by Bruce Catton
Grant was not in a mood to give McClernand a thing, and when he learned that the expedition had gone into Arkansas — this news reached him before he learned of the victory itself — he assumed that it was all McClernand’s doing, and he wrote indignantly to Halleck denouncing it as a senseless wild-goose chase. Then later returns came in: news of the victory, and the information that the idea had been Sherman’s. Grant promptly reversed himself and sent Halleck a message praising the move which he had just condemned and calling it an essential step in the Vicksburg campaign.12
At the same time he reversed his earlier strategic plan. It was obvious that the original route down the line of the railroad was very long and risky; obvious, too, that there was going to be a major drive down the river whether Grant liked it or not. McClernand had so much rank that wherever he went he would be in command unless Grant himself were present, and it was impossible for Grant to think calmly about things that might happen to an army in the steaming mud flats just north of Vicksburg with impulsive, unskilled McClernand in charge.
Grant would put all his eggs in one basket. The attack on Vicksburg would be made from the river. As large an army as Grant could assemble would be concentrated there, and Grant would go down to take personal command. On January 30, Grant joined McClernand, Sherman and Porter at Milliken’s Bend on the west bank of the river, ten miles above Vicksburg, and the decisive campaign of the Civil War had its beginning.
It would begin very slowly, and for a long time it would look like nothing so much as failure. Grant’s earlier impression that Vicksburg could not be attacked from the north and west — the only directions from which an army at Milliken’s Bend could conceivably approach it — was eminently correct. Ideally, it would have been much better to bring everyone back to Memphis and make a fresh start down the eastern side of the Yazoo Delta. But this just was not in the cards. The move down the river had been approved at Washington. Withdrawal now would be an unmistakable confession of defeat; the political situation in the North was excessively delicate, and it seemed likely that Fredericksburg and Stone’s River were, between them, about as large a budget of bad news as the citizenry would be likely to accept. There was nothing for it but to go ahead.
Chapter Eight
SWING OF THE PENDULUM
1. The Hour of Darkness
PROFOUND currents were moving in America that winter, but they had not yet fused to form one great tide that would carry everything along with it. They were still separate, often in conflict, with deep swirling eddies to mark the points of tension, and with odd backwaters where things seemed to drift upstream; and no one could say how the business would finally be resolved.
The three armies lay in their camps — in Virginia, in Tennessee, and along the Mississippi — and nothing seemed to be going right with them. Afterward men looked back and said that, taking everything together, this was the Valley Forge winter of the Civil War: the winter of misery and despair, of cold and hunger and of a seeming breakdown of all the arrangements that had been made to feed and clothe and usefully employ the men who had been called into the army. Certainly there was reason to draw the Valley Forge parallel, for in some ways the winter of 1862–63 marked the bottom of the depression.
Burnside made one more effort to use the Army of the Potomac after it had crawled back across the river to recuperate from the Fredericksburg defeat. In the middle of January, after a long spell of mild weather had dried the unpaved Virginia roads, he tried a march up the Rappahannock River to the fords that lie upstream from Fredericksburg, thinking to cross the river and come down on Lee’s flank. What luck he might have had with this move will never be known, for a howling rainstorm descended just as the army started to move, roads and fields turned into quagmires, and inside of twenty-four hours the whole army was hopelessly stuck in the mud. Pontoon trains and artillery columns were utterly helpless, bogged down so that they could not move at all unless men got shovels and dug them out. Infantry and cavalry could waddle along after a fashion, pounds of bulbous clay sticking to each helpless foot, but anything resembling an actual military movement was out of the question. After two days of it Burnside admitted that he was licked, and the army stumbled back to camp.
The camp to which it returned was cheerless enough, even without the humiliating knowledge that one more move had ended in defeat.
The Burnside regime had never quite been able to make regimental and brigade commanders keep house properly, and the log-and-canvas shelters which the men had put up over shallow pits in the ground were little better than pigsties. The commissary had broken down; in this safe camp no more than fifty miles from Washington, men were dying of scurvy because they had nothing but salt pork and hardtack to eat. Hospital arrangements were in a complete mess — no heat in the tents, no proper food for sick men, nursing so inefficient that some patients actually froze to death in their cots. Things, in short, were in a very bad state, and army morale reflected it.
Not only were the men grumpy toward their commanders — one corps defiantly refused to raise a cheer for Burnside at a review, even though all of the officers rode up and down the line, swinging their caps and chanting: “Hip — hip — hip — —” They were casting dark looks at President Lincoln himself. The Army of the Potomac was in theory the army that contained the largest core of anti-slavery sentiment, yet with everything going wrong the men found the Emancipation Proclamation hard to swallow.
