by Bruce Catton
Undeniably the Negro could stop a bullet. He could also help meet a draft quota back home, and northern state officials who were finding it increasingly hard to raise troops began to look his way optimistically. The only trouble seemed to be that most northern states did not, after all, contain so very many colored folk; the source of supply, untapped though it was, did seem to be limited. In Massachusetts the state authorities sent agents far afield, recruiting Negroes wherever they could find them, and forming two whole regiments of them. This led Governor John A. Andrew into trouble. He had promised the Negro recruits that they would be treated precisely as white soldiers were treated, and he presently learned that by a War Department ruling the colored soldiers could be paid no more than ten dollars a month, of which three dollars would stand for a clothing allowance. Since white troops got thirteen dollars a month in addition to their clothing, this represented a substantial difference. Andrew stormed down to Washington to get the ruling changed, failed, and then went back to Boston and got the legislature to agree to make up the difference with state funds.7
Negroes could stop bullets and meet draft quotas; they could also open the avenue for promotion to white soldiers. The new colored regiments would need officers. The officers, except in the rarest cases, would not be colored; they would be white men, combat veterans, selected from the ranks of the line regiments, given a quick course of sprouts in an officer-training school, and then commissioned as lieutenants, captains, or even better. The veterans perked up their ears at this news. Some of those who had been most bitter about the new program became reconciled to it when they considered that they themselves, as a result of it, might wear shoulder straps. There was no lack of candidates for the training schools. (A veteran in the Army of the Potomac complained that the selection board was biased; soldiers who might have won commissions in their own regiments if vacancies existed, he asserted, were passed over, while the young sprigs fresh out of college who had never seen gun smoke got in with ease.) In one way or another, colored regiments were called into being, officered, and put to work.8
There was a great deal of self-interest in the decision to turn Negroes into soldiers, but there was also the pressure of sheer necessity. The contraband slave was becoming uncommonly numerous; simply by his presence — by his insistence on fleeing from bondage and by his mute faith that the nearest Federal army would be his sure protector — he was compelling the authorities to do something with him, and very often the easiest thing to do was to put him into uniform.
In Virginia in 1863 this problem was not quite so acute. The Army of the Potomac had not penetrated very deeply into Confederate territory; it was living in a war-ravaged area in which there were not very many slaves, and the contrabands who did come in could easily be shipped back to Washington — where, for the most part, the government utterly failed to devise any intelligent system for handling them. But in the West so many slaves were seeking refuge with the Federal armies that some sort of action was imperative.
Shortly before the new policy was adopted a Union force came back to its base at Corinth, Mississippi, after some foray deeper into the state, and when it marched in it was followed by hundreds upon hundreds of fugitive slaves. The army command at Corinth did not want these people — had, in fact, very little idea what it could do with or about them — but it could not send them back, and it fenced off a big camp, put the ex-slaves into it, detailed a couple of infantry regiments to guard it, and plucked a chaplain from the 27th Ohio and told him he was in charge. The soldiers objected bitterly to guard duty, declaring that they had come down to Dixie to fight Rebels and not to be policemen for a lot of runaway slaves, and the chaplain came up with an idea. Let him (he urged) form a few infantry companies from among the men in the contraband camp; with a little drill and the proper direction they ought to be able to stand guard over their own people.
The commanding officer agreed that this was a good idea. He had no legal authority to do anything of the kind, but he dug up rifles and uniforms, detailed a few line sergeants to act as officers, and before long here was a detachment of illegal but effective Negro troops, pleased as could be with their uniforms and their responsibility, and the Corinth contraband camp was in effect taking care of itself.9
These contraband camps were not usually very inspiring places to look at. There was a huge one on a levee not far from Vicksburg, crammed with fugitives who huddled without shelter, subsisted on army rations, got no real care from anyone, and died by the dozen from bad sanitation, exposure, overcrowding, and general homesick bewilderment. Yet the faith that had brought them here — a faith that freedom was good and that the road to it somehow led through the camps of the Union army — did not seem to leave them, even when their camp became a shambles. A Wisconsin soldier who was detailed for duty around this camp looked on in silent wonder at the prayer meetings that were held every night. There were no lights; none was needed, he thought, since the leaders of the meeting had no Bibles or hymnals and could not have read from them if they had them; there was just a great crowd of men and women, dimly seen, bowed to the ground, swaying rhythmically as they prayed that God would set His people free and would send His blessing down on Massa Lincoln, Massa Grant, and all of Massa Lincoln’s soldiers.
