THE FEDERALS REGROUP
After the failure of the great Southern counteroffensive in the fall of 1862, the North tried to pick up the lost threads afresh. Its problem, then as always, was deceptively simple: to use its immense preponderance of physical strength in a sustained, increasing pressure that would collapse the Confederate defenses and destroy the Confederate armies and the government which they supported. In the spring it had seemed that success was very near; by autumn the vast difficulties that lay across the path were much more clearly visible. Momentum, so important to military success, had been lost, and in the East and in the West a new start would have to be made.
In this effort three armies would be chiefly involved - the Army of the Potomac in Virginia, the Army of the Cumberland in central Tennessee, and the Army of the Tennessee along the Mississippi River. The Army of the Potomac was led now by Major General Ambrose E. Burnside, a handsome, likable, unassuming West Pointer with a legendary growth of side whiskers, a man whose sincere desire to do the right thing was a good deal stronger than his ability to discern what that right thing might be. McClellan had at last been removed. He had let six weeks pass after Antietam before he crossed the Potomac and began a new offensive, and then he moved, as always, with much deliberation; Lincoln had lost patience, McClellan was in retirement, and Burnside now had the army.
It lay in the neighborhood of Warrenton, Virginia, east of the Blue Ridge. Burnside did not like the advance down the Orange and Alexandria Railroad which McClellan seemed to have projected, and he devised a new plan: go east to Fredericksburg, cross the Rappahannock there and force Lee to give battle somewhere between Fredericksburg and Richmond, and then drive on toward the Confederate capital. By the middle of November, Burnside had the army on the move.
The Army of the Cumberland was just below Nashville, Tennessee. Like the Army of the Potomac, this army had a new commander: bluff, red-faced William S. Rosecrans, who had taken Buell's place when that officer proved unable to overtake Bragg on the retreat from Kentucky. Rosecrans was well liked by his troops, and he was a stout fighter. He had commanded the portion of Grant's force which won the bloody battle at Corinth, and although Grant had been critical of the way he pursued Van Dorn's beaten army after the battle (it seemed to Grant that that army should have been destroyed outright), Rosecrans' general record of performance was good. He devoted some weeks now to refitting and reorganization, and late in December he began to move south from Nashville with 45,000 men. The Confederate army under Braxton Bragg lay in camp at Murfreesboro, behind Stones River, thirty miles away. At the moment it numbered some 37,000 soldiers.
The third army, Grant's, held western Tennessee, and it had two principal functions: to occupy the western third of the state, holding Memphis and the important network of railroads that ran east and northeast from that city and north from the Mississippi border to the upper Mississippi River; and to move down the great river, capture the Confederate stronghold at Vicksburg, join hands with the Union forces which held New Orleans and Baton Rouge, and so open the river from headwaters to gulf. Grant had 80,000 men in his department, but half of them were needed for occupation duties. When he moved against Vicksburg he would be able to put fewer than 40,000 in his field army. He would follow the north-and-south railroad that ran to the Mississippi capital, Jackson, forty miles east of Vicksburg, and then he would swing west. Opposing him was an undetermined number of Confederates led by Lieutenant General John C. Pemberton, a Pennsylvania-born West Pointer who had cast his lot with the South.
These three Federal armies, then, would move more or less in concert, and if all went well, the Confederacy would be pressed beyond endurance. If all did not go well, the Lincoln administration might be in serious trouble. The Emancipation Proclamation was meeting with a mixed reception in the North, and the fall elections had gone badly. The Democrats had sharply reduced the Republican majority in Congress and had elected Horatio Seymour governor of New York; and to the Republican radicals, Seymour, lukewarm about the war at best, looked no better than an arrant Copperhead. In the Northwest war weariness was clearly visible, and Lincoln was being warned that if the Mississippi were not soon opened, there would be an increasing demand for a negotiated peace with the South. For political reasons he needed new military successes.
For the immediate present he did not get them. Instead he got one disaster and a series of checks which looked almost as bad.
