The Campaign for the Big Muddy
1862–1863: Western Theater
John Helfers
When the Civil War began, General-in-Chief Winfield Scott proposed a two-part plan to crush the new Confederacy, primarily by water. The first part consisted of a blockade of the southern ports on the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico, where the enemy shipped and received needed goods to fund and equip its army. The second part consisted of sending a force down the Ohio to seize the Mississippi River, effectively cutting the South in half and encircling the main part of the Rebels. Pressure from the northern army on top, on the left from the captured Mississippi, on the south from the Gulf of Mexico, and on the right from the Atlantic would ensure the enemy’s surrender.
Critics derided the plan’s feasibility and goals, particularly since the Union didn’t have the necessary ships to carry out a river campaign at the start of the war. They compared it to an anaconda crushing its prey in its coils, and the name stuck. However, Scott would be proven right in one aspect of his plan—the campaign to take the Mississippi River would prove to be every bit as important as the famous land battles to the east.
Caught with a lack of men, equipment, and boats, the South would respond poorly at best, suffering from communication and command issues, as well as a lack of an overall plan to defend the river. They ended up leaving the individual cities and outposts to block the Union advance, and, not realizing their jeopardy until it was too late, let them all fall like dominoes, and with them the river, into Union control.
The western portion of Scott’s plan began in early January 1862, when Flag Officer David G. Farragut received orders to take his fleet of four steam sloops, twelve gunboats, and twenty-one mortar boats and capture New Orleans. Farragut assigned the floating artillery to shell the enemy force while the rest of his ships bypassed them and captured the city on April 25. Two weeks later, he seized the navy yard at Pensacola, Florida, depriving the South of another source of vessels. Emboldened by his successes, Farragut sailed upriver, taking Baton Rouge, then Natchez, Mississippi. However, in July he met his match in the heavily fortified city of Vicksburg, then the shipping crossroads of the Confederacy. Although Farragut’s attempt to conquer the city lasted throughout the month, he was forced to admit defeat, leaving the toughest nut on the river to be cracked by someone else.
That someone was Brigadier General Ulysses S. Grant, who had already established himself with his campaign to capture Forts Henry and Donelson, taking the Tennessee and the Cumberland Rivers from the Confederacy. He’d also gained his nickname of “Unconditional Surrender” by demanding exactly that from the enemy at Fort Donelson. Grant knew Vicksburg was the key to seizing the entire Mississippi River, but capturing it would require a major campaign.
First, he had to get there. Heading south on the river, the next target on Grant’s list was Island No. 10, another strongly defended outpost north of Memphis. With continual bombardment provided by Captain Andrew Hull Foote, General John Pope led his men across the river and captured Tiptonville, cutting off the garrison, which surrendered soon afterward.
Only one obstacle remained before Memphis—Fort Pillow. Foote had been injured in the Island No. 10 battle and was replaced by Captain Charles Davis. Although the Union ships suffered a surprise attack by fast, lightly armed Confederate gunboats that damaged two vessels, it was little more than a desperate feint. The Federal navy held fast, and the Rebels were forced to retreat, leaving the way to Memphis wide open.
The Confederate force defending Memphis, however, was determined to hold the city. To combat the fast southern gunboats, Davis turned to an invention that had been around for thousands of years: the ram. Colonel Charles Ellet brought six ram boats downriver to help take the city, and in a pitched battle they destroyed seven of the eight Confederate ships. They also didn’t lose any men during the battle, although Ellis himself was wounded in the fight and later died from his injuries.
The way to Vicksburg was now open, but conquering it would be difficult indeed. Called “the Gibraltar of the Mississippi,” its defenses were mounted on cliffs high above the river, making any approach or dash past on the river subject to heavy cannon fire. Although the rest of the river was now under Union control, the stretch between Vicksburg and Port Hudson, Louisiana, was a vital shipping artery for the increasingly commerce-strangled South—it had to be closed, and the sooner the better.
