Chapter Nine
1. Final Miscalculation
JOE HOOKER was another man who had a river to cross. The Rappahannock was not a coiled tawny flood running through bottomless swamps; with daring and good management the crossing could be made whenever he chose. As with Grant, the real tests would come afterward — cruel test of battle for the troops, searching test of lonely responsibility for the general.
He could count on the troops. The Army of the Potomac had been tried in fire. It had learned war in the Seven Days’, at Second Bull Run, at Antietam, and at Fredericksburg; it had known great discouragement and swift revival, acquiring a sinewy elasticity thereby, and its volunteers had lost just enough of their innocence to reach a sharp fighting edge. They could do just about anything their commander asked them to do; if he could use them to their full potential, they might win the war.
The question mark was Hooker himself. He was slim and handsome, with rosy cheeks and cold eyes, a hard-drinking, hard-living man with some coarseness of fiber. At his headquarters there was a glitter of arrogance, and in his speech in this spring of 1863 there was a contemptuous confidence in victory, a glib preacceptance of triumph that might just possibly hide a deep inner uncertainty.
Hooker led more than one hundred and twenty thousand men — battle-tested and well drilled, equipped with everything a rich government could provide. The Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, which he was about to fight, seemed badly overmatched. Lee had had to detach Longstreet and most of Longstreet’s corps to accomplish some food-gathering and Yankee-repelling mission in the watery flat country back of Norfolk, far below Richmond. As April ended, Lee’s army contained no more than half as many men as Hooker’s — men more poorly clad, more poorly fed, and less well equipped. By any test the Federals seemed to have all of the advantages.
Yet there would be a test that would go beyond a counting of battalions and a weighing of metal. What really lay ahead, as the serpentine body of the Army of the Potomac moved out of its camps and flowed purposefully down to the river crossings — while the bands played, and the endless length of the artillery columns jolted over the uneven roads, and new blossoms and young leaves touched the bleak woods with delicate color — what would matter the most in all of this would be the result of a searching inquiry into the character of two men — two men, in all of these scores of armed thousands — Lee and Hooker. These two men would not see each other. In all the wild battle shock of colliding armies they would not come within miles of each other. Yet they were the real antagonists. More than any other campaign in the Civil War, the campaign that began when Hooker put his army in motion at the end of April would depend on the stamina of the rival commanders.
It would be a moral issue, finally — a test of inner integrity and manhood. In this test Hooker would be so badly overmatched that it would be no contest.
Hooker’s plans were excellent, and so was his execution of them … up to the moment of testing.
He was far too intelligent to cross at Fredericksburg, as Burnside had done, and so commit his army to the impossible task of driving Lee’s army from its impregnable trenches. Instead he would go far up the river, crossing both the Rappahannock and the Rapidan twenty or twenty-five miles northwest of Fredericksburg, and then he would swing down and come in on Lee’s flank and rear. Hooker had created an effective cavalry force and he would use it to screen this march, so that Lee would not know about it until it was too late for him to make an effective reply. The Army of the Potomac was in perfect condition, stripped for action, wagon trains cut to a minimum; it would move fast, it would fight where all the chances would be in its favor, and, fighting so, it ought to win.
So went the plan. So went the execution, too, until the time came when everything depended on Joe Hooker. Then the whole business fell apart like a sheet of soggy blotting paper, and the South won a spectacular victory … from which, finally, it could gain no lasting advantage.
Hooker’s troops began to march on April 27. (Grant was nearly ready to put his men across the Mississippi; Grierson was riding hard for Baton Rouge.) Three army corps crossed the two rivers and drove swiftly in toward Fredericksburg, marching through a confusing and almost roadless jungle of second-growth timber known as the Wilderness, and going into bivouac on the last day of April at a crossroads by a pillared brick mansion: Chancellorsville. Two other army corps, left in Fredericksburg in the competent hands of General John Sedgwick, began to cross the river there, as if the Burnside fight were to be repeated, and two more Federal corps waited at the river fords a few miles upstream from Fredericksburg, where they could quickly join either wing of the army. Hooker himself went to Chancellorsville, and as April ended he could boast that he had done — so far — exactly what he set out to do and that he had done it very well.
He had at Chancellorsville very nearly as many soldiers as there were in Lee’s entire army, and they were hardly more than ten miles from Fredericksburg, right behind the great crescent of trenches with which the Confederates had surrounded that town. Abundant reinforcements were close at hand, and Sedgwick with forty thousand men was squarely in Lee’s front — a solid rock against which Hooker’s force could smash the Army of Northern Virginia. On the morning of May 1, Hooker put his men on the roads and they started east, moving in to make a finish fight of it. Hooker was confident, and the soldiers were confident. Even crusty George Meade, commander of one of the three army corps at Chancellorsville — a man who rarely bubbled with enthusiasm for anything — was showing his elation. “Hurrah for old Joe!” he cried to a brother officer. “We’re on Lee’s flank and he doesn’t know it.”1
Lee knew it well enough, but he refused to let it bother him. Technically he was in a desperate fix. If he stayed where he was he would be crushed between Hooker and Sedgwick. If he turned to meet the Chancellorsville thrust he would have to strike at a force that could quickly be made much stronger than his, and John Sedgwick would be right on his heels. If he tried to retreat toward Richmond, Hooker could easily cut across, strike him in flank, and cut off his escape. All of the choices open to him were bad, and it did not seem that there was very much that he could do about it.
Yet he seemed quite unworried. He left some ten thousand men to hold the line against Sedgwick, and with everybody else he set out for Chancellorsville to meet Hooker. Somewhere around noon on May 1, Confederate and Federal skirmish lines collided three miles east of Chancellorsville. When Federal battle lines came up behind the skirmishers they met a line of Confederate infantry, well posted, with field artillery in action. The commanders of the Federal advance confidently prepared to shoulder this roadblock aside and get on with the war, and they sent news of the encounter back to headquarters.
That put it up to Hooker, and he immediately began to wilt. Things were going precisely according to plan. Only the night before he had issued a big-talk statement to his troops, announcing that the enemy “must either ingloriously fly, or come out from behind his defenses and give us battle on our own ground, where certain destruction awaits him.” The enemy was following the script; he had come out from behind his defenses and he was giving battle, and it was on Hooker’s own ground at that. But instead of going on to apply the bit about certain destruction, Hooker began to wonder if there might not be something ominous about this development. He concluded, apparently, that there was; and he called off the advance and ordered his army to retire into improvised trench lines around Chancellorsville. And in those lines, as May Day came to an end, his army prepared to spend the night.
Hooker was still talking it up. He told his ranking officer, General Darius N. Couch: “It’s all right, Couch, I’ve got Lee just where I want him.” To other officers he remarked that Lee’s army was now “the legitimate property of the Army of the Potomac”; to still others he boasted that not even God Almighty could deprive him of the victory that he was about to win. But Couch concluded that under all of this fine talk Hooker was already a beaten man, and no one since that time has seen any reason to think that Couch was mistaken.
While Hooker made windy brags and put “the finest army on the planet” on the defensive, Lee sat on a cracker box a few miles away and held a conference with Stonewall Jackson. They had, by the most favorable estimate, fewer than forty-five thousand men with them; except for the force left at Fredericksburg, that was all the army there was, and they were in the immediate presence of eighty thousand Federals. But Lee was in charge of the battle now, and not Hooker, and what Lee wanted to discuss was the best way in which Hooker’s army might be wiped out. He and Jackson talked and they made a plan, and promptly the next morning they set about putting it into execution.
