by Bruce Catton
When streams were encountered they were quickly bridged. These western soldiers knew how to use axes and were handy with all of the frontier’s makeshifts; they knocked down buildings, built leaky but serviceable pontoon boats, tied them together with timbers and laid planks taken from barns and gin-houses; an amazed engineer officer saw three floating bridges thus constructed and wrote in wonder that they “were built by green volunteers who had never seen a bridge train or had an hour’s drill or instruction in bridge building.” A soldier in McClernand’s corps asserted that his comrades built almost two thousand feet of bridges, and added that they constructed a wagon road almost all of the distance to New Carthage. Here was an army with some rather special capabilities.…8
As they marched, some of the men heard a dull booming in the distance. Porter’s fleet was running the batteries, and the Vicksburg defenders were firing at him with everything they had.
Porter made his dash on the night of April 16, steaming out on the black river with seven ironclads, assorted wooden gunboats and rams, and three transports loaded with stores. Coal barges were lashed to the sides of the boats, both for protection and to give the navy a supply of fuel in a stretch of river where no supplies could be had. On the deck of the headquarters steamer, moored upstream just out of range of the Confederate guns, Grant and his staff watched. Grant’s family was visiting him at the time, and Mrs. Grant sat beside the general; a staff officer perched in a chair, one of the Grant children in his arms, and as the crash of gunfire rocked the night the child clung to him desperately, tightening its arms about his neck every time the baleful light flashed on the dark sky.
The business looked and sounded worse than it was; Porter’s flotilla got through, with one transport sunk, another banged up substantially, and only minor damage to the other boats. By now the navy was confident that it could make a dash past almost any fort without too much risk; what it could not do here at Vicksburg was stay within range and hammer the enemy into surrender. Porter made contact with the army below Vicksburg, and in a few days he arranged for half a dozen more transports, each one loaded to the guards with army rations, to come on down and join in the game.9
These transports were ordinary river steamers with civilian crews, and the crews promptly walked ashore, announcing that nobody had hired them to run the Vicksburg batteries; whereupon it developed that this army which could build its own roads and bridges could also operate its own steamboats. Grant called for volunteers from the army to operate the boats, and he got more than he needed — so many, indeed, that the men who volunteered finally had to draw lots to see which ones would be used. The men who were told they would not be needed felt aggrieved and tried to bribe their way aboard; one man who got a billet on a steamer reported that a comrade offered him $100 for his place.… This was a jack-of-all-trades army. One single regiment contributed one hundred and sixteen river sailors, from captains, pilots, and engineers down to deckhands and firemen.10
The transports made the dash. With the rations they brought the army at least would not starve before it crossed the river; and it was time now to get over to the other shore and get on with the campaign. Grand Gulf, however, turned out to be an obstacle — too strong to be reduced by naval gunfire, it offered no good ground upstream for an attack by the army. Run the batteries again, then, while the army slogged on through the mud to the vicinity of Hard Times Plantation; take the troops over at undefended Bruinsburg, and they could go inland and take Grand Gulf from the rear.
While all of this was going on, of course, it was necessary to deceive the Rebels. The troops that went downstream were McClernand’s and McPherson’s; Sherman, still darkly pessimistic, took his corps up around the mouth of the Yazoo and made motions as if a new attack on Chickasaw Bluffs was in preparation. With much puffing and chugging of steamboats it was easy to play the same game that Confederate Magruder had played so well at Yorktown and in front of Richmond. Confederate Pemberton was completely taken in, and he conceived that he was about to be attacked from the north.
Meanwhile, from the area near Memphis, Grant launched a cavalry raid to spread more confusion. Three cavalry regiments under Colonel Benjamin H. Grierson were sent down, roughly paralleling the line of the Mississippi Central Railroad, with orders to move straight south, do all the damage and spread all the alarm possible, and come out (if lucky) in Banks’s lines at Baton Rouge, which was six hundred miles off.
