Starving Grant's Army... Scorched Earth...

5fish

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In May of 1863, after grant had cross the Mississippi River and enter Mississippi to start his final push on Vicksburg.

What if Pemberton had started a scorched earth program as Grant moved in land form Port Gibson.

As Grant moves in land all he sees is fires burning off in the distance in all direction around him. As Pemberton turns northern Mississippi into a waste land...

What would Grant have done?
 

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In May of 1863, after grant had cross the Mississippi River and enter Mississippi to start his final push on Vicksburg.

What if Pemberton had started a scorched earth program as Grant moved in land form Port Gibson.

As Grant moves in land all he sees is fires burning off in the distance in all direction around him. As Pemberton turns northern Mississippi into a waste land...

What would Grant have done?
Southern civilians would go where after their farms are burned. The US was a net food exporter to Western Europe. Foraging only can last so long anyway if an army hunkers down. Foraging only works if an army is on the go. What percentage of the food required by Union forces during the Vicksburg Campaign were obtained by foraging?
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5fish

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Southern civilians would go where after their farms are burned. The US was a net food exporter to Western Europe. Foraging only can last so long anyway if an army hunkers down. Foraging only works if an army is on the go. What percentage of the food required by Union forces during the Vicksburg Campaign were obtained by foraging?
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I will put it this way. Grant's wagons that crossed the Mississippi carried no food only the supplies for war. The army was to forage off the land and it did. When he made to Vicksburg he link back up with the rest of his command and he could get resupplied. His trek across Mississippi was without any supply lines...
 

jgoodguy

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I will put it this way. Grant's wagons that crossed the Mississippi carried no food only the supplies for war. The army was to forage off the land and it did. When he made to Vicksburg he link back up with the rest of his command and he could get resupplied. His trek across Mississippi was without any supply lines...
If Grant had known it in advance, there would have been another plan. If it was a surprise then dig in and accumulate supplies.
 

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I will put it this way. Grant's wagons that crossed the Mississippi carried no food only the supplies for war. The army was to forage off the land and it did. When he made to Vicksburg he link back up with the rest of his command and he could get resupplied. His trek across Mississippi was without any supply lines...
Hard to believe that Grant would be defeated if his men could not forage off the land. The US had plenty of food one would think the USN could easily transport food the Union Army as long as they are reasonably close to water.
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in the 1920ies cut newspapers were still common in Germany You need a WC to need toilet paper as long as You do have a dump outhouse You don't need it View attachment 1491
TP is pretty important to Americans in fact it indispensable. Yes soft leaves can be used in an emergency but I can't imagine life without TP.
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I found this article on Grant supplying his army in Mississippi... https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/grants-vicksburg-supply-line
It is another story where the legend was better than the story so I have been hoodwinked by history again....


How is starts...

He fired off a message to his subordinate, General William T. Sherman:
I wish you to collect a train of 120 wagons . . . and send them to Grand Gulf; and there load them with rations, as follows: One hundred thousand pounds of bacon, the balance coffee, sugar, salt and hard bread . . . it is unnecessary for me to remind you of the overwhelming importance of celerity in your movements . . . The enemy is badly beaten, greatly demoralized, and exhausted of ammunition. The road to Vicksburg is open. All we want now are men, ammunition, and hard bread. We can subsist our horses on the country, and obtain considerable supplies for our troops.
Problem time...

Sherman had doubted Grant's plan to utilize Grand Gulf as a supply base from the outset, writing to his wife on April 29 that, "when they take Grand Gulf they have the elephant by the tail." On May 4, after receiving Grant's message for supplies, he wrote to General Frank Blair, one of his division commanders who would be responsible for guarding the supply line, predicting "some other way must be found to feed this army." Sherman despairingly wrote to General James Tuttle the next day: "I apprehend great difficulty in the matter of food." But Sherman's attitude improved somewhat on May 6, while he was still in Louisiana opposite Grand Gulf. He wrote to Blair, "Grant reports plenty of meat and corn on the other side, but salt, coffee, sugar, and bread are out of the question save in our commissariat." A lieutenant with McClernand's corps wrote to his wife on May 5 that his men were "waiting for provisions — we are nearly out — I have got one cracker left and some meat ..."

