Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

Polk, decided that the Confederacy could wait no longer to secure the Ohio River line, and on September 3, 1861, Polk’s troops moved into Kentucky and occupied Columbus. At first the Confederate government was tempted to repudiate Polk’s violation of Kentucky’s neutrality. But Jefferson Davis supported Polk’s action, and Confederate troops moved over into Kentucky to occupy Bowling Green. The Kentucky legislature angrily voted to end state neutrality and reconfirm its allegiance to the Union. An unhappy Governor Magoffin resigned his office in August 1862 and retreated into private law practice.11

Keeping Kentucky and Missouri in the Union saved the Ohio River line for the North by the end of 1861. The question then was what the federal government proposed to do next about it, and on that score both President Lincoln and his new general in chief, George B. McClellan, had very clear ideas. Lincoln wanted Kentucky occupied at once and cleared of Confederates, followed by a thrust into eastern Tennessee to rally Tennessee Unionists to the Federal armies. McClellan also advocated a movement into Kentucky and eastern Tennessee as part of the three-way pincer movement in the spring of 1862 from Virginia and the Carolina coast, which he hoped would bite off the upper third of the Confederacy at one stroke. Unfortunately, the Federal forces along the Ohio River line were badly organized and equipped; what was more, the length of the Ohio River was divided between two military departments whose commanders were either unwilling or unable to cooperate.

The first of these departments, the Department of the Ohio, running from western Virginia to the mouth of the Cumberland River, consisted of about 45,000 men commanded by Brigadier General Don Carlos Buell. It was to Buell that McClellan looked to spearhead the drive into eastern Tennessee. In January 1862 he wrote anxiously to Buell that “my own advance cannot, according to my present views, be made until your troops are soundly established in the eastern portion of Tennessee.” But Buell was hampered by his men’s rawness, a lack of experienced officers, and the difficulties of the terrain that lay before him. Although he defeated a small Confederate force at Logan’s Crossroads, in southern Kentucky, on January 19, 1862, Buell’s men had neither roads nor railroads to operate upon, and they proceeded to bog themselves down in the impenetrable wild mountains north of Knoxville.12

This provided an unlooked-for opportunity to Buell’s neighbor, Major General Henry Wager Halleck, the commanding general of the Department of Missouri, whose military jurisdiction stretched from the Cumberland River into Missouri itself. Halleck was “a black-browed saturnine man, heavy of figure and of feature; suspicious of everybody and incapable of friendship.” An 1839 graduate of West Point and one of the prizes of the Corps of Engineers, Halleck was nevertheless a capable administrator, “a man of great capacity, or large acquirements, and at the time possessed the confidence of the country, and of most of the army.” After leaving the army as a captain in 1854, he had served as secretary of state for California, practiced law in San Francisco, and wrote several outstanding textbooks on legal and military affairs. The outbreak of the war brought him back to the army as a major general, and on November 9, 1861, he inherited the troubled Department of Missouri. His appointment as the department head was largely prompted by Halleck’s considerable legal and administrative skills, since Missouri in 1862 was still a large political black hole, and no one expected much from him in the way of fighting.13

However, Halleck had no intention of playing second fiddle to Buell. In January 1862 Halleck suggested to McClellan that a more direct route into the Southern heartland lay in western, rather than eastern, Tennessee. There, Halleck pointed out, an army willing to borrow the steamboats that carried river commerce could use the broad, navigable Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers to move upon instead of getting as bogged down as Buell was in eastern Tennessee. What was more, the Tennessee River was navigable to steam-powered transports and gunboats all the way south through Tennessee into Alabama, while the Cumberland wound eastward into the eastern Tennessee mountains. An army that controlled these rivers could force three things to happen. First, using steamboats to seize control of the Tennessee River would isolate the occupation force that the Confederates had installed at Columbus, Kentucky, and compel them to retreat in order to keep their lines of operation open. That could clear all of western Kentucky of rebels at one stroke. Second, a similar steamboat movement up the Cumberland would force whatever Confederate forces were in the eastern mountains of Kentucky to withdraw into middle Tennessee, compelling the Confederates to abandon eastern Tennessee without a battle. And third, such an operation would have the additional advantage of severing the Memphis & Ohio Railroad, one of the Confederacy’s two east-west railroad lines, because the Memphis & Ohio relied on bridges over the Tennessee River, as well as the Cumberland River at Clarksville, which gunboats could easily destroy. By moving into western Kentucky and Tennessee on the rivers, rather than marching overland through eastern Kentucky and Tennessee, a Federal army could turn the Confederacy’s uppermost flank and easily peel open the upper South like ripe fruit. “Move up the Cumberland and Tennessee, making Nashville the first objective point,” Halleck recommended. “This line of the Cumberland or Tennessee is the great central line of the Western theater of war, with… two good navigable rivers extending far into the interior of the theater of operations.”14

It went without saying, of course, that both the Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers flowed through Halleck’s department rather than Buell’s, and that any such operation would be under Halleck’s command and not Buell’s. But Halleck had a point. Even Buell conceded that it might be a wise move to try to crack the Confederacy’s shell further to the west than he himself was operating. So, in January 1862, even while he was still haranguing Buell to move into eastern