Battle Cry of Freedom

by James M. McPherson

  The repulse at Milliken's Bend cut short Confederate attempts to succor Vicksburg from west of the Mississippi. All hopes for relief now focused on Johnston. The Vicksburg newspaper (reduced in size to a square foot and printed on wallpaper) buoyed up spirits with cheerful predictions: "The undaunted Johnston is at hand"; "We may look at any hour for his approach"; "Hold out a few days longer, and our lines will be opened, the enemy driven away, the siege raised."13 During the first month of the siege, morale remained good despite around-the-clock

  11. Grant, Memoirs, I, 545; Charles A. Dana, Recollections of the Civil War (New York, 1899), 86.

  12. O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 24, pt. 2, pp. 466, 459.

  13. Walker, Vicksburg, 187–88.

  Union artillery and gunboat fire that drove civilians into man-made caves that dotted the hillsides.

  But as the weeks passed and Johnston did not come, spirits sagged. Soldiers were subsisting on quarter rations. By the end of June nearly half of them were on the sicklist, many with scurvy. Skinned rats appeared beside mule meat in the markets. Dogs and cats disappeared mysteriously. The tensions of living under siege drove people to the edge of madness: if things went on much longer, wrote a Confederate officer, "a building will have to be arranged for the accommodation of maniacs." The tone of the newspaper changed from confidence to complaint: in the last week of June it was no longer "Johnston is coming!" but "Where is Johnston?"14

  Johnston had never shared the belief in himself as Deliverer. "I consider saving Vicksburg hopeless," he informed the War Department on June 15. To the government this looked like a western refrain of Johnston's behavior on the Virginia Peninsula in 1862, when he had seemed reluctant to fight to defend Richmond. "Vicksburg must not be lost without a desperate struggle," the secretary of war wired back. "The interest and the honor of the Confederacy forbid it. . . . You must hazard attack. . . . The eyes and hopes of the whole Confederacy are upon you."15 But Johnston considered his force too weak. He shifted the burden to Pemberton, urging him to try a breakout attack or to escape across the river (through the gauntlet of Union ironclads!). At the end of June, in response to frantic pressure from Richmond, Johnston began to probe feebly with his five divisions toward seven Union divisions commanded by Sherman which Grant had detached from the besiegers to guard their rear. Johnston's rescue attempt was too little and too late. By the time he was ready to take action, Pemberton had surrendered.

  Inexorable circumstances forced Pemberton to this course—though many southerners then and later believed that only his Yankee birth could have produced such poltroonery. All through June, Union troops had dug approaches toward Confederate lines in a classic siege operation. They also tunneled under rebel defenses. To show what they could do, northern engineers exploded mines and blew holes in southern lines

  14. Bruce Catton, Never Call Retreat (New York: Pocket Books ed., 1967), 195–96; Walker, Vicksburg, 192–96.

  15. O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 24, pt. 1, pp. 227–28.

  on June 25 and July 1, but Confederate infantry closed the breaches. The Yankees readied a bigger mine to be set off July 6 and followed by a full-scale assault. But before then it was all over. Literally starving, "Many Soldiers" addressed a letter to Pemberton on June 28: "If you can't feed us, you had better surrender, horrible as the idea is, than suffer this noble army to disgrace themselves by desertion. . . . This army is now ripe for mutiny, unless it can be fed."16 Pemberton consulted his division commanders, who assured him that their sick and malnourished men could not attempt a breakout attack. On July 3, Pemberton asked Grant for terms. Living up to his Donelson reputation, Grant at first insisted on unconditional surrender. But after reflecting on the task of shipping 30,000 captives north to prison camps when he needed all his transport for further operations, Grant offered to parole the prisoners.17 With good reason he expected that many of them, disillusioned by suffering and surrender, would scatter to their homes and carry the contagion of defeat with them.