At first, Grant’s attempts to get close enough to the city to capture it resembled the relatively ineffective efforts of the South to defend the Mississippi—unorganized and ineffectual. Unwilling to retreat all the way back to Memphis to bring his army down, he was determined to reach his objective by using either the Yazoo River or the Mississippi and tried several plans on both. During the winter months of 1862, construction was begun on two canals, one below Vicksburg, the other from Duckport, Louisiana, into bayou country, both of which met with failure. He also tried opening another waterway from the Arkansas–Louisiana border to Lake Providence and from there into bayou country to the Red River, and back to the Mississippi, which also failed due to the spring floods. A fourth option, digging to join Moon Lake to the Yazoo Pass to the Coldwater River, which flowed into the Tallahatchie, and from there into the Yazoo River, was stymied by a powerful Confederate battery on the Coldwater that couldn’t be approached. A fifth route, passing through a bewildering series of various rivers and creeks, failed when Confederate soldiers drove off the Union force in a narrow waterway.
With all other options exhausted, Grant persuaded Admiral David Dixon Porter to chance a run past the Vicksburg batteries on the night of April 16. Although his twelve ships were all hit several times by the shore guns, only one failed to make it downriver. A week later, six barges towing twelve transports tried the same maneuver, with less luck; only half survived the trip. But the damage had been done—Grant could now begin maneuvering his army into position.
On April 30, the first Union forces landed on the Vicksburg side of the river. They pushed the Rebels out of Port Gibson and Grand Gulf, then marched north. Against them was a force of about 50,000 men, led by Lieutenant General John C. Pemberton. Although urged by his superiors to defeat Grant’s army at all costs, Pemberton considered defending the city his highest priority, and felt that sallying out to meet Grant on the field would leave the city vulnerable to other Union forces, so he dug in and waited.
Aware that Confederate reinforcements were being mobilized at Jackson, Mississippi, forty-five miles away, Grant decided to take the potentially risky route of moving between Vicksburg and its relief force, and taking on first one army, then the other. Grant moved aggressively against the forces at Jackson, forcing General Joseph E. Johnston to try to hold the city long enough to evacuate cannon and supplies to the north, where he might meet up with Pemberton. Although Johnston had sent an order for Pemberton to attack Grant from the rear if he could, Pemberton refused to risk the city and stayed where he was. Grant intercepted the message, and if an attack had come, he would have been ready for it. By the time Pemberton marched his own men out, his and Johnston’s forces were headed in opposite directions. Before the mistake could be rectified, Pemberton’s force was defeated at the Battle of Champion Hill, then at the Black River.
Pemberton retreated to a ring of forts around Vicksburg to await Grant’s army, despite Johnston’s telegraph message urging him to abandon the city and save his troops. Grant attacked on May 19 and 22, but both assaults were unsuccessful, despite a small breach in Pemberton’s line. Realizing he couldn’t take the city by force, Grant hunkered down for a siege, acquiring enough men to increase his army to 71,000, and enabling him to turn some of them eastward to hold off Johnston, who was still gathering reinforcements with dimming hopes of breaking the Union forces and saving Vicksburg.
It was not to be. Throughout June, Grant set up 220 guns to pound the city day and night. Hearing more news of Johnston’s growing army, Grant was planning another assault on July 6, but on July 3, Pemberton met with the Union general to discuss surrender terms. The next day, the garrison at Vicksburg marched out to give up their arms.
The last remaining bastion of Confederate power on the Mississippi was at Port Hudson, whose defenders had valiantly held off three Union attacks. But upon hearing the news that Vicksburg had fallen, the 5,500-man garrison surrendered on July 8. The Mississippi was once again in Union hands, allowing President Lincoln to remark, “The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea.”
In the battle for the Mississippi, the Confederate forces were outmatched at every level. From Grant’s superb mastery of maneuver warfare during the campaign to the Union Navy’s performance on the river itself to the final blow at Vicksburg, Joe Johnston and John Pemberton were always at least one step behind the canny northern general. But the failure reached beyond these two men. General Albert Sidney Johnston vacillated between a passive defense—letting most of the Tennessee River fall into enemy hands after barely contesting it—and attacking haphazardly, reducing the available Confederate forces without blunting the advance of the Union Army, until he was killed in 1862. The South also never allocated enough men or supplies to the western theater, partly due to Jefferson Davis never giving it the attention it deserved until it was too late. But by that time, the coils of the Union anaconda had completed its western encirclement, trapping the Mississippi River in its coils and cutting the Confederacy in two.