Never Call Retreat (30 page)

The commanding generals accepted the outcome each in his own way. Meade rode to the front as the last of the Confederate wave was draining back down the long slope learned how completely the attack had been repulsed, made as if to swing his hat in exultation, thought better of it, and quietly said: "Thank God." When he had a chance, a little later, he got off a hasty note to his wife: "The men behaved splendidly—I really think they are becoming soldiers. . . . The army are in the highest spirits, and of course I am a great man but in my own heart I would thank God if I was relieved tomorrow and permitted to return home and live in peace and quiet." A mile to the west, Lee rode out to meet and rally the broken remnants of the three divisions, and in this backwash of defeat he had his emotions under full control. He told a disheartened general: "All this has been my fault—it is I that have lost this fight, and you must help me out of it the best you can." To Colonel Fremantle he summed it up: "This has been a sad day for us, Colonel —a sad day; but we can't expect always to gain victories." His supreme stroke as a warrior had failed, and he knew it, and there was only one thing he could do now: order a retreat, and hope that his foes had been too badly hurt to keep him from making a safe return to Virginia.

The long evening shadows came down, as the sun dropped behind the blue line of South Mountain, and except for the cries of the wounded men the field was silent. Unseen, a deeper shadow was dropping all across the Confederacy from other heights a thousand miles to the southwest. For just as the exhausted survivors of the final assault at Gettysburg were pulling themselves together, trying to find out who still lived, General Grant and General Pemberton were meeting under a flag of truce on a hill outside of Vicksburg, agreeing on the terms under which Pemberton and his army and the Vicksburg fortress and everything the Confederacy hoped for in the Mississippi Valley would next day be surrendered.

Of this, mercifully, Lee that evening knew nothing. He made arrangements for the retreat of the long ambulance train with its load of wounded, ordered Ewell's corps to withdraw to the high ground west of Gettysburg, sketched the plans by which the army would find its way back to the Potomac crossing—and finally, late at night, worn down by fatigue, he let his emotion find words. Standing by his horse in the moonlight, giving final orders to General John Imboden of the cavalry, who was to escort the ambulance train, he suddenly began to talk about the great charge his men had made. Never had he seen troops behave more magnificently, he said, than Pickett's men had behaved that day, and if they had been supported properly they would have broken the Yankee line and won the field. After a moment Lee cried out loudly: "Too bad! Too bad!
Oh—too bad!"
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CHAPTERFOUR

In Letters of Blood

1. All or Nothing

THE ONLY NORTHERNER who ever expressed dissatisfaction with U. S. Grant's achievement at Vicksburg was Grant himself. When he took his army down the west side of the Mississippi in April he wanted to destroy the last trace of Confederate authority in the lower valley, and it bothered him that he had to settle for a little less than that. In the middle of June, when it was clear that both the fortress and Pemberton's army must surrender before long, he expressed his discontent in a candid note to his father: "The fall of Vicksburg now will only result in the opening of the Mississippi River and demoralization of the enemy. I intended more from it." To apply the qualifying "only" to a victory that changed the whole course of the war occurred to no one else; not even to President Lincoln, who had become a most demanding perfectionist. This general was different.
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Grant's basic design was simple: to reach the high ground east of the river so that he could bring on a fight to the finish. His campaign plan was so flexible that it amounted to little more than a determination to move fast, deceive the enemy and take advantage of every opening, and the flexibility was what saved it because neither the Mississippi River nor General Nathaniel P. Banks behaved quite as Grant had anticipated.

The first step was to march the army to the village of New Carthage, a steamboat landing on the Louisiana shore some twenty miles below Vicksburg. From New Carthage the army (with the aid of Porter's gunboats) could go downstream fifteen miles and capture the Confederate batteries at Grand Gulf, which lay on the opposite shore below the place where the Big Black River came in from the northeast Grand Gulf was important because here was the first place south of the fortified zone immediately around Vicksburg where the all-important high ground touched the river's edge.

