by Jack Hurst
Medill, a devout antislavery proponent, saw a spirit of insubordination in Grant’s army but seemed not to see emancipation’s role in creating it. Grant, by contrast, saw emancipation-engendered treason flourishing in Medill’s backyard. To Julia he wrote on February 14 that his expectation of taking Vicksburg remained “unshaken” if Midwesterners in his army and back home were supportive. But if disgruntled soldiers such as those in the One Hundred Ninth Illinois chose to quit and go home, there would be no getting them back because disloyal citizens in the Midwest would “protect them in their desertion.”17
The worst influence on troop morale, however, was not emancipation, in Grant’s view. He wrote letters to Halleck and the federal paymaster complaining that his men had gone unpaid for many months. Soldiers’ families were doubtless suffering for lack of this income. The paymaster replied on March 1 that he had received enough money to give five divisions of Grant’s troops back pay owed through October 31, 1862. Other Federal officers then warned him not to risk bringing such a sum—$4 million—downriver into the combat zone. On March 4, the men remained unpaid. Aide John Rawlins issued an order for paymasters to be arrested and brought to Grant’s downriver bases to do their job.18
Pressures on Grant were myriad. Officers sought discharge for minor ailments, apparently to engage in cotton smuggling. Soldiers paid $13 per month could not be trusted to resist bribery. Railroad employees took illegal payments reportedly as large as $1,000 a month to sneak war matériel to the Confederates. Then there were guerrillas. Admiral Porter exchanged angry letters with Confederate general John Pemberton over Porter’s order that people shooting into vessels from riverbanks would not be treated as soldiers. Plus vessels for them to shoot into were scarce, many having been taken by General Rosecrans to the Tennessee and the Cumberland. As far away as Chicago, Grant’s agents sought boats small enough for use on bayous and Mississippi tributaries.
Halleck’s job was in jeopardy, as he was increasingly seen as a do-nothing. In January, he refused to honor President Lincoln’s urging that he make a personal inspection of General Burnside’s Virginia front and get Burnside to advance; Halleck offered his resignation rather than interfere with a commander’s own assessment of his situation on the ground. Lincoln did not accept the resignation, but Halleck’s fate, and that of the republic, increasingly depended on Grant’s Mississippi campaign because of the inactivity or defeat of other commanders. Most notably, Rosecrans had refused to follow up the Confederate retreat from Stones River in early January; Burnside’s troops had been slaughtered at Fredericksburg, Virginia, in mid-December; and Sherman’s attempted assault at Chickasaw Bayou had been decisively repulsed in late December. Amid Lincoln’s multiple frustrations, Grant and his Vicksburg expedition increasingly looked like the best hope, equivocal though it was. At least Grant, unlike the others, was continuing to attack his problems.19
Grant’s letters voiced continual hope that the canal digging would work. He had wanted his men paid quickly in part because, as he told Hurlbut on March 4, he expected “to make a move very soon which may delay payments for some time.” But flooding and an unexpected need to clear many trees that overhung or grew in the bayou channels caused serial delays. The trees had to be cut off beneath the surface. The water was so high and the mud so deep that digging crews could barely get themselves, let alone equipment, to the sites.
