This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [127]
It was a hideous night. A mist lay on the field, with a thin moon shining through it; a cold wind swayed in the cedars, the mud froze, no one was allowed to light a campfire, and the air was full of a steady crying and groaning from the thousands of wounded who lay all about, untended. In the morning a red sun came up, tinting the mist so that all the landscape looked bloody. One soldier on the skirmish line remembered being so stiff with cold that he had to take his right hand in his left and force his finger around the trigger of his musket before he could fire.10
New Year’s Day was anticlimax. Bragg had driven his enemy to the edge of destruction; now, unaccountably, he failed to resume his attack, and the day passed with nothing more than skirmish-line firing. Bragg wired Richmond that he had won a great victory, but he refused to try to make anything of it. Not until January 2 did he resume the attack. This time he tried to hit the Federal left; the ground was unfavorable, and a great bank of the Federal artillery caught his charging brigades in flank and broke them apart, crushing the attack almost before it got started. Bragg waited some more — and then at night ordered a full retreat, drawing his army miles to the rear and leaving Rosecrans in full possession of the field. Unable to believe their good fortune, the Federals realized that they had, in a way, won a victory. At least they had the battlefield, along with thirteen thousand casualties. If they could pull themselves together they could continue the invasion. But Stone’s River was not a field they ever cared to remember.
4. Down the River
The war was expanding at the end of 1862. Its potentialities were becoming immeasurable; so was the cost of fighting it, as the twenty-five thousand Federal casualties of Fredericksburg and Stone’s River attested. Burnside had been hopelessly beaten, and Rosecrans had been brought to a full stop. It remained to be seen whether U. S. Grant could do any better.
Grant held western Tennessee and was responsible for the territory north of it all the way back to the Ohio. He had some forty-eight thousand men in his command, although he had to use a good half of these to guard railroads, highways, supply dumps, and what not in his rear, and during the early fall he had been unable to advance. But after Bragg’s thrust into Kentucky was turned back, Grant was promised reinforcements, and it seemed to him that if he attacked the Confederates in his front vigorously he could keep them from bothering his rear too greatly. At about the time when Burnside began his unhappy move from the Blue Ridge foothillls to Rappahannock tidewater — early in November — Grant started south. He proposed to clear the last Rebel resistance out of western Tennessee and then strike down into Mississippi, where the Confederate General John C. Pemberton was waiting for him with an army that Grant believed to be about the size of his own.
Vicksburg was the objective, and Vicksburg was a hard place to reach, principally because of the existence of the Yazoo Delta.
The Yazoo River is the product of a large number of smaller streams, and it begins to be a river at a point near the Tennessee line, not far inland from the Mississippi itself. It wanders east into the state of Mississippi, picking up more rivers as it goes, drops south, and at last comes back to flow into the Mississippi a few miles above Vicksburg. To the east of the Yazoo there is high ground, but to the west of it — between the Yazoo and the Mississippi — there is a vast lowland, 170 miles long by 50 miles wide, a Venetian complex of sluggish streams, bayous, backwaters, and interconnecting sloughs, with a flat country all around subject to flood when the waters are high. As roads and wheeled transport existed in 1862, no army of invasion could hope to march across this Yazoo Delta. To reach Vicksburg,