On Friday Foote’s gunboats made their appearance, just as they had at Fort Henry, minus the luckless Essex and the flagship Cincinnati, which were still in the yards for repairs. In their places were the Louisville and the Pittsburgh. Grant mounted his horse and found a high ridge overlooking the river where he could observe the proceedings. Foote’s assault began at 3 p.m. when the ironclads, including Carondelet, formed a line of battle about two miles below the fort and began steaming toward it. The firing broke out at 3:30. The results were not encouraging.
Not only were the batteries at Fort Donelson situated well above high water, they contained heavier artillery and were manned by better gunners, or at least luckier gunners. As the distance closed within a mile the weight of the Rebel fire began to tell. “We heard the deafening crack of bursting shells, the crash of solid shot, and the whizzing fragments of shell and wood as they sped through the vessel,” wrote Captain Walke aboard Carondelet. “A shot hit the pilot house, killing one of the pilots,” Walke said. “They came harder and faster, taking flag staffs and smoke stacks and tearing off the side armor as lightning tears off the bark from a tree.”
Without warning, the portside rifled gun exploded. One of the gunners described it: “It knocked us all down, killing none, but wounding over a dozen men and spreading dismay and confusion among us. Then the cry ran through the boat that we were on fire and my duty as pump-man called me to the pumps. While I was there, two shots entered our bow-ports and killed four men, and wounded several others. They were borne past me, three with their heads off.”
Carondelet was within 400 yards of the fort, exchanging gunfire point blank, when Captain Walke noticed that they were alone. The other ironclads had taken enough punishment and “were rapidly falling back out of line.” St. Louis and Pittsburgh had their wheel ropes shot away and were spinning uncontrollably downstream in the fierce current. Louisville, likewise, had become unmanageable. All of the ships had sustained grievous damage and loss of life. Commodore Foote had been standing in the wheelhouse of St. Louis when a shot entered and killed the pilot standing next to him and tore his own foot nearly off.
Walke stood in with Carondelet as long as he could, giving as good as he got and the Rebels banging away with everything they had. It was later revealed that the gunboat sustained 54 direct hits. But at last he, too, was forced to retire—to the humiliating sound of cheering from the Rebel emplacements—having shot up most of his ammunition. It was a bitter fact that Fort Donelson was not going to be carried by gunboat attack alone.
That night there was more arctic weather; again the wind howled, again the temperature dropped into the teens, and by morning there was three inches of snow on the ground. There were also 10,000 Rebels outside their rifle pits before dawn, massed for an all-or-nothing attack against Grant’s right wing, which was in McClernand’s bailiwick. From here on, one would have to search deeply in Civil War annals to find conduct as inept, irresolute, and, ultimately, as shameful as the Confederate command at Fort Donelson after it came under Grant’s attack.
The previous day General Floyd had arrived at the fort accompanied by his brigade. As senior officer he was nominally in charge, but he deferred tactical operations to Pillow, who had been there a few days longer and presumably knew his way around. After a conference with the division and brigade commanders Floyd concluded that the fort was untenable “except with fifty thousand troops,” and that it should be evacuated. It was decided that General Buckner would cover an evacuation at noon on the 14th, led by Pillow, south toward Nashville by the river road. Noon came, but Pillow for some reason countermanded the order and put the men back in their rifle pits. Then came the battle with the ironclads, and a wave of confidence swept over the Confederate garrison. That night another council was called, the issues debated, and the decision was made to attack the Union right at dawn to force open a route of retreat to Nashville. Fortuitously for the Confederates, the howling nighttime wind and bitter sleet and snow masked the Rebels’ movement as they brought infantry, artillery, and cavalry unobserved, some of it right across the face of the Yankee line.
