Hello all. My apologies for the delayed episode. I am currently without the proper audio equipment - which in my case is very little indeed. However, while I am unable to record this week I prepared most of the episode in essay form. I will record with a little additional material pointing out some of the goings-on in the Union camp. This may potentially happen next week but I don’t want to over-promise. That said, I will be working on a short-ish biography for General Sherman. As a note, I am currently doing a lot of travel and can only cart around so many sources.
The Woes of Albert Sidney Johnston
In the wake of General Grant's victory at Donelson, we should take an opportunity to understand the viewpoint of Albert Sidney Johnston, who so recently just became commander of the Confederates forces in the Tennessee front.
Albert Sidney Johnston belonged the West Class of 1826 - two years ahead of Jefferson Davis. But he also attended Transylvania University before that in his native state of Kentucky, much like Davis. It seems that somewhere along the line, Jefferson Davis developed a lifelong case of hero worship. He would henceforth hold that Johnston was a soldier's soldier.
Johnston certainly earned a reputation as such in battle. He fought in the Black Hawk War as an American. He then joined the Texans in their fight for independence - and rose from private soldier to Brigadier General.
But he just hadn't quite his fill of fighting, so he led volunteers from Texas in the Mexican-American War, and then after went back to service with the United States. For a time he led the storied 2nd Cavalry, and then gained leadership of the Department of the Pacific.
Johnston now ranked very close to the top of the military hierarchy. That put him in a very elite group of officers, although he was no longer young by this time. When the Civil War arrived, he was fifty-seven, yet had more than enough energy to join one more great war.
When Texas seceded, Johnston likewise chose to go with the state he'd made a new home in all those years ago. The only problem was that he, at that moment, happened to be stationed in California. In fact, he and his family moved from San Francisco to Los Angeles, where his family stayed through the war years.
Regardless, in the aftermath of the bombardment of Fort Sumter, Johnston too chose war. In May, with war fever heating, Johnston made the decision to resign his command, although he didn't precisely do so quietly.
In fact, Johnston left in style and without any secrecy. After a hearty farewell dinner, he and a small band of compatriots made their way across the western expanse. The nearest Confederate outposts lay halfway across the western landscape, home to a a variety of tribes (some very hostile), natural hazards, and the heat and thirst. Yet Johnston, an experienced commander with years of military service, successfully arrived in Confederate-controlled territory in July of 1861. He and his fellows dodged every federal patrol; had they been caught they would presumably have become prisoners of war before even joining it.
Soon after, he went up to Richmond to meet with Davis personally. And Jefferson Davis was only too eager to hand a prime military command to his old friend. So in September, 1862, Albert Sidney Johnston arrived to take command in the West, and almost immediately had to make some very difficult decisions with far too few resources.
As we've mentioned several times, Confederate General Albert Sidney Johnston inherited a very tricky situation. General Polk's advance in Kentucky at Columbus became the serious political problem that we've discussed. But military, the situation actually looked even worse. The question lay in the realm of logistics and strategy. While Columbus did allow him to control the river, the town also lay on a spur line of the railroad that ran from Paducah - which Grant swiftly occupied - to points south.
General Grant could therefore potentially cut Polk's command off from the main Confederate battle line that Johnston established. This ran across northern Tennessee and southern Kentucky, following the primary east-west rail line. Johnston advanced with his main force to Bowling Green, Kentucky to put up a front against General Buell's command. And as we've seen, the East Tennessee command under Zollicoffer worked their towards Mill Springs.
Mill Springs itself was of absolutely no importance in this plan, nor did the railroads reach anywhere near there. Rather, Johnston wanted to keep his front as far forward as possible, for several reasons.
First, having as much extra room as possible to retreat and buy time would give his command a lot of flexibility. One command could fall back, gaining the room for reinforcements to join them and push the Union back. Or they might lead this or that Union army farther than their logistics could support, turning to face them when able.
But General Albert Sidney Johnston also chose to follow one of humanity’s most ancient and hallowed military traditions; he simply bluffed. He acted as aggressively as his situation allowed. He acted as though he had merely to give the order and endless waves of furious Rebels would sweep aside the entire Federal line, and that he only wanted to solid foundations for the bloody work to come in springtime.
