CHAPTER NINE
Until It Pleases God to Take Me …
ince his return to army command, Grant had dwelled in a twilight of monotonous “guard duty” in western Tennessee and Kentucky. His problem was not so severe as Pemberton's, for there was little fear after Shiloh and Corinth that the Confederates would try to attack him in force any time soon. But Halleck had dispersed Grant's army over a 150-mile front and required that he also protect the 250 miles of rail supply lines leading from the north. With Nathan Bedford Forrest on the loose, that was a tall order. To Grant, it must have seemed that Forrest was everywhere at once—raiding, tearing up track, burning bridges, attacking small outposts, capturing wagon trains, and disrupting things in general—in the process earning for himself Sherman's sobriquet “that Devil Forrest,” which he flaunted defiantly until the end of the war.
Meanwhile, Grant placed Sherman in charge of Memphis, with two divisions of about 14,000 men. It was the irascible Ohioan's first taste of control over civilians, and he exercised it with a stony harshness tempered by a chilling logic. When Sherman entered the city he found it all but closed down, and immediately he ordered everything—businesses, schools, churches, theaters, and saloons—to begin operating again. What he did about the galaxy of prostitutes that descended from points north upon Memphis and other Southern cities in the wake of the Union occupation is not recorded. (In Nashville, for instance, a delegation of concerned citizens badgered the Federal commander into deporting the prostitutes back to Ohio, but once the boat landed it was turned back yet again, prostitutes and all, by an equally concerned group of citizens in Cincinnati.) From the records available, Sherman's policy seems to have been focused more on practical lines. He rounded up all the fugitive slaves he could find and set them to work on his fortifications, restored the city council to its functions, and organized a civil police force so that “very soon Memphis resumed its appearance as an active, busy, prosperous place.”
This proved to be an oversimplification, and premature as well. It wasn't long until Sherman discovered that most citizens were still unhappy with the turn of events that had led to his arrival. Whenever they showed it, however, he showed them back. First, he threatened to close any church—and this included virtually all of them—whose minister or priest refused to offer a Sunday prayer to the president of the United States, whom they reviled. Next he began expelling from their homes the wives and families of rebel soldiers and sympathizers in reprisal for Confederates shooting at Union gunboats operating on the Mississippi.*1 Predictably, he arrested a number of newspaper reporters, both local and Northern, whose stories displeased him. On September 24, he ordered the town of Randolph, Tennessee, burned to the ground in retaliation for people firing on U.S. vessels and also, for the same reason, commanded the immolation of all homes, farms, and outbuildings for fifteen miles down the Arkansas side of the river opposite Memphis.
These seem to be the earliest of Sherman's pyromaniacal urges in connection with Southern civilians and their property, but by a long shot they were not his last. He had by now refined his philosophy regarding the civilian population of the South, and expressed it bluntly to Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase three weeks after taking over Memphis. The war, he said, had thus far been “complicated with the belief that all [southerners] are not enemies.” Sherman branded this assumption a great mistake and declared, “The Government of the United States may now safely proceed on the proper rule that all in the South are enemies.” This was a leap for Sherman, perhaps even an epiphany of sorts, because he had spent so much time in the South before the war and made so many friends he still held dear. In his mind it led to only one solution, and that was hard war—total war—where the conflict would no longer be confined to the battlefield alone but would consume everything and everyone around it and devil take the hindmost. It was ruthless policy, but he did not shrink from it.
Ironically, a problem that vexed Sherman particularly was the same one that bedeviled Van Dorn when he issued his Order No. 9—what to do about the cotton trade between the lines. The U.S. Treasury had recently adopted a policy encouraging such marketing on the premise that the bales of cotton purchased from Southern planters would be sent north and then sold to England and France for gold specie, which was much needed at the time. Sherman, however, contended that this was antithetical to the Union cause, since the southerners took the gold received from the Northern cotton traders and used it to buy arms, munitions, medical supplies, and other military goods from those same foreign countries, in fact prolonging the war in a vicious cycle of contraband trade. “We cannot carry on war and trade with a people at the same time,” he famously announced.
Sherman insisted that Federal troops should simply go into Mississippi and seize the cotton for nothing, and to that end he outlawed all gold, silver, and Federal treasury notes in his department outside Union lines, hoping it would put a stop to the practice. It didn't. Instead, he complained to Chase, “The commercial enterprise of the Jews soon discovered that ten cents would buy a pound of cotton behind our army; that four cents would take it to Boston, where they could receive thirty cents in gold. That translated into a 300 percent net profit over what they paid the Southerners.
“The bait was too tempting,” he continued, claiming that the cotton traders had now begun to barter with southerners for “salt, bacon, powder, percussion caps, etc. etc., worth as much as gold.”
Grant concurred in this assessment, writing Chase himself that the cotton traders' “love of gain is greater than their love of country.” Accordingly, he issued orders that all “speculators” were to be searched and, if found carrying gold or silver, turned back. If on the other hand they were caught with contraband items that might be bartered with the Confederates, they were to be arrested. “Jews should receive special attention,” Grant added—a notation that was destined to lead him into trouble and embarrassment, but that was in the future.
