Born to Battle

by Jack Hurst

  Grant beat them to it.The Federals arrived in the mid-morning of May 14 in the mud of a four-hour rain. Sherman’s artillery blasted aside a ragtag collection of Confederate mounted infantry, sharpshooters, and four cannons. Grant’s McPherson-led northern pincer bayonet-charged a thin Confederate line and swept it into the Jackson earthworks.The Federals regrouped, advanced again by mid-afternoon, and found the trenches abandoned. Before 2 p.m., Gregg had pulled out and headed north toward Canton, Mississippi, bringing up the rear of Johnston’s supply train. Gregg’s men had fought hard, but he had learned at the last moment that McPherson was only half his foe. And Johnston had been no help, preemptively removing as many men and supplies as he could, rather than holding until reinforcements arrived. He had ordered a withdrawal at 3 a.m., hours before sighting the Union attackers. At Jackson, 42 Federals had died, 251 were wounded, and 7 were missing. Just one of the three Confederate brigades reported its casualties: 17 dead, 64 wounded, and 118 missing.33

  Grant kept moving. He told Sherman to occupy the Jackson rifle pits and destroy rail and other facilities that might be useful to the Confederates. He himself took McClernand’s and McPherson’s corps and turned toward Vicksburg.

  Grant now had even more reason to hurry. On the evening of May 13, just prior to the battle for Jackson, Joe Johnston had sent Pemberton a message by three different couriers. One, a Union spy, took the message to McPherson instead. The dispatch informed Pemberton that Union troops were at Clinton on the Jackson-Vicksburg rail line and ordered Pemberton to attack there immediately to prevent the fall of Jackson.34

  If Pemberton was following Johnston’s orders, then Grant might catch him outside the Vicksburg trenches. Assuming Johnston was now circling northward to try to beat him to the bluff fortress, Grant sent the two corps rushing to Bolton Station, halfway to Vicksburg. There, they could keep Johnston and Pemberton apart until Sherman had wrecked anything at Jackson that might help them if they returned there after he departed.35

  Two day later, Grant fought the first of two battles with a conflicted Pemberton.

  Pemberton and Johnston differed greatly from Grant. Both soldiered by the West Point book, and neither liked fighting. Instead of trying to join forces as each claimed to want to do, they moved farther apart, Johnston to the northeast from Jackson and Pemberton southeast from Edwards Station on the Vicksburg-Jackson rail line. Pemberton was a man in the middle—between Johnston, who wanted to unite outside the trap Vicksburg seemed to be turning into, and Jefferson Davis, who wanted Vicksburg defended to the death. Trying hesitantly to reconcile the two, Pemberton had come out of Vicksburg along the railroad but then decided that trying to get through Grant’s army to join Johnston would be “extremely hazardous.” Subordinates finally persuaded him to target a two-hundred-wagon Union supply train moving from Grand Gulf toward Raymond, but his heart obviously was not in it.36

  Subordinates’ animosity likely also influenced Pemberton. They showed less confidence in him than the questionable amount he showed in himself. A Philadelphia native, he had led only the obscure Department of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida when promoted to major general in early 1862; he then rose to lieutenant general with his assignment to Vicksburg. Major General William Loring, a North Carolina–born career soldier who had lost an arm in the Mexican War, was openly contemptuous of him. And the prickly temperament of Brigadier General Lloyd Tilghman, who had faced Grant at Fort Henry, had chafed Pemberton for months. As they set out to nab Grant’s wagons, an aide to Brigadier General Winfield S. Featherston overheard Loring, Tilghman, and Featherston laughing at Pemberton’s orders.37

  Confederate discord increased on May 14. Pemberton had argued against obeying Johnston’s order to move farther from Vicksburg, and Loring urged grabbing Grant’s Raymond-bound wagons instead. Pemberton reluctantly decided Loring’s idea offered the only realistic chance to damage Grant. But, contrary to West Point dogma, Grant was not depending on his supply wagons to the usual extent. And Pemberton thought Grant was aiming to destroy Jackson, whereas Grant’s actual goal was to destroy Pemberton.38

