Grant Moves South (51 page)

Halleck was dubious, and on December 5 he warned Grant that he probably ought not to try to hold the country south of the Tallahatchie; the troops that were to go down the river from Memphis must be ready to leave by December 20, and Grant's main purpose now must be to hold the line from Memphis to Corinth as
economically as possibly and put all possible weight into the river expedition. Two days later, however, Halleck had a second thought. If Grenada could be taken, the prospect would be different; after all, Grant was to “move your troops as you may deem best to accomplish the great object in view.”

Hidden beneath all of this there was a challenge to Grant's capacity for generalship, a challenge as searching as any which the war was to bring him. He had planned and begun a major campaign, Washington had suddenly changed the conditions under which the campaign was to be made; and now, with all of his plans needing revision because of deep political pressures painfully clear in Washington but utterly invisible along the line of the Mississippi Central, Washington was brightly telling him to do as he thought best and to go ahead and win. Six months earlier the same thing had happened to McClellan, in front of Richmond. Protesting bitterly against injustice, McClellan had stressed the military soundness of his own program … and had lost. Now it was Grant's turn, and he could either butt his head against the wall or adapt his plan to necessity. The real challenge was that he make the best of a bad situation instead of building up a record showing that its badness was not of his making. On December 8, Grant sent Halleck a summary of his plans, dating his dispatch from Oxford, Mississippi:

General Sherman will command the expedition down the Mississippi. He will have a force of about 40,000 men. Will land above Vicksburg, up the Yazoo, if practicable, and cut the Mississippi Central railroad and the railroad running east from Vicksburg where they cross Black river. I will co-operate from here, my movements depending on those of the enemy. With the large cavalry force now at my command I will be able to have them show themselves at different points on the Tallahatchie and Yalobusha, and where an opportunity occurs make a real attack. After cutting the two railroads General Sherman's movements to secure the ends desired will necessarily be left to his own judgment. I will occupy this railroad to Coffeeville [a point seventeen miles short of Grenada].

Back from Halleck came a word of caution, with a veiled warning that the White House might upset Grant's command arrangements:

Do not make the Mississippi expedition so large as to endanger West Tennessee. I think 25,000 men, in addition to the forces to be added from Helena, sufficient; but send more if you can spare them. The President may insist upon designating a separate commander; if not, assign such officers as you deem best. Sherman would be my choice as the chief under you.
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McClernand's shadow was growing larger. On December 1 he had written to Stanton, explaining that the job he was doing in Illinois was about finished and suggesting that it was nearly time he himself went to Memphis to take command. On December 12, he told Lincoln that he had sent forward fully forty thousand men, forty-nine regiments of infantry and two batteries. There was little to be done at Springfield that could not be left to a good staff man, and it was time to get the Vicksburg expedition moving; “May I not ask therefore to be sent forward immediately?” Halleck, meanwhile, was dragging his feet. His official position was that he knew nothing definite about the President's plans and that in the absence of specific orders he would let things follow their normal course. General Curtis, in St. Louis, seeing some of his own troops detached for the Vicksburg move, had written to Halleck saying that he would rather like to take charge of this movement himself, and Halleck wrote a smooth answer: “In regard to the proposed expedition down the Mississippi and its commander I can give you no reply. I have been informed that the President has selected a special commander and that instructions have been or will be given to him by the War Department. If so they have not been communicated to me, and until I receive them I shall consider the officer of the highest rank as the commander, whoever he may be.”
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The officer of the highest rank, of course, was Grant.

McClernand, in fact, was by now on the end of a limb, and Halleck was getting ready to saw it off. Sherman was in Memphis, pulling his troops together. He had brought 7000 men back from the Tallahatchie, and two divisions under A. J. Smith and G. W. Morgan, half of whose men had been sent down by McClernand, were on hand, totaling 14,000 more; as soon as he got the troops from Arkansas—he hoped there would be at least 10,000 of these—he would be ready to move. Grant had his cavalry in motion, striking east to destroy the Mobile and Ohio railroad, and Dodge at Corinth
was sending a small force of infantry down to co-operate.
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Unless McClernand reached Memphis very quickly, the big offensive which he had helped to make possible would be moving without him.

