by H. W. Brands
The measure had little effect. Grant’s inspectors couldn’t be everywhere, nor could every one of them resist the bribes the traders offered. The commerce continued much as before.
He tried to focus on the Vicksburg campaign. “My plans are all complete for weeks to come,” he wrote his sister on December 15. “I hope to have them all work out just as planned.” But success wouldn’t come easily, and the effort was exacting a personal toll. “For a conscientious person, and I profess to be one, this is a most slavish life. I may be envied by ambitious persons, but I in turn envy the person who can transact his daily business and retire to a quiet home without a feeling of responsibility for the morrow. Taking my whole department, there are an immense number of lives staked upon my judgment and acts.” He was surrounded—literally—by enemies. “I am extended now like a peninsula into an enemies’ country with a large army depending for their daily bread upon keeping open a line of railroad running one hundred and ninety miles through an enemy’s country, or at least through territory occupied by a people terribly embittered and hostile to us.… With all my other trials I have to contend against is added that of speculators whose patriotism is measured by dollars and cents. Country has no value with them compared with money.”
Like Sherman, Dana and others who dealt with the speculators, Grant perceived Jews as playing a large part in the cotton trade. He had accompanied his order embargoing gold and silver with a note to Isaac Quinby, the commander of the district of the Mississippi: “Examine the baggage of all speculators coming south, and when they have specie, turn them back. If medicine and other contraband articles, arrest them and confiscate the contraband articles. Jews should receive special attention.” He sent a similar order to Stephen Hurlbut: “Refuse all permits to come south of Jackson for the present. The Israelites especially should be kept out.” To Joseph Webster, of his staff, he wrote: “Give orders to all the conductors on the road that no Jews are to be permitted to travel on the railroad southward from any point. They may go north and be encouraged in it; but they are such an intolerable nuisance that the department must be purged of them.”
As he got further into the planning for Vicksburg, Grant formulated yet another policy against the speculators. “I have long since believed that in spite of all the vigilance that can be infused into Post Commanders that the specie regulations of the Treasury Department have been violated, and that mostly by Jews and other unprincipled traders,” he explained to the War Department. “So well satisfied of this have I been that I instructed the commanding officer at Columbus to refuse all permits to Jews to come south, and frequently have had them expelled from the Department. But they come in with their carpet sacks in spite of all that can be done to prevent it. The Jews seem to be a privileged class that can travel anywhere. They will land at any wood yard or landing on the river and make their way through the country. If not permitted to buy cotton themselves they will act as agents for someone else who will be at a military post with a Treasury permit to receive cotton and pay for it in Treasury notes, which the Jew will buy up at an agreed rate, paying gold. There is but one way that I know of to reach this case. That is for Government to buy all the cotton at a fixed rate and send it to Cairo, St. Louis or some other point to be sold. Then all traders—they are a curse to the Army—might be expelled.”
Grant could merely recommend that the government buy the cotton at a fixed rate, but he thought he might expel the traders, or some of them, on his own. On December 17 he issued General Order No. 11, which declared: “The Jews, as a class, violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department, and also Department orders, are hereby expelled from the Department.” Post commanders in the Department of the Tennessee would give passes to Jews, who would have twenty-four hours to leave. Those who remained would be arrested and forcibly removed.
Grant later claimed that the language of the order—barring Jews as a people rather than simply Jewish speculators—reflected his exasperation and overwork. “The order was issued and sent without any reflection,” he said, “and without thinking of the Jews as a sect or a race to themselves, but simply as persons who had successfully (I say successfully, instead of persistently, because there were plenty of others within my lines who envied their success) violated an order, which greatly inured to the help of the rebels.”
This explanation gained plausibility from the fact that Grant’s every other criticism of Jews centered on their role as speculators who defied the interests of the Union and damaged the war effort. Yet Grant rarely slipped in his use of language, and he may simply have decided that the only way to rid himself of Jewish speculators was to force all Jews out of his department. Grant shared the penchant for stereotyping Jews common to the age in America, and he may well have concluded that whatever loss they suffered by being treated as a group was a burden they would have to bear. If the inconvenience of this comparatively small class was the price of winning the war, he was willing to make them pay it. He demanded far more of his soldiers every day.
Had Grant been thinking politically, he would have realized that the administration in Washington could never let his order stand. Grant knew perfectly well that there were Jews in the army and that Lincoln valued the political and financial support of Northern Jews for the war effort. The president was in the process of freeing the slaves, and Grant must have supposed that Lincoln wouldn’t appreciate this illiberal slap at another unfavored group. Grant would have understood that the Democrats, energized by victories in the 1862 congressional races, would assail the administration for his egregious violation of the civil liberties of Jewish Americans.
Yet Grant refused to take politics into account. He was a soldier, and he prided himself on thinking and acting like a soldier. The officers he despised most were those who acted like politicians. Perhaps he reasoned that the administration would require some weeks to respond to his order. He expected the Vicksburg campaign to be comparatively brief; by the time his order was rescinded, it should have accomplished its goal.
