—
BY MAY 18, Grant and his fifty thousand soldiers began to encircle Vicksburg, with thirty-one thousand Confederate soldiers trapped inside. As they rode toward the town, Grant and Sherman were so eager to secure supplies for their men on the Yazoo River that they rode ahead with advance skirmishers, exposing themselves to danger. As Grant conceded, “The bullets of the enemy whistled by thick and fast for a short time.”1 On May 19, the two men inspected Haynes’ Bluff on the high plain north of Vicksburg that Sherman had failed to take in December. As he shifted men east to stem Grant’s onrushing army, Pemberton had yielded this critical high ground. The seizure of this recently contested turf elicited a strong response from Sherman, who had been dubious about Grant’s strategy. “Until this moment I never thought your expedition would be a success,” he admitted to Grant. “I never could see the end clearly; but . . . this is a success if we never take the town.”2 Joseph Johnston had warned Pemberton that if Union troops ever occupied these strategic bluffs, Vicksburg’s days would be numbered. In such an eventuality, Johnston advised Pemberton, he should surrender Vicksburg and save his men, assaying an exodus toward the northeast. Pemberton did not heed this timely advice and paid a terrible price with his troops bottled up inside a death trap.
Sure that Pemberton and his men had been disheartened by recent defeats, Grant ordered an assault for the afternoon of May 19, expecting the rebels to capitulate quickly. As an extra measure, he had Admiral Porter project shells into the lower part of the city. At precisely 2 p.m., Grant unleashed three rounds of artillery fire, the signal for his entire line to storm the bulwark with its earthworks linked by rifle pits. Pemberton had built nine forts with walls twenty feet thick. Somehow the defending soldiers, drawing on new reserves of energy, dealt Grant a bloody setback, inflicting almost a thousand Union casualties while suffering fewer than two hundred of their own. Perhaps no less amazed than Grant himself, Pemberton informed Jefferson Davis, “Our men have considerably recovered their morale.”3
Grant would not be easily discouraged and scheduled a follow-up attack for 10 a.m. on May 22. As always, he believed delay would allow the other side to boost its defenses and absorb reinforcements. Ever since crossing the Mississippi, Grant’s men had been famished for decent victuals and basic comforts, and before this new assault he made sure they were outfitted with plenty of food, tents, and cooking utensils. Nevertheless, he worried what would happen if his men began to wilt in the Mississippi heat: “There was no telling what the casualties might be among Northern troops working and living in trenches, drinking surface water filtered through rich vegetation, under a tropical sun.”4
The night before the second assault, Porter’s gunboats terrorized the town with a blistering barrage of projectiles. Then, at the appointed hour, after Grant’s three chief commanders synchronized their watches (a novelty in wartime), all three corps raced forward with fixed bayonets, scaling ladders and ropes to surmount the sheer Vicksburg parapets. Although some troops neared the works and even planted their flags, they had to ward off Confederate fire and could not puncture the thick shell that shielded Vicksburg. The result was a second bloodbath—one Illinois colonel called it “the most murderous fire I ever saw”—with 3,200 Union soldiers killed, wounded, and missing.5 Grant’s losses approached his total casualties from the time his army had crossed the river until it approached the citadel.
During the battle, Grant’s plan was marred by a misleading report from John A. McClernand, who claimed he had captured two rebel forts and, if given more men, could stage a dramatic breakthrough. This turned out to be an exaggeration. But to avoid political problems, Grant diverted much of McPherson’s corps to support McClernand, even though he couldn’t see that either fort had been taken. The troops he dispatched to McClernand’s aid accounted for a full half of the day’s casualties. One journalist remembered the reaction of Grant and Rawlins to the self-serving deception. “[I] shall never forget the fearful burst of indignation from Rawlins, and the grim glowering look of disappointment and disgust which settled down on Grant’s usually placid countenance, when he was convinced of McClernand’s duplicity, and realized its cost in dead and wounded.”6
Grant wasn’t bashful about blaming McClernand. Two days later he sounded off to Halleck, noting that McClernand’s dispatches “misled me as to the real state of facts and caused much of this loss. He is entirely unfit for the position of Corps Commander both on the march and on the battle field.”7 Grant had heeded McClernand’s call for more troops against his better judgment, and he came to rank the May 22 assault as one of two wartime decisions he most regretted, the other being the later attack at Cold Harbor in Virginia.
After this second assault, with wounded soldiers writhing at the foot of the Mississippi ridge and dead bodies decomposing in fierce sunlight, Grant had to make an excruciating choice. Lest it signal weakness, he was reluctant to submit a request for a truce to inter the dead and care for wounded soldiers who lay helplessly exposed on the battlefield. It was Pemberton on May 25 who suggested a two-and-a-half-hour cease-fire—his soldiers had begun to gag on the stench of corpses—and Grant agreed, doubtless with relief.
