In the spring of 1863, a letter arrived at Ulysses S. Grant’s headquarters carrying the signature of his closest friend in the army. William Tecumseh Sherman wrote that the plan to capture Vicksburg was too dangerous, that the fleet would not survive running the city’s guns, and that moving the army deep into enemy territory without a proper supply line violated every principle of sound military thinking. Then he committed to paper the line that captured everything: “I tremble for the result.
” Grant read the letter, considered it, understood where it came from, and then ignored it. To understand the courage that decision required, one must understand the winter that preceded it. Vicksburg sat on a bluff above a bend in the Mississippi River. North of the city, the Yazoo Delta spread out as a maze of swamps, bayous, and flooded forests that blocked any direct approach.
Confederate batteries on the bluffs dominated the river itself. 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 would be cut in two.
Lose it and the war in the west would stall indefinitely. In December 1862, the first serious attempt ended in humiliation. Sherman led nearly 30,000 men against Confederate positions at Chickasaw Bayou north of Vicksburg. He attacked across swampy ground and was thrown back with almost 2,000 casualties while the Confederates lost fewer than 200.
Then came the long winter of failed projects. Grant’s engineers dug a canal meant to reroute the river and bypass the batteries, but the river did not cooperate. They tried the Lake Providence route and it did not work. They sent an expedition through Yazoo Pass that got tangled in swamps and Confederate resistance.
Steele’s Bayou was another attempt, another failure. By March of 1863, the Army of the Tennessee had been camped in Louisiana mud for months. The men were sick. The press was furious.
Northern newspapers called for Grant’s removal, and critics whispered that he was incompetent or drunk or both. Lincoln was running out of patience. In early 1863, Grant wrote to Halleck: “I will have Vicksburg this month or fail in the attempt. ”
The plan Grant formed by late March was, by conventional standards, almost indefensible.
He would march the army down the west bank of the Mississippi through swampy Louisiana terrain that armies were not supposed to march through. Then Admiral David Dixon Porter would run his fleet of gunboats and transports past Vicksburg’s river batteries at night, the same batteries that had stopped every previous attempt to move ships past the city. Using the ships, assuming any survived, Grant would ferry the army across the river below Vicksburg. Then he would move inland without a secure supply base, cut the railroad lines feeding the city from the east, and come at Vicksburg from the landward side.
The safe choice was obvious: pull back to Memphis, reorganize, and launch a fresh campaign along proper supply lines. That was the professional soldier’s answer, and that is what Sherman recommended. Sherman had seen enough of war to know how badly things could go. At Shiloh, he had commanded troops through a terrifying, chaotic battle where Grant’s army nearly collapsed on the first day.
Sherman was wounded there and had two horses shot from under him. He had also led the assault at Chickasaw Bayou just four months earlier and had watched men walk into prepared defenses and get cut apart. He was not cautious by temperament, but he was trained at West Point and understood military principles. Those principles said do not do this.
Grant read Sherman’s letter and the concerns of other officers, including James McPherson. Voices around him said to go back to Memphis. Grant did not go back. His reasoning came down to something that was not military doctrine at all.
It was political and psychological reality. The North, he explained to Sherman directly, was already disheartened. The war was almost two years old. The casualty lists filled newspapers across the country.
A retreat to Memphis would be an announcement that even Vicksburg was beyond reach, exactly the kind of news that turns a demoralized public into a defeated one. Grant also understood that a retreat probably ended his career. He had already been nearly fired once after Shiloh. There was no going back.
The night of April 16, 1863, was moonless by intention, so Porter’s ships would be less visible to Confederate gunners. Twelve vessels, gunboats and transports loaded with supplies, began moving downriver around ten o’clock. For a short time the passage was quiet. Then Confederate gunners opened fire.
Signal fires blazed along the riverbank to illuminate the targets, and the Mississippi at Vicksburg filled with muzzle flashes and the sound of artillery. One transport was destroyed. Another 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 below the batteries. Over the following two weeks, Grant’s army marched south through the mud of the Louisiana shore, heading for a crossing at Grand Gulf. On April 29, Porter’s gunboats bombarded the Confederate batteries there for six hours, but the guns sat on high ground and remained active.
