by Bruce Catton
I can hardly contain myself. Surely I will not punish any soldier for being “unco happy” this most glorious anniversary of the birth of a nation whose sire and father was a Washington. Did I not know the honesty, modesty and purity of your nature, I would be tempted to follow the example of my standard enemies of the press in indulging in wanton flattery; but as a man and soldier and ardent friend of yours, I warn you against the incense of flattery that will fill our land from one extreme to the other. Be natural and yourself, and this glittering flattery will be as the passing breeze of the sea on a warm summer day. To me the delicacy with which you have treated a brave but deluded enemy is more eloquent than the most gorgeous oratory of an Everett.
This is a day of jubilee, a day of rejoicing to the faithful, and I would like to hear the shout of my old and patient troops; but I must be a Gradgrind—I must have facts, knocks and must go on. Already my orders are out to give one big huzza and sling the knapsack for new fields.… I did want rest, but I ask nothing until the Mississippi is ours, and Sunday and July 4 are nothing to Americans until the river of our greatness is free as God made it.7
In every army there is always somebody who does not get the word. So it was here; a blameless engineer officer and a sweating work detail toiled vigorously all through the night of July 3, completing the 175-foot tunnel that had been dug under a Confederate salient in preparation for the big assault of July 6. On the morning of July 4 this officer was busy, far underground, getting a ton of powder tamped down in the magazine—until, at last, somebody remembered him, and a headquarters courier reached him with verbal orders to stop everything: the Rebels had surrendered, the shooting had stopped, this mine would never be used.8
Grant and his staff rode into the captured city shortly after the final terms had been accepted. They met Pemberton in a house on the Jackson road, and—according to Colonel Wilson—their reception was glacial. No one offered Grant a seat, and when he remarked that he would like a drink of water someone ungraciously remarked that he could go where the water was and help himself. Wilson angrily recorded that the behavior of Pemberton and his officers “was unhandsome and disagreeable in the extreme,” but he noted that three young West Pointers on Pemberton’s staff did their best to be courteous, “in recognition of which their haversacks and canteens were well filled with provisions and whisky when they bade us goodby.” If all of this bothered Grant he gave no sign of it; he rode on, presently, and went down to the river to see Admiral Porter, from whom he had just received a reassuring note:
I congratulate you on getting Vicksburg on any honorable terms. You would find it a troublesome task to transport so many men, and I think you will be left so free to act it will counterbalance any little concession you may seem to make to the garrison.9
The “little concession” that had been made looked larger to some of the men on the scene than it looked to men at a distance. Colonel Wilson, indeed, complained that Grant had in effect given Pemberton all Pemberton asked for, and considered that the General had made a serious mistake, and Halleck chided Grant mildly for letting the captured army go home on parole; but the nation as a whole, then and thereafter, recognized the achievement for what it was—a sweeping victory that fatally limited the Confederacy and pointed unmistakably toward final triumph, a victory which was the enduring capstone to one of the most daring and brilliant campaigns of the entire war. The Confederacy had lost a citadel which had to be held; losing it, it had lost the Mississippi River, and all the country to the west. (Port Hudson, hopelessly cut off, surrendered to Banks as soon as authentic news of the fall of Vicksburg came down; Grant sent Banks a division, as soon as he could get the men on steamboats, but the reinforcements were not needed.) Even more important, the Confederacy had lost an irreplaceable army. All in all, Grant had taken more than 40,000 Southern soldiers out of circulation. Nearly 31,000 became prisoners when Vicksburg fell, 6000 had been captured in the campaign before the siege began, and an equal number had been battle casualties. (Five or six thousand more would be lost in the surrender of Port Hudson.) Neither then nor later could the hard-pressed Southland afford a loss of that magnitude. Much war material had also been lost: 172 cannon and 60,000 rifles came into Grant’s possession when his troops entered Vicksburg, and many of the rifles were better than the ones Grant’s own men were carrying—so much so that he re-equipped many regiments with captured arms.
All of this Grant had won at moderate cost. From the moment he crossed the river to the day Pemberton surrendered, he had lost fewer than 10,000 men. (The legend of Grant as the heedless, conscienceless butcher finds nothing to feed on in the story of the Vicksburg campaign.) He had taken long chances—a newspaper correspondent had correctly reported: “A single mistake or disaster might have overwhelmed his army … but the mistake was not made, the disaster did not come.” Pemberton had been confused from beginning to end; with inferior numbers, Grant had driven him into Vicksburg and fended off the relieving army until reinforcements put him beyond danger. Johnston’s cry that Grant’s Western troops were twice as good as the Easterners he fought in Virginia was, in the end, a simple testimonial to the unerring skill with which Grant had handled them.
