VICKSBURG Chapter Forty - Six

 

Beginning bright and early on the morning of Friday, 15 May, 1863, the 16, 000 men of William Tecumseh Sherman's XVth Corp began destroying everything in Jackson, Mississippi which contributed to the military power of the Confederacy. 

This included, Sherman explained , burning “ the arsenal buildings, the Government foundry, the gun carriage establishment, including the carriages for two complete six-gun batteries”. Also a horse stable was burned down – not the horses, they were too valuable - dozens of captured wagons, with saddles, bridles and traces were also destroyed, as were the carpenter and paint shops. Seventeen cannon, captured in taking the city, were spiked, and then packed with powder and then set off, blowing out their breeches.

But the Yankees spent most of their energy, and seemed to most enjoy, dismantling the railroads. This meant tearing the iron rails from their cross ties.

Piling the ties four or five feet high , the soldiers then setting them on fire - which was easily done as they were soaked in lubricating oil constantly dripping from the locomotives. 

Once the ties were burning fiercely, the iron rails were piled on top and heated until they softened. These were then bent around an unlucky tree or post and twisted into what would later be nicknamed “Sherman's Neckties”.  If done right, such neckties would have be returned to a foundry, to be recast.

According to Sherman this treatment was applied to the rail lines crossing in the city for a distance of “4 miles east of Jackson, 3 south, 3 north, and 10 west.” 

In addition the Yankees burned the bridge over the Pearl River along with 3,000 feet of high trestle work connecting it to level ground. They also burned every other bridge they could reach. Sherman estimated the cost of rebuilding the rail lines alone would be $204,000.00 – over $4 million today.

The rail yards machine shops were dismantled and burned, all the machines for making machinery were pounded with sledge hammers until they were useless. Five locomotives were blown apart, and 22 freight cars were burned. Sherman estimated it would take six months to repair and replace all that was destroyed. But he was being conservative. Jackson was finished as railroad transfer center, as the confederacy lacked the material to replace any of it.

The Yankees also destroyed the state prison, known as “The Walls” (above). Since it's opening in 1840, Mississippi had used the labor of the 200 inmates to defray costs for their incarceration, even adding a 40 acre farm. But during the war most of the prisoners had either been shipped to adjoining states, or inducted into the Confederate Army. After the 1862 arsenal explosion, the prison factories had been used for making ammunition, as well continuing the manufacture of hemp rope, and bags for cotton harvesting. But Sherman's men now cleared that building and blew down its walls.

Not far from the state capital building, atop 'asylum heights', was the 7 year old state mental hospital (above). It had once sheltered 150 white patients, but war and 'natural' mortality had reduced that number by half.  However, Yankees under Brigadier General Joseph (Fighting Joe) Anthony Mower – in charge of the destructions in the center of Jackson - went on a shopping spree of the hospital's storehouse and garden, harvesting the crops and driving away many of the animals intended to feed the patients. 

Even worse, according to the Jackson Daily News, “...seven of the institution’s ten employees left their jobs and joined the Union Army.”  In other words, they had been slaves. It seems even the care of the most vulnerable in Mississippi had been done by the cheapest labor available. The remaining 50 or so patients survived as best they could, if they could, until the end of the war.

Since 1841 the Federal Government had been sitting on a fund to pay for the establishment of a state school for the blind. But the state of Mississippi refused to recognize the Federal right to seize and sell those lands, and for 13 years had refused to avail themselves of the money. Finally, in 1857, sanity demanded that the children came first and and in 1858 a dormitory and rude campus were constructed (above) a mile and a half west on the Clinton Road. Federal troops now investigated the property, but did little damage. However, the support staff were slaves and most chose personal freedom over caring for other people's children.   Meanwhile, the mostly young, indigent white patients were now just another cost of defending human slavery at all costs.

No Government buildings were purposely damaged – the state capital building (above) still stands a century later. The City Hall, the Masonic Hall, the Concert Hall and The Lyceum were all guarded by Federal troops to ensure their survival,  Even the Governor's mansion remained untouched. However a few Yankees had discovered a cache of rum and some pillaging of private property resulted. A minister admitted that while his church was undamaged, his home had suffered, “... wanton destruction...May God forgive them for all the evil they did...” But the war was still young, and compared to what Sherman would unleash upon Jackson just 5 months later, this was a benign occupation. 

