Grant Moves South

by Bruce Catton

  Back to Milliken’s Bend came Knox, seeking Grant’s express assent. He did not get it. Grant told him bluntly that he was not going to overrule Sherman on this point. If Knox could make his peace with Sherman, so that Sherman would agree that he should remain in this military area, then Grant would agree likewise; otherwise, Knox would have to leave. Grant suggested that Knox write Sherman a letter.

  Knox would not apologize or beg. He wrote Sherman a stiff note which did no more than express regret at “the want of harmony between portions of the Army and the Press,” with a rider voicing hope that this want of harmony might presently diminish. This was not good enough for Sherman, and he refused to let Knox come back as a correspondent. “Come with a sword or musket in your hand, prepared to share with us our fate in sunshine or storm, in prosperity and adversity, in plenty and scarcity, and I will welcome you as a brother and associate,” he wrote to Knox. “But as a representative of the Press which you yourself say makes so slight a difference between truth and falsehood, and my answer is Never!” Grant sustained Sherman, Knox went elsewhere, and the Herald sent a new man down to cover the army’s doings.11 The whole business unquestionably hurt the army’s press relations, since Knox clearly had done nothing worse than to write a badly biased news story—no uncommon failing in those days. But the affair had a certain significance. Anyone could have guessed that Grant would not overrule Sherman—but here, in a case which had generated much heat, Lincoln was refusing to overrule Grant. Slowly but increasingly, the President was beginning to understand this far-off general.

  Grant himself lacked Sherman’s high-pressure temper, and had fewer personal problems with the press. Sylvanus Cadwallader remembered that during the advance down the Mississippi Central in the fall he had sent home a story commenting bitterly on the marauding and pillaging which Grant’s soldiers inflicted on the people along the Tennessee-Mississippi border. When copies of the Times reached camp, Grant called Cadwallader to his tent. Cadwallader went, expecting to be sent home, perhaps even to be imprisoned as his predecessor had been. But Grant was calm enough; he asked whether the story in the Times was Cadwallader’s, and when told that it was he went on to admit that the troops had indeed behaved very badly. They could not well be restrained, he said, without the cooperation of the regimental officers; invading the enemy’s country, he could not stop everything in order to hold courts of inquiry and courts-martial; if he himself caught a soldier engaged in acts of vandalism he would probably have him shot at once—and, all in all, if Cadwallader never wrote anything more untruthful than this particular story he would never be in any trouble at headquarters. Then Grant went on to sum up his own policy in regard to war correspondents. He would not try to censor letters or dispatches in advance of publication; newspapers and their reporters must determine what to publish, and he would make the reporters personally responsible by ordering them home if they sent off improper dispatches. All correspondents in his department, he added, were at liberty to give all of the facts about an army move that had already taken place; all he would insist was that they must not publish predictions about future movements.12 Sherman might, and did, storm that unless the press could be muzzled “we are defeated to the end of time”; Grant simply said that the press must not reveal his military plans to the enemy, and let it go at that.

  As winter turned to spring, a faint change in the tone of press comment on affairs at Vicksburg was evident. The New York World continued to complain that muddleheaded management had let affairs slip into a stalemate, and it proposed that General McClellan be sent West to take hold of things and work out a campaign that would mean something, but even this paper was moderate in its discussion of Grant; the worst it had to say, just now, was that the Steele’s Bayou expedition had failed because the “ever-sanguine Grant” had entrusted it to Sherman the incompetent. The Chicago Journal reported that the health of the army, which never had been as bad as the North had been led to believe, was steadily improving, and the New York Times agreed that this was so. The real trouble, the Times explained, came from the utter indiscipline of the new regiments, the inevitable result of a defective system of organization. The Times correspondent went on to explain: “Each colonel comes into the field expecting to run for Congress, each captain has his eye upon a seat in the state legislature, each lieutenant and non-commissioned officer is looking forward to the hour when he can appeal to the patriotism of the public for the position of justice of the peace, constable, pound master or something; and in consequence not one of these dare say a peremptory word.… Nor all are like this, but the sick, the arsonites, robbers and criminals come from these regiments.” The Times man added that he had been told by one colonel, in a tone obviously meant for the lounging soldiers to hear, that discipline degraded men and made mere machines out of them.

