Battle Cry of Freedom

by James M. McPherson

  Lincoln's rationalization did not satisfy the general, nor does it fully satisfy the historian. Cotton was the great corrupter of the Civil War; as a Confederate general noted, it made "more damn rascals on both sides than anything else."67 This corrosion in the rear—like the antiwar fire in the rear—grew from a malaise of the flesh in the resource-starved South and a malaise of the spirit in the North. During the winter of 1862–63 this northern malaise, spread by military defeat, appeared more fatal than the South's malaise of the flesh. Military success was a strong antidote for hunger. Buoyed by past victories in Virginia and the apparent frustration of Grant's designs against Vicksburg, the South faced the spring military campaigns with confidence. "If we can baffle them in their various designs this year," wrote Robert E. Lee in April 1863, "next fall there will be a great change in public opinion at the North. The Republicans will be destroyed & I think the friends of peace will become so strong as that the next administration will go in on that basis. We have only therefore to resist manfully . . . [and] our success will be certain."68

  67. Capers, Occupied City, 164.

  68. Robert E. Lee to his wife, April 19, 1863, in Clifford Dowdey and Louis H. Manarin, eds., The Wartime Papers of R. E. Lee (New York, 1961), 438.

  21

  Long Remember: The Summer of '63

  I

  Grant's failure during the winter of 1862–63 to get his army on dry land for a drive against Vicksburg bolstered Confederate faith in this "Gibraltar of the West." Believing that the Yankees were giving up, Pemberton on April 11 informed Joseph Johnston that "Grant's forces are being withdrawn to Memphis." Pemberton had earlier sent most of his cavalry to Bragg in Tennessee, where danger appeared more imminent, and he now prepared to dispatch an 8,000-man infantry division to Bragg. On April 16 the Vicksburg Whig gloated that the enemy's gunboats "are all more or less damaged, the men dissatisfied and demoralized. . . . There is no immediate danger here." Civilians and officers celebrated at a gala ball held in Vicksburg that night of April 16. As the dancers swung from a waltz into a cotillion, flashes of light and loud explosions suddenly rent the air. "Confusion and alarm" erupted in the ballroom. Yankee gunboats were running the batteries. Grant had not gone to Memphis; he had only backed up for a better start.1

  One northerner who had never lost confidence in eventual victory at Vicksburg was Grant. All of his roundabout routes through canals, bayous, and swamps having failed, he resolved on a bold plan to march his

  1. Samuel Carter III, The Final Fortress: The Campaign for Vicksburg 1862–1863 (New York, 1980), 155; Peter F. Walker, Vicksburg: A People at War, 1860–1865 (Chapel Hill, 1960), 151, 152.

  army down the west bank of the Mississippi to a point below Vicksburg while sending the fleet straight past the batteries to rendezvous with the troops downriver. There they could carry the army across the mile-wide water for a dry-ground campaign against this Gibraltar from the southeast. Apparently simple, the plan involved large risks. The gunboat fleet might be destroyed or crippled. Even if it survived to ferry Grant's soldiers across the river, they would be virtually cut off from their base, for while the ironclads and even some supply transports might get past Vicksburg downriver with the help of a four-knot current, they would be sitting ducks if they tried to go back up again. The army would have to operate deep in enemy territory without a supply line against a force of unknown strength which held interior lines and could be reinforced.

  Grant's staff and his most trusted subordinates, Sherman and Mc-Pherson, opposed the plan. Go back to Memphis, Sherman advised Grant, and start over again with a secure supply line. Grant's reply demonstrated his true mettle. Like Lee, he believed that success could not be achieved without risk, and he was willing to lay his career on the line to prove it. As for returning to Memphis, he told Sherman,

  the country is already disheartened over the lack of success on the part of our armies. . . . If we went back so far as Memphis it would discourage the people so much that bases of supplies would be of no use: neither men to hold them nor supplies to put in them would be furnished. The problem for us was to move forward to a decisive victory, or our cause was lost. No progress was being made in any other field, and we had to go on.2

  Grant's first gamble paid off; the gunboats got through. As they floated silently on the current toward Vicksburg on the moonless night of April 16, rebel pickets spotted them and lit bonfires along the banks to illuminate the target for Vicksburg's gunners, who fired 525 rounds and scored sixty-eight hits but sank only one of the three transports and none of the eight gunboats. A few nights later, volunteer crews ran six more transports past the batteries and got five of them through. By the end of April Grant had a powerful fleet and two of his three corps thirty miles south of Vicksburg ready to cross the river.

