Under Siege! (5 page)

When he arrived onboard the ship that served as Grant’s headquarters, his father greeted him warmly. He showed Fred the cabin they would share belowdecks. Grant’s officers fussed over the boy. One gave him a personal tour of one of the ironclads—the most powerful fighting machines in the Union navy, with metal hulls that offered protection against gunfire. Another officer presented him with a pony. He even received a regulation army uniform that had been specially made for him. Fred was a handsome boy with his father’s strong spirit. Dressed smartly in his uniform and sitting proudly on his pony, he accompanied the general on daily troop inspections.

Since his infancy Fred had been around soldiers, and he enjoyed their company. He quickly settled into life on the ship. Instead of dining with the officers, he ate most of his meals with the enlisted men. Many nights he left his father’s cabin belowdecks to sleep up top where it was cool, soldiers stretched out all around him.

As happy as Fred was to be with the army, he was aware of the pressure on his father to finish the job he had come to do. Grant’s inability to take control of the river was a topic of both speculation and derision throughout the North. Grant and his army of 33,000 men had joined Sherman and his nearly 30,000 men in January 1863, a few weeks after Sherman’s defeat at Chickasaw Bayou. In the months since, Grant had sought a way to get his troops close enough to Vicksburg to attack. But each time he tried, either the Confederates or the Mississippi River sabotaged his plan. One plan had been to dig a canal that would create a new channel in the river, allowing ships to bypass Vicksburg and its guns. The men dug and dug, but the force of the river always destroyed their efforts, and finally Grant gave up.

He also tried to find an alternate water route to Vicksburg through the bayous and swamps that threaded off the river north of the city, but Union boats became trapped by trees that grew up through the murky,
alligator-infested water. If a boat struck a tree—and it was impossible not to—lizards, raccoons, cockroaches, rats, and poisonous snakes fell out of the branches, sometimes landing on the boat’s deck. Nervous sailors had to stand by with brooms to hastily brush them away. Even a few wildcats landed on boat decks and had to be shot. Confederate snipers onshore were yet another problem, for they dogged the boats, forcing sailors to stay belowdecks whenever possible.

When Fred arrived in Mississippi in early April, the weather was already hot. He saw for himself the toll the constant rain and slogging around in mud and muggy bayous had taken on the men. Young soldiers from states like Pennsylvania, Indiana, and New York were falling victim to pneumonia, malaria, and smallpox. Food was poor, the arrival of mail from home and paychecks from the government was undependable, and tempers grew thin.

The USS
Cairo,
sunk by a Confederate mine, had thirteen heavy cannon and was covered with twelve inches of metal.

The navy ironclads had their share of trouble, too. Confederates sank the Union
Cairo-the
first ship in naval history to be the victim of an electrically
detonated mine. After that, Union boats were more careful to sweep for mines before passing along the river.

Grant had other problems as well. Everywhere he went, Southern blacks left the homes and plantations where they had been slaves and followed the army, afraid for their safety if they struck out on their own, for in the eyes of most Southerners, they were not free. Grant was unsure what to do with them. As their numbers grew, feeding them became a burden. He employed some of them as laborers and cooks, but their numbers kept swelling.

Many black families escaped their masters and fled to the safety of Union lines. Grant had an estimated 10,000 liberated slaves with his army at Vicksburg.

Northern newspaper editors questioned everything. There was a war to fight, the troops were critically needed in other places, and here was the Army of the Tennessee still trying to silence the guns at Vicksburg. President Lincoln had selected Grant as the man to take Vicksburg because he knew Grant wouldn’t give up. The president’s confidence surprised some, for Grant had not yet proved himself to be an outstanding leader and had
only a few victories to his credit. But Lincoln said of him, “I cannot spare this man. He fights.”

Fred knew that his father’s soldiers loved him. They not only followed him, they worked for him. Grant stood five feet, eight inches tall and weighed 140 pounds. He was a plain man, rumpled, not given to talking very much. He almost always had a cigar in his mouth, whether lit or unlit. Though he was only forty-one, the soldiers affectionately referred to him as “The Old Man.” One said of him, “Somehow he was more partner than boss; we were in this thing together.”

