A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War

by Amanda Foreman

  However, Lincoln underestimated how much Halleck and Grant—neither of whom had any liking for enthusiastic amateurs, regardless of their political usefulness—would resent the encroachment on their authority. Grant immediately made plans to reach Vicksburg before McClernand. He ordered his trusted lieutenant William T. Sherman to take 33,000 men and sail down the Mississippi to about fifteen miles north of Vicksburg, where he was to leave the river and enter its tributary, the Yazoo. There was a bluff along a bend in the Yazoo that was easy to scale and would allow Sherman to follow an overland route to the town. Grant intended to march toward Vicksburg with the rest of the army, luring the Confederates into a battle and thus leaving the way open for Sherman. The operation began on December 20, 1862, as a fleet of troopships, floating hospitals, and gunboats set sail from Memphis. But while Sherman was traveling downriver, Confederate raiders destroyed Grant’s supply base, forcing him to turn back toward Tennessee. Sherman continued on his mission unaware that he would be facing the enemy alone.

  The floating attack force came to a halt on Christmas Day, a few miles short of the proposed bluff. The sinking of a gunboat, USS Cairo, revealed the existence of underwater mines around an area of the Yazoo known as Chickasaw Bayou. Still ignorant of Grant’s return to base, Sherman decided to alter his plan slightly and disembark at Chickasaw. There was more swamp than dry land here, but above the bluffs were the Walnut Hills and a road that led straight to Vicksburg. Sherman was not fazed by his first solo mission under Grant; he knew that the Walnut Hills were largely devoid of Confederate troops, and assumed that the taking of the bluffs would be achieved in a matter of hours.

  But he waited four days before launching the attack, giving ample time for the Confederates to prepare a defense. Sherman’s plan would now require the troops to cross a wide, open plain while being shot at from above, echoing Burnside’s folly at Fredericksburg. In his memoirs, Sherman described his division commander Brigadier General George Morgan cheerfully receiving the order of battle with the words “General, in ten minutes after you give the signal I’ll be on those hills.”5 Morgan’s memory of the meeting on December 28 was rather different: he had tried to dissuade Sherman from the idea, warning him that a direct frontal attack would turn the gloomy swamps of the bayou into a mass grave. But Sherman was suffering from an excess of bravado, not uncommon among generals when given their first independent command. “Tell Morgan to give the signal for the assault,” he ordered an aide. “We will lose five thousand men before we take Vicksburg, and may as well lose them here as anywhere.”6

  The battle commenced the following day, December 29. Morgan was furious with Sherman. The men to be lost were his men, the survivors of Cumberland Gap and the harrowing retreat through barren wilderness. Colonel John F. De Courcy was commanding Morgan’s 3rd Brigade. His sense of duty prevented him from questioning his orders, but, knowing what was about to happen, he insisted on hearing the orders from Morgan himself: “ ‘General, do I understand that you are about to order an assault?’ To which I replied, ‘Yes; form your brigade,’ ” Morgan recalled many years later. “With an air of respectful protest he said: ‘My poor brigade! Your order will be obeyed, General.’ ” De Courcy had also been changed by his experiences at Cumberland Gap; gone was the martinet, and in his place a commander whose loyalty to his regiment was reciprocated by the men.

  General Morgan watched as the brigade charged through the marshes into the freezing water. “All the formations were broken,” he wrote. “The assaulting forces were jammed together, and, with a yell of desperate determination, they rushed to the assault and were mowed down by a storm of shells, grape and canister, and minié-balls which swept our front like a hurricane of fire.”7 De Courcy raced back and forth as he tried to keep cohesion to the regiments. Some managed to cross the small river in front of the bluffs only to become trapped, others fell back, while a few remained on the near side. After the battle, Morgan and De Courcy were accused of failing to put more muscle into the attack, and Sherman was especially critical.8 Yet a survivor from De Courcy’s regiment, the 16th Ohio, wrote afterward that they were so close to the enemy that they could not retreat without being shot in the back, “so there was nothing left for us to do except to surrender.”9

