Grant Moves South (67 page)

Many days cannot elapse before the battle will begin which is to decide the fate of Vicksburg, but it is impossible to predict how long it may last. I would urgently request, therefore, that you join me or send all the force you can spare to co-operate in the great struggle for opening the Mississippi river. My means of gaining information from Port Hudson are not good, but I shall hope, even before this reaches Baton Rouge, to hear of your forces being on the way here.
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On May 12, two days after he sent this letter to Banks, Grant began to cut the regular communication with Grand Gulf. McPherson got his advance up to Raymond, and McPherson's men had a brisk fight there, driving the badly outnumbered Confederates out of the town. When the news reached Grant—who was some miles away, with Sherman's corps—it brought him to his final decision. So far he had carefully guarded the lower crossings of the Big Black, to keep Pemberton from getting in his rear and breaking his sketchy communications with Grand Gulf. Now he would use everything in a drive straight at Jackson, maneuvering in the hope of destroying Pemberton's army in the open field, and letting the lower crossings of the Big Black go unguarded—if Pemberton wanted to get in his rear and cut his communications he was welcome to try, since there would be no rear, and no communications. Grant got off a quick dispatch to Halleck, warning him that he would be out of touch for a while: “As I shall communicate with Grand Gulf no more, except it becomes necessary to send a train with heavy escort, you may not hear from me again for several days.” Then he sent word to McPherson to push on for Jackson, and ordered Sherman to follow. McClernand was to take position along a stream known as Fourteen-Mile Creek, with his outposts near Edwards Station.
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McPherson put on the pressure. Men of the 20th Ohio remembered that they had halted just west of Raymond, to stack their guns and light fires to cook supper; the order to move on reached them just as the meal was cooked, but before anyone had had a chance to eat it, and the men went tramping through Raymond, coffeepots and frying pans in hand, trailing a tantalizing odor of fried bacon. They went on through Raymond, Sherman moved east on parallel roads, and McClernand disengaged his pickets from the Edwards Station line and followed after. It began to rain early in the morning, and on May 14 McPherson's and Sherman's men went splashing across the fields through ankle-deep water to attack the capital of Mississippi.

Joe Johnston, weak from a spell in sickbed, had reached Jackson the day before. He found 6000 soldiers in town, and since Grant had fully 25,000 men moving in to the assault Johnston could not hope to do anything but fight a delaying action. His men held Grant off for most of the day, but more than that they could not do; and what Johnston wanted was a delay of a week or more—that, and some chance to bring his own troops and Pemberton's together in one solid mass. Reinforcements were on the way, from the east; Johnston would have 15,000 men in a few days, and 9000 more a little after that, and he sent word to Pemberton to meet him on or near the railroad line so that they could put up a real fight. But Pemberton, who conceived that he was not allowed to evacuate either Vicksburg or Port Hudson even for the sake of victory in the field, was unable to concentrate his own troops. With some 23,000 men he was now prowling forward in the Edwards Station area, hoping to compel Grant to retreat by striking his rear and his line of supply.
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Johnston moved his troops off to the north, and the Federals marched triumphantly into Jackson.

