This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [152]
Meanwhile, from the area near Memphis, Grant launched a cavalry raid to spread more confusion. Three cavalry regiments under Colonel Benjamin H. Grierson were sent down, roughly paralleling the line of the Mississippi Central Railroad, with orders to move straight south, do all the damage and spread all the alarm possible, and come out (if lucky) in Banks’s lines at Baton Rouge, which was six hundred miles off.
The expedition was oddly but effectively led. Grierson was an unlikely choice for dashing cavalry commander; he had been a middle-western music teacher before the war, with a habit of organizing amateur bands in small towns, and he had hated horses for many years because a horse had kicked him in the face when he was a child. When the war came he was prompt to volunteer, but he wanted to do his fighting on foot; when an unexpected chain of circumstances brought him a commission in the cavalry he tried hard, but without success, to get transferred to the infantry. A cavalryman in spite of himself, he became a good one, and it was Grant himself who named him to lead this raid.
Grierson started out on April 17, the day after Porter’s gunboats had run the Vicksburg batteries. He dodged the Confederate parties that tried to catch him — greatly aided by the fact that most of the Confederate cavalry had been sent to Tennessee to help Bragg — and between cutting Rebel communications and creating the impression that a heavy mass of Yankee infantry was apt to follow in his wake he added substantially to Pemberton’s confusion. After an exciting sixteen days, in which it looked repeatedly as if he would lose his entire command, Grierson reached safety at Baton Rouge, his men worn out and in tatters and all the country behind him boiling with alarms and excursions.11
And Grant got McClernand’s and McPherson’s men over the Mississippi, defeated a Confederate force in a sharp little fight a few miles inland, occupied Grand Gulf, and sent word for Sherman to hurry on down and join him.
He also learned that Banks was nowhere near Port Hudson; the plan to join forces and work upstream toward Vicksburg could not be carried out.
The obvious play-it-safe step for Grant now was to settle down at Grand Gulf, establish a secure base of supplies, and wait for Banks to get ready. It was a step that Grant had no intention of taking. He had seized the initiative; after long months of apparent inaction he had the jump on his opponent and he proposed to keep it at all costs. In and around Vicksburg there was Pemberton, with an army which then was nearly the size of Grant’s own; over in the Jackson area there was (or very shortly would be) Joe Johnston in person, assembling troops which, if they were added to Pemberton’s, would give the Confederates a numerical advantage. What Grant wanted to do was slice in between these two generals, knocking them apart, destroying the route by which Rebel supplies and reinforcements could reach Vicksburg, and lock Pemberton up in the riverside fortress before the enemy had time to figure out what was going on. To do this Grant would have to keep moving.
He moved. The rations that had come downstream by boat were unloaded and distributed. When the troops started to move inland, men lugged boxes of hardtack on their shoulders and rolled barrels of salt pork along the ground. Grant’s wagon train had not arrived, and he refused to wait for it. Instead he swept the countryside, seizing everything that moved on four feet, from blooded horses to oxen; farm wagons, buckboards, carriages, and surreys were rounded up, and a tatterdemalion wagon train of sorts was created; then, on May 7, the army left Grand Gulf and set off northeast, getting on the high ground and moving away from the river.12
Sherman got his men to Grand Gulf, looked things over, and saw that the whole army had to move by one road. Frantically he sent a message on to Grant: stop everything where