by Bruce Catton
Admiral Porter was a man of limitless energy. He sold the idea to Grant — who, all else failing, was about ready to buy anything — and Porter himself would go along to make sure that it worked. Porter got together five of his best gunboats, along with some tugs and a pair of mortar boats, and Grant ordered Sherman to take some troops and accompany the flotilla on land, to clear out any obstructive Rebels who might try to bar the way. In the middle of March — while Commander Smith was still plowing doggedly on toward Fort Pemberton — this odd expedition turned up the narrow bayou and went steaming off through the forest.
It met all of the troubles which Commander Smith’s troop had met, most of them multiplied by five. The waterway was painfully narrow. Felled trees and bridges blocked the way at frequent intervals; Porter used his powerful ironclads as tanks and sent them driving through such obstructions, knocking logs and timbers out of the way with prodigious crashing and banging, clouds of black smoke pouring from funnels, everybody dancing and swearing with excitement. The river was full of sunken logs, and donkey engines came into play as these were hoisted out with block and tackle. At times the stream was so narrow that the leading gunboat would be pinched in between the trees that grew out of the half-submerged banks and brought to a standstill. Then there would be much huffing and puffing, and the vessel would drive its way through by brute force, knocking over the trees as it went.
Things got worse and worse. The waterway wound and twisted incomprehensibly, so that there were times when all five gunboats, each dutifully following the tail of the next ahead, were steering in five different directions. Up in front there were web-footed Confederates who kept felling huge trees to block the channel, and each tree had to be fished out individually. All sorts of wildlife, from squirrels to raccoons, came aboard the boats as the overhanging trees were jarred; at times sailors stood by with brooms to sweep overboard such lesser vermin as snakes and bugs.
Then a new obstacle developed. Porter found himself leading his boats into a narrow channel which was all overgrown with young willows. Helpful Negroes explained that in seasons of low water all this country was a second-growth forest from which slaves cut numerous young willows to make baskets; with the water high, the limber little saplings came up like swamp grass through the middle of the stream, forming a yielding but impenetrable barrier that would catch the vessels’ hulls, slow them to a halt, and make further advance practically impossible. Porter gave saws and knives to all hands, set up rope-and-plank outriggers, and put his people to work hacking and slicing away at the miserable green withes; with a whole ship’s company at work, a gunboat might gain three or four feet after an hour’s work.
Ominous noises began to come, to disturb the admiral’s mind still more. A steady chop-chopping showed that the Confederates were felling trees to block the waterway — but they were felling these trees behind the flotilla, not in front of it; they knew it could not possibly advance much farther, and they hoped now to trap it so that it could never get out. Also, there was a snapping and a cracking as Rebel sharpshooters, hidden in the woods, opened fire on the working parties to drive them to cover; and from somewhere in the wet, leafy invisibility up ahead, some Confederate guns opened a methodical fire on the unlucky gunboats. In despair, Porter sent a message back to Sherman: could the general get his troops up here, clear the Rebs out of the way, and give the navy a chance to go on?
Sherman came up in person, and he brought enough troops along to save the navy from the supreme ignominy of having its crack admiral and one of its best flotillas captured en bloc by the Confederate army. When the pressure had been eased a bit — that is, when the Rebel sharpshooters had been driven off enough so that men could stand on the deck without getting killed by musket fire — Porter and Sherman agreed that there was just one thing to do: call off the whole expedition, confess abject failure, and get men and boats back into the Mississippi.
The channel was too narrow for the boats to turn around, and the soldiers seemed inclined to give the sailors a spirited going-over, verbally; it took four days to get disentangled, during most of which time the navy was dejectedly steering backward, and the tempers of the naval officers were worn abnormally thin; but in the end the flotilla did manage to return to the Mississippi, and one more attempt to get around to the soft side of Vicksburg had to be written off as a failure.6
This left it up to Grant. One canal, one lake-and-river waterway, two stabs at the Yazoo Delta; all had failed, and he was still on the wrong side of the river and the wrong side of Vicksburg, spring was coming on, press and country were demanding action, and his army was camped in a fifty-mile swamp where dead bodies oozed up through the clammy mud and where men sickened and died, day after day, of everything from malaria to smallpox.
One thing, to be sure, might have been done. The army could have boarded its steamboats, steamed all the way upstream to Memphis, moved inland, and started out again down the line of the Mississippi Central Railroad on the route that had been tried in December. It was the obvious course — perhaps the only course left.
But Grant would not follow it. The temper of the country, as far as the most sensitive political weather vanes could determine, was bad; one blatant confession of defeat, such as this return to Memphis, might be one ounce more than the country would stand. For the sake of the war effort itself, the thing could not be contemplated. Besides, there was a stubborn streak in U. S. Grant: a deep psychological reluctance, visible from early childhood, to retrace his steps or turn back from a goal he had set for himself. He could not turn back and he would not turn back; and he sat in his cabin on the headquarters steamer at Milliken’s Bend, smoking cigars until the room was blue with drifting smoke, staring into the shifting wreaths of vapor, saying nothing to anyone, and quietly evolving the plan that would take Vicksburg.
