In bucking all this up to the top echelon Grant was on even safer ground than he supposed. Just last week McClernand had received, in reply to a private letter to Lincoln charging Halleck “with wilful contempt of superior authority” because of his so-far “interference” in the matter, “and with incompetency for the extraordinary and vital functions with which he is charged,” a note in which the President told him plainly: “I have too many family controversies (so to speak) already on my hands to voluntarily, or so long as I can avoid it, take up another. You are now doing well—well for the country, and well for yourself—much better than you could possibly be if engaged in open war with General Halleck. Allow me to beg that tor your sake, for my sake, and for the country’s sake, you give your whole attention to the better work.” So it was: McClernand already had his answer before he filed his latest appeal. Lincoln would not interfere. The army was Grant’s, and would remain Grant’s, to do with as he saw fit in accomplishing what Lincoln called “the better work.”
His problem was how best to go about it. Now that he had inspected at first hand the obstacles to success in this swampy region, much of which was at present under water and would continue to be so for months to come, he could see that the wisest procedure, from a strategic point of view, “would have been to go back to Memphis, establish that as a base of supplies, fortify it so that the storehouses could be held by a small garrison, and move from there along the line of the [Mississippi & Tennessee] railroad, repairing as we advanced to the Yalobusha,” from which point he would have what he now so gravely lacked: a straight, high-ground shot at the city on the rebel bluff. So he wrote, years later, having gained the advantage of hindsight. For the present, however, he saw certain drawbacks to the retrograde movement, which in his judgment far outweighed the strictly tactical advantages. For one thing, the November elections had gone against the party that stood for all-out prosecution of the war, and this had turned out to be a warning of future trouble, with the croakers finding encouragement in the reverse. There was the question of morale, not only in the army itself, but also on the home front, where even a temporary withdrawal would be considered an admission that Vicksburg was too tough a nut to crack. At this critical juncture, both temporal and political, with voluntary enlistment practically at a standstill throughout much of the North and the new conscription laws already meeting sporadic opposition, such a discouragement might well prove fatal to the cause. “It was my judgment at the time,” Grant subsequently wrote, “that to make a backward movement as long as that from Vicksburg to Memphis, would be interpreted, by many of those yet full of hope for the preservation of the Union, as a defeat, and that the draft would be resisted, desertions ensue, and the power to capture and punish deserters lost. There was nothing left to be done but to go forward to a decisive victory. This was in my mind from the moment I took command in person at Young’s Point.”
In his own mind at least that much was settled. He would stay. But this decision only brought him face to face with the basic problem, as he put it, of how “to secure a footing upon dry ground on the east side of the river, from which the troops could operate against Vicksburg … without an apparent retreat.” Aside from a frontal assault, either against the bluff itself or against the heights flanking it on the north—which Sherman, even if he had done nothing more last month, had proved would not only be costly in the extreme but would also be fruitless, and which Grant said “was never contemplated; certainly not by me”—the choice lay between whether to cross upstream or down, above or below the rebel bastion. One seemed about as impossible as the other. Above, the swampy, fifty-mile-wide delta lay in his path, practically roadless and altogether malarial. Even if he were able to slog his foot soldiers across it, which was doubtful, it was worse than doubtful whether he would be able to establish and maintain a vital supply line by that route. On the other hand, to attempt a crossing below the city seemed even more suicidal, since this would involve a run past frowning batteries, not only at Vicksburg itself, but also at Warrenton and Grand Gulf, respectively seven and thirty-five miles downriver. Armored gunboats—as Farragut had demonstrated twice the year before, first up, then down, with his heavily gunned salt-water fleet—might run this fiery gauntlet, taking their losses as they went, but brittle-skinned transports and supply boats would be quite another matter, considering the likelihood of their being reduced to kindling in short order, with much attendant loss of life and goods.… In short, the choice seemed to lie between two impossibilities, flanking a third which had been rejected before it was even considered.
