VICKSBURG Chapter Sixteen

On Sunday, 5 April, 1863, about 50 old men and boys of the Tensas Parish mounted militia - AKA the 15th Independent Louisiana Cavalry - were on a "training patrol" along the eastern shore of Bayou Vidal, in one of the richest cotton growing parishes of cotton rich Louisiana. 

The parish had 118 plantations,  a third of which held more than 100 humans in bondage. After two full years of war slaves in the parish now outnumbered white males by two to one, heightening white fears of a slave revolt. 

 Late that afternoon the militia spotted a couple of Negroes paddling a flatboat across the bayou. With Yankees at Richmond, Louisiana,  all boats had been ordered held on the eastern shore. The whites ordered the slaves to halt. And when the command was ignored the militiamen fired on their disobedient servants. 

And to the white men's shock, somebody shot back. One militiaman was killed and another wounded. They rushed back to inform their commander, Major Isaac F. Harrison that the Yankees had come to Tensas Parish.

Major Harrison's first responsibility was to notify his superior officers, up the ladder to the deaf and cranky 59 year old Lieutenant General Theophilus Hunter Holmes (above).  But that seemed a pointless exercise because Holmes owed his exalted appointment to his incompetence, which had driven General Robert E. Lee to demand his removal from the eastern theater, and his long friendship to Confederate President, Jefferson Davis, who then made his incompetent friend Commander of the Trans Mississippi.  Besides, Holmes was far away in Little Rock, Arkansas, obsessed with guarding the few resources his department was holding on to.  So Major Harrison sent notice not only to General Holmes but also to the nearest commander in the neighboring Department of Mississippi - 32 year old Georgian, Major General John Stevens Bowen.

Bowen (above)  was a competent field commander, but his division at Grand Gulf, Mississippi actually numbered little more than 5,000 men. Still, he told his boss, Lieutenant General John C. Pemberton, in far off Jackson, Mississippi, that he wanted to send some men across the river to find out what Grant was up to. 

General Pemberton had suspicions about Bowen. After the battle Corinth the previous year, the Georgia native had filed charges of incompetence against his superior, General Earl Van Dorn. The General was found not guilty, but the stink of betrayal lingered over Bowen and made him suspect. Besides, Pemberton doubted the Yankees were moving south.  Earlier - on Friday, 3 April, 1863 - all but 7,000 men of General Nathaniel Bank's 35,000 man Federal Army of the Gulf had disappeared from lines defending Baton Rogue, on the east bank of the Mississippi. Pemberton had no idea where those 28,000 blue coated soldiers had gone, but it seemed unlikely Grant would be moving south to cross the river if Banks was no longer there to reinforce him. 

Also, scouts reported there was heavy steam boat traffic on the Mississippi between Milliken's Bend and Memphis, above Vicksburg.  This seemed to indicate Grant was shifting his army for another invasion of northern Mississippi. No, the Yankees at New Carthage were just a raiding party - at least that's what it looked like from Pemberton's perspective in Jackson. So he told Bowen to go ahead with a reconnaissance of Louisiana, but to remain ready to re-call those men if they were needed in Jackson.

On Thursday, 9 April, the 1st and 2nd under strength Missouri rebel regiments, under 28 year old lawyer and politician, Colonel Francis Marion Cockrell (above), crossed the river to Hard Times Landing. Cockrell was to find out what the Yankees were doing in Louisiana and if they were serious about it. So he pushed his infantry 6 miles north up the levee road beyond the head of the crescent Lake St. Joseph, south of New Carthage. There they bumped into the advance party of the 49th Indiana Volunteers.

Among the Hoosiers was Doctor John Ritter, and from his perspective the Yankees were a real threat.  "The Rebs", Dr. Ritter wrote his wife, had "occupied the high land down (to) the river. Their pickets were in sight all the time...We threw up breast works across the levee below and by that means held them in check...but if they had planted their artillery they could have shelled us out..."  Except Cockrell had no field guns. So after staring at each other for 5 days Colonel Cockrell decided to provoke a response by falling on an isolated company of the 2nd Illinois Cavalry, occupying the central houses of a plantation owned by Judge William Dunbar, guarding the Yankee right flank along Mills Bayou.

