Born to Battle

by Jack Hurst

  Forrest surely wondered why Wharton had not charged again when he saw much of the garrison in his front hurrying away. But Forrest said only—with great heat—that he found no fault with his troops. They had done their duty as always, he observed, perhaps questioning whether Wharton’s had.

  “General Forrest, my report does ample justice to yourself and your men,” Wheeler interjected.

  Forrest was in no mood. He exploded.

  “General Wheeler, I advised against this attack and said all a subordinate officer should have said against it,” he said, “and nothing you can now say or do will bring back my brave men lying dead or wounded and freezing around that fort to-night.”25

  Wheeler tried to cool him. As commander, he said, he himself took the “responsibility for this failure,” a declaration belied by the report’s assertion that the Federals would have surrendered had Forrest’s men not run back to their horses. Forrest grew angrier. According to a staff surgeon present, he responded to Wheeler with distraught contempt. Wheeler could tell that to the relatives of Forrest’s dead troopers, he said.

  “I will tell you this one thing with all due respect, and you may take my sword now if you want it,” he said, eyes afire. “I will go into my coffin before I will fight under you again, and you can put that in your report to General Bragg.”26

  Despite this outright rebellion, Wheeler could hardly allow the resignation of a man some might regard as the Confederacy’s most accomplished western warrior. Wheeler said he “exceedingly” regretted Forrest’s offer of his sword and that he himself bore all responsibility for the defeat—which assertion, of course, was not borne out in his report. But Wheeler’s mild response to the overt defiance of his older subordinate hints that Bragg’s cavalry commander realized Forrest deserved to hold that position himself. Indeed, Forrest had been publicly and repeatedly humiliated, denied a position to which rank entitled him and which Bragg initially promised him. General James Chalmers, a Bragg intimate and admirer who eventually became Forrest’s second in command, would say after the war that had Bragg chosen Forrest instead of Wheeler as cavalry chief, Wheeler would have enthusiastically accepted the subordinate position.

  “Bragg simply made the wrong choice and had to live with it,” Chalmers said.27

  As for Forrest, he would have regretted nothing he said to Wheeler at Yellow Creek Tavern. Any regret he would have felt would have been for his fallen troops and how he had wasted so many of them by participating in Wheeler’s ill-founded attack. He also surely smarted over his uncharacteristic battlefield mistakes—produced by an on-the-fly operation that permitted none of his usual careful planning.

  Anderson said that Forrest, just before offering Wheeler his saber, told his diminutive commander that he meant no disrespect and that Wheeler knew the affection Forrest had for him; this, though, has the ring of a postwar closing of ranks. There is little indication that Forrest had any positive feeling for Wheeler at that time. Evidences of personal regard between the two men did eventually surface—but only much later.28

  The war would be over.

  21

  FEBRUARY-APRIL 1863—GRANT IN LOUISIANA

  “Weather, Roads, and Water All Against Me”

  By the time Grant had assumed personal command of the Vicksburg expedition in late January 1863, the war’s—and America’s—political character had begun to change. Lincoln’s signing of the final Emancipation Proclamation at the beginning of the month overjoyed the Union’s abolitionist minority, but it cooled the ardor of unionist sentiment across the South, Midwest, and lower Northeast as well as in pockets of the South. The ranks of Grant’s army exhibited the chill with apathy, defiance, and sometimes disloyalty.

  Take the One Hundred Ninth Illinois Infantry, for example. Recruited in the southern part of Lincoln’s home state shortly before preliminary announcement of the proclamation back in September, the regiment reportedly contained just seven men who identified themselves as Republicans, four of whom opposed emancipation. At Columbus, Kentucky, in October 1862, the unit proved so reluctant to fight against slavery that some of its members apparently let Confederate prisoners escape. During the Confederate capture of Holly Springs, Mississippi, in December, others tried to surrender despite the fact they were guarding an area the enemy did not attack.