Having despaired of taking the fortress by storm, Grant settled down to a classic siege that would choke off every conduit of food, men, and ammunition for those walled up inside. Taking up shovels and spades, his men gouged parallel lines of entrenchment, some just fifty yards from the enemy. Grant trained 220 land guns and 100 naval guns on the beleaguered city. Embedding heavy cannon in embrasures was perilous work as Confederate marksmen zeroed in on Union soldiers. To allay the fear gripping his men, Grant “deliberately clambered on top of the embankment in plain view of the sharpshooters, and directed the men in moving and placing the guns,” observed one journalist. “The bullets zipped through the air by dozens, but strangely none of them touched his person or his clothing. He paid no attention to appeals or expostulations . . . and smoked quietly and serenely all the time, except when he removed his cigar to speak to the men at work. His example shamed the men into making a show of courage.”8
The prospect of Johnston hastening in from the east to lift the siege and rescue Pemberton haunted Grant, who told Sherman that Johnston “was about the only general on that side whom he feared.”9 To counter this threat, Grant assigned Sherman, his most trusted commander, to fend it off. “I never had a moment’s care while Sherman was there,” Grant reminisced. “I don’t think Sherman ever went to bed with his clothes off during that campaign, or allowed a night to pass without visiting his pickets in person.”10 As Grant besieged Vicksburg, Confederate generals knew he was far different from the pushovers they had trounced in the eastern theater. Johnston wrote soberly to the Confederate war secretary James A. Seddon: “Grant’s army is estimated at 60,000 or 80,000 men, and his troops are worth double the number of northeastern troops. We cannot relieve General Pemberton except by defeating Grant, who is believed to be fortifying.”11 Abraham Lincoln’s faith in Grant was being rewarded. “Whether Gen. Grant shall or shall not consummate the capture of Vicksburg,” he wrote on May 26, “his campaign from the beginning of this month up to the twenty second day of it, is one of the most brilliant in the world”—a judgment in which military historians would concur.12
Grant’s competence stood in striking contrast to the bumbling ineptitude of Fighting Joe Hooker, whose nickname had proven a sad misnomer at Chancellorsville, Virginia, in early May. Despite outnumbering Robert E. Lee by two to one, Hooker had been as timidly erratic as McClellan. When he received the telegram about the Chancellorsville debacle, Lincoln paced the room in despair, hands clasped behind his back. This fresh disappointment with an eastern commander was more than his frazzled nerves could bear. “My God! My God!” he wailed. “What will the country say! What will the country say!”13 Edwin Stanton identified this as “the darkest day of the war.”14 The only consolation anyone in Washington could extract from Chancellorsville was that Stonewall Jackson had been wounded by friendly fire and died in its aftermath. By late June, Lincoln cashiered Hooker, telling his cabinet he had exhibited “the same failings that were observed in McClellan after the battle of Antietam—a want of alacrity to obey, and a greedy call for more troops which could not . . . be taken from other points.”15 Major General George Gordon Meade took command of the Army of the Potomac. Amid such disillusionment, Lincoln valued more highly Grant’s distant victories. If occasionally vexed by his secrecy, Lincoln enjoyed the novelty of a general who took the offensive without any official prodding and had battle in his bloodstream.
By late May, Grant was ready to relieve McClernand for his erroneous May 22 dispatch. Sherman had warned him that McClernand was intriguing against him, circulating false stories in the press. Stanton gave Grant full power “to remove any person who by ignorance in action or any cause interferes with or delays his operations.”16 Nevertheless, Grant knew McClernand had the president’s ear and bided his time until Vicksburg was taken, which would enhance his own stature and make it easier to sack his faithless subordinate.
Then McClernand committed a blunder that played straight into Grant’s hands, delivering a self-congratulatory speech to his men that found its way into the press. Not only did McClernand try to steal the glory of the Vicksburg Campaign, he reiterated his bogus claim that the failure to reinforce him on May 22 had stopped him from taking the city. This bombastic, egotistical statement violated War Department rules about publishing such boasts. McClernand hadn’t cleared its publication with Grant, making him insubordinate. Grant now had all the ammunition he needed to banish him. He also fretted that, if he were disabled, his army command would settle on McClernand, who never got along with Sherman and McPherson. He now fired McClernand, with Rawlins heightening the effect by sending Colonel James H. Wilson to his tent at two o’clock in the morning to notify him of the decision. McClernand evidently knew what was coming. Wilson found him seated behind a table, two tapers burning, his sword laid out before him. Grant hadn’t consulted anyone in Washington before handing out this summary justice. Subject to Lincoln’s approval, he replaced McClernand with Major General Edward O. C. Ord. With McClernand exiled, Grant enjoyed undisputed control over the Vicksburg siege, having eliminated all rivals in the west.
The one nemesis Grant could not escape was a whispering campaign about his drinking. The protracted Vicksburg operation had imposed excruciating stress on Grant, who must have been sorely tempted to drink. A remarkable photograph taken of him that spring tells a haunting tale. There is an indescribable look of suffering in his sad, woebegone eyes, showing the terrible toll taken by the previous months. It is less the portrait of a conqueror than of a troubled survivor.
Historians have studied allegations that Grant got roaring drunk at a town called Satartia, northeast of Vicksburg, on an inspection trip up the Yazoo River on June 6, 1863, an episode that has become encrusted with legend. In early June, Grant suffered headaches or a spell of ill health that prompted Dr. Charles McMillan to prescribe wine as a sovereign remedy, not an uncommon practice at the time. This apparently led to more indulgence by Grant. Learning he had strayed from the strict path of sobriety, John Rawlins, his resident conscience, drafted an extraordinary rebuke to him in the wee hours of June 6 that seethed with moralistic outrage:
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 . . . induced you, notwithstanding your pledge to me, to take a glass of wine, and today, when I found a box of wine in front of your tent and proposed to move it, which I did, I was told that you had forbid its being taken away, for you intended to keep it until you entered Vicksburg, that you might have it for your friends; and tonight, when you should, because of the condition of your health if nothing else, have been in bed, I find you where the wine bottle has just been emptied, in company with those who drink and urge you to do likewise, and the lack of your usual promptness of decision and clearness in expressing yourself in writing tended to confirm my suspicions. You have the full control of your appetite and can let drinking alone. Had you not pledged me the sincerity of your honor early last March that you would drink no more during the war, and kept that pledge during your recent campaign, you would not today have stood first in the world’s history as a successful military leader.17
Some historians question whether Rawlins actually delivered this letter, but he himself wrote that he gave it to Grant: “Its admonitions were heeded, and all went well.”18 Years later Charles A. Dana said that he was with Grant when Rawlins rode up and handed “that admirable communication” to him.19 Far from bristling at such chastisement, Grant continued to embrace Rawlins as his most valuable staff officer, singling him out in July for his “gallant and meritorious services.”20
Although Rawlins claimed his admonition was heeded, it seems to have been followed by a far more significant lapse by Grant. As his hold on Vicksburg strengthened, Grant still worried that Johnston would roar in from the east and raise the siege, leading him to mass a Union force east of Satartia to forestall that possibility. His fears were further inflamed when Johnston sent a large, threatening force that took Yazoo City, north of Satartia, leading Grant to take a steamer up the Yazoo River, in Dana’s company, to investigate the developing situation for himself.
A distinguished correspondent for the Chicago Times and the New York Herald, Sylvanus Cadwallader, a loquacious but prickly man, later conjured up a notorious tale of Grant’s mad, drunken escapade on this trip. Virtually alone among journalists, he lived at camp with Grant, often messed and rode with him, became an ostensible staff member, and was the only reporter with privileged access to headquarters. Despite later writing about Grant’s indiscretions, Cadwallader had inordinate admiration for him, hailing him as “the greatest military chieftain his generation produced.”21 So close did the journalist become with Rawlins that they lived together after the war, and Cadwallader even named his son Rawlins. Grant reserved his highest accolade for Cadwallader, telling him in September 1864, “For two years past I have seen more of you personally probably than of all other correspondents put together,” and he commended his exemplary work in adhering to the legitimate journalistic duties assigned to him.22
Not wishing to violate confidentiality, Cadwallader delayed composing his memoirs until the late 1880s and early 1890s, when he was tending sheep in California. Fred Grant encouraged him to write, saying that “you certainly occupied a position with the Army that gave you great insight into affairs.”23 When the book was belatedly published in 1955, the historian Bruce Catton greeted it as “one of the great books of the Civil War.”24 Far from attempting to debunk Grant, Cadwallader intended to “emphasize his virtues” and show how the “splendor of his achievements will prove amply sufficient to cover all minor imperfections.”25 If Cadwallader had any ax to grind, it came from his belief that Grant in his Memoirs had slighted the wartime contribution of their mutual friend John A. Rawlins.
What we know for certain about the Satartia trip is that on June 6, at Haynes’ Bluff, Grant and Dana boarded a small craft, USS Diligence, which carried them up the Yazoo River. Soon after their departure, Grant became ill—this may have been a euphemism for drunk—and fell asleep in a cabin. When the Diligence approached within two miles of Satartia, it met two Union gunboats heading downstream. Their officers came aboard the steamer and warned that because of Confederate activity in the area and a federal withdrawal, it was too dangerous to proceed any farther. Dana said the officers tried to converse “with General Grant who was not in a condition to conduct an intelligent conversation”—a clear indication Grant was drunk.26 Under the circumstances, it was Dana, not Grant, who made the decision to have the boat turn back and return to Haynes’ Bluff, escorted by gunboats. When Grant awoke the next morning, perfectly sober, he imagined they were at Satartia. Dana had to explain that they had turned around and were back at Haynes’ Bluff, suggesting Grant had blacked out during the trip.27 Later Dana insisted that on the “excursion up the Yazoo River” Grant had gotten “as stupidly drunk as the immortal nature of man would allow; but the next day he came out as fresh as a rose, without any trace or indication of the spree he had passed through.”28 Ironically, Dana, originally sent by Stanton to spy on Grant’s drinking, became, like Rawlins, an unexpected accomplice in concealing the problem.
In narrating this tale, Sylvanus Cadwallader made a startling imaginative leap, placing himself aboard the boat to Satartia in lieu of Dana, even though contemporary records confirm that Cadwallader was absent and Dana present. Cadwallader described Grant’s clownish behavior when tipsy: “He made several trips to the bar room of the boat in a short time, and became stupid in speech and staggering in gait.”29 According to Cadwallader, he prevailed upon the captain to bolt the barroom, denying Grant access to more liquor. Casting himself in a heroic light, Cadwallader said he locked himself into a cabin with Grant and began to chuck whiskey bottles from the window to protect him. When Grant protested angrily, the journalist supposedly got him to lie down and behave. “As it was a very hot day and the State-room almost suffocating, I insisted on his taking off his coat, vest and boots, and lying down in one of the berths. After much resistance I succeeded, and soon fanned him to sleep.”30
The wildest part of Cadwallader’s story involved Grant mounting a horse named Kangaroo after they returned to Haynes’ Bluff and then careering through the woods. “The road was crooked and tortuous, following the firmest ground between sloughs and bayous, and was bridged over these in several places . . . He went at about full speed through camps and corrals, heading only for the bridges, and literally tore through and over everything in his way.” Cadwallader allegedly charged after him on horseback and overtook him. “I secured his bridle rein to my own saddle and convinced him that I was master of the situation. His intoxication increased so in a few minutes that he became unsteady in the saddle.” So subordinates would not see Grant intoxicated, Cadwallader “induced the General to lay down on the grass with the saddle for a pillow. He was soon asleep.”31 Cadwallader summoned an ambulance to fetch them back to camp. As they arrived at midnight, an alarmed Rawlins stood waiting. When Grant emerged from the ambulance, he “shrugged his shoulders, pulled down his vest, ‘shook himself together,’ as one just rising from a nap, and seeing Rawlins and [Colonel John] Riggin, bid them good-night in a natural tone and manner, and started to his tent as steadily as he ever walked in his life.”32
What to make of this fantastic tale? Aside from the fact that Cadwallader wasn’t on the trip to Satartia, many preposterous details strain credulity. If Grant engaged in a drunken, high-speed chase across bridges and through Union camps, many people would have noticed and recorded the shocking sight. No one did. It is also the only account of Grant drinking where he gets drunk, sobers up, then immediately gets drunk again. Grant also never allowed his men to see him drunk. It is impossible to take the Cadwallader story at face value.
