by Bruce Catton
Yet amid all of the confusion and unavoidable harshness, one thing was happening: the homeless Negro was slowly beginning to be recognized as a human being. Eaton was insisting that families—where they existed in any sort of understandable form—should be kept together, and he found that many of his people wanted to be married. Most marriages, he learned, merely solemnized unions which had existed for years on a sort of stock-farm basis, and he did his best to make such unions permanent and legal; he recalled that one day a chaplain who worked for him performed 119 marriages in one hour, and the morale of the contrabands began to rise. Eaton was able to use the services of a number of plantation-trained Negro preachers, whose qualifications sometimes were tenuous. One of these had deserted his own wife, and insisted on living with another woman, and an army chaplain tried to get this man to see the error of his ways, which scandalized the righteous. The Negro could not be moved; he had prayed and prayed about it, he said, but the Lord had sent him no clear call to make a change and so he thought he would go on as he had been doing. Soldiers finally had to get him out of the camp, whereupon he and his light o’love caught smallpox and died—a retribution which deeply impressed his former congregation.19
All of this was more than just another problem for General Grant, to whom nearly all of Eaton’s problems sooner or later came for final disposal. Grant was not merely working out the most important military campaign of the war; he was also cutting out the path along which a race would move toward freedom and manhood, and he had little to go on beyond his own instincts. The new policy toward the Negro was only technically being made in Washington. President and cabinet and Congress might make any plans they chose, but in the long run what would happen to the colored man was pretty much up to the Army commander in the field, and a good part of the underlying meaning of the war was bound up in what the field commander might do.
Different commanders had tried different things. Away back in 1861 at Fort Monroe, Ben Butler had ruled that fugitive slaves entering the Union lines were, as property owned by Rebels, mere contraband of war, and since this ruling enabled the Army to meet the problem on an ad hoc basis it was welcomed. But the fugitive slave was a source of ferment. Nothing that was done about him was ever final; in the last analysis he was what the war was mostly about, and he grew as the war grew. He had been a thing and the war was revealing him as a man, and every soldier in one way or another had to adjust himself to that fact.
David Hunter, along the South Carolina coast—the General whose place Grant had thought he himself might fill, when his own unhappy role in the army that was advancing on Corinth that spring had seemed unendurable—had tried to make the adjustment by enlisting Negroes as soldiers; but the effort was just one jump ahead of anything Washington was then prepared to recognize, and Hunter had first been overruled and then displaced. Ben Butler, in New Orleans, had begun to crack the problem by enlisting free Negroes as soldiers; then Hunter’s successor, Brigadier General Rufus Saxon, had won permission to recruit fugitive slaves, and the dark regiment of First South Carolina Volunteers had come into being as a result. But Washington had not quite made up its mind, and all anyone could say was that a recent Act of Congress authorized the President to receive into the service, for any useful labor which they might perform, such contrabands as local commanders might care to enroll. People in the North, happy enough to see slaves deserting their Confederate owners, were still frightened of what the Negro might mean if he came into their own midst as a free man, seeking a job and some recognition, and James Gordon Bennett had jeered in his New York Herald: “The Irish and German immigrants, to say nothing of native laborers of the white race, must feel enraptured at the prospect of hordes of darkeys over-running the Northern states and working for half wages, and thus ousting them from employment.”20 Within a year the workers of New York City whom Bennett was thus exhorting would put on a hideous race riot to prove that the hordes of darkeys frightened them beyond endurance.
In the middle of a trying military campaign Grant had this problem along with that of the Jewish traders who wanted to buy cotton at a bargain, and the problems were strangely related; related, not merely because cotton was common to both of them, but because Grant and most other men were children of their time and, without thinking, used derisive words denying human dignity to whole groups of people whose right to claim human dignity was what was chiefly at stake in this war. Like nearly everyone else, Grant could thoughtlessly say “Jews” when he meant scheming fixers who would have sold their own mothers for gain, and he could say “Darkeys”—as James Gordon Bennett said it—when he meant pathetically displaced men and women who were struggling upward to the point where people might recognize their decency as human beings. He could say “Jews” when he struck angrily at the sharpers, and he could say “Darkeys” when he devoted priceless time and effort that should have gone to a military campaign to an attempt to help people who were climbing a hard ladder.… When he wrote his Memoirs, Grant chuckled mildly about the frontier schoolrooms in which, as a child, he had been taught over and over again that “a noun is the name of a thing.” He was grappling with the names of things now, and the grapple was like Jacob’s, wrestling with the angel, for the names were important. Far ahead of him, not visible but perhaps dimly sensed, dependent in a strange way on the very campaign which he now was trying to repair, there might be a day when people of good will, like himself, would use no abraded epithets but would simply talk about human beings.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Winter of Discontent
When Sherman first started downstream from Memphis for the attack at Chickasaw Bayou the soldiers were full of confidence. This movement, they felt, could not miss; they spoke of it as “the castor oil expedition,” meaning that it would go straight through and bring speedy results, and for a few days they suspected that they were about to win the war. Then came the let-down. The attack was not simply repulsed; it was beaten back so easily that Sherman himself had to admit that it had no chance to succeed—if he had had two hundred thousand men, he muttered, the result would have been the same.1 The minor success at the Post of Arkansas raised the men’s spirits temporarily, but when McClernand took over and the soldiers found themselves camped in discomfort on the muddy levee west of the river, upstream from Vicksburg, disillusionment became acute. There was much sickness, the new regiments were deeply homesick, and nothing that anyone was doing seemed likely to cause Vicksburg to fall.
