Born to Battle by Jack Hurst

Author:Jack Hurst
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2012-04-14T04:00:00+00:00

21

FEBRUARY-APRIL 1863—GRANT IN LOUISIANA

“Weather, Roads, and Water All Against Me”

By the time Grant had assumed personal command of the Vicksburg expedition in late January 1863, the war’s—and America’s—political character had begun to change. Lincoln’s signing of the final Emancipation Proclamation at the beginning of the month overjoyed the Union’s abolitionist minority, but it cooled the ardor of unionist sentiment across the South, Midwest, and lower Northeast as well as in pockets of the South. The ranks of Grant’s army exhibited the chill with apathy, defiance, and sometimes disloyalty.

Take the One Hundred Ninth Illinois Infantry, for example. Recruited in the southern part of Lincoln’s home state shortly before preliminary announcement of the proclamation back in September, the regiment reportedly contained just seven men who identified themselves as Republicans, four of whom opposed emancipation. At Columbus, Kentucky, in October 1862, the unit proved so reluctant to fight against slavery that some of its members apparently let Confederate prisoners escape. During the Confederate capture of Holly Springs, Mississippi, in December, others tried to surrender despite the fact they were guarding an area the enemy did not attack.

After the Holly Springs raid, Grant ordered a court-martial, which convicted nine of the Illinoisans on shameful charges. All but one were officers. A lieutenant colonel had deserted in the face of the enemy, trying to get captured. A captain had encouraged his men to desert. Another captain tried to persuade men of his regiment that they were included in the Holly Springs surrender despite knowing otherwise. A third captain said “in the hearing of his men, in the presence of the enemy, that he would not fight if attacked,” and a fourth hatched a plan to get his regiment surrendered to the raiding Confederates. A second lieutenant persuaded a secessionist civilian to write fraudulent paroles for him and some of his men, so that they would seem to have been captured and released into temporary noncombatant status; another lieutenant feigned illness to get himself hospitalized and surrendered in Holly Springs. A first lieutenant spoke “in an improper manner of the War and the President,” and a commissary sergeant vowed never to fire a gun and voiced hope that the report, soon substantiated, that Confederates had slaughtered General Ambrose Burnside’s troops at Fredericksburg, Virginia, would prove true.

On February 1, Grant ordered that the convicted officers of the One Hundred Ninth Illinois be dismissed from the army. But he also exonerated the regiment itself, saying its sins had been caused by those found guilty. For offenses such as the One Hundred Ninth’s, Grant almost always blamed officers. Unlike many West Point–trained generals on both sides, his first impulse was not to stand a few low-ranking recent civilians in front of a firing squad. Grant seemed to identify with enlisted men; as a lieutenant in Mexico, he had jumped into waist-high water to work alongside some of them. He demanded discipline from his troops but held officers responsible for maintaining it.1

Grant, technically a professional, empathized with the citizen-soldier. Contrary

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