Born to Battle

by Jack Hurst

  GRANT’S VICKSBURG CAMPAIGN: This 1863 map shows the area of Grant’s five-battle run-up to the siege of Vicksburg. After crossing the Mississippi at Bruinsburg in the lower left, he took his army to Port Gibson, Raymond, and Jackson before turning back toward Vicksburg to fight at Champion Hill about halfway between Jackson and Vicksburg, then at Big Black River Bridge closer to Vicksburg.

  By 8 a.m. on the last day of April, Grant was ready. He had assigned McClernand’s corps to lead the amphibious attack, since it happened to be farthest in the advance when Grant made his downriver plan. Perhaps the position of honor also owed to Grant’s continuing wariness of McClernand’s Lincoln ties. Whatever the reason, McClernand’s corps now filled barges, steamboats, and gunboats and cast off from Deshroon’s Landing just south and opposite of Grand Gulf amid band music and reverberating cheers. They steamed some five miles downriver and hove to the east bank, where infantrymen of the Twenty-fourth and Forty-sixth Indiana splashed ashore first. They quickly arrested the only man they found on the Bruinsburg landing to prevent his spreading word of their coming. No uniformed Confederate was in sight.

  Grant experienced a gladness he never forgot. Rather than send his troops against the ravaging Grand Gulf cannon, he had found them an open door with nobody waiting inside it. But the reality was even more euphoric than that: he was at last on the business side of the Mississippi. It gave him “a degree of relief scarcely equaled since,” he wrote later. “All the campaigns, labors, and exposures from the month of December . . . to this time . . . were for the accomplishment of this one object.” Now, at last, he could fight.9

  With his men ashore, Grant’s vanguard suddenly dawdled. Rather than dash on up to the high ground past Bruinsburg, 17,000 McClernand riflemen sat for four hours on their beachhead to allow distribution of rations. Somebody had forgotten to do it the evening before.10

  This was just one of the myriad aggravations to which McClernand subjected his commander. Grant had ordered him to bend every effort toward a quick strike, but to little avail. Charles Dana, a former New York newspaperman who had recently become a special observer for the War Department, had reported to Stanton on April 25 that apparent confusion among McClernand’s command and staff were delaying Grant’s preparations to attack Grand Gulf. Although ordered to leave officers’ horses and tents behind, McClernand “carries his bride along,” Dana confided. Two days later, Dana wrote that the wait for a steamboat “carrying General McClernand’s wife, with her servants and baggage,” had delayed transportation of half a McClernand division.

  The primary hindrance, though, was Mrs. McClernand’s husband. Even the contingent of McClernand’s corps that had arrived at New Carthage was not quickly put onto boats on April 26 because McClernand had not yet gathered the vessels. Instead, that afternoon he held a review of his Illinois troops for that state’s visiting governor Richard Yates. The review included firing an artillery salute, violating Grant’s repeated orders to conserve ammunition for use against the enemy, Dana wrote. Dana added that after finding the transport vessels had “at last” been assembled, Grant pocketed a “severe letter” he had written McClernand—apparently choosing to bide his time.11

  Grant was not the only one seething at McClernand. Dana was chagrined that McClernand had the front spot in the amphibious attack. The War Department emissary wrote Stanton that he had objected to entrusting such an important place to McClernand. Stanton, perhaps fearing other eyes—especially presidential ones—seeing his correspondence, sharply told Dana to quit offering advice on command assignments.12

  But McClernand was hardly the only issue. Emancipation continued to roil Grant’s Midwest-rooted army. The Union’s decision to enlist and arm fugitive slaves also loomed forebodingly. Many white troops balked at the idea, as did some of their commanders. General Lorenzo Thomas had arrived at Milliken’s Bend on April 11 to begin speaking to generals and regular soldiers about it, and Dana soon reported that officers who had told him three months earlier that they would never fight alongside black regiments now said they would obey orders.

  Dana may not have talked with Grant division commander A. J. Smith. On the night of April 26, the day McClernand provided Illinois governor Yates with a troop review, Colonel H. C. Warmoth confided to his diary that General Smith, a Pennsylvania-born and West Point–schooled veteran, was so incensed at the prospect of fighting alongside blacks that he “will hang old Thomas if he comes into his camp making such a speech. Says . . . if Jesus Christ was to come down and ask him if he would be an abolitionist if he would take him to heaven, he answers that, ‘I would say NO! Mr. Christ. . . . I would rather go to hell than be an abolitionist.’”13

  The enlistment of fugitive slaves presented a thorny problem, but on the eastern bank of the Mississippi, in the face of looming combat, its importance receded.

