When Sherman’s troops were landed at Hayne’s Bluff and then withdrawn, the amphibious maneuver proved to be not particularly useful in distracting Confederate attention from Union movements farther south, but the significance of the correspondence about the operation between Grant and Sherman was that it underscored the way they were supporting each other. As for their problems with the press, Grant needed no encouragement from Sherman regarding what both believed to be their right to conduct their operations free from newspaper reports that might assist the enemy. From Milliken’s Bend, Louisiana, twenty miles above Vicksburg on the Mississippi, Grant fired off a message to Major General Stephen Hurlbut, who had replaced Sherman as military governor of Memphis: “Suppress the entire press of Memphis for giving aid and comfort to the enemy by publishing in their columns every move made here by troops and every [engineering] work commenced. Arrest the Editor of the Bulliten [sic] and send him here a prisoner, under guard, for his publication of present plans.”
Although they saw the press in the same light, there were times when Sherman disagreed with Grant’s strategy, and said so. At one point, when nothing seemed to be working, he strongly recommended that Grant take most of his army back to Memphis and move south again by an untried route. After advocating his plan in a conversation with Grant, he set it forth in a seven-point memorandum to Grant’s chief of staff John Rawlins, but closed with this: “I make these suggestions, with the request that General Grant will read them and give them, as I know he will, a share of his thoughts. I should prefer that he should not answer this letter, but merely give it as much or as little weight as it deserves. Whatever plan of action he may adopt will receive from me the same zealous cooperation and energetic support as though conceived by myself.”
Grant had a plan entirely different from Sherman’s, possibly the boldest idea of the war. He had already tried approaching Vicksburg by digging canals through the bayous and blowing the levee at Yazoo Pass to create a flood, and had been defeated by combinations of weather and terrain, long, vulnerable supply lines, and Confederates moving within their home territory to counter him at every point. Now he decided to do what the enemy, and everyone else, considered to be impossible. Placing his faith in his naval colleague Porter, he would run some gunboats and transports down the river under the murderous rows of artillery batteries placed on the miles of bluffs at Vicksburg, but do it at night.
The plan had enormous risks: not only would the ships have to run the gauntlet of enemy cannon, but in the darkness they could easily collide or run aground. If they got through, however, passing the swamps to their west, Grant’s men could go ashore on solid ground on the Louisiana side of the Mississippi below Vicksburg. This could then be used as a staging area for both the soldiers on the transports and the many thousands of Sherman’s troops who would soon be able march down the west bank in drier weather to join them there. If all this worked, Grant could ferry his army across the river to the east bank, below Vicksburg, and attack from the side of the city the enemy was least prepared to defend.
The news of what Grant intended to do reached the authorities in Washington. For a change, the secret was kept, but many who knew of it thought that Grant was about to lose Porter’s ships and a good part of his army. Stanton disapproved; Halleck was worried. But months had passed, the press and the public wanted action, Grant had tried so many strategies, and nothing else had worked. No one told Grant to stop, but the stage was set for a shocked disavowal of Grant’s actions if news of a disaster came north.
Before embarking on this dramatic move, Grant wanted to make a reconnaissance up the Yazoo River, a tributary of the Mississippi above Vicksburg. At just this point a journalist of a different sort arrived at Grant’s headquarters, a man with far more power than the officers there at first realized he had. He was Charles A. Dana, the former managing editor of Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune. At forty-three, he still had decades ahead of him in one of the great American journalistic careers of the nineteenth century. He came now not as a reporter but as a “special commissioner” appointed by Secretary of War Stanton to investigate the practices of paymasters in the Mississippi theater of war.