Amid all of this Grant had time to take a meditative look at his own situation. On December 15, he wrote to his sister a letter breathing quiet confidence; a strangely revealing letter, indicating that the newspaper criticism that had descended on him earlier in the year still hurt him, so that even at the crucial moment of a great campaign he had to think about it and voice a protest. The letter read:

We are now having wet weather. I have a big army in front of me as well as bad roads. I shall probably give a good account of myself however notwithstanding all obstacles. My plans are all complete for weeks to come and I hope to have them work out just as planned.

For a conscientious person, and I profess to be one, this is a most slavish life. I may be envied by ambitious persons, but I in turn envy the person who can transact his daily business and retire to a quiet home without a feeling of responsibility for the morrow. Taking my whole department, there are an immense number of lives staked upon my judgment and acts. I am extended now like a peninsula into the enemy's country, with a large army depending for their daily bread upon keeping open a line of railroad running one hundred and ninety miles through an enemy's country, or, at least, through territory occupied by a people terribly embittered and hostile to us. With all this I suffer the mortification of seeing myself attacked right and left by people at home professing patriotism and love of country, who never heard the whistle of a hostile bullet. I pity them and a nation dependent upon such for its existence. I am thankful however that, although such people make a great noise, the masses are not like them.
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If the people of the South were “terribly embittered and hostile,” part of it was due to the way in which the Army of the Tennessee had been behaving. A soldier was writing that all the country along the Tennessee-Mississippi border had been laid waste and made desolate, and said that every vacant house had been burned. Men
who marched past the smoking ruins would look at the gaunt, smoke-blackened chimneys and jeer: “There's another Mississippi headstone.” Foragers would butcher a farmer's hogs in the owner's presence, threatening him with bayonets if he protested, and the movement south had hardly begun before Grant found it necessary to rebuke his men for “gross acts of vandalism.” On three successive evenings, he had a notice read to each regiment in his command, warning that the legal penalty for straggling and looting was death and announcing that company and regimental officers would be held accountable for the misdeeds of their men. When parties from the 20th Illinois looted a store in La Grange, Tennessee, Grant figured the damage at more than twelve hundred dollars and ordered the sum deducted from the pay of the regiment's officers, pro rata; he also had two captains, who had tried to shield the culprits and hide the loot, mustered out of service. Yet all of this did little good. One veteran remarked that “such orders soon got to be a joke with the men, they in a quiet way giving the commanding officers to understand that they did not go down South to protect Confederate property.”
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By mid-December, McClernand was anxious to leave Springfield, Sherman was anxious to leave Memphis, and Grant was anxious to fight Pemberton so that Sherman's thrust might succeed; and now, unexpectedly, there came drastic intervention on the part of the Confederates, to compel a revision of everybody's plans.

