This Hallowed Ground (48 page)

He emerged from this spree, if he really had it, just in time to get rid of McClernand, McClernand was clearly not up to the command
of an army corps, and both Sherman and McPherson were disgusted with him; unfortunately he outranked everyone in the place except Grant, and if anything happened to Grant he would automatically take command of the army. The War Department had long since quietly let Grant know that if he wanted to dismiss McClernand his action would be upheld in Washington. Now, not long after the failure of the assaults on the Vicksburg lines, matters came to a head.

McClernand had undertaken to congratulate the men of his army corps on their bravery in the recent battle. His congratulations took the form of an official order, which claimed for McClernand’s corps credit for just about everything that had been done during the Vicksburg campaign and broadly implied that the corps would have taken Vicksburg if the rest of the army had done its part; and this order McClernand incautiously sent off to a St. Louis newspaper, in which it was immediately printed. This not only sent Sherman and McPherson to Grant’s tent with fire in their eyes; it was technically a breach of army regulations, which forbade any officer to publish an official paper without his superior’s permission. Naturally McClernand had never cleared this paper with Grant, and now, on June 18, Grant formally relieved McClernand of his command and sent him back to Illinois, turning his corps over to General E. O. C. Ord.

Back in Illinois, McClernand fumed and cursed and cried for justice, wiring Lincoln that he had been relieved “for an omission of my adjutant.” Justice — or at least reinstatement — he could not get. Lincoln sent him a soothing letter, which probably did not really soothe him very much, and declined to intervene. McClernand had played his part: he had put at the service of the administration his political and popular influence in Illinois, and he had brought together and organized a substantial number of highly useful soldiers who might not otherwise have got into the army at all. By these acts he had helped to give the Vicksburg expedition the weight and the impetus it needed … and now he was out of the war, milked dry, discarded, shelved where he could give neither Grant nor any other general any further worry. He seems to have felt that he was the victim of a put-up job.…
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Up and down the long lines the Federal trenches were inched closer to the defensive works. Sharpshooters were constantly busy, and the artillery was always active. There were casualties every day, and a man in the 12th Wisconsin wrote that “it looked hard to see six or eight poor fellows piled into an ambulance about the size of Jones’s meat wagon and hustled over the rough roads as fast as the mules could trot and to see the blood running out of the carts in streams almost.” Firing died down at night, although the naval batteries and the army siege guns kept booming away; in the darkness the glowing fuses of
the mortar shells could be seen, rising high above the town in great parabolas, the explosion lighting the sky like lightning, and every morning the hour of dawn brought a sudden step-up in the firing. Infantrymen learned to sleep soundly even in the rifle pits, despite the racket and the danger. In twenty-four hours the average soldier on the firing line would use from fifty to one hundred cartridges.
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Grant was steadily reinforced. He had seventy-five thousand men in his command now, and Joe Johnston could easily be held at a distance while the job of throttling the Vicksburg garrison went forward methodically. The Federals made a number of sap rollers for protection as they extended their trenches. Two empty barrels would be placed end to end, encased in a binding of saplings and filled with dirt; with the open ends plugged, this provided a heavy, bulletproof roller, and men could crouch behind it and dig in comparative security.

There was no drama in all of this and very little excitement; just a remorseless, constant tightening of the bonds around the fortress. The men understood that all of this drudgery was much more economical of life than any series of open assaults would have been, and they took to it willingly enough. A general explained their attitude:

“The veteran American soldier fights very much as he has been accustomed to work his farm or run his sawmill; he wants to see a fair prospect that it ‘is going to pay.’ His loyalty, discipline and pluck will not allow him under any circumstances to retreat without orders, much less to run away, but if he encounters a resistance which he thinks he cannot overcome, or which he thinks it would ‘cost too much’ to overcome, he will lie down, cover himself with a little parapet, and hold his ground against any force that may attempt to drive him back.”
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There were strange interludes now and then; facing each other at close range, week after week, the men of the opposing armies developed an odd sort of fellow-feeling for each other. One day the men in one Federal trench saw the Confederates opposite them standing on top of their parapet, looking toward them; they climbed into the open themselves and looked at their enemies, and when someone yelled across and asked the Rebels why they were standing up like that, the reply came back: “Because you are.” Then a lad in the 11th Wisconsin cried impulsively: “I’m going down into the ravine and shake hands with them Rebs.” He ran downhill to a little creek, a Confederate ran down to meet him, and presently hundreds of men from both sides were down there, shaking hands, talking, and picking blackberries. The Confederates asked the Federals how they liked the Mississippi climate, said that they had been getting mule meat for breakfast, and did not seem to feel that they could hold out much longer. Then at last a Confederate officer came out and scolded the men for fraternizing; the
Confederates reluctantly went back to their trenches, the Federals did the same, and in another minute the firing had been resumed as if there had never been a break.

Pickets grew friendly. One night a party from the 33rd Illinois was at work digging a trench out toward the Confederate line; unwittingly the men pushed their work until they had gone through the Rebel picket line, and the Confederate pickets protested at this infringement of their territory. Their officer of the guard came out and remonstrated: this was irregular, the Unionists were trespassing on Confederate soil. A Union officer replied that they did not mean to trespass, but they were under orders — they had been told to dig in this direction, picket line or no, and what could they do about it? The Confederate officer at last agreed that there was nothing that could be done about it, and he added despondently: “I suppose it really makes no difference, you’ll soon have the place anyway.”
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Closer and closer came the lines, until in places they were only a few yards apart. Now the Federals began to make tunnels under the Confederate lines, planting mines and exploding them. These were small-scale affairs and caused relatively few casualties; they did result in marvels now and then, as when one mine blew a Negro camp cook in the Confederate army clear over inside the Union lines. He was unhurt, oddly enough, and the Iowa outfit that captured him put him in a tent and exhibited him to the curious for several days, charging five cents a head.
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Inside Vicksburg food supplies were running low and hope was gone. The bombardment went on without a letup. Union trenches were so close in some spots that only a wall of earth separated attackers and defenders. Before long, obviously, the Federals could make a concerted rush that would break the defensive line once and for all. Luckless Pemberton held a council of war, confessed that there was no chance that Johnston could break the Federal cordon and relieve the Vicksburg garrison, and remarked that as far as he could see they could do one of two things — surrender now, while it might still be possible to get decent terms, or make one wild, desperate attempt to cut their way out — which would be completely hopeless but which probably would kill a good many Yankees. Most of the generals voted for surrender, and Pemberton agreed. On July 3 a white flag went through the lines, and before long Pemberton and Grant were standing under a tree talking things over.

