Never Call Retreat (15 page)

This was a good summary of what the general knew about the situation. He was being bewildered just as John Pope had been bewildered in Virginia, eight months earlier, and when the crisis came he would have to do what Pope did—make life-or-death decisions based on a total inability to understand what his enemies were trying to do. Grant's endless maneuvers had got the Federals not one foot nearer the high ground east of the Mississippi, but they had inflicted crippling damage on Grant's opponent.

Finally, at the end of March, Grant committed himself. He would march his army down the west side of the river, he would run gunboats and transports past the batteries, and then he would cross the river and attack Vicksburg from the south and east. On March 29 McClernand's corps was put to work, corduroying roads, building bridges, filling in swamps, and in a few weeks these westerners had built a road seventy miles long, winding down from Milliken's Bend to a riverside hamlet named Hard Times. The road was not very good but it would do for one march. Grant notified Porter to be prepared to run the batteries, first with gunboats and then with transports.

Now Porter warned him: this was the point of no return. The gunboats could probably pass the batteries going downstream, but they could never come back because against the current they moved so slowly that the batteries would destroy them. Once they went down the river Grant's whole campaign would stand or fall on this one thrust. Grant agreed. This was going to be it.

Pemberton learned no more than that the Yankees were trying some sort of raid over on the Louisiana side, and again he appealed for cavalry. He sent reinforcements to Loring at Fort Pemberton, believing that the Tallahatchie expedition was still a hovering menace. Then his intelligence service told him that the Yankees at Memphis were seizing river steamers, for some inscrutable purpose of their own; thirty boats, it was reported, all of them empty, had started down the Mississippi.

Not long after this Pemberton was warned—first by Johnston, who was in Tennessee, and then by President Davis— that there was reason to think that Rosecrans' army in central Tennessee was being reinforced, apparently by Grant; could Pemberton send some of his troops to help General Bragg? This struck Pemberton as reasonable; those empty steamers obviously were coming down to carry Grant's men somewhere, and the best information Pemberton could get indicated a return to Memphis. On April 12 Pemberton sent a message to Johnston: "Will forward troops to you as fast as transportation can be furnished—about 8000 men. Am satisfied Rosecrans will be reinforced from Grant's army."
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Then he began to suspect that this movement of the Federals might be a ruse. He had second thoughts, and on April 16 he wired Johnston that he did not think Grant was sending very many men away; as a result he could send Bragg only two brigades instead of the three he had promised.
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And on the night Pemberton wrote that dispatch Porter ran past the Vicksburg batteries with gunboats, empty transports and some loaded coal barges and went steaming on down the river to join the vanguard of Grant's army on the Louisiana shore south of Vicksburg. Early the next morning Grant went riding down McClernand's new road to look after things in person.

3. The Needs of Two Armies

THE RIVAL ARMIES along the Rappahannock that winter were under very different handicaps.

South of the river there was a shortage of material goods, not yet acute but still touching the army's nerves and muscles. In Richmond a mob rioted for bread, sacking jewelry stores in an excess of fervor, and in camp General Lee found that inadequate supplies imposed narrow limits on the possibilities open to the Army of Northern Virginia, whose meat ration had been cut to four ounces a day.

North of the river there was plenty of bread but a dire shortage of less tangible rations. The Army of the Potomac seemed to be hungry for some value not listed on the commissary tables; perhaps, despite the millions of words that had been spoken to, by and about this army it was still waiting for The Word, which if it had been uttered had not penetrated to all ranks.

Characteristic complaints were heard on each side of the river.

An officer in Brigadier General Harry T. Hays' Louisiana brigade, in Stonewall Jackson's corps, wrote to his Congressman to say that of 1500 men present for duty, 400 had no shoes. Many men had no blankets, many had neither underwear nor socks, hardly anyone had an overcoat, there were no tents, and everybody was hungry all the time. Troops from other states, said this officer, were eased over the rough spots by contributions from home, but this brigade had not had anything from Louisiana since the fall of New Orleans. General Lee told Mr. Davis that unless supplies could be increased, "I fear the efficiency of the army will be reduced by many thousands of men."
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North of the river an officer in the battle-tried 20th Massachusetts assured his brother that there would be no blessing on Northern arms until the wrong done by the removal of McClellan had been righted; he urged the brother to "lift your voice like a trumpet and show the people their sins and Abraham his transgressions." A soldier who had the ear of leading Democrat Barlow declared the enlisted men were deserting because they "will not fight to put niggers on a par with white men," and he said he anticipated "a general uprising in the North to put an end to this war and decapitate some of the leading men in the Cabinet." Brigadier General Marsena Patrick, Provost Marshal of the Army, wrote in his diary that "the President has the names of about 80 officers who are to be dismissed the service for having spoken disrespectfully of him in reference to the removal of McClellan and the Porter court martial."
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Thus each army lacked nourishment, whether for the body or for the spirit. In neither case was the outlook promising.

In the Confederacy there was a relative abundance of meat, grain, and forage, but the railroads that brought supplies to the Army of Northern Virginia were falling apart, the horses that handled the short hauls had too much to do and too little to eat, and the army was hungry. It was also beginning to be seen that a man taken from civil life and turned into a soldier cannot at the same time stay in a shop and make things for soldiers to use; a dismaying lesson, because the army desperately needed soldiers now but could not use them properly unless it got the goods and services these men used to produce before they became soldiers.

In some ways the Army of the Potomac seemed to be in an even worse fix. Needing food for the spirit, its only immediate resource was Joe Hooker, who never was noted for his spiritual qualities.

