Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War (26 page)

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Authors: Charles Bracelen Flood

Tags: #Biography, #History, #bought-and-paid-for, #Non-Fiction

BOOK: Grant and Sherman: The Friendship that Won the Civil War
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The next day, May 18, 1863, Sherman marched his corps around to the north of Vicksburg. Johnston had remained away from the city, and Grant achieved the objective he had sought for months: Union troops surrounded the enemy bastion on three sides, and on its west side, Porter’s warships controlled the waters of the Mississippi. In the final movement that sealed the ring around the city and its miles of defenses, Grant and Sherman rode among the advanced skirmishers at the front of one of their columns to secure the entrenchments atop Chickasaw Bluffs, which Sherman had been unable to take during the torrential rains five months earlier. Grant described what happened as they approached the hostile trenches: “These were still occupied by the enemy, or else the garrison from Haines’ [
sic
] Bluff had not all got past on their way to Vicksburg. At all events the bullets of the enemy flew thick and fast for a short time. In a few minutes Sherman had the pleasure of looking down from the spot coveted so much by him the December before where his command had lain so helpless for offensive action.”
As they rode into the just-abandoned Confederate positions, all was quiet. Now the muddy slopes of the previous December were dry, and the swamps below them bore no resemblance to the boiling brown rapids that had tumbled Sherman’s men back when they tried to advance under fire. The cannon still in the enemy trenches had been spiked by the withdrawing defenders to make them useless.
Sherman, usually talkative, remained silent for a while. It was he who had at one point urged Grant to take his army back to Memphis and strike out again for Vicksburg on a different route. Along with virtually everyone else, including Halleck and Stanton, Sherman had disapproved of Grant’s plan to move ships down the river under Vicksburg’s guns. When he had urged Grant to wait for his supply trains to catch up to the troops, Grant had cut loose, foraged off the country, and, movement upon movement, seized every opportunity to bring them to this day. Now he and Grant were sitting on their horses, atop strategically placed heights that looked toward the great Southern bastion that their army had surrounded. Inside Vicksburg were thirty thousand men who, no matter how well they defended their positions, could no longer get out to help other Confederate forces.
Turning to Grant, Sherman spoke words that combined apology and admiration: “Until this moment I never thought your expedition a success. I never could see the end clearly until now. But this is a campaign; this is a success if we never take the town.”
As for taking the town, Grant intended to do that as soon as he could. Pemberton was behind his fortifications with about thirty-three thousand soldiers, with another six thousand civilians of all ages and both sexes in the little city, but Grant knew that Pemberton was not the only enemy general he needed to think about. After his clashes with Grant, Joseph E. Johnston had decided not to come into Vicksburg but stay out in the open country to the east of Jackson for the time being, and, as Grant put it, “was in my rear, only fifty miles away, with an army not much inferior in number to the one I had with me, and I knew he was being reinforced. There was danger of his coming to the assistance of Pemberton.” Grant hoped to take Vicksburg at one stroke, so that he could be free to turn east again and face Johnston, if need be. Accordingly, at two in the afternoon on May 19, the day after he and Sherman were under fire together at Chickasaw Bluffs, Grant struck the Vicksburg defenses with all three of his corps: the one led by Sherman, the one belonging to the self-promoting McClernand, and the one under young Major General James B. McPherson, who had moved swiftly upward through the officer ranks and was a man both Grant and Sherman saw as a great future leader in the war.
As they headed up the slopes of the Vicksburg defenses, Grant’s men ran into a wall of fire. Grant later minimized the extent of that repulse, saying that the overall attack “resulted in securing more advanced positions for all our troops,” but Sherman wrote Ellen a more accurate appraisal: “The heads of Colums [sic] are swept away as Chaff thrown from the hand on a windy day.” Echoing Grant’s concerns, he added, “We must work smartly as Joe Johnston is collecting the shattered forces, those we beat at Jackson and Champion’s Hill, and may get reinforcements from Bragg … and come pouncing down on our Rear.” Telling Ellen about one of her younger brothers, Captain Charles Ewing, he said, “Charley was very conspicuous in the 1st assault, and brought off the colors of the Battalion which are now in front of my tent[,] the Staff 1/4 cut away by a ball that took with it a part of his finger.” Summing up the campaign to this moment, he said, “Grant[’]s movement was the most hazardous, but thus far the most successful of the war. He is entitled to all the Credit, for I would not have advised it.” As for his fellow corps commanders, “McPherson is a noble fellow, but McClernand a dirty dog.”
