In the spring of 1863, the Union war effort was stalled. The Army of the Tennessee had spent months camped in the Louisiana mud, trying and failing to find a way past the Confederate fortress at Vicksburg. Canal projects had failed. Expeditions through bayous had turned back. Northern newspapers were calling for Ulysses S. Grant’s removal.
Grant’s solution was a plan that defied conventional military doctrine. He intended to march his army down the west bank of the Mississippi, run a fleet of gunboats past Vicksburg’s batteries at night, and then cross the river into enemy territory without a secure supply line.
His most trusted general, William Tecumseh Sherman, believed the plan would destroy the army. He put his objections in writing. “I tremble for the result,” Sherman wrote.
This is the story of that disagreement, and how it forged one of the most important partnerships in American military history.
Vicksburg sat on a bluff above a bend in the Mississippi River. It was protected by geography. North of the city, the Yazoo Delta was a maze of swamps and flooded forests. The river itself was dominated by Confederate batteries that could tear apart any fleet. Lincoln called Vicksburg the key, and he was not being poetic. The city controlled the last major Confederate stretch of the Mississippi. Take it, and the Confederacy was cut in two.
In December 1862, Sherman led a force against Confederate positions at Chickasaw Bayou north of Vicksburg. He had nearly 30,000 men. He attacked across swampy ground and was thrown back with almost 2,000 casualties. The Confederates lost fewer than 200.
Then came the long winter of failed projects. Grant and his engineers tried to dig a canal across the neck of land opposite Vicksburg. The river didn’t cooperate. They tried the Lake Providence route. It didn’t work. They sent expeditions through Yazoo Pass and Steele’s Bayou. Both turned back.
By March of 1863, the army was sick and the press was furious. Critics said Grant was incompetent or drunk or both. Grant wrote to his superior, Henry Halleck, with a short promise. “I will have Vicksburg this month or fail in the attempt.”
The plan Grant formed by late March was almost indefensible by the standards of conventional military thinking. He would march the army down the west bank of the Mississippi through swampy Louisiana terrain. Then he would ask Admiral David Dixon Porter to run his fleet of gunboats and transports past Vicksburg’s river batteries at night. Then, assuming any of the ships survived, he would ferry the army across the river to the east bank somewhere below Vicksburg.
Once across, the army would move inland without a secure supply base. It would cut the railroad lines that fed Vicksburg from the east and defeat whatever Confederate forces came out to stop it.
The safe choice was obvious. Pull the army back to Memphis, reorganize, and launch a fresh campaign down the Mississippi Central Railroad with proper supply lines. That was the professional soldier’s answer. That is what Sherman recommended.
Sherman was 43 years old in the spring of 1863. He had been at Bull Run in 1861. He commanded troops at Shiloh in 1862, where he was wounded and had two horses shot from under him. He had led the assault at Chickasaw Bayou just four months earlier and watched men walk into prepared defenses and get cut apart.
Sherman was not cautious by temperament. He was impulsive and emotional. But he was trained at West Point and understood the principles of military history. The principles said not to run a fleet under batteries that could destroy them. They said not to march an army across swampy terrain to a crossing that may or may not hold. They said not to push an army into enemy territory and cut it off from its supply base.
His recommendation to Grant was clear. Go back to Memphis. Use the river and the railroads. Approach Vicksburg from the north. Do it right, even if it takes longer. Then he wrote the line: “My own opinion is that this plan is too desperate. I tremble for the result.”
Put yourself in the position of writing that sentence. You are writing to your commanding general, your friend, the man you trust more than any officer you’ve served with. You are telling him formally, in writing, that you believe his plan will fail. This is not disloyalty. It is the opposite. A man who doesn’t respect you tells you what you want to hear. A man who respects you tells you the truth even when you don’t want to hear it.
Sherman believed Grant’s plan would destroy the Army of the Tennessee. He believed the boats would be sunk, or the crossing would be repulsed, or the army would be stranded in the Confederate interior without supply or retreat. He was wrong. But he didn’t know that yet.
Grant read Sherman’s letter. He read the concerns of other officers, too. James McPherson had doubts. There were voices around Grant saying this was too dangerous. Grant did not go back to Memphis.