And he did this because Johnston knew very well that his command could hardly form a coherent battle line. First, he had far too few soldiers in the field. Each individual wing of his overall command (save one) faced larger Union forces in their immediate front.
The exception was General Polk at Columbus. But we will return to his thorny situation momentarily.
The short version is that pragmatically speaking, the Confederates could undertake no offensive without absurd luck, disproportionately skillful leadership, or preferably both. They would be small forces trying to oppose armies twice their size and horrible supply lines. Yet at the same time, they could not easily abandon certain areas in order to concentrate.
Jefferson Davis never entirely developed a strategic plan, but in practice he developed and implemented a "Cordon Defence" concept, in part due to the nature of the Confederacy as, more or less, a democracy. As an aside, it's understandable that you may quibble over that definition. African-Americans were at the very best completely disqualified from public or political life, when they weren't literally enslaved. But more or less every corner of the Confederacy had some manner of representation in Richmond, and that representation had consequences for Confederate President Davis.
Even with absolutely military necessity, abandoning any corner of the Confederacy threatened its political integrity. Leaving aside the question of what the average Johnny on the street thought, the thousands of slave-owners felt their humans property, and the wealth it gave them, under grave threat. If they thought that the Confederacy wouldn't, or couldn't, protect their power and station then they wouldn't support it, in turn.
Moreover, there was that tricky question of what the Johnny-on-the-street really did think. Secessionists could not openly admit their might be many Union loyalists. But implictly they feared that a large number of Unionists did exist. And the voting records of the border states strongly suggested that the Confederacy might not have the staying power it claimed. And while in 1861 recruiting held out, by 1862 it waned sharply.
Beside, the explicit political foundation of Confederacy was that the slave system made their elites wealthy, wise, united, and unfailingly courageous in battle. With an ideological foundation like that, how could Davis allow his armies to stand down from a fight? More to the point, could the myth survive such a retreat?
In fact, those feelings were in part why Albert Sidney Johnston did not want General Polk all the way up at Columbus. Polk had positioned a great deal of manpower and artillery there - precious resources which might well have been better used distributed throughout the western armies and forts. At that exact moment, Johnston had to decline offers of entire regiments as he lacked the arms with which to equip them. Indeed, he could not fully arm the men he did have, and lacked horses and wagons to move his command.
But with a little time and good fortune he might be able to put his forces in order. Johnston pleaded with Richmond for more arms for his soldiers and military engineers, who might be able to build the kind of defences he needed. But Jefferson Davis, having handed the command to Johnston, denied him any further assistance in the short term. He even told Johnston that he must look to his own resources - which did not bode well given that there were hardly any facilities at all. Modern gunsmithing required special machine tools - more or less all made in the North. While some did exist in the Confederacy, they could barely support the armies in the field and the largest stocks were kept in Virginia or various state arsenals.
Then Gen. Thomas attacked Mill Springs, and shattered the entire right flank of Johnston's line. This alone was bad enough, and Thomas could have marched into East Tennessee almost unopposed. He didn't for lack of transportation, and because his superior, General Buell, seemingly lacked the aggressive nature required for offensive campaigning. The Union would indeed have faced immense difficulties supplying an army in East Tennessee - but similarly would have caused an immense crisis for the Confederate strategic situation. In any case, that was not done.
Yet since Thomas didn't march on East Tennessee, his command remained in the field for other uses - like assisting his commander and pressuring Johnston himself. That, at the least was a potential concern for Johnston, since Buell already had more men in the center of the Union line than Johnston could match.
And then General Grant attacked Fort Henry, and the entire plan went out the window almost overnight. Before Johnston could possibly reinforce any of his positions, he had lost the key to the whole strategy. Union gunboats, far stronger at that point than anything afloat the Confederacy could put into the river, swept far into the Johnston's rear. This was, charitably, a very bad day.
