GRANT AT CORINTH
When Grant took command at Corinth he found matters in an exceedingly
confused and embarrassing condition. In the first place his authority
was so ill defined that he could do nothing of importance without risk
of subjecting himself to censure and perhaps even to a trial by court
martial for having exceeded his authority, while if he left anything
undone by reason of his uncertainty as to the scope of his command, he
must do so at equal risk of censure or court martial for neglect.
Halleck had been in command of the entire department and of all the
forces within its borders. In leaving General Grant as his successor he
did not invest him with a similarly comprehensive authority. Neither
did he make it clear that such authority was denied to him. So far as
his orders indicated Grant was still only a district commander, having
authority only over troops within the district of West Tennessee, whose
eastern boundary was the Cumberland river, beyond which Halleck had
sent a large part of the forces that had been under his command at
Corinth. And yet Grant was practically a department commander. His own
exposition of the situation is so clear, succinct and complete, that
no paraphrase can better it or equal it. On page 233 _et seq._ of his
"Memoirs," General Grant wrote:
I left Memphis for my new field without delay and reached Corinth
on the fifteenth of the month. General Halleck remained until the
seventeenth of July; but he was very uncommunicative, and gave me
no information as to what I had been called to Corinth for. When
General Halleck left to assume the duties of general-in-chief I
remained in command of the District of West Tennessee. Practically
I became a department commander because no one was assigned
to that position over me, and I made my reports direct to the
General-in-chief; but I was not assigned to the position of
department commander until the twenty-fifth of October. General
Halleck, while commanding the Department of the Mississippi, had
had control as far east as a line drawn from Chattanooga north.
My district only embraced West Tennessee and Kentucky west of
the Cumberland river. Buell, with the Army of the Ohio, had as
previously stated, been ordered east towards Chattanooga, with
instructions to repair the Memphis and Charleston railroad as
he advanced. Troops had been sent North by Halleck along the
line of the Mobile and Ohio railroad to put it in repair as far
as Columbus. Other troops were stationed on the [Mississippi
Central] railroad from Jackson, Tennessee, to Grand Junction,
and still others on the road west to Memphis. The remainder of
the magnificent army of 120,000 men which entered Corinth on the
thirtieth of May, had now become so scattered that I was put
entirely on the defensive in a territory whose population was
hostile to the Union.
One of the first things I had to do was to construct fortifications
at Corinth better suited to the garrison that could be spared to
man them. The structures that had been built during the months of
May and June were left as monuments to the skill of the engineer,
and others were constructed in a few days, plainer in design, but
suited to the command available to defend them.
In brief Halleck had completely thrown away one of the most brilliant
opportunities of the war. He had found an army of 120,000 men, flushed
with victory and full of spirit, concentrated at a point in the
center of the Confederacy, from which it was not only possible but
easy to advance in overwhelming force in any direction, while the
inflow of recruits at that time was great enough to make good and
even to double the losses that battle might involve. On the other
hand the Confederates had lost so heavily at Shiloh that they did not
venture to make a stand in their intrenchments at Corinth, even though
Halleck's extraordinary dilatoriness gave them seven weeks of precious
time in which to recruit their army, strengthen their defenses and
receive reinforcements of 17,000 seasoned and veteran troops that were
presently sent to them.
General Grant has pronounced the positive and unhesitating opinion
that an energetic advance immediately after the Shiloh battle, with
the enormously superior forces then concentrated at that point would
have resulted beyond a peradventure in the conquest of Corinth within
two days, with the capture of all the stores and ammunition there as
a necessary incident and the capture of Beauregard's army as at least
a promising possibility. By consuming three weeks in preparation for
an advance which ought to have been made at once and by wasting a
whole month more in an advance by parallels, where an advance at the
quickstep with fixed bayonets, was all that was needed, Halleck had
completely thrown away this opportunity.
But even then, even after wasting seven weeks in reaching Corinth, it
was not too late to achieve results of the most momentous consequence.
