CHAPTER SEVEN

VICKSBURG

General Grant is a great general. I know him well. He stood by me when I was crazy and I stood by him when he was drunk.

WILLIAM TECUMSEH SHERMAN

AT SHILOH, AS AT DONELSON, Grant turned defeat into Union victory. Unlike Donelson, however, the triumph was incomplete. Rather than pursue Beauregard’s battered army, Grant was ordered to hold his position. “Avoid another battle, if you can, until reinforcements arrive,” Halleck telegraphed on April 9. Old Brains said he was en route to Pittsburg Landing to assume command and that John Pope’s Army of the Mississippi, having finally taken New Madrid and Island No. 10, would be joining Buell and Grant. That would increase Union strength to 120,000 men—the largest Federal force yet to take the field. Grant was told that once the army was assembled, “We shall be able to beat them without fail.”1

Despite the opportunity to deliver a knockout blow, caution prevailed. The Confederates were broken, the rail junction at Corinth was within easy reach, and Beauregard would have been hard pressed to withstand a concerted Union attack.² “Our condition is horrible,” Bragg wrote on April 8. “Troops utterly disorganized and demoralized. Road almost impassable. No provisions and no forage.”³ Breckinridge, whose corps constituted the rebel rear guard, said: “My troops are worn out. I don’t think they can be relied on after the first volley.”⁴ Starved horses died by the roadside, guns were abandoned, and thousands deserted. An observer who rode alongside the retreating columns wrote that he saw more human agony and despair than he thought possible.⁵ Despite its hopeless condition, the Confederate army withdrew to Corinth unmolested.

Halleck arrived at Pittsburg Landing on April 11. The department commander had never fought a pitched battle or seen a major battlefield and Shiloh was a dismal lesson in the destructiveness of war. Halleck was shocked by the waste and disorder. Accustomed to lacquered garrison routine, he was equally unprepared for the untidiness of soldiers in the field.^I “This army is undisciplined and very much disorganized,” he wrote his wife upon arrival.⁶ Grant’s Army of the Tennessee, which suffered most, aroused Halleck’s particular displeasure. “Immediate and active measures must be taken to put your command in condition to resist another attack by the enemy,” he instructed Grant.⁷ Halleck said Grant and Buell would retain command of their respective armies, but his detailed order of the day made clear that Grant’s loose style of leadership would not be tolerated.⁸ “The Major General Commanding desires that you will again call the attention of your officers to the necessity of forwarding official communications through the proper military channel. Letters should relate to one matter only, and be properly folded.”⁹

Sherman thought Halleck had been prejudiced against Grant by rumors of Union unreadiness at Shiloh.¹⁰ That may be true. But it is equally true that Halleck and Grant were reading from different pages in the military hymnal. Grant believed war meant fighting, and the object of the present fighting was to destroy Beauregard’s army. Once it was whipped and the troops dispersed, the Mississippi valley would fall to the Union by default. Halleck, as America’s leading disciple of Jomini, subscribed to the places theory of war. In his view the Confederacy could not stand without Corinth, Vicksburg, New Orleans, Atlanta, Richmond, and so forth. Capture the key places by maneuver and fighting would prove unnecessary. In his Elements of Military Art and Science, Halleck wrote: “General battles are not to be fought” except under compelling circumstances.¹¹ Once he took command at Pittsburg Landing, Union sights were fixed on Corinth. Beauregard’s army ceased to be a target.¹² The result was that Corinth eventually fell, the Confederate army escaped, and the war in the West was prolonged another eighteen months.

The conceptual differences between Grant and Halleck went unarticulated in the spring of 1862. Halleck underrated Grant, but so did almost everyone else. Nevertheless, he recognized Grant’s usefulness. When Secretary Stanton, acknowledging public clamor, wired to inquire whether “any neglect or misconduct of General Grant . . . contributed to the sad casualties that befell our forces” at Shiloh,¹³ Old Brains declined to make Grant a scapegoat. “A Great Battle cannot be fought or a victory gained without many casualties, and in this instance the enemy suffered more than we did.”¹⁴ Despite their conceptual differences, Grant, for his part, continued to view Halleck as “one of the greatest men of the age.”¹⁵

For Grant the curtain came down on Shiloh. John Pope’s Army of the Mississippi arrived by convoy on April 21 and went into position on the Union left. Four days later Charles Ferguson Smith succumbed to the infection that had set in after his leg was injured. Everyone in the army would miss him, but no one more than Grant.¹⁶ In a letter to Mrs. Smith, Grant said, “The nation has lost one of its most gallant and able defenders.” Putting his loss in personal terms, Grant wrote: “It was my fortune to have gone through West Point with the General (then captain and commandant of cadets) and to have served with him in all his battles in Mexico and in this rebellion, and I can bear honest testimony to his great worth as a soldier and friend. Where an entire nation condoles with you in your bereavement, no one can do so with more heartfelt grief than myself.”¹⁷ Sherman was equally affected. Years later he wrote that if Smith had lived, “no one would have ever heard of Grant or myself.”¹⁸ Halleck ordered a salute fired at every post and aboard every warship in the department,¹⁹ and in Washington Secretary Stanton publicly noted Smith’s passing.²⁰ The Philadelphia Inquirer said it best: “There was no better soldier in the army than General Smith.”²¹

By the end of April, Halleck was ready to move against Corinth. Grant’s army occupied the position on the Union right, Buell the center, and Pope the left.²² The advance began April 29 and the following day Halleck fine-tuned his command structure. Grant was designated to be second in command—similar to the post Beauregard held under Johnston—and the army’s right wing was entrusted to George Thomas.²³ The change made sense. Halleck lacked combat experience and needed Grant to remedy that deficiency. Grant was also the ranking major general after Halleck, and Thomas was an able field commander who could handle the army’s right wing. The problem was that Grant was not Beauregard, nor was Halleck Johnston. Unlike the suave aristocrat from New Orleans, Grant was temperamentally incapable of being second in command and had never served in that capacity. As quartermaster with the 4th Infantry in Mexico he commanded the unit’s supply train, and when he returned to the service in 1861 he commanded a regiment. He had never filled the role of backstage adviser and general courtier, humoring his chief and pointing out tactfully the reasons why the chief should do this and not that. Even the vocabulary was alien. Grant was a man of action. Command decisions came naturally. He moved on intuition, which he often could not explain or justify to someone else.²⁴

Halleck was equally ill suited to the arrangement. Unlike Albert Sidney Johnston, Old Brains was a one-man show. He considered himself a strategist of the highest order with the formal rules of warfare at his fingertips. He did not need Grant unless the fighting became serious, and if Halleck planned carefully there would be no fighting. Grant was an insurance policy: Use only in case of catastrophe. Finally, there was the chemistry. The relationship between Johnston and Beauregard was lubricated with the genteel civility of the Old South. Grant and Halleck were products of a colder environment. Their dealings were formal, sometimes abrupt, always businesslike, and never reached a level of familiarity. Grant quickly came to resent the arrangement although there is no evidence Halleck meant any injustice.

The advance on Corinth consumed the month of May. The rebel rail junction was twenty miles away but the Union army inched forward like a glacier, plowing up the countryside as it went. Halleck, who feared that Beauregard would attack any moment, insisted the entire front entrench after each day’s march. Four hours digging; six hours sleep. Grant said “the movement was a siege from the start to the close.”²⁵ Sherman called it “a magnificent drill.”²⁶ Black Jack Logan, commanding an Illinois brigade, contemptuously told observers, “My men will never dig another ditch for Halleck except to bury him.”²⁷

As the siege tightened, Grant became morose. He was hypersensitive to the fact he was no longer in command and could not adjust to his new responsibilities. The bitterness seeped into his letters to Julia. After assuring her he was “sober as a deacon no matter what was said to the contrary,” Grant wrote he was thinking of returning home after Corinth was taken. “I have been so shockingly abused [by the press] that I sometimes think it almost time to defend myself.” If the war continued, Grant told Julia he preferred to serve elsewhere. “I have probably done more hard work than any other General officer and . . . although I will shrink from no duty, I am perfectly willing that others should have every opportunity for distinguishing themselves.”²⁸

On May 11 Grant sent his complaint to Halleck. Their tents were 200 yards apart yet Grant put his hurt in writing. He told Halleck the removal from an active command in the face of the enemy implied censure and he considered his present job demeaning. “I believe it is generally understood through this army that my present position differs little from that of one in arrest.” Grant said he wished to be restored to command of the Union right or relieved from further duty.²⁹

Halleck was genuinely unaware of Grant’s discomfort. As a desk soldier who disliked field duty, he could not understand Grant’s complaint. “Your position as second in command of the entire force here in the field rendered it proper that you should be relieved from direct charge of the right wing. I am very much surprised, General, that you should find any cause of complaint in the recent assignment of commands. You have precisely the position to which your rank entitles you.” Halleck said he had not intended to injure Grant’s feelings or reputation. “For the last three months I have done everything in my power to ward off the attacks which were made upon you. If you believe me your friend, you will not require explanation; if not, explanation on my part would be of little avail.”³⁰

Grant felt reassured. The tone of his letters to Julia immediately improved. “We are moving slowly but in a way to insure success,” he wrote on May 16. Grant said he was in excellent health “and am capable of enduring any amount of fatigue.”³¹ Grant’s health was a tip-off to his mental state because, like Sherman, he was not immune to psychosomatic ailments. The following week he was more upbeat. “When the great battle will come off is hard to predict. No pains will be spared to make our success certain and there is scarcely a man in our army who doubts the result.”³² Grant reached a modus vivendi with Halleck’s command structure. “My duties are much lighter than they have been heretofore. Gen. Halleck being present relieves me of great responsibility and Rawlins has become thoroughly acquainted with the routine of office and takes off my hands the examination of most papers.” As Grant did frequently, he instructed Julia about their finances. “Get yourself everything of the very best, and the same for the children, but avoid extravagance. A few thousand saved now will be of great benefit after a while.”³³

By May 28 Halleck’s ponderous war machine was within cannon shot of Beauregard’s works. Corinth was surrounded on three sides. Union troops outnumbered the Confederates two to one, yet Old Brains continued to worry about a rebel attack. When Grant suggested that Pope’s troops swing around the Union right and block Beauregard’s retreat, Halleck indignantly dismissed the idea. The goal was to force Beauregard to withdraw from Corinth, not destroy him.³⁴ It was an axiom of the classic military thought to which Halleck subscribed that an avenue of retreat be left open. “I was silenced so quickly,” said Grant, “I felt that possibly I had suggested an unmilitary movement.”³⁵

