Grant Moves South (64 page)

Yet morale was high. The army was moving at last, and there was a general feeling that the campaign was beginning to make sense. Even the incessant labor of creating the road on which they marched seemed to give the soldiers a sense of accomplishment. Colonel Wilson marveled at the army's capacity. Without a pontoon train, and with no bridging materials except the lumber that could be obtained by tearing down barns and houses, these troops could make a highway across swamps and bayous without appreciable delay. In a few days, he said, one division built two floating bridges, each one more than 300 feet long, creating a practicable road in a flooded country that might have stumped trained engineers, and he paid his tribute: “Those bridges were built by green volunteers who had never seen a bridge train nor had an hour's drill or instruction in bridge-building.” The men in this army had pioneer backgrounds, and they brought to this work all of the pioneer's ingenuity and adaptiveness. One private noted with pride that his division had bridged 1000 feet of water and cut two miles of road through dense woods. Grant was as impressed as Colonel Wilson: he began to see that these Volunteers could do almost anything—build roads, erect bridges, operate steamboats, march day and night in mud and water, fight like veterans—and his confidence in the enlisted men of his command became almost limitless. When he reported on the Vicksburg campaign he recalled this overland march and wrote: “It is a striking feature, as far as my observation goes, of the present volunteer army of the United States, that there is nothing which men are called upon to do, mechanical or professional, that accomplished adepts cannot be found for the duty required in almost every regiment.”

New troops coming down the river to Milliken's Bend to take part in the campaign caught the spirit and felt that there was something romantic and inspiring in this movement. A Wisconsin regiment, floating down the Mississippi under a full moon, remembered
“the great calm river, more like a long winding lake than a stream; the fleet of boats moving forward with that light puff-puff of the river steamer, and leaving the long triangular wake in the rear of each; the long, low banks stretching away on either side; the music now and then from some regimental band filling all the air above the water with melody, and then floating away over the dark woodlands of both Mississippi and Arkansas; the cheers, laughter and song of the men—the scene was indeed both an enlivening one and a quieting one.”
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Grant drove himself as hard as he drove anyone, and he seemed to appear at every point where a traffic jam developed, riding up, dismounting, and getting things straightened out, telling the men to keep moving on. The soldiers turned to look at him, recognized him, but indulged in no cheers. An officer who watched Grant getting a column across an improvised bridge reflected that Grant somehow made a profound impression by his very lack of dramatics: “There was no McClellan, begging the boys to allow him to light his cigar by theirs, or inquiring to what regiment that exceedingly fine-marching company belonged. There was no Pope, bullying the men for not marching faster, or officers for some trivial detail remembered only by martinets. There was no Bonaparte, posturing for effect.… There was no nonsense, no sentiment; only a plain business man of the republic, there for the one single purpose of getting that command across the river in the shortest time possible.”
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Another officer, who had seen much of Grant during the long winter, said that a new sense of energy and movement was evident in everything the General did, so that he seemed almost like a different person. “None who had known him the previous years could recognize him as being the same man.… From this time his genius and his energies seemed to burst forth with new life.” In all of the previous campaign, this officer said, he had never seen Grant ride at a gallop, or even at a fast trot: no matter what was going on Grant had never seemed to be in a hurry. But now everything was different: Grant was riding at top speed all the time, and “he seemed wrought up to the last pitch of determination and energy.” Yet Dana could see no cracks in the man's control. He recalled one night riding beside Grant in black darkness; Grant's horse stumbled and nearly pitched the General into the mud, and Dana found himself thinking,
“Now he will swear.” Grant disappointed him. He regained control of his horse and went on with his ride without giving any sign of impatience or irritation, and Dana reflected afterward that from one end of the campaign to the other he never heard Grant use an oath.
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Getting possession of Grand Gulf was a little harder than had been anticipated. It developed that the New Carthage area was not a suitable place from which to make the crossing; there was no good spot on the Mississippi side, between Warrenton and Grand Gulf, to put the troops ashore, the works at Grand Gulf itself were more formidable than had been supposed, and in the end the troops had to keep on moving downstream, fetching up at last at Hard Times plantation, twenty-odd miles farther south; and from there, finally, they had to move on another half-dozen miles until they reached the western bank of the river a little distance below Grand Gulf. The transports ran the Grand Gulf batteries successfully, and soldiers on the bank cheered mightily as the steamers swung in to make a landing, while a band at headquarters played “The Red, White and Blue.” Grant had moments of doubt, and he expressed these in a letter to Sherman on April 24:

I foresee great difficulties in our present position, but it will not do to let these retard any movements. In the first place, if a battle should take place we are necessarily very destitute of all preparations for taking care of wounded men. All the little extras for this purpose were put on board the
Tigress
, the only boat that was lost. The line from here to Milliken's Bend is a long one for the transportation of supplies and to defend, and an impossible one for the transportation of wounded men. The water in the bayous is falling very rapidly, out of all proportion to the fall in the river, so that it is exceedingly doubtful whether they can be made use of for the purposes of navigation.

Sherman, still encamped above Vicksburg, was to watch things closely; if Pemberton should weaken his forces there Snyder's Bluff might become vulnerable, and if so Sherman must be ready to pounce on it.
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One thing that could not be overlooked was the obvious fact that if Pemberton caught on to what was being attempted he
could easily move plenty of troops down to Grand Gulf to meet the Federal thrust. It was necessary to deceive him, and Grant had been giving thought to this. As early as the middle of February Grant had felt that a fast cavalry raid down the interior of Mississippi would give the Confederates something to think about, and among the troops in Tennessee he had an officer who looked capable of leading such a raid—an unlikely character named Benjamin Grierson, who had been a small-town music teacher and bandmaster in Illinois before the war and who now was colonel commanding a cavalry brigade in the area of La Grange, Tennessee. Grierson marched south with three regiments, about seventeen hundred men, on April 17, the day after Porter's ironclads ran the Vicksburg batteries, and went driving south twenty-five miles west of the line of the Mobile and Ohio Railroad, one hundred miles east of the river. His orders were simple: he was to destroy railroad track and supply dumps, stir up all the alarm he could, creating if possible the impression that a big move was in preparation, and he was to keep going until he reached Banks's lines at Baton Rouge, four hundred miles to the south. Grierson handled the assignment smartly. Pemberton was short of cavalry just then—most of his mounted troops had been sent away to help Bragg, in central Tennessee—and he was never able to catch up with Grierson or to find out precisely what the raid meant. By May 2 Grierson had his men safe at Baton Rouge; he had done substantial damage to Pemberton's communications, he had compelled various Confederate units to wear themselves out chasing him, and he had stirred up precisely the sort of confused alarm which Grant had intended.
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Meanwhile, there was another diversion. McClernand's corps was downstream, and McPherson's was on its heels, but Sherman's men were still in camp by the river above Vicksburg, and to Sherman, on April 27, Grant sent word that a convincing feint in the direction of Snyder's Bluff might deceive Pemberton as to the real direction of the Federal offensive. Grant did not give Sherman positive orders; the move might easily deceive the soldiers themselves and the people back home as well as the Confederates in Vicksburg, and the newspapers would probably be happy enough
to accuse Sherman of having led the army into another defeat. Grant worded his letter carefully:

The effect of a heavy demonstration in that direction would be good as far as the enemy are concerned, but I am loth to order it, because it would be hard to make our own troops understand that only a demonstration was intended and our people at home would characterize it as a repulse. I therefore leave it to you whether to make such a demonstration.… I shall probably move on Grand Gulf tomorrow.

