Ulysses S. Grant - Michael Korda [25]
Grant (and W. H. Russell, who had seen war at its best and its worst in the Crimea, where he had personally witnessed the Charge of the Light Brigade from a position next to Lord Raglan himself) understood almost at once that the key to winning the war was in the West, not in the East, in front of Washington.1 He saw that the Confederacy’s weakness was its size, not its industrial inferiority to the North. The Confederacy was vast, and there was no way it could be defended with equal strength all along its frontier, yet this was exactly what Jefferson Davis proposed to do. Davis wanted a big victory—big enough to shock Lincoln to the bargaining table for a treaty of peace, and to convince the European powers that the Confederacy was there to stay—but he also didn’t want to surrender an inch of territory for fear of what that might do to Southern morale. Though something of a bookworm at West Point and afterward, Davis seemed to have forgotten that old military maxim “To attempt to be strong everywhere is to be strong nowhere.”
Seen from drab, dusty Cairo, the heart of the South lay open to a determined thrust, aimed down the great rivers that separated the Confederacy into two separate regions. A determined advance through the border states of Missouri and Kentucky would bring a Federal army within reach of Tennessee and Mississippi, and such a thrust could be supplied by river rather than overland. Victory would split the Confederacy, expose its vast, weakly defended western border to attack at any point, and allow a Union army to threaten the Southern heartland, opening up a war of movement instead of big, set-piece battles. Grant might not have spent much time on books about strategy at West Point, but he could read a map, which is more than could be said for many of his colleagues. From Cairo he could see how to win the war, as plain as a pikestaff.
Russell saw it, too, hence his interest in Cairo. And, more important, a thousand miles to the east, Abraham Lincoln saw it—felt it in his bones—for, after all, he was an Illinois man, who had traveled up and down the great rivers in his youth. He sensed, uneasily, that McDowell had been wrong, that even General Scott was wrong, and that McClellan would be wrong, too, when his turn came, and looked to the West for a general who understood what was in the back of his mind: a whole different kind of war.
For the moment no such person seemed to exist. Grant’s immediate superior was the flamboyant Maj. Gen. John C. Frémont, “the Pathfinder,” as he was called, after his supposed explorations in the West, a political and celebrity general, an amateur, whose personal fortune, glamorous wife, and undisguised presidential ambitions did not inspire much confidence in Lincoln. Frémont was too busy talking to reporters to pay much attention to Grant, whom he scarcely knew, and thus was unable to prevent Grant from taking his forces forty miles above Cairo to seize the town of Paducah, Kentucky, before the Confederates got there. Paducah was not of itself much of a prize, but a look at the map shows that the Tennessee and the Cumberland Rivers both flow into the Ohio near Paducah. A Union army could descend* the two rivers deep into the heart of Tennessee.
The Confederates could read a map, too, and they had already built two strong forts, Fort Henry to protect the Tennessee River, and Fort Donelson to protect the Cumberland, and manned them with sizable