A thousand miles east in Washington, Abraham Lincoln’s anxiety over Donelson was overshadowed only by concern for his 11-year-old son Willie, who lay deathly ill in a giant rosewood bed upstairs in the White House. Frustrated as he had been by the inaction of Halleck and Buell, the President was now convinced that the Confederates would go to any lengths to destroy Grant and save Fort Donelson. In fact, Lincoln saw the value of Donelson—and the calamity that its downfall would have on the rebellion—far clearer than any of the Rebels. Thus the President telegraphed Halleck he was not worried that Grant would be beaten by the Rebel army inside the fort, but that “Grant should be overwhelmed from the outside.”
Lincoln had worked it all out in his mind. The assumption by Halleck and Grant that General Johnston would not bring his army to relieve Fort Donelson because it would allow Buell to walk into Nashville was false, the President insisted. The Rebels could burn the Nashville bridges over the Cumberland and by leaving only a small force there could keep Buell at bay for several weeks. Meantime, after crushing Grant, Johnston could then turn on Buell and do him in as well. Lincoln was convinced that the Confederates would spare nothing to save Fort Donelson and would bring reinforcements from Virginia. Therefore it was paramount to break all the rail connections possible.
So fearful was Lincoln that he concluded his telegram with this gloomy appraisal: “Our success or failure at Fort Donelson is vastly important, and I beg you to put your soul into the effort.” For his part, Halleck was convinced that the Confederates down in Columbus were actually preparing to attack Cairo, and fretting about how to defend it. He hadn’t the foggiest notion that they were evacuating Columbus and headed to Memphis and points south.
At daybreak the music of reveille in the Union camps surrounding Fort Donelson was suddenly eclipsed by a ferocious din of gunfire in McClernand’s far right sector near the river. The Rebel attack had begun and was rolling up the Yankee line. The Union general Lewis “Lew” Wallace, a 35-year-old Indiana lawyer and politician who would go on to write the novel Ben-Hur, gave this colorful description of the action at midmorning: “The wood rang with a monstrous clangor of musketry, as if a million men were beating empty barrels with iron hammers. Buckner flung a portion of his division on McClernand’s left, and supported the attack with his artillery. The roar never slackened. Men fell by the score, reddening the snow with their blood. Close to the ground the flame of musketry and cannon tinted everything a lurid red. Limbs dropped from the trees on heads below, as if shorn by an army of cradlers. The division was under peremptory orders to hold its position to the last extremity.”
Whose orders these were Wallace does not say, but they would not have come from Grant at this juncture since he had, in fact, left the field. After the shellacking of his ironclads the day before, Commodore Foote, who had been seriously wounded and could not be moved from his flagship, had requested a conference with the commanding general to consider what to do next. Grant had gone down to the gunboats before dawn where Foote told him it would take ten days to have his ironclads repaired at Mound City, Illinois, and Grant agreed that he had best lay siege to Fort Donelson till then.
Whatever Grant made of the sudden rumbling and growling of artillery upriver in the direction of his lines is not reported, but as he rode away from the conference with Foote he was intercepted by a frantic messenger with news that the Confederates were attacking McClernand in force and that his division was thrown back in disarray. This was the last thing Grant had expected, having assumed that Pillow and Floyd were bunglers who would have waited inside the fort and sooner or later run up a white flag. As he neared the battle area, Grant was shown haversacks from Confederate casualties containing extra rations, which he concluded was evidence that this attack was actually a retreat, and that the enemy was trying to cut their way out.
At length Grant came upon a traumatize
d McClernand in the company of Lew Wallace and, according to Wallace, “[Grant’s] face flushed slightly, with a sudden grip he crushed the papers in his hands, and in his ordinary quiet voice said, ‘Gentlemen the position on the right must be retaken.’ ” In reply McClernand muttered something—evidently aimed at Grant—that sounded like “This army wants a head.” Grant, taken aback by such an impolitic remark, replied evenly, “It would seem so,” and rode on.
Grant rode all over the battlefield, urging soldiers to replenish their cartridge boxes and go back into the line. Seeing their commander at the front, many of the men gave him a cheer and returned to the fight. “The one who attacks now will be victorious!” Grant declared to anyone who would listen, an axiom that he followed, rightly or wrongly, for the rest of the war. He soon told this to 55-year-old division commander C. F. Smith, who had been his commandant at West Point and was considered the epitome of martial manner and mien. Six feet three inches tall, with an upright bearing and a long, white mustache, Smith and his division anchored the Union far left. Grant ordered him to hit the Rebel line hard there, as a diversion from the fight in McClernand’s sector. Smith replied in his soldierly way, “I will do it.”