As usual when Grant was stymied, private reports of his drinking circulated. “On the 13th of March 1863 Genl. Grant . . . was Gloriously drunk and in bed sick all next day,” said one. That claim went to President Lincoln himself—from Grant’s old Cairo enemy William J. Kountz, accompanying a letter from McClernand.20
McClernand was just one of the subordinate snakes in the grass whom Grant had to worry about. Major General Charles Hamilton, a Grant classmate at West Point who had been in command at Memphis before Hurlbut arrived there from Cairo in early February, connived to keep his post over Hurlbut when that general did arrive. In February, apparently referring to McClernand’s effort to lead the Mississippi expedition before Grant took personal command, Hamilton obsequiously wrote Grant that taking Vicksburg “is your right . . . as the most successful general of the war.” Two days later, Hamilton wrote a Wisconsin senator that “Grant is a drunkard.” Adding that Julia had been a continual visitor at Grant’s various headquarters in West Tennessee and Mississippi for months to keep him sober, Hamilton said that on an occasion when Grant left her behind, he was “beastly drunk” for several days, “utterly incapable of doing anything.” Hamilton said he and their mutual West Point classmate, Brigadier General Isaac F. Quinby, had watched Grant “day & night . . . keeping liquor away from him,” until they could telegraph Julia and get her there to take care of him. He cautioned the senator that his letter was confidential because “Grant is a warm friend of mine.”21
Grant proceeded shrewdly in the face of the continual whisper campaign against him. His dealings with politically powerful opponents and subordinates had often contrasted sharply with his battlefield fire, but his self-assurance was growing. On February 21, he relieved Brigadier General Willis A. Gorman at Helena. Gorman was a former Indiana congressman and governor of the Minnesota Territory who had been praised for military competence in the Virginia theater. At Helena, though, he reportedly had a gunboat guarding his son’s commercial cotton-gathering enterprise. As the cotton rightly belonged to the government, Grant replaced Gorman at Helena and busted him to division command.22
Soon Grant relieved Charles Hamilton as well. After quarreling over rank with Hurlbut, his senior as major general by two days, Hamilton had asked that he be allowed to report to Grant rather than Hurlbut. Instead, Grant put Hamilton under McClernand. That should have signified to Hamilton that he was on thin ice, but he then made a worse slip. Noticing that he was senior to Seventeenth Corps commander McPherson, Hamilton suggested that the Seventeenth Corps was rightly his and said he was having McPherson’s date of rank checked in Washington. Grant reacted quickly. He asked Halleck to remove Hamilton from the department and send the matter to Lincoln. Hamilton resigned.23
During this period, McClernand also erred unforgivably. Back in the Midwest gathering troops, he had resumed associating with one of Grant’s bitterest enemies: William J. Kountz, the former chief of river transportation who in January 1862 had formally lodged inflammatory charges of drunkenness against Grant. McClernand had very likely abetted those charges since Kountz apparently was not in Cairo when some or all of the alleged incidents occurred. Additionally, McClernand had requested Kountz’s assignment to Cairo and then praised his work there. Now, more than a year later, Grant heard that Kountz was back in McClernand’s camps, and Chief of Staff John Rawlins shot McClernand a curt note: “If W. J. Kountz, late a Quartermaster, is at Millikens Bend you will please [ascertain] by what authority . . . and on what business and report . . . to . . . Headquarters.”
McClernand feigned ignorance, responding that he understood Kountz had been at Grant’s headquarters but had left by northbound steamboat the same day Kountz arrived. Actually, Kountz had come down on proper authority. Secretary of War Stanton had issued orders, at Kountz’s request, for him to join McClernand. And McClernand had written Kountz that his services were needed in Louisiana, where “I expect soon to move by water.” Rawlins’s note, however, prompted McClernand to bid Kountz a swift farewell.
Not swift enough, though. McClernand had crossed a Rubicon. Grant brooked no perfidy in the area of his drinking, and this time McClernand’s backstabbing was all but overt. The ex-congressman’s military future now depended on whether his remaining Washington clout could topple Grant—before Grant toppled him.24
Grant’s own career was approaching another crisis: the kind of political danger he had barely survived before and after Fort Donelson and again following Shiloh. McClernand was much disliked in the army, but he had strong—and, as the Mississippi stalemate wore on, growing—support in Congress and the Midwest. Grant’s
people feared Lincoln would yield to the malaise and replace their man with McClernand.
