v1.1.3 / chapter 47 of 93 / 01 sep 11 / greg goebel / public domain
* Southern leadership knew very well that the defense of Vicksburg and Port Hudson was critical to the survival of the Confederacy. Unfortunately, dislodging Grant and Banks proved easier said than done. In the meantime, back in Ohio, Burnside continued his clumsy attempts to control the citizenry until he was finally reigned in by his superiors, and on the Atlantic coast the Confederates attempted to break the Federal blockade with the latest rebel ironclad, the CSS ATLANTA.
* After sweeping through Mississippi and sealing the rebels up in Vicksburg, Grant was once more the man of the hour. Newspapers that had been abusing him for months now could not praise him enough. Sherman was properly disgusted, writing to his wife: "Grant is now deservedly the hero. He is now belabored with praise by those who a month ago accused him of all the sins in the calendar, and who next week will turn against him if so blows the popular breeze. Vox populis, vox humbug."
More significantly, Grant's men now had solid faith in their leader. Halleck, who had been making Grant's life miserable, became fully supportive and was sending heavy reinforcements. They were needed: the Union lines around Vicksburg were 12 miles (19 kilometers) long, and Grant's 50,000 men were stretched thin. By early June, however, 20,000 more troops had arrived. A Confederate observed that "a cat could not have crept out of Vicksburg without being discovered."
Having found frontal attacks suicidal, Grant was content to resort to a traditional siege. His army was receiving regular food and supplies, Pemberton's was not, and what food there was in Vicksburg had to be shared with civilians. Grant's artillery fired into the city around the clock, assisted by bombardments and target spotting from Porter's gunboats.
Grant had few trained engineers, but with a combination of a little reading and a lot of sense and ingenuity, his soldiers quickly learned the art of the siege. They dug zigzag trenches, or "saps", towards Confederate lines, protected by cylindrical baskets woven from twigs and filled with dirt, known as "sap rollers", that could be rolled forward to provide protection for diggers. Trench mortars were improvised by shrinking iron bands around tree trunks and hollowing them out to accommodate 6 or 12 pound (2.7 or 5.4 kilogram) shells.
The defenders rolled fuzed barrels full of powder, which they called "thunder barrels", down into the Yankee positions, and recovered dud Union shells to put them to use in a similar fashion. Confederate sharpshooters sniped at the Union soldiers, and rebel gunners occasionally fired turpentine-soaked projectiles into sap rollers, setting them on fire.
The Federals pressed forward anyway. They were confident that Vicksburg would fall sooner or later, and amused themselves by sticking a cap on a ramrod, shoving it above the trenches, and seeing how many bullet holes it would accumulate. With the lines drawing so close, soldiers from the two sides began to shout jokes and taunts at each other, and fraternize to an extent. In one case a Union soldier whose brother was in the Confederate army actually went into the town, and the two spent time wandering around together.
The Federals kept tightening their grip. By mid-June, Grant had over 200 guns firing into the city, while Porter added the weight of his gunboats' armament to the bombardment. Tens of thousands of shells were thrown into Vicksburg. The targets were Confederate defenses, but since these were all over the city, the effect was that no place was safe. Civilians began to dig caves into Vicksburg's yellow clay hills, prompting Union soldiers to call the place "Prairie Dog Village". Some of the caves were mere cubbyholes, while others were large and well-furnished. Less than a dozen civilians were reported killed during the siege, with possibly three times more wounded, but the citizens of Vicksburg lived in continuous terror.
On the other side of the lines, Grant had his own fear: that Joe Johnston would attack and allow Pemberton's army to escape. Johnston was rumored to have 30,000 men, and though Grant had a low opinion overall of Confederate generals, he regarded Johnston as an exception. Grant had his men build a second set of defenses faced to the rear to deal with any attack by Johnston, and assigned divisions to keep an eye on him.
Given that Grant's well-supplied army outnumbered both Pemberton's and
Johnston's forces combined, and that communications with Pemberton were
almost completely cut off, Johnston had little chance of seriously
threatening the entrenched Federals, and he knew it. He wired Richmond:
I CONSIDER SAVING VICKSBURG HOPELESS.
Confederate Secretary of War James Seddon energetically prodded Johnston to
attack Grant even if only as a matter of honor. Johnston did not see the
honor in futile bloodletting of the men he cared for so much. Southern
newspapers bitterly criticised him, one stating that he was giving Grant a
"terrible letting alone". But Johnston did nothing.
* A siege is a dull business, and with nothing happening Grant grew bored and frustrated. With his wife absent, he turned back to the bottle, in particular engaging in a two-day drinking spree during an inspection trip up the Yazoo in mid-June.
