The second was the discovery that Lincoln had also been listening hard to Brig. Gen. John A. McClernand, a fellow Illinois politician and amateur general, who proposed to raise a new force of volunteers for the purpose of taking Vicksburg, Mississippi, and had given McClernand secret instructions to proceed.
Vicksburg had long been fitfully on Grant’s mind as he sat behind his desk wrestling with such matters as Jewish cotton traders, since it was clear to anybody with a map of the Mississippi at hand that it was the key to opening up the river and splitting the Confederacy. Early in 1862 the navy had seized the city of New Orleans, a serious blow to the Confederacy, but so long as Vicksburg, situated on a high bluff overlooking a sharp bend in the Mississippi, 166 miles north of New Orleans (as the crow flies), remained in Confederate hands, traffic on the river was effectively blocked. Vicksburg had been fortified; it was protected by large numbers of heavy guns and by geography as well, for it was not only on high ground, but the approach from the north was made difficult by the muddy, low-lying swamps of the Yazoo River, which runs sluggishly into the Mississippi.
How McClernand, a mediocre general of volunteers but an astute politician, planned to take Vicksburg is hard to determine, but his greatest weakness was that the secret orders Lincoln had given him contained an escape clause—he was to take on his expedition only those men whom Grant did not need. The threat of McClernand brought Halleck and Grant close again, as thick as thieves, since neither of them wished to have a politician who was a friend of the president’s succeed where professional soldiers had failed. Vicksburg suddenly became the focus of Grant’s full attention.
This, of course, may have been Lincoln’s intention in the first place. Astute politician that he was, he may have been using McClernand to light a fire under Grant as well as to rap him on the knuckles for General Order #11; or he may have felt that two different, competing strategies might be needed to take Vicksburg—except for Winston Churchill in World War II, nobody was more clever at handling generals than Lincoln. Either way, it almost goes without saying that Grant found he needed all his troops and could spare none for McClernand, and that by the time McClernand returned to Washington to complain to Lincoln, Grant would already be in Vicksburg.
In the meantime Grant had to get there. Nothing in the history of warfare, including Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps with his elephants, has ever posed as much difficulty as Grant’s taking of Vicksburg. Like Overlord, the Anglo-American-Canadian D-day landing in 1944, it required huge and startling engineering and technical advances, many of which turned out to be dead ends, and like Anglo-French attempts to break through the German defenses on the western front from 1916 through 1918, it set in motion unprecedented numbers of men through terrain that seemed designed to slow them down and stop them. Mud, rain, flooding, the great river itself—all combined to prevent Grant’s men from reaching Vicksburg, and in the end it was only by the boldest and most daring move of his career that he managed to find his way around it to victory. Despite Lee’s reputation as a superior strategist, Grant’s strategy at Vicksburg was astonishing in its boldness and took advantage of his instinctive understanding of the role of modern industrial technology in warfare—something Lee never even tried to understand.
To take Vicksburg, Grant would use steam shovels, steam dredgers, railways, and steam-powered armored gunboats and turn his army into a giant labor force in which the pick and shovel were more important weapons than the rifle. Grant would eventually have nearly 75,000 men under his command to take Vicksburg, most of them digging and shoveling their way there through the ooze, foot by foot.
Vicksburg sits about two hundred feet above the Mississippi River, on a bluff overlooking the east bank of the river. The Mississippi makes a hairpin bend around Vicksburg, so the batteries of heavy guns dug in around Vicksburg commanded the river itself completely. Adm. David Porter’s armored gunboats might survive a determined attempt to slip past the town, but they could do no damage to the Confederate guns, since it was impossible to elevate their own high enough to reach the top of the bluff from the river.
Coming down on Vicksburg by land from the north was rendered impractical by the Yazoo River, which formed an almost impassible swamp as it met the Mississippi. Landing on the east bank, below the Yazoo and just above Vicksburg, at Chickasaw Bluffs, might be possible—at any rate it seemed possible to Sherman when he and Grant looked at the map together, but then most things looked possible to Sherman. In the end it was decided that Sherman would take a part of the army, about 25,000 men, land at Chickasaw Bluffs from Porter’s transports, and wait there for Grant, who intended to march the bulk of the army (40,000 plus) inland, move south swiftly, seize Jackson, Mississippi, and then strike west to rendezvous with Sherman.
