Grant Moves South (66 page)

But to do this he would have to abandon the plan which, in a somewhat unfinished form, had been in his mind ever since he started down the river—the plan by which he would join forces with Banks and reduce Port Hudson before attempting the main attack on Pemberton and Vicksburg.

He had told both Banks and Halleck that his army would establish itself at Grand Gulf and then would send at least an army corps downstream to help Banks take Port Hudson. After that, he and Banks together could move on Vicksburg. This suited Halleck, who was insisting that the one great object in the West was
to open the river, and who also felt that Banks and Grant should pool their resources in order to do it. It also suited Banks, who would get the top command (and, no doubt, the glory) out of any such venture; he was senior to Grant, and Washington definitely contemplated that he would be in charge of any combined operation in the valley.
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Yet Banks, as Grant learned at Grand Gulf, had somehow managed to go off on such a tangent that a combined operation in the immediate future was completely out of the question.

Banks, as a matter of fact, had taken his army up the Red River, directly away from the Port Hudson-Vicksburg area; and when Grant entered Grand Gulf, Banks and his army were near Alexandria, Louisiana, one hundred miles away in a straight line, probably twice that far away as the rivers went. It appears that Banks feared that Confederate forces in northwestern Louisiana might slice down at New Orleans, which was his base, if he did not attend to them before he moved up the Mississippi. Whatever the reason, Banks had moved eccentrically up the Red River instead of up the Mississippi; and at the moment when Grant was prepared to join hands with him at Port Hudson, Banks was enmeshed in a campaign that was likely to keep him busy for some time to come. Grant got the news at this time in a letter Banks had written three weeks earlier—communication between the two armies was very roundabout—and found that the best Banks could promise was that he would have fifteen thousand men near Port Hudson by May 10. The letter was clearly out of date, and it seemed likely to Grant that the May 10 estimate was exceeedingly optimistic.
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It was at this moment that the plan for a combined push at Port Hudson went out of Grant's mind forever. He would go for Pemberton and Vicksburg alone; if Banks could come along sometime and help, that would be fine, but Grant was going to send no army corps down the river, nor was he going to spend one day waiting at Grand Gulf for Banks to join him. After May 3, 1863, the Vicksburg campaign would be Grant's and Grant's alone.

As a matter of fact, the plan for a joint move against Port Hudson had always been more the expression of a pious hope than the precise formulation of a working military program. Even Halleck
himself apparently did not count too greatly on it; when Grant started down from Milliken's Bend, the most Halleck had said to Banks was that Grant was going to attack Grand Gulf “and perhaps co-operate with you against Port Hudson,” and he had warned Banks that Grant's primary object must be “to concentrate his forces so as to strike the enemy an important blow.”
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The Port Hudson plan contemplated one of the most delicate of all military operations—the bringing together of two widely separated armies, far down in hostile territory, in the presence of an active, vigilant enemy—and with communications between Grant and Banks as imperfect as they necessarily were it is doubtful that either Halleck or Grant had ever felt deeply bound to the Port Hudson idea. The notion that Grant was breathing defiance in the face of the General in Chief by abandoning the Port Hudson venture is, quite simply, a fiction. The one person who was deeply offended by Grant's change in plan was Banks himself, and Banks's displeasure was something Grant could easily live with.

Forgetting about Banks, Grant for several days did not even bother to let that general know that he had forgotten. (His dispatch telling Banks that the Port Hudson date was broken was not written until May 10.) He did, however, take pains to keep Halleck posted; and, indeed, throughout the Vicksburg campaign Grant was extremely careful to keep a steady flow of dispatches going to Washington, although it took several days for messages he sent from this part of the country to reach the War Department. (From Grand Gulf they had to go overland to Milliken's Bend and then by steamer via Memphis to Cairo, where they could be put on the telegraph wire.) He had already told Halleck that he was going to follow up the advantage gained at Port Gibson, Dana had given Stanton equally clear notice—and now Grant waited only for Sherman and for the wagons from upriver before plunging into action.