THE BATTLE OF FREDERICKSBURG
First there was Burnside. He got his army to the Rappahannock, opposite Fredericksburg, and if he could have crossed the river at once, he might have made serious trouble for Lee, who did not have all of his men on hand just yet. But the pontoon trains which Burnside needed to bridge the river had gone astray somewhere, and Burnside could think of nothing better to do than wait quietly where he was until they arrived. They reached him, eventually, but a fortnight had been lost, and by the end of it Lee had both Jackson and Longstreet in position on the opposite shore - 75,000 veteran fighters of high morale, ably led, ready for the kind of defensive battle in which they were all but unbeatable.
Burnside lacked the mental agility to change his plan, and he tried to go through with it even though the conditions essential for success had gone. He built his bridges, crossed the Rappahannock, and on December 13 assailed Lee's army in its prepared positions. As made, the attack had no chance to succeed. Solidly established on high ground with a clear field of fire, the Confederates beat off a succession of doomed assaults in which the Federals displayed great valor but an almost total lack of military acumen. At the end of the day the Army of the Potomac had lost more than 12,000 men, most of them in front of a stone wall and a sunken road that ran along the base of Marye's Heights. The Confederates had lost fewer than half that many men, and at no time had they been in any serious danger of being dislodged. Burnside called for new assaults the next day - he proposed to lead them in person, there being nothing wrong with his personal courage - but his subordinates managed to talk him out of it, and the Army of the Potomac sullenly withdrew to the north side of the river, its morale all but ruined. The two armies glowered at each other from opposite banks of the river for several weeks; then Burnside tried to move upstream to cross beyond Lee's left flank and fight a new battle, but three days of steady, icy rain turned the unpaved roads into bottomless mud and left his army completely bogged down. In the end the soldiers managed to pull themselves, their wagons, and their artillery out of the mire and came slogging back to camp, utterly dispirited. This fiasco was too much for everybody, and Burnside was removed from command. To all intents and purposes the Army of the Potomac was out of action for the winter.
FIGHTING IN THE CENTRAL THEATER
In central Tennessee things went better, although what was gained cost a good deal more than it was worth. Rosecrans moved down to Murfreesboro, and Bragg waited for him, and on December 31 their armies fought a desperate, inconclusive battle on a desolate frozen field. Tactically, the fight presented an interesting oddity: each general prepared to hold with his right and attack with his left, and if the two plans had been carried out simultaneously the armies would have swung around like a huge revolving door. As it happened, however, Bragg's men struck first, crushing the Federal right wing and compelling Rosecrans to abandon all thought of an advance with his left. For a time it appeared that the Union army would be completely routed, but Rosecrans' center was commanded by George Thomas, and that stolid Virginian was very hard to dislodge. His corps hung on while the shattered right was re-formed far to the rear, and the sounds of musket fire rose to such a deafening pitch that Confederates charging across a weedy cotton field stopped and plucked raw cotton from the open bolls and stuffed it in their ears before going on with the advance.
When night came, Rosecrans' line, which had been more or less straight at dawn, was doubled back like a jackknife with a partly opened blade, but it had not been driven from the field. Bragg notified Richmond that he had won a signal victory - and then, unaccountably, failed to renew the attack the next day. Through all of January 1 the armies faced each other, inactive; late in the afternoon of January 2 Bragg finally assailed the Union left, but his columns were broken up by Federal artillery, and at nightfall the armies were right where they had been at dawn. On January 3, again, they remained in contact, with sporadic firing along the picket lines but no real activity. Then, after dark, the unpredictable Bragg drew off in retreat, marching thirty-six miles south to Tullahoma. Rosecrans' moved on to Murfreesboro, but his army was too badly mangled to go any farther. Six months would pass before it could resume the offensive.
No one quite knew who had won this battle, or what its military significance was, if indeed it had any. The Federals did occupy the field, and the Confederates had retreated, so the North accepted it as a victory; but nothing of any consequence had been gained, Bragg's army was still in position squarely across the road to Chattanooga, the key city which the Federals wanted to possess, and the only concrete result seemed to be that both armies had been immobilized for some time to come. Since the North could not possibly win the war if armies were immobilized, this victory was not quite worth the price.
