by Bruce Catton
Some time after midnight, the firing died down. The fleet had got through without major damage. One transport had caught fire and sunk, another one had been put out of commission with a shot through her steam chest, one of the Turtles was leaking badly from a waterline shot in the bows, and several of the coal barges had been lost. But casualties to personnel had been light, and by dawn of April 17 the fleet was at anchor above New Carthage, fully operational. Grant was too impatient to wait for reports by courier; he had his horse saddled and rode off to New Carthage to see for himself.
Porter had warned him: once the fleet got below Vicksburg there could be no turning back. But now that the fleet had moved, the great river itself was complicating things afresh. All winter long it had been too high; now, when Grant wanted it to remain high, its level was perversely falling, and as a result it was becoming impossible to make a useful waterway out of the interlinked lakes and streams that came down from Milliken’s Bend to New Carthage. The whole campaign rested on the assumption that certain essential supplies—to say nothing of the soldiers themselves—could come down by this route. Gunboats might run past the batteries, but a transport full of men or explosives could not. McClernand was already estimating that his corps ought to take with it, when it crossed the river, six million rounds of musket ammunition. If all of this had to come down by road, it would take three days and 300 wagons—with 90 additional wagons needed to move the necessary 300 rounds per gun for his 10 six-gun batteries. In addition, it was clear that the whole army could never be rationed by wagon train over the narrow, winding, muddy roadway.9
Grant hurried back to Milliken’s Bend to make arrangements. Porter had got his ironclads past the batteries without trouble; now Grant would try sending a squadron of ordinary transports down the same route—regular river steamers, with civilian officers and crews, under government charter. They could carry forage and rations; once downstream they could ferry the army across the Mississippi; and, although the river men might pull their chins and mutter about the hazard of exposing unarmored vessels to concentrated gunfire, Grant had reason to suspect that the danger was less than was supposed. During the winter the unarmored ram Queen of the West had run the gantlet in broad daylight. Under fire for fifty minutes, she had been struck twelve times but had received no major injury. That the Confederates later captured her in the Red River did not alter the case; and the whole army was still chuckling about the way the impish Porter had made an imitation gunboat out of an old coal barge, some tar barrels, and odds and ends of scantling, to send it drifting downstream one night while the Confederate gunners, taking it for a regular warship, flailed away with everything they had. The flimsy, unmanned craft had gone as far as Warrenton without damage, and its appearance there had scared a Confederate salvage crew into destroying a wrecked Yankee gunboat which they had been trying to restore to serviceable condition. Late in March the ram Switzerland ran the batteries successfully.
Even transports, then, might come down past the batteries, if officers and crew had enough nerve; but they could not carry troops or ammunition as they made the trip, and bad as the twisting road south from Milliken’s Bend might be, the army was going to have to use it—building bridges, filling in ditches and corduroying swamps as it went. Grant was committed, now, and there could be no turning back. On April 20 he issued Special Orders No. 110, setting forth the details.
The purpose of the move, the orders stated, was “to obtain a foothold on the east bank of the Mississippi river, from which Vicksburg can be approached by practicable roads.” McClernand’s corps would have the advance, McPherson’s would follow, and Sherman’s would bring up the rear. No camp equipage would be carried: each company might take one tent, to protect rations from rain, and each regimental, brigade and division headquarters could have one wall tent. Corps commanders might take more, since they had books and papers to protect, but the army would travel light and the troops would bivouac without shelter. Each corps was to detail two regiments to guard the route from Richmond south; sick and disabled soldiers would remain at Milliken’s Bend, and suitable drill officers would stay with them to organize the convalescents into camp guards. McClernand was notified that it was important to take Grand Gulf at the earliest possible moment. Once the army was concentrated there, McClernand was to be prepared to move on downstream and work with Banks.
Porter seemed optimistic. He wrote Grant that he thought his gunboats could suppress the Grand Gulf batteries but that they might get so knocked about doing it that they could not protect the troop crossings, and so he believed they ought to wait until a joint Army-Navy attack could be made. He distrusted McClernand, who was moving slowly, and he told Grant bluntly: “I wish 20 times a day that Sherman was here, or yourself, but I suppose we cannot have all we wish.… We can, with the steamers and barges, land 6,000 men, if you think that enough; if we can get more transports it will be better.” Privately, Porter had more serious misgivings, and he confessed in a letter to Assistant Secretary of the Navy Gustavus Fox: “I am quite depressed with this adventure, which as you know never met with my approval.” McClernand, he complained, was very slow, and his corps was encumbered with too much equipment: “Sherman, the moving spirit, is left behind, where he should have been in the advance. With his corps we might ere this have landed on the Miss. side of the river, for he scorns tents and eatables and pushes his men ahead when there is an object in view.” Sherman himself continued to have doubts, and he wrote to Fred Steele: “I confess I don’t like this roundabout project, but we must support Grant in whatever he undertakes.”10
The transports came down the river on the night of April 22. Six boats made the dash. They were manned largely by Volunteers from the army; the civilian crews balked at the job, and soldiers took their places, so many men offering themselves that they had to be chosen by lot. From one regiment, 116 men presented themselves as qualified by experience to act as pilots, engineers, firemen and deck-hands, and competition for places was so keen that soldiers who were not chosen offered cash money for the chance to replace those who had been selected. Loaded with rations and forage, the steamers got through; only one—unfortunately, the one which carried medical supplies and hospital equipment—was lost.11 Now the army could cross the river whenever it chose.
