by H. W. Brands
All day the fighting raged and the carnage mounted. Neither side could win but neither would admit defeat. When darkness caused the shooting to stop, neither had the heart to count the casualties. The eventual tally would show two thousand Union soldiers dead and nearly ten thousand wounded, and similar numbers on the Confederate side. A terrible night of groans and death rattles gave way to an appalling dawn of visible suffering. “No tongue can tell, no mind can conceive, no pen portray the horrible sights I witnessed,” a Pennsylvania soldier recorded of that awful morning.
Lee expected the battle to resume that day. “We awaited without apprehension a renewal of the attack,” he reported afterward. But McClellan’s caution again set in. “I concluded that the success of an attack on the 18th was not certain,” McClellan explained. Unwilling to accept anything less than certainty, he regrouped and rested his forces.
Lee thereupon canceled the Maryland operation, grateful for the opportunity to escape with his diminished army intact. “As we could not look for a material increase of strength, and the enemy’s force could be largely and rapidly augmented,” he explained, “it was not thought prudent to wait until he should be ready again to offer battle.” On the night of September 18 Lee led his army back to Virginia.
John Walker recalled the retreat. “I was among the last to cross the Potomac,” he remembered. “As I rode into the river I passed General Lee, sitting on his horse in the stream, watching the crossing of the wagons and artillery. Returning my greeting, he inquired as to what was still behind. There was nothing but wagons containing my wounded, and a battery of artillery, all of which were near at hand, and I told him so. ‘Thank God!’ I heard him say as I rode on.”
Lincoln was sorely disappointed that McClellan hadn’t destroyed Lee’s army. He thought the opportunity might still exist. “The President directs that you cross the Potomac and give battle to the enemy or drive him south,” Halleck told McClellan. “Your army must move now while the roads are good.”
But McClellan refused, and Lincoln was compelled to take from the partial victory what he could. He gathered his cabinet and presented once more the document he had labored over at the telegraph office. “The time has come now,” he said. “I wish it were a better time. I wish that we were in a better condition. The action of the army against the rebels has not been quite what I should have liked.” Yet he had decided to go ahead.
On September 22, speaking as “Commander-in-chief of the Army and Navy,” Lincoln proclaimed broad emancipation as of January 1, 1863. “All persons held as slaves within any state, or designated part of any state, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free,” the president said.
The proclamation failed to satisfy the immediate abolitionists, as it didn’t touch slavery in the border states. But to everyone else, Northerners and Southerners alike, it marked a watershed in American history. Lincoln, at the stroke of his pen, transformed the nature and meaning of the war. The conflict had been about union; now it was about liberty as well. Expedience and conscience had heretofore clashed in the Northern soul; henceforth they aligned. Until this point Grant and the rest of the Union army had fought to preserve the status quo; from this point forward they fought to overturn it and create a new one.
28
THE UNION CAPTURE OF CORINTH PUT GRANT ATHWART CRUCIAL lines of Confederate communication, and the Confederates naturally sought to drive him off. In the second week of September 1862 Confederate general Sterling Price descended on Iuka, Mississippi, twenty miles east of Corinth, on the Memphis & Charleston Railroad. The outmanned Union colonel at Iuka withdrew without a fight. Grant wasn’t worried about his own position; he told Julia: “I am concentrated and strong. Will give the rebels a tremendous thrashing if they come.” But he did worry that Price and perhaps the other Confederate commander in the area, Earl Van Dorn, would drive north to join Braxton Bragg, whose Kentucky campaign was alarming Lincoln and the administration almost as much as Lee’s Maryland thrust was. “Have you heard anything from Covington?” Grant asked Julia of the town where his parents lived. “They must be badly frightened.”
