Grant Moves South (72 page)

So the conference ended. The cease-fire arrangement continued, and as dusk came Grant called a meeting of all corps and division commanders who were in the immediate vicinity—the nearest thing to a regular council of war, he said, that he ever had. Northern and Southern soldiers wandered out between the lines by hundreds for a chat. One Federal private wrote that “several brothers met, and any quantity of cousins. It was a strange scene.”
²
Meanwhile, Grant and his generals considered what ought to be done.

There was a good deal to discuss. Every man present knew, as the leading Confederates also knew, that Vicksburg was doomed. If it did not give up now it would almost certainly be taken by storm once the July 6 assault took place, and in any case there simply was not enough food in the city to enable the defense to be prolonged indefinitely. But Pemberton was flatly refusing to accept the unconditional surrender proposition. (It developed later that his intelligence service had been intercepting and decoding messages
wigwagged back and forth between Grant and Porter, and knew that to ship thirty thousand prisoners up the river to Northern prison camps would put an excessive strain on the available river transportation.) The question, then, was whether it would be better to offer no terms and pay in time and bloodshed for a delayed victory, or to recede from the famous formula and give the beaten General something he would immediately accept.

It came down, at last, to a question of whether Grant should agree to parole for Pemberton's army. Paroled soldiers were in a class apart. They belonged to the Army, they were supposed to stay in camp, subject to full military discipline, but they could not be used; they were uniformed ghosts, idling their lives away until the intricate machinery of exchange permitted them to be put back in the ranks of the fighting men. In an era wherein warring governments could still find a narrow area of mutual trust and confidence, they were men placed on the shelf; out of the war, but still liable to be drawn back into it whenever the infinite mathematics of two warring high commands put them where the chances of war would bear on them again without restriction.

In theory, Confederate soldiers paroled at Vicksburg were just as much prisoners of war as Confederates who had been shipped North to the squalid camps in Illinois and Ohio. But nobody trusted his foes beyond endurance, in this war. To put thirty thousand soldiers on parole was to take a certain chance. It was to gamble that no one on the other side would cut any corners or pull any fast ones; it was to suppose that men fighting for self-preservation would honor a pledge written bloodlessly on flimsy paper, keeping a whole army out of the fight until such time as some other army, similarly held inactive, could be permitted to go back into action. The whole arrangement rested on the assumption, still valid but getting paler day by day, that men who were at each other's throats would continue to abide by the rules.

A gamble: but examined very closely, a gamble that should win. Paroled soldiers were an immense problem to their own authorities. Civil War armies were badly disciplined and loosely indoctrinated. Paroled men were very hard to handle, because the soldiers assumed that when they had been captured and paroled they were out of the war. The officer in charge of Northern parolees
had written, less than three months before the surrender at Vicksburg, that “there are no troops more difficult to control, officers and men, than those on parole,” and had complained that the difficulty of the problem increased in direct ratio to the number on parole. Lew Wallace, who was presiding over camps full of such people back in Indiana, remarked that men on parole “become lousy, ragged, despairing and totally demoralized,” and a citizen of Columbus, Ohio, observing the habits of paroled Unionists in that Northern capital, had told Secretary Stanton that “unless the paroling system is abandoned we will be beaten by the number of paroled prisoners we shall have.” Another Federal officer who had to deal with this problem had remarked that paroled men felt themselves out from under every sort of discipline, and said that “a spirit of insubordination, bordering on mutiny” was their chief characteristic.
³
All things considered, dropping a large lump of paroled soldiers in the heart of the Confederacy might do the Confederates more harm than good.

Long afterward, Grant wrote that he himself had favored paroling Pemberton's soldiers but that most of his officers had opposed him. This, apparently, was rationalization after the fact. At the time he seems to have hoped that he could force Pemberton to make an unconditional surrender, in which case the Vicksburg garrison would have gone north as prisoners or been paroled on the spot at the Federal commander's option. As evidence, there is the message Grant sent to Porter some time late on this third of July:

I have given the rebels a few hours to consider the proposition of surrendering; all to be paroled here, the officers to take only side-arms. My own feelings are against this, but all my officers think the advantage gained by having our forces and transports for immediate purposes more than counterbalance the effect of sending them north.

