The Man Who Saved the Union (37 page)

Grant learned that Pemberton was approaching from the west, and he hoped to smash him before he got help from Johnston. “
I have just received information that the enemy has crossed Big Black with the entire Vicksburg force,” Grant wrote McPherson. “You will therefore pass all trains and move forward to join McClernand with all possible dispatch.” He ordered Sherman to put his men on the road toward Bolton at once. “
Great celerity should be shown in carrying out this movement. The fight may be brought on at any moment; we should have every man on the field.”

The clash occurred at
Champion’s Hill on Baker’s Creek, west of Bolton. Grant admired Pemberton’s choice of ground. “
It is one of the highest points in that section, and commanded all the ground in range,”
he wrote afterward. “On the east side of the ridge, which is quite precipitous, is a ravine running first north, then westerly, terminating at Baker’s Creek. It was grown up thickly with large trees and undergrowth, making it difficult to penetrate with troops, even when not defended.”

Grant’s columns converged on Pemberton’s position on May 16, and after a couple hours’ skirmishing the battle proper began. It lasted four hours and left Grant in control of Champion’s Hill but not of Pemberton’s army, the far greater prize. “
Had I known the ground as I did afterwards,” he said later, “I cannot see how Pemberton could have escaped with any organized force.” Yet the Confederate losses were heavy—as were those on the Union side—and to Grant they appeared decisive. “
The enemy were driven and are now in full retreat,” he wrote just after the battle. “I am of the opinion that the battle of Vicksburg has been fought.” He added: “We must be prepared, however, for whatever turns up.”

Grant gave chase as Pemberton fled back to Vicksburg. Nightfall found him near a house where Union surgeons and nurses tended to wounded Confederates. “
While a battle is raging, one can see his enemy mowed down by the thousand or the ten thousand, with great composure,” he reflected. “But after the battle these scenes are distressing, and one is naturally disposed to do as much to alleviate the suffering of an enemy as of a friend.”

Before dawn Grant’s men caught Pemberton a dozen miles from Vicksburg. “
The enemy were found strongly posted on both sides of the
Black River,” Grant explained in his postbattle report. Bluffs backed the stream on the west side; cultivated fields filled the flood plain on the east, surrounded by a bayou. “Following the line of this bayou the enemy had sunk rifle pits, leaving a stagnant ditch of water from two to three feet in depth and from ten to twenty feet wide outside.” Grant’s men tested the east-bank defenses in various places, looking for a weakness. Finding none they readied to charge.

At just this moment Grant received a letter from Halleck that had taken a week to find him. “
If possible, the forces of you and of General
Banks should be united between Vicksburg and Port Hudson, so as to attack these places separately with your combined forces,” Halleck said. Grant pondered the obsolete direction, then told the officer bearing the letter that it came too late. Halleck would not have written it if he had known the current state of affairs, he said. The officer manifested alarm, declaring that General Halleck would insist that the order be obeyed. The words were scarcely out of his mouth when a loud cheer erupted
on the Union right, where one of Grant’s brigadiers,
Michael Lawler, was leading a charge. “
I immediately mounted my horse and rode in the direction of the charge, and saw no more of the officer who delivered the dispatch, I think not even to this day,” Grant recalled years later.

Lawler’s charge was worth the cheering. “
Notwithstanding the level ground to pass over affording no cover to his troops, and the ditch in front of the enemy’s works being a great obstacle, the charge was gallantly made, and in a few minutes the entire garrison, with seventeen pieces of artillery, were the trophies of this brilliant dash,” Grant recorded after the battle. The Confederates west of the river, fearing a similar result, burned the bridge and headed for the comparative safety of Vicksburg.

At the cost of another seventeen hundred troops, Pemberton had bought himself time—but not as much as he hoped. Grant’s engineers fabricated pontoon bridges, employing cotton bales as pontoons, and threw them across the river by the next morning. His army reached the outer defenses of Vicksburg later that day.

