by Jack Hurst
So Sherman kept going. On December 22, while Forrest was still slashing his way through West Tennessee and Grant was withdrawing from northern Mississippi into southwestern Tennessee, Sherman’s expedition arrived at Milliken’s Bend, Louisiana, ten miles northwest of Vicksburg. To protect his rear and block any aid that Confederates in Louisiana might send to the citadel, he ordered a brigade several miles west to destroy tracks and trestles of the Shreveport-Vicksburg Railroad. He then pushed on to the mouth of the Yazoo River, a tributary running from the northeast into the Mississippi west of Vicksburg, well in front of the city’s northern defenses. Sherman steamed up the Yazoo twelve miles. There he faced the north end of the fourteen-mile Vicksburg trenches. They ran atop the Chickasaw Bluffs rising out of the Yazoo Valley.5
Even up here along the Yazoo, the defenses were daunting. At Sherman’s disembarkation site, the Yazoo combined with the Chickasaw Bayou and a bend of the Mississippi well behind him to enclose a huge, rough rectangle about nine miles long and six miles wide. This maze of bayous and swamps offered two narrow avenues to get at the hill-crowning fortifications: a causeway bridge corduroyed with logs and, a mile south of the bridge, a sand spit ford, both crossing Chickasaw Bayou. Confederate artillery and rifle pits frowned on each. Just to get to these crossings, Sherman’s men would have to attack through three miles of swamp, abatis, enemy pickets and skirmishers, and a deep, fifteen-foot-wide bayou. The water was bordered by swaths of quicksand that widened the barrier by a factor of as much as five or six. At both bridge and ford, the attackers would have to mass into two all-but-sitting targets. Those who survived the crossings would charge onto a dry, open shelf fronting the so-called Yazoo Valley Road. It ran from Vicksburg north to Yazoo City behind an earthen bank at the foot of a levee twenty-plus feet high. Behind the levee rose the Walnut Hills, the ridge backing the Chickasaw Bluffs. The hills were lined with more rifle pits and guns.6
There was little time to seek alternatives. Sherman’s information indicated the Confederates numbered about 15,000 and could be reinforced at a rate of 4,000 a day by railroad from Grenada if Grant could not keep Pemberton occupied there. “Not one word,” he wrote, “could I hear from General Grant, who was supposed to be pushing south.”7
Sherman had heard, of course, that the Holly Springs depot had fallen, which perhaps should have given him pause. But he had few other options. As far as he knew, Grant was out there somewhere holding—or at least pushing—Pemberton, and McClernand was expected to be heading south from Illinois at any time. And Sherman’s confidence had also been bolstered by recent intelligence. After landing on the Yazoo, he heard from a black man in the vicinity that a Federal force had arrived in Yazoo City. Sherman made no investigation of the report—he had little way to do that from where he was—but he presumed that the rumored approaching Federals were Grant’s, so he hurried to keep his end of their bargain. If the Yazoo City force was Grant, it meant Pemberton was retreating to Vicksburg, with Grant, as called for by their original plan, pursuing as closely as possible. So Pemberton had to be closer to Vicksburg than Grant or Sherman had expected or wanted.8
Sherman rushed ahead. On December 27 and 28, reconnoitering as they went, his men pushed Confederate skirmishers across the three miles of swamp leading to the crossings. A hellish nightlong storm of heavy rain pelted his unsheltered, ill-clad troops. Soaked and shivering, they got Sherman’s orders to attack the bluffs the following morning.9
Sherman’s plan was by the West Point book. He would launch a diversionary strike toward Vicksburg in front of his right, while sending his main assault to break the Confederate center. General George W. Morgan’s troops would cross the corduroy bridge in the primary attack while General A. J. Smith’s division would cross the sandy ford to Morgan’s right. When either force broke the Confederate line, its men could turn right toward the town of Vicksburg or left to decimate the Confederate right. The latter, if accomplished, would make a critical lodgment nearer Yazoo City and, Sherman presumed, nearer to Grant’s approaching army.10