On the afternoon of the Tuesday, 14 April, members of the 1st Missouri left their positions along Bayou Vidal and marched west, crossing Mills Bayou, before swinging north behind the Federal positions. After a few hours of fitful sleep, at 4:00am the next morning, they waded into the waist deep water of the bayou again, falling on the Yankees without warning. In the dark the Missourians were able to capture one sentry, and kill a second before the Yankee cavalrymen awoke and fell back from the main house in confusion.

Still in the dark, the Missourians gathered up the wives and children of the overseers and other white employees who had been left behind. They also rounded up the 100 slaves in their cabins, driving the frightened people like cattle back across Mills Bayou in the dark. They also claimed to have discovered a chaplain of the 2nd Illinois "entertaining" a “young, full grown, athletic” slave woman in a back room of the big house. The truth of that situation can never be proven because no one's version of events can be taken as gospel.

By dawn additional federal units had been awakened, and part of the 10th Ohio Infantry regiment joined the remainder of the 2nd Illinois in driving on the plantation with artillery support. Shortly after dawn the rebels were all safely back across Mills Bayou, taking any of their dead and wounded with them, leaving the Federals to claim only one rebel captured, in exchange for 1 dead, 2 wounded and 2 missing. It was not much of an engagement, unless you unlucky enough to have been shot or killed. But the rapid counter attack by the 10th Ohio, told Colonel Cockrell that there was strength behind this move south, and that it was not likely these Yankees were a mere raiding party.

The nervous Dr. Ritter, feeling vulnerable and isolated atop the open levee south of New Carthage, was not as alone as he felt. Behind him Federal engineers were directing the work of the the 1st Missouri Federal and the 127th Illinois and 34th Indiana infantry regiments building a dam...

...and 4 bridges - one 200 feet long - across flooded countryside, and widening to 20 feet and improving and "corduroying" 40 miles of road from Richmond to New Carthage, and " the road from Miliken's bend to Richmond, Louisiana.

Soldiers have been building corduroy roads across swamps for 6,000 years, and the process is simple. It merely requires unlimited manpower, and vast quantities of young trees. First, you clear the roadway, not only of trees but of stumps. Ideally you dig out the roadbed to a depth of a few inches. Then you lay felled trees, each 4 to 6 inches in diameter, across the road, packing the trunks as tightly together as you can, using branches and mud to chock the logs and keep them from rolling under the pressure of a passing legion, a single horse or a wagon. Then you cover the "road" in the mud dug out earlier, to cushion the impact of traffic and to provide safe footing for  the horses.

During the American Civil War only the Yankees seemed to build corduroy roads. Observed a member of the rebel Army of Northern Virginia, "...the roads might have been ‘corduroyed’ according to the Yankee plan...but timber was not to be procured for such a purpose; what little there might be was economically served out for fuel."  A corduroy road could strip a forest of a human generation worth of trees.

In fact the Federal armies got pretty good at it, learning that a fence stripped of its posts would provide enough wood to corduroy half its length in road.  But no corduroy road would survive long under the intense pressure of military use.  And marching 50,000 men over the 12 miles of corduroy road between Young's point and the Desoto Peninsula, would destroy the entire structure, even before the endless supply trains required to feed the men and horses which had marched down that same road. 

But Grant "doubled down" on this approach. Besides the 40 mile interior route to New Carthage,  he ordered the improvement of a second, shorter route, 8 miles long atop the levees directly from Young's Point to the shore of the Desoto Peninsula south of Vicksburg.  But then, Grant had no intention of supplying his army down either road he chose to march over.

Federal troops taking the shorter route would be fully visible to Confederates in Vicksburg, while the inland route was masked from enemy view.  Also, Grant discovered that although the digging had not added enough depth to the bayous to make them usable for shipping, it had deepened them enough to form a flooded obstruction to any rebel infantry from the west wishing to interfere with the march south. 

