This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [130]
Stanton sent him the most innocent of replies, brimming with reassurance. McClernand was not being superseded; Grant had been ordered to form the troops in his department into four army corps, McClernand would be named commander of one of these, and as soon as Grant signed the papers McClernand could go south, assume command of his troops, and head for Vicksburg. Simultaneously orders to proceed with the corps formation and the appointment of McClernand went from the War Department to Grant.
There was a letdown in this. Being a corps commander under Grant was not quite the same as being an independent army commander. There was also a catch in it. Grant made out the orders next day, December 18, and wired McClernand that his corps was ready and that it would “form a part of the expedition on Vicksburg”; Grant hoped that when McClernand reached Memphis he would find all preparations complete and the expedition ready to move.6 The catch lay in the fact that there was somehow a delay of several days in the transmission of this wire. By the time McClernand reached Memphis — he came down by special steamboat as soon as he got Grant’s message — he found that the expedition had not waited for him. Gunboats, transports, and two solid army corps, one of them belonging to McClernand and the other subject to his orders because he outranked its commander, had gone on down the river without him. There was nothing for him to do but go chugging down-river after it, fuming and fruitlessly demanding an explanation.
McClernand, in other words, had been given a neat double shuffle. He had dreamed up the expedition and he had brought in most of the troops for it, men who might not have enlisted at all without his efforts; now the expedition had moved out from under him, and although he would eventually overtake it, the moment of glory might easily elude him. He was never able to prove a thing on anybody, although it was clear that some very fancy footwork had been performed. Many years afterward Grant confessed: “I had good reason to believe that in forestalling him I was by no means giving offense to those whose authority to command was above both him and me.”7
Perhaps the Confederates helped a little, although the price of their help came high.
Grant’s army was moving down the line of the Mississippi Central Railroad while all of this was going on. It got as far as Oxford, thirty-five miles below the Tennessee line; some twenty miles in its rear, at the inconsiderable town of Holly Springs, Grant had established a huge supply dump. The country was wooded and thinly populated, and the inhabitants seemed to hold unanimous anti-Yankee sentiments of considerable bitterness. One reason, perhaps, was that the western troops were doing an uncommon amount of senseless looting. A Union officer remembered seeing in one occupied town a cavalryman staggering off, carrying a huge grandfather’s clock. Asked what on earth he proposed to do with it, the man explained that he was going to dismantle it “and get a pair of the little wheels out of it for spur rowels.”8 The idea took hold, and other cavalrymen were doing the same. Meanwhile the roads were poor, the weather was wet, most of the streams were swollen, and the army had no pontoon train.
Then, just as things seemed to be going well, two Confederate cavalry leaders taught Grant a lesson about the evils of exposing a long supply line to enemy action.
The first was curly-haired Earl Van Dorn, old-time friend of Grant at West Point, who brushed aside an incompetent Yankee cavalry force, scared a timorous infantry colonel into surrender, and seized the supply base at Holly Springs. The gray troopers made holiday in this town, burning more than a million dollars’ worth of Federal supplies and leaving Grant’s army in danger of starvation.
Worse yet was the incredible feat performed by Nathan Bedford Forrest.
Forrest took a newly recruited cavalry detachment, imperfectly mounted and largely unarmed, and