by Bruce Catton
These works were not simple lines of trenches. At intervals there were regular forts with steep walls, posted on the crest of high slopes, protected by ditches. In McPherson’s corps, the engineers built forty scaling ladders, fifteen or twenty feet in length, and when the first assault wave ran forward men dragged these after them with ropes. Two Iowa regiments, an Illinois regiment and another from Wisconsin, headed for a fort beside the railroad. Their advance patrols scaled the walls and got inside, triumphantly planting flags on the parapets; they stayed there for two or three hours, beating off determined counterattacks, and then were overwhelmed when a Texas contingent came in with bayonets, capturing flags and invaders and plugging the gap for good. The Texans’ feat won from Confederate Brigadier General Stephen D. Lee the tribute: “A more daring feat has not been performed during the war.” Some of Frank Blair’s troops reached the parapet on another part of the line, braving what an Illinois colonel called “the most murderous fire I ever saw”: they could not enter the Rebel works, and huddled in the ditch outside until the defenders at last dislodged them by lighting the fuses of 12-pounder shells and rolling the shells down into their midst. Another party managed to plant its flags halfway up the slope on still another fort, and one of McPherson’s brigades got four flags mounted just outside of a strong redoubt, but the Confederate line could not be cracked. The whole attack was given up, finally, as an expensive repulse, with more then 3000 casualties.2
Some of these casualties came because of the excess of enthusiasm displayed by McClernand. When McClernand saw that some of his men had reached the Rebel works and were flaunting their banners there he believed one more push might bring victory; he sent word to Grant that his men were in the trenches and that they could keep going if the rest of the army supported them. Grant did not believe him, but he was with Sherman at the time—when a battle was on Grant seemed to gravitate naturally to Sherman’s side—and Sherman told him that the message from McClernand was an official communication which could not be ignored. Grant sent McClernand reinforcements and ordered Sherman and McPherson to renew their assaults. The battle flared up again, but McClernand had appraised the situation wrong, and the new attacks accomplished nothing. Grant commented on all of this, two days later, in words much more bitter than he ordinarily used:
General McClernand’s dispatches misled me as to the real state of the facts, and caused much of this loss. He is entirely unfit for the position of corps commander, both on the march and on the battlefield. Looking after his corps gives me more labor and infinitely more uneasiness than all the remainder of my department.
Grant did not, however, remove McClernand from command. Probably he realized that the real trouble on this day lay in the fact that he and his entire army had been overconfident. One of his engineer officers summed it up in his report. Everyone, he said, had underestimated the strength of the Confederate Army, and “Our own troops, buoyant with success, were eager for an assault and would not work well if the slow process of a siege were undertaken.”
When night came the troops were pulled back to form a trench system of their own on a range of loosely connected hills a few hundred yards away from the Confederate lines. Grant got off a dispatch to Halleck, a curious mixture of justified confidence and a jaunty optimism which may in part have come from imperfect knowledge of just how little the day’s fighting had actually gained:
Vicksburg is now completely invested. I have possession of Haynes’ [Snyder’s] Bluff and the Yazoo; consequently have supplies. Today an attempt was made to carry the city by assault, but was not entirely successful. We hold possession, however, of two of the enemy’s forts and have skirmishers close under all of them. The nature of the ground about Vicksburg is such that it can only be taken by a siege. It is entirely safe to us in time, I would say one week if the enemy do not send a large army upon my rear.
Two days later he gave Halleck further reassurance: “The enemy are now undoubtedly in our grasp. The fall of Vicksburg and the capture of most of the garrison can only be a question of time.”3
Aside from his airy guess that the job could be done in a week, Grant was giving an accurate appreciation. Pemberton and his army were locked up, and Johnston was off on the rim, trying without success to build up a force strong enough to fight his way through to perform a rescue. Grant’s army was as securely based now as it would have been at Memphis; its access to supplies was clear, and reinforcements were on the way. The processes of siege warfare were slow, laborious and painful, but ultimately certain; the Federal lines would be made impregnable to any possible sally by the beleaguered garrison, approach trenches would be brought nearer and nearer to the Confederate lines, and in the end—if sheer hunger did not compel them to surrender—the Confederates could be overwhelmed. From this moment, given competent management, the Federal Army was bound to win.
