This Great Struggle (33 page)

News from the Confederacy’s other two major armies was generally encouraging if not quite as inspiring as that from Virginia. In Mississippi the Confederate commander was, it is true, the thoroughly uninspiring Pennsylvanian John C. Pemberton, but Vicksburg seemed as impregnable as ever, and Confederates enjoyed making jokes about Grant’s ridiculously futile continued efforts at taking it.

The news from Braxton Bragg’s army in Middle Tennessee was the least encouraging that winter. Not only had the Army of Tennessee given up another thirty-mile-wide swath of the state, but the army’s high command was locked in unseemly bickering, with several of Bragg’s subordinates determined never to forgive him for their own bad performances in the Kentucky Campaign. Bragg was anything but a politician, and his most glaring lack was his inability to win the hearts of his subordinates, though in several of their cases the efforts of the most gifted and charming of leaders would have been in vain. In the wake of the Battle of Stones River, a staff officer anonymously published a newspaper article accusing Bragg of retreating against the advice of his subordinate generals. This enraged Bragg since it was the exact opposite of the truth. He let it goad him into sending an ill-considered circular to all of his generals asking if they had counseled retreat after the recent battle and vaguely suggesting that he might resign if he did not have the confidence of his officers. All of them had to admit that they had indeed counseled retreat, but several, influenced by Bragg’s bitter enemies Polk and Hardee, took the opportunity of assuring Bragg that he had no one’s confidence and ought to resign at once.

Davis got wind of the affair and ordered Bragg’s superior, Confederate western theater commander Joseph E. Johnston, to go to Bragg’s headquarters at Tullahoma, Tennessee, and investigate the matter. Though Johnston’s report was highly favorable to Bragg, Davis, perhaps influenced by his old West Point friend Polk, decided that Bragg needed to go. Johnston disagreed, and, besides, relations between Johnston and Davis were such that the general enjoyed few things more than thwarting the president’s wishes. Johnston found excuse after excuse for disobeying Davis’s repeated orders to relieve Bragg and take command of the Army of Tennessee himself until finally the campaigning season began. Johnston was needed in Mississippi, and Davis ordered him there, abandoning his effort to remove Bragg from command of the Army of Tennessee.

The Confederate public spent the winter for the most part in blissful ignorance of the fact that one of their three major armies was commanded by a man in whom the president had no confidence and whom the president had tried unsuccessfully to remove or that its high-command structure was so rife with personal animosities as to render that army almost incapable of concerted action. Through the winter and all the way through the spring season as well, the Union army facing Bragg’s unhappy Army of Tennessee remained inert, doing nothing that might have taken advantage of the disarray in the Confederate high command.

That Union army was William S. Rosecrans’s Army of the Cumberland. After his bloody victory by default at Stones River, Rosecrans’s stock had soared in Washington, and Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton had promised him whatever he needed in the way of supplies and equipment in order to get his army ready for a new advance. Stanton had not dreamed just how much supplies and equipment—and how much time—Rosecrans would believe he needed before he dared face the Rebels in battle again. While other generals, notably Grant, made use of what they had and got on with the war, Rosecrans for six months bombarded Washington with demands for mountains of supplies, hundreds of wagons, thousands of horses and mules, and a variety of new equipment, including the new seven-shot, magazine-fed Spencer Repeating Rifles to equip several of his regiments. Although he received virtually everything he requested, he nevertheless held his army idle in its camps around Murfreesboro while the nation’s other armies launched campaigns and fought battles. Halleck, Stanton, and even Lincoln himself sent repeated messages prodding the reluctant general to fight, but throughout the first half of 1863 all were in vain.

GRANT’S NEW VICKSBURG CAMPAIGN

Meanwhile Grant tried every scheme he could think of to get his army around Vicksburg so as to have a fair chance in battle against its Confederate defenders. The steep bluffs on which Vicksburg perched represented the edge of Mississippi’s interior plateau. South of Vicksburg the Mississippi River lapped the base of the plateau. North of the town it was the Yazoo River, angling down from the northeast, that ran along the foot of the bluffs. Between the Yazoo and the Mississippi and for a number of miles west of the Mississippi stretched the Mississippi Delta, with some of the South’s richest cotton plantations ranging along the low curving forms of natural levies, formed by various streams and bayous and by former courses of the rivers themselves. Between the plantations lay dark cypress swamps and a maze of sluggish watercourses that scarcely seemed to flow in any direction at all.

Throughout the remainder of January 1863, as well as February and March, Grant’s efforts were aimed at somehow getting his riverboat transport vessels, as well as the navy’s river gunboats, into either the stretch of the Yazoo above Vicksburg or the stretch of the Mississippi below the town without their having to steam past the powerful Confederate heavy artillery batteries on both rivers at and near Vicksburg. Either stretch of either river would provide access to the interior plateau without suicidal assaults on prepared positions like those along Chickasaw Bayou.