Sherman remained skeptical about the Grand Gulf maneuver but he was indignant at the notion that he might need protection against criticism. To a staff officer he remarked: “Does General Grant think I care what the newspapers say?” He promptly wrote to Grant, pledging full co-operation and bristling with angry contempt for public opinion:

We will make as strong a demonstration as possible. The troops will all understand the purpose and will not be hurt by the repulse. The people of the country must find out the truth as best they can; it is none of their business. You are engaged in a hazardous enterprise, and, for good reasons, wish to divert attention; that is sufficient for me, and it shall be done.

He outlined his plans in detail, and then took a final side-swipe at the newspapers:

I will use troops that I know will trust us and not be humbugged by a repulse. The men have sense, and will trust us. As to the reports in newspapers, we must scorn them, else they will ruin us and our country. They are as much enemies to good government as the secesh, and between the two I like the secesh best, because they are a brave, open enemy and not a set of sneaking, croaking scoundrels.
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Sherman's troops put on a good show. Light gunboats and transports went puffing up the Yazoo, troops were landed and put to maneuvering as if unlimited numbers were about to make a frontal attack on the bluffs, and the Confederate commander there called for reinforcements. Troops that were to move south to meet
Grant were delayed, there was a deal of frenzied countermarching and preparation—and far down the river Porter's ironclads steamed in and opened a five-hour bombardment of the Grand Gulf batteries, while the transports waited on the western shore to bring the troops across.

The Grand Gulf batteries were tough: with powerful guns well emplaced forty feet above the water, served by good gunners; they could not be beaten down, and it became clear that troops could not land in front of them to take the bluffs by storm. At the end of April 29 the fleet drew away, somewhat battered, and it was time to make another revision in the plan.

Grant made it promptly. He would put his army across the river below Grand Gulf, move inland, and then march north, cutting off Grand Gulf and taking it from its unprotected rear. His maps were inadequate, and no one in the army knew much about the country east of the river. It was known, however, that an army approaching Grand Gulf from the east or south would have to cross a stream known as Bayou Pierre, which came in from the east, and this stream could best be crossed, apparently, at or near the town of Port Gibson, which was ten miles southeast of Grand Gulf. The immediate objective thus seemed to be Port Gibson, but simply to land troops on the eastern bank of the Mississippi and send them floundering off through the trackless bottom lands was to invite disaster. To get to Port Gibson a guide was needed.

After dark a detachment of Illinois soldiers rowed across the river, scouted about among the farms, and at last seized a Negro slave who had lived in that vicinity all of his life, knew how the roads went, and seemed to be a cut or two above the illiterate, Bress-de-Lawd plantation hand of tradition. He did not especially want to be carried off by the Union soldiers but he was overpowered and put in a rowboat, and after a time the men brought him to Grant's tent. Grant satisfied himself that the Negro was familiar with the country back of Grand Gulf, explained briefly where he wanted to go, and then led him to a table where there was a map.

“Look here,” said Grant. “Tell me where this road leads to—starting where you see my finger here on the map and running down that way.”

“Dat road fetches up at Bayou Pierre, but you can't go that way, 'kase it's plum full of backwater.”

Grant put it up to him.

“Which road would you take if you were going to lead me, followed by a great army and trains of loaded wagons and artillery—which road would you take to reach Bayou Pierre?”

“Dar is only one way, General, and dat is by Bruinsburg, eight miles furder down. Dar you can leave de boats and the men can walk on high ground all the way. De best houses and plantations in all de country are dar, sah, all along dat road.”
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Promptly on the morning of April 30 the transports went puffing out into the river, drifting downstream and coming in to the eastern shore at Bruinsburg, ten miles below Grand Gulf. The troops took to the road for Port Gibson—all of McClernand's corps, and a division of McPherson's—and many years afterward Grant told how the crossing struck him at the time:

When this was effected I felt a degree of relief scarcely ever equalled since.… I was now in the enemy's country, with a vast river and the stronghold of Vicksburg between me and my base of supplies. But I was on dry ground on the same side of the river with the enemy. All the campaigns, labors, hardships and exposures from the month of December previous to this time that had been made and endured were for the accomplishment of this one object.
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