This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [150]
Still, the army probably could get to New Carthage or some other point on the river if it floundered along relentlessly. But it would be in a very bad fix if it reached New Carthage and then found that Porter and his steamboats could not also get there; and to reach that part of the river, Porter’s vessels would have to run the gantlet of the Vicksburg batteries — many heavy guns, sited both at water level and on top of the high bluffs, ready to blast clear out of the water anything that floated. The run would of course be made at night, but the Rebels kept a careful lookout and had details ready to set fire to houses on the western bank. Any ships that passed the Vicksburg waterfront at night would assuredly be silhouetted against a background of rising flame.
A gamble, in other words, with the odds none too favorable. Sherman, who was beginning to believe in Grant as he believed in no other living man, thought the idea little better than lunacy. When the move finally began he wrote home glumly, “I feel in its success less confidence than in any similar undertaking of the war,” and he steeled himself only by reflecting that co-operation was his duty. McPherson had no higher opinion of the scheme. Oddly enough, it was jealous McClernand who endorsed it; he was a troublemaker and a malcontent, but there was nothing wrong with his nerve and he felt that Grant’s move was right.5
Right or wrong, it was the move Grant would take. Through March he waited, making preparations for the cross-country march, getting such reinforcements as could be sent to him from Missouri, and waiting for the high water to subside a bit. Then finally, in mid-April, the expedition took off.
The soldiers were in good spirits. Some inkling of the risk that was being taken seems to have filtered down to them, but it did not matter; anything was better than staying in the swamp digging hopeless ditches, and movement was always stimulating. Some of the new troops came rolling down from Memphis by steamboat, moonlight on the river, music from regimental bands floating across the water, men lounging by the railing in conversation or stretched out on deck looking at the pale night sky; they were glad to get to the Vicksburg sector, and afterward they recalled the first leg of the trip as a moving and romantic experience that remained fixed in the memory. A Wisconsin regiment that had toiled for months on obscure campaigns in Arkansas was brought over to join Grant’s army, and when the homesick boys from the north woods got out on the surface of the Mississippi they remembered that the headwaters of this muddy stream flowed somewhere past Wisconsin; they ran to the lower deck of their transport, lowered canteens and buckets over the side, and gulped down long drafts of water: “We drank and drank until it ran out of our noses, just because it came from the glorious north.”6
When the cross-country march began it was night — black night, mysterious, with a rain coming down; in the bayous and swamps men heard odd roaring noises and were told that these were made by alligators. Roads became almost impassable, so that wagons and guns stalled repeatedly and had to be hoisted out by sheer strength. Feeling themselves overburdened, some of the men dropped their overcoats and blankets by the roadside; later they learned that although spring days were hot, here in the Deep South, it could grow chilly late at night. Men in the advance guard swarmed around every plantation they came to, collecting skiffs and dugouts, for it seemed as if most of the country was under water.7
When streams were encountered they were quickly bridged. These western soldiers knew how to use axes and were handy with all of the frontier’s