Ulysses S. Grant - Michael Korda [27]
Grant was the last man to leave, riding his horse straight down a steep, almost “perpendicular” bank under enemy fire, then across a narrow plank onto the deck of the waiting steamer—another brilliant feat of horsemanship that would have been performed by a stuntman in a movie. No sooner was Grant in his cabin than a bullet came through the hull, hitting the pillow on which he was about to lay his head. He must have begun to sense in himself a certain destiny, but also, as he began to suspect at Belmont, and perhaps even in Mexico, a gift for command. Risks did not seem to scare him. He hardly even noticed danger. Quietly but firmly he got things done.
Halleck bristled at Grant’s transformation of a demonstration into an amphibious landing against a larger force, but Grant, with a newly acquired sense of public relations, or perhaps on Rawlins’s shrewd advice, decided to call it “a raid.” If it had been an attack, then he had been repulsed, as the Confederates claimed, whereas if it was a raid, it had been daring and successful. Halleck grumbled, was not fooled for a moment, but accepted Grant’s explanation, though it did nothing to increase his confidence in Grant.
Nevertheless, after considerable acrimonious correspondence between Halleck and Grant, and a few suggestions leaked from Halleck to Washington that Grant might have been drunk, Halleck reluctantly agreed to let his impetuous subordinate attack Fort Henry, the weaker of the two Confederate forts that guarded the Tennessee and the Cumberland Rivers, surely hoping to upstage General Buell and, perhaps wrongly, assuming that this would keep Grant occupied for some time.
Buell had 45,000 men in his command, just south of Louisville, Kentucky, and had been promising to advance on Nashville for some time. Halleck, with 91,000 men, and an eye fixed firmly on Washington, wanted very much to carry out an attack before Buell did. Buell’s forces were spread out, and he was in no hurry to move them, and Halleck must have thought there could be no harm in dispatching Grant to do a little mischief in the general direction of Nashville before Buell did.
Grant did not hesitate. He moved, like Rommel nearly eighty years later, mit blitzartiger Schnelle, the lightning speed so favored by German Panzer generals, and took the Confederates by surprise. Grant was carried south on the Tennessee River by a flotilla of transports and gunboats, under the command of Comm. Andrew H. Foote, U.S.N., which had originally been assembled to carry Buell south, and was still waiting for Buell to move.
Having preempted Buell’s flotilla, Grant now deftly stepped into the limelight before Buell. He was about to receive help from an unexpected source—his Confederate opponents. Despite his dislike of Napoleon, Grant was about to prove the emperor right again. When asked what kind of generals he liked best, Napoleon is said to have replied, “Lucky ones.” Luck was about to strike Grant at last.
Though the Confederacy had recognized the importance of the rivers flowing north into the Ohio before the Union generals did, its choice of positions for the forts defending them was hampered by a reluctance to advance too far north into Kentucky, and the Confederate fortress system was therefore built at unpromising points. Perhaps Jefferson Davis and Gen. A. S. Johnston had also dozed during the lectures on fortifications at West Point, or neglected to read Vauban’s classic work on the subject, but in any case Fort Henry, on the Tennessee River, was placed on low ground, so that it could be shelled by gunboats. The Confederates then made the classic mistake