On page 227 of his "Memoirs," General Grant gives this expert opinion
of the situation and the opportunity:
The Confederates were now driven out of West Tennessee, and on the
sixth of June, after a well contested naval battle, the National
forces took possession of Memphis, and held the Mississippi river
from its source to that point. The railroad from Columbus to
Corinth was at once put in good condition and held by us. We had
garrisons at Donelson, Clarksville and Nashville on the Cumberland
river, and held the Tennessee river from its mouth to Eastport.
New Orleans and Baton Rouge had fallen into the possession of
the National forces, so that now the Confederates at the West
were narrowed down for all communication with Richmond to the
single line of road running east from Vicksburg. To dispossess
them of this, therefore, became a matter of the first importance.
The possession of the Mississippi by us, from Memphis to Baton
Rouge, was also a most important object. It would be equal to the
amputation of a limb in its weakening effect upon the enemy. After
the capture of Corinth a movable force of 80,000 men, besides
enough to hold all the territory acquired, _could have been set
in motion for the accomplishment of any great campaign for the
suppression of the rebellion_.[1] In addition to this, fresh troops
were being raised to swell the effective force.
[1] The italics are not General Grant's, but are placed by the
author of the present work, upon words that seem to him to
be pregnant of criticism and explanation.
AUTHOR
But the work of depletion commenced. Buell, with the Army of the
Ohio, was sent east, following the line of the Memphis and Charleston
railroad. This he was ordered to repair as he advanced--only to have
it destroyed by small guerilla bands or other troops as soon as he was
out of the way. If he had been sent directly to Chattanooga, as rapidly
as he could march, sending two or three divisions along the line of
the railroad from Nashville forward, he could have arrived with but
little fighting, and would have saved much of the loss of life which
was afterwards incurred in gaining Chattanooga. Bragg would then not
have had time to raise an army to contest the possession of Middle and
East Tennessee and Kentucky; the battles of Stone river and Chickamauga
would not necessarily have been fought; Burnside would not have been
besieged in Knoxville without the power of helping himself or escaping;
the battle of Chattanooga would not have been fought. These are the
negative advantages, if the term negative is applicable, which would
probably have resulted from prompt movements after Corinth fell into
the possession of the National forces. The positive results might have
been, a bloodless advance to Atlanta, to Vicksburg, or to any other
desired point south of Corinth in the interior of Mississippi.
Will the reader bear in mind, that these military criticisms are not
made by the author of the present work, although they fully commend
themselves to his judgment, but are the calm and deliberate utterances
of Ulysses S. Grant, by all consent the ablest general that ever
commanded a Federal army, and a general minutely familiar with every
detail of the situation which presented itself after Shiloh? They bear
the authority both of intimate knowledge and of demonstrated military
skill. Reduced to their lowest terms they amount to this: If Halleck
had been an officer fit to command an army, he would have rushed upon
Corinth with his three to one force on the very day on which he assumed
command. The result could not have been in the least degree doubtful.
But even after he had wasted seven precious weeks--three of them in
preparation for an advance for which he was already fully prepared,
and four more in an advance over a wholly undefended space of nineteen
miles which he ought to have covered in one day or a day and a half
at most,--there was still open to a capable general an opportunity
which Halleck utterly failed to see or to seize. He had under his
command 120,000 veteran troops, of the very best fighting quality and
subordinately commanded by such masters of the military art as Grant,
Sherman, Thomas, Buell, Lew Wallace, Nelson, Prentiss and their fit
fellows. Making the most liberal allowance for detachments to guard
railroads and to hold every acre of country conquered, General Grant
says he could have mustered an effective army of 80,000 men or more for
aggressive operations in any direction that might have seemed best to
him, against which the Confederates could not have opposed more than
30,000 or 40,000 at the utmost. The whole central South lay before him
where to choose. His opportunity was one the like of which came to no
other commander North or South, during the whole course of the war.