  Grant launched a fast, hard-hitting campaign. He first had to cut off Vicksburg from rescue troops gathering in central Mississippi. Issuing three days’ rations, he moved his men onto high ground toward Port Gibson, junction of a road to Grand Gulf and another circling east and then north to Vicksburg. He aimed to flank Grand Gulf, take it, then make it the base for a two-pronged move. He would send McClernand south to aid Major General Nathaniel Banks in destroying Port Hudson, Louisiana, the only other formidable Confederate-held bastion on the Mississippi. Grant himself, meanwhile, would isolate Vicksburg and gather supplies for a campaign to capture it. Then he would recall McClernand’s men, and Grant and Banks would combine forces against Vicksburg.14

  Grant’s advance units struck enemy skirmishers eight miles from Port Gibson. They had pushed the Southerners backward four miles by dusk, and the next morning, May 1, they advanced into a pitched battle. Bowen, the Confederate commander at Grand Gulf, had gathered just 7,000 men to march down and oppose Grant’s 25,000, but he had selected a good site. The Bruinsburg Road forked into parallel routes into Port Gibson, and Bowen’s men guarded both on ridges too narrow to allow more than fractions of Grant’s strength to meet the Confederates at one time. Thickly overgrown hollows separated McClernand on the right from McPherson on the left. They could connect and aid each other only by retreating to the fork.15

  McClernand’s Federals routed an Alabama brigade before noon, and Grant accompanied McClernand and Illinois governor Yates forward on the right-hand road to inspect the captured ground. Soldiers along the route cheered them, and McClernand and Yates could not resist making speeches. “A great day for the Northwest!” McClernand proclaimed to an aide. Grant sat through the impromptu stumping, then suggested that the rifle-toting prospective voters needed to get about pursuing Confederates.16

  The enemy fought with tenacity, but Grant’s strength prevailed. Under McPherson’s command, Indianans and Illinoisans fought their way along and beside the left-hand road, pushing through a thicket of cane, trees, and underbrush in the ravine to the left of the roadway. They finally flanked a brigade of Alabamans as more of McPherson’s men advanced from Bruinsburg and reinforced them. The Arkansans, Mississippians, and Missourians facing McClernand realized they could be flanked, cut off, and captured if their comrades on the other road broke, so they stole away from the battlefield at about 5 p.m. In ratio of loss to total Union numbers, it was an inexpensive victory; of his 25,000, Grant had lost 131 killed, 719 wounded, and 25 missing. For the Confederates, the battle was much more costly. They reported 60 killed, 340 wounded, and 387 missing of their 7,000, and their figures were incomplete.17

  Darkness prevented pursuit, and Grant told McClernand to advance at dawn of May 2. With daylight, the Union troops moved up cautiously until they saw scattered arms, equipment, dead horses, and Confederate corpses. The enemy was gone, and the pursuers marched unopposed into nearly deserted Port Gibson about 10 a.m. There Grant found a newspaper disclosing that Grierson’s raid on rail lines in the Mississippi interior had been a smashing success.18

  Confederates had burned bridges on the roads leading from Port Gibson to bo
th Grand Gulf and Vicksburg, so the Federals laid pontoons. Grant was glad to see Lieutenant Colonel James Harrison Wilson of his staff enter the water and work alongside enlisted men, as Grant himself had done in the Mexican War. When they finished the makeshift bridge, the troops streamed over the pontoons, one wing heading directly toward Grand Gulf and the other skirmishing northeast toward Hankinson’s Ferry on the Big Black River. Learning that the Confederates had abandoned Grand Gulf, Grant headed there with an escort of twenty cavalry.

