I rode into the city to see the vast Federal fleet come down to the landing, with pinions and streamers fluttering, and blaring music and blowing whistles …
When returning to camp I was politely accosted by an officer in blue, who overtook me. We had some conversation, chiefly complimentary on his part, to the stubborn bravery of the troops, when, noticing that a large staff followed him, which I had not observed before, as the road was crowded with equestrians, I looked at him closely and found that it was General Grant himself.
At the waterfront, Grant went aboard Admiral Porter’s flagship, the Blackhawk, which had pennants flying from all its rigging, and its crew turned out in white dress pants and navy blue jackets. Grant joined in the victory party for a few minutes but then walked off to sit by himself. Porter said of the moment, “No one, to see him sitting there with that calm exterior amid all the jollity … would ever have taken him for the great general who had accomplished one of the most stupendous military feats on record.”
Throughout these climactic days, Grant and Sherman remained in constant communication. The day before the surrender took place, Grant had sent Sherman a telegram that began, “I judge, Johnston is not coming to Vicksburg, he must be watched though.” The challenge for Sherman now was to hold himself ready to come to Grant’s side if the negotiations failed at the last moment and a final massive attack became necessary, while not letting Johnston slip away as he often had. Informing Sherman that negotiations for Vicksburg’s surrender were under way, Grant made the assumption that the city would soon be in Union hands and gave Sherman his usual kind of directive—one that stressed action and momentum, and left it to the commander on the scene to work out the details: “When we go in [to Vicksburg], I want you to drive Johnston from the Mississippi Central Rail Road,—destroy bridges as far as Grenada with your cavalry, and do the enemy all the harm possible— You can make your own arrangements and have all the troops of my Command, except one Corps.”
Later the same day, Grant sent Sherman another message, explaining how the negotiations then stood and, thinking of the situation facing Sherman out in the country well to the east of Vicksburg, adding, “I want Johnston broken up as effectively as possible, and [rail]roads destroyed. I cannot say where you will find the most effective point to strike.”
Thinking that by the time he answered the city might have surrendered, Sherman fired off a telegram that said in part, “If you are in Vicksburg Glory Hallelujah the best Fourth of July since 1776,” and assured Grant that he was ready to move. While waiting for Pemberton’s answer that evening, Grant telegraphed Sherman yet again, saying, “There is but little doubt, but the enemy will surrender to night or in the morning—make your calculations to attack Johnston.” Continuing the exchange of messages, Sherman assured Grant that he had some units already on the move and would throw everything else forward at Johnston as soon as he knew that Grant would not need his support in taking Vicksburg if the surrender negotiations failed. Sherman wrote Grant’s chief of staff Rawlins a detailed plan of what he intended to do and said of Vicksburg, “The news is so good I can hardly believe it.”
Finally, Sherman got definite reports that the surrender was taking place. He sat down at his advanced “Camp at Bear Creek” to write Grant: “I can hardly contain myself … Did I not know the honesty, modesty, and purity of your nature, Would be tempted to follow the example of my standard enemies of the press in indulging in wanton flattery; but as a man and a soldier, and ardent friend of yours, I warn you against the incense of flattery that will fill our land from one extreme to the other. Be natural and yourself, and this glittering flattery will be as the passing breeze of the sea on a warm summer day.” After referring to the spirit of Grant’s treatment of Pemberton and his men as “the delicacy with which you have treated a brave but deluded enemy,” Sherman said, “This is a day of jubilee,” and assured Grant that he now had all his units moving to find Johnston. “Already are my orders out to give one big huzza and sling the knapsack for new fields.”
Still on the day of his greatest victory, thinking of momentum and not of mutual congratulations and praise, Grant sent Sherman yet another letter on purely operational matters. After telling Sherman that his decision as to which corps to use as a reserve “is just right” and asking to be told instantly about any new reports of Johnston’s movements, he closed with another example of his keep-the-ball-moving spirit: “I have no orders or suggestions to give. I want you to drive Johnston out in your own way, and inflict on the enemy all the punishment you can. I will support you to the last man that can be spared.”