  To divert Pemberton from challenging this crossing, Grant arranged a cavalry raid deep in the rebel rear and an infantry feint above Vicksburg. On the day after Porter's fleet had so rudely interrupted the Vicksburg

  2. The Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, 2 vols. (New York, 1885), I, 542–43n.

  ball, a former music teacher from Illinois set forth on what would become the most spectacular cavalry adventure of the war. Benjamin Grierson had disliked horses since one kicked him in the head as a child. When the war broke out he had joined the infantry, but the governor of Illinois soon assigned this erstwhile bandmaster to the cavalry. It was a stroke of genius, for Grierson soon became one of the finest horse soldiers in the western theater, where he rose to brigade command in 1862. In the spring of 1863 Grant borrowed a leaf from the enemy's book and ordered Grierson's 1,700-man brigade on an expedition into the heart of Mississippi to tear up Pemberton's supply lines and distract Confederate attention from the Union infantry toiling down the river's west bank. Combining speed, boldness, and cunning, Grierson's troopers swept through the entire state of Mississippi during the last two weeks of April. They won several skirmishes, killed or wounded a hundred rebels, and captured five hundred at a cost of two dozen casualties. They tore up fifty miles of three different railroads supplying Pemberton's army, burned scores of freight cars and depots, and finally rode exhausted into Union lines at Baton Rouge after sixteen days and six hundred miles of marauding. They had lured most of Pemberton's depleted cavalry plus a full infantry division into futile pursuit—futile because Grierson, having detached smaller units from the main body to ride off in various false directions, was never where the rebels expected him to be. Grierson more than evened the score against Forrest and Morgan. The Yankees rode through enemy territory, while the southern horsemen raided in Tennessee and Kentucky, where friendly natives aided them. And the strategic consequences of Grierson's foray were greater, perhaps, than those of any other cavalry raid of the war, for it played a vital role in Grant's capture of Vicksburg.

  Thanks to Grierson's raid, and thanks also to a feigned attack north of Vicksburg by one of Sherman's divisions, Grant's crossing on April 30 was unopposed. Sherman had landed this division near the site of his Chickasaw Bayou repulse the previous December. For two days Sherman's artillery and a few light gunboats shelled Confederate defenses while the infantry deployed as if for attack. Pemberton took the bait. In response to a panicky message from the commander confronting Sherman—"The enemy are in front of me in force such as has never before been seen at Vicksburg. Send me reinforcements"—Pemberton recalled 3,000 troops who had been on their way to challenge Grant.3

  3. Carter, Final Fortress, 182.

  The 23,000 bluecoats with Grant moved quickly to overwhelm the only rebels in the vicinity, 6,000 infantry at Port Gibson ten miles east of the river. The Yankees brushed them aside after a sharp fight on May 1. Having established a secure lodgement, Grant sent for Sherman and the rest of his troops, who would bring Union strength east of the river to more than 40,000 to oppose Pemberton's 30,000 scattered in various detachments. Pemberton finally recognized that Grant had crossed his whole army below Vicksburg. But what to do about it wa
s a puzzle because Grant's purpose remained unclear. His most logical move would seem to be a drive straight northward toward Vicksburg, keeping his left flank in contact with the river where he might hope to receive additional supplies from transports that ran the batteries. But Grant knew that Joseph Johnston was trying to scrape together an army at Jackson, the state capital forty miles east of Vicksburg. If he ignored Johnston and went after Pemberton, the Yankees .might suddenly find another enemy on their right flank. So Grant decided to drive eastward, eliminate the Johnston threat before it became serious and before Pemberton realized what was happening, and then turn back west to attack Vicksburg.

