The Civil War: A Narrative: Fredericksburg to Meridian

by Shelby Foote

  Four weeks of siege, highlighted by two full-scale assaults and one abortive night attack, had cost Banks more than 4000 casualties along his seven concave miles of front. His men, suspecting that they had inflicted scarcely more than one tenth as many casualties on the enemy, were so discouraged that the best he could say of them, in a note to Farragut that evening, was that they were “in tolerable good spirits.” Presently, though, even this was more than he could claim. “The heat, especially in the trenches, became almost insupportable, the stenches quite so,” a staff major later recalled. “The brooks dried up, the creek lost itself in the pestilential swamp, the springs gave out, and the river fell, exposing to the tropical sun a wide margin of festering ooze. The illness and mortality were enormous.” Counting noses four days after the second decisive repulse, Banks reported that he was down to 14,000 effectives, including the nine-month volunteers whose enlistments were expiring. This too was a source of discontent, which reached the stage of outright mutiny in at least one Bay State regiment, and the reaction was corrosive. Men whose time was nearly up did not “feel like desperate service,” Banks told Halleck, while those who had signed on for the duration did not “like to lead where the rest will not follow.” Old Brains had a prescription for that, however. “When a column of attack is formed of doubtful troops,” he answered, “the proper mode of curing their defection is to place artillery in their rear, loaded with grape and canister, in the hands of reliable men, with orders to fire at the first moment of disaffection. A knowledge of such orders will probably prevent any wavering, and, if not, one such punishment will prevent any repetition of it in your army.”

  This was perhaps reassuring, though in an unpleasant sort of way, since it showed the general-in-chief to be considerably more savage where blue rebels were concerned than he had ever been when his opponents wore butternut or gray. However, Banks had even larger problems than mutiny on his hands by then. Emory was crying havoc in New Orleans, which he protested was in grave danger of being retaken by the rebels any day now. “The railroad track at Terre Bonne is torn up. Communication with Brashear cut off,” he notified Banks on June 20, adding: “I have but 400 men in the city, and I consider the city and the public property very unsafe. The secessionists here profess to have certain information that their forces are to make an attempt on the city.” Five days later—by which date Port Hudson had been under siege a month—he declared that the rebels bearing down on him were “known and ascertained to be at least 9000, and may be more.… The city is quiet on the surface, but the undercurrent is in a ferment.” “Something must be done for this city, and that quickly,” he insisted four days later. His anxiety continued to mount in ratio to his estimate of the number of graybacks moving against him, until finally he said flatly: “It is a choice between Port Hudson and New Orleans.… My information is as nearly positive as human testimony can make it that the enemy are 13,000 strong, and they are fortifying the whole country as they march from Brashear to this place, and are steadily advancing. I respectfully suggest that, unless Port Hudson is already taken, you can only save this city by sending me reinforcements immediately and at any cost.” What was more, he said, the danger was not only from outside New Orleans. “There are at least 10,000 fighting men in this city (citizens) and I do not doubt, from what I see, that these men will, at the first appearance of the enemy within view of the city, be against us to a man. I have the honor to be &c. W. H. Emory, Brigadier General, Commanding.”

  But Banks had no intention of loosening his grip on the upriver fortress, which he believed—despite the nonfulfillment of all his earlier predictions—could not hold out much longer. Emory would have to take his chances. If it came to the worst and New Orleans fell, Farragut would steam down and retake it with the fleet that would be freed for action on the day Port Hudson ran up the white flag. Meanwhile the signs were good. On June 29, no less than thirty deserters stole out of the rebel intrenchments and into the Union lines, and though by now Banks knew better than to judge the temper of the garrison by that of such defectors, he was pleased to learn from those who arrived in the afternoon that their dinner had been meatless. In the future, they had been told, the only meat they would get would be that of mules. Judging by the adverse reaction of his own troops to a far more palatable diet, Banks did not think the johnnies would be likely to sustain their morale for long on that. However, one of the butternut scarecrows brought with him a copy of yesterday’s Port Hudson Herald, which featured a general order issued the day before by Gardner, “assuring the garrison that General Johnston will soon relieve Vicksburg, and then send reinforcements here.” The southern commander declared as well, Banks pointed out in passing the news along to Halleck, “his purpose to defend the place to the last extremity.”