  He traveled light. He had left everything except the clothes on his back on the far side of the Mississippi with a five-hundred-wagon train winding from Milliken’s Bend to Hard Times, so at Grand Gulf he borrowed an extra horse from a subordinate and clean underwear from a naval officer. Having had no tent and no food except such as he could filch from subordinates’ headquarters, he got a bath and a meal on a gunboat. Then he wrote a May 3 letter to Halleck summarizing his effort so far and expressing pride in how Bowen’s “bold . . . and well carried out” defense of Port Gibson had been vanquished by his Federals, “hardy men who know no defeat and are not willing to learn what it is.” He also wrote orders to corps commanders as well as other subordinates left in charge farther up the Mississippi. Finishing a letter to Julia around midnight, he did not go to bed. Instead, remounting the borrowed horse, he rode on to Hankinson’s Ferry, arriving before dawn.19

  Grant now had to make some strategic changes on the fly. At Grand Gulf he learned Banks could not begin the anticipated McClernand-reinforced campaign against Port Hudson before May 10. Having come north from New Orleans, Banks—a militarily incompetent former governor of Massachusetts—was focused on Port Hudson, the first obstacle in his path, and said he could not join Grant until after its reduction. That would delay the Vicksburg attack by a month, and already the Vicksburg Confederates were gathering reinforcements. Grant could not wait. With some of his troops already well started toward the railroad connecting Vicksburg and Jackson, he forgot Banks, retained McClernand, and kept moving.20

  Grant quickly instituted his new plan. He continued preparations to cram Grand Gulf with supplies floated across the Mississippi, but rather than wait for Banks, he would feint toward Vicksburg to confuse Pemberton, then head inland to the railroad linking the river fortress to Jackson. That would put him between Vicksburg and its potential rescuers and prevent a junction of the two.

  This new scenario would stretch Grant’s supply line paper-thin, beyond all bounds of West Point theory. Halleck would disapprove if he knew. But Grant saw no alternative. Like the run past the Vicksburg guns, moving eastward to cut off the city was the option that offered the best chance of success. He wrote Halleck a little of his developing scheme in the letter of May 3 from Grand Gulf, reporting that the countryside would supply forage and fresh beef. Halleck for months had urged his commanders to take advantage of such, so Grant knew that this part of his plan would go down well. Other supplies, Grant wrote, would have to come “a long and precarious route” from Milliken’s Bend down to Hard Times Landing, then across the Mississippi to Grand Gulf. Knowing his message would take days to reach Washington, he headed away from the river, beyond Washington contact. There, out of Halleck’s reach, he could revise his plan as resistance demanded.21

  On Grant’s order, Sherman now hurried his corps down from Chickasaw Bluffs to reinforce the two taking position east of Vicksburg. Grant wrote Sherman on May 3 that, on reaching Grand Gulf, he must draw three days’ rations and make them last five, augmenting them with local fare and feeding his horses on indigenous supplies. Speed, Grant said, was crucial.22

  Sherman protested, all but reciting the West Point principles Grant was flouting. He wrote Grant from Hankinson’s Ferry on May 9, pleading with his chief to wait a little and organize. A wagon train large enough to supply an army moving into the interior, he advised, would jam roads, marooning itself and the rest of the column in some remote, dangerous place. Grant replied that he would employ no five-hundred-wagon train. Rather, he would make his army leaner and faster—and, if necessary, hungrier. Bringing full rations from Grand Gulf would require more roads than he had time to build, he told Sherman. Instead, Sherman must assemble a train a quarter the usual size, 120 wagons, and load it with bacon, bread, salt, and coffee, items unavailable in interior Mississippi in sufficient bulk to supply an army. Everything else would have to come from the territory through which they passed.23

  From Bruinsburg on, Grant had troops scouring neighborhoods along the route for every wheeled conveyance that could haul ammunition. They assembled “a motley train,” he later recalled, that included fine carriages loaded with cartridge boxes and drawn by mules in plough harness alongside ox-drawn cotton wagons.24

  It must have looked more like a refugee procession than an army. In taking items from civilians, Grant ordered his men not even to fill out records until they had more time. His attitude toward nonmilitary secessionists was hardening. From Hankinson’s Ferry he wrote General Hurlbut in Memphis on May 5 that only the homes, bodies, and most personal possessions of civilians would be off-limits to his soldiers from then on. Hurlbut should keep troops out of civilian houses, but everything outside them was fair game. They must feed themselves off the fields they passed and destroy every crop that could be useful to Confederates. They should take all the mules and horses they needed and destroy farm implements whenever doing so did not require too much time. In sum, he said, “cripple the rebellion in every way without insulting women and children or taking their clothing, jewelry &c.” From now on, for opponents of his army, war would truly be hell—and not just on soldiers.25

