by Bruce Catton
But first of all there was Vicksburg. Grant wanted it, not so much because it was a fortress that closed the Mississippi as because it contained a powerful army which had to be eliminated. He would take Vicksburg, and he would eliminate Pemberton’s army … but first, he had to get across the river; and, as the early Southern spring came to the great valley, Grant meditated, chewed his cigars, and stared into the hazy smoke in the headquarters cabin, evolving the plan that would get his army into a position where it could fight.
CHAPTER TWENTY
An End to Worry
Everything else had failed. Grant’s area of choice was so narrow that it seemed to offer little more than the chance to select one of two routes to probable disaster. He could go back to Memphis and start all over again, which was out of the question for political reasons, or he could risk everything (and lose everything too, more likely than not) in a massed assault on the works at Snyder’s Bluff. By military logic these were the only options that remained.
It was time, therefore, to go beyond military logic. As Grant reflected on the situation, one fact began to be clear: an army which lay west of a fortified river and wanted to fight an enemy east of that river might conceivably reach that enemy in the simplest way imaginable—by walking downstream until it was past the fortifications, crossing the river in boats, and then walking upstream on the eastern side. If nothing else would work perhaps this would be the solution.
It was the solution which Grant at last found, but it was not nearly as simple as it may look now. West of the river the ground was swampy, cut up with innumerable pesky watercourses—too wet to march across, not quite wet enough for steamboats. If it did march, the army could not cross the river without transports, and the Federals had none of these below Vicksburg. Once across, it would have intricate problems of supply; and, finally, the Confederates would be bound to see what was going on, and presumably they would have the time, the means and the strategic intelligence to take effective countermeasures. The last point was important: over-all command of Confederate forces in Mississippi and Tennessee was held now by General Joseph E. Johnston, a strategist for whom Grant had immense respect.
Nevertheless, there was no other solution which offered any hope at all; and, indeed, it appears that this notion of getting into the rear of Vicksburg by moving downstream had been in the back of Grant’s mind all winter. It appears, also, that he owed something to the presence in Louisiana, somewhere below the Confederate stronghold of Port Hudson, of the Federal army commanded by General Banks.1 Grant and Banks were supposed to co-operate in the opening of the Mississippi River, and Banks apparently was about to move against Port Hudson. If Grant could get downstream and join hands with him, his supply line could run upstream from New Orleans and everything would be a good deal simpler. On March 22, just as the Steele’s Bayou fiasco was approaching its melancholy conclusion, Grant sent Banks a letter.
The letter is interesting because it shows Grant thinking out loud. His plans were still in the process of formulation; he was almost (but not quite) ready to abandon the approach he had been following through the winter, but he had not yet settled on the program he would finally follow. It is as if, writing to Banks, he was groping toward the final solution, being led toward it by Banks’s mere existence in the lower Mississippi valley.
He would not, he explained, be able to put his army on the eastern shore of the river above Vicksburg; he could see, by now, that nothing was going to come of the move through the Yazoo country. He had not, however, quite given up on the notion of a direct assault: indeed, when he wrote to Banks he felt that this might be his only recourse. The Yazoo move failing, he wrote, “there is nothing left for me but to collect all my strength and attack Haynes’ [Snyder’s] Bluff. This will necessarily be attended with much loss, but I think it can be done.” (In this last remark Grant was expressing an optimism that quickly died: he did not continue to think it could be done or he would have tried it.) But, Grant wrote, if Banks could take Port Hudson, Grant could send troops down to meet him, Banks could bring up his own transports—he had Admiral Farragut on the lower river—and the united forces could go anywhere they chose. If Banks could not take Port Hudson, he could at least pin down a good many Confederate troops there. Grant would bring part or all of his army down, and between them they could pinch off Port Hudson and open the lower river.
The day after he wrote to Banks, Grant wrote to Farragut, offering a slight elaboration of the plan. If he could assemble enough light-draft steamers from the Ohio River, he told the admiral, he could move at least twenty thousand men down to the Red River by the Lake Providence route. (He had not quite given up on this plan, at this moment.) From the Red River it would be easy to get in touch with Banks, and for the united armies the progression from Port Hudson to Vicksburg would be comparatively simple.
