VICKSBURG - Chapter One

I know three amazing things about General and later President Ulysses Simpson Grant (above), and the first one is that was not his name. His birth name was Hiram Ulysses Grant. 

His mother's maiden name had been Simpson, and in 1839 when Ohio Democratic Congressman Thomas Hamer (above) 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." 

So at West Point Hiram Ulysses became Ulysses Simpson (above), and Grant earned the nickname "Sam", as in Uncle Sam.  

The other amazing thing about U.S. Grant is that by mi-1862 he was slightly better than an average general. What made him maybe the best general of his generation was his successes and failures in the  campaign to capture the Mississippi river town of Vicksburg. And that did not begin very well at all.

Now, to most northerners, concentrating on the Eastern Theater,  the second full year of civil war looked like a stalemate: the battle between the Monitor and Merrimack on 9 March -  McClellan's failed Peninsular Campaign over May and August, followed by the bloody September battle of Antietam - in which 5,000 were killed and 20,000 wounded - all being tactically draws. And the year ended in the Federal disaster at Fredericksburg, Virginia.  But at the same time the slave holders in the west were beginning to panic.

In February Grant had won the double victories of Fort Donaldson on the Cumberland River - which resulted in the fall of Nashville, the first Confederate state capital to be taken - and Fort Henry on the Tennessee River -  which allowed the Federal "Brown Water" navy to clear that river south all the way to the Mississippi border. 

Then at dawn of Sunday, 6 April, 1862 Grant was caught napping at Pittsburgh Landing, or Shiloh Church  (above), and came within a hare's breath of having his 40,000 man Army of the Cumberland pushed into the Tennessee River.  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."  But he did not panic, and the next morning, reinforced, Grant  counterattacked and smashed the 40,000 man Confederate Army of Mississippi, thus clearing all of western Tennessee.  

This was followed by, on the first day of May, the capture of the largest and richest city in the Confederacy, New Orleans,  Louisiana - with 168,000 residents and $500 million in annual revenue - a port crucial to the long term economic survival of the Confederacy. The Federal force here was the blue water navy ships under Admiral David Farragut. 

Within days Admiral Farragut (above) also sailed 50 miles up the meandering Mississippi River to capture Baton Rouge, Louisiana - the second Confederate state capital -  and then continued another 50 twisting miles north to capture Natchez, Mississippi on the eastern bank. 

On 18 May, 1862 Admiral Farragut's fleet had even bombarded Vicksburg, Mississippi (above), 200 river miles from New Orleans.  And the Federal army even tried to cut a canal which would have allowed them to bypass the city. But Vicksburg refused to surrender to the Federal cannon, a rebel ironclad gunboat terrified the Union navy, and a dry summer caused the river to fall so fast the Admiral worried his ships might be left grounded.

Meanwhile, back on land, on 1 June, 1862, Union troops under the cautious Major General Steven Halleck - sent to keep an eye on Grant after his slip up at Pittsburg Landing -   occupied the railroad town of Corinth, Mississippi (above), where the East/West Memphis and Charleston, South Carolina railroad crossed the North/South Mobile Alabama and Ohio railroad -  called the 16 most valuable square feet in the Confederacy.  That was now firmly in federal hands,

With victories at the battle of Island Number Ten, ending on 8 April, and the fleet Battle of Memphis, Tennessee (above)  on 6 June,  the Old Man River itself was now in Federal hands from its headwaters south to the Tennessee/ Mississippi state line, and from the it's mouth at Head of the Pass, north to Baton Rouge, Mississippi. Only a 450 mile stretch between Vicksburg and Port Hudson. Mississippi, still connected the western slaves states with their eastern population centers,  And as of 1 November, 1862 the man who had the brains and the will to sever that remaining connection was Lieutenant General Ulysses Grant.  He would face extraordinary opposition, both human (north and south) and meteorological. 

As it does every year in North America, in 1862, winter arrived first on the West Coast, on 10 November. That Sunday a low pressure area over Alaska channeled the remains of a Pacific typhoon into a warm Atmospheric River, which persisted over the next three months and dropped 30" of rain on San Francisco, and 35" on  Los Angeles, shifting the mouth of the L.A. River 30 miles to the south.  Sacramento (above) got almost two feet of rain in December and January, which left 10 feet of water in the streets, requiring the new Republican Governor, Leland Stanford  to take a row boat to his inauguration.   Two thousand  feet up in the Sierra Nevada foothills, the Queen of the mining towns, Sonora, received 102 inches of rain and melting snow over December and January.  

At 20 miles an hour, each individual storm took 4 days to reach Tennessee and Mississippi, where they  turned Grant's December invasion of Mississippi into a slow mud march. Federal engineers would have to rebuild the Central Mississippi Railroad several times, relaying track and rebuilding bridges, to keep Grant's advancing army supplied, In fact rain (or the lack of it) would play a major role in the making of Ulysses Grant into the greatest military commander in the history of the United States. 

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