Grant Moves South (52 page)

I hope you will find all the preliminary preparations completed on your arrival and the expedition ready to move.

I will co-operate with the river expedition from here, commanding this portion of the army in person.

On the same day Grant sent a wire to Sherman, notifying him about the formation of the new army corps and specifying that McClernand was to have command of the expedition to Vicksburg.
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All of this was fine. On paper, the administration's plan was being carried out just about as ordered. The trouble was that Grant's messages did not get through. Both of them had to go from Grant's headquarters at Oxford, by telegraph, to Columbus, Kentucky, to be relayed thence to Springfield and to Memphis, and because of what Forrest had done they could not be delivered. McClernand still had no orders telling him to go to Memphis; Sherman had no orders saying that he had to wait for McClernand. Growing more and more restless, McClernand waited until December 23 and then wrote to Stanton: “I am not relieved from duty here so that I may go forward and receive orders from General Grant. Please order me forward.” Stanton promptly replied: “It has not been my understanding that you should remain at Springfield a single hour beyond your own pleasure and judgment of the necessity of collecting and forwarding the troops. You are relieved of duty at Springfield and will report to General Grant
for the purpose specified in the order of the General-in-Chief.”
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McClernand at last was ready to leave, but by now it was too late. He took off from Cairo by steamboat, accompanied by his bride—this energetic widower had recently been remarried, at Jacksonville, Illinois, to the sister of his former wife—and on December 28 he was in Memphis, only to find that Sherman and the two army corps had gone on down to Vicksburg. Consumed with fury, McClernand could do no more than start belatedly after his missing army. Quite clearly, he had been had, and he would blame the West Pointers for it to the end of his days, but he would never quite be able to prove that anyone had willfully disobeyed the President's orders. Beyond any question, Halleck had done his utmost to circumvent him, and Grant had been a party to it, but the record was straight enough. Halleck had stayed precisely within the limits of legality, and it is hard to escape the impression that neither Lincoln nor Stanton had expected him to do anything else. McClernand's troops had gone into Grant's department and had thereby come under Grant's control; Stanton had pointedly refrained from upsetting Halleck's program, and had indirectly but effectively endorsed the scheme whereby McClernand had become a mere corps commander instead of an independent operator; Grant had done exactly what Washington had told him to do, and if Bedford Forrest had kept Grant's orders from getting to Sherman and McClernand on time, Grant was blameless enough. Nevertheless, McClernand had been given the works. In his Memoirs, Grant dryly remarked: “I had good reason to believe that in forestalling him I was by no means giving offense to those whose authority to command was above both him and me.”
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Meanwhile, the Confederates had visited Grant's campaign with a second disaster. Earl Van Dorn, leading thirty-five hundred Confederate cavalry, had gone north to strike at Grant's immediate rear while Forrest was raiding in western Tennessee. Grant's own cavalry, moving east on the raid Grant had ordered earlier, just failed to intercept Van Dorn, and on December 20 the Confederate cavalry struck the big Federal supply depot at Holly Springs. There were enough Federal troops in the place to hold it, and Grant gave the Post Commander, Colonel R. C. Murphy, warning that the blow was coming, but Murphy was a weakling; on Van Dorn's demand he surrendered without a fight, and the Confederates went rampaging through Holly Springs, destroying or carrying off foodstuffs, forage, munitions and other material valued at more than a million dollars. Van Dorn got away unharmed, and Grant's army, deep in Confederate territory, abruptly found itself with no supplies and no supply line, in an area where no living white man would give any assistance to a Yankee army if he could help it. Taken together, Forrest and Van Dorn had completely canceled Grant's campaign plans.

Sherman and the Vicksburg expedition now were in great danger. The idea all along had been that Grant, pushing hard at Grenada and below, would keep Pemberton and most of Pemberton's troops so busy that Vicksburg would be held by a skeleton force. Sherman thus could come down the river, go ashore at the mouth of the Yazoo, and either take Vicksburg by storm or move inland, cut the city's communications, and prepare to make a junction with Grant's army. But with Grant's army immobilized, Pemberton could easily send troops to Vicksburg to thwart anything Sherman might try to do, and this Pemberton very promptly did. Grant sent a message of warning, on December 23: “Raids made upon the railroad to my rear by Forrest northward from Jackson, and by Van Dorn northward from the Tallahatchie, have cut me off from supplies, so that further advance by this route is perfectly impracticable. The country does not afford supplies for troops, and but a limited supply of forage. I have fallen back to the Tallahatchie, and will only be able to hold the enemy at the Yalobusha by making a demonstration in that direction or toward Columbus and Meridian.” But the message did not reach Sherman, although he had heard of Holly Springs' capture, nor did a second warning which Grant dispatched to Memphis two days later, addressed to McClernand.
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As far as Sherman knew, the original plan was still good, and he could safely carry out his part of the program.

As an inevitable result, the Vicksburg expedition steamed straight into a trap. Sherman got his immense flotilla of transports down to Milliken's Bend, a long, curving stretch of the river twenty miles above Vicksburg, on Christmas day, and paused there while he sent one brigade off to cut the Vicksburg, Shreveport and Texas railroad on the Louisiana side of the river, a line which terminated on
the tongue of land just across from Vicksburg. Then he moved on, and on December 26 he was at the mouth of the Yazoo River.

