The Civil War: A Narrative: Fredericksburg to Meridian (86 page)

He did not intend to take this lying down, but he soon found that Grant had played the old army game with such skill that his opponent was left without a leg to stand on. “I have been relieved for an omission of my adjutant. Hear me,” McClernand wired Lincoln from Cairo on his way to Springfield, their common home. From there he protested likewise to Halleck, suggesting the possible disclosure of matters that were dark indeed: “How far General Grant is indebted to the forbearance of officers under his command for his retention in the public service, I will not undertake to state unless he should challenge it. None know better than himself how much he is indebted to that forbearance.” That might be, but it was no help to the general up in Illinois; Grant challenged nothing, except to state that he had “tolerat[ed] General McClernand long after I thought the good of the service demanded his removal.” In time, there came to Springfield a letter signed “Your friend as ever, A. Lincoln,” in which the unhappy warrior was told: “I doubt whether your present position is more painful to you than to myself. Grateful for the patriotic stand so early taken by you in this life-and-death struggle of the nation, I have done whatever has appeared practicable to advance you and the public interest together.” However: “For me to force you back upon Gen. Grant would be forcing him to resign. I cannot give you a new command, because we have no forces except such as already have commanders.” In short, the President had nothing to offer his fellow-townsman in the way of balm, save his conviction that a general was best judged by those “who have been with him in the field.… Relying
on these,” Lincoln said in closing, “he who has the right needs not to fear.”

This was perhaps the unkindest cut of all, since McClernand knew only too well what was likely to happen to his reputation if judgment was left to Sherman and McPherson and their various subordinate commanders, including the army’s two remaining ex-congressmen Blair and Logan. Among all these, and on Grant’s staff, there was general rejoicing at his departure. Major General Edward O. C. Ord, who had fought under Grant at Iuka, had just arrived to take charge of a sixth corps intended to consist of the divisions under Herron and Lauman; instead, he replaced McClernand. Three days later, on June 22, Sherman was given command of the rearward line, which was strengthened by shifting more troops from in front of Vicksburg. “We want to whip Johnston at least 15 miles off, if possible,” Grant explained. Steele succeeded Sherman, temporarily, and the siege went on as before. No less than nine approaches were being run, all with appropriate parallels close up to the enemy trenches, so that the final assault could be launched with the lowest possible loss in lives. Mines were sunk under rebel strong-points, and on June 25 two of these were exploded on McPherson’s front, the largest just north of the Jackson road. It blew off the top of a hill there, leaving a big, dusty crater which the attackers occupied for a day and then abandoned, finding themselves under heavy plunging fire from both flanks and the rear. The mine accomplished little, but contributed greatly to the legend of the siege by somehow lofting a Negro cook, Abraham by name, all the way from the Confederate hilltop and into the Federal lines. He landed more or less unhurt, though terribly frightened. An Iowa outfit claimed him, put him in a tent, and got rich charging five cents a look. Asked how high he had been blown, Abraham always gave the same answer, coached perhaps by some would-be Iowa Barnum. “Donno, massa,” he would say, “but tink bout tree mile.”

Mostly, though, the weeks passed in boredom and increasing heat, under whose influence the Confederates appeared to succumb to a strange apathy during the final days of June. A Federal engineer remarked that their defense “was far from being vigorous.” It seemed to him that the rebel strategy was “to wait for another assault, losing in the meantime as few men as possible,” and he complained that this had a bad effect on his own men, since “without the stimulus of danger … troops of the line will not work efficiently, especially at night, after the novelty has worn off.” Another trouble was that they foresaw the end of the siege, and no man coveted the distinction of being the last to die. Not that all was invariably quiet. Occasionally there were flare-ups, particularly where the trenches approached conjunction, and the snipers continued to take their toll. Though the losses were small, the suffering was great. “It looked hard,” a Wisconsin soldier wrote, “to see six or eight poor fellows piled into an ambulance about the size of Jones’s meat
wagon and hustled over the rough roads as fast as the mules could trot and to see the blood running out of the carts in streams almost.” Taunts were flung as handily as grenades, back and forth across the lines, the graybacks asking, “When are you folks going to come on into town?” and the bluecoats replying that they were in no hurry: “We are holding you fellows prisoner while you feed yourselves.” There was much fraternization between pickets, who arranged informal truces for the exchange of coffee and tobacco, and the same Federal engineer reported that the enemy’s “indifference to our approach became at some points almost ludicrous.” Once, for example, when the blue sappers found that as a result of miscalculation a pair of approach trenches would converge just inside the rebel picket line, the two sides called a cease-fire and held a consultation at which it was decided that the Confederates would pull back a short distance in order to avoid an unnecessary fire fight. At one stage of the discussion a Federal suggested that the approaches could be redesigned to keep from disturbing the butternut sentries, but the latter seemed to think that it would be a shame if all that digging went to waste. Besides, one said, “it don’t make any difference. You Yanks will soon have the place anyhow.”

