by Bruce Catton
4. Down the River
The war was expanding at the end of 1862. Its potentialities were becoming immeasurable; so was the cost of fighting it, as the twenty-five thousand Federal casualties of Fredericksburg and Stone’s River attested. Burnside had been hopelessly beaten, and Rosecrans had been brought to a full stop. It remained to be seen whether U. S. Grant could do any better.
Grant held western Tennessee and was responsible for the territory north of it all the way back to the Ohio. He had some forty-eight thousand men in his command, although he had to use a good half of these to guard railroads, highways, supply dumps, and what not in his rear, and during the early fall he had been unable to advance. But after Bragg’s thrust into Kentucky was turned back, Grant was promised reinforcements, and it seemed to him that if he attacked the Confederates in his front vigorously he could keep them from bothering his rear too greatly. At about the time when Burnside began his unhappy move from the Blue Ridge foothillls to Rappahannock tidewater — early in November — Grant started south. He proposed to clear the last Rebel resistance out of western Tennessee and then strike down into Mississippi, where the Confederate General John C. Pemberton was waiting for him with an army that Grant believed to be about the size of his own.
Vicksburg was the objective, and Vicksburg was a hard place to reach, principally because of the existence of the Yazoo Delta.
The Yazoo River is the product of a large number of smaller streams, and it begins to be a river at a point near the Tennessee line, not far inland from the Mississippi itself. It wanders east into the state of Mississippi, picking up more rivers as it goes, drops south, and at last comes back to flow into the Mississippi a few miles above Vicksburg. To the east of the Yazoo there is high ground, but to the west of it — between the Yazoo and the Mississippi — there is a vast lowland, 170 miles long by 50 miles wide, a Venetian complex of sluggish streams, bayous, backwaters, and interconnecting sloughs, with a flat country all around subject to flood when the waters are high. As roads and wheeled transport existed in 1862, no army of invasion could hope to march across this Yazoo Delta. To reach Vicksburg, Federals in western Tennessee would either have to go straight down the Mississippi by steamboat or march down east of the Yazoo and come up to Vicksburg from the rear. The Yazoo country was an impassable barrier.
In the Mississippi the Union had a powerful naval squadron led by Admiral David Dixon Porter — an impish, long-bearded man of the rough-sea-dog type, too outspoken for his own good, and given to embroidering the tale of his own exploits, but for all that an energetic and capable naval officer. It was perfectly possible for Porter to steam down and bombard Vicksburg, but the place could never be captured that way; it lay upon high bluffs, and Confederate engineers had turned it into a fortress. It had to be approached from the east, and the army that tried to get there from western Tennessee would dangle at the end of a very long supply line, exposed to incessant Confederate raids.
Nevertheless, Vicksburg was all-important. As long as it held out the Mississippi was closed, and the administration was being warned that unless the river could be opened fairly soon the farmers of the Middle West, who felt, with reason, that the eastern railroads were gouging them mercilessly, might become highly sympathetic to the Confederacy. Furthermore, Vicksburg connected the two halves of the Confederacy; if it fell the South would automatically lose an irreplaceable part of its strength.
Accordingly, Grant began to move. He had no sooner begun than he discovered that something very mysterious was going on far to his rear.
One of Grant’s principal subordinates was Major General John A. McClernand of Illinois, a wiry, aggressive, ambitious man whom Grant eyed with deep distrust. McClernand was a Democratic politician; he had spoken up boldly for the Union cause after Fort Sumter, when the administration was in a mood to prize pro-war Democrats, and he had been made a general as a reward. There was nothing wrong with his fighting heart, but he was an unskillful soldier and he had so much seniority that he outranked everybody in Grant’s army except Grant himself. Grant had felt no especial sense of loss when late in August he got orders from Halleck detaching McClernand and sending him back to Springfield, Illinois, to help organize new volunteer troops. But by the end of November, Grant began to realize that McClernand was up to something.
In its great need for more soldiers that summer, the administration had played with the idea of getting some combination military and political hero to do a recruiting job. Mayor George Opdyke of New York, chairman of a big-name National War Committee, had asked Stanton to let either Frémont or Ormsby Mitchel tour the North to raise a special corps of fifty thousand men. Stanton had turned him down; the administration wanted no more of Frémont just then, and Mitchel had been ordered to duty along the Carolina coast (where he would presently die of a fever); but the basic idea was appealing, and shortly thereafter McClernand had come in with a plan of his own.
Let him go through the western states, he pleaded, getting and organizing recruits; then, when a force of perhaps thirty thousand of all arms had been raised, let him take it and move boldly down the Mississippi, answerable to no one but Washington. He would capture Vicksburg; this would open the river to the Gulf, split the Confederacy, assuage midwestern farmers, dampen the rising tide of northern Copperheads, and possibly win the war.1
Lincoln and Stanton told him to go ahead, and McClernand went west, conferring with governors and other men of influence and then taking to the stump to raise volunteers. He was popular with western Democrats and he was a good stump speaker, and before long new volunteers began to appear in quantity, especially in Illinois. McClernand busily organized them into regiments and wrote jubiliantly to Stanton, who assured him that “everything here is favorable for your expedition,” told him to make frequent reports, and added: “I long to see you in the field striking vigorous blows against the rebellion in its most vital point.”2
That McClernand was raising and organizing troops was, of course, public knowledge, but the rest of the program was top secret. Plenty of rumors were afloat, however, and these reached Grant; and then, on November 10, after he had wired Halleck asking why the reinforcements that had been promised him were not arriving, Grant received a very odd reply. A number of regiments were on the way, said Halleck, and more would quickly follow, and “Memphis will be made the base of a joint military and naval expedition on Vicksburg.”