One interesting plan was based on the fact that Vicksburg lay on the outside edge of a bend in the Mississippi. The plan involved digging a canal across the tongue of land called DeSoto Point, located on the Louisiana shore on the inside of the bend. In theory this would allow access to the lower reaches of the Mississippi without running the gauntlet of the Vicksburg batteries. Lincoln, who in his youth had taken a flatboat full of midwestern crops down the Mississippi to New Orleans, was intrigued by the idea and followed its progress eagerly. The scheme called for digging a ditch of reasonable size across the bend and then for the river itself to take over and scour the ditch into a new and shorter channel, as it was wont to do even without any human assistance. Unfortunately, the upper end of the canal entered the river in an area of slack water, where erosion was unlikely. Ultimately, the river proved as perverse as ever, refusing to use the new channel offered by thousands of man-hours of Grant’s soldiers’ work.

Another plan involved opening the Mississippi River levy at Lake Providence, Louisiana, fifty miles upstream from Vicksburg. In theory this would make accessible a chain of interconnected swamps and streams, swollen by seasonal high water to just enough depth for the shallow-draft riverboats, so as to allow access to the Red River. The boats would then have easy steaming down the Red River to its mouth, about 130 miles below Vicksburg. Like the canal scheme, the Lake Providence undertaking promised access to the Mississippi, where it lapped the base of the state’s interior plateau without exposing the boats to the guns of Vicksburg. Grant assigned one of his army’s three corps to encamp at Lake Providence and work on clearing the cypress trees that clogged the proposed waterway, but after weeks of work, it became apparent that the boats would never be able to get through by that route.

Yet another plan called for cutting the Mississippi River levy on the Mississippi side at a place called Yazoo Pass, almost opposite the town of Helena, Arkansas, about 175 miles upstream from Vicksburg. This would allow the gunboats to pass into Moon Lake, thence into the Coldwater River, which would lead to the Tallahatchie, which at last would join with the Yalobusha to form the Yazoo. The fleet, followed by the transports, would thus have access to the Yazoo far above Vicksburg and could easily insert Grant’s army onto the interior plateau of Mississippi.

It sounded simple enough, but the waterways were so narrow that details of sailors had to stand on deck with poles and push on the banks to get the sluggish gunboats to turn sharply enough to follow their winding courses. The gunboats’ smokestacks brushed and banged against overhanging trees, sustaining damage while knocking loose a rain of snakes, lizards, opossums, and other arboreal creatures that fell to the decks and had to be swept over the side with brooms by other details of sailors. Scarcely able to advance at all through the swamp channels that passed for watercourses, the fleet finally encountered the Confederates at the junction of the Tallahatchie and Yalobusha rivers, where a detail of Pemberton’s troops had erected a small fort made of cotton bales and armed with two cannon. The almost laughably small Fort Pemberton, as the Rebels called it, nevertheless proved to be enough to stop the gunboats since nature had almost stopped them already. The accompanying troops, surrounded by channels and even swamps too deep to wade, could do nothing to help. By mid-March it was clear that the expedition had failed and would have to withdraw.

About the time the Yazoo Pass Expedition stalled, Admiral Porter implemented a new idea for getting the fleet and transports into the stretch of the Yazoo between Fort Pemberton and Vicksburg. Only a few miles above Vicksburg on the Mississippi, a sluggish, narrow watercourse called Steele’s Bayou led into the interior of the half-drowned delta country. Porter had heard that from it a series of interconnecting waterways led into the Yazoo. While a detachment of his gunboats was still involved in the Yazoo Pass Expedition, Porter led a squadron of his most powerful vessels up Steele’s Bayou on March 16. Travel on the narrow, winding channels proved much like what the other boats had experienced on the previous expedition, with the added complication that sometimes willow withes in submerged thickets fouled the boats’ paddle wheels, holding them stuck fast for hours until sailors could cut their way free.

Confederates felled trees across the channels both in front of and behind the fleet, hoping to trap and capture the vessels. It looked as if they might do just that when sniper fire drove Union sailors from the exposed upper decks, preventing them from clearing the logs or even steering the gunboats by the usual method, in these narrow waters, of pushing off the bank with poles. The sailors fired back at the snipers with their heavy cannon, while Porter made plans to abandon and blow up the vessels and lead the crews in trying to fight their way out through the swamps on foot if the situation became that desperate. He also asked a local slave who had joined his fleet to carry a message through Confederate-controlled territory to reach Major General William T. Sherman, whose supporting infantry of the Fifteenth Corps was several miles behind.

Using his knowledge of the area, the brave African American, whose name unfortunately no one thought to write down, evaded the Confederates and reached Sherman. The general acted with the energy that had already made him Grant’s favorite subordinate. Quickly scraping together a relief force from scattered detachments that had been clearing away obstructions on the streams, Sherman, on foot, led it on a night march, sometimes wading swamps, to reach Porter’s gunboats the next day. Although the operation was a failure, it displayed the excellent army–navy cooperation that made it possible for Grant even to think of trying to take Vicksburg. Porter, who was not actually subject to Grant’s orders, had nevertheless been willing to take his gunboats into extremely narrow and hazardous waters in order to help Grant’s effort succeed. Sherman did not let Porter down but extended himself and his troops to the utmost in order to get the navy out of its jam. Grant had actively fostered this sort of cooperation and mutual loyalty, and the strong team he had built augured well for ultimate success. For now, though, it was clear only that the Steele’s Bayou route was impractical as a means of bypassing Vicksburg.