One New Englander wrote savagely in a letter to his family: “I don’t feel as much like fighting as I used to for it looks to me as if fighting for the Union and Constitution is played out and that now we are fighting for the Abolition of Slavery. Speaking of Abe, I have gone clean back on him! He may be a very good rail splitter but rather a poor President I reckon..… Let the Nigger go to hell for all of me, and if a man wants to preach abolition, emancipation or any other ism he must find somebody besides me to preach it to.” A New Yorker reflected on the abysmal failure of leadership and wrote to his mother: “Perhaps Old Abe has some funny story to tell, appropriate to the occasion.… I am sick and tired of disaster and the fools that bring disaster upon us.”1
Many people back home were feeling the same way, and the letters the soldiers received reflected it. An Illinois officer in the Army of the Cumberland wrote that the home folks were “writing letters which would discourage the most loyal of men.” He put in most of his time, he said, “talking patriotism at the boys and doing good, round, solid cursing at the home cowardly vipers who are disgracing the genus man by their conduct.” In the big Union base at Nashville there were so many prostitutes that an Ohio soldier declared the army’s very existence was threatened; the authorities finally took a provost guard, rounded up fifteen hundred of the women, and moved them under guard all the way to Louisville, with stern orders not to come any farther south. While Rosecrans worked to reorganize his army and get it in shape for the spring campaign, he feared that he was about to be attacked: he wrote Halleck that Bragg was being reinforced and would soon take the offensive. He demanded reinforcements and complained that Rebel cavalry was constantly annoying him. Meanwhile his winter camps were wet, muddy, and uncomfortable, and there was a great deal of pneumonia.2
Grant’s Army of the Tennessee found itself strung up and down the western bank of the Mississippi for fifty miles. The river was abnormally high, much of the bottom land was under water, and only the levee itself seemed to offer camping space. Unending rains beat upon the levee, every company street was ankle-deep with black gummy mud, and there was sickness everywhere. A man in a newly arrived Indiana regiment reported that “scarcely a man had anything like good health,” and said that “the levee for miles is almost one continued mass of graves”; men had to pitch their tents on top of new graves, and the evil scent of death was always in the air. A doctor reported that steamers fitted as hospital ships would come down, load up with sick men, and then reveal a complete lack of nurses, so that helpless invalids had to look out for themselve
s; on one such steamer, he said, twenty-two men died overnight, “and I believe before God some of them died for want of proper nourishment.”3
All sorts of wild rumors went through camp. Some men asserted that the northern states were going to call their regiments home, and it was believed that if a man ran away from the army his home-state authorities would give him protection. When the mails failed to reach the army for a time it was reported that peace had been declared and that Grant was purposely stopping letters and newspapers “for fear we could not be held in subjection if we knew the state of affairs.” There was an epidemic of desertion, and an Ohio veteran wrote: “Now the hour of darkness began.” In some regiments the sick men outnumbered the well. On top of everything else the army failed to get its paymasters around on time and the soldiers were broke.4
All of this made it look as if the bottom had fallen out of the tub, and the Union cause seemed to be dipping down toward acceptance of defeat in January and February of 1863. But if there was reason for gloom there was also, in these armies and in the country behind them, reason for quiet confidence. Under the dejection there was a certain toughness; the sulkiest of complaints could come from men who really had no idea of quitting; and soldiers and civilians alike had deep reserves of strength and hope, to be drawn on when most needed. It is not hard to find signs that the will to win was still powerful.
In Iowa an unusual job of recruiting had just been completed. Early in January this state sent to St. Louis, to go marching through the streets to the rendezvous at Benton Barracks, the 37th Iowa Volunteer Infantry, numbering 914 rank and file; a regiment like all others except for one thing — everyone from colonel to drummer boy was safely past the upper military age limit of forty-five years. (Many of the men were over sixty, some were in their seventies, and one sprightly private confessed to the age of eighty.)
This was Iowa’s famous “Graybeard Regiment,” recruited by special arrangement with the War Department as a means of showing that there were plenty of draft-proof citizens who were perfectly willing to go to war. There was a tacit understanding that the regiment would be given guard and garrison duty as much as possible, but there was nothing binding about this. The 37th was in no sense a home-guard outfit; it had enlisted for the full three years and eventually it was to campaign in Missouri, Tennessee, and Mississippi, hiking in the rain and sleeping in the mud like anybody else. During its three years only scattered detachments got into actual fighting — the total casualty list was only seven — but 145 men died of disease, and 364 had to be mustered out of service for physical disability, and when the regiment at last was paid off, in May of 1865, it was revealed that more than thirteen hundred sons and grandsons of members of the regiment were in Federal military service. So old were these men, and so young their state, that not a man in the regiment could claim Iowa as his birthplace. There had been no Iowa when these Iowans were born.5
An army surgeon in a Kentucky regiment who went down the river with McClernand’s flotilla and saw Sherman’s men just after their repulse at Chickasaw Bluffs noticed no signs of depression among them. Instead, he found these soldiers “the noisiest crowd of profane-swearing, dram-drinking, card-playing, song-singing, reckless, impudent daredevils in the world.” An Illinois recruit who came to the army at this time said that the men thought more of Sherman than of any other man alive but that they never raised a cheer for him when he rode along the lines.6
For the Westerners did not often cheer their generals. In the Army of the Potomac it was different. During the McClellan regime, staff officers would ride ahead of the commanding general when he was about to make an appearance, and would see to it that a cheer was raised; a cheer was accepted as part of the routine, and for the most part the men offered it willingly enough. Officers sometimes went to great lengths in this business. When the Irish Brigade was paraded to get its first look at its new division commander, General Israel B. Richardson (who was to be killed at Antietam), a member of Richardson’s staff galloped over to the brigade just before the general arrived and made a speech about Richardson’s many virtues.
