Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (116 page)

II

Jefferson Davis also encountered vexing problems during the winter of 1862–63. While Lincoln faced down senators in Washington, Davis traveled to Tennessee and Mississippi to confront generals about military contretemps in those theaters. In November, Joseph E. Johnston

14
. Theodore C. Pease and James G. Randall, eds.,
The Diary of Orville Hickman Browning
, 2 vols. (Springfield, Ill., 1927–33), I, 600–601.

15
. For contemporary accounts of this crisis, see
ibid.
, 596–604, and Howard K. Beale, ed.,
The Diary of Gideon Welles
, 3 vols. (New York, 1960), I, 194–204. For secondary accounts, see Nevins,
War
, II, 350–65, and James G. Randall,
Lincoln the President
, 4 vols. (New York, 1945–55), II, 241–49.

had reported himself ready for duty after recovering from his Seven Pines wounds. Because of his earlier differences with Davis, Johnston had become a rallying point for some of the president's critics. Perhaps to confound these critics, Davis on November 24 named Johnston "plenary commander" of a newly formed Department of the West embracing everything between the Mississippi and the Appalachians. Although this new department appeared impressive on paper, Johnston glumly appraised the appointment as an attempt to put him on the shelf with a "nominal and useless" command.
¹⁶
This was unfair, because Davis really did want someone to take charge of the strategic problem in the West. Johnston regarded the task as thankless, in part because the Army of Tennessee at Murfreesboro was still riven by dissension between Bragg and his corps commanders, while the new head of the Army of Mississippi at Vicksburg was unpopular because of his nativity. He was John C. Pemberton, an artillery expert whom Davis had transferred in October from command of the defenses of Charleston to those of Vicksburg. A native of Philadelphia who had become an adoptive southerner by marrying a Virginian, the curt and crusty Pemberton had compiled no combat record that justified to Mississippians the assignment of this "Yankee" to defend their state. Indeed, it is hard to understand why Davis appointed him (instead, for example, of sending Johnston to Vicksburg) except as a way of making room for another problem general, Beauregard. The colorful Creole took Pemberton's place at Charleston, where he had become a hero by firing on Fort Sumter and starting the war.

This kettle of catfish in the West prompted Davis to rise from a sickbed to make a December journey to the afflicted theaters. Instead of straightening matters out, however, this trip in some respects made them worse. Without consulting Johnston, Davis ordered a 7,500-man division in Bragg's army transferred to Pemberton. When Bragg and Johnston protested that this would encourage Rosecrans's army at Nashville to attack the weakened Army of Tennessee, Davis responded that Pemberton faced even longer odds and that holding Vicksburg was more vital than defending middle Tennessee. Accompanying Davis to Vicksburg, Johnston disapproved of Pemberton's defensive arrangements and urged a

16
. Joseph E. Johnston, "Jefferson Davis and the Mississippi Campaign,"
Battles and Leaders
, II, 475. See also James Lee McDonough,
Stones River: Bloody Winter in Tennessee
(Knoxville, 1980), 33–38.

shorter fortified line that could be held by a skeleton force to free most of the army for mobile operations. Johnston also believed that the main Confederate army in Mississippi was too small for success, and urged its reinforcement from across the river even if this meant the temporary loss of Arkansas. Though Davis suggested that the Arkansas commander send troops to Vicksburg, he did not
order
it—and it was not done. Johnston tried to resign his nugatory post. The president persuaded him to stay on, but their lack of mutual confidence and their differing concepts of strategy boded ill for the future.

For the short term, however, Confederate prospects in the West suddenly took a turn for the better. Applying the previous summer's successful formula, rebel cavalry raids on Union supply lines disrupted Grant's first Vicksburg campaign and came close to wrecking Rosecrans's drive against Bragg.

