by Ron Chernow
When Sherman floated his corps across the Mississippi on May 7, Grant’s army was complete and ready for battle. If Grant ever had a go-for-broke moment in the war, it was now as he commenced his high-speed march to Jackson. He wanted to maintain the tempo and badger the enemy with unrelenting pressure. He sent small forces north toward Vicksburg to precipitate minor flurries of fighting and trick Pemberton into thinking that was his intended route, while he rallied his army with ringing words: “Other battles are to be fought. Let us fight them bravely. A grateful country will rejoice at our success, and history will record it with immortal honor.”94 It was a thrilling but terrifying moment as he set out for the interior and left behind communications with Washington and the outside world. The short general with the forgettable appearance infused a winning spirit into his elated troops. “O, what a grand army this is,” wrote a young soldier. “I shall never forget the scene today, while looking back upon a mile of solid columns, marching with their old tattered flags streaming in the summer breeze, and harkening to the firm tramp of their broad brogans keeping step to the pealing fife and drum, or the regimental bands discoursing ‘Yankee Doodle’ or ‘The Girl I Left Behind Me.’”95
Limited rations endowed Grant’s movements with extra urgency. On May 11, he ordered McPherson to seize the town of Raymond, about a dozen miles southwest of Jackson, the next day. “We must fight the enemy before our rations fail,” he urged him, “and we are equally bound to make our rations last as long as possible.”96 After McPherson took the town in a bout of spirited fighting, Grant set his sights on the state capital. To isolate Vicksburg and starve it into submission, he needed to obliterate the vital railroad link connecting it to Jackson.
On May 9, the War Department in Richmond had placed Joseph Johnston, a general whom Grant greatly respected, in charge of defending Mississippi, and by nightfall on the thirteenth he arrived in Jackson after an extended train trip from Tennessee. Although enriched by fresh regiments from Georgia and South Carolina, Johnston had only six thousand troops to repulse an imminent Union attack. That same night, Grant’s soldiers waded through foot-deep puddles in a rainy, headlong rush toward the state capital. He ordered Sherman and McPherson to hit Jackson hard at dawn. Seeing that it was foolhardy to hold the town against overwhelming odds, Johnston beat a hasty retreat north, and Jackson collapsed with stunning speed, becoming the third southern capital after Nashville and Baton Rouge to succumb to the Yankee interlopers. By three o’clock on the afternoon of May 14, Union forces chased away the last Confederates. Six months earlier, Jefferson Davis had assured his followers that Mississippi citizens would “meet and hurl back these worse than vandal hordes.”97 Instead Grant had registered a hugely lopsided victory.
Seated on high ground in a rural area, Jackson seemed a civilized oasis, with stately public buildings and houses wrapped with wide verandahs. Fred Grant always remembered the Stars and Stripes being run up over the statehouse. In the topsy-turvy fortunes of war, Grant took up residence at Jackson’s finest brick hotel, the five-story Bowman House, sleeping in the room occupied by Joseph Johnston the night before. Union soldiers erupted in an orgy of celebration. “If there ever was a jubilant army,” said one gunner, “Grant’s army in Jackson was that night.”98 In a grim atmosphere of retribution, poor whites and blacks looted stores, and when convicts were released, they set ablaze the local prison, feeding flames that engulfed parts of the town. There were bitter charges that Grant’s men had vengefully desecrated the town. “The Yankees were guilty of every kind of vandalism,” wrote one British correspondent. “They sacked houses, stole clothing from the negroes, burst open their trunks, and took what little money they had.”99 Rich whites, fearing Grant might incinerate the town, supposedly fled to the countryside for safety.
Grant set forth a very different account: “Joe Johnston set fire to every store house in Jackson before I reached it. That was perfectly justifiable, as he could not take his provisions and did not want them to fall into my hands, but I had to issue two hundred thousand rations to prevent the people from starving.”100 When Grant and Sherman strolled into a cotton mill, they were astonished to discover it going at full throttle, manufacturing tent cloth and other essential goods for the Confederate army. “I guess we shall have to burn this,” Grant remarked, and the building was promptly burned to the ground.101 Most important, Sherman smashed facilities that had allowed Jackson to function as a transportation hub. Previewing things to come, his men also razed arsenals, machine shops, foundries, and factories as well as homes, performing their task with brutal efficiency.
