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 themselves; 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.

Hooker did all of this by a common-sense process of removing the causes of bad morale.

The camps were laid out anew, the old pigsty bunkhouses were abandoned, and Hooker’s inspectors saw to it that the soldiers lived in as much comfort and cleanliness as a winter camp might afford. The commissary system was overhauled so that vegetables and potatoes and fresh meat reached camp in quantity; scurvy disappeared, and a clean and well-fed army suddenly discovered that it did not have nearly as much sickness as it had had before. At the same time, Hooker reformed the hospital system so that sick men could get decent care and food, and the appalling death rates abruptly came down.

Hooker’s men had been almost unendurably homesick, and so Hooker gave them furloughs. (Most of the desertions that had been taking place were caused not so much by a conscious decision to leave the army as by a simple desire to get home and see the folks.) At the same time, he tightened up on the security system so that real deserters would have a much harder time getting away from camp.

Finally, Hooker put everybody to work. There were drills — company and battalion drills, brigade and division drills — hour after hour, day after day, with big reviews on weekends and all the pomp and grandeur of war to raise men’s spirits. Cavalry was reorganized as a unified corps and was told that the commanding general expected it to get out and fight. Cavalry rose to the occasion. Before long even the captious Federal infantry was admitting that “our cavalry is something to talk about now,” and was confessing that “Hooker is entitled to the credit of making the cavalry of use instead of ornament.”¹²

As all of this happened, the Army of the Potomac began to cheer again. Hooker would stage enormous reviews, with whole army corps marching back and forth on the dusty plains above the river; sometimes President Lincoln would be there, listening with a faint sense of unease to Hooker’s boasts that this was “the finest army on the planet” and that the question was not whether the army would capture Richmond but simply when. There was a great jubilant shouting when Hooker rode along the lines. The man had an air; he saw to it that his staff and escort were well mounted and neatly garbed, and to men who thought themselves disillusioned about war he brought back an enduring touch of the color and flashing gaiety of war’s romance. He made army life exciting, and under the excitement he infused a sense of great power and growing strength.

The careful, cautious soldiers were being weeded out. McClellan was gone, the cries of the soldiers who adored him still echoing in his ears, and the kind of war he was able to fight was gone forever. Buell was gone, as well, his kind of war also done for; and the War Department was bearing down brutally to prove to reluctant officers that the day of hard war had arrived. Fitz-John Porter who had led McClellan’s V Corps so ably on the peninsula, had been cashiered, convicted by court-martial of refusing to carry out John Pope’s orders at Second Bull Run. The facts that his conviction and sentence were outrageously unjust and that Pope had in his befuddlement issued impossible orders were beside the point; Porter was simply a victim, beheaded to show the career soldiers that the administration was very much in earnest. Ruthlessly trampling a man underfoot, the administration was also trampling down (as one combat veteran put it) “the damnable heresy that a man can be a friend to the government and yet throw every clog in the way of the administration and prosecution of the war.”¹³

2. Stalemate in the Swamps

The great river which western men believed to be the sign and symbol of the nation’s destined unity came down from the north with silent power and without haste. It brimmed over its banks, creating ponds and bayous and meaningless tangled waterways all over the flat country on either side; it spun great lazy loops and curves far to the right and the left, and it was swollen now from incessant rains, tearing at its neglected levees as if it might yet flood the war itself out of its broad valley. It was brown with silt; a steamboat captain assured gaping Illinois recruits that if a man drank Mississippi River water for as much as a week “he will have a sandbar in him a mile long.”¹

Half of the country seemed to be under water, a primeval swamp that nevertheless was a settled land with farms, villages, and here and there the bottomless trace of a muddy road. Below the horizon, out of sight except to the patrols and scouts, rose the great land mass where Vicksburg had been built. Its massive bluffs faced the river and swung northeast just below the mouth of the Yazoo, and with entrenchments and heavy guns and an endless chain of rifle pits the Confederacy had made here a stronghold which was the proud and arrogant reminder of the division that had come upon the nation.