In truth, Sherman had very little time to do much more. Before nightfall, “Cump” (above) had received orders that the last of his men were to be on the road to Clinton, by 10:00am, Saturday, 16 May, 1863. The Vicksburg campaign was rushing toward it's climax.

And Grant was ready. As the tail end of Sherman's Corps, General Blair 's division reached Raymond on 14 May, There they passed on the 200 wagon ammunition train to the protection of McClernand's Corps.  Most of what the army needed to eat and move was being taken from the Mississippi farmers and plantations. But shot and shell, sugar and coffee were all in short supply in the Confederacy. Those, the Army of the Tennessee  had brought with them from Grand Gulf, not in a continuous train of wagons, but in concentrated bundles, each protected by a full division. But this was to be the final bundle for Grant's army. After this train there would be no string of vulnerable wagons filling the roads between Grand Gulf and Jackson, Mississippi.

The vulnerable rear of the Federal army, which General Loring had convinced Pemberton to strike for, no longer existed. Had Pemberton struck on 12 May, or even 13 May, he might have hit Grant a serious blow. But by 15 May, it was too late. And had Pemberton followed Johnston's original order, he might have been striking toward Clinton on 15 May with 35,000 men, and the story of  Vicksburg might have been very different.

The story that was told later that a year and a half earlier an unnamed rebel civilian was suspected of union sympathies by authorities in the still Confederate city of Nashville, Tennessee (above). This rebel was then publicly accused and escorted out of the town in shame just before that city became the first rebel state capital to fall to Federals in February of 1862. 

That individual, now in Jackson, Mississippi, harbored his resentment until 13 May, 1863, when Captain James Yeager went looking for two volunteers to carry copies of General Joseph Johnston's orders through the Yankee armies to General Pemberton, in Bovina.  Knowing the vital nature of the message, the insulted rebel, volunteered. And at the first Yankee picket outside of Clinton,  he – or she – repaid the insult by handing over their copy of Johnston's message to Pemberton. Or so the story goes.

We know as fact the captured message, however it was acquired, went directly to the headquarters of Major General James Birdseye McPherson (above), who passed the message on to General Grant's headquarters in the evening hours of 14 May. 

Even with parts of the order written in an as yet unbroken code, the essence was clear. Pemberton (above) was ordered to abandon Vicksburg, and march on Clinton, where he would be met by Johnston's gathering host. Johnston may have been pushed out of the game, but Grant now knew a rebel army was bearing down on his rear.

This explained Grant's orders to  McPherson on the evening of Thursday, 14 May. His XVII Corps wheeled about on their heels and during 15 May marched back through Clinton, to Bolton - 20 miles west of Jackson.  Also on that Friday, the  Major General John Alexander McClernand was ordered to "Turn all your forces toward Bolton Station, and make all dispatch in getting there. Move troops by the most direct road from wherever they may be on the receipt of this order." Grant was determined to block all of the roads Pemberton might use to combine with Johnston's growing force -  the Bridgeport to Clinton Road, the Edward's Depot to Clinton Road which ran through Bolton, and the Bolton to Raymond road.   Sherman's 2 available divisions were  ordered to finish their work in Jackson and be on the Clinton road by 10:00am on Saturday, 16 May.

Grant's staff had just shifted the direction of march of the Army of The Tennessee 180 degrees. McClernand's and McPherson's Corps were now in the lead.  Sherman's Corps was now the reserve.  It was a classic Napoleonic use of independent Corps to quickly concentrate their power in whatever direction their general chose.  Grant could not know that Pemberton's decision to strike toward Raymond was, in effect, moving toward Grant's left flank, while uncovering Grant's most direct route to Vicksburg and a re-establishment of the Federal supply line.   And neither side could know the outcome of the entire campaign would now be determined not by human egos or minds, but by the rains of 14 May.

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VICKSBURG Chapter Thirty - Two

 

On Saturday, 9 May, 1863, 56 year old General Joseph Eggelston Johnson (above) received a telegram from the Confederate Secretary of War, 47 year old James Alexander Seddon. In classic Seddon double-talk, it read, “Proceed at once to Mississippi and take chief command of the forces there, giving to those in the field, as far as practicable, the encouragement and benefit of your personal direction. Arrange to take for temporary service with you, or to be followed without delay, three thousand good troops...now on their way to General Pemberton...and more may be expected.”

