This Great Struggle (32 page)

With rainy weather raising the river level and threatening to inundate his camps, Sherman ordered his troops back onto their transports. At this point, McClernand arrived, outraged at what he viewed as the abduction of his army and even more outraged that the plan he had advocated had already been tried and proven a failure. Pompous and insulting toward Sherman, whom he outranked, as well as Rear Admiral David D. Porter, who commanded the Navy’s cooperating squadron, McClernand was nevertheless at a complete loss to know what to do next.

Sherman and Porter talked him into making a side expedition up the Arkansas River, 150 miles north of Vicksburg, where the Confederates had built Fort Hindman at a low bluff called Arkansas Post and were using it as a base from which to stage hit-and-run attacks on Union supply and communications along the Mississippi. The expedition’s ironclad gunboats and thirty thousand ground troops might have been helpless against the unusual natural obstacles around Vicksburg, but Fort Hindman’s 5,500 defenders had no such advantages. After a short, sharp fight on January 11, 1863, Porter’s gunboats and McClernand’s troops, led primarily by Sherman, captured the fort and almost its entire garrison, more than squaring the casualty ratio for the campaign. Indeed, with Union losses at Arkansas Post scarcely over a thousand men, the campaign’s loss tally now tipped two to one in favor of the Union.

A few days later, Grant arrived to take command of the expedition in person. While Sherman had been experiencing frustration along Chickasaw Bayou and redemption, at least in a subordinate capacity, at Arkansas Post, Grant had been experiencing his own difficulties. After Sherman had departed for Memphis to begin his campaign down the river, Grant’s army had advanced more slowly, continuing to move down the Mississippi Central Railroad in order to keep Pemberton occupied, and for a time it worked.

The situation had become a matter of acute concern to Jefferson Davis, who made a tour of inspection of the Confederacy’s western armies during December. Joseph Johnston, who Davis had recently appointed overall Confederate commander in the West after his recovery from the wound he had suffered at Fair Oaks the preceding May, assured Davis that cavalry raids he was dispatching against Grant’s supply lines would suffice to repel the Union offensive, but Davis remained unconvinced. Against the advice of Johnston and Bragg he ordered the latter to detach ten thousand men, about one-fourth of his infantry strength, and send them to reinforce Pemberton.

Before the reinforcements could arrive, Johnston’s prediction proved true. A raid led by Nathan Bedford Forrest created confusion in West Tennessee. Worse, a second, more or less simultaneous raid under the command of Earl Van Dorn, who finally seemed to have found his niche as a cavalry commander, struck directly at Grant’s forward base of supplies at Holly Springs, Mississippi, on December 21. The Union officer commanding the small garrison at Holly Springs proved to be a coward and put up very little fight. Van Dorn and his raiders destroyed the supplies and cut the railroad, putting Grant’s army immediately on short rations, with no prospect of resupply. Continuing to push back Pemberton’s army without a supply line would have been impossible, and Grant had no choice but to fall back on his rear-area bases in extreme northern Mississippi and West Tennessee. Though his troops had to take in their belts a notch during the trip, they staved off starvation at the expense of the farms and plantations in their path.

Pemberton was thus released to deal with Sherman and began shifting troops down to Vicksburg to meet the threat of the river expedition. The Battle of Chickasaw Bayou took place before most of them—or any of the troops from Bragg’s army—could arrive near Vicksburg. As it turned out, none of them were needed since the position on the bluffs overlooking Chickasaw Bayou was all but impregnable against any attacking force, even with only a handful of defenders.

