VICKSBURG Chapter FIfty

In the dark, late on the evening of Thursday, 14 May, 1863, after abandoning Jackson, Mississippi General Joe Johnston (above) paused 6 miles north along the New Orleans and Memphis rail line. There he composed another missive – to call it an order seems to be stretching that definition beyond the breaking point - to Lieutenant General Pemberton, somewhere to the west, near Bovina Station. He wondered if Pemberton might be able to cut Grant's supply line. He wondered how long Grant's army could survive, once it's supply had been cut. And he urge, again, that Pemberton unit their forces. “I am anxious to see a force assembled that may be able to inflict a heavy blow upon the enemy." And that was the passive aggressive order he sent to Pemberton, near midnight on Friday, 15, May.

Later that morning another 4,000 man brigade joined his forces, bringing Johnston's strength to about 10,000 men. But the new arrivals were exhausted, and needed at least a day to recover. More troops were coming, and within a week Johnston would have perhaps 30,000 men. But ominously, forty miles to the west on that morning, Lieutenant General Pemberton and his army was not moving toward a junction, as ordered earlier, but were waiting.

Pemberton's original plan had been a compromise between his conflicting orders from Confederate President Jefferson Davis to hold Vicksburg, and his “orders” from General Joe Johnston, to abandon the city and march his army east to join forces with Johnston's gathering little force. Pemberton's solution to this conflict seemed practical. 

Pemberton left 2 divisions of infantry and the battalion of artillerymen – about 13,000 men in total – to hold Vicksburg and the heights above the mouth of the Yazoo River. With his remaining 3 divisions of infantry and Wade Adam's Cavalry -about 17,000 men - he would advance eastward along the Southern Railroad to Edward's Depot (above). By staying along the railroad he was protecting his own supply line.

However last night, at a council of war, Pemberton had accepted Major General Loring's suggestion, that the army should strike away from the railroad, toward Raymond – 20 miles to the southeast. The goal was to cut Grant's supply line, force him to pull back to protect his “line of communications”, and thus allow Johnston's smaller force to safely advance and link up with Pemberton. Thus Grant would be forced to react to the rebels for a change, perhaps even cause him to make a mistake. But, leaving the railroad required shifting the Confederate's supply line. And that required finding more horses and wagons.

It took time to seize the transport – until now Pemberton had refused to simply take what he needed – and to load the wagons and organize them into a column. And so Pemberton's entire army spent the morning on their asses while this wagon train was formed. The rebel army was not ready to move until the morning was almost gone. And then, before the great advance had made much more than a single mile, it was forced to halt again.

You see, there were three routes which could be taken from Edward's Depot to Raymond. The most northern road crossed Baker's Creek on a bridge and then rounded the northern slopes of a low hill before reaching a crossroads. Continuing east lead to Bolton. Turning south, on what was called The Middle Road, lead to Raymond. The central route, called the Jackson road, turned right off the Bolton Road a quarter of a mile east of the bridge, and then climbed that 75 foot hill. On its broad flat top the Jackson road crossed a narrow north south lane called the Ratcliff Road, before descending back to level ground where it passed the farmhouse of Sid and Matilda Champion, who had given their name to the entire hill.

The farmland had been a wedding gift from the father of the bride, and in the 7 years since their nuptials, Sid and Matilda  (above) had built a 2 story home, and introduced 4 children into the world. Sid had joined the 28^th Mississippi cavalry in '62. And now, a year later, with soldiers from both sides gathering around her home, Matilda had taken the children to her father's home in Madison County, Mississippi. The property was left to be guarded by the slaves who toiled soil. 

Following the Jackson Road after it passed the Champion home, lead to the small Jackson Creek and then it crossed The Middle Road. Turning south led to Raymond, but should the traveler continue east they would eventually reach Clinton and then the state capital of Jackson.

But General Pemberton had chosen the most southern route, which a mile east of Edward's Depot forded Baker's creek. It avoided Champion's Hill entirely, and ran adjacent to a light railroad, which in peace time had carried the cotton harvested in and around Raymond to the southern railroad at Edward's Depot. But this proved to be a most unfortunate choice, because, as the head of Pemberton's column approached the Baker's Creek ford the rebels found the stream so swollen with Friday's downpour, it had washed out the bridge.