One great stretch of the river the Confederacy still controlled — the part that lay between Vicksburg and Port Hudson, a Louisiana town just north of Yankee-held Baton Rouge. This piece of the river, measured along its innumerable curves and bends, was perhaps two hundred miles in length, and as long as it was held the Confederacy was still a united nation. For this was the gateway to the rich trans-Mississippi empire. Into the big river, not far above Port Hudson, flowed the Red River, which came southeast from Arkansas across Louisiana; and down the Red River, for shipment east, the trans-Mississippi sent invaluable supplies — quantities of horses, herds of cattle, munitions brought into Texas by blockade-runners, stout reinforcements for the Confederate armies. Until the Federals could seize this stretch of the Mississippi, opening it to their own traffic and sealing it off to the Confederates, they could not win the war for the valley, and if they could not win the war for the valley they could not save the Union.

According to plan, this part of the river was to be attacked from both ends at once. At the northern end there was Grant, operating against a steady background of complaints from General McClernand, who was bitter because his “Army of the Mississippi” had evaporated and because he himself now commanded nothing more than the XIII Army Corps. At New Orleans, preparing to move north and seize Port Hudson, there were twenty-five thousand Union troops under command of Major General Nathaniel P. Banks.

Banks was a devoted Republican who had had troubles and who was about to have more. In Virginia he had had to fight against Stonewall Jackson, which had tested him beyond his strength. He had been picked for this job in Louisiana partly because as a man of influence with the voters back home he was too good to waste, partly because a combination of circumstances had made it necessary to get Ben Butler out of there, and partly because — to an administration which correctly saw this as a political war but which did have its problems in finding the proper political instruments to use in it — he and John McClernand had for a time looked like the two halves of a perfect whole.

Banks and McClernand, it had been thought, could open the valley between them, and Banks’s appointment was the obverse face of the mysterious commission that had been given McClernand. When their forces were joined Banks would take top command, and then they would occupy Texas, complete the mopping up of Louisiana, start healthy shipments of southern cotton moving back up the river, and make it possible to bring this part of the South back into the Union.

The reconstruction problem, in fact, was at the core of Banks’s assignment. President Lincoln was groping desperately for a way by which seceding states that were firmly held by Federal troops could somehow be brought back into their old relationship with the central government. He had a scheme now for the discovery and careful cultivation of the little islands of Unionist sentiment which were known to exist in the South. If these were brought along properly, it might eventually be possible to restore the old Union without treating the occupied areas as conquered provinces; the new Union, in other words, might be caused to grow painlessly and naturally out of the deep roots of the old, with a final reconciliation that could help to heal the dreadful scars of war. It was worth trying. Banks understood all about it and believed in it, and to make a good start at it was one of his primary functions.²

But he must also lead troops in the field; must open the Port Hudson gateway while Grant opened the one at Vicksburg. Banks was now preparing to do this, but there were still a good many armed Confederates on the march in Louisiana, with a good many more just above them in Arkansas. Banks was worried by these; he would have to do some subsidiary campaigning before he could move on Port Hudson. The political problem was taking half of his attention, and he was not a very skillful strategist anyway. All of which added up to the fact that if the Mississippi was to be opened most of the work would have to be done by Grant’s army.

For the immediate present Grant’s army could not fight because it was quite unable to get to any place where a proper fight could be made. It was on the wrong side of the Mississippi and it was north of Vicksburg; to make its fight it would somehow have to get downstream, cross the river, and come at Vicksburg from the east. It did not occupy a very good place from which to make such a move, and before it could do anything at all it would have to get down in the swamps and do a great deal of old-fashioned hard work with pick and shovel. The source of its labors lay in an abortive move which the Federal high command had tried a number of months earlier.

