This Hallowed Ground (36 page)

McCook’s corps was routed, all of Rosecrans’s right wing had vanished, and now everything was up to Pap Thomas, who had his two divisions posted on high ground near a railroad crossing and a four-acre plot of dark cedars known locally as “the round forest.” Thomas was imperturbable. He got reinforcements from Crittenden’s corps (which had long since abandoned any idea of crossing the river to hit the Confederate right), and his men held their ground, pouring out an enormous volume of fire that some of the men felt was louder and more ear-shattering than any other fire they heard in all the war. Charging Confederates were seen to pause in the cotton fields and stuff cotton in their ears to deaden the sound.
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While Thomas held, Rosecrans was riding about the field in a fury of activity. An officer who rode with him that day said that from dawn
to dusk the general did not stay in one spot as long as half an hour.
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His chief of staff, riding beside him, was beheaded by a cannon ball, blood spattering Old Rosy’s uniform; and with his riding and shouting Rosecrans got together a long line of guns at the right of Thomas’s position and formed a new line of infantry from regiments that had been driven out of McCook’s position earlier. By afternoon the Union army was drawn up in an arrowhead formation, right and left wings standing almost back to back; and there, finally, as the cold day waned, they made their stand and held on grimly, beating off the last of the Rebel attacks.

There was a council of war that midnight, Rosecrans and his principal commanders; and Thomas tilted his chair back and went sound asleep while the generals asked one another whether the army could possibly stay where it was. The word “retreat” came to Thomas through his sleep; Rosecrans was asking him if he could protect the rear while the army withdrew. Thomas opened his eyes and said flatly: “This army can’t retreat,” then went back to sleep. His word held. The idea of retreat was abandoned and Rosecrans decided to hold his army in position and fight.
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It was a hideous night. A mist lay on the field, with a thin moon shining through it; a cold wind swayed in the cedars, the mud froze, no one was allowed to light a campfire, and the air was full of a steady crying and groaning from the thousands of wounded who lay all about, untended. In the morning a red sun came up, tinting the mist so that all the landscape looked bloody. One soldier on the skirmish line remembered being so stiff with cold that he had to take his right hand in his left and force his finger around the trigger of his musket before he could fire.
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New Year’s Day was anticlimax. Bragg had driven his enemy to the edge of destruction; now, unaccountably, he failed to resume his attack, and the day passed with nothing more than skirmish-line firing. Bragg wired Richmond that he had won a great victory, but he refused to try to make anything of it. Not until January 2 did he resume the attack. This time he tried to hit the Federal left; the ground was unfavorable, and a great bank of the Federal artillery caught his charging brigades in flank and broke them apart, crushing the attack almost before it got started. Bragg waited some more — and then at night ordered a full retreat, drawing his army miles to the rear and leaving Rosecrans in full possession of the field. Unable to believe their good fortune, the Federals realized that they had, in a way, won a victory. At least they had the battlefield, along with thirteen thousand casualties. If they could pull themselves together they could continue the invasion. But Stone’s River was not a field they ever cared to remember.

The war was expanding at the end of 1862. Its potentialities were becoming immeasurable; so was the cost of fighting it, as the twenty-five thousand Federal casualties of Fredericksburg and Stone’s River attested. Burnside had been hopelessly beaten, and Rosecrans had been brought to a full stop. It remained to be seen whether U. S. Grant could do any better.

Grant held western Tennessee and was responsible for the territory north of it all the way back to the Ohio. He had some forty-eight thousand men in his command, although he had to use a good half of these to guard railroads, highways, supply dumps, and what not in his rear, and during the early fall he had been unable to advance. But after Bragg’s thrust into Kentucky was turned back, Grant was promised reinforcements, and it seemed to him that if he attacked the Confederates in his front vigorously he could keep them from bothering his rear too greatly. At about the time when Burnside began his unhappy move from the Blue Ridge foothillls to Rappahannock tidewater — early in November — Grant started south. He proposed to clear the last Rebel resistance out of western Tennessee and then strike down into Mississippi, where the Confederate General John C. Pemberton was waiting for him with an army that Grant believed to be about the size of his own.

