NO LESS THAN the United States president and the Confederate States president recognized the importance of Vicksburg. Abraham Lincoln wrote, “Vicksburg is the key. The war can never be brought to a close until that key is in our pocket. I am acquainted with that region and know what I am talking about, and as valuable as New Orleans will be to us Vicksburg will more so.” Jefferson Davis wrote that if Confederate general John Pemberton “is able to repulse the enemy in his land and attack and to maintain possession of both Vicksburg and Port Hudson, the enemy’s fleet cannot long remain in the river between those points from their inability to get coal and other necessary supplies.”1 Grant soon had a keen understanding of Vicksburg’s significance.
One historian has called Vicksburg “Grant’s Great Campaign of Maneuver Warfare.” At the height of the Campaign, Grant’s field army consisted of sixteen divisions, and another six were close at hand. It was expected that with so many troops, Grant’s forces would easily overwhelm the Confederates early on. But that was not meant to be. Grant’s supply lines became more and more vulnerable the farther he penetrated along the Mississippi Central Railroad. Confederate cavalry cut his communication lines in December 1862, and he was forced to withdraw to Memphis while living off the land.
Grant’s first attempt to take Vicksburg commenced in November 1862 when forty thousand troops marched south from Memphis, Tennessee, under his command and thirty thousand more moved down the Mississippi under Sherman. This campaign came to an abrupt end when cavalry raids on Grant’s rear, commanded by Confederate generals Nathan Bedford Forrest and Earl Van Dorn, destroyed Union supply depots and communications, forcing Grant to retreat. Uninformed of these events (Forrest had cut the telegraph), on December 27 Sherman attacked Chickasaw Bluffs above Vicksburg and was repulsed.
Then in early 1863, Grant made four additional attempts to take the city of Vicksburg with no success. Not until mid-April, with the help of the navy, were the batteries protecting Vicksburg taken out. At the end of the month his army was able to cross the Mississippi River from the Louisiana side with the navy ferrying his men ashore. Later on he recalled, “I felt a degree of relief scarcely ever equaled since. . . . I was on dry ground on the same side of the river with the enemy. All of the campaigns, labors, hardships, and exposures from the end of the month of December previous to this time that had been made and endured, were for the accomplishment of this one object.”2
The first battle occurred on April 16 when a small naval force ran past the Vicksburg guns, followed six days later by barges and transports. Although six of twelve barges were sunk by the Confederate guns, Grant still had enough shipping to transport a large part of his army from the west bank of the Mississippi to the east bank south of Vicksburg, from where the city could be attacked.
On April 30, the first of Grant’s men from McClernand’s corps were ferried across the river to Bruinsburg. Although Grant had been working for this since December, it was also the most dangerous moment of the campaign. The forces of General John C. Pemberton, the Confederate commander in Vicksburg, temporarily outnumbered Grant’s forces, and if he launched an attack with all of his available men, Grant would be in serious trouble. Pemberton could have raised thirty thousand men against the twenty-three thousand Grant had so far managed to ship across the river. Instead, Pemberton remained at Vicksburg, determined not to risk losing the city to a sudden raid.
The only Confederate force close to Grant was one of six thousand men at Port Gibson, ten miles inland from the Mississippi. This force, the garrison of Grand Gulf, where Grant had initially wanted to land, had moved south to oppose Grant’s landing. Instead it found itself under attack. Despite being badly outnumbered, the Confederate defenders of Port Gibson had the advantage of terrain. Approaching from the south, Grant had to send troops along two different roads into the town, each running along a ridge and separated by a deep ravine. These ridges were to play a major part in the later siege of Vicksburg. For the moment they allowed the Confederates to push back the Union left, with heavy losses.
Grant’s superior numbers carried the day. He was able to order a full brigade to cross yet another ravine to a third ridge, thus threatening to outflank the Confederate defenders. This flanking maneuver must have distracted the Confederates, for another frontal attack by the Union left wing met with success. The Confederate force retreated back toward Grand Gulf. That night, Grant’s men camped two miles north of Port Gibson. The garrison of Grand Gulf withdrew to Vicksburg to avoid being cut off. Grant was now free to turn his attention east, to the forces being gathered to reinforce Vicksburg.