During all of this, the infantry columns kept moving. The roadway was bad, and it rapidly grew worse. One brigadier asserted: “a worse march no army ever made in the history of military operations,” remarking that it took from twelve to eighteen horses to move a single gun, and that the infantry floundered along knee-deep in mud. There was a good deal of rain, the march went on day and night, with innumerable halts during which men lifted guns and wagons bodily out of the mire and boosted them on toward drier ground. Everything except the road itself seemed to be under water, and Midwestern boys listened apprehensively to the sound of alligators bellowing in the bayous. An Iowa soldier reported that for three weeks nobody in his regiment had a chance to take his clothes off, and reported bleakly: “We are all as dirty as hogs … we are all lousy.” The days were hot, and men threw away blankets and overcoats, only to find that spring nights could be cold even in Louisiana. A gunner reflected that a hike which took a fortnight could have been made in two days if there had been good roads, dry ground and a few bridges.12
Yet morale was high. The army was moving at last, and there was a general feeling that the campaign was beginning to make sense. Even the incessant labor of creating the road on which they marched seemed to give the soldiers a sense of accomplishment. Colonel Wilson marveled at the army’s capacity. Without a pontoon train, and with no bridging materials except the lumber that could be obtained by tearing down barns and houses, these troops could make a highway across swamps and bayous without appreciable delay. In a few days, he said, one division built two floating bridges, each one more than 300 feet long, creating a practicable road in a flooded country that might have stumped trained engineers, and he paid his tribute: “Thos
e bridges were built by green volunteers who had never seen a bridge train nor had an hour’s drill or instruction in bridge-building.” The men in this army had pioneer backgrounds, and they brought to this work all of the pioneer’s ingenuity and adaptiveness. One private noted with pride that his division had bridged 1000 feet of water and cut two miles of road through dense woods. Grant was as impressed as Colonel Wilson: he began to see that these Volunteers could do almost anything—build roads, erect bridges, operate steamboats, march day and night in mud and water, fight like veterans—and his confidence in the enlisted men of his command became almost limitless. When he reported on the Vicksburg campaign he recalled this overland march and wrote: “It is a striking feature, as far as my observation goes, of the present volunteer army of the United States, that there is nothing which men are called upon to do, mechanical or professional, that accomplished adepts cannot be found for the duty required in almost every regiment.”
New troops coming down the river to Milliken’s Bend to take part in the campaign caught the spirit and felt that there was something romantic and inspiring in this movement. A Wisconsin regiment, floating down the Mississippi under a full moon, remembered “the great calm river, more like a long winding lake than a stream; the fleet of boats moving forward with that light puff-puff of the river steamer, and leaving the long triangular wake in the rear of each; the long, low banks stretching away on either side; the music now and then from some regimental band filling all the air above the water with melody, and then floating away over the dark woodlands of both Mississippi and Arkansas; the cheers, laughter and song of the men—the scene was indeed both an enlivening one and a quieting one.”13
Grant drove himself as hard as he drove anyone, and he seemed to appear at every point where a traffic jam developed, riding up, dismounting, and getting things straightened out, telling the men to keep moving on. The soldiers turned to look at him, recognized him, but indulged in no cheers. An officer who watched Grant getting a column across an improvised bridge reflected that Grant somehow made a profound impression by his very lack of dramatics: “There was no McClellan, begging the boys to allow him to light his cigar by theirs, or inquiring to what regiment that exceedingly fine-marching company belonged. There was no Pope, bullying the men for not marching faster, or officers for some trivial detail remembered only by martinets. There was no Bonaparte, posturing for effect.… There was no nonsense, no sentiment; only a plain business man of the republic, there for the one single purpose of getting that command across the river in the shortest time possible.”14 Another officer, who had seen much of Grant during the long winter, said that a new sense of energy and movement was evident in everything the General did, so that he seemed almost like a different person. “None who had known him the previous years could recognize him as being the same man.… From this time his genius and his energies seemed to burst forth with new life.” In all of the previous campaign, this officer said, he had never seen Grant ride at a gallop, or even at a fast trot: no matter what was going on Grant had never seemed to be in a hurry. But now everything was different: Grant was riding at top speed all the time, and “he seemed wrought up to the last pitch of determination and energy.” Yet Dana could see no cracks in the man’s control. He recalled one night riding beside Grant in black darkness; Grant’s horse stumbled and nearly pitched the General into the mud, and Dana found himself thinking, “Now he will swear.” Grant disappointed him. He regained control of his horse and went on with his ride without giving any sign of impatience or irritation, and Dana reflected afterward that from one end of the campaign to the other he never heard Grant use an oath.15