Among those who entered in triumph was Master Fred Grant, presumably still girt with sash and sword. He had been with his father and Sherman during the fight, and when the Confederates retreated Fred broke away and went trotting into the capital on his own hook, heading straight for the Statehouse. In the town he ran into a column of infantry in butternut—Confederate troops,
marching out to the North—and he huddled in a side street until they had passed. Then he saw one of McPherson's staff officers, riding hard for the Statehouse, carrying a United States flag. Sensing what the officer was going to do, Fred rode after him, but the officer was not cordial; he hurried on ahead, got into the Statehouse, and hoisted the flag. Fred saw a cavalcade of Federals approaching, and galloped to meet it—his father, with a cavalry escort, leading the infantry advanced into town.
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The soldiers were whooping with joy. They jeered mightily as they picked up copies of a local newspaper boasting that Yankee vandals would never pollute the streets of Jackson with their presence, and a gunner wrote: “If there ever was a jubilant army, Grant's army in Jackson was that night.” The men began to realize that this campaign was something special and that they were being led with cold audacity. Seizing Jackson, they had left a strong army in their rear and had cut it off from reinforcements; if things went on as they had begun, the Rebels would have to retire into Vicksburg, but if anything went wrong Grant's whole army would probably be destroyed. Proudly, these Middle Western soldiers told one another how captured Confederates, who had fought heretofore in the Eastern theater, admitted that when the fighting in the Jackson works began the Confederates had quickly realized “they were not fighting New York troops.”
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There would be no lingering in Jackson. Grant knew as well as Johnston that strong Confederate reinforcements would show up before long and that it was up to him to settle the campaign before these could arrive. (He also enjoyed a stroke of luck, just here. A Union agent in Confederate uniform, riding as courier for Johnston's troops, brought to Grant Johnston's order telling Pemberton to meet him somewhere near the railroad line.) McPherson, accordingly, was sent doubling back to the town of Clinton, eight miles west of Jackson, and McClernand was told to move his corps to Bolton, another half-dozen miles to the west of Clinton.

Above everything else, Grant now wanted to keep Johnston from joining Pemberton, and his orders to McClernand set forth his anxiety: “It is evidently the design of the enemy to get north of us and cross the Black river and beat us into Vicksburg. We must
not allow them to do this. Turn all your forces toward Bolton station and make all dispatch in getting there. Move troops by the most direct road from wherever they may be on receipt of this order.” Grant also took the time to write a wire to Halleck, telling him what had happened and explaining his refusal to try to meet Banks at Port Hudson with the all-sufficient remark: “I could not take the time.”
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Sherman was to remain in Jackson, destroying railroads, bridges, factories and military supplies—a task his soldiers performed with an uninhibited vigor that foreshadowed some of the things that would happen later on, in Georgia. Grant stayed in Jackson overnight, sleeping (as he was told) in the hotel room Johnston had occupied the night before. On the morning of May 15, Grant rode west to join McPherson.

Things were breaking for him. He knew where his enemies were and what they were planning, and his own army was posted where it could intervene effectively. The roads were muddy from the heavy rains, but the troops were in high spirits and went tramping along with enthusiasm. Reinforcements were near at hand: Frank Blair, with Sherman's missing division, had crossed the Mississippi and was not a dozen miles away from Bolton. Also, while at Jackson Grant got final and significant assurance that he and he alone was boss of this army. Dana showed him a telegram just received from Secretary Stanton:

General Grant has full and absolute authority to enforce his own commands, and to remove any person who, by ignorance, inaction, or any other cause, interferes with or delays his operations. He has the full confidence of the Government, is expected to enforce his authority, and will be firmly and heartily supported; but he will be responsible for any failure to exert his powers. You may communicate this to him.
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Whatever might lie ahead, Grant knew that he no longer needed to handle McClernand with gloves on.

Pemberton, belatedly, was moving east to make a fight of it. With some 23,000 men he crossed the Big Black, proposing to go somewhere south of the railroad line to strike Grant's rear. He
moved reluctantly, and only after a council of war had considered the matter, for he believed that to cross the river was to invite defeat; and when he moved he left ten thousand men or more in the vicinity of Vicksburg, disregarding the fact that if he did fight Grant he would need to have his entire force on hand. When the move was well under way, Pemberton received a second order from Johnston to come north of the railroad so that his and Johnston's forces could be united, and he was in the middle of this countermove when Grant's troops began hurrying west.
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McClernand's advance made contact with Pemberton's forces southeast of Edwards Station on the morning of May 16, and the severest battle of the campaign soon began.

McClernand's leading division was led by Brigadier General Alvin P. Hovey, a former Indiana lawyer who, as Dana remarked, devoted himself to soldiering “as if he expected to spend his life in it.” Hovey was marching directly west from Bolton, and when he found armed Confederates in his front he sent his mounted escort forward to see what was up. The Confederates were in position on a rugged plateau known as Champion Hill; Hovey shook out a skirmish line, sent it forward, and followed it with a regular line of battle.

