VICKSBURG Chapter Sixty - Eight

 

For the past six months the Federal primary supply depots were operating at Milliklen's Bend, eleven  river above Vicksburg. But with the capture of Haine's Buff these could now to be bypassed, and a new depot established just 6 miles behind the Yankee front lines -  up the Yazoo River at the Johnson plantation on Chickasaw Bayou. 

The regiments protecting those warehouses were transferred as well. But that left Grant with the same problem he had in December at Holly Springs. There were still depots at The Milliken's Bend, and 5 miles closer to Vicksburg, new hospitals (above)  which had sprung up at the scene of that previous winter's pestilence and disease, at Young's Point - opposite the mouth of the Yazoo River.

The only combat unit at hand to prevent the rebels from cutting the Mississippi river to Grant's rear was the heavily abused 23^rd Iowa Infantry regiment.  After sacrificing themselves at the battles of Port Gibson, Champion Hill and the Big Black River Bridge, there were only 160 Iowa boys left -  barely enough to guard Confederate prisoners captured at the Big Black. The need for more soldiers was so desperate that Grant had been forced to bolster the weary corn huskers were 1,410 black volunteers.

A few short weeks before they had been plantations slaves. Touching a gun would have gotten them shot dead or lynched.  Now they wore blue coats with brass buttons stamped “U.S.” And they carried muskets, produced so haphazardly some of them would not fire.  They were still largely untrained, and  their white officers were usually not the best officers.  These green soldiers had been roughly formed into the 9^th and 11^th Louisiana and 1^st Mississippi regiments, referred to as the African Brigade.  In no way could they yet be considered an effective combat force, but they were determined to fight rather than become slaves again.

But that was a drop in the bucket to what Grant needed. He begged General Hallack and the War Department to send new units to free up the XVI Corps, under 45 year old Minnesota businessman, Brigadier General Cadwallader Colden Washburn. These divisions under William Sooy Smith, Greenville Dodge, Nathan Kimball and Jacob Lauman, and been garrisoning Memphis and LaGrange Tennessee and Corinth, Mississippi.  It would take a week, but by the first of June the amazing northern railroad network and the United States Military Rail Road and the brown water navy had these green soldiers moving to occupy central Tennessee, freeing those 15,000 veterans to fill the southern trenches of McClernand's lines, closing the ring around Vicksburg.

With those men, Grant's strength would top 55,000. But if Joe Johnson's army, gathering around Jackson, Mississippi, could advance quickly enough, he might force an escape route for Pemberton's trapped 20,000 soldiers in Vicksburg. Grant (above) needed even more men. And, amazingly, he found them, thanks to the worst disaster suffered by the Union Army in the entire war.

Said a Yankee participant in the bloody fiasco of Saturday, 13 December 1862, “If ever men in this war were slaughtered blindly, it was there.” A federal General observing the battle recalled that rank after rank of blue clad soldiers melted “...like snow coming down on warm ground”. Still, they came on, 47 brigades, one brigade at a time, one after the other, thrown against  entrenched rebels. John L. Smith, of the 118^th Pennsylvania volunteers described the attacks as “...simply murder.” The returning wounded warned the fresh brigades they were “marching into an abattoir.” And still they marched on. Pennsylvania Governor Andrew Curtin told Lincoln to his face, “It was not a battle, it was a butchery.”

In this single disaster 1,284 union soldiers were killed, twice as many as were wounded. Almost another thousand were captured or walked away from the war in horror and disgust. Federal losses were 8 times those of the rebel defenders. Lincoln said later that another battle like this might destroy the army. And the sole man responsible for this catastrophe was the commander of the Army of the Potomac, Major General Ambrose Everett Burnside, for ever after known as the “Butcher of Fredricksburg”.

Like a Shakespearean character, command of the Army of the Potomac would be offered Ambrose Burnside (above) three times. Twice he had shown the good sense to reject it, assuring Lincoln, “I am not competent to command such a large army as this." But every time another of his peers failed, his political masters came back to Burnside. 

He was a graduate of West Point. He had invented his own carbine, 55,000 of which were in use. He was a solid Republican, and a popular Rhode Island politician. He was a successful businessman. In 1861 his IX Corps had cleared 80% of the North Carolina coast, and at South Mountain in mid 1862 by itself it had pinned down the rebel army, forcing it to fight for its life at Antietam. So Lincoln offered him the crown for a third time. And as ultimate proof of his incompetence, Burnside accepted.