A little scouting would have warned Pemberton of this problem But no one had checked the route in daylight, even with the hours of delay in getting started....

...not even the one armed General Loring (above), whose division formed the vanguard of this sad sack of a march. So now, Pemberton's little army had to turn about in place, one unit after the other slowly filing a mile back to Edward's Depot, and then lining up again on the Bolton road. It took another hour or more. The inability to execute a simple march sapped the energy and spirit of the troops. But the man most offended was Major General Loring. He had been urging Pemberton to attack the Yankees since the Battle of Port Gibson. This entire maneuver was his idea, And as its implementation quickly revealed its drawbacks, Loring blamed not himself but Pemberton. Old “Give 'em Blizzards” already low estimation of Lieutenant General Pemberton, plummeted even further.

Then Pemberton made things even worse. After crossing the bridge and turning south on the Jackson road he chose to lead the column onto the narrow and badly maintained “Ratcliff Plantation Road”, which ran a mile south across the top of Champion's Hill before dropping and reconnecting with road he had originally intended upon using. This final choice slowed their progress even more, and the effect of all this waiting, marching and counter-marching, and now following the narrow dark country lane, was that when darkness finally brought the frustrating and exhausting day to an end,  Private Wesley Connor, a member of the Cherokee Artillery near the rear of the column, recorded his unit set out promptly at 7:00am, and then “... marched two hundred yards, halted an hour or two, and then marched back to our position...” They then waited another 11 hours, until 6:00pm , when they “Left our position again, and marched eastward several miles and then southward. Bivouacked five or six miles from Edwards Depot.”  Loring's division had traveled the farthest, but by nightfall was little more than 4 miles down the Raymond road – reaching the property of the twice widowed, 46 year old Sarah Ann Walton Bowles Ellison.

Lorings men pitched their tents around the widow's house, while Lieutenant General Pemberton slept comfortably inside. Two miles up the road to the north centered of the junction of the Raymond and Ratcliff road was the division of Major General Bowen. And behind them, the troops commanded by Major General Stevenson camped around the hill top.  And behind them was the supply train, which had delayed the army for half a day. That train had advanced less than four miles in total. It was a disastrous day's march. In fact, the wreckage of Pemberton's first bold decision would save his army because it failed.

Awakening before 5:00 the next morning, Saturday, 16 May, 1863, Pemberton learned that the cavalry scouts sent ahead to locate Grant's supply trains had found the roads from Port Gibson to Raymond, completely empty. Suddenly Pemberton is adrift. Where are Grant's supply trains? Where is Grant's army” Then about 6:30 the commander of his cavalry brigade, Colonel Wirt Adams (above) came galloping up and dismounted. He reported that his men were skirmishing with Yankee infantry on the Bolton Road, at the very rear of Pemberton's army. And behind those skirmishers there appeared to be a lot of Yankee soldiers on the road to Edward's Depot.

Almost immediately a new rider appeared, bearing a message from General Johnston, in Jackson, Mississippi and dated on the afternoon of Thursday, 14 May. It informed Pemberton that Johnston was being forced to surrender Jackson, and added, “Our being compelled to leave Jackson makes your plan (to attack Grant's supply line) impractical. The only mode by which we can unite is by your moving directly to Clinton...".

And abruptly, Pemberton had no choice but to do that very thing.

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VICKSBURG Chapter Thirty-Four

The bullet hit the old man in the right shoulder, but the impact was so slight it left him in the saddle, instinctively still controlling his horse. His staff agreed it was a spent round - meaning that like most wounded on battlefields, General Joe Johnston  (above) was not the intended target. The sheer volume of metal and wood and rocks traveling at supersonic and near supersonic speeds on a battlefield are intended not so much to kill as to strip away the veneer of a rational God and replace him with the harsh deity of chaos. This weary bullet was not strong enough to do that. That would come next.

In the fading light of a frustrating Saturday, 31 May, 1862, General Joseph Eggleston Johnston paused on a low hill just west of the Fair Oaks Station on the Richmond and York Railroad, to get a final look at the carnage before nightfall. With their backs against the rebel capital of Richmond, Johnston's 60,000 man army had turned on the ponderous 100,000 man Army of the Potomac. 

