Born to Battle

by Jack Hurst

  This time, McClernand had gone too far. With May 22 looking more and more like the climactic fight of the campaign, he was frantic to wring the last vote out of it. In so doing, he provided Grant with justification for finally casting this scheming, Lincoln-backed albatross from around his neck.

  That Grant had functioned so well for so long while coping with McClernand reflected the commander’s iron will and heady restraint—qualities by which he had disarmed or outlasted a string of others far above himself in pay grade and supposed quality. Henry Halleck, so frightened by Grant’s aggressiveness early on that he had tried to replace him, by late 1862 had begun to perceive that the sometimes sloppy, nominal drunkard was not only competent but perhaps exceptional. Former general in chief George McClellan, grand on the drill field and wavering in battle, had been outraged at seeing Lieutenant Grant drunk on duty on the antebellum frontier—but McClellan was now sacked and retired. And Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who had blown hot and cold about Grant, had been counterbalanced by Stanton’s influential emissary, Charles Dana, an unequivocal Grant admirer. Grant’s tenacity and willingness to flout military orthodoxy, so emphatically displayed in his bottling up of Vicksburg, had awed them all.

  Halleck, McClellan, Stanton, and McClernand had epitomized the Federal high command’s unconscious prejudice against the commoner. They also represented its shortcomings, typifying its bureaucratic fixation on self-preservation and advancement rather than on winning the war. But each had, in his own way, been neutralized—except McClernand. Now McClernand, too, had reached the brink. His pushy politics had backed an ultramilitary Halleck into Grant’s corner; Halleck now staunchly supported Grant in conferences with McClernand’s diffident sponsor, Lincoln. The last of Grant’s major intra-army foes, McClernand—like Vicksburg on the Mississippi—was the final bastion of all-out anti-Grant antagonism in the West.

  Now, Grant finally felt secure enough to do what he had long ached to do. Ignoring the statements in McClernand’s published report, he focused on the fact that it had been published without permission. Dana wrote Stanton that this was only “the occasion” of Grant’s action, “not its cause.” Dana said the real cause was McClernand’s repeated disobeying of orders, his continual spirit of insubordination, his incompetence, and, above all, his relations with peer commanders, which were so sour that he could not command the army if Grant were incapacitated.27

  On the evening of June 18, John Rawlins issued an order he surely relished writing. McClernand, whom Rawlins had once termed a “damned, slinking, Judas bastard,” was relieved of command. He was ordered home to Illinois and replaced by Major General Edward Ord.28

  McClernand replied immediately. Noting that he had been appointed by Lincoln, he said he “might justly challenge” Grant’s order but would not “at present.” He raised the subject of, but did not quite call for, an investigation. Grant waited a week, perhaps for political fallout, then came as close to gloating as he ever did. In a letter to Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas in Washington summarizing his action, he concluded that McClernand’s removal “has given general satisfaction,” McClernand’s erstwhile corps “sharing, perhaps, equally in that feeling with the other Corps of the Army.”29

  McClernand was gone, but the job of starving out Vicksburg remained. Its Confederates were so tightly encircled that Joe Johnston could get messages inside only by entrusting coded versions to nocturnal swimmers whom he sent to ply the Mississippi. They had to hold onto logs and float down to a portion of the riverbank within the city’s defenses. The process required days or weeks. Union shelling had run townspeople and soldiers into caves, where they ate pets and rats. Federals burrowed trenches ever nearer to the ramparts, threw primitive grenades inside, and took potshots at defenders—at all but point-blank range—when they peeked out.30

  Despite the siege’s successes, though, Grant had concerns. The vaunted Johnston lurked in the Mississippi interior with thin ranks swelled somewhat, apparently, by conscription. And early June had brought a Confederate attempt to destroy Grant’s trans-Mississippi supply line. On June 7 and 8, at Pemberton’s insistence, troops under Major General Richard Taylor attacked three Federal garrisons in Louisiana: Lake Providence, Young’s Point, and Milliken’s Bend. Two of these three were helping build the Union’s new biracial—though segregated—army. The camp at Young’s Point organized blacks into regiments, four of which formed most of the garrison at Milliken’s Bend.31