Before and after the prayers the air would be tremulous with music, which was of a kind the Wisconsin boy had never heard before. “I beg you,” he wrote, “not to think of it as being like the jargon of the burnt-cork minstrels who sing for money. I cannot describe the pathos of the melody nor the sweet tenderness of the words as they arose on the night air.”10
Almost to a man the male contrabands were eager to enlist when the chance was offered. Yet disillusionment usually came soon afterward. It was hard for generals to think of them as combat troops; for the most part the Negro was looked upon as a sort of servant to the white soldiers, he got much more than his share of fatigue duty, and in some camps he was excused from drill altogether so that he might dig ditches, raise fortifications, and perform other pick-and-shovel work. When they were kept at this non-military work, it was noted, most colored soldiers became restive, sullen, sometimes insubordinate.11
In the main, though, the newly enlisted Negro was intensely proud of his status as soldier. His pride could be surprising at times, because it seemed to go deeper than mere pride in a musket and a uniform and became pride in a new status as a human being. When Governor Andrew of Massachusetts induced the legislature to appropriate money to equalize the pay for the state’s two colored regiments, he and the legislators got an abrupt shock. The paymaster went to pay the men and they refused to take the money. They appreciated what the state of Massachusetts was trying to do, they said, but they would serve without any pay until their enlistments ran out rather than take from the Federal government less money than the Federal government was paying its other soldiers. It was a matter between themselves and Uncle Sam — their Uncle Sam — and they would not let Massachusetts make up the difference. (The business caused a stir in Congress; ultimately, many months later, Congress revised the law and equalized the pay scales for white and colored troops.)12
Yet if the decision to put a uniform on the Negro had been taken partly from selfishness and partly because of necessity, and if the new recruits found that soldiering was not quite the stirring and uplifting thing they had supposed it would be, something momentous had nevertheless been taking place with the formation of the Negro regiments. Tough old Senator Zachariah Chandler, militant anti-slavery man from Michigan, who had shared the common abolitionist fear that the Emancipation Proclamation might someday be withdrawn, exulted: “Every Negro regiment of a thousand men presents just one thousand unanswerable arguments against the revocation of the President’s proclamation.” And the eloquent former slave Frederick Douglass, who had worked and hoped long to see his people brought to freedom, saw even more in it than that:
“Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters, U.S.; let him get an eagle
on his button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on earth which can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship in the United States.”13
4. End of a Campaign
It was time to shoot the works. The canals could never be made to work if they were dug until kingdom come, the intricate network of waterways could never be used, and to take everybody back to Memphis and start all over again was out of the question. Grant sat in what had been the “ladies’ parlor” of the headquarters steamboat, moored up by Milliken’s Bend, and smoked his cigars and looked into the blue clouds, and at last he made up his mind. He would defy the Confederate guns and military precedent, move straight down the river, abandon his communications, and gamble his army’s existence that he could outmaneuver and outfight his enemies and finally come up to Vicksburg from the east. There would be no more grubbing in the mud and playing it safe; he would let everything ride on one turn of the card, winning or losing all of it at once.
It was perhaps the crucial Federal military decision of the war; and it was made by a slouchy little man who never managed to look like a great captain, who had a casual unbuttoned air about him and seemed to be nothing much more than a middle-aged person who used to be a clerk in a small-town harness shop — a man who unexpectedly combined dogged determination with a gambler’s daring.
During the winter things had been working for him west of the big river. In December the Confederates had assembled a sizable army in Arkansas, and for a time it looked as if they might upset everything by making a bold dash up into Missouri. But the capture of Arkansas Post — that strange, unpremeditated thrust which had been designed to do little more than take the sting out of the Chickasaw Bluffs fiasco — had knocked one prop out from under this plan; then a Federal army came down from Missouri, whipped a Confederate force at Prairie Grove, and knocked out the other prop. By mid-January the Rebels had retreated to Little Rock, the Federals from Missouri were continuing to put pressure on them, and the southern hope that Arkansas troops might relieve the strain at Vicksburg had gone to seed. Whatever he might do when spring came, Grant could at least be confident that nobody in Arkansas could offer much interference.1
It did not seem that he could be confident of much else. When the country looked his way it believed that it saw an army hopelessly bogged down, and incompetently commanded to boot. Newspapers complained bitterly, circulated the old tales about drunkenness, enlarged on the sickness and inactivity of Grant’s troops, and demanded that he be removed. (Hot-tempered Sherman rose to high fury at this and asserted that “with the press unfettered as now we are defeated to the end of time.” It would not do, he added, to say that the people must have news; every soldier wrote home regularly, and that was all the news the people in the North needed.)2 Lincoln stood by Grant, remarking bluntly, “He fights!” to a caller who asked why he did not fire him; but Secretary Stanton had his doubts. To settle them, Mr. Stanton sent a civilian representative down to Vicksburg to keep an eye on things and make daily reports. This emissary was Charles A. Dana, one-time member of the transcendentalist troupe at Brook Farm, later an editor for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, now a vaguely titled special commissioner for the War Department.
The grapevine told Grant that Dana was coming, and some of his staff officers proposed that Mr. Dana be pitched neck and crop into the Mississippi on arrival. John A. Rawlins, Grant’s dedicated, consumptive little chief of staff, squelched such talk, and when Dana arrived early in April he was given a pleasant welcome and was lodged in a tent pitched next to Grant’s. Somewhat to everybody’s surprise he took to Grant at once. What Mr. Stanton heard about Grant began to be more favorable.3
Meanwhile the army got ready to move. There were between forty and forty-five thousand men in the dreary riverside camps, divided into three army corps: the XIII, under McClernand, the XV, which was Sherman’s, and the XVII, commanded by curly-bearded James B. McPherson, former engineer officer on Grant’s staff — a pleasant-mannered, capable Scot whom Grant trusted deeply, whom Dana liked, and whom Sherman was beginning to pick as one who might someday rise above Grant himself.