The pressure kept mounting. Halleck wrote Grant on March 20 that the “eyes and hopes of the whole country are now directed to your army.” The increasing Northern desperation infected even staunch Chicago Tribune editor Joseph Medill, who wrote House Speaker Schuyler Colfax that he sometimes thought they should settle for the best achievable boundary with the Confederacy. He complained that the effects of the war—mounting combat casualties, war-enabling taxation, “continued closure of the Mississippi,” sky-high fees “for carrying the farmers’ products eastward” in comparison to the cheaper prewar route down the Father of Waters—“all combine to produce . . . despondency and desperation.”25
Yet Grant’s ploys continued failing. By March 22, reaching Vicksburg from the north, the safest direction, looked unlikely. The Yazoo efforts had taken so long that the Confederates had managed to fortify the main routes, block the channel, and repel the gunboats. A third route, through Steele’s Bayou, was dangerously narrow and slow. Plus the Mississippi was now receding, decreasing the depths of the canals and threatening to trap Grant’s boats. His only chance of reaching Vicksburg now from the north, he thought, was to assault the scowling bluffs on Pemberton’s far right. Then he found he could not even do that. He inspected the site with Sherman and Rear Admiral David Porter on April 1 and found the cliffs overlooked too little land on which to debark and operate. An assault would entail “immense sacrifice of life if not . . . defeat,” he informed Porter.26
Press sniping increased to volleys. With Grant’s campaign seemingly running out of options, correspondents howled for an advance—led by McClernand. A Cincinnati Gazette reporter described the army as “thoroughly disgusted, disheartened, demoralized” because its commanders were “such men as Grant and Sherman.” The Gazette editor wrote US Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase that Grant—“foolish, drunken, stupid”—was “an ass” who was wasting their great Midwestern army. Another prominent newspaperman, the Cincinnati Commercial ’s Murat Halstead, informed Chase that Grant was a complete “jackass.” Chase took the letters to Lincoln.27
Even some of Grant’s supporters wavered. No less than US Representative Washburne’s brother, now a brigadier general in the Vicksburg effort, wrote his sibling that he feared Grant’s desperation would spawn a “calamity: . . . He knows that he has got to do something or off goes his head.” He apparently “intends to attack in front. . . . I hear that he has a plan . . . yet to be tried in which he has great confidence.”28
Grant did have an as-yet-untried idea. On March 22, he wrote Sherman that up to then he had hardly considered any scheme besides outflanking the bluffs north of Vicksburg, but he now was formulating another. Its outline, he said, had been in the back of his mind since mid-January. Now he fleshed it out, poring over maps for a week. Late one night, McPherson urged him to throw the “burden” off his mind for an hour or two and join him for a drink. Grant refused. All he wanted, he said, was another dozen cigars and solitude.
The plan he hatched frightened subordinates. With the Mississippi falling, he believed he could march troops via “a good wagon road” from Milliken’s Bend thirty-seven miles south to New Carthage, Louisiana. From there he could go farther south to link up with General Nathaniel Banks at Port Hudson. They could then capture that important town “and everything from there to Warrenton just below Vicksburg.” At New Carthage, he would also be halfway between the Mississippi towns of Warrenton and Grand Gulf, each offering roads to both Vicksburg and the state capital, Jackson. To reach either town, though, he would have to get his troops across the Mississippi. And the boats to ferry and supply them were all north of Vicksburg. To get these gunboats, transport steamers, and barges into position, he would have to run them past the miles of Vicksburg guns.29
Federal boats had dared those guns before. They had gotten some five craft past them over the preceding couple of months. But on March 25 Grant had seen the Vicksburg cannons destroy the iron-prowed “ram” Lancaster and damage another, the Switzerland. Brigadier General Alfred Ellet, commander of the Marine Brigade, had rashly sent the two vessels down by day. Admiral Porter warned Grant that even if the Confederates did not shoot his ships out of the water, the low-powered ironclads, essential to protect any marine convoy, could not get back upriver against the current. If Grant ordered such a move, he would be irrevocably committed to that route.30
Sherman blanched. He feared Grant’s ruin—and resultant McClernand ascendance to the Mississippi command. Grant’s plan violated every military maxim, Sherman said. He urged Grant to require every corps commander to submit ideas as to how to proceed. That way, no one—meaning McClernand—could later claim to have proposed anything he did not advocate at the time. Sherman reiterated his own idea: go back to Memphis and come at Vicksburg from interior Mississippi, down the Mississippi Central Railroad and through Jackson—the route Forrest and Van Dorn had slashed and burned in December.31
Grant had more iron inside him than Sherman, and his background gave him a far better feel for average Americans. His lifelong preoccupation with them, rather than with the comparatively insulated upper class, had made him more conscious of how near the Northern citizen in the street and behind the plow was to the breaking point. He had been, and at heart still was, such a citizen himself; West Point and thirteen years as an army officer had not changed his essence. After the army’s four-month Louisiana sojourn, the home front would not abide withdrawing from Milliken’s Bend and starting over. Northern support for the war could collapse. Sherman, with a senator brother and an even more prominent foster father, lived at the top of Northern society and took for granted that authority in America proceeded from there down. “Grant trembles at the approaching thunders of popular criticism,” he wrote his wife, Ellen, as if those thunders accompanied no lightning. Grant, having spent most of his life nearer the bottom, was much more attuned to the reality that in national crises, the anger, terror, and will of the people tended to rule their leaders; that intuition pervaded his biography. If he could not strike Vicksburg in time, the Union might well lose all will to fight.32
Grant often took Sherman’s advice; not now. His only general who supported the plan with enthusiasm was McClernand, the semicompetent who stood to profit if it failed. Unlike virtually all other high-ranking Union generals, Grant dared trust his own, solitary self in the face of ruin. He had done it in the late 1850s in his star-crossed farm fields and in the streets of St. Louis peddling wood. He had persevered in the face of looming disaster by second nature, and he did it again now.33
In early April, Grant cast the die.