But in attempting to crush the Yankee flank along Nine Mile Road and drive the invaders into the rain swollen Chickahominy River, the rebels had bungled the assault. Johnston was seeking to assess what needed to be done tomorrow to finish the job. He never got the chance.

A staff colonel warned that blue clad skirmishers seemed to be edging closer. The prim Johnston dismissed the potential for death saying, “There's no use in dodging. When you hear them, they have passed.” As soon as those words left his lips the random lead plowed into the General's shoulder. When his staff rushed to support him they unintentionally held him up upright just as a shell exploded to his front, sending spinning shards slamming into his chest and thigh. The same shell killed Private George Pritchard of Captain Robert Stribling's battery - the probable intended target - just unlimbering a few yards south of the General's position.

Johnston was knocked from his horse, the fall breaking his arm, his right shoulder blade and two ribs. He was carried from the field blood soaked and unconscious. He awoke briefly to the bitter reality of Jefferson Davis' false compassion and the schadenfreude sympathy from the President's military adviser, General Robert Edward Lee. 

Then darkness again embraced him. By the time Johnston awoke from surgery in a Richmond Hospital, Davis had appointed Lee the new commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, and Johnston was an extra general.

Conscious of losing his spot in the minuet of musical chairs for command, the 56 year old Johnston (above) reported as fit and ready for duty just 4 months later.  He was far from fully recovered - he would never fully recover from these wounds -  but Davis found just the spot for his least favorite general. 

He exiled Johnston to the newly created Department of the West, headquartered in Chattanooga, Tennessee. On paper Johnston was to coordinate the operations of 46 year old Braxton Bragg's 35,000 man Army of Tennessee, at Murfreesboro (above), just south of Nashville, and 54 year old Lieutenant General John Clifford Pemberton's 40,000 man Army of Mississippi.

Once in Chattanooga, Johnston found the two commands were 600 miles apart, with no direct rail or even telegraph connection between them, which meant they could not support each other. But when Johnston suggested a restructuring, Secretary of War Brigadier General George Randolph, said no. 

Shortly there after, Johnston realized that he was really dealing with his old enemy Jeff Davis (above), and the President was undermining him. In the normal chain of command, Bragg and Pemberton reported to and received orders from Johnston and Johnston reported to and receive orders from the War Department in Richmond. But both Bragg and Pemberton were communicating directly with President Davis, who often issued them orders without informing Johnston. When Johnston complained he was supported by Randolph. And when Davis refused to stop interfering, Randolph resigned. But all that accomplished was that Davis got a new “malleable” Secretary of War – James Seddon, and the confusion got worse.

Next, Johnston suggested he be given authority over 58 year old General Theophilus Holmes's Trans-Mississippi Department, including Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas. In response, Davis (above) mocked him - first Johnston complained his department was too big, and now he wanted to make it even bigger? The answer was no. Johnston then requested that Holmes transfer 20,000 men to Pemberton in Vicksburg. But Holmes was an old friend of the President's, and the answer again was no.

In late December of 1862, the 40,000 man Federal Army of the Cumberland under Major General William Rosecrans, marched 40 miles from Nashville to Murfessboro, and slammed into Bragg's Army of Tennessee. After four bloody days, which killed or wounded one third of the soldiers on both sides, Bragg felt forced to retreat 35 miles south to the railroad town of Tullahoma, Tennessee. 

Braxton Bragg's subordinates went into rebellion, calling the brooding Bragg (above) a fool and a coward and demanding his removal. In February Davis ordered Johnston to Tullahoma to remedy the situation.

It seemed clear Davis wanted Johnston to take over Bragg's army. But the infections in Johnston's wounds had flared up again, and he did not feel inclined to extend himself. He reported back that Bragg should be left in charge. Davis was infuriated, but without going to Tennessee himself, there was nothing he could do. So Johnston (above) returned to Chattanooga.

One of Johnston's few accomplishments was procuring the February transfer of the impulsive profligate “terror of ugly husbands", the handsome if diminutive southern coxsman, General Earl Van Dorn (above) from Pemberton's command to Bragg's. The reason for the change was not the potential for genius by the volatile and dapper Lothario, but because the equally volatile Nathan Bedford Forrest had announced he would “...be in my coffin before I will fight again under...” Bragg's cavalry commander, General Joe Wheeler. Wheeler was promoted out of the way, and Van Dorn assumed command at the Cheairs, mansion at Spring Hill, Tennessee, about 30 miles south southwest of Nashville. 

