This Hallowed Ground (37 page)

There was a letdown in this. Being a corps commander under Grant
was not quite the same as being an independent army commander. There was also a catch in it. Grant made out the orders next day, December 18, and wired McClernand that his corps was ready and that it would “form a part of the expedition on Vicksburg”; Grant hoped that when McClernand reached Memphis he would find all preparations complete and the expedition ready to move.
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The catch lay in the fact that there was somehow a delay of several days in the transmission of this wire. By the time McClernand reached Memphis — he came down by special steamboat as soon as he got Grant’s message — he found that the expedition had not waited for him. Gunboats, transports, and two solid army corps, one of them belonging to McClernand and the other subject to his orders because he outranked its commander, had gone on down the river without him. There was nothing for him to do but go chugging down-river after it, fuming and fruitlessly demanding an explanation.

McClernand, in other words, had been given a neat double shuffle. He had dreamed up the expedition and he had brought in most of the troops for it, men who might not have enlisted at all without his efforts; now the expedition had moved out from under him, and although he would eventually overtake it, the moment of glory might easily elude him. He was never able to prove a thing on anybody, although it was clear that some very fancy footwork had been performed. Many years afterward Grant confessed: “I had good reason to believe that in forestalling him I was by no means giving offense to those whose authority to command was above both him and me.”
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Perhaps the Confederates helped a little, although the price of their help came high.

Grant’s army was moving down the line of the Mississippi Central Railroad while all of this was going on. It got as far as Oxford, thirty-five miles below the Tennessee line; some twenty miles in its rear, at the inconsiderable town of Holly Springs, Grant had established a huge supply dump. The country was wooded and thinly populated, and the inhabitants seemed to hold unanimous anti-Yankee sentiments of considerable bitterness. One reason, perhaps, was that the western troops were doing an uncommon amount of senseless looting. A Union officer remembered seeing in one occupied town a cavalryman staggering off, carrying a huge grandfather’s clock. Asked what on earth he proposed to do with it, the man explained that he was going to dismantle it “and get a pair of the little wheels out of it for spur rowels.”
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The idea took hold, and other cavalrymen were doing the same. Meanwhile the roads were poor, the weather was wet, most of the streams were swollen, and the army had no pontoon train.

Then, just as things seemed to be going well, two Confederate cavalry
leaders taught Grant a lesson about the evils of exposing a long supply line to enemy action.

The first was curly-haired Earl Van Dorn, old-time friend of Grant at West Point, who brushed aside an incompetent Yankee cavalry force, scared a timorous infantry colonel into surrender, and seized the supply base at Holly Springs. The gray troopers made holiday in this town, burning more than a million dollars’ worth of Federal supplies and leaving Grant’s army in danger of starvation.

Worse yet was the incredible feat performed by Nathan Bedford Forrest.

Forrest took a newly recruited cavalry detachment, imperfectly mounted and largely unarmed, and swung far up into Tennessee, gobbling up one Federal base after another, seizing enough horses and arms so that his whole outfit could be fully equipped, cutting the railroad in several places, and destroying courier routes and telegraph lines so effectively that for days Grant was entirely cut off from communication with the rear echelon. It is possible that this was what delayed his message to McClernand: possible, too, that the complete silence (its cause not then known in Memphis) led Sherman to hurry off to Vicksburg in the belief that Grant had plunged deeply into Mississippi. McClernand, at any rate, was never able to prove that this was not the case.

The real importance of the raids, however, was that they brought Grant’s army to an abrupt standstill. All hands were put on half rations, and to keep his army from starvation Grant sent his wagons out into the country to seize supplies. They got so much stuff, incidentally, that Grant’s eyes popped out, and in the months to come he reflected long and hard on the likelihood that an army in Mississippi could abandon its supply line entirely and live off the country.
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This conclusion came to him later, however; at the time he could only call off his advance and wait while communications were restored. He could not get word to Sherman, and that officer sailed down-river for Vicksburg, confident that everything was going according to schedule.

Late in December, Sherman’s flotilla entered the mouth of the Yazoo, and the soldiers went ashore and made ready to assault Chickasaw Bluffs. As far as Sherman knew, Grant was approaching Vicksburg from the northeast, and the Rebels must be too busy fending him off to make a good defense at the bluffs.