His reasoning came down to something that was not military doctrine at all. It was political and psychological reality. The North was already disheartened. The war was almost two years old. Fredericksburg had been a slaughter. Chancellorsville was coming. The casualty lists filled newspapers across the North.
Another retreat would not just be a military setback. It would be an announcement that even Vicksburg was beyond reach. Grant could not afford that. Lincoln could not afford that.
Grant also understood something about himself. A retreat to Memphis probably ends his career. He had already been nearly fired once after Shiloh. He had survived as commander of the Army of the Tennessee partly through Lincoln’s protection and partly through results. If there were no results, the protection ran out.
The plan went forward.
On the night of April 16th, 1863, it was moonless. Porter chose it because there was less light to make his ships visible to Confederate gunners on the bluffs. He had 12 vessels, gunboats and transports, loaded with supplies for the crossing. The plan was to let the current carry them downriver past Vicksburg as quietly as possible.
Grant was watching from a transport steamer near the opposite bank. Several of his officers were with him. So was his wife, Julia. So were their children. Grant had arranged for his family to be on a transport to watch the run.
Sherman believed this fleet might be destroyed by Confederate guns. Grant was certain enough it would survive that he brought his wife and children to watch.
The fleet began moving around 10:00. For a short time, the passage was quiet. Then Confederate gunners opened fire. Signal fires blazed along the riverbank to illuminate the targets. The night filled with muzzle flashes and the sound of artillery.
Porter’s fleet fired back while pushing downstream. One transport was destroyed. One was badly damaged and driven back. Barges carrying supplies were lost. But the rest of the fleet made it through. Twelve vessels went in, ten came out the other side below Vicksburg.
Over the following two weeks, Grant’s army marched south down the Louisiana shore. The terrain was exactly as miserable as Sherman predicted. Louisiana in late April means mud and swamps and roads that barely deserve the name. Forty thousand men moved through it anyway.
On April 29th, Porter’s gunboats bombarded Grand Gulf’s Confederate batteries for six hours. It wasn’t enough. The guns at Grand Gulf sat on high ground that made them difficult to reach. Grant stood on a gunboat watching the bombardment and made his assessment. A direct crossing at Grand Gulf would cost too many men.
A local man told him about a better option further south. Bruinsburg, Mississippi. A small landing below Grand Gulf with good ground on the east bank. Grant didn’t hesitate. He shifted the crossing south.
On the night of April 30th into the early morning of May 1st, Porter’s fleet slipped past Grand Gulf in darkness and moved south. McClernand’s 13th Corps began loading onto the transports.
While this was happening, Sherman was 60 miles north at Haines’ Bluff above Vicksburg conducting a demonstration. A loud, aggressive faint. Firing guns, moving troops, calculated to keep Confederate attention away from the real crossing. He was helping execute the plan he told Grant not to attempt.
May 1st, 1863, early morning. The Army of the Tennessee crossed the Mississippi at Bruinsburg. The landing was unopposed. No Confederate guns covering the crossing point. No infantry waiting on the bank.
The diversions, Sherman’s faint to the north and a cavalry raid by Benjamin Grierson deep through central Mississippi, had pulled Confederate attention in every direction except where Grant was actually crossing.
Forty thousand Union soldiers poured across the Mississippi River. No fleet destroyed. No army stranded. No catastrophic repulse at the water’s edge.
Grant stepped onto the east bank. Later, in his memoirs, he wrote: “I was now in the enemy’s country with a large river and the stronghold of Vicksburg between me and my base of supplies. But I was on dry ground on the same side of the river with the enemy.”
Then he wrote the line that cuts through all the doubt: “I felt a degree of relief scarcely ever equaled since.”
That is not the language of a man who wasn’t sure. That is the language of a man who has been carrying the weight of a decision for two months and has just watched it work.
What follows over the next 18 days is one of the most remarkable stretches of the Civil War. Grant moved inland and he moved fast.
May 1st, Battle of Port Gibson. Confederate forces tried to stop Grant’s advance from Bruinsburg. The Union forces outnumbered them and pushed them back after a day of hard fighting.
May 12th, Battle of Raymond. A Confederate brigade tried to slow McPherson east of Vicksburg. They were defeated and pushed back toward Jackson.
