Lincoln’s sorrowful conclusion that “nothing can be done” was about to change, however. For some reason it suddenly dawned on Henry Halleck that, no matter how gloomily he saw his military situation, the commander who first made a move to placate the President at this tense stage of affairs could possibly find himself in high standing upon the slippery ladder to military power, while those who continued to procrastinate (such as Buell) would likely slide down out of sight, rung by greasy rung.
Also playing a part in his decision was a report—more like a warning—from McClellan that the infamous but highly regarded Rebel general P.G.T. Beauregard was on his way to Kentucky, along with 15,000 reinforcements. Even though the last part was false, to the Union high command—Halleck included—the notion of Beauregard himself coming west was enough to sound the fire bell in the night.
Thus on January 30, 1862, Grant received from Halleck these terse instructions: “You will immediately prepare to send forward to Fort Henry, on the Tennessee River, all your available forces.”
This was music to Grant’s ears. Halleck’s directive could not have come at a better time, for Grant had been currying an exemplary military friendship with the commanding officer of the new Federal ironclad fleet, Commodore Andrew H. Foote, and the two had cooked up detailed plans for a joint amphibious operation to take Fort Henry and Fort Donelson. It would become one of the first such operations in U.S. military history.
Foote was truly a sailor of the seven seas. He had fought from China to the South Atlantic, had apprehended slavers, and at one point purchased and transported a regiment of camels—including their drivers—from the khedive of Egypt, pursuant to an order from Jefferson Davis, then U.S. secretary of war, who wanted them for army topographical engineers to use as they surveyed routes for a continental railroad across the deserts of the American Southwest.2
Foote was a puritanical antislavery New Englander who held Sunday school classes for his sailors, abolished the rum ration aboard his vessels, and was an ardent believer in amphibious warfare—or at least joint army-navy operations, once telling his brother that the two services “were like blades of shears: united they were powerful—separated they were almost useless.” In this he held something very much in common with Grant; in fact, it may have been the only thing he held in common with him, given that Grant’s attitudes on drinking, slavery, and religion were ambiguous, at best.
Both men realized that merely taking the two Confederate forts would not be of much consequence in the long run, but opening the streams into the Southern heartland would be an immense blow to the rebellion. First off, when the water was high—as it was now—Foote’s powerful gunboats could maraud all the way down to Mississippi and northern Alabama, blasting Confederate railway bridges into toothpicks and otherwise disrupting the economy and communications in the enemy’s rear. Then transports of soldiers would follow on a hundred river steamers and assemble to fight and win a major battle that would decide the fate of the West. And with it, likely, the fate of the war itself, for if the rebellion was put down in the West the war in Virginia and the East Coast could not be sustained, or so the theory went.
These were thrilling concepts, almost too large to grasp for the crusty old sailor and the ill-dressed Union general sitting in the captain’s cabin on the ironclad Cincinnati. Then word came that a part of Buell’s army under Gen. George “Pap” Thomas, had whipped a small Rebel army at Mill Springs, in the southern part of Kentucky 150 miles to the east, and was now moving to confront the large Confederate force at Bowling Green. Grant’s attack on Fort Henry would thus constitute a general Union movement southward all across the Confederate front from the Cumberland Gap to the Tennessee—nearly 250 miles. No one dreaded this more than the Rebel general Albert Sidney Johnston, who commanded the Confederacy’s Department of the West.
Things had been more or less going the Confederates’ way until the reverse at Mill Springs, a dreary, agonizing affair characterized by misfortune (the Rebel commander Gen. Felix Zollicoffer, who was nearsighted, was shot and killed after he inadvertently rode into the Yankee lines) and insobriety (Zollicoffer’s superior Gen. George Crittenden, of the famed Kentucky family, was rumored to have been drunk during the battle).
