by Ron Chernow
Here Grant stepped outside a narrowly defined military role to declare himself in personal harmony with Lincoln’s overarching political objectives. His letter had the intended effect. On August 29, Secretary of the Treasury Chase recorded in his diary that Lincoln came into his office carrying Grant’s message and one of similar tenor from Banks about arming negro troops. “Both Generals express confidence in the efficiency of these troops and clear opinions in favor of using them. These letters give much satisfaction to the president.”78
Black soldiers still faced innumerable indignities. Until June 1864, they pocketed less pay than white counterparts, discrimination that stung deeply. But their sacrifice for the Union cause gave them pride, political standing, and leadership skills. Frederick Douglass recognized that once the black man had “a musket on his shoulder, and a bullet in his pocket,” there was “no power on earth” that could “deny that he has earned the right of citizenship in the United States.”79
As late June approached, Grant continued to pummel Vicksburg, preparing his opponents for capitulation. Morale eroded inside the beleaguered fortress as Pemberton’s men stripped wood from houses to construct a crude fleet of boats by which they hoped to escape to the Louisiana shore of the Mississippi River. Grant notified Admiral Porter to be on the lookout for clandestine nocturnal efforts to cross the waterway. “Had the attempt been made,” Grant wrote, “the garrison of Vicksburg would have been drowned, or made prisoners on the Louisiana side.”80 All the while, Sherman tightened the Union stranglehold on the city by obstructing roads with fallen timbers to forestall any outside attack by Johnston’s forces. Grant gave him thirty-four thousand soldiers to form a firewall around the city, a move that Sherman brilliantly executed.
Always open to technological innovations in warfare, Grant approved the explosion of a Union mine intended to topple one of the enemy forts. Into a network of trenches and tunnels General McPherson managed to load twelve hundred pounds of explosives. They were detonated with such force that they threw up a huge cloud of white smoke, gouging out a crater thirty-five feet in diameter. Several Confederate soldiers were whirled up into the air and tossed down, still alive, on the Union side. Unfortunately, for all the fireworks, the explosion failed to break open the nearby fort and the effort came to naught.
By the end of June, as Joseph Johnston marched four divisions toward the Big Black River, Grant braced for a huge fight. Meanwhile, daily rations inside Vicksburg dwindled, leading to starvation. With his light fieldpieces aimed at the fortress, backed by big naval guns and mortar boats floating in the river, Grant exercised a commanding position over the battered city. He set off a second mine explosion on July 1, bringing his army right up to the parapets in three different places. He ensured easy access to these ramparts for his men by laying planks and bags packed tightly with cotton over swampy ditches, enabling them to rush uphill with sure, rapid steps.
It was a misfortune for the South that John C. Pemberton was a Yankee with two brothers fighting on the northern side. A decent administrator, he lacked verve as a fighting general. A brusque, crusty Pennsylvanian who attended West Point, he had fallen under the spell of the South, having wed a Virginia woman whose fervent embrace of secession bound him to the Confederacy. Grant laughingly tagged him as “a northern man who had got into bad company.”81 Even had he not aroused southern suspicions by his northern birth, Pemberton’s curmudgeonly personality would have earned him a large quota of enemies. As Lieutenant General Theophilus Holmes pointed out, Pemberton had “many ways of making people hate him and none to inspire confidence.”82 Where another general might have heeded Johnston’s warning about not getting bogged down in Vicksburg, Pemberton dreaded charges that he had abandoned the city because of his northern background and feared a treason prosecution. As he mulled over surrender to Grant and pondered the “vanity of our foes,” he somehow fancied that Grant might confer lenient terms if allowed to take the town on Independence Day, July 4.83 Grant was neither vain nor tender in this regard.