But Grant had no sooner written to Farragut about the Lake Providence route than he was compelled to cancel this plan. The light-draft steamers he needed simply could not be had: he would need from forty to fifty of them to carry twenty thousand men, without counting the freighters needed to move ammunition, rations and ordnance; and the quartermaster’s people at St. Louis could not get their hands on a third of the required number.2 If Grant was to go down the river and meet Banks, his army would have to take the deceptively simple, potentially disastrous overland route down from Milliken’s Bend.
Below Milliken’s Bend, Louisiana is full of crescent-shaped bits of lost river bed brimming with stagnant water, all tied together by little watercourses which do not seem to lead anywhere in particular. Not far inland from Milliken’s Bend, a complicated chain of these began—Roundaway Bayou, Bayou Vidal, Lake St. Joseph, and the like, rimmed by muddy levees meant to keep the bottom land from ruinous floods, dotted here and there with plantations and, once in a great while, by a little town. This chain of bayous, lakes and swamps could with a little work be turned into a continuous, if shallow, waterway; if water from the Mississippi were then admitted, somewhere in the vicinity of Milliken’s Bend, the waterway should become deep enough to float tugboats, scows and perhaps some undersized steamboats; in which case the whole army could float down to a point on the Mississippi known as New Carthage, twenty miles below Vicksburg in a straight line, thirty-five miles downstream as the winding Mississippi flowed.
New Carthage might be exactly the spot Grant was looking for. It was safely below the Rebel batteries at Warrenton, and it was fifteen or twenty miles upstream from the other batteries at Grand Gulf. A Federal army at New Carthage (if it had transports, and some gunboats to guard the river crossing) could either move up and strike Warrenton or move down and strike Grand Gulf—or, for all anyone could tell, it might land on the eastern bank of the Mississippi somewhere between the two points, blotting out these riverside garrisons at its leisure.
The army would go to New Carthage, then—if it could get there. As March came to an end, McClernand was instructed to send out a detachment to explore the route, to clear it of any Confederate military elements that might be on hand, and to make possible the movement of the rest of the army.
Spearhead of the movement was the 69th Indiana infantry, accompanied by two companies of cavalry, a field battery and a detachment of engineers with a pontoon train: perhaps a thousand men, all told. The men started out on a clear spring morning, with a warm wind drifting north under a bright sun, and they remembered afterward that the fields were green, with flowers in bloom on occasional hilly slopes, and that it was good to be on the move after the tedious winter. What they did not know at the time—what nobody knew, unless Grant himself had a prevision of it—was that as their advance files moved away from the river and went tramping south in the end-of-March sunshine, the final doom of Vicksburg and of the Confederate cause in the West was beginning to take shape.
The movement went on at first without great difficulty. In the afternoon the soldiers drove Rebel patrols out of the village of Richmond, and the next day they went
on, following the watercourse. The engineers commandeered a scow on some plantation, turned it into a gunboat of sorts by erecting plank bulwarks and mounting a couple of howitzers, and with this odd craft (christened, for some reason no one could remember, Oppossum) and a flotilla of skiffs as its naval arm, the expedition moved on, and it pulled up at last on Smith’s plantation on the Bayou Vidal, two miles from the objective point, New Carthage.
Prospects here looked poor. There were breaks in the levee, and the surrounding country was badly flooded, so that New Carthage appeared to be an island. Still, if further reconnaissance must be made by boat, these soldiers had plenty of boats, and they had demonstrated that the route down from Milliken’s Bend, if difficult, was perfectly feasible. They went on to New Carthage, and they found that the foraging on the Louisiana plantations was excellent; when McClernand came down to join the advance the soldiers gave him a notable dinner of sweet potatoes, stewed chicken, and coffee laced with real cream. McClernand got more troops in motion, some guns were emplaced on the Mississippi levee, and Grant was given a progress report.3
Most of McClernand’s troops were still at Milliken’s Bend, but he had various regiments spread out over the whole thirty-mile route. As far as Smith’s plantation, he reported, the road was in fairly good shape, but beyond that point everything seemed to be mud and water, and there would be much work for the engineers. Grant digested all of this and notified Admiral Porter that he was going to need some gunboats. He believed that the inland waterway could be made passable for flatboats and tugs, and with these he should be able to cross the Mississippi; but to insure a safe landing on the eastern side he had to have the help of the Navy, since “without the aid of gunboats it will hardly be worth while to send troops to New Carthage, or to open the passage from here to there.”4
Porter was willing to do anything that was asked of him, but he wanted one thing made perfectly clear: once the gunboats ran downstream by the Vicksburg batteries, Grant would have passed the point of no return. Porter’s ironclads were those squat, ugly creations universally known as “Turtles,” and although they were exceedingly useful they had been sadly underengined. Going downstream they could run the batteries without much difficulty, but if they tried to come back upstream their progress against the current would be so very slow that the batteries might pound them to pieces.