May 14th, Battle of Jackson. Grant’s forces captured the Mississippi state capital. Joseph Johnston, gathering forces in central Mississippi to threaten Grant’s rear, was driven out of the city. The major rail hub feeding Vicksburg was in Union hands.
Now Grant turned west. He had spent two weeks moving through the Confederate interior, winning engagement after engagement, keeping his army fed partly off the land, moving faster than Pemberton inside Vicksburg could process what was happening.
May 16th, Battle of Champion Hill. This was the decision point. Pemberton came out of Vicksburg with around 20,000 men to meet Grant. The fighting was brutal. Back and forth, charges and countercharges, a Confederate thrust that nearly cut Grant’s army in two at one point. For several hours, it was genuinely uncertain. But Union forces held, then pushed back, then Pemberton’s line broke.
May 17th, Battle of Big Black River Bridge. Pemberton’s rear guard tried to hold the river crossing. Grant smashed through them in less than an hour.
May 18th, Union forces reached the outskirts of Vicksburg. Eighteen days. Five major battles. Five victories. From the crossing at Bruinsburg to the siege lines around Vicksburg, 18 days.
Sherman was wrong about everything. The fleet survived the battery run. The crossing succeeded. The army didn’t starve in the Confederate interior. Rather than concentrating and destroying Grant, Confederate forces had been defeated one at a time. Every specific fear that Sherman put into writing had been disproved by events.
And Sherman knows it. Not just at the end of the campaign, during it, while the battles are still happening.
Watch what Sherman is doing during those 18 days. He is not a spectator. His corps is actively engaged. He fights at Jackson. He marches hard. He executes. But somewhere between Port Gibson and Champion Hill, something changes in how he is watching all of this.
He had been right about doctrine. Every concern he put in that letter was professionally legitimate. Military history was full of armies that destroyed themselves by doing exactly what Grant was doing. But Grant had done it anyway, and battle by battle it was working.
Sherman starts watching differently. Less as a subordinate executing orders, more as a student trying to understand what he is seeing.
What he sees is this. Grant is not ignoring the risks Sherman identified. He has weighed them against a different kind of risk. The risk of not acting. The cost of retreating to Memphis, six more months in Louisiana mud, another round of failed canal projects. What that would do to the men, to the public, to Lincoln’s ability to keep prosecuting the war.
Sherman can see the battlefield risks clearly. He can calculate them and build plans around them. What he cannot see, not yet, is that inaction carries its own cost. A cost that accumulates slowly in newspaper headlines and desertion rates and political speeches, rather than all at once on a battlefield.
Grant can see both. That, Sherman will later conclude, is what makes him different.
In his post-war writing, Sherman is unusually direct about this moment. He does not pretend he was right. He does not claim he secretly agreed with Grant and only objected for form’s sake. He says clearly that he was wrong.
He had written, “I tremble for the result.” The result was that the Army of the Tennessee crossed the Mississippi, won five battles in 18 days, and placed Vicksburg under siege from the landward side, exactly as Grant had planned.
What Sherman realizes somewhere in those 18 days is that Grant sees the war differently than he does. Not recklessly, not luckily, differently. Able to hold two opposing risks in his head at once and choose the one the moment requires.
That is a hard thing to admit. Sherman is not a man who lacks confidence. He has strong opinions and holds them firmly. The idea that someone else’s judgment is simply better than yours, not in one small area, but in the essential skill that defines what you are both doing, is a difficult conclusion to sit with.
He sits with it. He writes the letters. He writes the memoirs. He says he was wrong and Grant was right.
And then he says something more. After Vicksburg, he would follow Grant anywhere. Not because Grant outranked him. Not because he had to. Because watching Grant take that army across the Mississippi into enemy territory without a supply base, winning battle after battle, arriving at the walls of Vicksburg with an intact army, watching all of that happen, Sherman developed the kind of trust that is almost impossible to manufacture and almost impossible to break.
There is a thing that happens sometimes between two people who have been through something together. Not a shared victory, a shared disagreement. The victories are easy. The disagreements are where you find out who someone actually is. Whether they tell you the truth. Whether they can be wrong and admit it. Whether their friendship can survive one person being right when the other was wrong.
