Belmont was a Civil War engagement fought in Missouri, 1861. It was a Union victory.
On November 6, 1861, Brig. Gen. U.S. Grant left Cairo, Illinois, by steamers, in conjunction with two gunboats, to make a demonstration against Columbus, Kentucky. The next morning, Grant learned that Confederate troops had crossed the Mississippi River from Columbus to Belmont, Missouri, to intercept two detachments sent in pursuit of Brig. Gen. M. Jeff Thompson and, possibly, to reinforce Maj. Gen. Sterling Price's force. He landed on the Missouri shore, out of the range of Confederate artillery at Columbus, and started marching the mile to Belmont. At 9:00 in the morning, an engagement began. The Federals routed the Confederates out of their Belmont cantonment and destroyed the Rebel supplies and equipment they found because they did not have the means to carry them off. The scattered Confederate forces reorganized and received reinforcements from Columbus. Counterattacked by the Confederates, the Union force withdrew, reembarked, and returned to Cairo. Grant did not accomplish much in this operation, but, at a time when little Union action occurred anywhere, many were heartened by any activity.
On November 7, 1861, opposing forces clashed at Belmont in Mississippi County, Missouri, marking the first time Brig. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant faced combat during the Civil War. His opponent that day was Major General Leonidas Polk, and though Grant would later rise to serve as Union Army general in chief and eventually as U.S. president, this engagement represented uncharted territory for him. The men he commanded here would form the "nucleus" from which the Union Army of the Tennessee eventually grew.
The action began a day earlier, on November 6, when Grant transported his forces by riverboat from Cairo, Illinois, aiming to strike a modest Confederate outpost positioned near Belmont, directly across the Mississippi from the Confederate bastion at Columbus, Kentucky. After putting his soldiers ashore on Missouri soil, he pushed forward toward Belmont itself. The assault caught Confederate defenders off guard, and Grant's men swept through their camp, tearing it apart. Yet the setback proved temporary for the Confederates, who regrouped their scattered units and soon received fresh reinforcements sent from Columbus. Backed by punishing artillery fire launched from the opposite riverbank, they mounted a counterattack that forced Grant to pull back to his boats and withdraw his troops to Paducah, Kentucky. In the broader scope of the war, the clash carried little strategic weight, yet because so little else was occurring on other fronts at that moment, newspapers gave it substantial coverage.
At half past eight in the morning on November 7,
From the Southern perspective, the clash at Belmont counted as a victory, given that Grant had launched an assault only to be pushed back. Johnston, who outranked Polk, declared that the seventh of November would occupy a shining place in Confederate military history, one that the sons and daughters of the South would recall with gratitude for generations. By the close of November 7 and into the following morning, Grant pulled back the forces he had sent forward into Missouri and Kentucky. A soldier fighting for the Union offered a blunt assessment, noting that Grant's defeat at Belmont had rattled him so badly that he reversed every order and marched the troops back to their original posts at a hurried pace. Grant himself told a different story afterward. According to his own memoirs, the fight at Belmont achieved both goals it had set out to accomplish, since the Confederates abandoned any plan to send troops away from Columbus, and their casualties proved unusually severe for that stage of the conflict. Meanwhile, a diarist from Mississippi described the aftermath as a disaster for Grant's men. He wrote of visiting the battlefield and witnessing a grim scene, where Union soldiers, operating under a flag of truce, buried their fallen comrades, sometimes stacking as many as ten bodies into a single grave before covering them over.
Casualties on the Union side totaled 607, consisting of 120 killed, 383 wounded, and 104 taken prisoner or unaccounted for. The Confederates suffered somewhat more, with 641 casualties made up of 105 dead, 419 wounded, 106 captured, and 11 missing. Perhaps the most lasting significance of the engagement lay in the experience it gave Grant, both in combat and in directing a sizable body of troops. It also shaped how President Lincoln, who badly wanted his forces to strike at the Confederacy somewhere, came to view Grant in a favorable light.
The battle later lent its name to Belmont Avenue in Chicago, Illinois. On the Kentucky side, the site once fortified during the conflict now exists as the Columbus-Belmont State Park, preserving the memory of the military activity that took place there. As of mid-2023, roughly 1.2 acres of the original battlefield have been safeguarded through efforts by the American Battlefield Trust and its partner organizations.
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