  Sherman was pacing up and down at his headquarters when Morgan went to see him about collecting the wounded from the field. Unable to accept the extent of his failure, Sherman at first refused a flag of truce, condemning many of the wounded to death and the rest to capture. His initiation into independent command had cost the lives of 1,800 men, half of them from De Courcy’s 3rd Brigade.10

  Five days later, on January 3, De Courcy and his shattered regiments slunk into camp at Milliken’s Bend. The army was divided between those who believed Morgan and De Courcy, who hotly asserted that they did move forward (and had the casualties to prove it), and those who accepted the account of Brigadier General John Thayer, who claimed that he had passed them with his soldiers while they cowered in the first rifle pits. The dispute would never be resolved; years later, Private Owen Hopkins of the 42nd Ohio Infantry wrote that De Courcy’s brigade had followed behind his own, “but the boys pressed forward so vigorously in the daring onset that it was difficult to tell who was in the advance.”11

  The growing dissension in the camp was halted by the arrival of General McClernand; in his pocket was an order inveigled out of President Lincoln assigning all of Sherman’s troops to his command. Ever mindful of his future political career, McClernand had a grand vision to implement. He informed a stunned but helpless Sherman—who had known nothing about McClernand’s visit to Washington—that the force was going to be renamed the Army of the Mississippi, with Sherman and Morgan as the two corps leaders under him.

  McClernand was not as inept as his contemporaries claimed.12 He did at least recognize a superior soldier when he saw one and was willing to listen to Sherman. At the start of the Chickasaw expedition, a Confederate raid had captured one of the Federal steamers, which was taken to Fort Hindman, some forty miles up the Arkansas River, which fed into the Mississippi. Sherman now suggested to McClernand that they capture the fortification. It held no more than five thousand troops, but its strategic location enabled the Confederates to sneak onto the Mississippi at will, wreaking havoc against Federal ships before escaping back up the Arkansas. This was the time, urged Sherman, when they had 32,000 men at their disposal, to erase this Confederate menace and claim the Mississippi north of Vicksburg.

  The Federals landed three miles below Fort Hindman on January 10, 1863. Morgan ordered De Courcy to hold his brigade at the rear, guarding the boats against an ambush, while the rest of the army began its assault. Admiral David Dixon Porter’s gunboats hammered their target—which was not much more than a bastioned dugout—with continuous fire for twenty-four hours. When Sherman gave the order for an all-out attack on the following day, there was only halfhearted firing from the fort. The first advance brought the soldiers to within “hand-shaking distance of the enemy,” according to Brigadier General Morgan, but “the fight continued with sullen stubbornness.” Several times a white flag appeared only to be hastily hauled down. Realizing that a little more effort would tip the scales, Morgan sent orders for De Courcy to march his brigade into action. The troops emerged from the woods along the riverbank and charged, double file, toward the fort. Within minutes, another white flag appeared on the parapet, and this time it remained.13

  The attack resulted in a thousand Federal casualties, almost ten times the number inflicted on the Confederates. But McClernand and Sherman had netted nearly five thousand prisoners, depriving Arkansas of a quarter of its troops. Although Grant initially blasted the operation as a monument to McClernand’s vanity, after a few days’ reflection he accepted that it had given a much-needed victory, both tactically and psychologically, to the army.

  On January 17 a snowstorm turned the blackened terrain a dazzling white as the troopships steamed back down the Arkansas River to
the Mississippi. The commanders took advantage of the quiet hours during the journey to compose their reports. In his letter to the secretary of the navy, Gideon Welles, Admiral Porter laid the entire blame for Sherman’s failure at Chickasaw on De Courcy: “But for the want of nerve in the leader of a brigade, the army should have succeeded.” Farther down the fleet, Brigadier General Morgan sat in his cabin writing precisely the opposite report: De Courcy’s “gallant brigade lost 580 men at Chickasaw Bluffs,” he observed, “and, with Blair’s brigade, bore the brunt of that hard-fought but unsuccessful day. Col. John F. De Courcy deserves promotion.”14

