The Man Who Saved the Union (35 page)

What he heard instead were the whistles of trains bearing Pemberton’s Confederate troops to Vicksburg. Only later, after Grant’s communications were restored, did Sherman learn of the Confederate raid on Holly Springs and Grant’s decision to move north instead of south. In the meantime he had no choice but to retreat and regroup. He descended the Yazoo to its mouth, where he met McClernand arriving with fresh troops and seniority. Sherman relinquished his command and hoped for the best.

But he also maneuvered to outflank McClernand. Grant, after withdrawing north from Mississippi, traveled to Memphis and then down the river to reconnoiter. He met with McClernand and separately with Sherman and
David Porter. The latter two urged him to take personal
command of the Mississippi expedition lest McClernand, through inexperience or excessive ambition, bungle it. “
I found there was not sufficient confidence felt in General McClernand as a commander, either by the Army or Navy, to insure him of success,” Grant reported to Halleck.

Grant didn’t cross McClernand lightly. “
General McClernand was a politician of very considerable prominence in his state,” he observed afterward. “He was a member of Congress when the secession war broke out; he belonged to that political party which furnished all the opposition there was to a vigorous prosecution of the war for saving the Union; there was no delay in his declaring himself for the Union at all hazards.”

But Grant agreed with Sherman and Porter that McClernand wasn’t up to the serious fighting ahead. “It would have been criminal to send troops under these circumstances into such danger,” Grant said. He concluded that he had no choice but to follow Sherman and Porter’s advice and lead the Vicksburg campaign himself.

T
he winter of 1862–63 gravely tested the resolve of the Union. Grant’s stumble at Holly Springs and Sherman’s repulse at Chickasaw Bayou followed a much larger setback for the
Army of the Potomac at Fredericksburg. Lincoln had replaced George McClellan after Antietam with
Ambrose Burnside, who promised the kind of bold action the president couldn’t elicit from McClellan. What Burnside actually delivered was a foolhardy assault on Lee’s entrenched
Army of Northern Virginia, resulting in horrific losses with nothing gained. The disaster deflated Unionists all across the North; Lincoln himself lamented, “
We are now on the brink of destruction. It appears to me the Almighty is against us, and I can hardly see a ray of hope.”

Grant felt the discouragement from the banks of the Mississippi. As he heard Sherman describe the difficulties of the Mississippi Delta and Porter explain the formidability of Vicksburg batteries, Grant briefly considered attempting a variant of his original, railroad-based plan. It would be safer and surer. But it would also be slower, and its slowness caused him to reject it. The North was watching and many would interpret delay as additional cause for despair. The army’s ability to fight would be materially weakened. “
The draft would be resisted, desertions ensue, and the power to capture and punish deserters lost,” Grant recalled telling Sherman and Porter. “There was nothing left to be done but to
go forward to a decisive victory
.”

G
oing forward meant getting in back of Vicksburg somehow. Sherman’s failure north of the city didn’t preclude a second attempt from that direction, but it made Grant consider others. Some involved audacious hydraulic engineering—nothing less, in fact, than changing the course and flow of North America’s mightiest river. The bend in the Mississippi in front of Vicksburg encompassed a neck of land of barely a mile wide. Eventually the river would slit the neck and create a new channel, as it had done many times to similar necks along its course. Grant aimed to give the river some help; if successful the operation would strand Vicksburg away from the new channel and render most of its guns useless. Union engineers in 1862 had begun digging a channel across the neck, but it was poorly placed with respect to the river’s currents and the enemy’s guns. “
I propose running a canal through, starting far enough above the old one commenced last summer, to receive the stream where it impinges against the shore with the greatest velocity,” Grant wrote Halleck in January 1863. “The old canal left the river in an eddy and in a line perpendicular to the stream and also to a crest of the hills opposite with a battery directed against the outlet. This new canal will debouch below the bluffs on the opposite side of the river and give our gunboats a fair chance against any fortifications that may be placed to oppose them.”

Grant set four thousand men to digging. “
Work on the canal is progressing as rapidly as possible,” he informed Halleck two weeks later. But heavy rains swamped the digging and lifted the river to a threatening height. “
The continuous rise in the river has kept the army busy to keep out of water, and much retarded work on the canal,” Grant reported.