So by 15 April, the day Colonel Cockrell's Missourians had poked at the Federal's right flank, Grant was ready to order the Hoosiers to push further south, toward Lake St. Joseph and beyond to Hard Times Landing, to make room for the remainder of General McClernand's Corps, and the rest of the army behind them.

Grant's goal seemed obvious, from his perspective at Millinken's Bend. But Pemberton was high and dry in Jackson, Mississippi. Pemberton did not awaken every morning to the sound and smell of the river.  He had not been living next to it and on it for three months, as Grant had. Pemberton's perspective inclined him to look to Grant's army, when his eyes and ears should have been following Grant's brown water navy.

                                    - 30 -

VICKSBURG Chapter Fifteen

History says the last great effort to avoid the guns at Vicksburg was called the Duckport Canal, but to the men who sweated in the mud for three weeks it was Pride's Ditch - named after the dark and dashing man who pushed them for 21 days, 33 year old Colonel George G. Pride (above). His official title was Chief Engineer for Military Railroads. In reality he was Grant's "Mister Fix It". But he never held an officer's commission. George had spent the 8 years before the war building railroad bridges across the south, and in 1861 he showed up in St. Louis volunteering to help defeat the rebellion. He wasn't even asking to be paid.

The first Federal commander in the west, the 50 year old "Pathfinder" John Charles Fremont (above) who only trusted foreigners with lots of gold braid.  He wouldn't even meet  with George. 

The next top western general, 48 year old Henry Wagnor "Old Brains" Halleck met the railroad engineer but was not impressed. 

But when one of Halleck's field commanders, General Ulysses  Grant (above), met George Pride, the two bonded. Grant sent George to see the 59 year old Secretary of War, Edwin McMasters Stanton, in Washington. Stanton returned the engineer to Grant without an endorsement but with permission to stick him somewhere. Grant dressed his volunteer in a "Colonel's" uniform and put him on his personal staff.

George Pride assisted Grant at Forts Henry (above)  and Donelson, in February of 1862, and at The Battle of Pittsburg Landing in April. He oversaw the construction of roads and gun emplacements, foot bridges and improvements to river fords. In December of 1862 he was bridging the rivers along the Central Mississippi railroad when the defeat at Holly Springs forced Grant to retreat. George then switched to destroying the bridges he had just built. By the time he had been dispatched to find a way around Vicksburg, George Pride was considered maybe the best engineer in the Federal service. Which is why Grant asked him to get the Duckport Canal dug and open before the level of the Mississippi River fell in the late spring.

Beginning on April Fool's Day, 3,500 soldiers wielding picks and shovels, and assisted by steam powered dredges, attacked the seeping mud of the flood plain to carve a passage a mile and a half long, 7 feet deep and 40 feet wide. 

"Colonel" Pride pushed the men to battle the heat, the mud,, the mesquites and malaria. Any man struck with malaria was relieved immediately and sent to the hospital - any man except volunteer George Pride  He could not be spared. Barges were already being collected to carry 20,000 men via the canal through Brushy and Roundabout Bayous to Bayou Vidal and into New Carthage, south of the Vicksburg guns. Suffering high fevers and bone shattering chills, George Pride kept pushing the men and himself.

On Saturday, 11 April, 1863, George warned Grant there were still some large trees to be removed in Brushy Bayou, and low water in Bayou Vidal required a switch to Harper's Bayou . Then, at noon on Monday, 13 April - just two weeks after the work had begun - the dam at the head of the canal was blown and water poured into Pride's Ditch. But not enough water.  Steam dredges could now be sent to deepen the canal and George rode the first steamboat from Milliken's Bend to Richmond on Saturday, 18 April. But the river level kept falling.

