The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 2: Fredericksburg to Meridian

  The crafty Virginian’s attempt to discourage and torment his pursuers with thirst was unsuccessful, however, for several reasons. For one, the siege-toughened bluecoats simply dragged the festering carcasses from the ponds, gave the water a few minutes to settle, then brushed the scum aside and drank their fill, apparently with no ill effects at all. For another, the rain soon moved down from the north, sudden thunderous showers under which the marchers unrolled their rubber ponchos and held them so that the water trickled into their mouths as they slogged along. Lifted so recently by the greatest victory of the war, their spirits were irrepressible, whether the problem was too little moisture or too much. “The dirt road would soon be worked into a loblolly of sticky yellow mud,” one veteran was to recall. “Thereupon we would take off our shoes and socks, tie them to the barrel of our muskets, poise the piece on the hammer on either shoulder, stock uppermost, and roll up our breeches. Splashing, the men would swing along, singing ‘John Brown’s Body,’ or whatever else came handy.” They gloried in their toughness and took pride in the fact that they never cheered their generals, not even “Uncle Billy” Sherman. A surgeon wrote home that they were “the noisiest crowd of profane-swearing, dram-drinking, card-playing, song-singing, reckless, impudent daredevils in the world.” They would have accepted all this as a compliment, second only to one Joe Johnston had paid them in warning his Richmond superiors not to underrate Grant’s Westerners, who in his opinion were “worth double the number of northeastern troops.” They thought so, too, and were ready to prove it on July 10 when their three columns converged on the rebel intrenchments outside Jackson and took up positions before them, Ord’s four divisions to the south, Steele’s three in the center, and Parke’s two on the north.

  Within the semicircular works—which, as usual, he considered “miserably located”—Johnston had four divisions of infantry confronting the Union nine, plus a small division of cavalry which he used to patrol the flanks along Pearl River, above and below the town. He made several brief sorties in an attempt to provoke the bluecoats into attacking, but Sherman, though he enjoyed a better than two-to-one numerical advantage, had had too much experience with earthworks these past eight weeks to be tempted into rashness. Instead, he spent two days completing his investment, meantime sending raiders north and south to break the Mississippi Central and thus cut Jackson off from any possible rail connection with the outside world, the bridge in its rear not having been rebuilt since its destruction back in May. Then on July 12, despite his admonitions as to caution, the mishap came. On Ord’s front, Lauman was advancing his division through an area obscured by trees and brush, when the lead brigade of 880 veterans suddenly found itself exposed to a withering crossfire from guns and rifles, losing 465 men and three stands of colors, as well as most of the cannoneers and horses of a section of artillery, before the remnant could recover from the shock and backpedal. “I am cut all to pieces,” Lauman lamented; Ord relieved him of command. Sherman approved the brigadier’s removal, but refused to be disconcerted by the affair, which had at least confirmed his assumption that Joe Johnston was a dangerous man when cornered: so much so, in fact, that the Ohioan began to wish the Virginian gone. “I think we are doing well out here,” he informed Grant two days later, “but won’t brag till Johnston clears out and stops shooting his big rifle guns at us. If he moves across Pearl River and makes good speed, I will let him go.”

  That was just what Johnston had in mind, now that Sherman had the capital invested on three sides. “It would be madness to attack him,” he wired Richmond that same day. “In the beginning it might have been done, but I thought then that want of water would compel him to attack us.” By next morning, July 16, he was convinced that his only hope for survival lay in retreat. “The enemy being strongly reinforced, and able when he pleases to cut us off,” he notified Davis, “I shall abandon this place, which it is impossible for us to hold.” Accordingly, after nightfall, he proceeded to carry out the most skillful of his withdrawals so far in the war. Previously—at Manassas and Yorktown, as well as here at Jackson two months ago yesterday, on the day after his arrival from Tennessee—it had been his practice to leave guns and heavy equipment in position lest their removal, which was likely to be noisy, warn the enemy of his intention; but not now. Silently the guns were withdrawn by hand from their forward emplacements while the sick and wounded were being sent eastward across the river, followed by brigade after brigade of soldiers who had been kept busy with picks and shovels till after midnight, drowning out the sounds of the evacuation. Breckinridge’s Orphans, who had accomplished Lauman’s discomfiture four days ago, went last. The lines of the aborted siege, which had cost the Federals 1122 casualties and the Confederates 604, yawned empty in the darkness and remained so until daylight brought a blue advance and the discovery that Johnston had escaped across the Pearl, much as Lee had done across the Potomac three nights earlier with somewhat less success.