For the most part, though, he remained optimistic. The Confederates’ ambitions would betray them, he told Julia. “You will see the greatest fall in a few weeks of rebel hopes that was ever known. They have made a bold effort, and with wonderful success, but it is a spasmodic effort without anything behind to fall back on. When they do begin to fall all resources are at an end and the rebellion will soon show a rapid decline.” As for his own position: “There is a large force hovering around us for the last ten days, and the grand denouement must take place soon.”
The Confederates kept hovering, prompting Grant to go after them. He devised a plan to corner Price at Iuka, with Union generals Edward Ord approaching from the northwest and William Rosecrans from the southwest; the Tennessee River, behind Price, would prevent an escape east. Yet the plan required careful timing, in that if Grant pulled troops from Corinth too soon, the other Confederate general, Van Dorn, might jump him there.
Midday on September 18 Ord moved into position. He made contact with Price’s advance column and in a spirited encounter drove the Confederates back. Rosecrans was supposed to be coming but sent a message saying he had been delayed. He would arrive in time the next afternoon to attack, he promised. Grant was doubtful, as the roads were bad. “Besides,” he remarked later, “troops after a forced march of twenty miles are not in a good condition for fighting the moment they get through. It might do in marching to relieve a beleaguered garrison, but not to make an assault.” Grant nonetheless told Ord to listen for the sounds of fighting and to strike against Price at Iuka as soon as Rosecrans did.
Rosecrans indeed required longer to reach the outskirts of Iuka than he had predicted, and when he got there his troops were roughly handled by the Confederates. The wind blew the noise of the firing away from Ord, who didn’t learn of the battle until hours after it ended. Grant got the news after the fact too and directed Ord to make up for Rosecrans’s failure. “You must engage the enemy as early as possible in the morning,” he said.
But Price was gone by then. Recognizing Grant’s trap, he had slipped away in the dark. Grant rode at once to Iuka and discovered that Rosecrans, pleading the fatigue of his men, had not even sent his cavalry in pursuit. Grant ordered a chase and joined Rosecrans for a few miles before turning back toward Corinth. Rosecrans halted soon after Grant departed and Price got clean away.
Grant didn’t have time to dwell on his disappointment. With Van Dorn at large and Price again afield, Grant’s position was vulnerable. The neighborhood was more dangerous than it had ever been. “We were in a country where nearly all the people, except the negroes, were hostile to us and friendly to the cause we were trying to suppress,” he recollected. “It was easy, therefore, for the enemy to get early information of our every move. We, on the contrary, had to go after our information in force, and then often returned without it.”
For ten days the rebels circled and feinted, leaving Grant unsure where they might strike. By the beginning of October he thought he knew. “It is now clear that Corinth is the point, and that from the west or southwest,” he informed Halleck. Four Confederate commands—under Price, Van Dorn, Albert Rust and John Villepigue—had come together. Grant meanwhile had been weakened by having some of his forces transferred to Kentucky to join the pursuit of Bragg. “My position is precarious but hope to get out of it all right,” he told Halleck.
As the battle neared, Grant grew eager. “The rebels are now massing on Corinth in the northwest angle of the railroad,” he wrote Halleck. For weeks they had eluded him; now that they were willing to do battle he hoped to crush them. He urged his generals forward. “We should attack if they do not; do it soon,” he wrote Rosecrans. “Fight!” To Stephen Hurlbut he declared, “The combined force of the enemy does not exceed thirty thousand. He must be whipped.”
; Yet coordination remained critical. Hurlbut was coming to reinforce Rosecrans at Corinth; unless they worked in tandem, and swiftly, the Confederates would pick them off separately. “Make all dispatch,” Grant ordered Hurlbut. To Rosecrans he said, “If the enemy fall back push them with all force possible and save Hurlbut, who is now on the way to your relief.” The two forces must act in close concert. “Hurlbut is not strong enough to handle the rebels without very good luck,” Grant told Rosecrans. “Don’t neglect this warning.”
