Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (118 page)

The first project was completion of the cutoff canal that Union soldiers and contrabands had begun digging the previous summer. Sherman's corps went to work on this with much energy but no success. The river refused to cooperate in the plan to cut a new channel out of range of Vicksburg's guns, and even if it had done so the rebels could have planted new batteries to dominate the mouth of the canal four miles downstream. Although work on this canal continued until rising waters in February threatened Sherman's men with drowning, Grant soon pinned his hopes on a second enterprise known as the Lake Providence route. This project became the task of soldiers in the corps of General James B. McPherson, formerly Grant's chief engineer and now next to Sherman his favorite combat officer.
³⁰
This route followed a meandering course from an oxbow lake fifty miles above Vicksburg through Louisiana swamps and bayous to the Mississippi again 400 rivermiles

29
. T. Harry Williams,
Lincoln and His Generals
(New York, 1952), 232–34; Foote,
Civil War
, II, 235–37.

30
. To answer a question frequently asked the author, he will state here that he is no relation to General McPherson.

below. Midwestern farm boys who had joined the army to fight rebels found themselves dredging tons of mud and sawing off trees eight feet under water to clear a channel for gunboats and transports. After a great deal of labor, however, this effort was called off because it looked as if it would go on until doomsday.

More promising—or so it appeared at first—were two water routes through the jungle-like Yazoo Delta north of Vicksburg. If gunboats and transports could ferry the army through this maze for a dry-ground landing north of the fortified bluffs, Grant's troops could go to work as soldiers instead of ditch-diggers. Several gunboats and part of McClernand's corps went to Helena, 400 river-miles above Vicksburg, and blew up a levee to float the gunboats into the flooded Delta rivers. But the fleet soon ran into trouble. Overhanging cypress and cottonwood branches smashed smokestacks, lifeboats, and everything else above deck. Rushing logs carried by the flood crashed into the boats while they maneuvered through channels scarcely wider than their beams. Confederates felled trees across the rivers in front of them. The naval commander in charge of the expedition began to show signs of a nervous breakdown. When his boats came under fire from a hastily built Confederate fort near Greenwood, Mississippi, he collapsed—and so did the expedition.

Meanwhile another flotilla commanded by Porter himself and carrying a division of Sherman's troops was working its way through a 200-mile tangle of bayous and tributaries just north of Vicksburg. These boats also encountered obstacles of tree branches, logs, snags, and rebel axemen. Snakes, coons, and wildcats dropped from the trees and had to be swept overboard by sailors with brooms. Immobilized by the jungle's tentacles, Porter's gunboats were in a bad spot by March 20, with Confederate infantry converging on them hopeful of capturing the whole lot. Porter swallowed his naval pride and called on the army for help. He sent a contraband with a note to Sherman a few miles back with the transports:

Dear Sherman,

Hurry up, for Heaven's sake. I never knew how helpless an ironclad could be steaming around through the woods without an army to back her.
³¹

Sherman disembarked his men to march through waist-deep swamps and drive off the rebels. Porter's paddlewheeled monsters backed ignominiously

31
. Samuel Carter III,
The Final Fortress: The Campaign for Vicksburg 1862–1863
(New York, 1980), 147.

up the choked channels, and another effort to flank Vicksburg came to an end.

For two months Grant's army had been floundering in the mud. Many of them rested permanently below the mud, victims of pneumonia or typhoid or dysentery or any of a dozen other maladies. Vicksburg stood defiant as ever. Republican editors began to join Democrats in branding Grant an incompetent failure—and a drunkard to boot. "Grant has no plans for taking Vicksburg," wrote General Cadwallader Washburn to his brother Elihu, Grant's chief sponsor in Congress. "He is frittering away time and strength to no purpose. The truth must be told even if it hurts. You cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear." Although many such complaints came to Lincoln, he refused to throw Grant to the wolves. "I think Grant has hardly a friend left, except myself," said the president. But "what I want . . . is generals who will fight battles and win victories. Grant has done this, and I propose to stand by him."
³²

A prevalent theme in complaints about Grant concerned his drinking. According to one story, Lincoln deflected such charges with humor, telling a delegation of congressmen that he would like to know Grant's brand of whiskey so he could send some to his other generals.
³³
It is hard to separate fact from fiction in this matter. Many wartime stories of Grant's drunkenness are false; others are at best dubious. Grant's meteoric rise to fame provoked jealousy in the hearts of men who indulged in gossip to denigrate him. Subject to sick headaches brought on by strain and loss of sleep, Grant sometimes acted unwell in a manner to give observers the impression that he had been drinking. But even when the myths have been stripped away, a hard substratum of truth about Grant's drinking remains. He may have been an alcoholic in the medical meaning of that term. He was a binge drinker. For months he could go without liquor, but if he once imbibed it was hard for him to stop. His wife and his chief of staff John A. Rawlins were his best protectors. With their help, Grant stayed on the wagon nearly all the time during the war. If he did get drunk (and this is much disputed by historians)

32
. Cadwallader Washburn to Elihu B. Washburne (the brothers spelled their surname differently), March 28, 1863, in Nevins,
War
, II, 388; Foote,
Civil War
II, 217. See also T. Harry Williams,
Lincoln and His Generals
, 225–26.