For now, Grant felt strongly that his army ought to be doing something other than pacifying civilians and guarding railroad bridges and track, and he wired Halleck that he wanted to organize a big push south. His problem, he noted, was that Washington's expectation that he hold every position in his large department was unrealistic and he proposed consolidating his troops and invading Mississippi, with the aim of taking Vicksburg. The tracks of the Mississippi Central Railroad ran straight south in the center of the state and Grant planned to use them as a guide and a road, provisioning his army from trains coming down from the Federal supply dumps in Kentucky. His first objective was the state capital at Jackson, some two hundred miles south, then he would turn due west to Vicksburg, less than fifty miles distant.
To beef up his army, Grant ordered most of a division based at Helena, Arkansas, to cross the river, which would involve help from the navy—namely Admiral Porter, a sailor who was skeptical of the army in general and West Pointers in particular, and who had been waiting impatiently in Cairo following the navy's retreat from Vicksburg. For their first meeting aboard his flagship, Porter dressed in his spit-and-polish with about as much gold braid as a French admiral and was therefore perhaps understandably startled at the appearance of his counterpart, Grant, who arrived in a slouch hat, gray pants, and a dingy brown coat that was buttoned wrong. Nevertheless, Porter, or so he said later, was impressed by Grant's “calm, imperturbable face” and, after a lengthy conference, came away convinced that Grant was the man—and not a slick politician like McClernand, whom he had met earlier—to lead the Union to victory on the Mississippi River.
Grant's was a bold plan, and somewhat dangerous, because he would be taking his army deep into enemy territory, far from his base of supply, to where the Confederates had no doubt set up formidable defenses that could be quickly reinforced by rail. Even his friend Sherman was against this, arguing, “I am daily more convinced that we should hold the river absolutely and leave the interior alone. With the Mississippi safe, we could land troops at any point.” But Grant was determined to grind it out on land and began organizing a huge supply base at the former Confederate stronghold of Columbus, Kentucky, where a rail line ran down through Tennessee and into northern Mississippi. With this in place, and after receiving only noncommittal replies from Washington about his intentions, Grant decided to strike out on his own.
Under his plan, by the end of November he would have marched some 30,000 men across the Tennessee-Mississippi border, taking Holly Springs, while Sherman, with another 20,000 from Memphis, would be on the way to link up with him at the university town of Oxford. But then events began to come to Grant's attention that suggested a change of plans might be in order. These had to do with the machinations of his most troublesome subordinate, Major General John A. McClernand.
McClernand had been a trial for Grant since Belmont, where he had stopped to give speeches before the battle was won, and especially since Fort Donelson, where his division had been driven from its position by the Confederates and he'd tried to blame it on Grant. McClernand was an Illinois political general, with a face like a hatchet and a mind just as sharp—a lawyer, a newspaper publisher, and an anti-abolition Democrat who nevertheless remained on good terms with Lincoln and had received his rank accordingly. No one ever questioned McClernand's bravery, but his military judgment and political posturing were another matter entirely. At the least, Grant knew McClernand bore close watching when in the field; what he didn't realize was that he needed watching all the time.
It is probably safe to say that McClernand harbored aspirations for the presidency, likely as early as 1864. It was well established in American political circles that a record of high-ranking military ser vice had won many a presidential election before the war—as it would afterward—and McClernand was apparently determined now to pitchfork himself into the ranks of the stellar commanders by proposing a secret win-the-war-quick scheme to Abraham Lincoln himself.
In September, under the guise of a leave of absence, McClernand, who hated West Pointers as much as Admiral Porter did, traveled to Washington, carrying with him the inflated notion that he was “tired of furnishing the brains for the Army of the Tennessee.” He told Lincoln that he wished to be temporarily detached from Grant's command for a recruiting campaign through Illinois, Iowa, and Indiana. He insisted to the incredulous president that he could raise at least 60,000 new troops, given his own popularity in the Midwest and the fact that the governors of those states were desperate to reopen the Mississippi for trade. In exchange, McClernand wanted command of this new army, which would take Vicksburg with an amphibious assault down the Mississippi. After thinking it over, Lincoln apparently decided that it couldn't hurt, since new recruits were getting hard to come by, and also he was all too aware of the discontent—not to say desperation—of the midwestern states.
If the account given later by Porter is accurate, and there is some reason to suspect it might not be, Lincoln soon became enthralled with the plan. Porter had seen the president shortly after McClernand's visit and was told that he would replace flag officer Charles H. Davis as commander on the Mississippi River. After assuring Lincoln that he intended to capture Vicksburg “with a large naval force, a strong body of troops, and patience,” Porter was asked by the president who he thought would be the best general to command the army operations. When Porter replied that it should be either Grant or Sherman or both, Lincoln shocked him by saying, “Well, Admiral, I have in mind a better general than either of them; that is McClernand, an old and intimate friend of mine.”
When Porter professed not to know who McClernand was, Lincoln declared that he had been the savior of Shiloh when Grant had failed and that McClernand was “a natural-born general.” The president wrote out a letter of introduction for Porter to give to McClernand and asked him to visit the Illinoisian before he left for the Mississippi. Porter did, and found McClernand at the Willard Hotel, laying plans for his upcoming wedding to his dead wife's sister, who was twenty-four years his junior. Vicksburg, McClernand told the astonished admiral, would be taken in one week!
Thus, with the lukewarm consent of Halleck, McClernand went on his way to assume the recruiting stump, and Porter to assume command of the river fleet. The newest expedition to conquer Vicksburg was under way.
McClernand's enlistment campaign proved quite successful; although not exactly what he had promised Lincoln, he did in fact persuade some 40,000 midwestern boys to sign on for cause and country, and he was in the process of recruiting still more when word of his activities reached Grant. Early on, Grant had selected as his chief of staff a lawyer named John Rawlins, who had been a neighbor and friend in Galena, and who watched over the general with more than just canine-like loyalty. He was a savvy political adviser, as well as Grant's keeper when it came to matters of his alcohol delinquency. Rawlins, himself a teetotaler, was perfectly suited to the job, because as a child he had been obliged to peddle firewood and coal on the streets of Galena when his alcoholic father could not provide for the family.
It was at about the time Grant was preparing to march his army into Mississippi that Rawlins saw a disturbing report from a commander up in Cairo, mentioning that a large number of midwestern recruits were beginning to arrive there, destined downriver for Memphis, “with a sort of loose order to report to Gen. McClernand.” This was the first that Grant had heard of it, and to make matters worse a muddled communication arrived from Halleck suggesting that he push no farther south at that point, but instead wait for a decision from Washington as to Sherman's role in the thing. Clearly agitated, Grant wired back, “Am I to have Sherman move subject to my orders, or is he and his forces reserved for some special services?” Halleck replied, “You have command of all troops sent to your Dept., and have permission to fight the enemy where you please.” No sooner had Grant interpreted this to mean he could proceed with his plan than Halleck sent another message leaving Grant more puzzled than before: “The enemy must be turned by a movement down the river from Memphis as soon as a sufficient force can be collected.”
What did this baffling declaration mean? Grant wondered. Was he to be in charge of this new force? Was Sherman? Was McClernand? Did it foreclose his advance through central Mississippi? Was Halleck somehow in cahoots with McClernand's scheme to usurp part of his command? It was maddening.
Grant decided to put the question to the test. He told Sherman to put his troops in motion from Memphis and, on November 20, 1862, cross into Mississippi and link up with him. A few days later Grant had taken Holly Springs, some twenty miles below the state line, and by December 5 he had captured Oxford. The Confederates obligingly fell back before his superior force, and with Sherman's linkup now imminent Grant had his 50,000 troops in Mississippi, heading south.
However, the more that Grant thought about it, the more he became concerned that something extraordinary and threatening was afoot with respect to McClernand and the army of new recruits who were arriving daily at Memphis. Therefore, he decided to take a different tack. Since Confederate resistance to his invasion had thus far been lighter than expected, Grant now reversed himself and told Sherman to march his divisions back to Memphis and organize a new force consisting of his own troops plus the “McClernand men” and, while Grant continued fighting his way south to invest Vicksburg by the landward side, Sherman would load this new army on steamboats for a surprise attack on the city's northern flank, via the Mississippi and the Yazoo rivers.
To the letter, at least, this would square neatly with both Halleck's authorization for Grant to fight the enemy where and when he pleased as well as his directive that “the enemy must be turned by a movement down the river.” The interesting part is that if Grant was congratulating himself for slyly circumventing what he feared might be a connivance between Halleck and McClernand, he was as wrong as could be. Halleck had no more use for McClernand than Grant did, but he was loath to communicate it because Lincoln himself was said to be solidly behind the plan. All Halleck could do—or rather all the canny old army bureaucrat in him would do—was continue making vague recommendations that were subject to enough interpretation by everybody to keep his own nose clean.
Such was the strategy for taking Vicksburg as the year of 1862 came to a close. So far as it went the plan seemed well laid, but well-laid plans in war have a way of turning sour for the simple reason that it is always dangerous to assume an enemy is going to sit there and let you bowl him over like a dummy made of straw.
As November wore on, however, repeated messages from Van Dorn, who commanded at Holly Springs, foretold of an impending invasion by Grant's army, which finally prompted Pemberton to leave his paperwork in Jackson and go up to the front and see for himself. At once he ordered Van Dorn to pull out of Holly Springs and fall back to the Tallahatchie River north of Oxford, and soon afterward, when Grant began his advance, Pemberton told Van Dorn to withdraw again and set up a deep defensive line behind the Yalobusha River at Grenada, midway between Jackson and the Mississippi-Tennessee border. Grant followed, stalking.
