Ulysses S. Grant - Michael Korda [33]
This, of course, may have been Lincoln’s intention in the first place. Astute politician that he was, he may have been using McClernand to light a fire under Grant as well as to rap him on the knuckles for General Order #11; or he may have felt that two different, competing strategies might be needed to take Vicksburg—except for Winston Churchill in World War II, nobody was more clever at handling generals than Lincoln. Either way, it almost goes without saying that Grant found he needed all his troops and could spare none for McClernand, and that by the time McClernand returned to Washington to complain to Lincoln, Grant would already be in Vicksburg.
In the meantime Grant had to get there. Nothing in the history of warfare, including Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps with his elephants, has ever posed as much difficulty as Grant’s taking of Vicksburg. Like Overlord, the Anglo-American-Canadian D-day landing in 1944, it required huge and startling engineering and technical advances, many of which turned out to be dead ends, and like Anglo-French attempts to break through the German defenses on the western front from 1916 through 1918, it set in motion unprecedented numbers of men through terrain that seemed designed to slow them down and stop them. Mud, rain, flooding, the great river itself—all combined to prevent Grant’s men from reaching Vicksburg, and in the end it was only by the boldest and most daring move of his career that he managed to find his way around it to victory. Despite Lee’s reputation as a superior strategist, Grant’s strategy at Vicksburg was astonishing in its boldness and took advantage of his instinctive understanding of the role of modern industrial technology in warfare—something Lee never even tried to understand.
To take Vicksburg, Grant would use steam shovels, steam dredgers, railways, and steam-powered armored gunboats and turn his army into a giant labor force in which the pick and shovel were more important weapons than the rifle. Grant would eventually have nearly 75,000 men under his command to take Vicksburg, most of them digging and shoveling their way there through the ooze, foot by foot.
Vicksburg sits about two hundred feet above the Mississippi River, on a bluff overlooking the east bank of the river. The Mississippi makes a hairpin bend around Vicksburg, so the batteries of heavy guns dug in around Vicksburg commanded the river itself completely. Adm. David Porter’s armored gunboats might survive a determined attempt to slip past the town, but they could do no damage to the Confederate guns, since it was impossible to elevate their own high enough to reach the top of the bluff from the river.
Coming down on Vicksburg by land from the north was rendered impractical by the Yazoo River, which formed an almost impassible swamp as it met the Mississippi. Landing on the east bank, below the Yazoo and just above Vicksburg, at Chickasaw Bluffs, might be possible—at any rate it seemed possible to Sherman when he and Grant looked at the map together, but then most things looked possible to Sherman. In the end it was decided that Sherman would take a part of the army, about 25,000 men, land at Chickasaw Bluffs from Porter’s transports, and wait there for Grant, who intended to march the bulk of the army (40,000 plus) inland, move south swiftly, seize Jackson, Mississippi, and then strike west to rendezvous with Sherman.
It is apparent that these plans were not so much aimed at Lt. Gen. John C. Pemberton, the new Confederate commander in Mississippi (with about 32,000 men), as at McClernand, who, in obedience to Lincoln’s “secret