Sherman spread his four divisions opposite the Confederate-held ridge, sending about half of them to feint an attack while the others actually charged across the bayou and overran the hills—or so it was hoped. As the attack opened, it was met with a furious artillery blast from the Southerners astride the hills. One of Sherman’s brigades hid behind the bank of the bayou and would not go forward, while another lurched off in a wrong direction. Those that did reach the base of the hills suddenly came under a galling crossfire by artillery on their flanks and rifle fire from above, and wound up cringing beneath the bluffs, trying to scrape out holes to hide in. It was only after nightfall that they managed to escape, one at a time.
Sherman’s army—minus some seventeen hundred killed, wounded, or captured—were loaded back on the transports to try to find another way, but Sherman was soon astonished to learn that he had been relieved of command. The new leader was to be General John McClernand, a politician who arrived with orders from Lincoln in person, putting him in charge. Naturally, when the press got wind of this, they “raised the usual cry of ‘repulse, failure and bungling’” and, as well, renewed the old accusation that Sherman was insane. Fact was, Sherman had learned a valuable lesson at Chickasaw Bayou—which was to be very wary of attacking high, heavily fortified positions head-on—and he put this firsthand knowledge to good use when he opened his Atlanta campaign the following year.
In late January 1863, Grant put Sherman to work on a stupendous project. He ordered him to excavate a huge canal in the marshy Mississippi River swamps opposite Vicksburg so that Union navy gunboats and transports could move past the Confederate batteries unmolested. Such an undertaking would have been difficult enough under the best of circumstances—the canal would have to be nearly a mile long and wide and deep enough to accommodate the big deep-draft warships, supply vessels, and troop transports of the federal fleet—but to try with only axes, picks, and shovels to dig out anything of that magnitude, and during the rainy season when the river was at flood, was indeed a colossal chore. All through January and February the men heaved up the thick delta soil, “fighting off the water of the Mississippi, which threatened to drown us,” Sherman complained. Frequently, the men had to clamber up onto the levee or jump aboard steamboats to keep from being swept away. After they had toiled for nearly two months, the river hit a new flood tide, crushing the dam at the north end of the canal and inundating the countryside for miles around. The soldiers were evacuated, the project abandoned, and Sherman sourly branded the whole business “fruitless.”
Next Grant set in motion another elaborate scheme for getting around the Vicksburg defenses, and again Sherman became the goat. Twenty land miles above the city was a point at which the Yazoo River—which flows into the Mississippi—intersected with a body of water called Steele Bayou, which in turn connected to half a dozen backwater rivers, bayous, streams, and creeks that ultimately led to a spot behind the harsh Confederate fortifications near Chickasaw Bayou, where Sherman had come to grief a few months before. The same high water that had cursed the canal project had providentially made all these normally shallow streams navigable—even for huge ironclad gunboats—and the plan was to load up Sherman and his troops and sneak them on a two-hundred-mile roundabout voyage through this labyrinth of snake-infested jungle to a spot where they would emerge on dry land and overwhelm the surprised Vicksburg defenders from the rear. If anything, this machination was even more ambitious than the ill-fated canal, but Sherman gave it a go, and on the 18th of March embarked his troops in an armada of ironclads, tugs, mortar boats, and transports to weave through the trackless delta swamp.
In the beginning it wasn’t so bad. The sturdy ironclads in the lead simply smashed their way through the overhanging trees and rude bridges they sometimes encountered; in other cases, Sherman’s men armed with axes and saws would cut a path through. The first day they made better than sixty miles. But the second day the head of the flotilla ran into trouble in the form of Confederates drawn up in their front with artillery, who shot down any sailor venturing outside of his iron shield to fend off the boats. To the rescue came Sherman (informed by a courier) leading a column of infantry, marching them by candlelight through, to use James Weldon Johnson’s words, canebrakes and thickets dark as a “hundred midnights in a cypress swamp.” Twenty-odd miles downstream Sherman reached the beleaguered gunboats and drove off the Confederate sharpshooters, but the naval officer in charge had already turned back. The Confederates had set work gangs to felling trees into the river, and at a crucial turn in the route, the channel was so obstructed it was impossible to go on. It took Sherman’s task force three days to back out of the morass, with Sherman muttering over “the most infernal expedition I was ever on.”
