VICKSBURG Chapter Forty-Six

I can only imagine the shock felt by Major General John Gregg when an officer walked into the capital building (above)  just after seven on Wednesday evening of 13, May 1863, to announce the arrival of full General Joseph Eggleston Johnston across the street at the Alabama and Ohio railroad depot. Gregg was conferring with the commander of Jackson, the fearless Brigadier General John Adams. Together they were trying desperately to cobble together a defense for the city. What they needed was more cavalry, more infantry and more guns, not another general, and lest of all one who outranked them both. Neither man had received so much as a hint that Johnston was coming to Mississippi. The flabbergasted generals had just minutes to adjust to the new reality before the slight thin gray haired Johnston made his appearance.

They had all met the previous December, when Confederate President Jefferson Davis dragged Johnston (above) with him on an inspection of the new Mississippi theater of operations. But now the 34 year Gregg was meeting his 56 year old commander in the midst of a full blown crises. The punctilious Virginian, always a stickler for formalities, calmly exchanged salutes and with no small talk, asked for a full tactical update. Johnston sat and closed his eyes as he received it, having spent the last 4 days and nights bouncing across three states and five separate railroad lines.

Gregg began by sharing his last message from Lieutenant General John C. Pemberton. “The enemy is apparently moving in heavy force toward Edward’s Depot...With my limited force, I will do all I can to meet him.” Gregg explained that Pemberton had 2 divisions, 40 miles to the west at Bovina, along the Southern railroad. General Loring's division was 10 miles closer at Edward's Depot, along with Wirt Adam's cavalry regiment. All together Pemberton had immediate command over 17,000 men. He had 2 more division in Vicksburg, but President Davis's order to hold that city at all cost meant those men would remain behind their fortifications. In any case, Pemberton had ordered Loring to probe south, to find out exactly where Grant's army was.

The day before, Tuesday, 12 May, 1863, Gregg's 4,000 man brigade had been mauled by a 7,000 man division of Yankee General James Birdseye McPherson's Corps, 21 miles to the south west at Raymond. Gregg had been forced to retreat, but the Federals did not seem to be advancing and Gregg assumed the Yankees had been hurt and were regrouping. But this afternoon there had come reports from Clinton, 10 miles due west of Jackson, of what seemed to be a brand new Federal division, which Gregg could only assume was part of Sherman's Corps. Obviously Grant had turned on Jackson, and it seemed obvious the greatest threat was Sherman's Corps at Clinton, just 10 miles from the city trench lines. Before Johnston's arrival, Gregg and Adams had been rearranging their available men to defend against that assault.

General Adams did have some good news to share with Johnston. In the city were a recently arrived Georgia brigade under the competent Brigadier General William Henry Talbot Walker, as well as a regiment from Charleston, South Carolina, under 31 year old Brigadier General States Rights Gist - in total another 3,000 men. In addition at any time Adams expected 38 year old Brigadier General Samuel Bell Maxey to arrive at the head of another 3,000 man brigade. Within 24 hours, there would be 9 or 10,000 men to defend Jackson. Having made their report, Gregg and Adams watched the frail old man sitting, eyes closed. They thought for a moment he might have fallen asleep.

But Johnston was thinking. He was thinking that behind him on the same rickety and broken rail lines he had just spent 4 days on, were another 3,000 infantry and artillery from Braxton Bragg's Army of the Tennessee. Once they arrived, and with the units he had just learned of, he could take on a full Yankee Corps. But Bragg's men would not arrive in Jackson for several days. And when they did, they would be as exhausted as he was. And recent experience taught Johnston to expect similar delays in Maxey's arrival. No, Old Joe had only the remaining 3,000 bloodied troops of Gregg's brigade, and the fresh 3,000 men of Walker and Gist, with which to defend Jackson.

After a long and uneasy silence, Johnston opened his eyes, and now leaning over the map table, he said simply, “I am too late.” Unwilling to sacrifice 6,000 men to slow 30,000 Yankees attacking from 2 directions, Johnston ordered that Jackson would have to be abandoned. It would be only the second Confederate state capital to have fallen to the Yankees. The undercurrent of doom, which had motivated the flurry of defense preparations, now fully descended on the three men and their staff. There was no argument with Johnston's assessment. Only a dark chill.

