The Real Horse Soldiers

by Timothy B Smith

  12W. S. Smith to S. A. Forbes, November 25, 1908, in Stephen A. Forbes Papers, UI.

  Prologue

  From the ironclad Benton, Ulysses S. Grant gazed across the Mississippi River through the early morning haze toward the distant shore. Along with Adm. David Dixon Porter, he was among the first Union soldiers preparing to land in Mississippi at the small burned-out village of Bruinsburg. Grant hoped his men could walk ashore and form a bridgehead. If the enemy were present, it was going to be a hard day. For Grant, everything was at stake, and not just this isolated operation. He had already tried and failed several times to put his army on the dry ground east of the river in order to capture Vicksburg. This attempt was the most difficult and dangerous, and there was no Plan B. If this gamble failed, Grant would be boxed into a situation from which he would be hard pressed to recover.1

  The date was April 30, 1863, the same day President Abraham Lincoln had set aside a month earlier as “a day of national humiliation, fasting, and prayer.” Lincoln believed the United States had “been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven; we have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity; we have grown in numbers, wealth, and power as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God.”2 To rectify this omission, Lincoln declared: “I do hereby request all the people to abstain on that day from their ordinary secular pursuits, and to unite at their several places of public worship and their respective homes in keeping the day holy to the Lord and devoted to the humble discharge of the religious duties proper to that solemn occasion.” Grant and his soldiers deep in Dixie could not “abstain . . . from their ordinary secular pursuits,” despite the secular and unholy nature of fighting and killing. If they thought of Lincoln’s proclamation that day, they would have been more than happy to have the prayers of millions of citizens turned in their direction. Their efforts would go a long way in determining whether there would be a united nation for God to continue to bless.3

  Grant and his men needed all the divine intervention they could get that day, for they were about to undertake a massive operation that almost defied human agency and planning. Grant was managing what was, up to that time, the largest potentially opposed waterborne landing in American history until World War II.4

  ***

  The crossing to Bruinsburg was the culmination of a long list of failures in Grant’s attempt to reach Vicksburg. Since October 1862 he had been trying to get to the city that was the last major blocking point to Union control of the Mississippi River. Capturing Vicksburg had been considered as early as 1861, when Gen. Winfield Scott had fashioned his famous Anaconda Plan. Most rolled their eyes at Scott’s idea, which would take months and likely years to implement. By late 1862, however, most people had come to realize that Scott’s timing was not that far off. The concerted effort to reach Vicksburg, starting in the fall of 1862, solidified that realization when Grant spent several months unsuccessfully trying to reach the hill city, much less capture it.5

  Grant began his movement south in late October 1862 with high hopes. He moved his divisions along the Mississippi Central Railroad through Holly Springs and Oxford, where William T. Sherman joined him with other troops from Memphis. Grant decided to make a two-front advance by sending Sherman back to Memphis and down the Mississippi River to hopefully capture Vicksburg while the Confederates were concentrating on Grant in north Mississippi. The Confederates did not fall for the trick, and they turned Grant back with cavalry raids in his rear against his supply base at Holly Springs. In late December, Sherman’s effort was met and thrown back at Chickasaw Bayou, just north of Vicksburg.6

  When the new year brought a flooded river and tributaries, Grant turned to roundabout waterborne operations in an effort to bypass Vicksburg or the defenses Sherman had found so daunting in December. In Louisiana, Grant tried to dig a canal across a bend in the river near Vicksburg so his vessels could pass without coming under the Confederate guns. The effort failed, as did a wide-ranging route through Lake Providence. Two efforts east of the Mississippi River offered more promise. Engineers cut a levee and flooded the delta region, giving the Federals access to the spider web of rivers and bayous. Failure soon followed because the Confederates blocked the Yazoo Pass expedition at Fort Pemberton near Greenwood. A similar effort at Steele’s Bayou also ended in failure and almost cost the navy several gunboats stuck in the narrow waterways of the delta.7

  Between October 1862 and April 1863, the Federals attempted six different major efforts, plus several side operations, to reach Vicksburg. The geography of the region, Confederate resistance, and internal squabbling defeated them all and left Grant in a quandary. His six failed attempts had led him farther south, down the Mississippi River, until he was within sight of the city he could not reach. What to do next?8

