VICKSBURG Chapter Six

The Federal troopers of the 4th Regiment of Illinois Volunteer Cavalry,  and 7th Kansas Cavalry were cautiously probing on foot across the rolling rain soaked terrain  about a mile north of Coffeeville, Mississippi, looking for rebel troops.  It was just about 2:30 in the Friday afternoon of 5 December, 1862. 

Their commander, 51 year old Colonel Theophilus Lyle Dickey (above) noted, "...suddenly the enemy opened at short range...using...six pieces of artillery...At the same time his infantry...opened upon our advanced dismounted skirmishers with rapid volleys..." The judge and Mexican war veteran realized at once that he had walked his men into an ambush.

The federals had already captured the Illinois Central Railroad shops in Water Valley (above), two miles to the north, and had no intention of allowing those works to fall back into rebel hands, at least not until they had dismantled and burned them. So the skirmish - or the Battle of Coffeeville in the rebel vernacular - was of little importance, except to the men whose lives were being risked.  

Under Dickey's skilled direction the federal troopers mounted and fell back to the foot of a rise, and opposing artillery shelled each other for a time before  300 troopers of the 7th Tennessee Cavalry, under 28 year old West Point graduate William Hicks "Red" Jackson, charged the Federal line, while another 200 flanked the Federal position from the east. The Yankees retreated to the crest of the hill, and after reforming, the Rebels charged the new line as well. About 4:00pm the Federals withdrew to Water Valley. The rebels did not pursue.  

There were some 3,000 men involved in the "Battle of Coffeeville", and each side lost about 10 killed and fewer than 50 wounded.  The day before, Saturday, 4 December,  Lieutenant General Ulysses Grant (above), had established his new headquarters at the college town of Oxford, Mississippi.  

It rained almost every day,  an endless progression of “heavy, persistent showers”.  Captain Charles Wright Willis, commander of the 103rd Illinois Infantry, wrote to his sister of the pitiable state his soldiers were in. "Our boys are suffering from the change of climate and water, and as much as anything, the sudden change of temperature." The steady drip, drip, drip had forced the Yankees to chop down entire forests to lay layers of sodden planks across the few roads, called corduroying. Even given the ten of thousands of hands put to work, the effort slowed the advance by days.  And half a step off the rough wooden road saw wagons and men swallowed by grasping, clinging mud. 

Pemberton and his 23,000 man army were now safely crossed the rain swollen Yalobusha River around Grenada, 113 miles north of Jackson. They were now digging an entire new line of trenches. All hopes for a decisive  engagement in the open were now gone. And it seemed unlikely the rains were going to stop anytime soon.  So Grant decided to use the 15,000 fresh troops Major General McClernand had recruited, still training in Memphis, Tennessee, before the would be usurper had finished his honeymoon and began his planned attack on Vicksburg.  Besides, this might be an opportunity to turn the high water levels to the Yankee's advantage.

On Wednesday, 8 December, 1862, Grant ordered 42 year old Major General William Tecumseh Sherman (above) to put one division on the empty supply trains returning to Memphis. He was to then load those troops along with reinforcements from McClernand's men, and from Hovey's command at Helena - henceforth designated the XIII Corps -  on to transports. Protected by ironclad gunships from Rear Admiral David Dixon Porter's command, the force was to proceed down the Mississippi River to it's junction with the Yazoo River.  Then, sailing up the latter stream, Sherman was to assault and occupy that high ground Grant's staff had identified back in October -  the Walnut Hills.

This would outflank the rebels defending Jackson, force them to divide their smaller force, perhaps even to abandon  Vicksburg entirely.  

There were two immediate problems with the plan. First, any leak about the plan in Memphis, where it had to be assumed everyone held rebel sympathies, would negate the entire effort. Also the telegraph lines between Oxford and Memphis might be tapped.  So Sherman struggled for  three days along the muddy roads to reach the slowly extending rail line, before he could board a train for Memphis. He did not reach the "Queen City" until Friday, 12 December.  And only then, face-to-face could he inform Vice Admiral Dixon Porter, of the plan.

Admiral Porter (above) was expected to cooperate with the army, but he could not be ordered to do so.  However, Porter believed, "The navy must be an adjunct to the army...".  In addition, Porter and Sherman had formed a friendship over the past year, while the Admiral had developed a deep distrust of McClernand. He was on record as having said the appointment of McClernand was as "...great a piece of folly (as) was ever before committed", and claimed to have told Lincoln, "...if you take troops from Grant and Sherman to give them to McClernand, you will weaken the army."

The 41 year old "Cump" Sherman had arrived at the head of  42 year old Brigadier General Morgan Lewis Smith's (above) 7,000 man division, Sherman then kidnapped the first two divisions of the XIII Corps which had arrived....

....the 6,000 men of 42 year old General George Washington Morgan (above)....

....and the 8,000 men under 48 year old General Andrew Jackson Smith. As soon as enough river transports arrived at Memphis, these 21,000 men would boarded.  However this would not happen until 20 December. And as he left the Memphis docks that morning he was putting himself out of contact with his boss and events in Central Mississippi.

Then, with 12,000 reinforcements from Helena, Arkansas, all 34,000 men would then enter the Yazoo river on 21 December, and five days later, just as McClernand was saying "I do" in back in Illinois, Sherman was landing his men 10 miles up the Yazoo river, at Chickasaw Bayou (above) on one of the many plantations owned by the family of Captain William A. Johnson - a one time  ship's captain and business partner of the pirate Jeanne Lafitte.

Captain Johnson was Lafitte's fence for those stolen cargoes which could be sold in New York. This proved such a successful business model that Johnson's five sons inherited and enlarged a sizable empire, stretching from legitimate shipping, to huge sugar and cotton plantations in the Louisiana delta and this one along the Yazoo delta. After harvest. the Johnson sugar cane would be shipped aboard Johnson ships to Johnson distilleries in Manhattan and Brooklyn, to be cooked with New England molasses into rum.

The mash waste from the distillation was shoveled next door as feed to cows kept in a dirty factory dairy, where they were milked by Bowery alcoholics , nicknamed "nurse maids". The New York Times described the resulting "swill milk" as a " “bluish, white compound of true milk, pus and dirty water, which, on standing, deposits a yellowish, brown sediment..." in the glass. 

 This was then peddled from street carts (above), adding to the high childhood death rate from cholera and diphtheria in the city. And it encouraged the adult residents to drink Johnson's rum as a safer alternative. The distilleries also funded a half century long political delay in New York City sanitary laws, and also paid for the political war against anti-slavery societies in the city.

It was the distillery side of their empire which in 1844 inspired one of the Captain's grandsons, Bradish Johnson (above), to name his new financial endeavor The Chemical Bank of New York. Ninety years after the civil war Chemical Bank bought out Chase Bank and then during the next half century of concentration of wealth, merged and morphed into the too big to fail J.P. Morgan Chase and Company. Thus the Johnson Plantation on the Yazoo River offers a glimpse of the true financial base of slavery.

When Porter's seven gun boats first nosed into the back waters of the Yazoo River there so few rebel soldiers defending the Walnut Hills above the Johnson Plantation, that Sherman saw no reason to rush his men off the 59 transports. Grant was presumed to have Pemberton's rebels tied down outside of Granada, Mississippi. But because the telegraph lines out of Holly Springs had been cut, Sherman did not know that Grant's men were already on half rations, while Pemberton was already transferring most of his little army west, to block Sherman's move at Chickasaw Bayou.

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