This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [175]
General Grant, meanwhile, wanted to get on with the war. Counting prisoners of war and casualties in the preliminary fighting, the Confederates had lost more than forty thousand men in the Mississippi Valley campaign — the equivalent of the army that fought at Shiloh. Although many of the Vicksburg parolees would presently show up in Confed erate armies again without benefit of formal exchange, this represented a loss which the Confederacy could not possibly make good. Grant had seventy-five thousand men with nobody much to fight. It seemed to him that he ought to go marching across the South, knocking all of the underpinnings out from under Bragg’s army in Tennessee; he could take Mobile, cross Georgia, and in general pull the Confederacy apart without serious opposition. He wanted to move.
Pemberton had no more than signed the surrender papers when Grant was striking at Joe Johnston. Sherman took off on July 5, marching for Jackson again, with elements of three army corps in his command. The weather was blistering hot, and the men had been standing in trenches for weeks and were not used to long hikes; water was scarce, shoes and uniforms were in bad shape, and some of the soldiers were sore because they had never so much as set foot inside the fortress they had just captured. No matter; they marched east, Johnston faded back before them, and Sherman was a driver — regiment; would slog the dusty roads all day and make camp after dark, with stragglers hobbling in until midnight. An Ohio battery went lumbering over the field of Champion’s Hill, where it had been furiously engaged in mid-May; to their astonishment the men found that the very field they had occupied, all torn and trampled the last time they saw it by the clash of opposing armies, had been plowed and planted with corn, and the corn now stood four feet high, as lush and peaceful-looking as if there had never been a battle within fifty miles of the place.4 The road was lit with pillars of fire and of smoke by night and by day; cotton gins, farmhouses, anything that would burn went up in fire, and the colonel of one regiment, eying a pillared plantation manor house, burst out angrily: “People who have been as conspicuous as these in bringing this thing about ought to have things burned. I would like to see those chimneys standing there without any house.” A few days later, when the army marched back from Jackson — which by now was getting to be pretty shopworn — the plantation displayed nothing but blackened chimneys.5 Even the fences had been burned.
But although Grant had no trouble in driving Joe Johnston away, he got nowhere with his plan to keep the war moving. General Halleck had other ideas.
In some ways General Halleck was ideally fitted to be general-in-chief in the Civil War. He was a born gossip and politician, and for this if for no other reason he could understand that the administration’s chief problems were political rather than military. If a Buell had to be fired and a Ben Butler had to be retained because of political reasons, Halleck could understand it and he could adjust himself to it, and he could soothe other generals with chatty, half-indiscreet letters of explanation. But war itself he looked on as something out of books. The books said that when you invaded an enemy’s country the big idea was to occupy territory, and this now was Halleck’s obsession.
Grant’s army was split up. He must hold the ground he had conquered, with detachments here, there, and elsewhere to symbolize Federal occupancy. Also, he must send help to others; so part of Grant’s army went to Arkansas to quell Rebel armies which, having been amputated from Richmond by the victory at Vicksburg, could no longer be of real concern. Another part had to go down to Banks, who was nursing some plan for seizing Texas — another amputated area outside the main stream of the war. Still more had to go to Missouri, and there were forts and outposts in Mississippi and along the river to be manned.