Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, Days After the Great Triumph at Fort Donelson, and Under Threat of Arrest by General Halleck, Pledges His Support to His Replacement, General C.F. Smith

The only letter we have ever seen offered for sale during the 9 days when Grant had been removed from field command

 

Days later, Smith would be dead, and Grant would be restored to command, headed toward the Battle of Shiloh

As 1862 opened, the war was not going well for the Union. In the east, Bull Run had been a disaster and led to the shake-up of command, with no results yet to show for it. In the west, the loss at Wilson’s Creek gave the Confederates the upper hand. The Federal armies in the west then turned their attention to implementation of the Anaconda Plan – to cut the Confederacy in half by securing the Mississippi River from St. Louis all the way to the Gulf of Mexico, and clearing a maritime invasion route into the heart of the Confederacy by taking the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers, which lay just to the east of the Mississippi. If successful, these maneuvers would cut Texas, Arkansas and Louisiana off from the main body of the South, hold Kentucky and Missouri firmly in the Union, and make it difficult for Tennessee to cooperate with her sister states. The first moves would be to take and hold commanding locations north on the Tennessee and Cumberland, and command of the operation was given to Brig. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, an obscure and largely unproven leader.

On February 6, 1862, Fort Henry, commanding the Tennessee River, was captured by Grant’s forces. It had a poor defensive position, and was reduced mainly by the bombardment of gunboats on the river. Nonetheless, its fall opened the Tennessee River to Union gunboats and shipping past the Alabama border, and provided a real victory for Union arms. Grant next focused his attention on Fort Donelson, eleven miles away on the more strategically important Cumberland River. This fort had a much stronger physical position, and the Confederates had placed some 20,000 men and a number of senior commanders on site to engage in its defense. They were not about to concede the fort, and they were ready and waiting for Grant. Grant arrived at Fort Donelson late on February 12 and on the 13th established his headquarters near the left side of the front of the line. That day was spent in battle preparation, with a few small probing attacks being carried out against the Confederate defenses.

The battle was severe, with nearly 1,000 soldiers on both sides killed and about 3,000 wounded. When Simon Buckner, the Confederate commander, asked for surrender terms, Grant famously replied, “No terms except unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted,“ adding “I propose to move immediately upon your works.” Buckner surrendered his command of about 15,000 men; this was the first of three Confederate armies that Grant captured during the war.

The capture of Fort Donelson gave the North control of the Cumberland River, which provided the road that opened the Deep South to Union invasion. It boosted morale in the North, which now saw that the war could result in great victories and not just defeats. It gave President Lincoln the fighting general he was looking for, and it made Grant’s career in the process; he was soon promoted to major general of volunteers.

In early March, Grant’s superior, Maj. Gen. Henry W. Halleck, then in command of the Department of the Missouri, assigned Grant to lead an expedition up the Tennessee River from the recently captured Fort Henry. On March 4, however, Halleck ordered Grant to give field command of the expedition to Charles Ferguson Smith, a trusted member of Grant’s team; this order has been variously attributed to professional jealousy and to Halleck’s lacking confidence in Grant due to certain administrative difficulties. Smith’s orders were to lead raids intended to capture or damage the railroads in southwestern Tennessee. Brig. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s troops arrived from Paducah, Kentucky, to conduct a similar mission to break the railroads near Eastport, Mississippi.

After turning over command to Smith, Grant was removed from field command and put in essentially an administrative role. This would have had real implications for the war effort. In his memoirs, Grant describes the incident: “I was surprised. This was the first intimation I had received that General Halleck had called for information as to the strength of my command. On the 6th he wrote to me again. ‘Your going to Nashville without authority and when your presence with your troops was of the utmost importance was a matter of very serious complaint at Washington so much so that I was advised to arrest you on your return.’ This was the first I knew of his objecting to my going to Nashville.”

Grant had apparently not been receiving the telegrams from Washington, and though more troops had been offered him, no response had been forthcoming. McClellan had ordered Grant arrested by Halleck if necessary. Grant continues, “Thus in less than two weeks after the victory at Donelson the two leading generals in the army were in correspondence as to what disposition should be made of me and in less than three weeks I was virtually in arrest and without a command.”

Grant was therefore without a field command from March 4 through March 13, at a time when the Union was looking to marshal its troops to forge deeper into Confederate territory.

Days after being replaced, and with the victory at Fort Donelson fresh in everyone’s mind, he wrote his replacement, in this apparently unpublished letter, offering his full support to the mission, and pledging all his resources to the expedition on the Tennessee River.

Autograph letter signed, from Headquarters, the District of Tennessee, Fort Henry March 9, 1862, to General C.F. Smith, his replacement and commander of the expedition up the Tennessee River. “I just learn through my quartermaster that there are yet quite a number of teams, complete, at Henry that can be given you should you require then. Anything you may require send back transports for, and if within my power you shall have it.” He signed it, “U.S. Grant, Major General.” This is a rare letter from during a very important stretch of Grant’s career.

Charles Ferguson Smith, the recipient of this letter, was more than just a fellow soldier to Grant. “During the war father was saddened often over the death of many who had been associates either at West Point or in the army,” Frederick Dent Grant wrote in 1899, “but I think his greatest grief, and perhaps his greatest disappointment, were occasioned by the accidental death of General Smith.” On the night of March 12, 1862, 3 days after Grant wrote this letter, General Smith tripped and slashed his leg as he climbed into an awaiting rowboat on the Tennessee River. The fall caused Smith to rip the flesh from his shin down to the bone. The onset of an infection, combined with dysentery, led to his death a little more than a month later on April 25, 1862.

In his authoritative biography titled, Teacher of Civil War Generals: Major General Charles Ferguson Smith, Soldier and West Point Commandant, Allen H. Mesch stated that Smith influenced Grant throughout his military career. Smith’s sudden demise “forced Grant to mature into a capable field commander and to forge an alliance with William T. Sherman that would ultimately win the Civil War.” Not only losing one of his best subordinates, Grant lost a mentor, role model, and friend in a period during the Civil War when he was most vulnerable.

Grant was reinstated on March 13, and joined his army in the field on March 17. By early April, Grant’s army had grown to a total of roughly 50,000 men. The three new divisions were commanded by Brig. Gen. Stephen A. Hurlbut (4th Division), Brig. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman (5th), and Brig. Gen. Benjamin M. Prentiss (6th). On April 6–7, Grant’s forces fought the bloodiest battle of the Civil War to that time, the Battle of Shiloh, when Confederate forces advanced largely undetected from Corinth, Mississippi, and attacked the five Union divisions staged at Pittsburg Landing.

This letter has been in a private collection for over half a century, and is now offered for sale for the first time in all those years.