by Bruce Catton
Above everything else, Grant now wanted to keep Johnston from joining Pemberton, and his orders to McClernand set forth his anxiety: “It is evidently the design of the enemy to get north of us and cross the Black river and beat us into Vicksburg. We must not allow them to do this. Turn all your forces toward Bolton station and make all dispatch in getting there. Move troops by the most direct road from wherever they may be on receipt of this order.” Grant also took the time to write a wire to Halleck, telling him what had happened and explaining his refusal to try to meet Banks at Port Hudson with the all-sufficient remark: “I could not take the time.”24
Sherman was to remain in Jackson, destroying railroads, bridges, factories and military supplies—a task his soldiers performed with an uninhibited vigor that foreshadowed some of the things that would happen later on, in Georgia. Grant stayed in Jackson overnight, sleeping (as he was told) in the hotel room Johnston had occupied the night before. On the morning of May 15, Grant rode west to join McPherson.
Things were breaking for him. He knew where his enemies were and what they were planning, and his own army was posted where it could intervene effectively. The roads were muddy from the heavy rains, but the troops were in high spirits and went tramping along with enthusiasm. Reinforcements were near at hand: Frank Blair, with Sherman’s missing division, had crossed the Mississippi and was not a dozen miles away from Bolton. Also, while at Jackson Grant got final and significant assurance that he and he alone was boss of this army. Dana showed him a telegram just received from Secretary Stanton:
General Grant has full and absolute authority to enforce his own commands, and to remove any person who, by ignorance, inaction, or any other cause, interferes with or delays his operations. He has the full confidence of the Government, is expected to enforce his authority, and will be firmly and heartily supported; but he will be responsible for any failure to exert his powers. You may communicate this to him.25
Whatever might lie ahead, Grant knew that he no longer needed to handle McClernand with gloves on.
Pemberton, belatedly, was moving east to make a fight of it. With some 23,000 men he crossed the Big Black, proposing to go somewhere south of the railroad line to strike Grant’s rear. He moved reluctantly, and only after a council of war had considered the matter, for he believed that to cross the river was to invite defeat; and when he moved he left ten thousand men or more in the vicinity of Vicksburg, disregarding the fact that if he did fight Grant he would need to have his entire force on hand. When the move was well under way, Pemberton received a second order from Johnston to come north of the railroad so that his and Johnston’s forces could be united, and he was in the middle of this countermove when Grant’s troops began hurrying west.26 McClernand’s advance made contact with Pemberton’s forces southeast of Edwards Station on the morning of May 16, and the severest battle of the campaign soon began.
McClernand’s leading division was led by Brigadier General Alvin P. Hovey, a former Indiana lawyer who, as Dana remarked, devoted himself to soldiering “as if he expected to spend his life in it.” Hovey was marching directly west from Bolton, and when he found armed Confederates in his front he sent his mounted escort forward to see what was up. The Confederates were in position on a rugged plateau known as Champion Hill; Hovey shook out a skirmish line, sent it forward, and followed it with a regular line of battle.
Champion Hill rises one hundred and forty feet above the surrounding country, and has steep sides, cut up with ravines and little gullies, overgrown with dense woods. The fields which the approaching Federals had to cross were under sharp fire, and the country was so broken that it was almost impossible for Hovey or anyone else to tell just how the terrain lay or where the enemy was posted. Hovey’s infantry plowed straight ahead, moved six hundred yards up the slope and through the woods, seized some guns and a good bag of prisoners, and then met a furious Confederate counterattack which drove it back in some confusion. The 24th Iowa, which had seized a battery in a wild bayonet charge, promptly lost the guns and had to retreat; one of Hovey’s brigadiers described this part of the fight as “one of the most obstinate and murderous conflicts of the war,” another testified that it was an “unequal, terrible and most sanguinary” struggle, and Hovey sent back a desperate plea for reinforcements.27
The rest of McClernand’s corps was not on hand, but McPherson’s advance was coming up. John Logan’s division had gone into action on low ground off to Hovey’s right, at an angle; as a matter of fact it was out on the Confederate flank, posted so that a direct advance would have cut off Pemberton’s line of retreat, but nobody was quite aware of the fact. Grant, who had reached the scene, did not see it himself, and he sent one of Logan’s brigades over to help Hovey, following it a little later by telling Logan to bring over the rest of his men. Other reinforcements came up from McPherson’s second division, led today by Brigadier General Marcellus M. Crocker—a frail, tubercular man, whom Grant considered one of the best division commanders in the Army; a man who was often on the sicklist but never, as Grant testified, when a battle was developing.