One road...

Sherman traveled to Hankinson's Ferry, and on May 9 warned Grant at Rocky Springs: "There are over 500 wagons across the river [in Louisiana] ... Stop all troops till your army is partially supplied with wagons, and then act as quickly as possible, for this road will be jammed as sure as life if you attempt to supply 50,000 men by one single road."


Grant changes plans on the fly ...

He changes directions...

having decided upon a new plan of attack— rode six miles eastward to Rocky Springs. He would not move directly north across a captured bridge over the Big Black River to fight Pemberton south of Vicksburg, but instead planned an indirect approach "to get to the railroad east of Vicksburg, and approach from that direction." An indirect approach would require a much longer line of supply and was risky. In fact, after Vicksburg surrendered more than two months later, President Lincoln wrote to Grant, "When you turned northward east of the Big Black, I feared it was a mistake."

He changes plans...

Grant immediately responded to Sherman's dire prediction: "I do not calculate the possibility of supplying the army with full rations from Grand Gulf ... What I do expect, however, is to get up what rations of hard bread, coffee, and salt we can, and make the country furnish the balance." Grant also wrote to another subordinate working the supply line that, "Hard bread, coffee and salt should be kept up anyhow, and then the other articles of the rations as they can be supplied."

It truth Grant had a supply line referred to as MSR... He never abandoned it for more than three days...

Remarkably, the existence of an MSR for Grant's army has been misunderstood or even disclaimed since those fateful days in May of 1863. The myth of Grant's cutting loose from his supply base probably began when Charles Dana, a former reporter who accompanied Grant's army as an observer for the Secretary of War, wrote back to Washington on May 4, 1863: "As soon as Sherman comes up and the rations on the way arrive, he [Grant] will disregard his base and depend upon the country for meat and even for bread." In 1867 Adam Badeau, a former Grant staff officer, published the first volume of his three-volume Military History of General U. S. Grant. Badeau wrote that, "[Grant] at once decided to abandon his base altogether, to plunge into the enemy's country with three days rations, trusting to the region itself for forage and supplies." A year later, in The Personal History of U. S. Grant, Albert Richardson compared Grant's Vicksburg Campaign with "Scott's brilliant campaign from Puebla to Mexico," and wrote that Grant "determined to abandon his base."

In 1879, during an interview with a New York Herald reporter, Grant, while recalling the Vicksburg Campaign, said that, as his troops crossed the Mississippi on April 29 and 30, he "had rations in abundance on board the transports, but no transportation for them into the interior." He said he did not abandon his base but "directed the officers to gather all the wagons and teams they could from the plantations as we moved on." Even though the river crossing was several days before Grant arrived at Grand Gulf on May 3, his intentions were dear: he had to have a supply line for his army. Some things such as ammunition, coffee, bread, salt, and sugar could not be foraged from the Southern countryside.
 

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I think Grant was schooled inadvertently by Van Dorn and Forrest with the Holly Springs raid back in December of 1862. Van Dorn demolished the big Union supply depot there, and Forrest demolished the railroads while Morgan hit toward the river traffic in Tennessee. Grant thought he'd have to leave altogether but then it dawned on him the people around abouts were doing pretty well - lots of stuff to appropriate. His answer to objections about his troops commandeering vittles was something along the lines of we brought our food but since your dogs ate our lunch, we have to eat yours! He was surprised at the bounty he found, and that was the seed of Sherman's march. (Our friend Forrest was not one to let a good lesson go to waste - he put a dent in Union supplies at Johnsonville a couple years later that the Union felt for sure.)
 

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The first Union general to live off the land without a supply line was General Samuel Curtis who after his victory over the the Confederate Army at Pea Ridge despite being outnumbered marched his men to Helena , Arkansas and occupied it.
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diane

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That's true! The poor orphaned Trans-Mississippi! Curtis definitely deserves a thread, doesn't he? (JO Shelby, too - he and Forrest would have been a dream team.) Never did lick the guerrillas, though, but it wasn't for lack of trying.

