The Civil War: A Narrative: Fredericksburg to Meridian (123 page)

But that was later, after the souvenir hunters had the run of the field. For the present, the oak remained as intact as almost seven weeks of bullets and shells from both sides had allowed, and Grant and Pemberton continued their pokerlike contest of wills beneath its twisted branches. If the Confederate played a different style of game, that did not necessarily mean that he was any less skillful. In point of fact—at any rate in the limited sense of getting what he came for—he won; for in the end it was the quiet man who gave way and the sputterer who stood firm. In the adjoining group, Bowen proposed that the garrison “be permitted to march out with the honors of war, carrying with them their arms, colors, and field batteries,” which was promptly denied, as he no doubt had expected; whereupon Pemberton, after pointing out that his suggestion for the designation of commissioners had been rejected, observed that it was now Grant’s turn to make a counteroffer as to terms. Grant agreed; Pemberton would hear from him by 10 o’clock that evening, he said; and with that the meeting broke up, though it was made clear that neither opponent was to consider himself “pledged.” Both returned to their own lines and assembled councils of war to discuss what had developed. Pemberton found that all his division commanders and all but two of his brigade commanders favored capitulation, provided it could be done on a basis of parole without imprisonment. Grant found his officers of a mind to offer what was acceptable, although he himself did not concur; “My own feelings are against this,” he declared. But presently, being shielded in part from the possible wrath of his Washington superiors by the overwhelming vote of his advisers, he “reluctantly gave way,” and put his terms on paper for delivery to Pemberton at the designated hour. Vicksburg was to be surrendered, together with all public stores, and its garrison paroled; a single Union division would move in and take possession of the place next morning. “As soon as rolls can be made out, and paroles signed by officers and men,” he stipulated, “you will be allowed to march out of our lines, the officers taking with them their side-arms and clothing, and the field, staff, and cavalry officers one horse each. The rank and file will be allowed all their clothing, but no other property.” Remembering Pemberton’s claim that he had plenty of provisions on hand, Grant added a touch that combined generosity and sarcasm: “If these conditions are accepted, any amount of rations you may deem necessary can be taken from the stores you now have, and also the necessary cooking utensils for them.… I am, general, very respectfully, your obedient servant, U. S. G
RANT
, Major General.”

Now that he had committed his terms to paper, he found them
much more satisfactory than he had done before. “I was very glad to give the garrison of Vicksburg the terms I did,” he afterwards wrote. To have shipped the graybacks north to Illinois and Ohio, he explained, “would have used all the transportation we had for a month.” Moreover, “the men had behaved so well that I did not want to humiliate them. I believed that consideration for their feelings would make them less dangerous foes during the continuance of hostilities, and better citizens after the war was over.” So he said, years later, making a virtue of necessity and leaving out of account the fact that he had begun with a demand for unconditional surrender. For the present, indeed, he was so admiring of the arrangement, from the Union point of view, that he did what he could to make certain Pemberton could not reject it—as both had reserved the right to do—without risking a mutiny by the beleaguered garrison. He had Rawlins send the following note to his corps commanders: “Permit some discreet men on picket tonight to communicate to the enemy’s pickets the fact that General Grant has offered, in case Pemberton surrenders, to parole all the officers and men and to permit them to go home from here.”

