Never Call Retreat (31 page)

When he moved Grant turned away from Vicksburg and went northeast behind the line of the Big Black, heading in the general direction of Jackson, the state capital, forty-five miles due east of Vicksburg. He knew that if the Confederacy sent Pemberton any kind of help the help was bound to come by way of Jackson, because the only railroad line that came into Vicksburg went through Jackson; if Grant could break that line or occupy Jackson Pemberton would be isolated, left tied to the weighty fortress of Vicksburg as to a millstone. There was only one problem. Whatever Grant did must be done quickly.

It must be done quickly because the Confederacy was working desperately to build up a relieving force at Jackson. Joe Johnston in person was hurrying to the place to take general charge, some 6000 soldiers had already been concentrated there and more were on the way, and before long Johnston might make Pemberton too strong to be beaten. When the last element of Sherman's corps came up Grant would have a field army of rather more than 40,000 men, and he must make his campaign with this force because he could not hope for reinforcements until he got back to the Mississippi River. In addition he faced the same factor Lee faced in Pennsylvania: an army that is mostly living off of the country must at all costs keep moving. Grant warned McPherson that "we must fight the enemy before our rations fail," told him to gather food wherever he could find it, and added: "Upon one occasion you made two days rations last seven; we may have to do the same thing again."
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It was going to be all or nothing. If he moved fast and made no blunders, Grant could probably destroy Pemberton's army; if not he would probably lose his own.

But it was Pemberton who felt the pressure. For weeks this unhappy general had been unable to see what his enemies were trying to do. He knew only that they seemed to threaten him in half a dozen places at once. Now his lack of cavalry was a cruel handicap. Grant was moving but it was impossible to learn what his objective was; Pemberton felt obliged to keep strong forces at all the places where Grant might cross the Big Black, lest there be a sudden thrust at Vicksburg, and he also felt compelled to protect the railroad line to Jackson; it seemed necessary to keep infantry off to the north, as well, because he believed that Federal infantry was marching down from Memphis and Corinth; meanwhile, he wanted to fight Grant in the open field if he could but it was hard to assemble an adequate force. The orders from his superiors were in conflict. Johnston telegraphed him to use every man in his command to strike at Grant, even if he had to evacuate Vicksburg to do it, arguing that Vicksburg could easily be reoccupied once Grant was beaten. President Davis had telegraphed that he must hold on to Vicksburg and Port Hudson at all costs. As Pemberton cautiously moved east along the railroad line, crossing the Big Black in the vicinity of Edwards Station, he could bring with him hardly more than 18,000 men.
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Not enough. Grant left McClernand's corps nearby to hold Pemberton in check and marched the rest of his army off to Jackson, knocking away a Confederate brigade that tried to check him at the town of Raymond and driving on through a rainstorm on May 14 to strike the field works that protected the capital. Johnston had reached the city only the day before, his winter-long pessimism still strong in him; now he could do no more than fight a delaying action, and before the day ended he drew his inadequate force off in a retreat to the northward, sending word to Pemberton to pitch into the Federal rear if he saw a chance. Greatly pleased with themselves, Grant's soldiers marched into Jackson, seizing cannon and military stores and hoisting the United States flag over the statehouse, and that night when Grant checked in at a hotel he was given the room Johnston had just vacated.
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He did not linger there very long. Next day, leaving Sherman's corps to destroy bridges, railroad installations and military equipment—a task the westerners performed so vigorously that they destroyed a good part of the town as well —Grant took McPherson's corps back to rejoin McClernand, with Sherman under orders to follow as soon as adequate destruction had been accomplished.

Luckless Pemberton, meanwhile, had been edging to his right, hoping to force a Federal retreat by cutting Grant's supply line, cruelly handicapped by the fact that that line no longer existed. Now he got a new message from Johnston, telling him to circle around north of the railroad and join up with Johnston's force; but Johnston's courier had been corrupted by Yankee gold and Grant had a copy of the order, and as Pemberton tried to make the march Grant lunged at him and brought him to battle, on May 16, on an uneven plateau known as Champion's Hill, a few miles east of Edwards Station.