At the same time, it shows remarkable consistency with other drinking stories about Grant—the granite self-command breaking down under the influence; the slurred speech, wobbly gait, and sudden personality change; the strange reversion to a babbling, childlike state; the straightening up and getting sober and resuming his official personality in a twinkling. These factors make one suspect that the story, though hugely embellished, may contain a kernel of truth instead of being concocted whole cloth by Cadwallader’s overwrought imagination. In all likelihood, Cadwallader heard the story of the Satartia trip from Dana or Rawlins and presented it as his own eyewitness account for dramatic effect or self-aggrandizement.
In his memoir, Cadwallader did provide a sound analysis of Grant’s drinking habits: how he would resolve after a bender never to drink again; how that pledge would hold for several months; how many people close to him never saw him drunk; how he sat soberly at banquets with his glass turned upside down. “He was not an habitual drinker. He could not drink moderately. When at long intervals his appetite for strong drink caused him to accept the invitation of some old classmate, or army associate, to take ‘just one glass before parting,’ he invariably drank to excess unless some one was with him (whose control he would acknowledge) to lead him away from temptation.”33 Cadwallader also noted the merciless retribution Rawlins visited on anybody who led Grant down the primrose path: “Later on it was no secret that any staff officer who offered the General a glass of liquor, or drank with him . . . would be disgracefully dismissed and actually degraded in rank.”34
Like Cadwallader, Dana left a knowing description of Grant’s drinking, arguing that he always had a degree of control over it—somewhat unusual for an alcoholic. He noted that Grant never drank when it might imperil his army, but “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 by him.”35 Of the Satartia trip, he said, “It was a dull period in the campaign. The siege of Vicksburg was proceeding with regularity.”36 Dana provided a convincing explanation of why some people close to Grant claimed, in all honesty, that they never saw these drinking episodes: “The times were chosen with perfect judgment, and when it was all over, no outsider would have suspected that such things had been.”37 He asserted that Grant drank only at three- or four-month intervals and that he knew of only “two or three other occasions” when he got seriously drunk.38 In other words, Charles A. Dana had arrived at the same conclusion as John A. Rawlins: that Ulysses S. Grant was so essential to the Union cause that it was better to shield his sporadic binges than expose him to official censure. The story of the Yazoo River bender was an isolated case of Grant’s drinking in a dangerous war zone where enemy forces were concentrated.
Perhaps alarmed by his binge, Grant on June 9 invited Julia and the children to join him at Vicksburg, where they could stay on a steamer during the siege. His son Fred—now “a thoughtful, serious boy and very sensible,” said one relative—had stayed by his side during the campaign and adored his father for showing such faith in his maturity.39 “I had the happiness as a child and as a man of being his constant companion in peace and war.”40 Grant obtained a Shetland pony for his youngest boy, Jesse, who joined him on inspection tours, “often perched behind him,” wrote Jesse, “and clinging to his belt as we thundered along upon a big buckskin horse that had been presented to him, called, because of its viciousness, Mankiller.”41
Unable to find a comfortable wartime niche with the Grant family and condemned to a vagabond life, Julia welcomed her periodic stays with her husband, when she was known to pore over military maps and was said to possess an excellent grasp of military strategy. As Grant’s influence grew, so did hers, and she exercised it benevolently. “She had a kindly, gracious way that captured us,” noted one general. “The officers who had annoyances and grievances that they could not take to the General, appealed to Mrs. Grant . . . and many an officer could thank her for solving his grievances.”42 And when Julia Grant was around, the stories about her husband’s drinking had a way of disappearing instantly.
As he blasted Vicksburg into submission, Grant had no doubt the town would submit. He now had more than seventy thousand men camped in the vicinity and was surprised Pemberton made no attempt to slash his way out: “I didn’t think the rebels would be such fools as to shut up thirty thousand troops there for me to capture.”43 It was a gargantuan feat to strangle Vicksburg, hemmed in by ravines and fallen trees. Grant established a Union line fifteen miles long to contain seven miles of enemy fortifications. He watched as federal trenches crept close enough to Vicksburg that his soldiers, crouching behind bulletproof sandbags, could toss hand grenades into the Confederate forts. Union infantry was protected by sharpshooters with such expert aim that rebel soldiers dared not poke their heads above the parapets. All the while, Grant shelled the city at regular intervals, sowing terror among the inhabitants, who slowly regressed to a primitive state.
Plagued by early summer heat and steady rain, Grant worked hard to strengthen his men’s morale, even though one British doctor concluded that “no man alive could have counteracted the effects of that climate. Malaria, salt pork, no vegetables, a blazing sun, and almost poisonous water, are agencies against which medicine is helpless.”44 After two aborted assaults and many casualties, Union soldiers willingly endured a siege that spared them further bloodshed. Grant constantly fraternized with his men. One newspaperman noted how he sauntered about in worn clothes, his left hand thrust in his pocket, an unlit cigar in his mouth, his brow contracted thoughtfully. Grant, he discerned, inspired more respect than affection: “They do not salute him, they only watch him . . . with a certain sort of familiar reverence.”45 Grant never assumed military airs and talked casually with his men, as if he were a peer. “He sat on the ground and talked with the boys with less reserve than many a little puppy of a lieutenant,” wrote an Illinois soldier.46 Everyone noticed Grant’s strangely nonchalant demeanor in a war zone. One day he strolled about in full view of Confederate marksmen as enemy bullets raised the dust around him. A newspaper reporter who did not recognize him shouted: “Stoop down, down, damn you, down!”47 Grant didn’t flinch.
Inside Vicksburg, General Pemberton banked all hope for deliverance on Joseph E. Johnston, a short, dapper, elegant-looking Virginian with a graying goatee, finely trimmed side-whiskers, and sharply chiseled features. With a certain romantic dash, Johnston liked to ride into battle sporting a black feather in his hat. Whenever his troops cheered him, a Tennessee soldier claimed, “Old Joe smiles as blandly as a modest maid, raises his hat in acknowledgment, makes a polite bow, and rides toward the firing.”48
By mid-June, Pemberton flooded Johnston with desperate pleas for relief from the relentless salvos, but despite the large army at his disposal, Johnston offered no consolation. “I consider saving Vicksburg hopeless,” he replied.49 Horrified by this defeatist attitude, Confederate secretary of war Seddon lectured Johnston that “Vicksburg must not be lost without a desperate struggle. The interest and honor of the Confederacy forbid it.” Johnston said Grant had done his work too thoroughly to be defeated. “Grant’s position, naturally very strong, is intrenched and protected by powerful artillery, and the roads obstructed.”50 The confident Grant, while he respected Johnston beyond other Confederate generals, said he would be thrilled if he dared to barge his way into Vicksburg: “If Johnston tries to cut his way in we will let him do it . . . You say he has 30,000 men with him? That will give us 30,000 more prisoners than we now have.”51 By June 11, Grant blocked the last road between Pemberton and Johnston, hermetically sealing off Vicksburg. Later he said he regretted not having been able to confront Johnston’s army, which would have permitted him to destroy two armies at once.
Grant rejected pleas for more men from General Banks, who had laid siege to Port Hudson, farther south on the Mississippi, just north of Baton Rouge. The original plan called for Banks to overrun Port Hudson, then steam up the river and cooperate with Grant’s operation against Vicksburg, but the effort to subdue Port Hudson proved long and hazardous. Halleck was enraged at Banks for failing to unite his forces with Grant’s, yet he seemed powerless to rein in the political general.52
In Washington, Lincoln studied telegrams from Vicksburg as he anxiously awaited the siege’s outcome. An Associated Press reporter watched in the War Department telegraph office as the president absorbed an erroneous dispatch bringing dreadful news from Vicksburg. At once Lincoln looked “nervous,” his whole frame “shook violently,” and his face whitened with a “ghastly” pallor.53 Lincoln never wavered in his belief that Vicksburg represented the centerpiece of Confederate defenses in the west. “We can take all the northern ports of the Confederacy,” he insisted, “and they can defy us from Vicksburg.”54
With deserters pouring from the town daily, Grant had a precise image of the brutal condition of soldiers and citizens cooped up inside. Hunger had yielded to starvation as dogs, cats, and even rats vanished from the city. Soldiers accustomed to beef and bacon settled for leathery mule meat, supplemented by small portions of rice, corn, and peas. Many contracted scurvy, and by late June half the garrison was laid low by illness.
Although bombarding civilian populations would be commonplace in future conflicts, it still arose as a dreadful novelty in the Civil War. Fleeing nonstop shelling, Vicksburg residents sought shelter in cellars or man-made caves carved out of hillsides. People spent so much time in these improvised bunkers that they furnished them with carpets, beds, and easy chairs until they resembled rude apartments. “Caves were the fashion—the rage—over besieged Vicksburg,” recorded a survivor.55 Nighttime bombardments made these cave dwellers shrink in terror as they listened to the shrieking whistle of diving shells. “Morning found us more dead than alive, with blanched faces and trembling lips,” wrote one young woman.56 To perk up the failing spirits of residents, local newspapers kept alive the dreamlike prospect that Joseph Johnston would materialize to deliver them from blue-coated evil. Confronted with a newsprint shortage, local papers published their columns on the backs of rectangular sections of wallpaper with bright floral prints.
As the siege wore on, Grant presided over a vast expansion in the care of runaway slaves, who now streamed into his camp in enormous numbers. Several hundred thousand slaves were liberated by Grant’s army, and he enlisted them to perform vital military duties. Black auxiliaries engaged in dangerous, arduous tasks: digging trenches and rifle pits around Vicksburg, enhancing Union defenses at Haynes’ Bluff and Grand Gulf, and tearing up railroad tracks east of the city. They became so indispensable that one colonel wrote to McClernand and pleaded for more: “I hardly know how I am to get along unless I can have some more Contrabands.”57
Grant embraced the new policy of arming Negroes promulgated by Halleck on March 30, 1863: “It is the policy of the government to withdraw from the enemy as much productive labor as possible . . . it is the opinion of many who have examined the question without passion or prejudice, that [former slaves] can also be used as a military force.”58 Three weeks later, Grant reported to Halleck that he had equipped black soldiers for the first time: “At least three of my Army Corps Commanders take hold of the new policy of arming the negroes and using them against the rebels with a will . . . You may rely on my carrying out any policy ordered by proper authority to the best of my ability.”59
In late March, Lincoln had dispatched Brigadier General Lorenzo Thomas, adjutant general of the U.S. Army, to confer with Grant about the plight of liberated slaves—the so-called freed people—and aid the recruitment of black troops, a policy that formed a natural sequel to the Emancipation Proclamation. The ulterior purpose of Thomas’s trip was to assess Grant’s military performance at Vicksburg. On April 11, when he arrived in camp, he was bowled over by Grant and soon confessed himself “a Grant man all over.”60 In cobbling together black regiments, Thomas displayed a crusading style, delivering rousing speeches to counter deeply rooted racial prejudice endemic in the northern army. The bigotry was so ingrained that one Ohio soldier warned northern soldiers “would lay down their arms and unbuckle their swords” if Washington persisted in arming blacks.61 By year end, Thomas had plucked twenty thousand young black men from contraband camps in the Mississippi Valley and absorbed them into African American regiments. Grant placed the full weight of his prestige into coaxing his commanders to flesh out these new regiments.
All the while, Grant maintained his enthusiastic backing of Chaplain John Eaton, the general superintendent in the Mississippi Valley, who provided education, shelter, medical care, and employment to people in contraband camps, where disease and despair proliferated and mortality rates often ran high. When Eaton met Grant on June 11, the chaplain immediately saw in the seamed face and crow’s-feet around Grant’s eyes the stress of the rugged Vicksburg Campaign. “He was dressed . . . in an old brown linen duster surmounted by an old slouch hat; his trousers showed holes worn by the boot-straps, where they had rubbed against the saddle.”62
Even amid the siege, Grant devoted time to Eaton, who read aloud to him a report he had written covering thirty-four pages of foolscap. Grant “showed not a sign of weariness to the end,” reported Eaton, “and when I had finished he remarked: ‘That is a very important report. I must send you with it to the President, with a personal letter.’”63 Grant wrote promptly to Lincoln, saying the document would bring him up to date on the “negroes . . . coming into our lines in great numbers.” He described Eaton’s conscientious supervision of contraband camps. “Mr. Eaton’s labors in his undertaking have been unremitting and skillful and I fear in many instances very trying. That he has been of very great service to the blacks in having them provided for when otherwise they would have been neglected . . . the accompanying report will show.”64 Frederick Douglass stated that Lincoln received the report from its emissary “with the greatest satisfaction, asking many questions about General Grant’s views upon the whole subject of the treatment of the colored people . . . he repeated the expressions of his gratification that a General who was winning such military successes over the rebels was able, from a military standpoint, to give him so many practical illustrations of the benefits of the emancipation policy.”65 This reaction says much about Grant’s rising star in the Lincoln firmament, for he was fast becoming the president’s beau ideal of a general: one who regularly beat the enemy while endorsing the expanded war aims.
John Eaton grew so intimate with Grant that they even touched upon the delicate subject of Grant’s prewar drinking travails. “It was plain that the army life in Washington Territory and Oregon had been full of temptations, and it is more than probable that he followed the example of the other officers while there,” Eaton wrote. “To escape from the environment was certainly one motive for his leaving the army.”66 Eaton was impressed by Grant’s candor and came to believe that the early stories of his drinking were true, the later ones baseless.
Just how much Grant would support the newly emancipated slaves became evident at a fertile spot called Davis Bend, located on a Mississippi River peninsula, about twenty-five miles below Vicksburg. Jefferson Davis and his rich brother Joseph had owned huge slave plantations there. When Joseph fled in 1862, his slaves invaded the mansion house and divided clothing and furniture among themselves. Even before Union troops came on the scene, the onetime slaves already operated the plantation. Grant spied a prime opportunity to create a model community for blacks that would showcase their industry and self-reliance. As Eaton recalled, “It was General Grant’s desire that these plantations should be occupied by the freedmen, and, to quote his own words, ‘become a Negro paradise.’”67 Grant wasn’t responding to a Washington directive but undertook this on his own initiative.
The experiment fully corroborated Grant’s expansive vision. The land was leased to the freedmen, who paid the government for their rations, mules, and tools. While men worked the cotton fields, women tended vegetable gardens and peddled their wares to steamboat traffic on the Mississippi. Residents showed skill and enterprise at every turn, building a church, a schoolhouse, and an infirmary that housed orphaned children and elderly, ailing residents. By 1865 the Davis Bend community produced two thousand bales of cotton, earning a $16,000 profit and proving to skeptics that freed people could be fully productive, self-supporting members of society.
Grant’s transformation into an imaginative abolitionist arose partly from his conception of himself as a professional soldier who believed in military subservience to civilian rule; he was following a changed policy that flowed down from the president. The evolution in his thinking was influenced by other factors, however, including the battlefield performance of blacks. Although the Emancipation Proclamation made them eligible for military service, many northern commanders wondered whether they were capable of courage and discipline, a prejudice that seeped down to the common soldiers. “The idea of arming and equipping Negro Regiments for the purpose of making them soldiers is, to my mind, worse than ridiculous nonsense,” said an Iowa soldier at Vicksburg. “Blacks would only work if you made them do so.”68 If Grant reserved any private doubts on the matter, a historic battle at Milliken’s Bend on the Mississippi on June 7, helped to retire them forever.