At Grand Gulf, or somewhere near it, Grant proposed to leave 10,000 men, to make warlike feints from a secure position behind the Big Black and so lead General Pemberton to look for an immediate attack. With 20,000 more he would go on downstream and join forces with General Banks for an attack on Port Hudson, where Admiral Farragut's ships had taken such a pounding earlier in the spring. Once Port Hudson was pinched off there would be a clear supply line straight down to New Orleans, and Grant and Banks together could come back upstream, overwhelm Pemberton, take Vicksburg and sweep the last armed Confederates out of Mississippi once and for all.

All of this would begin with the overland march from Milliken's Bend to New Carthage—about 20 miles in an air line, more than twice that much as the roads went—and when McClernand's corps took up that line of march it found that the roads were in the highest degree abominable. This Louisiana country was half under water, and the roads went through an interminable marshland in looping semicircles along the slightly less oozy ground that fringed the bayous and swamps. To make the march at all, McClernand's men had to spend many days laying corduroy roads, building causeways and rigging up improvised bridges, and the business went so slowly that Grant privately concluded that "the enemy cannot fail to discover my plans." It was obvious that this roadway would never stand up under the day-after-day hammering it would get if the supply trains tried to make regular use of it, but the engineers managed to make a sort of waterway through the swamps by cutting channels from one sluggish backwater to another, and it seemed likely that light draft steamers could use this as a regular supply route. In mid-April Grant told Halleck that the situation was promising, and during the next two weeks he moved his army on downstream to a steamboat landing two miles above Grand Gulf, on property which some gloomy planter had named Hard Times.
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But at this point the water level in the Mississippi began to fall. This was a perverse twist, because the level had been unfavorably high for weeks; now it fell, and the bayous and streams that made up the military waterway were reduced to streaky bits of marsh which not even the smallest steamer could use. Thus the waterway went entirely out of existence just when it was needed most, and although Porter did manage to run a few transports and barges past the Vicksburg batteries the supplies for an extended campaign could never be brought down that way. Neither by land nor by water could Grant maintain an adequate flow of the innumerable things his army was going to need.

Then Grant discovered that he could not cross at Grand Gulf. The Confederate engineers had emplaced heavy guns on steep bluffs there, overlooking a hairpin turn in the river where the current was strong, and this layout was more than the navy could handle. Porter took his flotilla down on April 29 and valiantly bombarded the place, but had to confess flat failure; his vessels were hurt, he had substantial casualties, he did the Confederates very little harm, and it seemed to him that in some ways the Confederate position here was stronger than the one at Vicksburg. If Grant wished, Porter could run gunboats and transports past these batteries at night, to make a crossing farther down, but to force a landing here was impossible.
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And finally it developed that Grant could not meet Banks at Port Hudson in any case. Banks was moving away from the big river instead of toward it. He was in excellent spirits, full of hope and energy, and on the day Porter bombarded Grand Gulf Banks wrote to his wife that the next campaign would be a success: "The atmosphere has changed in New Orleans.
'A New Man has Risen!' "
On this same day he confidently assured his friend General Burnside: "Had I a few more men I would sweep the country west of the Mississippi. As it is I have hope." All of this was encouraging, but Banks' orders told him to sweep east of the river rather than west; instead of moving toward Port Hudson he was marching toward Alexandria, which lay far to the west in Louisiana, and it was precisely at this time that he composed for the administration's guidance his rhapsodic account of the limitless potential of the Red River cotton trade. He liked the idea of a joint attack on Port Hudson well enough, but the attack would have to wait because it would probably be May 10 before he could get there. When he heard this Grant correctly concluded that Banks' estimate of time was unrealistic: in the end it was a solid fortnight before the man could even leave Alexandria, and it was between three and four weeks before he actually got over to the Mississippi and established the siege of Port Hudson.
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By this time Grant had nothing at all to spare—not supplies, nor time, nor patience either—and being thus unencumbered he began to move fast. He pulled his army a few miles farther south, coming back to the river nearly opposite the Mississippi hamlet of Bruinsburg, eight or ten miles below Grand Gulf, and he had Porter bring his steamers down past the batteries. Then the men went piling aboard the transports, cheering mightily—they began to sense that they would be on top of the game once they crossed the river—and by April 30 Grant had his vanguard in the state of Mississippi, all of McClernand's corps either across or crossing and the head of McPherson's corps coming up behind. The profound gamble of the Vicksburg campaign was about to begin, but by his later testimony Grant felt now that the worst was over. Where so much had gone wrong the one thing that mattered had gone right: "I was on dry ground on the same side of the river with the enemy."
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It is possible that this was about all he really cared about from the beginning.