The battle was sharp, hard, and decisive. McClernand's leading division, under Brigadier General Alvin P. Hovey, charged across the hill, was driven back, returned to the assault, settled down to a wearing fire fight, and before the day ended lost a third of its numbers; Hovey called Champion's Hill "a hill of death" and wrote, "I never saw fighting like this." During the middle of the day the Confederates held their ground, but in the afternoon McPherson's corps came into action and stormed in hard on the Confederate left, and Pemberton's army was forced back—step by step, at first, and then in a retreat that finally became a rout. In many units organization was lost, hundreds of men left their commands and took off for Vicksburg as best they could, officers galloped frantically about trying to find their regiments, artillerists were looking for their guns, and there was so much confusion that Loring's entire division lost touch with the rest of the army, drifted off to the south, and finally circled all the way around Grant's army and stumbled off to join up with Johnston. One Confederate officer confessed that what he saw on Champion's Hill "made it look like what I have read of Bull Run," another said that dispirited soldiers chattered wildly that Yankee-born Pemberton "has sold Vicksburg," and Pemberton himself admitted that his army's morale was temporarily shattered. He got his men back to Vicksburg as best he could, leaving a shaky rear-guard to cover the crossing of the Big Black River. Not counting Loring's missing division, he had lost 3800 men and twenty-seven guns, and his force was so disorganized that it needed to sort itself out behind the fortifications.
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Grant's men paid for their victory with 2,400 casualties of their own, and Grant had not quite done what he had hoped to do, which was to crush Pemberton's army utterly and then brush the fragments aside and take his own men into Vicksburg unopposed. At the same time, the battle had been decisive. On the day after Champion's Hill was fought Grant's vanguard came up to the Big Black River and overwhelmed Pemberton's rear-guard with little difficulty. Then, with Sherman's corps in the lead, the army marched toward Vicksburg as fast as it could, and before nightfall on May 18 it reached the stretch of ground that Grant needed more than he needed anything else in the world—the heights that ran north from Vicksburg to Haynes' Bluff overlooking the Yazoo River.

As long as Pemberton held that chain of hills, no Federal force could approach his stronghold from the upper Mississippi; indeed, it had been the Confederate grip on this area that forced Grant to make the long march by way of Hard Times, Bruinsburg, Jackson, and Champion's Hill, because everything his army had done since the end of March had really been keyed to his need to possess these few square miles. Compelled to man his trench lines on the outskirts of Vicksburg, Pemberton found that he had to evacuate Haynes' Bluff and everything that went with it, and when Sherman's troops spread out over these heights Grant's Vicksburg campaign became a success. Now he had no more worries about his line of communications; whole fleets of steamboats could come up the Yazoo and dock here in perfect security, and he could get all of the reinforcements, food, and ammunition he needed.

Among the men who realized what this would do for Grant was General Johnston, who telegraphed Pemberton to cut his losses and get out.

"If Haynes' Bluff be untenable Vicksburg is of no value and cannot be held," Johnston wrote. "If therefore you are invested in Vicksburg you must ultimately surrender. Under such circumstances, instead of losing both troops and place you must if possible save the troops. If it is not too late, evacuate Vicksburg and its dependencies and march to the northeast."
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It was too late. Pemberton did not think his army now was in shape for vigorous activity in the open field, and besides Grant's army blocked every road of escape. What with his battle losses, the absence of Loring's division and his growing sick list, Pemberton found that he could put no more than 18,500 muskets into line. Grant had more than twice that number facing him, with strong reinforcements on the way. Pemberton could only hold his ground and hope for the best.
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Meanwhile, Grant was crowding him. As soon as Sherman's corps had taken possession of the northern heights, Grant ordered it to move down on May 19 and assault the left end of the Confederate trench line, on the theory that Pemberton's shaken troops might not be in shape to resist. The theory was quite wrong. Even a badly demoralized army could recover its fighting edge quickly if it could act entirely on the defensive behind good fortifications, and the demoralization of Pemberton's soldiers had been no more than skin-deep anyway. Sherman's assault was repulsed; with more than a thousand Federal casualties.

