by Bruce Catton
Summer was coming, the hot sun blistered the long lines of trenches, water was scarce and hard to get, and between Confederate sharpshooters and the nightly pick-and-shovel details the soldiers were having hard enough times. From the North came well-intentioned visitors, bringing parcels of food—poultry, usually, a drug on the market in this army which had lived on Mississippi chickens so long that it actually preferred ordinary salt pork and hard bread.23 On the picket lines, Yank and Reb discussed the progress of the siege, traded coffee and hardtack for tobacco, and now and then sent personal messages back and forth: the brother-against-brother legend would grow hackneyed, with the passage of years, but it was a literal reality here. Each army contained regiments from Missouri, and one day the men on one part of the front stopped firing so that a Missourian in one of the Union regiments could walk across and see his brother, who served Missouri in a Confederate regiment … the Northern brother wanted to hand over some greenbacks for the Southern brother to send home to the old folks.24
Federal trenches grew wide and deep, designed so that a column of fours could march through in safety. The approaches crept closer and closer to the Rebel lines, and the Federals’ amateur engineers busily dug tunnels and planted mines. On June 25 a mine was exploded under a Confederate strongpoint near the Jackson road; it blew off the top of a hill, but did no serious harm. Another mine was exploded on July 1. Inexplicably, it tossed a Negro cook all the way into the Union lines (he landed more or less unhurt, and wound up with a job in John Logan’s headquarters) and created a dusty hollow which Union soldiers occupied for twenty-four hours and then abandoned.25
This mine warfare accomplished little but symbolized much. It meant that the Union lines were being brought so close to the defensive works that before long the Union advantage in numbers would become decisively effective. Pemberton’s lines would simply be swamped. What could not be done on May 22, when assault troops had to run forward for a quarter of a mile under heavy fire, could certainly be done at moderate cost once the attackers were close enough to blow the defensive works apart and then charge in through the dust cloud. In front of Sherman’s corps, the engineers began a new tunnel, working day and night to put a mine under a Confederate salient. The heat was oppressive, especially in the cramped, unventilated mine shaft, and the soldiers toiled in six-hour shifts; twenty-eight feet below the Rebel trench, they would plant twenty-two hundred pounds of gunpowder, tamped in with sandbags, ready to explode whenever Grant ordered a final attack.26
This attack would come, according to headquarters planning, on July 6. Johnston, meanwhile, had plans of his own. He had thirty-two thousand men by now, and as June ended he began to move toward the Federal lines, maneuvering toward the south in the hope of flanking the formidable fieldworks which ran cross-country from the Big Black to the Yazoo. He proposed to make an attack on July 7. He did not think this would drive the Federals away, but it might create enough of a diversion so that Pemberton could cut his way out of Vicksburg and save most of his army.
Pemberton was trying to find out whether such a thing was physically possible, and he circularized his generals to ask if their men could stand a fight and a long hard march. The replies he got were not encouraging. Duty had been hard, rations had been poor, there had been much sickness and men had had to remain in the trenches when they should have been on the sicklist; they could probably hold the lines a while longer, but a field campaign was just about out of the question. The Federal rifled artillery spoke with power; only the most massive earthworks offered any protection—rifled shell could drive through parapets sixteen feet thick—and the periodic Federal cannonades brought the Confederate Army nearer and nearer to exhaustion. Water was so scarce that sentinels were posted around wells, so that “none might be wasted for purposes of cleanliness.” Brigadier General Louis Hebert probably spoke for most of Pemberton’s subordinates when, in his final report, he summed up the things that had ground his men down until they were incapable of field service:
“Forty-eight days and nights passed in the trenches, exposed to the burning sun during the day, the chilly air of night; subject to a murderous storm of balls, shells and war missiles of all kinds; cramped up in pits and holes not large enough to allow them to extend their limbs; laboring day and night; fed on reduced rations of the poorest kinds of food, yet always cheerful …”27
In plain terms, the men had had it. They could not possibly break out; they could not even stay where they were very much longer; and the next step was up to the Lieutenant General commanding.
