by Ron Chernow
First a mass of black things detached itself from the shore, and we saw it float out toward the middle of the stream. There was nothing to be seen except this big black mass, which dropped slowly down the river. Soon another black mass detached itself, and another, then another. It was Admiral Porter’s fleet of ironclad turtles, steamboats, and barges. They floated down the Mississippi darkly and silently, showing neither steam nor light . . . The vessels moved at intervals of about two hundred yards.64
Numerous precautions were taken to buffer the ships from the drubbing they would soon undergo. Boilers and decks were packed with hay, logs, cotton bales, sacks of grain, and sandbags that could safely absorb fire or at least muffle it. Ship lights were dimmed and pets banished to prevent telltale sounds that might notify rebel gunners of ships floating by. The boats towed coal barges to have fuel once they cleared the batteries.
Grant watched the proceedings silently, a cigar tucked in his mouth. When the flotilla came within range of Vicksburg’s arsenal, Confederate cannon ignited in a thunderous pyrotechnic display—“Magnificent, but terrible,” Grant called it—for an hour and a half.65 Sulphurous smoke drifted everywhere. Little Buck began to bawl in Wilson’s arms and was put to bed. To illuminate their targets, the rebels kindled bonfires on the Vicksburg shore and burned a wooden house on the Louisiana side, casting a lurid reddish glow over the ships speeding by. Instead of trying to widen their distance from the batteries, the flotilla hugged the eastern bank, leading shore batteries to overshoot their marks. Dana clocked 525 discharges of fire, of which only 68 hit the target. One heavily bombarded steamer, the Henry Clay, went down in flames. “The boat itself took fire and burned to the water’s edge and floated downstream a burning mass,” Grant reported to Halleck.66 One other transport was slightly harmed. Miraculously, that was the total damage. While most, if not all, of the gunboats were repeatedly hit, they came through this perilous stretch unscathed, with only fourteen people wounded and none killed.
At once Grant galloped off excitedly to get a firsthand glimpse of the ships downstream.
The next morning he mingled with the armada at New Carthage where crew members were in high spirits. For Grant it had been a sensational triumph, his huge wager paying off brilliantly. Best of all, Pemberton did not seem to realize that the gunboat operation represented the first step of an unfolding sequence that would bring Grant’s army en masse to his doorstep. Prematurely celebrating, the Vicksburg Whig editorialized that Grant’s gunboats “are all more or less damaged, the men dissatisfied and demoralized.”67
On the cloudy night of April 22, 1863, Grant dispatched six more steamers and twelve barges to brave the Vicksburg armaments and rendezvous with the fleet now stationed farther south. He had concluded that his army could not transport sufficient supplies by wagon down the single narrow road on the western shore. Hence, these transports were packed with critical supplies, each containing one hundred thousand rations and a forty-day supply of coal. Once again Grant was the foremost spectator of the encounter, one Illinois private remembering him “standing on the upper deck of his headquarters boat, a man of iron, his wife by his side. He seemed to me the most immovable figure I ever saw.” As a cannonade rained down on his boats from the Vicksburg heights, Grant, counting five hundred shots, remained a study in composure. “No word escaped his lips,” recalled the private, “no muscle of his earnest face moved.”68 Once more the operation proved an overwhelming success, with only one steamer destroyed, two damaged, and nobody killed. Grant rode off to meet Porter at Grand Gulf below Vicksburg, the point from which he hoped to launch his massive invasion of Mississippi’s interior.
Once the gunboats cleared Vicksburg, Grant focused on the next stage of his master plan: to march his army down the west bank of the Mississippi, starting from Milliken’s Bend, under extremely adverse conditions. “This whole country is under water,” Grant told his father, “except strips of land behind the levees along the river and bayous and makes operations almost impossible.”69 He committed the entire machinery of his army, putting it irrevocably in motion. That his army managed to march down a watery shoreline in stormy weather was a wonder. Alligators slithered in nearby bayous. Soldiers and wagons sank in the soft, oozing mud, and it sometimes took eighteen horses to dislodge a single heavy gun from the muck. The soldiers lacked time to wash or change mud-smeared clothing. In the amused view of one Iowa soldier, “We are all as dirty as hogs . . . we are all lousy.”70 Nonetheless, the raw recruits plowed ahead with a lusty sense of purpose, throwing off knapsacks and grabbing axes to construct roads. They drained swamps and stripped wood from houses and barns, laying corduroy roads across boggy turf. Since the volunteer ranks included mechanics and other skilled craftsmen, they succeeded in building two floating bridges, each more than three hundred feet, across flooded plains.
