by Ron Chernow
As Sherman steamed toward Vicksburg with a huge flotilla of thirty-two thousand men, crammed aboard seventy transports, Grant lost communication with him for more than a week since Forrest had torn the telegraph wires to shreds. This meant that when Sherman launched his morning attack on the north side of Vicksburg on December 29, he had no inkling of the disaster that had befallen the Union entrepôt at Holly Springs or that Grant had retired northward. He faced the full strength of the enemy alone and his attack proved hopeless from the outset. First his soldiers had to traverse the treacherous terrain of Chickasaw Bayou, a maze of swamps and streams. When they reached high, dry ground on an open plateau, they made easy targets for Confederate marksmen firing from the bluffs. One Union general described being “mowed down by a storm of shells, grape and canister, and minié-balls which swept our front like a hurricane of fire.”84 More a massacre than a battle, the operation was over by noon, the Union side having suffered nearly 1,800 casualties. Sherman shouldered the blame. “Our loss has been heavy,” he wrote, “and we accomplished nothing.”85 So total was the communication blackout between Grant and Sherman that on January 5, Grant reassured Halleck of his firm “belief that news from the South that Vicksburg has fallen is correct.”86 It would be another four days before Grant received irrefutable confirmation of the horrific failure of Sherman’s mission.
The short-tempered McClernand was incensed when he realized Grant and Sherman had outsmarted him, stolen his troops, and excluded him from the Vicksburg operation. Erupting in indignation, he howled to Lincoln, “I believe I am superseded. Please advise me.”87 To remind Grant who was boss, McClernand took thirty thousand soldiers, packed them on fifty transports, and led them on what Grant termed “a wild goose chase” to attack Fort Hindman on the Arkansas River.88 Although McClernand captured thousands of prisoners and believed he deserved high praise for his initiative, Grant regarded the fort as devoid of strategic value and protested the wasted effort to Halleck. In reply, he got the exact message he longed to receive: “You are hereby authorised, to relieve Genl McClernand from command of the Expedition against Vicksburg, giving it to the next in rank, or taking it yourself.”89
Henceforth, Grant spearheaded the expedition down the Mississippi himself. While he would have preferred to hand the role to Sherman, the latter was junior in rank to McClernand; McClernand could hardly protest if Grant personally took command. In handling McClernand, Grant had shown tact in a thorny matter of rank and protocol and proved surprisingly adept at bureaucratic infighting. McClernand continued to rant against Grant and Halleck. On January 22, exasperated by his pushiness, Lincoln wrote to McClernand and laid down the law, hectoring him to accept as a fait accompli his subordinate position under Grant: “I have too many family controversies (so to speak) already on my hands to voluntarily take up another . . . Allow me to beg, that for your sake, for my sake, & for the country’s sake, you give your whole attention to the better work.”90 Periodically McClernand would pretend he retained a command independent of Grant, but Lincoln had spoken decisively and Grant had neatly consolidated his power.
CHAPTER TWELVE
—
Man of Iron
ON JANUARY 1, 1863, Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. His hand had grown sore from greeting guests at the annual New Year’s Day reception at the White House, and he waited a short while for it to heal so he could sign the document for posterity with a firm hand. Couched as a military order, the proclamation applied only to slaves in Confederate areas, not to Union border states or pockets of the South under federal control, but it was no less radical for all that. No longer did Lincoln mention schemes to compensate masters for their slaves. The time for halfway measures was over.
By expanding war objectives to include abolition of slavery, the proclamation upped the stakes and guaranteed an uncompromising, winner-take-all struggle. “The Union party in the South is virtually destroyed,” Halleck warned Grant. “There can be no peace but that which is forced by the sword.”1 More than ever the war became a clash between two incompatible ways of life, an effort to remake the nation as well as to save it. Through the proclamation, Lincoln hoped to subvert the southern economy, bridge a widening rift in his own party, and capture the allegiance of mass opinion in Europe. This would now be modern warfare at its most ferocious, exploiting every stratagem, straining every nerve, and mobilizing every resource to defeat the enemy. Grant was the general best suited to exploit the numerical superiority of northern manpower and manufacturing, while his army was best positioned to destroy enemy property.