At ten o’clock on the morning of July 3, white flags blossomed out along a portion of the Confederate works. As the firing died down, two horsemen rode forward toward the Union lines—the General Bowen who had fought so hard and so well at Port Gibson, and a colonel on Pemberton’s staff. They had a letter from General Pemberton to General Grant, proposing an armistice and the appointment of commissioners to determine the formula under which Vicksburg should be surrendered.28
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Sling the Knapsack for New Fields
General Pemberton felt that he was in a position to bargain. He warned that he could hold his position for a long time, and he said that his proposal sought to avert “the further effusion of blood,” which must “be shed to a frightful extent” if the siege continued. General Bowen handed the note to salty General A. J. Smith, and said that he himself would like to talk to General Grant, whom he had known in Missouri before the war. Grant would not see him. He liked Bowen and respected him, but he would be friendly after the surrender, not before. He sent word that he would be glad to talk to Pemberton that afternoon, and he wrote a note for Bowen to take to the Confederate commander. The note was pithy:
… the useless effusion of blood you propose stopping by this course can be ended at any time you may choose, by the unconditional surrender of the city and garrison. Men who have shown so much endurance and courage as those now in Vicksburg will always challenge the respect of an adversary, and I can assure you will be treated with all the respect due to prisoners of war. I do not favor the proposition of appointing commissioners to arrange the terms of capitulation, because I have no other terms other than those indicated above.
Bowen took the message back inside the Confederate lines, while the soldiers lounged in the trenches and an unaccustomed quiet settled down along the scarred range of sun-baked hills. At three that afternoon Pemberton, Bowen and a staff officer came out, and Grant and a handful of his own officers rode forward to meet them. Dismounting, Grant and Pemberton walked aside, near a stunted oak tree, and had a stiff, unsatisfactory conference. Pemberton asked what terms Grant would give if the Confederate Army surrendered, and Grant replied that his letter said everything he had to say.
Pemberton was irritable: a man under great pressure, to whom a touch of temper might be forgiven. He was a Northerner, trusted by Jefferson Davis, distrusted by many Confederate soldiers and civilians. He knew that he would be blamed, bitterly, for giving up his army and his citadel, and that blame would also go to Davis who had promoted and supported him; and he clung to a notion that his opponent would grant lenient terms in order to win his victory on July 4, Independence Day. Now he was being offered nothing more than had been offered to Buckner at Fort Donelson. Dana, watching from a place not far off, said that Pemberton seemed excited and impatient, and Grant recalled that Pemberton said, “rather snappishly,” that if Grant had no other terms the conference might as well end then and there. Grant thought so too; Pemberton turned away, and it appeared for a moment that there would be no deal. But either Bowen or Grant himself kept the conference alive by suggesting that the subordinate officers discuss terms for a while. They did so, while Pemberton and Grant had a few more fruitless words together; and at last it was agreed that at ten that night Grant would send another letter through the lines, giving his final terms.1
So the conference ended. The cease-fire arrangement continued, and as dusk came Grant called
a meeting of all corps and division commanders who were in the immediate vicinity—the nearest thing to a regular council of war, he said, that he ever had. Northern and Southern soldiers wandered out between the lines by hundreds for a chat. One Federal private wrote that “several brothers met, and any quantity of cousins. It was a strange scene.”2 Meanwhile, Grant and his generals considered what ought to be done.
There was a good deal to discuss. Every man present knew, as the leading Confederates also knew, that Vicksburg was doomed. If it did not give up now it would almost certainly be taken by storm once the July 6 assault took place, and in any case there simply was not enough food in the city to enable the defense to be prolonged indefinitely. But Pemberton was flatly refusing to accept the unconditional surrender proposition. (It developed later that his intelligence service had been intercepting and decoding messages wigwagged back and forth between Grant and Porter, and knew that to ship thirty thousand prisoners up the river to Northern prison camps would put an excessive strain on the available river transportation.) The question, then, was whether it would be better to offer no terms and pay in time and bloodshed for a delayed victory, or to recede from the famous formula and give the beaten General something he would immediately accept.
