Ulysses S. Grant by Michael Korda

Author:Michael Korda
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Non-fiction, History
ISBN: 9780061755408
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2004-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Inaction, overwhelming responsibilities for which he was unsuited, and some doubt about what to do next were certainly part of the problem, but worse was to come. Up until then Grant had consoled himself with the thought that he enjoyed Lincoln’s confidence, but two events put doubt into Grant’s mind. The first was a visit from a well-known and respected newspaperman, Charles A. Dana, whom Edwin Stanton, the secretary of war, had sent to scout out, on Lincoln’s behalf, whether there was any truth to the rumors about Grant’s drinking that were being spread by his enemies. Dana, as matters would turn out, liked Grant, and his reports to Washington were favorable, but it cannot have eased Grant’s nerves to know that he was being watched by somebody who had the ear of both the secretary of war and the president.

The second was the discovery that Lincoln had also been listening hard to Brig. Gen. John A. McClernand, a fellow Illinois politician and amateur general, who proposed to raise a new force of volunteers for the purpose of taking Vicksburg, Mississippi, and had given McClernand secret instructions to proceed.

Vicksburg had long been fitfully on Grant’s mind as he sat behind his desk wrestling with such matters as Jewish cotton traders, since it was clear to anybody with a map of the Mississippi at hand that it was the key to opening up the river and splitting the Confederacy. Early in 1862 the navy had seized the city of New Orleans, a serious blow to the Confederacy, but so long as Vicksburg, situated on a high bluff overlooking a sharp bend in the Mississippi, 166 miles north of New Orleans (as the crow flies), remained in Confederate hands, traffic on the river was effectively blocked. Vicksburg had been fortified; it was protected by large numbers of heavy guns and by geography as well, for it was not only on high ground, but the approach from the north was made difficult by the muddy, low-lying swamps of the Yazoo River, which runs sluggishly into the Mississippi.

How McClernand, a mediocre general of volunteers but an astute politician, planned to take Vicksburg is hard to determine, but his greatest weakness was that the secret orders Lincoln had given him contained an escape clause—he was to take on his expedition only those men whom Grant did not need. The threat of McClernand brought Halleck and Grant close again, as thick as thieves, since neither of them wished to have a politician who was a friend of the president’s succeed where professional soldiers had failed. Vicksburg suddenly became the focus of Grant’s full attention.

This, of course, may have been Lincoln’s intention in the first place. Astute politician that he was, he may have been using McClernand to light a fire under Grant as well as to rap him on the knuckles for General Order #11; or he may have felt that two different, competing strategies might be needed to take Vicksburg—except for Winston Churchill in World War II, nobody was more clever at handling generals than Lincoln.

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