Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

was from the Yankees on the Tennessee River and the upper Mississippi, and Johnston’s determination to throw Grant and Halleck out of Tennessee had led him to clear out all the Gulf coast garrisons, including New Orleans, of men and equipment, including a squadron of river gunboats that might have made a significant difference in Farragut’s ability to maneuver upriver. When the Federal navy burst through the back door into New Orleans only two weeks after Shiloh, New Orleans was simply too weak to defend itself.

With the Union suddenly holding both the upper and lower ends of the river, it seemed to Ulysses Simpson Grant a worthwhile effort to move over and seize the remaining parts in the middle, around the fortified town of Vicksburg. Grant could not have known it, but at that very moment Halleck was already under pressure from Lincoln to make precisely that kind of move. The November midterm congressional elections would soon be upon Lincoln, and the farmers of the Union West were restless at the prospect of a longer and longer war that kept the Mississippi shipping network closed to them. John A. McClernand, a powerful Illinois Democrat and now a major general of volunteers in Grant’s district, had gone off on his own to Washington demanding that Lincoln let him recruit his own army to take down the Mississippi and blow open the Vicksburg bottleneck; to placate the Northern Democrats, Lincoln had given him a curiously worded authorization in October to raise a force of volunteers. Halleck looked upon McClernand as a nuisance, and rather than take the risk that Lincoln would actually allow an inexperienced politician to take a Federal army on a joyride down the Mississippi, Halleck sanctioned Grant’s plan to move on Vicksburg, with McClernand parked safely under Grant’s command.

This time almost nothing went right for Grant. At first he hoped simply to march overland from Corinth with a force of 72,000 men and quickly seize Vicksburg and its garrison, but once under way in November, Grant changed his mind and detached Sherman and 32,000 men to advance down the Mississippi in another combined army-navy operation. He might have saved himself the trouble: Confederate raiders under Earl Van Dorn struck at Grant’s supply base at Holly Springs, Mississippi, on December 20, destroying the bulk of Grant’s supplies and stopping his overland march in its tracks. Meanwhile, Sherman’s men arrived before Chickasaw Bayou, northeast of Vicksburg, on December 26 to find that the Confederate troops from Vicksburg had dug themselves in along the hills on the other side of the bayou. After a series of futile attacks, Sherman withdrew and the whole endeavor went up in smoke.42

Grant would not give up on Vicksburg that easily. He would admit only that the idea of an overland march on Vicksburg from above the city was impractical, and during the winter of 1862–63 he mounted no fewer than five attempts to find a way to move his men downriver, past Vicksburg, and land them on the other side of the city, where he could cut off supplies and reinforcements to the city from points south and east. None of his ideas (which included attempts to dig canals around Vicksburg, to navigate the back bayous, and to reroute the Mississippi) worked, though, and by March 1863 he was no closer to taking Vicksburg than ever. Finally, in April, Grant decided to gamble on the riskiest of all the possible approaches to Vicksburg. He ferried his men across the Mississippi, marched them down below Vicksburg on the Louisiana side of the river, and on the moonless night of April 16–17, 1863, ran a fleet of eight navy gunboats and three transports (plus some coal barges) past the four-mile-long line of Confederate naval artillery on the Vicksburg waterfront. Every one of the gunboats was hit, but only one transport was sunk, and once below Vicksburg they provided cover for Grant to safely ferry his men back across the Mississippi, this time below Vicksburg.43 Within a month Grant had cut off all of Vicksburg’s outside communications and had bottled up Vicksburg’s 30,000 Confederate soldiers into an airtight siege. After six weeks the Confederates were reduced to near starvation, and on July 4, 1863, Vicksburg surrendered to Grant.

With Vicksburg the Confederacy had lost a citadel, an army, and an additional measure of its self-confidence. “The surrender was the stab to the Confederacy from which it never recovered,” remembered one of Vicksburg’s citizens. “No rational chance of its triumph remained after the white flag flew on the ramparts of the terraced city.”44 With Vicksburg, Ulysses Simpson Grant had redeemed a reputation. He also set a president to wondering whether he had at last found a general who could win his war for him.

THIS IGNORANT MAN

At the beginning of the Civil War Abraham Lincoln was fifty-two years old, and the numerous photographs that were taken of him during his first year as president reveal a man thin and spare, but erect and powerful, with a strongly etched face and the familiar whiskers (which he had grown as a fashionable whim shortly after his election) encircling his jaw. By the end of the war, Lincoln’s face had grown aged and careworn, his cheeks sunken into ashen hollows, his coarse black hair showing tufts of white, and his beard shrunken to a pitiful tuft at the chin. As the conflict dragged on and the casualty lists began to lengthen, Lincoln descended deeper into a peculiar variety of religious mysticism in which he began to view himself as merely “a humble instrument in the hands of our Heavenly Father,” powerless to guide events on his own terms. As the off spring of parents who were hard-shell Calvinistic Baptists, Lincoln had already imbibed a brooding certainty that all human activity was predestined to some mysterious end. Now that sense of helplessness in the face of events intensified: “I have all my life been a fatalist,” Lincoln remarked to one congressman, and added, quoting Hamlet,