Shortly after the capture of New Orleans old Admiral Farragut had taken his salt-water ships up the river to bombard Vicksburg, on the off-chance that the city would cave in as quickly as New Orleans had done. It was a vain hope, and before long Farragut went steaming back down the river, better informed about the strength of this fortress on the bluffs. But a modest detachment of troops had gone upstream at the time, to camp across the river from Vicksburg, and it had occurred to the authorities that it might be possible to by-pass Vicksburg entirely by having these troops dig a canal.

Vicksburg lay near the northern end of a sharp loop in the river, and the land just across the river was actually a long, flat, narrow peninsula. If a suitable ditch could be cut across the neck of this peninsula, it was thought, the river’s powerful current would scour it out, the river would presently shift its channel and flow through this expanding ditch, and Vicksburg would be left high and dry, an inland city without military importance. The ditch had been begun, and although the project had lapsed the idea still looked good — especially to President Lincoln, who had all of a frontiersman’s interest in tinkering, particularly when a river which he himself had once navigated was involved. Grant was under orders to do all he could to finish the job.

Grant and his engineers had little use for the plan. The half-completed canal had been planned wrong. Its upstream end led out of a backwater, where the current was unlikely to make itself felt, and the downstream end would hit the river at a spot the Confederates could easily reach with the guns at Vicksburg. To make matters ever so much worse, the river was very high just now, and the land that would be crossed by canal was half under water — too wet for diggers but not wet enough for steamboats. But orders were orders, and after the engineers had redrawn the plans so that the canal, if completed, might have a better chance to work as it was supposed to work, thousands upon thousands of soldiers were given picks and shovels and told to get busy.

There was another construction project on the agenda, for that matter. Fifty miles above Vicksburg a lost crescent of a slough known as Lake Providence lay in the flat land a few miles west of the Mississippi. A series of connecting streams led out of Lake Providence and flowed ultimately into the Red River. If a channel could be cut from the Mississippi into Lake Providence, and if the tortuous waterway leading from the lake to the Red River could be made passable for steamboats, it might be possible for Grant’s army and Porter’s navy to go steaming triumphantly down, enter the Mississippi a little way above Port Hudson, and then steam back to approach Vicksburg from the south, with a moderately secure supply line behind them.

Like the plan for a canal at Young’s Point, this idea looked a good deal better than it really was. The route would be fantastically roundabout — Grant estimated that it would involve a detour of something like 470 miles before it could get him to Vicksburg — and there was something unreal about the thought that a steady stream of transports, freighters, and other craft could ply such a waterway, deep in enemy territory, without interference. Besides, when the engineers got to work they found that many miles of the projected waterway were full of trees. These could be cut down in time, but to do it so that loaded steamboats could safely float over the stumps would call for specially designed underwater saws, to say nothing of many man-hours of labor.

Lake Providence, in short, was no better than the canal. Both ideas had to be followed up; there was a whole army of strong young men who had nothing else to do, and it seemed to Grant that they might as well be working as idle. Furthermore, all of this activity was likely to confuse the Confederates and keep them from finding out what the real objective was. But while the men toiled in mud and swamp, Grant had very little hope that the result of their labors would ever really amount to very much.³

He still had his original problem: how to get his army to a spot where it could attack Vicksburg with some chance of success. For a time it looked as if the answer might lie up the river.

Across the Mississippi from Helena, Arkansas, and just a few miles downstream — two hundred miles above Vicksburg, or thereabouts, as the winding river went — there was a lackadaisical chain of bayous, flooded swamps, and inconsequential streams known as Yazoo Pass which began just under the lee of the Mississippi levee and communicated at last with the Coldwater River, which fed into a stream known as the Tallahatchie, which in turn went into the Yalobusha, which finally, some 250 desolate miles later, went into the Yazoo. If the levee were cut, boats from the Mississippi could go down this intricate waterway. With any luck they could come out on dry ground a little distance above the mouth of the Yazoo — dead north of Vicksburg, where an army would have the option either of hitting the Chickasaw Bluffs which had stopped Sherman or of circling east and coming up to the fortress from the rear.

