Free Shiloh, 1862 by Winston Groom Page B

congressional elections of 1862.
    With the Mississippi River closed to Northern traffic since the war started, the midwestern states were suffering badly from lack of an outlet to sell their products to the South or ship them abroad. The result was steamboats rotting at the wharfs, crops rotting in the fields, timber and manufactured goods piling up in sheds, and no market for hogs, cattle, and dairy products. Almost since war broke out Lincoln had been pressing for a Union advance downriver but to no avail.
    Part of the problem seemed to be finding a Union general willing to risk his reputation in battle against the Confederates. The only one who had tried, Nathaniel Lyon, was killed and his army defeated at the Battle of Wilson’s Creek several months earlier. But the greatest problem of all seemed to lie with famed general “Pathfinder” Frémont, mastermind of the California conquest a decade and a half past.
    Once disgraced by court-martial for insubordination and sentenced to dismissal from the service, Frémont had political connections (he was married to the daughter of Thomas Hart Benton, an influential Democratic senator for 30 years) that had brought himout of mothballs and installed him in this important job. A series of published accounts of his western exploits had made Frémont a national hero, but he was trained as a topographical engineer and had no formal military education, nor any experience in handling large bodies of troops. The results ranged from disorder to chaos.
    Like a self-imposed Prisoner of Zenda, Frémont established himself in a palatial St. Louis mansion surrounded by a ridiculous coterie of pompously dressed guards, and he received almost no one in his headquarters, including his own generals. Inquiries went into the headquarters and remained there, mysteriously ignored. His logistics were hopelessly plagued by extravagant government contracts with unscrupulous dealers, while Frémont’s attention seemed focused on freeing slaves wherever and whenever he could—a policy that, for political reasons, was the last thing Lincoln wanted.
    It was under these stressful circumstances that Grant set out to do battle with the Confederates who had recently established themselves near the small settlement of Belmont, Missouri, about 25 miles downriver from Cairo. After his peaceful occupation of Paducah, Grant had looked for some new task and decided that the concentration of Rebels at Belmont was not only a menace to navigation but offered an opportunity for his troops to get some real battle experience.
    Even that early in the war, Grant seemed to grasp that the overarching Union strategy in the West should focus on clearing the Mississippi River—as opposed to merely capturing cities—and restoring Federal commerce from the Midwest to the Gulf of Mexico, while at the same time cleaving the Confederacy in two. Accordingly, he applied to the navy for steamship transportation and gunboat protection, and early on the morning of November 1, 1861, he shovedoff downriver with five infantry regiments, six artillery batteries, and two companies of cavalry—about 3,100 men in all—accompanied by the “timberclad” gunboats
Tyler
and
Lexington
.
    The expedition was in the nature of a raid rather than conquest and occupation. The Confederates under Gen. Sterling Price were using Belmont for an induction and training center and reinforcement channel both to and from their powerful new fortifications at Columbus, Kentucky, on the opposite shore.
    Columbus had become a hot potato as the war intensified. At the beginning of the conflict Kentucky, a slave state divided almost evenly in sentiment between North and South, tried to remain neutral, which was to say that its legislature voted not to take sides in the contest and declared that neither Federal nor Rebel troops were welcome on its soil. It was a notion that would have been almost laughable had the stakes not been so high, for neither the Union nor