Grant Moves South

by Bruce Catton

  Strong reinforcements were coming down from the north, and before long Grant had more than enough men to keep Pemberton’s force under complete control. Hurlbut at Memphis combed out the western Tennessee garrison to send new troops, a full division came from Missouri, and two divisions of the Ninth Army Corps were brought down from Kentucky. Admiral Porter with his gunboats guarded the Mississippi, sealing the western approaches. Frank Blair took a division on an expedition up the Yazoo, to clear out lurking Confederates and despoil the rich delta land of food and forage, and more than thirty thousand men, with Sherman in command, were sent to hold the open country between the Yazoo and the Big Black—the territory across which Joe Johnston would have to march if he came in to break the siege.

  With more than seventy thousand soldiers now on hand, Grant felt a new confidence. When a staff officer remarked that he feared Johnston might fight his way in to Vicksburg, Grant disagreed: “No, we are the only fellows who want to get in there. The Rebels who are in now want to get out, and those who are out want to stay out. If Johnston tries to cut his way in we will let him do it, and then see that he don’t get out. You say he has thirty thousand men with him? That will give us thirty thousand more prisoners than we now have.” Men in an Illinois regiment said that one evening Grant strolled out, sat down by a campfire, and “talked with the boys with less reserve than many a little puppy of a lieutenant.” Grant told the soldiers that everything was under control, said that “Pemberton was a northern man who had got into bad company,” and insisted that the Union position could be held even if the Confederates sent in a relieving column of fifty thousand men.13

  Off to the rear, Sherman kept a sharp eye on the crossings of the Big Black. At one crossing, where Rebel cavalry patrolled the eastern bank, Sherman detected a security leak, and he wrote to Rawlins about it; a plantation house on his side of the river was full of women, he said, wives and daughters of Confederate soldiers, and these were in constant communication with the cavalrymen across the river. “So,” said Sherman, “I moved them all by force, leaving a fine house filled with elegant furniture and costly paintings to the chances of war.” It occurred to Sherman that Grant might not approve of this ruthless deportation of civilians, and he gave Rawlins a note of warning: “These may appeal to the tender heart of our commanding general, but he will not reverse my decision when he knows a family accessible to the enemy—keen scouts—can collect and impart more information than the most expert spies. Our volunteer pickets and patrols reveal names and facts in their innocence which, if repeated by these women, give the key to our points.”

  Sherman need not have worried. Rawlins showed the letter to Grant, who promptly wrote to Sherman: “You need not fear, general, my tender heart getting the better of me, so as to send the secession ladies to your front; on the contrary, I rather think it advisable to send out every living being from your lines, and arrest all persons found within who are not connected with the army.”14

  The exchange of notes illustrates a profound difference between Grant and Sherman.

  Sherman was and remains famous as a hard man who believed in hard war. In his complex nature there apparently was some strain that vibrated to this note—something that led him to talk brutally about the brutal things which war obliged him to do. Over and over, from this moment to the time, years after the war, when he wrote his Memoirs, Sherman would dwell on the waste and destruction which his army inflicted on the people of the South; would dwell on it so enthusiastically that at times he actually exaggerated the harsh deeds done by the men in his command. Sherman was in most ways a tough realist, and yet far underneath he retained a touch of the romantic viewpoint in regard to war. He could talk about the grand and glorious game of war, could retain in his memory vignettes of light and shadow as fine war pictures, could see and appreciate the figure which he and his men were cutting; and in some way his habit of tough talk reflects this trait, as if his very sensitivity to the changing nature of war had brought it forth—as if, indeed, in an oddly inverted way he were a Middle Western Jeb Stuart who wore toughness instead of the horseman’s plume and scarlet-lined cape in order to cut a flourish.