By July 1, Pemberton saw his last hopes vanish amid a desperate food shortage for his army. “Unless the siege of Vicksburg is raised, or supplies are thrown in,” he warned his commanders, “it will become necessary very shortly to evacuate the place.”84 With his garrison verging on mutiny, Pemberton reluctantly concluded he could not withstand an assault rumored for July 4. Hence, at 10 a.m. on July 3, white flags sprouted along rebel parapets and gunfire ceased. Then two high-ranking emissaries, Major General John Bowen and Colonel Louis Montgomery, Pemberton’s aide-de-camp, were seen advancing on horseback toward Union lines under a fluttering white flag. Pemberton had selected his messengers with care. Bowen, who had befriended Grant during his dark days of hardscrabble farming in St. Louis, was grievously ill and would soon die of dysentery, but Pemberton wished to gain every possible advantage with Grant.
Much as Grant had steeled himself against any sentimentality in favor of Simon Bolivar Buckner at Fort Donelson, he refused to receive Bowen, although he perused closely the letter he bore from Pemberton: “I have the honor to propose to you an armistice . . . with a view to arranging terms for the capitulation of Vicksburg—To this end if agreeable to you, I will appoint three commissioners, to meet a like number to be named by yourself, at such place and hour today as you may find convenient.” Pemberton gave way to false bravado: “I make this proposition to save the further effusion of blood which must otherwise be shed to a frightful extent, feeling myself fully able to maintain my position for a yet indefinite period.”85 Grant, guessing that Pemberton preferred to surrender rather than be captured in a July 4 assault, was relieved the Confederate general chose to avoid further fighting, which he thought would be “little less than murder.”86 After consenting orally to meet between the lines at three that afternoon, Grant wrote Pemberton a tough, uncompromising response—by now his trademark.
Your note of this date is just received, proposing an armistice for several hours for the purpose of arranging terms of capitulation through commissioners to be appointed, &c.
The useless effusion of blood you propose stopping by this course can be ended at any time you may choose, by the unconditional surrender of the city and garrison. Men who have shown so much endurance and courage as those now in Vicksburg, will always challenge the respect of an adversary, and I can assure you will be treated with all the respect due to prisoners of war.
I do not favor the proposition of appointing commissioners to arrange terms of capitulation, because I have no terms other than those indicated above.87
For all his politeness, Grant knew he had the upper hand and played it to the hilt.
At 3 p.m., under a slightly overcast sky, Grant rode through the trenches toward a designated hillside spot beyond the city walls, accompanied by Generals Ord, McPherson, John Logan, and Andrew J. Smith. There he encountered Pemberton, who remembered him from their joint service in the Mexican War. While Grant attempted to be civil, greeting his Confederate counterpart “as an old acquaintance,” the testy Pemberton spurned any pleasantries. He said he understood that Grant had “expressed a wish to have a personal interview with me” and Grant promptly denied any such thing.88 When he asked Grant for the terms he would give if his army surrendered, Grant reiterated his uncompromising stand. Pemberton snorted in response, “The conference might as well end,” and wheeled about as if to go. “I can assure you, sir,” he threatened Grant, “you will bury many more of your men before you will enter Vicksburg.”89 Coolly puffing on a cigar, Grant was adept at a poker face, and not a muscle twitched as he stared at his foe. “Very well,” said Grant, who did not care to tip his hand, especially when Pemberton was so full of bluster.90 After Bowen suggested he should parley with a Union general, Grant agreed, and Bowen and Smith talked while Grant and Pemberton stepped aside under the shade of a stunted oak. Bowen put forth a proposal by which Confederate soldiers would march out of Vicksburg with full honors of war, bearing th
eir small arms. As usual, Grant refused initially to yield an inch to his adversaries and said he would send final terms by ten o’clock that night.
