Memoirs of General William T. Sherman — Complete
At midnight I left Admiral Porter on his gunboat; he had his fleet
ready and the night was propitious. I rode back to camp and gave
orders for all to be ready by daybreak; but when daylight came I
received a note from General Steele reporting that, before his
boats had got up steam, the fog had settled down on the river so
thick and impenetrable, that it was simply impossible to move; so
the attempt had to be abandoned. The rain, too, began to fall, and
the trees bore water-marks ten feet above our heads, so that I
became convinced that the part of wisdom was to withdraw. I
ordered the stores which had been landed to be reembarked on the
boats, and preparations made for all the troops to regain their
proper boats during the night of the 1st of January, 1863. From
our camps at Chickasaw we could hear, the whistles of the trains
arriving in Vicksburg, could see battalions of men marching up
toward Haines's Bluff, and taking post at all points in our front.
I was more than convinced that heavy reenforcements were coming to
Vicksburg; whether from Pemberton at Grenada, Bragg in Tennessee,
or from other sources, I could not tell; but at no point did the
enemy assume the offensive; and when we drew off our rear-guard, on
the morning of the 2d, they simply followed up the movement,
timidly. Up to that moment I had not heard a word from General
Grant since leaving Memphis; and most assuredly I had listened for
days for the sound of his guns in the direction of Yazoo City. On
the morning of January 2d, all my command were again afloat in
their proper steamboats, when Admiral Porter told me that General
McClernand had arrived at the mouth of the Yazoo in the steamboat
Tigress, and that it was rumored he had come down to supersede me.
Leaving my whole force where it was, I ran down to the month of the
Yazoo in a small tug boat, and there found General McClernand, with
orders from the War Department to command the expeditionary force
on the Mississippi River. I explained what had been done, and what
was the actual state of facts; that the heavy reenforcements
pouring into Vicksburg must be Pemberton's army, and that General
Grant must be near at hand. He informed me that General Grant was
not coming at all; that his depot at Holly Springs had been
captured by Van Dorn, and that he had drawn back from Coffeeville
and Oxford to Holly Springs and Lagrange; and, further, that
Quinby's division of Grant's army was actually at Memphis for
stores when he passed down. This, then, fully explained how
Vicksburg was being reenforced. I saw that any attempt on the
place from the Yazoo was hopeless; and, with General McClernand's
full approval, we all came out of the Yazoo, and on the 3d of
January rendezvoused at Milliken's Bend, about ten miles above.
On the 4th General McClernand issued his General Order No. 1,
assuming command of the Army of the Mississippi, divided into two
corps; the first to be commanded by General Morgan, composed of his
own and A. J. Smith's divisions; and the second, composed of
Steele's and Stuart's divisions, to be commanded by me. Up to that
time the army had been styled the right wing of (General Grant's)
Thirteenth Army Corps, and numbered about thirty thousand men. The
aggregate loss during the time of any command, mostly on the 29th
of December, was one hundred and seventy-five killed, nine hundred
and thirty wounded, and seven hundred and forty-three prisoners.
According to Badeau, the rebels lost sixty-three killed, one
hundred and thirty-four wounded, and ten prisoners. It afterward
transpired that Van Dorn had captured Holly Springs on the 20th of
December, and that General Grant fell back very soon after.
General Pemberton, who had telegraphic and railroad communication
with Vicksburg, was therefore at perfect liberty to reenforce the
place with a garrison equal, if not superior, to my command. The
rebels held high, commanding ground, and could see every movement
of our men and boats, so that the only possible hope of success
consisted in celerity and surprise, and in General Grant's holding
all of Pemberton's army hard pressed meantime. General Grant was
perfectly aware of this, and had sent me word of the change, but it
did not reach me in time; indeed, I was not aware of it until after
my assault of December 29th, and until the news was brought me by
General McClernand as related. General McClernand was appointed to
this command by President Lincoln in person, who had no knowledge
of what was then going on down the river. Still, my relief, on the
heels of a failure, raised the usual cry, at the North, of
"repulse, failure, and bungling." There was no bungling on my
part, for I never worked harder or with more intensity of purpose
in my life; and General Grant, long after, in his report of the
operations of the siege of Vicksburg, gave us all full credit for
the skill of the movement, and described the almost impregnable
nature of the ground; and, although in all official reports I
assumed the whole responsibility, I have ever felt that had General
Morgan promptly and skillfully sustained the lead of Frank Blair's
brigade on that day, we should have broken the rebel line, and
effected a lodgment on the hills behind Vicksburg. General Frank
Blair was outspoken and indignant against Generals Morgan and De
Courcey at the time, and always abused me for assuming the whole
blame. But, had we succeeded, we might have found ourselves in a
worse trap, when General Pemberton was at full liberty to turn his
whole force against us. While I was engaged at Chickasaw Bayou,
Admiral Porter was equally busy in the Yazoo River, threatening the
enemy's batteries at Haines's and Snyder's Bluffs above. In a
sharp engagement he lost one of his best officers, in the person of
Captain Gwin, United States Navy, who, though on board an ironclad,
insisted on keeping his post on deck, where he was struck in the
breast by a round shot, which carried away the muscle, and
contused the lung within, from which he died a few days after. We
of the army deplored his loss quite as much as his fellows of the
navy, for he had been intimately associated with us in our previous
operations on the Tennessee River, at Shiloh and above, and we had
come to regard him as one of us.