In mid-January a frustrated Grant arrived at the headquarters of the Mississippi River expedition, still embarked on steamboats, and Sherman, McClernand, and Porter briefed him on the failure at Chickasaw Bayou and secondary success at Arkansas Post. Grant faced a dilemma. Only from the interior of Mississippi could Vicksburg be approached with any hope of military success. Yet any approach through the interior of the state invited constant repetition of the kinds of raids that had derailed his recent push down the Mississippi Central. McClernand further complicated Grant’s situation. Sherman, Porter, and other officers begged Grant not to leave the expedition in the not-so-capable hands of the ambitious political schemer. Grant knew he could not sack the president’s special appointee—not yet, anyway—and he also knew that any plan that divided his force into two columns would give McClernand, as second-ranking officer, command of one of them. Grant therefore determined to unite his army and encamp it on the Louisiana side of the river just above Vicksburg, there to stay until he somehow found a way to get around the Confederate fortress city and its many natural barriers.

By that time the third of the Union’s winter offensives had also run its course. Secrecy for military movements was a rarity in the Civil War, but few information leaks were as dramatic as the prompt publication by the
Chattanooga Daily Rebel
of news that Jefferson Davis was transferring one-fourth of Bragg’s infantry from the Army of Tennessee camps around Murfreesboro, Tennessee, to reinforce Pemberton in Mississippi. Among the
Rebel
’s most interested readers was William S. Rosecrans, who, though not a subscriber, received a copy in Nashville only a few days later. He immediately put his army in motion to attack Bragg’s weakened force at Murfreesboro.

Confederate cavalry gave Bragg ample warning and slowed Rosecrans’s advance so that it took several days for his Army of the Cumberland to cover the thirty miles to Murfreesboro. By the evening of December 30, 1862, the two armies confronted each other in battle formation straddling a shallow stream called Stones River, just north of town. That evening as the soldiers awaited the battle that was sure to open next morning, bands on both sides of the line took turns serenading the armies, who could clearly hear both the Rebel and the Union musicians. Finally, one of the bands struck up “Home, Sweet Home,” and all of the others on both sides joined in as the soldiers sang along, concluding the concert with a poignant reminder of the American culture the contending forces shared.

Each commanding general planned to attack the other’s right flank the next morning, but Bragg moved first, swinging wide to envelope the Union right. Suddenly plunged into a desperate situation, Rosecrans canceled his own attack and began shifting troops to shore up his hard-pressed right. There the Federals fell back, fighting furiously and leaving the battlefield littered with the dead of both sides. By late afternoon the right wing of the Army of the Cumberland had rotated back about ninety degrees and was desperately trying to hang on to the turnpike that ran northwestward toward Nashville and was the Army of the Cumberland’s only line of supply and, if it came to that, of retreat. Rosecrans coped with the situation much better than he had the similar one at Corinth three months before. He maintained his composure and rode along his lines encouraging his men, who cheered him enthusiastically wherever he appeared.

Bragg was tantalizingly close to a victory that might cut off and trap the Army of the Cumberland but lacked the troop strength to finish the job. If he had still had those ten thousand men Davis had sent to Mississippi, things would have been different, but in that case Rosecrans might never have attacked in that time and place. As it was, Bragg had had to commit his reserve early in the day to compensate for a blunder by an incompetent division commander whom he had tried to remove months ago, only to be told by Davis that the man must stay. The attack suffered a further setback from the blundering of another of Bragg’s subordinate generals who was intoxicated. Then when Bragg ordered the general commanding a large, unengaged division on his right to send troops for the final effort to crush Rosecrans’s line, that general, a politician and former vice president of the United States, first refused, then forwarded the troops a brigade at a time, so that there was little prospect of using them for a concentrated mass assault.

On the other side of the lines, Rosecrans was well served by his subordinates, especially his senior corps commander, George H. Thomas, who held a key sector and proved to be a veritable rock in such a defensive role. When nightfall ended the fighting and Rosecrans consulted with his generals about what to do next, Thomas and others were strong in urging him to hold his ground, and so he did.