  Grant’s nature was much simpler, and deeper. He had no liking at all for the cruel weight which modern warfare puts on the civilian, on all who are helpless and luckless enough to stand in its path, and he never wasted any words talking about it; but he could order the weight applied without the slightest hesitation when it seemed to him to be necessary. His concept of his role in the Civil War had become mature, in this campaign. Superior force had been put in his hands, and it was to be used not so much to win strategic victories as to destroy a nation. The richness of the Mississippi land had been taken to feed his army, during the march away from Grand Gulf, but it would have been well to take it even if his army had not been hungry, because this richness was a military target in itself: it helped to support the fabric of a nationhood which the North was sworn to obliterate. Sherman could, and did, write graphically about the cruelty of driving helpless women out of a good home which must be left to the prankish destructiveness of hard-handed soldiers; Grant was the one who calmly suggested that instead of removing one family the army ought to drive every family out of whole counties. Of the two men, the one who had the direct vision and the real core of iron was Grant.

  Early in June there was one little incident to interrupt the even course of Grant’s way. Just what happened is obscure, and the matter is of no importance anyway, since whatever actually happened did not prolong the resistance of the Vicksburg garrison by as much as five minutes, or cost the life of one Union soldier, or give to either Pemberton or Johnston an opening that could be used. But because it fits into the deathless legend of Grant as a hard drinker it survives.…

  Grant went up the Yazoo to see how operations there were coming on, and according to the newspaper correspondent Sylvanus Cadwallader he had much too much to drink on a headquarters steamer, took a wild, breakneck ride across country, and was at last, by Cadwallader, with much difficulty, got under control and brought back to headquarters in an army ambulance. At headquarters, said Cadwallader, a thin-lipped, censorious Rawlins met the ambulance, saw Grant safely to bed, and then turned on Cadwallader in a fury and demanded: “I want you to tell me the exact facts—all of them—without any concealment. I have a right to know them, and I will know them.” So Cadwallader told Rawlins the facts, which—as the reporter put them down later—involved a horrendous two-day binge which narrowly missed being a scandal for the whole army.

  It makes a gaudy tale. The difficulty with it is that it does not jibe with a letter which was written at the time by Rawlins himself; differs with it so much, indeed, that it is not possible to accept both Cadwallader and Rawlins as witnesses in the matter.

  At one o’clock in the morning on June 6, Rawlins wrote Grant a subsequently famous letter, beginning: “The great solicitude I feel for the safety of this army leads me to mention, what I had hoped never again to do, the subject of your drinking.” Rawlins then went on to say that he might possibly be “doing you an injustice by unfounded suspicion”; still, he had been informed that Grant had recently had a glass of wine at Sherman’s headquarters, he himself had that very day discovered a box of wine in Grant’s tent and had been told, by Grant, that it was being saved to celebrate the eventual capture of Vicksburg; and, finally, on this very evening “I find you where the wine bottle has just been emptied, in company with those who drink and urge you to do likewise.” This was bad; and, Rawlins continued, “the lack of your usual promptness and decision, and clearness in expressing yourself in writing conduces to confirm my suspicion.” More in sorrow than in anger, Rawlins recalled that Grant had promised two months earlier to drink no more during the present campaign, and he wrote sadly: “If my suspicions are unfounded, let my friendship for you and my zeal for my country be my excuse for this letter.”

  Years after the war Captain John M. Shaw of the 25th Wisconsin Infantry, a Galen
a man who had known Rawlins well before the war, read the text of this letter in a public address. The copy which he had, he said, bore an endorsement in Rawlins’s hand:

  This is an exact copy of a letter given to the person to whom it is addressed at its date, about four miles from our headquarters in the rear of Vicksburg. Its admonitions were heeded and all went well.—JOHN A. RAWLINS.15

