ORGANIZING THE CORPS.
Meanwhile the new troops continued to come from New York, although
it was not until the 11th of February that the last detachments
landed. The work of organizing the whole available force of the
department for the task before it was pursued with vigor. In order
to form the moving column, as well as for the purposes of
administration, so that the one might not interfere with the other,
the main body of troops was composed of four divisions of three
brigades each. The garrisons of the defences and the permanent
details for guard and provost duty were kept separate. While this
was in progress orders came from the War Office dated the 5th of
January, 1863, by which all the forces in the Department of the
Gulf were designated as the Nineteenth Army Corps, to take effect
December 14, 1862, and Banks was named by the President as the
corps commander.
To Augur was assigned the First division, to Sherman the Second,
to Emory the Third, and to Grover the Fourth. Weitzel, retaining
his old brigade, became the second in command in Augur's division.
In making up the brigades the regiments were so selected and combined
as to mingle the veterans with the raw levies, and to furnish, in
right of seniority, the more capable and experienced of the colonels
as brigade commanders. Andrews, who had been left in New York to
bring up the rear of the expedition, became Chief-of-Staff on the
6th of March, and Bowen was made Provost-Marshal General.
To each division three batteries of artillery were given, including
at least one battery belonging to the regular army, thus furnishing,
except for the second division, an experienced regular officer as
chief of artillery of the division. The cavalry was kept, for the
most part, unattached, mainly serving in La Fourche, at Baton Rouge,
and with the moving column. The 21st Indiana, changed into the
1st Indiana heavy artillery, was told off to man the siege train,
for which duty it was admirably suited. When all had joined, the
whole force available for active operations that should not uncover
New Orleans was about 25,000. Two thirds, however, were new levies,
and of these half were nine months' men. Some were armed with guns
that refused to go off. Others did not know the simplest evolutions.
In one instance, afterwards handsomely redeemed, the colonel, having
to disembark his men, could think of no way save by the novel
command, "Break ranks, boys, and get ashore the best way you can."
The cavalry, except the six old companies, was poor and quite
insufficient in numbers. Of land and water transportation, both
indispensable to any possible operation, there was barely enough
for the movement of a single division. In Washington, Banks had
been led to expect that he might count on the depots or the country
for all the material required for moving his army; yet Butler found
New Orleans on the brink of starvation; the people had now to be
fed, as well as the army, and the provisions that formerly came
from the West by the great river had now to find their way from
the North by the Atlantic and the Gulf. The depots were calculated,
and barely sufficed, for the old force of the department, while
the country could furnish very little at best, and nothing at all
until it should be occupied.
Again, until he reached his post, Banks was not informed that the
Confederates were in force anywhere on the river save Vicksburg,
yet, in fact, Port Hudson, 250 miles below Vicksburg and 135 miles
above New Orleans, was found strongly intrenched with twenty-nine
heavy guns in position and garrisoned by 12,000 men. Long before
Banks could have assembled and set in motion a force sufficient to
cope with this enemy behind earthworks, the 12,000 became 16,000.
Moreover, Banks was not in communication either with Grant or with
McClernand; he knew next to nothing of the operations, the movements,
or the plans of either; he had not the least idea when the expedition
would be ready to move from Memphis; he was even uncertain who the
commander of the Northern column was to be. On their part, not
only were Grant, the department commander; McClernand, the designated
commander of the Vicksburg expedition; and Sherman, its actual
commander, alike ignorant of every thing pertaining to the movements
of the column from the Gulf, but, at the most critical period of
the campaign, not one of the three was in communication with either
of the others. Under these conditions, all concert between the
co-operating forces was rendered impossible from the start, and the
expectations of the government that Banks would go against Vicksburg
immediately on landing in Louisiana were doomed to sharp and sudden,
yet inevitable, disappointment.
Grant, believing himself free to dispose of McClernand's new levies,
had projected a combined movement by his own forces, marching by
Grand Junction, and Sherman's, moving by water from Memphis, on
the front and rear of Vicksburg.
Sherman set out from Memphis on the 20th of December in complete
ignorance of Halleck's telegram of the 18th, conveying the President's
positive order that McClernand was to command the expedition.
Forrest cut the wires on the morning of the 19th just in time to
intercept this telegram, as well as its counterpart, addressed to
McClernand at Springfield, Illinois. On the 29th of December,
Sherman met with the bloody repulse of Chickasaw Bluffs. On the
2d of January he returned to the mouth of the Yazoo, and there
found McClernand armed with the bowstring and the baton.
Where was Grant? While his main body was still at Oxford, in march
to the Yallabusha, Forrest, the ubiquitous, irrepressible Forrest,
struck his line of communications, and, on the 20th of December,
at the instant when Sherman was giving the signal to get under way
from Memphis, Van Dorn was receiving the surrender of Holly Springs
and the keys of Grant's depots. There seemed nothing for it but
to fall back on Memphis or starve. Of this state of affairs Grant
sent word to Sherman on the 20th. Eleven days later the despatch
was telegraphed to Sherman by McClernand; nor was it until the 8th
of January that Grant, at Holly Springs, learned from Washington
the bad news from Sherman, then ten days old. As if to complete
a very cat's-cradle of cross-purposes, Washington had heard of it
only through the Richmond newspapers.
The collapse of the northern column, coupled with the Confederate
occupation of Port Hudson, had completely changed the nature of
the problem confided to Banks for solution. If he was to execute
the letter of his instructions at all, he had now to choose between
three courses, each involving an impossibility: to carry by assault
a strong line of works, three miles long, defended by 16,000 good
troops; to lay siege to the place, with the certainty that it would
be relieved from Mississippi, and with the reasonable prospect of
losing at least his siege train in the venture; to leave Port Hudson
in his rear and go against Vicksburg, upon the supposition, in the
last degree improbable, that he might find Grant, or McClernand,
or Sherman there to meet him and furnish him with food and ammunition.
This last alternative appears to have been the one towards which
the government leaned, as far as its intentions can be gathered,
yet Banks could only have accepted it by sacrificing his communications,
putting New Orleans in imminent peril, and creating irreparable
and almost inevitable disaster as a price of a remote chance of
achieving a great success. In point of fact, in the early days of
January, McClernand, accompanied by Sherman as a corps commander,
was moving toward the White River and the brilliant adventure of
Arkansas Post. After capturing this place on the 11th, McClernand
meant to go straight to Little Rock, but Grant rose to the occasion
and peremptorily recalled the troops to Milliken's Bend. "This
wild-goose chase," as Grant not inaptly termed it, cost McClernand
his new-fledged honors as commander of "The Army of the Mississippi,"
and brought him to Sherman's side as a commander of one of his own
corps; a bitter draught of the same medicine he had so recently
administered to Sherman.
Had Banks marched against Vicksburg at the same time that McClernand
was moving on Little Rock, with Grant cut off somewhere in northern
Mississippi, the Confederate commanders must have been dull and
slow indeed had they failed to seize with promptitude so rare an
opportunity for resuming, at a sweep, the complete mastery of the
river, ruining their adversary's campaign, and eliminating 100,000
of his soldiers.
Thus, almost at the first step, the two great expeditions were
brought to a standstill. They could neither act together nor
advance separately. The generals began to look about them for a
new way.