After noon on December 28, Morgan thought he found a route safer than the corduroy bridge. Midway between the bridge and the ford, the bayou ran deep and wide, so the Confederates had left that area undefended. Morgan proposed bridging this point under cover of darkness and crossing there before the Confederates could react. Sherman approved. But during the stormy night, the engineers unwittingly bridged a nearer stretch of water that lay parallel to the one Morgan and Sherman intended. When day dawned and Morgan discovered the blunder, he informed Sherman that the engineers could remedy the error in two hours by taking up the bridge they had lain in the dark and laying it again across the correct pool. That pool, though, was wider than the first, and in the rush from Memphis, they had forgotten to bring enough pontoon linkage and flooring. They would have to cut trees to extend the new bridge the proper distance. As they started cutting the timber, they came under fire from Confederates hurrying to fill this gap in their line. Sherman refused to wait any longer. During the night, trains had been heard arriving in Vicksburg. Every lost minute threatened greater resistance.11
Sherman’s tension was high, and it showed that morning in one of his controversial career’s most flammable remarks. With the bridge-building scheme now useless and junked, the sole route left for Morgan’s advance—the corduroy bridge—promised to exact a high cost in blood. Just beyond the crossing lay swampy ground that would further slow the bridge-bunched troops amid a vortex of fire. Morgan asked Sherman to have a look. For silent minutes, Morgan later remembered, Sherman studied the terrain. Then he pointed toward the daunting bluffs beyond the bridge and refused to change the plan. “That is the route to take!” he decreed and turned back toward his headquarters at a plantation in the rear. Soon an order arrived for Morgan. The aide carrying it said Sherman’s words were, “Tell Morgan to give the signal for the assault. We will lose five thousand men before we can take Vicksburg and may as well lose them here as anywhere else.”12
Sherman was between a rock and a hard place. He had promised Grant he would attack, and he needed to do it before Pemberton’s reinforcements further filled the Vicksburg lines. As far as Sherman knew, McClernand could arrive at any moment. If that happened before Sherman attacked, Sherman would have to hand his army to the ex-politician without trying for the victory he and Grant needed. Not trying would be more than an abandonment of both commanders’personal aspirations; it would also elevate the headline-hungry McClernand’s marginal competence to where it could threaten the fate of the nation. Sherman had to attack, odds—and hopelessness—be damned.
But Sherman’s plan unknowingly threw his army’s strength at the strongest point in the Chickasaw Bluffs defenses. The majority of the Confederate defenders fronted Morgan at the corduroy bridge: seven regiments of infantry backed by artillery, all entrenched to the eyes on higher ground. General Smith’s rightward lunge at the sandy ford was intended “to prevent a concentration on Morgan,” but the Confederate muscle was already concentrated on Morgan. Facing Smith at the sand-spit ford were just two regiments, along with a single battery. These, though, were exceptionally situated.
The terrain at the ford made the Confederate position there as forbidding as the one at the bridge. The sand spit and the high bayou bank beyond were impossibly narrow; the latter offered an upward path only wide enough for two men to charge abreast. Division commander David Stuart had learned from reconnaissance that Confederate rifle pits overlooked the narrow path up the far bayou bank. Confederates there, he feared, could “drop every man who attempted to ascend it as fast as he appeared.” Stuart thought the Federals might be able to reach the far bank across the ford, but they could not possibly ascend it. He explained his misgivings to his superiors, but to no avail.
