by Bruce Catton
By mid-December, McClernand was anxious to leave Springfield, Sherman was anxious to leave Memphis, and Grant was anxious to fight Pemberton so that Sherman’s thrust might succeed; and now, unexpectedly, there came drastic intervention on the part of the Confederates, to compel a revision of everybody’s plans.
The intervention came chiefly from a rough-hewn Confederate officer who did not at all share in the cavalier tradition but who was one of the most striking military geniuses developed in the war: Nathan Bedford Forrest, whose activities would finally wring from Sherman a grim tribute—there could be no peace in western Tennessee, Sherman would cry bitterly, until Forrest was dead. Forrest was taking off just now on a raid. He had very little in the way of an army, and less in the way of equipment, but he figured that he would get horses and weapons from Yankee supply bases and that he would enroll new recruits from western Tennesseans in Yankee-held territory—an estimate which proved entirely correct. He was moving up now on the far side of the Tennessee River, and Rosecrans at Nashville got wind of it and sent Grant a warning telegram: “Tell the authorities along the road to look out for Forrest.” Grant passed the word along, alerted Dodge at Corinth, and sent word to Admiral David Porter, at Cairo, that there was ominous Rebel activity along the Tennessee: could some light-draft gunboats be sent up to keep Confederate cavalry from crossing into West Tennessee? On December 15 one of Grant’s outposts notified him that Forrest was crossing the river, and Grant wired Porter that Forrest was over the river bent on mischief. He believed that the raid could be broken up; he told McPherson that he was concentrating troops in the threatened area, and that he did not think many of Forrest’s men would ever get back into their own territory, although they might be able to break the Mobile and Ohio for a day or two. To Dodge he sent word that his own forces would make no further advance until Forrest was disposed of. To one subordinate he sent a wholly characteristic wire. After specifying movements that should be made to bring Forrest to bay, Grant added: “Don’t fail to get up a force and attack the enemy. Never wait to have them attack you.”18
If any man but Forrest had been leading the raid, Grant’s dispositions would probably have been effective. The raiders were heavily outnumbered, with Federal detachments closing in on them from every direction, and dependable Grenville Dodge was moving up from Corinth to take charge of the operation. But Forrest was something special. As the Federal columns converged on him he dodged, fought when he had to, outguessed and outmarched his foes, and got back to safety east of the Tennessee, at last, with a prodigious achievement purchased by insignificant losses. He had broken the all-important Mobile and Ohio at various places over a sixty-mile stretch, running nearly to the Kentucky line, had completely cut off Grant’s telegraphic communications with the outside world, had put at least twenty-five hundred Federal troops out of action, and had left Grant’s army isolated, its supply line broken so badly that it would be many weeks before it could be restored. For nearly a fortnight Grant would not even be able to get or send telegrams.
By an odd coincidence, this interruption of communications came just when it would be most damaging to the aspirations of General McClernand.
Earlier in the fall Grant had been left in the dark about the back stage manipulating that was going on; now it was McClernand who was bewildered. Like Grant, he was hearing plenty of rumors, and the rumors were disquieting. Most of his troops had gone down the river but he had not gone with them, and he suspected that some very fast footwork was being performed by somebody. On December 16 he wired Halleck, asking to be sent downstream “in accordance with the order of the Secretary of War of the 21st of October giving me command of the Mississippi expedition.” On the following day he telegraphed Lincoln: “I believe I am superseded. Please advise me,” and he wired in similar vein to Stanton. Stanton’s reply was only moderately soothing:
There has been, as I am informed by General Halleck, no order superseding you. It was designed, as you know, to organize the troops for your expedition after they should reach Memphis or the place designated as their rendezvous. The troops having been sent forward, they are now to be organized. The operations being in General Grant’s department, it is designed to organize all the troops of that department in three army corps, the First Army Corps to be commanded by you, and assigned to the operations on the Mississippi under the general supervision of the general commanding the Department. General Halleck is to issue the order immediately.19
This was bad news. McClernand had supposed that he would be an independent army commander, answerable to Washington; now he was being told that he would simply command an army corps under Grant. Even worse, however, was the prospect that the corps he was supposed to command might leave Memphis before he himself could join it. McClernand needed to get orders from Grant—and it was precisely now that Forrest’s raid prevented anything Grant might say from reaching McClernand in time to do any good.