  The press no longer predicted gloomily that the army would sicken and die in the mud before it could get into action, but it was not able to forecast a quick end to the campaign. Rather plaintively, the Times this spring was asking, “what man of genius, in this fertile land of genius” would suggest to “our bedevilled country and baffled generals, some possible mode of taking Vicksburg—and take it?” The eternally gloomy World remarked sagely that “we have the best reasons for believing that neither the generals in command of our land forces there nor their superiors at Washington expect or hope to take Vicksburg this year.”13

  In all the Mississippi Valley, apparently, only one man believed that Vicksburg would presently be taken, and that man was Grant himself. But the plan on which the successful campaign would finally be based seems to have been worked out slowly, over many weeks. Much later, Grant wrote that he had had this plan in his head all along, and had brought it out only after trying all of the expedients which others had suggested, but it seems likely that his memory betrayed him on this point. Judging by what he said and wrote at the time, one is forced to believe that if this plan did indeed exist in the General’s mind it was lodged in his subconscious, revealing itself slowly, emerging piece by piece from the haze of cigar smoke in the cabin of the headquarters steamer. This smoky haze, indeed, was quite literally present, and there is at least one shadowy glimpse of Grant sitting in the middle of it, bent over a table of maps and reports in what had been the “ladies’ cabin” of his boat while other generals and lesser officers listened to the military band play, passed the bottle, and relaxed. Up to Grant’s table, at last, came McPherson, glass in hand, to say: “General, this won’t do, you are injuring yourself; join us in a few toasts and throw this burden off your mind.” Grant, it is told, looked up, smiled at McPherson, said that whisky would not help—and suggested that if McPherson would give him a dozen cigars and then go away and let him alone, he could probably get his plans in order.14 So he smoked and brooded, and the basic elements of the great Vicksburg campaign began to fall into place in his head.

  As Grant smoked and reflected and made ready for the spring campaign he was compelled to see that the war itself was changing profoundly. It was becoming very grim, and in the steps he took to check guerilla warfare Grant was showing a grimness of his own. At the beginning of the winter he had notified Hurlbut, at Memphis, that the Memphis and Charleston railroad must be kept open as far as Corinth in spite of all opposition … “if necessary I will remove every family and every species of personal property between the Hatchie and Coldwater rivers. I will also move south every family in Memphis of doubtful loyalty … if it is necessary for our security.” He explained the basis for such actions: “If the enemy, with his regularly organized forces, attack us I do not propose to punish non-combatant citizens for it; but these guerillas receive support and countenance from this class of citizens, and by their acts will bring punishment upon them.”15 In addition, Halleck was warning him that the war now must be fought without gloves, and there was a new emphasis on the problem of fugitive slaves. Grant had put Chaplain Eaton in charge of the camps for lost contrabands, and he had found that this problem wa
s growing larger and larger; the question of the slave was central to the whole war effort, and it could be handled only if those who handled it adopted a new attitude toward the attempt to beat down the rebellion.

  It had been decreed that slaves who wanted to leave their masters were to be welcomed into the Union lines, and were to be cared for; but there were so many of them that the mere act of receiving and caring for them got in the way of the war effort, and Grant had tried this winter to whittle the problem down to size. In mid-February he had issued orders, setting forth the fact that the army had enough to do without making itself responsible for this mass of helpless fugitives and specifying that “the enticing of Negroes to leave their homes to come within the lines of our army is positively forbidden.” Negroes now within the Union lines would not be turned out, but no more would be permitted to come in. To McPherson, Grant wrote a note of explanation: “In regard to the contrabands, the question is a troublesome one. I am not permitted to send them out of the department, and such numbers as we have it is hard to keep them in.” But Halleck wrote that this exclusion policy was wrong. Escaped slaves must not only be harbored; they must be positively encouraged to leave their masters, because the Army’s attitude toward them could become a powerful instrument toward the winning of the war.

