Perhaps alarmed by his binge, Grant on June 9 invited Julia and the children to join him at Vicksburg, where they could stay on a steamer during the siege. His son Fred—now “a thoughtful, serious boy and very sensible,” said one relative—had stayed by his side during the campaign and adored his father for showing such faith in his maturity.39 “I had the happiness as a child and as a man of being his constant companion in peace and war.”40 Grant obtained a Shetland pony for his youngest boy, Jesse, who joined him on inspection tours, “often perched behind him,” wrote Jesse, “and clinging to his belt as we thundered along upon a big buckskin horse that had been presented to him, called, because of its viciousness, Mankiller.”41
Unable to find a comfortable wartime niche with the Grant family and condemned to a vagabond life, Julia welcomed her periodic stays with her husband, when she was known to pore over military maps and was said to possess an excellent grasp of military strategy. As Grant’s influence grew, so did hers, and she exercised it benevolently. “She had a kindly, gracious way that captured us,” noted one general. “The officers who had annoyances and grievances that they could not take to the General, appealed to Mrs. Grant . . . and many an officer could thank her for solving his grievances.”42 And when Julia Grant was around, the stories about her husband’s drinking had a way of disappearing instantly.
As he blasted Vicksburg into submission, Grant had no doubt the town would submit. He now had more than seventy thousand men camped in the vicinity and was surprised Pemberton made no attempt to slash his way out: “I didn’t think the rebels would be such fools as to shut up thirty thousand troops there for me to capture.”43 It was a gargantuan feat to strangle Vicksburg, hemmed in by ravines and fallen trees. Grant established a Union line fifteen miles long to contain seven miles of enemy fortifications. He watched as federal trenches crept close enough to Vicksburg that his soldiers, crouching behind bulletproof sandbags, could toss hand grenades into the Confederate forts. Union infantry was protected by sharpshooters with such expert aim that rebel soldiers dared not poke their heads above the parapets. All the while, Grant shelled the city at regular intervals, sowing terror among the inhabitants, who slowly regressed to a primitive state.
Plagued by early summer heat and steady rain, Grant worked hard to strengthen his men’s morale, even though one British doctor concluded that “no man alive could have counteracted the effects of that climate. Malaria, salt pork, no vegetables, a blazing sun, and almost poisonous water, are agencies against which medicine is helpless.”44 After two aborted assaults and many casualties, Union soldiers willingly endured a siege that spared them further bloodshed. Grant constantly fraternized with his men. One newspaperman noted how he sauntered about in worn clothes, his left hand thrust in his pocket, an unlit cigar in his mouth, his brow contracted thoughtfully. Grant, he discerned, inspired more respect than affection: “They do not salute him, they only watch him . . . with a certain sort of familiar reverence.”45 Grant never assumed military airs and talked casually with his men, as if he were a peer. “He sat on the ground and talked with the boys with less reserve than many a little puppy of a lieutenant,” wrote an Illinois soldier.46 Everyone noticed Grant’s strangely nonchalant demeanor in a war zone. One day he strolled about in full view of Confederate marksmen as enemy bullets raised the dust around him. A newspaper reporter who did not recognize him shouted: “Stoop down, down, damn you, down!”47 Grant didn’t flinch.
Inside Vicksburg, General Pemberton banked all hope for deliverance on Joseph E. Johnston, a short, dapper, elegant-looking Virginian with a graying goatee, finely trimmed side-whiskers, and sharply chiseled features. With a certain romantic dash, Johnston liked to ride into battle sporting a black feather in his hat. Whenever his troops cheered him, a Tennessee soldier claimed, “Old Joe smiles as blandly as a modest maid, raises his hat in acknowledgment, makes a polite bow, and rides toward the firing.”48
By mid-June, Pemberton flooded Johnston with desperate pleas for relief from the relentless salvos, but despite the large army at his disposal, Johnston offered no consolation. “I consider saving Vicksburg hopeless,” he replied.49 Horrified by this defeatist attitude, Confederate secretary of war Seddon lectured Johnston that “Vicksburg must not be lost without a desperate struggle. The interest and honor of the Confederacy forbid it.” Johnston said Grant had done his work too thoroughly to be defeated. “Grant’s position, naturally very strong, is intrenched and protected by powerful artillery, and the roads obstructed.”50 The confident Grant, while he respected Johnston beyond other Confederate generals, said he would be thrilled if he dared to barge his way into Vicksburg: “If Johnston tries to cut his way in we will let him do it . . . You say he has 30,000 men with him? That will give us 30,000 more prisoners than we now have.”51 By June 11, Grant blocked the last road between Pemberton and Johnston, hermetically sealing off Vicksburg. Later he said he regretted not having been able to confront Johnston’s army, which would have permitted him to destroy two armies at once.
