Admiral Porter had his own ideas for the Rebels' undoing, which presently had nothing to do with armies or canals or amphibious landings. Instead, after correctly identifying the two main objectives of the Mississippi campaign, he just as correctly proceeded to separate them. One, of course, was to reopen the river to commercial traffic from the Midwest to the Gulf and thence to ports far and wide. Desirable as this was, it would still require the reduction of Vicksburg and Port Hudson, which only the army could accomplish, and they weren't getting anywhere fast. From a purely military standpoint, however, the second goal was even more vital, and that was to sever the Confederate connection between the bountiful lands of the trans- Mississippi, since the ultimate destination of their bounty was the Rebel armies of Virginia, Tennessee, and Mississippi. In sheer size, the trans- Mississippi was nearly as large as the rest of the Confederacy east of the river. Up until then it had provided the South with more than 100,000 soldiers, about 30 percent of the number presently serving under arms. Perhaps even more significantly, the trans- Mississippi was an inexhaustible granary that supplied much of the beef, corn, hogs, rice, wheat, and staples that filled stockpiles in Atlanta and Richmond. Not only that, but because of the blockade it also was a major conduit of European arms, munitions, and medical supplies through supposedly neutral Mexico. Cut off the supplies, Porter reasoned, and the enemy armies would begin to wither and starve. His view was later shared by no less an authority than the Harvard historian and philosopher John Fiske, who wrote in 1900, "To sever from the Confederacy its three trans- Mississippi states was an object of paramount importance. It would destroy nearly half its resisting power." This Confederate pipeline had already suffered a major blow with the fall of Memphis, and Sherman, before going up the Yazoo to attack Chickasaw Bluffs, had seen to the destruction of the Shreveport and Vicksburg Railroad. While these actions went a long way toward cutting the connection, it still left almost three hundred miles of the Mississippi under Rebel control all the way down to Port Hudson, and it was upon this stretch that Porter cast his nautical eye. He already knew he could get his ironclads past the Vicksburg batteries--albeit with the inevitably heavy damage--and once below there would be no sustainable source of coal, and the fireboxes of the ironclad ships were not designed for burning wood. Porter was still trying to figure a way to solve that problem when a catalyst arrived in the shape of a big Confederate riverboat named City of Vicksburg that steamed up from the South laden with supplies and tied up at the town docks. The brazenness of this prompted the admiral to summon his newest charge, Colonel Charles Rivers Ellet, who a scant six months earlier had been a nineteen- year- old medical cadet. Following the death of his father during the Battle of Memphis, young Ellet now commanded the army ram fleet, which, over the protest of Secretary of War Stanton, had just been turned over to the navy. Porter now wanted to know if Ellet thought it was possible to send in one of his rams to sink the City of Vicksburg, which, to his eternal annoyance and disgust, was lying in plain sight of his flagship.* Ellet replied that it was not only possible but, with himself in command, it was as good as done. Thus in the early hours of February 2, 1863, Ellet began sneaking downriver in Queen of the West, his best ram, which could burn either coal or wood. Elaborate preparations had been taken according to Porter's instructions, or so the admiral believed. Double bales of cotton had been placed around the decks to fortify against Confederate cannon shot, a nighttime attack had been ordered to minimize the danger from Rebel batteries, and Ellet had been told to s Excerpted from Vicksburg, 1863 by Winston Groom All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