  As for provisions, Grant remembered what he had learned after Van Dorn's destruction of his supply base the previous December. This time he intended to cut loose from his base, travel light, and live off the country. Although civilians were going hungry in Mississippi, Grant was confident that his soldiers would not. A powerful army on the move could seize supplies that penniless women and children could not afford to buy. For the next two weeks the Yankee soldiers lived well on hams, poultry, vegetables, milk and honey as they stripped bare the plantations in their path. Some of these midwestern farm boys proved to be expert foragers. When an irate planter rode up on a mule and complained to a division commander that plundering troops had robbed him of everything he owned, the general looked him in the eye and said: "Well, those men didn't belong to my division at all, because if they were my men they wouldn't have left you that mule."4

  Divided counsels and paralysis in the fact of Grant's unexpected and rapid movements crippled the Confederate response. On May 9 the War Department in Richmond ordered Johnston to take overall command of the Mississippi defenses and promised him reinforcements. But Johnston got no farther than Jackson, where he found 25,000 confident Yankees

  4. Bruce Catton, Grant Moves South (Boston, 1960), 438.

  bearing down on the capital after bowling over a small rebel force at Raymond a dozen miles to the west. Coming on through a rainstorm, Sherman's and McPherson's corps on May 14 launched a straight-ahead attack against the 6,000 entrenched Confederates defending Jackson and sent them flying through the streets out of town. Sherman's corps set to work at a task in which they soon became experts—wrecking railroad facilities and burning foundries, arsenals, factories, and machine shops in the capital along with a fair number of homes that got in the way of the flames, doing their work so thoroughly that Jackson became known to its conquerors as Chimneyville.

  Meanwhile Johnston urged Pemberton to unite his troops with Johnston's 6,000 survivors north of Jackson, where with expected reinforcements they would be strong enough to attack Grant. This would leave Vicksburg undefended, but Johnston cared little about that. His strategy was to concentrate superior numbers against Grant and beat him, after which the Confederates could reoccupy Vicksburg at leisure. Pemberton disagreed. He had orders to hold Vicksburg and he intended to do so by shielding it with his army. Before the two southern generals could agree on a plan, the Yankees made the matter moot by slicing up Pem-berton's mobile force on May 16 at Champion's Hill, midway between Jackson and Vicksburg.

  This was the key battle of the campaign, involving about 29,000 Federals against 20,000 Confederates The Union troops were McPherson's and McClernand's corps (Sherman's men were still burning Jackson), which found the rebels posted along four miles of the seventy-foot high Champion's Hill ridge. While the normally aggressive McClernand showed unwonted caution, McPherson pitched into the enemy left with blows that finally crumpled this flank after several hours of bloody fighting. If McClernand had done his part, Grant believed, the Yankees might have bagged most of Pemberton's army; as it was the bluecoats inflicted 3,800 casualties at the cost of 2,400 to themselves and cut off one whole division from the rest of Pemberton's force. The main body of Confederates fell back in demoralized fashion to the Big Black River only ten miles east of Vicksburg. Grant's cocky midwesterners came after them on May 17. The rebel position at the Big Black was strong, but an impetuous brigade in McClernand's corps, chafing at its lack of a share in the previous day's glory, swept forward without orders and routed the left of the Confederate line defending the bridge that Pemberton was trying to keep open for his lost division, which unbeknown to him was marching in the opposite direction to join Johnston. The unnerved rebels collapsed once again, losing 1,750 men (mostly prisoners) while Union casualties were only 200. Pemberton retreated to Vicksburg, where citizens were shocked by the exhausted countenances of the soldiers. "I shall never forget the woeful sight," wrote a Vicksburg woman on the evening of May 17. "Wan, hollow-eyed, ragged, footsore, bloody, the men limped along unarmed . . . humanity in the last throes of endurance."5

  Thus had Grant wrought in a seventeen-day campaign during which his army marched 180 miles, fought and won five engagements against separate enemy forces which if combined would have been almost as large as his own, inflicted 7,200 casualties at the cost of 4,300, and cooped up an apparently demoralized enemy in the Vicksburg defenses. Of all the tributes Grant received, the one he appreciated most came from his friend Sherman. "Until this moment I never thought your expedition a success," Sherman told Grant on May 18 as he gazed down from the heights where his corps had been mangled the previous December. "I never could see the end clearly until now. But this is a campaign. This is a success if we never take the town."6

  But Grant hoped to take the town, immediately, while its defenders were still stunned. Without stopping to rest, he ordered an attack by his whole army on May 19. With confidence bred by success, northern boys charged the maze of trenches, rifle pits, and artillery ringing the landward side of Vicksburg. But as they emerged into the open the rebel line came alive with sheets of fire that stopped the bluecoats in their tracks. Ensconced behind the most formidable works of the war, the rebels had taken heart. They proved the theory that one soldier under cover was the equal of at least three in the open.