Having made half a dozen unsuccessful attempts on Vicksburg, Grant finally decided to play his last card—he persuaded the navy to attempt to silently drift the supply ships past the dreaded Vicksburg fortifications in the dark. The army would cross over to the Louisiana side of the river and stealthily make a wide sweep south, then recross, to come up in the rear of the city. Sherman’s role in this was to stage a diversion near his old bugaboo, Chickasaw Bayou, to confuse the Confederates, and this he did, before crossing the river himself and joining Grant forty miles below Vicksburg at a place called Hard Times.
From there, the federal soldiers pushed quickly inland another forty miles to Jackson, the rail center and state capital, where, on May 14, they routed a Confederate army under General Joseph E. Johnston that had been sent to support General Pemberton’s defense of Vicksburg. Sherman was immediately employed to destroy anything of possible military value in the city, and within a day or so he had torn up all its rail lines and torched factories, warehouses, shops, and depots. Next the army turned back toward Vicksburg and on the 16th of May, halfway between the two cities, it met Pemberton’s army in the battle of Champion’s Hill. Sherman did not take part in this engagement but marched on toward Vicksburg, where, on May 19th, the Union army finally confronted the bastion from the rear. Grant immediately launched an assault, but it was repulsed. Next day he tried again, twice—with the same result—and at last he decided that his only alternative was the laying of a siege.
For six weeks Vicksburg held out, completely surrounded by Grant’s army on one side and the federal gunboat flotilla, which had run the Vicksburg defenses, on the other. Meantime, Johnston’s Confederate army was reinforcing to the east in hopes of attacking Grant in the rear, and Sherman was sent out with what amounted to a corps to forestall any such designs. During this time a poignant incident occurred. After positioning his corps to defend against Johnston, there wasn’t much for Sherman to do but sit and wait out the siege. Learning that a Mrs. Wilkerson, whose son had attended the Louisiana Military Academy while Sherman was superintendent, was staying nearby, Sherman rode over to the house, where he found “quite a number of ladies sitting on the porch.” When he inquired after her son, Mrs. Wilkerson replied that he was an artillery captain, now besieged inside Vicksburg; when he asked about her husband, whom he had also known, “she burst into tears and cried out in agony, ‘You killed him at Bull Run, where he was fighting for his country!’” Taken aback, Sherman later wrote, “I disclaimed killing anybody at Bull Run; but all the women present burst into loud lamentations, which made it most uncomfortable for me, and I rode away.” Afterward, Mrs. Wilkerson came to Sherman with a request that she be allowed to pass through the Union lines to visit her son at Vicksburg, and the stern Ohio general immediately wrote her a note to take to Grant himself, requesting permission, which was given.
On the 4th of July, 1863, Vicksburg surrendered with its entire army—the first and only surrender of a whole Confederate army until Appomattox—thus “fatally bisecting the Southern Confederacy,” as Sherman put it. On that same day, Lee’s battered army began retreating southward from Gettysburg with the shattered Hood in an ambulance. Though few on either side were convinced of it at the time, the high-water mark of
the Southern bid for independence had been reached, a couple of weeks short of two years after the contest opened in earnest.
For the next three months the Union army relaxed in its camps near Vicksburg while Sherman further honed his philosophy of how to deal with the South. On September 27 he responded to a request from Halleck to provide his views on the future of the conflict to President Lincoln—specifically, his view on whether the Lincoln administration should attempt to reconstruct the Southerners under its control at this stage of the game, or subjugate them, or was there something else.
In a three-thousand-word document, Sherman defined the problem as he saw it, sorting the Southerners into four social and economic classes. “First,” he wrote, “are the large planters, owning lands, slaves and all kinds of personal property.” Describing this class as “educated, wealthy and easily approached,” Sherman ventured, “If this country were like Europe, crowded with people, I would say it would be easier to replace this class than to reconstruct it”—just how, he did not say. But he went on to suggest that there were more battles to be won before these aristocrats could be reconstructed, and only then should they be “allowed to adjust their minds to this new order of things.”