The reinforcements went up the hill, picked up Hovey’s men just as they were about to be driven down the slopes, and moved on into action. For a time the battle was a formless melee in which, as one of Hovey’s officers said, Federals and Confederates took turns in driving one another. A colonel in one of Logan’s brigades wrote that the rifle fire was so intense that a staff officer who came forward to give him an order kept shading his eyes with his hand, precisely like a man who is facing into a driving rain. The Iowa regiment which had been driven away from the captured battery rallied, charged and retook the guns—and suddenly, by the middle of the afternoon, Pemberton’s army broke and moved off in rapid retreat. It was obviously half-demoralized; a division selected to act as rear guard got completely separated from the rest of the army, lost guns and men when it tried to move back along inadequate plantation roads, and finally went drifting off to the south and east, its baggage train and even its cooking utensils lost in the rout. It wound up, after an all-night march through the fringes of the Union camps, somewhere south of Jackson, and Pemberton saw it no more.28
Grant pushed his men on as long as the light lasted, and Pemberton got west of the Big Black, leaving a detachment to make a fight for the crossings. Pemberton was gloomy; as he had foreseen, he had run into a shattering defeat, and as he headed back for the Vicksburg lines he reflected that his career was in ruins. (Grant noted that even in defeat Pemberton played the wrong card: he could, said Grant, have made a night march, swung around to the north, and moved east to join Johnston. This would have given up Vicksburg but, said Grant, “It would have been his proper move … and the one Johnston would have made if he had been in Pemberton’s place.”) Grant was not satisfied with his own handling of the battle, for that matter. If he had been able to bring the rest of McClernand’s corps into action, he said, or if he had realized just how the land lay and so had used Logan’s division to the best advantage, he might have obliterated Pemberton’s whole army.29 As always, anything short of complete destruction of the enemy struck Grant as an imperfect victory.
But if the victory had been incomplete it was nevertheless decisive. Pemberton had lost 3800 men and 27 guns, his army was on the verge of demoralization, and, once and for all, he had been isolated and driven back into the fortress from which the rest of the Confederacy would be unable to extricate him. From now on, Johnston could do no more than hover on the perimeter of things. He wrote Pemberton that if the Yankees moved on and occupied the works at Snyder’s Bluff Vicksburg could not be held and he added: “If, therefore, you are invested in Vicksburg you must ultimately surrender. Under such circumstances, instead of losing both troops and place, we must, if possible, save the troops. If it is not too late, evacuate Vicksburg and its dependences and march to the northeast.”30
The victory had not been cheap. Federal casualties came to upwards of 2400 men. Hovey had lost a third of his enti
re division, and when he wrote his report he testified to the unleashed fury of the fighting his men had been through: “I cannot think of this bloody hill without sadness and pride.… It was, after the conflict, literally the hill of death.” Totaling his losses, he added: “I never saw fighting like this.”31
Next day was May 17, and Grant’s advance hurried up to the crossings of the Big Black. The Rebel rear guard was waiting, and the position was a tough one. A muddy bayou half filled with down timber ran from swamp to river directly across the front. The Confederates were entrenched behind it, the position could not be flanked, and to reach it the Federals would have to cross open fields devoid of cover and swept by rifle and artillery fire. But the defenders were hopelessly outnumbered, and the disaster at Champion Hill had left them in low spirits, while the Federal soldiers by now had the notion that they themselves were irresistible; they crowded forward in line of battle, two divisions from McClernand’s corps, and a brigade led by Brigadier General Michael Lawler went forward on the extreme right to see if this Confederate position was really as strong as it looked.