Pemberton's position was clearly in peril. He was outnumbered by about three to one—too weak to attack—and sooner or later Grant could simply keep maneuvering him out of his positions by flanking movements until he was ultimately left helpless, or useless, or both. Several weeks earlier, as soon as Pemberton began to divine Grant's intentions, he began telegraphing Braxton Bragg in Tennessee to send him some troops; Bragg refused, saying it was too dangerous. Pemberton then contacted Richmond, asking authorities there either to order Bragg to dispatch reinforcements or perhaps to bring them from the trans-Mississippi, where Lieutenant General Theophilus Holmes was said to command a large army at Little Rock doing little or nothing at present. In fact, not only was Holmes doing nothing, he wasn't even intending to do anything except stay there and make his presence known for the sake of Arkansas citizens who felt that the Richmond authorities had deserted them. He replied with a disrespectful letter saying as much, and branding Pemberton as a man who “has many ways of making people hate him, and none that inspire confidence.”
In response, Jefferson Davis concluded that because of the distances involved the western theater needed a single commander to coordinate movements and allocate forces, and for this job he selected General Joseph E. Johnston, who was recovering from wounds suffered during the Federal advance on Richmond. For Davis it was a practical solution to a sticky problem. First, a high place for Johnston, the hero of Bull Run, had to be found, and it was out of the question to let him resume command of the Army of Northern Virginia in place of the victorious Lee. Second, Davis didn't like Johnston (the feeling was mutual) because he considered him difficult, condescending, and a prima donna, and sending him out west would solve at least part of that problem.
Johnston agreed to go, but he went reluctantly, which was not a good sign. He brought with him a pessimistic attitude surpassed, perhaps, only by that of his wife, who had come along with him. Shortly after arriving in Tennessee, she'd written a friend back in Virginia of her new surroundings: “How dreary it all looks and how little prospect there is of my poor husband doing ought than lose his army. Truly a forlorn hope it is.”
There was also a major flaw in Davis's plan that had all the earmarks of being fatal, and it had to do with the authority that Richmond bestowed upon Johnston to conduct the war in the West as he saw fit. Johnston's mandate extended from the Alleghenies to the Mississippi, but no farther. This meant that he would be able to request, but not order, assistance from the considerable Confederate forces across the river, including those of the dilatory Theophilus Holmes. With a shortage of troops and control of the river in the balance, this seems incredibly shortsighted on Davis's part.
If that wasn't bad enough, when Johnston came on board he naturally assumed that Pemberton would report directly to him and no one else. Pemberton, however, understood that Johnston would be his immediate superior, but, still, there was Davis's instruction that he should report straight to Richmond. So Pemberton did both, which led to no end of trouble when advice from the two headquarters began to conflict. Around this time Mary Chesnut, the acknowledged doyenne of Richmond insider gossip, ruminated in her famous diary on Davis and the uneasy command situation in the West, closing with a queer notation from Euripides: “Whom the Gods would destroy, they first make mad.”
But when the occasion arose, Johnston could also be petty, jealous, spiteful, secretive, defensive, and resentful, which in time of crisis were certainly not assets to his personality. The occasion arose most prominently with respect to Jefferson Davis. If one leaves out the rumor of his altercation with Davis during their West Point days, the ill feelings seem to have been triggered in the late 1850s when Davis, then secretary of war, held up Johnston's promotion, and again right after secession, when Davis appointed Johnston to the rank of full general—which under most circumstances would have been received as an honor, except Johnston resented the fact that three other generals had been appointed before him, giving them seniority. His complaint was that he had outranked each of them in the old army, which might have had some merit but Johnston chose to exacerbate things by distributing his feelings all over Richmond, prompting Davis to conclude that he was a troublemaker.
For his part, Johnston was further annoyed by the fact that Davis, who was of course himself a West Pointer and Mexican War hero, let alone a former secretary of war, tended to meddle not only in the organization of the army but in its operations as well, right down to strategy and sometimes even tactics.
During the first Battle of Bull Run, or First Manassas, Johnston, along with Beauregard, was in charge of the army that defeated the first big Federal invasion of Virginia. Though he was the senior officer on the field, he relinquished command on grounds that Beauregard was more familiar with the terrain, but much of the credit for the victory attached to Johnston, and rightly so. After Beauregard fell from favor, Johnston was given command of the Army of Northern Virginia as McClellan began his ill-fated Peninsula Campaign, but he retreated nearly a hundred miles from Yorktown, to within five miles of Richmond, before finally standing up to the Federals at what became the Battle of Seven Pines. The fight itself was inconclusive, but there the Union advance stalled until the entire campaign was finally hurled back in disgrace by Robert E. Lee, who took over after Johnston was wounded.
For most southerners, in the years right after the war Johnston remained one of the great heroes. Even his hardest adversaries, Grant and Sherman, noted in their memoirs that they considered him one of the Confederacy's most formidable strategists. But the light that history has cast upon his career has been less kind. In retrospect, Johnston seems to have been the Confederacy's answer to McClellan: beloved by his soldiers (they called him “Uncle Joe”), admired for his military bearing, praised for his ability to organize an army and prepare it for battle—everything, that is, but the battle itself. There his shortcomings were revealed: “timid,” some called him; “prudent” was a more charitable word. Throughout the war Johnston always seemed to be preparing for attacks that never came off—maneuvering, delaying, testing, and feinting—waiting for the golden opportunity to deliver a crushing blow that would not risk his army in the process.
An acquaintance of Johnston's recalled an incident from many years earlier that provides some insight. Hearing that Johnston was reputed to be a fine wing shot, he invited him to go quail hunting in the Virginia coutryside. Most times when a covey rose up, Johnston declined to fire, and when asked what was wrong he would reply that the birds were too far away, or screened by brush or trees, or that the sun was in his eyes, leading the friend to conclude that he was afraid to take a shot unless it was perfect. In short, he wasn't a gambler or a killer like Robert Lee.
To avoid speculation that the government was abandoning Richmond in the face of a huge Federal buildup on the Rappahannock, Davis sneaked out of Richmond on a night train to Chattanooga, where he would see General Joseph Johnston, who had just established his headquarters there. He continued on to Murfreesboro, only thirty miles southeast of Nashville, where General Braxton Bragg's army was encamped. After a conference with Bragg, and over the strenuous objections of Johnston, Davis secured from Bragg's army a reinforced division, of about 9,000 men, to aid Pemberton during the present emergency. Having accomplished that, he returned to Johnston's headquarters, where he learned that Lee, with a force half its size, had hurled the 120,000-man Federal army back across the Rappahannock, leaving behind them 13,000 dead and wounded on the heights of Fredericksburg. Davis was of course greatly relieved, but Johnston received the report in a way that only underscored his resentments. “What luck some people have,” he remarked. “Nobody will ever come to attack me in such a place.”
Since Johnston had never visited the Mississippi front under his command, Davis asked him to come along to Vicksburg, and when “Uncle Joe” balked the president nearly had to order him to go. In any case, armed with the good news of Fredericksburg, the president and the commander of the western theater went on to the bluff city, arriving on December 19, 1862, where more news, good and bad, awaited them.
The good news was that a few days earlier one of Admiral Porter's most powerful ironclads, the Cairo, had ventured up the Yazoo River, never to return.
Several months before, Beverly Kennon, the Rebel navy officer previously stationed in New Orleans, arrived at Vicksburg with plans for an underwater explosive device he had been tinkering with. The torpedo, or mine, was not unknown to the Confederates; indeed, it had been used in Charleston and, as we have seen, might have been employed to great advantage during Farragut's attack on New Orleans. But the early ones had been activated by a percussion primer—that is, when a ship struck the mine a bullet in its nose would set off the explosion—and they were too often defective after exposure to the water.
The contraption Kennon had in mind would be electrically detonated, with copper wires suspended beneath the surface running to a camouflaged “torpedo pit” hidden on shore, where the mine would be manually set off with an electric battery. A number of these devices were assembled with the notion of protecting the Yazoo from further Yankee incursions, and the man selected to lead the mining enterprise was Lieutenant Isaac Brown, presently a captain without portfolio since the demise of the Arkansas. It was a deliciously wicked scheme and worked to perfection as the Cairo steamed insolently up the Yazoo. As her bow crossed over one of the five-gallon glass demijohns—large jugs used to store whiskey or make wine—that were filled with black powder, it exploded with such fury as to actually lift the huge warship right out of the water, and, just as she settled down again, a second mine blew up directly beneath her. Within ten minutes the pride of the U.S. Navy's Mississippi River fleet was lying on the bottom in thirty-six feet of water, earning her the dubious distinction as the first warship in history to be sunk by an electric underwater mine.*2
That was the good news. The bad news was what the Cairo was doing there in the first place. She had arrived a few days earlier with a flotilla of gunboats and other vessels, the first to darken Vicksburg's waters since Farragut had abandoned his designs the previous summer. Reports by Rebel spies at Memphis produced the ominous news that a large riverborne attack by Yankee infantry was in the making.
With the bulk of his force menaced by Grant's army north of Grenada—more than 150 miles away by rail—this new threat left Pemberton facing twin swords of Damocles. He had been forced to leave fewer than 6,000 men to defend Vicksburg itself and desperately needed relief. To that end he summoned the unpopular Earl Van Dorn for an important mission.
It seemed that a colonel of the Texas Brigade, which had recently been remounted as cavalry, had been ruminating on how the cause could best be served by men on horseback. His conclusion was that a great surprise raid employing most of the available cavalry in the department—about 4,700 sabers, including irregulars—could be staged far behind Grant's lines to cut him off from his base and force the Federals to retire. The notion became all the more attractive when Bragg decided to unleash Forrest around Memphis and, most especially, along the rail line from Columbus, Kentucky, that had become Grant's lifeline.
It was the Texas colonel's proposal that Holly Springs should be the target of this raid, since reports had arrived indicating that Grant was stockpiling enormous stores of food, ammunition, clothing, and other material there.
Pemberton heard the officer out, then sent for Van Dorn and appointed him to lead this delicate operation. The little Mississippian was profoundly grateful to accept the challenge, since he continued to remain in the doghouse because of the odious Order No. 9, the abortive Baton Rouge expedition, and most especially the failure at Corinth. Recently he had written his wife in frustration and disgust, “Until it pleases God to take me … I shall fight this war if I am left with no friends but my family.”
The first thing Van Dorn insisted upon was utmost secrecy and only a few high-ranking officers were told of the ultimate destination. In fact, the rank and file was not even told that he was to lead the expedition. Van Dorn handpicked the regiments that were to participate and made the decision not to bring along artillery, which would slow the column down. Instead he would rely on the shock and awe produced by 2,500 Confederate cavalrymen—the number finally settled upon—dashing out of what he hoped would be a misty dawn onto an unsuspecting enemy.
An additional advantage was that, until recently, Van Dorn and much of the cavalry had been posted in and about Holly Springs and knew their way around. Kickoff time for the raid was Tuesday, December 16, and, as usual for that time of year, the weather had turned horrible—rain and bone-chilling cold—but, even so, it might mask the noise of the advance. If everything went as planned, they would attack Holly Springs in four days. As the troopers rode out two abreast from their bivouac in the early hours, their column stretched nose to tail for more than three miles along the south bank of the Yalobusha. A member of Van Dorn's staff recalled that the controversial general “rode straight as an Indian, sitting astride his horse like a knight, and looking every inch a soldier.”
In particular, Johnston said he preferred an offensive-defense strategy that would rely on movement and opportunity rather than the static defense favored by Pemberton. In other words, Johnston was willing to give up as much ground as necessary to make that perfect shot he always had in mind. Pemberton, on the other hand, was trying to square the admonition Robert E. Lee had given him back at Charleston not to risk losing an army just to defend a particular point of ground with Lee's later reversal of that maxim, when he had counseled that if it came to defending Charleston, the city must be held “street by street and house by house.” Also there was Davis's charge that Vicksburg be retained at “all costs.”
There was something else, too, that in the end might have dramatically changed the outcome of the campaign. Across the river in Arkansas sat the Rebel army of Theophilus Holmes, said variously to contain between 35,000 and 50,000 men. Presently there was no Yankee force of any size in Arkansas, and both Johnston and Pemberton had been urging Davis to transfer at least some of these men over to Vicksburg, which seemed to them the obvious solution to counter Grant's invasion. That would have given Pemberton 50,000 men, including cavalry, and one of the rare opportunities for the Confederates to meet the enemy on more than equal terms.
The problem was, Holmes wouldn't budge. The secretary of war had written him a letter, which he believed constituted an order, to join Pemberton in Mississippi. No movement had been forthcoming, however, and the only thing accomplished was the resignation of the secretary of war, which he tendered after Davis chided him for sending an order to an army without clearing it with him first. Finally, while visiting Vicksburg, Davis himself wrote Holmes, who was in Little Rock, asking him to provide 20,000 men for Pemberton's aid. “We cannot at all points hope to meet the enemy with a force equal to his own,” Davis explained, “and must find our security in the concentration and rapid movement of troops.” That was all well and good, but then Davis added two sentences that sealed the fate of the enterprise. “I have thus presented to you my views, and trusting alike in your patriotism and discretion, leave you to make the application of them when circumstances will permit. Whatever may be done should be done with all possible dispatch.”
Holmes, a half-deaf fifty-eight-year-old North Carolinian and West Pointer, had, like so many ranking officers of both armies, served with distinction in the Mexican War. But he had been criticized by some for apathy, and was later appraised thusly: “Although undoubtedly the possessor of many soldierly qualities, it is apparent that he was unequal to his high rank.” He appeared to be one of those unfortunate commanders who recognizes all the problems lying before him but can never figure out a solution. At any event, Holmes seemed to take Davis's plea to heart, especially the part about “Whatever may be done should be done with all possible dispatch.” He immediately did nothing.
With all these things to consider, Pemberton decided to maintain his defensive front behind the Yalobusha River and await the results of Van Dorn's raid.
It was also about this time that Grant issued an odious order of his own, which would dog him all the way to the White House years after the war ended. Reports had continued to pile up that the cotton speculators were ignoring his warning about trading with the enemy in gold specie and greenbacks and, worse, actual contrabands of war (i.e., slaves). By December 17 Grant had heard enough and told Rawlins to issue the following decree, styled “General Orders No. 11”: “The Jews, as a class having violated 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.”
It went on to say that his post commanders would “see that all of this class of people … be required to leave,” and that any who didn't would be arrested and made prisoners, adding that no appeals would be heard by his headquarters or by anyone else within his authority.
