The Civil War: A Narrative: Fredericksburg to Meridian (39 page)

The total bag, including the 200-man detail picked up on the way into Rome that same Sunday afternoon as it returned from its fruitless mission, was 1466 bluecoats, and though they had been feared as would-be conquerors—a fear which had thrown the Rome citizenry into such a panic of feverish activity that the Federal scouts, observing from across the Oostanaula, had mistaken the milling for preparedness—they were welcomed and fed generously as captives. Forrest’s own entrance was the occasion for the presentation of a horseshoe wreath of flowers, hailing him as the town’s deliverer, and a fine saddle horse, which helped to make up for the two that had been shot from under him in the course of the long chase. Then began a famous celebration, attended by what one matron called “just a regular wholesale cooking of hams and shoulders and all sorts of provisions” to relieve the hunger pangs of the gray heroes. Nor were the prisoners excluded from this bounty; “We were quite willing to feed the Yankees when they had no guns,” she added. But the Roman holiday was cut short on the night of May 5 by the arrival of word that another column of blue raiders had left Tuscumbia that afternoon, headed southeast for Jasper and possibly Montgomery. Forrest and his men were back in the saddle next morning. Riding once more through Gadsden the following day, they learned that the rumor was groundless, Dodge having returned to Corinth; so they swung north, recovering the third regiment en route, to resume their accustomed work in Tennessee. On May 10, however—another Sunday—Forrest was handed orders from Bragg, instructing him to have his brigade continue its present march but for him to report in person to army headquarters, where he would receive, along with a recommendation for promotion to major general, appointment to the command Van Dorn had vacated three days ago, when he came under the Spring Hill doctor’s pistol.

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Along toward sunset of January 28, completing a 400-mile overnight trip from Memphis down the swollen, tawny, mile-wide Mississippi, a stern-wheel packet warped in for a west-bank landing at Young’s Point, just opposite the base of the long hairpin bend in front of Vicksburg and within half a dozen air-line miles of the guns emplaced along the lip of the tall clay bluff the city stood on. First off the steamboat, once the deck hands had swung out the stageplank, was a slight man, rather stooped, five feet eight inches in height and weighing less than a hundred and forty pounds, who walked with a peculiar gait, shoulders
hunched “a little forward of the perpendicular,” as one observer remarked, so that each step seemed to arrest him momentarily in the act of pitching on his face. He had on a plain blue suit and what the same reporter called “an indifferently good ‘Kossuth’ hat, with the top battered in close to his head.” Forty years old, he looked considerably older, partly because of the crow’s-feet crinkling the outer corners of his eyes—the result of intense concentration, according to some, while others identified them as whiskey lines, plainly confirming rumors of overindulgence and refuting the protestations of friends that he never touched the stuff—but mainly because of the full, barely grizzled, light brown beard, close-cropped to emphasize the jut of a square jaw and expose a mouth described as being “of the letterbox shape,” clamped firmly shut below a nose that surprised by contrast, being delicately chiseled, and blue-gray eyes that gave the face a somewhat out-of-balance look because one was set a trifle lower than the other. Wearing neither sword nor sash, and indeed no trappings of rank at all, except for the twin-starred straps of a major general tacked to the weathered shoulders of his coat, he was reading a newspaper as he came down the plank to the Louisiana shore, and he chewed the unlighted stump of a cigar, which not only seemed habitual but also appeared to be a more congruous facial appendage than the surprisingly aquiline nose.

“There’s General Grant,” an Illinois soldier told a comrade as they stood watching this unceremonious arrival.

“I guess not,” the other replied, shaking his head. “That fellow don’t look like he has the ability to command a regiment, much less an army.”

It was not so much that Grant was unexpected; he had a habit of turning up unannounced at almost any time and place within the limits of his large department. The trouble was that he bore such faint resemblance to his photographs, which had been distributed widely ever since Donelson and which, according to an acquaintance, made him look like a “burly beef-contractor.” In person he resembled at best a badly printed copy of one of those photos, with the burliness left out. Conversely, the lines of worry—if his friends were right and that was what they were—were more pronounced, as was perhaps only natural when he had more to fret about than the discomfort of holding still for a camera. Just now, for instance, there was John McClernand, who persisted in considering the river force a separate command and continued to issue general orders under the heading, “Headquarters, Army of the Mississippi.” Before Grant had been downriver two days he received a letter from McClernand, noting “that orders are being issued directly from your headquarters directly to army corps commanders, and not through me.” This could only result in “dangerous confusion,” McClernand protested, “as I am invested, by order of the Secretary of War, indorsed by the President, and by order of the President communicated to
you by the General-in-Chief, with the command of all the forces operating on the Mississippi River.… If different views are entertained by you, then the question should be immediately referred to Washington, and one or the other, or both of us, relieved. One thing is certain; two generals cannot command this army, issuing independent and direct orders to subordinate officers, and the public service be promoted.”