To Johnson's experienced eye the missive set him up to be blamed for the military disaster created by the arrogant meddlesome martinet, Confederate President Jefferson Davis ((above). And hidden in Seddon's verbosity were two ugly realities. There were no additional troops available, and Davis reserved the right to make things worse by interfering at any time with Johnson's command. 

The unwelcome call to duty found Johnson still recovering from his 1862 wounds, almost bedridden in muddy little village of Tullahoma, Tennessee, watching the 45,000 hungry men of The Army of Tennessee slowly starving to death.  It was clear to Johnson, that his subordinate, 46 year old General Braxton Bragg, was going to be easy prey, as soon as the well fed 50,000 man Federal Army of the Cumberland,  under 42 year old Major General William Starke “Rosy” Rosecrans, decided to move against them.  But south of Bragg's precarious position was the vital railroad junction town of Chattanooga, Tennessee, through which food and arms from Alabama and Georgia were being  carried to the rebel Army of Northern Virginia.  Surprisingly little of that bounty reached Bragg's much closer but slowly dwindling army.

Like the arrogant and annoying carbuncle Jefferson Davis thought him to be, Johnson replied promptly. He wrote, “ I shall go immediately, although unfit for field-service. I had been prevented, by the orders of the Administration, from giving my personal attention to military affairs in Mississippi at any time since the 22d of January. On the contrary, those orders had required my presence in Tennessee during the whole of that period.” You could almost hear Davis spit in reply across the humming telegraph wires.

Pausing in his whining, on Sunday morning, 10 May, 1863, Joseph Johnson boarded an express train headed south for Chattanooga. Arriving on the Tennessee River, he was less than 400 miles from his destination, via first the Memphis and Charleston Railroad, to Corinth, Mississippi, where he would previously have changed to the Mobile and Ohio rail line directly to Jackson. At 30 miles an hour the journey should have taken less than a day. But Corinth had been in Federal hands for a year, and that route was no longer available to Confederates.

So, from Chattanooga, General Johnson had to continue 140 miles south via the Western and Atlantic Railroad to Atlanta, Georgia. There he had to switch to the Atlanta and West Point Railroad to connect in that city with the Western Railway of Alabama, in order to reach Montgomery - another 160 miles of travel. It is famously only 50 miles from Montgomery to Selma, Alabama, home in 1863 to the Ordnance and Naval Foundry complex at the head of navigation on the Alabama River. And it was only 50 miles further to Meridian, Mississippi, along the planned route of the Alabama and Mississippi Railroad. But the war had broken out before that line had reach much beyond Selma, and the final 50 mile gap would never be completely closed – a bridge over the Tombigbee River would not be built until the 1870's.

So, after reaching Selma, General Johnson had to shift to a spur of the Nashville and Louisville railroad, which traveled 176 miles south and west to Mobile Alabama. There he was able to transfer to the Mobile and Ohio railroad for the 150 mile trip almost due north to Meridian, Mississippi. Once there, the weary and wounded General could board a Southern Railroad express for the final 100 miles to the capital city - Jackson, Mississippi. The 400 mile original trip had been almost doubled and the travel time tripled. Johnson did not arrive in Jackson until Wednesday, 13 May, 1863 – a day late and a far more than a dollar short.

As the sun rose on Tuesday, 12 May 1863, 19 year old regimental adjutant Henry Otis Dwight (above), was marching north out of Utica, Mississippi in the lead of 7,000 federal infantry. He recalled, “The weather was splendid, the roads were in fine condition and there was plenty to eat in the country.” He also noted, “...we were more conscientious about taking (about) what we wanted than where we were.”

Where they were was deep in the bowels of the Confederacy, without a safe line of retreat or a reliable line of supply. And yet they were supremely confident in themselves and their commanders - from 38 year old Colonel Manning Ferguson Force of the 20^th Ohio, all the way up to 37 year old commander of the 3^rd division, 37 year old Illinois native John “Jack” Alexander Logan.