  The Rawlins letter is moving, and it seems clear enough that somebody around headquarters had been doing some drinking; but Rawlins’s letter makes no sense at all if the Cadwallader story is true. Rawlins speaks of his possibly “unfounded suspicions,” of finding Grant in the company of men who had been tipping the bottle, and so on; but according to Cadwallader, Rawlins had direct, immediate knowledge of a colossal drunk that could not conceivably be referred to in the terms Rawlins used. The spree could not have taken place after delivery of the letter, either: Rawlins’s endorsement is explicit. In his dealings with Grant, Rawlins was never at any time mealy-mouthed. That letter and its endorsement simply could not have been written if Rawlins himself had seen Grant brought back from a forty-eight-hour drunk in an ambulance and had immediately thereafter been given a detailed, firsthand description of the whole business. It is extremely hard to see how the Cadwallader story can be classed as anything but one more in the dreary Grant-was-drunk garland of myths.

  It is not necessary, in writing this story off, to try to portray Grant as a steadfast teetotaler. The simple truth apparently is that, like most other officers of that generation, he occasionally wanted, and took, a drink, and then went on about his business. After the war an officer on George Thomas’s staff said that at about this time he was visiting briefly at Grant’s headquarters. The day was hot and dry, and the visitor had a certain thirst, but there did not seem to be any whisky about the place; people explained quietly that the stuff was outlawed because “Rawlins is death on liquor.” Finally, however, after dark, the visitor found himself in a tent with a surgeon, who produced a bottle of rye, poured some into a tin cup, and put the cup on a cracker box for the guest. Just then there were footsteps outside, someone fumbled with the tent flap, and the surgeon muttered “It’s Rawlins!” Then the flaps opened and Grant appeared. Without a word he reached for the cup, drained it, replaced it and went away. Years later, the officer said, he met Grant on a train, and Grant asked him if he remembered that little occasion. When the officer replied, “Perfectly,” Grant said: “I don’t think I ever wanted a drink so much, before or after.”16

  It makes a great stir and it means very little. All that matters is the fact that the Commanding General of this army continued to draw an increasingly tight line around Vicksburg and its defenders. From Porter’s gunboats and mortar boats and from the land batteries, intermittent bombardments struck the city and its defenses. Lacking coehorn mortars to toss shells into the enemy trenches, Grant’s infantrymen made usable imitations out of wood, boring short logs to take 6- or 12-pound shells and binding the logs with stout iron bands. Once, the Confederates approached the river on the Louisiana side and made a spirited attack on the troops around Milliken’s Bend; they were driven off, after a sharp fight, in which the fire of a couple of gunboats proved decisive, and Grant noted that some of his new Negro soldiers fought here and, for raw troops, behaved very well.17

  Pemberton grew increasingly despondent. He sent Johnston a message expressing doubt that he could cut his way out, as Johnston had been hoping he could do, and saying that even if he succeeded Vicksburg itself and many men would be lost; in his despair, he suggested a fantastic expedient. Grant, he said, did not know how many men Johnston had or what his plans were; he might, if approached properly, agree to let the whole Vicksburg army march out with its guns and equipment, taking the city and fortifications as a gift and, in return, letting the defenders go scot free. Pemberton did not see how he himself could send such a proposal to Grant, but he thought Johnston could. Johnston contented himself by replying coldly that if there were to be any negotiations with Grant, they must be made by Pemberton.18 It is hardly necessary to remark that Grant would have listened to no such proposition. From first to last it was the army he wanted rather than the city.

  Grant’s confidence was running high. On June 15 he wrote to a friend that “all is going on here now just right,” and he went on to specify:

  We have our trenches pushed up so close to the enemy that we can throw hand grenades over into their forts. The enemy do not dare show their heads above the parapets at any point, so close and so watchful are our sharpshooters. The town is completely invested. My position is so strong that I feel myself abundantly able to leave it so and go out twenty or thirty miles with force enough to whip two such garrisons.

  Johnston, said Grant, could not force his way in unless he could muster “a larger army than the Confederacy have now at any one place.”

