Ulysses S. Grant (8 page)

By noon, however, Sherman—ever the optimist—had reported more hopeful signs, and by one o’clock Buell himself finally appeared and met with Grant aboard his steamer. Grant urged Buell into action, and for once Buell moved quickly, and by late afternoon, the Confederate rush had been slowed by a series of fierce artillery clashes and vicious hand-to-hand fighting. Grant did not know it yet, but luck had touched him again. Confederate general A. S. Johnston had been hit in the thigh; thinking it was a minor wound, he ignored it, continuing to urge his troops forward. When his staff finally got him off his horse and pulled his boot off, it was full of blood. It was too late to save Johnston, who bled to death on the battlefield, and command passed to Beauregard, who had not shared Johnston’s optimism about the attack in the first place.

With Johnston’s death the steam went out of the Confederate attack. As the dreadful day ended in a torrential rainstorm, Grant
took refuge in a battlefield hospital, but he could not stand the blood, the screams, and the cries of the wounded and the dying (shades of the tannery), and took shelter under a tree. Sherman found him there in the dark, whittling a stick with his pocketknife and smoking a cigar, his hat pulled low over his eyes. As the story goes, Sherman said, “Well, Grant, we’ve had the devil’s own day, haven’t we?” Grant went on whittling and, without looking up, said, “Yes, lick ’em tomorrow, though.”

And so it would prove. Grant attacked in the morning—now, he finally had all Buell’s twenty thousand men and Wallace’s five thousand, the author of
Ben Hur
having at last found his way to the battlefield—drove the Confederates back, and by nightfall they were back in Corinth again. Shiloh was, to that date, the biggest battle ever fought on American soil, and the casualties came to nearly thirty thousand killed, wounded, and missing. More Americans were killed at Shiloh than in all previous American wars combined—the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and the Mexican War—a grim statistic that was to shock both the North and the South alike.

Grant, though Shiloh was not his finest moment as a general, had at least not been paralyzed by Johnston’s surprise attack or by the sheer ferocity of the fighting, as Burnside would be at Fredericksburg, and Hooker at Chancellorsville. He had dispersed his forces poorly, reacted slowly, and arrived on the scene late, but once he was there he didn’t lose his nerve. He stood his ground against superior numbers and won.

Nevertheless his victory brought down upon his head a torrent of criticism and abuse. The “butcher’s bill” of Shiloh, once it reached the press, fueled speculation that Grant had been caught napping, that he had deployed his forces ineptly, that he had been incapaci
tated by drink. Newspapers and members of Congress called for an investigation, while Halleck, shaken by the storm of criticism, did not attempt to defend Grant—quite the contrary.

Grant did little to defend himself—perhaps on the wise advice of Rawlins—and stayed as silent as Achilles in his tent, though he toyed with the idea of resigning from the army until talked out of it by Sherman. In time the storm blew over, chiefly because Lincoln never lost his confidence in Grant, and also because it began to dawn on people that Shiloh, however bloody, was a victory, and that the war would not be won without casualties.

When Jesse Grant, enraged at the criticism of his son, took to writing furious letters to the newspapers defending him, Grant wrote his father a firm letter that made it clear that the son was now grown up. “I have not an enemy in the world who has done me so much injury as you in your efforts at my defense. I require no defenders and for my sake let me alone…. Do nothing to correct what you have already done, but for the future keep quiet upon this subject.”
³
It is hard not to sense the satisfaction with which Grant must have written this letter.

Demoted to Halleck’s second in command, Grant glumly accompanied Halleck on a tortuously slow advance toward Corinth, Mississippi—Halleck, once out from behind his desk, moved at a snail’s pace—until news came that Halleck had been ordered to Washington to replace McClellan as general in chief, a job that might, in fact, have been made to order for him, and at which he would excel—while Grant was to replace him as commander of Union forces in the West.

He was now, at last, in charge.