  Bloodied but still undaunted, the Union troops wanted to try again. Grant planned another assault for May 22, preceded this time by reconnaisance to find weak points in enemy lines (there were few) and an artillery bombardment by 200 guns on land and 100 in the fleet. Again the Yankees surged forward against a hail of lead, this time securing lodgement at several points only to be driven out by counterattacks. After several hours of this, McClernand on the Union left sent word of a breakthrough and a request for support to exploit it. Distrustful as ever of McClernand, Grant nevertheless ordered Sherman and McPherson to renew their attacks and send reinforcements to the left. But these

  5. Quoted in Walker, Vicksburg, 161.

  6. Quoted in Carter, Final Fortress, 208.

  efforts, said Grant later, "only served to increase our casualties without giving any benefit."7 For the second time in four days the southerners threw back an all-out attack, doing much to redeem their earlier humiliation and inflicting almost as many casualties on the enemy as in all five earlier clashes combined.

  Though they failed, Grant did not consider these assaults a mistake. He had hoped to capture Vicksburg before Johnston could build up a relief force in his rear and before summer heat and disease wore down his troops. Moreover, he explained, the men "believed they could carry the works in their front, and they would not [afterwards] have worked so patiently in the trenches if they had not been allowed to try."8 After the May repulses the bluecoats dug their own elaborate network of trenches and settled down for a siege. Grant called in reinforcements from Memphis and other points to build up his army to 70,000. He posted several divisions to watch Johnston, who was now hovering off to the northeast with a makeshift army of 30,000, some of them untrained conscripts. Grant had no doubt of ultimate success. On May 24 he informed Halleck that the enemy was "in our grasp. The fall of Vicksburg and the capture of most of the garrison can only be a question of time."9

  Pemberton thought so too, unless help arrived. Regarding Vicksburg as "the most important point in the Confederacy," he informed J
ohnston in a message smuggled through Federal lines by a daring courier that he intended to hold it "as long as possible." But Pemberton could hold on only if Johnston pierced the blue cordon constricting him. "The men credit and are encouraged by a report that you are near with a large force." For the next six weeks Pemberton's soldiers and some three thousand civilians trapped in Vicksburg lived in hope of rescue by Johnston. "We certainly are in a critical situation," wrote a southern army surgeon, but "we can hold out until Johnston arrives with reinforcements and attacks Yankees in rear. . . . Davis can't intend to sacrifice us."10

  But Davis had no more reinforcements to send. Braxton Bragg had already lent Johnston two divisions and could not spare another. Robert E. Lee insisted that he needed every soldier in Virginia for his impending invasion of Pennsylvania. In Louisiana, General Richard Taylor

  7. Grant, Memoirs, I, 531.

  8. Ibid., 530–31.

  9. Quoted in Foote, Civil War, II, 388.

  10. Ibid., 387; Carter, Final Fortress, 207, 223.

  (son of Mexican War hero Zachary Taylor) reluctantly diverted three brigades from his campaign against Banks to assist Pemberton. Their only accomplishment, however, was to publicize the controversy surrounding northern employment of black troops. In a futile attempt to disrupt Grant's restored supply line, one of Taylor's brigades on June 7 attacked the Union garrison at Milliken's Bend on the Mississippi above Vicksburg. This post was defended mainly by two new regiments of contrabands. Untrained and armed with old muskets, most of the black troops nevertheless fought desperately. With the aid of two gunboats they finally drove off the enemy. For raw troops, wrote Grant, the freed-men "behaved well." Assistant Secretary of War Dana, still with Grant's army, spoke with more enthusiasm. "The bravery of the blacks," he declared, "completely revolutionized the sentiment of the army with regard to the employment of negro troops. I heard prominent officers who formerly in private had sneered at the idea of negroes fighting express themselves after that as heartily in favor of it."11 But among the Confederates, Dana added, "the feeling was very different." Infuriated by the arming of former slaves, southern troops at Milliken's Bend shouted "no quarter!" and reportedly murdered several captured blacks. If true, such behavior undoubtedly reflected their officers' sentiment: the rebel brigade commander "consider[ed] it an unfortunate circumstance that any negroes were captured," while General Taylor reported that "a very large number of the negroes were killed and wounded, and, unfortunately, some 50, with 2 of their white officers, captured." The War Department in Washington learned that some of the captured freedmen were sold as slaves.12