by Bruce Catton
As far as anyone could see, in this unhappy January of 1863, Grant’s army was in a blind alley.
Grant knew this as well as anyone. To get at Pemberton’s army he had to approach Vicksburg from the land side, the east. In the light of what he knew now, he could see that from a strictly military point of view it had been a mistake to give up the move down the Mississippi Central Railroad. To be sure, Van Dorn had captured his base of supplies and Forrest had destroyed his communications; but during the fortnight in which his army had collected food and forage from the surrounding countryside Grant had learned something about the possibility of operating in this rich southland without any supply line at all. He confessed later that his army could have lived off the country for two months instead of two weeks and that it might have been possible simply to drive ahead, letting Rebel cavalry do anything that it cared to do in his rear, and force Pemberton to fight east of Vicksburg. His troops had lived high after the supply lines were broken. Plantations provided plenty of meat, poultry and corn; local mills had been put to work grinding meal, Western farmboys had raided plantation corn cribs and made quantities of hominy, and on Christmas Day General McPherson had found himself treated to an elaborate feast by his pioneer corps—roast turkey, chicken, meat pies, corn bread, wheaten cakes, stewed fruit. All in all, the old rule that an army of invasion must retain a firm connection with its own base looked like a rule that might be discarded, in a land that produced a surplus of food. The lesson would stick in Grant’s mind.7
But it had not been possible, at the end of December and the first of January, for Grant to make the decision which, later, he believed should have been made. Washington had decided that there was going to be an expedition on the river, and that was that. Halleck had warned Grant sharply to do everything possible to reinforce the Mississippi Army: “Take everything you can dispense with in Tennessee and Mississippi. We must not fail in this if within human power to accomplish it.”8 So Grant had come to the river, and now that he was here he could not turn back. To uproot the whole expeditionary force, return to Memphis, and plan a new campaign east of the delta would be to confess a failure and to perform what North and South alike would consider an ignominious retreat. Militarily the move might be wise, but politically it was out of the question. There was nothing to do but go ahead with the river expedition and somehow make it work.
At the end of January, Grant had in his department approximately 103,000 officers and men, present for duty, equipped. About half of these would have to stay in Tennessee, even though Grant was ordering much of the railroad network and the rear-area installations abandoned in order to make as many men as possible available for duty at the front. On hand, in the general vicinity of Vicksburg, he had nearly 40,000 men, with perhaps 15,000 more waiting at Memphis to join him.9 He might be reinforced, later, and he might not. As far as he could learn, Pemberton’s numbers—in Vicksburg, at Port Hudson, and at various inland points—were about equal to the numbers he himself could use.
Grant’s troops were spraddled out over a wide area, for this Mississippi country was not hospitable. On the eastern shore, above Vicksburg, it offered no place at all for an army to camp. The troops had to pitch their tents on the western side, which was bad enough in all conscience—muddy levee, with limitless acres of swamps, swollen backwaters, stumpy bayous and drowned lakes sprawling out on the Louisiana side for miles. The army made its camp mostly at Milliken’s Bend, a lazy crescent edging the river twenty miles upstream from Vicksburg; at the lower end of this crescent there was Young’s Point, where Grant’s headquarters steamer, the Magnolia, was tied up; and below Young’s Point there was low, muddy ground directly across the river from Vicksburg, terminus for a railroad that came in from Monroe, Louisiana. At all of these places, and at isolated spots farther up the river, there were Federal troops, sharing the ground, as a newspaper correspondent remarked, with frogs and crawfish. The latter were being eaten, in quantities; a soldier could dig a shallow hole near his tent, let it fill with water—which it would do, in no time—and then, after a short wait, dangle in it a piece of meat on a string. He could quickly obtain a peck of crawfish, “of good flavor and easily digested.”10
Grant took up his new job with tempered optimism. On his way down the river he stopped at Helena, Arkansas, and talked briefly with Congressman Washburne’s brother, Brigadier General Cadwallader C. Washburn. (The Congressman retained a final “e” on the family name and the younger brother dropped it; writing to either of them, Grant was likely to spell the name both ways, impartially, in the same letter.) To the Congressman, General Washburn sent a brief report on Grant: “He looks well and feels pretty well, but feels that he has got a heavy job on his hands. The high water and overflowed country render it very difficult to operate now on land, and Vicksburg can only be taken by a great sacrifice, except by a land force in the rear.” Sherman gave Grant a gloomy appraisal; troops aided by gunboats might perhaps land along the city’s waterfront, or an assault might possibly be made at Snyder’s Bluff, but the only real hope seemed to be to find some way of getting a large force on the high ground east of Vicksburg. Meanwhile, Sherman feared that impetuous McClernand “may attempt impossibilities.” To Halleck, as he went downstream, Grant sent a brief wire: “What may be necessary to reduce the place I do not yet know, but since the late rains think our troops must get below the city to be used effectively.”11
Before he could begin to operate properly Grant had to show McClernand who was boss. When Grant reached Young’s Point, he found that McClernand considered the river force a separate army under his own command; McClernand was writing letters and orders under the heading, “Headquarters, Army of the Mississippi,” and he did not propose to give up any part of his authority. On January 30, shortly after Grant’s arrival, McClernand sent Grant a letter bristling with independence and inviting a showdown:
I understand that orders are being issued directly from your headquarters directly to army corps commands, and not through me. As I am invested, by order of the Secretary of War, indorsed by the President, and by order of the President communicated to you by the General-in-Chief, with the command of all the forces operating on the Mississippi river, I claim that all orders affecting the condition or operation of those forces should pass through these headquarters; otherwise I must lose a knowledge of current business and dangerous confusion ensue.
