The Civil War: A Narrative: Fredericksburg to Meridian (75 page)

Nor was the council of much assistance to him in finding a way around the impasse. Though a majority of the participants favored complying with Johnston’s suggestion that the two forces be united, they were obliged to admit that it could not be accomplished by a direct march on Clinton, which was plainly an invitation to disaster. Meanwhile Pemberton’s own views, as he told Johnston later, “were strongly expressed as unfavorable to any advance which would remove me from my base, which was and is Vicksburg.” Apparently he limited himself to this negative contention. But finally Loring—known as “Old Blizzards” since his and Tilghman’s spirited repulse of the Yankee gunboats above Greenwood—suggested an alternate movement, southeast nine miles to Dillon, which he believed would sever Grant’s connection with Grand Gulf and thus force him either to withdraw, for lack of supplies, or else to turn and fight at a disadvantage in a position of Pemberton’s choice. Stevenson agreed, along with others, and Pemberton, though he disliked the notion of moving even that much farther from Vicksburg, “did not, however, see fit to put my own judgment and opinions so far in opposition as to prevent a movement altogether.” He approved the suggestion, apparently for lack of having anything better to offer, and adjourned the council after giving the generals instructions to be ready to march at dawn. At 5.40, on the heels of the adjournment, he got off a message informing Johnston of his intentions. “I shall move as early tomorrow morning as practicable with a column of 17,000 men,” he wrote, explaining the exact location of Dillon so that Johnston would have no trouble finding it on a map which was enclosed. “The object is to cut the enemy’s communications and to force him to attack me, as I do not consider my force sufficient to justify an attack on the enemy in position or to attempt to cut my way to Jackson.”

Johnston received this at 8.30 next morning, May 15, by which time he had withdrawn another three miles up the Canton road, still farther from the intended point of concentration at Clinton. Though
the message showed that Pemberton had anticipated the Virginian’s still unreceived suggestion that he attempt to “cut [Grant] off from [the Mississippi],” Johnston no longer favored such a movement. “Our being compelled to leave Jackson makes your plan impracticable,” he replied, and repeated—despite Pemberton’s objection to being drawn still farther from his base—his preference for an eastward march by the mobile force from Vicksburg: “The only mode by which we can unite is by your moving directly to Clinton, informing me, that [I] may move to that point with about 6000 troops. I have no means of estimating the enemy’s force at Jackson. The principal officers here differ very widely, and I fear he will fortify if time is left him. Let me hear from you immediately.”

Evidently Johnston believed that Grant was going to hole up in the Mississippi capital and thus allow him time to effect a junction between the Vicksburg troops and his own, including the “12,000 or 13,000” reinforcements expected any day now from the East. If so, he was presently disabused. A reply from Pemberton, written early the following morning but not delivered until after dark, informed him that the advance on Dillon—badly delayed anyhow by the need for building a bridge across a swollen creek—had been abandoned, in accordance with his wishes, and the direction of march reversed. It was Pemberton’s intention, as explained in the message, to move north of the railroad, swing wide through Brownsville to avoid the mass of Federals reported to be near Bolton, and converge on Clinton as instructed. “The order of countermarch has been issued,” he wrote, and followed a description of his proposed route with the words: “I am thus particular, so that you may be able to make a junction with this army.”

The Vicksburg commander at last had abandoned his objections to what Johnston had called “the only mode by which we can unite.” He was, or soon would be, moving east toward his appointed destination. But there was an ominous postscript to the message, written in evident haste and perhaps alarm: “Heavy skirmishing is now going on to my front.”