Two clear advantages Grant had, however, by way of helping to offset the gloom, and both afforded him comfort under the strain. One was the unflinching support of his superiors; the other was an ample supply of troops, either downstream with him or else on call above. “The eyes and hopes of the whole country are now directed to your army,” Halleck presently would tell him. “In my opinion, the opening of the Mississippi River will be to us of more advantage than the capture of forty Richmonds. We shall omit nothing which we can do to assist you.” Already, before Grant left Memphis, Old Brains had urged him: “Take everything you can dispense with in Tennessee and [North] Mississippi. We must not fail in this if within human power to accomplish it.” His total effective strength within his department, as of late January, was approximately 103,000 officers and men, and of these, as a result of abandoning railroads and other important rear-area installations, Grant had been able to earmark just over half for the downriver expedition: 32,000 in the two corps under McClernand and Sherman, already at hand, and 15,000 in McPherson’s corps, filing aboard transports southbound from Memphis even now. In addition to these 47,000—the official total, “present for duty, equipped,” was 46,994—another 15,000 were standing by under Hurlbut, who commanded the fourth corps, ready to follow McPherson as soon as they got the word. Just now, though, there not only was no need for them; there actually was no room. Because of the high water and the incessant rain overflowing the bayous, there was no place to camp on the low-lying west bank except upon the levee, with the result that the army was strung out along it for more than fifty miles, north and south, under conditions that were anything but healthy. As morale declined, the sick-lists lengthened; desertions were up; funerals were frequent. “Go any day down the levee,” one recruit wrote home, “and you could see a squad or two of soldiers burying a companion, until the levee was nearly full of graves and the hospitals still full of sick. And those that were not down sick were not well by a considerable.” Pneumonia was the chief killer, with smallpox a close second. Some regiments soon had more men down than up. The food was bad. Paymasters did not venture south of Helena, which increased the disaffection, and the rumor mills were grinding as never before. When the mails were held up, as they frequently were, it was reported from camp to camp, like a spark moving along a fifty-mile train of powder, that the war was over but that the news was being kept from the troops “for fear we could not be held in subjection if we knew the state of affairs.” They took out at least a share of their resentment on such rebel property as came within their reach. “Farms disappear, houses are burned and plundered, and every living animal killed and eaten,” Sherman informed his senator brother. “General officers make feeble efforts to stay the disorder, but it is idle.” Then when the mail came through at last they could read in anti-administration newspapers of the instability and incompetence of the West Pointers responsible for their welfare, including Sherman—“He hates reporters, foams at the mouth when he sees them, snaps at them; sure symptoms of a deep-seated mania”—and the army commander himself: “The confidence of the army is greatly shaken in General Grant, who hitherto undoubtedly depended more upon good fortune than upon military ability for success.”
The wet season would continue for months, during which all these problems would be with him. As Grant said in retrospect, “There seemed to be no possibility of a land movement before the end of March or later.” Yet “i
t would not do to lie idle all this time. The effect would be demoralizing to the troops and injurious to their health. Friends in the North would have grown more and more insolent in their gibes and denunciations of the cause and those engaged in it.” So he launched (or rather, continued) what he called “a series of experiments,” designed not only “to consume time,” but also to serve the triple purpose of diverting “the attention of the enemy, of my troops, and of the public generally.” Two failures were already behind him in his campaign against Vicksburg: the advance down the Mississippi Central and the assault on the Chickasaw Bluffs, both of which had ended in retreat. Now there followed five more failures, bringing the total to seven. Looking back on them later he was to say—quite untruthfully, as the record would show—that he had “never felt great confidence that any of the experiments resorted to would prove successful,” though he had always been “prepared to take advantage of them in case they did.”
The third of these seven “experiments”—the attempt, by means of a canal across the base of the tongue of land in front of Vicksburg, to divert the channel of the river and thus permit the column of warships, transports, and supply boats to bypass the batteries on the bluff—had been in progress ever since the return of the army from Arkansas Post, but Sherman, who had assigned a thousand men a day to the digging job, was not sanguine of results. “The river is about full and threatens to drown us out,” he was complaining as he sloshed about in a waste of gumbo, with the rain coming down harder every week. “The ground is wet, almost water, and it is impossible for wagons to haul stores from the river to camp, or even horses to wallow through.” Conversely, as if to preserve a balance of optimism, Grant’s expectations rose with the passage of time. In early March he wired Halleck: “The canal is near completion.… I will have Vicksburg this month, or fail in the attempt.” But this was the signal for disaster. “If the river rises 8 feet more, we would have to take to the trees,” Sherman had said, and presently it did. The dam at the upper end of the cut gave way, and the water, instead of scouring out a channel—as had been expected, or anyhow intended—spread all over the lower end of the peninsula, forcing the evacuation of the troops from their flooded camps, with the resultant sacrifice of many horses and much equipment. “This little affair of ours here on Vicksburg Point is labor lost,” Sherman reported in disgust, announcing the unceremonious end of the third experiment.
But Grant already had a fourth in progress. Fifty-odd miles above Vicksburg, just west of the river and south of the Arkansas line, lay Lake Providence, once a bend of the Mississippi but long since abandoned by the Old Man in the course of one of his cataclysmic whims. Though the lake now was land-locked, separated moreover from the river by a levee, Bayou Baxter drained it sluggishly westward into Bayou Macon, which in turn flowed into the Tensas River, just over a hundred winding miles to the south. Still farther down, the Tensas joined the Ouachita to form the Black, and the Black ran into the Red, which entered the Mississippi a brief stretch above Port Hudson. Despite its roundabout meandering, a distance of some 470 miles, this route seemed to Grant to offer a chance, once the levee had been breached to afford access to Lake Providence and the intricate system of hinterland bayous and rivers, for a naval column to avoid not only the Vicksburg batteries but also those below at Warrenton and Grand Gulf. Accordingly, two days after his arrival at Young’s Point, he sent an engineer detail to look into the possibilities indicated on the map, and the following week, in early February, he went up to see for himself. It seemed to him that “a little digging”—“less than one-quarter,” he said, of what Sherman had done already on the old canal—“will connect the Mississippi and Lake, and in all probability will wash a channel in a short time.” If so, the way would be open for a bloodless descent, at the end of which he would join Banks for a combined attack on Port Hudson, and once that final bastion had been reduced the Confederacy would have been cut in two and the Great Lakes region would have recovered its sorely missed trade connection with the Gulf. Impressed by this vista, Grant sent at once for McPherson to come down with a full division and get the project started without delay. “This bids fair to be the most practicable route for turning Vicksburg,” he told him in the body of the summons.