It seemed hardly possible that any news could rival that of Vicksburg’s capture, but on July 3, the day before the city surrendered, Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia was thrown back decisively at Gettysburg by the Union’s Army of the Potomac under General George Gordon Meade. Lee’s invasion of Pennsylvania, which had threatened Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Harrisburg, came to a bloody end. During the massive three-day battle, just under ninety thousand federal troops fought seventy-five thousand Confederates, but the Confederate losses in killed, wounded, captured, and missing were larger, totaling twenty-eight thousand compared to the Union’s twenty-three thousand, and, as before, the North had a greater capacity to replace its losses.
A most important victory had been won, but the greatest drama of Gettysburg centered on one man: Robert E. Lee, in whom the hopes of the South were so profoundly embodied. Grant’s old friend, Julia’s cousin Confederate general James Longstreet, had done everything in his power to avoid having to execute the final failed uphill attack that Lee ordered, the gallant doomed effort that came to be known as Pickett’s Charge. When Lee saw the shocked and wounded survivors of the fifteen thousand men he had sent up Cemetery Ridge come staggering back down the slope on the afternoon of July 3, he immediately took the entire blame upon himself. To his despondent general Cadmus Marcellus Wilcox, who had been a groomsman at Grant and Julia’s wedding, he said, “Never mind, General, all this has been my fault—it is I that have lost this fight, and you must help me out of it the best way you can.” When he saw Pickett, whose division had just been slaughtered, Lee told him, “It’s all my fault. I thought my men were invincible.”
As aggressive a general as Grant, at the end of this day of defeat Lee showed yet another aspect of what he was. It was later described by a Union soldier who said of himself, “I had been a most bitter anti-Southman, and fought and cursed the Confederates desperately.” A musket ball had shattered the man’s left leg, and as he lay on the ground near Cemetery Ridge, Lee and his officers came by, starting their retreat.
As they came along I recognized him, and, though faint from exposure and loss of blood, I raised up my hands, looked Lee in the face, and shouted as loud as I could, “Hurrah for the Union!”
The General heard me, looked, stopped his horse, dismounted, and came toward me. I confess that at first I thought he meant to kill me. But as he came up he looked at me with such a sad expression upon his face that I wondered what he was about. He extended his hand to me, and grasping mine firmly and looking right into my eyes, said, “My son, I hope you will soon be well.”
If I live a thousand years I shall never forget the expression on General Lee’s face. There he was, defeated, retiring from a field that had cost him and his cause almost their last hope, and yet he stopped to say words like those to a soldier of the opposition who had taunted him as he passed by! As soon as the General had left me I cried myself to sleep there upon the bloody ground!
While Pemberton’s troops marched out of their fortifications at Vicksburg to surrender to Grant’s men, Lee’s shattered army was retreating to Virginia, with Meade failing to pursue them as closely as Lincoln hoped he would. Deep in the details of the immediate aftermath of the Vicksburg surrender and planning his next moves, Grant simply noted in a letter to General Nathaniel Banks that he had received a telegram from Washington “stating that Meade had w
hipped Lee badly,” but Sherman, while concentrating on the Vicksburg victory in a letter to Ellen, said that “the news from the Potomac … appears so favorable that I sometimes begin to think that the Secech will have to give in and submit.” (It was in this letter that Sherman wrote Ellen, “I want to hear from you after you hear of the fall of Vicksburg. I have bet you will get tight on the occasion, à la fashion of Green Street California.”)
In the North, the victory at Gettysburg naturally resonated far more loudly than the news from far-off Vicksburg. The Philadelphia Inquirer announced in a headline, “Victory! Waterloo Eclipsed!” The Northern church bells rang for Gettysburg, but the men of the West understood what the removal of the great Southern bastion on the Mississippi River meant. When Port Hudson, the last remaining Confederate fortress between Vicksburg and New Orleans, surrendered a few days later as a result of Vicksburg’s loss, the Confederacy was cut vertically in half, and Union shipping could go safely from St. Louis down to the Gulf of Mexico. Abraham Lincoln said of the pivotal moment, “The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea.”