After the battle of Corinth in October, Grant had launched an invasion southward along the Mississippi Central Railroad to capture Vicksburg. Establishing a forward base at Holly Springs, Grant with 40,000 men had advanced to Oxford by early December. But one enemy in front and two in the rear threatened his further progress. In front, Pemberton entrenched 20,000 men along the Yalabusha River at Grenada. Behind Grant, 150 miles of railroad offered a tempting target to enemy cavalry. Deep in his rear—all the way back to Illinois, in fact—Grant faced a potential threat from his former subordinate John A. McClernand, a political general who was organizing a separate army to proceed down the Mississippi for its own attack on Vicksburg. A War Democrat from Lincoln's home state, McClernand had managed to persuade the president that he could rekindle the patriotism of Democrats in the Old Northwest if given an independent command. Without informing Grant, Lincoln told McClernand to go ahead. With great energy fueled by dreams of military glory, McClernand recruited and forwarded to Memphis dozens of new regiments during the fall. Grant got wind of this activity and requested clarification of his authority. General-in-Chief Halleck, who shared Grant's reservations about McClernand, wired Grant that he had full control of all troops in his department. Halleck also ordered the divisions organized by McClernand formed into two corps to be commanded by McClernand and Sherman. When McClernand learned of this, he protested bitterly to Lincoln that a West Point conspiracy had defrauded him of his army. Lincoln upheld Grant and Halleck, however, and advised McClernand for his own good and the good of the country to obey orders and get on with the war.
¹⁷

McClernand's greatest humiliation occurred when he arrived at Memphis on December 28 to find his troops gone. Grant had again outwitted the political general in the game of army politics, with an unwitting assist from none other than Nathan Bedford Forrest. When Grant learned of the new troops arriving at Memphis he sent Sherman to prepare them for a downriver expedition against Vicksburg in tandem with Grant's overland invasion. This two-pronged drive, if successful, would force Pemberton to divide his outnumbered forces and enable the Federal pincers to close on Vicksburg by land and by river. If McClernand reached Memphis before the river expedition left, he would take command by reason of seniority. Sherman therefore sped his preparations and got off on December 20. Meanwhile Grant's telegram to Illinois informing McClernand of the expedition's imminent departure was delayed because a raid by Forrest had cut Grant's communications.

Grant had little reason to feel thankful to Forrest, however, because this action and another simultaneous cavalry raid by Van Dorn brought Grant's first Vicksburg campaign to grief. Forrest rode westward from central Tennessee in mid-December with 2,000 men. Picking up local guerrillas along the way, Forrest outfought, outmaneuvered, or out-bluffed several Union garrisons and cavalry detachments while tearing up fifty miles of railroad and telegraph line, capturing or destroying great quantities of equipment, and inflicting 2,000 Union casualties. The rebels lost only 500 men, who were more than replaced with new recruits attracted by Forrest's hell-for-leather tactics and inspiring leadership. While this was going on, Earl Van Dorn with another cavalry force of 3,500 rode northward from Grenada, circled behind Grant's army, and wrecked the poorly-defended supply depot at Holly Springs on December 20. For good measure Van Dorn tore up several sections of the railroad and returned to Confederate lines before Union horsemen could catch up with him.

Dangling deep in enemy territory without a supply line, Grant called off his advance on Vicksburg. During the retreat to Tennessee the army lived off food and forage seized along the way. Grant was "amazed at the quantity of supplies the country afforded. It showed that we could have subsisted off the country for two months. . . . This taught me a

17
.
CWL
, VI, 70–71; Bruce Catton,
Grant Moves South
(Boston, 1960), 323–340.

lesson."
¹⁸
Grant and Sherman would apply the lesson with spectacular results in the future, but just now Grant's retreat left Sherman out on a limb. The latter had taken his (and McClernand's) corps up the Yazoo River a few miles north of Vicksburg for an assault on the Confederate defenses overlooking Chickasaw Bayou. This morass of swamps and waterways offered the only route to high and dry ground for an attack on the northside land defenses of Vicksburg itself. Sherman's plans were based on the assumption that Grant's simultaneous advance would occupy most of Pemberton's troops. The downed telegraph lines prevented Grant from informing Sherman of his withdrawal. On December 29 Sherman managed to get two-thirds of his 32,000 men across the narrow causeways and through the sloughs for an assault on the bluffs. The 14,000 dug-in defenders knocked them down like tenpins. After losing nearly 1,800 men (to the Confederates' 200), Sherman called it quits. The battered and water-logged bluecoats pulled back to the Mississippi a dozen miles above Vicksburg. News of this repulse added to the gloomy mood in the North.

