The 20 Most Significant Events of the Civil War

by Alan Axelrod

  Determined not to be thwarted, Grant emulated Major General John Pope’s bold evasion of the Confederate guns of Island No. 10 in the Mississippi (February 28-April 8, 1862). Like Vicksburg, the guns defending Island No. 10 commanded a sharp bend in the river. Pope dug a canal that cut across the bend and thus bypassed the guns. To be sure, digging a canal to avoid the Vicksburg artillery was a job on a vastly greater scale, but, if it worked, Grant could bring gunboats to bear on the town without fear of artillery counter-fire. What was supposed to be a combat expedient, however, turned into an epic engineering and construction project. In January 1863, Grant authorized work to begin on the Williams Canal across DeSoto Point on an island opposite Vicksburg. On the face of it, the project was the completion and enlargement of something that had begun in July 1862 by order of Union General Benjamin Butler but was soon abandoned. It seemed to Grant that this canal could now be completed along a course that would bypass the Vicksburg guns. This required widening the canal from a mere six feet to sixty while also dredging a foot more of depth, from six feet to seven. The work fell to Major General Sherman, and while he obeyed Grant’s orders, he cordially resented the project, which he dubbed Butler’s Ditch. In the event, Sherman’s men did not get far. Confederate harassing artillery fire combined with torrential rains made the work impossible, and, in February, Sherman, like Butler before him, abandoned the project.

  Grant did not give up on the idea of transforming the landscape in order to accomplish his mission. He ordered Brigadier General James B. McPherson to dredge a brand-new canal from the Mississippi River to Lake Providence, northwest of Vicksburg. This would allow troop transports to unload at a point from which the soldiers could get into the city. If fully completed, the canal would provide passage to Bayou Baxter and Bayou Macon, which, in turn, would allow navigation to the Tensas and Black Rivers, both of which feed into the Red River. The Red River furnished a connection with troops from the Department of the Gulf under Brigadier General Nathaniel Banks.

  This, at any rate, was the plan. Remarkably enough, McPherson completed the work assigned to him on March 18, but the resulting assemblage of waterways was not uniformly navigable. In the end, only small boats of very shallow draft could negotiate the entire passage. These craft could not possibly carry the volume of troops necessary to make even the slightest strategic dent in Vicksburg.

  Grant had one more string left to his bow. Even before giving up on both Butler’s Ditch and the McPherson project, he had ordered his engineers to blow up a Mississippi River levee near Moon Lake (not far from Helena, Arkansas). This was some 150 miles above Vicksburg—a long way—but Grant reasoned that demolishing the levee would flood the Yazoo Pass from Yazoo City, Mississippi, to Memphis, Tennessee. The flood waters would sufficiently swell both the Coldwater and Tallahatchie rivers, rendering them navigable by troop transports, which could get onto the Yazoo River at Greenwood, Mississippi. From Greenwood, disembarked troops could ascend the bluffs northeast of Vicksburg and thereby hold the city under artillery siege. The so-called Yazoo Pass Expedition commenced promisingly enough with the demolition of the levees on February 3, 1863. The Confederates, however, who could read a map as well as Grant could, began felling trees into the rivers, creating snags that blocked the Union gunboats. By early April, Grant had been thwarted and added the Yazoo Pass Expedition to the grim litany of aborted canal projects.

  A month before Grant gave up on Yazoo, the Union’s Admiral David Dixon Porter had already concluded that the Yazoo Pass Expedition was doomed. On his own initiative, he decided to essay a gunboat traversal of the Yazoo Delta via Steele’s Bayou north of Vicksburg. If he could get his gunboats and troop transports to Deer Creek, they would be positioned for a flanking attack on Fort Pemberton, one of the most formidable Confederate forts, which was located at Greenwood, Mississippi. Take this fort and troops could be landed between Vicksburg and Yazoo City. The problem was that Porter’s maps did not accurately reveal the hazards to navigation in the Yazoo Delta. The existing natural obstacles were multiplied and amplified by more of the Confederates’ handiwork. Porter found that even his shallow-draft gunboats snagged on trees felled by Confederate soldiers. As the vessels bogged down, Confederate troops began firing from shore. Sherman rushed reinforcements to the rescue, but both he and Grant saw the handwriting on the wall. Vicksburg would not be taken via the Yazoo Delta.