  De Courcy tried to resign, but the request was denied. His longing to escape his present location was exacerbated by the wretchedness of camp conditions. Rain followed the snow in a gray downpour that continued day after day. The ground beneath the tents flooded, causing the camp’s rudimentary latrines to overflow and poison the water wells.15 The only dry land was occupied by hospitals and graves, which presented the men with the choice of sleeping among the dead or alongside the barely living. Yet Grant could not afford to have his army lie idle while they waited for the weather to cooperate. He had slapped down McClernand’s ambitions, taking control of the Army of the Mississippi himself so he could merge it with the other Federal forces in the area. His best course of military action was politically impossible, since it would mean starting the campaign afresh and leaving the vicinity of Vicksburg. This the Northern public would have interpreted as another defeat. So Grant had the men begin several canal projects in the somewhat forlorn hope of engineering an alternative route to the town. The men were sent out with shovels and ordered to dig. Sherman thought the whole enterprise was “a pure waste of human effort.”16

  Every officer in De Courcy’s regiment fell ill with swamp fever, and De Courcy himself lasted just two weeks before suffering a total collapse. The army doctor took pity on him and recommended his removal from the camp. The patient had suffered much “both in body and mind,” he wrote on February 14, 1863, making him prey to “typho-malarial fever.” A few days later, De Courcy joined a wagon train heading east. He would not see his old regiment for many months. His destination was Cincinnati, Ohio, seven hundred miles from Vicksburg, and the long journey was almost as harrowing as the life he left behind. By the time De Courcy was examined by another doctor on March 14, his body had become almost skeletal in appearance. He was immediately placed on sick leave and declared unfit for duty for sixty days.

  At the War Department in Washington, reports of Grant’s futile engineering works caused alarm, especially since there were rumors that the general was drinking again. Lincoln had already been forced to step in and countermand an order by Grant that threatened to have serious political repercussions: General Order No. 11, which Grant issued in late December, had called for the arrest and expulsion of all Jews in the parts of Mississippi and Tennessee under Union control.16.3 Lincoln revoked the order two weeks later, leaving it to General Halleck to explain to Grant about the wisdom of proscribing “an entire religious class, some of whom are fighting in our ranks.” But the reversal was too late for local Jewish communities, including thirty families in Paducah, Kentucky, who were driven from their homes and dumped into riverboats bound for Ohio.17

  Lincoln and his secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, decided to send Charles A. Dana, a former journalist and troubleshooter for the War Department, to Grant’s headquarters. The reason given was the department’s concern about inefficiencies in the paymaster service, but in reality Dana’s mission was to be the eyes and ears of the administration. There were too many calls in Washington for Grant’s removal for Lincoln to do nothing.

  The Vicksburg campaign had assumed even greater importance since the Battle of Murfreesboro in central Tennessee on New Year’s Day. U.S. general William Rosecrans and Confederate general Braxton Bragg had fought each other to a stalemate. Each had lost a third of his army, putting both out of action for many months; crucially, neither general would be able to send reinforcements to Vicksburg. When Dana reached the main army camp at Milliken’s Bend, just above Vicksburg, Grant and his staff chose the wise course of bringing him into the military family. Dana was allowed full access to everything that was happening in the Army of the Tennessee, and soon came to admire Grant as a resourceful and determined leader.

  Francis Lawley also visited the Vicksburg area during the great digging operations. Naturally, he did not go near Grant’s headquarters, and so he had no opportunity to take the measure of the man who was staking his reputation and career on Vicksburg’s capture. In Lawley’s opinion, the town was impregnable. “The swollen state of the river, the dreary wastes of oozy swamp and fen,” he wrote for The Times, were more powerful weapons “than sword or bullet.” Through his telescope he could see the parlous state of the soldiers in the Federal camps.18 Lawley departed for Atlanta confident that Grant would never succeed.

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  General Banks’s army in New Orleans—which he called the XIX Corps—consisted of fifty-six regiments, many of them less than four months old and totally ignorant of military life. One of the newest regiments was the 133rd New York Infantry Volunteers, also known as the 2nd Metropolitan Guard because the recruits were mostly New York policemen—tough working-class men whose fighting skills had been honed against the feral gangs that terrorized lower Manhattan. The 133rd were bemused and dismayed to have a British Army officer as their commander.