3. The Face of the Enemy
Part of the time the enemy was the terrible curse of war itself; mud, weariness, the steady erosion of human values, the ugly sickness that came upon young men who ate bad food, wore shoddy clothing, and went to sleep wet to wake up cold. At other times it was the visible human foe in gray and butternut, who bore the same curse himself but who always stood ready to fill the hills and woods with fire and smoke and the echoing crash of gunfire. But underneath everything else the real enemy was a deep blindness of the spirit, an ancient constriction of the mind that fatally narrowed the circle of humanity. This enemy had to be defeated at any cost, even though final triumph might be delayed for generations; the war was just a skirmish in the unending fight, but if it was to repay any part of its cost the skirmish must make final victory a little more likely.
Nobody had consciously made up his mind to fight this enemy. The decision was subconscious; it was being worked out painfully, far below the surface, by men who went about their jobs in the steaming swamps along the Mississippi and in the echoing drill fields above the Rappahannock. Trying to win the visible war, they were being forced to grapple with a foe within themselves — the blind, arrogant assumption that some people are by birth and by nature superior to others, so that anything that democracy might finally do must be funneled out through an opening too narrow for any but the lucky few to pass.
This enemy appeared in many forms. It peered out, mocking and hideous, from an order issued early in the winter by U. S. Grant, which read as follows:
“The Jews, as a class violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department and also department orders, are hereby expelled from the department within twenty-four hours from the receipt of this order.
“Post commanders will see that all of this class of people be furnished passes and required to leave, and anyone returning after such notification will be arrested and held in confinement until an opportunity occurs of sending them out as prisoners, unless furnished with a permit from these headquarters.”1
Back of this order there were two moving causes, one obvious and immediate, the other coming out of the air men breathed in
those days, as old as sin and no better to think about.
The obvious immediate reason was cotton. Northern mills and northern exporters desperately needed cotton, and with the war on they were getting very little of it. Whenever a Union army got down into cotton country the speculators would follow if they had half a chance, and there seemed to be nothing at all that they would not do, no length of bribery or chicanery they would not approach, in order to get cotton and send it north. Ormsby Mitchel had got into trouble in 1862, when his men held northern Alabama, because of cotton. To pay the cost of operating a railroad line he held, he had seized Rebel cotton, had invited New York dealers to come in, had sold the cotton to them to get the funds he needed, and then he had helped the dealers move their cotton north. Only the fact that he was an administration pet, probably, had saved him from dismissal. In New Orleans the cotton speculators were everywhere; in Memphis they were sniffing about, frantically eager for any chance to buy cotton and move it north.
What had touched Grant off, apparently, was an alliance made by his father, Jesse Grant, a shrewd little leather merchant who had business dealings in Ohio and Illinois and who possessed both an unerring eye for the main chance and a total lack of understanding of the standards which ought to guide the father of a major general.
Jesse appears to have formed connections with some cotton dealers, and he took them down to see the general. Grant was highly cordial, until he discovered that what his father’s friends really wanted was special consideration in the matter of getting permits to buy and ship cotton. In their corrupt innocence they had supposed that the fix was in when they went to headquarters with the commanding general’s father. These dealers happened to be Jewish, and when Grant’s wrath exploded — he sent his father and his father’s friends back to Ohio on the next train — it left him with a hot resentment that broke out a few days later in the form of this order expelling all Jews from the department.2
But the invisible cause of the order — the thing that turned it from a simple tightening up of controls on illicit cotton brokerage into a blind, shotgun blast at the Jewish people — was the fact that Grant at all times reflected the age in which he lived; and this age, which lived by the American dream and which was now paying a stupendous price to broaden it, had nevertheless failed almost totally to understand the dream’s power and splendor. It was an age in which race prejudice in all of its forms could stalk unchecked and almost unrebuked.
For Americans of the blood interpreted their birthright narrowly and guarded it with fierce jealousy, treating those whose origins were not as theirs with fear, hatred, or contempt. The country was changing. Year after year the packet ships had been bringing in more and more folk from beyond the ocean, people drawn by many factors, among which was the wild and intoxicating notion that to be an American need not be exclusively a matter of birth. It could also be a matter of conscious choice; one could elect oneself a member of this free society, breaking with the past, sharing in the great pilgrimage toward a dazzling future not because one had been fortunately born but because one wanted to share in it. People came from all over — from Germany and from Ireland and from many other places — bringing languages and creeds and folkways that the nation had not known before and that struck many of the native-born as bewilderingly strange and therefore ominous.