The plan was the distilled and concentrated essence of extreme daring.
Jackson would take twenty-five thousand men, march the length of Hooker’s front, circle around until he was due west of him, and attack his exposed right flank. The march would take the better part of the day, and to form line of battle in the trackless wilderness where Hooker’s flank rested might take hours; it would be early evening before Jackson could make his fight. Until then Lee with fewer than twenty thousand men would have to confront Hooker and his eighty thousand. Indeed, merely to confront him would not be enough; he would have to pretend to be fighting an offensive battle, and the pretense would have to be convincing, because if Hooker ever found out what Jackson was up to or learned how small Lee’s force really was he could destroy the Army of Northern Virginia before the sun went down.
Hooker would find out nothing, for Lee had him in his hands and was toying with him. Jackson made his march (it was discovered, but in the paralysis that had come upon his spirit Hooker was quite unable to interpret the meaning of his discovery; he concluded finally that part of Lee’s army must be retreating, and he sent out a couple of divisions to prod the fugitives along). Lee gave a masterful imitation of a general who is about to open a crushing attack all along the line, and kept Hooker looking his way without inducing him to look so attentively that he could discover anything. And a little while before sundown Jackson struck Hooker’s exposed flank like the crack of doom.
One Federal army corps was driven off in rout, the right half of Hooker’s line was disrupted, and Jackson believed that if the attack could be pressed the Federals could be cut off from the Rappahannock crossings and destroyed utterly. But effective woods fighting in the darkness was impossible, the Confederate battle line was all confused … and Jackson himself, at last, was shot down and had to be carried to a field hospital with a wound that would kill him within the week. The fighting died out, with a confusing and malignant sputter of picket-line firing and sudden, meaningless cannonades, around midnight. In the streaky moonlight that lay on the narrow lanes and the crowded clearings, one Federal division collided with other Federal troops and fought a savage battle. Massed Federal artillery, hastily dug in on high ground near the Chancellorsville house, sprayed the landscape with gunfire; Yankee cavalry blundered into marching columns of Confederate infantry, and there were blind slashing and firing; and neither Hooker nor any of his generals quite realized that although their army had been jarred off balance it nevertheless lay between the separate pieces of Lee’s army, with an excellent chance to turn Lee’s victory into defeat when daylight came.
With daylight the Confederate attack was renewed. Jeb Stuart, the jaunty cavalryman with the plumed hat and the floating cloak lined with scarlet, was called away from his mounted men and given control of the fight Jackson had commenced, and while he desperately reorganized the mixed-up southern infantry elements his gunners moved fieldpieces into an open meadow which the stumbling Federals had abandoned, and from this vantage point his artillery hammered at the Federal guns and blanketed Chancellorsville clearing with a storm of shell. One missile knocked down a pillar of the Chancellorsville mansion. Hooker, who was lounging against the pillar, was thrown down and stunned. The will to strike a counterblow flickered and died in the Federal commander, and by noon his troops were fighting a rear-guard action, pulling back to form a great defensive horseshoe covering the Rappahannock bridgeheads. The two wings of Lee’s army came together again, and the huge northern army was shoved and huddled into its new lines, all notion of an offensive fight gone forever. Hooker was not thinking of anything larger than the hope that the army might avoid annihilation.
Back at Fredericksburg, John Sedgwick came into action. His men hit the Confederate trenches on the high ground west of town, captured the heights that Burnside had been unable to take in December, and started off to rescue Hooker. But Lee, as calmly as if he had been directing maneuvers back in the Richmond training fields, left a few brigades to keep an eye on Hooker’s host and with the rest of his army turned, boxed Sedgwick’s tough soldiers up in a bend of the Rappahannock halfway between Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, and after a wearing day’s fighting compelled them to retreat across the river, glad enough to escape alive. Then — as smoothly as if this shuttling back and forth against impossible odds were all part of the normal routine — Lee regrouped his army in front of Hooker’s horseshoe bridgehead and prepared for a new blow that would complete the rout of the Army of the Potomac.
This blow he never had to make, for Hooker had had enough. His men occupied a powerful position, with good trenches on high ground and abundant artillery. He greatly outnumbered Lee, and nearly half of his soldiers had not yet been in action at all; by the book, any Confederate attack now could lead to nothing but a Confederate defeat. But Hooker folded up, once and for all, and on a dark and rainy night he pulled his troops back, crossed to the north side of the Rappahannock, and marched back to his camps opposite Fredericksburg, abandoning the campaign that had been planned and begun so ably. He had been hopelessly beaten, he had lost seventeen thousand men, some of his generals were almost in a state of mutiny — tough little Couch was declaring that he would never serve under Hooker again and was asking the War Department for a transfer — and his soldiers were angrily inquiring how they had lost a battle in which so many of them had not even had a chance to fight.
By any standard, this was a personal triumph for Lee. It had been the story of the Seven Days’ all over again, with all of the highlights and the shadows intensified; the man with all the odds against him had taken desperate chances and had seen them pay off, while the man with everything in his favor had gone nervous and had seen his chances evaporate like the gun smoke shredding out over the forests of spiky pines and saplings. At no other time in the Civil War did the moral superiority held by one general over another stand out so clearly as a decisive factor in battle.
And yet this dazzling victory was sterile. Not only had it cost the Confederacy more than the Confederacy could afford to pay — it killed Stonewall Jackson, who was literally irreplaceable, and it put twelve thousand of other ranks out of action to boot — but it left the high command facing a problem that proved finally to be beyond solution.
Hooker had been whipped, and the spring invasion of Virginia had been canceled. But the war was not a duel between generals, and the enormous forces it had set loose would not finally dispose of themselves just because one man was stronger than another. Chancellorsville with its great flame and smoke and noise had done little more than give the Confederacy time to take a second look at its desperate predicament.
Destiny lay in the West. Grant had Vicksburg surrounded now. His army held a great semicircle that ran east of town from the Chickasaw Bluffs and curled around to the banks of the Mississippi a few miles downstream. Within this semicircle Pemberton and his thirty-one thousand were locked up, helpless; outside the semicircle Joe Johnston and an inadequate army tried in vain to find some way to crack the shell. Grant had been reinforced, he was receiving all the supplies the North could send to him, and he was able without effort to hold Johnston off at arm’s length while he waited for Vicksburg to fall. Three hundred miles to the northeast, Rosecrans was beginning to move with his Army of the Cumberland. Bragg, who opposed him, was outnumbered. In Mississippi and Tennessee the doom of the Confederacy was beginning to take visible form. Against long odds, battles might be won in Virginia, and the Yankee invader might be made to retreat across the Rappahannock, perhaps even across the Potomac; but Vicksburg would fall and Tennessee would be lost, and if these things happened the Confederacy would be a cut flower in a vase, seeming to live for a time, but cut off forever from the possibility of independent existence.
This was the reality that demanded the attention of the Confederate government as the spring of 1863 drew on toward summer.
