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By Root 1738 0

bogged down, and incompetently commanded to boot. Newspapers complained bitterly, circulated the old tales about drunkenness, enlarged on the sickness and inactivity of Grant’s troops, and demanded that he be removed. (Hot-tempered Sherman rose to high fury at this and asserted that “with the press unfettered as now we are defeated to the end of time.” It would not do, he added, to say that the people must have news; every soldier wrote home regularly, and that was all the news the people in the North needed.)2 Lincoln stood by Grant, remarking bluntly, “He fights!” to a caller who asked why he did not fire him; but Secretary Stanton had his doubts. To settle them, Mr. Stanton sent a civilian representative down to Vicksburg to keep an eye on things and make daily reports. This emissary was Charles A. Dana, one-time member of the transcendentalist troupe at Brook Farm, later an editor for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, now a vaguely titled special commissioner for the War Department.

The grapevine told Grant that Dana was coming, and some of his staff officers proposed that Mr. Dana be pitched neck and crop into the Mississippi on arrival. John A. Rawlins, Grant’s dedicated, consumptive little chief of staff, squelched such talk, and when Dana arrived early in April he was given a pleasant welcome and was lodged in a tent pitched next to Grant’s. Somewhat to everybody’s surprise he took to Grant at once. What Mr. Stanton heard about Grant began to be more favorable.3

Meanwhile the army got ready to move. There were between forty and forty-five thousand men in the dreary riverside camps, divided into three army corps: the XIII, under McClernand, the XV, which was Sherman’s, and the XVII, commanded by curly-bearded James B. McPherson, former engineer officer on Grant’s staff — a pleasant-mannered, capable Scot whom Grant trusted deeply, whom Dana liked, and whom Sherman was beginning to pick as one who might someday rise above Grant himself.

Grant’s plan was simple. He would march downstream on the west side of the river, coming out at some point twenty or thirty miles below Vicksburg. Admiral Porter would bring gunboats and transports down and ferry the army over to the eastern bank. There Grant could do one of two things — go on down the river, meet Banks (if by chance Banks had begun to move) and capture Port Hudson, basing his troops thereafter on New Orleans; or he could swing east to the Mississippi state capital and railroad center, Jackson, destroying Confederate installations there and then wheeling west for a decisive blow at Vicksburg itself.4

A great many things could go wrong with such a plan. All told, the Confederates had more soldiers in Mississippi than Grant had, and it was perfectly possible for them to swarm in on him and beat him — and to be beaten so far down in enemy territory, without any open road for retreat, would be to meet complete and final disaster. There was also the prospect that once he crossed the river Grant would have no secure line of supply. His army might simply be starved into surrender if the Confederates played their cards right and had a little good luck. It was certain that the whole proposition would scare cautious Halleck right to the tips of his wispy hair. Therefore, Halleck would not be let in on the secret until it was too late for him to countermand it.

The immediate danger was that the expedition might not even be able to get off the ground.

Primary objective of the troops would be a Confederate strong point known as Grand Gulf, on the eastern side of the river and perhaps twenty-five miles south of Vicksburg in an air line — substantially farther by the twisting course of the river. To get at Grand Gulf the Federal troops must first march down the west side of the river to New Carthage; twenty miles or thereabouts as the roads lay. Between Milliken’s Bend and New Carthage lay a somber expanse of flat country, swamps, winding streams, sluggish crescent-shaped bayous, and an inadequate grid of atrocious roads. High water had swollen the waterways and left the land