VICKSBURG Chapter Forty - Four

 

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  General Joseph Eggleston Johnston just down the street at the Alabama and Ohio railroad depot. 

Gregg was conferring with the commander of the city, 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 - 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 via five separate railroad lines.

Gregg began by sharing his last message from Lieutenant General John C. Pemberton, now in Vicksburg.  “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 itself,  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 to Mississippi Springs, but the Federals did not seem to be following him up, and Gregg assumed the Yankees had been hurt and were regrouping. But this afternoon  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 obviously the greatest threat was what Gregg assumed to be 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 new threat.

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 remain 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 traversing, 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 exhausted.  And recent experience taught Johnston to expect similar delays in Maxey's arrival. So, for the next 48 hours, if not longer, Old Joe had only the 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 the capital of Mississippi would have to be abandoned. It would be  the second Confederate state capital to fall to the Yankees. The undercurrent of doom, which had motivated the flurry of defense preparations, now fully descended on the two men and their staffs. There was no argument with Johnston's assessment. Only a dark chill.

In the morning, Johnston ordered Gregg to take 2 brigades out the Clinton road to delay Sherman's men. Meanwhile General Adams would collect as many supplies and as much ammunition as possible, load it on trains or wagons, and dispatch 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 after the fall of Jackson, all reinforcements coming by rail would have to find their around the city to Canton by foot. 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 and slave owner.  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 walked 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 you. And that is not their fault.  Jefferson Davis never learned that.

- 30 -

VICKSBURG Chapter Thirty - Seven

 

John Gregg (above) was a successful lawyer, with a practice in the east Texas flat lands of Fairfield County and a personal wealth of over a quarter of a million in today's dollars. Still he felt self conscious about comparing what he had to offer his 1858  bride, Mary Francis Garth, to what she was giving up – her father's large plantation in north central Alabama, with almost 200 slaves toiling daily to provide for her care and comfort.

The Garth's were cousins to Patrick Henry. And Jessie Winston Garth (above)  himself had spent time with Thomas Jefferson at Monticello, and was a long time friend of the 10^th President of the United States, John Tyler.  Jessie  himself had been a general in the Virginia Militia during the War of 1812.   After moving south to share in the lands bullied from native peoples, Jessie Garth had helped found the town of Decatur, helped write the Alabama state constitution, was the first President of the state senate and had served in the state house as well. 

He was the first President of First National Bank  (above) in Decatur, and owned enough stock in the Memphis and Charleston Railroad, that the first steam engine to pull a train into Decatur was named after him. John Gregg would never measure up to Jessie Garth's social accomplishment. But there was an even more fundamental matter dividing John Gregg from his father-in-law.

Seventy year old slave owner Jessie Winston Garth would willing give up his slaves, he insisted, in order to save the union of the United States of America . But having never fought beside northerners, 34 year old John Gregg (above) felt no need to compromise or learn from the free labor of the north.   Lincoln observed before he took the oath of office that secessionist demanded Republicans not only promise to not touch slavery, they must somehow convince men like John Gregg they would not touch slavery.  And by 1861, that was no longer possible. 

These were violent, ambitious men like John Gregg who were unwilling to admit their "peculiar institution" was both economically and morally bankrupt.  A civil war could only hasten the death of slavery, and yet men like John Gregg were driven to bring on the cataclysm that would destroy it.  

As was observed at the time, secession was a logical discordance which had gripped one third of the nation. Without such periodic bouts of insanity humans would never have needed the Code of Hammurabi, the Magna Carta, the Declaration of Independence and the Emancipation Proclamation.

In the name of defending slavery, John Gregg became colonel of the 746 men from 9 east Texas counties who formed the 7^th Volunteer infantry regiment.  In the summer of 1861, after Mary Francis had been sent back to the Garth's Alabama estates for safety,  John had joined his regiment at Hopkinsville, Tennessee, on the border with neutral Kentucky.  There, over six months, disease buried 130 of Gregg's men before they fired a shot in anger. 

Then, in February of 1862 another 20 were killed and 40 wounded at the battle of Fort Donelson. Almost all of the remainder, including John, were forced to surrender.

