by H. W. Brands
Relief causes some persons to relax; it prompted Grant to redouble his effort. “The march immediately commenced for Port Gibson,” he told Halleck a short while later. Grant’s soldiers were issued three days’ rations; with these in their haversacks they set off for the Mississippi interior. They made contact with the enemy a few miles from Port Gibson in the predawn darkness of May 1, and a battle ensued. “The fighting continued all day and until dark over the most broken country I ever saw,” Grant explained. “The whole country is a series of irregular ridges divided by deep and impassable ravines, grown up with heavy timber, undergrowth and cane. It was impossible to engage any considerable portion of our forces at any one time.” But the Union troops drove the Confederates steadily back. “General Bowen’s, the rebel commander’s, defense was a very bold one and well carried out,” Grant told Halleck. “My force, however, was too heavy for his and composed of well disciplined and hardy men who know no defeat and are not willing to learn what it is.” Bowen evacuated Port Gibson that night.
Grant proposed to maintain the pressure against the Confederates. “The country will supply all the forage required for anything like an active campaign and the necessary fresh beef,” he wrote from Grand Gulf, which the Confederates had evacuated to strengthen Vicksburg. “I shall not bring my troops into this place but immediately follow the enemy, and if all promises as favorably hereafter as it does now, not stop until Vicksburg is in our possession.”
Grant’s subordinates thought he was moving too fast. Even the energetic Sherman warned him to slow down. “Stop all troops till your army is partially supplied with wagons,” Sherman urged. “This road will be jammed as sure as life if you attempt to supply 50,000 men by one single road.”
“I do not calculate upon the possibility of supplying the army with full rations from Grand Gulf,” Grant answered. “I know it will be impossible without constructing additional roads. What I do expect, however, is to get up what rations of hard bread, coffee and salt we can, and make the country furnish the balance.” Initial experience had been promising. “We started from Bruinsburg with an average of about two days’ rations and received no more from our own supplies for seven days,” he told Sherman. “Abundance was found in the meantime. Some corn-meal, bacon and vegetables was found, and an abundance of beef and mutton.”
Grant knew that Halleck, especially, wouldn’t like his audacious plan, but he guessed that once he started he might be out of reach of any countermanding order from Washington. “I shall communicate with Grand Gulf no more except it becomes necessary to send a train with heavy escort,” he telegraphed Halleck on May 11. “You may not hear from me again for several days.”
With this parting message, Grant commenced the greatest gamble of his career. Halleck wanted him to head south and join forces with Nathaniel Banks, who was approaching Port Hudson; the combined army would move deliberately against that fortress and then Vicksburg. But Banks informed Grant he couldn’t reach Port Hudson for another week and then with merely fifteen thousand troops. Grant decided he couldn’t wait. “The enemy would have strengthened his position and been reinforced by more men than Banks could have brought,” he related afterward. “I therefore determined to move independently of Banks, cut loose from my base, destroy the rebel force in rear of Vicksburg and invest or capture the city.”
But doing so required nerve in the commander and alacrity in his subordinates. One rebel army, commanded by John Pemberton, occupied Vicksburg; another, under Joseph Johnston, was near Jackson. Either one might give Grant trouble; combined they could crush him. Yet Grant self-consciously put himself between the two commands, intending to strike one and then the other and by this means beat both.
He knew that any number of things could go wrong. His men might lose their way in the unfamiliar country. His harvest of the local crops and livestock might fail. A critical message might be intercepted. His intelligence regarding the enemy’s numbers might be mistaken. (In fact it was: Grant thought Pemberton had thirty thousand men when he actually had more than fifty thousand.)
Yet Grant took the gamble. His instinct, as always, was to fight, to carry the battle to the enemy, to hit him when he was off balance and then to hit him again. “The enemy is badly beaten, greatly demoralized and exhausted of ammunition,” he wrote Sherman on May 3. “The road to Vicksburg is open.”
It wouldn’t stay open for long. Speed was essential. “Every day’s delay is worth two thousand men to the enemy,” Grant declared to William Hillyer on May 5. On May 9 he told Julia: “Two days more, or Tuesday next, must bring on the fight which will settle the fate of Vicksburg.”
