Born to Battle

by Jack Hurst

  Halleck was atypically enthusiastic. Dealing with Lincoln’s chagrin at other generals’ lassitude—McClellan’s reluctance to contest Lee’s retreat from Antietam and Buell’s similar dawdle behind Bragg—Halleck welcomed offensive movement anywhere.

  “I approve of your plan of advancing upon the enemy,” Halleck replied on November 3. “I hope for an active campaign on the Mississippi this fall.”11

  With pushes from Halleck, regiments, brigades, and divisions of reinforcements for Grant kept flowing from the Midwest into Columbus, Kentucky. From there they poured down the Mobile & Ohio Railroad into West Tennessee. More steamed down the Mississippi past Columbus into Memphis. Grant relished these new arrivals, seeing in them the means to seize all-out initiative again. Wanting to make the slash southward that he thought should have immediately followed the battle of Shiloh, he began to envision a strike down the Mississippi Central Railroad through the center of the state to Vicksburg’s land side, its back door.

  Vicksburg was the second-largest town in Mississippi, trailing only Natchez, its neighbor seventy miles downstream. Situated on the next flood-safe bluff below Memphis 250 land miles to the north, it sat 200 feet above the river and boasted nearly 5,000 residents, three newspapers, five churches, and two hospitals. With the coming of war, the waterside approaches had been fortified for miles with frowning trenches and gun emplacements. These defenses would grow to include 171 cannons, most of them overlooking the river.12

  Grant’s plans aimed to capitalize on enemy disarray. Outnumbered Confederates, feeling the shrinkage of their ranks by the 5,000 casualties at Corinth, were reportedly withdrawing from Holly Springs. Their Mississippi commander, Van Dorn, had requested a court of inquiry into his alleged mishandling of the Corinth battle—through inadequate reconnaissance and purported drunkenness—and the court had weakly sustained him. But public outcry over his leadership prompted Jefferson Davis to reduce his command to cavalry alone and subordinate him to a new Mississippi commander, Pennsylvania-born Lieutenant General John Pemberton. Pemberton quickly countermanded the withdrawal from Holly Springs and ordered Confederate troops back into the town and north of it, to the south bank of the Coldwater River.13

  Happy to have the Confederates await him on the Coldwater, Grant spent early November gathering supplies and troops north of the Tennessee-Mississippi border. He also sent reconnaissance parties south from LaGrange and Grand Junction. On November 8, near Lamar, Mississippi, on the road to Holly Springs, cavalry and infantry under McPherson skirmished with enemy cavalry. Flanking them and getting into their rear, they killed at least sixteen Confederates and captured more than a hundred. McPherson’s advance reached the Coldwater.14

  The next afternoon, November 9, McPherson himself arrived on the river’s north bank. Across it he saw 10,000 Confederates in line of battle, with another 10,000 under Sterling Price reported just south of Holly Springs and 13,000 more at Abbeville nearby. The Confederates were plainly ready to fight, and McPherson, undermanned, fell back.

  Grant was content to “let them lay” until another 20,000 troops under Sherman could join his developing campaign. Then, as he wrote another subordinate on November 9, he could loose Sherman in a flanking move from the west onto the Confederate rear or bring Sherman’s troops to join him on his march down the Mississippi Central line. The final plan might depend on the progress of two other Federal moves purportedly underway, one upriver from New Orleans and another from Helena, Arkansas, against Grenada.15

  The day after his lead units marched south from LaGrange toward Holly Springs, Grant took a subtler step, one that at bottom was fully as aggressive. It aimed to foster indigenous support for the Union.

  On its face, his plan intended to aid loyal Southern civilians suffering the privations of war. General Orders No. 4—which Grant issued for implementation in his jurisdiction, the Department of the Tennessee—noted that many noncombatants in the area lacked food and clothing and a way to earn the means of getting them. It directed that persons not rebelling should not go hungry in a region lush with supplies. And the Union, which had not caused the war, should not bear the cost of feeding them. That burden, Grant’s order said, should fall on those responsible: supporters of secession. So the bill would go to Confederate sympathizers. They would be assessed “money, foodstuffs, or forage.”16

  But General Orders No. 4 entailed more than was obvious at first glance. Who were all these Union loyalists who lacked food and clothes and had no way of earning a living? A minority of whites doubtless fit this description, but many more of the “suffering” noncombatants were almost certainly fugitive slaves. On October 29, Grant aide William Hillyer wrote Sherman in Memphis recommending that if Sherman found it “necessary to distribute food to the poor and destitute families, or to unemployed contrabands,” he should pay for it with assessments on “better provided” secessionists.