The 7^th Regiment was paroled and exchanged at Vicksburg in the fall of that year.   By 1863 John was promoted to the rank of Brigadier General, and the Texas 7^th joined with the 3^rd, 10^th,, 41^st and 50^th Tennessee regiments into the 4,500 man 10^th Battalion or Gregg's Brigade. They were supported by Bledsoe's Missouri Battery, a smooth bore 6 pound bronze cannon called “Old Sacramento” and a pair of iron 6 pound cannon, all under Captain Hiram Bledsoe.

For the first 4 months of 1863, Gregg's Battalion was stationed 80 feet above the Mississippi river at Port Hudson (above), some 20 miles north of Federal lines at Natchez, Mississippi. Until Sunday,  3 May, 1863, that is - when a telegram arrived from Lieutenant General Pemberton in Vicksburg. Grant's breakout at Port Gibson had forced a desperate reshuffling of battle lines. Pemberton ordered Gregg and his men to move with all dispatch to Jackson, Mississippi, 200 miles away.

G

So on Monday, 4 May, at Port Hudson (above) General Gregg loaded his men onto the 7 cars of the Port Hudson and Clinton Railroad, for the 20 mile trip inland to the seat of East Feliciana Parish.

Their top speed over the corroded line was no more than 5 miles an hour. And after a seemingly endless series of shuttles back and forth the brigade's trip terminated in Clinton, a town of 1,500 white souls. Gregg's 4,500 Tennesseans and Texans then began a 37 mile forced march in the heat and dust of a suddenly dry Mississippi spring.  Fifteen miles east of town they crossed the almost empty Amite river and then camped beside the trickle of the Tickfaw creek. Private W.J. Davidson of the 41st Tennessee remembered, ", Our rations gave out and the heat and dust was almost insufferable." The next day they reached Kent's Mills. Here Gregg's Battalion boarded cars of the New Orleans and Jackson railroad, to continue their journey north.

But they had barely resumed their progress when, shortly after crossing the Mississippi state border they had to disembark again. Two weeks earlier Grierson's Yankee raiders had destroyed many of the rails between Osyka and Brookhaven, Mississippi. So it was another 47 mile forced march, before Gregg's Battalion could board a third train for the 56 final miles into the state capital of Jackson, Mississippi. The Battalion had marched over 100 miles and traveled 100 miles by rail in 5 long exhausting days. They arrived in Jackson early on Saturday 9 May, 1863. That evening the weary rebels drank their fill from the cool waters of the upper Pearl River.

But the next day General Gregg received new orders from General Pemberton. And before dawn on Monday, 11 May, John Gregg would lead his weary battalion on yet another forced march of 27 miles to the southwest. That afternoon they were greeted by cheering crowds at the town of Raymond, happy to see so many Confederate soldiers after a week of apparent abandonment. Their joy was mitigated somewhat when after filing into a field just south of town, “…the brigade...were too tired to stand in line...and everyone dropped...as soon as we halted.” 

General Gregg, meanwhile was seething with anger. The cavalry he expected to find guarding the roads south of Raymond (above) , were nowhere to be seen.

Pemberton was trying to form a ring to contain Grant's army, behind the Big Black River to the west, and its tributaries Fourteen Mile and Baker's creeks to the north and east. And the force he chose to stake out the positions south of Raymond until Gregg's men arrived, were the 500 troopers of Colonel Willaim “Wirt" Adams 1^st Mississippi cavalry regiment. And the reason they were not where they were supposed to be had to do with their hot headed commander.

Both 49 year old William "Wirt" Adams (above)  and his younger brother Daniel were violent southern gentlemen prone to spontaneous duels -slash -brawls to defend their “honor”. Younger brother Daniel had even been tried for the murder of a journalist, but the jury generously found he had been acting in self defense.  Colonel Adams would eventually die in a similar encounter on a street corner.  But that was 20 years in the future. On Friday, 8 May, the 1^st Mississippi cavalry were in Jackson, resting men and horses after futile and frustrating week spent chasing Gerierson's raiders across central Mississippi, with only a brief encounter at cannon range to slate their hunger. 