  Confident none the less “of a speedy and favorable result”—so at least he assured the general-in-chief—Banks kept his long-range batteries at work around the clock, determined to give the Confederates no rest. The fire at night was necessarily blind, but that by day was skillfully directed by an observer perched on a lofty yardarm of the Richmond, tied up across the river from the bluff. He communicated by wigwag with a battery ashore, which also had a signalman, and the two kept up a running colloquy, not only to improve the marksmanship, but also to relieve the tedium of the siege.

  “Your fifth gun has hit the breastwork of the big rifle four times. Its fire is splendid. Can dismount it soon.”

  “You say our fifth gun?”

  “Yes, from the left.” But the next salvo brought a shift of attention. “Your sixth gun just made a glorious shot.… Let the sixth gun fire 10 feet more to the left.”

  “How now about the fifth and sixth guns?”

  “The sixth gun is the bully boy.”

  “Can you give it any directions to make it more bully?”

  “Last shot was little to the right.”

  Just then, however, the cannoneers were forced to call a halt. “Fearfully hot here,” the battery signalman explained. “Several men sunstruck. Bullets whiz like fun. Have ceased firing for a while, the guns are so hot. Will profit by your directions afterward.” Presently they resumed firing, though with much less satisfactory results, according to the observer high in the rigging of the Richmond.

  “Howitzer shell goes 6 feet over the guns every shot; last was too low, little too high again.” Exasperated, he added: “Can’t they, or won’t they, depress that gun?”

  “Won’t, I guess.… Was that shot any better, and that?”

  “Both and forever too high.”

  “We will vamose now. Come again tomorrow.”

  “Nine a.m. will do, will it not?”

  “Yes; cease signaling.”

  5

  The forces threatening New Orleans were no such host as Emory envisioned, but they were under the determined and resourceful Richard Taylor, who earlier, though much against his will, had struck at Grant’s supposedly vital supply line opposite Vicksburg. “To break this would render a most important service,” Pemberton had told Kirby Smith in early May, in one of his several urgent appeals for help across the way. Returning to Alexandria as soon as Banks pulled out, Taylor prepared to move at once back down the Teche, threaten New Orleans, and thereby “raise such a storm as to bring General Banks from Port Hudson, the garrison of which could then unite with General Joseph Johnston in the rear of General Grant.” On May 20, however, before he could translate his plan into action, he received instructions from Smith directing him to march in the opposite direction. “Grant’s army is now supplied from Milliken’s Bend by Richmond, down the Roundaway and Bayou Vidal to New Carthage,” the department commander explained, and if Taylor could interrupt the flow of supplies along this route, the Federal drive on Vicksburg would be “checked, if not frustrated.” He sympathized with Taylor’s desire “to recover what you have lost in Lower Louisiana and to push on toward New Orleans,” Smith added, “but the stake contended for near Vicksburg is the Valley of the Mississi
ppi and the Trans-Mississippi Department; the defeat of General Grant is the terminus ad quem of all operations in the West this summer; to its attainment all minor advantages should be sacrificed.” Taylor agreed as to the object, but not as to the method, much preferring his own. However, as he said later, “remonstrances were of no avail.” He turned his back on New Orleans, at least for the present, and set out up the Tensas, where he was joined by a division of about 4000 men under Major General John G. Walker, a Missourian lately returned from Virginia, where he had commanded a division in Lee’s army and was one of the many who could fairly be said to have saved the day at Sharpsburg.