Vicksburg was the objective, and Vicksburg was a hard place to reach, principally because of the existence of the Yazoo Delta.

The Yazoo River is the product of a large number of smaller streams, and it begins to be a river at a point near the Tennessee line, not far inland from the Mississippi itself. It wanders east into the state of Mississippi, picking up more rivers as it goes, drops south, and at last comes back to flow into the Mississippi a few miles above Vicksburg. To the east of the Yazoo there is high ground, but to the west of it — between the Yazoo and the Mississippi — there is a vast lowland, 170 miles long by 50 miles wide, a Venetian complex of sluggish streams, bayous, backwaters, and interconnecting sloughs, with a flat country all around subject to flood when the waters are high. As roads and wheeled transport existed in 1862, no army of invasion could hope to march across this Yazoo Delta. To reach Vicksburg, Federals in western Tennessee would either have to go straight down the Mississippi by steamboat or march down east of the Yazoo and come up to Vicksburg from the rear. The Yazoo country was an impassable barrier.

In the Mississippi the Union had a powerful naval squadron led by Admiral David Dixon Porter — an impish, long-bearded man of the rough-sea-dog type, too outspoken for his own good, and given to embroidering the tale of his own exploits, but for all that an energetic
and capable naval officer. It was perfectly possible for Porter to steam down and bombard Vicksburg, but the place could never be captured that way; it lay upon high bluffs, and Confederate engineers had turned it into a fortress. It had to be approached from the east, and the army that tried to get there from western Tennessee would dangle at the end of a very long supply line, exposed to incessant Confederate raids.

Nevertheless, Vicksburg was all-important. As long as it held out the Mississippi was closed, and the administration was being warned that unless the river could be opened fairly soon the farmers of the Middle West, who felt, with reason, that the eastern railroads were gouging them mercilessly, might become highly sympathetic to the Confederacy. Furthermore, Vicksburg connected the two halves of the Confederacy; if it fell the South would automatically lose an irreplaceable part of its strength.

Accordingly, Grant began to move. He had no sooner begun than he discovered that something very mysterious was going on far to his rear.

One of Grant’s principal subordinates was Major General John A. McClernand of Illinois, a wiry, aggressive, ambitious man whom Grant eyed with deep distrust. McClernand was a Democratic politician; he had spoken up boldly for the Union cause after Fort Sumter, when the administration was in a mood to prize pro-war Democrats, and he had been made a general as a reward. There was nothing wrong with his fighting heart, but he was an unskillful soldier and he had so much seniority that he outranked everybody in Grant’s army except Grant himself. Grant had felt no especial sense of loss when late in August he got orders from Halleck detaching McClernand and sending him back to Springfield, Illinois, to help organize new volunteer troops. But by the end of November, Grant began to realize that McClernand was up to something.

In its great need for more soldiers that summer, the administration had played with the idea of getting some combination military and political hero to do a recruiting job. Mayor George Opdyke of New York, chairman of a big-name National War Committee, had asked Stanton to let either Frémont or Ormsby Mitchel tour the North to raise a special corps of fifty thousand men. Stanton had turned him down; the administration wanted no more of Frémont just then, and Mitchel had been ordered to duty along the Carolina coast (where he would presently die of a fever); but the basic idea was appealing, and shortly thereafter McClernand had come in with a plan of his own.