  The difficult geography and Confederate resistance concerned Grant, but the political factors swirling around his failures were even more troubling. Some of his officers, including his closest friend Sherman, counseled taking the army back up the Mississippi River and restarting the campaign from Memphis. “I was putting myself in a position voluntarily which an enemy would be glad to maneuver a year—or a long time—to get me in,” Grant remembered Sherman arguing. Grant, however, was determined to press forward, because the political fallout of a move backward would be disastrous, tantamount to an outright battlefield defeat. Grant would be admitting defeat, and the politicians and newspapermen who were already tiring of the slow campaign would have a field day. Grant had no choice; he had to move forward.9

  Newspapermen could adversely sway public opinion, but the politicians held Grant’s career in their hands. Some of Grant’s generals had already begun undermining him, falsely reporting he was drinking again. Some politicians were only too eager to listen. More important, President Lincoln was growing more irritated by the day. General in chief Henry W. Halleck in Washington informed Grant, “The President . . . seems to be rather impatient about matters on the Mississippi.” He then added, “You are too well advised of the anxiety of the Government for your success, and its disappointment at the delay, to render it necessary to urge upon you the importance of early action.” Fortunately, Lincoln was not yet ready to make any changes, telling a friend who called for Grant’s removal, “No, I rather like the man, and I think I will try him a little longer.” But Grant was well aware that his time was about up.10

  Without the military ability to attack up the steep bluffs directly at Vicksburg or the political ability to turn north and start a fresh campaign all over, Grant did the only thing he could and kept moving south. He decided he would send his Army of the Tennessee south, past Vicksburg, and across the Mississippi River below the city. Unlike his earlier approaches, Grant could then maneuver and advance toward Vicksburg on dry, level land. It was a huge gamble, but by that point a fairly easy decision. Much like being surrounded, Grant had no other reasonable choice.11

  Even with the realization that it had to be done, Grant’s seventh attempt was fraught with danger. His army would be south of Vicksburg, cut off from his supply chain except by a roundabout and long route over the bayous and creeks west of the river. Supplying the army would be a slow and tedious process. Once they had steamed south past Vicksburg’s batteries, the navy gunboats could not return upriver, because the strong current would leave them nearly stationary in front of the Confederate guns. Most important, once he was downriver, Grant had to find a way to cross it and establish a bridgehead. If the Confederates deduced his intentions, they would be waiting for him in strength and make the crossing difficult and perhaps impossible.12

  Thus Grant found himself, on Lincoln’s day of fasting and prayer, about to cross the mighty river and invade Mississippi once more. In a sense his effort was akin to the oft-repeated story of the old Mississippi woman who left a prayer meeting in her town as it was about to be invaded by Union soldiers. She headed out on the road toward the enemy with a simple fire poker amid the jeers of her fellow citizens who asked
what she could do with so little. She simply responded, “Sometimes you have to put feets to your prayers!”

  ***

  Grant put “feets” to the many prayers lifted up that day and made his tremendous gamble less of a long shot through a series of feints and diversions in progress or just recently ended, some hundreds of miles away in different states. If these combined feints tricked the Confederate high command in Mississippi to take its collective eye off his crossing, getting into Mississippi would be much easier. Intelligence indicated that something must have worked: The enemy was nowhere to be seen across the river as the first Federals stormed ashore in Mississippi.

  While two of his corps under John A. McClernand and James B. McPherson had been making the risky move south through Louisiana in preparation for the dangerous river crossing, Sherman’s corps was making two major feints, one directly north of Vicksburg and the other farther north on the Mississippi River near Greenville. At the same time, another of Grant’s corps commanders, Stephen A. Hurlbut, was launching infantry and cavalry raids out of Memphis and West Tennessee to pin down Confederate attention in northwestern Mississippi. Other divisions under Hurlbut coordinated with Abel Streight’s famous “Mule March” from the Army of the Cumberland in Middle Tennessee and performed similar service against watchful Confederates in northeastern Mississippi.13

  Hurlbut’s most notable, damaging, and famous diversion that April, however, was a cavalry raid south and between two other shallow feints, one each into northwest and northeast Mississippi. The raid was conducted by a lone Union cavalry brigade, and it drove directly between the two thrusts, and, more importantly, directly between the pursuing Confederate commands in north Mississippi whose focus was now to the northwest and northeast. As Hurlbut incisively observed, “If this movement [Streight’s raid] goes on, it will materially aid my contemplated cavalry dash on the railroad below, for it will draw off their cavalry force into Alabama, and leave my field clear.”14