  After the Holly Springs raid, Grant ordered a court-martial, which convicted nine of the Illinoisans on shameful charges. All but one were officers. A lieutenant colonel had deserted in the face of the enemy, trying to get captured. A captain had encouraged his men to desert. Another captain tried to persuade men of his regiment that they were included in the Holly Springs surrender despite knowing otherwise. A third captain said “in the hearing of his men, in the presence of the enemy, that he would not fight if attacked,” and a fourth hatched a plan to get his regiment surrendered to the raiding Confederates. A second lieutenant persuaded a secessionist civilian to write fraudulent paroles for him and some of his men, so that they would seem to have been captured and released into temporary noncombatant status; another lieutenant feigned illness to get himself hospitalized and surrendered in Holly Springs. A first lieutenant spoke “in an improper manner of the War and the President,” and a commissary sergeant vowed never to fire a gun and voiced hope that the report, soon substantiated, that Confederates had slaughtered General Ambrose Burnside’s troops at Fredericksburg, Virginia, would prove true.

  On February 1, Grant ordered that the convicted officers of the One Hundred Ninth Illinois be dismissed from the army. But he also exonerated the regiment itself, saying its sins had been caused by those found guilty. For offenses such as the One Hundred Ninth’s, Grant almost always blamed officers. Unlike many West Point–trained generals on both sides, his first impulse was not to stand a few low-ranking recent civilians in front of a firing squad. Grant seemed to identify with enlisted men; as a lieutenant in Mexico, he had jumped into waist-high water to work alongside some of them. He demanded discipline from his troops but held officers responsible for maintaining it.1

  Grant, technically a professional, empathized with the citizen-soldier. Contrary to the howling of McClernand and a few others about victimization by a West Point cabal, Grant tended to side with and promote colonels and brigadiers with civilian backgrounds. His letters in February 1863 indicate he felt non–West Pointers generally showed more ability and inclination to fight. On February 9, he wrote with uncharacteristic heat to Lincoln about having seen a list of names sent to the US Senate for confirmation of promotion to brigadier or major general. Outraged that West Point–educated Napoleon B. Buford, a Kentucky aristocrat, had been recommended for major general, he wrote that Buford “would scarcely make a respectable Hospital nurse if put in petticoats, and certain [ly] is unfit for any other military position.”2

  Grant’s revulsion for Buford contrasted starkly with his feeling for several commanders of less distinguished background. Buford had disobeyed orders from Grant and McClernand on the battlefield at Belmont in November 1861, nearly got his regiment captured, and was excluded from the Fort Henry–Fort Donelson expedition. Yet Washington clout got him command of the Cairo supply base, displacing General James M. Tuttle, who had led the first Union regiment into Confederate trenches at Fort Donelson and did much to hold the Union line in the Hornet’s Nest at Shiloh. To Grant, combat performance was almost everything, and he valued Tuttle accordingly.3

  Tuttle was not a West Pointer. Neither was Brigadier General John A. Logan, the first man Grant recommended to Lincoln in the letter condemning Buford. Grant went on to name a half dozen more officers deserving promotion. Only one had seen the inside of a West Point classroom, and that one, Marcellus M. Crocker, had dropped out after two years to become an attorney in Iowa. Of all these, the highest praise went to Logan, and it left little doubt as to the quality Grant most valued. Logan was a prewar southern Illinois congressman known as “Black Jack” for his dark eyes, hair, and complexion. He was best-known, though, for his
courage on the battlefield. He had started out as colonel of the hard-fighting Thirty-first Illinois, which sustained 176 casualties at Fort Donelson. One was Logan himself.4

  “There is not a more patriotic soldier, braver man or one more deserving in this Dept. than Gen. Logan,” Grant wrote.5

  Grant’s lowest opinion was reserved for war profiteers. With these, he was iron-fisted. He held that the federal government, rather than private businessmen, should get all profits from the sale of captured Confederate cotton. On February 8, he ordered Brigadier General John McArthur, new commander at Lake Providence, Louisiana, to “positively prohibit . . . speculators from going into the country to purchase and bring in cotton. Enforce that Article of War which says that any person, citizen or soldier, passing beyond the outer pickets shall be shot. These people with the army are more damaging than the small pox.” One of the more recent of these pests, to Grant’s undoubted shame, had been his own father.6

