Never Call Retreat (6 page)

As the first two weeks in December passed McClernand suspected that something like this was being attempted, and he sent angry protests to Washington. Secretary Stanton's reply was as bland as the message Halleck had sent to Grant: McClernand was by no means being superseded, he was about to be announced in War Department orders as commander of a corps in Grant's army, the plan for the amphibious assault on Vicksburg stood, and as soon as McClernand reached Memphis he could take charge of the expedition because he outranked everybody in Grant's department except Grant himself.

This reassurance was in fact somewhat deflationary, because to command a corps under Grant was not quite the same as to be at the head of an independent army. Still, McClernand could make the best of it; he was to remain leader of the expedition against Vicksburg, and all he needed now was a signed order from Grant telling him to go to Memphis and start his campaign.

But this order was strangely late in reaching him. Nobody except McClernand (who had no control over it) seemed to be in a rousing hurry about it; and anyway there was unanticipated interference by armies of the Southern Confederacy. McClernand's advance toward greatness began with a humiliating anticlimax.

Shortly before this, fortified by renewed assurances from Washington that he could control all activities in his department, and still officially ignorant of any special orders affecting McClernand, Grant notified Halleck that Sherman would command the amphibious expedition and he ordered Sherman to get under way as soon as men, transports, and naval support were properly organized. Halleck sent a quiet warning: Sherman would be his own choice, but the President might insist on naming a commander for this expedition. Then, on December 18, Grant at last got a positive directive from the general-in-chief: the troops in his department were being organized into four army corps, their commanders designated at Washington. The troops at Memphis, plus a division that was being made available from beyond the Mississippi, would form two of these corps; McClernand would command one of them and Sherman would have the other. Finally: "It is the wish of the President that General McClernand's corps shall constitute a part of the river expedition and that he shall have the immediate command under your direction."
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This of course could not be evaded and Grant did not try to evade it. He did exactly what he was supposed to do; that is, he immediately sent a message to McClernand, at Springfield, explaining the situation and telling him to go at once to Memphis, where Sherman would turn over the command and give him all of the written and oral orders and information that had been issued to date. Grant added that he hoped McClernand would find the expedition ready to move, and he pointed out that quick action was essential; he promised, also, that he himself would co-operate by menacing Pemberton along the line of the railroad. To complete the transaction he ordered a copy of this message transmitted to Sherman at Memphis.
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Now Grant and his troops were at Oxford, Mississippi, and any messages he sent to his subordinates had a long way to go. His line of supply and communication ran straight north along the railroad all the way to Columbus, Kentucky, more than 175 miles away. The fact that on its way through western Tennessee the railroad and its telegraph system passed within fifty miles of Memphis did not help, because Confederate cavalry and guerrilla bands had broken all land communication with Memphis. The message to Sherman, therefore, had to be sent to Columbus by telegraph and then had to go down the river to Memphis by steamboat. Similarly, the message to McClernand had to go to Columbus, to be forwarded thence by boat to Cairo, Illinois, where it could be telegraphed on to Springfield. It was possible for energetic enemies to interfere with all of this, because no matter how diligently the Federals tried to guard this line it remained painfully exposed.

One of the first men to realize this was the Confederacy's General Johnston. Shortly after he took command in the west he telegraphed to General Bragg, urging him to strike that vulnerable line with his cavalry. Apparently Bragg never got this telegram but that did no harm because he thought of the same thing independently and told Nathan Bedford Forrest to assemble his cavalry and go to work; after which he optimistically told President Davis that if this stroke succeeded it might compel Grant to retreat.
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The odds were much against success. Forrest's cavalry was miserably equipped and totally untrained; indeed, it barely existed at all, for it was still being organized when Bragg gave Forrest his orders. The men were the rawest of raw recruits, hundreds of them had neither weapons nor horses, those who were armed carried nothing better than shotguns or flintlock muskets, hardly anyone had any clothing or blankets except what he had brought from home, and supplies were so skimpy that Bragg warned Forrest the men would have to find their own food and forage once they set out. To get at Grant's railroad this cavalry must first cross the Tennessee River, which had no bridges and few boats and was much too deep to wade. Once across they would be in a region swarming with many thousands of Yankee soldiers who had been carefully posted all along the railroad for the specific purpose of beating off raids like this; and no matter how the raid went, in the end these Confederates would have to get back across the river with many times their number hotly pursuing them. By any logical appraisal of the prospects, this expedition had no chance . . . except that it was being led by Forrest.

