The Civil War: A Narrative: Fredericksburg to Meridian (28 page)

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McClernand, conferring with Sherman at Milliken’s Bend on the day after his arrival from upriver—it was January 3; the two were aboard the former Illinois politician’s headquarters boat, the
Tigress
, tied up to bank twenty-odd miles above Vicksburg—did not blame the red-haired Ohioan for the repulse suffered earlier that week at Chickasaw Bluffs; Sherman, he said in a letter to Stanton that same day, had “probably done all in the present case anyone could have done.” The fault was Grant’s, and Grant’s alone. Grant had designed the operation and then, taking off half-cocked in his eagerness for glory that was rightfully another’s, had failed to co-operate as promised, leaving Sherman to hold the bag and do the bleeding. So McClernand said, considerably embittered by the knowledge that a good part of the nearly two thousand casualties lost up the Yazoo were recruits he had been sending down from Cairo for the past two months, only to have them snatched from under him while his back was turned. “I believe I am superseded. Please advise me,” he had wired Lincoln as soon as he got word of what was afoot. But permission to go downriver had not come in time for him to circumvent the circumvention; the fighting was over before he got there. He took what consolation he could from having been spared a share in a fiasco. At least he was with his men again—what was left of them, at any rate—and ready to take over. “Soon as I shall have verified the condition of the army,” he told Stanton, “I will assume command of it.”

He did so the following day. Christening his new command “The Army of the Mississippi” in nominal expression of his intentions, or at any rate his hopes, he divided it into two corps of two divisions each, the first under George Morgan and the second under Sherman—which, incidentally, was something of a bitter pill for the latter to swallow, since he believed a large share of the blame for the recent failure up the Yazoo rested with Morgan, who had promised that in ten minutes he would “be on those hills,” but who apparently had forgot to wind his watch. However that might be, McClernand now had what he had been wanting all along: the chance to prove his ingenuity and demonstrate his mettle in independent style. His eyes brightened with anticipation
of triumph as he spoke of “opening the navigation of the Mississippi,” of “cutting my way to the sea,” and so forth. For all the expansiveness of his mood, however, the terms in which he expressed it were more general than specific; or, as Sherman later said, “the
modus operandi
was not so clear.”

In this connection—being anxious, moreover, to balance his recent defeat with a success—the Ohioan had a suggestion. During the Chickasaw Bluffs expedition the packet
Blue Wing
, coming south out of Memphis with a cargo of mail and ammunition, had been captured by a Confederate gunboat that swooped down on her near the mouth of the Arkansas and carried her forty miles up that river to Arkansas Post, an outpost established by the French away back in 1685, where the rebels had constructed an inclosed work they called Fort Hindman, garrisoned by about 5000 men. So long as this threat to the main Federal supply line existed, Sherman said, operations against Vicksburg would be subject to such harassment, and it was his belief that, by way of preamble to McClernand’s larger plans—whatever they were, precisely—he ought to go up the Arkansas and abolish the threat by “thrashing out Fort Hindman.”

McClernand was not so sure. He had suffered no defeat that needed canceling, and what was more he had larger things in mind than the capture of an obscure and isolated post. However, he agreed to go with Sherman for a discussion of the project with Porter, whose cooperation would be required. They steamed downriver and found the admiral aboard his headquarters boat, the
Black Hawk
, anchored in the mouth of the Yazoo. It was late, near midnight; Porter received them in his nightshirt. He too was not so sure at first. He was short of coal, he said, and the ironclads, which would be needed to reduce the fort, could not burn wood. Presently, though, as Sherman continued to press his suit, asking at least for the loan of a couple of gunboats, which he offered to tow up the river and thus save coal, Porter—perhaps reflecting that he had on his record that same blot which a victory would erase—not only agreed to give the landsmen naval support; “Suppose I go along myself?” he added. Suddenly, on second thought, McClernand was convinced: so much so, indeed, that instead of merely sending Sherman to do the job with half the troops, as Sherman had expected, he decided it was worth the undivided attention of the whole army and its commander, whose record, if blotless, was also blank. With no minus to cancel, this plus would stand alone, auspicious, and make a good beginning as he stepped off on the road that led to glory and the White House.

He took three days to get ready, then (but not until then) sent a message by way of Memphis to notify Grant that he was off—one of his purposes being, as he said, “the counteraction of the moral effect of the failure of the attack near Vicksburg and the reinspiration of
the forces repulsed by making them the champions of new, important, and successful enterprises.” He left Milliken’s Bend that same day, January 8, his 30,000 soldiers still aboard their fifty transports, accompanied by 13 rams and gunboats, three of which were ironclads and packed his Sunday punch. By way of deception the flotilla steamed past the mouth of the Arkansas, then into the White, from which a cutoff led back into the bypassed river. Late the following afternoon the troops began debarking three miles below Fort Hindman, a square bastioned work set on high ground at the head of a horseshoe bend, whose dozen guns included three 9-inch Columbiads, one to each riverward casemate, and a hard-hitting 8-inch rifle. A good portion of the defending butternut infantry, supported by six light pieces of field artillery, occupied a line of rifle-pits a mile and a half below the fort, but these were quickly driven out when the gunboats forged ahead and took them under fire from the flank. Late the following afternoon, when the debarkation had been completed and the four divisions were maneuvering for positions from which to launch an assault, the ironclads took the lead. The
Louisville
, the
De Kalb
, and the
Cincinnati
advanced in line abreast to within four hundred yards of the fort, pressing the attack bows on, one to each casemate, while the thinner-skinned vessels followed close behind to throw in shrapnel and light rifled shell. It was hot work for a time as the defenders stood to their guns, firing with precision; the
Cincinnati
, for example, took eight hits from 9-inch shells on her pilot house alone, though Porter reported proudly that they “glanced off like peas against glass”; the only naval casualties were suffered from unlucky shots that came in through the ports. When the admiral broke off the fight because of darkness, the fort was silent, apparently overwhelmed. But when Sherman, reconnoitering by moonlight, drew close to the enemy outposts he could hear the Confederates at work with spades and axes, drawing a new line under cover of their heavy guns and preparing to continue to resist despite the long numerical odds. Crouched behind a stump in the predawn darkness of January 11 he heard a rebel bugler sound what he later called “as pretty a reveille as I ever listened to.”

