Ulysses S. Grant - Michael Korda [35]
It took a long time to organize it all—longest of all to get the army and its vast supplies down to Hard Times on the improvised roads—and it was fortunate that Dana was able to persuade the president to be patient. It would not be until April 16, on a moonless night, which was just what he needed, that Porter was finally able to run his fleet past Vicksburg, and although the Confederates set houses on fire until the river was lit as if by day, and opened up one of the heaviest bombardments of the war, he lost only one transport. In the meantime, on April 17, Grant sent Col. Benjamin H. Grierson off from Memphis, Tennessee, on a cavalry raid that would take Grierson’s troopers around Jackson and all the way down to the Union lines at Baton Rouge, Louisiana, diverting Pemberton’s attention from what was happening at Hard Times, and revealing the hollowness of the Confederate defenses in Mississippi (the raid would be the subject of The Horse Soldiers [1959], a hugely successful movie starring John Wayne as the Grierson character). By April 29 Grant was across the Mississippi with more than 40,000 men, on the same side of the river as Vicksburg and less than twenty miles south of it, while Pemberton, still addled “like a duck hit on the head,” to use one of Lincoln’s favorite phrases, by the Grierson raid, dithered. He would shortly be reinforced, in numbers if not in determination, by the arrival of Gen. Joseph E. Johnston, with nearly ten thousand men, but in the meantime the damage had been done. Grant would attack Vicksburg by the “back door,” while the Confederates wasted time and manpower looking for Grierson’s troopers and trying to figure what they were doing deep behind Confederate lines.
“Don’t allow yourself to be shut up in Vicksburg under any circumstances,” Johnston had advised Pemberton, but Pemberton eventually did just that. Meanwhile Grant rampaged through Mississippi for three weeks, capturing more than six thousand prisoners, taking more than one hundred guns, and living off the land. At one point he even raided Jefferson Davis’s plantation and appropriated one of the Confederate president’s favorite horses as his own (he renamed it “Jeff Davis”), revenge perhaps for Davis’s snub to Jesse Grant in refusing to reinstate Ulysses’ captaincy. In three weeks Grant marched his army two hundred miles, and by the end of May he had cut Pemberton’s line of communication with Jackson and effectively trapped him in Vicksburg. On May 22 Grant stormed Vicksburg, taking terrible losses, and was forced to withdraw, the only blessing being that McClernand finally and irrevocably blotted his copybook by his reckless handling of his own troops and his overoptimistic reporting to Grant.
Grant paused to take a deep breath, then invested Vicksburg. If he could not take it by storm, he would starve it out, and so he did. On July 1 Pemberton finally asked for a truce, and on July 3 he and Grant sat down under a tree, Grant smoking a cigar, Pemberton chewing on a blade of grass, to work out the surrender terms.
Grant took nearly 32,000 prisoners and 172 cannon and gave Pemberton more generous terms than he had given Buckner at Fort Donelson, paroling all prisoners until they could be exchanged. Really he had no choice—he had not the time, the place, nor the supplies to deal with them.1
The news reached Washington on July 4, the same day as the news of Pickett’s disastrous charge on the last day of Gettysburg. Although Gettysburg, with its fifty thousand casualties, has achieved a place of mythic significance