Living off the land on a large scale, though, was something that surprised Grant - he really hadn't realized why Mississippi was the richest state in the Union at that time. Sherman's excursion through the prairies on his Meridian campaign gave him further information and confidence that the South was rich. Why their soldiers were starving was a mystery, but the people sure weren't! He determined there was enough wealth and supplies a major army did not need to be tethered to its supply/communication base. He could have gone for Selma, Mobile or other points through the South but the most dramatic and psychologically damaging would be straight through the whole thing to Savannah. Sherman was so confident he could git 'er done there were only two people he feared - Forrest and R E Lee. For Grant's part - well, being Grant, he didn't worry about what Forrest or any other Confederate was up to until they got in his face!
 

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That's true! The poor orphaned Trans-Mississippi! Curtis definitely deserves a thread, doesn't he? (JO Shelby, too - he and Forrest would have been a dream team.) Never did lick the guerrillas, though, but it wasn't for lack of trying.

Living off the land on a large scale, though, was something that surprised Grant - he really hadn't realized why Mississippi was the richest state in the Union at that time. Sherman's excursion through the prairies on his Meridian campaign gave him further information and confidence that the South was rich. Why their soldiers were starving was a mystery, but the people sure weren't! He determined there was enough wealth and supplies a major army did not need to be tethered to its supply/communication base. He could have gone for Selma, Mobile or other points through the South but the most dramatic and psychologically damaging would be straight through the whole thing to Savannah. Sherman was so confident he could git 'er done there were only two people he feared - Forrest and R E Lee. For Grant's part - well, being Grant, he didn't worry about what Forrest or any other Confederate was up to until they got in his face!
Absolutely beating an insurgency is difficult but has been done but it takes a long time.
The Union Army during the ACW was about has successful as it would ever get in terms of winning a Counterinsurgency war.
No doubt while Sherman was a highly flawed military leader the March through Georgia made up for it.
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jgoodguy

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Absolutely beating an insurgency is difficult but has been done but it takes a long time.
The Union Army during the ACW was about has successful as it would ever get in terms of winning a Counterinsurgency war.
No doubt while Sherman was a highly flawed military leader the March through Georgia made up for it.
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A man can have lots of flaws, but still powers through to success. Sometimes persistence is as needed as genius.
 

jgoodguy

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Grant, he didn't worry about what Forrest or any other Confederate was up to until they got in his face!
Yes

Oh, I am heartily tired of hearing about what Lee is going to do. Some of you always seem to think he is suddenly going to turn a double somersault, and land in our rear and on both of our flanks at the same time. Go back to your command, and try to think what we are going to do ourselves, instead of what Lee is going to do.
 

O' Be Joyful

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Oh, I am heartily tired of hearing about what Lee is going to do. Some of you always seem to think he is suddenly going to turn a double somersault, and land in our rear and on both of our flanks at the same time. Go back to your command, and try to think what we are going to do ourselves, instead of what Lee is going to do.
:)
 

diane

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A man can have lots of flaws, but still powers through to success. Sometimes persistence is as needed as genius.
That is very true. That's why I find both Sherman and Forrest interesting - they were brilliant and had major flaws, some of which they shared. Sherman was, in fact, fascinated by Forrest. When they literally bumped into each other on a Mississippi river boat, heading the same place, Sherman's bag fell to the ground and Forrest picked it up. That led to a very interesting conversation between the two - Sherman just had to try to find out what this 'most remarkable man our Civil War produced' was all about. Forrest was a little on the restrained side - Sherman apparently forgot about some delicately testy business with Congress and so forth...!
 

Kirk's Raider's

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A man can have lots of flaws, but still powers through to success. Sometimes persistence is as needed as genius.
One can also argue that any Captain Obvious could of decided to do the March on Georgia since there was precenent about living of the land and by late summer of 1864 the Confederacy was in bad shape as Davis acknowlged in his prior speech in Macon, Georgia where he openly admitted that two thirds of the army was AWOL.
On the other hand to victor goes the spoils.
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