Grant Moves South (63 page)

At this moment, hardly any of the Federal commanders aside from Grant himself really believed in the new movement. Frank Blair recalled after the war that Grant had explained the operation to a conference of his generals and his staff just before the move began, and that all of them were opposed to it. Sherman, in particular
, was disturbed; the whole thing was most unmilitary, he told Grant, and he did not think it could possibly succeed. Grant replied that he knew as well as anyone that the move was unmilitary, but that as far as he could see it was the only movement that had any chance at all; he then dismissed the council, and issued the formal orders that put McClernand's troops on the road.

Some of the opposition unquestionably arose from the fact that it was McClernand who would be in the lead, carrying the heaviest share of responsibility. Nobody believed McClernand was quite up to it, and both Sherman and Porter warned Grant that he was taking a long chance in giving him the assignment. (Dana added his own remonstrance, and wrote to Stanton about it. For reply, he got a curt reminder from the Secretary that he was there strictly as an observer, not as a shaper of high policy: “Allow me to suggest that you carefully avoid giving any advice in respect to commands that may be assigned, as it may lead to misunderstandings and troublesome complications.”) In any case, the protests accomplished nothing. Grant pointed out that McClernand after all was the senior corps commander, that his corps was placed where it would logically take the advance, that McClernand was an especial favorite of the President, and that McClernand himself was highly in favor of the new campaign and could be counted on to do his best. Sherman remained unconvinced, and he sent Grant a long letter, urging him to cancel all of his plans, go back to Memphis, and start a new advance along the old line of the railroad, but Grant's mind was fixed.
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He relied on Sherman more than on any other man, but this decision was his and his alone and he would stick to it. This new move was going to work … or else.

McClernand's corps kept moving on, McPherson's troops got ready to follow, and Porter prepared to take his gunboats down the river to help reduce Grand Gulf and guard the river crossing. It took time to assemble the flotilla and get it in proper shape, after the Steele's Bayou expedition, and just as Porter had things ready a violent storm swept down the river, breaking steamers loose from their moorings and threatening to send warships, transports and supply vessels drifting down under the guns of the Vicksburg batteries; one officer remembered seeing Grant on the hurricane deck of a steamer, shouting orders as Army and Navy together
fought to get the boats under control. In the end no great harm was done, but “the excitement while it lasted was equivalent to that of a first-class battle.”
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Porter made his preparations with care. He was using eight warships—seven regular gunboats and a ram which had been captured from the Confederates at Memphis the summer before—plus three ordinary river steamers loaded with stores. Each vessel had lashed to its starboard side a barge full of coal, leaving the port-side guns of the warships free to respond to the fire of the batteries. Water-soaked bales of hay and cotton were stacked around the otherwise unprotected boilers of the transports, and were banked up across the fragile sterns of the gunboats, to guard against raking shots. To ensure quiet, all steam exhaust pipes were led into the paddle boxes, and captains were ordered to proceed at low speed, letting the current do most of the work, until the Rebels discovered them and opened fire. Porter was so anxious to avoid noise that he even ordered all poultry and pets to be sent ashore. There were to be no lights, except for dim signals carried astern, hooded so as to be invisible to the Confederates. Boats were to proceed in single file, at fifty-yard intervals, and each captain was to steer a little to one side of the boat ahead, so that if that boat should be wrecked he could go past it without changing course. Men were stationed at intervals in the holds of the steamers, ready to cram wadded cotton into shot holes in the hull.

The flotilla ran the batteries on the night of April 16; a clear night, with bright stars in a cloudless sky, but very dark down by the surface of the water. Nothing could be seen except the lights of Vicksburg itself, banked up on the bluff, visible over the top of the low point of land. It grew late, and one by one most of these lights blinked out, and the officers and men who waited felt that there was something theatrical about it all—the stage was black, but it would be brilliantly and violently lighted before long. Grant's family was visiting him at this time, and Julia and the children were with him on the upper deck of the headquarters steamer, which had steamed down to a vantage point just safely beyond the range of the Vicksburg guns; and on this night when everything had a dramatic tinge, one observer, seeing the Grants behind the
white railing, with staff officers standing near, thought at once of an oversized party in the proscenium box of a huge theater. Young Colonel Wilson sat in a chair near Mrs. Grant, with one of the smaller Grant children on his lap.