But tidings soon arrived from Tennessee that relieved some of Lincoln's distress. Since taking over the Union Army of the Cumberland in late October, William S. Rosecrans had built up supplies and reorganized his troops for an advance. Rosecrans was a study in paradox: a man of bulldog courage, he seemed reluctant to get into a fight; slow and methodical in preparation, he moved quickly once he started; a convivial drinking man, he was a devout Catholic who loved to argue theology with his staff officers. Rosecrans had gotten his job because Buell was too cautious; Lincoln prodded Old Rosy to march against the rebels at Murfreesboro forthwith if he wanted to keep the job. After exasperating delays, Rosecrans's 42,000 men finally moved out from Nashville the day after Christmas for the showdown with Bragg's Army of Tennessee.

Bragg had 8,000 fewer infantrymen than Rosecrans. But the rebel cavalry evened the odds. Forrest and Morgan raided deep behind Union lines while Bragg's remaining cavalry under twenty-six-year-old Joseph Wheeler slowed the northern infantry with hit-and-run skirmishes. On December 29, Wheeler took off on a ride completely around the enemy rear where he wreaked havoc on supply wagons and captured part of Rosecrans's reserve ammunition. But the Yankees came on relentlessly. On December 30 they moved into line two miles northwest of Murfreesboro

18
.
Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant
, 2 vols. (New York, 1885–86), I, 435.

to confront Bragg's divisions drawn up astride Stones River. Both commanders formed similar plans for the morrow: to turn the enemy's right, get into his rear, and cut him off from his base. As the two armies bedded down a few hundred yards from each other, their bands commenced a musical battle as prelude to the real thing next day. Northern musicians blared out "Yankee Doodle" and "Hail Columbia," and were answered across the way by "Dixie" and "The Bonnie Blue Flag." One band finally swung into the sentimental strains of "Home Sweet Home"; others picked it up and soon thousands of Yanks and Rebs who tomorrow would kill each other were singing the familiar words together.

At dawn on December 31 the southerners struck first, catching the bluecoats at breakfast as they had done twice before, at Donelson and Shiloh. This time their initial success was even greater, as 13,000 rebels massed on the left "swooped down on those Yankees like a whirl-a-gust of woodpeckers in a hail storm," in the words of a Tennessee private.
¹⁹
In several hours of ferocious fighting the graybacks drove back the Union flank three miles, but were stopped short of the railroad and turnpike in the Union rear. Rosecrans cancelled his attack on the Confederate right and rushed reinforcements to shore up his own crumpled right. Old Rosy was at his bulldog best in this crisis, riding from one part of the line to another, his uniform spattered with blood from a staff officer beheaded by a cannonball while riding alongside Rosecrans.

The Union army was saved from disaster during the morning by the fierce resistance of Philip Sheridan's division in the right center. Anticipating Bragg's tactics, Sheridan had his division awake and under arms by 4:00
A.M.
; when the rebels swept down on them after wrecking two other Union divisions, Sheridan's men were ready. They shredded and slowed the rebel attack at heavy cost to themselves as well as to the enemy: all three of Sheridan's brigade commanders were killed and more than one-third of his men became casualties in four hours of fighting. By noon the Union line had been forced into the shape of a bent jack-knife. The hinge was located in a patch of woods along the railroad and turnpike known locally as the Round Forest. Believing this position the key to the Union defense, Bragg ordered the division commanded by John C. Breckinridge—Buchanan's vice president and the southern Democratic presidential candidate in 1860—to go forward in a do or die attack on the Round Forest. They went, many died, but the Yankees

19
. Foote,
Civil War
, II, 87.