A week later, on Saturday, 25 April, the dredges had finished their work and General William Tecumseh Sherman rode down to take a look. He was not impressed. He wrote Grant, "The first mile is comparatively good; the middle mile is bad....will take near fifty days' work to make a canal 8 feet deep. Your tugs draw 71/2 feet."  The race against spring had failed. George Pride had so worn himself down, that he had to withdraw from Grant's staff, and return home. He would play no further direct role in the war.  Grant now turned to 50 year old Acting Rear Admiral, David Dixon Porter, who had been running some experiments of his own.

The great Vice Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson (above), the ultimate expert on naval warfare for the previous sixty years, supposedly said that it was madness for a ship to attack a fort, and that one gun on land was worth 3 on the water. 

But on the Monday morning of 2 February, 1863, Admiral Porter decided to put that adage to the test. His pawn for this suicide mission was the 180 foot long, 406 ton U.S.S. double side wheel ram U.S.S. Queen of the West (above), sailing under 20 year old Colonel Charles Rivers Ellet.

Just after sunrise, Colonel Ellet rounded Desoto Point, making 7 knots with the current. The rebel gunners were caught by surprise, but the whirlpool at the end of the point spun the under-powered Queen in a graceful pirouette, before she broke free. Each rebel battery in its turn opened fire. In the few moments as she passed, they hit the Queen 12 times. Most of the shots were swallowed by the cotton bales Ellet had stacked on the deck.  Then, just when it looked as if the Queen would sail past the city, she turned toward the southern most docks and struggled across the current. aiming her bow at the 625 ton Confederate ram, the C.S.S. City of Vicksburg.

The Queen's best weapon was the thick internal oak beam running from bow to stern, and covered by three 14 inch thick and 7 feet high solid oak bulkheads. Ellet drove the Queen into the Vicksburg, just forward of the rebel pilot house and cracking the Vicksburg's hull. And only then did Ellet order his four guns, a 30 pound cannon and three 12 pound howitzers, to fire burning turpentine balls at the Vicksburg, setting her alight. Porter's instructions were clear. "It will not be part of your duty to save the lives of those on board; they must look out for themselves."

However, the crew of the Vicksburg were more than capable of doing that, and quickly extinguish the fires on their ship. But the burning turpentine spread to the cotton bales aboard the Queen, and Ellet was forced to pull back and float downstream until he could safely throw the burning cotton overboard. With that, his first mission was accomplished. The Confederate warship Vicksburg took on water, and she never sailed to defend her namesake city. Eventually her guns and boilers were striped and sent to Yazoo City, to be reused.  Meanwhile, the largely uninjured Queen continued down the Mississippi to its junction with the Red River, where she had a short but profitable career ambushing and destroying over $12 million of rebel shipping.

Porter followed this success two weeks later - Monday night, 16 February - when he dispatched the 511 ton, 174 foot long ironclad USS Indianola (above). She had 3 inches of iron plating over 3 feet of solid wooden hull angled at 26 degrees. Two 11 inch fat bellied Dahlgren cannon glowered out her forward casemate, and two 9 inch Dahlgrens fired from her stern. Her twin side paddle wheels gave her unparalleled maneuverability, and she also had twin propellers, giving her a top speed of 9 to 12 knots. To the Confederates the Indianola was a terrifying monster.

Her captain, 27 year old Hoosier Lieutenant Commander George Brown, had a lower opinion of his ship.  The monster had 7 separate engines -1 each for her side paddle wheels, one for each propeller, 2 for her capstans, to pull her off sandbars and mudflats, and one to supply drinking water, and power the bilge and fire pumps. All that equipment did not leave much room for the crew, who like sailors on other federal ironclads had to build their own vulnerable quarters above deck. The gun ports were so small, the Dahlgren's could not be elevated to maximum range, and the pilot house port holes were so small as to be almost useless. Still, when she pulled up anchor in the mouth of the Yazoo River fifteen minutes after 10:00pm, with 2 barges carrying 14,000 bushels of coal strapped to her sides, the rebels thought the Indianola was the most dangerous boat on the Mississippi.