Sylvanus Cadwallader, the Chicago TIMES reporter who had come to Grant's headquarters with Fred Grant, was on good terms with the Grant and accompanied him on the steamship. Cadwallader was partial to the general, in particular because if Grant were relieved of command, McClernand would take over, an idea Cadwallader didn't welcome. Although the regular army generals had reasons to dislike political generals such as McClernand as a class, it appears that McClernand worked hard at being unpleasant and was detested by almost everyone.
Before long Cadwallader found Grant stumbling around the vessel and rambling in a slurred voice. Cadwallader managed to drag Grant to his stateroom, where the reporter tossed all of Grant's whiskey out the windows into the river over Grant's sodden protests. Cadwallader managed to get Grant quieted down and into bed.
That evening, the steamship put ashore, where Grant managed to scrounge up another supply of whiskey. The next day he was roaring drunk again, as the vessel steamed toward Chicksaw Bayou. The place would be crowded with Union troops and officers, Grant was in no condition to be seen in public, and Cadwallader managed to talk the captain into delaying the arrival until after dark.
Chicksaw Bayou relatively quiet when the steamship arrived, but unfortunately the captain docked next to a sutler's boat, and the sutler had been generously giving away free drinks to Union officers whose favor might do him some good. Cadwallader asked the sutler not to give Grant any drinks. The man agreed, but when the reporter came back later he found Grant busily getting soused again.
Once more, Cadwallader managed to drag Grant away, though this time Grant reacted resentfully and decided he had other ideas. Grant had a borrowed horse named "Kangaroo" because it liked to jump up on its hind legs and dash off when mounted, and the general and the horse were off like a shot. It was an indication for the uncanny knack Grant had for horses that he had no problem with the wild ride even when he was falling-down drunk. The route took them through campgrounds and over fires, leaving behind furious soldiers shouting curses after them.
Cadwallader didn't feel he had a chance of catching up, but he finally found horse and rider ambling idly down the road in the dark. He managed to get Grant off the horse and encouraged him, with difficulty, to lay down and get some rest. Cadwallader flagged down a passing soldier and asked him to relay a message describing matters to Grant's chief of staff, Lieutenant Colonel John A. Rawlins. The reporter emphasized to the soldier that no one else was to hear of the matter.
Rawlins sent an ambulance to pick up Grant. Cadwallader had to accompany the general back to headquarters to keep him quiet. Rawlins and another staff officer were waiting when they arrived. Rawlins was about ready to explode with rage. He was the son of an alcoholic and had appointed himself guardian of Grant's good conduct. In the early days of his service with the general, Rawlins would even publicly browbeat the general for his failings, and Grant, in his unexciteable way, always accepted it.
Rawlins had learned more discretion by this time, but now he was furious. Cadwallader thought Rawlins was angry at him and protested his innocence, but Rawlins put Cadwallader at ease, telling him: "No, no! I know him! I know him!" He got Cadwallader to explain matters, and then put Grant to bed.
Not another word was said about the incident. Grant acted as though nothing had happened later, and Cadwallader was given special privileges and treatment from that moment on as a reward for his discretion; after all, it was an unusual reporter who would pass up the chance to turn in a story like that to his editor. The matter would not become public knowledge until about 90 years later, when Cadwallader's memoirs, written in the reporter's old age and hidden away for 60 years, were uncovered. Oddly, when they were revealed, there were protests that the story was untrue, though what basis there was for disputing it is hard to understand.
* If life was slow for Grant at that time, he at least had the satisfaction of solving a problem that had been bothering him for a long time. General John McClernand's lack of military competence and consideration for others, coupled with his continuous posturing in front of the newspapers, had not endeared him to Grant or any of the other generals in Grant's command. Grant had been waiting for a good excuse to have him removed.
Some time earlier, Grant had sent his young inspector general, Lieutenant Colonel James H. Wilson, over to McClernand to deliver an order, requesting that McClernand provide troops to a force commanded by Sherman that was keeping an eye on Joe Johnston. McClernand exploded in Wilson's face, shouting: "I'll be goddamned if I'll do it!" -- and followed with a stream of abuse. Wilson responded with a cold fury, threatening to "beat the boots" off of him. McClernand backed up and apologized, but when Wilson told Grant of the incident, Grant replied: "I'll get rid of McClernand the first chance I get!"
In mid-June, Sherman was given a newspaper that quoted McClernand as saying the positive achievements of the bloody fiasco in front of Vicksburg on 22 May had been due to his leadership, and the defeat was due to the failure of Sherman and McPherson to back him up. Sherman and McPherson were of course enraged. The accusations would have been vicious and unjust even if McClernand had expressed them in private, but he had expressed them in public. That was going much too far. On 18 June, Grant wrote up an order relieving McClernand of his duties.