Though Grant was not an abolitionist at the war’s outset, his thinking had evolved in tandem with Lincoln’s and he now opposed slavery on practical, military, and religious grounds, taking on the president’s agenda as his own. As early as the summer of 1861, he had told an army chaplain “he believed slavery would die with this rebellion, and that it might become necessary for the government to suppress it as a stroke of military policy.”2 Grant’s soon-to-be brother-in-law Michael John Cramer confirmed that “as the war progressed [Grant] became gradually convinced that ‘slavery was doomed and must go.’ He had always recognized its moral evil, as also its being the cause of the war . . . hence General Grant came to look upon the war as a divine punishment for the sin of slavery.”3
In a letter to Elihu Washburne, composed eight months after the Emancipation Proclamation, Grant explained that since slavery was the root cause of the war, its eradication formed the only sound basis for any settlement with the South. It had become “patent to my mind early in the rebellion that the North & South could never live at peace with each other except as one nation, and that without Slavery. As anxious as I am to see peace reestablished I would not therefore be willing to see any settlement until this question is forever settled.”4 In later years, Grant explained that many Union soldiers thought it “a stain to the Union that men should be bought and sold like cattle” and that an early end to the war “would have saved slavery, perhaps, and slavery meant the germs of new rebellion. There had to be an end of slavery.”5
The wartime fate of four slaves owned by Julia Dent Grant showed the sea change in Grant’s outlook. As Julia recorded: “Eliza, Dan, Julia, and John belonged to me up to the time of President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation”—implying they were then freed.6 That they were indeed emancipated is shown by the fact that a year later one of the former slaves refused to return with Julia to St. Louis “as I suppose she feared losing her freedom if she returned to Missouri,” Julia wrote.7 Jesse Root Grant said his son had been converted to abolition even earlier, having already told Julia’s slaves “before any Proclamation of Emancipation was issued to go free and look out for themselves.”8
While it has often been glibly stated that the Emancipation Proclamation did not free a single slave at the time—those affected resided in Confederate territory—it had immediate consequences in the field, accelerating the exodus of slaves, inspired by the promise of freedom, from plantations to Union camps. Union troops were now encouraged to entice slaves from their masters. No less consequential was that the proclamation authorized the recruitment of black soldiers, provoking outcries from Democrats and Unionists in border states. Eventually, 179,000 black troops would fight for the North, many of them having been slaves, a development that not only helped to win the war but began the slow, deep, if halting transformation of the United States into a multiracial society.
On January 10, 1863, Grant temporarily moved his headquarters to Memphis, taking up offices in a local bank while he and Julia occupied rooms at the Gayoso House. While there, Grant was leveled by the debilitating migraine headaches that had pestered him throughout the war. John Eaton found him at the hotel “with his head and neck all swathed in hot poultices, which his wife was applying in order to relieve the violent sick headache from which he was suffering.”9 Julia, who fretted about his condition, was particularly upset when a doctor tried to
ease his pain with liquor. “I cannot persuade him [i.e., Grant] to do so,” she said; “he says he will not die, and he will not touch a drop upon any consideration.”10 With Julia, Grant always emphasized his abstinence from drinking, exhibiting his best behavior. “The bottle of Bourbon sent by Mrs. Davies I sent over to Gen. Sherman,” he informed her from Oxford. “Myself nor no one connected with the Staff ever tasted it.”11
In explaining away stories of her husband’s drinking, Julia often griped that people misinterpreted his migraine headaches as instances of alcoholic abuse. Whether coincidentally or not, their brief stay in Memphis coincided with fresh allegations of drinking against Grant. On February 11, General Charles S. Hamilton scribbled a damning letter to Senator James R. Doolittle of Wisconsin:
You have asked me to write you confidentially. I will now say what I have never breathed. Grant is a drunkard. His wife has been with him for months only to use her influence in keeping him sober. He tries to let liquor alone—but he cannot resist the temptation always. When he came to Memphis he left his wife at LaGrange, & for several days after getting here, was beastly drunk, utterly incapable of doing anything. [Brigadier General Isaac F.] Quinby and I, took him in charge, watching him day & night, & keeping liquor away from him, & we telegraphed to his wife & brought her on to take care of him.12
It must be noted that Hamilton, a disaffected general, hoped to supplant the popular James B. McPherson as one of Grant’s corps commanders and that Grant resisted his efforts, supplying Hamilton with a timely motive for slander. By late March, Grant removed the embittered Hamilton, alluding to his “natural jealous disposition,” and recommended to Washington that his resignation be accepted.13
If Grant wrestled with migraines, it may have been from grappling with the war’s biggest headache, Vicksburg, which he described as “very strongly garrisoned and the fortifications almost impregnable.”14 With seven miles of elaborate fortifications strung along the Mississippi’s east bank, it posed an insuperable obstacle. It stood at a hairpin bend of the river, an unavoidable bottleneck that slowed ships, making them easy prey for bulging guns lodged high on the citadel’s crest. There was no handy way to surround or even approach a fortress that was both natural (two-hundred-foot cliffs, cut by ravines) and man-made. The low-lying delta around it, a trackless wilderness of bayous and backwater, overhung by trees and infested by snakes, alligators, and bears, seemed unfit for man or beast. Such inhospitable swamps were all but impenetrable to armies dragging heavy artillery and equipment. The only high, dry ground around Vicksburg lay to the north and southeast, which Grant and Sherman had failed to take after the unforeseen debacle at Holly Springs.
Adding to Grant’s nervous strain was that both sides identified Vicksburg as a vital strategic asset whose fate might determine the war’s outcome. “Vicksburg is the key,” argued Lincoln, who had twice journeyed down the Mississippi as a young man. “This war can never be brought to a close until that key is in our pocket.”15 Lincoln heeded the clamor of midwestern farmers who needed the river outlet for surplus crops and now sent much of their produce east by canal or rail at extortionate rates. Jefferson Davis knew Vicksburg was the grand trophy sought by Union forces in the West and that its surrender might sacrifice a huge section of the Confederacy, including Texas, West Louisiana, and Arkansas. To safeguard the stronghold, Davis appointed Lieutenant General John Pemberton, fortifying him with a thirty-thousand-man army and setting the stage for a prolonged battle for this linchpin of Confederate hopes.
Grant realized that, however much the North yearned for a major victory, it would take time to reach the high ground around Vicksburg, and the public would grow weary awaiting action. The Copperhead press took dead aim at Grant, with the New York World alleging that “the confidence of the army is greatly shaken in Gen. Grant, who hitherto undoubtedly depended more upon good fortune than upon military ability for success.”16 In late January, Grant steamed down from Memphis aboard his flagship, the Magnolia, mooring at Young’s Point, Louisiana, twenty miles upstream from Vicksburg. He strode nonchalantly down the gangplank, reading a newspaper, an unlit cigar in his mouth. “There’s General Grant,” one Illinois soldier remarked to another. “I guess not,” the other corrected him. “That fellow doesn’t look like he has the ability to command a regiment, much less an army.”17
During this trying time, Grant had to cope with incessant rains that produced flooding of biblical proportions, postponing a direct assault on Vicksburg. The west shore of the Mississippi was so low that the river overflowed it, forcing Grant’s men to camp on levees, often the only dry land poking above omnipresent water. Stuck in this quagmire, his army was threatened more by the elements than by Confederate weaponry. “The swollen state of the river, the dreary wastes of oozy swamp and fen,” wrote a British correspondent, were more potent “than sword or bullet.”18