Hooker indeed had nothing to offer but the resources of a hard-boiled soldier; yet these, for the moment and up to a point, turned out to be enough. He had the insight to realize that the plight of his army looked worse than it really was. Morale was far down, but to a large extent the soldiers had simply been suffering from an acute case of poor administration. There was plenty of food, but it was so bad the army actually was showing symptoms of scurvy. Camps were miserably policed, hospital services were atrocious, discipline was slipshod and the generals were visibly warring among themselves. The men were veterans denied the veteran's one consolation, the feeling that his closed military society would get on with its job no matter how the winds of politics blew; this military society obviously was in no shape to get on with any job. More than anything else the soldiers needed to feel that they were being used sensibly by a general who knew what he was doing. If Hooker could evoke that feeling he would have a different sort of army.

His immediate task happened to be within his means. He was neither cursed nor blessed with any profound convictions about what the war ought to mean; he was at the moment the favored soldier of the radical Republicans, but this was a marriage of convenience, and Hooker's driving force was a simple desire to be a winner. In the Army of the Potomac he had an instrument that he could win with if he knew how to handle it. He played it on that basis.

He began by shaking up the army's housekeeping services; quartermaster and commissary and medical departments. Rations suddenly improved, filthy camps were made clean and tolerably comfortable, hospitals became places where sick men might recover. Discipline grew tighter, so that it was much harder for unhappy men to slip away and go home— a point of some importance, because desertions had been averaging two hundred a day; at the same time liberal grants of furloughs did something to ease the homesickness that caused the desertions.

Hooker believed that idleness was "the great evil of all armies," especially of this one. He asserted that perhaps a majority of the officers, especially those of rank, were hostile to the government's policy and he said that when the army had nothing to do these disaffected persons "began to show themselves and make their influence felt in and out of camp." He got rid of some of the worst of the troublemakers; more important, he ended the idleness by sternly putting the army to work, and there were incessant drills and reviews, with regular classes of instruction for company and regimental officers. Periodically there were spectacular parades, with the dashing commanding general riding his horse, evoking cheers and making the men feel like soldiers once more. (This worked fairly well because the enlisted men liked Hooker, considering him a two-fisted fighter; also, he shared with Mc-Clellan the knack of
looking
like a good general.) Within weeks a Wisconsin officer wrote that "the army is in excellent condition as far as the health and spirit of the men are concerned," and an army historian asserted that in a comparatively short time "the busy scenes in camp once more betokened a healthful state."
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Hooker abolished the Grand Divisions, considering them cumbersome. Possibly this was a mistake, because it threw too much detail work on army headquarters, and in the stress of battle it would be hard for the army commander to keep his hand on all of the controls; Hooker may have felt that he had no subordinates capable of handling 40,000 men in the field. He did put through one badly needed reform, consolidating the army's cavalry into one corps of four divisions under command of Brigadier General George Stoneman. Previously the cavalry regiments had been distributed all through the army, and it had never been possible to bring together a contingent that could cope with Jeb Stuart's superb Confederate brigades. Now the Federal cavalry had a chance to do cavalry's proper job, and there was a striking improvement in its fighting capacity. Stoneman, to be sure, was no Stuart, and it remained to be seen whether either he or Hooker would know how to use the troopers effectively. But at least the possibility of effective use was there.
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So the army began to get back into fighting trim. It was at work once more, doing things that appeared to make sense, and the conditions under which it lived and worked were about as tolerable as they ever are in an army camp. The malcontents who had done so much to destroy morale were muzzled, Frariklin and Smith and their staff officers were gone, and the ugly lesson taught by the cashiering of luckless General Porter was being absorbed. What one officer after the war remembered as "a military aristocracy . . . defying the government at home with only a little less disdain than Davis manifested at Richmond" had been brought into line.
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The army at least was not going to be made impotent by its own discontent.

Yet a question mark remained. General Hooker was immensely pleased with everything, announcing that he commanded "the finest army on the planet" and assuring President Lincoln that the question was not
whether
he would capture Richmond but simply
when:
and this led the President to wonder whether the general was not a little too self-confident, uttering brave words to cloak an inner doubt.

There was an odd gap in Hooker's relationship with Washington. He treated General Halleck with disdain, dealing directly with the President and almost entirely ignoring the general-in-chief, building up a body of ill-will that might some day have to be paid for. He had been sharply critical of many of his generals, and if trouble came they could be counted on to be critical in return. They served him dutifully and with diligence now, but they did have reservations.
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Beyond this, the real test of army and general alike would come on the field of battle, where General Lee would apply his own searching and pitiless analysis; and although this army had been reorganized and shaken out of despondency it still retained a queer feeling of separateness that made it unlike all other Federal armies. In the other armies the men were and incurably would remain civilians in arms, men who had dropped their ordinary pursuits to do an unpleasant job but not changing very much: in this army it was subtly different, with the men standing somehow apart from everything they had been before they became soldiers, relying only on themselves and not expecting a great deal from presidents, generals, or the people back home. One veteran remarked after the war that "the capability of enthusiasm seemed to have died out of the army at this time . . . the rank and file of the Army of the Potomac had begun to consider themselves better soldiers than their commanders."
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This put an especial burden on Joe Hooker, who might have thought about it with profit if he had been the reflective type. This army would respond well enough to his professional skill, but what it particularly wanted from its commanding general (although it could never formulate this desire) was some indication of the moral stature that could lead the army to surpass itself. Nobody would know whether it was actually going to get this until it reached the battlefield, and that day could not be postponed for long, because as soon as spring came Hooker was bound to take the offensive. He was driven to this, not merely because the government expected it but also because there were in his army forty-three regiments of short-term soldiers, 20,000 effectives in all, who would go out of the service in May. Hooker had to do whatever he was going to do before these trained men left the army. Their departure would rob him of the equivalent of a good-sized army corps.
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