Lieutenant Colonel Wilson took the order to McClernand's tent late that night, and found McClernand waiting for him, wearing a full dress uniform. Clearly the visit was not a surprise. McClernand read the order and said: "Well, sir! I am relieved!" Wilson did not hide his satisfaction, but McClernand uncharacteristically managed to demonstrate a little grace under pressure, saying: "By God, sir! We are both relieved!" McClernand protested to the President himself, but Lincoln politely declined to help him. McClernand was out of Federal Army of the Tennessee for good.
* With McClernand gone, Grant focused on taking Vicksburg. By this time, Grant's strategy of digging his way in had taken a more devious turn. On 23 June, 35 soldiers who had been coal miners were put to work digging a tunnel under the rebel lines. In two days they had dug a tunnel 45 feet (13.7 meters) long, which then branched off to three smaller tunnels 15 feet (4.6 meters) long. On 25 June, these tunnels were loaded with 2,200 pounds (1 tonne) of gunpowder.
The Confederates had become aware of the mine and were in fact digging a countermine to try to stop the Yankees even as the gunpowder was being put into place. That afternoon, Grant's men set off the charge, killing six Confederates and blasting a crater in the rebel defenses. A black cook named Abraham who had been helping the rebel soldiers was tossed into Union lines with no serious injury. He was adopted by the Yankee soldiers and became something of a sideshow attraction.
A Federal brigade under Brigadier General Mortimer D. Leggett charged into the crater, but was stopped cold. The Union diggers had lost the element of surprise and the rebels were waiting, greeting the Yankees with terrible volleys of rifle fire. The attack bogged down into bloody close-quarters combat, with the Federals tossing black-powder grenades while the Confederates caught them and tossed them back. The rebels also rolled lit shells into the crater. The Federals hung on to their position in the crater for three days, to finally pull back on the afternoon of 28 June. They had lost almost 200 men, while the Confederates had lost less than half that number.
The Federals set off another mine on 1 July, not too far from the position of the first. This second mine caused severe damage, killing 12 rebels and injuring 108. However, Federal officers did not believe that the explosion had seriously disrupted Confederate defenses and so did not attempt to follow it up with an assault.
* Downriver at Port Hudson, Nathaniel Banks was conducting his own siege while simultaneously fending off Halleck's meddling. Like Grant, Banks did not welcome Halleck's interference in his plans and had kept him in the dark. Halleck had of course discovered that Banks had not joined forces with Grant, Banks preferring instead to focus on Port Hudson. Halleck wrote Banks critical messages dated 3 and 4 June, expressing dissatisfaction and strongly suggesting that Banks send "spare forces" to Vicksburg. Banks replied with strained patience his reasons for moving on Port Hudson, and Halleck grudgingly came around. By that time, relief from badgering by Halleck was likely very welcome to Banks, since things had not otherwise been going well.
Reports from Confederate deserters in early June had indicated that the defenders of Port Hudson were not far from running out of food and that their morale was poor. However, when Banks' men made a probing night attack in the dark hours of 11 June, they were firmly driven off by the alert defenders. Although this bloodying gave Banks pause, new reports from Confederate deserters indicated the defenders of Port Hudson were on their last legs. On 13 June, Banks conducted an hour-long bombardment of the rebel defenses, and then sent a formal note across the lines demanding that Gardner surrender. Gardner returned a shorter but equally formal refusal.
The next day Banks pounded Port Hudson for an hour once again and sent his men in. The results were disastrous. The Federals suffered 1,792 casualties, the Confederates only 47. The only thing that Banks learned from this fiasco was that Confederate deserters were not to be trusted. He did not know if Gardner's men were really at their limits, but he was becoming only too aware that his own men were. Fighting in Louisiana swamp and scrub in June was unhealthy, and many of Banks' men were falling ill and dying. By this time, he was down to 14,000 effectives. Many of his men were close to the end of their enlistments and had no enthusiasm for further soldiering. In response to Banks' reports of the wavering of his soldiers, Halleck gave helpful and unfortunately characteristic advice: "When a column of attack is formed of doubtful troops, the proper mode of curing their defection is to place artillery in their rear, loaded with grape and canister, in the hands of reliable men, with orders to fire at the first opportunity."
Banks, for whatever his other limitations, was no monster and was unlikely to have found Halleck's recommendation very inspiring. Banks also had other sources of discouragement. Frantic reports indicated that Confederate forces were massing to move on New Orleans in his rear. Although such news could not have helped him sleep well at nights, he was determined to maintain his hold on Port Hudson. The rebels might retake New Orleans before Port Hudson fell, but if so, Banks would simply have to take it back when he was free to do so.
In the meantime, the Federals kept up artillery fire on Port Hudson. If the rebels were too well dug in to be done much real harm, they could at least be given no rest. The number of Confederate deserters increased through the month, and if Banks no longer took much faith in what they said, the quantity said something in itself.