Grant’s first act, after he reached Porter, was to send a message to Halleck:
The enemy surrendered this morning. The only terms allowed is their parole as prisoners of war. This I regard as a great advantage to us at this moment. It saves, probably, several days in the capture, and leaves troops and transports ready for immediate service. Sherman, with a large force, moves immediately on Johnston, to drive him from the state. I will send troops to the relief of Banks, and return the Ninth Army Corps to Burnside.10
There were annoying details in connection with the business of parole. Pemberton wanted the victors to compel all prisoners to sign paroles; some of the men, vowing they would fight no more, hoped to be sent North, out of their own Army’s reach forever. Pemberton also wanted Grant to let him have enough weapons to arm a battalion to act as guards, so that men who gave their paroles could be kept from deserting. Grant turned down both requests; if paroles meant trouble for the Southern authorities he had no intention of doing anything to ease the situation.
There was also the matter of slaves. The terms of surrender did not allow Confederate officers to take their body servants with them when they left, but one of Pemberton’s staff came to Grant saying that in most cases the body servants actually wanted to go; they had been brought up in the family, and it would be cruel to enforce a separation. Might not those loyal, faithful servitors who could not bear to be parted from Old Massa go along with the officers whom they worshiped? Grant laid down the rule in a note to McPherson:
I want the Negroes to understand that they are free men. If they are then anxious to go with their masters I do not see the necessity of preventing it. Some going might benefit our cause by telling that the Yankees set them all free. It is not necessary that you should give yourself any trouble about Negroes being enticed away from officers. Everyone that loses a Negro will insist that he has been enticed off, because otherwise his Negro would not leave.
… because otherwise there was something very wrong indeed with the whole legend which the white man had built up about the benefits, to those who were owned, of the institution of slavery; and while McPherson did his best to be guided by this order, he could hear the death rattle of the ancient institution which both he and Grant were trying to destroy. The first warning came from General John Logan, the stout Illinois Democrat who had never had any abolitionist tradition in his blood and who, when war started, was thought to be a man who was as likely to go with the South as with the North. Two days after Vicksburg had surrendered, Logan wrote to Rawlins to voice a hard protest “against the manner in which Confederate officers are permitted to intimidate their servants.” The Negro who was asked if he wanted to go with his master, said Logan, was asked in the presence of the man who had always owned him; knowing that the men in blue unifor
ms would probably take the master’s word over his own. This struck Logan as wrong, and he complained that “the manner in which this is done is conniving at furnishing Negroes to every officer who is a prisoner in Vicksburg.” Grant told McPherson to “give instruction that no passes are to be given to Negroes to accompany their masters in leaving the city,” and on July 7 McPherson sent a note to Pemberton:
I am constrained, in consequence of the abuse of the privilege which was granted to officers to take out one private servant (colored) each, to withdraw it altogether, except in cases of families and sick and disabled officers. The abuses which I speak of are: 1. Officers coming here with their servants and intimidating them, instead of sending them by themselves to be questioned. 2. Citizens have been seen and heard in the streets urging Negroes who were evidently not servants to go with the officers. 3. Negroes have also been brought here who have been at work on the fortifications.11
Much died when Vicksburg died; meanwhile, Sherman was dogging the heels of General Joseph E. Johnston. Johnston learned on July 5 that Vicksburg had been lost, and he retreated at once to Jackson, where he dug in and waited to see what Sherman would do. Sherman followed, flung a semicircle of men and guns around the city, had everybody open fire, and began pounding.
Johnston fended him off, and found time to write to Richmond protesting that the paroling of Pemberton’s men had given the Confederacy a very tough problem: “What shall be done with the men? They cannot remain in this Department without great injury to us from deficiency of supplying them. Shall they go to their homes until discharged, or be distributed in regiments in their respective states? Can they be exchanged immediately for prisoners taken in the recent great Confederate victory?” (At that moment it was believed in the Deep South that Lee had won a smashing triumph at Gettysburg.)
Pemberton was equally unhappy. Two weeks after the surrender, he wrote to President Davis to say that his paroled men insisted on going home and that he had no way to stop them, because they just wanted to see their families. Most of the men from Mississippi and the trans-Mississippi, he said, had already left, and the men from Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee would go as soon as they were near their homes. Of the 31,600 men who had been paroled, he had about 1600—men from Missouri—who could be counted on for immediate service. Nothing but a universal grant of furloughs, he said, would give any prospect of getting the rest of the men back.
Grant’s own intelligence service was saying the same thing, and Grant assured Halleck that Pemberton’s army had effectively been dismissed from service:
At last accounts, Pemberton had but 4,000 left with him, and they were no doubt men whose homes are in the states east of here, and are only waiting to get near them to desert, too. The country is full of these paroled prisoners, all of them swearing that they will not take up arms again if they are exchanged. Thousands have crossed the Mississippi river and gone west; many buy passages north, and quite a number expressed a strong anxiety to enlist in our service. This of course I would not permit.12
In Mississippi the Confederacy was helpless. By the middle of July Johnston evacuated Jackson and retreated to the East. Sherman reflected on Grant’s orders that he “damage the enemy as much as possible,” and undertook to carry them out: a task for which he was admirably fitted. Railroad tracks, bridges, cars, roundhouses and every installation which might conceivably be of use to a struggling Confederacy were destroyed with grim effectiveness. Sherman reported to Grant that “Jackson cannot again become a place for the assemblage of men and material with which to threaten the Mississippi river,” private soldiers looked at the wreckage and gave Jackson the descriptive name of “Chimneyville,” and on July 23 Sherman pulled his army back and prepared to give all hands a rest.13 He left a desert behind him. Vicksburg was secure.