By launching in the Yazoo River mouth, (above, upper right) Brown could avoid the Desoto whirlpool (above, upper center)  and having to use his noisy engines. So under the merest sliver of a waxing new moon, the Indianola drifted with the current straight down the eastern bank of Old Man River, slipping silently beneath the 14 heavy guns of the Water Battery and Fort Hill (above, right). According to Commander Brown he passed a couple of hundred yards in front of the gunners at 11:10pm. 

The ironclad's looming bulk must have been seen brushing quietly past, because 12 minutes later, at 11:22pm, the rebel gunners in the city batteries opened fire on the big black monster,  letting fly  18 rounds. By 11:41 - less than 30 minutes after weighing anchor - the Indianola was past Vicksburg, beyond the range of even the 7 heavy guns in the Marine Hospital Battery. The ironclad had not suffered a single hit. As Confederate Western Theater Commander General Joseph Eggleston Johnston had observed back in December, the cities' batteries were too spread out to effectively close the river.

After spending the night anchored 4 miles south of Warrenton, Mississippi, at daybreak on Tuesday, 17 February, 1863, the Indianola would steam south in search of her partner, the Queen of the West. The sinews binding the 374,000 square miles of the trans Mississippi Confederacy to the industrial centers of the slave empire suddenly were looking very tenuous. But they had not yet been cut.

But, by the time the Indianola ran the gauntlet, The Queen of the West had been isolated, damaged and then captured. The rebels then used her to assist in cornering the Indianola, damaging and capturing her. Within weeks the rebels would blow up the Indianola (above) to prevent her recapture by advancing Federal forces. The lesson was that individual ships could not hold The River without land forces to support them.  And with that lesson the mesmerizing psychological hold the looming guns of Vicksburg had on the Federal sailors - on Admiral David Dixon Porter - had been broken. And that would prove fatal for Vicksburg.

- 30 -

VICKSBURG Chapter Fourteen

 

During his 4 years at the United States Military Academy at West Point, Ulysses "Simpson" aka "Sam" Grant's (above) best friend was Missouri born Frederick Tracy Dent. And after graduation in 1843 Grant was posted to the Quartermaster's Corps, at Jefferson Barracks, in Saint Louis, where he fell in love with Fred's slightly cross-eyed sister, Julia Boggs Dent.

Overshadowed by her affliction, Julia (above)  was quiet and determined. She played the piano pretty well, and like "Sam" she was a skilled horsewoman. Although they were well matched and deeply in love, the Mexican-American War prevented the couple from marrying until 1848. Sam's father did not attend the wedding because Julia's family owned slaves.

Sam did not like military life very much, but Julia's presence made his postings to Detroit and then Sackett's Harbor, New York (above), on Lake Erie, more than bearable. But in 1854 Sam was assigned to Fort Humboldt in modern day Eureka, California. 

To get there he would have to cross the fever infested isthmus of Panama, and since Julia was pregnant, Sam made the dangerous, lengthy passage alone. Eighteen months later, and six months after arriving at Humboldt, the homesick Captain Grant was drunk so often, he was forced to resign.

Back in Missouri, he twice tried farming (above), once with slaves loaned by his father-in-law and once with a slave Julia had inherited. He was a failure both times. Unable to house or feed his wife and 4 children, Sam had only one object of value he could sell. The slave was worth some $1,500, a small fortune in 1858. But rather than sell the man, Sam gave him his freedom. His wife's in-laws clucked their tongues at his impracticality. His wife's cousins gave him a job as a bill collector. Sam was a failure at that, too. 

Then in 1860, Sam's father gave him a job running a "Grant and Perkins Leather Goods" shop (above) in Galena, Illinois. He might have been a failure at that, too. But a year later the Civil War broke out, and Grant would later say, "I never went into our leather store again."

Success now surrendered to Grant. By January of 1863, not as quickly as Pemberton but within 2 years, Grant rose from a Colonel of Volunteers to Lieutenant General, commanding the 103,000 men of the Army of The Tennessee . And if that makes it sound as if he should easily have smashed Pemberton's Army of 50,000, it is a gross over simplification.