If different views are entertained by you, then the question should be immediately referred to Washington, and one or the other, or both of us, relieved. One thing is certain, two generals cannot command this army, issuing independent and direct orders to subordinate officers, and the public service be promoted.
Grant did not need McClernand to tell him about the necessity for a unified command. Looking far beyond his immediate surroundings, he had previously written to Halleck to say that all of the Western departments really ought to be combined under one head; then, lest it seem that he himself was angling to get the top job, he added: “As I am the ranking department commander in the west, I will state that I have no desire whatever for such combined command, but would prefer the command I now have to any other that can be given.” Halleck made no change in the chain of command, and Grant proceeded now to put McClernand in his proper place. On the same day he got McClernand’s letter, he issued orders announcing that he was assuming command of the Vicksburg expedition and that Department headquarters would thenceforth be on the Mississippi. Army corps commanders were formally directed to resume the immediate command of their respective corps and to report to and get orders from Grant’s headquarters—an unmistakable way to let McClernand know that he was now a corps commander and nothing more. The order added that McClernand’s 13th Corps would be responsible for garrisoning the post at Helena and any other point on the west bank south of Helena which it might be necessary for the army to hold.
McClernand responded at once. He drew Grant’s attention to the fact that, “having projected the Mississippi river e
xpedition, and having been by a series of orders assigned to the command of it, I may be entirely withdrawn from it” if this order of Grant’s meant what it seemed to mean. Just what, he asked, did Grant have in mind?
Grant’s reply, sent the following day, was blunt. The order, he wrote, meant that “I will take direct command of the Mississippi river expedition, which necessarily limits your command to the Thirteenth Army Corps.” Also, as a clincher: “I have seen no order to prevent my taking immediate command in the field, and since the dispatch referred to in your note I have received another from the General-in-Chief of the Army, authorizing me directly to take command of this army.” Stiffly, McClernand replied that he would submit “for the purpose of avoiding a conflict of authority in the presence of the enemy,” but he asked that the whole business be referred to Halleck and, through Halleck, to Stanton and Lincoln. Grant by this time must have been fairly confident that he held the winning hand, and he quickly sent the papers to Halleck. In a covering note, he remarked that he had no confidence in McClernand’s ability to conduct a major campaign; still, if President and Secretary of War ruled in McClernand’s favor, “I will cheerfully submit … and give a hearty support.”12
Washington refused to interfere; the army was all Grant’s. The question now was what he would do with it.
For the immediate future the problem seemed to be one for the engineers. Three opportunities apparently existed. All of them would be tried.
The first involved an attempt to induce the Mississippi river to by-pass Vicksburg entirely.
Directly across the river from Vicksburg, the Louisiana shore in the 1860’s formed a long, narrow peninsula, a muddy finger pointing northeast into the hollow of a hairpin curve which the Mississippi then made just above the city. Anyone who looked at the map could see that if the river could somehow be induced to cut through the base of the peninsula, instead of flowing around its tip, Vicksburg would be left high and dry, an inland town instead of a river stronghold, a problem for Federal armies no longer. The river’s current could do strange things with a fissure in the lowland banks, and it seemed likely that if a modest ditch were cut across the peninsula the river would quickly scour it out and create a new channel. The line such a ditch might follow had even been traced, before the war, during some long-forgotten dispute between Mississippi and Louisiana, and when Farragut brought his salt-water fleet up the river in June, 1862, the idea came to life. With Farragut was Brigadier General Thomas Williams, leading a brigade of Federal infantry, and for several weeks Williams’s men toiled in the summer heat, digging away at this ditch until the abandonment of the expedition called them all back to Baton Rouge.
Now the notion was revived once more. It particularly struck the fancy of President Lincoln, who knew something about the Mississippi at first hand and who had a frontiersman’s pragmatic interest in projects of this kind. Halleck gave Grant warning that the President wanted this canal dug, and Grant took it up where Williams had left it.
Grant had no great hope that anything very valuable would come of this work. The canal had been planned wrong. On the upstream side of the long point, the canal struck the river in a backwater; the current hugged the opposite bank here, and it was not probable that it would ever come into the ditch with enough force to create a new channel. Downstream, the canal would touch the river below Vicksburg, but still above Warrenton, and when the Confederates perceived what the Yankees were up to they simply put new guns in position at Warrenton and waited, quite unconcerned; even if the whole affair worked just as planned, Confederate batteries would still control the river.