On Friday, 10 April, 1863, Van Dorn tested his new command, sending his 2 brigades of horsemen north to poke at the federal outpost protecting Nashville, the new Fort Granger, at Franklin, Tennessee. Van Dorn was not impressed with the results. He lost 137 men to the Yankee's 100, and withdrew to Spring Hall to lick his wounded ego and...

...seek comfort in the arms of the lovely and lonely Mrs. Jessie McKissack Peters, third wife of Dr. George Peters, a retired physician and a member of the state legislature.  Luckily she lived less than a mile away, just across the a valley

Later that month Johnston's infection flared up again and he was bedridden when he received a rare telegram from Pemberton on Saturday, 1 May. “A furious battle has been going on since daylight, just below Port Gibson,” Pemberton wrote. “General Bowen says he is outnumbered trebly....”. Johnston forwarded Pemberton's request for help to Richmond, telling Secretary Seddon that any new troops, “...cannot be sent from here without giving up Tennessee.” Seddon did not respond at least to Johnston, and for four days the telegraph lines from Vicksburg dissolved into incoherent static and confusing coded messages. Johnston's pride did not allow him to ask Jefferson Davis if he had heard anything. Finally, on Tuesday, 5 May, Johnston's sent a telegram to Vicksburg, asking for information, and telling Pemberton that his army was more valuable to the Confederacy than the city. But there was still no reply.

Then, on Thursday morning, 7 May 1863, Dr. Peters rode up to the Cheairs mansion (above).  The representative often visited Van Dorn's headquarters, to obtain a safe conduct pass when visiting his constituents near the Yankee lines.  He was immediately admitted into the General's presence, and a few minutes later reappeared, mounted his horse and cantered off.  

A few moments later General Van Dorn, married father of two “legitimate” children and several “illegitimate children”, life long unrepentant womanizer and reprobate and one of the most talented cavalry commanders remaining to serve the Confederate cause, was found slumped over his desk, with a small caliber bullet hole in the back of his skull. He died five hours later, without regaining consciousness.

Doctor Peters rediscovered his affection for the Federal Union when he received asylum behind Union lines in Nashville.  He was never charged with the murder of Van Dorn, and later freely moved to other property he owned in Arkansas, where he was eventually joined by his repentant Jessie. Eight months after the murder, Jessie had given birth to a girl.  And Doctor Peters raised her as his own.  The "affair" provides a glimpse beneath the Victorian mask of southern womanhood and noble Confederate Cavaliers. 

Beyond that,  Earl Van Dorn's isolated "honor murder" at the age of 42, was as much a waste of life as the other half million southerners who died fighting to keep humans in bondage. The best that might be said of the man was that at least Van Dorn died seeking pleasure in life, not merely the death, dismemberment and enslavement of others.  When one southern woman urged the notorious seducer to “let the women alone until the after the war is over”, Van Dorn defended himself, saying “I cannot do that, for it is all I am fighting for."

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VICKSBURG Chapter Four

There was less than an hour left in the old year of 1862, when disaster struck the weary engine and it's meager 4 car train. The crew were running at just 10 miles an hour, 3 miles west of Edward's Depot, bound for Vicksburg, when the rails sank into the rain soaked soil and splayed apart, sending the engine and tender careening off the ridge line, dragging the 40 foot long passenger cars behind. The wooden carriages shattered on impact, each spilling 60 plus troopers of the 28th Mississippi cavalry like so many broken eggs from a basket. One passenger, 29 year old Private Charles Cone, managed to jump to safety, but he remembered with horror the "shrieks, cries and groans of the dying, mangled and crushed...". The toll of 7 dead and dozens injured would have been higher if the engineer had been running at the antebellum speed of 25 miles an hour. The "Vicksburg Wig" newspaper would rationalize the disaster, "The railroad was built with light iron twenty-odd years ago... with light engines carrying light trains....(The war had forced) the company....(to put) on it five times as much as it could safely bear." But the truth was the rebellion's entire railroad system was nearing collapse.

In 1860 the south had produced 26,000 tons of new rails to replace the worn out sections of their 9,000 miles of track. In 1861 and 1862 that number was zero, as all iron production was diverted to cannon and iron cladding for warships. 