Lawler was one of the picturesque characters in this army; an enormous jovial man, in peacetime an Illinois farmer, so stout that he could not make a swordbelt go properly about his waist and so wore his sword suspended by a strap from one shoulder. A devout Catholic, he always said his prayers before going into battle, and then whooped his men forward so vigorously that Grant was moved to remark: “When it comes to just plain hard fighting I would rather trust old Mike Lawler than any of them.” Lawler was coatless today; he got impatient under the hot sun and the blistering rifle fire the Confederates were sending across the plain, and he decided to attack without waiting for orders. Swinging his sword and yelling mightily, he led his men across a cotton field into the muddy, shoulder-deep bayou, floundering up to the Rebel line in what a watching newspaper correspondent called “at the same time the most perilous and ludicrous charge I witnessed during the war.” Lawler’s men broke in the end of the Confederate line, and the other Federals who were waiting in support took fire from Lawler’s example and began to charge on their own account. Quite typical was the case of the 99th Illinois, which had been crouching under an annoying fire, whose colonel suddenly stood up and shouted: “Boys, it’s getting too damned hot here. Let’s go for the cussed Rebels!” Presently the entire Union line was advancing, and resistance ceased abruptly as the defenders set fire to their bridges and lit out for Vicksburg. Casualties in this unusual battle were comparatively light, but in their hasty retreat the Confederates lost fully 1700 men as prisoners, to say nothing of 18 guns. Mike Lawler proudly reported that his brigade captured 1120 Confederates—more men, he said, than the whole brigade took into action.32
While the soldiers began to improvise new bridges—out of cotton bales, old logs, and lumber gained by tearing down every building in the vicinity—Grant sent a hasty, exultant note to Sherman: “The enemy have been so terribly beaten yesterday and today that I cannot believe that a stand still will be made unless the troops are relying on Johnston’s arrival with large re-enforcements, nor that Johnston would attempt to re-enforce with anything at his command if he was at all aware of the present condition of things.” Sherman hurried to the front, and when darkness came the bridges were finished. Huge fires of pitch pine were built on each side of the river to give light, and Grant and Sherman sat together on a log and watched the army go west over the Big Black. In his old age Sherman recalled the endless moving lines of troops, smoke piling up from the bonfires to intensify the shadows of the night, firelight gleaming from the black water and touching red flecks of light from polished gun barrels, and he remarked that the whole made “a fine war picture.”33
During this battle of the Big Black there was an odd incident. Up to Grant came an officer from Banks’s command, bearing what Grant always remembered as a letter from Halleck, ordering Grant to drop everything, go back to Grand Gulf, and join forces with Banks. The officer who brought this message appears to have been Brigadier General William Dwight, and he was insistent that Grant return to the Mississippi at once. Grant remarked that the order came too late and that no one, in view of what had happened in the last few days, could expect him to retrace his steps now. Just then Mike Lawler’s charge began to move, and Grant galloped on to watch it, leaving the sputtering officer behind. Writing about it years later Grant remarked: “I saw no more of the officer who delivered the dispatch; I think not even to this day.”34
It makes a good story, and the only trouble is that the message which Dwight gave to Grant almost certainly was not an order from Halleck telling Grant to go back to Grand Gulf. Halleck very probably would have disapproved of Grant’s march inland if the plan had been submitted to him in advance, but when it actually took place Halleck seems to have adjusted himself to it with remarkably little fuss. The only message in the records that even remotely resembles the order Grant refers to is a mild dispatch which Halleck wrote on May 11, telling Grant that “if possible, the forces of yourself and of General Banks should be united between Vicksburg and Port Hudson so as to attack these places separately with combined forces.” It seems likely that General Dwight came up with a strong complaint from Banks himself; Banks was furious when he learned that Grant was not going to help him take Port Hudson, and he protested to Grant, to Halleck and to the unrelenting Heavens. The traditional picture of Grant on the field of victory defying the General in Chief can hardly be classed as anything much better than legend.35
In any case, the triumphant Federals pressed ahead, on May 18, and they came up at last to the fortifications that covered the land side of Vicksburg. These ran for miles, touching the hairpin bend of the great river just above the city and following the high ground to the east and south for eight or nine miles until they reached the muddy bottom lands below. Riding west on the road from Jackson, McPherson and his staff came out on a wooded ridge late in the afternoon and looked at the fortress they had marched so far to see; and the infantry moved on to take position in front of the trenches, while regimental bands jubilantly played “The Girl I Left Behind Me.”