Dana was a brilliant, mercurial man, a descendant of a galaxy of New England figures that included Abigail Adams. He had studied at Harvard until his eyes failed him; he had combined physical labor with intellectual activity living at the Brook Farm experiment started by Ralph Waldo Emerson and other Transcendentalists; he had covered the revolutions of 1848 in Paris as a foreign correspondent. Going to Germany later that year, he met Karl Marx, who a few months earlier had published the Communist Manifesto. Three years later, Dana arranged for Marx to write letters on European affairs for the Tribune, and when Dana and the Tribune’s literary editor George Ripley began what became the sixteen-volume American Cyclopaedia, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels started contributing what became a total of eighty-one articles on politics and military affairs. Four years before the war began, while continuing all his journalistic activities, Dana founded and edited the widely read and profitable Household Book of Poetry, which broadened the readership of such writers as Edgar Allan Poe. One of Lincoln’s strong journalistic supporters, he knew both Lincoln and Stanton. Dana had met Grant in Memphis the previous year and recalled “the pleasant impression Grant made—that of a man of simple manners, straightforward, cordial, and unpretending.” A combination of intellectual and outdoorsman, the athletic Dana had been unable to join the military because of his bad eyes and wanted to help the Union cause.
“Special Commissioner” Dana was in fact a spy of sorts, sent by Lincoln and Stanton to stay at Grant’s headquarters and make his own estimate of Grant’s behavior and ability. Tales continued to reach Washington of Grant’s occasionally being drunk, and General McClernand, while outwardly reconciled to his position subordinate to Grant, had been sending his allies in the capital incessant criticism of Grant’s performance as a general. The campaign intended to capture Vicksburg had been under way for four months; Lincoln wanted to continue to believe in Grant, but at the moment found it hard to do. The War Department had set up a special cipher for Dana to use in sending his reports to Stanton, a code known only by those close to Stanton, who would take the messages to Lincoln. If Dana sent back negative reports, Grant might well be relieved of command.
Before Dana arrived, two officers close to Grant met to talk about handling this man who was clearly going to be more than a visitor. Grant’s rough-tongued chief of staff Rawlins sat down with Grant’s inspector general, Lieutenant Colonel James Harrison Wilson. When Wilson first reported in at Grant’s headquarters, two months before, Rawlins had come right to the point. According to Wilson, Rawlins said, “I’m glad you’ve come, you’re an Illinois man and so am I. I need you here. Now I want you to know what kind of man we are serving. He’s a goddamned drunkard, and he’s surrounded by a set of Goddamned scalawags who pander to his weakness. Now for all that, he is a good man, and a nice man, and I want you to help me in an offensive alliance against the Goddamned sons-of bitches.”
Now, with Dana about to start living in their midst, Rawlins. and Wilson came to an agreement. Describing their talk, Wilson said that “it was finally decided that he was to have access to everything, favorable and unfavorable, official or personal … With plenty of enemies about to bring him both truth and exaggerations, the worst tactics would be to arouse his suspicions by attempted concealment. A wise decision and fully endorsed by Grant.”
A situation arose that tested Dana’s loyalty and judgment. Included on a reconnaissance trip Grant made up the Yazoo River aboard Admiral Porter’s flag boat Blackhawk, he later described the General’s behavior: “Grant wound up going on board a steamer … and getting so stupidly drunk as the immortal nature of man would allow; but the next day he came out fresh as a rose, without any trace of the spree he had just passed through. So it was on two or three occasions of the sort and when it was all over, no outsider would have suspected
such things had been.”
So there it was. If Dana did what he had been sent to do, a telegram in secret code intended for President Lincoln would be on its way as soon as the Blackhawk landed, and Grant’s career might be finished.
Dana did nothing. A professional journalist who had witnessed a sensational story, the thing he wanted most was for the North to win the war, and he had decided to invest his faith in this man Grant. (While Dana had recorded of their first meeting that Grant had “simple manners” and was “straightforward, cordial, and unpretending,” he expanded his estimate to “Grant was an uncommon fellow—the most modest, most disinterested, and the most honest man I ever knew, with a temper that nothing could disturb, and a judgment that was judicial in its comprehensiveness and wisdom.”) Dana was to be present at another time Grant drank, with equally bad results, but he waited for this campaign to end before he wrote Stanton that, when necessary, Rawlins could control Grant’s drinking.
