CHAPTER XIII. BANKS AND GRANT.
The first effect of the despatches from Grant and Farragut, referred to in the preceding chapter, was to cause Banks to reconsider his plan of campaign, and to put the direction of his next movement in suspense. While waiting for fresh advices in answer to his own communications and proposals Banks halted, and while he halted Taylor got time to breathe and Kirby Smith to gather new strength.
This correspondence has been so much discussed, yet so little understood, that, chronology being an essential part of history, the narrative of the events now at hand may be rendered clearer, if we turn aside for a moment to consider not only the substance of what was said upon both sides, but, what was even more important, the time at which it was heard.
Farragut's letter, written from the Hartford above Port Hudson on the 6th of April, was the first communication Banks had received from Farragut, save a brief verbal message brought to him by the Admiral's secretary, Mr. E. C. Gabaudan, on the 10th of April, just before the army set out from Brashear. Mr. Gabaudan had come straight from the Admiral, but without any thing in writing, having floated past Port Hudson by night in a skiff covered with twigs so as to look like a drift log. Farragut's letter gave assurance of the complete control of the Red River and the Atchafalaya by the navy of the Union.
Grant's despatch bore date the 23d of March. It was the first writing received from him. It conveyed the answer to the letter addressed to him by Banks on the 13th of March, and placed in the hands of Farragut just before the Hartford ran the batteries of Port Hudson. Thus on either side began a correspondence clearly intended by both commanders to bring about an effective co-operation between the two armies, aided by the combined fleets of Farragut and Porter. Yet in the end, while the consequences remained unfelt in the Army by the Tennessee, upon the Army of the Gulf the practical effect, after the first period of delay and doubt, was to cause its commander to give up the thought of moving toward Grant and to conform all his movements to the expectation that Grant would send an army corps to Bayou Sara to join in reducing Port Hudson. Thus, quite apart from the confusion and the eventual disappointment, much valuable time was lost while the matter was in suspense; and so was demonstrated once more the impossibility, well established by the history of war, of co-ordinating the operations of two armies widely separated, having different objectives, while an enemy strongly holds the country between them.
When Banks wrote his despatch of the 13th of March, he was at Baton Rouge, about to demonstrate against Port Hudson. When Grant received this despatch he was on the low land opposite Vicksburg, with the rising river between him and his enemy, laboriously seeking a practical pathway to the rear of Vicksburg, and in the meantime greatly troubled to find dry ground for his seventy thousand men to stand on. Grant's first idea, derived from Halleck's despatches, was that Banks should join him before Vicksburg, with the whole available force of the Army of the Gulf. When he learned from Banks that this would be out of the question so long as Port Hudson should continue to be held by the Confederates, Grant took up the same line of thought that had already attracted Banks, and began to meditate a junction by the Atchafalaya, the Red, the Tensas, and the Black rivers. What Grant then needed was not more troops, but standing-room for those he had. Accordingly, he began by preparing to send twenty thousand men to Banks, when the Ohio River steamers he had asked for should come.(1) They never came, yet even after he had embarked upon the campaign, alike sound in conception and splendid in execution, that was to become the corner-stone of his great and solid fame, Grant kept to his purpose.
On the 14th of April he penned this brief telegram to Banks:
"I am concentrating my forces at Grand Gulf; will send an army corps Bayou Sara by the 25th, to co-operate with you on Port Hudson. Can you aid me and send troops after the reduction of Port Hudson to assist me at Vicksburg?"
This message, although Banks and Grant were then only about two hundred miles apart, had to travel three thousand miles to reach its destination. Banks received it just before marching from Opelousas on the 5th of May, twenty-one days after it left Grant's hands. As received, the message was in cipher and without a date. As the prevailing practice was, in conformity with the orders of the Secretary of War, the only persons in the Department of the Gulf who held the key to the cipher were the Superintendent of Military Telegraphs and such of his assistants as he chose to trust, and Mr. Bulkley was at New Iberia, where the wires ended. The code employed was the route cipher in common use in the service, and with the help of the words "Bayou" and "Sara" as guides the meaning was not hard to make out. Banks did not trust to this, however, and waited until, late at night, he received from the Superintendent an official translation, still without date, as indeed was the original document received at headquarters from New Orleans. The 25th Banks naturally took to mean the 25th of May. Grasping eagerly at the first real chance of effective co-operation, he at once replied: "By the 25th probably, by the 1st, certainly, I will be there." This despatch was not in cipher, because he had no code. Captain Crosby carried it to the Hartford at the mouth of Red River. Captain Palmer, who was found in command, the Admiral having crossed Fausse Point and joined his fleet below, at once forwarded the despatch. Near Natchez Crosby met Captain Uffers of Grant's staff and turned back with him bringing Grant's despatch of the 10th of May, written at Rocky Springs. This Banks received at Alexandria on the 12th of May. From it he learned that Grant was not coming. Having met the Confederates after landing at Grand Gulf and followed on their heels to the Big Black, he could not afford to retrace his steps; but he urged Banks to join him or to send all the force he could spare "to co-operate in the great struggle for opening the Mississippi River." The reasons thus assigned by Grant for his change of mind were certainly valid; yet it must be doubted whether in these hurried lines the whole of the matter is set forth, for three weeks earlier, on the 19th of April, five days after the promise to send an army corps to Bayou Sara by the 25th, Grant had reported to Halleck: "This will now be impossible." Moreover, until the moment when he crossed the river with his advance on the 30th of April he not only held firmly to his intention to send the twenty thousand men to join Banks at Bayou Sara as soon as the landing should have been secured, but the corps for this service had been designated; it was to be made up of the main body of McClernand's corps and McPherson's, and Grant himself meant to go with it. It was indeed the 2d of May when Grant received at Port Gibson Banks's despatch sent from Brashear on the 10th of April indicating his purpose of returning to Baton Rouge by the 10th of May, and although Grant also attributes to this despatch the change of his plans, the 10th of May had already come before he made known the change to Banks.