General Johnston, after surveying his assignment and the state of his army, despaired over the status of Fort Henry on the Tennessee River. Hastily erected by the state right after war broke out, it was in wretched shape to begin with, unfinished, and now half flooded by high water in the river. (The fort was located improperly in the first place, and without consideration for the possibility that the Yankees would come with huge ironclad vessels of war capable of carrying large-caliber, long-range cannons.) Johnston received many messages conveying the sorry state of affairs at Fort Henry. Gen. Lloyd Tilghman, a West Pointer, wrote that it was placed in a location “without one redeeming feature,” and, he concluded in abject disgust, “The history of military engineering records no parallel in this case.”
All through the autumn of 1861 Johnston served up orders to various officers concerning the river forts. On October 17, for instance, the bishop general Polk was warned to “Keep a vigilant eye on the Tennessee River … Fortify opposite to Fort Henry. No time should be lost.” Again on October 31 he warned that the rivers “require incessant watching … The Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers afford lines of transportation by which an [enemy] army may turn your right with ease and rapidity.” To Tilghman, who had been assigned command of Fort Henry on November 17, Johnston wrote, “The utmost vigilance is enjoined, as there has been gross negligence in this respect … You will push forward the completion of the works and armament with the utmost activity.” And on January 18: “Occupy and intrench the heights opposite Fort Henry. Do not lose a moment. Work all night.” But in the end it came to no avail.
However much he realized it, Johnston had taken on a stupendous assignment. Certainly he must have begun to appreciate the gravity of it when he reached his headquarters and compared the scope of what he was supposed to accomplish with the personnel and materials on hand. His army was outnumbered by the Federal forces more than two to one, and many of his troops carried only their personal shotguns or hunting rifles—or else they had been armed with old flintlock weapons left over from the War of 1812. Uniforms, in many units, were a matter of personal taste, but as a general rule soldiers in the ranks wore an outfit of homespun cloth in a brown shade known as butternut.
Worse, the strategy that Jefferson Davis had decreed for the defense of the West was fatally flawed. He had drawn an imaginary line—below which no Yankee was to set foot—from the Cumberland Gap in the Appalachians all the way through Tennessee and across the Mississippi River into Arkansas and Oklahoma until, after more than a thousand miles, it “trickled out somewhere in the desert sands of Arizona.” In other words, Davis intended to fight for every inch of Southern soil, a notion that was attributed to his forlorn hope for European intervention.3 It might have worked in a small area, such as Virginia, but strategically, in the vastness of the West, it became a practical impossibility.
Furthermore, the Confederacy was monstrously unprepared at this stage of the war. Soon after he had arrived in Kentucky, Johnston sent a subordinate to Richmond to protest that he desperately needed arms and men. “My God!” Davis told the startled emissary. “Why did General Johnston send you to me for arms and reinforcements, when he must know that I have neither?”
When this unpleasant news reached Johnston’s ears he was ensconced with his army of about 27,000 at Bowling Green, Kentucky, keeping a sharp eye on the Yankee general Buell at Louisville, who was beginning to inch toward him with an army of his own. And that was not to mention Ulysses Grant, who had his eye on Bowling Green as well.
It’s worth lingering a few moments to focus on the terrible and conflicting civilian drama spawned by the war. Nowhere, perhaps, is it exposed so nakedly as in the diary of Josie Underwood, a 20-year-old daughter of a wealthy family of Kentucky slaveh
olders who were also staunch Unionists. Until the threat of secession sheared their lives, the Underwoods had led a nearly idyllic life in Bowling Green. Then came the storm of war, and General Johnston marched his army into town.
Bowling Green was a tranquil southern Kentucky city of about 2,500 souls, whose population likely shared a greater cultural and political affinity with the Tennesseans right across the border than, say, the citizens of Louisville in the north, who were just downriver from Yankee Cincinnati, Ohio. Josie Underwood’s family was among the most prominent in town. Her father was a successful planter and lawyer and had been a state representative as well as a U.S. congressman until 1859, and he was the principal leader of the community until the question of secession broke out. Like most Unionists in that part of the state, he reviled Lincoln and his policies and had supported the conciliatory ticket of John Bell, yet he abhorred the notion of secession. The family lived at Mount Air, a thousand-acre cotton plantation on the outskirts of town, in a palatial two-story brick manor house surrounded by orchards and with a ballroom upstairs.4 The 1860 census valued their land and personal property (including the 28 slaves who worked the place) at $105,000—some $2.8 million in today’s money.