  Sherman’s corps arrived and drew ammunition at Grand Gulf on May 6 and 7, and Grant launched a wide, fast sweep northeastward. Its purpose was to eliminate any risk of attacks from his rear when he turned back west to approach Vicksburg’s land side. At Edwards Station, halfway out the Vicksburg-Jackson rail line, Pemberton was reportedly gathering significant forces. Grant would have to prevent them from connecting with reinforcements to the east and remove them from his own approach to Vicksburg.26

  The three Federal corps advanced abreast south of the Vicksburg-Jackson rail line. That way, each had fresh fields to ravage for forage and food. McClernand led the left nearest the railroad, Sherman the center, and McPherson the right. From May 9 to 12, the Federals drove on parallel routes from Hankinson’s Ferry, Rocky Springs, and Utica thirty miles toward Edwards Station, Bolton Depot just beyond it, and Raymond. Once Grant cleared the territory on the Jackson end of the railroad, he could safely turn west and assault Pemberton.

  On May 11, Grant had ordered McPherson to Raymond. The urgency of finding food had increased. McPherson was to do his utmost to gather all available foodstuffs around Raymond. Needing to fight before their food gave out, they would have to make their rations last as long as possible. Grant reminded McPherson that on a previous occasion he had made two days’ rations last seven, and he might have to do the same thing again.27

  MAJOR GENERAL JAMES B. MCPHERSON

  Grant was outrunning even his streamlined supply trains. This is likely why he recalled later, and historians have repeated, that he abandoned his base, cutting himself off from all sources of reinforcement and matériel. His letters and orders show he never meant to do that wholly. He had stockpiled supplies at Grand Gulf from wagon-borne cargoes that continued to clatter into Hard Times for ferrying across the Mississippi. He did, however, risk outdistancing his rations. McPherson reported that meat was plentiful, but bread less so, and his men also lacked horses, mules, and haul vehicles. McPherson said he barely had wagons enough to move camp equipment and ammunition; locally commandeered vehicles usually broke down. His troops were also badly in need of shoes. Nearly a third of his First Brigade had worn theirs out on the long march from Milliken’s Bend. Many feet were bare and sore.28

  On May 12, complying with a Grant order to enter and sack Raymond, McPherson had to fight his way in. Two miles south, 3,000 Confed
erates under Brigadier General John Gregg assailed his right. In this, his first full battle as on-site commander of a large unit, McPherson overestimated his opposition, guessing Confederate strength to be twice what it was. McPherson was no Grant, so his inflated figure gave him pause; 6,000 would have been more than half his own total of 10,000-plus—and roughly equal to the assailed part of his force. Gregg, for his part, had attacked because he did not know he was outnumbered. He thought he had in his front only a single Federal brigade “on a marauding excursion.”29

  The battle raged from noon to 4 p.m. By 2, the outcome was decided. Vicious enfilading of Confederates charging to the right and left of McPherson’s center helped to turn the tide, as did a Federal counterattack and the deployment of 4,000 Union reinforcements under Brigadier General Marcellus Crocker. McPherson reported 66 killed, 339 wounded, and 37 missing. Partial Confederate totals were 73 killed, 252 wounded, and 190 missing. As at Port Gibson, the Union sum was small in relation to the number engaged; the Confederate one, daunting.30

  After the Raymond fight, Grant again improvised. Gregg had retreated toward Jackson, where Confederates were reported massing, and Joe Johnston was expected there at any moment to take command. Grant knew he could not afford to leave such a prestigiously led force behind him when he about-faced to deal with Pemberton at Vicksburg. He decided to attend to the Confederates at Jackson and, as he reported, “leave no enemy in my rear.”31

  Grant sent Sherman’s and McPherson’s corps hurrying to the Mississippi capital. McPherson followed the railroad, descending on the city from the northwest, while Sherman, accompanied by Grant, took a road from Raymond to strike Jackson from the southwest. The 24,000 Federals faced just 6,000 Confederates under Johnston, but the capital was fortified, and 7,000 more Confederates were racing toward it.32