The Civil War: A Narrative: Fredericksburg to Meridian

by Shelby Foote

  He did not intend to take this lying down, but he soon found that Grant had played the old army game with such skill that his opponent was left without a leg to stand on. “I have been relieved for an omission of my adjutant. Hear me,” McClernand wired Lincoln from Cairo on his way to Springfield, their common home. From there he protested likewise to Halleck, suggesting the possible disclosure of matters that were dark indeed: “How far General Grant is indebted to the forbearance of officers under his command for his retention in the public service, I will not undertake to state unless he should challenge it. None know better than himself how much he is indebted to that forbearance.” That might be, but it was no help to the general up in Illinois; Grant challenged nothing, except to state that he had “tolerat[ed] General McClernand long after I thought the good of the service demanded his removal.” In time, there came to Springfield a letter signed “Your friend as ever, A. Lincoln,” in which the unhappy warrior was told: “I doubt whether your present position is more painful to you than to myself. Grateful for the patriotic stand so early taken by you in this life-and-death struggle of the nation, I have done whatever has appeared practicable to advance you and the public interest together.” However: “For me to force you back upon Gen. Grant would be forcing him to resign. I cannot give you a new command, because we have no forces except such as already have commanders.” In short, the President had nothing to offer his fellow-townsman in the way of balm, save his conviction that a general was best judged by those “who have been with him in the field.… Relying on these,” Lincoln said in closing, “he who has the right needs not to fear.”

  This was perhaps the unkindest cut of all, since McClernand knew only too well what was likely to happen to his reputation if judgment was left to Sherman and McPherson and their various subordinate commanders, including the army’s two remaining ex-congressmen Blair and Logan. Among all these, and on Grant’s staff, there was general rejoicing at his departure. Major General Edward O. C. Ord, who had fought under Grant at Iuka, had just arrived to take charge of a sixth corps intended to consist of the divisions under Herron and Lauman; instead, he replaced McClernand. Three days later, on June 22, Sherman was given command of the rearward line, which was strengthened by shifting more troops from in front of Vicksburg. “We want to whip Johnston at least 15 miles off, if possible,” Grant explained. Steele succeeded Sherman, temporarily, and the siege went on as before. No less than nine approaches were being run, all with appropriate parallels close up to the enemy trenches, so that the final assault could be launched with the lowest possible loss in lives. Mines were sunk under rebel strong-points, and on June 25 two of these were exploded on McPherson’s front, the largest just north of the Jackson road. It blew off the top of a hill there, leaving a big, dusty crater which the attackers occupied for a day and then abandoned, finding themselves under heavy plunging fire from both flanks and the rear. The mine accomplished little, but contributed greatly to the legend of the siege by somehow lofting a Negro cook, Abraham by name, all the way from the Confederate hilltop and into the Federal lines. He landed more or less unhurt, though terribly frightened. An Iowa outfit claimed him, put him in a tent, and got rich charging five cents a look. Asked how high he had been blown, Abraham always gave the same answer, coached perhaps by some would-be Iowa Barnum. “Donno, massa,” he would say, “but tink bout tree mile.”

  Mostly, though, the weeks passed in boredom and increasing heat, under whose influence the Confederates appeared to succumb to a strange apathy during the final days of June. A Federal engineer remarked that their defense “was far from being vigorous.” It seemed to him that the rebel strategy was “to wait for another assault, losing in the meantime as few men as possible,” and he complained that this had a bad effect on his own men, since “without the stimulus of danger … troops of the line will not work efficiently, especially at night, after the novelty has worn off.” Another trouble was that they foresaw the end of the siege, and no man coveted the distinction of being the last to die. Not that all was invariably quiet. Occasionally there were flare-ups, particularly where the trenches approached conjunction, and the snipers continued to take their toll. Though the losses were small, the suffering was great. “It looked hard,” a Wisconsin soldier wrote, “to see six or eight poor fellows piled into an ambulance about the size of Jones’s meat wagon and hustled over the rough roads as fast as the mules could trot and to see the blood running out of the carts in streams almost.” Taunts were flung as handily as grenades, back and forth across the lines, the graybacks asking, “When are you folks going to come on into town?” and the bluecoats replying that they were in no hurry: “We are holding you fellows prisoner while you feed yourselves.” There was much fraternization between pickets, who arranged informal truces for the exchange of coffee and tobacco, and the same Federal engineer reported that the enemy’s “indifference to our approach became at some points almost ludicrous.” Once, for example, when the blue sappers found that as a result of miscalculation a pair of approach trenches would converge just inside the rebel picket line, the two sides called a cease-fire and held a consultation at which it was decided that the Confederates would pull back a short distance in order to avoid an unnecessary fire fight. At one stage of the discussion a Federal suggested that the approaches could be redesigned to keep from disturbing the butternut sentries, but the latter seemed to think that it would be a shame if all that digging went to waste. Besides, one said, “it don’t make any difference. You Yanks will soon have the place anyhow.”