  He took with him everything movable but he could not take the railroad or the town. Undefended, Jackson was reoccupied—and re-burned. That task was assigned to Sherman’s old corps, primarily to Blair’s division, which was fast becoming proficient in such work, while Ord moved south with instructions to break up the Mississippi Central “absolutely and effectually” for a distance of ten miles, and Parke did the same in the opposite direction. Steele’s men did a thorough job on the capital, sparing little except the State House and the Governor’s Mansion. Pettus had departed, but the victorious generals held a banquet in his mansion on the second night of the occupation, and when one brigadier was missing next morning he was found asleep beneath the table, so freely had the wine flowed. “You can return slowly to Black River,” Grant replied to news that the town had fallen, but Sherman stayed on for a week, supervising the extensive demolition his chief had prescribed at the outset. Added to what had been done in May, this new damage converted the Mississippi capital into what he referred to as “one mass of charred ruins.” (Blair’s exuberant veterans had a briefer, more colorful description of the place; “Chimneyville,” they called it.) Though he found the stripping of the countryside by his foragers for fifteen miles around “terrible to contemplate,” Sherman thought it proper to add that such was “the scourge of war, to which ambitious men have appealed rather than [to] the judgment of the learned and pure tribunals which our forefathers have provided for supposed wrongs and injuries.” Characteristically, however, before his departure he distributed supplies to civilian hospitals and turned over to a responsible committee enough hard bread, flour, and bacon to sustain five hundred people for thirty days, his only condition being that none of this food was to be converted “to the use of the troops of the so-called Confederate states.” Despite the damage to their pride, the committeemen were glad to accept the offer, whatever the condition. “The inhabitants are subjugated. They cry aloud for mercy,” Sherman informed his commander back at Vicksburg.

  How lasting the damage would be, either to their pride or to their property, was open to some question. Up to now, particularly in regions where the occupation had been less than constant, the rebels had shown remarkable powers of recovery from blows about as heavy. On the march eastward from the Big Black, for example, one of the Federal columns had crossed a portion of the field that took its name from Champion Hill, which the shock of battle had left all torn and trampled, scorched and scored by shells and strewn with wreckage. That was how the marchers remembered the scene from their passage this way a little less than two months back; but now, to their considerable surprise, they found that much of the field had been plowed and planted and corn stood four feet tall in neat, lush rows, not only as if the battle had never been fought, but also as if, except for the reappearance of the soldiers, there had never been a war at all, either here or anywhere else. It was in a way discouraging. This time, though, as Johnston faded back before them without fighting, they were less distracted and could give their full attention to the destruction which had been m
ore or less incidental on the western march. They blazed a trail of devastation; gins, barns, farmhouses, almost everything burnable went up in flames and smoke; rearward the horizon was one long smudge. Looting took on new dimensions, sometimes of absurdity. One officer, watching a cavalryman stagger along with a grandfather’s clock in his arms, asked what on earth he planned to do with it, and the trooper explained that he was going to take it apart “and get a pair of the little wheels out of it for spur rowels.” There was time, too, for bitterness. A colonel viewing a porticoed mansion set back from the road in a grove of trees, neatly fenced and with a well-kept lawn and outbuildings, including slave quarters, burst out hotly: “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.” That his troops had taken his words to heart was evident on the return from Jackson, when the regiment passed that way again. His wish had been fulfilled. All that remained of the plantation house was its blackened chimneys. “Sherman monuments,” they were called; or, perhaps more aptly, “Sherman tombstones.”