As he moved inland from Bruinsburg, Grant was much helped by the rocketing advance, fifty miles to the east, of a slim column of Union cavalry whose movement he had ordered weeks earlier. This column was led, improbably but well, by Colonel B. F. Grierson, by profession a bandmaster, a man who disliked and distrusted all horses but who nevertheless had become a first-rate cavalryman, with a good cavalryman's eccentricities; where Jeb Stuart kept a banjo player on his staff Grierson kept a jew's-harp in his pocket, and he was doing a job now that would have been much to Stuart's taste. He had left Tennessee on April 17, and he came slicing down the eastern corridor of the state of Mississippi with some 950 Illinois and Iowa troopers, his chief mission being to stir up trouble and confuse the Rebels. He did this admirably. Pemberton was badly short of cavalry and had no way to tell what Grierson was up to, where he was going or who might be following him; one result was that a whole division of Pemberton's infantry (which would have been most useful right now at Bruinsburg) was tied up along the line of the Mobile & Ohio Railroad, and Pemberton confessed that in the general confusion it was impossible for him to get reliable information of any Yankee movements. Grierson reached the Federal lines at Baton Rouge on May 2 after a six-hundred-mile ride that had cost him no more than twenty-four men and had materially improved Grant's chances at the moment when the over-all strategic plan had to be changed in mid-air.
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To add to Pemberton's perplexities Grant sent special orders to Sherman, whose corps was still at Milliken's Bend; and so on April 30 and May 1 Sherman took ten regiments and some light gunboats up the Yazoo, opened a showy bombardment, put troops ashore, and acted for all the world as if he planned to attack the northern bastion of Pemberton's line at Snyder's Bluff, eight miles above Vicksburg. For the few hours that mattered, this shadow-boxing was persuasive. The harassed Pemberton knew only that there were Yankees in eastern Mississippi, Yankees downriver at Bruinsburg, and Yankees here on his own back doorstep, all of them looking for trouble, and it seemed to him that if he massed men to strike at Grant Sherman would take Vicksburg. He waited for light, and by the time he saw where the real power lay it was too late. With nearly 50,000 men at his disposal he was able to put no more than 8000 at the first point of contact, near Bruinsburg, and since Grant had 23,000 there the 8000 were not nearly enough.

The Confederate commander who had those 8000 men facing Grant, Brigadier General John S. Bowen, was one of Pemberton's best officers, and he put up a good fight. He met Grant's advance on May 1 near Port Gibson, a few miles inland from Bruinsburg, and his men fought a rugged all-day battle there in a tough country of knobby hills and deep ravines; but he was dreadfully outnumbered, he sadly missed the troops that might have been with him but were not and by evening he had to retreat. He went north of the Big Black River, heading for Vicksburg, leaving the formidable works at Grand Gulf unattended. While McClernand's men saw Bowen across the Big Black, Grant himself went into Grand Gulf long enough to get a bath and a change of clothing on one of Porter's warships and to send a message to Sherman saying that all plans had been changed.

Originally, a fragment of Grant's army was to make a feint behind the line of the Big Black. Now the whole army was going to go there, the feint was going to be the big blow of the campaign, and Sherman must bring his command downstream and join the main body as fast as he could. Sherman protested. He had never liked this move to begin with, it seemed to him that by marching into the middle of Mississippi Grant was taking a fearful risk, and he pointed out that the road from Milliken's Bend down to Hard Times was so bad that Grant could never in the world supply his army that way. Grant replied that he did not propose to supply his army that way. He would bring down enough hardtack, coffee, and salt to get by on and for everything else he would use what his men had in their haversacks and what they could take from the farmers of Mississippi, whose barns and smokehouses were packed with things soldiers could eat. For a wagon train he rounded up all of the farm carts, carriages, buckboards, and drays he could find in the neighborhood, impressing horses, mules, and oxen to pull them and warning his corps commanders that the troops might have to get along on meager rations for a while. Then, on May 7, Sherman's corps having arrived, the army began to move.
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