The same day Jackson fell, Grant gained access to a message Johnston had dashed off to Pemberton: “I am anxious to see a force assembled that may be able to inflict a heavy blow upon the enemy.”102 Johnston wanted Pemberton to break out of Vicksburg with a large column of soldiers and unite their two forces to stop Grant. As soon as he divined Confederate intentions, Grant started barking out rapid-fire orders. He knew his own mind and needed no consultation. The all-important goal was to separate Pemberton and Johnston. Two of Grant’s corps commanders, McClernand and McPherson, would hurry west and confront Pemberton, while Sherman stayed behind and pinned down Johnston at a safe distance. Grant galloped west to meet McPherson’s men, having accomplished his paramount objective: he had flushed Pemberton and a portion of his army from their Vicksburg defenses, forcing them to fight in the open.
The armies of Grant and Pemberton clashed at Champion’s Hill, where Pemberton massed about twenty thousand men. Dug in for miles along a wooded ridge seventy feet high, the rebel position presented distinct challenges to their twenty-nine thousand blue-coated foes. Grant’s men would have to traverse ground broken by gullies and ravines. As the battle got under way, Grant found McClernand too timid and dilatory in his forward movements even as McPherson punched away with sure-handed gusto. Both sides discharged fire in thunderous, nonstop volleys. “The rattle of musketry was incessant for hours,” wrote a journalist. “Cannons thundered till the heavens seemed bursting.”103
Grant ordered Brigadier General A. P. Hovey to throw his brigades against the Confederate left. An Indiana lawyer in civilian life, Hovey was “ambitious, active, nervous, irritable, energetic, clear-headed, quick-witted and prompt-handed,” as Dana described Hovey to Stanton.104 In a bloody charge up the ridge, Hovey’s men drove the Confederates back before a counterattack forced them to retreat. The seesaw battle was one of unremitting savagery, “one of the most obstinate and murderous conflicts of the war,” one of Hovey’s men said.105 At this point, Grant saw his right wing endangered. Drawing on his cigar, he studied the situation with his usual masklike inscrutability. “I was close enough to see his features,” said one soldier. “Earnest they were, but signs of inward movement there were none.”106 True to form, Grant dwelled on enemy weakness, spying an opportunity to reverse the battle’s course. “If the enemy has driven them he is not in good plight himself,” Grant reasoned. “If we can go in again here and make a little showing, I think he will give way.”107 His optimism was justified. Once reinforced, Hovey’s soldiers retook the high ground. By midafternoon Pemberton’s forces were routed and Grant’s units tailed them until after sundown.
More than two thousand of Pemberton’s men had been killed or wounded and three thousand prisoners taken, but the Union toll soared to staggering levels as well. In a matter of hours, the gallant Hovey had sacrificed a full third of his division, rendering it a bittersweet victory. As he said, “I cannot think of this bloody hill without sadness and pride . . . It was, after the conflict, literally the hill of death.”108 Grant’s joy was somewhat constrained by knowledge that if McClernand had enacted his assigned role, they might have rolled up Pemberton’s army. Nonetheless, Vicksburg was now severed from the outside world and it seemed a foregone conclusion that it would fall.