Pemberton now ordered Colonel Adams to “picket” his men on the roads south of Raymond. But he also ordered Adams to ride to Edward's Depot, to assess the situation there.

Two weeks earlier Pemberton had been so desperate for cavalry to stop Colonel Gierson's raid, he had ordered 3 companies of the 20^th Mississippi Infantry at Jackson, Mississippi – about 400 men - to be put on horseback, and sent to Edward's Depot to guard the 300 muskets and 10,000 rounds of ammunition stored in Edward's Produce and Grocery. These guns were one of dozens of such arsenals through out Mississippi,  kept to deal with a feared uprising by the victims of the allegedly “benign” institution of slavery.

On 6 May, 1863 a 100 man scouting detachment of the 20^th Mississippi horse-slash- infantry, out of Edwards Depot, was surprised along Bakers Creek by union cavalry.  And it was their capture which had so frightened editor and publisher George William Harper at Raymond, that he had inspired Pemberton's concern about the capabilities of the metamorphosed 20th Mississippi. 

And that was why Pemberton had asked Colonel Adams to ride the 25 miles from Jackson, through Bolton, and across Bakers Creek to Edward's Depot. Once there he was to coolly observe and calmly report about the condition and combat readiness of the 20th regiment.  But cool and calm were not words usually associated with either of the Adams boys.

If Colonel Adams had caught up with Grierson's raiders, even for a brief struggle, he might have reacted differently to Pemberton's orders.  But the insult of  burned box cars and warehouses along the Grierson's route was seared into his mind. He had breathed in the stench of blackened wooden cross ties and bridges, felt the humiliating heat of smoldering and twisted bow tied iron rails. His honor demanded revenge. Revenge was something William Wirt Adams understood.

So on Saturday morning 10 May,  even though ordered to  picket his men on the roads between Raymond and Forty-mile Creek,  Brigadier General William Wirt Adams had mounted his entire command and ridden the 25 miles to Edward's Depot.  Here, behind Confederate lines, all was confusion. Adams spent the next 48 hours in Edward's Depot, looking for a fight, unaware he had just missed the most important one in his life. 

Because, on the evening of 11 May,  Brigadier General John Gregg's 4,500 infantrymen were  left defending the three roads leading into the town of Raymond without the eyes and ears of cavalry to warn them of any approaching Yankee army.  And the Yankees were approaching,  In great numbers.

- 30 -

VICKSBURG Chapter Thirty - Five

  

The 38 year old bespectacled publisher of the Hinds County Gazette, George William Harper (above), was worried.  Despite his personal rejection of succession, the one time mayor, two term state representative had volunteered as commissariat, securing supplies for the two regiments raised in Hinds county, Mississippi. But over the next two years, the war crept closer to 512 Palestine Street in Raymond, Mississippi, where George's wife Anna and their six children lived.

Raymond seemed safe from the anarchy of the war. The petite capital of Hinds county was off the main road between Vicksburg and Jackson, yet close to the Natchez Trace, on property donated by General Raymond Robinson. By 1862 the 1,500 white residents boasted a new Greek revival county court house (above) (built with slave labor)... 

...Two respectable rooming houses - “The City” and “The Oak Tree” (above) - as well as the not quite so respectable Florin House, several grand homes and two dozen or more tenement apartments. 

The town also boasted a new Episcopalian  church as well as the older Methodist church, ministered over by the Reverend Cooper - who was also owner of the diuretic medicinal waters of Coopers Wells resort (above)  just south of town. 

There were a couple of dry goods stores, a few saloons and blacksmiths, a hand full of doctors, a flurry of lawyers and Harper's  Hinds County Gazette - second oldest newspaper in the state. Raymond was as peaceful a town as could be found in the cotton empire. And then, four days ago on 2 May, 1863, the Yankees had captured Port Gibson, just 50 miles to the south.

The sudden appearance of blue uniforms in the very gut of Mississippi ripped apart the carefully cultured self image of gentility which had graced the south for a century. In a region already stripped of young white males, the nightmare of race retribution was abruptly set free to stalk the land in daylight, and the thousands of ways the “peculiar institution” had twisted and bent the society, laws and psychology of the south were revealed in all their hypocrisy. So terrifying was this sudden reality it must be doubtful if either master or slave welcomed the revelation without reservations.