The casualties had been shocking. The Federals had lost 13,000 men and the Confederacy 10,000 or more - in each case, more than a fourth of the army's total strength. Few Civil War battles ever cost more or meant less.
POLITICAL MANEUVERING AND FIGHTING ON THE WESTERN FRONT
If the Federals were to get anything at all out of the winter's operations, they would have to get it from Grant, and for a long time it did not seem that his luck was going to be any better than anybody else's.
He started out brightly enough, beginning in November to advance down the line of the railroad. He established a base of supplies at Holly Springs, two dozen miles south of the Tennessee-Mississippi border, and went on with a methodical advance toward Grenada. His progress, however, was first delayed and then brought to a complete halt by two unexpected developments - a strange case of military-political maneuvering among the Federals, and a display of highly effective aggressiveness by Confederate cavalry led by Van Dorn and Forrest.
Grant had hardly begun his advance before he began to realize that something odd was going on in the rear. He was moving so as to approach Vicksburg from the east - the only point from which that riverside stronghold could really be attacked with much hope of success. But as he moved he got persistent reports that there was also going to be an expedition straight down the river, some sort of combined army-navy operation apparently intended to break the river defenses by direct assault. He had planned no such operation, but it was going to take place in his department, and although he could get no clear information about it from Halleck, it seemed that the business would be more or less under his command if he played his cards carefully. It took him a long time to find out what was really in the wind, and when he did find out he was obliged to revise his plans.
What was in the wind was an ambitious attempt by one Major General John A. McClernand to find and use a new route to victory. McClernand had been prominent in Democratic politics in Illinois before the war, and as a prominent "War Democrat" his standing with the administration was very high; he had been given a brigadier general's commission and then he had been made major general, and he had led troops under Grant at Fort Donelson and at Shiloh. He was not a West Pointer, and Grant considered him too erratic and opinionated for independent command, but he was a good fighter and leader of men, and on the whole his combat record was good. He had taken leave of absence late in September and had gone to Washington to see Lincoln and Stanton, and he had persuaded them that unless a conclusive victory were won soon in the Mississippi Valley, the whole Northwest might fall out of the war. Since this jibed with what they already had been told, the President and the Secretary of War listened attentively.
McClernand's proposal was unorthodox but direct. He had a solid following among the Democrats of the Northwest. He believed that he could organize enough fresh troops in that area to form a new army. With such an army, he believed, he could go straight down the Mississippi, and while Grant and the others were threshing about inland he could capture Vicksburg, opening the waterway to the sea and providing the victory which would inspire the Northwest and make possible a final Federal triumph. Lincoln and Stanton liked the idea and gave McClernand top-secret orders to go ahead. In these orders, however, they wrote an escape clause which McClernand seems not to have noticed; what McClernand did was to be done in Grant's department, and if Halleck and Grant saw fit, Grant could at any time assume overall command over McClernand, McClernand's troops, and the entire venture.
McClernand went back to Illinois and began to raise troops, and rumors of the project trickled out. Halleck could not tell Grant just what was up, but he did his best to warn him by indirection: also, he saw to it that as McClernand's recruits were formed into regiments the regiments were sent downstream to Grant's department. In one way and another, grant finally came to see what was going on. There was going to be an advance on Vicksburg by water, and Halleck wanted him to assume control of it; wanted him, apparently, to get it moving at once, before McClernand (for whose abilities Halleck had an abiding distrust) could himself reach the scene and take charge.
The upshot of all this was that in December Grant recast his plans. He sent his most trusted subordinate, William T. Sherman, back to Memphis, with orders to organize a striking force out of Sherman's own troops and the new levies that were coming downstream from Illinois, and to proceed down the river with it at the earliest possible date and put his men ashore a few miles north of Vicksburg. Grant, meanwhile, would bring his own army down the line of the railroad, and Pemberton could not possibly meet both threats; if he concentrated against one Federal force, the other would strike him in the rear, and since he would be outnumbered he could not possibly meet both threats at once. Sherman hurried to get things in motion, and Grant went on with his own advance.