The effect of the order was to banish not only the Jewish cotton traders and speculators who had come from all over the North, but also the numerous Jews who had long resided in Tennessee and Kentucky, from Memphis to Paducah, and all points in between.*3 And that was not to mention the Jews who were in Grant's own army. The results were immediate and devastating. Whole families were uprooted, some in the dead of night, and sent packing either up the Mississippi by steamboat or across the Ohio to Cincinnati and other cities. Many Union-loyal Jews who had nothing to do with cotton speculating were swept up in the dragnet when overenthusiastic officers rousted them out of house and home, carrying only the bare necessities. Horror stories were circulated, including that of a baby tossed bodily into a boat bound for the far side of the Ohio; many Jews who for one reason or another did not get the word in time were arrested and put in stockades.
Reaction by the Jewish community was not long in coming. A delegation of Jewish leaders from Kentucky sent a telegram of protest to Lincoln, and when that did no good one of them, Cesar Kaskel, took it upon himself to go to Washington and see what could be done.†1 Eventually, Kaskel received an audience with the president, who denied knowing anything about the matter. When it was explained, however, the following colloquy was said to have ensued.
“And so the children of Israel were driven from the happy land of Canaan?” Lincoln asked, to which Kaskel responded, “Yes, and that is why we have come unto Father Abraham, asking protection.”
“This protection they shall have at once,” was Lincoln's reply, and he sent Kaskel away with a note instructing General Halleck to cancel Grant's order—which he finally did a full month and more after it was issued. Later, Halleck wired Grant: “It may be proper to give you an explanation of the revocation of your order expelling all Jews from your department. The President has no objection to your expelling traitors and Jew peddlers, which, I suppose, was the object of your order, but as it proscribed an entire religious class, some of whom are fighting in our ranks, the President deemed it necessary to revoke it.”
As mentioned, the matter did not rest there but continued to ferment in the political cauldron until it arose again as an issue when Grant ran for president in 1868. What followed was an unseemly string of denials by several of Grant's old staff cronies to the effect that he was unaware of the order, and that subordinates had written it without his approval.
Of course Grant suspected nothing of those repercussions as he bided his time north of the Yalobusha, waiting for Sherman to shove off for Vicksburg and lure Pemberton's men away from his front. Later he would remember: “My action in sending Sherman back was expedited by a desire to get him in command of the forces separated from my direct supervision [McClernand's recruits]. I feared that delay might bring McClernand, who was his senior and who had authority from the President and the Secretary of War to exercise that particular command—and independently… I doubted McClernand's fitness.”
If Grant indulged himself in daydreams, it must have been doubly satisfying to picture McClernand standing on the dock at Cairo, furious as a bride left at the altar, when news of Sherman's departure came his way.
The first day they made a remarkable forty-six miles before stopping to rest around midnight. At dawn they were on the road again before bedding down for a few hours in a cold drizzle, and without fires so as to avoid detection by Yankee patrols. Passing through the village of Pontotoc they were treated to a lively reception by the townspeople, who lavished them with food and drink, but the urgency of the mission prompted Van Dorn to keep on pressing northward. It was near Pontotoc that they were spotted by a column of Federal cavalry. Its commander tried to warn Grant but, through some mix-up of the “I told him to do it” and “I ordered it done” variety, headquarters was not notified of this valuable information until the morning of Van Dorn's proposed attack.
On Thursday, December 18, both men and horses were near exhaustion and many troopers slept in their saddles as they went slip-and-stumble through the flooded bottomlands. Next day, as the unsuspecting Union garrison at Holly Springs was preparing for a Christmas holiday dance, Van Dorn's men were a mere thirty miles away. The weather had broken and turned snappy cold and they were now under the direction of local guides, who brought them down a little-known road that led into Holly Springs.
By midnight on the nineteenth, they had closed in on the town. As luck would have it, three Yankee cotton speculators turned up on the outskirts of town, and Van Dorn's men quickly relieved them of their clothing and their “trading passes,” and soon afterward three disguised Confederate cavalrymen entered Holly Springs bold as you please for a look around. They returned with good news: nobody suspected anything and the coast was clear.
Grant in fact had about 4,000 infantry posted in the vicinity, but only 1,500 in the town itself—and of these only about half were fighting troops, the rest being detail men. The fighting men were in several encampments ranging from half a mile to a mile from one another. Still, they were infantry, and infantry was considered an abomination to cavalry, owing to what massed rifle fire could do to horses. Be that as it was, Van Dorn decreed that the attack would begin at dawn.
Meantime, an orgy of blundering was under way between Grant's headquarters and the commander at Holly Springs. Just about the time that Van Dorn and his party were arriving outside town, alarming reports began to come in to Grant's nerve center down at Oxford. A slave had told Union scouts of a large body of Confederate cavalry on its way north. Then the commander of the original Federal scouts who had seen the gray raiders arrived in person to add his news. Other details followed rapidly over the telegraph, all pointing to an impending Rebel attack on Holly Springs.
Grant began sending messages ordering his available cavalry to get cracking against this dangerous intrusion behind his lines. Foremost, he sent a telegram to the post commander at Holly Springs, Colonel Robert Murphy, a Wisconsin lawyer and “political officer,” warning, “Jackson is moving north with a large force of cavalry … send out all the cavalry you can to watch their movements. I am sending the cavalry from the front.”*4 What Murphy made of this is unknown, but after alerting his cavalry as directed he went to bed.
The nervous slave informant was taken to the Holly Springs mansion in which Colonel Murphy was sleeping. It was now 5 a.m. Murphy heard out the slave and sent him on his way. The amazing thing is that the slave had carried Van Dorn's plan to Murphy as sure as if it had been handed over by Van Dorn himself. But instead of immediately rousting the garrison Murphy wrote out a telegram for Grant, saying, “Van Dorn only 14 miles from town, 5,000 cavalry, intending to destroy stores and dash on to Grand Junction. He is on the Ripley Road and expected to be here by daybreak. Have ordered out my cavalry, but my force is only a handful.”
And as if that was not amazing enough, Murphy then went back to bed, which is where he was found right after sunrise when all hell broke loose.†2
From their concealment a mere two hundred yards from the edge of town, Van Dorn's men, nearly all 2,500 of them, burst forth at a gallop, battle flags flying and pistols firing above the shrieking Rebel yell. They dashed right through one of the infantry encampments, where the startled and disbelieving occupants emerged from their tents in all manner of dress and undress before scattering up and down streets and alleys and across lawns and fields, including the town cemetery. Some ran all the way to Memphis, or so it was said. A brief, vicious sword fight broke out between part of an Illinois cavalry regiment and a Confederate detachment from Mississippi, but the Yankee horsemen were quickly subdued.
Half-dressed women came rushing from their homes to cheer the Rebels on, shouting, “Kill them! Kill them!,” some weeping with elation and relief. Children also appeared, clapping and waving small Confederate flags. The unfortunate Murphy was paraded before Van Dorn covered only with his humiliation and his nightshirt. Local lore has it that Ulysses Grant's wife, Julia, was likewise rousted from the comfortable home she had been occupying with the general before he went south, and Van Dorn ordered that a guard be posted at her door so that she would not be molested.*5
The raiders found much of what they had come looking for on Depot Avenue.†3 Here were the mountains of Federal stores that Grant's army depended upon to exist deep in enemy territory—warehouses filled with uniforms, shoes, food, rifles, pistols, ammunition, tents, saddlery, wagons—as well as a generous supply of whiskey and cigars, which were appropriated in no time at all by the jubilant raiders. Of course, this last became a concern to Van Dorn and his officers since the main purpose of the raid was to carry off or destroy all the Yankee supplies, and drunk soldiers do not make good stevedores. But after the arduous and scary march the raiders were not to be denied, and they set out to prove that drunk men do make good stevedores, with mixed results.
By midmorning, Confederate officers had distinguished between what could reasonably be carried away and what needed to be destroyed. There was so much that it staggered the imagination of the average trooper, who, under the Confederate system, had brought to the war his own horse, tack, pistol, saber, and uniform—and here all these things were for the taking. Many Rebels were seen stuffing half a dozen or more pistols into their blouses, and carbines were gathered, too, and handfuls of cigars and bottles of whiskey and tinned oysters and fruits. Some raiders helped themselves to fresh Yankee horses found in the Federal corrals.
On sidings adjacent to the depot warehouses were boxcars lined end upon end and packed to overflowing with untold riches. These were set afire, as were the stores in the warehouses themselves (and with the blessing of their owners, it might be added), since there was no time to carry the booty into the street for fear Union forces would soon be upon them. It was not an idle concern, for as soon as Grant discovered he no longer had telegraph contact with Holly Springs he would realize what had happened, and Van Dorn was well aware of that as well.
In midafternoon a pall of smoke hovered above Holly Springs and the surrounding countryside. Several homes and their outbuildings had inadvertently caught fire, including one containing Mrs. Grant's handsome new carriage. Van Dorn had detailed scouts in all directions to warn of approaching danger, while others were responsible for tearing up track so that a Federal relief force could not get at them by railroad. At 4 p.m., he decided that enough had been accomplished and it was best to git, while the gittin' was good.
To dispose of the large number of Yankee prisoners, which he obviously could not take with him, Van Dorn demanded that Murphy sign a document of surrender, including the provision that all Federal soldiers would be paroled, meaning that they would agree not to fight again until properly exchanged. Murphy was stupid enough to sign the paper, ensuring that if by chance a Union relief party suddenly arrived on the scene his 1,500 men would have been of no use to aid them.
With that, Van Dorn and the Holly Springs raiders rode out of town, heading north toward Tennessee, where they hoped to link up with Bedford Forrest and inflict even more mischief. That they did not succeed hardly mattered. As it was, they had destroyed some $1.5 million of Union supplies—worth $50 million today—and gave Grant a setback from which he was hard-pressed to recover. As usual, his enemies—including, naturally, the Northern press—were waiting in the wings with shrill cries and mean whispers.