Grant Moves South (71 page)

Grant's confidence was running high. On June 15 he wrote to a friend that “all is going on here now just right,” and he went on to specify:

We have our trenches pushed up so close to the enemy that we can throw hand grenades over into their forts. The enemy do not dare show their heads above the parapets at any point, so close and so watchful are our sharpshooters. The town is completely invested. My position is so strong that I feel myself abundantly able to leave it so and go out twenty or thirty miles with force enough to whip two such garrisons.

Johnston, said Grant, could not force his way in unless he could muster “a larger army than the Confederacy have now at any one place.”

Having written all of this, Grant apparently felt that he may have sounded vainglorious, for he added: “This is what I think but do not say it boastingly, nor do I want it repeated or shown.”
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An even surer sign of Grant's confidence was the fact that he finally relieved McClernand of his command and sent him back to Illinois. He had come close to doing this when the May 22 attacks ended so badly, but had concluded it would be better to let McClernand stay until Vicksburg fell and then quietly ease him out;
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but McClernand's injudicious order of congratulation to the 13th Corps got into the papers in mid-June—not without some assistance from McClernand's headquarters—and that was the end. The order infuriated both Sherman and McPherson, who felt that McClernand was reaching out for glory at the expense of their commands, and they immediately sent Grant vigorous letters of protest. Sherman wrote bitterly that the order was really addressed, not to the soldiers, “but to a constituency in Illinois,” and McPherson agreed that it was designed “to impress the public mind with the magnificent strategy, superior tactics and brilliant deeds” of McClernand. Unfortunately for McClernand, in getting his order into the papers he had violated a standing War Department regulation which stipulated that such papers must be submitted to army headquarters before publication. This congratulatory order had not been submitted. Grant sent McClernand a note, asking if the order as published was genuine, and when McClernand replied
that it was and that he was prepared to stand by it, Grant had Rawlins draw up an order of dismissal. This order, dated June 18, read as follows:

Major General John A. McClernand is hereby relieved from the command of the Thirteenth Army Corps. He will proceed to any point he may select in the state of Illinois and report by Letter to Headquarters of the Army for orders.

The order added that Major General E. O. C. Ord would replace McClernand as corps commander.

Rawlins drafted the order and got it signed after working hours, and Grant supposed that it would be given to McClernand the next morning. But Colonel Wilson returned to headquarters sometime after midnight, and when Rawlins told him about it the two staff men agreed that the order ought to be served without any delay whatever. Headquarters expected the Vicksburg garrison to attempt a sortie at any time. The sortie would very probably hit the lines held by McClernand; McClernand would fight, and he had a good, fighting corps; and once the fighting began Grant would probably suspend or even cancel the order of removal. It had better be delivered while it was hot.

So Wilson got the Provost Marshal, a sergeant and four enlisted men, donned his own best uniform, and rode off to McClernand's headquarters, arriving about two in the morning and demanding that the General be aroused. McClernand received him, after some delay; he could be punctilious about the formalities, too, and Wilson found him in full uniform, seated behind a table in his tent, two candles burning, general's sword lying on the table in front. With the Provost Marshal and his squad drawn up outside, Wilson handed the letter across the table, remarking that he was instructed to see that the General read it and understood it. McClernand adjusted his glasses, scanned the paper, and burst out: “Well sir! I am relieved!” He paused, and added: “By God sir, we are both relieved!”
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McClernand went back to Illinois, remarking that since he had been appointed by the President he did not think a mere major general could dismiss him, but that with the army in the immediate presence of the enemy he would not linger to make a point of it.
From Illinois he wrote vigorously—to Halleck, to Stanton and to Lincoln himself—demanding a reversal, an accounting, a court of inquiry, any official action that would restore the bright promise of the last autumn. He could get nowhere, and in the following September, with the Vicksburg campaign long since ended and the participants gone on to other things, he sent Halleck a letter complaining that Grant's report of the campaign did him grave injustice. He showed his fangs over this, writing:

How far General Grant is indebted to the forbearance of officers under his command for his retention in the public service so long, I will not undertake to state unless he should challenge it. None know better than himself how much he is indebted to that forbearance. Neither will I undertake to show that he is indebted to the good conduct of officers and men of his command at different times for the series of successes that have gained him applause rather than to his own merit as a commander, unless he should challenge it, too.
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It did no good. Grant challenged nothing, and Washington—holding perhaps the view that a general who had twice captured entire armies might have some asset besides the forbearance of his officers and the good conduct of his men—buried the protests deep in the War Department files. Ord took over the 13th Corps, McClernand simmered the summer away in Illinois, and the Army of the Tennessee got on with the siege.