  This is not only bad policy in itself [wrote Halleck in reference to the exclusion order] but is directly opposed to the policy adopted by the government.… It is expected that you will use your official and personal influence to remove prejudices on this subject and to fully and thoroughly carry out the policy now adopted and ordered by the government. That policy is to withdraw from the use of the enemy all the slaves you can, and to employ those so withdrawn to the best possible advantage against the enemy.

  Then Halleck went on to explain the new situation.

  The character of the war has very much changed within the last year. There is now no possible hope of reconciliation with the rebels. The Union party in the South is virtually destroyed. There can be no peace but that which is forced by the sword. We must conquer the rebels or be conquered by them. The North must conquer the slave oligarchy or become slaves themselves—the manufacturers mere “hewers of wood and drawers of water” to Southern aristocrats.

  This is the phase which the rebellion has now assumed. We must take things as they are. The Government, looking at the subject in all its aspects, has adopted a policy, and we must cheerfully and faithfully carry out that policy.16

  Grant adapted himself without delay. Shortly after hearing from Halleck he passed the word along in a letter to Major General Fred Steele:

  Rebellion has assumed that shape now that it can only terminate by the complete subjugation of the South or the overthrow of the Government. It is our duty, therefore, to use every means to weaken the enemy, by destroying their means of subsistence, withdrawing their means of cultivating their fields, and in every other way possible. All the Negroes you have you will provide for where they are, issuing to them necessary rations until other disposition is made of them. You will also encourage all Negroes, particularly middle-aged males, to come within our lines. General L. Thomas is now here, with authority to make ample provision for the Negro.17

  The reference was to the lean, dusty Adjutant General of the Army, Major General Lorenzo Thomas, who was visiting Grant’s army now on a vaguely defined mission which apparently had a faint overtone of the job assigned to Dana—that is, to give the War Department a report on Grant—but who also had something more concrete to do: to organize combat regiments out of the able-bodied males in the mass of contrabands in the Army’s camps. Thomas was making speeches to the troops, explaining the new program, pointing out that the colored regiments would be officered by white men chosen from the Army—cunningly picked bait, this, since it meant that some hundreds of enlisted men might aspire to commissions—and he was warning that the full weight of government authority lay back of this.… “All of you will some day be on picket duty, and I charge you all if any of this unfortunate race come within your lines that you do not turn them away but receive them kindly and cordially. They are to be encouraged to come to us. They are to be received with open arms; they are to be fed and clothed; they are to be armed.” Not only, continued the General, was he authorized to commission men for these Negro regiments; he was also authorized to dismiss from the Army any man, regardless of rank, who resisted the new policy; and “this part of my duty I will most assuredly perform if any case comes before me.”18

  This program was not popular with all of the troops, and there was a good deal of grumbling. An Ohio soldier wrote that there was so much opposition to the formation of Negro regiments that it “at times assumed the character of anarchy”; many officers and enlisted men, he said, muttered that “they would lay down their arms and unbuckle their swords.” An Illinois soldier complained that the Negroes he had seen could no more take care of themselves than so many eight-year-old children, and said: “If we have to keep those Negroes in the country, I say keep them as slaves. Take them from secesh and turn them over to Unionists, but don’t free them in America. They can’t stand it.” But the grumbling did not last long, and the threatened mutinies did not take place. The business of the commissions was attractive; so, too, was the dawning notion that the colored soldiers who stopped a Confederate bullet was simply intercepting a missile that otherwise might strike a white soldier. The Illinoisan who had held forth so bitterly about the Negro’s lack of capacity for a free man’s status wrote a few weeks later that he had been visiting the Negroes’ camps and that “an honest confession is good for the soul.”

