This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [153]
Strong in Grant’s memory was the lesson he had learned at Holly Springs in December, when Van Dorn had destroyed his base of supplies and he had to seize food from the planters to keep his army from starving; Mississippi was full of food, and an army that moved fast and kept on moving could support itself for weeks.… The Van Dorn who had taught him this lesson came to the end of the trail just at this time; he was shot to death, in his own headquarters, by a civilian who believed that his wife and Van Dorn had been too friendly.
The army swept inland, heading in the general direction of Jackson, sixty miles away. Grant got off a message to Halleck, telling him what was being done. The message would be a long time reaching Halleck; it had to go upriver by steamboat, all the way to Cairo, Illinois, before it could be put on the wires, and the answer would have to come back in the same way. Halleck would infallibly tell Grant not to do what he was doing, but by the time his answer was received the job ought to be just about finished. Grant set out in the early days of May with a great feeling of relief and freedom.14 For the next fortnight he would be entirely on his own.
The army stepped out confidently, glad to be on the road again after the dreary months around Milliken’s Bend. Everything worked. Day after day Grant’s impromptu wagons lumbered out around the country, accompanied by details of gleeful infantry; evening after evening they returned to camp, bringing incredible numbers of cattle, sheep, pigs, chickens, geese, and ducks. As these reached camp, other details would butcher and dress the animals, while the commissaries issued corn meal freshly ground on plantation mills. Of its own supplies, the army was issuing nothing much but coffee, sugar, and salt; Mississippi provided all the rest; the soldiers gorged on fresh poultry, roast pork, and beefsteaks. They ate so much of this, in fact, that some men were heard to say that they would be glad to get back to army hardtack and bacon eventually; their fare now was so rich they were getting tired of it.
None of this foraging slowed the army’s progress. It went knifing across the state toward its objective, and luckless Pemberton was approaching complete confusion. The Yankees had been ineffective all winter, and the Vicksburg area had been quiet; now it had blazed up into incomprehensible activity, and the Confederate commander could not cope with it. He drew his forces together to repel an anticipated dash at Vicksburg, and Grant’s army slid past him, moving east. Pemberton thought to stop him by cutting his lines of communication, and got nowhere because there were no lines to cut; Confederate regiments marched around helplessly seeking the nonexistent.
A small part of Pemberton’s army made solid contact around the town of Raymond, a dozen miles west of Jackson, and was crumpled and driven back. Rain came down, and the Union soldiers went splashing through ankle-deep pools in roads and fields to attack the Confederate defenses at Jackson.
These defenses were not strong. Joe Johnston had arrived at last, but he had no more than six thousand troops with him, and after a brisk fight Sherman’s and McPherson’s men knocked these aside and went whooping into the capital on May 14. They reported that the streets were full of disorderly elements — Confederate stragglers, skulkers and deserters, displaced civilians from everywhere, fugitive Negroes, and a growing assortment of Federals who had dropped out of ranks to have