Siege warfare was a job for engineers, and of regular military engineer officers Grant’s army had very few—during most of the operation, it could put no more than three on duty at one time. Yet the engineer officers were discovering anew, as they had seen during the march downstream from Milliken’s Bend, that these soldiers were handy jacks-of-all-trades who could do almost anything they set their hands to. One engineer confessed after it was all over that in the immense task of constructing trenches, saps, batteries and covered ways he could safely rely on the “native good sense and ingenuity” of the men in the ranks. “Whether a battery was to be constructed by men who had never built one before,” he wrote, “a sap-roller made by those who had never heard the name, or a ship’s gun carriage to be built, it was done, and after a few trials well done.… Officers and men had to learn to be engineers while the siege was going on.”4
Watching pessimistically from afar, Confederate Joe Johnston paid his own tribute to the uncommon qualities of Grant’s army. Not long after this date he sent a letter to Secretary of War Seddon, saying that he hoped soon to have about 23,000 effective men. He did not think these would be enough, for he pointed out: “Grant’s army is estimated at 60,000 or 80,000 men, and his troops are worth double the number of northeastern troops. We cannot relieve General Pemberton except by defeating Grant, who is believed to be fortifying.”5
Far downstream, Banks was at last getting his troops over to Port Hudson. The strength of this place had been reduced, but Grant’s earlier guess that the garrison was too weak to hold out in face of a determined attack was wrong; Confederate General Gardner was well dug in, Banks’s force was not quite large enough, and Banks asked Grant for the loan of ten thousand men. Grant explained that he did not propose to spare a man, and in a letter, which one of his staff officers took to Banks, Grant described his own situation:
Concentration is essential to the success of the general campaign in the west, but Vicksburg is the vital point. Our situation is for the first time, during the entire western campaign, what it should be. We have, after great labor and extraordinary risk, secured a position which should not be jeopardized by any detachments whatever. On the contrary, I am now and shall continue to exert myself to the utmost to concentrate. The enemy clearly see the importance of dislodging me at all hazards. General Joe Johnston is now at Canton [a Mississippi town 25 or 30 miles north of Jackson] and making his dispositions to attack me. His present strength is estimated at 40,000 and is known to be at least 20,000.
Grant believed that he could hold his position and could reduce Vicksburg by the latter part of June, but he could not and would not send away any troops.6
It would take time to make Vicksburg cave in, but men who were paid to comment on all of this began to see that what had already been done was prodigious. The New York Times man, looking back at the recent past, spread himself in an enthusiastic dispatch just after the May 22 assault had failed: “A more audacious plan than that devised by the Commander has scarcely ever been conceived. It was, in brief, nothing else than to gain firm ground on one of the enemy’s flanks, which to be done involved a march of
about 150 miles through the enemy’s country and in which communication with the base of supplies was liable at any moment to be permanently interrupted.” Grant’s army, said this correspondent, had fought the Rebels five times, winning every fight, had captured more than fifty guns and six thousand prisoners, and had done all of this “in a foreign climate, under a tropical sun ablaze with the white heat of summer, with only such supplies as could be gleaned from the country.” He added that “it must be admitted that whether ultimate success crowns our efforts, our gallant army has done sufficient within the last month to entitle it at once to the esteemed gratitude and admiration of the people at home.” Even the correspondent of the New York World, a paper which was dedicated to the belief that anything a Federal commander did was probably wrong, confessed handsomely that “Vicksburg is ours beyond a reasonable doubt,” and added that Grant could take the Confederate fortifications whenever he was ready to spend from six to ten thousand men in the attempt. The fate of Vicksburg was settled, this writer felt, when the Rebels were beaten at Champion Hill.7
As the lines were drawn more tightly, McClernand smoldered. His own bright dream of glory had faded badly. He had put together a fair number of the troops which would presently capture Vicksburg and he had been allowed to see himself as the hero of the war, but Grant had relentlessly whittled him down to size, and when the great day came it was not going to be McClernand who had opened the Mississippi Valley and won the great war in the West. He believed that the West Pointers had ganged up on him, and with some reason he felt that the clear intent of the President and the Secretary of War had been nullified; he was a man with a grievance, and it burst out, one day, when young Colonel Wilson came to him with an order from Grant directing McClernand to strengthen a force which he had sent back to watch the crossings of the Big Black River.
McClernand read the order and then snapped: “I’ll be Goddamned if I’ll do it. I’m tired of being dictated to—I won’t stand it any longer, and you can go back and tell General Grant.” He added some more remarks in the same vein, and Colonel Wilson dropped his own West Point formality, pointed out that McClernand was insulting not only the Commanding General of the army but Wilson himself, and offered to get off his horse and use his fists if the offensive expressions were not promptly withdrawn. McClernand withdrew them, and, by way of apology, went on to say: “I was simply expressing my intense vehemence on the subject matter, sir, and I beg your pardon.” When Wilson reported on this to Grant, Grant found the apology most amusing. All through the rest of the campaign, when Grant heard anyone use profanity—it was usually hotheaded Rawlins, who was profane when in a temper—Grant would explain: “He’s not swearing—he’s just expressing his intense vehemence on the subject matter.”8
McClernand continued to smolder, and he sat down to write an order congratulating his corps on its achievements and implying broadly that if the rest of the army had supported it properly Vicksburg would have fallen on May 22. In the end this order would create a storm that would blow McClernand all the way out of the Army, but for the moment the routine of the siege went on smoothly.
