This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [132]
At the same time he reversed his earlier strategic plan. It was obvious that the original route down the line of the railroad was very long and risky; obvious, too, that there was going to be a major drive down the river whether Grant liked it or not. McClernand had so much rank that wherever he went he would be in command unless Grant himself were present, and it was impossible for Grant to think calmly about things that might happen to an army in the steaming mud flats just north of Vicksburg with impulsive, unskilled McClernand in charge.
Grant would put all his eggs in one basket. The attack on Vicksburg would be made from the river. As large an army as Grant could assemble would be concentrated there, and Grant would go down to take personal command. On January 30, Grant joined McClernand, Sherman and Porter at Milliken’s Bend on the west bank of the river, ten miles above Vicksburg, and the decisive campaign of the Civil War had its beginning.
It would begin very slowly, and for a long time it would look like nothing so much as failure. Grant’s earlier impression that Vicksburg could not be attacked from the north and west — the only directions from which an army at Milliken’s Bend could conceivably approach it — was eminently correct. Ideally, it would have been much better to bring everyone back to Memphis and make a fresh start down the eastern side of the Yazoo Delta. But this just was not in the cards. The move down the river had been approved at Washington. Withdrawal now would be an unmistakable confession of defeat; the political situation in the North was excessively delicate, and it seemed likely that Fredericksburg and Stone’s River were, between them, about as large a budget of bad news as the citizenry would be likely to accept. There was nothing for it but to go ahead.
Chapter Eight
SWING OF THE PENDULUM
1. The Hour of Darkness
PROFOUND currents were moving in America that winter, but they had not yet fused to form one great tide that would carry everything along with it. They were still separate, often in conflict, with deep swirling eddies to mark the points of tension, and with odd backwaters where things seemed to drift upstream; and no one could say how the business would finally be resolved.
The three armies lay in their camps — in Virginia, in Tennessee, and along the Mississippi — and nothing seemed to be going right with them. Afterward men looked back and said that, taking everything together, this was the Valley Forge winter of the Civil War: the winter of misery and despair, of cold and hunger and of a seeming breakdown of all the arrangements that had been made to feed and clothe and usefully employ the men who had been called into the army. Certainly there was reason to draw the Valley Forge parallel, for in some ways the winter of 1862–63 marked the bottom of the depression.
Burnside made one more effort to use the Army of the Potomac after it had crawled back across the river to recuperate from the Fredericksburg defeat. In the middle of January, after a long spell of mild weather had dried the unpaved Virginia roads, he tried a march up the Rappahannock River to the fords that lie upstream from Fredericksburg, thinking to cross the river and come down on Lee’s flank. What luck he might have had with this move will never be known, for a howling rainstorm descended just as the army started to move, roads and fields turned into quagmires, and inside of twenty-four hours the whole army was hopelessly stuck in the mud. Pontoon trains and artillery