  Grant’s order was timely. On September 22, as a whipped Lee retreated from Maryland, Lincoln had issued a preliminary proclamation of emancipation. Some declared the action a political sham, since it granted freedom— as of January 1, 1863—only to slaves in territory under Confederate control. It was no sham, however. The slave mobs that followed the invading Union armies increased after Lincoln’s preliminary proclamation. Any suggestion of a forward move by Federal troops brought more refugees from the area to be invaded. Grant wired Halleck on November 15 that they were “coming in by wagon loads.”17

  The fugitives constituted a huge burden for the army but also an invaluable military boon. The slaves provided information about Confederate moves and local back roads, creek fords, and terrain. As numerous as a second army, they were helpful in still more respects, and Grant began exploiting as many of these as he could. Able-bodied men were put to work as teamsters, cooks, and construction workers, while other males, females, and children above age ten picked corn and cotton on abandoned plantations.

  Grant appointed Chaplain John Eaton of the Twenty-seventh Ohio Volunteer Infantry to supervise a huge camp for the former slaves at Grand Junction and supplied him with assistants and guards. Eaton was a New Hampshire native who had graduated from Dartmouth to become schools superintendent in Toledo, Ohio, then had left Toledo in 1859 to attend Andover Theological Seminary. He and Grant established pay scales for work by the former bondspeople. After the cotton was picked and the workers paid, the harvest was shipped north by the army quartermaster to be sold, with proceeds going to the federal treasury. Any owners remaining on their plantations could save their crops by hiring the work done at the same rates. The former slaves were suddenly earning wages in the same areas where for centuries their forebears had labored for nothing.18

  But the refugees kept coming, and the sheer magnitude of the influx interfered with military movements. To free up the army, Grant began sending some north to Cairo. There a glaring flaw in the national character again asserted itself. Reflecting the indifference that had permitted human bondage to thrive in America for 243 years, the majority of Northerners evinced little more compassion for African Americans than did Southerners. Judge David Davis, one of Lincoln’s closest advisers, wrote on October 14 to protest sending the unfortunates to Illinois. It would, he warned, “work great harm in the coming election.” The bulk of antislavery politics in the North was founded on the principle that white workingmen should not have to compete with slave labor for a livelihood, that each man should live by his own labor. Most antislavery feeling consisted of enmity toward the slaveholder, not empathy for the slave, and even well-meaning people evincing the latter, including Lincoln himself at the time, thought freed slaves should be shipped to Africa, not brought north to try to survive in white-ruled society.19

  But while the overwhelming majority of Northerners did not have the best interests of the former slaves at heart, the issuance of General Orders No. 4 indicates that Grant was not just attempting to remove an African American millstone from around his army’s neck. He was acting on an impulse of h
umanity that he already had shown toward slaves. Part of his motivation for feeding, clothing, and employing them in the fall of 1862 likely grew out of guilt for having followed Congressman Elihu Washburne’s July suggestion to draft them for military uses. The slaves’ fate was uncertain by any measure in late 1862, emancipation or no, and not knowing whether their labors for the army would reap a happier destiny surely bothered Grant’s sense of fairness. More than the Maine-born Washburne and other Northerners fixated on the blacks’ usefulness in the war, Grant thought about the people themselves. Having labored alongside both slaves and whites in slaveholding territory, he knew how cloudy their future was.

  Grant was not without his own ugly prejudice, though. In November and December 1862, he disclosed this fault in one of the most repulsively bigoted acts of his career.

