- 19 Dec 2021 13:42
#15203677
December 20, Sunday
Grant offers Washington another plan, a dual offensive to be launched simultaneously from Chattanooga and New Orleans, while the Army of the Potomac gives up its weary attempt to capture Richmond from the north and lands instead on the North Carolina coast in order to approach the rebel capital from the south, astride its lines of supply and communication. He says nothing more about replacing Meade with Sherman—probably because he has decided he will need Sherman to lead one of the two western columns—or with Baldy Smith, who by now has begun to exercise his talent for contention that has kept him in hot water for most of his military life.
In his reply, which incorporates Lincoln’s and Stanton’s views as well as his own, Halleck doesn’t mention Baldy, either, no doubt assuming that Grant has confirmed their misgivings about the Vermonter’s “disposition,” but limits himself to an assessment of the strategy involved in the proposal for a double-pronged offensive, East and West. It will not do. Not only does it commit the cardinal sin of attempting two big things at once in each of the two theaters; it also requires more troops than are available in either. If attempted, it would expose both Washington and Chattanooga to risks the government simply cannot run, and moreover it shows the flawed conception of a commander who makes enemy cities his primary objective, rather than enemy armies, as the President has lately been insisting must be done if this war is ever to be won. In Halleck’s opinion, Grant will do better to concentrate on the problems at hand in Tennessee and north Georgia, and leave the large-scale thinking to those who are equipped for it. Just as Meade’s objective is Lee’s army, Grant’s is Johnston’s, and both are to keep it in mind that neither Washington nor Chattanooga—nor, for that matter, east Tennessee, the region of Lincoln’s acutest concern—is to be exposed to even the slightest danger while they attempt to carry out their separate missions of destroying the rebel masses in the field before them.
Sherman has returned by now from Knoxville. Grant has informed him that the spring campaign, which will open as soon as the roads are fit for marching, will be southward against Joe Johnston and Atlanta, and every available man in both his and Thomas’s armies will be needed for what promises to be the hardest fighting in the war. The redhead is all for it; but first he wants to put an end to disruptions that have developed in the department he left to come to Tennessee. In his absence, guerillas have taken to firing at steamboats from the banks of the Mississippi, north and south of Vicksburg, and he does not intend to abide this outrage. To those who object to his proposed means of doing so—destruction of towns along the Red, Oachita, Yazoo, “or wherever a boat can float or soldier march,”—as war against civilians, Sherman makes the point that if rebel snipers can “fire on boats with women and children in them, we can fire and burn towns with women and children.” He has been growing angrier by the week. Taking dinner at the home of a Union-loyal Nashville matron, for example, he turned on his hostess when she began to upbraid him for the looting his troops had done on the march to Knoxville. “Madam,” he replied, “my soldiers have to subsist themselves even if the whole country must be ruined to maintain them. There are two armies here. One is in rebellion against the Union; the other is fighting for the Union. If either must starve to death, I propose it shall not be the army that is loyal.” This said, he added in measured tones: “War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.”
Sherman’s main fear just now is that the guerillas along the lower Mississippi, emboldened by the example of the snipers, will band together in sufficient strength to attack the reduced garrisons at the various river ports and thus undo much that has been accomplished in the past year. It is Sherman’s notion, discussed with Grant—a notion made more urgent by the need to reduce those garrisons still further on order to furnish additional troops for the campaign scheduled to open in north Georgia in late March or early April—to return to Mississippi between now and then, rather than keeping his veteran soldiers lying idle in the winter camps, and nip this threat of renewed obstruction in the bud. He doesn’t propose to waste his energies in running down individual snipers, which would be like trying to rid a swamp of mosquitos by swatting them one by one, but rather to destroy the economy—the society, even, if need be—that affords them subsistence. The way to do this, he maintains, is to wreck their production and transportation facilities so thoroughly that they have nothing left to defend and nothing left to live on if they attempt resistance for its own sake. What is more, the situarion on the lower Mississippi seems made to order for the execution of such a project. Less than two hundred miles east of Jackson is Selma, Alabama, whose cannon foundry and other manufacturing installations Jefferson Davis admired on his October visit, and roughly midway between them is Meridian, where three vital railroads intersect and which serves as a storage and distribution center, not only for industrial products from the east, but also for grain and cattle from the fertile Black Prairie region just to the north. A rapid march by a sizable force, eastward from Vicksburg, then back again for a total distance of about five hundred miles, can be made within the available two months, he believes, and the smashing of these two major objectives, together with the widespread destruction he intends to accomplish en route, will assure a minimum of trouble for the skeleton command he will have to leave behind when he comes back upriver to rejoin Grant for the drive on Atlanta—which Johnston, incidentally, will be much harder put to defend without the rations and guns now being sent to him from Meridian and Selma.
There are, as Sherman sees it, three main problems, each represented by an enemy commander who will have to be dealt with in launching this massive raid, first across the width of Mississippi and then beyond the Tombigbee to a point nearly halfway across Alabama. One is Polk, who has in his camp at Demopolis, between Meridian and Selma, the equivalent of two divisions. Another is Johnston, who might send heavy detachments rearward by rail to catch him far from base and swamp him. The third is Forrest, who by now has attracted a considerable number of recruits to the cavalry division he is forming in north Mississippi and can be expected to investigate. Discussing these problems with Grant, Sherman arrives at answers to all three. As for the first, he will employ no less than four divisions in his invasion column—two from Vicksburg and two from Memphis, which he will pick up on his way downriver—for a total of 20,000 infantry, plus about 5,000 attached cavalry and artillery. That should take care of Polk, who can muster no better than half that many: unless, that is, he is reinforced by Johnston, and Grant agrees to discourage this by having Thomas menace Dalton, Georgia. Forrest, the remaining concern, is to be attended to by a special force under W. Sooy Smith, recently placed at the head of all the cavalry in the Army of the Tennessee. At the same time the main body starts east from Vicksburg, Smith is to set out from west Tennessee, with instructions to occupy and defeat Forrest on the way to a link-up with Sherman at Meridian, from which point he and his troopers will take the lead on the march to Selma. His superiors see, of course, that his more or less incidental defeat of Forrest, en route to the initial objective, is a lot to ask; but to make certain that he doesn’t fail they will arrange for him to be reinforced to a strength of 7,000, roughly twice the number Forrest has in his green command.
In any case, having arrived at this solution to the third of the three problems, Grant and his red-haired lieutenant part company for a time, the latter to enjoy a Christmas leave with his family in Ohio while the former sets out, shortly afterward, on a triumphal inspection tour through east Tennessee and Kentucky, followed by what will turn out to be a pleasant visit to St. Louis, where he will be dined and toasted by civic leaders who once looked askance at him as a poor catch for a Missouri girl.
President Lincoln tells an official of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society: “I shall not attempt to retract or modify the emancipation proclamation....”
Federal troops scout from Lexington, Missouri.
Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.
—Edmund Burke
More realistically, as “interesting” as that might be (in the sense of “may you live in interesting times”), what makes this thread possible is that we’re looking back from over a century and a half.
- By FiveofSwords
- By wat0n
- By JohnRawls