Let him go through the western states, he pleaded, getting and organizing recruits; then, when a force of perhaps thirty thousand of all arms had been raised, let him take it and move boldly down the Mississippi, answerable to no one but Washington. He would capture
Vicksburg; this would open the river to the Gulf, split the Confederacy, assuage midwestern farmers, dampen the rising tide of northern Copperheads, and possibly win the war.
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Lincoln and Stanton told him to go ahead, and McClernand went west, conferring with governors and other men of influence and then taking to the stump to raise volunteers. He was popular with western Democrats and he was a good stump speaker, and before long new volunteers began to appear in quantity, especially in Illinois. McClernand busily organized them into regiments and wrote jubiliantly to Stanton, who assured him that “everything here is favorable for your expedition,” told him to make frequent reports, and added: “I long to see you in the field striking vigorous blows against the rebellion in its most vital point.”
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That McClernand was raising and organizing troops was, of course, public knowledge, but the rest of the program was top secret. Plenty of rumors were afloat, however, and these reached Grant; and then, on November 10, after he had wired Halleck asking why the reinforcements that had been promised him were not arriving, Grant received a very odd reply. A number of regiments were on the way, said Halleck, and more would quickly follow, and “Memphis will be made the base of a joint military and naval expedition on Vicksburg.”

Since Grant’s own plans called for an overland hike on the eastern side of the Yazoo Delta country, this sounded very much as if someone else were coming in to supersede him, and that someone could only be McClernand. Grant sent Halleck an anxious inquiry.

Halleck was playing his cards carefully. He had no use for McClernand, an independent Vicksburg expedition struck him as absurd, and if in the preceding winter he had tried to elbow Grant out of the army he was very much on Grant’s side now. Studying the McClernand case, Halleck discovered that the administration had put in McClernand’s orders a little escape clause, and of this Halleck now was prepared to take full advantage.

The War Department on October 20 had given McClernand confidential orders instructing him to do all of the things he had asked to be allowed to do. Among other things, these orders told McClernand to send the new troops he was raising to Cairo, Memphis, or such other place as Halleck might direct, “to the end that, when a sufficient force not required by the operations of General Grant’s command shall be raised,” McClernand might lead his men against Vicksburg.

Halleck was a good lawyer, and he saw through all of this without difficulty. The troops would go forward, as fast as McClernand got them ready, into Grant’s department. On arrival, it might easily turn out that they would be “required by the operations of General Grant’s command,”
especially if McClernand himself did not at once go with them. Blandly Halleck wired Grant that he was not being superseded; all troops entering his department were under his command.
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Grant put Halleck’s messages on top of all the rumors he had been hearing and worked out a new program. He would march down into Mississippi as he had planned, following the line of the Mississippi Central Railroad, which goes roughly parallel to the Yazoo, thirty or forty miles farther inland. Simultaneously a joint army-navy expedition would leave Memphis for Vicksburg. It would include some of the troops that had been in the department all along, and all of the McClernand troops that had arrived, but it would be under the command of William Tecumseh Sherman.
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Together, these two thrusts might be very effective. Grant’s own advance should force Confederate Pemberton to come up to meet him. Meanwhile Porter and his gunboats would convoy Sherman clear down the Mississippi to the mouth of the Yazoo. By ascending the Yazoo a short distance Sherman could put his army ashore at the foot of the Chickasaw Bluffs, just a few miles north of Vicksburg. If the Confederate defenders were kept busy opposing Grant’s thrust from the north, Sherman could storm the bluffs and take the city; if the Confederates concentrated against Sherman they could not very well keep Grant from moving on down the railroad. And, in any case, the big Vicksburg expedition would be put in motion without McClernand.

McClernand, meanwhile, back in Illinois, was happily sending new regiments down to Memphis, where Sherman was hastily giving them brigade and division formation and preparing to march them on transports. By the middle of December, McClernand was reporting to Washington that he had sent most of his men and that there was nothing of importance remaining for him to do in Illinois: might he not now be ordered to go to Memphis and assume the promised command?

The orders did not come, but news of what was going on at Memphis did, and on December 17 McClernand sent an outraged wire to Lincoln: “I believe I am superseded. Please advise me.”
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To Stanton, on the same day, he telegraphed a similar complaint.

Stanton sent him the most innocent of replies, brimming with reassurance. McClernand was not being superseded; Grant had been ordered to form the troops in his department into four army corps, McClernand would be named commander of one of these, and as soon as Grant signed the papers McClernand could go south, assume command of his troops, and head for Vicksburg. Simultaneously orders to proceed with the corps formation and the appointment of McClernand went from the War Department to Grant.