He threw it utterly away. He scattered his superbly overwhelming army
to the four winds, under orders that rendered their courage and their
enterprise futile, and left Grant in a hopelessly defensive position,
with no army capable of any measure of aggression, and with an
authority so ill defined that he could not order a concentration even
in the smallest way.
And yet, this man, Halleck, who had never fought a battle in his life,
and who had never commanded an army except to scatter and waste it, was
chosen to command all the armies of the United States.
Surely the country could not have been worse served if the
administration had been intent upon losing the war instead of
carrying it to success. And very certainly the long domination of this
peculiarly incapable man served to embarrass "enterprises of great pith
and moment," and to prolong the destructive, fratricidal struggle for
long after the time during which, under wiser counsels, it would have
endured.
Curiously enough no explanation of this costly blunder has ever been
suggested. We know of course that Halleck's first appointment to
command in the West was made upon General Scott's recommendation, at a
period of the war when nobody knew or could know what officers of the
old army were capable of achieving results and what ones were unfit
for command. General Scott's mistake in selecting Halleck for a highly
responsible command was pardonable under the circumstances. But after
his extraordinary dealings with the victories at Fort Henry and Fort
Donelson, and still more conspicuously after his phenomenal failure
to seize upon the opportunity that came to him ready made by the
results achieved at Shiloh, it is absolutely impossible for the most
imaginative critic to conceive of a reason which might have justified
the administration at Washington in selecting this man with his doubly
demonstrated incapacity to direct all the armies of the Union in their
operations.
Not only was Grant left upon the defensive with a force too small to
permit aggression of any kind on his part, but even this scant force
was rapidly and very dangerously depleted by orders from Halleck's
Washington headquarters. The Confederates and guerrillas were daily
threatening his communications and frequently attacking his defensive
detachments in force. He was confronted on the south by an effective
force of 35,000 men under Van Dorn and Price, threatening Memphis,
Corinth, Bolivar and other points. Grant's concern for the safety of
Memphis, isolated as that post was by the Confederate occupation of
Grand Junction--between Memphis and Corinth--was lightened only by
the fact, as he himself suggestively put the matter, that "it was in
Sherman's hands."
Under this stress of circumstances, and with extraordinary disregard
of what disastrous consequences there might be involved, Halleck
on the fourteenth of August ordered Grant still further to weaken
himself by sending two more divisions to Buell on his tedious march
eastward. Again on the second of September, Grant received orders to
send still further reinforcements to Buell, and two days later Gordon
Granger's division was detached and sent, by orders from Washington, to
Louisville. On the twenty-second Colonel Rodney Mason, whom Grant had
forgiven for arrant cowardice at Shiloh, made a dastardly surrender of
Clarksville with half a regiment or more.
Thus the one commander who had thus far shown himself capable of
conceiving campaigns and conducting them to success, was left with
a totally inadequate and constantly diminishing force, to waste his
time in guarding a vast territory while Bragg was marching from
Rome, Georgia, with a strong Confederate army toward Chattanooga,
meaning to seize that position before Buell could get there. In his
"Memoirs" General Grant gives expression to his regret that he was
not permitted to move, instead of sitting still, at a time when even
with the depleted force under his command, he still felt confidant of
his ability to crush and destroy Bragg's force, thus forestalling and
rendering unnecessary the very severe and bloody campaigns which were
destined to follow for lack of such a timely blow.
The Confederates, early in the spring, had enacted and enforced a
conscription law which had resulted in putting every man in the South
capable of bearing arms, into the army. At the North--largely because
of the defeat of McClellan and Pope in Virginia, and of Halleck's
astonishing failure to follow up the Shiloh campaign with aggressive
operations--the volunteering had so far ceased that Mr. Lincoln's call
for an additional 300,000 men met with a meager and unsatisfactory
response. In several states--New York among them--the quotas were not
furnished by volunteering and it was necessary to order a draft to fill
up the ranks depleted by battle and disease. The North at this time had
more than twice as many men in the field as the South could muster. But
with every southward advance of Federal armies more and more men must
be withdrawn from the active work of aggression and set to guard places
captured, to maintain lines of communication and to hold regions that
had been overrun. Moreover the Southerners were mainly fighting on the
defensive, which in some degree compensated for their lack of equal
numbers. Still again the enlistment of every man at the South was to
endure to the end of the war, while very large numbers of men at the
North were enlisted for shorter terms, some of them for only three
months or a hundred days, scarcely time enough in which to discipline
and train them into effectiveness.