That night Grant slept on the porch of a house that had been converted into a Confederate field hospital an
d was crammed with dead and mutilated bodies from Champion’s Hill. As at Shiloh, the horror of battle only hit him in its aftermath. Once again, death in individualized form affected him more powerfully than mass death. He later offered this candid admission: “While a battle is raging one can see his enemy mowed down by the thousand, or the ten thousand, with great composure; but after the battle these scenes are distressing, and one is naturally disposed to do as much to alleviate the suffering of an enemy as a friend.”109
By the morning of May 17, Grant’s army lay within ten miles of Vicksburg. It now squared off against a rebel army that had assumed advantageous positions on the Big Black River, a bayou choked with detritus and fallen trees. Pemberton’s men improvised defenses by stacking cotton bales from a nearby plantation and tossing dirt over them. Tired, their spirits deflated, those men were no match for the élan of Grant’s invigorated troops. The big Union breakthrough came from the impetuous action of Brigadier General Michael Lawler. A hearty, corpulent Illinois farmer—“a fine type of the generous, rollicking, fighting Irishman,” said an admiring journalist—Lawler brandished his sword and ordered his men to charge at the enemy across a cotton field.110 Deflecting a deadly torrent of musket fire, they struggled across the bayou in mud up to their armpits. Grant would never have ordered this risky maneuver, but the exhausted Confederates, unnerved by Lawler’s daring, immediately stuck cotton on their bayonets in a sign of surrender. On the spot, nearly two thousand prisoners fell to Union forces. Grant refused to quibble with success. As he observed, “When it comes to just plain hard fighting, I would rather trust old Mike Lawler than any of them.”111 One victim was Fred Grant, who was grazed in the right thigh by a bullet, again raising questions about Ulysses’s paternal judgment in permitting him to loiter in the vicinity of battle.
It had been another one-sided triumph for Grant. The Confederate army suffered 1,751 killed or captured while Grant’s lost only 276 killed or wounded. Retreating rebels burned the main bridge over the Big Black—some drowned as they splashed in terror to the other side—and Grant constructed three temporary bridges in one day, slapped together with wood taken from dismantled houses and barns in the area. That night, Grant and Sherman sat together on a log by the river, illuminated by bonfires of pitch pine, and watched their columns snake across the Big Black, a sight so vivid Sherman said it made “a fine war picture.”112
In less than three weeks, Grant had traversed 130 miles on foot and handily won five consecutive battles in a bravura campaign that would be enshrined in military textbooks. He had shown true virtuosity in spontaneously coordinating many moving parts and adapting to shifting enemy positions. With the Army of the Tennessee, he had created the mobile, lightning-quick army for which Lincoln yearned in contrast to the hidebound eastern forces. As Lincoln’s secretary John Nicolay exclaimed, “The praise of our western soldiers is on every lip, Illinois valor particularly receiving as it properly should, large honor.”113 Contrary to his image of securing victories at heavy cost, Grant had sacrificed 4,300 men versus 7,200 for the Confederates, even though he had tackled a combined Confederate force at Vicksburg, Grand Gulf, and Jackson of more than 60,000 men, much larger than the 43,000 he transferred across the Mississippi. “Grant is now deservedly the hero,” Sherman proclaimed. “He is now belabored with praise by those who a month ago accused him of all the sins in the calendar.”114 One journalist traveling with Grant’s army summed up his new stature: “Nothing like this campaign has occurred during this war. It stamps Gen. Grant as a man of uncommon military ability—proves him the foremost one in the west; if not in the nation.”115 The New York Times, noting that Grant had captured fifty guns and six thousand prisoners, stressed that this whirlwind operation had been accomplished “in a foreign climate, under a tropical sun ablaze with the white heat of summer, with only such supplies as could be gleaned from the country.”116
As Grant’s columns strode confidently toward Vicksburg, scenes of ecstatic jubilation greeted them as they passed abandoned plantations and were applauded by former slaves. One ex-slave, seated on a lawn, rocking back and forth in joy, kept shouting, “Glory, hallelujah, glory, hallelujah . . . Bless God, bless God. I never spected to see dis day.”117 As his defeated men slunk away from the Big Black, John Pemberton peered into his blighted future. Back at Vicksburg, fearing the worst, he had his men herd cows, sheep, and hogs into the city in anticipation of a prolonged siege. Those Vicksburg residents who thought the “Gibraltar of the West” unassailable were shocked by the tattered, defeated soldiers shuffling back into town. “I shall never forget the woeful sight of a beaten, demoralized army—humanity in the last stage of endurance,” said one observer. “Wan, hollow-eyed, ragged, foot-sore, bloody, the men limped along unarmed, followed by siege guns, ambulances, gun carriages and wagons in aimless confusion.”118