Summer was coming, the hot sun blistered the long lines of trenches, water was scarce and hard to get, and between Confederate sharpshooters and the nightly pick-and-shovel details the soldiers were having hard enough times. From the North came well-intentioned visitors, bringing parcels of food—poultry, usually, a drug on the market in this army which had lived on Mississippi chickens so long that it actually preferred ordinary salt pork and hard bread.
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On the picket lines, Yank and Reb discussed the progress of the siege, traded coffee and hardtack for tobacco, and now and then sent personal messages back and forth: the brother-against-brother legend would grow hackneyed, with the passage of years, but it was a literal reality here. Each army contained regiments from Missouri, and one day the men on one part of the front
stopped firing so that a Missourian in one of the Union regiments could walk across and see his brother, who served Missouri in a Confederate regiment … the Northern brother wanted to hand over some greenbacks for the Southern brother to send home to the old folks.
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Federal trenches grew wide and deep, designed so that a column of fours could march through in safety. The approaches crept closer and closer to the Rebel lines, and the Federals' amateur engineers busily dug tunnels and planted mines. On June 25 a mine was exploded under a Confederate strongpoint near the Jackson road; it blew off the top of a hill, but did no serious harm. Another mine was exploded on July 1. Inexplicably, it tossed a Negro cook all the way into the Union lines (he landed more or less unhurt, and wound up with a job in John Logan's headquarters) and created a dusty hollow which Union soldiers occupied for twenty-four hours and then abandoned.
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This mine warfare accomplished little but symbolized much. It meant that the Union lines were being brought so close to the defensive works that before long the Union advantage in numbers would become decisively effective. Pemberton's lines would simply be swamped. What could not be done on May 22, when assault troops had to run forward for a quarter of a mile under heavy fire, could certainly be done at moderate cost once the attackers were close enough to blow the defensive works apart and then charge in through the dust cloud. In front of Sherman's corps, the engineers began a new tunnel, working day and night to put a mine under a Confederate salient. The heat was oppressive, especially in the cramped, unventilated mine shaft, and the soldiers toiled in six-hour shifts; twenty-eight feet below the Rebel trench, they would plant twenty-two hundred pounds of gunpowder, tamped in with sandbags, ready to explode whenever Grant ordered a final attack.
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This attack would come, according to headquarters planning, on July 6. Johnston, meanwhile, had plans of his own. He had thirty-two thousand men by now, and as June ended he began to move toward the Federal lines, maneuvering toward the south in the hope of flanking the formidable fieldworks which ran cross-country from the Big Black to the Yazoo. He proposed to make an attack on July 7. He did not think this would drive the Federals away, but it
might create enough of a diversion so that Pemberton could cut his way out of Vicksburg and save most of his army.

Pemberton was trying to find out whether such a thing was physically possible, and he circularized his generals to ask if their men could stand a fight and a long hard march. The replies he got were not encouraging. Duty had been hard, rations had been poor, there had been much sickness and men had had to remain in the trenches when they should have been on the sicklist; they could probably hold the lines a while longer, but a field campaign was just about out of the question. The Federal rifled artillery spoke with power; only the most massive earthworks offered any protection—rifled shell could drive through parapets sixteen feet thick—and the periodic Federal cannonades brought the Confederate Army nearer and nearer to exhaustion. Water was so scarce that sentinels were posted around wells, so that “none might be wasted for purposes of cleanliness.” Brigadier General Louis Hebert probably spoke for most of Pemberton's subordinates when, in his final report, he summed up the things that had ground his men down until they were incapable of field service:

“Forty-eight days and nights passed in the trenches, exposed to the burning sun during the day, the chilly air of night; subject to a murderous storm of balls, shells and war missiles of all kinds; cramped up in pits and holes not large enough to allow them to extend their limbs; laboring day and night; fed on reduced rations of the poorest kinds of food, yet always cheerful …”
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In plain terms, the men had had it. They could not possibly break out; they could not even stay where they were very much longer; and the next step was up to the Lieutenant General commanding.

At ten o'clock on the morning of July 3, white flags blossomed out along a portion of the Confederate works. As the firing died down, two horsemen rode forward toward the Union lines—the General Bowen who had fought so hard and so well at Port Gibson, and a colonel on Pemberton's staff. They had a letter from General Pemberton to General Grant, proposing an armistice and the appointment of commissioners to determine the formula under which Vicksburg should be surrendered.
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CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Sling the Knapsack for New Fields

General Pemberton felt that he was in a position to bargain. He warned that he could hold his position for a long time, and he said that his proposal sought to avert “the further effusion of blood,” which must “be shed to a frightful extent” if the siege continued. General Bowen handed the note to salty General A. J. Smith, and said that he himself would like to talk to General Grant, whom he had known in Missouri before the war. Grant would not see him. He liked Bowen and respected him, but he would be friendly after the surrender, not before. He sent word that he would be glad to talk to Pemberton that afternoon, and he wrote a note for Bowen to take to the Confederate commander. The note was pithy:

… the useless effusion of blood you propose stopping by this course can be ended at any time you may choose, by the unconditional surrender of the city and garrison. Men who have shown so much endurance and courage as those now in Vicksburg will always challenge the respect of an adversary, and I can assure you will be treated with all the respect due to prisoners of war. I do not favor the proposition of appointing commissioners to arrange the terms of capitulation, because I have no other terms other than those indicated above.

Bowen took the message back inside the Confederate lines, while the soldiers lounged in the trenches and an unaccustomed quiet settled down along the scarred range of sun-baked hills. At three that afternoon Pemberton, Bowen and a staff officer came out, and Grant and a handful of his own officers rode forward to meet them. Dismounting, Grant and Pemberton walked aside, near a stunted oak tree, and had a stiff, unsatisfactory conference. Pemberton asked what terms Grant would give if the Confederate Army surrendered
, and Grant replied that his letter said everything he had to say.

Pemberton was irritable: a man under great pressure, to whom a touch of temper might be forgiven. He was a Northerner, trusted by Jefferson Davis, distrusted by many Confederate soldiers and civilians. He knew that he would be blamed, bitterly, for giving up his army and his citadel, and that blame would also go to Davis who had promoted and supported him; and he clung to a notion that his opponent would grant lenient terms in order to win his victory on July 4, Independence Day. Now he was being offered nothing more than had been offered to Buckner at Fort Donelson. Dana, watching from a place not far off, said that Pemberton seemed excited and impatient, and Grant recalled that Pemberton said, “rather snappishly,” that if Grant had no other terms the conference might as well end then and there. Grant thought so too; Pemberton turned away, and it appeared for a moment that there would be no deal. But either Bowen or Grant himself kept the conference alive by suggesting that the subordinate officers discuss terms for a while. They did so, while Pemberton and Grant had a few more fruitless words together; and at last it was agreed that at ten that night Grant would send another letter through the lines, giving his final terms.
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