Never Call Retreat (14 page)

The western flank was no softer. Vicksburg sprawled along the side of a long bluff, protected by numerous batteries and trenches for infantry. The Federals might have landed a storming party along the waterfront, but no one imagined that such a storming party could fight its way uphill and seize the town and its fortifications. Whatever else it might do, Grant's army could not take Vicksburg from this approach.

Before he even got to Young's Point, Grant notified Halleck that although he did not know what would have to be done he did think that "our troops must get below the city to be used effectively."
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This was sound as Gospel; unhappily, to get the army below Vicksburg looked no easier than crossing the Yazoo Delta looked. The Louisiana country west of the river was flat, crisscrossed by innumerable little streams, with wandering country roads that were utterly inadequate for the use of an army with its guns and trains; and even if the army did somehow manage to march forty or fifty miles downstream it would still be on the wrong side of the Mississippi. To fight Pemberton, Grant's army had to reach the high ground east of the river, and it could not cross the river without transports—of which the Federal government had none below Vicksburg. It was not enough for Grant to get his army south of Vicksburg; he had to get steamboats down there too, accompanied by gunboats, and the frowning batteries along the Vicksburg waterfront looked like an impassable barrier.

By logic, Grant probably should have taken the whole army back to Memphis and made one more attempt to come down overland, along the railroad line east of the Yazoo Delta. But logic was powerless now. For better or worse the government was committed to a river campaign. To retreat, confessing failure, and to start all over again would probably be too much for the Northern people to take. Grant had to solve this problem where he found it, and he found it at Milliken's Bend.

There were several things he could try, and he put the army and navy to work on all of them.

He might bypass the Vicksburg batteries by digging a canal. Right above the city the river made a 180-degree turn; opposite Vicksburg there was a narrow peninsula, four miles long by less than a mile wide, very low, protected along most of its length by levees. If the levees were cut and a ditch were dug at the base of the peninsula the river might well scour the ditch out and create a deep channel. Then gunboats and transports could float down, avoiding the Vicksburg batteries altogether, to find a proper landing place somewhere south of Pemberton's fortifications. An unproductive beginning had been made in the preceding summer, when Farragut's cruisers and a brigade of Butler's troops tried unsuccessfully to take Vicksburg. Grant remembered this, and he sent an engineer officer down to study the situation even before McClernand got back from Arkansas Post. The engineer said the thing might conceivably be done, and so in February Grant brought in dredges and a boatload of picks and shovels and put Sherman's corps to work as canal diggers.
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There were other ventures, each one requiring thousands of soldiers and sailors to work unproductively in the mud. None of these ventures looked promising, but all of them were tried more or less simultaneously.

Fifty miles above Vicksburg a placid bayou known as Lake Providence lay west of the Mississippi. Through swamps, ponds, and stagnant rivers it seemed to offer a waterway which, after wandering halfway across Louisiana, led at last into the Red River, and if this waterway could be widened, deepened and cleared of dead logs so that steamboats could use it the army could float along and get into the Mississippi not far above Port Hudson. Up to Lake

Providence came engineers, followed by working parties with full equipment, and another job of canal digging got under way.

More than a hundred miles above Lake Providence, on the east side of the Mississippi, there was a desolate expanse of mud, water, and trees known as Yazoo Pass. In the old days the Mississippi used to discharge flood waters here, and some years before the war men had built a levee to keep the Yazoo Delta from being drowned. Now details came to blow up the levee, and a torrent of foaming brown water went spilling off through the pass and on into the Coldwater River; and after the turbulence subsided a little, gunboats and transports went through, seeking to go on to the Tallahatchie River and from that into the Yazoo itself. This waterway was exceedingly roundabout, and it was even less simple than it looked, because many large trees had to be hauled out of the channel and for miles the boats cruised along rivers so narrow the growth on the banks knocked down their smokestacks. The route was a sailor's nightmare, and the officer Porter put in charge of this flotilla went half out of his mind, collapsed physically, and presently died in the hospital, apparently of exhaustion coupled with sheer frustration. But the flotilla kept on going; if it got through Grant could put his army on the east side of the trackless Yazoo Delta, north of Vicksburg, and then he could get on with the campaign.

