On the night of April 16, 1863, a moonless blackness hung over the Mississippi River at Vicksburg. Admiral David Dixon Porter had chosen this darkness deliberately, hoping his fleet of twelve gunboats and transports could slip past the Confederate batteries perched on the bluffs above the city. Grant watched from a transport steamer on the opposite bank. He was not alone.
His wife Julia was with him, and their children. Sherman had written in fear that this fleet might be destroyed; Grant was so certain it would survive that he brought his family to watch. The passage began quietly, the current carrying the lead ships south while Confederate gunners failed to spot them at first. Then the guns opened fire.
Signal fires blazed along the riverbank, illuminating the targets, and the night filled with muzzle flashes and artillery thunder. Porter’s gunboats fired back as they pushed downstream. One transport was destroyed. Another was badly damaged and driven back.
Supply barges were lost. But the core of the fleet made it through, and ten vessels emerged below the batteries, intact and on the right side of the river. The plan was still alive. That plan had tested the friendship between Ulysses S.
Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman to its limit. Two weeks before the crossing, Sherman had put a formal objection in writing. He believed Grant’s scheme was too dangerous. Running a fleet past Vicksburg’s guns, marching an army through the swamps of Louisiana, then cutting loose from its supply line deep in Confederate territory, he argued, contradicted every principle of sound military thinking.
He closed with the line that captured everything: “I tremble for the result. ”
To understand why Sherman trembled, one has to understand the winter that preceded it. Vicksburg sat on a bluff above a bend in the Mississippi, the last major Confederate-held stretch of the river. Lincoln called it the key, and it was.
Whoever held Vicksburg controlled passage along the river, and whoever controlled the river cut the Confederacy in two. Every attempt to reach the city had failed. In December 1862, Sherman himself had led nearly 30,000 men against Confederate positions at Chickasaw Bayou north of Vicksburg. He was thrown back with almost 2,000 casualties while inflicting fewer than 200.
Then came months of failed canal projects and expeditions through flooded backwaters that bogged down in swamp and resistance. By spring, the Army of the Tennessee sat mired in Louisiana mud, sick and demoralized. Northern newspapers called for Grant’s removal. Critics whispered that he was incompetent or drunk.
Lincoln had not lost faith, but the public wanted results, and Grant himself had written to Halleck with blunt determination: “I will have Vicksburg this month or fail in the attempt. ”
The plan Grant formed by late March 1863 was nearly indefensible by conventional standards. March the army south through swampy Louisiana terrain that barely had roads. Run the fleet past batteries that had stopped everything before it.
Ferry the army across the river below Vicksburg. Then cut loose from supply lines, strike the railroads feeding the city from the east, defeat whatever Confederate forces appeared, and approach Vicksburg from the landward side. Failure at any point could strand the army in enemy territory with no retreat. This was the fate Sherman feared.
His recommendation was the safe one: pull back to Memphis, reorganize, and advance down the Mississippi Central Railroad with proper supply lines. That was doctrine. Grant heard the recommendation and refused it. The North, he explained, was already disheartened.
Another withdrawal after months of failure would announce that even Vicksburg was beyond reach. At two years into the war, with casualty lists filling the papers and Washington wondering if the war could be won, that was a risk Grant could not take. Nor did he believe he could survive it. A retreat to Memphis would probably end his career, nearly ended once already after Shiloh.
There was no going back. After the fleet ran the batteries, Grant’s army marched south through the same misery Sherman had predicted. Mud, swamp, and roads that barely deserved the name, but 40,000 men moved through anyway. On April 29, Porter’s gunboats bombarded the Confederate batteries at Grand Gulf for six hours without silencing them.
Grant stood on a gunboat watching the effect and concluded that a direct crossing there would cost too many men. A local man directed him to a better landing further south: Bruinsburg, below Grand Gulf, with good ground on the east bank. Grant shifted the crossing without hesitation. That same night, Sherman was sixty miles north at Haines’ Bluff, conducting a loud, aggressive demonstration designed to draw Confederate attention away from the real crossing.
He was helping execute the plan he had told Grant not to attempt. Meanwhile, Benjamin Grierson’s cavalry raid was tearing through central Mississippi, pulling attention in every direction except where Grant was crossing. On the early morning of May 1, 1863, the Army of the Tennessee crossed the Mississippi at Bruinsburg. The landing was unopposed.