It is apparent that these plans were not so much aimed at Lt. Gen. John C. Pemberton, the new Confederate commander in Mississippi (with about 32,000 men), as at McClernand, who, in obedience to Lincoln’s “secret” plan, was already on the march, and hoped to take command of the Union forces on the river. In any event they miscarried, inevitably, for Grant had committed the classic error of dividing his forces. Grant’s position inland was rendered hopeless by a Confederate raid on his supply post; Sherman, unaware that Grant was retreating, attacked at Chickasaw Bluffs and was badly defeated; and McClernand, who had hoped to supplant Sherman, and possibly even Grant, was reduced to impotence by Grant’s swift arrival to take personal command of the whole operation.
It was now January 1863. A month had been wasted in maneuvering to the north of Vicksburg, with nothing to show for it but casualties and McClernand’s hurt feelings. Clearly Grant would have to think his way around Vicksburg.
He looked at the map again and discovered that the Yazoo River had at one time been connected to the Mississippi, and that a levee had been built to separate them and prevent flooding. Cutting the levee might enable Porter to bring his gunboats and transports to the undefended rear of Vicksburg by water. The Confederates, it should be explained, had made the same mistake at Vicksburg that the British did in Singapore eighty years later. Just as the big guns at Singapore had been sited to fire out to sea, thus leaving the city undefended against an attack from the land, the guns at Vicksburg had been placed to defend it from attack from the river or from the north. The “back door” to Vicksburg was lightly defended, and cutting the road or the railway line from Jackson would eventually starve its defenders and inhabitants of supplies.
In the event, the levee was cut, with enormous effort, but the Confederates had had time (and ample warning) to place a fort on high ground and block the gunboats, which had to back their way, under heavy fire, to the Mississippi.
Grant next attempted to descend to the rear of Vicksburg via the bayous, only to find that the Confederates chopped down trees in front of the boats, blocking the way, and then chopped trees down behind them, blocking their retreat, while Confederate sharpshooters picked off anybody who showed his head.
Grant then turned his attention to the west bank of the Mississippi, where the army busied itself building miles of roads and bridges through the marshy ground. It was clear enough that given time and effort they could make their way south of Vicksburg, but what then? The Mississippi was more than half a mile wide, and the troops would need to be transported across it. Grant thought he had a solution to that: He would cut a canal, allowing the fleet to get south of Vicksburg without running the gauntlet of the Confederate batteries on the other side of the river, so the army fell to work to dig a full-scale ship canal, only to have the Mississippi rise and flood it out just as they completed it.
It was now the end of February, and Grant was no nearer Vicksburg than before. In the North the newspapers hurled criticism and ridicule at him, in the South they made fun of him, and McClernand reported back to Washington that Grant was drinking again, which appears to have been untrue. It was, perhaps, his lowest moment as a general, matters not being improved when a steward on his steamer threw
Grant’s false teeth overboard by mistake. On shore smallpox and cholera were striking the army, due to unsanitary conditions, and in Washington there was talk of replacing Grant. Perplexed and troubled, Lincoln sent Charles A. Dana back again, and once again Dana’s reports saved Grant’s career and, in some mysterious way, raised Grant’s spirits. His dentist, S. L. Hamlin, arrived with a new set of teeth, and Grant sat down at the map again with Porter and Sherman and came up with a new plan.
This one required daring from the navy, but fortunately for Grant, Porter was a kind of seaborne Sherman. Porter would take his fleet down the Mississippi at night past Vicksburg, first his gunboats, then his transports, running the gauntlet of the Confederate guns. Sherman and McClernand, meanwhile, would bring their troops down the west bank of the Mississippi to the aptly named town of Hard Times, where the navy would transport them across the river to Port Gibson, about twenty miles south of Vicksburg. Grant would then march the army east and north, probably meet and fight Pemberton, then cut the road and railway between Jackson and Vicksburg. Porter was confident of getting his armored gunboats past Vicksburg but more pessimistic about the fate of the transport steamships, which he proposed to protect with bales of hay and cotton.