In this unwholesome atmosphere, smallpox, typhoid, dysentery, measles, malaria, and pneumonia flourished, landing a third of the army on the sick list at one point. As soldiers died, they had to be buried on levees, producing a ghoulish situation in which soldiers slumbered on moist earth a mere foot above the buried corpses of their comrades. “Go any day down the levee,” wrote an Ohio soldier, “and you could see a squad or two of soldiers burying a companion, until the levee was nearly full of graves and the hospitals full of sick.”19 Not infrequently, wagon wheels would churn up a coffin, heaving it open and exposing its cadaver to view. Grant came under heavy criticism for inadequate soldier care, but he pointed to hospital boats he brought in expressly designed for the situation. “I venture the assertion that no Army ever went into the field with better arranged preparations for receiving sick and wounded soldiers than this,” he insisted.20 Grant’s belief was supported in March by Frederick Law Olmsted of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, who came to inspect the situation: “You cannot conceive how well and happy the men in general looked . . . If I were young and sound, I would like nothing so well as to be one of them.”21
Early on Grant knew his best chance of taking Vicksburg was to venture south of the city, scurry past its guns, then approach it from dry land on the east bank. “I hope yet to fool the rebels and effect a landing where they do not expect me,” he told an aide. “Once on the East bank of the river, on high ground reaching Vicksburg, there will be a big fight or a foot race.”22 Such a landing could not take place until late March at the earliest and until then he worried about the idle state and grinding misery of his men. He therefore approved a series of quixotic engineering projects meant to take Vicksburg by expanding the waterways of nearby bayous, allowing boats to sneak closer to the city. He later claimed these were more makeshift projects than realistic hopes, but he pursued them in an amazingly stubborn and inventive manner, suggesting that he thought one might actually succeed. Employing steam shovels and dredges as well as hand tools, these efforts also showed the modernity of his mind and his openness to innovation.
The first such project envisioned digging a wide canal across the peninsula formed by the river’s sharp bend opposite Vicksburg. The idea was to allow the Mississippi to enter the ditch and gouge out a deep channel, enabling gunboats to enter safely from the west side of the peninsula before emerging on the east side south of the city and beyond the reach of its batteries. The concept intuitively made sense to Lincoln. “Direct your attention particularly to the canal proposed across the point,” Halleck urged Grant. “The President attaches much importance to this.”23 Unfortunately, it was a herculean effort undone by the rising river. At Grant’s command, four thousand black workers, armed with spades and picks, set to work. “Grant requested me to make a careful observation of the conditions provided for the comfort of the Negroes engaged on the work,” Eaton recalled. “I found them fairly well supplied with food and blankets, and so reported the matter to General Grant.”24 As laborers dredged up sediment, they threw it aside in huge mounds, but the resulting dam collapsed from a swollen river
and rains in early March, terminating the project. The river had proven mightier than the men trying to redirect its course.
The second experimental plan proved more intricate. Four hundred river miles north of Vicksburg, a waterway called the Yazoo Pass had once allowed boats to enter from the Mississippi, then travel south by a series of winding, interconnected rivers, ending up at the Yazoo River north of the city. Before the war, the state had built a levee that blocked the entrance of this inlet from the Mississippi. By rupturing the levee, Grant hoped to carve out a backdoor approach to northern Vicksburg for his transports near the high ground of Haynes’ Bluff. For this demolition job, he selected twenty-five-year-old First Lieutenant James H. Wilson, a topographical engineer who had graduated from West Point in 1860. “A slight person of a light complexion and with rather a pinched face,” he was a fountain of strong opinions and described by one journalist as “quick and nervous in temperament, plain and outspoken on all subjects.”25 In early February, in a spectacular explosion, Wilson blew the levee to smithereens, then watched the river water pour “through, like nothing else I ever saw, except Niagara Falls,” he wrote. “Logs, trees and great masses of earth were torn away with the greatest ease.”26 Whatever his initial pessimism, Grant grew enamored of the project, exulting that the “Yazoo Pass expedition is going to prove a perfect success.”27