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
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Citadel
BY MAY 18, Grant and his fifty thousand soldiers began to encircle Vicksburg, with thirty-one thousand Confederate soldiers trapped inside. As they rode toward the town, Grant and Sherman were so eager to secure supplies for their men on the Yazoo River that they rode ahead with advance skirmishers, exposing themselves to danger. As Grant conceded, “The bullets of the enemy whistled by thick and fast for a short time.”1 On May 19, the two men inspected Haynes’ Bluff on the high plain north of Vicksburg that Sherman had failed to take in December. As he shifted men east to stem Grant’s onrushing army, Pemberton had yielded this critical high ground. The seizure of this recently contested turf elicited a strong response from Sherman, who had been dubious about Grant’s strategy. “Until this moment I never thought your expedition would be a success,” he admitted to Grant. “I never could see the end clearly; but . . . this is a success if we never take the town.”2 Joseph Johnston had warned Pemberton that if Union troops ever occupied these strategic bluffs, Vicksburg’s days would be numbered. In such an eventuality, Johnston advised Pemberton, he should surrender Vicksburg and save his men, assaying an exodus toward the northeast. Pemberton did not heed this timely advice and paid a terrible price with his troops bottled up inside a death trap.
Sure that Pemberton and his men had been disheartened by recent defeats, Grant ordered an assault for the afternoon of May 19, expecting the rebels to capitulate quickly. As an extra measure, he had Admiral Porter project shells into the lower part of the city. At precisely 2 p.m., Grant unleashed three rounds of artillery fire, the signal for his entire line to storm the bulwark with its earthworks linked by rifle pits. Pemberton had built nine forts with walls twenty feet thick. Somehow the defending soldiers, drawing on new reserves of energy, dealt Grant a bloody setback, inflicting almost a thousand Union casualties while suffering fewer than two hundred of their own. Perhaps no less amazed than Grant himself, Pemberton informed Jefferson Davis, “Our men have considerably recovered their morale.”3
Grant would not be easily discouraged and scheduled a follow-up attack for 10 a.m. on May 22. As always, he believed delay would allow the other side to boost its defenses and absorb reinforcements. Ever since crossing the Mississippi, Grant’s men had been famished for decent victuals and basic comforts, and before this new assault he made sure they were outfitted with plenty of food, tents, and cooking utensils. Nevertheless, he worried what would happen if his men began to wilt in the Mississippi heat: “There was no telling what the casualties might be among Northern troops working and living in trenches, drinking surface water filtered through rich vegetation, under a tropical sun.”4
The night before the second assault, Porter’s gunboats terrorized the town with a blistering barrage of projectiles. Then, at the appointed hour, after Grant’s three chief commanders synchronized their watches (a novelty in wartime), all three corps raced forward with fixed bayonets, scaling ladders and ropes to surmount the sheer Vicksburg parapets. Although some troops neared the works and even planted their flags, they had to ward off Confederate fire
and could not puncture the thick shell that shielded Vicksburg. The result was a second bloodbath—one Illinois colonel called it “the most murderous fire I ever saw”—with 3,200 Union soldiers killed, wounded, and missing.5 Grant’s losses approached his total casualties from the time his army had crossed the river until it approached the citadel.
During the battle, Grant’s plan was marred by a misleading report from John A. McClernand, who claimed he had captured two rebel forts and, if given more men, could stage a dramatic breakthrough. This turned out to be an exaggeration. But to avoid political problems, Grant diverted much of McPherson’s corps to support McClernand, even though he couldn’t see that either fort had been taken. The troops he dispatched to McClernand’s aid accounted for a full half of the day’s casualties. One journalist remembered the reaction of Grant and Rawlins to the self-serving deception. “[I] shall never forget the fearful burst of indignation from Rawlins, and the grim glowering look of disappointment and disgust which settled down on Grant’s usually placid countenance, when he was convinced of McClernand’s duplicity, and realized its cost in dead and wounded.”6