Perhaps there was no really good answer. General Longstreet, who had missed Chancellorsville and who was consulted by President Davis in Richmond, urged that troops be taken from Lee’s army and sent to Tennessee; given such reinforcements, Bragg could perhaps defeat Rosecrans and compel Grant to draw back from in front of Vicksburg. Secretary of War Seddon believed that reinforcements from Lee’s army might go direct to Mississippi, so that Johnston could smite Grant’s iron ring directly. There was no certainty that either of these expedients would work; they were just cards that might possibly be played.
Lee could read the future no better than anyone else. He did point out that the government must in effect decide whether to hold the line in Mississippi or to hold it in Virginia. To give up Virginia would be to give up Richmond, national capital, symbol of nationhood, source too of essential munitions and manufactures; loss here would probably mean speedy loss of the war itself, whereas the doom that would descend in the West would at least come more slowly. Furthermore, it would not do to wait and defend Virginia passively. Chancellorsville had humiliated Hooker’s army but had not crippled it; in a month or two the Federals would inevitably be ready to invade Virginia anew. Better (argued Lee) to defend Virginia by fighting in the North. A battle won above the Potomac might convince war-weary Northerners that the Confederacy could never really be beaten; it might induce the government at Washington to recall Grant and Rosecrans for home defense; it might even bring reality to that will-o’-the-wisp of southern dreams, recognition of the Confederacy by England and France. It might, in short, be the stroke that would change everything, and at the very least it would take the contesting armies out of ravaged Virginia for a time.2
Few soldiers called on by government for advice are ever able to speak with the overpowering prestige that was Lee’s in the spring of 1863. When he proposed that he take the Army of Northern Virginia and march into Pennsylvania, the issue was settled. Only Postmaster General Reagan, of all the Cabinet, continued to argue for a troop transfer to the West; President Davis and everyone else backed their winning general, as they were humanly bound to do, and by the middle of May the invasion of the North was ordered.
Probably no other decision could have been made, given all of the circumstances. Yet once again there had been profound miscalculation: the latest in a series of miscalculations, all of them fatal.
It had been calculated that in the concept of the Union of the states there was not anything so compelling that men would fight and die for it; that the institution of slavery could be made to live on in a world that was dreaming broader dreams; that this war (which itself had come against calculation) could be waged as a formalized contest that would go by familiar rules and not as an upheaval of terrible infinite forces that would go by no rules ever heard of and would forever change the people who were fighting it. Of these miscalculations the Confederacy was dying a slow death; to them, now, there was added the hopeful belief that if the brilliant stroke that had been so dazzling at Chancellorsville could just be repeated in Pennsylnia, all that had been lost could be happily redeemed.
Fog of war lay on the land, and men had to make the best decisions they could by the murky light that was available. The men in Richmond determined that the Army of Northern Virginia must march to Pennsylvania, and there it did march, pulling the Army of the Potomac after it — a fated, tragic march that led to the nation’s most unforgettable single moment of tragic drama, but that led away from the main current of the war itself. Between them, the two armies that had to make this march would pay fifty thousand casualties for it.
2. Moment of Truth
Most of the men in the Army of the Potomac had been soldiers for very nearly two years. In those years a man who had been in all of the army’s battles — and very few had been in all of them — might have known as many as twenty days of actual combat. All the rest was monotony; endless days in camps, hour upon hour of work on the drill field, long marches on bad roads with hot sun and dust or cold rain and mud for accompaniment. The soldier’s greatest enemy always was simple boredom. The high adventure of army life came down at last to the eternal performance of dull tasks and to an unbroken routine of physical discomfort.
Life after Chancellorsville went on much as it had always gone. The troops were sullen and perplexed, yet there was no great drop in morale as there had been after Fredericksburg. The memory of the terrible battle in the blazing thickets seemed to be dulled very quickly. The old routine caught men up again; by its very familiarity it brought a revival of spirits; by the end of May it was almost as if the battle had not been fought. The army was living wholly in the present.
Yet with all of this there was a growing sense of great things to come. Chancellorsville had settled very little; it had been prelude, not finality, and army life was in a condition of unstable equilibrium. The desolate camping ground by the Rappahannock could not be a permanent abode. There was a rising tension, a dim foreknowledge of approaching climax. The big showdown that had seemed so near when the army moved for the Rappahannock fords at the end of April had not come off; it would come, and when it came it would be cataclysmic, bringing a day of violence worse than anything that had gone before.1
The army’s failures had always been failures at the top. It was a great army, capable of great deeds, but no commander had ever used it with full throttle. McClellan, Pope, and Burnside had been either too cautious or too clumsy. Hooker, in a way, had been worst of all; crusty General Meade expressed the common feeling when he wrote to his wife that Hooker “disappointed all his friends by failing to show his fighting qualities at the pinch.”2 The army sensed that it would not fight another battle under Hooker, and the national administration had a firm conviction on the matter; the general remained in command, but he was operating on borrowed time, and although he was irritating his subordinates now by trying to find a scapegoat for disaster it seemed likely that when the next fight came someone else would be in charge.
The next fight would come soon. Across the river there was a stir in Lee’s camps. Behind the cavalry screen the Confederate divisions began shifting toward the northwest, moving for the gaps in the Blue Ridge to reach the Shenandoah Valley, which offered a sheltered route to northern territory. Yankee cavalry crossed the river and provoked a savage fight at Brandy Station early in June, taking Jeb Stuart somewhat by surprise and getting a line on the Confederate movement. A bit later Hooker’s soldiers read a grim omen in the fact that all civilians and sutlers were ordered outside the army’s lines.
Lee was moving in a wide arc, beginning a fateful invasion of the north. Hooker thought of pitching into him en route; considered, too, the idea of moving straight for Richmond, believing that this would speedily call Lee back. But Washington ordered Hooker to play a strict defensive game, and by the middle of June the Army of the Potomac was on the move, marching for the Potomac crossings above Washington, circling warily to keep itself between the invader and the national capital.
As the two armies quickened their pace everybody watched — governments in Washington and Richmond, plain people North and South — as if the focus of the entire war centered here, with its final result and meaning depending altogether on what came of this desperate movement. Quick spurts of fire sparkled along the slanting fields, the copses and stone-fenced farms and drowsy hamlets on the eastern slopes of the Blue Ridge, where hard-fighting cavalry patrols probed and sparred, fighting simultaneously for concealment and discovery. The Army of Northern Virginia became mysteriously elongated, advance guard splashing across the Potomac shallows above Harpers Ferry, rear guard lingering near Fredericksburg, other elements strung out between. Lincoln reflected that so long an animal must be very slim somewhere, and he suggested that it might be broken in half if the thinnest spot could just be found. But War Department distrust of Hooker was too solid by now, and Hooker could not take the initiative; he was crippled by the Chancellorsville failure, and neither he nor anyone else could prevent what was coming. All of the chances that had been missed in two years of war were piling up, generating a pent-up violence that must be discharged finally in one shattering explosion. What was coming was fated. The war was following its own grim logic, and the men who seemed to control it were being carried by a tide they could neither direct nor understand.