  The Mississippi was rising. Grant was living on a steamboat on the river north of Vicksburg, but, he told Julia in a January 31 letter, he would go into camp as soon as he fastened on a plan of action. The Vicksburg area, he added, was “a terrible place at this stage of water. The river is higher than the land, and it takes all the efforts of the troops to keep the water out.” It was drowning the lowland opposite the Vicksburg bluffs and their miles of Confederate cannon emplacements. Flood or no, the price in blood of approaching the defenses on Vicksburg’s side of the river anywhere near the town from the north was prohibitive in the extreme. And Sherman’s repulsed December assault had proved that the cannon-bristling hills were insurmountable even if Grant could get at them.

  The best chance was to get south of Vicksburg on the river’s Louisiana side, then cross over into Mississippi and attack the town from the rear. The west bank, however, was a virtual swamp. A sliver of knife-shaped Louisiana lowland jabbed northeast in front of Vicksburg, shoving the river into a hairpin curve from which it then turned to run south past the town. The hilt of the knife seemed a likely site for a canal that could let boats detour downriver out of range of Vicksburg’s guns, and Federals had begun to dig one the previous summer. If Grant’s forces could divert enough of the river into this projected mile-long, twenty-yard-wide trough, they could float troops across the knife’s handle and reenter the river below Vicksburg. Now, though, most of northeast Louisiana appeared in danger of inundation. Grant urged General Gorman at Helena, Arkansas, to send boats “as soon as they can possibly get here” because it “may become necessary to move our forces from here to higher ground.”7

  Then Grant got a look at the canal and despaired. He “lost all faith in it ever leading to any practical results,” he wrote Halleck in Washington in early February. On both ends, he explained, the site was perpendicular to the river current, which caused the new waterway to begin and end in eddies. The river could force little water into the ditch, and any that did enter had trouble exiting. Worse, Confederates were already fortifying bluffs overlooking the exit site and posting cannon on bluffs at Warrenton, the next waterside town south of Vicksburg. So digging here promised marginal success at best. At the same time, it was causing Confederates to divide forces and disperse their cannon over more territory. Rethinking, Grant proposed alternate, simultaneous attack routes. The first was through Yazoo Pass, which left the Mississippi three hundred miles on the winding river north of Vicksburg and wound inland to the Coldwater River, then the Tallahatchie, and finally the confluence of the Tallahatchie and the Yalobusha, forming the Yazoo. Up the Yalobusha lay Grenada and crucial railroad bridges. Down the Yazoo sat Yazoo City, where Confederates were reportedly building gunboats. On down the Yazoo towered Haynes Bluff at the north end of the Vicksburg trenches. If Union troops got that far, Grant thought, they would outflank the Confederate river batteries and Vicksburg’s massive fortifications.8

  THE MISSISSIPPI “GIBRALTAR”: The fortifications of Vicksburg eventually ran along the Mississippi and its tributaries from the Walnut Hills north of the city to the town of Warrenton nearly fifteen miles south of it. This map from the period shows the “New Channel,” which Grant ordered dug to try to bypass the city.

  Two other routes also looked promising. Each could use networks of rivers and bayous on the Louisiana side to depart the Mississippi north of Vicksburg and reenter it south of Warrenton. One proceeded from Lake Providence and reconnected with the Mississippi via the Red River well south of Natchez. Another, much shorter, left the Mississippi at Milliken’s Bend north of Vicksburg and took Willow and Roundaway Bayous to return to the Mississippi south of Warrenton at New Carthage. The latter looked more viable than the canal and “would have been accomplished with much less labor if commenced before the water had got all over the country.” But political and public impatience did not allow Grant to wait for the flood to recede. Lincoln liked the canal idea, so, despite his own skepticism, Grant pushed ahead with the excavation while plotting alternatives. He wrote Halleck that he was making new intake and outflow mouths to try to better employ the force of the river current.9