There were still other possibilities. Another canal was begun, on the west bank near Milliken's Bend, at Duckport, and details assembled more picks and shovels to connect forgotten bayous and sloughs so that steamboats could reach the Mississippi twenty miles south of Vicksburg. There were moments when this idea looked good, and eventually one light-draft steamer made the trip; but then the water level of the Mississippi receded, the waterway became impassable, and one more project went for nothing.

Last of all there was a plan that involved no digging but that almost cost Porter a flotilla of gunboats. All of the innumerable bodies of water in the low country seemed to connect with one another, and it developed that by going a few miles up the Yazoo, turning north into Steele's Bayou, and then threading a tortuous course through rivers nobody had ever heard of—Black Bayou, Deer Creek, Rolling Fork, and Sunflower River—steamers could get back into the Yazoo several miles above the Confederate works at Haynes' Bluff. This involved a 200-mile journey to reach a point that was only about twenty miles away, but anything was worth trying and Porter took eleven gunboats and tried it. He came to a halt, at last, miles from nowhere, in a stream so narrow his vessels could not turn around and so thick with saplings that they could not move forward, and he had to back out ignominiously lest his squadron be hung up there forever. Grant's army might reach dry land east of Vicksburg someday, but it obviously was not going to do it by this route.

Nor by any of the others; all of them, vigorously tried, turned out to be impractical. The winter wore away and the army toiled mightily without making progress, and in the North it began to seem that the whole campaign was a dismal failure. There was some grumbling by the higher officers. Major General Frank P. Blair, division commander under Sherman and brother to Postmaster General Montgomery Blair, said that the army was wearing itself out and complained that "this business of working our men to death when there are hundreds of thousands of Negroes who could be had to do the work in the mud and water is disgusting beyond all measure." Brigadier General Cadwallader C. Washburn of the cavalry rendered his own gloomy verdict: "There is no push in this Army, and there is very little Common Sense among Generals. I fear Grant won't do. He trusts too much to others and they are incompetent." To the people who begged him to remove Grant and put someone better in his place, Mr. Lincoln could give no answer better than a grim: "I can't spare this man. He fights."
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He would fight if he could ever reach a battlefield, but by spring he was still in the swamps. Yet the morale of his army remained good, and the rank and file complained, not of its own hardships but of the rise of defeatist sentiment back home. Typical was the outburst of a Missouri soldier: "There is a strong feeling growing up in the army against all the enemies of the government, whether at home or abroad, and meetings are being held, strong resolutions are being passed and letters are being written home by officers and men (for publication)  sustaining the President and denouncing the

Traitors everywhere." Talk about the army's extensive sick list, said this soldier, was "all gammon . . . True, there is sickness and death, but no more than is usual with new Regiments the first winter in the field." An Illinois soldier wrote that his regiment was healthy and happy, and said that as soon as these canals were finished "we are going round and cut a canal across the upper part of Florida, thereby cutting that invaluable state off from the 'Confed' and give the alligators a deed for it."
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The winter's work apparently accomplished nothing, yet a strange thing was happening. Trying half a dozen ventures at once and failing in all of them, Grant nevertheless was preparing General Pemberton for defeat. As spring approached, Pemberton felt that he was under a constantly increasing pressure. He knew that this unceasing coiling and shifting of his powerful enemy would sooner or later find a weak spot in his inadequate line of defense. He could not see Grant's failures: he could only see that the Federals were moving all over the map, making moves that might be feints and might be real. It was impossible to tell where the heavy blow was going to be struck. He became first anxious and then confused and out of many small confusions there came at last a large and fatal confusion.