In many armies, after a disaster like Fredricksburg,  Burnside would have been tried for incompetence, and shot by a firing squad.  In the American Army he was exiled to headquarters in Cincinnati, Ohio. He requested his old IX corps to join him there. And as a sop to his battered ego, in March of 1863, stripped of one division, the 8,000 men were returned to Burnside and took over occupation duties in Kentucky.

And that is why, in late May of 1863, a frantic War Department found two full divisions of damn good soldiers sitting on their behinds in Kentucky. The 1^st Division of 39 year old Pennsylvania canal boat operator Brigadier General Thomas Welsh, and the 2^nd Division of 33 year old Schenectady lawyer Brigadier General Robert Brown Potter, were transferred to Grant's command and told to quickly move south. Needless to say, General Burnside was ordered not to accompany them.

The IX Brigade was transported to Haine's Bluff, to defend the new supply depot. With their arrival Grant's army numbered about 75,000 men. More troops would follow, with time. The rule of reinforcing success was now working for Grant.

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VICKSBURG Chapter Twenty - Four

The four ugly dark ships came steaming around Caffees' Point about 7:30am, Wednesday, 29 April, 1863, with the 512 ton, 175 foot long USS Pittsburg, leading the way. Twenty minutes later her big guns - two 9" and three 8" cannon, and six big rifles - opened fire on Grand Gulf's upper battery , 50 feet above the river. 

But as they approached the head on confluence of the Big Black River and the Mississippi (above, top right), the whirlpool which gave Grand Gulf its name twisted the ships around, complicating their aim, until finally they drew so close their guns could not elevate high enough to hit the battery. As they continued their attack on the lower battery south of the town, at about 8:25am, a second squadron of 3 more gunboats appeared, anchored just below the whirlpool, and continued the assault on the upper battery. Once again the Yankees were learning that the river controlled everything that happened along it.

There is an underlying order to the geography of the great flat floodplain of the Mississippi Delta which reveals itself in repetition. In example; the Yazoo river is forced to join the Mississippi just above Vicksburg because it is blocked by the high bluffs the town sits upon. And forty miles to the south, the return of those same high bluffs channel the head of the Big Black River into the main stream bellow the 175 foot high Point of the Rocks, just above the community of Grand Gulf.  The only difference is that unlike at Vicksburg, where the Louisiana shore is the high ground of the De Soto peninsular,  the western shore opposite Grand Gulf is flat and swampy. 

After four hours 52 year old Admiral David Dixon Porter's brown water navy silenced the lower battery. But two more hours of bombardment by all 7 Federal gunboats failed to seriously damage the upper battery. And one Federal ironclad - the 930 ton casemate sternwheel USS Tuscumbia - suffered damage to her engine room, and drifted powerless downstream to beach on the Louisiana shore. The rest of Federal ships withdrew about 1:00pm to Hard Times Landing.

As the dark ships retreated back upstream, the commander at Grand Gulf , 32 year old General John Stevens Bowen had no doubt they would be back. While the attack was still in progress he telegraphed his boss, General Stevenson, in Vicksburg. Detailing the assault, he added, "Six transports in sight, loaded with troops, but stationary. "

Stevenson was at last galvanized into action. He telegraphed his boss, Lieutenant General John C. Pemberton in Jackson that, " The line to Grand Gulf is broken. Heavy firing in that direction..." He also ordered 29 year old Georgia lawyer Brigadier General Edward Dorr Tracy Jr and 35 year old Columbus, Mississippi bookstore owner Brigadier General William Edwin Baldwin to move their brigades to Grand Gulf as quickly as possible.

Across the river, Lieutenant General Ulysses Grant was on the move as well, riding toward the 500 acre plantation owned by 47 year old Doctor Jeremiah Yellott Hollingsworth, and his wife Francis, which they called "Hard Times".  

This cotton plantation was the end of a 75 mile long corduroy road from Milliken's Bend, built over April by Major General John A. McClernand's XIII Corps. The troops on the 6 transports spotted by General Bowen had been the lead elements of that corps, the 10,000 men of 40 year old Brigadier General Peter Joseph Osterhouse's 9th division and 33 year old Brigadier General Eugene Asa Carr's 14th division. But following McClernand's corps down that same road were also the troops of the XVII Corps, under 34 year old Major General James Birdseye McPherson.