The Confederates almost preempted Grant’s joining of forces. Van Dorn struck at dawn on October 4, hoping to overwhelm Rosecrans before Hurlbut arrived. The attack was spirited and sanguinary, with the Confederates inflicting and receiving many casualties. But the Federals held their own, and by the time Hurlbut’s column and that of James McPherson, whom Grant had summoned from Jackson, reached the scene, the Confederates were falling back.
Hurlbut contested the Confederate retreat but Rosecrans did not. Deciding his men had fought enough for one day, he let them rest overnight. “We move at daylight in the morning,” he assured Grant.
Grant put the best face on things for the administration in Washington. “The enemy are in full retreat leaving their dead and wounded on the field,” he informed Halleck. “Everything looks most favorable.”
But he fumed at another opportunity’s being lost. “Push the enemy to the wall,” he demanded of Rosecrans. The next day he ordered: “You will avail yourself of every advantage and capture and destroy the rebel army to the utmost of your power.”
Rosecrans belatedly gave halfhearted and ineffectual chase. Grant, disgusted, ordered him back to Corinth—only to have Rosecrans protest the return order and call for reinforcements. Grant denied the request. “Although partial success might result from further pursuit,” Grant explained to Halleck, “disaster would follow in the end.”
Abraham Lincoln heard the news from Mississippi and sighed relief. “I congratulate you and all concerned on your recent victories,” the president wrote Grant. “How does it all sum up?”
Grant had wished he could report the capture of an entire army. But on reflection he judged the results still substantial. “About eight hundred rebels already buried,” he replied to the president. “Their loss in killed about nine to one of ours. The ground is not yet cleared of their unburied dead. Prisoners yet arriving by every wagon road and train.… Our killed and wounded at Corinth will not exceed nine hundred, many of them slightly.”
The more Lincoln thought about it, the more he appreciated what had been accomplished. “The victory was most triumphant as it was,” he asserted in his official report on Corinth. “All praise is due officers and men for their undaunted courage and obstinate resistance against an enemy outnumbering them as three to two.” Grant’s part of the western theater was secure and the Confederates in the region were badly weakened. Price and Van Dorn were prevented from joining Bragg, whose invasion of Kentucky collapsed.
In late October the War Department acknowledged Grant’s achievement by giving him command of the Department of the Tennessee, encompassing western Tennessee, northern Mississippi, southern Illinois and western Kentucky. Halleck offered no guidance regarding operations, so Grant, the day after he took command, made a suggestion of his own: “With small reinforcements at Memphis I think I would be able to move down the Mississippi Central road and cause the evacuation of Vicksburg.”
29
THE LARGER HIS RESPONSIBILITY GREW, THE MORE WORRIED GRANT became about the vulnerabilities of his position. He shared Sherman’s concern that the cotton trade was arming the rebels and Sherman’s conviction that the trade must be halted if the occupation of the South was to be successful. Like Sherman he expressed his views to Salmon Chase, although in terms less confrontational than those Sherman employed. He told the Treasury secretary that he understood the administration’s reasons for treating occupied territory like other parts of the Union with respect to commerce. “It is, however, a very grave question in my mind, whether this policy of ‘letting trade follow the flag’ is not working injuriously to the Union cause,” he continued. “Practically and really I think it is benefiting almost exclusively, first, a class of greedy traders whose first and only desire is gain, and to whom it would be idle to attribute the least patriotism, and secondly our enemies south of our lines.” Grant said he had tried to counter the problem, to no avail. “Our lines are so extended that it is impossible for any military surveillance to contend successfully with the cunning of the traders, aided by the local knowledge and eager interest of the residents along the border. The enemy are thus receiving supplies of most necessary and useful articles which relieves their sufferings and strengthens them for resistance to our authority; while we are sure that the benefits thus conferred tend in no degree to abate their rancorous hostility to our flag and Government.” The current situation must not continue. “The evil is a great and growing one, and needs immediate attention.”