On December 18, the War Department notified Grant that, by order of the President, he was to divide his forces into four army corps—the 13th, to be commanded by McClernand; the 15th, to be commanded by Sherman; the 16th, to be commanded by Hurlbut, and the 17th, to be commanded by McPherson. Dutifully enough, Grant immediately wrote a long dispatch for McClernand:
I have been directed this moment by telegraph from the General-in-chief of the Army to divide the forces of this department into four army corps, one of which is to be commanded by yourself, and that to form a part of the expedition on Vicksburg.
I have draughted the order and will forward it to you as soon as printed. The divisions now commanded by Brig. Gen. George W. Morgan and Brig. Gen. A. J. Smith will compose all of it that will accompany you on the expedition, and the divisions of Brig. Gen. F. Steele and Brig. Gen. M. L. Smith will accompany you and will be commanded directly by Maj. Gen. W. T. Sherman, who will command the army corps of which they are a part. Written and verbal instructions have been given General Sherman, which will be turned over to you on your arrival at Memphis.
I hope you will find all the preliminary preparations completed on your arrival and the expedition ready to move.
I will co-operate with the river expedition from here, commanding this portion of the army in person.
On the same day Grant sent a wire to Sherman, notifying him about the formation of the new army corps and specifying that McClernand was to have command of the expedition to Vicksburg.20
All of this was fine. On paper, the administration’s plan was being carried out just about as ordered. The trouble was that Grant’s messages did not get through. Both of them had to go from Grant’s headquarters at Oxford, by telegraph, to Columbus, Kentucky, to be relayed thence to Springfield and to Memphis, and because of what Forrest had done they could not be delivered. McClernand still had no orders telling him to go to Memphis; Sherman had no orders saying that he had to wait for McClernand. Growing more and more restless, McClernand waited until December 23 and then wrote to Stanton: “I am not relieved from duty here so that I may go forward and receive orders from General Grant. Please order me forward.” Stanton promptly replied: “It has not been my understanding that you should remain at Springfield a single hour beyond your own pleasure and judgment of the necessity of collecting and forwarding the troops. You are relieved of duty at Springfield and will report to General Grant for the purpose specified in the order of the General-in-Chief.”21
McClernand at last was ready to leave, but by now it was too late. He took off from Cairo by steamboat, accompanied by his bride—this energetic widower had recently been remarried, at Jacksonville, Illinois, to the sister of his former wife—and on December 28 he was in Memphis, only to find that Sherman and the two army corps had gone on down to Vicksburg. Consumed with fury, McClernand could do no more than start belatedly after his missing army. Quite clearly, he had been had, and he would blame the West Pointers for it to the end of his days, but he would never quite be able to prove that anyone had willfully disobeyed the Presi
dent’s orders. Beyond any question, Halleck had done his utmost to circumvent him, and Grant had been a party to it, but the record was straight enough. Halleck had stayed precisely within the limits of legality, and it is hard to escape the impression that neither Lincoln nor Stanton had expected him to do anything else. McClernand’s troops had gone into Grant’s department and had thereby come under Grant’s control; Stanton had pointedly refrained from upsetting Halleck’s program, and had indirectly but effectively endorsed the scheme whereby McClernand had become a mere corps commander instead of an independent operator; Grant had done exactly what Washington had told him to do, and if Bedford Forrest had kept Grant’s orders from getting to Sherman and McClernand on time, Grant was blameless enough. Nevertheless, McClernand had been given the works. In his Memoirs, Grant dryly remarked: “I had good reason to believe that in forestalling him I was by no means giving offense to those whose authority to command was above both him and me.”22