Grant took his army downriver to regroup. Through early 1863, Union forces sought to penetrate the maze of bayous and swamps around Vicksburg to gain high ground east of the city. Nothing worked. Typhoid and dysentery claimed an alarming number of Union soldiers, and clamors against Grant as an incompetent drunk rose in the North. Lincoln again refused to yield to such pressures. “What I want,” said the president, “is generals who will fight battles and win victories. Grant has done this, and I propose to stand by him.” With one or two possible exceptions (neither of them during active military operations), there is no reliable evidence of Grant drinking to excess during the war. His chief of staff John Rawlins and Julia, when she was with him, zealously guarded him from temptation.
In mid-April 1863 Grant set in motion a campaign that won acclaim as the most brilliant of the war. Because of its high risks, Sherman and other subordinates opposed it, but Grant was a great commander because of his willingness to take risks. He sent Union cavalry under Colonel Benjamin Grierson on a raid through Mississippi as a diversion. He ordered Union gunboats and transports under Rear Admiral David Dixon Porter to sail directly past the Vicksburg batteries to a point thirty miles south, where they could ferry the troops, who had toiled through the swamps down the west bank, across the river. Most of the fleet got through, and once across the river, Grant’s army cut loose from anything resembling a line of supply. They had to live off the country until they could fight their way back to contact with their supply lines at the river above Vicksburg.
Newspaper correspondent Charles Dana became intimate with Grant during the siege of Vicksburg. He described Grant as “an uncommon fellow—the most modest, the most disinterested, and the most honest man I ever knew, with a temper that nothing could disturb, and a judgment that was judicial in its comprehensiveness and wisdom.” Furthermore, Dana wrote, Grant was “not a great man, except morally; not an original or brilliant man, but sincere, thoughtful, deep and gifted with courage that never faltered.”3 Such traits were shown during the Vicksburg Campaign.
Instead of driving straight north toward Vicksburg, Grant marched east toward the state capital of Jackson, where a Confederate army was being assembled by Joseph E. Johnston. Grant then intended to turn west and invade Vicksburg, defended by another Confederate force under Pemberton. During the next three weeks, Grant’s men marched 130 miles, fought and won five battles against separate enemy forces (that, if combined, would have nearly equaled Grant’s forty-five thousand), and penned the enemy behind the Vicksburg defenses.
Realizing he could probably take Vicksburg from the north, Grant set about digging trenches and dredging new rivers that could move the troops south of the city. In April 1863, a flotilla of naval gunboats, under heavy fire, ran the blockade at Vicksburg to come to Grant’s assistance. With the Mississippi River under Grant’s control, in May McClernand and Sherman crossed nine miles south of Vicksburg. At Champion’s Hill, Grant led the forces to a strong rout of Confederate troops and isolated them.
As the campaign progressed, the issue of drinking continued to haunt Grant. On one occassion he was accompanying an expedition to check on an exaggerated buildup of Confederate forces on the Yazoo River when he became ill aboard the steamer. He had actually not been feeling well for some time. This was not surprising since the heat and swampy conditions around Vicksburg made many of the Union troops sick. Although he did not report it at the time, newspaperman Sylvanus Cadwallader believed Grant was actually drunk. He waited until after Grant’s death to make such an accusation, thus avoiding any confrontation with the former Union commander. Dana, the newspaperman followed Grant and was actually sent by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton as a spy. He claimed that Cadwallader was not even present during the expedition and could not prove that Grant was drunk. However, Dana and one of Grant’s aides, James Wilson, who was not fond of his boss, claimed Grant was drunk one time during the campaign. They never provided absolute proof, but as one historian points out, “Even if the story was accurate, it was equally true that Grant never let drinking get in the way of his goal of taking Vicksburg, nor in the way of any of his campaigns.”4 On May 22, 1863, a daylong direct attack on the breastworks of the city failed to yield results. Grant lost thirty-two hundred men, far more than his opponent, but his strategy began to emerge, a strategy that no other Union general could ever stomach, one that would eventually lead to victory. Grant knew that he had more men to lose than his enemy, and he was not afraid to wear down his opponents with brutal assault after brutal assault. Yet Vicksburg was heavily fortified, and Grant reluctantly settled down for a siege, pressuring the Confederates until Pemberton surrendered thirty thousand half-starved men on July 4.
Again, Grant offered no terms and said he would accept only “unconditional surrender.” Nevertheless, remembering the liberal terms offered by General Taylor at Monterrey during the Mexican War, Grant softened his position. He proposed to parole Pemberton’s army by having each soldier sign an agreement not to get back into the war until exchanged on a one-to-one basis with prisoners held by Confederate forces. The seven thousand troops in the Confederacy’s only remaining fort on the Mississippi at Port Hudson surrendered as well, four days later. Grant had cut the Confederacy in two and opened the whole river to Union shipping. As Lincoln phrased it, “The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea.” Combined with other Union successes that summer, especially the epochal victory at Gettysburg, the capture of Vicksburg was a crucial turning point in the war. “Grant is my man,” said Lincoln, “and I am his the rest of the war.”
An anxious President Lincoln eagerly waited for news about Vicksburg; at the the same time he yearned to learn the outcome in Gettysburg. He rejoiced jubilantly when he was told of the dual Union victories. But Lincoln wanted the Army of the Potomac to crush Lee’s forces in Gettysburg before they could escape across the river into Virginia. Meade, after three days of brutal fighting, refused to press his men further, and the Confederates lived to fight another day. Despite Lincoln’s disappointment about Lee’s forces, he turned his attention to Grant and sent him a congratulatory note: “I don’t remember if you and I ever met personally,” Lincoln wrote. “I write this now as a grateful acknowledgement for the almost inestimable service you have done the country.” Then Lincoln confessed that during the campaign, he had lost confidence in Grant when his army had difficulty penetrating the bayous and swamps in February and March. Grant of course finally ran the enemy batteries and got below Vicksburg. It was then that the president hoped Grant would go down the river and join Banks. Instead, Grant had turned northeast of the Big Black River. “I feared it was a mistake,” Lincoln admitted. “I now wish to make the personal acknowledgement that you were right and I was wrong.” From that point forward Lincoln never doubted Grant.
It was also during the Vicksburg Campaign that Grant found himself in trouble over a controversial order he issued. At this time he was in command of the Department of the Tennessee, which gave him administrative control over armies from northern Mississippi to Cairo, Illinois, and from the Mississippi River to the Tennessee River. Although most administrative matters were handled by subordinate commanders while Grant focused on tactical issues, the problem of trade regulations drew his attention.
Exactly why Grant issued General Order #11 in December 1862, is not entirely clear, but whatever the reason it haunted him the remainder of his life. There is reason to suspect that his father had something do with it. Jesse and his son corresponded frequently during the war, and the latter often spoke about Grant to eager newspaper reporters. This became irksome for the general who shied away from publicity. Jesse was still very much a business man and it appeared that he was attempting to use his son’s influence to buy cotton in Mississippi to sell to a Jewish broker in Cincinnati, Ohio. Grant was a patient man, but the Vicksburg campaign was not going well and one of the problems was keeping his lines of supply open. When it was reported to him that Jewish peddlers, such as the ones associated with his father, were interfering with his supplies, Grant was furious and issued what Julia called that “Obnoxious Order.” Grant said that “during war times:
I. The Jews, as a class violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department and also department orders, are hereby expelled from the department within twenty-four hours from the receipt of this order.
II. Post commanders will see to it that all of this class of people be furnished passes and required to leave, and any one returning after such notification will be arrested and held in confinement until an opportunity occurs of sending them out as prisoners, unless furnished with permit from headquarters.
III. No passes will be given these people to visit headquarters for the purpose of making personal application of trade permits.5
Paducah, Kentucky, felt the wrath of Grant’s order far greater than any other place within the Department of the Tennessee. Captain W. L. Wardell, the provost marshal there, received General Order 11 in later December and acted immediately. Even though Grant implied that only Jewish cotton speculators were to be removed from the department, Wardell took greater latitude by notifying the roughly thirty heads of Jewish households that they and their families had twenty-four hours to vacate the city. Almost all of the families were longtime residents of Paducah, none of them were known to have involvement in cotton speculation, and at least two of the Jewish men served in the Union army. Obeying Wardell’s demands, they locked up their homes and businesses and boarded a steamer bound for Cincinnati, Ohio. Yet not all of Paducah’s Jewish merchants were so obedient. Before leaving, a group banded together and sent President Lincoln a telegram condemning the order and appealing for his assistance in having the order revoked. Furthermore, the group sought help from a larger Jewish congregation and asked that they send emissaries to Washington to place additional pressure on the president.
Word spread by way of newspapers and protests from Jewish communities throughout Kentucky and Ohio, and suddenly General Order Eleven became far more controversial than Grant could have imagined. The issue reached a boiling point in early January 1863 when one of Paducah’s former merchants, Cesar Kaskel, rushed to Washington to meet with Congressman John A. Gurley of Cincinnati. The men met with Lincoln at the White House, where the astonished president was for the first time made aware of the order. Without hesitation he instructed Halleck to inform Grant to countermand the order, and on January 4, 1863, the army chief of staff did just that. “A paper purporting to be a Genl Order No.11 issued by you Dec 17th has been presented here,” Halleck wrote with an air of caution. “If such an order has been issued, it will be immediately revoked.”
Believing that further explanation was necessary, a staff officer assigned to Halleck, Colonel John C. Kelton, wrote Grant the following day: “Permit me to inform you unofficially the objection taken to your Genl Order No 11. It excluded a whole class, instead of certain obnoxious individuals. Had the word ‘peddler’ been inserted after Jew,” Kelton surmised, “I do not suppose any exception would have been taken to the order. Several officers and a number of enlisted men in your Dept are Jews. A Govr of one of the Western states is a Jew.”
Almost three weeks later Halleck again wrote Grant about the matter with basically the same explanation Kelton had provided: “It may be proper to give you some explanation of the revocation of your order expelling all Jews from your Dept. The President has no objection to your expelling traders & Jew peddlers, which I suppose was the object of your order, but as it in terms prescribed an entire religious class, some of whom are fighting in our ranks, the President deemed it necessary to revoke it.” There is no evidence to suggest that Grant requested a further explanation about why he had to revoke the order; in fact, he didn’t so much as respond to either Kelton or Halleck.
The controversy eventually faded away, and Grant escaped without any damage to his career. One historian correctly points out that
Grant had come a long way from Belmont. He had learned from mistakes, and he had repeated mistakes. He had struggled to acquire a good feel for the politics of command, even though he still found it all distasteful. He had experienced the highs and lows: he had used his commanders well at times and not so effectively at others. In short, Grant had grown into his job as all initially inexperienced army commanders must if they are to succeed. He had seemingly reached his personal pinnacle on the heights of Vicksburg. But the war not yet won, and a man with Grant’s credentials surely had more to do before peace reigned. He had no idea just how much work remained.6
After Vicksburg there was still much hard fighting on the horizon, and Grant would be in command of most of it. At the Battle of Chickamauga on September 19–20, 1863, the Confederates dealt a sharp setback to the Union Army of the Cumberland’s theretofore triumphant advance into northern Georgia. Driven back to Chattanooga, the besieged Northerners seemed unable to break out. This crisis, which threatened to undo the Union gains of the summer, compelled the Lincoln administration to send reinforcements to Chattanooga. The most important reinforcement was Grant, whom Lincoln named commander of all Union forces in the Western Theater.