  The intent of the raid was not just to penetrate the northern tier of Mississippi counties, as the others did, but to continue south to tear the heart out of Confederate Mississippi and destroy the most important rail line supplying Vicksburg. The raid’s overarching strategic objective was to act as a large moving diversion for Grant’s crossing. “I desire to time so as to co-operate with what I suppose to be your plan,” Hurlbut wrote Grant, “to land below Vicksburg, on [the] south side of Black river.” Hurlbut also hoped this raid would move Confederate garrisons defending Vicksburg and the all-important crossing points of the Mississippi River toward the east, allowing Grant a free hand to land his army and march inland.15

  If all went according to plan, the deep raid led by an artsy music teacher from Jacksonville, Illinois, would be the most defining factor of Grant’s attempt to reach and capture Vicksburg. At the least, if it was successful, the raid would be the most spectacular performance of musician Benjamin Grierson’s career.

  1Edwin C. Bearss, The Vicksburg Campaign, 3 vols. (Dayton, OH: Morningside, 1985), vol. 2, 318.

  2Abraham Lincoln: “Proclamation 97—Appointing a Day of National Humiliation, Fasting, and Prayer,” March 30, 1863, at Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=69891.

  3Ibid.

  4Warren E. Grabau, Ninety-Eight Days: A Geographer’s View of the Vicksburg Campaign (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2000), 148-49.

  5James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 333-35.

  6Bearss, The Vicksburg Campaign, vol. 1, 21-230.

  7Ibid., 421-596.

  8For a concise overview of Grant’s attempts, see William L. Shea and Terrence J. Winschel, Vicksburg Is the Key: The Struggle for the Mississippi River (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003).

  9OR, 24, pt. 3, 179-80, 201; William T. Sherman, Memoirs of General William T. Sherman: Written by Himself, 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1875), vol. 1, 315; Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant, 2 vols. (New York: Charles L. Webster and Co., 1885), vol. 1, 542-43; Brooks D. Simpson, Ulysses S. Grant: Triumph over Adversity, 1822-1865 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 174.

  10OR, 24, pt. 3, 134; 24, pt. 1, 25, 28-29; Adam Badeau, Military History of Ulysses S. Grant, From April, 1861, to April, 1865, 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1881), vol. 1, 180; Albert D. Richardson, A Personal History of Ulysses S. Grant (Hartford, CT: American Publishing Company, 1868), 290, 299.

  11Timothy B. Smith, “The Decision Was Always My Own”: Ulysses S. Grant and the Vicksburg Campaign (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2018), 80-85.

  12Michael B. Ballard, Vicksburg: The Campaign That Opened the Mississippi (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 191-93.

  13For the diversions, see Bearss, The Vicksburg Campaign, vol. 2, 107-253.

  14OR, 23, pt. 2, 214.

  15Ibid.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Plan

  Benjamin Grierson walked into XVI Corps commander Stephen A. Hurlbut’s headquarters in Memphis, Tennessee, and was astonished at what he learned. Major General Ulysses S. Grant, Hurlbut’s superior, wanted to make a bold move to focus Confederate attention away from the Mississippi River. This, in turn, would make it easier to push the Union Army of the Tennessee from Louisiana across the river into Mississippi and form a powerful beachhead below Vicksburg. Hurlbut, wrote Grierson, envisioned a mounted “expedition southward into Mississippi.” As he would soon learn, however, this was no ordinary expedition, like countless others he had conducted over the past year or so. Rather, this was a much deeper, much bolder, and by extension, much more dangerous raid all the way down to the Southern Railroad of Mississippi, the main rail line connecting Vicksburg with the outside world. The weight of the operation began to sink in, Grierson remembered, when Hurlbut handed him “some maps and other papers giving information of the country over which the contemplated march would probably be made.”1