  “I never thought I would,” he went on, “but I am getting strongly in favor of arming them, and am becoming so blind that I can’t see why they will not make soldiers. A year ago last January I didn’t like to hear anything of emancipation. Last fall, accepted confiscation of rebels’ Negroes quietly. In January took to emancipation readily, and now believe in arming the Negroes. The only objection I have to it is a matter of pride. I almost begin to think of applying for a position in a regiment myself.”19

  Grant threw the weight of his authority back of the program, ordering all corps, division and post commanders to help complete the Negro regiments that were being organized and to see that supplies, stores and the like were issued just as for other troops. “It is expected,” he wrote, “that all commanders will especially exert themselves in carrying out the policy of the administration, not only in organizing colored regiments and rendering them efficient, but also in removing prejudice against them.”20

  This was not a one-way proposition. The North had been bumbling its way through a connected chain of inevitabilities, and from fighting to put down rebellion it was now prepared to fight for a new status for the Negro, although not very many of those who were doing the fighting could work up much enthusiasm for the change; but of all the things which the North might have done, nothing could have been better designed to touch off a last-ditch resistance among the leaders of the Confederacy. The tip-off had come much earlier—in August of 1862, to be precise, when Major General David Hunter (he whose place Grant’s staff had thought Grant might well take, if the difficulties with Halleck became unendurable), commanding Union troops along the South Carolina coast, had organized a regiment of Negro troops. When Secretary Stanton asked him what he thought he was doing, Hunter had blandly replied that he was not enlisting fugitive slaves: he was simply making up a regiment of Negroes who had belonged to fugitive Rebels, Negroes who were “working with remarkable industry to place themselves in a position to go in full and effective pursuit of their fugacious and traitorous proprietors.” This had gone down well with the abolitionists, but it had stirred fury in Richmond. From the Confederate Adjutant General, Samuel Cooper, there came an order stating that Hunter, or any other Federal, “employed in drilling, organizing or instructing slaves with a view to their armed service in this war,” would not, if captured by Confederates, be treated as a prisoner
of war; he would be held for execution as a felon, at such time and place as the President of the Confederacy might order. As professionally-minded a soldier as Beauregard was moved, in the fall of 1862, to write to his good friend, Congressman W. Porcher Miles, in Richmond: “Has bill for execution of abolition prisoners after 1st of January next passed? Do it and England will be stirred into action. It is high time to proclaim the black flag for that period. Let the execution be with the garrote.” Addressing the Confederate Congress at the beginning of 1863, Jefferson Davis had referred bitterly to the Emancipation Proclamation, speaking of “our own detestation of those who have attempted the most execrable measure recorded in the history of guilty man.”21 The South would assuredly meet grimness with grimness.

  There was more to all of this than a mere business of tightening up on the guerillas and trying to turn contrabands into useful soldiers. Unexpressed but implicit, there was a final departure from the original notion that a permanent political settlement could be obtained by a purely military victory. The war was taking on its final character: it was no longer a mere matter of armies, but of two nations putting every resource into a struggle for survival. All of the capacities which the country possessed were to be used remorselessly, to the hilt, until the enemy’s ability to fight had been destroyed. And as it changed, the war was becoming more and more the kind of struggle which Grant, more than any other Union officer, was fitted to conduct. His distinguishing characteristic from the start had been an uncomplicated determination to make direct and complete use of the North’s obvious advantages. He had never had any of McClellan’s or Buell’s feeling that the end in view was to outmaneuver an opposing army, so that its general might be induced to confess defeat, and he had never shared in Halleck’s belief that the war might be won by the simple occupation of Confederate territory. His deepest instinct was not to beat the army that opposed him, but to annihilate it. Halleck’s current warning that there could be no peace but by the sword was, in effect, a charter of authority. From now on, increasingly, the war would go Grant’s way.