VICKSBURG Chapter One

 

I know two amazing things about General and President Ulysses Simpson Grant, and the first one is that was not his name. His real name was Hiram Ulysses Grant (above), but he hated the name Hiam.  His mother's maiden name had been Simpson, and in 1839 when Ohio Democratic Congressman Thomas Hamer nominated Ulysses for West Point, somebody on his staff screwed up the application. So, as the reporter in "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" intones, "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." Thus,  Hiram Ulysses became, on his West Point application,  Ulysses Simpson Grant, or U.S. Grant - earning him the nickname at West Point of "Sam", as in Uncle Sam. 

The other amazing thing about Grant is that in the fall of 1862 he was a slightly better than average general. In early April he had been caught napping at Pittsburgh Landing, and came within a hare's breath of having his 40,000 man Army of the Cumberland pushed into the Tennessee River. But he did not panic, and the next morning, reinforced,  he counterattacked and drove the 40,000 man Confederate Army of Mississippi from the field, and smashed it. 

Grant later wrote, "I saw an open field...over which the Confederates had made repeated charges...so covered with dead that it would have been possible to walk across the clearing, in any direction, stepping on dead bodies, without a foot touching the ground."  By midsummer, after a few months under the tight leash of his superior, General Henry Halleck, Grant was given full command of the western Federal armies. And after the rebel general Van Dorn's failed attempt to capture Corinth, he was given instructions by President Lincoln via Halleck,  to capture Vicksburg.

During the middle of October of  1862, Grant secreted himself and his staff in a Cincinnati hotel suite (above). With maps and reports scattered about the rooms, Grant familiarized himself with the terrain of Mississippi, until he had committed every inch of it to memory.

William Tecumseh Sherman, (above) Grant's most trusted officer,   advocated using the Mississippi river as the line of attack against Vicksburg.  And Grant's superior in Washington, General-in-Chief Halleck, agreed, With the Navy's new fleet of ironclad gunboats a river supply line would be unbreakable. .  But nobody had ever tried such an advance before, and Grant became coy about his plans, never hinting that he agreed with "Sherm".  In all communications he expressed a preference to have solid ground beneath his feet and to advance through central Mississippi. To their credit neither Halleck nor Sherman went public with their disagreements with Grant. He was the man who would have to fight the battles and would bear the professional weight of defeat.

The reason Vicksburg was the next logical target was succinctly stated by the amateur military genius, Abraham Lincoln.  “…Vicksburg is the key", said Lincoln. "Here is the Red River, which will supply the Confederacy with cattle and corn to feed their armies. There are the Arkansas and White Rivers which can supply cattle and hogs by the thousand. From Vicksburg these supplies can be distributed by rail all over the Confederacy….Let us get Vicksburg and all that country is ours. The war can never be brought to a close until that key is in our pockets…It means hog and hominy without limit, fresh troops from all the states of the far South and a cotton country where they can raise the staple without interference.” I have never found a more cogent or accurate description of the strategic situation in the fall of 1862.

To many in the north, that fall of 1962, the war looked like a stalemate. But the slaveholders knew better. In February, Grant had captured Fort Henry and Fort Donaldson (above), opening the Tennessee and  Cumberland rivers and eventually leading to the capture of Nashville and most of the state of Tennessee. 

The largest and richest city in the Confederacy, New Orleans,  Louisiana,  had been captured by the Federal Navy on the first of  May. That closed the Mississippi river from its mouth up to Baton Rouge. 

And with the battles of Island Number Ten, and the river fleet Battle of Memphis  on 6 June,  the Old Man River was now in Federal hands from its headwaters down to the Tennessee/Mississippi state line. That left Vicksburg, in the words of rebel President Jefferson Davis,  as the "nail that held the Confederacy together."

Meanwhile, on land, Union troops under the cautious Major General Steven Halleck had managed to occupy the railroad cross road town of Corinth, Mississippi on 1 June, 1862 and the rest of that summer rebel armies had broken themselves trying to retake. 

On 5 August, 1962, Rebel forces also tried to retake Baton Rouge (above), just north of New Orleans on the Mississippi river, but were driven back by the Federal Navy  Both of these Confederate failures gave Grant the initiative in the western theater of operations. But how to take Vicksburg?

As Grant studied the maps his mind began to focus on a three mile stretch of 90 foot high bluffs. They rose steeply from the bottom land, beginning 23 miles up the lethargic and meandering Yazoo River. Eventually he could name the obscure features in his sleep; Drumgould's Bluff, Snyder's Mill and Snyder's bluff, Haine's Landing and Haine's Bluff, the Johnson Plantation and Chickasaw Bayou.  It was the key to Vicksburg, and over the following 8 months Grant never forgot those bluffs. It was that stubborn vision held in the face of repeated failures, which would make him the greatest general of his generation.

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