Born to Battle

by Jack Hurst

  McClernand was hardly Grant’s sole ongoing problem. In January 1863, Halleck ordered him to repair the railroads smashed by Forrest and Van Dorn. The general in chief wanted the Mobile & Ohio tracks fixed across Tennessee to Columbus, Kentucky. That was not all. Grant also was ordered to withdraw his army to the Corinth-Memphis line and fashion a new supply route. First he reopened the Memphis & Charleston rails to Corinth, but this did not remedy his supply problem. Forrest’s rail and trestle wrecking had marooned too many cars on the Mobile & Ohio in Tennessee and Kentucky; there were not enough left on the Memphis-Corinth line to feed Grant’s men. To do that, he had to resort to gathering forage and meat from civilians in the countryside.28

  Then there were the contrabands. Fugitive slaves from Mississippi, Tennessee, and Kentucky continued to overwhelm his department’s commanders. Grant did not know what to do with all those he could not employ with the army as cooks, laborers, laundresses, and so on. He wrote Halleck on January 6 that he had authorized an Ohio philanthropist to take all who were at Columbus to his state at government expense. “Would like to dispose of more same way.”29

  The officer commanding at Columbus wired Grant that the condition of the fugitives thronging that Kentucky town was “terrible.” Sympathy for them, though, was hard to find. Eleven days after Grant’s note to Halleck, Secretary of War Stanton got a letter from a New Yorker, possibly a Republican political operative, warning that if Grant shipped large numbers of these needy blacks into Cincinnati, it would be “very impolitic.” Stanton directed that Grant countermand his order. Grant aide John Rawlins tried to do that, but too late. The commander at Columbus wired Rawlins that “the Tennessee contrabands were forwarded to Cairo Ill . . . as follows[:] 212 men, 200 women, and 203 children.” It turned out that these six hundred were “still at Cairo without proper shelter.” Rawlins ordered them left at Cairo or sent back to Columbus, “whichever place they can be of most use and best cared for.”30

  While Grant juggled refugees and railroads, McClernand found himself a battlefield. Supplanting Sherman on January 4, the Illinoisan renamed his force the Army of the Mississippi and looked for a place to attack. Steaming down from Memphis in pursuit of Sherman, McClernand had voiced to Brigadier General Willis Gorman at Helena the need to reduce a Confederate stronghold forty miles up the Arkansas River. Arkansas Post, as it was known, had loosed attacks on Union supply boats on the Mississippi. While Sherman was at Chickasaw Bayou, Confederates had captured one, the Blue Wing, that was carrying needed coal.31

  Sherman and McClernand both claimed authorship of the Arkansas Post attack, and both had reason. McClernand needed to christen his new military administration with a quick triumph to make headlines in Illinois and Washington. Sherman, who had the same idea before McClernand arrived, was in worse need. The public and press were condemning him for the casualty-ridden repulse at Chickasaw Bayou. Lincoln and the whole North—having just suffered appalling losses at Fredericksburg, Virginia, and in the draw at Stones River in Tennessee—ached for a turn of fortune. After the debacle at Chickasaw Bayou, Sherman’s, and now McClernand’s, army needed a victory more than ever. Even Grant would acknowledge this after learning Sherman had advocated the move against Arkansas Post.32

  Not initially, however. When on January 11 he received a letter from McClernand announcing his intent to attack, Grant wired Halleck terming it “a wild-goose chase.” He also rebuked McClernand and refused to approve the move. It would, he wrote, incur unacceptable losses and diverge from the quest for “the one great result, the capture of Vicksburg.” Grant seemingly could not hide his anger and chagrin over his failed ploy to take Vicksburg before McClernand’s arrival. Even now, though, he remained wary in dealing with the ultrapolitical general. “Unless you are acting under authority not derived from me,” Grant wrote, “keep your command where it can soonest be assembled for the renewal of the attack on Vicksburg.”33

  Grant had thought General Nathaniel Banks would arrive soon from New Orleans to cooperate against Vicksburg and had previously ordered McClernand and Sherman to await news of Banks’s approach. But McClernand and Sherman were at Milliken’s Bend, closer to New Orleans than Grant, and they had heard nothing to suggest Banks was coming. So McClernand, not having received Grant’s January 11 letter forbidding it, pushed his army up the Arkansas River.