  Some among the Confederates in and out of uniform, but most particularly Richmond friends of Davis and Seddon, put the blame for much of this on Johnston, whose policy it had ever been to sacrifice mere territory, the land and all it nourished, rather than risk avoidable bleeding by any soldier in his charge. Always, everywhere in this war except at Seven Pines—which battle, poorly fought as it was, had done more to sustain than refute his theory: especially from the personal point of view, since it had cost him two wounds and command of the South’s first army—he had backed up after a minimum of fighting, leaving the civilians of the evacuated region to absorb the shocks he evaded. So some said, angered by his apparent lack of concern for the fate of Vicksburg, which he had been sent to save. Others not only disagreed; they even pointed to the recent campaign as an example of his superior generalship. Unlike Pemberton, who had lost his army by accepting risks Johnston had advised him to avoid, the Virginian had saved his men to fight another day, and in the process had inflicted nearly twice as many casualties as he suffered. Mainly such defenders were members of his army, who not only had good cause to feel thankful for his caution, but also had come under the sway of his attractive personality. A genial companion, as invariably considerate of subordinates as he was critical of superiors, he won the affection of associates by his charm. There were, however, a few who were immune, and one among them was Pemberton, though this was only recently the case. At the outbreak of the war they had been friends; Johnston in fact had chosen the Pennsylvanian as his adjutant before the northern-born officer’s transfer to South Carolina. But that was far in the past, in the days before the siege one friend had waited in vain for the other to raise.

  Soon afterwards, in mid-July and in accordance with Grant’s instructions for the paroled lieutenant general to report to his immediate superior, Pemberton found the Virginian “sitting on a cleared knoll on a moonlight night surrounded by members of his staff.” Thus a witness described the scene, adding that when Johnston recognized the “tall, handsome, dignified figure” coming toward him up the slope, he sprang from his seat and advanced to meet him, hand outstretched.

  “Well, Jack old boy,” he cried. “I’m certainly glad to see you!”

  Pemberton halted, stood at attention, and saluted.

  “General Johnston, according to the terms of parole prescribed by General Grant, I was directed to report to you.”

  The two men stood for a moment in silence as Johnston lowered his unclasped hand. Then Pemberton saluted once more, punctiliously formal, and turned away.

  They never met again.

  4

  News that Meade had stopped Lee at Gettysburg sent Lincoln’s expectations soaring; he foresaw the end of the war, here and now, if only the victory could be pressed to its logical conclusion with “the literal or substantial destruction” of the rebel host before it recrossed the Potomac. Then came the letdown, first in the form of the northern commander’s Fourth of July congratulatory order to his troops, calling for still “greater efforts to drive from our soil every vestige of the presence of the invader.” Lincoln’s spirits took a sudden drop. “My God, is that all?” he exclaimed, and presently he added: “This is a dreadful reminiscence of McClellan.… Will our generals never get that idea out of their heads? The whole country is our soil.” His fears were enlarged the following day by word that Lee had stolen away in the night, and no dispatch from Meade, that day or the next, gave any assurance of a vigorous pursuit. Lincoln fretted as much after as he had done before or during the three-day battle, so high were his hopes and so great was his apprehension that they would be unfulfilled. At a cabinet meeting on July 7 his expression was one of “sadness and despondency,” according to Welles, “that Meade still lingered at Gettysburg, when he should have been at Hagerstown or near the Potomac, in an effort to cut off the retreating army of Lee.” That afternoon he was conferring with Chase and a few others in his office, pointing out Grant’s progress to date on a map of Mississippi, when Welles came running into the room with a broad smile on his face and a telegram from Porter in his hand. The admiral had sent a fast boat up to Cairo, the Memphis wirehead having broken down, and beat the army in getting the news to Washington: “I have the honor to inform you that Vicksburg has surrendered to the U.S. forces on this 4th day of July.”