* Banks' worries about the security of New Orleans had plenty of basis in fact. The energetic Richard Taylor was on the loose and dangerous, and by mid-May Taylor had decided to move on the city. However, the Yankee threat to Vicksburg took priority, and Taylor was forced to change his plans. He was ordered to attack the Federal outpost at Milliken's Bend, not far up the Mississippi from Vicksburg on the Louisiana side of the river. The Confederate high command believed that taking this installation would cut Grant's supply line and loosen his hold on the besieged city.
Taylor received a small division of reinforcements and went upstream on the Mississippi. Landing on 5 June, he quickly learned that Grant had shifted his base for supplies up the Yazoo, and Milliken's Bend no longer had any strategic importance. Taylor was too aggressive to simply pack up and go back home without a fight, and so, on the morning of 7 June, Taylor attacked the Union outposts at Milliken's Bend and nearby Young's Point.
Many of the defenders were freed slaves. Grant had intended to use them for labor and so had not given them much combat training. They were severely pressed back by the rebel attack and there was bitter fighting at close quarters, but then Porter's gunboats showed up and pounded away at the Confederates until they were forced to pull out. The rebels had managed to inflict over 650 casualties on the Federals -- with many of the losses in the form of black soldiers who were either shot after being captured or taken prisoner to be returned to slavery -- compared to only 185 Confederate casualties. However, the fight would have gained the rebels very little under any circumstances and their losses gave them no reward. Taylor gladly gave up "these absurd movements", and went back downstream to renew his plans to retake New Orleans.
Grant was pleased at the outcome, reporting that the conduct of the black troops was, in spite of their lack of training, "most gallant", and that under good officers "they will make good troops." As one Union officer said after the battle: "I never more wish to hear the expression: 'The Niggers won't fight.'"
* Back up in the Department of the Ohio, Ambrose Burnside was enthusiastically following up his arrest of Clement Vallandigham in May with further actions against the traitors lurking in the rear. In the dark hours of the morning of 3 June 1863, Burnside's troops invaded the offices of the Chicago TIMES. The newspaper was charged with "repeated expressions of disloyalty and incendiary statements." The soldiers shut down the presses, burned stockpiles of newspapers, and announced that the paper was out of business.
The public reaction of Chicagoans after the sun came up was as outraged as might have been predicted. Mass public meetings were attended even by staunch Republicans; a council of prominent citizens convened by the mayor of Chicago sent a protest off to President Lincoln; and the Illinois legislature denounced the raid. The following morning, 4 June, Lincoln revoked the suspension of the TIMES. He also instructed Secretary Stanton to order Burnside to make no more arbitrary arrests of civilians, and shut down no more newspapers without checking with his superiors first.
The whole fiasco could be chalked up to the bumbling way Ambrose Burnside did things, but in reality his error was only one of degree. Hundreds of papers were suppressed or suspended during the war, and the arbitrary arrest of those suspected of being disloyal was commonplace. Burnside's sin had been to pick targets that were too visible. The Lincoln Administration had no great hesitation to suspend the rights of American citizens if the pressures of war seemed to demand such measures, but if Federal power was an iron fist, it needed to be kept in a velvet glove.
* While the Confederacy fretted about what to do about Vicksburg, other rebels focused their efforts on breaking the Federal coastal blockade. The English blockade-runner FINGAL, which had arrived in Savannah, Georgia, in November 1861 with a heavy load of arms and ammunition, ended up being bottled up in the port by the Yankees. Instead of letting her sit idle, the Confederates decided to convert her into an ironclad along the lines of the CSS VIRGINIA.
The final result, the CSS ATLANTA, resembled the VIRGINIA, but was much less powerful. She had only four guns of moderate caliber, though she was also fitted with a ram and a black powder charge on a pole, or "spar torpedo". She had four inches (10.2 centimeters) of iron on top of 18 inches (46 centimeters) of teak on her sloped sides.
On 17 June, the ATLANTA, accompanied by a wooden gunboat, went down the Savannah River to engage Federal blockaders. The sortie was a disaster. The ATLANTA grounded itself on a sandbar by accident, and was taken under fire by two Union monitors, the USS WEEHAWKEN and the USS NAHANT. The Yankees pounded the helpless Confederate vessel, with the WEEHAWKEN's 15-inch (38 centimeter) Dahlgren gun causing serious damage and many injuries. The ATLANTA finally surrendered.
The rebel ironclad was repaired and put into service for the Union. The ingenuity of the Confederacy in improvising weapons to challenge the Federals was impressive, but it was not enough to really challenge the stream of iron monsters that came down the ways of Northern shipyards, month after month.