Grant rejected pleas for more men from General Banks, who had laid siege to Port Hudson, farther south on the Mississippi, just north of Baton Rouge. The original plan called for Banks to overrun Port Hudson, then steam up the river and cooperate with Grant’s operation against Vicksburg, but the effort to subdue Port Hudson proved long and hazardous. Halleck was enraged at Banks for failing to unite his forces with Grant’s, yet he seemed powerless to rein in the political general.52
In Washington, Lincoln studied telegrams from Vicksburg as he anxiously awaited the siege’s outcome. An Associated Press reporter watched in the War Department telegraph office as the president absorbed an erroneous dispatch bringing dreadful news from Vicksburg. At once Lincoln looked “nervous,” his whole frame “shook violently,” and his face whitened with a “ghastly” pallor.53 Lincoln never wavered in his belief that Vicksburg represented the centerpiece of Confederate defenses in the west. “We can take all the northern ports of the Confederacy,” he insisted, “and they can defy us from Vicksburg.”54
With deserters pouring from the town daily, Grant had a precise image of the brutal condition of soldiers and citizens cooped up inside. Hunger had yielded to starvation as dogs, cats, and even rats vanished from the city. Soldiers accustomed to beef and bacon settled for leathery mule meat, supplemented by small portions of rice, corn, and peas. Many contracted scurvy, and by late June half the garrison was laid low by illness.
Although bombarding civilian populations would be commonplace in future conflicts, it still arose as a dreadful novelty in the Civil War. Fleeing nonstop shelling, Vicksburg residents sought shelter in cellars or man-made caves carved out of hillsides. People spent so much time in these improvised bunkers that they furnished them with carpets, beds, and easy chairs until they resembled rude apartments. “Caves were the fashion—the rage—over besieged Vicksburg,” recorded a survivor.55 Nighttime bombardments made these cave dwellers shrink in terror as they listened to the shrieking whistle of diving shells. “Morning found us more dead than alive, with blanched faces and trembling lips,” wrote one young woman.56 To perk up the failing spirits of residents, local newspapers kept alive the dreamlike prospect that Joseph Johnston would materialize to deliver them from blue-coated evil. Confronted with a newsprint shortage, local papers published their columns on the backs of rectangular sections of wallpaper with bright floral prints.
As the siege wore on, Grant presided over a vast expansion in the care of runaway slaves, who now streamed into his camp in enormous numbers. Several hundred thousand slaves were liberated by Grant’s army, and he enlisted them to perform vital military duties. Black auxiliaries engaged in dangerous, arduous tasks: digging trenches and rifle pits around Vicksburg, enhancing Union defenses at Haynes’ Bluff and Grand Gulf, and tearing up railroad tracks east of the city. They became so indispensable that one colonel wrote to McClernand and pleaded for more: “I hardly know how I am to get along unles
s I can have some more Contrabands.”57
Grant embraced the new policy of arming Negroes promulgated by Halleck on March 30, 1863: “It is the policy of the government to withdraw from the enemy as much productive labor as possible . . . it is the opinion of many who have examined the question without passion or prejudice, that [former slaves] can also be used as a military force.”58 Three weeks later, Grant reported to Halleck that he had equipped black soldiers for the first time: “At least three of my Army Corps Commanders take hold of the new policy of arming the negroes and using them against the rebels with a will . . . You may rely on my carrying out any policy ordered by proper authority to the best of my ability.”59
In late March, Lincoln had dispatched Brigadier General Lorenzo Thomas, adjutant general of the U.S. Army, to confer with Grant about the plight of liberated slaves—the so-called freed people—and aid the recruitment of black troops, a policy that formed a natural sequel to the Emancipation Proclamation. The ulterior purpose of Thomas’s trip was to assess Grant’s military performance at Vicksburg. On April 11, when he arrived in camp, he was bowled over by Grant and soon confessed himself “a Grant man all over.”60 In cobbling together black regiments, Thomas displayed a crusading style, delivering rousing speeches to counter deeply rooted racial prejudice endemic in the northern army. The bigotry was so ingrained that one Ohio soldier warned northern soldiers “would lay down their arms and unbuckle their swords” if Washington persisted in arming blacks.61 By year end, Thomas had plucked twenty thousand young black men from contraband camps in the Mississippi Valley and absorbed them into African American regiments. Grant placed the full weight of his prestige into coaxing his commanders to flesh out these new regiments.
