by Bruce Catton
The Lake Providence scheme seemed more promising, and, although in the end it accomplished nothing, some of the people who worked on it at least got a little fun out of the job. Early in February, the soldiers spent ten days hauling a river tugboat a mile and a half overland from the Mississippi into Lake Providence. The idea back of this was to find a navigable passage through the connecting swamps into navigable river channels, but various generals and their staffs managed to make some use of the boat for festive cruising. One soldier who was assigned to duty on this vessel wrote that McPherson liked to get friends aboard of an evening, with a regimental band, and go cruising up the lake to a landing at a back-country plantation which had an excellent wine cellar. The boat would come puffing back long after midnight, whistle blowing, band playing, moonlight shining on the black water, mysterious shadows lying under the half-submerged trees on either hand. Men who could not join in these cruises found Lake Providence pretty, and discovered that it was full of fish. The swamps, unfortunately, were full of trees and submerged stumps which had to be removed, and up-rooting a stump whose base was eight feet under water took some doing. In addition, it began to be clear that even if a passage could be opened Grant could not get enough light-draft steamers to carry his army down to the Red River anyway, and the Lake Providence venture slowed down to a halt about the time Sherman’s canal had to be abandoned.18
That left Yazoo Pass, which was both the most promising and, in the end, the most exasperating venture of the lot.
Like all of these attempts to create a new channel for steamboats, this called for a great deal of very hard work, all of it performed by enlisted men who had come down here with the notion that they were going to fight Rebels. The pass itself, which led from the cut levee into the Coldwater, was deep enough for ocean liners, but it was very narrow, and there were lush forests on each bank. Rebel working parties had come in and had felled scores of trees, some of them four feet through the trunk, dropping them so that they lay completely across the river. Wilson, who had the working details in hand, found that the best way to get these out was to haul them out by hand, and he borrowed hawsers from the Navy and put whole regiments to work, five hundred men tailing onto one cable to drag a tree up on the bank. It worked, he said, better than one would expect. After watching it, he never wondered how the ancient Egyptians had moved the ponderous stones they put into the pyramids; put enough men on a rope and you could move anything. In a short time he was telling Grant that “no one here entertains a doubt of our being able to work through,” and Galena’s Russ Jones, still trying to turn an honest dollar by a cotton deal (and balked by Grant’s refusal to permit any trade whatever below Helena), wrote enthusiastically about the work to Congressman Washburne, predicting that “Grant will get Vicksburg before he quits.”19
By the end of February the way into the Coldwater was open, and an imposing flotilla moved in—two ironclad gunboats and divers lighter naval craft, under the Navy’s Lieutenant Commander Watson Smith, and twenty-two light transports carrying forty-five hundred soldiers under Brigadier General Leonard F. Ross. As this expedition moved forward, Grant’s hopes rose, and his ideas of what could be accomplished grew larger. He had hoped, originally, at least to clean out certain Confederate warships which were supposed to be lurking, or under construction, somewhere in the Yazoo, and to break the railroad bridges over the Yalobusha River at Coffeeville—the town that had marked the southern limit of his advance when he came down the Mississippi Central in December. The Confederates were repairing that much-abused railroad, and seemed likely to strike north along that route into Tennessee, to compel Grant to send troops back from before Vicksburg; and Grant notified Admiral Porter that if the bridges could be destroyed “it would be a heavy blow to the enemy and of much service to us.” Now it seemed likely that the whole campaign could be based on this Yazoo River move, with the entire army getting in to the high ground northeast of Snyder’s Bluff; Grant ordered a second division moved up to support Ross, and told McPherson to be prepared to follow with his entire corps.20
However, there were problems. The Mississippi was much higher than the connecting streams, and when the levee was cut a powerful current came through; gunboats and transports spun end for end, often being swept into the banks where trees wrecked their upper works. Floating trees came down with the current to batter the boats’ hulls, and now and then the flotilla would run into a tangle of driftwood, uprooted trees and old logs which two days’ labor would hardly clear. Commander Smith found the business a nightmare, and Admiral Porter wrote later that this officer—understandably, perhaps—was showing “symptoms of aberration of mind.” Smith was a deep-water sailor, used to handling a vessel off soundings in the open ocean; here he was in a narrow, twisting river, where overhanging trees knocked down smokestacks and stumps punctured hulls, cruising in what looked like an unbroken wilderness. Even after the flotilla got into the Coldwater it took six days to go thirty miles, and by the time the Tallahatchie was reached all of the vessels were more or less battered. One of the ironclads had hit a snag and had a hole in her bottom, with a patch held in place by beams shored in from the deck above; one of the lighter gunboats was wholly disabled with a wrecked paddle wheel, and the commander was wishing he had never heard of the State of Mississippi. And finally, when the expedition approached the Yazoo itself, the Confederates were waiting, prepared to fight in a constricted spot where proper naval maneuvering was quite impossible.