Even though the luckless farmers of Mississippi were going to have to provide most of the army's food, some sort of wagon train was necessary. The number of army wagons that could be brought down from Milliken's Bend was limited; a staff officer reported that there would be only two wagons to a regiment, in which all ammunition, rations and equipment must be carried, and he soberly
noted that “it will be impossible to keep the army from suffering.” It was necessary to improvise—for, as Grant noted, even if the soldiers could get food and forage from the plantations, they had to bring all of their ammunition, and the quantity a foot soldier could carry on his back was limited. And so even before the fighting around Port Gibson had ended Grant had detachments swarming all over the countryside, collecting every four-wheeled vehicle, and every draft animal capable of pulling such vehicles, to make up a fantastic, unmilitary wagon train: fine carriages, long-coupled wagons made to carry cotton bales, farm carts, anything at all on wheels, pulled indiscriminately by horses, mules and oxen, many of them wearing makeshift harness put together from whatever was at hand. With these, and with such Army wagons as could be brought down the river and ferried over to the Mississippi shore, his army could carry the things it had to have in order to live and fight.
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While Grant prepared to move, his advance guard kept up a ceaseless movement of reconnaissances and skirmishing thrusts to give Pemberton the notion that a direct advance on Vicksburg was in preparation. Grant's attention, however, was primarily centered on the railroad which ran from Vicksburg to Jackson. This town was, in effect, Vicksburg's connection with the rest of the Confederacy. At Jackson the railroad from Vicksburg crossed the north-and-south line that came down to New Orleans from West Tennessee; through this place, troops and supplies meant for Pemberton would move; to Jackson, as Grant would presently learn, Joe Johnston in person was coming, to arrange for the formation of a relieving army. A hard blow to break the railroad connections, destroy military supplies and disperse the gathering reinforcements would isolate Pemberton and doom both his army and Vicksburg itself.

At the end of the first week in May, Grant's troops were placed to threaten both Jackson and Vicksburg. The left was at Hankinson's Ferry, on the Big Black, and the right, under McClernand, lay half a dozen miles to the east, behind Big Sandy creek. McPherson could move eastward toward Jackson while McClernand and Sherman moved to break the railroad at Edwards Station
and guarded the Big Black crossings against a sudden thrust by Pemberton.

For Sherman was on the scene by now, and Grant had thirty-five thousand men, with eight thousand more marching down to join him. Sherman reached Grand Gulf on May 6, spent the next day bringing his troops across—except for Frank Blair's division, which was still on the march from Milliken's Bend—and promptly moved up to Hankinson's Ferry. Sherman was still uneasy about this campaign, and he reflected now that the entire army would have to be supplied by one inadequate road running north from Grand Gulf. Eighteen months later, he would be world-famous as the general who marched unconcernedly off into the unknown with no supply line at all, but he had not reached that point yet; he could be the most unorthodox of soldiers, but in the spring of 1863 the textbook formula still held him, and he sent a quick warning to Grant: “Stop all troops till your army is partially supplied with wagons, and then act as quickly as possible, for this road will be jammed as sure as life if you attempt to supply 50,000 men by one single road.” Back from Grant, who had his headquarters five miles east, at Rocky Springs, came the reply: “I do not calculate upon the possibility of supplying the army with full rations from Grand Gulf. I know it will be impossible without constructing additional roads. What I do expect, however, it to get up what rations of hard bread, coffee and salt we can and make the country furnish the balance.… A delay would give the enemy time to re-enforce and fortify. If Blair were up now I believe we could be in Vicksburg in seven days.”
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As he read that dispatch, Sherman advanced a long stride in his military education.