You must recollect [Porter wrote] that when these gunboats once go below we give up all hopes of ever getting them up again. If it is your intention to occupy Grand Gulf in force, it will be necessary to have vessels there to protect the troops or quiet the fortifications now there. If I do send vessels below, it will be the best vessels I have, and there will be nothing left to attack Haynes’ Bluff, in case it should be deemed necessary to try it. It will require some little preparation to send these vessels below. Coal and provisions are wanted; they cannot well do without.
Grant’s mind was made up. He explained his reasons to Porter in a letter written on April 2:
I am satisfied that an attack upon Haynes’ Bluff would be attended with immense sacrifice of life, if not with defeat. This, then, closes out the last hope of turning the enemy by the right. I have sent troops through from Milliken’s Bend to New Carthage, to garrison and hold the whole route and make the wagon road good. At Richmond a number of boats were secured, which can aid in carrying subsistence from that point to New Carthage, and will also answer for ferrying any intermediate bayous. In addition to this, I have a large force working on a canal from the river to Willow [Walnut] Bayou, and in clearing this latter out. With this done, there will be good water communication from here to Carthage for barges and tugs. I have sent to St. Louis and Chicago for barges and tugs, and ordered all empty barges here to be fitted up for the transportation of troops and artillery. With these appliances I intend to be able to move 20,000 men at one time.
A final paragraph gave Porter a fuller insight into Grant’s plan:
Having then fully determined upon operating from New Carthage either by way of Grand Gulf or Warrenton, I am of the same opinion as when I addressed you a few days since, that is, that it is important to prevent the enemy from further fortifying either of these places. I am satisfied that one army corps with the aid of two gunboats can take and hold Grand Gulf until such time as I might be able to get my whole army there and make provision for supplying them. If necessary, therefore, I would send this number of troops as soon as the necessity for them was demonstrated. I would, admiral, therefore renew my request to prepare for running the blockade at as early a day as possible.5
At this moment, hardly any of the Federal commanders aside from Grant himself really believed in the new movement. Frank Blair recalled after the war that Grant had explained the operation to a conference of his generals and his staff just before the move began, and that all of them were opposed to it. Sherman, in particular, was disturbed; the whole thing was most unmilitary, he told Grant, and he did not think it could possibly succeed. Grant replied that he knew as well as anyone that the move was unmilitary, but that as far as he could see it was the only movement that had any chance at all; he then dismissed the council, and issued the formal orders that put McClernand’s troops on the road.
Some of the opposition unquestionably arose from the fact that it was McClernand who would be in the lead, carrying the heaviest share of responsibility. Nobody believed McClernand was quite up to it, and both Sherman and Porter warned Grant that he was taking a long chance in giving him the assignment. (Dana added his own remonstrance, and wrote to Stanton about it. For reply, he got a curt reminder from the Secretary that he was there strictly as an observer, not as a shaper of high policy: “Allow me to suggest that you carefully avoid giving any advice in respect to commands that may be assigned, as it may lead to misunderstandings and troublesome complications.”) In any case, the protests accomplished nothing. Grant pointed out that McClernand after all was the senior corps commander, that his corps was placed where it would logically take the advance, that McClernand was an especial favorite of the President, and that McClernand himself was highly in favor of the new campaign and could be counted on to do his best. Sherman remained unconvinced, and he sent Grant a long letter, urging him to cancel all of his plans, go back to Memphis, and start a new advance along the old line of the railroad, but Grant’s mind was fixed.6 He relied on Sherman more than on any other man, but this decision was his and his alone and he would stick to it. This new move was going to work … or else.
