A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [206]
But he waited four days before launching the attack, giving ample time for the Confederates to prepare a defense. Sherman’s plan would now require the troops to cross a wide, open plain while being shot at from above, echoing Burnside’s folly at Fredericksburg. In his memoirs, Sherman described his division commander Brigadier General George Morgan cheerfully receiving the order of battle with the words “General, in ten minutes after you give the signal I’ll be on those hills.”5 Morgan’s memory of the meeting on December 28 was rather different: he had tried to dissuade Sherman from the idea, warning him that a direct frontal attack would turn the gloomy swamps of the bayou into a mass grave. But Sherman was suffering from an excess of bravado, not uncommon among generals when given their first independent command. “Tell Morgan to give the signal for the assault,” he ordered an aide. “We will lose five thousand men before we take Vicksburg, and may as well lose them here as anywhere.”6
The battle commenced the following day, December 29. Morgan was furious with Sherman. The men to be lost were his men, the survivors of Cumberland Gap and the harrowing retreat through barren wilderness. Colonel John F. De Courcy was commanding Morgan’s 3rd Brigade. His sense of duty prevented him from questioning his orders, but, knowing what was about to happen, he insisted on hearing the orders from Morgan himself: “ ‘General, do I understand that you are about to order an assault?’ To which I replied, ‘Yes; form your brigade,’ ” Morgan recalled many years later. “With an air of respectful protest he said: ‘My poor brigade! Your order will be obeyed, General.’ ” De Courcy had also been changed by his experiences at Cumberland Gap; gone was the martinet, and in his place a commander whose loyalty to his regiment was reciprocated by the men.
General Morgan watched as the brigade charged through the marshes into the freezing water. “All the formations were broken,” he wrote. “The assaulting forces were jammed together, and, with a yell of desperate determination, they rushed to the assault and were mowed down by a storm of shells, grape and canister, and minié-balls which swept our front like a hurricane of fire.”7 De Courcy raced back and forth as he tried to keep cohesion to the regiments. Some managed to cross the small river in front of the bluffs only to become trapped, others fell back, while a few remained on the near side. After the battle, Morgan and De Courcy were accused of failing to put more muscle into the attack, and Sherman was especially critical.8 Yet a survivor from De Courcy’s regiment, the 16th Ohio, wrote afterward that they were so close to the enemy that they could not retreat without being shot in the back, “so there was nothing left for us to do except to surrender.”9
Sherman was pacing up and down at his headquarters when Morgan went to see him about collecting the wounded from the field. Unable to accept the extent of his failure, Sherman at first refused a flag of truce, condemning many of the wounded to death and the rest to capture. His initiation into independent command had cost the lives of 1,800 men, half of them from De Courcy’s 3rd Brigade.10
Five days later, on January 3, De Courcy and his shattered regiments slunk into camp at Milliken’s Bend. The army was divided between those who believed Morgan and De Courcy, who hotly asserted that they did move forward (and had the casualties to prove it), and those who accepted the account of Brigadier General John Thayer, who claimed that he had passed them with his soldiers while they cowered in the first rifle pits. The dispute would never be resolved; years later, Private Owen Hopkins of the 42nd Ohio Infantry wrote