The Civil War: A Narrative: Fredericksburg to Meridian (74 page)

Grant could sympathize with the boy’s disappointment, but he had just been handed something considerably more valuable to him than the lost flag or even the seventeen guns that had been taken in the engagement that served as prelude to the occupation of the capital. Charles Dana arrived in mid-celebration with a dispatch just delivered by a courier from Grand Gulf. Signed by the Secretary of War and dated
May 5, it had been sent in response to a letter in which Dana had given him a summation of Grant’s plan “to lose no time in pushing his army toward the Big Black and Jackson, threatening both and striking at either, as is most convenient.… He will disregard his base and depend on the country for meat and even for bread.” Now Stanton replied:

There was more here than met the eye. Stanton of course had authority over Halleck, so that if—or rather, as Grant believed from past experience,
when
—the time came for the general-in-chief to protest that Grant had disobeyed orders by abandoning Banks and striking out on his own, he would find—if indeed he had not found already—that Stanton, and presumably Lincoln as well, had approved in advance the course Grant had adopted. Nor was that all. Dana, having long since taken a position alongside the army commander in his private war against McClernand, had been keeping the Secretary copiously posted on the former congressman’s military shortcomings, large and small, and feeling him out as to what the administration’s reaction would be when Grant decided the time had come for him to swing the ax. Now the answer was at hand. Grant not only had “full and absolute authority” to sit in judgment; he would in fact be held “responsible for any failure to exert his powers” in all matters pertaining to what he considered his army’s welfare and the progress of what Stanton called his “operations,” whether against the rebels or McClernand.

It was no wonder then—protected as he now was from the wrath of his immediate superior, as well as from the machinations of his ranking subordinate—that he was in good spirits during the hotel-lobby victory celebration. All around him, meanwhile, the town was in a turmoil. “Many citizens [had] fled at our approach,” one Federal witness later recalled, “abandoning houses, stores, and all their personal property, without so much as locking their doors. The Negroes, poor whites, and it must be admitted some stragglers and bummers from the ranks of the Union army, carried off thousands of dollars worth of property from houses, homes, shops and stores, until some excuse was given for the charge of ‘northern vandalism,’ which was afterwards made by the South. The streets were filled with people, white and black, who were carrying away all the stolen goods they could stagger under, without the slightest attempt at concealment and without let or hindrance
from citizens or soldiers.… In addition … the convicts of the penitentiary, who had been released by their own authorities, set all the buildings connected with that prison on fire, and their lurid flames added to the holocaust elsewhere prevailing.” He observed that “many calls were made upon [Grant] by citizens asking for guards to protect their private property, some of which perhaps were granted, but by far the greater number [of these petitioners] were left to the tender mercies of their Confederate friends.”

After all, Grant had not brought his army here to protect the private property of men in revolution against the government that army represented; nor, for that matter, had it ever been his custom to deny his soldiers a chance at relaxation they had earned, even though that relaxation sometimes took a rather violent form. His purpose, rather, was to destroy all public property such as might be of possible comfort to the Confederacy. This applied especially to the railroads, the wrecking of which would abolish the Mississippi capital as a transportation hub, at least through the critical period just ahead. But that other facilities were not neglected was observed by a witness who testified that “foundries, machine shops, warehouses, factories, arsenals, and public stores were fired as fast as flames could be kindled.” Sherman was the man for this work, Grant decided, and he gave him instructions “to remain in Jackson until he destroyed that place as a railroad center and manufacturing city of military supplies.”

Meanwhile there was the campaign to get on with; Pemberton was hovering to the west, already on the near side of the Big Black, and beyond him there was Vicksburg, the true object of all this roundabout marching and such bloodshed as had so far been involved. McPherson was told to get his corps in hand and be prepared to set out for Bolton Depot at first light tomorrow to support McClernand, whose corps was no longer the army’s rear guard, but rather its advance. Having attended to this, Grant joined Sherman for a little relaxation of his own; namely, a tour of inspection to determine which of the local business establishments would be spared or burned. In the course of the tour they came upon a cloth factory which, as Grant said later, “had not ceased work on account of the battle nor for the entrance of Yankee troops.” Outside the building “an immense amount of cotton” was stacked in bales; inside, the looms were going full tilt, tended by girl operatives, weaving bolts of tent cloth plainly stamped C.S.A. No one seemed to notice the two generals, who watched for some time in amused admiration of such oblivious industry. “Finally,” Grant said afterwards, “I told Sherman I thought they had done work enough. The operatives were told they could leave and take with them what cloth they could carry. In a few minutes cotton and factory were in a blaze.”

This done, Grant returned to the Bowman House for his first
night’s sleep on a mattress in two weeks. Joe Johnston, he was told, had occupied the same room the night before.