No guns covered the crossing point, no infantry waited on the bank. Grant stepped onto Mississippi soil and later 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 came the line that cut through every doubt: “I felt a degree of relief scarcely ever equaled since.
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Over the next eighteen days, Grant moved inland with startling speed. On May 1, at Port Gibson, Confederate forces tried to check the advance from Bruinsburg and were pushed back after hard fighting. On May 12, at Raymond, a Confederate brigade came out to slow McPherson east of Vicksburg and was defeated. On May 14, Grant captured Jackson, the Mississippi state capital, driving Joseph Johnston out and seizing the major rail hub feeding Vicksburg.
Then Grant turned west. On May 16, at Champion Hill, Pemberton came out of Vicksburg with around 20,000 men to meet him. The fighting was brutal, back and forth, and a Confederate thrust nearly cut Grant’s army in two before Union forces held and then broke Pemberton’s line. On May 17, at Big Black River Bridge, the Confederate rear guard was smashed in less than an hour.
On May 18, Union forces reached the outskirts of Vicksburg. Eighteen days. Five major battles. Five victories.
The plan that made Sherman tremble had worked exactly as Grant intended. Sherman had been wrong about everything. The fleet survived. The crossing succeeded.
The army did not starve. Confederate forces were defeated one at a time before they could concentrate. Every specific fear he had committed to paper had been disproved by events. And Sherman knew it, not just afterward but during the campaign, while he marched and fought his own corps through the mud of Jackson and beyond.
He had been right about doctrine. Every risk he had identified was legitimate. Military history was full of armies that destroyed themselves doing exactly what Grant was doing. But Grant had done it anyway and won.
What Sherman recognized was that Grant was not recklessly ignoring the risks; he was weighing them against a different kind, the risk of not acting at all. Sherman could see battlefield risks and calculate them. What he had not seen was that inaction carried its own cost, one that accumulated in newspaper headlines, desertion rates, and political speeches rather than all at once on a battlefield. Grant could see both.
Sherman later wrote openly that he had been wrong, never pretending he had secretly agreed. Watching Grant take the army across the river and win battle after battle with an intact army producing a trust Sherman described as almost impossible to break. After Vicksburg, he said, he would follow Grant anywhere, not because Grant outranked him, but because he had seen what Grant was. This friendship had already survived the opposite test.
After Shiloh, when Grant was publicly blamed for being surprised, mocked in the press, stripped of operational command and reduced to a meaningless staff role, it was Sherman who talked him out of resigning. Sherman had endured his own public humiliation in late 1861, reported in the press as nearly insane and sent home by his own superiors. He told Grant to stay, that the war was bigger than one bad newspaper season, and that staying and fighting through it was the only choice that mattered. Grant stayed.
Now the ledger was balanced from the other direction. Grant had saved the campaign by seeing something Sherman could not. Two men, two moments, each seeing what the other could not, and each with a relationship solid enough to say the hard thing and, when it turned out wrong, to admit it. Grant never lorded the success over Sherman.
No letter reminded him of the warning. Sherman never minimized the error. He wrote it down and applied the lesson. Vicksburg fell on July 4, 1863, the same week as Gettysburg.
The Confederacy lost its grip on the Mississippi, and the country was cut in two. In March 1864, Lincoln gave Grant command of all Union armies, and when Grant went east to confront Robert E. Lee, he left Sherman in command in the West. Sherman took Atlanta in September 1864, a capture that arguably saved Lincoln’s re-election, then marched to the sea through Georgia and the Carolinas, breaking the Confederate war machine.
That march worked in part because Sherman had internalized what he learned at Vicksburg. He had watched Grant cut an army loose from its supply base, move through enemy territory, live off the land, and keep the enemy confused. He now executed that concept on a scale far larger than anything Grant had attempted in Mississippi. The teacher and the student, both teaching, both learning, neither forgetting what the other had shown them.
Two old soldiers remembered a night in Louisiana when the fleet ran the batteries and everything could have gone wrong and did not. The general who said it could not be done became the general who proved, on a grander scale still, what it looks like when a man refuses to be stopped by reasonable fear.