The Civil War: A Narrative: Fredericksburg to Meridian (17 page)

Withdraw he did, re-embarking his soldiers the following day and proceeding downriver without delay. There was more room on the decks of the transports now, and Sherman was low in spirits: not because he was dissatisfied with his direction of the attempt—“There was no bungling on my part,” he wrote, “for I never worked harder or with more intensity of purpose in my life”—but because he knew that the journalists, whom he had snubbed at every opportunity since their spreading of last year’s rumors that he was insane, would have a field day writing their descriptions of his repulse and retreat. Presently he was hailed by Porter, who signaled him to come aboard the flagship. Sherman did so, rain-drenched and disconsolate.

“I’ve lost 1700 men,” he said, “and those infernal reporters will publish all over the country their ridiculous stories about Sherman being whipped.”

“Pshaw,” the admiral replied. “That’s nothing; simply an episode of the war. You’ll lose 17,000 before the war is over and think nothing of it. We’ll have Vicksburg yet, before we die. Steward! Bring some punch.”

When he got the red-head settled down he gave him the unwelcome news that McClernand was at hand, anchored just inside the mouth of the Yazoo and waiting to see him. Sherman, who could keep as straight a face as his friend Grant when so inclined, afterwards remarked of his rival’s sudden but long-expected appearance on the scene: “It was rumored he had come down to supersede me.”

McClernand, too, had news for him when they met later that day. Grant was not coming down through Mississippi; he had in fact been in retreat for more than a week, leaving Pemberton free to concentrate for the defense of Vicksburg. Sherman suggested that this meant that any further attempt against the town with their present force was hopeless. Indeed, in the light of this disclosure, he began to consider himself most fortunate in failure, even though it had cost him a total of 1848 casualties for the whole campaign. “Had we succeeded,” he reasoned, “we might have found ourselves in a worse trap, when General Pemberton was at full liberty to turn his whole force against us.”

Dark-bearded McClernand agreed that the grapes were sour, at least for now. Next day, January 3, he and Sherman withdrew their troops from the Yazoo and rendezvoused again at Milliken’s Bend, where McClernand took command.

“Well, we have been to Vicksburg and it was too much for us and we have backed out,” Sherman wrote his wife from the camp on the west bank of the Mississippi. Reporting by dispatch to Grant, however, he went a bit more into detail as to causes. “I attribute our failure to the strength of the enemy’s position, both natural and artificial, and not to his superior fighting,” he declared; “but as we must all in the future have ample opportunities to test this quality, it is foolish to discuss it.”

Pemberton would have agreed that it was foolish to discuss it, not for the reason his adversary gave, but because he considered the question already settled. The proof of the answer, so far as he was concerned, had been demonstrated in the course of the past two weeks, during which time he had stood off and repulsed two separate Union armies, each superior in numbers to his own. What was more, he had gained new confidence in his top commanders: in Van Dorn, whose lightning raid, staged in conjunction with Forrest’s in West Tennessee, had abolished the northward menace: in the on-the-spot Vicksburg defenders, Major General Martin L. Smith and Brigadier General Stephen D. Lee, who with fewer than 15,000 soldiers, most of whom had arrived at the last minute from Grenada, had driven better than twice as many bluecoats out of their side yard, inflicting in the process about nine times as many casualties as they suffered: and in himself, who had engineered the whole and had been present for both repulses. Not that he did not expect to have to fight a return engagement. He did. But he considered that this would be no more than an occasion for redemonstrating what had been proved already.

“Vicksburg is daily growing stronger,” he wired Richmond soon after New Year’s. “We intend to hold it.”

  5  

Rosecrans too was aware that haste made waste, but unlike Grant he was having no part of it. In reply to Halleck’s frequent urgings that he move against Bragg and Chattanooga without delay—it was for this, after all, that he had been appointed to succeed his fellow Ohioan, Don Carlos Buell, whose characteristic attitude had seemed to his superiors to be one of hesitation—he made it clear that he intended to take his time. He would move when he got ready, not before, and thus, as he put it, avoid having to “stop and tinker” along the way. His policy, he explained in a series of answers to the telegraphic nudges, was “to lull [the rebels] into security,” then “press them up solidly” and “endeavor to make an end of them.” When Halleck at last lost patience altogether, informing the general in early December that he had twice been asked to designate a successor for him—“If you remain one more week in
Nashville,” he warned, “I cannot prevent your removal”—Rosecrans set his heels in hard and bristled back at the general-in-chief: “I need no other stimulus to make me do my duty than the knowledge of what it is. To threats of removal or the like I must be permitted to say that I am insensible.”