Sherman ably assisted Grant’s efforts in the Vicksburg campaign.

Grant’s close friend General William Tecumseh Sherman was also “in this thing” with him. Sherman was forty-three, tall, craggy, with red hair and a scruffy red beard. Like Grant, he chain-smoked cigars, and he was restless, his hands always moving. When he was born, his father named him “Tecumseh” for the Shawnee Indian chief he considered a great warrior.
Sherman was still a boy when his father died, and other family members added the first name “William,” feeling the child needed something more suitable. Sherman had been at West Point with Grant, and they had served in the Mexican War together. Their friendship was strong. They knew they could trust and rely on each other.

About the time Fred joined his father on the Mississippi, Grant was explaining to Sherman and his other officers his newest plan to take Vicksburg. Though it involved a long route to reach the town, after Grant’s previous disasters it seemed the best way to actually get there.

But it was complicated. The army was currently in Louisiana, across the river and north of Vicksburg, so the first step would be to march the men south along the Louisiana shore—a slow, arduous task through difficult, often flooded terrain—to a point below Vicksburg.

Admiral David Porter, commander of the navy’s Mississippi River squadron, had a reputation/or acting alone, but he worked well in partnership with Grant.

Then navy ships, currently on the river north of the city with Grant, would make a run southward to try to get past Vicksburg’s guns. If the run past the batteries was successful, the ships would then transport the Union army, which would be waiting on the Louisiana shore, across the river and into Mississippi. Rather than try to fight through the swamps that protected Vicksburg to the south, Grant would march the men east to the state capital of Jackson, and then follow the Jackson road west back to Vicksburg. As the army surrounded and attacked the city, the Union navy would bombard it from the river. Once that happened, Grant was confident he could force Vicksburg’s surrender within a day.

Grant’s officers were skeptical. Though Sherman privately feared failure, he agreed to go along with the plan. Navy admiral David Dixon Porter, whose ironclads would take the brunt of fire if the fleet was discovered while trying to pass Vicksburg, viewed the plan with reluctance, but like Sherman, he trusted Grant. His ships would be ready.

As for Fred, he had no doubts.
This
plan was going to work!

I
N THE WEEKS THAT FOLLOWED
, the army marched southward along the Louisiana shore, sometimes struggling through muck and bogs, until the men were finally south of Vicksburg. The next step was for the navy to transport them across the river and into the state of Mississippi. It was time to try to get the entire fleet, including the ship that served as Grant’s headquarters, downriver beyond Vicksburg.

Grant was confident they could do it. He selected April 16 as the night for this venture. With luck, clouds would cover the moon, and, as the ships floated downriver in the darkness, the Confederates would never be the wiser. Fred planned to be standing right on deck with his father when they silently glided past Vicksburg.

During the day of April 16, as sailors busily prepared each boat for that night’s run, Julia Grant arrived with her younger three children for a visit. She had managed to get a ride down the river from Memphis, where the family was staying, and had brought Ulysses Jr., who was ten, Nellie, seven, and little Jesse, just five, to visit their older brother and their father. Grant was pleased to see them. No sooner had they arrived than Fred heard his mother offering his father suggestions on how to take Vicksburg. Julia Grant recalled that, in response to her unsolicited advice, “the General was greatly amused and inquired if I, too, had a plan of action to propose. Of course I had.”

While she was explaining it, Grant’s eyes twinkled. Then he said, “Mrs. Grant, I will move upon Vicksburg and will take it, too. You need
give yourself no further trouble … I am glad you arrived in time to witness the running of the blockade.” He explained how that night the Union ships would “drop silently down the river as far as possible and then put on all steam and go flying past Vicksburg and its batteries to where I want to use them.”

Julia Grant was delighted. She had been at Holly Springs with Grant the previous December when the Union supply base was raided and destroyed by Confederate troops. Her carriage had been burned and her horses stolen, but she took danger in stride and looked forward to the evening’s events.