In mid-December of that year, a month after Lincoln’s election and a mere week before South Carolina would vote to secede from the Union, Josie and her friend Jane Grider took the train to Memphis to spend the winter with Josie’s sister Jupe, and her husband, William Western, a prosperous lawyer and ardent secessionist, who owned a mansion in the Memphis Garden District. It was Josie’s first time away from home since she became, in her own words, “a full fledged ‘Young lady.’ ” But had it not been for Western’s “general good-naturedness,” her arrival might have invited a level of unwanted tension since, like her father, she remained a Unionist.
This general good nature did not necessarily extend to Memphis’s social circles, however, as Josie would soon discover. She was an attractive young woman and highly sought after by the town’s leading bachelors, especially a 28-year-old lawyer named Thomas Grafton. Josie soon felt herself as much drawn to the wealthy, witty, and handsome Grafton as she was repelled by his political views. He took her to a play, and instead of watching it he watched her; he brought her flowers.
As their relation blossomed it is evident from Josie’s diary how the most basic emotions became cramped, twisted, and too often torn apart by the prospect of secession. As weeks passed during the early winter of 1861, and more Southern states seceded, discussions often turned to arguments—or worse—as became the case with Tom Grafton.
Will Webb, another young lawyer in Memphis, the brother-in-law of William Western’s legal partner, was outspoken in his strong Unionist sentiments and less than circumspect in the way he expressed them. As Josie remarked to her diary, “The subject of secession like Banquo’s ghost will not die down but will come up—no matter what the place or time—especially if Will Webb and Tom Grafton meet.”
The occasion this time and place was the Grand New Year’s Eve Ball at Memphis’s famed Gayosa Hotel,5 at which all of Memphis society turned out. In Josie’s estimation, it was “the most splendid affair I ever attended—my first big full grown ball!” With Tom Grafton as her escort, they encountered Will Webb, “whose bad taste started the subject,” she wrote, adding, “I as bad as any of them.” What infuriated her most was that whenever the secession issue came up Tom Grafton—in his most lawyerly fashion—would invariably link her to Lincoln and the abolitionists, who were despised in those parts, referring jokingly to “your friend Lincoln.”
Still, of all the young men, “Tom Grafton interests me most,” she admitted. “I don’t know just why.”
It was a scene playing out all over the state. Josie’s cousin, for example, a West Point graduate, was on the verge of becoming engaged to a girl who insisted that he resign his U.S. Army commission and join the Confederacy. Lifelong friends suddenly found themselves not just in opposite political camps but divided by hatreds that transcended politics.
Josie continued her conflicted relationship with Tom Grafton, often at the same time trying to talk herself out of it. “For truly I do not know whether I love him or not,” she wrote in her diary. “I know I don’t feel as I want to feel towards the man I would marry but maybe there is no such exalted love as I imagine,” she said. “Yet I would not be satisfied with less, and his secessionism is a great barrier between us.”
One day word came that Grafton and Will Webb had become embroiled in a “personal altercation” inside the law offices during which Webb had called Grafton a “traitor” and a “liar,” and Grafton “jerked up a chair and would have killed Mr. Webb” but another of Josie’s cousins, Jack Henry, “sprang forward and caught the chair” and got the matter settled down. Grafton then “marched out glaring at Webb saying, ‘this is not the end. Sir—insignificant as you are, pistols make us even.’ ”
Next day Grafton sent his challenge to Webb, and for the rest of that day and the next the seconds were busy arranging for the duel across the river in Arkansas where such things were routinely conducted. The night before the affair was to take place, Grafton appeared at the Westerns’ residence, where Josie was, by chance, alone. As was the custom, a cloak of silence had descended over the matter of the duel, so neither the authorities nor the ladies, Josie included, were aware of it. There in the parlor Grafton professed his love.