Mid-June brought sweltering heat, with heavy dust in the torn roads, and the divisions of the Army of the Potomac were driven on in a series of forced marches which the men remembered as the worst they made in all the war. Men died of sunstroke or fell out by the roadside and staggered on to overtake their units after dusk, and the moving army trailed a soiled fringe of beaten stragglers; regiments would make camp at night with fewer than half of their men present, and the laggards would come stumbling in at all hours, exhausted.3
(In the West, Grant clamped a tighter grip on Vicksburg and waited for the end, and Joe Johnston vainly sought guidance: seeing that it could not possibly hold both, did the Confederate government prefer to give up Tennessee or Mississippi? Rosecrans got his army ready for movement, and in Arkansas a Confederate column began a hopeless attempt to drive the Federals away from Helena and the rivers; yet those who watched the war kept looking to the North, to Pennsylvania, where Lee’s forward elements curled east toward York and Harrisburg, and as June came to an end they found themselves looking at a quiet little market town known as Gettysburg.)
Gettysburg was a dot on the map marking a place where all the roads crossed; a pleasant little town lying amid rolling hills and broad shallow valleys, a blue mountain wall rising a score of miles to the west, rival armies moving toward it without design, as if something in the place drew them irresistibly. All of Lee’s army was north of the Potomac by now, connected with its southern bases by the thinnest of threads; it was on its own in a strange land, scooping up supplies from the fat Pennsylvania farming country, driven by an inexorable compulsion — lacking a supply line, it must eternally keep moving, because if it did not it would starve, and whenever and wherever it found its enemy it must strike without delay, no matter how the odds might look.
Hooker’s army was above the river too, although Lee did not know it; Jeb Stuart, most famous of cavalrymen, had slipped the leash and gone off on a wild, meaningless raid that took him out of the play and left Lee groping in the dark, condemned at last to fight a battle in which he could not maneuver. But the Army of the Potomac was not Hooker’s army any longer. As June ended, the War Department at last extorted from Hooker the thing it desired but hardly dared ask for — Hooker’s resignation; and now Hooker was off in retirement and George Gordon Meade was in charge, his army loosely spread out across western Maryland, cavalry patrols groping north and west to see where the Confederate strength might be.
Confederate strength was coming together fast, and it was all heading for Gettysburg. Lee had finally learned that the Army of the Potomac was north of the border, looking for him, and when the news reached him his own troops were strung out along sixty miles of Pennsylvania highway, from Chambersburg in the west to the neighborhood of York and Harrisburg in the east. It was necessary for him to concentrate east of the mountains and to do it at once, and couriers had been riding hard to call the scattered divisions together. The Gettysburg area was the handiest place for them to meet, and so to Gettysburg they were coming; and at daylight on July 1 a Union cavalry division that had bivouacked on a low ridge just west of town saw the head of a Confederate infantry column coming toward it.
Stolid General John Buford, who commanded the cavalry, put his dismounted troopers in line, unlimbered his artillery, sent riders pelting south to notify Meade that the Rebels had been found, and opened fire. And from the moment when cavalry and infantry began to exchange long-range shots — firing tentatively, as if they were probing this embryonic battle to see what it might amount to — the two armies were committed to their most terrible fight.
Gettysburg was an act of fate; a three-day explosion of storm and flame and terror, unplanned and uncontrollable, coming inevitably (as the war itself had come) out of the things that hard-pressed men had done in the light of imperfect knowledge, the end result of actions that moved with an inexorable logic toward a fundamental and astounding goal. It would come to symbolize all the war, as if the blunders and the heroism, the hopes and the delusions, the combativeness and the incomprehensible devotion of all Americans had been summed up once and for all in one monstrous act of violence. It was enormously destructive, its significance was not seen until long after it had ended, and — to make it finally and perfectly characteristic — it opened and closed with moments of heartbreaking drama.
Buford’s cavalry had to hold the ridge until some of Meade’s infantry could come up. The Confederates got an infantry division in line and began to move forward, and ragged smoke clouds hung over the ridge as the firing grew heavier; then, in the middle of the morning, the leading brigade of General John Reynolds’s I Army Corps came swinging up the Emmitsburg road from the south, Reynolds himself galloping on ahead to see Buford and get a line on the fight. As the Federals came nearer they left the road and headed cross-lots, taking a short cut to the scene of action; and some impulse made the commander of this leading brigade shake out the battle flags and put the fife and drum corps at the head of the column to play the men into battle. On they came, five regiments of lean Middle Westerners, roar of battle just ahead, shrill fifes playing “The Campbells Are Coming,” eighteen hundred veteran soldiers tramping along in step.4 This battle of Gettysburg would begin with a flourish and a snatch of music, with the shock troops giving a last salute to the fraudulent romance of war before plunging into the storm. Then the music ended, the infantry ran out along the ridge, and the fight was on.
This day began well for the Federals, but it ended disastrously. Reynolds’s men knocked the first Confederate attack back on its heels, capturing a Rebel brigadier and mangling a couple of Confederate brigades almost beyond repair; but Confederate reinforcements were reaching Gettysburg faster than the Federals, and the battle lines grew and grew until they formed a great semicircle west and north of the town, Federals outnumbered and outflanked, Reynolds killed and his army corps cut to pieces. Another Yankee corps, the XI, came up and went through town on the double, colliding head on with Confederates who were marching south from Carlisle. These Confederates cut around both flanks of the XI Corps’ line, crumpled them, punched holes in the line, and late in the afternoon drove the survivors back through the village in rout; then the line west of town caved in, and by evening the Federals who were left (they had had upward of ten thousand casualties) were reassembling on the high ground south and east of Gettysburg, grimly determined to hold on until the rest of the army came up, but not at all certain that they could do it.
Perhaps Lee could have driven them off that evening and clinched things. Most of his army was on the scene by now, and the Federals were badly outnumbered; one final drive in the Stonewall Jackson manner might have done it. But Lee was fighting blind. The cavalry that might have told him where all of Meade’s men were was still absent, an exhausted column riding hard somewhere off to the east, and Jackson was in his grave, and by the time the southern generals had conferred and considered and weighed risks, night had come and it was too late. The battle would have to be resumed next day.
July 2 came in hot after a windless night in which a full moon lit the dreadful debris on the fields and hills where men had fought on the first day. Meade was on the scene now, most of his army in hand and the rest coming up fast. He held good ground: Cemetery Hill, a massive height on the southern edge of town, wooded Culp’s Hill half a mile to the east, and the long crest of a ridge that ran south from the cemetery, taking its name from it — Cemetery Ridge — which ended in two rocky knolls a mile or more away, Little Round Top and Big Round Top. On these heights the Army of the Potomac waited while Lee prepared for a new assault.
Running parallel to Cemetery Ridge, a mile west across a shallow open valley, was a similar rise in the ground, Seminary Ridge, taking its name from a Lutheran theological institute. On this ridge, looking east, was perhaps half of the Confederate army. The rest of the army was in position in and on both sides of Gettysburg, facing south — an awkward position, since it compelled the smaller of the two armies to occupy the longer line and gave Meade the advantage of a compact central position; wherever they made their fight, the Confederates would have to come uphill.
One Confederate did not like the looks of it at all. James Longstreet was a stubborn, opinionated man, and on July 2 his opinion was that Gettysburg was not a fit place for the Confederates to fight — an opinion that he clung to with massive stubbornness. Better, he argued, to maneuver, sliding far around the Union flank and finding some position in which the Army of Northern Virginia could sit tight and let the Yankees do the attacking. But Lee looked east from Seminary Ridge, saw the ranks of the waiting Federals, and made the inescapable decision: The enemy is there, and there I will attack him. Longstreet argued, grumbled, and sulked, but it made no difference. Here the fight had started and here it would have to end.
