacoast than this railroad, calling it “the vertebrae of the Confederacy.” The Confederate government was aware by now that the Federals would soon be mounting an assault on New Orleans via the Mississippi passes, but when Donelson fell the best troops in the Louisiana sector were rushed north, along with much military equipment.2
Naturally the northern authorities were jubilant. The chief engineer of the Army of the Potomac wrote to McClellan saying that the victory “knocks all present calculations in the head” and remarking that if McClellan’s army did not move pretty soon it might find that the western troops had won the war without its aid. “We can march anywhere, I take it,” he exulted.3
This touched McClellan where he was sore. President Lincoln, the Cabinet, and the Republican leadership generally had been getting more and more impatient with him because he was refusing to move, and Lincoln not long since had irritably remarked that if McClellan did not propose to use the army