Proud of his resourceful soldiers, Grant had no qualms about dismounting from his horse to lend a helping hand. More and more he had developed a mystique as the unglamorous man who got things done. “There was no Bonaparte, posturing for effect,” observed an officer. “There was no nonsense, no sentiment; only a plain business man of the republic, there for the one single purpose of getting that command across the river in the shortest time possible.”71 After maddening months of doomed canal projects, Grant seemed liberated by the forward movement, his latent talent quickened into action. As Brigadier General John B. Sanborn remarked, “None who had known him the previous years could recognize him as being the same man . . . From this time all his genius and his energies seemed to burst forth with new life.”72 Instead of proceeding at a trot, Grant sped from place to place at top velocity. By April 27, McClernand’s corps had reached its destination, a place of rude cabins named Hard Times, Louisiana, almost directly opposite Grand Gulf, soon followed by McPherson’s corps. Two-thirds of Grant’s army had now congregated below Vicksburg.
Having mulled over his plans at length, Grant executed a mature, sophisticated strategy with many interlocking parts. While concentrating his forces at Grand Gulf, he would simultaneously disperse enemy forces guarding Vicksburg, proving a master of deception. Early in the war, he had been frustrated by the prowess of Confederate cavalry and now intended to show the North could surpass it. (Late in life, he argued that Stonewall Jackson stood out only because he had fought inexperienced Union troops early in the war and would have been destroyed by Phil Sheridan later on.) Grant tapped Colonel Benjamin H. Grierson to spearhead a bold cavalry raid in eastern Mississippi. This former music teacher and Illinois bandmaster was an improbable choice. Ever since being kicked in the head as a child, he had heartily disliked horses. On April 17, he set out from La Grange, Tennessee, with seventeen hundred horse soldiers on a historic expedition that would cover six hundred miles in sixteen days. Pushing southward, he captured five hundred rebel soldiers and laid down a pell-mell path of destruction that uprooted fifty miles of railroad tracks. Most critical of all, he confused Pemberton about Grant’s real intentions, damaged his vital rail links between Jackson and Meridian, made him divert cavalry, and distracted him from Grant’s momentous operation at Grand Gulf. As Grant wrote, Grierson had “spread excitement throughout the State, destroyed railroads, trestle works, bridges, burning locomotives & rolling stock taking prisoners destroying stores of all kinds.”73 The stunning raid sent shock waves through the Confederacy as Grierson gave southern towns a taste of the terror that had been so liberally meted out by Nathan Bedford Forrest.
In this campaign of dazzling deceptions, Grant had another trick up his sleeve. He had Sherman take ten regiments and eight gunboats left behind by Porter and feign an attack north of Vicksburg, at Haynes’ Bluff, not far from his failed assault at Chickasaw Bayou in December. For two days in late April, Union gunboats lobbed shells, Sherman’s artillery chimed in with sporadic fire, and infantry lined up as if girding for a major attack. “The enemy are in front of me in force such as has never before been seen at Vicksburg,�
�� a Confederate commander implored Pemberton. “Send me reinforcements.”74 Exactly as Grant had hoped, Pemberton proved a sucker for the ruse and summoned back three thousand troops who had gone to do battle with him.