Grant explained to
David Porter that the reduction of Vicksburg, the object for which they had been working for months, had finally begun. “
My men are now investing Vicksburg,” Grant said. “Sherman’s forces run from the Mississippi River above the city two miles east. McPherson is to his left, and McClernand to the left of McPherson.” The defenders were severely weakened by the recent battles. “The enemy have not been able to return to the city with one half of his forces.” Grant hoped to shrink that number further with Porter’s help. “If you can run down and throw shell in just back of the lower part of the city, it would aid us and demoralize an already badly beaten enemy,” he told Porter.

Grant rode to Sherman’s position north of the city. The two men climbed the highest part of the bluff that commanded the river and its banks. “
Until this moment I never thought your expedition a success,” Sherman told Grant. “I never could see the end clearly until now. But this is a campaign. This is a success, if we never take the town.”

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J
OE
J
OHNSTON AGREED.
T
HE
C
ONFEDERATE COMMANDER UNDERSTOOD
he had been out-generaled, and he determined to cut his losses. “
If Haynes’ Bluff is untenable,” he wrote Pemberton, who had already decided it
was
untenable, “Vicksburg is of no value, and must ultimately surrender. Under such circumstances, instead of losing both troops and place, we must, if possible, save the troops. If it is not too late, evacuate Vicksburg and its dependencies, and march to the northeast.”

Pemberton convened a council of war. He polled his generals as to the feasibility of following Johnston’s order. “
The opinion was unanimously expressed that it was impossible to withdraw the army from this position with such morale and material as to be of further service to the Confederacy,” he replied to Johnston. While the Confederate officers were meeting, Grant’s guns commenced a bombardment of the Vicksburg defenses. Pemberton realized that his situation was dire. But he wouldn’t give up. “I have decided to hold Vicksburg as long as possible, with the firm hope that the Government may yet be able to assist me in keeping this obstruction to the enemy’s free navigation of the Mississippi River,” he told Johnston. “I still consider it to be the most important point in the Confederacy.”

Grant didn’t want to give Confederate assistance a chance to arrive. The momentum of the previous month, during which his men had marched two hundred miles and won five battles, prompted him to try to take Vicksburg by storm. “
Johnston was in my rear, only fifty miles away, with an army not much inferior to the one I had with me, and I knew he was being reinforced,” Grant explained afterward. “There was danger of his coming to the assistance of Pemberton, and after all he might defeat
my anticipations of capturing the garrison if, indeed, he did not prevent the capture of the city.” Moreover, a quick defeat of Pemberton would let him turn on Johnston’s army, whose defeat or dispersal would go far toward ending the rebellion. A final argument clinched the case for an assault: “The troops believed they could carry the works in their front, and would not have worked so patiently in the trenches if they had not been allowed to try.”

The attack was scheduled for the morning of May 22. Grant had his corps commanders synchronize their watches so they could launch at precisely ten o’clock. “
The assault was gallant in the extreme on the part of all the troops,” Grant told Halleck afterward. In places Union soldiers managed to plant their flags on the outer works of the Confederate defenses. But the geometry and geography of the city and its surroundings prevented Grant from bringing his superior numbers to bear. “Each corps had many more men than could possibly be used in the assault over such ground as intervened between them and the enemy,” he said. “More men could only avail in case of breaking through the enemy’s line or in repelling a sortie.”

Such a breakthrough occurred in McClernand’s sector—or so McClernand reported. Grant was skeptical. “
I don’t believe a word of it,” he told Sherman. He added later: “I occupied a position from which I believed I could see as well as he what took place in his front, and I did not see the success he reported.” But Sherman pointed out that McClernand had put his report in writing and that if Grant ignored it there might be political trouble. Reluctantly Grant sent reinforcements.

He soon wished he hadn’t. The initial assault had been repelled with heavy losses; the second wave, prompted by McClernand’s questionable report, did no better. “
This last attack only served to increase our casualties without giving any benefit whatever,” Grant acknowledged.

A
fter the unsuccessful attack on May 22, the siege proper of Vicksburg began. The modernity of the Civil War—the employment of
railroads and steamboats for transport, the application of industrial techniques to the production of war matériel—meant little to the millennia-old problem of reducing a hilltop fortress. If Grant had possessed sufficient siege cannon, he might have tried to batter down Vicksburg’s walls. But his six thirty-two-pounders, complemented by a battery of naval guns borrowed from Porter, hardly dented the city’s defenses. His
smaller guns and some makeshift mortars—hollowed logs ringed with iron bands—harassed the inhabitants and defenders without threatening to breach the works.

