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and poison the water wells.15 The only dry land was occupied by hospitals and graves, which presented the men with the choice of sleeping among the dead or alongside the barely living. Yet Grant could not afford to have his army lie idle while they waited for the weather to cooperate. He had slapped down McClernand’s ambitions, taking control of the Army of the Mississippi himself so he could merge it with the other Federal forces in the area. His best course of military action was politically impossible, since it would mean starting the campaign afresh and leaving the vicinity of Vicksburg. This the Northern public would have interpreted as another defeat. So Grant had the men begin several canal projects in the somewhat forlorn hope of engineering an alternative route to the town. The men were sent out with shovels and ordered to dig. Sherman thought the whole enterprise was “a pure waste of human effort.”16

Every officer in De Courcy’s regiment fell ill with swamp fever, and De Courcy himself lasted just two weeks before suffering a total collapse. The army doctor took pity on him and recommended his removal from the camp. The patient had suffered much “both in body and mind,” he wrote on February 14, 1863, making him prey to “typho-malarial fever.” A few days later, De Courcy joined a wagon train heading east. He would not see his old regiment for many months. His destination was Cincinnati, Ohio, seven hundred miles from Vicksburg, and the long journey was almost as harrowing as the life he left behind. By the time De Courcy was examined by another doctor on March 14, his body had become almost skeletal in appearance. He was immediately placed on sick leave and declared unfit for duty for sixty days.

At the War Department in Washington, reports of Grant’s futile engineering works caused alarm, especially since there were rumors that the general was drinking again. Lincoln had already been forced to step in and countermand an order by Grant that threatened to have serious political repercussions: General Order No. 11, which Grant issued in late December, had called for the arrest and expulsion of all Jews in the parts of Mississippi and Tennessee under Union control.16.3 Lincoln revoked the order two weeks later, leaving it to General Halleck to explain to Grant about the wisdom of proscribing “an entire religious class, some of whom are fighting in our ranks.” But the reversal was too late for local Jewish communities, including thirty families in Paducah, Kentucky, who were driven from their homes and dumped into riverboats bound for Ohio.17

Lincoln and his secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, decided to send Charles A. Dana, a former journalist and troubleshooter for the War Department, to Grant’s headquarters. The reason given was the department’s concern about inefficiencies in the paymaster service, but in reality Dana’s mission was to be the eyes and ears of the administration. There were too many calls in Washington for Grant’s removal for Lincoln to do nothing.

The Vicksburg campaign had assumed even greater importance since the Battle of Murfreesboro in central Tennessee on New Year’s Day. U.S. general William Rosecrans and Confederate general Braxton Bragg had fought each other to a stalemate. Each had lost a third of his army, putting both out of action for many months; crucially, neither general would be able to send reinforcements to Vicksburg. When Dana reached the main army camp at Milliken’s Bend, just above Vicksburg, Grant and his staff chose the wise course of bringing him into the military family. Dana was allowed full access to everything that was happening in the Army of the Tennessee, and soon came to admire Grant as a resourceful and determined leader.

Francis Lawley also visited the Vicksburg area during the great digging operations. Naturally, he did not go near Grant’s headquarters, and so he had no opportunity to take the measure of the man who was staking his reputation and career on Vicksburg’s capture. In Lawley’s opinion, the town was impregnable. “The swollen state of the river, the