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VICKSBURG

Off to the west, in Memphis, where the sun’s
Mid-morning fire beat on a wider stream,
His purpose headstrong as a river runs,
Grant closed a smoky door on aides and guards
And chewed through scheme on scheme
For toppling Vicksburg like a house of cards.

—Richard Wilbur

IN THE FALL of 1862, in western Tennessee, Grant was moving through his slackest days in the war. Halleck’s promotion to Washington in July had left no one general clearly in command in the west, and Grant’s restoration to the Army of the Tennessee did not guarantee that he would have sufficient authority to act. It was a dispiriting time for him. The only major actions during the period were the inconclusive attacks by Generals E. O. C. Ord and William S. Rosecrans on a vulnerable General Sterling Price at Iuka, Mississippi, in September, and the repelling, at high human cost, of an attack by Generals Earl Van Dorn and Price on Rosecrans at Corinth early in October. Grant, not present at either engagement, was jealous of the good press Rosecrans received, and when, ironically, Halleck prodded him about not aggressively pursuing the enemy after the two battles, his excuses (namely, the insufficiency of supplies and of men) were uncharacteristically lethargic.

It took a rival to wake him up and focus his attention clearly and relentlessly on a single goal: Vicksburg. The rival was John A. McClernand, who without Grant’s or Halleck’s knowledge had persuaded Lincoln and Stanton to allow him, a volunteer general, to recruit a new army in Illinois—his home state—and in neighboring Indiana, and to begin a campaign to open the Mississippi River to the Union by taking Vicksburg, Mississippi.

That little river town, almost falling off the high bluff on which it is perched, seems an unlikely spot to have given its name to a great martial struggle. But the Confederates had fortified the town impressively in 1862; their guns ruled the Mississippi River. Until Vicksburg was taken it would not be possible to link the Union forces at New Orleans, which had been occupied by Admiral David G. Farragut that spring, with those of General Grant at Memphis, two hundred miles to the north. Until Vicksburg fell, the Union could not challenge the Confederacy’s domination of the greatest of America’s rivers. Once Vicksburg was captured, the only other important Confederate stronghold that guarded passage on the river, Port Hudson, could be taken easily, and control of the whole river would be secured. The Confederacy would have no dependable link between its western part—Texas, Arkansas, and trans-Mississippi Louisiana—and the remainder. The movement of substantial amounts of foodstuffs or large forces of men to the east to sustain Jefferson Davis’s government would be impossible past Union gunboats in the river.

At noon on November 9, 1862, Grant was not contemplating Vicksburg in such grand strategic terms. He was in La Grange, Mississippi, accomplishing little, when he received a communication from one of his generals, Charles S. Hamilton, who reported on local maneuvers and then asked, “Have you heard from Sherman? A letter from Wisconsin advises me that Wisconsin regiments in the State…are ordered to McClernand. Is that so?” If this was so, it was confirmation of the rumor that McClernand was raising his own army and would usurp Grant’s chances on the Mississippi. This move by a rival general brought both sides of Grant’s nature into play. There was a renewal of the suffocating sense of defeat, of once again having someone push past him, and there was a stubborn determination to beat the threat by moving straight on.¹

That same day Grant, frustrated and immobile, lashed out at the bustling activity of merchants who had rushed in to exploit both his soldiers and the civilians in the region. He sent a telegram to General Stephen A. Hurlbut, in command in Memphis: “Refuse all permits to come south of Jackson for the present. The Isrealites especially should be kept out….” On one level Grant’s notorious exclusion of the Jews was simply an expression of the routine anti-Semitism of the day. Grant was fed up with the cotton speculators and the greedy suppliers of goods to his armies, but rather than attack the entire voracious horde, which included an astonishing assortment of entrepreneurs—among them Charles A. Dana and Roscoe Conkling, for example—Grant singled out the Jews. The ancient stereotype of the grasping trader was invoked; once again a frustrated man chose the age-old scapegoat.²

There may have been an additional, unconscious reason for the outburst. This is suggested by a comment made in the 1890’s by one shrewd, if not always trustworthy, observer of Grant—James Harrison Wilson, himself anti-Semitic. Speaking to Hamlin Garland of Grant’s order, Wilson said, “There was a mean nasty streak in old Jesse Grant. He was close and greedy. He came down into Tennessee with a Jew trader that he wanted his son to help, and with whom he was going to share the profits. Grant refused to issue a permit and sent the Jew flying, prohibiting Jews from entering the line.” The image of Grant, in high dudgeon, driving a miscreant from the temple does not ring quite true, and yet Wilson may not have been entirely off the mark. Grant, Wilson suggested, could not strike back directly at the “lot of relatives who were always trying to use him” and perhaps struck instead at what he maliciously saw as their counterpart—opportunistic traders who were Jewish.³