  Having written all of this, Grant apparently felt that he may have sounded vainglorious, for he added: “This is what I think but do not say it boastingly, nor do I want it repeated or shown.”19

  An even surer sign of Grant’s confidence was the fact that he finally relieved McClernand of his command and sent him back to Illinois. He had come close to doing this when the May 22 attacks ended so badly, but had concluded it would be better to let McClernand stay until Vicksburg fell and then quietly ease him out;20 but McClernand’s injudicious order of congratulation to the 13th Corps got into the papers in mid-June—not without some assistance from McClernand’s headquarters—and that was the end. The order infuriated both Sherman and McPherson, who felt that McClernand was reaching out for glory at the expense of their commands, and they immediately sent Grant vigorous letters of protest. Sherman wrote bitterly that the order was really addressed, not to the soldiers, “but to a constituency in Illinois,” and McPherson agreed that it was designed “to impress the public mind with the magnificent strategy, superior tactics and brilliant deeds” of McClernand. Unfortunately for McClernand, in getting his order into the papers he had violated a standing War Department regulation which stipulated that such papers must be submitted to army headquarters before publication. This congratulatory order had not been submitted. Grant sent McClernand a note, asking if the order as published was genuine, and when McClernand replied that it was and that he was prepared to stand by it, Grant had Rawlins draw up an order of dismissal. This order, dated June 18, read as follows:

  Major General John A. McClernand is hereby relieved from the command of the Thirteenth Army Corps. He will proceed to any point he may select in the state of Illinois and report by Letter to Headquarters of the Army for orders.

  The order added that Major General E. O. C. Ord would replace McClernand as corps commander.

  Rawlins drafted the order and got it signed after working hours, and Grant supposed that it would be given to McClernand the next morning. But Colonel Wilson returned to headquarters sometime after midnight, and when Rawlins told him about it the two staff men agreed that the order ought to be served without any delay whatever. Headquarters expected the Vicksburg garrison to attempt a sortie at any time. The sortie would very probably hit the lines held by McClernand; McClernand would fight, and he had a good, fighting corps; and once the fighting began Grant would probably suspend or even cancel the order of removal. It had better be delivered while it was hot.

  So Wilson got the Provost Marshal, a sergeant and four enlisted men, donned his own best uniform, and rode off to McClernand’s headquarters, arriving about two in the morning and demanding that the General be aroused. McClernand received him, after some delay; he could be punctilious about the formalities, too, and Wilson found him in full uniform, seated behind a table in his tent, two candles burning, general’s sword lying on the table in front. With the Provost Marshal and his squad drawn up outside, Wilson handed the letter across the table, remarking that he was instructed to see that the General read it and understood it. McClernand adjusted his glasses, scanned the paper, and burst out: “Well sir
! I am relieved!” He paused, and added: “By God sir, we are both relieved!”21

  McClernand went back to Illinois, remarking that since he had been appointed by the President he did not think a mere major general could dismiss him, but that with the army in the immediate presence of the enemy he would not linger to make a point of it. From Illinois he wrote vigorously—to Halleck, to Stanton and to Lincoln himself—demanding a reversal, an accounting, a court of inquiry, any official action that would restore the bright promise of the last autumn. He could get nowhere, and in the following September, with the Vicksburg campaign long since ended and the participants gone on to other things, he sent Halleck a letter complaining that Grant’s report of the campaign did him grave injustice. He showed his fangs over this, writing:

  How far General Grant is indebted to the forbearance of officers under his command for his retention in the public service so long, I will not undertake to state unless he should challenge it. None know better than himself how much he is indebted to that forbearance. Neither will I undertake to show that he is indebted to the good conduct of officers and men of his command at different times for the series of successes that have gained him applause rather than to his own merit as a commander, unless he should challenge it, too.22

  It did no good. Grant challenged nothing, and Washington—holding perhaps the view that a general who had twice captured entire armies might have some asset besides the forbearance of his officers and the good conduct of his men—buried the protests deep in the War Department files. Ord took over the 13th Corps, McClernand simmered the summer away in Illinois, and the Army of the Tennessee got on with the siege.