Grant Moves South (53 page)

One thing had become clear. Grant could not hope to make sense out of the operation against Vicksburg as long as he himself was isolated in western Tennessee, and it was futile to try to co-ordinate the movements of widely-separated armies. He would have to give up the overland move, arrange troops so as to hold the line between Memphis and Corinth, and go down the river himself with every regiment he could spare. He ordered his advance withdrawn to Holly Springs, took off for Memphis, and on January 13 wrote to McPherson that “it is my present intention to command the expedition down the river in person.” He was doubtless strengthened in this resolve by a brief message from Halleck:

“You are hereby authorized to relieve General McClernand from command of the expedition against Vicksburg, giving it to the next in rank or taking it yourself.”
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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

A Noun Is the Name of a Thing

It is easy to get a distorted picture. A general is maneuvering an army deep in enemy country, hoping to strike a blow that may win the war. To him come rumors of enemy movements, reports about things done by his own troops, accounts of clashes and skirmishes on the front or on the flanks, veiled warnings of policy decisions far away in Washington. He studies these, reaches the best conclusions he can, issues his orders, and then goes on to victory or to defeat; and when we look back long afterward we suppose that all of his attention was taken up by purely military problems.

Yet really it was not that way at all when Grant made his drive down the shaky railroad line at the end of 1862. No matter what might happen with McClernand and Sherman, with Pemberton and Forrest and Van Dorn, or with the advancing brigades of his own army, Grant had to give much the greater part of his time and energy to matters that had nothing to do with the progress of the invasion. Before everything else he was an administrator of occupied territory. This territory was generating problems of incredible intensity, for whose solution nothing in his training offered any guidance at all. He had to deal with these problems every hour of every day, and each one was loaded with extraordinary pressures. Even if his front had been totally inactive Grant would still have been occupying one of the most difficult spots held by any Federal commander. Since his front, instead of being inactive, was the key strategic location of the entire war, Grant was carrying a staggering load.

To begin with, there was cotton.

Grant's armies were entering some of the richest farming land in America—the “cotton garden of the world,” as it was called, the heart and center of the South's great cotton empire. All about him,
on vast plantations and on tiny farms, were immense quantities of this staple, which a powerful industry in the North wanted more than it wanted anything else on earth. Until Grant's army came there was no legitimate market for this cotton. Many planters, strong in their Confederate patriotism, simply burned theirs; others, less steadfast, held onto their bales and waited to see what would happen. What happened was a miraculous continuing boom in the cotton market, with an immense number of Northern traders, fixers and schemers swarming in from everywhere to get as much cotton as they could in any way and at any price possible. The market was made livelier by the fact that the area which produced all of this cotton was desperately short of items like coffee, medicines, whisky, flour and salt, not to mention an endless list of manufactured goods, so that the Southern planter had an almost overwhelming incentive to let the detested Yankee have some of the cotton. (The prices being offered were the highest in sixty years; also, the traders were prepared to pay in U. S. Treasury notes, or even in gold, so that the man who wanted to sell did not have to take depreciated Confederate currency.) To intensify the pressure still further, the Confederate Armies could not survive without salt, with which the beef and pork which the soldiers ate could be preserved; if the Confederate authorities winked at letting cotton go North they could get salt, as well as gunpowder, revolvers and other munitions of war; and Pemberton was warned by the Confederate War Department that certain “irregular modes of supply” had to be countenanced if his army was to be fed and maintained.