To take Vicksburg he turned away from Vicksburg, driving instead toward Jackson. “Move your command tonight to the next cross roads three or four miles to your front, if you can find water,” he told James McPherson on May 11. “And tomorrow push with all activity into Raymond.… We must fight the enemy before our rations fail.” After McPherson engaged the Confederates at Raymond in a sharp battle that left hundreds killed or wounded, Grant related the result to John McClernand: “The enemy was driven at all points.… He retreated towards Clinton and no doubt to Jackson. I have determined to follow and take first the capital of the State.”
Grant realized that his decision would expose his rear to an attack by Pemberton, who at the least could sever his line of communication. “So I finally decided to have none—to cut loose altogether from my base and move my whole force eastward,” he recalled. “I then had no fears for my communications, and if I moved quickly enough could turn upon Pemberton before he could attack me in the rear.”
He issued orders more rapidly than ever. “Move one division of your corps through this place to Clinton, charging it with the duty of destroying the railroad as far as possible to a point on the direct Raymond and Jackson road,” he instructed McClernand on May 13 from Raymond. “Move another division three or four miles beyond Mississippi Springs, and eight or nine miles beyond this place, and a third to Raymond ready to support either of the others.” He ordered Sherman: “Move directly towards Jackson, starting at early dawn.” Just after midnight he wrote McPherson from the outskirts of Jackson: “Send me word how you are progressing; we must get Jackson or as near as it is possible tonight.”
Grant discovered that Johnston at Jackson was expecting reinforcements imminently; the discovery caused him to push even harder. Heavy rains delayed the attack on Jackson, but on the morning of May 14 McPherson and Sherman struck the outer defenses of the city. The Confederates resisted primarily to cover Johnston’s withdrawal of the main body of his outnumbered force lest the whole be captured by Grant’s men. Johnston got away to the north, but Grant took Jackson, sleeping that night in the house where, he was told, Johnston had slept the night before.
Bagging the capital of the home state of Jefferson Davis won Grant praise in the North, but he himself considered it merely a step to the larger goal of reducing Vicksburg. He summoned McPherson and Sherman to the Mississippi statehouse on the afternoon of May 14 and told McPherson to head back toward Vicksburg at once, with Sherman to follow after he eliminated Jackson’s capacity for supporting the Confederate war effort. “He set about his work in the morning, and utterly destroyed the railroads in every direction, north, east, south, and west, for a distance, in all, of twenty miles,” Adam Badeu said of Sherman’s work at Jackson. “All the bridges, factories, and arsenals were burned, and whatever could be of use to the rebels destroyed. The importance of Jackson as a railroad center and a depot of stores and military factories was annihilated.”
A few other facilities were wrecked as well, without authorization. “Just as I was leaving Jackson, a very fat man came to see me, to inquire if his hotel, a large frame building near the depot, were doomed to be burned,” Sherman recalled. He replied that he intended nothing of the kind; he would raze only those properties that produced war-related goods. The hotel owner expressed relief, avowing that he was a loyal Union man. “I remember to h
ave said,” Sherman continued sardonically, “that this fact was manifest from the sign of his hotel, which was the ‘Confederate Hotel,’ the sign ‘United States’ being faintly painted out, and ‘Confederate’ painted over it.” Sherman would have left the matter there with the hotel intact. “But just as we were leaving the town, it burst out in flames and was burned to the ground. I never found out exactly who set it on fire, but was told that in one of our batteries were some officers and men who had been made prisoners at Shiloh, with Prentiss’s division, and had been carried past Jackson in a railroad train; they had been permitted by the guard to go by this very hotel for supper, and had nothing to pay but greenbacks, which were refused, with insult, by this same law-abiding landlord. These men, it was said, had quietly and stealthily applied the fire underneath the hotel just as we were leaving the town.”
