Battle of Belmont, 1861: Ulysses S. Grant's first battle

Belmont was a small battle that mattered for one reason above all: it was the first time Ulysses S. Grant commanded troops in battle in the Civil War. It came close to ending in disaster, and both sides claimed it as a victory. It also showed Abraham Lincoln a general who was willing to fight.²

Who won the Battle of Belmont and why?

Neither side won clearly. Grant's 3,000 men overran and burned the Confederate camp, but Leonidas Polk ferried reinforcements across from Columbus and drove them back to their boats. Losses were nearly equal, about 600 on each side. The Confederates claimed victory because Grant retreated; Grant claimed success because he had planned only a raid.³

Kentucky and the Mississippi

In 1861 Kentucky tried to stay neutral. Loyalties in the state were deeply divided, and both sides hesitated to make the first move. The Confederates moved first: in early September Major General Leonidas Polk took Columbus, Kentucky, a town on high bluffs above the river, and the state's neutrality was broken. Grant, then commanding at Cairo, Illinois, answered by occupying Paducah at the mouth of the Tennessee River.⁴

Columbus became a fortress, its guns commanding the river. Across the Mississippi, on the Missouri bank, the Confederates kept a small camp of observation at the steamboat landing of Belmont. The National Park Service notes that the position gave them control of communications between southeast Missouri and the Confederates east of the river.⁵

The Confederates also meant to close the river itself. They stretched a heavy iron chain across the Mississippi from the Columbus shore toward Belmont to stop Union boats from steaming south; on the Kentucky side it was held by a huge anchor. Union gunboats tested the bluffs in the weeks before the battle and found the batteries too strong to attack from the water.⁶

Grant and Polk

The two commanders were unlikely opponents. Grant, a West Point graduate and Mexican War veteran, had been a brigadier general of volunteers only since August 1861. On 28 August Frémont gave him command of southeast Missouri, with his headquarters at Cairo, where the Ohio meets the Mississippi. By 1 November, he later wrote, he had at least 20,000 men there, nearly all of whom had never been in a battle.⁷

Polk was a bishop. He had graduated from West Point but resigned his commission soon afterward to enter the Episcopal Church, and by the 1830s he was one of its leading bishops in the South. His friendship with Jefferson Davis, a West Point classmate, won him a major general's commission in 1861. The American Battlefield Trust judges that his invasion of Kentucky cost the Confederacy a state that might have been a great asset.⁸

A demonstration becomes an attack

At the start of November the Union commander in the West, Major General John C. Frémont, received reports that Polk was about to send troops from Columbus into Missouri and Arkansas. Grant was ordered to make a demonstration toward Columbus to stop any such move. He left Cairo on transports on 6 November with about 3,000 men.⁹

His force was five regiments of infantry from Illinois and Iowa and two companies of cavalry, carried on steamboats and escorted by two wooden gunboats. To keep Polk guessing, Grant had already sent a column under Colonel Richard Oglesby into southeast Missouri, and he asked Brigadier General Charles F. Smith to march from Paducah toward Columbus on the Kentucky side. The steamers tied up for the night on the Kentucky shore some miles above Columbus.¹⁰

Grant had not meant to fight a battle. His men were restless for action, and in his memoirs Grant wrote that he could not see how he could keep discipline, or the confidence of his men, if he took them back to Cairo without trying to do something. The National Park Service says he received fresh intelligence on the way that the Confederates were sending troops against Unionists in southeast Missouri, and turned his transports toward Belmont.¹¹

Grant dated that intelligence to about 2 a.m. on 7 November: a report that the enemy was crossing troops from Columbus to the Missouri bank, presumably to go after Oglesby. Columbus itself was too strong and too heavily garrisoned to attack, so he decided to land on the Missouri side, break up the camp at Belmont and come back. HistoryNet points out that no record of that message survives from the time and that the Confederates were in fact preparing to send troops east, not west.¹²

The fight for the camp

On the morning of 7 November the Union troops landed on the Missouri shore three miles north of Belmont. Warned of the landing, Polk sent three regiments across to the camp under Brigadier General Gideon Pillow.¹³

Polk believed the landing was a feint. In HistoryNet's account he expected the real blow to fall on Columbus from the Kentucky side, where Smith's column was approaching, and he kept most of his troops in the fortress. Grant made the same reading of his opponent: the Confederates, he wrote, must have thought he meant to draw troops away from the east bank and then strike Columbus itself.¹⁴

The ground favored a slow fight. The river bottom on the Missouri side was low and marshy, cut by sloughs and covered with heavy timber, with only a few clearings and cornfields. Grant posted a guard in a dry hollow near the landing to protect the transports, then marched south at about eight in the morning and deployed most of his men as skirmishers in the woods.¹⁵