To effect a breach Grant turned to one of the oldest techniques of siege warfare. His sappers dug tunnels toward the walls of the city. They dodged the tunnels Pemberton’s men dug against them and after weeks of mining reached a spot beneath the Confederate defenses. Grant’s artillerists crammed the cavern with black powder and on June 25 ignited it. The explosion hurled dirt, rocks and rebels high into the air, leaving a gaping hole in the Confederate works and a yawning crater in the ground. Union soldiers, who had been expecting the explosion, poured into the gap; Confederate troops, who hadn’t, nonetheless responded almost as quickly. The fierce battle that followed was fought at close quarters with bayonets, rifle butts, knives, fists and teeth. Grant’s men won the crater but couldn’t exploit their success as the Confederates simply retreated a short distance and retrenched.

Grant reluctantly settled for a strategy of attrition. He hammered the fortress mercilessly, as Pemberton explained to Johnston. “
The enemy has placed several very heavy guns in position against our works,” the Confederate commander wrote on June 15. “His fire is almost continuous. Our men have no relief; are becoming much fatigued.… We are living on greatly reduced rations.” Within the week Pemberton reiterated: “My men have been thirty-four days and nights in trenches, without relief, and the enemy within conversation distance. We are living on very reduced rations, and, as you know, are entirely isolated. What aid am I to expect from you?”

After Johnston replied that he had scant aid to send and that it couldn’t get through Grant’s lines, Pemberton felt more isolated than ever. Supplies continued to dwindle. “Our stock of bacon having been almost exhausted, the experiment of using mule meat as a substitute was tried,” he reported. “I am gratified to say it was found by both officers and men not only nutritious but very palatable.”

The bombardment from the Union guns caused the residents of Vicksburg to seek shelter wherever they could find it. Discovering that their houses afforded little protection, they burrowed caves into the hillsides of the city. These kept them comparatively safe from the balls and shells, but living underground added to the emotional toll. “
Even the very animals seemed to share the general fear of a sudden and frightful death,” a woman who experienced the siege recorded. “The dogs would be seen
in the midst of the noise to gallop up the street, and then to return, as if fear had maddened them. On hearing the descent of a shell, they would dart aside—then, as it exploded, sit down and howl in the most pitiful manner.” Nor did the earth above the caves invariably provide protection. “Sitting in the cave one evening, I heard the most heartrending screams and moans,” the Vicksburg woman recalled. “I was told that a mother had taken a child into a cave about a hundred yards from us, and having laid it on its little bed, as the poor woman believed, in safety, she took her seat near the entrance of the cave. A mortar shell came rushing through the air and fell with much force, entering the earth above the sleeping child—cutting through into the cave—oh! most horrible sight to the mother—crushing in the upper part of the little sleeping head and taking away the young innocent life.”

By the beginning of July the situation was desperate. “
Unless the siege of Vicksburg is raised or supplies are thrown in, it will become necessary very shortly to evacuate the place,” Pemberton wrote his generals. “I see no prospect of the former, and there are many great, if not insuperable, obstacles in the way of the latter.” Pemberton requested that the officers assess the ability of the troops to stand the strain of a forced evacuation. “You will, of course, use the utmost discretion while informing yourself,” he added.

The gist of the officers’ response was that the men were too enfeebled to break the siege and escape the besiegers. “Under these circumstances,” Major General
M. L. Smith wrote, in words echoed by the others, “I deem it best to propose terms of capitulation before forced to do so from want of provisions.”

Pemberton had reason for putting his subordinates on record. As a native Northerner, from Philadelphia, he remained suspect in the eyes of some in the South despite the gallant service he had performed till then. If Vicksburg fell, as appeared increasingly inevitable, he didn’t want its surrender to be his decision alone. “With this unanimous opinion of my officers against the practicability of a successful evacuation, and no relief from General Johnston, a surrender with or without terms was the only alternative left to me,” he reported afterward.