HALLECK'S TREATMENT OF GRANT
When Halleck assumed command at Pittsburg Landing after the battle of
Shiloh he seemed intent, not only upon depriving Grant of the privilege
of vigorously following up the victory he had won but also upon
"snubbing," ignoring and humiliating that successful general in every
way possible. If Grant's tremendous and at last successful struggle
to force Beauregard back to his defenses at Corinth had been a crime
instead of a heroic achievement, his commanding general could scarcely
have punished it in more annoying and humiliating ways than he did.
It was a sore affliction to Grant to have command taken from him at the
moment when he saw before him a perfect opportunity to pluck the ripe
fruits of his obstinate fighting by pressing forward in overwhelming
force for the completion of the conquest for which that fighting had
provided an easy and certain way. It was still more severely painful to
him to sit still and see all the easy possibilities of the situation he
had created, deliberately thrown away by martinet incapacity.
To a man like General Grant, simple minded and sincere, a man whose
sole ambition was to force the war to a successful conclusion within
the briefest possible time, and whose vigor in action seemed to make
that result certain with the masterful means now in hand at Pittsburg
Landing, this foolish frittering away of the opportunity he had created
by his splendid fighting, must have been the most painful of all the
punishments which Halleck at that time inflicted upon him for his
impertinence in wresting a great victory from a calamitous defeat,
before his superior officer could reach the field and reap the credit
for himself.
But Halleck had other humiliations in store for his impertinently
successful lieutenant the late Galena clerk, and the now admired and
applauded officer of volunteers. Grant even yet had no rank in the
regular army, and he had ventured to advise the temporary dissolution
of the regular army in order that the skill and training of its
officers might be utilized--with capacity alone as the test--in making
the volunteers, who after all constituted the country's chief reliance
for its salvation, as effective in the field as if they had been
regulars.
We have seen how, after Grant's conquest of Forts Henry and Donelson,
and the complete rupture of the first Confederate line of defense,
Halleck forbade him to gather the fruits of his victory, suspended him
from command and seemingly threatened him with arrest. After Shiloh it
would not have been prudent for Halleck again to suggest the arrest
of a general whose name was on every lip as that of the one Federal
commander who was capable of winning victories while all others were
meeting conspicuous defeats. But Halleck had other arrows in his
quiver. He left Grant as nominally his second in command, and, in form
at least, assigned him specifically to the command of the right wing of
the army. But he proceeded from the beginning to ignore his second in
command. He summoned him to none of those councils and consultations to
which he invited Grant's own subordinates. Even in the matter of orders
to that wing of the army which he had technically placed in Grant's
charge, he ignored all the courtesies and flagrantly violated all the
usages of war, by sending his commands directly to division generals,
instead of sending them through General Grant's headquarters--thus
rivaling the discourtesy of Judah P. Benjamin in his dealings with
Stonewall Jackson. This left Grant in humiliating ignorance even of
the orders issued to divisions which were supposed to be under his
command, and for whose movements and conduct he was held responsible.
His situation was unendurable, even to a man of his robust habits of
mind, and by way of relief he finally asked permission to establish his
headquarters as District Commander, at Memphis, a city which had by
that time come into Federal control.
These details are recited here, not by way of apology or defense of
General Grant. His fame needs no defense, and very certainly his
conduct in war needs no apology. Moreover all these circumstances, and
others that reflect still more unfavorably upon Halleck's extraordinary
treatment of the only Federal general who at that period of the war
seemed able to achieve victories, are calmly and fully set forth in
General Grant's own memoirs. But such details are necessary here,
in explanation of that fair and full, and impartial history of the
Confederate war, which is intended in these volumes.
There were repeated occasions in the course of the struggle when vigor
of generalship on the one side or upon the other, would very certainly
have brought the war to an early conclusion, sparing both sides the
tremendous sacrifices which a lack of capable generalship in the end
entailed upon both.
This post-Shiloh imbecility was one of those conspicuous, and
conspicuously neglected occasions. There is not room for doubt that if
Halleck had remained in his St. Louis headquarters, and had permitted
Grant with the now combined armies of himself, Buell and Pope, to
prosecute an instant and vigorous campaign, the whole Mississippi
Valley would have been speedily brought under Federal control, with all
the consequences that such a conquest must have involved.