Perhaps as a result of the episode on the Yazoo, Julia Grant appeared, accompanied by their children. It was unusual for Julia to be allowed to come this close to the actual fighting, but she soon witnessed one of the most spectacular scenes of the war. On the evening of April 16, she and two other ladies went aboard the riverboat Henry von Phul. Julia said that “we dined on board with many officers”—Grant, Sherman, and Admiral Porter were not among them—“and when quite dark we silently dropped down the river.”
Grant was about to send selected ships of the fleet past Vicksburg’s miles of cannon. Aboard his warship Benton, Admiral Porter would be leading six other gunboats, including one named the Henry Clay, followed by three transports loaded with thousands of men. The transports were towing a total of ten barges loaded with coal that would be needed for the future operations down the river if they got through. Far astern of the others, by herself to minimize damage if she were hit and exploded, was a barge loaded with ammunition that would also be needed if this fleet survived.
Grant and Porter had worked hard, trying to anticipate everything as they prepared for this gamble. As Grant put it:
The great essential was to protect the boilers from the enemy’s shot, and to conceal the fires under the boilers from view. This he [Porter] accomplished by loading the steamers, between the guards and boilers on the boiler deck up to the deck above, with bales of hay and cotton, and the deck in front of the boilers in the same way, adding sacks of grain. The hay and grain would be wanted below [down the river], and could not be supported in sufficient quantity by the muddy roads over which we expected to march.
Before this I had been collecting, from St. Louis and Chicago, yawls and barges to be used as ferries when we got below … Men were stationed in the holds of the transports to partially stop with cotton shot-holes that might be made in the hulls.
Ready to observe what he called this “perilous trip,” Grant was accompanied by Dana and his staff aboard a vessel in the middle of the river upstream of the enemy’s gun emplacements. On the river below the city, Sherman was well out from the shore on one of the yawls Grant had acquired. On Sherman’s orders, his men had hauled four of these sailing craft across the swamps and placed them in the Mississippi below Vicksburg: ready for a disaster, Sherman had “manned them with soldiers, ready to pick up any of the disabled wrecks as they passed by.”
Everyone was ready. Watching from the deck of the Henry von Phul, Julia noticed that it was so quiet that she could hear the frogs and katydids along the dark riverbank singing “their summer songs.” Standing near Grant on the river transport, Dana saw it begin.
Just before ten o’clock … the squadron cut loose its moorings. It was a strange scene. First a mass of black things detached itself from the shore, and we saw it float out towards the middle of the stream. There was nothing to be seen except this big black mass, which dropped slowly down the river. Soon another black mass detached itself, and another, then another … They floated down the Mississippi darkly and silently, showing neither steam nor light, save occasionally a signal astern, where the enemy could not see it.
Julia, Dana, and Sherman saw what happened next from their different places on the river. Julia said, “All was going well when a red flare flashed up from the Vicksburg shore and the flotilla of gunboats and transports and our own boats were made visible.” Dana recalled that the gunboats “were immediately under the guns of nearly all the Confederate batteries, when there was a flash from the upper forts.” Down the river, Sherman had the best view:
As soon as the rebel gunners detected the Benton, which was in the lead, they opened on her, and on the others, in quick succession, with shot and shell; houses on the Vicksburg side and the opposite shore were set on fire [something in fact done by Confederates who crossed over] which lighted up the whole river; and the roar of cannon, the bursting of shells, and finally the burning of the Henry Clay, drifting with the current, made a picture of the terrible not often seen. Each gunboat returned the fire as she passed the town, while the transports hugged the opposite shore.
The sound of the cannon was heard sixty miles away, and the firing lit up the sky for more than three hours; Julia said that, even at her vantage point upstream, “The air was full of sulphurous smoke.”