For a long time there was nothing to see, except the deeper patches of blackness by the invisible shores. Then, upstream, a massive shadow seemed to detach itself from the edge of the night and to come drifting slowly down the river; and behind it there was another shadow, similarly adrift, with another behind that—all noiseless, mysterious, seemingly utterly lifeless … and the people on the headquarters boat, and all of the other watchers on other boats and on the levees, became silent, so quiet and so tense that a newspaper correspondent noticed that when a man let the breath out of his lungs it sounded like a sob. The shadows drifted on; now the gunboats were rounding the point and drifting straight past the Vicksburg waterfront—and then, suddenly, there was a quick flash of light, and then another, from the Vicksburg hillside, as watchful Rebel gunners opened fire. Confederate pickets on the point set fire to some wrecked houses there, the flames threw a revealing red glare over the river, all of the batteries opened, and black smoke drifted down on the water, throbbing with enormous blows of sound. The child in Colonel Wilson's lap whimpered, and clung closer to him, an arm about his neck. Mr. Dana, taking a detached interest in the drama, counted the reports of the cannon and said afterward he made note of 525. Grant chewed the end of a cigar and said nothing; downstream, Sherman came out on the river in a yawl to greet the survivors of this bombardment; and Admiral Porter stood on the open deck of his flagship and saw such a blaze of illumination along the Vicksburg batteries that he thought for a moment the city was on fire.
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Some time after midnight, the firing died down. The fleet had got through without major damage. One transport had caught fire and sunk, another one had been put out of commission with a shot through her steam chest, one of the Turtles was leaking badly from a waterline shot in the bows, and several of the coal barges had been lost. But casualties to personnel had been light, and by dawn of April 17 the fleet was at anchor above New Carthage, fully operational. Grant was too impatient to wait for reports
by courier; he had his horse saddled and rode off to New Carthage to see for himself.

Porter had warned him: once the fleet got below Vicksburg there could be no turning back. But now that the fleet had moved, the great river itself was complicating things afresh. All winter long it had been too high; now, when Grant wanted it to remain high, its level was perversely falling, and as a result it was becoming impossible to make a useful waterway out of the interlinked lakes and streams that came down from Milliken's Bend to New Carthage. The whole campaign rested on the assumption that certain essential supplies—to say nothing of the soldiers themselves—could come down by this route. Gunboats might run past the batteries, but a transport full of men or explosives could not. McClernand was already estimating that his corps ought to take with it, when it crossed the river, six million rounds of musket ammunition. If all of this had to come down by road, it would take three days and 300 wagons—with 90 additional wagons needed to move the necessary 300 rounds per gun for his 10 six-gun batteries. In addition, it was clear that the whole army could never be rationed by wagon train over the narrow, winding, muddy roadway.
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Grant hurried back to Milliken's Bend to make arrangements. Porter had got his ironclads past the batteries without trouble; now Grant would try sending a squadron of ordinary transports down the same route—regular river steamers, with civilian officers and crews, under government charter. They could carry forage and rations; once downstream they could ferry the army across the Mississippi; and, although the river men might pull their chins and mutter about the hazard of exposing unarmored vessels to concentrated gunfire, Grant had reason to suspect that the danger was less than was supposed. During the winter the unarmored ram
Queen of the West
had run the gantlet in broad daylight. Under fire for fifty minutes, she had been struck twelve times but had received no major injury. That the Confederates later captured her in the Red River did not alter the case; and the whole army was still chuckling about the way the impish Porter had made an imitation gunboat out of an old coal barge, some tar barrels, and odds and ends of scantling, to send it drifting downstream one night while the Confederate gunners, taking it for a regular warship,
flailed away with everything they had. The flimsy, unmanned craft had gone as far as Warrenton without damage, and its appearance there had scared a Confederate salvage crew into destroying a wrecked Yankee gunboat which they had been trying to restore to serviceable condition. Late in March the ram
Switzerland
ran the batteries successfully.

