The Civil War: A Narrative: Fredericksburg to Meridian (67 page)

Unable to wait for word from below—news, perhaps, that the indispensable fleet had gone out of existence—Grant went ashore, got on his horse, and rode south under the paling stars, galloping along the crude and pot-holed road McClernand’s corps had spent the past three weeks constructing. This was quite unlike the old Grant, who had never seemed in a hurry about anything at all. Something had come over him, here lately. “None who had known him the previous years could recognize him as being the same man,” one officer observed. He had never seen the general ride at even a fast trot, let alone a gallop; but now, he said, “[Grant’s] energies seemed to burst forth with new life,” with the result that he rode at top speed practically all the time and “seemed wrought up to the last pitch of determination and energy.” Shiloh and the long hot unproductive summer of 1862, the ill-wind fiasco near Iuka and the fruitless victory at Corinth, the period of indecision in
Memphis and the recent seven failures above Vicksburg, all were behind him now; he was launched at last on an all-or-nothing effort, a go-for-broke campaign, of which the passage of the batteries by the fleet was the first stage. If this failed, all failed; he would never get his troops across the mile-wide Mississippi. It was no wonder he rode fast.

Near New Carthage about midday he drew rein and breathed a sigh of relief at the sight of the fleet riding at anchor, apparently intact. Closer inspection showed that the boats had been knocked about considerably, however. All were damaged to various degrees, some in their hulls and others in their machinery. One was missing altogether: a transport, as it turned out, set afire by repeated hits and sunk to the accompaniment of cheers from the rebel batteries. But all the rest were seaworthy, or soon would be, after the completion of repairs already under way by bluejackets swarming over their ripped-up decks and pounded bulwarks. Porter and his captains were in excellent spirits, though they were frank to admit that last night’s experience had been little short of horrendous. For one thing, all their precautions involving stealth and secrecy had availed them nothing. As they proceeded, dark and silent, down the straightaway eastern shank of the hairpin bend, Confederate sentries posted in skiffs on the river spotted them quickly; whereupon some rowed eastward to give the alarm to the Vicksburg cannoneers, while others, risking capture, crossed to the opposite bank, where they set fire to prepared stacks of pitch-soaked wood, as well as to the abandoned De Soto railroad station midway up the point. Quick-leaping flames floodlighted the approaching Yankee gunboats and the alerted rebel gunners promptly took these well-defined targets under fire. Another difficulty was that the prescribed low speed left the vessels to the mercy of the eddying current, which caught them alternately on the bow and quarter, swinging them broadside to the stream and in some cases even spinning them halfway around, so that they were obliged to come full circle under the plunging fire, as if responding to cruel encores that held them on the brightly lighted stage for further pelting by an irate audience. Clear at last, they played a brief epilogue at Warrenton, then swept on south to anchor above New Carthage in the predawn darkness. Assessing damages, Porter was grateful to discover that, despite a total of 68 hits received, the transport
Henry Clay
was the flotilla’s only loss. Not a man had been killed, even aboard the missing boat, and only 13—in this case a decidedly lucky number—had been wounded. Give him a couple of days in which to complete repairs, he said, and he would be quite ready to co-operate with the army.

Grant returned to Milliken’s Bend, much pleased with the outcome, and prepared for another run within the week, this time by transports alone, in order to provide more ferries for the crossing. “If I do not underestimate the enemy,” he wrote Halleck on April 21, “my force is abundant, with a foothold once obtained, to do the work.” Next night
six river steamers, loaded with rations, forage, and medical supplies, attempted the second run under instructions “to drop noiselessly down with the current … and not show steam until the enemy’s batteries began firing, when the boats were to use all their legs.” This was an all-army show, the steamers being army-owned and manned by army volunteers, since the civilian crews had balked at exposing their persons to what they had watched six nights ago from a safe distance. Now as then, Grant was there to see the show; an Illinois private later told how he “saw standing on the upper deck of his headquarters boat a man of iron, his wife by his side. He seemed to me the most immovable figure I ever saw.” Then came the fireworks across the way, the sudden illumination and the uproar of the guns on the fuming bluff. Grant took it calmly, the soldier recalled; “No word escaped his lips, no muscle of his earnest face moved.” Presently the batteries fell silent and word arrived from below that, now as before, only a single vessel had failed to survive the run—the steamer
Tigress
, McClernand’s former headquarters boat, which Grant had ridden to Shiloh a year ago. Loaded with medicines and surgical equipment, she was hulled a dozen times or more and broke in two and sank, her skeleton crew floating downstream to safety on bits of wreckage. Once more not a man had been killed and the wounded were only a handful. Half the steamers had their engines permanently smashed, but that was no real drawback, since they would hold as many troops as ever and could be pushed or towed across the river as barges. As Grant saw it, this second run had been quite as successful as the first, and he was twice as pleased.