Dana wrote that the paroling plan was proposed by McPherson and that all of Grant's officers but Steele favored it; Grant, he said, “reluctantly gave way” to the arguments, and finally sent off a letter to Pemberton proposing that the Confederates stack their arms outside of their lines, give their paroles, and then go off weaponless
to such Southern internment camps as the Confederate authorities might suggest. In any event, this was the program that was at last adopted. Grant was canny enough to have Rawlins send a note to Ord and McPherson:

Permit some discreet men on picket tonight to communicate to the enemy's pickets the fact that General Grant has offered, in case Pemberton surrenders, to parole all the officers and men and to permit them to go home from here.
⁴

Grant, as a matter of fact, made a virtue out of necessity. Judging by Northern experience, the paroled men would be out of control. They would fade away, drifting off to their homes as fast as their legs would take them, and the Confederacy would be able to get very few of them back on the firing lines, exchange or no exchange. The Federals would be spared the labor and expense of sending their thirty thousand prisoners to Illinois and Ohio; the Vicksburg captives would be a problem for the Confederacy, not for the North, and in the long run their presence in the South would help to show that the Confederate government could not control its own people.… So Grant sent his revised terms off to Pemberton shortly before midnight:

In conformity with the agreement of this afternoon I will submit the following proposition for the surrender of Vicksburg, public stores, etc. On your accepting the terms proposed I will march in one division as guard, and take possession at 8
A.M
. tomorrow. As soon as rolls can be made out and paroles be signed by officers and men, you will be allowed to march out of our lines, the officers taking with them their side-arms and clothing; and the field, staff and cavalry officers one horse each. The rank and file will be allowed all their clothing, but no other property. If these conditions are accepted, any amount of rations you may deem necessary can be taken from the stores you now have [a pointed reference to Pemberton's boast that his supplies would enable him to hold out indefinitely] and also the necessary cooking utensils for preparing them. Thirty wagons also, counting two-horse or mule teams as one, will be allowed to transport such articles as cannot be carried along. The same conditions will be allowed to all sick and wounded
officers and soldiers as fast as they become able to travel. The paroles for these latter must be signed, however, whilst officers present are authorized to sign the roll of prisoners.
⁵

Whether Grant imposed this plan on his own reluctant generals or was persuaded by them to accept it, he quickly concluded that it made a great deal of sense. Many of Pemberton's men came from the southwestern part of the Confederacy, and, said Grant, “I knew many of them were tired of the war and would get home just as soon as they could.” Taken to a parole camp, most of them would simply desert; to have sent them North “would have used all the transportation we had for a month.” There was also another consideration: “The men had behaved so well that I did not want to humiliate them. I believed that consideration for their feelings would make them less dangerous foes during the continuance of hostilities, and better citizens after the war was over.”
⁶

Pemberton's reply came back during the small hours. He accepted the terms, but proposed minor amendments: his army would march out, stack arms in front of the trenches and then go away, officers would retain their personal property, and all rights and property of citizens would be respected. These amendments Grant refused to accept. Each brigade, he said, might move out and stack arms in front of its own trenches, but thereafter all must go back in the city and stay there as prisoners until the long process of parole should be completed. Officers' rights in respect to their own property would be as originally stated—side arms, baggage, and, for mounted officers, one horse apiece; and although Grant would protect citizens against “undue annoyance or loss,” he would make no stipulation regarding treatment of their private property—which, among other items, would include large numbers of slaves. Pemberton could have until nine o'clock in the morning to accept these terms. If he did not accept, the Federal Army would start to fight again.

And so at last it was arranged. On the morning of July 4, white flags fluttered over the Confederate works. The cease-fire became permanent, and John Logan was ordered to march his division into the city, post guards to keep unauthorized persons from entering or leaving, and take charge of captured people and property.
Meanwhile, Sherman was to move at once to drive Johnston off and relieve the captured town of any threat from the east.