Jesse Grant was not in La Grange on November 9, 1862, but John McClernand’s threat to push Grant out of the way was. That powerful man, close to Lincoln, could not be repulsed at once. Those Israelites could be repulsed, and were. On November 10 Grant told Joseph D. Webster, “Give orders to all the conductors…that no Jews are to be permitted to travel on the Rail Road southward from any point.” In December, Grant banned all Jews from his department, explaining to Sherman, in great exasperation, that the cotton merchants were so eager to purchase crops that instead of keeping to the rear of the armies they were getting ahead of them. Charles A. Dana, a convert to rectitude, later wrote disparagingly of the “mania for sudden fortunes made in Cotton, raging in a vast population of Jews and Yankees,” and Grant, similarly exercised, told Sherman that, “in consequence of the total disregard and evasion of orders by the Jews, my policy is to exclude them so far as practicable from the Dept.”⁴

Protests against Grant’s anti-Semitism were swift and when they reached Lincoln and Stanton, effective. On December 17, 1862, Rawlins issued an order: “…By directions of the Gen in Chief of the army at Washington the Gen Order from these headquarters expelling Jews from the Department is hereby revoked by order of Maj. Gen. U.S. Grant.”⁵

If Grant vented his anger at McClernand’s raising a new army in ways that suggested he might be retreating into self-defeat, he also gave expression to the steadier side of his character. On November 9, he set in motion a major thrust south to Holly Springs, Mississippi. General McPherson had warned him of a buildup of enemy troops; General Hamilton, of reports that his troops would be diverted to Memphis and McClernand’s command. Grant told McPherson to be alert but not yet begin a major engagement; he told Hamilton he was not aware of any order for troops to report to McClernand. In the face of two dangers to his army, he did marshal his forces, and only then, when they were moving, did he, that evening, send an angry telegram to Halleck: “Am I to understand that I lay still here while an Expedition is fitted out from Memphis or do you want me to push as far South as possible?” The next day Halleck’s reply came: “You have command of all the troops sent to your Dept, and have permission to fight the enemy when you please.” This reply eliminated Grant’s immediate worry—that troops on the way to assist him would be diverted to McClernand—though it did not remove the larger question of what would happen if McClernand was given an independent department. In any event, the tone of the telegram did clearly encourage that side of Grant that wanted to act boldly. The offensive, now sanctioned, went forward.⁶

Grant further showed himself in command by issuing an order, on November 11, telling all the officers of new units coming into his army just who on his staff should be “recognized and obeyed.” His close aide from Donelson days, Joseph D. Webster, was now promoted to brigadier general and placed in charge of railroads. This move increased the importance of Lieutenant Colonel John A. Rawlins as Grant’s chief of staff. Clark B. Lagow left Grant’s staff, but William S. Hillyer, William R. Rowley, and Theodore S. Bowers, who were to be with Grant for the balance of the war, were there and now were joined by the outspoken, able, and slightly treacherous James Harrison Wilson, who had left the Sea Islands to come west as chief of topographical engineers. Invited west by McClernand, he became a partisan of Grant’s, but one who could be dangerously gossipy about his chief. He also quickly became an intimate friend of John Rawlins’s. The ties among the men of Grant’s staff were close.⁷

With Sherman on the right, Hamilton on the left, and McPherson in the center, Grant moved south first to Holly Springs and then on to Oxford, while the Confederate general John C. Pemberton fell back to Grenada. Grant was still two hundred miles from Vicksburg, and the dense forests of the river-laced bayou country made the approach to the town by land exceedingly difficult. Therefore, he sent Sherman back to Memphis with a regiment, instructing him to add to his forces two of McClernand’s regiments that had arrived there and go south by river, to the point where the Yazoo River enters the Mississippi, twelve miles northwest of Vicksburg. Going up the Yazoo, Sherman was to take the Chickasaw Bluffs just north of Vicksburg, preparatory to an attack on the river town.⁸

Sherman moved quickly; since McClernand outranked him, Sherman had to get off to the Yazoo and Chickasaw Bluffs before McClernand could reach Memphis. McClernand would then arrive to find himself merely a commander of one segment, and Sherman of another, of Grant’s Army of the Tennessee. Once he was sure Sherman had left Memphis, Grant sent orders to McClernand, welcoming him to the town and saying, “I hope you will find all the preliminary preparations completed on your arrival and the expedition ready to move.” Grant was handling his enemies within his own army with skill, but his Confederate enemies proved more difficult to outmaneuver. On December 20, while Grant was at Oxford, his supply depot at Holly Springs was attacked by General Earl Van Dorn, and huge quantities of supplies, including food, were captured. What was more, the Confederates almost captured Julia Grant. Luckily, with her slave Julia, she had left for Oxford the day before. Meanwhile Nathan Bedford Forrest was attacking Union positions along the Memphis-Jackson railroad and Grant was in grave danger of being trapped deep within rebel territory.⁹

Grant, meeker than he had been at Shiloh or would be in the Wilderness, thought he could no longer keep Pemberton occupied and distracted from Sherman’s assault on Vicksburg. Indeed, he did not even know whether Sherman or McClernand was in command on the river. His message to the “Commanding Officer Expedition down Mississippi” told whomever that was that he could no longer keep Vicksburg from being reinforced by Pemberton; he would, in fact, have to give up and go back to Memphis. On December 29, despite aid from David Dixon Porter, who was in command of naval forces on the Mississippi, Sherman was repulsed from the Chickasaw Bluffs; he reported privately to his wife, “Well, we have been to Vicksburg and it was too much for us and we have backed out.” On January 3, McClernand arrived down the river, took command from Sherman, and ordered their forces back to winter quarters at Milliken’s Bend, on the Louisiana side of the Mississippi. Neither Grant nor McClernand had taken Vicksburg.¹⁰