Morgan’s discarded suggestion had been the best move. Opposite the spot where Morgan had wanted to bridge, there remained an undefended quarter mile separating just two regiments of Georgia infantry. But rather than hitting
this weakest spot in the Confederate line, Sherman had ordered Morgan to lead his men across the corduroy bridge and into the massed might of the enemy defenses.13
The Federals who had to do it knew that attacking across the corduroy bridge was suicide. When brigade commander John F. DeCourcy received Morgan’s order to form his troops, DeCourcy rode to him and asked if he was about to order a charge. Morgan said he was. “My poor brigade,” DeCourcy said. “Your order will be obeyed, General.”14
It was—with doomed heroism. The attackers’ valor was squandered in five hours of slaughter. DeCourcy’s men crossed the bayou, deployed on an open half mile of ground sloping upward to the Confederate trenches, and charged into a storm of fire from the front, both sides, and previously undetected Confederates to their left rear. Two more of Morgan’s regiments pressed forward in support, but because of the constriction at the crossing point, they could not arrive before the men in front fell back. The hails of cross fire around and beyond the bridge were murderous.15
Hearing Morgan’s firing nearly a mile away, Smith began his diversion. He sent the regiment in his center, the Sixth Missouri, charging across the bayou. Once over the ford, however, the Missourians could only take cover beneath the flood-hollowed bank beyond. Unwilling to ascend the narrow path into certain slaughter, they tried to dig through the bank. The digging achieved nothing, which was just as well; the Confederates soon reinforced the two regiments holding this part of their line with a third, the Sixtieth Tennessee. After dark, Smith withdrew the Missourians.16
Most of the carnage had occurred at the corduroy bridge. Casualty tallies for the three days—two spent crossing the bayou and one on the final assault—would give DeCourcy’s Sixteenth Ohio 311 men killed, wounded, or missing. The Fifty-fourth Indiana lost 264; the Twenty-second Kentucky, 107; the Forty-second Ohio, 42. Morgan reported that the flag of the Sixteenth Ohio was “shot to tatters, only shreds remaining on the staff,” while that of the Twenty-second Kentucky was “not less dripping with blood.”17
Not all the Union colors made it back across the bayou. Troops under Confederate general Stephen Lee, who commanded in front of the bridge, reported taking four regimental flags, more than three hundred prisoners, and five hundred stands of small arms. Sherman’s losses over the three days totaled 1,776. Confederate losses during the same period were reported as just 187.18
Sherman had had his fill of Chickasaw Bayou. He and gunboat commander Admiral David Porter decided to move farther up the Yazoo and attack the far right of the Confederate line on December 31, hoping to connect with Grant. Sherman was so desperate that he proposed a night attack, but upon their arrival at the site upriver, a thick fog so hampered the vessels that Porter deemed any assault, night or day, “too hazardous to try.”
All the while, Confederate reinforcement had continued. Sherman heard trains arriving and leaving. Then he heard a rumor that Grant had retreated, which “became confirmed by my receiving no intelligence from him.” He decided it was time to give up this bloody sally on Vicksburg.19
Two days later, as Sherman steamed back upriver, a very unhappy General McClernand ran him to ground.
Grant had covered his tracks in the McClernand affair. Outwardly, he appeared merely to have deferred to superiors on the question of McClernand’s place in the Vicksburg campaign. On December 18, he wrote McClernand the latest instructions from Washington the same day he himself had received them. These included Halleck’s order that all Vicksburg-bound troops be under Grant and divided into four corps. Halleck went on to specify that Lincoln wanted McClernand’s new army to be “part” of the troops over which Grant had supervisory authority; McClernand could have active command, but under Grant. Halleck, himself wary and contemptuous of McClernand, had obviously persuaded Lincoln that the Union could not have a new army operating outside its chain of command.20
While seeming only to follow orders, Grant skillfully obstructed McClernand. He knew that the political general was still in Illinois and could not get to Memphis before Sherman left with McClernand’s troops. Sherman had written Grant on December 12 that he expected to leave Memphis on December 18. So when writing McClernand on the latter date, Grant could be all but certain that by the time McClernand received his letter, Sherman would have left Memphis and thus would be out of range of McClernand’s higher rank when he did show up. And until the political general did arrive in Memphis, McClernand would not even know Sherman had gone.