The railroad owners warned the rebel congress that after 1862 they could no longer guarantee reliable service, and by 1863 one in four southern locomotives were in need of maintenance. Proof of all of this, if needed, was available during the fall of 1862, when the new commander of the Western Theater was delayed reaching his post because of 4 separate train wrecks.

Early on in his career the 56 year old General Joseph Eggleston Johnston (above) realized that a general's job is not to win battles but to win wars. His men loved him for not wasting their lives, although, as one said later, "I fought more continuously while under his command than in all my previous life." Despite this, critics called him "The great retreat-er" and complained "his reputation had grown with every backward step."

But the real problem was that "Retreatin' Joe" was a magnet for drama, When he couldn't attract a crises - he was wounded eight or nine times - he invented one. In 1854 the persnickety "Little Game Cock" picked a fight with Secretary of War Jefferson Davis (above) over some promotion regulation minutia, and continued to nurse that argument after they both joined the Confederacy six years later. Five months after his latest wound at the battle of Seven Pines in May of 1862, Johnston's career was again in the hands of the President of the Confederacy - his old enemy, Jeff Davis. And Davis created just the spot for the annoying burr under his blanket - Commander of the Western Theater in far off Tennessee.

When he finally arrived in Chattanooga in November, Johnston protested that the two armies - the Army of the Cumberland under 46 year old porcupine Braxton Bragg (above), a "vain, petty, conniving man", and perhaps the most hated man by his own officers in either army...

...And northerner turned southerner, the not overly bright John Pemberton commanding the Army of Mississippi - were too widely separated to share any meaningful strategy. Johnston wrote the President, 'I cannot direct both parts of my command at once”. "Ol' Joe" was right, as usual, but as usual, Davis ignored him. And when "Ol' Joe" realized that both Bragg and Pemberton were still communicating directly with Davis, it was clear he had been sidelined. After that, as diarist Mary Chestnut observed, Johnston's hatred of Davis "amounts to a religion." And Davis, she made clear, returned the bile in kind.

Still, Johnston followed orders, trailing Davis on a tour of the new Western Theater. On 20 December they reached the city of a hundred hills - Vicksburg.  Johnston's observations here were accurate and grim, describing the Gibraltar of the Confederacy as "An immense entrenched camp, requiring an army to hold it...instead of a fort requiring only a small garrison. In like manner the water-batteries had been planned to prevent the bombardment of the town, instead of to close the navigation of the river...consequently the small number of heavy guns had been distributed along a front of two miles, instead of being so placed that their fire might be concentrated on a single vessel...."

"...a garrison of twelve thousand men was necessary to hold the place," Johnston continued, adding that Pemberton,  "...then had about half the number. From a map of Port Hudson....that place seemed to require a force almost as great to defend it".

Davis refused Johnston's request to transfer troops from the Trans-Mississippi - requiring in some cases merely a mile long boat ride - to reach Vicksburg.  Instead, Davis ordered Johnston to order Bragg to send Major General Carter Littlepage Stevenson's 7,500 men from distant Tennessee. The first of those reinforcements would be the unlucky members of the 28th Mississippi Cavalry. Having been humiliated, and forced to put his name to what he believed was a disastrous policy, Johnston returned to Chattanooga as quickly as he could. 

Johnston knew that the newly appointed 43 year old Yankee Major General William Starke Rosecrans (above) had been prodded to finally march to engage Braxton Bragg's Army of the Cumberland along Stones River.  Bragg told his men "he wold win in that battle or die in the field."

He did neither. On the same night the troopers were being thrown from the train outside of Edward's s Depot, Mississippi, 76,000 other men were colliding near the little central Tennessee town of Murfreesboro. 

Over three days of see-saw fighting  - Wednesday 31 December 1862 to Friday 2 January 1863 - the armies of "Rosie" and Bragg attacked and retreated back and forth,  leaving one in three men dead or wounded - , the highest causality rate for any battle in 4 long years of bloody battles. The Nashville Daily Union reported, "Murfreesboro is one vast hospital..."