  Grant started yet another canal, from Duckport Landing to Walnut Bayou. He recognized that only a light, shallow craft would be able to move past Vicksburg along this canal, but he persuaded himself that he could make do. What he had not contemplated, however, was that water levels would severely shallow out in April. No vessel capable of carrying more than a handful of men at a time could use the canal, which was soon abandoned.

  Ulysses S. Grant was nothing if not brutally honest with himself—at least as a rule. But he had just devoted four months to fruitless digging. In his Private Memoirs he made the implausible claim that the entire affair had been nothing more or less than a make-work exercise intended to maintain and enforce discipline among his troops during weeks of idleness in winter and early spring.

  Loath to let up the pressure in the area, Grant ordered two corps, one under McPherson, the other commanded by Sherman, to take Jackson, Mississippi, a rallying point for Confederate reinforcements. The May 14, 1863, attack succeeded, and Grant therefore ordered an attack at Champion Hill on May 16. Stunningly, McPherson met with an unanticipated level of resistance here, and while he won, he did so at the cost of nearly 2,500 casualties (to the CSA’s 3,840). Halleck could not see the point of it and questioned Grant’s strategy, which appeared to him nothing more than attacking whatever concentration of enemy troops happened to present itself anywhere. If asked, Grant would have admitted precisely this. His objective was to kill the enemy, and he continually invited them to present themselves for the killing. Nevertheless, everything he did was also done to advance the objective of taking Vicksburg. Key to this task was a continuous offensive. To Grant, the Vicksburg Campaign was all about giving battle at every opportunity.

  Indeed, three days after Champion Hill, Grant convinced himself that he was finally in position to make an assault on Vicksburg itself. On May 19, he launched what he had sworn he would never attempt: a frontal assault on Vicksburg. The result was all too tragically predictable—a costly repulse. Three days later, he tried again and suffered an even heavier defeat, with more than 3,200 killed and wounded.

  At this point, Grant reconciled himself to conducting what he knew would be a protracted siege. This is not what he wanted. Siege warfare ties up valuable manpower, even as it destroys morale, erodes the physical conditioning of troops, and, like any prolonged encampment, invites outbreaks of epidemic disease. But all of his attempts to work around Vicksburg’s guns had failed, as had two frontal assaults. Siege was the third and final alternative, and so Grant ordered trenches to be dug. From the end of May through the start of July, his artillery shelled Vicksburg day and night. More than two hundred cannon and siege mortars were kept continuously active.

  Vicksburg was both fortress and city. It was not only garrisoned by soldiers, but also peopled by ordinary citizens—men, women, children, the old, the infirm, and the healthy alike. They now found themselves sharing a terrible misery. As the bombardment became unendurable, the people dug caves out of the malleable yellow clay of the bluff. They devolved from surface dwellers to cave dwellers, abandoning their exposed homes to share dark, dank quarters with snakes, worms, and insects. In an effort to provide a modicum of civilized comfort, some installed a few pieces of furniture in their new earth-fast abodes. But food supplies dwindled. Dogs and rats began to appear less as pets and pests and more like food. Then, even these creatures began to disappear. “I think all the dogs and rats must be killed or starved,” one woman wrote in her diary on May 28. “We don’t see any more pitiful animals prowling around.”

  A week after this anonymous resident recorded he
r observation, Confederate General Pemberton sent Grant a note indicating his possible inclination to negotiate terms of surrender. When he took Fort Donelson, Grant rejected a similar offer to negotiate by stating that the only terms of surrender he would accept was unconditional surrender. From that point on, “U. S. Grant” became Unconditional Surrender Grant, and he saw no reason to depart from that policy now. His first reply, therefore, was a demand for unconditional surrender. Then he thought the better of it. Without question, Grant wanted total surrender. But there was one thing he did not want, and that was prisoners of war—30,000 of them, hungry and his to feed and guard and transport. So he sent Pemberton a second reply, this time offering him a single concession: parole. Those who surrendered would be relieved of their weapons and then released upon giving their word (“parole”) that they would not take up arms again unless officially exchanged for Union POWs.