  Grant thought so, too. By now, in fact—though he kept his soldiers burrowing, intending to launch his final assault from close-up positions in early July—he was giving less attention to Pemberton than he was to Johnston, off in the opposite direction, where Sherman described him as “vibrating between Jackson and Canton” in apparent indecision. Blair had reported earlier, on returning from a scout, that “every man I picked up was going to Canton to join him. The negroes told me their masters had joined him there, and those who were too old to go, or who could escape on any other pretext, told me the same story.” This had a rather ominous sound, as if hosts were gathering to the east, but Grant was not disturbed. He had access, through the treacherous courier, to many of the messages that passed between his two opponents. He knew what they were thinking, what the men under them were thinking, and what the beleaguered citizens were thinking. He spoke of their expectations in a dispatch he sent Sherman on June 25, the day the slave Abraham came hurtling into the hands of the Iowans: “Strong faith is expressed by some in Johnston’s coming to their relief. [They] cannot believe they have been so wicked as for Providence to allow the loss of their stronghold of Vicksburg. Their principal faith seems to be in Providence and Joe Johnston.”

  By then—the fortieth day of siege—it had been exactly a month since the man in whom Vicksburg’s garrison placed its “principal faith” assured Pemberton: “Bragg is sending a division. When it joins I will come to you.” The division reached him soon afterwards, under Breckinridge, and was combined with the three already at hand under Loring, French, and Walker; Johnston’s present-for-duty strength now totaled 31,226 men, two thirds of whom had joined him since his arrival in mid-May. But he found them quite deficient in equipment, especially wagons, and deferred action until such needs could be supplied. In the interim he got into a dispute with the Richmond authorities, protesting that he had only 23,000 troops, while Seddon insisted that the correct figure was 34,000. Finally the Secretary told him: “You must rely on what you have,” and urged him to move at once to Pemberton’s relief. But Johnston would not be prodded into action. “The odds against me are much greater than those you express,” he wired on June 15, and added flatly: “I consider saving Vicksburg hopeless.” Shocked by his fellow Virginian’s statement that he considered his assignment an impossible one, Seddon took this to mean that Johnston did not comprehend the gravity of the situation or the consequences of the fall of the Gibraltar of t
he West, which in Seddon’s eyes meant the probable fall of the Confederacy itself. It seemed to him, moreover, that the general—in line with his behavior a year ago, down the York-James peninsula—was moving toward a decision not to fight at all, and to the Secretary this was altogether unthinkable. “Your telegram grieves and alarms me,” he replied next day. “Vicksburg must not be lost without a desperate struggle. The interest and honor of the Confederacy forbid it. I rely on you still to avert the loss. If better resources do not offer, you must hazard attack. It may be made in concert with the garrison, if practicable, but otherwise without; by day or night, as you think best.” Still Johnston would not budge. “I think you do not appreciate the difficulties in the course you direct,” he wired back, “nor the probabilities or consequences of failure. Grant’s position, naturally very strong, is intrenched and protected by powerful artillery, and the roads obstructed.… The defeat of this little army would at once open Mississippi and Alabama to Grant. I will do all I can, without hope of doing more than aid to extricate the garrison.” Fairly frantic and near despair over this prediction that the Father of Waters was about to pass out of Confederate hands, severing all practical connection with the Transmississippi and its supplies of men and food and horses, Seddon urged the general “to follow the most desperate course the occasion may demand. Rely upon it,” he told him, “the eyes and hopes of the whole Confederacy are upon you, with the full confidence that you will act, and with the sentiment that it were better to fail nobly daring than, through prudence even, to be inactive.… I rely on you for all possible to save Vicksburg.”