On the 4th of January, 1863, our fleet of transports was collected
at Milliken's Bend, about ten miles above the mouth of the Yazoo,
Admiral Porter remaining with his gunboats at the Yazoo. General
John A. McClernand was in chief command, General George W. Morgan
commanded the First Corps and I the Second Corps of the Army of the
Mississippi.
I had learned that a small steamboat, the Blue Wing, with a mail,
towing coal-barges and loaded with ammunition, had left Memphis for
the Yazoo, about the 20th of December, had been captured by a rebel
boat which had come out of the Arkansas River, and had been carried
up that river to Fort Hind.
We had reports from this fort, usually called the "Post of
Arkansas," about forty miles above the mouth, that it was held by
about five thousand rebels, was an inclosed work, commanding the
passage of the river, but supposed to be easy of capture from the
rear. At that time I don't think General McClernand had any
definite views or plays of action. If so, he did not impart them
to me. He spoke, in general terms of opening the navigation of the
Mississippi, "cutting his way to the sea," etc., etc., but the
modus operandi was not so clear. Knowing full well that we could
not carry on operations against Vicksburg as long as the rebels
held the Post of Arkansas, whence to attack our boats coming and
going without convoy, I visited him on his boat, the Tigress, took
with me a boy who had been on the Blue Wing, and had escaped, and
asked leave to go up the Arkansas, to clear out the Post. He made
various objections, but consented to go with me to see Admiral
Porter about it. We got up steam in the Forest Queen, during the
night of January 4th, stopped at the Tigress, took General
McClernand on board, and proceeded down the river by night to the
admiral's boat, the Black Hawk, lying in the mouth of the Yazoo.
It must have been near midnight, and Admiral Porter was in
deshabille. We were seated in his cabin and I explained my views
about Arkansas Post, and asked his cooperation. He said that he
was short of coal, and could not use wood in his iron-clad boats.
Of these I asked for two, to be commanded by Captain Shirk or
Phelps, or some officer of my acquaintance. At that moment, poor
Gwin lay on his bed, in a state-room close by, dying from the
effect of the cannon shot received at Haines's Bluff, as before
described. Porter's manner to McClernand was so curt that I
invited him out into a forward-cabin where he had his charts, and
asked him what he meant by it. He said that "he did not like him;"
that in Washington, before coming West, he had been introduced to
him by President Lincoln, and he had taken a strong prejudice
against him. I begged him, for the sake of harmony, to waive that,
which he promised to do. Returning to the cabin, the conversation
was resumed, and, on our offering to tow his gunboats up the river
to save coal, and on renewing the request for Shirk to command the
detachment, Porter said, "Suppose I go along myself?" I answered,
if he would do so, it would insure the success of the enterprise.
At that time I supposed General McClernand would send me on this
business, but he concluded to go himself, and to take his whole
force. Orders were at once issued for the troops not to disembark
at Milliken's Bend, but to remain as they were on board the
transports. My two divisions were commanded--the First, by
Brigadier-General Frederick Steele, with three brigades, commanded
by Brigadier-Generals F. P. Blair, C. E. Hooey, and J. M. Thayer;
the Second, by Brigadier-General D. Stuart, with two brigades,
commanded by Colonels G. A. Smith and T. Kilby Smith.
The whole army, embarked on steamboats convoyed by the gunboats, of
which three were iron-clads, proceeded up the Mississippi River to
the mouth of White River, which we reached January 8th. On the
next day we continued up White River to the "Cut-off;" through this
to the Arkansas, and up the Arkansas to Notrib's farm, just below
Fort Hindman. Early the next morning we disembarked. Stuart's
division, moving up the river along the bank, soon encountered a
force of the enemy intrenched behind a line of earthworks,
extending from the river across to the swamp. I took Steele's
division, marching by the flank by a road through the swamp to the
firm ground behind, and was moving up to get to the rear of Fort
Hindman, when General McClernand overtook me, with the report that
the rebels had abandoned their first position, and had fallen back
into the fort. By his orders, we counter-marched, recrossed the
swamp, and hurried forward to overtake Stuart, marching for Fort
Hindman. The first line of the rebels was about four miles below
Fort Hindman, and the intervening space was densely, wooded and
obscure, with the exception of some old fields back of and close to
the fort. During the night, which was a bright moonlight one, we
reconnoitred close up, and found a large number of huts which had
been abandoned, and the whole rebel force had fallen back into and
about the fort. Personally I crept up to a stump so close that I
could hear the enemy hard at work, pulling down houses, cutting
with axes, and building intrenchments. I could almost hear their
words, and I was thus listening when, about 4 A. M. the bugler in
the rebel camp sounded as pretty a reveille as I ever listened to.
When daylight broke it revealed to us a new line of parapet
straight across the peninsula, connecting Fort Hindman, on the