Meanwhile, the Confederates had visited Grant’s campaign with a second disaster. Earl Van Dorn, leading thirty-five hundred Confederate cavalry, had gone north to strike at Grant’s immediate rear while Forrest was raiding in western Tennessee. Grant’s own cavalry, moving east on the raid Grant had ordered earlier, just failed to intercept Van Dorn, and on December 20 the Confederate cavalry struck the big Federal supply depot at Holly Springs. There were enough Federal troops in the place to hold it, and Grant gave the Post Commander, Colonel R. C. Murphy, warning that the blow was coming, but Murphy was a weakling; on Van Dorn’s demand he surrendered without a fight, and the Confederates went rampaging through Holly Springs, destroying or carrying off foodstuffs, forage, munitions and other material valued at more than a million dollars. Van Dorn got away unharmed, and Grant’s army, deep in Confederate territory, abruptly found itself with no supplies and no supply line, in an area where no living white man would give any assistance to a Yankee army if he could help it. Taken together, Forrest and Van Dorn had completely canceled Grant’s campaign plans.
Sherman and the Vicksburg expedition now were in great danger. The idea all along had been that Grant, pushing hard at Grenada and below, would keep Pemberton and most of Pemberton’s troops so busy that Vicksburg would be held by a skeleton force. Sherman thus could come down the river, go ashore at the mouth of the Yazoo, and either take Vicksburg by storm or move inland, cut the city’s communications, and prepare to make a junction with Grant’s army. But with Grant’s army immobilized, Pemberton could easily send troops to Vicksburg to thwart anything Sherman might try to do, and this Pemberton very promptly did. Grant sent a message of warning, on December 23: “Raids made upon the railroad to my rear by Forrest northward from Jackson, and by Van Dorn northward from the Tallahatchie, have cut me off from supplies, so that further advance by this route is perfectly impracticable. The country does not afford supplies for troops, and but a limited supply of forage. I have fallen back to the Tallahatchie, and will only be able to hold the enemy at the Yalobusha by making a demonstration in that direction or toward Columbus and Meridian.” But the message did not reach Sherman, although he had heard of Holly Springs’ capture, nor did a second warning which Grant dispatched to Memphis two days later, addressed to McClernand.23 As far as Sherman knew, the original plan was still good, and he could safely carry out his part of the program.
As an inevitable result, the Vicksburg expedition steamed straight into a trap. Sherman got his immense flotilla of transports down to Milliken’s Bend, a long, curving stretch of the river twenty miles above Vicksburg, on Christmas day, and paused there while he sent one brigade off to cut the Vicksburg, Shreveport and Texas railroad on the Louisiana side of the river, a line which terminated on the tongue of land just across from Vicksburg. Then he moved on, and on December 26 he was at the mouth of the Yazoo River.
The Yazoo is a tangled stream which comes down from northern Mississippi through rich bottom lands, meandering lazily and communicating, by way of bayous, backwaters and flood channels, with almost every other stream in the neighborhood, and it entered the Mississippi river five or six miles above Vicksburg. By following it a short distance upstream, Sherman believed that he could find ground from which his troops could assault the Walnut Hills, a stretch of high ground which goes off north and a little east from the city’s bluffs, and during the next two days he got his men ashore on the soggy bottom land along a backwater called Chickasaw Bayou, a land cut up by creeks and swamps and dismal little ponds, ten miles up the Yazoo from the big river.
