Chapter XIII




Grant's First Success


Up to this time the war in the West had been largely an affair of
skirmishes. A body of Union troops would find itself confronting
a Confederate force, one of the two commanders would attack and
a fight would follow; or the Confederates would march into a town
and their opponents would attempt to drive them out of it, not
because it was of any particular value, but because the other side
held it. "See-a-head-and-hit-it" strategy governed the day and no
plan worthy of the name had been adopted for conducting the war on
scientific principles.

But Grant had studied the maps to some purpose in his office at
Cairo and he realized that the possession of the Mississippi River
was the key to the situation in the West. As long as the Confederates
controlled that great waterway which afforded them free access to
the ocean and fairly divided the Eastern from the Western States,
they might reasonably hope to defy their opponents to the end of
time. But, if they lost it, one part of the Confederacy would be
almost completely cut off from the rest. Doubtless, other men saw
this just as clearly and quite as soon as Grant did; but having
once grasped an idea he never lost sight of it, and while others