At this point the Confederates took a hand. The General Von Dorn who had been beaten at Corinth took a cavalry force, swung behind Grant, and captured the vast Federal supply base at Holly Springs; and at the same time Bedford Forrest rode up into western Tennessee, cutting railroad and telegraph lines, seizing enough Federal weapons, horses, and equipment to outfit new recruits who joined him in that stoutly secessionist area, and creating vast confusion and disorganization deep in the Federal rear. In consequence, Grant was brought to a standstill, and he could not get word of this to Sherman, who by now was en route to Vicksburg with 30,000 men, many of whom belonged to the absent McClernand.
So Sherman ran into trouble, because Pemberton was able to ignore Grant and give Sherman all of his attention. The Federals attacked on December 29 and were decisively repulsed, losing more than 1,700 men. Sherman withdrew to the Mississippi River, and on January 2 he was joined there by the indignant McClernand, who was beginning to realize that things were not working out quite as he had hoped. McClernand assumed command, and - for want of anything better to do - he and Sherman, with the help of the navy's gunboats, went up the Arkansas River to capture Confederate Fort Hindman: a nice little triumph, but not precisely what had been contemplated earlier. From Fort Hindman they returned to make camp on the west shore of the Mississippi at Young's Point and Milliken's Bend, some dozen miles above Vicksburg.
There, at the end of the month, Grant showed up, bringing with him most of the men with whom he had attempted the advance down the railroad. His arrival reduced McClernand to the position of a corps commander - a demotion which McClernand protested bitterly but in vain - and gave Grant a field force which numbered between 40,000 and 50,000 men. It also gave Grant a position from which it was all but impossible even to get at the Confederate stronghold, let alone capture it.
TARGET VICKSBURG: A PROBLEM OF GEOGRAPHY
Grant's move to the river had been inevitable. There was going to be a Federal column operating on the river, whether Grant liked it or not - Washington had settled that, and the decision was irreversible - and it was clearly unsound to try to coordinate that column's movements with the movements of a separate army operating in the interior of the state of Mississippi. The only sensible thing to do was concentrate everything along the river and make the best of it. But in this area geography was on the side of the Confederates.
Vicksburg occupied high ground on the east bank of the Mississippi, and it could be attacked with any chance of success only from the east or southeast. The Yazoo River entered the Mississippi a short distance north of Vicksburg, with steep bluffs along its left bank, and Pemberton had entrenched these bluffs and put troops in them; Sherman's December experience had shown the futility of trying an assault in that area. North of there, the fertile low country of the Yazoo delta ran for two hundred miles, cut by innumerable rivers, creeks, and bayous - fine land for farming, almost impossible land for an army of invasion to cross with all of its guns and supplies.
To the south things looked little better. The Louisiana shore of the Mississippi was low, swampy, intersected like the Yazoo delta by many streams, and if the army did go south it could not cross the river without many steamboats, and there did not seem to be any good way to get these past the Vicksburg batteries. Even if steamboats were available, Confederates had mounted batteries to cover most of the downstream places where a crossing might be made.
What all of this meant was that the army must somehow get east of Vicksburg in order to assault the place, and there did not seem to be any way to get east without going all the way back to Memphis and starting out again on the overland route which Grant had tried in December. This was out of the question because it would be an obvious, unmitigated confession of defeat, and an unhappy Northern public which was trying to digest the bad news from Fredericksburg and Murfreesboro probably could not swallow one more defeat.