  Debarking June 5 on the east bank of the Tensas, some twenty-five miles west of Grant’s former Young’s Point headquarters, Taylor sent his unarmed transports back downstream to avoid losing them in his absence. Next day he surprised and captured a small party of Federals at Richmond, midway between the Tensas and the Mississippi, only to learn that Grant had established a new base up the Yazoo, well beyond the reach of any west-bank forces, and was no longer dependent on the one at Milliken’s Bend. “Our movement resulted, and could result, in nothing,” Taylor later admitted. All the same, he carried out his instructions by attacking, at dawn of the 7th, both Young’s Point and Milliken’s Bend, sending a full brigade against each. Like Banks, Grant had been recruiting Negroes, but since he intended to use them as laborers rather than as soldiers, he had given them little if any military training apart from the rudiments of drill. Surprised in their camps by the dawn attacks, they panicked and fled eastward over the levee to the protection of Porter’s upstream flotilla. The gunboats promptly took up the quarrel, blasting away at the exultant rebels, and Taylor, observing that the panic was now on the side of the pursuers, ordered Walker to retire on Monroe, terminus of the railroad west of Vicksburg, while he himself went back down the Tensas and up the Red to Alexandria. Once there, he returned his attention to Banks and New Orleans, glad to have done with what he called “these absurd movements” against a supposedly vital supply line which in fact had been abandoned for nearly a month before he struck it.

  Though the losses had been unequal—652 Federals had fallen or were missing, as compared to 185 Confederates—Grant was not disposed to be critical of the outcome. Agreeing with Porter that the rebels had got “nothing but hard knocks,” he was more laconic than reproachful in his mid-June report of the affair: “In this battle most of the troops engaged were Africans, who had little experience in the use of firearms. Their conduct is said, however, to have been most gallant, and I doubt not but with good officers they will make good troops.” Anyhow, this was beyond the circle of his immediate attention, which was fixed on the close-up siege of Vicksburg itself. Six divisions had been added by now to his original ten, giving him a total of 71,000 effectives disposed along two lines, back to back, one snuggled up to the semicircular defenses and the other facing rearward in case Joe Johnston got up enough strength and nerve to risk an attack from the east. Three divisions arrived in late May and early June from Memphis, the first of which, commanded by Brigadier General Jacob Lauman, was used to extend the investment southward, while the other two, under Brigadier Generals Nathan Kimball and William Sooy Smith, made up a fourth corps under Washburn, now a major general, and were sent to join Osterhaus, who had been left behind to guard the Big Black crossings while the two assaults were being launched. Frank Herron, who at twenty-five had won his two stars at Prairie Grove to become the Union’s youngest major general, arrived from Missouri with his division on June 11 and extended the line still farther southward to the river, completing Grant’s nine-division bear hug on Pemberton’s beleaguered garrison. The final two were sent by Burnside from his Department of the Ohio. Commanded by Brigadier Generals Thomas Welsh and Robert Potter, they constituted a fifth corps under Major General John G. Parke and raised the strength of the rearward-facing force to seven divisions. “Our situation is for the first time in the entire western campaign what it should be,” Grant had written Banks in the course of the build-up. And now that it was complete, so was his confidence as to the outcome of the siege, which he expressed not only in official correspondence but also in informal talks with his officers and men. “Gen. Grant came along the line last night,” an Illinois private wrote home. “He had on his old clothes and was alone. He sat on the ground and talked with the boys with less reserve than many a little puppy of a lieutenant. He told us that he had got as good a thing as he wanted here.”

  One item he would have liked more of was trained engineers. Only two such officers were serving in that capacity now in his whole army. However, as one of them afterwards declared, this problem was solved by the “native good sense and ingenuity” of the troops, Middle Western farm boys for the most part, who showed as much aptitude for such complicated work as they had shown for throwing bridges over creeks and bayous during the march that brought them here. According to the same officer, “Whether a battery was to be constructed by men who had never built one before, [or] a sap-roller made by those who had never heard the name … it was done, and after a few trials well done.” Before long, a later observer remarked, “those who had cut wood only for stoves would be speaking fluently of gabions and fascines; men who had patiently smoothed earth so that radishes might grow better would be talking affectionately of terrepleins for guns.” In all of this they were inspired by the same bustling energy and quick adaptability on the part of the generals who led them; for one thing that characterized Grant’s army was the youth of its commanders. McClernand, who was fifty-one, was the only general officer past fifty. Of the twenty-one corps and division commanders assigned to the Army of the Tennessee in the course of the campaign, the average age was under forty. And that promotion had been based on merit was indicated by the fact that the average age of the nine major generals was as low as that of the dozen brigadiers; indeed, excepting McClernand, it was better than one year lower. Moreover, nine of these twenty-one men were older than Grant himself, and this too was part of the reason for his confidence in himself and in the army which had come of age, so to speak, under his care and tutelage. He considered it more than a match for anything the Confederates could bring against him—even under Joe Johnston, whose abilities he respected highly. One day a staff officer expressed the fear that Johnston was planning to fight his way into Vicksburg in order to help Pemberton stage a breakout; but Grant did not agree. “No,” he said. “We are the only fellows who want to get in there. The rebels who are in now want to get out, and those who are out want to stay out. If Johnston tries to cut his way in we will let him do it, and then see that he don’t get out. You say he has 30,000 men with him? That will give us 30,000 more prisoners than we now have.”