  On January 12, McClernand attacked the 5,000 Confederates at Arkansas Post with some 30,000 infantry, 3 navy ironclads, and 6 other gunboats. The four-hour battle cost the Federals 1,000-plus casualties, but they captured 5,000 Confederates, 18 pieces of artillery, and 5,000 small arms. “Glorious! Glorious! My star is ever in the ascendant! I’ll make a splendid report!” McClernand crowed. So, anyway, claimed Sherman, whose dislike of McClernand had turned to hate after a few days under the ex-congressman’s leadership.

  Pressure on Sherman was mounting. Enduring renewed questions from the press about his sanity because of the seemingly suicidal assault on Chickasaw Bayou, he again showed signs of the paranoia he had exhibited in Kentucky in 1861. He wrote his wife, Ellen, that Lincoln’s placement of McClernand over him was meant “to ruin me for McClernand’s personal glory.” Slipping toward depression, he accused journalists of spying and supplying information to the enemy. He went so far as to initiate the only court-martial of a reporter—Thomas Knox of the New York Herald—in American history.34

  Sherman’s turmoil reflected the effect McClernand was having on Grant’s officers generally. Grant needed to intervene—and, out of the blue, he got orders to do just that. On January 12, in response to Grant’s “goose chase” telegram, Halleck wired back a one-sentence godsend: “You are hereby authorized to relieve General McClernand from command of the expedition against Vicksburg, giving it to the next in rank or taking it yourself.”35

  This directive was no huge departure from Halleck’s December 18 order placing McClernand’s downriver army under Grant’s overall command, but it was less veiled. It openly invited Grant to take hands-on charge of the McClernand force. Grant must have been overjoyed, but he did not overreact. McClernand was still, after all, an associate of the president.

  Unbeknownst to Grant, though, Lincoln was tiring of McClernand and his tattling, self-serving letters. The president received another after McClernand got Grant’s communications disapproving the Arkansas Post attack. On January 16, the egomaniacal ex-congressman wrote Lincoln that his victory at Arkansas Post “is gall and wormwood to the clique of West Pointers who have been persecuting me for months.” He added an all but outright command: “Do not let me be destroyed, or, what is worse, dishonored.”36

  McClernand was not just the victim of a West Point clique, as he loudly claimed. He was disliked by nearly everybody. And Grant, despite being a West Pointer, had himself been victimized by the “clique.” Having such an unimpressive academic record, family background, personal appearance, and history, he had been almost as much a target of West Point prejudice as McClernand. True, he had finally reached an accommodation with Halleck, and he was liked by two other outstanding West Pointers in his lieutenants, Sherman and McPherson. But Halleck and McClellan had so underestimated Grant in 1861 and most of 1862 that only the luck and timing of his indispensable victories had prevented his permanent removal from army leadership. McClernand’s howls notwithstanding, Grant remained an utter anomaly among the West Point elitists who made up the Union high command.37

  The fact that Grant was part of it at all, though, sharply differentiated Northern and Southern soldiery. Lincoln’s relationships with non–West Pointer McClernand and Grant differed dramatically from Jefferson Davis’s relations with Bragg and Forrest. After Fort Donelson and Shiloh made Grant the Union’s most victorious general, Lincoln appeared to care little about his education or social level, just as he appeared to care little about McClernand’s lack of military education. The Union president was smart enough, and plebeian enough, to seek help anywhere he might find it.

  Lincoln was too busy now, tho
ugh, to coddle the pestiferous McClernand any longer. Their bipartisan connection was reaching the point of diminishing returns. The president’s written reply to McClernand’s plea observed that in the army the ex-politician was attempting to help not only the country but also himself. Lincoln bluntly advised against “open war with Gen. Halleck.” Reading these words, McClernand’s blood must have iced over. He had already suspected he was nearing peril. The same day he had written his pleading letter to the president, he also wrote a friend in Illinois, “I may be standing on the brink of official ruin.” This instinct was uncharacteristically prescient.38

  Grant wasted no time. On January 13, the day he got Halleck’s wire suggesting he take personal command of the Vicksburg drive, he wrote McPherson that he would do just that. The confidential message reflected the thirty-four-year-old McPherson’s rapid ascent into the tiny circle of Grant’s most trusted subordinates, the only others being his chief of staff, John Rawlins, and Sherman.