The army moved, slipping to the northeast, with the Big Black River winding down across its left flank: a shield for Pemberton's army, as that general supposed, but also a curtain, blotting out knowledge of what the invader was up to. About fifteen miles to the north, the Southern Railroad of Mississippi, going due east from Vicksburg, crossed the river near Edwards Station and then went on thirty miles east to Jackson, and as Grant's marching columns drew closer to this railroad, General Pemberton's perplexity in
creased. He had supposed, after Bowen was driven out of Port Gibson, that Grant would move straight up the Mississippi to Warrenton; then he guessed that a raid on Jackson was being attempted; then it struck him that what Grant really was intending might be a blow at the railroad bridge over the Big Black River near Edwards Station; and from Vicksburg, on May 12, he sent an unhappy dispatch to Jefferson Davis:

“I am obliged to hold back large forces at the ferries on Big Black, lest he cross and take this place. I am also compelled to keep a considerable force on either flank of Vicksburg, out of supporting distance of Edwards, to prevent his approach in those directions.”
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Pemberton, as a matter of fact, had four problems, and taken all together they were far too much for him. The first problem was Grant himself. The second problem was President Davis, who believed that both Vicksburg and Port Hudson must be held at all costs and who kept sending Pemberton orders based on that belief. The third problem was Joe Johnston, Pemberton's immediate superior, who felt that Pemberton ought to abandon all fixed positions, concentrate his forces so as to beat Grant in the open field, and then regain the places he had given up. And the final problem was the great imponderable that bore on every Confederate commander in this war—the fact that the Federal government, with its vast advantage in man power, economic strength, and the materials of war, was bound to win whenever it found a general who would relentlessly and steadfastly put all of those advantages to the fullest use. The Confederacy had few generals unluckier than John Pemberton.

Grant was traveling light, in this campaign, but he did have his oldest son with him—Frederick Dent Grant, the bouncy twelve-year-old who had been allowed to make the overland trip down from Milliken's Bend and who had no intention of missing any of the fun. When the army made the crossing at Bruinsburg, Fred had been left in bed on the headquarters boat, but he roused himself and followed on foot—joining forces, as he trudged after the
Commanding General, with the War Department's Mr. Dana, who also wanted a front-row seat. Fred wore the sash and sword which his father never bothered to use, and he and Dana followed the sound of the guns. Somewhere along the way some staff officers presented the pair with a couple of somnolent plantation horses, and Grant remembered meeting them, “mounted on two enormous horses, grown white with age,” just after the close of the battle of Port Gibson. They stuck with headquarters for the rest of the campaign, and Grant loyally recorded that Fred's presence “caused no anxiety to me or to his mother, who was at home.”
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There was plenty for a small boy to see. Forty years later Frederick Dent Grant remembered riding into Willow Springs and joining his father and other officers on the porch of a little house just as an indignant plantation owner, mounted on a mule, rode up to complain that marauding Federals had robbed him of everything he owned. The troops, he said, belonged to the command of Brigadier General A. J. Smith, who had a division in McClernand's corps; Smith, a blunt and salty character, happened to be present, and he was told to talk to the man. He listened to the planter's complaint, then asked: “Whose mule is that you rode up on?” His own, said the planter. “Well,” said Smith, turning away, “those men didn't belong to my division at all, because if they were my men they wouldn't even have left you that mule.”
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Now the army was picking up speed; and as it moved Grant kept spurring his subordinates to forget about rations and supplies and keep crowding forward. When McClernand sent him a note, protesting that he had so few wagons that his corps could not carry all the foodstuffs and cooking utensils it needed, Grant curtly replied that he had seen McClernand's corps on the march, and that it was accompanied by plenty of horses and mules to carry a full five days' rations “if relieved of the knapsacks, officers, soldiers and Negroes now riding.” To McPherson, Grant sent word to move for the town of Raymond, fourteen miles west of Jackson: there was reported to be a Confederate brigade there and Grant wanted it driven out—“We must fight the enemy before our rations fail, and we are equally bound to make our rations last as long as possible.” And finally, on May 10, Grant found time to send a letter to Banks explaining the new campaign plan:

It was my intention on gaining a foothold at Grand Gulf, to have sent a sufficient force to Port Hudson to have insured the fall of that place with your co-operation, or rather to have co-operated with you to that end. Meeting the enemy, however, as I did, south [west] of Port Gibson, I followed him to the Big Black and could not afford to retrace my steps. I also learned, and believe the information to be reliable, that Port Hudson is almost entirely evacuated. This may not be true, but it is the concurrent testimony of deserters and contrabands.