Book Title: The Decision Was Always My Own: Ulysses S. Grant and the Vicksburg Campaign by Timothy B. Smith. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2018. ISBN-10: 0-8093-3666-9. ISBN-13: 978-0-80-933666-1. Photographs. Maps. Pp. xv, 249. $34.50.
Review Posted: On Point: The Journal of Army History
This book describes and weighs the consequences of eight of General Ulysses S. Grant’s key decisions during his 1862-63 operations against the Confederate stronghold at Vicksburg, Mississippi.
Grant began his first attempt on that riverport in late 1862, advancing overland into northern Mississippi, because moving downriver—as he eventually did—was supposedly too difficult. He relied on the railroads in West Tennessee to supply his force, which was concentrating at Grand Junction. This attempt ended when cavalry raids by Nathan Bedford Forrest and Earl Van Dorn smashed Grant’s lines of communication.
Dr. Timothy Smith follows standard Civil War historiography in his unrelenting attacks against Major-General John A. McClernand. The Lincoln administration had decided to place McClernand in charge of an expedition down the Mississippi River to seize Vicksburg. Grant didn’t like that general— McClernand was out for personal glory, like many other officers, and more importantly he out-ranked Grant’s favorite general, William T. Sherman. To counter McClernand, General Grant, and the army’s supportive general-in-chief, Henry Halleck, surreptitiously worked together to give Sherman command of the expedition, even if they were being insubordinate to the President.
In contrast, the author does offer the rarely heard conclusion that the Vicksburg “area was purposefully left in no man’s land between Grant and the commander to the south, Nathaniel P. Banks.” Yet, McClernand is often attacked for trying to operate independently within Grant’s jurisdiction. This book ignores the import of Halleck’s own directive that “[i]t is the wish of the President” that McClernand “shall have the immediate command” of the river expedition under Grant’s direction. Despite Lincoln’s expressed desire, Grant then placed himself in personal charge of the campaign, even though McClernand had just won a well-timed victory at Arkansas Post.
The author offers a cursory review of the ensuing operations that the Union commander initiated in order to get past the city via canals on the west bank or to reach high ground on the east bank through various convoluted routes. Smith correctly notes Grant’s error in claiming “I, myself, never felt great confidence that any of the experiments resorted to would prove successful.” Actually, Grant had placed great faith in these attempts. That general even thought about attacking at Chickasaw Bayou, where Sherman had earlier come to grief.
In the end, circumstances forced Grant to march his army past Vicksburg on the opposite bank, board them on transports that had passed the city’s batteries, and cross the Mississippi below. McClernand, however, had suggested a similar crossing to Lincoln mid-November 1862, more than five months earlier.
Dr. Smith discusses elements of Grant’s personal life throughout this examination of the Vicksburg campaign. In this, he relies heavily on the recollections of Grant’s son, Fred, such as their watching the gunboats passing the Vicksburg batteries. Fred wrote how the “scene is as vivid in my mind to-night as it was then to my eyes, and will remain with me always.” Unfortunately, Fred told much the same story at another time, but with him and his father actually on the gunboats. With his inability to remember, Fred should not have been relied upon for accurate history.
Grant finally began his campaign on the east bank by heading Northeast to Mississippi’s capital, Jackson, where he cut the railroads. He then turned west to march toward Vicksburg. After defeating the Confederate force commanded by John Pemberton at Champion Hill, the Union army began to invest Vicksburg. Grant decided to assault Vicksburg twice, trying to end the campaign without a siege, but failed. The subsequent siege eventually forced the city’s surrender.
After Vicksburg’s capitulation, Grant made the choice of paroling the surrendered Confederate garrison of twenty thousand effective soldiers, along with ten thousand sick, wounded, and non-combatants, rather than sending these Southerners to northern prison camps, which would have consumed much of the Union’s transport capacity. Unfortunately, the decision wasn’t Grant’s own. Smith details how Grant let his own opinion be overruled by a council of war. Too late, Halleck informed Grant that “your paroling the garrison at Vicksburg without actual delivery to a proper agent, as required by the seventh article of the cartel, may by construed into an absolute release, and that these men will be immediately placed in the ranks of the enemy.” The U.S. administration had attempted to embarrass Robert E. Lee with federal prisoners taken during the Gettysburg campaign, and now the invalidly paroled soldiers at Vicksburg soon became a much-needed reinforcement for General Braxton Bragg, in his battle against William Rosecrans at Chickamauga. Grant’s misstep nullified much of the benefit gained by his victory and helped cause Rosecrans’ defeat.