N
O SOONER DID
G
RANT
have what he wanted—or appeared to want—than he slipped into one of his periodic slumps. In the fall of 1862 Halleck was in faraway Washington, Grant was deep in Mississippi, the outrage over the casualties at Shiloh was beginning to die down, put into perspective by what appeared to be an endless series of costly and shameful Union defeats at the hands of Robert E. Lee in the East, Mrs. Grant had joined him, and there was even talk, which would soon be fulfilled, of making Grant a major general in the Regular Army, as opposed to a mere major general of volunteers. On the other hand Grant now found himself military commander in an area almost the size of Western Europe, with social, political, and military problems that would have daunted Caesar. To say that Grant was not equipped for this role is putting it mildly. His previous experience in administration, after all, had been as a quartermaster of army supplies in the small garrison of Fort Vancouver and as a clerk wrapping packages in his father’s shop in Galena, under the
watchful eyes of his younger brothers. His generals seemed unsure whether Grant was in command of them or not, and perhaps as a result the attack on the wily Confederate general Sterling Price at Iuka, Mississippi, by Generals Edward O. Ord and Rosecrans, and Rosecrans’s defense of Corinth were inconclusive and needlessly bloody battles, productive of very little except casualties. Grant was in the dumps.

Grant was a quick learner but not necessarily a happy one. It is one thing to know how to fight a battle, quite another to learn how to command other generals to fight one, and while he was pleased enough to have Halleck off his back, he had not entirely grown used to handling Halleck’s duties as well as his own. Washington expected him to win victories, and that he had done; but now Washington expected him as a military commander to deal with
political
difficulties as well, since he alone represented the United States in what was, practically speaking, enemy territory. Like Ike in North Africa or France, Grant would have to become a politician, an administrator, and a diplomat as well as a general, and none of this came as easily to Grant as fighting did. Not surprisingly he began by putting his foot in it.

It is in the context of this that his notorious General Order #11, expelling Jews from his territory, must be judged. That Grant was enraged by the number of Northern traders who followed his army down the Mississippi, buying up cotton at rock-bottom prices from the defeated Southerners and making fortunes by trading with the enemy, is easy enough to understand—anything to do with trade and money was always an irritant to Grant, to whom the whole subject was a closed book. He was himself not only honest to a
fault, but totally hopeless at any kind of business transaction, and the fact that he was now surrounded by people who were good at that kind of thing (and making a fortune out of it) must have been hard for Grant to bear. It did not help that one of them was his own father, Jesse Grant, that astute old rogue, in partnership with a Jewish businessman, or that several members of the Dent family were doing so as well. When Grant lost his temper, it was volcanic and usually short-lived, and General Order #11 was in any case swiftly withdrawn when it reached Lincoln’s attention. It has been suggested that Grant’s staff, possibly the ubiquitous Rawlins, put into his head the notion that most of the traders he objected to were Jewish, but it seems more likely that Grant suffered from the subliminal anti-Semitism of most American Anglo-Saxons of his day where business affairs were concerned, and that when he lost his temper he attacked the Jews rather than his father and his in-laws—a process we would now call “scapegoating.”

Inaction, overwhelming responsibilities for which he was unsuited, and some doubt about what to do next were certainly part of the problem, but worse was to come. Up until then Grant had consoled himself with the thought that he enjoyed Lincoln’s confidence, but two events put doubt into Grant’s mind. The first was a visit from a well-known and respected newspaperman, Charles A. Dana, whom Edwin Stanton, the secretary of war, had sent to scout out, on Lincoln’s behalf, whether there was any truth to the rumors about Grant’s drinking that were being spread by his enemies. Dana, as matters would turn out, liked Grant, and his reports to Washington were favorable, but it cannot have eased Grant’s nerves to know that
he was being watched by somebody who had the ear of both the secretary of war and the president.

The second was the discovery that Lincoln had also been listening hard to Brig. Gen. John A. McClernand, a fellow Illinois politician and amateur general, who proposed to raise a new force of volunteers for the purpose of taking Vicksburg, Mississippi, and had given McClernand secret instructions to proceed.