  But no matter what ringing tones the Secretary employed, Johnston would not be provoked into what he considered rashness. “There has been no voluntary inaction,” he protested; he simply had “not had the means of moving.” By then it was June 22. Two days later he received a message from Pemberton, suggesting that he get in touch with Grant and make “propositions to pass this army out, with all its arms and equipages,” in return for abandoning Vicksburg to him. Johnston declined, not only because he did not believe the proposal would be accepted, but also because “negotiations with Grant for the relief of the garrison, should they become necessary, must be made by you,” he replied on June 27. “It would be a confession of weakness on my part, which I ought not to make, to propose them. When it becomes necessary to make terms, they may be considered as made under my authority.” In other words, any time Pemberton wanted to throw in the sponge, it would be all right with Johnston. However, he prefaced this by saying that the Pennsylvanian’s “determined spirit” encouraged him “to hope that something may yet be done to save Vicksburg,” and two days later, June 29, “field transportation and other supplies having been obtained,” he put his four divisions on the march for the Big Black, preceded by a screen of cavalry.

  He had never been one to tilt at windmills, nor was he now. The march—or “expedition,” as he preferred to call it—“was not undertaken in the wild spirit that dictated the dispatches from the War Department,” he later explained, and added scornfully: “I did not indulge in the sentiment that it was better for me to waste the lives and blood of brave soldiers ‘than, through prudence even,’ to spare them.” He never moved until he was ready, and then his movements were nearly always rearward. The one exception up to now had been Seven Pines, which turned out to be the exception that proved the rule, for it had cost him five months on the sidelines, command of the South’s first army, and two wounds that were still unhealed a year later. Moreover, it had resulted in his present assignment, which was by no means to his liking, though his resultant brusqueness was reserved for those above him on the ladder of command, never for those below. To subordinates he was invariably genial and considerate, and they repaid him with loyalty, affection, and admiration. “His mind was clear as a bell,” a staff officer had written from Jackson to a friend, two weeks ago, while the build-up for the present movement was still in progress. “I never saw a brain act with a quicker or more sustained movement, or one which exhibited a finer sweep or more striking power.… I cannot conceive surroundings more intensely depressing. Yet amidst them all, he preserved the elastic step and glowing brow of the genuine hero.”

  Desperation never rattled him; indeed, it had rather the opposite effect of increasing his native caution. And such was the case now as he approached the Big Black, beyond which Grant had intrenched a rearward-facing line. On the evening of July 1, Johnston called a halt between Brownsville and the river, and spent the next two days reconnoitering. Convinced by this “that attack north of the railroad was impracticable,” he “determined, therefore, to make the examinations necessary for the attempt south of the railroad.” On July 3, near Birdsong’s Ferry, he wrote Pemberton that he intended “to create a diversion, and thus enable you to cut your way out if the time has arrived for you to do this. Of that time I cannot judge; you must, as it depends upon your condition. I hope to attack the enemy in your front [on] the 7th.… Our firing will show you where we are engaged. If Vicksburg cannot be saved, the garrison must.”

  Next morning, however, before he took up the march southward he noticed a strange thing. Today was the Fourth—Independence Day—but the Yankees over toward Vicksburg did not seem to be celebrating it in the usual fashion. On this of all days, the forty-eighth of the siege, the guns were silent for the first time since May 18, when the bluecoats filed into positions from which to launch their first and second assaults before settling down to the digging and bombarding that had gone on ever since; at least till now. Johnston and his men listened attentively, cocking their heads toward the beleaguered city. But there was no rumble of guns at all. Everything was quiet in that direction.