Grant was not entirely convinced, and he hoped to avoid a long siege if possible, so he ordered a larger attack by the entire army on May 22, with careful preparation, a sharp preliminary bombardment, picked storming parties and elaborate synchronization of the general officers' watches. It went no better than Sherman's attack had gone and it was beaten back with heavy losses, many of which occurred because McClernand believed that his men had cracked the Confederate line, and called for a renewal of the offensive after it had visibly failed. When the day ended Grant had to admit that these works were too strong and too stoutly held to be carried by assault. He put his men to work with pick and shovel to develop a strong encircling line of their own (if they could not break in they could certainly keep the Confederates from breaking out) and he detached a force to the upper part of the Big Black to keep Johnston at arm's length. Not long afterward he relieved the unhappy McClernand of his command, giving his army corps to Major General E. O. C. Ord. Meanwhile he brought up heavy guns, and had the navy bring up mortars in barges, to begin a long, methodical, and relentless bombardment of the Confederate lines and the city these lines protected.

Pemberton was almost entirely helpless now; he could prolong the agony but he could do no more. His lines were so long and his numbers relatively so few that his soldiers had to stay in the trenches night and day, week after week after week, under the blistering sun and in heavy rain, without so much as a chance to get out and stretch their legs. They were locked up in their own fortress, and they had nothing to sustain them except the hope that some day Johnston would break Grant's line and rescue them.

Johnston was building up his army, battalion by battalion, but Grant's army was being built up faster; still too weak to fight, Johnston had to realize that each week increased the enemy's strength more than it increased his, and early in June he considered failure inevitable. To a brother officer he wrote: "There are odds against us here such as Napoleon never won against. The only imaginable hope is in the perpetration by Grant of some extravagant blunder, and there is no ground for such a hope."
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In Vicksburg soldiers and civilians settled down to endure the siege, and found that it contained unexpected elements. A Vicksburg woman discovered that her thoughts went where they had never gone before: "I have never understood before the full force of these questions—what shall we eat? what shall we drink? and wherewithal shall we be clothed?" Many people ate mule meat, and a Missouri soldier stoutly held that "if you did not know it you could hardly tell the difference, when cooked, between it and beef." An officer said that living in a besieged city was a strange experience, because it was so hard to realize that there was no way to communicate with anyone on the outside; he believed that if the affair went on much longer "a building will have to be arranged for the accommodation of maniacs," because the constant tension was driving people out of their minds.
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Constant tension, plus shelling: not unbroken shellfire, like that which precedes an attack on a military position, but a day-and-night business that was broken by intervals of silence but that never really let up. Some people moved into caves in the sides of cliffs, finding security amid discomfort; others discovered that it was possible to put up with anything and lived and slept at home even though a 13-inch shell might obliterate home and everyone in it at any moment. These big shells came from Porter's mortar boats, and there were two opinions regarding them. Some people considered them by far the most demoralizing weapon the Yankees had, but others said they really did little harm, and weren't even very frightening once you got used to them. One citizen who had a good vegetable garden in his back yard complained that he lost sleep, not because of shelling but because he had to stay up nights to keep hungry soldiers from stealing all he was growing. A woman reflected that the oddest thing of all was that as far as nature was concerned this was just another spring—birds were singing, building nests, and raising other birds, flower gardens were full of bright blossoms, and the air was all scented with the odor of jasmine and honeysuckle.
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. . . People in besieged cities have talked much this way, probably, since the days of Jericho.

At Jericho the walls finally came tumbling down. Here at Vicksburg the walls held, but the people inside the walls had had all they could take. Johnston was never going to be able to break Grant's lines. Food supplies in Vicksburg were running low and the defending soldiers were close to exhaustion from unbroken days and nights in the cramped rifle pits. Grant's engineers were bringing the Federal trenches closer and closer to the Confederate works, digging tunnels and planting mines to blow up strong points, and when Pemberton polled his generals he found none who believed that his men were in shape to fight their way out of the trap. At last, on July 3, the flag of truce went out, and Pemberton stiffly conferred with Grant about terms.