  This was not to say that the two repulsed assaults had taught him nothing. They had indeed, if only by way of confirming a first impression that the rebel works were formidable. One officer, riding west on the Jackson road, had found himself confronted by “a long line of high, rugged, irregular bluffs, clearly cut against the sky, crowned with cannon which peered ominously from embrasures to the right and left as far as the eye could see.” Beyond an almost impenetrable tangle of timber felled on the forward slopes, “lines of heavy rifle pits, surmounted with head-logs, ran along the bluffs, connecting fort with fort, and filled with veteran infantry.” The approaches, he said, “were frightful enough to appall the stoutest heart.” Sherman agreed, especially after the two assaults which had cost the army more than four thousand casualties. “I have since seen the position at Sevastopol,” he wrote years later, “and without hesitation I declare that at Vicksburg to have been the more difficult of the two.” Skillfully constructed, well sited, and prepared for a year against the day of investment, the fortifications extended for seven miles along commanding ridges and were anchored at both extremities to the lip of the sheer 200-foot bluff, north and south of the beleaguered city. Forts, redoubts, salients, redans, lunets, and bastions had been erected or dug at irregular i
ntervals along the line, protected by overlapping fields of fire and connected by a complex of trenches, which in turn were mutually supporting. There simply was no easy way to get at the defenders. Moreover, Grant’s three-to-one numerical advantage was considerably offset, not only by the necessity for protecting his rear from possible attacks by the army Johnston was assembling to the east, but also by the fact that, because of the vagaries of the up-ended terrain, his line of contravallation had to be more than twice the length of the line he was attempting to confront. “There is only one way to account for the hills of Vicksburg,” a Confederate soldier had said a year ago, while helping to survey the present works. “After the Lord of Creation had made all the big mountains and ranges of hills, He had left on His hands a large lot of scraps. These were all dumped at Vicksburg in a waste heap.” One of Grant’s two professional engineers was altogether in agreement, pronouncing the Confederate position “rather an intrenched camp than a fortified place, owing much of its strength to the difficult ground, obstructed by fallen trees to its front, which rendered rapidity of movement and ensemble in an assault impossible.”

  Yet even this ruggedness had its compensations. Although the hillsides, as one who climbed them said, “were often so steep that their ascent was difficult to a footman unless he aided himself with his hands,” the many ravines provided excellent cover for the besiegers, and Grant had specified in his investment order: “Every advantage will be taken of the natural inequalities of the ground to gain positions from which to start mines, trenches, or advance batteries.” With the memory of slaughter fresh in their minds as a result of their two repulses, the men dug with a will. Knowing little or nothing at the outset of the five formal stages of a siege—the investment, the artillery attack, the construction of parallels and approaches, the breaching by artillery or mines, and the final assault—they told one another that Grant, having failed to go over the rebel works, had decided to go under them instead. Fortunately the enemy used his artillery sparingly, apparently conserving ammunition for use in repelling major assaults, but snipers were quick to shoot at targets of opportunity: in which connection a Federal major was to recall that “a favorite amusement of the soldiers was to place a cap on the end of a ramrod and raise it just above the head-logs, betting on the number of bullets which would pass through it within a given time.” Few things on earth appealed to them more, as humor, than the notion of some butternut marksman flaunting his skill when the target was something less than flesh and blood. Mostly, though, they dug and took what rest they could, sweating in their wool uniforms and cursing the heat even more than they did the snipers. Soon they were old hands at siege warfare. “The excitement … has worn away,” a lieutenant wrote home from the trenches in early June, “and we have settled down to our work as quietly and as regularly as if we were hoeing corn or drawing bills in chancery.”