Forrest was self-made all the way, a brigadier general with no military background whatever and no social background worth mentioning, a man who would be wholly out of place in the gallery of Confederate officers were it not that he was, inexplicably, a military genius: the best man in either the Confederacy or the Union for the kind of exploit Bragg was demanding. The measure of his capacity lies in what he now accomplished. He completely disrupted all of the Federal plans—Halleck's, Grant's, McClernand's, everybody's—and with excellent assistance from the romantic Van Dorn, who launched a simultaneous strike at Grant's immediate rear, he made Bragg's hopeful prediction good: Grant did have to retreat, getting out of Mississippi entirely and going all the way back to Memphis. Quite incidentally, Forrest armed, equipped, recruited and fed his cavalry while he was doing all of this. When the raid ended he had more men than he had when it began, all of them excellently mounted, armed, clad and fed by the United States government.

Forrest's cavalry started from the town of Columbia, southwest of Murfreesboro, on December 11. Forrest crossed the Tennessee River at Clifton, swimming his animals and taking his men over, a troop at a time, in an old flatboat; then he struck west, routing a Federal cavalry detachment on the way, and coming up to the railroad junction town of Jackson, Tennessee, where Grant's Mississippi Central stemmed off of the principal north-south line, the Mobile & Ohio. Veering away from Jackson, which the Federals held in force, Forrest went rampaging north along the Mobile & Ohio, capturing Union supply and ammunition dumps, brushing off hostile patrols, seizing the horses, weapons, and other equipment he needed, and utterly ruining the railroad for a stretch of sixty miles or more. Grant sent powerful contingents of cavalry and infantry to destroy this marauder, but Forrest was extremely elusive. One Federal column at last got in his path at Parker's Cross Roads, a converging column came up from Forrest's rear, and there was a sharp fight in which Forrest lost 300 men; but at last Forrest broke away, shook off his pursuers, got to the Tennessee, retrieved the flatboat he had used earlier, and got his expedition safely over to Confederate territory on the eastern side of the river. He had put 2500 Federals out of action, had captured ten pieces of artillery and 10,000 small arms, and had completely broken Grant's communications with the outside world for ten days.
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The first result was that neither McClernand nor Sherman got Grant's December 18 orders until many days later. Obeying his earlier orders—-which, as far as he knew, were still in force—Sherman started south from Memphis on December 20. McClernand, receiving his own orders only after this force had reached the vicinity of Vicksburg, could do no more than get on a steamboat in frantic pursuit, complaining bitterly that because of "petty jealousy
somewhere
in high authority" he had been the victim of exceedingly sharp practice.
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He was correct in his belief that neither Halleck nor Grant wanted him to command the Vicksburg expedition; but both men had dutifully followed the President's directive, and neither could really be blamed for the fact that Forrest's troopers cut the Mobile & Ohio telegraph line on the evening of December 18 just in time to prevent transmission of Grant's dispatches.

