Grant Moves South (59 page)

Things got worse. Porter at last reached a spot where hundreds of limber saplings grew out of the bed of the stream, bringing his already slow progress down to the merest crawl; and as the steamer puffed away, making a few feet in an hour's time, he began to hear, far behind him, the sound of many men chopping away with axes—Confederate working parties in the rear, felling trees across the river so that the Yankee flotilla, unable to advance any farther, could never get back by the way it had come. It seemed quite likely that the whole fleet would be lost in the middle of a forest.

In the end Sherman came to the rescue, marching troops up along the banks, driving the Confederate working parties away, and enabling Porter to extricate his luckless little fleet. Rudders were unshipped and the ironclads were hauled out stern-to, all of them more or less damaged, everyone aboard from Porter down to the most humble powder-monkey worn out and disillusioned. The Steele's Bayou venture had been the worst failure of the lot. Army and Navy by mutual consent abandoned all further attempts to get into the Yazoo. If Vicksburg were ever taken, it would be taken by some other approach than this one.
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Now it was past mid-March, and the entire Vicksburg operation had come to a dead end. Grant had had high hopes—a week earlier he had written to Washburne that “the Yazoo pass expedition is going to prove a perfect success,” and he had proudly assured the Congressman that “we are going through a campaign here such as has not been heard of on this continent before.” The men were in
good health and good spirits: “The health of this command is a subject that has been very much exagerated by the press. I will venture the assertion that there is no army now in the field showing so large a proportion of those present with their command being for duty. Really our troops are more healthy than could possibly have been expected with all their trials.” But Pemberton's army was still out of reach, and Grant confessed in a letter to the distant General Banks, far downstream, that “there is nothing left for me but to collect all my strength and attack Snyder's Bluff. This will necessarily be attended with much loss, but I think it can be done.” To Congressman Washburne came a doleful letter from his brother, General Cadwallader Washburn:

This campaign is being badly managed. I am sure of it. I fear a calamity before Vicksburgh. All Grant's schemes have failed. He knows that he has got to do something or off goes his head. My impression is that he intends to attack in front.… As one after another of the schemes fail, I hear that he says he has a plan of his own which is yet to be tried in which he has great confidence.
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If Grant had a new plan it was time to try it. He had been on the river for two months, and Vicksburg was no nearer falling now than when he came.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The Man on the River

Charles A. Dana had been around. New Hampshire-born and Harvard-educated, he had spent five years in the famous Brook Farm colony, where he wrote essays, sang in the choir, gave lectures, taught various classes and displayed a bump of practical common sense so uncommon among the precious colonists that he was made one of the managing trustees. After Brook Farm evaporated he went into journalism and in 1847 started to work for the
New York Tribune
, where he developed powerful talents as an editor and soon was second in command to Horace Greeley. Meanwhile, he traveled in Europe, compiled a best-selling volume of poetry, and began work on the very successful American Cyclopaedia. He resigned from the
Tribune
in the spring of 1862 when he found the convolutions of the Greeley line in respect to the conduct of the war too hard to follow.

In this varied experience Dana had seen all sorts and conditions of men and had shown the ability to render judgments on them, and now he was supposed to tell Secretary Stanton and President Lincoln all about U. S. Grant. The world had not yet shown him anyone quite like Grant, and Dana was about to have a broadening experience—which, in the end, would be of service to himself, to the administration, and to Grant as well.

Dana was coming out to the Mississippi this spring as a sort of high-class spy for the Secretary of War. He carried a letter of appointment specifying that, as a special commissioner of the War Department, he was to investigate and report on the condition of the pay service in the Western Armies, but in actual fact he was supposed to report on Grant. Both the President and the Secretary of War had their doubts, they were getting many complaints, they wanted a man on the spot who could tell them just what Grant was like and what he was up to, and in the latter part of March Dana reached
Memphis prepared to enlighten them. General Hurlbut, commanding at Memphis, gave him a quick fill-in on Grant's progress, or lack of progress, down to date; but what could be learned at Memphis was secondhand and fragmentary, and Stanton presently directed Dana to go to Grant's headquarters, stay there as long as he wished, and get the facts at first hand. Dana appeared at Milliken's Bend on April 6, took up quarters on a steamboat that was moored by the levee, noted that the countryside was lush with roses, magnolias, Osage orange and stately trees, but desolate because all of the slaves had vanished and the fields were untilled, and got down to work.