It was well on in the afternoon before the Confederates could make their attack; and this second day at Gettysburg was made up of many separate fights, each one a moment or an hour of concentrated fury, with a blinding, choking fog of blue powder smoke over the hillsides and the rocky woods, hammered down by unending deafening noise, sparkling and glowing evilly with constant spurts of fire. In the batteries the slim iron rifles and the squat brass smoothbores bounded backward at each discharge, their trail-pieces tearing the ground; sweating gunners manhandled them back into place, rammed home fresh charges, stood aside for a new salvo, and then ran in to lay hold of wheels and handspikes to make ready for another blast. Above all the racket there was the sound of men cheering and cursing and the fearful screaming of wounded horses, and all the ground was covered with dead and wounded. Ragged lines of infantry swayed in and out of the shifting veils of smoke, battle flags visible here and there, generals riding, gesturing with swords, couriers going in on the gallop with orders that might or might not be heeded. Commanding officers sent troops forward, called up reinforcements, peered anxiously through their glasses at the murk that hid the battle from their sight. They had called this violence into being but they could do no more with it. This was the soldiers’ fight now.
East of Gettysburg there was Culp’s Hill, high and covered with trees, anchor of the right end of Meade’s bent line. Confederate Richard Ewell sent his men in, long battle lines forming in the flat ground and running forward into the woods. They found the Federals posted in solid breastworks of earth and felled trees; they struggled up the smoke-drenched hillside, stumbled back down, tried again, won a foothold that threatened the Union army with disaster — and could not quite make it, while the chain lightning of the flashing guns laced in and out among the tree trunks and sparkled in the hot woodland dusk.
South of Gettysburg there was high ground along the Emmitsburg road, and here, against Meade’s orders, General Dan Sickles had posted the III Army Corps. Longstreet drove his own army corps in on these men amid an immense bombardment, a cannon ball took off Sickles’s leg, and the III Corps was broken up and driven back in confusion, although it made a bitter fight of it before retreating. There was a peach orchard, where men fought hand to hand with bayonets and musket butts amid little trees shattered by shell fire. There was a wheat field, grain trampled flat and strewn with dead bodies, where Northerners and Southerners knelt thirty paces apart and blazed away with unremitting fury; the Federals lost the field, brought up reinforcements and regained it, then lost it for good when a new Confederate attack was driven home. Near the wheat field there was a great tangled area of boulders and stunted trees known as the Devil’s Den; it earned its name that afternoon, while men fired from behind rocks and trees, wounded men dragged themselves into rocky dens and crevices for shelter, and Yankee batteries in the rear blasted the place indiscriminately with shell and solid shot. East of Devil’s Den there was Little Round Top, swept by southern rifle fire, defended by last-minute Federal reinforcements who ran panting along the uneven hillside to drive back the Confederates who had swept through Devil’s Den.
Sickles’s line was pulverized, and fresh troops who came in were broken and driven back, and for a time there was a great gaping hole all along the left of Meade’s line. But Little Round Top held, and a line of Federal guns was posted in a farmyard, where it held off Longstreet’s charging men until Meade could get fresh infantry on the scene. At one time a Confederate division charged all the way to the crest of Cemetery Ridge, and the Army of the Potomac was in danger of being broken in half; but the invaders could not stay, a series of disorganized but effective countercharges cut them and drove them back, and when darkness came at last the Union left continued to hold the high ground. Over near Culp’s Hill there was a final flare-up, and once again disaster came near; charging Southerners broke an infantry line and got in among the Yankee guns on Cemetery Hill, but a Union brigade ran in at the last moment, fighting in pitch-darkness with only the spitting fire from gun muzzles to tell where the battle line was, and the Southerners drew off at last and retired to the plain north of the hill. The second day at Gettysburg came to a close, and as the guns were stilled a constant, agonizing chorus of cries from the helpless wounded men filled the moonlit night; thousands upon thousands of maimed lay in field and woods and on the rocky knolls, all the way from Round Top and the wheat field around to Culp’s Hill.
In the rear of the Army of the Potomac there was a great confused huddle of bewildered fugitives, walking wounded, wrecked artillery units, and panicky non-combat details. During the night and early morning the last of Meade’s reinforcements came up through this backwash. A gunner in the VI Corps remembered how the stragglers and wounded men told doleful tales of defeat — “there was all kinds of stories flying round in the rear, some telling us that we were whipped to death and that any God’s quantity of our artillery was captured”; but when the replacements got to the battle line they found everybody confident. A wounded infantry colonel assured them that “we are just warming them and giving them the damndest whipping they ever got,”5 and when daylight brought a renewal of the Confederate attempt to seize Culp’s Hill the Federals steadied and beat the attack off with smooth competence.
After the fight for Culp’s Hill ended, there was a lull, and the hot noon hours of the third day passed with nothing to break the stillness but an occasional sputter of skirmish-line fire. The thing had not been settled yet. The armies had not quite fought themselves out; the Army of Northern Virginia had enough strength left for one final assault, and the Army of the Potomac was still strong enough for one more desperate stand. It would happen now. Everybody knew it, and the armies waited, tense, while the sun beat down on the steaming fields.
While they waited, there was a restless stir of movement along the center and left of the Confederate line. Rank upon rank of artillery took position in the open, west of Emmitsburg road; behind, in the woods along Seminary Ridge, troops were on the move, glint of sunlight on rifle barrels visible now and then to the waiting Federals a mile to the east. Meade had predicted the night before that if Lee attacked again he would hit the Union center: he had tried both flanks and had failed; only the middle line was left. Meade was right. Lee was massing strength for one last great blow, aiming it at the strongest part of the Union line, where the chance of success was little better than Burnside’s chance had been in front of the stone wall at Fredericksburg. Lee was used to long odds, he had the habit of success, and there was in him a deep confidence that his men could do anything if they were once properly thrown into action. The point they would strike was marked by a little clump of trees — center of the target for Lee’s final shot.
He would throw them into action here and now, in spite of the odds, trusting that the valor of an infantry which he believed to be unconquerable would make up for all of the mistakes that had been made. A courier rode out from Longstreet’s headquarters with an order for a battery commander; two guns were fired with a breathless, measured interval between — and then, at one o’clock, came the explosion, and the whole line of Confederate guns opened in a thunderous bombardment. Federal gunners on Cemetery Ridge ran to their pieces to reply, Yankee infantry huddled behind low breastworks, dazed by the storm, and the fifteen thousand Southerners who had been appointed to charge across the valley knelt in the woods behind their flaming guns and waited likewise, while the ground trembled and a great smoke-fog filled the open space between the ridges, and the war’s supreme hour of tension tightened toward its breaking point.
It was the most prodigious bombardment of the war. The roar was continuous, so intense that artillerists could hardly hear the reports of their own guns; men who thought they had seen and heard the ultimate at Antietam or Gaines’s Mill found that this went beyond anything they had known or imagined. It was the utmost the two armies could do.