Although federal causalities slightly outnumbered rebel ones, the battle was a tactical draw - one in which Steven's division might have made the difference. Instead, on the morning of Sunday, 4 January, Bragg decided his losses, which he could not replace, and his withering supply line, required that he retreat, thus converting the battle into a strategic win for the Federals. A private letter from one rebel officer, captured and published in the New York Times, called Bragg a disgraceful failure., adding that he was "...almost universally hated by all our troops...it is sheer folly to call him a general....Col. Savage remarked..."This may be good Generalship, but if it is, I can't see it."

Rosecrans won Lincoln's praise for not losing, while Bragg earned almost universal anger from his officers for not winning. Davis ordered Joe Johnston to assess the situation. Did this,  like the loss at Shiloh, require a change in commanding officer?  It seems likely that Davis (above) had been expecting Johnston to replace Bragg.  Instead, after visiting the army in its new camps south of the Duck River, and finding it displaying good discipline, Ol'e Joe recommended that Bragg stay right where he was. The general officers might despise Bragg but the common soldiers generally admired him. And so, with both sides exhausted physical and morally, the war in Tennessee went to sleep for six months.

But in Mississippi, at year's end the situation was far more dramatic. The raid on Holly Springs forced General Ulysses Simpson Grant to put his army on half rations, and begin his retreat from Oxford on Christmas eve, 1862.  But this was not a panicked run for supplies. As the Federals slowly withdrew north, back up the Central Mississippi railroad, they destroyed everything of value to the Confederacy - barns and plantation houses, salt licks and bridges, and, of course, the railroad itself. And the flesh and blood engines the rebels depended upon to convert the soil into future wealth, the slaves, followed of their own free will. On Saturday, 9 January 1863, the Yankees evacuated Holly Springs,  leaving behind nothing of value, not even the population

The prime example of the advantage Grant had over Pemberton and Johnston was on full exhibit at the once vital railroad junction town of Corinth, Mississippi (above). On Sunday, 25 January, 1863 the Yankees left Corinth, having destroyed the rail lines, and burned the locomotive shops and bridges. And they were not followed closely by a rebel army. The most important railroad crossroads in the Confederacy was not re-occupied by a Confederate army because without repairing  the rail lines, they could no longer support large numbers of men in northern Mississippi. Like a paraplegic trapped in a broken body, once this "vertebra" of the south and been snapped, it could not be rejoined. Horse drawn baggage cars might plod the abandoned rail lines. But the south had not enough iron rails to replace what was twisted or stolen.

And because, without the iron rails the steam engines could no longer reach Corinth, without the mechanics and blacksmiths and their forges to repair the engines, the laborers, often slaves who filled and maintained the water towers and collected the wood the engines burned, because all of those people were driven out,  the town of Corinth had no justification for existing.  And so it ceased to exist until the engines would return, after the war.

Jefferson Davis' Confederacy, fighting to maintain its addiction to human slavery, could not occupy northern territory in the same way Grant had just occupied northern Mississippi. Even if the rebels could drive the hated Yankees back from Confederate lands, as they had at Oxford, Holly Springs and Corinth, they could not fully reclaim the land, not merely because buildings were burned or iron rails were twisted and stolen. The human heart and muscle of the land had left it.

Having created a war to defend slavery, that war was destroying the institution even before Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, which had gone into effect on Thursday, 1 January, 1863. But accelerating with each passing day, the South's peculiar institution was finally dying.  Freedom, with all its risks and dangers, with free slaves knowing they would be despised by soldiers in blue as well as grey, was prefered by a high enough percentage of slaves over a half filled belly and a shabby roof overhead. Not all slaves, in some areas perhaps not even most slaves, but enough of the youngest and strongest were willing to risk their lives to experience that magical word -  Freedom.   It quickly put the lie to the myth of happy darkies basking in the benevolent warmth of European - white - superiority.

And because no rebel army followed the Federal retreat, Grant could leave just a single corps to guard the high ground around Lagrange, Tennessee.  A second corps, under Sherman, was held in Memphis, as a mobile striking force. And his new third Corps, under the troublesome McClernand, Grant decided to use to poke and prod at Pemberton. Grant had never intended on attacking Vicksburg from the river side. This shift had been forced upon him by circumstances. And it would take him a little time to decide how to best proceed. But, unlike other generals, he was not going to sit idly until a plan presented itself. Grant was going to go out looking for one. Starting right now.

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