At the exact storm center of this pressure was Grant, who did not want to think about anything except the best way to whip the opposing armies but who possessed the power of life or death over a trade as insistent, and as charged with the chance for immense profits, as anything a California or a Klondike gold rush ever saw. Commerce, the administration had decided, would follow the flag; there would be no trade with the enemy, but in a region held by the Union Armies trade would be encouraged, and although cotton in theory would be bought only from loyal citizens, the Treasury agents who were on hand to give out permits were very often men who could be corrupted—and, in any case, who was to say that a Southern farmer who took the oath of loyalty was willfully perjuring
himself in order to sell a couple of bales of cotton? A trader who could establish contacts outside of the Union lines could make utterly fantastic profits, provided the Army would enable him to transport his cotton back to a market. One man operating out of Oxford, Mississippi, while Grant had his headquarters there, paid 12,000 dollars for 1500 bales of cotton, contingent on his ability to move it to Columbus, Kentucky—where it would be worth 500,000 dollars to him. This trader told Grant that he himself would find the transportation; all he wanted from Grant was a permit. Grant refused to give it to him, and warned him that if the cotton came within his lines he would confiscate every bale of it for the government; whereupon the trader offered to cut the General in on the profits. There was no deal; and it was about this time that Grant wrote to his sister, remarking: “To all the other trials that I have to contend against, is added that of speculators whose patriotism is measured by dollars and cents. Country has no value to them compared with money.”
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Most generals made no deals, but there were rumors of deals all over the place, and they poisoned the atmosphere in which Grant's army lived. If that army sent troops out to seize any place, there was certain to be talk that the real reason for the expedition was to help some speculator buy cotton, and a Northern newspaper would ask: “Is it just that our soldiers should peril their lives for the pecuniary benefit of a few speculators?” The
New York Times
, wondering why Grant drew his supplies all the way from Columbus, asked why the long railroad line should be kept open and offered its own answer: “We venture the assertion that cotton-speculating influences have controlled the policy and kept the road open. The profit of individuals and not the prosperity of the campaign has ordered it.”
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Early in the summer Grant tried to keep things in hand by ruling that no gold or silver could be paid for cotton. U. S. Treasury notes might be offered, and if a man who offered cotton for sale refused to accept such money he could be arrested and his cotton could be seized and sold by the Army, the money to be held in trust for settlement later. Washington disapproved of this, however, and Grant was ordered to encourage the cotton trade and to permit the use of hard money in its purchase. He complied, much against
his will, and Sherman protested bitterly that “the cotton order is worse to us than a defeat,” pointing out that gold which entered the Confederacy would immediately be used to buy munitions of war. “If we provide our enemies with money we enable them to buy all they stand in need of,” he wrote Grant. “Money is as much contraband of war as powder.” To Secretary of the Treasury Chase, Sherman declared that Memphis now would be more valuable to the Confederacy under Union rule than it was when the Confederates held it.
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This did no good. The new orders had to stand, and shortly after he began his march to the south Grant tried to restrict the trade as much as possible with a new set of regulations.