Seeking to avoid a general engagement, Halleck settled in for a lengthy wait. The wait ended before it began. Shortly after midnight on May 30 John Pope informed Halleck that Beauregard was being heavily reinforced. Trains were coming and going constantly on the Mobile & Ohio tracks leading into Corinth from the south. “I have no doubt, from all appearances, that I shall be attacked in heavy force at daylight,” warned Pope.³⁶ Halleck’s fears seemed to have come true. Ten minutes after receiving Pope’s report, Old Brains alerted Buell: “There is every appearance that Pope will be attacked this morning. Be prepared to reinforce him, if necessary.” A similar message went to Thomas on the Union right.³⁷ In reality, the trains Pope heard were carrying Beauregard’s army out of Corinth to Tupelo, fifty miles south. When Union pickets moved forward at first light they found the Confederate works deserted. Beauregard had slipped his army out of harm’s way. Even rebel civilians were scarce, all but two of the local families having departed with the troops. Corinth was a ghost town. Dummy soldiers, some with grins painted on, greeted Pope’s advance guard. “These premises to let; inquire of P. G. T. Beauregard.”³⁸ According to Grant: “There was not a sick or wounded man left by the Confederates, nor stores of any kind. The trophies of war were a few Quaker guns—logs about the diameter of ordinary cannon, mounted on wheels of wagons and pointed in the most threatening manner towards us.”³⁹ Lew Wallace said, “Corinth was not captured; it was abandoned to us.”⁴⁰

Reviews were mixed. Sherman called the taking of Corinth “a victory as brilliant and important as any recorded in history.”⁴¹ On the other hand an officer in the 3rd Iowa wrote that he and his comrades had “an indescribable feeling of mortification that the enemy with all his stores and ordnance had escaped.”⁴² The Chicago Tribune said, “General Halleck . . . has achieved one of the most barren triumphs of the war.” The Cincinnati Commercial thought Beauregard, by his timely withdrawal, “achieved another triumph.”⁴³ Halleck, sensitive to criticism the Confederates slipped away, put the best face on the capture he could. “Beauregard evidently distrusts his army,” he wired Stanton, “otherwise he would have fought.”⁴⁴

In his Memoirs Grant placed the capture of Corinth in perspective, focusing implicitly on the difference between Halleck and himself. The officers and men, he wrote, “could not see how the mere occupation of places was to close the war while large and effective rebel armies existed. They believed that a well-directed attack would at least have partially destroyed the army defending Corinth. For myself, I am satisfied that Corinth could have been captured in a two days’ campaign commenced promptly on the arrival of reinforcements after the battle of Shiloh.”⁴⁵

True to form, Halleck began to fortify Corinth as if the final battle of the war would be fought there. The little momentum the army had acquired quickly eroded. In Tupelo meanwhile Beauregard refitted and reorganized, taking full advantage of the Union army’s failure to pursue. As the northern gateway to the lush black belt of eastern Mississippi, Tupelo and its environs offered a congenial setting for the rebels to gather reinforcements, their morale boosted by the ease with which they extricated themselves from almost certain defeat. As the Union troops dug in and the Confederates regrouped, Grant grew despondent. Second in command of the vast army at Corinth, his position carried enormous prestige—not unlike the vice president of the United States. And like the vice president, Grant had little or nothing to do. Three days after Corinth fell, Sherman discovered him packing to leave. “As I rode up, [Grant’s staff] were standing in front of his headquarters, and piled up near them were the usual office and camp chests, all ready for a start in the morning.

“I inquired for the general, and was shown to his tent, where I found him seated on a camp stool with papers on a rude camp table. He seemed to be employed in sorting letters and tying them up with red tape into convenient bundles.” After exchanging pleasantries, Sherman asked Grant if he were going away.

“Yes,” said Grant. “Sherman, you know. You know that I am in the way here. I have stood it as long as I can, and can endure it no longer.”

“Where are you going?” asked Sherman.

“St. Louis.”

“Have any business there?”

“Not a bit,” Grant replied.

Sherman was touched. On the field at Shiloh, when the Union cause looked hopeless, he developed enormous respect for the rumpled little man who said “lick ’em tomorrow.” Like C. F. Smith, Sherman recognized Grant’s unique gift for warfare and understood the loss the Union would suffer if he departed. In his hard-bitten way, Sherman had formed an affection for Grant, who suffered even more than he in the 1850s. He pleaded with Grant not to leave, buttressing the argument with his own example. “Before the battle of Shiloh, I was cast down by a mere newspaper assertion of ‘crazy,’ but that single battle gave me new life, and I am now in high feather.” Sherman told Grant that if he went away, events would move along and he would be left out. If he remained, “some happy accident might restore him to favor and his true place.”⁴⁶

Grant was struck by Sherman’s candor.⁴⁷ As at Fort Humboldt in 1854, perhaps he was taking himself too seriously. He promised Sherman to think about what he said.⁴⁸ That evening Grant wrote Julia he would not be coming home after all. “Necessity changes my plans, or the public service does, and I must yield.”⁴⁹ The next day he wrote Sherman to tell him he would stay. Sherman rejoiced. “You could not be quiet at home for a week when armies were moving.”⁵⁰ Casual conversations occasionally constitute critical turning points in history. The few words exchanged by Sherman and Grant changed the course of Grant’s life and perhaps the Civil War.⁵¹ Grant had rallied Sherman at Shiloh; Sherman came to Grant’s rescue at Corinth.

Halleck’s decision not to attack Beauregard or pursue him to Tupelo was a near-fatal mistake. The opportunity to deliver a knockout blow was missed and the rebels regained the initiative by default. Four days after taking Corinth, Halleck put the Union army on the defensive. As Old Brains saw it, this was a time to consolidate. “There is no point in bringing on a battle,” he informed his wing commanders, “if the object can be obtained without one. I think that by showing a bold front for a day or two the enemy will continue his retreat, which is all that I desire.” The Union army would become an army of occupation. “The repair of the railroads is now the great object to be attended to,” said Halleck.⁵² The early pattern of the war in the West was repeating itself. After Donelson, Union delay allowed Johnston to regroup and consolidate. After Shiloh, Beauregard’s defeated army was not pursued, and it was the same story after Corinth. Union commanders were imbued with the importance of consolidating gains, holding territory, and operating on interior lines of communication. Grant was the exception. His instinctive recognition that victory lay in relentlessly hounding a defeated army into surrender had yet to gain a place in Union strategy.

On June 10 Halleck dispersed the army for occupation duty. Buell, with four divisions from the Army of the Ohio, was dispatched along the tracks of the Memphis & Charleston railroad 200 miles east to Chattanooga, instructed to repair the line as he went. Pope’s Army of the Mississippi was deployed in front of Corinth to defend the vital rail junction,^II while Grant, restored to command of the Army of the Tennessee, was sent west to Memphis, his troops strung out across half a dozen railheads along the Mississippi-Tennessee border.⁵³ Halleck acknowledged to Stanton that the disposition had a flaw, but did not grasp how serious that flaw might be. “This plan is based on the supposition that the enemy will not attempt an active campaign during the summer months. Should he do so . . . the present dispositions must be varied to suit the change of circumstances.”⁵⁴

Grant set out for Memphis on June 21 accompanied by his staff and a dozen troopers for escort. Grant, the best equestrian in the army, preferred to travel the hundred miles on horseback rather than by train, and he arrived two days later, narrowly avoiding capture by Confederate cavalry who had been alerted he was coming.⁵⁵ Grant found Memphis “in rather bad order, secessionists governing much in their own way.”⁵⁶ The population remained adamant in their attachment to the Confederacy. Aside from the problems this created for civil government, local clergymen persisted in offering prayers each Sunday for the president of the Confederacy. Union officers ordered all references to Jefferson Davis deleted from church services and required that prayers be said for President Lincoln instead. Grant was unwilling to go that far. The day after his arrival his assistant adjutant general announced: “I am directed by Major General Grant to say that you can compel all Clergymen within your lines to omit from their church services any portion you may deem treasonable, but you will not compel the insertion or substitution of anything.”⁵⁷

Grant was gratified to have his army back, although his relations with Halleck remained awkward. Not strained, not hostile, just awkward. The two men were so unlike it was difficult to communicate. Halleck was sarcastic and Grant unduly sensitive. By the end of June they were trading ripostes. Halleck fired first: “You say thirty thousand rebels are at Shelbyville to attack La Grange or Memphis. Where is Shelbyville? I can’t find it on a map. Don’t believe a word about an attack in large force on La Grange or Memphis. Why not send out a strong reconnaissance and ascertain the facts. It looks like a mere stampede. Floating rumors are never to be received as facts.”⁵⁸

Grant returned the shot. “I did not say 30,000 troops at Shelbyville but at Abbeyville, which is south of Holly Springs, on the road to Grenada. I heed as little of floating rumors as anyone. . . . Stampeding is not my weakness—on the contrary I will always execute any order to the best of my ability with the means at hand.”⁵⁹

Halleck let the matter rest. He had not intended to offend Grant, although his words had had that effect. Four days later he apologized. “I made no insinuation that there had been the slightest neglect on your part. Nor did I suppose for a moment that you were stampeded, for I know it is not in your nature.” Halleck soothed Grant’s ruffled feathers. “I must confess that I was very much surprised at the tone of your dispatch, and the ill feeling manifested in it, so contrary to your usual style, and especially towards one who has so often befriended you when you were attacked by others.”⁶⁰ The brief set-to reflected no ill will between Grant and Halleck. It was merely a failure to communicate, exacerbated by Grant’s fragile selfesteem and Halleck’s patronizing manner.⁶¹

Grant’s assignment to Memphis coincided with a shake-up in the Confederate high command. Jefferson Davis, like Halleck, was a places strategist and the loss of Corinth set poorly in Richmond. Failing to recognize that Beauregard’s army at Tupelo, reinforced by the recent arrival of Van Dorn’s legion from the trans-Mississippi, was ideally positioned to strike the fragmented Union command and roll it up, Davis relieved the Creole commander on June 17 and replaced him with Braxton Bragg. Bragg lacked Beauregard’s flair, but he was a thorough professional, a strict disciplinarian,^III and was considered a fearsome opponent. The rate of fire of his battery at Buena Vista still stood as a record for muzzle-loading artillery, and at Shiloh he led the final assault on Grant’s last line. The Confederate defeat, he wrote, taught a valuable lesson: “Never, on a battlefield, lose a moment’s time, but leaving the killed, wounded, and spoils to those whose special business it is to care for them, press on with every available man, giving a panic-stricken and retreating foe no time to rally.”⁶² Like Grant, Bragg was a fighter, and within a month he was ready to take the offensive.

