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153 8 “Developed by Circumstances” Grant, Intelligence, and the Vicksburg Campaign William B. Feis On July 4, 1863, Major General Ulysses S. Grant telegraphed the War Department with news he had been longing to send for months: “The Enemy surrendered this morning.”1 These five words marked the end of the Vicksburg Campaign, one of the more remarkable and significant military victories in the Civil War and, for that matter, in American military history . On that day, Lieutenant General John Pemberton’s Confederate forces gave up Vicksburg, Mississippi, one of the last major Confederate bastions guarding a strategically significant stretch of the Mississippi River. Pemberton ’s surrender resulted, in part, from Grant’s relentless siege operations that began on May 22 and by Independence Day had starved the Vicksburg garrison into submission. However, the siege was but the capstone of an earlier, rapidly unfolding maneuver campaign conducted by Grant’s Army of the Tennessee between April 30 and May 19. This “Mississippi Blitzkrieg” phase began when Grant crossed the Mississippi at Bruinsburg on April 30 and ended with two failed assaults on Vicksburg’s fortifications on May 19 and 22. During this period, the Army of the Tennessee marched 180 miles through hostile territory, fought and won five battles against isolated Confederate forces, captured the state capital at Jackson, drove Pemberton’s troops into the city’s fortifications, and cut them off from outside aid, essentially dooming the garrison. Coupled with the simultaneous Confederate defeat at Gettysburg in the East, the war seemed to turn decisively in favor of the Union. But what Major General William T. Sherman told Grant after they reached the outskirts of Vicksburg in May speaks to the importance of the maneuver campaign in its own right. “Until this moment I never thought your expedition a success,” he remarked. “But this is a campaign. This is a success even if we never take the town.”2 William B. Feis 154 Reflecting upon the campaign in his memoirs, Grant that it seemed “as though Providence had directed the course of the campaign while the Army of the Tennessee executed the decree.”3 Divine intervention notwithstanding , he also declared that the course he pursued was, from beginning to end, “suggested and developed by circumstances.” He started with a large strategic objective and the broad outlines of a plan to achieve it, but the campaign on the ground was essentially an ad hoc affair, dependent upon local conditions, enemy reactions, and the blind crossroads where paper plans and reality collide to give it shape, texture, and direction. The only clarity Grant could hope to scratch out of this swirling chaos would come from the information he received in the midst of it, either from intentional intelligence collection efforts or by sheer happenstance. This essay will examine how Grant procured and used intelligence during the opening weeks of the Vicksburg campaign (roughly mid-March through mid-May) and will argue that the Union general not only outmaneuvered his opponent but also outgeneraled him in the “intelligence war.” As Grant would attest, however, merely possessing the right intelligence did not by itself bring success. The difference between triumph and failure came down to what he did with that information. It was in those lonely moments of truth that he came face to face with one of war’s many object lessons: intelligence does not make decisions , commanders do. By the time Grant penned those five words on July 4, he had not only embraced that lesson but transcended it. Before the Vicksburg Campaign unfolded in the spring of 1863, Grant had perhaps more experience than any other Union officer in confronting fortified Confederate positions along or near major waterways. In late 1861, he led an unsuccessful attempt to outflank Columbus, Kentucky, a fortress on the Mississippi River, by attacking a Confederate outpost at Belmont, Missouri, directly across the river. This action failed to turn Columbus, but in early 1862, after a short but sharp campaign, Union forces captured Fort Henry on the Tennessee River and Fort Donelson on the Cumberland, breaking the Confederates’ major defensive line in the West and forcing the evacuation of both Columbus and Nashville. Later that spring, Grant positioned his forces along the Tennessee River for an assault on the fortifications ringing Corinth, Mississippi. Though the Confederates’ surprise attack at Shiloh delayed that campaign, Corinth soon fell, followed shortly by New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Memphis. By late 1862, one of the last significant Confederate strongholds on...

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