On that day, two thousand Texan troops under Major General John Walker invaded a Union supply depot, garrisoned by a thousand, mostly black, troops recently mustered into regiments in Grant’s district. Jefferson Davis had already warned that rebellious slaves in northern uniforms would be sent back to their old masters or hanged as criminals. Southern soldiers often reacted viciously when they encountered former slaves in uniform. Arming blacks trespassed on sacred taboos for many of them, and they now flew black flags as a sign they would give no quarter. The Union victory at Milliken’s Bend was notable for its hand-to-hand savagery. “After it was over,” wrote Charles Dana, “many men were found dead with bayonet stabs, and others with their skulls broken open by butts of muskets.”69 Rebel soldiers reportedly butchered blacks whom they captured and even sold some of them as slaves. Far from succumbing to terror, the novice black troops, stuck with outdated muskets, fought off the larger rebel contingent and won honor for blacks everywhere with their bayonet charge. Dana believed the engagement had “completely revolutionized the sentiment of the army with regard to the employment of negro troops. I heard prominent officers who formerly in private had sneered at the idea of the negroes fighting express themselves after that as heartily in favor of it.”70 The defeat shocked southern sensibilities, and one stupefied Confederate lady wrote it was “hard to believe that Southern soldiers—and Texans at that—have been whipped by a mongrel crew of white and black Yankees. There must be some mistake.”71
Grant was profoundly impressed by his black troops’ performance at Milliken’s Bend. “This was the first important engagement of the war in which colored troops were under fire,” he wrote. “These men were very raw, having all been enlisted since the beginning of the siege, but they behaved well.”72 He assured Lorenzo Thomas the black soldiers had been “most gallant and I doubt not but with good officers they will make good troops.”73 The word soon made the rounds that Grant had gone from being a reluctant recruit to abolitionism to an ardent convert. In late July, Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts reported on a conversation with Dana about Grant: “He says that [Grant] is in favor of destroying the cause of this civil war—of overthrowing Slavery and that his army is deeply imbued with the same feeling.”74
That Grant, whose army occupied the region with the most black refugees, was an enthusiastic proponent of black regiments ingratiated him with Lincoln. “The colored population is the great available and yet unavailed of, force for restoring the Union,” the president told Governor Andrew Johnson of Tennessee. “The bare sight of fifty thousand armed, and drilled black soldiers on the banks of the Mississippi, would end the rebellion at once.”75 That May, Lincoln mused aloud to visiting church leaders that he “would gladly receive into the service not ten thousand but ten times ten thousand colored troops.”76 Grant was the general best positioned to translate this wish into reality. On August 23, he sent Lincoln a remarkable letter in which he made it clear that he endorsed the recruitment of black regiments both as an order he was bound to obey and as something he personally approved:
Gen. [Lorenzo] Thomas is now with me and you may rely on it I will give him all the aid in my power. I would do this whether the arming of the negro seemed to me a wise policy or not, because it is an order that I am bound to obey and do not feel that in my position I have a right to question any policy of the Government. In this particular instance there is no objection however to my expressing an honest conviction. That is, by arming the negro we have added a powerful ally. They will make good soldiers and taking them from the enemy weaken him in the same proportion they strengthen us. I am therefore most decidedly in favor of pushing this policy to the enlistment of a force sufficient to hold all the South falling into our hands and to aid in capturing more.77
Here Grant stepped outside a narrowly defined military role to declare himself in personal harmony with Lincoln’s overarching political objectives. His letter had the intended effect. On August 29, Secretary of the Treasury Chase recorded in his diary that Lincoln came into his office carrying Grant’s message and one of similar tenor from Banks about arming negro troops. “Both Generals express confidence in the efficiency of these troops and clear opinions in favor of using them. These letters give much satisfaction to the president.”78
Black soldiers still faced innumerable indignities. Until June 1864, they pocketed less pay than white counterparts, discrimination that stung deeply. But their sacrifice for the Union cause gave them pride, political standing, and leadership skills. Frederick Douglass recognized that once the black man had “a musket on his shoulder, and a bullet in his pocket,” there was “no power on earth” that could “deny that he has earned the right of citizenship in the United States.”79
As late June approached, Grant continued to pummel Vicksburg, preparing his opponents for capitulation. Morale eroded inside the beleaguered fortress as Pemberton’s men stripped wood from houses to construct a crude fleet of boats by which they hoped to escape to the Louisiana shore of the Mississippi River. Grant notified Admiral Porter to be on the lookout for clandestine nocturnal efforts to cross the waterway. “Had the attempt been made,” Grant wrote, “the garrison of Vicksburg would have been drowned, or made prisoners on the Louisiana side.”80 All the while, Sherman tightened the Union stranglehold on the city by obstructing roads with fallen timbers to forestall any outside attack by Johnston’s forces. Grant gave him thirty-four thousand soldiers to form a firewall around the city, a move that Sherman brilliantly executed.
Always open to technological innovations in warfare, Grant approved the explosion of a Union mine intended to topple one of the enemy forts. Into a network of trenches and tunnels General McPherson managed to load twelve hundred pounds of explosives. They were detonated with such force that they threw up a huge cloud of white smoke, gouging out a crater thirty-five feet in diameter. Several Confederate soldiers were whirled up into the air and tossed down, still alive, on the Union side. Unfortunately, for all the fireworks, the explosion failed to break open the nearby fort and the effort came to naught.
By the end of June, as Joseph Johnston marched four divisions toward the Big Black River, Grant braced for a huge fight. Meanwhile, daily rations inside Vicksburg dwindled, leading to starvation. With his light fieldpieces aimed at the fortress, backed by big naval guns and mortar boats floating in the river, Grant exercised a commanding position over the battered city. He set off a second mine explosion on July 1, bringing his army right up to the parapets in three different places. He ensured easy access to these ramparts for his men by laying planks and bags packed tightly with cotton over swampy ditches, enabling them to rush uphill with sure, rapid steps.
It was a misfortune for the South that John C. Pemberton was a Yankee with two brothers fighting on the northern side. A decent administrator, he lacked verve as a fighting general. A brusque, crusty Pennsylvanian who attended West Point, he had fallen under the spell of the South, having wed a Virginia woman whose fervent embrace of secession bound him to the Confederacy. Grant laughingly tagged him as “a northern man who had got into bad company.”81 Even had he not aroused southern suspicions by his northern birth, Pemberton’s curmudgeonly personality would have earned him a large quota of enemies. As Lieutenant General Theophilus Holmes pointed out, Pemberton had “many ways of making people hate him and none to inspire confidence.”82 Where another general might have heeded Johnston’s warning about not getting bogged down in Vicksburg, Pemberton dreaded charges that he had abandoned the city because of his northern background and feared a treason prosecution. As he mulled over surrender to Grant and pondered the “vanity of our foes,” he somehow fancied that Grant might confer lenient terms if allowed to take the town on Independence Day, July 4.83 Grant was neither vain nor tender in this regard.
By July 1, Pemberton saw his last hopes vanish amid a desperate food shortage for his army. “Unless the siege of Vicksburg is raised, or supplies are thrown in,” he warned his commanders, “it will become necessary very shortly to evacuate the place.”84 With his garrison verging on mutiny, Pemberton reluctantly concluded he could not withstand an assault rumored for July 4. Hence, at 10 a.m. on July 3, white flags sprouted along rebel parapets and gunfire ceased. Then two high-ranking emissaries, Major General John Bowen and Colonel Louis Montgomery, Pemberton’s aide-de-camp, were seen advancing on horseback toward Union lines under a fluttering white flag. Pemberton had selected his messengers with care. Bowen, who had befriended Grant during his dark days of hardscrabble farming in St. Louis, was grievously ill and would soon die of dysentery, but Pemberton wished to gain every possible advantage with Grant.
Much as Grant had steeled himself against any sentimentality in favor of Simon Bolivar Buckner at Fort Donelson, he refused to receive Bowen, although he perused closely the letter he bore from Pemberton: “I have the honor to propose to you an armistice . . . with a view to arranging terms for the capitulation of Vicksburg—To this end if agreeable to you, I will appoint three commissioners, to meet a like number to be named by yourself, at such place and hour today as you may find convenient.” Pemberton gave way to false bravado: “I make this proposition to save the further effusion of blood which must otherwise be shed to a frightful extent, feeling myself fully able to maintain my position for a yet indefinite period.”85 Grant, guessing that Pemberton preferred to surrender rather than be captured in a July 4 assault, was relieved the Confederate general chose to avoid further fighting, which he thought would be “little less than murder.”86 After consenting orally to meet between the lines at three that afternoon, Grant wrote Pemberton a tough, uncompromising response—by now his trademark.
Your note of this date is just received, proposing an armistice for several hours for the purpose of arranging terms of capitulation through commissioners to be appointed, &c.
The useless effusion of blood you propose stopping by this course can be ended at any time you may choose, by the unconditional surrender of the city and garrison. Men who have shown so much endurance and courage as those now in Vicksburg, will always challenge the respect of an adversary, and I can assure you will be treated with all the respect due to prisoners of war.
I do not favor the proposition of appointing commissioners to arrange terms of capitulation, because I have no terms other than those indicated above.87
For all his politeness, Grant knew he had the upper hand and played it to the hilt.
At 3 p.m., under a slightly overcast sky, Grant rode through the trenches toward a designated hillside spot beyond the city walls, accompanied by Generals Ord, McPherson, John Logan, and Andrew J. Smith. There he encountered Pemberton, who remembered him from their joint service in the Mexican War. While Grant attempted to be civil, greeting his Confederate counterpart “as an old acquaintance,” the testy Pemberton spurned any pleasantries. He said he understood that Grant had “expressed a wish to have a personal interview with me” and Grant promptly denied any such thing.88 When he asked Grant for the terms he would give if his army surrendered, Grant reiterated his uncompromising stand. Pemberton snorted in response, “The conference might as well end,” and wheeled about as if to go. “I can assure you, sir,” he threatened Grant, “you will bury many more of your men before you will enter Vicksburg.”89 Coolly puffing on a cigar, Grant was adept at a poker face, and not a muscle twitched as he stared at his foe. “Very well,” said Grant, who did not care to tip his hand, especially when Pemberton was so full of bluster.90 After Bowen suggested he should parley with a Union general, Grant agreed, and Bowen and Smith talked while Grant and Pemberton stepped aside under the shade of a stunted oak. Bowen put forth a proposal by which Confederate soldiers would march out of Vicksburg with full honors of war, bearing their small arms. As usual, Grant refused initially to yield an inch to his adversaries and said he would send final terms by ten o’clock that night.
That evening, as northern and southern soldiers socialized between the lines, Grant gathered his officers for a war council, one in which he alone would wield ultimate power. The debate hinged on whether the Confederate garrison should be ferried north as prisoners or paroled, sending them home and effectively excluding them from the war. Despite Grant’s reservations, his generals convinced him of the wisdom of the parole option; instead of tying up Union soldiers and monopolizing transports to steer more than thirty thousand rebels to northern prisons, Grant’s army would immediately be freed up for fresh military adventures. As the years went by and his name became synonymous with reconciliation, Grant tended to forget that he had started out favoring harsher treatment for Pemberton’s men. As he wrote in 1884, “The men had behaved so well that I did not want to humiliate them. I believed that consideration for their feelings would make them less dangerous foes during the continuance of hostilities, and better citizens after the war was over.”91
Once the war council ended, Grant presented Pemberton with generous terms, which would enable Confederate soldiers to save face and surrender with traditional war honors: “As soon as rolls can be made out and paroles signed by officers and men you will be allowed to march out of our lines the officers taking with them their side arms and clothing, and the Field, Staff & Cavalry officers one horse each.”92 Turning up the pressure on Pemberton to accept these honorable terms, Grant slyly leaked the news to Confederate pickets. Once the rebel rank and file realized Grant was offering them a chance to head home, it would be difficult for Pemberton to reject his offer. He largely accepted the terms and said his men would march out the next morning with colors flying and stack their arms, but he tried to widen one loophole: “Officers to retain their side arms, and personal property, and the rights and property of citizens to be respected.”93 Grant knew slaves counted as personal property and had no intention of allowing them to be hauled back into bondage. Before dawn, Grant informed Pemberton he had vetoed this last request and gave him until 9 a.m. to abide by his terms or he would open a full-throttle attack on Vicksburg. Sometime around dawn Pemberton saw the light and the siege ended. At breakfast time, Grant sat in his tent, composing dispatches on a small table, when an orderly arrived with Pemberton’s submission to his final terms. Wan, exhausted from the siege, Grant stood up and said with tangible relief to his son Fred, “W-e-e-e-ll, I’m glad Vicksburg will surrender.”94