  “Refuse all [civilians] permits to come south of Jackson for the present,” he wired Major General Stephen A. Hurlbut at Jackson, Tennessee, on November 9. “The Israelites especially should be kept out.”20

  Hurlbut and other Grant subordinates tried to make these orders less toxic, rephrasing them to bar all “civilians.” Grant seemed not to notice their efforts. On November 10 he ordered Colonel Joseph Webster, in charge of rail transportation in Grant’s department, to instruct conductors that “no Jews” could travel by rail southward. He described them as “such an intolerable nuisance that the Department must be purged from them.” By December 17 the discrimination in these directives would reach an infamous crescendo in General Orders No. 11, which expelled “the Jews as a class” from his department.21

  At the time, nativism was the norm among working-class white Americans. Grant may have absorbed it from his father or from other non-Jewish businessmen who competed with Semitic ones. The army was a prime repository of such attitudes. One of Grant’s closer military friends before the war had been Kentuckian and future Confederate general Simon Bolivar Buckner. After resigning from the army to become a Chicago businessman in the mid-1850s, Buckner briefly ran an immigrant-decrying, Know Nothing Party–affiliated newspaper in the Windy City.22

  But the abrupt and all-encompassing nature of Grant’s General Orders No. 11 had more to do with his present circumstances than with his past. It resulted in part from disgust with traders of all backgrounds who followed the army like vultures, seeking to grab captured cotton at bargain prices, swindle soldiers, and exploit any other commercial opportunity. Grant had to contend with these obsessed profiteers, and like most front-line soldiers, he hated them. Most traders were not Jewish, but a number of the more prominent were. An indication of the kind of problems they gave Grant, and of the tension-raising levels of political clout they could wield, is found in a letter he wrote Congressman Washburne on November 7. Grant had read a false forecast in Illinois newspapers that Bloomington attorney Leonard Swett, a close Lincoln associate, was to receive a White House advisory position. Grant told Washburne he considered Swett “one of my bitterest enemies” because, during the 1861–1862 winter, when Grant was in charge at Cairo, he had prevented the cheating of soldiers and the federal government by “contractors and speculators” with whom Swett seemed to be allied.23

  The context of General Orders No. 11 likely also had even more personal overtones. Just nine days before issuing it, he had revoked a similar order by Colonel John V. DuBois. What happened between December 8 and 17? On December 15, Grant—then at Oxford, Mississippi—learned that his father was at Holly Springs, fewer than thirty miles north. He surely learned within another day or so that Jesse Grant’s purpose was not just to accompany Julia to see Ulysses; it was also to buy cotton for a Jewish firm in Cincinnati. Jesse’s deal with Mack & Brothers was to work his son’s department in return for a one-fourth share of profits. Jesse, who had derided his son as a failure until he became a general, had sought ever since to parlay the son’s rise into personal promotion.24

  Perhaps Jesse’s entry into an arena that had already vexed his son to distraction was too much, causing the younger Grant to overreact. The son’s desperation could well have been prompted by fear that newspapers, eager after Shiloh to print any rumor of his whisky consumption, might now also charge him with colluding with his father to profit from the war. That allegation would have been more mortifying to him than charges of drunkenness.

  General Orders No. 11 died swiftly. Jewish leaders visited Abraham Lincoln. Legislation condemning the order was introduced in the House and Senate, failing in both but only barely in the House. The White House revoked the order within two weeks. Halleck wrote Grant that Lincoln likely would not have objected had the order restricted only Jewish merchants. But it banned “an entire religious class, some of whom are fighting in our ranks.”25

  General Orders No. 11 has been justly condemned. But a comparison of it with General Orders No. 4 probably gets closer to Grant’s essence. The latter meant to aid a minority of families, white and black, who were near starvation. The former—although it resulted in undeniable suffering by Jewish people in such places as Paducah, where some thirty families were expelled within twenty-four hours—was intended to stop unethical enrichment of fat businessmen seeking to get fatter. Evident in both orders is the intent to protect the deserving less fortunate. In the case of the former, though, its execution was misguided and ugly.26

  By mid-November, Grant’s army was moving well into northern Mississippi. It was skirmishing often and collecting small gangs of disheartened captives. Significant numbers of Confederates from Kentucky, Tennessee, and Missouri, having seen their states abandoned by their armies, were deserting, pledging allegiance to the Union, and going home.27