Meanwhile, the Federals had gone flocking into Vicksburg. It was an odd sort of occupation. There was no cheering, and nobody turned any handsprings. Grant noted that “the men of the two armies fraternized as if they had been fighting for the same cause,” and an officer who guided a wagon train of rations into the city wrote that the sight of the first Confederate brigade he passed, “every man of which looked so gaunt and hungry,” moved him so deeply that he simply stopped and broke open his barrels and boxes of hardtack, sugar and coffee and dealt out a liberal allowance to everybody within sight. He was rewarded, he said, by “the heartfelt thanks and cheers” of the Confederates, and that night when his own men complained that their rations were deficient “I swore by all the saints in the calendar that the wagons had broken down and the Johnnie Rebs had stolen all of the grub.” One Confederate staff officer who rode a white pony, on which he had daily made the circuit of the Confederate lines, was brightly accosted by a Unionist, who sang out: “See here, Mister—you man on the little white horse. Danged if you ain’t the hardest feller to hit I ever saw; I’ve shot at you more’n a hundred times!” He remembered, too, that the only cheer he heard on the day of Federal occupation was a cheer which one Federal outfit raised for “the gallant defenders of Vicksburg.” A reporter for Greeley’s New York Tribune saw soldiers from each army standing together talking good-humoredly about the ins and outs of the siege, and wrote: “There is no jeering or tormenting from our men.… We have even refrained from cheering, and nothing—absolutely nothing—has been done to add humiliation to the cup of sorrows which the Rebels have been compelled to drink.” Grant said that he believed that “there was a feeling of sadness among the Union soldiers at seeing the dejection of their late antagonists.”14
And here, shining out from under the dissolving smoke of battle, was the mysterious, haunting leitmotiv of the Civil War.
Strangest of all the strange sides of this war was the inexplicable feeling of understanding and half-suppressed sympathy that grew up between the rival armies. In battle, these men fought without reservations. Fury descended on them, and they gave way to fire-born anger in the desperate attempt to kill and maim. Yet there was a queer, inexpressible bond between them. They were brothers, or cousins, or at the very least men of the same blood and tradition, and in the long run they probably understood their enemies better than they understood the patriots back home who were waving flags and pushing them forward. War was the one real enemy—war, and much of the time officers; and the desperate killing that took place was accomplished by men who had a working but unvoiced knowledge of the real inwardness of the brotherhood of man.
Of all men, Grant himself had a deep knowledge of this. He could not put it into words, except that he could spare 29,491 men a trip to Northern prison camps with the remark that he did not want to humiliate them and that in time to come they would be better fellow citizens if they were decently treated; and the same General who could urge Sherman to “do the enemy all the harm possible” could also see the enemy as men with whom he and his own folk would some day be good friends. This was not a conscious, carefully-worked-out attitude; it was something born in him, something that had blossomed in the Mexican War, when he had developed a deep respect and liking for the brown-skinned men against whom he had had to fight. He had never jeered at the Mexicans as poor fighters; he always had thought that they did pretty well, considering what they had to fight for, and with, and under; and fighting them had somehow made him feel closer to them. It was the same here at Vicksburg. He shared with the soldiers he commanded a deep, overriding respect, something finally resembling affection, for the men who had been enemies—the logical corollary to which was the ingrained belief that something worth winning, keeping and dying for lay behind the fearful tumult of battle. Victory was something to be won, but final fellowship between victors and vanquished was something that would come afterward, justifying victory. Grant could be very military, on occasion, but he could never be warlike—in which points he was the precise opposite of his great lieutenant, Sherman.
Grant took up quarters in Vicksburg, in a comfortable house on the heights overlooking the river. He had his chief engineer la
y out a new line of works which could be held by a garrison of five thousand men, he sent the Ninth Corps back to Burnside, and he shipped other troops up the river to help repel a Rebel thrust into Arkansas. Sending troops to Banks, he let his intense pride in his army find brief expression, telling Banks that the men going downstream were “as good troops as ever trod American soil: no better are found on any other.” He tried to get rest and a breathing spell for the rest of the army, and he warned Halleck that the men were too exhausted for much immediate duty that involved extensive marching. He took time, too, to return to the thorny old subject of cotton-trading. Secretary of the Treasury Chase wanted to see the trade expanded, and Grant warned him against being in a hurry about it:
The people in the Mississippi valley are now nearly subjugated. Keep trade out but for a few months, and I doubt not but that the work of subjugation will be so complete that trade can be opened freely with the states of Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi.… My position has given me an opportunity of seeing what could not be known by persons away from the scene of the war, and I venture, therefore, a great caution in opening trade with Rebels.15
Grant wanted the corrupting influence of the cotton trade held away for a time; and it seemed to him equally important to hold the whole valley area free from the presence of Confederate armies, so that the people could adjust themselves to the developing fact of reunion. To Halleck he sent a statement of his views:
