rant was quick to grasp that speed and maneuver were the only tactics that could extricate him from this hellish topography and into a landscape favorable for fighting on his own terms. If it's true that a cat has nine lives, and if Grant had been a cat, then adding up all the previous failures to take Vicksburg would make this the last one.
Thus, when he reached the now-vacated town of Port Gibson, Grant at once set to building a bridge upstream across Bayou Pierre that could quickly take his columns farther north and east into open country. An old bridge at Port Gibson had been burned by the Confederates when they withdrew, but what Grant needed now was a new larger, sturdier bridge that could carry his entire army across, heavy guns, wagons, and all. He nominated his staff engineer James Wilson for the task, owing to Wilson's prior experience constructing bridges on the Louisiana side of the river. In retrospect, it was an extraordinary feat, since the water was high and running fast and there was quicksand in the bottoms. Wilson and the brigade that had been assigned to him plunged into the work that morning, tearing down “houses, stables, fences, etc.,” and by that same afternoon Grant had his bridge, fifty yards long and fifteen feet across—with side rails, no less—strong and safe enough to support a marching army*1
Meantime, Grant was faced with another problem that he alone was confident would be solved. The lead divisions of the army had crossed the river on April 30. It was now May 2, and their three-day rations were nearly exhausted. Grant ordered foraging parties to fan out for ten miles on either side of the advance, which developed into what was surely one of the oddest-looking military operations of the war. Since the army's supply wagons had yet to cross the river, it was decided to procure the necessary transportation vehicles from the citizens of Claiborne County, with which to rob them of their food. Yankee quartermasters, escorted by cavalry, soon were roaming the countryside in cotton wagons, buggies, gigs, carriages, oxcarts, fringed surreys, hansom cabs, goat wagons, buckboards, even logging sleds, and the booty they brought in was beyond even Grant's imagination: barrels of bacon and cured pork, flour, cornmeal, molasses, salt, and sugar; wagonloads of corn, hogsheads of cheeses and butter, herds of cattle, sheep, swine, and goats; flocks of geese, chickens, and ducks; jars of put-up vegetables and fresh ones if they had matured; plus the inevitable larders of whiskey, rum, and, from the finer plantations, vintage wines. All these things, so dear in the city, were found in abundance in the countryside, leaving one to conclude that hoarding had become commonplace.
About the only items Grant's people could not procure from the good residents of Mississippi were coffee, as Kate Stone eloquently attested; hardtack, which no self-respecting Mississippian would eat anyway—at least, at that point, of his or her own free will—and soap. Accordingly, Grant ordered ample supplies of these items, including 150,000 bars of soap, hauled down along the single-lane, jerry-built road through the Louisiana swamps, then ferried across the river from Hard Times to supplement the abundance of meat and groceries that the foragers were bringing in.
Sherman, who was presently marching his corps south along that very road, was appalled. He sent a message telling Grant, “This road will be jammed sure as life if you attempt to supply 50,000 men by one road.” To the Ohioan, Grant's response came like a bolt from the blue. “I do not calculate … supplying the army … from Grand Gulf,” Grant said. Hardtack, coffee, and salt was all he intended to bring over, adding that he would “make the country furnish the balance.” To Sherman—who had written to his wife, “No place on earth is favored by nature with natural defenses as Vicksburg, and I do believe the whole thing will fail”—it seemed like madness, but by then Grant already knew it could be done.
The foragers also left their usual calling cards or, as an Illinois soldier put it, “proofs of their customary lack of respect for the property of rebels,” in which the troops lolled about, “eating their bacon and hardtack from marble-topped tables and rosewood pianos.” As McClernand's and McPherson's divisions marched deeper into the interior of the state, these plantation homes, which Dana compared with “the finest villas on the Hudson,” were stripped of anything valuable, and often as not what couldn't be carried away was smashed or left to rot in the rain. Then, when Sherman's corps finally came across and found nothing left to loot, they reacted spitefully by burning down the houses.
Meantime, as well, Grant was surprised when his twelve-year-old son, Fred, accompanied by Charles Dana, walked into his headquarters house in Port Gibson. Grant had left the boy asleep aboard one of the steamers at Bruinsburg but, awakened by the distant rumble of the battle at Port Gibson, he had set out alone and on foot to find his father. Along the way he met up with Dana, and the two of them somehow acquired “two enormous horses, grown white with age,” Grant recalled, “each equipped with dilapidated saddles and bridles.” Grant was chagrined that he had “no facilities for even preparing a meal,” but they all managed to get by until the headquarters wagon trains were ferried across. Grant himself had endured the hardships with his men, “sleeping on the ground without blankets or covering of any kind, and having no baggage but a toothbrush,” according to the journalist Cadwallader.
By afternoon on May 2, McPherson's corps had marched all the way to Hankinson's Ferry on the Big Black River some twenty miles northeast of Grand Gulf, while McClernand's corps rested for a day in Port Gibson after the battle. By now not only had Grant's army flanked Grand Gulf but, by crossing Bayou Pierre upstream, they also threatened to cut off and capture Bowen's whole force. When this distressing news reached Pemberton, who had at last moved his headquarters from Jackson to Vicksburg, he reluctantly ordered Bowen to evacuate Grand Gulf. This was carried out in a timely, orderly, and effective fashion, with the men spiking the guns, blowing up the magazines, and making off with almost all the stores and baggage in the middle of the night to link up with Pemberton's army.
Grant had suspected as much but had no way of proving it, so on the morning of May 3 he rode off to find out for himself, with only a small cavalry escort. This certainly might have meant trouble if he had stumbled across Bowen's 9,000 men on their march from Grand Gulf, but as luck would have it he didn't. Porter, meantime, had taken notice of the explosions when the Confederates set off their magazines and decided to investigate. With several of his ironclads he steamed cautiously up to, then past, the Grand Gulf fortifications that had caused him so much grief a few days earlier. When nothing happened, he put in at the once formidable bastion and, discovering it deserted, hoisted the Star-Spangled Banner over its battered ramparts.
It wasn't long before Grant himself showed up, only to receive another perplexing surprise. It had been the expectation in Washington that once Grant crossed the Mississippi he would send at least a part of his army south to cooperate with Banks against Port Hudson. Grant understood this, and had already earmarked McClernand's corps for the assignment. It was a sound strategy too, at least on paper, because with Port Hudson taken the combined armies, as well as the navies under Farragut and Porter, could then converge on Vicksburg with an irresistible force. But as we have seen, Banks did not seem to appreciate this design, or felt he had greater priorities.
Back in March, instead of advancing his available force against Port Hudson, he had detailed more than half of it to chase after Dick Taylor's little army and to protect strongpoints in the wilds of Louisiana. Now Grant learned to his amazement and disgust—from a letter that Banks had sent three weeks earlier, but that only now had caught up with him at Grand Gulf—that Banks had taken his remaining 12,000 men deep into the Red River country, some 150 miles away from Port Hudson, to deal with Rebel problems there and would not be available at Port Hudson until May 10. Given this turn of events, Grant decided it would be better to leave the Massachusetts politician flopping around in the Louisiana bayous than to wait for him.
“The news from Banks forced upon me a different plan of campaign from the one intended,” Grant recalled. “To wait for his co-operation would have detained me at least a month. The reinforcements [Banks could bring] would not have reached ten thousand men after deducting casualties … [meanwhile] the enemy would have strengthened his position and been reinforced by more men than Banks could have brought. I therefore determined to cut loose from my base, destroy the Rebel force in rear of Vicksburg and invest or capture the city.”
Those were bold words but Grant meant every one of them, given that each tick of the clock magnified his vulnerability. It also might have crossed his mind that with Banks out of the picture he would be the senior general on the field and wouldn't have to share credit for the victory with anybody else. On the other hand, if there wasn't a victory Grant was willing to take the blame for that, too.
In Pemberton's headquarters the mood seemed to vacillate between anxiety and elation. As Grant was landing, Pemberton wired Davis that Port Hudson was being evacuated, “and the whole force concentrated for a defense of Vicksburg and Jackson.” But Davis wired back that it was necessary to hold both Vicksburg and Port Hudson, as “a connection with the Trans-Mississippi,” and told Pemberton to countermand the order. Pemberton did so in a kind of compromise that could have turned out to be one of his better decisions of the campaign, but didn't, through no fault of his own; he ordered Gardner to hold Port Hudson with 2,000 men and send the rest (about 8,000) to Jackson, from where they could be distributed as needed.
On May 2, during the Battle of Port Gibson, Pemberton again telegraphed Davis, “It will require 6,000 cavalry to prevent heavy raids and to keep railroad communications, on which our supplies depend. Vicksburg and Port Hudson have each about thirty days' subsistence at present.” This final sentence was freighted with meaning, although no one seemed to grasp it at the time. If Davis and the War Department expected Pemberton to hold Vicksburg and Port Hudson to the last, and if enough reinforcements could not be rushed in quickly to help defeat Grant's army in the field, or to lift a siege if it came to that, then Pemberton's estimate of thirty days of supplies spelled with clockwork precision how long those garrisons could last.
But as the desperate hours passed it appeared the urgent reinforcements might indeed arrive on time. From Beauregard's South Carolina command 5,000 were already boarding the trains, with 4,000 more set to follow. Likewise, Johnston was at last sending more than advice, telegraphing Pemberton that Forrest's cavalry was finally moving to his assistance. It was only a quarter of the 6,000 Pemberton had asked for but it was Forrest's, and to most minds that would make up the difference.*2 Meanwhile, other untapped sources of manpower were being set in motion, including 600 recently exchanged prisoners—a full regiment—whom Pemberton ordered to be rearmed and returned to the army. Hundreds more who had been guarding bridges on the Big Black River and other points on the railroad were told to come to Vicksburg.
Not only that, but Davis personally ordered Johnston to remove himself from Tennessee posthaste and go to Mississippi to supervise the defense of Vicksburg, taking with him 3,000 “good troops” from Bragg's army. The Virginian complied with alacrity, but with his usual caviling. “I shall go immediately, although unfit for service,” he replied, alluding to continued discomfort from his wounds at Seven Pines.
All this, coupled with the revelation that Sherman's corps had pulled out opposite the city's northern defenses, led Pemberton to wire Davis that even though Grant's army had established a foothold below, “With reinforcements, and with [Forrest's] cavalry promised in North Mississippi, [I] think we will be all right.”
This must have come as sweet music to Jefferson Davis, given that on that same day the Rebel Army of Northern Virginia had inflicted on the Yankees one of the most decisive beatings of the war at Chancellorsville, about fifty miles southwest of Richmond. Outnumbered two to one, Robert E. Lee had surprised, and then routed, the Federal army under Joseph Hooker. The only cloud over the triumph had come when Lee's most valuable lieutenant, Stonewall Jackson, had been mortally wounded. Nevertheless, with this almost miraculous victory, and with Pemberton's reassuring words from Vicksburg, Davis must have rested not only easier but supremely confident that the star of the Confederacy was again in the ascendant.
Pemberton might not have been so sure, but there was no panic at his headquarters as he evolved a plan of defense. There was no stopping Grant from landing the rest of his troops; Bowen's defeat at Port Gibson had seen to that. But landing was one thing; beating a sizable Confederate army on its own turf was another.
As Pemberton saw it, Grant's vulnerability lay in what would become an ever-lengthening line of supply. From its present position the Federal army was still about forty to fifty miles southeast of Vicksburg, and its base of supply was way up at Milliken's Bend on the Louisiana side of the river. There were only two ways to keep that supply line going. One was the rickety, tortured path through the swamps down to Hard Times that Sherman had complained about, and the other was to carry the provisions downriver by steamboats. This last had worked well enough the first two times, but when Grant had ordered a third fleet of transports to run the Vicksburg batteries they had fared poorly, with a number being sunk or inflamed, owing to much-improved gunnery by the Confederates, now that they had gained experience shooting at live moving targets.
Pemberton reasoned that the only way Grant could keep his army supplied was to establish a base north of Vicksburg, on the same side of the river, somewhere up the Yazoo, and to do that he would have to conquer the Rebel batteries at Haines's Bluff. Thus he concluded that he would have to keep Haines's Bluff fully manned.
At the same time, when Pemberton reviewed his maps in light of Grant's likely route of march, he saw before him an almost perfect defensive position in the rear of the city. This was the line of the Big Black, a deep river wide enough for steamboats that ran from the Mississippi at Grand Gulf and arced around his fortifications about ten miles east of the city. Its western banks—those on his side—were lined with bluffs, not as tall as Vicksburg's, of course, but formidable for any army that planned a cross-river assault.
If the Big Black had formed a complete arc back into the Yazoo, Vicksburg's rear defenses would have been immeasurably improved, especially if it had intersected with the Yazoo right on the east side of the Haines's Bluff bastion. But it did not, and there was the rub. Pemberton was convinced that Grant would hurry his army along the far side of the Big Black, using it as a shield, until he reached the spot where it began to narrow and turned off north. There, he predicted, Grant would try to force a crossing and secure his base on the Yazoo, with Porter's ironclads cooperating. And it was there that Pemberton intended to be waiting for him, if he didn't spot a better opportunity along the way.
Then Grant threw another curve. Instead of moving north along the Big Black, Grant's army made a beeline northwest, away from Vicksburg, and toward the Jackson-Vicksburg railway, with the object of cutting off Pemberton's lifeline for reinforcements and supplies. For a critical few hours Pemberton didn't know what to make of this, and he proceeded with his plan to concentrate his troops behind the Big Black. Accordingly, when William Loring and his division finally reached the area, as senior commander he ordered Bowen to march his division west alongside his own.
On May 10, the day Stonewall Jackson died, Grant gave his three corps commanders their order of march; it was to be a three-pronged attack. McClernand, on the left, was to hug the east bank of the Big Black, advancing toward the Confederate railroad and posting guards at river crossings to warn if Pemberton was coming out. McPherson, on the right, was to move toward Raymond, a town about ten miles west of Jackson, to guard against a Confederate movement from that direction. Sherman would march in the center toward Edwards Station, ready to lend support to either of the other corps, should they need it.
Grant knew that the ever-cautious Halleck never would have approved of his cutting loose from his base of supplies on the river, but he had a solution for that, too. He waited until right before the march to inform the general in chief of his plan—a message that would have to be carried by horseback to one of the transports, ferried across the river, hauled up the sloggy bayou road to Milliken's Bend, and placed on another transport bound all the way up to the telegraph depot at Cairo, Illinois, before it could be wired to Halleck. “I knew the time it would take to communicate with Washington and get a reply would be so great that I could not be interfered with,” Grant said laconically.
At that point, Grant was so confident of success that he ordered Hurlbut to send downriver a full division from his command at Memphis, plus another brigade to hold the base at Milliken's Bend. It was his intention, if necessary, to throw his entire command into the fight at this juncture, a risk he was willing to take, even though the politician in Grant was fully aware of the ramifications if he failed. These included, among other things, risking the defeat of the president and the future course the war would take, and upon these two subjects rested the fate of the United States. Whether Grant had read de Tocqueville or not, he had certainly read in the newspapers of the impatience with the war effort. It was one of the prices you paid for democracy.
At 3 a.m. on May 11 the Rebel general John Gregg, whose brigade had been one of those recently ordered up from Port Hudson, was in camp near Jackson when he received an urgent telegram from Pemberton, ordering him to take his troops to Raymond immediately. Reports had come in that a large column of Yankee infantry was marching in that direction from Utica, a town about twelve miles southeast. Pemberton's message said that Wirt Adams's cavalry would be at Raymond for scouting purposes, but when Gregg arrived that afternoon all he found “was a single sergeant and 4 men,” plus a local mounted company composed “of youths of the neighborhood.”
Gregg, a native Alabamian turned Texas lawyer and politician, sent a message to Adams, who had made his headquarters at Edwards Station, about twenty miles west, telling him to come at once to Raymond, then began placing his brigade in position to meet the Federal advance. From the scanty intelligence he had received, Gregg believed the enemy was nothing more than a brigade about his own size “on a marauding excursion.” In fact, what he would soon be facing was McPherson's entire corps, 12,000 strong, but unequal as the fight was Gregg's men would give more than they got for the better part of the day.
The clash began about 11 a.m. when the division of John “Black Jack” Logan, another political general, ran into the Rebel front and were heavily and bloodily repulsed. A vicious attack by Gregg threw Logan off balance, but when he recovered and reinforced he launched a counterattack of his own, which likewise failed. By then, however, as Gregg watched regiment after regiment of bluecoats begin wrapping around his flanks, he realized he was up against a leviathan and somehow managed to disengage before he was crushed.
As Gregg's soldiers retreated through the tree-lined streets they found no time to stop and partake of the elaborate picnic dinner that the ladies of Raymond had prepared for them in honor of their anticipated victory. While Gregg formed his men in defensive position five miles northeast of Raymond to have another go at McPherson, the blue-clad victors arrived in town and helped themselves to what they considered a well-earned hot meal. It had been a nasty little fight, with the Rebels suffering 515 killed, wounded, or missing and McPherson losing 442. As at Port Gibson, the Confederate losses were far greater in proportion to the number of troops they had on the field.
Anne Martin, a daughter of the Vicksburg Whig editor Marmaduke Shannon, watched indignantly as “that immense army pour[ed] into [Raymond], flaunting their star spangled banner, playing Yankee Doodle, and, oh, the desecration! The Bonnie Blue Flag … All night the fife and drum was heard as fresh regiments passed … we could hear them tearing down fences, shooting cattle, shouting and going on and we expected every minute to be broke in on … the doors were locked but they broke them open and took everything but one sidesaddle, even pulled the curtains down and tore them in strings. The remaining sidesaddle was taken by one of these fancy yellow [mulatto] girls, an especial pet of one of their officers… We could see them bringing all kinds of plunder, showing around silverware and jewelry they had stolen. If you are ever invaded, Emmie, don't bury anything… Hearing that Mrs. Robinson had buried her silverware, they dug up every foot of her garden until they found it. Mrs. Durden's baby was buried in the yard and would you believe it: that child's remains were dug [up] no less than three different times in search of treasure. This is how we fared at the hands of the Yankees.”
These unfortunate episodes made little or no impression on the commanders of the two opposing armies, although Pemberton had officially, and in writing, expressed concern that by defending Vicks-burg and its immediate environs he would, by necessity, be leaving the rest of the state beholden to the tender mercies of the Yankee army. For Grant, the favorable results of the battle for Raymond provoked a quick shift in strategy. Rather than simply settle for breaking the rail line to Vicksburg, he now decided to order a ninety-degree wheel to the east and assault Jackson itself, clearing the city of enemy troops and rendering it useless as a Rebel reinforcement center and operating base.
That same day, Johnston arrived in Jackson as Jefferson Davis ordered. What he found there was a total of 6,000 troops, with Gregg as senior commander, and news that Sherman's 16,000-man corps was astride the Jackson-Vicksburg railway about ten miles west of the city. The fact that it was actually McPherson's corps, not Sherman's, along the rail tracks did not matter; Sherman was in the area in any event, down toward Raymond.
Despite the fact that Johnston was also told that some 5,000 reinforcements were scheduled to arrive either the next day or the day after, the Virginian straightaway decided that the cause was hopeless and ordered an evacuation of the city. “I am too late,” he wailed in a telegram to Confederate secretary of war James Seddon, as if to absolve himself of blame in case a disaster occurred. It was strange that he was able to reach this conclusion, given that he had no way of knowing whether the Yankee force on the railroad was coming after him, holding still, or going in the opposite direction. Stranger yet, he sent off a dispatch to Pemberton, telling him to bring up all his forces and fall on the enemy's rear, offering to “cooperate” with the troops he had on hand at Jackson.*3 “To beat such a detachment,” Johnston advised, “would be of immense value.” Finally, Johnston ordered Gregg to oversee the defense of the city by a delaying action until the evacuation could be accomplished.
While Johnston retired to his room at the Bowen House hotel, Gregg began marching his two brigades out of Jackson at night toward the Yankee host that had been reported gathering to the west at Clinton. In the meantime, the Rebel general John Adams, who was commanding the district of Jackson, was assembling rail and wagon trains for removing all the military stores and munitions in preparation for taking them northward. (Earlier in the week Pemberton, in anticipation of a possible attack on the capital, had advised Governor Pettus to move all vital state records and documents to a place of safety.)
Gregg's defense of Jackson was just as courageous and just as futile as his defense of Raymond. Early that morning it had begun to pour rain, turning the roads to glue, slowing the Union advance. But by noon a full-fledged engagement was in progress, with the Rebels giving ground foot by surly foot to allow Johnston's evacuation to proceed.
About that same time, Pemberton received Johnston's message of the previous night. It placed him in a quandary, but apparently not one that included Johnston's admonition to march his army into Grant's rear and start a fight. Pemberton had assembled some 23,000 men at Edwards Depot, located on the rail line about twenty miles due west of McPherson's Yankee corps at Clinton and thirty miles from Jackson, leaving another 7,500 to hold Vicksburg and 3,000 more to guard various bridges and crossroads.
Later, he summed up his appreciation of the Virginian's strategy thusly: “The ‘detachment’ General Johnston speaks of in his communication consisted of four divisions of the enemy, constituting an entire army corps, numerically greater than my whole available force in the field.” This of course was untrue. McPherson had only two divisions at Clinton, totaling about 11,000 men, but Pemberton went on to reiterate the superior numbers of Grant's army, concluding that “the movement expressed by General Johnston was extremely hazardous.” Then he did what any commander of his limited combat experience would do under such vexing circumstances: he called a council of war. When the council disagreed with him, though, he ignored it.
Half a dozen generals were assembled for Pemberton's pitch. He told them of Johnston's order to march the army into Grant's rear, and of Johnston's proposal to cooperate with his force at Jackson. Even though Pemberton had reluctantly answered Johnston's dispatch by agreeing to comply with the order, he now opposed the idea. He told the council that he was now convinced it was best to pull back to the robust positions on the west side of the Big Black and let Grant break his army apart on the Rebel defenses when he tried to attack them.
From what he knew at this stage, Pemberton argued, not only was a full Union corps before him at Clinton, but to the southeast McClernand's corps was ready to attack him as well, as soon as he moved forward. He stated that he considered it his solemn duty to first defend Vicksburg itself, even if it meant leaving Grant's army to ravage the rest of Mississippi. Jefferson Davis had personally ordered him to “hold Vicksburg at all costs,” he said. It is over this clash of opinions that a war of words has roiled discussion of the Battle of Vicksburg from that day to this.
A majority of the generals disagreed with Pemberton. They had an army that wanted to fight, they argued; the Yankees were on Mississippi soil, and they wanted to get at them here and now. Johnston's order should be obeyed, they said. However, the minority, led by Loring, felt the best move would be to attack Grant's rear between Jackson and Grand Gulf and cut off his supply line. This, it was maintained, would force the Federals to retreat.
It was an alternative with both merits and disadvantages, chief among the latter being that, unbeknownst to the Rebels, Grant's army had no supply line but was “living off the land.” At least that's the way Grant liked to tell it in the years to come. In fact he did have a very important supply line that consisted of the munitions trains that kept his army in bullets, powder, shot, and shell, without which it would be useless, as well as the pipeline for Union reinforcements. If that line could be cut, and the landing spots at Grand Gulf and Bruinsburg retaken, Grant would be forced to either fight the Confederate army at a place of their choosing or cut his way out of Mississippi any way he could.
Pemberton preferred to stick to his own strategy, convinced that major reinforcements would be coming from other parts of the Confederacy—enough to outnumber and beat Grant with a superior army. Nevertheless, with the vote of the others strongly in favor of going on the offensive now, he reluctantly opted for Loring's proposal.
Since Loring had championed the idea, Pemberton sent him off first, in the direction of Dillon's plantation, about seven miles to the southeast. Then he scribbled a message to Johnston, informing the commanding general that his order to attack was not to be obeyed, and that he was going to go after Grant's supply line. He closed this missive almost plaintively, saying, “I wish very much I could join my reinforcements,” making several suggestions as to how this could be accomplished. What he didn't know was that there would be no reinforcements. Joe Johnston had sent them all away.
Ever since Grant's army began moving inland, Confederate authorities at Jackson had been digging earthworks and rifle pits, using slave labor as well as civilian volunteers. This was to be the last-ditch line of defense, after Gregg moved his army out toward Clinton to meet and stall the Yankees. The Union force consisted of the two divisions of McPherson's XVII Corps, aligned on the Vicksburg-Jackson railway northeast of the city, as well as two divisions of Sherman's XV Corps, which was approaching from the southwest. Owing to a lack of good reconnaissance, Gregg had been prepared to meet McPherson, but Sherman's appearance was news to him, until it was too late.
During the early hours of May 14 it began to rain heavily and by sunup the roads were a sea of paste as McPherson's men trudged their way toward Jackson. Skirmishers from the two forces met at about 9 a.m. as the skies began to clear, just west of the deaf and dumb asylum on the Clinton road. At first sight of the enemy main force, the Confederates attacked amid a furious cannonade by a Mississippi battery that sent the Yankees scattering. But the bluecoats quickly regrouped and re-formed with a series of well-coordinated regimental maneuvers that slowly began to outflank the Rebel force. As planned, Gregg gave ground obstinately until about 2 p.m., when word came that the last evacuation trains were on their way out of Jackson. He then ordered his men to withdraw and join the rest of Johnston's retreat northeast toward the town of Canton.
Good order and a spirited defense had been the hallmarks of Gregg's command, but a comparable analogy could not be made with the defenders of the city's southwest approaches. Because Sherman's attack there had not been anticipated, the Confederates had posted only a single brigade plus some assorted detail units and a group of civilian volunteers. At the first roar of Sherman's artillery batteries, these frightened men absconded without even burning their bridges behind them, and Sherman moved easily into town, capturing three Rebel field batteries—nine cannons in all—and several hundred prisoners of war.
The Battle of Jackson had cost 1,000 or so casualties, and though it got better play in the press because it involved a Rebel state capital it was nonetheless considered a minor engagement, at least to those with no personal stake in it. As with Port Gibson and Raymond, the Confederates suffered the most casualties, having used two brigades to defend against four enemy divisions—odds of six to one. The long-term effect of this was summed up dramatically by Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Fremantle, a British officer of the famous Coldstream Guards, who had come to America to observe the Civil War. He later told some Rebel officers, “Don't you see your system feeds upon itself? You cannot fill the places of these men. Your troops do wonders, but every time at a cost you cannot afford.”
That evening Grant, Sherman, and McPherson parleyed at the Bowen House hotel, opposite the Mississippi capitol building, with Grant occupying the room Johnston had just vacated. There, the commanding general laid out his plans for Pemberton's undoing, based on the intercepted orders from Johnston that the Union spy had betrayed to McPherson. The corps of McClernand and McPherson, Grant said, would deploy to intercept and destroy Pemberton's army as it marched toward Clinton. Meantime, Sherman was to linger in Jackson another day to “destroy [it] as a railroad centre, and manufacturing city of military supplies,” which, Grant delicately added, “he did most effectually.”
Along those lines, earlier that day Grant and Sherman had visited a Jackson cloth factory, which had continued to operate throughout the battle, its machinery manned “mostly by girls.” They stayed long enough to see tent cloth bearing the letters “C.S.A.” coming off the looms, whereupon Grant told Sherman, “I think they have done work enough” and ordered the girls sent home, “taking with them as much cloth as they wanted.” Then, over the pleas of the owner, who pointed out that the girls were impoverished and would have no jobs, Sherman had the place torched.
Likewise he had his troops destroy all the rail tracks leading in and out of Jackson,*4 blow up an arsenal, incinerate a foundry, and wreck or burn any other public property that might “contribute to the enemy war effort.” This last Sherman interpreted most liberally and his corps, which had already developed a particular flair for arson, was only too happy to participate. In the process of carrying out their mission, his men managed to burn down the Catholic church, two hospitals, a carriage factory, the public stables, an entire city block of private and public buildings near the capitol—even the state penitentiary, which Sherman later protested was done by the convicts themselves.
Colonel Fremantle, the British observer, had joined Johnston around the time of the evacuation and said of the Union occupation, “During the short space of thirty-six hours, in which General Grant occupied the city, his troops … had gutted all the stores, and destroyed what they could not carry away.” By the time Sherman departed the next afternoon, half the town was in flames, including whole blocks of private homes, with only their smoldering chimneys still standing, leaving Jackson with the sorrowful nickname “Chimneyville.” As he rode away Sherman declared that Jackson “can be of little use to the enemy for six months,” later blaming most of the looting, vandalism, and arson on the unauthorized use of liberated whiskey and rum. Then he marched his corps westward toward Vicks-burg to join McPherson and McClernand for what they were now certain would be a quick and decisive end to the campaign.
Joe Johnston said that he was furious at Pemberton for disobeying his orders to attack Grant's rear, but if he had been sincere in his desire to unite their two forces he had an odd way of showing it. As soon as Johnston heard that reinforcements were within just a few hours' reach of Jackson, he sent urgent messages for them to halt and move off in the opposite direction. First to receive these alarming instructions was Brigadier General Samuel B. Maxey, West Point graduate and veteran of the Mexican War, aboard a train from Port Hudson with his 3,000-man brigade, which had stopped at a depot thirty miles south of Jackson. There, Maxey was handed a wire stating, “Halt! Don't come any farther. Fall back on your wagons…. Go in the direction of Port Hudson.”
Maxey suspected the message might be a Yankee trick, so he detached the engine from the rail cars and sent it and one of his aides toward Jackson to see what was going on. A few miles south of the city the aide encountered a man coming toward him on a handcar carrying another message from Johnston's headquarters directing Maxey to “take measures to save your command by crossing the Pearl River,” which was in the opposite direction from Jackson. Bewildered that instead of being the savior he himself was now in need of being saved, Maxey obeyed instructions and took himself out of the fight.
A similar warning was sent to a brigade coming from South Carolina, commanded by Brigadier General States Rights Gist, a thirty-two-year-old Harvard-educated lawyer and son of the former governor of that state whose given name was the very epitome of the Lost Cause. Gist was within ten miles of Jackson when a courier intercepted him with orders to divert his leading elements—1,500 men—fifty miles away from the city. Likewise two brigades from Bragg's Tennessee army under Brigadier Generals Evander McNair and Matthew Ector were halted at Meridian, just a few hours from Jackson by rail.
Having thus sent away all these hard-to-come-by reinforcements—more than 10,000 men—Johnston sent a curt message to Pemberton saying: “Your dispatch of yesterday just received. Our being compelled to leave Jackson makes your plan impracticable. The only mode by which we can unite is by your moving directly to Clinton, informing me that we may move to that point with about 6,000.” Then Johnston proceeded with the rest of his command toward Canton, which was about twenty-five miles northeast of Jackson, instead of swinging them around southeast to effect the union with Pemberton's army he said he desired.
The whole affair was handled poorly on the Confederate side, with Johnston dithering Hamlet-like on the outskirts of Jackson while Pemberton vacillated between there and Vicksburg like a rat trapped in a maze. If Pemberton had taken out his adding book on May 14, he would have discovered that with the 23,000 troops he presently had in the field, and the almost 10,000 he had left behind at Vicksburg or elsewhere on guard duty, he could have assembled a 33,000-man army that would have been at least the equal to anything Grant could have thrown against him at that point, given that Sherman's corps was in Jackson. Rarely had any Confederate general been offered such favorable numerical odds.
The fact that Pemberton felt compelled to leave nearly 10,000 infantry in Vicksburg is testimony enough to the conflict of command between his ultimate superior, Davis, who had told him to hold Vicksburg and Port Hudson at all costs, and the instructions of his immediate superior, Johnston, who had told him when the Federals began their invasion, “If Grant crosses unite all your forces and beat him.” Pemberton interpreted these orders to be mutually exclusive, and thus tried to accommodate both, which usually results in bad consequences, as it did now.
Moreover, if Johnston hadn't panicked and decided to retreat from Jackson, but instead told Gregg to pull back to the entrenchments around the city and hold on “at all costs”—and had he not sent his new reinforcements away—Johnston's army by the afternoon of the fourteenth should have numbered more than 17,000. And even if Johnston couldn't hold Jackson, if he had looped his 17,000 men around to the northwest and united with Pemberton, then a concentrated Rebel army—combined with those still in Vicksburg—would have numbered some 50,000, again, enough to deal with Grant on an equal basis. This also would have given Johnston the advantage of a direct supply line to the provisions and munitions stored at Vicksburg, not to mention vastly superior knowledge of the terrain.
But Johnston did not do these things, and Pemberton did not do these things, and now each was marching off in a different direction, one from the other.
Jefferson Davis was understandably alarmed by the news from Mississippi—at least from what he could get of it, now that the telegraph from Jackson and Vicksburg had been cut by the Yankees. In Richmond, the surge of elation following Lee's brilliant victory at Chancellorsville was dampened by grief over the death of Stonewall Jackson, and on its heels came intense anxiety over the fate of Vicksburg and the war in the West, which Davis considered one and the same, even if others did not. Johnston, for one, complained to the authorities in the Confederate capital, “The near danger appears to be much greater than the distant one.”
Davis, however, was doing all he could. When it became clear after Chancellorsville that the menace from the Army of the Potomac had passed, at least temporarily, the president went to Lee to see if he could send some of his troops to Mississippi to assist Pemberton. After all, Longstreet and most of his large corps was still down in North Carolina, having missed the Chancellorsville fight entirely. If these troops could be rushed to Vicksburg in time, then Grant might well be destroyed in a powerful pincers movement between Jackson and the river.
Lee was not amenable to the idea. What he had in mind, he told the president, was to go on the offensive and march his entire army north through Maryland and into Pennsylvania. Among other things, he said, this would likely create a diversion to keep Grant from being reinforced. As to Longstreet, the general continued, if the Yankees discovered he had gone to Mississippi, they would probably launch another attack on Richmond. Besides, he said, Longstreet's corps would be sorely needed in the Pennsylvania invasion to make up for the 13,000 casualties his army had suffered at Chancellorsville.
Abraham Lincoln was likewise apprehensive over the situation then developing in the West. The catastrophe at Chancellorsville had hit him particularly hard—like a “thunderbolt,” according to his friend the California journalist Noah Brooks, who described the president when he got the news as pacing his office in the White House, groaning, “My God! My God! What will the country say! What will the country say!”
Lincoln simply could not seem to find proper leaders for his armies; either they were outgeneraled like Hooker, Burnside, and Pope or they were dilatory like Rosecrans, McClellan, Buell, and Banks. Now, having just been handed another humiliating defeat in the East, the pressures were building, not only against Lincoln's war policy but also against his administration in general, following enactment of the Emancipation Proclamation.
In fact the nation was growing war weary, just as de Tocqueville had prophesied, and the so-called Peace Party, composed of Democrats, was gaining popularity. And from the Midwest reports had begun to filter back about a secretive antiwar organization called the Knights of the Golden Circle, said to be planning to overthrow the government.
General Burnside solved part of the problem, or so he thought, right after he was named the new head of the Department of the Ohio following his defeat at Fredericksburg. Upon arriving in Chicago, Burnside learned that the obnoxious Clement Vallandigham was stumping around Illinois preaching against the war in general and Lincoln in particular. The former congressman's remarks so incensed Burnside that he had Vallandigham arrested in the middle of the night and thrown in jail for treason. When Vallandigham asked for a writ of habeas corpus, Burnside himself denied it. Not only that, but when the antiwar Chicago Tribune objected in its pages that Vallandigham's arrest was unconstitutional Burnside had the newspaper closed down.
One could easily see Burnside's point: if Vallandigham's tirades did not constitute treason, what did? On the other hand, there were many thousands in the North—perhaps hundreds of thousands—who felt exactly the way Vallandigham did. Was it now against the law to express one's opinions about the war? The notion was a sticky one to contemplate, and the Vallandigham affair immediately created a furor, mainly with the press, which is always by nature sensitive to such things as the First Amendment, but also among civil liberties advocates. Lincoln felt compelled to overrule his Indiana general, but with Solomon-like perspective. He had Vallandigham released from jail but then banished him south, inside Rebel lines, where he could rant and rave all he wanted. Then the president ordered Burnside to let the Tribune reopen, and not to fool with it again, thus letting word get out to the other departmental commanders that newspapers were sacrosanct.
Nevertheless, Lincoln knew the situation at Vicksburg was dicey, with Grant down there all by himself and no fast way to get him help. If Grant's army somehow got gobbled up, Lincoln would be in political trouble and he knew it, and yet he managed to appear optimistic throughout the battle. Despite the continuing hubbub regarding Grant's alleged drunkenness, the president wrote his old friend the Illinois congressman Isaac Arnold, “Whether or not Gen. Grant shall or shall not consummate the capture of Vicksburg 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.”
When the telegraph to Jackson went dead, the citizens of Vicks burg became suspended in a limbo of rumor and uncertainty. One, however—Lida Lord, daughter of the Episcopal minister Dr. William Wilberforce Lord—did not “doubt either the valor or wisdom of our generals, but felt confident [of] the speedy surrounding and utter annihilation of Grant's army.”
That was wishful thinking, since Pemberton, whether or not he knew it, was dancing on the sharp edge of a knife. As he maneuvered south to cut off the enemy supply line, the last thing he wanted was to tangle with Grant's army, but that was exactly what Grant had in mind.
Since it had originally been Loring's idea to attack Grant's supply line, Pemberton had him lead off the march before daylight on May 15, followed by the divisions of Bowen and Stevenson and, lastly, the four-hundred-wagon supply train. From the beginning things began to go sour.
First, someone at Pemberton's headquarters had forgotten to order up food and munitions from Vicksburg, and that caused a delay of six or seven hours. Then Loring reported that a ford across Baker's Creek about two miles from Pemberton's headquarters at Edwards Station was unusable owing to high water from a torrential downpour the night before. That prompted another delay of several hours while the lead elements took an awkward detour. There was no excuse for these lapses other than sloppy staff work. Pemberton and Loring both should have sent scouts and engineers to reconnoiter the route of march, and the failure to bring up provisions was plainly unforgivable.
The result of these two blunders was that instead of hitting the Yankee supply route with an irresistible force at sunrise the next morning, the army was forced to stop in its tracks and camp for the night with Loring's lead division no farther than three miles from the original starting point on the railroad line. Nevertheless, the men were in fine spirits and spoiling for a fight. A Tennessee officer in Stevenson's division enthused just before his men marched out that they were “fighting for their properties, for their families, for their rights [and] can't be subjugated,” adding that they were “all joyful and full of glee marching perhaps into the jaw of death.” That may well have been so but, before the army could resume its march the next morning, the courier that Johnston had sent from Jackson finally arrived with his message informing Pemberton that his plan was “now impracticable” and again ordering him to march east to unite the two forces.
Pemberton at this point considered such a tactic suicidal, but orders were orders. He immediately issued instructions for the army to turn around and march the other way, which, by itself, was a difficult maneuver; first, all those four hundred wagons would have to be turned around so that they'd become the head of the column instead of the tail and it was while this was being done that a most fateful collision of the campaign at Vicksburg began.
Ever since first light the ominous thuds of artillery fire had sounded in the distance, indicating that some kind of contact had been made with the enemy. As Pemberton and his staff rode forward to see what the matter was, he encountered Loring, who advised the commanding general that “the sooner [Pemberton] formed a line of battle the better, as the enemy would soon be upon us.” Pemberton concurred and sent word to all division commanders. So after first having faced south to cut a Federal supply line, then reversing itself to face north for the union with Johnston, the Confederate army now turned east to face U. S. Grant.
Unlike Pemberton, Grant had moved with alacrity after leaving Sherman to tend business in Jackson. Armed with the revelations in Johnston's purloined order telling Pemberton to move forward and attack Grant's rear at Clinton, Sherman now had his army do an about-face and march west to meet the Confederates. McClernand's and McPherson's corps marched toward Vicksburg on parallel roads until dark when they went into bivouac. Ironically, as the men of both armies bedded down that night they were a mere four miles apart, though no one on either side knew it. The fact that Pemberton had first disregarded Johnston's order to move on Grant's base of supplies, then reversed himself again and was turning east to link up with Johnston, was not just immaterial; instead, it played right into Grant's hands. As luck would have it Grant caught the Rebel army at a most vulnerable time: strung out on the march for three miles, just when it was trying to change directions.
The earlier firing that Pemberton had heard resulted when the ubiquitous Wirt Adams and his cavalry ran into a brigade from McClernand's corps that was advancing down the Raymond road. Eventually it swelled into a constant, unsettling noise, but a major battle had not been joined. It was a little after 10 a.m.
Even though Pemberton had not wanted a fight at this point, the good thing was that the route of march his army had been following lay along a low ridgeline beginning at Champion Hill, the cotton plantation of Sid and Matilda Champion, and extended southward to the Raymond road. Champion Hill itself sloped gently down some seventy feet to the same kind of countryside Grant had found so nightmarish when he had first landed on the Mississippi side of the river: cut up by steep ravines, streams, ridges, canebrakes, thick timber, and underbrush fit only for the bears, wild boars, panthers, and other creatures that inhabited it. It meant that Grant's army would have to travel on the three available dirt roads that ran east to west, and on these Pemberton had set up roadblocks. That was the good news. The bad news was that Grant outnumbered him by about two to one.
Stevenson's division, which had been last in the original line of march, now became first and set up defensively on Champion Hill, unlimbered its artillery, established field hospitals, and waited for the Yankees to appear. To their immediate south the Missourians and Arkansans of Bowen's division did the same and, farther south still, Loring's men followed suit. They would not have long to wait.
Part of McClernand's corps had come up opposite Loring's and Bowen's divisions but, because Grant had instructed the commanders to “move forward cautiously,” they did not attempt to bring on a general attack but contented themselves with engaging each other in an artillery duel. The Confederates ran their guns out in front to provide a lively exchange, but before long the rifled Yankee Parrot guns began to take their toll on the Rebel smoothbores and they were slowly forced back to the main battle line. This, however, led Pemberton to assume that Grant's attack would fall on his right, while just the opposite was true.
In fact, something very sinister was afoot in the deep woods in front of Stevenson's division on Champion Hill, which lay near the Vicksburg-Jackson road about half a mile from the rail tracks. Brigadier General Alvin P. Hovey, a contentious Indiana lawyer who took to soldiering “just as if he expected to spend his life in it,” had marched his division down the Jackson road until he came upon a skirmish line sent out by the Rebel general Stephen Dill Lee, who had performed so well during the Battle of Chickasaw Bluffs. Eager to get at his enemy, but wary of Grant's instruction to proceed with caution, Hovey sent a message to McClernand asking if he should attack. McClernand, who was farther south with the main body of his corps, passed the decision on to Grant.
Grant decided to have a look-see and rode to the front, but he was not pleased with what he found. The ground the Rebels had picked to defend, he wrote later, “whether by accident or design,” was well chosen, and he opted to wait until McPherson's corps was up before launching an all-out assault. Meantime, Hovey reported that scouts had found Champion Hill full of Rebels, and that Confederate artillery fire had become so heavy that he would have to either move his men forward or retire. When the first of McPherson's divisions—that of John Logan—arrived, Grant sent it around to the right, hoping to flank Carter Stevenson's division, but the latter shifted Stephen Lee's Alabama brigade to conform to the Yankee movement.
By “refusing” his flank, Stevenson had prevented an almost certain disaster, but in doing so he left a dangerous gap between Lee and Brigadier General Alfred Cumming's brigade of Georgians. Now Cumming was faced with a dilemma, because if he shifted to conform to Lee it would leave a six-gun battery that had been covering a vital crossroads unprotected, and if he did not it would leave the unacceptable gap. The situation perfectly illustrates the problem of being outnumbered by an enemy, who can simply keep extending around until you are left too thin to effectively resist. Cumming eventually decided to divide his force, sending half into the gap and the other half to defend the guns. It wasn't a perfect solution but it would have to do. There wasn't any perfect solution.
With Logan's division now in line with Hovey's and the artillery and long-range rifle fire getting hotter by the moment, Grant was confronted with the choice of going forward to attack now or waiting for McPherson's other division under Brigadier General Marcellus Crocker to come up. That would have provided him an overwhelming superiority of three divisions against Stevenson's one, but it would also allow the Rebels time to improve their defenses. At 10:30 Grant gave the go-ahead and the bluecoats began moving forward.
It was very rough going to reach Champion Hill. An Indiana soldier reported that his company had to “pull ourselves up the sides of the ravines by the bushes.” All the while the Confederate artillery was playing on the Yankee line, but because it was shielded behind the cut-up terrain little damage was done. Within the hour the bluecoats had reached the foot of the hill two hundred yards from the Rebel line, and McPherson gave the order to storm the heights. From Stevenson's horrified perspective—and probably Pemberton's, too, since he was in a position to watch it—the double-rank Yankee formation had added at least two brigades that had not been spotted previously, so that along the Confederate front the enemy line appeared as a giant door, about to be swung shut, overlapping Stevenson's extended left flank.
At 11:30 the Federal attack exploded out of the woods directly up the face of Champion Hill led by Hovey's Indianans, bayonets fixed and glinting in the springtime sun. The section of the line they happened to fall upon was manned by Cumming's thinned-out Georgians. Despite a murderous fire from four Rebel guns just below the crest of the hill, the Federals braved the double-shotted canister and overwhelmed the position in five minutes, capturing the Confederate guns in the bargain.
Meantime, Lee had managed to repulse successive charges by Black Jack Logan's division, but Cumming's collapse to his right compelled him to withdraw. For the better part of an hour and a half the battlefield was consumed in desperate and bloody fighting, at times involving gun butts, bayonets, fists, knives, and artillery sponge staffs. The din was at once breathtaking and terrible, as the nonstop roar of scores of cannons offered an earsplitting backdrop to the incessant musketry, which, to a young girl trapped in her home during the battle, sounded “like the crackling of a canebrake that is on fire.” A lieutenant in an Ohio regiment watched as the first man in his company to die was shot in the head going up Champion Hill, then the lieutenant gasped in horror as his own brother was shot through the heart.
“He had his gun at the ready, about to aim, and as he fell in death, he pitched his musket toward the enemy; it fell with the bayonet stuck in the ground, the stock standing up,” the soldier wrote after the war.
Back in the rear, the sawbones in the field hospitals were attending to their grim work. One of them, Dr. William Beach of London, Ohio, who had set up his surgical station at the Champion House—which was also Grant's headquarters—remembered seeing Grant and his staff dismount at the gate of an abandoned farmhouse he had set up as a surgical station for Logan's division. “The steady roar of battle had rolled from Hovey's front by this time to that of Logan's, which was steadily advancing, and where the sound of the conflict was now simply terrific.” Beach remembered the commanding general “leisurely taking his cigar from his mouth, he turned slowly to one of his staff and said, ‘Go down to Logan and tell him he is making history today.’ ”
For the Confederates, by midafternoon the battle was in danger of deteriorating into a rout, but about 2 p.m. Pemberton took a desperate chance. The large Union force on his right (McClernand's corps) that had seemed so threatening earlier that morning had shown no inclination to attack, and so he ordered Bowen to abandon that front and come to Stevenson's assistance at Champion Hill. The fact that the Yankees, not Stevenson, now occupied the hill served only to inspire Bowen, and his men came on the run to pitch into Hovey's exhausted soldiers just at their moment of triumph.
Led by the brigades of Colonel Francis Marion Cockrell and General Martin Green, not only did Bowen's Missourians chase Hovey's Indianans off Champion Hill, recapturing eleven Rebel cannons, they chased them at the point of the bayonet all the way back to Grant's headquarters, half a mile behind the fighting line, punching a huge gap in the Federal front. “We ran, and ran manfully,” recalled one of Hovey's men, who characterized the action as “the most desperate hand-to-hand fighting.” Joining in this devastating offensive was Lee's brigade, which had rallied after its retreat off the hill. In the midst of all this, a group of women from the Isaac Roberts plantation manor, where Pemberton had made his headquarters, and which was smack in the middle of the battlefield, poured out into the yard and began cheering the Rebel soldiers and singing “Dixie.” General Cockrell provided his own notion of inspiration by riding among his troops “with a magnolia flower in one hand and a sword in the other.”
Bowen's bold attack, according to no less an authority than James B. McPherson, the Federal corps commander, “turned the tide of the battle in favor of the Confederates.” All during this crisis, witnesses recalled, Grant stood unperturbed with his back resting against his horse, a bay mare, giving occasional orders and smoking his eternal cigar. Fortunately for Grant, Crocker's division came up in the nick of time to slow Bowen's rampage. If Pemberton could have sent Bowen reinforcements, it might have won the day for the Confederates, but because of an extraordinary turn of events reinforcements were not forthcoming. As it was, Bowen's troops had stripped the dead and wounded of their ammunition and now were fighting for their lives.
Loring had been instructed by Pemberton to keep contact with Bowen's division, so when Bowen began his double-time march north to reinforce Stevenson, Loring should have shifted as well, or at least inquired of Pemberton if this was what was wanted. Instead he did nothing.
William Loring was a peculiar soldier with a difficult personality, whose photograph bears a striking resemblance to the familiar likeness of William Shakespeare. Born in North Carolina in 1818, his family moved to St. Augustine, Florida, where as a boy of fourteen he participated in the Seminole Wars. In 1846, as a member of the Florida legislature, he received, without benefit of a West Point education, a direct commission to the regular army and was breveted lieutenant colonel after losing an arm during the Battle of Chapultepec in the Mexican War. When the Civil War broke out he was the youngest line colonel in the U.S. Army and was immediately commissioned a brigadier general after siding with the South.
No sooner had Loring joined the Confederate army than he became known as a troublemaker. When in 1861 a force he commanded in western Virginia came under the command of Robert E. Lee, Loring and Brigadier General John B. Floyd—of Fort Donelson notoriety and disgrace—began a campaign of backbiting and insubordination against Lee that caused the Virginian much embarrassment. Assigned to Stonewall Jackson's army later that year, Loring also began a feud with that formidable officer, culminating with the infamous “Romney petition,” in which he sponsored a list of grievances against Jackson for demanding “undue hardships” on his command. Jackson threatened to resign over Richmond's handling of the affair and the situation was defused only when Loring was transferred out of the department to the West.
Now, at the height of the fighting on Champion Hill, only Loring's division could provide the reinforcements needed to make Bowen's attack a success, but neither he nor his division could be found.
As Bowen's men prepared for their assault, Pemberton sent Loring instructions to bring his men up in support. When no response was forthcoming, Pemberton sent his inspector general, Major Jacob Thompson, to reiterate the order. Loring shook his head, “asking me [Thompson] if General Pemberton knew that the enemy was in great force in his [Loring's] front.” “The order I delivered,” Thompson informed Loring, “was that General Pemberton desires you to come immediately, and with all dispatch, to the left, to the support of General Stevenson, whatever may be in your front.”
Thompson returned to Pemberton's headquarters and repeated the conversation he had had with Loring. Just then two of Stevenson's regiments broke and Pemberton went out to rally them. When he returned, he again asked, “Where is Loring?” Again, Thompson was sent to find him, along with Pemberton's adjutant general, Thomas H. Taylor, and when they did not return promptly Pemberton himself rode off in a fury toward Loring's last known position, but all he could find were two forlorn regiments, while the whereabouts of the rest of Loring's division remained a mystery.
Meanwhile, things were beginning to fall apart on the Confederate left. A series of assaults on Stevenson's northernmost flank had caused him to fall back and try to re-form at about 4:30 p.m., and at five Bowen sent back word that his division was out of ammunition, under increasing pressure, and “could no longer hold its position.” Still finding no trace of Loring, Pemberton returned to the Roberts plantation, where a short time before the ladies of the house had serenaded his soldiers with “Dixie” and learned from an exhausted Bowen that his division had been forced all the way back to the original line. Upon this bleak news Pemberton was left with little choice but to retreat to Vicksburg. Aside from saving the army and defending the city, his options had run out.
*1 The project was not without its setbacks. Engineers decided to test their original handiwork by sending across a cannon drawn by four mules. The bridge tipped over and the gun and mules sank to the bottom, prompting one of the workers to remark, “Better [that] than a column of infantry.”
*2 In requesting the 6,000 cavalry, Pemberton undoubtedly meant the force under Earl Van Dorn that had been on loan from him to Bragg's army. While these would not be coming, Van Dorn himself could not have come if he'd wanted to. On May 7, a doctor named George Peters, of Spring Hill, Tennessee, walked into Van Dorn's headquarters and blew the general's brains out after becoming upset over Van Dorn's alleged “undue attentions” to his wife. An interesting sidelight is that before firing the fatal shot Peters had secured a pass from Van Dorn to go through the lines, thus enabling him to escape into Union-held territory.
*3 The dispatch to Pemberton was sent by three separate couriers to make sure that at least one copy got through. However, one of the couriers was a Union spy who immediately delivered the secret message to McPherson. Armed with this information, Grant ordered McClernand's corps to “about face” and prepare to protect the Federal rear.
*4 Sherman's people probably destroyed more rail tracks, before or since, than any army in the history of the world, and it was here that they developed and refined their famous recipe for “Sherman's neckties.” A regiment would line the track and at a given signal heave up a section of rail, which was then detached from its cross ties. The ties were placed in a pile and set on fire with the rails placed atop them until the iron glowed red in the center, whereupon strong men at each end would twist the rail around a tree until it was bent useless.