In the morning, Gregg could take 2 brigades out the Clinton road, Johnston ordered, to delay Sherman's men. Meanwhile General Adams would collect as many supplies and as much ammunition as possible, load it all on trains of the New Orleans and Ohio Railroad, or wagons, sending it all 20 miles northeast to the town of Canton, Mississippi. Johnston ordered that the capital must be evacuated no later than 3:00pm the next day, Thursday, 14 May, 1863.

The the only practicable line of retreat was to the north. So all reinforcements would have to find their way around the Yankees to Canton. Having issued his orders, at 8:40pm Johnston composed a message for General Pemberton. “I have lately arrived, and learn that Major-General Sherman is between us, with four divisions, at Clinton. It is important to reestablish communications, that you may be re-enforced. If practicable, come up on his rear at once. To beat such a detachment, would be of immense value. The troops here could co-operate. All the strength you can quickly assemble should be brought. Time is all-important."

And then, because the telegraph lines had been cut, Johnston asked for a volunteer to carry his message across Yankee controlled territory to Bovina. Captain James Rucks Yeager stepped forward. He was a New Jersey native, who after graduating Princeton in 1859 had moved to Mississippi to become a planter. With the coming of war Yeager had sided with the south, and Johnston recognized him from the 1862 Peninsula campaign. The General accepted Yeager's offer. Recognizing the importance of the message, Yeager picked two more men to carry copies, to ensure the message got through.

Johnston then sent a telegram to the Secretary of War Seddon in Richmond, knowing that President Davis would be reading it as well. It began, “I arrived this evening finding the enemy's force between this place and General Pemberton, cutting off the communication. I am too late." And then he walk across the street to the Bowman House hotel (above) to catch a little sleep. 

There are deep basements in parts of modern day Richmond Virginia, where you can still hear echoes of Jefferson Davis's response to that telegram. Although, what Joe Johnston was supposed to do with the steaming mess Jeff Davis handed him, was never made clear. Like Jesus or Mohammad or even Buddha, if all you ever ask of your heroes is the impossible, they are often going to fail. And that is not their fault.

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VICKSBURG Chapter Forty-Five

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

The first outward indication of Grant's shift in strategy came shortly after 4:30am on Wednesday, 13 May, 1863, when the bloodied troops of General Logan's 3^rd division marched through the village of Raymond, and surprisingly took the right hand fork in the road. They were heading not toward the capital of Jackson, just 25 miles to the east, but north. At an average pace of 3 miles an hour, on a relatively good road, by noon they had reached the railroad town of Clinton. Before the war 20,000 bales of cotton a year had been shipped through this little village, but destroying this profit making center of the Confederacy was not why Grant was so eager to capture the place.

After the bloodletting of 12 May, General John Gregg (above) withdrew his battalion north of Raymond to a line along Snake Creek. But he could not stay there. His little force was now reduced to less than 3,000 effectives - healthy men still in organized units with ammunition and the spirit to do battle. But this was the only force available to defend the state capital. Allowing his men a few hours of rest, Gregg pulled them back further to Mississippi Springs. But in the process, because the Texas General had no cavalry, he lost contact with the Yankees. The afternoon of 13 May, 1863, Gregg returned to Jackson, to push every man he could westward, to defend the city.

The small, almost insignificant village of Clinton, Mississippi fell without a shot fired in its defense. In effect, Grant merely extended his arm, that appendage being Logan's division (above), and the great prize the Federal armies had striven for the past 5 months, dropped into the palm of his hand like a ripe fruit. He now had only to close his fist and the Gibraltar of the Confederacy, the western post supporting the thousand mile long jugular that pumped life's blood from the bounty of the trans-Mississippi region across the continent to Richmond, Virginia would be sliced in two. The instant Yankee soldiers picked up the first ten foot long iron rail from its bed or set fire to the first bridge over a dry creek along the Southern Railroad, the 45,000 rebel soldiers 40 miles to the east defending Vicksburg were cut off.