  Colonel L.D.H. Currie, as he liked to style himself, was the young officer whom William Howard Russell had referred to in his diary as laughing ruefully at the total lack of military discipline in McClellan’s army. The thirty-one-year-old career soldier and veteran of the Crimea16.4 had been sent to Brigadier General W. F. “Baldy” Smith’s division, where he quickly showed himself to be far too useful to be relegated to administrative work. By the beginning of 1862, Currie was taking part, if not the lead, in cavalry expeditions against Confederate pickets in northern Virginia.19 When McClellan was threatening Richmond in June, Currie’s unflappability stood him in good stead after his horse was killed under him. By July there was a groundswell of support for giving Currie a regiment of his own. Four generals, including McClellan, sent letters on his behalf. “I believe him capable of filling any military position which may be assigned to him,” wrote Major General William B. Franklin.20

  Whether Currie was capable of commanding the unruly 133rd remained to be seen. Already furious at having been assigned to a foreigner, the regiment saw nothing positive about being in New Orleans. The women still turned their backs and scowled at the slightest provocation. The male inhabitants seemed to divide into two distinct species: those who wished to fleece them and those who were waiting for an opportunity to kill them. The city was like a poisonous flower: beautiful to behold but dangerous to touch. General Butler had cut down the murder rate, but every other vice had been allowed to flourish. General Banks was appalled to discover that many of the stories that had reached him were true. Federal officers treated private property in the Crescent City as theirs for the taking. A family might receive an eviction notice with orders to move out the same day, taking nothing except clothes and necessities. The occupier would move in the following day, and the plundering would begin.

  The Scotsman William Watson observed Banks’s attempt to impose civic order on the city and almost felt sorry for him. The Northerner was, wrote Watson, “altogether too mild a man to grapple with the state of things then existing in New Orleans.”21 “Everybody connected with the government has been employed in stealing,” a horrified Banks wrote to his wife in mid-January. “Sugar, silver plate, horses, carriages, everything they could lay their hands on.” He also discovered that nothing happened without a bribe. Among his first directives was an order for all officers to leave civilian accommodation and return to army quarters.22 Mary Sophia Hill had recently returned to New Orleans carrying hundreds of messages and letters for the marooned families of Confederate soldiers, and was simila
rly appalled by the moral degradation that had spread through the city.

  The 133rd was sent north to Baton Rouge, where Currie did his best to continue training the men, teaching them the rudiments of drill. By the end of January he was just beginning to make some headway when he learned that the War Department had received serious allegations against him. A former member of the regiment had been trying to persuade his old colleagues to make a joint protest against Currie. When he failed to whip up enough support, he went ahead on his own, concocting an absurd list of crimes allegedly committed by the colonel. Currie knew he would be exonerated if the authorities questioned his fellow officers, but he recoiled at the thought of an investigation. It would, he was sure, undermine his hard-won authority. Moreover, he found the whole affair deeply offensive. “I have been engaged in a humble way, but to the best of my ability in suppressing rebellion, and maintaining constitutional government, which is scarcely compatible with such charges,” he wrote to his superiors; “if, after a life of fourteen years of active employment in a profession of honour, my character requires defence, it is not worthy of it.” They agreed. On February 4, 1863, Currie’s commander declared that no attention should be paid to the allegations.23

  Currie’s exoneration was followed by an order to lead a scouting expedition through the bayous west of Baton Rouge. After Vicksburg, the Mississippi River meandered for about 150 miles until it reached another deep bend carved into eighty-foot-high bluffs. Here the little town of Port Hudson was perched on top of the eastern bank, the perfect site for heavy artillery to bombard enemy ships as they slowed down to navigate the sharp turn. The bastion not only kept the Federal army bottled up between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, it also protected the Confederates’ chief supply route west of the Mississippi. The romantically named Red River, so called for the rust-colored clay along its northern banks, flowed from the corner of northern Texas all the way down and across Louisiana, finally emptying into the Mississippi just above Port Hudson. It passed through some of the most fertile regions of the Confederacy. If Banks could take Port Hudson, he would also have the Red River, its grains and cattle, and, most important of all, its rich cotton plantations.