Logan had been born and raised in the southern tip of of the north which touched the slaves states of Missouri and Kentucky. The busy port of Cairo, at the junction of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers,  along with the towns of Thebes, Goshen and Karnak, inspired the title usually given to the region - “Little Egypt”. In fact Cairo, Illinois was further south than Richmond, Virginia. 

And although the 1847 state constitution made Illinois a “free state”, there were always slaves to be found in “Little Egypt”. And as a member of the state legislature in 1853, John Logan had authored the “Black Law”, which fined any free black man or woman $50 if they stayed in Illinois for longer than 10 days. It earned him the nickname, “Dirty Work Logan”. The fine was increased by $50 for each re-arrest. But even as members of his own family, and his long time law partner condemned him for the law and his support for slavery, John Logan, as a Stephen Douglas Democrat,  spoke against secession. At the behest of then Colonel Ulysses  Grant, he told a crowd of potential recruits, "There can be no neutrals in this war, only patriots or traitors."

It was understandable then, if there were many who thought “Black” John Logan was a little crazy. He certainly looked it. Logan was “...not a large man, (but) his long black hair, piercing ebony eyes, and swarthy complexion gave (him)...an impressive presence.” He was also a political general, given a command because he could raise troops and inspire loyalty in a conflicted region. And he turned out to be a damn good field commander. Wounded three times at Fort Donaldson, and reported as dead on the casualty list, he kept his unit in the fight and held off the rebel attempt to break out. General Logan missed the battle of Shiloh while his wife nursed him back to health. But by the spring of 1863, he was back in the saddle, and in command of the 3^rd Division as it marched across Mississippi.

What John Logan saw of slavery in the flesh, in all of its ugly sexist brutality,  convinced this racist that Americans of black skin must be given their freedom, and the right to vote. No less a man than Frederick Douglas once said that if a man like “Black” Jack Logan could have a change of heart about race, then there was hope for everyone. And out in front of  Logan's hope, just after 10:00am this Tuesday morning, was Henry Dwight, and the men of the 20^th Ohio.

Dwight wrote later, “The road lay through woods and fields, passing few houses, and what there were were as still as a farmhouse in haying time...Sometimes an old negro woman would appear, bowing and smirking, and then when the first embarrassment had worn off like she would say: “Lord a masay! Be there any more men where you uns come from? ‘Pears like as if I nebber saw so many men since I’se been born.” At this, some one would be sure to give the regular answer in such cases made and provided: “Yes, aunty, we come from the place where they make men.

“After a while... we heard two pops, which we were able to recognize as gunshots, far on in front. “Hello, somebody is shooting squirrels,” said one of the boys. “Pop, pop, pop,” came three more shots in quick succession, but a little nearer. “The squirrels are shooting back,” growled a burly Irishman, “and sure it’s meself that don’t approve of that kind of squirrel shooting, not a bit of it.”

It was the beginning of the battle or Raymond. And within a few hours, the military situation in Mississippi would be very different.

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VICKSBURG Chapter Ten

 

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 slipping in slow motion off the embankment, dragging the 40 foot long passenger cars behind. 

The wooden carriages splintered 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 standard 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 and Mississippi.

When he finally arrived in Chattanooga Tennessee 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 commander by his own officers in either army...

...And northerner turned southerner, the not overly bright John Pemberton (above) 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 engage Braxton Bragg's Army of the Cumberland along Stones River.  Bragg told his men "he would 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 which could not be improved, 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....Colonel 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 own officers for not winning. Davis ordered Joe Johnston to assess the situation. Did this,  like the loss at Cointh, require a change in commanding officer?  It seems likely that Davis (above) had been expecting Johnston to replace Bragg with himself.  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 still 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 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 even 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 had been 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 preferred 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 white superiority.

And because no rebel army followed the Federal retreat, Grant could leave just a single weak corps to guard the high ground around Lagrange, Tennessee.   Grant had never intended on attacking Vicksburg from the west 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. As he told a member of his staff,  “In war anything is better than indecision. We must decide. If I am wrong, we shall soon find out, and can do the other thing. But not to decide wastes both time and money, and may ruin everything". Even as he retreated from Oxford, Grant was looking for a new way to cut that southern rail line at Jackson, isolate Vicksburg and destroy Pemberton's army.

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