The expedition was oddly but effectively led. Grierson was an unlikely choice for dashing cavalry commander; he had been a middle-western music teacher before the war, with a habit of organizing amateur bands in small towns, and he had hated horses for many years because a horse had kicked him in the face when he was a child. When the war came he was prompt to volunteer, but he wanted to do his fighting on foot; when an unexpected chain of circumstances brought him a commission in the cavalry he tried hard, but without success, to get transferred to the infantry. A cavalryman in spite of himself, he became a good one, and it was Grant himself who named him to lead this raid.
Grierson started out on April 17, the day after Porter’s gunboats had run the Vicksburg batteries. He dodged the Confederate parties that tried to catch him — greatly aided by the fact that most of the Confederate cavalry had been sent to Tennessee to help Bragg — and between cutting Rebel communications and creating the impression that a heavy mass of Yankee infantry was apt to follow in his wake he added substantially to Pemberton’s confusion. After an exciting sixteen days, in which it looked repeatedly as if he would lose his entire command, Grierson reached safety at Baton Rouge, his men worn out and in tatters and all the country behind him boiling with alarms and excursions.11
And Grant got McClernand’s and McPherson’s men over the Mississippi, defeated a Confederate force in a sharp little fight a few miles inland, occupied Grand Gulf, and sent word for Sherman to hurry on down and join him.
He also learned that Banks was nowhere near Port Hudson; the plan to join forces and work upstream toward Vicksburg could not be carried out.
The obvious play-it-safe step for Grant now was to settle down at Grand Gulf, establish a secure base of supplies, and wait for Banks to get ready. It was a step that Grant had no intention of taking. He had seized the initiative; after long months of apparent inaction he had the jump on his opponent and he proposed to keep it at all costs. In and around Vicksburg there was Pemberton, with an army which then was nearly the size of Grant’s own; over in the Jackson area there was (or very shortly would be) Joe Johnston in person, assembling troops which, if they were added to Pemberton’s, would give the Confederates a numerical advantage. What Grant wanted to do was slice in between these two generals, knocking them apart, destroying the route by which Rebel supplies and reinforcements could reach Vicksburg, and lock Pemberton up in the riverside fortress before the enemy had time to figure out what was going on. To do this Grant would have to keep moving.
He moved. The rations that had come downstream by boat were unloaded and distributed. When the troops started to move inland, men lugged boxes of hardtack on their shoulders and rolled barrels of salt pork along the ground. Grant’s wagon train had not arrived, and he refused to wait for it. Instead he swept the countryside, seizing everything that moved on four feet, from blooded horses to oxen; farm wagons, buckboards, carriages, and surreys were rounded up, and a tatterdemalion wagon train of sorts was created; then, on May 7, the army left Grand Gulf and set off northeast, getting on the high ground and moving away from the river.12
Sherman got his men to Grand Gulf, looked things over, and saw that the whole army had to move by one road. Frantically he sent a message on to Grant: stop everything where it was until new roads could be built, because the movement of supplies from Grand Gulf would create a traffic jam that would tie everything in a hard knot. Back came Grant’s amazing answer: there would be no supply line, he would not try to maintain contact with Grand Gulf at all. The army would live off the country, and the beggar’s
-opera wagon train would serve to carry food levied from the plantations — that, and the army’s priceless supply of ammunition. Sherman blinked and began to adjust himself to a type of warfare he had not dreamed of before.13
Strong in Grant’s memory was the lesson he had learned at Holly Springs in December, when Van Dorn had destroyed his base of supplies and he had to seize food from the planters to keep his army from starving; Mississippi was full of food, and an army that moved fast and kept on moving could support itself for weeks.… The Van Dorn who had taught him this lesson came to the end of the trail just at this time; he was shot to death, in his own headquarters, by a civilian who believed that his wife and Van Dorn had been too friendly.