Without offense, also,--and certainly no offense is intended--it is
fair to say that the volunteers and conscripts who at this period of
the war came into the Confederate service, were in many cases morally
superior to the men brought by draft processes into the armies of the
Union. They were all Americans for one thing, while great multitudes
of those enlisted or drafted into the service at the North were recent
immigrants from Europe who neither knew nor cared for the issues
involved in the contest but who entered the service as they might
have accepted any other employment, for the sake of the money returns
promised. These money returns included, besides pay, rations and a
clothing allowance, a bounty of extraordinary liberality, amounting
in many cases to a larger sum of money than its recipients had ever
dreamed of owning, as the price of substitution. For while at the
South every man included within the terms of the conscription law must
shoulder his musket and go to the front, whatever his wealth or social
position might be, the case was very different at the North. There men
who had the means of buying a substitute very often did so. Many who
lacked the means or were unwilling to pay the high price exacted by
those who stood ready to sell themselves as substitutes, emigrated to
Canada or went to Europe to escape the military service.
These facts undoubtedly created a disparity between the two contending
armies, which had not existed during the earlier part of the war. The
immigrants and the purchased substitutes who joined the Federal armies
after the campaigns of 1862 were over, were not morally the equals of
the native or long naturalized Americans who had fought so heroically
around Richmond, at the second battle of Manassas, at Sharpsburg, and
at Shiloh. For this as well as for the other reasons indicated, the
North had need of larger numbers than the South, in order to carry the
war to success.
The Confederates now held a smaller section of the Mississippi than
before, but they held that more strongly. A general of capacity, after
Shiloh, might easily have wrested its possession from them, as General
Grant has pointed out. Under a general incapacity, nothing was done to
that end and the Confederates, thus favored by Federal neglect, had
so far fortified their strongholds that the dislodgment which would
have been easy in the spring could now be accomplished only by one of
the severest, bloodiest and most perilous campaigns of the war. Thus
all that had been gained above or below, towards the reconquest of the
Mississippi, had gone for next to naught. For the possession of its
mouth on the one hand, and the control of its upper reaches on the
other, meant nothing so long as the Confederates held Vicksburg and
Port Hudson, thus obstructing a river whose sole value was as a highway.
In Virginia the Southern arms had been successful in an extraordinary
degree. McClellan's splendid army of 120,000 men had been broken and
beaten back from the very gates of Richmond, and sent hurriedly
northward to defend the National capital itself against threatened
capture. Pope, at the head of an army quite equal to any that the
Confederates could muster, had been outmaneuvered, outfought and
overthrown at Manassas, and hurled back upon the defenses of Washington
as a needed refuge. Lee had invaded Maryland, his cavalry amusing
themselves by unopposed marches into Pennsylvania. Finally Burnside's
attempt at Fredericksburg with an army overwhelming in its numbers, had
resulted in fearfully bloody failure.
As the autumn drew on Grant was left at Corinth, by no fault of his own
but because of Halleck's orders, with a force barely sufficient, if
sufficient at all, to hold the railroads and outlying posts which he
was set to guard. In his front there lay a threatening army stronger
than any that he could hope to bring together at any one point. To the
eastward Buell, under paralyzing orders, was slowly marching toward
Chattanooga, while Bragg with a strong Confederate army was hastening
northward to seize that commanding strategic position and to push
thence northward with high hopes and fair prospects of making the Ohio
river before the year was out, the dividing line between the Northern
and Southern forces, replacing the line which by Grant's successes had
been drawn the whole width of two states further south.
