This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [167]
Ended; yet singularly incomplete, not to become a rounded whole until months afterward. It was the queer fate of the men who fought over the great question of Union that this most desperate and spectacular of all their battles should not be entirely comprehensible until after all of the dead had been buried, the wounded tended, the field itself made into a park, and the armies gone far below the horizon, fighting other battles in other places. Then the President would come and speak a few sentences, and the deep meaning of the fight would at last begin to clear. Then the perplexing mists and shadows would fade and Gettysburg would reveal itself as a great height from which men could glimpse a vista extending far into the undiscovered future.
Meanwhile they had to get on with the war. Lee would hold his lines until the next day, withdrawing sullenly, a third of his army out of action; Meade would follow with great caution, well aware that he had lost fully a quarter of his force and that Lee’s army was still dangerous as a wounded tiger; and in the end both armies would return to Virginia, and the most that could surely be said was that one more attempted Confederate invasion had been driven back. But far to the west the great valley had been opened, and now an Illinois farmer could send his wheat down-river to New Orleans and the outside world, as if 1861 had never happened.
3. Unvexed to the Sea
When Grant’s army first came up to Vicksburg, on May 18, the men thought that perhaps it was going to be easy. They were cocky. In less than three weeks they had crossed the Mississippi, marched far inland to seize and despoil the capital of the state, beaten the Confederates in battle wherever they met them, taken several thousand prisoners, and forced Pemberton to pull his army back inside of his fortified lines. They had lived, while doing all of this, off the fat of the land; and although they had fought hard, marched hard, and lived hard, there had been about the whole expedition some of the aspects of an especially unrestrained picnic. The soldiers were beginning to believe that they could do just about anything they wished, and it seemed likely now that with one sharp rush they could capture Vicksburg and end the campaign.
Grant himself seems to have felt very much the same way. He suspected, in addition, that the Confederates were badly demoralized. They had just retreated pell-mell into the works after being decisively whipped in the open field, and if they could be hit hard before they had a chance to get set, the blow might be decisive. Grant spent twenty-four hours arranging his three army corps in front of Pemberton’s works, and then on the afternoon of May 19 his signal guns boomed and the attack was made.1
It did not turn out to be easy, and if the Confederates were demoralized they concealed it admirably. The ground was made for defense, and these Southerners speedily demonstrated anew the truth of an old military axiom — that even badly beaten troops can do very well if they are put into good fieldworks and allowed to fight on the defensive. They proved it now so conclusively that they kept Grant’s army out of Vicksburg for a month and a half.
Vicksburg was on an uneven plateau, and the ground all around the town was hilly and rolling, seamed by an infinite number of ravines and gullies that ran in all directions and tended to have very steep walls. It made ideal defensive ground, and Pemberton’s engineers had laid out their