The army swept inland, heading in the general direction of Jackson, sixty miles away. Grant got off a message to Halleck, telling him what was being done. The message would be a long time reaching Halleck; it had to go upriver by steamboat, all the way to Cairo, Illinois, before it could be put on the wires, and the answer would have to come back in the same way. Halleck would infallibly tell Grant not to do what he was doing, but by the time his answer was received the job ought to be just about finished. Grant set out in the early days of May with a great feeling of relief and freedom.14 For the next fortnight he would be entirely on his own.
The army stepped out confidently, glad to be on the road again after the dreary months around Milliken’s Bend. Everything worked. Day after day Grant’s impromptu wagons lumbered out around the country, accompanied by details of gleeful infantry; evening after evening they returned to camp, bringing incredible numbers of cattle, sheep, pigs, chickens, geese, and ducks. As these reached camp, other details would butcher and dress the animals, while the commissaries issued corn meal freshly ground on plantation mills. Of its own supplies, the army was issuing nothing much but coffee, sugar, and salt; Mississippi provided all the rest; the soldiers gorged on fresh poultry, roast pork, and beefsteaks. They ate so much of this, in fact, that some men were heard to say that they would be glad to get back to army hardtack and bacon eventually; their fare now was so rich they were getting tired of it.
None of this foraging slowed the army’s progress. It went knifing across the state toward its objective, and luckless Pemberton was approaching complete confusion. The Yankees had been ineffective all winter, and the Vicksburg area had been quiet; now it had blazed up into incomprehensible activity, and the Confederate commander could not cope with it. He drew his forces together to repel an anticipated dash at Vicksburg, and Grant’s army slid past him, moving east. Pemberton thought to stop him by cutting his lines of communication, and got nowhere because there were no lines to cut; Confederate regiments marched around helplessly seeking the nonexistent.
A small part of Pemberton’s army made solid contact around the town of Raymond, a dozen miles west of Jackson, and was crumpled and driven back. Rain came down, and the Union soldiers went splashing through ankle-deep pools in roads and fields to attack the Confederate defenses at Jackson.
These defenses were not strong. Joe Johnston had arrived at last, but he had no more than six thousand troops with him, and after a brisk fight Sherman’s and McPherson’s men knocked these aside and went whooping into the capital on May 14. They reported that the streets were full of disorderly elements — Confederate stragglers, skulkers and deserters, displaced civilians from everywhere, fugitive Negroes, and a growing assortment of Federals who had dropped out of ranks to have fun, everyone apparently bent on picking up any valuables that might be found. There was a good deal of looting and destruction, which grew worse as Federal troops began ripping up railroad tracks and wrecking foundries, warehouses, and other installations useful to the southern war effort. Someone had released the convicts in a local prison, and these joined in the looting until Federal patrols at last restored something resembling order. For a time Jackson knew all of the woes of a conquered town.15
Grant now was where he wanted to be, interposed between Pemberton and Johnston, and he proposed to make the most of it. He waited in Jackson only long enough to wreck the place, then turned and headed for Vicksburg, determined to keep his rivals apart and to drive Pemberton back into the Vicksburg lines.
Unluckiest of living generals at that point was Pemberton. He was that rarity, a Northerner born and bred who had cast his lot with the Confederacy — for principle (he was a confirmed states’-rights man) and because his wife lived in Virginia. Southern xenophobes had muttered against his appointment, and he was a rigid, austere man, lacking the personal gifts that could win doubters to his side. Now Johnston was ordering him to leave Vicksburg and bring about a Confederate concentration, while Jefferson Davis was ordering him to hold Vicksburg at all hazards. Pemberton’s own idea seemed to be that he could perhaps do a little of both. He did not know exactly where Grant was or what he was up to, he was the victim of conflicting orders, the sands were running out for him — and, all in all, his number was up and there was very little he could do about it.
He fought Grant on May 16 at Champion’s Hill, a hilly wooded area halfway between Jackson and Vicksburg. (Johnston was out of touch, off to the northeast, hopelessly out of the play.) There was a hard, wearing battle; McClernand’s troops drove Pemberton’s lines back, came to a halt, and were themselves driven off by a savage counterattack. Not all of Grant’s army was up, and McClernand was handling his corps inexpertly; Grant intervened, pulled John A. Logan’s division out of line and ordered it into action.
