This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [129]
That McClernand was raising and organizing troops was, of course, public knowledge, but the rest of the program was top secret. Plenty of rumors were afloat, however, and these reached Grant; and then, on November 10, after he had wired Halleck asking why the reinforcements that had been promised him were not arriving, Grant received a very odd reply. A number of regiments were on the way, said Halleck, and more would quickly follow, and “Memphis will be made the base of a joint military and naval expedition on Vicksburg.”
Since Grant’s own plans called for an overland hike on the eastern side of the Yazoo Delta country, this sounded very much as if someone else were coming in to supersede him, and that someone could only be McClernand. Grant sent Halleck an anxious inquiry.
Halleck was playing his cards carefully. He had no use for McClernand, an independent Vicksburg expedition struck him as absurd, and if in the preceding winter he had tried to elbow Grant out of the army he was very much on Grant’s side now. Studying the McClernand case, Halleck discovered that the administration had put in McClernand’s orders a little escape clause, and of this Halleck now was prepared to take full advantage.
The War Department on October 20 had given McClernand confidential orders instructing him to do all of the things he had asked to be allowed to do. Among other things, these orders told McClernand to send the new troops he was raising to Cairo, Memphis, or such other place as Halleck might direct, “to the end that, when a sufficient force not required by the operations of General Grant’s command shall be raised,” McClernand might lead his men against Vicksburg.
Halleck was a good lawyer, and he saw through all of this without difficulty. The troops would go forward, as fast as McClernand got them ready, into Grant’s department. On arrival, it might easily turn out that they would be “required by the operations of General Grant’s command,” especially if McClernand himself did not at once go with them. Blandly Halleck wired Grant that he was not being superseded; all troops entering his department were under his command.3
Grant put Halleck’s messages on top of all the rumors he had been hearing and worked out a new program. He would march down into Mississippi as he had planned, following the line of the Mississippi Central Railroad, which goes roughly parallel to the Yazoo, thirty or forty miles farther inland. Simultaneously a joint army-navy expedition would leave Memphis for Vicksburg. It would include some of the troops that had been in the department all along, and all of the McClernand troops that had arrived, but it would be under the command of William Tecumseh Sherman.4
Together, these two thrusts might be very effective. Grant’s own advance should force Confederate Pemberton to come up to meet him. Meanwhile Porter and his gunboats would convoy Sherman clear down the Mississippi to the mouth of the Yazoo. By ascending the Yazoo a short distance Sherman could put his army ashore at the foot of the Chickasaw Bluffs, just a few miles north of Vicksburg. If the Confederate defenders were kept busy opposing Grant’s thrust from the north, Sherman could storm the bluffs and take the city; if the Confederates concentrated against Sherman they could not very well keep Grant from moving on down the railroad. And, in any case, the big Vicksburg expedition would be put in motion without McClernand.
McClernand, meanwhile, back in Illinois, was happily sending new regiments down to Memphis, where Sherman was hastily giving them brigade and division formation and preparing to march them on transports. By the middle of December, McClernand was reporting to Washington that he had sent most of his men and that there was nothing of importance remaining for him to do in Illinois: might he not now be ordered to go to Memphis and assume the promised command?
The orders did not come, but news of what was going on at Memphis did, and on December 17 McClernand sent an outraged wire to Lincoln: “I believe I am