The History of the Confederate War, Its Causes and Its Conduct, Volume 1 (of 2) / A Narrative and Critical History

by George Cary Eggleston

Accordingly General Grant was censured for his unauthorized advance upon Nashville, and instead of proceeding against Confederate strongholds further South which were easily within his vigorous and resolute grasp, was peremptorily ordered to return to the forts which he had captured with such splendor of success and there to sit still till released from what amounted to arrest.

It was the story of Manassas over again, except that it was reversed in its application. As after Manassas Washington lay an easy prey to the Confederates, which by reason of incapacity they did not grasp, so, and in like measure, the central strongholds of the Confederacy lay, after the capture of Forts Henry and Donelson, within the easy grasp of Grant's army. The only difference was that in the one case it was the inexperience of the general in the field that forbade, while in the other it was the paralyzing prohibition of the general in a secure headquarters that stood in the way of achievement.

In the one case it was the predestined men of action who faltered and failed of their opportunity. In the other the man of action was restrained by "orders" which he dared not disobey.

Thus by the paralysis of Halleck's official hand, Grant was restrained from pushing the war to results—possibly even to a conclusion—prompt, certain and immediate.

General Halleck, who never in all his life commanded an army in battle, was by the pure unreason of military law and etiquette officially authorized to restrain the military impulse of Grant toward manifestly right ends.

Grant had neglected, or was accused of having neglected, some technical formality as to details in making his report of the actions which had made him master of the forts. To ordinary common-sense it would seem that the only important facts which he was called upon to report on that occasion were that he had certain forces under his command; that after three days of hard fighting in rain and sleet and indescribable mud his enemy had surrendered the forts with 14,623 men, 65 pieces of artillery and 17,000 stands of small arms; that he had made himself master of the two strongholds and now completely commanded both rivers, having thus opened a double river route into the heart of the Southern Confederacy, which he proposed to make still further available by an immediate advance upon Nashville and other strategic points the possession of which would give him an open pathway to the Gulf itself.

This was all that common-sense required Grant to report for the information of his superiors, and he reported precisely that. But those office-housed superiors held him guilty of neglect in that he had not given in detail the position of every regiment and brigade and battery that had helped to win the victory. In punishment of this neglect of infinitely petty detail—and also in emphasis of the fact that Grant was after all only a general of volunteers who had presumed to win unauthorized victories in no way assigned to him to win—Grant was called back from his advance for the conquest of those strategic points that lay so easily within his grasp and ordered instead to remain where he was and to let slip from his hands the ripe fruits of his victory.

Was there ever anything so absurd as this, outside of comic opera—this and the extraordinary reign of incapacity in the Confederate army and Government? That was of like kind and quality.

The simple fact, of which the historian is obliged to take account, is that if ordinary common-sense and the commonest forms of military sagacity had been in control on either side at the beginning of the war—if the men able to do things had been permitted to do them—the struggle must almost certainly have ended within a few months after its beginning; tens, yes, scores and hundreds of thousands of lives must have been spared and multitudes of millions in expenditure and in the destruction of property would have been saved to the American people.

That however was not to be. It was written in the Book of Fate that for a time incapacity, self-seeking, narrow-minded, jealousy of rank, and other like forces of the coarse and the commonplace were to rule about equally on the one side and on the other, and that thus the war was to be prolonged at terrible cost of sorrow and suffering and slaughter.