At the beginning, in January, Pemberton had been optimistic enough. Sherman's assault at Chickasaw Bayou had failed so completely that Pemberton proudly remarked that 100,000 Yankees could not have succeeded there. He kept on strengthening Vicksburg's defenses, and he told a fellow officer that if he had to (although he would not tell higher authority) he could spare 8000 men to help Bragg in Tennessee. He did not complain greatly—not then, anyway—when Johnston ordered him to send Van Dorn and three-quarters of the 6000 cavalry in the department off to work with Bragg's cavalry, and in the middle of the month Pemberton considered the possibility of taking the offensive. He had 15,000 men at Grenada, east of the Yazoo Delta and 120 miles north of Vicksburg, under the Major General W. W. Loring whom Lee had found so touchy in that long-forgotten West Virginia campaign eighteen months earlier, and he ordered Loring to prepare his command for a northward movement up the line of the Mississippi Central Railroad.
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But the Federals who had been so badly beaten came back, powerfully reinforced, and the river above Vicksburg was full of gunboats, mortar schooners, transports, and supply vessels—more than a hundred of them had come down, Pemberton was told, in three days, and Grant in person had come with them—and there was every evidence that a big push was in the making. Pemberton was guarding a line fully two hundred miles long, and his immediate defenses at Vicksburg ran for more than fifteen miles, from Haynes' Bluff on the north to Warrenton south of the town. He sent a sober dispatch to Johnston: "Enemy in full force again opposite the city, with indications of attempting to force his way below. This necessarily separates my command. Must have large force at Warrenton." He ordered the Vicksburg entrenchments strengthened and told the garrison commander to alert the waterfront batteries and prepare for an early attack. Loring heard no more about an advance up the railroad. Instead he was warned that the Yankees might try to break through Yazoo Pass and that it would be well to get ready to block them.
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So far there was no real cause for alarm, yet there were many places where the enemy might cause trouble. The canal opposite Vicksburg looked as if it might work, and, in the middle of February, Pemberton told Mr. Davis that this would enable the Federals to run downstream, and said that "either from above or below there is a possibility that troops may be landed and Vicksburg be invested by land or water." He was fairly well supplied with food and ammunition but he did not have enough to stand a siege, and he feared that Federal operations on the Yazoo would cut off the supplies he was getting from the delta country. Loring built a makeshift fort, duly christened Fort Pemberton, where the Tallahatchie and Yalobusha rivers join to form the Yazoo, and armed it as well as he could. Pemberton confessed he could send him no heavy guns but told him this position must be held even if he had to use infantry as boarding parties to capture armored gunboats: he had been informed that the Federals planned to go east from the Yazoo and assault Grenada with 50,000 men. He notified Mr. Davis that the progress of the canal compelled him to fortify Grand Gulf, where high bluffs overlooked the Mississippi twenty-five miles below Vicksburg, and to do this he would have to have more artillery. Then he learned that Porter was going up Steele's Bayou, and he had to detach men from Vicksburg to put up batteries there.
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Actually, it was impossible for Pemberton to tell what was happening. On March 11 the Federal gunboats came down the Tallahatchie to Fort Pemberton and opened fire. The river channel was so narrow that they had to come in single file, bows-on, and the country roundabout was so badly flooded that it was impossible to land infantry or artillery; the attack failed dismally, and the invaders went back up the Tallahatchie. But Pemberton had no way to know that this attempt had been written off; two weeks later Loring called for more guns and more infantry; Pemberton tried to find reinforcements for him, and told Johnston that as spring dried the roads it might be possible for the Federals to march east from the Tallahatchie to strike the Mississippi Central Railroad near Grenada. The commanding officer at Vicksburg held that Porter's expedition up Steele's Bayou would probably be the main Federal effort; he continued to think so as late as April 2, although by that time Porter had taken his gunboats back to the Mississippi and the whole project had been given up. Pemberton began to complain bitterly that since Van Dorn and the cavalry had been sent away he could not find out what Grant's people were doing. Something menacing apparently was being prepared in northern Mississippi, and the Federals appeared to be making some sort of move on the west side of the big river. It was reported that 30,000 Federals were going to attack Port Hudson; also, that troops in west Tennessee were about to become aggressive in northern Mississippi. Early in April Pemberton sent an expressive report to Richmond: "Enemy is constantly in motion in all directions."
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