Grant thought so, too. By now, in fact—though he kept his soldiers burrowing, intending to launch his final assault from close-up positions in early July—he was giving less attention to Pemberton than he was to Johnston, off in the opposite direction, where Sherman described him as “vibrating between Jackson and Canton” in apparent indecision. Blair had reported earlier, on returning from a scout, that “every man I picked up was going to Canton to join him. The negroes told me their masters had joined him there, and those who were too old to go, or who could escape on any other pretext, told me the same story.” This had a rather ominous sound, as if hosts were gathering to the east, but Grant was not disturbed. He had access, through the treacherous courier, to many of the messages that passed between his two opponents. He knew what they were thinking, what the men under them were thinking, and what the beleaguered citizens were thinking. He spoke of their expectations in a dispatch he sent Sherman on June 25, the day the slave Abraham came hurtling into the hands of the Iowans: “Strong faith is expressed by some in Johnston’s coming to their relief. [They] cannot believe they have been so wicked as for Providence to allow the loss of their stronghold of Vicksburg. Their principal faith seems to be in Providence and Joe Johnston.”

By then—the fortieth day of siege—it had been exactly a month since the man in whom Vicksburg’s garrison placed its “principal faith” assured Pemberton: “Bragg is sending a division. When it joins I will come to you.” The division reached him soon afterwards, under Breckinridge, and was combined with the three already at hand under
Loring, French, and Walker; Johnston’s present-for-duty strength now totaled 31,226 men, two thirds of whom had joined him since his arrival in mid-May. But he found them quite deficient in equipment, especially wagons, and deferred action until such needs could be supplied. In the interim he got into a dispute with the Richmond authorities, protesting that he had only 23,000 troops, while Seddon insisted that the correct figure was 34,000. Finally the Secretary told him: “You must rely on what you have,” and urged him to move at once to Pemberton’s relief. But Johnston would not be prodded into action. “The odds against me are much greater than those you express,” he wired on June 15, and added flatly: “I consider saving Vicksburg hopeless.” Shocked by his fellow Virginian’s statement that he considered his assignment an impossible one, Seddon took this to mean that Johnston did not comprehend the gravity of the situation or the consequences of the fall of the Gibraltar of the West, which in Seddon’s eyes meant the probable fall of the Confederacy itself. It seemed to him, moreover, that the general—in line with his behavior a year ago, down the York-James peninsula—was moving toward a decision not to fight at all, and to the Secretary this was altogether unthinkable. “Your telegram grieves and alarms me,” he replied next day. “Vicksburg must not be lost without a desperate struggle. The interest and honor of the Confederacy forbid it. I rely on you still to avert the loss. If better resources do not offer, you must hazard attack. It may be made in concert with the garrison, if practicable, but otherwise without; by day or night, as you think best.” Still Johnston would not budge. “I think you do not appreciate the difficulties in the course you direct,” he wired back, “nor the probabilities or consequences of failure. Grant’s position, naturally very strong, is intrenched and protected by powerful artillery, and the roads obstructed.… The defeat of this little army would at once open Mississippi and Alabama to Grant. I will do all I can, without hope of doing more than aid to extricate the garrison.” Fairly frantic and near despair over this prediction that the Father of Waters was about to pass out of Confederate hands, severing all practical connection with the Transmississippi and its supplies of men and food and horses, Seddon urged the general “to follow the most desperate course the occasion may demand. Rely upon it,” he told him, “the eyes and hopes of the whole Confederacy are upon you, with the full confidence that you will act, and with the sentiment that it were better to fail nobly daring than, through prudence even, to be inactive.… I rely on you for all possible to save Vicksburg.”