  LIEUTENANT GENERAL JOHN C. PEMBERTON

  On May 15, Grant sent 3 2,000 of his Federals hurrying westward on three roads. Pemberton meanwhile plodded. A planning error delayed his 23,000 Confederates for five hours. No one had sent enough ammunition and rations to Edwards Station, the jumping-off point for the operation against Grant’s wagon train. Then, despite headquartering two miles away, Pemberton failed to scout a bridge his troops needed to cross Baker’s Creek. When they got there, flooding had washed it out, and a detour ate more hours. By day’s end, Pemberton’s men were exhausted. Some arrived in the target area—on the Raymond-Port Gibson Road and roughly halfway between those two towns—too late to sleep.39

  At 5 a.m. on May 16, Grant got more Southern aid. Subordinates brought him two men who worked on the Vicksburg-Jackson rail line. They said that they had passed through Pemberton’s force a few hours earlier, and the Confederates were moving east 25,000 strong. Grant yet again revised his plan. He ordered Sherman to cut short his wrecking of Jackson and hurry a division west to Bolton with ammunition wagons. They were not to stop until they reached the rest of Grant’s army.40

  Soon after daylight, Pemberton heard firing. Scouts reported a strong Federal column approaching from the east. A courier also arrived with a reiterated order from Johnston that Pemberton join him to the north. Only now did Pemberton learn that Jackson had fallen, rendering his previous orders from Johnston (which he had not obeyed) obsolete. Johnston now ordered him to rendezvous at Clinton, Mississippi, some ten miles west of Jackson. With his cavalry pickets already skirmishing and Federal artillery unlimbering on the head of his column, Pemberton forgot Grant’s wagons and decided to return to Edwards Station and try to reach Johnston.

  Pemberton soon found himself stymied in this effort too. At a hill on the farm of a family named Champion, the Confederates left under Major General Carter Stevenson met a Federal division of McClernand’s corps under Brigadier General Alvin P. Hovey. Stevenson had no way of knowing that just behind Hovey, marching west from Bolton, was McPherson’s whole corps: two divisions, led by generals “Black Jack” Logan and Marcellus Crocker. The Federal path southward led up Champion Hill and then down to a critical junction with the so-called Middle Road, another thoroughfare running from Edwards Station to Raymond. This was the middle of three routes on which Grant’s forces were hastening west. It was also Pemberton’s own intended route back to Edwards. Stevenson took position on Champion Hill to hold it open.

  Confederate scouts then reported more Federals approaching on the Middle Road east of the junction, heading for Stevenson’s right rear. This second Union column, a half mile south of Hovey and McPherson, comprised four brigades under McClernand division commanders Eugene Carr and Peter Osterhaus. And two miles south of them, on the main road from Raymond to Edwards Station, were four more brigades under Major Generals A. J. Smith of McClernand’s corps and Frank Blair of Sherman’s. Pemberton was in the crosshairs of ruin.41

  Battle erupted at 7 a.m. with a cavalry clash on the lower Raymond road. Union artillery and Confederate sharpshooters joined in. Loring, facing Smith and Blair, suggested the Confederates form a battle line to fend off the imminent Union attack. Pemberton ordered him to block the lower Raymond road. But a Loring staff officer thought Pemberton looked as if he had made “no . . . plans for the coming battle.”42

  In mid-morning, McPherson joined the onslaught, attacking the Confederates’ other wing. Pemberton, preoccupied with the lower Raymond road, ignored half of the Federal army for a couple of hours. Confederates under General Stevenson clung to Champion Hill and tried to fend off McPherson, but a Federal drive shoved them backward and overlapped their left. Grant’s hard-fighting favorite, Major General “Black Jack” Logan, commanded this Federal flanking lunge. Logan did not even give his men the usual time to lay down their personal gear before leading them forward. “Damn them,�
� he roared, “you can whip them with your knapsacks on!”43

  Logan’s punch had carried all the way to the Jackson Road, Pemberton’s best route back to Vicksburg. Grant, at the Champion house with McPherson, sent an aide to Logan to tell him he was making history.44

  McPherson’s center fought from noon until 1:30 for the crest of Champion Hill. A bayonet charge took a battery of four Confederate guns, which then were lost to a withering counterattack. The Federals retreated, then with reinforcements mounted another charge, pushing back Confederates under brigade commanders Stephen Lee and Alfred Cumming. Confederates barely kept a grip on Jackson Road and the crossroads.45

