Never Call Retreat (13 page)

If a Federal army could get on the Red River and stay there, he said, suppressing guerrillas and enabling planters to send produce direct to the New Orleans market, something between 50,000 and 150,000 bales would be brought into circulation. This would make millions of dollars for the government, the Red River people would find that Federal rule meant money in the pocket and so would abandon the Secessionist heresy, and domestic and foreign manufacturers would be partly relieved from "the cotton starvation under which they are suffering." General Banks wanted to know how the administration felt about it.
¹¹

The administration was both repelled and fascinated; and in the end the lure of Red River cotton would waste an army and a fleet, destroy most of General Banks' military reputation, and make this part of the war look like nothing nobler than a gigantic cotton raid. These fruits, however, were for the future. In this winter and spring of 1863 Banks' troops campaigned laboriously along the Atchafalaya and the Teche, fighting against the landscape almost as much as against Secession. (The ground was swampy, rivers were numerous, water was high and the objectives were diverse.) They fought battles, skirmishes and the false alarms that beset green troops at night in strange country, and by late April they made it possible for Banks to go to the Red River. First, though, there was a joint army-navy nudge at Port Hudson. It did not accomplish very much, but after it was over Admiral Farragut believed that Banks had missed a fine chance. Port Hudson, said the admiral, might have been had.

The admiral, to be sure, was impatient. He had had an unhappy winter; neither he nor his ships were being used as he felt they should be used, and he was eager to wipe out the memory of the loss of
Harriet Lane
at Galveston. To a fellow sailor he wrote angrily that this was "not only the most unfortunate thing that has ever happened to the Navy, but the most shameful and pusillanimous"; and it was followed by other misfortunes. The blockading flotilla at Mobile somehow let C.S.S.
Florida
slip out in mid-January to begin a spectacular career as a commerce raider, and Farragut's plan to recapture Galveston failed when U.S.S.
Hatteras
was sunk by a new, English-built Confederate cruiser named
Alabama
—a ship the Navy would be a long time forgetting. Farragut wrote: "I hope we shall soon have some good luck, for I am sick of disasters," and early in the spring he began peering up the Mississippi to see if good luck might not be found there.
¹²

The Navy's luck recently had been no better on the river than on the gulf. Rear Admiral David D. Porter, commanding the flotilla that was attached to Grant's expedition above Vicksburg, sent the ram
Queen of the West
down past the Vicksburg batteries in broad daylight on February 2. This craft reached the mouth of the Red River and seized a number of Confederate supply steamers, doing so well that two weeks later Porter sent the new ironclad
Indianola
down to help. But
Queen of the West
meanwhile ran aground and was captured, and using this vessel and some of their own gunboats the Confederates then captured
Indianola
as well, and now they had a fairly formidable little navy on the river between Vicksburg and Port Hudson. Farragut growled that "Porter has allowed his boats to come down one at a time & they have been captured by the enemy, which compels me to go up & recapture the whole or be sunk in the attempt, the whole country will be in arms if we do not do something."
¹³
To Banks, Farragut said that they simply must get past Port Hudson.

The situation was presently made easier by a farce-comedy sequence. The Confederates on the river understood that Porter was getting one or more of the new, supposedly irresistible ironclad monitors, and Porter took an old scow, had his carpenters build a false turret-and-pilot-house superstructure (at a total cost of $8.61) and sent the thing drifting downstream in dead of night. The Vicksburg batteries fired at it without effect, the scow continued down the river, and the word went out that a live Yankee monitor was loose. Panicky, the crew of captured
Indianola
ran their vessel ashore and blew her up,
Queen of the West
fled incontinently down to the Louisiana waterways, the fake ironclad came to rest peacefully on a sandbar, and affairs on the Mississippi returned to the status quo. But it seemed clear that a Federal squadron near the mouth of the Red River could do the Confederacy much harm, and Farragut determined to go ahead.
¹⁴

Over a bottle of wine in his cabin on
Hartford,
Farragut spoke his mind to General Banks,

"General," he said, "we have more men and more resources than these traitors and five times as much money. We must beat them in the end, but we must do it by poking them, butting them whenever we see them. By God, shall a United States ship of war hesitate to go in and destroy a dozen of these wretched Mississippi steamers? I am sick of hearing my officers talk of cotton-clad boats and impregnable rams. They should pitch in and destroy them."

At this point, apparently, the elderly admiral paused to pour another drink. He went on: "What matters it, General, whether you and I are killed or not? We came here to die. It is our business and must happen sooner or later. We must fight this thing out until there is no more than one man left and that man must be a Union man. Here's to his health."
¹⁵

The attempt was made on the night of March 14. Banks was ready to do no more than make a diversionary attack, but that did not stop Farragut. He had four sea-going cruisers,
Hartford, Richmond, Monongahela,
and
Mississippi,
along with gunboats
Albatross, Genesee,
and
Kineo,
and while Banks was starting his columns up toward the Port Hudson lines the squadron got under way.

It ran into trouble at once. The current was strong, the river made a hairpin turn right where the powerful Confederate batteries could do their worst, General Gardner had placed locomotive headlights to play on the water and light up the targets, and the army never did get into action.
Mississippi
ran aground and was destroyed,
Monongahela
also went aground, stayed there under fire for nearly half an hour, and at last staggered back downstream,
Richmond
was disabled by a shell through her steam pipes, and only
Hartford
and
Albatross
got past the batteries and went on to safety upstream. Farragut was isolated, he had acted without orders, and for all he knew he might be in line for a sharp reprimand from the Navy Department. Still, he did have
Hartford
and
Albatross
up above the batteries, and he set to work to patrol the river, lamenting that if he had only one more warship he could make the blockade of Port Hudson air tight.

Not long after this an army officer at Baton Rouge wrote to him commiserating him on the disaster that had befallen his squadron and offering any kind of help the army could supply. Farragut replied that as far as the disaster was concerned, men in battle had to take their chances and "were we to be deterred by the apprehension of such accidents there would be no battles fought." Port Hudson, he added, would surely have fallen if Banks' army had attacked while the fleet was engaging the water batteries. He would be glad to get further assistance from Banks' army, he said, "but I look for General Grant's forces before that day."
¹⁶

2. In Motion in All Directions

FROM THE BEGINNING, General Johnston suspected that the Federals in the Mississippi Valley held a winning hand if they played it right. That Van Dorn and Forrest had made Grant retreat from Oxford was of course good, and Sherman's repulse at Chickasaw Bayou was still better; but even before the rejoicing had died down Johnston told President Davis that "it would be very embarrassing" if Grant brought all the rest of his army down to join Sherman, whose force was resting unhappily at Milliken's Bend. Johnston felt that the Confederacy had too much ground to cover here, and that the Federal commander could always concentrate, at one pressure point or another, an army too big for the defense to dislodge.

"Should the enemy's forces be respectably handled," wrote General Johnston, "the task you have set me will be above my ability."
¹

Grant was about to make the very move that Johnston feared. He could see, as readily as his opponent could do, how this move would embarrass the Confederacy, and besides his hand was forced by the presence at Milliken's Bend of the irrepressible General McClernand.

Full of energy and resentment, McClernand reached Milliken's Bend on January 4 and informed the 30,000 Union soldiers there that they were now the Army of the Mississippi and that he was the army's commander.
²
This fractured Grant's published orders styling McClernand a corps commander in Grant's army, but Grant was many miles away. Having given himself promotion, McClernand might well make it stick if he won victories while Grant was still extricating himself from the desolation of western Tennessee. McClernand's immediate problem was to find where such a victory could be most readily won and quickly seen.

Now he was helped by a man who detested him, General Sherman, who told him about the Post of Arkansas.