Next, Sherman described his “second class”: the small farmers, workers, and merchants who made up three-fourths of the population. Essentially, he considered those people stupid and foolish. “The Southern planters, who understand this class, use them as the French use their masses—[and] seemingly consult their prejudices, while they make their orders and enforce them. We should do the same,” he wrote cynically.
For his third division, the Union men of the South, Sherman expressed only contempt. “I have no respect for this class,” he said, branding them cowards for not standing up to the Confederates. “Their sons, horses, arms, and everything useful, are in the army against us, and they stay at home, claiming all the exemptions of peaceful citizens. I account them as nothing in this great game of war.”
Finally, he turned his rage on his fourth class—the “young bloods of the South: sons of planters, lawyers about town, good billiard-players and sportsmen, men who never did work and never will. War suits them, and the rascals are brave, fine riders, bold to rashness. . . . This is a larger class than most men suppose, and they are the most dangerous set of men that this war has turned loose upon the world. They are splendid riders, first-rate shots and utterly reckless.” Sherman cited Confederate generals J.E.B. Stuart, John Morgan, Bedford Forrest, and Stonewall Jackson as “the types and leaders of this class,” concluding, “These men must all be killed or employed by us before we can hope for peace.”
Having thus classified the people of the Confederacy, the feisty Ohioan scoffed at the idea of establishing any kind of reconstruction government in the conquered states at that point. Calling for total subjugation of the entire South, he went off on another of his florid proclamations: Southerners, he declared, must be made to understand that even if it took twenty years, the Union army would “take every life, every acre of land, every particle of property, every thing that to us seems proper; that we will not cease till the end is attained; that all who do not aid us are our enemies, and that we will not account to them for our acts.”
Duly impressed by Sherman’s reasoning, Lincoln wanted the letter published, according to Halleck, but Sherman demurred, claiming that he did not want any further controversy with the press.
In October, a tragedy befell General Sherman and his family. After the battle of Vicksburg, Sherman brought his wife and children down from Memphis, including his son, nine-year-old Willie, and they stayed on with him in his encampment until the end of September, when word came of the Union disaster at Chickamauga. Reinforcements were being rushed from all quarters to Rosecrans’s Army of the Cumberland, which Bragg had now bottled up in Chattanooga, and Sherman was ordered by Grant to take his corps back into eastern Tennessee. As Sherman’s party was boarding the steamer north, Willie fell sick, and a regimental doctor diagnosed typhoid fever. The river had fallen, and the passage upriver took several days, during which time Willie’s condition worsened. When they finally reached Memphis, and the best doctors, it was too late; the little boy died the next day. Sherman was heartbroken, but in the military emergency attending at Chattanooga he had no time to lose. Willie had been made an honorary sergeant in the Thirteenth Battalion of United States Regulars, and it was those troops who escorted the small body aboard a steamer bound north for burial in Illinois. Years later officers and men of the Thirteenth Battalion designed and carved a marble monument for Willie’s grave.
A few days later, Sherman was en route for Chattanooga aboard a train that was loaded with orderlies, clerks, horses—and the Thirteenth Battalion of regulars. Two dozen miles out of Memphis the train suddenly ground to a halt near the Collierville depot, and a Confederate officer rode up under a white flag. Identifying himself as the adjutant of General James Chalmers, the Confederate demanded surrender of the depot, train, and Union troops, but Sherman refused and began deploying the battalion of regulars and arming the clerks and orderlies. The Confederate attack came swiftly, isolating the train by tearing up the tracks and then blasting the locomotive to bits with artillery. The fight seesawed back and forth until dark; the Southerners managed to capture the rear of the train and stole Sherman’s favorite horse, a mare called Dolly, and also set the cars afire using as fuel a suitcase of shirts belonging to Sherman’s aide-de-camp. But Sherman’s unlikely little band held fast, and the Confederates eventually drew off, leaving them to repair the damage and continue toward Chattanooga next day.