Yet it was oddly inconclusive. The guns swept Cemetery Ridge with flame and with fragments of flying metal; they killed men and animals, broke gun carriages to fragments, exploded caissons. Over the heads of the waiting Confederate infantry the Federal shells ripped branches and ugly jagged splinters from trees, killed crouching men who never saw the battle, filled the air with the sound and the scent of violent death. But the great assault, when it came, would go about as it would have gone if there had been no bombardment at all. The Federal power to resist was not materially weakened — except that some of Meade’s batteries ran out of long-range ammunition and would have to wait for their attackers to get to close quarters; the Confederate power to attack was as strong as it was before the guns went off; and the power and the fury that had beaten upon the rocky hills were no more than the overture for the moment that lay just ahead.
That moment would linger and shine in the American memory forever, the terrible unforgettable moment of truth that would symbolize inexpressible things. It blotted out other scenes then, and it still does. A few miles to the east, all but unnoticed by the armies themselves, Union and Confederate cavalry were fighting a desperate mounted battle, charging lines crashing into each other at full gallop as if these troopers by themselves would win the day and the war; and if Stuart’s worn brigades had managed to break through they could have gone all across the defenseless rear of the Army of the Potomac, where they could have made vast trouble. But they did not break through; they drew off at last with heavy losses — and afterward all anyone would say was, “Oh yes, the cavalry fought at Gettysburg too, didn’t it?” And far down in Mississippi a white flag was coming out through Pemberton’s lines, and for the second time in his life Grant was being asked what terms he would give to a surrendering army; yet then and now, to look at that hour is to see it through the eyes of the sweating Federals who crouched on Cemetery Ridge and squinted west, peering toward the afternoon sun.
What they saw was an army with banners, moving out from the woods into the open field by the ranked guns, moving out of shadow into eternal legend, rank upon endless rank drawn up with parade-ground precision, battle flags tipped forward, sunlight glinting from musket barrels — General George Pickett’s Virginians, and ten thousand men from other commands, men doomed to try the impossible and to fail. It takes time to get fifteen thousand men into line, and these Southerners were deliberate about it — perhaps out of defiance, perhaps out of sheer self-consciousness and pride. Then at last they had things the way they wanted them and they went marching up toward the clump of unattainable trees, and all the guns opened again, and a great cloud of smoke and dust filled the hollow plain.
Lee watched from the crest of Seminary Ridge, and because of the smoke he could see very little. Meade saw nothing at all, for he had been busy about headquarters duties far behind the lines, and although he mounted and rode for the front he did not get there until it was all over. The rolling cloud crossed the fields and went up the slope, and the crash of battle rose higher and higher as the men came to grips with each other on Cemetery Ridge, choking fog hiding the battle flags, Federals from right and left swarming over to join in the fight. Then suddenly it was finished. The charging column had been broken all to bits, survivors were going back to the Confederate lines, the smoke cloud was lifting as the firing died down — and the battle of Gettysburg was ended.
Ended; yet singularly incomplete, not to become a rounded whole until months afterward. It was the queer fate of the men who fought over the great question of Union that this most desperate and spectacular of all their battles should not be entirely comprehensible until after all of the dead had been buried, the wounded tended, the field itself made into a park, and the armies gone far below the horizon, fighting other battles in other places. Then the President would come and speak a few sentences, and the deep meaning of the fight would at last begin to clear. Then the perplexing mists and shadows would fade and Gettysburg would reveal itself as a great height from which men could glimpse a vista extending far into the undiscovered future.
Meanwhile they had to get on with the war. Lee would hold his lines until the next day, withdrawing sullenly, a third of his army out of action; Meade would follow with great caution, well aware that he had lost fully a quarter of his force and that Lee’s army was still dangerous as a wounded tiger; and in the end both armies would return to Virginia, and the most that could surely be said was that one more attempted Confederate invasion had been driven back. But far to the west the great valley had been opened, and now an Illinois farmer could send his wheat down-river to New Orleans and the outside world, as if 1861 had never happened.
3. Unvexed to the Sea
When Grant’s army first came up to Vicksburg, on May 18, the men thought that perhaps it was going to be easy. They were cocky. In less than three weeks they had crossed the Mississippi, marched far inland to seize and despoil the capital of the state, beaten the Confederates in battle wherever they met them, taken several thousand prisoners, and forced Pemberton to pull his army back inside of his fortified lines. They had lived, while doing all of this, off the fat of the land; and although they had fought hard, marched hard, and lived hard, there had been about the whole expedition some of the aspects of an especially unrestrained picnic. The soldiers were beginning to believe that they could do just about anything they wished, and it seemed likely now that with one sharp rush they could capture Vicksburg and end the campaign.
Grant himself seems to have felt very much the same way. He suspected, in addition, that the Confederates were badly demoralized. They had just retreated pell-mell into the works after being decisively whipped in the open field, and if they could be hit hard before they had a chance to get set, the blow might be decisive. Grant spent twenty-four hours arranging his three army corps in front of Pemberton’s works, and then on the afternoon of May 19 his signal guns boomed and the attack was made.1
It did not turn out to be easy, and if the Confederates were demoralized they concealed it admirably. The ground was made for defense, and these Southerners speedily demonstrated anew the truth of an old military axiom — that even badly beaten troops can do very well if they are put into good fieldworks and allowed to fight on the defensive. They proved it now so conclusively that they kept Grant’s army out of Vicksburg for a month and a half.
Vicksburg was on an uneven plateau, and the ground all around the town was hilly and rolling, seamed by an infinite number of ravines and gullies that ran in all directions and tended to have very steep walls. It made ideal defensive ground, and Pemberton’s engineers had laid out their lines with skill. They put strong redoubts on commanding heights, connected these with a chain of rifle pits, and arranged it all so that every ravine or hollow that led up to their works could be swept by artillery and musketry. In effect, any assaulting party would either have to scale a precipitous bluff or must come up through the narrow end of a funnel, with Rebel marksmen enjoying a clear shot all the way.
The attack on May 19 was bound to fail, and it failed quickly. Grant’s troops dashed at the Confederate works, were rebuffed, and then began to dig trenches of their own within easy musket shot of the enemy lines. They still were not convinced that the Vicksburg trenches could not be stormed, and when Grant conferred with his corps commanders he found that his generals were not convinced either — nor, for the matter of that, was he himself. It still seemed as if one determined push ought to take the town and everything in it; Grant was fully aware that Joe Johnston, off to his rear somewhere, was striving to assemble an army large enough to raise the siege — and, all in all, it seemed advisable to try it once more.
The new fight was made on May 22. It cost the Union army rather more than three thousand men and gained nothing worth talking about. The experience of a brigade in McClernand’s corps was typical.