Apparently, then, the Northern war machine was stalled, on dead center. It was perfectly possible that the Federals had broken the great Confederate counteroffensive in the fall only to let their hopes of victory die of sheer inanition during the winter. The Army of the Potomac had a new commander - Major General Joseph Hooker, handsome, cocky, a hard drinker and a hard fighter - and Hooker was doing his best to get the army back into shape. By reorganizing his supply and hospital services, shaking up the chain of command, overhauling his cavalry, and instituting a program of constant drills, Hooker was restoring morale, but it would be the middle of the spring before the army could be expected to do anything. (No one except Hooker himself was really prepared to bet that it would then fare any better against Lee than McClellan, Pope, and Burnside had fared.) At Murfreesboro lay the Army of the Cumberland, licking its wounds and recuperating. It had suffered no decline in morale, but it had been cruelly racked at Stones River, and Rosecrans was going to take his time about resuming the offensive.
It was up to Grant, even though he did seem to be stymied. He had hardly reached the Mississippi before he began to try every possible means to solve the problem which faced him. There seemed to be four possibilities. He would try them all.
Opposite Vicksburg the Mississippi made a hairpin turn. If a canal could be cut across the base of the narrow finger of land that pointed north on the Louisiana side, the Mississippi might pour through it, bypassing the city entirely. Then gunboats, transports, and everything else could float downstream unhindered, and Vicksburg would be a problem no longer. Dredges were brought down, and Sherman's corps was put to work with pick and shovel, and the canal was dug. (In the end it did not work; perversely, the Mississippi refused to enter it in any volume, and Sherman's men had done their work for nothing.)
Fifty miles upstream from Vicksburg, on the Louisiana side, a back water known as Lake Providence lay near the river. It might be possible to cut a channel from river to lake and to deepen the chain of streams that led south from Lake Providence. If that worked, steamers could go all the way down to the Red River, coming back to the Mississippi 150 miles below Vicksburg. Using this route, the army could get east of the river, roundabout but unhindered; it also could draw supplies and substantial reinforcements from New Orleans. So this too was tried; after two months it could be seen that this was not quite going to work, partly because the shallow-draft steamers needed could not be obtained in quantity.
A good 300 miles north of Vicksburg, streams tributary to the Yazoo flowed from a deep-water slough just over the levee from the Mississippi. Cut the levee, send transports and gunboats through, get into the Yazoo, and cruise down to a landing point just above the fortified chain of bluffs; put troops ashore there, take the fortifications in flank - and Vicksburg is taken. Engineer troops cut the levee, gunboats and transports steamed through: and where the Tallahatchie and Yalobusha rivers unite to form the Yazoo, they ran into Confederate Fort Pemberton, which was not particularly strong but was situated in a place that made it practically impregnable. It was surrounded by water, or by half-flooded bottom land, and could be attacked only from the river, and the river just here came up to the fort in a straight, narrow reach which was fully controlled by the fort's guns. The gunboats moved in to bombard, got the worst of it - and the whole situation had to go ignominiously back to the Mississippi. The Yazoo venture was out.
A fourth possibility involved a fearfully complicated network of little streams and backwaters which could be entered from the Mississippi near the mouth of the Yazoo. Gunboats and transports might go up this chain for a hundred miles or more and, if their luck was in, safely below Fort Pemberton go on over to the Yazoo, coming down thereafter to the same place which the other expedition had tried to reach. This too was tried, with troops under Sherman and gunboats under the David Porter who had commanded Farragut's mortar boats below New Orleans. This move was a total fiasco. Porter's gunboats got hung up in streams no wider than the boats were, with an infernal tangle of willows growing up ahead to block further progress, and with busy Confederates felling trees in the rear to cut off escape. The whole fleet narrowly escaped destruction. It finally got back to the Mississippi, but it had demonstrated once and for all that this route to Vicksburg was no good.
Four chances, and four failures: and as spring came on Grant sat in the cabin of his headquarters steamer at Milliken's Bend, stared into the wreaths of cigar smoke which surrounded him, and worked out the means by which he would finally be enabled to attack Vicksburg. If he failed, his army would probably be lost, and with it the war; if he succeeded, the North would at last be on the road to victory. Either way, everything was up to him.