Abraham Lincoln, Volume II

by Jr. John T. Morse

assault would be made the next day, and he knew that it must succeed; he did not want to illustrate the Fourth of July by so terrible a Confederate loss, so magnificent a Federal gain. Yet he haggled over the terms, and by this delay brought about a part of that which he had wished to avoid. It was due to his fretfulness about details, that the day on which the Southern army marched out and stacked their arms before the fortifications of Vicksburg, and on which the Northern army, having generously watched the operation without a cheer, then marched in and took possession of the place, was that same Fourth of July on which two other defeated generals were escaping from two other victorious Northern armies.

In a military point of view this campaign and siege have been pronounced by many competent critics the greatest achievement of the war; but the magnificent and interesting story must, with regret, be yielded to the biographer of Grant; it does not belong to the biographer of Lincoln. The whole enterprise was committed to Grant to be handled by him without let or hindrance, and it was conducted by him from beginning to end without interference, and almost even without suggestion. Yet this very fact was greatly to the credit of the administration. In the outset the President passed judgment upon the man; and it was a correct judgment. Afterward he stood to it gallantly. In the middle of the business, when the earlier expedients went wrong, a great outcry

against Grant arose. Editors and politicians, even the secretary of the treasury himself, began to hound the President with importunate demands for the displacement of a general whom they fervently alleged to be another of the incompetents; in short, there was the beginning of just such a crusade as that which had been made against McClellan. But by this time the President had had opportunity to measure the military capacity of editors and politicians, and he was not now so much disquieted by their clamor as he once had been. He simply, in his quiet way, paid no attention to them whatsoever. Only when one of them reiterated the gossip about Grant being drunk at Shiloh, he made his famous reply, that he should like to send to some other generals a barrel of the whiskey which Grant drank. In a word, the detractors of the silent general made little impression on the solitary President, who told them shortly and decisively: "I can't spare this man; he fights." They wholly failed to penetrate the protecting fence which the civilian threw around the soldier, and within the shelter of which that soldier so admirably performed the feat which more than any other illustrates the national arms. Certainly the President comes in for his peculiar share of the praise. When the news came to Mr. Lincoln he wrote to General Grant this letter:—

"July 16, 1863.

"My DEAR GENERAL,—I do not remember that you and I ever met personally. I write this

now as a grateful acknowledgment for the almost inestimable services you have done the country.

"I wish to say a word further. When you reached the vicinity of Vicksburg, I thought you should do what you finally did,—march the troops across the neck, run the batteries with the transports, and thus go below; and I never had any faith, except in a general hope that you knew better than I, that the Yazoo Pass expedition and the like would succeed.

"When you got below and took Port Gibson, Grand Gulf, and vicinity, I thought you should go down the river and join General Banks; and when you turned northward, east of the Big Black, I feared it was a mistake. I now wish to make a personal acknowledgment that you were right and I was wrong."

Immediately after the ceremony of surrender was over Sherman marched away with a strong force to find and fight Johnston's army. But that general, shunning the conflict, moved so far southward into Mississippi that pursuit was imprudent during the hot season.

While Grant was finishing the siege of Vicksburg, General Banks was besieging Port Hudson, which lay at the southern end of the rebel section of the river. The fall of the northern post rendered the southern one untenable, and it was surrendered on July 9. Henceforth the great river was a safe roadway for unarmed craft flying the stars and stripes.