Sent in to make its attack, this brigade had to advance by the flank, in column of fours, up a winding gully. The approach was fairly well protected from Confederate fire, but precisely at the point where the gully broadened and gave the troops room to deploy it exposed them to destruction. The leading regiment, reaching this spot, formed column of companies and went forward on the double. The first blast of Confederate fire annihilated the leading company outright — of thirty-two men, all but one were either killed or wounded — and the succeeding companies fared little better. Most of the brigade wound up at last hugging the ground at the bottom of a railroad cut and praying for darkness. At the top of the slope Confederates were lighting the fuses of shells and then rolling the shells downhill on their heads. Now and then the Federals would manage to pick one up and toss it back before it exploded. After night came what was left of the brigade crept back to the rear to reassemble.2
Somehow, during this fight, McClernand got the idea that he was winning. In two or three places his men actually reached the first line of Rebel trenches; McClernand saw their flags there and sent word to Grant that he had cracked the Confederate line and that he could go on in and take Vicksburg if McPherson and Sherman supported him properly. Grant was skeptical, but he had the other corps renew their efforts — only to learn later that McClernand’s optimism was simply the delusion of an unskilled soldier still obsessed by the belief that he would be the hero who would take Vicksburg, open the Mississippi Valley, and win the war. Sherman and McPherson, whose men lost heavily in the extra attacks because of McClernand’s claims, were furious, and Grant made up his mind that as soon as Vicksburg fell he would send McClernand home.3
For Vicksburg was bound to fall, eventually. Grant’s line of encircling trenches ran thirteen miles, from the Chickasaw Bluffs north of town all the way to the Mississippi on the south, and if the Federals could not force their way in, the Confederates had even less chance to force their way out. On the men, the food, and the ammunition that he had in Vicksburg to begin with, Pemberton would have to make his fight; and there was not a chance that what he had would be enough. Joe Johnston was still in Grant’s rear, and because Rosecrans had not yet taken the offensive in Tennessee, Johnston was getting reinforcements; but Grant was being reinforced too, and he was able to form a defensive line of his own, some miles to the east of the lines he had drawn around Vicksburg, to hold Johnston at arm’s length. Porter and his ironclads held the river, and at night the naval mortars tossed huge shells into Vicksburg, wrecking homes and killing civilians and driving the citizens to live in caves dug in ravines. All the Federals had to do now was to hold on and eventually the fortress was bound to fall.
The soldiers settled down to it as philosophically as they could. An Iowan wrote home that “we are all as dirty as hogs” and infested with vermin; they had not had their clothes off for four weeks, and in the trenches they could hardly get enough water to drink; to make any attempt to keep clean was completely hopeless. Men in a Wisconsin regiment dug a hundred-foot well but got only a little muddy water for their pains. Most of the troops had to send details all the way to the Mississippi to bring back water in barrels — “and poor stuff it is when they get it.” A Rebel prisoner boasted that Pemberton’s army had enough corn and bacon to last a year and said it could never be starved out. Fever and ague were common in the Federal trenches, and many men were on the sick list.4
Yet Federal morale remained good. The men were proud of the campaign they had made, and they were strategists enough to know that they had the Confederates in a box. They told one another that they would be in Vicksburg by the Fourth of July; meanwhile they worked night and day to make their own trenches strong. Sandbags were piled along the parapets, leaving loopholes for muskets; heavy logs were then laid on top of the sandbags, and along most of the line a man in the trenches could walk erect in comparative safety. Gunners in an Ohio battery boasted that they had built a regular fort, with walls eight feet high, and at the gun ports they put a casing of saplings around their sandbags so that the blast from the muzzles of their guns would not tear the gunny-sacking. Two miles away they could see the cupola of the Vicksburg courthouse, and when nothing else was going on they would train their guns for extreme elevation and amuse themselves firing at it. They never knew whether they actually hit it.5
Grant was the one whose morale suffered. It was strange about Grant: he would go down in history as a stolid, unemotional slugger, yet in reality he was a man who liked to keep moving, and the dull routine of the siege was almost more than he could take. Military routine of any sort bored him; military life itself, with its unimaginative ritual and its way of doing things by rote, he detested. With nothing to do now but watch his men perfect their trenches and start digging the long, slanting ditches that would ultimately get them close to the Confederate lines, Grant became bored. It is alleged that he took to drink, went on an epoch-making bender in the cabin of a supply steamer anchored up the Yazoo, and was saved from exposure and disgrace by a newspaper correspondent who got him out of the place, sent word to Grant’s adjutant general, Colonel Rawlins, and finally managed to smuggle Grant back to headquarters, unseen, in an ambulance. Rawlins was waiting, pale with suppressed fury, when the ambulance pulled up. Grant buttoned his uniform coat, got out of the vehicle as steadily as if he had never so much as sniffed at a cork, gave Rawlins a quiet “Good evening,” and walked off to his tent, seemingly as sober as any man alive.6
So, at any rate, ran the story which the correspondent put in his memoirs years later. It is an unsupported story and there are flaws in it, and it does not really matter very much whether it is true or not. For it is to be noted that while Grant might drink too much on occasion, he never let it get in the way of serious business. He drank when things were dull — drank, apparently, from loneliness as much as anything; Rawlins always breathed easily when the general was able to have Mrs. Grant in camp with him. Throughout the war the times when liquor was a problem to Grant were the times of inaction. When the chips were down Grant could stay sober.
He emerged from this spree, if he really had it, just in time to get rid of McClernand, McClernand was clearly not up to the command of an army corps, and both Sherman and McPherson were disgusted with him; unfortunately he outranked everyone in the place except Grant, and if anything happened to Grant he would automatically take command of the army. The War Department had long since quietly let Grant know that if he wanted to dismiss McClernand his action would be upheld in Washington. Now, not long after the failure of the assaults on the Vicksburg lines, matters came to a head.
McClernand had undertaken to congratulate the men of his army corps on their bravery in the recent battle. His congratulations took the form of an official order, which claimed for McClernand’s corps credit for just about everything that had been done during the Vicksburg campaign and broadly implied that the corps would have taken Vicksburg if the rest of the army had done its part; and this order McClernand incautiously sent off to a St. Louis newspaper, in which it was immediately printed. This not only sent Sherman and McPherson to Grant’s tent with fire in their eyes; it was technically a breach of army regulations, which forbade any officer to publish an official paper without his superior’s permission. Naturally McClernand had never cleared this paper with Grant, and now, on June 18, Grant formally relieved McClernand of his command and sent him back to Illinois, turning his corps over to General E. O. C. Ord.
Back in Illinois, McClernand fumed and cursed and cried for justice, wiring Lincoln that he had been relieved “for an omission of my adjutant.” Justice — or at least reinstatement — he could not get. Lincoln sent him a soothing letter, which probably did not really soothe him very much, and declined to intervene. McClernand had played his part: he had put at the service of the administration his political and popular influence in Illinois, and he had brought together and organized a substantial number of highly useful soldiers who might not otherwise have got into the army at all. By these acts he had helped to give the Vicksburg expedition the weight and the impetus it needed … and now he was out of the war, milked dry, discarded, shelved where he could give neither Grant nor any other general any further worry. He seems to have felt that he was the victim of a put-up job.…7
Up and down the long lines the Federal trenches were inched closer to the defensive works. Sharpshooters were constantly busy, and the artillery was always active. There were casualties every day, and a man in the 12th Wisconsin wrote that “it looked hard to see six or eight poor fellows piled into an ambulance about the size of Jones’s meat wagon and hustled over the rough roads as fast as the mules could trot and to see the blood running out of the carts in streams almost.” Firing died down at night, although the naval batteries and the army siege guns kept booming away; in the darkness the glowing fuses of the mortar shells could be seen, rising high above the town in great parabolas, the explosion lighting the sky like lightning, and every morning the hour of dawn brought a sudden step-up in the firing. Infantrymen learned to sleep soundly even in the rifle pits, despite the racket and the danger. In twenty-four hours the average soldier on the firing line would use from fifty to one hundred cartridges.8
Grant was steadily reinforced. He had seventy-five thousand men in his command now, and Joe Johnston could easily be held at a distance while the job of throttling the Vicksburg garrison went forward methodically. The Federals made a number of sap rollers for protection as they extended their trenches. Two empty barrels would be placed end to end, encased in a binding of saplings and filled with dirt; with the open ends plugged, this provided a heavy, bulletproof roller, and men could crouch behind it and dig in comparative security.