After the battle of Shiloh Grant had by his own estimate 120,000 men
at and near Pittsburg Landing, or within easy call. For in addition
to Buell's army Pope had reinforced him with 30,000 men. Beauregard
had about 30,000 effectives at Corinth--or after Van Dorn reinforced
him, perhaps 47,000. Grant's own expert opinion expressed in print, is
that within two days he could and would--if let alone--have captured
Corinth, driving the Confederate forces there into disorderly retreat
if not compelling their surrender, and capturing all their stores.
He would then have been in position to move in overwhelming force
upon Vicksburg and Port Hudson, points not yet strongly fortified or
heavily garrisoned. Capturing them, as he easily could have done, he
would have made the Federals masters of the Mississippi above Baton
Rouge, while Farragut was making himself master of all the lower
reaches of the river. In the meanwhile Grant would have prevented that
concentration and recruitment of Beauregard's army for which Halleck
gave generous leisure to his enemy by delaying his own advance from
Pittsburg Landing for three weeks of preparation and then consuming an
entire month in pushing a force of three men to his adversary's one
over an unobstructed and undefended space of less than twenty miles
only to find when he got to his destination that his enemy, greatly
strengthened, had in leisurely fashion retired to another position,
taking with him every pound of provisions and every round of ammunition
he possessed.
Here were seven of the most precious weeks of the war lost, and the
loss is very inadequately measured by that statement. It is not too
much to say that Halleck's extraordinary deliberation and delay
alone made possible and certain all the terrible fighting and all
the losses of human life incident to the Vicksburg campaign, just as
the paralyzing incapacity of his orders after the capture of Fort
Donelson, made needlessly possible and destructively certain the
tremendous battling of the Confederates at a later period at Nashville,
Chattanooga, Franklin, Lookout Mountain, Chickamauga and in the Atlanta
campaign.
If military etiquette upon either of these occasions had permitted
General Grant, with the support his words would undoubtedly have had
from Sherman, Buell and Thomas, to set forth clearly the conditions,
needs, and opportunities in the Western Department, the authorities
at Washington would pretty certainly have set Halleck's embarrassing
authority aside, thus giving demonstrated capacity the license it
desired to achieve results of incalculable benefit to the National
arms. But Halleck alone of all the generals in that quarter enjoyed
the privilege of direct communication with the War Department, and
Halleck so adroitly represented--perhaps he did not consciously or
intentionally misrepresent--the facts of the situation, that presently,
on the eleventh of July, he was appointed to succeed McClellan as
Commander in Chief of all the Union armies.
This was perhaps the most astonishing, not to say the most unwise,
appointment made on either side during the entire course of the war,
unless we except Mr. Jefferson Davis's appointment of Pemberton after
he had lost Vicksburg, to the position of military adviser of himself,
with apparent authority to control and command even Robert E. Lee.
In the meanwhile Halleck had done all that was possible to him to
humiliate General Grant and to deny him everything in the shape of
opportunity. General Grant, in his "Memoirs," (page 219), pathetically
says:
Although next to him [Halleck] in rank, and nominally in command of
my old district and army, I was ignored as much as if I had been
at the most distant point of territory within my jurisdiction; and
although I was in command of all the troops engaged at Shiloh, I
was not permitted to see one of the reports of General Buell or his
subordinates in that battle until they were published by the War
Department long after the event.
Again on page 225, General Grant tells of an occasion when he suggested
a military movement to General Halleck--a thing that the second in
command might very well have been expected to do. After explaining
to his readers what his suggestion was, General Grant adds: "I was
silenced so quickly that I felt that possibly I had suggested an
unmilitary movement."
Yet when Halleck was ordered to Washington to assume chief command he
saw clearly that it would not be prudent in the existing state of the
public mind to make any other than Grant the commander at Corinth. He
therefore sent word to Grant in Memphis to report at Corinth. But he
said nothing whatever to him about his own appointment to the command
of all the armies, or about his intended departure for Washington,
or even about his intention that Grant should assume command at
Corinth. He merely directed him to report there, leaving it entirely
to uninformed conjecture whether he was merely to report in person
for some instruction or was to remove his headquarters from Memphis
to that point. In this uncertainty Grant telegraphed asking whether
or not he was to take his staff with him. To this Halleck curtly and
discourteously replied: "This place will be your headquarters. You can
judge for yourself."