Ulysses S. Grant by Michael Korda

be no harm in dispatching Grant to do a little mischief in the general direction of Nashville before Buell did.
    Grant did not hesitate. He moved, like Rommel nearly eighty years later, mit blitzartiger Schnelle, the lightning speed so favored byGerman Panzer generals, and took the Confederates by surprise. Grant was carried south on the Tennessee River by a flotilla of transports and gunboats, under the command of Comm. Andrew H. Foote, U.S.N., which had originally been assembled to carry Buell south, and was still waiting for Buell to move.
    Having preempted Buell’s flotilla, Grant now deftly stepped into the limelight before Buell. He was about to receive help from an unexpected source—his Confederate opponents. Despite his dislike of Napoleon, Grant was about to prove the emperor right again. When asked what kind of generals he liked best, Napoleon is said to have replied, “Lucky ones.” Luck was about to strike Grant at last.
    Though the Confederacy had recognized the importance of the rivers flowing north into the Ohio before the Union generals did, its choice of positions for the forts defending them was hampered by a reluctance to advance too far north into Kentucky, and the Confederate fortress system was therefore built at unpromising points. Perhaps Jefferson Davis and Gen. A. S. Johnston had also dozed during the lectures on fortifications at West Point, or neglected to read Vauban’s classic work on the subject, but in any case Fort Henry, on the Tennessee River, was placed on low ground, so that it could be shelled by gunboats. The Confederates then made the classic mistake of attempting to strengthen it by building a supporting fort—Fort Heiman—on the opposite, west bank of the Tennessee, which was on higher ground but only lightly manned.
    Had they paid more attention at West Point to reading Vauban, Louis XIV’s builder of fortifications, they would have realized the folly of trying to reinforce a poor position with a weak one, butGrant saw the opportunity at once. He landed Brig. Gen. Charles F. Smith—a crusty, competent, “scientific” soldier, who by coincidence had been Grant’s chief instructor at West Point—on the west bank of the Tennessee about two miles north of Fort Heiman, and the Confederate commander immediately abandoned it. That left Fort Henry exposed to fire from Foote’s gunboats and to an overland enveloping attack carried out swiftly by Grant, so Fort Henry too was abandoned, its 2,500-man garrison marching on two dirt tracks over muddy, rugged country to join the Confederate forces at Fort Donelson, on the west bank of the Cumberland.
    Grant took the opportunity of sending Smith, who seemed to relish having escaped from his teaching position at West Point into real warfare, to destroy the Memphis & Ohio railroad bridge over the Tennessee, in effect stranding the Confederates; then moved his forces through cold, wet weather and thick mud in two columns to invest Fort Donelson.
    He had taken Fort Heiman on February 4, he took Fort Henry on the sixth, and he had surrounded nearly twenty thousand Confederate troops in Fort Donelson by the fourteenth. By the night of February 15–16, Grant’s left wing, under Smith, pierced the elaborate Confederate defenses, and Confederate generals John Floyd and Gideon Pillow fled, abandoning command to the hapless Buckner, who surrendered to Grant on the sixteenth, after their famous exchange of correspondence. 2
    Thus in twelve days Grant had opened up the way into Tennessee, captured the largest number of Confederate prisoners and guns since the war began—it was in fact the largest surrender in the history of North America to date—and achieved the first majorUnion victory of the war. Grant’s troops were now only seventy miles from Nashville, and within a few days, as the news traveled north by telegraph, he would be proclaimed a national hero by the press and promoted to major general of volunteers.
    Because he smoked cigars