SlothSlayer

Good morning from Virginia. 🇺🇸 On the morning of November 7, 1861, the Mississippi was running low and the air was damp and chill as a small flotilla of steamboats, guarded by the gunboats Tyler and Lexington, eased toward the Missouri shore a few miles above the ferry landing at Belmont. Aboard were roughly three thousand Union soldiers under a new brigadier general named Ulysses S. Grant, a man still largely untested in command. Across the river, on the high bluffs at Columbus, Kentucky, Confederate guns commanded the water. Grant’s landing at Hunter’s Farm was meant to be screened by woods and out of easy range of those batteries. The men stepped ashore into cornfields and timber and began the march south. For hours the fighting was a slow, stubborn business of skirmish lines and advancing regiments. Grant stayed forward with the troops. Early in the action a horse was shot from under him; he took another from a staff officer and continued. By early afternoon the Union men had driven the Confederate defenders—first a small camp force, then reinforcements under Brigadier General Gideon Pillow—back through an abatis of felled trees and into their tents at Camp Johnston. The camp was overrun. Tents went up in smoke. Prisoners and a pair of guns were taken. For a brief time it appeared the day had gone as Grant intended. Then the picture changed. From the Kentucky side Major General Leonidas Polk sent more men across the river. Fresh regiments, and later troops under Benjamin Cheatham, struck the Union force as it began to pull back toward the boats. What had been an advance became a running fight through the woods. Some officers spoke of surrender. Grant’s answer, later remembered, was plain: they had cut their way in and could cut their way out. The column fought back to the landing under pressure, the rear ranks taking the heaviest fire. Near the end Grant was still on the field. He rode out looking for stragglers and found Confederate troops closer than he expected. When he reached the river the transports were already casting off. A captain recognized him and ordered a plank run out. Grant’s horse, as he later wrote, seemed to understand. There was no gentle path down the bank—the Mississippi’s edge at that season was steep. The horse put its forefeet over, slid on its haunches, and trotted across the single plank onto the deck. Grant was the last man of his army to leave Missouri that day. Once aboard he went to the upper deck. A bullet later passed through the sofa where he had briefly lain. Both sides paid heavily. Union losses came to about 607—120 killed, 383 wounded, 104 missing or captured. Confederate losses were roughly 641. Each side claimed the victory. The camp had been destroyed and prisoners taken, yet the Union force had been driven back to its boats and Columbus still held. What remained clearest, in the quiet after the guns fell silent, was the character of the commander who had chosen to attack rather than wait. In a war still young, and with many generals still cautious, Grant had shown he was willing to take the offensive with the men and boats he had. It was only his first real combat command. It would not be his last. America 250 🇺🇸