On Tuesday, 5 May, halfway between Raymond and Edward's Depot. 500 troopers of the 2^nd Illinois Cavalry had descended upon and captured 100 mounted infantry of the 20^th Mississippi. That put Yankees within 8 miles of Raymond.  

The next morning, George Harper used his new Number 3 Washington Press, manufactured by New York based Robert Hoe and Company, to deliver the depressing news to his readers. It was, he wrote, “...a very gloomy day. Enemy reported at Edwards Station, Auburn, Cayuga, (and) Rocky Springs.”

George assured his readers the Yankees would concentrate on Vicksburg, 40 miles to the east, and that the fighting would come no closer than the banks of the Big Black River – still 20 miles, a full day's travel, away.  But George knew a zone of uncertainty had opened up in the rolling hills of central Mississippi, bordered by Bayou Pierre on the south, the Big Black River on the west, Snake Creek to the east, and to the north, the little community of Edward's Depot.

The 20 year old Tennessean Richard O. “Rich” Edward was one of the 75,000 whites drawn and 100,000 slaves forced to Mississippi after the 1830 Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek. The sudden creation of 11 million acres of land turned conventional economics on its head. As attorney and author of “The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi”, Joseph Glover Baldwin put it, “The country was just settling up”. Fraud was rampant, and it seemed every idiot was making money. One of them explained, “...credit is plenty, and he who has no money can do as much business as he who has...”. “Rich” Edward easily acquired a few hundred acres in the Yazoo River delta and started growing cotton.

In 1834, Mississippi produced 85 million pounds of cotton. Three years later the cotton kingdom produced 200 million pounds of the white fiber. Over the same time the price paid for that cotton in New Orleans almost doubled. This drove inflation, but again, few seemed to notice. Baldwin explained that “Money, or what passed for money was the only cheap thing to be had.” It seemed as if the good times would go on forever. They did not.

During March and February of 1837 the price of cotton dropped 25%. The immediate cause was President Andrew Jackson's order that the only payment accepted for Federal lands would be in gold or silver. This caused private banks to raise interest rates on paper – or specie – loans. And that produced a seemingly endless string of bankruptcies. In August of 1838, Colonel William H. Shelton, President of one of the largest banks in Mississippi,  fled after his bank failed - “Gone to Texas” was the phrase. A year later he committed suicide. In 1840 the entire state of Mississippi defaulted on $2 million worth of loans to cotton farmers. It took seven long years for the recovery to even begin.

In 1847 Richard Edward paid a dollar an acre for a section of 640 acres of Harlan County, 16 miles from Vicksburg and just east of the Big Black tributary called Baker's Creek. The impetus for his investment was a new cotton boom.   In 1850 Richard's 30 slaves produced one hundred eighty 500 pound bales of cotton, shipped out of his own depot on the Mississippi Southern Railroad (above). By 1860 Richard's wealth included 124 slave laborers, making him one of the top 12% of slave owners.

But in a back room at Edward's Produce and Grocery was the iron fist required to make that wealth possible – 300 muskets and 10,000 rounds of ammunition. Almost every large plantation in the south required such a larder, ever ready to respond to the expected great slave revolt, when it came. The 3,000 weapons destroyed by Grierson's raid were further evidence of these doomsday vaults dispersed though out Mississippi.  And these were not hysterical fantasies. 

According to the 1860 census, there were 791,000 humans living in the state of Mississippi, of whom 437,000 – 55% - were owned by the remaining 45%. Some 80,000 white Mississippi men then went to war, further unbalancing the social power structure. It would have been odd, if the whites had not felt vulnerable, because they were.

But in the pine forests of Winston county, in north/central Mississippi,  where there were only 122 black slaves, owned by just 14 white families - out of the total of 637 white families in the district. There was strong pro-union sentiment in Winston County. Yet even here, where masters vastly outnumbered those in bondage, owner Mr. C. D, Kelly was willing to believe his own cook's tale of a mass slave conspiracy. Her name was never provided, but Mr. Kelly said that on Friday, 20 September 1860, while he was “chastising”, the “girl”, she had revealed a massive plot to poison every white family in the county. 

