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 Seventeen

  

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 minor 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 almost 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.

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VICKSBURG Chapter Twenty-One

 

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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