It came down, at last, to a question of whether Grant should agree to parole for Pemberton’s army. Paroled soldiers were in a class apart. They belonged to the Army, they were supposed to stay in camp, subject to full military discipline, but they could not be used; they were uniformed ghosts, idling their lives away until the intricate machinery of exchange permitted them to be put back in the ranks of the fighting men. In an era wherein warring governments could still find a narrow area of mutual trust and confidence, they were men placed on the shelf; out of the war, but still liable to be drawn back into it whenever the infinite mathematics of two warring high commands put them where the chances of war would bear on them again without restriction.
In theory, Confederate soldiers paroled at Vicksburg were just as much prisoners of war as Confederates who had been shipped North to the squalid camps in Illinois and Ohio. But nobody trusted his foes beyond endurance, in this war. To put thirty thousand soldiers on parole was to take a certain chance. It was to gamble that no one on the other side would cut any corners or pull any fast ones; it was to suppose that men fighting for self-preservation would honor a pledge written bloodlessly on flimsy paper, keeping a whole army out of the fight until such time as some other army, similarly held inactive, could be permitted to go back into action. The whole arrangement rested on the assumption, still valid but getting paler day by day, that men who were at each other’s throats would continue to abide by the rules.
A gamble: but examined very closely, a gamble that should win. Paroled soldiers were an immense problem to their own authorities. Civil War armies were badly disciplined and loosely indoctrinated. Paroled men were very hard to handle, because the soldiers assumed that when they had been captured and paroled they were out of the war. The officer in charge of Northern parolees had written, less than three months before the surrender at Vicksburg, that “there are no troops more difficult to control, officers and men, than those on parole,” and had complained that the difficulty of the problem increased in direct ratio to the number on parole. Lew Wallace, who was presiding over camps full of such people back in Indiana, remarked that men on parole “become lousy, ragged, despairing and totally demoralized,” and a citizen of Columbus, Ohio, observing the habits of paroled Unionists in that Northern capital, had told Secretary Stanton that “unless the paroling system is abandoned we will be beaten by the number of paroled prisoners we shall have.” Another Federal officer who had to deal with this problem had remarked that paroled men felt themselves out from under every sort of discipline, and said that “a spirit of insubordination, bordering on mutiny” was their chief characteristic.3 All things considered, dropping a large lump of paroled soldiers in the heart of the Confederacy might do the Confederates more harm than good.
Long afterward, Grant wrote that he himself had favored paroling Pemberton’s soldiers but that most of his officers had opposed him. This, apparently, was rationalization after the fact. At the time he seems to have hoped that he could force Pemberton to make an unconditional surrender, in which case the Vicksburg garrison would have gone north as prisoners or been paroled on the spot at the Federal commander’s option. As evidence, there is the message Grant sent to Porter some time late on this third of July:
I have given the rebels a few hours to consider the proposition of surrendering; all to be paroled here, the officers to take only side-arms. My own feelings are against this, but all my officers think the advantage gained by having our forces and transports for immediate purposes more than counterbalance the effect of sending them north.