Grant was in an even more embarrassing position than

McClernand. With his line of supply coming down from Columbus, Kentucky, he had planted his advance base at Holly Springs, Mississippi, thirty miles north of his army's position near Oxford, and he supposed that the garrison of 1500 men he had posted there was strong enough to protect it. But on December 20, just when Forrest was doing his worst a hundred miles to the north, Earl Van Dorn with all of Pemberton's cavalry, 3000 men or more, slipped by the Federal patrols and came storming in to Holly Springs and demanded that the town be surrendered. The Union commander was a Colonel R. C. Murphy, and he caved in at once, surrendering without more than token resistance. Van Dorn's soldiers went through the supply dumps like a swarm of locusts, destroying everything Grant's army possessed— $1,500,000 worth of food, ammunition, and equipment, by Van Dorn's estimate, including three solid freight trains waiting to be unloaded. A jubilant Southern reporter saw panicky Yankees in flight "clothed very similarly to Joseph when the lady Potiphar attempted to detain him," and wrote breathlessly of "tents burning, torches flaming, Confederates shouting, guns popping, sabres clanking, abolitionists begging for mercy, 'rebels' shouting exultingly, women
en deshabile
clapping their hands frantic with joy, crying 'Kill them! Kill them!' " Grant announced "the disgraceful surrender" with "pain and mortification," and said Holly Springs could easily have been held; and scapegrace Colonel Murphy was dismissed from the service.
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Van Dorn got away unharmed, and Grant's army, finding itself with no supplies and no means of getting any more, went dejectedly northward in retreat.

Between them, Forrest and Van Dorn destroyed any chance that the amphibious expedition might succeed, whether with or without McClernand. This operation had been keyed to the expectation that Grant's advance would keep Pemberton from reinforcing the Vicksburg garrison, and when Grant's advance became a retreat Pemberton had no problem. Sending reinforcements on ahead, Pemberton reached Vicksburg on December 26 to find Sherman's men disembarking along the Yazoo River. When the Federal assault was made on December 29, on low ground along Chickasaw Bayou just north of Vicksburg, Pemberton's men beat it off without difficulty. Sherman lost more than 1700 men, accomplished nothing at all, and withdrew to a cheerless camp at Milliken's Bend, on the west side of the Mississippi twenty miles above the Confederate stronghold. There, at last, McClernand caught up with him, assuming command of a force which had just had to confess a humiliating failure.
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4. In the Mists at Stone's River

WINTER IN TENNESSEE (said a man who campaigned there) "means cold, and snow, and rain, and boundless mud," and neither the Federals at Nashville nor the Confederates at Murfreesboro really wanted to be active before spring. The main bodies of the armies were only thirty miles apart, but this was more of a distance than the map showed because the country between them was firmly held by Braxton Bragg's cavalry. Bragg's new cavalry chief, Major General Joseph Wheeler, was young and somewhat full of himself— he had a gay way of telling his staff, when he had a raid in the making: "The War Child rides tonight!"—but he was diligent and active, and he was providing a solid cavalry screen behind which Bragg's infantry could remain quietly on the defensive.

Bragg wanted to remain on the defensive as long as possible because he felt too weak to do anything else. On General Johnston's orders he had lately sent a solid infantry division, 9000 men under Major General C. L. Stevenson, off to Mississippi to help General Pemberton; General Johnston believed that helping Pemberton thus might eventually cause the loss of both Tennessee and Mississippi, but President Davis insisted and Johnston issued an order which both he and Bragg disliked very much. So Stevenson's division was gone, probably for good; Forrest's men were off to the west, harrying the Mobile & Ohio country, and Morgan's were raiding far to the northward, in Kentucky; as Christmas came Bragg had fewer than 40,000 men of all arms, and it was greatly to his interest to stay inactive.

Besides this, he gained much simply by remaining at Murfreesboro. Middle Tennessee was a productive land of plenty, and as Ions as Bragg's army controlled it the Confederacy could draw large supplies of food, forage, leather, cloth, and other essential materials.
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Naturally, Bragg wanted to stay where he was.

His opponent, Major General William S. Rosecrans, wanted to drive him away but refused to be hasty about it. When he took over the command from Don Carlos Buell at the end of October, Rosecrans was appalled to find that a third of his army was either in the hospital or absent without leave, and that much of the rest was badly drilled and miserably equipped. Like Grant, he dangled at the end of an exposed supply line, which was an irresistible temptation to Confederate raiders; with good reason Rosecrans refused to advance until he had built up a reserve of at least two million rations. He also wanted to strengthen his cavalry so that it could keep the jaunty Confederate troopers from riding circles around it, and his entire army clearly needed a refit and a general reorganization. His reasons for delay were numerous and compelling, and he explained them to Washington in much detail.
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