  Stars in Their Courses

  WHATEVER LACK OF NERVE OR INGENUITY had been demonstrated in Mississippi throughout the long hot hungry weeks that Vicksburg had shuddered under assault and languished under siege, there had been no shortage elsewhere in the Confederate States of either of these qualities on which the beleaguered city’s hopes were hung. Indeed, a sort of inverse ratio seemed to obtain between proximity and daring, as if distance not only lent enchantment but also encouraged boldness, so far at least as the western theater was concerned. A case in point was Beauregard, 650 air-line miles away on the eastern seaboard. Charleston’s two-time savior was nothing if not inventive: especially when he had time on his hands, as he did now. In mid-May, with the laurels still green on his brow for the repulse of Du Pont’s ironclad fleet the month before, he unfolded in a letter to Joe Johnston—with whom he had shared the triumph of Manassas, back in the first glad summer of the war, and to whom, under pressure from Richmond, he had just dispatched 8000 of his men—a plan so sweeping in its concept that the delivery of the Gibraltar of the West, whose plight had started him thinking along these lines, was finally no more than an incidental facet of a design for sudden and absolute victory over all the combinations whereby the North intended to subjugate the South. According to his “general views of the coming summer campaign,” propounded in the letter to his friend, Johnston would be reinforced by troops from all the other Confederate commanders, who would stand on the defensive, east and west, while Johnston joined Bragg for an all-out offensive against the Union center, wrecking Rosecrans and driving the frazzled remnant of his army beyond the Ohio. Johnston would follow, picking up 10,000 recruits in Middle Tennessee and another 20,000 in Kentucky, and if this threat to the Federal heartland had not already prompted a withdrawal by the bluecoats from in front of Vicksburg, he could march west to the Mississippi, above Memphis, “and thus cut off Grant’s communications with the north.” When the besiegers moved upriver, as they would be obliged to do for want of supplies, Johnston would draw them into battle on a field of his choice, “and the result could not be doubtful for an instant.” With Grant thus disposed of, the victorious southern Army of the Center, some 150,000 strong by then, could split in two, one half crossing the big river to assist Kirby Smith and Price in the libera
tion of Louisiana and Missouri, while the other half joined Lee in Virginia to complete “the terrible lesson the enemy has just had at Chancellorsville.” Meanwhile, by way of lagniappe, a fleet of special torpedo boats would be constructed in England, from designs already on hand at Charleston, to steam westward across the Atlantic and “resecure” the Mississippi, upwards from its mouth. The war would be over: won.

  Thus Beauregard. But after waiting five weeks and receiving no sign that his suggestions had been received, much less adopted, he felt, as he told another friend, “like Samson shorn of his locks.” Time was slipping away, he complained in a postscript to his retained copy of the letter, despite the fact that “the whole of this brilliant campaign, which is only indicated here, could have been terminated by the end of June.” On July 1 he heard at last from Johnston, though only on an administrative matter and without reference to his proposals of mid-May. Assuming that the original must have gone astray, he sent him at once a copy of the letter, together with the postscript stressing the need for haste in the adoption of the plan which he called brilliant. “I fear, though, it is now too late to undertake it,” he admitted, and added rather lamely: “I hope everything will yet turn out well, although I do not exactly see how.”

  Nothing came of the Creole general’s dream of reversing the blue flood, first in the center and then on the left and right; but others with easier access to the authorities in Richmond had been making similar, if less flamboyant, proposals all the while. Longstreet for example, on his way to rejoin Lee in early May, hard on the heels of Chancellorsville and the aborted Siege of Suffolk, outlined for the Secretary of War a plan not unlike Beauregard’s, except that it had the virtue of comparative simplicity. It was Old Peter’s conviction “that the only way to equalize the contest was by skillful use of our interior lines,” and in this connection he proposed that Johnson give over any attempt to go directly to Pemberton’s assistance and instead reinforce Bragg at Tullahoma, while Longstreet, with his two divisions now en route from Suffolk, moved by rail to that same point for that same purpose; Rosecrans would be swamped by overwhelming numbers, and the victors then could march for the Ohio. Grant’s being the only force that could be used to meet this threat, his army would be withdrawn upriver and Vicksburg thereby would be relieved.… Seddon listened attentively. Though he liked the notion of using Hood and Pickett to break the enemy’s grip on the Mississippi south of Memphis, he preferred the more direct and still simpler method of sending them to Jackson for a movement against Grant where he then was. However, this presupposed the approval of Lee: which was not forthcoming. Lee replied that he would of course obey any order sent him, but he considered the suggestion less than wise. “The adoption of your proposition is hazardous,” he wired Seddon, “and it becomes a question between Virginia and the Mississippi.” The date was May 10; Stonewall Jackson died that afternoon. But Lee suppressed his grief in order to expand his objections to the Secretary’s proposal in a letter that same Sunday. He not only thought the attempt to rescue Pemberton by sending troops from Virginia unduly risky; he also considered it unnecessary. “I presume [the reinforcements] would not reach him until the last of this month,” he wrote. “If anything is done in that quarter, it will be over by that time, as the climate in June will force the enemy to retire.”