  3  

Johnston—not Beauregard, as rumor had had it earlier—had arrived at dusk the day before, at the end of a grueling three-day train ride from Tennessee by way of Atlanta, Montgomery, Mobile, and Meridian, only to find the Mississippi capital seething with reports of heavy Union columns advancing from the west. As night closed in, a hard rain began to fall, shrouding the city and deepening the Virginian’s gloom still further: as was shown in a wire he got off to Seddon after dark. “I arrived this evening finding the enemy’s force between this place and General Pemberton, cutting off communication. I am too late.” To Pemberton, still on the far side of the Big Black, he sent a message advising quick action on that general’s part. To insure delivery, three copies were forwarded by as many couriers. “I have lately arrived, and learn that Major General Sherman is between us, with four divisions, at Clinton,” Johnston wrote. “It is important to re-establish communications, that you may be reinforced. If practicable, come up in his rear at once. To beat such a detachment would be of immense value. The troops here could cooperate. All the strength you can quickly assemble should be brought. Time is all important.”

He had at Jackson, he presently discovered, only two brigades of about 6000 men with which to oppose the 25,000 Federals who were knocking at the western gates next morning. After a sharp, brief skirmish and the sacrifice of seventeen guns to cover a withdrawal, he retreated seven miles up the Canton road to Tugaloo, where he halted at nightfall, unpursued, and sent another message to Pemberton, from whom he had heard nothing since his arrival, informing him that the capital had been evacuated. He was expecting another “12,000 or 13,000” troops from the East, he said, and “as soon as [these] reinforcements are all up, they must be united to the rest of the army. I am anxious to see a force assembled that may be able to inflict a heavy blow upon the enemy.… If prisoners tell the truth, the force at Jackson must be half of Grant’s army. It would decide the campaign to beat it, which can only be done by concentrating, especially when the remainder of the eastern troops arrive.” He himself could do little or nothing until these men reached him, reducing the odds to something within reason, but he did not think that Pemberton should neglect any opportunity Grant afforded meanwhile, particularly in regard to his lines of supply and communication. “Can he supply himself from the Mississippi?” Johnston asked. “Can you not cut him off from it, and above all, should he be compelled to fall back for want of supplies, beat him?”

This last was in accord with Pemberton’s own decision, already arrived at before the second message was received. The first, delivered by one of the three couriers that morning at Bovina Station, nine miles east of Vicksburg, had taken him greatly by surprise. He had expected Johnston to come to his assistance in defense of the line along or just in front of the Big Black; yet here that general was, requesting him “if practicable” to come to
his
assistance by marching against the enemy’s rear at Clinton, some twenty miles away. Pemberton replied that he would “move at once with the whole available force,” explaining however that this included only 17,500 troops at best, since the remaining 9000 under his command were required to man the Warrenton-Vicksburg-Haines Bluff defenses, as well as the principal crossings of the Big Black, which otherwise would remain open in his rear, exposing the Gibraltar of the West to sudden capture by whatever roving segment of the rampant blue host happened to lunge in that direction. “In directing this move,” he felt obliged to add, by way of protest, “I do not think you fully comprehend the position Vicksburg will be left in; but I comply at once with your request.”

So he said. However, when he rode forward to Edwards, where his mobile force of three divisions under Loring, Stevenson, and Bowen was posted four miles east of the Big Black, he learned that a Union column, reportedly five divisions strong—it was in fact McClernand’s corps, with Blair attached as guard for the wagon train—was at Raymond, in position for a northward advance on Bolton. If Pemberton marched on Clinton, as Johnston suggested, ignoring this threat to his right flank as he moved eastward along the railroad, he would not only be leaving Vicksburg and the remaining two divisions under Major Generals M. L. Smith and John H. Forney in grave danger of being gobbled up while his back was turned; he would also be exposing his eastbound force to destruction at the hands of the other half of the Northern army. Perplexed by this dilemma, and mindful of some advice received two days ago from Richmond that he “add conciliation to the discharge of duty”—“Patience in listening to suggestions … is sometimes rewarded,” Davis had added—he decided the time had come for him to call a council of war, something he had never done before in all his thirty years of military service. Assembling the general officers of the three divisions at Edwards Station shortly after noon, he laid Johnston’s message before them and outlined the tactical problems it posed. Basically, what he had to deal with was a contradiction of orders from above. As he understood the President’s wishes, he was not to risk losing Vicksburg by getting too far from it, whereas Johnston was suggesting a junction of their forces near Jackson, forty miles away, in order to engage what he called a “detachment” of four—in fact, five—divisions, without reference to or apparent knowledge of the five-division column now at Raymond, both of which outnumbered the Confederates
at Edwards. Pemberton, on the other hand, did not strictly agree with either of his two superiors, preferring to await attack in a prepared position near or behind the Big Black River, with a chance of following up a repulse with a counterattack designed to cut off and annihilate the foe. These three views could not be reconciled, but neither did he consider that any one of them could be ignored; so that, like the nation at large, this Northerner who sided with the South was torn and divided against himself. That was his particular nightmare in this nightmare interlude of his country’s history. According to an officer on his staff, the Pennsylvania’s trouble now and in the future was that he made “the capital mistake of trying to harmonize instructions from his superiors diametrically opposed to each other, and at the same time to bring them into accord with his own judgment, which was averse to the plans of both.”