Still, it had to be tried. Washington had ordered it, and anyway it would give a few thousand of the soldiers in this immobilized army something to do. Grant put Sherman and the 15th Corps to work, bringing in dredges to rush the job along, while his engineers tried to re-design the layout so that the river would actually flow through the canal when the job was done.13
Much more promising was a project which involved making use of a crescent-shaped body of water called Lake Providence, which lay just west of the river fifty miles or more above Vicksburg. Grant learned about this as soon as he reached Young’s Point.
All of the Louisiana country west of the river seemed to be half-drowned, the land being low and the river being high, and Lake Providence apparently offered a way into a two-hundred-mile waterway by which the army could float past Vicksburg undisturbed. Lake Providence was near the Mississippi, separated from it by a levee. From the lake, a sluggish stream known as Bayou Baxter meandered through a cypress swamp for half a dozen miles, connecting beyond the swamp with a more open bit of water, and running thereafter into a series of streams which finally came out into the Red River, which in turn reached the Mississippi a little above Port Hudson. If Grant wanted to get below Vicksburg without bloodshed, this might be the way: very roundabout, to be sure, but feasible, if the levee were cut and if a way could be opened through the trees and mud of Bayou Baxter. Slightly skeptical but anxious to try everything, Grant sent an engineer officer up to look the situation over, and on January 30 he got off a note to Admiral Porter:
By inquiry I learn that Lake Providence, which connects with Red river through Tensas Bayou, Washita and Black rivers, is a wide and navigable way through. As some advantage may be gained by opening this, I have ordered a brigade of troops to be detailed for this purpose, and to be embarked as soon as possible. I would respectfully request that one of your light-draught gunboats accompany this expedition, if it can be spared.14
A few days later he went up the Mississippi to see for himself, grew more enthusiastic, and sent a quick message to McPherson asking him to bring a division and come down at once.
This bids fair to be the most practicable route for turning Vicksburg [he wrote]. You will note from the map that Lake Providence empties through the Tensas, Washita, Black and Red rivers into the Mississippi. All these are now navigable to within a few miles of this place, and by a little digging, less than one-quarter that has been done across the point before Vicksburg, will connect the Mississippi and Lake, and in all probability will wash a channel in a short time.
Sherman saw the reports and concluded that Lake Providence offered a much better chance than the ditch his own soldiers were digging. He wrote to Grant:
It is admirable and most worthy of a determined prosecution. Cover up the design all you can, and it will fulfill all the conditions of the great problem. This little affair of ours here on Vicksburg Point is labor lost.15
The third possibility seemed for a while to be the best of the lot. It involved another job of levee-cutting, this one far up the Mississippi a few miles below Helena, Arkansas. In olden times there had been an opening in the Mississippi’s eastern bank here, giving access to a bayou known as Yazoo Pass. This offered a connection with the Coldwater River, which soon entered the Tallahatchie, and farther downstream the Tallahatchie joined the Yalobusha to form the Yazoo. This chain of rivers had once provided a route for light-draft steamboats serving the back country in the Yazoo delta; but because the delta land was so low that a moderate rise in the Mississippi would cause floods, a levee had been built across the mouth of Yazoo Pass, blocking the passageway. Cut this levee, now, let the Mississippi’s flooded waters enlarge the channel, and it should be possible to get gunboats and transports over into the Yazoo—in which case, with moderate luck, the expedition could steam far inland, reach the high ground many miles above the Confederate strongpoint at Snyder’s Bluff, and get in behind all of Vicksburg’s fortifications east of the city, the same area that could have been reached if the movement down the line of the Mississippi Central Railroad had gone according to plan. When he first came to the river Grant took note of this route, and he wrote to McClernand that “it is barely possible that Yazoo Pass might be turned to good account.” As soon as he had established himself at Young’s Point, he sent a staff member, Lieutenant Colonel James H. Wilson, up the river to do something about it.
Three projects, then, all being pushed hard as February went by, each one meaning much toil for the soldiers. The high water in the Mississippi was an eternal problem, and there were times when it seemed likely that floods would put an end to all canal-digging; the work had hardly begun when Sherman was glumly writing that “if the river rises 8 feet more—we would have to take to the trees,” and in the middle of February he confessed: “The river is about full and threatens to drown us out, the ground is wet, almost water, and it is impossible for wagons to haul stores from the river to camp, or even horses to wallow through.” In the end, indeed, the canal across the point came to nothing. Rising waters broke through the dam at the upper end, and instead of gouging out a deep channel the river simply spread all over the peninsula, submerging camps and forcing the troops to flee for their lives and causing the loss of many horses and much equipment. By the beginning of the second week in March it was clear that this canal was not going to be the answer.17