  Initial prospects along the alternate routes were encouraging. On February 2, the day that he wrote Halleck about the three alternatives, Grant received a heartening report on the Yazoo Pass. Lieutenant Colonel James Harrison Wilson said he had arrived at a levee across the pass around noon that day, had men digging by 2 p.m., and expected to open a navigable waterway by evening of February 3. Wilson reported that the difference in the water levels outside and inside the levee was eight and a half feet, promising a powerful current and “fine results.” On February 4, Wilson reported troops had blasted a channel through the levee twenty feet wide and five feet deep, and four hours later the resulting flash flood had washed the opening to a width of forty yards. Water was “pouring through like nothing else I ever saw except Niagara Falls,” he exulted. “Logs, trees and great masses of earth were torn away with the greatest ease. The work is a perfect success.”10

  The outlook for the route from Lake Providence to Red River was also rosy. On February 3, Lieutenant Colonel George Deitzler at Lake Providence wrote that the water there, too, was eight feet lower than the river. Within a week, Deitzler thought, they could make a hundred-foot gap in the levee between the river and the lake, creating a channel five feet deep linking the two. Then gunboats and small steamboats could navigate a bayou, Baxter’s, ten to fifteen miles to another bayou, Macon. When the Mississippi inrush finished raising the level of Lake Providence, Deitzler wrote, Baxter’s Bayou would float large boats. “Once in Bayou Macon,” he added, “we shall have a clean coast to Red River.”11

  On the river’s east side, Grant ordered six hundred infantrymen onto shallow-draft gunboats and sent them toward Yazoo Pass. He hoped to capture enemy transport vessels in the Yazoo and its tributaries, destroy two gunboats under construction there, and burn two Grenada bridges on railroad lines to Memphis and Columbus, Kentucky. He told Rear Admiral David Porter that Confederates were repairing both lines and making such progress on the one to Columbus that, unless the relevant Grenada bridge was destroyed, he might at any time have to take much of his force on the Mississippi and march it inland to protect the Yazoo expedition.12

  Grant gave similar attention to the Louisiana side of the river. On February 5 he wrote General James McPherson at Memphis to hurry his Seventeenth Army Corps to Lake Providence, which Grant had decided offered the best route. Enclosing a map showing the route linking the Tensas, Washita, Black, and Red Rivers to the Mississippi, he said all were navigable almost the whole way. He thought that less than a quarter of such digging as had already been done across the river from Vicksburg would connect the Mississippi and Lake Providence and wash a channel.13

  Then things slowed. McPherson and his sixteen-hundred-man division were marooned in Memphis by a lack of transport steamers. Grant himself suffered a setback. He wrote Julia in Memphis on February 11 that the previous evening he had put his teeth in some water in a wash basin, and t
he servant attending his stateroom, “finding water in the basin, threw it out into the river teeth and all.” He asked Julia to get an officer to find his dentist and make arrangements for a new dental impression.14

  Grant’s problems proliferated. On February 13, he wrote Major General Hurlbut advising him to rescind an order banning the Southern-sympathizing Chicago Times from Sixteenth Corps camps at Memphis. Grant, though no proponent of press intrusion into army matters, doubted that halting distribution of the Times in a single corps would accomplish the main purpose of keeping it from reaching the Confederates—because they could get it “through other channels.” And banning it would only give it more notoriety and probably increase its sales.15

  Grant’s action enraged the Times’s principal competitor, the Lincoln-backing Chicago Tribune. Editor Joseph Medill wrote Congressman Washburne that by this order “your man Grant . . . shows himself to be little better than a secesh [secessionist].” Medill claimed the Times had quickly shipped 3,000 copies into Grant’s department “to breed more mutiny and demoralization.” The editor said he had heard “from a hundred sources” that Grant’s army was approaching “a state of insubordination” and that he had lost the confidence of the “loyal officers and privates.” Medill added that out of consideration for Washburne, the Tribune had gone lightly on Grant: “We could have made him stink in the nostrils of the public like an old fish had we properly criticized his military blunders.” Citing Grant’s sending of “crazy Sherman” to Chickasaw Bayou, he added, “Was there ever a more weak and imbecile campaign.”16