The men of the XVII corps had spent February and March digging the canal at Lake Providence, Louisiana.  But in early April they had moved to Milliken's Bend, and began to march down the corduroy road, repairing it as they came on. The work slowed their progress, but as yet Grant was not certain exactly where these men were marching to.  

Typical was the experience of the 20th Ohio Volunteer Regiment, of the 2nd Brigade, 37 year old Major General John Alexander Logan's 3rd Division in McPherson's Corps. The Buckeyes were covering an average of just 6 miles a day.  Their Major, 39 year old Cincinnati lawyer Manning Ferguson Force, remembered the "6 days of plodding" down a road which was "strewn with wrecks of wagons and their loads, and half buried guns. At a halt of some hours the men stood deep in mud, for want of any means of sitting."

Major Force, "A spare grave man with an eye that penetrated to the spine of a culprit..." also remembered the humidity, and the bugs. "When the sun set, the leaves of the forest seemed to exude smoke," he wrote after the war, " and the air became a saturated solution of gnats....They swarmed upon our necks, seeming to encircle them with bands of hot iron. Tortured and blinded, we could neither eat nor see.” But they kept slowly marching south, and Grant, with his pathological aversion to retracing his steps, was going to have to quickly figure out some where to put 40,000 soldiers.

After arriving in the Hollingsworth Plantation house at about 2:30pm that Wednesday, 29 April, Grant was immediately confronted by Admiral Porter, with news of his failure to overcome the upper battery at Grand Gulf.  Grant's response was quick and quiet. "Unload the infantry. The men will march another 3 miles south of Grand Gulf over the Coffee Peninsula, and after dark I shall run every transport I have below the batteries and not one shall be injured." Porter accepted the idea at once, and issued the orders to the transports and barges waiting offshore.

The two divisions, Osterhouse's and Carr's disembarked, formed up on the levee, and set off on the five mile march to the home owned by Passmore Hoopes and his wife Eliza, bearing the romantic French name of Disharoon. By dark both divisions were encamped, waiting for the ships to join them. With a flash and bang of covering fire from Porter's ironclads, the six federal transports with barges and flatboats in tow made the run past Grand Gulf. And as Grant had said, they made it without a single loss of boats or lives.

Grant's plan that afternoon was to re-board his men on the steamboats the next morning, and carry them 12 miles south to the Mississippi shore at the old French river port of Petit Gouffre - "Little Gulf" as opposed to Grand Gulf.  The village's name had been changed in 1828, adopting the nomen of the first Chief Justice of Mississippi Territory - from 1803 to 1811 - Thomas Rodney, originally from Delaware. His older brother, Caesar, had been a member of the Continental Congress and a signer of the Declaration of Independence. To confirm his plan, Grant sent a scouting party down river to Rodney, to confirm there was a road which would lead back to Grand Gulf.  But when they returned later that night they brought with them a runaway slave. And as so often happened in this war for union, a black man changed everyone's plans.

This man told Grant there was no need to travel 12 miles to find a good landing spot on the Mississippi shore. Just 3 miles south from the dock at Disharoon, a few hundred yards south of a little stream called Bayou Pierre (above), was a solid earthen bank and plenty of room for several steamboats to tie up and unload. Just inland above the river was the almost abandoned village of Bruinsburg, with a small Bethel Church. 

From there the man assured Grant, two good roads climbed the bluffs north toward Port Gibson (above), and which,  once captured,  would outflank Grand Gulf.

By all accounts, Grant expressed no second thoughts. He ordered the transports to load troops in the morning, of Thursday, 30 April, 1863, at Disharoon Landing, Louisiana and unload them again at Bruinsburg, Mississippi.  It would be the largest amphibious operation in the history of the United States, until the Normandy landings of 6 June 1944.

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VICKSBURG Chapter Fifteen

 

On Wednesday, the first day of April, 1863, "The Enrollment Act", the nation's first military draft, went into effect. Signed by Lincoln just the month before, it required all males 20 to 45 years of age to register. They would then be called up to meet monthly quotas established for each Congressional district. However, draftees could buy an exemption for $300 (equal to over $6,000 today), or pay a substitute to serve for them. Northern critics now labeled it a rich man's war, but a poor man's fight. Within months this would lead to riots. But in the Confederacy, the war was even more unpopular.