He was an orphan, he said. Both mother and father died when he “was too young to remember,” and there were no siblings, and thus “there was no one to love him, even if he should die.”
He said to her, “Miss Underwood, I generally take life as it comes to me, and waste no time on self pity, but tonight I felt so unutterably lonely … [and] in my loneliness my heart turned to you.” He was leaving town next day, he said, “and then he told me—in words I can’t write—that he loved me—also that it was wrong for him to tell me—as he had already offered himself to his state as a soldier, … and he could not ask any bright young life to be tied to his, but he found he could not leave me without trying for the happiness of winning a little word of love from me.”
She tried to soothe him but in the end could not bring herself to honor his request. “I don’t know just what to think of myself—whether I am capable of love or not,” she told her diary. “I tried to explain to him that I liked him more than any man I knew, … I don’t feel as he feels toward me—for he seems to be everything a girl might love except, alas! his desire to break up our country.”
He kissed her hand and said goodbye, then asked her “in a solemn sort of way ‘Pray for me tonight—for I have no mother to do it.’ ” And then he was gone.
Next day when Josie went in to breakfast she found that William Western had left early. She “couldn’t help but feel uneasy, just why I couldn’t say.” Her cousin Warner came in and informed everyone that Grafton had challenged Webb to a duel at sunup that morning, and suddenly she realized what all the talk of dying and going away had been about the night before. Her friend Miss Jane asked, “Are they dead?” When Western replied, “No, neither,” Josie’s “heart gave a great throb of joy!” He further explained that “they had gone across the river but with so many interested parties it leaked out and the [law] officers got wind of it and got there just in time to stop the awful murder and suicide, for that is just what a duel is.”
Josie saw Grafton a few times after that. Her stay in Memphis was cut short by the dramatic events surrounding secession and the forming of the Confederacy. “There is so much excitement and nobody knows from one day to another—what will happen next—that I think I must bring my visit to an end soon,” she wrote in the early days of 1861. “The young men here have organized a company called the Shelby Grays, and all our Secession friends are in it.” That included Tom Grafton, whom she saw for a final time on January 31, 1861. There was a gathering at the Westerns’ “for the girls and gentlemen we have known best—about 30—to spend the evening.” When the
evening came to an end Josie noticed Tom Grafton walking out the door and wondered why he had not said goodbye. Suddenly her cousin Jack Henry tugged on her sash from outside one of the tall, open French windows and asked if she “had a pin.” She thought that “he had met with some accident,” and stepped onto the wide veranda. “What can I do?” she asked, to which he replied, “Give it to Grafton.”
Tom Grafton stepped from the shadows. “I could not say good-bye to you in there,” he told her. Then, “with broken sentences, with feeling, repeated what he had before told me and taking my hand—lifted it quickly to his lips and was gone.” Again he’d confided his worry—that there’d be no one to grieve for him if he were killed. She lingered awhile on the veranda, her cheeks flushed, then her cousin came out. “That’s a fine fellow—don’t be too hard on him,” he told her. Josie’s world was quickly falling apart, and her story is intertwined with this tale. We will revisit her as it goes along.
At last, in early February 1862, with Halleck’s approval, Grant got his invasion of the South under way.
The Rebel general Tilghman was in Fort Henry on the Tennessee River with 3,400 Confederates on February 4 when Commodore Foote’s gunboats appeared several miles downstream, followed by a score of Ulysses Grant’s troop transports, whose smoke painted the northern horizon with dark, warlike clouds “as far as the eye could see.” The men were in awe as they entered the enemy’s lair. They were mystified to see odd bunches of green leaves growing in trees that were supposed to be leafless in February—until someone informed them it was a plant called mistletoe. The body of a dead soldier floated by, whether Northern or Southern they could not tell. Sometimes they shot at people along the banks whom they feared might be Confederates. As they steamed deeper into Rebel territory, one Iowa soldier remarked ominously—if not ironically—to his companions, “The further we go, the larger the elephant gets.”