What that portended Johnston did not know; but Grant did. Before he retired to the hotel room his adversary had occupied the night before the fall of Jackson, he received from McPherson one of the three copies of Johnston’s message urging Pemberton to “come up in [Sherman’s] rear at once.” This windfall was the result of a ruse worked some months ago by Hurlbut, who banished from Memphis, with considerable fanfare, a citizen found guilty of “uttering disloyal and threatening sentiments,” though he was in secret, as Hurlbut knew, a thoroughly loyal Union man. The expulsion, along with his continued expression of secessionist views after his removal to the Mississippi capital, won him the sympathy and admiration of the people there: so much so,
indeed, that he was one of the three couriers entrusted with copies of Johnston’s urgent message. He delivered it, however, not to Pemberton but to McPherson, who passed it promptly along to Grant. “Time is all important,” the Virginian had written. Grant agreed. By first light next morning, May 15, McPherson was marching west from the capital, leaving Sherman to accomplish its destruction while he himself moved toward a junction with McClernand, who had been instructed simultaneously by Grant: “Turn all your forces toward Bolton station, and make all dispatch in getting there. Move troops by the most direct road from wherever they may be on the receipt of this order.”

McPherson’s three divisions had seventeen miles to go, and McClernand’s four—five, including Blair—were variously scattered, from Raymond back to Fourteen Mile Creek. Each corps got one division to Bolton by late afternoon—Hovey and Logan, in that order—while the others camped along the roads at sundown. Carr and Osterhaus were three miles south, with A. J. Smith between them and Raymond, where Blair was. Brigadier Generals John McArthur and Marcellus Crocker, commanding McPherson’s other two divisions, were bivouacked beside the railroad leading back to Clinton. Riding out from Jackson to that point before nightfall, Grant ordered McClernand to move on Edwards in the morning, supported by McPherson, but warned him “to watch for the enemy and not bring on an engagement unless he felt very certain of success.” The fog of war, gathering again to obscure the Confederate purpose, had provoked this note of caution; but it was dispersed once more at 5 o’clock next morning, when two Union-sympathizing employes of the Vicksburg-Jackson Railroad were brought to Grant at Clinton. They had passed through Pemberton’s army in the night, they said, and could report that it was moving east of Edwards with a strength of about 25,000 men. Though this was in fact some 7500 high, it was still some 10,000 fewer than Grant had on hand. But he was taking no unavoidable chances. Deciding to ignore Johnston, who by now was a day’s march north of Jackson at Calhoun Station, he ordered Sherman to “put one division with an ammunition train on the road at once, with directions to its commander to march with all possible speed until he comes upon our rear.” The remaining division was to hurry its demolition work and follow along as soon as might be. The orders to McClernand and McPherson were unaltered; all that was changed by this second dispersal of the war fog was the weight of the blow about to be delivered. Now that he knew Pemberton’s strength and had him spotted, Grant intended to hit him with everything he had.

At about the time the railroad men were telling all they knew, McClernand started forward in high spirits. “My corps, again, led the advance,” he was to say proudly in a letter giving his friend Lincoln an account of the campaign. Such was indeed the case. Three roads led
west from the vicinity of Bolton to a junction east of Edwards, and McClernand used all three: Hovey on the one to the north, Osterhaus and Carr on the one in the middle, and Smith on the one to the south. Blair followed Smith, and McPherson’s three divisions followed Hovey. Rebel cavalry was soon encountered, gray phantoms who fired and scampered out of range while the blue skirmishers flailed the woods with bullets. Then at 7.30, five miles short of Edwards, Smith came upon a screen of butternut pickets and dislodged them, exposing a four-gun battery, which he silenced. He wanted to plunge on, despite the signs that the high ground ahead was occupied in strength, but McClernand told him to hold what he had till Blair came up to keep his exposed left flank from being turned. Immediately on the heels of this, a rattle of gunfire from the north signified that Osterhaus and Hovey had also come upon johnnies to their front. McClernand inspected the rebel position as best he could from a distance and, finding it formidable, decided to hang on where he was until the situation could be developed. Having obeyed Grant’s instructions “to watch for the enemy,” he was also mindful of the injunction “not [to] bring on an engagement unless he felt very certain of success.” At this point, with his various columns a mile or two apart and facing a wooded ridge a-swarm with graybacks, he was not feeling very certain about anything at all. What he mainly felt was lonely.