Some two hundred miles in from Yazoo Pass the Tallahatchie makes a wide horseshoe loop to the east, with a little town named Greenwood lying at the eastern end of the loop, just where the Yalobusha river joins the Tallahatchie. The two rivers together form the Yazoo, and it swings back west to complete the loop, leaving a neck of land no more than a quarter of a mile wide; and on this neck the Confederates had built Fort Pemberton out of cotton bales and heaped-up earth, with several fieldpieces, one heavy rifle and a few lighter rifles in position. The Tallahatchie flowed down to this fort in a straight reach. The gunboats had to come in head-on, and there was just room for two boats to fight abreast; and on March 11 Commander Smith took a last doubtful look at the layout and brought in his ironclads, De Kalb and Chillicothe, to begin the fight.
Fort Pemberton had been hastily built, completed just before the warships appeared, and it was of no great strength. But Smith could bring only a fraction of his strength to bear, the Rebel gunners were firing straight down the alley at him, and in a short time both gunboats were put out of action. Patchwork repairs were made, and the warships renewed the action two days later, but the results were no better; the fort was knocked about but her guns remained in service, the gunboats were badly hammered, and by March 17 the bombardment was called off. The gunboats could not silence Fort Pemberton so that the transports could run by, and it was impossible to land troops and take the place by storm because all of the land thereabouts was under water; and when the supporting division came down the river it found the whole expedition steaming back up the Tallahatchie en route to Helena. Commander Smith, who had been in bad health to begin with, collapsed and had to go back to a hospital—in which, a little later, he died—and by the end of March the movement was an obvious failure.
Young Colonel Wilson fumed angrily, and wrote furious letters to Rawlins, back at Young’s Point. “To let one 6½-inch rifle stop our Navy. Bah!” he sputtered. Commander Smith, he insisted, was not quite the equal of Lord Nelson: he was responsible for the failure of the expedition, “for no other reason than his timid and slow movements.” The thing would not work unless the Navy cleared the way; the Army could always get through, in time, but “if the land forces are required to stop at every point of importance and reduce it by a siege, how long do you think it will require them to reach Yazoo City?” He grew darkly pessimistic: if this move failed—and its failure was apparent—the whole Vicksburg operation would become of secondary importance, Rosecrans and his Army of the Cumberland would get the play, and
Grant might find himself compelled to send fifty or sixty thousand men to help some other general win a reputation.21
To Grant came the discouraging word that the expedition was hung up. Along with it came reports that Pemberton was sending troops to the Tallahatchie, hoping to block the river upstream and trap gunboats, transports, soldiers and all in a net from which they could not escape. Grant took counsel with Admiral Porter, who set about it to see if there might not be some other way into that unattainable stream, the Yazoo River.
Porter was a salty character, of the bluff-seadog persuasion; a stocky, bearded man with a rough sense of humor and an innocent fondness for spinning tall tales, a man with enough drive and force to satisfy even the impatient young Colonel Wilson. He had originally had a profound distrust of West Pointers, and hoped to work with generals who had been appointed from civilian life, but Sherman and McClernand between them had cured him of this; Sherman he liked and could work with, but McClernand he considered utterly impossible, and he now was developing a great liking for Grant. He went to work energetically, and he presently found a way into the Yazoo—a tangled, roundabout but possibly feasible route which led up through a backwater called Steele’s Bayou.