Grant began by restating the old “unconditional surrender” theme. He did not really mean it, however, and in the end Pemberton was given terms so lenient that Halleck, back in Washington, rapped Grant’s knuckles for not being sterner. In effect the Confederates were allowed
to come out of the citadel, lay down their arms, and then go to their homes under parole. Grant believed that it would take half of the summer, and be infernally expensive as well, to ship the whole lot all the way north to a prison camp; besides, he felt that Pemberton’s men were so discouraged that very few of them would ever return to the army even if they were finally exchanged. (Several hundred of the men refused to sign their paroles, preferring to be sent north as prisoners of war so that they could not under any possibility be forced back into the army; Federals who mingled with the prisoners heard many say that they had “done their last fighting for the South.”)
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In any case, the Confederate flag came down on July 4, and Grant found himself in possession of thirty-one thousand prisoners, one hundred and seventy-two cannon, and more than sixty thousand small arms, many of which were better weapons than his own men were carrying. A number of Federal regiments rearmed themselves with captured rifles after Vicksburg. It was noted that the victorious Unionists did no cheering when the Confederates laid down their arms — except that one division raised a cheer for “the gallant defenders of Vicksburg.” As soon as the ceremonies were over the men of the two armies were mingling on friendly terms, and Confederates who had been eating mule meat got Yankee hardtack and bacon for supper. One Union sharpshooter, seeing a Confederate officer on a distinctive white horse, called out to him: “Mister — you man on the little white horse! Danged if you ain’t the hardest feller to hit I ever saw; I’ve shot at you more’n a hundred times!”
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That night, for the first time in a month and a half, no guns fired anywhere along the Vicksburg front. Federal soldiers found it impossible to get to sleep; the unfamiliar quiet was somehow oppressive and disturbing.
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Far downstream, at Port Hudson, Banks had at last brought up the army that did not come up in time to meet Grant, and Port Hudson had been under siege since May 23. The business was a small-scale replica of Vicksburg — seven thousand Confederates in the trenches, fourteen thousand Federals outside trying to get in, capture by assault impossible, escape for the beleaguered garrison impossible also. After the fall of Vicksburg a broadside announcing the event was tossed over inside the Port Hudson lines. It brought a defiant shout: “That’s another damned Yankee lie!” — but when all the Federals began to cheer and their bands started giving patriotic concerte up and down the lines, the defiance began to fade, and by July 9 Port Hudson was surrendered, lock, stock, and barrel. There were no longer any Confederate troops or fortifications anywhere along the Mississippi River. From St. Paul to the Gulf, the stream was open.

What had been accomplished required no elaboration. The event spoke for itself. It was the logical conclusion of all that had been done in the West since the war began. The strong hand in Missouri, the slow advance up the Tennessee and the Cumberland, the fights at Fort Donelson and Shiloh, at New Madrid and Island No. Ten, at Corinth and Perryville and Stone’s River, the long months of sickness and discontent in the muddy swamps and bayous — all of these made a coherent pattern, and no one needed to wait for a presidential speech to explain it. It was all going just about as Winfield Scott had thought it might, in the dim days before Bull Run, although the dropsical old general himself was rusticating at West Point, knowing of the war only by the echoes that came up the Hudson. The Confederacy was broken now, and the break would be permanent; would be followed, inevitably, by others. Mr. Lincoln would use great phrases to tell of Gettysburg, but Vicksburg he could sum up in one terse sentence:

“The father of waters rolls unvexed to the sea.”

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was believed that the Middle West now was back where it had been in 1860. The Mississippi Valley was open again, and it was an article of faith that this river was the all-important highway to the markets of the world. The West was free; the terrible threat of isolation posed by secession was ended, and the farmers and traders of the continental interior no longer had to see a closed door at the mouth of the great river. They could also count themselves relieved from economic bondage to the merchants and bankers of the East.

Yet war is fought in a fog, and men are not always able to understand just what they have done. The Mississippi would never again be what it had been before — not even when the last vengeful guerrillas had been driven from the canebrakes and cured of their new habit of taking shots at passing steamboats. The road to the outer world would run east and west now, river or no river, war or no war. Not again would there be the lazy life of drifting downstream with the tide, high-pressure engines swinging paddle wheels in slow, splashing rhythm, corn and wheat and pork and mules and lumber borne away by the Father of Waters to the great ships waiting at the New Orleans levee. The dike that had obstructed the river was broken, but the old flow would never quite be resumed. The West had won the most significant campaign of the war, but it had not brought back the past. That was gone forever. Now the West must face east, not south. And the entire country must look to the future rather than to the past.

That the capture of Vicksburg would have unexpected results was no more than natural. It had been thought of as something that would soothe the rising war-weariness west of the Alleghenies and make farmers feel that they would gain by the war; it turned out to be the stroke that would decide the war itself, or at least would go far
toward doing so, and Sherman was exultantly writing to his brother, the senator, that Federal armies “will be in Mobile in October and Georgia by Christmas if required.” He was talking with southern men of repute and position, and he reported: “The fall of Vicksburg has had a powerful effect. They are subjugated.”
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