Charles Dana agreed. Dana had been a journalist and would become a spy for Edwin Stanton and the War Department within Grant’s camp; meanwhile he thought to try his hand at cotton trading. But he had no sooner arrived in Memphis than he discovered the destructive effect the cotton trade was having on the Union war effort. “The mania for sudden fortunes made in cotton, raging in a vast population of Jews and Yankees scattered throughout this whole country, and in this town almost exceeding the numbers of the regular residents, has to an alarming extent corrupted and demoralized the army,” Dana wrote to Stanton. “Every colonel, captain, or quartermaster is in secret partnership with some operator in cotton; every soldier dreams of adding a bale of cotton to his monthly pay. I had no conception of the extent of this evil until I came and saw it for myself. Besides, the resources of the rebels are inordinately increased from this source. Plenty of cotton is brought in from beyond our lines, especially by the agency of Jewish traders, who pay for it ostensibly in Treasury notes, but really in gold.” Dana recommended a draconian curtailment of the cotton trade, starting with the expulsion of all private traders.
David Porter, the commander of Union naval forces in Grant’s theater, was equally indignant at the cotton speculation. Porter contended that the Treasury’s program of sending aides, or agents, to license the commerce was worse than no program at all. “A greater pack of knaves never went unhung,” Porter wrote. “Human nature is very weak, and the poor aides, with their small pay, could easily be bribed to allow a man to land 100 barrels of salt when he had only permit for two. And so on with everything else. The thing is done now so openly that the guerrillas come down to the bank and purchase what they want.”
Bolstered by the support of others who had seen the problem firsthand, Grant decided to try something new. “Gold and silver will not be paid within this district by speculators for the products of the rebel states,” he ordered. “United States Treasury notes are a legal tender in all cases, and when refused, the parties refusing them will be arrested.… Any speculator paying out gold and silver in violation of this order will be arrested and sent North.” He proposed, without yet giving an order, extending his Memphis ban on rebel sympathizers within Union lines to the western district as a whole. “There is an evident disposition on the part of many of the citizens to join the guerrillas on their approach,” he explained to Halleck. “I am decidedly in favor of turning all discontented citizens within our lines out South.”
Halleck told Grant to go ahead with the removal. “It is very desirable that you should clean out West Tennessee and North Mississippi of all organized enemies,” Halleck said. “If necessary, take up all active sympathizers and either hold them as prisoners or put them beyond our lines. Handle that class without gloves, and take their property for public use.… It is time that they should begin to feel the presence of war on our side.”
But the administration vetoed Grant’s attempt to curtail the cotton trade. Halleck passed along orders from Stanton: “The payment of gold should n
ot be prohibited.… See that all possible facilities are afforded for getting out cotton. It is deemed important to get as much as we can into market.”
Grant later described the administration’s reversal of his cotton policy as an “embarrassment.” He understood the political and diplomatic reasons for the reversal but believed military considerations should have been given priority. “Stations on the Mississippi River and on the railroad in our possession had to be designated where cotton would be received,” he wrote in his memoirs. “This opened to the enemy not only the means of converting cotton into money which had a value all over the world and which they so much needed, but it afforded them means of obtaining accurate and intelligent information in regard to our position and strength. It was also demoralizing to our troops. Citizens obtaining permits from the Treasury department had to be protected within our lines and given facilities to get out cotton by which they realized enormous profits.” Speaking for himself as much as for his troops, Grant declared, “Men who had enlisted to fight the battles of their country did not like to be engaged in protecting a traffic which went to the support of an enemy they had to fight, and the profits of which went to men who shared none of their dangers.”
So he tried to work around the administration’s order. He required cotton brokers and purchasers of other commodities to receive permits from their local provost marshals in addition to the licenses they were issued by Washington. Moreover, they must stay in the rear of the army. “It will be regarded as evidence of disloyalty for persons to go beyond the lines of the Army to purchase cotton or other products, and all contracts made for such articles, in advance of the Army, or for cotton in the field, are null and void.… All parties so offending will be expelled from the Department.”