by Shelby Foote
It had been quite a costly operation all around. Thirty-five of the flotilla’s 112 casualties were dead men—only two less than had been killed in the venture below New Orleans by a force almost three times as large—and of the seven ships that had attempted to run Port Hudson, one was destroyed and four had been driven back disabled. As a box score, this gave the Confederates ample claim to the honors of the engagement; but the fact remained that, whatever the cost, Farragut had done what he set out to do. He had put warships north of the bluff on the Mississippi, and he was ready to use them to dispute the rebel claim to control of the 250 miles of river below Vicksburg. Dropping down at dawn to just beyond range of Port Hudson’s upper batteries, he fired the prearranged three-gun signal to let the rest of the flotilla know that he was still afloat, then set out upriver and anchored next morning off the mouth of the Red, up which he learned that the renegade Queen and the fast-steaming Webb had taken refuge after their flight from Porter’s dummy ironclad. Both were too heavily damaged, as a result of their ram attacks on the Indianola, to be able to fight again without extensive repairs. So he heard; but he was taking no chances. Lowering the Hartford’s yards to the deck, he lashed them there and carried a heavy anchor chain from yard tip to yard tip, all the way round, to fend off attackers. Still unsatisfied, he improvised water-line armor by lashing cypress logs to the sides of the vessel and slung hawsers from the rigging, thirty feet above the deck, with heavy netting carried all the way down to the rail to frustrate would-be boarders. Then, accompanied by her six-gun escort Albatross, the Hartford—whose own builders would scarcely have recognized her, dressed out in this manner—set out northward, heading for Vicksburg in order to open communications with the upper fleet.
Passing Grand Gulf on March 19 the two ships came under fire that cost them 2 more killed and 6 more wounded, almost three times the number they had lost five nights ago; otherwise they encountered no opposition between Port Hudson and the point where they dropped anchor next morning, just beyond range of the lower Vicksburg batteries. Porter was up Steele Bayou, but conferring that afternoon with Grant and A. W. Ellet, the ram fleet commander, Farragut asked that he be reinforced by units from the upper flotilla. Ellet volunteered to send two of his boats, the Switzerland and the Lancaster, respectively under C. R. Ellet, the former captain of the Queen, and his uncle Lieutenant Colonel J. A. Ellet. They made their run at first light, March 25. The Lancaster was struck repeatedly in her machinery and hull, but she made it downstream, where a week’s patchwork labor would put her back in shape to fight again. Not so the Switzerland; she received a shell in her boilers and others which did such damage to her hull that she went to pieces and sank, affording her nineteen-year-old skipper another ride on a bale of cotton. Unperturbed, Grant reported her loss as a blessing in disguise, since it served to reveal her basic unfitness for combat: “It is almost certain that had she made one ram into another vessel she would have closed up like a spy-glass, encompassing all on board.”
In point of fact, whatever the cost and entirely aside from his accustomed optimism, he and all who favored the Union cause had much to be joyful about. As a result of this latest naval development, which would establish a blockade of the mouth of the Red and deny the rebels the use of their last extensive stretch of the Mississippi, Farragut had cut the Confederacy in two. The halves were still unconquered, and seemed likely to remain so for no one knew how long, but they were permanently severed one from the other. When the Hartford and the Albatross passed Port Hudson and were joined ten days later below Vicksburg by the steam ram Lancaster, the cattle and cereals of the Transmississippi, together with the goods of war that could be smuggled in through Mexico from Europe, became as inaccessible to the eastern South as if they were awaiting shipment on the moon.
This was not to say, conversely, that the Mississippi was open throughout its length to Federal commerce or even to Federal gunboats; that would not be the case, of course, until Vicksburg and Port Hudson had been taken or abolished. Continuing his efforts to accomplish this end, or anyhow his half of it, Grant was already engaged in the seventh of his experiments—which presently turned out to be the seventh of his failures. Work on the canal across the base of Vicksburg Point having been abandoned, he sent an engineering party out to find a better site for such a project close at hand. Receiving a report that a little digging south of Duckport, just above Young’s Point, would give the light-draft vessels access to Roundaway Bayou, which entered the main river at New Carthage, well below the Vicksburg and Warrenton batteries, Grant gave McClernand’s men a turn on the picks and shovels. For once, however, he had no great hope that much would come of the enterprise, even if it went as planned—only the lightest-draft supply boats would be able to get through; besides, there would still be the Grand Gulf batteries to contend with—and for once he was right. Even this limited success depended on a rise of the river; whereupon the river, perverse as always, began to fall, leaving Grant with a seventh failure on his hands.