Lincoln’s eloquent words also had meaning in terms of Union strategy, a concept that had been largely lacking in these twenty-six months of war. Insofar as there had ever been a vision of what the entire Union military and naval effort should be, in May of 1861 the aged and soon-to-retire Union general in chief Winfield Scott had devised what came to be called the Anaconda Plan. The North was to be the great snake wrapping itself around the South, and the South was to be effectively strangled by a combination of blockading its seaports and a careful buildup of Northern military strength aimed at establishing control of the Mississippi River. The concept had been, in Scott’s words, to “envelop the insurgent states and bring them to terms with less bloodshed than by any other plan,” but his strategy had been rejected as being too slow, and there was little to indicate that it would have brought the Confederacy to a peace table. With the fall of Vicksburg, Scott’s military and naval goals had to some extent been reached, but in their Western campaigns it had become ever clearer to both Grant and Sherman that Southern tenacity could be overcome only by penetrating the South, rather than encircling it. The Union was still fighting the war on an ad hoc basis, attacking as opportunity presented itself and defending when attacked.
Whatever the Union lacked in an overarching concept of how to win the war, Vicksburg was a great victory, and Lincoln fully appreciated the remarkable accomplishment. He promoted Ulysses S. Grant from major general of Volunteers to major general in the Regular Army—the highest rank he could then bestow—and, on Grant’s enthusiastic recommendation, promoted Sherman from major general of Volunteers to the higher permanent rank of brigadier general in the Regular Army. Of Grant, on the day after Vicksburg surrendered, Lincoln said, “Grant is my man, and I am his, for the rest of the war.”
Despite all this praise for and promotion of Grant, Lincoln was not finished. “My Dear General,” he soon wrote him, “I do not remember that you and I ever met personally. I write this now as a grateful acknowledgment for the almost inestimable service you have done the country.” Lincoln then set forth the concerns and fears he had felt about some of Grant’s movements during the long Vicksburg campaign, and closed with this:
I now wish to make the personal acknowledgment that you were right, and I was wrong.
Yours very truly,
A. Lincoln
8
PAIN AND PLEASURE ON THE LONG ROAD TO CHATTANOOGA AND MISSIONARY RIDGE
With Vicksburg’s fall, Grant began planning the overall exploitation of the position in which the campaign had placed the forces under his command, while Sherman headed east to find and attack Joseph E. Johnston. His men found themselves marching day after day through the blazing heat of a Mississippi summer. Private Leander Stillwell of the Sixty-first Illinois described their encounters with thunderstorms: “The dirt road would soon be worked into a loblolly of sticky, yellow mud. Thereupon we would take off our shoes and socks, tie them to the barrels of our muskets … and roll up our breeches. Splashing, the men would swing along, singing ‘John Brown’s Body’ or whatever else came handy.”
Pushing ahead swiftly, Sherman came once again to the Mississippi state capital of Jackson, where Johnston had paused in his retreat to consider whether to make a stand there with his thirty thousand men. By this time, Sherman’s exhausted soldiers had little heart for singing “John Brown’s Body” or anything else. On July 12, he tried to storm the city in a frontal assault. Although Sherman had twice the number of soldiers Johnston had, his troops were thrown back with losses he did not wish to repeat. He decided to put Jackson under siege, lobbing shells at the enemy every few minutes, but before he could encircle the city, Johnston slipped his army away on the night of July 16.
The following day brought Sherman and his men to a breaking point. As the siege of Vicksburg had come to a close, both Grant and Sherman had thought beyond the city’s fall: the plan was not only for Grant to capture Vicksburg but also for Sherman to complete months of campaigning by bringing Johnston to battle in the area east of the captured city. He was to find Johnston’s army and destroy it if possible. Sherman had found it and tried to encircle it, but Johnston was gone, again. Learning that Johnston had evacuated his men from Jackson during the night, Grant wired Sherman, “If Johnston is pursued, would it not have the effect to make him abandon much of his [supply wagon] trains and many of his men to desert?” Aware of the conditions under which Sherman’s men had been operating, Grant added, “I do not favor marching our men much but if the Cavalry can do anything they might do it.”
