Joseph E. Johnston's Grenada Blunder: A Failure in Command

JOSEPH E. JOHNSTON'S GRENADA BLUNDER: A Failure in Command Jeffrey N. Lash Joseph E. Johnston assumed command of Confederate forces in Mississippi in May, 1863, in the midst of an alarming military crisis. A Federal Army was marching rapidly on Jackson, the state capital, in implementation of Ulysses S. Grant's plan to attack Vicksburg from the east. Johnston was powerless to reinforce John C. Pemberton , Vicksburg's garrison commander, and retreated to Canton, a railway station situated twenty-five miles above Jackson. While Grant drove Pemberton's troops toward Vicksburg, William T. Sherman's Fifteenth Corps devastated the railroads around Jackson . Besides tearing up track on the Southern of Mississippi Railroad , which ran east and west through the city, and on the New Orleans , Jackson & Great Northern Railroad, which extended north and south from the capital, Sherman demolished the Pearl River railroad bridge at Jackson. The destruction of the bridge not only disrupted Confederate communications in central Mississippi, but isolated over four hundred locomotives and cars around Grenada, a town located 105 miles above Jackson, at the junction of the Mississippi Central and Mississippi & Tennessee Railroads. Johnston could prevent Federal cavalrymen from either capturing or burning that equipment only by repairing prompdy the New Orleans, Jackson & Great Northern and Southern of Mississippi Railroads and particularly the Pearl River bridge; the rolling stock could then be removed from Grenada to a point of safety beyond the river by way of Jackson. The execution of this task further necessitated close cooperation between Johnston and civilian railroad officials and the War Department in Richmond. In short, Johnston faced a military problem that would try his illustrious reputation as an accomplished topographical engineer and as a masterful field strategist.1 After Sherman evacuated Jackson in mid-May, Johnston began preparing for an attack on Grant's army that now pressed against 1 Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, (New York, 1886), 1, 507-08; Joseph E. Johnston, Narrative of Military Operations Directed During the Late War Between The States (New York, 1874; reprinted ed., with an Introduction by Frank E. Vandiver, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1959), pp. 171-74, 176-78. 114 the gates of Vicksburg. To this end, he left Canton on May 23 and reestablished headquarters at the Mississippi capital. Impressed by his survey of the property damage around the city, Johnston, on May 24, ordered Major Livingston Mims, Chief Quartermaster for the Department of Mississippi and East Louisiana, to provide the railroad authorities with all the laborers and resources that they needed for the repair of their battered tracks and trestles. By May 31, Mims completed the impressment of "Large numbers" of slaves, supplied the railroaders with materials and mechanics, and commenced immediately the reconstruction project.2 His work gangs finished track-laying and bridge-building around Jackson in early June, but the construction of another trestle over the Pearl River presented a far more formidable undertaking.3 Although the engineers of the Southern of Mississippi and Mims's mechanics salvaged the smoldering structure's stone piers to help build the new bridge, the construction work dragged into mid-June. When Johnston marched his army toward Vicksburg two weeks later, but half the trestle had been raised.4 When the General learned of Pemberton's surrender of Vicksburg on July 4, he retired toward Jackson. Acting on the assumption that Grant would pursue his command and besiege the capital, Johnston decided to suspend the work being performed on the Pearl River bridge. On Johnston's orders, his Assistant-Adjutant General at Jackson, Lieutenant Colonel Thompson B. Lamar, directed Major Mims "to take immediate steps to preserve the bridges now being erected over pearl river from injury, and to save as much of the materials from destruction as possible."5 Although Mims prompdy halted the bridge-building work, his efforts proved unavailing; the timbers that he had stacked on the right bank of the Pearl remained there when Sherman confronted Johnston's force west of the stream.8 Considering his position untenable in view of Sherman's encirclement of the city, Johnston instructed his engineers to throw pontoon bridges across Pearl River against the evacuation of Jackson. Then on...