In the western theater, all supplies - men and horses, wagons and shoes, hardtack and beef on the hoof, ammunition and nails - was fed into the funnels of Evansville, Indiana, Cairo, Illinois and Louisville, Kentucky. 

 From there, via the Louisville and Nashville railroads, the supplies were transported to the great warehouse of the western armies, Nashville, Tennessee (above). The city was surrounded by mushrooming repositories, depositories and warehouses that "covered whole blocks, with corrals and stables by the acres". And there were thousands of additional tons of overflow bounty, "..stored outdoors on raised, covered platforms." 

 From Nashville, the Federals were maintaining two separate armies invading the Confederacy. The objective given to General William Rosecrans' Army of the Cumberland was Atlanta, and its supply line ran 152 miles southeast from Nashville to Chattanooga. The supply line for Grant's Army was divided in-two. The Nashville and Mississippi railroad ran 160 miles to Madea, Tennessee, on the Mississippi River, and from there by steamboat to Memphis.

With the lesson of Holly Springs fresh in his memory Grant felt required - and Halleck  insisted - he  use half his strength to guard his supply line. There were 15 to 20,000 men, mostly "heavy" artillery units, in and around his supply base at Memphis. 

He had another 15 to 20,000 infantry and cavalry, on his left flank, protecting LaGrange, Tennessee. Another 5 to 6,000 men were in fortifications along the Mississippi to discourage attacks on his supply ships plying the river. 

While Grant could briefly call upon some of those 40 to 45,000 men to support his attacks, it reduced his "effectivies" - soldiers available for combat - to about 52,000 men, divided equally between McClernand's XVIII Corps, Sherman's XV Corps and McPherson's XVII Corps.

Pemberton's rebels, defending their own territory, had far shorter supply lines. .So on the battlefield the odds were almost even - about 50,000 rebels against 50,000 federals. To gain a temporary advantage in numbers, Grant had tried using the rivers, the Mississippi, the Yazoo, the Talihatichie, and the bayous of the delta to steal a march and outflank Pemberton's men. But using interior lines the rebels had so far been able to block the Federal moves. In his frustration, Grant decided to reduce his ambitions.

The latest option presented by Grant's engineers was to dig a mile and a half long canal straight from a dock called Duckport Landing along Milliken's Bend. This canal would connect just southwest of Richmond, Louisiana, to the headwaters of a turgid bayou called Walnut. This creek was so contorted it confused even the locals who called some sections  of the same stream, "Brushy Bayou", others Walnut Bayou.  This stream meandered for 20 miles across the flood plain, covering only some ten miles in straight line, before joining the larger aptly named Roundabout Bayou, which generally turned southeastward until it connected with a smaller seep called Bayou Vidal.

Thirty-seven miles from the beginning at Brushy Bayou, this last narrow stream trickled into an oxbow aneurysm called Lake St. Joseph   At its southern end, this body of water came within a few yards of touching the Mississippi at the 500 acre Hard Times Plantation owned by a Baltimore transplant, Dr, Jeremiah Yelloet Hollingsworth. The dock used for loading Dr. Hollingsworth's cotton harvests was called Hard Times Landing.  It was just south  of the sunken village of New Carthage. And this tiny half sunken piece of Louisiana was now the target for Lieutenant General Ulysses Grant's entire army.

Significantly, Hard Times Landing was 5 miles south of the town of Grand Gulf, on the Mississippi state side of the river. Once his gun boats and barrages loaded with troops had used the Duckport canal to pass the fearsome Vicksburg batteries, Grant could cross the river to Grand Gulf, and bring Pemberton's army to battle. At that point Grant and his men were certain they would defeat the rebels.

But the closer to New Carthage the tip of Grant's spear - the 600 Hoosiers of Colonel Bennet's (above) 49th Indiana - got, the stiffer the rebel resistance became.

- 30 -