He could have spared himself the precaution and his courier the ride. “By this time,” a Confederate declared, “the atmosphere was electric with expectancy, and the wildest rumors raced through camp and city. Everyone had the air of knowing something vital.” What was more, a good deal of back-and-forth visiting had begun on both sides of the line. “Several brothers met,” a Federal remarked, “and any quantity of cousins. It was a strange scene.” Whatever the blue pickets might say, on whatever valid authority, was only going to add to the seethe of speculation within and without the hilltop fortress which was now about to fall, just under fourteen months after its mayor replied to the first demand for surrender, back in May of the year before: “Mississippians don’t know, and refuse to learn, how to surrender to an enemy. If Commodore Farragut and Brigadier General Butler can teach them, let them come and try.” The upshot was that Grant had come and tried, being so invited, and now Pemberton had been taught, although it galled him. Assembling his generals for a reading of the 10 o’clock offer, he remarked—much as his opponent had done, an hour or two ago, across the way—that his “inclination was to reject these terms.” However, he did not really mean it, any more than Grant had meant it, and after he had taken the all but unanimous vote for capitulation, he said gravely: “Gentlemen, I have done what I could,” then turned to dictate his reply. “In the main, your terms are accepted,” he told Grant, “but in justice both to the honor and spirit of my troops, manifested in the defense of Vicksburg, I have to submit the following amendments, which, if acceded to by you, will perfect the agreement between us.…” The added conditions, of which there were two, were modest enough in appearance. He proposed to march his soldiers out of the works, stack arms,
and then move off before the Federals took possession, thus avoiding a confrontation of the two armies. That was the first. The second was that officers be allowed “to retain their … personal property, and [that] the rights and property of citizens … be respected.” But Grant declined to allow him either, and for good cause. As for the first, he replied, it would be necessary for the troops to remain under proper guard until due process of parole had been formally completed, and as for the second, while he was willing to give all citizens assurance that they would be spared “undue annoyance or loss,” he would make no specific guarantees regarding “personal property,” which he privately suspected was intended to include a large number of slaves, freed six months ago by Lincoln’s Proclamation. “I cannot consent to leave myself under any restraint by stipulations,” he said flatly. Denial of the proposed amendments was contained in a dispatch sent before sunrise, July 4. Pemberton had until 9 a.m. to accept the original terms set forth in last night’s message; otherwise, Grant added, “I shall regard them as having been rejected, and shall act accordingly.”

Now it was Pemberton’s turn to bend in the face of stiffness, and this he did the more willingly since the morning report—such had been the ravages of malnutrition and unrelieved exposure—showed fewer than half his troops available for duty as effectives. “General,” he answered curtly about sunrise: “I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of your communication of this day, and in reply to say that the terms proposed are accepted.” The rest was up to Grant, and it went smoothly. At 10 o’clock, in response to the white flags that now fluttered along the full length of the Confederate line, John Logan marched his division into the works. Soon afterwards the Stars and Stripes were flying over the Vicksburg courthouse for the first time in two and a half years. If the victors were somewhat disappointed professionally that seven weeks of intensive shelling by 220 army cannon, backed up by about as many heavier pieces aboard the gunboats and the mortar rafts, had done surprisingly little substantial damage to the town, it was at least observed that the superficial damage was extensive. Not a single pane of glass remained unbroken in any of the houses, a journalist noted. It was also observed that, despite the southern commander’s claim that he had ample provisions, the gauntness of the disarmed graybacks showed only too clearly, not only that such was not the case, but also that it apparently had not been so for some time. One Federal quartermaster, bringing in a train of supplies for the troops in occupation, was so affected by the hungry looks on the faces of the men of a rebel brigade that he called a halt and began distributing hardtack, coffee, and sugar all around. Rewarded by “the heartfelt thanks” of the butternut scarecrows, he said afterwards that when his own men complained that night about the slimness of their rations, “I swore by all the saints in the calendar that the wagons had broken down and the Johnny Rebs had
stolen all the grub.” Not only was there little “crowing,” which some Confederates had feared would be encouraged and enlarged by a Fourth of July surrender, but according to Grant “the men of the two armies fraternized as if they had been fighting for the same cause.” Though that was perhaps an overstatement of the case, there was in fact a great deal of mingling by victors and vanquished alike—“swapping yarns over the incidents of the long siege,” as one gray participant put it—and even some good-natured ribbing back and forth. “See here, Mister; you man on the little white horse!” a bluecoat called out to Major Lockett, whose engineering duties had kept him on the move during lulls in the fighting. “Danged if you aint the hardest feller to hit I ever saw. I’ve shot at you more’n a hundred times.” Lockett took it in good part, and afterwards praised his late adversaries for their generosity toward the defeated garrison. “General Grant says there was no cheering by the Federal troops,” he wrote. “My recollection is that on our right a hearty cheer was given by one Federal division ‘for the gallant defenders of Vicksburg!’ ”