Getting possession of Grand Gulf was a little harder than had been anticipated. It developed that the New Carthage area was not a suitable place from which to make the crossing; there was no good spot on the Mississippi side, between Warrenton and Grand Gulf, to put the troops ashore, the works at Grand Gulf itself were more formidable than had been supposed, and in the end the troops had to keep on moving downstream, fetching up at last at Hard Times plantation, twenty-odd miles farther south; and from there, finally, they had to move on another half-dozen miles until they reached the western bank of the river a little distance below Grand Gulf. The transports ran the Grand Gulf batteries successfully, and soldiers on the bank cheered mightily as the steamers swung in to make a landing, while a band at headquarters played “The Red, White and Blue.” Grant had moments of doubt, and he expressed these in a letter to Sherman on April 24:
I foresee great difficulties in our present position, but it will not do to let these retard any movements. In the first place, if a battle should take place we are necessarily very destitute of all preparations for taking care of wounded men. All the little extras for this purpose were put on board the Tigress, the only boat that was lost. The line from here to Milliken’s Bend is a long one for the transportation of supplies and to defend, and an impossible one for the transportation of wounded men. The water in the bayous is falling very rapidly, out of all proportion to the fall in the river, so that it is exceedingly doubtful whether they can be made use of for the purposes of navigation.
Sherman, still encamped above Vicksburg, was to watch things closely; if Pemberton should weaken his forces there Snyder’s Bluff might become vulnerable, and if so Sherman must be ready to pounce on it.16
One thing that could not be overlooked was the obvious fact that if Pemberton caught on to what was being attempted he could easily move plenty of troops down to Grand Gulf to meet the Federal thrust. It was necessary to deceive him, and Grant had been giving thought to this. As early as the middle of February Grant had felt that a fast cavalry raid down the interior of Mississippi would give the Confederates something to think about, and among the troops in Tennessee he had an officer who looked capable of leading such a raid—an unlikely character named Benjamin Grierson, who had been a small-town music teacher and bandmaster in Illinois before the war and who now was colonel commanding a cavalry brigade in the area of La Grange, Tennessee. Grierson marched south with three regiments, about seventeen hundred men, on April 17, the day after Porter’s ironclads ran the Vicksburg batteries, and went driving south twenty-five miles west of the line of the Mobile and Ohio Railroad, one hundred miles east of the river. His orders were simple: he was to destroy railroad track and supply dumps, stir up all the alarm he could, creating if possible the impression that a big move was in preparation, and he was to keep going until he reached Banks’s lines at Baton Rouge, four hundred miles to the south. Grierson handled the assignment smartly. Pemberton was short of cavalry just then—most of his mounted troops had been sent away to help Bragg, in central Tennessee—and he was never able to catch up with Grierson or to find out precisely what the raid meant. By May 2 Grierson had his men safe at Baton Rouge; he had done substantial damage to Pemberton’s communications, he had compelled various Confederate units to wear themselves out chasing him, and he had stirred up precisely the sort of confused alarm which Grant had intended.17
Meanwhile, there was another diversion. McClernand’s corps was downstream, and McPherson’s was on its heels, but Sherman’s men were still in camp by the river above Vicksburg, and to Sherman, on April 27, Grant sent word that a convincing feint in the direction of Snyder’s Bluff might deceive Pemberton as to the real direction of the Federal offensive. Grant did not give Sherman positive orders; the move might easily deceive the soldiers themselves and the people back home as well as the Confederates in Vicksburg, and the newspapers would probably be happy enough to accuse Sherman of having led the army into another defeat. Grant worded his letter carefully:
The effect of a heavy demonstration in that direction would be good as far as the enemy are concerned, but I am loth to order it, because it would be hard to make our own troops understand that only a demonstration was intended and our people at home would characterize it as a repulse. I therefore leave it to you whether to make such a demonstration.… I shall probably move o
n Grand Gulf tomorrow.
Sherman remained skeptical about the Grand Gulf maneuver but he was indignant at the notion that he might need protection against criticism. To a staff officer he remarked: “Does General Grant think I care what the newspapers say?” He promptly wrote to Grant, pledging full co-operation and bristling with angry contempt for public opinion:
We will make as strong a demonstration as possible. The troops will all understand the purpose and will not be hurt by the repulse. The people of the country must find out the truth as best they can; it is none of their business. You are engaged in a hazardous enterprise, and, for good reasons, wish to divert attention; that is sufficient for me, and it shall be done.