The slowness of this first hydro-engineering project spurred Grant to attempt others. Lake Providence filled a portion of an old river bend on the west side of the Mississippi above Vicksburg; bayous and larger streams linked it eventually to the Red River, which joined the Mississippi below Vicksburg. A canal from the Mississippi to Lake Providence would allow gunboats and transports to get past the Confederate fortress without facing its guns. “
There is no question but that this route is much more practicable than the present undertaking,” Grant told Halleck, comparing the Lake Providence route with the Vicksburg canal.

Grant traveled to Lake Providence to observe the work himself—and soon had his optimism dashed. The diggers hadn’t completed the canal from the river to Lake Providence, but engineers had managed to drag
a small steamer through. “
With this we were able to explore the lake and bayou as far as cleared,” Grant recorded. “I saw then that there was scarcely a chance of this ever becoming a practicable route for moving troops through an enemy’s country.” The waterways were too narrow and tortuous. “The enemy could throw small bodies of men to obstruct our passage and pick off our troops with their sharpshooters.” Yet he kept his discouragement to himself. “I let the work go on, believing employment was better than idleness for the men.” Moreover, it kept the enemy guessing.

A third plan sought to improve on Sherman’s experience in the Delta. Three hundred miles above Vicksburg a levee on the Mississippi’s left bank was all that kept the big river from pouring into the Yazoo Pass and eventually to the Yazoo River. Grant gave the order to blow up the levee, theoretically allowing shallow-draft boats a new route to carry troops to the high ground above Vicksburg. But trees, vines, stumps and other forms of living and dead vegetation clogged the waterway, which in any case was so narrow as to invite attacks from the shore, and after an indecisive encounter between Union gunboats and Confederates at
Fort Pemberton, where the Tallahatchie joined the Yazoo, this approach was abandoned.

Similar difficulties befell
David Porter, who tried to push up the Yazoo from its mouth. Porter’s boats carried some of Sherman’s men, and he expected support from Sherman as his flotilla plunged into the tangle of the Delta. But even as Porter found the Delta too solid for effective naval operations, Sherman found it too liquid for infantry movements. Porter called for assistance as Confederate forces closed in on him. “
Hurry up, for Heaven’s sake,” he wrote Sherman. “I never knew how helpless an ironclad could be steaming around through the woods without an army to back her.” Porter managed to extricate his boats, but the Delta remained undefeated.

Grant didn’t know what to do. “
I am very well but much perplexed,” he wrote Julia at the end of March. “Heretofore I have had nothing to do but fight the enemy. This time I have to overcome obstacles to reach him. Foot once upon dry land on the other side of the river, I think the balance would be of but short duration.” But how to reach that dry land was as puzzling as ever.

Finally he decided that the best route past the defenses of Vicksburg was the most obvious. He asked Porter if his boats could run the batteries. Porter replied that they could, but given the danger and the strength
of the current, it would be a one-way trip. “
When these gunboats once go below, we give up all hopes of ever getting them up again.”

Grant took the gamble. He decided to risk everything on a river crossing below Vicksburg. Porter’s gunboats would accompany and cover vessels carrying provisions; if the provision boats got past the Vicksburg batteries they would supply Union soldiers who had made their way down the western bank and would ferry the soldiers across the river. The crossing would afford Grant the footing he desired and open the way, he hoped, to Vicksburg.

C
harles
Dana had switched from cotton speculation to administration espionage. The slowness of the Vicksburg campaign had revived the stories of Grant’s drinking, and Edwin Stanton sought to confirm or silence them. Dana’s ostensible role was to investigate the finances of Grant’s paymasters, but his real purpose was to investigate Grant. He had a special cipher, distinct from that of Grant and the other officers, for communicating his discoveries to the war secretary.

He caught up with Grant at Milliken’s Bend on the Louisiana side of the river above Vicksburg. “
The Mississippi at Milliken’s Bend was a mile wide,” Dana remembered, “and the sight as we came down the river by boat was most imposing. Grant’s big army was stretched up and down the riverbank over the plantations, its white tents affording a new decoration to the natural magnificence of the broad plains. These plains, which stretch far back from the river, were divided into rich and old plantations by blooming hedges of rose and Osage orange, the mansions of the owners being enclosed in roses, myrtles, magnolias, oaks and every other sort of beautiful and noble trees. The negroes whose work made all this wealth and magnificence were gone, and there was nothing growing in the fields.… I had seen slavery in Maryland, Kentucky, Virginia, and Missouri, but it was not until I saw these great Louisiana plantations with all their apparatus for living and working that I really felt the aristocratic nature of the institution, and the infernal baseness of that aristocracy.”