“And what do you think of the brave old fellow?” he demanded. “He has sent to this camp three barrels of whiskey, a barrel for each regiment, to treat the boys of the brigade, and we ought to give him a thundering cheer when he comes along.”
Naturally the Irishmen gave Richardson a tumultuous reception — not knowing that the staff officer had unblushingly lied to them and that no whiskey had been sent.7
The Easterners took their cue from McClellan, who liked cheering; the Westerners may have taken theirs from Grant, who didn’t care. An officer remembered seeing Grant one night while the army was crossing a bayou on a pontooon bridge during a forced march; he was in the saddle, solid, erect, and brown, keeping the traffic moving with repeated orders: “Push right along, men — close up fast and hurry over.” The men all turned to look at him, made note that the commanding general was in their midst, but said never a word. Looking back on it afterward, the officer mused: “Here was no McClellan, begging the boys to allow him to light his cigar by 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.”8
The Westerners would go where the generals told them to go, and within reasonable limits they would do what the generals told them to do, but they insisted on being unmilitary about it. But when the Potomac soldiers flatly refused to cheer Burnside, it was a sign that they had written him off.
At Murfreesboro the time of sickness and depression did not last long. Rosecrans got his supply lines working in spite of the Rebel raiders and saw to it that there was plenty to eat. The men cut cedar boughs to shade and protect their tents, camps were made clean and were kept well policed, and before long an Ohio private was confessing that “we may be said to have enjoyed all the comforts which can fall to a soldier’s lot.” The army had been badly mangled at Stone’s River; Rosecrans was going to let it get plenty of rest before it began a new campaign. He carried this prescription so far, indeed, that by spring both Halleck and Grant were complaining that his army was not pulling its weight.
Rosecrans himself had put in some of his spare time examining statistics, as a result of which he told his troops that they were going to have to brush up on their marksmanship. In the Stone’s River fight, he said, a comparison of Federal ammunition expenditures with Confederate casualties showed that it had taken 145 rounds of musketry to hit one Rebel and that a Yankee cannon had to be fired twenty-seven times to inflict a single casualty.9
A resident of Tennessee who had seen a good deal of both Union and Confederate armies wrote out a comparison of his own, basing much of it on what he saw in Rosecrans’s camps.
The Federal soldiers, he said, managed their camps better than the Confederates. Even if they were to be in a place only a few days, men would scurry around to build little beds — usually by driving forked sticks into the ground and laying saplings or planks across them — and they would build little shelters for their cooking stoves. Confederates seldom bothered with such comforts. Where a Union camp would be bustling with activity, a Confederate camp was apt to be a scene of idle relaxation. Union animals were better fed and groomed than those in a southern camp; guns and equipment were kept better polished, and the camp itself was usually cleaner.
But the Confederates were incomparably the more orderly. A Confederate detachment might camp in a place for weeks, without a single hen roost being the poorer; but “when the Union troops came around we all had to look out for our money, jewels, watches, vegetables, pigs, cows and chickens.” Much of the Federal looting was senseless, with men taking things that could be of no earthly use to them. The Tennessean remembered one outfit that stole a shipment of two hundred Bibles and then tore the books up and used them to build fires. The Tennessean believed that
these Federal habits developed partly because the men felt themselves to be in enemy country, where anything was fair game, and partly because the Yankee armies contained so many foreign-born and so much “riff-raff from the large cities.”10
One Confederate very well qualified to pass on soldierly attributes was studying the western armies that winter — Joseph E. Johnston, recovered now from the wound that had put him out of action at Seven Pines, and sent west by Jefferson Davis to co-ordinate the efforts of Bragg’s and Pemberton’s armies. Johnston did not enjoy this assignment; the armies were quite a distance apart, it was almost impossible for one man to exercise any real control over both, and most of the decisions he had to make were, he felt, policy matters on which Richmond itself ought to pass. Anyway, Johnston had been comparing the Federal armies in Tennessee with the Army of the Potomac back in Virginia, and he was warning the Confederate Secretary of War not to underestimate the Westerners who were serving under Grant — “his troops are worth double the number of northeastern troops.”11
The Potomac army was being brought out of its black mood as winter drew on toward spring. Burnside was finally removed, and Joe Hooker at last got the command he had wanted so badly — got it, and a canny letter from Abraham Lincoln telling him that those cracks about the need for a dictatorship had been heard and would be remembered and that what was wanted from Hooker was military victory, as soon as possible.
Somewhat to everyone’s surprise (for the man was thought to be nothing more than a hard-driving fighter), Hooker turned out to be a first-rate military administrator. His contribution to the ultimate northern victory, indeed, was not really a matter of fighting at all; it consisted in the fact that he got the Army of the Potomac back on its feet, shook the kinks out of it, and left for his successors a first-rate fighting machine that would go on functioning to the end of the war.