Grant Moves South by Bruce Catton

Author:Bruce Catton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504024204
Publisher: Open Road Media

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Victory, and a New Plan

What made Corinth important was the railroads. The great Memphis and Charleston line, the Confederacy’s vital East-West axis, ran through here on its way to Chattanooga, and at Corinth it crossed the Mobile and Ohio, which linked Kentucky with the Gulf. With these roads securely held and with Corinth itself properly fortified, the mighty Union Army could digest its conquest of West Tennessee and, at its leisure, could gather strength for an irresistible new advance into a half-paralyzed South. Everything that had been done since Shiloh had been based on the belief that this would be so. Now, in the middle of the summer of 1862, this belief was being exposed as a massive error in judgment.

One trouble was that holding the railroads did not paralyze the Confederates in the least. On the contrary, it inspired them to a new activity, for it offered a wealth of targets which could be hit by small bands of guerillas (whose name was legion) or by detachments of roving cavalry. Simply to get the roads into operating condition kept thousands of Union soldiers so busy they had no time for anything else, and whatever they did could be undone, overnight, by a handful of Southerners. The army of occupation became half constabulary and half track-repair gang, and the main current of the war simply flowed out from under it.

Buell, moving east to take Chattanooga, was tied to the railroad, and two months after Corinth was occupied he still had not reached his goal, although his men had performed prodigies of road-building. (This did little good, because the road ran squarely across the Confederate front and it could be cut anywhere at a minor expenditure of Southern effort.) Grant was no better off; the line from Corinth to Memphis still was not open, the connecting lines farther to the rear were in little better shape, and the handiest way to get from Memphis to Corinth was to go up to Columbus, Kentucky, by steamboat and then to come down from Columbus by rail.

The guerillas were an expensive nuisance. Lacking cavalry, Grant had to shift whole infantry divisions about to meet them, an expedient that never worked because the swiftly moving Confederates refused to wait for the ponderous columns to arrive. Grant tried to extemporize a mounted force—his appeal for cavalry reinforcements having been turned down—by putting foot-soldiers on horses seized from Tennessee plantations, but this did little good.1 His army’s rear seemed no more secure than its front lines.

A painful illustration of this fact came on August 22, when Grant was obliged to report to Halleck that a guerilla detachment had captured one of his posts far back at Clarksville, on the Cumberland. This loss was especially irritating because of the way in which it came about. Clarksville had been garrisoned by six companies of the 71st Ohio, under Colonel Rodney Mason, and Mason had been one of the fainthearts who led his regiment off the field at Shiloh in the first shock of battle.

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