Grant then continued back down the line. Everywhere he rode the snow-covered ground resembled a slaughterhouse, bloodstained and littered with the crumpled bodies of the wounded, dead, and dying of both sides. Finally, revolted by these gory sights, Grant told his staff, “Let’s get out of this dreadful place.”
It is worth hearing Lew Wallace’s account of General Smith’s charge, which became something of a legend in the Army of the Tennessee (which it was not yet called): “The air about him twittered with minie-bullets. Erect as if on review, he rode on, timing the gait of his horse with the movement of his colors. He never for a moment doubted the courage of volunteers; they were not regulars—that was all. If properly led he believed they would storm the gates of His Satanic Majesty. A soldier said, ‘I was nearly scared to death, but I saw the old man’s white mustache over his shoulder, and went on.’
“On to the abatis the regiments moved, leaving a trail of dead and wounded behind. There the fire seemed to get trebly hot, and there some of the men halted, whereupon, seeing the hesitation, General Smith put his cap on the point of his sword, held it aloft, and called out, ‘No flinching now, my lads!—Here—This is the way! Come on!’ ”
Now Dr. John H. Brinton, Grant’s surgeon, picks up the story in a letter to a fellow physician. “You ought to have heard old C. F. Smith cursing as he led his storming regiments. ‘Damn you gentlemen, I see skulkers! I’ll have none of that here. Come on you volunteers! This is your chance. You volunteered to be killed for love of country, and now you can be! You are only damned volunteers! I’m only a soldier, and don’t want to be killed, but you came here to be killed, and now you can be!’ ”
Wallace resumes: “He picked a path through the jagged limbs of trees, holding his cap all the time in sight; and the effect was magical. The men swarmed in after him—not all of them, alas! Up the ascent he rode, and up they followed. At the last moment the keepers of the rifle-pits clambered out and fled.”
The effect of this action on the Rebel general Pillow was palpable. Upon hearing that an apparently successful attack was in progress in his rear, he told Buckner to cease the attack and get his men back in the trenches. When Floyd—who was in supreme command—heard this, he immediately countermanded the order, since he had just sent a telegram to Johnston stating, “The day is ours.” Then, when he spoke to Pillow personally, Floyd proceeded to pluck defeat right out of the jaws of victory. He canceled his countermand and returned the army to the fort, much to the disgust of Nathan Bedford Forrest, who later wrote that not only had the Rebel attack that morning opened a road to Nashville, it had opened three roads before the soldiers melted back into their trenches and the Yankees again began closing the ring.
What went on in Pillow’s mind seems beyond rational explanation, unless he felt it was necessary somehow to reorganize his men before beginning the retreat. Yet that alone does not make much sense, since the whole bloody enterprise was to get the troops out of Fort Donelson and on the road—any road—to Nashville, and urgently. The failure appears to have been a masterpiece of shilly-shallying by the commanding general, John Floyd, and his second in command, Gideon Pillow, for whom Grant now held an even more deserved contempt.
That night a final counsel of war was held within Fort Donelson, which may even have superseded the fantastic dithering of the day. With a mile-wide line of escape between the river and the pushed-back Union front still open to them, both Floyd and Pillow decided, over Bedford Forrest’s continued objections, that the day was now lost and surrender was the only option.
Floyd, however, allowed that he did not wish to be captured personally, on account of the pending indictment against him in federal court in Washington and other accusations that might lead to the hangman’s rope. Instead, he proposed to take the last remaining steamship out of Fort Donelson and make his way to Nashville where he might be of further use to the cause.