About halfway there a telegraph came for Sherman with big news. Grant had been promoted to theater command, comprising the armies of the Ohio, Cumberland, and Tennessee, and Sherman now became the commanding general of this last. Furthermore, for letting Bragg whip his Army of the Cumberland, Rosecrans was fired and replaced by George H. Thomas, the “Rock of Chickamauga.”
When Sherman reached Chattanooga, he was astonished to behold Lookout Mountain, “with its rebel flags and batteries” frowning down upon the town. “Up until that time I had no idea how bad things were,” he said, adding, “Rebel sentinels, in a continuous chain, were walking their posts in plain view, not a thousand yards off.”
“Why, General Grant, you are besieged!” he exclaimed to his cigarchomping riding companion.
“It is too true,” was Grant’s solemn reply.
Bragg’s siege was taking a fearful toll, and for the second time, as at Chickamauga, Grant was in danger of losing an entire army. Horses were so starved they were too weak to haul artillery, and to feed themselves the men were actually stealing corn intended for the animals. Worse, the soldiers had become so demoralized over their humiliation at Chickamauga, it was “feared they could not be got out of their trenches to assume the offensive.” But the state of affairs that was permitted to exist under General Rosecrans was not going to continue for long under General Grant.
Within two weeks an attack was launched. “Fighting Joe” Hooker had arrived on the scene with four divisions from the Army of the Potomac and combined with Thomas’s six and Sherman’s four for a total of nearly seventy-five thousand men to throw against Bragg’s Confederate army of forty thousand. The design was for Sherman to clamp on to Bragg’s right flank, Hooker his left, while Thomas attacked his center. As Sherman later explained it, “The object of General Hooker’s and my attacks on the extreme flank of Bragg’s position was, to disturb him to such an extent, that he would naturally detach from his centre as against us, so that Thomas’ whole army could break through his centre.” Bragg’s entrenchments along Missionary Ridge were a tough nut to crack, but as it turned out, it was easier than anyone thought—except Sherman.
Holding the north end of Missionary Ridge at Tunnel Hill was Confederate General Pat Cleburne. The tough Irishman had anchored his division into the steep hillside without the least intention of being the nut that cracked, and when, at daybreak, Sh
erman hit him head-on he recoiled as if snakebit. Sherman threw more and more of his divisions into the all-day fray but never gained even a toe-hold against Cleburne’s stubborn men, who even heaved large rocks down on their blue-clad assailants. All the while he was watching his columns repulsed, Sherman was listening impatiently for the noise that would indicate Thomas had begun his attack on the Confederate center. Not until 3 P.M. did he breathe a sigh of relief when the racket of Thomas’s tardy assault came echoing across the valley.
Grant’s plan had worked like a charm. To the surprise of everybody, Thomas easily pierced Bragg’s line, capturing many prisoners and supplies and forcing the Confederate army to evacuate backward into Georgia. Sherman was mightily disgruntled that he had been denied a share in the limelight of this repulse, but he had little time to worry over it because Grant immediately sent him and his corps up to Knoxville, where Longstreet—who had been detached from Bragg’s army—was besieging the city. Before Sherman could arrive, however, Longstreet became aware of his moves and withdrew back toward Virginia.
After a little well-earned rest, Sherman was again on the move. In early February 1864, he organized a march from Vicksburg of seventeen thousand men and descended on the Mississippi city of Meridian, a rail and supply center close by the Alabama line. After cutting a fifty-milewide swath of destruction and blackened ruins from one side of the state to the other, Sherman reached Meridian on the 14th and immediately set about wrecking it so thoroughly that he could report later, “It no longer exists.” The Meridian march was merely practice for what Sherman envisioned next. Before setting out, he broke his usual silence to the press with the publication of a letter to the people of the South, which he declared they should use “to prepare them for my coming.” In it, among other things, he threatened everybody involved in the Confederacy—men (and) women—with death and dispossession of their lands and property.