Pemberton did not share in the fraternization, not only because of his present sadness, his sense of failure, and his intimation of what the reaction of his adoptive countrymen would be when they got the news of what had happened here today, but also because of his nature, which was invariably distant and often forbidding. For him, congeniality had been limited mainly to the family circle he had broken and been barred from when he threw in with the South. Even toward his own officers he had always been stiffly formal, and now toward Grant, who came through the lines that morning on his way to confer with Porter at the wharf, he was downright icy; indeed, rude. Perhaps it was the northern commander’s show of magnanimity, when he knew that such concessions as had been granted—parole of the garrison, for example, instead of a long boat ride to prison camps in Ohio and Illinois—had been the result of hard bargaining and a refusal to yield to his original demand for unconditional surrender. In any event, one of his staff found Pemberton’s manner “unhandsome and disagreeable in the extreme.” No one offered Grant a seat when he called on Pemberton in a house on the Jackson road, this officer protested, and when he remarked that he would like a drink of water, he was told that he could go where it was and help himself. He did not seem perturbed by this lack of graciousness, however; he went his way, taking no apparent umbrage, content with the spoils of this Independence Day, which were by far the greatest of the war, at any rate in men and materiel. Confederate casualties during the siege had been 2872 killed, wounded, and missing, while those of the Federals totaled 4910; but now the final tally of captives was being made. It included 2166 officers, 27,230 enlisted men, and 115 civilian employees, all paroled except one officer and 708 men, who preferred to go north as prisoners rather than risk being exchanged and required to fight
again. In ordnance, too, the harvest was a rich one, yielding 172 cannon, surprisingly large amounts of ammunition of all kinds, and nearly 60,000 muskets and rifles, many of such superior quality that some Union regiments exchanged their own weapons for the ones they found stacked when they marched in.

One additional prize there was, richer by far than all the rest combined and to which they had served as no more than prologue. The Mississippi would return to its old allegiance as soon as one remaining obstruction had been removed, and that allegiance would be secure as soon as one continuing threat had been abolished. The obstruction—Port Hudson—was not really Grant’s concern except for the dispatching of reinforcements, which he could now quite easily afford, to help Banks get on with the job. He kept his attention fixed on Joe Johnston—the threat—who continued to hover, off to the east, beyond the Big Black River. Conferring with Porter, Grant requested his co-operation in flushing out the rebels up the Yazoo, re-established there by Johnston while the Federals were concentrating on the reduction of Vicksburg. As usual, the admiral was altogether willing; he assigned an ironclad and two tinclads the task of escorting 5000 infantry upstream to retake Yazoo City, which the Confederates had refortified since their flight from the approaching gunboats back in May. But the northern army commander’s main concern was Johnston himself and the force he was assembling west of Jackson. Yesterday, while surrender negotiations were under way, Grant had notified Sherman, whose troops were already faced in that direction, that he was to strike eastward as soon as Vicksburg fell. “I want Johnston broken up as effectually as possible, and roads destroyed,” he wired. This message was followed shortly by another, in which he was more specific as to just what breakage was expected. “When we go in,” he told his red-haired lieutenant, “I want you to drive Johnston from the Mississippi Central Railroad, destroy bridges as far as Grenada with your cavalry, and do the enemy all the harm possible. You can make your own arrangements and have all the troops of my command, except one corps—McPherson’s, say. I must have some troops to send to Banks, to use against Port Hudson.”

As it turned out, there was no need for more troops at Port Hudson. All that was required was valid evidence that its companion bluff 240 miles upriver was in Union hands, and this arrived before the reinforcements: specifically, during the early hours of July 7. That evening Gardner received from one of his three brigade commanders—Miles, whose position on the far right afforded him a view of the river, as well as of the extreme left of the Federal intrenchments—a report of strange doings by the enemy, ashore and afloat: “This morning all his land batteries fired a salute, and followed it immediately [by another] with shotted guns, accompanied by vociferous yelling. Later in the day
the fleet fired a salute also. What is meant we do not know. Some of them hallooed over, saying that Vicksburg had fallen on the 4th instant. My own impression is that some fictitious good news has been given to his troops in order to raise their spirits; perhaps with a view of stimulating them to a charge in the morning. We will be prepared for them should they do so.”