Grant’s plan was simple. He would march downstream on the west side of the river, coming out at some point twenty or thirty miles below Vicksburg. Admiral Porter would bring gunboats and transports down and ferry the army over to the eastern bank. There Grant could do one of two things — go on down the river, meet Banks (if by chance Banks had begun to move) and capture Port Hudson, basing his troops thereafter on New Orleans; or he could swing east to the Mississippi state capital and railroad center, Jackson, destroying Confederate installations there and then wheeling west for a decisive blow at Vicksburg itself.4
A great many things could go wrong with such a plan. All told, the Confederates had more soldiers in Mississippi than Grant had, and it was perfectly possible for them to swarm in on him and beat him — and to be beaten so far down in enemy territory, without any open road for retreat, would be to meet complete and final disaster. There was also the prospect that once he crossed the river Grant would have no secure line of supply. His army might simply be starved into surrender if the Confederates played their cards right and had a little good luck. It was certain that the whole proposition would scare cautious Halleck right to the tips of his wispy hair. Therefore, Halleck would not be let in on the secret until it was too late for him to countermand it.
The immediate danger was that the expedition might not even be able to get off the ground.
Primary objective of the troops would be a Confederate strong point known as Grand Gulf, on the eastern side of the river and perhaps twenty-five miles south of Vicksburg in an air line — substantially farther by the twisting course of the river. To get at Grand Gulf the Federal troops must first march down the west side of the river to New Carthage; twenty miles or thereabouts as the roads lay. Between Milliken’s Bend and New Carthage lay a somber expanse of flat country, swamps, winding streams, sluggish crescent-shaped bayous, and an inadequate grid of atrocious roads. High water had swollen the waterways and left the land partly flooded. Grant had no pontoon train, and the streams that had to be crossed must be bridged by some on-the-spot operation; the only timbers available would be those taken from plantation houses, barns, and other buildings in the immediate vicinity. There was a great shortage of engineer officers and an almost total lack of trained engineer troops.
Still, the army probably could get to New Carthage or some other point on the river if it floundered along relentlessly. But it would be in a very bad fix if it reached New Carthage and then found that Porter and his steamboats could not also get there; and to reach that part of the river, Porter’s vessels would have to run the gantlet of the Vicksburg batteries — many heavy guns, sited both at water level and on top of the high bluffs, ready to blast clear out of the water anything that floated. The run would of course be made at night, but the Rebels kept a careful lookout and had details ready to set fire to houses on the western bank. Any ships that passed the Vicksburg waterfront at night would assuredly be silhouetted against a background of rising flame.
A gamble, in other words, with the odds none too favorable. Sherman, who was beginning to believe in Grant as he believed in no other living man, thought the idea little better than lunacy. When the move finally began he wrote home glumly, “I feel in its success less confidence than in any similar undertaking of the war,” and he steeled himself only by reflecting that co-operation was his duty. McPherson had no higher opinion of the scheme. Oddly enough, it was jealous McClernand who endorsed it; he was a troublemaker and a malcontent, but there was nothing wrong with his nerve and he felt that Grant’s move was right.5
Right or wrong, it was the move Grant would take. Through March he waited, making preparations for the cross-country march, getting such reinforcements as could be sent to him from Missouri, and waiting for the high water to subside a bit. Then finally, in mid-April, the expedition took off.
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nbsp; The soldiers were in good spirits. Some inkling of the risk that was being taken seems to have filtered down to them, but it did not matter; anything was better than staying in the swamp digging hopeless ditches, and movement was always stimulating. Some of the new troops came rolling down from Memphis by steamboat, moonlight on the river, music from regimental bands floating across the water, men lounging by the railing in conversation or stretched out on deck looking at the pale night sky; they were glad to get to the Vicksburg sector, and afterward they recalled the first leg of the trip as a moving and romantic experience that remained fixed in the memory. A Wisconsin regiment that had toiled for months on obscure campaigns in Arkansas was brought over to join Grant’s army, and when the homesick boys from the north woods got out on the surface of the Mississippi they remembered that the headwaters of this muddy stream flowed somewhere past Wisconsin; they ran to the lower deck of their transport, lowered canteens and buckets over the side, and gulped down long drafts of water: “We drank and drank until it ran out of our noses, just because it came from the glorious north.”6
When the cross-country march began it was night — black night, mysterious, with a rain coming down; in the bayous and swamps men heard odd roaring noises and were told that these were made by alligators. Roads became almost impassable, so that wagons and guns stalled repeatedly and had to be hoisted out by sheer strength. Feeling themselves overburdened, some of the men dropped their overcoats and blankets by the roadside; later they learned that although spring days were hot, here in the Deep South, it could grow chilly late at night. Men in the advance guard swarmed around every plantation they came to, collecting skiffs and dugouts, for it seemed as if most of the country was under water.7