The exact nature of his mission was one of the most poorly kept secrets of the Civil War. Grant and his staff knew all about it before Dana arrived, and some of the staff members argued that this War Department emissary ought to be thrown into the river on arrival. Rawlins took a different line, however, insisting that Dana be received and treated with proper hospitality, and Grant himself seemed to be glad Dana was present. If Dana was going to be sending daily progress reports to the Secretary of War Grant himself would not have to write nearly so many letters; also, Grant had nothing to hide, and in no time Dana found himself a member of the family, with access to all of the top-secret plans.
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Dana was about to have an experience—the experience of seeing Grant as a plain, seemingly unremarkable man who somehow, in a wholly indefinable way, conveyed an impression of solidity and capacity. He did not really seem a
great
man; like most people who saw him at close range, Dana felt compelled to make that point; and it is clear that this polished Easterner who had traveled so widely and known so many men was just a little baffled by what he was looking at now. Years afterward, Dana tried to sum up his impressions of Grant, and his words are obviously the words of a man who has rubbed elbows with someone profoundly out of the ordinary but who cannot quite say just how or why he was so impressed.

Grant was an uncommon fellow—the most modest, the most disinterested and the most honest man I ever knew, with a temper that nothing could disturb and a judgment that was judicial in its comprehensiveness and wisdom. Not a great man except morally; not an original or brilliant man, but sincere,
thoughtful, deep and gifted with courage that never faltered; when the time came to risk all, he went in like a simple-hearted, unaffected, unpretending hero, whom no ill omens could deject and no triumph unduly exalt. A social, friendly man, too, fond of a pleasant joke and also ready with one; but liking above all a long chat of an evening, and ready to sit up all night talking in the cool breeze in front of his tent. Not a man of sentimentality, not demonstrative in friendship, but always holding to his friends and just even to the enemies he hated.
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Other men were coming to the same sort of conclusion. Even the
New York World
, which had attacked Grant so bitterly a little earlier, was beginning to see him in a different light. Its correspondent wrote, almost as if he were saying it against his will:

Gen. Grant still retains his hold upon the affections of his men. His energy and disposition to do something is what they admire in him and he has the remarkable tact of never spoiling any mysterious and vague notions which may be entertained in the minds of the privates as to the qualities of a commander-in-chief. He confines himself to saying and doing as little as possible before his men. No Napoleonic displays, no ostentation, no speech, no superfluous flummery. Thus distance lends enchantment to the view of the man.

Another newspaperman summed him up in more cordial terms. Writing for the
New York Times
, the correspondent who signed himself “Galway” said that Grant “moves with his shoulders thrown a little forward of the perpendicular, his left hand in the pocket of his pantaloons, an unlighted cigar in his mouth, his eyes thrown straight forward, which, from the haze of abstraction that veils them, and a countenance drawn into furrows of thought, would seem to indicate that he was intensely preoccupied.” Galway agreed that the soldiers trusted him. He went on:

The soldiers observe him coming and rising to their feet gather on each side of the way to see him pass—they do not salute him, they only watch him … with a certain sort of familiar reverence. His abstract air is not so great while he thus moves along as to prevent his seeing everything without apparently looking at it; you will see this in the fact that however
dense the crowd in which you stand, if you are an acquaintance his eye will for an instant rest on yours with a glance of recollection, and with it a grave nod of recognition. A plain blue suit, without scarf, sword or trappings of any sort, save the double-starred shoulder straps—an indifferently good “Kossuth” hat, with the top battered in close to his head; full beard of a cross between “light” and “sandy”; a square-cut face whose lines and contour indicate extreme endurance and determination, complete the external appearance of this small man, as one sees him passing along, turning and chewing restlessly the end of his unlighted cigar.
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A doctor on McPherson's staff wrote that Grant was “plain as an old shoe,” and said that it was hard to make new troops believe that this man in a common soldier's blouse with a battered felt hat, and with cavalry pants stuffed in muddy boots, was actually the Commanding General. A private soldier said that the army believed Grant never made mistakes: “Everything that Grant directs is right. His soldiers believe in him. In our private talk among ourselves I have never heard a single soldier speak in doubt of Grant.” The men liked Grant's unassuming ways. Most generals, when they rode the lines, went attended by swanky staffs, usually with a cavalry escort; Grant was customarily attended by no one save a couple of orderlies, to carry messages if need arose. “The soldiers seem to look upon him as a friendly partner of theirs, not as an arbitrary commander. As he passes by, the private soldiers feel as free to greet him as they would to address one of their neighbors when meeting him at home. ‘Good morning, General,' ‘Pleasant day, General,' and like expressions are the greetings he meets everywhere. The soldiers when meeting him are never embarrassed by the thought that they are talking to a great general.” Yet they rarely cheered him, and when he rode the lines they did not throw their hats in the air and yell. “A pleasant salute to, and a good-natured nod from him in return, seems more appropriate.”
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The simple fact is that Grant was not quite the same person in the early spring of 1863 that he had been before. He had been growing, developing, finding himself, in the months since Halleck left for Washington. The change is evident through a study of his
dispatches, reports and official correspondence. They become crisper, more solid, straight to the point, business-like; the impression gained by studying them is that of a man who has at last mastered the job of running an army, who no longer doubts either his own status or his own powers and who is moving ahead with full confidence.

Sherman commented, years later, on the way in which Grant liked to write his own orders and dispatches. He was jealous, said Sherman, of any secretary's attempt to write anything for him: “He would sit down and scribble off an order easier than he could tell another what he wanted. If anyone came along and remarked to him, ‘That was a clever order Rawlins put out for you today,' Grant would say right out, ‘I wrote that myself.' I presume I have 150 orders and memoranda all in his own hand. Some of them read about like this: ‘Take plenty of shovels and picks up to Rye Bend to clear the way.' I think that is just how one of them reads. He had been over the ground I was to go on … He knew what was wanted and so sent me word. He may have spoken to me about it before. He was a great man for details. He remembered the most minute details and watched every point.” On a very different level, a private soldier got the same impression, saying: “He will ride along the long line of the army, apparently an indifferent observer, yet he sees and notices everything. He seems to know and remember every regiment, and in fact every cannon in his large army.”
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Grant owed something, undoubtedly, to the change in his relationship with Halleck. The nagging faultfinding of the Donelson-Shiloh-Corinth period was gone. Halleck was treating him now as a tested, fully competent officer, writing gossipy letters to him, giving him friendly advice, offering him the support which a general-in-chief would give to a trusted subordinate. In part, this may have been because none of the other army commanders with whom Halleck was dealing was measuring up: more and more, the tone of Halleck's letters shows that he was relying on Grant as he never could rely on Burnside, Hooker or Rosecrans—to say nothing of McClellan and Buell. The McClernand tangle had unquestionably brought Grant and Halleck closer together, and it had left Grant with a fuller awareness of his own authority.

The winter had been difficult. None of the schemes to bring the
army into a good fighting position had worked. Yet Grant was confident, as the last of the Yazoo ventures faded out, and he proudly told Washburne “we are going through a campaign here such as has not been heard of on this continent before.” At Donelson and Shiloh, Grant could cry out that he did not know what Washington wanted of him: now that note is gone, he knows what he wants and he knows, deep within himself, that what he wants will be what Washington wants. The Grant of April, 1863, is at last the Grant who knows precisely what he is about.
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