That evening, as northern and southern soldiers socialized between the lines, Grant gathered his officers for a war council, one in which he alone would wield ultimate power. The debate hinged on whether the Confederate garrison should be ferried north as prisoners or paroled, sending them home and effectively excluding them from the war. Despite Grant’s reservations, his generals convinced him of the wisdom of the parole option; instead of tying up Union soldiers and monopolizing transports to steer more than thirty thousand rebels to northern prisons, Grant’s army would immediately be freed up for fresh military adventures. As the years went by and his name became synonymous with reconciliation, Grant tended to forget that he had started out favoring harsher treatment for Pemberton’s men. As he wrote in 1884, “The men had behaved so well that I did not want to humiliate them. I believed that consideration for their feelings would make them less dangerous foes during the continuance of hostilities, and better citizens after the war was over.”91
Once the war council ended, Grant presented Pemberton with generous terms, which would enable Confederate soldiers to save face and surrender with traditional war honors: “As soon as rolls can be made out and paroles signed by officers and men you will be allowed to march out of our lines the officers taking with them their side arms and clothing, and the Field, Staff & Cavalry officers one horse each.”92 Turning up the pressure on Pemberton to accept these honorable terms, Grant slyly leaked the news to Confederate pickets. Once the rebel rank and file realized Grant was offering them a chance to head home, it would be difficult for Pemberton to reject his offer. He largely accepted the terms and said his men would march out the next morning with colors flying and stack their arms, but he tried to widen one loophole: “Officers to retain their side arms, and personal property, and the rights and property of citizens to be respected.”93 Grant knew slaves counted as personal property and had no intention of allowing them to be hauled back into bondage. Before dawn, Grant informed Pemberton he had vetoed this last request and gave him until 9 a.m. to abide by his terms or he would open a full-throttle attack on Vicksburg. Sometime around dawn Pemberton saw the light and the siege ended. At breakfast time, Grant sat in his tent, composing dispatches on a small table, when an orderly arrived with Pemberton’s submission to his final terms. Wan, exhausted from the siege, Grant stood up and said with tangible relief to his son Fred, “W-e-e-e-ll, I’m glad Vicksburg will surrender.”94
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
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Deliverance
AS ALWAYS AFTER A GRANT VICTORY, Union soldiers engaged in no gloating as they watched their enemies being humbled. On the morning of July 4, a hot, steamy day, Union men stared in respectful silence as their Confederate counterparts, one regiment at a time, marched out of Vicksburg, deposited their arms in stacks, then retreated to their lines. The hush seemed palpable after weeks in which the navy had punished the town with more than twenty thousand rounds of shell and shot. Grant wrote that “not a cheer went up, not a remark was made that would give pain. Really, I believe there was a feeling of sadness just then in the breasts of most of the Union soldiers at seeing the dejection of their late antagonists.”1 The extreme heat made the prolonged ritual an ordeal for both sides. As Grant’s telegraph operator, Samuel Beckwith, recalled: “The tramping of myriads of feet had stirred up a fine, yellow clay dust that coated our garments and filled our eyes and ears and nostrils until it was almost unbearable.”2
Grant had not simply notched another major victory: he had bagged a gigantic army, and nothing pleased him more, said an aide, than “to reduce the enemy’s strength by captures than by slaughter.”3 The speed, daring, and sophistication of the Vicksburg Campaign eclipsed anything Grant had accomplished before. More than thirty-one thousand southern soldiers fell under his control, joining six thousand captured during the siege and six thousand more in earlier battles after the river crossing. Adding to this bountiful harvest, Grant collected seventeen rebel cannon and sixty thousand muskets and rifles. By contrast, he had sacrificed fewer than ten thousand of his own men, prompting Bruce Catton to remark: “The legend of Grant as the heedless, conscienceless butcher finds nothing to feed on in the story of the Vicksburg campaign.”4
Once the last Confederate surrendered, Grant ordered John Logan to lead his division into the fallen citadel and hoist the Stars and Stripes over Vicksburg’s courthouse for the first time in two and a half years. The siege damage was manifest everywhere in toppled walls, shattered windows, and the emaciated faces of inhabitants. The town was “one vast cemetery,” said one aide, with skulls and limbs of buried soldiers protruding from the earth.5 Soldiers on both sides gazed at one another in wonder, the prosperous appearance of the Yankees no less surreal than the haggard faces of the famished Confederates. A Vicksburg woman, setting eyes on well-appointed Union men, wrote sadly, “What a contrast to the suffering creatures we had seen so long were these stalwart, well-fed men, so splendidly set up and accoutered. Sleek horses, polished arms, bright plumes—this was the pride and panoply of war.”6 Union soldiers were roused to pity by their “gaunt and hungry” foes, and one officer started handing out hardtack, sugar, and coffee to every rebel soldier he saw.7 Grant was struck by how quickly the two sides began to mingle, retrieving their common nationality. Mortal hatred gave way to friendly banter. “I myself saw our men taking bread from their haversacks and giving it to the enemy they had so recently been engaged in starving out.”8 For the first time Grant toured the prehistoric apartments dug from the deep clay of the Vicksburg hills by residents driven underground by his incessant bombing.