The trip back to Memphis was humiliating for Grant; for the refugees who had made themselves dependent on him it was harrowing. Throughout the fall thousands of slaves, finding themselves in the murderous paths of two swiftly moving armies crossing and recrossing the rich cotton lands of southwestern Tennessee and northern Mississippi, had tried to make their way to safety. In many cases their owners had been driven out by the Union armies, leaving the confused slaves to fend for themselves. As Grant, in succinct bewilderment, had put the problem to Halleck, “Citizens south of us are leaving their homes and Negroes coming in by wagon loads. What will I do with them? I am now having all cotton still standing picked by them.”¹¹

Even before he asked this question, Grant on November 13, 1862, had made an important appointment to bring order to a desperate situation. He had told a reluctant Ohio chaplain, John Eaton (who knew he would be laughed at for taking on so ludicrous a task), that he was “to take charge of Contrabands’ who came within Union lines. They were to be organized into work parties in the army camps and “set to work picking, ginning and baling all cotton now out standing in Fields.” The indefatigably entrepreneurial traders that had so annoyed (and impeded) Grant in his operations all summer and fall had their eye on that valuable cotton, and Grant now yielded to their pressure and put the contrabands to work harvesting the crop. Under this arrangement the laborers were not free, but they were given protection: “Suitable guards will be detailed by Commanding Officers nearest where the parties are at work to protect them from molestation.”¹²

In September a different practical solution to the problems of some of the refugees had suggested itself to General James M. Tuttle, Grant’s successor in command at Cairo, Illinois. He told Stanton that Grant was sending “large lots of negro women and children” to Cairo and “directs me to ask you what to do with them.” Tuttle had a suggestion: “Parties in Chicago and other cities wish them for servants. Will I be allowed to turn them over to a responsible committee, to be so employed? If so, can I transport at Government expense?” Stanton replied yes, but soon Illinois politicians had second thoughts. David Davis, associate justice of the Supreme Court, told Abraham Lincoln that an influx of blacks from the South into Illinois would “work great harm in the coming Election,” and, in John Y. Simon’s well-chosen word, a “blockade” was established. Grant would have to care for the refugees within the South.¹³

In late November a camp for these displaced persons was established under Eaton’s direction at Grand Junction, Tennessee, under a field order issued by Rawlins on November 14. The baling of cotton was again specified as the work to be done; a detachment of troops was assigned to guard the workers, from attack, but also from escape; and medical assistance and rations were provided.

John Eaton was an able and humane man, and his authority over the black refugees was soon extended to the whole of Grant’s department; on December 17, 1862, he was made general superintendent of contrabands. This appointment established the pattern of giving to a chaplain or other man of humanitarian bent within the army the job of caring for people who on January 1, 1863, under the Emancipation Proclamation, would become “freedmen.” The role of welfare agent is an odd one for the army, but it was generally agreed by black observers and their friends that, vicious as some army men were, a “do-gooder” chaplain like Eaton was preferable to the Treasury Department agents who were competitors for the job. These officials were so intent on making money by utilizing seized labor that for humanitarian reasons the care of the freedmen could not be trusted to them. Grant’s appointment of Eaton was wise. When, in 1865, Secretary of War Stanton was looking for someone within the army to head the Freedmen’s Bureau, Grant proposed Eaton, but the post went instead to the then head of the Army of the Tennessee, another Christian soldier, General O. O. Howard.¹⁴

In 1862 Eaton could keep his charges fairly safe at least as long as marauders stayed away. But when one of these marauders was the cavalry commander Nathan Bedford Forrest, whose cruelty to black soldiers foreshadowed his later leadership of the Ku Klux Klan, the Negroes’ fears were well placed. When Grand Junction was ordered abandoned in the wake of the attack on Holly Springs, Grant sent many of his soldiers back to Memphis by railroad and the refugees tried to join them: “Their terror of being left behind made them swarm over the passenger and freight cars, clinging to every available space and even crouching on the roofs. The trains were moved very slowly and with the utmost caution, but even so the exposure of these people—men, women, and children—was indescribable.”¹⁵

Memphis was a crowded river city, and its reputation was not made less lurid by the presence of the army and of those of its followers who speculated in cotton and sex: “Sodom,” General Stephen A. Hurlbut called it. Hurlbut, shocked but able, was in command of Memphis during the days when it was the essential supply post for the attack on Vicksburg. Although Eaton strove to provide for them, Memphis proved a strange promised land for the freezing freedmen huddling against the snow around inadequate bonfires in January 1863. Nor was the port a cheerful place for Grant’s men, coming back from the aborted attempts to take Vicksburg and to hold the Mississippi lands east and north of it.¹⁶