Steele’s Bayou entered the Yazoo five miles up from the place where the Yazoo flowed into the Mississippi. Gunboats and transports could ascend the Yazoo to that point without difficulty; the frowning Confederate works that barred passage up the Yazoo were at Snyder’s Bluff, six or eight miles farther upstream. Steele’s Bayou was nothing much, but—like all other waterways in this half-flooded delta country—it had important connections. Forty miles from the place where it emptied into the Yazoo it led into a chain of sloughs and forgotten streams—Black Bayou, Deer Creek and something called Rolling Fork—and these, after a time, led to the Sunflower River, a substantial stream which flowed leisurely south for fifty miles and then joined the Yazoo, well above Snyder’s Bluff. The waterway was excessively complicated, and the connecting creeks and bayous were narrow, inordinately crooked, and full of trees, and all in all it was a good two hundred miles by this channel from Young’s Point to Snyder’s Bluff, although these places were not twenty miles apart in an air line; but if the high ground along the Yazoo was the objective, and if the Yazoo Pass outfit could not get by Fort Pemberton—which was obviously the case—then this was the only chance. Grant and Porter spent a day looking at the lower reaches of this waterway from the deck of a gunboat, and then Grant gave the orders: Porter would force his way through, and Sherman and a division of his army corps would follow.
If the lamented Commander Smith had found the Yazoo Pass route nightmarish, he would have been utterly unable to find words to describe this Steele’s Bayou business: it was so impossible it made the northern approach look simple. Porter went ahead, hammering his way through channels where his ironclads had to act like modern-day tanks, butting trees out of the way, in channels so crooked that at times five warships, steaming along nose to tail, would be headed in five different directions. Half a mile an hour was good progress. Rebel sharpshooters infested the surrounding forest and sniped at all sailors who showed themselves, and the trees grew so close to the channel that a plague of squirrels, raccoons, fledgling birds and lesser wildlife dropped from the branches onto the boats’ decks and had to be swept overside with brooms. In all his years of going to sea Porter had never met anything quite like this. In one intricate little stream, he found his flagship, which had a 42-foot beam, moving in a channel no more than 46 feet wide. Bridges spanned the watercourse here and there, and had to be butted down by main strength; now and then a gunboat would get hung up, wedged firmly between two trees, immobilized until the crew could get axes and cut through the thick trunks.
Things got worse. Porter at last reached a spot where hundreds of limber saplings grew out of the bed of the stream, bringing his already slow progress down to the merest crawl; and as the steamer puffed away, making a few feet in an hour’s time, he began to hear, far behind him, the sound of many men chopping away with axes—Confederate working parties in the rear, felling trees across the river so that the Yankee flotilla, unable to advance any farther, could never get back by the way it had come. It seemed quite likely that the whole fleet would be lost in the middle of a forest.