There was no drama in all of this and very little excitement; just a remorseless, constant tightening of the bonds around the fortress. The men understood that all of this drudgery was much more economical of life than any series of open assaults would have been, and they took to it willingly enough. A general explained their attitude:
“The veteran American soldier fights very much as he has been accustomed to work his farm or run his sawmill; he wants to see a fair prospect that it ‘is going to pay.’ His loyalty, discipline and pluck will not allow him under any circumstances to retreat without orders, much less to run away, but if he encounters a resistance which he thinks he cannot overcome, or which he thinks it would ‘cost too much’ to overcome, he will lie down, cover himself with a little parapet, and hold his ground against any force that may attempt to drive him back.”9
There were strange interludes now and then; facing each other at close range, week after week, the men of the opposing armies developed an odd sort of fellow-feeling for each other. One day the men in one Federal trench saw the Confederates opposite them standing on top of their parapet, looking toward them; they climbed into the open themselves and looked at their enemies, and when someone yelled across and asked the Rebels why they were standing up like that, the reply came back: “Because you are.” Then a lad in the 11th Wisconsin cried impulsively: “I’m going down into the ravine and shake hands with them Rebs.” He ran downhill to a little creek, a Confederate ran down to meet him, and presently hundreds of men from both sides were down there, shaking hands, talking, and picking blackberries. The Confederates asked the Federals how they liked the Mississippi climate, said that they had been getting mule meat for breakfast, and did not seem to feel that they could hold out much longer. Then at last a Confederate officer came out and scolded the men for fraternizing; the Confederates reluctantly went back to their trenches, the Federals did the same, and in another minute the firing had been resumed as if there had never been a break.
Pickets grew friendly. One night a party from the 33rd Illinois was at work digging a trench out toward the Confederate line; unwittingly the men pushed their work until they had gone through the Rebel picket line, and the Confederate pickets protested at this infringement of their territory. Their officer of the guard came out and remonstrated: this was irregular, the Unionists were trespassing on Confederate soil. A Union officer replied that they did not mean to trespass, but they were under orders — they had been told to dig in this direction, picket line or no, and what could they do about it? The Confederate officer at last agreed that there was nothing that could be done about it, and he added despondently: “I suppose it really makes no difference, you’ll soon have the place anyway.”10
Closer and closer came the lines, until in places they were only a few yards apart. Now the Federals began to make tunnels under the Confederate lines, planting mines and exploding them. These were small-scale affairs and caused relatively few casualties; they did result in marvels now and then, as when one mine blew a Negro camp cook in the Confederate army clear over inside the Union lines. He was unhurt, oddly enough, and the Iowa outfit that captured him put him in a tent and exhibited him to the curious for several days, charging five cents a head.11
Inside Vicksburg food supplies were running low and hope was gone. The bombardment went on without a letup. Union trenches were so close in some spots that only a wall of earth separated attackers and defenders. Before long, obviously, the Federals could make a concerted rush that would break the defensive line once and for all. Luckless Pemberton held a council of war, confessed that there was no chance that Johnston could break the Federal cordon and relieve the Vicksburg garrison, and remarked that as far as he could see they could do one of two things — surrender now, while it might still be possible to get decent terms, or make one wild, desperate attempt to cut their way out — which would be completely hopeless but which probably would kill a good many Yankees. Most of the generals voted for surrender, and Pemberton agreed. On July 3 a white flag went through the lines, and before long Pemberton and Grant were standing under a tree talking things over.
Grant began by restating the old “unconditional surrender” theme. He did not really mean it, however, and in the end Pemberton was given terms so lenient that Halleck, back in Washington, rapped Grant’s knuckles for not being sterner. In effect the Confederates were allowed to come out of the citadel, lay down their arms, and then go to their homes under parole. Grant believed that it would take half of the summer, and be infernally expensive as well, to ship the whole lot all the way north to a prison camp; besides, he felt that Pemberton’s men were so discouraged that very few of them would ever return to the army even if they were finally exchanged. (Several hundred of the men refused to sign their paroles, preferring to be sent north as prisoners of war so that they could not under any possibility be forced back into the army; Federals who mingled with the prisoners heard many say that they had “done their last fighting for the South.”)12
In any case, the Confederate flag came down on July 4, and Grant found himself in possession of thirty-one thousand prisoners, one hundred and seventy-two cannon, and more than sixty thousand small arms, many of which were better weapons than his own men were carrying. A number of Federal regiments rearmed themselves with captured rifles after Vicksburg. It was noted that the victorious Unionists did no cheering when the Confederates laid down their arms — except that one division raised a cheer for “the gallant defenders of Vicksburg.” As soon as the ceremonies were over the men of the two armies were mingling on friendly terms, and Confederates who had been eating mule meat got Yankee hardtack and bacon for supper. One Union sharpshooter, seeing a Confederate officer on a distinctive white horse, called out to him: “Mister — you man on the little white horse! Danged if you ain’t the hardest feller to hit I ever saw; I’ve shot at you more’n a hundred times!”13
That night, for the first time in a month and a half, no guns fired anywhere along the Vicksburg front. Federal soldiers found it impossible to get to sleep; the unfamiliar quiet was somehow oppressive and disturbing.14
Far downstream, at Port Hudson, Banks had at last brought up the army that did not come up in time to meet Grant, and Port Hudson had been under siege since May 23. The business was a small-scale replica of Vicksburg — seven thousand Confederates in the trenches, fourteen thousand Federals outside trying to get in, capture by assault impossible, escape for the beleaguered garrison impossible also. After the fall of Vicksburg a broadside announcing the event was tossed over inside the Port Hudson lines. It brought a defiant shout: “That’s another damned Yankee lie!” — but when all the Federals began to cheer and their bands started giving patriotic concerte up and down the lines, the defiance began to fade, and by July 9 Port Hudson was surrendered, lock, stock, and barrel. There were no longer any Confederate troops or fortifications anywhere along the Mississippi River. From St. Paul to the Gulf, the stream was open.
What had been accomplished required no elaboration. The event spoke for itself. It was the logical conclusion of all that had been done in the West since the war began. The strong hand in Missouri, the slow advance up the Tennessee and the Cumberland, the fights at Fort Donelson and Shiloh, at New Madrid and Island No. Ten, at Corinth and Perryville and Stone’s River, the long months of sickness and discontent in the muddy swamps and bayous — all of these made a coherent pattern, and no one needed to wait for a presidential speech to explain it. It was all going just about as Winfield Scott had thought it might, in the dim days before Bull Run, although the dropsical old general himself was rusticating at West Point, knowing of the war only by the echoes that came up the Hudson. The Confederacy was broken now, and the break would be permanent; would be followed, inevitably, by others. Mr. Lincoln would use great phrases to tell of Gettysburg, but Vicksburg he could sum up in one terse sentence:
“The father of waters rolls unvexed to the sea.”