This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [151]
As they marched, some of the men heard a dull booming in the distance. Porter’s fleet was running the batteries, and the Vicksburg defenders were firing at him with everything they had.
Porter made his dash on the night of April 16, steaming out on the black river with seven ironclads, assorted wooden gunboats and rams, and three transports loaded with stores. Coal barges were lashed to the sides of the boats, both for protection and to give the navy a supply of fuel in a stretch of river where no supplies could be had. On the deck of the headquarters steamer, moored upstream just out of range of the Confederate guns, Grant and his staff watched. Grant’s family was visiting him at the time, and Mrs. Grant sat beside the general; a staff officer perched in a chair, one of the Grant children in his arms, and as the crash of gunfire rocked the night the child clung to him desperately, tightening its arms about his neck every time the baleful light flashed on the dark sky.
The business looked and sounded worse than it was; Porter’s flotilla got through, with one transport sunk, another banged up substantially, and only minor damage to the other boats. By now the navy was confident that it could make a dash past almost any fort without too much risk; what it could not do here at Vicksburg was stay within range and hammer the enemy into surrender. Porter made contact with the army below Vicksburg, and in a few days he arranged for half a dozen more transports, each one loaded to the guards with army rations, to come on down and join in the game.9
These transports were ordinary river steamers with civilian crews, and the crews promptly walked ashore, announcing that nobody had hired them to run the Vicksburg batteries; whereupon it developed that this army which could build its own roads and bridges could also operate its own steamboats. Grant called for volunteers from the army to operate the boats, and he got more than he needed — so many, indeed, that the men who volunteered finally had to draw lots to see which ones would be used. The men who were told they would not be needed felt aggrieved and tried to bribe their way aboard; one man who got a billet on a steamer reported that a comrade offered him $100 for his place.… This was a jack-of-all-trades army. One single regiment contributed one hundred and sixteen river sailors, from captains, pilots, and engineers down to deckhands and firemen.10
The transports made the dash. With the rations they brought the army at least would not starve before it crossed the river; and it was time now to get over to the other shore and get on with the campaign. Grand Gulf, however, turned out to be an obstacle — too strong to be reduced by naval gunfire, it offered no good ground upstream for an attack by the army. Run the batteries again, then, while the army slogged on through the mud to the vicinity of Hard Times Plantation; take the troops over at undefended Bruinsburg, and they could go inland and take Grand Gulf from the rear.
While all of this was going on, of course, it was necessary to deceive the Rebels. The troops that went downstream were McClernand’s and McPherson’s; Sherman, still darkly pessimistic, took his corps up around the mouth of the Yazoo and made motions as if a new attack on Chickasaw Bluffs was in preparation. With much puffing and chugging of steamboats it was easy to play the same game that Confederate Magruder had played so well