  McPherson was a top-of-his-class West Point engineer, but that had nothing to do with why Grant liked and trusted him. The two came from common ground in more than the geographic sense: both had been born on Ohio farms, spent time struggling to make a living, and performed common work as storekeepers. Perhaps most important, McPherson—initially sent to Grant by Halleck to watch out for whisky—identified with and admired Grant and disliked McClernand. Grant amply rewarded McPherson’s loyalty. A lieutenant colonel when he came to Grant in February at Fort Donelson, by October McPherson was a major general.

  On December 20, two days after Halleck decreed that McClernand’s command of the Vicksburg expedition must be under Grant’s direction, McPherson had urged Grant to consider directing it in person. He had also asked to go along. Now, on January 13, Grant informed McPherson he was taking his advice. On January 15, he ordered the grateful subordinate to accompany him.39

  Grant did not, however, immediately tell McClernand he was taking hands-on control of the Vicksburg campaign. He had loose ends to tie up. He dropped the attempt to move south along the Mississippi Central Railroad and sent three divisions out of interior Mississippi into Memphis. He also abandoned the Forrest-wrecked Mobile & Ohio Railroad north of Jackson and instead readied the Memphis-Corinth tracks, so as to maintain a substantial Union presence in northern Mississippi. And he named Major General Charles Hamilton, one of his West Point classmates, commander of the Memphis district in his absence.

  Grant finally visited the downriver expedition on January 18. There he consulted with McClernand, Sherman, and naval commander David Porter, but he still did not mention to McClernand that his presence would soon be permanent. He likely wanted to forestall the general’s inevitable howl to Washington until he was ready. But on January 20, back in Memphis, he wrote Halleck, “I found there was not sufficient confidence felt in Gen. McClernand as a commander, either by the Army or the Navy, to insure him success.”40

  A week later, Grant departed Memphis for good. On January 28, he arrived at Young’s Point, Louisiana, located on an eastward bulge in the Mississippi’s western shoreline opposite Vicksburg. There, he inspected a canal he had ordered dug across the neck of the bulge, connecting with the Mississippi on either side. He wanted to see if it would allow his army to bypass the towering bluff that commanded the river in front of the town. If the scheme worked, he could attack the Gibraltar from its less defended southern side. But the force of the water diverted into the canal was insufficient to wash it to the width and depth needed, and he began looking for other routes.

  He waited two more days—until he was fully ready—before informing McClernand that he was not just there to visit this time. On January 30 his staff issued General Orders No. 13, under which he assumed “immediate command of the expedition against Vicksburg.” It restricted McClernand’s authority to command of a single corps.41

  McClernand squalled. He charged that General Orders No. 13 disobeyed previous orders from Lincoln, Stanton, and Halleck. Grant’s reply was swift and curt. While he regarded the president as the army’s commander in chief and would obey his every directive, he said, he had received no order precluding him from taking direct command of the Vicksburg expedition—and he had received one from Halleck authorizing it.42

  The next day, McClernand demanded that his protest be forwarded to Washington. Why is unclear. He had already received letters from Lincoln and Stanton subtly backing Halleck. It was likely a bluff intended to cause Grant to reconsider. So far, a prudent wariness of the ex-congressman’s influence had tempered Grant’s dealings with McClernand, who perhaps hoped Grant might choose not to face off with him under scrutiny from Washington.43

  Whatever McClernand was thinking, his ploy failed. Grant did not know about Lincoln’s chilly letter to McClernand, but he did know Halleck was backing him this time. He surely also suspected Halleck would not have supported him if Halleck thought the Lincoln-McClernand bond was still tight. So he complied with the politico’s request and sent Halleck’s office a copy of everything—General Orders No. 13 and the resultant exchanges between McClernand and himself. Grant accompanied the package with a letter of explanation. He said that had Sherman been left in command of the force on the lower Mississippi, he would not have felt the need to go there in person. But he had no confidence in McClernand’s ability to do the job. However, he added, he was “respectfully submit[ting] this whole matter to the Gen. in Chief and the President.”44

  McClernand must have quaked when he heard.