  The Louisiana attacks failed, but the overtones were enormous. Lincoln had first resisted the idea of black soldiery, but he relented as he considered the terror it could engender in Dixie. Southern-born and wedded into a slave-owning Kentucky family, he said the sight of large numbers of armed bondsmen would frighten Southerners into surrender. He was correct about the frightening, but he misjudged the result. Federal issuance of rifles to recent slaves risked sparking a race war within the war, and now the fuse had been lit in the western theater. Confederates now regarded Union victory as Armageddon. They and their forebears had always met mere hints of slave uprising with brutality, and they now redoubled it.32

  GENERAL JOSEPH E. JOHNSTON

  When Taylor attacked the Louisiana garrisons, however, it was the black soldiers whose performance stood out. Confederate intelligence regarding Union numbers at the three Louisiana installations had been faulty, and the attackers were outnumbered at Lake Providence and Young’s Point; the Federals chased them away with mere skirmishing. But at Milliken’s Bend, 1,500 Texans under Brigadier General Henry McCulloch drove the 1,000-plus Federals backward into their camp. White Iowa infantrymen fled, and most white officers of the black units did too.

  Not the black soldiers, though. Untrained but all too familiar with Dixie’s age-old punishments for insurrection, the black troops at Milliken’s Bend battled desperately. With minimal knowledge of their Austrian rifles, they got off just one volley at the charging Texans, yet most did not turn and run. They instead fought hand to hand with bayonets and musket butts, then retired to form a second line behind a levee. Huge artillery shells from a hundred-pounder Parrott cannon on the gunboat Choctaw kept the Confederates away from that second line. The Texans looted what they could from the part of the camp they had overrun, captured some Federals cut off from their comrades, and took cover. The approach of a second gunboat, the Lexington, was enough for McCulloch. He withdrew.33

  Even the Confederate McCulloch indicated that the best Union soldiers at Milliken’s Bend that morning were the black ones. The white Federals “ran like whipped curs,” he reported, but the blacks “resisted . . . with considerable obstinacy.”34

  The white Federals may have thought they had more to fear at Milliken’s Bend than their black counterparts. The Confederates had gone there to stop the arming of slaves—by committing selective, premeditated murder. They hawked this intent with a black flag emblazoned with a skull and crossbones.They shouted, “No quarter for the officers, kill the damned abolitionists, spare the niggers!” as they crossed the Federal barricades.35

  These yells were politically correct in Dixie. General Beauregard had responded to the Emancipation Proclamation by calling for wholesale hanging of “abolition prisoners” beginning January 1, 1863, the day the proclamation took effect. A week earlier, Jefferson Davis had ordered all captured members of the new US Colored Troops to be delivered to state governments and tried for insurrection; the standard state penalty was death. But on May 1, 1863, undoubtedly at the behest of slaveholders, the Confederate Congress passed new legislation implicitly recognizing how important slaves were to the South’s war effort. It mandated that black soldiers be returned to their masters.36

  Such dubious mercy was unseen at Milliken’s Bend. Despite the reported cry of the attackers, the blacks were not “spared.” McCulloch lost 44 killed, 131 wounded, and 10 missing from his force of 1,500. By contrast, of their original 1,061, the inexperienced and outnumbered Federals lost more than half: 101 killed, 285 wounded, and 266 missing.
The fates of the missing could only be surmised—at least, until a story from a Texan deserter came to Grant on June 22. The man said that, after retreating to Richmond, Louisiana, General Taylor had put his troops in formation to formally hang a white Federal captain and several black soldiers captured at Milliken’s Bend.37

  Grant wrote Taylor the day he heard the story. The behavior of African American troops at Milliken’s Bend had changed his opinion of black soldiers. To the son of his old Mexican War hero, General Zachary Taylor, Grant noted that the attacked Federals had captured and spared the lives of six or eight prisoners despite the black flag they were flying. He threatened a response in kind if any other Confederate generals adopted a policy of executing prisoners taken in battle.