Halfway between Vicksburg and Memphis the Arkansas River flows into the Mississippi from the northwest, and about fifty miles up the Arkansas the Confederates had built Fort Hindman, commonly known as the Post of Arkansas or simply as Arkansas Post. It was not part of the Vicksburg defense apparatus but it did lie on the flank of any Federal supply line that came down the Mississippi, and to knock it over would obviously be a good deed. McClernand had been talking about opening the Mississippi and cutting his way to the sea but he had not focused on anything specific; now Sherman gave him an objective and he took it with enthusiasm. He sent Grant a dispatch that spoke rather vaguely about making a diversion in Arkansas, promising to return to the big river after he accomplished his purpose; then, with the Army of the Mississippi and Porter's river fleet, he set off for Fort Hindman.

This gave Grant the impression that the ambitious McClernand had gone thrashing off into the wilds for some improbable end of his own just when it was essential that he stay at Milliken's Bend to await the advance of General Banks, who was going to be ever so much later than General Grant then supposed. Grant sent an indignant complaint to Halleck (getting in return formal authorization to remove McClernand from command if he saw fit) and he wrote a dispatch to McClernand telling that officer to get back to Vicksburg "unless you are acting under authority not derived from me."
³

Before this message reached McClernand, however, the victory had been won. Arkansas Post was well laid out and adequately garrisoned, but nobody had ever imagined that the Yankees would come after it with a whole fleet and an army of 30,000 men, and it fell on January 11 after a brisk assault and bombardment. McClernand found that he had taken nearly 4800 prisoners at a cost of about 1000 of his own men and he sent word of his victory to Grant, telling his own troops meanwhile that "a success so complete in itself has not hitherto been achieved during the war." He wanted to go on up the Arkansas and take Little Rock, which would have been another glittering victory although it would have taken him a long distance from Vicksburg; he gave it up when Porter told him there was not enough water farther up the Arkansas to float gunboats and transports, and at last McClernand got his command afloat and steamed back to Milliken's Bend.
⁴

Grant had to reverse himself: the blow at Arkansas Post had been a good move, even though it did Pemberton no especial harm. (The reversal came more easily when Grant learned that the move had been Sherman's idea in the first place.) But Grant had to be on the Mississippi himself. The big campaign against Vicksburg was going to be made from the river because the President and the Secretary of War said so. In Grant's absence McClernand would command because he ranked everyone but Grant, and the man obviously had Banks' own weakness for going off on a tangent. Grant could do nothing but make the river expedition as strong as possible and then take charge of it in person. By the end of January he had his headquarters at Young's Point, on the west bank a few miles below Milliken's Bend, and he had made it clear to McClernand that the commander of the Army of the Mississippi was Grant and nobody else. He had concentrated some 40,000 troops at Vicksburg and he had perhaps 15,000 more waiting at Memphis to come down when needed. Now his task was to find out just how the army at Milliken's Bend was going to come to grips with Pemberton.

The problem was hard because the Federal army was on the wrong side of the river. It had to be there because it could not put its camp and its base on the eastern side; there was no place to land east of the river that was not covered by Confederate guns. Before they could beat their enemies the Federals must first get at them, and to do this they had to defeat geography itself. Right here geography was very much on the side of the Southerners.

North of Vicksburg on the east side of the Mississippi, running almost all the way to Memphis, was the vast area of the Yazoo Delta, two hundred miles from north to south and up to fifty miles across; flat, swampy, seamed with rivers and bayous, black-soil farming land that had never been properly drained and was half under water. To march an army with its guns and supply trains across this land and reach the high ground east of the Yazoo and Tallahatchie rivers was wholly impossible. To be sure, the Yazoo entered the Mississippi a little below Milliken's Bend, but when Sherman tried to take this route in December he had floundered helplessly into defeat. A little farther up the Yazoo, a dozen miles north of Vicksburg, there were strong Confederate batteries at Haynes' Bluff, barring the way to Federal transports. Pemberton's northern flank looked perfectly secure.