All the while, Grant maintained his enthusiastic backing of Chaplain John Eaton, the general superintendent in the Mississippi Valley, who provided education, shelter, medical care, and employment to people in contraband camps, where disease and despair proliferated and mortality rates often ran high. When Eaton met Grant on June 11, the chaplain immediately saw in the seamed face and crow’s-feet around Grant’s eyes the stress of the rugged Vicksburg Campaign. “He was dressed . . . in an old brown linen duster surmounted by an old slouch hat; his trousers showed holes worn by the boot-straps, where they had rubbed against the saddle.”62
Even amid the siege, Grant devoted time to Eaton, who read aloud to him a report he had written covering thirty-four pages of foolscap. Grant “showed not a sign of weariness to the end,” reported Eaton, “and when I had finished he remarked: ‘That is a very important report. I must send you with it to the President, with a personal letter.’”63 Grant wrote promptly to Lincoln, saying the document would bring him up to date on the “negroes . . . coming into our lines in great numbers.” He described Eaton’s conscientious supervision of contraband camps. “Mr. Eaton’s labors in his undertaking have been unremitting and skillful and I fear in many instances very trying. That he has been of very great service to the blacks in having them provided for when otherwise they would have been neglected . . . the accompanying report will show.”64 Frederick Douglass stated that Lincoln received the report from its emissary “with the greatest satisfaction, asking many questions about General Grant’s views upon the whole subject of the treatment of the colored people . . . he repeated the expressions of his gratification that a General who was winning such military successes over the rebels was able, from a military standpoint, to give him so many practical illustrations of the benefits of the emancipation policy.”65 This reaction says much about Grant’s rising star in the Lincoln firmament, for he was fast becoming the president’s beau ideal of a general: one who regularly beat the enemy while endorsing the expanded war aims.
John Eaton grew so intimate with Grant that they even touched upon the delicate subject of Grant’s prewar drinking travails. “It was plain that the army life in Washington Territory and Oregon had been full of temptations, and it is more than probable that he followed the example of the other officers while there,” Eaton wrote. “To escape from the environment was certainly one motive for his leaving the army.”66 Eaton was impressed by Grant’s candor and came to believe that the early stories of his drinking were true, the later ones baseless.
Just how much Grant would support the newly emancipated slaves became evident at a fertile spot called Davis Bend, located on a Mississippi River peninsula, about twenty-five miles below Vicksburg. Jefferson Davis and his rich brother Joseph had owned huge slave plantations there. When Joseph fled in 1862, his slaves invaded the mansion house and divided clothing and furniture among themselves. Even before Union troops came on the scene, the onetime slaves already operated the plantation. Grant spied a prime opportunity to create a model community for blacks that would showcase their industry and self-reliance. As Eaton recalled, “It was General Grant’s desire that these plantations should be occupied by the freedmen, and, to quote his own words, ‘become a Negro paradise.’”67 Grant wasn’t responding to a Washington directive but undertook this on his own initiative.
The experiment fully corroborated Grant’s expansive vision. The land was leased to the freedmen, who paid the government for their rations, mules, and tools. While men worked the cotton fields, women tended vegetable gardens and peddled their wares to steamboat traffic on the Mississippi. Residents showed skill and enterprise at every turn, building a church, a schoolhouse, and an infirmary that housed orphaned children and elderly, ailing residents. By 1865 the Davis Bend community produced two thousand bales of cotton, earning a $16,000 profit and proving to skeptics that freed people could be fully productive, self-supporting members of society.