Grant meanwhile surmised that Johnston’s northward retreat would bend to the west so that Johnston’s army might join up with Pemberton’s, and he moved to forestall the meeting. “I am concentrating my forces at Bolton to cut them off,” he told Halleck. An intercepted message from Johnston to Pemberton confirmed Grant’s surmise. Stephen Hurlbut had arranged to plant a spy behind the Confederate lines, a man who received a noisy expulsion from the Union army on asserted grounds of disloyalty. This person found his way to Jackson, where he fulminated against Grant and subsequently offered to carry a message from Johnston to Pemberton through territory controlled by Grant’s forces. He seemed reliable enough to Johnston that the Confederate commander let him make the hazardous run, which included a stop in McPherson’s Union camp.
Grant learned that Pemberton was approaching from the west, and he hoped to smash him before he got help from Johnston. “I have just received information that the enemy has crossed Big Black with the entire Vicksburg force,” Grant wrote McPherson. “You will therefore pass all trains and move forward to join McClernand with all possible dispatch.” He ordered Sherman to put his men on the road toward Bolton at once. “Great celerity should be shown in carrying out this movement. The fight may be brought on at any moment; we should have every man on the field.”
The clash occurred at Champion’s Hill on Baker’s Creek, west of Bolton. Grant admired Pemberton’s choice of ground. “It is one of the highest points in that section, and commanded all the ground in range,” he wrote afterward. “On the east side of the ridge, which is quite precipitous, is a ravine running first north, then westerly, terminating at Baker’s Creek. It was grown up thickly with large trees and undergrowth, making it difficult to penetrate with troops, even when not defended.”
Grant’s columns converged on Pemberton’s position on May 16, and after a couple hours’ skirmishing the battle proper began. It lasted four hours and left Grant in control of Champion’s Hill but not of Pemberton’s army, the far greater prize. “Had I known the ground as I did afterwards,” he said later, “I cannot see how Pemberton could have escaped with any organized force.” Yet the Confederate losses were heavy—as were those on the Union side—and to Grant they appeared decisive. “The enemy were driven and are now in full retreat,” he wrote just after the battle. “I am of the opinion that the battle of Vicksburg has been fought.” He added: “We must be prepared, however, for whatever turns up.”
Grant gave chase as Pemberton fled back to Vicksburg. Nightfall found him near a house where Union surgeons and nurses tended to wounded Confederates. “While a battle is raging, one can see his enemy mowed down by the thousand or the ten thousand, with great composure,” he reflected. “But after the battle these scenes are distressing, and one is naturally disposed to do as much to alleviate the suffering of an enemy as of a friend.”
Before dawn Grant’s men caught Pemberton a dozen miles from Vicksburg. “The enemy were found strongly posted on both sides of the Black River,” Grant explained in his postbattle report. Bluffs backed the stream on the west side; cultivated fields filled the flood plain on the east, surrounded by a bayou. “Following the line of this bayou the enemy had sunk rifle pits, leaving a stagnant ditch of water from two to three feet in depth and from ten to twenty feet wide outside.” Grant’s men tested the east-bank defenses in various places, looking for a weakness. Finding none they readied to charge.
At just this moment Grant received a letter from Halleck that had taken a week to find him. “If possible, the forces of you and of General Banks should be united between Vicksburg and Port Hudson, so as to attack these places separately with your combined forces,” Halleck said. Grant pondered the obsolete direction, then told the officer bearing the letter that it came too late. Halleck would not have written it if he had known the current state of affairs, he said. The officer manifested alarm, declaring that General Halleck would insist that the order be obeyed. The words were scarcely out of his mouth when a loud cheer erupted on the Union right, where one of Grant’s brigadiers, Michael Lawler, was leading a charge. “I immediately mounted my horse and rode in the direction of the charge, and saw no more of the officer who delivered the dispatch, I think not even to this day,” Grant recalled years later.
Lawler’s charge was worth the cheering. “Notwithstanding the level ground to pass over affording no cover to his troops, and the ditch in front of the enemy’s works being a great obstacle, the charge was gallantly made, and in a few minutes the entire garrison, with seventeen pieces of artillery, were the trophies of this brilliant dash,” Grant recorded after the battle. The Confederates west of the river, fearing a similar result, burned the bridge and headed for the comparative safety of Vicksburg.