“This campaign is being badly managed,” Cadwallader Washburn, a brigadier in McPherson’s corps, informed his congressman brother Elihu in Washington. “I am sure of it. I fear a calamity before Vicksburg. All Grant’s schemes have failed. He knows that he has got to do something or off goes his head. My impression is that he intends to attack in front.” (Washburn’s fears were better founded than he knew. Grant had just written a long letter to Banks, reviewing his lack of progress up to now, and in it he had stated flatly: “There is nothing left for me but to collect my strength and attack Haines Bluff. This will necessarily be attended with much loss, but I think it can be done.” On April Fools’ Day, however, accompanying Porter up the Yazoo for a reconnaissance of the position, he decided that such an attack “would be attended with immense sacrifice of life, if not defeat,” and abandoned the notion, adding: “This, then, closes out the last hope of turning the enemy by the right.”) Nor were others, farther removed from the scene of action, more reticent in giving their opinion of the disaster in store for the Army of the Tennessee. For example Marat Halstead, editor of the Cincinnati Commercial, addressed his friend the Secretary of the Treasury on the matter: “You do once in a while, don’t you, say a word to the President, or Stanton, or Halleck, about the conduct of the war? Well, now, for God’s sake say that Genl Grant, entrusted with our greatest army, is a jackass in the original package. He is a poor drunken imbecile. He is a poor stick sober, and he is most of the time more than half drunk, and much of the time idiotically drunk.… Grant will fail miserably, hopelessly, eternally. You may look for and calculate his failures, in every position in which he may be placed, as a perfect certainty. Don’t say I am grumbling. Alas! I know too well I am but feebly outlining the truth.” Alarmed, Chase passed the letter on to Lincoln with the reminder that the Commercial was an influential paper, and the indorsement: “Reports concerning General Grant similar to the statements made by Mr Halstead are too common to be safely or even prudently disregarded.” Lincoln read it with a sigh. “I think Grant has hardly a friend left, except myself,” he told his secretary, and when a delegation came to protest Grant’s alleged insobriety he put these civilians off with the remark, “If I knew what brand of whiskey he drinks I would send a barrel or so to some other generals.” About this time a Nebraska brigadier, in Washington on leave from Vicksburg, called on the President and the two men got to talking. “What I want, and what the people want, is generals who will fight battles and win victories,” Lincoln said. “Grant has done this, and I propose to stand by him.”
The evidence was conflicting. Some said the general never touched a drop; others declared that he was seldom sober; while still others had him pegged as a spree drinker. “He tries to let liquor alone but he cannot resist the temptation always,” a Wisconsin brigadier wrote home. “When he came to Memphis he left his wife at LaGrange, and for several days after getting here was beastly drunk, utterly incapable of doing anything. Quinby and I took him in charge, watch
ing him day and night and keeping liquor away from him.” According to this witness, the bender was only brought to an end when “we telegraphed to his wife and brought her on to take care of him.” On the other hand, Mary Livermore—later famous as a suffragette—led a Sanitary Commission delegation down to Young’s Point to investigate the rumors, and it was her opinion that the general’s “clear eye, clean skin, firm flesh, and steady nerves … gave the lie to the universal calumnies then current concerning his intemperate habits.” Still unsatisfied, Stanton sent the former Brook Farm colonist and Greeley journalist Charles Dana down the Mississippi, ostensibly as an inspector of the pay service, but actually as a spy for the War Department. He arrived in early April, became in effect a member of the general’s military family, and soon was filing reports that glowed with praise not only of Grant but also of Sherman and McPherson, declaring that in their “unpretending simplicity” the three Ohioans were “as alike as three peas.” McClernand did not fare so well in these dispatches; for if Dana acquired a fondness for the army commander’s friends, he also developed a dislike for his enemies. Later he summed up his findings by describing Grant as “the most modest, the most disinterested, and the most honest man I ever knew, with a temper that nothing could disturb and a judgment that was judicial in its comprehensiveness and wisdom. Not a great man except morally; not an original or brilliant man, but sincere, thoughtful, deep, and gifted with courage that never faltered.”