Countermarching in obedience to the message received early that morning from Johnston, Pemberton had been warned by his outriders of the Union host advancing westward along the three roads from Bolton and Raymond. When this danger was emphasized by the “heavy skirmishing” mentioned in the postscript to his reply that he was moving north and east toward a junction at Clinton, he knew he had a fight on his hands, wanted or not, and to avoid the risk of being caught in motion, strung out on the road to Brownsville, he hastily put his troops in position for receiving the attack he knew was coming. Whether his choice of ground was “by accident or design,” as Grant ungenerously remarked, there could be no doubt that Pemberton chose well. Just south of the railroad and within a broad northward loop of rain-swollen Baker’s Creek, a seventy-foot eminence known as Champion Hill—so called because it was on a plantation belonging to a family of that name—caused the due-west road from Bolton to veer south around its flank, joining the middle road in order to cross a timbered ridge that extended southward for three miles, past the lower of the three roads along which the enemy was advancing. Pemberton placed Stevenson’s division on the hill itself, overlooking the direct approach from Bolton, and Bowen’s and Loring’s divisions along the ridge, blocking the other two approaches. Here, in an opportune position of great natural strength, he faced as best he could the consequences of his reluctant and belated compliance with his superior’s repeated suggestion that he
abandon the security of his prepared lines, along and just in front of the Big Black, for an attack on the Federal “detachment” supposed to be at Clinton. Now, however, as the thing turned out, it was Pemberton who was about to be attacked, a dozen miles short of his assigned objective. And here, precisely midway between Vicksburg and Jackson, both of which were twenty-two miles away, was fought what at least one prominent western-minded historian was to call “the most decisive battle of the Civil War.”

Grant did not much like the look of things when he came riding out from Bolton and reached the front, where the road veered south beyond the Champion house, to find Hovey exchanging long-range shots with the enemy on the tall hill just ahead. It seemed to him, as he said later, that the rebels “commanded all the ground in range.” However, unlike McClernand on the two roads to the south, he was not content to hold his own while waiting for the situation to develop more or less of its own accord. Logan’s division having arrived, he sent it to the right, to prolong the line and feel for an opening in that direction. This was about 10 o’clock; he preferred to wait for Crocker to come up and lend the weight of McPherson’s second division to the attack. But Hovey by now was hotly engaged, taking punishment from the batteries on the height and protesting that he must either go forward or fall back. Grant unleashed him. A former Indiana lawyer, of whom it was said that he had taken to the army “just as if he expected to spend his life in it,” Hovey drove straight up the steep acclivity to his front, flinging back successive Confederate lines, until he reached and seized the eleven guns that had been pounding him from near the crest. His men were whooping with delight, proud but winded, when they were struck in turn by a powerful counterattack launched from a fringe of woods along the crest. “We ran, and ran manfully,” one among them declared, explaining how he and his fellows had been swept back from the captured guns and down the slope they had climbed. Reinforced by Crocker’s lead brigade, which had just arrived under Colonel George Boomer, they managed to hang on at the foot of the hill; but only by the hardest. One officer called the fighting there “unequal, terrible, and most sanguinary.” For half an hour, he said, the troops “on each side took their turn in driving and being driven.”

It was obvious that Hovey, who had left about one third of his division lying dead or wounded on the hillside, could not hold out much longer unassisted. Then one of the survivors looked over his shoulder and saw the army commander speaking to the colonel in charge of Crocker’s second brigade, which was coming forward along the road behind them. “I was close enough to see his features,” the man was to recall. “Earnest they were, but sign of inward movement there was none.” This was the Grant of Belmont, Donelson, and Shiloh, reacting to adversity here as he had reacted there. If the face was “cool and calculating,”
the soldier observed, it was also “careful and half-cynical.” He could not catch the spoken words across the distance, but they were as characteristic as the calm, enigmatic mask or the habitual cigar stump that was wedged between its teeth. “Hovey’s division and Boomer’s brigade are good troops,” Grant was saying. “If the enemy has driven them he is not in good plight himself. If we can go in again here and make a little showing, I think he will give way.”