Vicksburg had long been fitfully on Grant’s mind as he sat behind his desk wrestling with such matters as Jewish cotton traders, since it was clear to anybody with a map of the Mississippi at hand that it was the key to opening up the river and splitting the Confederacy. Early in 1862 the navy had seized the city of New Orleans, a serious blow to the Confederacy, but so long as Vicksburg, situated on a high bluff overlooking a sharp bend in the Mississippi, 166 miles north of New Orleans (as the crow flies), remained in Confederate hands, traffic on the river was effectively blocked. Vicksburg had been fortified; it was protected by large numbers of heavy guns and by geography as well, for it was not only on high ground, but the approach from the north was made difficult by the muddy, low-lying swamps of the Yazoo River, which runs sluggishly into the Mississippi.

How McClernand, a mediocre general of volunteers but an astute politician, planned to take Vicksburg is hard to determine, but his greatest weakness was that the secret orders Lincoln had given him contained an escape clause—he was to take on his expedition only those men whom Grant did not need. The threat of McClernand brought Halleck and Grant close again, as thick as thieves, since neither of them wished to have a politician who was a friend of
the president’s succeed where professional soldiers had failed. Vicksburg suddenly became the focus of Grant’s full attention.

This, of course, may have been Lincoln’s intention in the first place. Astute politician that he was, he may have been using McClernand to light a fire under Grant as well as to rap him on the knuckles for General Order #11; or he may have felt that two different, competing strategies might be needed to take Vicksburg—except for Winston Churchill in World War II, nobody was more clever at handling generals than Lincoln. Either way, it almost goes without saying that Grant found he needed
all
his troops and could spare none for McClernand, and that by the time McClernand returned to Washington to complain to Lincoln, Grant would already be in Vicksburg.

In the meantime Grant had to get there. Nothing in the history of warfare, including Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps with his elephants, has ever posed as much difficulty as Grant’s taking of Vicksburg. Like Overlord, the Anglo-American-Canadian D-day landing in 1944, it required huge and startling engineering and technical advances, many of which turned out to be dead ends, and like Anglo-French attempts to break through the German defenses on the western front from 1916 through 1918, it set in motion unprecedented numbers of men through terrain that seemed designed to slow them down and stop them. Mud, rain, flooding, the great river itself—all combined to prevent Grant’s men from reaching Vicksburg, and in the end it was only by the boldest and most daring move of his career that he managed to find his way around it to victory. Despite Lee’s reputation as a superior strategist, Grant’s strategy at Vicks
burg was astonishing in its boldness and took advantage of his instinctive understanding of the role of modern industrial technology in warfare—something Lee never even tried to understand.

To take Vicksburg, Grant would use steam shovels, steam dredgers, railways, and steam-powered armored gunboats and turn his army into a giant labor force in which the pick and shovel were more important weapons than the rifle. Grant would eventually have nearly 75,000 men under his command to take Vicksburg, most of them digging and shoveling their way there through the ooze, foot by foot.

Vicksburg sits about two hundred feet above the Mississippi River, on a bluff overlooking the east bank of the river. The Mississippi makes a hairpin bend around Vicksburg, so the batteries of heavy guns dug in around Vicksburg commanded the river itself completely. Adm. David Porter’s armored gunboats might survive a determined attempt to slip past the town, but they could do no damage to the Confederate guns, since it was impossible to elevate their own high enough to reach the top of the bluff from the river.

Coming down on Vicksburg by land from the north was rendered impractical by the Yazoo River, which formed an almost impassible swamp as it met the Mississippi. Landing on the east bank, below the Yazoo and just above Vicksburg, at Chickasaw Bluffs, might be possible—at any rate it seemed possible to Sherman when he and Grant looked at the map together, but then most things looked possible to Sherman. In the end it was decided that Sherman would take a part of the army, about 25,000 men, land at Chickasaw Bluffs from Porter’s transports, and wait there for Grant, who intended to march the bulk of the army (40,000 plus) inland,
move south swiftly, seize Jackson, Mississippi, and then strike west to rendezvous with Sherman.