Once more Grant’s ability was in question. Early in the spring of 1863, Charles A. Dana, the erstwhile newspaperman and cotton dealer, was back in Memphis, ostensibly to audit paymaster accounts of the War Department. Actually, Lincoln and Stanton, seeking to “settle their minds as to Grant, about whom…there were many doubts,” wanted still another check on the general, and Stanton had sent Dana to spy on him. Dana was delighted. His enthusiasm for the war had cost him his job with a skeptical Horace Greeley on the New York Tribune, and poor eyesight had cost him a chance to fight, but this assignment would take him close to the war’s center. Grant knew why Dana was back in his department and shrewdly chose not to shun, but to cultivate him. Dana, an intelligent man with an instinct for both news and warriors, had already been drawn to Grant, and soon after getting back to Memphis he moved on to Grant’s new headquarters at Milliken’s Bend. He stayed first on a steamer, “for though my tent was pitched and ready, I was not able to get a mattress and pillow.” This problem did not deter him: “I…hunted up Grant and explained my mission.” Presumably, by “mission” he meant the auditing, but it is likely that he blurted out his real aims as well. In any case, Grant received him “cordially,” and soon he was sharing the general’s mess. In the trying spring of 1863, the spy became one of Grant’s strongest advocates.¹⁷

The failed efforts of the late fall and winter of 1862, and the almost impassable terrain between the Mississippi and the Yazoo River, convinced Grant that he could not take Vicksburg from the north. Instead, implausible as it seemed, he would have to attack from below the very town that blocked his passage down the river. And he would have to rely on his own troops, since General Nathaniel P. Banks, in Louisiana, could not be counted on to supply reinforcements from the south or west. So the game of early 1863 was to find, through the morass of islands and near islands formed by the bayous along the Mississippi, a way to get men south of the town. For months the soldiers of the Army of the Tennessee were like children playing in a muddy runoff at the edge of a giant’s flooded road, trying to make streams flow where they had not flowed before. Abraham Lincoln, his one trip down the Mississippi on a flatboat in 1828 making him an expert on rivers, was determined that a canal should be dug across a short neck of land at a point at which the river began a fantastic loop up to Vicksburg and then curved back to within five miles of itself. Grant indulged his commander in chief; he thought Lincoln’s idea harmless, and it was desirable for the men to be busy rather than idle. The enemy discovered the endeavor and trained deadly guns on the two dredge barges that were at work, and once dug, the canal was not deep enough to become the new channel of the river. Attempts to cut roads along the river or find other passages for boats in the bayous also required herculean labors. If the roads were to be usable, tree stumps could not be left, and at this time of year the roots of the trees being cut began well under the water; similarly, if the new river channels were to carry troop barges, the dense branches of the trees stretching out over the river had to be cut. Finally, when the winter yielded to spring, troops slogged down the western side of the Mississippi to a point twenty-eight miles below Vicksburg, but the ground was so wet and the water formed into streams and pools so frequently that supply wagons could not accompany them. Therefore, on the night of April 16, Rear Admiral David Dixon Porter ran the gantlet, taking a fleet of gunboats and supply barges through, under the spectacular fire of the Confederate guns. Again the navy, as the famous Currier and Ives print attests, did splendidly.

Running the Rebel Blockade, Vicksburg, April 16, 1863. Currier & Ives print. THE OLD PRINT SHOP

On April 19, Porter’s gunboats shelled the Confederate emplacements below Vicksburg at Grand Gulf, on the eastern side of the river, but with no luck; the Confederate guns, raining destructive fire down on the navy boats, were too high to be hit. Grant, told by a local black adviser of an unfortified crossing point nine miles south of Grand Gulf, had McClernand’s and McPherson’s units of his army cross there the next day. They were unopposed, but McClernand, slow in getting additional men to the crossing, made no swift inland attack on the town at Grand Gulf, thus allowing Confederate reinforcements from Vicksburg to arrive with the hope of pushing the other Union force, under McPherson, back across the Mississippi. They did not succeed; in the battle at Port Gibson on May 1, 1863, McPherson’s men held their ground, and Sherman crossed the Mississippi at Grand Gulf, now evacuated to the Union.¹⁸

Vicksburg could be attacked from the south and the rear, along the Big Black River, but the attacking forces would be dangerously isolated from supplies and reinforcements. Long before Grant started his assault on the town, General Sherman, the man over all others whose word Grant took seriously, had come to his commander and argued that the plan of approaching from the south and rear was imprudent. Grant did not change his mind. He told his articulate adviser that the country’s morale required a quick, decisive victory. Grant was the politician, and Sherman, resolutely, was not. Grant had the confidence now to stand alone even against the advice of the man he most admired. He knew that Halleck would not be reluctant to dismiss him if his gamble for taking Vicksburg failed. Nor would Lincoln. Grant, outranking McClernand, had succeeded in assuming the over-all field command, but having edged past the powerful McClernand he had to prove the wisdom of taking on all the responsibility himself. Grant knew that Lincoln was watching every move he made with intense curiosity (they had never met), and he realized that Lincoln would look for still another general if he faltered. In short, everything was at stake in the Vicksburg campaign.¹⁹