The Union soldiers marched through woods and cornfields and met Pillow's men in the late morning. The Confederates were slowly pushed back into their camp and then beyond it to the riverbank. By about 2 p.m., in the American Battlefield Trust's account, the Union troops had the upper hand and took the camp.¹⁶

Grant rode with the advance. Early in the fighting his horse was shot under him, and he took another from one of his staff officers. The fighting grew fiercer for about four hours as the Confederates were forced back toward their camp. The defenders fell back through the felled trees around their tents and over the edge of the riverbank, where the steep bank hid them from Union fire.¹⁷

Victory, then chaos

Then discipline broke down. For many of the men it was their first victory, and they began to loot and celebrate in the captured camp. Grant wrote that some of the senior officers were little better than the privates, riding from group to group to make speeches for the Union, while men fired captured guns at empty steamers far out of range.¹⁸

Grant saw what his men did not: two steamers crossing from Columbus, crowded with gray soldiers, and the beaten defenders working their way north along the bank. When he could not get the gunners to turn the captured cannon on the loaded boats, he ordered the camp set on fire. The flames told the Confederate batteries on the bluffs that the camp was no longer in friendly hands, and their heavy guns opened on the Union troops, which brought officers and men back under control.¹⁹

Cutting a way out

The beaten Confederates had sheltered under the steep riverbank, covered by the heavy guns of Columbus. They now worked north along the bank and came out on the higher ground between Grant's men and their boats. At the same time Polk, realizing at last that the attack was not a feint, ferried more troops across the river and his artillery fired across it onto the Union troops.²⁰

Polk's own report lists the reinforcements: three regiments sent over under Pillow at the start, three more at intervals, then Benjamin F. Cheatham, and finally two more regiments that Polk took across himself to support a flank attack. HistoryNet describes Cheatham gathering the scattered survivors of the morning and striking the rear of the Union column as it marched back toward the landing, while fresh troops blocked the road in front of it.²¹

Some of Grant's officers, seeing themselves surrounded, talked of surrender. Grant replied, as he recalled in his memoirs, that they had cut their way in and could cut their way out just as well. His men, back under control, broke through to the landing.²²

Grant nearly did not get away himself. Riding out alone to look for the enemy, he found a column of Confederate troops passing through the tall corn less than fifty yards from him, turned his horse and galloped back to the river. He learned later that Polk had seen him and invited his men to try their marksmanship on the lone Yankee, but no one fired. The boats were already pulling out; a captain ran out a plank, and Grant's horse slid down the steep bank and trotted aboard.²³

The Park Service records that Grant was the last man aboard. He lay down in his cabin, went on deck when firing broke out from the shore, and on his return found that a shot had gone through the couch he had been lying on. Union gunboats drove the Confederates back from the bank and the transports got away.²⁴

Counting the cost

The losses were close. The American Battlefield Trust puts the Union loss at 607 men and the Confederate loss at 641; HistoryNet speaks of more than 600 casualties on each side. Grant, writing in his memoirs, put his own loss at 485 and the Confederate loss, as officially reported, at 642.²⁵

The numbers engaged are just as disputed. The American Battlefield Trust counts 3,114 Union troops against about 5,000 Confederates in all. Grant wrote that he had about 2,500 men in action, not counting the guard at the boats, against some 7,000 Confederates once the troops from Columbus are included, while Polk reported the Union force as about 7,500 strong. Both sides took prisoners: Grant brought back 175 Confederates and two captured guns.²⁶

The Confederates claimed victory because they had driven Grant back to his boats. Polk reported that the enemy had been thoroughly routed and pursued to the river. Grant claimed success because he had meant only a raid; in his memoirs, the American Battlefield Trust notes, he wrote that the Confederates gave up all idea of detaching troops from Columbus afterward.²⁷

After Belmont

Grant recalled that in the North Belmont was severely criticized as a wholly unnecessary battle. But it gave Grant confidence in himself and in his men, and it brought him to Lincoln's notice as one of the few Union generals eager to fight. Grant himself wrote that his troops acquired at Belmont a confidence in themselves that did not desert them through the war.²⁸

The fortress at Columbus soon lost its value. In February 1862 Grant took Fort Henry and Fort Donelson on the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers, breaking the Confederate line that ran from Columbus to Bowling Green. In the spring of 1864 Lincoln gave Grant command of all the Union armies. More on the man in our profile of Ulysses S. Grant.²⁹

The bluffs at Columbus are now Columbus-Belmont State Park, which commemorates the battle. Visitors can see a section of the great river chain and its anchor, a Confederate cannon and the earthen trenches, and a museum housed in a building that served as a hospital during the war.³⁰