Sherman and his men had come to the end of their strength. He wired Grant that “the weather is too hot for a vigorous pursuit,” and in another telegram added that he would destroy enemy equipment captured in and around Jackson, but “I do not pursue because of the intense heat, dust & fatigue of the men.” Grant replied from Vicksburg, “Continue the pursuit as long as you have reasonable hopes of favorable results, but do not wear your men out. When you stop the pursuit return by easy marches to the vicinity of this place.”
Trying to explain that his army was in a state of near collapse, Sherman sent a telegram back at nine that evening, saying in part, “All of the Division Brigade & Regiments are so reduced and so many officers of rank sick & wounded determined on furloughs … Every officer & man is an applicant for furlough.” Half an hour later he sent yet another telegram, written without punctuation and saying that the force with him under Major General Edward Ord “is very much out of order & mine reduced by sickness Casualties & a desire for rest Genl W. S. Smith is really quite ill & says he must go home Cols. Giles, Smith, Tupper, Judy & others are urging their claims to furloughs & I repeat that all the army is clamorous for rest The constant stretch of mind for the past two months begins to tell on us all”
Hearing nothing more from Grant, Sherman closed the exchange with a telegram indicating that, after his men destroyed anything that was left of use to the Confederates in Jackson, he was bringing his spent army back toward Vicksburg. “Our march back, will be slow and easy, regulated by [camping where there is] water.”
With Johnston clearly beyond pursuit and posing no threat—he needed to rest his own men—Grant and Sherman settled down for a respite for themselves and their soldiers. Julia Grant and their four children came to be with him in what she described as “a large, white, colonial house” in Vicksburg that he was using for headquarters. Ellen Sherman brought their four oldest children to the vast camp Sherman’s divisions constructed beside the Big Black River, thirty miles east of Vicksburg. Writing to his stepfather Thomas Ewing, Sherman spoke of the encampment: “It combines comfort, retirement, safety and beauty … I have no apprehensions on the Score of health and the present condition of my command satisfies me on this score.” Headquarters was in a grove of large oaks. Two big hospital tents served as quarters for Sherman, Ellen, and their daughters, Minnie, now thirteen, and Lizzie, ten.
Nine-year-old Willy and six-year-old Tommy stayed with their uncle Charley, now Sherman’s inspector general, in one of the regular military headquarters tents.
It was a happy time. Soon after Julia Grant arrived, she and Grant drove out to call on Sherman and Ellen. Lest Grant take himself too seriously after what he had achieved in capturing Vicksburg, Julia began calling him “Victor” when they were among close friends. She enjoyed Sherman’s witty conversation and appreciated his loyalty to Grant. All the Shermans occasionally went into Vicksburg and visited with the Grants and their children; Sherman took his family on a tour of the recently surrendered fortifications and let his children pick up battlefield souvenirs. Out at the Big Black River encampment, the atmosphere was often that of an outing under the trees. In the evenings, a black man known as “Old Shady” sang songs for the Shermans and their guests, and military bands frequently gave concerts. A battalion of the United States Thirteenth Regular Infantry Regiment—the regiment that Sherman was assigned to command at the beginning of the war but that he never led as a colonel because of his duties inspecting the defenses of Washington—treated Willy and Tommy as their own. Tommy had his corporal’s uniform from an earlier visit, and a regimental tailor now made Willy a uniform with sergeant’s chevrons. The boys were happy in the midst of camp life. Willy, his father’s favorite child and a boy who showed real enthusiasm for the military, frequently rode on a pony to accompany his father on inspections and reviews.
During this quiet time, Grant and Sherman each received a letter from General Halleck in Washington, asking them for their views on what forms of civil government should be set up in the areas of the South now firmly under Union control. Halleck added, of the answers he was soliciting, “I may wish to use them with the President.”
Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War Page 24