Under these rules, a man who wanted to buy cotton and send it North must have, in addition to a Treasury Department permit, a permit from the nearest Army provost marshal. No one could go beyond Army lines to buy cotton or anything else; railroad freight agents were required to make daily reports on all cotton shipments, and cotton shipped by persons lacking the proper permits was to be confiscated. Recognizing that civilians in occupied territory greatly needed manufactured goods from the North, Grant permitted licensed dealers to carry such goods in stock and allowed their sale to citizens who would take the oath of allegiance and who would specify that the items bought were for their own use and not for resale. Government teams were forbidden to haul any private property, and any cotton found in Army wagons was to be confiscated by the quartermaster for the benefit of the government.
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Enforcing such rules, however, was something else again. As Sherman pointed out, payment in gold provided an irresistible stimulus. Both inside and outside of Federally-held territory, Southerners who previously had hidden their cotton were having a change of heart, the gold that flowed south was creating an immense traffic in munitions, and Sherman angrily asserted that the great Northern merchandising center of Cincinnati “furnishes more contraband goods than Charleston, and has done more to prolong the war than the state of South Carolina.”
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There were times when it seemed that cotton and gold were corrupting both sides. A Confederate cavalry officer patrolling northwestern Mississippi complained that he found “the whole community engaged in trading cotton with the enemy,” in river towns cotton smuggling was widespread and
open, and one Confederate officer wrote to Braxton Bragg that “Yankee gold is fast accomplishing what Yankee arms could never achieve—the subjugation of this people.” Newspaperman Charles A. Dana, who had left the
New York Tribune
in order to indulge in a little cotton trading on his own hook, wrote that parts of the Union Army were becoming demoralized; “Every colonel, captain or quartermaster is in secret partnership with some operator in cotton; every soldier dreams of adding a bale of cotton to his monthly pay.” Grant agreed with him that the net effect was very bad, although he insisted that Dana had overstated the extent of corruption in the army. Six months later Grant wrote to Secretary Chase saying that trade with the rebellious states “is weakening us of at least 33 percent of our force.… I will venture that no honest man has made money in West Tennessee in the last year, whilst many fortunes have been made there during that time.” Soldiers noticed with grim amusement that when Van Dorn captured Holly Springs his troopers rounded up a number of cotton traders, took their gold away from them, and marched them through the street at the point of the bayonet.
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All of this was a heavy distraction for a general conducting a delicate military operation in a hostile land. It was all the heavier because the cotton fever had infected members of Grant's own intimate circle. Traveling with him at this time was another Galena crony, one J. Russell Jones, a close friend of Congressman Washburne, and a United States marshal at Chicago; and while Jones was on hand ostensibly just to visit with an old friend he was extremely anxious to buy a little cotton if the price was right. He wrote to Washburne that he would be moderate; if he could buy cotton at 25 to 40 cents a pound he would spend what money he had with him and go home content; but the gold rush atmosphere got into his blood, and he told Washburne later that he “could have made an eternal, hell-roaring fortune” if, when he got to Memphis, he could have seen how cotton prices were going to rise. If he could just get down into Arkansas below Helena, he said, “I can make all the money any one man ought to have in ten days.” As it was, he reported rather unhappily on his return to Chicago, he had made no more than twenty-five thousand dollars.
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There is no hint in any of his letters that Grant was in any way a party to his deals; still, there
it was—an acquaintance of the General, and a close friend of the Congressman who had been the General's stanchest supporter, moving with the army, was himself on the make.

Even worse was the nasty tangle created by Grant's father, canny little Jesse Grant.

Between Grant and his father there had always been a strange, tragic lack of understanding. Long ago, in southern Ohio, Jesse had sent Grant to West Point when an Army career was the last thing on earth the son wanted. Later, when the peacetime Army had been too much for him, Grant had not been able to get the help which Jesse could easily have given him; finally, apparently without enthusiasm, Jesse had given his son a little job in the Galena harness shop, muttering to his acquaintances that the Army had spoiled his son for business. More recently, Jesse had taken great pride in the new fame which his son had won, and had made so much noise about it that Grant had felt called on to rebuke him, in a letter which, for Grant, was amazingly cold and sharp. Now, with the cotton problem lying heavily on his stooped shoulders, Grant was to find Jesse making book with the very traders who were Grant's worst trial—coming in, sly and insinuating, to help the men whose patriotism, as Grant believed, was to be measured by dollars and cents.

The whole business is a little less than crystal clear, but what happened apparently went like this: Jesse Grant, in Cincinnati, formed some sort of partnership with three brothers, Henry, Harmon and Simon Mack, merchants who traded as Mack and Brothers. Under this deal, Jesse and the Macks would go South to buy cotton in the military department controlled by Jesse's son, the General; the Macks would furnish the capital, Jesse would furnish the son—who was in a position to say whether any trader in West Tennessee or northern Mississippi could buy and ship cotton at all—and the profits would be split And so, early in December, while Grant was trying to get his army down to the Tallahatchie, and while Sherman was hurriedly getting his own expedition on transports at Memphis, with Porter's gunboats puffing in the stream, Jesse and the Macks came down to northern Mississippi to see General Grant.
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