Belittling the loss of the
Tigress
and her cargo, which he said amounted to nothing more than “little extras for the men,” he set off southward again on horseback to join Porter for a naval reconnaissance of Grand Gulf, designated as the point where the army would obtain a foothold once the navy had blasted its batteries out of existence. Porter was experiencing misgivings, and Grant, looking the place over from just beyond range of its guns on the 24th, saw that he had indeed given the navy a tough nut to crack. Its batteries were sited high, as at Donelson and Vicksburg, and what was more they seemed altogether ready for whatever came their way. “I foresee great difficulties in our present position,” he informed Sherman on his return from the exploratory boat ride, “but it will not do to let these retard any movements.” In this connection it seemed to him there might be a chance for an assault to succeed at last up the Yazoo, despite the previous fiasco. “It may possibly happen,” he wrote Sherman, “that the enemy may so weaken his forces about Vicksburg and Haines Bluff as to make the latter vulnerable, particularly with a fall of water to give you an extended landing.” However: “I leave the management of affairs at your end of the line to you,” he added by way of making it clear that he was not definitely ordering an assault.

Monday, April 27, was Grant’s forty-first birthday. It also marked the completion of his first-stage preparations for getting his troops across the river in order to come to grips with the rebels on dry ground, which was what he had been after from the start. By now all four divisions of McClernand’s corps, having extended their march southward around Bayou Vidal and Lake Saint Joseph, were at Hard Times, Louisiana, the designated point of embarkation for the landing at Grand Gulf, five miles downstream. One of McPherson’s divisions was also there and the other two were closing fast, while Sherman’s three remained at Young’s Point, on call to follow but held in place for the present so as to confuse the lookouts on the Vicksburg bluff. Seven warships and seven transports were available below, and though Porter was still troubled by misgivings—he thought his gunboats could suppress the Grand Gulf batteries, all right, but he warned that they might get so knocked about in the process that they would not be able to provide adequate cover for the crossing that would follow—Grant himself, as usual, expressed no doubt as to the outcome. He foresaw “great difficulties,” but he did not admit that they were any occasion for delay. All he asked of the navy was that the rebel guns be silenced, after which there would be no need for cover. Before the anniversary was over, he sent McClernand word to go ahead: “Commence immediately the embarkation of your corps, or so much of it as there is transportation for.”

The showdown was unquestionably at hand; but Grant was disclosing nothing he could avoid disclosing until the final moment. He had, in fact, devised three separate feints or demonstrations, two of them designed to mislead the enemy as to his chosen point of attack, well downstream, and a third whereby he hoped not only to distract his opponent by diverting his attention from front to rear, but also to add to his confusion, throughout this critical period, by disrupting the lines of supply and communication leading back into the interior of the state whose welfare and defense were the southern commander’s assigned concern.

Sherman was organically involved in two of these, one of which had already been accomplished during the first ten days of April. Lest Pemberton call in the troops disposed to guard against a penetration of the Delta, and thereby strengthen the Vicksburg garrison in time for the showdown fight now imminent, Fred Steele’s division was sent a hundred miles up the Mississippi to Greenville, where the men went ashore and thrashed about for a week in the interior, giving the impression that they were merely the advance contingent for another major drive on the Gibraltar of the West. Having done so—to the extreme alarm of the local planters, who bemoaned the attendant loss of cotton, cattle, and Negroes, and the home-guard commanders, who called loudly for reinforcements—they got back aboard their transports and rejoined Sherman at Young’s Point for a share in the second and more
important feint, this time against Haines Bluff. Grant had suggested it in his letter of the 24th, after a look at the Grand Gulf defenses, but now on his birthday he returned to the matter in more persuasive terms. “The effect of a heavy demonstration in that direction would be good so far as the enemy are concerned,” he wrote Sherman from Hard Times, where McClernand’s men were preparing to embark, “but I am loth to order it, because it would be hard to make our own troops understand that only a demonstration was intended and our people at home would characterize it as a repulse. I therefore leave it to you whether to make such a demonstration.”