Grant’s transformation into an imaginative abolitionist arose partly from his conception of himself as a professional soldier who believed in military subservience to civilian rule; he was following a changed policy that flowed down from the president. The evolution in his thinking was influenced by other factors, however, including the battlefield performance of blacks. Although the Emancipation Proclamation made them eligible for military service, many northern commanders wondered whether they were capable of courage and discipline, a prejudice that seeped down to the common soldiers. “The idea of arming and equipping Negro Regiments for the purpose of making them soldiers is, to my mind, worse than ridiculous nonsense,” said an Iowa soldier at Vicksburg. “Blacks would only work if you made them do so.”68 If Grant reserved any private doubts on the matter, a historic battle at Milliken’s Bend on the Mississippi on June 7, helped to retire them forever.
On that day, two thousand Texan troops under Major General John Walker invaded a Union supply depot, garrisoned by a thousand, mostly black, troops recently mustered into regiments in Grant’s district. Jefferson Davis had already warned that rebellious slaves in northern uniforms would be sent back to their old masters or hanged as criminals. Southern soldiers often reacted viciously when they encountered former slaves in uniform. Arming blacks trespassed on sacred taboos for many of them, and they now flew black flags as a sign they would give no quarter. The Union victory at Milliken’s Bend was notable for its hand-to-hand savagery. “After it was over,” wrote Charles Dana, “many men were found dead with bayonet stabs, and others with their skulls broken open by butts of muskets.”69 Rebel soldiers reportedly butchered blacks whom they captured and even sold some of them as slaves. Far from succumbing to terror, the novice black troops, stuck with outdated muskets, fought off the larger rebel contingent and won honor for blacks everywhere with their bayonet charge. Dana believed the engagement had “completely revolutionized the sentiment of the army with regard to the employment of negro troops. I heard prominent officers who formerly in private had sneered at the idea of the negroes fighting express themselves after that as heartily in favor of it.”70 The defeat shocked southern sensibilities, and one stupefied Confederate lady wrote it was “hard to believe that Southern soldiers—and Texans at that—have been whipped by a mongrel crew of white an
d black Yankees. There must be some mistake.”71
Grant was profoundly impressed by his black troops’ performance at Milliken’s Bend. “This was the first important engagement of the war in which colored troops were under fire,” he wrote. “These men were very raw, having all been enlisted since the beginning of the siege, but they behaved well.”72 He assured Lorenzo Thomas the black soldiers had been “most gallant and I doubt not but with good officers they will make good troops.”73 The word soon made the rounds that Grant had gone from being a reluctant recruit to abolitionism to an ardent convert. In late July, Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts reported on a conversation with Dana about Grant: “He says that [Grant] is in favor of destroying the cause of this civil war—of overthrowing Slavery and that his army is deeply imbued with the same feeling.”74
That Grant, whose army occupied the region with the most black refugees, was an enthusiastic proponent of black regiments ingratiated him with Lincoln. “The colored population is the great available and yet unavailed of, force for restoring the Union,” the president told Governor Andrew Johnson of Tennessee. “The bare sight of fifty thousand armed, and drilled black soldiers on the banks of the Mississippi, would end the rebellion at once.”75 That May, Lincoln mused aloud to visiting church leaders that he “would gladly receive into the service not ten thousand but ten times ten thousand colored troops.”76 Grant was the general best positioned to translate this wish into reality. On August 23, he sent Lincoln a remarkable letter in which he made it clear that he endorsed the recruitment of black regiments both as an order he was bound to obey and as something he personally approved:
Gen. [Lorenzo] Thomas is now with me and you may rely on it I will give him all the aid in my power. I would do this whether the arming of the negro seemed to me a wise policy or not, because it is an order that I am bound to obey and do not feel that in my position I have a right to question any policy of the Government. In this particular instance there is no objection however to my expressing an honest conviction. That is, by arming the negro we have added a powerful ally. They will make good soldiers and taking them from the enemy weaken him in the same proportion they strengthen us. I am therefore most decidedly in favor of pushing this policy to the enlistment of a force sufficient to hold all the South falling into our hands and to aid in capturing more.77