The routine was inexorable. Grant’s lines ran from the Yazoo River, above the town, to the lowlands along the Mississippi to the south—fifteen miles of camps, trenches and gun emplacements on the hills and ridges, so tightly held that a Confederate defender wrote despairingly: “When the real investment began a cat could not have crept out of Vicksburg without being discovered.” Pemberton was woefully outnumbered. He had more than 30,000 soldiers, but they were plagued by illness and malnutrition, and by no means all of them were fit for duty in the trenches.9 His supply of food and ammunition was strictly limited, and he had no way to get any more. Unless Johnston could break the Federal lines, Pemberton could do nothing but hold his ground and watch the remorseless construction of Federal approaches: a day-and-night process which brought the Union outworks closer and closer to his own defenses, getting the Federals constantly nearer to places from which they could mine the Confederate trenches, making inevitable the day when the assault troops would be close enough to swarm in over the Southern lines in unbeatable strength.
A strange apathy seemed to descend on the defenders. Their abundant artillery was seldom used; for the most part, the Federal working parties which kept pushing their trenches closer were harassed by nothing more than musketry fire. Federal engineers reported afterward that although the Confederate artillery had been badly battered by the Union siege guns, it could have been used more effectively—could, indeed, have made the progress of the investment much more costly.
Odd things happened on the picket lines. One night Northern troops who were bringing two approach trenches forward at an angle found that the place where the two new trenches were supposed to join lay inside the Rebel picket line. Northerners and Southerners held informal consultation, while the firing died down; a Federal engineer came forward and indicated the place where the two trenches were to meet, and suggested that if necessary his men would fight to gain the necessary ground. In the end the Confederates pulled their guards back so that the construction could go forward without a fight. As a Northern soldier remarked, “It certainly was a strange war scene for the opposing men … to meet and talk over the disputed ground just as though it was adjoining neighbors who had met in a friendly way to establish their line fence.” At one stage, indeed, one Northerner suggested that the approaches be redesigned so that the Confederate guards need not be disturbed; and a Confederate replied, “Oh, that don’t make any difference. You Yanks will soon have the place anyway.” In front of one corps, rival officers met between the lines to make a harmonious arrangement of picket lines, and a Federal engineer officer confessed: “As the enemy could have stopped our work by remaining in his lines and firing an occasional volley, the advantage of this arrangement, novel in the art of war, was entirely on our side, and was not interfered with.” This officer characterized the Confederate defense as “far from being vigorous,” and said that the whole object of the defenders seemed to be “to wait for another assault, losing in the meantime as few men as possible.”10
Yet although an engineer might say that the defense lacked vigor, none of Grant’s men considered the siege of Vicksburg a picnic. Infantry firing usually died down at night—there was an unspoken agreement along the picket lines not to do any shooting after dark except under orders from higher up—but the Federal artillery was apt to break out with a heavy barrage at any moment, and shell fuses were so defective that many Federal shells burst over Federal trenches; some soldiers insisted that these caused more casualties than Rebel bullets. Daybreak usually brought a hard bombardment from the siege lines, and from dawn to dusk the musket fire was heavy. It was common for a man in the trench lines to use from fifty to one hundred cartridges in one day, at a time when no attack was being made or threatened. After darkness, the Confederates liked to jeer at their Yankee opponents, asking them how they liked the sunny South, and inquiring—with pointed reference to the large number of rifles the Federals had lost in the unsuccessful assaults of May 22—whether the Yankees wanted to get rid of any more Enfields. The heat and the constant labor of trench building were a burden, and men complained that they were “as dirty as hogs,” with no chance to change clothing and no water to wash face or hands. One boy who wrote to his sister said the Confederates had not fired a cannon for seven days, but that at least fifty rifle bullets had whizzed over his head in the last ten minutes. Many men were wounded simply because they got too used to trench warfare and exposed themselves unnecessarily; one man insisted that “as long as a man uses proper caution he is not in much danger.”11
Grant was out on the firing line often enough, and at times he was rebuked for making a target of himself. When he climbed a timber observation tower which often came under enemy fire, a Minnesota private, not recognizing him, yelled up angrily: “You old————, you’d better keep down off of there or you’ll be shot.” A comrade tugged at the man�
�s sleeve and told him: “That’s Grant!” and the man quickly lost himself. One day Grant rode a mule behind an exposed section of line, and was greeted with a shout from the trenches: “See here, you damned old fool, if you don’t get off that mule you’ll get shot.” When the man who had shouted was told who this mule-rider was, he stoutly replied: “I don’t care who he is, what’s he fooling around here for anyway? We’re shot at enough without taking any chances with him.” A newspaper correspondent visiting the trenches one day saw two men walking without haste toward a gun emplacement, while Confederate bullets kicked up spurts of dust about their feet, and he stuck his own head above the parapet long enough to call: “Stoop down, down, damn you, down!” The pedestrians walked in among the guns, and the reporter saw that they were Grant and Hovey. Grant, he said, stood on the parapet to examine the Rebel works through his field glasses, motioning Hovey to get down under cover, and Hovey protested that it was Grant who should take shelter—“I’m only a general of division and it’s easy to fill my place, but with you, sir, it’s different.”12