This was worth a try, and late in February an expedition got under way — twenty thousand infantry in transports, with a force of navy gunboats to clear the way. Army engineers blew up a mine to break the levee, a miniature Niagara went boiling through Yazoo Pass, and presently eight gunboats and two rams, followed by transports bearing the army’s advance guard, went hopefully into the waterway.

Naval officer in charge was Lieutenant Commander Watson Smith, and from the start he found himself mixed up in a sailor’s nightmare. The stream he was to follow wound and turned on itself interminably and was full of snags that could rip the bottom out of an incautiously piloted gunboat; there was a powerful current that made it impossible to steer properly, and when the flotilla made three miles a day it was doing well. Smith was a salt-water sailor, and here he was with a squadron of valuable warships navigating in waters where one of the hazards was the chance that the branches of overhanging trees would knock down his smokestacks. The stream was narrow, and artful Confederates swarmed all about, felling trees to clog the waterways. Between the navy and the army engineers, these obstructions were removed — young Colonel James H. Wilson of Grant’s staff would send an entire regiment ashore, tail them onto cables, and have them haul the felled trees out by sheer strength and awkwardness. It worked so well, he said, that he never afterward wondered how the Egyptians had hauled their great blocks of stone to build the pyramids — obviously they did it by everyday manpower. In one way and another, this amphibious expedition got deeper and deeper into the half-drowned country of the Yazoo Delta.⁴ March wore away, and the sailors and soldiers inched their way down toward the Yazoo River. They got, at last, after a good deal of pulling and hauling and worrying, to the place where the Yalobusha flowed into the Yazoo; and here, on the only bit of dry ground visible for miles around, the Confederates had built a stout little fort of cotton bales and scooped-up earth, which they called Fort Pemberton. It mounted very few guns, but as things worked out, these few were more than enough.

The river was narrow, and the gunboats could approach just one at a time, in line ahead. Of the eight gunboats, only two were proper ironclads, and these had been hastily and poorly built; when they steamed up for a duel, the Confederate gunners racked them, receiving little damage in return. The logical thing to do now was to land infantry and let it storm the fort, but there was no dry ground for infantry to land on; everything all about was water, with a few muddy tussocks here and there, sprouting dejected pine trees and offering no place for infantry maneuvers. Commander Smith fell ill — he had been having a tough time for a month, and a battle like this in a mosquito-infested swamp was something no navy training had prepared him for — and eventually he turned over the command to a junior and went back to the big river to die of a fever. The junior concluded that nothing more could be done here, and although young Colonel Wilson swore in a fine fury and denounced all weakhearted sailors, it was clear that the game was up. With everybody feeling humiliated, the expedition turned about and floundered back to the Mississippi. Fort Pemberton had stopped it cold.⁵

Admiral Porter, meanwhile, had thought up a similar and equally complicated venture.

Not far above the place where the Yazoo flowed into the Mississippi, a lazy stream known as Steele’s Bayou came wandering out of the delta to join the big stream. A venturesome steamboat man who went up Steele’s Bayou could before long turn to his right on a little ditch called Black Bayou, which in turn would put him into Deer Creek, which was narrow and shallow and generally mean. Upstream a way there was the mouth of Rolling Fork, which — since all rivers in this land of mud and water seemed to interconnect, flowing impartially in both directions as the state of the water directed — led into the Sunflower River, which in its own good time fed into the Yazoo.

Theoretically a flotilla might leave the Mississippi via Steele’s Bayou and, with perseverance and good luck, get into the Yazoo far above Vicksburg. It could then put an army ashore on the high ground back from the Mississippi, this army could take the fortifications on the Chickasaw Bluffs from the rear, its supplies could come to it through this marshy labyrinth — and, in fine, Vicksburg itself could be captured.

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

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.

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

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