Shortly before noon he sent word that he was ready. His corps was on the right, Morgan’s on the left; both faced the newly drawn enemy line which extended across the rear of the fort, from the river to an impassable swamp one mile west. McClernand, having established a command post in the woods and sent a lookout up a tree to observe and report the progress of events, passed the word to Porter, who ordered the ironclads forward at 1.30 to renew yesterday’s attack. Sherman heard the clear ring of the naval guns, the fire increasing in volume and rapidity as the range was closed. Then he and Morgan went forward, the troops advancing by rushes across the open fields, “once or twice falling to the ground,” as Sherman said, “for a sort of rest or
pause.” As they approached the fort they saw above its parapet the pennants of the ironclads, which had smothered the heavy guns by now and were giving the place a close-up pounding. Simultaneously, white flags began to break out all along the rebel line. “Cease firing! Cease firing!” Sherman cried, and rode forward to receive the fort’s surrender.

But that was not to be: not just yet, at any rate, and not to Sherman. Colonel John Dunnington, the fort’s commander, a former U.S. naval officer, insisted on surrendering to Porter, and Brigadier General Thomas J. Churchill, commander of the field force, did not want to surrender at all. As Sherman approached, Churchill was arguing with his subordinates, wanting to know by whose authority the white flags had been shown. (He had received an order from Little Rock the night before, while there was still a chance to get away, “to hold out till help arrives or until all dead”—which Holmes later explained with the comment: “It never occurred to me when the order was issued that such an overpowering command would be devoted to an end so trivial.”) One brigade commander, Colonel James Deshler of Alabama, a fiery West Pointer in his late twenties—“small but very handsome,” Sherman called him—did not want to stop fighting even now, with the Yankees already inside his works. When Sherman, wishing as he said “to soften the blow of defeat,” remarked in a friendly way that he knew a family of Deshlers in his home state and wondered if they were relations, the Alabamian hotly disclaimed kinship with anyone north of the Ohio River; whereupon the red-headed general changed his tone and, as he later wrote, “gave him a piece of my mind that he did not relish.” However, all this was rather beside the point. The fighting was over and the butternut troops stacked arms. The Federals had suffered 31 navy and 1032 army casualties, for a total of 140 killed and 923 wounded. The Confederates, on the other hand, had had only 109 men hit; but that left 4791 to be taken captive, including a regiment that marched in from Pine Bluff during the surrender negotiations.

McClernand, who had got back aboard the
Tigress
and come forward, was tremendously set up. “Glorious! Glorious!” he kept exclaiming. “My star is ever in the ascendant.” He could scarcely contain himself. “I had a man up a tree,” he said. “I’ll make a splendid report!”

Grant by now was in Memphis. He had arrived the day before, riding in ahead of the main body, which was still on the way under McPherson, near the end of its long retrogade movement from Coffeeville, northward through the scorched wreckage of Holly Springs, then westward by way of Grand Junction and LaGrange. Having heard no word from Sherman, he knew nothing of his friend’s defeat downriver—optimistic as always, he was even inclined to credit rumors that the Vicksburg defenses had crumbled under assault from the Yazoo—until
the evening of his arrival, when he received McClernand’s letter from Milliken’s Bend informing him of the need for “reinspiration of the forces repulsed.”

This was something of a backhand slap, at least by implication—McClernand seemed to be saying that he would set right what Grant had bungled—but what disturbed him most was the Illinois general’s expressed intention to withdraw upriver for what he called “new, important, and successful enterprises.” For one thing, if Banks was on the way up from New Orleans in accordance with the instructions for a combined assault on Vicksburg, it would leave him unsupported when he got there. For another, any division of effort was wrong as long as the true objective remained unaccomplished, and Grant said so in no uncertain terms next morning when he replied to McClernand’s letter: “I do not approve of your move on the Post of Arkansas while the other is in abeyance. It will lead to the loss of men without a result.… It might answer for some of the purposes you suggest, but certainly not as a military movement looking to the accomplishment of the one great result, the capture of Vicksburg. Unless you are acting under authority not derived from me, keep your command where it can soonest be assembled for the renewal of the attack on Vicksburg.… From the best information I have, Milliken’s Bend is the proper place for you to be, and unless there is some great reason of which I am not advised you will immediately proceed to that point and await the arrival of reinforcements and General Banks’ expedition, keeping me fully advised of your movements.”