Grant had had Sherman's move in mind from the moment the surrender negotiations began. On July 3 he notified Sherman that surrender was imminent, and told him to strike the moment it became a fact: “I want Johnston broken up as effectually as possible, and roads destroyed. I cannot say where you will find the most effective place to strike; I would say move so as to strike Canton and Jackson, whichever might seem most desirable.” A little later he amplified this: “When we go in I want you to drive Johnston from the Mississippi Central railroad; destroy bridges as far as Grenada with your cavalry, and do the enemy all the harm possible. You can make your own arrangements and have all the troops of my command except one corps—McPherson's, say. I must have some troops to send to Banks, to use against Port Hudson.” On July 4 a telegram went to Sherman as soon as Pemberton's acceptance of terms reached Grant's headquarters. Sherman replied in a characteristic note that was pure rhapsody:

I can hardly contain myself. Surely I will not punish any soldier for being “unco happy” this most glorious anniversary of the birth of a nation whose sire and father was a Washington. Did I not know the honesty, modesty and purity of your nature, I would be tempted to follow the example of my standard enemies of the press in indulging in wanton flattery; but as a man and soldier and ardent friend of yours, I warn you against the incense of flattery that will fill our land from one extreme to the other. Be natural and yourself, and this glittering flattery will be as the passing breeze of the sea on a warm summer day. To me the delicacy with which you have treated a brave but deluded enemy is more eloquent than the most gorgeous oratory of an Everett.

This is a day of jubilee, a day of rejoicing to the faithful, and I would like to hear the shout of my old and patient troops; but I must be a Gradgrind—I must have facts, knocks and must go on. Already my orders are out to give one big huzza and sling the knapsack for new fields.… I did want rest, but I ask nothing until the Mississippi is ours, and Sunday and July 4 are nothing to Americans until the river of our greatness is free as God made it.
⁷

In every army there is always somebody who does not get the word. So it was here; a blameless engineer officer and a sweating work detail toiled vigorously all through the night of July 3, completing the 175-foot tunnel that had been dug under a Confederate salient in preparation for the big assault of July 6. On the morning of July 4 this officer was busy, far underground, getting a ton of powder tamped down in the magazine—until, at last, somebody remembered him, and a headquarters courier reached him with verbal orders to stop everything: the Rebels had surrendered, the shooting had stopped, this mine would never be used.
⁸

Grant and his staff rode into the captured city shortly after the final terms had been accepted. They met Pemberton in a house on the Jackson road, and—according to Colonel Wilson—their reception was glacial. No one offered Grant a seat, and when he remarked that he would like a drink of water someone ungraciously remarked that he could go where the water was and help himself. Wilson angrily recorded that the behavior of Pemberton and his officers “was unhandsome and disagreeable in the extreme,” but he noted that three young West Pointers on Pemberton's staff did their best to be courteous, “in recognition of which their haversacks and canteens were well filled with provisions and whisky when they bade us goodby.” If all of this bothered Grant he gave no sign of it; he rode on, presently, and went down to the river to see Admiral Porter, from whom he had just received a reassuring note:

I congratulate you on getting Vicksburg on any honorable terms. You would find it a troublesome task to transport so many men, and I think you will be left so free to act it will counterbalance any little concession you may seem to make to the garrison.
⁹

The “little concession” that had been made looked larger to some of the men on the scene than it looked to men at a distance. Colonel Wilson, indeed, complained that Grant had in effect given Pemberton all Pemberton asked for, and considered that the General had made a serious mistake, and Halleck chided Grant mildly
for letting the captured army go home on parole; but the nation as a whole, then and thereafter, recognized the achievement for what it was—a sweeping victory that fatally limited the Confederacy and pointed unmistakably toward final triumph, a victory which was the enduring capstone to one of the most daring and brilliant campaigns of the entire war. The Confederacy had lost a citadel which had to be held; losing it, it had lost the Mississippi River, and all the country to the west. (Port Hudson, hopelessly cut off, surrendered to Banks as soon as authentic news of the fall of Vicksburg came down; Grant sent Banks a division, as soon as he could get the men on steamboats, but the reinforcements were not needed.) Even more important, the Confederacy had lost an irreplaceable army. All in all, Grant had taken more than 40,000 Southern soldiers out of circulation. Nearly 31,000 became prisoners when Vicksburg fell, 6000 had been captured in the campaign before the siege began, and an equal number had been battle casualties. (Five or six thousand more would be lost in the surrender of Port Hudson.) Neither then nor later could the hard-pressed Southland afford a loss of that magnitude. Much war material had also been lost: 172 cannon and 60,000 rifles came into Grant's possession when his troops entered Vicksburg, and many of the rifles were better than the ones Grant's own men were carrying—so much so that he re-equipped many regiments with captured arms.