A personal element may have entered into Grant’s thinking. During the war his chronically difficult relationship with his father underwent a decided transformation. The more confident he grew of his abilities, the more he resented his past dependence on Jesse and the more he insisted on showing he was no longer dependent. Jesse, from worthy reasons or otherwise, had taken to promoting his son’s reputation wherever he could, until it became a source of embarrassment to Grant. Jesse retailed stories as coming from the rising general, to Grant’s dismay and eventual anger. “I would write you many particulars,” Grant declared in a letter to Jesse from Corinth in the autumn of 1862, “but you are so imprudent that I dare not trust you with them. And while on this subject let me say a word. I have not an enemy in the world who has done me so much injury as you in your efforts in my defense.… I have heard this from various sources, and persons who have returned to this Army and did not know that I had parents living near Cincinnati have said that they found the best feeling existing towards me every place but there. You are constantly denouncing other General officers, and the inference with people naturally is that you get your impressions from me. Do nothing to correct what you have already done, but for the future keep quiet on the subject.”
Jesse quieted down, and Grant discovered other things to worry about—until he learned that his father had engaged with a Jewish firm, Mack & Brothers of Cincinnati, to trade in Southern cotton in Grant’s department. Grant didn’t know the terms of the deal, but he could easily imagine that Jesse had hinted that his son would ensure the success of the enterprise. Grant by now considered his father incorrigible, but if the son couldn’t strike at the father effectively, he might strike at the father’s partners.
Possibly the filial issue had nothing to do with Grant’s decision; he had sufficient other reasons for trying to restrain the speculators. Vicksburg was the prize that could determine the outcome of the war; anything that facilitated its capture was
worth doing, father or no father.
The administration moved faster than Grant guessed it would. After Jewish leaders complained to Lincoln, the president agreed that the order must be rescinded. On January 4, 1863, Halleck telegraphed Grant tersely: “It will be immediately revoked.”
The next day Halleck’s adjutant elaborated on the administration’s objection to Grant’s order. “It excluded a whole class, instead of certain obnoxious individuals,” John Kelton said. “Had the word ‘pedlar’ been inserted after Jew, I do not suppose any exception would have been taken to the order.” Halleck himself elaborated in similar vein: “The President has no objection to your expelling traders and Jew pedlars, which I suppose was the object of your order, but as it in terms proscribed an entire religious class, some of whom are fighting in our ranks, the President deemed it necessary to revoke it.”
Grant quietly rescinded the order and said nothing more about it. He probably wondered whether Washington would really have let him expel Jewish speculators, given the administration’s resistance to any curbs on the cotton trade. And he remembered why he hated politics. “It is a great annoyance to gain rank and command enough to attract public attention,” he told Edward Ord. “I have found it so and would now really prefer some little command where public attention would not be attracted toward me.”
30
HAVING GROWN UP ALONG THE OHIO RIVER AND SPENT MUCH OF HIS adulthood on the Mississippi, Grant appreciated the fundamental importance of the great waterways of the American heartland. By the beginning of 1863 the war for the West centered on a convoluted stretch of the Mississippi from Vicksburg in the north to Port Hudson, Louisiana, in the south. The straight-line distance between the two points was somewhat more than a hundred miles, but the river distance was three times that. Union gunboats commanded the river below Port Hudson, and a separate Union fleet secured the stream above Vicksburg. The Confederates controlled the river in between and with it a vital east-west corridor through which the crops and livestock of Texas and Arkansas flowed to the Confederate armies as far away as Virginia. At the same time, the Confederates blocked the north-south corridor by which the produce of the Union West would have floated down the Mississippi to the Gulf and away to the Union East. While this state of affairs persisted, the Confederacy could live and fight; should it be disrupted—should the Confederate corridor be closed and the Mississippi opened to Union traffic—the Confederacy would be crippled.
Lincoln shared Grant’s midcontinental mentality, and he agreed on the strategic importance of Vicksburg. “Vicksburg is the key,” Lincoln told David Porter as the two inspected a map of the region from Vicksburg to Port Hudson. “Here is the Red River, which will supply the Confederates with cattle and corn to feed their armies. There are the Arkansas and White Rivers, which can supply cattle and hogs by the thousand. From Vicksburg these supplies can be distributed by rail all over the Confederacy. Then there is that great depot of supplies on the Yazoo. Let us get Vicksburg and all that country is ours. The war can never be brought to a close until that key is in our pocket.”
Though geography dictated that Vicksburg must be taken, it didn’t say how the feat could be accomplished. If anything, geography conspired to conceal an effective strategy. Starting north of Vicksburg the Mississippi meandered across a broad valley the locals called the Delta, which was so nearly flat that the river ran west, east and even north almost as often as it ran south. One result of this meandering was that the stream had deposited a deep black soil that supported every kind of wild or cultivated plant species, particularly cotton. Some of the richest plantations in the South—including that of Jefferson Davis—lined the banks of the river near Vicksburg. But another result was that the land was frequently impossible to traverse, as the least rise in the river inundated roads along the riverbanks.
