This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [69]
The victory at Fort Donelson stirred people. So far the people of the North had had Bull Run defeats, and losing battles at Wilson’s Creek, and reasonless Ball’s Bluff tragedies, and cautious McClellan had gone on with drilling and preparation as if a long war lay ahead. Here, suddenly, was a reversal. Fifteen thousand armed Confederates had been swallowed at a gulp, the war had been pushed from mid-Kentucky all the way back below Tennessee, and in Grant’s curt “unconditional surrender” note there had been a sure, confident note that Northerners had not yet heard. Off in Missouri the 15th Illinois, which had detested Grant ever since he ordered its colonel about the summer before, began to admit that perhaps this Grant was not so bad after all. It was ordered down to join his army now, and when it got to Fort Henry and found itself boarding vessels in a fleet of fifty transports and sailing up the Tennessee with colors flying and bands playing, it agreed that the war was fine, exciting, and grand. All through the western theater, regiments that had been doing the drudgery of training-camp or border-patrol duty found themselves hoping to be sent to Grant’s army. Victory lay up the river somewhere and everybody wanted to be in on it.13
Up the river, or down another river; for the Mississippi moved south not too far west from the valley of the Tennessee, and Union strength was being felt there too. Blustering John Pope, for whom Halleck had vainly sought promotion, who despised volunteer troops and seemed to long for the old-army days of obedient regulars, was taking the Confederate post at New Madrid, Missouri, and with the aid of Foote’s ironclads was putting in motion the offensive that would soon take Island No. Ten and open the river all the way to Memphis. In the southwest a cautious sobersides of a professional soldier named Samuel Curtis was taking an army down to the farthest corner of Missouri, crossing into Arkansas, and routing a Confederate force at Pea Ridge, following Pathfinder Frémont’s old trail and giving the Confederates such a setback that Halleck exultantly (and prematurely, as it turned out) was notifying Washington that the rebellion in Missouri had finally been crushed — “no more insurrections and bridge-burnings and hoisting of Rebel flags.”14
From the Atlantic seaboard the news was equally good. Army and navy together were exploiting the break-through into the North Carolina sounds, hammering Confederate forts into submission, seizing New Bern and Roanoke Island and opening the way for sea-borne invasion. Farther south the navy had broken its way into Port Royal, South Carolina, getting possession of a deep-water base for its whole southern blockading fleet and raising an obvious threat to Charleston. Another amphibious expedition was hitting the Georgia coast and would soon control the sea approaches to Savannah; and in the Gulf, a fleet under a sprightly old salt named David Glasgow Farragut was inside the passes at the mouth of the Mississippi, heading for New Orleans.
There was a feeling of triumph in the air, and no one felt it more than stolid, unemotional Grant himself. Back in command with the blots off his record, Grant was going up the Tennessee, his own headquarters at the town of Savannah, Tennessee, a strong advance-guard posted at Pittsburg Landing, ten miles upstream. He was being reinforced, he would shortly have from forty to forty-five thousand men in his command, and Buell was under orders to march overland to the Tennessee and join him with perhaps thirty thousand more. The objective seemed to be a railroad-junction town, Corinth, Mississippi, twenty miles below Pittsburg Landing, a place where the north-and-south Mobile and Ohio Railroad crossed the all-important Memphis and Charleston. Johnston and Beauregard were pulling their forces together there, and it was clear that the next thing to do was to go down to Corinth and smash them.
Grant