Disillusionment came quickly. Pemberton did not have to worry about Grant, and he had plenty of men waiting for Sherman’s attack. The position on Chickasaw Bluffs was so strong that when it was properly manned it could not possibly be stormed, and when the Federals made their attack on December 29 they were quickly defeated,
with over seventeen hundred casualties. Sherman got his men back on the boats, moved out of range, and glumly wondered what to do next. The expedition was a flat failure, and it seemed advisable to do something to put a good face on matters. He and Admiral Porter talked things over and agreed that something might be salvaged from defeat by making a quick stab at Confederate Fort Hindman, otherwise known as Arkansas Post — a stronghold forty miles up the Arkansas River, which entered the Mississippi seventy miles above Vicksburg. No real attack on Vicksburg, Sherman argued, could be made until this post was reduced; besides, a victory there would help the North forget about what had happened at Chickasaw Bluffs.
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No sooner had they agreed on this than the steamer
Tigress
came in bearing McClernand — angry and eager. McClernand issued a proclamation assuming command of everything — between the men who had come down with him and the ones Sherman had led, there were now thirty-two thousand Federal soldiers in the vicinity — and he announced that this would hereafter be known as the Army of the Mississippi. Sherman would command one corps in this army and the other would be under General G. W. Morgan.
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This rubbed Sherman where he was raw; he felt that Morgan had let him down badly in the fight at the bluffs by failing to attack as ordered, but McClernand was boss and there was no help for it.

McClernand did respect Sherman as a soldier, and when the Arkansas Post idea was explained to him he immediately approved it. He had reached the scene on January 3, and by January 10 his army and Porter’s flotilla had gone up the Arkansas River and were hammering away at the fort.

The fort caved in quickly, the Federals took nearly five thousand prisoners, and here was a neat little success to counterbalance Chickasaw Bluffs. McClernand, Sherman, and Porter dropped down the river again to a point near the mouth of the Yazoo; and Grant, who had returned to Memphis, got the news.

Grant was not in a mood to give McClernand a thing, and when he learned that the expedition had gone into Arkansas — this news reached him before he learned of the victory itself — he assumed that it was all McClernand’s doing, and he wrote indignantly to Halleck denouncing it as a senseless wild-goose chase. Then later returns came in: news of the victory, and the information that the idea had been Sherman’s. Grant promptly reversed himself and sent Halleck a message praising the move which he had just condemned and calling it an essential step in the Vicksburg campaign.
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At the same time he reversed his earlier strategic plan. It was obvious that the original route down the line of the railroad was very long and
risky; obvious, too, that there was going to be a major drive down the river whether Grant liked it or not. McClernand had so much rank that wherever he went he would be in command unless Grant himself were present, and it was impossible for Grant to think calmly about things that might happen to an army in the steaming mud flats just north of Vicksburg with impulsive, unskilled McClernand in charge.

Grant would put all his eggs in one basket. The attack on Vicksburg would be made from the river. As large an army as Grant could assemble would be concentrated there, and Grant would go down to take personal command. On January 30, Grant joined McClernand, Sherman and Porter at Milliken’s Bend on the west bank of the river, ten miles above Vicksburg, and the decisive campaign of the Civil War had its beginning.

It would begin very slowly, and for a long time it would look like nothing so much as failure. Grant’s earlier impression that Vicksburg could not be attacked from the north and west — the only directions from which an army at Milliken’s Bend could conceivably approach it — was eminently correct. Ideally, it would have been much better to bring everyone back to Memphis and make a fresh start down the eastern side of the Yazoo Delta. But this just was not in the cards. The move down the river had been approved at Washington. Withdrawal now would be an unmistakable confession of defeat; the political situation in the North was excessively delicate, and it seemed likely that Fredericksburg and Stone’s River were, between them, about as large a budget of bad news as the citizenry would be likely to accept. There was nothing for it but to go ahead.

P
ROFOUND
currents were moving in America that winter, but they had not yet fused to form one great tide that would carry everything along with it. They were still separate, often in conflict, with deep swirling eddies to mark the points of tension, and with odd backwaters where things seemed to drift upstream; and no one could say how the business would finally be resolved.