As the ships came down the river, Sherman was everywhere. He managed to pull alongside the Benton and “had a few words with” Admiral Porter, checked on the gunboat Tuscumbia as she towed the “transport Forest Queen into the bank out of the range of fire,” and reported that “the Henry Clay was set on fire by bursting shells and burned up; one of my yawls picked up her pilot floating on a piece of wreck, and the bulk of her crew escaped in their own yawl-boat to the shore.”
Grant’s idea had worked. One ship had been lost and any number of shells had hit the gunboats, but to everyone’s amazement, not a single soldier or sailor was killed. Grant had ships and men and supplies below Vicksburg, ready to cross the river and approach the city from its most vulnerable side. (Union soldiers later learned that on this night, many citizens of Vicksburg began the evening by dancing at a “gala ball” to celebrate the invincibility of their “Gibraltar”—a confidence shaken when the sudden sound and physical thud of cannon fire interrupted the music.)
Grant was always a man to follow up on an opportunity. When Dana was with him the next day, he decided to send massive loads of supplies down the river on ships, running the same gauntlet while his columns of soldiers started making their way down the bank of the river to a point below Vicksburg where they could be ferried across. Dana said that Grant “ordered that six transport steamers, each loaded with one hundred thousand rations and forty days’ coal, should be made ready to run the Vicksburg batteries … The transports were manned throughout, officers, pilots, and deck hands, by volunteers from the army … This dangerous service was sought with great eagerness, and experienced men found for every post. If ten thousand men had been wanted instead of one hundred and fifty, they would have engaged with zeal in the venture.”
This second effort to pass down the river went off on the night of April 26. The transports got through, but Grant’s headquarters steamer Tigress was hit and sunk, although Grant was not aboard. Sherman, who was right there in a yawl, helping those aboard the Tigress get to shore, explained what these two night operations had accomplished: “Thus General Grant’s army had below Vicksburg an abundance of stores, and boats with which to cross the river.”
Grant had done it. His army still had to make its way down the east side of the river to be ferried across, but the willingness of his soldiers to volunteer for hazardous duty such as manning the ships during the second run past Vicksburg’s batteries showed that his men believed in him as never before. There were sighs of relief in the White House and the War Department. Against all odds, with Sherman’s help Grant was placing his army where he wanted it to be, but the great fortress still had to be taken.
7
THE SIEGE OF VICKSBURG
On April 30, Grant ferried his troop
s across the river from the Louisiana shore to Bruinsburg, Mississippi, and the first columns began an eight-mile march east to the inland town of Port Gibson, twenty-five miles south of Vicksburg. On May 1, the Union troops fought an all-day battle against two Confederate brigades, throwing them back and taking Port Gibson.
Grant had orders telling him that, before he moved against Vicksburg, he must first march south to join Major General Nathaniel Banks in an effort to capture Port Hudson, Louisiana, but he learned from Banks that he was still clearing the west side of the Mississippi in his Red River campaign and could not move on Fort Hudson for another month. At the same time, Grant received intelligence that Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston, a master of maneuver, was assembling forces that would total twenty-four thousand men in Alabama and eastern Mississippi. Johnston’s plan was to have these men follow him as soon as possible to Jackson, forty-five miles east of Vicksburg, where there were six thousand Confederate soldiers in place. The situation was fluid: Johnston hoped to find a way to link up with the Confederate defenders now inside Vicksburg and either defeat Grant in the field or in some other way relieve the pressure that was sure to be brought on that city.
Johnston’s movements prompted Grant to make a decision that was in its way as bold as the one to run down the river in front of Vicksburg. Disobeying orders and against the advice of his subordinates, Grant took forty thousand men and headed straight for Jackson. His plan was to intercept Johnston and defeat or throw him back, and then to turn and give his full attention to Vicksburg.
Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War Page 20