The veterans were ragged even before the expedition took off, and an Illinois soldier complained that the seats of their pants were so tattered that the girls laughed when the troops marched through the streets of Memphis. One of the newer regiments reported 352 sick out of a total strength of 842, and an Indiana recruit said that half of his outfit was sick and the other half contained hardly anyone who was really healthy; it was “the worst times the 15th corps ever saw, for the sickness was general and the soldiers continued to die off by hundreds.” It rained steadily, the country beyond the levee was mostly under water, and the tents were pitched in malodorous mud. In the new regiments organized by McClernand, camp diseases such as measles were running their course, and a hospital steward noted that many sick men grew listless and seemed to lose their will to live. Mails were delayed, and disturbing rumors were about: one of these said that peace had been declared but that the authorities, for reasons of their own, were keeping the news secret. A steamer fitted up as a floating hospital took aboard hundreds of invalids from McClernand’s corps, but someone had failed to ship any rations. A regimental surgeon who visited the boat a few days later found twenty-two men from his regiment dead on the deck, and he asserted: “I believe before God some of them died for want of proper nourishment.”2
There were many desertions. An Ohio recruit commented, “Now the hour of darkness began,” and enlarged on the problem in a letter to his parents: “Go any day down the levee and you could see a squad or two of soldiers burying a companion, until the levee
was nearly full of graves and the hospitals still full of sick. And those that were not down sick were not well by a considerable. Men at the north, who were not to be trusted, were taking advantage of the occasion by writing discouraging letters and sending traitorous scraps of printed matter to their sons and friends in the army. The men became discouraged in a great degree. There was common talk of deserting, for they felt sure they would be protected in the act by their friends at home.” A soldier from the 103rd Illinois asserted that the sick actually out-numbered the men who were present for duty.3
Copperhead newspapers in the North did their best to persuade everyone that the Vicksburg campaign was bound to end in failure. The New York World, in particular, spread gloom in its news dispatches and in its editorials, asserting that “the confidence of the army is greatly shaken in Gen. Grant, who hitherto undoubtedly depended more upon good fortune than upon military ability for success.” It stated gravely that Sherman was subject to fits of insanity: “He hates reporters, foams at the mouth when he sees them, snaps at them, sure symptoms of a deep-seated mania.” The trouble, as the World saw it, was that the administration was too busy warring on its own generals to make effective war on the South; its only successes had been made when McClellan was General in Chief: McClellan had been replaced by Halleck “whose ways are notoriously past finding out,” and Grant’s record was dismal—his only victory, Fort Donelson, had been won for him by C. F. Smith, Belmont had been a failure, Shiloh “a surprise and a disgrace” and the campaign in Mississippi had been a blunder from the start. The World’s editorial writer summed him up: “His famous Jew order proves him to be wanting in tact and judgment and without these no man can be great though accident can make him a successful general.” Even the stoutly loyal New York Times denounced mismanagement of the Army hospitals near Vicksburg, and wrote bitterly of one general who took over an airy mansion for his own headquarters but ordered his sick soldiers quartered in the slave cabins; as a result, said the Times, his men were dying at the rate of from fifteen to thirty every day. Getting decent rations for the sick, the Times complained, was just too much trouble, and it quoted an unnamed general as saying that it was easier to dig two graves than to sign one set of requisitions.4
What men said privately was worse than what was printed for the public to read. The Middle West contained no more thoroughgoing Northern patriot than Joseph Medill, editor of the Chicago Tribune, but Medill this winter was about ready to quit. In a letter to Congressman Washburne, Medill confessed that “the rebs can’t be conquered by the present machinery,” and admitted that the war was bound to end in an armistice sometime during 1863. “We have to fight for a boundary—that is all now left to us,” he wrote, and his only hope was that the North could somehow capture Vicksburg before the armistice was made. If Vicksburg could not be taken, then the South had won the war—“they will have a ring in our nose and the string in their hands.” The administration ought to withdraw at least sixty thousand men from the Army of the Potomac and send them to Banks, in New Orleans. The Vicksburg campaign probably should remain in Grant’s hands; Medill was not very enthusiastic about Grant, “but he can plan and fight—the others can’t.” The editor then went on to hymn his despair in plain words:
I can understand the awful reluctance with which you can be brought to contemplate a divided nation. But there is no help for it. The war has assumed such proportions—the resistance is desperate and stubborn. Our finances are so deranged and exhausted. The democratic party is so hostile and threatening that complete success has become a moral impossibility. The war has been conducted so long by “central imbecility,” Seward intrigue, and McClellan, Buell, Porter, Halleck, Steele, Franklin, Nelson, McCook and other pro-slavery half-secesh generals, that the day of grace is past. It is now “save what we can.” If there is to be reform it comes too late. But I see no prospect of reform with anything. Halleck and his gang are firmly retained. Lincoln is only half awake, and will never do much better than he has done. He will do the right thing always too late and just when it does no good.5