Vicksburg itself formed an exception to the rule of minimal elevation. Starting several miles above Vicksburg, near where the Yazoo River joined the Mississippi, the latter stream rubbed against a bluff that marked the eastern boundary of the alluvial plain. Vicksburg sat atop the bluff beside a sweeping bend in the river. The bluff provided the original reason for the town’s existence; traders and other inhabitants didn’t have to worry about being flooded. But the bluff lent additional importance to the city during the war, for it allowed artillery placed there to bombard anything that moved along the river. In fact, so high was the bluff—more than two hundred feet in spots—that gunboats on the river couldn’t raise their barrels sufficiently to reach the batteries on top.
The inefficacy of gunboats rendered a frontal assault problematic and compelled Grant to consider how to get behind Vicksburg. His initial plan, as outlined to Halleck in October 1862, was to move down the Mississippi Central Railroad and threaten the city from the east. He supposed the Confederates would be forced to evacuate Vicksburg, as the city’s principal defenses faced west. If they stood and fought, the result would be even better, for besides taking the fortress he would capture the garrison. As before, Grant deemed the destruction of the enemy’s army more important than the seizure of his cities; the army could survive without the cities but not the cities without the army.
His instinct to attack would alone have sufficed to get his men moving, but army politics added a spur. “At this stage of the campaign against Vicksburg I was very much disturbed by newspaper rumors that General McClernand was to have a separate and independent command within mine, to operate against Vicksburg by way of the Mississippi River,” he remembered. McClernand, the Illinois Democrat, had lobbied Lincoln for the command, and the president, especially after the Democratic victories in the 1862 elections, appeared inclined to give it to him. Grant didn’t like the idea one bit. “Two commanders on the same field are always one too many,” he remarked.
He commenced the Vicksburg campaign by pressing south down the railroad from Corinth to Holly Springs, Mississippi, which he made his depot for food and ammunition. He continued to the Tallahatchie River, where a Confederate force under John Pemberton had destroyed the railroad bridge and now defied Grant to cross the rain-swollen stream. Grant dispatched his cavalry east upstream, where it found a crossing and, approaching Pemberton’s rear, forced the Confederates to withdraw. Grant’s engineers repaired the broken bridge and his army marched across.
He meanwhile heard that McClernand had gotten the command he desired and that an attack on Vicksburg via the Mississippi was going to happen regardless of his—Grant’s—wishes. Grant decided to preempt McClernand, who was en route from Washington, by assigning Sherman the same task. He told Sherman to gather up all the troops near Memphis. “As soon as possible, move with them down the river to the vicinity of Vicksburg, and with the cooperation of the gunboat fleet under command of Flag Officer Porter, proceed to the reduction of that place in such manner as circumstances and your own judgment may dictate.”
Grant intended to assist Sherman by keeping Pemberton busy. If Pemberton retreated to Vicksburg, Grant would follow him; otherwise he would hold Pemberton north of the city. But his strategy suffered a blow in late December when Confederate cavalry under Earl Van Dorn got behind Grant’s lines and captured the depot at Holly Springs. Grant blamed the colonel of the garrison. “The surrender of Holly Springs was most reprehensible and showed either the disloyalty of Colonel Murphy to the cause which he professed to serve, or gross cowardice,” he said later. But he also acknowledged the inherent vulnerability of a strategy that relied on long lines of transport through enemy territory.
The severing of Grant’s supply delighted the Southerners around him, but only briefly. “The women came with smiling faces to Grant’s headquarters, to see how he bore the loss of Holly Springs,” Adam Badeau of Grant’s staff remembered. “They asked him civilly, but exultingly, what he would do, now that his soldiers had nothing to eat. But their exultation and smiles were of short continuance, when the quiet general informed them that his soldiers would find plenty in their barns and storehouses. T
hey looked aghast at this, and exclaimed: ‘You would not take from noncombatants!’ But a commander’s first necessity is to provide for his troops; so the country was stripped bare, and the army was supplied.”
Grant lived off the land at this point only long enough to reestablish his rail links to the North. He remained sufficiently wedded to tradition that once he determined that he couldn’t defend the railroad clear to Vicksburg he abandoned his original plan of attack. He retreated north and prepared to put all his resources into an attack down the river. But he tucked away the lesson of self-sufficiency for future use.
Sherman would put the same lesson to even greater use than Grant the following year, but for now Grant’s retreat left him dangling. Sherman distrusted McClernand as much as Grant did, and he was as happy to preempt him as Grant was to have him do so. Following Grant’s order he moved down the Mississippi to the Yazoo River, which he ascended with difficulty. He led his troops among the swamps and bayous of the Delta to a place where the Confederate defenses appeared vulnerable. On December 29 his men assaulted the bluffs above Chickasaw Bayou and came within a dozen bloody yards of dislodging the rebels from their stronghold. All the while he expected to hear Grant’s guns in the enemy’s rear.
What he heard instead were the whistles of trains bearing Pemberton’s Confederate troops to Vicksburg. Only later, after Grant’s communications were restored, did Sherman learn of the Confederate raid on Holly Springs and Grant’s decision to move north instead of south. In the meantime he had no choice but to retreat and regroup. He descended the Yazoo to its mouth, where he met McClernand arriving with fresh troops and seniority. Sherman relinquished his command and hoped for the best.