Grant stood on a gunboat watching the bombardment and concluded that a direct crossing there would cost too many men. A local man told him about a better option farther south: Bruinsburg, a small landing accessible by road with good ground on the east bank. Grant shifted the crossing. On the night of April 30 into the early morning of May 1, Porter’s fleet slipped past Grand Gulf in darkness and moved south.
Sherman, sixty miles north at Haines’ Bluff, conducted a demonstration, firing guns and moving troops to keep Confederate attention away from the real crossing. He was helping execute the plan he had told Grant not to attempt. On May 1, the Army of the Tennessee crossed the Mississippi at Bruinsburg. The landing was unopposed.
No Confederate guns covered the crossing point, no infantry waited 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. Grant stepped onto the east bank 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.
” He added that he felt “a degree of relief scarcely ever equaled since. ”
What followed over the next eighteen days was one of the most remarkable stretches of the Civil War. On May 1, Union forces pushed Confederate troops back at Port Gibson. On May 12, they defeated a Confederate brigade at Raymond.
On May 14, they captured the Mississippi state capital at Jackson, driving Joseph Johnston out of the city and seizing the major rail hub feeding Vicksburg. Grant then 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, with a Confederate thrust that nearly cut Grant’s army in two.
But Union forces held, pushed back, and broke Pemberton’s line. On May 17, Grant smashed through Pemberton’s rear guard at Big Black River Bridge in less than an hour. On May 18, Union forces reached the outskirts of Vicksburg. Eighteen days, five major battles, five victories.
Sherman had been wrong about everything. The fleet survived the battery run. The crossing succeeded. The army did not starve in the Confederate interior.
Rather than concentrating to destroy Grant, Confederate forces had been defeated one at a time. Sherman knew it, and during the campaign itself something changed in how he watched the events unfolding. He started watching less as a subordinate executing orders and more as a student trying to understand what he was seeing. What he saw was that Grant had weighed the battlefield risks Sherman identified against a different kind of risk: the risk of not acting.
Sherman could calculate battlefield risks clearly, but he could not see, not yet, that inaction carried its own cost, accumulating slowly in newspaper headlines and desertion rates and political speeches rather than all at once on a battlefield. In his post-war writing, Sherman was unusually direct about the moment. He did not pretend he had been right. He said clearly that he was wrong, and he said something more.
After Vicksburg, he would follow Grant anywhere, not because Grant outranked him, but because watching Grant take that army across the Mississippi into enemy territory without a supply base, winning battle after battle, and arriving at the walls of Vicksburg with an intact army had produced a trust that was almost impossible to break. The two men had already been through one version of this from the opposite direction. After Shiloh, when Grant was publicly humiliated and sidelined, it was Sherman who talked him out of resigning. Sherman told him the war was bigger than one bad newspaper season and reminded him that he himself had been reported in the press as nearly insane in late 1861.
Grant stayed. Less than a year later, Grant saved the campaign by knowing something Sherman could not see. Two men, two moments, each seeing something the other could not, each with a relationship solid enough to say the hard thing and, when the hard thing turned out to be wrong, solid enough to admit it. Grant did not lord the victory over Sherman.
There are no accounts of him reminding his friend that his advice had been ignored. Sherman did not deflect or minimize his error. He wrote it down and took the lesson. The result was the partnership that carried the Western war to its end.
Vicksburg fell on July 4, 1863. In March 1864, Grant was given command of all Union armies, and when he went east to face Robert E. Lee, he left Sherman in command of the Western armies. Sherman took Atlanta in September 1864, then marched to the sea through Georgia and the Carolinas.
That campaign worked in part because Sherman had internalized what he learned at Vicksburg: that an army could be cut loose from its supply base, move through enemy territory, live off the land, and keep the enemy confused. He could not have conceived it with enough confidence to execute it if he had not watched Grant prove the concept in Mississippi. Two men who had been publicly humiliated, who had doubted themselves and each other, who had disagreed in writing about the most important military operation either had ever attempted, came through it closer than before. Sherman wrote “I tremble for the result” in the spring of 1863.
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. Years later, two old soldiers remembered the night the fleet ran the batteries, 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.