The Yankees spent the afternoon tearing up rails for a mile or more to the west of Clinton Station. Anything in town they could not eat or wear or use to rearm themselves, they burned. And while they did, McPherson pushed the 13 regiments of 33 year old Brigadier General Marcellus Monroe Crocker's 14^th Division out the Jackson road. And before the tail of McPherson's XVII Corps had even reached the fork in the road, the 17,000 men of William Tecumseh Sherman's XV Corps marched into Raymond on the Utica road. The next day, 14 May they were to strike at the capital of the state of Mississippi.

The first effect of the war on the 3,000 residents of Jackson was that it unleashed inflation. Within a year a pair of boots cost as much as $125.00, a pound of sugar was going for $3.50, Tea cost $7.00 a pound and locally grown watermelons cost up to $25.00 apiece. Still, the war remained a distant abstraction until April of 1862, when trains delivered a small portion of the the 8,000 wounded from the bloody fields around Shiloh Church, Tennessee. 

That winter Jackson was encircled by a single “mild” trench dug by slaves, when Grant first invaded the state. By then the population had almost doubled, consisting mostly of families of state workers, and those employed by the Southern and the New Orleans and Ohio Railroads, and the cities' textile and war industries, which turned out leather shoes and cotton uniforms and tents for the states regiments.

And there was also the Jackson Arsenal, in the College Green neighborhood, 2 blocks east of the state capital building (above)  and a block south. 

In the 2 story brick North School building in College Green – the boy's school - some 80 men, women and children assembled ammunition, small arms' cartridges up stairs and artillery shells on the ground floor. 

The work was hard, the pay was low, the conditions abysmal, and the outcome inevitable. At about 3:00pm on Wednesday, 5 November, 1862 there was horrific explosion, which blew apart the school. This was followed by fires which set off many of the stored munitions.

The Weekly Mississippian reported 2 days later, “ All the men and women employed in the building...had been hurled to instantaneous destruction...One man had a leg torn off and his brains literally blown out. The body of a poor girl was hanging by one foot to the limb of a tree...her clothes were still burning. Other bodies were blown to the distance of from fifty to one hundred and fifty yards, and presented a mutilated and most shocking appearance. The packages of powder and the shells were yet continually exploding...The fire engine was promptly on the ground, but could not do much owing to the want of water.”

It would appear that several people in authority knew full well the unsafe conditions in the arsenal, since, as the Mississippian pointed out, “The officers in charge of the Arsenal...save one superintendent, were not on duty at the site.” One was, in fact, “in his sick room.” Those who died did so because they needed the money, and because they were dedicated to the cause.

Then, at about 10:30pm that very night “...a fire broke out in (a South State Street)...jewelry and dry-goods establishment...The fire raged northward...and destroyed the house occupied by Mrs. Evans as a millinery establishment and continued its ravages to Mr. Weirs, next to John Martz, next to Mr. John Robinson's where the progress of the flames was arrested. Also destroyed was the depot of the Southern Railroad with several surrounding buildings. Several bales of cotton and a considerable quantity of goods were also destroyed..." One resident noted that before dawn, many of the goods saved from the burning homes and stores were then stolen by looters. Now it felt as if the war was  truly coming to Jackson.

A year of dread followed, and it began to weigh upon the citizens. As soon as Grant had crossed the Mississippi, General Pemberton had advised the governor to send the state archives into the interior. People took note of that. Less than a week later, civilians were looking for safety. The Mobile Register and Advertiser newspaper noted “The trains for the interior are crowded with non-combatants, and the sidewalks blocked up with cases, barrels, old fashioned trunks and chests,..."  Civilians were getting out, and soldiers, like General Gregg, were coming in.

And the night of Wednesday, 13 May, 1863, General Gregg was startled to discover yet another arrival in the capital of Mississippi, Lieutenant General Joseph Eggleston Johnson. No one had been told to expect the old man. But Gregg welcomed him, particularly because he was closely followed by 3,000 reinforcements.

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