  20

  JANUARY 3-FEBRUARY 3, 1863—FORREST AT DOVER

  “I Will Go into My Coffin

  Before I Will Fight Under You Again”

  Forrest’s savaging of the West Tennessee railroads, along with Van Dorn’s fiery raid on the Union supply depot at Holly Springs, had wrecked Grant’s first try for Vicksburg. Forrest returned to Columbia, Tennessee, anchor of Bragg’s left wing, in early January facing a new year more promising than his commander’s. Forrest, after all, had excelled in the last days of 1862. Bragg had not.

  Bragg had retreated from Murfreesboro in the wake of his epic draw at Stones River between December 31 and January 2, and Southern disappointment was intense. He had formulated an all-but-impossible battle plan, had fought a bloody stalemate in forbidding weather, then had withdrawn from the field when Federal commander William S. Rosecrans would not. The Confederates had pulled back south of Duck River, headquartering at Tullahoma and abandoning another large swath of forage-rich Middle Tennessee. Bragg appeared unsure of himself and asked subordinates if he should resign. This seeming insecurity, however, was apparently disingenuous. He shortly began to blame the Stones River mistakes on generals who had answered his question in the affirmative. His detractors, civilian and military, proliferated. An admired Kentucky brigadier, Roger Hanson, had gone into his final Stones River assault saying Bragg should be shot. Luckily for Bragg, Hanson—who limped from an antebellum duel—was the one who now stopped a bullet, receiving a mortal wound in the charge.1

  But Bragg was not the only unfortunate facing a grim new year. The war’s macrocosm offered a mixed, dispiriting picture to both sides. The Union army had endured senseless butchery in a defeat at Fredericksburg, Virginia, in November and in another at Chickasaw Bluffs, Mississippi, in late December. In Richmond, Jefferson Davis learned that many of his generals—and higher-ranking ones than Roger Hanson—were coming to regard Bragg’s abilities with contempt and the man himself with hate. Albert Sidney Johnston’s son Preston said Bragg possessed “the instincts of a drill-sergeant but not the genius of a general.” Edmund Kirby Smith had vowed following the Kentucky debacle never to work under Bragg again. Bragg, never accepting blame, tried to turn the Stones River censure onto Leonidas Polk and John C. Breckinridge, who returned his enmity in spades.2

  So it was to bolster himself in Davis’s eyes, rather than to advance Forrest, that Bragg wrote to the Confederacy’s president on January 8 and praised Forrest’s raid. He recalled that he had order
ed Forrest into West Tennessee to strike Grant’s supply lines, and it had worked in “brilliant” fashion, even though Forrest’s troops were mostly “new” and “imperfectly armed and equipped.” Bragg did not mention that they were in that condition because Bragg himself had refused to arm and equip them. And he only turned to the subject of Forrest after lavishing praise on John Hunt Morgan for Morgan’s tardy and less decisive strike into northern Kentucky. The lesser nature of the Morgan effort was not the Kentuckian’s fault. Throughout much of November and December, instead of putting Morgan—a personal friend—to work, Bragg had allowed the thirty-seven-year-old widower to spend most of that time in Murfreesboro with his eighteen-year-old fiancée, preparing for their December 14 wedding, which Bragg attended. A weeklong local honeymoon followed.

  The principal departure from Morgan’s November–December romantic idyll occurred on December 7. Bragg’s dispatch to Jefferson Davis accurately described the event of that day as a “brilliant affair” at Hartsville, Tennessee, just fifty miles from Murfreesboro. The Kentuckian lost fewer than 150 casualties there while capturing more than 2,000 Federals, whom he whisked away under the noses of a larger Federal force nearby.

  Two weeks later, on December 21, Bragg finally ordered Morgan to leave his new bride and strike behind Federal lines into northern Kentucky. There, as Bragg wrote, “distance and long repose” had lulled the foe into complacence, and the Kentuckian destroyed two long Louisville & Nashville Railroad bridges. But the feat did not matter nearly so much as it would have if conducted three weeks earlier, because in the interim the Federals had not been as complacent as Bragg and Morgan. Federal supply trains whose tracks had been wrecked during Bragg’s Kentucky sojourn had been up and running again since November 26, and the Federals kept the rails hot. They stockpiled matériel at Nashville for nearly a month before Bragg even learned that the Louisville & Nashville line was operational again. Yet Bragg wrote that Morgan’s “brilliant effort” merited the Confederacy’s “admiration and gratitude.”3