In referring thus to the probable adverse reaction by “our people at home,” who of course would get their information from the papers, many of which were hostile—particularly toward Sherman, who returned the hostility in full measure—Grant may or may not have intended to use psychology on his journalist-hating friend. But at any rate it worked. “Does General Grant think I care what the newspapers say?” Sherman exclaimed as soon as he read the letter. And despite his growing antipathy for the strategy his superior had evolved (“I tremble for the result,” he wrote his wife that week; “I look upon the whole thing as one of the most hazardous and desperate moves of this or any other war”) he replied at once with a pledge of full co-operation. “We will make as strong a demonstration as possible,” he declared. “The troops will all understand the purpose and not be hurt by the repulse. The people of the country must find out the truth as best they can; it is none of their business. You are engaged in a hazardous enterprise, and for good reason wish to divert attention; that is sufficient for me, and it shall be done.” Warming as he wrote, the red-haired general bristled with contempt for public opinion. “The men have sense, and will trust us. As to the reports in newspapers, we must scorn them, else they will ruin us and our country. They are as much enemies to good government as the secesh, and between the two I like the secesh best, because they are a brave, open enemy and not a set of sneaking, croaking scoundrels.”

Accordingly, he spent the next two days in preparation, and on the final day of April—previously designated by Lincoln, at the request of Congress, “as a day of national humiliation, fasting, and prayer” because, in the words of the proclamation, the people had “forgotten God” and become “too proud to pray”—set off up the Yazoo with ten regiments from Frank Blair’s division, escorted by the flotilla remnant Porter had left behind, three gunboats, four tinclads, and three mortars, under Lieutenant Commander K. R. Breese. Intent on making the greatest possible show of strength, Sherman spread his troops over the transport decks with orders for “every man [to] look as numerous as possible.” Short of Haines Bluff and near the scene of their December repulse, the bluecoats went ashore; marching and countermarching, banners
flying and bands playing for all they were worth in the boggy woodland, they demonstrated in sight of the fortified line of hills, while the gunboats closed to within point-blank range of the bluff itself. For three hours the naval attack was pressed, as if in preparation for an infantry assault. However, the defenders clearly had their backs up; nor was there anything wrong with their marksmanship. The overaged
Tyler
, a veteran of all the fights since Henry, retired early with a shot below the water line, and the other two hauled off at 2 p.m. roughly handled, one having taken a total of forty-six hits. Sherman might have let it go at that, but he was determined to play out the game to full advantage. May Day morning he wrote Grant: “At 3 p.m. we will open another cannonade to prolong the diversion, and keep it up till after dark, when we shall drop down to Chickasaw and go on back to camp.” The other two divisions, waiting at Young’s Point under Steele and Brigadier General James M. Tuttle, were alerted for the long march to Hard Times, while Blair was told to keep up the pretense of attack until darkness afforded cover for withdrawal, at which time he would “let out for home,” meaning Milliken’s Bend, where he was to shield the rear of the two divisions moving southward to join Grant. Meanwhile, Sherman told him, “I will hammer away this p.m. because Major Rowley, [a staff observer] now here, says that our diversion has had perfect success, great activity being seen in Vicksburg, and troops pushing up this way. By prolonging the effort, we give Grant more chance.” The infantry continued to mass as if for attack, and the gunboats moved again within range of Haines Bluff, keeping up the action until 8 o’clock that evening. Then Blair’s men got back aboard their transports and withdrew, returning to the west bank of the Mississippi, followed by the somewhat battered but undaunted ten-boat flotilla, which dropped anchor off the mouth of the Yazoo. Steele and Tuttle took up the march for Hard Times at first light next morning, accompanied by Sherman himself, who sent a courier ahead with a full account of the two-day affair. Casualties had been negligible, he reported, afloat and ashore. Whether matters had gone as well for Grant, far downriver at Grand Gulf, he did not know; but he was satisfied that the feint from above had held a considerable portion of the Vicksburg garrison in position north of the city, away from the simultaneous main effort to the south. “We will be there as soon as possible,” he assured his friend and superior.