Three days after this, on May 22, Grant once again threw all three of his corps at the slopes of Vicksburg. This time it was another of Ellen Sherman’s younger brothers, Brigadier General Hugh Ewing, who was in the thick of the action. Lying with his men in a ditch just down the slope below an enemy parapet from which they had fallen back under a withering fire, he handed a captain a new regimental battle flag and said, “I want this planted on the top.” The captain took the banner forward and was killed; the man’s younger brother managed to spike the flag’s staff into the earth at the crest and rolled back down the slope to safety. The area became a no-man’s-land; for hours, the Confederates kept trying to rush that battle flag at the edge of their defenses and capture it, while Ewing’s men exposed themselves to rise up and shoot them down. At dusk, when orders came to withdraw down the slope, a private volunteered to crawl forward and yank the flag out of the earth. He succeeded, and Ewing and his men came down the slope with their flag.
It had been an afternoon of brave fighting on both sides, but of this effort, which cost him more than three thousand casualties, Grant said, “The attack was gallant, and portions of each of the three corps succeeded in getting up to the very parapets of the enemy and placing their battle flags upon them; but at no place were we able to enter.” As for an additional attack during the afternoon that Grant ordered in deference to repeated messages from McClernand that he was about to break through and needed additional support from Sherman on his right and McPherson on his left, Grant commented, “This last attack only served to increase our casualties without giving any benefit whatever.”
As aggressive a general as the Civil War produced, Grant nevertheless realized that more frontal attacks would be futile. “I now determined upon a regular siege—to ‘out-camp the enemy,’ as it were, and to incur no more losses. The experience of the 22d convinced officers and men that this was best, and they went to work on the defenses and approaches with a will. With the navy holding the river, the investment of Vicksburg was complete. As long as we could hold our position the enemy was limited in supplies of food, men and munitions of war to what they had on hand. These could not last always.”
While Grant’s army began its various entrenchments, building earthworks to house the artillery that would ceaselessly slam away at the “Gibraltar of the Confederacy,” visitors, some of them coming down the river on ships that disembarked them above the city, arrived to visit their family members who were soldiers and to see where the next act of the long Vicksburg drama would take place. Grant found himself amused by the sight of families of soldiers bringing the men “a dozen or two of poultry.” Unaware that in living off the land, Grant’s troops had wrung the necks of any number of chickens, ducks, and turkeys, hastily cooking them and often eating them while they marched, “They did not know how little the gift would be appreciated … the sight of poultry … almost took away their appetite. But the intention was good.”
Not only the families of soldiers came to see besieged Vicksburg. Grant described one of the most important visitors and how Sherman refused to take any credit for the success of the campaign to date and directed it all toward Grant.
Among the earliest arrivals was the Governor of Illinois, with most of the State officers. I … took them to Sherman’s headquarters and presented them. [Fifteen of Sherman’s fifty regiments were from Illinois.] Before starting out to look at the lines—possibly while Sherman’s horse was being saddled—there were many questions asked about the late campaign … There was a little knot around Sherman and another around me, and I heard Sherman repeating, in the most animated manner, what he had said to me when we first looked down … upon the land below on the 18th of May, adding: “Grant is entitled to every bit of the credit for the campaign; I opposed it …”
But for this speech it is not likely that Sherman’s opposition would ever have been heard of. His untiring energy and great efficiency during the campaign entitle him to a full share of all the credit due for its success. He could not have done more if the plan were his own.
 