Meanwhile in the East, the long-awaited Union offensive against Richmond had miscarried. McClellan battled Joseph E. Johnston to a draw at Seven Pines in early June, but on June 25 the Army of Northern Virginia, fighting under Lee for the first time,^IV ripped into Federal forces on the banks of the Chickahominy River. In a series of hard-fought engagements known as the Seven Days’ battles (June 25–July 1, 1862), the Confederates forced the Army of the Potomac to retreat down the Virginia peninsula to Harrison’s Landing, where Union troops took refuge under the protection of Navy gunboats. McClellan was whipped, Richmond was saved, and Lincoln—at the urging of John Pope, who served as the president’s informal military adviser during the crisis—ordered Halleck to Washington to assume the responsibilities of general in chief.⁶³

Lincoln’s telegram arrived in Corinth July 11. “Your orders are received,” Halleck wired the president. “General Grant, next in command, is at Memphis. I have telegraphed to him to immediately repair to this place. I will start for Washington the moment I can have a personal interview with General Grant.”⁶⁴ Halleck’s message to Grant was cryptic. “You will immediately repair to this place [and] report to these headquarters.”⁶⁵

Grant had no inkling what was in store. “Am I to bring my staff?” he asked.⁶⁶

“This place will be your headquarters,” Halleck replied. “You can judge for yourself.”⁶⁷

In his Memoirs, Grant was critical of Halleck’s failure to inform him why he was being summoned to Corinth.⁶⁸ Halleck’s abruptness was well established, however, and chattiness was not his command style. More important, the telegraph line from Corinth to Memphis ran for more than a hundred miles through rebel-infested territory. Unlike the command link to Washington, it was scarcely secure. As Halleck saw it, there was no reason to inform the Confederates of the changeover until it was made.⁶⁹

Grant arrived in Corinth on July 15. The following day Halleck issued Special Field Orders No. 161, which gave Grant the military department embracing north Mississippi, west Tennessee, and Kentucky west of the Cumberland, as well as command of two armies—his own and Pope’s old force, now under Rosecrans, “heretofore known as the Army of the Mississippi.”⁷⁰ Buell’s Army of the Ohio, moving laboriously toward Chattanooga, became a separate command. Both Buell and Grant reported directly to Halleck as general in chief. In retrospect this was another serious error on Halleck’s part. He may have felt that because of the tension between Grant and Buell it was best for them to operate independently, or (more likely) he may have wanted to keep control of the Western theater in his own hands.⁷¹ But the effect was to divide the army he had assembled into separate commands, deprive it of numerical dominance at a single point of concentration, and allow Bragg to strike each element at times and places of his own choosing. The troops Grant inherited—approximately 80,000 men organized into ten divisions—were dispersed from hell to breakfast in north Mississippi and west Tennessee, incapable of offensive action and barely able to keep the most important rail lines free from rebel marauders. Grant wrote later that “the most anxious period of the war” was during the summer of 1862 when “the Army of the Tennessee was guarding the territory acquired by the fall of Corinth and Memphis and before I was sufficiently reinforced to take the offensive.”⁷²

Bragg was quick to take advantage of the situation. The question was whether to hit Grant or Buell, and Bragg chose Buell. His plan was to beat the slow-moving Army of the Ohio to Chattanooga, link up with Edmund Kirby Smith, who commanded a Confederate force of 18,000 troops in eastern Tennessee, crush Buell, liberate Nashville, and then move north into Kentucky and menace Cincinnati. “ ‘De l’audace, encore l’audace, et toujours de l’audace,’ ” said Beauregard approvingly when informed of the plan.⁷³ Bragg left Sterling Price at Tupelo with 16,000 men to protect north Mississippi, sent Van Dorn to Vicksburg with another 16,000, and on July 23 loaded his Shiloh veterans onto cars of the Mobile & Ohio for a circuitous 776-mile rail journey to Chattanooga via Mobile, Montgomery, and Atlanta. The trip involved six separate railroads, some of different gauge, and a ferry ride across Mobile Bay. Nevertheless, lead elements of Bragg’s command chugged around Lookout Mountain into Chattanooga on July 29 while Buell was still picking his way through north Alabama, a hundred miles away. Bragg had moved men farther, faster than troops had ever moved before. He had united two Confederate armies, his own and Smith’s, and stood poised to reverse the direction of the war.

Grant meanwhile scrambled to concentrate his forces. On July 30 he wired Halleck that Bragg’s army was in Chattanooga and that Sterling Price had formed up at Holly Springs, an important commercial center on the Mississippi Central railroad forty miles southwest of Corinth. Grant requested permission to drive Price south.⁷⁴ Halleck cut Grant slack with one hand, but reined him in with the other: “You must judge for yourself the best use to be made of your troops [but] be ready to reinforce Buell if necessary.”⁷⁵ Grant, delighted to be in command once more, did not quibble. He understood what Halleck meant. “We will have to draw in our horns a little,” he wrote Rosecrans, “and spread again when we can.”⁷⁶ This was a more mature Grant than the one who stretched his orders at Belmont and Donelson.

Knowing Halleck as he did, Grant recognized what was in store. George Thomas’s division was transferred immediately to Buell, two more divisions were shifted in mid-August, and on September 2 a fourth division was ordered to Louisville. That reduced Grant’s strength to 46,000 men—enough to defeat Price and Van Dorn, or Bragg for that matter, but not enough to defend hundreds of miles of railroad, pacify western Tennessee, and thwart rebel guerrillas, particularly with Nathan Bedford Forrest on the loose. Grant, against his instincts, was forced on the defensive.

Bragg, unopposed, moved north from Chattanooga on August 28. At the same time, Kirby Smith left Knoxville, skirted the Cumberland Gap, and marched directly on Lexington, Kentucky. In the East, Lee delivered a knockout blow to John Pope’s Federal Army of Virginia at Second Manassas, and on September 4 the Gray Fox crossed the Potomac heading north. Smith took Lexington on September 2, and on September 6 Stonewall Jackson, leading the 2nd Corps of the Army of Northern Virginia, occupied Frederick, Maryland. The following week Jackson’s corps captured the United States arsenal at Harpers Ferry, taking 12,000 prisoners and liberating a vast storehouse of Federal equipment. It was ebb tide for the Union. Buell, marching parallel to Bragg’s army, had already fallen back to Nashville and was heading retrograde toward Louisville. In effect, central Tennessee had been retaken by the Confederates without firing a shot. At this point Bragg ordered Price to join the advance. “Sherman and Rosecrans we leave to you and Van Dorn, satisfied that you can dispose of them, and we shall confidently expect to meet you on the Ohio.”⁷⁷

As was often the case the Confederates counted their chickens too soon. Grant was yet to be reckoned with. In compliance with his orders from Bragg, Sterling Price moved north on September 7 and struck the eastern anchor of Grant’s line at Iuka, Mississippi, on September 13. Twenty-odd miles east of Corinth on the Memphis & Charleston line, Iuka was a shipping point for hill country cotton. Price planned to dispose of the small Union garrison, replenish his supplies, and march on to join Bragg in Kentucky. It was a strategic miscalculation of the first magnitude. If Price had moved due east along the Holly Springs–Tupelo axis into Alabama before heading north, he would have avoided Grant’s troops and reached Bragg unmolested. Instead, he ran into the left flank of a Union army waiting to pounce. “If Price would remain in Iuka until we could get there, his annihilation was inevitable,” said Grant.⁷⁸

Grant wasted no time. He ordered Rosecrans to move from Corinth with two divisions and hit Price from the south. Major General Edward Ord, as able a Union commander as the war produced, was instructed to swing north with another two divisions and assault Iuka from that direction. Rosecrans would attack first and divert Price, at which point Ord would fall on the unprotected rebel rear and render the coup de grâce. The plan was too ambitious. Later in the war Union troops might have accomplished such a maneuver, but not in 1862. Rosecrans was late getting into position, an acoustic shadow (similar to what Grant experienced at Donelson) prevented Ord from hearing the fighting when it began, and Price—a wily old peckerwood—stole away after dark on a road south that Rosecrans neglected to block. Grant had reversed Price’s thrust northward and prevented him from joining Bragg, but the Confederates escaped with their forces intact. So ended the battle of Iuka. Rosecrans lost 790 men; Price 535.

Van Dorn meanwhile had come north from Vicksburg and was encamped at Holly Springs. Headstrong, wily, and ambitious, “Coon” Van Dorn was itching to join the Confederate advance. Ordering Price to join him at the north Mississippi hamlet of Ripley, he proposed to press north along the Hatchie River until they reached the Memphis & Charleston at Pocahontas, turn east and strike Rosecrans at Corinth before help could arrive. The plan was as daring as Bragg’s move into Kentucky or Lee’s crossing the Potomac. Corinth was the centerpiece of Grant’s position. Once cracked, the Union army would be vulnerable to defeat in detail. Rosecrans had four divisions defending the rail junction, roughly 20,000 men. Between them, Van Dorn and Price had 22,000. “No army ever marched to battle with prouder steps, more hopeful countenance, or with more courage,” said Van Dorn as his troops moved out.⁷⁹

On October 3 the Confederates struck Corinth with full fury. Rosecrans, who had spent four years at West Point with Van Dorn, was ready and waiting, his troops dug in behind a formidable double line of entrenchments. Considering the relatively small size of the forces engaged, the battle of Corinth was one of the fiercest of the war. By mid-afternoon the Southerners had penetrated two miles but were bogged down before Rosecrans’s inner defense line. Federal artillery took a deadly toll, while the unseasonable 94 degree heat wilted defenders and attackers alike. The next morning Van Dorn renewed his assault into the face of the Union guns. “Our lines melted under their fire like snow in a thaw,” a rebel officer recalled.⁸⁰ Rosecrans counterattacked at noon and the exhausted Confederates gave way. By one o’clock Van Dorn was in full retreat. Southern losses were staggering. Of the 22,000 rebel troops engaged, 5,000 were killed, wounded, or missing. Rosecrans lost 2,000. Price wept as he watched his thinned ranks withdraw, the men desperately aware they had suffered a crushing defeat.

Grant ordered Rosecrans to pursue the retreating Confederates and sent Ord and McPherson to assist. Ord blocked Van Dorn on the Hatchie, but Rosecrans was once again slow off the mark and the Southerners made good their escape after losing another 600 men. Although Grant failed to destroy the rebel army, the Corinth campaign proved to be the last Confederate offensive in the Mississippi theater. Van Dorn and Price had been thwarted in their attempt to move north, and with reinforcements arriving daily, the initiative reverted to Grant.

The tide turned elsewhere as well. On September 17, 1862, Lee’s veteran soldiers slammed into McClellan’s vastly expanded Army of the Potomac along Antietam Creek near the sleepy Maryland village of Sharpsburg. Outnumbered two to one, the Confederates fought the enemy to a standstill in one of the bloodiest battles of the war.^V But the rebel invasion of the Northern heartland was defeated. Lee withdrew his battered army and recrossed the Potomac heading south, relieving the threat to Harrisburg, Baltimore, and Washington.