She said she had been provided with poison to murder her master, his wife and child.  According to the New York Times, a week after learning of the plot, Mr. Kelly, “...called on some five or six responsible and sober-thinking gentlemen,” to form a Vigilance Committee. On 28 September the committee went from plantation to plantation, beating slaves without explanation or examination. The following day, the committee returned and some of the slaves spontaneously “confessed”, leading to the arrest of about 30 slaves. It was assumed white agitators had lead the conspiracy, specifically a traveling photographer, later detained in Philadelphia and identified only as G. Harrington – possibly Cole Harrington, originally from New York City.

Observed The Times, “ Knowing well that the law is too tardy in its course...” the committee “...unanimously committed” to pass punishment, “...on all persons, black or white, that may be impeached before it. of aiding or abetting in insurrectionist plans or movements, heretofore or hereafter.” The result, as reported in the Louisville and St. Louis newspapers, was that one negro and Mr. Harrington “had been hung.” 

And, of course the remaining 29 slaves were whipped, “...so severely, that it was thought they would die.’’

In February of 1862 such fear drove Joseph Davis, elder brother to Confederate President Jeff Davis,  to take his family and “house slaves” to Alabama for "their" safety.  But the moment the master's boat left the dock of his Hurricane Plantation,  his field hands took control of the entire peninsula, ransacking both Joseph's Hurricane Plantation house and Jefferson Davis' Brierfield Plantation house.   

All the cotton was burned, while the self-emancipated slaves took everything they could use back to their cabins (above) And there they stayed.  A Confederate lieutenant, dispatched with a patrol to put down the rebellion was shot at. The officer complained that, “...almost all the slaves on (the) Davis plantation had guns and newspapers.” 

Fifteen of the rebellious slaves were caught and several executed, but the remaining slaves remained defiant. They even refused to surrender the property to the Yankees, when they arrived. 

It was clear that for some time the so called benign slave masters had been sitting atop a powder keg of their own making. 

Robert Augustus Tombs (above), the 53 year old alcoholic Georgia genius, made the other obvious point regarding slavery in his farewell address in U.S. Senate in 1861. He said, “We want no negro equality, no negro citizenship...” But this deeply racist man also accepted as fact that slavery was doomed in America. A year later, as Confederate Secretary of State, he assured the Confederate Congress, "In 15 years more, without a great increase in Slave territory, either the slaves must be permitted to flee from the whites, or the whites must flee from the slaves."  It would seem that all talk of "benign slavery" was so much antebellum horse manure, not shared by the actual defenders of the institution. 

 Also,  viewed on a purely economic basis, slavery in the America was already dying. The first slave empires had been Virginia and Maryland. Fifteen to twenty years later "...due to the exhaustion of the soil..."  South Carolina had replaced them in cotton output.  As the cotton bushes consumed the available nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium in the soil, cotton yields in first South Carolina and fifteen years later, in Mississippi and Georgia began falling off. By 1860, Arkansas and Louisiana were the new queens of cotton production. By 1875, if not earlier, Texas would be used up. And then, without expansion into Mexico, which had made slavery illegal in 1845, slavery in North America would die a natural death.

Would the United States fight a new war, as they had in 1838 to seize Texas, to convert Mexico into the new slave empire? Was it likely Britain and France would allow such a conquest, if attempted,  to go unchallenged? 

The truth was, as George William Harper well knew, the day of the slave empire was ending. And the American Civil War was about one third of the nation refusing to accept that reality.

There were three men who would affirm that unequivocal reality to the citizens of the Confederacy - President Abraham Lincoln, in Washington, D.C., commander of the Army of the Tennessee, Lieutenant General Ulysses Grant, and General William Tecumseh Sherman, who on 6 May, 1863, stepped ashore at Grand Gulf, Mississippi, at the head of the 15,000 men of his XVth. Corp.

- 30 -