This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [138]
According to plan, this part of the river was to be attacked from both ends at once. At the northern end there was Grant, operating against a steady background of complaints from General McClernand, who was bitter because his “Army of the Mississippi” had evaporated and because he himself now commanded nothing more than the XIII Army Corps. At New Orleans, preparing to move north and seize Port Hudson, there were twenty-five thousand Union troops under command of Major General Nathaniel P. Banks.
Banks was a devoted Republican who had had troubles and who was about to have more. In Virginia he had had to fight against Stonewall Jackson, which had tested him beyond his strength. He had been picked for this job in Louisiana partly because as a man of influence with the voters back home he was too good to waste, partly because a combination of circumstances had made it necessary to get Ben Butler out of there, and partly because — to an administration which correctly saw this as a political war but which did have its problems in finding the proper political instruments to use in it — he and John McClernand had for a time looked like the two halves of a perfect whole.
Banks and McClernand, it had been thought, could open the valley between them, and Banks’s appointment was the obverse face of the mysterious commission that had been given McClernand. When their forces were joined Banks would take top command, and then they would occupy Texas, complete the mopping up of Louisiana, start healthy shipments of southern cotton moving back up the river, and make it possible to bring this part of the South back into the Union.
The reconstruction problem, in fact, was at the core of Banks’s assignment. President Lincoln was groping desperately for a way by which seceding states that were firmly held by Federal troops could somehow be brought back into their old relationship with the central government. He had a scheme now for the discovery and careful cultivation of the little islands of Unionist sentiment which were known to exist in the South. If these were brought along properly, it might eventually be possible to restore the old Union without treating the occupied areas as conquered provinces; the new Union, in other words, might be caused to grow painlessly and naturally out of the deep roots of the old, with a final reconciliation that could help to heal the dreadful scars of war. It was worth trying. Banks understood all about it and believed in it, and to make a good start at it was one of his primary functions.2
But he must also lead troops in the field; must open the Port Hudson gateway while Grant opened the one at Vicksburg. Banks was now preparing to do this, but there were still a good many armed Confederates on the march in Louisiana, with a good many more just above them in Arkansas. Banks was worried by these; he would have to do some subsidiary campaigning before he could move on Port Hudson. The political problem was taking half of his attention, and he was not a very skillful strategist anyway. All of which added up to the fact that if the Mississippi was to be opened most of the work would have to be done by Grant’s army.
For the immediate present Grant’s army could not fight because it was quite unable to get to any place where a proper fight could be made. It was on the wrong side of the Mississippi and it was north of Vicksburg; to make its fight