Grant moved with assurance. On May 5, Stanton had told Dana to let Grant know that “he has the full confidence of the Government, is expected to enforce his authority, and will be firmly and heartily supported.” He now had the power to do what he wanted to do, and as always, he had the conviction that everyone was out of step but him. He moved up to the rear—to the east—of Vicksburg, from the southwest. He did not wait for Banks to bring his men up from Louisiana to help. Instead, Grant cut his own supply line and imprudently placed his vast army within a pincers formed by Pemberton in Vicksburg and the enemy general Grant most admired, Joseph E. Johnston, northeast of Vicksburg above Jackson, Mississippi. Had Grant’s plan failed he would have been pilloried for doing something so stupid, and Johnston was not reluctant to bring on such a punishment. As Grant moved north to cut the Vicksburg-Jackson railroad, Johnston ordered Pemberton to move out from Vicksburg to meet him, so that together they could crush Grant. However, Johnston did not make the rendezvous; instead, McClernand and McPherson met the Confederate general near Jackson and drove him north to Canton. There, thirty miles north of Jackson, Johnston remained a threat to Grant throughout the siege of Vicksburg; it was feared that he could attack the rear of the Federal position at any time. Meanwhile, as ordered, Pemberton had crossed the Big Black and occupied a good position on Champion’s Hill. While Sherman moved on Jackson, destroying enemy supplies in Mississippi’s capital, Grant attacked at Champion’s Hill, ordering McClernand’s and McPherson’s men forward in a bloody assault on Pemberton. Because McClernand was slow to move, the Confederates were not surrounded; however, their losses were great, and Pemberton was driven back to Vicksburg. Kenneth P. Williams states that some regard Champion’s Hill as the most decisive single engagement of the Civil War. Grant won.²⁰

As Grant was watching his men drive the Confederates back across the Big Black, he committed the final act of assumption of command: he elected to be insubordinate. Dana’s message from Stanton had suggested that not even Halleck could override his decisions now. James Marshall-Cornwall, who has written astutely of Grant as warrior, takes note of the passage in the Memoirs in which, with great triumph, Grant told how he broke free:

…an officer from Banks’ staff came up and presented me with a letter from General Halleck, dated the 11th of May. It had been sent by the way of New Orleans to Banks to be forwarded to me. It ordered me to return to Grand Gulf and to co-operate from there with Banks against Port Hudson, and then to return with our combined forces to besiege Vicksburg. I told the officer that the order came too late, and that Halleck would not give it now if he knew our position. The bearer of the dispatch insisted that I ought to obey the order, and was giving arguments to support his position when I heard great cheering to the right of our line and, looking in that direction, saw Lawler [a brigade commander] in his shirt sleeves leading a charge upon the enemy. I immediately mounted my horse and rode in the direction of the charge, and saw no more of the officer who delivered the dispatch….

He was in total control. One soldier who had been fighting on the hill watched Grant stand, “cool and calculating,” with a cigar in his mouth ordering fresh assaults over bloody ground. Shelby Foote cites the soldier’s perception of Grant’s “careful and half-cynical” command. When things were going poorly, he acted as if that was exactly how he expected them to go, and sent new men in to make them go better.²¹

After Champion’s Hill, Pemberton was trapped in Vicksburg. He had orders from Johnston to move out or even surrender, but he stayed, determined to hold the town and the Mississippi. Grant was equally determined. The whole long, clumsy campaign was reaching its climax, and he wanted to break through the earthworks that Pemberton, an engineer, had skillfully erected. On May 22 Grant stormed them, and for two hours, in a battle without a name, armies only yards apart kept up a blizzard of fire, while assault after assault, with gruesome losses, failed to break the Confederate defenses. All of his commanders—Sherman, McPherson, and McClernand—had been eager for the attack, and so had their men. The Yankees began with the hope of finishing the job.²²

By noon, however, the eagerness was gone and stymied and frightened men thought they were through for the day. Grant and Sherman, standing together, thought so too, but a message came from McClernand saying he still believed he could break through, if only McPherson and Sherman would order one more attack. Grant was skeptical, but Sherman was aware of how it would look if McClernand could say his boldness had been thwarted, so a new assault was ordered on the well-dug Confederate fortifications, built skillfully into the uneven terrain east of town. Union troops—Sherman’s and McPherson’s men as well as McClernand’s—were forced to rush up steep banks into murderous fire to try to reach the parapets and plunge through the Confederate defenses. Grant, watching intently, saw men agonizingly reach the top of the enemy’s earthworks, only to die or be driven back. The dirt was red. Grant later confessed that there were only two days of battle that he regretted: June 3, 1864, at Cold Harbor, and this day in May outside Vicksburg. He lost more men than did his enemy, 3,200 in all. McClernand’s second assault did not succeed in breaking through. What was more, there had been no reason to try. The way to take Vicksburg was not by a fierce climactic battle, but by the long, slow starvation of a siege. McClernand, however, did not see victory in such terms. Scurrying to make defeat into victory, on May 30, 1863, he wrote a three-page order to his men exhorting them in spacious rhetoric to aspire to be martyrs equal to those of Monmouth and Bunker Hill and asking, “Shall not our flag float over Vicksburg? Shall not the great Father of Waters be opened to lawful commerce? One thinks the emphatic response to one and all of these is, ‘It shall be so.’” One can easily imagine the words the men chose, privately, to respond to this rot, but the big question was how Lincoln and Stanton would react. McClernand had managed to make his domestic political power go a long way in sustaining his military politicking. If, indeed, Grant had faltered again, McClernand was more than willing to become the hero at Vicksburg in his place. McPherson and Sherman, as well as Charles A. Dana, now special commissioner of the War Department, were well aware of McClernand’s aspirations even before they finally got wind of this flamboyant publicity ploy in mid-June. Meanwhile, McClernand was counting on impatience in Washington to operate in his favor, for abandoning the senseless frontal assaults, Grant had committed the army to the slow, immobile, nervous business of siege. Vicksburg was to be starved out. And while this ugly logic was being worked, Ulysses Grant got drunk.²³