  Writing back, Taylor lied. He confirmed that he had been at Richmond for several days following the battle. But he claimed he would have ordered “the punishment it deserved” had he heard of such an atrocity. He said the Confederate government had ordered that blacks captured in uniform be turned over to local authorities for punishment under state law.38

  A deserter’s story is questionable, but this one was not the only indication of Confederates killing officers and men of the US Colored Troops. Admiral Porter had gone ashore at Milliken’s Bend on the day of the attack and seen dead black soldiers lining the ditch behind the first levee, “mostly shot on top of the head.” Porter may have mistaken some hand-to-hand musket butt injuries for gunshot wounds, but whether all were inflicted in combat is open to doubt.

  Beyond debate is the fact that at least some high Confederate officers ignored their Congress. They wanted all black or black-connected Union troops killed in or immediately after battles. In the few places where the policy was written down, no reason was mentioned, but—in addition to the obvious one of demanding the supreme penalty for insurrection—the practice eliminated the red tape, not to mention the required guard details, of returning blacks to masters, especially the significant numbers of US Colored Troops who had never been slaves. Brigadier General J. G. Walker reported that in breaking up Federal government-run cotton-raising operations between Milliken’s Bend and Lake Providence, he had captured 2,000 African Americans “who have been restored to their masters, with the exception of those captured in arms. . . . I consider it an unfortunate circumstance that any armed negroes were captured.” General Taylor’s own official report, filed the day after the battle, said that a large number of blacks were killed and wounded and seemed to apologize for the fact that, “unfortunately, some 50, with 2 of their white officers,” had been captured. A letter from Taylor’s superior on June 13 was even clearer. Lieutenant General Edmund Kirby Smith wrote Taylor of his dissatisfaction at hearing that black troops had been taken alive: “I hope this may not be so, and that your subordinates who may have been in command of capturing parties may have recognized the propriety of giving no quarter to armed negroes and their white officers.”39

  To his discredit, Grant—possibly influenced by his admiration for Taylor’s distinguished father—took Taylor’s word. He wrote back that he could not believe the report, “although told so straight,” and was “truly glad to have your denial.” In his defense, he stood up for fairness to black troops at a time when precious few on either side would have. He said he did not know what the Federal policy would be if the execution report proved true, but “I cannot see the justice of permitting one treatment for them and another for the white soldiers.” In other words, all uniformed captives should be treated as prisoners of war.40

  Plainly, though, Grant shrank from further investigation of the looming, monstrous, and dreaded explosion of American racial hatred. He already had learned, when he had tried to send several hundred hungry and homeless fugitive slaves north from West Tennessee the previous autumn, that the overwhelming majority of Northern whites and politicians were unsympathetic. Their reaction to the killing of black soldiers after surrender was unlikely to be much different. Despite his wish that black and white soldiers be treated the same, Grant surely knew that backing for such a policy would be tepid at best. He kicked talk of the Milliken’s Bend atrocities under the rug.

  The prevailing racism of the time notwithstanding, there was almost certainly another reason Grant turned away from the subject so quickly. The day he wrote his second letter to Taylor, July 4, was a full one.

  On July 3, Pemberton proposed a cease-fire. The Confederate commander wanted to name commissioners to arrange surrender terms, and he and Grant met under a flag of truce to discuss the matter. The two had served in the same unit in Mexico, and they now came together again on Vicksburg’s bloody, sun-baked field. Grant later recalled that because of their prior association, he knew Pemberton well; nonetheless, this meeting was tense.

  Pemberton had sent Grant a letter to propose the meeting. Grant had agreed to meet but said he could not agree to name commissioners to draft conditions for capitulation; his only terms were unconditional surrender. Now, as they met under a small oak tree, Grant greeted Pemberton as “an old acquaintance,” but the atmosphere swiftly turned somber. Pemberton, apparently thinking Grant’s letter to him had been a ploy, asked what terms he offered in return for Pemberton’s surrender. The same as he had named in his letter, Grant replied. “The conference might as well end,” Pemberton snapped, turning to leave.