Since Grant’s own plans called for an overland hike on the eastern side of the Yazoo Delta country, this sounded very much as if someone else were coming in to supersede him, and that someone could only be McClernand. Grant sent Halleck an anxious inquiry.
Halleck was playing his cards carefully. He had no use for McClernand, an independent Vicksburg expedition struck him as absurd, and if in the preceding winter he had tried to elbow Grant out of the army he was very much on Grant’s side now. Studying the McClernand case, Halleck discovered that the administration had put in McClernand’s orders a little escape clause, and of this Halleck now was prepared to take full advantage.
The War Department on October 20 had given McClernand confidential orders instructing him to do all of the things he had asked to be allowed to do. Among other things, these orders told McClernand to send the new troops he was raising to Cairo, Memphis, or such other place as Halleck might direct, “to the end that, when a sufficient force not required by the operations of General Grant’s command shall be raised,” McClernand might lead his men against Vicksburg.
Halleck was a good lawyer, and he saw through all of this without difficulty. The troops would go forward, as fast as McClernand got them ready, into Grant’s department. On arrival, it might easily turn out that they would be “required by the operations of General Grant’s command,” especially if McClernand himself did not at once go with them. Blandly Halleck wired Grant that he was not being superseded; all troops entering his department were under his command.3
Grant put Halleck’s messages on top of all the r
umors he had been hearing and worked out a new program. He would march down into Mississippi as he had planned, following the line of the Mississippi Central Railroad, which goes roughly parallel to the Yazoo, thirty or forty miles farther inland. Simultaneously a joint army-navy expedition would leave Memphis for Vicksburg. It would include some of the troops that had been in the department all along, and all of the McClernand troops that had arrived, but it would be under the command of William Tecumseh Sherman.4
Together, these two thrusts might be very effective. Grant’s own advance should force Confederate Pemberton to come up to meet him. Meanwhile Porter and his gunboats would convoy Sherman clear down the Mississippi to the mouth of the Yazoo. By ascending the Yazoo a short distance Sherman could put his army ashore at the foot of the Chickasaw Bluffs, just a few miles north of Vicksburg. If the Confederate defenders were kept busy opposing Grant’s thrust from the north, Sherman could storm the bluffs and take the city; if the Confederates concentrated against Sherman they could not very well keep Grant from moving on down the railroad. And, in any case, the big Vicksburg expedition would be put in motion without McClernand.
McClernand, meanwhile, back in Illinois, was happily sending new regiments down to Memphis, where Sherman was hastily giving them brigade and division formation and preparing to march them on transports. By the middle of December, McClernand was reporting to Washington that he had sent most of his men and that there was nothing of importance remaining for him to do in Illinois: might he not now be ordered to go to Memphis and assume the promised command?
The orders did not come, but news of what was going on at Memphis did, and on December 17 McClernand sent an outraged wire to Lincoln: “I believe I am superseded. Please advise me.”5 To Stanton, on the same day, he telegraphed a similar complaint.
Stanton sent him the most innocent of replies, brimming with reassurance. McClernand was not being superseded; Grant had been ordered to form the troops in his department into four army corps, McClernand would be named commander of one of these, and as soon as Grant signed the papers McClernand could go south, assume command of his troops, and head for Vicksburg. Simultaneously orders to proceed with the corps formation and the appointment of McClernand went from the War Department to Grant.
There was a letdown in this. Being a corps commander under Grant was not quite the same as being an independent army commander. There was also a catch in it. Grant made out the orders next day, December 18, and wired McClernand that his corps was ready and that it would “form a part of the expedition on Vicksburg”; Grant hoped that when McClernand reached Memphis he would find all preparations complete and the expedition ready to move.6 The catch lay in the fact that there was somehow a delay of several days in the transmission of this wire. By the time McClernand reached Memphis — he came down by special steamboat as soon as he got Grant’s message — he found that the expedition had not waited for him. Gunboats, transports, and two solid army corps, one of them belonging to McClernand and the other subject to his orders because he outranked its commander, had gone on down the river without him. There was nothing for him to do but go chugging down-river after it, fuming and fruitlessly demanding an explanation.
McClernand, in other words, had been given a neat double shuffle. He had dreamed up the expedition and he had brought in most of the troops for it, men who might not have enlisted at all without his efforts; now the expedition had moved out from under him, and although he would eventually overtake it, the moment of glory might easily elude him. He was never able to prove a thing on anybody, although it was clear that some very fancy footwork had been performed. Many years afterward Grant confessed: “I had good reason to believe that in forestalling him I was by no means giving offense to those whose authority to command was above both him and me.”7
Perhaps the Confederates helped a little, although the price of their help came high.