He did so on June 6, 1863, and again the next day. Admirers of the general who witnessed his behavior made sure that reports of it neither got into the newspapers to create a scandal that might well have ended with his removal, nor reached Lincoln and Stanton directly to raise fresh doubts in their minds. Ever since, there has been a loyal conspiracy to protect Grant from the story. Sylvanus Cadwallader, a Chicago Times reporter, told it in his memoirs, which he wrote in 1896, in his seventies, when he was a sheep rancher in California. The manuscript was not published until 1955, and when it did appear, both Cadwallader and the historian who arranged for its publication were vilified for violating the gentlemanly silence on the subject. Much fur has flown over the story; John Y. Simon, the careful editor of Grant’s Papers, citing Charles A. Dana’s memory years later, claims Cadwallader was not present for the drinking bout, but does not deny that it took place. He surmises that Cadwallader’s story was based on headquarters gossip, of which there was assuredly plenty. The exuberant Dana later acknowledged Grant’s drinking in an editorial in the New York Sun for January 28, 1887, entitled “Gen. Grant’s Occasional Intoxication.” This editorial was no doubt the source of much of the story, the most sensible and witty analysis of which is in Shelby Foote’s The Civil War. No doubt Cadwallader, as an old man, embellished an episode he remembered from long ago. However, he was not likely to have forgotten its essentials, and little about the story, including his claim to have been aboard, fails to make sense, unless one is flatly determined to refuse to believe that Ulysses Grant was ever drunk.²⁴

On the evening of June 6, Grant got away from John A. Rawlins, who kept a sharp eye on his chief and was apparently the only person allowed by Grant to speak to him about his drinking. At this time he had been separated from Julia for about six weeks. As Foote put it, “The trouble seemed in part sexual, as in California nine years ago, and it was intensified by periods of boredom, such as now.” There had been little fighting in early June, and during the impatient waiting for the siege to do its work, Grant’s enormous repressed appetite exploded. Whatever it was that wanted satisfying was released—if only in fraternal talk and good drink—on the steamer Diligent, on which Grant was making an inspection tour to Satartia, on the Yazoo River.²⁵

Since one of the reasons for war is to have an excuse to do some drinking, it is not surprising that there was an enormous amount of it done during the Civil War. The activities on June 6 and 7, 1863, were made special only by the identity of one of the participants. As Sylvanus Cadwallader tells it, he saw Grant walk drunkenly out of the barroom on the steamer. At this instant the reporter apparently made a decision. He could have sent a sensational story of debauchery to the Chicago Times, which might have made him famous as a reporter while perhaps causing Grant irreparable harm. But he knew that if he filed the story he would be thrown out of Grant’s command just when the big news of the fall of Vicksburg seemed likely to break. In any event, he chose to do as so many people do, and respected the privacy of a man who had been drinking. Indeed, instead of exposing Grant, he chose to be his protector. When two officers declined to take responsibility for getting Grant to bed, Cadwallader took on the job. He got Grant into his stiflingly hot cabin, insisted on removing the general’s coat, vest, and boots, and put him on a bunk. In the suffocating stateroom Grant slept.²⁶

Charles A. Dana, another observer who seemed never to miss anything, and who certainly was aboard the Diligent, wrote politely, “Grant was ill and went to bed soon after we started.” But Dana felt compelled to interrupt the general and did knock on his door when naval officers on a downriver gunboat warned the Diligent that it was not safe to proceed. Dana told the officers that Grant was “sick and asleep,” but they insisted on knowing the general’s wishes. When Dana awakened him, Grant was “too sick to decide” and uncharacteristically told him, “I will leave it with you.” But once awake, Grant insisted on putting on the rest of his clothes, and went ashore. Cadwallader coaxed him into returning to the boat and again put him to bed, where he slept while the boat steamed twenty-five miles back down the Yazoo.²⁷

The next morning, “fresh as a rose, clean shirt and all,” Grant came to breakfast and said, “Well, Mr. Dana, I suppose we are at Satartia now.” Dana, always the perfect gentleman, undoubtedly found a way to tell Grant tactfully, without referring to drink at all, that he was at Haynes Bluff, twenty-five miles southwest of Satartia. Untroubled by his mistake, and momentarily refreshed, Grant started drinking again and insisted on moving south past the Chickasaw Bluffs. Cadwallader, apprehensive lest Grant be seen drunk, arranged for a delay, so that they would not reach the Chickasaw Bayou dock at the busy middle of the day. Unfortunately, when they did dock in the evening, they found themselves next to a boat on which a sutler was entertaining a swarm of army officers, and the party soon moved over to the ladies’ lounge of the Diligent.²⁸