General Johnston did have one good stroke of luck, although ironically it shortly rebounded to his great misfortune. Richmond could not spare a single rifle nor a single engineer, but Jefferson Davis wanted to get rid of a very specific nuisance. So he packed up General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard and sent him off to the west. That resolved the awkward command situation under General Joe Johnston, and besides, Davis personally loathed Beauregard by this point and wanted him as far away as possible.
Yet despite his many quirks and deficiencies of character, Beauregard retained his almost-unwavering optimism and strange habit of giving very good advice. When Beauregard and Johnston talked it over, they could see only one way to retrieve the situation: Beauregard must go and get General Polk out of his fortress, now more like a cage, at Columbus. Beauregard had the necessary talent and prestige to make this a swift process. Meanwhile, Johnston himself would fall back on Nashville.
So, four days after the battle of Fort Henry, Johnston's armies began to retreat southward, leaving Kentucky for the time being. But Johnston did one thing more: he moved every spare man, and he did possess a few regiments kept around for just such a crisis, to reinforce Fort Donelson. Hence when General Grant marched on the latter, he discovered the Confederates suddenly had more men defending than he had attacking.
And as it happened, General Buell let Johnston slip away unhindered, beginning a habit of lackadaisical movements that will ultimately lead to his dismissal in the months to come. This was in reality a serious military mistake. Back in Washington, President Lincoln and even the infamously-timid George McClellan started to take notice that Buell seemingly failed to move when there was absolutely no reason avoid a fight. Instead Buell called for a "cooperation" between himself and Halleck, but did little to make that cooperative campaign happen.
Had Johnston thrown all sense to the wind, massed his entire center force, and ventured to directly attack Grant, it seems that Buell would have simply failed to do much of anything. Grant, for once, would have faced overwhelming numbers, and without an easy way to respond. Johnston did not do this, and thereby earned a certain amount of scorn by historians. Yet in reality it would have been sheer madness to take such a risk at this stage.
Indeed, there’s no guarantee Grant would not have held the line - for the area near Forts Henry and Donelson made excellent defensive ground, while Buell simply marched into Johnston’s flank and rear and entirely cut him off.
And one of the reasons General Johnston did not, and emphatically should not, have taken such a risk was that from his perspective, Fort Donelson ought to have been fairly secure. His reinforcements arrived and could fend off Grant for some time, giving him the leeway to bring General Polk's army into his strategic planning. But General Beauregard's reputation preceded him - literally!
You see, the Union command knew that Beauregard had headed out west. What they did not know is that he arrived alone, unaccompanied by a single Company. They believed that he led an army fifteen-thousand strong - entirely true, but he left them in Virginia. So when Henry Halleck heard that Grant took Fort Henry, he pulled all the reinforcements available to send down the Cumberland River, in order to match the nonexistent ranks led by Beauregard.
This gave Grant a substantial advantage in numbers. Yet still, properly led the Confederate army at Donelson could hold for a long time. Moreover, as Grant discovered, it was very difficult indeed to close all the escape routes. But Johnston had another run of ill luck, for between them, the inept Floyd and manic Pillow utterly ruined the defence of Fort Donelson. And that was an almost-irretrievable disaster.
First, the loss of nearly the entire army at Donelson removed well over ten thousand soldiers from Johnston's already-thin ranks, not to mention the loss of their armaments. Second, Johnston knew that the Union gunboats would soon sweep upriver to Nashville. No doubt the army would follow shortly behind them.
As it turned out, It was Buell’s army who arrived in Nashville, taking the city unopposed. Only General Forrest’s cavalry watched his approach, and they got the last of the military supplies on the move mere minutes before soldiers in Union blue arrived on the scene. But thousands upon thousands of pounds of rations went up in flames, burned to prevent the Union from taking possession. And so the first Confederate state capital, and the first really significant city regardless, fell into Union hands on the 24th of February, 1862.
Grant himself didn’t make it, mostly because Henry Halleck decided to play a deeply stupid political game in the hopes of acquiring more status for himself. But that is a story for another day.
This has been the American Civil War Podcast. Thank you for reading, and I hope you’ll join us next time.