The intervention came chiefly from a rough-hewn Confederate officer who did not at all share in the cavalier tradition but who was one of the most striking military geniuses developed in the war: Nathan Bedford Forrest, whose activities would finally wring from Sherman a grim tribute—there could be no peace in western Tennessee, Sherman would cry bitterly, until Forrest was dead. Forrest was taking off just now on a raid. He had very little in the way of an army, and less in the way of equipment, but he figured that he would get horses and weapons from Yankee supply bases and that he would enroll new recruits from western Tennesseans in Yankee-held territory—an estimate which proved entirely correct. He was moving up now on the far side of the Tennessee River, and Rosecrans at Nashville got wind of it and sent Grant a warning telegram: “Tell the authorities along the road to look out for
Forrest.” Grant passed the word along, alerted Dodge at Corinth, and sent word to Admiral David Porter, at Cairo, that there was ominous Rebel activity along the Tennessee: could some light-draft gunboats be sent up to keep Confederate cavalry from crossing into West Tennessee? On December 15 one of Grant's outposts notified him that Forrest was crossing the river, and Grant wired Porter that Forrest was over the river bent on mischief. He believed that the raid could be broken up; he told McPherson that he was concentrating troops in the threatened area, and that he did not think many of Forrest's men would ever get back into their own territory, although they might be able to break the Mobile and Ohio for a day or two. To Dodge he sent word that his own forces would make no further advance until Forrest was disposed of. To one subordinate he sent a wholly characteristic wire. After specifying movements that should be made to bring Forrest to bay, Grant added: “Don't fail to get up a force and attack the enemy. Never wait to have them attack you.”
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If any man but Forrest had been leading the raid, Grant's dispositions would probably have been effective. The raiders were heavily outnumbered, with Federal detachments closing in on them from every direction, and dependable Grenville Dodge was moving up from Corinth to take charge of the operation. But Forrest was something special. As the Federal columns converged on him he dodged, fought when he had to, outguessed and outmarched his foes, and got back to safety east of the Tennessee, at last, with a prodigious achievement purchased by insignificant losses. He had broken the all-important Mobile and Ohio at various places over a sixty-mile stretch, running nearly to the Kentucky line, had completely cut off Grant's telegraphic communications with the outside world, had put at least twenty-five hundred Federal troops out of action, and had left Grant's army isolated, its supply line broken so badly that it would be many weeks before it could be restored. For nearly a fortnight Grant would not even be able to get or send telegrams.

By an odd coincidence, this interruption of communications came just when it would be most damaging to the aspirations of General McClernand.

Earlier in the fall Grant had been left in the dark about the back
stage manipulating that was going on; now it was McClernand who was bewildered. Like Grant, he was hearing plenty of rumors, and the rumors were disquieting. Most of his troops had gone down the river but he had not gone with them, and he suspected that some very fast footwork was being performed by somebody. On December 16 he wired Halleck, asking to be sent downstream “in accordance with the order of the Secretary of War of the 21st of October giving me command of the Mississippi expedition.” On the following day he telegraphed Lincoln: “I believe I am superseded. Please advise me,” and he wired in similar vein to Stanton. Stanton's reply was only moderately soothing:

There has been, as I am informed by General Halleck, no order superseding you. It was designed, as you know, to organize the troops for your expedition after they should reach Memphis or the place designated as their rendezvous. The troops having been sent forward, they are now to be organized. The operations being in General Grant's department, it is designed to organize all the troops of that department in three army corps, the First Army Corps to be commanded by you, and assigned to the operations on the Mississippi under the general supervision of the general commanding the Department. General Halleck is to issue the order immediately.
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This was bad news. McClernand had supposed that he would be an independent army commander, answerable to Washington; now he was being told that he would simply command an army corps under Grant. Even worse, however, was the prospect that the corps he was supposed to command might leave Memphis before he himself could join it. McClernand needed to get orders from Grant—and it was precisely now that Forrest's raid prevented anything Grant might say from reaching McClernand in time to do any good.

On December 18, the War Department notified Grant that, by order of the President, he was to divide his forces into four army corps—the 13th, to be commanded by McClernand; the 15th, to be commanded by Sherman; the 16th, to be commanded by Hurlbut, and the 17th, to be commanded by McPherson. Dutifully enough, Grant immediately wrote a long dispatch for McClernand:

I have been directed this moment by telegraph from the General-in-chief of the Army to divide the forces of this department into four army corps, one of which is to be commanded by yourself, and that to form a part of the expedition on Vicksburg.

I have draughted the order and will forward it to you as soon as printed. The divisions now commanded by Brig. Gen. George W. Morgan and Brig. Gen. A. J. Smith will compose all of it that will accompany you on the expedition, and the divisions of Brig. Gen. F. Steele and Brig. Gen. M. L. Smith will accompany you and will be commanded directly by Maj. Gen. W. T. Sherman, who will command the army corps of which they are a part. Written and verbal instructions have been given General Sherman, which will be turned over to you on your arrival at Memphis.