On these points the testimony of General Grant is too direct, too
conclusive and too valuable to be omitted here, or to be given
otherwise than in his own carefully chosen words. On page 237 _et seq._
of the "Memoirs" he writes:
General Buell had left Corinth about the tenth of June to march
upon Chattanooga. Bragg, who had succeeded Beauregard in command,
sent one division from Tupelo on the twenty-seventh of June for
the same place. This gave Buell about seventeen days' start. If he
had not been required to repair the railroad as he advanced, the
march could have been made in eighteen days at the outside, and
Chattanooga must have been reached by the national forces before
the rebels could have possibly got there.
On page 240 we have this careful estimate of the situation at the
beginning of September:
On the seventh of September I learned of the advance of Van Dorn
and Price, apparently upon Corinth. One division was brought from
Memphis to Bolivar to meet any emergency that might arise from this
move of the enemy. I was much concerned because my first duty after
holding the territory acquired within my command, was to prevent
further reinforcing of Bragg in Middle Tennessee. Already the army
of Northern Virginia had defeated the army under General Pope,
and was invading Maryland. In the center General Buell was on his
way to Louisville and Bragg marching parallel to him with a large
Confederate force for the Ohio river. I had been constantly called
upon to reinforce Buell until at this time my entire force numbered
less than 50,000 men of all arms. This included everything from
Cairo south within my jurisdiction. If I too should be driven back
the Ohio river would become the line dividing the belligerents west
of the Alleghanies while at the east the line was already farther
north than when hostilities commenced at the opening of the war. It
is true Nashville was never given up after its first capture, but
it would have been isolated and the garrison there would have been
obliged to beat a hasty retreat if the troops in West Tennessee
had been compelled to fall back. To say, at the end of the second
year of the war the line dividing the contestants at the east was
pushed north of Maryland, a state that had not seceded, and at
the west beyond Kentucky, and this State which had been always
loyal, would have been discouraging indeed. As it was many loyal
people despaired in the Fall of 1862 of ever saving the Union. The
Administration at Washington was much concerned for the safety of
the cause it held so dear.
This was a most trying time for a man of General Grant's overmastering
instinct of activity. The task set him of guarding a vast territory
and three railroad lines against a ceaselessly active and enterprising
enemy, gave him occupation enough it is true. But the situation forbade
him to concentrate anywhere, or to do anything indeed except repel
assaults first upon one insignificant point and then upon another.
A mere catalogue of the actions fought at this time in that quarter
would occupy pages of print. Only one of them had enough significance
to require mention in this history. On the thirteenth of September the
Confederate general, Sterling Price, with a considerable force occupied
Iuka, a town on the Memphis and Charleston railroad, about twenty
miles east of Corinth. The fact was a significant commentary upon the
unwisdom of the orders which delayed Buell's march on Chattanooga, in
the end defeating its purpose, in order to repair a railroad, any point
upon which the Confederates could seize at will in spite of Grant's
utmost diligence in an impracticable and indeed impossible defense.
Grant feared that the object of Price's movement might be something
of vastly more importance than the destruction of a railroad station,
as indeed it was. Price's purpose in seizing Iuka was to get control
of the railroad east of that point long enough to enable him to send
heavy reinforcements to Bragg, who was at that time pushing Buell back
upon Louisville, with the prospect, if reinforced in timely fashion,
of capturing that city, compelling Grant's retirement to Cairo, and
establishing the Ohio river as the northern boundary and the military
line of the Confederacy. Accordingly Grant dangerously weakened
several exposed points in order to concentrate under Rosecrans a
sufficient force to drive Price out of Iuka before the main body of the
Confederate army south of Corinth could join him there.
The operation resulted in some strenuous fighting. Price was driven
back and his scheme was defeated. The details of the battle need not be
recounted here. They belong to the domain of minute history, covering
special campaigns. For the purposes of a general history of the war, it
is sufficient to point out the only strategic purpose involved in the
movement, and its defeat by a timely and judicious activity.