At the cost of another seventeen hundred troops, Pemberton had bought himself time—but not as much as he hoped. Grant’s engineers fabricated pontoon bridges, employing cotton bales as pontoons, and threw them across the river by the next morning. His army reached the outer defenses of Vicksburg later that day.
Grant explained to David Porter that the reduction of Vicksburg, the object for which they had been working for months, had finally begun. “My men are now investing Vicksburg,” Grant said. “Sherman’s forces run from the Mississippi River above the city two miles east. McPherson is to his left, and McClernand to the left of McPherson.” The defenders were severely weakened by the recent battles. “The enemy have not been able to return to the city with one half of his forces.” Grant hoped to shrink that number further with Porter’s help. “If you can run down and throw shell in just back of the lower part of the city, it would aid us and demoralize an already badly beaten enemy,” he told Porter.
Grant rode to Sherman’s position north of the city. The two men climbed the highest part of the bluff that commanded the river and its banks. “Until this moment I never thought your expedition a success,” Sherman told Grant. “I never could see the end clearly until now. But this is a campaign. This is a success, if we never take the town.”
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JOE JOHNSTON AGREED. THE CONFEDERATE COMMANDER UNDERSTOOD he had been out-generaled, and he determined to cut his losses. “If Haynes’ Bluff is untenable,” he wrote Pemberton, who had already decided it was untenable, “Vicksburg is of no value, and must ultimately surrender. Under such circumstances, instead of losing both troops and place, we must, if possible, save the troops. If it is not too late, evacuate Vicksburg and its dependencies, and march to the northeast.”
Pemberton convened a council of war. He polled his generals as to the feasibility of following Johnston’s order. “The opinion was unanimously expressed that it was impossible to withdraw the army from this position with such morale and material as to be of further service to the Confederacy,” he replied to Johnston. While the Confederate officers were meeting, Grant’s guns commenced a bombardment of the Vicksburg defenses. Pemberton realized that his situation was dire. But he wouldn’t give up. “I have decided to hold Vicksburg as long as possible, with the firm hope that the Government may yet be able to assist me in keeping this obstruction to the enemy’s free navigation of the Mississippi River,” he told Johnst
on. “I still consider it to be the most important point in the Confederacy.”
Grant didn’t want to give Confederate assistance a chance to arrive. The momentum of the previous month, during which his men had marched two hundred miles and won five battles, prompted him to try to take Vicksburg by storm. “Johnston was in my rear, only fifty miles away, with an army not much inferior to the one I had with me, and I knew he was being reinforced,” Grant explained afterward. “There was danger of his coming to the assistance of Pemberton, and after all he might defeat my anticipations of capturing the garrison if, indeed, he did not prevent the capture of the city.” Moreover, a quick defeat of Pemberton would let him turn on Johnston’s army, whose defeat or dispersal would go far toward ending the rebellion. A final argument clinched the case for an assault: “The troops believed they could carry the works in their front, and would not have worked so patiently in the trenches if they had not been allowed to try.”
The attack was scheduled for the morning of May 22. Grant had his corps commanders synchronize their watches so they could launch at precisely ten o’clock. “The assault was gallant in the extreme on the part of all the troops,” Grant told Halleck afterward. In places Union soldiers managed to plant their flags on the outer works of the Confederate defenses. But the geometry and geography of the city and its surroundings prevented Grant from bringing his superior numbers to bear. “Each corps had many more men than could possibly be used in the assault over such ground as intervened between them and the enemy,” he said. “More men could only avail in case of breaking through the enemy’s line or in repelling a sortie.”
Such a breakthrough occurred in McClernand’s sector—or so McClernand reported. Grant was skeptical. “I don’t believe a word of it,” he told Sherman. He added later: “I occupied a position from which I believed I could see as well as he what took place in his front, and I did not see the success he reported.” But Sherman pointed out that McClernand had put his report in writing and that if Grant ignored it there might be political trouble. Reluctantly Grant sent reinforcements.