Grant’s army was moving down the line of the Mississippi Central Railroad while all of this was going on. It got as far as Oxford, thirty-five miles below the Tennessee line; some twenty miles in its rear, at the inconsiderable town of Holly Springs, Grant had established a huge supply dump. The country was wooded and thinly populated, and the inhabitants seemed to hold unanimous anti-Yankee sentiments of considerable bitterness. One reason, perhaps, was that the western troops were doing an uncommon amount of senseless looting. A Union officer remembered seeing in one occupied town a cavalryman staggering off, carrying a huge grandfather’s clock. Asked what on earth he proposed to do with it, the man explained that he was going to dismantle it “and get a pair of the little wheels out of it for spur rowels.”8 The idea took hold, and other cavalrymen were doing the same. Meanwhile the roads were poor, the weather was wet, most of the streams were swollen, and the army had no pontoon train.
Then, just as things seemed to be going well, two Confederate cavalry leaders taught Grant a lesson about the evils of exposing a long supply line to enemy action.
The first was curly-haired Earl Van Dorn, old-time friend of Grant at West Point, who brushed aside an incompetent Yankee cavalry force, scared a timorous infantry colonel into surrender, and seized the supply base at Holly Springs. The gray troopers made holiday in this town, burning more than a million dollars’ worth of Federal supplies and leaving Grant’s army in danger of starvation.
Worse yet was the incredible feat performed by Nathan Bedford Forrest.
Forrest took a newly recruited cavalry detachment, imperfectly mounted and largely unarmed, and swung far up into Tennessee, gobbling up one Federal base after another, seizing enough horses and arms so that his whole outfit could be fully equipped, cutting the railroad in several places, and destroying courier routes and telegraph lines so effectively that for days Grant was entirely cut off from communication with the rear echelon. It is possible that this was what delayed his message to McClernand: possible, too, that the complete silence (its cause not then known in Memphis) led Sherman to hurry off to Vicksburg in the belief that Grant had plunged deeply into Mississippi. McClernand, at any rate, was never able to prove that this was not the case.
The real importance of the raids, however, was that they brought Grant’s army to an abrupt standstill. All hands were put on half rations, and to keep his army from starvation Grant sent his wagons out into the country to seize supplies. They got so much stuff, incidentally, that Grant’s eyes popped out, and in the months to come he reflected long and hard on the likelihood that an army in Mississippi could abandon its supply line entirely and live off the country.9 This conclusion came to him later, however; at the time he could only call off his advance and wait while communications were restored. He could not get word to Sherman, and that officer sailed down-river for Vicksburg, confident that everything was going according to schedule.
Late in December, Sherman’s flotilla entered the mouth of the Yazoo, and the soldiers went ashore and made ready to assault Chickasaw Bluffs. As far as Sherman knew, Grant was approaching Vicksburg from the northeast, and the Rebels must be too busy fending him off to make a good defense at the bluffs.
Disillusionment came quickly. Pemberton did not have to worry about Grant, and he had plenty of men waiting for Sherman’s attack. The position on Chickasaw Bluffs was so strong that when it was properly manned it could not possibly be stormed, and when the Federals made their attack on December 29 they were quickly defeated, with over seventeen hundred casualties. Sherman got his men back on the boats, moved out of range, and glumly wondered what to do next. The expedition was a flat failure, and it seemed advisable to do something to put a good face on matters. He and Admiral Porter talked things over and agreed that something might be salvaged from defeat by making a quick stab at Confederate Fort Hindman, otherwise known as Arkansas Post — a stronghold forty miles up the Arkansas River, which entered the Mississippi seventy miles above Vicksburg. No real attack on Vicksburg, Sherman argued, could be made until this post was reduced; besides, a victory there would help the North fo
rget about what had happened at Chickasaw Bluffs.10
No sooner had they agreed on this than the steamer Tigress came in bearing McClernand — angry and eager. McClernand issued a proclamation assuming command of everything — between the men who had come down with him and the ones Sherman had led, there were now thirty-two thousand Federal soldiers in the vicinity — and he announced that this would hereafter be known as the Army of the Mississippi. Sherman would command one corps in this army and the other would be under General G. W. Morgan.11 This rubbed Sherman where he was raw; he felt that Morgan had let him down badly in the fight at the bluffs by failing to attack as ordered, but McClernand was boss and there was no help for it.
McClernand did respect Sherman as a soldier, and when the Arkansas Post idea was explained to him he immediately approved it. He had reached the scene on January 3, and by January 10 his army and Porter’s flotilla had gone up the Arkansas River and were hammering away at the fort.
The fort caved in quickly, the Federals took nearly five thousand prisoners, and here was a neat little success to counterbalance Chickasaw Bluffs. McClernand, Sherman, and Porter dropped down the river again to a point near the mouth of the Yazoo; and Grant, who had returned to Memphis, got the news.