Bragg also decided to stay put the next day. It was the first day of 1863. In Washington, D.C., six hundred miles to the northeast, Lincoln issued the final Emancipation Proclamation, but on the battlefield on either side of Stones River, the two armies watched each other warily without engaging in further combat. On January 2 Bragg tried a limited assault to take a key piece of terrain from Rosecrans’s Federals, but the attack turned out badly. That night, with his subordinates insistently urging him to retreat, Bragg finally gave up and ordered the Army of Tennessee to fall back behind a chain of hills called the Highland Rim, twenty-five miles to the southeast. The Battle of Stones River, or Murfreesboro as the Confederates called it, was over. Its percentage of casualties among the troops engaged, about one-third, would stand as the highest of any of the Civil War’s many grisly encounters.

Rosecrans had won a victory by default and one that had gained him only a thirty-mile-wide swath of Tennessee countryside, but at this stage of the war Lincoln was happy to take any victories he could get. While discussing further operations in an exchange of telegrams with Rosecrans several months later, the president noted, “I can never forget, whilst I remember anything, that
about the end of last year
, and beginning of this, you gave us a hard earned victory, which had there been a defeat instead, the country scarcely could have lived over.”
¹

8

“PEACE DOES NOT APPEAR SO DISTANT AS IT DID”

DISCOURAGEMENT AND DISCONTENTMENT ON BOTH SIDES

T
he winter offensives that Lincoln had sparked with his command shake-ups in the late fall of 1862 had run their course by mid-January 1863. In the high-visibility yet chronically indecisive eastern theater, Fredericksburg had been a spectacular fiasco. The two-headed monster of a command arrangement Lincoln had created in the Mississippi Valley had snagged a target of opportunity at Arkansas Post but had been stopped cold in its primary mission of taking Vicksburg and opening the Mississippi to midwestern commerce, a culmination that now seemed as distant as ever. In Middle Tennessee, Rosecrans had won a victory by staying on the battlefield longer than his opponent was willing to do, gaining a narrow swath of Tennessee countryside but bringing final Union triumph very little closer. Only in the Mississippi Valley, where Grant had taken command firmly into his own hands, was there any prospect of further offensive operations. Rosecrans’s and Burnside’s armies were firmly ensconced in winter quarters, and no progress could be expected from them for months to come, while Grant had encamped his army in front of Vicksburg but for the moment could find no way of getting behind the Confederate stronghold, where lay the only prospect of a successful assault.

It was all very discouraging—to Lincoln, to Union soldiers, and to the northern public. Disaffected members of the New Jersey legislature introduced resolutions complaining that the war was hopeless and the restoration of the southern states impossible. They called for an immediate end to hostilities and the opening of negotiations that could lead only to a permanent division of the country. Newspapers such as the
New York World
hewed to the same line, while newspapers in the South gleefully picked up and repeated such expressions of northern war weariness and defeatism. Demoralized or disloyal northern civilians sent copies of such negative newspaper articles to soldier acquaintances and relatives of theirs, down south in the camps of the armies in Louisiana, Tennessee, or Virginia. With the newspapers (or instead of them), they sent their own commentary on the current unwinnable war and the hopelessness of ever restoring the Union by force of arms. Some went so far as to urge the soldiers to desert and promise them protection and concealment if they should come back home now. A few radical opponents of the war actually visited the armies’ camps in person to urge their friends to desert, though they risked arrest if discovered by most officers. Despite the officers’ efforts, morale dropped still lower in the nation’s armies among soldiers discouraged by the costly and seemingly fruitless campaigns that had closed out 1862.

On the other side of the lines, morale was, for the most part, correspondingly high. Confederate soldiers and civilians reveled in their armies’ victories, especially the seemingly effortless triumphs of Robert E. Lee, whose fame was by now coming to rival that of his subordinate Stonewall Jackson. The latter had been a darling of the southern press and public since his exploits in the Shenandoah Valley the preceding spring, and now Lee took his place alongside him as one of the Confederacy’s foremost heroes. Confederate morale and even the Confederate people’s sense of nationhood were rapidly coming to center and rest on these two men and their ragtag but seemingly invincible army.