It took a long time to organize it all—longest of all to get the army and its vast supplies down to Hard Times on the improvised roads—and it was fortunate that Dana was able to persuade the president to be patient. It would not be until April 16, on a moonless night, which was just what he needed, that Porter was finally able to run his fleet past Vicksburg, and although the Confederates set houses on fire until the river was lit as if by day, and opened up one of the heaviest bombardments of the war, he lost only one transport. In the meantime, on April 17, Grant sent Col. Benjamin H. Grierson off from Memphis, Tennessee, on a cavalry raid that would take Grierson’s troopers around Jackson and all the way down to the Union lines at Baton Rouge, Louisiana, diverting Pemberton’s attention from what was happening at Hard Times, and revealing the hollowness of the Confederate defenses in Mississippi (the raid would be the subject of The Horse Soldiers [1959], a hugely successful movie starring John Wayne as the Grierson character). By April 29 Grant was across the Mississippi with more than 40,000 men, on the same side of the river as Vicksburg and less than twenty miles south of it, while Pemberton, still addled “like a duck hit on the head,” to use one of Lincoln’s favorite phrases, by the Grierson raid, dithered. He would shortly be reinforced, in numbers if not in determination, by the arrival of Gen. Joseph E. Johnston, with nearly ten thousand men, but in the meantime the damage had been done. Grant would attack Vicksburg by the “back door,” while the Confederates wasted time and manpower looking for Grierson’s troopers and trying to figure what they were doing deep behind Confederate lines.
“Don’t allow yourself to be shut up in Vicksburg under any circumstances,” Johnston had advised Pemberton, but Pemberton eventually did just that. Meanwhile Grant rampaged through Mississippi for three weeks, capturing more than six thousand prisoners, taking more than one hundred guns, and living off the land. At one point he even raided Jefferson Davis’s plantation and appropriated one of the Confederate president’s favorite horses as his own (he renamed it “Jeff Davis”), revenge perhaps for Davis’s snub to Jesse Grant in refusing to reinstate Ulysses’ captaincy. In three weeks Grant marched his army two hundred miles, and by the end of May he had cut Pemberton’s line of communication with Jackson and effectively trapped him in Vicksburg. On May 22 Grant stormed Vicksburg, taking terrible losses, and was forced to withdraw, the only blessing being that McClernand finally and irrevocably blotted his copybook by his reckless handling of his own troops and his overoptimistic reporting to Grant.
Grant paused to take a deep breath, then invested Vicksburg. If he could not take it by storm, he would starve it out, and so he did. On July 1 Pemberton finally asked for a truce, and on July 3 he and Grant sat down under a tree, Grant smoking a cigar, Pemberton chewing on a blade of grass, to work out the surrender terms.
Grant took nearly 32,000 prisoners and 172 cannon and gave Pemberton more generous terms than he had given Buckner at Fort Donelson, paroling all prisoners until they could be exchanged. Really he had no choice—he had not the time, the place, nor the supplies to deal with them.1
The news reached Washington on July 4, the same day as the news of Pickett’s disastrous charge on the last day of Gettysburg. Although Gettysburg, with its fifty thousand casualties, has achieved a place of mythic significance in American history, partly due to Lincoln’s speech there, Vicksburg was the more decisive victory. To Lincoln’s despair, Meade failed to pursue Lee and allowed him to retreat back across the Potomac to safety, while Grant had won a complete victory. “The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea,” wrote Lincoln, and it was true. Grant had opened the Mississippi from the north to New Orleans, splitting the Confederacy in two and opening its heartland to attack—it was the biggest victory in the history of America.
Despite yet another fall from a horse, which laid him up for two weeks, Grant was soon joined in Vicksburg by Julia and their children. In their presence he relaxed until October 1863, when Lincoln ordered him to go with all possible speed to Chattanooga, where a Union army was in desperate straits, and take command there.
Grant moved quickly and took in the situation swiftly—General Rosecrans had been badly beaten by Confederate general Braxton Bragg in the bloody Battle of Chickamauga and was now surrounded in Chattanooga, his army demoralized and starving. Grant relieved Rosecrans, replaced him with Maj. Gen. George H. Thomas, opened up a new supply line down the Tennessee River, and, taking personal command, broke the siege of Chattanooga. Waiting only for Sherman to join him, he then moved to attack Bragg’s supposedly impregnable positions on Missionary Ridge, and in a brutal uphill frontal attack—no fancy maneuvering here—drove Bragg back and took six thousand Confederate prisoners.
It was another stunning victory, so widely applauded that it seemed almost inevitable, given the nature of American politics, that Grant would be nominated for the presidency by either the Republicans or the Democrats in ’64.