  Grant’s offer tipped the balance, and Pemberton surrendered his army on July 4—Independence Day. Without soldiers to defend them, the people of Vicksburg likewise gave up.

  Like most victories that result from siege, this one did not feel particularly glorious to the winners. Worse, it was overshadowed in the Northern press by the Union victory, the day before, at Gettysburg. As usual, what took place in the east trumped what happened in the west. Yet while the fall of Vicksburg lacked the profound symbolic importance of Gettysburg—the ejection of Confederate forces from loyal Union land, and the defeat of the Confederacy’s best by the Union’s best—it was arguably of greater consequence in bringing about the decline of the Confederacy, an end to the war, and the abolition of slavery. Grant gave the Union the Mississippi River. This not only provided a major avenue of transport, both of supplies and of troops, it also gave the North control of the Confederacy’s northern and western borderlands. Texas was entirely cut off, virtually excluded from any further significant role in the war. At will, the Union army could make that flanking invasion Scott had called for. In any case, the Confederacy was now contained on both the north and the west. It could do nothing but try to defend the diminishing territory it held with a dwindling body of soldiery it could neither reinforce nor replace.

  Independence Day? Not for the Confederacy—and not for the people of Vicksburg, who henceforth refused to join the rest of the nation in celebration of the Fourth of July until 1945, when, with World War II victory achieved in Europe and imminent in the Pacific, the descendants of the bombardment and siege and surrender finally set off fire crackers and bottle rockets like any other American on the Fourth of July.

  13

  May 7, 1864

  Defeated, Grant Advances

  Why it’s significant. After taking command as the Union’s general-in-chief, Grant launched his Overland Campaign with a new strategy that was both instantly brutal and ultimately effective: force the Confederacy to choose between two non-negotiable outcomes—give up or bleed to death.

  BEGINNING WITH IRVIN McDowell, the Union general who lost the First Battle of Bull Run (July 21, 1861), and continuing with George B. McClellan (“The Young Napoleon”), John Pope, Ambrose Burnside, Joseph Hooker (“Fighting Joe”), and Henry Wager Halleck (“Old Brains”), the Union’s top generals were all West Point graduates and as highly qualified as it was possible to be in the nineteenth-century American military. Yet, to a man, they produced disappointing, often heartbreaking results on the field of battle. Even George Meade, under whose command the Army of the Potomac won the turning-point Battle of Gettysburg (July 1–3, 1863), let Lincoln and the Union down by failing to pursue the defeated Army of Northern Virginia in its withdrawal back to Confederate ground.

  In contrast to varying degrees of failure in the Eastern Theater of the war, one general in the Western Theater was producing some remarkable results. He was Ulysses S. Grant.

  For too long, hardly anybody paid attention. Halleck, his commanding officer in the Western Theater, was uncomfortable with Grant’s relentlessly aggressive spirit. Halleck favored a strategy of protecting territory over killing the enemy, disdained Grant’s personal appearance as insufficiently military, and was quick to give credence to unsubstantiated rumors of drunkenness. For his part and in contrast to Halleck, Grant was resolutely apolitical, which meant that he lacked the connections that advanced many other less-deserving officers.

  But the most formidable obstacle to Grant’s advancement was the very theater in which he achieved his successes. All eyes were on the Eastern Theater, especially Virginia. What happened in the vicinity of the Mississippi typically elicited from public and politicians little more than a nod. The one exception was Shiloh (April 6–7, 1862). While that battle (Chapter 14) ended in an important strategic victory for the Union, opening up an advance into northern Mississippi, its cost in casualties was unprecedented: more than 13,000 Union soldiers killed, wounded, captured, or missing—about one in five of the men who fought. From among a horrified public came demands that the president fire Grant. To these Lincoln responded that he needed Grant, needed him because “he fights.” While the Northern press pointed to a 20 percent casualty rate among Union forces at Shiloh, Lincoln noted a nearly 26 percent rate among the Confederates. While the likes of McClellan and Halleck viewed strategy in the Napoleonic terms of controlling territory, Grant was killing the enemy army. Grant understood that the Union North not only possessed a stronger economy and much greater industrial capacity than the Confederate South, it also had many more people: 23 million versus 9 million in the South, of which 3.5 million were slaves. The North could make good its manpower losses. The South could not.