Extracting Grant from the party, Cadwallader got him away from the boat (and the bottle) and on shore started back to headquarters. Grant mounted a horse named Kangaroo. It lived up to its name by rearing on its hind legs, but Grant remained in the saddle, and then spurred the beast, which galloped off ahead of the rest of the party. As Foote has it: “The road was crooked, winding among the many slews and bayous, but the general more or less straightened it out….” Grant, in Cadwallader’s words, was “heading only for the bridges, and literally tore through and over everything in his way. The air was full of dust, ashes, and embers from camp-fires, and shouts and curses from those he rode down in his race.” Kangaroo finally slowed, and Cadwallader caught up with Grant, got him off the horse, and dispatched a man to Rawlins, to have an ambulance sent for the general. When it arrived, Grant was reluctant to admit he needed it and resisted getting in. When the disheveled party finally reached headquarters, Rawlins was waiting. Cadwallader got out first, and then Grant climbed down, straightened his vest, and as if nothing had ever been amiss, said good night and went to bed. Of Rawlins, Cadwallader wrote, “The whole appearance of the man indicated a fierceness that would have torn me into a thousand pieces had he considered me to blame.” Luckily for the reporter, Rawlins chose not to resent Cadwallader’s having temporarily taken on his own self-appointed role as Grant’s protector against liquor; rather, with his fanatic fascination with drink and vice, he asked for every detail. Laconically, James Harrison Wilson noted in his diary on June 7, 1863, “Genl. G. intoxicated.”²⁹

Rawlins had seen signs that Grant was about to drink: he had found a case of wine outside Grant’s tent and a few days earlier had seen the general drinking with a surgeon. On June 6, the very day of Grant’s trip up the Yazoo, Rawlins had written his chief a strange, threatening letter that seemed to come directly from a Calvinist conscience. “Tonight,” he had stated, “when you should, because of the condition of your health if nothing else, have been in bed, I find you where the wine bottle has just been emptied, in company with those who drink and urge you to do likewise.” Rawlins spoke of a promise: “Had you not pledged me the sincerity of your honor early last March that you would drink no more during the war, and kept that pledge during your recent campaign, you would not to-day have stood first in the world’s history as a successful military commander.” He spoke, too, of the responsibility of a general to “the friends, wives, and children of these brave men whose lives” are “imperilled” by his want of control when he has been drinking. Whether Grant ever read the letter—Rawlins is said to have read it to his friend—and if he did, how he and Rawlins moved past this crisis in their relationship, is not known. Somehow, Rawlins did function as Grant’s conscience, or better, as the friend who gave the only orders, other than those from his wife, that Grant willingly obeyed. Furthermore, Rawlins knew he could reach Grant with threats of resignation. The general could not contemplate such an abandonment, and perhaps with no explicit conversation on the point at all, Grant listened, but, on this occasion, did not obey.³⁰

Cadwallader, fascinated by his excursion into intimacy with Grant, was nonetheless nervous lest he be ordered out of Grant’s department for having been privy to the escapade. Grant’s mind worked the other way. He never mentioned the events to the reporter, and the latter, in turn, had the sense never to mention them to Grant. And for the remainder of the war, Cadwallader had privileged access to Grant’s headquarters. Dana, also fascinated by Grant and the men around him, particularly the bright and gossipy James Harrison Wilson, sent no account of the incident that could—and would—be interpreted in Washington as indicating alcoholism. He was loyal to his new friends and clearly preferred an occasionally roaring drunk Grant to the pretentious McClernand, who would likely succeed to the command if Grant was dismissed. What Dana did, rather than deny Grant’s drinking altogether, was to make light of it in his reports to Stanton; thus he wrote Stanton in July, after the Vicksburg victory, “…whenever he commits the folly of tasting liquor, Rawlins can be counted on to stop him.”³¹

All of Dana’s hopes for that victory depended on the success of the siege. He could only wait and keep his eye on the jealous generals around Grant. On June 15 General Francis P. Blair, Jr., read in the Memphis Evening Bulletin McClernand’s exhortation to his men to take Vicksburg. Disgusted, he sent it to Sherman, who exploded over the “effusion of vain-glory” and pronounced it, in a note to Grant, an appeal to Illinois voters at the expense of dead men. To McClernand’s accusation that he had not been properly supported on the day of the murderously ineffective assaults in May, Sherman roared “monstrous falsehood,” and McPherson agreed. Grant no doubt snorted at McClernand’s mawkish prose and, shrewdly, sensed that Lincoln and Stanton had done the same. In the two weeks since the exhortation had been issued, it had not become celebrated in Washington. At last, McClernand had overextended himself.³²

Grant, by letter, asked McClernand if the newspaper text of the order was accurate, thereby simultaneously reprimanding McClernand for not sending his commanding officer a copy and establishing insubordination. When McClernand replied lamely that his aide had simply neglected to send a copy to headquarters, Grant sent James Harrison Wilson to tell McClernand he was relieved from duty. McClernand was expecting the order; he was awaiting Wilson in full uniform, his sword on the table. Grant had at last moved to get rid of the man who had established himself as something of a sacred cow with the president of the United States. Grant had given McClernand enough rope; Lincoln let him hang. The president, receiving McClernand’s protest against his dismissal, said blandly that if events proved that McClernand was right, exoneration would follow. One experienced Illinois politician consigned a second to oblivion, and permitted a third—a novice—to move into a most promising position.³³