Grant and his entourage repaired to a fine mansion whose front lawn had grown rank with weeds during the siege. As he mounted the wide front steps, Pemberton stepped onto the verandah and “stood for a single moment glaring upon his conqueror,” Beckwith said.9 The Confederate commander gruffly unbuckled his sword, belt, and revolver and “thrust more than offered” them in surrender to Grant, who reacted with punctilious restraint. “Retain your side arms, General,” he told Pemberton, placing his hand softly upon the sword.10 When Grant offered him a cigar, Pemberton took one with exaggerated reluctance. He refused to offer Grant a seat, and when Grant asked for a glass of water, a rebel officer told him he could get it himself. Behaving with his congenital aplomb, Grant did not stoop to anger, and the contrast between the two generals struck observers. According to Charles A. Dana, Grant “was received by Pemberton with more marked impertinence than at their former interview. Grant bore it like a philosopher, and in reply treated Pemberton with even gentler courtesy and dignity than before.”11 Based on his prewar experience, Grant knew a thing or two about the tender ego of a defeated man.
As Pemberton foresaw, Vicksburg proved a full-blown catastrophe for his career and he was busted from lieutenant general to a lowly lieutenant colonel of artillery. In reporting on operations in Mississippi, Joseph Johnston loaded him with blame, noting that he had been told under no circumstances to allow himself to be besieged. The South needed a scapegoat, and the northern-born Pemberton presented the ideal target. Jefferson Davis did not allow Johnston to wriggle free, criticizing him for his failure to attack Grant. Such was the success of Grant’s parole program that much of Pemberton’s army withered away, many demoralized men swearing never to fight again. While some soldiers violated their paroles and returned to the war, most headed home, further depleting the limited stock of southern manpower.
With none of the conquistador in his nature, Grant impressed most folks in Vicksburg with his unassuming, egalitarian nature. When he went to a barbershop for a haircut, an aide tried to shove Lieutenant Frank Parker from a chair to make room for him, but Grant refused to brush aside a junior officer. “You are all right, my friend; go ahead,” Grant said. “You feel just as much like getting cleaned up as any general, and you
have got as much right to your turn as I have to mine.” Parker was touched, since the hirsute Grant desperately needed a barber’s attention. “He looked rough . . . his beard was long and his hair was ragged and his clothes were dusty and faded, but he never put on airs and never assumed to be a general.”12
The short, plain man with the history of business failure now reigned as the leading northern general, although he still did not receive the adulation he might have garnered in the East. Armies in the western theater roamed a vast, sprawling territory with comparatively scant newspaper coverage. The fall of Vicksburg rendered indefensible Port Hudson on the lower Mississippi, and on July 9, its seven thousand defenders surrendered to Nathaniel Banks. Once again the Mississippi became an open thoroughfare for commerce from the northern states. As Lincoln phrased it more poetically, “The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea.”13 Union control of the waterway sheared off Texas and Arkansas from the rest of the Confederacy, depriving it of western horses and cattle that had sustained its soldiers.
For many southerners, the loss of Vicksburg seemed to portend the demise of the Confederacy itself, and a fatalistic tone crept into their commentary. Dazed by this defeat, Jefferson Davis was more profoundly depressed by Vicksburg’s loss than by Lee’s simultaneous defeat at Gettysburg, moaning, “We are now in the darkest hour of our political existence.”14 Josiah Gorgas, head of Confederate ordnance, saw the South skidding on a permanent downward spiral: “Yesterday we rode on the pinnacle of success—today absolute ruin seems to be our portion. The Confederacy totters to its destruction.”15 Grant could now force his way into the vitals of the Confederacy instead of chipping away at its periphery.