Logan was an unusual soldier — a swarthy man with a great shock of black hair, profound drooping mustachios, and an ability to lead men in battle which contrasted oddly with his complete lack of any military background. He had been a politician before the war (still was one, for the matter of that, and would go on being one until he died) and he had been such a partisan Democrat that after Fort Sumter people in Illinois had wondered if he might not come out openly for the South. He finally began to make speeches for the Union, was rewarded (after the innocent custom of the day) with a colonel’s commission and was now a general; and Grant felt that he was well qualified to handle more than a mere division. There was a homespun informality in the behavior of Logan’s soldiers. In this Champion’s Hill battle, one lanky private who apparently had been wandering about on his own hook sauntered up to Logan (who was on horseback, surveying the scene), gestured largely off to the right, and remarked, man-to-man fashion: “General, I’ve been over on the rise yonder, and it’s my idee that if you’ll put a regiment or two over there you’ll get on their flank and lick ’em easy.” Logan looked, concluded that the advice was sound, sent over two regiments — and presently drove the Rebels in retreat.16
However it was done, the field at last was won, and Pemberton went west in full retreat, making for the only haven that was open to him — Vicksburg. He turned next day for a rear-guard action at a crossing of the Big Black River, was quickly driven off, and rode on to the entrenched lines around his fortress city. He reflected sadly that this date was the anniversary of his entrance into West Point — one date, he said, would mark both the bright beginning and the ignominious end of his military career. He had no illusions about what would happen once Grant drew in his lines around Vicksburg and settled down to a siege.
During the fight at the Big Black a self-important staff officer from Banks’s army came riding up to Grant, all in a lather, bearing a dispatch from Halleck — at last! — sharply ordering Grant to stay in Grand Gulf, abstain from adventures, and wait until Banks was ready to move. Grant tore the dispatch up, the staff officer began to sputter angrily, and then Grant heard cheering, saw that his men had broken the Confederate line, and rode off to see about it. Recalling the business twenty years later, Grant said that the officer was still protesting when he rode off; and he added dryly that as far as he could remember he never saw him again in all his life.17
Chapter Nine
THE TREES AND THE RIVER
1. Final Miscalculation
JOE HOOK
ER was another man who had a river to cross. The Rappahannock was not a coiled tawny flood running through bottomless swamps; with daring and good management the crossing could be made whenever he chose. As with Grant, the real tests would come afterward — cruel test of battle for the troops, searching test of lonely responsibility for the general.
He could count on the troops. The Army of the Potomac had been tried in fire. It had learned war in the Seven Days’, at Second Bull Run, at Antietam, and at Fredericksburg; it had known great discouragement and swift revival, acquiring a sinewy elasticity thereby, and its volunteers had lost just enough of their innocence to reach a sharp fighting edge. They could do just about anything their commander asked them to do; if he could use them to their full potential, they might win the war.
The question mark was Hooker himself. He was slim and handsome, with rosy cheeks and cold eyes, a hard-drinking, hard-living man with some coarseness of fiber. At his headquarters there was a glitter of arrogance, and in his speech in this spring of 1863 there was a contemptuous confidence in victory, a glib preacceptance of triumph that might just possibly hide a deep inner uncertainty.
Hooker led more than one hundred and twenty thousand men — battle-tested and well drilled, equipped with everything a rich government could provide. The Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, which he was about to fight, seemed badly overmatched. Lee had had to detach Longstreet and most of Longstreet’s corps to accomplish some food-gathering and Yankee-repelling mission in the watery flat country back of Norfolk, far below Richmond. As April ended, Lee’s army contained no more than half as many men as Hooker’s — men more poorly clad, more poorly fed, and less well equipped. By any test the Federals seemed to have all of the advantages.