This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [168]
The attack on May 19 was bound to fail, and it failed quickly. Grant’s troops dashed at the Confederate works, were rebuffed, and then began to dig trenches of their own within easy musket shot of the enemy lines. They still were not convinced that the Vicksburg trenches could not be stormed, and when Grant conferred with his corps commanders he found that his generals were not convinced either — nor, for the matter of that, was he himself. It still seemed as if one determined push ought to take the town and everything in it; Grant was fully aware that Joe Johnston, off to his rear somewhere, was striving to assemble an army large enough to raise the siege — and, all in all, it seemed advisable to try it once more.
The new fight was made on May 22. It cost the Union army rather more than three thousand men and gained nothing worth talking about. The experience of a brigade in McClernand’s corps was typical.
Sent in to make its attack, this brigade had to advance by the flank, in column of fours, up a winding gully. The approach was fairly well protected from Confederate fire, but precisely at the point where the gully broadened and gave the troops room to deploy it exposed them to destruction. The leading regiment, reaching this spot, formed column of companies and went forward on the double. The first blast of Confederate fire annihilated the leading company outright — of thirty-two men, all but one were either killed or wounded — and the succeeding companies fared little better. Most of the brigade wound up at last hugging the ground at the bottom of a railroad cut and praying for darkness. At the top of the slope Confederates were lighting the fuses of shells and then rolling the shells downhill on their heads. Now and then the Federals would manage to pick one up and toss it back before it exploded. After night came what was left of the brigade crept back to the rear to reassemble.2
Somehow, during this fight, McClernand got the idea that he was winning. In two or three places his men actually reached the first line of Rebel trenches; McClernand saw their flags there and sent word to Grant that he had cracked the Confederate line and that he could go on in and take Vicksburg if McPherson and Sherman supported him properly. Grant was skeptical, but he had the other corps renew their efforts — only to learn later that McClernand’s optimism was simply the delusion of an unskilled soldier still obsessed by the belief that he would be the hero who would take Vicksburg, open the Mississippi Valley, and win the war. Sherman and McPherson, whose men lost heavily in the extra attacks because of McClernand’s claims, were furious, and Grant made up his mind that as soon as Vicksburg fell he would send McClernand home.3
For Vicksburg was bound to fall, eventually. Grant’s line of encircling trenches ran thirteen miles, from the Chickasaw Bluffs north of town all the way to the Mississippi on the south, and if the Federals could not force their way in, the Confederates had even less chance to force their way out. On the men, the food, and the ammunition that he had in Vicksburg to begin with, Pemberton would have to make his fight; and there was not a chance that what he had would be enough. Joe Johnston was still in Grant’s rear, and because Rosecrans had not yet taken the offensive in Tennessee, Johnston was getting reinforcements; but Grant was being reinforced too, and he was able to form a defensive line of his own, some miles to the east of the lines he had drawn around Vicksburg, to hold Johnston at arm’s length. Porter and his ironclads held the river, and at night the naval mortars tossed huge shells into Vicksburg,