McClernand’s corps kept moving on, McPherson’s troops got ready to follow, and Porter prepared to take his gunboats down the river to help reduce Grand Gulf and guard the river crossing. It took time to assemble the flotilla and get it in proper shape, after the Steele’s Bayou expedition, and just as Porter had things ready a violent storm swept down the river, breaking steamers loose from their moorings and threatening to send warships, transports and supply vessels drifting down under the guns of the Vicksburg batteries; one officer remembered seeing Grant on the hurricane deck of a steamer, shouting orders as Army and Navy together fought to get the boats under control. In the end no great harm was done, but “the excitement while it lasted was equivalent to that of a first-class battle.”7
Porter made his preparations with care. He was using eight warships—seven regular gunboats and a ram which had been captured from the Confederates at Memphis the summer before—plus three ordinary river steamers loaded with stores. Each vessel had lashed to its starboard side a barge full of coal, leaving the port-side guns of the warships free to respond to the fire of the batteries. Water-soaked bales of hay and cotton were stacked around the otherwise unprotected boilers of the transports, and were banked up across the fragile sterns of the gunboats, to guard against raking shots. To ensure quiet, all steam exhaust pipes were led into the paddle boxes, and captains were ordered to proceed at low speed, letting the current do most of the work, until the Rebels discovered them and opened fire. Porter was so anxious to avoid noise that
he even ordered all poultry and pets to be sent ashore. There were to be no lights, except for dim signals carried astern, hooded so as to be invisible to the Confederates. Boats were to proceed in single file, at fifty-yard intervals, and each captain was to steer a little to one side of the boat ahead, so that if that boat should be wrecked he could go past it without changing course. Men were stationed at intervals in the holds of the steamers, ready to cram wadded cotton into shot holes in the hull.
The flotilla ran the batteries on the night of April 16; a clear night, with bright stars in a cloudless sky, but very dark down by the surface of the water. Nothing could be seen except the lights of Vicksburg itself, banked up on the bluff, visible over the top of the low point of land. It grew late, and one by one most of these lights blinked out, and the officers and men who waited felt that there was something theatrical about it all—the stage was black, but it would be brilliantly and violently lighted before long. Grant’s family was visiting him at this time, and Julia and the children were with him on the upper deck of the headquarters steamer, which had steamed down to a vantage point just safely beyond the range of the Vicksburg guns; and on this night when everything had a dramatic tinge, one observer, seeing the Grants behind the white railing, with staff officers standing near, thought at once of an oversized party in the proscenium box of a huge theater. Young Colonel Wilson sat in a chair near Mrs. Grant, with one of the smaller Grant children on his lap.
For a long time there was nothing to see, except the deeper patches of blackness by the invisible shores. Then, upstream, a massive shadow seemed to detach itself from the edge of the night and to come drifting slowly down the river; and behind it there was another shadow, similarly adrift, with another behind that—all noiseless, mysterious, seemingly utterly lifeless … and the people on the headquarters boat, and all of the other watchers on other boats and on the levees, became silent, so quiet and so tense that a newspaper correspondent noticed that when a man let the breath out of his lungs it sounded like a sob. The shadows drifted on; now the gunboats were rounding the point and drifting straight past the Vicksburg waterfront—and then, suddenly, there was a quick flash of light, and then another, from the Vicksburg hillside, as watchful Rebel gunners opened fire. Confederate pickets on the point set fire to some wrecked houses there, the flames threw a revealing red glare over the river, all of the batteries opened, and black smoke drifted down on the water, throbbing with enormous blows of sound. The child in Colonel Wilson’s lap whimpered, and clung closer to him, an arm about his neck. Mr. Dana, taking a detached interest in the drama, counted the reports of the cannon and said afterward he made note of 525. Grant chewed the end of a cigar and said nothing; downstream, Sherman came out on the river in a yawl to greet the survivors of this bombardment; and Admiral Porter stood on the open deck of his flagship and saw such a blaze of illumination along the Vicksburg batteries that he thought for a moment the city was on fire.8