  The Fourth of July 1863 was the most memorable Independence Day in American history since that first one four score and seven years earlier. Far away in Pennsylvania the high tide of the Confederacy receded from Gettysburg. Here in Mississippi, white flags sprouted above rebel trenches, the emaciated troops marched out and stacked arms, and a Union division moved into Vicksburg to raise the stars and stripes over the courthouse. "This was the most Glorious Fourth I ever spent," wrote an Ohio private. But to many southerners the humiliation of surrendering on July 4 added insult to injury. The good behavior of the occupation troops, however, mitigated the insult. Scarcely a taunt escaped their lips as Union soldiers marched into the city; on the contrary, they paid respect to the courage of the defenders and shared rations with them. Indeed, the Yankees did what many Vicksburg citizens had wanted to do for weeks—they broke into the stores of "speculators" who had been holding food for higher prices. As described by a Louisiana sergeant, northern soldiers brought these "luxuries" into the streets "and throwing them down, would shout, 'here rebs, help yourselves, you are naked

  16. O.R. Navy, Ser. I, Vol. 25, p. 118.

  17. A parole was an oath by a captured soldier, given in return for release from captivity, not to bear arms again until formally exchanged. A year earlier, in July 1862, the Union and Confederate governments had agreed to a cartel for exchange of prisoners.

  and starving and need them.' What a strange spectacle of war between those who were recently deadly foes."18

  A Vicksburg woman who watched the entry of Union soldiers pronounced an epitaph on the campaign: "What a contrast [these] stalwart, well-fed men, so splendidly set-up and accoutered [were] to . . . the worn men in gray, who were being blindly dashed against this embodiment of modern power." But in Richmond an embittered Jefferson Davis attributed the loss of Vicksburg not to the enemy's power but to Joe Johnston's timidity. When a War Department official commented that lack of provisions had doomed the garrison, Davis responded: "Yes, from want of provisions inside and a General outside who wouldn't fight."19

  The capture of Vicksburg was the most important northern strategic victory of the war, perhaps meriting Grant's later assertion that "the fate of the Confederacy was sealed when Vicksburg fell."20 But the Union commander did not intend to rest on his Fourth of July laurels. Johnston still threatened his rear, and the Confederate garrison at Port Hudson 240 river miles to the south still held out against Nathaniel P. Banks's besieging army. Grant ordered Sherman with 50,000 men to go after Johnston's 31,000 "and inflict all the punishment you can."21 Grant also prepared to send a division or two to help Banks capture Port Hudson.

  In the event, however, Banks needed no more help than the news of Vicksburg's capitulation, which persuaded the southern commander at Port Hudson to surrender his now untenable position. After a two-month campaign to establish Union control of the rich sugar and cotton regions along Bayou Teche, Banks's soldiers aided by Farragut's warships had laid siege to Port Hudson in the last week of May. Outnumbering the Confederate garrison by 20,000 to 7,000, Banks nevertheless had to contend with natural and man-made defenses as rugged as those at Vicksburg. Two head-on northern assaults on May 27 and June 14 produced only a twelve to one disparity in casualties. In the attack of May 27 two Union regiments of Louisiana blacks proved that they could die

  18. Quotations from Carter, Final Fortress, 297–98, 301.

  19. Dora Miller Richards, "A Woman's Diary of the Siege of Vicksburg," Century Magazine, 30 (1885), 775; Frank E. Vandiver, ed., The Civil War Diary of General Josiah Gorgas (University, Ala., 1947), 50.

  20. Grant, Memoirs, I, 567.

  21. O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 24, pt. 3, p. 473.

  as bravely as white Yankees. After the failure of these assaults, Banks had to rest content with starving the garrison into submission. Port Hudson's defenders lived in the hope that Johnston would rescue them after he had disposed of Grant at Vicksburg. When news came instead that the upriver fortress had fallen, the garrison at Port Hudson—subsisting on
mules and rats—did likewise on July 9. A week later an unarmed merchant ship from St. Louis arrived in New Orleans after an unmolested trip down the Mississippi. "The Father of Waters again goes un-vexed to the sea," announced Lincoln. The Confederacy was cut in twain.22

  Johnston was also soon disposed of. Retreating to his defenses at Jackson, the cautious southern commander hoped to lure Sherman into a frontal assault. Having learned the cost of such attacks at Vicksburg, Sherman refused the bait. He started to surround the city and cut its communications. Johnston evaded the trap by slipping across the Pearl River on the night of July 16. Unlike Pemberton he had saved his army—an achievement cited by his defenders—but its withdrawal halfway to Alabama abandoned central Mississippi's plantations and railroads to the none-too-tender mercies of Sherman's army. Johnston's retreat came as icing on the cake of Grant's Vicksburg campaign, which Lincoln described as "one of the most brilliant in the world"—a judgment echoed by a good many subsequent military analysts. "Grant is my man," the president declared on July 5, "and I am his the rest of the war."23

  II

  Important as they were, Grant's achievements in Mississippi took second place in public attention to events in the Virginia theater. The Union ultimately won the war mainly by victories in the West, but the Confederacy more than once came close to winning it in the East. During the spring and summer of 1863, Robert E. Lee scored his greatest success in this effort—followed by his greatest failure.