On Thursday, 2 April 1863 a thousand or so desperate workers, most from the Tredegar Iron Works (above) gathered at the foot of Washington's statue in Richmond's Capital Square, demanding a meeting with Virginia Governor John Lecter, to discuss food shortages.  

It had been a hard winter for all 100,000 war time citizens of Richmond, Virginia (above). In early March there had been an explosion at the Brown's Island ammunition factory which killed 45 workers, all of them women and girls. There had been 20 measurable snow falls over the bitter cold winter, and just the week before a foot of snow had isolated the city.  

The weather was driving up food prices almost as much as the Union blockade. Speculators had tripled the pre-war price of flour to $40 a barrel. Milk and butter, if they were available, now cost 4 times what they had in 1861. In early March the desperate Jefferson government had seized 5,000 barrels of flour from Richmond speculators, but that did nothing to convince workers the government cared about their sacrifices.

Tredegar was the third largest iron works in the United States, and the largest in the Confederacy. Its 900 skilled employees forged cannon and locomotives and the sheathing for iron clad warships. Half of Tredegar's workers were slaves - who were, of course, provided smaller food allowances than the whites.  And with so many white males in uniform, most of the remaining white workers were women. If the Confederacy could not feed workers in this vital industry, it was clearly doomed.

The problem was becoming a crises. According to the "The Carolina Watchman", on Wednesday, 18 March, 1863, 50 hungry, angry wives and mothers of Confederate soldiers were driven to chop down the pantry door of a grocery in the Piedmont village of Salisbury, North Carolina. They accused the owner, Michael Brown, of profiteering when he had no flour available at the state mandated $20 a barrel.  After hacking at the door for several minutes, the  women were convinced to accept just 20 barrels of flour to end the assault.  

Down the street at "Henderson and Enniss", John Enniss provided 3 more barrels of flour to placate the angry women.  Another store owner managed to buy off the hungry women with a single jug of molasses. Shop owner Thomas Foster claimed the salt in his store was already paid for and waiting to be shipped. Instead he offered the women $20 cash out of his own pocket. The women took the cash, and some salt. The railroad agent protecting a flour shipment at the Carolina Depot was literately run over by the women. "They took ten barrels, and rolled them out and were setting on them...waiting for a wagon to haul them away."

The "Watchman" said the Commissioners for County Relief should hang their heads in shame for allowing things to get this bad. But the paper also chastised "the ladies" - "In God’s name let us not fall to devouring each other by mobs." Such riots were not uncommon that spring, everywhere the local authorities had failed to appreciate the plight of the working poor.

Back in Richmond, the Governor lectured the Tredegar protesters and promised no concessions. The crowd began march down the street, chanting  "Bread, bread, bread." The mayor ordered them to disperse. In response, 40 year old, 6 foot tall butcher's apprentice Minerva Meredith, raised a "skeleton arm" and shouted, "We are starving!" The chant now switched to "Bread or blood!"

The mob began emptying warehouses, grocery stores, mercantile shops, seizing food, clothing, and wagons. Some merchants resisted but most watched helplessly as the looters seized bacon, ham, flour, and shoes intended to be sold as profitering.

Two hours after it began, Confederate President Jefferson Davis ordered the looters to go home. He had  a loaf of bread thrown at his head. He then took out his pocket watch and announced that in five minutes he would order the militia to open fire. 

Before the willingness of the local men to shoot down hungry local women was tested, the crowd dispersed. Some 60 men and women were brought to trial, including Minerva Meredith, She was convicted and sentenced to 6 months in jail and fined $100. The rebel authorities tried to keep the riot secret, but a week later the details appeared in the New York Times. Few noticed it, however.  Nor did they notice the big things that were beginning to happen along the Mississippi River, near Vicksburg.

Any sane person in 1863, wishing to travel from the village of Richmond, Louisiana to New Carthage, Louisiana would make most of the journey by water. You might begin at Richmond's railroad depot, and take a train to the end of the line, 5 miles west to the the port of Desoto. There you would board a ferry to cross the 900 yard wide Mississippi River to the town of Vicksburg, where you would transfer to a riverboat.

Five miles south on the Mississippi river you would pass the somber ruins of Warrenton, Mississippi (above). In the summer of 1862, Yankees from Admiral Farragut's blue water fleet had shelled the town, and then landed a regiment, seeking to intimidate nearby Vicksburg into surrender. But the rebels had counter attacked and the battered buildings had been fought over until the the Yankees were convinced Vicksburg was not going to surrender. The net result was, for the 250 people who had called Warrenton home, just another senseless tragedy.

Three miles south the river jogged to the west, around a knuckle called Diamond Point, with 3 or 4 islands - depending on the level of the river - close to the Mississippi shore. These showed the safe depth was on the Louisiana side. Once past the Diamond Islands, the river turned east again, and the current shifted across the channel, carrying you toward the Mississippi plantation docks of Mr. Thomas Freeland. But the river was merely gathering strength for its next big adventure, a 90 degree westward twist called Davis Bend, at the base of a thumb of land called the Hurricane Peninsula.

For the next 5 miles Old Man River swept around three sides of the 5,000 acre Mississippi Plantation of 78 year old Joseph Emory Davis (above). A West Point Graduate, then a successful lawyer, and finally a progressive among slave owners, he was one of the ten richest men in the south, holding - as of 1860 - 365 human beings in bondage.  Davis' 3 story brick mansion was considered one of the finest in the state, containing one of the largest private libraries. 

"Colonel" Joseph Davis was so wealthy he provided on his property a 200 acre ,116 slave plantation for his younger brother. That single story plantation mansion (above)  was called Brierfield . The younger brother was 56 year old politician Jefferson Finis Davis, President of the Confederacy. While Jeff was away in Richmond  mismanaging the war, Joseph had abandoned his home, taking his wife and children, most of his books, his wardrobe and his slaves south to safer properties. He left the two plantations under the care of his trusted overseer, manumitted slave named Benjamin Montgomery.

At the apex of Hurricane Bend on the Louisiana shore, some 20 river miles south of Vicksburg, was the village of New Carthage, Louisiana. That spring of 1863 the little village was abandoned, inundated up to its eves by the flooding river. There was not much dry ground left for a human to stand on except the levee. Still, at the start of April, 1863, thousands of men were heading toward New Carthage, and they were coming by road.

Grant's orders for the advance were issued on Tuesday, 31 March to Major General John Alexander McClernand, commander of the XIII Corps. 

He ordered his Ninth Division, commanded by 40 year old Prussian-American General Peter Joseph Osterhouse, to lead the advance. 

And Osterhouse gave the point to 32 year old Hoosier lawyer and politician, Colonel Thomas Warren Bennet (above), commander of the approximately 600 members of the 1st Brigade, 49th Indiana Volunteer Regiment. As support Bennet was also given 3 companies of the 2nd Illinois Cavalry, and 2 mountain howitzers from the 6 Missouri Cavalry. Most importantly however, for Grant's Vicksburg operation, Bennet's command also included the 40 members of 36 year old Captain William Franklin Patterson's Kentucky Company of Engineers and Mechanics, reinforced with 300 "pioneers" to rebuild the road to New Carthage.

According to Captain John Alexander Ritter (above), a 44 year old surgeon with the Richmond, Indiana Hoosiers, "Our regiment left Milliken's Bend on the 2nd (and) went (12 miles) to Richmond", he wrote. "The next morning, the 3rd, they went out on a scout 20 miles to Smiths Plantation on Bayou Videl, where Roundaway Bayou connects..." There the Hoosiers dug in and held for a week while Patterson's engineers improved the road behind them.

Dr. Ritter told his wife Margaret that although the regiment had only been issued 2 days rations, they had never eaten better in the service.  Here at the business end of the war, flour was going for $100 a barrel. "That is what the "sesesh" have to pay, " wrote doctor Ritter. The Yankees just took what they wanted. "The boys...have had chickens, mutton, fresh pork, fresh beef, goats, young pigeons etc. Honey. The Colonel has a milk cow tied to a stake."  But he assured Margaret "We have had a peaceable time. Thus far General Ostehaus is quite a favorite. He is a Dutchman, a very plain man, quite sociable. We have a good deal of confidence in General Grant...."

And as they moved closer to New Carthage, that confidence would grow.

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