  Only at about 1 p.m. did Pemberton seek help for his embattled left. He summoned Loring and John Bowen from the lower Raymond road. Neither general obeyed immediately. Heavy Federal forces were in their front, they said. The aide who had delivered the first message finally returned to Bowen with a mandatory order: send at least a brigade to the left immediately. It was around 2:30 p.m. before 5,000 Missourians and Arkansans under Bowen hit the Federal line at the crossroads. Because of the hilly, much-forested terrain—one officer said it was impossible to see more than fifty to a hundred yards in any direction—Bowen’s strike landed like a knockout sucker punch. His men ran the Federals off Champion Hill three-quarters of a mile, recapturing some of the cannons the Confederates had lost and getting close to Union ammunition wagons at the Champion house. Men in Bowen’s First Brigade fired as many as ninety rounds apiece in this thrust—forty in their cartridge boxes, the rest scavenged from fallen friends and enemies. Federals rushing forward to help saw their comrades flee so brokenly that they threatened to panic the reinforcements.46

  Grant did not panic, but he made a knee-jerk error. In sending more men to aid those on Champion Hill, he ordered a withdrawal of Logan’s brigade, whose sweeping charge around the Confederate left had blocked Pemberton’s Jackson Road retreat route. But Confederates farther out Jackson Road were too traumatized to react.47

  Loring, meanwhile, was lost to Pemberton for an hour, having taken a little-used and longer road to reach the left. When he tardily neared the Jackson Road, the left of Stevenson’s fought-out line had broken, and the delay had wasted Bowen’s smashing charge as well as an accompanying countersurge by Stephen Lee to Bowen’s left; Grant’s men regained equilibrium. All Loring saw as he approached were fleeing Confederates, some without hats or weapons and looking, one staff officer thought, “as if they had just escaped from the Lunatic Asylum.” But Loring and an indefatigable Lee were preparing another charge when Pemberton ordered them to retreat to Edwards Station.48

  The Confederate disaster was immense. Pemberton lost at least 4,000 of his 23,000 troops at Champion Hill, 2,500 of them missing and captured. He also lost most of Loring’s men, cut off from his army by the onrushing Federals. Union casualties were about 2,200.49

  The Confederates marched or straggled back toward Vicksburg. Pemberton forgot about trying to reach Johnston, which was just as well. Pemberton had at least made an aborted attempt to get to his superior; Johnston made none to get to him. So Pemberton put his survivors back across Baker’s Creek and ordered them to hold the crossing for Loring, who never arrived.50

  Before dawn on May 17, the Confederates gave up on Loring. They fell back to an already fortified, mile-wide position straddling the railroad and guarding its bridge over Big Black River. Rearguard commander Bowen put 5,000 men into a formidable-seeming position on the river’s east bank, their battle line stretching across the inside of a horseshoe bend in the Big Black. Around and south of the railroad, where Bowen expected the brunt of any Federal assault, bristled twenty cannons. On each wing, he placed his bloody, hard-fighting units from Missouri and Arkansas. Between, he put a Tennessee brigade under Brigadier General John C. Vaughn. Vaughn occupied rifle pits fronted by a parapet, a fifteen-foot-wide bayou, and knee-deep water filled with fallen trees. His men were “fresh . . . and not demoralized,” Bowen thought.51

  But demoralization was probably not an issue with these Tennesseans. Vaughn’s troops were conscripts from the state’s unionist eastern third. The Richmond government had thought marching them away from their people would make them better Confederates. It did not. They cared little for the Confederacy. And many of them—along with the Missourians and Arkansans and even their commander, John Bowen—wondered why Pemberton had ordered them there at all. All but Bowen likely forgot that Pemberton thought he must hold the bridge for the missing Loring, whose troops still might arrive. But doing so was dangerous.The deep Big Black and the sixty-foot bluffs on its west side seemed much better able to stop Grant—and they would dangerously impede the 5,000 Confederates left on the east bank. There were just two bridges over the river: one forming part of the railroad and, just south, a temporary one thrown across the deck of a steamboat. Both were narrow. They could accommodate 5,000 men only if their withdrawal was deliberate and orderly. Such was not to be.52