  That Lee could take any initiative at all seemed unlikely in April 1863. Food and forage for his army were in such short supply that men hunted sassafras buds and wild onions to ward off scurvy while horses died for lack of grass. Longstreet had taken two divisions to confront

  22. CWL, VI, 409. Lincoln's felicitous phrase was not entirely accurate, for Confederate guerrillas continued to vex Union traffic on the Mississippi.

  23. CWL, VI, 230; T. Harry Williams, Lincoln and His Generals (New York, 1952), 272.

  Federal thrusts from Norfolk and the North Carolina coast. These Union movements amounted to little in the end, but Longstreet remained in southeast Virginia through April to harass the enemy and gather supplies from this unscarred region. Without these two divisions, Lee had only 60,000 men along the Rappahannock to watch double that number of bluecoats under their new and dynamic commander, Joseph Hooker. The Confederate cavalry had to disperse over a wide area to find grass for the horses, further weakening southern forces at a time when Hooker had reorganized his cavalry into a single corps better armed and mounted than Jeb Stuart's troopers. The days of easy rebel cavalry superiority were over.

  Nevertheless, morale remained high in Confederate ranks, the supplies sent by Longstreet improved their rations, and the elaborate network of trenches they held along twenty-five miles of the Rappahannock near Fredericksburg gave them confidence that they could hold off any number of Yankees. But Hooker had no intention of assaulting those trenches. Having reinvigorated the Army of the Potomac after the Burn-side disasters, he planned a campaign of maneuver to force Lee into the open for a showdown fight. Brash and boastful, Hooker reportedly said: "May God have mercy on General Lee, for I will have none."24

  For a few days at the end of April, Hooker seemed ready to make good his boast. He divided his large army into three parts. Ten thousand blue horsemen splashed across the Rappahannock far upstream and headed south to cut Lee's supply lines. Seventy thousand northern infantry also marched upriver to cross at fords several miles beyond Lee's left flank, while another 40,000 feigned an advance at Fredericksburg to hold Lee in place while the flanking force pitched into his left and rear. The Army of the Potomac carried out these complicated maneuvers swiftly. By the evening of April 30 Hooker had his 70,000 infantry near a crossroads mansion called Chancellorsville, nine miles west of Fredericksburg in the midst of a dense second-growth forest called locally the Wilderness. For once the Yankees had stolen a march on Lee and seemed to have the outnumbered rebels gripped in an iron pincers. "Our enemy must ingloriously fly," declared Hooker in a congratulatory order to his men, "or come out from behind his defenses and give us battle on our own ground, where certain destruction awaits him."25

  Despite his nickname of Fighting Joe, Hooker seems to have expected—

  24. Williams, Lincoln and His Generals, 232.

  25. O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 25, pt. 1, p. 171.

  and hoped—that Lee would "ingloriously fly" rather than "give us battle." When Lee instead showed fight, Hooker mysteriously lost his nerve. Perhaps his resolve three months earlier to go on the wagon had been a mistake, for he seemed at this moment to need some liquid courage. Or perhaps a trait noted by a fellow officer in the old army had surfaced again: "Hooker could play the best game of poker I ever saw until it came to the point where he should go a thousand better, and then he would flunk."26 Whatever the reason, when Lee called his bet on May 1, Hooker gave up the initiative to the boldest of gamblers in this deadliest of games.