Grant and Sherman had already been through one version of this from the opposite direction. After Shiloh, after the press firestorm, after Halleck arrived and took operational command away and reduced Grant to a meaningless staff role, it was Sherman who talked Grant out of resigning.
Grant was ready to quit. He had been humiliated publicly. He was being blamed for being surprised at Shiloh. He was sidelined and irrelevant. Sherman went to him and told him to stay. He told Grant that the war was bigger than one bad newspaper season. He told him that he himself had gone through public humiliation. In late 1861, Sherman had been reported in the press as nearly insane, sent home by his own superiors, finished. Staying and fighting through it was the only choice that mattered.
Grant stayed.
This is the other side of the ledger. Sherman had saved Grant’s career by knowing something Grant couldn’t see. That the career was worth saving. That the public humiliation would pass and the work would remain.
Then, less than a year later, Grant saved the campaign against Vicksburg by knowing something Sherman couldn’t see. That the risk of the river crossing was smaller than the risk of retreat. That military doctrine is a starting point, not a ceiling.
Two men, two moments, each one seeing something the other couldn’t. Each one with the relationship solid enough to say the hard thing and then, when the hard thing turned out to be wrong, solid enough to admit it.
This is not common. Look at the Civil War’s history of generals and you will find an army full of men who couldn’t do this. Men who buried their mistakes and blamed subordinates. Men who never admitted error and spent their post-war years writing memoirs that relitigated every battle in their favor. Men who poisoned their relationships with other commanders through jealousy and credit stealing and score settling that lasted decades.
Grant didn’t lord the Vicksburg success over Sherman. There are no accounts of him reminding Sherman that he had ignored his advice. No letter saying, “Remember when you told me this would fail?” He filed no grudge. He held no victory lap over his friend’s objections.
Sherman didn’t deflect or minimize his error. He wrote it down. He said he was wrong. He said Grant could see things he couldn’t. He took the lesson and applied it.
The result of that is the partnership that carries the Western war to its end.
Vicksburg falls on July 4th, 1863, the same week as Gettysburg in the East. The Confederacy loses its grip on the Mississippi. The country is cut in two.
Grant is eventually given command of all Union armies in March 1864. When Grant goes east to handle Robert E. Lee in Virginia, he leaves Sherman in command of the Western armies.
Sherman takes Atlanta in September 1864, the capture that arguably saves Lincoln’s re-election and thus the war itself. Then he marches to the sea, through Georgia, through the Carolinas, breaking the will of a population that had believed it was invincible.
This is the same man who trembled for the result in the spring of 1863. The March to the Sea works in part because Sherman has internalized what he learned at Vicksburg. He watched Grant cut an army loose from its supply base and move it through enemy territory, living off the land, moving fast, keeping the enemy confused.
Sherman does this on a scale that dwarfs the Mississippi campaign. He could not have conceived it with enough confidence to execute it if he hadn’t watched Grant prove the concept in Mississippi.
Late in the war, after Atlanta, after the march to the sea, Sherman reflects on his commanding general. What he says across letters and conversations from this period comes down to something simple. He stood by Grant when the world called Grant crazy. Grant stood by his plan when Sherman called it too dangerous to attempt.
That is the whole thing right there. Two men who had been publicly humiliated. Two men who had doubted themselves and doubted each other. Two men who had disagreed in writing about the most important military operation either of them had ever attempted and who came through it closer than before.
“I tremble for the result.” Sherman wrote that in the spring of 1863 looking at a plan he believed would destroy everything.
The result was Port Gibson, Raymond, Jackson, Champion Hill, Big Black River Bridge, Vicksburg. The result was one of the most audacious campaigns in American military history, conducted by a man who could not be talked out of his conviction that the risk was worth taking.
The result was Sherman himself watching it work, updating everything he thought he knew about what a general could be.
And years later, the result is two old soldiers who remember a night in Louisiana when the fleet ran the batteries and everything could have gone wrong and didn’t. And the friendship that held through disagreement and humiliation and war long enough for both of them to find out what they were capable of.
The fleet ran the batteries. The army crossed the river. The city fell. And the general who said it couldn’t be done became the general who proved in Georgia and the Carolinas that it could be done on an even larger scale because he had seen with his own eyes what it looks like when a man refuses to be stopped by reasonable fear.