The three armies lay in their camps — in Virginia, in Tennessee, and along the Mississippi — and nothing seemed to be going right with them. Afterward men looked back and said that, taking everything together, this was the Valley Forge winter of the Civil War: the winter of misery and despair, of cold and hunger and of a seeming breakdown of all the arrangements that had been made to feed and clothe and usefully employ the men who had been called into the army. Certainly there was reason to draw the Valley Forge parallel, for in some ways the winter of 1862–63 marked the bottom of the depression.

Burnside made one more effort to use the Army of the Potomac after it had crawled back across the river to recuperate from the Fredericksburg defeat. In the middle of January, after a long spell of mild weather had dried the unpaved Virginia roads, he tried a march up the Rappahannock River to the fords that lie upstream from Fredericksburg, thinking to cross the river and come down on Lee’s flank. What luck he might have had with this move will never be known, for a howling rainstorm descended just as the army started to move, roads and fields turned into quagmires, and inside of twenty-four hours the whole army was hopelessly stuck in the mud. Pontoon trains and artillery columns were utterly helpless, bogged down so that they could not move at all unless men got shovels and dug them out. Infantry and cavalry could
waddle along after a fashion, pounds of bulbous clay sticking to each helpless foot, but anything resembling an actual military movement was out of the question. After two days of it Burnside admitted that he was licked, and the army stumbled back to camp.

The camp to which it returned was cheerless enough, even without the humiliating knowledge that one more move had ended in defeat.

The Burnside regime had never quite been able to make regimental and brigade commanders keep house properly, and the log-and-canvas shelters which the men had put up over shallow pits in the ground were little better than pigsties. The commissary had broken down; in this safe camp no more than fifty miles from Washington, men were dying of scurvy because they had nothing but salt pork and hardtack to eat. Hospital arrangements were in a complete mess — no heat in the tents, no proper food for sick men, nursing so inefficient that some patients actually froze to death in their cots. Things, in short, were in a very bad state, and army morale reflected it.

Not only were the men grumpy toward their commanders — one corps defiantly refused to raise a cheer for Burnside at a review, even though all of the officers rode up and down the line, swinging their caps and chanting: “Hip — hip — hip — —” They were casting dark looks at President Lincoln himself. The Army of the Potomac was in theory the army that contained the largest core of anti-slavery sentiment, yet with everything going wrong the men found the Emancipation Proclamation hard to swallow.

One New Englander wrote savagely in a letter to his family: “I don’t feel as much like fighting as I used to for it looks to me as if fighting for the Union and Constitution is played out and that now we are fighting for the Abolition of Slavery. Speaking of Abe, I have gone clean back on him! He may be a very good rail splitter but rather a poor President I reckon..… Let the Nigger go to hell for all of me, and if a man wants to preach abolition, emancipation or any other ism he must find somebody besides me to preach it to.” A New Yorker reflected on the abysmal failure of leadership and wrote to his mother: “Perhaps Old Abe has some funny story to tell, appropriate to the occasion.… I am sick and tired of disaster and the fools that bring disaster upon us.”
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Many people back home were feeling the same way, and the letters the soldiers received reflected it. An Illinois officer in the Army of the Cumberland wrote that the home folks were “writing letters which would discourage the most loyal of men.” He put in most of his time, he said, “talking patriotism at the boys and doing good, round, solid cursing at the home cowardly vipers who are disgracing the genus man by their conduct.” In the big Union base at Nashville there were so
many prostitutes that an Ohio soldier declared the army’s very existence was threatened; the authorities finally took a provost guard, rounded up fifteen hundred of the women, and moved them under guard all the way to Louisville, with stern orders not to come any farther south. While Rosecrans worked to reorganize his army and get it in shape for the spring campaign, he feared that he was about to be attacked: he wrote Halleck that Bragg was being reinforced and would soon take the offensive. He demanded reinforcements and complained that Rebel cavalry was constantly annoying him. Meanwhile his winter camps were wet, muddy, and uncomfortable, and there was a great deal of pneumonia.
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