Grant himself rode straight for the Yazoo river. It was the high ground on the left bank of this river that had been the objective of all of his maneuvering and marching and fighting—the Walnut Hills, that rose back of Chickasaw Bayou where Sherman’s men had made their unhappy fight five months ago and that went on all the way to Snyder’s Bluff. If Grant could win this high ground, gunboats and transports from the north could come up the Yazoo and unload men and supplies without limit; he would have a secure, permanent base and Vicksburg would be doomed. Johnston had just warned Pemberton that the city could not be held unless these hills were held. They were empty now, unguarded except for a few retreating Confederate skirmishers, and with Sherman at his side Grant rode to the top of the bluffs on May 19, and looked down at the looped course of the Yazoo; and Sherman, who had been skeptical from the moment this campaign was suggested, turned to him impulsively and blurted out his apology:
“Until this moment, I never thought your expedition a success. I never could see the end clearly, until now. But this is a campaign; this is a success if we never take the town.”
The sentimental outburst might come from Sherman; the rank and file would respond in its own way a couple of days later, and in the response there would be something everlastingly characteristic of this matter-of-fact aggregation of fighting men … who had somehow patterned themselves, just a little, on the man who commanded them. Grant got his troops posted where he wanted them, sent word to Admiral Porter that the transports and store ships could find good landing places along the Yazoo, got off a quick message to Halleck, and then went riding down just in the rear of the fighting lines. The soldiers, drawn up facing the powerful Confederate works, were quite impressed with themselves and with what they had done, but they were also hungry: living off the country was all very well, but during the last few days rations had been skimpy and une
ven, many soldiers had been on a straight meat diet, and it seemed to the men that what mattered most was that they were at last in contact with the army’s line of supplies … and as Grant rode along a private soldier looked up, saw him, and, in a conversational tone, said: “Hardtack.” Other soldiers looked up, recognized Grant, and took up the call; and very soon everyone in the vicinity was yelling “Hardtack! Hardtack!” at the top of his lungs … the Army of the Tennessee, saluting its general at the supreme moment of his greatest campaign.
Grant reined in and explained: a road was being built just back of the Union lines, steamboats were at the landing, and everything anybody needed would be issued directly. The men laughed and cheered, and that night the army wagons trundled past with hardtack and coffee for everybody. As Grant wrote, “The bread and coffee were highly appreciated.”36
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The Core of Iron
The Confederate Defenses covering Vicksburg were powerful. One of McPherson’s staff officers remembered how they looked when he rode in along the Jackson road: “A long line of high, rugged, irregular bluffs, clearly cut against the sky, crowned with cannon which peered ominously from embrasures to the right and left as far as the eye could see. Lines of heavy rifle-pits, surmounted with head logs, ran along the bluffs, connecting fort with fort, and filled with veteran infantry.” In front, on the slopes, was a tangle of fallen timber, tree-tops interlaced to make an almost impenetrable abatis. The officer confessed: “The approaches to this position were frightful—enough to appal the stoutest heart.”1
But the Federal Army was cocky, from Commanding General down to the men in the ranks. At Champion Hill they had seen Pemberton’s army streaming off in disorganized retreat, and the business at the crossings of the Big Black had been a stampede rather than a battle; these works might be strong, but the army that held them looked weak, and one quick, hard smash might settle matters. On May 19, after brief preliminary skirmishing, Grant ordered an assault—only to discover that even badly demoralized troops can recover their fighting edge quickly enough if they are put into solid fortifications and allowed to fight on the defensive. The assault failed—five stands of Federal colors were left lying on the slopes—and Grant spent the next two days perfecting his lines and making ready for a new, more comprehensive attack. He still believed that the Confederates were badly dispirited; he knew that Johnston was off to his rear somewhere, gathering strength for an attempt to come to Pemberton’s relief; and he did not propose to settle down to the long, wearing business of a siege if there was any chance to take the place by storm. He knew, too, that his own men were still confident, and he wanted to use their enthusiasm. On May 22 he had long lines of guns in position, and after a hard bombardment he ordered an attack all along the line—three army corps, Sherman’s and McPherson’s and McClernand’s, driving in on the Confederate works.