Grant agreed at least with the final sentence—which he later paraphrased and sharpened into a maxim: “Two commanders on the same field are always one too many”—but he found the letter as a whole “more in the nature of a reprimand than a protest.” The fact was, it approached outright insubordination, although not quite close enough to afford occasion for the pounce Grant was crouched for. “I overlooked it, as I believed, for the good of the service,” he subsequently wrote. By way of reply, instead of direct reproof, he issued orders announcing that he was assuming personal command of the river expedition and instructing all corps commanders, including McClernand, to report henceforth directly to him; McClernand’s corps, he added by way of a stinger, would garrison Helena and other west-bank points well upriver. Outraged at being the apparent victim of a squeeze play, the former congressman responded by asking whether, “having projected the Mississippi River expedition, and having been by a series of orders assigned to the command of it,” he was thus to be “entirely withdrawn from it.” Grant replied to the effect that he would do as he saw fit, since “as yet I have seen no order to prevent my taking command in the field.” McClernand acquiesced, as he said, “for the purpose of avoiding a conflict of authority in the presence of the enemy,” but requested that the entire matter be referred to their superiors in Washington, “not only in respect for the President and Secretary, under whose authority I claim the right to command the expedition, but in justice to myself as its author and actual promoter.” Grant accordingly forwarded the correspondence to Halleck, saying that he had assumed command only because he lacked confidence in McClernand. “I respectfully submit the whole matter to the General-in-Chief and the President,” he ended his indorsement. “Whatever the decision made by them, I will cheerfully submit to and give a hearty support.”

In bucking all this up to the top echelon Grant was on even safer ground than he supposed. Just last week McClernand had received, in reply to a private letter to Lincoln charging Halleck “with wilful contempt of superior authority” because of his so-far “interference” in the matter, “and with incompetency for the extraordinary and vital functions with which he is charged,” a note in which the President told him plainly: “I have too many
family
controversies (so to speak) already on my hands to voluntarily, or so long as I can avoid it, take up another. You are now doing well—well for the country, and well for yourself—much better than you could possibly be if engaged in open war with
General Halleck. Allow me to beg that tor your sake, for my sake, and for the country’s sake, you give your whole attention to the better work.” So it was: McClernand already had his answer before he filed his latest appeal. Lincoln would not interfere. The army was Grant’s, and would remain Grant’s, to do with as he saw fit in accomplishing what Lincoln called “the better work.”

His problem was how best to go about it. Now that he had inspected at first hand the obstacles to success in this swampy region, much of which was at present under water and would continue to be so for months to come, he could see that the wisest procedure, from a strategic point of view, “would have been to go back to Memphis, establish that as a base of supplies, fortify it so that the storehouses could be held by a small garrison, and move from there along the line of the [Mississippi & Tennessee] railroad, repairing as we advanced to the Yalobusha,” from which point he would have what he now so gravely lacked: a straight, high-ground shot at the city on the rebel bluff. So he wrote, years later, having gained the advantage of hindsight. For the present, however, he saw certain drawbacks to the retrograde movement, which in his judgment far outweighed the strictly tactical advantages. For one thing, the November elections had gone against the party that stood for all-out prosecution of the war, and this had turned out to be a warning of future trouble, with the croakers finding encouragement in the reverse. There was the question of morale, not only in the army itself, but also on the home front, where even a temporary withdrawal would be considered an admission that Vicksburg was too tough a nut to crack. At this critical juncture, both temporal and political, with voluntary enlistment practically at a standstill throughout much of the North and the new conscription laws already meeting sporadic opposition, such a discouragement might well prove fatal to the cause. “It was my judgment at the time,” Grant subsequently wrote, “that to make a backward movement as long as that from Vicksburg to Memphis, would be interpreted, by many of those yet full of hope for the preservation of the Union, as a defeat, and that the draft would be resisted, desertions ensue, and the power to capture and punish deserters lost. There was nothing left to be done but to
go forward to a decisive victory
. This was in my mind from the moment I took command in person at Young’s Point.”

In his own mind at least that much was settled. He would stay. But this decision only brought him face to face with the basic problem, as he put it, of how “to secure a footing upon dry ground on the east side of the river, from which the troops could operate against Vicksburg … without an apparent retreat.” Aside from a frontal assault, either against the bluff itself or against the heights flanking it on the north—which Sherman, even if he had done nothing more last month, had proved would not only be costly in the extreme but would also be fruitless,
and which Grant said “was never contemplated; certainly not by me”—the choice lay between whether to cross upstream or down, above or below the rebel bastion. One seemed about as impossible as the other. Above, the swampy, fifty-mile-wide delta lay in his path, practically roadless and altogether malarial. Even if he were able to slog his foot soldiers across it, which was doubtful, it was worse than doubtful whether he would be able to establish and maintain a vital supply line by that route. On the other hand, to attempt a crossing below the city seemed even more suicidal, since this would involve a run past frowning batteries, not only at Vicksburg itself, but also at Warrenton and Grand Gulf, respectively seven and thirty-five miles downriver. Armored gunboats—as Farragut had demonstrated twice the year before, first up, then down, with his heavily gunned salt-water fleet—might run this fiery gauntlet, taking their losses as they went, but brittle-skinned transports and supply boats would be quite another matter, considering the likelihood of their being reduced to kindling in short order, with much attendant loss of life and goods.… In short, the choice seemed to lie between two impossibilities, flanking a third which had been rejected before it was even considered.