Champion Hill rises one hundred and forty feet above the surrounding country, and has steep sides, cut up with ravines and little gullies, overgrown with dense woods. The fields which the approaching Federals had to cross were under sharp fire, and the country was so broken that it was almost impossible for Hovey or anyone else to tell just how the terrain lay or where the enemy was posted. Hovey's infantry plowed straight ahead, moved six hundred yards up the slope and through the woods, seized some guns and a good bag of prisoners, and then met a furious Confederate counterattack which drove it back in some confusion. The 24th Iowa, which had seized a battery in a wild bayonet charge, promptly lost the guns and had to retreat; one of Hovey's brigadiers described this part of the fight as “one of the most obstinate and murderous conflicts of the war,” another testified that it was an “unequal, terrible and most sanguinary” struggle, and Hovey sent back a desperate plea for reinforcements.
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The rest of McClernand's corps was not on hand, but McPherson
's advance was coming up. John Logan's division had gone into action on low ground off to Hovey's right, at an angle; as a matter of fact it was out on the Confederate flank, posted so that a direct advance would have cut off Pemberton's line of retreat, but nobody was quite aware of the fact. Grant, who had reached the scene, did not see it himself, and he sent one of Logan's brigades over to help Hovey, following it a little later by telling Logan to bring over the rest of his men. Other reinforcements came up from McPherson's second division, led today by Brigadier General Marcellus M. Crocker—a frail, tubercular man, whom Grant considered one of the best division commanders in the Army; a man who was often on the sicklist but never, as Grant testified, when a battle was developing.

The reinforcements went up the hill, picked up Hovey's men just as they were about to be driven down the slopes, and moved on into action. For a time the battle was a formless melee in which, as one of Hovey's officers said, Federals and Confederates took turns in driving one another. A colonel in one of Logan's brigades wrote that the rifle fire was so intense that a staff officer who came forward to give him an order kept shading his eyes with his hand, precisely like a man who is facing into a driving rain. The Iowa regiment which had been driven away from the captured battery rallied, charged and retook the guns—and suddenly, by the middle of the afternoon, Pemberton's army broke and moved off in rapid retreat. It was obviously half-demoralized; a division selected to act as rear guard got completely separated from the rest of the army, lost guns and men when it tried to move back along inadequate plantation roads, and finally went drifting off to the south and east, its baggage train and even its cooking utensils lost in the rout. It wound up, after an all-night march through the fringes of the Union camps, somewhere south of Jackson, and Pemberton saw it no more.
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Grant pushed his men on as long as the light lasted, and Pemberton got west of the Big Black, leaving a detachment to make a fight for the crossings. Pemberton was gloomy; as he had foreseen, he had run into a shattering defeat, and as he headed back for the Vicksburg lines he reflected that his career was in ruins. (Grant noted that even in defeat Pemberton played the wrong
card: he could, said Grant, have made a night march, swung around to the north, and moved east to join Johnston. This would have given up Vicksburg but, said Grant, “It would have been his proper move … and the one Johnston would have made if he had been in Pemberton's place.”) Grant was not satisfied with his own handling of the battle, for that matter. If he had been able to bring the rest of McClernand's corps into action, he said, or if he had realized just how the land lay and so had used Logan's division to the best advantage, he might have obliterated Pemberton's whole army.
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As always, anything short of complete destruction of the enemy struck Grant as an imperfect victory.

But if the victory had been incomplete it was nevertheless decisive. Pemberton had lost 3800 men and 27 guns, his army was on the verge of demoralization, and, once and for all, he had been isolated and driven back into the fortress from which the rest of the Confederacy would be unable to extricate him. From now on, Johnston could do no more than hover on the perimeter of things. He wrote Pemberton that if the Yankees moved on and occupied the works at Snyder's Bluff Vicksburg could not be held and he added: “If, therefore, you are invested in Vicksburg you must ultimately surrender. Under such circumstances, instead of losing both troops and place, we must, if possible, save the troops. If it is not too late, evacuate Vicksburg and its dependences and march to the northeast.”
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