He sent McClernand first west and then southeast, following a winding wagon road through inland Louisiana. This route left the Mississippi above Vicksburg and returned to the river’s banks below the city. The politician-general was to shepherd a massive force along this route: 20,000 troops, 6 million rounds of small arms ammunition, and 10 six-gun artillery batteries with 300 rounds per gun. By McClernand’s figures, it would take the 150 available wagons three trips and thirteen days to get the load to New Carthage. There, according to Grant’s plan, McClernand would meet however many provision-laden, gunboat-guarded transports and barges survived the fire of the miles of Vicksburg guns.34
The plan’s second phase commenced on the dark night of April 16. Admiral Porter ordered seven gunboats, three transports, and a dozen barges out into the channel to dare the wall of fire. Grant and his family watched. Julia and the children, visiting at Milliken’s Bend, were aboard as the headquarters boat Henry von Phul pulled to the upper mouth of the useless canal fronting Vicksburg. Fred Dent Grant, twelve, watched his father puff the habitual cigar, eyes glowing intensely. Aide James Harrison Wilson held on his lap one of the smaller Grant children, who whimpered and held tighter to Wilson’s neck with every cannon blast. The Confederate guns on the bank and the Union ones on the gunboats combined to make 525 of these great booms, accord
ing to War Department official Charles Dana. What Grant saw must have looked like fifty Fourths of July—but the glow Fred saw in his father’s eyes reflected more than cannon blasts. The Confederates torched huge fires for visibility when they heard the convoy coming past. On the Vicksburg bank, they ignited barrels of tar and great piles of pine logs as daring skiff-borne lookouts sped to the Louisiana side and fired entire houses.35
Each vessel required twenty minutes to pass the guns. In the disarray, smoke, and confusion, the boats and barges spun in a complete circle once or even twice like slow-motion tops. Some crashed into each other and lost parts of their protective piles of cotton and hay bales. Some of the cotton, set ablaze by the Confederate cannons, fell overboard and bobbed on the current, making scores of floating bonfires.36
But it might have been worse. The convoy’s descent had taken Pemberton by surprise. He and his officers were at a gala thrown because Grant was thought to be giving up, withdrawing northward following his repeated failures; Confederates had seen Federals retreating from Yazoo Pass. Also benefiting Grant, many of the Vicksburg guns—located atop the bluffs as well as two or three dozen yards above the water line—were protected by such high, thick fortifications that they had trouble firing steeply downward. The shells slid forward in the muzzles before ignition, decreasing the shots’velocity. Union convoy commanders foresaw that advantage and hugged the Mississippi side of the river.37
The protective measures worked. All but two of the vessels made it down, the only exceptions being a coal barge that sank and the transport steamboat Henry Clay, which exploded under Confederate fire. But the success was not at first apparent from downriver. On the morning of April 17, the first thing McClernand’s lookouts on the New Carthage levee saw floating toward them on the current seemed a harbinger of doom: numbers of flaming cotton bales and the battered pilothouse of the Henry Clay. Confederate adherents along the banks were gleeful, but not for long. At 12:20 p.m., in the wake of three barges, the black, beloved ironclads hove into view. The sight was electrifying. Union officers yelled, danced, and began drinking.38