  Grant’s plan was first to get past Holly Springs and Oxford to Grenada. Grenada connected with Memphis by rail and could provide a supply route much shorter than the tracks coming from Columbus, Kentucky. By November 14, the Union advance had reached the Tallahatchie River south of Holly Springs. Grant wrote Sherman that mounted troops under Colonel Albert Lee of Kansas had met and driven back five regiments of Confederate cavalry. Lee had killed some 50 men and taken 250 prisoners, with a Federal loss of just 3 wounded. This had driven Confederate General Pemberton’s cavalry out of Holly Springs and back to Pemberton’s fortified line on the south bank of the Tallahatchie. To dislodge him, Grant expected to meet Sherman and 16,000 troops from Memphis at the Tallahatchie and then to begin opening the Memphis-Grenada rail line. He was awaiting word of Sherman’s departure.28

  Then, on November 15, Grant received a wire from Halleck, saying he could not supply twelve additional locomotives Grant had requested to activate the Memphis-Grenada line. The general in chief may have feared Grant’s drawing men and attention away from the supply line back to Columbus, Kentucky, and the many Kentucky and West Tennessee outposts guarding it, in order to open the shorter Memphis-Grenada route. Nixing the latter, he mandated a two-pronged offensive. He restricted Grant’s operations in the Mississippi interior to fast, short marches against significant enemy forces. And they must be combined with a stronger flanking thrust down the Mississippi River by Grant’s units in Memphis.29

  A week later, Grant received another wire from Halleck regarding the river operation. It asked how many men Grant had and how many he could float down the Mississippi to Vicksburg. Grant replied that his department contained a total of 72,000, 16,000 of whom could go downriver. But, he continued, Sherman had already left for the Tallahatchie with the troops from Memphis. Union troops in Arkansas had promised to threaten Grenada, and Federal gunboats were headed farther southward to the Yazoo River to prevent the building of enemy fortifications just north of Vicksburg. Should he scrap these efforts?

  “Proposed movements approved,” Halleck telegraphed on November 25. But “do not go too far.”30

  Grant-Halleck relations were improving. Since late October, each man had brooded over a worsening problem: their unhappy and treacherous subordinate Major General John McClernand. For Halleck, the choice between the bulldog West Pointer and the grasping po
litician in uniform was no contest. McClernand was by far the more dangerous.

  The ex-congressman’s ambition was overweening. It resembled the obsession of the hungriest Washington officeholder, the type with White House dreams. A longtime acquaintance of Lincoln, McClernand had seemed to covet Grant’s job—if not Lincoln’s—since fate threw the two generals together in autumn of 1861. One of McClernand’s ugliest traits was a tendency to appropriate others’ accomplishments as his own. He had claimed for his troops, and thus for himself, more credit than they were due after Belmont, then Fort Donelson, then Shiloh. Worse, he used the stolen glory to exploit his connections in Midwestern statehouses, Congress, and the White House. Lincoln, a Republican, prized McClernand’s Democratic influence as a tool for forging a bipartisan Union war effort, and McClernand wielded this cachet like a club.

  Despite his clout, though, McClernand had been frustrated. In the summer of 1862, he had schemed for transfer to the Army of the Potomac to escape Halleck and Grant—only to see Halleck promoted to general in chief and moved to Washington, with direct oversight of the Army of the Potomac. Now McClernand pushed another ploy. Taking a leave from his position as commander of the Army of the Tennessee’s First Division, he trekked to Illinois and Washington. Sherman soon would write his senator brother, John, that McClernand was “trying to get elected to the U.S. Senate.” General Sherman was doubtless correct, and McClernand meant to get there by raising an army of his own that he could lead to military-political glory. On October 21, Secretary of War Stanton issued a confidential order directing McClernand to recruit and organize volunteers and draftees in Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa, then dispatch them to Memphis. He was to use all of them not needed by Grant, the order said, “to clear the Mississippi River and open navigation to New Orleans.” McClernand had bedazzled Lincoln with an alluring military and political prospect. Heartland merchants were clamoring for the reopening of the Father of Waters, and McClernand had promised to do it.31