He could scarcely have assigned the task to an officer better prepared to undertake it. McPherson, who was thirty-three and a fellow Ohioan, had been top man in the West Point class of ’53 and had returned to the academy as an engineering instructor; he also had worked on river and harbor projects in the peacetime army, and had served at the time of Shiloh, when he was a lieutenant colonel, as chief engineer on Grant’s staff. His advancement since then had been rapid, though not without some grousing, on the part of line officers he had passed on his way up the ladder, that a man who had never led troops in a major action should be given command of a corps. Sherman, on the other hand, considered him the army’s “best hope for a great soldier,” not excepting Grant and himself; “if he lives,” he added. A bright-eyed, pleasant-faced young man, alternately bland and impulsive, McPherson came quickly down from Memphis with one of his two divisions and set to work at once. Without waiting for the levee to be cut, he horsed a small towboat overland, launched it on the lake, and got aboard for a reconnaissance—with the result that his high hopes took a sudden drop. The Bayou Baxter outlet led through an extensive cypress brake, and what could be found of its channel, which was but little at the present flood stage, was badly choked with stumps and snags that threatened to knock or rip the bottom out of whatever came their way. He put his men to work with underwater saws, but it was clear that at best the job would be a long one, if not impossible. Besides, Grant now saw that, even if a passage could be opened in time to be of use, he would never be able to get together enough light-draft boats to carry his army down to the Red River anyhow. McPherson and his staff meanwhile enjoyed something of a holiday, taking a regimental band aboard the little steamer for moonlight excursions, to and from the landing at one of the lakeside plantation houses which turned out to have a well-stocked cellar. Soldiers too found relaxation in this quiet backwater of the war, mainly in fishing, what time they were not taking turns on the underwater saws. By early March it was more or less obvious that nothing substantial was going to come of this fourth attempt to take or bypass Vicksburg, but Grant declared, later and rather laconically: “I let the work go on, believing employment was better than idleness for the men.”
All seven of these experiments, four of which by now had gone by the board, anticipated some degree of co-operation from the navy. For the most part, indeed, they were classically amphibious, depending as much on naval as on army strength and skill. But if Porter, whatever his other shortcomings—one acquaintance called him “by all odds the greatest humbug of the war”—was not the kind of man to withhold needed help, neither was he the kind to be satisfied with a supporting role if he saw even an outside chance at stardom. And he believed he saw one now: had seen it, in fact, from the outset, and had already made his solo entrance on the stage. One of the two main reasons for attempting the reduction of Vicksburg and Port Hudson—in addition, that is, to opening a pathway to New Orleans and the Gulf—was to choke off rebel traffic along and across the nearly three hundred miles of river that flowed between them, particularly that segment of it tangent to the mouth of Red River, the main artery of trade connecting the goods-rich Transmississippi’s far-west region with the principal Confederate supply depots in Georgia and Virginia. To accomplish this, the admiral perceived, it would not be absolutely necessary to capture either of the two bastions anchoring opposite ends of the long stretch of river. All that was needed, really, was to control what lay between them, and this could be done by sending warships down to knock out whatever vestiges of the rebel fleet remained and to establish a sort of internal blockade by patrolling all possible crossings. In early February, accordingly, while Sherman’s men were still digging their way across soggy Vicksburg Point and Grant was steaming upriver for a pr
eliminary look at cypress-choked Lake Providence, Porter gave orders which put his plan in the way of execution.
First off, this would require a run past the batteries on the bluff, and he gave the assignment to the steam ram Queen of the West, which had done it twice before, back in July, in an unsuccessful attempt to come to grips with the Arkansas. She was one of the navy’s best-known vessels, having led the ram attack at the Battle of Memphis, where she had been commanded by her designer and builder, Colonel Charles Ellet, Jr., who had died of the only wound inflicted on a Northerner in that one-sided triumph. His son, nineteen-year-old Colonel Charles R. Ellet—who, as a medical cadet, had gone ashore in a rowboat, accompanied by three seamen, to complete the Memphis victory by raising the Stars and Stripes over the post office—had succeeded his uncle, Brigadier General A. W. Ellet, who had succeeded the first Ellet as commander of the ram fleet, as skipper of the Queen. Patched up from the two poundings she had taken from Vicksburg’s high-perched guns, and fitted out now with guns of her own for the first time—previously she had depended solely on her punch—she made her run at daybreak, February 4, taking an even dozen hits, including two in the hull but none below the water line, and pulled up at a battery Sherman had established on the west bank, just around the bend, for the protection of his diggers. Above the town, two nights later, Porter set adrift a barge loaded with 20,000 bushels of coal, which made it downstream on schedule and without mishap, apparently not having been spotted by the lookouts on the bluff. “This gives the ram nearly coal enough to last a month,” the admiral proudly informed Secretary Welles, “in which time she can commit great havoc, if no accident happens to her.”