In Kentucky, Don Carlos Buell, prodded into action by Lincoln and Halleck, met Bragg sixty miles southeast of Louisville along a ridgeline near Perryville. Buell brought eight seasoned divisions to the encounter; Bragg, who had divided his army, could muster only three. Yet the North Carolinian concentrated his troops, attacked boldly, and almost carried the day. Later Bragg wrote that “for the time engaged, it was the severest and most desperately contested engagement within my knowledge.”⁸¹ But like Lee’s thrust into Maryland, the Confederate invasion of Kentucky had run out of steam. What had been heralded as a full-scale offensive to establish the northern border of the Confederacy along the Ohio River petered out as Bragg (to the consternation of his subordinates) ordered his army back to Tennessee.⁸²

Lincoln, who now despaired of bringing the South back into the Union short of total victory, seized on McClellan’s limited success at Antietam to issue a preliminary emancipation proclamation, utilizing his war powers as commander in chief to announce the freedom, effective January 1, 1863, of “all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States.”⁸³ The president emphasized that reunion, not abolition, was still the object of the war. Loyal slave owners would be compensated for their loss, and the rebels had three months to make up their minds. Two days later, September 24, 1862, Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus throughout the United States—a draconian war measure that he believed essential to the preservation of the Union. The president acted pursuant to congressional authorization, but it was clear that civil liberties, like emancipation, took a back seat to saving the Union.^VI “Are all the laws, but one [the right to habeas corpus], to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated?” Lincoln asked.⁸⁴

Grant took heart from the victories of Buell and McClellan and immediately laid plans to capture Vicksburg. Two weeks after Corinth, he wired Halleck that in the absence of any instructions from Washington he proposed to abandon the railheads he occupied, concentrate his forces in northern Mississippi, and assume the offensive. Grant said that with a few reinforcements from Memphis, “I think I would be able to move down the Mississippi Central [Rail] road and cause the evacuation of Vicksburg and be able to capture or destroy all the boats in the Yazoo River.”⁸⁵ After waiting a week, during which time Halleck made no reply, Grant put his plan in motion. On November 2, 1862, he informed the War Department that he was moving against Grand Junction—the intersection of the Memphis & Charleston and the Mississippi Central lines—with five divisions. “Will leave here [Jackson, Tennessee] tomorrow evening and take command in person.” Grant said he then planned to attack the rebel base at Holly Springs and push on to Grenada, Mississippi.⁸⁶ For Washington, it was a pleasant surprise. Halleck had not anticipated that Grant would act so swiftly, but once it became clear that the Army of the Tennessee was on the move, he not only wired his support but said that reinforcements would be immediately forthcoming. “I hope for an active campaign on the Mississippi this fall.”⁸⁷

Grant’s alacrity in moving against the enemy in the autumn of 1862 contrasts sharply with the caution displayed by McClellan and Buell following their victories at Antietam and Perryville. It took McClellan six weeks to cross the Potomac at Sharpsburg, and by then Lee was safely back in front of Richmond. In Kentucky, Buell showed no inclination to pursue Bragg’s retreating army and insisted instead on returning to Nashville. After repeated warnings from Halleck to take action or else, Buell was relieved of command of the Army of the Ohio (redesignated the Army of the Cumberland) on October 24 and replaced by Rosecrans. McClellan, who was equally obdurate to entreaties to attack, was removed on November 7. As one historian has written, “The guillotine had fallen on two of the foremost exponents of limited, cautious, gentlemanly warfare.”⁸⁸ Of the three Union commanders who had stemmed the rebel tide in 1862, only Grant remained. And Grant, who now enjoyed the confidence of the War Department, could scarcely be described as a devotee of limited warfare.

The Vicksburg campaign opened auspiciously. Grant took Holly Springs against token resistance on November 13, and by early December he had occupied Oxford, Mississippi, accumulated a mountain of supplies, and was ready to begin his advance. With 40,000 men, Grant planned to move southward along the Mississippi Central Railroad, take the capital city of Jackson, sever Vicksburg’s rail link with the eastern Confederacy, and then turn west and assault the river bastion. Sherman, with another 33,000 men, would descend the Mississippi River from Memphis and join the assault.⁸⁹ Confronting Grant, Lieutenant General John C. Pemberton was entrenched with an army of 25,000 men along the Yalobusha River at Grenada, an important rail junction on the Mississippi Central, 100 miles north of Jackson and Vicksburg. Another 25,000 Confederates manned the battlements at Vicksburg and the downriver fortress of Port Hudson.

The forty-eight-year-old Pemberton, a native of Philadelphia married to a Virginian, was one of the few Northern-born regular army officers to side with the South. Grant, who knew Pemberton from Mexico, once sympathetically described him as “a northern man who had got into bad company.”⁹⁰ Promoted rapidly by the Confederacy, Pemberton had been recently assigned by Jefferson Davis—to the consternation of most Mississippians—to defend Vicksburg, superseding Van Dorn and Price, who remained under his command. A classmate of Bragg’s at West Point, Pemberton’s abrasive self-assurance had already made him persona non grata in Charleston, his previous assignment, but Davis hoped that it was precisely that combination of certitude and inflexibility that could hold Vicksburg against Grant’s onslaught.

Grant, for his part, was energized by rumors, soon confirmed, that the second-ranking officer in his command, Major General John McClernand, was back in Illinois raising volunteers for an independent assault on Vicksburg. In one of the more bizarre episodes of the Civil War, McClernand, a prominent Illinois lawyer, Democratic member of Congress, and close friend of Lincoln’s, took leave of Grant in early autumn and journeyed to Washington to see the president and another old friend, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. Fueled by dreams of military glory and critical of Grant’s ability to command, the politically ambitious McClernand persuaded Lincoln that he could rekindle the patriotism of Democrats in the old Northwest Territory if given the opportunity to raise a new army of volunteers, descend the Mississippi, capture Vicksburg, and “open navigation to New Orleans.”⁹¹ Without informing Grant, Lincoln approved the scheme. McClernand left Washington in late October armed with a confidential order dictated by the president authorizing him to proceed to the Middle West and raise a separate force to capture Vicksburg. Halleck protested the arrangement and at the last minute convinced Lincoln to insert language in McClernand’s instructions that made whatever troops he raised subject to the general in chief’s orders “according to such exigencies as the service . . . may require.”⁹²

Halleck was not about to have an independent command operating in Grant’s department.⁹³ As Halleck saw it, it was not merely a matter of correct military organization. Grant was a professional soldier who could be relied upon. McClernand was a political loose cannon. Accordingly, Halleck set about to cut his troops from under him. As soon as McClernand raised a new regiment, Halleck ordered it to Memphis, where it reported to Grant. Historians have stressed the tension between Halleck and Grant, but in this instance they worked together seamlessly. Halleck played his cards close to his chest. Without mentioning McClernand, he told Grant in early November that Memphis would be the depot for a joint army and navy expedition against Vicksburg.⁹⁴ Grant was equally circumspect. He had heard rumors of what McClernand was up to and asked Halleck whether he was to go ahead with his plans to move south, or should he wait until the new expedition was fitted out. Specifically, Grant asked if Sherman, at Memphis, was still under his command or “reserved for some special service.”⁹⁵ Halleck’s response was probably more than Grant hoped for: “You have command of all troops sent to your Department, and have permission to fight the enemy when you please.”⁹⁶

That was all Grant needed. His immediate problem was that McClernand ranked Sherman. If Grant delayed moving south, McClernand would return to Memphis and take command of the river expedition regardless.⁹⁷ Grant moved quickly. On December 8 he ordered Sherman to take charge of all troops on the Mississippi. “Move with them as soon as possible down the river to the vicinity of Vicksburg, and with the cooperation of the gunboat fleet under command of Flag-officer [David D.] Porter [the brother of “Dirty Bill” Porter], proceed to the reduction of that place in such manner as circumstances, and your own judgment, may dictate.”⁹⁸ The following day Grant wired Halleck that he had received a letter from McClernand stating that he would be leaving Illinois for Memphis shortly. “Sherman has already gone,” said Grant.⁹⁹

It is impossible to know what Grant and Halleck felt at that moment. Halleck’s biographer notes that the general in chief “had taken the responsibility of meeting intrigue with intrigue and may have enjoyed the resulting farce.”¹⁰⁰ Grant said at the time that McClernand was “unmanageable and incompetent.”¹⁰¹ Later he wrote, “I had good reason to believe that by forestalling him I was by no means giving offence to those whose authority to command was above both him and me.”¹⁰² The point was that Grant and Sherman were on their way to Vicksburg.

It was not clear sailing. On December 10 Nathan Bedford Forrest, the most dangerous of Confederate cavalrymen, rode westward from central Tennessee with 1,800 troopers to wreak havoc in Grant’s rear areas. Picking up recruits along the way, Forrest, in a three-week campaign, outmaneuvered, outfought, and outwitted a Union force ten times his size. He severed Grant’s principal supply line north of Jackson, Tennessee; destroyed fifty miles of Mobile & Ohio track so effectively that that portion of the road was out of commission for the rest of the war; cut telegraph lines with such abandon that Grant was unable to communicate with much of his command for over a week; and captured or destroyed vast quantities of Federal food and equipment, including 10,000 rifles and over a million rounds of ammunition. When he withdrew on New Year’s Day, Forrest had inflicted 2,500 Union casualties and established a reputation for daring that never waned. Forrest, in fact, became the one Confederate horse soldier Grant dreaded because, as an aide remarked, “he was amenable to no known rules of procedure, was a law unto himself for all military acts, and was constantly doing the unexpected at all times and places.”¹⁰³

While Forrest was tearing up western Tennessee, Earl Van Dorn was striking Grant’s midsection. With another 3,500 cavalrymen, Van Dorn rode northeast from Grenada on December 18, circled around the Union left, slipped past a force sent to intercept him, and fell upon Grant’s Holly Springs depot at dawn on the 20th. Although the post commander had been warned of Van Dorn’s approach, no preparations were made to receive him and the Union garrison was taken by surprise. Holly Springs was the field equivalent of the Federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry—a massive supply base stacked with food, forage, and ammunition to sustain Grant’s advance. Van Dorn’s troopers had a field day burning what could not be carried off, and taking 1,500 prisoners.¹⁰⁴ Moving north from Holly Springs, Van Dorn tore up several sections of the Memphis & Charleston Railroad before returning safely to Grenada the following week. Grant, who believed the garrison at Holly Springs had been more than adequate to defend the base, was mortified. His plans to move overland against Vicksburg had gone up in smoke. Pemberton was pulling back from the Yalobusha, but Grant saw no possibility of pursuing him. Van Dorn had destroyed the supplies he had stockpiled, and Forrest had made it impossible for him to bring up more. Grant called off his overland move against Vicksburg and ordered a withdrawal, sending his main body back to Grand Junction, Tennessee. Deprived of resupply, the army lived off the countryside. “I was amazed at the quantity of supplies the country afforded,” Grant said later. “We could have subsisted off the country for two months instead of two weeks. . . . This taught me a lesson.”¹⁰⁵ Grant would apply that lesson with spectacular results shortly, but just now his retreat left Sherman’s river expedition against Vicksburg dangerously exposed.

