When he appears at the Clark County Historical Society’s third Civil War Symposium that day, the author and graduate of the U.S. Army War College will make a case that in March of 1863, one hesitant human being along Rolling Fork Creek, Miss., may permanently have altered the course of the war.
Hills will discuss Ulysses S. Grant’s Vicksburg Campaign, and Kent Masterson Brown will address the raging battle at Gettysburg during the gathering at the Clark County Heritage Center.
The weekend will include a Civil War tour of Ferncliff Cemetery and Arboretum at 6 p.m. Friday, April 12. Cost of the symposium, which includes lunch, is $35 for adults, $30 for members. Cost of the cemetery tour is $10. Tickets for the combined events are $40 for adults, $30 for members and $20 for students, with scholarships available.
Registration deadline is April 5. For details, call the historical society at 937-324-0657.
Retired as a brigadier general from the Mississippi National Guard, Hills said Grant’s strategic goal from late 1862 until the July 4, 1863, surrender of the confederate forces at Vicksburg, was to open the Mississippi River for the Union.
To a Lincoln Administration teetering on failure, Hills added, control of the river was as important for political reasons as for military reasons.
With the Mississippi closed to commercial traffic, farmers and other producers of Indiana goods were chafing under the amount they had to pay railroad barons to ship their goods to market, Hills said.
The Hoosier State was discussing recognizing the Confederacy, said Hills, so “Lincoln had to get something done.”
“There were so many attempts to take Vicksburg,” Hills said.
In December of 1862, Grant tried to approach the city from its undefended back side but was turned by Confederate Cavalry, including those led by Nathaniel Bedford Forrest, whom Hills says shares billing with Grant as a military genius of the Civil War.
Grant for a time also explored digging a canal across the peninsula so Union gunboats could paddle downstream without having to pass Vicksburg, something Hills said would “render it inconsequential.”
“But they had to cut down virgin cypress trees, trees that were three and four feet thick,” Hills said. “And while it’s one thing to cut down a tree, it’s another thing to pull up a stump.”
Grant then embarked on his Bayou Campaign. Although the general’s memoirs say it wasn’t a serious undertaking, Hills argues that’s contradicted “if you read Grant’s correspondence at the time.”
In addition, Hills says, the campaign came “within a hair’s breadth of actually working.”
The strategic purpose was to get five union gunboats, what Hills calls “the heart of the ironclad fleet” behind the Confederate fortifications, again attacking from the rear.
Hills said the only reason the first attempt didn’t work “was the naval commander named Watson Smith, who didn’t believe in the mission.”
Ill and lacking the will to fight, Smith advanced so slowly that Confederates were able to bring artillery to their fort at Greenwood, Miss., where two rivers meet to form the strategically important Yazoo River. From there, it could have destroyed the gunboats if they had tried to pass.
“Had (Union forces) arrived a day or two earlier in Greenwood, they would have been able to go right past that fort,” Hills said.
But the Union came closest to ultimate failure during what was called the Steele’s Bayou expedition. Union Rear Admiral David Porter had taken his five gunboats up Steele’s Bayou and horseshoed them along a three-mile glorified ditch called Black Bayou when Confederate forces almost caught him high and dry.
As the boats neared their destination at Rolling Fork Creek, forces under the command of Lt. Col. Samuel Ferguson, a West Point graduate, chopped down trees to obstruct the waterway, and willow reeds in the shallows started getting tangled up in the boat’s paddle wheels.
Ferguson was ready to order his troops to capture the boats and deal a massive blow to the Union cause when Brig. Gen. Winfield Scott Featherston arrived and ordered Ferguson not to attack.
Porter had been so convinced he was going to lose the boats that he’d ordered his crews to prepare to scuttle them by firing the boats’ own cannons through their decks and hulls, Hills said.
“Had Featherston not stopped Ferguson,” he added, the Union would have lost the naval power used in Grant’s later successful siege of Vicksburg; Porter would certainly have lost his job, as would have Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, whose troops had failed to keep up with the boats they were supposed to be protecting. Grant’s position certainly would have been undermined.
“Imagine if in one fell swoop, the Union would have lost Sherman, Grant and Porter,” Hills said. “How easily American history could have been changed.”
Instead, the boats escaped and Grant launched his successful siege to Vicksburg in late May after two unsuccessful attacks.
Although he granted liberal terms of surrender that July 4, Grant’s victory at Vicksburg was in a way more important to the Union victory at Gettysburg, where the battle was raging even as Vicksburg fell.
“After Gettysburg, as bloody a fight as it was, two armies marched away,” said Hills. “After Vicksburg one army ceased to exist. It was now just a mass of starved men.”
But had Winfield Featherston either been more aggressive or even a little later in arriving at Rolling Fork Creek, said Hills, the result could have been much different.
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