At 8 a.m. on April 29, as Grant, his son Fred, and Congressman Washburne stared agog from a tugboat, eight gunboats commanded by Admiral Porter began pounding the Confederate batteries at Grand Gulf, forty miles below Vicksburg. The plan called for the navy to soften up the bastion, providing cover for Grant as he whisked his men across the river. As Porter had warned Grant, the Confederate defenses were imposing, set on steep bluffs, and they now dealt a shellacking to Union gunboats. One Iowa soldier remembered “the batteries covering the face of the bluff, tier upon tier, belching forth streams of flame.”75 In the end, Porter did not knock out a single Confederate gun and his flagship absorbed a devastating hit. Grant arrived at the battered ship toward dusk. “The sight of the mangled and dying men which met my eye as I boarded the ship was sickening.”76
After five hours of fruitless effort, it grew clear that heavily fortified Grand Gulf would not submit, confronting Grant with a tough predicament: he already had ten thousand men boarded on transports, floating in the middle of the river, ready to storm the shore. He proposed a risky, high-stakes gambit to Porter: they would have the gunboats and transports run the Grand Gulf batteries that night, much as at Vicksburg. With some transports now disabled, he wanted to enlist Porter’s gunboats as ferries to take his troops across the river afterward. Grant awaited Porter’s response with some anxiety. “If he had been a touchy admiral, jealous of his rank, in a severe state of discipline, he would have objected to his boats doing ferry duty,” Grant reminisced. Fortunately, Porter “relieved my anxiety by saying that all his gun-boats were at my disposal to be used as transports and ferry-boats for getting the troops over the river.”77
Grant’s unorthodox strategy paid off handsomely. Porter’s fleet sprinted past the blockade that night, while Grant had McClernand land his troops on the west side of the river. He had decided to effect a surprise landing at Bruinsburg, Mississippi, a spot of steep hills and thick forest sixty miles south of Vicksburg. The unexpected choice of Bruinsburg came after a local slave informed Grant that the shoreline was unguarded there, enabling his army to travel straight into the interior on dry, elevated land, past fertile plantations.78 Riding with Grant that night, Dana recorded Grant’s extraordinary equanimity and horsemanship at this tense moment: “The night was pitch dark, and, as we rode side by side, Grant’s horse suddenly gave a nasty stumble. I expected to see the general go over the animal’s head, and I watched intently, not to see if he was hurt, but if he would show any anger. I had been with Grant daily now for three weeks, and I had never seen him ruffled or heard him swear . . . instead of going over the animal’s head, as I imagined he would, he kept his seat. Pulling up his horse, he rode on, and, to my utter amazement, without a word or sign of impatience.”79
The nocturnal maneuver was a tour de force of audacity. McClernand’s “troops marched across the point of land [top of a levee] under cover of night, unobserved,” Grant recalled. “By the time it was light the enemy saw our whole fleet, iron-clads, gunboats, river steamers and barges, quietly moving down the river three miles below them, black, or rather blue, with National troops.”80 By the morning of April 30, one corps under McClernand and one division under McPherson had floated across the Mississippi, and Grant never forgot the blissful moment when they all debarked safely on the eastern shore: “When this was effected I felt a degree of relief scarcely ever equalled since . . . I was on dry ground on the same side of the river with the enemy.”81
Once on the eastern Mississippi bank, Grant engaged in a race against time. Knowing the Confederates would hustle troops from Grand Gulf to stop him, he swiftly set his troops in motion toward the interior highland, even before his army finished disembarking. Such precise timing was Grant’s specialty. Although transports brought rations galore, he sent out raiding parties to corral wagons from local farmers to carry food and ammunition, and before long his men had commandeered a motley array of vehicles from fancy carriages to rude commodity carts. Herds of cattle were gathered for slaughter. Lest his Washington superiors lodge objections, Grant kept them in the dark until the operation was too far along to be revoked. For the direction of his march, he made a breathtaking decision. Instead of driving straight north toward Vicksburg, sticking close to the river and his supply base, he would veer inland in a northeast direction toward the state capital of Jackson. His basic concept was to throw his army between Pemberton’s main force in Vicksburg and a collateral force in Jackson and defeat the enemy piecemeal. The danger was that he might get crushed between two converging armies, whereas his intent was a one-two punch: to destroy the Jackson force first, then turn west and finish off Pemberton in Vicksburg.