When Grant pulled back, Sherman was already downriver. He planned to arrive at Vicksburg by Christmas and quickly overrun what he thought would be the city’s lightly manned defenses.¹⁰⁶ That was based on the assumption that Grant would keep the bulk of Pemberton’s army pinned on the Yalobusha. Thanks to Van Dorn and Forrest, however, the telegraph lines were down and Sherman was unaware Grant had withdrawn. As a result, the river expedition ran into more than they bargained for. Pemberton rushed troops from Grenada to man the battlements at Vicksburg, and when Sherman’s troops went ashore the Confederates were ready and waiting. On the morning of December 29 Sherman launched four divisions in a frontal assault against rebel defenses on the Chickasaw Bluffs north of the city and the carnage was severe. Within two hours Sherman lost 1,800 men. At noon he called it quits. “Our loss has been heavy,” he wrote later, “and we accomplished nothing.”¹⁰⁷ The second prong of Grant’s winter offensive against Vicksburg had been repulsed. Sherman reembarked his task force on the boats that had brought them and headed back upriver.

December 1862 was the low point of Grant’s Civil War career. In addition to his own and Sherman’s aborted attempts to take Vicksburg, on December 17 Grant issued an order that would stain his reputation forever. In one of the most blatant examples of state-sponsored anti-Semitism in American history, Grant expelled all members of the Jewish faith from the Department of the Tennessee.¹⁰⁸ The order was rooted in the illicit cotton trade along the Mississippi, which Grant had been unsuccessful in stamping out. Cut off from foreign markets by the Union blockade, Southern producers found ready purchasers for their cotton in the legion of Yankee speculators who followed the army. Often these speculators worked surreptitiously with Grant’s troops, creating a serious disciplinary problem. As a War Department agent reported to Washington, “Every colonel, captain, or quartermaster is in secret partnership with some operator in cotton; every soldier dreams of adding a bale of cotton to his monthly pay.”¹⁰⁹ To complicate matters further, Grant received contradictory instructions as to how to handle the cotton trade. The Treasury Department wanted to restore business with occupied areas to win back the inhabitants’ loyalty. But the War Department worried that Southern profits from cotton sales might reach Confederate hands and prolong the war. As a compromise, trade was permitted so long as the traders held permits, did not cross into enemy territory, and did not trade in gold.¹¹⁰ Grant found the rules impossible to enforce, and so as he moved south he attempted to prevent cotton traders from moving with the army.

Although most of the traders were not Jewish, several of the most visible were.¹¹¹ Grant gave vent to his displeasure November 9, instructing General Hurlbut to refuse all permits to cotton merchants who sought to go south of Jackson, Tennessee. “The Israelites especially should be kept out.”¹¹² The next day he told Colonel Joseph D. Webster, who commanded the railroads: “Give orders to all the conductors on the road that no Jews are to be permitted to travel on the railroad south from any point. They may go north and be encouraged in it; but they are such an intolerable nuisance that the department must be purged of them.”¹¹³ Still frustrated by his inability to control the illicit trade, Grant wrote Sherman that “in consequence of the total disregard and evasion of orders by the Jews my policy is to exclude them so far as practicable from the Department.”¹¹⁴ On December 17 he made the policy official. General Orders No. 11, published for the guidance of the whole department, read as follows:

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 by Post Commanders, they will see that all of this class of people are furnished with passes and required to leave, and anyone remaining after such notification, will be arrested and held in confinement until an opportunity occurs of sending them out as prisoners unless furnished with permits from these headquarters.¹¹⁵

Apologists for Grant have suggested that the order was issued by staff officers without Grant’s knowledge;¹¹⁶ that it was issued pursuant to instructions from Washington;¹¹⁷ or that the word “Jew” was used in a shorthand way of describing anyone considered shrewd, acquisitive, aggressive, and possibly dishonest.¹¹⁸

None of this is true. Grant’s adjutant, Colonel John Rawlins, argued strenuously against the order. The record suggests that it was dictated personally by Grant and issued over Rawlins’s protest. “They can countermand this from Washington if they like,” Grant is reported to have said.¹¹⁹ There is also no record in the extensive files of the War Department of any instructions authorizing or encouraging General Orders No. 11.¹²⁰ It is conceivable that Grant may have been using the terms “Jew” and “cotton trader” interchangeably, but that too is unlikely. Grant understood nuanced distinctions and he used the English language as precisely as any military commander before or since. More important, however, the sentiment expressed in General Orders No. 11 is consistent with a streak of nativism that ran deep in Grant.¹²¹ Xenophobia and anti-Semitism were prevalent throughout the United States in the 1860s, particularly in the army, and Grant shared the prevailing prejudices.¹²²

In any case, General Orders No. 11 had a short life. Newspapers throughout the country were quick in their condemnation. The New York Times, which normally supported Grant, led the way. “It is a humiliating reflection,” said the Times, “that after the progress of liberal ideas even in the most despotic countries has restored the Jews to civil and social rights . . . it remained for the freest Government on earth to witness a momentary revival of the spirit of the medieval age.”¹²³ Lincoln, when informed of the order, insisted upon its immediate revocation.^VII Halleck notified Grant of the president’s decision, but he did so with respect bordering on deference: “A paper purporting to be General Orders No. 11, issued by you December 17, has been presented here. By its terms, it expels all Jews from your department. If such an order has been issued, it will be immediately revoked.”¹²⁴ Whether Halleck was handling Grant with kid gloves, or whether he may have agreed with the order is unclear. Later he wrote Grant a sympathetic letter giving him the benefit of the doubt. “The President,” said Halleck, “has no objection to your expelling traders and Jew pedlars, which I suppose was the object of your order, but [because] it prescribed an entire class, some of whom are fighting in our ranks, the President deemed it necessary to revoke it.”¹²⁵ Reaction in Congress divided along party lines. Democratic efforts to censure Grant failed by the narrowest of margins in the House, 53–56, but by a lopsided 7–30 in the Republican-dominated Senate.¹²⁶ Grant revoked the order on January 6, 1863, but he mustered little grace in doing so and made it clear that he was complying with instructions from Washington.¹²⁷

To add to Grant’s problems in the winter of 1862, McClernand returned from his recruiting expedition, went downriver, and assumed command of Sherman’s force steaming back from Vicksburg. McClernand was still under the impression that he had been empowered by the president to command an independent Mississippi River offensive. He restyled Sherman’s four-division task force the Army of the Mississippi, designated Sherman to be one of two corps commanders, and undertook to “reinspire” the troops by leading them against the small Confederate garrison at Arkansas Post, some forty miles up the Arkansas River. “General McClernand has fallen back to White River, and gone on a wild-goose chase to the Post of Arkansas,” Grant wired Halleck on January 11.¹²⁸ “I am ready to reinforce, but must await further information before I know what to do.” Halleck replied promptly. “You are hereby authorized to relieve General McClernand from command of the expedition against Vicksburg, giving it to the next in rank or taking it yourself.”¹²⁹

For Grant, Halleck’s telegram was a godsend. Because of the close relationship between Lincoln and McClernand, and because McClernand carried a personal letter of authorization from the president, Grant had been uncertain how to handle him. Halleck’s message cleared the air. The following day Grant informed McPherson, whose corps was back in Tennessee after the retreat from the Yalobusha, that he intended to take command of the expedition down the river in person.¹³⁰ The assault on Vicksburg would consist of a single thrust. The overland drive down the Mississippi Central would be abandoned. In this instance personnel considerations dictated Union strategy. Grant doubted McClernand’s ability and distrusted his ambition. So did Sherman and Admiral Porter.¹³¹ Grant said later that he “would have been glad to have put Sherman in command of an independent drive down the Mississippi,” but since he was junior to McClernand, there was no alternative but to assume command himself.¹³²

Having made his decision, Grant hastened to Young’s Point, Louisiana, where the river force was assembled. On January 30, 1863, he issued General Orders No. 13 assuming command. As he would do throughout the war, Grant said department headquarters “will hereafter be with the expedition.”¹³³ The commanding general would be in the field. More important, McClernand had been superseded. Obviously stunned by Grant’s presence, he filed an immediate reclama, recounting how he had been invested “by special order of the President . . . with the command of all forces operating on the Mississippi river.” McClernand demanded the question be referred to Washington immediately, “and one or the other, or both of us, relieved. One thing is certain, two generals cannot command this army”¹³⁴

Grant’s reply was blunt. He told McClernand that he was taking direct command of the expedition against Vicksburg, “which necessarily limits your command to the 13th Army Corps.” Grant said he was not aware of any order from Washington “to prevent my taking immediate command in the field.” To the contrary, Grant said he had received specific instructions from Halleck to do so if he believed it necessary.¹³⁵ Once again McClernand insisted the issue be referred to Lincoln,¹³⁶ and Grant willingly complied. In forwarding McClernand’s complaint to Washington, he told Halleck that if the president ruled in McClernand’s favor, “I will cheerfully submit . . . and give a hearty support.”¹³⁷ Grant assumed, however, that he had Lincoln’s backing and he was not disappointed. If given the choice between supporting his fellow townsman or the one Union general who would fight, the president clearly preferred the latter. “Don’t engage in an open war” with the army high command, Lincoln cautioned McClernand. The president said he already had “too many FAMILY controversies” to enter another. McClernand was told to devote his attention to winning the war in whatever position he might be assigned by the War Department.¹³⁸

After displacing McClernand, Grant confronted the task of taking Vicksburg. Union morale was sagging, anti-war Democrats had gained in the midterm elections, and without a quick victory the days of the Lincoln administration appeared numbered. Recruiting had already dried up, the army depended on the draft for replacements, and desertions were approaching an all-time high.¹³⁹ Grant’s headquarters at Young’s Point was less than ten miles in a direct line from Vicksburg. Yet as he surveyed the swampy morass that led to the Chickasaw Bluffs, much of which would be underwater for months to come, he recognized that he had abandoned the high ground along the Mississippi Central too quickly. He could not, however, retrace his steps to the Yalobusha. Grant said that to move back from Vicksburg and start over “would be interpreted as a defeat. There was nothing left to be done but go forward.”¹⁴⁰ Since Sherman had already proved that a head-on attack up the face of the bluffs could not succeed, the question for Grant was how to get beyond Vicksburg and assault the rebel position from the high ground south and east of the city.