33
. John Eaton,
Grant, Lincoln and the Freedmen
(New York, 1907), 64. Although some historians regard this story as apocryphal, and in any case it appears not to have been original with Lincoln—having been told about other generals in earlier wars—Bruce Catton considers Eaton a reliable source and accepts the story as true. Catton,
Grant Moves South
(Boston, 1960), 396–97.

it never happened at a time crucial to military operations. Recognized today as an illness, alcoholism in Grant's time was considered a moral weakness. Grant himself believed it so and battled to overcome the shame and guilt of his weakness. In the end, as a recent scholar has suggested, his predisposition to alcoholism may have made him a better general. His struggle for self-discipline enabled him to understand and discipline others; the humiliation of prewar failures gave him a quiet humility that was conspicuously absent from so many generals with a reputation to protect; because Grant had nowhere to go but up, he could act with more boldness and decision than commanders who dared not risk failure.
³⁴

Despite Lincoln's continuing faith in Grant, he permitted Secretary of War Stanton to send a special agent in March 1863 to investigate matters in the Army of the Tennessee. The agent was Charles A. Dana, former managing editor of the
New York Tribune
and now an assistant secretary of war. Dana went to the Mississippi ostensibly to straighten out the paymaster service in western armies, but Grant was aware of his real mission. Instead of giving Dana the cold shoulder—as some of his staff advised—Grant welcomed him. It was a wise action. Dana sized up the general favorably and began sending a stream of commendatory dispatches to Washington. Grant was "the most modest, the most disinterested and the most honest man I ever knew, with a temper that nothing could disturb," wrote Dana later in summary of his impressions

34
. The best analysis of Grant's drinking, informed by modern studies of alcoholism, is Lyle W. Dorsett, "The Problem of Grant's Drinking During the Civil War,"
Hayes Historical Journal
, 4 (1983). Among historians, Bruce Catton and Kenneth P. Williams question or deny Grant's weakness for liquor, while Benjamin Thomas, William McFeely, Shelby Foote, and Lyle Dorsett tend to accept its truth. The only detailed eye-witness account of a Grant binge during the war was written thirty years later by Sylvanus Cadwallader, a Chicago newspaper correspondent who spent more than two years with Grant's armies during the war: see Cadwallader,
Three Years with Grant
, ed. Benjamin P. Thomas (New York, 1955), 102–21. Catton and Williams and John Y. Simon challenge the authenticity of this particular story, though other historians accept it. For additional discussions of the issue of Grant's drinking, including the Cadwallader story, see Catton,
Grant Moves South
, 95–97, 462–65, 535–36; Kenneth P. Williams,
Lincoln Finds a General
, 5 vols. (New York, 1949–59), IV, 439–51, 577–82; exchange between Kenneth Williams and Benjamin Thomas in
American Heritage
, 7 (1956), 106–11; Foote,
Civil War
, II, 416–21; William S. McFeely,
Grant: A Biography
(New York, 1981), esp. 132–35, 148; John Y. Simon, ed.,
The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant
, 14 vols. (Carbon-dale, III., 1967–85), VIII, 322–25n.

at the time. "Not a great man except morally; not an original or brilliant man, but sincere, thoughtful, deep and gifted with courage that never faltered."
³⁵

Men in the ranks shared Dana's opinion. They appreciated Grant's lack of "superfluous flummery," his tendency to wear a plain uniform "without scarf, sword, or trappings of any sort save the double-starred shoulder straps." A private reported that the men "seem to look upon him as a friendly partner of theirs, not as an arbitrary commander." Instead of cheering him when he rode by, they were likely to "greet him as they would address one of their neighbors at home. 'Good morning, General,' 'Pleasant day, General,' and like expressions are the greetings he meets everywhere. . . . There was no nonsense, no sentiment; only a plain business man of the republic, there for the one single purpose of getting that command over the river in the shortest time possible."
³⁶

Get them over the river Grant would soon do, with spectacular results. But at the end of March 1863 the northern public could see only the failures of the past four months—on the Mississippi as well as in Virginia. "This winter is, indeed, the Valley Forge of the war," wrote a Wisconsin officer. Such a remark at least implied a hope for ultimate success. But many other Yankees had given up hope. Captain Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., recovering from his Antietam wound, wrote dispiritedly that "the army is tired with its hard and terrible experience. . . . I've pretty much made up my mind that the South have achieved their independence." The staunchly loyal Joseph Medill, editor of the
Chicago Tribune
, believed that "an armistice is bound to come during the year ′63. The rebs can't be conquered by the present machinery."
³⁷
Into this crisis of confidence strode the copperheads with their program for peace without victory.

35
. Charles A. Dana,
Recollections of the Civil War
(New York, 1902), 61—62.

36
. Quotations from Catton,
Grant Moves South
, 390–91, and Foote,
Civil War
, II, 218–19.

37
. Wisconsin officer quoted in Catton,
Glory Road
, 95; Mark DeWolfe Howe, ed.,
Touched with Fire: Civil War Letters and Diary of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr
., 1861–1864 (Cambridge, Mass., 1946), 73; Medill to Elihu Washburne, Jan. 16, 1863, in Catton,
Grant Moves South
, 369–70.

20
Fire in the Rear

I

Despite his preoccupation with military matters, Lincoln told Charles Sumner in January 1863 that he feared " 'the fire in the rear'—meaning the Democracy, especially at the Northwest—more than our military chances."
¹
The president had ample grounds for concern. The peace faction of the Democratic party grew stronger with each setback of Union armies. And the enactment of a conscription law in March 1863 gave the antiwar movement additional stimulus.

By 1863 Clement L. Vallandigham had emerged as leader of the Peace Democrats. Only forty-two years old, the handsome Ohio congressman had cut his political eyeteeth on the Jeffersonian philosophy of limited government. "It is the desire of my heart," he declared soon after the outbreak of war, "to restore the Union, the Federal Union as it was forty years ago." To this desire Vallandigham added sympathy for the South produced by descent from a Virginia family and marriage to the daughter of a Maryland planter. Although Ohio Republicans had gerrymandered him into defeat in the 1862 election, Vallandigham went out with a bang rather than a whimper. In a farewell speech to the House on January 14, 1863, and a subsequent tour from New Jersey