Unquestionably the general war picture was bad. In the East, General Ambrose E. Burnside had taken over the Army of the Potomac after the administration had finally sent McClellan back to private life, and Burnside had blundered into fearful defeat at Fredericksburg, Virginia, on December 13. Morale in his unlucky army had gone far down, sickness and discouragement were even worse along the Rappahannock than along the Mississippi, and the administration was nerving itself to remove Burnside and put handsome Joseph Hooker in his place. In central Tennessee at a bend in Stones River near Murfreesboro, Rosecrans, with the army that been Buell’s, had fought a desperate, inconclusive battle with Bragg at the beginning of the new year. Bragg, unpredictable as always, had retreated after apparently having won one of the bloodiest fights of the war, and so the battle was recorded as a Union victory, but Rosecrans’s army had been so mangled that it would be immobilized until summer. The autumn elections had gone against the administration, the peace party in the North was riding high, and Medill’s profound pessimism was a reflection of the general temper. Even tough Medill, ready to consent to a division of the Union, was staking what hope remained to him on the faith that Vicksburg could be taken; but the most he could say for Grant—who must take the place, if anyone did—was that he was the best of a poor lot. The principal hope of the North rested on the shaky belief Medill had voiced—that Grant at least was a fighter.
It was a legend, a true tale that would be remembered a long time, that in the dark days after Shiloh the canny Pennsylvania politician A. K. McClure had gone to President Lincoln to say that Grant must be discarded; he was a fumbler and a drunkard, and he represented a political liability heavier than the administration could carry. And McClure told how Lincoln heard him out, thought it over in silence, and then returned his verdict: “I can’t spare this man: he fights.”
Grant would fight; that statement, in this gloomy winter, represented the best hope of the Union cause. But right now Grant could not fight, because the enemy was hopelessly out of his reach.
Grant was so near the great Confederate citadel that a brief walk and the use of a pair of field glasses would bring Vicksburg river fortifications into clear view,6 but Pemberton’s army was where he could not get at it. Adapting himself to the new campaign forced upon him by Washington, Grant had to start all over again. He was west of the river and the Confederate Army was east of it, and until he found some way to get his troops over the river to a place where Pemberton could be forced to give battle he could do nothing. If Grant was in fact no more than a heads-down slugger, this campaign was over before it could even begin.
East of the Mississippi there was high ground, more or less continuously, from the mouth of the Ohio down to Memphis. All of this high ground the Union now owned; but below Memphis there was a 200-mile stretch of delta country, half-overflowed now because the river was abnormally high, and the high ground was fifty miles or more inland. It did not return to the river until after the Yazoo River emptied into the Mississippi a few miles above Vicksburg; then it came in on a long slant, the Walnut Hills, looking down into the half-drowned valley of the Yazoo. Sherman had tried to fight his way out of this valley with no success at all, and there was no sense in repeating that effort. A dozen miles up the Yazoo the Confederate line was anchored at a height known as Snyder’s Bluff; gunboats and transports coming up the Yazoo could not hope to pass these fortifications. Unless the Union Army could somehow get around to the east and approach this bluff from the rear, that end of Pemberton’s line was secure.
Reaching the Mississippi just below the Yazoo, the high ground ran south close to the water’s edge, and Vicksburg was built on the bluffs, its wharves and docks down by the water’s edge, streets climbing to the plateau above. There were many guns planted here, at water level and above, and the one certainty in an uncertain world was that the place could not be taken from the river. Gunboats and mortar boats could bom
bard it, to be sure, and a stout fleet under a determined admiral could always run past it, if the admiral cared to stand the hammering; tough old Farragut had already proved that, and Porter would prove it again, but it meant very little. The finest army in the world could not land along the waterfront and take the city by storm. From the west Vicksburg was completely impregnable.
Downstream things looked no better. The left end of Vicksburg’s immediate defenses was solidly posted at Warrenton, a few miles south of town. Twenty-five miles farther downstream the Confederates had guns in position on the bluffs at Grand Gulf; it seemed unlikely that the Yankee army at Milliken’s Bend could get around these defenses, because the ground west of the river was half-flooded, virtually impassable to marching columns with wheeled vehicles, and there were no transports at all below Vicksburg. Banks, to be sure, might some day come up from the river’s mouth, but he would have to pass the Rebel works at Port Hudson first and this might be beyond his means.
