Vicksburg, Mississippi, Morning, July 5, 1863.
General Grant took a long pull on his cigar and blew the smoke out into the morning air. His heart was beating nicely. He had won the battle, wresting Vicksburg from the rebel Confederacy after a bitter siege of forty-eight days. This victory more than redeemed his defeats at Belmont and Shiloh.
Grant stood on the top-floor balcony of the two-story house he had commandeered for use as his headquarters. The house was located on the highest point of the town and two hundred feet above the Mississippi River. From here he had an excellent view down over the cannon-shattered city, and beyond that some quarter-mile distant to Commander Porter's flotilla of ironclad ships, gunboats, and river steamers tied to the wharfs on the Mississippi. Commander Porter had held the water side of the siege line and prevented the Confederate army from escaping or receiving supplies by boat.
The general savored the quietness after weeks of constant cannon fire, and the air was sweet, cleansed of its sulfurous stink of burned gunpowder. Today there were no battle plans to devise. All the deadly forts, the strong redoubts, salients, and bastions of the enemy-fortified city, had been surrendered the day before and were now occupied by his troops. Squads of Union soldiers patrolled the city streets to enforce his Orders of Occupation.
Within but a few minutes after the Confederate forces had surrendered the city, the news had made a quick passage through both armies. Then a strange and moving sight had occurred. Brothers and cousins and uncles and nephews who had minutes before been enemies had come out from the opposing armies and into the narrow no-man's-land between the trenches, and laughingly shouted out greetings to their kin. Every man, happy to be alive and glad to see his relatives were also among the living, had embraced without constraint.
The fourteen thousand enemy soldiers, stripped of their weapons, had been allowed to leave the city. Grant had no way to hold them prisoners, so he had paroled them upon their sworn oath that they would never again take up arms against the Union. Of course, Grant knew that many would immediately break that oath. Left behind were three hundred Confederates too badly wounded to travel. They were being cared for in private residences in the town.
Heavily armed Vicksburg, with its strategic position on the high ground overlooking the Mississippi, had controlled that vital artery of transportation and denied the Union its use. Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy, had called Vicksburg the Gibraltar of the West and the lynchpin that held the South together. General Grant had knocked that lynchpin loose. All the machinery of the factories and mills of the town were salvageable and would be quickly put into operation for the Union. The full length of the river now belonged to the Union, and its soldiers and cannon, all the necessities of war could move freely. Texas, Louisiana, and Kansas had been severed from the Confederacy. Grant knew his victory would substantially shorten the war.
"General, sir, may I speak with you?" Colonel Crowley, the chief surgeon, said from the top of the stairs at the end of the balcony.
"Come up and share the view with me, Colonel Crowley," Grant replied.
"Thank you, sir," Crowley said. He came to the railing of the balcony and looked west across the battered town toward Louisiana on the far side of the river.
"A much more enjoyable view this morning than the ones we've had these past many days," Grant said.
"Yes, sir."
"Victory does that, changes the complexion of everything," Grant added.
"It's sad that men have to fight and kill each other."
"At times fighting is necessary. And fighting means killing." Grant's tone was sharper than he wanted. Still, many Union and Confederate soldiers had been killed in the battle for Vicksburg, and Crowley shouldn't have brought that into the conversation and ruined a glorious day. "What did you want to see me about?" Grant asked, still angry at the chief surgeon.
"Captain Payson has requested to be released from duty and discharged," Crowley replied. The general's tone had stung.
"Discharged? He can't even stand on his feet." The young captain hadn't recovered from the injury he'd received when the Confederates had tried to break out of the siege three weeks earlier. The enemy's attempt to breech the encircling Union lines had been near the hospital, and in the bitter fighting, a pistol bullet had struck the tent where Captain Payson had been operating on the wounded. The bullet had entered his right chest, penetrating his lung, and lodged against the spine.
"He can get better treatment from you and your staff than from any civilian doctor," Grant added.
"He's very ill and wants to go home to Texas."
"Do you think he'll die?"
"The odds are greatly against him, for lung wounds are almost always fatal and his was an especially serious one. He survived the injury and the operation to remove the bullet because he has such a strong will. But the internal bleeding won't stop and he continues to cough up blood. I believe the injured lung has adhered to the side of the chest and simply his breathing keeps the wound open and bleeding."
"What does he say?" Grant wanted the captain's opinion, for he judged him to be one of the best surgeons in the medical corps, even though he was the youngest at twenty-five years.
"We've discussed the wound, and though he hasn't said so, I think he agrees with me. He appears to have accepted the likelihood of dying and now just wants to choose his burial place."
Grant considered most of his officers likeable fellows. He found Captain Payson the most pleasant of all. In the evenings he would assemble his staff and discuss the results of the day's fighting and the plans for the following day's action. After the meeting he would frequently invite Payson to stop by his tent and they would talk, sometimes play chess, and sip a little bourbon. Grant sorely missed the man's company.
"Sounds like foolishness. But let's go and hear the captain's plans," Grant said. He led off with the colonel following him down from the balcony to the ground. Grant's two orderlies, armed with rifles and pistols, came to attention at the foot of the stairs. They were also his bodyguards, for there were thousands of men in the city who wanted him dead. They fell in behind Grant and the colonel and went off along the street with them.