But no matter what ringing tones the Secretary employed, Johnston would not be provoked into what he considered rashness. “There has been no voluntary inaction,” he protested; he simply had “not had the means of moving.” By then it was June 22. Two days later he received a message from Pemberton, suggesting that he get in touch with Grant and make “propositions to pass this army out, with all its arms and
equipages,” in return for abandoning Vicksburg to him. Johnston declined, not only because he did not believe the proposal would be accepted, but also because “negotiations with Grant for the relief of the garrison, should they become necessary, must be made by you,” he replied on June 27. “It would be a confession of weakness on my part, which I ought not to make, to propose them. When it becomes necessary to make terms, they may be considered as made under my authority.” In other words, any time Pemberton wanted to throw in the sponge, it would be all right with Johnston. However, he prefaced this by saying that the Pennsylvanian’s “determined spirit” encouraged him “to hope that something may yet be done to save Vicksburg,” and two days later, June 29, “field transportation and other supplies having been obtained,” he put his four divisions on the march for the Big Black, preceded by a screen of cavalry.

He had never been one to tilt at windmills, nor was he now. The march—or “expedition,” as he preferred to call it—“was not undertaken in the wild spirit that dictated the dispatches from the War Department,” he later explained, and added scornfully: “I did not indulge in the sentiment that it was better for me to waste the lives and blood of brave soldiers ‘than, through prudence even,’ to spare them.” He never moved until he was ready, and then his movements were nearly always rearward. The one exception up to now had been Seven Pines, which turned out to be the exception that proved the rule, for it had cost him five months on the sidelines, command of the South’s first army, and two wounds that were still unhealed a year later. Moreover, it had resulted in his present assignment, which was by no means to his liking, though his resultant brusqueness was reserved for those above him on the ladder of command, never for those below. To subordinates he was invariably genial and considerate, and they repaid him with loyalty, affection, and admiration. “His mind was clear as a bell,” a staff officer had written from Jackson to a friend, two weeks ago, while the build-up for the present movement was still in progress. “I never saw a brain act with a quicker or more sustained movement, or one which exhibited a finer sweep or more striking power.… I cannot conceive surroundings more intensely depressing. Yet amidst them all, he preserved the elastic step and glowing brow of the genuine hero.”

Desperation never rattled him; indeed, it had rather the opposite effect of increasing his native caution. And such was the case now as he approached the Big Black, beyond which Grant had intrenched a rearward-facing line. On the evening of July 1, Johnston called a halt between Brownsville and the river, and spent the next two days reconnoitering. Convinced by this “that attack north of the railroad was impracticable,” he “determined, therefore, to make the examinations necessary for the attempt south of the railroad.” On July 3, near Birdsong’s Ferry, he wrote Pemberton that he intended “to create a diversion, and
thus enable you to cut your way out if the time has arrived for you to do this. Of that time I cannot judge; you must, as it depends upon your condition. I hope to attack the enemy in your front [on] the 7th.… Our firing will show you where we are engaged. If Vicksburg cannot be saved, the garrison must.”

Next morning, however, before he took up the march southward he noticed a strange thing. Today was the Fourth—Independence Day—but the Yankees over toward Vicksburg did not seem to be celebrating it in the usual fashion. On this of all days, the forty-eighth of the siege, the guns were silent for the first time since May 18, when the bluecoats filed into positions from which to launch their first and second assaults before settling down to the digging and bombarding that had gone on ever since; at least till now. Johnston and his men listened attentively, cocking their heads toward the beleaguered city. But there was no rumble of guns at all. Everything was quiet in that direction.