In two years of war Grant had not only proved that he knew how to fight and how to command an army, but also that he knew how to beat the enemy. Like Lincoln, he learned on the job and did not let his ego get in the way. Dogged determination, the ability to take a licking and come back fighting, above all the realization that the enemy’s difficulties were at least as great as his own, and perhaps greater—the notion that had struck him with such clarity way back in 1861 when he was still an inexperienced colonel of volunteers pursuing Colonel Harris’s Confederates through the countryside around the village of Florida, Missouri—all these had finally matured him into that rarest of men, a successful commander.
Grant was flattered at the offers he received, but not tempted, and was by now wise enough to let Lincoln know it. With a sigh of relief, no doubt—for Lincoln wanted a second term as much as any American president—he persuaded Congress to revive the rank of lieutenant general, nominated Grant be the first to receive that rank, and then called him to Washington to put him in command of all the Union armies.
Chapter Seven
GRANT ARRIVED IN WASHINGTON on March 8, 1864—the last time he had visited the capital was to try to persuade the War Department that he was not responsible for the theft of one thousand dollars when he had served as a quartermaster during the Mexican War—and quietly checked in at Willard’s Hotel, accompanied by his fourteen-year-old son Fred. The desk clerk was astonished when the man in the dusty, wrinkled, shabby uniform signed the register, “U. S. Grant and son, Galena, Ill.” As the news of his presence spread through the hotel, crowds gathered in the lobby to watch Grant, having put his son to bed, come downstairs to smoke a cigar. Then he walked across Lafayette Park to the White House, where the Lincolns were holding a reception. Leaving his battered black slouch hat with a servant, he joined the crowd in the East Room, an awkward, il
l-dressed figure, uneasy, as he always was in social situations without Julia to tell him what to do. Lincoln, either because he had been tipped off or because he recognized the new lieutenant general, came over to him, shook Grant’s hand, pulled him into the center of the room, and introduced him to Mrs. Lincoln, saying, “Why look, Mother—here is General Grant.”1
They must have looked like Mutt and Jeff, Grant a stocky, robust five feet seven, Lincoln an awkward, angular six feet four, but they made conversation—easy for Lincoln, the lawyer and professional politician, but hard work for Grant—until the president, having heard the buzz of excitement in the room at the presence of the victor of Fort Donelson, Shiloh, Vicksburg, and Missionary Ridge, persuaded Grant to stand on a couch so people could see him.
The next day Grant received his formal promotion and sat down for his first serious talk with the president. Lincoln made it clear that he did not intend to look over Grant’s shoulder, as he had with so many of his previous generals. He would later write to Grant, “The particulars of your plans I neither know or seek to know,” a very different approach from the fretful micromanagement by telegraph that Lincoln had inflicted on McClellan, Burnside (who had burst into tears at the thought of his own inadequacy on being told he was to command the Army of the Potomac), and Hooker, and no doubt Lincoln emphasized his belief that Grant should “hold on with a bulldog grip, and chew & choke, as much as possible.”
That was Grant’s own view of the matter. He had opened up the South, and would shortly send Sherman on his famous march to the sea; in the meantime he intended to hold on to Lee “with a bulldog grip” until Lee’s army was defeated in the field. He had no complicated strategy in mind; he did not much care whether he took Richmond or not—he simply calculated that the North had a larger population than the South, that he could therefore afford casualties better than Lee could in the long run, and that the only way to win was to move forward and push Lee back, day by day, inflicting casualties on the Army of Northern Virginia until the South ran out of men to replace them. It was simple, brutal, and would prove to be effective, but it required a general with Grant’s grim view of war to make that deadly calculation and see it through to the bitter end. Lee had remarked to Jackson at Fredericksburg, as he watched Burnside’s troops make charge after futile charge into a storm of Confederate fire, “It is well that this is terrible, or else we might grow fond of it,” but it is hard to imagine Grant agreeing with him. He had no romantic notions about war and would surely have agreed with Sherman’s famous remark, “War is hell.” The waving flags, the glint of bayonets through the smoke, the bugle calls and thunder of artillery drowning out the screams of dying men and horses—none of this held anything in the way of an attraction for Grant. The sooner it was over, the better for all concerned, including the Confederates, and the way to end it fast was to kill them in larger quantities than anybody had heretofore contemplated. It was not a prospect that gave him pleasure—indeed it merely deepened his tendency to melancholy—but he did not shrink before it, or at what it would cost in Union lives.
Ulysses S. Grant Page 8
