This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [169]
The soldiers settled down to it as philosophically as they could. An Iowan wrote home that “we are all as dirty as hogs” and infested with vermin; they had not had their clothes off for four weeks, and in the trenches they could hardly get enough water to drink; to make any attempt to keep clean was completely hopeless. Men in a Wisconsin regiment dug a hundred-foot well but got only a little muddy water for their pains. Most of the troops had to send details all the way to the Mississippi to bring back water in barrels — “and poor stuff it is when they get it.” A Rebel prisoner boasted that Pemberton’s army had enough corn and bacon to last a year and said it could never be starved out. Fever and ague were common in the Federal trenches, and many men were on the sick list.4
Yet Federal morale remained good. The men were proud of the campaign they had made, and they were strategists enough to know that they had the Confederates in a box. They told one another that they would be in Vicksburg by the Fourth of July; meanwhile they worked night and day to make their own trenches strong. Sandbags were piled along the parapets, leaving loopholes for muskets; heavy logs were then laid on top of the sandbags, and along most of the line a man in the trenches could walk erect in comparative safety. Gunners in an Ohio battery boasted that they had built a regular fort, with walls eight feet high, and at the gun ports they put a casing of saplings around their sandbags so that the blast from the muzzles of their guns would not tear the gunny-sacking. Two miles away they could see the cupola of the Vicksburg courthouse, and when nothing else was going on they would train their guns for extreme elevation and amuse themselves firing at it. They never knew whether they actually hit it.5
Grant was the one whose morale suffered. It was strange about Grant: he would go down in history as a stolid, unemotional slugger, yet in reality he was a man who liked to keep moving, and the dull routine of the siege was almost more than he could take. Military routine of any sort bored him; military life itself, with its unimaginative ritual and its way of doing things by rote, he detested. With nothing to do now but watch his men perfect their trenches and start digging the long, slanting ditches that would ultimately get them close to the Confederate lines, Grant became bored. It is alleged that he took to drink, went on an epoch-making bender in the cabin of a supply steamer anchored up the Yazoo, and was saved from exposure and disgrace by a newspaper correspondent who got him out of the place, sent word to Grant’s adjutant general, Colonel Rawlins, and finally managed to smuggle Grant back to headquarters, unseen, in an ambulance. Rawlins was waiting, pale with suppressed fury, when the ambulance pulled up. Grant buttoned his uniform coat, got out of the vehicle as steadily as if he had never so much as sniffed at a cork, gave Rawlins a quiet “Good evening,” and walked off to his tent, seemingly as sober as any man alive.6
So, at any rate, ran the story which the correspondent put in his memoirs years later. It is an unsupported story and there are flaws in it, and it does not really matter very much whether it is true or not. For it is to be noted that while Grant might drink too much on occasion, he never let it get in the way of serious business. He drank when things were dull — drank, apparently, from loneliness as much as anything; Rawlins always breathed easily when the general was able to have Mrs. Grant in camp with him. Throughout the war the times when liquor was a problem to Grant were the times of inaction. When the chips were down Grant could stay sober.
He emerged from this spree, if he really had it, just in time to get rid of McClernand, McClernand was clearly not up to the command of an army corps, and both Sherman and McPherson were disgusted