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SIXTEEN

The Missing Key to Victory

New Year’s Day—Heartbreak at Vicksburg—General Banks assumes command at New Orleans—The Alabama embarrasses the U.S. Navy—Seward returns to his old ways

The English volunteer Dr. Charles Mayo finally took a break from work on New Year’s Day to attend a public reception at the White House. By the time he reached the front of the queue outside the Blue Room, Lincoln had been shaking hands for more than two hours without a break. “His presence is by no means majestic,” wrote Mayo, “and I could not but pity the poor man, he looked so miserable.”1 A journalist observing the occasion wrote that Lincoln’s gait had become “more stooping, his countenance sallow, and there is a sunken, deathly look about the large, cavernous eyes.”2 The president had also hosted the official reception for dignitaries, foreign diplomats, and politicians earlier in the day. It was the only occasion when the ministers were expected to wear their dress uniforms to the White House. Notwithstanding the finery on display, the atmosphere had been subdued. Seward hardly left Lincoln’s side, Lyons noticed, and made no attempt to engage his colleagues in conversation.

Once the White House had emptied, Lincoln could concentrate on the immediate problem at hand: General Burnside had called in the morning to offer his resignation. Though the president had lost confidence in Burnside’s capabilities, he was not sure that it would be right to give the Army of the Potomac its third leader in three months. Over the past few days, telegrams had been arriving from out west that filled him with anxiety. The Federal armies in Mississippi and Tennessee both appeared to be on the brink of defeat.

Ill.30 New Year’s Day reception at the White House, by Frank Vizetelly.

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Only five months earlier, Lincoln had complained that Europe concentrated far too much on the North’s failures in the East and entirely ignored the great successes it enjoyed in the West, where Federal armies were “clearing more than a hundred thousand square miles of country.”3 But since then, the U.S. Navy had been unable to take control of the Mississippi River, and General Grant had failed to capture the river port of Vicksburg, his next objective. For as long as Vicksburg stayed in Confederate hands, the mighty Mississippi remained the South’s most precious supply route and means of communication between its eastern and western parts. The significance of the river as the economic backbone of America was no mere story to Lincoln; during his youth he had worked on it, traveling on flatboats from Illinois down to New Orleans. “Vicksburg is the key,” he had told his generals in 1861. “The war can never be brought to a close until that key is in our pocket.… We can take all the northern ports of the Confederacy, and they can defy us from Vicksburg.”16.1 4

Since that discussion, the Federal army had grown to just under a million men, twice the Confederate total of 464,000. Lincoln wanted this numerical superiority exploited; a week of Fredericksburgs would wipe out Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia but cause only a dent in the North’s fighting capacity.

Vicksburg was roughly equidistant between Memphis, Tennessee, and New Orleans; the next fort was Port Hudson, 150 miles farther south, which guarded the approach to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Nicknamed the “Hill City” before the war, but now referred to as the Gibraltar of the Mississippi,16.2 Vicksburg owed its defensive strength to the spectacular geography of the Mississippi Delta. Situated along a sprawling chain of hills overlooking a sharp bend in the river, surrounded by alligator-infested swamps and densely wooded bayous whose emerald-colored waters obscured a netherworld of poisonous snakes and snapping turtles, Vicksburg afforded few approaches that could not be defended from the town. Before the war, Vicksburg had been a thriving commercial center of four thousand inhabitants, with six newspapers, several