Dana wrote that the paroling plan was proposed by McPherson and that all of Grant’s officers but Steele favored it; Grant, he said, “reluctantly gave way” to the arguments, and finally sent off a letter to Pemberton proposing that the Confederates stack their arms outside of their lines, give their paroles, and then go off weaponless to such Southern internment camps as the Confederate authorities might suggest. In any event, this was the program that was at last adopted. Grant was canny enough to have Rawlins send a note to Ord and McPherson:
Permit some discreet men on picket tonight to communicate to the enemy’s pickets the fact that General Grant has offered, in case Pemberton surrenders, to parole all the officers and men and to permit them to go home from here.4
Grant, as a matter of fact, made a virtue out of necessity. Judging by Northern experience, the paroled men would be out of control. They would fade away, drifting off to their homes as fast as their legs would take them, and the Confederacy would be able to get very few of them back on the firing lines, exchange or no exchange. The Federals would be spared the labor and expense of sending their thirty thousand prisoners to Illinois and Ohio; the Vicksburg captives would be a problem for the Confederacy, not for the North, and in the long run their presence in the South would help to show that the Confederate government could not control its own people.… So Grant sent his revised terms off to Pemberton shortly before midnight:
In conformity with the agreement of this afternoon I will submit the following proposition for the surrender of Vicksburg, public stores, etc. On your accepting the terms proposed I will march in one division as guard, and take possession at 8 A.M. tomorrow. As soon as rolls can be made out and paroles be signed by officers and men, you will be allowed to march out of our lines, the officers taking with them their side-arms and clothing; and the field, staff and cavalry officers one horse each. The rank and file will be allowed all their clothing, but no other property. If these conditions are accepted, any amount of rations you may deem necessary can be taken from the stores you now have [a pointed reference to Pemberton’s boast that his supplies would enable him to hold out indefinitely] and also the necessary cooking utensils for preparing them. Thirty wagons also, counting two-horse or mule teams as one, will be allowed to transport such articles as cannot be carried along. The same conditions will be allowed to all sick and wounded officers and soldiers as fast as they become able to travel. The paroles for these latter must be signed, however, whilst officers present are authorized to sign the roll of prisoners.5
Whether Grant imposed this plan on his own reluctant generals or was persuaded by them to accept it, he quickly concluded that it made a great deal of sense. Many of Pemberton’s men came from the southwestern part of the Confederacy, and, said Grant, “I knew many of them were tired of the war and would get home just as soon as they could.” Taken to a parole camp, most of them would simply desert; to have sent them North “would have used all the transportation we had for a month.” There was also another consideration: “The men had behaved so well that I did not want to humiliate them. I believed that consideration for their feelings would make them less dangerous foes during the continuance of hostilities, and
better citizens after the war was over.”6
Pemberton’s reply came back during the small hours. He accepted the terms, but proposed minor amendments: his army would march out, stack arms in front of the trenches and then go away, officers would retain their personal property, and all rights and property of citizens would be respected. These amendments Grant refused to accept. Each brigade, he said, might move out and stack arms in front of its own trenches, but thereafter all must go back in the city and stay there as prisoners until the long process of parole should be completed. Officers’ rights in respect to their own property would be as originally stated—side arms, baggage, and, for mounted officers, one horse apiece; and although Grant would protect citizens against “undue annoyance or loss,” he would make no stipulation regarding treatment of their private property—which, among other items, would include large numbers of slaves. Pemberton could have until nine o’clock in the morning to accept these terms. If he did not accept, the Federal Army would start to fight again.
And so at last it was arranged. On the morning of July 4, white flags fluttered over the Confederate works. The cease-fire became permanent, and John Logan was ordered to march his division into the city, post guards to keep unauthorized persons from entering or leaving, and take charge of captured people and property. Meanwhile, Sherman was to move at once to drive Johnston off and relieve the captured town of any threat from the east.
Grant had had Sherman’s move in mind from the moment the surrender negotiations began. On July 3 he notified Sherman that surrender was imminent, and told him to strike the moment it became a fact: “I want Johnston broken up as effectually as possible, and roads destroyed. I cannot say where you will find the most effective place to strike; I would say move so as to strike Canton and Jackson, whichever might seem most desirable.” A little later he amplified this: “When we go in I want you to drive Johnston from the Mississippi Central railroad; destroy bridges as far as Grenada with your cavalry, and do the enemy all the harm possible. You can make your own arrangements and have all the troops of my command except one corps—McPherson’s, say. I must have some troops to send to Banks, to use against Port Hudson.” On July 4 a telegram went to Sherman as soon as Pemberton’s acceptance of terms reached Grant’s headquarters. Sherman replied in a characteristic note that was pure rhapsody:
