23
MAY 1-18, 1863—GRANT FROM PORT GIBSON TO BIG BLACK RIVER
“Men Who Know No Defeat and
Are Not Willing to Learn What It Is”
The Confederate high command thought Grant had given up. He had pushed most of his ironclads and transport boats past the Vicksburg cannons and had scant means of getting them back. To Major General Dabney H. Maury, commanding in Mobile, and fellow Confederates ranging from Pemberton in Vicksburg to Robert E. Lee in Virginia, the effort appeared harmless. They assumed his boats were headed down the Mississippi to join those based in New Orleans. His army, with radically weakened lines of supply and little means of returning to Memphis, would likely follow the boats down the west side of the river, his foes thought. No West Point mind could conceive of all but abandoning one’s base to launch an offensive.
1
With the threat to Vicksburg apparently subsiding, in early May the Confederacy seemed to get a second wind. Beauregard was holding off army-navy foes at Charleston; Confederate forces in Louisiana and Arkansas were holding their ground; Forrest had just destroyed Streight’s drive into Georgia; and, most noticeably, at Chancellorsville, Virginia, Lee and Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson were delivering a May 4 body blow to Federal general Fighting Joe Hooker’s Army of the Potomac. The Lee-Jackson gambit, not Grant’s, appeared to be the successful dare of long odds; mid-battle, Jackson pulled his whole army away from Lee’s on an end run that smashed and whipped Hooker—but at awful cost: the life of Jackson himself, mortally wounded by friendly fire.
Unknowingly, the Confederates had discounted their most fearsome opponent. Grant’s humble roots and manner, as well as his reputation as a sot, led even most of his associates to miss his capabilities as a soldier. A few, though, knew differently. Before another year passed, Grant’s cousin by marriage, Confederate general James Longstreet, would say as much to Virginians looking down their noses at the Ohioan. “Do you
know Grant? Well, I do. I was with him for three years at West Point, I was present at his wedding, I served in the same army with him in Mexico . . . that man will fight us every day and every hour until the end of this war.”
2And now Grant was getting into the best position to battle them. If that position also entailed the worst risk, so be it. Since even before West Point, where his sole standout achievement was setting a horse-jumping record that stood for decades, he had relished making long vaults on faith. After graduation, he remained in top form. He showed it off during the overland late-April trek from Milliken’s Bend to New Carthage—accompanied by a small mounted escort and his twelve-year-old son, Fred. Fred later recalled that when they came to a narrow bridge over a slough and everybody else awaited a turn on the structure, Fred’s father turned his horse aside and “made one of his daring leaps” to the opposite bank. This leaper was no blithe youth assuming himself invincible. He was a man of forty hard years who remained uncowed.
3
There was another reason the Confederates could not imagine Grant meant to attack from Vicksburg’s south side. Never in history had anybody attempted an amphibious operation of such size.
But that was not all. Grant made it seem as if he were focused elsewhere. While he got all his men, ammunition, and other supplies down the road from New Carthage to Hard Times Landing on the Louisiana side, he created diversions. He had ordered Colonel Benjamin Grierson’s cavalry south from Memphis to cut Vicksburg’s eastward rail lines, and with Van Dorn gone north to Bragg, Grierson rampaged all but unopposed through the heart of Mississippi from April 17 to May 2. In addition, three shorter expeditions—under General William Sooy Smith and Colonels Edward Hatch and George Bryant—sowed confusion at various points near Grierson’s path. All these raids helped keep Pemberton from concentrating his forces at Vicksburg.
Sherman mounted the longest decoy. On April 29, he took ten regiments on ten transport steamers along with an armada of mortar vessels and eight gunboats that remained north of Vicksburg—two ironclads, four tinclads, and two timberclads—and moved them back northward past Chickasaw Bluffs, scene of his December trouncing, to the farthest end of the Vicksburg defenses: Haynes Bluff, twelve miles northeast of the city. Grant had told Sherman that a demonstration there would be good, because it would pull major Confederate attention away from Grant’s crossing of the Mississippi some thirty land miles downstream. But Grant said he hated to order Sherman even to feint an assault, lest the Northern public see it as another repulse.
Sherman improvised. On April 30, instead of attacking, he acted as though he had Grant’s whole army with him and was preparing to. He had the gunboats and mortar craft bombard the bluffs as if softening them up preliminary to landing the infantrymen from the transports. The Confederates on the bluffs held their positions rather than move southward, but not because of Sherman so much as the suspicions of the Vicksburg ground commander, Major General Carter Stevenson; Stevenson feared that Grant’s troops at Hard Times might be the diversion. On his way north on April 28, Sherman had seen Confederate scouts crossing from the bluff city to the Louisiana side of the Mississippi “to see what we are about.” They would not discover much, he assured Grant, because they could not get where they needed to. The river had flooded their only road to Richmond, Louisiana, midway point of the roundabout wagon route on which elements of Grant’s army were still moving to New Carthage.
4The Federals kept moving farther south, seeking the best landing site on the opposite bank. Those already at New Carthage slogged along the riverside levee to Hard Times Landing. On April 29, more than thirty miles downstream from Sherman’s position at Chickasaw Bluffs, Admiral Porter’s seven ironclads launched a marathon bombardment at Grand Gulf, Mississippi, opposite Hard Times. They passed back and forth in front of that bluff-crowning town, slugging it out with the towering fortified Confederate artillery for six hours. Confederate brigadier general John S. Bowen, the West Point–trained Grand Gulf commander, saw a half dozen troop-crammed Union transports hovering on the Mississippi’s far bank.
5But the transports did not attempt to cross, even when the Confederate artillery hushed. The ironclads had taken a licking. They lost eighteen sailors killed and fifty-seven wounded. Grant correctly suspected that the firing had not ceased because the Confederate guns had been destroyed. As he had learned all too well at Fort Donelson, gunboats forced to fire at a target well above them could not elevate their shots skillfully enough to ensure hitting it. He reported to Halleck that the boats had proved entirely unable to silence the enemy guns. He was right. The Confederates had only stopped firing because of a temporary shortage of shells. Their casualties were just three men killed and “12 or 15 wounded,” Bowen reported.
6The Northern public would allow him just one assault, Grant figured, and this was not the place to make it. Crossing troops at Grand Gulf in the unarmed barges, even with gunboat escort, could be suicide. Numerically, the enemy was far inferior; Bowen had just 4,000 men at Grand Gulf. Yet 4,000, behind dug-in cannon, might drown Grant’s amphibious assault before it made landfall.
7So Grant moved farther south that same day. In a tactic he would later use to bludgeon Robert E. Lee, he forced the Confederates to keep spreading their lines ever wider and thinner to protect their flanks. He ran past the Grand Gulf guns as he had those at Vicksburg and Warrenton. Disembarking his men and marching them farther down the Mississippi’s west bank, he had the gunboats launch another attack after dark while his transports slipped past in the din. He intended to land them ten more miles downriver at Rodney, Mississippi—at first. But during the night of April 29, a Union cavalry patrol on the Louisiana side procured the aid of a slave who told them of a better landing spot. Halfway between Grand Gulf and Rodney, the man said, the village of Bruinsburg offered a good, shorter road leading toward Port Gibson and Grand Gulf.
8
GRANT’S VICKSBURG CAMPAIGN: This 1863 map shows the area of Grant’s five-battle run-up to the siege of Vicksburg. After crossing the Mississippi at Bruinsburg in the lower left, he took his army to Port Gibson, Raymond, and Jackson before turning back toward Vicksburg to fight at Champion Hill about halfway between Jackson and Vicksburg, then at Big Black River Bridge closer to Vicksburg.
By 8 a.m. on the last day of April, Grant was ready. He had assigned McClernand’s corps to lead the amphibious attack, since it happened to be farthest in the advance when Grant made his downriver plan. Perhaps the position of honor also owed to Grant’s continuing wariness of McClernand’s Lincoln ties. Whatever the reason, McClernand’s corps now filled barges, steamboats, and gunboats and cast off from Deshroon’s Landing just south and opposite of Grand Gulf amid band music and reverberating cheers. They steamed some five miles downriver and hove to the east bank, where infantrymen of the Twenty-fourth and Forty-sixth Indiana splashed ashore first. They quickly arrested the only man they found on the Bruinsburg landing to prevent his spreading word of their coming. No uniformed Confederate was in sight.
Grant experienced a gladness he never forgot. Rather than send his troops against the ravaging Grand Gulf cannon, he had found them an open door with nobody waiting inside it. But the reality was even more euphoric than that: he was at last on the business side of the Mississippi. It gave him “a degree of relief scarcely equaled since,” he wrote later. “All the campaigns, labors, and exposures from the month of December . . . to this time . . . were for the accomplishment of this one object.” Now, at last, he could fight.
9
With his men ashore, Grant’s vanguard suddenly dawdled. Rather than dash on up to the high ground past Bruinsburg, 17,000 McClernand riflemen sat for four hours on their beachhead to allow distribution of rations. Somebody had forgotten to do it the evening before.
10
This was just one of the myriad aggravations to which McClernand subjected his commander. Grant had ordered him to bend every effort toward a quick strike, but to little avail. Charles Dana, a former New York newspaperman who had recently become a special observer for the War Department, had reported to Stanton on April 25 that apparent confusion among McClernand’s command and staff were delaying Grant’s preparations to attack Grand Gulf. Although ordered to leave officers’ horses and tents behind, McClernand “carries his bride along,” Dana confided. Two days later, Dana wrote that the wait for a steamboat “carrying General McClernand’s wife, with her servants and baggage,” had delayed transportation of half a McClernand division.
The primary hindrance, though, was Mrs. McClernand’s husband. Even the contingent of McClernand’s corps that had arrived at New Carthage was not quickly put onto boats on April 26 because McClernand had not yet gathered the vessels. Instead, that afternoon he held a review of his Illinois troops for that state’s visiting governor Richard Yates. The review included firing an artillery salute, violating Grant’s repeated orders to conserve ammunition for use against the enemy, Dana wrote. Dana added that after finding the transport vessels had “at last” been assembled, Grant pocketed a “severe letter” he had written McClernand—apparently choosing to bide his time.
11Grant was not the only one seething at McClernand. Dana was chagrined that McClernand had the front spot in the amphibious attack. The War Department emissary wrote Stanton that he had objected to entrusting such an important place to McClernand. Stanton, perhaps fearing other eyes—especially presidential ones—seeing his correspondence, sharply told Dana to quit offering advice on command assignments.
12But McClernand was hardly the only issue. Emancipation continued to roil Grant’s Midwest-rooted army. The Union’s decision to enlist and arm fugitive slaves also loomed forebodingly. Many white troops balked at the idea, as did some of their commanders. General Lorenzo Thomas had arrived at Milliken’s Bend on April 11 to begin speaking to generals and regular soldiers about it, and Dana soon reported that officers who had told him three months earlier that they would never fight alongside black regiments now said they would obey orders.
Dana may not have talked with Grant division commander A. J. Smith. On the night of April 26, the day McClernand provided Illinois governor Yates with a troop review, Colonel H. C. Warmoth confided to his diary that General Smith, a Pennsylvania-born and West Point–schooled veteran, was so incensed at the prospect of fighting alongside blacks that he “will hang old Thomas if he comes into his camp making such a speech. Says . . . if Jesus Christ was to come down and ask him if he would be an abolitionist if he would take him to heaven, he answers that, ‘I would say NO! Mr. Christ. . . . I would rather go to hell than be an abolitionist.’”
13
The enlistment of fugitive slaves presented a thorny problem, but on the eastern bank of the Mississippi, in the face of looming combat, its importance receded.
Grant launched a fast, hard-hitting campaign. He first had to cut off Vicksburg from rescue troops gathering in central Mississippi. Issuing three days’ rations, he moved his men onto high ground toward Port Gibson, junction of a road to Grand Gulf and another circling east and then north to Vicksburg. He aimed to flank Grand Gulf, take it, then make it the base for a two-pronged move. He would send McClernand south to aid Major General Nathaniel Banks in destroying Port Hudson, Louisiana, the only other formidable Confederate-held bastion on the Mississippi. Grant himself, meanwhile, would isolate Vicksburg and gather supplies for a campaign to capture it. Then he would recall McClernand’s men, and Grant and Banks would combine forces against Vicksburg.
14Grant’s advance units struck enemy skirmishers eight miles from Port Gibson. They had pushed the Southerners backward four miles by dusk, and the next morning, May 1, they advanced into a pitched battle. Bowen, the Confederate commander at Grand Gulf, had gathered just 7,000 men to march down and oppose Grant’s 25,000, but he had selected a good site. The Bruinsburg Road forked into parallel routes into Port Gibson, and Bowen’s men guarded both on ridges too narrow to allow more than fractions of Grant’s strength to meet the Confederates at one time. Thickly overgrown hollows separated McClernand on the right from McPherson on the left. They could connect and aid each other only by retreating to the fork.
15McClernand’s Federals routed an Alabama brigade before noon, and Grant accompanied McClernand and Illinois governor Yates forward on the right-hand road to inspect the captured ground. Soldiers along the route cheered them, and McClernand and Yates could not resist making speeches. “A great day for the Northwest!” McClernand proclaimed to an aide. Grant sat through the impromptu stumping, then suggested that the rifle-toting prospective voters needed to get about pursuing Confederates.
16The enemy fought with tenacity, but Grant’s strength prevailed. Under McPherson’s command, Indianans and Illinoisans fought their way along and beside the left-hand road, pushing through a thicket of cane, trees, and underbrush in the ravine to the left of the roadway. They finally flanked a brigade of Alabamans as more of McPherson’s men advanced from Bruinsburg and reinforced them. The Arkansans, Mississippians, and Missourians facing McClernand realized they could be flanked, cut off, and captured if their comrades on the other road broke, so they stole away from the battlefield at about 5 p.m. In ratio of loss to total Union numbers, it was an inexpensive victory; of his 25,000, Grant had lost 131 killed, 719 wounded, and 25 missing. For the Confederates, the battle was much more costly. They reported 60 killed, 340 wounded, and 387 missing of their 7,000, and their figures were incomplete.
17Darkness prevented pursuit, and Grant told McClernand to advance at dawn of May 2. With daylight, the Union troops moved up cautiously until they saw scattered arms, equipment, dead horses, and Confederate corpses. The enemy was gone, and the pursuers marched unopposed into nearly deserted Port Gibson about 10 a.m. There Grant found a newspaper disclosing that Grierson’s raid on rail lines in the Mississippi interior had been a smashing success.
18Confederates had burned bridges on the roads leading from Port Gibson to both Grand Gulf and Vicksburg, so the Federals laid pontoons. Grant was glad to see Lieutenant Colonel James Harrison Wilson of his staff enter the water and work alongside enlisted men, as Grant himself had done in the Mexican War. When they finished the makeshift bridge, the troops streamed over the pontoons, one wing heading directly toward Grand Gulf and the other skirmishing northeast toward Hankinson’s Ferry on the Big Black River. Learning that the Confederates had abandoned Grand Gulf, Grant headed there with an escort of twenty cavalry.
He traveled light. He had left everything except the clothes on his back on the far side of the Mississippi with a five-hundred-wagon train winding from Milliken’s Bend to Hard Times, so at Grand Gulf he borrowed an extra horse from a subordinate and clean underwear from a naval officer. Having had no tent and no food except such as he could filch from subordinates’ headquarters, he got a bath and a meal on a gunboat. Then he wrote a May 3 letter to Halleck summarizing his effort so far and expressing pride in how Bowen’s “bold . . . and well carried out” defense of Port Gibson had been vanquished by his Federals, “hardy men who know no defeat and are not willing to learn what it is.” He also wrote orders to corps commanders as well as other subordinates left in charge farther up the Mississippi. Finishing a letter to Julia around midnight, he did not go to bed. Instead, remounting the borrowed horse, he rode on to Hankinson’s Ferry, arriving before dawn.
19Grant now had to make some strategic changes on the fly. At Grand Gulf he learned Banks could not begin the anticipated McClernand-reinforced campaign against Port Hudson before May 10. Having come north from New Orleans, Banks—a militarily incompetent former governor of Massachusetts—was focused on Port Hudson, the first obstacle in his path, and said he could not join Grant until after its reduction. That would delay the Vicksburg attack by a month, and already the Vicksburg Confederates were gathering reinforcements. Grant could not wait. With some of his troops already well started toward the railroad connecting Vicksburg and Jackson, he forgot Banks, retained McClernand, and kept moving.
20Grant quickly instituted his new plan. He continued preparations to cram Grand Gulf with supplies floated across the Mississippi, but rather than wait for Banks, he would feint toward Vicksburg to confuse Pemberton, then head inland to the railroad linking the river fortress to Jackson. That would put him between Vicksburg and its potential rescuers and prevent a junction of the two.
This new scenario would stretch Grant’s supply line paper-thin, beyond all bounds of West Point theory. Halleck would disapprove if he knew. But Grant saw no alternative. Like the run past the Vicksburg guns, moving eastward to cut off the city was the option that offered the best chance of success. He wrote Halleck a little of his developing scheme in the letter of May 3 from Grand Gulf, reporting that the countryside would supply forage and fresh beef. Halleck for months had urged his commanders to take advantage of such, so Grant knew that this part of his plan would go down well. Other supplies, Grant wrote, would have to come “a long and precarious route” from Milliken’s Bend down to Hard Times Landing, then across the Mississippi to Grand Gulf. Knowing his message would take days to reach Washington, he headed away from the river, beyond Washington contact. There, out of Halleck’s reach, he could revise his plan as resistance demanded.
21On Grant’s order, Sherman now hurried his corps down from Chickasaw Bluffs to reinforce the two taking position east of Vicksburg. Grant wrote Sherman on May 3 that, on reaching Grand Gulf, he must draw three days’ rations and make them last five, augmenting them with local fare and feeding his horses on indigenous supplies. Speed, Grant said, was crucial.
22Sherman protested, all but reciting the West Point principles Grant was flouting. He wrote Grant from Hankinson’s Ferry on May 9, pleading with his chief to wait a little and organize. A wagon train large enough to supply an army moving into the interior, he advised, would jam roads, marooning itself and the rest of the column in some remote, dangerous place. Grant replied that he would employ no five-hundred-wagon train. Rather, he would make his army leaner and faster—and, if necessary, hungrier. Bringing full rations from Grand Gulf would require more roads than he had time to build, he told Sherman. Instead, Sherman must assemble a train a quarter the usual size, 120 wagons, and load it with bacon, bread, salt, and coffee, items unavailable in interior Mississippi in sufficient bulk to supply an army. Everything else would have to come from the territory through which they passed.
23From Bruinsburg on, Grant had troops scouring neighborhoods along the route for every wheeled conveyance that could haul ammunition. They assembled “a motley train,” he later recalled, that included fine carriages loaded with cartridge boxes and drawn by mules in plough harness alongside ox-drawn cotton wagons.
24It must have looked more like a refugee procession than an army. In taking items from civilians, Grant ordered his men not even to fill out records until they had more time. His attitude toward nonmilitary secessionists was hardening. From Hankinson’s Ferry he wrote General Hurlbut in Memphis on May 5 that only the homes, bodies, and most personal possessions of civilians would be off-limits to his soldiers from then on. Hurlbut should keep troops out of civilian houses, but everything outside them was fair game. They must feed themselves off the fields they passed and destroy every crop that could be useful to Confederates. They should take all the mules and horses they needed and destroy farm implements whenever doing so did not require too much time. In sum, he said, “cripple the rebellion in every way without insulting women and children or taking their clothing, jewelry &c.” From now on, for opponents of his army, war would truly be hell—and not just on soldiers.
25
Sherman’s corps arrived and drew ammunition at Grand Gulf on May 6 and 7, and Grant launched a wide, fast sweep northeastward. Its purpose was to eliminate any risk of attacks from his rear when he turned back west to approach Vicksburg’s land side. At Edwards Station, halfway out the Vicksburg-Jackson rail line, Pemberton was reportedly gathering significant forces. Grant would have to prevent them from connecting with reinforcements to the east and remove them from his own approach to Vicksburg.
26
The three Federal corps advanced abreast south of the Vicksburg-Jackson rail line. That way, each had fresh fields to ravage for forage and food. McClernand led the left nearest the railroad, Sherman the center, and McPherson the right. From May 9 to 12, the Federals drove on parallel routes from Hankinson’s Ferry, Rocky Springs, and Utica thirty miles toward Edwards Station, Bolton Depot just beyond it, and Raymond. Once Grant cleared the territory on the Jackson end of the railroad, he could safely turn west and assault Pemberton.
On May 11, Grant had ordered McPherson to Raymond. The urgency of finding food had increased. McPherson was to do his utmost to gather all available foodstuffs around Raymond. Needing to fight before their food gave out, they would have to make their rations last as long as possible. Grant reminded McPherson that on a previous occasion he had made two days’ rations last seven, and he might have to do the same thing again.
27
MAJOR GENERAL JAMES B. MCPHERSON
Grant was outrunning even his streamlined supply trains. This is likely why he recalled later, and historians have repeated, that he abandoned his base, cutting himself off from all sources of reinforcement and matériel. His letters and orders show he never meant to do that wholly. He had stockpiled supplies at Grand Gulf from wagon-borne cargoes that continued to clatter into Hard Times for ferrying across the Mississippi. He did, however, risk outdistancing his rations. McPherson reported that meat was plentiful, but bread less so, and his men also lacked horses, mules, and haul vehicles. McPherson said he barely had wagons enough to move camp equipment and ammunition; locally commandeered vehicles usually broke down. His troops were also badly in need of shoes. Nearly a third of his First Brigade had worn theirs out on the long march from Milliken’s Bend. Many feet were bare and sore.
28On May 12, complying with a Grant order to enter and sack Raymond, McPherson had to fight his way in. Two miles south, 3,000 Confederates under Brigadier General John Gregg assailed his right. In this, his first full battle as on-site commander of a large unit, McPherson overestimated his opposition, guessing Confederate strength to be twice what it was. McPherson was no Grant, so his inflated figure gave him pause; 6,000 would have been more than half his own total of 10,000-plus—and roughly equal to the assailed part of his force. Gregg, for his part, had attacked because he did not know he was outnumbered. He thought he had in his front only a single Federal brigade “on a marauding excursion.”
29The battle raged from noon to 4 p.m. By 2, the outcome was decided. Vicious enfilading of Confederates charging to the right and left of McPherson’s center helped to turn the tide, as did a Federal counterattack and the deployment of 4,000 Union reinforcements under Brigadier General Marcellus Crocker. McPherson reported 66 killed, 339 wounded, and 37 missing. Partial Confederate totals were 73 killed, 252 wounded, and 190 missing. As at Port Gibson, the Union sum was small in relation to the number engaged; the Confederate one, daunting.
30After the Raymond fight, Grant again improvised. Gregg had retreated toward Jackson, where Confederates were reported massing, and Joe Johnston was expected there at any moment to take command. Grant knew he could not afford to leave such a prestigiously led force behind him when he about-faced to deal with Pemberton at Vicksburg. He decided to attend to the Confederates at Jackson and, as he reported, “leave no enemy in my rear.”
31Grant sent Sherman’s and McPherson’s corps hurrying to the Mississippi capital. McPherson followed the railroad, descending on the city from the northwest, while Sherman, accompanied by Grant, took a road from Raymond to strike Jackson from the southwest. The 24,000 Federals faced just 6,000 Confederates under Johnston, but the capital was fortified, and 7,000 more Confederates were racing toward it.
32Grant beat them to it.The Federals arrived in the mid-morning of May 14 in the mud of a four-hour rain. Sherman’s artillery blasted aside a ragtag collection of Confederate mounted infantry, sharpshooters, and four cannons. Grant’s McPherson-led northern pincer bayonet-charged a thin Confederate line and swept it into the Jackson earthworks.The Federals regrouped, advanced again by mid-afternoon, and found the trenches abandoned. Before 2 p.m., Gregg had pulled out and headed north toward Canton, Mississippi, bringing up the rear of Johnston’s supply train. Gregg’s men had fought hard, but he had learned at the last moment that McPherson was only half his foe. And Johnston had been no help, preemptively removing as many men and supplies as he could, rather than holding until reinforcements arrived. He had ordered a withdrawal at 3 a.m., hours before sighting the Union attackers. At Jackson, 42 Federals had died, 251 were wounded, and 7 were missing. Just one of the three Confederate brigades reported its casualties: 17 dead, 64 wounded, and 118 missing.
33Grant kept moving. He told Sherman to occupy the Jackson rifle pits and destroy rail and other facilities that might be useful to the Confederates. He himself took McClernand’s and McPherson’s corps and turned toward Vicksburg.
Grant now had even more reason to hurry. On the evening of May 13, just prior to the battle for Jackson, Joe Johnston had sent Pemberton a message by three different couriers. One, a Union spy, took the message to McPherson instead. The dispatch informed Pemberton that Union troops were at Clinton on the Jackson-Vicksburg rail line and ordered Pemberton to attack there immediately to prevent the fall of Jackson.
34If Pemberton was following Johnston’s orders, then Grant might catch him outside the Vicksburg trenches. Assuming Johnston was now circling northward to try to beat him to the bluff fortress, Grant sent the two corps rushing to Bolton Station, halfway to Vicksburg. There, they could keep Johnston and Pemberton apart until Sherman had wrecked anything at Jackson that might help them if they returned there after he departed.
35
Two day later, Grant fought the first of two battles with a conflicted Pemberton.
Pemberton and Johnston differed greatly from Grant. Both soldiered by the West Point book, and neither liked fighting. Instead of trying to join forces as each claimed to want to do, they moved farther apart, Johnston to the northeast from Jackson and Pemberton southeast from Edwards Station on the Vicksburg-Jackson rail line. Pemberton was a man in the middle—between Johnston, who wanted to unite outside the trap Vicksburg seemed to be turning into, and Jefferson Davis, who wanted Vicksburg defended to the death. Trying hesitantly to reconcile the two, Pemberton had come out of Vicksburg along the railroad but then decided that trying to get through Grant’s army to join Johnston would be “extremely hazardous.” Subordinates finally persuaded him to target a two-hundred-wagon Union supply train moving from Grand Gulf toward Raymond, but his heart obviously was not in it.
36Subordinates’ animosity likely also influenced Pemberton. They showed less confidence in him than the questionable amount he showed in himself. A Philadelphia native, he had led only the obscure Department of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida when promoted to major general in early 1862; he then rose to lieutenant general with his assignment to Vicksburg. Major General William Loring, a North Carolina–born career soldier who had lost an arm in the Mexican War, was openly contemptuous of him. And the prickly temperament of Brigadier General Lloyd Tilghman, who had faced Grant at Fort Henry, had chafed Pemberton for months. As they set out to nab Grant’s wagons, an aide to Brigadier General Winfield S. Featherston overheard Loring, Tilghman, and Featherston laughing at Pemberton’s orders.
37Confederate discord increased on May 14. Pemberton had argued against obeying Johnston’s order to move farther from Vicksburg, and Loring urged grabbing Grant’s Raymond-bound wagons instead. Pemberton reluctantly decided Loring’s idea offered the only realistic chance to damage Grant. But, contrary to West Point dogma, Grant was not depending on his supply wagons to the usual extent. And Pemberton thought Grant was aiming to destroy Jackson, whereas Grant’s actual goal was to destroy Pemberton.
38
LIEUTENANT GENERAL JOHN C. PEMBERTON
On May 15, Grant sent 3 2,000 of his Federals hurrying westward on three roads. Pemberton meanwhile plodded. A planning error delayed his 23,000 Confederates for five hours. No one had sent enough ammunition and rations to Edwards Station, the jumping-off point for the operation against Grant’s wagon train. Then, despite headquartering two miles away, Pemberton failed to scout a bridge his troops needed to cross Baker’s Creek. When they got there, flooding had washed it out, and a detour ate more hours. By day’s end, Pemberton’s men were exhausted. Some arrived in the target area—on the Raymond-Port Gibson Road and roughly halfway between those two towns—too late to sleep.
39At 5 a.m. on May 16, Grant got more Southern aid. Subordinates brought him two men who worked on the Vicksburg-Jackson rail line. They said that they had passed through Pemberton’s force a few hours earlier, and the Confederates were moving east 25,000 strong. Grant yet again revised his plan. He ordered Sherman to cut short his wrecking of Jackson and hurry a division west to Bolton with ammunition wagons. They were not to stop until they reached the rest of Grant’s army.
40Soon after daylight, Pemberton heard firing. Scouts reported a strong Federal column approaching from the east. A courier also arrived with a reiterated order from Johnston that Pemberton join him to the north. Only now did Pemberton learn that Jackson had fallen, rendering his previous orders from Johnston (which he had not obeyed) obsolete. Johnston now ordered him to rendezvous at Clinton, Mississippi, some ten miles west of Jackson. With his cavalry pickets already skirmishing and Federal artillery unlimbering on the head of his column, Pemberton forgot Grant’s wagons and decided to return to Edwards Station and try to reach Johnston.
Pemberton soon found himself stymied in this effort too. At a hill on the farm of a family named Champion, the Confederates left under Major General Carter Stevenson met a Federal division of McClernand’s corps under Brigadier General Alvin P. Hovey. Stevenson had no way of knowing that just behind Hovey, marching west from Bolton, was McPherson’s whole corps: two divisions, led by generals “Black Jack” Logan and Marcellus Crocker. The Federal path southward led up Champion Hill and then down to a critical junction with the so-called Middle Road, another thoroughfare running from Edwards Station to Raymond. This was the middle of three routes on which Grant’s forces were hastening west. It was also Pemberton’s own intended route back to Edwards. Stevenson took position on Champion Hill to hold it open.
Confederate scouts then reported more Federals approaching on the Middle Road east of the junction, heading for Stevenson’s right rear. This second Union column, a half mile south of Hovey and McPherson, comprised four brigades under McClernand division commanders Eugene Carr and Peter Osterhaus. And two miles south of them, on the main road from Raymond to Edwards Station, were four more brigades under Major Generals A. J. Smith of McClernand’s corps and Frank Blair of Sherman’s. Pemberton was in the crosshairs of ruin.
41Battle erupted at 7 a.m. with a cavalry clash on the lower Raymond road. Union artillery and Confederate sharpshooters joined in. Loring, facing Smith and Blair, suggested the Confederates form a battle line to fend off the imminent Union attack. Pemberton ordered him to block the lower Raymond road. But a Loring staff officer thought Pemberton looked as if he had made “no . . . plans for the coming battle.”
42In mid-morning, McPherson joined the onslaught, attacking the Confederates’ other wing. Pemberton, preoccupied with the lower Raymond road, ignored half of the Federal army for a couple of hours. Confederates under General Stevenson clung to Champion Hill and tried to fend off McPherson, but a Federal drive shoved them backward and overlapped their left. Grant’s hard-fighting favorite, Major General “Black Jack” Logan, commanded this Federal flanking lunge. Logan did not even give his men the usual time to lay down their personal gear before leading them forward. “Damn them,” he roared, “you can whip them with your knapsacks on!”
43Logan’s punch had carried all the way to the Jackson Road, Pemberton’s best route back to Vicksburg. Grant, at the Champion house with McPherson, sent an aide to Logan to tell him he was making history.
44McPherson’s center fought from noon until 1:30 for the crest of Champion Hill. A bayonet charge took a battery of four Confederate guns, which then were lost to a withering counterattack. The Federals retreated, then with reinforcements mounted another charge, pushing back Confederates under brigade commanders Stephen Lee and Alfred Cumming. Confederates barely kept a grip on Jackson Road and the crossroads.
45Only at about 1 p.m. did Pemberton seek help for his embattled left. He summoned Loring and John Bowen from the lower Raymond road. Neither general obeyed immediately. Heavy Federal forces were in their front, they said. The aide who had delivered the first message finally returned to Bowen with a mandatory order: send at least a brigade to the left immediately. It was around 2:30 p.m. before 5,000 Missourians and Arkansans under Bowen hit the Federal line at the crossroads. Because of the hilly, much-forested terrain—one officer said it was impossible to see more than fifty to a hundred yards in any direction—Bowen’s strike landed like a knockout sucker punch. His men ran the Federals off Champion Hill three-quarters of a mile, recapturing some of the cannons the Confederates had lost and getting close to Union ammunition wagons at the Champion house. Men in Bowen’s First Brigade fired as many as ninety rounds apiece in this thrust—forty in their cartridge boxes, the rest scavenged from fallen friends and enemies. Federals rushing forward to help saw their comrades flee so brokenly that they threatened to panic the reinforcements.
46Grant did not panic, but he made a knee-jerk error. In sending more men to aid those on Champion Hill, he ordered a withdrawal of Logan’s brigade, whose sweeping charge around the Confederate left had blocked Pemberton’s Jackson Road retreat route. But Confederates farther out Jackson Road were too traumatized to react.
47Loring, meanwhile, was lost to Pemberton for an hour, having taken a little-used and longer road to reach the left. When he tardily neared the Jackson Road, the left of Stevenson’s fought-out line had broken, and the delay had wasted Bowen’s smashing charge as well as an accompanying countersurge by Stephen Lee to Bowen’s left; Grant’s men regained equilibrium. All Loring saw as he approached were fleeing Confederates, some without hats or weapons and looking, one staff officer thought, “as if they had just escaped from the Lunatic Asylum.” But Loring and an indefatigable Lee were preparing another charge when Pemberton ordered them to retreat to Edwards Station.
48The Confederate disaster was immense. Pemberton lost at least 4,000 of his 23,000 troops at Champion Hill, 2,500 of them missing and captured. He also lost most of Loring’s men, cut off from his army by the onrushing Federals. Union casualties were about 2,200.
49The Confederates marched or straggled back toward Vicksburg. Pemberton forgot about trying to reach Johnston, which was just as well. Pemberton had at least made an aborted attempt to get to his superior; Johnston made none to get to him. So Pemberton put his survivors back across Baker’s Creek and ordered them to hold the crossing for Loring, who never arrived.
50Before dawn on May 17, the Confederates gave up on Loring. They fell back to an already fortified, mile-wide position straddling the railroad and guarding its bridge over Big Black River. Rearguard commander Bowen put 5,000 men into a formidable-seeming position on the river’s east bank, their battle line stretching across the inside of a horseshoe bend in the Big Black. Around and south of the railroad, where Bowen expected the brunt of any Federal assault, bristled twenty cannons. On each wing, he placed his bloody, hard-fighting units from Missouri and Arkansas. Between, he put a Tennessee brigade under Brigadier General John C. Vaughn. Vaughn occupied rifle pits fronted by a parapet, a fifteen-foot-wide bayou, and knee-deep water filled with fallen trees. His men were “fresh . . . and not demoralized,” Bowen thought.
51But demoralization was probably not an issue with these Tennesseans. Vaughn’s troops were conscripts from the state’s unionist eastern third. The Richmond government had thought marching them away from their people would make them better Confederates. It did not. They cared little for the Confederacy. And many of them—along with the Missourians and Arkansans and even their commander, John Bowen—wondered why Pemberton had ordered them there at all. All but Bowen likely forgot that Pemberton thought he must hold the bridge for the missing Loring, whose troops still might arrive. But doing so was dangerous.The deep Big Black and the sixty-foot bluffs on its west side seemed much better able to stop Grant—and they would dangerously impede the 5,000 Confederates left on the east bank. There were just two bridges over the river: one forming part of the railroad and, just south, a temporary one thrown across the deck of a steamboat. Both were narrow. They could accommodate 5,000 men only if their withdrawal was deliberate and orderly. Such was not to be.
52
The Battle of Big Black River Bridge was brief and hot, an exclamation point following the Confederate disaster at Champion Hill. Grant had hedged his bet, sending more pontoons to cross the Big Black farther north and sidestep Pemberton if necessary. No sidestep was needed, though, thanks to Union troops under Brigadier General Michael Lawler. Commanding one of five advance Federal brigades facing three Confederate ones, the burly forty-seven-year-old native Irishman put his men in woods along the Big Black facing the northern end of the Confederate line. There an inward bulge caused by a swampy area interrupted the rifle pits. To the southeastern front of this gap, annual river overflow had carved a swale in a large field. Lawler’s cavalry chief recognized a topographic gift. He told Lawler a brigade could cross part of the open field and then shelter in the swale. There they would be close enough that defenders could get off just one volley before a Federal charge overwhelmed them. Lawler began forming his troops into two heavy columns of fours.
53
Grant sat watching the unit deployments near the road, which ran beside the railroad through the center of the Union and Confederate lines. A courier rode up and handed him a May 11 telegram from Halleck in Washington. It ordered Grant, “if possible,” to join Banks in Louisiana and mount joint attacks on Port Hudson before trying Vicksburg. Grant read the wire, then put it in his pocket. Two days earlier, in a telegram that would not arrive in Washington until May 20, he had reported to Halleck that Banks had gone “off in Louisiana” and would be unavailable until May 10. Grant “could not lose the time” from his lightning campaign to drive off prospective rescuers to the east before assaulting or besieging Vicksburg, he concluded.
54Lawler lost no time now. At noon he threw his cheering troops across the field into the swale and onto the Confederate center. Seeing Federal strength building, the defenders got nervous about their bridges. They loosed a volley that ripped 199 casualties from Lawler’s ranks. But then the bayonet-brandishing Midwesterners charged the Confederate center delivering a volley of their own. They leaped into the bayou ditch and splashed through logs and brush to the parapet.
55Most of the Tennesseans fled. The remainder raised white rags or puffs of cotton from the bales anchoring their parapet. Missourians and Arkansans on the flanks ran, too, and clogged the little bridges. Those arriving late tried to swim. Some drowned. Lawler’s brigade took more prisoners than their own numbers. When most of their uncaptured comrades had crossed, the Confederates fired the turpentine-soaked bridges.
56The Federals counted coup. They had taken 1,751 more prisoners, 18 more cannon to add to 27 taken at Champion Hill, 1,525 artillery shells, 1,421 stands of small arms, and 6 battle flags. In seventeen days since leaving Bruinsburg, Grant’s army had traveled two hundred miles and fought five battles. It had inflicted 7,000 casualties and lost half that. Pemberton returned to Vicksburg with just 9,000 of the 23,000 men he had taken out.
Employing or building crossings to the north and south, Grant quickly put Big Black River between himself and any force Johnston might gather behind him. Vicksburg was now surrounded. Unless Johnston did something quick and miraculous, it was doomed.
57
The many letters Grant wrote over the next several days did not include one to Julia. On May 9 on the road to Raymond, he had written her that she should join him as soon as she heard Vicksburg had fallen, and he had not written her since. He thought, he later informed her, that Vicksburg would fall before another letter could reach her.
After Big Black River Bridge, he may also have wanted to buy time for the healing of a wound that would be best unreported to her. In a May 3 letter from Grand Gulf, he had told her that their twelve-year-old son, Fred, who had accompanied him on this remarkable trek, was “enjoying himself hugely.” The boy had been close enough to combat to hear “balls whistle” and had not flinched, Grant reported. But at Big Black River Bridge, Fred had been too much of a chip off the old block. Excited by Lawler’s charge, the boy spurred his horse, jumped the parapet with some support troops, and followed to the river to watch the swimming Confederates. There a bullet from the west bank grazed his leg. When Fred’s father wrote Julia again on June 9, he was cryptic regarding their son.
58“Fred has enjoyed his campaign very much,” the general wrote. “He has kept a journal which I have never read but suppose he will read to you.”
59What Julia did not know could not hurt her.