  The idea that would ultimately develop into Grierson’s Raid, the most successful of the many diversions, was born out of Grant’s necessity to get his army to Vicksburg so he could defeat the Confederates there and break their lock on the mighty river. His many efforts to date included digging what became known as “Grant’s Canal” across the De Soto Peninsula, the Lake Providence operation, and the early stages of the Yazoo Pass operation. While still seeking a way to get around Vicksburg to the west, Grant also began contemplating additional efforts east of the Mississippi River, including a cavalry raid that would damage Confederate supply and communications east of the Confederate stronghold. While it was not anything like what would eventually develop and would never be conducted in the form originally envisioned, the idea germinated in Grant’s mind to use cavalry deep in the Confederate rear to break up their logistics system.2

  Ulysses S. Grant. Major General Ulysses S. Grant needed help in his advance on Vicksburg and realized what a cavalry raid in the enemy’s rear might accomplish. It was he who first suggested the plan, and Grant strongly advised that Grierson lead it. Library of Congress

  Initially, Grant wanted to launch a cavalry raid south out of West Tennessee to break up the Mississippi Central Railroad, which ran north to south through the center of the state to Jackson. “If practicable,” Grant wrote Hurlbut in Memphis on February 9, 1863, “I would like to have a Cavalry expedition penetrate as far South as possible on the Miss Central RR to destroy it.” Grant was beginning to think seriously of using cavalry deep in Mississippi. About the same time, one of Hurlbut’s commanders at Corinth, Charles S. Hamilton, under whom Grierson served, was thinking much the same thing. In all likelihood, the general idea came out of the January transfer of Confederate cavalry commander Earl Van Dorn’s 5,000 mounted troops east to the Army of Tennessee. The “movement of Van Dorn’s clears our front of all cavalry. . . . It is the time to strike,” Hamilton insisted.3

  Although Hamilton
’s idea was never reported to Grant, the latter soon expressed an even bolder plan. Grant knew the Southern Railroad of Mississippi—which ran across the state east from Vicksburg to Jackson and thence to Meridian—provided most of Vicksburg’s supplies. He followed his earlier note to Hurlbut with a more detailed plan on February 13. A raid might “cut the rail-road East of Jackson Miss,” explained Grant, who went on to include several caveats. “The undertaking would be a hazardous one but it would pay well if carried out,” he lectured Hurlbut. “I do not direct that this shall be done but leave it for a volunteer enterprise.” Proving he had been giving the idea more thought than his few words indicated, Grant informed the Memphis commander that he also had a man in mind to lead the effort: “It seems to me that Grierson with about 500 picked men might succeed in making his way South.”4

  Hurlbut, who once described the city of Memphis as having “more iniquity in it than any place since Sodom,” jumped on Grant’s recommendation and began planning an elaborate raid on the Southern Railroad east of Jackson. The prewar politician whose rank stemmed more from his friendship with Abraham Lincoln than to any particular military prowess or experience, however, missed much of Grant’s purpose. Hurlbut considered hitting the Big Black River Bridge well west of Jackson between that city and Vicksburg, a move one veteran later noted “would have concentrated Pemberton’s army just where Grant did not want it.” As excited as he was about the plan, Hurlbut was loathe to lose Grierson, preferring instead another colonel and another regiment for the dangerous raid. According to one Illinois trooper, Hurlbut wanted to “send other troops and another commander to be captured.” Hurlbut, like Hamilton, realized the move of Confederate cavalry from north Mississippi east toward Middle Tennessee presented the perfect opportunity for a thrust south because it “will remove nearly all cavalry from my front.” Instead of the full grand raid, however, he ordered Grierson to take his brigade south across the Tallahatchie River to the Yalobusha River, “cut the wires, destroy bridges and demonstrate in that neighborhood.” At the same time, Hurlbut planned to send a smaller cavalry force under Col. Albert Lee down through Holly Springs to make a wide sweep to Panola and Hernando, nearer to Memphis. While all this commotion was taking place, Col. Edward Hatch of the 2nd Iowa Cavalry, part of Hamilton’s command, would push forward “night and day toward the main road between Meridian and Vicksburg, if possible to destroy the bridge across Pearl River, in rear of Jackson, and do as much damage as possible on that line.” Hurlbut, who was not blind to the danger of such an operation, admitted the raid “appears perilous. But I think it can be done and done with safety.” Allowing for adaptability, Hurlbut also wrote that Hatch’s troopers would return “by the best course they can make.” The thrusts, Hurlbut informed Grant, “may relieve you somewhat at Vicksburg.”5