“Old Rosy” the men called him, not only because of his colorful name, but also because of his large red nose, which one observer classified as “intensified Roman.” He was a tall, hale man, a heavy drinker but withal an ardent Catholic; he carried a crucifix on his watch chain and a rosary in his pocket, and he so delighted in small-hours religious discussions that he sometimes kept his staff up half the night debating such fine points as the distinction between profanity, which he freely employed, and blasphemy, which he eschewed. One such discussion achieved marathon proportions, going on for ten nights running, and though this was hard on the staff men, who missed their sleep, Rosecrans considered the problem solved beforehand by the fact that, like himself, they were all blond; “sandy fellows,” he remarked upon occasion, were “quick and sharp,” and, being more industrious by nature than brunets, required less rest—although he, for his own part, often slept till noon on the day following one of the all-night sessions devoted to eschatology or the question of how many angels could stand tiptoe on a pinpoint. Like Bardolph, whom he so much resembled in physiognomy, he could swing rapidly from gloom to equanimity or from abusiveness to affability. The bristly reply to Halleck was characteristic, for he would often flare up on short notice; but he was likely to calm down just as fast. All of a sudden, on the heels of an outburst of temper, he would be all smiles and congeniality, stroking and cajoling the very man he had been reviling a moment past, and if this was sometimes confusing to those around him, it was also a rather welcome relief from the dour and noncommittal Buell. Rosecrans was forty-three, two years younger than his present opponent Bragg, who had graduated five years ahead of him at West Point, where each had stood fifth in his class. Sometimes he seemed older than his years, sometimes not, depending on his mood, but in general he was liked and even admired, especially by the volunteers, who found him approachable and amusing. For instance, he would stroll through the camps after lights-out, and if he saw a lamp still burning in one of the tents he would whack on the canvas with the flat of his sword. The response, if not blasphemous, would at any rate be profane and abusive. Prompt to apologize when they saw the red-nosed face of their general appear through the tent flap, the soldiers would explain that they had thought he was some rowdy prowling around in the dark. He took it well, including the muffled laughter that followed the extinguishing of the lamp on his departure, and the result was a steady growth of affection between him and the men of the army which Halleck was protesting he was slow to commit to battle.

That army’s present over-all strength was 81,729 effectives, divided like Grant’s into Left Wing, Center, and Right Wing, commanded respectively by Major Generals T. L. Crittenden, George Thomas, and Alexander McCook, all veterans of the bloody October fight at Perryville, Kentucky, under Buell. By mid-December—Halleck having more or less apologized for the previous nudgings by explaining that they had not been intended as “threats of removal or the like,” but merely as expressions of the President’s “great anxiety” over the fact that, Middle Tennessee being the Confederacy’s only late-summer gain which had not been erased, pro-Southern members of the British parliament, scheduled to convene in January, might find in this apparent stalemate persuasive arguments for the intervention France was already urging—Rosecrans became more optimistic, despite the drouth which kept the Cumberland River too shallow for it to serve as a dependable supply line. “Things will be ripe soon,” he assured his nervous superiors on the 15th, and followed this dispatch with another, put on the wire within an hour: “Rebel troops say they will fight us.… Cumberland still very low; rain threatens; will be ready in a few days.”

The few days stretched on to Christmas, and still he had not moved. By then, however, he had received encouraging reports from scouts and spies beyond the rebel lines. In the first place, Morgan and Forrest were on the prowl, and though normally this would have been considered alarming information, in this case it was not so, for the former was now so far in his rear as not to be able to interfere with any immediate action south or east of Nashville, while the latter was clean outside his department. Whatever harm they might do in Kentucky and West Tennessee (which, as it turned out, was considerable) Rosecrans could wish them Godspeed, so long as they kept their backs in his direction. Moreover, he had learned of the visit to Murfreesboro by Jefferson Davis and the subsequent detachment of one of Bragg’s six divisions to Pemberton. Now if ever was the time to strike, and the Union commander was ready. Orders went out Christmas Day for the advance to begin next morning in three columns: Crittenden on the left, marching down the Murfreesboro turnpike through La Vergne and paralleling the Nashville & Chattanooga Railroad; McCook in the middle, crosscountry through Nolensville; Thomas on the right, due south through Brentwood, then eastward across McCook’s rear to take his rightful position in the center. Each of the three “wings” was well below its normal three-divisional strength because of guard detachments. Thomas, for example, had left a whole division on garrison duty at Nashville, in case Morgan or Forrest turned back or some other pack of raiders struck in that direction while the main body was attending to Bragg, and Crittenden and McCook were almost equally reduced by piecemeal detachments on similar duty elsewhere along the lines of supply and communication. The result was that Rosecrans had barely
44,000 troops in his three columns—Crittenden 14,500, Thomas—13,500, McCook 16,000—or only a little more than half of his total effective strength. But he was not ruffled by this reduction of the numerical odds in his favor; he knew that he was still a good deal stronger than his opponent. What was more, his deliberate preparations had paid off. Not only would he be free of the necessity to “stop and tinker” for lack of engineering equipment; he had within reach “the essentials of ammunition and twenty days’ rations.” Thus he had notified Washington on Christmas Eve, while planning the movement of his eight attack divisions, and he added in regard to the enemy, thirty miles southeastward down the pike: “If they meet us, we shall fight tomorrow; if they wait for us, next day.”

It was neither “tomorrow” nor the “next day”—which was in fact the day he actually got started. Nor was it the day after that, or the day after that, or even the day after that. Still, Rosecrans was not unduly perturbed. Delay had already gained him much, including the loss by the Confederates of one infantry division and two brigades of cavalry; further delay might gain him more. Such was not the case, as it turned out, but what fretted him most just now was the slashing efficiency of the cavalry retained by Bragg, which cost the advancing Federals portions of their wagon train, as well as isolated detachments of their own horsemen assigned to protect the flanks and rear of the main body, slogging forward in three columns. As these drew near Murfreesboro on the 29th and 30th, consolidating at last to form a continuous line of battle along the west bank of the south fork of Stones River, two miles short of the town, they began to encounter infantry resistance, spasmodic at first and then determined, which seemed to promise fulfillment of the vow Rosecrans had passed along to Halleck two weeks before: “Rebel troops say they will fight us.” However, he had followed this with a vow of his own, which he also believed was moving toward fulfillment: “If we beat them, I shall try to drive them to the wall.”