Free from swampy terrain, Grant pursued his quarry with a sure step. The first town to fall on May 1 was Port Gibson, where he routed eleven thousand soldiers in daylong fighting and established a bridgehead. As Washburne observed, “The boys went in with such a shout as you never heard, and the enemy ran like the very devil and our boys after them, closing up the day with perfect success.”82 Legend has it that Grant thought the town “too beautiful to burn.”83 He boasted to Halleck afterward that “our victory has been most complete and the Enemy thoroughly demoralized.”84 The road to the Big Black River and Jackson now lay wide open. Grant implemented his plan to have troops feed off local plenty and patrols gathered abundant hams, chickens, mutton, bacon, and molasses, accompanied by sweet potatoes, corn, and strawberries. When a disgruntled farmer rode up on a mule to complain that his farm was stripped bare, a Union general taunted him: “Well, those men didn’t belong to my division at all, because if they were my men they wouldn’t even have left you that mule.”85 As a rule, Grant tried to blunt any punitive behavior. One terror-stricken woman who fled from Port Gibson wrote and asked if she could return safely with her children. Grant replied: “MADAM—You are at liberty to return to Port Gibson whenever you wish; women and children are non-combatants—we do not make war upon them. U.S. Grant.”86
For days after crossing at Bruinsburg, Grant stayed on horseback, traveling like a humble private, his saddle devoid of fancy trappings. Temporarily deprived of personal belongings, he had only the clothes on his back and couldn’t change his underwear. As Washburne wrote whimsically, “I am afraid Grant will have to be reproved for want of style. On this whole march for five days he has had neither a horse nor an orderly or servant, a blanket or overcoat or clean shirt, or even a sword . . . His entire baggage consists of a tooth-brush.”87 Dana was startled when Grant bedded down for the night on moist grass. “I have an overcoat here; let me put it under you,” Dana offered. “I’m too sleepy; don’t disturb me,” replied Grant, drawing his knees to his chest and nodding off in seconds. The message of Grant’s businesslike bravery filtered down to average soldiers. “He could stand any hardship they could stand and do their thinking beside,” reflected one officer. “They went with him like men to a game; no despondency, all alert and eager, glad to know inaction had ended and vigorous work had begun.”88
Twelve-year-old Fred Grant, a stout but fearless boy, crossed the river on a gunboat and made his way to the front, proudly carrying his father’s sword and sash. Grant thought his son would stay aboard Porter’s flagship and was taken aback to see him riding with Dana, “mounted on two enormous horses, grown white from age, each equipped with dilapidated saddles.”89 It seems odd that Ulysses and Julia Grant allowed Fred’s presence in an active war zone, but Grant liked to toughen up his sons and insisted Fred’s presence “caused no anxiety either to me or to his mother, who was at home.”90 After Port Gibson, Grant boasted with fatherly pride that young Fred had “heard balls whistle and is not moved in the slightest by it,” making him sound like Grant himself as a boy.91
On May 3, Union forces reached Grand Gulf, wh
ich had been evacuated by Pemberton. Grant was reunited with Admiral Porter and his fleet and for the first time in days indulged in a bath and fresh change of clothes. At first he had entertained a cooperative movement with General Nathaniel Banks to take Port Hudson to the south. Succeeding Benjamin Butler as commander of Union forces in southern Louisiana, Banks was a former Massachusetts governor and Speaker of the House of Representatives, a prime example of the political generals who bedeviled Grant. Grant imagined that once he helped Banks take Port Hudson, Banks would then turn north for a rendezvous with him, contributing additional men to the onslaught against Vicksburg. Now Grant received a belated letter from Banks, effectively bowing out of the Vicksburg Campaign and saying he would journey up the Red River instead. This was a defining moment for Grant, who opted to skip Port Hudson, forget about Banks, and wager everything on the impending thrust into Mississippi’s heartland. “To wait for his [Banks’s] cooperation would have detained me at least a month,” wrote Grant. “I therefore determined to move independently of Banks, cut loose from my base, destroy the rebel force in rear of Vicksburg, and invest or capture the city.”92 Grant could not afford to squander time by awaiting permission from Halleck and courageously took full responsibility for shucking conventional strategy. As usual, he did not disclose to his corps commanders the overall plan of the campaign.
At first, Sherman feared that Grant planned to supply the army of forty-five thousand men by a long, single road soon glutted with wagons. But an emboldened Grant had no intention of clinging to this supply route and bet everything on his radical departure of feeding off the land, although he never lost touch entirely with his supply base. To his commanders, he laid out a formula for crippling civilian productive capacity in their path: “Impress upon the Cavalry the necessity of keeping out of people’s houses, or taking what is of no use to them in a Military point of view. They must live as far as possible off the country through which they pass and destroy corn, wheat crops and everything that can be made use of by the enemy in prolonging the war . . . In other words cripple the rebellion in every way without insulting women and children or taking their clothing, jewelry &c.”93 Faced with these immense logistical challenges, Grant drew on his old quartermaster experience as never before.