Dana showed Grant the letter of reference explaining his ostensible mission. Grant may have guessed that Dana’s true charge was broader, but he made no attempt to hide anything. “
He received me cordially,” Dana recalled. “Indeed, I think Grant was always glad to have me with
his army. He did not like letter writing, and my daily dispatches to Mr. Stanton relieved him from the necessity of describing every day what was going on in the army. From the first neither he nor any of his staff or corps commanders evinced any unwillingness to show me the inside of things.”

Dana got to know
Grant’s assistants and subordinates. “
Grant’s staff is a curious mixture of good, bad, and indifferent,” Dana wrote Stanton. “As he is neither an organizer nor a disciplinarian himself, his staff is naturally a mosaic of accidental elements and family friends. It contains four working men, two who are able to accomplish their duties without work, and several who either don’t think of work or who accomplish nothing no matter what they undertake.” The hardest of the workers was
John Rawlins. “Lieutenant-Colonel Rawlins, Grant’s assistant adjutant general, is a very industrious, conscientious man, who never loses a moment, and never gives himself any indulgence except swearing and scolding. He is a lawyer by profession, a townsman of Grant’s.… Grant thinks Rawlins a first-class adjutant, but I think this is a mistake. He is too slow, and can’t write the English language correctly without a great deal of careful consideration. Indeed, illiterateness is a general characteristic of Grant’s staff.”

William Sherman was the best of Grant’s lieutenants. “
A very brilliant man and an excellent commander of a corps,” Dana wrote later. “Sherman’s information was great, and he was a clever talker. He always liked to have people about who could keep up with his conversation; besides, he was genial and unaffected. I particularly admired his loyalty to Grant.” To Stanton, Dana declared of Sherman: “What a splendid soldier he is!”

As for Grant himself, Dana arrived a skeptic but became a believer. He observed not a drunk but a singular commanding officer. “
Grant was an uncommon fellow—the most modest, the most disinterested, and the most honest man I ever knew, with a temper that nothing could disturb, and a judgment that was judicial in its comprehensiveness and wisdom,” Dana wrote. “Not a great man, except morally; not an original or brilliant man, but sincere, thoughtful, deep, and gifted with courage that never faltered; when the time came to risk all, he went in like a simple-hearted, unaffected, unpretending hero, whom no ill omens could deject and no triumph unduly exalt. A social, friendly man, too, fond of a pleasant joke and also ready with one; but liking above all a long chat of an evening,
and ready to sit up with you all night, talking in the cool breeze in front of his tent. Not a man of sentimentality, not demonstrative in friendship, but always holding to his friends, and just even to the enemies he hated.”

B
y the time Grant decided to send the boats past the Vicksburg batteries, Dana had the run of the camp. He got a look at Vicksburg from the deck of a craft that ventured to within sight of the cliffs. “
It was an ugly place, with its line of bluffs commanding the channel for fully seven miles, and battery piled above battery all the way,” he recalled.

He remembered the critical moment. “Just before ten o’clock on the night of April 16th the squadron cast loose its moorings,” he said. “It was a strange scene.… A mass of black things detached itself from the shore, and we saw it float out toward the middle of the stream. There was nothing to be seen except this big black mass, which dropped slowly down the river. Soon another black mass detached itself, and another, then another. It was Admiral Porter’s fleet of ironclad turtles, steamboats, and barges. They floated down the Mississippi darkly and silently, showing neither steam nor light, save occasionally a signal astern, where the enemy could not see it.” The vessels spaced themselves two hundred yards apart. “First came seven ironclad turtles and one heavy armed ram; following these were two side-wheel steamers and one stern-wheel, having twelve barges in tow; these barges carried the supplies.” The gunboats were rounding the sharpest part of the bend before Vicksburg, just under the bluffs, when Confederate pickets spotted them in the dark and the Confederate batteries opened fire. “There was a flash from the upper forts, and then for an hour and a half the cannonade was terrific, raging incessantly along the line of about four miles in extent. I counted five hundred and twenty-five discharges.” To illuminate their targets the Confederates torched some houses at the base of the bluffs; by the infernal light the gunners improved their aim.