  Guessing correctly that the main threat came from the Union troops at Chancellorsville, Lee left only 10,000 infantry under feisty Jubal Early to hold the Fredericksburg defenses, and put the rest on the march westward to the Wilderness on May 1. At mid-day they clashed with Hooker's advance units a couple of miles east of Chancellorsville. Here the dense undergrowth gave way to open country where the Federals' superior weight of numbers and artillery gave them an edge. But instead of pressing the attack, Hooker ordered his troops back to a defensive position around Chancellorsville—where the thick woods evened these odds. Thunderstruck, Union corps commanders protested but obeyed. Years later General Darius Couch of the 2nd Corps wrote that when Hooker informed him "that the advantages gained by the successive marches of his lieutenants were to culminate in fighting a defensive battle in that nest of thickets . . . I retired from his presence with the belief that my commanding general was a whipped man."27

  Sensing his psychological edge, Lee decided to take the offensive despite being outnumbered nearly two to one. On the night of May 1, Jackson and Lee sat on empty hardtack boxes and conferred by firelight. The Federals' entrenched line on high ground around Chancellorsville seemed too strong for a direct assault. The Union left was anchored on the Rappahannock and could not be turned. While the two generals discussed how to get at "those people," Stuart brought reports from his scouts that Hooker's right flank was "in the air" three miles west of Chancellorsville. Here was the opportunity Lee needed, and Jackson was the man to seize it. The only problem was to find a route through the wilderness of scrub oak and thorny undergrowth by which a force could get around to this flank unobserved. One of Jackson's staff officers

  26. Alexander K. McClure, Recollections of Half a Century (Salem, Mass., 1902), 348.

  27. Couch, "The Chancellorsville Campaign," Battles and Leaders, III, 161.

  solved this problem by finding a local resident to guide them along a track used to haul charcoal for an iron-smelting furnace.

  Screened by Stuart's cavalry, Jackson's 30,000 infantry and artillery left early May 2 for a roundabout twelve-mile march to their attack position. Lee remained with only 15,000 men to confront Hooker's main force. This was the most daring gamble Lee had yet taken. Jackson's flank march across the enemy's front—one of the most dangerous maneuvers in war—left his strung-out column vulnerable to attack. Lee's holding force was likewise in great peril if Hooker should discover its weakness. And Early still faced nearly three times his numbers at Fredericksburg (from which Hooker had called one more corps to Chancel-lorsville). But Lee counted on Hooker doing nothing while Jackson completed his march; the Union commander fulfilled expectations.

  Hooker could not blame his cavalry for failure to detect Jackson's maneuver, for he had sent nearly all of it away on a raid that threw a scare into Richmond but otherwise accomplished little. Besides, Federal infantry units spotted Jackson's movement and reported it to Hooker—who misinterpreted it. Two of Daniel Sickles's 3rd Corps divisions moved out and attacked the tail of Ja
ckson's column. Sickles was a character of some notoriety, the only political general among Hooker's corps commanders, a prewar Tammany Democrat with a reputation for philandering. His wife, perhaps in revenge, had taken a lover whom Sickles shot dead on a Washington street in 1859. He was acquitted of murder after the first successful plea of temporary insanity in the history of American jurisprudence. Rising from colonel to major general in Hooker's old division, Sickles was one of the army commander's favorites. His probing attack on May 2 alerted Hooker to Jackson's movement toward the southwest. Fighting Joe momentarily wondered if the slippery Stonewall was up to his old flanking tricks, but the wishful thought that the rebels must "ingloriously fly" soon convinced him that Lee's whole army was retreating! Hooker therefore failed to prepare for the blow soon to fall on his right.

  Commander of the 11th Corps holding the Union right was Oliver O. Howard, the opposite in every respect of Sickles. A West Point professional whose distinguished combat record included loss of an arm at Fair Oaks, Howard was a monogamous teetotaling Congregationalist known as the Christian Soldier. He had little in common with the German-American soldiers who constituted a large part of his corps. This "Dutch" corps, only 12,000 strong, had a poor reputation, having turned in mediocre performances under Frémont in the Shenandoah Valley and Franz Sigel at Second Bull Run. What happened at Chan-cellorsville did nothing to improve that reputation. All through the afternoon, alarmed pickets sent word to Howard that the rebels were building up to something off to the west. Howard assured Hooker that he was ready for an attack. Yet most of his regiments were facing south, for Howard considered the thick woods to the west impenetrable. And like Hooker he also thought that this enemy activity was designed to cover a retreat. As suppertime approached, many of Howard's troops were relaxing or cooking.