The siege began. From out in the river, the 100 cannon aboard Admiral Porter’s gunboats began firing shells into the fortified city at all hours, and Grant’s 220 cannon and mortars opened up on the inland side. The Confederate defenders responded with artillery fire from more than 170 guns, and sharpshooters from both armies began firing at anything that moved. As the siege continued, Grant received reinforcements from Memphis; eventually he had between seventy and eighty thousand men, and used half of them to guard his rear against Joseph E. Johnston, who at times had thirty thousand men under his command in the area east of the city but had almost no artillery with him and little in the way of a supply line. (On May 29, Johnston tried to get a letter through the lines to Pemberton. In it he said, “I am too weak to save Vicksburg,” and held out only the hope that he might be able to “save you and your garrison” if Pemberton could “cooperate” in an effort to break out of the city and link up with him. The impossibility of that was shown by the fact that the Union lines were so closely drawn around the city that the letter could not be sneaked through to Pemberton until sixteen days later.)
As the daily bombardments and sniping continued, attackers and defenders had an enormous variety of experiences. Within the besieged area, Henry Ginder, a civilian construction engineer who was continuing to improve the already-formidable Confederate fortifications, wrote an account of the dangers he faced and of a shell that was a dud and did not explode.
Not a day passed but in riding back and forth from my labors the shells burst around my path and minié balls whiz past my ears. Last night I was on foot returning from the scene of my labors, and I heard a 13-inch shell coming but couldn’t see it; it came nearer and nearer until I thought it would light on my head, when splosh! it went into the earth a few feet to my left, throwing the dirt into my face with such force as to sting me for some time afterwards. The Lord kept it from exploding … Otherwise it would have singed the hair off my head and blown me to pieces into the bargain.
 
Many of the civilians inside Vicksburg began spending much of their time in caves, to avoid being hurt in the bombardment. What could happen to a house was recorded in her diary by Dora Richards, the young wife of a lawyer: “I was just within the door when the crash came that threw me to the floor … Shaken and deafened I picked myself up … The candles were useless in the dense smoke, and it was many minutes before we could see. Then we found the entire side of the room torn out.” The defenders started to cope with shortages: running out of newsprint, the defiant Vicksburg
Citizen
and the Vicksburg
Whig
, both assuring their readers that Joseph E. Johnston was on his way to break the siege and save the city, put out their editions in a small format printed on one side of cut-up wallpaper.
Among the besiegers, various unlooked-for things occurred. “Old Abe,” the American bald eagle that accompanied the Eighth Wisconsin as its mascot, was wounded by the defenders’ fire but survived. Captain J. J. Kellogg of the 113th Illinois, a company commander in the brigade led by Ellen Sherman’s brother Hugh Ewing, a few days earlier had seen Grant and Sherman looking at him through their field glasses as he led a charge up to the parapet on which a Union battle flag was finally planted. Now, redeployed with his company to a seemingly far safer position beside a bayou on an approach to Vicksburg, he started to put up a sleeping tent and encountered a surprise.
When I was driving stakes for my new home, a great green-headed alligator poked his nozzle above the surface of the bayou waters and smiled at me.
Upon examination of the ground along the bayou shore, I discovered alligator tracks where they had waltzed around under the beautiful light of the moon on a very recent occasion, so I built my bunk high enough to enable me to roost out of reach of these hideous creatures.
Though I had built high enough to escape the prowling alligators I had not built high enough to get above the deadly malaria distilled by that cantankerous bayou.
 
On one of the early days of the siege, a private of the Fourth Minnesota saw an older Union soldier in a rumpled uniform standing at the top of an observation tower near the front, looking toward the entrenchments on the enemy-held slopes, and shouted, “Say! You old bastard, you better keep down from there or you will get shot!”

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