Aside from the rhetoric here included, practically all of the general’s soldiers would have agreed with this assessment of his character and abilities, even though it was delivered in the wake of seven failures. “Everything that Grant directs is right,” one declared. “His soldiers believe in him. In our private talks among ourselves I never heard a single soldier speak in doubt of Grant.” According to a New York reporter, this was not only because of “his energy and disposition to do something,” it was also because he had “the remarkable tact of never spoiling any mysterious and vague notions which [might] be entertained in the minds of the privates as to the qualities of the commander-in-chief. He confines himself to saying and doing as little as possible before his men.” Another described him as “a man who could be silent in several languages,” and it was remarked that, on the march, he was more inclined to talk of “Illinois horses, hogs, cattle, and farming, than of the business actually at hand.” In general he went about his job, as one observer had stated at the outset, “with so little friction and noise that it required a second look to be sure he was doing anything at all.” One of his staff officers got the impression that he was “half a dozen men condensed into one,” while a journalist, finding him puzzling in the extreme because he seemed to amount to a good deal more than the sum of all his parts, came up with the word “unpronounceable” as the one that described him best. Grant, he wrote, “has none of the soldier’s bearing about him, but is a man whom one would take for a country merchant or a village lawyer. He had no distinctive feature; there are a thousand like him in personal appearance in the ranks.… A plain, unpretending face, with a comely, brownish-red beard and a square forehead, of short stature and thick-set. He is we would say a good liver, and altogether an unpronounceable man; he is so like hundreds of others as to be only described in general terms.” The soldiers appreciated the lack of “superfluous flummery” as he moved among them, “turning and chewing restlessly the end of his unlighted cigar.” They almost never cheered him, and they did not often salute him formally; rather, they watched him, as one said, “with a certain sort of familiar reverence.” Present discouragements were mutual; so, someday, would be the glory. Somehow he was more partner than boss; they were in this thing together. “Good morning, General,” “Pleasant day, General,” were the usual salutations, more fitting than cheers or hat-tossing exhibitions; “A pleasant salute to, and a good-natured nod from him in return, seems more appropriate.” All these things were said of him, and this: “Here was no McClellan, begging the boys to allow him to light his cigar on theirs, or inquiring to what regiment that exceedingly fine-marching company belonged.… There was no nonsense, no sentiment; only a plain business man of the republic, there for the one single purpose of getting that command over the river in the shortest time possible.”
Yet the fact remained that he and they were into their third month of camping almost within the shadow of the Vicksburg bluff, and all they had accomplished so far was the addition of five to their previous two failures; they were still not “over the river.” However, as the flood waters receded, defining the banks of the bayous and even the network of greasy-looking roads hub deep in mud, there were rumors that Grant was evolving an entirely new approach to the old problem. “As one after another of his schemes fail,” Congressman Washburne heard from his brigadier brother—who had dropped the final euphonious “e” from his surname, presumably as superfluous baggage for a soldier—“I hear that he says he has a plan of his own which is yet to be tried [but] in which he has great confidence.” Just what this was Grant would not say, either to subordinates or superiors, but his staff observed that he spent long hours in the former ladies’ cabin of his headquarters boat the Magnolia, blueing the air with cigar smoke as he pored over maps and tentative orders, not so much inaccessible (“I aint got no business with you, General,” they heard one caller tell him; “I just wanted to have a little talk with you, because folks will ask me if I did”) as removed, withdrawn behind a barrier of intense preoccupation. After several days of this, McPherson came into the cabin one evening, glass in hand, and stood facing Grant across the work-littered desk. “General, this won’t do,” he said. “You are injuring yourself. Join us in a few toasts, and throw this burden off your mind.” Mrs Livermore, for one, would have been horrified, but what followed would have quickly reassured her. Grant looked up, smiled, and replied that whiskey was not the answer; if McPherson really wanted to help him, he said, he could give him a dozen cigars and leave him alone. McPherson did so, and Grant returned to brooding over his papers, still seeking a way to come to grips with the Confederates in their hilltop citadel.