It is apparent that these plans were not so much aimed at Lt. Gen. John C. Pemberton, the new Confederate commander in Mississippi (with about 32,000 men), as at McClernand, who, in obedience to Lincoln’s “secret” plan, was already on the march, and hoped to take command of the Union forces on the river. In any event they miscarried, inevitably, for Grant had committed the classic error of dividing his forces. Grant’s position inland was rendered hopeless by a Confederate raid on his supply post; Sherman, unaware that Grant was retreating, attacked at Chickasaw Bluffs and was badly defeated; and McClernand, who had hoped to supplant Sherman, and possibly even Grant, was reduced to impotence by Grant’s swift arrival to take personal command of the whole operation.

It was now January 1863. A month had been wasted in maneuvering to the north of Vicksburg, with nothing to show for it but casualties and McClernand’s hurt feelings. Clearly Grant would have to
think
his way around Vicksburg.

He looked at the map again and discovered that the Yazoo River had at one time been connected to the Mississippi, and that a levee had been built to separate them and prevent flooding. Cutting the levee might enable Porter to bring his gunboats and transports to the undefended rear of Vicksburg by water. The Confederates, it should be explained, had made the same mistake at Vicksburg that the British did in Singapore eighty years later. Just as the big guns at Singapore had been sited to fire out to sea, thus leaving the city undefended against an attack from the land, the guns at Vicksburg had been placed to defend it from attack from the river or from the
north. The “back door” to Vicksburg was lightly defended, and cutting the road or the railway line from Jackson would eventually starve its defenders and inhabitants of supplies.

In the event, the levee was cut, with enormous effort, but the Confederates had had time (and ample warning) to place a fort on high ground and block the gunboats, which had to back their way, under heavy fire, to the Mississippi.

Grant next attempted to descend to the rear of Vicksburg via the bayous, only to find that the Confederates chopped down trees in front of the boats, blocking the way, and then chopped trees down behind them, blocking their retreat, while Confederate sharpshooters picked off anybody who showed his head.

Grant then turned his attention to the west bank of the Mississippi, where the army busied itself building miles of roads and bridges through the marshy ground. It was clear enough that given time and effort they could make their way south of Vicksburg, but what then? The Mississippi was more than half a mile wide, and the troops would need to be transported across it. Grant thought he had a solution to that: He would cut a canal, allowing the fleet to get south of Vicksburg without running the gauntlet of the Confederate batteries on the other side of the river, so the army fell to work to dig a full-scale ship canal, only to have the Mississippi rise and flood it out just as they completed it.

It was now the end of February, and Grant was no nearer Vicksburg than before. In the North the newspapers hurled criticism and ridicule at him, in the South they made fun of him, and McClernand reported back to Washington that Grant was drinking again, which appears to have been untrue. It was, perhaps, his lowest
moment as a general, matters not being improved when a steward on his steamer threw Grant’s false teeth overboard by mistake. On shore smallpox and cholera were striking the army, due to unsanitary conditions, and in Washington there was talk of replacing Grant. Perplexed and troubled, Lincoln sent Charles A. Dana back again, and once again Dana’s reports saved Grant’s career and, in some mysterious way, raised Grant’s spirits. His dentist, S. L. Hamlin, arrived with a new set of teeth, and Grant sat down at the map again with Porter and Sherman and came up with a new plan.

This one required daring from the navy, but fortunately for Grant, Porter was a kind of seaborne Sherman. Porter would take his fleet down the Mississippi at night past Vicksburg, first his gunboats, then his transports, running the gauntlet of the Confederate guns. Sherman and McClernand, meanwhile, would bring their troops down the west bank of the Mississippi to the aptly named town of Hard Times, where the navy would transport them across the river to Port Gibson, about twenty miles
south
of Vicksburg. Grant would then march the army east and north, probably meet and fight Pemberton, then cut the road and railway between Jackson and Vicksburg. Porter was confident of getting his armored gunboats past Vicksburg but more pessimistic about the fate of the transport steamships, which he proposed to protect with bales of hay and cotton.