Even transports, then, might come down past the batteries, if officers and crew had enough nerve; but they could not carry troops or ammunition as they made the trip, and bad as the twisting road south from Milliken's Bend might be, the army was going to have to use it—building bridges, filling in ditches and corduroying swamps as it went. Grant was committed, now, and there could be no turning back. On April 20 he issued Special Orders No. 110, setting forth the details.

The purpose of the move, the orders stated, was “to obtain a foothold on the east bank of the Mississippi river, from which Vicksburg can be approached by practicable roads.” McClernand's corps would have the advance, McPherson's would follow, and Sherman's would bring up the rear. No camp equipage would be carried: each company might take one tent, to protect rations from rain, and each regimental, brigade and division headquarters could have one wall tent. Corps commanders might take more, since they had books and papers to protect, but the army would travel light and the troops would bivouac without shelter. Each corps was to detail two regiments to guard the route from Richmond south; sick and disabled soldiers would remain at Milliken's Bend, and suitable drill officers would stay with them to organize the convalescents into camp guards. McClernand was notified that it was important to take Grand Gulf at the earliest possible moment. Once the army was concentrated there, McClernand was to be prepared to move on downstream and work with Banks.

Porter seemed optimistic. He wrote Grant that he thought his gunboats could suppress the Grand Gulf batteries but that they might get so knocked about doing it that they could not protect the troop crossings, and so he believed they ought to wait until a joint Army-Navy attack could be made. He distrusted McClernand, who was moving slowly, and he told Grant bluntly: “I wish 20 times a day that Sherman was here, or yourself, but I suppose
we cannot have all we wish.… We can, with the steamers and barges, land 6,000 men, if you think that enough; if we can get more transports it will be better.” Privately, Porter had more serious misgivings, and he confessed in a letter to Assistant Secretary of the Navy Gustavus Fox: “I am quite depressed with this adventure, which as you know never met with my approval.” McClernand, he complained, was very slow, and his corps was encumbered with too much equipment: “Sherman, the moving spirit, is left behind, where he should have been in the advance. With his corps we might ere this have landed on the Miss. side of the river, for he scorns tents and eatables and pushes his men ahead when there is an object in view.” Sherman himself continued to have doubts, and he wrote to Fred Steele: “I confess I don't like this roundabout project, but we must support Grant in whatever he undertakes.”
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The transports came down the river on the night of April 22. Six boats made the dash. They were manned largely by Volunteers from the army; the civilian crews balked at the job, and soldiers took their places, so many men offering themselves that they had to be chosen by lot. From one regiment, 116 men presented themselves as qualified by experience to act as pilots, engineers, firemen and deck-hands, and competition for places was so keen that soldiers who were not chosen offered cash money for the chance to replace those who had been selected. Loaded with rations and forage, the steamers got through; only one—unfortunately, the one which carried medical supplies and hospital equipment—was lost.
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Now the army could cross the river whenever it chose.

During all of this, the infantry columns kept moving. The roadway was bad, and it rapidly grew worse. One brigadier asserted: “a worse march no army ever made in the history of military operations,” remarking that it took from twelve to eighteen horses to move a single gun, and that the infantry floundered along knee-deep in mud. There was a good deal of rain, the march went on day and night, with innumerable halts during which men lifted guns and wagons bodily out of the mire and boosted them on toward drier ground. Everything except the road itself seemed to be under water, and Midwestern boys listened apprehensively to the sound of alligators bellowing in the bayous. An Iowa soldier reported that for three weeks nobody in his regiment had a chance to take his
clothes off, and reported bleakly: “We are all as dirty as hogs … we are all lousy.” The days were hot, and men threw away blankets and overcoats, only to find that spring nights could be cold even in Louisiana. A gunner reflected that a hike which took a fortnight could have been made in two days if there had been good roads, dry ground and a few bridges.
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