Under the command of Major General William Rosecrans, the Army of the Cumberland had almost been destroyed at Chickamauga and afterward shifted operations northward to Chattanooga, where it was unable to hold Lookout Mountain or Missionary Ridge. While the Confederate Army of Tennessee under Major General Braxton Bragg occupied the two mountain ridges, Rosecrans undertook a defensive position on the valley floor, which did not allow access to his supply lines. Trapped there almost a month, the army was in danger of being starved. As a result, Grant relieved Rosecrans of his command and appointed Major General George H. Thomas in his place.
Grant arrived at Chattanooga on October 23, 1863, and sought out the new commander of the Army of the Cumberland to assess the current situation. It was a difficult journey for Grant and his chief of staff, John Rawlins. They had ridden on narrow and muddy roads, and when the party arrived to meet Thomas, Grant’s uniform was a mess. Surprisingly, Thomas did not offer his commander a new uniform, although he did offer food and a seat by the fireplace. One officer on Grant’s staff chastised Thomas for not being more cordial: “General Thomas, can’t you get General Grant some dry clothing?” Thomas then made the offer to find dry clothes, but Grant waved him off and pulled out a cigar.
Thomas explained the situation at hand with the help of his staff, mainly chief engineer Major General William F. “Baldy” Smith, who spoke about the poor roads and the difficulty in securing supplies. The main problem was feeding the army, and until that happened, they could not move against the enemy. Grant asked a number of questions and then undertook what he did best—writing a series of dispatches and formulating a battle plan.
With Thomas and Smith as his escort, Grant rode west from Chattanooga to become familiar with the terrain. Then Grant announced how the siege would be broken and the Union Army resupplied: Major General Joseph Hooker would head toward the Tennessee River and Lookout Mountain, where they would drive the Confederates away from the supply lines. Pontoon bridges would be constructed to assist in the transportation of supplies so that hungry troops could be fed. Once the supply crisis was resolved, Grant could concentrate on taking the offensive.
By mid-November 1863, Bragg’s army had been reduced in strength when a significant part of his command moved north to besiege a Union garrison at Knoxville, Tennessee. On November 24, Bragg was soundly defeated by Hooker at Lookout Mountain and was then forced to concentrate his forces on Missionary Ridge. The next day, Grant sent Sherman and Hooker to attack the flanks of Bragg’s army. When the attacks stalled, Grant ordered Thomas and his Army of the Cumberland to advance toward the center of the line, which they did successfully, driving Bragg from Missionary Ridge. As a result, Chattanooga was no longer in Confederate hands, with casualties on both sides relatively light. Union losses were 5,815, while the Confederates lost 6,667 men.
After Chattanooga was secured, Grant sent Sherman to Knoxville, and on November 29 the latter moved in that direction and arrived there in early December. Sherman’s show of force drove Major General James Longstreet into the mountains north of the city. Following the two victories, President Lincoln sent a warm message to Grant and his army: “I wish to tender you, and all under your command, my more than thanks, my profoundest gratitude for the skill, courage, and perseverance which you and they, over so great difficulties, have effected that important object. God bless you all.”
Grant spent most of the winter of 1864 in and around Chattanooga organizing the next campaign in the Western Theater, known as the Meridian Campaign, slated to take place in February and March. Its object was to remove Confederate units remaining on the east bank of the Mississippi River. Grant also spent time in St. Louis with his family. He mostly went there to see his oldest son, Fred, who had contracted a virulent disease while staying at his father’s headquarters during the Vicksburg Campaign. The boy recovered from his illness before his father arrived, so Grant was able to relax some while he was home and visit old friends and attend the theater. A magnificent banquet was thrown in his honor at the Lindell Hotel. One observer in attendance that evening said it struck him that “the most remarkable quality of the man was his imperturbable calmness and un-excitability.” At the banquet there were toasts and speeches made to honor Grant, “and his face never changed its unmoved expression,” he recalled. “It never lit up with excitement. . . . His silence was a native endowment, nothing studied, nothing acquired.” However, this changed when he was around Julia and the children. “His greatest enjoyment was manifestly with them. Their presence and happiness made his face beam as nothing else would.” Such honors bestowed upon Grant were only a taste of what was about to come.