  Lincoln rose at once. “I myself will telegraph this news to General Meade,” he said, then took his hat as if to go, but paused and turned to Welles, throwing one arm across the shoulders of the bearer of good tidings. “What can we do for the Secretary of the Navy for this glorious intelligence? He is always giving us good news. I cannot in words tell you my joy over this result. It is great, Mr Welles; it is great!” The Secretary beamed as he walked to the telegraph office with his chief, who could not contain his pleasure at the outcome of Grant’s campaign. “This will relieve Banks. It will inspire me,” he said as he strode along. He thought it might also inspire Meade, and he had Halleck pass the word to him that Vicksburg had surrendered; “Now if General Meade can complete his work so gloriously prosecuted thus far … the rebellion will be over.”

  A wire also went to Grant: “It gives me great pleasure to inform you that you have been appointed a major general in the Regular Army, to rank from July 4, the date of your capture of Vicksburg.” Moreover, on Grant’s recommendation, Sherman and McPherson soon were made permanent brigadiers, the reward that had gone to Meade at Frederick that same day. The following day, however, when Grant’s own announcement of Pemberton’s capitulation came limping in behind Porter’s—which had said nothing about terms—there was cause to think that his victory was by no means as complete as had been supposed before details of the surrender were disclosed. Surprise and doubt were the reaction to the news that practically all of the nearly 30,000-man garrison had been paroled. Halleck, for instance, protested by return wire that such terms might “be construed into an absolute release, and that the men will immediately be placed in the ranks of the enemy.” Grant had already noted that the arrangement left his and Porter’s “troops and transports ready for immediate service” against Johnston and Gardner, which otherwise would not have been the case, and when he explained that the parolees had been turned over to an authorized Confederate commissioner for the exchange of prisoners, which made the contract strictly legal, Old Brains was mollified. So was Lincoln, who was a lawyer himself and knew the dangers that lurked in informalities, though what appealed to him most was Grant’s further contention that the surrendered troops were “tired of the war and would get home just as soon as they could.” There, he believed, they would be likely to create more problems for the Confederacy than if they had been lodged in northern prison camps, a headache for the Union, which would be obliged to feed and guard them while awaiting their exchange.

  Others not only disagreed, but some among them formed a delegation to call on Lincoln with
a protest against Grant’s dereliction and a demand for his dismissal from command. What rebel could be trusted? they asked, and predicted that within the month Pemberton’s men would violate their parole and be back in the field, once again doing their worst to tear the fabric of the Union. Referring to his callers as “crossroads wiseacres,” though they must have included some influential dignitaries, Lincoln afterwards described to a friend his handling of the situation. “I thought the best way to get rid of them was to tell the story of Sykes’s dog. Have you ever heard about Sykes’s yellow dog? Well, I must tell you about him. Sykes had a yellow dog he set great store by—” And he went on to explain that this affection was not shared by a group of boys who disliked the beast intensely and spent much of their time “meditating how they could get the best of him.” At last they hit upon the notion of wrapping an explosive cartridge in a piece of meat, attaching a long fuze to it, and whistling for the dog. When he came out and bolted the meat, cartridge and all, they touched off the fuze, with spectacular results. Sykes came running out of the house to investigate the explosion. “What’s up? Anything busted?” he cried. And then he saw the dog, or what was left of him. He picked up the biggest piece he could find, “a portion of the back with part of the tail still hanging to it,” and said mournfully: “Well, I guess he’ll never be much account again—as a dog.” Lincoln paused, then made his point. “I guess Pemberton’s forces will never be much account again as an army.” He smiled, recalling the reaction of his callers. “The delegation began looking around for their hats before I had got quite to the end of the story,” he told his friend, “and I was never bothered any more after that about superseding the commander of the Army of the Tennessee.”