This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [170]
McClernand had undertaken to congratulate the men of his army corps on their bravery in the recent battle. His congratulations took the form of an official order, which claimed for McClernand’s corps credit for just about everything that had been done during the Vicksburg campaign and broadly implied that the corps would have taken Vicksburg if the rest of the army had done its part; and this order McClernand incautiously sent off to a St. Louis newspaper, in which it was immediately printed. This not only sent Sherman and McPherson to Grant’s tent with fire in their eyes; it was technically a breach of army regulations, which forbade any officer to publish an official paper without his superior’s permission. Naturally McClernand had never cleared this paper with Grant, and now, on June 18, Grant formally relieved McClernand of his command and sent him back to Illinois, turning his corps over to General E. O. C. Ord.
Back in Illinois, McClernand fumed and cursed and cried for justice, wiring Lincoln that he had been relieved “for an omission of my adjutant.” Justice — or at least reinstatement — he could not get. Lincoln sent him a soothing letter, which probably did not really soothe him very much, and declined to intervene. McClernand had played his part: he had put at the service of the administration his political and popular influence in Illinois, and he had brought together and organized a substantial number of highly useful soldiers who might not otherwise have got into the army at all. By these acts he had helped to give the Vicksburg expedition the weight and the impetus it needed … and now he was out of the war, milked dry, discarded, shelved where he could give neither Grant nor any other general any further worry. He seems to have felt that he was the victim of a put-up job.…7
Up and down the long lines the Federal trenches were inched closer to the defensive works. Sharpshooters were constantly busy, and the artillery was always active. There were casualties every day, and a man in the 12th Wisconsin wrote that “it looked hard to see six or eight poor fellows piled into an ambulance about the size of Jones’s meat wagon and hustled over the rough roads as fast as the mules could trot and to see the blood running out of the carts in streams almost.” Firing died down at night, although the naval batteries and the army siege guns kept booming away; in the darkness the glowing fuses of the mortar shells could be seen, rising high above the town in great parabolas, the explosion lighting the sky like lightning, and every morning the hour of dawn brought a sudden step-up in the firing. Infantrymen learned to sleep soundly even in the rifle pits, despite the racket and the danger. In twenty-four hours the average soldier on the firing line would use from fifty to one hundred cartridges.8
Grant was steadily reinforced. He had seventy-five thousand men in his command now, and Joe Johnston could easily be held at a distance while the job of throttling the Vicksburg garrison went forward methodically. The Federals made a number of sap rollers for protection as they extended their trenches. Two empty barrels would be placed end to end, encased in a binding of saplings and filled with dirt; with the open ends plugged, this provided a heavy, bulletproof roller, and men could crouch behind it and dig in comparative security.
There was no drama in all of this and very little excitement; just a remorseless, constant tightening of the bonds around the fortress. The men understood that all of this drudgery was much more economical of life than any series of open assaults would have been, and they took to it willingly enough. A general explained