The Yazoo is a tangled stream which comes down from northern Mississippi through rich bottom lands, meandering lazily and communicating, by way of bayous, backwaters and flood channels, with almost every other stream in the neighborhood, and it entered the Mississippi river five or six miles above Vicksburg. By following it a short distance upstream, Sherman believed that he could find ground from which his troops could assault the Walnut Hills, a stretch of high ground which goes off north and a little east from the city's bluffs, and during the next two days he got his men ashore on the soggy bottom land along a backwater called Chickasaw Bayou, a land cut up by creeks and swamps and dismal little ponds, ten miles up the Yazoo from the big river.

The prospects were not encouraging. The ground itself was forbidding, there were Confederate rifle pits along the base and slopes of the hills, and there were guns and infantry on the higher ground. Grimly outspoken as always, Sherman looked at the terrain, remarked that it would cost five thousand men to take Vicksburg eventually, and that the five thousand might as well be lost here as elsewhere, and on December 29 he launched the assault. His men tried hard enough, but the Rebel position was impregnable and it was held in strength; the assault was a dismal failure, the Federals never got past the swamps. Sherman lost more than 1700 men—if it was any comfort, he was at least well under the stated minimum of 5000—and the Confederates lost no more than 200.
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Sherman pulled his men back out of range, projected and then abandoned a plan for another assault farther up the Yazoo, and at last loaded the troops on the transports and steamed back to Milliken's Bend. If he could do nothing else he could at least wait here for Grant.

And then, on January 2, the river steamer
Tigress
came down from Memphis, bearing General McClernand and his staff.

McClernand exhibited his orders and took charge. Clinging to the idea that he was to command an independent army, he denominated the expeditionary force “The Army of the Mississippi”; Sherman was to command one corps (which in fact was already the case) while the other would be directed by Brigadier General
G. W. Morgan. McClernand himself would command the whole.

McClernand also brought news. He had left Memphis on December 30, so he knew about what Forrest and Van Dorn had done; knew, also, that Grant's army was withdrawing from its position near Grenada, and that any sort of advance in the near future was out of the question. When McClernand and Sherman consulted about what they should do next, McClernand talked broadly about opening the navigation of the Mississippi and cutting their way to the sea, but he seemed to have no specific plan. In a letter to Secretary Stanton—in which he complained that “the authority of the President and yourself … has been set at naught”—he proposed that Grant might base himself on Memphis, repair the railroads down to Grenada, and resume his march south to Jackson, while McClernand co-operated from the river.
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Sherman, however, had a more immediate suggestion. The Arkansas river entered the Mississippi about halfway between Memphis and Vicksburg, and forty miles up the Arkansas the Rebels had a fort, Fort Hindman, more commonly known as the Post of Arkansas, which posed a threat to the supply route of any Federal force operating down-river. Sherman proposed that the Army of the Mississippi, with the Navy's help, go up the Arkansas and capture this fort. This would at least provide a victory to counterbalance the defeat that had just been suffered. McClernand agreed—he had given thought to such a venture before he left Memphis—and the army took off for Fort Hindman.
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Grant, meanwhile, was in a fog. He had put his army on three-quarters rations, and he had ordered out foraging parties to sweep the country for food; but he could not find out what was happening on the Mississippi, and although he knew that his own inability to advance had left Sherman in a bad spot he kept getting rumors that Vicksburg had been captured. The hope that Sherman might have taken the place vanished when he got a dispatch from that general telling what had happened at Chickasaw Bayou, but the rumors of a Federal victory continued, and Grant began to suppose that the expedition from New Orleans was making itself felt.

General Nathaniel P. Banks had reached New Orleans in the middle of December, to replace Ben Butler and to lead up the river an army to co-operate with the troops that were coming down. He
was not, as a matter of fact, making any especial progress, but as far as Grant could tell the man was on his way, and it would be essential for the McClernand-Sherman force to be ready to co-operate with him if he drew near.

Halleck emphasized this, in a message sent January 7. Richmond newspapers left no doubt that Sherman had been defeated, and “every possible effort must be made to re-enforce him.” No one knew where Banks was, but he was under orders to move upstream as fast as he could; Grant must take everything he could spare from Tennessee and Mississippi and strengthen the column on the river. Halleck's dispatch emphasized the urgency of the situation: “We must not fail in this if within human power to accomplish it.”
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On the heels of this, Grant got a dispatch from McClernand, in which that general announced that the army was off for the Post of Arkansas. McClernand recited the obvious reasons for making the move, remarked that it was impossible to do anything against Vicksburg without a co-operative movement along the inland route, and spoke airily of the need to make a diversion against the Rebels in Arkansas and to co-operate with General Curtis's movements. The column would return to the Mississippi, McClernand said, “after completing any operations undertaken in Arkansas.”

This was too much for Grant. Just when Banks might be approaching Vicksburg, ambitious McClernand was plunging into Arkansas on a mission that might end no one knew where or how. Grant sent Halleck an angry wire: “General McClernand has fallen back to White River and gone on a wild-goose chase to the Post of Arkansas. I am ready to re-enforce but must await further information before knowing what to do.” Then he wrote a curt letter to McClernand, announcing that he disapproved of the Arkansas movement and telling the General: “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.” Since no steamer was ready to go down the river, this letter could not be forwarded, and Grant supplemented it on January 13 with a calmer note. In this he told McClernand that he could not tell just what was best to do immediately, but he warned him that “unless there is some object not visible at this distance your forces should return to Milliken's Bend, or some point
convenient for operating on Vicksburg, and where they can cooperate with Banks should he come up the river.”
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