This suddenly put the onus on Pillow, who likewise took a pass. It seems that Pillow had made so boisterous a habit of publicly proclaiming “Give me liberty or give me death” that he feared becoming a laughingstock if he now gave up to the Yankees, and wanted to go away with Floyd. Thus the burden of surrendering the first Confederate army during the Civil War fell upon the good soldier Simon Bolivar Buckner, while his superiors cravenly made their escapes to safety across the river.
For his part, Bedford Forrest announced, “I did not come here for the purpose of surrendering my command,” and he sought permission to take his cavalry out of harm’s way. Buckner acquiesced, and by sunup, after wading through icy swamp water sometimes rump-high on their horses, Forrest and his cavalrymen made good their getaway, taking along with them a number of like-minded infantrymen.
At last the time arrived for Buckner to perform his repugnant duty. He wrote a letter to Grant alluding to his “present state of affairs” and asked for the appointment of commissioners to “agree upon the terms of capitulation,” signing it, “Respectfully, your obedient servant, etc.”
In the early hours of the morning a Confederate party came out of the fort and delivered Buckner’s envelope to the nearest available Yankee command, which happened to be that of General Smith, whose evening rest had already been disturbed once that night when he accidentally gave himself a hotfoot by sleeping too close to his fire.
Smith delivered the letter to Grant himself, trudging through the snow after his famous day to the small farmhouse where Grant was sleeping on a mattress on the kitchen floor. He entered the room “half frozen,” according to Dr. Brinton, and wanted a drink. Brinton produced a flask as General Smith warmed himself by the fire and had his drink and Grant read over Buckner’s letter. “No terms to the damn rebels,” said Smith to his former pupil, causing Grant to chuckle as he wrote out his reply: “No terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted. I propose to move immediately upon your works.” Smith, still standing by the fire, wiped his mustache and nodded in approval, and then, claimed Doc Brinton, the old soldier thrust out his foot revealing that the sole of his boot was nearly burned off and remarked sheepishly, “I slept too near the fire; I have scorched my boots!” Finally everyone could have a good laugh.
General Buckner’s personal reaction to Grant’s reply is nowhere recorded, but if he expected his old friend to let his men march out of Fort Donelson as the Confederates had when Fort Sumter surrendered the previous spring—under arms and with the Union flag flying—he was seriously misguided. He sent Grant a grumbling response that protested “the ungenerous and unchivalrous terms which you propose,” then hauled down his flag and made himself a Union prisoner.
Grant immediately became a hero in the North. The press touted his line to Buckner about “unconditional surrender” and dubbed him U. S. “Unconditional Surrender” Grant. T
he papers reported that Grant had smoked a cigar during the heat of the battle and people began sending him cigars by the box, precipitating a habit that eventually would kill him.2
Fort Donelson did not come without cost: Combined casualties were more than 5,000; 507 Union soldiers were killed, 1,976 were wounded, and 208 were either captured or missing versus for the Confederates 327 killed, 1,197 wounded, and a small army, 12,392, were made prisoners.
The 25-year-old colonel William Camm, of the 14th Illinois, an Englishman by birth and a teacher by trade, went over the field where the Rebels had lost most of their men shortly after the surrender. The sight was frightful. “The dead are badly distorted,” Camm wrote in his diary. “One poor fellow had fallen across a fire and was burned in two. Citizens, some of them women, were searching for relatives among the dead,” he wrote. “I came across the body of what looked like a pretty girl quietly sleeping. The pale face was turned up, the rain had combed the auburn hair back from a high, smooth forehead, and washed all the blood from the hole where the bullet had gone through the temple.”
As Camm gazed upon the dead soldier, who was in fact a young man, not a girl at all, he noticed an envelope in the breast pocket of his half-opened coat. The letter, Camm said, “was in a beautiful hand, from a mother to her son, urging him to be a good soldier, to do his duty without fear, not to drink or swear, and if those he fought against fell into his hands, to be kind to them.”
Camm replaced the letter and mulled its contents. He decided that the boy had come from a “quality” upbringing and concluded that it would have been better if the mother “had taught her handsome son to revere human freedom and justice … for the negroes,” even at the expense of slavery.