For the next ten weeks Grant busied himself with a variety of halfbaked schemes to divert the Mississippi from its main channel and provide an alternate water route to flank Vicksburg’s defenses. In his Memoirs, Grant called the measures a series of experiments designed to consume time, divert the attention of the enemy, keep the troops busy until the ground hardened in spring, and convince the Northern public that the army was moving forward.¹⁴¹ Grant said he “never felt great confidence” that any of the experiments would succeed, but he had always been ready “to take advantage of them if they did.” First, Sherman’s corps was set to digging a canal across the base of a tongue of land in front of Vicksburg to allow union vessels to move south of the city without coming under fire from Confederate artillery on the bluffs. Lincoln, who was familiar with the Mississippi from his youth, was enthusiastic about the project, but it was hopeless from the beginning. “If the river rises 8 feet more we will have to take to the trees,” said Sherman, and it soon did just that.¹⁴² A second project involved creating a ship channel from Lake Providence, fifty miles above Vicksburg, through a series of Louisiana swamps and bayous to the Black River, the Red River, and back to the Mississippi 150 miles below Vicksburg. McPherson’s corps was harnessed to the task, but the project was too ambitious and Grant lacked enough shallow-draft boats to move his army even if a channel had been reamed through. “I let the work go on,” Grant wrote, “believing employment was better than idleness for the men.”¹⁴³

Grant’s third experiment involved blowing the levee at Yazoo Pass, Mississippi, 200 miles north of Vicksburg. The resulting flood, it was anticipated, would raise the level of delta rivers sufficiently to allow gunboats and transports to proceed down the Tallahatchie to the Yazoo and hit Vicksburg from behind. The rivers indeed flooded, and in early March a naval flotilla headed down the Tallahatchie into the heart of rebel territory. The Confederates blocked the channel with a sunken steamer, constructed a hasty fort near Greenwood, Mississippi, and entrusted the defense of the fort to Brigadier General Lloyd Tilghman, who was determined to restore his reputation, having surrendered Fort Henry to Grant the year before. Outnumbered and outgunned, Tilghman handled his artillery masterfully. The Union ironclads backed off, the flotilla commander collapsed with a nervous breakdown, and another “experiment” went for naught.

Grant’s fourth effort to turn the Confederate position flowed literally from the third. The cut in the levee at Yazoo Pass had flooded the delta to such an extent that Admiral Porter believed he could navigate the swamps and bayous around Vicksburg with his ironclads and convey Grant’s troops inland unopposed. After cruising the area with Porter, Grant ordered Sherman to embark a division for what became known as the Steel Bayou expedition. It too failed miserably. Porter found his iron monsters surrounded by rebel riflemen in the narrow bayous, sent an urgent message to Sherman for help, and quickly called off the exercise. “I never knew how helpless an ironclad could be steaming around through the woods without an army to back it up,” said Porter.¹⁴⁴

It was now late March and Grant was no closer to taking Vicksburg than when he assumed command in January. Casting about for another ploy, he put McClernand’s corps to digging a second canal, departing from the Mississippi at Duckport, just above Young’s Point. When completed, the cut would give light-draft vessels access to Roundabout Bayou, which flowed back into the Mississippi at New Carthage, thirty-five miles downstream from Vicksburg. The project depended on continued high water, whereupon the Mississippi, perverse to the ways of man, began to fall, leaving Grant with another failed experiment.

Counting his own and Sherman’s unsuccessful efforts to take Vicksburg in December, Grant had made seven attempts to dislodge Pemberton, who was now more firmly entrenched than ever. To add to Grant’s winter misery, he lost his teeth in mid-February and had to go without dentures for almost a month. Grant wrote Julia that contrary to his usual habit he had taken his teeth out when he went to bed, put them in a washbasin and covered them with water. “The servant who attends my stateroom [on Grant’s headquarters vessel, the Magnolia] came in about daylight and finding water in the basin threw it out into the river teeth and all.”¹⁴⁵

Public opinion also turned against Grant, abetted by grumbling from the occasional officer with too much time on his hands. Brigadier General Cadwallader Washburn, an officer in McPherson’s corps, wrote to his brother Elihu,^VIII who was Grant’s chief congressional supporter, that the Vicksburg campaign was being badly managed. “All Grant’s schemes have failed. He is frittering away time and strength to no purpose. The truth must be told even if it hurts. You cannot make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.”¹⁴⁶ The perennially gloomy New York World remarked archly that “we have the best of reasons for believing that neither the generals in command of our land forces there nor their superiors at Washington expect or hope to take Vicksburg this year.”¹⁴⁷ Joseph Medill, editor of the Chicago Tribune, thought an armistice was inevitable. “If Vicksburg cannot be conquered, the South has won the war.”¹⁴⁸ Marat Halstead, editor of the Cincinnati Commercial, expressed his concern to an Ohio friend, Salmon P. Chase, secretary of the treasury. Grant, wrote Halstead, was “a jackass in the original package. He is a poor drunken imbecile. He is a poor stick sober, and he is most of the time more than half drunk, and much of the time idiotically drunk.”¹⁴⁹ Chase passed the letter to Lincoln, noting that “Reports concerning General Grant similar to the statements made by Mr. Halstead are too common to be safely or even prudently disregarded.” The president was unimpressed. “I think Grant has hardly a friend left, except myself,” said Lincoln. “What I want, and what the people want, is generals who will fight battles and win victories. Grant has done this and I propose to stand by him.”¹⁵⁰

Chaplain John Eaton, who supervised the resettlement of freed slaves for Grant, saw Lincoln a short time later. Eaton reported that the president told him that a delegation of congressmen had come to the White House recently to urge that Grant be relieved because he drank too much. According to Eaton, Lincoln said: “I then began to ask them if they knew what he drank, what brand of whiskey he used, telling them seriously that I wished they could find out. They conferred with each other and concluded they could not tell what brand he used. I urged them to ascertain and let me know, for if it made fighting generals like Grant, I should like to get some of it for distribution.”¹⁵¹

Did Grant drink? Had he revisited old habits? The evidence is overwhelming that during the Vicksburg campaign he occasionally fell off the wagon.¹⁵² Grant was a binge drinker. In a clinical sense, he may have been an alcoholic.¹⁵³ He could go for months without a drink, but once he started it was difficult for him to stop. Assistant Secretary of War Charles Dana, who was sent by Stanton to keep an eye on Grant, said “General Grant’s seasons of intoxication were not only infrequent, occurring once in three or four months, but he always chose a time when the gratification of his appetite for drink would not interfere with any important movement that had to be directed or attended to by him.” Grant’s favorite device was to commandeer a steamer for an overnight excursion. On one such occasion Dana reports Grant “getting as stupidly drunk as the immortal nature of man would allow; but the next day he came out fresh as a rose, without any trace or indication of the spree he had passed through.”¹⁵⁴

For the most part Grant remained sober, protected from alcohol by his adjutant, Colonel John Rawlins, and especially by Julia. “If she is with him all will be well and I can be spared,” said Rawlins.¹⁵⁵ During the Civil War, senior officers were often accompanied by their wives during the lulls between battles, and Julia had joined Grant briefly after Belmont. She returned again when he was in Oxford and Holly Springs, but was not present during the dreary winter months before Vicksburg. As a result, Rawlins had his hands full. Rawlins’s father was an alcoholic, and he saw in Grant another potential victim whom he must save. He did not pull his punches. Writing to Grant after one debauch, Rawlins said: “The great solicitude I feel for the safety of this army leads me to mention what I had hoped never again to do—the subject of your drinking. . . . I have heard that Dr. McMillan, at General Sherman’s a few days ago, induced you . . . to take a glass of wine, and today, I found a case of wine in front of your tent, and tonight, when you should have been in bed, I find you where the wine bottle has just been emptied, in company of those who drink and urge you to do likewise. [The] lack of your usual promptness of decision and clearness in expressing yourself in writing tend to confirm my suspicions.” Rawlins told Grant that unless he ceased drinking immediately, “no matter by whom asked or under what circumstances, let my immediate relief from duty in this department be the result.”¹⁵⁶ Rawlins remained with Grant throughout the war, and followed him to Washington, where he served faithfully until his death from tuberculosis in 1869. Grant periodically backslid and went on a bender, but thanks to Rawlins’s vigilance such episodes were few and far between. As a journalist who covered Grant’s campaigns wrote: “It can be safely asserted that no officer or civilian ever saw any open drinking at General Grant’s headquarters from Cairo to Appomattox. This was wholly and solely the result of Rawlins’ uncompromising attitude, and Grant’s acquiescence in what he knew to be for his own good.”¹⁵⁷

Stymied in the shadow of Vicksburg, Grant had critics aplenty although the troops he commanded were not among them. A reporter for the New York World wrote that despite the repeated setbacks, “General Grant still retains his hold upon the affections of his men.” They admire “his energy and disposition to do something.” There are “no Napoleonic displays, no ostentation, no speed, no superfluous flummery.”¹⁵⁸ An Illinois private put it best when he said the army trusted Grant. “Everything that Grant directs is right. His soldiers believe in him. In our private talk among ourselves I have never heard a single soldier speak in doubt of Grant.”¹⁵⁹ Above all, the troops appreciated Grant’s unassuming manner. Most generals went about attended by a retinue of immaculately tailored staff officers. Grant usually rode alone, except for an orderly or two to carry messages if the need arose. Another soldier said the men looked on Grant “as a friendly partner, not an arbitrary commander.” Instead of cheering as he rode by, they would “greet him as they would address one of their neighbors at home. ‘Good morning, General,’ ‘Pleasant day, General’. . . . There was no nonsense, no sentiment; only a plain businessman of the republic, there for the one single purpose of getting that command over the river in the shortest time possible.”¹⁶⁰

A doctor on McPherson’s staff wrote that Grant was “plain as an old shoe,” and said it was hard to make new recruits believe that this man in a common soldier’s blouse with old cavalry pants stuffed in muddy boots was really the commanding general.¹⁶¹ Grant’s style reflected conscious choice, not lassitude. Sherman commented on his casual intensity. Grant, he said, was a man who let nothing slip by. “He remembered the most minute details and watched every point.”¹⁶² An enlisted man noted that Grant knew every regiment “and in fact every cannon. He will ride along the long line of the army, apparently an indifferent observer, yet he sees and notices everything.”¹⁶³ A veteran of the Mexican War, had one been present, would have recognized Zachary Taylor’s mannerisms immediately. Grant even took to wearing a Tayloresque linen duster and a battered civilian hat over his uniform.¹⁶⁴ And like Old Zack, his conversation with aides and associates revolved around horses and farming rather than the business at hand.¹⁶⁵