Death of a Soldier
PIERRE GUSTAVE TOUTANT BEAUREGARD WAS as flamboyant by nature as by name, and over the course of the past two years this quality, coupled all too often with a readiness to lay down the sword and take up the pen in defense of his reputation with the public, had got him into considerable trouble with his superiors, who sometimes found it difficult to abide his Creole touchiness off the field of battle for the sake of his undoubted abilities on it. Called “Old Bory” by his men, though he was not yet forty-five, the Hero of Sumter had twice been relieved of important commands, first in the East, where he had routed McDowell’s invasion attempt at Manassas, then in the West, where he had saved his badly outnumbered army by giving Halleck the slip at Corinth, and now he was back on the scene of his first glory in Charleston harbor. Here, as elsewhere, he saw his position as the hub of the wheel of war. Defying Union sea power, Mobile on the Gulf and Wilmington, Savannah, and Charleston on the Atlantic remained in Confederate hands, and of these four it was clear at least to Beauregard that the one the Federals coveted most was the last, variously referred to in their journals as “the hotbed of treachery,” “the cradle of secession,” and “the nursery of disunion.” Industrious as always, the general was determined that this proud South Carolina city should not suffer the fate of his native New Orleans, no matter what force the Yankees brought against it. Conducting frequent tours of inspection and keeping up as usual a voluminous correspondence—a steady stream of requisitions for more guns and men, more warships and munitions, nearly all of which were returned to him regretfully unfilled—he only relaxed from his duties when he slept, and even then he kept a pencil and a note pad under his pillow, ready to jot down any notion that came to him in the night. “Carolinians and Georgians!” he exhorted by proclamation. “The hour is at hand to prove your devotion to your country’s cause. Let all able-bodied men, from the seaboar
d to the mountains, rush to arms. Be not exacting in the choice of weapons; pikes and scythes will do for exterminating your enemies, spades and shovels for protecting your friends. To arms, fellow citizens! Come share with us our dangers, our brilliant success, or our glorious death.”
Two approaches to Charleston were available to the Federals. They could make an amphibious landing on one of the islands or up one of the inlets to the south, then swing northeastward up the mainland to move upon the city from the rear; or they could enter through the harbor itself, braving the massed batteries for the sake of a quick decision, however bloody. Twice already they had tried the former method, but both times—first at Secessionville, three months before Beauregard’s return from the West in mid-September, and again at Pocotaligo, one month after he reassumed command—they had been stopped and flung back on their naval support before they could gather momentum. This time he thought it probable that they would attempt the front-door approach, using their new flotilla of vaunted ironclads to spearhead the attack. If so, they were going to find they had taken on a good deal more than they expected; for the harbor defenses had been greatly improved during the nearly two years that had elapsed since the war first opened here. Fort Moultrie, Castle Pinckney, and Fort Sumter, respectively on Sullivan’s Island, off the mouth of the Cooper River, and opposite the entrance to the bay, had not only been strengthened, each in its own right, but now they were supported by other fortifications constructed at intervals along the beaches and connected by a continuous line of signal stations, making it possible for a central headquarters, itself transferrable, to direct and consolidate their fire. First Beauregard, then Pemberton, and now Beauregard again—both accomplished engineers and artillerists, advised moreover by staffs of specialists as expert as themselves—had applied all their skill and knowledge to make the place as nearly impregnable as military science and Confederate resources would allow. A total of seventy-seven guns of various calibers now frowned from their various embrasures, in addition to which the harbor channels were thickly sown with torpedoes and other obstructions, such as floating webs of hemp designed to entangle rudders and snarl propellers. Not content with this, the sad-eyed little Creole had not hesitated to dip into his limited supply of powder in order to improve the marksmanship of his cannoneers with frequent target practice. Like his idol Napoleon he believed in a lucky star, but he was leaving as little as possible to chance; for which reason he had set marker buoys at known ranges in the bay, with the corresponding elevations chalked on the breeches of the guns. As a last-ditch measure of desperation, to be employed if all else failed, he encouraged the organization of a unit known as the Tigers, made up of volunteers whose assignment was to hurl explosives down the smokestacks of such enemy ships as managed to break through the ring of fire and approach the fortress walls or the city docks. The ironclads might indeed be invincible; some said so, some said not; but one thing was fairly certain. The argument was likely to be settled on the day their owners tested them in Charleston harbor.