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

would trigger civil war threw him to the Democrats. He had not lived in Galena long enough to vote in the 1860 election, which (he reflected later) was just as well, for if he had voted, it would have been for Douglas.16 When the war broke out, Grant unhesitatingly wrote to the War Department to try to get a commission in the regulars to fight secession. He never received a reply (the letter was found years later in “some out-of-the-way place” in the adjutant general’s office), but a month later the governor of Illinois appointed Grant colonel of the 21st Illinois Volunteers, and from then on, Grant went nowhere but up. In September a friend in Congress obtained a brigadier general’s commission for him, and in November he found himself under Halleck’s command in the Department of Missouri.17

Grant and Halleck had both seen at virtually the same time the opportunity presented by the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers. However, the Confederates in Kentucky also realized the vulnerability of the river lines and had constructed two forts at points on the rivers just below the Kentucky-Tennessee border, Fort Henry on the Tennessee River and Fort Donelson on the Cumberland. Both were in good position to bottle up the rivers pretty securely. Flag Officer Foote was confident that his gunboats could beat down the fire of the forts if Grant could bring along enough infantry to take the forts from their landward sides. So Halleck gave Grant 18,000 men, and on February 3, 1862, Grant put them onto an assortment of steamboats and transports, and along with Foote’s gunboats, entered the Ohio and then the Tennessee River for the turn up to Fort Henry. Built in 1861, Fort Henry was a small but powerful nut to crack: it mounted seventeen guns facing upriver, including a big 10-inch Columbiad, protected by fifteen-foot-wide earthen parapets. There were only a hundred men detailed to garrison Fort Henry, however, and heavy early spring rains put Fort Henry’s parade ground under two feet of Tennessee river overflow. Grant moved to the attack on the morning of February 6. Smothered by the fire of Foote’s four ironclad gunboats—Carondolet, Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Essex—the Confederates kept up a halfhearted fight at Fort Henry for three hours, and then abandoned it.18

Almost any other Federal commander in 1862 would have sat down at once and begged alternately for reinforcements, more supplies, and a promotion. Grant now began to demonstrate to what degree he resembled no other Federal general in 1862 or any other year, for as soon as Fort Henry had surrendered, he sent one gunboat downriver to destroy the Memphis & Ohio railroad bridge over the Tennessee, and then he casually telegraphed Halleck that he was going to move over to Fort Donelson at once.

Fort Donelson was a considerably bigger target than Fort Henry: a twelve-foot-high earthen parapet enclosed fifteen acres of ground, plus a separate pair of “water batteries” at river’s edge with eight 32-pounder guns and another 10-inch Columbiad. Taken together, Donelson bristled with sixty-seven big guns and had a combined garrison of some 19,000 men, and the water batteries proved themselves quite capable of badly damaging Foote’s gunboats when they tried to duplicate their earlier success at Fort Henry. The Confederate command at Fort Donelson was divided unevenly between two incompetents, former secretary of war John B. Floyd and Gideon Pillow, and even more badly divided over its options. Floyd and Pillow threw away, by inaction, an opportunity to beat Grant piecemeal while his troops were still strung out on the roads between the two forts. They then threw away an opportunity to evacuate Fort Donelson on February 15 when they punched an escape hole through Grant’s lines and then turned around and walked back to their entrenchments. The next day Fort Donelson finally surrendered to Grant. About 5,000 Confederates (including Floyd and Pillow) made off in the night, leaving 14,000 to fall into Union hands.19

Little more than a single week’s campaigning had driven an ominous wedge into the upper South. It also made Grant a national hero, for when the last Confederate commander at Donelson, Simon Bolivar Buckner, sent out his white flag, suggesting that he and Grant negotiate for terms of surrender, Grant bluntly replied that he would consider “no terms at all except immediate and unconditional surrender.”20 It was with a genuine sense of relief that the Northern public at last heard of a general who was concerned simply with winning.

KEEP MOVING ON

When the news of the surrender of Forts Henry and Donelson struck Washington, the victory-starved capital went berserk with joy. Guns boomed all day, and in the Senate the frock-coated solons of the republic violated their own procedural rules by cheering and applauding like schoolboys. Grant suddenly found himself a man with a reputation for fighting, and on March 7 he was rewarded with a promotion to major general, while Foote won promotion to rear admiral when Congress created the new rank that summer. Grant’s aggressiveness was certainly a welcome departure from the attitude other Northern generals had brought to the battlefield, although this was certainly not because of what he had learned at West Point. Grant himself ruefully admitted that he “had never looked at a copy of tactics from the time of my graduation,” and even then, “my standing in that branch of studies had been near the foot of the class.” In this case, however, Grant’s ignorance only meant that he had less to unlearn and more readiness to adapt to the realities of his situation as a commander. “War is progressive,” Grant wrote in his Memoirs, and for an officer trained in an engineering-and-fortifications school and whose only war experience was the diminutive war in Mexico fifteen years before, Grant turned out to be a surprisingly progressive military thinker.21

One way in which war had become very progressive, and very swiftly, was the use of the railroads and the telegraph. Electrical telegraphy was only seventeen years old