  “Very well,” Grant said.41

  The two parted but agreed to confer further by messenger. Pemberton warned Grant that, with no agreement, Grant would “bury more of your men before you enter Vicksburg.” Grant made no reply except to give him a long look, not moving a muscle. The look said Pemberton would bury men too.42

  That evening, subordinates asked Grant to bend a little. McPherson said paroling Pemberton’s 30,000 men would cost the Union less than shipping them north for imprisonment. It also would prevent tying up steamboats needed elsewhere in the war. There was the danger that the Confederates would break their paroles and reenter the fight after being sent home, but the odds seemed against that happening generally. A number of the Confederates, especially Vicksburg’s Tennessee and Georgia troops, were reportedly refusing to fight.

  Grant thought many of them, paroled, would quit the war. He therefore took McPherson’s suggestion. But he also loosed a psychological weapon to leverage Pemberton. As he sent his offer to the Confederate general, he ordered his commanders to tell their pickets to talk to their Confederate counterparts. The Federals were to confide that if the Confederates surrendered, the men could head directly home instead of to Virginia for the usual paroling process.43

  At 10 a.m. the next morning, July 4, white flags appeared on Vicksburg’s parapets. After hanging eight months in the balance, the Confederate Gibraltar was returning to the Union. Pemberton’s 30,000 men—well fortified but starving—capitulated to Grant’s 80,000. General John “Black Jack” Logan’s hard-fighting Illinois division marched into the city, unfurled the Stars and Stripes above the courthouse, and shared rations with the hungry Confederates. Aboard Porter’s flagship, the admiral broke out celebratory wine. It was, as Sherman put it in a dispatch, “Glory Hallelujah the best fourth of July since 1776.”44

  The tenacious author of the Union victory indulged in one glass with Porter, then retired to plot further strategy. Joe Johnston and his army of 30,000 still lurked. Within hours, Grant had ordered Sherman to find Johnston and “inflict . . . all the punishment you can.” Sherman left Vicksburg on July 5, pushed Johnston eastward from the Big Black River to Jackson, then put the Confederate capital under siege beginning July 10. Johnston evacuated Jackson six days later. He faded into the forests of the state’s eastward interior, pursued for some ten miles by one Sherman division. The rest of Sherman’s troops completed the damage they had done to Jackson and its railroads on their previous visit in May. With Johnston thus banished, Grant recalled Sherman to Vicksburg on July 25.45

  Grant’s mind may already have moved on to Johnston, but there was no overstating the importance of this July 4 and t
he Vicksburg surrender. The victory at Fort Donelson had been pivotal in Grant’s rise because it threw open the gates of the western Confederacy to Union invasion. The skin-of-the-teeth win at Shiloh had throttled a western Confederate comeback and demonstrated that Grant’s Donelson performance had been no fluke. But Vicksburg made the other two triumphs look Lilliputian. A showpiece of will, daring, and ingenuity, it solved one of military history’s thornier problems and signified that the little man from an Ohio tanning shed, the shabby firewood hawker of the prewar St. Louis streets, had become one of the great captains of all time. His vanquishing of Vicksburg was more consequential than the half-consummated Union victory at Gettysburg the day before. There, Major General George G. Meade had let Lee’s defeated troops escape to fight many more days. Grant, by contrast, had bagged a whole Confederate army—his second, doubling the numbers he disarmed at Fort Donelson. From Cairo, Illinois, and continual jeopardy of being replaced, in less than two years Grant had risen to unchallengeable command dominance in the west.

  The Vicksburg capture won him a personal victory, but it was just as fateful for the Union. It fulfilled the so-called anaconda plan of old Winfield Scott, the war’s first general in chief, who had prophesied this war would be won by capturing the South’s rivers and coasts and strangling it to death. Vicksburg’s fall and that of Port Hudson, Louisiana, three days later lopped off three whole states—Louisiana, Texas, and Arkansas—from the rest of the Confederacy. The opening of the Mississippi River would provide a powerful and speedy logistical highway for operations against the South’s deep interior, the area to which its military industry had fled after Nashville fell. Perhaps most important, though, was the psychological symbolism. The Union had restored to itself the continent’s supreme commercial and military artery, its Father of Waters, and had found an invincible general in the process.