It was not yet a decade since a powerful political party had grown up, built entirely on this fear: the Know-Nothings, who campaigned unashamedly on blatant prejudice, electing governors and senators, coming tolerably close to winning the presidency itself, and demanding that all newcomers be excluded or reduced to second-class citizenship. People who were not infected by this fear nevertheless tended to deny full humanity to the newcomers by seeing them as stereotypes, usually more or less comic. Germans were “Dutchmen,” fat and rather stupid folk who talked an amusing brogue and drank too much beer; Irishmen were clumsy bog-trotters who talked an even funnier brogue and who were devoted to fighting and to whiskey; Jews were bearded, hook-nosed sharpers who peddled goods from wagons and who could be denounced and expelled en masse by an angry general; and Negroes — —
Negroes were in some inexplicable manner what the war itself was mostly about. Their status seemed mysteriously to be changing, and as it changed — if it changed — there must be corresponding changes in each of the social levels that lay above, and finally in the way Americans looked upon their fellow human beings. For the most fundamental change of all was that it was becoming necessary to look upon the Negro as a man rather than as a thing. Let that once take hold, and racism in all of its forms must receive a mortal wound, even though it might be a very long time dying. What was won for the least of these would finally be won for everybody; and once a common humanity was admitted, an incalculable victory would have been gained, because sooner or later the admission would have to be acted on.
Yet victories are won in odd ways, sometimes by men who are thinking about something very different. The General Grant who could express a subconscious but profound racial prejudice in his order expelling the Jews — an order that, by direction of President Lincoln, he very shortly withdrew — could at the same time be working most effectively to destroy racism’s foundations, not because he understood what he was about, but simply because he wanted to do everything possible to win the war. One of the instruments he would use would be the Negro as a soldier, the ex-slave put into uniform and empowered to make war against the men lately his masters. The government had come to that step this winter, and colored troops were being raised wherever there were Federal armies.
This decision to use the Negro as a soldier did not necessarily grow out of any broad humanitarian resolve; it seems to have come largely out of the dawning realization that, since the Confederates were going to kill a great many more Union soldiers before the war was over, a good many white men would escape death if a considerable percentage of those soldiers were colored.
Halleck put the thing quite bluntly in a message to Grant in March. It was good policy, he said, to withdraw as many slaves from the South as possible; equally good policy, having withdrawn them, to use them to help win the war. They could certainly be used as teamsters and as laborers, and some people believed they could be used as combat soldiers. Grant must try, and if he found — as he undoubtedly would — that many of the people in his army objected to it, he must ride their objections down and see that this new policy was carried out.
“There can be no peace,” wrote Halleck, “but that which is forced by the sword. We must conquer the Rebels or be conquered by them.… This is the phase which the rebellion has now assumed. We must take things as they are.”3
This new phase of the rebellion was a good deal broader than Halleck dreamed. To accept the Negro as a soldier was to state, in a back-handed but decisive way, that the base of membership in the American community had been immeasurably widened. Once widened, it could not again be narrowed. The war henceforth would be fought for this, even though some of the men who were most effectively fighting it had no idea that the base was not already quite wide enough. For the war had become a breaking up of the foundations of the great deep, and to “take things as they are” meant to change things to their fundamentals.
Grant dutifully went to work — this chore came upon him while the various mud-and-water expedients were being tried above Vicksburg — and he instructed corps, division, and post commanders to speed the organization of the Negro regiments. He warned dissenters: “It is expected that all commanders will especially exert themselves in carrying out the policy of the administration, not only in organizing colored regiments and rendering them effective, but also in removing prejudice against them.”4
Removing the prejudice would not be easy. Soldiers who disliked slavery very often looked upon the slaves themselves as subhuman creatures who belonged neither in the army nor in America itself. An Illinois veteran wrote from Tennessee that he and many others would be emancipationists “if the brutes could be shipped
out of the country,” but that did not seem to be possible. Slavery, he admitted, was “an awful sin,” but if Negroes had to remain in America they ought to remain as slaves; the only suggestion he could make was that they be transferred from Confederate masters to masters thoroughly loyal to the Union.5
An Ohio soldier reported that there was intense opposition in his division to the recruiting of Negro troops, which at times “assumed the character of anarchy,” with officers and enlisted men vowing that they would throw down their arms and go home if Negroes became soldiers.
This anarchic opposition was quickly tamped down, partly because of Grant’s orders and partly because of the unexpected intervention of a rather unlikely hero — lanky, dry-as-dust Lorenzo Thomas, adjutant general of the army, the paper-shuffler from Washington who had been sent to the Mississippi Valley on a mixed mission that seems vaguely to have included the task of telling the War Department just what Grant was up to out there. Part of Thomas’s job was to speed the raising of Negro regiments, and he took to this with crusty enthusiasm. He called troops together and warned them that Negroes fleeing from slavery were to be made welcome: “They are to be received with open arms, they are to be fed and clothed; they are to be armed.” He was empowered, he added, to dismiss from the army “any man, be his rank what it may, whom I find maltreating the freedmen. This part of my duty I will most assuredly perform if any case comes before me.”
The division in which the Ohio soldier had reported so much discontent was drawn up in hollow square and addressed by Thomas. Men who left the army because of the recruiting of Negroes, he warned, would be considered guilty of treason and would be shot, and there would be courts-martial for all who interfered with the program. The boys talked it over around campfires afterward and concluded finally that “a Negro could stop a bullet just as well as a white man,” and that “for everyone so sacrificed there would be just that many more white soldiers to return north to their families and friends.”6