  The Battle of Big Black River Bridge was brief and hot, an exclamation point following the Confederate disaster at Champion Hill. Grant had hedged his bet, sending more pontoons to cross the Big Black farther north and sidestep Pemberton if necessary. No sidestep was needed, though, thanks to Union troops under Brigadier General Michael Lawler. Commanding one of five advance Federal brigades facing three Confederate ones, the burly forty-seven-year-old native Irishman put his men in woods along the Big Black facing the northern end of the Confederate line. There an inward bulge caused by a swampy area interrupted the rifle pits. To the southeastern front of this gap, annual river overflow had carved a swale in a large field. Lawler’s cavalry chief recognized a topographic gift. He told Lawler a brigade could cross part of the open field and then shelter in the swale. There they would be close enough that defenders could get off just one volley before a Federal charge overwhelmed them. Lawler began forming his troops into two heavy columns of fours.53

  Grant sat watching the unit deployments near the road, which ran beside the railroad through the center of the Union and Confederate lines. A courier rode up and handed him a May 11 telegram from Halleck in Washington. It ordered Grant, “if possible,” to join Banks in Louisiana and mount joint attacks on Port Hudson before trying Vicksburg. Grant read the wire, then put it in his pocket. Two days earlier, in a telegram that would not arrive in Washington until May 20, he had reported to Halleck that Banks had gone “off in Louisiana” and would be unavailable until May 10. Grant “could not lose the time” from his lightning campaign to drive off prospective rescuers to the east before assaulting or besieging Vicksburg, he concluded.54

  Lawler lost no time now. At noon he threw his cheering troops across the field into the swale and onto the Confederate center. Seeing Federal strength building, the defenders got nervous about their bridges. They loosed a volley that ripped 199 casualties from Lawler’s ranks. But then the bayonet-brandishing Midwesterners charged the Confederate center delivering a volley of their own. They leaped into the bayou ditch and splashed through logs and brush to the parapet.55

  Most of the Tennesseans fled. The remainder raised white rags or puffs of cotton from the bales anchoring their parapet. Missourians and Arkansans on the flanks ran, too, and clogged the little bridges. Those arriving late tried to swim. Some drowned. Lawler’s brigade took more prisoners than their own numbers. When most of their uncaptured comrades had crossed, the Confederates fired the turpentine-soaked bridges.56

  The Federals counted coup. They had taken 1,751 more prisoners, 18 more cannon to add to 27 taken at Champion Hill, 1,525 artillery shells, 1,421 stands of small arms, and 6 battle flags. In seventeen days since leaving Bruinsburg, Grant’s army had traveled two hundred miles and fought five battles. It had inflicted 7,000 casualties and lost half that. Pemberton returned to Vicksburg with just 9,000 of the 23,000 men he had taken out.

  Employing or building crossings to the north and south, Grant quickly put Big Black River between himself and any force Johnston might
gather behind him. Vicksburg was now surrounded. Unless Johnston did something quick and miraculous, it was doomed.57

  The many letters Grant wrote over the next several days did not include one to Julia. On May 9 on the road to Raymond, he had written her that she should join him as soon as she heard Vicksburg had fallen, and he had not written her since. He thought, he later informed her, that Vicksburg would fall before another letter could reach her.

  After Big Black River Bridge, he may also have wanted to buy time for the healing of a wound that would be best unreported to her. In a May 3 letter from Grand Gulf, he had told her that their twelve-year-old son, Fred, who had accompanied him on this remarkable trek, was “enjoying himself hugely.” The boy had been close enough to combat to hear “balls whistle” and had not flinched, Grant reported. But at Big Black River Bridge, Fred had been too much of a chip off the old block. Excited by Lawler’s charge, the boy spurred his horse, jumped the parapet with some support troops, and followed to the river to watch the swimming Confederates. There a bullet from the west bank grazed his leg. When Fred’s father wrote Julia again on June 9, he was cryptic regarding their son.58

  “Fred has enjoyed his campaign very much,” the general wrote. “He has kept a journal which I have never read but suppose he will read to you.”59

  What Julia did not know could not hurt her.

  24

  MAY-JUNE 1863—FORREST IN MIDDLE TENNESSEE

  “No Damned Man Will Kill Me and Live”

  For a couple of May’s first days, after his epic capture of Abel Streight, Forrest was the toast of Rome, Georgia. The entire Confederacy was buoyed, too, by Robert E. Lee’s smashing victory over Fighting Joe Hooker at Chancellorsville in Virginia. But ominous events occurred alongside these. Grant had finally managed to cross the Mississippi below Vicksburg and was heading toward the Mississippi capital, and the wound Stonewall Jackson had suffered at Chancellorsville began to appear mortal.