The prospects were not encouraging. The ground itself was forbidding, there were Confederate rifle pits along the base and slopes of the hills, and there were guns and infantry on the higher ground. Grimly outspoken as always, Sherman looked at the terrain, remarked that it would cost five thousand men to take Vicksburg eventually, and that the five thousand might as well be lost here as elsewhere, and on December 29 he launched the assault. His men tried hard enough, but the Rebel position was impregnable and it was held in strength; the assault was a dismal failure, the Federals never got past the swamps. Sherman lost more than 1700 men—if it was any comfort, he was at least well under the stated minimum of 5000—and the Confederates lost no more than 200.24 Sherman pulled his men back out of range, projected and then abandoned a plan for another assault farther up the Yazoo, and at last loaded the troops on the transports and steamed back to Milliken’s Bend. If he could do nothing else he could at least wait here for Grant.
And then, on January 2, the river steamer Tigress came down from Memphis, bearing General McClernand and his staff.
McClernand exhibited his orders and took charge. Clinging to the idea that he was to command an independent army, he denominated the expeditionary force “The Army of the Mississippi”; Sherman was to command one corps (which in fact was already the case) while the other would be directed by Brigadier General G. W. Morgan. McClernand himself would command the whole.
McClernand also brought news. He had left Memphis on December 30, so he knew about what Forrest and Van Dorn had done; knew, also, that Grant’s army was withdrawing from its position near Grenada, and that any sort of advance in the near future was out of the question. When McClernand and Sherman consulted about what they should do next, McClernand talked broadly about opening the navigation of the Mississippi and cutting their way to the sea, but he seemed to have no specific plan. In a letter to Secretary Stanton—in which he complained that “the authority of the President and yourself … has been set at naught”—he proposed that Grant might base himself on Memphis, repair the railroads down to Grenada, and resume his march south to Jackson, while McClernand co-operated from the river.25 Sherman, however, had a more immediate suggestion. The Arkansas river entered the Mississippi about halfway between Memphis and Vicksburg, and forty miles up the Arkansas the Rebels had a fort, Fort Hindman, more commonly known as the Post of Arkansas, which posed a threat to the supply route of any Federal force operating down-river. Sherman proposed that the Army of the Mississippi, with the Navy’s help, go up the Arkansas and capture this fort. This would at least provide a victory to counterbalance the defeat that had just been suffered. McClernand agreed—he had given thought to such a venture before he left Memphis—and the army took off for Fort Hindman.26
Grant, meanwhile, was in a fog. He had put his army on three-quarters rations, and he had ordered out foraging parties to sweep the country for food; but he could not find out what was happening on the Mississippi, and although he knew that his own inability to advance had left Sherman in a bad spot he kept getting rumors that Vicksburg had been captured. The hope that Sherman might have taken the place vanished when he got a dispatch from that general telling what had happened at Chickasaw Bayou, but the rumors of a Federal victory continued, and Grant began to suppose that the expedition from New Orleans was making itself felt.
General Nathaniel P. Banks had reached New Orleans in the middle of December, to replace Ben Butler and to lead up the river an army to co
-operate with the troops that were coming down. He was not, as a matter of fact, making any especial progress, but as far as Grant could tell the man was on his way, and it would be essential for the McClernand-Sherman force to be ready to co-operate with him if he drew near.
Halleck emphasized this, in a message sent January 7. Richmond newspapers left no doubt that Sherman had been defeated, and “every possible effort must be made to re-enforce him.” No one knew where Banks was, but he was under orders to move upstream as fast as he could; Grant must take everything he could spare from Tennessee and Mississippi and strengthen the column on the river. Halleck’s dispatch emphasized the urgency of the situation: “We must not fail in this if within human power to accomplish it.”27
On the heels of this, Grant got a dispatch from McClernand, in which that general announced that the army was off for the Post of Arkansas. McClernand recited the obvious reasons for making the move, remarked that it was impossible to do anything against Vicksburg without a co-operative movement along the inland route, and spoke airily of the need to make a diversion against the Rebels in Arkansas and to co-operate with General Curtis’s movements. The column would return to the Mississippi, McClernand said, “after completing any operations undertaken in Arkansas.”