As it happened, the interval between Sherman’s departure and McClernand’s receipt of Grant’s letter was longer than Grant could have hoped for. Thanks to the Van Dorn-Forrest savaging of communications, McClernand did not receive the letter until December 29. He found it awaiting him in Memphis when he arrived.21
When he did turn up, he had to have been thunderstruck to find he had no army. He would not have been surprised, though, to find himself still under Grant’s overall command. Halleck had sent him a copy of the orders he sent Grant; McClernand had gotten them while still in Springfield, Illinois, on December 22. The command structure they outlined was, of course, not what Lincoln had promised McClernand, and the ex-congressman faced yet another frustration within twenty-four hours. On December 23, he had to prod Halleck just to cut travel orders authorizing him to go to Memphis, let alone launch a Vicksburg campaign.22
MAJOR GENERAL JOHN A. MCCLERNAND
McClernand saw his scheme unraveling. He had planned to use his clout with Lincoln to outflank Halleck and Grant and descend on Vicksburg with an independent army. He had envisioned arriving in Memphis in pomp, accompanied by a train of not only military subordinates but also, improbably, attendants to his campaign-christening December 23 nuptials; that day, the same one on which he received Halleck’s authorization to proceed to Memphis, he had married his deceased wife’s young sister. Now, rather than posturing in front of his wedding party, the fifty-one-year-old politico had to chase down and capture the expedition he had doubtless boasted he would lead.23
McClernand was certain he knew the authors of his embarrassment and that they included not just Grant and Sherman. He was sure the two would not have acted without first consulting Halleck. So McClernand focused his hottest ire on the general in chief. On January 3, a day after catching up with Sherman at the mouth of the Yazoo, he formally protested in a letter to Secretary of War Stanton. McClernand informed Stanton he was writing to “establish . . . the fact that either through the intention of the General-in-Chief or a strange occurrence of accidents, the authority of the President and yourself, as evidenced by your acts, has been set at naught, and I have been deprived of the command that had been committed to me.” Four days later, on January 7, he wrote Lincoln with no such restraint, blasting Halleck as possessing no “genius, justice, generosity, or policy.”24
McClernand had correctly identified the pivotal actor in the charade. Halleck’s revulsion at politicians intruding in army business was strong, and his preference for West Pointers over unaccredited commanders was more so.
Meanwhile, perhaps aided by the ongoing McClernand drama, the Grant-Halleck relationship continued to warm. The improvement also seemed in direct proportion to Halleck’s increased dealings with the commanders of his other key armies: the balky, West Point–trained prima donnas George McClellan, Don Carlos Buell, and William Rosecrans. It likely did not hurt, either, that Grant cultivated his superior’s favor. Grant had heard in early December from his congressional patron, Illinois congressman Washburne, that Halleck had spoken favorably of him and had said he would aid Grant in “anything” Grant wanted regarding changes to his staff. On December 14, Grant thanked Halleck for his expression of confidence. He also confided his views of his individual staff members, his subordinate generals, positions that needed filling, and the officers he thought should get them.
In the same letter, Grant did not miss the golden chance to voice his disdain for McClernand. He said his wing and division commanders were good and that he hoped no officer would be sent
him that outranked them—then added, “I would regard it as particularly unfortunate to have either McClernand or [Lew] Wallace sent to me. The latter I could manage if he had less rank, but the former is unmanageable and incompetent.”25
Thus, by late December Halleck and Grant were in solid agreement regarding McClernand. They were also actively cooperating to keep him from leading a Union campaign against Vicksburg. When McClernand caught up with Sherman at the Yazoo and found Sherman already had led a Vicksburg strike, he let his displeasure show in a foul humor directed toward both Sherman and Admiral Porter.26
It may have occurred to McClernand, however, that Halleck and Grant had done him an unwitting favor. By rushing Sherman ahead downriver, they had gotten Sherman—not McClernand—besmirched with the blood of Chickasaw Bayou. In the effort there, Sherman had “probably done all in the present case that anyone could have done,” McClernand wrote Secretary Stanton, damning with faint praise. He then rushed on to blame Sherman, Grant, and Halleck for the defeat. He said Grant had not cooperated with the Chickasaw Bayou attack (which was true, but only because Van Dorn and Forrest had prevented him), and the composition of the tools and troops in the assault had been badly planned and “essentially defective.”27