  Still, it was not until March 9, 1864 that President Lincoln promoted Grant to lieutenant general—making him the highest-ranking officer in the US Army—and then appointed him chief of all Union land forces. Up to this time, Lincoln had been replacing one general after another, vainly searching for the right combination of fighting spirit and strategic skill. In Grant, he finally found a military leader not with a little more of this or that, but with an entirely new approach to the war. Under Grant, the Union armies would have a single aim: destroy the Confederate armies. Yes, Grant would still attack major Southern cities, but less to simply occupy them than to deprive the Confederate army of its ability to furnish transportation and supplies. And, yes, he would resume the advance against Richmond, but less for the purpose of claiming the Confederate capital than with the objective of continually forcing Robert E. Lee to defend it and, in the process, sacrifice men he could not afford to lose.

  By the time Grant was given the North’s top military job, only two major Confederate armies remained on the field: the Army of Northern Virginia, commanded by Robert E. Lee, and the Army of Tennessee, under the command of Joseph E. Johnston. Kill these two armies, and the war would end. Grant had on hand two major instruments of their destruction. The first was the Army of the Potomac, and the second the Military Division of the Mississippi.

  Before becoming the Union’s general in chief, Grant held command of the Military Division of the Mississippi, having stepped up to the post from command the Army of the Tennessee. (Like most Union armies, it was named after the nearest river and is not to be confused with the Confederate Army of Tennessee, which, like most Confederate armies, was named after a state or region.) When he left to take command of the Division, William Tecumseh Sherman succeeded him as commanding general of the Army of the Tennessee. With Grant’s appointment to the top Union command, Sherman then ascended to command of the Military Division of the Mississippi, whose main field armies were the Army of the Tennessee, the Army of the Ohio, and the Army of the Cumberland.

  Sherman was every bit as aggressive as Grant, and, like him, possessed a keen faculty for cutting to the very heart of a problem. While Grant would use the Army of the Potomac, nominally commanded by George Meade, for the march against Richmond—all the while forcing repeated combat on Lee—Sherman summed up his mission in a single sentence: “I was to go for Joe Johnston.” While Grant ate away at
the Army of Northern Virginia, Sherman was to destroy the Army of Tennessee. As Grant fought his way toward Richmond, Sherman would follow the tracks of the Western and Atlantic Railroad to take Atlanta. Seizing this would deprive the Confederacy of its chief transportation hub, and it would certainly force Johnston to fight.

  On May 4, 1864, Grant and Meade, with roughly 120,000 men of the Army of the Potomac, crossed the Rapidan River. This script had been followed before, early in the war, by George Brinton McClellan. Unlike him, however, Grant was not plagued by a morbid fear of being outnumbered. He had accurate intelligence, which told him that Lee could no longer field more than 65,000 men. A warrior at heart, Grant was confident in his ability to defeat Lee, whom he outnumbered nearly two to one. His intention, moreover, was to choose the battle ground. He wanted to force Lee into the open, to expose the Army of Northern Virginia and to give the Army of the Potomac vast room for maneuver and its artillery clear fields of fire. The superiority of Union artillery was one of the North’s great advantages over the military of the depleted Confederacy.

  Grant, to be sure, was not McClellan. But Lee was still Lee—a superb tactician when he was at his best and, even more, a commander committed to ceding nothing. He immediately understood that Grant meant to manipulate him into a position that favored the Union. Lee refused to be pushed. With numerically inferior forces and confronted by an invading army, a conventional commander would have dug in to make a stand in a static defense. Lee instead went on the attack, hurling his outnumbered army against the approaching columns. He hit Grant not out in the open, where the Union commander wanted to fight and where his artillery could be brought to bear, but in the dense forest known locally as the “Wilderness.” It was not a virgin battlespace. Almost a year to the day earlier, Lee had dealt Joseph Hooker and the Army of the Potomac a massive defeat here at the conclusion of the Battle of Chancellorsville (Aril 30-May 6, 1863).