In the end Sherman came to the rescue, marching troops up along the banks, driving the Confederate working parties away, and enabling Porter to extricate his luckless little fleet. Rudders were unshipped and the ironclads were hauled out stern-to, all of them more or less damaged, everyone aboard from Porter down to the most humble powder-monkey worn out and disillusioned. The Steele’s Bayou venture had been the worst failure of the lot. Army and Navy by mutual consent abandoned all further attempts to get into the Yazoo. If Vicksburg were ever taken, it would be taken by some other approach than this one.22
Now it was past mid-March, and the entire Vicksburg operation had come to a dead end. Grant had had high hopes—a week earlier he had written to Washburne that “the Yazoo pass expedition is going to prove a perfect success,” and he had proudly assured the Congressman that “we are going through a campaign here such as has not been heard of on this continent before.” The men were in good health and good spirits: “The health of this command is a subject that has been very much exagerated by the press. I will venture the assertion that there is no army now in the field showing so large a proportion of those present with their command being for duty. Really our troops are more healthy than could possibly have been expected with all their trials.” But Pemberton’s army was still out of reach, and Grant confessed in a letter to the distant General Banks, far downstream, that “there is nothing left for me but to collect all my strength and attack Snyder’s Bluff. This will necessarily be attended with much loss, but I think it can be done.” To Congressman Washburne came a doleful letter from his brother, General Cadwallader Washburn:
This campaign is being badly managed. I am sure of it. I fear a calamity before Vicksburgh. All Grant’s schemes have failed. He knows that he has got to do something or off goes his head. My impression is that he intends to attack in front.… As one after another of the schemes fail, I hear that he says he has a plan of his own which is yet to be tried in which he has great confidence.23
If Grant had a new plan it was time to try it. He had been on the river for two months, and Vicksburg was no nearer falling now than when he came.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The Man on the River
Charles A. Dana had been around. New Hampshire-born and Harvard-educated, he had spent five years in the famous Brook Farm colony, where he wrote essays, sang in the choir, gave lectures, taught various classes and displayed a bump of practical common sense so uncommon among the precious colonists that he was made one of the managing trustees. After Brook Farm evaporated he went into journalism and in 1847 started to work for the New York Tribune, where he developed powerful talents as an editor and soon was second in command to Horace Greeley. Meanwhile, he traveled in Europe, compiled a best-selling volume of poetry, and began work on the very successful American Cyclopaedia. He resigned from the Tribune in the spring of 1862 when he found the convolutions of the Greeley line in respect to the conduct of the war too hard to follow.
In this varied experience Dana had seen all sorts and conditions of men and had shown the ability to render judgments on them, and now he was supposed to tell Secretary Stanton and President Lincoln all about U. S. Grant. The world had not yet shown him anyone quite like Grant, and Dana was about to have a broadening experience—which, in the end, would be of service to himself, to the administration, and to Grant as well.
Dana was coming out to the Mississippi this spring as a sort of high-class spy for the Secretary of War. He carried a letter of appointment specifying that, as a special commissioner of the War Department, he was to investigate and report on the condition of the pay service in the Western Armies, but in actual fact he was supposed to report on Grant. Both the President and the
Secretary of War had their doubts, they were getting many complaints, they wanted a man on the spot who could tell them just what Grant was like and what he was up to, and in the latter part of March Dana reached Memphis prepared to enlighten them. General Hurlbut, commanding at Memphis, gave him a quick fill-in on Grant’s progress, or lack of progress, down to date; but what could be learned at Memphis was secondhand and fragmentary, and Stanton presently directed Dana to go to Grant’s headquarters, stay there as long as he wished, and get the facts at first hand. Dana appeared at Milliken’s Bend on April 6, took up quarters on a steamboat that was moored by the levee, noted that the countryside was lush with roses, magnolias, Osage orange and stately trees, but desolate because all of the slaves had vanished and the fields were untilled, and got down to work.
The exact nature of his mission was one of the most poorly kept secrets of the Civil War. Grant and his staff knew all about it before Dana arrived, and some of the staff members argued that this War Department emissary ought to be thrown into the river on arrival. Rawlins took a different line, however, insisting that Dana be received and treated with proper hospitality, and Grant himself seemed to be glad Dana was present. If Dana was going to be sending daily progress reports to the Secretary of War Grant himself would not have to write nearly so many letters; also, Grant had nothing to hide, and in no time Dana found himself a member of the family, with access to all of the top-secret plans.1
Dana was about to have an experience—the experience of seeing Grant as a plain, seemingly unremarkable man who somehow, in a wholly indefinable way, conveyed an impression of solidity and capacity. He did not really seem a great man; like most people who saw him at close range, Dana felt compelled to make that point; and it is clear that this polished Easterner who had traveled so widely and known so many men was just a little baffled by what he was looking at now. Years afterward, Dana tried to sum up his impressions of Grant, and his words are obviously the words of a man who has rubbed elbows with someone profoundly out of the ordinary but who cannot quite say just how or why he was so impressed.