Charles Dana’s capsule sketch of Grant captures the essence of the little man from Galena who moved so effortlessly among his troops. Grant, he wrote, was “the most modest, the most disinterested and the most honest man” he ever knew. He had a temperament “nothing could disturb and a judgment that was judicial in its comprehensiveness and wisdom. Not an original or brilliant man, but sincere, thoughtful, deep and gifted with a courage that never faltered. When the time came to risk all, he went in like a simple-hearted, unaffected, unpretending hero, whom no ill omens could deject and no triumph unduly exalt.”¹⁶⁶

Grant’s moral courage—his willingness to choose a path from which there could be no return—set him apart from most commanders. Lee, of course, shared this attribute, and both men were uniquely willing to take full responsibility for their actions. Writing years later, Grant explained his attitude toward command. With wry modesty he allowed as how he would have given anything to command a brigade of cavalry in the Army of the Potomac. But the president chose the nation’s commanders, and Grant believed that one served where he was assigned, “without application or the use of influence to change his position.” Having been selected to command the Army of the Tennessee, Grant said his responsibility ended with doing the best he knew how:

If I had sought the place, or obtained it through personal or political influence, my belief is that I would have feared to undertake any plan of my own conception, and would probably have awaited direct orders from my distant superiors. Persons obtaining important commands by application or political influence are apt to keep a written record of complaints and predictions of defeat, which are shown in case of disaster. Somebody must be responsible for their failures.¹⁶⁷

Paradoxically, with the press and the public demanding action, Grant’s relations with Halleck improved. Grant was stalled at Vicksburg but not for lack of trying. The general in chief, sweating the war from Washington, found Grant to be the one general who could be relied on to take the fight to the enemy. Ambrose Burnside, who had succeeded McClellan, vacillated at Fredricksburg in December and suffered a resounding defeat. He was replaced by “Fighting Joe” Hooker, who, despite his sobriquet, proved equally hesitant on the battlefield. In Tennessee, Rosecrans turned out to be as obstinate as Buell, and seemed more concerned with his date of rank than moving against Bragg or Edmund Kirby Smith.¹⁶⁸ Grant was the exception. The McClernand charade had unquestionably brought Halleck and Grant closer together, and their correspondence became so cordial that one might have assumed they were the best of friends. “The eyes and hopes of the whole country are now directed to your army,” Halleck wrote on March 20. “In my opinion the opening of the Mississippi River will be to us of more advantage than the capture of forty Richmonds. We shall omit nothing which we can do to assist you.”¹⁶⁹

Grant needed no prodding. On April 1, accompanied by Admiral Porter and Sherman he steamed abreast of the Vicksburg bluffs on a waterborne reconnaissance. The river was still high, there was little ground on which the troops could land, and the Confederate emplacements high above looked more imposing than ever. Grant told Porter an attack on the bluffs would be immensely costly and would likely fail.¹⁷⁰ Sherman concurred. The following day Grant wired Halleck that the Confederate position was impregnable.¹⁷¹ It could not be turned from upriver, so he proposed to attack it from below.

Grant’s decision to move south of the Confederate citadel, cut himself off from his supply base at Memphis, march east into Mississippi toward Jackson, turn 180 degrees and strike Vicksburg from the side on which it was vulnerable, ranks as one of the great strategic gambits in modern warfare. Unlike his desperate midwinter experiments to get behind Vicksburg, the plan was neither harebrained nor devised on the spur of the moment. As early as January 18 Grant advised Halleck he thought “our troops must get below the city to be effective.”¹⁷² As January dragged into February, and February into March, and as one experiment after another failed, Grant brooded over getting his army downstream past the sixteen mile gauntlet of rebel artillery on the bluffs. Night after night he sat alone at a mahogany table in what had been the ladies’ salon of the Magnolia, poring over charts and maps and keeping his own counsel. Gradually through the haze of cigar smoke the plan emerged, and during the final week of March Grant stayed up late each evening applying the final brush strokes. Once, in the early morning hours, McPherson ventured into the smoke-filled room and invited Grant to join him for a drink. “Throw this burden off your mind,” urged McPherson. Grant said whiskey wouldn’t help. What he really wanted was to be left alone—“and a dozen more cigars.”¹⁷³

Grant’s plan was breathtakingly simple but fraught with peril at every step. McClernand’s corps, still at work on the Duckworth canal, was ordered to stop digging and to repair the road that paralleled the ditch to New Carthage. The ground was mushy, four bridges were out, the levee was broken in several places, and the bayou currents ran rapid with floodwaters. Whether the route could be made serviceable was doubtful, yet McClernand’s men, buoyed by the prospect of seeing action, rose to the occasion. One week after getting underway, the first division of Grant’s army, including its artillery, arrived at New Carthage without the loss of a single man or gun.

Convinced now that the army could move down the west bank, Grant informed Halleck of his plan on April 4. The army would assemble near New Carthage, cross the mile-wide Mississippi with the aid of Porter’s gunboats, move against the Confederate garrison downriver at Grand Gulf, then on to Vicksburg. “This is the only move I now see as practicable, and hope it will meet your approval. I will keep my army together and see to it that I am not cut off from my supplies or beat in any other way than a fair fight.”¹⁷⁴ What Grant did not say was that all of his generals except McClernand thought the plan too risky. Admiral Porter was equally skeptical, and it was far from clear that the gunboats and steamers essential to the river crossing could pass safely downstream beneath Vicksburg’s heavy guns.

As soon as he learned of the move, Sherman was so concerned that he called on Grant to register his objections. “I was seated on the piazza engaged in conversation with my staff when Sherman came up,” wrote Grant. “After a few moments’ conversation he said that he would like to see me alone. We passed into the house and shut the door after us. Sherman then expressed his alarm . . . saying that I was putting myself in a position which an enemy would be glad to maneuver a year to get me in. I was going into the enemy’s country, with a large river behind me and the enemy holding points strongly fortified above and below. He said that it was an axiom in war that when any great body of troops moved against an enemy they should do so from a base of supplies, which they would guard as they would the apple of the eye.” Sherman told Grant the proper military thing to do was to return to Memphis, establish a base, and then retrace their steps to Grenada.¹⁷⁵ Grant heard Sherman out. Then he told him that he had no intention of changing his plans. The Union needed a victory, so they had to go forward. “You will be ready to move at ten o’clock tomorrow morning.”¹⁷⁶ Sherman loyally ordered his corps forward, but not before putting his views in writing and once again asking Grant to reconsider.¹⁷⁷ Grant read the letter but did not reply. Insofar as he was concerned, the die was cast. Later Grant wrote that Sherman “gave the same energy to make the campaign a success that he would have done if it had been ordered by himself. . . . I did not regard either the conversation between us or the letter as protests, but simply friendly advice which the relations between us fully justified.”¹⁷⁸

Halleck, grateful that Grant was moving forward, evidently did not share Sherman’s concern. After advising Grant to live off the land as much as possible and to give “but little attention to the occupation of the country,” Halleck restated his trust in the commander of the Army of the Tennessee. “I am confident you will do everything possible to open the Mississippi river. In my opinion this is the most important operation of the war, and nothing must be neglected to ensure success.”¹⁷⁹ Halleck did not explicitly approve or disapprove of Grant’s plan. It was Grant’s call, and the campaign was his to win or to lose.

On the moonless night of April 16, Admiral Porter commenced his hazardous descent downriver. With the flagship Benton leading the way, the Union flotilla of seven ironclads and three transports slipped anchor and drifted silently with the current toward the imposing batteries of the latest “Gibraltar of the West.” Porter had banked his furnaces hoping the vessels could slip past unnoticed, and for a while it looked as though the ruse would succeed. Suddenly all hell broke loose. From the opposite bank rebel lookouts lit massive bonfires of tar barrels and pine logs, illuminating the sky as though it were high noon and silhouetting the fleet for artillerymen on the bluff. The guns of Vicksburg opened a devastating barrage, which Porter’s ironclads answered. So ferocious was the firing that people sixty miles away heard the cannonade.¹⁸⁰ It required one and a half hours for the ships to pass, and the Confederate big guns spat shot and shell as rapidly as their crews could serve them. All told, rebel gunners fired 525 rounds, scored sixty-eight hits, but sank only one of the transports and none of the seven gunboats. Grant, who witnessed the passage of the fleet from the deck of the Magnolia, called the sight “magnificent, but terrible.”¹⁸¹ Pemberton, who five days earlier had informed Richmond triumphantly that “most of Grant’s forces are with drawing to Memphis,”¹⁸² failed to recognize what was in store. He acknowledged that Porter’s presence downstream blocked Confederate navigation of the lower Mississippi, but did not link passage of the fleet to the possibility that Grant might cross the river below Vicksburg.¹⁸³ The Confederate high command in Richmond also missed the point. When asked for his opinion, Robert E. Lee assured Jefferson Davis that the Union “can derive no material benefit” from Porter’s run, and predicted that the arrival of additional artillery in Vicksburg would prevent any repeat performance.¹⁸⁴

Encouraged by the passage of Porter’s flotilla, Grant prepared to make another run of the Vicksburg gauntlet, this time with additional transports and barges needed for the river crossing. On April 22 the vessels got underway, drifting at night with the current. This was an all-army show. When the civilian crews balked at taking the unarmed ships under the guns on the bluff, they were replaced by infantry volunteers from Black Jack Logan’s division: men who had served with Grant since Belmont. “I want no faltering,” Logan told his troops before embarking. “If any man leaves his post, I want him shot on the spot.”¹⁸⁵

Once again luck was on Grant’s side. The Confederate batteries fired 391 rounds that night, but managed to sink only one vessel and disable a few barges. The next day Grant moved his headquarters downriver to New Carthage. By the end of the month he had two of his three corps thirty miles south of Vicksburg and had assembled a motley fleet of vessels to assist the crossing. “If I do not underestimate the enemy,” he wired Halleck, “my force is abundant with a foothold once obtained to do the work.”¹⁸⁶ Porter was less confident. After a tugboat reconnaissance of the river with Grant, he informed Navy Secretary Gideon Welles that he saw “no certainty of a successful landing of our army on the Mississippi side.”¹⁸⁷