All this time Banks bore with him Halleck's instructions of the 9th of November, and more than once studied with care and solicitude these significant words: "As the ranking general in the Southwest you are authorized to assume the control of any military force from the upper Mississippi which may come within your command. The line of division between your department and that of Major-General Grant is, therefore, left undecided for the present, and you will exercise superior authority as far north as you may ascend the river." By the articles of war, without these words, Banks would have been entitled to the command they gave him, but the words showed him plainly what was expected of him by his government. To the incentives of patriotism and duty were thus superadded one of the most powerful motives that can affect the mind of the commander of an army,—the hope and assurance of power and promotion. If, then, he held back from joining Grant in Mississippi, it was because he hesitated to take the extraordinary risks involved in the movement. In this he was more than justified.
Since the miscarriage of Sherman's attempt at the beginning of the year, Grant had been engaged in a series of tentative efforts, steadily prosecuted in various directions, yet all having a common object, the finding of a foothold of dry ground for a decisive movement against Vicksburg. Four of these experimental operations had failed completely, and Grant was now entering upon a fifth, destined indeed to lead to a great and glorious result, yet in itself conveying hardly more assurance of success than the most promising of its predecessors, while involving perils greater than any that had been so far encountered. Of these, the greatest danger was that the enemy, after allowing him to land on the east bank of the river and to penetrate, with a portion of his army, into the heart of Mississippi, might then concentrate all the available forces of the Confederacy in that region and fall upon him with vigor at the moment when his supplies should be exhausted and his communications interrupted. In such an event the fortune of war might have rendered it imperative for him to retire down the river; but what would have happened then if Banks, disregarding Port Hudson in his eagerness to join Grant before Vicksburg, should in his turn have abandoned his communications? Both armies would have been caught in a trap of their own making, whence not merit but some rare stroke of luck could alone have rescued either.
In the strong light of the great and decisive victory of Vicksburg, it is scarcely possible to reproduce, even in the mind of the most attentive reader, the exact state of affairs as they existed at the moment of Grant's landing below Grand Gulf. This phenomenal success was not foreshadowed by any thing that had gone before it, and it would have been the height of imprudence to stake upon it the fate of two armies, the issue of an entire campaign, and the mastery of the Mississippi River, if not the final result of the war. Nor should it be forgotten that Grant himself regarded this movement as experimental, like its forerunners, and that up to the moment he set foot upon the soil of Mississippi, he had formed no conception of the brilliant campaign on which he was about presently to embark. But instead of concentrating and acting with instant determination upon a single plan with a single idea, at the critical moment the Confederates became divided in council, distracted in purpose, and involved in a maze of divergent plans, cross purposes, and conflicting orders. While events caused the Confederate leaders to shift from one plan to the other, with the chances of the day, Grant was prompt to see and quick to profit by his advantage, and thus the campaign was given into his hands.
But on the 4th of May these great events were as yet hidden in the unknown future, and when, after waiting thirteen days at Opelousas, Banks began his march on Alexandria, it was with the earnest hope of a speedy meeting of the two Union armies on the Mississippi; then came the cipher telegram to exalt this hope into a firm and just expectation of finding three weeks later an entire corps from Grant's army at Bayou Sara, and as Banks mounted his horse to ride toward the head of his column, it was with the fixed purpose of being with his whole force at the appointed place at the appointed time.
(1) "I sent several weeks ago for this class of steamers, and expected them before this. Should they arrive and Admiral Porter get his boats out of the Yazoo, so as to accompany the expedition, I can send a force of say 20,000 effective men to co-operate with General Banks on Port Hudson."—Grant to Farragut, March 23d; received by Banks, April 21st. The cipher message that followed seemed to Banks a confirmation of this.