The month of June was spent building trenches through which the attacking units would assault the constantly reinforced earthwork fortifications of the enemy. It was a game of sandbox madness. In the dirt and heat, men dug scooped-out hollows no farther than the other side of a good-sized living room from the scooped-out hollows of other men. So close together physically, and engaged in the same silly, deadly pastimes, they began to talk to one another. Fierce obscenities yielded to friendly ones as boredom made the soldiers forget they were expected to hate those they were shortly to try to kill.

In town, civilians moved uneasily in and out of caves and suffered starvation. The Federals suspected this shortage of food and supposed also that the absence of intense bombardment by Confederate cannon during the time the fortifications were being built was due to a shortage of ammunition. Hence they were surprised, when surrender came, to find that there were large amounts of ammunition as well as nearly 60,000 muskets and rifles and 172 cannon. Realizing the desperation of his people, Pemberton abandoned any prospect of deliverance by Johnston and on July 3, 1863, asked Grant for terms. Hoping, as Grant’s old friend Buckner had hoped at Donelson, that prewar friendship would count for something, the Confederates roused from his sickbed John Bowen, who had known Grant in St. Louis and was now dying of dysentery. Painfully, Bowen rode to Grant’s headquarters to try to effect a favorable arrangement. Grant would not see him. Instead, Pemberton was told that loss of life could be avoided only by unconditional surrender. But this time Grant did not want the symbol of victor of a surrender of prisoners. He wanted Vicksburg, and Pemberton had to do the surrendering himself. When he and Grant met, the Pennsylvanian rather testily accepted Grant’s instructions that his men march out, accept parole (an unenforceable promise not to go back into the Confederate army), and give up their arms—and the town.³⁴

“In Vicksburg thank God” began a letter from a Union captain to his wife dated July 4, 1863. The rebels were marching out and stacking their guns; a fellow captain was reading out loud the Declaration of Independence. “We are going to celebrate this Fourth of July in spirit and truth,” continued Captain Ira Miltmore, and growing exuberant he declared, “The Stars and Stripes are now waving to our right, and the white flags to our left, as far as we can see. The backbone of the Rebellion is this day broken. The Confederacy is divided—Pemberton is a prisoner. Vicksburg is ours. The Mississippi River is opened, and Gen. Grant is to be our next President.”³⁵

Success did not pile on success quite as fast as Ira Miltmore had anticipated, but the excitement in Washington and all across the North when the twin Fourth of July victories of Gettysburg and Vicksburg were announced was enormous. General Grant, of Vicksburg, and not General Meade, of Gettysburg, emerged as the hero of the day despite the fact that Gettysburg was the scene of a greater battle than Vicksburg. Indeed, the taking of Vicksburg, the culmination of the campaign to open to the Union a river route through the Confederacy, was not achieved through a battle at all. It was completed not with colors handed gloriously over parapets, but with the ignominious starving out of a small town. The action at Gettysburg, by contrast, had the gory majesty of the storied battles of eighteenth-century and Napoleonic Europe, yet its victor, George Gordon Meade, never caught the eye of the public the way Grant did. It was not so much that the people, along with President Lincoln, were distressed that Meade had not made good his victory by pursuing and destroying Lee’s retreating army. It was more the elusive matter of personal appeal. Americans could have found in Meade, as they had found in George Washington, the aristocrat as warrior-hero. Instead, the proper Philadelphian, who would “not even speak to any person connected with the press,” exasperated the war correspondents and bored other Americans.³⁶

On the other hand, Grant, with simple style, attracted enormous attention. Lee was so maddeningly grand and the generals who had been sent to destroy him so unsuccessful that Americans in the North gave up on grandeur and looked westward to an average man. “Surrounded by the most ordinary set of plebeians you ever saw,” himself plain, though not dully so, Grant might have been too hopelessly colorless to catch attention—even after Vicksburg—had he not had the virtues of his alleged vices. Unlike that monolith of rectitude Robert E. Lee, Grant was vulgar, was thought to drink, and was not known to be a student of anything. In a not uncharacteristic reach for the anti-intellectual and the unknown when problems are greatest, Americans turned their attention toward Vicksburg and took a long look at Ulysses S. Grant.³⁷

There are two classes in America: celebrities and commoners. Until July 1863, an eminently forgettable Ulysses Grant was among the commoners, but as the hero of Vicksburg he was irretrievably consigned to celebration. Like other people, Americans are often fickle about their heroes—which, no doubt, is just as well—but in this instance they were not. During the rest of his life. Grant never lost the hold on the people’s imagination that in his first forty years had so thoroughly eluded him. Grant had many opportunities to falter after Vicksburg, but in the strange world of public opinion even a bad day on the battlefield, as at Cold Harbor, or scandals such as those which marked his presidential administration could not drive him into obscurity.