Grant planned to force a crossing at Grand Gulf, storm the Confederate fortress located there, and overrun the defenders. Porter, who believed an assault crossing would prove too costly, preferred to run past the rebel works at Grand Gulf and cross the army below.¹⁸⁸ When Grant insisted, Porter dutifully responded. At 8 A.M. on April 29 his squadron of gunboats launched a preparatory bombardment. The entrenched Confederate artillery replied with ferocious counterfire. Toe-to-toe, the gunners slugged it out for five hours. Losses aboard the fleet were staggering. Benton was struck forty-seven times and its sister ship, the Tuscumbia, eighty-one. Nevertheless, Federal firepower proved overwhelming. By 1 P.M. Porter’s tubes had fired 1,729 rounds (almost twice what Japanese battleships launched against Guadalcanal in 1942),¹⁸⁹ and the Confederate guns fell silent. Porter told Grant it was safe to cross. Now it was Grant’s turn to have second thoughts. Southern firepower had been impressive, and he worried that there might be additional batteries that had not been silenced. These could wreak havoc upon his infantry, exposed during the crossing on unarmored transports and open barges. Porter’s original advice looked sound. Demonstrating the flexibility that had become his hallmark, Grant decided not to force a crossing at Grand Gulf. Instead, he ordered the troops to march downstream to the vicinity of Port Gibson, where they could embark safely out of range of any lingering rebel artillery. “A landing will be effected [on] the east bank of the river tomorrow,” Grant wrote Halleck on April 29. “I feel that the battle is now more than half won.”¹⁹⁰

As the troops slogged southward, Grant took up a position at the near end of a narrow bridge they must cross. Sitting his horse at roadside, he encouraged the men to hurry over. “Push right along,” he gently urged the marchers, speaking in a simple conversational tone. The soldiers’ spirits were lifted by Grant’s presence, but an officer noted that their only response was to “hurry over.” They did not cheer as they passed; they merely did as Grant directed. “It was as if, in the course of the long winter of repeated failure, they had caught his quality of quiet confidence.”¹⁹¹

Shortly after dawn on April 30, the first division of McClernand’s corps cast off from the Louisiana shore. The greatest amphibious operation in American history to date was underway. Like Caesar’s descent on Britain, Grant was risking the future of his army on the crossing, and Porter mobilized his fleet to assist. Troops crammed aboard gunboats, river steamers, coal barges, and the occasional bayou flatboat. Even the Benton, Porter’s flagship, served as a ferry. The mass of shipping allowed Grant to cross a division at a time, and, fortuitously, the landing was unopposed. By dusk McClernand’s corps had completed the mile-wide crossing, as had a division of McPherson’s corps. Grant had 23,000 men across the river and was marching on Port Gibson. In his Memoirs he wrote that he felt “a degree of relief scarcely ever equalled since. . . . I was now in the enemy’s country, with a vast river and the stronghold of Vicksburg between me and my base of supplies. But I was on dry ground on the same side of the river with the enemy. All the campaigns, labors, hardships and exposures . . . that had been made and endured were for the accomplishment of this one object.”¹⁹²

To keep Pemberton off balance, and to prevent him from disrupting the crossing, Grant had earlier suggested to Sherman that he launch a diversionary attack against the bluffs at Vicksburg. “I am loath to order it,” said Grant, because “it would be hard to make our troops understand . . . and our people at home would characterize it as a repulse.”¹⁹³ Sherman still harbored doubts about Grant’s strategy, but he had no qualms about complying with his commander’s request.^IX “You are engaged in a hazardous enterprize,” he wrote Grant, “and for good reason wish to divert attention. That is sufficient to me and it shall be done.”¹⁹⁴

On April 30, as McClernand’s troops began their crossing, a task force under Sherman’s command entered the Yazoo River steaming upstream toward the Chickasaw Bluffs and Vicksburg’s front door. Intent on making the greatest show of strength, Sherman spread his troops across the decks of the transports with orders for “every man to look as numerous as possible.”¹⁹⁵ The following morning the troops went ashore near the site of their December repulse. Under Sherman’s watchful eye they marched and countermarched as if Grant’s entire army would soon follow. Meanwhile, the remnants of Porter’s squadron (several woodclad gunboats that did not attempt to run the Vicksburg gauntlet) shelled the bluffs with calculated abandon. At noon Sherman wrote Grant all was well. “Our diversion has been a perfect success, great activity seen in Vicksburg, and troops pushing this way.” Sherman said he would reopen his cannonade at 3 P.M. and prolong the effort until after dark. Then he would hurry south.¹⁹⁶

Another diversion, designed to sow confusion in its own right, involved a daring raid by Union cavalry to disrupt Confederate communications in Mississippi. Tired of being victimized by the dashing exploits of Forrest and Van Dorn, Grant sent his cavalry brigade deep into rebel territory to destroy Pemberton’s supply line and divert attention from his own move south. Led by Colonel Benjamin Grierson, a former music teacher who loathed horses, Grant’s troopers rode 600 miles in sixteen days, marauding through central Mississippi. They tore up fifty miles of three different rail lines, burned rolling stock and depots, and lured most of Pemberton’s cavalry plus a full infantry division on a wild-goose chase during the last two weeks of April. Sherman called Grierson’s raid “the most brilliant expedition of the war.”¹⁹⁷ Grant, reporting to Halleck, said “Grierson has knocked the heart out of the State,” which was not far off the mark.¹⁹⁸

Pemberton was flummoxed. For almost five months he had held Grant at bay, and he was cosseted by rosy optimism. On May 1, as McPherson’s corps completed its crossing of the Mississippi and Sherman knocked at Vicksburg’s outer gate, a local newspaper boasted that the city was safer than at any time since the fall of Fort Donelson. “Let any man who questions the ability of General Pemberton only think for a moment on the condition of this department when he arrived. No general has evinced a more sleepless vigilance in the discharge of his duty, or accomplished more solid and gratifying results.”¹⁹⁹ Pemberton was not led astray by his good press. But like any West Point–trained general he had difficulty comprehending what Grant was up to. The idea of uprooting an entire army from its base of supply did not seem credible. Not until May 2 when Grant marched into Port Gibson did Pemberton realize that the Army of the Tennessee had slipped past, crossed the river, and was ensconced on his vulnerable southern flank.

The battle of Port Gibson was sharp but brief. Brigadier General John Bowen, a friend and former neighbor of Grant’s from his hardscrabble days in Missouri, evacuated his entrenchments at Grand Gulf and boldly set out with the 6,000-man garrison, placing himself between the Union army and the beautiful neoclassic village of Port Gibson. Outnumbered four to one, Bowen took up a strong defensive position along two ridgelines and checked Grant for twelve hours until the weight of the Federal advance overwhelmed him. Casualties were about equal: 832 Confederates and 875 Union troops were killed, wounded, or missing. Grant told Halleck that Bowen’s defense “was a very bold one and well carried out. My force however was too heavy.” Grant said the Mississippi countryside would supply abundant beef and forage, but ammunition and other supplies would have to be transported overland down the west bank from Milliken’s Bend. “This is a long and precarious route but I have every confidence in succeeding in doing it.”²⁰⁰

Part of Grant’s confidence rested on Sherman, who was now en route. On the same day he wrote to Halleck, Grant told his most trusted lieutenant to organize a 120-wagon supply train and fill it with rations: “one hundred thousand pounds of bacon, the balance coffee, sugar, salt, and hard bread. For your own use on the march you will draw three days rations and see they last five days. It’s unnecessary for me to remind you of the overwhelming importance of celerity. . . . The enemy is badly beaten and greatly demoralized. The road to Vicksburg is open.”²⁰¹

Grant’s enthusiasm was contagious, but it scarcely reflected the situation. After the clash at Port Gibson, Bowen returned with his force to the powerful defensive works at Grand Gulf. Pemberton, with 26,000 men—almost as many as Grant’s two corps—was poised at Vicksburg; another 10,000 rebel troops were scattered at detachments along the Yazoo; and a hundred miles to the south 12,000 Confederate effectives manned the battlements at Port Hudson. In addition, General Joseph E. Johnston, recovered from his wounds at Seven Pines, was collecting an army in eastern Mississippi and Alabama and heading toward Jackson. Grant was surrounded in enemy territory and his supply line was uncertain. On the other hand, his forces were massed, while the enemy was scattered. Above all, Grant had seized the initiative. Better than almost any general before or since, Grant recognized the value of momentum. His troops were on the move and the rebels had been thrown off balance.

Wasting no time, Grant decided to bypass the garrison at Grand Gulf and head north. His objective was Hankinson’s Ferry, a hamlet six miles away where the main road to Vicksburg crossed the Big Black River, the last natural obstacle between his army and its goal. Grant wanted to establish a bridgehead on the other side of the river before the Confederates could regroup. The term blitzkrieg had yet to be coined, but those were the tactics Grant employed. Within the next two weeks his army would cut loose from its supply line, march 180 miles, change direction twice, fight five major engagements against an enemy whose combined strength exceeded his own, inflict over 7,000 casualties while suffering half of that, and pin Pemberton’s demoralized troops against the ropes at Vicksburg.

The dash to the Big Black was the stuff of which legends are made. McPherson’s 17th Corps was in the lead, Logan’s division in the van. “Push right along. Close up fast,” the troops heard Grant say as they passed him standing in the dust at roadside.²⁰² Nearing the Hankinson’s Ferry bridge, Logan’s lead regiment double-timed ahead, only to find a Confederate demolition team preparing to blow the span. The troops stormed the bridge before the charges could be detonated and gave Grant the toehold on the opposite bank he hoped for.²⁰³

By moving north quickly and crossing the Big Black, Grant turned the Confederate position at Grand Gulf. Bowen had no choice but to withdraw quickly toward Vicksburg or risk being cut off. The evacuation was completed before dawn on May 3. The mighty river fortress fell to Grant without a fight. Porter said later the rebel works were impregnable. “No fleet could have taken them.”²⁰⁴ Grant left it to McPherson to complete the lodgment on the Big Black and rushed to Grand Gulf with a small cavalry escort. Like his army, Grant had been traveling light. His headquarters had been in the saddle, and he rode a borrowed horse at that. He had been without his baggage and mess since leaving New Carthage a week ago. “Consequently, [I] had had no change of underclothing, no meal except such as I could pick up sometimes at other headquarters, and no tent to cover me. The first thing I did was to get a bath, borrow some fresh underclothing from one of the naval officers and get a good meal on the flagship.”²⁰⁵ Grant then turned to his correspondence. He told Halleck the army was in fine spirits and that he would not pause to occupy Grand Gulf “but immediately follow the enemy and . . . not stop until Vicksburg is in our possession.”²⁰⁶ To Julia he wrote that the bloodless capture of Grand Gulf represented an important victory. “Management I think has saved us an immense loss of life and gained all the results of a hard fight. I feel proud of the army at my command. They have marched day and night without tents and with irregular rations without a murmur of complaint.”²⁰⁷